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bambi-kinos · 9 months ago

Note

I just came across your analysis of However Absurd and thought it was lovely. I'm curious, as someone who thinks John and Paul had some kind of romantic or sexual relationship, what is your take on The Lovers That Never Were? Is he using the word "lovers" to mean "partners"? I have always interpreted it to mean that Paul knows there was something there but it never happened. Every time I start to be convinced that they were together in some way I think of this song and the devastating way Paul sings it in the demo and the heartbreaking fact that he still felt it that intensely 13 years after John's death.

Oh wow thank you! The server had a lot of fun discussing that, if it's good it's because I had a little help from my friends heheh (─‿‿─) ♡

I ended up writing a massive novel in response to all this so I hope you enjoy reading it heheh. For server members, I've pulled some quotes from my previous Discord essays on this topic so you'll see some stuff that you've read.

tl;dr - I don't think "The Lovers That Never Were" contradicts the secret relationship theory at all! I think it compliments it very well actually.

In order to get into All That, I will outline how I perceive what their relationship was built on and how they reacted to it. I should note that I don't consider this definitive. It's important to remember that we all have unique interpretations of John and Paul because of our experiences and our personal POVs. There is no single answer until Paul decides to tell us what happened and/or Sean publishes John's diaries (written and audio). Until that happens, we are all forced to look at the same material and draw our own conclusions which will naturally be shaped through our personal perceptions. Some of us are older and are much closer to the original culture that John and Paul were raised in; some of us are younger and grew up in a much more LGBT+ positive environment. This naturally has an impact on how we interpret John and Paul's relationship.

I say this because I know my POV on John and Paul is a bit different from everyone else's. I'm a historian by training but part of being a historian is the understanding that you will never fully understand the events as they happened because your personal viewpoint and inherent bias is simply too strong. But that's okay because this is a part of humanity that we all share, yeah? With that understanding LET'S GO!

Paul My view on Paul is that he's always understood that he's different from other men. I doubt he could put a name to it until very recently. Paul has synesthesia, he's bisexual, he connects to music in a savant-like way, he's neurodivergent which is why he takes criticism so hard, and all of that would still be true even if he didn't have left over emotional issues from his mother dying the way she did + his fraught relationship with his father.

Keep in mind that circumstantial evidence points to the idea that Paul orchestrated the meeting at the fête! He realized he had a mutual friend with John in Ivan (who is to say that he did not meet Ivan at a QM performance and had that mental realization there?) He went through Hot Girl Summer before and after the fête, wanting to be fucking fit so that he wasn't embarrassed to meet John! I did the same thing when I had a crush as a teenager!

So with all that in mind, imagine this: you're Paul McCartney. You met John Lennon barely a year after Mary died. You turned 15 on June 18th, 1957 and met John at the fête on July 6, 1957. At some undetermined point before this garden party you saw a beautiful boy on the bus and began riding it obsessively hoping the Teddie boy would get on it. You followed him to the chippie and stood in line behind him…allegedly because you thought "oh wow he looks so cool." Marky Mark thinks (and I agree) that you may have even followed John to at least one Quarry Man show before the fête. Is this 'normal' behavior? Or is this the unhinged behavior of a teenager with a massive crush? The kind that comes about when you see a cute boy with red hair, and red is the color you associate with happiness, and then you find out that he plays guitar just like you and you follow him around until you see one of his performances and he's so good he knocks you back and then someone says "hi Paul, I didn't know you liked music!" behind you. And you realize that it's your friend and that you can meet the boy you have a crush on through this friend. You just need to lose weight and grow your hair out first.

When did Paul first see John, anyway? Before he turned 15 I'd wager.

I submit the idea that Paul has been in love John Lennon for his entire life. It will be 67 years of love when this July 6th rolls around. John was making a name for himself, he was known around town as "that Lennon." A minor celebrity like we’ve all had in our hometowns. Paul loved music. Before the internet you would go to the town square to hear a band.

Paul did that. Saw John. Pursued him with intent. When John went to Gambier Terrace to be with Stuart, Paul made a nuisance of himself showing up at their parties and playing the proto-version of "Michelle" in front of the girls…and John.

I love you, I love you, I love you That's all I want to say Until I find a way I will say the only words I know that You'll understand

I don't think that a 15 year old Paul McCartney would explicitly label his feelings for John as 'love' or a 'crush' but I do think that's what happened. When you're a teenager, a crush can express itself in many different ways. I used to have a big crush on a girl who was a volleyball player at my junior high school…that expressed itself as intense admiration. I even told one of my friends that I thought she was 'really cool.' It wasn't until later that I realized that I had a crush on her.

But I think that Paul has always known that he's 'different' and that he wasn't like other boys while growing up. Part of his touchiness about his looks comes from being bullied but I also think that he's a lot more self aware than he pretends to be. I think he realized relatively fast how he felt about John (maybe once John picked up with Stuart and Cynthia at art college.) I think he carried that with him for years hence his anguished response to being jilted in Hamburg and how furious he was at John for running off to Spain with Brian. He didn't realize it immediately but once it sticks to you then it fucking sticks. I think that Paul has done a lot internal wrestling with being a bisexual man and what that means for him and that he has been wrestling with it for decades. I think he was fully in the grip of that wrestling as he and John's friendship began growing and Paul realized what was happening to him. He does enjoy women but I also think that he felt it was necessary to pursue them heavily as a young man to camouflage himself.

I don't think a day has gone by since 1957 where Paul has not known what he was. What exactly that means for him…is up for interpretation. That's where the gray area is. But IMO Paul has almost always known that he's sexually attracted to other men and that John woke this in him. The big question for Paul is what he should do about it.

John There's been a lot written about John and his sexuality that I won't rehash here but truthfully I think John was in a similar place to Paul in knowing that he's always had a sexual preference for other men. John was a lot less comfortable about it though. Having unprotected sex with his girlfriends was, IMO, John trying to subconsciously engineer a situation that would "fix" him via an accidental pregnancy necessitating a marriage.

Of course that didn't do anything because it never does. John still felt chemistry with Paul when they met at the fête, with that quote about them "circling each other like cats." IMO John felt something immediately -- it's not entirely clear what -- though I don't think it "love at first sight" like with Paul. IMO their friendship, while still rooted in that chemistry, developed very naturally for John and he got to enjoy a platonic relationship with Paul before he put it all together. I say this because John saw Paul as a kid, not a peer, and that this endured for their lives in Liverpool pre-Hamburg. I struggle to imagine John or Paul deliberately inciting sexual or romantic contact during that time period aside from the group wank sessions (which were really trolling sessions from John.) Like, when Julia died, John went out and sought peers at art college like Cynthia and Stuart, other students his age. John and Paul bonded over losing their mothers and Paul has that quote about pranking people with the "oh yeah…my mum's dead thanks <3" bit but it also seems like John didn't want to be around that all the time. He lost his Uncle George and then his mother, he was starting to think that he was a death-curse on men in his family and that he brought suffering with him. He wanted to be away from that so he took a vacation from music to get a chance of scenery. Which meant putting Paul in a place of competition with Stuart and Cyn but I don't think John was thinking of that initially (though he exploited the situation later.)

Then Hamburg happens and they run wild. I have an entire meta about this that you can read here but I genuinely think John did not see Paul as a full fledged adult and potential sexual partner until they were in Hamburg in the red light district. I think that something happened there that we don't know about, that it's tied up in Stuart deciding to be with Astrid, John jilting Paul, Paul saying "fuck you I'm done" and getting a job at the coil winding factory in Liverpool after being deported, John tracking Paul down and spending weeks (probably) groveling and then giving Paul an ultimatum to come back to the Beatles. All of that screams 'I just realized I'm in love with my best friend and I'm freaking the fuck out' to me lmao.

John and Paul Of course something else changed after that too and John and Paul ended up becoming so close that even the Liverpool squares around them noticed. I think that whatever was going in their relationship, it started here. In the place where John and Paul were equally distraught with each other, the future of the band was uncertain, and Paul wanted a sign of commitment from John so that he didn't feel like he wasted years of his life. And of course John always felt compelled to be the man Paul wanted him to be so he treated Paul to a vacation in Paris which was so life affirming for them that it stayed with them for the rest of their lives. IMO the Paris vacation was explicitly romantic for them.

I think a switch flipped in 1961 and they went from "messing around" to "there's something there." It erupted in Paris and they showed each other more understanding and care then they expected from each other. John did sexy pin up poses for Paul in a bed that they shared; John remembers how the French held each other in their arms and just kissed each other, lovingly; Paul felt that he discovered the answer and that all those big name philosophers had nothing on the self realization he came to inside himself. Paul even took a photo of John that high lighted his package! Thanks to @louiselux for pointing this one out:

The thing was all the kissing and the holding that was going on in Paris. And it was so romantic, just to be there and see them, even though I was twenty-one and sort of not romantic. But I really loved it, the way the people would just stand under a tree kissing; and they weren’t mauling at each other, they were just kissing. — John Lennon, Playboy interview 1980

“We were like Paris existentialists. Jean-Paul Sartre had nothing on us. Sod ‘em all - I could write a novel… It was all inside me. I could do anything now.”

Paul McCartney, Anthology

Something happened in Paris and it wasn't just them getting haircuts and John buying Paul milkshakes. There was commitment there. And then the spell comes over them again when they return in January 1964:

The first night, John and Paul stayed in their suite, listening to records and reading fan mail. George, who had been signed for 100 pounds a day by the Daily Express to write of his experiences in Paris, went to a nightclub in the Place Pigalle.

Back in the City of Light, John and Paul slept till three o'clock in the afternoon. That much everybody agreed on.

Quote by Vincent Mulchrone from Daily Mail: George Harrison was astir early, but John Lennon and Paul McCartney slumbered on until frantic photographers forced them at lens point into the Champs-Élysées.

Derek Taylor (a British journalist) wanted to know why the Beatles slept so much. "My office wants to know what they're doing in Paris, so they'd better be doing something."

Love Me Do by Michael Braun

But I know what you're thinking. "What the hell does this all have to do with these two songs?"

And my reply is to keep a few things in mind:

Paul takes criticism and slights incredibly hard, possibly overreacting in some places and letting them overwhelm him mentally.

He never got over Barcelona, he never stopped resenting Stuart and Brian, he never got over John pulling the rug out from under him regarding the order of their names in the song credits. He contemplated committing suicide by smothering himself while he was in Scotland recovering from John leaving him.

John Lennon had a baby with a woman in the middle of all this. Julian Lennon was born April 8, 1963, conceived in July 1962, less than a year after Paris.

However Absurd & The Lovers That Never Were I listened to "However Absurd" and "The Lovers That Never Were" in that order. My immediate reaction is that these are both the same kind of song: they are both expressing sadness and frustration with John. This is a common theme with Paul's post-1980 John songs. What I find interesting is that they depict different though related gripes regarding John. In "However Absurd" Paul is expressing his longing for a cottagecore fantasy romance with John and then expressing frustration at John mocking him for it:

Ears twitch, like a dog Breaking eggs in a dish Do not mock me when I say This is not a lie

But in "The Lovers That Never Were" Paul expresses a different gripe: frustration that John won't commit to him and "anticipating" the break up that he secretly knew was coming ever since 1963 when John abandoned him and his own son to play patty-cake with Brian in Spain:

I hang patiently on every word you send Will we ever be much more than just friends? As for you, you sit there playing this game You keep me waiting

When all of the clocks have run down All over the world We'll be the lovers that never were

For as long as the sun shines in somebody's eyes I believe in you baby, so don't tell me lies For as long as the trees throw down blossoms and leaves I know there will be a parade of unpainted dreams

And I know dear, how much it's going to hurt If you still refuse to get your hands dirty So you, you must tell me something… I love you Say goodbye or anything

All of the clocks have run down Time's at an end If we can't be lovers we'll never be friends

John's penchant for disregarding Paul's feelings and even weaponizing them against Paul; the dashing of Paul's cottagecore dreams that were made and solidified in Paris; the fact that John, no matter what his intentions, could not get his shit together and commit to Paul no matter what he may have felt. These two songs are not contradictory to one another. Paul's idea of "commitment" looks very much like what he had with Linda and John in 1967: sharing a home, sharing a bed, being together every day, preferably somewhere green and remote. Exclusivity. Remember that Paul deliberately sabotaged his relationship with Jane Asher by nailing a woman in their bed when Jane came home, knowing perfectly well that he was breaking their exclusivity agreement.

That IMO, is what makes someone a lover and not just a friend you have sex with and secretly pine for. No cheating, or at least your agreed version of it. No disrespecting the relationship. Continuously being together. What did John do instead of this?

I think that Paul started out his "relationship" with John carrying high hopes and then watched them crumble to dust, over and over, because John simply did not take him seriously. He got Cynthia pregnant, he ran around on Paul with Brian, he had the nerve to flip out on Jane Asher when Paul brought her around when he was the one who couldn't stay faithful to Cynthia.

My hot take is that these songs demonstrate that Paul simply could not imagine John ever truly committing to him and treating him as a true partner. The homophobia and yes ~society~ is in there too but Paul was happy to flout this when it came to just about anyone else, traipsing all over France with Fraser and Mal. The difference is that he flat out didn't trust John. Being jilted for Stuart in Hamburg loomed too big in his head. Cynthia and Julian loomed too big in his head. Brian and Barcelona, realizing that John would happily betray whatever agreements or understandings he had with Paul simply to screw Paul out of a deal, loomed too big in his head. I think in particular its Barcelona that made Paul think John didn't value any of their professed ideals. John broke Paul's heart years before Yoko came along.

He didn't trust John. Fatalism is easier than taking control of your own life sometimes, and in Paul's mind there was no reason to believe John was genuine. Like, Paul knew John very well! He had very good reason to think that John was simply not serious about him. And John, no matter what his intentions were, proved that correct over and over and over and over.

So ultimately, I think that's what these songs are about. The melodies don't necessarily reflect this when I listened to them but I think that "The Lovers That Never Were" in particular is juxtaposing bitter wink-and-nod lyrics with an oddly perky tune. It's Paul laughing at himself for ever thinking John was willing to commit. He's mocking himself because while he allowed himself to get swept up in the dream of a possible genuine relationship with John, he knew deep down that it would go the way it did. That John would find a reason to get tired of him and abandon him. And then when Yoko came along, that's exactly what John did. Paul fatalistically accepted that the time had come and John met Paul's low expectations of him.

The Weight I don't think John and Paul necessarily planned to have a secret relationship. It seems more like they bundled the sexual/romantic stuff into their "thing" where it was just part and parcel of who they were and what they did. "It's only gay if the balls touch" etc. At some point that changed but Paul became convinced early on that it wouldn't work out so he didn't acknowledge his own secret desires and dreams. There was no roadmap between him and John about where they were taking this exactly and how they were going to make it work. He had sex with John and even engaged with romantic actions with John, hoping against hope that something would change and he would be proven wrong, but then John would be careless and Paul would collapse into hurt.

And oh yeah: Paul never, ever discussed any of this with John Lennon. He never told John how hurt he was because he didn't want to put up with John's derision. He felt devalued and lost and in typical Paul fashion he chose to ignore this for years and never bring it up, forcing it to come out in bizarre nonsensical actions when he inevitably boiled over. Why would he choose to confront it? He made sure to set up several safety nets to catch him! Jane and the Ashers, striking out on his own with "The Family Way" score, rubbing John's face in his escapades with other males as a way to go 'see, I don't need you just like you don't need me. How about THAT?'

I don't think John ever intended to hurt Paul as badly as he did. He thought that if Paul was upset about something then he would know via their ~telepathic connection.~ I think that he deliberately overlooked warning signs because he felt intensely guilty about certain actions he took (God only knows which ones) and that he helped himself not see Paul's hurt. I do think if he had the slightest idea of what was going on in Paul's head then he would have changed tactics immediately out of fear of losing Paul forever. But at heart John was a coward and if he didn't want to see something was wrong then he wouldn't see it unless something forced his hand. Like say, having his former best friend/ex-lover look him in the eye and go "I can write new songs" and kill The Beatles in a court of law. (And of course once he realized what he had done, years after the fact, it was too little too late. He couldn't take it back. How do you make up for inflicting that much hurt on someone that you supposedly care for? This paralyzed John for years.)

This was obviously a huge mistake and I think it was one of the landmines that blew their relationship up. Paul allowed his distrust and bitterness to overwhelm him. He should have been honest with John about his feelings; maybe not immediately but when they were able to look back with some perspective. Paul should have realized that their relationship could take heat. He should have trusted John more and if he had then John could have risen to the occasion. Everything could have been different. No more "I believe in you baby, so don't tell me lies." No more "Do not mock me when I say/This is not a lie."

He even expresses this in a third song, one that IMO puts this entire thing into perspective and ties these three songs together with a neat bow. "This One":

youtube

Did I ever take you in my arms, look you in the eye Tell you that 'I do?' Did I ever open up my heart And let you look inside?…

Did I ever touch you on the cheek Say that you were mine, thank you for the smile? Did I ever knock upon your door Try to get inside?…

Please take note of the bolded "Tell you that 'I do'!" Paul's deepest regret with regards to John is not trusting him more. He wishes that he had opened up to John about his hurt and how he angry he was that John was devaluing their relationship. That he wanted to commit to John but that he was scared John wouldn't say 'I do' back.

From John's POV he's just being John; he's looking out for the band. God knows he tried to be what Paul needed him to be but he got mixed signals and inconsistent behavior and Paul's ice queen behavior frustrated him to no end. This resulted in an endless circle of "fuck you/no no no, fuck YOU/well fuck you then!/fuck you" that ended up killing what they had.

But John is guilty in this too. He never made himself accountable to Paul. He didn't explain his actions. He acted rashly and selfishly and then was shocked when it blew up in his face. He didn't consistently act like he loved Paul. He took Paul for granted and told himself that he was doing the right thing, because changing your behavior is very very hard. He didn't let Paul in when it mattered.

Did you ever take me in your arms Look me in the eye, tell me that 'you do?'

As Paul grew up and he started to come to grips with the "What happened" of it all, maybe he realized that he had procrastinated. That he put off what mattered most because he couldn't bear to make himself vulnerable as a young man. Maybe he was waiting for a perfect moment to open himself up to John knowing perfectly well it would never arrive, a common delaying tactic for insecure and avoidant people. Not admitting that the perfect moment would never come and that he had to extend trust to receive it in return.

If I never did it, I was only waiting For a better moment that didn't come There never could be a better moment Than this one, this one

I think he's still angry at John for multiple betrayals, slaps to the face, and devaluing the specialness of their relationship and their affection for each other. But I also think that Paul is angry at himself for not trusting John, for not working harder at their relationship. He also delivered multiple betrayals and slaps to the face to John, feeding John's insecurity and fears of abandonment. Making a mockery of their relationship and how special it was. Paul has been doing public penance for this ever since John died, which snapped everything into perspective and he finally realized the full scope of his own screw ups.

Because it took two to destroy a relationship this intense and this special. If Paul did not know that before...

Well. He does now.

#the beatles #mclennon #john lennon #paul mccartney #mclennon meta #my meta #mclennon server #this was a really fun ask anon thank you!

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callipraxia · 1 year ago

Text

As semi-promised on Thursday night: here is a fuller explication of my thoughts after reading @zephrunsimperium's post about Ford and anger (which you should go check out their various Ford analysis pieces if you haven’t, they’re excellent and, unlike me, actually get to the point in a timely manner!)...thoughts which ultimately melded with some attempts at another essay I had semi-abandoned a few months ago, so hold on tight, friends, you’re in for quite the long ride with this one, should you choose to wade through it to the end, for this essay is more than 10,000 words long. Numbers in parentheses indicate endnotes, which can be found at the, well, end. Trigger warnings for extended discussions of multiple kinds of abuse portrayed/only thinly made into metaphors in the GF canon, and for discussion of mental health. For anyone feeling up to dealing with all that...read on below the cut.

To my way of thinking, one of the most essential things for understanding Ford lies in recognizing all the gaps between who he is, who he wants to be, and who he wants other people to think he is, and the intersection of anger, the performance of masculinity, and his long, long history of relational traumas is the fateful crossroads which those gaps emanate from. At the risk of sounding unduly like a pop psychologist, I also think his father is an important individual to consider in light of these issues.

