#maybe when i get around to that one “arcane if the politics were actually meaningful” au i have in the back of my head

[comet-soda-lite]

While I did really love season 2 of Arcane (especially episode 7 and the subsequent follow-through of its plot threads, no notes there), I do feel like it dropped the ball compared to season 1 overall.

Season 1's narrative was complex, nuanced, and above all, highly political. The exploration of police brutality, the state's monopoly on "justified" violence, the difference (or lack thereof) between direct violence and violence by way of systemic neglect/oppression, and the role of discrimination/vilification (both intentional & subconscious) in maintaining control over a socioeconomic underclass, were all core to Arcane's identity.

For instance, what's the difference between the council's neglectful, stagnant, and often actively oppressive approach to governing the Under City—which allowed thousands to suffer and starve and be exploited in every way imaginable—versus Jinx (the "monster")'s direct acts of violence against relatively only a handful of people? This question is posed to the audience a lot in season 1, this idea that maybe the councillors (including Mel, Heimerdinger, and Jayce) should be under the same amount or even more scrutiny than a character like Jinx. But in season 2, the show suddenly seems completely uninterested in scrutinizing them in that way or to that extent.

Season 2 actually pulled back on all the aforementioned core themes, both in scope and depth. The political stuff was nearly absent in comparison. And when it was present, the complexity and teeth with which it was willing to tackle its subject matter (especially in terms of the enforcers) was toned way down.

Of course, the relevant political commentary was always destined to fall by the wayside the moment the show pivoted to Viktor as the main antagonizing force. His cult arc refocused the show around a more philosophical theme, that being "human emotion and imperfection may be the cause of all conflict and pain, but they're also the reason life is worth living." Which is a theme a really like, don't get me wrong, but it's a pretty broad idea and a pretty common theme across a shitton of media, and Arcane really does not explore it in any especially unique or meaningful way. Viktor only seems to even believe in his cause—not because of a long built-up character arc that makes the audience question whether he might actually have a point—but because he's being influenced by the Hexcore.

Episode 7 is fantastic though, like I said. One invention, one moment, one turn of fate, can change history forever (i.e. Vi's death got Jayce properly exiled and his research actually destroyed, preventing Hextech and allowing real social change to happen in its place, calling into question both Jayce & Viktor's and the irl endless chase for "progress"). Yes the choices we make are in-part responsible for defining us, but we could be anyone, driven to do anything, if life played out a different way. Look to that better world that hypothetically could've been if only the past went a little differently, and instead of being paralyzed by the injustice of it, move forward fighting for the future that could be. I can't put into words my emotions around that episode, but it really felt meaningful and even radical, compared to a lot of the rest of the season.

[marsreds]

thinking about how Mel loved Jayce in the same way her mother loved her: genuinely, earnestly and by trying to mold him into something he's not with best intentions

[jonthethinker]

Does the Cerberus Assembly need to be reformed, or destroyed? And can it really be either?

Let’s start with an opinion we can all agree on; Trent Ikithon sucks. He’s clearly a very bad person, and our collective hatred of him is one of the rare things this fandom seems to actually agree on. What he’s done to his “disciples” is horrifying, and his general ideology is monstrous and abhorrent, although not surprising considering the role he plays in the Empire. We can, on this, agree that the world would be a better place if he was removed from power, correct?

Now this is where I start explaining my probably very divisive opinion.

A lot of people would say that all it takes to make the Cerberus Assembly better would be to replace the members like Ikithon with Good People. Maybe Caleb Widogast, for instance. If you simply put someone with a stronger moral character into that position, then its output in turn will also be Good.

This, whether knowingly or not, implies that institutions, even those like the Cerberus Assembly, are by their nature at the very least morally neutral. That all it takes to make an institution like the Assembly be Good is have Good People run it. You do that, and with time, all is well.

But what if institutions did have a moral character? what if the responsibilities and powers given to a body like the Assembly and its requisite components are not Good or even neutral, but instead very, very bad? And what if the incentives the people deciding who stands on the Assembly, namely the members of the Assembly themselves, are actually antithetical to any ideas of a substantially reformed Assembly in the first place?

