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oumakokichi · 4 years ago

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What are the differences between the original and localization?

Hmm, that’s a very simple question with a pretty lengthy answer! I did answer some similar questions in the past, but that was a long time ago, much closer to when the localization was first released. There are probably a lot of people whose main experience with the game has only been with the localization, and who don’t really know or remember those differences anymore.

For that reason, I’m going to go into kind of a “masterlist” of things that were changed in the localization in this post. This will be very long, but I really want to explain the whole story behind the localization and its differences from the original to people who might only be hearing about this for the first time. I’m going to cover full spoilers for the game obviously, so be careful when reading!

Also, please feel free to share this post around, as I think it contains a lot of information that might be interesting to people who’ve only experienced the localization!

Before I really get into it though, I want to stipulate that the differences I’m covering in this post are mostly going to be things that I believe could’ve been handled or translated better, not every single line that was changed verbatim in the game. This is because a localization’s purpose is incredibly different from a literal translation.

Where a literal translation seeks to keep as much of the original authorial intent as possible and has the leeway to explain various Japanese terms and cultural specifics to the readers in footnotes or a glossary, a localization is usually much more targeted towards a specific target audience, usually one more unfamiliar with Japanese culture or terminology. As a result, some things in a localization are occasionally changed to make them more understandable to a western audience.

So, for example, I’m not going to fault the localization for changing Monosuke’s extremely heavy Kansai accent in Japanese to a New York accent in the English dub. It’s much easier for western players to immediately grasp that, “hey, this guy has a very specific regional accent that the other characters don’t,” and it works really well as a rough equivalent. Similarly, localization changes like changing a line here or there about the sport of sumo to be about the Jets and the Patriots also helps get the point across to players quickly and easily without having to explain an unfamiliar sport to western players in-depth before they can get the joke.

That being said… there were some liberties taken with ndrv3’s translation which I don’t believe fulfill the point of a localization, and which changed certain deliveries or even perceptions about the characters in a way that I just don’t agree with.

Let me explain first how the localization team actually worked, to people who might be unfamiliar with the process. Ndrv3 had four separate translators working on the localization. When NISA first announced that the game was being localized, these four translators introduced themselves on reddit in an AMA, where they also mentioned that they were by and large dividing up the 16 main characters between themselves, with each translator specifically assigned to four characters.

Having more translators working on a game might sound like a good idea in theory, but it’s often not. The more translators assigned to a game, the harder it is to provide a consistent translation. Translation is messy work: often there are multiple ways to translate the same sentence, or even the same word between two different languages. If a translation has multiple translators, that means they need to be communicating constantly with one another and referencing each other’s work all the time in order to avoid mistranslations: it’s difficult work, but not impossible.

However… this didn’t happen with ndrv3’s translation team. It’s pretty clear they did not reference each other’s work or communicate very well, and the translation suffers for it. I’m not just guessing here, either; it’s a fact that various parts of the game have lines completely ruined by not looking at the context, or words translated two different ways almost back-to-back. I’ll provide specific examples of this later.

Many of the translators also picked which characters they wanted to translate on the basis of which were their favorites—which, again, isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but which does raise the risk of letting character bias influence your work. No work is inherently without bias; all translators have to look at their own biases and still attempt to translate fairly regardless. But because translators were assigned four characters each, this meant that while they might be really enthusiastic about translating for one character in particular, they were less enthusiastic for others. These biases do reflect in the work, and I will provide further examples as I make my list.

This system of delegation also leaves more questions than it answers. It becomes impossible to tell who translated certain parts of the game, particularly in areas where the narrator is unclear. For example, did Saihara’s translator translate Ouma’s motive video, as Saihara is the one watching it in chapter 6? Or did Ouma’s translator do it, since it’s his motive video? Who translated the parts we see at the beginning of certain chapters, where characters from the outside world make occasional comments? It’s really unclear, and I’m not even sure if the translators divvied up these parts amongst themselves or if only one person was supposed to handle them.

To put it simply, there were quite a lot of complications and worrying factors about the way the translation was divided by the team, and the communication (or lack thereof) between said translators. It’s impossible to really discuss the main problems that ndrv3’s localization has without making it clear why those problems happened, and I hope I’ve explained it well here.

With that out of the way, I’m finally going to cover the biggest differences between the original game and the localization, and why many of these changes were such a problem.

1.) Gonta’s Entire Character

To this day, I still feel like this is probably the most egregious change of the entire localization. Gonta does not talk like a caveman in Japanese. He does not even have a particularly limited vocabularly. He talks like a fairly normal, very polite high school boy, and the only stipulation is that he’s not very familiar with electronics or technology due to his backstory of “growing up in the woods away from humans.”

Gonta does refer to himself in the third-person in Japanese, but I need to stress this: this is a perfectly normal thing to do in Japanese. Many people do it all the time, and it has no bearing on a person’s intelligence or ability to speak. In fact, both Tenko and Angie also refer to themselves in the third-person in the Japanese version of the game, yet mysteriously use first-person pronouns in the localization.

I wouldn’t be so opposed to this change if it weren’t for the fact that Gonta’s entire character arc revolves around being so much smarter than people (even himself!) give him credit for. He constantly downplays his own abilities and contributions to the group despite being fairly knowledgeable, not only about entomology but also about nature and astronomy. He has a fairly good understanding of spatial reasoning and is one of the first people to guess how Toujou’s trick with the rope and tire worked in chapter 2.

Chapter 4 of ndrv3 is so incredibly painful because it makes it clear that while Gonta was, absolutely, manipulated by Ouma into picking up the flashback light, he nonetheless made the decision to kill Miu of his own accord. He was even willing to try and kill everyone else by misleading them in the trial, because he thought it was more merciful than letting them see the outside world for themselves. These were choices that he made, confirmed when we see Gonta’s AI at the end of the trial speak for himself and acknowledge that yes, he really did think the outside world was worth killing people over.

Gonta is supposed to be somewhat naïve and trusting, not stupid. He believes himself to be an idiot, and other characters often talk down to him or don’t take him seriously, but at the end of the day he’s a human being just like the rest of them, and far, far smarter and more capable of making his own decisions than anyone thought him capable of.

Translating all of his speech to “caveman” or “Tarzan speech” really downplays his ability to make decisions for himself, and I think it’s a big part of why I’ve seen considerably more western fans insist that he didn’t know what he was doing than Japanese fans. I love Gonta quite a lot, but I can’t get over the localization essentially changing his character to make him seem more stupid, instead of translating what was actually there in order to more accurately reflect his character.

2.) Added Some Slurs, Removed Others

It’s time to address the elephant in the room for people who don’t know: Momota is considerably homophobic and transphobic in the original Japanese version of the game. In chapter 2, he uses the word “okama” to refer to Korekiyo in an extremely derogatory fashion. This word has a history of both homophobic and transphobic sentiment in Japan, as it’s often used against flamboyant gay men and trans women, who are sadly and unfortunately conflated as being “the same thing” most of the time. To put it simply, the word has the equivalent of the weight of the t-slur and the f-slur in English rolled into one.

This isn’t the only instance of Momota being homophobic, sadly. In the salmon mode version of the game, should you choose the “let’s undress” option in the gym while with Momota, he has yet another line where he says, “You don’t swing that way, do you!?” to Saihara, using his most terrified and disgusted-looking sprite. This suggests to me that, yes, the homophobia was a deliberate choice in the Japanese version of the game, as Momota consistently reacts this way to even the idea of another guy showing romantic interest in him.

The English version more or less kept the salmon mode comment, but removed the use of the slur in chapter 2 entirely. Which I have… mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I am an LGBT person myself. I don’t want to read slurs if I can help it. On the other hand, I really don’t think the slur was removed out of consideration to the LGBT community so much as Momota’s translator really wanted to downplay any lines that could make his character come across in a more negative light.

This is backed up by the fact that both Miu and Ouma’s translators added slurs to the game that weren’t present in the original Japanese. Where Miu only ever refers to Gonta as “baka” (idiot) or occasionally, “ahou” (a slightly ruder word that still more or less equates to “moron”), her translator decided to add multiple instances of her using the r-slur to refer to Gonta specifically, and on one occasion, even the word “Mongoloid,” a deeply offensive and outdated term. Ouma’s translator similarly took lines where he was already speaking harshly of Miu and added multiple instances of words like “bitch” or “whore.”

To me, this suggests that the translators were completely free to choose how harsh or how likable they wanted their characters to come across. Momota’s translator omitting just the slur could maybe pass for a nice gesture, so people don’t have to read it and be uncomfortable—except, that’s not the only thing that was omitted. Instances of Momota being blatantly misogynistic or rude were also toned down to the point of covering up most of his flaws entirely. His use of “memeshii” against Hoshi (a word which means “cowardly” in Japanese with specifically feminine connotations, like the word “sissy” in English) is simply changed to “weak,” and when he calls Saihara’s trauma “kudaranai” (literally “worthless” or “bullshit”), this is changed to “trivial” in the localization.

Momota’s translator even went so far as to omit a line entirely from the chapter 2 trial, which I touched on in an earlier post. In the original version of the game, Ouma asks Momota dumbfounded if he’s really stupid enough to trust Maki without any proof and if he plans on risking everyone else’s lives in the trial if he turns out to be wrong. And Momota replies saying yes, absolutely, he’s totally willing to bet everyone’s lives on nothing more than a hunch because he thinks he’s going to be right no matter what.

This is a character flaw. It’s a huge, running theme with Momota’s character, and it’s brought up again in chapter 4 deliberately when Momota really does almost kill everyone in the trial because he refuses to believe that Ouma isn’t the culprit. But the localization simply omits it, leaving Momota to seem considerably less hard-headed and reckless in the English version of the game. If anyone wants proof that this line exists, it is still very much there in the Japanese dialogue, but it has no translation whatsoever. This goes beyond “translation decisions I don’t agree with”; omitting an entire line for a character simply because you want other people to like them more is just bad translation, period.

3.) Angie’s Religion

In the original Japanese version of the game, neither Angie’s god nor her religion have any specific names. She refers to her god simply as “god” in the general sense, and clearly changes aspects of their persona and appearance based on who she’s trying to convince to join her cult. Everything about her is pretty clearly fictionalized, from her island to the religious practices her cult does.

Kodaka’s writing with regard to Angie is already a huge mess. It feeds into a lot of harmful stereotypes about “crazy, exotic brown women” and “bloodthirsty savages,” but at the very least it never correlated with a specific religion or location in the original version of the game.

This all changed when Angie’s translator, for whatever reason, decided to make Angie be Polynesian specifically and appropriate from the real religion of real indigenous peoples native to Polynesia. That’s right: Atua is a real god that has very real significance to tons of indigenous peoples.

In my opinion, this decision was incredibly disrespectful. It spreads incredible misinformation about a god that is still very much a part of tons of real-life people’s religion, and associates it with cults? Blood rituals? Human sacrifices? It’s a terrible localization decision that wasn’t necessary whatsoever and to be quite frank, it’s racist and insensitive.

As I said, the original game never exactly had the peak of “good writing decisions” when it came to Angie; there are still harmful stereotypes with her character, and she deserved to be written so much better. But associating her with a real group of indigenous people and equating a real god to some fictional deity that’s mostly treated as either a scary cult-ish boogeyman or the punchline to a joke is just… bad.

4.) Ouma’s Motive Video

Some of the decisions taken with Ouma’s translation are… interesting, to say the least. In many ways, he feels like a completely different character between the two versions of the game. This is due not only to the translation, but also the voice direction and casting.