Filbrick, as Stan tells us in ATOTS, was a strict man who had “the personality of a cinderblock.” Stan is not always a terribly reliable narrator, but he seems to lack the ability to lie to the flashback camera, and the first few flashbacks of the episode give us a glimpse at what the Pines family was like in the sixties which supports Stan’s assertion about his father. In those scenes, Filbrick is the only character we don’t see expressing strong emotion of some kind before the science fair, something that makes the ‘sound and fury’ of the scene where Stan is disowned, when it comes around, all that much more shocking. Until this point, Filbrick came about as close to physically resembling a cinderblock as his personality was said to; even when he expressed approval of Ford in the principal’s office, it was a relatively muted display, barely more emotive than his earlier “I’m not impressed” or his silent disappointment in the season one flashback when Stan recalls the summer Filbrick first sent him to boxing lessons. We learn after the science fair that he can, apparently, express anger very vividly, but “Lost Legends” further underlines how he is otherwise mostly emotionally inaccessible to his family; Stan (despite being far more aware of his emotions than he might like to admit that he is) cannot just talk to his father about how he feels, and once again, the only concrete emotion Filbrick shows on-screen is anger. Pictures near the end suggest possible mild experiences of a few other feelings, and the adult Ford, narrating many years after the fact and very probably after Filbrick’s death, speculates about what might have been going on in his head, but those feelings are never made explicit the way his anger is. We don’t know why Filbrick is this way (the closest thing to a hint we get is the information that he was a World War II veteran - there is, after all, a reason for the common portrayal of the Stan twins’ entire generation as one which was saddled with cruddy fathers in the aftermaths of World War II and Korea – but for all we know, Filbrick could have been like that before the War, too. What was his family life like, growing up? His financial condition? Could he just be someone who was born with a strong predisposition toward an emotional or personality disorder, regardless of whatever else happened in his life? We just don’t have enough information about him to say for sure), but it seems safe to speculate that he was this way pretty consistently: whatever else was going on with him, the only emotion he seems to have felt comfortable expressing was anger.

And this is the guy Ford and Stan had held up to them as their first, and quite possibly most influential, example of what being a man is.

I’d argue that – when they were children, at least – this was more of a problem for Stan than for Ford. Filbrick presumably saw them both as shamefully weak as children, but Ford, at least, had another route to the old man’s approval readily available to him. If Filbrick was at least grudgingly proud of Ford’s intelligence, then Ford could receive the measure of parental approval which Stan craved and could never get; we also see that Ford could apparently hold his own while sparring with Stan by the time they were teenagers, so it’s likely enough that he no longer had to worry about physical assault from his classmates by the time he was in high school, either. Though still isolated and insecure underneath it all because of his childhood experiences and probably in part due to his ongoing social isolation, Ford was able to find a path to a kind of self-esteem: he was both brilliant and quite capable of using his six fingers to break your nose if you had too much to say about them, and he knew it, and everyone else knew it, too. He also had his brother as a constant source of support. When Ford was made to look ridiculous by having a drink thrown in his face in public, Stan promptly threw a drink in his own face in order to look even more ridiculous. When Ford won competitions, which he seems to have started doing at an impressive rate very early in life, Stan seems to have been almost over-enthusiastic in his approval: he looks as delighted about Ford winning the science fair (at the time, before the meeting with the principal) as Ford himself does, if not even happier about it. Even his habit of copying off Ford’s papers in class could have served as a reinforcement for Ford’s ego: he not only could manage for himself, but he could even allow someone else to depend on him.

In this way, by the time everything went wrong, the teenaged Ford had probably already developed a degree of self-respect and self-sufficiency that Stan was still struggling to reliably maintain forty years later. Neither of them could ever be the kind of man Filbrick was, or of which they thought he would approve, they were both too emotionally vulnerable and expressive for that, but it’s probably noteworthy that Ford kept pictures of famous scientists (instead of family photographs) around him during his college and young adult years: because he could also do something Filbrick never could, he was able, to some degree, to carve out an idea of “how to be a man” on his own terms. If Filbrick’s approval was an immovable object in the path between Stan, Ford, and healthy expressions of adult masculinity, then where Stan flailed against it, Ford simply walked around it by choosing new conscious role models.

Tesla, Sagan, Einstein, and company were “great men,” successful (well, at least remembered posthumously) and respected, who were also given to Nerdy Enthusiasms. Said enthusiasm, an open delight in the marvels of the natural world, was therefore an emotion besides anger that Ford could express freely without compromising his view of himself, and it seems that he did so regularly. This appears to have worked well for him; we know very little about his college years – only that he worked very hard, that he made at least one close friend and (based on his usage of the plural ‘friends’ when discussing DD&MD) possibly even had a social group of sorts, and that he continued to indulge his creative side to a degree by playing DD&MD, which was as close as someone in his late teens and early twenties could probably get to continuing the kind of fantasy play he’d enjoyed as a child without sabotaging his probable adolescent desire to feel very grown up – but it seems they were productive and reasonably happy. Six years after them, a slice of his life comes into focus for us in the form of his journal. He was probably around thirty to thirty-three years old when it was written(1), give or take a year or two, and we find him several years into the circumstances he was in when he says, as a much older man, that he’d finally found somewhere to belong. He could be lying - Ford, unusually, even has the ability to lie to the flashback camera, or at least omit things - but we don't really have any reason to believe this; when the flashbacks turn to Stan making an abortive attempt at contact, Ford on the phone sounds cheery. His lack of paranoia and surprise about someone phoning him is also not the only evidence that, at this time, he may not even have been totally socially isolated in Gravity Falls – in the same years, he goes to the public library with some regularity, he declines to buy cookies from a zombie Boy Scout, he converses sometimes with the mailman, and he is on friendly enough terms with Dan Corduroy, even some years after Dan finished building Ford’s house, to know that Dan’s family had a holiday cabin and to ask to use it. Clearly nobody was too close to Ford even then, but his chosen path was going reasonably well for him; it's possible that Stan might have found him rather harder to replace at this point than he did later, after an unspecified time lapse, which may have lasted as long as a year,(2) during which Ford had gradually became a complete recluse as he became more and more consumed by his relationship with Bill Cipher. Before that time lapse, Ford the man seems like a logical enough place for Ford the boy to have ended up; after it…..

Well, after it is where we get back to the topics of anger and its intersection with various aspects of identity and self-concept.

A decent place to begin is with Fiddleford, and with why, exactly, Ford asked him to come to Gravity Falls. Ford tells us that he asked Fiddleford to come because he (Ford) did not have the technical know-how to complete the Portal. There is some evidence to support the veracity of this idea: Fiddleford is, after all, the man who later proves able to build astonishingly lifelike robot monsters whilst homeless (and thus, it seems safe to assume, without conventional sources of funds or supplies), and he is the one who sees the flaws in the Portal design. Indeed, he seems to start spotting them before he even has a chance to physically see them: Ford tells us that Fiddleford started suggesting revisions to the plans over the phone while still in California, in the same conversation where he agreed to come. In the third portion of the Journal, the sixtysomething Ford also mentions hearing about how a Parallel Earth Fiddleford was convinced to come back to the project, at which point the Parallel Portal was stabilized and became something that could be used the way Ford had intended to use it (as opposed to how Bill had intended to use it). The implication is that Ford not only didn’t understand how to complete the Portal, but that he also didn’t understand the plans even as far as he thought he understood them. Certainly the Fiddleford of the main timeline, who would have worked with him before, was instantly suspicious about the existence of a third collaborator once he saw how far Ford had gotten without him, which further supports the idea that Ford was more of a theoretician than a mechanic. This does, however, run somewhat against the grain of much of what we see Ford do on-screen. As a teenager of modest economic means, he was shown to be as comfortable working with his hands as with his pencil, and he was able to build something which acted enough like a perpetual motion device that he won a state-wide competition and drew the attention of an elite university. At university, he created the mind control tie – something which appears, both by its existence and by the glimpse we get of how it’s wired in “The Stanchurian Candidate,” to involve electronics more sophisticated than what Fiddleford was shown working with in roughly the same time period. I tend to run with the idea that the events of the episode “The Stanchurian Candidate” only happened in a particularly vivid nightmare of Stan’s, and therefore include the tie simply because it was in the Journal, but if one goes with official canon and accepts that “Stanchurian Candidate” happened, then Ford somehow, in a matter of hours, with no budget or supplies, invented a thousand-year lightbulb that also improves the complexion of the user in the same episode that shows us the wiring of the tie. In the eighties, he also seems to have developed his mind-encrypting machine as a private project, and in the Multiverse, he survived entirely on what he could steal or construct for thirty years, and it seems he had progressed a long way toward the development of the Quantum Destabilizer on his own before he stumbled into the ‘Better World’ dimension; Parallel Fiddleford really just sped the completion process up because he’d happened to discover a useful fuel source for presumably completely unrelated reasons years before Ford showed up. Clearly, Ford can more than hold his own as an engineer, and as one with a particular flair for doing impossible things with electricity and the laws of energy conservation; even Fiddleford trusted his gift in that area enough to, however reluctantly, briefly accept his claim that he had been working alone despite his serious doubts about the idea, and to allow Ford to bully him into silence about the Portal’s design flaws for weeks or possibly months before the confrontation at the diner. Why, then, did he suddenly become convinced, during that fateful July, that he could not finish the Portal without Fiddleford?

The answer may lay a few pages further back in the Journal. Not long before he calls Fiddleford, Ford makes notes on the plans for the Portal that Bill had showed him in a dream. One of these notes is “I MUST NOT LOSE MY NERVE!�� Later, in a state of mind where he is increasingly paranoid and beginning to lose a degree of touch with reality, he reflects repeatedly about Fiddleford’s nerve in similar terms. There may well have been some level, deep down, on which Ford knew he was getting in over his head, and he was scared out of his mind by that realization. If this is true, then, on some level, he knew something was...off, with what was going on around him. He knew he needed help from someone he trusted and who was not Bill. And so he reached out to his college roommate for that help, and he did so in a way that allowed him to still plausibly deny just how much trouble he was in, both to himself and everyone else, and he didn’t only need that deniability because he was inviting a third party into the isolation of an increasingly abusive relationship and would need an excuse if Bill took exception to the idea of Ford relying on anyone or anything other than Bill. He also needed that plausible deniability to preserve his self-concept, because by this time, whatever he had or hadn’t been earlier, Ford Pines had become a deeply, deeply dishonest man.

One of the key moments for understanding this - and, in many ways, the character overall - occurs in “Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons.” There, Ford delivers the exasperated line, “if my hands were free, I’d break every part of your face!” If that line was taken totally out of context and shown to a casual viewer, the casual viewer would likely misidentify it as a line of Stan’s. Stan is, after all, the character with the hair-trigger temper and violent tendencies, right?

To an extent, yes. In “The Golf War,” Stan asks Soos if it would be “wrong” to punch a child (Pacifica) – probably more of an indirect threat in response to Pacifica’s insults toward the Pineses than a true question, but Stan’s moral code is sufficiently different from the standard issue that one can’t completely dismiss the possibility that he really wanted to, well, punch a child. And who can forget his antics in “The Land Before Swine” or “Scaryoke,” where he punches his way single-handed through monsters which had defeated the rest of the cast? Or in “Not What He Seems,” where he takes on multiple government agents in zero gravity while, for at least part of the time, he had his hands fastened behind his back? Or that glorious moment in the finale when he did, in fact, break every part of Bill Cipher’s glitched-out face? Stan is also the character who lost his temper to the extent that he lashed out at Ford physically in the middle of the save-the-world ritual, and Stan is the one who keeps his old boxing gloves around his bedroom, along with owning at least one set of brass knuckles. As an old man, he still seems to take pride in having learned to fight back against the world physically as a child, and he recommends that Dipper try knocking Robbie unconscious bare-handed when Dipper is challenged to a fight. And, of course, the man is a menace whenever he gets within a certain radius of the Stanmobile, the vehicle that can take out roadway railings, light poles, and theme park gates without showing a scratch. There’s no denying it: Stan is perhaps many other things, too, but he’s also a very physically aggressive kind of guy. If, therefore, someone in this series was going to threaten to break someone’s face, it seems obvious it would be Stan…but it wasn’t. It was his supposedly milder-mannered, “goody nerd-shoes,” brother who, on examination, actually behaves far more casually violently than Stan does throughout his sadly short time in the series. To demonstrate:

Ford sets foot in his house for the first time in thirty years and identifies the first person he sees as his brother. Later, writing in his reclaimed journal, Ford describes his own reaction thus: “instinct took over and I punched him right in the face. I feel kind of bad about that!”

In the very next episode - aside from his antics in the first scenes(3) and the already-mentioned description of what he’d like to do to Probabilitator after the wizard captures him - we also have Ford’s immediate reaction to the wizard’s materialization. Stan is, naturally, most clearly unnerved by an evil math wizard suddenly materializing in the TV room, but there’s a moment where he glances sideways at Ford after Ford pulls a gun; to me, at least, this glance made it seem like he found that behavior pretty disturbing as well. For the past several hours, after all, Ford had been playing board games. Most people do not bring concealed guns to game night with their nephews. Ford does.

Stan and Ford both have wanted posters that show up ‘on screen’ – Stan’s in his box of memorabilia in “Not What He Seems,” and Ford’s in Journal 3. Stan’s talks about “scams, frauds, and identity theft” - all potentially serious crimes that can ruin the lives of the people on the other ends of them, but ones which follow the general tendency (per the reading I did last March) of real-world con men to avoid violence in the commission of their crimes. Ford’s, on the other hand, refers to its subject as ‘armed and dangerous,’ and as someone with a bounty on his head. From the way Ford depicts his own appearance in it, it seems likely that particular version of the poster is at least ten to fifteen years old, but in “Lost Legends,” he is still instantly recognizable in the multiverse for his criminal shenanigans, even in the company of his near-identical twin. In his own words, “a number of dimensions consider me an outlaw to this day.” If one uses the dictionary definition of the term - and considering how much variety comes up just in the few examples Ford gives of worlds he’s visited, there’s no reason to assume he hasn’t visited a few Premodern Justice Dimensions - this means there could be multiple dimensions out there where the authorities took the time and trouble to formally declare that he had done something shocking enough to justify the revocation of all rights and protections he might have otherwise enjoyed under the law, thus allowing anyone to do anything they could physically manage to him with no fear of any negative repercussions except those he could personally inflict on them. He also refers to his own exploits as “swashbuckling” (a term which brings piracy to mind) and offhandedly mentions travels with “bandits” (a term which describes practitioners of behavior usually classified under the ‘organized crime’ umbrella due to the cooperative nature of the often violent or potentially violent crimes in question).

Much of this behavior, it’s true, can be attributed to a combination of trauma responses and, in the Multiverse, sheer necessity. He refers in the journal to talking “my way into and out of food and shelter,” and the “out of” comment underlines how, like Stan before him, he very abruptly went from having a relatively stable situation (at least in the material sense) to being homeless, which would be at least a serious shock to the system of almost anyone, including people in much better mental health than he was in at that time. Then there’s the more complicated non-material aspects of his previous situation. As an adult reader, it’s stomach-knotting to go through the 1980s portion of the journal, because if you look at the behaviors and dynamics and leave out the “incorporeal eldritch abomination” element, it only takes a very little extrapolation from the material for his ‘partnership’ with Bill becomes an uncomfortably realistic depiction of a domestic abuse situation. Considering that either of these major traumas of 1981-1982 could (and, if the fantastical elements are stripped out, regularly do) induce PTSD in nearly anyone, and considering how many more traumatic events he doubtless went through in the years following, it’s not implausible that the man would develop a tendency toward believing that the best defense is a good offense. However, there is also evidence that at least some of these tendencies predated Ford’s major traumas, and that – despite how he would very likely insist this was not the case - the trigger-happy adrenaline addict we meet in “A Tale of Two Stans” may not represent a total change in character from who he was before the Portal – or even before Bill. The evidence here is admittedly scarcer and more ambiguous, but to illustrate:

In Journal 3, Ford seems sincerely puzzled about why Fiddleford would show signs of trauma after the gremlobin incident. This incident involved Fiddleford being shown his worst fear (something which ended in tourists being removed from the Mystery Shack via stretcher in apparent catatonic states. Fiddleford was a man who probably had an anxiety disorder to begin with, who was just accepting the reality of the supernatural, and who was living, for at least several months, hours away from where his wife and young son were, something which seems to have troubled him at the best of times. It's remarkable he was functioning at all after the gremlobin incident). He was also hit with a bunch of venomous quills, and flown through the air by something which clearly had no good intentions for him in mind…and that was all before the solution to the situation ended up involving Ford crash-landing everyone through the roof of a barn, breaking Fiddleford’s arm in the process.

The gremlobin incident is not the only time Ford, even before the multiverse, appears bewildered by perfectly ordinary responses to frightening stimuli. While Fiddleford admittedly may have had some form of anxiety or compulsive disorder to begin with (an idea supported by events like his tearing out his own hair under stress and his need to correct the Cubik’s Cube), his reactions to monsters appear far more reasonable than Ford’s offhand assertion that he has survived many monster attacks without registering any of the experiences as traumatic.

When Fiddleford was in danger, Ford’s automatic response involved, essentially, jumping off a cliff and hoping the magnet gun-to-hyperdrive attraction would first catch and then carry him long enough for him to catch up…and that he would then somehow figure out how to land the improvised gremlobinmobile without killing himself, Fiddleford, and the monster all in one go.

When we go into the bunker in “Into the Bunker,” Soos finds a candy dispenser in a cabinet filled with weapons. These weapons appear to be a mix of firearms alongside various medieval or Renaissance-style pieces. It is, of course, possible - though to my mind, improbable; Fiddleford seems to prefer indirect methods of aggression, mostly in the form of homicidal robots - that some or all of these weapons belonged to Fiddleford, but there is also evidence that there was a similar mix of weapons in the house which later became the Mystery Shack: sside from Ford’s singular ideas about how to answer a door in “A Tale of Two Stans,” we also see a box of other manual weapons which Dipper has access to in “Boss Mabel,” and which Stan is seen rifling through to find a crossbow - presumably the same one which had come alarmingly close to his nose thirty years earlier – at the beginning of “Love God.” Stan further asserts there are ten guns in the Shack during “Fight Fighters,” but we never see them; even while fighting against zombies, while following pterodactyls into caverns beneath the town, and during Weirdmageddon, Stan routinely arms himself with bludgeoning weapons, not ranged ones. The only time we see him use a ranged weapon (at least that I can recall) is the time he aims the crossbow at a balloon, which was out of reach. Ford, however, despite demonstrating almost immediately upon arrival that he’s quite capable of fighting without one, repeatedly uses ranged weapons even in close quarters: the crossbow in Stan’s face, the handgun in the living room, the Quantum Destabilizer during Weirdmageddon, the spear in the closing montage of the finale. These examples are, of course, all justifiable enough in their various contexts, but the combination of several incidents and all the weapons around the house and its environs makes it seem eminently possible that Ford was a bit of a weapons nut long before he became an interdimensional fugitive, and that if there actually are ten guns in the house, Stan may have more or less 'inherited' them along with the Stanford identity.

When Bill - who knew Ford very well before the Portal - shows Ford a vision of a possible future in an attempt to convince Ford to join him in his conquest of the universe, it is a vision of complete destruction. We see Bill’s giant finger tearing cities apart in an uncomfortable amount of detail, and are treated to the sight of planets being munched on like apples…and this is Bill’s sales pitch, the ‘party’ he is inviting Ford to and really, really wants Ford to agree to attend. This leaves us with two options: either Bill can’t understand that anyone might ultimately desire anything beyond or besides the chance to participate in unlimited, consequence-free violence (something which doesn’t square too well with Bill’s otherwise apparently excellent grasp of human motivation and how to manipulate it to serve his own ends), or Bill has some reason for thinking that the prospects of immortality and a group of ‘friends’ to destroy things with on a massive scale might genuinely appeal to his “old pal” just as much as the prospect of being “all-powerful” and “all-knowing” would. This is also hinted at by how Bill appears to try to convince Ford to relate to him by revealing that he was once mortal himself and explaining that he burned his dimension before offering Ford the chance to effectively do the same to the universe of the canon timeline. 'Become a god of destruction' or 'get tortured a lot' were also not the only possible options Bill could have offered; he could, for instance, have tried to convince Ford that if he (for all intents and purposes) became a god, then he could save at least some sapient life-forms in the universe from Bill by setting up his galaxy as a benevolent dictatorship or the like, with the alternative being that everyone would die if Ford didn’t take that deal. Bill did not attempt anything of the sort. Bill, at least, thinks Ford is not only capable of observing or even committing acts of great violence, but that he is capable of relishing the opportunity to do so.

