#most aren’t outright I love Hitler

[philsmeatylegss]

POV: I talk to another person online who also likes to study the third reich

[noshitshakespeare]

I read in multiple places that Coriolanus has been performed "both as pro-fascist and pro-communist" and I desperately need to know more about that, but none of the places I've read it elaborated in any way. I guess I'm asking, what leads to those - so drastically different - interpretations? And do you know of any good examples of both?

Thank you for this great question! The staging history of Coriolanus and the politics of it all is a really fascinating subject (lots has been written on it). 

Many of Shakespeare's plays can be interpreted in drastically different ways, because the representation of the characters and their positions tend to be pretty nuanced and even-handed. the plays themselves don’t always give a full sense of who it sides with, or who the audience ought to side with. Even characters who do great evil, like Macbeth, are given the kind of psychological depth that makes it difficult to condemn him outright, though the case there is a little clearer than in Coriolanus. 

The chief reason that Coriolanus invites such diametrically opposed interpretations is because of the central themes: the class conflict between the patricians and the plebeians, war, patriotism, and the right to rule and authority. There’s some historical context for this. When Shakespeare wrote the play sometime around 1605-10 there had been especially bad harvests and high food prices for a few years, which led to the Midland Uprising of 1607-8 (pretty close to Stratford-upon-Avon). One of the chief complaints here was that rich people were storing their grain in order to drive the market price up so that when they do bring out their store to sell they could sell it for more. It’s precisely what the rioters complain about at the beginning of the play: ‘They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain’ (1.1.76-78). But the bigger question here is who has the right to authority over others, control of land and food? These are issues that are not quieted easily, and in one form or other, led to the Civil War of 1642 that dissolved the monarchy.  

To put it very simply, what splits interpretations is whether you see the play as about the people rising up against an unfair government and potential dictator, or whether you see a potential dictator overcoming a corrupt democratic government and a weak-minded mob. Is it more patriotic to rise up and take control of a bad government, or to support power and expansion at all costs?

Coriolanus wasn’t a great favourite, and wasn’t performed in its original form in England for a very long time after Shakespeare’s death, but these questions remained and made it a very topical play all around Europe in the early twentieth century. For instance, just before the second world war, there was a big scene in Paris in 1933 when the Fascist Party, Action Française, got the Comédie-Française to put on a production of Coriolanus. The production presented the protagonist as a hero against a corrupt democratic government in protest against the then left-wing and scandal-ridden French government. The show even featured something that resembled the Nazi salute at the moment Martius returns in victory from the battle in Corioli. There were shouts then of ‘Bravo, Hitler’ in the audience, and, indirectly or not, the theatre became the focus for a riot that led to 15 deaths and 1300 injured people. Before this point, Coriolanus hadn’t been performed much in France after Napoleon banned an 1806 performance because he thought the Martius in the production was modeled too much after himself. Evidently, he didn’t think it a straightforwardly flattering enough portrait of martial prowess to risk the potential subversion that could be read into the play, especially given the fall of the hero at the end.  

But the real focus here has got to be the treatment of the play in Nazi Germany itself. Germany has a long history of love for Shakespeare, and even before the war, there were more performances of Shakespeare in Germany than by any native German playwright. This was, of course, some embarrassment to the emerging Nazi government, but instead of banning Shakespeare as a writer from an enemy country, they appropriated Shakespeare by emphasising that all great artists belong to the world, not to a particular country. And given the beauty of the Schlegel-Tieck translations of Shakespeare, Germans were even inclined to say that Shakespeare is better in German than in English (I still hear this sometimes. ‘Unser Shakespeare’, as they say). 

Coriolanus became part of the school curriculum in Nazi Germany, used to show the 'Hitler Youth the unsoundness of democracy and to idealize Martius as an heroic führer trying to lead his people to a healthier society “as Adolf Hitler in our days wishes to lead our beloved German father-land”’ (Oxford Shakespeare Coriolanus, p. 124). Coriolanus was perfect because it showed the military power of Rome, like the Germany Hilter was trying to create, and because it could be used to show Martius as a powerful warrior above the common people, with a personality that is ‘above’ democracy. Thus, translations of the play in Germany at the time called Coriolanus ‘the true hero and Führer’ against the plebians, who were ‘a misled people, a false democracy’. The strength of this teaching was so powerful that the Allied forces banned the play in Germany during their occupation, and it wasn’t performed in Germany again until after 1953. There’s no particular version you need to read (unless you can get your hands on a copy from the time and read it in German). The point is that they got this version mostly via interpretation, so the play itself is not changed very much. 

The communist readings obviously emphasise the other side of the divide and sees Martius as an anti-democratic fascist. There were, apparently, quite a lot of Soviet stagings of this play that emphasised this aspect, but, unfortunately, there aren’t very many records of those. You can readily see, though, how the play might be presented as the destructive power of egoistic individualism at the cost of social order and cohesion. The most obvious choice if you want to read one, would be Bertolt Brecht’s Coriolan, which is a re-written version of the play that was staged in East Berlin after his death. The focus there is on class warfare and the power of the plebeians in ending the tyrannical rule of Coriolanus. In other words, it centres on the dictatorial rise of Coriolanus and the plebeians’ restoration of democracy at the end instead of lauding the power of Coriolanus himself. This version is especially powerful when you consider that Brecht chose to write and stage it for an audience that would have been educated mostly under the Nazi regime and were used to seeing Martius as the representative of the heroic individual and power of the fatherland. 

To move away from these political nuances, many productions (especially in England) tried to focus more on Coriolanus the individual for many years, especially the Freudian interpretation of Martius’ relationship with his mother -- as in the famous RSC Olivier production -- or on his incredible rage. The key, it seems, was to try to focus on Martius as an individual -- his feelings and motivations -- rather than on the political circumstances of his rise and fall. But I think it’s difficult to divorce Coriolanus from this hero versus the people dichotomy, perhaps even more so after the political upheavals of the twentieth century, and maybe now once again in our politically unstable times. How power should be distributed; whether power lies with the people or the government; what to do when a government or leader is corrupt or tyrannical; and how to balance the amount of leadership someone has at times of war with national defence, are all complicated questions that will never cease to be relevant while we have borders, leaders, and governments, and the play contains a lot of potential for all sides to argue their case. 

[talenlee]

The Johnlock Conspiracy Conspiracy

First of all this is going to be building off a point first cast into relief for me by Sarah Z’s video on The Johnlock Conspiracy. She is both directly connected with the experience of this space and did the research into the actual history of the people involved, a sort of on-the-spot observer recounting her experiences ethnographically. If you want a longer form deep dive on what The Johnlock Conspiracy is, check out that video. I will be providing a quick summary.

I’m also going to talk about fanagement, which I wrote about last year, which is about the way that fan engagement was seen as being a thing that corporate entities could deliberately engage for commercial ends. Fanagement isn’t necessarily an inherently evil or corrupting thing, but it’s something to know about as something that exists, and knowing it exists can colour your relationship to the media created in response to fanagement.

There’s this idea of ‘The Johnlock conspiracy.’

In the agonisingly mediocre BBC mystery drama Sherlock that ran from who cares to also who cares, starring in the loosest sense of the word Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (a man ‘renowned’ for this, The Office and the Hobbit trilogy, on a scale of poisonous influence to actual outright evil), as a modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that has some interesting ideas that it absolutely does not use well, mysteries that are not interesting and a relationship tension that was making itself up as it went along. Much ink has been spilled about how this series is not very good, and that’s good, because it’s a very expensively made bad series that banks on the reliable draw of the same fistful of boring privilege.

Part of what made it popular, sort of, was the tension of the relationship between John and Sherlock. See, they were both men, you see, and what if they kissed.

Now, tumblr is, by volume, mostly connections to other parts of tumblr. If you make something popular, it becomes amplified and exploded and brought to the attention of others and curated into lists. Content that gets shared is the very sinew of what Tumblr is, which means that doing things people share around is a strange form of primacy on the site. Making content is powerful, heady, druglike. Commanding curation where you determine what does and does not get shared is even moreso. It is a space for an audience that is engaged deeply with the concept of being engaged, and in this space, fandom happened.

There’s not a lot of Sherlock. There were big gaps between the seasons. When a season came out, it did not explain itself or deliver on its promise at all. It is, as I’ve said, bad. But it was well made and used actors you’d heard of and was treated as being prestigious and so, when the show came out, and because people liked the idea of what it could be, fandom struck on a conspiracy:

What if this terrible show is secretly great?

And I understand the impulse. It’s heart to a lot of fandom. I can’t possibly have spent this time and energy on something I don’t like, it must be that the thing I like is secretly this thing I really like. And so scaffolding comes out to buttress the idea. We’re not taught that fandom is right – we’re taught that fandom is something that justifies itself by being right. If you have a story in your heart about a Dark Fuckprince and his soft bean injured Watson, that story is real and right, and doesn’t need the official endorsement of the BBC to be good.

Without that armour of love, though, instead the fandom turned into this endless oroborous of hostility centered around three people, who seem to just be total dickheads, great job you. This resulted in the blossoming of what was known as ‘the Johnlock Conspiracy,’ where through thousands of pages of well intentioned fumes, these fans huffed themselves into believing that Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis were secretly building up to exactly what they wanted, and they were the smartest people ever for noticing it. The lack of payoff of their beliefs and the active hostility Moffat had to their ideas and positions in person, that was all part of the conspiracy.

Oh, by the way, that idea – conspiracy – is when you have an unfalsifiable conjecture. If you can’t prove it false, no matter what, that’s when you’re dealing with a conspiracy theory.

The dramatic conclusion to all this was the series ended, their conspiracy was wrong, they theorycrafted themselves a few more months of content, and then most people let it drop.

But what if I told you there was a conspiracy?

Because there was. It just wasn’t the conspiracy they thought.

See, a conspiracy is a real thing: it’s a secret plan to do something harmful. And the BBC, since they published the work that Matt Hill described in Torchwoods Trans-Transmedia: Media Tie-Ins and Brand Fanagement, worked with the parameters of their experiment aggressively.

The idea, as I outlined in my article about Fanagement was that making the program so it could engage fans directly, and give fans feelings of creative ownership over the work would drive viewership and the kinds of engagement they liked (like, paying for things). Fanagement sought to make media ‘gifable’ – low saturation backgrounds with cuts of under a second so you could break a scene apart easily and conveniently. It wanted to make fan media easy to make, and to minimise hard declarative statements.

The lessons learned from this paper included things like ship teasing as a deliberate task – and I do mean teasing, with the idea that you had to do it in deniable and ambiguous ways. Making things definite wouldn’t get you as much fan engagement as keeping things ambiguous, because fans would make an inference based on what you show them, talk about it, then other fans would watch it again to make sure they could argue with you about it.

A mystery show like Sherlock was perfect for this kind of treatment. Treating the series as if there was some really deep, thoughtful question at the heart of it meant that there was always a reason to keep from ‘revealing’ the secret of the story, to string the audience along, like they’d believe or tolerate it, if it was all in service of a clever explanation. You get it, right? After all, we gave you all the clues.

The toxic fandom of Sherlock did not form as much as it was fostered.

A lesson from this experience, a lesson easily escaping notice, is that it’s not that ‘fandoms are all the same.’ They really aren’t. They are wildly varying in the terms of their problems and those problems root causes. What they tend to have in common is dynamics, but those dynamics are expressed in a lot of different ways. It’s not that ‘fandoms’ naturally become toxic and awful. There are fandoms that are generally, quite nice, and they tend to be that way because of the values of the central movers and shakers and the conscious willingness of people who perceive themselves as part of the fandom as taking care of it. The dynamic is the same – you have common nexuses of community that people interact with – and the kind of behaviour that’s acceptable and reasonable is filtered through them. If the idea of asking people to modify their behaviour or respect people’s boundaries is seen as unreasonable, then you can get a toxic space.

Also, as I talk about ‘toxic fandoms,’ understand toxicity is relative. There is, after all, a very real, very unironic Hitler Fandom, and they are probably one of the worst fandoms out there. Being a mean lawyer on the internet is bad, and I’ve no doubt the fandom curators known now as the Powerpuff Girls absolutely wrecked some teenagers’ lives – like, there are definitely people with, I am not joking or being hyperbolic, some PTSD triggers about (say) Tumblr or whatnot, based on the kind of social force these people were leveraging.

And then remember that holding that lever at the high end, right at the top with the most power over it was a company that made TV shows that was trying to make sure you watched their shows.

Also: The tools for doing this are available to all the companies that read the paper.

My advice? Exhort and uplift queer creators. Be positive about it, not negative. Don’t make your time about attacking other people’s dark fuckprince. Bring what you like to life, and bring that life into the light. Share and love each other, rather than find reasons to be mad at one another for how you’re all playing with toys a corporation wants you to treat with respect and only play properly. And as always, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept – so make sure your fandom circles aren’t putting up with some Powerpuff Girls.

Originally posted on my Blog.

[crossdressingdeath]

I realized just today that JC reminds me a lot of Daenerys. I mean about how the fandom deals with the being antagonist. With Dany it makes sense because we are tricked into thinking she's a hero until she isn't, with JC he was presented as an antagonist since the start, but in both cases fans are in total denial. When today saw people saying that Dany will have a good ending and will be the hero in the books I really was like "Oh, this is the same level of denial that JC's fandom".

To be fair, if memory serves book Dany hasn’t been set up as an antagonist. The show just threw her character arc off a fucking cliff, like they did with most of their cast. We aren’t tricked into seeing Dany as a hero until she isn’t, D&D totally failed to make even a token attempt at setting her up as a villain and then expected everyone to just buy her doing a complete 180 in personality because “Uh... she killed people, yes they were slavers but still, killing people is wrong, look at you falling for her clever tricks”. Up until the point where she went full Flying Hitler her actions were mitigated by her sincere attempts to be and do good! She burned slavers alive and rescued slaves, she hated her enemies and loved her friends. She was a flawed human being whose heart was in the right place despite her making incredibly bad calls. There was no gradual fall to the dark side for Dany, and she wasn’t an antagonist from day one like JC; it was a pointless twist for shock value, not a good story decision. She may fall to the dark side as she loses perspective during her genuinely well-meant fight to help people, but she may not. It’s not denial to say that book Dany will end up the hero in the books, because right now it could go either way. The books and the show diverge so severely and with changes that GRRM so clearly disapproved of that you cannot use the show to judge what will happen in the books; I mean, the Tyrells all die in a fiery explosion in the show and that sure as fuck doesn’t seem likely to happen in the books. There is a big difference between “This character who has been set up as heroic but in many ways misguided will turn out heroic in the end” and “This character who is outright antagonistic in every scene he appears in and causes the protagonist’s death is totally the Real Hero”. People looking at a character who can currently go either way and saying “Yeah, I think she’s going to turn out good in the end” aren’t the same as people looking at a character who spent thirteen years torturing people to death and saying that he’s never done anything wrong.

[the-kazoo-kid]

The Two Types of Goblincore

I’ll begin by saying that I’m a Jewish archaeologist, and one of my main areas of study is the pogroms of Eastern Europe during the beginning of the 20th century. This affects the way I think of goblincore in two major ways:

Goblins were used as a negative caricature of Jews to tother them and incite negative feelings and violence among non-news

I have been accused of only wanting to be an archaeologist so that I can dig up and hoard shiny things

I spend a lot of my time looking at images like this one. It’s an antisemetic political cartoon from 1898. 

Look at the crown, the long, hooked nose, and most importantly the clawed, webbed hands. His hands envelope the world, symbolizing the perceived universal greed of the Jew.

This stereotype of the greedy Jew didn’t originate in the 19th century either. It goes all the way back to the Middle Ages when Jews in Europe were banned from occupations other than banking. 

So now let’s talk about goblins in popular culture. First and foremost in my mind are J.K Rowling’s goblins who are portrayed as greedy, hoarding and-- you guessed it-- in charge of the money and treasure.

There are even physical similarities between J.K. Rowling’s goblins and the political cartoon above. Note the hooked nose and the hands. 

I was about eight when I read the first Harry Potter book. I remember bringing it to a synagogue event where one of the adults remarked about how uncomfortable the goblins made them. Before I was allowed to watch the movie my mother sat me down and explained what was problematic with those goblins and why.

Next up: LOTR

He has the crown and the hands, although not the nose, and while he bares less direct resemblance to that cartoon, this is still an example of antisemitism. This is a placeholder character for a Jew that is disgusting, hoarding wealth, and a direct antagonist to the main characters. 

Everquest 2:

(I found another image where this character was specifically labeled The Goblin Banker but tumblr wouldn’t allow me to upload it for whatever reason.) This goblin is so other that it’s not even recognizable as a person, and in fact in the game they’re classed as a Mob Race. Yikes. Additionally, Wikipedia describes them as “attempting to - unsuccessfully - forge gold coins, and yet they have no intention spending any of this money, they simply wish to 'have' it.” This goes along with a lot of the greed aspect of goblins and their obsession with hoarding.

So what do we do?

First, I want to say that just because these pieces of media (or any others) have these problematic aspects doesn’t mean that you have to stop consuming and enjoying them. If we never read books or watched movies or played games that were problematic we would back ourselves into a corner where nothing was permitted.

The important thing is to educate yourself to the point where you can recognize the negative caricature/stereotype in something that you come across, and to not create any new media containing the stereotype. 

But what if you really like goblins?

The good news is that this is the first, older kind of goblincore, but it’s not the only one out there. There’s a new wave happening that emphasizes the positive things without including the negative ones. These next examples are technically called trolls in their respective universes, but they really get the vibe that I’m going for.

Boxtrolls:

See? Shiny treasure thing, delight, and no malice. Admittedly the trolls in this movie are some funny looking creatures, but they don’t come across as perpetuating the negative Jewish stereotype to me.

Frozen:

Cute little guys made of stone and moss. They live peacefully, and when they encounter the protagonists they have a nice musical number and then dispense some wise advice. No greed, no bad intentions. Good for them.

(Again, these examples are both technically trolls but I think the idea comes through, especially since they’re so far from the large, lumbering brutes that are trolls in say... Harry Potter or LOTR.)

