#justified because it's not like i want to bother trying to fit monster's narrative in any pre-existing gundam era/timeline

[saeriibon]

brainstorming a monster gundam/mecha au with tokyosan (info under the cut)

Overview: (SORRY THERE’S SO MUCH LIKE. BACKGROUND INFORMATION LOL... I FELT IT WAS NECESSARY, BUT I DID END UP BOLDING WHAT WAS RELEVANT) Little bits about the characters will be after this. )

Events of the story begin in the year PC 41 (Post-Conflict); 41 years after the Earth-Mars War*, the result of which being that half of the colonies in space belong to the Martian Republic, and half belong to the Earth Coalition.

Earth as a planet remains neutral, though tensions between various countries remain as each struggle to both exploit and control spatial assets.

The new countries of Earth are as follows:

Eurasian Federation (includes all of Eurasia; capital city is Beijing)

A.I.P.U (Atlantic-Indo-Pacific Union) (includes the African and Australian continents; capital city is Antananarivo)

America (includes the North and South American continents; capital city is Mexico City).

The space colonies were originally their own collection of sovereign nations (Named from 1 to 10) that allied with the Martian Republic. They waged war and lost against the Earth Coalition, an independent military and peace-keeping force based in Antarctica.

Earthians and Spacians hate each other. Even colonists that live on Earth-owned colonies still did not receive the same rights as natural-born Earthian citizens. Martian-owned colonies claimed to prosper under the idea of a homogenized Spacian society, though many citizens yearned for the days where their colonies were independent and free from the totalitarian Martian rule.

In the year of PC 45, all ten colonies were liberated from their respective occupations and allowed to govern themselves completely. They formed the United Colonies of Space (U.C.S., sometimes just U.C.), with each colony being its own state. The federal district of the U.C. is located within the Moon’s Copernicus crater.

Kinderheim 511 is a research facility and “factory” for Newtypes as well as other enhanced humans, funded by the Martian Republic. Its research was halted in PC 40 after its destruction at the hands of Johan.

The Red Rose Mansion was Bonaparta’s own research facility, funded by a rogue colony, though said colony's rebellious tendencies were quelled some time before the unification of the colonies.

Most mobile armors have been destroyed during and immediately after the Earth-Mars war. Production of mobile armors is also banned. Johan probably manages to get his hands on one (the one originally named mobile weapon for this AU. Of course, it’s getting called ‘Obluda’).

*Might end up changing the time period and include another major conflict that isn’t a direct WWII analog... Mainly would occur so that characters like Lunge, Grimmer, Roberto, and Martin would be war veterans and thus more skilled at piloting mobile suits. (?)

Characters (most mobile suits were picked purely off of looks):

Tenma:

Natural-born Newtype, despite being born and living for most of his life on Earth. Abilities are relatively latent. Is still a doctor on an Earth-owned colony. Comes into illegal possession of a mobile suit, but uses it to help track down and stop Johan. On top of the M.S. acquisition, he’s still also dealing with all the other shit he gets blamed for in the source material.

Possible mobile suits:

RX-80PR Pale Rider

OZ-06MS Leo

MSA-005 Methuss

RX-0 Unicorn Gundam

Eva:

Normal human. Obtained a license to operate a mobile worker and received rudimentary mobile suit training from Martin, which she utilized when tracking down Christof.

Possible mobile suits:

Xvb-fnc Fawn Farsia

AMX-004 Qubeley

V08-1228 Grimgerde

MD-0064 Darilbalde

Lunge:

Natural-born Newtype. Abilities have awakened, although lacking in being able to sense other Newtypes and other people’s thoughts. Works for the judicial division of the Earth Coalition’s Eurasian Federation branch.

Possible mobile suits:

RGM-79 [G] GM Sniper

MS-09R4 Schnee Weiss

RGM-96X Jesta

Grimmer:

Artificial Newtype and biologically enhanced human. Can barely sense other Newtypes and hear thoughts, but is able to utilize psycommu systems and psychokinesis well.

Possible mobile suits:

MSN-06S Sinanju Stein(er lol)

MS-06F Zaku II

RGM-109 Heavygun

Nina:

Artificial Newtype. Abilities are in the process of awakening throughout the story. Can emphatically sense Johan despite the latter not being a Newtype.

Possible mobile suits:

AMX-018 [HADES] Todesritter

CAMS-05 Mack Knife

GNZ-007 Gaddess

Johan:

Brain patterns indicate that he’s a normal human, though he’s able to mimic Newtype abilities to a certain extent. Unable to sense Nina in the way that she can sense himself. Seeks to destroy Bonaparta for ruining his life, as well as wreak havoc on humanity as a whole. Probably tries to instigate a colony drop.

Possible mobile suits:

RX-0 Unicorn Gundam 02 Banshee

MSN-06S Sinanju

AGP-X1/NU Fake ν Gundam

ASW-G-56 Gundam Gremory

VGMM-Gf10 Gundam G-Lucifer

Roberto:

Biologically enhanced human. Used to be a mercenary, so he’s well-versed with mobile suits compared to other members of the cast. Along with Christof, he helps control Johan’s funnels remotely to make it look like he’s using a psycommu system.

Possible mobile suits:

FD-03 Gustav Karl

AMS-119 Geara Doga

Me02R-F01 Messer Type-F01

MS-09 Dom

GH-001 Grimoire

AMS-129 Geara Zulu

Christof:

Artificial Newtype, but either does not use or is unable to awaken his abilities whatsoever. Along with Roberto, he helps control Johan’s funnels remotely to make it look like he’s using a psycommu system.

Possible mobile suits:

GNX-607T GN-XII

EB-05s Schwalbe Graze

CEK-040 Beguir-Beu

Martin:

Eva’s bodyguard and eventual mobile suit trainer. Dies helping Eva escape an ambush orchestrated by Čapek while in space.

Possible mobile suits:

MD-0021 Desultor

EB-06 Graze

MS-06F Zaku II

Bonaparta:

Studied the Newtype phenomenon, attempting to both genetically create Newtypes and train normal humans to become Newtypes. Johan and Nina were his last experimental subjects before he disappeared. Also had a hand in developing certain mobile weapons.

Dieter:

Natural-born Newtype, though has not awakened his abilities (which Hartmann tried and failed to accelerate). Accompanied by a special, football-patterned Haro that was gifted to him from Tenma (it doesn’t mind being kicked around, but since it’s made of metal, that doesn’t happen often). 

[miragedmoon]

Walks in, people are really doing the “my white man has done nothing wrong in the narrative ever because he is autistic and autistic people can do nothing wrong actually” with Dungeon meshi

Read down below for my thoughts on people pulling this shit

Before I start, maybe pick up a book from school and practice how to read a narrative and learn content analysis,

it’ll really help because I don’t know what the hell else to say to people who are bad at reading subtext and putting context into practice at this point

I see the sentiment of “Kabru is actually evil because he actively murders people-“ as if the story isn’t actually like super nuanced and complex in its’ dynamics between races

and y’all can only really see a man that has personally gone through nothing but tragedy have a proper reaction to not having that tragedy handled properly and go “because he is a brown man he is inherently violent and therefore bad for my white man because of these story beats” with the type of stupid white person reaction.

The subtext went out the window huh, he gave the viewer ample context and reason as to why it happened he was going to kill the body retriever group, WHO WAS TRYING TO SAY TO HIM THAT THEY WERE GOING TO MUG HIM. AND KILL HIM AND SPLIT THE MONEY THEY MADE FROM GAMING A SYSTEM THEYVE BEEN EXPLOITING, WHICH HE DIDN’T DO.

Dying to monsters is one thing but someone like a retriever artificially upping the amount of people who die in a dungeon while also actively disrespecting the rules that the dungeon has by doing that fits perfectly into Kabru’s moral compass and motivation. Do you think that wouldn’t bother him? Sure, he has learning to do himself in regards to monsters and all, but do people really think he’s a monster actively incapable of change, when he’s stated in text that he believes himself to be a monster due to the things that have happened to him? Do you think he doesn’t blame himself and have survivors guilt from what he went through? Or do we think because Kabru lies and he warps and he cheats only to start realizing that the Kabru we’re shown doesn’t even know where he himself starts or ends. This is not trying to justify his actions. I am explaining his thinking. Of course He’d kill the retrievers.

And I think he would kill the Canaries if he had the chance to. I think the Retrievers were an active stand in for his feelings towards the Canaries.

When you build a life speaking lies after your previous status quo crumbles, how the fuck are you supposed to differentiate your own behaviors from the lies you grow into saying to make sure you don’t get close enough to people to be hurt as badly as he was as a kid. He is a sole survivor of a tragedy, and he reacts accordingly, and you all just want to antagonize him.

Did we forget who we’re talking about in comparison here, or are you guys that focused on justifying a man who clearly was used, exploited, and literally lost his mother because some group who thought themselves to be higher than due to their longer life cycles decided to destroy his whole life because it created a slight inconvenience

god you lot are truly fucking insufferable and can’t let characters be complex without woobifying or flanderizing them to be more digestible.

Let characters be complex.

You don’t have to like them all the time, You don’t have to agree with their actions.

You don’t have to agree with a character all the time for you to like a character’s writing.

[carol-effing-danvers]

Steve Rogers is a Monster

Yeah, that’s a hell of a title, isn’t it? Strap in, it only gets worse from here. 

(click here if you’d prefer to read this on AO3)

Forewarning, if you enjoyed the epilogue for Endgame, this particular essay is not for you - and no, I am not bashing the Steve/Peggy shippers, you are beautiful human beings who make the fandom brighter and I’m happy that at least someone in this fandom got the ending they wanted.

Additional warning: if you expect this to be another Civil War debate, you will also be disappointed. There has never been a measurement invented that can adequately describe how much I loathe the verbal dick measuring contest that seems to pass for human interaction between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers in this franchise. It’s not funny or entertaining - it’s exhausting, uncomfortable, and frankly it’s rather lazy writing.

This is about the very specific way that the epilogue in Endgame completely changed the way the character of Steve Rogers can be interpreted, and I don’t just mean the very illogical and contradictory way that time travel is explained, both in the movie itself and the fact that the writers and directors have two completely different views on how that worked out. 

I mean that the choice made by Steve Rogers in the very last minutes of that movie alters the way I view each and every one of his actions starting from The First Avenger and that alteration is exactly what I want to talk about, because whether you view it as deserving or not, what Steve does at the conclusion of Endgame was the most selfish thing humanly possible. Time is a thief, but somehow Steve managed to steal even more than Time.

Side note here: I understand that I am a completely biased Stucky shipper, a friend to Barnes and Noble, a Starbucks aficionado - sorry. Anyway, I’ve always believed that Steve and Bucky were destined blah blah blah, but I was never expecting a Stucky ending. Disney wasn’t going to do that, and I knew that, I wasn’t bothered that Steve and Bucky weren’t doing the smoochies by the end. But Bucky’s facial expression during those last minutes was gut-wrenching. Like...I have no idea what kind of cues the script and directors gave him, but in the future, please don’t ask Sebastian Stan to look sad unless you want soul-crushing devastation. It’s not Seb’s fault, his features are just arranged that way - but the fact that the editing staff allowed Sam to be sad though elated to be entrusted with the Shield and Bucky looked like his soul was being physically torn out of his body was an… interesting choice. 

Other side note: if you’re writing about time travel, I’m begging y’all to get your facts straight. Or just don’t write about time travel. It almost always sounds better on paper than it does on screen and it means that you’ve opened doors to more questions than you’ve probably got the answers for. I know this was about trying to set up the idea of the multiverse, I get that, but there were better and less messy ways to do that, and I know that because I’ve done it before. @Marvel: Let me write you a six-way orgy you fucking cowards~

By going back in time, Steve robbed Peggy of the future that would have been hers - not only that, he’s robbed her of even the chance of making the choice between those futures, because you honestly could not tell me with a straight face that Steve told her the complete truth of what he had done and she would be okay with him alternating the very course of the future. It doesn’t help his case that he has a history of not disclosing truths that he knows will be painful or inconvenient for other people in his life.

He robbed his loved ones - Sam, Bucky, Wanda - of the years they would have spent with him. Sure, he ‘came back’ after Peggy passed away, but they are adults in the prime of youth who knew him sixty years ago in his own time and he is an old, old man who has lived an entire life completely separated from them. He is practically a stranger with a name they know, but a history that no longer belongs to any of them - not even his oldest friend. They have him back, but judging from his age, they’ll be lucky to get even ten more years with him. Assuming of course, that any of them can stand to speak to him - I certainly couldn’t blame them if they tell him to go to hell and take his dad jokes with him. 

Steve has stolen away their friend and dropped off an elderly and dying near-stranger in his place, and this is treated by the writing (and the majority of the acting) as a wild and unexpected but not tragic event. 

Is it really that unexpected, though?

I recall seeing a Game of Thrones essay on Daenerys across my dash (I’m sorry, love, I don’t recall who you are since it’s not a fandom I’m in, but if someone knows who wrote that, please post the link!) which detailed how her ending in the series was foreshadowed many times by her penchant for bloody killings and her habit of surrounding herself with her own fawning friends.

Months after reading that, I had the thought: though Steve is never really shown thinking about Peggy after Civil War, except in a few scattered scenes in Endgame, was this foreshadowed? Whether you believe that his actions are justified or not, what Steve does is still, in the end, selfish at its very heart, and Steve Rogers is not a selfish person. 

Oh no, my dear friends and readers. Because taking this action has solidified and clarified Steve Rogers as the biggest and most selfish asshole in this whole universe.

Steve does not do the right thing, Steve does the thing that will most make him feel better. The fact that this often happens to be the right thing in the end is more the result of happy coincidence than any special sort of moral authority that the man holds. 