Why are all these things easy to overlook? In part, it is because Ford wants us to overlook them, because they do not ‘fit’ with the person Ford wishes that he was. He wants, very much, to see himself as a cool-headed, utterly rational, cultured figure – not least because this would represent a total contrast to his twin brother and everything Stan stands for, either in reality or inside Ford’s imagination - and so he uses long words and is usually fairly softly-spoken. He emphasizes his “well-ordered and scientific mind” even as he behaves in ways which suggest he’s highly volatile and puts in writing (however carefully concealed the information might be behind veils of words) that he planned to make his name on a scientific project which wasn’t of his own design, a behavior which indicates a comfort with shortcuts even more potentially disastrous than Stan’s. When he does, rarely, have to acknowledge something that he would rather not acknowledge directly, he always immediately justifies the potentially unflattering behavior in fairly grandiose ways - stealing radioactive materials, for instance, is rationalized as a ‘doing a public service,’ and all the things he did to become a wanted man in multiple dimensions are, similarly, lumped together and dismissed as crimes committed “for a noble purpose.” No doubt some of them were, but on the page about the Infinity Die, one doesn’t really get the impression that he was particularly discriminating about when he used that thing, considering the usage statistics we’re given. The page informs us that the Die saved Ford’s life three times, endangered it “around 20,” permanently changed the color of a sky one time…and that it’s been used enough other times besides these that he can note the odd frequency of rolling a four(4). When talking to Dipper, he also seems quite confident about just how far the Die can warp reality - he doesn’t speak as if “the universe could turn into an egg” is an exaggeration. Use of the Infinity Die would not be a reliable way to limit damage or even to advance his goals while committing other crimes, so it becomes a bit difficult to justify his apparently relatively casual use of it as something he did only as a last resort and/or only in service of a noble purpose. Most fans recognize that he clearly started over-identifying Dipper with himself toward the end of the series, but he identifies Dipper with himself only when it comes to traits he is proud of having; otherwise, the “grammar, Stanley” remark is one of the few criticisms he has of Stan which doesn’t also come across as something he might want to say about himself and his own less desirable qualities, if he could only bring himself to acknowledge them for what they are in plain language. It reads, to borrow from someone I once talked about the character with on Reddit, like “my man is just as chaotic [as Stan], he just manifests it differently.”

Part of this difference lies in their respective approaches to the truth. Neither is anything you could reasonably call an honest man, but the distinction lies in how Ford appears to lie to himself a lot more often than Stan does. Stan, outside of ‘working hours,’ is utterly up-front about who and what he is and what he cares about: he’s a crook and a grifter and a liar, interested only in that which benefits him and the small number of people he personally cares about. Only once, when contemplating his epitaph in “The Stanchurian Candidate,” does he show anything even vaguely resembling shame about this, and even then, he still includes the detail that he would, of course, be a crooked mayor if he became one. It's entirely possible that the only ultimately sacrificed himself to destroy Bill because of the direct and imminent threat Bill represented to his individual relatives. As the man himself once said: it wasn’t enough for him to be the town’s hero, because his real agenda was being Dipper and Mabel’s. Ford, on the other hand, seems to have shared many of Stan’s desires (wealth, respect, shortcuts to these things) as a young man, but also to have always felt some need to convince himself that he wanted more (for lack of a better term) socially acceptable ‘side features’ as well. When he dreams of scientific accomplishment, he will admit he looks forward to riches and glory...but he also throws in that he wants to revolutionize science to enhance the well-being of all mankind, too. When he writes down the story of how he began his quest to kill Bill, he acknowledges that he wished to “wreak vengeance for the life he stole from me” - but only after saying he would “save the multiverse from [Bill’s] wrath.” Later, though, when talking about his meeting with a parallel Fiddleford, he refers to his vow as a “vendetta” - a word defined as “a blood feud in which the family of a murdered person seeks vengeance on the murderer or the murderer's family; a prolonged bitter quarrel with or campaign against someone.” The word can be used far less precisely in casual conversation, of course, and he probably does sincerely see it as his duty to atone for his mistakes by removing the entity which seeks to exploit them, but at the end of the day, despite his attempts to frame his behavior in terms of doing what is objectively right, there’s also a massive degree to which his quest is personal. Anger and revenge and personal concerns ultimately prove just as important to him as they are to his brother, if not even more important. This is illustrated perhaps most dramatically in the lead-up to the Final Deal: one can only imagine what Bill’s back-up plan was, because Bill came close to not needing one. Ultimately, when put to the test, the principles which went along with the persona Ford tried so hard to project crumbled: the family was, in the end, more important to him than saving the world, just as it was for Stan. He never mentioned the idea of making any attempt to save himself in the deal (on top of doubtless believing that such an effort would be doomed to failure, there are hints that Ford always planned to die in the execution of his revenge, or at least never saw a way around doing so), but he was willing to let Bill take over the galaxy “or worse” just to save (or at least exempt himself from the responsibility of personally dooming) three other people on a probably quite temporary basis. If Bill was unraveling reality all around them, after all, where exactly were Stan and the twins supposed to go?

“What other choice do we have?” It took no few viewings of the finale for it to register why I always find that line so wrenchingly uncomfortable to watch. At that moment, finally, for the first time on screen, Ford admits that he cannot save the situation, or even himself. That he’s been backed into a corner – trapped – forced to acknowledge that another entity can and will hurt him, and that it can and will hurt him on as many levels as it pleases. He’s been taken right back to where he was when his first grade classmates nearly put him in the hospital, and he can’t hide it from himself or anyone else anymore...and it’s after this moment that we almost immediately see a dramatic change in Ford’s behavior and self-representation. The same man who remained remarkably defiant, all things considered, when tied up by an evil sorcerer who was gloating about its plans to consume his brain, or even in the midst of what was probably several days of severe torture,(5) visibly flinches, his hands shaking, while using the memory gun; in the aftermath of that moment, we then see him standing in a corner, looking helpless and at a loss for what to do while other people (specifically, mostly Mabel) try to figure out a solution without his assistance, as he's meekly accepted the situation instead of trying to change it. Dipper notes that some point in that day was the “only time” anyone had ever seen Ford cry, a statement that implies there had been other occasions where Dipper expected him to cry when he didn’t do so – perhaps it’s just because Dipper is used to Stan, who cries rather a lot, but for some reason, Dipper regarded this observation as specific enough to underline the severity of the situation during the first hours of Stan’s amnesia. The closest Ford really gets to his pre-Weirdmageddon demeanor again is when he takes the long way around the block in order to ask Stan to accompany him to investigate some anomaly up north, just as he’d previously made the same excuse about being too old to manage on his own anymore for asking Dipper to stay in town after the summer ended; since even unbending enough to, effectively, ask anyone not to leave him was already a step away from his isolated-hero act, it’s far from one of his more distinctive adult characteristics reasserting itself. Something, it seems, in the man profoundly broke in the throne room of the Fearamid, and based on his worryingly fervent attempts in the last pages of his journal to represent both Stan and Fiddleford as plaster saints, it doesn’t seem like it’s getting fixed any time soon.

I noted earlier that I suspected Ford had no intention of surviving his duel with Bill in the Nightmare Realm during “Not What He Seems.” There are a few reasons for this. One is simple probability, of course (even if he had destroyed Bill, there would have still been plenty of creatures around that would have been more than happy to eat him, and his death ray was almost out of power). More pertinent, however, are a few of Ford’s own words. Twice, he refers to Stan as having “saved” him – not ‘rescued’ ‘retrieved’ ‘gotten back’ or any other possible combination of words, but “saved.” The first, where he’s still grumbling about it, is when he shows Dipper the Rift and explains why he was angry at Stan for this seemingly charitable behavior: he saved Ford’s life, but at the cost of endangering the world, and at that time, Ford was still deeply committed to the idea of himself as someone who sacrifices, not someone who sacrifices are made for. On the second occasion, while trying to explain what just happened to Dipper and Mabel after they realize that Stan no longer recognizes them, he sounds almost bewildered as well as moved as he makes the statement. Shortly before that second occasion, in the Fearmid itself, he also, infamously, uses the word “suicide” on the Disney Channel, when he tells Dipper and Mabel that any attempt to take on Bill – or, in other words, to undertake the very task he was attempting when the Portal reopened in NWHS – was a “suicide mission.” His behavior, from the moment he comes back, is usually varying degrees of reckless, and the Journal illustrates that this isn’t an entirely new tendency: aside from vowing to undo the damage he’d done “or lose my life in the attempt” at the end of the 1980s section, he also put himself through the kind of work conditions that can literally kill a person for, it seems, months before he realized Bill had played him; afterward, he proceeded to have a breakdown while continuing, or even increasing, his dangerous habits of sleep deprivation and stimulant overuse. And even before that, as previously noted: he once didn’t think twice about jumping off a cliff. There has, at least since he came to Gravity Falls, always been a part of Ford which seems to have had some inclination toward self-destruction; he may not have been suicidal as such in the early years, but even then, he seems to have been more than merely indifferent to his own well-being. It is at this point that all the disparate threads of this essay will begin to gather back together into a single line, because this behavior can be interpreted as Ford, essentially, daring the universe to so much as try to make a victim of him, because it was at in those years that he began to feel the need to assure himself that he wasn’t one. After he admits he’s out of ideas in the Fearamid, though, he finally has no other choice but to admit that he has in fact been victimized – specifically, by Bill Cipher.

When Ford chose to adopt famous scientists as his models for how to be a man, he began to lie to himself about himself to some degree. He insisted he was rational and unemotional when he was anything but. He retained some pride in being in better physical condition than the other men close to him during both his scientist and hero arcs, but he downplayed his quite real attraction toward violence (recall that on two of the three occasions where he and Stan came to blows, Ford was the one who escalated the conflict) and thrill-seeking, trying to veil them from himself as well as the reader. Ford’s tendency toward black-and-white thinking didn’t disappear at the end of the show; he simply reversed the polarity, so that now, instead of him being the hero, he recast others in that role and was at least attempting to accept a place among the ranks of those who’d needed saving. This was something that he’d been denying he was for a very long time, even at the price of focusing on anger-inducing aspects of the past, perhaps distorting them out of proportion in his memory so he could keep his mind on the future. Unable to cope with the loss of control implicit in his situation with his 'Muse,' acting as the agent of something else and being manipulated in deeper and deeper over his head, he directed his attention to a future where he would be on top again, focusing on anger toward the past instead of on his fear of the present.

For most of the show, Ford has real issues with anger, and I tend to believe that quite a lot of them had to do with the need to protect two things after the disintegration of his relationship with Bill Cipher. One is his image of himself, and the other - arguably, something dependent on the maintenance of his self-concept - is his sanity – or at least, if not his sanity, then his ability to function. As noted the other night – anger might not feel good, exactly, but it can feel so much better than hurting that it can be mistaken for feeling good. Fury can be paralyzing, yes, but it can also, when directed outward, keep you moving – spite, as they say, is the source of many an accomplishment Self-loathing, on the other hand, will crush you like a boulder, sooner or later...and it’s painfully obvious, in the scrambled, increasingly unhinged journal entries between the Portal test and his decision to call Stan, that Ford is capable of intense self-hatred. Even in later years, when he has focused his entire mind on revenge for decades and reviles the traits in his brother that he dislikes in himself, there’s still that undercurrent of guilt and self-hatred running just beneath the surface, so close to the top that even he can never really fully ignore it. He doesn’t really know how to accept help while maintaining his self-respect, and here’s where we get to him being both an abuse survivor and, arguably, specifically a male one.

Earlier, I referred to his partnership with Bill as an uncomfortably realistic depiction of a domestic abuse situation when you strip the supernatural frills away. Bill could well have marked off items on some kind of manipulation checklist: he would flatter Ford to draw him in, and then withdraw without explanation, leaving Ford despondent and thus that much more dependent on Bill upon Bill’s return. Bill convinces Ford that nobody else really understands him like Bill does, and that nobody else ever could do so. They are all parasites who want to ride on Ford’s coattails, or steal his work, or are people who will hurt him because they are jealous of him; Bill is the one who inspires him, because he’s just that deserving of inspiration...except, of course, when he isn’t. When the Muse would go silent for long stretches of time, waiting with highly uncharacteristic patience until he got just close enough to desperate for a breakthrough. Then the whole cycle would begin all over again, until finally, by 1980-1981, Bill had succeeded in reducing Ford’s world to little more than himself. Based on the state of Ford’s study, he was, by the end, probably literally worshiping Bill as a god.(6) It is therefore possible to argue that the relationship included spiritual abuse in addition to the blatant psychological, physical (“enjoy the mystery bruises”), and financial (in that much of the grant ended up being used to pursue Bill’s agenda instead of for its intended purpose) abuse...and all of that happens before the possession sub-plot after the Portal test, where any illusion that their association is consensual or in any way for Ford’s benefit falls apart. Bill systematically violates every understood boundary within the relationship during the weeks between the Portal test and the Portal incident, and Bill very clearly enjoys doing so. He takes the time to taunt his victim by scribbling in the Journal when Ford blacks out. He seems to derive a great deal of satisfaction not only from the ability to completely deprive Ford of all mental and bodily autonomy on a whim, but from reminding Ford that he had this ability: he seems to have gotten a twisted satisfaction from knowing that Ford knew that, sooner or later, he would be unable to physically prevent himself from sleeping any longer. The hopelessness and inescapability of his situation are thrown in Ford's face again and again, and apparently for no better reason than that Bill is a physical and psychological sadist. Other people's misery and horror are like a drug to Bill, and we see, again and again, in the series that Bill will even undermine the pursuit of his own goals in order to enjoy it.

And the person he did all this to was Ford. Someone who already had profound trust issues (from his point of view, everyone he ever cared for had betrayed him to one degree or another), and whose formative years were during early fifties. This is significant, even aside from the impact of personality flaws specific to Filbrick Pines on his son’s development. Even today, in our rather better-informed times, many people dismiss the idea that men and even boys can be victims of abuse entirely, and even some of those who acknowledge the possibility won’t take it as seriously as the idea of men abusing women and girls. When Ford was physically and verbally bullied in elementary school, the only solution his father could offer was “learn to hit harder than the other guy.” If someone hurts you, you hurt them back; this, in the earliest examples he seems to have had, is how you reclaim power, and if you can’t do that, then Filbrick thinks you’re weak, that you’re an embarrassment, and that he just wishes you were gone, to very nearly quote Stan from “Dreamscaperers.” This was also a general attitude of the surrounding culture, without a lot of prominent examples of better options. Years later, it follows - horrible though it is to say – reasonably enough that when Ford realized he’d been manipulated and used by something that couldn’t be punched in the face, he began to have a breakdown, which only began to resolve in a small way when he convinced himself there was, in fact, a way to do something at least equivalent to punching Bill in the face. His plan was irrational and poorly strung together, and it did require him to ask someone for help, which must have galled – but it’s only Stan he has to ask, after all, and Stan doesn’t really count, and Stan owes him anything he might choose to ask for anyway, and besides, he’s not really asking Stan to help him deal with the problem, is he? He’s going to be the one who defeats that bastard or dies trying. Stan’s just...going to hold his beer, so to speak. Or book, as the case may be. Because he doesn’t need Stan. He doesn’t need anyone. Because he’s in control of this situation. He’s going to save the universe, and then everything will be fine again (or so he tells himself), because then he will be, once and for all, beyond the reach of anyone who might want to hurt him again. Because if he can pull this one off, then who would dare? Who would even want to? He’ll be a hero, a savior, someone deserving of everyone’s respect – and if not, he’ll at least be a martyr, which to him likely seems like a better second choice than continuing to live with the thought that he’s vulnerable and that everyone knows it.

An interesting thing to examine at this point is the similarity between his approaches to Fiddleford and Stan in the eighties. Earlier, it was argued that Ford may have reached out to Fiddleford as much out of repressed fear as from any real need for technical assistance. When Fiddleford first comes to Gravity Falls, Ford cannot stop talking about Fiddleford’s excellence, praising it even above his own. Fiddleford is his friend, his partner, his companion on this path to glory. Slowly, though, it changes. He begins to cast more and more doubt on Fiddleford’s capabilities, in a way, at first, which almost seems reasonable due to Fiddleford’s neuroses. He begins to feel that he is doing Fiddleford a favor – many favors, in fact – by allowing him to participate in “making history” like this. He projects and lashes out. This shows up even more clearly when he writes to Stan. He does not, admittedly, start out with praise in that case, but he still clearly goes through the same process of progressing from acknowledging a need to twisting it around in his own head so he no longer has to do so, just at a higher rate of speed. Almost as soon as he decides to write to Stan, he adds in his journal that “perhaps he can prove his worth to me.” This is followed by some prevarication – the line about how perhaps the mistakes of the past can be made right could apply to his thoughts on how he feels Stan wronged him, his thoughts on his situation with Bill, or even his past actions toward Stan, and when Stan arrives, Ford initially seems to present the matter as one where he needs a partner-in-crime because Stan is the one person he can trust – but within minutes, he shouts about how he’s offering Stan the one chance he’ll ever have to do something meaningful in his entire life. He’s progressed again to the idea that he doesn’t need help, and that he’s just doing these people - people who he has ostensibly asked for help - a favor. He is still in control. Because he doesn’t need them. He doesn’t need anyone. And when he triumphs over Bill, then….

...Then….

...Then we get to the bit I did write about on Thursday night. Specifically, how there’s very likely going to come a day when Ford will start finding it very, very hard not to have Bill around to hate anymore. To paraphrase zephyrsimperium - even when anger is hurting you so much that even you can see that it’s doing so, even when you know, intellectually, that it doesn’t really feel very good at all, it still hurts less than actually cleaning out the psychological wound.

To a certain extent, Ford’s anger did save him in 1982. Coping mechanisms can be necessary, for a time, when a trauma is too close to deal with. Truly dealing with it would be healthier, but there are situations where some distance has to be put between oneself and the trauma before it can be addressed; situations where you’ve just very suddenly become homeless and are being hunted by your reality-warping abuser would, it seems safe to say, be among these. Too much pain from too many sources could not be addressed all at once, especially by someone who, for reasons both cultural and innate, possessed none of the psychological tools or self-awareness to even begin to work through it all, and so when survival became a priority, focusing on hating Bill more than he hated himself probably was the only choice Ford realistically had in that moment. At the end of the show, however...Bill’s gone. Ford no longer has that mission to focus on, and at some point, that’s likely to mean waking up and realizing – if I may be forgiven for quoting a song from the Dark Ages, aka, my childhood -

“Wherever you go, there you are/You can run from yourself, but you won’t get far.”

Learning to defend himself as a child wasn’t enough – he still had to seek validation, acceptance of some kind, through all those competitions. Winning the competitions wasn’t enough – he still needed to find a place where he could fit in, somehow, either as a genius or as an anomaly. Going to college, finding someone he considered even more brilliant than himself, winning a grant – somehow, it still wasn’t enough, he needed to discover a new theory and emblazon his name in the history books...never realizing that even if he’d succeeded in that endeavor, it still wouldn’t have been enough. And all that was before Bill. Afterward, sure...he killed Bill. The being that made him feel weak and stupid and helpless all those years ago, it’s gone now. He won. And it still won’t be enough, because removing Bill doesn’t undo what Bill did to him. It doesn’t take away the difficulty of trusting anyone else after such an acute betrayal. It doesn’t take away the anger at himself for being someone who got duped. It doesn’t take away all those years out in the Multiverse, and the memories of whatever less-than-ideal things he had to do to survive them, or the impulse to hit first and ask questions later that he’s developed, or anything else. Nor is throwing himself into being the Perfect Friend or Perfect Brother in an attempt to make up for the past going to ultimately help much – he can’t undo whatever wrongs he did Fiddleford or Stan any more than they can undo the ones they did him, and all three of them are likely in for a rough ride of learning how to have relationships where sometimes you clash and disagree, but you trust the other person enough that you can have a relationship with them when neither of you is a Perfect Anything to the other…and where you trust the other person to still want to be your friend after you demonstrate that you aren’t perfect, or even able to perfectly fit into a simple, clear mold. As hard as accepting onself as a flawed individual with vulnerabilities that can be exploited is, it's probably still child's play compared with then, after having been taken advantage of in the past, to trust anyone to not do so at the first opportunity again.

