#my entire worldview is reorienting

[noknowshame]

today years old when I learned the Usher lyrics are "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love Again" and NOT "the DJ God is Falling in Love Again"

[outoutdamnspark]

I just found this in my drafts and I don’t remember writing it or where exactly I was going with it, but hey! Have some random Gardenshipping thoughts!

(cw: none. one minor suggestive mention of office stuff. under cut for length)

For all the silverfox!Emmet x Reina stuff I’ve thought of, for some reason I’ve never thought of Reshiram!Emmet x Reina before? So...

🔥 I imagine Emmet is an aspect of Reshiram - not the god-dragon in full, but a piece of it. He’s probably reincarnated several hundred times by now, as the mortal aspect of Truth, and has memories of all his previous mortal incarnations as well as Reshiram’s memories and probably even a good chunk of Kyurem’s. The man is A Mess™️, especially after Ingo, his twin, his brother, his other half (platonic, don’t make it weird), vanishes. After all, what is Truth without Ideals to give it purpose?

🔥 That’s why, when he meets Reina and she becomes his personal assistant at Gear Station, he gravitates towards her. Just like in Gardenshipping canon, he starts to fall for her because of her genuinely kind and caring nature; she also has no idea he’s a piece of a fucking god, so she just treats him like a normal person. Not a celebrity trainer, not a deity, just. As Emmet. And he soaks it up like a man dying of thirst. Here’s this beautiful young woman who truly doesn’t care what or who he is, she just wants to make sure he’s eating and sleeping and taking care of himself. How can he not be intrigued by her?

🔥 He can also smell dishonesty a mile away and he can tell Reina is just actually that good of a person. Sure, she lies about her living situation (she doesn’t tell him that she’s unhoused for the longest time), but I’d imagine Emmet can also tell the intent of a falsehood, so he probably picks up on the fact that any lie she tells is born from the need to survive, rather than malice or the desire to mislead. She isn’t hurting anyone - she just wants to keep her misfortunes private, and Emmet can... sooooort of understand that? (He might not like it, it makes him worry about her, but in the end it really only affects Reina herself, which makes Emmet bound and determined to get to the bottom of her problems and help her in any way he can. The man is SMITTEN.)

🍃 On Reina’s side, I honestly don’t think she’s all that religious; Reina is from Kanto originally, and she has a lot of internalized stuff from the local belief system (i.e. she’ll say things like “Legends” or “Birds” in place of “Arceus” or “Dragons”). She’ll probably still have a subconscious desire to believe in something, but she doesn’t actively practice anything. Also, having only been in Unova for a couple of years at most, she might not really understand the region’s religion all that much. She probably doesn’t really think about it - which. Valid.

🍃 That being said, she would probably not know how to handle being face to face with a literal piece of a deity. For starters, her entire worldview would be - at the very least - a little bit shaken. After all, if you go from nearly thirty years of disillusionment and not fully believing in anything because you’ve been through absolute hell, to suddenly finding out the man you’re in love with (and who’s been railing you over his desk every day) is the Incarnation of Truth, you miiiiiight need a moment to process.

🍃 (That last part, especially, because how on earth do you reconcile the fact that you’ve had an actual god between your legs?)

🍃 Reina already has hella self worth issues, so to find out that her boyfriend isn’t even human, she might not handle it well for a while. In her eyes, what could a god possibly see in a lowly human like her? She still loves him, that part will never change, but she’ll have to take some time to try and reorient before she can even work up the courage to go near him again.

🔥 Emmet, in the meantime, is going to be utterly distraught. He’ll put on his trademark Subway Master Emmet smile, but it’ll be hanging on with a hope and a wish, because he is not doing okay knowing that the love of his life might be terrified of him now. He can’t lie, no, but he’s gotten really, really good at talking around the truth after countless lifetimes, so anyone that asks how he’s doing is getting a series of non-answers until he can slip away. Reina makes him feel normal, human almost, which is something he’s never fully gotten to experience - because while he might be a shard of a Dragon, he’s still somewhat his own entity, since he’s, you know, actually out in the world of man and not sitting dormant in a rock somewhere. He’s constantly torn between two halves of his own existence, and the thing that made it bearable all this time was his twin; with Ingo gone, however, Emmet has been feeling the extra weight of responsibility around his shoulders like a yolk for damn near a decade.

🔥 Until Reina.

🔥 (Like in regular Gardenshipping canon, one of the reasons Emmet falls for Reina is because she just treats him like a person. Doesn’t fawn, doesn’t get close to him just to challenge him, doesn’t pity him; just sits with him and lets him be a regular guy.)

🔥 I’m also imagining the way Reina even finds out Emmet is one of the God Dragons of Unova is uhhhhhhh not the most pleasant of circumstances. Probably Team Plasma, but I’m picturing there being some sort of siege on Gear Station or an attack somewhere that requires Reshiram’s attention, and somehow, someway, Reina winds up witnessing Emmet with his more draconian features and spewing ethereal fire. Get that sweet, sweet ‘oh shit’ moment with Emmet turning around, eyes slitted and glowing, claws out, wings sprouting from his back, fire still trickling from between fangs too big for a human mouth, only to see Reina standing there, completely frozen, just staring at him. 

