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aroclawthornes · 3 years ago

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Blooming Brilliant, an Aroace Willow Park Manifesto

[id: a gif of a heart locket opening. One half of the locket displays a picture of Willow Park from The Owl House, winking and making peace signs with her fingers. Blue and yellow stars surround her. The other half reads "willow park my beloved." /end id.]

Greetings! It’s me, User Aroclawthornes, and instead of working on all the time-sensitive homework I have I sat down and wrote an essay explaining why I think Willow Park OwlHouse could plausibly be read as aroace, and why it would be a thematically enriching interpretation. I’ve never written anything like this before, so it’s oddly formal, a little pretentious, and contains a lot of qualifying language, but I'm confident that it gets my point across. I’m not intending to speak over other interpretations of Willow or assert that it's the only true way to read her, but it's a headcanon I find interesting, and I think there’s a lot of evidence to back it up, between certain elements that Willow’s arc employs to some good old overanalysed symbolism. If you're aspec, I hope this is validating; if you're not, I hope it's interesting; if you don't care, scrolling past it is quick, free, and easy.

Some disclaimers on terminology: I’m speaking from an aroace perspective, and so when I say “aspec coding” I’m generally referring to both orientations as a catch-all - a lot of the coding surrounding Willow could go either way. I’m also going to be talking about commonly accepted “aspec” narratives, but I’m aware of the limitations of this insofar as my experiences are only a single facet of the diverse range of aspec people in this world, so anyone who wants to add or argue anything - respectfully - is encouraged to.

Analysis below the cut!

The Thing About Plants

I’m not going to pretend that an association with plants is historically indicative of aspec coding, because, frankly, there haven’t been enough aspec characters to establish it as a convention, and it’s also a fairly wide-reaching branch of symbolism. However, I am going to propose that lighthearted comparisons between asexual people and plants (however misguided on functions of plant reproduction they are) are fairly common elements of budding ace teenage humour, as are related quips about photosynthesis.

[id: a screenshot of Willow from "I Was A Teenage Abomination", depicting her sitting on the ground while casting a spell over a small, pink flower. /end id.]

I’m also not going to claim that the colour green Belongs To Aromantics, and therefore that All Plants Are Belong To Us, but in tandem with everything else I’m about to cover, the connection between Willow and plants seems like a fairly plausible nudge to a relatively common element of aspec humour.

“Half-a-witch” Willow and the Late Bloomer Experience

[id: a screenshot of Willow with glowing green eyes, from "I Was A Teenage Abomination", depicting her summoning a mess of thorned vines. /end id]

Willow is literally nicknamed “half-a-witch”, in reference to her supposedly incomplete state - this is a sentiment eerily reminiscent of the pressure to find one’s “other half”, which affects aspec - especially aromantic - people particularly profoundly. She’s considered a late bloomer, someone who hasn’t reached the societal milestones of growth at the expected age, and who is derided and considered immature as a result of this perceived failure. However, we quickly discover that Willow is, in fact, an exceptionally competent and powerful witch - taken out of the restricting frame of the Abominations track, she’s able to grow into her own, “complete” person, therefore proving that she was never really lacking in anything in the first place. Like real-life aroace people, she was perceived as limited and immature based on the expectations and judgements of other people, but Willow was never deficient in anything, least of all herself.

[id: a screenshot of Willow and Luz from "I Was A Teenage Abomination". They are holding hands - the former is laughing with her eyes closed, and the latter is grinning, while covered in abomination goop. /end id]

As far as symbolism goes...the track Willow is initially put in literally requires her to conjure up another humanoid entity, with the expectation that she will therefore prove herself to be a whole and mature person. Only with this ability, she’s told, will she be successful and happy as an adult. The shapelessness of her attempts at conjuring an abomination reinforces this connection in my mind - if I may reference this quote from Ducktales 2017‘s (absolutely stellar) A Nightmare On Killmotor Hill, in which the protagonists explore their own subconscious fears via. the dream realm, for a second:

“I think that’s supposed to be my romantic interest, but I’m too threatened by the concept, so it never takes shape.”

A lot of young aroace people find themselves in situations where they attempt to convince themself of their interest in someone in an attempt to be “normal,” or end up lying in response to family members or friends’ questions about crushes. While Willow’s abominations, first and foremost, represent the expectations from her school, classmates, and family to be a successful, “complete” witch with a profitable future, I think that with an aroace interpretation of Willow they could also very easily be read as representing some latent insecurities over a lack of attraction, or pressure to find a significant other.

(I’m not condemning Willow’s dads, by the way - they seem like perfectly lovely fellas, and I’m confident that they were doing what they thought was best for her. They’re certainly very quick to drop everything to assure her future in Escaping Expulsion, so obviously they care about their daughter very much.)

Greens, Blues, and Yellows: Colour-Coding Willow Park

A while back, I made this post comparing Willow’s palette to the aromantic and aroace flags:

[id: a screenshot of a post depicting the aromantic and aromantic asexual flags, colour-picked from images of Willow in her Hexside uniform and casual dress respectively - these are overlaid on top of the flags. The caption reads "observations on willow park". /end id.]

The grey-and-green aromantic flag has long been the accepted mainstream symbol of aromanticism, and, as the above post - and many others - demonstrate, Willow’s palette reflects it near-perfectly. This could easily be a coincidence, owing to the palette of the standard Hexside Plant Track uniform, as well as her hair and eye colours - which are obviously supposed to be reflective of her plant-related abilities. However, given how fond of employing hidden meanings The Owl House has shown itself to be, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to claim that there’s at least a chance that her palette was constructed with the flag in mind.

The latter is...a bit more problematic for me, although it’s fun to joke about. The blue-and-yellow aroace flag was only created in December 2018, relatively late into The Owl House’s initial production, and it’s still relatively obscure, although on the rise in popularity as the accepted aroace flag (I only recently started using it myself), so I don’t know if Willow’s casual wear is enough to verify the presence of any deliberate subtext. I think it’s a fun coincidence, however, and (as was pointed out in this post) it’s cool that these blue and yellow stars surrounding Willow occur in the same frame as Luz’s bisexual decor:

[id: a photograph of Luz, Gus, and Willow, all surrounding a disgruntled-looking Principal Bump. Luz has flowers in the colours of the bisexual flag decorating her hair, while Willow is surrounded by bright blue and yellow stars. /end id.]

also seen above: powerful bi/aspec solidarity

Conclusion:

Do I genuinely believe that Willow is being deliberately written this way? If you’d asked me, say, two months ago, I’d have said probably not - as far as queer representation in kids’ cartoons has come, it has a ways to go, and focusing on transgender characters seems like a more obvious (and equally invaluable) route to go down. I can name maybe five explicitly aspec characters off the top of my head, two of whom have been written as alloromantic and/or sexual in adaptations or continuations of the source material (I have...some grievances with 2005 Doctor Who). But the emergence of Raine, an explicitly nonbinary character on Disney Channel, has given me a little spark of hope, and so, even if it’s never confirmed, it’s comforting to be able to see a character with such strong elements of aspec coding and think to myself, just maybe, that there might be some intent behind it.

I also...really want to see interesting things done with Willow. We’re halfway through Season 2, and despite some promising setup for her arc in the Season 1 finale, she’s sort of been left by the wayside lately in favour of developing the more “plot-relevant” characters, such as Luz, Amity, Eda, and Hunter. Frankly, I think it’s a disservice to her Season 1 development, despite how much I adore all the characters I just listed - beyond any personal motivation, the prospect that Willow could be aroace adds a lot of sorely-sought depth to her, and, as detailed, a lot of this has already been set up in her earlier episodes. I just...I think it’d be neat. Rarely do you get a kids’ show so brazenly queer in its themes as Owl House, and aspec people deserve to be included in that.

Willow would also be great aroace representation because, well - those five or so aspec characters I mentioned being aware of are all white or “raceless” (...also written as white, basically), and so an aspec Asian character would be a really lovely step forward in this area. Additionally, all the characters I referred to are also conventionally skinny, and Willow is not only fat, but written in a way that doesn’t treat this feature as a caricature. People who are more knowledgeable on these topics than I are absolutely free to make additions, as is anyone who feels like I’ve left certain details out.

tl;dr: Willow’s association with plants could be read as a cool nod to aspec humour, her “late bloomer” narrative is eerily reminiscent of some common aspec experiences, her palette speaks for itself, and it’d be really cool if we could diversify the so-far fairly bland sphere of aspec representation.

I’m going to conclude this by linking Rose by The Oh Hellos, because they’re my favourite band, they share The Owl House’s initials, and I also think it’s a good Willow song. Peace out.

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#the owl house #willow park #pspspspsps you will read my 1.5k word aroace willow essay #hooting #meta #willow #aroace willow manifesto #fuck it. this is getting posted

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pokelolmc · 4 years ago

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10 Danny Phantom Episodes with Good Concepts that Sorely Disappointed Me: “The Ultimate Enemy” (Part 2)

Alright, here I am, everyone—part two of my critical analysis on “The Ultimate Enemy”, and how its faulty writing let down a good episode idea. For those stumbling across this for the first time, I am in the process of composing an analytical list of ten Danny Phantom episodes whose concepts I liked, but didn’t like the execution of. “The Ultimate Enemy” is the first on this list. Due to the size of my complaints with the episode, I’ve split my arguments into multiple categories across multiple posts; I highly suggest you start from the beginning with part 1 here before moving onto this post. It covered the main introduction, and Category A of my problems with the episode: the plot points that were primarily irrelevant to Dan’s character.

For those of you continuing from the first part, I apologise for this part being overdue. I proposed I would edit and upload part two roughly a day after part one, but those days dragged on due to constant re-editing and problems with my mental health. Parts three and four shall probably take longer than a few days to edit and upload as well, as I discovered arguments in the essay that needed massive overhauls before posting. I can guarantee they’re coming eventually (the whole thing essay is fully written, point-wise); I need to rework and trim the fat off some paragraphs.