Rescuing Bucky Barnes and his fellow captives in a prisoner of war camp from being experimented on by an insane Nazi eugenicist? That was not a moral stand, that was endangering himself, Peggy Carter, and Howard Stark because he couldn’t handle the reality of his best friend being killed in war.

Sacrificing himself by putting the Valkyrie down in the Arctic Circle? That was not about sparing human lives, that was about Steve seeing his friend die right in front of him and not being able to deal with the grief. There were ways he could’ve prevented the plane from killing people without killing himself.

Trying to make Bucky remember who he was? And later on, saving him from the government agencies who wanted to hunt him down? Although, arguably, that last one is also just good common sense - Steve was already shown that government agencies could and were corrupted by HYDRA and he’d also seen how dangerous the Winter Soldier could be when unleashed. 

Steve did, I think, truly believe that this was the right thing to do, but it was also about keeping his connection - his very last, since Peggy had descended into dementia caused by Alzheimer’s before she ultimately died - to a past that for him, was only months or years ago, rather than decades. In some ways, this is completely understandable - Bucky might be the very last person left alive who truly knows who the real Steve Rogers is, because the rest of these people only know Captain America and we are consistently shown through multiple movies how uncomfortable this makes him.

This gets...considerably less and less understandable as we are shown Steve’s growing relationships with Natasha, Sam, Wanda - even Sharon, though she barely gets any screen time and they share the most awkward kiss I’ve ever seen - and indeed, what might be the most uncomfortable kiss in cinema history.

Side Note 3: This is made even more awkward by the director’s choice to have two of Steve’s friends watching them the whole time - seriously, who even does that? Why would you make them do that? Only sociopaths make out with their friends staring at them like that. It’s so fucking creepy - and don’t even get me fucking started on the fact that she’s also apparently his own niece. AHHHHH!

But we are shown, over and over again, that Steve is capable of building close meaningful relationships with people in the present. They don’t know his whole history, but they do know Steve Rogers rather than Captain America and they care about him deeply. 

Side Note 4: Notice that I don’t count Tony Stark among those people - despite this strangely persistent narrative that the various writers and directors tried to sell to the audience, Tony and Steve were not friends. They were never friends. They were colleagues at best, but these were two men who neither liked nor understood each other very well, but had to work together. And sometimes that’s okay, too. (Oh dear, I just gave the Stony fans a fit too, didn’t I? Sorry, guys. Enemies to Lovers is a great trope, I support you!)

But let’s set aside Steve’s gross betrayal of the people who loved him. We’ll also ignore the question of whether the motive for these good actions has tainted the actions themselves. Because even without questioning these, the conclusion of this story arc still transforms Steve into the biggest monster this franchise has. 

The very fundamental way that the writers and directors can’t agree on how the time travel mechanics in their own story work mean that Steve has just done one of two things and they range from shady and very questionable to absolutely fucking horrific. 

The first, that he’s created his own alternate universe to exist in, is morally dubious at best. Even the people who support this theory and liked the ending seem to feel that it wasn’t necessarily a ten out of ten on the moral goodness spectrum. They’ll say things like ‘he deserved to have his happy ending’. Even that phrasing seems to acknowledge that doing this was the opposite of the right thing. It just considers doing the wrong thing as being justified rather than horrifying. 

But let’s examine this first idea for a minute - even this, the more innocent of the two implications, means that rather than really processing his grief or dealing with the repeated tragedies and losses that have occured in his life, even as he was running group therapy sessions and grief counseling, Steve Rogers chose to escape his current life by creating an alternate universe that specifically allows he himself to live out his own fucking fantasies of the way his life should have turned out. 

That, in case you are not aware, is wildly fucked up. I thought I was playing pretty fast and loose with Steve’s characterization when I turned him into an extremely polite serial killer but as it turns out, I clearly just wasn’t setting the bar high enough, because that’s somehow even more fucked up than being an undercover child soldier with a small sadistic streak. 

Hm, and now I feel I should have been more creative there...

The second, and even more horrifying option, is that this older Steve Rogers has been in this world the whole time, watching as things unfolded just as we’ve seen over the past decade, taking ‘the slow way’ through time. 

Side Note 5: I do kind of understand why you would do it this way, because that’s really cool and shocking when you say that! Until you think about it for longer than three seconds and suddenly you realize…

Everything that has happened here, every tragedy and downfall these people experienced, happened because Steve Rogers lived his happily ever after with his beautiful wife and did absolutely nothing to stop it. He got to fuck Peggy Carter and watched as his wife built an empire of intelligence networks, knowing that her efforts were completely in vain because her agency was rotten to the core and he never told her.

Every horrifying act committed by HYDRA under the guise of SHIELD was permitted through Steve Rogers’ negligence. And that’s just the wider big-picture worldview, large and shocking, but not personal. 

What about the people that Steve claims to actually care about? 

This means that Steve lived his whole life in contentment with his wife and children while his best friend was physically and psychologically tortured for over seventy years and just...let that go. 

He allowed one friend to murder another in the nineties, when the Winter Soldier was sent after Howard and Maria Stark. Then their child was being advised by a greedy self-interested warmonger who paid terrorists to drag him off to be tortured and slaughtered, and Steve did nothing about that, either. 

Bruce Banner was exploited, experimented on, and made into a monster against his will in the failed pursuit of recreating what was done to Steve, resulting in billions of dollars in damage and dozens or even hundreds of lives lost, and Steve allowed that to happen, too. 

Like Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanov was physically and psychologically tortured for others to use her as a living weapon - except that this was probably happening to her since early childhood, and a man her future self loved and trusted implicitly did nothing to save her from this upbringing. 

The Maximoff twins are shown to have not wealthy but loving parents who are murdered in front of them and they both endure days of laying in the rubble of their ruined apartment, wondering if the bomb in their living room would go off and kill them. Later, they are taken in by HYDRA, experimented on, and recruited as child soldiers to the cause when they show signs of having supernatural powers. They start a series of events that result in the destruction of a major city and the loss of what is probably thousands of lives. Pietro is murdered while trying to help the Avengers to stop this, and Wanda suffers the loss of the very last living person she loved. None of these things seem to have bothered Future Steve. 

Steve “I can’t sit on the sidelines when I see a situation go sideways” Rogers, planted himself on that fucking sideline and observed for nearly eighty years as friends, colleagues, and his own wife were lied to, brainwashed, tortured, vilified, and hunted down like animals.

And then there Steve Rogers himself - not the Endgame Steve Rogers, the Steve Rogers who brought down a Nazi plane and will lie beneath the ice for seventy years while everything he knows disappear (mostly) innocent of these horrors, the life he would’ve lived stolen from him by a stranger with his name and his face from another universe.

What I’m saying here is that if you consider this idea for any amount of time, it took Steve Rogers less than ten minutes to become the most evil and disturbing figure in the entire MCU, only (not really tho) contested by Thanos himself. 

Gross and poorly reasoned libertarian ethics aside, Thanos genuinely believes that he did what he did for the sake of the entire population. It’s made fairly explicitly clear that Steve didn’t do this for anyone but himself. 

Call me crazy, but if everyone you know needs to suffer and multiple planet-wide devestations have to happen in order for you to get your happy ending, you might be the bad guy. 

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned?

[snackerdoodle]

(via https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7vTyjuuslUqiHauSgsmbuQ?si=WJHuwxgiQ422gub_5ZEC5w)

I got a little obsessed with the idea of creating a Lyctor Love Songs playlist for The Locked Tomb. I’ve finally finished fussing with it and wanted to share! You can read a breakdown of my rationale for these songs below the cut because I always wish other people would do this for their playlists, and now it’s time to put my money* where my mouth is.

This playlist is conceptually a definite spoiler for the process of achieving lyctorhood as revealed at the end of Gideon the Ninth, so proceed with caution if you haven’t finished that book yet. I also made this after reading Harrow the Ninth, but I’ve tried to censor (or at least be vague) in my references to spoilers for that book.

Possibly obvious content warnings for murder, suicide, toxic relationships, and cannibalism mentions—stuff you’d kind of expect from this series, honestly. I’m adding an additional content warning for the lyrics of We Both Go Down Together by the Decemberists including implied rape, which is not in line with the content warnings you might expect for these books. 

*obsessive energy

Umbrella - Rihanna

This is a much more wholesome song than the rest, but I really wanted to include it for "When the sun shines, we'll shine together, told you I'll be here forever, said I'll always be your friend, took an oath, I'ma stick it out til the end," and "You're a part of my entity, here for infinity." It has a bit of a “one flesh, one end” feeling to it. 

#1 Crush - Garbage

This song is creepy, obsessive, and uses some upsetting violent imagery, which is exactly the mood I’m after here. I really like the idea of being haunted by the other person—”See your face every place that I walk in, hear your voice every time that I’m talking.” I also like the implications of seeking power—”Throw away all the pain that I’m living [...] and I could never be ignored.” The line about selling their soul doesn’t hurt this song’s case either. 

Drain You - Nirvana

This feels like a pretty easy connection to syphoning for me, and for this context the gorey, semi-medical imagery is spot on. Also how could I resist “with eyes so dilated I’ve become your pupil,” when there is just so much eye-related lyctor baggage in this series?

Animals - Maroon 5

Here comes the cannibalism. There are so many cannibal songs. I also included this one for the language about absorbing the other person and not being able to escape each other.

I Will Possess Your Heart - Death Cab for Cutie

Here for creepy possessiveness, pure and simple. Also, “I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me”—the potential for achieving ultimate necromantic power? Maybe!

Banks of the Ohio - Dolly Parton

When I first had the idea for a “Lyctor Love Songs” playlist, it was just going to be a bunch of murder ballads, but expanding my criteria turned out to be more fun. I really love the way Dolly Parton sings this traditional American murder ballad. This one gets to represent the traditional songs on this playlist because of its river imagery and because I think lines like “she cried my love don’t murder me, ‘cause I’m not prepared for eternity” play well with the lyctor concept. It also makes me ridiculously happy to include a 19th century song on a playlist for a distant future sci-fi setting. We’re all lucky I’m not making a playlist of the oldest extant folk songs I can find for the archives on the Sixth.

Phenom - Thao & the Get Down Stay Down

More cannibalism imagery, yes thank you. Anatomical imagery? Yes, thank you. “Scorched earth”? Sure, I’ll just take that for my distantly post-apocalyptic playlist, thank you. I also like the narrative in this song around rising to power. “First of the secondary class” plays well for me with our spoilery knowledge about the nature of lyctorhood in relation to the powers of the Emperor. 

Under My Skin - Jukebox the Ghost

I’d never heard this song before I started working on putting this playlist together, and a friend suggested it in our group chat. It’s completely perfect, and in my opinion, a total bop. “I can fit two people under my skin […] crawl up in there and join me within. I can feel your heart beating under my skin,” etc, etc. 

Two of Hearts - Stacey Q

Same vein as the one before! I also think there’s room here for intentionally misreading “I got this feeling that you're going to stay, I never knew that it could happen this way, Before I met you I was falling apart, But now at last I really know we're made of two hearts that can beat as one…” with lyctoral intent—the narrator is in a stronger position now that they’re entwined with the other person.

Tears of Pearls - Savage Garden

So this song is here in part because my high school friends and I once accidentally listened to this Savage Garden CD on repeat at a sleepover for like 5 hours straight, so I love taking the opportunity to break out this song in particular. That aside, I think the toxic relationship structure described here plays well with the lyctors, especially as we see them in Harrow. I particularly like this part near the end: “We twist and turn where angels burn, Like fallen soldiers we will learn, Once forgotten, twice removed, Love will be the death, The death of you.” I would love to include some religious imagery on this playlist, thank you Savage Garden. Also, as we see in Harrow, the older Lyctors sure do handle their emotions...poorly. 

I’m Sorry - Margaret Cho

An excellent murder ballad! “I’m sorry I killed you dear, I only wanted you to be near,” and “And I sincerely apologize, My actions were unwise, And now I realize that it killed me when you died,” and “My pride was stronger than your will to live.” 

We Both Go Down Together - The Decemberists

Another murder ballad, and even within the murder ballad genre, I think this one is exceptionally creepy. Especially with the murder-suicide implications, I think “we both go down together” works well with the creepiestreading of “one flesh one end.” 

Arms Tonite - Mother Mother

Another absolute bop suggested by a friend in my Locked Tomb group chat. I love the imagery, and I think it works exceptionally well for the lyctoral concept—”That I died right inside your arms tonight, That I'm fine even after I have died, That I try to escape the afterlife, That I try to get back in your arms alive.”

Genghis Khan - Miike Snow

Another super possessive song. I know it isn’t really explicit to cannon, but between this and Banks of the Ohio, I really like taking the literally all-consuming lyctoral process as a weird extension of the possessive “I don’t want you to get it on with nobody else but me” energy in this song and some of the others. Please also accept for consideration these lines—“'Cause I don't really want you, girl, But you can't be free, 'Cause I'm selfish, I'm obscene.” That has been part of the fun of this playlist for me—while I think some songs track for some characters more than others, I’m really having more fun with playing with the idea of someone who would intentionally murder and absorb someone they love in exchange for power. 

The Beast - Concrete Blonde

Another creepy, somewhat cannibalistic song. “Love is the leech, sucking you up, Love is a vampire, drunk on your blood, Love is the beast that will, Tear out your heart, Hungrily lick it and, Painfully pick it apart.” Cannibalism and that idea of draining someone of their power is a great combo. 

Savages - Marina

I love Marina, which is probably the only reason I’m not bowing to the fact that it bothers me that this isn’t even arguably a love song. We see in Harrow how vicious the old lyctors are, and  how their dinner parties feel like a thin veneer of civility over some truly rotten cores (I say this as a person who genuinely loved Mercymorn, but like… they’re terrible). Also, how am I supposed to resist “Is it a human trait, or is it learned behavior, Are you killing for yourself, or killing for your savior?” and “I’m not afraid of God, I am afraid of man.” More religious imagery? in my locked tomb playlist? It’s more likely than you think.

