#meanwhile the lead's whole narrative up until a certain point (when the narrative has started shying away because the queerness has become

[variousqueerthings]

heterosexuals really want to see lenny and midge get together

queers understand that it's all about susie and midge

[vickyvicarious]

I originally just saved these lines because... well, because yikes, Juror No. 2! But on further thought, I think this line brings up a really interesting theme and storytelling device that TGAA* uses.

*(Here is where I'm gonna disclaim that I've only played the first game, Adventures, so far. There are thorough spoilers for the first game in this, but I can't speak to what's done in Resolve yet.)

Namely, the usage of class differences - both in terms of social status, and wealth. It's utilized both to create the underdog situation that AA games rely upon, even in a far more legally egalitarian situation, and to dig into storylines of corruption/trust. I'm gonna split this meta up to talk about each one in turn, to keep things a little more organized.

.

Underdog Power Imbalance

From the start of the games as a parody of Japan's unfair legal system favoring the prosecution, this dynamic has been present throughout the entire franchise. In the very first game, there was even a ton of corrupt prosecutors and police, and eventually they introduce other concepts like the 'Dark Age of the Law', or the even more extreme system in place in Khura'in, where defense attorneys share the death penalty with their clients when they (inevitably, until Phoenix comes along) lose.

But the legal system alone is clearly set up in favor of the prosecution, and heavily so. The accelerated pace of the investigations and only three days in trial mean that defense has little time to craft a case, and often might not have any real context at all until the trial itself. They aren't supposed to be allowed into crime scenes, and usually have to sneak or beg their way in to look around. The prosecution preps all the witnesses, and the defense rarely or never gets to call in their own. There is no jury, and the judge always gives the prosecution far more leeway than the defense. It's a constant struggle to keep him from passing a verdict in their favor. Unsubstantiated objections often result in penalties; meanwhile the prosecution gets free reign to literally attack people with whips, coffee mugs, prayer beads, a hawk, etc.

This whole setup is obviously not a good legal system, but it makes for a challenging gameplay experience. The player is always the underdog by virtue of the world itself, which provides for a lot of clever skin-of-your-teeth strategies, narrative tension and room for all the crazy shenanigans the franchise is known for. There's a reason the Mason system wasn't implemented in Dual Destinies; it's much easier from a gameplay perspective to not actually develop this legal system any further in terms of leveling the playing field between defense and prosecution.

But TGAA is a different setting, with different rules. They have a jury system, at least in Britain. (I'm pretty sure there was some dialogue about it being adopted soon in Japan as well, so maybe there will be such a case in the second part.) And in Barok van Zieks, we get a rival prosecutor who for the most part seems to legitimately care about discovering the truth. There are a couple of times that he makes witnesses stick around longer and give testimony the defense has requested, which probably isn't helpful to his own case. And even before we get to this point, the investigation and trial aren't under a time limit. Now, functionally, they don't really seem to want the trials to get dragged out, so we still only have a certain amount of time (usually a day or so) before the trial begins, but it's still true that in-world, there is more time to both investigate and carry on the trial if needed.

But this would be too easy, right? Where's the classic AA underdog storyline? Well, they do a little bit to rush you by saying that the courts are very busy and trying to get through cases very quickly. This leads to a faster turnaround and less investigation time. It's still not a straight-up law stopping you, but there's enough reason to keep the gameplay on a schedule.

But more importantly, TGAA leverages societal power against you. Where in other games, it was legal, here it's social. Ryunosuke is always the underdog, and usually his client is too.

Case 1 - Ryunosuke is arrested. As defendant, his word is less trustworthy. But that isn't enough; the victim is British, and there is intense pressure from above to get a swift resolution to the case, in a way that won't anger Japan's ally nation. The fact that the culprit is a noble British lady provides not only linguistic challenges, but also makes it diplomatically difficult to accuse her without strong proof - the burden of which is on Ryunosuke to provide, since he is all around the easier option.

Case 2 - Ryunosuke is the suspect, once again. This case is unusual in that it never actually reaches a courtroom, but he still has to prove himself innocent or else he will be arrested and sent back home. The main way he's an underdog in this one is because he's already breaking the law: by smuggling himself onboard, he's instantly less trustworthy, and the consequences for him will be all the worse if he can't prove his innocence.

Case 3 - The pressure here stems from a few different sources. Firstly, Ryunosuke has been informed that if he doesn't win this trial, he will be sent home and be unable to continue Kazuma's work. That's an internal pressure, but there's external ones too. Namely, the British jury tend to be bigoted if not xenophobic. There's several instances where people scoff at this 'mere Eastern student'. Adding to this, Ryunosuke is new to law at all, and even newer to British law. He's unfamiliar, uncertain since it's his first trial and he's not really a lawyer yet, desperate to succeed for Kazuma's sake... plenty of pressure. His client is a wealthy, well-respected man, though he's Irish instead of British.

Case 4 - The close of the previous trial adds to the internal tension on this case. But the real pressure comes more from the bigoted jury - made worse by former witnesses you've angered coming back as jurists. Once again, there are some pretty rude stuff said about Natsume. And because he is poor and foreign, he can't afford to defend himself well. He's also looked down upon, and Ryunosuke has to convince people not only that Natsume isn't the only one who could have done the deed, but also that he's not just inherently suspicious even though he's simply a reclusive scholar.

Case 5 - This is the most extreme case yet. Ryunosuke's client is, as Juror 2 says above, "gutter trash". Gina's a pickpocket who lives on the streets, and the respectable society looks down on her and believes her far more likely to commit a crime (and more deserving of harsh punishment) for that alone. Then when you add in the classified government secrets, you get the police actively working to convict her even if they know she's likely innocent, simply they want to protect the secrets over her. Gina also is very distrusting of people who claim to want to help, which is the reason she ended up being involved in the case at all; if she'd trusted Herlock then she would never have broken into the shop in the first place.

There's always an element of illegality, government interference, or social status involved. And the function is always the same: to make it harder for Ryunosuke to win.

Even once he starts defending other people, his clients get less and less 'respectable' each case. From rich and 'philanthropic' Irishman, to moody and poor Nipponese, to distrusting thief who's seen as 'scum'.

It's just a really clever way, on a meta level, of making Ryunosuke face the same level of difficulties as Phoenix and the rest, even in a legal system that is theoretically much more fair.

.

Power Corrupts / Who To Trust

I probably won't linger as long on this part, but I didn't want to leave it unsaid. The other function of this element of classism ties in really well to the focus on trust. Both trusting yourself and, through that, putting your faith in others.

There are various social strata represented throughout the game. The British and Japanese governments, nobility, military, police, the rich, common but respectable people, and finally criminals.

Government - In both the first and last case, each respective government are far more concerned with their own 'big picture' to care about their individual citizens facing dire consequences. Whether it means maintaining an important alliance, or protecting government secrets, they'll happily throw innocent people under the bus in favor of their own concerns.

Nobility - There isn't a lot of this outright, but it pervades the game on a more subtle level. First, van Zieks is a nobleman. And even if he is more willing to consider the defense's points, this alone (plus his reputation) inherently sets up a power imbalance in court. Other 'gentlefolk' involve probably the Judge, Stronghart, Jezaille Brett. All in positions of power, with people sucking up to them left and right. This is kind of shown with Gregson and Iris too, the way he calls her 'Ladyship' and bows to the power she has over his reputation. It's not solely due to her status, but he still uses that particular language to grovel. Miss Brett is the one who wields her status as a direct weapon the most; for the rest, it's more implicit in their power.

Military - this doesn't show up a lot, but there are two military-affiliated witnesses. Both are really defined by belonging to that group, even when one is retired. Both get this kind of generic respect for that alone, but both turn out to be hiding an embarrassing secret.

Police - the noble profession of the London bobby! I mean, once again, the institution is highly valued, and any insinuation against even a single individual in that group is taken as a major offense - at least when suggested by someone lower-class like Ryunosuke. Even though it's later proved that Roly Beate was lying, and Gregson outright lies on the stand and colludes with a criminal. They don't go so far as making them have evil motives, exactly, but they certainly don't live up to the stainless reputation they're afforded.

Rich - this is a major focus in England. Between McGilded wielding so much power despite his relatively low-class beginnings, and Graydon being so obsessed with gaining power of his own in the same way, we get a pretty clear picture of money's corrupting influence. Or at least, the lust for it above all else leading people down a pretty dark path. At the same time, until their crimes are revealed, they generally have good reputations and are more likely to be trusted. The money brings with it at least the image of nobility (with McGilded, of the character sort; with Graydon, the social class sort), and there's according status.

Respectable Commoners - The witnesses who don't have any particular institution backing them, but are still looked upon well enough. In general, they're seen more as the status quo. There's a pretty wide range amongst what I'm calling this group from more 'gentlemanly' characters like that banker guy, to those desperately clinging to keep their status like the Garridebs, to more poor but honest workers like the Beates or, initially, the cabby driver. I'd put foreigners here too, more at the lower end (at least in London).

Criminals - people like Gina and the Skulkin brothers. Poorest for sure. Deeply mistrusted, looked down upon, and dismissed as 'gutter trash'. There are linguistic differences too, with the Cockney accents. Basically, it's very clear to everyone that they are the lowest class. They're pretty much seen as scum.

There are good and bad people in every group, sure. But in general, we are drawn more and more to the lower side of things by virtue of the cases Ryunosuke takes and his own status as a foreigner. I'm certain that Susato is from a very respectable family (nobility), and Ryunosuke is an upper-leaning 'respectable commoner' back home, but in London they are slid down to nearly the bottom automatically. Herlock is a gentleman, but his antics tend to garner a little less respect since they don't match any of the institutions.

The institutions (government, police, military) on the whole are clearly flawed and not innately trustworthy. The nobility hold power over our characters - and wield it against them. The people who really put an emphasis on money are uniformly untrustworthy. As for the last few categories, there's much more individual diversity. Still liars, still thieves among them, but in general they aren't incredibly evil and they don't have enough power to do massive harm even if they meant to (which they generally don't).

Despite the general sense that the higher social stratas should be more trustworthy, the story almost trends in the opposite direction. Certainly the unquestioning distrust aimed at people like Gina is shown to be wrong, and damaging besides.

In addition, everyone who wants to climb the social ladder finds themselves worse off. The people obsessed with their own status do bad things to maintain or better it (you can't be at the top of the ladder if no one is beneath you, after all. Look at the juror up top - she serves someone else, but at least she's respectable, she isn't like that gutter trash). You have the Garridebs, restructuring their whole lives around maintaining a facade of greater wealth than they actually have on one end. And then, at the other extreme, you've got Ashley Graydon. He got involved in treason because the stigma of being a poor, low-class criminal terrified him so much. He completely rewrote himself as this posh upper-class dandy, not caring how many people he hurt along the way. And then when his father (more honorable even if lower class) was killed, he turned his hatred onto McGilded, in doing so becoming the very type of monster he claimed to hate.

McGilded himself shows a very cunning understanding of the kind of power that money and a good public image can gain him. He knows how to wield it to cover up his own bad deeds. He knows, too, that people like Gina don't have enough power to fight back against him, and that he can use them for his own ends pretty easily. No one was going to believe her over him, and even if they did he could have her killed; it's why she testified for him in the first place.

All of this plays into the themes of trust, and where you place it. Clearly, just following the usual societal standards of "what type of person is trustworthy" isn't going to get you anywhere. You have to be more discerning, and at the same time more open-minded to all sorts of people. Ryunosuke and Gina both eventually learn to trust again - him in himself, her in others. They know that there's a risk you can be let down, but that taking the risk is important, and incredibly rewarding when it pays off and your trust is returned. Nonetheless, there's no greater trust in the system. Even Susato distrusts the very legal system she loves enough that she felt the need to tamper with a crime scene. Individual trust, irrespective of social class, is the winner at the end of the day.

On the other end of the scale, you've got van Zieks, who clearly has little trust in anyone. He outright states that he hates people who use their riches in order to cheat others, as well as people who betray him. Despite being a firmly entrenched member of the upper classes/the legal authorities, he seems to have little inherent faith in the systems he upholds. However, he doesn't balance that out with faith in individuals either, not like our heroes do. At least, not disregarding social class; he'll distrust the larger systems (the top rungs), but still buy into social stigmas like that Gina's totally untrustworthy and Roly Beate as a bobby is automatically more trustworthy. Still, he seems to trust no one but himself fully. So yeah, he'll make witnesses stay and testify for the defense, even very important ones... but he'll also be very suspicious of all Japanese people just because someone who was Japanese betrayed his trust in the past. He feels the need to see everything proved to him; until then he's not willing to give his trust. He's more like where Gina started out... except unlike her, he wields a lot of power, so the consequences of his distrust could be quite severe.

I just think the way all these more stratified social groups plays into the themes of the game are really interesting, and work really well. I'm really eager to see how this plays out in the second part. Especially if (as I strongly suspect) Mael Stronghart turns out to be a villain. He's probably the character who most exemplifies maintaining order and keeping to certain roles, what with his clockwork obsession. Also the most powerful individual we've met so far. Definitely could continue this theme.

[scope-dogg]

Gundam Narrative: Thoughts

This movie had something of a lukewarm reception from critics and fans. I think a big part of that is that it was more or less a direct sequel to Gundam Unicorn, which as I mentioned earlier was excellent in most ways. Directly compared to it, Narrative doesn’t really stack up. It looks worse than Gundam Unicorn (despite being a theatrical release,) the story is worse than Gundam Unicorn, and it’s a hell of a let cornier than Gundam Unicorn.

That said, being worse than Gundam Unicorn doesn’t necessarily translate to “bad.” While I definitely wouldn’t consider this to be an excellent movie, and in fact there were parts of its runtime that I’d consider to be downright poor, ultimately by the time the end credits rolled it had done enough to win me over. While I definitely see why some fans consider this movie to be one to forget, I ultimately enjoyed my time with it.

The plot setup is that while we saw only two RX-0 units in Unicorn, there exists a third unit called the Phenex that went rogue. In UC 0097, one year after the conclusion of the events of Gundam Unicorn, the Phenex has reappeared and has gone on the rampage. The Federation has dispatched a task force to capture it, only to be joined by Michele Luio and Jona Basta, respectively a representative of a powerful corporation who has a special interest in the Phenex, and Jona Basta, a fairly average mobile suit pilot who’s nevertheless been assigned the Narrative Gundam in order to recapture the Phenex. Both have history that ties them to the elusive machine’s former pilot, Rita Bernal. Meanwhile, a rogue Neo Zeon faction also seeks to capture the Phenex for themselves. Amongst their number is Zoltan Akkanen, a mentally unstable reject from the cloning project that brought forth Full Frontal, who seeks to enact his own agenda.

The movie’s biggest problem is that it’s straight up too short for what it’s trying to do. It’s 90 minutes long, and honestly it felt like a full hour of extra runtime to fill out blanks and just slow down what feels like a rushed pace a little would not have gone amiss. It doesn’t help that much of the runtime is flashbacks to Jona, Rita and Michele’s past, which is delivered in chunks and makes things feel choppy and sometimes repetitive as the narrative keeps revisiting the same flashback scenes multiple times. This is kind of a shame as the actual story itself is pretty good once you get past the sometimes-confusing way it’s delivered. Honestly it took me right up until the end for me to come round to liking the movie, and I think a part of that is because that’s when everything finally clicked into place. The characters are mostly pretty good - Jona’s a sympathetic lead, Michele is a fairly nuanced character, especially once her backstory’s all delivered, and Zoltan comes across as totally unhinged in a way that makes him an engaging villain, but not so unhinged that his motivations don’t make any sense. As far as the storytelling goes as a whole, I think it has a strong beginning, a weak middle and a strong conclusion. This is largely because the best animation and battles are front-and-back loaded, but also because the early part introduces the characters and builds intrigue, the middle starts to make things confused and things don’t resolve properly until the dramatic conclusion.

I can’t really sign off on talking about the story without mentioning what’s likely to be the biggest sticking point for a certain segment of fans. Some gundam fans express disdain for “newtype magic,” and prefer it when the series trends more towards being a more grounded war drama. If that describes you, this movie is definitely not for you. Unicorn was already considered excessive by many in regards to the power level afforded to newtypes by psychoframe-equipped mobile suits and their overall centrality to the plot. Narrative goes even further beyond that, to the point where it honestly gets silly. Personally, while I like the grounded war drama side of Gundam, the newtype stuff’s always been important to UC ever since the original series, so I typically welcome its inclusion, but even I thought that it was pushed to beyond reasonable levels here. I made the conscious choice to just try and accept it and enjoy it for what it was, knowing that this was ultimately just a side story rather than anything with real lasting ramifications for the setting, but I think that many others will hate it and see it as the series jumping the shark, and they might not be wrong.

On the presentation front, as I mentioned in the preamble, it’s definitely weaker than Unicorn. It’s not bad looking, but as a followup to Unicorn that was released on the silver screen you’d probably expect more, doubly so considering the movie’s short runtime. That said, it makes do with what it has quite well - while most of the mobile suit designs return from Unicorn, the two stars of the show, the Phenex and Narrative Gundam (coming in three variations,) are well-animated and feature in exciting battle sequences. The final battle in particular is a glorious pyrotechnic ballet with an exciting conclusion. While visually it falls short of the mark that Unicorn set, Hiroyuki Sawano returns to deliver another excellent soundtrack that elevates the rest of the package another level - particular mention deserves to be given to the track “Vigilante” which was probably the highlight of the whole movie.

Ultimately, while I think that as a direct sequel to Unicorn it’s definitely lacking, I think it’s still better than its reception would indicate and that it’s at least worth a watch. Just know that it’s more of a bonus side story and not the next epic chapter of UC Gundam - if you set your expectations accordingly I think it’s definitely at least worth a watch.