Despite the somewhat gloomy tone of this essay, there are reasons for hope. One lies simply in the fact that Ford got this far. His story, after all, follows the arc of many a tragic hero, and yet, he manages to end the show alive and without having gone over to the Dark Side (even if he came dangerously close and was only pulled back from the edge by Stan’s quick thinking and acting skills). Another, more promising, is in "Lost Legends," where we get a glimpse of the Pines family in the week between Weirdmageddon and the birthday party. We see that Stan has recovered his normal personality and memories enough that he and Ford manage to annoy each other throughout the adventure. They disagree on how to proceed, which of them is more competent to look after the twins, etc...and the incident ends with a truce, rather than each of them slinging blame at the other for the situation Mabel ultimately has to rescue them both from. Ford is able to accept that they both contributed to the problem, rather than it being a black-and-white situation, the way he seems to have viewed most situations for quite some time. He even lets Stan play with the super-glue gun of science. It's progress. Here's hoping, for everyone's sake, that it's one step among many to be taken.

Notes

(1) See my essay “The Trouble With Timelines” on AO3 for an explanation of this assertion.

(2) Reasoning for this hypothesis can also be found in “The Trouble With Timelines.”

(3) Based on his lack of alarm when a second specimen later attacks him in the lab, my theory is that Ford staged the near-escape of the Cycloptopus at the beginning from first to last - note how he appears to have a pretty solid grip on it when he enters the gift shop, and later turns to the family, holding it up and smiling brightly, after subduing it as though looking for approval from others before indicating that he’d like to be included at meal times. Later, in “The Last Mabelcorn,” we learn from the read-out of his thoughts that he lurked closely enough behind the vending machine to eavesdrop for at least long enough to hear Stan refer to him as a “dangerous know-it-all;” since his other thoughts in that sequence all involve loss, anxiety, regret, and childhood bullying, it seems reasonable to assume that whatever he had hoped to overhear, it wasn’t that. Considering how Ford agreed to avoid the children at the end of “A Tale of Two Stans,” it seems likely to me that Ford staged the Cycloptopus incident just for an excuse to interact with the rest of the family for a moment without obviously trying to do so, and that the creature was not actually especially dangerous.

(4) Though it is possible that some of the times Ford rolled a four were among the 20-odd times the Infinity Die allegedly endangered his life; if he was already in a bit of a bind and decided to risk getting a solution that way, rolling a four with something that is highly illegal to own - and, therefore, probably even more highly illegal to roll - would be unlikely to improve his situation

(5) I saw an essay once where someone actually tried to figure out what, if Bill was accurately portraying his own usage of electricity, happened there: best-case scenario involved convulsions violent enough to dislocate joints accompanied by severe internal and external burns. It seems, considering the contrast between his first appearance in “Take Back The Falls” and his relatively physically normal behavior during the rest of the episode, that being turned into gold again resulted in the instantaneous restoration of his pre-torture physical condition, but this would probably provide small comfort if you are under the impression that every time you ‘wake up,’ you’re just going to go right back through the same thing again...and again...and again….

(6) Comments in the codes of all Journals and in invisible ink in the blacklight journal make the question of Ford’s religious beliefs another interesting one; we know he was raised Jewish, but his few remarks after dealing with Bill could suggest that, by the story’s main time, he may have become some form of dualist. An argument which can be used either for or against this idea is the apparent existence of the Axolotl cult, as shown in exclamations by space refugees, carvings in Jheselbraum’s shrine, Bill’s dying invocation, and a bumper sticker in “Lost Legends.” On one hand, Ford expresses confusion about what the refugees meant by “praise the Axolotl!” and makes no explicit connection between the statement and the carvings he later sees in Dimension 52; when he speculates on “the opposite of Bill?”, it is unclear if he is referring to Jheselbraum or her background art/presumed patron deity (“Oracle” is suggestive of the Oracles of Delphi, who were priestesses of Apollo and were supposed to prophesy through divine inspiration, so it does seem likely that Ford, Jheselbraum, or both believe that another entity is the source of her prophetic gift). It is also unclear what, exactly, the power dynamic between Bill and the Axolotl is; the fact that Bill invokes it in the hopes of returning from his deletion implies it is far more powerful than him, but it is unclear (both in Bill’s invocation and in the Axolotl’s prophecy in “Time Pirates’ Treasure”) if the Axolotl could choose to ignore the invocation if it wished to do so. Bill, we know (or are at least told), was once a mortal being which sought escape from all laws, including the laws of nature which dictated his own mortality; we do not know how the Axolotl came to exist outside of time and space, or what this implies about its nature. When Bill muses on his enemies, however, he swears that neither Time Baby nor “the big frilly jerk” will stop him; this could imply that he sees Time Baby and The Big Frilly Jerk (most likely Axolotl, unless the canon version really does have a twin brother) as equal threats, and that perhaps “the ancient power” is something they are all in some way bound to/reliant upon for their seeming immortality? Bill was able to reduce Time Baby to his component molecules, but word of author is that TB is not actually dead and will eventually manage to pull said molecules back together into a Time Baby-like shape again, which renders the issue of power levels even murkier.

#gravity falls #gravity falls characters #gravity falls analysis #character analysis #essay #footnote time!#stan pines #ford pines #thoughts form as typing happens #drafts

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zonedelicious · 8 months ago

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Defending Ben 10 Alien Force Season 3 With My Life!

(An analysis of Ben's character and why I find it consistent up to this point)

This essay thingy is part one of a bigger project where I rewatch all of Ben 10 and look back on the series. A sort of retrospective.

Originally I wanted to watch all the shows, and then write one big post. But I decided to do it in parts to make it easier. And since the final season of alien force is largely hated, I thought I should focus on it specifically (since I have very different opinions than everyone on this).

Now when starting I did expect to see Ben's character be inconsistent, going from classic, to alien force, to season 3 of alien force. That is the popular opinion online and the one I had as a kid. Ben goes from childish kid, to mature teen, to an even more childish kid.

So I'm sure a lot of people are going to be shocked when I say that not only do I completely disagree with this perspective, I found Ben's character strangely consistent through both shows and I think he only becomes more nuanced and interesting by the end.

First I think most people who say Ben is either childish, or mature, or a psychopath, don't really know what these words mean, or don't even understand how Ben's character traits work.

(the psycho thing we'll get to in the next post since we haven't gotten to ultimate alien yet)

Does being mature mean you can't be petty or selfish sometimes? Does having negative traits automatically make you a child? This is the kind of flaw in ben 10 discussion I have noticed with this rewatch, we associate bad traits with regression and good traits with development. But that is very shallow way to look at fiction. Characters can have more than one trait, they can even have conflicting traits. And character development can also include negative development.

I think Ben's maturity is something that's greatly overstated, because his personality in Alien Force is a trait he has shown in the classic series many times. And by boiling him down to childish and mature Ben, it takes away a lot of the nuance he has as a character.

So enough about that, let's go back to the beginning.

Ben 10 (the original show)

The start of the series shows us that Ben is a kid who just wants to sit back and enjoy life, but hates bullies and wants to help others. And also he really loves his grandpa (this is a clue that will help us later).

Throughout the first season Ben struggles with being a hero. He struggles to differentiate helping people selflessly, and helping people because he gets a kick out of it. For a 10 year old his behavior is very realistic. Of course he wants to be seen as a big shot and be validated for his actions.

It isn't until Max is hospitalized that Ben finally realises the dangers of the world he's in. That's when we see Ben drop the hero act and turn into a scared kid. We see him at his most vulnerable. The first look at the real Ben.

Ben and Max fight a lot in the original show, but despite that Max is probably the most important person in Ben's life. Even more than his parents. And I think it's largely because Ben wishes he can be more free like his grandpa. Living in an rv and going wherever you want. So losing Max for 10 year old Ben is the worst thing that can happen to him. He not only looks up to grandpa Max, he idolises him and wants to follow in his footsteps. Which becomes more obvious once Ben finds out about the Plumbers. And now season 2 is about Ben becoming an even bigger hero.

The first season definitely has the most consistent narrative of the classic series. I think Ben doesn't really learn much until the movie. He does learn to be closer with his family, but there's no real challenge for him like the first season. People will say this is the show recycling his character arc, which I sort of get, but it's not the same to me. Ben isn't being challenged on the same level, he's just going through episodic cartoon plots. A lot of it isn't serious so Ben isn't really being serious. To him he's the cool alien with a badass grandfather and can solve any problem. It's all a fun adventure to him.

Even when he meets his future self the message is that Ben being a kid and having fun is what makes him Ben. It's future Ben who has to learn to have fun and be a kid again. A clever twist on the time travel trope.

Despite that Ben is shown to be more responsible with the hero stuff. He tries to help others not just by literally saving their lives, but also talking to them, or standing up to villains. Kevin being the best example. Ben tries to befriend him many times, but will also risk his own life to stop Kevin from hurting Gwen. Which at the moment Ben didn't even have the Omnitrix at the end of season 2. We see that despite being a kid he's also gotten braver.

Another note, Gwen and Ben have a pretty good relationship from the start. While they do fight it's never anything serious, they're just being kids and fooling around. The kind of childish arguments you forget in an hour. Yet they're very close and love goofing around together. You can tell that they care for each other despite the petty banter.

Of course once we get to the secret of the Omnitrix (the true ending of the first show imo) Ben's character is finally given its conclusion for the classic series. Here Max's role is swapped with Tetrax, Ben looks up to Tetrax in a similar way, and while Tetrax is friendly, he's also the guy who really knows how to get Ben to reflect on his actions. Once Ben thinks he has lost Gwen he is back to the scared vulnerable kid. We see all his aggression, how he blames himself, how all that weight is really hard for him to process at such a young age.

What's even better about this is how the movie starts with Ben causing trouble for Gwen and they get in a fight. But Gwen still sneaks into Tetrax's ship to help Ben. So losing Gwen is not only him losing his cousin. Ben's losing someone he felt responsible for. He's failing Gwen, himself, and grandpa Max all at the same time.

Of course Gwen is alive but it doesn't change that Ben has finally opened up about his insecurities and we finally get a full look into his inner self. Which brings us to...

Alien Force, the show that made Ben mature (or did it?)

Now remember everything I said about his character? Now think about the plot of alien force. Ben realises his grandfather is missing, there's an alien conspiracy that his grandfather entrusted him to solve, and even an old foe is there he needs to ally with.

Ben is essentially forced to take up the role of grandpa Max in the story. And for a 15 year old that's a lot of pressure to take.

I'd say Ben's character shift for Alien Force is not only organic, it's the natural follow up to his character arc in the classic show. As someone who's always seeking validation now finally being put in a position where he has to be the person he always looked up to. Sure the stakes were high in classic, but Max (and Tetrax) was always there to help and give Ben motivation.

There's an aura of tension early on as Ben still doesn't even trust Kevin. He doesn't understand the new Omnitrix or the new aliens. He has to watch max die and still keep his cool. Because he was trusted this role and can't let Max down.

I don't think Ben matured, he was forced into a role of being the mature adult at 15.

Even Ben's parents are mad at him for doing all this. As they should because Ben is still a kid. He shouldn't be risking his life. He should literally be at the club. The first thing he does before he puts on the Omnitrix again is talk to Gwen. Because he needs her help. And Kevin. Later from other plumber kids too. He isn't doing it all by himself, and he understands that he can't do it alone to an extent. But despite that there's still that urge to be the leader. The one who has to be in charge all the time. He wants to prove himself after all.

Ben's ability to befriend others, is ultimately his strongest trait in the first 2 seasons. It's what ends up saving the universe after all. Something that wasn't all that present in the original show, but can be seen through characters like Kevin, who Ben tried to help many times. And now he's his best ally.

A lot of this is very subtle, and some of it might even be my own interpretation of the story. I don't know if the writers intended all this nuance I'm describing. It is only interesting to look back and analyse it.

The mystery and the slow lumin threat of the highbreed is a good plot for Ben's arc of taking up responsibility. It's something he can't directly solve as easily as in the classic show. Where in the classic show any problem he faced was over in 1 or 2 episodes. All mystery was behind the scenes with him not being aware.

But now it's different. The mystery comes crashing into him. He literally got a football medal the same day he found out his grandfather has went missing because of a secret alien invasion that's been going on for a long time. Again the pressure he's put under comes at him suddenly and he has to adjust to it all in the moment. He's 15 years old.

And despite all odds Ben comes through and stops the invasion, saving the entire galaxy. With the help of all the people he befriended of course. Ben finally proved himself to his grandfather and to the entire universe that he is worthy of being a hero. In the classic series he showed he was a hero, but was still a kid who had learning to do. But now he proved he can stand on his own as a man at age 15.

So naturally Ben took a break.

The part where I shamelessly defend season 3 with my life

The shift for season 3 is off (especially when the first episode starts with an argument we have no context for) and I understand some of this was a mandate, yet I love it. It's a strange shift at first until you start to think what is actually going on in Ben's head.

He finally did what he always wanted to achieve. Become a great hero like his grandfather. The galaxy loves him. And all that validation is more than enough to tell him to relax for now.

Ben had to take a break after all the pressure that was placed on him. He needed a break. He needed to be a teenager again who watches cartoons and has fun. It's important for his mental health after all.

Of course this is a cartoon and he isn't real. But this analysis isn't about that, it's about trying to understand what kind of person Ben is.

Still i do not see how Ben is stupid or childish in these episodes. Relaxed and silly yeah, but in a teenager way, not a 10 year old Ben way. With the gold poop episode for instance I went in expecting to hate it, but now I love it. It's a decent mystery, and Ben's chill attitude makes sense for the situation. It's a celebration and Ben loves to party. Of course he'd be silly with the little aliens.

What I have noticed however is despite Ben being relaxed he's still pretty clever and mature throughout season 3. His quick thinking is actually a major part of this season. With it being directly referenced and even being how he saves the day at the end of the season. I did not expect the show to directly point out Ben's most useful trait and then focus on it durring what's basically his downfall arc.

To reference a few times Ben does this in this season:

In the vreedle episode, Julie emergency calls Ben and Ben shows up seconds later. He didn't wait to think, he arrived as fast as possible once finding out she's in danger.

In the episode where Ben is trapped in the null void without the Omnitrix, we see him actually surviving and doing smart things like covering himself in mud so he won't get spotted.

In the plumber kids episode, Ben is playing the role of the villain mastermind and he has to quickly adapt to the situation and train these kids while not breaking character.

In Charmcaster's debut episode, Ben calls out Kevin for not trusting Gwen. Ben being the mature one in this situation.

We see Ben hasn't changed at all from previous seasons. Season 3 having some of his best moments even. What has changed is the context and circumstances of his actions. He's trying to stay cool and simple because he wants to live his childhood stress free, even if the universe keeps calling him back over and over again, he wants to stay a kid. And that's interesting. We haven't seen that in ben yet. In the classic show he was trying to be a big hero. But now he's tired of all that weight on his shoulders.

Unfortunately the universe keeps calling for his return. The moment Ben tries to relax Vilgax is back. He has taken over 10 planets. And has killed the galactic enforcers trio (they are 100% dead he literally killed 3 side characters just like that). And Ben of course does the reasonable thing and tries to hack the Omnitrix yet again. With horrible results.

People try to use this as an example of Ben being dumb but you gotta realise he's panicking and not thinking straight, and the result is him causing a mess for himself and Kevin. The show is aware Ben is in the wrong here and his actions have consequences. The rest of the season will spend its time exploring Ben's actions and how his quick thinking is both his strongest weapon, as well as his biggest flaw.

Anyway the fight with Vilgax is brilliant and really shows how much Ben had grown. With the return of Diamondhead being both nostalgic and a great way to show his growth. As well as giving Ben another victory that increases his huge ego.

But I must also mention the visuals being beautiful themselves. Season 3 of Alien Force has a subtle upgrade in visuals that I never see mentioned. Everything is more colorful, backgrounds more interesting, the animation more smooth, and the storyboarding is simply wonderful. Don't know why people never talk about this. I guess it will ruin the narrative this is the worst season ever made because of like 4 boring episodes. But I digress.

Still apparently people hate this fight too and claim this scene RUINED Vilgax. How? The only argument I see is he got defeated too easily which.. Have you watched the classic show? Vilgax gets defeated in one single episode by a 10 year old. Vilgax is actually stronger in Alien Force if anything. I don't get how this ruined him at all.

Don't get me wrong. I also prefer his original design and personality. I think this was a poor choice to change him so drastically when the point was bringing back an old foe. But that doesn't mean he's weak. He's clearly stronger. He does a good job fighting Ben. And has even killed 3 characters that you'd expect wouldn't die considering they showed up in a ben 10k episode.

(remember when I said I will be fighting for my life here? I wasn't kidding)

The rest of Season 3 is very episodic ,which is an interesting shift from the previous 2 seasons since they didn't have to make it like this. They had more episodes this time too and cartoon network wasn't against plot or lore. So I'd say this was more of a creative choice than a mandate. Ben's more relaxed so we go back to less world ending threats. Which is good imo because the best standalone episodes are in this season.

Notably Gwen and Kevin get a good focus here (even Julie who should have been the 4th member). With Gwen's best episode so far is in this season. We get more character development for the other 3 protags. And it's very much needed.

Gwen I think didn't get much in the first 2 seasons. She did feel a bit of a downgrade from her classic self. Now however her rivalry with Charmcaster is back, she has her magic, and she has one of the best episodes in the season. The time travel episode is beautiful both visually and naratively, not to mention it's basically writen like a Doctor Who episode, and you gotta love that. But what I love more is how we see Gwen making a huge mistake. Gwen so far hasn't been writen with flaws, unlike Ben and Kevin she isn't given as much depth. So to have an episode that gives Gwen time to make a mistake and fix it, while showing all the effort she'd go through to help Kevin. It was very much needed. Her character deserves more moments like this.

Julie's relationship with Ben is given a bit of drama but in a way where they do communicate and aren't in anyway toxic. I hear this is when their relationship fell off but I don't see it. Their arguments are something Gwen and Kevin often have too and are only there to strengthen their bond. Julie definitely needs to be characterized outside being Ben's girlfriend though, but she's never in a position where she's just Ben's girlfriend. If anything her friendship with Gwen is given more spotlight. Her last appearance for the season being her hanging out with Gwen. Julie definitely deserved to be more than just a side character.

On the other end Kevin gets a huge upgrade with his story line being imo significantly better than what they originally had planned. Originally the story was going to have Kevin turn evil and I am grateful they saved that story line for a later season while this one builds up to it more organically. Here we see how desperate and insecure Kevin is. He even goes back to his more evil self at times. But never too much. His badness is due to his circumstances. He wants to turn back to human. He gets angry. He doesn't trust Gwen. He teams up with villains. But all because he's being pushed into being vulnerable rather than him turning evil suddenly. It's a good small arc that builds up to something bigger later.

As you can see I value character flaws as much as their positive traits. To me a character is less interesting if the story avoids giving them a human element. That's why the character assassination of Ben Tennyson that people talk about to me is one of the best things to ever happen to him.

One episode I HATED as a kid, but now love is the one where the gang go to an alien planet to solve a conflict between 2 identical armies. Kid me hated this because Ben kept messing up and there was no solution in the end. Now however I see the political genius that it is.

While I think this was meant to parody the political system of the US (one group being red and one blue doesn't make it all that subtle), i think the other message I got from it is showing the problems with white saviorism. Ben comes to a planet he has zero political understanding of, and decides he knows how to solve all their problems and can save the day in like 3 hours. Of course he won't and of course he'd end up making things worse.