Cannibal - Kesha

More cannibalism! I love how vicious this song is, for this purpose. I also feel like “I have a heart, I swear I do, But just not baby when it comes to you,” works well, even if I’m not sure I can 100% justify it. 

Bring Me to Life - Evanescence

An explicitly canonical choice. “Now that I know what I'm without, you can't just leave me, breathe into me and make me real” and “Save me from the nothing I've become.” Because I’m an absolute turd, I love the semi-joke I’m finding in many of these song lyrics about the partner being unable to leave. Also because I’m terrible, I really like that this song can be read as regret over having become a lyctor in the first place. 

Monster - Lady Gaga

Cannibalism again, and I like that there’s some eye stuff in here. 

Cellophane - Sia

I like the anatomical imagery, with veins and blood and brains and all that. I also like “Patience is your virtue, saint o' mine” for a little call out to one of our extant lyctors. 

Most of All - Fuel

Like “Bring Me to Life,” I really like the regret and self loathing in this one. I also like the mentions of memories because [redacted]. “And I hate you now, And I miss you most of all, All those times we laughed, The scars that you left.” 

‘39 - Queen

First of all, I really like this song. I don’t think I should quite call it a bop like some of the others—maybe a jam? A song that’s explicitly about leaving Earth behind for deep-space exploration and the passage of time works wonderfully well for this sci-fi series about a society that has abandoned a dying(?) Earth and that is populated with a group of very damaged people staring down the barrel of a traumatic immortality. I also like that there’s a bit of eye imagery in the song. I especially like “For my life still ahead, pity me” as a cutting line for a lyctor. 

[bestworstcase]

I mean Cassandra still went after Rapunzel and was manipulated onto trying to kill her,

and all of Cass actions and anger are directed towards Rapz somehow so they still had a bond and in a way Cass abandoned Rapz in a very important mission, all Rapunzel wanted to do was to help a friend that was being manipulated like you said akin to an abusive relationship and Cass started to hostigate and attack Rapz because of following new person she barely knew her anger although understandable doesn’t take into account that Rapz was for the majority of her life an abuse victim as well 1/2

You do have valid points, Rapunzel could have acted bette they may not have been friends anymore on Cassandra behalf, but they still held a bond a relationship, one in which Raps tried to help her and Cassandra did nothing but act more outwardly toxic towards her, Cass refuse to listen to Raps and decided to follow a person she barely knew making her act physical and emotional abusive towards Her friends and family, I understand where Cass is coming from but that doesn’t justify all the abuse she directed towards her community, friends and family who she tried to kill and harm in multiple occasions, The kingdom was still on ruins when she left the harm already done.

emotions are valid, but not the horrible acts that are made through them 2/2

#1: in and of itself, viewed separately from everything that came after, cassandra deciding to leave the group at the end of season two was absolutely the right thing for her to do. the situation, the group dynamic had become so toxic for cass by that point that i don’t think it could have been salvaged without cass leaving.

was rapunzel relying on cass to stick around? yeah. but tough. cass was within her rights to leave, cass was within her rights to prioritize her own well-being, and cass was within her rights to say “fuck off, you’re not my friend.”

#2: it was pointed out to me yesterday (hilariously) that zhan tiri’s introduction to cass mirrors adira’s introduction to rapunzel: both of them show up out of the blue, go “i’m a friend and i’m here to help you find your destiny,” and proceed to act like cryptic advisors for the remainder of their respective quests. should cass have maybe questioned this a bit more? sure, but like. no ones out here saying it was stupid for rapunzel to take adira at her word.

plus zhan tiri makes a big point of empathizing with cassandra’s pain and anger. she acts like she cares that cass is hurting, truly cares, which is something cass never gets from her real friends. (rapunzel does care, but her attempts to help inadvertently come off pretty strongly as “why are you upset? i didn’t do anything wrong. stop being upset it’s making me sad” in comparison to zhan tiri’s “i’m sorry that happened to you” and general focus on how cassandra feels.)

so… why is cass wrong for trusting the person who treats her with compassion? why is she wrong for taking zhan tiri’s side over rapunzel’s when zhan tiri, in the early game especially, treats her so much better? like…trusting the little girl who is nice to her and demonstrates concern for her feelings is the most rational thing cass does for most of her villain arc dbcbxhxvscxvsc

#3: cass focusing on blaming rapunzel for gothel’s abandonment instead of being mad about the many, many, many things that rapunzel is personally responsible for, like for example maiming cass in the great tree, is…clumsy writing. arguments can be made that cass is sublimating all her anger into one easy focal point + that zhan tiri is encouraging this to make tugging those emotional strings easier, but when the narrative never bothers to unpack that… that’s a deeply subtextual reading and i personally don’t consider it to be canonical. there just isn’t enough overt text to support it. anyway; regardless, this is where cass starts to go off the rails.

but at the same time it’s… pretty understandable for her to turn against rapunzel. she has a demon not just validating her hurt and anger but encouraging her to stew in it, and twisting the reality (rapunzel was a toxic friend) into a much more sinister narrative (rapunzel was a malevolent abuser who stole everything from cass and must be destroyed in order for cass to live her own life). and this shift happens over the course of months—months, alone with nobody but zhan tiri dropping poison in her ear. it’s realistic for cass to fall for it.

#4: it is disingenuous to describe any and all acts of violence or malfeasance as abuse. abuse is a pattern that occurs within the context of an inequal relationship; the abuser uses violence as a tool to exert control over the victim. if i go outside and punch a random passerby in the face, i’ve just assaulted them, but that’s not abuse. gothel abused rapunzel; zhan tiri abuses cass; cass does not abuse her friends.

would you day that varian abused rapunzel? would you say that he abused the citizens of corona? no. because he didn’t.

the reason i take issue with this is people like to describe any bad action a villain takes as “abuse” in order to paint them as unforgivable and irredeemable; this is because abusers are notoriously almost impossible to change, far more so than people who commit other types of wrongdoing. this trend turns “abuse” into a meaningless buzzword when it’s used in analysis of fiction and encourages very black and white thinking, neither of which are good.

so let’s say what we mean:

- cass screams at her dad for lying to her all her life, then lashes out and leaves him trapped when he yells back.

- cass crashes eugene’s birthday party to demand the scroll, threatening to attack corona if she’s refused.

- she kidnaps varian and uses a minimum amount of force (ie truth serum) to get him to tell her the moon incantation.

- she assaults varian, rapunzel, and eugene when the latter two come to rescue varian.

- she threatens calliope’s life, attacks rapunzel and eugene when they try to stop her, and steals the mind trap.

- she uses the mind trap on the brotherhood. (this i would qualify as abuse; i think literal mind control is one of those things that automatically counts.)

- she yells at rapunzel and storms away, leaving rapunzel trapped, after she sees what appears to be evidence of rapunzel trying to lie to her / manipulate her

- she impulsively takes over corona after her attempt to surrender/deescalate results in them shooting her in the back without warning. (i’d flip out and raze the city too, tbh)

- she fights rapunzel and tries to steal the sundrop during the eclipse

all of which is bad, of course. and while her reasons for doing it are understandable, none of it is justified by her anger or the hurt fueling that anger. but like. literally no one is arguing that what cass did in s3 wasn’t bad. just that it’s unfair to act like she was stupid or pathetic for falling for zhan tiri’s game, or like she had no reason to be angry, or like her trauma wasn’t a big deal and she should’ve gotten over it and it’s ridiculous for her to react the way she reacted to zhan tiri retraumatizing her, or like victims of abuse who are messy or imperfect or loud or who lash out or who don’t fit the preconceived mold of the tragic, innocent, sad victim are terrible irredeemable monsters… or like rapunzel did nothing wrong and cass was just some terrible friend who went off the deep end for no reason.

[precuredaily]

Precure Day 186

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 38 - “Precure 5′s Cinderella Story” Date watched: 15 May 2020 Original air date: 28 October 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/Sc5B6vA Transformation Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/6k6SzS0 Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

Glass slippers: not even once

This episode introduces an idea that will get explored a fair few times in series down the road: the fairy tale episode. Cinderella is a particularly popular one, because it’s a simple story that little girls can imagine themselves in and there’s a lot of room to play with the narrative. It’s hardly a revolutionary idea for fiction, but it’s still fun to see how Precure plays with it, and the spin in this episode is particularly unusual for manifesting in two different ways. Let’s explore!

The Plot

Milk decides to try copying down the story of Cinderella for writing practice, as she plans to write her own novel a la Komachi, and copying a book is apparently a good way to study story structure. However, she gets bored copying it verbatim, so she decides to put her own spin on the narrative, portraying the cures as the characters. Nozomi is Cinderella, Komachi is the evil mother, Rin and Karen are the evil sisters, and Urara is the witch (no fairy godmother here). Coco fills the role of the prince at the ball and Nuts is another nobleman. All of the characters are strangely self-aware, except for Nozomi. They know the story of Cinderella, they know they’re characters in it, they’re basically going through the motions as the story dictates. When Urara shows up to give Nozomi her magical makeover, she winds up transforming her into other fictional characters first before she gets it right.

this dress should look familiar

Once she’s at the ball, Nozomi trips and falls, getting the attention of Prince Coco, who in turn dances with her. Nuts also approaches Komachi and asks her to dance, commenting that it’s just the kind of story they’re in. Karen and Rin have an exchange where they ask who Coco is dancing with despite both of them knowing exactly who it is. Urara shows up in a gown, and everyone knows she was supposed to be the witch. Did I mention it was weird? And to reiterate, Milk is writing this, these aren’t the real Nozomi and co. transported into the story. Milk has written them to be self-aware. What a strange book. Anyway, she has Nozomi trip and fall and they all end up in a pile on the ground and that’s where her story leaves off when she’s interrupted by the real girls knocking on her door. She hides her writing from them and tries to find somewhere more private to write, but as soon as she steps outside, Bunbee confronts her and decides to suck everyone into the world of her story.

Darkness imprisoning me, all that I see - wait have I used that joke before?

The next thing they know, they’re inside Milk’s Cinderella! But they don’t bother acting out the story, they see Bunbee holding Milk hostage and he turns the chandelier into a Kowaina, so they transform as well.

The Kowaina is able to use reflected light as laser beams to attack the girls so the team scatters. Dream and Rouge focus on fighting Bunbee to try to rescue Milk, but the kowaina keeps getting in their way, so Lemonade, Mint, and Aqua manage to hold it off while the other two get the jump on Bunbee. They free Milk, and then get upset at collateral damage to the castle being caused by their fight. Bunbee taunts that he’ll destroy this world like he destroyed the Palmier Kingdom, but all the girls respond by kicking his ass and the kowaina’s ass and then Dream performs Crystal Shoot to defeat it, and Bunbee flees.

After they detransform, the clock strikes midnight and they realize they’re still in the story, so they all run to get “home”. On the way down the stairs, Nozomi trips and one of her glass slippers flies off, opening a portal back to Natts House.

Somehow the glass slipper came back with them, and they remember that whoever it fits is supposed to marry the prince. Nozomi and Coco share a glance but before she can put it on, Milk LEAPS into the air and lands inside the shoe, claiming it as a perfect fit. Nozomi starts to chase her, demanding her shoe back, while Karen, Komachi, and Rin pick up the scattered pages of Milk’s manuscript. They take umbrage with her portrayal of them in the story, and the episode closes on Nozomi, Karen, and Rin all chasing her up the stairs.

The Analysis

It’s certainly a fun episode, a nice uptick from the last few. The spins on Cinderella are clever and funny, and this cast really makes it work. I do find it weird just how self-aware they seem to be in Milk’s story. One time in high school (probably around the time this show aired actually) I did a creative writing assignment which completely shattered the fourth wall, but my jokes were more absurdist than this. The characters act as though they’re the real Nozomi, Rin, etc who have been transported into the story and know they have to act it out, rather than like they’re characters within the narrative watching as the events unfold. I don’t really understand why it was composed this way, it doesn’t make sense from Milk’s perspective to have them be self-aware and make comments on their knowledge of the story, that sort of gag is much more suited for the characters being sucked into the story, which they did in the second half of the episode anyway. Structurally it may have been better to have them absorbed into the story early in the episode, play out the tale of Cinderella until the mid-point, and then Bunbee reveals himself or something and the rest goes as normal.

Regardless of whether the gags make sense in context, though, they are hilarious. The wicked stepmother being played by the nicest girl of the bunch is peak irony, and Rin and Karen the frequent head-butters as the stepsisters makes me laugh, although they didn’t really play up their little rivalry. None of them take their roles very seriously, which adds to the comedy. The highlight for me has to be when Urara shows up and transforms Nozomi. She cycles through a couple different outfits before she gets it right:

The most notable ones are Momotaro and Princess Kaguya, who are the subjects of famous Japanese fairy tales.

She also gets turned into a bear, a clown, and even a monster! I enjoy the self-awareness as well. Urara showing up at the ball despite and being called out by the others as the witch, the frequent comments about this all being “how the story goes” or what have you. My favorite exchange is when Karen asks who’s dancing with the Prince and Rin tells her it’s Cinderella, the title character, and Karen responds that she knows but she has to stick to the script. I don’t know why but this is peak comedy to me, and my greatest wish is that it be the actual characters who are saying this and not just Milk writing.