[morwensteelsheen]

WIP wednesday thoughts:

willow cabin is utterly fucked because i changed my intended ~moral~ halfway through and now im stuck trying to integrate this shitty political intrigue plot into what should’ve been a more interesting story about éowyn adapting to life in gondor. hugely fucking annoyed by it and just totally unsure how to proceed. i could significantly increase the chapter count, but im worried that because the initial framing device was this bandits shit that closing out that plot and then still going for ages afterwards would be really shitty? i honestly don’t know, it’s so difficult. really i just need someone to read my outline and tell me if im being a dumb twat about it lol

meanwhile I know exactly where I want to go with AFTA but for some unaccountable reason im stressed that my ass is gonna get roasted for the direction i want to take it in. it’s all based in both tolkien’s personal politics and (some) historical precedent, but im worried people are gonna see it as a marysue-ification? but also im hoping to do sthg of a sequel to afta to practice the political intrigue writing so i don’t make the same mistakes i did in wc, and to do that it would require this specific set up in AFTA. im gonna put my AFTA thing under the cut so don’t click read more unless you’re gucci with potential AFTA spoilers!!

this royal affair au is definitely gonna get published at some point but im trying to decide if i want to do ~tasteful~ smut that drives a longer narrative or if im really just gonna do a whole 3,000 word build up to some run of the mill, old fashioned PWP lmao

okay so i have spent a Lot of time thinking about what impact i think éowyn and faramir would have on each other in a pre-ring war setting, and the honest to god conclusion ive come to is that they would somewhat inadvertently egg on each other’s (wildly divergent) idealism.

faramir’s an idealist politically in ways that, as Big D rightly points out, are not super productive in a wartime scenario. but so far as im concerned, the war doesn’t feel as warlike until they have to blow the bridge at osgiliath. until that point, there’s not really anything to say that faramir’s whole throwback optimism isn’t a perfectly justifiable position to have.

but what that idealism is and how it manifests are two really important considerations. the crux of his idealistic politics is that he looks at númenor and sees something valuable in it, and looks at gondor and sees a lot that he thinks is fucked up. outside of articulating a general angst towards the glory hunting, it’s not like he’s spending time talking about his specific policy prescriptions. however, we do know a few things that can guide us to a more coherent reconstruction of his politics:

he’s pretty rigidly hierarchical (when it’s convenient for him). as seen in: him basically telling sam to fuck off and stay in his lane in WOTW, and in how and when he chooses to refer to his father as ‘father’ vs ‘my lord’ or ‘lord of the city’ in the aftermath of the osgiliath retreat and then before he gets his ass sent back there. i don’t want to go into too much detail here but if i go with this i’ll definitely justify it more thoroughly in the footnotes.

so we’ve got faramir’s emphasis on hierarchy and his occasional (when convenient) belief that the upper echelons of a hierarchy are there because they’re intellectually and/or morally better. or, maybe to remove the causation from that instance, because they are in those upper echelons, they have an obligation to be more morally/intellectually upstanding, and the people in the structure below them have an obligation to show deference. unless you’re faramir and you’re dealing with denethor in which case that all goes out the window. classic.

we know there is some sort of nascent pseudo-democratic tradition of popular sovereignty in gondor. we know this because faramir asks the masses at aragorn’s coronation if they’ll accept him as king. faramir is a lot of things, but he is certainly not a progressive political radical, and i cannot imagine any situation in which he cooked up that rigmarole himself. that then implies to me that it’s building on some sort of political/cultural expectation in gondor. so: some sort of relationship to popular legitimacy. the people of gondor are subjects, but perhaps not as totally passive and unconsidered in the power structure as we might assume given the comparability to feudal europe/asia.

given those two things, i want to use AFTA to argue:

that faramir, in looking to assign blame for the faults he sees in gondor, would not directly assign blame to the lower classes, but rather to the aristocracy, because he will have seen them as failing in their moral obligations to the people they rule over. this is not to say that he isn’t fucked off about The People™ valorising war, but i think he’d take the position that they couldn’t possibly be expected to form those values and opinions of their own volition, and the fault lies in their rules. faramir: not gramscian.

faramir lacks any power that is non-military, and even that is of questionable worth because the rangers seem to be fairly distinct to the general structure of the army, and are not exactly a huge force.

faramir lacking any political power isn’t necessarily a huge concern for him (as in, he’s not actively trying to change that), because he knows he’s not going to lead a moral revolution and isn’t interested in taking up the responsibilities having political capital would engender because he’s stuck dealing with this war, that he fucking hates btw has he mentioned that he hates it?

however, given that he is apparently eminently versed in lore and scholarship, he is probably keenly aware that there is this incipient notion of popular legitimacy somewhere in gondor’s culture. it’s not, for most of his life, knowledge that actually does anything for him, but it is there.

éowyn, meanwhile, doesn’t really have many strong political convictions (yet). not because she’s a dumbass or whatever, but because she looks at court politics as kind of a farce, and doesn’t believe that power legitimately emanates from anywhere that isn’t a Big Fucking Army. and why, strictly speaking, would she not think that? the event that brought about the creation of her kingdom was not careful, soft spoken negotiation, it was her ancestors being in the right place at the right time with a Big Fucking Army.

and the internal politics of the Riddermark actually seem to be fairly stable, all things considered. i sincerely doubt that Théoden or Théodred are having to negotiate complex politicking in the way Denethor and Boromir are. so where, then, would éowyn see that kind of political behaviour outside gondor? with gríma.

éowyn, then, will see the immediate contrast between gríma (backroom dealer, manipulator extraordinaire) and théoden (owner of Big Fucking Army). and gríma goes and fucking wins that fight. that forces éowyn to confront the fact that, jesus christ, maybe there are different types of power.

at the same time, she’s going to be in minas tirith and needing to cover for théoden letting his shit get wrecked. not just because she’s prideful, which of course she is, but because if denethor/gondor think that théoden is too weak to hold up his end of the bargain, why would they ever go help the Mark? éowyn, seeing that théoden’s f-f-fucked, knows that there’s a very very good chance the Mark will need help.

against her feelings about courtly politics, she starts to accept that she’s going to need to do something to get power in gondor. not anything substantial, it’s not like she’s trying to overthrow anybody, but enough that when push comes to shove she can force denethor to help out the Mark (if he doesn’t do so willingly).

but, as ive sort of already shown in AFTA, she’s a bit of a dogshit diplomat. good for a little big-brawny-enforcer stuff, but not exactly brimming with cultural sensitivity. by the time she realises théoden + the Mark are fucked, she’ll have burnt quite a few bridges with the gondorrim nobles, and it’s not like she’s the sort of person to go running cap-in-hand begging for mercy.

so: she has to look elsewhere. and wow! a chance for faramir to do his favourite thing — talk about his opinions! and by god, his weird idealistic politics are… actually kind of helpful? because he’s like, look, you’re never gonna be a diplomat, but there are other ways of consolidating power. and one of those ways is by appealing to The People™. so why not work that angle?

and actually, we know that this is a viable route for éowyn because hama, in arguing for her to take up the mantle of théoden’s heir when théoden and éomer fuck off to helm’s deep, basically says that The People™ love her and would have willingly chosen her to lead them.

we also know, based on faramir’s middle men speech, that the people of gondor and the mark have grown alike in nature. not totally unreasonable to then think that the people of gondor would take to her like the people of the mark did.

éowyn, then, in various ways begins to try to win over the people of minas tirith. i need to do a little more research on this bc what ive got on the practicalities of that so far are a bit, uhhh, sketchy, but the least jargony way to describe this is to point to when natalie dormer’s character in GOT gets out of the carriage to go hug and kiss some babies. (marc bloch, eat your heart out)

this would later segue into a potential sequel where, while trying to secure the way for aragorn’s coronation, éowyn actually plays an interesting role because she’s fallen into this incidental Diana, People’s Princess™ role and so is better positioned than almost anyone to go advocate on his behalf. wow! cool! éowyn getting to be politically useful in more ways than just getting hitched!

so yeah. that’s how i am thinking it might play out. this would obviously have a rolling impact on the remainder of AFTA and how certain (🔥) events pan out later, but i think that building up part has to begin pretty much now, narratively. also this lets me get in a reference to “and then her heart changed, or else at last she understood it” and have it not be almost entirely about wanting to shag faramir, but actually about her gradual evolution from valorising war above all else to being like, hmm, maybe there are other ways of being powerful. which i think still largely captures the “no longer I will vie with the great riders” stuff, but more subtly and without feeling quite so… deferential, I guess? Like it’s not that she’s swapping one form of power (violence) for nothing (gardening?? healing?? tolkien accidental articulation of necropolitics??) but swapping violence for a different type of more sustainable power.

yeah. that’s the take, basically. who fucking knows.

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)

This review contains spoilers.

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was released in recent years by the Criterion Collection, that great home video company that's probably the OG of boutique labels, known for putting out acclaimed, significant or otherwise interesting films in really nice packages. (For some reason I had been thinking they put this out only last year until I actually looked it up. I guess my sense of time has been a little warped as of late, and as much as I'd like to tie this review into pandemic-era life, the fact is other labels have captured my attention lately, as can be evidenced by my embarrassingly large and extremely shameful Vinegar Syndrome haul from their Halfway to Black Friday sale from a few months ago.) Now, nobody in 2021 is going into this movie truly blind, but if I happened to pick up the Criterion cover and perused the back, aside from the list of special features and disc specs, you'd see the below (which I grabbed off their website):

Blonde Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia (Laura Harring). Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project. David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.

Now, this is a tough movie to evoke with only a blurb, but I'd say that does a pretty respectable job. I however do not own this release. What I do own is the barebones Universal DVD that was released a few months after the movie, back when going into the movie blind would have been far more likely. This is the description on the back:

This sexy thriller has been acclaimed as one of the year's best films. Two beautiful women are caught up in a lethally twisted mystery - and ensnared in an equally dangerous web of erotic passion. "There's nothing like this baby anywhere! This sinful pleasure is a fresh triumph for Lynch, and one of the best films of the year. Visionary daring, swooning eroticism and colors that pop like a whore's lip gloss!" says Rolling Stone's Peter Travers. "See it… then see it again!" (Time Out New York)

Now, the previous description probably couldn't fully capture the movie's essence, but this one makes it sound like an erotic thriller. (Could you imagine somebody going into this thinking this was like a Gregory Dark joint? I say this having seen none of his thrillers and only his hardcore movies, although I must admit an MTV-influenced Mulholland Drive starring, say, Lois Ayres is something I find extremely intriguing.) But you know what? Good for them. Among other things, this movie, with its two all-timer sex scenes, feels like one of the last hurrahs from an era when mainstream American movies could be unabashedly horny, before we were sentenced to an endless barrage of immaculately muscular bodies in spandex (stupid sexy Flanders) somehow drained of all sex appeal (god forbid somebody pop a boner...or ladyboner, let's be egalitarian here). I apologize if I'm coming off as a little gross, but having been able to barely leave the house for practically a year and a half, watching sexy movies like this is one of the few remaining thrills at my disposal. Please, this is all I have.

Now I suppose I should say something about the movie itself, but it might be a challenge given how elusive it is in certain respects (Lynch is notoriously cagey about offering interpretations of his movies) and, as a result, how heavily it's been scrutinized over the years. No doubt any analysis I offer as to the movie's overarching meaning will come off extremely dumbassed. What I will note however, is that for whatever reason, the scene I remembered most vividly is where Justin Theroux walks in on his wife with Billy Ray Cyrus, particularly the candy pink paint he dumps on her jewellery as revenge. We've been following Theroux, a movie director, as he's been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, having had control over casting his lead actress taken from him, which he proceeds to process by taking a golf club to a windshield of his producers' car and then reacting as above when he finds his wife with the singer of "Achy Breaky Heart".

With his Dune having been notoriously tampered with by producers, I suspect there's a bit of Lynch's own experience in the scene with the producers, which plays like an entirely arbitrary set of rituals deciding the fate of his movie with no regard for his opinion or even basic logic. While I don't know how particular Dino DeLaurentiis was about his espresso, I did laugh. Now, taking the reading that the first two acts of the movie are a fantasy of Naomi Watts' character, who is revealed to be miserable and ridden with jealousy in the third act, the amount of time we spend with Theroux is maybe hard to justify. Is this perhaps her "revenge" on him, his romantic and professional success having been flushed away while he flounders in search of greater meaning to his arc? Aside from possible autobiographical interest, these scenes do play like a riff on the idea that everyone is the main character in their own story, and if the Watts and Laura Harring characters can be thought of as having merged or swap identities, then perhaps Theroux's arc is the remainder of that quotient. (Now, it's worth noting that aside from being insecure and arrogant, Theroux in this movie is a less stylish than the real Lynch. If Watts conjures the best version of herself in her dream, Lynch maybe doesn't want his dream avatar outshining him.)

Now why did the Cyrus scene stick with me all these years when other details had slipped? Mostly because I'd found it amusing, partly because of the extra specific image Lynch produces, and somewhat because of the casting of Billy Ray Cyrus. Now, I don't have any special relationship to the Cyrus' body of work, but Lynch's casting of him, with his distinct mix of bozo, dudebro and hunk, results in a very specific comedic effect. This is something Lynch does elsewhere in the movie, like when he has Robert Forster show up as a detective for a single scene. The Forster role is likely in part a leftover from the movie's origins as a TV pilot, but the effect is similar (albeit less comedic). Melissa George appears as a woman who may or may not be a replacement for Watts in some realm of reality. Other directors obviously cast actors for their screen presence and the audience's relationship to their career, but the way Lynch does it feels particularly pointed, as if he's reshaping them entirely into iconography. The effect is particularly sinister with the presence of Michael J. Anderson, with whom he worked previously on Twin Peaks, and Monty Montgomery as a mysterious cowboy who dangles the secret of the movie over Theroux's character.

Cowboys in movies are frequently heroic presences (see any number of westerns) and are otherwise innocuously stylish (I confess I've come dangerously close to ordering a Stetson hat and a pair of cowboy boots), but the presence of one here feels like a ripple in the movie's reality. A dreamy, brightly lit mystery set in Los Angeles should have no place for a cowboy. It ain't right. (It's worth noting that Lynch at one point copped to admiring Ronald Reagan for reminding him of a cowboy. Is this his expression of a changed opinion? I have no idea, but Lynch has never struck me as all that politically minded.) Neither is the hobo that appears behind the diner. Certainly hobos have made their homes behind diners, but this one's presence and the way Lynch produces him feel again like a ripple in the the movie's narrative. Jump scares are frequently knocked for being lazy and cheap devices to generate shocks, but the one here gets under your skin.

Now about the movie's look. This starts off like a noir, and the mystery plot on paper would lead you to think that's how the whole movie plays, but the cinematography is a lot brighter, with almost confection-like colours, than that would lead you to believe, at least during the daytime scenes. This is another element that likely comes from its TV origins, but it does give the movie a distinctly dreamlike, fantastical quality that a more overtly cinematic look, like the one Lynch used in Lost Highway a few years earlier, might not capture. This is one of the reasons I think this movie works better than that one, and there's also the fact that the amateur sleuthing that drives the bulk of the plot here serves as a more pleasing audience vantage point than the male anxieties that fuel the other film. I also would much rather hang out with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring than a charisma void like Balthazar Getty.

The manufactured warmth of the daytime scenes also results, like in Blue Velvet, in the nighttime scenes feeling like they're in a completely different setting, one which perhaps offers the key to unlocking the mystery, or at least revealing the phoniness of the movie's surfaces. I think of the evocative Club Silencio sequence, which comes as close as anything in the movie to laying its illusions bare. ("No hay banda.") But at times Lynch will throw in disarmingly childlike, inexplicable imagery, like the dancing couples against a purple screen in the opening, something that would seem tacky and amateurish elsewhere but feels oddly cohesive here. There are a number of directors whose work I admire for being "dreamlike", and putting them side by side they all feel quite distinct (you would never mistake a Lucio Fulci film for a Lynch), but they have the unifying idea of imbuing the tactile qualities of film with the truly irrational to really burrow into your subconscious. Other directors have made movies with some of the same elements as Mulholland Drive, but none have put them together in quite the same way.

[zelvyth]

 From a very young age it was reinforced that my ADHD was a disability I was meant to overcome rather than a tool I could use to better myself. I didn’t even know that I had been diagnosed, and that my mother had chosen not to medicate me, until I was partway through highschool. By that point I had already begun to give up on ever truly “making it” in life. The hurdles I needed to overcome had demoralized me to the point of near total apathy. Between my sexuality and early coming out in a small town highschool, and my various mental health problems, I felt like no one in the world saw things from my point of view. The last blow to my self esteem came when my grade 12 english teacher, the true decider of fate to any young person, told me my final thesis on Lady Macbeth being one of the greatest example of the flaws in Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was brilliant, but due to formatting and scattered grammar issues, she could give me no higher than a 60%. After years of getting consistent high 90’s in my english classes as well as other subjects, I had failed this extremely crucial essay due to the idiosyncrasies of the most frustrating language known to humankind. I passed that class with a 68, and felt like my fate was sealed. No chance at getting into any University in the country without redoing 5 months of work because one person believed that following the rules was a more important indication of intelligence than original ideas and the ability to make an argument. It crushed me. I admit that I didn’t put in the effort, but I had spent my entire life being told I was incredibly intelligent. It was the one thing I held onto. I felt betrayed by the education system. Though it was also due to many other factors at the time, this contributed to the second of my four suicide attempts. Today, I reject that philosophy. 

    When a person with ADHD is thinking, they connect ideas in their heads much faster than the average person. It can be confusing and disorienting to the people around them. I constantly have to explain how I got from point A to point B because the points connect automatically in my head. It’s exhausting, so I frequently do not bother to try. It’s extremely helpful when crafting an argument, however it can be debilitating in many aspects of modern life. Things the average person doesn’t think about, can be crippling for me. Without a true passion towards something, my ability to focus becomes hazy and my thoughts become scattered. I spend the majority of the day stuck in my head having conversations with myself instead of doing “normal” things with my time. I have spent my life being told that ADHD is my weakness, today I can tell you with the utmost certainty that it is my greatest strength.

    When the international pandemic of the respiratory disease “Covid-19” truly began and the world went into full nationwide lockdown, the bistro that I had, for the most part, happily been employed at shut down. After 8 years of honing my culinary craft certain that my skills, though undervalued, would always be needed somewhere, I was out of a job. Indefinitely. So was most of the country that worked with their hands or, in some capacity, physically with other people. Unless you were able to conduct business through zoom conferences or were a suddenly “essential” employee like a fast food worker, you were left with little to do but sit and think or try desperately to distract yourself from the increasingly troubling world around you. Luckily, to my surprise, the conservative government had pledged to keep us all fed and watered as best they could. What deeply worried me was the knowledge that my friends south of the border, through no fault of their own, and already mostly furious with their government, were not being treated with the same bare minimum of respect. I knew it was a recipe for true disaster and widespread civil unrest as early as march.

    I watched while the culture of social media, at least from my own lgbt bias, slowly started to shift and I picked up a lot of the big picture through memes and personally shared anecdotes. Celebrities were being ripped apart as they tried to get our attention again from their huge mansions while people sat at home worried about how to feed their children. Using insensitive phrasing like “we’re all in this together” when they undeniably weren’t. It quickly became a social caste system. The desperately poor trying to creatively make money any way they could. The often needlessly endangered. And the upper class for whom, little had changed besides the inability to do whatever they want at any given time. The lines were very clearly drawn. While the rich bemoaned their accessibility to haircuts, the poor argued with landlords about rent. All the while another group was frequently paid minimum wage to work on the proverbial front lines; flipping hamburgers, being yelled at by the rich because you were out of everything with the supply chain so damaged, or literally saving peoples lives. The anger and frustration quickly took over nearly every form of social media. Subtly, but day by day it grew. There was only so much one could do from inside their apartments, and globally, the havenots found solace and comfort with one another. The narratives of meme culture, which had matured and specialized far beyond the early days of “lolcats” and “trollface” comics, became almost exclusively about mocking the rich and their inability to deal with slight inconveniences.