If you're expecting things to actually be solved and characters to make logical and satisfying actions then this episode is definitely one of the bad ones. But for me, someone who likes to see how characters mess up and the story to collapse on them I really found this episode enjoyable. It's also just very funny. Ben comes off as very comedic to me in his attempt to be helpful and reasonable. He's not being immature but he's being very self centered and too up his own ass to notice that he's coming off as a dick.

I think that's what this season is focusing on. Not Ben becoming immature or childish as like a singular character trait he switches to. No, what the season is telling us is despite Ben being a great hero and a quick thinker, he's also easily able to fall into the arrogant asshole type if he doesn't control himself.

In the ghostfreak episode we even see how despite being his quick thinking self, he doesn't trust Gwen and Kevin as much as before. His ego is getting to him and others are taking notice.

Ben's behavior to me comes off as very realistic. I cannot hate a character who's flawed in a way that a real person is flawed. I don't see a switch in personality. I see one person displaying their traits in different ways depending on the scenario they are in.

So why people hate this season so much I will never understand.

Anyway let's talk about the worst episode in alien force.

Primus

Okay people you're right about this one. Primus sucks. It's bad. It's meaningless. It's confusing. And it's counterproductive for what it's trying to do. Honestly it feels like a rough draft of an episode before they actually start writing it.

Ignoring the fact that the concept itself is flawed, there's no time given to even show us Primus or make us understand it. And it ruins Vilgax's arc by giving him the Omnitrix WAY TOO EARLY. It kind of ruins the finale too since Ben giving the Omnitrix away is part of the climax of this season. Both Vilgax and Azmuth are pretty dumb this episode and it's weird watching them here. Vilgax is a bit better until he gets the Omnitrix and becomes dumb for no reason. Couldn't they just make it so Ben is the one with the key to activate the Omnitrix? Azmuth also what do you mean you turned into Rath to fight Vilgax instead of like way big? Ben isn't dumb in this one though. His trick to get back the Omnitrix is smart even though the way it was written is dumb. And we do get to see him vulnerable after losing the Omnitrix. Still this episode should have been replaced with something better and the show would have been better off for it.

This episode is brought up often because it is the weakest and if it was your impression of the season you'd think it's bad too. I don't even think Vilgax is bad this season but he definitely is poorly writen here.

So yeah this episode is very bad. Like couldn't they have replaced this with an extra Tetrax episode? That man deserves it.

Oh right Tetrax

Tetrax episode is peak fiction and I don't care about the haters. I'd argue it's one of the best episodes in the series and the fact we never got a follow up is baffling.

For starters Tetrax is Ben's real dad. Let's be real. He fills the same role as grandpa Max and so Ben has the urge to prove himself to him. That's why watching Ben fulfill the propercy of the diamondhead people and save Tetrax's planet is one of the most satisfying moments in the series for me. Tetrax destroyed his planet. He made a huge mistake that Ben could have easily made if he didn't have a mentor figure. And now once he sees he has an opportunity to bring everyone back he goes straight to shattering Ben into pieces with no explanation. (Tetrax pretty much is Ben without grandpa Max if you think about it)

This episode is a meme for the Jesus bits. but it works. It's good lore. And it's a great conclusion to a character arc and storyline.

The fact this episode is a follow up to Tetrax origin and incorporates a new alien into it is really smart. Obviously they didn't plan this at first so it's great when things work out like that.

It works as a Vilgax episode too because we see how big of a threat he is. Everyone's struggling to fight him, even Tetrax and Ben. He's not some pushover as people claim.

But more importantly Ben redeems Tetrax by saving the diamond people and that's something he wouldn't be able to do if he's some dumb kid. Ben is a true hero again in this episode. He sees what the threat is and he solves it with his quick thinking and courage. And I think it's thanks to Tetrax's presence that Ben is back to the more serious role, because he wants to prove himself to him.

(if only Tetrax had a bigger presence)

And now the ending

The ending is what made me want to take a different look at this season before rewatching because I remember how cool the Azmuth and Ben scene was. On a rewatch i was not disappointed.

For starters animation was really good and the fights with Albedo specifically were choreographed well. Kevin and Gwen were even using their powers in a unique way.

Then we have Vilgax weakening Ben by taking away Gwen and Kevin. Seems simple at first, but when you think of the narrative of this season you realise it's about making Ben vulnerable both physically and mentally.

And once Ben loses the Omnitrix he has a full mental breakdown and this entire sequence is one of the best moments in Ben 10 ever. The way he runs off into the forest. The small chat with Gwen. How he begs Azmuth for help. The little mutual understanding at the end of their argument. It's peak fiction at its most peak fictionest.

For the entire season Ben tried to relax, he tried to be more straight forward, not looking for others for help. But now he's back at being the vulnerable kid he was at the start of the entire series. And I think it's not just that he lost his powers that's hurting him, but that he's also taking out all the pressure he had building up inside. And now he's asking for others to help him.

This moment makes this season work for me. We see a deconstruction of sorts of the kind of person Ben is. Not mature or immature. But this kid who wanted validation until the pressure was too much for him. He tried to act cool like nothing happens. But then he messes up and he's the one who needed to be saved.

This emotional moment was what Ben needed to come up with a genius plan. Go to Vilgax's ship and activate the self destruct feature of the Omnitrix. Honestly I forgot about this part on my rewatch so it came out of nowhere for me. Ben making a bomb threat as his great 4d chest move? You just gotta love that. Remember he's got nothing on Vilgax right now. Vilgax can easily kill him. So for Ben to confidently come in and threaten to blow up the Omnitrix, that he cares about too, it takes courage.

If there's one thing I'd change about the ending it's bringing back Tetrax. He seemed like he would be a part of this and it would have probably mad the mental breakdown of Ben Tennyson more impactful if Tetrax was there too. Or maybe I love this minor character a bit too much. Maybe way too much I admit.

Conclusion

For me what sells season 3 of Alien Force is Ben's character downfall that builds up to this ending. It's not just that he becomes dumb and then is told to stop being dumb. It's that he's struggling in the role of hero. He's struggling to be both the serious badass and a goofy kid. And letting go of the responsibility and trying to act normal only created a different kind of pressure.

Ben for me is a character who was forced into a role he wasn't prepared for and we get to watch how that affects him. Naturally he will have shifts in how he acts. His environment will affect his behavior. That's just life. That's what being a teenager is like. You're always gonna be screwing up in one way or another. Ben's flaws in season 3 aren't about him being childish. He's not dumb or less mature. Ben still does smart things and is shown to care about Gwen, Kevin, Julie, Tetrax, and everyone that comes to his aid.

And of course his ideas and actions aren't always good. They can be stupid or selfish. And that's also fine. Because he's only human. And his humanity is what makes him Ben. Take that away and he'd grow up to become the Ben 10k who refused to transform back to human.

Most of this is my interpretation of events. Other people watching will have different takes. And that is fine. I'm fine with knowing I'm like one of 10 people who loves season 3 of alien force. I'm just here to write a different perspective and hopefully it will encourage more deeper readings of Ben 10 as a series. But mostly I'm fine knowing someone else read all this. So thanks for getting this far.

See you next time when I will be breaking down the neoliberalism of shadow the hedgehog the video game.

/jk

/or am I?

#zone analysis #Ben 10 #Ben 10 retrospective #Alien force #Season 3 is good #Tetrax should have appeared more though #Long post

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heavymachinebun · 2 years ago

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Understanding Puss in Boot: The Last Wish through its villains (but mostly just Jack Horner)

By @terminatorbuns, with special thanks to my wife @da-manta-ray

We don't talk enough about the villains of Puss in Boots, the Last Wish. I mean we do, I just want to talk about it MORE.

It's been a while since this movie was released and I'm glad to see all the discussion and discourse around all the ways that this movie has excelled in all technical and writing aspects. I love discourse and analysis and I've been dying to share some of my own thoughts about this movie since release. There's so much to talk about, but for now let's talk a little bit about the very impressive way this movie handles villains.

To be clear, I use "villain" to mean antagonist, people who oppose the main characters. In this movie, the villains are Goldilocks (plus bears), Death, and Jack Horner respectively. I'm not particular about semantics, villain is a cooler word to say, and they all commit crimes anyways, so whatever. Having said that, Puss in Boots has one of the most impressive uses of villains I've ever seen in a movie, delivering three extremely compelling villains in a two hour window when many longer films struggle to even deliver a single good villain. Not only that, but each villain in Puss in Boots represents a completely different villain archetype, each with a different role to play in the story, and each one executed to perfection for their respective roles. I think everyone who has watched the movie has come away with a favorite villain, and so the intention of this essay is to explore in depth the archetypes that each villain represents, their implementation, and the significance of each fairy tale chosen (yeah, it's important). As an analysis nerd, maybe I can bring to your attention some things about your favorite villain that you had not considered, maybe give you something to think about the next time you get into a friendly debate about who is the best Puss in Boots villain.

Because it's JACK HORNER. HOLY SHIT is it Jack Horner. This is THE Jack Horner essay, I need people to understand how big brained the execution on this narrative behemoth is, this is the ONLY reason this essay exists. Jack Horner is on an entirely different level of writing to the other two, LET ME SELL YOU ON THIS. The team at DreamWorks poured liquid narrative gold into this titan of a villain and this essay does not stop until I fully explain how much narrative genius is on display here, they have worked TOO hard for their work to go unappreciated. You can actually just skip to the Jack Horner section that's where the hot, hot analysis is. We have to talk about 18th century political discourse, galaxy brained narrative framing devices, and Jack's significance to the core themes of the Shrek franchise. I have lost sleep researching Jack Horner, this rabbit hole is DEEP. I'll talk about each villain in depth, but we stan Jack Horner in this house.

1. Goldilocks, the sympathetic villain

Goldilocks and her supporting bear family is the sympathetic villain archetype, villains who oppose the hero's goals but who otherwise have understandable, likable motivations that make an audience want to see them win. The strength of this style of villain is to serve as secondary protagonists: when the audience likes a villain, the audience wants to see them complete an emotional journey just as much as the main hero characters. Sympathetic villains are exceptionally strong when they are working towards the same goals as the heroes, because their motivations are inherently relatable. It's the same motivation that the good guys have, after all.

Goldilocks is one of the more well known fairy tale properties of the three villains and that lends itself well to her villain archetype. The fact that audiences are already familiar with the Goldilocks story, combined with the fact that she gets the most screen time of the three villains, gives the audience a lot of context and backstory to understand Goldilocks as a character, and relate to her more easily. Her supporting bear family is written to be lovably goofy and it's easy to get attached to this lovable family. They fulfill the sympathetic villain archetype by being as lovable as they are.

The recontextualization of the original Goldilocks fairy tale as a found family story is also a very clever choice. The repeated line "too big, too small, just right" is used in the original fairy tale to describe Goldilocks trying beds until she finds one that fits her, but is cleverly reframed in this movie as a metaphor for Goldilocks trying to find a FAMILY that fits her. The bear family that adopted her is "just right" as a permanent family for Goldilocks, yet she must struggle with different ideas of family before she is able to settle on her "just right".

The Goldilocks subplot easily parallels the journey of Puss, Kitty, and Perrito. Goldilocks and our main heroes are all in conflict over the wishing star, but ultimately both parties end up discovering that their needs are met by embracing their respective found families, no wish required. Puss, Kitty, and Perrito all suffer from loneliness and require each other's company to be truly happy, just like Goldilocks needs the company of the bears to be happy. And so, Goldilocks ends the movie not as enemies to Puss' party, but as allies, sitting next to Puss' party, celebrating their similar victories together. A classic and clean execution of a sympathetic villain.

2. Death, the symbolic villain

Death is an example of a symbolic villain, which is a villain designed specifically to symbolically challenge specific traits or beliefs held by the protagonists. Symbolic villains may have personal motivations but their primary narrative significance is the effect they have on the hero, and their job is to highlight the fears and anxieties of the hero and to force the hero to face their fears. To this end, symbolic villains can often have little or no personal motivations, at which point they are also known as force-of-nature villains, villains that function more as a threatening force than as a person with needs and wants. Force of nature villains don't even have to be people, a tornado can fill the role of a force of nature antagonist.

Death is a very obvious choice for this role, one of Puss' primary anxieties is his fear of death, and there's no better symbolic villain to challenge this than "Death, straight up". He qualifies as a force of nature villain in a very direct way by being a literal embodiment of a concept, threatening and unavoidable. The choice of depicting Death as an incarnation of the big bad wolf also has some significance. He doesn't have any narrative ties to the original incarnation of the big bad wolf (or the wolf from Shrek), but the big bad wolf is a well understood cultural shorthand for "fairy tale bad guy". Indeed, that's what Death represents for this movie, he plays the role of a fairy tale bad guy, and his depiction as the big bad wolf hides his true identity until later into the story.

It should be noted that the personal motivations of a symbolic villain barely matters, and that's very true of Death. He has minimal screen time to explain his motivations, because it's not particularly important. More interestingly, what little we know about his motivations are not particularly likable or relatable. Many have made the mistake of understanding Death as a neutral, noble party just doing his job as death, but that's not true of this movie. It's NOT Death's job to kill Puss in Boots, his job is to take Puss' life when Puss dies of normal causes. Death isn't supposed to stab people personally with a knife, he just wanted to kill Puss for fun. It's fine because Death isn't meant to be sympathetic, Death is a dick in this movie, straight up.

Since symbolic villains have everything to do with the hero, they are most effective when they force the hero into action. Death's presence forces Puss into retirement, then it forces him on the journey to find the wishing star, and shows up along the way to pressure him further. He forces Puss into a very sincerely depicted panic attack scene, and that's what symbolic villains do, they push our heroes to reveal things about themselves, their needs and wants and anxieties, so our heroes can then confront those things. The visual execution on his threatening presence also must be commended, since everyone knows how dangerous DreamWorks made him look. I have no notes, he's just cool as fuck.

3. Jack Horner is the unsympathetic villain

Alright we're starting to wade into the Jack Horner waters here, but we'll start with the baby surface level analysis of Jack's villain archetype. Jack is the unsympathetic villain, a particularly monstrous one, who no one likes because he's a dick. His motivations are surprisingly fleshed out more than that of Death since Jack at least explains his backstory, but his motivations are trash because he's trash. The heroes barely interact with him and his motivations add very little to the journey of the heroes. Unsympathetic villains are often like this because their role in the story is to simply be unlikeable, to be such a shitty person that their eventual failure delights the audience with a sense of catharsis. That in and of itself has its own kind of narrative strength, entertainment is still the ultimate goal of any piece of media, after all.

He's reminiscent of classic Disney villains such as Jafar and Scar in a number of ways: he's petty and power hungry despite having minimal backstory reasons to be so, and his depiction is not conventionally attractive (although those are some BROAD shoulders). He's also partially queer-coded in the same way as the classic Disney villains through his very unconventional masculinity: he's temperamentally flamboyant, and he's even got the pink hair to boot. Queer coding in villains is a complicated discussion I'm not qualified to discuss in depth, but it can be surprisingly enjoyable to see joyful unconventional masculinity on screen even if the context is an evil villain. We want to see him scheme, and we want to see him fail; The audience just wants to see him do stuff because he's so fun.

Jack embodies the unsympathetic villain well in his simplicity, all his actions are motivated by petty greed and he approaches every situation with uncomplicated evil. I would ask you, is this really all there is to this incarnation of Jack Horner though? YUP, turns out that's it. However, like the other two villains, Jack Horner is inspired by an existing cultural text that influences the development of his narrative. I have explained the motivations behind the other two, I will do the same for Jack.

THIS is where the fun starts.

4. Welcome to 18th century political discourse

Jack Horner's original text is the least well known property out of the three villain origins. "Little Jack Horner" is an 18th century nursery rhyme that's short enough to be read word for word in the film, and short enough to be included in this essay:

Little Jack Horner

Sat in the corner,

Eating his Christmas pie;

He put in his thumb,

And pulled out a plum,

And said, "What a good boy am I!"

That's the whole thing, some kid eats a plum out of a pie. However, even in its early days the Jack Horner rhyme became (somehow) associated with the themes of greed and opportunism. Let's try to follow the logic: we have some kid, CLEARLY financially privileged enough to receive a pie for Christmas, decides to steal a plum out of the center of the pie, ruining it with his dirty kid fingers before anyone could cut the pie to share, then he has the gall to declare "what a good boy am I"! THIS FUCKER. The pie is the wealth of the common man, or something, and the plum is, like, the fruits of their labor, and this BOURGEOIS child is reveling in his destruction of the economy with his hunger for profit (and plums).

It sounds stupid because it IS stupid, but the association stuck and found use in a surprising amount of historical literature and political writings. I can just rattle off examples from the Wikipedia article: English poet Samuel Bishop uses Jack Horner as a critique of the Civil service bureaucracy, the satirical novel Melincourt (1817) has 5 people sing a song describing how they misuse their trades to fleece the public that compares themselves to Jack Horner, etc, etc, there's like 6 more examples. Also fun is the fact that educators in the 1800's have made attempts to sanitize the Jack Horner rhyme by adding verses that describe Jack Horner totally sharing his pie afterwards because it's the good ethical thing for little boys to do. Jack Horner shows up in war propaganda, it's absolutely wild.

This is the historical context behind the little Jack Horner rhyme, the reason why Jack Horner represents capitalistic greed and cruelty in the movie. I had to look this stuff up after the movie, who even knows about this stuff, but the writers have seriously done their homework to find a nursery rhyme with a historyc this interesting, and it's fascinating to see how they worked to recontextualize this rhyme into a movie villain for Puss in Boots. I say this, because the next layer of Jack Horner's narrative construction is even more interesting.

5. Jack the Anti-Pinocchio

Drew like a dark, fucked up version of Pinocchio, haha. Just a glimpse into my dark reality. A full stare into my twisted perspective would make most go simply insane, lmao.

Jack Horner's screen time is punctuated with references to the story of Pinocchio, who I'm sure we are all familiar with. Jack's intro flashback features Pinocchio and he spends a lot of time with "ethical bug", the very shameless clone of Pinocchio's cricket. On one hand, this is a very clever way to contextualize Jack Horner using a better known media property, but on the other hand, the choice of Pinocchio is very deliberate because Jack Horner is used in this movie specifically as a dark, villainous reflection of Pinocchio. 2022 is truly the year of Pinocchio for bringing us three Pinocchio movies and ending the year on the Anti-Pinnochio: Jack Horner.

Pinocchio is the story of a little puppet boy, naive to the ways of the world, learning how to be a "good boy" through trials and tribulations. He fails to listen to his father and his companion cricket sometimes but he ultimately learns a sense of morality and kindness. Compare and contrast this to the use of "good boy" in the Jack Horner rhyme, where Jack ruins a pie then ironically declares himself a good boy. This is where the parallels start: Jack Horner at multiple points calls himself a "good boy", but he has done nothing good to earn such a title. Everytime he says "good boy" it is not only a reference to his own rhyme, but as an ironic allusion to the story of Pinocchio as well.

Consider the appearance of Pinocchio early on in Jack's introduction scene, where Jack is upstaged by Pinocchio's magic puppet show and becomes jealously possessive of magic. The significance of that scene comes from the fact that Pinocchio's magic body is NOT a net positive advantage for Pinocchio: as a puppet Pinocchio struggles to fit in with human children, but the only advantage to his magic body is his ability to entertain crowds for stage shows, if he offers his only asset up for commercial exploitation. Not only that, but Pinocchio's magic forces his nose to grow when he lies, so it's as much a liability as it is an asset. Jack is jealous of a socially underprivileged child for the ONLY advantage Pinocchio has, planting the seeds of Jack's characterization mere moments after his introduction.

Jack's journey with off brand cricket completes his characterization. We see him abuse his men against the advice of cricket, but we also see that he perfectly understands cricket's advice, he just has no interest in being good. Contrast this with Pinocchio, who also fails to heed cricket's advice, but only because he is naive and fails to understand the nuances of the advice. We also learn how he was overwhelmingly privileged in life but still wishes for magic, the only privilege he's ever been denied, and his intention to hoard it from everyone else. Jack is written with the intention of filling the role of the monstrous, unsympathetic villain, and so it was a very deliberate and intelligent decision to frame him as the moral antithesis of a "good boy", the moral antithesis of Pinocchio. What morality Pinocchio has to learn, Jack disregards completely and declares himself a "good boy" anyways. Each of the three villains in this movie is designed around their respective archetypes, but Jack Horner takes his design prompt and fucking SOARS.