Without further ado, this post will take a look at everything I’ve chucked into Category B—my issues with Dan’s characterisation, and how what the episode showed us about who deserved responsibility for Dan contradicted what it told us about how Dan was created.

(Also, because of my saltiness seeping in when I was writing, my captions for the images got a little too snarky for an analytical essay, but I am too tired of re-editing this section to remove them. Hopefully, they’ll serve as humour; if not, I apologise.)

1. The episode incorrectly portrayed Danny as the only one responsible for Dan’s existence, and for the wrong reasons (the wrong events in the timeline). Upon scrutiny of the actual sequence of events that led to Dan’s creation, the direct responsibility for Dan’s birth was either an even split between Danny and Vlad, or slightly more Vlad’s fault (depending upon the interpretation of the event that did actually cause Dan).

(Spoiler alert: No. No, it was not.)

The episode initially chose to establish Danny cheating on the CAT as the cause for Dan’s existence. While this was partially, indirectly true (since it set up the chain of events that led to Dan’s creation), it was not the event that directly caused Dan—yet, the episode treated it as a highly important tipping point, close to the point of no return that led to Dan. Looking at Dan’s backstory from the information Future Vlad gave (as dubious as it was), and working backwards, it was clear that Danny cheating on the test was not the vital “point of no return” by any means. Neither was the explosion at the Nasty Burger, for that matter (which the episode treated as the point of no return after Dan cheated on the CAT in Danny’s place, which required the episode to postpone the narrative stakes of preventing Dan’s creation to the Nasty Burger fight).

(Well...not exactly--it didn’t ruin Dan’s future, but it did ruin Danny’s. There’s a distinction.)

Kick-starting the entire chain of events that set up the eventual moment of Dan’s birth was not synonymous with directly creating Dan, and blaming the causality for Dan’s existence on Danny cheating (the leap of logic that “Danny became evil in the future because he cheated on a test”) or even his loved ones dying at the Nasty Burger was incorrect.

To demonstrate the argument, I’ll shift to an in-universe hypothetical:

Imagine yourself in Clockwork’s shoes: an “evil future version of Danny” has been created, and you have to prevent Dan’s existence by searching through the events that led his creation to find as many openings between key events as possible, in order to change one and subsequently avert all the events (including Dan’s creation) that followed.

To lay it out in full, the chain (separating the events based on intervention windows) was as follows: (1) Danny cheated on the CAT -> (2) Mr. Lancer met with Danny’s parents at the Nasty Burger to discuss it -> (3) they (including Sam, Tucker and Jazz) died in the Nasty Burger explosion -> (4) a grief-stricken Danny went to Vlad in Wisconsin -> (5) Danny requested that Vlad numb his emotional pain -> (6) Vlad split Danny’s ghost half from his human half—only for the ghost half to immediately pull out Vlad’s own and fuse with it into Dan.

Dan’s existence being the result of (what was essentially) a disastrous line of falling dominoes made his origin more sinister, but also highly easy to prevent (at least, without taking into account the mess caused by the story’s poorly thought out use of time travel, which I’ll explain later in section C). After all, the more complex a system (the more elements necessary for a system to successfully operate and achieve a desired result), the more weak spots it has—as meddling with one part can affect all the other parts and lead the entire operation to fail.

Utilising any of the intervention room between the events in “The Ultimate Enemy’s” alternate timeline would prevent Dan’s entire existence. The only event, therefore, that could be labelled the direct cause of Dan’s existence was the event that immediately resulted in Dan’s birth, and the most dire pivotal point—which rendered Dan inevitable—was the event directly before that. The event of Dan’s creation itself (or the cause of Dan) was event number six—the removal of both Danny and Vlad’s ghost halves using the Ghost Gauntlets, and their subsequent fusion with each other. The event which led to this—event number five, which was Danny’s request for Vlad to remove his emotional pain—was the direct catalyst for the procedure, and therefore the important “point of no return” leading to Dan that the episode tried to make Danny cheating on the CAT (and once that was over, the act of losing his loved ones) out to be. (Technically speaking, it was one of possibly two options for the event upon which Dan’s existence truly hinged—number four was also a likely candidate).

Danny cheating on the CAT was not the cause of Dan (even if it set the eventual stage), because there were numerous ways to interfere after the incident of Danny cheating the CATs and still prevent Dan from existing. Clockwork could’ve interfered between events one and two, by changing Mr. Lancer’s parent-teacher meeting location to anywhere safer than the Nasty Burger, so no one died (he could’ve utilised Jazz to sway Mr. Lancer, perhaps—it’s safe to assume Clockwork was aware of her knowledge on Danny’s secret, and she was the one Mr. Lancer approached about Danny cheating). He could’ve interfered between events three and four—had Danny’s loved ones still die at the Nasty Burger but convinced Danny himself not to go to Vlad. He could’ve popped in between events four and five and convinced Danny, right after moving in with Vlad, to not ask for a way to numb his emotional pain. However, Vlad proved to be a dubious source in the flashback of Dan’s origin story, and was typically too much of a wild card, so preventing Danny from moving in with Vlad at all is likely the safest option.

Ergo, either event four or five should’ve been treated as the important point that led to Dan’s existence. On top of that, Vlad’s role in event six proved he was partially responsible for Dan’s creation, but the rest of the episode outside of the flashback neglected this fact in favour of pushing the “Dan was all Danny’s fault” message.

(Begin Vlad’s unreliable narratorhood in 3...2...1...)

However, Future Vlad behaved like an unreliable narrator of the “Dan’s creation” flashback, so his explanation of events shouldn’t be taken at face value. Assuming the basic outline of events was trustworthy, however, the episode indicated to us that Vlad was roughly equally as responsible for Dan’s creation as Danny. He conceded to Danny’s desire to escape his emotions and responded with the halfa-splitting operation that caused Dan’s fusion.

He stretched the reality of the event to Present Danny when he exaggerated the delivery of some (if not most) of his narration lines in the flashback. It was most blatantly clear in the line where he inflated his importance to Danny after the tragedy, “With nowhere else to go, you came to me—the only person left on the planet who could possibly hope to understand your situation.” He verbally emphasised the words ‘me’ and ‘possibly’, and the phrases “the only person left on the planet” and “could possibly understand” were hyperbole in their own right. Another was the line, “No more painful human emotions to drag you down,” where he spoke the italicised words with overt disdain for Danny’s emotions. It could be interpreted simply as Vlad’s typical habit of speaking in a dramatised manner, rather than trying to make himself look good to Danny by stretching the truth. However, even if choosing to interpret Vlad’s delivery as the latter, he still skewed his recount through vagueness and omission in the literal content of his narration (when linked to the visuals that ran alongside his lines).

According to Future Vlad, Danny asked for his emotional pain to be taken away; and Vlad removed his ghost half to “[honour] [his] wishes,” while the shot changed from Vlad’s sympathetic face at the grieving Danny to the procedure with the Ghost Gauntlets. Future Vlad never explicitly stated whether it was Danny or him that decided removing Danny’s ghost half was the course of action to take, Vlad only explained that Danny “wanted to make the hurt go away”, and then the shot cut to Vlad removing Danny’s ghost half with the only explanation that he was acting in accordance with that wish.

On top of not explicitly saying whose idea it was, (though, with Vlad’s knowledge and experience with halfa research far exceeding Danny’s, it was almost certainly his) the episode did not explain how his logic leapt from “remove Danny’s emotional pain” to “remove Danny’s ghost half”, which was an insensible method to solve Danny’s problems.

The “no more human emotions” line indicated that his intention behind the procedure was to remove Danny’s human emotions, yet he knew that the procedure entailed removing Danny’s ghost half.

It made no sense, in universe, for Vlad to competently assume that removing Danny’s ghost half from him would work to remove an emotionality rooted in his human half (the episode overall, by the way Dan referred to human emotions and sentimentalities as a “humanity” he gave up, implied that it intended to frame the emotional attachment to Danny’s loved ones as part of his human half). If it could be chalked up to an external fault, like the lack of clear research into the procedure’s outcome, and not Vlad’s failure to realise the logical inconsistency, the episode needed to give evidence of this. Without that information, the only feasible assumptions were either that he wasn’t making any sense in-universe, he was supposed to be sensible but the episode’s writing didn’t make sense, or he had an ulterior motive for convincing Danny into going through with the operation. Either way, it was yet another part of Dan’s creation that Vlad was responsible for, not Danny, and the episode’s message was illogical to contradict this.

Through potentially exaggerating his sympathy for the alternate Danny in his verbal intonation, and blatantly failing to mention the details of why he chose removing Danny’s ghost half to fix a “human” problem, Vlad told his version of Dan’s birth in a way that would minimise his moral fault in the incident to Present Danny. His only logically feasible motivation for this was to hide further moral accountability for Dan’s creation than what we already saw in the face-value version of the flashback.

To summarise this entire sub-category of arguments, the episode was wrong to pin Dan’s existence on Danny cheating on the CAT (and even on losing his family, as the second half of the episode changed gears to), rather than his desire to remove/escape his emotions (even if the deaths resulted in the pain that he wanted to remove in the first place, which I shall explain later in Section D). It was also mistaken to portray Danny as the primary cause of Dan, rather than acknowledge that Vlad was equally (if not more), responsible than him.

Additionally, the fact that Vlad, as an in-universe character, tried to minimise his moral role/accountability in the physical causality of Dan’s creation by skirting around the truth in his retelling was something that the episode itself should’ve acknowledged or called out, through more reliable information from a third-person or other characters’ perspectives such as Danny, Dan’s or Clockwork’s—but it didn’t.