A lot of his lines are tweaked or changed entirely to make his character seem much louder, less serious, and less sincere than the original version of the game. Obviously, Ouma lies, a lot. That’s sort of the whole point of is character. But what I mean is that even lines in the original version of the game, where it was clear he was being truthful via softer delivery, trailing off the end of his sentences, and seeming overall hesitant about whether to divulge certain information or not are literally changed in the localization to him pretty much yelling at the top of his lungs, complete with tons of exclamation points on lines that originally ended with a question mark or ellipses.

Tonally, he just feels very different as a character. The “sowwy” speak, lines like “oopsie poopsie, I’m such a ditz!”—all of these things are taken to such ridiculous extremes that it feels a little hard to take him seriously. Even in the post-trial for chapter 4 when Ouma starts playing the villain after Gonta’s death, a moment which should have been completely serious and intense, the mood is kind of completely killed when the line is changed from him calling everyone a bunch of idiots to him calling everyone…. “stupidheads.” These changes don’t really seem thematically appropriate to me, but overall, they’re not damning.

What is damning, however, is the fact that Ouma’s motive video is completely mistranslated and provides a very poor picture of what his motivations and ideals were like. I still remember being shocked when I played the localization for the first time and discovered that they completely omitted a line stating that Ouma and DICE have a very specific taboo against murder.

Literally, this is one of the very first lines in the entire video. The Japanese version of the game makes it explicitly clear that DICE were forbidden to kill people, and that abiding by this rule was extremely important to them. By contrast, the localization simply makes a nod about him doing “petty nonviolent crimes and pranks,” without ever once mentioning anything at all about rules or taboos.

This feels especially egregious in the localization considering Saihara later uses Ouma’s motive video as evidence in the chapter 6 trial and states there that Ouma and DICE “had a rule against killing people,” despite the game… never actually telling you that. It not only skews the perception of Ouma’s character at a crucial moment, it also just straight-up lies to localization players and expects them to make leaps in logic without actually providing the facts. So it winds up sort of feeling like Saihara is just pulling these assumptions out of his ass more than anything else.

I actually still have my original translation of Ouma’s motive video here, if anyone would like to compare. Again, translation is a tricky line of work, and obviously not all translators are going to agree with one another. But I consider omitting lines entirely to be one of the worst things you can do in a translation, particularly in a mystery game where people are expected to solve said mysteries based on the information and facts provided to them.

5.) Inconsistencies and Lack of Context

As I mentioned earlier, there are many instances of lines being completely mistranslated, or translated two different ways by multiple translators, or addressed to the wrong character. This is, as I stated, due to the way the translation work was divided by four separate people who appear to have not communicated with each other or cross-referenced each other’s work.

One of the clearest examples of this that I can think of off the top of my head is in chapter 3, where Ouma mentions “doing a little research” on the Caged Child ritual, and Maki in the very next line repeats him by saying… “study?”

On their own, removed from any context, these would both potentially be correct translations. However, it’s very clear that the translators just didn’t care to look at the context, or communicate with each other and share their work. The fact that characters aren’t even quoting each other properly in lines that are back-to-back is a pretty big oversight, and something that should have been accounted for knowing that four separate people were going to be translating various different characters.

This lack of context causes other, even more hilarious and blatantly wrong mistranslations. At the start of the chapter 3 trial, there is a line where Momota mentions that he couldn’t perform a thorough investigation on his own “because Monokuma disrupted him.” In the original, Ouma responds and tells Momota that he’s just using Monokuma as an excuse to cover for his own flaws. However, what we actually got in the localization was… this.

I don’t even have words for how badly this line was butchered (though I could make several hilarious jokes about Monokuma “over-compensating”). Presumably, this happened because Ouma’s translator saw Ouma’s line without any of the lines before it or the context of what Momota was saying, had no clue who Ouma was actually supposed to be talking to, and just ad-libbed it however they could, even though it literally makes no sense and doesn’t even fit into the conversation.

There are other similar instances of this, too. For example, did you know that the scene after Saihara faints in chapter 2, just before he wakes up in Gonta’s lab, is actually supposed to have Ouma talking to him? The narrator is unnamed, but there are several lines just before Saihara wakes up where Ouma tells him “come on, you can’t die on me yet!” and keeps prodding him and poking him to wake up. This is never explicitly told to you from the text… but it becomes pretty obvious when you look at the context and see that a huge CG of Ouma looking over Saihara as he starts to wake up is the very next part of the scene.

In the localization, however, Saihara’s translator pretty clearly had no idea what was happening or who was supposed to be talking to him, because they translated those lines as Saihara talking to himself, even though the manner of speech and phrasing is clearly supposed to be Ouma instead.

I could go on and on listing other examples: Tsumugi makes a joke in the original about Miu being able to dish out dirty jokes but not being very good at hearing them herself, but it’s changed in the localization to Tsumugi saying “I’m not so good with that kind of stuff,” and a line where Momota protests against Maki choking Ouma because she’ll kill him if she keeps going is instead changed to him saying “you’ll get killed if you don’t stop!” In my opinion, the fact that this is a consistent problem throughout the whole game shows that the translators weren’t really communicating or working together at any point, and that it wasn’t simply a one-time mistake here or there.

6.) Edited CGs and Plot Points

I have made an entirely separate post about this in the past, but at this point I don’t think anyone actually knows anymore: the localization actually edited in-game CGs and made some of them completely different from the Japanese version of the game. I’m not accusing them of “censorship” or anything like that, I mean quite literally that they altered and edited specific CGs to try and fix certain problems with them and only ended up making them worse in the process.

In chapter 5, Momota gets shot in the arm by Maki’s crossbow when trying to defend Ouma, and Ouma gets shot in the back shortly afterward when attempting to make a run for the Exisals. These injuries are relevant to how they died, but they’re not actually very visible in the CGs of Ouma and Momota shown later in the chapter 5 trial.

There are a whole bunch of inconsistencies with the CGs in chapter 5 in general: Momota gives Ouma his jacket to lie on under the press, but is magically still wearing it when he emerges from the Exisal himself at the end of the trial (I like to think he snuck back into the dorms Solid Snake style to get a new one from his room before joining the trial), the cap to the antidote is still on the bottle when Ouma pretends to drink it in front of Maki and Momota, etc. None of these things really deter from the plot though, and so I would say they’re fairly unimportant.

However, for some reason, NISA decided that “fixing” at least some of the CGs in the chapter 5 trial was necessary. They did this by adding bloodstains to Momota’s arm while he’s under the press, to better show his injury from the crossbow…. and in doing so, for some completely inexplicable reason, they changed the entire position of his arm. Here’s what I mean for comparison:

This is how Momota’s arm looked in the original CG from chapter 5, shown when the camcorder is provided as evidence that it’s “Ouma” under the press.

And this is how the localization edited it to look. I can understand and even sympathize with adding the bloodstains, but… changing the entire arm itself? Moving it to be sticking out from under the press? To put it nicely, this change doesn’t make any sense and actually makes it harder to understand Ouma and Momota’s plan.

The whole trick behind their plan was that nothing was supposed to stick out from under the press, other than Momota’s jacket. They waited until the instant when the press completely covered every part of Momota’s body, arms and all, and then performed the switch to mislead people. But the edited version of the CG in the localization just has Momota’s arm sticking completely out, hanging over the side, meaning it would’ve been impossible for the press to hide every part of it and the whole switch feels… well, stupid and impossibly easy to see through in the localized version.

Again, this shows a total disregard for presenting the facts as they actually appear and actually makes things more difficult for English players of the game, because they’re not being given accurate information. I really don’t understand why these changes were necessary, or why the bloodstains couldn’t have just been added without moving Momota’s entire arm.

7.) In Conclusion

This has gotten extremely long (nearly 10 pages), so I want to wrap things up. I want to specify that my intention with this masterlist isn’t to insult or badmouth the translators who worked on this game. I’m sure they worked very hard, and I have no idea what time or budget constraints they were facing as they did so.

Being a translator is not easy, and typically translators are not very well-paid or recognized for their work. I have the utmost respect for other translators, and I know perfectly well just how difficult and taxing it can be.

I am making this list because these are simply changes which were very different from the original version of the game, and which I believe could have been handled better. Personally, I disagree with many of the choices the localization made, but that does not mean that they didn’t do a fantastic job in other places. I absolutely love whichever translator was responsible for coming up with catchphrases and nicknames throughout the game: little localization decisions like “cospox,” “flashback light,” “Insect Meet n’ Greet,” and “cosplaycat criminal” were all strokes of genius that I highly admire.

I only want to stress that the Japanese version of the game is very different. Making changes to the way a character is presented or portrayed means influencing how people are going to react to said character. Skewing the information and facts presented in trials in the game means changing people’s experience of the game, and giving them less facts to go off of. Equating fictional gods to real-life ones can cause real harm and influence perception of real indigenous peoples. These are all facts that need to be accounted for before deciding whether a certain change is necessary or not, in my opinion.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! Again, feel free to share this post around if you’d like, since this is probably the most comprehensively I’ve ever covered this topic.

#danganronpa #new danganronpa v3 #dangan ronpa #ndrv3 spoilers //#ask #anonymous #this isn't meta but it's IS a comprehensive masterlist of translation comparisons #so i think it's okay to post in the tag #okay to reblog

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abreathoffresheyre · 3 years ago

Text

Everything Wrong With Katie Roiphe’s “The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism”

In stark contrast to my usual attitude toward feminist literature - which involves eagerly consuming information by the chapter late into the night - The Morning After by Katie Roiphe inspired anything but gleeful page-turning when I started it last Thursday. I did stay up pretty late reading The Morning After, as is my usual routine. I couldn’t put it down, actually. Not because it was particularly insightful or interesting, but because it was unlike any feminist theory I’ve read before - and not in a good way. Reading it felt like spotting a car wreck on the freeway; you’re horrified, yet can’t help but stare.

The Morning After is a non fiction piece written in 1993 about various forms of sexual violence on campus and the movements which aim to combat them. Essentially, Roiphe argues that what she calls “rape crisis feminists” are merely hysterical women exaggerating the prevalence of sexual violence on campus for political gain or statement-making purposes. She questions the existence of rape culture and what constitutes sexual harassment, arguing that modern notions of such issues paint women as prudish victims; girl-children who are scandalized by dirty jokes and unable to gage what they really want out of a given sexual encounter. Certainly this is a discussion worth having, but the problem with The Morning After is that in questioning whether or not anti-rape movements in the 1980’s re-fortified the idea that women are emotional, illogical beings incapable of handling adult sexual relationships, Roiphe ends up reinforcing the notion that women aren’t able to logically asses their own environments herself.

Statistics

In the the books second chapter Taking Back The Night, Roiphe states that it “does not seem like one of Gods greatest injustices” for women college students to feel afraid of being raped when walking alone at night. Upon noting this, she also observes that “out of 19 assaults with a deadly weapon reported [to Harvard police in 1992], 16 victims were male and 3 were female.” The point (or at least the implication) of this observation being that women should not be afraid of rape when walking alone at night, because men are also at risk of being attacked. There are several issues with this chunk of content, especially when it comes to the lack of relevance of the statistics provided.

Here, Roiphe makes the mistake of lumping together all forms of violence into the same disastrous cesspool. Despite what she seems to believe, rape and assault with deadly weapons are not in the same category of crime, and therefore there is no point in comparing statistics about the two. (It also seems important note that the number of assaults - sexual or otherwise - reported to campus police at Harvard does not implicate the prevalence of assault in general). Roiphe’s willfully obtuse analysis of who’s at risk of being attacked at night and who’s not reminds me of an argument I heard from a self-proclaimed facist on Omegle not long ago. This man claimed that because black people in America are more likely than to be arrested than white people, they are therefore an inherently violent race. In this case I suppose the parallel argument is, because men are in danger of being assaulted with deadly weapons, women are not in danger of being raped. I’m not accusing Roiphe of being a facist - she’s obviously nothing of the sort - rather that the logic she applies when criticizing “rape crisis feminists” and their (genuine, justified, and statistically backed) concerns about sexual violence on campus is not dissimilar to analysis I’ve heard from anti-female right wingers.