Let’s think for a minute about Trent and his job. We are all horrified by his methods of creating his Volstruckers. But as much as it bothers me, what bothers me more, personally, is what they are for. While we tend to view them as arcane assassins, what they really are is a wholly unaccountable means of performing all of the Assembly’s, and by extension the Empire’s, dirty deeds not meant for public notice. And seeing as they fall under the sole purview of the Archmage of Civil Influence, this is largely going to translate to “managing dissidence and discontent” in the polite language a body like the Assembly would use to describe its work.

What this means is that its job, and the job of Trent’s office as a whole, is to keep the wrong ideas from getting too popular and the people from getting too loud about the awfulness of their everyday lives, and inside a broader system like the Empire, this is usually going to be dealt with by means of coercion and outright violence. While it’s easy to feel sorry for the incredibly abused and tormented people under Trent’s power, like Caleb and Astrid and Eadwolf, I feel like I’m one of the few in the fandom who has really considered the true extent of terror being unleashed on so many whose faces we’ll never know.

Peasant farmers’ organizing for lower taxes on their grain sales. Laborers gathering to raise hell over the low wages they receive from mandatory state projects. Citizens concerned about the unchecked brutality of the Crown’s Guard. Religious worshipers worried the Empire is straying from the path set by their gods. The mentally ill and other people who simply don’t comfortably fit into the grand scheme of things. Races of folks seen as outsiders suspected of conflicting allegiances. How many people like this have vanished in the night, either to be imprisoned or tortured or killed, or I guess in many cases, all three? How much suffering has been caused, hidden away from any measure of accountability?

And this brings me to my next point; While Trent is truly awful, his title, and the role he plays, are also awful, and I think you don’t get into a position like that in the first place without being someone like Trent. I say this because we’ve gotten to meet a handful of people on the Assembly outside of Trent, and they’ve all generally had the same things to say about him; he gives them the creeps and they don’t like him personally, but he has his uses. I interpret this to mean he performs the responsibilities of his office well enough, and while his methods and general demeanor may be off-putting, it isn’t worth causing a fuss about so long as the work gets done. If they simply ignore what he’s doing, they get the benefits of a suppressed polity with very little of the personal hangups of what it requires to make that happen.

So let’s say, for some reason, Trent dies or is imprisoned and disgraced, and Caleb assumes his role. Caleb has experienced a remarkable amount of personal growth, although not without his own stumbles and set-backs like any victim of severe trauma such as he. He is, in my humble opinion, a Good Man. I know if given the power of this office, he’d be motivated to end the traumatizing of children, and killing of parents, and perhaps even the wholesale disbanding of the Scourgers itself. He’d maybe seek to alleviate the suffering of those his office is meant to contain instead of inflicting more pain upon them. And wouldn’t that be nice?

But when you’ve got this entrenched elite like the Empire does, those sorts of efforts are not going to go unnoticed, and in many cases, are going to cause one hell of a backlash among the powerful, who more often than not believe in their heart of hearts that those lowly commoners deserve their lot in life, and to spare the lash is to spoil the child, and soon you’ll have a bunch of peasants thinking they can go so far as to ask for actual power, actual control over the direction of their lives, and for any empire, but especially this one, how do you imagine that’s going to fly?

I’m reminded of an anecdote out of Brazilian politics. Former President Lula da Silva is one of the the most popular Brazilian political figures of all time, and managed to massively alleviate poverty in Brazil while also working with Brazil’s entrenched elite to make sure not to piss off the wealthiest of the wealthy. But the comfortably upper middle class, or “petite bourgeoisie” as Marx would call them, were disgusted that all these poor people were suddenly climbing the ladder. According to some folks, they complained “The airports are starting to look like bus stations,” because for the first time, working class people in Brazil could actually afford to fly. This discontent among the comfortable led to a chain events ending in the false arrest and imprisonment of Lula and the rise of their current terrifying president Jair Bolsonaro. I learned from this, and other tales like it, to never underestimate how angry some people will become when their special status ain’t so special anymore.