2. On top of physical responsibility for Dan, the episode was wrong to pin Danny with the moral blame and identity of Dan. It treated the two of them as essentially the same person, and portrayed Dan as just a Danny from the future who turned evil because of a combination of Danny’s potential evilness (potential to do “selfish/evil” things) and tragic circumstances. Considering Dan’s backstory, it made no sense for Danny to be the sole owner of either Dan’s immorality or identity/personhood.

Dan’s backstory told us that physically Danny wasn’t solely responsible for his creation, but the rest of the narrative still deeply connected Dan to Danny alone by treating Dan as what would happen if Danny let his pre-existing moral flaws take over him—that Dan’s villainy (or evil nature) came from Danny.

Clockwork referred to Danny Phantom as “grow[ing] up into the most evil ghost on the planet” in the cold open (which, given that Dan was a product of a fusion, was blatantly false.)

“The Ultimate Enemy” attempted to build up the idea that Danny had the potential for evil, and that Dan was him realising his own evil, in the scene where the trio entered Clockwork’s lair. As they watched Dan’s carnage through the observation window, Danny excitedly admired Dan’s Ghostly Wail, completely oblivious to the seriousness of the situation, and Sam called him out for not reading the room.

(Though, Sam’s condemnation of Dan’s villainy was extremely underwhelming—calling a world-destroyer and (presumable) mass murderer just “kind of a jerk” in a snarky tone did not do the severity of Dan’s actions any justice.)

When they confronted Clockwork, Danny scoffed at him to find just “one” evil thing he’d done. The shot then immediately focussed onto “examples” of Danny’s “evil” in the time window—first, Jazz finding out Danny was going to cheat the CATs (which, as established in point one, was not as morally significant as the episode tried to portray it—that shall be further elaborated later in Section D). After Tucker sassed at Clockwork, “[I] bet you can’t find two!”, the time window changed to Dan standing atop his destruction in the alternate future, and Clockwork replied, “How about two thousand?”—implying that Clockwork was referring to what Dan did in the future as at least part of the (supposedly numerous) evil things Danny did (or would do). This made no sense unless the episode was implying that Dan’s immorality was Danny’s own. However, this implication was incorrect, leaving Clockwork to state that he had seen countless instances of Danny Fenton/Phantom being evil with no valid examples to show for it whatsoever.

Dan’s atrocities had no weight as examples of Danny’s morality flaws due to the fact that Dan’s evil was not primarily Danny’s to begin with, creating a feedback loop of invalidation; evidence for the argument was invalid because its own validity was dependent on the validity of the very argument it was supposed to be supporting.

(Danny, despite the episode’s reluctance to be fair to him with its accusations of his “potential villainy”, was actually justified in asking this of Clockwork. You know there’s something wrong with your story when your self-centred, short-sighted teenage protagonist is righter than your supposedly all-knowing Master of Time in this situation.)

(Cheating on a test is not evil, Clockwork, try again.)

(Nope, sorry, Dan’s evil is not Danny’s “evil”; your argument is invalid.)

(I typically put the “improvements/fixes” part at the end of each point, but for the sake of its direct relevance to the aforementioned example, I’ll put it here to avoid structural confusion in the essay:

“The Ultimate Enemy”, for some reason decided that its reason/foreshadowing of Danny’s potential for evil had to be self-contained; ironically, almost all (sans a small few) of the episode’s examples of Danny’s moral flaws weren’t “evil” at all, and they would’ve been far better off using actual events of Danny showing potentially villainous traits from previous episodes. Danny may have been justified in asking Clockwork to name one evil thing he’d done, because that accusation had no basis at that point, but Clockwork’s response should’ve been to show previous instances in the series where Danny took advantage of others with his powers.

For example, imagine if in the episode, when Danny demanded, “Name one evil thing I’ve done!”, Clockwork’s time window had switched to moments like the end of “Maternal Instincts”, where he manipulated Vlad into lowering his guard, or his acts of overshadowing Dash for petty revenge in “Splitting Images” or “Reign Storm”? Not only were they more legitimate examples of morally corrupt characteristics—tricking people for his own gain/victory and abusing his powers to the detriment of others—it would’ve given such a significant episode in the series more continuity with the previous ones. In fact, the examples in two of those previous episodes resulted in Vlad pointing out that Danny was becoming more like him, as a way to use Vlad’s relationship as Danny’s nemesis/character foil for the sake of tension. “The Ultimate Enemy” could’ve used those examples in its own narrative to turn Dan into a proper payoff of this long-term build-up of Vlad’s whole “We’re not so different, you and I” thing going on with Danny.

Also, it would add to the thematic irony of Dan being a fusion of Danny and Vlad’s ghost halves, if that aspect of his backstory was not altered in a rewrite of TUE.)

Vlad owned Dan’s evil nature equally as much as (if not more than) Danny because Dan was also half-Vlad. However, the episode neglected to acknowledge this outside of a few seconds on Dan’s birth in the flashback. While explaining the scene of the two ghost halves fusing into Dan, Future Vlad’s most honest lines of narration (because they straightforwardly confessed he was morally accountable for Dan to Danny, and thus had no motivation to be a lie) explained that, “My [ghost half’s] evil side overwhelmed you”. This implied that the reason Dan turned out evil in the first place was that Vlad’s evil took over Danny’s mind during the fusion.

Given that we trust Vlad’s line, Vlad (or Plasmius, as Vlad’s ghost half) deserved most of the accountability for Dan’s lust for destruction and lack of a moral compass, not Danny. So, calling Dan “Danny’s evil future self” was only accurate in the literal sense of “this is what remained of Danny’s mind/existence in the future—his ghost half—even though it’s only a part of a larger fusion with another ghost, and this fusion is evil”. Dan was not a warning that “Danny was going to turn evil”, because Danny was not the primary source of Dan’s villainy.

In regards to overall personal identity, rather than just morality, Dan was also not “Danny’s evil future self” on account of the fact that he was not “Danny’s future self”, period. He shouldn’t have been an “older Danny” (or essentially the same person as Danny but older and evil), according to his backstory’s statement that he was half-Phantom, half-Plasmius. Yet, for some asinine reason, Dan only identified himself personally as “Danny” for the duration of the episode (without mention of Vlad).

After travelling to the past under Danny’s guise, Dan referred to Danny’s bedroom and face in the mirror as his own.

(Whoops--another image where I goofed the subtitles, this time in formatting...and MS Paint’s lack of layers makes redoing it an unnecessary pain. Sorry about that.)

When he met Sam and Tucker in the future, he explained his cold response to seeing them again as a result of “[surrendering his] human half a long time ago”. His singular human half. Not plural…because even Dan himself wanted to pretend that he wasn’t half Vlad, for some reason.

Perhaps it could be chalked up to people behaving differently in different social contexts; in that case, it was understandable that—even if he was part-Vlad—his Danny-side and memories influenced him the most in front of Danny’s friends…but that alone didn’t justify him stating that he only had one human half as a fact. The only other option that made in-universe sense was that it was a deceit/falsehood on Dan’s part, and therefore knowingly untrue. Perhaps Dan didn’t want to admit that he had more than one human half to Sam and Tucker—because he was not obliged to divulge that information to them—or that he preferred to mentally distance himself from Vlad’s human half because the latter was still alive, and separate from Dan. However, it was still untrue to link Dan and Danny together as people, but not Vlad, with the idea of only owning Danny’s human half.

The assumption that Dan was a future, evil Danny in person (and not also part-Vlad in person, or a new person from either of them entirely) implied that the fusion resulted in Plasmius’s mind giving his evil to Danny’s and then disappearing into the aether. It implied that a fusion of two people resulted in a powered-up being that was solely one of them psychologically, in order to purport that Danny (or, at least Phantom as his ghost half) was still Danny in sense of self for the last ten years in the alternate future. This contradicted the more logically valid implication that Plasmius’s mind or identity still existed as a component inside Dan, and Dan was at least both Danny and Vlad mentally.

Vlad explained in the flashback, “[Vlad’s] evil ghost half mixed with [Danny’s].” The general interpretation of “mixing” implied that the two ghost halves merged together into a new being and their traits and minds blended together. His identity should, theoretically, be either a half-and-half joining of the two halfas, or a whole new person with Vlad and Danny’s ghost halves as mere fusion ingredients. Ten years of existence and experience after the initial fusion would also, theoretically, give Dan enough time to develop this new mixed mind into his own individual sense of self beyond who/what either of Danny or Vlad were as people (prior to the ghost half fusion). In that case, Dan was not Danny’s “future self” in identity, and had little reason to identify Danny’s face, room and family as “his old [life]” (or, at least his only one).

The next most obvious theory (about Dan’s psychological makeup as a fusion) is that one half was more dominant than the other during the fusion, leading to Dan to become primarily just one of them in identity. That dominant one had to have been Danny, based on how Dan identified himself in the episode, but that wouldn’t make sense. Phantom taking full control of the fusion and assimilating Plasmius into himself required that a grief-stricken fourteen year old was somehow capable of winning against a more experienced forty-something in a battle of minds, thoroughly enough to the point of absorbing the latter. Considering that Phantom was mentally weak enough to be the one “overwhelmed” by Plasmius’s evil (a single facet of Plasmius’s larger mind) almost immediately, that hypothesis seems unlikely. The notion of Phantom overwhelming Plasmius in the fusion to gain dominance, and Plasmius being the one to overwhelm him to turn him evil, contradict each other. Ergo, Dan being a mix of both Phantom and Plasmius was the most likely (and sensible) outcome of the fusion.

In that case, the episode was thoughtless and inaccurate to treat Dan as “Danny’s future self who became a villain”. Dan was not inherently linked to Danny in either the majority of his morality or his identity, due to the part Vlad played in Dan’s creation, and his mental component in Dan’s fusion.