Not only are Roiphe’s points lazily argued and shallow, they’re also heaven sent to rape apologists. The bizarre preoccupation she employs throughout the book that involves proving that men face as much violence as women do suggests that the women participating in movements like Take Back The Night are exaggerating a crisis for some sort of political scheme; it’s a take the misogynists I occasionally interact with online have long argued. These are men who believe that the “rape crisis” is a facade plucked out of thin air by the evil feminist who aims to destroy and otherwise dehumanise men who’ve actually done nothing wrong. Roiphe’s analysis of these issues is the same one internet trolls have happily regurgitated for decades in an attempt to deny that misogyny remains a prevalent issue in modern society.

The conclusion any logical reader can draw from this section of content is that, sure, men experience violence. Perhaps more than women do in some cases. But those forms of violence aren’t what the women Roiphe is so critical of were marching against. The women set on “Taking Back The Night” were specifically protesting sexual violence perpetrated against women on campus. If male college students wished to organise a march against assault with deadly weapons on campus, they were free to do so. The mere fact that they chose not to illustrates that the attacks they were at risk of facing were simply not comparable to the looming threat of sexual violence that Take Back The Night organisers were set on stomping out.

This type of analysis is typical of Roiphe, who consistently offers up statistics without analysing the environment in which they are produced. My geography teacher frequently reminds us when we write our reports that “there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”. I encourage Roiphe to to consider this perspective in the future.

Same Words

Roiphe also fails to consider the possibility that men feel more comfortable reporting assault with deadly weapons than women do reporting rape. Perhaps women have a distrust in the legal system, while men do not. Perhaps rape is a crime that carries with it shame and embarrassment, while those who are assaulted with a deadly weapon do not feel ashamed of what they have experienced. Perhaps people hear the same words differently when they’re coming out of a woman’s mouth.

Here, I thought of A Little Life, which I finished a couple weeks ago. The novel focuses on a man called Jude, who experiences multiple rapes and other forms of abuse during his childhood. Upon reading A Little Life I was shocked to hear that it had been praised so extensively by almost every major newspaper and book review despite its gut wrenchingly specific descriptions of child sexual abuse, while books like The Kiss and Tiger Tiger - not dissimilar to A Little Life in their more than graphic descriptions of child sex abuse, but both about women - were met with disgust and widely condemned by reviewers. The difference in reaction on the part of readers to books about the same thing exists for the same reason that men in 1992 felt more comfortable reporting violence perpetrated against them on campus than women did: A Little Life is a “heartbreaking” account of trauma, while Tiger Tiger is “nothing but a manual for paedophiles”, in the same way that women recounting campus rapes are walking a “[delicate line] between fact and fiction” their accounts “tinny” and “staged”, their fear “mystical”, their attitudes “hysterical” (Roiphe’s words, not mine), while men reporting assault with deadly weapons are “at risk” and “vulnerable”. The conclusion drawn by Roiphe that “freedom from fear is a [state of mind]” is nothing but a purposefully contrarian perspective which illustrates a lack of comprehensive analysis on Roiphe’s end rather than on the end of the leaders of the movement she aims to criticize.

Sarah

In chapter six, The Mad Hatters Tea Party, Roiphe tells the story of a girl she calls “Sarah” - an androgynous dressing, man hating, career destroying student who is terrifically offended when a male professor compliments her haircut. Sarah, who calls every little compliment sexual harassment, sounds like a woman described by a “mens rights activist” on r/theredpill, and out of her Roiphe crafts an archetype of the over-zealous, hysterical, severely sensitive woman who breaks down at an innocent comment simply because it’s coming from a man.

In what world, I thought upon reading this passage, does this actually happen? I myself have time and again listened to my female friends (and have definitely done it myself) excuse away typically “inappropriate” male behaviour with phrases like, “He’s just being friendly… he doesn’t mean anything by it… I don’t mind it that much…” and so on. If anything, women are usually under reacting when it comes to sexual violence - especially sexual harassment - and if anybody is exaggerating for the purpose of making political statements, it’s Roiphe herself.

Sarah is obviously “mad”, but she’s nothing more than a personality crafted by Roiphe in order to criticise a movement at large, which from what I understand was about actions a hell of a lot more serious than male professors commenting on their female students haircuts1. In creating this “crazy” woman victim who is representative of the average anti-rape protester, it is Roiphe who reinforces the notion that women are hysterical beings who cannot think rationally, control their own emotions, or logically asses their own environments. By arguing that these women’s reactions to their own experiences are nothing but hysterical twist ups of chaste behaviour on the part of the alleged harasser Roiphe only encourages people to shut up about the matter altogether, rather than offering up a solution or alternative method of how to go about dealing with sexual violence on campus. Rebecca Solnit observes that women are often told they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives. Roiphe’s depiction of anti-rape protesters as “exaggerators” (We all know how women are prone to exaggeration. Such a dramatic demographic) reinforces this inherently patriarchal notion.

Perhaps if I were not someone already fairly familiar with feminist literature and political discourse about sexual violence, I would take this analysis as a message not to tell my teachers when I’m uncomfortable (a word Roiphe doesn’t seem to like very much, probably because she has never been it). And perhaps as a result of this interpretation, were something serious were to happen, say, a teacher were to try and reach his hand up my skirt, I would lump that action in with the rest of the so called “puritanical hysteria” Roiphe argues is nothing more than a series of exchanges exaggerated for political purpose - a dangerous notion to spread among students, but I suppose Roiphe didn’t think to consider that.

1 A 1988 study done by Ms. Magazine in association with the Center for Prevention and Control of Rape found that one in four women “had had an experience that met the American legal definition of rape or attempted rape”

#feminism #nonfiction #writer #review #books #literature

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rosesastrology · 4 years ago

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Will I become a famous author? March 1, 2021, 4:03 PM, WPG

Short answer: no

Long answer:

Ascendant: 19° Leo.

Main significator of querent: Sun/11° Pisces/8th house/in the decan of the Moon in Libra in the 3rd house/in the term of Jupiter in Aquarius in the 6th house.

The sun is the classical significator of fame so it makes sense for the querent to be signified by this. The Sun is however in Pisces, double-bodied and mute sign. This already tells me there is some sense of duality in the querent's head regarding the question. The sign is mute, which indicates they aren't spending time on writing right now, at least not as much as they want to or feel they need to to make a career out of it where they become famous. The Sun is in the 8th house of death and other people's finances, this question has nothing to do with either. According to William Lilly, this suggests the querent has a lot of anguish and fear regarding this question. The Sun is in the term of Jupiter in Aquarius in the 6th house. This actually explains exactly why the querent does not have time. Jupiter is seen as the great benefic in horary and it finds itself in the weak-voiced sign of Aquarius, Aquarius is an individualistic sign that is focused on activism and finding friends and community. It finds itself in the 6th house of mala fortuna. The house of hospitals, routines, day jobs and the employees of the querent. This suggests to me that the querent does not have employees yet and is thus individualistic, perhaps they have no label or way to publicize their books yet—or they are busy with their current day job. The Sun is in the face of the Moon, the co-significator of the querent. The Moon is in Libra, a loud-mouthed sign, in the 3rd house of communication. This tells me that the querent has a passion for their writing—the face is however a minor dignity and there is no dignity here, the Moon is in a neutral position in Libra, it only finds minor dignity because it's in its joy in the 3rd house. The sun as no major dignity in this chart so it is not strong to act—it is essentially peregrine. This makes sense with its 8th house position and the duality of Pisces—the querent is essentially feeling fearful because they are fighting between their responsibilities/job (or perhaps even illness) and their passion of writing.

Co-significator: Moon, as always. Moon/16° Libra/3rd house/in the face of Uranus in Taurus in the 10th house/in the term of Mars in Taurus in the 10th house

The Moon, the querent's co-significator, finds itself in 16° Libra in the 3rd house. As discussed earlier, Libra is a loud-mouthed sign and the 3rd house is the house of communication, in this case we can associate it with writing. Additionally, the Moon is in its joy in the 3rd house. The Moon is in the term of Mars in Taurus in the 10th house. Mars is in its detriment in Taurus, so it's severely debilitated here. It is in the 10th house, showing that the house of career is under the influence of this debilitation. Later we will look at the significator of the 10th to get a better image. It should be noted that Mars is in conjunction with Algol, Caput Algol brings difficulties and is seen as the offlossing of one's head. Mars is already a malefic, a malefic in its detriment conjunct Algol in the signifcant house of career does not bring any good. This alone brings evidence for a "no", but we must remember that Mars isn't a significator. Additionally, the good news is that this has already happened as Mars is seperating from Algol by 2°. This indicates to me that the querent has already taken this hitm Mars is also conjunct Alycone (applying), the fixed star of regret also known as the weeping sisters. It seems as though the career of the querent will face some form of regret that is possible due to the misfortune the querent went through before. However, this is one of the effects within the 10th house and we will look at the significator of the 10th later and piece all of this together. The Moon is under the terms of this influence of Mars, which may indicate that the querent, in their heart of hearts, believes they will fail or regret their decisions—and is extremely afraid (as suggested by their Sun in the 8th) which affects their writing badly. The Moon is in the face of Uranus in Taurus in the 10th house. Uranus is like a fixed star in horary and shows disruption and divorce of some kind. Uranus is in Taurus, the fall of Uranus; and finds itself in the 10th house of career along with the severly debilitated Mars. Fall is essentially exaggerated badness (although detriment is worse). With detriment, things look bad and are bad—with fall, things look bad and they are but they're less bad than the querent envisions it. It seems to me as though there will be a fall/disruption within the querent's career due to an extreme misfortune (Mars) but the fall itself will be less bad—whereas the misfortune will be excruciating.

Significators

I'll choose the 10th house to signify the career, first of all.

10th house/Taurus

Venus/5° Pisces/7th house/in the term of Mars in Taurus in the 10th house/in the face of Neptune in Pisces in the 8th house/Combust

Venus is exhalted in the sign of Pisces. Showing Venus' excitement about their career and about the arts, as Venus naturally signifies the arts as well. Their career is exciting— however, there is exaggeration in the career regarding writing and things appear better than they are. This is also signified by debiliated Mars and Uranus in the 10th, as mentioned before. Additionally, Pisces is a mute sign—this is not good for worth-smithing in a career. It shows the duality (or delusion) of what's going on with the career as well. Venus being in the 7th house of partners is an interesting phenomenon. It could indicate the excitement to find out more about this question via an astrologer (me), as the 7th in horary signifies the astrologer. However, it also gives me the sense of 'the public' or 'the other people' as the question talks about fame—the querent is obviously worried about getting a big public or perhaps a business partner or contract. Additionally, it could signify open enemies or in this case the other writers and competition. The career seems exciting—but voiceless. Venus is in the terms of Mars in Taurus in the 10th house. Mars here shows the before mentioned disruption in the career, Venus is at mercy (literally playing under the terms) of the changes Uranus will bring rapidly—these changes can appear 'good' as that's the vision of Venus (the lesser benefic) but will prove not to be (the fall of Uranus in Taurus). Venus is in the face of Neptune in Pisces in the 8th house. Neptune is in its domicile sign but it's in a weak house. Neptune tends to show deceit of some sort. With the 8th being the house of other people's finances, it could be that the querent gets scammed by their deal, enemies or via their contract. This is because Venus is in the 7th, and thus the finances of it are displayed by the 8th—the radical 2nd house from the 7th. Additionally, and this is most important, Venus is combust by the Sun. This is a hard no for the carwer. Combust means that the significator is within 8.5° of the Sun, the Sun is hiding Venus (the career, MC), so the chance of the career going well in this front is low. However, as the Sun also represents the querent, it could represent that the career the querent is thinking of is not going to happen for them—but other things are. Additionally, Frawley would argue that Venus falls into the 8th house cause it's within ±5° of the 8th and in the same sign (Pisces) as the 8th. This gives a darker image—where there appears to be a death (8th house) of the career (Venus). Venus is applying to the Sun by a conjunction of 6°. This aspect is not perfected before the Sun changes signs from Pisces to Aries, indicating that the career of the querent won't take take this turn/there won't be an event within the career that is relating to the querent and this question. When taken into context of the 8th house, this career death will not happen the way we see it now. The aspect perfects with Venus at 3° Aries and the Sun at 3° Aries. Until that happens, Venus has to travel 27° to catch up with Sun. This timeframe is likely meaning 'days', as other terms would seem odd here. It seems as though this 'death' happens when the querent is in a particularly favourable spot, namely its domicile in Aries. Venus (the career) will be extremely bad—as Venus is in its detriment in Aries. Both planets are about to transfer into the 9th house of skill and wisdom after this—it seems to me that the querent will find another career where they feel more at home with and they won't pursue writing in the same way. This decision will be made within a month from the starting date, so it'd be march 28th. Would love to hear if this resonates at all with you!