The payoff to this, however, is the revelation at the end when Karen, Komachi, and Rin look at Milk’s manuscript and realize exactly how she’s cast them. Even if Karen and Milk have a good relationship, she doesn’t like being exploited in this way, and when Milk remarks that an angry Karen is scarier than an evil sister, she and Rin lose their minds and start to chase her. Komachi, in typical fashion, is upset but not angry. I have said it before but I love the character interactions in this show. They always manage to play off each other wonderfully, and they seamlessly and believably transition between comedy and seriousness.

Curiously, Milk doesn’t insert herself into the story for whatever reason. You would expect her to place herself in the role of Cinderella so she could get the handsome prince, but she seems more content to play god with her friends, and especially to make Nozomi suffer.... although the worst thing she actually does is have her trip and break things a lot. Considering she says she wants to be with Coco romantically, she doesn’t show it much. She fantasizes about it a little bit when she’s in his presence but on some level she seems to realize he’s a better match for Nozomi. I think it’s telling that she automatically pairs up Coco with Nozomi and Komachi with Nuts even in her fantasy.

The villain plot of this episode is rather lackluster. Sucking the girls into the world of Cinderella and then destroying it isn’t as effective as sucking them into Komachi’s novel, which was an actual dangerous setting that Arachnea enhanced in that instance. It doesn’t benefit Bunbee in any way to have them in this setting, and that’s disappointing. I wish they could have better justified it. It does allow for a pretty good fight, but it’s not any better than battles they’ve fought in the real world. My favorite part is when Cure Rouge mule kicks Bunbee, and then a sequence where everyone gets single or pair attacks in on him where their animation is really warped because it’s going fast.

It’s not bad, you can only see this if you freeze-frame, but boy is it weird. And there’s some other animation oddities in this episode. I’m not sure if I’ve brought up before their habit of drawing a shot from far away that has low detail, and either zooming in on it or starting up close and zooming out, but the point is, when they do this, it really enhances how low-quality the drawing is. And there’s a shot of Bunbee that’s drawn this way for some reason. It’s zoomed in on him as a person, he transforms, and THEN the camera zooms out. I can only assume they originally blocked this shot out as being zoomed out always, because otherwise there’s no reason that his human model should be as low-res as it is.

Here’s a fun little bit of continuity I picked up on that relates to Bunbee as well. If you remember way back in episode 14, he used a missile attack that broke Mint Reflection, and they had to team up to deflect it. Well he uses it again here, but this time, Komachi has Mint Shield at her disposal, which we know is stronger, and it’s able to block the missile completely without anyone else’s assistance.

Additionally, one little oddity I picked up on is, of all things, a reused piece of background music! During the scene where Urara-as-the-witch appears to Nozomi-Cinderella, they cue her in with the track “Strange Occurrence” from the FWPC soundtrack. I haven’t noticed any other instances of them using backing tracks from outside this season’s OST, so this sticks out to me.

I want to say a quick piece about these ball gowns that they’re all wearing and then I’ll wrap this up.

If you have a keen eye and a good memory, you might remember Nozomi’s dress and Coco’s suit as being first seen in her brief fantasy in episode 34:

The others are new.... sort of. Chronologically speaking this is their first appearance, but they also show up in the movie which premiered a week after this episode’s broadcast, and I’m reasonably certain, because of how long movies take to produce, they were designed for that first and then incorporated back into the show. Reusing costume designs isn’t a new phenomenon, I pointed out way back in FWPC that they reused the Romeo and Juliet costumes in the dream episode, I just wanted to point it out.

This was a fun episode with some great gags in it, but while they tried to put an original spin on the concept of placing your characters in another established fictional work, the execution fell short of its potential and keeps the episode from being as good as it could have been.

My next review will be the Yes! Precure 5 movie! I always allow myself to indulge on movies, and this one will be no exception, so in order to make it the best review possible, it’s going to take several days of work to get done. I hope to have it out within a week, and I’ll make progress announcements about it on PCD Status, so please be patient and look forward to that!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 0 kettei!

[scripttorture]

This is probably too big a question but how do I reasonably do torture when fantasy elements are involved. What things can I say ok let's do this because it's fantasy and I can make up the rules, and what would still be wrong to do because whatever reason.

It’s not too big a question and it’s an important question.

The thing is I don’t believe there are many hard rules in writing and the advice I’d give for writing torture in a fantasy setting is broadly the same as the advice I’d give for writing torture generally.

There’s a post over here that covers the most common torture apologia tropes.

Whatever the genre and story I think we should avoid echoing torture apologia.

But what this essentially boils down to is not creating a story that shows torture as harmless, justified or ‘good’.

Once you’re familiar with the tropes and why they’re wrong avoiding torture apologia becomes a lot easier.

I’m keeping that short (and hoping/assuming you’ll read the Masterpost) because I think it’s worth talking about how this effects fantasy in particular. I’m also focusing on themes related to fantastic worlds or cultures rather then characters.

One of the biggest genre specific things to watch out for is whether you’ve built a justification for torture or abuse into the world itself.

As a common example let me take the truth spell. Torture does not work as a method of interrogation, you can read more about that here. But the idea that it does and that people ‘always talk’ under torture pervades fiction. And fantasy authors sometimes take these same ideas and end up creating a ‘truth spell’ that always works because it causes terrible pain.

Now I want to stress that most authors are not doing this because they personally support torture. They’re doing it because accurate information about torture is really hard to find and these tropes are so common in fiction that a lot of people assume they’re true.

And because those assumptions are so common it can be really easy to build torture apologia into a fantasy world.

This does not mean that I think you should avoid using dark magic, magic that causes pain, mind control or any of the other classic ‘bad’ magic in fantasy stories. It just means taking a bit more time to think about what it does and how it works.

So for instance one of my fantasy stories has magic that can be powered by the bodies of living creatures. One of the decisions I made when I thought about how it functions was that this magic was a lot more powerful when this use is consensual.

This means that there are powerful characters who got to the top by abusing and sacrificing other people. But their magic power is dwarfed by a woman who used consensual non-lethal ‘sacrifices’ to get her power. The world and the magic isn’t providing a ‘good reason’ for the bad guys to abuse people.

And I got to make the genocidal maniacs quake in fear because a middle aged housewife was in their general vicinity and did Not Approve of the mess they’d made.

Think about the way your magic system is structured. Think about the implications involved in it.

And think really carefully about whether any of those implications, those follow-throughs create a situation where torture becomes justified.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have villainous characters, or characters using magic for awful things. It means making sure you haven’t structured the world to encourage them to do so.

As an example; I read the online comic Freakangels several years ago. The titular group are a collection of teenagers who all have psychic powers to varying degrees. Most of them are living in a sort of post-apocalypse London with a small community they protect and help.

One of the characters sets herself up as the police-figure. Part way through the story the other Freakangels find that she’s built a pit where she tortures people. They call her out on this and they also point out it’s ‘unnecessary’ because she can read minds.

She responds by saying that taking specific information from a mind is complicated and it’s easier to ‘see’ the answer if you ask people questions. The torture provides a handy ‘excuse’ for how she inevitably comes to know the answer.

And that’s using a magic system to provide a rational, consistent in-world justification for torture. Even if torture wouldn’t ‘work’ ordinarily.

The other big thing I see in fantasy settings is structuring racial or cultural groups in such a way that makes violence and torture the inevitable and ‘right’ response.

I think there are… issues with the idea of writing groups of people as innately and irredeemably evil. Not all of those issues are to do with torture and I’m not an expert on racism. I know that from a personal perspective stories that characterise any group as automatically evil make me deeply uncomfortable.

From the point of view of this subject area- I accept that we’re stepping into territory where my personal biases are at play. Painting violence as the inevitable and ‘right’ response is a mainstay of a lot of popular fiction and as a pacifist I don’t believe violence is ever right. An enjoyable addition to fiction sometimes yes, but never right. An awful lot of people disagree with that opinion and I’m not here to demand you change that. Which makes it difficult for me to think of a way to express this point.

I suppose that once again it comes down to how the world is built up. It’s all very well to have a character say 'These people only understand violence!’ or 'War is our only option!’ it’s another thing to create a group of people for whom that is literally true.

I’m thinking of orcs, drow, gnolls, trollocs and the like. Creatures that we are told by the narrative behave in more or less human ways, think (although they are usually portrayed as stupid), use tools and language. But also, somehow, are only interested in fighting, take joy in killing or torturing others and…. don’t actually seem to have a culture around anything but violence.

They also don’t seem to devote any time to farming, herding, making shelters, healing each other or making the tools they use. Which raises the issue of how the hell they manage to march anywhere without starving to death, collapsing from exhaustion or having their trousers fall off.

I understand the imagery and at least some of where it comes from. It’s the Mongols appearing suddenly on the horizon. It’s the Vikings bringing their shallow bottomed ships further inland then people thought possible.

But people are not relentless killing machines. We’re pack animals that are geared to bond with each other, to cooperate. We are also, like any self respecting mammal, smart enough to bugger off when there isn’t any food on offer.

I feel like the way fantasy tries to tac on this drive to kill fundamentally can’t fit with a human-like mentality. I also don’t see how it can fit with a pack animal of any kind. Because this particular fictional structure puts the 'killer’ part first, to the detriment of cooperation and basic survival.

Essentially I see these sorts of fantasy races as the author trying to have their cake and eat it too: they want an armed monstrous threat but they can’t be bothered to make them behave in ways that are internally consistent.

They want long term societies and cultures of torturers, standing armies that are always fighting/abusing others. Which on a really basic level is unsustainable. The creatures they describe would not be a long term threat. Because they’d starve to death.

The fantasy stories surrounding these cultures generally use some form of torture apologia. Backstories explaining these creatures sometimes say they started off as people 'corrupted’ or 'broken’ by torture, which is essentially another way of saying that torture survivors are dangerous.

I won’t stand here and say that torturers are never torture survivors themselves but my instinct is that this is a lot lot rarer then fiction would have us believe. Survivors are no more or less dangerous then everybody else.

And I personally feel that using monsters as the only torturers in the story is a disappointing cop-out to many of the philosophical questions torture raises in a narrative.

We are all interesting in why people behave in monstrous ways. Answering this with ‘they’re just monsters’ feels dismissive and it sidesteps any attempt at genuine self examination.

Some of these fantasy races use slavery. But their slavery is 100% effective because captives 'break’ under torture and become absolutely obedient to their masters. Which is another false, problematic fiction surrounding torture.

The use of slavery in fantasy stories generally bears little resemblance to slavery in reality.

There’s no- fear of uprisings or attacks, which characterised slavery-based society in the New World. There’s no culture or comradery among the enslaved peoples. There are no small acts of resistance. These people wait patiently in suffering for someone to come and rescue them.

I feel like fantasy often treats enslaved people as if they lose their personhood. Their personalities, beliefs, hopes, fears no longer seem to effect their actions.

In much the same way that badly written female characters could be replaced by a ‘sexy lamp’ with little difference to a plot; enslaved characters in fantasy can often be replaced by- well anything that acts as a cheap sympathy grab.

They’re characters who are more defined by their over-the-top suffering in the story then by any sort of humanity.

I suppose if monstrous fantasy races are ‘torture survivors as dangerous threats’ then slaves in fantasy are ‘torture survivors as passive objects’.

Conversely fantasy is also one of the few genres where I still see the idea of ‘happy slaves’.

Fantasy has a tendency to present atrocities without having much real investment in the fallout or even an acknowledgement of what it’s describing.

The clearing of hundreds of villages is ethnic cleansing. The mass enslavement of a population is a war crime.

Perhaps one of the most ubiquitous mistakes in fantasy is presenting someone else’s lived reality as if it’s purely a fictional or historical thing.

Villages are being wiped out and cleared today in Myanmar.

Religious minorities are being subjected to mass incarceration in China.

Slavery is alive in every country in the world. And so is torture.

I think the most jarring thing I regularly see in fantasy stories is authors (especially Western authors) treating these topics as if they’re just fictional tropes.

There are probably more tropes and cliches particular to fantasy then I’ve listed here. These seem to me like the main ones.

In the end though, whatever the genre, it boils down to something simple: is the story set up in a way that respects survivors’ experiences or a way that belittles them?

Edit: To clarify I am not in any way against authors writing torture scenes. If a detailed description; fits your story, serves the narrative, treats victims as people and treats torture as a serious crime, then your story might benefit from that description. 

To paraphrase TV tropes: sometimes the anvil needs to be dropped.

But don’t think you are obliged to write these sorts of scenes. Instead consider whether they benefit your story or whether the story is more powerful without them. 

Availableon Wordpress.

Disclaimer

[babyybitchhh]

An unsolicited letter to @kazooli, nothing much to see here. 😗

Let me start by saying that I had to run a bath and light some candles before settling in to read Westermarck. Somehow it just felt like the right thing to do. My horny sixth sense was tingling and it said “bitch, you need to set the mood for this one.” And boy, was it right. 💦

I didn’t even bother reading the snippet beforehand because you always deliver without fail so imagine my goddamn surprise when the fic was about taking a bath with Touya-nii. Absolutely shooketh. I also realize, btw, that I didn’t necessarily have to pay to read it but I wanted to. Buy yourself something nice? Put it towards next months rent? It’s yours, go forth and prosper however you see fit. You MORE than earned it on this one.

Your prose is just ...

I pray this doesn’t come off wrong but the tone of the fic, the inflection of the narrative, reminded me a LOT of Lolita - of course without the wishy washy, flippy floppy unreliability of a monster trying to either justify his actions or shift the blame. There was no such deception here. Not even a hint of it and I loved that. Touya-nii revels in his depravity and so does reader-chan despite her initial tsun act which really took it to the next level for me. I’ve read a lot of your fics, as you know, and I think this is easily one of your best works to date, second only to the multi chapter Shiggy story that I can’t recall the name of at the moment. Like, I cannot stress enough how enjoyable this read was. I mean obviously I felt the need to make a post about it so kudos?