🔥 The follow-up conversation is gonna be... a lot.

🍃 I feel like it’ll take about a week or so for her to be able to talk to him again

[fallowhearth]

@literary-illuminati

basically every in-depth review of Dawn I've seen was some variety of 'this was a really Important book, except for a bunch of unfortunate inaccuracies in the part I happen to have some expertise in' which yeah did uh not inspire a lot of confidence

I've tried to avoid reviews (somewhat unsuccessfully) - I must have seen a positive review at some point as I bought the book - since they're either academic reviews* or by non-historians, which fine, but also liable to raise my blood pressure if they accidentally trip one of my niche academic beef landmines.

*(and therefore subject to the grad school trauma zone, which since I've finished the new Murderbot, I'm tempted to start calling [redacted])

Tbh I have a soft spot for this kind of cross-disciplinary, too ambitious, paradigm-shifting work of history. I always found them most appealing as a grad student and my own work tended to lean that way - probably partly why I found grad school such a nightmare, as the projects that do best in that system are, like, anti-secessionist political movements in two counties in South Carolina during the two years preceding the Civil War (details slightly fudged to protect the innocent, no shade intended, lovely guy).

Anyway I'm going to take this opportunity to plug my favorite Most Important Book Nobody Read: Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1998. One of the seminal works of global history, incredibly provocative, ruthlessly critiques basically all theorists, so basically unworkable in how much it shredded received wisdom that hardly any historians seriously incorporated it into their worldview. Tragic! Literally anyone reading this, hit me up and I will send you an only-slightly-crusty pdf of this book.

Going to finish with a quote from Frank's preface, which I think is entirely apropos:

[...] at least I need not fear that any of my readers may be fooled into seeing a nonexistent solidity here. Surely, they will note that this book is full of holes.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021

This is not a review. It will probably be a bit of a ramble about my approach to reading history and thinking through why I bounced off this so many times. This is also about letting myself off the hook - I'm going to let this one remain unfinished. I don't need to finish reading it.

After I dropped out of grad school (highly recommended), it took me a good few years to be able to stomach picking up a history book again. But, I do really enjoy the discipline. There's a reason I wanted to do it as a career. I eventually found a way back in - from YouTube video essays, to a few podcasts, to reading history from outside my field. I had the most success with ancient/pre-modern histories; obligatory Tides of History plug as I've loved all the deep dives into genetic history and archaeology (and gotten quite a few great book recommendations). I don't have any particular knowledge in these fields, I don't have the language skills or context to interpret sources myself, I've never even taken an ancient history course. So reading these I have no option but to basically rely on the expertise of the historian, to see what they say about various topics and about each other. It's the opportunity to read history like a layperson, and hey, it's pretty interesting!

On the one hand, Dawn is engagingly written - I'd call it kind of magazine style? - and tells a compelling story. But, the whole time I'm wondering, but is any of it true?

My impulse when reading something from within my area of academic expertise is to go and take a look at some of the sources myself. It's always a useful sense-check; it's due diligence. History is by its nature kind of subjective. Historians don't just deal in lonely facts (to paraphrase someone whose name escapes me), but in interpretation and argumentation. Everything has been passed through several human filters before a historian even looks at it. So, in a room full of historians you respect, you can have a lively, contentious discussion where no two people have quite the same reading of the source. There's a skill you pick up after a while - you get a sense for the range of defensible interpretations of a particular piece of evidence. You'll feel more affinity for part of that range, based on the things you believe about how the world works, your particular axe to grind, other things you've read, niche academic beef, etc.

I'm confident I've read at least a few of the sources Dawn uses, and I've definitely read within adjacent bodies of sources. So, I have an incredibly strong need to go and take a look at the specific things they're basing their argument on. I trust my own judgement; I want to establish that range of defensible interpretations, I want to see what readings I'd pull out first, I want to see what the distance is between Dawn's point on that range and mine. The problem is that I can't. Even if I wanted to dive back into the archive, I literally don't have any of the institutional accesses that would allow me to. Also I really don't want to. So I'm constantly feeling this itch I can't scratch at the back of my mind while reading Graeber and Wengrow's work.

The broad version of Dawn's thesis is something like: 'humans have experimented with diverse ways to live and organise their societies across space and time, in ways that are not accommodated by the teleological models developed within the colonial context'. I'd say, yeah, I pretty much agree with that! (In fact it's a thesis I'd love to nail to the doors of many popular history writers.) But I get the same sense reading Dawn as I did reading various provocative works of global history (many of which I really like): the broad thesis is generally defensible, but it falls apart on the page-to-page level. Of course I can't actually confirm this since, well, I haven't done my due diligence!

[stillwinterair]

Engaging with Mass Effect 1 unlocks Secret Emotions that I cannot get anywhere else.

The feeling of landing on an uncharted world. Of walking around the Citadel and doing quests. Of being snowed in at Port Hanshan on Noveria. Of walking around the Normandy, so dim and quiet, like everybody's getting ready for bed but aren't quite ready to lay their heads yet. Of finding the Prothean relic on Eletania, and watching through the eyes of a stone age human observed by Protheans. Of speaking to Sovereign for the first time. Of speaking to Vigil. Of the climax to the geth side quest, and hearing the mournful broadcast of the geth honoring their creators, which totally recontextualizes everything you've seen of them so far. Of solving affairs for far-flung colonists and scouts, eking out their livings on distant, hostile worlds. Of tracking a conspiracy all the way down, to the death of Admiral Kahoku and beyond, picking up the trail of some mysterious group known only as Cerberus.