All the signs point to a no, but I want to have a look at Mercury (planet of communication, books, etc.) for more clarity.

Mercury/14° Aquarius/6th house/in the term of Mercury/in the face of Mercury

Mercury is the lord of the 2nd & 11th house in this chart (Virgo and Gemini), which mean self-esteem/money and community respectively.

Mercury has dignity because it's in its own term and face. It is confident, however, it is again acting in the 6th house where it is weak—it is concerned with these employees, this day job, or illness/health of the querent. There are no applying aspects to any other significators.

#horary

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dmsden · 4 years ago

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Fortune Favors the Young - Playing a kid in D&D

Hullo, Gentle Readers. This week’s Question from a Denizen comes from my friend mishacatpookah-blog. They ask, “I've come up with a concept I like, but wondering about his credibility. What I have in mind is a young human druid-5/fighter-2. He was growing up as a druid but was taken captive and forced to become a pit-fighter for the last year or two. The thing is, he's only 14-16 years old. Is it stretching things too far that a kid that age could be a level-7 char?”

So, is it believable? No, not particularly. But neither are fireballs, or chimeras, or dungeons, or, for that matter, dragons.

I’m teasing, because Misha’s a friend, but I think there’s a curious fetish for believability and realism in fantasy RPGs. As I’ve said elsewhere, what we all want isn’t realism - it’s verisimilitude, which is not quite the same thing. We want to say, “If this fantasy world existed, it would be internally logical that it worked this way.” So does the idea of a kid being a 7th-level adventurer have verisimilitude? Yes and no.

Obviously, the average 15 year old in the D&D world is not a 7th level adventurer. But neither is the average adult. Adventurers are extraordinary people. A little 3 foot tall halfling could be as strong as the strongest human. A half-orc could be witty and charming. An elf could be a battle-axe wielding barbarian. Adventurers break the norms. Often, that’s probably why they become adventurers - because they are extraordinary. With this in mind, I don’t think I would hesitate on letting someone in my campaign be only 15 or 16 and being a 7th level character. Heck, they could hit level 20 before puberty, and all I’d want to know is that there was a solid story reason for them to be who they are.

Now, obviously, this is something to discuss with your DM. You want to make sure they are okay with it, because they may or may not agree with me, and that’s their right to do so. Their campaign might have certain forces that make it necessary for someone to reach their age of majority before they come into their full powers as a sorcerer, or something. They may be uncomfortable endangering a kid the way they would another character. Or they may simply find it unrealistic for a kid to have the same abilities as an adult. Whatever their reasons, you should make sure they’re okay with it before setting your heart on the kid character. Likewise, it’s worth talking with the other players to get their buy in. Sometimes hidden feelings resurface when it’s brought out through roleplaying. Someone who might not bat at eye at gutting a thousand gnolls might suddenly feel very squeamish about seeing a teenager do the same for reasons they may not even be able to enunciate. You don’t want to play a character that’s going to make anyone else at the table uncomfortable.

I say in my Personal Plot articles that players tell you a lot about the kinds of stories they want to tell through the characters they make, and a choice like this would be absolutely screaming at me for some story. This is another good thing to discuss with your DM ahead of time. What are the themes you might want to explore with this character? How has this kid ended up so extraordinary? What is driving them to adventure at an age when most kids are just trying to figure out who they are?

As a DM, I’d be thinking about a lot of concept myself. How is society going to treat them? Is anyone looking for them, or will any do-gooders try to remove them from this life because it’s too dangerous? Will any monsters react differently to them because of their age? This last one is especially fun to contemplate. An evil fighter might have a soft spot for kids, making him underestimate the youngster, but a hag might target them more directly, due to the classic relationship of kids and witches in faerie tales.

So, in short, while I think this is a perfectly viable concept, I do recommend speaking with your DM and players about it to make sure everyone’s cool with the idea, just because it’s an unusual one. Let us know how the kid’s adventures go! I hope they make it!

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x--daughters-of-darkness--x · 4 years ago

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Amy Lee Dives Into the Tragedies That Inspired Evanescence’s ‘The Bitter Truth’ — Exclusive Interview

Congrats on the release of The Bitter Truth — how are you feeling?

Thank you, I'm feeling so happy that it's out. It's hard to really sum it up — awesome feelings of satisfaction. I'm really happy that it's out there and everybody's listening to it, it's cool to see the fans react to it and dig into it. We're going to be releasing our video for "Better Without You" (which came out on April 16), I'm so excited about the video!

So we're in a good, happy place right now. Looking forward to when we can be together again, for sure.

Obviously this wasn't your first record, but is the first new, original material you guys have put out in about a decade. Do you still find it nerve-wracking when you release new music, especially when fans have been waiting awhile for something new?

(Laughs) Well, I don't find it nerve-wracking as far as anticipating a reaction, I'm mostly just excited for that. It's just getting back into the groove of doing a lot of press and promo, and running around. And it's different nowadays with the pandemic because it's like, "Do your own lighting! Do your own audio! Do your own everything," and like, make it work from home most of the time.

So it's been a lot of work, but when you're working for something that you really love, it's worth it. I mean, it's fun. So I'm feeling good.

Have you seen any fan theories about any of the songs come up at all, and were any of them accurate?

That's a good question. I can't think of something off the top of my brain like that. I don't know, I feel like mostly they're just getting it. But you ask me whatever you want, and I will answer to the best of my comfort zone (laughs).

How did all of the personal tragedies that the band went through, and all of the events that have been happening in the world impact this album?

Those two things are literally the biggest lyrical catalyst for this time and for this album, particularly the grief. That's what started the whole thing. We started writing this album, focused on it, in 2019, at the beginning of the year. And I'm so glad we did, we had a bunch of writing sessions throughout 2019 in between touring, we'd just get together when we could and write. I was writing on my own, but just setting aside time as a band to write.

I lost my brother in 2018 at the beginning of the year, so that was just a really, impossibly hard life change. So I think I've learned, yet again, that the biggest challenges and the biggest pains in my life are usually what lead me to music, and it's hard to admit this, but what tend to make the best work for me. Not just grief, but challenges — things that are hard.

And the whole world has been going through incredible challenges over the last year, the last couple of years actually with everything going on, the pandemic and the fight for democracy in the world. All of that came at the right time, where I was coming out of grief. I'm still living in it, but processing it, and then this fire and this fight became a part of it. So the journey through all of that, that is the majority of what the album's about.

You kind of hit the nail on the head there because I was going to ask if you think that the best art seems like it comes out of a place of sadness and pain, since it is so cathartic for artists. And as you've called it — it's "writing to heal." So do you find yourself gravitating toward music that is more emotional?

You know, I don't even know if I can say it's "the best," but it's the deepest. It's the most meaningful. You have to go through something to have something to say that is going to touch somebody on a deep level. And for me personally, music has always been my therapy, my catharsis, the place to pour it out and spin it into something good that I can love and reflect on.

Instead of running away from all of the hard things in life, if I dive into them through music and really start pouring it out and processing there, it's like you're able to make it worth something. It wasn't just all a waste, because I have seen, over the last 17 years, with interacting with our fans how much that it can mean to them and help them connect and process and be something good in their lives.

Knowing that now, too, was something that pushed me forward in the times when I felt like it was too hard. Knowing that we were all going through something and our fans were down too and hoping for something, we promised we were gonna come out with a new album in 2020. We just all kind of made a pact at the beginning of the year when everything started getting shut down that we weren't gonna let anything stop us.

So how was your experience writing this album versus others in the past, and how do you think you've grown as a songwriter and a musician this time around?

We had to be brave. And you know, I have to say, it's weird to connect it to this, but Synthesis taught us something about being brave and trusting that something would work that we'd never tried before and just going for it.

I have always been the person who over prepares, practices for way too long before we get together, has everything totally run through when we're gonna play a concert that we've done before a lot of times. And I have broken from that routine so much in the past years.

Synthesis was important for us because we had to trust every day, the only way to do it was to work with a different orchestra every night. Having a different group of musicians onstage every single night was the only way to make that happen. You don't have time to have rehearsed the whole entire set with that group that day, and then play that whole concert that night, it's just not possible.

So we were literally playing the majority of our sets on that tour for the very first time with that group of musicians — without a click and everything else — just live in front of the audience. It was literally like a tightrope, like there's no way to know if something's gonna go horribly wrong, and we just had to trust that we were gonna be good enough musicians and performers to handle it and look at each other, and work through it and get to the next place.

Man, it was so satisfying, it was such a good experience, and it was so beautiful and rewarding. Part of the takeaway from that for me was to be confident and not to be afraid, and just to trust that we've got it in us to do what it is that we think we can do, that we dream of.

This year, going into it, we just started breaking rules. Before the pandemic even hit it was like, 'We don't have the whole album written. We just have a few songs and a whole bunch of pieces. We're not going on tour 'til March." That actually didn't happen, but we weren't planning to go on tour until last March (laughs).

Why don't we hit the studio for just a couple of songs and avoid burn out of having to have all of the songs before we go in, "Let's just go in for a couple of songs." It went really well, it turned into four and then we had to be apart for the rest of the album.

It was another one of those moments where it's like, "Okay, we can either have faith and just say 'Fuck it, I don't know what's gonna happen with the pandemic or when we're ever gonna be able to go back and get together again in person. But I have faith that we're gonna find a way to work it out no matter what. So let's go ahead and start putting singles out.'"

It was either that or just wait and go, "Sorry everybody, I know we said we were gonna release music, but we're not going to." I didn't want to be another disappointment. There was so much of it last year, I wanted to be something that was proof that life could go on.

So the decision was just like, "Okay, we're gonna go ahead. We're gonna put out 'Wasted On You' and make a video from home, and then release another one in a couple of months." And it wasn't just about not knowing when we were gonna get back together, it was that the songs weren't written, and for me, that's terrifying. Like, before the songs are written, we're already on a promo schedule and talking about the album, releasing songs already and like, the clock is ticking in a way.

That was a lot of pressure to put on ourselves, but it really was just like, "We're just gonna have to have faith in this. I know we can do it somehow. We always do. In the end it works out, it's gonna work out!" And thank god it did, we finally got to get together, most of us, last end-of-July. Jen [Majura, guitarist], we still haven't seen since those first four songs right before the pandemic lockdown.

That's wild. I mean, it's out now, and it seems like it came just at the turning point in all of this with the vaccine and everything. Everybody's starting to get back on their feet.