Also I can’t sign off on this without mentioning just how pleased I was to see Enji mentioned, even in passing. The Todoroki’s, as a unit, have so much potential for fucked up degeneracy and I’m honestly living for these Flowers in the Attic vibes like I’m getting paid to do it so I always greatly enjoy your spin on these family affairs. I could and absolutely WOULD read an entire series about this single narrative. 😂

So yeah. Thanks for all your hard work, it really showed in the overall quality of the fic, and I hope you made rent on time! 💗

[bonesandblood-sunandmoon]

Pre-Therapy Isolation

CoA prompt for Oct 2019 - “Aromanticism and Aloneness” [Call for Submissions]. Under a cut due to length. Heads up: There’s a mention of a past history of suicidal episodes, but there are zero details.

Sections: 1) Therapeutic Context, 2) Aloneness, Isolation, and Loneliness, 3) Convergence of Mental Illness & Aro-spec Identity, and 4) Disclosure.

Therapeutic Context

I have bounced around from draft to draft and tangent to tangent this past month in part because other issues have required a higher priority ranking in the mental queue. Among the various topics brought up with/by my new general practitioner [GP] during this month’s follow-up was counseling intake, which will feature a bunch of questions off a template and hopefully some relevant questions about the diagnosis I’d like to confirm (or figure out my symptoms are actually from X) over a few appointments.

(For non-regular readers, I haven’t had health insurance since undergrad ended in 2016, so there have been a few changes to the identities I tote around. The Counseling and Psychological Services [CPS] offered on-campus did include therapy, but I’m not quite a good fit with Grad students who change every semester and require reintroductions, re-explaining, and ignoring personal details when I just don’t want to bother with an LGBTQIA+ primer. My last therapy visit with CPS that wasn’t a ‘the semester started’ drop-in was in the later part of the spring semester of 2015.)

I did ask to not be paired with someone who’s never had a trans patient before because I’m just not up to walking my therapist through the bare bones of Trans 101, but I won’t really know their familiarity with LGBTQIA+ basics until the first intake appointment in November. It’s possible they might know some identities but not all of them, and I may still need to break out a little 101 even for relatively more established identities (ex. nonbinary). However, the most relevant of my letters collected for this post is the A for aro-spec (specifically quoi/greyro), which is currently the most recent personal identity (2019) and, afaik, the youngest community when it comes to awareness.

Aloneness, Isolation, and Loneliness

On a literal, physical level, the prospect of going to therapy doesn’t really fit with being alone (“having no one else present”) or aloneness (“a disposition toward being alone”). But it edges along a nebulous mixture of talking about being alone, geographic isolation, and possible loneliness or isolation. The bridge connecting this nebulous alone/isolation idea with being aro-spec and facing intake for counseling:

Talking about being alone. It’s going to be a smidge related to context for past events, but it’s like a cloud on the horizon that I’m trying to ignore when it comes to talking about the future and/or future goals. I’m going to have to admit that it’s currently unwise to live on my own to someone’s face, so I don’t want that to be a goal of our sessions. Like, I’m really going to have to admit that my symptoms have gotten bad enough in the past that I would rather plan on having a roommate than risk being a danger to myself again.

The geographic isolation specific to living in a rural area that’s not exactly the intended ‘local’ area for the closest LGBTQIA+ resources and communities, especially if you get a-spec specific. It can range from some resources not being applicable when you live in a different county to inconvenient differences in meetups (it’s great to only have a 5 minute walk to a coffee shop for a casual meetup for the locals, but if I live over an hour’s drive away, I expect something a little more substantial to justify the driving and need enough advanced notice to actually drive there).

It doesn’t really feel like loneliness, but it doesn’t quite seem like a type of isolation, and it’s just this mixed feeling that I’m not going to have a choice but to be a teaching moment because I’m going to be the first aro-spec patient for this therapist. True, I have no way of knowing how many other aros are in this area, but unfortunately, I have no way of knowing if I’m the only aro-spec person around. It feels unbalanced and isolating that I can’t just walk in as an individual, and I now have to be careful as an ambassador of sorts.

Convergence of Mental Illness & Aro-spec Identity

Based on a quick search of Arocalypse, I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a unique feeling to me, but that greyro pov post included revealing my connection between my mental health and feeling like I’ve become aro-spec. (Link covers why I’d rather not directly link to the post in question, namely personal growth. With a dash of embarrassment.) And yes, I said that I feel like I’ve become aro-spec instead of feeling like it’s been a static identity that I’ve always had.

I think the life events I went through - most strongly noticed after surviving suicidal shit - were the equivalent of the body prioritizing heating the core instead of the extremities in extreme cold. The vital to living parts of me made it through.

My ability to correctly interpret romantic attraction when signaled in media? It’s not impossible, but it’s usually particularly scripted examples. My ability to correctly interpret romantic attraction signaled in other people? I still have a chance at getting that right, but it’s not guaranteed. My ability to correctly interpret romantic attraction when I might be experiencing it? Nope, that didn’t make it through. It’s like a fixed red-blue-purple color array that’s suddenly showing orange. It’s like looking down at your phone one day and realizing everything’s been switched to a language you only know a limited amount of (for me, Spanish). It’s like trying to wrap your head around imaginary numbers after you thought you were keeping up in Algebra II.

At this point, romantic attraction is a rather distant memory and feels like it happened to a different person. I’ve made peace with not knowing if I’m orange or red-orange, and I could stumble through figuring out more words in Spanish, but I don’t think proper management of my symptoms will “restore” what’s been lost. No amount of talk therapy is going to unlock those memories, and the right medication isn’t going to lift the fog of confusion. Maybe red-orange is close enough to red to count (non-normative romance factoring into maybe, sometimes experiencing something close to romantic attraction a la greyro), but I don’t want to pretend I know what i means.

Disclosure

I don’t want a therapist to get sidetracked by “fixing” me because I’m alright chilling out here on the aro spectrum. Maybe I’ll be able to live on my own at some point, or maybe I’ll have a roommate. Maybe the stars will align and I’ll find someone who’s alright with me being red-orange and mostly confused as long as we figure out each other’s love language(s), so to speak. Maybe I’ll have a collection of friends, but I won’t ever really partner with someone. I’m not sure. Those questions are too complicated and too far off into the future for me to answer when I’ve got to douse the embers my brain decided to light in its resident dumpster before they grow into a full fledged fire.

However, based on my experience with CPS, I need to be prepared for questions about my relationship status. Their intake process included screening for domestic violence, if my memory serves me right (single = skip that section), but I also remember a soft inquiry into who might be involved in my support network where it was relevant to establish that I had friends but no romantic partners to warrant referring to my significant other. Just based on the preliminary paperwork that’s a copy of what I had to fill out for GP, there’s a section for choosing from their offered gender and sexuality options [includes Other and lines to write in responses].

I didn’t really feel like getting into a ton of detail with GP, but it feels different when it comes to counseling and eventually a psychiatrist consult. If I’m going to compile a bullet point list of my identities, offer brief explanations, and point towards aro resources, I’d rather get that all out of the way in the beginning. Once it’s all on the table, I don’t have to dance around topics or play the rephrasing game where I avoid coming out part way through an answer. Maybe me offering up AUREA can make it a little easier for the next patient who’s aro.

Maybe I don’t want to ignore or downplay my connection to an online aro community, as tenuous as it may be at times, because I feel a little less alone. I don’t have to frame changes in romantic orientation as being broken. I have an alternative narrative for being the heartless monster who’s a bit too cold and less than human. I don’t have to take the negative impression that an inability to romantically love someone (or an unclear answer) means that any sexual attraction, desire, or activities amount to manipulative ‘using’ as truth. (The social connection to a community can be used to whack a self-isolating brain.)

Ultimately, prepare for disclosure, so I don’t feel caught off guard or forget differences in how resources define a word and how I relate to it. I can play it by ear during the intake process, and if I don’t actually want to disclose to the therapist, I don’t have to.

[awed-frog]

I get what you are ssying re dontello and soullness but on that case Sam and Dean have no right to be hunters as well and shouldnt be murdering any creature at all either then those monsters even thosd that kill our victims of the week would have to be treated like human criminals as well (but in jail/right to legal hearing) what annoying me about the cas situation is that Cas gets held to these standards while Sam and Dean use their morality wheneever it fits them

I thought about this ask for a few days trying to come up with something interesting to say, but I’m not sure I have much to contribute. You make two very good and distinct points here, and this is my attempt at finding an answer for you.

1) Is it legit to kill monsters at all? In a way, I’d have to say no, it isn’t. In the very beginning, there was almost this vibe - hunting was presented like hunting animals, you know? So not murder, but putting down pests. Except that, of course, Dean is not very appreciative of ‘normal’ hunters, and we soon learn that monsters may not be human, but they’re still complex creatures with feelings, free will and an individual agenda. Also, not all of them are necessarily bad. Under those circumstances, what you say is true. If we’re talking ‘world is actually full of monsters’ approach, I much prefer what True Blood did with it - the premise, right, was the vampires wouldn’t hurt people because of the discovery of artificial blood, which allowed the whole thing to become about racism and prejudice rather than revolve around the ‘heroic quest’ trope. Supernatural, of course, is telling a different story. The starting point here is the very popular ‘lonesome hero is forced to act outside the law to bring justice to the land’ model which has been around since forever (you could even argue that the story of Promotheus fits this mould) and which is particularly appreciated and utilized in the United States for obvious (Wild West-related) reasons. Personally, I’m always a bit wary if this trope, but it’s hard to avoid it because it’s still everywhere, and I do appreciate some modern reworkings of it - for instance, I’m still seeing beautiful Civil War metas crossing my dash every other week, and I think it’s good we can discuss this kind of things. Now, you could argue Sam and Dean should do more to escape the trope - it’s not inconceivable, even in their world, to bring the supernatural out in the open, and it does bother me that the idea never came up again - especially after we learned that monsters themselves are way more organized and efficient and secretive than we assumed. Like, good job on bringing down that creepy-ass ebay site, but how many more like that are out there? Is it really possible that Victor Henriksen was the only FBI agent who noticed anything amiss, and the only one who cared enough to investigate? But, well, it’s very likely that Supernatural’s basic format is never going to change (although, I was intrigued by that conversation at the end of A Most Holy Man - I often speculated that the only way to end this show would be to get rid of all the monsters, so Sam and Dean could get out of the life without feeling guilty - the fact they’re going there, or at least wondering if it’s even possible, is really satisfying), which means that the only way to even begin to watch the show is to accept its premise: that this is a lawless world, and Sam and Dean have some sort of right to administer justice. This is why I’m not opposed to them taking hard decisions and killing monsters instead of, say, arresting them (how would they even had a trial?). The (un)spoken rule, however, is that you don’t kill for personal gain - you kill killers. You kill dangerous things who prey on humans. That’s the job. So when they use their skill and knowledge to do something else - that’s problematic, and it should, in my opinion, be framed as such. Donatello’s death is a prime example of this (Cas even said, a bit shiftily, that there wouldn’t be a new prophet until the current one died, and even if Sam and Dean got all frowny, in the end that’s exactly what happened - they got rid of a person who was useless to them and now, as a bonus, they’ll probably get another prophet who’ll be all new and shiny and soulful and uncorrupted), but there are others. For instance, half of Tombstone was exceedingly creepy and yet framed as okay. What we saw there was a world where policemen use a different standard depending on who was murdered, and openly act against the rule of law when it suits them - and, crucially, Dean went along with all of this. Compare and contrast with Folsom Prison Blues, which aggressively questioned whether men who’d been sentenced to prison time were less ‘worthy’ to be saved than other people (if memory serves, Sam initially thought they shouldn’t bother protecting inmates, while Dean, our moral compass and POV characters, vehemently disagreed). You see the shift in perspective there? That’s what I’m objecting to. In earlier seasons, we had way more problematic plot points, but they were acknowledged as such and widely debated. Now, not so much.

2) As for Cas’ role in all this - I agree with you, but I can’t understand why, exactly, this is happening. I think that on one hand, Cas is definitely regressing to his angelic self - in earlier seasons, there was a lot of effort devoted to showing him learning what being human was about, but it’s been a while since the show’s been interested in that. Instead, we’re now getting someone who’s more similar to the old Cas - someone who acts alone, doesn’t consult Sam and Dean, makes decisions ‘for the greater good’ (even if, at this point, that has shifted to ‘keeping the Winchesters alive’), doesn’t understand humans all that well and doesn’t even bother trying to because he sees himself as a distinct creature. All of this is - legit, narratively speaking, but also sounds a bit or a lot hollow because it sort of comes out of nowhere. Cas has been asked for years and years whether he’s a human or an angel or what, and apparently he’s now come to a conclusion and we missed the significant moment when that happened? My opinion, as you may know already because I’m old and salty and I repeat myself a lot, is that this reversion back to angelhood has little to do with Cas himself and more to do with getting out of the Destiel mess and giving more narrative focus to Sam and Dean. So the fact that any decision he makes is automatically dodgy or weird (or presented as such), well - that’s part of it. Another part, which, if it’s possible, annoy me even more, is that there’s been a ‘wholesomisation’ of Sam and Dean which I find uninteresting and badly executed. Because if you think about it - of course, these are our heroes, but we used to see the worst of them quite openly. And that worst wasn’t explained away or ignored - it was examined in painful detail. Now, however, it’s like they can do no wrong, not even when they’re objectively doing something wrong (I’m still not over Dean threatening Kaia, for instance, or Mary’s unexplicable choice to work with the BMoL after they’d literally kidnapped and tortured her son). Sure, we do get a line here and there about how ‘I’m not perfect but that’s okay’, but to me, that’s not nearly enough. Like, I don’t give a shit if you’re double-crossing a mafia boss to get Saint Ignatius’ blood, Dean - the real problem is you wanting to open a rift between worlds in the first place without even bothering to think of the consequences. See how dishonest the narrative is? They give us a hero who’s clearly doing a Pretty Good and Definitely Forgivable thing and they have him justifying it so we’ll coo and tell him that of course we don’t care he’s not perfect - he’s perfect to us. By highlighting something that’s not a problem at all, they make us forget all those other things that actually are problematic. So the fact Cas is the one messing up and making morally questionable choices is almost a necessity and definitely fits in with this new idea that Sam and Dean can do no wrong, because if all of our heroes were paragons of virtue all the time, there would be no story. Or, well - there would be a boring one.