Now I’m going to hand this conversation over to @goblinblogging who is a Jew working on reclaiming and reworking the idea of what a goblin is and what a goblin does.

-Reid

Now, I know learning that something you’re doing could be problematic is scary! I also know that a ton of people have abandoned goblincore just because they learned of these stereotypes. 

However, you don’t have to abandon something you love! What you need to do is educate yourself and learn about why these things are harmful and learn what you can do to make sure you aren’t doing something harmful yourself! 

Let's start off with how this stereotype came around (Or at least, one way it originated.) In the book Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines, the author goes into detail about how European origins say the goblins of the mines were the ghosts of dead Jews, sentenced (in properly medieval anti-Jewish fashion) to perpetual restlessness for their supposed role in the crucifixion of Jesus. Which is where the “Goblins live in caves and mines” came from! 

So this explains that the ghosts of Jews became goblins because they were being punished for killing jesus. Already a pretty rough start! Now for common goblin appearances that are nothing but antisemitism in disguise. First, and most obvious, large, hooked, warted noses. I don’t really feel like I have to go into much detail about this one. Anyone who took history class in middle and high school should know about Hitler’s propaganda against jews and the depictions of their bulbous noses, often covered in warts. This caricature directly translates over to goblins having their predominant warted noses. Second, Let’s have a look at green skin. Hitler in particular loved to depict jews with green skin, or at the very least, in very green light so it turned their skin green. 

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Notice the green tint, the evil sneer, hooked nose, and pointed ears in this one! All very reminiscent of traits we commonly see in goblins. 

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 This last one is a movie poster “Suss the Jew” produced by Terra Film at the behest of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and considered one of the most antisemitic films of all time. Notice the green skin! 

 Next is horns and teeth. Hitler in particular would depict jews with devil’s horns hidden under their Kippah (also referred to in Yiddish as a yarmulke, or less frequently as a koppel.) He’d also just depict them outright as demons. 

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This one is Ukranian. Translated means “Satan has taken off his mask” Notice how “satan” has huge teeth and horns, red skin, with the star of David carved into his forehead. Also notice how his jewish mask has a large nose.

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This one is from Russia (1919), a caricature of Leon Trotsky, who was viewed as a symbol of Jewish Bolshevism. Notice the red skin and pointed ears. Also notice how he’s sitting above the people down below (who are sitting on skeletons and bones) symbolizing the Jew’s greed, which we’ll get into later.

And then there’s this one, where you can see (white) people inside of the Jew’s mouth, you can also see horrendously sharp teeth crushing them. Also pay attention to the large nose and pointed ears. I just remembered that I forgot to cover another very important anti-jewish facial feature, which is that many jews in propaganda have dark beady eyes and drooping eyelids. These are things you can see for yourself in the images above!

Next, we’re moving on to greed. This one in particular hits me close to home. I’ve heard the phrase “Jewing me out of my money” too many times to count. Or alternately, “Don’t be a Jew” when the other person doesn’t think that I’m giving them enough of what they want. (Could be money, could even be sweets. The first time I heard this phrase I was a little kid and I had a bag of skittles. I wanted to share with everyone but I still wanted to have enough for me to eat myself. I was passing out handfuls when my friend’s older brother (he was a teen) didn’t like how much I gave him. He said to me, “Come on, don’t be a Jew, give me some more skittles”. I didn’t understand and when I asked my mom what it meant later she was horrified.) Jews, and their caricatures, have almost always been viewed as greedy and power hungry. As @whalefromwales said above me, Jews in Europe used to be banned from any job besides banking. 

We also have images like this from WWII: 

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Anyone who has taken any class where the Holocaust was talked about should be able to recognize this image, The Eternal Jew. He has money in one hand, which is reached out to demand more - he’s also looking at the money, and a whip in his other hand. In his arm, he holds the whole country of Germany.

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There is also this one. A jew, tinged with red, weighs a man’s life against a large pile of money. Notice also how he’s looking at the money - not the man. 

And this one should also be easy to recognize. It reads “The Jews - A People of Contagion!” A city burns in the background as a jewish man sits atop a pile of bones counting his money. Notice the bulbous, hooked, nose, black eyes with drooping eyelids, and large hands! Hitler depicted jews this way (and as goblins) in order to segregate us. “Us VS Them”. “We are the Good Human Beings and Jews are monsters!” in order to make it easy for him to begin committing the atrocities that he did! It never happened overnight, there were key stepping stones that built up to concentration camps. One of those was “Jews aren’t really people, so it’s okay that we’re doing this to them. We’re doing it to save us, the Good Christian Germans.”  

So what does all of this mean? Well, first and foremost, it means that you have to be careful how you depict your goblins. How? When drawing your goblinsonas or goblin ocs, stay away from drawing them with huge, hooked, and warted noses, don’t make their skin green or red (personally, I prefer grey skin for goblins.) If your goblin has sharp teeth, don’t make them huge and obvious. Because modern goblins are fair folk, it’s difficult to depict them without pointed ears, but try not to exaggerate the proportions.  

Behavior: Stop with the “greedy little goblin” thing. That DIRECTLY comes from jewish stereotypes. Your Goblins are allowed to collect shiny things they find, but don’t make them greedy about it! Have your goblin share what they collect, make it a community effort. Sharing the things you love is way better than being miserly anyhow, and sharing more represents what we as goblins should want in our community! Also, be careful with your goblins being terrors. Yes, there are usually evil beings in every single race (whether mythological or real) but just be really really careful. Hitler loved to depict jews eating the Good Germans(™) or terrorizing communities. So even if your goblin is an evil one, be really really careful and be sure to educate yourself first so you’re not just perpetuating the same tired shit that Hitler did.Collecting coins. 

Now, this has been a huge topic of discourse lately. Coins are shiney! I understand why people would want to collect them. Hell, I have some awesome 50 cent pieces and gold dollars in my collection. You just can't depict  yourself or your goblin character collecting only coins and being very greedy with them. That’s literally doing nothing but echoing the same propaganda that Hitler used against us. Collect them all you want, but if I see “Greedy little goblin hoarding coins all for themselves” I swear I’m gonna hit the fan. To clarify, you can absolutely show off you coin collection in the goblin tags, just be careful how you frame it. “I’m really interested in history, so I collect old coins because I think they’re neat” is waaaaaay different then “Horrible littel crecher is greedy for shiney monies” (That last quote is something I’ve SEEN in the tags, luckily op was just completely unaware of why that was so wrong and they removed the caption after they were educated.) 

 So please, enjoy being into goblincore. Enjoy the culture and the fantasy. Goblincore is about appreciating the things about us that may be depicted as “weird” or “ugly”. Goblincore is a safe haven for neurodivergent people (I’m Autistic!) and also Trans and other LGBTQIA+ people! It’s a culture for appreciating nature, collecting things that may not be seen as normal, and sharing these things with other people. It’s a culture where you shouldn’t be ashamed to be who you are or afraid to get dirty. Goblincore is a support network for the weirder folks where we strive to uplift one another. Goblincore is wonderful and I’ve been so impressed at how welcoming everyone is! Especially on tumblr! Before the discourse happened, I was sure that goblincore was one of the kindest communities on tumblr. However, I understand why the discourse happened, and goyim in the goblincore tag really did need to be educated, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave! So be sure to educate yourself and be aware of how your actions could negatively affect folks. Listen to other Jewish people and be mindful of what they say. Some Jews are very uncomfortable with goblincore, and for very good reason! And I do not claim to speak for all Jews with this post. 

I am trying to reclaim the word goblin for use by any person who wants the label. I no longer want these fantasy creatures associated with such a beautiful and vibrant culture of people. Goblins are very interesting as a fantasy race, but the negative stereotypes do nothing but hurt real life Jewish people. Which is why I’m hoping that folks will read this post and realize what behaviors and depictions of goblins are wrong and harmful. Also, tag your goblincore appropriately! Again, many Jewish people are uncomfortable with goblincore because of antisemitism that has happened in their past. I’ve been compared to a goblin many times! So keep your goblincore in just the goblincore tags. There are many overlaps between goblincore and other micro communities on tumblr (Such as crowcore, cottagecore, naturecore, and vulture culture) but be mindful of what you’re putting in those tags. Most vulture culture people hate us goblins cuz we put pictures of dirt or “I’m just a smol crecher” in their tags, and I don’t blame them! Vulture culture is only for the remains of dead animals, and dead animal remains should be the only things added to those tags. So fellow goblins, I’m going to end this post with a sincere thank you for reading, be mindful of your actions, and most of all, HAVE FUN with goblincore! 

Here is where you should be able to read Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts for free if you want.

TLDR: This is what we, as Jewish people, mean when we say that goblins are based off of negative stereotypes of jews. This is also why some jews get really upset at goblincore, however, there are many ways to participate in goblincore without using harmful stereotypes! So please, use this post to educate yourself so you can both be good goblins and good Jewish allies.

- @goblinblogging

[seyaryminamoto]

I recently saw a heavy criticism of The Beach saying "it's the single least realistic portrayal of teenagers on television: spoiled, rich kids don't actively shun Zuko for having a disfiguring scar on his face, no one tries to start shit with Azula over the volleyball game, teenagers referring to themselves as teenagers, a teen boy tells people not to make a mess, a bunch of 14-16 year-olds sit in a circle and psychoanalyze each other, everything else about the campfire scene." Your thoughts?

:’) that someone looks at the Beach and dismisses it for being “unrealistic” by whatever their cultural standards are is probably enough of a sign of the irrelevance of said person’s opinion. I mean, obviously they’re free to think what they will, but...

Fire Nation society is not American society. I’m going blind here, maybe this person isn’t American at all, but somehow I mostly see such kinds of narrow-minded criticism from first-worlders who are seldom exposed to lifestyles outside their particular, contemporary bubble of experiences. 

Now then, let’s get into the actual debate: Fire Nation society values violence quite a lot. Fire Nation society is full of people who saw Zuko’s literal Agni Kai burning scene, and didn’t look away: the only character who does is Iroh, a very obvious hint by the writers that Iroh has discarded the cruel moral values the rest of the Fire Nation upholds.

With this in mind, a boy with a scarred face might earn all sorts of “ews” from our societies, damn right. From Fire Nation society, though? If even watching how the burn is inflicted didn’t bother most of them, why would the result be a problem? If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if people with burn scars are even seen more attractive because it implies they were caught in violent scuffles with fire and still survived? Of course, the argument might go that Zuko’s burn is meant to be a mark of shame... but it’s a mark of shame for PRINCE Zuko. For that mysterious boy with the emo haircut in Ember Island, whose real identity is a mystery? It is shown, instead, to result in this reaction:

Now then, we could say that this is meant to be a jab by the creators and writers at Zuko’s hordes of fangirls, because frankly, Book 3 has several instances of groups of girls swooning over Zuko and it might be what they were going for. In this case, though, they’re swooning over him WITHOUT knowing who he is, as opposed to the fangirls in Nightmares and Daydreams. So, while it absolutely can be inspired on the many Zuko fangirls the staff knew about, this actually ends up serving to characterize a society, a culture: they don’t think his scar makes him unattractive. It’s blatantly stated that their reaction is the opposite. So, instead of thinking “oh god that’s so unrealistic”, how about we actually stop trying to measure everything by our standards and consider that this could be an element of WORLDBUILDING...? :’)

(Also, I’m pretty sure there’s a fair share of privileged young women in our current society who think Kylo Ren was hot as hell with a huge scar across his face... are those people not real, by any chance? :’D If anything, they’re living proof that girls swooning over a scarred boy in ATLA are absolutely feasible, no matter if not everyone shares their opinion)

Continues under the cut becasue this got long....

Now then, Azula is shown to take the Kuai ball game too far. She outright causes the ball, in the final kick, to burst into flames and burns the net. Going by Chan and Ruon Jian, these kids are privileged idiots, why lie... but are these privileged idiots stupid enough to see a girl flying three feet into the air, kicking a firebent ball and then giving a foreboding speech, and say “OKAY WE’RE GONNA PICK A FIGHT WITH YOU FOR BEING SO COMPETITIVE!”???? I mean... honestly. Why would anyone do this? Azula turned an inoffensive Kuai ball game into a battlefield singlehandedly: THIS, as well, is meant to be a display of characterization. That people don’t take the game so seriously, that they wouldn’t pick a fight with her because she’s dangerous or because they just don’t care as much as she does... it’s characterizing Fire Nation people every bit as much as it characterizes Azula.

Azula and Zuko are both shown reacting in ridiculous ways to casual things in this episode: Azula takes the game too far, potentially stages the burning down of a house in retaliation for being rejected by a boy, Zuko is hysterical and jealous and snaps at Mai over stupid things... it’s, again, a matter of showing how poorly adjusted these characters are. They’re not normal kids. They DON’T behave like normal kids. Normal, privileged kids in the Fire Nation, are kids like Chan and Ruon Jian. The episode literally gives you the chance to see Fire Nation society for what it is, in a way no other episode does... and because it’s not like our societies, it’s somehow wrong?

... Also, teenagers referring to themselves as teenagers is somehow unrealistic? I mean... is it nowadays? I don’t think any teenagers had a problem with saying they were teens in my youth :’DDD literally remember MCR released a song called Teenagers and a lot of us loved it to pieces. What exactly is so outrageous about it? Might be that this worked better in the mid-00′s, but I hardly think this makes no sense? Aang refers to himself as a kid earlier in the show, is that unrealistic too and worth rebuking a whole episode over? Are all teenagers supposed to be pretending to be grown-ups, like so many 16-year-olds on Tumblr who always talk like they’ve figured out the world and try to impose rules on fully-grown adults upon whom they have absolutely no power? :’DDDDD Yeah, I think this particular point is a stupid thing to make a fuss over. Honestly, it is.

Chan tells people not to make a mess = unrealistic. Ha. Did this person ignore his reactions at the chaos Azula, Zuko, Mai and Ty Lee caused in his house? “YOU BROKE MY NANA’S VASE!!!”, anyone? Like... I’m sorry, but this IS characterization, yet again! This shows Chan is a spoiled brat who wants to stay in his family’s good graces. The party isn’t at all as crazy and wild as you’d expect from, again, an American teenage party... and why? Because, for one thing, Chan is clearly afraid of the consequences of too much chaos in the beach house: this implies fear of authority, of his parents, perhaps even his grandparents. 

For another, again, FIRE NATION SOCIETY: what does this clever critic know, by any chance, of Nazi Germany’s Hitler Youth? I’ve watched a few documentaries about it, and basically if you were a boy and you weren’t in Hitler Youth, you were no one. You were worthless. And what happened in Hitler Youth? Conditioning to the extreme. These kids were taught all the alt-right ideology that Tumblr despises, and they were made to believe it was an undeniable reality. Were there cases of kids who didn’t like it, kids who didn’t approve of it? Surely. But the general idea of Hitler Youth was to educate every kid to behave in the way Hitler considered appropriate, to the point where “the notion "Germany must live" even if they (members of the HJ) had to die was "hammered" into them.”

This is, of course, an extreme example and I’m sure Fire Nation education wasn’t that extreme because we saw it for ourselves, it’s not. But a slightly milder version of it? That’s absolutely feasible and consistent with what we see in The Headband. Therefore, kids getting high and drunk at a party? Maybe that kind of thing simply DOESN’T happen in a Fire Nation party? :’) Maybe they’re taught that those kinds of things are off-limits to anyone under a certain age (or outright forbidden, might be the case with drugs), and as they live in a tyrannical society that priorizes the Fire Lord and his decrees above all else, where his word is treated as that of a god, even mischievous teenagers refuse to act out? :’D oh, what an implausible concept, this just can’t possibly make any sense! Hitler Youth is unrealistic too!

Lastly, that a bunch of kids would sit in a circle psychoanalyzing each other seems implausible to this person is actually laughable for me. Not only have I constantly found myself, from my early teenage years to current days, serving as some sort of unofficial therapist for many of my friends, who share their woes and ask me for advice (whether they’ll heed it or not), most importantly, I once had an experience with a friend, back in high school, much like what happens with these kids in The Beach, after I’d spent years doing a lot of post-depression introspection. I shared a lot of stuff I didn’t often talk about, and beats me WHY I felt completely comfortable sharing it with my friend that day, but I did. She understood me, listened, offered her opinion, and we talked about her problems too. This happened when I was 15-16. If this person has never experienced such situation... why, that’s not anyone’s business. But it’s certainly not their business to determine this just DOESN’T happen, to anyone, ever. I can safely say it does, to people who do have problems and who sometimes just need a friendly shoulder to rely on. Maybe this critic’s life is just so perfect they’ve never had to share their woes with anyone else :’) I’m afraid that doesn’t invalidate those of us who are different, and it doesn’t invalidate the possibility that those four could talk, as they did, without breaking characterization, in the scene of the fireplace at the beach.

ANYWAYS...

Saying that a show about a group of kids who save the world and then effectively become leaders of such world, facing very little opposition in the process, is unrealistic because “teenagers aren’t like that becuase I wasn’t like that as a teenager” may be one of the most ridiculous and shortsighted things I’ve seen in this fandom, AND I’VE SEEN A LOT OF RIDICULOUS AND SHORTSIGHTED THINGS. A person’s experiences are NOT universal, regardless of how widespread their culture may be. More importantly, fiction does NOT have to abide by rules established by our current society’s state and cultural values. ATLA, as it is, is a completely different world from our own, regardless of its inspiration in many Asian cultures.

I, personally, find it a lot more unrealistic that Fire Lord Zuko can become Fire Lord without much in the way of visible protesting or boycotting when he was a banished prince who didn’t even win in his Agni Kai against Azula since it’s Katara who ends up defeating her and, as far as the rules go, Azula technically won even if not in the most dignified of ways. I find it even more unrealistic that LOK tells us Zuko was Fire Lord successfully for 70+ years and the Fire Nation has been fully reformed into a non-warmongering country despite the 100+ years of indoctrination started by Sozin’s rule. That this gets swept under a rug, not only in the neatly wrapped finale that leaves a thousand unanswered questions, but in the sequel show that merely confirms Zuko succeeded and shows NOTHING of how he managed to reform such a fucked up society...? That is a thousand times more important to me than “privileged kids aren’t acting like privileged kids OMG!”. Honestly, you want privileged kids abusing all their privileges in our society? Go watch Gossip Girl, I genuinely recommend it. You want something that proposes a completely different possibility and a glance at what a society guided by a tyrannical dictator looks like? Feel free to watch The Beach again with a completely different focus and MAYBE you’ll understand what the writers were going for.