Yeah, I think it's working out honestly. Because now, it's just come out and we can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like you said, with the vaccines and stuff and getting back and eventually going on tour. Because the next thing that we're all just looking towards and dying for, is to play these songs live.

Absolutely. How do you think that these songs might translate live differently from anything you guys have done in the past?

It's just going to feel really good to have new material to play live, like so much of it. Because for so long, we've been playing shows a lot over the past, I don't know how many years, during this time that we haven't been putting out new music. So our live show has really just been about picking out hits and our favorites and whatever, and making set lists out of our music that's been there.

We finally have something that represents us now that isn't, there were a couple of songs on Synthesis, but literally since like 2011. We're a new band since then, a lot happened since then. So to put something out now that feels so exactly in tune with who we are, what our tastes are, what our abilities are, is just gonna feel really good. It's gonna be hard to play the old ones, honestly.

So let's dive into the album a little bit. Starting with the opener, I'm not sure if there's an actual significance to this or not, but is there a reason "Artifact" and "The Turn" are split into different parts?

They're different songs in my head, it was kind of a decision about the first bit, the second bit and "Broken Pieces Shine," like where the track markers were gonna go. And that was a tough choice for me because I know the majority of people aren't really listening in order on a CD, a lot of people are just plucking out a song.

So I want you to be able to click to "Broken Pieces Shine" and just hear the song, but it so needs that build-up, that's part of it in my mind. So it really was just a decision about clipping it.

The first part — "Artifact" — that's me in a hotel in the middle of the night on tour in 2019, just recording into my laptop. I just had an idea. We actually kept it and didn't re-record it, which was really weird, and I didn't expect to happen. But it just made sense in the end.

That next portion — "The Turn" — that's a collaboration between Scott Kirkland from the Crystal Method and myself. We just sorta met on tour one day and made friends, and decided, "Hey, send me stuff! I'd love to work with you, okay I'd love to work with you." And he sent me a bunch of stuff, and I sent him stuff. He had that bit of music sort of, and I rearranged it and wrote vocals to it and that turned into that part.

I knew early on that I wanted that into "Broken Pieces Shine" to be the beginning of the album because of the way the lyrics set it up. The first part, "Artifact," lyrically is just a dedication to my brother. I'm just gonna put it that simply — it's a dedication to my brother.

And then when "The Turn" starts, it's sort of just like this calling-us-back, like calling all of the spiritual forces in the universe back to ourselves and collecting all the pieces of who we've been, who we were, who we are and who we're gonna be.

After all this time that we haven't been out, it's like we need to just build into the moment where you finally hear the guitars come in. So that's part of it.

And then when "Broken Pieces Shine" happens... I've always sort of seen this album, the moment, like where it begins and what it's about, is it begins sort of at ground zero of a tragedy. The result of the album is about the journey getting back up.

So when I hear those guitars, and the first line starts, "There's no way back this time / What is real and what is mine / Survival hurts," it's like I see somebody face-down on the ground standing back up again and dusting off, clawing back up and then starting to walk forward and refuse to just lay there and die.

So that's the setup to the beginning of the album, and then the rest is plenty of ups-and-downs, and it's about plenty of things. But that's the beginning of the journey.

"The bitter truth" is a line that's repeated a couple of times throughout "Wasted on You." How did you go about choosing that as the title for the album, as opposed to any other phrase that's repeated throughout the album?

I think it really sums up a theme that we come back to a lot on the album, which is about facing the pain. The only way out is through, not just the pain, but facing the broken pieces, facing the things about ourselves and about our society that aren't perfect, that are flawed, that are broken or that are wounded.

Because we can't heal, we can't improve, we can't change, we can't grow and we can't ever leave the horror of the moment until we first accept the brokenness of ourselves. Until we accept that something's wrong, we can't fix it.

That song, "Wasted on You," that was one of the first ones that was really finished, and it was time to pick the album title and we were still writing songs. But it was already forming and I was like, "This sums up what we're talking about now and what we're going through in a really big way on an outward-in, inward level."

Based on the lyrics in "Wasted on You," do you consider yourself someone who has a hard time getting over things and moving on from things? What advice can you give to people who do struggle to move on from either failed relationships or a loss?

It's hard, because sometimes you're in a relationship that you just need to cut out of your life in order to move on. It's just true. It doesn't make you a bad person for you to just step completely away and cut somebody out of your life, and there are times I've had to do that. It sucks.

But you don't need to feel guilty about it if you're making a choice that's for health and stability and all of those things. But I think that we don't always have to do it that way either, and I do also think it's important to remember it's important not to just stuff stuff down like it never happened deep within yourself. I feel like it's better to hold onto your memories.

And even in those bad relationships, those bad breakups and those moments in time that you've had to move on from, I'm at a place in my life now where I'm not feeling anger anymore really. Not for the most part, even the people that were horrible (laughs). I'm not sitting around thinking about horrible, I wasn't able to actually still remember the good moments, too.

It's weird to say that. It took a really long time. But you only get one life. So I don't know, I try not to be the person who's constantly saying, "Oh that time was terrible, that person was terrible, everything about that was a monster," and flush it all away and forget about the parts about it that were why you were in that situation, too.

There's things that you need to move away from and then there's also things that you need to learn from, as well, so it's better not to forget, I guess is the right way to say it.

In "Yeah, Right," you talk about getting paid. Is that a literal reference to getting paid by an actual job, or is it in allusion to something deeper?

Uh, it's about money (laughs). I've seen money change people more often than I would've liked to. And it's always in a negative way.

Well I guess maybe this follows suit, does "Better Without You" happen to be about the music industry?

Part of it is, but it's not entirely about that. "Better Without You"... so each verse is dedicated to a different person or entity in my life along the way. And they go in order. I don't want to name-call, and I've carefully avoided doing that with this song and it's hard because they're about really specific things to me.

If you know me personally, then you know who it's all about. I don't really want to drag people into things many years later. So it starts out a long time ago (laughs) in the first verse with some battles there — a big one for independence. All of it was really a fight for independence.

The second one is the one that's more for the industry. And then the third one kind of brings us to today, in our world and the world around us. I sang the last few lyrics to "Better Without You," including the bridge, the day they called it for Biden. Not to make it political, because the song isn't really. But that was in my heart. I mean, "It's over. It's over now." Feeling it. And it felt so good to sing it knowing that it was true, at least in regards to Trump

Wow that's cool, I wouldn't have looked at it like that. There were a couple of songs where I was wondering if it was about a relationship or something on the grander scheme, and you letting go of that.

Yeah, it is. And it's funny because I don't want it to seem like it's all about the label. It's really not. That's been part of my journey, but there is stuff that's been way more personal than that, and harder. But when I say "the industry," it does mean more than the label. It's just the whole world of people that surround you when you're doing this.

And there was definitely more to it than the label that I was fighting against and struggling with during my journey, but one of the things that I remember being a threat at times was like, "If you don't do this or you don't do that, then it's just all gonna fall apart. You're not gonna have it. This is all gonna crumble. Everything that you have."

And I'm looking at it and going, "I don't want what I had. I want my future, I have an idea for something more." So the chorus, "As empires fall to pieces / Our ashes twisting in the air / It makes me smile to know that / I'm better without you," going like, "It's okay, go ahead. Let it burn down. Let the old idea of the tiny thing that you thought this could be go ahead and burn down because I have an idea for something bigger."

Can you explain the chorus of "Blind Belief," specifically the lines, "We hold the key to redemption / Let icons fall?"

This is another one that's a little bit in the political zone, or social. Why do we believe what we believe? Why do we do the things we do? Why are the laws that are in place, some of them aren't there for good reasons. Some things are just the way they are because they've always been that way.

And I think we've reached a time where we need to say, "That's not enough. We need to make changes that make sense for how much our world and our awareness has grown, and how we need to be better." We need to improve over time and not just leave things the way that they are.

I was actually writing those lyrics, being inspired by the Confederate statues coming down. We can still love our ancestors even if they made mistakes, and we can actually love them better, we can actually do better for our world. It doesn't have to be a betrayal if your grandparents thought differently than you.

We can only grow by moving forward and making better and better decisions as the generations go on. And if we want this place to get better, then we need to admit that things are wrong!

Saying "We hold the key to redemption" is saying you don't have to stand by something that's wrong. Go ahead and let icons fall! Just because something is the way it is and it's always been that way doesn't make it right. We should be asking those questions, and sometimes change is good. It's nothing to be afraid of.

To wrap up, of all of the topics that you cover on The Bitter Truth, what are you hoping at the end of the day that people will take away from this album as they sit with it?

I hope they feel empowered, I really do. I didn't go into this writing process feeling empowered, I started to feel that way through the process. It starts from feeling human, feeling vulnerable, feeling fragile and feeling broken.

But as I start to work, especially together with my friends, with people that support me and I support them, having a band is a really cool thing. Just having something to work on together last year and the year before, amidst the pain and the loss and the frustration, just made it so much better. It was such a healing thing for all of us, and I'm hoping that that same healing and empowered feeling can spread to those who listen to it. I really do.

Instead of just wallowing in grief, we found a way through the music to feel strength and inspiration and hope for something better in the future. I think, if there's a punchline, the biggest thing is that life is worth living.

I think that's something that people need to hear right now, because there has been so much to just feel sad about, so much to feel depressed and frustrated about and helpless, without a voice. Like, "It doesn't even matter what you do, I'm just one little drop in the bucket." But it's not true, that's a lie. We are strong, and change is happening.

And the greatest losses that we can imagine, we actually can overcome and there can still be good things left in life to experience, you just don't know what they are yet. If it can be empowering and spread hope to people, that's what I would most hope for.

#Amy Lee #Evanescence #2021 interviews

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shostakobitchh · 4 years ago

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chapter 16: the rising deep sneak peek!

here’s a preview of the first part of the chapter! I will be on break starting Friday, and I hope to have it done in the early part of next week. enjoy!

Severus stared down at the pocket watch, making certain that it read Gryffindor Tower before placing it back into his trousers.

Dumbledore turned away from the window to gaze back at him, rain battering against it. The room was quiet, save for the fire crackling in the hearth and Fawkes’ gentle preening. Even the portraits were silent, grave expressions on their faces as they waited for the current Headmaster to offer his opinion on the matter. Severus had come to him after making sure Miss Evans had climbed through the Fat Lady’s portrait, and there had not yet been a single word exchanged between the two, only solemn stares that conveyed the seriousness of the situation. Severus didn’t know where to begin, really, and he supposed Dumbledore didn’t either.

Unspoken words hung in the air between them, like breath curling into mist. It took every mite of Severus’ strength not to break something, to force himself to believe that Dumbledore cared about the girl’s safety as much as he did, and that he wasn’t being purposefully obtuse. They both had too much to lose if something happened to her — the thought was incomprehensible. The old man’s silence, however, was only adding to Severus’ uneasiness as the seconds dragged by.

once I started I couldn’t stop

it’s been in my dreams it won’t leave me alone

you don’t care what I do or what happens

Severus stifled the urge to check the pocket watch again.

“Minerva is quite upset.” Dumbledore finally said, the grim expression on his face unwavering. “Rightfully so, but I’ve convinced her to hold off any punishment until morning.”

Severus kneaded his forehead with his thumbs, leaning heavily against the back of a chair. “That’s your concern right now?”

Dumbledore hummed a short, quick sound, like he wasn’t quite sure. Severus knew, though — he knew that he’d been disturbed at what Miss Evans had seen, what she’d heard, and what she had done. Severus knew, because he felt it, too. It hung high above their heads, just below the vaulted ceiling, where the whir of magic usually was. The office’s once comforting glow now seemed ominous — warning lights, a red sun rising at dawn.