6. The Shrek Cinematic Universe

Let's take a brief detour through the history of the Shrek franchise.

In 1994, Jeffrey Katsenberg was ousted from a chairman role from Walt Disney and went on to co found DreamWorks Studios. The original Shrek movie started development the year after in 1995, as a very loose adaptation of a now very obscure children's picture book of the same name. It is often said that Shrek was written as a cynical parody of the fairy tale films of Disney as a form of revenge from Katsenberg. Disney films at the time were known for being family friendly and moralistically pure and full of beautiful, wholesome heroes on noble quests, and Shrek sought to subvert those expectations deliberately. At release Shrek had become an amalgamation of various fairy tale stories, featuring many parodies of Disney properties such as Pinocchio and Snow White. The humor was crass and irreverent to contrast with the properties of Disney, with a story focused on the uglier, dirtier ogre Shrek learning to become an unconventional hero to a fairytale kingdom.

It turns out the market was indeed craving the kind of off beat fairy tale that Shrek had become, as an alternative to Disney's clean, beautiful properties. Shrek's celebration of unconventional beauty and its clever parodies of classic fairy tales both struck a chord with audiences, and the Shrek franchise has been a DreamWorks classic ever since. The two Puss in boots movies are spin-offs of the Shrek franchise. Both Puss in Boots movies differ from Shrek in the way that they use fairy tales: the fairy tales are still different from their original contexts, but they are much closer to their original meanings rather than fully comedic comedies. The first Puss in Boots was a moderate success while the second Puss in Boots is critically acclaimed and seems to be on track to revive the entire Shrek franchise.

I want to highlight the strategy Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has found for handling its fairy tale properties, and how it contributed to this film's current success. Puss in Boots has figured out the storytelling potential of becoming a sort of cross over film for multiple fairy tale stories, recontextualized for a modern audience, but with more faithfulness and sincerity to the original text than the Shrek franchise before it. It's reminiscent of the very popular Marvel Cinematic Universe, but for even older public domain stories. In a way this is still within the spirit of Shrek, it still makes use of an ensemble cast of reimagined public domain fairy tale stories to construct a new, modern narrative. It even has some parallels to the original Disney properties that led to the creation of Shrek, as Disney also built its brand off the adaptation of the same public domain fairy tales that make guest appearances in Shrek.

This style of storytelling has the unique power of reviving older, forgotten media properties into fresh new narratives, made even more complex by blending multiple stories into a single movie and forcing them to develop new meaning through interacting with one another. This approach does an incredible job of capturing the essence of Shrek: Shrek himself is a lesser known property elevated to the status of a cultural icon through his interactions with an exciting ensemble cast of comedic fairy tale imaginings, and the Shrek franchise is responsible for bringing attention and meaning to even more fairy tales and nursery rhymes, some well known, some not. Might I remind you, Puss in Boots himself was not amongst the most popular fairy tales such as Pinocchio and Cinderella, the properties that were themselves brought to fame by being associated with the Disney brand. Shrek is often praised for its celebration of unconventional beauty, and while this is true for its celebration of literal unconventional beauty features, it's also a celebration of the revival of the unconventional, forgotten stories of the past that have the potential for new life.

I say to you that Jack Horner is the perfect encapsulation of this, the spirit of the Shrek franchise. This excruciatingly simple 6 line nursery rhyme, kept alive throughout centuries through artists extracting a comical amount of political meaning from it, now revived once more by the talented team at DreamWorks. Jack Horner had the least well known origins of the three villains, many people didn't even know the nursery rhyme going into the theater, but the amount of care put into his narrative construction is a monumental testament to the power of narrative reinvention. All this, at a time when the Shrek franchise itself was in decline and required its own reinvention to survive. This, when Puss in Boots 2 required bold new changes after the lukewarm reception to the first Puss in Boots. A daunting task, but if a property as obscure as Jack Horner can be revitalized with such vigor, then so can the Shrek franchise.

I'm tearing up about Jack Horner why the fuck is this happening.

#puss in boots #jack horner #goldilocks #death #long post

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autumn-oceanopromises · 1 year ago

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Writing Like A Woman

I bought a book and I'm waiting for it to be delivered: "To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction", by Joanna Russ. I've never read her work before, seminal and powerful as it seems to be in relation to queer, intersectional, and feminist perspectives, and her work seems to be mostly out of print, as she was active (and alive) in the 60s to 90s.

I'll be quite honest - up until probably my mid-twenties, the title of that book alone would have put me off it completely. (There's a whole story and essay to be had there, the growing-up ways that a POC immigrant boy - man - seeks the media perception of white (=good, =great) masculinity and pretends to be the most masculine and milquetoast, which includes rejecting femininity in everything, in order to reject perceptions of weakness, which are mostly to do with how other boys see boys, within the masculine subculture. How virtue signaling is constant, even in the most private of spaces and to absolutely nobody but myself.)

But that's not the topic of this entry. This one's about writing like a woman: the female-expectation-derived plot points and structures that are rarely examined and re-combined by amateur male writers, why writing and exploring those structures are especially important in the low-agency world we are entering into or are already living in now, and how I want to but don't quite know where to start.

*Trigger warnings and disclaimers: I come at this from the perspective of someone whose publicly posted body of amateur writing is 50% poetry, 40% erotica/pornography, including some extremely dark content (though none of it is, of course, hosted on this blog), so appropriate trigger warnings apply when I discuss this, and 10% other things, including NANO novels, short stories, slash and romance fanfic, game design, worldbuilding lore, marketing copy, etc. I read predominantly amateur fantasy and science fiction, often fanfiction, and not professionally published literary fiction, horror, or romance, and am unaware of the trends within them. I am a cishet POC man living in a predominantly white country, and as such, may mention and perpetuate problematic perspectives. This is my personal opinion, written in 2023.* I've approached the work of Joanna Russ circuitously. I would like her guidance in the literary analysis of feminist fiction. I discovered her first by finding out about her essays and novels from r/menwritingwomen, a subreddit about pinpointing the ways that men write women - as a lampoon, as a satire, as a horror. I've looked at critical, if fond, examinations of her work, which is often the only things available for free on the Internet any longer - respected authors, mostly women, who point to her work as something that inspired and provoked them. I very, very much look forward to finding out what her work reads like. I very much look forward, if dread, examining and being deeply, viscerally horrified, at my thinking, my plot structures, and my internalized bigotry. I look forward to deliberately playing some really horrible shit straight, but with an undercurrent of horror. I look forward to writing things which are less horrifying. I very much look forward to writing like a woman, especially in science fiction and fantasy.

Writing like a woman without acerbic wit and superb guidance (at least according to all the critics), it turns out, in 2023 amateur writing spaces, even and especially under the current flood of "strong female characters", is incredibly fucking hard. Writing, plot and structure, is still mostly treated with the implication and context of masculine-derived plot and structures. The Hero's Journey is about men, after all, and it inseminates most things in modern media. In amateur genre fiction, which holds a lot of eyeballs, including isekai and litRPGs, there's very few non-male viewpoints; fantasy and science fiction as a setting abounds just about everywhere, but the rise and fall of the plot remains action, adventure, base-building, and shounen: everything stems from what society expects and pressures boys and men to do and desire: to conquer, to save, to explore, to investigate, to fight, to build and create, to happen to - to take, to seize, to plunder.

Some of the most popular tropes in this field are: overpowered protagonists, crushing and laying waste to things before them; time travel, cheat items and powers, systems to manipulate and game. The number of these stories are increasing, rapidly, and are a thriving ecosystem - the number of popular complete fucking jackasses maybe one or two morality pets is through the fucking roof.

I consume an absolute shit-ton of these. It was originally a guilty pleasure, but it's rapidly become less guilty, and more of blatant escapism and a solid portion of my day. I'm one of the target audience: I hate my job, but am reasonably good at it in some bits. I hate going to work, I hate being at work, and I hate the feeling of general helplessness and corporate bullshit, in myself, my team, and my customers, even while being very aware that I have probably some of the least corporate bullshit and helplessness that a person working in retail and in general is trading time for money, has. I have very much a lot of agency and I know I'm using it very poorly.

There is very little stopping me, in terms of amount of bureaucratic rules, except for the fact that the company is seriously overcharging people for a health-related product, mainly because the company is part of the fashion-industrial complex and a monolithic monopoly in the heart of unchecked capitalism. As a symptom of the general shittiness though, and unrelated to the corporate bullshit side of things, I especially hate entitled customers, who treat my team and me like shit for less and less amounts of money. Sure, you paid a "lot" of money for "the worst customer service in your whole life". We went out of our way to give you special treatment, including at least three free products and processes worth nearly 1.5 grand, something like four hours in consultation, and you in total spent $200 in a store where $800 is the average price, where you knew the average price walking in. I wish you genuinely shitty customer service for the rest of your miserable fucking life. That said, it's true that people in general just are making less money than the prices of living goods, and belts are squeezing tighter everywhere. If you can afford belts.

As people get less and less able to afford important shit, become less and less able to enact their own personal individualism and individual thoughts, and more and more ruled by whatever the higher-level narrative is - the news, the fashion companies, the social media trends, all of that shit - the more escapism rises, but also the more I believe that writing like a woman, like the challenges women faced in in the '60s to '90s is important. I would like to write "like a woman": I want to explore plot structures where the action happens in carving out agency under an unbearable and generally unbeatable social pressure - focusing more on the bureaucratic rather than the supernatural as in horror genre fiction, rather than the protagonist happening to the world. Figuring out the mystery where everyone and everything wants to kill or suppress you, girl (or boy, or other) meets house, and more structures that I just don't know yet, with and about things happening to the protagonist, the manic pixie dream boy archetypes, all that shebang and shemoves. I realize as I say this that it sounds incredibly stupid. The whole first half of the hero's journey is shit happening to the protagonist, the protagonist breaking out and developing agency, and arguably, a protagonist - especially in film - is almost always entirely reactionary.

But that focus on it? Where the pressure is right there, if unacknowledged or right out of the eyeline? Where specifically, the focus is the variation on and about carving out what little agency you can have in a world that specifically is trying to keep you down and quiet and in your little box and if you go too far they'll slap you down into place with horrific impersonal consequences, so walking the line and making peace with walking the line, is really, really important? Joanna Russ wrote a lot of this in science fiction, and many, many feminist writers have explored this in fantasy (in historical and epic), in mystery, in romance, in horror, in literary fiction, in erotica made by and for women. It exists in trans narratives, in queer narratives, in POC narratives, in narratives about poverty.

I don't know anyone who's cross-applied the same structures to the boxes for cishet middle-class men, even though we're rapidly entering a world where those boxes are getting more and more obvious and more and more crushing, because the middle-class is shrinking rapidly and high-level narratives, spin, trends, all that shit, are turning people on people. Radicalising via arousing extreme states of anger and fear, lust and gluttony and envy and greed. And, okay, there's a lot of fiction out there for cishet men already. It's just, that fiction for cishet men always runs with the same narratives that, frankly, causes this shit to happen IRL for everyone else.

I'll be honest: this whole entry is probably nothing new to people already reading and agreeing with the points of feminist literature. And cishet man discovers one of the good points of feminist literature, news at 11. But it matters to me.

And I don't know any mainstream literature or media, where specifically, the direction to make this situation and setup is about empowerment. Bioshock, maybe. But even that has caveats. Because a lot of works in these structures are tragic, specifically are about arousing extreme fear and anxiety and tension. Sometimes sexually arousing, sometimes sublimating it into an orgy of "justified" violence. Can I make this setup empowering and joyful and ecstatic and awe-inspiring and wonderful, with happy endings that don't result in breaking out of the physical box entirely or withdrawing into personal self-isolation, through whatever means? Because the pressure is overwhelming and there's a lot of it. And you can't change the world around you, you can't control it, but you can control yourself and your reaction to it - that's one of the most common therapy adages. And this is, very much, the same thing. I think it's really important, because the direction, very much, in high-level narratives and spin, especially in Western countries, is "give up when you're faced with this pressure". It's give in and join the complex. It's "escape into a fantasy world where shit is easy". It's escape into apathy. Apathy is the highest it's ever been, political or otherwise. Lack of social connection, lack of intimacy, lack of knowing and understanding and empathizing. It's rabble-rousing with undirected anger and fear directed against other people who are also angry and fearful.

And I think it's really worth disguising as a different take, so that some of the audience that's consuming media and fiction that would cause it IRL, instead starts looking at and exploring and varying takes on dealing with it instead. I don't know if there is much like this, in published fiction. though maybe there's a heap of it and I just have never found it. Therapy-heavy fiction and takes exist, but they come off really proselytizing.

Specifically though, on a personal level, I'm wondering, yet again, about the courtesan universe that I'm writing. All the fixed points in the timeline, everything I've written so far about it, I now realize is variations on this theme. But, having come at it from a male perspective, having written and consumed only ever male perspectives or male-reflected expectations and perspectives, it's always come off incredibly flat, somehow, with caricatures of characters. I've put in conflicts and things which are irrelevant and sometimes contradictory to the underlying message and exploration of theme for that universe, and it reads badly. My whole life, as well, has been about "breaking out of the box", while being incredibly aware that I keep putting myself back inside, or breaking out of the box and realizing I'm just in a bigger box; carving out agency while staying in the same box still feels like a failure to me.

I really want to explore this, though. I want to carve out my own agency, and be okay with it, living in the box that society dictates. I would like to explore, in writing, and hopefully share with other people, and inspire them to explore the same thing, their own takes on it. This is still, quintessentially, a very male perspective on a female-based structure, and I'm aware of that, so I would appreciate guidance. I really want to tell these stories, and explore these themes, writing like a woman.

#essay #feminism #writing like a woman #opinion

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all-devouring-history-hub · 2 years ago

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Black Death: The Plague That Nearly Killed Europe.

Welcome, My to be amazing readers, to the first-ever history post on this blog. Apologies for the long wait, I had a lot of things on my shoulders, But now I'm here.

As I said, This is the first of many history essays that I will be doing on the weekends. Any topic of history, except anything current as I don't have much info about it to get that in-depth, will be discussed

I will break it down and uncover each piece into each section to function properly.

You might have thought I was going to start this off with WW2 or something, and while I would definitely like to analyze Parts of ww2, I figured we start this with a more historical approach, going back in time with the Middle Ages.

Today, People see Covid -19 as a thing that should not exist. I mean, they aren't wrong. Others see this as it is going to wipe out humanity.

So many people are concerned about covid and think it's the worst disease out there when in reality we faced something worse than that.

The black death was a disease that almost wiped out European civilization, as well as fundamentally changed European society. But what was the black death? How did it start? How did it spread to all of Europe?

Well, That's what I want to explore with this analysis. Buckle in folks, this is going to be a long one.

Where It All Started.

Now there have been a lot of questions as to how the black death started in the first place and how it spread to the extent that it did., More importantly, where did it come from?

Some sources say that it came from Asia from countries Like China or Kyrgyzstan, or even the Slik road during the Mongol invasions. Others say It came from the Middle East. We may never know where it originated.

Now while these sources have been helpful in getting info, I wouldn't call them correct in any way. Some say That the bubonic plague( the real name for the black death) Didn't have records in China until the 1640s. Yet they are still adamant about China as a source.

China's Role in the plague is still being disputed to this day. I don't believe they did it because there aren't any records that It directly came from China, What I am certain is who is the culprit who started this.

The Culprit of the Plague.

This is Xenopsylla cheopis, Or As it is commonly known as the Oriental rat flea. This isn't your typical flea, as indicated by the name alone. It spreads through rats.

This Flea is able to live on any kind of warm-blooded mammal and is able to transmit diseases such as Rickettsia typhi, Murine typhus, Or the main disease responsible for the plague, Yersinia pestis

Yersinia pestis was without a doubt the main disease that caused the plague in the first place. And It very much still exists today. Yersinia pestis was able to be transmitted into fleas.

Basically, the bacteria build up in the gut of the flea to the absolute extent that it can barely swallow, instead, it is only able to draw the host's blood into its esophagus or food pipe, which is the part of the body that runs from its throat to its stomach.

From there the blood mingles with live plague bacteria. unable to swallow because it is full of plague, the flea regurgitates the blood and bacteria into the bloodstream of the host. In other words, It pukes.

So In short, Flea vomit was the cause of the epidemic. I'm sorry If I gave you all nightmares through this description but best to say something than to not say anything at all.

From there the flea is able to be hosted inside rats, Like this one for example.

This is Rattus Rattus Or the black rat. It was a common sight in Europe at the time, especially aboard the ships sailing across the sea. this made it a perfect host for the rat flea to get itself on there and to transmit the disease.

The Spread.

In 1347, Genoese traders were coming from the port city of Kaffa in the Crimea. During a siege of the city by the Mongols under Jani Beg, who was leading the golden horde army. Deciding to end the siege due to his troops suffering from the disease, Jani decided to catapult dead and infected bodies into the city walls.

Although it's more likely the rats were the ones who spread this, this terrified the traders to flee and sail to Constantinople in the summer of 1347. And this is where the disease begins to spread.

The plague killed the 13-year-old son of the Byzantine emperor, John VI Kantakouzenos. The outbreak lasted a year but would recur ten times before 1400.

In October of the same year, Genoese galleys arrived on the island of Sicily, which then the disease proceeded to spread rapidly across the island. By January of 1348, It had spread to the entirety of Italy including Venice and Genoa.

It soon made its way to France, Spain, Portugal, and England By June 1348. It made its way to northern Germany, Scotland, and Scandinavia from 1348 to 1350. Norway got it by 1349. Finally, Russia got it in 1351.

It wasn't just Europe as well, The middle east and North Africa got it as well. Egypt got it in 1347 as a result of slaves. Cario got infected in the late summer of 1348. The Nile River was full of corpses as the sickness spread.

By that year, The cities of what is today Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Palestine were infected. In the span of two years, the plague had spread throughout the Arab world.

Pretty big Huh?

Now as the plague was spreading in Europe, What are the symptoms of this plague that made it so deadly? Now if you guys know how plagues work then I'm not going to give you a full recap, but for those that don't, here is a list of the symptoms.

•Fever of 38-41 °C (100–106 °F)

• Headaches.

• Painful aching joints.

• Nausea

• Vomiting

• Malese

• Buboes, which ooze pus and stuff.

And those are just the more notable ones. Other symptoms included blood vomiting, gangrene ( which causes the skin to rot) Purple skin patches, And many more symptoms. Of those that were left untreated, 80% died within eight days.

Yes, You read correctly, 80% of those that get the plague, if left untreated, Die within eight days. 80% Not 8%, 80%. Which means more people die as a result of this. Since this was the middle ages and nobody had a clue what proper hygiene was, you are more likely to die from that.

Because of this, The plague was such a nightmare for Europe and the Europeans did some, Well crazy things.

Society In the black death.

When the black death spread throughout the continent, Life just collapsed for the Europeans. People were dying on the streets in horrendous conditions. Carts and wagons were filled with corpses being taken to the graves.

The hysteria got so bad that people thought this was the end times for Europe. Old noble families were being wiped out, The feudal system that lasted hundreds of years was falling apart, and society in many ways was just collapsing on itself.

This was made incredibly worse by the uselessness of the doctors at the time. they believed that the plague circulated in the air. Thus their solution was to order patients to close their doors and avoid bathing, which probably didn't help the situation either.

Mass graves were being built in cities like London because the graveyards were too full of corpses. The rats were pretty much thriving in this entire chaotic mess because of their numbers.

The only animal available to stop them, The cat, was nearly wiped out due to European medieval superstition that the cats were connected to witches, thus they were killed eliminating one of the only things that could have made things better.

Other people went incredibly unhinged. The Christians believed this was the punishment sent by god himself. In Germany, people joined the Flagellants who asked for the forgiveness of god and proceeded to Whip themselves in the back bloody with iron-tipped lashes

Eventually, the flagellants were stamped out by 1350 by the orders of the pope himself, but not before turning the blame on the Jews. In those days It actually wasn't hard to get a mob against Jews. As a result across the continent, Hundreds of Jews were being hunted down.