If this person happens to see my answer, I hope they learn that worldbuilding, for a storyteller, entails CREATING a world that isn’t necessarily like the one we’re familiar with. There are multiple layers to such a world, and society and culture are some of them. Not all cultures and societies work the same way, which is part of why sometimes you’ll find behaviors from people who belong to wholly different cultures and wind up perplexed because whatever they’re doing is completely unfamiliar for you. Are there any universal behaviors in humans? Maybe! But in a work of FICTION, even the most universal of behaviors can be changed, deleted, altered however the writer sees fit! :’D it’s not a novel concept, and as far as logical fallacies are concerned, this show features a whole slew of those that have nothing to do with this peculiar sense of “realism”, fallacies that absolutely can and should be called out. Namely, things that contradict the internal logic of the show, rather than things that are incompatible with OUR world. Portraying a world that’s very different from ours, on virtually every level you can think of? That’s called creativity, not lack of realism. Please learn the difference.

[kendrixtermina]

The "waifu bait" criticism of Edelgard is so dumb given that most of the cast is technically waifu/husbando bait in one way or another, they're all meant to appeal to players as romance options, and she's the only one getting flack for it. (Well, not the only one, there were some people giving Dimitri shit too for being "wish fullfillment for stupid teenage girls who think they can fix a man," but I see the complaint most often with Edelgard.)

Yeah. I mean, you can boink Rhea and Jeritza!

It’s not like satelite love interests aren’t a plague onto anime and fiction in general, but I only ever hear this “you only like them because they’re waifu/bishie” thing directed at characters who very much DO have personality, unique compelling features and plot relevance. 

I’ve also seen this thrown at, say, Evangelion’s Miss Ayanami, as if all the fascinating sci-fi concept stuff and compelling narrative about finding your own worth and making a connection in a cruel lonely world wasn’t there - and at least we do see her through a “main character’s love interest” sorta lens. (I was thinking about how Byleth is actually quite similar, except more proactive with more of a dorky side, and less philosophical/reflective, but because Byleth is the MC we come off with a fairly different impression. )

Meanwhile with Edelgard they really didn’t pull any punches, the whole story is set in motion and dominated by her active choices, most the unique designs/outfits she gets are geared to look elegant/powerful.  (Apart from the usual ‘individually wrapped boob armor would break your sternum’ thing but you’d really have to know physics for that/ could be fixed easily by making the fit more sweater-like), she has a specific discernable philosophy and makes impactful choices, that can genuinely be agreed or disagreed with.

You can’t swag her into your way of thinking - you can only ally with her under the presupposition that you already actively agree. (See all the people complaining that you cant “criticise her more”, expecting her to be like Dimitri basically even though they are exact opposites. You can only get on her route by making two deliberate choices. I mean they wrote this with your first playthrough in mind, in-universe you’re not there because you wanna complete all aroutes but because you actively chose to join her after she spent a year unsubtly trying to recruit you to her cause)

You don’t talk Claude out of his tactics either. (and forcing it all into this comparision often leads ppl to overlook that he has ambiguities or character development at all, maybe he isn’t vilified but he gets simplified and therefore wronged just as much in the end. They’re not all Dimitri. The whole point of having three or four different potential deuteragonists to choose from is that they’re different)… heck, even if you look at Dimitri, you only get him back to what he really wanted to do back in part I before his black-and-white thinking and exaggerated sense of duty got the better of him. 

With all three, joining them eventually just enables them to get closer to their actual vision. Back when you meet her in Remire, Edelgard outright tells you that “with your power on my side, we could courttail the slitherer’s atrocities much more efficiently”. You don’t change her mind at all; You enable her to use “Plan A”. Same with Claude, who otherwise plains much more defensively both because he has less support and because he’s more jaded. And Dimitri essentially pulls a Sayaka, ie being unable to live up to his own unrealistic standards drive him to lose all hope and become the very opposite of the hero he wanted to be, but you do help him get back to that, or to a more balanced mature understanding of that. 

The best proof of that is that the popularity poll numbers actually went down after the release, ie a lot of ppl who liked her just bc they liked her design were turned off that there’s a specific personality there that isn’t necessarily their type/ a MO they don’t necessarily agree with. Or all those peeps complaining that the S-support was too understated for them. Claude got that too - They’re just not the most open/expressive people in the world, one would think that after playing through their routes you would know and understand that. Whereas Dimitri has been super emotional from day one (which is both his greatest strength and greatest weakness), so it figures that he’d be more conventionally romantic. 

- Hardly things that would happen if she were written to be “blandly pleasant”.  I mean generally speaking she’s not the best as showing her feelings and when she does she’s often pretty blunt at it even with her closest friends (El: ”Hubert! I order you to tell me what it is you’re not telling me!” Hubert: [elegantly weasels out of answering] El: [after he’s left the room] I’m worried about him tho. )

Seems senseless to claim that she’s blandly pleasant when she’s absolutely gotten a love-it-or-hate-it-marmite-reaction all across the board. It also seems to go along with the implicit idea that everyone who likes her is heterosexual boys. I’m neither, and it’s not like heterosexual boys aren’t ever interested in “plot” or “writing” I mean geez. Though I would resist the temptation to fully ascribe it to things like that. 

To an extent it’s simply confusion. “How can they like this thing that obviously sucks? Must be an ulterior motive”, whereas in reality ppl who like her have probably parsed what happened here differently to begin with (It depends greatly on how powerful you concluded Rhea was, ie, wether what Edelgard is doing is a conquest or a revolt. She certainly sees it as a revolt. Even today in the modern day most of us see revolts as legitimate, or at least, if they get overly destructive, as a fault of the bad government. Heck, there are many on this very site who would label all revolts legit by default (”eat the rich”, the more ‘original sin-like’ variants of privilege theory) which is further than I would go )

There certainly are a bunch of ‘cute’ scenes post holy-tomb scene and under the assumption that Edelgard is this my-way-or-the-highway type of person that many have her pegged as I can see how they might think that it “makes no sense” but that’s really down to wanting her not tp step outside of that idea they have of her. I mean even supervillains have silly everyday situations. Bin Laden loved Disney Movies, Hitler loved his dogs. By itself that has nothing to do with morality or likeability. It’s just being human. Supervillains blush, not because they’re not villains, but because they have blood vessels in their faces. It’s only logical that once you get close to someone and get them to trust you, you get to see more of their silly or vulnerable sides. It’s the same with Rhea. (except that the same people argue that having personable vulnerable sides at all makes Rhea good s of course it causes some cognitive dissonance when Edelgard also has them. I’ve yet to see ppl calling “waifuism” on Rhea (whom I would consider a full-fledged villain), and they shouldn’t - it’s characterization.) Same with ppl calling Edelgard a “manchild” for liking stuffed animals and sweets. She’s actually very mature and adult for her age, having some interests that aren’t super high-minded is just realistic and if you looked at her as a full 3D person who can have more than one trait you’d see that. 

This also goes with that tendency of holding up AM as the gold standard complaining about the lack of AM-like plot that they completely miss the different but equally compelling character arcs in VW and CF. That’s not a lack of arc, that IS the arc, it’s just a different arc: We get to see this tough, in-control high-minded character who’d completely given up on the normal life she wanted so much and resigned herself to never being understood finding out that she is very much still capable of normalcy and humanity and finding friendship and love and I think that’s beautiful. It’s my jam. 

And it’s meaningful precisely because it’s a change from only seeing the tough leader guise otherwise. Complaining about that is like complaining about getting to see Claude’s more wistful, dreamy, benevolent, not-entirely self-interest side in VW or claiming that the writing would be better if he were just a straight-up selfish trickster. Actually, if you removed their heroic traits you’d end up with a lot more generic characters. You’d simply get every wild card trickster ever, and every “Nietzschean” villain ever.  It’s the fact that they’re unconventional heroes that makes Claude and Edelgard so unique, compelling and interesting. If you like conventional heroes, Dimitri is right here. Your basic heroic fantasy ‘rightful king returns/ soft peace loving hero’, plus your basic jrpg guilt-ridden angsty protagonist. I mean there’s good reason that these character archetypes are popular. Plus he’s especially well-executed and recontextualized by the contrast to the others, but there he is, enjoy him! We’re not stopping you. 

It’s really Seteth who came up short arc wise. You could have given him an arc, the potential was there, he essentially transistions from protecting himself and his family to taking on his family’s heroic quest and rising up to that, but he doesn’t get like, a scene reflecting on that. Or you could’ve sent them on some mission to actually curb some corrupt cardinals etc, shown them actually reforming the church and realizing that it wasn’t all perfect, after all he very much knows that Rhea herself wasn’t all perfect. 

For all that much of media is obsessed with making characters “hot”, the truth is that if people like them for any reason, they will find them hot anyways, regardless of whether that was the intention. (unless the people in question are aroace, or the character is a literal, realistic prepubescent child)

You don’t have to “make”  a character hot for ppl to find them so.

[frasier-crane-style]

Let’s talk about Treks baby

The One Where Riker Stars In The Grey.

When Riker is reassigned to go over a terraforming colony bedeviled by pesky, genetically engineered wolves, a new first officer is assigned to the Enterprise. And he’s kwazy.

The irritatingly named Quintin Stone is sort of the Nick Locarno to Peter David’s later Mackenzie Calhoun. Brooding rogue, troubled past, gets the job done, you know how it goes. It’s a pretty unabashed power fantasy/Mary Sue in New Frontier, but there the whole thing is so over the top and tongue in cheek that you really can’t take it too seriously. Quintin, on the other hand, is more played for drama--for most of the story, there’s a question as to whether he’s outright homicidally insane. Luckily, Troi is on top of things, checking on his mental well-being and also kinda being his love interest, like a literal version of this gif.

Spoiler alert: It turns out he’s deeply traumatized by a not wholly believable incident in his past*, so good on ya for catching that one, Troi. 

Looking back on it, this book would almost seem to count as a deconstruction of the ‘broody antihero’ trope, showing that the character type just doesn’t work in TNG. He infuriates most of the cast and doesn’t get the girl, while those who are taken in by him are presented as saps (yup, Wesley). 

Speaking of New Frontier, with the self-aware jokeyness and tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of Trek’s campier elements, would it be fair to say PAD was ahead of the curve in predicting the modern incarnation of Trek? Its take on Star Trek would definitely fit in with the Kelvinverse movies and especially with The Orville, which is pretty much the people’s choice for Trek these days.

*Okay, I get the interpretation of the Prime Directive as not interfering or revealing yourself to alien cultures until they develop warp drive, at which point they’re going to figure out you’re there anyway. And if you can stop an asteroid from wiping them out without them knowing about it, fine. Cool. I get that. But I don’t get Star Trek stories where the PD means you can’t interfere with the Romulans’ development, even though they’re showing up on your doorstep every other week and shooting at you. It’s like saying if Hitler 2.0 showed up in Germany and started amassing power, the US shouldn’t try to discourage that shit or, I guess, engage in any diplomacy whatsoever. It’s mindbogglingly isolationist. And isn’t it arguable that part of a culture’s natural development is interacting with other cultures? Like the back and forth between America and Japan driving forward the medium of animation?

The One Where Picard Nearly Bangs Guinan’s Sister

This one has a bit of nontroversy attached to it, because it came out while Star Trek was still kind of hashing out the Borg, so there’s a disclaimer at the beginning basically going

The gist of it is that Borg aren’t supposed to have gender (a bunch of people with blue hair just had their ears perk up, didn’t they?), but PAD here has a drone that gets detached from the Collective and is a girl. It seems pretty self-evident to me--Picard gets assimilated, they get him back, he’s still a dude, so why wouldn’t it work that way with a chick? But this is back when assimilation wasn’t the Borg’s m.o. the way it would later become. They assimilate a Ferengi in this book (yup) and it’s kind of a big deal. Oh, and as you might’ve guessed, Girl Borg bears a few similarities to Seven of Nine, who would show up later in the franchise, although PAD’s take on it is more “we rescued a girl from a serial killer’s basement after ten years and she’s totally catatonic,” less “what is this human emotion you call ‘kissing’?”

Good thing we have Deanna Troi, a counselor, to ease Girl Borg through the healing process. Oh, wait, she basically takes one look at GB and goes

Thanks for the help, Troi. I guess this subplot is supposed to prove that it’s pointless to try to save any assimilated person other than Picard, because mentally they’re already dead, so might as well just have a bunch of fun guiltlessly blowing them away

(And that goes for you too, audience.) But still, bit of a downer. At least Spock would’ve tried a mind-meld.

There’s also this chick Delcara, who in a pretty XXtra Flamin' Hot narrative choice is like Picard’s soulmate and he’s sort of in love with her slash obsessed with her after having a psychic vision of her in Starfleet Academy and y’know? TNG might’ve opened the door to this by having Crusher bang a ghost, but we should close that door. We should close it right now.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering if this Guinan’s sister business means Picard is down with the swirl, it turns out she’s Guinan’s adopted sister, so is it just me or is that weirdly ambiguous? She’s a beautiful black woman and Picard wants to do her. You can come out and say it, book. No one minds.)

Anyway, Delcara is piloting one of dem planet-killers from back in TOS--in hindsight, it’s weird that the Abrams movies never did anything with the one big Death Star-y thing that actually is canon to TOS, isn’t it? They gave Khan and Nero ridiculously super-sized ships, but the one kaiju that’s actually in continuity, nothing--on a vendetta against the Borg, who basically killed her family twice over. Man, if only there were some kind of psychologist on board the Enterprise to help her through that trauma.

I sense she feels great bitterness, Captain.

Yeah, why does she get a seat next to the Captain again? Let Worf have that seat. How is it fair that he has to stand around all day, he actually does stuff!

Anyhoo, as you might’ve guessed from the opening set on a holographic rendition of Don Quixote, with a Data Discussion(tm) of quixotic endeavors... and the fact that Delcara intends to totally wipe out the Borg, gosh, I wonder if she’ll succeed--this one’s something of a downer. It does give the promised Planet Killer on Borg Cube action for those fanboys who’ve wondered who would win in a wrassling match, and Picard learns a valuable lesson about not pursuing suicidal vendettas against the Borg, which he definitely takes to heart...

(Wow, he did that one-handed? What kind of gains does Sir Patrick have?)

But still... bit depressing.

The One Where Bones Becomes A Space Pirate

Another giant novel, I’m surprised this one never got raided for parts in any adaptation. Even on the page, it’s pretty breathtakingly cinematic, and yet, the only part of it that’s really been used is, if you squint, Bob Burnham in Discovery being a disgraced Starfleeter.

The premise is that, some months ago, the TOS Enterprise crew was involved in a breaking of the Prime Directive that resulted in the destruction of a world and the ‘Enterprise 5′ of bridge officers blamed for the tragedy being shunned and hated wherever they go (ah, that utopian Star Trek future, predicting an entire population that’s politically engaged). 

Now, with the command crew scattered, everyone’s trying to get back to the planet where it all happened to find out what tf went down for reals. In a bit of a stretch, this is really hard for them--no one seems to be able to call in a favor or hire Han Solo to take them there or anything, which I suppose is in keeping with Star Trek 3′s similar situation six years prior. They don’t have to go so far as to steal a Constitution-class this time. I suppose it’s fitting for the wild and woolly TOS era. In TNG time, they’d probably be able to dial a Space Uber. (As it turns out, it seems like if they’d just coordinated their plans, they all could’ve hitched a ride with Spock, but then there’d be no book, much less a Giant Book.)

Anyway, Kirk’s been court-martialed and is working as an asteroid miner, Chekov and Sulu fall in with Orion pirates, Spock is challenging the whole thing in court, and Uhura’s in jail........oh. It’s like that, huh, Starfleet?

Like I said, most of the plot involves the crew going off on all their separate adventures, eventually getting the band back together and figuring out what went down. Apparently, the book was criticized for its nonlinear structure, but I think it worked out really well. Starting months after the incident, with everyone disgraced, gets you pumped to find out what happened. Then when they flashback to the shit going down, there’s a great sense of foreboding because you know something is going to happen, just not what exactly. 

If I can make a criticism, it’s that after some great build-up, the ending seems a bit anticlimactic. The nature of the threat requires some unbelievable Hollywood Evolution to buy (nothing new for Star Trek, admittedly, and this is a crew that’s fresh off meeting Apollo and Abraham Lincoln) and while it is fitting that they’re able to resolve the situation without blowing up anything or punching anyone (Star Trek loves to talk the talk about how anti-military it is, then end their movie with some Klingons getting blasted), it still seems a little... dry. You’re not going to have Kirk hang off of anything, story? Not even a little? Okay. I still had fun. 

And you’ll note that once again, Deanna Troi was of no help whatsoever. Geez, woman, you’re oh for three here!

[silenthillmutual]

fletchinder replied to your post: while we’re all here talking about Harry Potter...