2.5.A notable counterpoint, for the sake of not one-sidedly flipping all of the fault for Dan onto Vlad:

To be fair—as the idea of solely blaming Vlad would also be inaccurate to what Dan’s origin story showed—I should acknowledge a piece of evidence explicitly indicating that Danny still contributed some of his own darkness to Dan’s villainy, albeit less than Vlad. Once separated from his human half, Phantom ripped out and fused with Vlad’s ghost half of his own volition, all with a malicious grin on his face.

However, there was no clear motivation or reason for the separated Phantom to fuse with Plasmius (the physical cause of Dan that Danny/Phantom could be blamed for) —in fact, it made no sense for there to be any premeditated intention for Phantom to fuse with him, since he couldn’t have known that fusion with another halfa’s isolated ghost half was even possible at that point; it was an untried, never-seen-before method, hardly likely to mentally occur to Danny in the first place. Phantom resorted to attacking Vlad, stealing the Ghost Gauntlets and pulling out Plasmius for some unknown reason, but ghost-half fusion could not have sensibly been it. The Gauntlet attack simply demonstrated that Phantom took ill-willed pleasure from the act of hurting or depowering Vlad. After removing Vlad’s ghost half, fusing with it was the second step. Danny could be held responsible for his ghost half explicitly harbouring malice/potential evil in the attack (and his ghost half’s response to being removed was part of Danny’s responsibility in Dan’s creation), but that wouldn’t explain the crucial next step of the fusion itself.

This is where my ideas for potential improvements for the story of “The Ultimate Enemy” come in, as the exact extent of Danny’s contribution to Dan (in physical responsibility and mentality) wasn’t entirely clear—outside of this explicit evidence of Phantom’s facial expression. This uncertainty leaves the room for a do-over of the narrative to ask a lot of questions about how physically and morally accountable for Dan’s birth and evilness Danny actually was.

We could assume implicit evidence that Danny had some sort of inner darkness which contributed to Dan, even if only the minority, from the possibility that his grief at the loss of his loved ones (as well at helplessness at not being able to do anything to save them, and low evaluation of his own worth as a person) led to buried malice, anger and a desire for power to compensate.

Based on how splitting halfas apart worked in “Identity Crisis”, it made sense that Phantom had a sense of hostility and motivation to hurt Vlad once separated from Danny in “The Ultimate Enemy”. When Danny was split in half the first time, the halves took on the mental characteristics of the whole Danny’s momentary intents and desires. When Danny wanted his ghost half to do all the hero work so his human half could have the time to have fun, his ghost half took on an exaggerated hero personality and his human half an irresponsible teenager personality. Assuming this logic consistently determines the split halves’ personalities each time, and the fact that Danny’s desires in the alternate future revolved around escaping his emotional pain, it was logical that one of the split halves inherited a condensed majority of Danny’s pain (in this case, the ghost half), while the other half (the human one) was innocently blind to most of Danny’s grief and self-hatred—and that the suffering half acted out aggressively or malevolently as a result.

However, since we could logically assume that fusing with Plasmius was not the initial reason Phantom removed him from Vlad (and we assume the fusion was a spur-of-the-moment decision that occurred to him afterwards), why did he remove Plasmius in the first place? Was he intending to spite Vlad after all the grief he caused Danny in their rivalry? Was it a sense of inferiority telling him to tear Vlad down from his superior position? Was it to avoid letting Vlad stay a possible physical threat to Danny? There is such a large gap here, one could brainstorm countless possible motivations.

Furthermore, if that only covered his motivation to remove Plasmius, then what made him decide to fuse with him? Was he attempting to possess Plasmius as one ghost half trying to possess another for some reason? Was it internal panic? Was it a hunger for power pushing him to seize the opportunity that opened up? Why didn’t/couldn’t Plasmius fight Phantom off in the fusion scene?

These questions could be explored if the story of “The Ultimate Enemy” was redone. Present Danny, the Danny whose point of view we saw the episode from (rather than the Alternate Danny) hadn’t experienced the Dan future himself, so he didn’t know what was going through his alternate self’s head (human or ghost) during Dan’s creation. How much of it was his fault? How much of it wasn’t? How did he fill in the holes in the story Future Vlad told to him based on his own insecurities, and what did he blame himself for?

For that matter, why not get present Vlad wrapped up in it too? Have him take responsibility for what is HIS. If not, the episode should’ve at least acknowledged that Dan was not entirely “Danny’s evil”, and made it clear that he was cleaning up both his and Vlad’s collective mess by himself. If the message of the evil future self being Danny corrupted to the side of evil was so necessary for the episode, then simply remove the fusion plot entirely from Dan’s origin and have Danny become a villain by his own moral corruption. It weakened the impact of the future-self villain being a warning of “what the hero should avoid becoming” by having the main character only become evil by fusing with an already malevolent character.

3. The Observants’ conclusion that they had to kill Danny to save the world from Dan didn’t make sense, due to Vlad being primarily responsible for Dan’s evilness—but the episode, instead of acknowledging this inanity, actually reinforced the opposite.

Having now established that Vlad was half (if not more) at fault for Dan’s evil than Danny, the plot to kill Danny in the episode lost any of the ground it had to stand on.

(Nope...no, he didn’t have to.)

It was illogical for the Observants to assume killing Danny was the best way to stop Dan from existing when killing Vlad would equally achieve this (not to mention that either of these options were overkill, in the presence of the intervention methods mentioned in Section A). Without Vlad, Dan could not exist either. Eliminating Vlad would stop his continuous crimes against both worlds, and let Danny live to continue doing the good he’d done. After the events of “Reign Storm”, a large part of the Ghost Zone knew that Danny had saving Amity Park, and the entire Ghost Zone, under his belt—if an entire wasteland civilisation like the Far Frozen came to worship Danny for his victory against Pariah Dark (as shown in season three’s “Infinite Realms”).

(For that matter, where were the Observants hounding Clockwork to get on Vlad’s troublesome ass when he tried to steal the Crown of Fire and the Ring of Rage in “Reign Storm”, if Pariah Dark was so dangerous?)

If they were being somewhat rational, it was possible that they chose Danny as Vlad’s less powerful counterpart, and an easier target—even though they delegated the task off to Clockwork because intervention wasn’t their job, and they clearly acknowledged Clockwork’s power and competence to some degree. The Observants openly referred to Clockwork as the master of time while shirking their responsibility for fixing the future onto him, so whether or not killing Vlad would be too difficult for themselves would be irrelevant, since they made it Clockwork’s problem and became backseat commentators. Though, Clockwork would’ve probably foreseen Vlad’s importance in Danny’s emotional growth as his nemesis and also kept him alive anyway—but from a purely logical standpoint, it made little sense to execute Danny over Vlad, if they ever needed to kill anyone at all.

To be honest, the episode could’ve used the invalidity of the Observants’ plan to paint their incompetence more, expanding on Clockwork’s disdain for them and how he told the audience they “just observe”. However, to do that, the episode itself would’ve had to actually portray the Observants’ plan (not just the Observants themselves, but their actual plan to kill Danny itself) as nonsensical. The episode never did, however, as it had Clockwork—the character portrayed as bolder and wiser than the Observants—reinforce their proposition as worth trying and go along with their request for Danny’s demise. He sent two ghosts to attack Danny (although the fight with Boxed Lunch was more of a moral test about giving Danny the CAT answers, rather than an attempt on his life, Danny “failed” that moral test before Clockwork sent Skulktech after him—so, the latter at least counted as a potential hit on Danny) to the extent of attempting to kill Danny himself on the last attempt. That Clockwork went along with the Observants’ plan showed that the episode saw the plan as reasonable, despite its illogicality.

(While there is a possible argument for Clockwork’s knowledge of how the episode would end—insinuating that he knew Danny would never actually end up dying—justifying why he went along with the plan in the first place, the next section of the essay shall tackle that. Since Clockwork is the Master of Time, and the issues with his character were heavily intertwined with the effects the time travel lore had on the plot, that shall be addressed in Category C, the section covering the mess created by the time-travel in the episode.)

...actually, that just gave me an idea. You know what would be interesting, if a little too much to content to stuff into the narrative? Having an Observant character distinguished as their own individual, who doubts the other Observants’ unreasonable decisions and becomes a rogue element to the rest of the council, directly intervening in the timeline themselves. The rogue Observant could abandon the council of Observants to side with Clockwork, and characterise Clockwork by having him change his globalised impression of the Observants to understand this new, non-conformist one as an ally. Or, perhaps the Observant plays a more compassionate foil to Clockwork, choosing to himself save Danny’s life from the ghost attacks Clockwork sent after him?)

#danny phantom #danny phantom analysis #danny phantom essay #the ultimate enemy #danny fenton #vlad masters #dan phantom #the observants #danny phantom clockwor #time to get into one of the longest sections of this essay hoo boy #I apologise for the verbosity

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jonny-versace · 4 years ago

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Hey! I kinda stumbled into your post about The Magicians and, as someone who a) is also interested in fandom culture and b) was an active member of The Magicians fandom during its highest (and lowest) points, I thought I'd share some of the context revolving around the shipping controversy.

So, during the first two seasons, the central m/f ship clearly seems like endgame, with no big hints about the main character being anything but straight. Sure, because the protagonist's best friend is a queer man who has a crush on him, and there are the usual queerbaty lines here and there, they were a big ship among the fandom, but nothing more. Until season 3 came along, and had something of a bottle episode, where the two get stranded in the past together and are explicitly in a romantic relationship. After they return, both kinda acknowledge the fact, but The Plot comes knocking. Shippers became more numerous, and some people started speculating that they could be a viable ship, but most of the fandom took it as a nod from the writers and a self-contained story that wouldn't come back.