The clanking sounds of your boots on the metal floor of a prefab building, the dim light glimmering on thickly-molded glass, of the eerie, whispering song that plays on uncharted worlds. The rolling, metallic sound of superheated rounds rolling out of an assault rifle, and the lament of Vigil, and the poetic calm of Uncharted Worlds. The sense that no one has stood where you're standing in billions of years, and maybe no one ever will again. The sense that something is wrong, that nothing in your journey is quite adding up, and the ultimate revelation of the Reapers completely changing your worldview and adding an existential, apocalyptic crisis to your periphery, doom impending who-knows-when -- now, if you don't stop it, and if you do? Then when? They're coming regardless. What can you do to prepare? What will you sacrifice? What alliances will you build, or break?

Every single one of these moments just Does Something to me, and there is a particular something about the design of ME1 that feels both comfortingly at home, and so cosmically horrifying as to excite me and spur me along.

ME1 is one of those games that, I really don't want to erase my memory of to play with fresh eyes, because as good as the first time was, the second was better, and the third even better, and so on. I've played all the way through it well over a dozen times since 2007 and I still get so excited even thinking about its various twists and turns. I play through it like once a year to experience that atmosphere, more than anything else. It feels like home more than maybe any other game I've ever played. New Vegas is close, but something about Mass Effect... it's a world I want to live in; I know the whole game by heart, but the Citadel especially -- I know where every Keeper is intrinsically, I know when every side quests pops up. The Wards on the Citadel and Port Hanshan on Noveria are like, my mental happy places. Even though Noveria is a corporate hellhole, once again, it's just the atmosphere of it. I can practically feel the cold creeping in from the outside.

The rest of the series never quite recaptured The Magic for me. ME2 gets close a number of times, but the dramatically smaller hub space and the reorienting of locations to being more like strip malls and less like actual places really fucked with me. I love parts of ME2; Illium and Omega almost feel real. Certain side quests broaden the universe beautifully. But the complete shift in narrative focus, and this abrupt change from a dimly-lit, soft-edged atmosphere to the blinding brightness of ME2's stark aesthetic sensibilities did not mesh with me, nor did the switch to cover-shooting first and foremost, nor did the complete refocusing of the entire plot away from the Reapers and onto, like... some of their pawns? For the entire game? The complete lack of actual exploration ultimately did it in for me, though, and this was only compounded in ME3, where everything just feels like strip malls and shooting galleries.

But ME1... there's this perfect gem of an idea in that game. It's rough and unpolished, and I think needed a lot more work to make the combat feel dynamic and to make the squad feel like family, but it was heading in a beautiful direction, and I still feel like we never got the series that game's potential had promised.

[bestworstcase]

We all know that the Gothel twist was terrible and was only there for the sake of having a twist, but if it absolutely have been done, how should it had happened to make it better narratively?

so. i spent a lot of time kind of mulling over and autopsying s3 and my personal conclusion about what went wrong is that tts hamstrung itself with poor narrative structure. and this is going to be one of those posts where i lead with definitions of the terminology i’m going to use, for the sake of clarity and to avoid any misunderstanding. 

to whit: 

story is the sum total of every element of a narrative: character, plot, setting, theme, and structure.  

character is, of course, the people in the story. it’s “who?”

plot is the events that happen in a story. it’s “what?”

setting is the time and place of the story. it’s “where?” and “when?” 

theme is what the story is *about.* it’s “why?”

and then there’s narrative structure, which i think is a little harder to grasp because it’s much more invisible than the other things. but it’s the framework of the story, or the scaffolding. it’s “how?” — how are the characters rendered? how is the setting created? how are the events of the plot strung together along the throughline? how is the story built? 

now… in my opinion, character is the single most important element of a story; compelling characters can salvage an otherwise mediocre story, and nothing kills a story faster than uninteresting characters. 

but the one thing good characters can’t ultimately compensate for is poor structure. if the construction is shoddy, so to speak, sooner or later, the roof is gonna leak. right? and we can see this happen in tts: s1 and s2 are solid, and then bam! we hit s3 and it’s a mess of bizarre pacing and dropped characters, the feelings and motivations of key players get all wonky, the plot loses focus, and things increasingly feel like they’re happening by authorial fiat. the weak structure of the narrative has failed, and it dragged the entire story down with it. 

and we can look back in retrospect and see that, yeah, all of these problems existed before; tts always had odd pacing, always had an issue with maintenance of the supporting cast, always relied more on convenience than a narrative really should. but these things didn’t hit a critical mass until s3. 

so what does this have to do with gothel? well,

in and of itself, “gothel is cassandra’s mother!” is not a terrible plot twist. the problem with it is a problem of execution, which is to say, the flaw is in the structure, not the plot.