This is to say, that while Caleb is an undoubtedly brilliant man, without the potential intervention of DM magic, I don’t see someone with his lack of political savvy either holding power long or holding onto his convictions long enough to do anything meaningful, if someone like him is considered for the job in the first place. AND even if he does accomplish all those wonderful things through this office and survives until he’s old and gray, he will eventually die. And judging solely on the general quality of character among the wizards we’ve met thus far, I’m not so optimistic about his potential replacement.

This example does spill out my major beef with the whole “Good Person in power” idea of reform. Good People either can’t live up to their values and actually wield power, or the clock itself defeats them and everything they ever stood for. This is also my problem with governmental models overly dependent on norms, as all it takes is someone willing to just completely ignore them,and for the people in power around them to have no incentive to stop them, for things to completely go off the rails. This is why reforms generally don’t last unless they universally redistribute power itself, from the top to the bottom, and even this is going to come with its own backlashes, and it generally doesn’t happen from polite attempts at reform by well meaning leaders, at least not all on their own, but through the sheer force of mass movements or outright revolutions.

And its not just Trent’s office that has this problem. It’s every single seat on the Assembly. His is just a particularly egregious example. Vess DeRogna didn’t get her job by being polite, of that much I’m sure. She’s clever, devious, and patient, not to mention her skill set and interests directly line her up for the role as Archmage of Antiquity. I don’t really think her sole interest is making sure nobody gets hurt by all these artifacts lying around, and neither do I imagine the Empire itself has any intention of keeping her discoveries behind lock and key; they pretty clearly want them mass produced where they can and immediately wielded against their enemies, both foreign and domestic.

And I’ve hinted at this earlier, but if you think Trent is a unique monster in the halls of Dwendalian mages, I’m going to have to disagree. I’m certain there are more than a few wizards in service of the Assembly and the Empire, who if not already believing similarly to Trent, could easily be convinced of his convictions, and ready to use his power themselves in an eerily identical manner. People like Trent aren’t as rare as we’d like them to be, and they’re all ready to grab power just as soon as they can.

So it would seem I come firmly on the “burn it all down” side of things. If only I believed it were that simple.

You see, I see the Cerberus Assembly as an institution that exists, in its entirety, for the cementing of power of the Dwendalian Elite and the progression of its interests. It protects them from threats both from inside and out, it teaches their children magic, it helps negotiate its trade, it aids in putting food on its table, and makes sure its armed for bear with the deadliest of magic only the Age of Arcanum and ancient elves could provide. It’s very reason for existence is to uphold the way of life for those on top. Even if it competes idly for who sits at the head of the table, it very much is invested in maintaining the structure of that table.

So if it were sundered and destroyed as an institution, what is to stop its functions from simply being absorbed by the broader Empire? What’s to stop the Empire from simply recreating the Volstrucker program under a different name? What’s stopping them from hiring its wizards to perform their original tasks, just under the sole discretion of the king? So I’d wager the problem isn’t the Assembly, but the very distribution of power required to maintain an Empire like Dwendal’s in the first place. The assembly is an immoral institution upholding a much larger, equally immoral institution. And you can’t truly solve the problem without tearing the whole damn thing down.

Do I think this campaign is going to be one in which our lovely players start a revolution? Hell no. I expect Trent at least to die or be deposed, and with the aid of some DM magic, things will get a little better. But Matt has given enough consideration to the political forces present in his world building, that I wanted to treat his world as if it were subject solely to the forces and motivations our own is. Just to see how things could turn out without a generally kind god like Matthew Mercer at the helm.

Plus I just really love trying to understand how fantasy political structures would really work. It’s usually a lot less depressing than real political structures, at least in so far as there are no real consequences for their abject failures. But I’ve rambled long enough. Thank you to the poor souls who read this ramble. You’re truly wonderful.