All the while, the show's social media accounts hyped up this pairing more than any other, and made frequent remarks suggesting more canon recognition. Virtually every week you'd find a tweet, a poster, and so on, that egged people on. And by this point, the showrunners had the audience's trust due to their handling of other topics. There were more POC than usual for TV, the main character's chronic depression was an ongoing struggle, things like addiction and trauma were handled in believable ways. By having a self-described "depressed supernerd", who is comfortable with being bi/ pan, and storylines that catered to a queer neurodivergent audience, during three years they grew and grew in popularity and as a safe space for exactly these groups. I was one of those: I'm a historian, and pretty used to consuming media critically; I wasn't a teenager who's never seen herself represented, but an adult who got used to looking for good representation when I want to find it, or just watching things with no expectations for the fun of it, and at most dissecting the "what ifs". This show stroke me as the former, and became the relaxing and understanding queer space I ran into after a very long week. And there were A LOT of people in a similar situation.

Then came Season 4, and that's when things got tricky. Because you see, for three years they told us this show was clever, and it turned out to actually be; that this was a subversive and complex story being told in an absurdist way, and all that came to fruition. So when, with this season, there was both a flashback confirming that the main character wanted to persue a romantic relationship with his best friend, like in the past, but got turned down, and a very final break up between him and the girl who seemed like endgame for the first seasons, shipping went from "cool but unlikely pairing" to "damn, that's a great subversion of queerbaiting!". And their social media, trailers, released images and so on confirmed that to the audience (the tweet I recall better had the main m/f pairing, with a closed book, and was captioned with something on the lines of "a chapter ends so that another can begin"). The protagonist spent the entire season trying to rescue the guy he'd confessed feelings for. In a moment where they'd have to establish his identity, the frase said by said guy was the same reference used to talk about the bottle episode multiple times before. The nature of their relationship having changed is acknowledged by another character. At the end of the day, it seemed like a clearly confirmed fact.

And that's when the protagonist dies. There's a lot more ugliness around his death and how it was handled by the script, or how the showrunners pat themselves in the back. But it suffices to say that when an audience is mostly composed of "queer depressed supernerds", killing off the person who represented how someone like this could not only survive, but thrive, is more than a little traumatic. And doing so without ever giving the oh-so-central amd hyped up m/m relationship any ending, good or bad, makes it all seem both pointless and mean spirited.

Sorry about the gigantic text; this was such a unique fandom response and situation that I'm still quite fascinated by it (something like the near perfect creation and corruption of a vulnerable community's safe space). I don't know if you care about it, but just in case this interests you as well, now you have a summary.

hi hello! first, thanks for the extremely thoughtful post, it was interesting (I don't explicitly remember what I said in my post but I very much do remember being fascinated by the fall out of what the show did at the time) (I swear I'll finish pick it from S2 one day, though I'll admit I personally found season one a bit of a slog).

I remember reading enough posts from people on here and articles on sites like io9 to agree that what they did re killing off the bipolar I believe? lead and framing it as a noble sacrifice or something was in extremely poor taste, and I sympathise(d) with all the people who could relate to him and their grief coz like you said, even from my outsider perspective it seemed very ugly on the part of the show.

as far as the ship part of the conversation goes, I'm still largely ignorant of that from a first hand experience pov. but generally speaking, for me, I was and still am fascinated by what these (often lower budget, American CW/syfy etc) shows do to kinda stoke or fan fandom expectations/wants vs what fandoms do to themselves to set themselves up for a fall (canon vs fanon basically). in other words, how much a show queerbaits its audience vs how much the audience queerbaits itself, if that makes sense. not at all saying that's what happened in your fandom, again I haven't yet seen enough of the show to form an opinion on the ship aspect, but really just generally with those kind of shows (Supernatural being the big one recently, that Roswell show, even Teen Wolf going way back).

I usually find myself coming to the conclusion that like most things it's not a black and white issue, and that there's a certain amount of "blame" for lack of a better word on both sides. but again that's usually an observation from me as like a satellite to these shows and fandoms, not really valid in many senses, just something that eases the itchy part of my brain that's super intrigued when these fandom dramas explode as they're prone to do.

but no, I deffo do care in a larger sense so thanks so much! I'll deffo save this in case I ever get around to finishing the show for myself

#planetarywho #long post #really thanks for this!#kinda stoked an interest to get back on the show #again s1 was very much not for me but i want to finish almost from an experimental position lol

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deargrilledcheesusyouredelicious · 5 years ago

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youtube

[caption for screenreaders: the above video clip is from Everybody Loves Raymond Season 9, Episode 6 ‘Boys Therapy’]

Gather ‘round Riverdale fans and take 1:53 seconds to watch this clip from the show Everybody Loves Raymond (CBS 1996-2005), in which main characters Ray and Robert Barone discover that their father Frank was abused by his father. I would have pulled something from the Riverdale canon to illustrate my complaint, but this clip suffices more than anything from the show itself would. We need to talk about a belief that has sprung up in the fandom that FP Jones is an abusive parent.

I don’t care how much retconning has been done by the show for the sake of their ham-handed plots, the facts remain that even if Forsythe Sr. had what he believed justified reasoning for his actions, he abused FP and probably FP’s mother, both verbally and physically. We have canonical evidence of this throughout the series, and it is a continually justified fact. In 3.4, FP tells the Midnight Club that he ‘won’t hit his kid like my old man hits me’.

Yes, FP has problems with alcohol abuse, and he admits that he has an addiction. Yes, there was a period of time where FP’s drinking got so bad that Jughead moved out of the house. It used to be viewed as canonical that Gladys skipped town with Jellybean as a result of FP’s drinking, but in light of her season 3 characterization and behavior, I am not entirely sure that is the case. I am pretty sure that Jughead just assumed that and it was taken at face value because FP was a drunk and he was telling his friends that. Of course they would believe Jughead.

Neither FP nor Gladys was prepared to be a parent. Even though it may not be explicitly stated in canon, the subtext states that Jughead was an unplanned pregnancy and Jellybean was a pregnancy designed to hold a failing marriage together, which clearly did not work out. While Gladys displayed questionable parenting skills, both in her refusal to let Jughead stay with them when FP was in jail, and her actually physically abusing him in her in show appearance in season 3, and with her treatment of Jellybean, where she let her 11/12 year old work at a chop shop and tried to alienate her against her own father and brother, and clearly preferred being a friend and not a parent, FP actually tried his best to be a decent parent. The problem is that FP had no real barometers for being a decent parent -- his father was abusive and even though he and Fred were ‘best friends’ I’m not exactly sure that he could have gone to him for guidance, or even that Fred himself was the best example of how to parent -- and parents who were abused have a very skewed sense of what’s normal. This combined with FP’s addictions led to him making some less than ideal choices. However, over the course of the series, we have seen him grow and mature.

People view FP’s justified moments of anger (like when Betty had Jughead’s cell phone when he was missing and looked like she was guilty as sin) as abusive, when they’re really not. Parents/adults are allowed to get angry. In FP’s case it isn’t helped by the fact that he is an intimidating looking gang leader. He’s just someone who is flawed doing the best that he can with the limited resources that he has.

We can see evidence of people who fell in line with their abusive teachings in Penelope and Hal. These are people who grew up in abusive situations and saw nothing wrong with abusing their children as well. Oftentimes the fandom views these people as merely misunderstood.

#tw abuse #rd negativity

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myhouseidea · 5 years ago

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Villa Cinquecento is a project designed by Napur Architects. In its lifetime, Villa Cinquecento has been through the hands of three different owners and went through many visions of transformation by various architects – a situation which is difficult to handle on its own when tackling a new design challenge. Therefore, when Napur Architects were tasked to redesign the multi-residential building, it was inevitable throughout the whole process that the participating architects and the new customers would need to collaborate through open, transparent communication to achieve a high-quality result. Photography by Tamás Bujnovszky

#gallery-0-6 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-6 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 25%; } #gallery-0-6 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-6 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Reacting to the steeply wooded site of Buda, Villa Cinquecento is designed as a highly responsive dwelling that embeds itself into the hillside. Anyone who has been in Buda before, couldn’t argue with the statement that the most beautiful inner part of the district falls into the area of the so-called Istenhegy, Svábhegy, and Kútvölgy. An incredibly exciting valley, where the topology of the landscape is part of the design process of every house. There are plenty of narrow streets, steep and dramatic slopes; plots where the woody, steep bushy landscape is not only stretching extensively and infinitely from one corner of the horizon to the other, but it almost feels like it’s at your fingertips. And still. The typical city dweller is not very familiar with this spectacular sight. This beautiful cinematic play of nature coming alive in front of our own eyes is a privilege for only a few in the bustling city of Budapest.

Such a situation has proved to be an inspiration for this multi-residential generous condominium. Its central character draws inspiration from the modernism of contemporary villas. The house stands on one of the steep sides of the street, with an extremely wooded hillside on the opposite side. Therefore the main orientation point for the architects during the design process was this beautiful green square in front of the house. More precisely, in terms of compositional principles, it was not the contour of the house or the boundary of the plot which served as an orientational element, but building inward from the point of the green hillside in a shell-like structure.

Besides, this natural landscape played a significant role in designing the floor plan, terraces, rooms, and the glass curtain wall. Put this way, you can understand the location of the pool or the extensive terrace in the back, which is built into the more intimate zone, while the ground floor above the garage cellar, as well as the first and the second level of the dwelling, was opened up to the green hills visible from the street. This dwelling is not a typical structure, which communicates in 360 degrees towards its surroundings, but rather a building that emphasizes a strong view of the landscape from specific perspectives.