I think Rick read Harry Potter but I sure didn’t and I’m getting the impression that it’s a LOT of shitty stuff barely held together by a story about like, friendship that was at least kinda okay -Gore

unfortunately i (and a lot of other people i think) didn’t really catch onto some of the shittier stuff in it because, understandably, most of us were kids when we read it and not everyone goes back to re-read it. but some of the big things that stand out are:

afab people can enter the amab dormitories without issue, but not the other way because amab people aren’t “pure of intention” or something

the house elves like being slaves and are incredibly resentful of anyone trying to free them

the second fantastic beasts movie has an extremely uncomfortable extended scene where you have to sit through, essentially, a white supremacist meeting

that ends with a jewish- & mentally ill-coded character joining, essentially, the wizard nazis (after she brainwashed her polish-american boyfriend into marrying her) 

the goblins & snape both being antisemitic caricatures

gay characters who weren’t revealed as gay until after the fact & any and all supplementary material (fantastic beasts) makes absolutely no reference to this fact despite the fact that she’s the one who revealed dumbledore was gay in the first place and is the one who wrote the script

some of her weirder assertions like that hufflepuffs participate in group masturbation and that wizards shit themselves and clean it up using magic

glorifying both dumbledore and snape despite them both being abusive - dumbledore in more of an emotional abuse & manipulation fashion but snape being outright abusive and an on-again off-again nazi

dumbledore’s only love was the original wizard nazi

naming a chinese character “cho chang”, her appropriation of native american culture, there being no black characters in 1920s harlem, making a villain out of an autistic-coded character who is played by a jewish queer actor, keeping johnny depp hired, and making 2nd wizard hitler’s familiar an asian-american woman cursed to be held in the body of a snake for the rest of her life not only with no good reason but also with it just not making any fucking sense for the timeline of the story

[bigboxofbees]

Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and everyone else...

I would like to place a disclaimer here first, since I know some people don't wish to read about this and these are some more serious topics.

This text will include discussions/mentions of:

Abortion

Rape and sexual assault

The holocaust

So if you do not wish to read about those topics, I suggest you skip this text.

Also to note, I'm using pretty heteronormative language here, since I deem it appropriate. However, this does not mean that I ignore the fact that trans men and non-binary individuals can get pregnant, I am well aware, but their perspective might look a bit different from what I'm describing here.

Why did I spend like two hours on this?

In the past week or so, all I've seen all over social media is about abortion. Which makes sense, given the horrendous laws that are being passed as we speak in the US. It's a good thing that people are talking about this, it's extremely important. But it's also very tiring, despite not being american this debate has certainly taken a toll on me. I've wanted to write about this in dept for the whole week, but I haven't been able to get myself to do it. But I'm doing this now. So buckle up, because this is going to be a long post about all the things I've thought about and discussed this past week. However, this is by no means a complete list. And for convenience, I'm going to use different headlines to sort things.

How do we define life and which lives should be protected?

Does life begin at conception? From a legal and scientific perspective, not really. While cells certainly are alive, that doesn't mean that every living cell is part of a living being. And it is living beings we wish to protect, right? Otherwise, we'd protect plants and bacteria as well, and I think we can all agree that plants aren't people. What about animals? They are most certainly living beings, yet we kill them for food (despite the fact that it's possible for almost everyone to live a life without eating meat). I'd argue that any living animal is more worth protecting than an embryo, because animals are sentient. And I am by no means a vegan, but I do find it rather telling when I've asked pro-birth people if they're vegans and all I've gotten was silence.

Speaking from a legal and scientific perspective, a heartbeat does not determine "life". In order to be consider a life, a living being, the organism has to meet a couple of criteria; a embryo or a fetus before around the 25th week does not meet those criteria. What we use to determine life is not a heartbeat, it's brain activity. Brain activity cannot be maintained without a heartbeat, however, a heartbeat can exist without brain activity. That's why relatives can choose to pull the plug when their loved one is brain dead; because they are considered dead, despite the fact that they have a heartbeat. That's why a heartbeat isn't the definition of life; brain activity is.

A fetus can't have more human rights than a person

"It's not your body, it's a separate life! It has the right to life!" Well... does it, really? Let's say it is a person (even though it is not), a fetus cannot be given more rights than a person. Yes, I did say "more rights". Say a fetus would have all the human rights a person has, that still doesn't permit the fetus to use the pregnant person's body against their will. Nobody has the right to use another persons body unless they consent to it, I don't and neither do you. Doesn't matter if it's the only way to survive, it is still not a right to survive using another person's body. So why should a fetus have that right? If a fetus is equal to a living human person, then it doesn't have that right. In fact, you can't do anything to another person's body unless they've given consent, not even after they're dead. Pregnant people should not have less bodily autonomy than a corpse.

The poor becomes poorer

Rich people won't be affected by abortion bans, period. Really, anyone with the means to travel out of state for a weekend can still obtain an abortion legally. So who will be forced to give birth to children? Teenagers with little to no support and the poor, those who's lives are affected the most by unwanted pregnancies. Teenagers who likely have to put their plans for the future on ice to work a low-paying job to support their child, thus landing themselves and the child in poverty. And the poor will be forced to have more children resulting in even more severe poverty. Abortion bans feeds the circle of poverty. I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist here, but who profits from this? The rich. Who has the most influence over the creation of laws? The rich.

When things get ugly

I've seen several really vile comparisons. But the worst one has to be the one with the holocaust, which I see frequently, tightly followed by slavery. These people consider the termination of embryos and fetuses to be equal to the horrors and dehumanization of the holocaust and of slavery. They can't seem to comprehend that a blob of non-sentient cells is not the same as a living human being. They've argued that "well Hitler and slave owners didn't consider those humans to be people, and you are not considering human life (note: fetuses, but they don't see it that way) people, so how are you any better than Hitler?" In fact, I outright asked a woman if she truly believed a 5 year old child crying for their mother at Auschwitz was equal to an embryo. She said yes, and saw nothing wrong with that. That is probably the most insane thing I have heard this week. Yet it's not too far from what I've seen multiple times; that legal and safe abortion is the "holocaust but for poor innocent babies". And in all honesty, I don't have much to say about this, it's just horrible and I don't know how to respond.

The hypocrisy, it was never about "life"

If it truly was, then this wouldn't be their top priority. And if it was truly about eliminating the need for abortions, this wouldn't be their top priority. Their top priority then would be to reduce the need for abortions through education and accessible birth control for all, and the second step would be to create social programs and fund organizations that help with the financial burden of raising a child, yet the states that have passed these laws do next to nothing to prevent unwanted/unplanned pregnancies nor help those who want to have the child but cannot afford that.

Making abortion illegal would only stop safe abortions from happening, since it does nothing to reduce the need for them. Illegal and unsafe abortions will increase, and women will hurt themselves or kill themselves because they were denied an abortion. It would also mean that all miscarriages would be investigated as a possible crime, putting women in prison for natural miscarriages. Not to mention that I've heard pro-birthers advocate for the death penalty for having an abortion. I have personally encountered pro-birthers who want this to happen, who think women who seek abortions deserve to die from unsafe abortions. How very pro-"life" of them.

I also noticed a parallell with the death penalty, a large portion of pro-birth people support the death penalty and see nothing morally wrong with that. That is also very hypocritical, how can you in the same breath say "all life is precious" and "execute the criminal" without sounding like the biggest fool? By doing that, you are at that point picking and choosing who deserves life according to you, at that means it's no longer about how all life must be protected.

And finally, a fair amount of people who are pro-birth do still think it's okay to have an abortion if you were raped. Why? I thought you cared about all human life? How is this any different? Yet another example of hypocrisy. They know it's cruel to force someone to carry their rapist's child, and they know they can't advocate for that. So for some reason they make an exception, an exception that goes against what they claim is their core belief (keep this particular part in mind when you read the next two parts). It really doesn't make sense, so perhaps it's not truly about "life".

Power play

Being pregnant is much different from getting someone pregnant. One has to be pregnant for 9 months, give birth and alter their body permanently. The other part could simply walk away at any moment and never look back. That is not an option for the one who's pregnant, and they are often the one left to deal with the child once it's born, altering their life to fit the needs of the child. And even if there is a father in the picture, the mother is still more likely to carry most of the responsibility. And if we look to the past, and we only have to rewind a few decades, the woman in the relationship was expected to be a stay at home mom, with no option to have a career. And while she was at home, tending to the home, making sure her husband never had to lift a finger in the house, he was out working and making a name for himself. This power imbalance doesn't exist to the same extent when women have ownership over their own bodies. And I can't help but feeling that this is related to why some people want to criminalize abortion; because if women can exist on the same conditions as them, their spaces are threatened.

It takes two to tango

"Close your legs", "don't have sex unless you want a baby", "it takes two to tango". Sounds familiar? These are all phrases used by pro-birthers, and they are almost almost directed at the female. So why does the man get a pass? When they say "close your legs", they never follow it up with "keep it in your pants". When they say "don't have sex unless you want a baby", they never follow it up with "don't have sex unless you want to be a father". When they say "it takes two to tango", they never follow it up with "if he gets her pregnant, he has to take responsibility and support her".

Men wanting to have sex is seen as natural, normal and a need, but if women want to have sex they need to be punished, the punishment being "having to take responsibility", which really is just code for "pregnancy is a punishment for women wanting to have sex".

A slippery slope

If we consider abortion, the removal of pregnancy, morally wrong because it stops a child from developing, then where do we draw the line? Would embryos at a fertility clinic be entitled to personhood? Would all embryos have to be used to grow a person? Would using a condom be illegal because it interrupts the natural process? Same with other forms of birth control? And what about periods and male masturbation, is that "throwing way" potential life? I know some religious people think contraceptives and plan b should be illegal, and I could definitely see how these types of laws could lead to future restrictions on birth control.

Final thoughts

Pro-"life" has never been about protecting life. It has always been about birthing babies, controlling women in different ways and punishing women who dare to have sex just because she wants to. Pro-birth people also have plenty of flaws in their arguments and the hypocrisy is unbelieveable. Abortion is by no means a black and white issue, it never has been, but criminalizing abortion will do more harm than good and will not stop abortions from happening. And fact of the matter is, morality is subjective. While you may think it's wrong to terminate a pregnancy, I don't. However, I do think it's morally wrong to force your personal beliefs into other people's lives.

[sending-the-message]

I can see people's auras... and it's a curse. by A10A10A10

Yes, I can see people’s auras.

And I hate saying it so bluntly. It makes me sound like some hack psychic who fakes the ability as a means of exploitation and a paycheck. I’ve never made money from my ability. I’ve never taken advantage of it. And, until now, I’ve never spoken of it to anybody.

But I really do see them, and I’m starting to view it as more of a curse. I have a reason for typing this out and I assure you, there isn’t a happy ending.

For me, it’s quite simple. I see a faint light surrounding people. Everyone. And in that light, I can see their morality. The brighter and more translucent the light is, the better the person. The darker and opaquer, the worse. Dim and partly translucent are morally ambiguous. To simplify things, those are the three ways I describe them. Dark equals evil. Bright equals good. Dim equals somewhere in between. It’s strange, I’ve always viewed the people with grey/dim auras as… arbiters. Mediators. The people in between, who aren’t one or the other, and will always have difficult decisions to make.

I was a child when I first became aware of my gift. It didn’t take long to figure out that the brighter auras were kinder to me and selfless. While both of my parents are good people, my father’s aura was quite a bit brighter than my mothers. As a result, he was always far more patient and understanding with me. It was clear to see that my teachers and fellow students with brighter auras were usually friendlier and more compassionate. The dark auras were the stereotypical fighters, lunch money stealers, and bullies. I would say I was around 8 years old when I fully figured out that I have a gift that most people don’t have. That possibly nobody else has.

I’ve read some of the ‘new age’ websites and alternative medicine articles that give their take on aura reading. While I believe that the vast majority of it is bullshit, I expect there must be at least SOME other people out there with my ability. So I don’t want to completely dismiss those people as an outright hoax. It’s just that, for me, it doesn’t work anything like the way those websites describe. I’ve visited numerous aura readers and psychics. Most of them have dim or dark auras themselves, and I’m certain they don’t really hold this power. I’m not saying all “psychics” are terrible people. I’ve visited a few who had very bright auras. They were unable to convince me that they really have psychic powers, but they at the very least used their deception to try and help people.

You need to understand… I’m going to end this entry by sharing a terrifying event that is happening to me. But before I get to that, I think there are a few more things I need to explain. I imagine many of you are curious as to what type of aura is the most common. I’m happy to tell you that the majority of people are somewhere between dim and bright. I see very few dark auras. This isn’t scientific, and I haven’t traveled the world plotting out charts and graphs, but I’d estimate around 60% of people are bright-ish. Around 25% dim-ish. Leaving just around 15% dark-ish. Again, these are just estimates. What’s the precise difference between, say, bright and dim? I have no idea. But rest assured, there is far more “bright” in the world than “dark”.

The next thing I’d like to discuss is children. I can see a person’s aura right from birth, and I’ve never encountered an aura changing as someone ages. I’m not sure what this means for the whole nature vs nurture debate. And I’m not saying that everyone with a dark aura always behaves terribly, or vice versa. A person with a bright aura might be born in horrible conditions, acquire a drug problem, and then resort to thievery to feed their addiction. I think the difference is this… a bright aura thief with a horrible upbringing may rob someone, but they would never intentionally hurt someone in the process. A dark aura thief would kill someone if they could get away with it without even a second thought.

Another interesting note… I find the ratio between bright/dim/dark to be similar across pretty much all human activities. Whether I’m at a church or a death metal concert, it always seems to be around that same 60%-25%-15% ratio. I once visited a federal prison and was shocked to see that at least half of the prisoners had bright auras. I had to be at the prison in person to see this because I can’t see auras on photographs, television shows, movies, or even in mirrors. I can only see auras in the real world. Another strange thing… I can’t even see my own aura. I assume and hope I would be on the brighter spectrum… but I can’t see it.

The brightest person I ever saw worked as a social worker. She shone so bright that it was difficult for me to even look at her. Based on the way people acted in her presence, I think that almost everyone around her could sense her brightness in a subconscious way. Everyone loved her. She had donated a kidney to someone she barely even knew. She had a special needs adopted child. Most of the money she earned was donated to various charities. And that’s only the little that I knew of her. This woman shined so brightly that she scared me. It was scary that someone could be so good.

But it wasn’t nearly as scary as the darkest person I ever saw. I was 20 years old at the time, leaving a club downtown at 2 am. A man quietly walked down the street. I didn’t see him at first, but I noticed the light dimming around me. This man was so dark that he partly absorbed the light around him. I looked at him long and hard. He looked desperate, cruel, and callous. When he looked up and locked eyes with me, it made me fall back. He smirked, as though he knew what I could see. I saw his face up close. I would never forget it. And I recognized it when I saw his mugshot a few weeks later in the newspaper. He had murdered his ex-wife and two children in cold blood.

I think I need to get to it now. The reason why I’m writing this out.

I fell in love a year ago. She didn’t shine anywhere near as bright as what I’ve seen before, but she most assuredly wasn’t dark or even dim. She was beautiful. Her sense of humor, her wit, her.. everything. She was my dream woman. And I’ve never told her anything at all about the auras I see. I could go into far more about her but this isn’t a love story. What’s important is this: We fell in love. She got pregnant. We got married. We were happy. We were so happy.

I remember hearing the buzz of my phone two mornings ago. I remember my excitement when I saw “It’s happening. Come to the hospital.” I remember my frustration when I got stuck in traffic. I remember how long it took to find a parking spot. I remember shouting at a nurse “WHAT ROOM IS MY WIFE IN.” I remember bursting through a door and seeing the smile on my wife’s face. I remember seeing the doctor, his light shining so bright, as he told me “Congratulations, it’s a boy.”

The doctor held him up to me.

And all the light in the room dissipated.

“No, this can’t be.” I remember saying. The doctor put him in my arms.

The darkness around my son was so absolute that I could barely even see him. He was a void. He was so dark that the world barely even existed around him. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I started weeping. I think my wife and the doctor thought they were tears of joy. But they weren’t. Lord knows they weren’t.

I think back to the dark outline around that man that murdered his family. It was up to that point the darkest I’d ever seen. But the darkness around my son was 100 times worse. A thousand times worse. And what could possibly be a thousand times worse than murdering your entire family?

It’s been two days. We’re home now. My son’s darkness is so extreme that it dims the hallway leading to his room. My wife knows something is wrong. I think she suspects I’m having regrets about having children at all. If only she knew…

What do I do? He’s my son. Just 20 minutes ago I stood above him, holding a pillow over his face. But I couldn’t do it. Not yet anyway. A man who could murder his two-day old baby boy: what color would his aura be?

And here’s the thought that keeps going through my mind as I sit here alone. The fathers of our worst. The Adolf Hitler’s. Joseph Stalin’s. Timothy McVeigh’s. If their fathers knew what they would become, would they murder them in the cradle? Would they have the strength to hold down the pillow as long as it takes?

I can see the door of my son’s room from my office. The hallway seems to be growing darker. I look down at my hands as I type this. Maybe I’m going crazy, but there seems to be an aura around my hands and arms now. It’s gray. It’s dim. Maybe it’s always been dim.

I’m looking down at the pillow beside me. The grayish dim outline around my hands more apparent than ever. Maybe it’s time. Maybe this is why I have this gift. It all comes down to right now.

Maybe it’s time.

I think it’s time.

[dudence-blog]

Dear Dudence for 16 October 2017

Hope everyone had a great weekend.  There were some leftover margaritas from a party we threw and I’m not one to let them go to waste.  So with frozen slushy goodness in a salt-rimmed glass to power me through, on the answering questions!  If you want your own alcohol-enhanced responses to your problems, big or small, email me at AskDearDudence@gmail.com ro join the fun at Facebook!

One of my closest friends - "Tina" - has been in a happy relationship with "Diane" for about a year. Tina and Diane have this very annoying habit of whispering to each other when we hang out. It doesn't matter if it's just the three of us, or if it's a large group. I'll be in the middle of a sentence saying something in conversation, and Tina and Diane will start whispering! I find this to be very rude and annoying. I don't think they are talking about me specifically, because they do it no matter who is talking. I honestly have no idea what they could be whispering about.

Dear Whispering Love Birds, they are whispering about what to make for dinner tonight, that those pants make your ass look fat, whether they’ll make it to the movie they bought tickets for already, and Tina is telling Diane that she is going to wreck her during their bang session when they get home.  It’s rude, but on the scale of “rude things people do casually” it’s not that bad.  If you can’t just live with it next time they do it during a conversation with say “I’m sorry, what was that?”, they’ll respond “Oh nothing, sorry,” and then the next time they’ll whisper about how nosey you’re being.  Let it go.