#1: set-up

plot twists are kind of difficult to pull off well, because you don’t want to blindside people, but you also don’t want to tip your hand too soon. you want to surprise, or maybe even shock—but you don’t want your audience to go, “wait, WHAT? that makes no sense!”

do you remember the whole “ricky’s quest” thing that went on in s2? we were told that there was an important piece of foreshadowing somewhere in s1 or s2 that no one had picked up on yet and there was this whole thing of people trying to figure out what it was, and then… rapunzel’s return aired, and ricky revealed that the answer was “cassandra briefly glances into the shattered mirror in rapunzel’s tower.” 

and that, + the fact that we know cass is adopted and doesn’t remember her birth parents, + vague visual similarities, is the entirety of the s1-s2 foreshadowing for cassandra being gothel’s daughter.

which isn’t nothing, i’ll grant you, but for something as major as the gothel twist, for something that profoundly changes the worldview and motivations of one of the main characters to such a degree that she completely changes sides because of it, it might as well be nothing.

gothel is afforded zero narrative importance in s1-s2. rapunzel has one nightmare about her, and some lingering trauma connected to the tower that is explored, and of course tromus briefly uses her image to try to control rapunzel in rapunzeltopia. but gothel herself is a non-entity until she abruptly and without warning becomes the emotional lynchpin of the entire conflict in s3. that’s jarring.

cassandra is a complex character whose apparent motivations for turning against rapunzel are meticulously built up over the course of s2… only for s3 to pull a bait-and-switch, sweep all of that set-up under the rug, and replace it with cassandra’s messed up feelings about gothel’s abandonment. even her ruined hand never gets mentioned again—not by her, not by zhan tiri, not by rapunzel, not by anyone. that’s jarring, too. 

to use my own work as a point of comparison here, the bitter snow equivalent of the gothel reveal is cassandra finding out that sirin is her aunt and her parents were innocent. like the gothel twist, learning that information profoundly changes how cassandra sees herself and the world, and it’s intended to be a big shock… but unlike the gothel twist, i did a lot of setting up for it: 

1: sirin has real narrative importance in the first half of the story, pre-reveal. the fic opens with her, her involvement with the separatists is established early, etc. 

2: pieces of cassandra’s backstory are threaded through the first half of the story. by the time we hit the reveal, it’s been established that cass is saporian, that her parents were executed for treason, that this treason involved selling poisoned crops and causing outbreaks of a deadly sickness. 

3: there are many demonstrations of anti-saporian discrimination and prejudice in the first half of the story: the way cass sees herself and the alienation she feels from the rest of corona, past incidents where she was targeted for being saporian, basically every time gilbert opens his mouth, what happened to caine’s dad. 

4: cassandra discovers evidence of the harsh, unjust nature of the crackdown and realizes that at least some of what she’s been taught about coronan law enforcement and recent history is inaccurate… thus planting the seed, for the readers if not for cass herself, that other things might be false too.

5: caine points out that cass is the reason the separatists don’t let parents join up, and though she doesn’t elaborate on that, it’s because cass is proof that corona will steal saporian children if their parents are accused of treason.

and 6: everything sirin says to cass in chapter 14 is wrapped up in her being painfully, painfully aware that a) cass is her niece and b) probably doesn’t know the whole story—while also trying to stick to the plan. so… while she doesn’t spill the beans there, she knows who cass is, she stops andrew from hurting her, she makes a point of not acknowledging the legitimacy of cassandra’s adoption, and obliquely suggests that sir peter is a murderer… and while she tries to stop cass from interfering with what they’re doing, she doesn’t hurt her, even though she very much could.

so… in chapter 15, when sirin comes out with “actually, the blight was a natural disaster no one anticipated and saporians got sick and died too, your parents were just scapegoats because corona wanted someone to blame, and oh, by the way, you’re my niece,” it’s a shock but not one that comes entirely out of left field. cassandra’s parents being innocent victims of an overzealous and prejudiced justice system is a logical extension of all the stuff that has already been set up, and sirin being cass’s aunt helps to clarify motivations that were previously opaque (such as: why does sirin despise corona so much, why didn’t she just kill cass, etc). 

and because all of this stuff is given so much attention in the first half of the story, the way it snaps cassandra’s worldview in half and causes such a massive reorienting of her goals and loyalties feels natural. because it already mattered a great deal to her, and it related to the doubts she was already experiencing. 

which like, that’s the key. setting up a big plot twist isn’t about establishing one basic fact (“cass is adopted”) and tossing in one instance of symbolic foreshadowing (the mirror thing) and nothing else, over the course of two whole seasons of a tv show. it is about priming the audience to be ready to accept the reveal.

how could tts have done this with the gothel reveal? here’s some ideas: 

1: give gothel a greater presence in the narrative. the simplest way to do this would be to really lean in to how fucked up rapunzel is because of her. more nightmares, more overt moments where we see rapunzel still being haunted by her memory. alternatively, lean more into the fact that gothel was a disciple of zhan tiri.

2: give cassandra’s adoption, and the question of her birth parents, even a teeny tiny glimmer of interest. specifically, let “dad found me after my parents abandoned me” be the only thing cass knows about her adoption, and let that hurt her. she doesn’t even have to be curious about who her birth parents were—just have that pain of abandonment more present in the first two seasons. 

3: imply the captain knows more about cassandra’s origins than he lets on. 