I knowingly left an essential and exciting part of the design at the end of the writing that touches the character of the frontal area. As if it was a small art gallery, an art object itself, a tiny concrete building is located in the front garden sheltering a design icon behind its glass windows – a classic Fiat 500 Nuova with a Roman license plate. International publications are filled with Porsches, Mustangs, Ferraris fitted into contemporary villas; and living with such an object can mean eternal love, childish soul and passion for racing or mere bragging. That is why it’s very thoughtful of the client to have a classy concrete box explicitly designed for a vehicle that is far from being ostentatious. The dialogue between the dwelling and the pavilion prompts elegant and stratified interpretations. It is about proportions, pure forms, passionate relationships, superior engineering, and aesthetic dimensions. Compared to the gray concrete mass of the lowest level that sinks into the slope of the plot, the upper, pierced levels seem light and airy. This feeling is further reinforced by the fact that the two sides of the carriageway foreground are covered with beautiful soft-line architectural landscaping solutions.

Villa Cinquecento by Napur Architects Villa Cinquecento is a project designed by Napur Architects. In its lifetime, Villa Cinquecento has been through the hands of three different owners and went through many visions of transformation by various architects - a situation which is difficult to handle on its own when tackling a new design challenge.

#bathroom #bedroom #house #house idea #houseidea #kitchen #living #myhouseidea #Napur Architects #outdoor #pool #terrace #villa #Villa Cinquecento

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parkminijiminie · 6 years ago

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I do not know if you ever commented on this, but what do you think about that mini video that JM posted with a glasses filter? (many people said that was why someone tweeted "if you're dating jk, post a photo of glasses" or something)

Hi, Anon. I have some thoughts on this particular matter that I’ve never shared before so why not now.

(!!!) Disclaimer: these are my personal observations, views, and thoughts on the matter. I’m not trying to convince anyone in anything. You’re welcome to disagree.

For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about here’s a little backstory: After Jimin and Jungkook returned from Japan a fan tweeted (sorry, can’t find the original tweet):“Jimin, if you and Jungkook are dating, wear glasses in youр next selca/twitter post”.

Оn 12th of November 2017 (4 days after GCFt was uploaded and some days after the fan tweet) JM posted this on twitter:

https://twitter.com/BTS_Trans/status/929703965213773824

Now, in order for us to debate what this means, we must first ask ourselves a few questions:

1. Could have Jimin really seen the fan tweet? - The message was written in Korean and got a couple of thousand (2-3k) likes. I don’t remeber if the fan had tagged BTS’s twitter account but even if she didn’t, Jimin has admitted himself to checking social media and keeping an eye on what people say. Hence, it is possible he did saw it.

2. Was his twitter post his next selca? - No, it was not. Between the fan’s message and this tweet were other posts (I believe one other post) made by him.

3. Does that mean the video is not Jimin’s response? - Not, necessarily. It might have taken some days for the fan’s tweet to gain popularity and for Jimin to see it and so by then he had already posted other things. Or he might have not wanted to be too obvious and deliberately didn’t do it on his next exact post but on the one after that.

4. But he’s not technically wearing glasses? - Yes, he didn’t wear glasses, he used a filter, something he had done before - this is not his first video with such filter. Maybe he did it this way because it was easier, maybe he was on location and didn’t have his glasses with him. Or maybe (most likely) he didn’t want to be too obvious and no-one would find the filter unusual as he had used it before. Technically he’s still wearing glasses at the video like the fan asked, just not in real life.

5. What about the caption? - Well, that’s definitely interesting. Why did he feel the need to explicitly write “glasses” and why this particular two emojis: a peace sign and a cute laughing one? Clearly the choice of caption was not random as he did wrote it himself (and he rarely does anything without meaning anyway) so it must mean something. Maybe he wanted to make sure that his point came across and using the caption was simultaneously thr most direct but also most not standing out way.

6. Is there anything special about the video itself? - Yes. Jimin is of course very cute and beautiful but what is interesting is his choice of clothes. The gree hoodie he’s wearing is very similar to the one Jungkook wore while they were in Tokyo and also one Jimin was seen wearing a lot in the time after they came back from the trip. Recently, he wore it again. It is debatable whether it is the same hoodie (Jungkook’s) or if they in fact have matching ones. Some people say they both have one but personally I’m not sure. Either way this item of clothing has become a symbol of the trip and GCFt. Of course, it’s highly likely that Jimin was already wearing it and didn’t specifically put it on for the video but he could have filmed it wearing any type of outfit, he could have waited to come home and change for example. It didn’t have to be this hoodie but he chose to wear it in the video anyway.

7. Would Jimin really risk this way if they’re dating? - Well, Jimin isn’t risking much with this tweet. The fan’s message wasn’t that popular (and was also not made in English), this wasn’t his next selca and the video itself is very harmless - just him and some filter. The caption as well can be interpreted in a number of ways, it isn’t explicit. Overall, if Jimin wanted to confirm things, this would be a perfect way to do that without endangering himself and Jungkook. It’s obvious to those who know what it is about and want to believe it but not obvious enough to be a cause for drama. If you don’t know the backstory, you wouldn’t think anything special of it.

8. Does this all mean Jimin is (was at the time) dating Jungkook? - We can’t know. Maybe he saw it and just wanted to tease the fandom a little, have some fun with us. Or maybe they really are dating. It certainly could mean that. This whole case is not conclusive enough to be sure but it definitely is open to interpretation. Just like GCFt it could be aimed to not directly confirm anything but to raise questions and reasonable doubt.

My conclusion based on what is discussed above: After their Tokyo trip and GCFt release there was a lot of talk about Jimin and Jungkook and their possible relationship. A lot of supportive messages was send on youtube as well as twitter. No doubt both of them have seen at least some of those messages and for sure they made them happy even if they’re not dating. Maybe all the love and support they received gave JM the confidence that him and Jungkook can be accepted by the fans and the courage to respond to the fan’s tweet. It’s safe to assume that if JK and JM are together, at some point they will get tired of all the hiding and secrecy and would maybe want to show their love to the people who support them.

A personal assumption: Maybe Jimin’s tweet (similar to Jungkook’s GCFt) is his way to do just that - come out of the glass closet a little, interact with us and calm us that yes, our support is not in vain, it is needed, seen and appreciated. It’s not the first time he’s left clues and cryptic things for us but this is the most direct way he’s ever reached out. If we accept he did tried to reach out, in my opinion the way he did it is very very smart given their situation. Those who want to believe it, the ones he is trying to connect with in the first place, will believe it. Those who don’t, will simply ignore it and move on. The supporters will be happy and the ones who are not supportive have nothing to be angry for. No ships wars created, no drama.

Personal opinion: I believe it would be too much of a coincidence for Jimin’s tweet to match so well the fan’s post both in timing and content, especially taking into consideration everything else that was happening at the time, all the moments between him and Jungkook and the generally positive reaction the fandom had for them after JK’s video.

For me, Jimin is a very smart man who is definitely capable of doing something like this.

#jikook #kookmin

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rapeculturerealities · 6 years ago

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It is difficult to overstate the visceral impact—and rarity—of seeing a black man, one as statuesque and imposing as Crews, step forward to identify himself as a survivor of sexual assault and reject external demands that he bury his shame. Crews has spoken at length about the tenacity of shame, the way it embeds itself more deeply in survivors’ psyches with each dismissal of their accounts. He has acknowledged that his race and size render his story unbelievable to some, that those same factors kept him from responding to his alleged assailant with violence for fear of being stereotyped as a “thug”—or facing violence at the hands of police.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the days since Crews shared his Senate testimony, a number of his peers have taken to the internet to discredit his experiences—and his manhood. Most notably, rapper and actor 50 Cent (née Curtis Jackson) posted (and then deleted) a bizarre meme featuring Crews shirtless, with the words I got raped / My wife just watched superimposed onto the image, as well as another photo of Crews with a rose in his mouth, with the words Gym timeinexplicably in the top right corner. The photos also included a strange, tone-deaf caption in which 50 Cent suggested he would have responded to a similar situation with gun violence rather than the trepidation Crews recounted: “👀LOL,What the fuck is going on out here man? Terry: I froze in fear,😆they would have had to take me to jail. 🤨get the strap.” Both in the comments of 50 Cent’s post, and on Twitter, men insisted they could never stand silent or motionless in the face of another man’s unwanted provocations. Some, like Russell Simmons, who has been accused of rape or sexual assault by more than a dozen women, responded to Jackson’s post with all the concern of a laughing emoji.

Jackson, and the many others who mocked Crews, communicated their allegiance to an idealized masculinity that they imagine as impervious to assault. (Jackson has since insisted his post was a joke, but even so, its purported humor would only stem from the “surprise” of a strong man’s victimhood.) Crews imparting his experience of assault placed him squarely outside that moving goal post, rendering him “weak” and “emasculated” in the eyes of people—most often men—who refuse to untether masculinity from displays of Herculean strength or aggression. For his part, Crews respondedfirst with love for 50 Cent’s music, then by saying he “proved that size doesn’t matter when it comes to sexual assault.” Friday morning, Crews tweeted a response to the misguided questions he’d received in the wake of sharing his story: “Why did you just let it happen? I didn’t. Why didn’t you beat him up? (Sigh),” the tweet ended.

There is a seductive allure to Jackson’s logic, the idea that only “weak” men “allow” themselves to be victimized. It is the same logic that animates victim-blaming rhetoric most often directed at women, but with an added valence of patriarchal posturing. When Jackson (or any other man) suggests that Crews only froze in fear when targeted by a predator because Crews is uniquely weak-willed, the detractor is insisting on his own imperviousness to harm. Because he is a man, he is strong. Because he is strong, he cannot be overpowered. But victimhood is not just the domain of the weak. Sexual violence does not select against “strong” people (and even if it did, Jackson’s comments would still be reprehensible).