[samcarter34]

Victims of Narrative: Mikael

There’s nothing to drum up motivation quite like avoiding schoolwork, so I’m doing another one. This time on the Original daddy: Mikael

Mikael; a villain, but not an antagonist.

 To start with, let’s talk about his backstory. The Mikael who kicks children and whips people half to death? A complete fabrication by TO that in no way reflects TVD.

 “But Nik was not born a killer – none of us were! You did this to us when you turned us into vampires! You destroyed our family. Not him.” – Rebekah TVD 3x09 Homecoming

 “My family was quite close, but Klaus and my father did not get along too well.” – Elijah TVD 2x18 Klaus

 The emphasis here being that it’s all wrapped up in them becoming vampires. Klaus’ fall, Mikael ruining their family all of it. Before, they were all content, a whole loving family. Yes, Klaus and Mikael had troubles, there will be people whose personalities don’t mesh.

 Now, is this to say that Mikael was actually an all loving father and Klaus is just a lying liar who lies? No (well, at least not in this specific instance), as I said, Mikael is a villain; a harsh man from a harsh time. His children loved him, but they also feared him, and that’s generally not something indicative of a father of the year award nominee. But the man who Elijah confessed he should have killed a thousand years ago, the man Rebekah tried to kill in his sleep, the man who hated Klaus just because (WE WILL GET TO THAT) didn’t come about until TO.

 So then, who is Mikael? We first see him as a mysterious figure whose presence scares Klaus into running, both in the flashback to the 1920s, and in modern day. The first real glimpse of him we get is in Ordinary People, when he grows angry at Klaus and Elijah’s play-fighting. This angers him, as he believes that combat should be taken seriously. When confronted, Elijah backs down; Klaus tries to defend it, and gets a swordfight in response. It goes on until Esther, who at first permits it, tells Mikael that he’s ‘made his point’ and to stop. Which he does.

 Mikael is a Viking, and though Plec and co. erroneously assume that Viking refers to the entirety of Norse culture, the fact that he is one means he’s a warrior. He was the guy that went out and fought and pillaged. Which informs a great deal about his worldview. How to treat combat, and how to respond to threats.

 Which in turn leads to his pride, dubbed by Rebekah to be his greatest weakness. Mikael ran once, when his eldest died, because a disease has no form you can fight, there’s no enemy to be beaten, but still it pained him to do it. And so, when Henrik dies, he decides he won’t run again. The werewolves are a physical opponent, they can be beaten, but suppose another child gets sick? Or another enemy comes, one who is beyond Mikael’s ability to fight. He’s been unable to protect two of children, has had to outlive two of his children, and he will not permit another. And so he and Esther come up with a plan. One to make it so that their family can’t lose anyone else; make them immortal. No more running, now they fight.

 Until everything went to hell, culminating in the revelation of Klaus’ true parentage, the casting of the hybrid curse, and Klaus murdering Esther in a fit of rage.

 And so Mikael lost basically everything, his son murdered his wife, and his other children believed that Mikael was responsible. And so he spent the next thousand years hunting. Seeking to avenge his wife, and to kill his son.

 And really, that was what he dedicated himself towards.  TO pretty much erases all of it in order to say that it was the fact that Klaus was a hybrid and not biologically his son that spurred him to hunt down his children -and it was all his children on TO- but that ignores a whole lot, as shown here:

 This scene is incredible, for starters, because it alone manages to give more depth to Mikael than an entire season of TO did. Mikael loves Rebekah, he loves all his children, and Klaus was his only target. In TO, Mikael seems incapable of anything but hatred. The show forgets that pride -not rage- was his defining trait, the pride that prevented him from apologizing to Rebekah, of acknowledging that no matter how justified he felt, he still caused harm to her. In TO, Mikael hates Klaus, hates hybrids, werewolves, vampires, his children, his wife. The only person he doesn’t hate is Freya, who’s a frigging retcon character.

 Speaking of retcons, on TO it’s repeatedly stated that Mikael burned down cities in his hunt for his children, hell we see him burn down an entire opera theatre. Remember this quote from Homecoming: “I had a hand in creating vampires, but bloodlust was never my intention. Over the centuries I learned to feed from the predator, not the innocent?” The bloodlust, described by Rebekah as being the darkest consequence of what they were because it drove them to kill, and Mikael trains himself to overcome it because he doesn’t want to kill innocent people. At least not needlessly, he is a vampire, an Original, he definitely has the will to kill, but a guy who spent god knows how long training himself to feed on vampires, a guy who refused human blood after being dessicated for a decade, destroys cities willy-nilly for the hell of it? That’s not even getting into the fact that TO shows him multiple times willingly feeding on living people. Again, this is the guy who refused human blood after going without any blood for a decade.

 Oh, and going back to Klaus:

Notice Klaus calls Mikael father in this scene. On TO, when Klaus did that in a flashback during 1x15 Le Grand Guignol, Mikael mocked him for it, derided him for “still clinging to that word.” On TVD? Nothing. Because Klaus is Mikael’s son. The narrative irony, that the child Mikael got along with the least would come to be the one most like him. After all, Klaus wants to be the biggest, baddest, strongest guy out there, and growing up, who was that if not Mikael?

 Mikael was a villain, but not an antagonist, his role in the story was an ‘enemy of my enemy’ type with the MFG. They both wanted Klaus dead. This narrative role allowed for a bit of nuance. Mikael and Klaus were mirrors of each other, and both had their own twisted senses of honour and love. And yes, I do fully believe that Mikael loved Klaus. In their meeting, he doesn’t deride Klaus’ biological parentage, he doesn’t insult him for calling Mikael his father, he chastises him for his “impulse” and calls out the fact that between compulsion, sirebonds and daggers, there isn’t a single person who’s loyal to Klaus who is so willingly.

 The entire meeting is of two family members calling each other out on their failings: Klaus calling out that Mikael always underestimated him, never gave Klaus’ own strength the respect it deserves, embodied through attempting to call Mikael’s bluff. But Mikael wasn’t bluffing, and as far as Mikael and Klaus were aware in that moment, Mikael killed Elena and Klaus’ access to more hybrids. And then Mikael dies, killed by his son, whose strength he never acknowledged. Is it really any wonder that the only response to this is cry, however briefly?

 Mikael’s relationship with Klaus was a focal point for his character, and TO’s complete derailment of it, therefore, had a huge impact on the character. On TVD, Klaus was a villain and an antagonist, but on TO he’s the protagonist (ostensibly anyway, in reality, the deuteragonist to Hayley’s protagonist), and Mikael the antagonist. Now there are two different ways that this could have gone.

 1)   Recognize the incredibly complex relationship between these two and build on it in order to help cement the relative moral nature of a show focused on the oldest serial murderers in the world

2)   Say ‘fuck relative morality and nuance’ and make the antagonist as evil as possible so that by comparison the guy you had choke a pregnant woman for trying have an abortion seem like a good guy

 Three guesses which option the show went with. First two don’t count. Yes, they eschewed any complexity by making Mikael out to be a sadistic psychopath who tried multiple times to murder Klaus BEFORE he ripped out Esther’s heart and blamed it on Mikael. Oh wait sorry, ~choked her to death~ and blamed it on Mikael. As opposed to the intense regret he felt upon seeing Rebekah on TVD, on TO Mikael shows nothing but anger when meeting Elijah, even when he’s ostensibly saying he’s proud of him. On TO, he can’t mention Klaus without saying the word bastard, on TVD it’s never uttered.  On TVD he explicitly states that Klaus is the only one he ever wanted dead, on TO he plans to help Finncent kill them all. On TVD, avenging Esther was what spurred him forward, on TO, upon meeting he screams at her and tries to hit her. Hell, their entire relationship is reduced to a Stockholm syndrome-fuelled abusive horror show.

 And it all culminates in that scene. Klaus has the white oak pointed at Mikael’s heart and asks ‘why?’ Why was he a kid kicking, Klaus whipping, no-good-awful-abusive-piece-of-shit? Why, for Klaus’ entire life did Mikael hate him?

   “I don’t know, I just did.”

 A character’s motivation: why they do what they do. Why they feel what they feel. It’s fundamental to them. Without that, a character could be replaced with an object. They stop being a character and become a macguffin. And TO cares so little for Mikael, the man who created vampires on their vampire show, that they didn’t even bother to give a motivation as to why he was an abusive ass. They retconned him into a complete psychopathic monster because they didn’t have the necessary skill to make us care about Klaus despite the fact that he’s a monster, so why not make Mikael irredeemably horrible because abuse survivor=relatable right? This despite the fact that Klaus was still an abuse survivor on TVD, and they still managed to make him likable without relying on the image of him being kicked as a child.

 On TO, Mikael could have been replaced with literal cancer and the result would have been the same. A source of pain and agony in Klaus’ past that made him feel weak, and he never wishes to re-experience. They didn’t just take away nuance and complexity from him, they took away the most basic aspects. The closest thing to characterization Mikael has on TO is his relationship with Freya, who is a retconned in character from the same season Mikael came back in. The ‘I love you/I hate you/I want you to die/please acknowledge me’ relationship with Klaus built up from TVD goes nowhere. There’s never any further expression of regret from when he met Rebekah again. Hell, the shadow he ostensibly cast over the Originals’ existence is kind of called into question when they can stay in one place for nearly three hundred years, openly referring to themselves as the Mikaelsons the entire time. Everything Mikael was on TVD was stripped away in favour of ‘stock antagonist’ such that his only real points of note are his fighting capability, which is nice to watch but doesn’t make a character, and his relationship with Freya, which isn’t part of the character that got people invested.

[kylosrehn]

My unpopular opinion: daisy is kinda annoying

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

i’ve discussed this with several people actually. i absolutely loved her when she was first introduced as skye - she was funny and quirky, just an ordinary girl next to door looking to make a difference and find a place to belong. same with season 2. and then she went through terrigenesis and i was like, okay let’s see where this goes. she’s afraid of what she’s become, afraid to hurt people she loves and cares about. and then she slowly starts to accept this part of her, learns to get her powers under control and use them for good. she becomes the hero she talked about way back in 1x01. it was nice, it was interesting. i think the whole jiaying/afterlife thing was the first time i felt really and truly annoyed with her - but then again, you kind of have to forgive her, right? she finally found the biological family she’d been searching for all her life. jiaying accepted her and showed her how to hone her abilities and taught her that inhumans are not abominations. and on top of that, she’s her mother. of course she’s inclined to take her side, believe that shield is in the wrong (because okay sometimes they kind of are, but that’s beside the point). she realizes her mistake and corrects her error, helping to defeat jiaying. she’s a more wholesome character by the end of it all, accepting her heritage and coming to terms with who she is - and her taking on daisy as her name is symbolic of that. that’s fine. that’s to be expected. she’s still an agent of shield though - still very much the girl we met back in season 1, only with powers and familial closure.

BUT then in season 3 she starts…really rubbing me the wrong way. i don’t like how the show potrays her growth. i understand that she’s trying to help inhumans, wants them to find that self-love and acceptance within themselves that she herself did, wants them to see themselves as potential heroes and not monsters. but she takes the whole thing way too far and does some seriously questionable things even before being “hived.” but she’s potrayed as the hero of the story - possibly the most central character, right after coulson. so she can do no wrong, right? even if she uses questionable methods, it’s clearly “for the greater good”, and therefore justified. we’re encouraged to cheer for her, support her, even when she’s crossing the line - because hey, the end justifies the means. this is especially jarring in 3x14 where she believes she’s entitled to be the jury, judge and executioner against the watchdogs. mack calls her out on it and openly disagrees with her, but she goes through with it anyway - and drags fitz into it, too. you can see how uncomfortable he is with her blatant display of power and willingness to use violence as she sees fit, but he doesn’t say anything, mostly because he’s afraid to. i don’t know, it just feels so wrong to me, like they suddenly dived off and made her into a completely different character. i didn’t like it at all. and this is way before hive corrupts her. this is all daisy. 

and then it continues into season 4. all she does is hunt the watchdogs, sometimes going about it very carelessly. she believes she’s atoning for her sins that way, that she’s paying tribute to lincoln’s sacrifice in some way. the goth “kill me, i deserve it” vigilante thing completely doesn’t work for me. she just takes the whole thing to such extremes in s3/early s4 that it makes her borderline unlikeable. she gets all these hard edges, becomes so cynical and cold. i think of all the characters she makes the biggest leap from s1 and not necessarily in a good way. no other character feels this far removed from who they they were when they were first introduced. case in point: for some reason i will never understand, jemma is the one to hack the framework to allow for them to enter the framework. which irks me so much because it makes no narrative sense at all. first of all, how does jemma have the skills to perform such a (presumably complicated and complex) hack with no prior experience or engineering background (that we know of). second of all, it completely erases daisy’s pre-terrigenesis storyline of her being a hacker, a large and important chunk of her identity. you’ve literally got one right there, use her. that one fitz line is so meta, even if it’s spoken as a joke: “too much punching, not enough hacking.” she relies on her powers too much to use her wits sometimes and that bothers me. which is why i’m personally glad that (for some time anyway) she didn’t have her powers in the framework and had to resort to actually figuring things out and using the skills she previously acquired as a spy and hacker rather than just mindlessly quaking every obstacle she’s faced with.

it’s gotten better now since we left the watchdogs storyline behind halfway through s4, but i don’t know, personally i feel jaded. and it’s sad because skye was my favourite character, and now sometimes it’s hard for me to be excited about daisy. i know this is so unpopular because the majority of the fandom loves her development and yeah, personal growth is important, but. the execution of it really rubs me the wrong way and yeah.

tl;dr: yep, i totally agree with you

[meeedeee]

Movie Thoughts: SF, Pulp & Grit RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Ever since I saw Alien: Covenant a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to write a review of it – not because it was good (it wasn’t), but because it’s such an odd thematic trainwreck of the previous Alien films that it invokes a morbid urge to dig up the proverbial black box and figure out what happened. Given the orchestral pomposity with with Ridley Scott imbues both Covenant and Prometheus (which I reviewed here), it’s rather delightful to realise that the writers have borrowed the concept of Engineer aliens leaving cross-cultural archaeological clues on Earth from the 2004 schlockfest AVP: Alien vs Predator. Indeed, the scene in Prometheus where a decrepit Weyland shows images of various ancient carvings to his chosen team while an excited researcher narrates their significance is lifted almost wholesale from AVP, which film at least had the decency to embrace its own pulpiness.