“It is a good thing you found her when you did,” Dumbledore went on, his voice heavy.

He could still picture Granger flying into his office, the door slightly ajar since Severus had been preparing to leave for dinner. There was a frantic, fresh sort of panic that Severus had not seen since Evans had crashed into him on Halloween. Granger hadn’t even managed to say whatever she’d flown down to the dungeons to say. Severus had known it was Miss Evans, and he’d known that it wasn’t good.

Severus swallowed roughly. “She said it’s gaining more of a form, becoming more corporeal.”

Dumbledore lifted his eyes back towards the window, wind slamming the rain against the glass. “It spoke to her again, you said? Did it demand anything?”

“No, it just… told her to act on her impulses.”

Dumbledore made a new kind of sound, one that was strong and disapproving. “That type of behavior cannot be tolerated, Severus.”

“It wasn’t her doing,” he forced through gritted teeth. “surely you realize that.”

“On the contrary, it’s for that very reason I must insist Ariel be dealt with, and swiftly.” Dumbledore said, his eyes dark and intense, like the storm outside. “Resorting to violence, even when persuaded, must be discouraged. She cannot fall into the habit of using force when faced with adversity.”

Severus’ temple began to throb. “She’s eleven, for Merlin’s sake. The little beasts brawl like common Muggles until they learn to throw their first Hex.”

“Ariel will be tempted more than any of them,” Dumbledore said seriously.

“You never gave a damn when Potter and Black threw punches for far less.” he snapped.

Fawkes stopped his grooming to stare up at Severus, as if he understood that he had let something slip he hadn’t meant to, and wanted to make sure he knew this. Severus sent him a warning glare, and Fawkes chirped, cocking his head at him.

“Those were far different circumstances,” Dumbledore said, not unkindly. “James was not Marked for something no child should be subjected to.”

Severus threw himself off the chair, balling his fists at his sides. “This is pointless. You need to do something — or better yet, let me have my way with Quirrell, if you truly think he’s somehow involved.”

Dumbledore’s brow furrowed. “I cannot allow you to practice Dark Magic within this school.”

“Dark Magic can find whoever’s doing this!” Severus snarled.

“I forbid it, Severus.” Dumbledore's face was cold and unyielding. “Ariel cannot be exposed to such things, especially now.”

“She would not be exposed —”

“You are her father,” Dumbledore said, and Severus flinched. “if you were to fall into old patterns, she would inevitably make contact. She is too young and would not be able to resist the temptation.”

Like you, a voice whispered, you could not resist, and it cost you everything.

“It would keep her safe!” Severus shot back, but his voice wavered. He cursed himself for it.

Dumbledore’s eyes softened. “I know you worry for her —”

“Don’t mistake this for pity.” Severus hissed. “That girl is being hunted.”

He recalled her bloody knuckles, the way they shimmered in the pale light. Her thin face twisted in pain and misery, her black eyes shining with tears, and a childlike rage that Severus knew all too well. That rage would turn into hunger, and when it did, the girl would destroy herself from the inside out as Severus had, almost a decade ago. He’d spent so much time seeing Lily in the girl that he had forgotten that half of her was also Severus, and that she could be susceptible to the same darkness that had lured him in. The parts of Severus in their daughter could ruin her.

He would move Heaven and Earth to make sure that did not happen. He owed it to Lily.

“It cannot harm her, I promise you.” Dumbledore took a tentative step towards him, his robes trailing behind him. “I would not allow Ariel to stay here if I was not certain of this.”

Severus gave a humorless snort. “No, you’ll just allow it to torture the girl into insanity.”

“Which is why I am thankful that she is spending her evenings with you.” Dumbledore sighed, and it was a tired sound, one that Severus had never heard before.

He glared at him, wanting to rip that solemn look right off his face. “Detention isn’t going to keep that thing at bay for much longer.”

“No, but it will keep her under close watch. It hasn’t attacked her while she’s been with you, has it? I would suppose that’s for a very good reason.”

“Until it becomes desperate.” Severus said bitterly. “Then what would you have me do? I cannot fight an enemy I cannot see!”

Dumbledore ignored his question. Fawkes chirped happily at him as his brow deepened in thought, murmurs from the portraits amongst one another offering no possible insights. They’d insisted that they had never seen anything like this before inside of Hogwarts, but this was not news to Severus. There had never been someone like Miss Evans, either.

“Did Ariel mention what triggered this?” Dumbledore fell against the side of his desk, hands gripping the sides. There was a faraway look in his eyes, one that told Severus he knew more than he was letting on, but couldn’t decide if it was worth sharing.

“Draco was pining for her attention,” Severus muttered, rubbing a hand over his face. “unfortunately, it seems that Lucius forgot to teach the boy some tact. He has the subtlety of a freight train, and has been ruthless in his approach.”

“I assume you’ll be speaking with him?” Dumbledore’s eyes flashed in a way that told Severus this was not a suggestion.

“I won’t be able to do much, if that’s what you’re implying. Draco will grow bored eventually, but once Narcissa and Lucius hear what Miss Evans did to their precious baby boy… well, Lucius will be mortified, but Narcissa will likely want blood.”

“All the more reason that Ariel must understand the gravity of the situation.” Dumbledore said with a sigh. “She does not need more enemies, although Minerva has mentioned that Draco has been particularly vicious. Have you seen no cause to intervene?”

He hadn’t — what the little dunderheads did amongst themselves, Severus couldn’t have given less of a fuck about. As long as they weren’t causing bodily harm to one another (Miss Evans had checked that box off tonight), Severus didn’t bother… well, unless he found out that one of his Snakes was being harassed by another House. Then Severus took great pleasure in exercising his authority over the little shits.

“Miss Evans has appeared unaffected.” Severus said, nonplussed.

Dumbledore inclined his head. “I would beg to differ.”

“Obviously,” Severus snapped back. “I would think that the boy has learned enough of a lesson. The girl broke his damn nose.”

#sam speaks #aim and ignite #writing until my hands fall off

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tardis-stowaway · 3 years ago

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@kaydeefalls did a music meme and tagged anyone who wanted to share their taste in music. I feel like sharing, so here we go. Links go to either youtube or bandcamp so you can listen to the songs in question.

1. Favourite song at the moment

Even with the “at the moment” qualifier, I can’t possibly name a single favorite song! I also don’t want to list over a dozen songs for this one question. So I will say that one song that’s really been in heavy rotation for me recently is “Avalon” by Rhiannon Giddens. I love the Celtic-influenced strings and her voice.

2. A song you associate with your favourite ship

This meme is asking me to pick favorites again. Rude! Obviously I can’t choose an all time favorite ship, but lately most of my fannish energy has gone to Jon/Martin from TMA. A song I particularly like for them is “I See You” by Front Country. As you might guess from the title, the lyrics fit them beautifully, though the upbeat melody suggests it may be an AU. A sample:

I hear you I believe you I see you If you’re having to fight your way back home And every problem feels like only yours alone Oh i wish i could tell you how to be okay But at least i can tell you, that I’m here today

3. A song that could be about you

With the grad school experience still heavy on my mind, I think I have to pick “I Hope My Discipline Improves in Time” by Marian Call. The title makes the point well, but the whole song is accurate and worth a listen.

4. A song you think is overrated

This would be a lot easier to answer if we weren’t in the middle of a global pandemic. I've heard very little music I didn’t choose for the past 16 months. Also, it’s hard to tell if a popular but not appealing song in a genre I rarely listen to is overrated or just Not For Me. I suppose I’ll go with a campfire song from when I was working in environmental education called “Bazooka Bubble Gum.” Out of all the shouty and silly songs we led, it was the only one that really grated on my nerves, so of course the kids friggin’ LOVED it. The rhymes don’t even work well!

5. A song that reminds you of a good memory

I didn’t go to a lot of parties in college, but one of the most popular songs at the ones I did attend was Madonna’s “Like A Prayer.” I always associate that song with hitting the dance floor with my friends, everybody singing along. It also got played on road trips with those friends and later their weddings. I still don’t know why that particular song was quite so ubiquitous, many years after the song’s release and at a college known for academic rigor and awkward nerds. I guess it’s like Madonna says: life is a mystery.

6. The last song you listened to

I’ve been listening to the songs as I select them for this meme, so it’s technically “Like a Prayer.” iTunes informs me that the last song I listened to before starting this meme was “The Funeral” by Band of Horses.

7. A song that makes you laugh

A youtube user called elliotly has made songs based on the wiki pages of various Magnus Archives characters. They’re hilarious and unfairly catchy. Perhaps the one that most consistently cracks me up is “she has a boyfriend named tom,” the Not!Sasha song (contains spoilers through S5). For a non-Magnus song, I may never stop being amused by “I’m On a Boat” by the Lonely Island with T-Pain.

8. A song you want your mutuals to listen to

I want y’all to listen to songs that you enjoy! That may not be the same as my taste at all. If you do want a suggestion, in addition to the songs already named I direct you to the gorgeous “The God of Loss” by Darlingside. It will make you feel things, and the animation on the video is a lovely bonus.

I continue the practice of tagging anyone who feels like playing! Yes, that means you! Tell me about your music if you like.

#music #about me

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tarhalindur · 4 years ago

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Belated Gou episode 16 comments (because there’s one point that’s threading a needle and I still don’t think it’s coming out right) under the cut:

1) Yakusamashi-hen: Rika gaslights the fuck out of Satoko.

Nekodamashi-hen: Satoko gaslights the fuck out of Rika.

Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

2) This episode probably locks in Satoko as a mortal world culprit; the question is whether she’s the only one. At the meta level, I think this probably rules out Bern (I don’t see her manipulating the situation quite like that - the likely motive in those worlds was always Bern having a Homura-esque hatred of her past self, I don’t think that’s consistent with what’s presented here), but that was always the least likely possibility of the threes; Lambda and Featherine both remain plausible suspects.

(2a: Dear Gou: Please to be confirming what if any connection Lambda has to Satoko within the next 2-3 weeks, please? Sincerely, local fanfic author who would really appreciate a canon answer...)

3) Speaking of Rebellion parallels (pinging @thewhitefluffyhat), consider: Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni: Rebellion, with Rika Furude (or perhaps Frederica Bernkastel?) as Madoka Kaname.

Which... maybe? Looking back at the archives I don’t think I ever actually posted the post I drafted on the subject (I had a crash a while back, I’ll bet it got eaten then), but one of my standing opinions is that for all the similarities in their situations and other surface-level similarities at the deepest levels Rika and Homura are quite different characters. Most obviously, Homura wrapped herself in an archetype as cloak and armor and Rika shows no signs of that (the only Higurashi character who could possibly fit is Hanyuu herself, and even that’s a stretch), but there’s other parts to that as well. One of them plays directly into this episode; for all that the presentation of Rika’s supposed selfishness in this episode is obvious rubbish I think there’s a grain of truth in the claim that Rika is selfish, specifically in the sense that that she sometimes has, for lack of the right words, a lack of recognition for any consequences of her actions on others. (This dates back to before the loops, judging by the apparent reason for Satoko’s bullying in Saikoroshi-hen; also consider the effects of Rika drinking on Hanyuu (Hanyuu in OG has a good reason to not be particularly happy about Rika drinking!), or that point someone else made about how Rika functionally causes Keiichi to die repeatedly by taking action to ensure he arrives at Hinamizawa -- this is a net benefit in terms of reaching a solution, but still has costs[1].) There’s two obvious contributing factors for this. First, Rika is still young physically; she has a century’s worth of experience, but has never had the chance to get the kind of maturity that comes with physical age, and indeed her kind of self-centeredness is common in kids. Second, Rika is in many respects spoiled (despite both the horrors of the loops and the best efforts of her immediate family) -- she’s extremely high status in her hometown (reincarnation of Oyashiro-sama and all that) and extremely cute besides, it is perhaps not surprising that she’s got some of the traditional pathologies of those born to privilege. (Homura's personality and her utterly isolated and often helpless upbringing, meanwhile, has left her with fewer such issues; her issues are more a combination of squelching that part of herself as part of her coping mechanism and a toxic combination of bad assessments of what others want + inability and/or unwillingness to reassess, probably mostly the former given her likely tunnel vision issues.)