Nearly every month of 2020 was a new major nationwide crisis and people had little else to do but talk about it or ignore it. The year kicked off with serious threat of a third world war because Donald Trump was tweeting intentionally inflammatory remarks towards the fascist leader of North Korea. All while nearly the entire country of Australia was ravaged by forest/bush fire. January saw a clearly corrupt president unbelievably not be impeached. Sparking outrage among, in my humble opinion, any sane individual. This also exposed, to anyone who knew all the facts, that the systems to hold those in power accountable was clearly broken and corruptible. Towards the end of January, beloved basketball player Kobe Bryant died in a horrible helicopter accident involving his daughter. Late February leading into early March was when global fears over Coronavirus began to be taken extremely seriously by every government in the world, the exception being the United States and the Trump administration. By late April, the country had over a hundred thousand dead, and nearly a quarter of its population out of a job. The irony of this, is that the calls to reopen the country didn’t come from those that had lost their jobs, but the upper class that had grown restless deprived from their usual comforts. Meanwhile we openly mocked them on instagram, tumblr, and twitter. Trying desperately to make light of a horrible situation and bring at least a little levity to their lives. News that a new breed of dangerously fatal hornets had migrated to North America was derided as a filler episode. One of my personal favourite takes on the year as a whole so far was a comparison to the four horseman of the apocalypse. January representing War, February representing Pestilence, March representing Famine, and April representing Death. In fact a lot of meme culture started to take on an extremely apocalyptic vibe. The message for many was clear, and depressing.

Then things started to happen really fast, so fast that for many it would make your head spin looking at it from the outside. It began with a video featuring a white Canadian woman from Waterloo named Amy Cooper that went viral across the globe. In the Ramble area of Central Park in NYC, this woman was filmed by a clearly peaceful, yet insistent, black man named Christian Cooper, no relation, asking her to leash her dog. This is a bylaw of the area. The woman refused and began to become very distressed, roughly handling her dog by the collar. She started dailing 911 and accused the man of assaulting her to the dispatcher. What many understood about this act, and rightfully called her out in outrage over, is that she was using her knowledge of how police handle black people in America to threaten this mans life over leashing her dog. She has been fired, and the shelter has taken her dog back.

Two days later, as I was travelling to my family’s cottage to “get away from it all and unplug”, a friend sent me a snapchat video from Minneapolis. It was on fire. I immediately did everything I could to try to find out what had happened. That, is when I saw the video of 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a police officer with his knee on the neck of another human being. This did not shock, nor suprise me. I had followed the many accounts of police killing people on video since 2014 when I was 16. When the Ferguson protests over Michael Brown’s killing by police officers were broadcast over most of the developed world. I had seen little change, despite Barrack Obama being President. This continued to happen for the next 6 years, though there were no more protests. Some of the people of those original protests that started the Black Lives Matter Movement, went missing over the next several years. Mainly those that had been photographed.

George Floyd’s death, I feel, was the straw that broke the camels’ back. Which is how anyone who has personally experienced police mistreatment and injustice would understand watching that video. A societal contract had been broken. And Minneapolis started to burn down the city that would let this happen to their friend, their neighbour, their father, their brother, and most importantly, their son. The words that chilled me to my very core… And continue to make me cry when I think about. Continue to make me want to punch every cop I run into.The words that have caused me to continue having this argument every day with everyone I know. The words that make me want to scream and rage and burn that country to the ground….  “Mama”

In his dying breaths this man called out to his mother. Who had died 2 years earlier. Who could not come save him. The police officer casually, with his hands in his pockets, knowing he could get away with it, murdered that man while he called out for his dead mother. Suffocated him to death in the middle of a global pandemic driven by respiratory disease. If I had been in Minneapolis that night, I would have helped burn it to the ground.

Something I didn’t expect happened then. Something I didn’t expect when I saw the fires and the rage from mostly black citizens of the city. As I watched Fox News try to turn the story into a conversation about rioting and looting rather than Police accountability. Other peaceful protests started up in other cities. My entire social media feed from multiple sources was filled with people discussing their anger and vowing to protest it. I don’t like to admit that I didn’t see this coming. But on May 26th, as I ravenously tried to keep up from the comfort of a cottage on Crystal Lake Ontario, a spark of hope for humanity that I had lost a long time ago started to ignite.

Something interesting happens when you get most of your information from social media. It either makes you hyper critical of everything you’re told and willing to research anything important, or it makes you willing to believe anything your friends tell you. As the protests kicked off in major cities across America, after months of inactivity, my ADHD kicked into high gear. I used every neuron of my brain power to follow the protests from as many different angles as I could. Most importantly, I followed the story from the people who were at them. That’s what growing up in modern society makes you do. After months if not years if not decades of being lied to for personal gain constantly. It makes you pay attention to the people who have nothing to gain.

I got back to my appartment from my cottage a day later, still glued to my phone. Barely talking, barely eating, barely sleeping. I watched police officers in riot gear throw tear gas into peaceful protests in every city in America. Tear gas, by the way, is an international war crime in combat situations. I watched media with an implicitly right wing bias condemn the protests. Convincing people that looting was worth a war crime. I watched it work. It worked with my own father. It did not work for me. I watched the news from political biases of both sides but took most of it with a grain of salt. That’s what I had been taught to do from as young as 14 by the world I grew up in. The news could give me general information. However, the story was on the ground and I knew from experience that people would try to bury it so I had to watch it as quickly as possible. I watched friends of mine in the states get tear gassed and beaten while exercising their first amendment rights. I watched the news condemn the protests. I was horrified. I watched the peaceful protesters of police brutality in New York get beaten and gassed from a minimum of 30 different perspectives of the people I knew and trusted, and those I didn’t. I watched the peaceful protestors in LA get beaten and gassed from the same amount of perspectives. I watched them throw flash bombs and shoot rubber coated bullets into the faces of my friends in every city in America. I watched the President of the United States order the peaceful protestors in front of the White House to be beaten and gassed so he could have an awkward photo-op with a fucking bible. I watched this for a week straight from every angle available. Day in and day out. Every hour I was conscious, I watched fascism try to grab power in in every city in America. I watched people in powerful positions deny it.

It wasn’t just paying attention to the protests and the news of them explicitly. I wasn’t just filled with horror. I was also watching something wonderfully unexpected happen. I watched my black friends, my gay friends, my asain friends, and my intelligent friends, begin to weaponize social media. I watched them beg all of their friends to do the same. So did I, even though I felt like there wasn’t anything I could really do from cozy liberal Waterloo. I watched us all turn the algorithms against the people who made them. I did everything I could to make sure you couldn’t turn away. I told my gay white friends condemning the actions of protestors that his rights came from a riot. I watched them shrink in fear of my voice. My father told me I was getting caught up in left wing rhetoric. I tore his arguments to shreds. He told me broad angry statements don’t do anything. I told him broad angry statements create the conversation we’re having. Resistance is a highway with many lanes, and I knew my lane.

You grow up, especially in my age, especially when you’re gay, especially when you are exposed to a lifetime of stories of rebellion against tyranny, hearing about the power of resistance. As I marched in Waterloo with over thirty thousand people I didn’t know, I realized that I have never truly understood that power. How it surges through your body like electricity as you scream until your voice is hoarse. It’s a high better than any drug known to man, than any pride parade where I was pandered to by corporations for hours. It took my fear, and my anger, and my helplessness and turned it into raw power exploding from my body. I continued to watch people I knew deny reality. 

The protests grew. They spread across the world like wildfire. I went to facebook, a place I avoid because I don’t agree with the majority of people on it, and told anyone who would listen to me that this is what Pride means. What it truly means to be proud of your community. Not a rainbow flag in a store window, not a corporation asking you to buy it’s rainbow backpack. But turning apathy in face of evil into raw unbridled electricity. I watched the protests spread to Montreal and Toronto, I watched the police mishandle things there too. I watched violence perpetuated by the state against my friends, people I’ve known for years. The power I felt merely grew. It grew with every flash grenade and bullet and tear gas canister shot at my friends. It will not subside till this is over or until I die. I’m going to spend the next decade giving up the comfortable life of good food, great drinks, and fantastic company that I found in the restaurant industry. I’m going to spend a decade getting my Law degree to fight for every last one of us in the courtroom because that is a place I can make it count. 

Today is June 8th of the year 2020 and I began writing this piece at Noon, it is now 4:11 P.M. I have done zero editing and I refuse to. I submit this as my revised final essay. I want to know when you got behind the protests. Because if it was as you were reading this, I deem you unworthy to judge my critical thinking skills. If it was yesterday I think you should be ashamed of yourself. I was with them from hour one. You should have been too. How dare you spend years teaching children about racism and oppression. How dare you tell me that I’m not worthy of higher education in any form. Telling children that wikipedia is unreliable as a source is idiotic, it’s one of the most peer reviewed encyclopedia’s to ever exist. How dare you tell me and the young adults you teach that you don’t give out scores higher than ninety percent. What is the point of forcing teenagers to write in cursive. Why must I live the experiences you write about in your precious properly formatted essays. In this country a 68 is two percent shy of getting into any University.  It’s sentencing an intelligent person with an array of disabilities a life of believing they have no power. Despite my own mistakes at the time and the amount I have grown as a person since, I will hold you personally accountable for that. 

As a closing statement, to every English teacher in this province, no, to every English teacher in the great country of Canada. Think very hard about when exactly you put your full support behind this movement. Because your curriculum is outdated, and absolutely useless in the real world. And your racism is showing.

Post Script.

There is no bibliography of unbiased sources because all sources are biased. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and this should all be public information. Look it up.

[ineffable-endearments]

Psycho-philosophy & the angels, fallen or not (part I)

I swear I wasn’t taking any mind-altering substances while I wrote this. It’s very heavy and I’m not sure anyone will enjoy it, but I felt like I had to get it out.

And now it’s too long to be just one part. Here is the first part anyway.

It’s established that Aziraphale and Crowley symbolize the “opposing” sides of human nature, but I have a pretty difficult time with believing that they actually represent “good” and “evil.” THEY believe they represent “good” and “evil.” But even before the two of them develop their humanity by spending time on Earth, before they start to affect each other, they both have philosophies that are far more complicated than just “do good things/be helpful” or “do bad things/be hurtful.”

Before you can be “good,” you need a definition of “good.” And the same goes for “evil.” And I absolutely do not think that the characters’ personal definitions of “good” and “evil” match with the narrative’s definitions of “good” and “evil” (which I’m not strictly sure it really has). So...what might they represent more closely?

In extremely broad terms based more in dictionary definitions than in the finer points of academic philosophy, I’d cast Crowley as the individualist and Aziraphale as the collectivist. Individualism is the prioritizing of the individual’s interests over a group’s interests. Collectivism is the prioritizing of a group’s interests over the individual’s interests.

Obviously, this is heavily informed by abuse from their Sides. Hell motivates its demons to behave by making them fear for their own souls using physical intimidation. Temptations are also usually focused on taking advantage of some selfish motivation in humans. Heaven, meanwhile, motivates its angels with the promise of the Greater Good, intimidates its angels with the belief that disobedience is out of line with the Greater Good, and shames its angels for acting with any sort of personal interest.

“What?!” you say. You’re going to cast Crowley, the guy who initially hatched the plan to try to save the world at great personal risk, as the self-centered individualist, and Aziraphale, the hedonist who’s just about ready to watch the world burn at Heaven’s command until Crowley buys him lunch, as the collectivist one?!

Well...in a way. Because while the characters believe they represent these ideas, and while they genuinely buy into them on some level, the whole point is that the two viewpoints taken to extremes end up looking awfully similar. They also rely on each other, no matter how much they try not to.

I should clarify a few things before arguing any more.

The perceived “selflessness” of collectivism is sometimes idealized, and that’s why it maps onto the supposed “goodness” of Heaven, but it doesn’t actually mean kindness, compassion, or goodness. It means not considering oneself - including one’s own identity, preferences, or moral conscience. Likewise, the perceived “selfishness” of individualism is often vilified and gets cast as evil, which is why it maps onto Hell, but all it really means is placing one’s own perspective at the utmost importance, which can be beneficial depending on who’s doing it.

I’ve seen some incredibly smart commentary on the Good Omens book being a just-barely-post-Cold War novel comparing, among other things, Capitalism (heavy on individualism) and Communism (heavy on collectivism). I thought the analysis I read was brilliant, it told me a lot that I had not thought of before, and I would love to read more. But that’s not what I want to talk about here.

In this essay, I’m really sticking to the terms “individualism” and “collectivism” as they inform the psychologies of individual people (Crowley and Aziraphale). I’m trying to have a discussion that I think is important, because it’s important for humans to have a healthy notion of how individuals fit into their relationships and communities, but my commentary is much more vague and not tied to a specific moment in history. I’m frankly not very qualified to talk about the Cold War, anyway.

Crowley and Aziraphale are a couple of paradoxes. At least, they’re paradoxes until they discover Earth as their true allegiance, at which time they just become two balanced angels of neither Heaven nor Hell.

CROWLEY’S PHILOSOPHY

Crowley knows he’s supposed to represent Hell and the kind of self-interested desperation that drives people to damnation - a kind of extreme individualism. But he’s been condensed into an Earthly being who’s formed relationships and preferences and loves and, gosh, although he wouldn’t admit it, a conscience. Unlike Aziraphale, he’s much more OK with this sense of identity, because individualism is not incompatible with being, well, an individual. But he does struggle with the fact that he’s supposed to be working toward The End Of All Things for his own self-preservation when his real wish is for The Continuation Of All Things.

Most of Crowley’s decisions are framed from his own personal opinions. He approaches the world as he sees fit, which includes accepting his job of damning souls because he has to or he’ll get destroyed. He does what he needs to survive, so you could say he “answers to the higher power of Hell for self-interested reasons,” but for moral purposes, Crowley does not answer to anyone. Interestingly, though, he DOES have a conscience based in his own feelings.

By personality (not because he serves some moral power but because it’s just his personal preference), Crowley does not like certain kinds of cruelty. He’s willing to do his job, but he doesn’t enjoy taking free will away from people, for example. And in most cases, outright violence (like Hastur turning into a pile of worms and eating the telemarketers alive) is not something Crowley is into, either. In this case, the fact that he’s self-motivated means he has enough imagination to grasp what it’s like to be another person, and while he’s willing to upset people/give people the opportunity to damn themselves/generally be inconsiderate in public, Crowley simply does not enjoy the experience of destroying others without giving them a choice.

Oh, and we can’t forget: “You’re supposed to test them, but not to destruction.” It’s Crowley’s personal feelings that lead him to believe Armageddon shouldn’t happen, and Crowley’s personal feelings that lead him to act out against Hell.

With all that said, Crowley feels a profound love for the world and Aziraphale (whether he’ll admit it or not) because he really enjoys it on Earth, and he wants to keep enjoying it. Therefore, all of his “individualism” ends up working in the favor of the “greater good” anyway. In the end, Crowley temporarily loses hope and stops fighting, but by this point, he’s already had his positive effect.

It’s kind of like Terry Pratchett’s powerful quotation about witches being selfish. “All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany's Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours!” Maybe it’s not so intentional on Crowley’s part, but the outcome of his love for Earth and his bond with Aziraphale ends up serving the interests of others.

Crowley’s journey involves a less drastic change than Aziraphale’s. Once he thinks it’s possible to fight for the world and survive, he doesn’t have a single qualm about it, because he answers to his own standards, not anyone else’s.

AZIRAPHALE’S PHILOSOPHY

Aziraphale, on the other hand, has to basically figure out that it’s a good thing to use his own judgment instead of Heaven’s. In doing so, he has to rewrite his belief system and even rework his identity.

Aziraphale knows he’s supposed to represent the collective, Heaven, the Greater Good. But he’s been condensed into an Earthly being who’s formed relationships and preferences and loves and a conscience and an identity of his own. At first, this feels wrong to him, because many of his personal interests go against Heaven’s. It’s why he’s so incredibly good at repressing and denying; he has this sense of Self but doesn’t believe he’s entitled to it and doesn’t realize there is any way to separate from Heaven, so as far as he knows, to allow this Self to grow and flourish would ultimately be extremely painful and potentially dangerous. You can tell the other angels aren’t happy with his sense of self, either, as far as he allows it to go (see: any interaction in the bookshop, Gabriel’s behavior over the sushi).

Aziraphale is so oriented toward the Heavenly collective that he literally denies himself his own judgments, his own opinions. He’s convinced that Heaven is the Greater Good, so he accepts that as reality no matter how absurdly wrong their actions might seem to someone with an iota of common sense. He has not been allowed to have an opinion on it, and he will not form one now. He does intensely enjoy performing altruism and does not approve of Heaven’s plans to drown all of Mesopotamia and turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, but he will even push aside the satisfaction of kindness and the fear of cruelty if he’s told that his feelings don’t fit within the Great Plan.

It’s important to note that as far as Aziraphale believes, the existence of Hell and the work that Crowley is doing for Hell is in fact part of the Great Plan. He says as much to the Archangels when they bully him outside his bookshop.

Aziraphale is enthusiastic and adoring about life on Earth and about humans - and about Crowley! And oh, he does indulge. But he sees this all in a rather passive way, at least at first. He is simply enjoying the world and allowing the Great Plan to unfold. He does not think he has the right or ability to defend the world from Heaven’s judgment, even though he wants to. So, like Crowley’s self-orientation coming full circle to serve the interests of others, Aziraphale’s orientation toward the collective comes full circle to become very self-serving.

THE TWO TOGETHER

Enter Crowley’s judgment. Crowley is really fantastic company, but I think the specific thing he did in the long run was to help Aziraphale see that his own desires and judgments matter. Even when Aziraphale temporarily disavowed their relationship, Crowley’s influence was strong - would the Aziraphale who was standing on the Wall of Eden, or the Aziraphale who witnessed the Great Flood, have chased Gabriel around asking if the war was necessary, or would he have called the Metatron to argue everyone could be saved? Even when Aziraphale doesn’t actually ask questions, these interactions are an assertion of Aziraphale’s own feelings and judgments when he’s being told to be quiet and fall in line. And I really do not think he would have made these assertions before his long Arrangement with Crowley. In this way, Crowley gave Aziraphale the world and the gift of Being Himself.

As for Crowley, he doesn’t care about any Great Plan and thinks Heaven’s will is positively odious, but Aziraphale is convinced that the cosmic dance between the two of them is just ineffable. By playing along with that notion, Crowley allows it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The meaning of Crowley’s existence goes from “just make everyone as miserable as possible” to “balance out Aziraphale” which really means “create a world that doesn’t suck as much as Heaven or Hell, which are both insufferable.” In this way, Aziraphale gave Crowley the world and the gift of Being Part of Something.

[darkspellmaster]

Castlevania Season 3: In Regard to the Alucard Situation, or How to make him go Darker and more emo as they drag him into Symphony of the Night

So for those that are going to be reading below the cut, there are spoilers for the new season, the game and the following CD Drama Nocturne of Recollection which follows events of Symphony and introduces past events for Alucard. 

Before I go any farther, I’m putting the links up here and refrecing them by numbers in the peice so that it’s easier to find them. 