[theconservativebrief]

Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household in Michigan by parents who, at one point, believed the apocalypse was imminent. In fact, the family stored up so much nonperishable food in the event of the end of the world that they ended up subsisting for months on “colorless suppers of dried meat and powdered mashed potatoes,” refusing to admit their error.

O’Gieblyn writes about her upbringing, and the influence of religion in her life, in the 15 essays that comprise her debut essay collection, Interior States, which comes out this week. Diverse in subject — in one essay, she writes about the way critics of Alcoholics Anonymous are uncomfortable with its spiritual character; in another, she analyzes a theme park devoted to biblical creationism — the writings are consistently, exquisitely thought-provoking. In all, the collection of essays is at once challenging and lyrical, and portrays a nuanced, complicated look at faith, secularism, and evangelical culture in 2018.

While O’Gieblyn writes, frequently and movingly, of losing her faith in adulthood, her criticisms of evangelical culture and Christianity are filled not with polemic but with yearning: a spiritual and moral hunger for what Christianity could and should have been, and the “missed opportunities” for faith in a capitalist, secular age.

I spoke with O’Gieblyn about American evangelicalism, her own faith, and her process. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Tara Isabella Burton

In a lot of your essays, you talk about different elements of what you call your “deconversion” experience, out of a quite extreme form of evangelical Christianity. Can you tell me a bit more about your faith journey?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I was raised in a fundamentalist home in Michigan. I was homeschooled until 10th grade. And when I was 18, I went to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which is a very small, very old, conservative Christian college founded by Dwight L. Moody in the 19th century. And it was while I was there — while I was studying theology and really getting in depth into the Bible for the first time in a way that I hadn’t as a child — that I started contending with a lot of problems. Particularly the theology surrounding hell, predestination, the problem of evil, that I didn’t really think about in any depth until I was at that school.

I was also driven by the cultural problems within Christianity — a lot of the hypocrisy in that culture, the way that women were regarded. So I ended up leaving Moody after two years of a four-year program, and spent many years still struggling. I didn’t call myself an “atheist” when I left. It wasn’t a clean break. But writing was one of the ways that helped me make sense of these questions and forge a new identity. All of my essays are in different ways trying to make sense of that experience.

Tara Isabella Burton

Something I find really striking about your work is that while you absolutely do criticize much of the faith tradition you come from, you’re also similarly critical of a secular world (and media) that fails to understand that faith tradition. Throughout your essays, you reserve harsh words for magazine articles that refer, say, to the idea that the Western world “stopped believing in hell” sometime around the European Enlightenment, or scholars who refer to Satan as an “antiquarian relic of a superstitious age,” as biblical scholar Elaine Pagels did. What does the secular world get wrong about evangelicalism and fundamentalism?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I think the thing they get wrong most often is that it’s a very simplistic worldview and that it depends upon wishful thinking and faith. Faith is obviously a big part of Christianity, and a lot of believers do defer to that, no question. But the type of Christianity I grew up in was a very intricate worldview that depended upon rational principles, that functioned within that world sort of separate from secular rationality. So you know we were taught apologetics as children. We were taught to defend our faith, to use Scripture as evidence to respond to these common attacks on Christianity.

When I was at Moody Bible Institute, the intellectual culture there was very intense and academically rigorous, even though we were studying the Bible from a literalist point of view. We weren’t studying liberal theologians. It was a very insular world. But we read the Bible with a kind of attention and depth that I think would be familiar to academics. It’s hard to explain that to a secular audience because a lot of the things we were studying in depth sound insane to a secular audience. We’re talking about how to prove that the Earth was actually created in six days based on all of these theologically arcane methods. But it did function within its own insular world as a system of rational thought.