On the flip side, Satoko does have a couple of notable similarities to Homuhomu, despite their different circumstances. Most importantly, she’s a far closer match to Homura’s utterly isolated background, and this episode is supportive of Satoko latching onto Rika the same way Homura did to Madoka. Also, much like Homura, I wouldn’t be surprised if Satoko is on the autism spectrum; note that in both cases the girl in question would have sunk special interest-level attention into social interaction (Homura to become cooler, Satoko because she needed it for her special interest in trapmaking). (I wouldn’t be shocked in Rena is in the same boat too re: autism, with the special interest in her case deriving from reaction to her mother’s betrayal - “won’t get fooled again”, as the old line goes.)

(If Gou really does go for strong Rebellion parallels/inversions, I would expect two more things: the local goddess as the meta-level culprit (so Hanyuu/Featherine with Satoko as a piece - the goddess dragging the looper down instead of vice versa), and the win condition being equivalent to a putative Madoka re-ascension - which, this being When They Cry and the OP being the OP, would probably mean Rika’s ascension to witchdom.)

[1] - The Higurashi Trolley Problem!

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calumcest · 4 years ago

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helen!! <3 for the writer ask thing how about: 3, 13, 23, 43, and 44? ilysm

hello my love thank u for asking!! <3

3. Are there any fics that inspired you to write what you do?

oh yes. there aren’t any fics in particular that inspired me to write the pairings i do 5sos did that all by themselves and i was fairly early into the fandom back in the day so there wasnt anything that really inspired me in particular that i can recall to make me start writing? and what inspired me to start writing again was a lack of fic so i really can’t answer this question properly unfortunately skdjfnskjdf so instead i’m gonna twist this question so i can mention my beloved, my sweetheart, the love of my life anatomy of a fall and in particular conclusions but really anything bexless wrote which very much inspired my writing style

13. Do you outline your fics? How much of a headache would someone get if they just looked at an outline of yours without reading the fic?

skdfjnsdkjf well i feel like you’re in a position to comment on that i do not outline any of my fics everything is constnatly made up as i go along sometimes if i’m writing a very long fic aka britpop i will have little notes at the end of the document with things that i may want to remember to include but it’s usually only the odd word or something but afaik actually britpop is the only fic i’ve done that for even soulmate au doesn’t have that i don’t think so no i do not outline my fics i write like a maniac and i think anyone would get a headache if they tried to live inside my head i mean i literally have a permanent headache myself so

23. What’s your absolute favorite trope to write?

oh thats a good question mmm honestly i have the most fun writing historical aus, time travel aus, ghost aus, and possibly (with my track record, the beginnings of) enemies to lovers i think? not that i’m particularly good at any of them but those are the most fun however i think i’m best at things like mutual pining and stuff i just don’t really enjoy writing it as much

43. Talk about a positive experience with fanfiction or the fanfiction community that you will always remember.

oh god so many! honestly i think one of the best things is just the general feeling of elation whenever someone comments something nice on your fics and feeling like someone liked something that you created and that it had worth to someone and could make someone experience emotions is one of the best feelings i’ve ever experienced i love being a narcissist but also i’ve made some of my best friends through fanfic funny story i met one of my best mates through fanfic when we were like 16/17 bc she was my beta for a big bang fic i did and then we ended up going to the same uni and living together last year so that’s definitely up there

44. Rant about something writing related.

okay this is my excuse to talk about this: what am i gonna do w myself when britpop is over? i have never in my life enjoyed writing a fic like i enjoy writing that one i genuinely look forward to writing it and its the only fic of mine i actually like and feel proud of i think like most fics ive written i liked the idea and i obviously didnt dislike writing (most of) them or i would’ve stopped (welcome to my wips) but i’ve never actively enjoyed the process of writing a fic and loved writing the characters until i wrote britpop its a real passion project and i dont know what im going to DO when it ends how am i going to find a fic that i’m so genuinely invested in again . what am i going to do with myself. i’m going to be a shell of a woman

#gonna write the whole thing againf rom michaels pov #thank u my love <3 #tirednotflirting #helen answers

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fencesandfrogs · 4 years ago

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an abridged history/explanation of warrior cats if you didn’t read them as a kid and have questions (a primer)

welcome. i’m going to keep things to the point, this is not a plot summary, just, well, its a pandemic and people are seeking items of childhood comfort and its come to my attention that a lot of people didn’t read these books as kids and then they come up in conversation and they act shocked so! i felt compelled to write this.

[2.5k words, 10min read. section headers, no pictures. not a ton of helpful formatting. i don’t want to say don’t read this because obviously i wrote it and think it’s worth reading, but i’ll be honest, this is a lot.]

section one: about me

i was an avid reader as a child, most of which fits solidly into “stories for another time,” and some of which would necessitate me adding tags onto this post that are, well, not necessary. so i will skip over that backstory but for those aware of lexile scores, i had one that was too high for literally any book that was appropriate to give me. so reading in school was torture and reading for fun was excellent.

now because i was a first-ish grader and my mom was trying to keep the fifth harry potter out of my hands, she looked desperately for something else to pass to me. her friend, who had a daughter a year or two older than me, was into these cat books, and my mom was like “here honey you like cats” without thinking too much about it.

which is good, because as i’ll get into, it was a really good fit for me. but like a dozen books later she asked me about the plot and well. i think at that moment she realized that it might have been better to just let me read harry potter.

but yeah i continued to read them long past the recommended reading ages and still as a Young Adult will return to them for nostalgia, and also as i will get into, some really good books. (see a list of books for “morbidly curious but i don’t want to spend 56 to 168 hours reading this”)

i’m not fully caught up on the series but this is not a plot summary so that should not impact my ability to discuss this

section two: content warnings

these books (not this post) includes the following:

discussion of castration (1.1 series 1, book 1, i’m not including this on every item/discussion because this is a complicated series but i want to demo how up front some of this is)

teenage romance/sex/pregnancy (1.1ish-1.3 or 4, continues throughout the series quite a lot, comes up again in 3.4/5, 4.4-5, and a bit in 5)

death from childbirth (1.can’t remember which book, many others)

unwanted pregnancy (se super edition, or a longer one off novel, discussed in 4&5)

sex/implied, discussed, and very very very heavily hinted but never directly said/shown (1.1-3ish, se, other)

murder (constantly, 1.1, 1.4, literally every book, 3.5, i’m just listing the ones i remember off the top of my head that were particularly graphic)

disability/illness, esp. the debilitating and/or deadly nature of it (1.3-5ish, 3.1, but all of 3, 3.4ish)

dementia (1.3-5, i’ve heard in some of the later series?)

abuse (7/8 this is reported i haven’t read these books but based on what i know it’s def there)

child abandonment (1.4-5, 3.4/5, it’s also all over the place but i think those are the only major character incidents of it)

treason (1.3-5, all over the place)

the horror/tragedy of war (background, but pretty constant)

disagreeing with an integral religion/tradition (3, based on the series title, 8, and generally scattered)

the corrupting influence of power (1.4/5, possibly 7/8, others)

racism (1, 3-5, possibly others)

sexism (se, background)

patriarchal societies (se, seems to be somewhat softened based on what i’ve heard but i’m not entirely sure about this)

and more! but it starts to get stranger and this is enough to prove my point

basically everything that could go wrong does

oh yeah! child abuse also child abuse that’s a very major theme in the first series as well as during other points. and elder abuse in the first series.

okay i’ve made my point.

section three: the appeal

look. so. i think we’re kind of pastel-ify children’s literature based on movies. see, parents have to watch children’s movies with their kids, so they can’t be gritty and intense because a lot of parents will say “not for my nine year old! they can’t deal with treason!” and that seems to be bleeding into children’s literature.

but warriors is not that. it’s intense, it borders on “too gruesome for children,” and it’s from a time where kids books got to be serious and heavy and dark because they were about animals. which was great because i couldn’t find books at my reading level that weren’t too thematically difficult, so i got to read something below my reading level, but thematically too hard, so it kind of balanced out.

and then well. so. the series grows with the audience, but the books don’t grow in terms of like difficulty so new readers start deep into it and it’s a complicated thing, the fandom history is complex, but.

the appeal is that parents don’t usually read the books their kids read and so they see a book about cats and assume it’s fluff, and kids who are starved of complex content get to read hamlet-for-kids.

section four: worldbuilding/lore

oh yeah also there’s some really deep lore to explore. so there’s two bits of appeal.

i’m not doing a full world/plot summary, but i’ll explain some common elements here.

thunder/shadow/wind/riverclan: harry potter houses for cats (gryffindor, slytherin, hufflepuff, ravenclaw, except this doesn’t work for the last two but that’s fine because no one cares about them despite riverclan being pretty important in most of the books)

-kit/-paw/-star: naming conventions. everyone has a two part name. (we’ll use cinder as an example because i like the two cinders we know, even tho neither of them get to be cinderstar.) babies are -kit (cinderkit), then when they’re apprentices, which is like being a student, you know, elementary through high school, you’re paw, so cinderpaw. then you get an Official Name from ur clan leader (cinderheart). if you become clan leader, you get to be -star (cinderstar). i know i haven’t explained clan leaders bear with me. this is kind of important because i have the names burned into my memory so i cannot simply always call firestar firestar if he was firepaw at the time of the events i’m describing. it won’t be ambiguous, cinderheart/cinderpelt are a special case. if this is tricky for you it’s fine just only read the first part of the name.

clan (leader, deputy, medicine cat, elder): roles with in the clan. leaders literally have nine lives. deputies are next in line and chosen by the leader. leaders usually go through several deputies, because deputies don’t have nine lives. medicine cats are doctors. they also have an apprentice. those are all one per clan. elders are just retired cats. they’re not a special category per say, but i wanted to mention them.

warrior: adult.

warrior code: laws.

star clan: dead cats. this ties into the religion which is pretty important to the books but for the most part if you understand that dead cats get to give guidance and send their approval, you have the gist of it.

section five: so um, what the fuck

so we start with a cat named rusty who runs into the woods to join thunderclan and then his name is firepaw and we all forget that he’s named rusty except for like that one time it comes up again. bluestar is a great leader with some corrupt deputies but fireheart eventually takes care of it and becomes clan leader which is a big deal.

then a bunch of other shit happens and suddenly ashfur is possessing brackenstar and being (more) abusive to squirrelflight (who is on the outs with brackenstar anyway for lying about their kits jayfeather, hollyleaf, and lionheart because they’re actually the children of firestar’s other daughter leafpool who had them with crowfeather after she fell in love with him but he’s from windclan and she’s a medicine cat so that’s double illegal and apparently hollyleaf is alive even though she yeeted herself into a pit and died because she killed ashfur when he threatened to reveal this but couldn’t live with being the product of an illegal meeting and then it was all pointless because leafpool stopped being a medicine cat out of guilt anyway and jayfeather is just an ornery bitch about everything but especially all of this)

i’m not explaining any of that.

section six: i repeat: so um, what the fuck

so the thing about these books is they’re soap operas and dramas about cats and that means they get just as strange and chaotic as anything else in the genre. i think a lot of people like me, who read them as children, regard the series we knew as a child (usually either the first three or the first five, plus super editions) as something good and warm and comforting (despite being dark and gruesome) because they made us feel good.

they were also a breeding ground for young fandom because of all the the drama that exists and the nature of the books providing that.