4: you know the parallel in RATGT where rapunzel screams at cass the way gothel screamed at rapunzel? more of that. like, how delicious would it be if there were many little instances in s1-s2 of rapunzel lashing out at cass with behaviors she obviously subconsciously learned from gothel, only for s3 to pull the sucker punch of cassandra being gothel’s daughter? like! imagine how that could so EASILY make cassandra recontextualize her entire relationship with rapunzel by linking rapunzel’s toxic behaviors with gothel’s abuse and abandonment in her mind? and then in s3 you can really dig into rapunzel interrogating her own behaviors and struggling to break the cycle of abuse. 

5: if gothel being a former disciple of zhan tiri is narratively important, it can go hand-in-hand with zhan tiri and the other disciples more overtly targeting cass, specifically. even if we don’t know why until the reveal.��

i’ve seen a couple posts from other folks discussing how to “fix” the gothel twist, and many of them involve cass either knowing from the start or finding out much earlier, but while that could work, i don’t think it’s necessary. it’s all about the set up. it’s all about constructing the story in such a way that the audience goes “OH!” instead of “WHAT?!” when the reveal happens, and the specific timing of the reveal doesn’t really… matter.

#2: execution

surprising absolutely no one, i’m going to talk about zhan tiri now. 

based on what chris has said in various interviews, my understanding is this: originally, cass was originally supposed to be a secret antagonist all along and know about her parentage right out of the gate. her characterization softened early on in the process, her knowing about gothel got dropped, and suddenly the creators needed a way for her to learn that gothel was her mom, and thus zhan tiri entered the narrative.

she is a plot device whose whole purpose is to tell cass “gothel was your mom and abandoned you for rapunzel,” and then fuel her downward spiral. the rest of her character exists in service of that, full stop. 

which… like the gothel reveal, having a character whose primary function is to be a plot device isn’t a problem in and of itself. however. “ancient evil demonic sorceress with deep ties to the magical lore of the setting and an entrenched hatred for team hero, whose MO is manipulating people” is a terrible character archetype to use as this kind of plot device, because that kind of character needs to have an agenda in order to function, and as soon as you give them an agenda they develop a gravitational pull on the rest of the story, especially if they’re directly involved with a main character. 

and if you’re willing to roll with that gravitational pull, it can be fine. but if you’re not… you get tts s3. 

chris has pretty much spelled this out in interviews. he said at one point that they debated multiple potential motives for zhan tiri… but found that anything more complex than “wants the drops and to burn corona to the ground, because reasons” sucked oxygen away from the cass vs raps conflict and eventual reconciliation, which… yeah. so they gave zhan tiri the cardboard motives and didn’t really do anything with her other than trotting her out to give cass a good shove in whatever direction the plot needed cass to fall in every so often. 

that zhan tiri is a compelling character in s3 at all is a testament to the strength of her VA and the sheer potential of her established lore, in combination with the fact that she and cassandra are off screen enough to demand that the audience fill in a lot of gaps. but in, like, the actual text, she has all the complex personality of a piece of damp tissue paper and she is, for all intents and purposes, literally just Cassandra’s Brain. every decision, every single decision cass makes in s3 is because of zhan tiri. why take the moonstone? zhan tiri tells her to. why is she so mad at rapunzel? zhan tiri made her that way. why does she attack rapunzel? zhan tiri convinced her she had to. why does she go to gothel’s cabin in TOTS? zhan tiri tipped her off that rapunzel would be there. why does her fragile truce with rapunzel fall apart at the end of TOTS? zhan tiri interfered. why does she try to reconcile again in OAH? she found out zhan tiri was… zhan tiri. why does that reconciliation fail? zhan tiri. why does cass ultimately redeem herself? because zhan tiri stabs her in the back first. 

*deep breath*

this is what happens when you troubleshoot a broken narrative with plot devices instead of opening it up to fix whatever is wrong with the underlying structure. in this case, cassandra not knowing about gothel from the get go broke her planned villain arc… and the creators applied zhan tiri like a bandaid, molding this new character into someone who could railroad cass down the preexisting plan for her villain arc. 

what needed to happen instead was a wholesale reexamination and reconfiguration of cassandra’s villain arc, her reasons for going down that path, and her reasons for coming back. even if finding out the truth about gothel was still the trigger for it, it’s ultimately not about gothel anymore. gothel is just the last straw. 

and in order to work with the characters as-established in s1-s2, the events of s3 would need to be framed that way. if, after all the shit she goes through in s2, cass met zhan tiri, learned that gothel was her mom and abandoned her for rapunzel, and finally just snapped and went after the moonstone because fuck this, fuck you, and then zhan tiri came in with the compassion and emotional validation and the “your mother treated you as a servant and then discarded you for something she thought was better, and so did rapunzel, didn’t she? but i see you, i believe in you, i am your friend, and we can help each other,” and cass bought that because she’s desperate for emotional support and kindness and fuck it, she’s on team demon now, only for her conscience to eat away at her until she couldn’t take it anymore and broke away from zhan tiri for good… then it works, full stop. 

like, you don’t have to change a single plot event for the gothel twist to work. you just have to string those plot events along an emotional throughline that makes sense and feels connected to what happened in s1-s2. you can’t use zhan tiri to graft the s3 arc of evil-all-along proto-cass onto canon s1-s2 and call it a day because that doesn’t work! you have to write for the characters you have, not their early planning-stages iterations. if you make a decision early on that breaks your original plan, you have to commit to redoing the whole plan. 

and if you do that, if you fix the underlying structure, you don’t need a character whose sole purpose is to railroad another character down a predetermined path that no longer fits her characterization; cass and zhan tiri can instead both be characters, acting according to their motivations and goals, and not puppets pantomiming the ghost of a broken plan. 