Jackson is far from the first to mock Crews for speaking out. In a March interview with BuzzFeed News, Crews noted the controversy that now surrounds him in Hollywood: “I walk in the room, and the room is split right down the middle,” he said. “It just divides right there. It’s kind of like lightning.” While not everyone in the camp Crews identifies as unsupportive speaks of the actor in terms that are as vulgar as Jackson’s, their irritation with Crews’s accounts still functions to discredit both his stories and his masculinity.

The logic of male imperviousness also serves to distance Strong Men(™) from the “weaker” sex. If strength is a hallmark of masculinity, then Jackson’s insistence on his own immunity to harm is also a feverish attempt at denouncing femininity. It is common, when naming sexual assault as an issue that disproportionately affects women, to be met with a barrage of trolls lambasting female advocates for supposedly overlooking male survivors. And so often, the men who decry female advocates’ efforts do not support male survivors when the time comes to do so. The invocation of the male survivor is more often rooted in disdain for women’s organizing than it is in any real concern for the livelihood of the boys and men who must contend with the effects of sexual violence on their lives.

In the days since Crews’ testimony, the silence from other men—men whom Crews has explicitly said he hopes to comfort and embolden with his actions—has been deafening. Meanwhile, the men who mock Crews are participating in the theater of masculine performance to the detriment of their own—and other men’s—healing.

Crews’s testimony also comes in the same week that celebrities in the worlds that he and Jackson both inhabit have thrown their support behind a man whose life represented a far different model of (black) masculinity. Just hours after Crews spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee, 23-year-old Philadelphia rapper Lil Uzi Vert tweeted his plans to establish a foundation for the family of the slain rapper XXXTentacion, whose list of alleged abuses included beating his pregnant ex-girlfriend so badly that she may still be in danger of losing vision in one eye. Uzi’s tweet also included a call for other celebrities to assist his endeavors; thus far, Nicki Minaj, Lil Yachty, and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie have all pledged their support. XXXTentacion, who brought his fans tremendous comfort and his alleged victim deep pain during his short life, attracts sympathy from his peers with ease. To rally behind a “controversial” dead man, even one accused of heinous abuses, may be shocking to some, but it is hardly without precedent. To support Crews, however, a man forsaking the comfortable façade of patriarchal force for a revealing vulnerability, would be to admit complicity in valuing the masculine veneer.

In his testimony, Crews deftly noted that part of the appeal of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights is the distance it gives victims from the immediate trauma they have faced. “It gives survivors the right to receive information, including access to police reports, rape-kit results, and access to sexual assault counselors,” he said. “And by requiring that rape kits and forensic DNA evidence be retained for the duration of the statute of limitations, this bill gives survivors the right to have time to distance themselves from the immediate trauma before making the difficult decision to report the assault to law enforcement.”

While law enforcement has an unfavorable track record with addressing (even perpetrating) sexual assault—and a worse one yet with treating black people as humans—the core of Crews’s concern still rings true. To acknowledge the fact that survivors deserve to process their traumas on their own terms is to recognize that sexual violence affects those who experience it differently. Crews’s process may not be the same as that of every person he testifies alongside, but his efforts add depth to the chorus. “I have to say, the silence is deafening when it comes to men talking about this issue,” he noted in his testimony. Amid that absence, Crews’s voice is as valuable as it is clear.

#Crews #victim blaming #50 cent #toxic masculinity #gender essentialism

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threehoursfromtroy · 7 years ago

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hi, i've been watching the asks you've been responding to, and just wanted to say that i sadly agree with the first anon. seeing someone post an ask like that actually makes me feel more comfortable speaking out bc this is something that's bothered me for a while. i asked a few of my friends and they agreed that they often want to say something but don't want to come across as rude. that anon isn't alone, and i know not everyone feels this way but many do and then have no way to change it

So like, agree my comments are unwanted, unappreciated, or inappropriate? I keep getting quite a few differing opinions here, from personal messages of support to more voices, not all anon, thinking my reblogging style is outside tumblr etiquette. I do want to be approachable, and I'll give any well-intended message honest consideration. But this doesn't seem open and shut. Posts being responded to with more content is baked into the structure of this site. Thats the basic functionality. I'm reassessing the kinds of comments to put on reblogs, but it had always seemed to me that the POINT of adding a caption was to put something on the post that will follow it, continue and expand on it. Something like a message board or forum with sharable threads.If you want a platform where you post a thing and people share and consume it, isnt that sorta what pinterest and instagram are? Honest question, really! Because I feel like I am using a core feature of this platform in a pretty standard way, and I know I have quite a few followers who follow me explicitly BECAUSE of how I do my reblogs. Like I said, I'll be more careful not to add anything that might go against the original poster's point, or doesn't add to the work itself. But otherwise, this may be one of those "can't please everyone" situations. :/

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mhsn033 · 4 years ago

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South China Sea dispute: Australia says Beijing’s claims have no legal basis

Image copyright DigitalGlobe via Getty Photos

Image caption Satellite image reveals Woody Island – in general is named Yongxing and Phu Lam – one of the best in the Paracels (file describe)

Australia has formally rejected China’s territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea, aligning itself more carefully with the US as tensions upward thrust.

In a declaration to the United Nations, Australia stated the claims, which derive the bulk of the sea, had “no apt foundation”. China has now not reacted.

It comes after the US known as some of China’s actions in the region “unlawful”.

In present years China has built bases on synthetic islands in the sea, asserting its rights tear aid centuries.

Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam contest China’s claims. The international locations hold wrangled over territory for a protracted time but tensions hold progressively increased in present years, with quite loads of maritime confrontations taking build.

Beijing claims a tall region is named the “nine-high-tail line” and has backed its claims with island-constructing and patrols. It has built necessary militia infrastructure, though it insists its intentions are mute.

Despite the true fact that largely uninhabited, two island chains in the region – the Paracels and the Spratlys – would possibly perchance perchance hold reserves of pure sources round them. The ocean is also a key shipping route and has most vital fishing grounds.

In 2016, a world tribunal ruled against China, asserting there became no evidence it had historically exercised irregular put an eye on over the sea’s waters or sources. But China rejected the judgment.

What is Australia’s build?

Australia’s declaration to the UN, submitted on Thursday, reads: “Australia rejects China’s claim to ‘ancient rights’ or ‘maritime rights and pursuits’ as established in the ‘lengthy route of historical word’ in the South China Sea.”

The text references the 2016 ruling by the Eternal Court docket of Arbitration, alongside side: “There is no apt foundation for China to intention straight baselines connecting the outermost aspects of maritime parts or ‘island teams’ in the South China Sea.”

It also stated it did now not settle for Beijing’s assertion that its sovereignty over the Paracels and the Spratlys became “broadly recognised by the area community”, citing objections from Vietnam and the Philippines.

Analysts declare the declaration marks a dramatic shift in build for Australia, which has beforehand informed all claimants to procure to the backside of their disputes per world law.

The transfer comes amid deteriorating family people between Australia and China over a call of disorders, alongside side an Australian call for a world investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which first emerged in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan final twelve months.

The text became issued ahead of annual talks between Australia and the US due to the happen in Washington on Tuesday. The two international locations are terminate and lengthy-standing allies.

What is the US build?

The US has lengthy been serious of China’s militarisation of the find 22 situation, and the Trump administration has now not too lengthy ago reversed a protection of now not taking aspects, explicitly backing the territorial claims of China’s South East Asian neighbours.

US Secretary of Suppose Mike Pompeo stated earlier this month some of China’s actions had been “fully unlawful”, condemning Beijing’s “advertising and marketing and marketing campaign of bullying to manipulate” the region. In response, China stated the US “deliberately distorts details and world law”.

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Media captionA BBC body of workers flew over the disputed South China Sea islands in a US militia airplane in 2018

Family between China and the US hold also deteriorated now not too lengthy ago over disorders alongside side Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, its actions in Hong Kong and its medication of Muslim minorities.

Earlier this week, the US ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, with Mr Pompeo accusing China of “stealing” mental property. China ordered the closure of the US consulate in Chengdu in response.

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linkspooky · 7 years ago

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Two Birds of a Feather

So this cover page was published with “134″, and at the time I thought it was rife with meaning. Which is a little strange because the caption is not something I’ve seen discussed. So let’s discuss it.

Feathers, and a life that remain in obscurity

The first part feathers, is rather easy to decode. Ukaku means feather red. It’s a reference to Touka’s Ukaku, which has always symbolically been depicted as wings. Even in the picture itself, there’s a splash of paint suspiciously in the shape of wings emerging from just behind her back.

This technique has been used to represent Touka’s ukaku wings multiple times before, most notably in the first Tokyo Ghoul opening.

Not only are wings a common artistic depiction with Touka’s character, they also have special regards in the meaning to her arc. As I mentioned [x] here a long time back, when Touka was drawn with one wing it was a sign of her former place in the world being at her brother’s side both of them using a combination attack with only one ukaku wing. Therefore when Ayato left, it also became a sign for her loneliness and the missing half of her brother.

Whereas a Touka with Two Wings such as the one depicted in “Spreading Wings” had matured to the point where she could accept that Ayato would come back on his own, and Ayato’s life was not merely about her own loneliness. Therefore she was capable of standing on her own and using both ukaku wings in combination to protect others.

There’s an additional layer of meaning to the wings though, as often symbols can come to stand for more than one thing. When Ayato leaves Touka, he’s depicted with two wings on the back of his shirt. As pointed out by Cor [x].

When Ayato and Touka reunite on the roof and have a battle of ideals, they fight specifically with their ukaku, one vs two. Ayato gaining the edge in the fight decides to rip apart her kagune by biting at the kakuhou. Not only is the line he drops significant, but his reasoning for doing so.