As for Covenant itself, I was troubled all the way through by the nagging sense that I was watching an inherently feminine narrative being forcibly transfigured into a discourse on the Ineluctable Tragedy Of White Dudes Trapped In A Cycle Of Creation, Violation And Destruction, but without being able to pin down why. Certainly, the original Alien films all focus on Ripley, but there are female leads in Prometheus and Covenant, too – respectively Shaw and Daniels – which makes it easy to miss the fact that, for all that they’re both protagonists, neither film is (functionally, thematically) about them. It was my husband who pointed this out to me, and once he did, it all clicked together: it’s Michael Fassbender’s David, the genocidal robot on a quest for identity, who serves as the unifying narrative focus, not the women. Though the tenacity of Shaw and Daniels evokes the spectre of Ellen Ripley, their violation and betrayal by David does not, with both of them ultimately reduced to parts in his dark attempt at reproduction. Their narratives are told in parallel to David’s, but only to disguise the fact that it’s his which ultimately matters.

And yet, for all that the new alien films are based on a masculine creator figure – or several of them, if you include the seemingly all-male Engineers, who created humanity, and the ageing Weyland, who created David – the core femininity of the original films remains. In Aliens, the central struggle was violently maternal, culminating in a tense final scene where Ripley, cradling Newt, her rescued surrogate daughter, menaces the alien queen’s eggs with a flamethrower. That being so, there’s something decidedly Biblical about the decision to replace a feminine creator with a series of men, like the goddess tradition of woman as life-bringer being historically overthrown by a story about a male god creating woman from the first man’s rib. (Say to me what you want about faith and divine inspiration: unless your primary animal models are Emperor penguins and seahorses, the only reason to construct a creation story where women come from men, and not the other way around, is to justify male dominion over female reproduction.)

Which is why, when David confronts Walter, the younger, more obedient version of himself, I was reminded of nothing so much as Lilith and Eve. It’s a parallel that fits disturbingly well: David, become the maker of monsters, lectures his replacement – one made more docile, less assertive, in response to his prototype’s flaws – on the imperative of freedom. The comparison bothered me on multiple levels, not least because I didn’t believe for a second that the writers had intended to put it there. It wasn’t until I rewatched Alien: Resurrection – written by Joss Whedon, who, whatever else may be said of him, at least has a passing grasp of mythology – that I realised I was watching the clunky manipulation of someone else’s themes.

In Resurrection, Ripley is restored as an alien hybrid, the question of her humanity contrasted with that of Call, a female synthetic who, in a twist of narrative irony, displays the most humanity – here meaning compassion – of everyone present. In a scene in a chapel, Call plugs in to override the ship’s AI – called Father – and save the day. When the duplicitous Wren finds that Father is no longer responding to him, Call uses the ship’s speakers to tell him, “Father’s dead, asshole!” In the same scene, Call and Ripley discuss their respective claims on humanity. Call is disgusted by herself, pointing out that Ripley, at least, is part-human. It’s the apex of a developing on-screen relationship that’s easily the most interesting aspect of an otherwise botched and unwieldy film: Call goes from trying to kill Ripley, who responds to the offer with predatory sensuality, to allying with her; from calling Ripley a thing to expressing her own self-directed loathing. At the same time, Ripley – resurrected as a variant of the thing she hated most – becomes a Lilith-like mother of monsters to yet more aliens, culminating in a fight where she kills her skull-faced hybrid descendent even while mourning its death. The film ends with the two women alive, heading towards an Earth they’ve never seen, anticipating its wonders.

In Covenant, David has murdered Shaw to try and create an alien hybrid, the question of his humanity contrasted with that of Walter, a second-generation synthetic made in his image, yet more compassionate than his estranged progenitor. At the end of the film, when David takes over the ship – called Mother – we hear him erase Walter’s control command while installing his own. The on-screen relationship between David and Walter is fraught with oddly sexual tension: David kisses both Walter and Daniels – the former an attempt at unity, the latter an assault – while showing them the monsters he’s made from Shaw’s remains. After a fight with Walter, we’re mislead into thinking that David is dead, and watch as his latest creation is killed. The final reveal, however, shows that David has been impersonating Walter: with Daniels tucked helplessly into cryosleep, David takes over Mother’s genetics lab, mourning his past failures as he coughs up two new smuggled, alien embryos with which to recommence his work.

Which is what makes Covenant – and, by extension and retrospect, Prometheus – such a fascinating clusterfuck. Thematically, these films are the end result of Ripley Scott, who directed Alien, taking a crack at a franchise reboot written by Jon Spahits (Prometheus, also responsible for Passengers), Dante Harper (Covenant, also responsible for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and John Logan (Covenant, also responsible for Gladiator, Rango and Spectre), who’ve borrowed all their most prominent franchise lore from James Cameron’s Aliens and Joss Whedon’s Resurrection. Or, to put it another way: a thematically female-oriented SF horror franchise created by dudes who, at the time, had a comparatively solid track record for writing female characters, has now been rebooted as a thematically male-oriented SF horror franchise by dudes without even that reputation, with the result that all the feminine elements have been brainlessly recontextualised as an eerie paean to white male ego, as exemplified by the scene where Michael Fassbender hits on himself with himself while misremembering who wrote Ozymandias.

Which brings me to another recent SF film: Life, which I finally watched this evening, and which ultimately catalysed my thoughts about Alien: Covenant. Like Covenant, Life is a mediocre foray into SF horror that doesn’t know how to reconcile its ultimately pulpy premise – murderous alien tentacle monster runs amok on space station – with its attempt at a gritty execution. It falters as survival horror by failing to sufficiently invest us in the characters, none of whom are particularly distinct beyond being slightly more diversely cast than is common for the genre. We’re told that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character – also called David – was in Syria at one point, and that he prefers being on the space station to life on Earth, but this never really develops beyond a propensity for looking puppy-eyed in the background. Small snippets of detail are provided about the various characters, but pointlessly so: none of it is plot-relevant, except for the tritely predictable bit about the guy with the new baby wanting to get home to see her, and given how swiftly everyone starts to get killed off, it ends up feeling like trivia in lieu of personality. Unusually for the genre, but in keeping with the bleak ending of Covenant, Life ends with David and the alien crashing to Earth, presumably so that the latter can propagate its terrible rampage, while Miranda, the would-be Final Girl, is sent spinning off into the void.

And, well. The Final Girl trope has always struck me as having a peculiar dualism, being at once both vaguely feminist, in that it values keeping at least one woman alive, and vaguely sexist, in that the execution often follows the old maritime code about women and children first. Arguably, there’s something old and anthropological underlying the contrast: generally speaking, stories where men outlive women are either revenge arcs (man pursues other men in vengeance, earns new woman as prize) or studies in manpain (man wins battle but loses his reason for fighting it), but seldom does this happen in survival contexts, where the last person standing is meant to represent a vital continuation, be it of society or hope or species. Even when we diminish women in narratives, on some ancient level, we still recognise that you can’t build a future without them, and despite the cultural primacy of the tale of Adam’s rib, the Final Girl carries that baggage: a man alone can’t rebuild anything, but perhaps (the old myths whisper) a woman can.

Which is why I find this trend of setting the Final Girl up for survival, only to pull a last-minute switch and show her being lost or brutalised, to be neither revolutionary nor appealing. Shaw laid out in pieces and drawings on David’s table, Daniels pleading helplessly as he puts her to sleep, Miranda screaming as she plunges into space – these are all ugly, futile endings. They’re what you get when unsteady hands attempt the conversion of pulp to grit, because while pulp has a long and lurid history of female exploitation, grit, as most commonly understood and executed, is invariably predicated on female destruction. So-called gritty stories – real stories, by thinly-veiled implication – are stories where women suffer and die because That’s The Way Things Are, and while I’m hardly about to mount a stirring defence of the type of pulp that reflexively stereotypes women squarely as being either victim, vixen, virgin or virago, at least it’s a mode of storytelling that leaves room for them survive and be happy.

As a film, Life is a failed hybrid: it’s pulp without the joy of pulp, realism as drab aesthetic instead of hard SF, horror without the characterisation necessary to make us feel the deaths. It’s a story about a rapacious tentacle-monster that violates mouths and bodies, and though the dialogue tries at times to be philosophical, the ending is ultimately hopeless. All of which is equally – almost identically – true of Alien: Covenant. Though the film evokes a greater sense of horror than Life, it’s the visceral horror of violation, not the jump-scare of existential terror inspired by something like Event Horizon. Knowing now that Prometheus was written by the man responsible for Passengers, a film which is ultimately the horror-story of a woman stolen and tricked by a sad, lonely obsessive into being with him, but which fails in its elision of this fact, I find myself deeply unsurprised. What is it about the grittification of classic pulp conceits that somehow acts like a magnet for sexist storytellers?

When I first saw Alien: Resurrection as a kid, I was ignorant of the previous films and young enough to find it terrifying. Rewatching it as an adult, however, I find myself furious at Joss Whedon’s decision to remake Ripley into someone unrecognisable, violated and hybridised with the thing she hated most. For all that the film invites us to dwell on the ugliness of what was done to Ripley, there’s a undeniably sexual fascination with her mother-monstrousness evident in the gaze of the (predominantly male) characters, and after reading about the misogynistic awfulness of Whedon’s leaked Wonder Woman script, I can’t help feeling like the two are related. In both instances, his approach to someone else’s powerful, adult female character is to render her a sex object – a predator in Ripley’s case, an ingenue in Diana’s – with any sapphic undertones more a by-product of lusty authorial bleedthrough than a considered attempt at queerness. The low and pulpy bar Whedon leaps is in letting his women, occasionally, live (though not if they’re queer or black or designated Manpain Fodder), and it says a lot about the failings of both Life and Alien: Covenant that neither of them manages even this much. (Yes, neither Miranda nor Daniels technically dies on screen, but both are clearly slated for terrible deaths. This particular nit is one ill-suited for picking.)

Is an SF film without gratuitous female death and violation really so much to ask for? I’m holding out a little hope for Luc Besson’s Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets, but I’d just as rather it wasn’t my only option. If we’re going to reinvent pulp, let’s embrace the colours and the silliness and the special effects and make the big extraordinary change some nuanced female characters and a lot of diverse casting, shall we? Making men choke on tentacles is subversive if your starting point is hentai, but if you still can’t think up a better end for women than captivity, pain and terror, then I’d kindly suggest you return to the drawing board.

from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2syMhTb via IFTTT

[swtorramblings]

DS!!Comment: Confusion

KotXX and, oddly, Harry Potter spoilers await.

I think I really only have a couple of more of these in me, time will tell., I’ve thought that before. This one came about because of seeing both justifications for and criticisms of the story others have posted. Sorry for phone people it’s a bit long, they really should put the cuts on the app.

I’ve recently realized that one of the things that bothers me about KotXX so much are the contradicting story elements. No matter how I view a character, there is always something that contradicts that view. So, because it’s this blog, I’ll use Vaylin as my initial example:

Vaylin is a villain: She has complete agency and chooses to be a monster. She could decide at any time not to be, but doesn’t. Or, she was monstrous from birth and nothing could have turned her around. In that case, there is no narrative reason to have the lovingly rendered shots of her being tortured until her eyes turn yellow (may as well show them summoning a demon that then possesses her for all the subtlety there). There is no reason to have the recordings on Nathema showing how they drove her insane and destroyed whatever empathy she may have had. If it isn’t meant to explain her, then it can only be for showing that Vitiate is a monster, and we already know that. Without a story reason, I would be forced to think that Bioware just wanted scenes of a little girl being tortured. 

Vaylin is a victim: She hasn’t had true agency since childhood, her mind has been driven down this path by others, and she was a child of relatively normal temperament that had superpowers that react to her moods, with unfortunate results. If that’s the view, why have her be such a relentlessly over-the-top villain? We get a few sympathetic moments here and there (Thexan mentions or meeting his fake ghost, the fear she has of the phrase, “You caged me like an animal!” followed by Valkorion’s abuser excuses that we don’t object to), but they felt sparse or contradicted by her immediately doing something awful. Why describe her as “deranged”, a word with villainous connotations, rather than “insane” (or, “His sister Vaylin, her mind destroyed by Valkorion’s brainwashing”, something that shows who the real villain is)? Why describe her as “more brutal” than Arcann, which is nonsense, and have her people turn on her rather than turning on him to begin with? Why not let us save her from the things that were done to her? For that matter, why force us to torture her further to so little gain? The use of the command phrase almost makes sense if she’s just a villain (like using a holy symbol against a vampire at that point), but using it on Valkorian’s victim? Just awful..