They did this every easter, But the plague massacres were bigger and huge than anything the Jews of Europe would experience until the holocaust. between 1348 and 1349, thousands of Jews were killed, tortured, burned, and executed by Christian Europeans.

Other people instead turned to looting and stealing, even killing in some instances. Some partied to get by.

Doctors tried their best to heal the sick and wounded by treating them. Most skilled physicians had fled, so it was up to second-rate doctors to combat this challenge. They wore costumes in all black with bird masks. Yep, those are what we modern folk would call plague doctors.

These doctors were hired by city officials to cure people of the plague. And the methods that they used to do this more than likely did more harm than good. For example, they attempted to use leeches to cure the patient. Yes, you heard me, leeches. This is not a joke, This is actually real.

While I would like to go more in-depth about plague doctors, this is already long enough as it is so let's do this.

The Aftermath

By 1351, The black Death was over. In the aftermath, thousands of people were dead. The old order was gone. Medieval society had collapsed. In its place was a new society coming in with new ideas and more ways to replace the new.

Death estimates are hard, to say the least, as many who did them did it based locally. But in Europe alone, Some 75 to 200 million people died. 80% of the population was gone. Over a third of Europe's population, Now no longer existed.

Yes, this was truly one of the darkest times for Europe.

It was clear that society had to be rebuilt from the ground up. But not in the way they expected. The Plague pretty much was the death of feudalism in Europe.

What followed is what we Modern folks consider to be capitalism or at least the beginnings of the system. For the peasants, they were no longer bound to an estate, so now they could work at whatever they pleased, they dressed better, ate better, and lived better than before.

Of course, for many, this was temporary, But for some who were lucky, This gave them numerous opportunities. The Merchant class was born. Noble family's fortunes declined as disputes over their money started. What became known as real estate laws, began over this.

Socially, things have changed as well. The nobility were no longer the only high-class people here. They now have to compete with merchants for social status. Nobles were often quite hostile and gave the newly rich contempt. Eventually, over time, They would outshine the nobles as the dominant working class.

The power of the church began to decline as well. The plague had taken its toll on the church. three archbishops were dead, seven cardinals and many, many priests were gone as well. Latin, which was once the dominant language, now was in decline.

New languages, Like English, Spanish, german, and many others flourished. Art was given more expressive freedom. The most important thing was that it gave rise to new religious ideas, eventually leading to the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment respectively.

In 1348, Pope Clement VI lifted the ban on human dissection or studying the insides of a dead body, so that people can understand what caused the Black Death. Thus was born the age of modern medicine. Let's wrap this up, shall we?

In Conclusion

The Black Death was an event that changed Europe forever. Before the plague, The nobles were still the power that they were, as was the church. Knights still existed as a force to be reckoned and peasants were still peasants. But the plague changed all of that. It was the death of the feudal system and the medieval age.

Now in its place was a new society, with more ideas, and more change economically, The middle class was now a power. New ideas in law, art, and religion flourished in this new post-black Death world.

That doesn't mean the black death is a good thing. Not at all. Millions still died in the end. It's more than likely that had things gotten worse, It could have wiped out European society as a whole. While the middle eastern and Asian societies would have survived because they weren't affected as much ( though they would still be affected).

In short, this could have been the death of European society, Luckily it never wiped every single European out, though it came close.

Today, we have modern medical procedures to prevent epidemics of the black like this from happening again. while covid is huge, I don't believe it will reach a point like what happened in Europe during the black death, thanks to medicine being far more advanced than back then.

In the end, the black death, Or bubonic plague, Changed the history of Europe and the world. by the end of this, A old generation and order were gone, But with that came a new generation that was born from the ashes, set to give birth to the systems that make up our modern generation.

#History #middle ages

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dozenbeginnings · 1 year ago

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Tea in Zero Dimensions

Chapter 3: A Matter of Etiquette

A philosophical discussion, and Lunch.

General audiences.

Human philosophy tends to pingpong back and forth a bit about what the origin of everything is. The pinging and the ponging is nothing linear; after all, billions of people and millions of cultures across thousands of years, each generating ideas and dismissing them faster than a planet's orbit, faster than a star's life, so fast that the mind of a god would boggle at the pace of it. There are more variants than anyone can count. For the ping we will say that the world is a thing, one of fire, or atoms, or energy, or even nothing at all - and for the pong we will say that the world is a mind first, and that all else is a thought.

This back and forth debate is one that certain philosophical traditions take great joy in contesting, the great minds of Academy and Monestary and University and Particle Lab delighting in the thrill of their sacred competition. The lofty lust for truth itself drives them to refine their minds and bodies until they can grasp the very foundation of existence itself in their hands. The great search is performed by everyone, the lofty and the lowly, boards of directors and weed-addled children.

---

Tripple-Em, as convenience will begin to call her, is a creature of etiquette. She and her dear friend thrive on ritual. For them, there is nothing else in the universe than minds and the rules that mediate them. There is matter scattered about and it provides a lovely little backdrop, but it is no more important to their ontology than your wallpaper is to your well-being.

---

Many - perhaps even most - traditions, of course, don't concern themselves with this debate at all. Some of the greatest minds in history have written thousands of words in black ink on fine paper without it even occurring to them that it might matter what the universe is built on, any more than a master farmer needs to wonder what the first stalk of corn looked like.

Lisa, despite having grown up in what is often referred to as the Western tradition, liked that attitude better. When Lisa was told as a senior in high school that she must choose a great work of philosophy as a subject of an essay, she had chose Sun Tzu's Art of War. When she had been asked to write about an ethical debate in modern medicine for a college course, she had chosen the economic merits of certain vaccine preservatives. Lisa was a brilliant thinker who found it just as exceedingly boring to futz about with the fundamental nature of reality as it was to do a plot and character analysis of computer code. When the Philosophy majors got in their dollar-a-dozen debates over four shots and a toke, she left the room to go neck with a Marine Biology kid.

One time she had been at a lecture about world literature, and a classmate had asked:

"We keep talking about the culture heroes, but who created the world?"

And the professor had said,

"Well, they didn't really have any stories about that until after the Silk Road popularized the idea. The origin myths in this region are about founding civilization, not creating the world."

Lisa liked this idea. Who cared what happened before there were people about?

---

Nobody commented on Tripple-Em. She was sitting there in broad daylight looking like a Dark Crystal reject as reimagined by Hayao Miazaki, and the waitress didn't give her a second glance. The way she moved was very proper in an unaccountable way that made Lisa a little uncomfortable. It really was like she was a machine programmed to move a certain way, and that way was the way that signaled British High Tea the most effectively.

Lisa found herself with a desperate, overwhelming

need to fall into a pattern, so as soon as the appetizer was served, she decided to take charge of the conversation. She picked up the little crayon pack and decided that blue and a faux-cloth paper napkin would do.

"I'm going to go about this systematically, it that's alright with you."

Triple-Em gave a befuddled look. "Why, certainly, dearest. Whatever is most appropriate."

"I am going to ask you a series of questions. Answer as briefly as you can."

The Muppet looked annoyed again.

"…As briefly as you can make me understand, rather."

That placated her. "As you wish, dear."

"Alright. Here goes." Lisa had a personal shorthand she had used for notes in college, and which served her well with her crayon. "What happened to me to make these things happen?"

"You became lodged inside my most beloved friend."

Lisa had become accustomed to not asking further questions. It was clearly going to serve her in this endeavor. "Alright. Let's list some consequences. First of all, I keep teleporting. Second, my debit card is magic. What else?"

"My friend my might die," Triple-M said without hesitation. It gave Lisa pause. Don't think about it.

"Okay, how soon might that happen?"

"Any time between now and a century from now."

"I see. What will happen to me if that happens?"

"You will be dead, dear."

Fair enough. Moving on.

"Do we know how to dislodge me from your friend?"

TripleM hesitated. "No, dear."

"Do we know how to find out?"

"Perhaps."

"Okay, that's good enough. What will happen to me if I dislodge?"

"We do not know."

"Will anything happen to me if I don't dislodge?"

"Most likely more of the same, dear."

Lisa tapped the crayon in thought.

"Okay, moving on to questions about you and your friend. Is that okay?"

Triple-M's brow furrowed. "We are not the only ones involved in this."

It took Lisa a long moment to figure out an answer to that that did not stem from her own biases - yes but I'm human or you're a fucking Muppet. Fortunately, Triple-M was very patient, almost eerily so.

"Yes, but-" Lisa spun the crayon in her hand- "there is a knowledge gap here. You two are friends, so I assume you know things about each other that I don't. And I get the impression that you are missing a lot of information about me, and maybe people like me in general."

It was the right answer. Triple-M sighed with a susiferous rustle of her feathers. "Yes, I quite am, dear. I am afraid I assumed a much easier venture; I am not accustomed to working at this scale."

Scale. Got it. What scale?

"Okay. So I am going to ask questions about you two first. Your friend. Why are you here instead of them?"

"They do not occupy space. It makes travel impossible."

"How did I get stuck in them?"

"I surely have no idea."

"No, I mean - if they don't occupy space, how can I be in them?"

Triple-M was becoming frustrated. "I can't understand what your confusion is, dear."

Weird meta bullcrap. Moving on.

"Alright. Your friend can't come down themself. Are they able to communicate in other ways?"

"Not as such. They can communicate with you, dear, but had a good deal of difficulty making themself understood. I cannot occupy this scale and keep in touch at the same time. I would have to go back up."

Scale again. Did she mean size?

"So the things I'm experiencing - easy access to money and whatnot - is that their influence?"

"I imagine so, dear."

"Okay. I'll remember to thank them, then."

"I'm sure they appreciate that," Triple-M said.

Lisa looked at the list so far:

What? -Lodged in Friend

teleporting, free money, might kill friend -> within 100 yrs (will die)

Plan: no

If dsldgd: ?

How: ?

Sees me, I cannot see them (scale?)

No com. available

"So, I definitely have more questions, but I think one more for now before we move on to your questions about me." Lisa tried not to think about how she was completely winging this, playing journalist when she had no idea what she was doing. "You were asking about etiquette. It seems like that was really important, but down" (down?) "here it's not really a very big deal most of the time. I wanted to-"

"Oh, I can't believe that that's true, dear," Triple-M said, actually cutting her off. "You clearly are behaving by a very complex code of manners. It is obviously important to you."

Lisa blinked. "May I finish?"

Triple-M turned red (literal candy apple red) and nodded. "I am very sorry, dear."

"We can talk more about manners and rudeness, but I just want to make sure that being rude doesn't, like, physically hurt you or anything." When Triple-M didn't immediately respond, she continued: "So, I don't know anything about what you are, and down here, we have a lot of myths and stories about creatures who can get hurt if you break the rules and don't greet them properly, or who can't enter a house unwelcome, stuff like that. Obviously those stories are fiction, but this is completely new territory for me, so I want to know if there are any problems like that to worry about."

Triple-M was fading back to her old customary color, but she still did not speak.

"Are you alright?"

"I think," she said, "I am good deal more confused than I thought."

#writblr #creative writing #original fiction #original story #story #tea in zero dimensions #chapter 3 #2/12

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bizarrequazar · 3 years ago

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Another version of a water army: The fake following of @JusticeForZhangZheHan

[twitter thread summarizing this essay, please retweet it if you agree]

Yesterday, two accounts on Twitter made tweets about Zhang Sanjian which got a fair amount of attention for how they prioritized Zhang Sanjian over Zhang Zhehan. “Zhehan I love you. But lately i love sanjian more ...” These tweets came across as obviously inflamatory, so I decided to check something—were these real people? A very quick check revealed that they were not: both accounts had been created years ago, yet they had no posts until the last few months when they suddenly started tweeting about almost nothing but Zhang Zhehan.

Those who have been following developments about Zhang Zhehan’s case on Twitter are probably familiar with the user JusticeForZhangZheHan (nicknamed and hereafter referred to as Justina). This account has become a driving force among the English community for supporting Zhang Sanjian and directing hate and false accusations against Gong Jun, including making unfounded claims of him being the mastermind behind 813. Despite her name, she does very very little to actually seek justice, instead persistently harrassing larger accounts that discuss information about his case. This account boasts 773 followers at the time of writing this.

The question is, how many of these followers are actual people who believe what she’s saying? How can we tell?

Method

The data presented below was collected by myself on the evening of March 21st 2022. As a representative sample, I started at the top of Justina’s follower list and checked every fifth account until I had looked at 100. Privated accounts were skipped. When I encountered an empty account—one with no tweets or retweets—I noted down that it existed then checked the one directly beneath it; these serve only to fill the base statistic and are not included in the further analysis. For each account with tweets, I checked what month and year the account had been registered in, then scrolled down until I reached the earliest post that still remains on it and took note of the date. I tried to look only at original tweets for this as there’s no way (to my knowledge) to look when something was retweeted, but retweets were counted for accounts that had no original tweets.

All of this should be very easily replicable for anyone who doesn’t trust my word on it.

I did not take statistical data on when the accounts had most recently posted, nor what the content of the accounts’ tweets were, though I’ve noted down some of my observations.

Findings and Evidence

The first thing to take into account is empty accounts. Of the hundred accounts checked, 33 did not have any content, leaving 67 to be looked at further. Taking it as a percent, this already brings Justina’s follower count to 518 rounding up.

Next is the matter of when accounts were registered. Of the 67 remaining accounts, 30 had been created in or following August 2021, with 18 created since the start of 2022.

Of the 37 accounts registered before 813, 10 had not made tweets within the last year. One notable account registered in 2009 had not been active since 2013, and reading the tweets indicated that the user had likely committed suicide.

Almost all of the accounts with older tweets had ones from within a few months after they had been registered, had gone inactive for a period of at least a year, then had suddenly started tweeting/retweeting about Zhang Zhehan following 813, even if they had never tweeted about anything related to pop culture previously. In some cases, older posts indicated that the account had either been hacked at some point or had been created as a bot only to be abandoned. One was still an active spam account. A number of accounts had previously tweeted in other languages only to switch to English when they started tweeting about Zhang Zhehan; several of these had a transition where posts about Zhang Zhehan were created in the original language, then slowly changed partially or wholly to English.

Moving onto when the accounts’ earliest tweets were made, 48 of the 67 accounts did not have any tweets from before 813, with 29 not having any tweets until 2022. To compare: 67.5% of the accounts existing before 813 did not make their “first tweet” until after it.

I have been made aware that there is a flaw in my data about old accounts that appear to only have recent tweets due to a feature of Twitter’s where older tweets are sometimes hidden on accounts with a high number of posts. I have all the accounts I checked for this written down and I will be going through them again using a workaround that lets me view their full tweet history. This only affects this one area of data and there are only a handful of accounts that this should apply to.

I apologize for not being aware of this sooner. Thank you to those who pointed it out and explained it to me. Please let me know if there are any further concerns.

Of the more recent accounts and the older accounts with only recent posts, those created in the last few months were often either very sparse with only perhaps a few dozen tweets, or else they had mass-retweeted hundreds of tweets about Zhang Zhehan over the course of a couple days. With one exception, every account where I noticed slander against Gong Jun had been created or had become active only in or after February.

Breaking it down further into dates, the highest amount of accounts—whether new or old—became active around early February and March 13th. The former was just before the six month marker from 813 when Zhang Sanjian was beginning to make his presence known, and the latter was when Zhang Zhehan’s fans on Twitter held an event to raise awareness about what had happened—an event during which Justina and her followers did not particpate other than to use it as an opportunity to slander Gong Jun. Furthermore, the two accounts I found that had become active on March 16th were one after the other:

Given that I was only checking every 5th account, this indicates that there was a significant rise in new followers for Justina that day, likely fueled by or in partner with the attack on Gong Jun that day (March 17th in China).

Conclusion

After looking at so many accounts, it is glaringly obvious that not simply the vast majority but almost all of Justina’s followers are fake. When I was going through them, there reached a point where I was hoping to find accounts that seemed legitimate just so my data wouldn’t seem intentionally skewed. Nearly every account I looked at had some indication of being fake—whether it was a newly registered account with a ton of activity, a huge gap in activity, no past history of interest in pop culture, a language discrepancy, or simply no content at all.

Of the the 100 accounts that I looked at, there were only 6 six that seemed as if they might be genuine—and that’s being generous. To apply those statistics to her entire follower count, Justina likely only has a real following of about 47 people, rounding up. The rest of them are artificially created to give the illusion of credibility.

JusticeForZhangZheHan is not an account that is on our side fighting for justice for Zhang Zhehan, despite what her handle claims. There is no army of followers at her side—only hundreds of suspicious accounts without real people behind them, which have seen a rise in number within just the last few weeks. Allowing people to believe what Justina says is dangerous, as whether intentional or not, she has become a vehicle for planted fake fans and toxic behaviour that is already serving to only hurt Zhang Zhehan more.

[twitter thread summarizing this essay, please retweet it if you agree]

#Zhang Zhehan #Zhang Sanjian #813 #woh cast #Word of Honor #I'm tagging those 'cause I KNOW most of you don't look at zzh's tag #I see you.

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helliontherapscallion · 4 years ago

Text

(Y/n) and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week: Thursday (Part 2)

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday (Part 1) Friday Saturday Sunday

Spotify Playlist (collaborative)

Warnings: panic attacks, swearing, puking, concussions, mentions of injuries/bullying, homophobia

Word count: 5,138

After school, you were sitting on the couch as you furiously typed on your keyboard at an extremely fast pace. You were on a roll with these essays, they were probably going to be finished by the time you had to go back to the school to get on the bus with the team. You figured that you could even finish Annie’s essay and get started on Sammy’s US history presentation on the sociopolitical climate of the United States in the mid twentieth century to today. However, instead of covering a variety of topics like the rubric requested you to do, you were only going to talk about the significant events that happened to the LGBT+ community starting with Stonewall and going to Obergefell v. Hodges. You were also going to go in depth about how even if there are more opportunities available and more laws set in place to protect for LGBT+ people in the present then there were in past, members of the LGBT+ community still suffer heavy discrimination in the workplace and in the public. With receipts of course, the assignment required a minimum of three pictures per slide, and the group chat was a perfect source.

After that was done, you would email Sammy’s teacher (you had her last year for US history and you knew that she had a son in the grade below you currently transitioning from female to male) that you were the one that did her project and send screenshots of Sammy calling you slurs. Luckily for you, you had receipts of her being transphobic in the past that you could also send. Everything was effortlessly falling into place for you today.

As you were typing, the front door swung open and two overly excited fifth graders ran into the house and up the stairs. A tired Schlatt followed them. “I will never know how the hell Phil keeps up with them.”

“I dunno, maybe because he’s already raised three kids before.”

You watched as your uncle jumped and whipped his head over towards you, his hand clutching his chest. He lightly glared at you, “christ kid don’t do that, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

You smirked at him before turning back to your laptop to continue typing the essay. You were almost done with the conclusion paragraph on Annie’s essay and you wanted to get to Sammy’s presentation as fast as possible. As you were typing, you felt a warm air fan across your neck and your uncle’s voice right next to your ear, “whatcha typin?”

You lept off the couch and almost fell into the coffee table before steadying yourself and deadpanning at Schlatt. “I was typing an essay before you interrupted me.”

He snorted, “it looked like you were on a roll, just thought I’d see what my beloved niece was writing. Can I read it?”

Your eyes lit up as an excited grin split your cheeks, “yeah, but lemme catch you up real quick. Adrian, Sammy, and Annie got mad at me a few days ago and wanted me to do some homework for them as a sort of payment. But after they pulled that little stunt in the lunchroom yesterday, they decided to be little bitches to me and call me slurs. So naturally, I decided to change the essay prompt into an in depth analysis about discrimination LGBT people face from their peers on the daily. My english teacher’s really against homophobia and the project’s worth twenty five percent of our overall grade, so it’s perfect.”

While you were rambling on and on about your detailed plot for revenge, Schlatt couldn’t help but be proud of the person you’d become. A major part of him was impressed that you came up with a detailed plan so quickly, that meant that his cunning nature was rubbing off on you and that made him ecstatic. Sure you mentioning not being straight was new to him, but he was prepared to accept you for whatever you identified as. He didn’t care how people identified, he just cared if they were good people. And his niece was one of the best kids he knew. He’d let your slip up slide for now until you felt comfortable enough to properly come out to him.