What's the classiest way to say "really and truly, DO NOT bring your kids into my house, no matter how cool or mature they are"? We have this problem where we throw nice grown up parties and our friends bring kids. We've tried to be nice. First we changed the names to identify the nature of the party--"Fancy Cocktail Hour," "Wine & Dine," etc. That helped, but didn't fix the problem. So we got direct and included "please--no kids" on the invitation. We STILL get a few people at every party who bring their kids. Because their kids are cool, their kids are mature, blah blah blah. The thing is... I don't care! It's my house and I don't want kids in it.

Dear How to Throw a Grown-Ups Only Party, make it clear on the invite that everyone will be throwing the car keys into a bowl at the entry way; a bowl of keys screams “Class!”  Honestly, if you want it to be adults-only, and you don’t want to risk someone bringing their child, you might be the one who needs to change.  First off, don’t say “please no kids” say “Adults only”.  It’s a subtle different, but an important one.  “Please no kids” is an ask “Adults only” is a tell.  Don’t invite people who have children, or stop inviting them after they violate the “no kids” rule.  Have your parties later in the evening or during the school week.  Don’t invite your breeder friends to your after-Thanksgiving dinner party.  It’s Thanksgiving, they’re with their kids and they’re not shelling out Holiday Babysitter rates.  That one is totally on you.  If none of these are acceptable to you, and you still want to party, you might just need to learn to embrace the suck.  It can be as simple as dedicating some other room as the kid room and banishing them to it, or coordinate for a neighbor to provide some babysitting/supervision for the kids.  Your friends are probably not setting out to provoke conflict, they honestly have forgotten that people without kids don’t always want them around, or they don’t think those rules you’re setting apply their perfect kids.  Ultimately “Your House, Your Rules,” if they can’t abide by it for a night every so often, that’s on them.  

Last week's false compliments LW has me writing in about this. I'm in a similar position where my boyfriend is not objectively good-looking, but he is so amazing of a person and partner that I'm attracted to him anyway. The problem is that some girls in our large friend group (who we're around a lot but aren't close to) think I'm better looking and loudly make fun of us during get-togethers: I must "REALLY like his personality," etc. Thorny banter is the norm for my friends, but this makes him sad and me angry

Dear He’s Pretty to Me, have you tried “he has the most beautiful cock and he bangs me in ways which make my toes curl,” because if you haven’t you might want to give it a go.  You could try telling a group of bullies (because that’s what the girls you’re describing are behaving like) that what they’re doing is mean and they should stop, which is what Newdie is suggesting, or you could try to shut them up by hitting them where it hurts.  You’re with a dude you like, who makes you happy, rub it in their faces how petty their comments are.

One of my closest friends - "Tina" - has been in a happy relationship with "Diane" for about a year. Tina and Diane have this very annoying habit of whispering to each other when we hang out. It doesn't matter if it's just the three of us, or if it's a large group. I'll be in the middle of a sentence saying something in conversation, and Tina and Diane will start whispering! I find this to be very rude and annoying. I don't think they are talking about me specifically, because they do it no matter who is talking. I honestly have no idea what they could be whispering about.

Dear Whispering Love Birds, they are whispering about what to make for dinner tonight, that those pants make your ass look fat, whether they’ll make it to the movie they bought tickets for already, and Tina is telling Diane that she is going to wreck her during their bang session when they get home.  It’s rude, but on the scale of “rude things people do casually” it’s not that bad.  If you can’t just live with it next time they do it during a conversation with say “I’m sorry, what was that?”, they’ll respond “Oh nothing, sorry,” and then the next time they’ll whisper about how nosey you’re being.  Let it go.

I recently showed my friend a pic of my daughter and her boyfriend.  Her only comment was "he's SO dark!"  (He is a different race from her.) I was stunned and didn't know what to say.  Since then, her comment has been really bothering me by how insensitive and racist it was.  Is this a deal breaker for our friendship or forgive and forget?

Dear Stunned Silent, I’m assuming this friend doesn’t have a long history of making insensitive and racist comments. You know, you could ask her about it.  “Hey, the other day you remarked about how dark my daughter’s boyfriend was, what was up with that?”  “Oh, I’m sorry, I said ‘It is so dark’, why didn’t you use the flash on your camera?”  Maybe she was surprised your uggo daughter was going out with such a handsome guy but didn’t want to show you how surprised she could score someone that far out of her league, and focused on the first physical characteristic she noticed?  Maybe she thinks he looks like one of those brooding vampire types?  Or, you know, she starts ranting and raving about how your daughter is contributing to the downfall of western civilization through her miscegenation with the lesser races.  If she does that feel free to cut off the relationship.  But you’ll never know unless you actually ask her about it.

My boyfriend and I have been together for about 5 months and it's honestly the best, healthiest relationship I've ever been in. I am 31, he is 29. We've met friends/ families, said "I love you," and probably spend 4-6 evenings a week with each other. Both of our leases end this spring and I want to move in together. I am so nervous about broaching the topic; most likely because I'm terrified about messing things up if he doesn't want to or thinks it's too soon to discuss. I have to make a decision about re-signing my lease in January.

Dear When to Have The Talk, are you me writing in from the early 2000s?  Nevermind.  If both of your leases are expiring around the same time I guarantee your boyfriend has had the same thought.  That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, but it does mean you’re not going to be bringing up a subject which isn’t also on his mind.  I would go ahead and suggest you have a serious discussion with yourself about whether this is a step you’re taking because you want to further integrate your life into his, or if it’s something you’re considering because it would help save money on rent.  I also guarantee it will be much easier if you both choose to keep your own place, decide to move in at a time of your own choosing without the artificial constraint of “Our leases are expiring!”  It will be much cheaper for one of you to get out of a lease than for both of you to realize you moved in before you were ready.

A friend was recently the victim of an online mob inspired by half truths and outright lies that rallied to seek revenge for a perceived slight.  It spread like wildfire from virtual to real life with calls for boycotts and threats of physical harm at her place of employment. I'm doing what I can to help her rebuild. My problem is that months later, I'm still angry with the friends and friends of friends who participated in spreading this. Social media gave me a peek inside the nastiness of those I once respected.

Dear When Friends are Social Media Shamers, pointing out that these folks were attacking and abusing someone because of a misconstrued Tweet or some comment on a wall stripped of any context would work if you’re dealing with people who have some sense of self-awareness, shame, or are capable of introspection.  Once you’re at the point where you’re tossing shit and piss at someone you’re dealing with a person who is a 50/50 shot of, then, turning on you for supporting the person they were attacking.  I am all for calling people out on such behavior, but do it fully aware they could just as easily turn on you and then, suddenly, some comment you made on a blog 5 years ago is proof-positive you are, literally, Hitler.  As for the potential hire, are you a NFL executive looking at back-up QB options?  Nevermind.  I’m assuming that “problematic history on social media” is something you could choose to not hire for.  Tell the folks you were disturbed by why and what about their behavior disturbed you.  The “Mean Girls” mobbing of people won’t stop until the people mobbing folks for slights way out of proportion to their offense suffer for their actions.  I wish you the best of luck, you’re fighting the good fight.

My father and mother had a very turbulent relationship throughout my childhood. They separated when I was thirteen but stayed married. I didn't see my father again until I was seventeen and went to live with him. Now we have a fairly good relationship, but we don't talk often.  Although I visit my mom often, our relationship is souring. We can't talk about anything without her bringing up my dad.

Dear My Mom is Still Hurt Over My Dad, NuPru is on-point here.  Whatever relationship issues your mom is having with your dad is something you can’t, and shouldn’t, be involved in.  It’s going to be a hard conversation for your mom because she’s going to think you’re being unfair to her, preferring your dad to her, and all sorts of other feelings.  But it is a situation you need to extricate yourself from.  It’s not good for you and it’s not helping herself.

I recently got an unexpected inheritance of a vast sum and I haven't told my long-term boyfriend about it yet. He is amazing. Attractive, attentive, fun, funny, and the complete package- but he is attached to a mother who treats him like dirt. Because my boyfriend isn't a sociopath or a druggie, he isn't worth anything to his mother. Her time and affection goes to his younger brothers who haven't kill anyone yet and that is the best I can say about them (in and out of jail, smoke weed all day, won't work, and are doted on by their mother). My boyfriend's father died while he was in his twenties but left his finances in good standing, except for his widow devoting herself to ruining her life in the name of her younger sons.

Dear Money & Love, oof… hard question time:  Where do you see your relationship with your boyfriend going?  Because right now, wherever it goes, it is going to be attached to a millstone in the form of his mother and brothers.  This is probably not an issue you’re going to be able to keep from your boyfriend for any appreciable length of time.  If you two have been together any length of time he’s eventually going to notice that your spending is a bit freer, your budget a bit less tight, or someone will mention that Uncle Moneybags left his nieces a sum of money.  He’s going to find out, it’s probably better he finds out from you.  So, after that conversation you need to have the harder one about his family and the fact he is in a destructive co-dependent relationship with his mother and brothers.  Just because you have some money now doesn’t mean he gets to put himself in dire financial straits saving his mom from her decisions.  It also doesn’t mean you become the Bad Guy who won’t let him continue being mom’s knight in shining armor.  If you and your boyfriend are going to go further as a couple you need (and you probably need to do this anyway) to insulate yourself from his family.  Also don’t pay off a depreciating asset like a car.  You’d probably have been better off investing the money you spent buying the car and then just taking the payment out of that; as long as the money’s growth out-paced the interest on the loans and fees for the investment you’d have come out ahead.  But I’m giving advice to strangers who don’t know I’m giving advice and doing it for free, so take my money advice for what that’s worth.  But I am right about you protecting yourself from your boyfriend’s destructive family.  

[dwestfieldblog]

IT SEEMS TO BE NOW OR FOREVER/ A NEW DISORDER OF THE AGES

(Or is it only ancient and unjustified?) Hail Eris...I escaped England on the day Boris Johnson became the newest puppet of masters, vested interests, donors and manipulators. The evil of of two lessers. 23rd of July, Sirius day (The sun behind the sun). British people prefer characters these days more than actual character. Put it down to the Reality TV facebook twitter lifestyle. A loveable eccentric eh? Blonde and bumbling, good for a laugh huh? Despite the fact that he is a serial barefaced liar, was a very dubious lord mayor of London with highly expensive/ridiculous ideas and utter bollocks at being Foreign Secretary. Boris wrote in 1999 'I am a raving Euro federalist...a pro European of the most violent, dyspeptic and incurable disposition'. (That was until he saw 52 percent of Brits wanted to leave the EU and thought AHA! I smell a way to power.) We all forgive a rogue with boyish charm don't we? Let's see how long the United Kingdom survives. On the day I flew back The New York Times front page had a column: 'Is Johnson how Britain will end?' 

Depressing advert seen on the side of of red London bus...'Bucket Life (KFC) delivered'. Buckets of antibiotic pumped peculiar half 'chicken' type chemicals straight to your door. Good to have the empty bucket handy after one has consumed a feast fit for vomiting straight out again. Obesity well on the rise over there, he says, wolfing an entire packet of chocolate waffles with half a litre of cold milk.

Religion/politics...Nice quoted headline from a Taliban spokesman last month: 'We will not bomb schools or hospitals'. How very decent and noble of them after all these years, perhaps there aren't enough left to bother with. Today on the BBC news their spokesman said they 'never targeted civilians'. Well quite a lot seem to have been accidentally blown up by roadside and suicide bombs...Hard to imagine a decent future for the non fanatical people of Afghanistan, especially the females and shameful that the west is withdrawing because 'peace' is so near. Fnord. Perhaps they will get a cut in the opium profits/prophets. 'Mission accomplished'. Really? Saudi Arabia will now allow women to go out without permission or a guardian. In '2019'? Surely they will microchip them under the veil and have them followed by drones. How long did it take the sheiks just to accept female drivers? Nice folk who agreed to release a woman's rights activist only IF she said she hadn't been tortured. Swine.

'Can Christians in the US survive without bibles? The answer is probably not'. Thus spake the Global Times newspaper, run by the allegedly communist party of China. This, in response to hearing of new US tariffs on Chinese goods...guess where their bibles are made? That's right. 'The spiritual world of most American people is based on China's industrial capability'. Fascinating sentence on many levels. Take five seconds and think on the implications of that, if you will...

I watched several Trump debacles on CNN this summer. As usual, the 'fake news/liberal media' (etc etc) doesn't actually need to make any stories up, he provides a limitless supply of verbatim goodies with which to play. And then tries to deny he ever said them by using outright lies and obfustication (exactly the same as Boris's 'dead cat on the table' idea.) The four congresswomen of colour Trump ranted about...the chanting crowd 'Send her back'....'I didn't like that they did that and I started speaking very quickly'....Live TV coverage showed it took him 13 seconds before he spoke over them, while he turned left and right...and just for a second got that look of shiny eyed pride. His sentence that he had been 'down there' with the first responders on Nine Eleven. Surely his supporters (apart from QAnon who is either a moron, brilliant comedian or Kremlin sock puppet) must know he is lying in their faces..perhaps they really don't care. Like Melania's coat.

One of the congresswomen (Born in Somalia and a naturalised citizen) had made a non racist comment that some congressmen appear to have received money from Israeli businesses to promote their interests. Well..seems likely and fair enough, that is how it usually works everywhere. Those with money pay politicians to dance and the dosh is gleefully accepted. Not just Israel. It looks as if Trump seized on this as a useful way of stirring up manure. Criticising the state of Israel and her government is not racist just because they are Jewish. Corruption is corruption, whatever the colour or creed. And a prostitute is a prostitute. How many of Trump's KKK followers and Republican Christian haters of abortion actually support Israel? Take a calm guess on the percentages of probability. How many 'acting' people has he around him now? (One way of keeping them on their toes...) 'Fat tangerine racist with the brains of a McNugget' indeed. Hopefully he will continue to take no unhealthy exercise and maintain his cheeseburger diet.  

And Yet Another mass slaughter by a man/boy with a gun. In protest at the 'Hispanic invasion'. In Texas. That's right Texas, which used to belong to the Mexicans before the old land grab in the name of oil. Trump rambling that bigotry, racism and white supremacy have no place in America. Well apparently they do and are not diminished by your former and continuing outright lack of total condemnation over the last few years. Although they have been strengthened by your petulant little blonde boy Hitler youth type attitudes towards blacks, Moslems, Native Americans and Mexicans. Germophobia because of colour? (unless the showers are golden) Does darker skin seem dirty to you? You approach black sportsmen and musicians with a type of benevolent fascination rather than actual friendship.  

Extinction Rebellion...Hmm..'And yes, some of us may die in the process', as one of the English leaders of the movement said. Unlikely the 52 year old with a PhD meant himself. However, a placard I saw held aloft by a young protester read; 'WHY AM I BEING EDUCATED IF YOU DON'T LISTEN TO THE EDUCATED' was a highly salient point (albeit without a question mark at the end.) Scientists amass careful evidence of global warming and the politicians, being paid regular large sums by oil, gas, precious metal companies etc, ignore long term survival for the sake of all following generations. Leave it for the kids to inherit a wasteland. However, in the XR handbook, it mentions the protests causing the 'necessary material disruption and economic cost'. Costs which will be mostly paid by those on average to minimum incomes...doesn't really square with XR also seeking the 'redistribution of wealth'. Marxist twats masturbating their egos. Personally, I am far more on the side of the rebellious, always have been and will be, just seems a shame XR seem so full of smugness, radical unbalanced vegans and hatred. (and I would like to know exactly where their funding comes from) Not possible to be a quiet, determined but peaceful fanatic. I have always liked Jaz Coleman's old quote that 'Fanaticism is the only way of dealing with a situation of overwhelming odds.' At last reason makes perfect sense! And speaking of those who love Mother Earth...

Who didn't love Putin's wonderful speech to a manufacturing and industrial forum in Yekaterinburg?....Hilarious stand up comedy as he asked 'How many birds are dying?' (By flying into wind farm turbines.) And followed that heartfelt classic up with 'This is no joke, the worms crawl right out of the ground' (due to the shaking...) 'This is the consequence of these modern forms of energy production'. In other words, keep buying oil and gas and sod clean solar and wind power because some worms and birds have a problem with it. How does the universe not laugh him into a Siberian gulag? Trump had said that wind turbines 'are killing all the eagles'. He didn't mention the worms. Don't mention the worms! It is lovely to know Mr Putin cares so much about our feathered and slimy friends. (Good to see Russia welcomed back into the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe after 5 years out in the howling wilderness for its invasion of Crimea. Well, the PCE were running very low on funding and Russia owed them a lot of well needed roubles. These assemblies cost money...and souls for Yog Sothoth)

Many hundreds of protesters have been arrested in Moscow over the last couple of weeks. They had been asking a fair question of where all the opposition parties and leaders had gone for the local elections. And the main opposition leader was moved from prison to hospital (and then back again) due to having had 'an allergic reaction'. Well, poison can do that to a man. Especially when he thwarts the Kremlin in any way. Whoever described Russia as a democracy? Not Solzhenitsyn. 11th August, one week after it told America that it is watching its missile programme VERY closely and will 'match every step with one of our own', Russia tells Google to stop advertising 'illegal demonstrations' or it will take action against it. Lovely news.

Meanwhile in Hong Kong...How long before the veritable Mrs Lam 'invites' the tanks in to help? Good luck with freedom people, be careful. At least Li Pcheng is dead. (one of the minds behind the June 1989 massacre of students in Peking) As one newspaper over here said 'One butcher is gone, others remain.' Detention Centres/'Vocational Schools' have been set up in Tibet where lucky students 10-20 years old can 'learn law (!) language and employable skills' and renounce the Dalai Lama. The latter is non optional. And the former. China has said the camps are 'all expenses paid humane boarding schools'. Humane is not a word for semantic realists to associate with their regime. One more time, Tibet is NOT China in any way whatsoever and certainly not spiritually. A fair number of Huawei workers were educated at and worked with and for China's varied military agencies. Enough to be worrying that Britain has yet to refuse them contracts involved in building the 5G mobile network. Smart phones for foolish people. Are these really the folk to have linked up to a telecommunications network in a democratic country?