(you do still have to accept that zhan tiri will pull focus away from the cass+rapunzel friendship, though. them’s the breaks. don’t use zhan tiris if you’re not willing to let them gobble up the spotlight a bit.)

TL;DR: to fix the gothel twist, set it up better in s1-s2 by making the question of cassandra’s parentage, or abandonment by her parentage, important to the narrative at all, or else by focusing more closely on gothel being a disciple of zhan tiri; then execute the s3 villain arc in a way that makes sense for canon cass and what she experiences in s1-s2, rather than using zhan tiri to railroad her down the path evil-all-along proto-cass was supposed to take. 

the problem is a structural one so at the end of the day the solution is to fix the structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[arcticdementor]

Near the beginning of Ibram X. Kendi’s celebrated best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi writes something that strikes me as the key to his struggle: “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be anti-racist.” Kendi’s parents were “saved into Black liberation theology and joined the churchless church of the Black Power movement.” That was their response — at times a beautiful one — to the unique challenges of being black in America.

And when Kendi’s book becomes a memoir of his own life and comes to terms with his own racism, and then his own cancer, it’s vivid and complicated and nuanced, if a little unfinished. He is alert to ambiguities, paradoxes, and the humanness of it all: “When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power or racist policymakers.” He sees the complexity of racist views: “West Indian immigrants tend to categorize African-Americans as ‘lazy, unambitious, uneducated, unfriendly, welfare dependent, and lacking in family values.’” He describes these painful moments of self-recognition in what becomes a kind of secular apology: a life of a sinner striving for sainthood, who, having been saved, wants to save everyone else.

…

Liberal values are therefore tossed out almost immediately. Kendi, a star professor at American University and a recent Guggenheim Fellowship winner, has no time for color-blindness, or for any kind of freedom which might have some inequality as its outcome. In fact, “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethno-state, but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.” He has no time for persuasion or dialogue either: “An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change.” All there is is power. You either wield it or are controlled by it. And power is simply the ability to implement racist or antiracist policy.

The book therefore is not an attempt to persuade anyone. It’s a life story interspersed with a litany of pronouncements about what you have to do to be good rather than evil. It has the tone of a Vatican encyclical, or a Fundamentalist sermon. There is no space in this worldview for studying any factor that might create or exacerbate racial or ethnic differences or inequalities apart from pure racism. If there are any neutral standards that suggest inequalities or differences of any sort between ethnic groups, they are also ipso facto racist standards. In fact, the idea of any higher or lower standard for anything is racist, which is why Kendi has no time either for standardized tests. In this view of the world, difference always means hierarchy.

…

He’s capable of conveying the complicated dynamics of that violent mugging on a bus, but somehow insists that the only real violence is the structural “violence” of racist power. After a while, you realize that this worldview cannot be contradicted or informed by any discipline outside itself — sociology, biology, psychology, history. Unlike any standard theory in the social sciences, Kendi’s argument — one that is heavily rooted in critical theory — about a Manichean divide between racist and anti-racist forces cannot be tested or falsified. Because there is no empirical reality outside the “power structures” it posits.

…

He wants unelected “formally trained experts on racism” (presumably all from critical race-theory departments) to have unaccountable control over every policy that won’t yield racial equality in every field of life, public or private. They are tasked with investigating “private racist policies.” Any policy change anywhere in the U.S. would have to be precleared by these “experts” who could use “disciplinary tools” if policymakers do not cave to their demands. They would monitor and control public and private speech. What Kendi wants is power to coerce others to accept his worldview and to implement his preferred policies, over and above democratic accountability or political opposition. Among those policies would be those explicitly favoring nonwhites over whites because “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

…

I once thought I understood what sex and gender meant. “Sex” meant male or female; “gender” meant how you express that sex. Simple enough. I also thought that homosexuality was defined as a sexual and emotional attraction to someone of your own sex, as would be implied by “homo” meaning same, and “sexuality” meaning, well, sexuality. This baseline agreement on basic terms was a good start for a reasoned debate. You can tell someone’s sex by their chromosomes, hormones, genitals and secondary sex characteristics. You can tell someone’s gender by the way they manifest their sex and sex characteristics. People have infinitely different ways to express their maleness or femaleness, and cultures create different norms for these expressions. And my basic position was that we should expand those norms and accept all types of nonconforming men and women as very much men and very much still women.

But now I’m confused, and I don’t think I’m alone. Slowly but surely, the term “sex” has slowly drifted in meaning and become muddled with gender. And that has major consequences for what homosexuality actually is, consequences that are only beginning to be properly understood. Take the Equality Act, the bill proposed by the biggest LGBTQ lobby group, the Human Rights Campaign, backed by every single Democratic presidential candidate, and passed by the House last May. Its core idea is to enhance the legal meaning of the word “sex” so it becomes “sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity).”