“That an amazing plan, fuckin brilliant. Though, you could do more.”

That piqued your interest, “I’m listening.”

“Do you have any blackmail?”

Your eyes glinted with sudden understanding, “why yes I do, uncle dearest. I just so happen to have thousands of texts from them talking shit about each other and basically the entire school. And them being incredibly racist. They would be destroyed if that came out.”

“Two things. One, never call me that again. Two, perfect. Keep it as leverage if they try to do something. You don’t pull out all the good cards in the first round, you wait for the right moment to strike so you can win. You need to constantly defend yourself against other players and anticipate their every move. If you leak everything right now, you won’t have anything to use against them if they have something up their sleeve you didn’t know about. Patience is key in things like this.”

You absorbed every single word that came out of his mouth like it was the holy gospel. Although he was your uncle and you loved him with all your heart, but he was a sly bastard when he wanted to be. He knew his way around fighting and manipulating people just right, so you were incredibly happy that you were on his good side and he absolutely adored you. Though questionable and morally gray, he was giving you advice because he cared about you and you’d be an idiot to not heed his advice.

“That’s genius, Uncle Schlatt. What would I do without you?”

“You’d get along just fine without me, you would’ve gotten there eventually. You’re smart. I’m just givin you a little push in the right direction.”

“I honestly would’ve never thought about waiting, I was so dead set on getting revenge that I would’ve just leaked everything all at once. I want them to feel how I felt when they were around me. I-” you paused. Would this make you the same as them? You’d be screwing up all their grades, Adrian��s job, and Sammy’s athletic career. You came to the chilling realization that you’d be the same as them. You’d be as manipulative as they were. “...Uncle Schlatt, would that make me the same as them?”

“Fuck no! You’re always gonna be better than them no matter what. When they’re at their best, you’re always gonna be a whole lot better than them. They deserve what’s happening to them, it sounds like they put you through so much shit the past few years. I actually think you could do a whole lot worse to them if you’re willing to put more work in, but it’s your plan and if you think that what you’re doing is too much,” he darkly chuckled, “you wouldn’t like my idea.”

“You’re right, they deserve everything I have planned for them. God, I don’t know what I was thinking, ‘would that make me the same as them,’” you mocked what you said earlier, “what a load of shit. Anyways, thanks Uncle Schlatt. I’m gonna get back to writing this. They’re due tomorrow and I wanna finish as much as I can before I have to go.”

“Alright, whaddya want for dinner? Phil’s gonna be like thirty minutes late from work so I’m cookin tonight.”

Oh no. No, no, no, no. That man can barley cook boxed mac n cheese, let alone anything else. He’d burn down the house if you left him alone in the kitchen with the stove. “On second thought, why don’t I help you with dinner? We can make some chicken alfredo.”

“Awe, you’d rather hang out with me than finish your homework? Ya really do love me. C’mon let’s start.”

The process of making dinner was… interesting. Multiple times, Schlatt almost spilled boiling water on himself and he even managed to burn the pasta while it was in the water. How he even managed to do that you’d never find out, you had your back turned cutting up vegetables and herbs at the time. That was when you subtly started to take over in the kitchen, giving him smaller tasks while you handled everything else. You felt bad for Tubbo, his father can’t cook for shit.

By time you finished, about an hour passed and Philza had come home and changed out of his work clothes. The two adults sat at the table discussing something that you didn’t pay attention to while your brothers and cousin were in the living room waiting for you to finish dinner. Finally, you set the table and it was time to eat.

Because you couldn’t have many fatty foods before any matches or practices, you had made a separate plate for yourself that only had plain pasta, chicken, and broccoli. You were surprised with how well it turned out, you were following an iffy recipe you found on the first link Google brought up.

After dinner, you went upstairs to put your uniform on and pack a little bag full of things you might need: a small blanket, some snacks, a water bottle, and a portable charger. Oh, and fuzzy socks and a pair of crocs. You could never go wrong with fuzzy socks and crocs. Feeling a vibration in your pocket, you pulled out your phone.

Hales : )

(Y/n), I’m omw to your house

Gonna give you a ride to the school

(Y/n)

Hales you don’t have to give me a ride, I can drive

Hales : )

Don’t care

Omw, be there in like 7 mins

You swiped out of yours and her conversation and opened up the family group chat

(Y/n)

I don’t need a ride to the school, Haley’s giving me one

She’s gonna give me a ride home too

Dadza

Alright, thank her for me

Tell her I said good luck too!

Uncle Schlatty Patty

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do

Dadza

(Y/n), do everything he wouldn’t do

Uncle Schlatty Patty

Fuck you I’m a good influence

Dadza

You’re really not

Wilby

^^^^

Technology Sword

Uncle Schlatty Patty

Fuck all of you

You heard Haley’s car pull into the driveway and dashed out of your room with your bag. Just as you put your hand on the doorknob, a hand stopped you.

“Coat.”

You grumbled as you reached past Philza to grab your coat. After you slipped it on, you were pulled into a hug. “You’re gonna do great out there. I know you’re gonna win this, we’ll be watching in the stands.”

“Damn right she’s gonna do good, she’s my niece after all.”

Schlatt pulled you away from your father’s hug and tried to ruffle your hair before you swatted away his hand, “don’t. You have no idea how long it took me to get a perfect ponytail. I have an ungodly amount of hairspray and bobby pins in my hair right now.”

“Fine. You’re gonna kick their asses tonight.”

Tommy and Tubbo pushed past Schlatt and both tackled you into a hug making you stumble slightly back.

“Kick their asses good (y/n)!” Tommy cheered, making you crack up before one stern glance from Philza completely stopped you. “Tommy, don’t say that. (Y/n), not funny.”

“Alright, Haley’s waiting for me. I gotta go, love you guys!” As you turned to walk through the door, you could hear your family following you and shouting “good luck”. You felt heat creep up on your cheeks as Haley rolled down her window and wove at your family with the biggest grin on her face.

“Thank you! We’re gonna take home the gold for sure!”

You hopped in her car as she rolled up the window and chuckled. “I love your family, they’re always so full of energy. It’s refreshing to see compared to how boring my family is.”

You glanced at your entire family gathered on the front porch. Tommy and Tubbo were practically vibrating with excitement, Wilbur and Techno calmly smiled and wove at you, Philza was grinning widely at you as you saw his mouth forming words that you couldn’t hear or read, and Schlatt was grinning cheekily at you. You raised your hand to wave at them as they vanished from view when Haley pulled out of your driveway. You smiled softly, “I love em too.”

The car ride was relatively quick with the same soft indie pop music floating from the speakers and an easy going conversation with Haley about the match tonight. You both thought that you could beat the other team if everyone focused 100% and played exactly like you guys did in practices. If everyone did that, you would be unstoppable.

Luckily for you and Haley, you were the first ones in line to board the bus so you two got the back seat with Zara and Jazzy sitting across from you guys. The hour long bus ride passed quickly and lively with you four passing around your phone and playing some mad libs, you were sure that by the end of the last game you four were laughing and crying. Sometime in the middle of the trip, you noticed that Haley would start to lean on your shoulder and continuously glance at you as she laughed. You desperately wanted to believe that it was because she liked you, but she was straight and she was your best friend. She was probably trying to make sure you were having a good time.

When the team had gotten to the opposing school and left the locker room to stretch in the gym, you could hear your family start to scream your and Haley’s names from the front row next to you, Tommy and Tubbo being the loudest amongst them with Philza trying to get them to quiet down so you could focus. You felt your cheeks heat up as you smiled at them and Haley wove enthusiastically back at them. Zara was laughing at you two. Stretching went by in a flash and before you knew it, you were on the court facing the opposing team.

The first match was won by the opposing team by five points. The second match stretched on and on until it was won by your team narrowly by two points. The team was going to have to shape up in the third match if you guys wanted a chance at winning, the opposing team was good. Before the third match started, Coach Williams called for a time out so you guys could talk about strategy. Before Haley could go back onto the court, you pulled her aside.

“Hales, we need to do what we practiced. The other team won’t be expecting it at all, I’ve been setting you up this entire game. They’re never going to expect you setting me up for a spike.”

“When are we going to do it though? We need a better plan.”

“I’m sure the opportunity will come and both of us will recognize it. We just can’t do it too early in the game though, that’ll ruin their surprise.”

“(Y/n), I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“When do I not Hales? We gotta get gold this year.”

The third round went by with both teams constantly swapping places until you both were tied fifteen to fifteen. You saw the ball flying towards Haley, giving her the perfect opportunity to set you up for a spike. “HALEY NOW!”

You watched as her face hardened in determination as she pretended like she was going to spike it by jumping high in the air and stretching her arms back, making the opposing front row players all gather in front of her. Much to their surprise, she launched it towards you as you leaped up and went for the kill. The stinging of the ball hit by your wrist and the smack sound the ball made when it slammed onto the open gym floor was something you’d never forget as the crowd around you went wild over the unexpected play. You could hear the high pitched screaming of Tommy and Tubbo over everybody else. Glancing at them over your shoulder, you saw them jumping up and down on the gym floor and looking at you with awe filled eyes and gaping mouths. The rest of your family looked at you with similar expressions, their cheers echoing in your mind. Winking at them, you turned back to your team and went straight to Haley. Clapping a hand on her shoulder, you pulled her into a quick hug, yelling over the raving of the crowd. “HALEY WE NAILED THAT!”

“HOLY SHIT I DID NOT THINK THAT WAS ACTUALLY GONNA WORK!”

“You have such little faith in your setter! You wound me Hales.”

“Well, I would have more faith in you if you weren’t chaotic on the court, sweetheart.”

You felt yourself surge in happiness at the nickname, but you couldn’t afford to focus too much on it. Your team only needed one more point to win best in the state and go to nationals. It would be the first time in your team’s history if you reached national level, and you’d be damned if you were the one to screw it up for them.

The last rotation went on for a while, each team fighting tooth and nail for the state championship title with clashing determination. You tried your best to block every hit and try to set Haley up for a spike, and you were successful for the most part, only missing a few blocks. You saw the setter adjacent to you set the spiker up for a spike and jumped up in time to try to block it, your arms stretched upwards and your palms out. Only, the ball didn’t hit your hands. It collided painfully with your nose, ricocheted off your face with a thwack and sailed over to the other side of the court. Your head whipped back as your body followed suit and flew backwards onto the floor. Without giving you any time to react, your head bounced back and cracked against the polished hardwood floor of the gym. Everything went black.

“...(y……”

“..(y/n)......”

“(Y/n).”

You faintly heard someone calling someone’s name over the continuous ringing noise. Was it your name? It felt right, so it had to be your name. You peeled your eyes open to see a blurry figure hovering over you. It was swirled with tans, browns, and backs. After a while of the figure repeating your name, it slowly became more recognizable, albeit appearing twice in your vision. It took you a while to figure out who this was before your muddled brain recognized Haley.

“Hales! There’s two o’ya. Twice as beautiful babe…” You slurred out as you attempted to smile at her.

“Oh thank god, PLEASE WE NEED A DOCTOR SHE HIT HER HEAD!” Her usually angelic voice gritted against your brain like sandpaper making you cringe as pain exploded in your head.

“God babe you’re so loud, why’s so bright? I-wha's goin on?” You blearily tried to move your head to look around only to be stopped by a pair of large hands on each side of your head gently holding it in place. You moved your laggy eyes around to look at the figure. He was a blonde man with blue eyes and a hint of stubble on his chin. His eyebrows were knitted together and he looked… he looked… your brain worked to figure out why he looked how he looked. Who was he?

“Please don’t move hun.” His muffled voice was baritone. You squinted at him trying to figure out who this man was.

“Who th f-fuck… why?”

“I’m your dad hun. Do-do you not recognize me?” You made a noise in the back of your throat as your stuffy brain finally put a name to the face.

“Dad- wha’s goin on? I’on feel so good…”

“Shh, I know, I know. Just stop moving and talking. Everything’s fine. I’m here. You’re okay.”

“Mmk… Dad, where are we? I’ont know- you’re so quiet.”

“Stop moving so much. You’re on the floor in a gym. You just won your team the state championship. Now stop talking please.”

Huh. So that’s why everybody seemed to appear from above you. You strained your eyes to look around you, but you could only see your dad’s face hovering above you. “Shit I- who’s aroun’ me? Where’s Hales?”

“I’m right here sweetheart. I got the doctor, Mr. Minecraft.”

Your dad’s face moved away from your vision so fast that it made your head spin and your stomach twist. Another face appeared above you that you once again didn’t recognize.

“I’m Doctor Martin, can you tell me your first and last name?”

“Uh, (y/n) Minecraft?”

“Good, what month are we in right now?”

“Nov-November?”

“Close, it’s late October. Can you tell me who this,” he pointed to your dad, “is?”

“S’my dad Phillip.”

“That’s your dad Philza.”

The questioning stopped as he suddenly shined a blinding light into your sensitive eyes. You hissed as you tried to move your head away from the offending light only to be held in place by your dad’s hands. Your head spun as you moved too quickly and a wave of nausea hit you, making you groan and move your arm to cover your eyes. Your hand was stopped by something warm and soft wrapping around it and holding it tightly. Everything was so overwhelmingly and painfully bright and loud. You wanted to make it stop.

“Mr. Minecraft, your daughter appears to have a concussion. I don’t have the tools on hand to determine the severity of it, but it’s worrying that her pupils are asymmetrical, she’s delirious, and has slight memory loss. I understand you live about an hour away from here, and it’s alright for you to take her to a hospital closer to your house. Make sure you keep her alert.”

Your delirious mind only registered about half of what came out of the doctor’s mouth. You mumbled gibberish as you once again opened your eyes to look around. You were only briefly able to crane your neck to the left. Several figures large and small were standing behind your dad. Your family, your mind supplemented. Slowly, your mind was starting to recognize your surroundings even if there was currently double of everything and everything was blurry.

“I’m going to help you stand up. Do ya think you can do that?”

“Yeah Dad.” You lifted your upper body off from the ground with a gentle hand on your back helping you sit up. Fighting the wave of nausea that slapped you in the face, you reached up to rub at your eyes. A hand once again stopped you. You peeked your eyelids open and lightly glared at whomever stopped you. “Hales you’re lucky you’re so cute I woulda slapped you. I like holdin but you’re bein annoying. Stop.” You attempted to make your voice sound firm, but the words that came out of your mouth were slightly slurred.

She was silent as she helped her dad haul you to your feet. Once on your feet, you saw the room spin and felt yourself start to sway slightly. An arm wrapped itself around your shoulders and pulled you close to them so that your weight was supported. They were a little taller than you were making it easy to lean on them.

“...Can you walk?” A deep, monotone voice rumbled the chest of the person you were leaning against.

“Mhm. ‘M not weak.” Though your limbs felt like they were made of molasses, you placed one foot in front of the other slowly. The person moved alongside you, “you’re doing so good, keep going.” That sparked familiarity in you as you stopped in your tracks and tried to look up at the person you were leaning against making the person tighten their arm around your shoulders when you almost fell over.

“Tech?”

“Yeah, it’s Technoblade. Just focus on walking. You’re almost out of the gym.”

When you realized that you were out of the gym, you sighed in relief. It was so much quieter and darker. Though it was still relatively bright, it was better than the gym.

“S’better.”

“When we get her to the car we can give her some sunglasses or something if it’s still too bright for her.”

“Wilbs-”

“Focus on walking.”

You huffed in irritation, “don’ tell me what to do bitch.”

You felt Techno’s body jolt slightly as he chuckled, making your head throb at the sudden movement. “Just walk.”

When you walked outside, you shivered as you felt the cool air nip at your exposed skin. Right, you were in your volleyball uniform. “I’ll go pull the car around, you guys stay with her.”

You saw a tall brunet start to walk away from you. Uncle Splat? Uncle Schmat? Whatever his name was, you were sure he was your uncle. You tried to snuggle closer to Techno, craving warmth but never being satisfied. Where was your uncle?

After a while, you saw a car moving towards you and blinding light pointed right at you making you cringe away and groan. Techno started to slowly walk towards the car. “C’mon (y/n), you’re almost there. When you’re in the car you can relax.”

“Tommy, Tubbo, and Techno, you’re in the back row. Schlatt can drive and Wil, you’re taking the passenger seat. I’ll stay with her in the middle row so she can have some room to lay down.” Tommy and Tubbo were with you? Why weren’t they talking, they usually were very vocal.

“Tom, Tubbs didja like the game?”

They didn’t say anything as they climbed into the car. Did they not hear you?

“They’re just… tired (y/n).” Your dad’s voice reassured you as he took Techno’s place holding you up.

“I wanna nap. ‘M so tired.”

“You can’t sleep yet. We gotta get you to a doctor first.”

“Mm. Makes sense.”

“Let’s get you in the car hun.”

As he helped you climb into the car, you felt an overwhelming wave of nausea wash over you making you lose your balance and almost faceplant into the cloth seats. You felt yourself being gently, yet urgently taken out of the car and led to grass as you felt your esophagus shorten. Something burning made its way up your throat and spewed into the grass. You felt someone rubbing your back as you puked up your dinner.

When you were done, you reached up with a shaking hand to wipe your mouth. “You feelin better? Think you can get back into the car or do you need to sit down for a bit?”

“Car.”

After some difficulty, you were successfully in the middle row of the car laying down with your head on Philza’s lap. Soon enough, your shoes were taken off and a blanket was draped over you.

“(Y/n), what do you remember?”

You scrunched up your face as you squinted at Philza’s face. “I remember playing volleyball with Hales. She’s so pretty, she’s straight though. I remember the other team hitting the ball, me jumping, then nothin. Wha’ happened?”

You watched as Philza winced, “well, you got everything right so far. You got hit in the face with the ball so you fell and hit your head on the floor. You were passed out for a minute before you woke up. It was a pretty nasty fall, we’re going to the hospital now. How’re ya feelin?”

“Head hurts, ‘m seein two of everything, an I can’t think.”

“Do you know what a concussion is?” You nodded in his lap slightly, “you probably have one.”

After a while of talking, you were slowly starting to come to your senses and your speech was clearing up, but your head was still too stuffy to think about what you were saying before you said it. You didn’t have a filter.

“Do you wanna tell us about your week so far? Do you remember most of it?”

“Mhm, it was shit. On Monday I had a panic attack and Adrian, Sammy, and Annie were being bitches to me all day. They fucked up my back. On Tuesday, they got mad at me for ditching them and they had me do their homework, had another panic attack, and Haley told me that someone took pictures of our boobs ‘n stuff and they were gonna leak it to the school if Haley didn’t stop hanging out with me. Haley and I almost kissed, but she’s straight. Pulled an all nighter and Wednesday I accidentally came out to Tech and Wil and had another panic attack. Annie, Adrian, and Sammy took more pictures of me through my window, Annie outed me to the entire school and slapped me. Another panic attack, skipped the last two classes and felt like shit the entire practice. Today Adrian and Sammy told me to kill myself and I had another panic attack. ’S about it.”

As you were going through your week, the hand that was previously gently stroking your hair had frozen as the car was enveloped in a tense silence. Luckily, Tommy and Tubbo were passed out in the back seat so they didn’t hear how bad your week was. Everyone awake knew that you had a few bad days this week, but they didn’t know the full extent of it. You watched as Philza’s expression had turned downright murderous, but you didn’t really care. You were busy talking about your week.

For the rest of the car ride, Philza asked you simple questions like what your favorite color was, your favorite animal, basically your favorite everything. Eventually, the car pulled into the hospital parking lot and Philza helped you get out of the car. “Schlatt, can you take the boys home so they can get some rest? I’ll stay with her.”

“Yeah, I’m on it. Don’t cause too much trouble (y/n), we all know you can raise hell.” He watched you for a reaction, but when you didn’t react, he coughed. “Well, I’ll see ya later kid. Good luck.”

The car drove off leaving you and Philza at the front of the emergency room building. “It’s gonna be a long night (y/n).”

“I gotta finish Annie’s essay and Sammy’s presentation though.”

“No you don’t, I’ll email your teachers.”

You two checked in with the front desk before moving to sit on the uncomfortable chairs. It was going to be a long night. You were so tired.

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