Speaking of which...Seems that most folk in Britain have not got the smallest idea how much they have been manipulated. Direct links between Boris, (still in close touch with Steve Bannon) Farage and Trump. The well interwoven threads of populists pandering to the lowest common denominator in the name of self gain. The democracies of the western world are being turned against themselves in the name of foul hearted demagogues. Lack of balanced education has made a deep mass unawareness of actual facts. Human emotions are being weaponised to make choices based on wrong information.  It has always been so but it is far easier now due to false twitter accounts/facebook et al. Trump's entire vision is based exactly on genuine false news and what he and the other similar familiars are promoting is a virus of illusion and outright lies.  

Psyops..(psychological operations) have been used for centuries. There is much wrong with the EU, but they are way closer to us (Britain) in spirit and democratic culture than Russia and China. Those voting for more control of borders will eventually be gifted with less and less freedom but at least it will have been their democratic choice. Arf. The majority of Britons believe they are making patriotic choices. They are not. They are assisting in the break up and destabilising of friendships based on level headed, pragmatical agreements. And into this weakness will move those whose only interest is mass control. We are serving our enemies.

But that said, it is good to be aware that 'Opinions result from perceptions and perceptions reinforce opinions which then further control perceptions, in a repeating loop that logic can never penetrate.' Stasis and decay result unless a little shock of the new is introduced one way or the other to 'startle the brain enough to re-frame its experiences'. So there you have it. Or as Buddha said, 'We are the result of everything we have thought.' Makes you think, doesn't it? Ha. How do you know you are thinking? So...You knew that would happen but you did it anyway...

Back to normality....

While in London, I played with my band and after we had played a fast song called Natural Chaos, (a classic) the bass player told me I had shape shifted and looked like a reptile. No drugs involved. Very disturbing to be told this as I have various theories about those who look reptilian. Oh well, perhaps cold rage and evil are still within. Shame. I spent three and a half hours one afternoon freeing a bumble bee from a large black spider's web in the garden. Got it out, gave it a couple of flowers to suck from and get energy, some rain drops of water to help clean itself, tiny tiny bits of hedge twig to gently attempt to get the web off like a careful brain surgeon. Got two legs free, very gently helped clean one half of the head (it didn't fight or try to sting me) Put it in sunshine for some seconds to power it up, then back into cooler shade and back to work. Absolute focus of three hours. Web is VERY difficult to get off. I left it alone with some more rain drops from a flower tray to drink from. Went back, tried again until darkness fell. Had to leave it by side of flower bed, still half covered by binding web. In the morning found the bee was dead but had managed to remove the rest of the web itself and die clean. The energy it must have spent would have been massive. Wondered about attempting to mess with nature and whether it is justified but I could not have left it wrapped up and trapped. So, I am a hippy reptile. And according to someone in my family I am also a Socialist and cynical. Cynical I can live with (having checked the exact meaning and origin) but bollocks to Socialism. Labels are truly ridiculous...Libertarian anarchist is closer to a useful definition. Or failed mystic. Arf arf arf. The wizard without any whizz. Maybe.

'Whatever is done for love is beyond good and evil.' Hmmm...First, try define Love.  What do you seek? Happiness and learning, Freedom and magick...Balance?   Between the I and the AM, there sparks the relay of Will and vision and so, creation. 'Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the kingdom of Heaven, Jesus (Yeshua ben Yosif) in the Gospel of Thomas....So, All together now..Yod-He-Vau-He...(To couples too withdrawn to truly open their hearts, fearing pain or too guilty to express their inner nature to their partner or themselves.) Sex without true passion leads to orgasm but without connection by those who have been taught or who have learned to be afraid of love. Chasing orgasms is a fraction of the colossal energy and brain change possible. When Earth blends with Heaven, the astral is born and all take on aspects of the other, empowering all. Merge the fields, unify the forces and don't rush before the fields are charged. Open and focus.

I read in the New York Times today about various problems with tumblr...would be a pity if it vanished. All I have seen in the years I have been on, has been of far more heart and good spirited humour and care than other sources of individual expression on line for free.  All the best back to school...All Hail Discordia and see you with Love at Halloween. Keep expanding your reality labyrinths until now or forever....

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 6, p. 3

Night Terrors: This is an unusual episode, particularly for this season, in that it’s really quite unambitious. It’s pretty unambiguously an episode of a children’s show, more so than most other episodes of the reboot or even much of the classic series. It’s a straightforward, simple little story about a frightened little boy and the monsters in his closet, and overall it’s pretty charming. The concept of how we deal with fear has definitely been done in much more sophisticated ways elsewhere on the show; “Midnight” was a terrifying look at how fear can make us turn on one another, while the later episode “Listen” is a powerful exploration of the ways in which fear moves and inspires us. This story is a much narrower tale of one child’s experience of feeling worried and vulnerable, but it’s a perfectly fine version of that story.

           While this episode is relatively unimpressive when compared with stories like “Midnight” and “Listen,” its focus on childhood fears could also invoke comparisons to Season Two’s disastrous “Fear Her,” possibly the only episode of the reboot to be more clearly directed at a child audience than this one is. The show seems to have benefited from the criticism of the former episode, as it avoids most of its mistakes (and retains its one strong point by including a cute animal—the landlord’s droopy bulldog is not tied to quantum humor like Possibly Schrodinger’s Cat, but compensates by looking very huggable.) While the ending remains extremely sentimental, the sentiment is grounded in the primary plot about George and his father rather than centering on nonsense about the Olympic torch. Unlike the offensively demonic portrayal of Chloe, George comes across as frightened but actively trying to keep the monsters at bay through various rituals, like having his mother flick the lights on and off and putting frightening things in the closet. This episode also portrays George’s dad much more sensitively than its predecessor managed with Chloe’s mom, and Daniel Mays’s endearing performance in the role goes a long way toward making this story palatable. It would have been nice to see a little bit more of George’s mother, though, not least because female characters other than Amy don’t get much to do in this episode.

           The episode’s visuals vary in quality, with the setting generally faring better than the monsters. The apartment complex has an oddly comforting presence, particularly after the more outlandish settings in recent episodes; to me, it’s the most familiar-looking depiction of contemporary Earth since Davies left the show. The enlarged dollhouse is also enjoyable, and I like the Ponds’ exploration of the odd space, complete with wooden pans painted to look like copper, seemingly anachronistic lighting, and eyeballs in drawers. The dolls themselves are pretty disappointing, though—their appearance is creepy enough, but this portion of the story is just too sleepy and slow-moving to capture my attention. (That said, it does give the Ponds some entertaining dialogue, and I’m amused that Rory is starting to get annoyed at how many times he has “died.”) George’s toys, and the shadows that they cast on his bedroom walls, are more successfully scary; they’re not among the show’s most memorable frights, but I can remember feeling precisely the same kinds of terrors when I was little, so I can empathize with George here.

           As Amy and Rory are mostly tied to the dollhouse plot, it’s not a great episode for them. On the one hand, this episode fits really nicely into their overall arc this season. It’s yet another iteration of the “parents save the world by loving their children and refusing to be separated from them” narrative that happens a lot in Season Six, and my heart goes out to Amy and Rory every time this works for everybody except them. On the other hand, the episode was controversial for not having them directly comment on how close to home this situation is for them. This has been explained in part by the fact that the episode was initially slated for the first half of the season, when it would have preceded their loss of Melody, and then later moved to the second half. This actually winds up working out well for Amy, I think; the second half of this season is very focused on how much she is bottling up her feelings, and the next two episodes are going to go into the psychological impact of that to such a degree that I think it would be a mistake to have her abandon that mentality and actually talk about or even visibly react to her own loss here. While the season as a whole provides lots of reasons for Amy’s occasional underreactions, it never quite manages to do the same for Rory, and so while it’s totally believable to me that Amy would be pushing herself to keep a stiff upper lip, it would have made sense to get more of a reaction from him.

A lot people hate this episode, but while I think you could skip it without missing anything integral to the season, I honestly find most of it extremely pleasant. There are so many large-scale episodes this season that it’s sort of nice to have a more low-key one here, and there’s enough angst both before and, especially, after this episode that a sweet story about the monsters in a child’s closet is a welcome change of pace. B-

The Girl Who Waited: I almost never cry in reaction to TV. There are a few rare occasions in which I’ve gotten slightly teary, but for the most part, my default emotional reaction is to get very tense and forget to breathe. (Temporarily, of course.) The first time I watched the end of this episode, I started sobbing. When I rewatched it a couple of months later, I had exactly the same reaction. I have never had a reaction quite this dramatic to any other television episode, and it took me some time to figure out quite what was producing this response, in large part because this episode is more complicated than it looks. On the surface, this looks like an episode about Amy’s love for Rory, which is sweet but is already very well established and so isn’t great subject matter for a story. In truth, though, Amy’s relationship with Rory is the least important one in this storyline, serving as the constant in an exploration of Amy’s much more volatile relationships with the Doctor and with her own mental state. (The title, which references Amy’s history with the Doctor, is a pretty good clue that this episode isn’t really going to be about Rory.) This episode is dark in a way that this show can only manage every once in a long while, but as bleak as it can be, there is something beautiful about how much it tells us about Amy.

           This is the first intentional trip that the three have taken since the events of “Let’s Kill Hitler,” as “Night Terrors” involved a detour in response to George’s message, and they are pretty clearly on a mission to comfort Amy. Appalappachia (what a great name!) is supposedly one of the nicest planets out there, which would have been a nice respite after the draining events they’ve been through if it hadn’t turned out to be under quarantine for the one-day plague. Instead of a nice vacation, Amy gets a fairly sterilized medical facility, where she is constantly being offered “kindness” that would kill her and where she is mostly cut off from communication with Rory and the Doctor. Her aloneness, her inability to talk to even those closest to her, and the total uselessness of attempts at kindness, are not the subtlest pieces of subtext the show has ever done, but the episode generally does a good job of using the sci-fi plot to showcase Amy’s pain and sense of isolation without sledgehammering “This is a symbol of Amy’s grief over losing her child!!!”

           The plot, in which Amy hits the wrong button when entering Appalappachia and winds up in a different time stream from the one that Rory and the Doctor are in, is simple enough, allowing the episode to focus on the emotions of the characters. Even the Appalappachian facility is pretty straightforward, although the grounds look beautiful and the harsh white light is distinctive; there aren’t a lot of nuances to this planet, and the robots play a minimal role, so the world informs the experiences of the characters without really distracting attention from them. It’s a dark episode for the Doctor, who has to lie to Older Amy in order to bring about Young Amy’s rescue. It’s chilling when he slams the door on Older Amy’s face at the end, but the episode manages to work with this dark side of the Doctor without engaging in outright character assassination. He’s in a terrible position, knowing that his best friend will have to endure 38 years—most of her adult life—of complete solitude if he brings Older Amy on the TARDIS with him. I don’t really know what I think the right choice is here, and that lets us look at the Doctor’s tendencies toward manipulation without making him look like a monster. Rory is also in a harrowing position, especially since he sort of has to grieve for the loss of the wife he knew while interacting with the person she has become. I’m glad that Older Amy makes the decision for him at the end, because it really should be her call, but watching him wrestle with which version of Amy to take with him is horribly sad, and completely justifies his furious claim to the Doctor that “You’re turning me into you.”

           As interesting as the Doctor and Rory are here, though, it’s the Amy Pond show, and Gillan is absolutely magnificent as the version of herself who has been alone for nearly four decades. We can see remnants of Amy’s personality in her sense of humor, but she’s thoroughly changed by her time on her own. For one thing, she’s gotten extremely good at surviving—without any help from the Doctor or Rory, she has managed to fend off the robots and make a life for herself. The nature of that life is difficult to imagine; not only does she have to deal with complete solitude, she has to contend with not knowing whether she’ll ever be rescued. Every day could be the day that the Doctor and Rory finally reach her, and having that hope frustrated over and over again for 38 years is probably the most difficult part of this scenario. It also means that this Amy has had time to process what the Doctor has meant to her life and how his behavior has affected her, and after 38 years, all that’s left is anger. It’s not the first time that he’s accidentally shown up at the wrong moment—their very first encounter featured him turning up twelve years later than promised. Amy’s abandonment takes the concept of “Aw, tiny Amelia waited for her Doctor all night with a little suitcase” and transforms it into something deeply horrifying—all the more so because we know that the Doctor’s sometimes irresponsible behavior has caused Amy irreparable harm already this season. She insists that the device she’s made is a sonic probe, not a screwdriver, because she’s “not on a romp.” The implication that the Doctor is just out playing and being whimsical while other people suffer the consequences makes sense from someone who has endured nearly four decades of solitude because of him, and she’s not kidding when she declares that she hates the Doctor.

           She still loves Rory, though, and the scene in which young Amy uses that love to convince her older self to help her escape is extremely moving. Her words about Rory becoming beautiful as she got to know him are appropriate to the relationship that she has with Rory, which was pretty clearly not love at first sight, but rather a gradual growth toward an understanding of Rory’s importance to her. The scene allows her a beautiful articulation of exactly what Rory means to her, and it’s the kind of connection that seems plausible as something that would still be resonant 38 years later. The following scene, in which she sort of awkwardly does the Macarena to remind herself of her first kiss with Rory, is the one part of this episode that falls a bit flat for me, but its setup, in which she declares “I’m going to pull time apart for you,” is a perfectly-rendered moment: Gillan’s performance and the soundtrack combine to create an absolutely stunning sense of her determination and resolve.

It’s leading up to something impossible, though; there can’t be two Amys, and in convincing Older Amy to save her younger self, Young Amy is unwittingly causing the older version to unwrite herself. “Time can be rewritten” is Amy’s favorite phrase, only here she’s what’s being rewritten, which is even sadder when considered in light of recent events in Amy’s life. There are two Amys now, one who is still clinging to faith and hope, the other who has acknowledged the destructive impact that the Doctor had on her and who is fully willing to express her anger and sense of betrayal. She’s the embodiment of all of the feelings that Young Amy isn’t expressing, but in the end, she erases herself from existence because Rory and Amy will be happier together without her. Until the final seconds, this is portrayed as noble, generous and heroic. “Tell Amy, I’m giving her my days,” she says to Rory, as she speaks to him from outside the TARDIS, only her outstretched hand visible from his point of view. She goes out bravely, willingly turning away from the TARDIS and facing the robots armed with kindness. Her last seconds, as she asks the Interface to show her Earth, are astonishingly effective, and the script invests so fully in Older Amy’s perspective that it takes a while to grasp the fundamental wrongness of the situation. It’s not until the very end of the episode, when Young Amy awakes and asks where her older self is, followed by an ominous chord and a shot of the Doctor looking conflicted, that we get an overpowering sense of “Something very not good is going to come of this.”

One of the hardest things about psychological crisis is that acts of self-erasure feel so temptingly right. At my lowest point, I had a brief breakdown just once, when I came home from a party after having a little bit too much to drink and stood in front of my bathroom mirror and screamed at my reflection while gasping for breath. Other than that, in the eight months or so when I was experiencing my usual mental health issues to a much more serious extent than is usually the case, I didn’t cry, I didn’t raise my voice, and I didn’t let anyone know how much pain I was in. This wasn’t so much fear of anyone’s reaction as it was a persistent sense that there was something else to do; I constantly felt like I ought to do something about my mental state, but I really needed to finish a conference paper, and a couple of my students needed a lot of help or they were going to fail the next assignment, and even though I believed very strongly in the need to acknowledge and work carefully through mental health problems, this belief always came with an attached “…but not yet.” We tend to think about a crisis as a time of emotional intensity, but mine mostly involved waiting—I knew that a lot of difficult feelings were there, and I had every intention of dealing with them…later, when there was more time. It felt powerful, sometimes, when I managed to accomplish things in spite of the fact that I was spending significant portions of most days practically unable to move. Look at me, I thought to myself, heroically finishing a dissertation chapter and grading lots of student work and going to multiple social events in one week in spite of feeling like this. These are fairly small victories, but they felt enormous to me because of the state that I was in, and the pride that I felt from getting my work done and keeping my composure every day was enough of a rush that I couldn’t shake that sense that I needed to keep holding off on acknowledging how much of a crisis I was in. I need to deal with how I’m feeling, I’d think, but I really needed to get a lot done today, and I did it without falling apart, and I stuck with that mentality, week after week, month after month, until finally I had a flash of recognition that if I had let myself step a little bit closer to falling apart that might have been better for me. Over time, though, things get buried, and if you repress your feelings for long enough, it can be difficult to get them back when you figure out that you need to express them. By the time I got to the point of wanting to acknowledge what I’d gone through, I felt detached from some of those feelings, as if there had been another woman who had felt anger and grief and betrayal and fear, but I’d stopped her from surfacing by replacing her with the smiling, professional, emotionally stable person that I’d performed for so long. Trying to get back some of those feelings was difficult, because they had grown confused from lack of use, and while I knew that that other me had existed and had been real, I was mostly left wondering, like Amy, “Where is she?”

I hadn’t quite put some of this into words, until I watched this episode and was so emotionally overpowered by it that I started thinking about why it made me feel so strongly. It took me a couple of times to quite get what was going on in this episode, and even longer to connect it fully to myself, but I can’t think of another episode of television that has looked so much like how that psychological low point felt. As much as this episode made me think about myself a lot, it leaves us with a frightening sense of what is yet to come for Amy. She has been through a lot this season, and she’s struggled to put her feelings into words. She’s finally met the embodiment of her anger, grief, and loneliness, but that body has literally vanished, made to have never existed, and for someone in a crisis, it’s hard to think of a more concerning image. This is an intriguing story, and the use of off-kilter time streams is fascinating in itself, but what’s truly memorable about this one is how much it lets us into how lonely it is to be the girl who waited. A+

The God Complex: This episode isn’t quite as brilliant or as emotionally captivating as the previous one, but while the previous episode remained quite serious and fairly heavy throughout, this one is frequently silly and whimsical, and so the fact that it gets pretty close to the emotional heights of its predecessor is even more impressive. “The Girl Who Waited” is one of several episodes that is memorable as a departure from the show’s usual tone—“Midnight” and “Heaven Sent” are similar in this respect. This episode is exactly what regular Doctor Who should be like: fun, enjoyable, and creative, with a great deal to laugh at but a surprising amount of insight at the same time.