1.  Akumajo Dracula X: Tsuioku no Yasokyou or Nocturne Recollection (in English) -Link to the Castlevania Wiki on the subject of the Symphony of the Night Drama CD

2.  Subed version of Noctune of Recollection -done by Shido T. 

3. Shido T.’s Nocturne of Recollection  -Translated Transcript of the drama CD by Shido T. 

So after watching Season 3, and I’ll have a review up of the whole season when I get a chance, I realized why I was so disappointed in the events regarding Alucard. It wasn’t just the idea of Mr. Ellis using christian iconography (Judas Kiss, cross wrapped in thorns, they know not what they do, etc) as he did with Lisa (something he likes to do for certain characters even in his own works -hey Authority how you doing?), that was fine, I was expecting that. And it wasn’t just the idea of an assault (rape, could qualify for it as it was done to him using means that didn’t allow him to consent to something that was being told to him honestly) as a means of making him hate Humanity, that was something I was expecting, again based on Mr. Ellis’s other works, since it’s clear that he’s trying to push Alucard as far as possible from wanting to be awake so that when we get to the Symphony of the Night story it will make sense why he’s in the coffin again. 

No what got to me was that these two bland and flat characters were created just for the purpose of, well, fridging them for Alucard to go dark. (For those that don’t know Fridging is a term used in Comic tropes where Character A is killed so that Character B has some trauma or dramatic growth in comics, and is typically a woman but can be other genders or living things -dog from John Wick for example.) Sumi, or Zumi, and Taka come off as basically put there to die characters. They are strategically created for the express purpose to betray Adrian and die. That is pretty much it. There to build him up so that when he falls he falls far, far farther than before, thus probably forcing Trevor and Sypha to seal him away so that he can repair his own issues or something. 

This is something that keeps gnawing at me. Alucard is not dumb enough to let his guard down like this, ever. Even in the first two seasons, he was crafty about watching and observing Trevor and Sypha to see who and what they were about before trusting them. It’s clear that this season was not written with the same thought process as Season 1 and 2 which were cohesive and thoughtful in how each character and plot beat set up the events that leads to the end of the story of Dracula (and boy oh boy do I have thoughts about Lisa in Hell because...that makes no sense given who she’s probably connected to). He wouldn’t be letting them just into his life like this, he’d be cagey and cautious, given they are unknown factors, and wouldn’t be just randomly sleeping in his bed like this. He’d be locking their doors and locking his. 

To be frank Adrian at this point in time would already have limited trust of humans because he’d have seen his mother die one year before. He uses his glamour to go down to the village and do thing. This has been shown in later games when he’s in his Genya Arikado form in Japan. The man is good at hiding out, and is way older than Trevor or Sypha, so trusting people would be on his low end already. He’s seen a lot of shit (especially if they go the ‘He’s Trevor’s daddy or grand-daddy route) and isn’t a character that is just trusting. Read his lines from Symphony and even Castlevania III, and you’ll see that he’s a man that can trust, but it’s hard to gain that trust. Same with Sonia Belmont in the non canonical game, it takes a long while for him to gain trust with her and eventually work with her to defeat his father. 

Which brings us to the issue with Sumi(Zumi) and Taka. Both characters are supposed to be analogs of people that were harmed by the Vampires who want them to pay for their actions. Both are well voiced, but their characterizations are flat as all get out to me. Which shouldn’t be a surprise as the arc feels like Mr. Ellis was pulling from a dropped idea from his run on Authority. While, yes they are not twins, it’s clear that there had to be some assumption in making them look alike for added creepy factor in this. Which again, rings odd to me that Alucard would allow his room to be wide open at all with strangers, as they have only known him for a short time (remember how he was cautious around Trevor and his regard about killing Vampires). 

Honestly, I would say take them out and replace them, because there is a better story to be had and it already has connections to the series and could bring about two very interesting characters from the Drama CD and expand on Alucard, Dracula, and Lisa all in one go. 

So a quick Summary is needed here about Nocturne of Recollection. The basic parts that are important are that Alucard is dealing with another vampire who is attacking people, and seemingly attacking his new found friend (love of his life) Maria. This turns out to be a former friend/servant Lyudmil, who at one point had been tossed from his village for trying to help Lisa and ended up coming to work under Dracula and serving Adrian. The two became friends, until something happened in Lyudmil’s village and he became a vampire and Alucard went way dark for a while, leading to Dracula’s servant Magnus to come and manipulate Lyudmil into hating Humans more and eventually leading the two friends to fight, and Lyudmil to change sides and work with Alucard, only to end up dying from mortal wounds. 

Just for the record: 

This is Lyudmil 

And this is Magnus: 

Where unlike in Season 3 a made up couple of people can come in and wreck him, I think a far better story would be to use the two characters from Nocturne and build that into Season 4 in regard to Alucard’s story. 

If...and I say this again, If, I were to advise about how these two characters could work better in setting up Alucards fall I would say that they play a larger idea into the savior turned sinner narrative that could really screw up Alucard’s mind for a while. 

So, how would I go about telling this tale of tragedy that could bring Alucard down with out having to resort to a full on sex scene that wasn’t needed to show how intimacy can be corrupted and how people can be betrayed by their own human fallacies...

The arc would start with Lyudmil coming from the town near the castle and Magnus starting out his plans. We start with Adrian doing as he does in the opening sequences and learn that he’s being observed by someone as the night comes into play. This would be Magnus who we learn has been watching the castle for the past week or two. He was a servant of Dracula, and, unlike the other vampires, didn’t make it to the feast. Of course he wants to know what’s up with Alucard and, like the other vampires, has been trying to carve out his own safe place, but with Dracula dead, and him being weaker, it has become very hard for him to survive. So he wants to have the castle for himself as a place to be safe (maybe bring back Dracula). 

Meanwhile you have Lyudmil whom we learn lives at the edge of the town where Lisa once tended the sick. Lyudmil’s mother was the midwife that helped Lisa give birth to Adrian. (For the sake of everything we can say that Lyudmil is the same age or a year younger than Adrian, and his sister is like a year younger than him so. Adrian is 20, Lyudmil is 20 to 19, and his sister, Liliya is 19 to 18.) Because when the Bishop came to arrest her Lyudmil and his sister defended Lisa they were thrown from the city for trying to help her. Since they’re on their own, they’ve been living off the land and with the Night creatures causing trouble, and illness coming because of them, Lily, Lyudmil’s younger sister, is very sick. 

Lyudmil hears word from the few people that will interact with him, that Dracula is dead, and because he can’t think of any other way to help his sister, he decides to take her to the castle and see if any of Lisa’s books are there. Lyudmil takes his sister and heads off with her to reach the castle and find a cure. After a month of travel, since the Castle is now over the Belmont Keep, Lyudmil finds the castle and Adrian senses him, and attacks. Lyudmil is not a fighter so he runs and ends up asking Alucard to not kill him as he just wants to find Lisa’s books to save his sister. Adrian is curious about this, and Lyudmil show’s he’s not lying by bringing Adrian to Liliya who is clearly sick with an illness. He’s not sure if he can help, but he figures that his mother’s books may have something, so he welcomes the duo into the castle. 

Alucard uses his mother’s books to cure Liliya. The two are asked to stay in the castle for Lily to recover. While this is happening Magnus realizes that Adrian was one of the ones that Killed Dracula, thanks to a magic item that lets him see what happened to Dracula in his last minutes. Angry that the son of Dracula would allow Humans into his master’s home and that the boy is living there after he killed his own father, Magnus decides he wants to screw over Adrian for his own personal reasons. 

Magnus sets about making the town near where the Belmont keep is turn  on the two young people. He has been showing up at a field near the castle dressed as a merchant who is selling items and collecting flowers to dress up said items. Alucard is wary of him but gives into his human side and figures that the merchant is not that bad. Though all the time that he talks to Adrian, we get these moments of him twisting words to make Alucard question and doubt himself and his reasons of allowing the duo to stay. 

At the same time we learn that Liliya wants to learn to heal, since someone needs to take up Lisa’s job in the village when they go back, and Lyudmil wants to learn from Adrian how to fight so he can eventually become a city protector. The trio start to form a deep bond, and viewers learn that both Liliya and Lyudmil have feelings for Alucard. We spend time getting to know the trio, and use them for the lighter moments in the show, compared to say, Hectors story. We learn about their family and the connection to Lisa, also we learn how their mother died giving birth to Liliya and how their father was killed by some night creature just before Liliya was born. Lyudmil doesn’t like people, but he also doesn’t want kids to be like him. Near the end of the season, Magnus rouses the towns suspicions enough with the castle and the two siblings that when Liliya goes out to get followers a group of men come and capture her and drag her to the village for trial of being in league with the Night creatures. 

Here they basically beat or harm her, trying to make her confess to connections, (this act is unknown to most of the village). Magnus banks on her crying out for help, which she does, and uses that to unleash his minions on the town. Lyudmil goes looking for her when she’s late. leaving Alucard in the meadow where the trio eat together. Magnus, as the Merchant, tells Lyudmil where to find his sister. When he gets into town it’s a wreck and he fights his way into the building where he finds her tied up and the men are scared. Angry, Lyudmil kills them all and rescues his sister, dragging her out to the forest area and leaving her to rest, so he can go and find the monster that is controlling all of this and basically stop them from harming any kids there, as he sees them as innocent in all this. 

Magnus, as the merchant, goes to see Alucard, who has seen the smoke and was already headed for the woods, and tells him what happened. He then leads him to Liliya who is dying from her wounds from earlier. She asks Alucard to save her brother, and then dies. Alucard rushes to the town, fights a bunch of creatures who scatter, as it’s part of the plan and finds a mortally wounded Lyudmil. Conflicted on what to do Magnus comes by as himself and, since he’s an Incubus, starts putting temptations into Alucard’s ear. 

Lyudmil for his part thanks Alucard for all the kindness he offered him and says that he’s glad they had their short time together and that he’s sorry to leave him. Magnus keeps reminding Alucard of how alone he was before the two came, that Liliya asked him to save Lyudmil, that as Dracula’s son he could change Lyudmil to keep him alive, etc. Alucard in a moment of weakness and desperate not to be alone, as Lyudmil has his eyes closed and is ready to die, bites and turns him into a vampire. 

Last episode of the season ends with Lyudmil waking up and finding out he’s a vampire. He’s not exactly thrilled about it, but realizes that he can stay and learn from Alucard how to uses these powers to protect others and hunt down the one that turned him and probably caused his sister’s death. Alucard lies to him when pressed about who turned him, he says it was a vampire, and Lyudmil thinks it was the guy that seemed to control the monsters. 

We now have a set up for Season 4 that makes sense for a fall for Alucard and a far deeper betrayal. Alucard has betrayed his own beliefs, his own word. He’s take a life and twisted it, like his father, and then lied for his own desprate need to make sure that Lyudmil doesn’t leave him because he feels alone. This guilt and grief over the loss of Liliya and his own cover up to Lyudmil, slowly eats away at him and makes him push Lyudmil away through season 4, until Magnus blows everything to hell when he gets Lyudmil to find out that Alucard was the one to turn him. which in turn causes a fight, and Lyudmil to question everything that Alucard had done for him and his sister and leads him in the season eventually to change sides to Magnus and betray Alucard, by litterally stabbing him in the back, and leaving him to die. Where in you have Trevor and Sypha come and find their friend in bad shape wanting to know what happened, only for him to say he fucked up, and begs them to put him in his coffin to sleep after Sypha heals his wounds. 

This would lead to a wide open castle for Isaac for season 5, and a set up for a later season of the Rondo of blood/Symphony of the Night arc.

Having Alucard betray his own beliefs makes him more like his father than killing Taka and Sumi. When Mathias lost his wife Elisabetha, he used his best friend to get what he wanted, which was immortality. He went against his own beliefs about their friendship and focused on his own desires to make his own wish come true, which in this case was to screw over God and Humans for taking his beloved Elisabetha away. Yet, he still wanted that close association with Leon Belmont, whom he’d known since they were kids, and when Leon rejected him in the end it broke everything that Mathias was clinging on to in the hopes of some sense of not being a full on monster. 

For Alucard, who didn’t want to be like his dad, who could walk in the light, who cared for people and had told Trevor and Sypha he would be okay, this action would have been a tipping point. How could he be so damn selfish to turn someone because of his own needs. How could he corrupt Liliya’s dying request to save her brother into some personal wish to not be alone and corrupted it in his mind so that he didn’t have to feel guilty over it. What makes it all the worse then is that he no longer believes he had the right to stand up against his father since they are alike and he did a horrible thing to a friend, just as Mathias had to Leon. Loyalty can also play a part in it, as well as truth and trust, since Alucard is all of 20 at this point. 

You can have a hell of a philosophical situation there about desires, requests, and how far to go to save someone. Are they alike, or is it all in the lies from Magnus. Magnus would also be someone that Alucard could conflict with as it would allow for the two different views of Dracula to show off how they both feel about things. Magnus wanting to be a son to Dracula, to be praised and loved by him as a child or a servant to a master. Someone who cares for the darker side of the man yet feels compassion and empathy for him. Where as Alucard, feels love for his father, he also knows that the man is capable of great evil and needs to be stopped and wants him to be in the light. Magnus could easily be the opposite of Carmilla, someone who is grieving the loss of Dracula as much, or possibly more so, than Isaac as he was probably with Dracula longer. Where as she is glad he’s dead and is free to do as she pleases. 

It just feels like there could have been a better story arc for him in here instead of what we got. There’s so much rich lore in Castlevania and the connections between characters that it feels kind of wrong that the story of Alucard, Lyudmil and Magnus was left on the way side, and in stead we have a pair of characters that are okay over all but ultimately a waste. 

[evilelitest2]

"because a lot of folks on this site for example are buying into conservative mindsets even as they battle conservatives" Can you elaborate on this a bit more? It is interesting.

Ok so you know how in the build up to the American Civil War a lot of white Northerners were fiercely opposed to slavery but were still extremely racist in terms of their world view, they basically were right for the wrong reasons.  A lot of leftists here seem to doing the same thing, they oppose conservatism but don’t actually doubt many of the core principles of conservatism.  This is especially obvious when looking at tactics or methods 

1) Accepting Right wing Framing of Issues.  @randomshoes actually made this observation to me, but I’m going to steal it for this post here

Basically when the Right frames an issue, its often this massively simplistic binary narrative like “Capitalism good, Communism bad” or “The West is totally a real thing and it is good and anything on western is bad” or “Christianity=good, nonchristain=bad”  And so many leftists, rather than challenging the binary just accept it but invert it.  So I see people being like “Lets downplay the crimes of Joseph Stalin” rather than “actually making it capitalism vs. communism is a massively simplistic way of viewing extremely complicated political movements that emerged over centuries”.  Or people going on to these extremely nasty anti Christian movements rather than just accepting 

The most extreme version of this is that I sometimes see leftists support literal conservatives because they happen to be opposed to Westernization, like I see leftists justifying ISIS or even Japanese Ultra Nationalist.  

2) The desire for everything bad to be traced back to a single unified source.  If you ever have the misfortune to watch Right wing News like I do, their world view is one where everything they don’t like from socialism to Islamic fundamentalism to Crime to Hollywood to racial minorities  are all one mass that they just call “enemies” ussually led by George Soros or some other antisemitic stereotype.  Because a core part of rightist thought process is an embrace of intellectual simplicity and rejection of complexity.  They like nice simple narratives with clear bad guys and good guys and where they don’t have to imagine things in a more nuanced or complicated manner.   

So it is super infuriating when the left buys into it

Both me and @randomshoes have met leftist who honest to god believe that there is some council of rich white men who are sitting around table being like “ok so the 15th meeting of the Oppressors meeting has met, what are some new ways we can make the world shittier for black people?”  There is no secret cabal of oppressors out there, there are systems, that is why its called “systemic oppression”.  There are people who want to spread or take advantage of that oppression (see entries, Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, the Entire Republican Party) but the systems go beyond just the right.  For that matter, they go beyond capitalism itself in many ways. 

To use one concrete example, so many people at my college were 100% convinced that capitalism invented patriarchy and racism which like....no, capitalism doesn’t exist until the 17th century (ish) while racism goes back to like...all of recorded history.  Even if we specifically mean “racism based on skin color” well that was invented by the Spanish in their conquest of the Americas and Spain was very much not a capitalist power.  Meanwhile patriarchy like...have you studied the ancient greeks.

I could go on through literally dozens of examples of this, but the left can be just as guilty as “all of my problems can be traced to one issue” as the right, though unlike the right at least the left has real actual problems.  

3) Utter lack of Nuance.  Again if you spend time on right wing media, you notice that they tend towards dramatic demononization vs. idealizing of public figures.  Anybody in their circle is good, and those that aren’t are pure evil.    because again....complex thinking is literally antithetical to right wing thinking.  It would be really really nice if the left could avoid this...but nope.  

This can be the sort of Moral Cholesterol thing that I’ve talked about before (and thank you @archpaladin for coining that term), where people are like “oh i morally agree with this movie therefore it is good” or the inverse which is just the most simplistic way you can possibly view art.  Or it can be how certain elements of the left views historical figures.  

You see this the most with equivocation, I have met leftists being like “oh the US interment camps are equatable to the Rape of Nanking” which like...no....one is bad one is far far worse.  

I could write a whole series of post on this one its 

4) Embrace of Conspiracy Theories, Pseudo History, Pseudo Science etc

The Right thrives on conspiracy theories, because again...facts don’t care about feelings but I get really testy when I see the left embracing these tactics as well. Again, the right is worse at this, I’m not equivocating, but lets remember Anti Vaxxers were a left wing bullshit theory. Actually the entire “new Age” movement is rife with grifters, conspiracy theorists, and associated bullshit.  

I mean on tumblr you will see posts talking about how China really discovered American (nope), how Beethoven was African (nope), how a Jewish lobby controls Washington (ugg) or 

I mean just a few days ago, a classmate of mine was claiming that Christianity invented patriarchy and mentioned the example of “like with overthrowing cleopatra” which like....nooo on every possible level

This goes from annoying to outright sinister when you take into account that some leftists are willing to serve as apologists for certain horrific regimes, like I keep finding Mao apologists on this site.  

5) Mob tactics.  Again, the Right is so much worse about this since they deliberately artificially create mobs for the purpose of mass harassment (cough Gamergate cough) but the left is pretty guilty of this as well, I refer to you that entire contra points fiasco as one example.  

6) Not Checking Sources.  I swear to god, if I could get everybody on tumblr to change just one thing about their behavior it would be

.....to get ride of the nazis...

but somewhere on the list would be this public service announcement 

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING CLAIMED ON TUMBLR.....DOUBLE CHECK IT FIRST

the amount of times i see people just spreading utter bullshit that was just posted on this site which a basic google search could stop is just...ugg

7) Nostalgic.  I see a lot of leftists engaging in primordial ism, romanticism and “appeals to nature fallacies.  Again you will find a lot of leftists indulging in “oh things were better before modernity” nonsense

8) Fetishistic of violence, especially revolutionary violence, ignoring the consequences that tend to emerge from that.  Still better than the right obviously

9) Finally dehumanization.  This one i’m a bit understanding of, after all the Alt Right are basically evil, and the Republican are a death c ult at this point, but even so quite a few elements of the left are just a bit too gleeful.  And the thing about that militant mindset is that while it might be directed against bad people at first, it quickly can get corrupted.