Ayato specifically attacked her Kakuhou so Touka’s kagune would be so damaged she no longer would be able to participate in the fight. As Kaneki pointed out later, Ayato’s intention has always been to protect Touka. It’s through Ayato’s own emotional immaturity and childish piques of violence though we see how possessive this form of protection can take. Ayato would rather his sister be crippled, then have the agency to walk into the fight for herself, because her making that decision for herself means he might lose her.

Touka is the victim of that attitude but she reflects it in a way too. As Ayato is breaking his sister’s legs so that she cannot walk away from him, Touka mourns at the same time, why both her mother, father, and ayato himself all walked away from her. Touka remembers explicitly, Ayato leaving with two wings on his back. Ayato having two wings and the ability to fly, also implicitly means to her that they might fly away from her.

Wings are independence and freedom, Ie the ability to make decisions on your own and stand on your own. Freedom is exactly that though, a lack of attachment, it means you might fly away. Both of those meanings are embodied in Touka’s constant depiction with wings, it’s even basically spelled out by Kaneki during their talk.

Kaneki’s remembrances of Touka are pretty much all with her back facing him, and either her ukaku or the marks left from wher she used them prominent on her back. He admires her decisiveness and independence, but at the same time Kaneki fears that these qualities mean Touka might leave him behind.

How exactly do you compromise on this then? What is the way to allow people to be full complete people, but at the same time ensure they will stay around you.

A bird’s wings will stay perfectly in tact inside of a cage, but at the same time they won’t be able to fly away. It’s probably better that way though, because the outside world is too terrible of a place to survive in.

The fact that Touka stares so long at Loser after being unable to see the beauty in her own wings, makes it pretty clear that she sees herself in Loser. A person with wings and power, but unable to live the life she even remotely wants because the world is so dead set against her existence. It’s not even that Touka just like every other ghoul has is forced to hide herself and her identity or be hunted down, but a step beyond that as Arata intentionally conditioned Touka to believe she had to participate in specific self harming behaviors in order to pass for human [x].

The arc that preceded this chapter with Loser specifically illustrated the negative consequences those actions have on Touka, as because she insisted upon eating the entirety of Yoriko’s food to appear human and normal she was too weak for most of the fight with Tsukiyama and could barely step in to protect Kaneki.

The temptation every character faces this arc which is specifically about leading a rebellion to smash the cage that restricts ghoul kind in order to create a world where they can lie more freely, is that it might simply be easier and less risky to accommodate to the cage rather than fight it. As @undergroundsky quoted so elegantly:

“Man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that is the best definition of him.”

Or if you want to go the route of Milton rather than Dostoyevsky,

“ Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

A propagandist cry from Lucifer to all of his followers when they mourned the loss of their former glory, and their current destitution in a cold and unforgiving hell when they once lived happily among the clouds. Easily comparable to the ghoul’s current position in the 24th ward, Lucifer cries out it’s better here where we are miserable because at least we have chosen that misery for ourselves. It’s an illusion of agency where there is none.

Kaneki frames the slow starvation of the ghouls not to be desperation, but to be a noble sacrifice, a worthy one that will lead to future prosper. Again too, he makes it sound like a choice that they are stuck in this prison.

Paradise Lost is a religious parable, the reason it makes such a sympathetic antagonist, a propagandist and speaker of out Lucifer one of the most unambiguously evil figures in christian mythology is because it’s meant to show how tempting sin is. Milton was not attempting to make a sympathetic figure out of Satan, but rather to show how tempting the path of sin can seem. Human beings are tempted to remain in misery with their sin precisely because they do not want to challenge their believes and accept they are wrong. They would rather futiley stay where they are and attempt to make a paradise out of hell itself, then reach out for something better.

This is the temptation every ghoul hiding in the 24th ward faces, to simply stay in the literal garbage dump living like rats because there it is “Safe”. To simply bear the hardships out forever and learn to accommodate them, rather than fighting for a rightful place in the world and risk losing more than you already have.

However, it is also an issue that has heavily been a part of Touka’s character arc since the start. Touka and her flaws have always risen up from this conflicting need she has to first be true to herself and her own strong, decisive but temperamental nature, yet at the same time follow the urge to conform something that has been forced on her since her childhood by Arata. Not that Touka’s urge to conform is a bad thing, she has a rightful place in society. If Mob Psycho 100 has taught anything, it’s that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to just be a productive member of society. At the same time though, the origin point of Touka’s need to conform is the problem itself. It comes from a certain belief that if she hides well enough, that she acts peacefully enough, she will be passed over and her loved ones will stay around her. It’s because she believes the comfortable world that humans have built for themselves belongs exclusively to humans, and exists only for humans, something inaccessible to a ghoul that pushes Touka to conform to the point where she commits acts of genuine self harm.

Touka at this point would probably saw her own legs off if it meant fitting into the hole. In the same way she reflects Ayato’s own previous actions of breaking her legs so that she did not wander too far away from him, but in this case she does so to herself. Perhaps that is why people in the fandom have such trouble spotting Touka’s flaws, because while every other character in the manga lets their issues spill out and harm one another, most of the harm Touka does is to herself.

As this meta points out it’s always been a long running theme with Touka’s character, her passive self harm [x]. However, I would like to make the point that Touka has far from quit this behavior in Re:

A life in obscurity

So we see Touka’s response to living in a world that demands she live in obscurity, that is to obfuscate herself. You can see the lesson she has learned and put into practice since the end of Tokyo Ghoul, repeatedly in Re: but this scene is the one that makes it the most clear.

Compare her reaction back then to now. Touka cried and cried, threw a tantrum, but eventually accepted that she had to move on and make the sacrifice, ot now where she accepts it almost immediately with only one pained look.

Of course Touka has matured since then, but is it really somehow more mature to accept the death of your uncle immediately without shedding a tear? Perhaps it was the situation that called for her not to cry but to move on, but we see Touka handling another death without even expressing a single tear, bit of anger, or frustration at the difficult decision she had to make.

It’s not that Touka made the decision she had to, but rather that we see none of the emotions behind the decision that she made. Touka might as well have been completely fine, because she got married and threw a massive party immediately after receiving the news that her best friend would be executed because she herself was a ghoul.

Yoriko says this explicitly last chapter, that Touka’s tendency is to bear everything with a grin. But that’s a bad thing, because she should not have to deal with those emotions alone. Yet, Touka is married to Kaneki, and she cannot even get upset at him enough to confront him over a pretty significant lie he told.

Touka’s concern when Kaneki leaves the room after almost discovering her pregnancy, is not her own painful pregnancy but the fact that Kaneki himself is tired and she does not want to add onto the pile.

Perhaps the self harming nature of Touka’s behavior isn’t clear enough yet with Touka having to literally eat human food again and starve herself in order to have a baby, which has always been the symbol of Touka harming herself in order to try and fit in with society, let’s draw this comparison then.

Touka and Mutsuki make similar faces while their faces are completely obscured, but for opposite reasons, and facing in opposite directions.

This meta [x] points out that Mutsuki on the cover of volume is deliberately mirroring Touka in envy of her position at Kaneki’s side, and is in a way trying to become her.

I’m going to look at this angle from a different angle though. Rather than comparing if either Mutsuki or Touka is truly ‘healthier’ or ‘better’ in regards to the way they love Kaneki, isn’t it extremely unhealthy that Mutsuki thinks that if he sacrifices of obscures some part of himself that Kaneki will come back to him.

Does Mutsuki’s actions in believing that everything will be okay if Kaneki simply comes back to him, reflect Touka’s in a way? A less put together way?

Mutsuki too, is repressing a significant amount of his emotions. Remember, Mutsuki was caught on the island and severely traumatized and then immediately put back on active duty. He was never even given the slightest oppurtunity to mourn what had been done to him, and look how Mutsuki acts as a result. He’s completely confident and put together one moment, and then in the next he breaks down crying, screaming, and wailing like he’s in pieces.

For all the confidence Mutsuki displays in this arc, whenever things go slightly away from plan he always seems one step away from a similiar breakdown. In the same way, the Oggai are able to be vicious one moment and then cry for their mothers like actual 11 year old children would the next.

In a way Mutsuki is acting similiarly to Touka, he’s ignoring all the mourning he might do for his own situation and instead trying to focus entirely on Kaneki instead. Mutsuki used to act like a full person who thought about his family, his little brother, and even the other Quinx. Then suddenly Kaneki came in to encompass all of those tragic feelings.

It’s not that Mutsuki and Touka only care about Kaneki, but rather that Kaneki is simply the biggest symbol for all of the things they had lost in their life. As Kaneki, rather than the others who were taken away, inserted himself in and then willingly departed from them. So then it seems like Kaneki is the most important thing to either character, when he isn’t.

And I do think the narrative is trying to trick you into thinking that Kaneki is the most important thing to Touka. The only time she explicilty mentions the purpose of Re: it was to wait for Kaneki’s return in case he might one day need to. Kaneki’s decision at the end of Tokyo Ghoul, her resolve was that Kaneki would find his way home one day.

So Mutsuki serves as an extreme to show how unhealthy Touka’s own behavior of stifling her emotions will be. Mutsuki who lies and obscures about himself so well that his personality is cut neatly into halves. The extreme, but Touka somehow practicing this behavior more passively does not make it any healthier.

If Kaneki is unable to move past his grieving for the people he loses and effectively move on from then, then Touka is the opposite. She moves on right away without ever allowing herself to grieve, and it’s a behavior pattern she’s been stuck in since the end of Tokyo Ghoul. There is more to living than simply losing.

Touka won’t be able to fight for the right reasons until she comes to accept that fact, unless she truly wants to live a life in obscurity, if she thinks her child really will somehow be happy living in the dumpster fire that is the 24th ward as long as Touka and Kaneki are still around them and together.

#tg meta #touka kirishima #kaneki ken #meta

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