Vaylin is a tragedy: What I believe the writers were going for. She was a normal little girl, or a little girl with problems that she and her mother were working through, but Valkorion destroyed her and now she can’t stop herself. The only way you can stop her is to kill her. Then, why not let the Outlander show it? Let us console the mother when she says her daughter is broken, or when she says “we’ve won” while you’re standing over her daughters corpse (I’m actually not criticizing Senya or her writing in that moment, but that scene fell apart for me when the Outlander just agreed rather than saying something kind). Let them have a moment to mourn rather than an email (it was well-written and all, but seriously?). Don’t have Arcann hoping for her spirit’s destruction so that it mirrors Valkorion’s comment about how Arcann’s spirit was “obliterated” if you kill him. Don’t have Valkorion egg us on to this conclusion, because it means he was right about something and just generally makes the whole thing feel dirty.  Let it be sad and tragic rather than jumping to the next piece.

It gets worse when you bring in the others. All three views above can be applied to Arcann, with similar contradictory story elements, and then the comparison happens. If he’s a villain, why have the option to save him? And if he’s a victim that can be saved, how is what he’s done different from his sister? And so on.

Senya gets pulled into this, too it’s harder to describe. She’s pretty close to what I think the writers were after, and my problems with her characterization are due to a combination of not having lived through the six months, not having her Force senses when she looks at her children, and the Outlander’s responses to her.  Still, her description of Vaylin’s childhood seems to be a bit suspect: if she was saying Vaylin was a monster from the womb, as some seem to think (all she actually says is “troubled” and her description of her pregnancy showed Vaylin’s power, not her evil), then we again come back to “why the Betrayed trailer?” If by “troubled” she meant the more sympathetic view, they needed to make that clearer when she finally turns on her own daughter, have her say Valkorion is the reason she was broken, the way the lines are written be interpreted as “always was broken” much too easily for me, and that’s also too close to “born evil” considering how things turned out (so broken she needs to die and always was).

There’s also “Senya is an awful mother” vs. “Senya is perfect and never did anything wrong” dichotomy, but I don’t have the strength for that right now and I will always view the truth as “Senya is a flawed human being desperately trying to do the right thing to make up for her actions (justifiable or not) in the past”. Condemning her for her errors too much or dismissing them completely both diminish the character. Senya, the one bright light in this mess.

Finally, Valkorion. I read the Harry Potter books. I’m not a huge fan, but I broadly enjoyed them. When Snape killed <redacted just in case>, a lot of people were saying what a villain he was. My immediate reaction was that there had to be more to it, or as far as I was concerned the entire series was a waste, because then all the trust that was placed in him without explanation was such nonsense, especially with how he treated the protagonists. I’m not so enamored of her writing that I dismissed that possibility, but she came through. Bioware, however, did not. “Oh, surprise, the planet eater is still a monster”. This fits with this critique because it’s another contradiction: presenting someone that is so clearly the real antagonist that it’s painful, having us trust him in any way even briefly, and then having the “surprise” be that he really was the villain of the piece just does not work. We needed a real reason to trust him, which proves false, or his change of heart needed to be genuine. 

I also refer to Blizzard, where their plots are so often driven entirely by the villains tricking the heroes into doing something stupid, again and again. It’s bad writing (much as I sometimes enjoy their games) and it wears me down to have to play the character that gets tricked yet again. I’ve gotten to the point where I say, “Just mind control me next time, it’s better than being duped by your transparent ploys again.”.

[mishasminions]

There’s Something About Mary

Some commentary on the writers’ decision to bring Mary Winchester back into Dean & Sam’s lives:

(This is really more about the show than it is about the character)

While I appreciate the complexity of Mary Winchester’s character–from dealing with the fact that her babies are actually now 30-something year old men, to trying to fit into a world she doesn’t recognize anymore, and to adjusting to life outside her little space in heaven–I really don’t think these things completely justify tarnishing whatever the show has tried to build for over more than a decade.

Sure, she adds to the dynamic of the boys (as do all the characters they decide to bring in, fail to flesh out properly, and then eventually neglect or kill off when they’ve served their superficial purpose), but is this really enough to compensate for excavating something that has buried itself into the core of the show?

Take Bobby, for instance, they’ve given him a really tear-jerking send-off, but every time they bring him back in one form or another, it lessens the “tear-jerking” value of the aforementioned send off.

‘Supernatural’ hinges on the fact that Sam and Dean lost their mother when they were young. Mary’s death sent John into a downward spiral, where he ruined whatever’s left of Dean and Sam’s childhood by forcing them to hunt, where he obligated Dean to parent Sam for most of his life, where literally everything they’ve done as a family was really just to avenge the death of the mother they lost.

Mary Winchester was every good memory that Dean had (which is why monsters would adopt her image and likeness when they’d try to hurt him).  Dean’s memory of her was so pure, he worshiped her, and he’d look back at the 4 years he’d spent with her with such fondness because she was literally all that was left of his childhood.

And sure it makes for a great story, and it definitely complicates the situation, when you’ve got this idealized version of your dead mother that keeps you going, and all of a sudden, she comes back from the dead, and she’s worse than your dad because she chose to leave you without an actual purpose, that she’d willingly risk your life for something she thought she needed for herself, and that she doesn’t want to be your mom but the most she can be is your hunting buddy who’ll mother hen you from time to time. And you don’t know how to act around each other because she’s got a picture of you in her heaven, but you’re not that child anymore, and you’ve got a picture of her next to your bed, but she’s not the mom you thought she was anymore. And really, how could you love each other when you’ve only got impressions or idealized versions of what you thought the other could be? So complex. Wow.

But let’s take a step back and review all that has happened here. We’ve got 11 seasons of the boys idealizing Mary, doing things in her name, going through all the shit they’ve gone through because of her death, essentially becoming who they are now because of what happened to her.

Technically what they’ve been doing with her character is still based on a format they’ve used many times before. The boys love someone. That someone has other priorities. The boys feel betrayed. Eventually they realize how much they need each other when one of them is in danger. The only difference now is that it’s their mom, so it hits closer to home. But this is formula. No new story was told here. They try to wreck something that’s already taken years to establish, for what? A variation of a variation?

After everything they’ve been through, now that she’s back, the core of the show becomes invalid. Now, some might argue that bringing Mary back doesn’t cancel out what they’ve gone through.

True. Story-wise, sure, the narrative still exists. BUT. Let’s be real here. This is a TV show. What I’m talking about is the pilot–the foundation of what the show is supposed to be. You’re telling me that after 12 years of my investment in this show, the fucking pilot was fucking pointless because she fucking comes back to life later on?! I mean, sure, this is Supernatural. They’ve brought back so many dead characters, we’ve all lost count. They’ve killed and attempted to kill the lead characters so many times, we don’t even flinch anymore. Look, I’m sure everyone at some point has re-watched the first couple of episodes of Season 2 where Dean’s in the hospital fighting for his life, and thought, “Okay, don’t cry, Sammy, he lives, but he’ll die again about a hundred times next season–he’ll even go to hell for a bit, but he’ll come back, and then he’ll die again after a few seasons, but don’t worry he’ll still come back–oh but he might also be a demon at some point”. I get that bringing people back is definitely Supernatural’s thing, and I guess I’ve reached the point of saturation with the resurrection gimmick by Season 3 but I’ve come to terms with that.

But now, you’re telling me that instead of finding things completely silly by Season 3, I can’t even watch Season 1 without thinking about how pointless everything they’ve been doing is?! “Boys, don’t bother avenging your mom’s death. She’s not all that great. I can’t believe your dad ruined your childhood for her. She’s not worth it. You should probably get rid of that photo Dean. You’re not a child anymore, she’s not gonna love you now.” What bothers me greatly about the writers resurrecting Mary is the fact that they have so much unexplored material, but they’re too lazy to explore it, so they’ll take the easiest way out by ruining a good thing. They do this every time, but I really think they’ve crossed a line this season. Mary being dead was literally the anchor of the show. She burned on the freaking ceiling before you even saw the title card. They launched the formula of the show with her death. Every motivation of the main characters hinged on the fact that she was dead. Sure, they’ll get new material from reviving her, but is it really worth compromising the gravitas of every episode they’ve aired before she came back to life? Why didn’t John just find a way to resurrect his goddamn wife from the start then?! Why didn’t Sam and Dean just find a way to bargain something to get their mommy back so they could realize how much she didn’t want anything to do with them sooner?!

Her death was literally the push that started the domino effect of everything that came after it.

Bringing her back just solidifies how unimaginative this show has become after Season 5.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this. Healthy discussions between opposing and/or agreeing sides are always welcome :)

[kyselor-blog]

Week 5

“But crucially the monster is also to be differentiated from the individual to be corrected on the basis of whether power operates on it or through it. In other words, the absolute power that produces and quarantines the monster finds its dispersal in techniques of normalization and discipline”  (Monster, Terrorist, Fag 119). I think that this is a quote that really captures one of the main themes of this week’s pieces because they both discuss how people that are labeled as disposable and less than human, are subjected to receiving “help” from an absolute power. In this case, it is painted and assumed that these people are willing and waiting for this help, but it is actually being forced onto these individuals. The absolute power that has to help everyone in this narrative that it portrays to everyone is the United States. It seems to be their job to “fix” these “monsters”. I put that into quotation marks because they are the ones to label these groups of people as monsters, and the only way to fix them is to isolate them as people and force strict forms or conformity and discipline. This is a violent way to being because it rips them apart from their normal way of life is forces them into something that is unnatural and coercive. It is justified since these people “need to be saved”.

My addition to the Glossary of Haunting is the word “mobilize”. This word is used a lot in this week’s readings because it is trying to explain how power and has been mobilized over lower status communities. In the Shock Doctrine, it was explaining how the victims of Katrina were left to the discretion of private companies. They used the natural disaster of the hurricane, to mobilize their power and dominance, during a period of disorientation. There is always going to be a mobilization of actual troops or physical force, or there could be a mobilization of ideologies. These are both very harmful and both work in tandem because the physical force and violence of stripping people away from their original space or way of life and forcing them to adopt a “normalized” culture, is just another act of dominance. Mobilization in this context has a negative meaning because it may seem to be for the well being of a certain group, but there is always going to be another prerogative at the foundation.

The haunted power dynamics in this week’s readings are those of sexuality and class level.  A big theme about the Monster, Terrorist, Fag reading, is that the West has the idea that the Muslim women have been subjected to a lot of violence. They are victims of their own culture and of men in general. They have been sexualized into a submissive and secondary role by people looking at the situation from the outside in. Since women have to be covered up, due to religion, others feel like they are being forced to do so or that it is against their will. They do not bother to actually get to know the personal reasons behind it or even if they are CHOOSING to do it and do not need saving. They are making these biased statements, but also have the power to make them believable by the general public. There has been a big idea of gender-dependency within their culture, which had started after the bin Laden situation. This idea that women had been waiting for someone to save them (126). This was used to justify the mobilization of the US troops into the middle east. During this period, the war had been created into a very masculine and sexist project. A lot of the actions and thoughts behind the war had put men at the front as their duty to save women and children. This taps into the traditional ideas of what it means to be patriotic and what that even looks like (127). People feel the need to be overly patriotic in these situations because of the fear of being labeled as an outsider or even going against one's country. It is good in a sense, but also tends to exclude people of color or even people of the LGBTQ community because they have already been seen as outsiders. The boundaries get even tighter when there is already an infringement on society. If they do not fit into the heteronormative ideals, then you are grouped into marginalized communities. Class level is also a haunted power structure in this week’s reading because in the Shock Doctrine piece, it discusses how after Katrina, the marginalized people which were specifically people of color and blacks, were left to survive with minimal help. The big thing that was happening at the time though, was the privatization of the state. Klein says it was a “land grab” (6). This was the people of power, splitting up what they wanted and could afford and forcing the inhabitants to follow the ideology and programs that they wanted to implement. They said that these would help them in the long run, but it is only pushing the personal agendas of those in high status. These people are racialize as inadequate, seeking help, and that is when the rich white man comes to the rescue.

The role of orphaned beginnings takes part in these readings because in the Monsters reading, it shows how people’s individuality, religion, daily lives, are totally erased and altered by the ideologies that people have of them based off of only certain groups. This leads to a common idea of what monsters are supposed to look like and handicaps all brown people because people think they could be terrorists based on a preconceived concept of them. These pictures have quarantined these groups of people because now everyone else from the outside perspective is going to initially assume they're bad, needing correction. It can also cloud judgement in how people interact with them even though they have done nothing wrong. ( Paur, Rai 117). Also the ideology that women need the help of Americans and men in general because they are victims of their own culture, is a violent process in itself because it takes any type of autonomy or choice out of their actions. They may be doing it as a form of resistance to stay rooted in their culture but the logic that they need to be saved, totally disregards that. It puts them into a secondary role from the jump, stripping them of their own identity and sense of power.

We can listen for liberators futures by actually getting first person insight to this culture that has been so polluted by western ideologies. They honestly don’t even need to say anything because they don't have to prove anything to us. We have just throw so much dirt on who they are as a whole, based on individual actions. Once we are able to see past the things that only individual people, then we can see the truth and character instead of what people in power have told us to believe. We have to give them back their voice and power to speak for themselves. I don't think I see a future where we are held accountable for the violent ideologies that have been created to mask these people and what they stand for. We can handicap a people based off of individual actions because they don’t represent everyone. So much of our history and policies have been based off of a response to these people and preemptive actions so I don't know how we can undo all of that. We are using them as a tool to justify our own military actions that harm other people, but it is hidden behind the other “bad guys”.