Take RadFems for example, a group who I’ve always thought were a great example of anti intellectualism, militancy and violence from the start, with their almost Manichean attitude towards men.  The thing is that this approach didn’t really hurt any men ,not really but it was this “with us or against us attitude” that lead many of them to go on to become TERFS.  

This “the enemy must be destroyed” attitude is like a poison which sort of consumed yourself in it, and leads to hurting those who can’t fight back.  

In Short, the left frustrates me when it behaves like the right, who are utterly awful at their core. 

[gryphons-of-aentha]

The Approximate Plotline of the Gryphonverse (pt. 2)

Because this is what you were getting yourselves into when you followed me.

Right, so, Talon and Iadra join up with Kyran to overthrow Kyran’s asshole father, who happens to rule the country. They end up working well together and form a sizeable group of aquei and one or two additional gryphons who Iadra managed to convince. If not for the fact that it was all being headed by a seventeen year old with absolutely no martial experience at all (not to mention a much greater talent for dividing people than uniting them, which was great for starting the rebellion but not finishing it), it might have worked. Unfortunately, it was being headed by a seventeen year old, and he doesn’t believe in stealth or subtlety because he’s melodramatic enough to want an audience when he confronts and in theory usurps his father. While they do manage to make a heavy dent in the king’s guard/soldiers and cause a lot of problems for him, they’re overpowered without much effort in the end. Talon and Iadra manage to escape the aftermath mostly unscathed, though not all the gryphons do, and Kyran is arrested and very promptly exiled on the spot. The king’s hope was likely that the humiliation of such a complete and public defeat would prevent him from ever showing himself in Andolia again, but as it turns out humiliating Kyran has roughly the effect of throwing water on a grease fire, and he was already plotting revenge before he’d even finished storming out of the room. 

Meanwhile, Talon and Iadra are trying to figure out where to go from here because this whole fiasco has made the Andolian impression of gryphons even worse (largely because the king is actively pushing the narrative in that direction to throw the blame off himself, since Kyran managed to make himself into a massive PR disaster). Even Talon is finding himself less welcome in a lot of places than he used to be, and distances himself from the places he is welcome to avoid bringing unwanted attention to them, so he mostly hangs out in the no-man’s-land with other gryphons unless his town has some kind of monster-of-the-week situation he needs to deal with. Iadra does have to rescue his ass more than once when he overestimates the goodwill of a few villages, because he’s entirely too optimistic when it comes to judgement of character, but while she's more wary about which aquei she’ll interact with, she enthusiastically jumps on the reputation-grinding sidequest train (gryphons are very fond of three things: proving how badass they are with dangerous heroics, being complimented about it, and receiving shiny things, so this is really the gig they were made for) and even becomes cautiously friendly with Talon’s hometown.

Barring the occasional snag, they do this pretty successfully for a couple years until who should show up again but Kyran, with an even bigger chip on his shoulder and an even more horribly ill-conceived plan to get back at the king.

Among the many powerful eldritch forces and arcane loci that can be encountered in the wilderness around Andolia is what I vaguely dubbed the Powers of Darkness and then never got around to actually naming properly. Anyway, the Powers of Darkness are a sort of multi-consciousness/hivemind/sentient form of malicious energy that feeds on suffering and conflict, generating from and partially comprising what I equally vaguely refer to as the Eleventh Dimension. Just don’t ask too many questions about this one. Obviously, Kyran looked at this extremely powerful malevolent force that has no agenda other than causing more misery that it can feed on and a resume of imprisoning souls via impulsively-made contracts as long as time itself and thought “yeah I can probably use that and deal with the consequences later” because he has learned nothing in the last two years and is still holding a massive grudge about his previous defeat. He proceeds to summon and make a bargain with this thing, certain that if he inflicts enough collateral damage along the way it will satisfy whatever price the Powers of Darkness would otherwise take from him.

He doesn’t tell Talon or Iadra this, he just states that he’s found a source of power that can potentially raze the capital to the ground, to which both are like “okay, no, committing war crimes over your unresolved daddy issues would be bad, actually.” Iadra has been pretty thoroughly done with him since he almost got them killed last time and is wary of burning the bridges they’ve been carefully rebuilding, but Talon, giant stoic golden retriever that he secretly is, still thinks that Kyran has potential if he could just be steered off the wildly destructive path he keeps going down and probably would be, if not a good king, at least a better king than Shale given a few years to mellow out. Two years ago this was probably true, but now he’s strongly underestimating how much Kyran should not be put in charge of anything. This leads to the first major conflict Talon and Iadra have ever had, which eventually ends in Iadra just throwing her hands up and going back to Talon’s town to brood about it and continue what they’ve been doing, assuming Talon will come to his senses after the plan inevitably goes to shit, having known him long enough to be confident that he’ll survive the consequences just fine. 

Those would have been safe assumptions if not for the fact that Kyran was much more dangerous and stupid than either of them were prepared for, and even Kyran wasn’t prepared for the fact that the Powers of Darkness also possess the more subtle tendency to slowly get into peoples’ heads and drive them to extremes they’d never reach on their own (not that this absolves him of wanting to destroy a city but he was very much under their influence by that point). Now granted, his desire to work with Talon was sincere; they’d become very close during the first rebellion attempt because Kyran’s lack of a competent father figure matched up well with Talon’s deeply ingrained Mandalorian Instinct™ and there was a good reason why Talon was so willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here. The problem is that Kyran didn’t think to read the fine print while making deals with actively evil eldritch forces and was confronted with the consequences of his actions much earlier in his plan than expected. Suddenly realizing that he’s much less impervious to said consequences than he flippantly assumed, and pretty thoroughly cornered, he does the last thing available to him that doesn’t involve actually dealing with his own shit and paying the price himself, and turns on Talon to sacrifice him instead. Normally a moderately competent but inexperienced teenager against an adult gryphon whose day job is fighting things would be a laughably unfair fight, but the Powers of Darkness have a vested interest in Talon losing, and to the surprise of both of them he falls very quickly to Kyran, who hacks off one of his wings (unfortunately for Talon, the Powers of Darkness don’t feed on death or amicable defeat) and leaves him to bleed out, then flees into the hills, very much traumatized (albeit not as traumatized as Talon) but confident that he’s off the hook and determined to now proceed with his plan.

Luckily for Talon, this all went down not far from a fairly isolated aquei homestead, and he’s found by the couple who lives there, who heard all the crashing and screaming and are both 200% ready to throw down until they arrive on the scene and find nothing but an unconscious gryphon hybrid in a puddle of blood with one of his wings laying several yards away. Given the current state of interspecies relations, they probably would have killed him had they not recognized him as that guy from that one weird town, but fortunately all the sidequests have paid off. They haul him back to the farm and he eventually makes an impressive physical recovery, though due to the circumstances of losing the wing he’s kind of stuck between forms and can no longer shift to fully humanoid or fully gryphonic, which is an unusual state to get stuck in but still very livable in his case (he mostly just looks a lot more like a winged aquei than an regular half-gryphon). Still, losing an entire limb and all ability to fly is a lot, and he’s down for the count both physically and psychologically for a good chunk of time.

Iadra, when she doesn’t hear from him or Kyran for a while, starts to wonder if maybe something went wrong. Eventually word reaches her that Talon is dead (which even Kyran believes to be true, since the only two people who know otherwise are keeping their mouths shut) and she immediately decides to hunt down Kyran herself and absolutely murder the shit out of him. He’s not easy to track down, as he’s currently laying low and gathering power for what he’s determined will be the final assault on the capital and his father, and she has to increasingly rely on her human form the deeper into Andolia she goes, but Iadra is extremely determined and Kyran is pretty bad at being subtle, and she eventually tracks him straight into the capital. The ensuing fight between an accidental evil warlock who’s also the king’s bastard son and a horse-sized flying apex predator with fairly recognizable plumage almost immediately causes a scene and also a lot of property damage, and the king’s guard arrives quickly to apprehend both of them (or they will, just as soon as everyone stops flailing claws and dangerous forces around). Kyran, who this time lacks both the biased support of the Powers of Darkness and the element of surprise, fares much worse against Iadra than he did against Talon. So, in a last-ditch move of desperation, he calls on much more power than he’s already paid for to try and portal himself out of there.

Which is how he, and by extension Iadra, find out that Aentha has an inherent interdimensional connection to the planet Earth, and specific humans who live on it. And unfortunately, this is getting too fucking long again so I guess there’s going to be a part three.

[jobsystem-blog]

possibilities for pc agency in choice of games romances

long post under the cut about my feelings about romance in games, particularly choice of games (along with stuff like genderflipping characters based on the pc’s gender and sexuality), basically just wanna vent + organize my thoughts on this! [cw for sex mentions + a single assault mention]

i’ve been playing and thinking about a lot of choice of games recently. i’ve always been drawn to them because nearly every one features lgbt characters and romances, but as much fun as i’ve had with the format, as well as the individual settings and characters, that romance aspect that had me so drawn always fell just a little bit flat. a lack of individuality and character in romantic options. they generally weren’t defined, and were customizable to the point of being boring. even now, even when they have their own personalities to some degree, none of the intimate moments between your characters ever feel real or special, because they are either the same across different romance options (choice of the deathless is a sore spot for me lol), or the moments aren’t integrated into the plot and don’t have any sort of emotional basis (i.e. they’re just tacked on)

i remember my first cog that wasn’t just the basic choice of dragons, romance, etc., heroes rise. you only got one love interest, who looked just like a specific celebrity you chose at the beginning of the game. in the next game, you literally choose another love interest’s name for them. of course, genderflipped chars tend to have this issue worse than characters with established genders, not because of that inherently, but because the lack of characterization and high customizability shows even more blatantly. that being said, even non-genderflipped characters can feel cookie cutter and boring after the first playthrough (again....choice of the deathless*)

over the course of the heroes rise series, you do actually get the chance to have romances with established characters, which really intrigued me. i never actually finished those romances (particularly not jury, which REQUIRED you to nonconsensually kiss him to begin the romance, but that’s a whole nother thing), but i remember being really excited realizing you actually could have a relationship with jenny, jury, and prodigal. especially since they felt like they each had their own sexualities, rather than just being bi for convenience, or straight/gay based on your sexuality**

there was something about those romances that felt, to me, much more integrated in the plot. like i was actually having a real romantic subplot in some superhero movie, instead of it just being tacked on and empty the way some of the romances felt***

over time, choice of games have definitely focused more on character development than their predecessors, with a much higher volume of characters with set genders and sexualities. the problem is....it hasn’t been nearly enough

i get that not every game is going to have romance be a big deal. my issue with this is that if you’re going to include romance, it should feel like it’s part of the story, not just some random aside. if writers aren’t going to give as much attention to romance as other parts of their story, why even bother including it? i think cog authors need to start understanding that there doesn’t need to be romance in their games for people to enjoy them, and boring romances don’t do anything for the quality of their stories

i’ve been quietly frustrated about this for a while now, but after playing heart of the house, with its relatively well-developed romances (and surprisingly detailed sex scenes lmao), my issues with how choice of games typically handle romance have become clearer in my head. i’m realizing now that the level with which heart of the house incorporated romance into the story should be the bare minimum that a game that markets itself as having a romance element should. even the one genderflipped character had a fleshed out personality, and good romantic/intimate scenes.

that being said

heart of the house still falls into some of the same traps that virtually all other choice of games do:

1. “pick this one specific flirty option to begin the romance”

this isn’t specific to choice of games, pretty much any game with romance that’s not a dating sim does this. it’s frustrating, because it only really works with certain pc’s personalities. i wanted to romance bastian in heart of the house with a weird occult nerd who doesn’t quite understand social conventions, but finds himself falling for bastian over time. i eventually had to break character if i wanted anything to happen, because apparently in the world of choice of games, characters can only understand love/flirting if it’s in the form of a saucy pickup line, which again, works for some characters (like the one i romanced dev with in another playthrough), but not for others.

the solution: give players multiple ways of starting a romance that can suit a variety of personality types. allow multiple ways to flirt, allow ways to subtly indicate your interest to your prospective love interest for people who wanna make shy, passive characters, and give multiple points at which a romance can start throughout the story so that people can experience their characters gradually falling in love instead of having to miss out on their chance to romance a character because they didn’t imply they wanted to fuck within the first five minutes of meeting them

2. linear romance

despite giving you a bunch of other personality stats and traits for every other part of the game, romances generally tend to play out in the same linear ways across playthroughs. somehow all these things affect every other part of the story....except for romantic + intimate scenes. it really breaks me out any immersion, especially when my character has to act out of character to even access any romances in the first place.

the solution: give players more agency during romantic + intimate scenes. let them take the lead, or allow the love interest to. let them direct the flow of the scene, just like any other non-romantic scene in the game.

3. genderflipping and perspective

genderflipping is controversial among the cog player base, with the majority of people relaying a single criticism of it: accusing the author of writing a character as a specific gender (male or female), and then just switching pronouns. another related complaint, is that of authors writing love interests for specific genders of pc (for instance, the way the sex scene with dev is written makes me think it was primarily written for a female pc, particularly with the way your male pc’s sexual preferences are basically decided for him). it’s true that many games do give off this vibe. however, many of the complaints strike me as strangely essentialist, as if a character should have a completely different personality if they’re male than if they were female, it’s true, gender has a huge impact on people, but this essentialism denies the reality that we are all human, we are all suggestible and influenced by our environments (which imo, largely account for gender differences in personality trends), and there is no one personality trait that every woman has that every man does not, and vice versa. i think we can criticize heteronormativity, homophobia, and misogyny without reifying the concept that men and women are intrinsically different on an emotional and personal level. imo, this very essentialism, where characters whose genders are variable across playthroughs (both love interests and the pc) are written from a specific gendered perspective, is what causes people to be alienated during romances, one way or another

the solution: again, this is where player agency comes in. allowing players to define their own narrative based on their own idea of their character will help players feel connected to their character. additionally, having a strong idea of what a character is like is key. rather than defaulting to heteronormative assumptions of how romance and sex must play out for male love interests vs. female love interests, take a minute to actually think through the personality of your character and what their preferences would be like. this is what i loved about bastian in heart of the house, because though he was a genderflipped character, what he was doing in the sex scene felt very in line with who he was, regardless of gender. meanwhile, dev’s sex scene was...well-written, but didn’t really speak much to dev’s character, in my opinion. in some ways, it almost felt out of character, and it was certainly very ooc for my pc, who was an outgoing flirt who liked to take charge. if you have a strong handle on what kind of person your characters are, they’ll seem genuine regardless of anything else.

4. integrating romance with the story

oftentimes, you can tell right away when a romance scene is going to be happening in a cog. the story suddenly gets diverted from w/e you’ve been focusing on until now, onto either some circumstance that has very little plot relevance, but is contrived to bring you and another character together, or a circumstance that does have plot relevance, usually with a brief diversion focusing on your chosen romance, followed up by the consummation of your relationship shortly after. even when you’re romancing a major character, during plot-important scenes, their dialogue with you often does not change, regardless of the level of relationship they have with you (enemies, friends, lovers, etc., it’s often all the same). the fact that you’re in a relationship with any given person generally doesn’t affect the overarching plot (except for choice of romance, ofc), and romances often feel tacked on for extra flavor. i don’t think i’ve seen a game that combines all these issues in one (except like....choice of the dragon but i dont think that counts lol), but most games have at least one element of this. in heart of the house, the first and only intimate/sex scene you have with your love interest always happens during the ball, and at no other time. in dinoknights, you may as well not have had a romance at all, except during a few brief asides.

the solution: this one is more complicated than the others, but even if you don’t want the player’s relationships to directly affect the main story, romantic + intimate scenes often feel much more integrated when they aren’t mainly segregated to defined “romance portions” of the game. a better way of approaching it is letting the story happen as it will, making sure love interests are interesting, well-defined, and relevant to the story, and considering how a romance might affect events as they play out. in my own game concept, there is a choice you can make that determines whether a certain character lives or dies. if that character lives, the aftermath of the danger that threatened them results in a vulnerable moment for them, and is the first point at which you can start a romance with them. this event would happen in the story regardless, but the way it proceeds would change based on your relationship with and reaction to them and the event, making a pivotal part of the story a similarly pivotal part of the development of your relationship.

i don’t know if this is all i want to say on the subject, but i wanted to get my thoughts out and down, for reference and also to help me think through the subject

congrats if you managed to read and stay interested in all of this lol

*ironically, the genderflipped character in deathless was the most interesting romance, iirc **i don’t actually think this is inherently a bad thing, but having characters with a variety of sexualities makes every other character’s sexuality feel more fleshed out, imo ***that being said.....i really did love lucky when the hero project first came out djshkjhs ****i’m referring to bastian with he pronouns, because that’s what he was in my playthroughs, and i don’t actually know what the female version of his character is named

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming. If you like this series, or my other work, and want to see more of the same, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who’s writing his memoir in the late 80’s. I’m gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R. Delany, he’s been namedropped on this channel before and he probably will be again because he’s my favorite writer. Delany’s writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50’s/early 60’s - that is, nearly a decade before Stonewall - and he opts to share a couple of anecdotes, which I will relate to you now.

One is about a time when he decided to come out to his therapy group. While being gay in mid-century New York brought Delany a lot of joy, he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix. By reflex, he presented himself as lonely and ashamed, though, in reality, he was neither. And, while he did eventually describe himself more accurately, he can’t help but muse, in the book, on the limits of language at the time.

Back then, the word “gay” was explicitly associated with high camp and effeminacy, where Delany is more of a bear, a term that was not yet in common usage. The default term was “homosexual,” which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder. “Queer” and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriated. So, while all the words to describe himself were, technically, available, they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men: that they were isolated, aberrant, and pitiable.

Another story is about Delany being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups. By the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secreted between parked semi trailers, any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him, but none could get a view of the whole. But, during the raid, from his vantage point, Delany saw, for the first time, the size of the entire crowd, and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops. In the morning, the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who’d been arrested, and not the 80 or 90 who got away.

Both of these stories are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self-reinforcing: A constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and, consequently, from each other. And the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by straight people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing their narrative.

Delany argues that, among the most revolutionary things the 60’s did to culture, was the radicalization of language - redefining old terms and popularizing new ones - and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers. In short, two of the most powerful tools for making any marginalized group less marginalized are Language and Visibility.