           The fake eighties hotel is an absolutely brilliant setting: it looks so convincingly mundane and ordinary that it throws all of the insanity unfolding within it into sharper relief. Having a separate room for each fear is a solid device, and the shifting corridors mean that this Minotaur-centric episode has managed to turn the hotel into a sort of labyrinth, which is a lovely touch that completely escaped me the first time I watched the episode. The Minotaur itself is fabulous; I generally enjoy the big, clompy monsters, but even apart from that the makeup department did a great job with it. (In spite of the repeated exclamations of “Praise him!” the Doctor generally refers to the Minotaur as “it,” so I’m going to take that as the correct pronoun.) It’s definitely an intimidating presence, and is made even more so by how long it takes us to get a proper look at it, but its appearance also manages to evoke sympathy, in part because when we get closeups of its face it looks surprisingly like ET. Its final scene, in which it gratefully dies after the Doctor cuts off his food source, is a lot more moving than you would expect the death of a character who has just wandered around growling to be, and the Doctor’s translation of his last words show him to have a hugely effective sense of empathy. (He also gets the Doctor to make a brief reference to Classic Who’s utterly ridiculous but generally entertaining “The Horns of Nimon,” which is a nice callback.) What the Minotaur does to its victims—invoking their worst fears in order to prey upon their most deeply-held beliefs—is among the most horrifying things we’ve seen this season, but it emerges from the episode looking more like a victim of the system that links Gods and worshippers than an intentionally evil figure.

           The “minotaur in a labyrinth” narrative isn’t the only traditional story at work here, as this is also an iteration of the time-honored “fears coming to life” episode. This has appeared in plenty of sci-fi and fantasy shows (“Nightmares” and “Fear Itself” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are both good examples.) There are some terrific individual fears here: “that brutal gorilla” is awesome, and the wall of fears is both terrifying and darkly funny; I wouldn’t want my last memorial to be my photo on a wall with “Other people’s socks” captioned beneath it. The story is so interesting, and the Minotaur is such a great monster, that the episode could have gotten away with uninteresting minor characters, but in this regard it remains mostly sublime. Even the initial exchange between the Doctor/Ponds and our new characters for this episode is an absolute delight: Amy mocks Rory for responding to their new acquaintances by yelling “It’s okay, we’re nice!” while the Doctor realizes that this is, in fact, not the first time that someone has threatened him with a chair leg. Howie looks for a while like a sort of mean-spirited depiction of a nerd, but there’s a nice moment after his death in which Rory notes with admiration that he had just gotten over a stammer through speech therapy, and I really appreciate the inclusion of this positive information about a character who might have otherwise come across as a one-note joke. Gibbis is our first glimpse of the Tivolian species, and the bits of information that we get about this constantly-surrendering planet are hilarious. Between their anthem (“Glory to Insert Name Here”), Gibbis’s school motto (“Resistance is Exhausting”), and his job (planting trees so that invading armies can march in the shade), Tivoli sounds amazing; it might be too nonsensical to support an actual storyline, but hearing occasional facts about it works extremely well. As funny as the character is, David Walliams also does a great job of conveying the aggressive, controlling aspects of the character’s cowardice.

If I could pick one single-story character in the entirety of the reboot to serve as a major companion, I would probably pick Rita, the Muslim doctor (or medical student? I don’t think this is clarified) who believes the hotel is Jahannam. Amara Karan’s performance is splendid, allowing Rita to join characters like Rose and Bill in feeling like a believable, well-rounded character even before anything much happens with her. She’s extraordinarily likeable: clearly concerned about what is happening, but composed enough to formulate and find comfort in a theory and even, awesomely, to find out where the hotel keeps its tea. While a parent’s disappointment about a low grade is awfully clichéd as an Asian woman’s worst nightmare, she otherwise gets some really interesting material, and I would include her death scene in that category. It can get irritating when the show brings on a great new female character, only to kill her off immediately, and I do wish that we could have gotten at least a few episodes for this character, especially since the episode ends with the Ponds getting a vacation from the Doctor. Unlike Lorna Bucket a few episodes ago, though, Rita’s death scene really feels like an occurrence that has significance beyond the Doctor’s resulting sense of guilt. The Minotaur’s actions take away most of her ability to think for herself, but she insists on preserving what little autonomy she can retain, asking the Doctor to turn the screen off and let her be robbed of her faith in private. It’s such a beautifully-written moment that I react to it in the way that I reacted to the Hostess’s death in “Midnight” and Bishop Octavian’s death in “Flesh and Stone,” in that I’m just so fascinated by the depiction of the dying character’s final moments that it doesn’t occur to me to think about the death in terms of how it might move forward the narrative or other character arcs. Not having Rita as a long-term companion is the biggest missed opportunity of this season, but even in death she’s compelling and memorable.  

This is also the one episode this season in which I’m completely satisfied with the depiction of Rory. There’s been a lot of vagueness regarding his reaction to the events surrounding Melody Pond, but in this story, we can see just how troubled he is. The Minotaur has so little interest in him that he’s constantly seeing ways out of the hotel, and once we find out what the Minotaur is actually interested in, this means that Rory just doesn’t have any faith. Not in the Doctor, not in his relationship with Amy—just no faith at all. As the hotel seems to take the concept of faith extremely broadly, well beyond religion, it’s a sad indication of his current mindset that the Minotaur can’t find any belief to latch onto. He also, in his conversation with the Doctor, speaks of his travels with the Doctor in the past tense, suggesting that he is basically done with the kind of life he and Amy have had on the TARDIS. I still think that this season could do more to explain Rory’s feelings, but this episode gives us far more depth for him than any other.

For a while, Amy seems like a minor presence in this episode. The version of herself who feels actual rage and disillusionment toward the Doctor having been erased from existence in Appalappachia, she is now the embodiment of firmly-committed belief in the Doctor. The previous episode’s events were a severe test, but she has gotten through it, clinging to her belief in the Doctor by the skin of her teeth. She’s fully prepared to trust him here, which is why she’s in so much danger. She’s fought for the faith that so endangers her here, maintaining her hope in him even when he abandoned her as a child, believing “for twenty minutes” when he asked her to in “The Eleventh Hour,” trusting in him enough to walk past the Angels with eyes closed in “Flesh and Stone,” keeping hold of that faith even when he was gone from the universe in “The Big Bang,” insisting, in the midst of grief and loss besetting her throughout Season Six, that “time can be rewritten.” She’s gotten through all of that without losing her grip on her faith, but in order to survive the Minotaur, she’s got to destroy it. She even has to destroy this belief voluntarily—it’s not taken forcibly from her, so she has to deliberately choose to set aside her trust in him. After so many years of insisting on that belief, she essentially has to relearn how to see the world, and she has to do so in a moment characterized by precisely the kind of fear that would generally call forth her reliance on the Doctor. Gillan’s face here is just perfection, showing not so much grief as confusion, as if she is wondering, “how do I learn to think like this?” The knowledge that her worst fear is her disappointed but still hopeful younger self makes this even sadder. (I wasn’t sure, when I first watched this scene, whether the room was Amy’s or the Doctor’s, but on rewatch, it’s clear that it’s hers, because the door that falls on Rory has a 7 on it, which is established earlier in the episode as Amy’s room.) My heart just breaks for Amy, but I’m impressed that she has the strength to go through with what she does here, even if she does have the Doctor walking her through it. It’s not easy to let go of the beliefs that sustain you, especially when you’ve been having a rough time, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be for her to have to shift a fundamental sense of how she perceives the world within seconds.

This makes the ending something of a relief. I have varying opinions on the moments in which the Doctor sends companions away for their own good; I’m perfectly fine with it in “The Parting of the Ways,” for instance, but much less so in “Journey’s End.” This is one of the times in which it seems justified—after what the Ponds have been through this season, and especially after what we’ve seen of Amy’s mental state, they really do need some time away from the Doctor. I love that he gives them a house with a little blue door, and that he remembered exactly what Rory’s ideal car looked like. (In general, I’m just really happy that the Doctor got something specifically for Rory here, because sometimes he treats Amy like she’s his companion and Rory is just along for the ride, so I’m glad that he put some thought into his temporary departure from both of the Ponds.) He makes it clear that he’s not saying goodbye for good, but this is a huge transitional point for them; after this, they start to gravitate back toward their normal lives, and act as much more temporary companions. Everything is different after this episode, and it’s not because anyone died, or had their memory wiped, or jumped into a timeline, or got trapped somewhere, it’s just because the Doctor and Amy thought about what they meant to each other, and realized what needed to change. A+/A

Closing Time: This sequel of sorts to “The Lodger” captures some of the fun of that earlier episode, but overall doesn’t live up to it. James Corden continues to be delightful as Craig, and young Stormageddon is enjoyable, but the episode doesn’t quite manage the exuberance that made “The Lodger” such a success. I do like seeing the Doctor hanging out in Craig’s house again, and the shop generally works well as a setting, particularly because it gives us an opportunity to watch the Doctor play with toys. (I agree with him that Yappy the Robot Dog is nowhere near as good as K-9.) While there are plenty of fun moments here, much of the humor seems much cheaper than it was in Craig’s first episode. While “The Lodger” grounded most of its comedy in the absurdity of the Doctor functioning in an ordinary human space, this episode takes as the premise for many of its jokes the notion that the Doctor and Craig are acting sort of like a couple. There are multiple scenes that play the possibility of a Doctor/Craig relationship for comedic effect, most notably Val assuming that the Doctor and Craig are involved and the Doctor declaring his love for Craig in an effort to distract him from the spaceship. Gareth Roberts, who wrote the episode, is gay himself, but even coming from a gay writer this kind of humor seems mean-spirited to me. There’s also a brief bit of “comedy” about the Doctor walking into a changing room while a woman is changing, as well as a scene about Craig freaking out a female employee working in the lingerie section. There are plenty of moments of humor that do work, but it’s aggravating that we have to wade through these ill-advised jokes in between.

           As a Cyberman story, this is a pretty mixed bag. I really like Cybermats, so having them running about is nice, and there are moments in which the Cybermen are used to very good effect: the solitary one that greets Shona from a changing room in the beginning is especially creepy. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough of an effort here to figure out how to resolve the Cyber threat, so we get a silly resolution that fits nicely into the seasonal arc but doesn’t work very well on its own. Throughout the Moffat era, the Cybermen are used to challenge ideas about what constitutes humanity and how emotion fits into that picture. It’s an endeavor that functions much more interestingly in later seasons, when Moffat begins to shift into an understanding of the fundamentally human qualities that are not immediately reliant on emotion. For now, though, we’re stuck with Craig’s love for his child overcoming the cyberprogramming, and it comes across as an arbitrary and underwhelming way of fending off the threat. (Also, the Doctor specifically calls attention to the idea that love was the solution—if you’ve got a somewhat lazy ending to your story, it’s probably best to avoid having the Doctor directly mention it.) We conclude with a couple of scenes that lead into the finale: first, there are some voiceovers from people who saw the Doctor in his final moments before going to Lake Silencio, and then we move to River being sent on her mission to kill the Doctor. The latter is at least a decent way of building anticipation, but the first is deeply annoying and utterly unnecessary.

           I do find this episode more interesting in terms of its contribution to the more personal dimensions of the seasonal arc. Amy and Rory are very close to not being in this episode, but it’s still highly concerned with their feelings. The most obvious approach that this episode takes to the Ponds is the final installment of the “everyone saves the world through a refusal to be separated from their children, except for Amy and Rory” subplot. Craig’s love for his son is so powerful that it can offset Cyber technology; meanwhile, Amy and Rory have a brief, basically meaningless exchange with a little girl looking for an autograph. Every time this season juxtaposes triumphs of parental love with their own loss of Melody, it’s very effective, and this is the moment at which the contrast is at its strongest. The subtler approach to the Ponds’ emotional state comes in the form of a tiny echo of language from earlier in the season. Amy is now a model, appearing in posters for “Petrichor,” a perfume. We were first introduced to this term in “The Doctor’s Wife,” when the TARDIS defined it as “the smell of dust after rain.” I guess this isn’t completely implausible as a perfume scent, as there is a quite nice aroma to dust in this state, but it’s just unusual enough that it draws attention to the words. If you google “Dust after rain,” one of the first things that comes up is “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” a book that appears to be focused on our difficulties with properly expressing and experiencing grief. I don’t think that the show is referencing this particular book, but I mention it because it confirms for me that there’s a basis for my association between these images and the notion of grief that has been somehow blocked. Rain is naturally suggestive of tears, but the idea of dust in the wake of rain conjures up the image of the dull, messy feelings that ensue when the first shock of grief is over. We see basically nothing of the Ponds’ feelings here, but we persist in the sense, set up in the previous two episodes, that something is very badly wrong.

           These implications about the Ponds’ emotional state give the episode a little bit of the emotional weight it would otherwise lack, and Corden and Smith work together so well that the episode is more successful than the script really merits. The cheap humor and the weak ending to the Cyberman plot are enough, though, to make this a fairly weak episode. C+

The Wedding of River Song: “Sometimes you don’t look hard enough,” the Doctor tells Amy, in a season finale that necessitates extremely careful observation. This episode definitely has its flaws, but in between them, it’s absolutely magical. Like much of this season, it is not really an episode for casual enjoyment, as appreciating its nuances requires a lot of commitment and effort, and I can understand the mentality that this episode is just too much work. In spite of the ambition, though, it’s absolutely delightful, full of tiny pieces of brilliance that mostly counterbalance the moments in which it goes slightly off the rails.  

           The story is aided by a terrific setting, replete with “don’t feed the pterodactyls” signs, Charles Dickens on the news, and Emperor Winston Churchill returning home on his own personal mammoth. (I really, really want there to be a mammoth on this show. I’m sad that we didn’t get to see Churchill’s mammoth here, but even just the mention really made me laugh—there’s something about the solemnity with which the newscaster delivers the line that makes it hysterically funny.) It’s chaos, but it’s wonderfully satisfying chaos, the kind that works because it’s silly but also very carefully planned. I wish we had five episodes in which to play around in this universe, but I guess that giving us a glimpse of it without dwelling too long lets us enjoy how thrilling it is without getting tired of it. Even the bits that we see of the regular universe are wonderfully done: there are CHESS GLADIATORS and Dorium’s severed head enjoying the free wi-fi in a crypt, and a bad guy being devoured by skulls, and everything is just so thrilling and imaginative and I love it.

           There are also some pretty glaring issues here, the first of which is that the timeline of events in the main, ordinary universe just completely confuses me. I can just about buy that Amy would be able to access some of her memories from the real world in the time-collapsed universe, although even that requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. What I can’t really follow is what her experience is of the real timeline. At what point does she remember what happened in the alternate timeline? When does she become aware that the Doctor has died? I can understand the sequence of events within each universe, but the interaction between them just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.

The other main problem is the depiction of River’s avoidance of the main timeline. In spite of being in the title, it’s not really a great episode for River, in part because her declaration of how much she will suffer if she has to kill the Doctor is just so overwrought. Kingston is usually fantastic, but she can’t quite make the heavy-handed scene work, and so her wedding doesn’t have quite the lead-in that I want it to. I do rather like the actual wedding ceremony, which is pleasingly simple and sweet, but I would have liked this entire development better if River’s emotions had been worded more clearly, or in ways that didn’t make her look massively selfish. (I mean, she thinks having to kill the Doctor is worse than the deaths of billions of people? Really?)

The gaping plot holes with regard to the relationship between universes and the poor writing for River definitely weaken the episode, but there are a lot of compensations. The Doctor is very charming in both universes, in spite of being stuck with possibly the worst haircut ever seen on this show while he’s in the alternate world. I like his early-episode exuberance, followed by the sobering news about the Brigadier’s death—if this had been the last we’d heard of the Brigadier, I’d be a little sad that he didn’t get more of a moment, but the end of Season Eight takes care of that, and the Doctor’s grief is nicely played here. He is also sort of adorably invested in the Ponds’ relationship, even if he thinks that dating basically just involves “texting and scones.” I really appreciate that the season ends with his decision to play dead for a while, on the grounds that he has gotten “too big.” We haven’t spent a lot of time exploring his actual reaction to the accusations that River made at the end of “A Good Man Goes to War,” but his actions here suggest that he’s actually thought about some of his flaws and is trying to correct them, so that’s nice. Moffat’s insistence on incorporating the show’s title into the plot might be wading a little bit too far in a meta direction, but I honestly really do enjoy it, and so I like the decision to end the episode with Dorium repeating “Doctor Who?”

While there’s a lot of spectacle at work here, the heart of the episode is still Amy’s attempt to recover from the events that have happened to her this season. “The God Complex” was a pivotal moment in her arc, but giving up on the intensity that had characterized her faith in the Doctor to that point isn’t an endpoint but rather the creation of a new set of problems. As I said before, the nature of her memories of the real world is a bit confusing, but she does seem to have at least some access to the memories that occurred this season, which means that she’s reacting to the loss of Melody and to the choice that she made to cut off her faith in the Doctor. This has had a number of effects—for one, now that she isn’t relying so heavily on the Doctor to fix things, she’s doing more herself. Her efforts to join River in summoning all of the Doctor’s friends to come to his aid don’t have much of a narrative payoff—there isn’t much they can do about this scenario, so they’re mostly irrelevant. It’s a nice reversal, though, of the previous season’s finale, in which all of his enemies joined forces to defeat him, and I like that Amy and River have been working together on such a large-scale project. This universe also exists in such an extreme state—everything is happening at once! Time is falling apart!—that it creates a sort of perpetually high-stakes environment, and that seems to draw more reaction from her than anything else has this season. Not long ago, she was engaged in pretty destructive self-erasure, and some of her behavior here seems like an endeavor to un-erase her life. She literally has to draw things, to commit them to paper in order to prevent them from escaping her, and the attempt to create physical memories of things that threaten to vanish from her mind is an interesting psychological step for her.