Tara Isabella Burton

That makes a lot of sense within the paradigm of your work, which treats religion and the ideas behind it extremely seriously, and with depth, even when you’re criticizing it. And at times, you still see the value in it. In your essay on the differing ways hell has been treated in contemporary Christianity, for example, you talk about how there is a potential within the narrative of hell to find “a sober counternarrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue.” What elements of your religious upbringing would you like to see preserved, and why?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

When I was writing many of these essays, my biggest criticism of the church is that it didn’t provide an antidote to capitalism. And it could have! I grew up in the 1990s during the megachurch era. There was still this idea that they could compete with secular youth culture. I have an essay in here, for example, about the phenomenon of Christian music, and how a lot of Christian artists in the 1990s were trying to compete with bands, which were on MTV, to compete with whatever was popular and add a Christian “twist” and sell whatever was popular. It leads to an inauthenticity.

There was a missed opportunity to offer an alternative to this culture of consumerism, of capitalism, that a lot of us were already disillusioned with, and the church was doing the exact same thing. It wasn’t providing an escape. It was marrying the culture.

I talk about this in my piece on hell. In the 2000s, people stopped talking about hell to appeal to a larger audience. Pastors started running churches like a business. They did market research and found that hell made people uncomfortable. People didn’t want to hear about hell, or how they were sinners. But the gospel message doesn’t really work if there’s no stakes, nothing to be saved from. And I think there was a missed opportunity to reinterpret hell — as a metaphor for evil, for these difficult experiences that people go through, like addiction or war.

Tara Isabella Burton

Let’s home in on that a little bit more. In Interior States, you talk a lot about the evangelicalism of the late ’90s and early 2000s. In the past few decades, how have you seen that world change? Where has evangelicalism gone in America?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

It’s become much stranger, I think, than it was even when I was a Christian. It’s interesting watching the movement evolve now, as an outsider. With the Trump presidency, and the overwhelming amount of white evangelicals who voted for him — that was an incredible disillusionment for me. The narrative of when I grew up at school during the Bush years was, “He’s one of us; he’s a good man.”

And then to see the church do a total 180 and support someone like Trump, who is not a Christian, who is an adulterer, who totally goes against all their values — it makes it clear that [Christian politics] were about cultural dominance, Christian nationalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. I think the Trump presidency sort of revealed the extent to which maybe Christian politics were always about those issues.

And there’s been a rift, too, within evangelicalism. I think a lot of Christians, particularly younger evangelicals, have become really disillusioned with that label, or are calling themselves “ex-evangelicals” or gravitating toward mainline Protestant denominations that are more concerned with things like social justice.

Penguin Random House

Tara Isabella Burton

Let’s talk a little bit more about your own work and your process. In your essay “On Subtlety,” you talk about how your experience of faith informs your writing on a narrative as well as content level. You talk about how a kind of sense of meaningfulness pervading the world, and a compact of trust between a narrator and a reader that mirrors that between God and creation, made you more prone to writing “subtle” pieces, where you trust the reader to get it. Can you expound further on how your faith tradition informs your writing as well as your subject matter?

Meghan O’Gieblyn

I actually started off as a fiction writer. And one of the criticisms I always got in workshop with my work was that I wasn’t being explicit enough — that I was forcing the reader to make connections that I should have been making as a writer. And I’ve gotten criticism even as a nonfiction writer. It started to seem like it was larger than a craft problem — like it was actually a problem with the way I looked at the world.

When I was growing up in the church, there was this whole narrative of “you have to pay attention. God can speak to you in mysterious ways.” And you have to be careful in calling attention to those connections. Christians were always looking for signs, like, “God is speaking to me through the words of a popular song.”

There’s also this interpretative vigilance that we were taught as children. We were taught that the secular world was kind of this unified ideology that was trying to dupe us, and we had to deconstruct these messages and be vigilant guarding ourselves against it. And I think that was a useful education in a lot of ways, because it taught me critical thinking.

Also, there’s a way in which that idea of religious mystery is something that has informed my writing. I do sometimes think of writing as a very mystical process. A lot of writers do. Sometimes you don’t understand the way your subconscious works — the way the ideas rise to the surface. It can feel like a religious experience at times.

Original Source -> How Christianity can be an “alternative” to consumerism

via The Conservative Brief