Folks, we’re talking today about Mainstreaming, the process by which a group or idea from the fringes of society moves towards the center. How strangers become neighbors and how thoughts become common sense. There is a concept known as the Overton Window, which I am not going to describe because plenty of people have done so already - link in the down there part - but, in short: as a fringe group becomes more visible, and their language becomes commonplace, their presence in society starts to seem normal. They become demystified. Some people who thought they were strange and threatening will start to warm up to them, though this does not happen across the board. Many who hated them when they were fringe will see their becoming mainstream as a kind of existential occupation of territory, as in “If this is normal now, what does that make me?”

But much of what is considered standard in society today has gone through this process.

Now, straight folks like myself often think that greater queer visibility and the proliferation of queer language is for our benefit; if our queer friends feel safe coming out to us and we know which words we should and shouldn’t use, it makes it easier for straights and queer folks to be pals! And it is true that no one gets mainstreamed without advocates in the existing mainstream, but let’s not beat around the bush: Language and Visibility are tools of consolidating power. Visibility means having a sense of your numbers. Common language means forming alliances. You get a bunch of formerly isolated gay men connecting with each other and accurately describing their experiences, you’ve got yourself a movement, with or without straight friends.

This is why it’s to the benefit of straight society to tell queer men they are isolated, because isolated queer men are in no position to make demands.

(Just so it doesn’t get left out of yet another conversation, Delany is writing about gay men because the book is a memoir and that’s his experience, but neither he nor I are ignoring that the Gay Rights movement was kicked off by trans women.)

Okay!

While the example I’m using is a positive one that any progressive worth their salt should be in favor of, mainstreaming is a morally neutral phenomenon. Culture is plastic. Any fringe group or idea can become normalized, regardless of its inherent worth. And, for a certain subset of extremely online people with fringe beliefs, who understand the ways mainstreaming has evolved in the attention economy, it can be a weapon.

We need to ask how a group of predominantly disgruntled twenty- and thirtysomething white men congregating on anonymous imageboards becomes a political movement, whose members get profiled in the New York Times, whose writing patterns are recognized by most of the internet, and whose figureheads get staffed in the White House. Where did the Alt-Right come from?

Mainstreaming is not a wholly organic process, because usually the people who get mainstreamed are actively working to become so. But people usually have only so much control over how and how fast this happens: A group expands its language and visibility; if this leads to larger numbers and greater mainstream acceptance, the process repeats, this time with a bigger group and a bigger audience; so long as there is growth, each cycle is more impactful, as the bigger a group is the faster it gets even bigger and the more common language becomes the faster it proliferates.

By all rights, if your beliefs are wildly unpopular, this process shouldn’t work. Your language and visibility don’t expand because too many people don’t want to talk like you or about you. So what do you do then? Well, normally, you either give up or bide your time, but, if you have a lot of media literacy and no real moral compass, you get it done dirty.

If the media doesn’t want to cover you, make yourself newsworthy. Threaten to publicly out immigrants in front of a crowd. Start a hoax about white student unions. Lead a white power rally and leave the hoods at home. Do the kinds of things that journalists cannot, in good conscience, ignore. Once you’ve made yourself news, they’ll feel they can’t publish a condemnation without getting your side of the story, so, bam, you’ve got an interview. The more erratic and dangerous you seem, the more they’ll want to write a profile so people can figure you out; the article about how surprisingly normal you seem in person basically writes itself. If you want to spread a conspiracy theory, send it to a small, local news site that doesn’t have the resources to fact check you; once they publish something salacious, all the bigger news channels will have to talk about it, if only to debunk it. Put provocative stuff in front of politicians; anything they retweet has to be news. In a pinch, you can always piggyback off a famous activist by making takedown videos, or, if you’re really ambitious, harass someone at a conference.

Everyone’s desperate for clicks. If you can generate them, you’ll get your message out.

If nobody’s adopting your language, adopt it for them. Make sure you and all your friends each have half a dozen fake Twitter accounts spamming the same terminology at everyone who discusses race, gender, orientation, or ability. Put every Jewish name in parentheses until everyone on the internet knows what that means whether they want to or not. Hell, don’t even do it yourself: Russia’s not the only one who can make bots. Make thousands of bots. And make sure your real account, your fake accounts, and your bots all talk the same so no one can tell the difference anymore. Make hashtags and get them trending all by yourself, and, while you’re at it, spam all the hashtags for movements you hate with porn and gore so they can’t be used. And if your words and memes still aren’t popular? Just steal words and memes that are already popular. Just decide “this? this means white power now,” “this is antifeminist now.” Saturate the web with your new usage, always insisting that you’re doing it “ironically,” while eroding confidence in anyone who uses these words in the original sense. And never stop insisting that most everyone would talk the same as you if there weren’t so much damn censorship.

Delany’s experience was having few words to describe himself that could conjure images of a gay man in a loving community. What the Alt-Right does is shout “you just call everyone you don’t like Nazis” while their people are giving interviews wearing Nazi paraphernalia; they even imply that calling dudes marching to the tune of “Jews will not replace us” Nazis is somehow antisemitic. Meanwhile they ask to be called identitarians and race realists. They want to stigmatize words that conjure images of white fascism - which, again, they very explicitly support - and replace them with words that conjure images of clean-cut philosophy majors.

And where Delany saw a group of 80 or 90 gay men reported in the papers as a group of 4 or 5, the Alt-Right wants to get reported as being much larger than it actually is. They want to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary, up to and including violence, but to ensure that, any time the cameras train on a violent act, there is a man in a suit ready to distance himself from it; to paint the picture that, but for a few bad actors, this is a peaceful movement of young, presentable intellectuals.

This isn’t simply a battle between different ideologies, this is a battle over the definition of normal. The Alt-Right knows how plastic culture can be. Their anger comes from the normalization of things they hate, and their movement exists because they believe anything that becomes mainstream can be made fringe again. Which is why, if you wanna cater to them, you promise to reassert old norms.

Much as we’d like to believe people are driven by morality, most people are driven by the desire to be normal. And when the news is filled with images of swastikas, iron crosses, and tiki torches, the guy in the suit with the fashy haircut looks pretty normal by comparison. And that’s why he wears the suit.

Thankfully, the plasticity of culture cuts both ways. Just as surely as we can lose all the ground we’ve gained over the last half-century, everything the Alt-Right does to make itself palatable can be undone. (In fact, it’s maybe beginning to happen.) It’s going to be a long road that will probably require changes to how media platforms generate traffic and a lot of new politicians. But I want you to keep a phrase close to your heart: this is not normal.

That phrase has become something of a mantra since the election in 2016. It can be misused: white supremacy, sexism, and every other kind of bigotry are part of the fabric of American life and always have been, so, even if this is more extreme than the ushe, it’s not by nearly as much as most privileged people like to think. So I want you to treat it less like an observation and more as a statement of intent. Whatever shit the Alt-Right pulls, I want you to say: this is not normal; this is not normal; this is not normal.

We will not let this be normal.

[wits-writing]

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 3 Ep 4: “Josh’s Ex-Girlfriend Is Crazy” review

[My other Crazy Ex-Girlfriend reviews here]

When it was announced that music video and movie director Joseph Kahn was being brought in to do an episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend this season, I was hyped for what he had in store. No matter what you may think about the songs attached to them, his music videos always look fantastic. It’s rare for me to go into an individual episode of a series with high expectations, but this is the rare exception. Show creators Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna have managed to write an episode attached to Khan’s direction that changes everything.

I don’t say that lightly, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has never been a show that gets too comfortable in a status quo, but certain things have always been more stable than others. In the wake of everyone learning the truth about Rebecca’s past, they’re all forced to deal with their own dirty laundry and face the facts of their lives and consequences of actions that go all the way back to the show’s first episode.

[Full review under the cut]

The episode picks up immediately where the previous one left off with everyone in Rebecca’s life, specifically Paula, Valencia, Heather and Daryl, coming to her house to talk to her about what they learned from the files about her past (while she’s still being held in Nathaniel’s arms.) She rejects this hasty intervention on its face with her rejection of ever having people feel sorry for her rearing its ugly head, especially once Paula mentions a doctor Father Brah recommended for her. So instead of accepting any of their sincere attempts to connect with her and understand what she’s been through, she says the worst possible things she can to all of them. These are the sort of things it’s easy to imagine she’s thought to herself about the people in her life on various occasions but never dwelt too much on until this chance to use them as ammunition.

She tells Valencia that organizing the wedding at the end of last season to be like her dream wedding was pathetic. She also confesses that Paula was plotting with her to sabotage Valencia’s relationship with Josh before she broke up with him. Heather gets an earful about how lame it is that she was so dedicated to remaining a student that her community college had to essentially kick her out by forcing her into graduation. She tells Daryl that it’s ridiculous how someone as stupid as him is her boss and how he needs to take the hint that White Josh doesn’t want to raise a kid with him. When Nathaniel expresses confusion about what’s going on, Rebecca assumes that he was secretly in on this and helped entrap her into this intervention. Before she leaves Paula tries to stop her, she says that if she’s crazy Paula didn’t help with how much she assisted in the schemes to get with Josh. Especially with how she spent more time paying attention to that and treating Rebecca like a surrogate daughter than keeping track of her own family. After saying all these things that feel designed to intentionally alienate her from everyone in her life, she rushes out of her apartment.

After this is when the more cinematic visual style that defines the rest of the episode takes over, as Rebecca angrily marches down the streets of West Covina leaving dozens of messages for Josh blaming him for what she just went through. Eventually she ends up at a hostel where she meets a Danish tourist named Jarl, who fulfills the role of her confidant this episode since she can’t explain stuff to the people in her life after what she said to them. We see that she’s still defining her life based on unhealthy media-influenced views on what her roles in life can be. She doubles down on the “woman scorned” role she assigned for herself at the beginning of the season, demonstrated in a 007-style movie opening parody called “Scary Scary Sexy Lady.” This number contains various visual references to what happens later in the episode and further extrapolates on Rebecca’s idea that if she’s not the hero of her own romance, then she’ll be the scorned woman out for revenge.

This episode all ties back to how Rebecca struggling to define who she is without relating her life back to Josh Chan in some way. Her quest for revenge takes the form of absurd stalking, part of which involves being disguised as a shrub wandering around the backyard of his parents’ house. Josh doesn’t tell his parents any of what really happened between Rebecca and him, probably since they still seem to have a high opinion of her as someone who could’ve been a good influence on him. He’s ready to get his life back on track and move on from trying to become a priest to escape his guilt. This all comes into conflict as Rebecca’s multiple attempts at gaslighting him start to pile up; hanging his old teddy bear in his bedroom as an effigy, framing him for stealing from his job at the electronics store and finally leaving a threatening note about how she’s taken his mother somewhere, which turns out to be the local carnival.

During Rebecca’s worst downward spiral yet, we see how everyone in her life is looking for her and dealing with the things she had to say about them before running away. They start talking about if anything Rebecca said in her anger holds any merit about where they are in their lives. Daryl and White Josh talk about if WhiJo was serious about considering raising a baby together. That conversation eventually gets awkward to be around, so Hector ends up going to search with Heather. She’s taking the search less seriously than everyone else but as she starts talking to Hector, new feelings for Hector start to pop up. Meanwhile, Valencia asks Paula if all the stuff Rebecca said about them going after her was true. Paula confesses to this, but says that they are friends now against any expectations she ever had for either of them and they need to be there for Rebecca.

Their search provides them no leads as Paula, Valencia and Heather go back to Heather and Rebecca’s home, where they find out Nathaniel never left. He was waiting all night for Rebecca to come back, since he’s still trying to figure out what he should do about the feelings he has for her, going as far as conscripting George (who was in the middle of a date) to help him. Nathaniel’s lack of understanding in this situation is almost hard to watch as he’s under the idea that because he slept with Rebecca he knows her better than her closest friends.

As Paula is worrying about Rebecca, she ends up having Valencia and Heather tell her that they agree with Rebecca about how little attention she pays attention to her own family. The unhealthy nature of Paula’s obsession over Rebecca’s obsessions and how she deals with those has been a thread in the series since the start. Last season she started dealing with that by determining that she wouldn’t let herself be caught up in Rebecca’s relationship drama anymore, but she was still stuck in her habits that stem from viewing Rebecca as the daughter she never had. She’s stuck in her own patterns of self-destruction, even as she’s taken some steps towards getting out of them. Her story this episode culminates with called Rebecca’s mother, Naomi, about Rebecca’s decent and how she needs help, making a step towards letting go of viewing Rebecca as a daughter.

Rebecca’s revenge plot against Josh and how much of her self-worth she’s invested in him all ties around her view of life in the context of stories. She talks the whole episode about how this is “her movie” and how she gets to decide how it plays out. Her hostel roommate Jarl discusses this with her and says that if she’s the scorned woman out for revenge she’s the villain who dies in the end, which Rebecca dismisses since she’s still determined to think she has control over this narrative (symbolized in the joke opening/end credits that give most of the credit in “her movie” to herself.) He also notes how none of this is about Josh as much as it’s about how Rebecca resents that she could never be “normal” or “happy” the way she’s been taught to define those things, which Rebecca rejects saying it is all about Josh.

It’s when she’s at the carnival with Josh’s mom, hanging out and talking about how she regrets never getting to be her daughter-in-law, that reality starts to crash down on her. Josh confronts her about everything she’s been doing to him in a sequence where Rebecca’s determined to make him the bad guy in this situation, because in her mind someone must have that role. When she nearly lets herself fall into a ditch and Josh saves her, he tells her to leave him and his family alone. She’s left with nothing else to turn to except the bar where Greg used to do his “study drinking” and he coincidentally ends up butt dialing her. This accidental call emphasizes how she’s left without anyone in West Covina to fall back on, until she sees Greg’s dad, Marco, at the bar. He tells her that Greg has found love since he started attending Emory and has remained sober the whole time. The conversation goes on and it eventually leads to Rebecca’s lowest point yet, sleeping with her ex-boyfriend’s dad.

This lead to the episode’s big finale number sung by a cameo appearance from Josh Groban, “The End of the Movie.” Rebecca solemnly walks down the road reflecting on how it’s been a mistake to consider any of this in the context of a movie in the first place. The main refrain in the song is about how “life is a series of gradual revelations that occur over a period of time” and how things don’t resolve quickly the way we want. During this we also see brief glimpses of the other characters being left in positions of uncertainty; Daryl and White Josh don’t know where their relationship is going to go next, Nathaniel is still waiting for Rebecca to return to her place and Josh is struggling to put together a resume for a job search. There’s nothing left for them except to figure out their next step. That next step ends up finding Rebecca as she gets a call from Naomi when she gets back to the hostel. She tells her mother that she’s given up on this whole crazy idea and she’ll come home.

Between the directorial style, absurdity from Rebecca’s craziest actions yet and being brave enough to have one of the biggest downer endings of any episode in the series (which is saying something), “Josh’s Ex-Girlfriend Is Crazy” is the biggest technical achievement Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has ever done. It’s feels like a season finale worthy event used to close out the first third of this season. Wherever Rebecca’s journey goes next, she needs to find who she really is beyond Josh Chan. We’ll see how that turns out for her next time in “I Never Want to See Josh Again.”

[theinquisitivej]

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ - A Game Review

I don’t often do game reviews. The medium is dear to my heart, and I posted the odd review for smaller games that fascinated me back in the early days of this blog. But film is what I’m drawn to, even leading me to decide to spend my life studying it, so my writing has reflected that. Despite this, games are still an important part of my life, so I’m going to write game reviews every now and then if I’ve finished a game and feel a need to talk about it.

          The Mass Effect trilogy is one of my favourite game series, and features my favourite sci-fi setting in any medium. The world building and character development is unparalleled, and experiencing them through the eyes of Commander Shepard resulted in fantastic interactive storytelling. Shepard would always be a distinguished Commander in the human military, but their gender, appearance, history, decisions, and actions were all in the player’s hands. Some viewed this as potential for limitless storytelling, where your decisions had a direct, impact on the world your character inhabited, leading to an experience where you, the player, could carve out your own narrative. This was true to an extent, but I prefer to think of it as elastic storytelling; you can stretch the story in multiple directions, but there will always be a limit. How you would resolve a situation was ultimately your choice, but there were only ever a finite number of pre-selected options in each scenario for the player to choose from. The game’s developers used their finite resources to craft an experience which we knew could only unfold in a certain number of ways, but still managed to feel limitless. Our playthroughs were memorable and beloved because players will forever feel like they shared a journey with THEIR Shepard.

          So a trilogy closes, half a decade passes, and we return to begin a new journey. This time, we play as Ryder, a human who has taken part in the Andromeda Initiative, a mammoth undertaking by the various races of the Milky Way to explore the far-off galaxy of Andromeda, and eventually establish a home there. 600 years have passed as the Arks, vast colony ships housing the different species, have finally completed their long journey. Inevitably, problems have arisen. A strange and devastating radiation called the Scourge makes much of Andromeda space dangerous for ships to even travel through, and has even turned potential colony planets uninhabitable. On top of that, a new hostile race called the Kett poses a threat to all life in Andromeda. Meanwhile tensions are high between the Initiative and the Angara, the native race of Andromeda, and racial relations are crucial to prevent making another intelligent species our enemy. Finally, Ryder’s father has perished, and his role as the human Pathfinder, a leader charged with ensuring the survival of their species, has been passed onto Ryder. It is up to them and the player to somehow make the Andromeda Initiative work.

          Let’s get the obvious criticisms out of the way first: the facial animation and glitches. Many have torn ‘Andromeda’ to shreds for its lacklustre facial animation, in which characters stare with wide-eyed blank expressions, and the various parts of their face move with an uncomfortable strain. The vocal performances are still up to the series’ standards, but hearing them come out of these uncanny androids is distracting, especially when paired with stiff body movements that don’t quite sync up with the character’s tone or mood. Yes, Mass Effect, and Bioware games generally, have always suffered from awkward character models and stiff animation, but this was either a case of it being especially bad, or the straw that broke the camel’s back; people simply cannot accept lacklustre presentation when they’re trying to engage themselves in a virtual world. The various game-breaking glitches and character movement bugs don’t help either, leading to a disappointing feeling of sloppiness. I understand why so many people damned this part of the game, especially closer to release when things were even worse.

          Having said all of that, I am tired of this being the only point of discussion when it comes to ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’. When people discuss ‘Andromeda’, it’s only about its animation and glitches. I realise that such a striking and immediate fault would be a major talking point, but I have little interest in reducing my overall impressions of a game to what ultimately amounts to presentational issues. Mass Effect was never just about presentation. It was an experience that blended fine characterisation, worldbuilding, and some solid gameplay. The character models are not great. Now let’s move on to discuss how the rest of the game holds up.

          When you’re not having conversations with characters or advancing the story and making tough decisions from a list of options for each situation, Mass Effect games are third-person shooters with a range of tools to play with. In addition to a diverse range of futuristic guns, the player has access to skills and abilities that can be powered up as they progress through the game. Maybe you want to be a soldier specialising at using weapons and military equipment, or a tech-savvy engineer that hacks enemy equipment and uses gadgets to adapt to any situation, or perhaps you want to enhance your biotic abilities, the equivalent of psychic powers in the Mass Effect universe which happen because… um, convoluted lore and backstory, shut up, you can lift a man into the air and snipe him out of the sky.