The Act provides four different ways to understand the word “sex,” only one of which has any reference to biology. Sex means first “a sex stereotype”; secondly “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related condition”; thirdly “sexual orientation or gender identity”; and last “sex characteristics, including intersex traits.” Yes, at the end, we have “sex characteristics” in there — i.e., biological males and females — qualified, as it should be, by the intersex condition. But it’s still vague. “Sex characteristics” can mean biologically male or female, but can also mean secondary sex characteristics, like chest hair, or breasts, which can be the effect of hormone therapy. So in fact, the Act never refers to men and women as almost every human being who has ever existed on Earth understands those terms.

…

In these lesson plans, here’s the definition of homosexuality: “a person’s sexual identity in relation to the gender to which they are attracted.” Homosexuality is thereby redefined as homogenderism. It’s no longer about attraction to the same sex, but to the same gender. I’m no longer homosexual; I’m homogender. But what if the whole point of my being gay is that I’ve always been physically attracted to men? And by men, I mean people with XY chromosomes, formed by natural testosterone, with male genitals, which is what almost every American outside these ideological bubbles means by “men.” I do not mean people with XX chromosomes, formed by estrogen, with female genitals, who have subsequently used testosterone to masculinize their female body — even though I would treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve in every context.

…

Of course, anyone can and should like whatever they like and do whatever they want to do. But if a gay man doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a vagina and a lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a dick, they are not being transphobic. They’re being — how shall I put this? — gay. When Rich suggests that “it’s not just possible but observable and prevalent to have ‘preferences’ that dog-whistle bigotry,” and he includes in the category of “preferences” not liking the other sex’s genitals, he’s casting a moral pall over gayness itself. Suddenly we’re not just being told homosexuality is “problematic” by the religious right, we’re being told it by the woke left.

That’s the price of merging gender with sex. It’s time the rest of us woke up and defended our homosexuality.

[darkstar6782]

4.02: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Dean Winchester - My Rewatch Review

This episode is full of so much beautifully painful Dean-centric angst, and coming right on the heels of the season premiere makes it doubly-blessed. From the very first scene in Bobby’s kitchen, where we see him trying to come to terms with the existence of angels and God and the idea that they might have taken a personal interest in him, to the very last scene, where he confronts and is threatened with being returned to Hell by the same angel who rescued him from Hell in the first place and also discovers that Lucifer and the Apocalypse are real, Dean is experiencing a significant reorienting of his worldview with regards to the nature of good and evil in the universe and his role in the battle between those larger forces.

But this is one of those things that I love about Dean’s character, and that I am glad stayed consistent right up until the very end. Because no matter how grand in scale the story gets—from the realization that they are meant to play the key roles on either side of the apocalypse, right up to the ultimate revelation that their lives are being personally written and directed by God himself—Dean’s insistence that he is just an ordinary guy never wavers, and he fights like hell against all the greater forces in the universe in order to make that desire a reality, for both him and Sam. Which, once again, brings me back to the finale, and the reason why it was the perfect ending, because, for better or worse, it gave both of these boys the lives and deaths that they deserved after everything they had been through: they lived and died as ordinary men do, not in the service or cause of some greater destiny. Despite that fact that a greater destiny had dogged them for their entire lives, in the end, they both escaped the greater story with their lives, and got to live on their terms until the end.

I also noticed Meg’s implied warning to Dean about Sam during this rewatch. Though I am not sure if she actually meant it as such or not, her story about her little sister getting lost after her death was an obvious parallel to what Sam went through while Dean was gone, even if we aren’t exactly clear on the details just yet. And the warning comes right on the heels of Sam and Ruby meeting up to talk about angels, and of Sam’s unconcern in stark contrast to Ruby’s terror about their power and where they fall on the whole ‘good vs evil’ divide, which is some great foreshadowing for the conflict that Sam is going to be at the heart of this season. I actually really wish that Sam had gotten a little more screen time in these first few episodes, because as much as I love unpacking and watching Dean’s emotional journey post-Hell, I would have loved to see a bit more of Sam’s emotional interior as well, and I feel like far too much of it is just left up to inference and imagination. Not that it’s hard to imagine what Sam is going through, because he is just as well-established a character as Dean, and in my opinion it is actually more heartbreaking. Because Sam has no problem accepting that God and angels are real; he always believed that they were, as we learned way back in Season 2. And he also has no trouble accepting the idea of being singled out by some sort of powerful entity—I swear, that look he gives Dean when Dean says “I don’t like being singled out at birthday parties, much less by God,” could have been an eye roll, and was definitely a ‘Join the club, pal’ expression, even though Dean has no reason to interpret it as such yet. And the true tragedy of this entire story arc is that Sam, the one who has faith and wants to do good, has been picked to be on the side of evil, while Dean, the one who doesn’t want to believe even when proof is staring him in the face, has been picked to be on the side of the angels (I won’t say good, because we all know the angels aren’t that, as Castiel proves so clearly in that excellently creepy scene at the end of the episode).