She also directly articulates her feelings about the loss of her baby, in an incredibly dark scene that ends with her leaving Madame Kovarian to die. This is preceded by a moment in which she shoots down a lot of the Silence with a machine gun in order to protect Rory, immediately before finally articulating her anger about the loss of her baby. Having Amy destroy the Silence immediately before breaking her own silence about her feelings is not going to win Moffat any Subtlety of the Year awards, but I like it. If this were the end of a conventional action movie, killing Madame Kovarian would be the natural endpoint—she’s a force of considerable destruction, whose actions have not only hurt Amy and those close to her but have also sometimes threatened all of existence. Amy hasn’t exactly gone evil here, but she has rejected the kind of ethics that the Doctor usually employs. Her words to Madame Kovarian are partly a statement of vengeance toward the woman who stole her baby, but they seem just as motivated by her thoughts about the Doctor. The Doctor told young Amelia that he would be five minutes and then didn’t return for twelve years, he told her that he’d pick her up in Appalappachia and then he showed up 38 years late, he has at multiple points wandered off without telling her when he would return, and her whole relationship with the Doctor has featured the persistent uncertainty about whether or not he would be there when he said he would. When she tells Madame Kovarian, “You know what else the Doctor is? Not here,” it’s partly an expression of her willingness to break the Doctor’s rules in his absence, but in part an expression of anger at the abandonment she has suffered over and over again on this show. I do think that this scene lurks fairly close to linking trauma with violence, but it generally avoids suggesting anything too damaging. Earlier in the season, I mentioned that the Doctor had sort of gone off of the usual Doctor Who ethos and into more of a Star Wars approach, and Amy is essentially embracing here the notion of “striking down the villain is the natural goal of an adventure.” It’s a mentality that the Doctor usually rejects (although not without exception), but she’s turned into Luke Skywalker, not Darth Vader, and that removes most of the harm that this might otherwise do.

Her position of rejection toward the Doctor’s approach to violence is not the end of the story, though, because we eventually return to the usual world, unburdened by the collapse of time. Amy is sad, but when River turns up she’s more willing to communicate than she has been for much of the season. She starts to tell River everything, from her grief about the Doctor to her guilt about Madame Kovarian. (I really appreciate that the script makes time for her to directly acknowledge that this is still real to her; River tries to give her a pass by saying that this happened in another universe that has now gone out of existence, but Amy rightfully dismisses this with the brief statement that “I remember it, so it happened, so I did it.”) I’m happy whenever there’s interaction between Amy and River, but it’s especially nice to watch Amy so determined to face reality and express her feelings. This kind of emotional awareness and directness has been eluding her the whole season, and so this conversation feels like a huge triumph for her, even though it is an expression of some very troubled feelings.

It’s not a gloomy ending, though, because Moffat gives Amy a moment of tremendous joy to cap off a season that has been mostly sadness for her. We don’t hear exactly what River tells Amy about how the Doctor escaped death—it’s fitting, given the themes of the season, that the most important words are silent to us. We know the substance of what has happened, though, and can piece together something of what those words must have expressed. At Lake Silencio, when she watched the Doctor die, she immediately said that maybe it was a clone or a doppelganger, because she’s Amy Pond, the woman who believes, the one who acts with constant faith in the idea that time can be rewritten. You can’t rely on that, not all of the time, not even with a time machine and a brilliant alien best friend, and Amy let herself get so wrapped up in the idea that things will right themselves, that a miracle will happen and all will turn out for the best, that her faith has sometimes led her astray. This kind of faith isn’t an entirely bad thing, though, at least not when it’s directed toward something good, and what River’s off-screen words reveal to her is that her sometimes excessive hopefulness might be damaging at times, but it’s not always going to be wrong. We don’t hear the words, whatever they are, just the scream of pure happiness that gives way to adorable awkward dancing. It’s not the same kind of joy that we got at the end of last season, when the Doctor rebooted the universe and everyone ran off jubilantly after a beautiful wedding. After all of the holes that this season has poked in Amy’s approach to belief, though, having that quality actually validated for once is such a lovely way to resolve this season that I wind up happier about this than I did about the more obviously joyful conclusion to Season Five.

           Plenty of this episode doesn’t work, but the pieces that do add up to a beautiful resolution of this season’s narrative. The previous Christmas special defined Christmas as being “halfway out of the dark,” and it would have been a reasonable guess to assume that the expression would wind up characterizing the Doctor, who in previous seasons was the only character really to have an extended brush with darkness. At the close of the season, though, it’s Amy who is best described by this phrase. She hasn’t gotten past every dark thing she’s gone through this season—as the start of this scene shows, she’s still dealing with her actions in the other world. If she hasn’t completely emerged from the darkness, though, she looks like she’s about halfway out: after a season of silence, she’s finally speaking, and for a moment at least, she’s so full of joy that it looks like Christmas morning. A-/B+

[nightcoremoon]

there's a disturbing trend going around recently in which binarism is being overused.

now when I say binarism I mean in the literal most basic sense. 1 and 0. black and white. good and evil. right and wrong. dark and light. and the like.

people pretend like all values are in absolutes.

discussion of religion lumps all atheists versus all those with faith. this ignores agnostics. this ignores atheists of different faithful upbringings and different societies and different cultures. this ignores the divide between judeochristian entities. this ignores the divide between east & west. this ignores the split between buddhism and hinduism. this ignores the difference in the structure of faith versus mythology. it ignores enmity between different branches of various faiths but mostly between types of christianity: most notably the divide between catholic and protestant. even further it ignores orthodoxy (which I'll fully admit to knowing jack shit about which is why I don't discuss it with frequency). this ignores unitarians and other blended faith. I see cishet white dudebros talking shit about faith and religion as if it's all the same thing, all diametrically opposed to their own philosophy, and assume that all atheists are how they are even though this demographic is still instilled values of fundamentalist christianity. they see the issue as their limited intelligence and their position on atheist as the other side of the coin in which all religious people are on the same boat on the other side. I see ignorant christians lumping "heathens" of every religion and also atheists together as The Enemy™ who are all equally bad and terrible and going to hell for their beliefs. even though that's not even how christianity works. even further I see christians believing the basics of their faith in which jesus forgave all of humanity for their sins and they'll all be pardoned in the afterlife but still turn right around and condemn gays, women, and brown skinned people to hell. sure, there are multiple multitudes of people who don't follow in these demographics, but view the discussion in the same terms, as atheism / science vs religion / christianity, as if terms were interchangeable.

this is just one example.

politics. people see left versus right. they see liberal versus conservative. they see red versus blue. they see republican versus democrat. this ignores the tiers of leaning, apoliticals, and the extremists. this assumes all people on either side are all the same. this ignores all of the more complex situations that can arise from governing masses of people. you'll get liberals clamoring over hilary clinton, bernie sanders, and both of the obamas in spite of all of their questionable deeds which come hand in hand with big government, unable to distinguish the difference between moderate conservatives and outright fascists, who either refuse to compromise with the moderates or don't take seriously the threat of the nazis. and you'll get conservatives shitting themselves in rage at lgbtq rights because they're bigoted assholes incapable of considering dissenting opinions or just bitching and moaning over their guns being taken away and digging their heels in at any left leaning prospects which save lives, adamantly refusing to acknowledge that their paragon of tangerine apathy is an incredibly dangerous sociopath with the mind of a child no matter how many steps down hitler's path he takes, because they can't comprehend that racism affects people other than themselves. and on top of all of that you'll see cynical fucknuggets sneering at everyone because "both sides are the same" because they both feel conviction in their beliefs. you'll get rabid anarchists who all demand that everyone create cryptosocieties because the neoliberalism and liberals are all the same people who will cause nuclear winter when they take control of the country and go to war with russia, the moderate conservatives and the literal mussolini sympathizers are all the same people and should be murdered on sight, and even the rare breed who follow in randist objectivism as if that's a good idea. you get literal fucking communists who have never read a history book in their life who delight in cyberbullying everybody who dares to have an opinion. caught in the crossfire are all of the minorities who suffer to the tyranny of majority which is democracy. there are liberals who love cops and guns, there are conservatives who're black or gay, and they get left behind without a single explanation and thrown under the bus for the sake of "their side".

it's ridiculous.

we've even got this mentality so ingrained we stop acknowledging it. just likes and dislikes on youtube, and no "I liked some aspects of this video but disliked other aspects" selection. "I love this band" vs "this band sucks", no "this band does not appeal to me but I can respect its artistic integrity and I can appreciate that there are people who enjoy it". the line drawn between rich capitalists and the poor workers even though there are people who have money and struggle to make ends meet as well as people who have no extra money but still have a roof, a bed, clothes, a meal, and animals who also have a meal [the middle class and the lower middle class exist, it's not just the upper class and the lower class. also fuck billionaires]. division of intelligent people and stupid people as if there aren't a dozen types of intelligence exhibited in people. I could go on for hours.

it's a problem with humans in general, it seems. our obsession with anally compartmentalizing everything has stretched nearly every aspect of society to the breaking point. every culture in the world I'm aware of has issues like this. and the biggest topical issue right now is gender. uneducated eurocentric white christianized cis people only think there are two, and ignore all attempts to explain that the gender binary is completely nonexistent outside of the realm of social constructs. they shove their heads up their asses and go "blah blah blah I can't hear you" until your mouth stops moving and they regurgitate the same platitudes forcfed into them their whole lives, hands held through everything they've ever experienced, and told exactly what to think at any given moment.

literally nothing in life is a coin flip.

tangential I know but I wanna draw analogues to blizzard entertainment. particularly think of the worlds of warcraft and starcraft... no pun intended. warcraft has horde versus alliance. you got the humans who have gone to war with the orcs forever, the dwarves who support their allies the humans, the gnomes who take refuge with the dwarves, the night elves who just want to keep the world from falling apart, the drainei who are basically just literal stereotypical space jews who want to keep their dying culture alive, the worgen who are just humans who are also werewolves from HyperBritain, and the pandas who joined them but didn't realize they were enlisting in a war against their own people. and that's the alliance. frail tenuous connections based on necessity. then you have the horde. you have the orcs who just wanted a home in azeroth but the xenophobic humans attacked them and started a war, the trolls who all lived peacefully with the orcs, the peaceful tauren [giant cow people] who traded with the orcs, the undead forsaken who were cast out by the humans (for being similar in appearance to the undead scourge of lordaeron who were all used as weapons by literal demons) and taken in as allies by the orcs, the blood elves who used to be what became the night elves before they became literal space nazis like it's in fucking wolfenstein and decided hey let's help out all the people who hate the people who love the people who we hate (the enemy of my friends friend is my friend), the goblins who almost got eaten by a dragon and then begged the orcs for help, and the pandas who were in the same boat as before. an honor bound covenant of staying alive together and resisting the purge from the alliance. but then you also have the evil aliens and the evil demons and the crazed wildlife and the evil dragons and the evil lich king and the evil humans and the evil orcs and the evil elves of all elf races and the neutral goblins that make it absolutely clear that the horde and the alliance are not the be all end all on inherent goodness or evilness. evil is done by the alliance, the horde, third parties; good is done by the alliance, the horde, third parties. there are dozens of "sides".

meanwhile starcraft has terran, protoss, & zerg. all three just wanna live their lives but they're all brought into a war with two kinds of aliens they never met before, and the actions of a few evil people in each group caused a fuckin full scale intergalactic war between all of them. and not to mention the terran fighting each other even though they're all from the same planet, the rogue protoss having their various civil wars, and the collapse of the zerg overmind causing tribal warfare between zerg, and amon who is super super evil and wants to kill everybody in the universe and fuse their corpses together because the xel'naga (gods) left an unclear prophecy, and also the xel'naga themselves. there are a dozen factions of each of the three races ALONE who all hate each other, and not all of them are good or evil. in fact it's left super obvious that the only truly evil people are amon and the only truly good people are in raynor's allies, kerrigan's swarm, artanis' fleet, and uhhh probably valerian's dominion maybe.

and that's just how the world is. things aren't ever simple and easy. there are exceptions to every rule. bickering and fighting and putting things into neat little categories and thinking you're the fucking king of the field are all not helping the situation we're in.

all atheist assholes and all religious assholes are bad. all neoliberals and all fascists are bad. not all atheists or religious people are good but many are. not all people with a political leaning are good but many are. (this ones iffy and I'll make a lot of enemies but... moderate liberals seem to be pretty okay for the most part and moderate conservatives can be okay if they make concessions and fucking listen and the other positions seem to be directly proportional in overall goodness to how much they discount dissenting opinions. naziism is not an opinion, guillotine the billionaires, complicity in fascism is fascism which is bad, tolerating intolerance is a fallacy, fuck trump, fuck every single dumb motherfucker who voted for him, oh yeah and fuck the broken not working two party system). gender is a complex concept beyond complete human comprehension and anyone who thinks they know everything about us is a fucking idiot who should stop talking. stop shoving things into one of two boxes.

we should really think in more like magic the gathering colors. black is the evil demon hell zombie monster fucks. white is the be nice to people but destroy evil brigade. blue is the logic/science/reason/coexist with the scary brutal nature or die/survival of the fittest kind of people. red is the "nature is scary and life is meaningless so let's all just get drunk" aspect of apathetic nihilistic neutrality. green is the "nature is beautiful and we should stop fucking destroying it and then make the world a better place" tree hugging nerds who mean well but can be a bit cold and unfeeling when it comes to those less fortunate. we'll all probably do a lot better thinking in those terms than how we've been doing.

[live4thelord-blog1]

Do Not Be Deceived: Hell Is Real

Msgr. Charles Pope • February 27, 2019 • 1 Comment

Last Judgment – Michelangelo Buonarroti (1541)

There is a verse from the Letter to the Hebrews that deserves attention because it is a more common problem than many imagine:

See to it, brothers, that none of you has an unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But exhort one another daily, as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness (Heb 3:12-13).

When most of us read a text like this, we think only of obvious and dark cases. For example, someone’s tendency to lash out at others leads him to increasing violence and cruelty, or someone’s desire for possessions leads him to increasing stinginess and unkindness, or someone’s lust leads him to sexually promiscuity that is more and more debased and perverse. However, there are less egregious versions of what this text describes that can lead even religiously observant Catholics to become hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

An example of this is the outright, almost categorical denial of the doctrine of Hell by a large number of Catholics, even ones who attend Mass faithfully each week. Although Jesus taught it consistently, many today firmly resist the biblical teaching that many people are in significant danger of going to Hell.

It can be argued that 21 of the 38 parables have as their theme the warning of impending judgment in which some are judged unable or unwilling to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. For example, there are sheep and goats; wheat and tares; those on the right and those on the left; wise virgins and foolish ones; those who accept the invitation to the wedding and those who refuse; those properly dressed and those who are not; those who are told, “Come, blessed of my Father” and those who are told, “Depart from me.” This is not the place for me to give a full teaching on these doctrines. (I have posted in more depth on these topics previously: here and here and here.)

Many today, even among the religiously observant, do not take these consistent teachings seriously. “God wouldn’t do that because He is love and compassion,” they say. “There aren’t many people in Hell, except maybe Hitler.” Most people are quite “hardened” in this “deceitful” view, to use the language from Hebrews. Even when presented with verse after verse from Scripture—most directly from Jesus’ mouth—many still stubbornly persist in rejecting what is clearly taught, saying: “Yeah, I know, but He didn’t really mean it. He won’t really do that.”

To illustrate, some years ago a woman confronted me after Mass objecting to my sermon, which included a warning about Hell for those who refuse to repent. (The Gospel for that Sunday included Jesus’ sad warning that the road to Hell was wide with many on it, while the road to salvation was narrow and only a few were walking its way and would find salvation). She said to me, “I didn’t hear the Jesus I know in your sermon about Hell today.” I replied, “But ma’am, I was quoting Jesus!” She did not miss a beat, saying, “Oh, please! We know He never really said that.” This reply indicates a hardening by the deceit of sin on several levels: she rejects the revealed Word of God in favor of her own views, she rejects the doctrine and warnings of Hell itself, and she remakes the Lord so that He conforms to her notions and can be worthy of her credence and worship. (We used to call this last thing “idolatry.”)

Listen again to the words from Hebrews: See to it, brothers, that none of you has an unbelieving heart … so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. This refers to more than just wicked behaviors. Sometimes the hardness is a refusal to believe revealed doctrines or to accept the Lord’s serious warnings. A world hardened by the deceit of sin will not accept that there are lasting consequences for the refusal to repent. Many have allowed themselves to be influenced by it, setting aside God’s Word in favor of human ideas and preferences.

Beware of this tendency, which is so common today. Study the doctrines. Read the warnings of the Lord in Scripture. Ask questions about things that puzzle or trouble you; pray for insight—but do not be misled into sinfully and stubbornly rejecting what is revealed.

The reading for Wednesday’s Mass contains a salutary warning:

Rely not on your strength in following the desires of your heart. Say not, “Who can prevail against me?” for the LORD will exact the punishment. Say not, “I have sinned, yet what has befallen me?” for the LORD bides his time. Of forgiveness be not overconfident, adding sin upon sin. Say not, “Great is his mercy; my many sins he will forgive.” For mercy and anger alike are with him; upon the wicked alights his wrath. Delay not your conversion to the LORD, put it not off from day to day; For suddenly his wrath flames forth; at the time of vengeance, you will be destroyed. Rely not upon deceitful wealth, for it will be no help on the day of wrath (Sirach 5:1-10).

The Lord says these things because He loves us. He does not want us to be lost. In the end, though, God respects our freedom to say no to what He is offering. He knows how we are made and how stubborn we can be. He knows that the values of Heaven (particularly love of our enemies, forgiveness of those who have wronged us, and chastity) are not pleasing to many people. The Lord will not force us to live values like these, but they are what Heaven is about. Thus, He warns us to let Him instill a desire in us for what He offers so that we will desire the Heaven He describes. Listen to Him; He warns us in love so that He can take our heart of stone and give us a true heart to desire the Heaven He is offering.

Do not be hardened by deceitful teachings rooted in this world of sin!