          ‘Andromeda’ does a decent job encouraging you to explore the different abilities found in each class, as you can switch between a set of four customisable profiles, allowing you to mix and match classes if you don’t want to commit to playing the game in one particular style throughout the whole playthrough. I appreciate the effort, and think it works well to a degree. However, because of the profile system, you only have access to three abilities at a time, and when you switch profiles your abilities are all automatically set on a cooldown. What this means is that when you’re done using three abilities and want to seamlessly switch to another set to unleash more powers, you have to wait for a while before you can use those new powers. For people who enjoyed focusing more on the powers and abilities rather than the weapons, this can feel limiting. Maybe I was missing some trick to speed up the cooldowns which would allow me to snap between profiles and have my powers ready to go, but the game doesn’t exactly walk you through the intricacies of the combat, so you’re left on your own to figure stuff out.

          A neat feature which changes up the combat is the new ability to use a jump-pack and evade dash. Since enemies still orient themselves to cover, you can use the jump-pack to leap over cover and slam down, or, alternatively, temporarily hover and fire down on them from above. It’s another option for the player to use or not use at their discretion, and it fits in seamlessly with the rest of the mobility found in combat. Where it starts to present a problem is how it affects movement outside of combat. You see, when you’re exploring alien worlds, the jump-pack is there to allow Ryder to traverse the landscape and free up vertical movement when, say, climbing a mountain. But the geometry isn’t always smooth, so Ryder will leap up, but not quite find a landing large enough to stay put. As a result, exploring Andromeda often boils down to mashing the jump button as you continuously slam your head against a steep surface until you somehow reached the top. Things get even worse when you’re in the Remnant sites, ancient ruins with machinery from an unknown dead civilisation. These sites are meant to elicit wonder, like a hidden tomb in an ‘Indiana Jones’ film. Instead, they boil down to platforming segments as the machinery morphs into a series of platforms for you to traverse by jumping and climbing. What should be a glimpse into the game’s deeper lore becomes a disjointed sequence that feels very much like something that only exists because this is a video game. Ryder also moves in a floaty way when they’re not involved in combat, so you’re not so much controlling Ryder as you are struggling to convince them to go in the direction you need. Consequently, platforming becomes imprecise and unsatisfying.

          It took me a little while to warm to the worldbuilding, but I did end up really liking what they were going for. At first, all the people you meet are fellow volunteers that went on this Andromeda Initiative, which means there’s a bit less diversity between individuals. For a long time, one of the dialogue options for every single person you come across will always be “so why did you join the Initiative?”, like students awkwardly falling back on “so what subject are you studying” as an ice-breaker. For the early parts of the game, I was worried that we weren’t really getting a new world with countless different perspectives to explore, but rather a pretty environment with a bunch of people who all shared the exact same “oh gee whiz, I just want to explore the universe!” philosophy. However, as you go further along, you do start to see that people have their own reasons, and not all of them can be chalked up to a starry-eyed spirit for adventure. I also appreciated being someone in charge of making the Initiative work and meeting people who had different attitudes towards it after things start to go wrong. You have to decide whether to try and convince the disenfranchised that there’s still hope, or to move forward with honest transparency and trust that people will have the strength to cope with it on their own.

          Things become even more interesting when the Angara come into play. From that point on, ‘Andromeda’ is not just about ensuring the survival of the people placed under your care in a hostile environment, but also about navigating the many obstacles and pitfalls that come with establishing a co-operative relationship with a new civilisation. First contact is something the original Mass Effect trilogy never really covered. All of that had already happened, and served as the lore for a pre-established universe. Here, you get to see every part of this new relationship between species unfold, and much of the questions that you would ask and the themes you’d want to explore are gone into through the many side missions and small tasks that you can undertake throughout the game. This is my favourite aspect of the game, and ‘Andromeda’ delivered a lot of satisfying and memorable moments that focused on this premise.

          I also enjoyed going through this with the new cast of characters. The new crew will never hold a candle to your squadmates from the Normandy back in the original trilogy, but I did find myself becoming attached to the characters as I fought alongside them. I was frustrated by Liam constantly causing problems, but also loved his optimism and the fact he never stopped trying, even when things went wrong. Vetra, as the Turian squadmate, was always going to be cool, but I thought the issues she was dealing with as an older sister forced to take responsibility in an uncertain environment made her a solid character underneath an appealing visual design. Cora and Peebee didn’t get as much time in my squad as the others, but I warmed to them once I got to know what made them tick, even if their surface personalities didn’t do as much for me. Drack was my second favourite squadmate, and not just because it’s been too long since we’ve had a Krogan on the team. Stanley Townsend delivers Drack’s sage advice with a badass gruffness, as well as an assured certainty that sells the fact this character has lived and fought for over a thousand years. Drack is fun, but also wiser and more nurturing than his jagged exterior would have you believe. Much like the other players I’ve spoken with, Jaal has become my favourite character in the game. As the Angaran squadmate, he’s a fascinating representation for the species, and I thought it made the most sense to have him on every mission to ensure that I constantly had the Angaran perspective in mind when making my decisions. He is sincere, hilarious, and shows multiple sides to his identity which, instead of making him feel ill-defined, results in him being the most well-rounded personality on the team. Nyasha Hatendi gives Jaal a rich charm through his voice, and I think he, as well as the rest of the cast, should be very proud of their performances.

          The one area where the characters appear weak is the main villain. The Kett are interesting enough once you discover what they intend to do to the people of Andromeda and are left guessing at their motives, but the Archon, their leader, is a disposable Saturday morning cartoon of a villain. He pontificates and does nothing except tell Ryder that the Kett are superior and we will never succeed, and his dialogue just repeats this ad nauseum. This is most grating in the final boss fight, where his big ‘GRRR I’M AN EVIL BAD GUY’ voice is constantly chiming in with updates that yes, he is totally going to kill us all, and that he is the ultimate being, blah blah bloody blah. How did we go from fascinating antagonists like Saren and the Illusive Man to this? Those guys represented a real threat, but when they showed up to have a conversation with you, they had your full attention. Their philosophy had led them to twisted conclusions, but you could understand it, and to a certain level, even agree with them. I could never find myself giving the Archon anywhere near the same level of respect as these two, and I certainly never found the threat he posed to be as haunting as the elemental terror the Reapers instilled.

          The thing that bothered me the most while playing ‘Andromeda’ was that, the further I got into it, the more it felt like I wasn’t exploring a living, breathing world, but moving down a checklist. Missions and tasks pile up, and so many of them can be boiled down to ‘go to this exact point on the map, and then you’ll either have to scan a thing, or a fight will break out’. Yes, the characters you engage with along the way provide context which can make you care about the implications of what you’re doing. But there’s little room for deviation or a winding road along the way. You simply move to an exact point on the map, do a thing, then move onto the next thing. Even within missions, there are so many times where things are padded out when you try a door or a bridge and you’re told ‘this isn’t working; go five feet over there and scan that object or switch it on. Done it? Okay, now we can move on’. It seems like an unnecessary detraction, and if this tangent doesn’t engage the player, why bother? I don’t feel like an explorer playing this game, but someone doing a job. In a strange way, that does kind of work with the context of being placed in a position of responsibility and endeavouring to help in as many places as you can. But not everyone is going to think like that, and even with that concession I found the experience to drag at times.

          I’ve had a great deal of complaints about this game, but I do think there is some good content in there. I care about this world and its characters, and there were countless moments where I was confronted with problems on both the large and small scale which made me pause and deliberate. These are some of the most vital components to a Mass Effect game, and I believe ‘Andromeda’ does well in these areas. But there is a lot of things about it that detract from the overall experience. I would be a lot more on board with the theme of exploration that every character goes on about if the way we explored this universe wasn’t so stiff and ordered (it also doesn’t help that ‘Breath of the Wild’ from earlier this year handles open-world exploration so much more masterfully, but that’s for another review). I’ve said my problems, and so have many people in the gaming community, as well as the Mass Effect fanbase. Yet for all its faults, I am glad I played ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ for all those times I felt truly engaged with its world. The game’s poor reception may mean that we won’t see it for some time, but I think it deserves to be expanded upon and refined in a subsequent instalment.

For its technical features, I’d give ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ a 5/10, but to give you my honest take-away from this, I’m giving it a…

6/10.

Its flaws are numerous, but the experience is kept afloat by a compelling premise and many moments with solid characterisation and interesting moral dilemmas. A rough ride, but one I’m glad I saw through to the end.

[may-shepard]

Doyle’s The Parasite and s4

This little non-Sherlockian, paranormal gem, published in Harper’s Weekly starting in November 1894--that’s right, a little less than a year after Doyle published The Final Problem (November / December 1893)--deserves our attention. When @longsnowsmoon5 pointed it out a week or two ago, a few of us shouted about it a bit, but we didn’t really dig deep with it. Since then, I’ve re-read it twice, and boy howdy. 

In case you’re not familiar, here are some plot elements to whet your interest: 

a skeptical physiologist (Austin Gilroy) who allows himself to become a subject in a mesmerism / mind control experiment

a woman with mind control abilities (Miss Penclosa) who is generally unimpressive and walks with a crutch, but is surprisingly powerful

two people about whom Gilroy cares--his fiancée Agatha and his colleague, Charles Sadler--who are also both mesmerised (to offer some comfort to more tender readers of this meta, I read both Agatha and Charles as Sherlock equivalents when translated into the BBC Sherlock narrative)

obsession--specifically, Miss Penclosa’s desire to seduce Gilroy

supernatural mind control abilities that cause Gilroy to behave erratically, cause missing time, and, eventually, make him do things he would never otherwise do, some of them criminal

narrative bonus feature: the story is told from Gilroy’s perspective, in the form of his journal entries

(I recommend reading it at Gutenberg because there is much more to it of interest than I’ve been able to cover in this meta.)

Sound like it might, maybe, have some relevance to s4? I think it does, especially in terms of figuring out what the fuck is happening to both John and Sherlock. 

Reading s4 through the code of The Parasite may help explain Sherlock’s sudden propensity for intuition / premonition, and John’s erratic behaviour. Ultimately, including The Parasite as one of the many intertexts of s4 offers a great deal of support to readings like @jenna221b‘s theory about Mary manipulating John using TD12, which in turn adds support to the ever growing pile of evidence that Mary is a villain (thanks to @teaandqueerbaiting for that monster post). It also informs readings of Mary as femme fatale and the Woman in Green (femme fatale thread by @inevitably-johnlocked, Woman in Green addition by @deducingbbcsherlock​). Although I’m not sure mofftiss should ever be let off any hooks for s4, this reading might offer John fans (myself included) a much needed opportunity for a more positive reading of John in this series. 

Details under the cut.

Although the fandom as a whole has put its finger on a massive number of movie intertexts for s4, many of which seem to have unduly influenced this series, especially TFP, The Parasite is, to my mind, the standout literary intertext, for two reasons: 

First, it represents one of Doyle’s dips into the “strange tale” / paranormal / horror genre. Given the general bent of s4 away from the detective story genre and toward something uncanny / weird tales-ish / disturbing, The Parasite seems a more likely fit with s4 than the stories from which the series borrows its titles: The Final Problem, The Six Napoleons, and The Dying Detective. With s4′s final revelation of Eurus as the ultimate antagonist of the series (although I read that revelation as hallucinatory), it points very directly to the themes of The Parasite. 

Second, specific features and key plot points of The Parasite are echoed in series 4 character / plot / thematic developments. These serve as an interpretive aid in understanding what the hell, exactly, happened in s4, to very, very interesting effect.

A Study in Genre Hopping

One of the major disappointments / wtferies / cause of mass despair of TFP, and s4 in general, was the apparent sudden switch in genre. Sherlock Holmes, although in this incarnation an astoundingly sensitive fellow, has always been the centre of stories that stuck to a certain rational, materialist, logical ethos. If you can think clearly enough, and know the right facts, you can understand the world around you. Almost sort of comforting, right? 

Well. 

This series offered us a Sherlock transformed--into a really, really, kind, good man, which, YAY!--but also into a sort of intuitive soothsayer. The show even went out of its way to signal the turn away from Sherlock’s deductive methodologies, quite early, in this moment in TST, as Sherlock is deducing this client, and explaining how he’s arrived at his conclusions:

KINGSLEY: Sorry. I-I thought you’d done something clever. (Sherlock’s head turns towards him.) KINGSLEY: No, no. Ah, but now you’ve explained it, it’s dead simple, innit?

Excuse you, Kingsley.

Meanwhile, Sherlock is intuiting stuff all over the place, like in this moment in Mycroft’s office:

SHERLOCK (thoughtfully, looking off to one side): There’s something important about this. (For a few moments, the reflection and sound of dark blue rippling water seems to surround him.) SHERLOCK: I’m sure. Maybe it’s Moriarty. Maybe it’s not. But something’s coming. (The water disappears. Mycroft frowns and leans forward, folding his hands on the desk.) MYCROFT: Are you having a premonition, brother mine? (Sherlock blinks and looks towards Mycroft.) SHERLOCK: The world is woven from billions of lives, every strand crossing every other. What we call premonition is just movement of the web. If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable, as inevitable as mathematics.

This series emphasizes, from the beginning, the idea that we’re not in the land of deduction any more. Something else is at play, something that can only be arrived at through following intuition:

JOHN: Now what’s wrong? SHERLOCK: Not sure. I just ... ‘By the pricking of my thumbs.’ JOHN (scoffing sarcastically): Seriously? You?! SHERLOCK: Intuitions are not to be ignored, John. They represent data processed too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend.

We never quite seem to discover what these intuitions might be trying to say, not really. The Thatcher busts continue to give Sherlock the heebie jeebies. They lead him to AGRA and Ajay, and Mary’s past, a series of events that ends in Mary’s death (“Mary’s” “death”). We never really get a sense of why the Thatcher busts give Sherlock these intuitive hits, or why that water effect happens when he looks at them, or. (They are surely not geniune premonitions. They are something else.)

As beginnings go, I think that it could actually have been an interesting setup to something or other. One of the best things a writer can do to a character is take away their usual method of doing things and plunge them into an unknown territory. And Sherlock is clearly lost. Something is not right with him. He’s in some kind of altered state. But what does it all mean? 

If we follow the throughline offered to us on a textual level in s4, all of this means, apparently, nearly getting murdered in a truly weird hospital room, and ending up on Horror Movie Mashup Island for some hijinks with the plot device secret sister that literally no one cares about. Not exactly the payoff one might hope for, is it? 

In times of textual failure, it pays to follow the subtext, however, and, in this case, the intertext, because this is where The Parasite comes in--at least, I think it does. We are, at least, on the level of the text, in hinky jinky supernatural territory, from the beginning of the series--or at least, things are presented that way. (They are not really that way, but I’ll get to that in due time.) 

A Nefarious Plot

Back to plot of The Parasite. The story starts when the main character, Austin Gilroy, gets roped into attending a party thrown by Wilson, a wacky eccentric academic who is all wrapped up in pursuing the brand spanking new field of human psychology (ahhh...the state of science in the late 19th century). Wilson has decided to start by pursuing the most out there phenomena he can find: specifically, cases of extreme mesmerism. He thinks he’s found the perfect practitioner in Miss Penclosa, who humblebrags her way into Gilroy’s attention, and, essentially, challenges him to pick anyone in the room for her to influence, by way of demonstrating what she can do.

Miss Penclosa claims to have extraordinary powers of exertion over others--powers that depend, she asserts, not on anything known to science, but on her ability to extend her will into whomever she chooses. Gilroy picks his fiancée, Agatha Marden, believing that she’s strong of mind and unlikely to be influenced. Miss Penclosa puts her in a trance, and whispers in her ear--

--oopsie--

--Miss Penclosa whispers in Agatha’s ear, and all is well. 

Until the next morning, when Agatha turns up at Gilroy’s house and tells him their engagement is over. She offers no further explanation, simply assures him that they’re finished, and she leaves. 

Gilroy discovers it’s all part of the demonstration; half an hour later, Agatha doesn’t remember breaking up with him, and the engagement is still on. But, in an excessively creepy moment, Gilroy asks Miss Penclosa if Agatha would have killed him if she’d programmed her to, and Miss Penclosa agrees, yes, she would. 

In fact, Miss Penclosa affirms that she has only scratched the surface of revealing her abilities. She has “further powers.” He, of course, wants to know more. She replies:

"I shall be only too happy to tell you any thing you wish to know. Let me see; what was it you asked me? Oh, about the further powers. Professor Wilson won't believe in them, but they are quite true all the same. For example, it is possible for an operator to gain complete command over his subject— presuming that the latter is a good one. Without any previous suggestion he may make him do whatever he likes."

"Without the subject's knowledge?"

"That depends. If the force were strongly exerted, he would know no more about it than Miss Marden did when she came round and frightened you so. Or, if the influence was less powerful, he might be conscious of what he was doing, but be quite unable to prevent himself from doing it."

"Would he have lost his own will power, then?"

"It would be over-ridden by another stronger one."

"Have you ever exercised this power yourself?"

"Several times."

This sort of wildly successful, wide-ranging mind control, is, of course, familiar from TFP:

GOVERNOR: Everyone we sent in there; it-it’s hard to describe. (John turns as the governor continues.) GOVERNOR: It’s ... it’s like she ...

MYCROFT: ... recruited them.

SO! So far we’ve got mind control powers, people under the influence of mind control powers, and those same people doing things they would never normally do. It’s enough of a connection, especially with Murder Mind Control Island TFP, to argue that The Parasite is at work in s4. BUT GUESS WHAT? IT GETS BETTER, IN THE SENSE OF MUCH MORE SCREAMINGLY RELEVANT.

It gets better because Gilroy’s narration, through his journal entries, in addition to some implications of missing days / time fuckery throughout the story, offers a first person description of what it’s like to be under the influence of Miss Penclosa. He describes not being able to help himself, but, once she decides to use her mojo as a tool of seduction, Gilroy holds hands with her, and spends time talking about how boring Agatha is, in comparison with Miss Penclosa. He tries to resist, and Miss Penclosa’s influence only deepens. He decides that, at all costs, he’ll never go anywhere near her again. And yet, when the evening rolls around and their usual meeting time comes, he finds himself simply and irresistibly drawn to her. 

So, he locks himself in his room and slides the key under the door. When the moment for his standing appointment comes, he finds himself on the floor, trying to reach the key with a quill pen. This is how he describes what he feels:

It was all wonderfully clear, and yet disassociated from the rest of my life, as the incidents of even the most vivid dream might be. A peculiar double consciousness possessed me. There was the predominant alien will, which was bent upon drawing me to the side of its owner, and there was the feebler protesting personality, which I recognized as being myself, tugging feebly at the overmastering impulse as a led terrier might at its chain. 

(Gilroy compares himself to a dog, and others compare him to a dog, so many times, I lost track.)