So, in the end, even though it takes a little more reading between the lines, and even though Dean gets more of the direct emotional storytelling, this episode provides plenty of angst fodder for both boys, and adds a whole new dimension to what they are facing. Bring on the Apocalypse!

[robinreyrshaw]

Modern Education is Pavlovian Conditioning

Modern Education is The Very Essense of Indoctrination

All quotes from Jay Dyer, Modern Education is Pavlovian Conditioning

The Goals of Modern Education Laid Out By Its Founders

From its inception, the architects of the American public education system, and its corollary system of “higher education” in the college and university system, were established explicitly for the purpose of reorienting classical modes of pedagogy for “democratic,” “socialistic,” “utopian,” and “egalitarian” techniques of state conditioning that would confer “personhood” on the individual pupil through integration into the collective, allowing for a smoother transition into the Comtean civic religion of scientistic naturalism, paying obeisance to the gods of state, as life would be lived out in the “New Jerusalem” of the public-private cubicle. These claims are precisely the words of the key founders of American Education, including: John Dewey, J.B. Watson, Horace Mann, James G. Carter, William James, and many others, all intent on inculcating their own religious philosophy of Darwinian scientism, pragmatism and collectivist socialism under the banner of progressive, democratic, secular humanism. It could more properly be titled Americanist Education, where the goal of indoctrination centers around the installment of the decrepit final end of its Enlightenment origins.

The Classic Understanding of Education

Arising from the ancient and medieval conception of the world as a unified whole under the providential governance of Reason and/or God, the birth of the university cultivated learning and the classical method of pedagogy that reflected that same belief in an ordered cosmos. From this idea arose the term “uni” – “versitas,” a unified whole (See Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University). Thus, a liberal arts education was grounded in the foundations of grammar, logic and rhetoric, being followed by the more advanced subjects that flow therefrom, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. This was possible because all facts of man’s experience were interpreted and given meaning within an all-encompassing worldview that saw a Personal Deity (by the Middle Ages) as a unifying metaphysical principle that linked the disparate phenomena of human experience.

The Modern Understanding of Education is More Akin to Behavioral Modification

By the time of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, however, the dominant perspective on education would begin to change, as revolutionary philosophies from the likes of Rousseau, Mill, Jefferson and Comte would reshape the West’s approach to education. Higher academia too, especially in the U.S., would begin to assume a messianic character that believed in man’s inherent ability to build a global utopia through the proper application of external stimulation and conditioning that was the result of the materialistic pragmatism promoted especially by the British Royal Society (a powerful entity even today in academia).

Pay For Your Own Indoctrination Through Taxation

From this survey of merely a few quotes from America’s educational luminaries, we can see a clear agenda at work. Not only was the strategy to make state-mandated education a necessity imposed by law through truancy, the goal was all-encompassing, millennial and religious in character, inculcating in children from the intentional adoption by the state through kindergarten (also borrowed from Prussian Socialism), up to adulthood through the university system, the credal faith in the power of the apotheosized socialist “democratic” state. To add fuel to the fire, these educational lights convinced the nation’s leaders to pay for their own indoctrination through taxation, a hurt that is most powerfully felt today in the masses of student loan debt racked up for merely 4 years of “higher education.”

All of This Was Planned

None of this was by accident, as the wealthiest families in the U.S. supported this socialization, and in particular the control of education through controlling education boards, tax-exempt foundations, and even the establishment of entire universities (such as the Rockefellers and The University of Chicago). This is exactly what the Reece Committee found in its 1952-4 investigations into tax-exempt foundations and their influence, and in particular in the Committee’s Dodd Report the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie Endowments were discovered to be funding Columbia, Harvard, Chicago University and the University of California to implement social engineering and conditioning that would “promote oligarchical collectivism.” The foundations, however, were merely following suit in what the public school system had always been established to accomplish, inasmuch as fascism, socialism, communism and Marxism have always been tools of financial elites, according to Dr. Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, and Dr. Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. These entities are also linked to the escapades of the Frankfurt School Marxists and their critical theory.

Save Your Children From Indoctrination

In order to thus solve the “problem of education,” the question arises as to the entire system of public education itself, and it is my contention our overblown imperial state has no business in the raising of children to begin with. In our day, the population is becoming keenly aware of the outrageous corruption that has long nested in Washington D.C., and to think that these managerial kleptocrats are competent for the “fixing” of a “broken system” is merely to prolong the problem. What is necessary is to understand the academic system itself is a ponzi scheme to load students with masses of debt for an increasingly irrelevant piece of paper that qualifies them to become “social justice warriors,” the very icon of perfect conditioning.

  What is does not do is teach sound philosophy and empower the individual student to learn on his own (as it should do) – in fact, it exists to break down morals and all traditional and existing worldviews. The solution is thus to remove oneself from this entire superstructure, encourage entrepreneurship, and begin to convince behind-the-times corporations to no longer require permission slips (degrees) from statist institutions, but rather to hire on the basis of abilities and skills actually possessed. In the meantime, we must simply avoid the academic social engineering juggernaut and utilize tools such as the Internet (which is already beginning to make them obsolete) to attain knowledge. Ultimately, this is the fruit of medieval nominalism. Modern Education is Pavlovian Conditioning : Waking Times

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