Most striking of all about The Parasite is what happens when Gilroy confronts Miss Penclosa, telling her that he finds her disgusting:

The very sight of you and the sound of your voice fill me with horror and disgust. The thought of you is repulsive. That is how I feel toward you, and if it pleases you by your tricks to draw me again to your side as you have done tonight, you will at least, I should think, have little satisfaction in trying to make a lover out of a man who has told you his real opinion of you. You may put what words you will into my mouth, but you cannot help remembering--

I stopped, for the woman’s head had fallen back, and she had fainted. 

Mary is no fainter (I mean, idk, maybe faking your death is a type of fainting), but John certainly makes a move toward rejecting her in Morocco:

MARY: I always liked ‘Mary.’

JOHN (smiling): Yeah, me too.

JOHN: I used to.

Gilroy’s repudiation of Miss Penclosa triggers an endgame, in which she causes him to do increasingly terrible (and out of character) things that threaten to ruin his life. She goes after his career first, making him interrupt his own lectures at the university with gibberish. He becomes a laughingstock--people start attending his lectures to see what bizarre things he’s going to say next. 

The university suspends Gilroy’s lectures, deciding that he’s not mentally fit to run classes, effectively taking his career away from him. 

Has something similar happened to John? It’s certainly implied in TLD:

NURSE CORNISH: You involved much? JOHN: Sorry? NURSE CORNISH: Um, with Mr Holmes – Sherlock and all his cases?

JOHN: Uh, yeah. I’m John Watson. NURSE CORNISH (looking as if that means nothing to her): Okay. JOHN: Doctor Watson.

NURSE CORNISH: I love his blog, don’t you? JOHN: His blog?

...

JOHN (interrupting): It’s my blog.

SHERLOCK: It is. He writes the blog. NURSE CORNISH (to John): It’s yours? JOHN: Yes.

NURSE CORNISH: You write Sherlock’s blog? JOHN: Yes.

NURSE CORNISH: It’s ... gone downhill a little bit, hasn’t it?

I can’t think what the hell would fuel this exchange, unless the blog has genuinely gone downhill (you guys, I miss the blog), or Nurse Cornish is in on the whole gaslighting / manipulation / mind control deal (extremely possible, as implied by her position in front of a big hairy grinning yikes worthy head shot of Culverton Smith). Since the blog has stopped, or whatever is actually (”actually”) happening, it’s impossible to check and see if the blog really has gone downhill. If we take The Parasite as an intertext, however, we could certainly imagine John’s writings, and his sense of self, deteriorating as a result of the forces that are manipulating him. 

Things take a turn for the extremely disturbing when Gilroy thinks he has found an ally in Charles Sadler, a friend and colleague. [I’ll just say here that this is the bit that convinced me that Mofftiss are cribbing off The Parasite, and, if anything in this meta has a trigger warning, the next bit should, for physical violence on par with the morgue scene, or, one might say, exactly like the morgue scene.]  Charles Sadler has also been under the influence of Miss Penclosa, albeit to a lesser degree. Gilroy plans to talk to Sadler after they spend an evening together, at a university function, where Gilroy goes to prove that he hasn’t completely lost his sanity. Miss Penclosa is there, watching both of them from the sidelines. She knows that Sadler might support Gilroy. Gilroy narrates:

To-night is the university ball, and I must go. God knows I never felt less in the humor for festivity, but I must not have it said that I am unfit to appear in public. If I am seen there, and have speech with some of the elders of the university it will go a long way toward showing them that it would be unjust to take my chair away from me.

10 P. M. I have been to the ball. Charles Sadler and I went together, but I have come away before him. I shall wait up for him, however, for, indeed, I fear to go to sleep these nights. He is a cheery, practical fellow, and a chat with him will steady my nerves. On the whole, the evening was a great success. I talked to every one who has influence, and I think that I made them realize that my chair is not vacant quite yet. The creature was at the ball—unable to dance, of course, but sitting with Mrs. Wilson. Again and again her eyes rested upon me. They were almost the last things I saw before I left the room. Once, as I sat sideways to her, I watched her, and saw that her gaze was following some one else. It was Sadler, who was dancing at the time with the second Miss Thurston. To judge by her expression, it is well for him that he is not in her grip as I am. He does not know the escape he has had. I think I hear his step in the street now, and I will go down and let him in. If he will—

Gilroy wakes up the next morning, having broken off his journal entry with no memory of doing so, only to find that his hand is “greatly swollen” for some reason he can’t recall.

JOHN: I really hit him, Greg.

JOHN: Hit him hard.

Gilroy goes to Charles Sadler’s rooms, and is shocked by what he finds there:

I went to Sadler and found him, to my surprise, in bed. As I entered he sat up and turned a face toward me which sickened me as I looked at it.

"Why, Sadler, what has happened?" I cried, but my heart turned cold as I said it.

"Gilroy," he answered, mumbling with his swollen lips, "I have for some weeks been under the impression that you are a madman. Now I know it, and that you are a dangerous one as well. If it were not that I am unwilling to make a scandal in the college, you would now be in the hands of the police."

"Do you mean——" I cried.

"I mean that as I opened the door last night you rushed out upon me, struck me with both your fists in the face, knocked me down, kicked me furiously in the side, and left me lying almost unconscious in the street. Look at your own hand bearing witness against you."

I won’t screencap the morgue beating, because it’s traumatised people more than enough, but I was really, really struck by the identical quality of the choreography of what Gilroy does to Sadler, set against what John does to Sherlock. 

John Watson, who wonders why everything is always his fault in HLV, may not in fact be to blame for these terrible actions, if we follow The Parasite intertext. If he is being manipulated, if Mary is in his head the same way that Miss Penclosa is in Gilroy’s, then it may be that John has been in some way compelled to hurt the one person who matters most to him. 

The story of The Parasite progresses quickly from Gilroy’s attack on Charles Sadler. Miss Penclosa takes Gilroy over once more, and tries to force him to throw a bottle of vitriol (sulfuric acid) in Agatha’s face. Gilroy comes awake in Agatha’s room, vitriol in hand, and realises that the influence has lifted. It turns out that Miss Penclosa is dead--having tried to force him to do something so absolutely awful to Gilroy’s beloved, Miss Penclosa has exerted too much of her will / mojo / magical effort-stuff, and it’s killed her. Love conquers all? Ish? In any case, Gilroy and Agatha (and Charles Sadler too, I suppose) are free.

Implications for s4

Some free association style thoughts:

The Mary John sees in his mind may or may not be actual Mary (I really *love* the idea that Mary is still lurking around both John and Sherlock throughout TLD); she is, at least, the trace of an undue and unnatural influence that Mary has on him. 

It’s possible that by the time we get to John’s confession scene in 221B at the end of TLD, he has, somehow, through the power of his will, transformed this mental image into something genuinely benevolent / representative of what he in fact wants--like Gilroy, exerting his own will to drain the spectre of Mary’s influence. However, it’s also possible that there are two Marys--the trace of the Mary that is trying to destroy John (and through him, Sherlock) and the image of Mary that John has made into something better.

This reading is suggested by the appearance of “scary Mary” in the Childrens Ward scene in TLD (balancing the frame behind John with Nurse Cornish--I SEE YOU VILLAIN) 

with “angelic / Jiminy Cricket” Mary, who sits in front of him:

(I will just add, once you become aware of Scary Mary in this scene, it is NOT OKAY to watch it, it’s super creepshow.)

Obviously I wouldn’t argue for a magical mind mojo influence deal in s4. We don’t need to presume anything supernatural, because the narrative gives us a perfectly good mind control mechanism in TD12. Like others have argued, Mary could have been dosing John for as long as the narrative suits. Sherlock may or may not have been dosed by her as well--evidence suggests there may be other people involved. 

I personally have always favoured the idea of Mary as henchwoman (because of her coding as Moran in HLV / The Empty House scene), rather than as main supervillain, although I don’t much care either way--she bad. I like the idea of Eurus as Moriarty sib, orchestrating John’s deterioration through Mary, even as Sherlock is similarly fucked with. The plan is to tear John and Sherlock apart, and it very nearly works, too. 

As for Sherlock himself, he may have been receiving his “treatments” by another hand (Wiggins? I know...say it ain’t so...but Wiggins).

.

WIGGINS: Is ‘cup of tea’ code?

...

SHERLOCK: Stop talking. It makes me aware of your existence. 

(If John talks to not-there / sometimes-there Mary, does Sherlock talk to not-there / sometimes-there Wiggins, who shows up from time to time to assure that Sherlock is fully dosed?)

So. What looks like genre-hopping, a sudden embrace of nonsense, and serious gaps in both plot and storytelling technique from the beginning of TST, may simply be the artifacts of memories erased, replaced, manipulated, and controlled. If Mary can make John hallucinate her, then she or whoever she’s working with can also, presumably, make Sherlock think he’s having a premonition / intuitive hit, when he is, in fact, trying to process memories that have been taken from him, or ideas that have been planted. Since TST is probably Mary’s exit plan--wild speculation here--could it be that she needed to make sure Sherlock found the breadcrumb trail of the Thatcher statues that would lead to her “death,” in order to make her exit plan work? 

Similarly, many of the qualities of TFP could be the legacy of mind control on John’s hallucinating, dying mind after he is shot at the end of TLD. Sister X-Man’s uncanny abilities could be the explanation invented by the dreamer / John for the anomalies he has been encountering in his waking life. Unable to process or understand what has happened, even his own actions, and unable to deal with the idea that Mary is at the root of his personal torment, he ascribes executive function in the prison in his mind to a madwoman who can make people do whatever she wants, and who is a mishmash of his own impulses and desires, and the influence he’s been under. The events of TFP are John’s mind offering a partial explanation of a probable truth that has only barely leaked through the text of s4. 

So, what really happened in s4?

Tentatively, I think that the real plot of s4 concerns Mary's failure to take John away from Sherlock, which was, I would argue, always her assignment. Sherlock is too stalwart, too loyal--he even befriends the woman sent to destroy him. Because of her failure, Mary is now withdrawn from the field via a faked death, leaving maximum carnage in her wake by manipulating John to behave in a totally self- and Sherlock-destructive way. This plan also fails to ruin John and Sherlock, because they do the unexpected--John allows himself to be forgiven, and Sherlock forgives. At the end of TLD, they’re closer than ever.

The only thing left is for John to die. It’s the last in a series of plans to burn the heart out of Sherlock. Enter TFP--the extended Garridebs moment--and the cliffhanger of the century.

Tagging @devoursjohnlock and @shamelessmash because look! I finally posted this.

[never-shuts-up]

RAW 4/10 Adventure: Getting All Shook Up

So I got a message around 8 AM Monday that a friend of a friend had some openings for seat fillers for RAW at Nassau Coliseum that night. So the adventure began!

 I immediately texted D and by 10 AM we had both made plans to leave work early, and I was working on my second dose of kava and third or so near anxiety attack.

Left work at quarter to three, on the road by four… and promptly got stuck in traffic. Accidents kept popping up on the map and there were moments when we were certain we would never get there before the call time, and even contemplated turning around, but we were already on the GWB and I was still determined to try. 

When it was starting to look impossible, this exchange happened:

Me: I guess anything worth doing in life leads to either a scar or a story.

D: If you can call sitting in traffic “a story.” Unless it ends in “And that’s where you came from!”

Me: I think that would lead to a very specific selection of baby names.

Two hours later we rolled up to the Coliseum with less than a gallon of gas in the tank, no idea where the nearest gas station was, and no clue where to find our contact.

The particulars of us actually getting in aren’t important, but we found our guy and made it. We were given the rundown of how seat-filling works and shown to some really good seats where we would wait for a wrangler to come move us to empty seats on camera if and when we were needed. From there we got to see the first few matches, and then our wrangler found us and waved us down to even better seats, low in the bleachers on the other side of the ring. We were slightly above eye level with the wrestlers in the ring and right in front of the cameras, but any time they played toward the main cameras, we were watching them from behind. With some of the talent, this is a really good problem to have (insert a bunch of “peach” emojis here), and with some it’s not a problem at all because they are able to play to all sides.

The Highlights:

- Enzo and Cass opening things up in a taping for Main Event. They were super extra hyped up because it’s basically a hometown show, so much “how you doin’?” With which I just wanted to respond “stuck in traffic” as Enzo detailed the drive there from Jersey. Cass vs. Titus O'Neil while Enzo worked the crowd.

- Lucha cruiserweight tag team with Gran Metallik! This was the point when D and I both well and truly lost our shit. Luchadors at any non-lucha show are just so extra that you can’t not love them, and I want to give them the Best Dressed award for the night. Sparkle capes!!!!!

- Miz and Maryse opening the show with their John Cena & Nikki Bella bit. I was in stitches, because I thought they were done with that and certainly didn’t expect to see them coming to RAW with it. And then who shows up? As you know, it was Dean Fucking Ambrose! And meanwhile I’m thinking “shit. If Dean’s coming here, then Seth Rollins must be leaving because they would never tease us with the idea of a Shield reunion (or even messing with the leftover threads of that plot) without putting a giant wrench in it somehow.” This only dampened our spirits until the setup for the Sami Zayn vs. Miz match, which had me jumping out of my seat. Hell fucking yes! Sami in a singles match!

- Cruiserweights were an absolute treat because Austin Aries is hilarious, and Neville just sat next to the announcers’ table looking pissed. I don’t quite buy TJP as a heel, maybe I’m just not up on the history here, but I’ll gladly keep watching.

 - We moved seats before Seth’s “Fate” appearance, so we were watching it from behind, and that was a smidge disappointing but I know my face was in the background doing… I don’t know what. Emoting like a motherfucker. Cheering, crumpling, cheering again. I think D was sitting in the row in front at the time so he didn’t see my face, but I bet he could hear it. Watching Kurt Angle’s entrance, the entire exchange, and Samoa Joe getting shut. the. fuck. down. was magnificent.

- Finn Balor vs. Jinder Mahal: OMG. Finn did his infamous entrance crotch pose on our side of the ring, almost directly in front of us, and I died a little. Aside from a messy forearm, Jinder did make Finn look good, but then again Finn always looks good, and even though he doesn’t really work the crowd as much as others, his grace and intensity always impress, and the crowd was With Him 100%.  (Before and after this match was when my phone started blowing up with messages from friends who saw us on TV, and the timing could not have been better to capture us at peak enthusiasm.) Of course, I’m pissed that Finn got concussed, but so grateful that I was able to see him wrestle just once.

- Sami vs. Miz was everything. I danced like a lunatic to Sami’s music, and we had several “ole ole” chants going. We booed the Miz so hard he turned around and full-on glared at our entire section a few times, which just made us boo louder. The energy we built up for Sami felt great, and he was definitely taking and appreciating it, and effing killed it. And of course we all freaked out again when he won; I was doing the Running Man at my seat and giving zero fucks what that looked like.

- 8 Man Tag Team Match - so many highlights. Too-sweeting Gallows & Anderson, who finally ditched the dopey shoulder pads they wore last week. The Hardys being the Hardys and so so so many “Delete” and “Brother Nero” chants. They may not be broken, but I think we might be. Sheamus and Cesaro doing their James Bond meets Magic Mike entrance in the kilts. Watching Cesaro take a beating from G&A and the Shining Stars at the same time, for a long fucking time, was punishing, but the ups outnumbered the downs. The guys in the row behind us had a gigantic Irish flag, so Sheamus gestured right at us to acknowledge it during their exit, and D had a whole “Immortan Joe looked at me! I am awaited in Valhalla!” moment.

- The end of Ambrose vs. Owens, which in general was more satisfying than a lot of the Ambrose matches in recent memory, he actually seemed to flip the switch in a more believable and useful way. By this point we were really getting tired, and thinking about the logistics of leaving… and then Chris Jericho showed up to deliver a “bye, bitch” Codebreaker at his former bestie, the televised part of things ended, and shit got interesting. How interesting? Samoa Joe interesting. 

Then more interesting.

Seth Freakin’ Rollins interesting.

I made a sound that I’m pretty sure only dogs and bats can hear.

 So the match that was supposed to happen last week went forward as a dark match. I was marking out for all of it. There were “Stupid Idiots” chants, which were everything. I think D didn’t have the heart to make fun of me for freaking out when Seth sold the knee thing, because I always die a little when that happens. But everyone’s favorite shiny pants goofballs triumphed, of course, and Jericho got to work the crowd and tell Long Island we made the list. (After our ordeal getting there, if I had the List I would have put Long Island on it for sure. I would have put Long Island at the TOP of the fucking List and everyone who drives in the greater NY area as well, because fuck it all.) During this part, he was playing toward the crowd on the camera side, and Seth was standing in the opposite corner working our side, including some great drumroll-spirit-fingers when Jericho built up to his signature line. Couldn’t have asked for a better ending. I wanted to go down to the floor to try and catch a closer glimpse or a high-five or something on their way out, but decided that kind of access should be saved for the people who paid a shit-ton of money to be there, not our freeloading asses.

The Low Points

- Mixed feelings about Nia vs. Charlotte. It looked like Nia was finally getting her due and getting to be the monster we all know she can be, but even though I couldn’t tell from where we were sitting, I heard later that it looked wildly unsafe on camera. Charlotte looked pretty wrecked at the end, but I couldn’t tell if it was just her selling it really well.  Later, Alexa and Mickie’s big reveal built Monster!Nia up further, and I freaked the hell out at seeing Alexa. The only problem is, Nia gets way too close to being too real, to an extent that gets scary - and even if you don’t know much and don’t know what you’re looking for, you can feel something is out of place.

- The Wyatt teaser. I don’t really understand the logic of trading him. Eater of Worlds vs. Demon King has the potential to be pretty badass, but it kicks the whole Wyatt Family narrative right in the balls.

 -  Slut-shaming chants aimed at Maryse, who was leaning on the apron right in front of us during the Sami/Miz match, with her butt sticking out in some very accentuating black and rhinestone shorts. I think I yelled “I don’t agree with your decisions, Maryse, but I respect them!”

- The Roman backstage beatdown I have a lot of mixed feelings about. I’m not a fan of backstage beatings after a certain point - a few blows or throws to build up a plot are fine, but watching someone get full-on wrecked never sits well with me. Sometimes it just feels cheap. And this definitely did not sit well. As seat fillers, we were told that we should cheer or boo with the people around us, but I really couldn’t. I could not get down with it for a LOT of reasons, and was really glad not to be on camera. I know there were good plot reasons for it to happen this way, but I couldn’t really get into the tidal wave of emotion the rest of the audience was riding. If anything, it made me feel seasick. Especially when they started replaying it. Repeatedly.

Overall? Amazing night. Worthwhile experience. Some of the trades seemed to be set up well, some didn’t seem all that necessary, but it kind of has to be considered as a whole with Tuesday’s Smackdown. As the FIRST live WWE event that D and I have been to, it was really one for the books, and I would not trade it for anything. Even though it had its flaws, I was thrilled to death to be there, and grateful for every moment. Also, if you watch this and see some goofy platinum-blonde in a yellow scarf cheering and hollering her heart out next to a tall, long-haired ginger dude, let me know. I was flailing extra just for you.