section seven: super editions

the simple answer to what a super edition is has already been given (it’s a novel length one-off about a single character, and its usually either a side character - bluestar, crowfeather - or a event/perspective we don’t get to see - firestar, skyclan, greystripe - and they’re generally more mature)

my favorite super edition is bluestar’s prophecy. i read it at like 16, slinking into the children’s library with a stack of other ya fiction and a “children’s book” which dealt with unwanted pregnancy, grief, forbidden love, and more. still not sure why that’s in the children’s section.

section eight: about the drama

so there’s been a lot of fandom drama about these books. i can’t tell you about the nuances, because i am an old fan, so i watched but didn’t partake. the highlights reel that i can recall goes as follows (please note i will refer to characters by name without explanation. it’s fine. the point of this section is to convey the pettiness of this drama):

tigerstar: did he do anything wrong? (the answer is holy shit yes, this isn’t discourse, it’s okay to like a villain)

scourge: did he do anything wrong, also what color is his collar? (also yes, doesn’t matter)

was the new prophecy (2)/omen of the stars (3)/etc good? (yes, eh, no, yes, no comment, no comment)

should jaypaw or hollypaw be medicine cat apprentice (neither of them, but jaypaw’s employment opportunities are limited because he’s blind, so its gotta b him)

uhh a massive tangle around this parentage drama between squirrelflight, leafpool, brackenfur, and crowfeather, which i used as the crux of humor for how batshit the plots can get, so i’m not even going to pretend i can make it funny, but just know that it’s batshit and the correct opinion is as follows: no one is right, but squirrelflight has done the least wrong, brackenfur is an asshole to her where it’s unwarrented, and hollyleaf is an idiot

and the current drama centers around brackenstar and ashfur and is tied directly to the point above, which is why i’ve kind of given up trying to make jokes about this because this is the culmination of like 35 novels.

section nine: i feel like i need to have some conclusive point to justify writing all of this

but i don’t have one, because this was really an excuse to ramble about an old passion for like half an hour. i mean i guess i can say, like, i think younger fans are sort of embroiled in this drama they don’t really have context for, because i’m not kidding, the current drama centers around the grandchildren of our original cast.

it’s kind of hard to know why, say, mistystar matters if you don’t know that she’s the child of bluefur and oakheart and if you don’t remember the drama that surrounded that when bluestar was dying and tigerstar and leopardstar were ruling a combined shadow/riverclan.

(i really hope that’s intelligible i tried to lay the groundwork for it. basically, there’s a biracial kid in a very segregated society who becomes the leader of one of the clans. which is obviously drama, especially considering that that clan was part of a weird supremacy movement a while back.)

& you know? i really hope one of the new series gets to be like, a soft reboot. just. end the current drama and pick up again with the latest generation. a) we’re starting to run out of names, and b) i think that it’s kind of tipped over the edge of sane.

the series also used to be very low fantasy. the cat societies are reasonably close to feral cat colonies (the biggest detail is that toms don’t all have their own territory, but there’s honestly in-universe discussion of this and it’s basically a culture thing), and while star clan/religion is a real and legitimate thing, there’s also a discussion of its abuse and most of the early books don’t really use star clan/related ideas as a physical force so much as a plot device, barring, like, when a new leader gets their nine lives.

honestly, i’ll always adore these books for serving the role they did, and a lot of the series is fantastically well written. but the fandom surrounding it can be, uh, not great because 9-14 year olds don’t really have good brains to understand this.

also, i’m very sad that i can’t find the flash game that was for the great prophecy. it was not very fun, but i enjoyed playing it, so if anyone knows the url so i can search the internet archive for it, please let me know.

section ten: i’m morbidly curious but there are 56 hours of books to read, assuming a very fast reading pace, so is there something i can start with to experience this without dedicating 4 days to it?

yes, there is.

it’s called bluestar’s prophecy. it’s standalone, and i should have given you enough of a background on the lore that you don’t need to know anything else. i’ve already given away the twist in series 1 that it would spoil, so you’re all good on that front.

if you want more, or want the original experience, the first series is self contained and quite good. i’ve given the broad outlines of the plot, but trust me, there’s a lot of surprises and all sorts of things i skipped over because while i like it, it’s not exactly fandom primer material

i also enjoy firestar’s quest and skyclan’s destiny for super editions, but you’ll need to read the first series to understand FQ and FQ to understand SD, so it’s not exactly a starting point. also, SD especially deals with a very different set of themes as the other books.

also, if you were to, say, search “readwarriorcats” (no spaces) on duckduckgo, and then click on one of the first links, you know, not the official site, the one hosted on one of those free website things, you know, not wix, not wordpress, the other one, you would only find lists of the books with hyperlinks.

#warrior cats #fandom #txt #mine #1st #February #2021 #February 1st 2021 #essay #personal #long #q

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dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram · 4 years ago

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Hi! I so appreciate your blog. I don’t always agree with you but I enjoy the way you don’t stand for logical fallacies. If you’re not done with the topic, I think one of my biggest gripes about haylor is how so many refer to Harry as a CHILD at 18. It reminds me of narrative surrounding white rapists (boys will be boys, don’t ruin his future!) do you have thoughts about age and power dynamics, and why it seems so many in this newer generation think of 18 yos as children?

Thanks so much for this ask, and it ended up being very timely, because after this came in I got a super disturbing ask that played into this dynamic (which I’ve already answered).

In some ways I am not a good person to answer this question, because I do just look at the discourse and think ‘What the Fuck is going on?’. But I’m going to make some guesses and then other people can share their opinion.

I think it’s interesting that you suggest that it’s younger people who are driving this idea. I hadn’t even got enough on a handle on it to know that, but it does make sense. I do know that in the US (and I think other similar countries) there has been a marked change in the age that young people start doing things, whether it’s learn to drive, have sex, drink, do drugs - all of that is happening later (alongside economic steps like get a job and move out of home, but obviously the causation there is a little more complicated). Those changes may have an impact on how younger people see the teenage years.

The second, and I think you touch on this, is that there is a racialised idea about who gets to be young. And I feel like there’s a conscious effort by African-Americans in particular to demand that their children be seen as young. Gary Younge wrote a book about all children killed by gunshot in hte US on a particular day (well worth reading obviously) - and he classified anyone under 20 as a child. Likewise people had to fight to get Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin understood as children.

And I wonder if this has just sort of permeated through the culture detatched from its original dynamic and some people have come to believe that it’s progressive to always refer to teenagers as children (which is something that I would do only in very limited circumstances). But as you suggest, this ignores the flip side of the racial dynamic. There is no need to claim more youth or more childhood for white teenagers - they get given all the leniency and more that they need.

It does seem very strange to me to talk about 18 year old Harry as a child, when referring to him pretending to be in a relationship with Taylor. 16-18 year olds have to make a lot of decisions about their lives - around work and education. You can join the army at 16 in the UK. Now I disagree with the terms of almost all of those - but it’s routine in the UK and the US to decide what opportuniteis people have based on their ability to navigate education between the age of 16-18 and so it seem super weird to pretend that people of that age can’t make other decisions.

I also flat out don’t understand why people think an age gap matters in a fake relationship. None of the reasons why age gaps are a problem in actual relationships are true in pretend relationships.

People’s Harry’s age were joining the army, and taking on £9,000 debt, raising their own kids and gaining guardianship over their siblings. The idea that being papped with Taylor Swift as part of your job is something 18 year olds shouldn’t experience, seems to me to be in complete denial of what a lot of 18 year olds go through.

Finally, as I’ve been saying in response to a few other posts - there has been a huge history of using the idea that teenagers are children to control and harm them, particularly queer teenagers. And playing into the idea that teenagers cannot know their own desires does unimaginable damage to actual teenagers.

This is not an abstract academic danger. Less than a week ago in the UK the High Court set an impossibily high standrd before 15 or 16 year olds’ consent to puberty blockers can be taken seriously. NHS England has said that 15 or 16 year olds need a court order before they can access puberty blockers. People who hate trans people are using the idea that teenagers are children, and therefore can’t consent to being trans, as a way of blocking trans teenagers’ access to healthcare.

That’s what makes it extra horrifying that fandom is full of mini-Thatchers enacting a personal version of section 28. The exact same logic is being used to deny trans teens’ access to health care. People are doing so much damage by playing into transphobes.

I think it’s important to be clear about the underlying politics of denying teenagers’ agency. It is a politics of control not liberation, and the first people to be harmed have always been LGBTQ teens.

#I would be really interested in hearing other people's thoughts #about why these changes are happening #Anonymous

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rocketfool · 4 years ago

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fawks: 16, 46, 58, 64 + kass: 10, 15, 57, 69 (IF THIS IS TOO MANY, feel free to only choose a handful lmaoooo... i am just curious!!!)

FAWKS

16. what are their feelings on the people who raised them?

it’s extremely Complicated!!! I think fawks does love her family, but feels like there’s a lot of baggage there--she never felt like she was good enough for her mom and that a lot of her love was conditional on fawks’ ability to achieve and in particular to meet expectations on how she should act as a member of her well-known family. becoming a professor in the shadow of her parents’ illustrious academic careers only exacerbated that situation. I think some of the tension with her mom is based on the fact they didn’t really understand each other and that they both stopped trying after a certain point, but there is still the possibility they could reconcile someday since none of that distance came out of a place of true anger.

fawks’ relationship with her dad is more straightforward, as her dad was much more supportive of her interests and made an effort to ensure she could pursue them. at the same time, though, he was always pulled between her and her mom, and I think fawks also never really allowed herself to be super open with him because she was afraid whose side he’d take if she ever did burn bridges permanently.

46. what do they deprive themself of?

HMMMMM not surprising but she deprives herself of emotional intimacy, and probably even of a connection with her own feelings. she’s become very self-reliant as a coping strategy, but that does also mean she avoids dwelling on her negative emotions and tries to distance herself from them. which is! not neccessarily a healthy way to deal with them! I think she’s getting better at...trying to wrestle with them and being more open/trusting with people on her feelings, but it is still very hard for her.

58. what do they think their role in the party is? what is their role in actuality?

LMAO I think at her best fawks likes to think of herself as one of the idea people and a leader of sorts for that reason, since she has such a strong perspective and is also more than a little full of herself. in reality though, I think maybe she more contributes to like...spontaneity and a willingness to be curious and inquisitive, to follow your passions and the joy they bring you. idk what exact ~role that is, but she definitely is all about being true to yourself and I think encourages the party to be too just based on her own enthusiasm for it.

64. do they value mercy or justice more?

JUSTICE FOR SURE. her way of thinking is very black and white. I think she has the capacity to be moved towards mercy/forgiveness, but she’s much more likely to think people deserve the consequences they are given (which has made the whole situation with the black dragon weigh on her more--she thinks she deserves some type of punishment for her mistake).

KASS

10. how often do they lie? what situations cause them to be dishonest?

why would you ask kass, a spy, this? :)

LMAO but in seriousness, kass does of course have a more free-wheeling approach to telling the truth than most. he has no problem with lying to achieve his own ends, particularly when he believes it’s for something important/some type of mission. he also does not neccessarily have an issue with telling white lies if he believes it will help someone (or at the very least, not do them any ill).

THAT ALL BEING SAID, I think he holds himself to a pretty high standard of being truthful with people when he has no reason not to be. kass greatly values honesty given the nature of his profession, and he tries to be genuine with both friends/allies and strangers when he has the luxury of doing so. the only time he’d lie to someone close to him is if he thought it would protect them--he definitely does not have an inherent desire to deceive or manipulate anyone, and I think at his heart definitely prefers to engage openly with people.

15. do they trust their party? why or why not?

not to get TOO into the weeds about his ~complicated morality since we covered that with the last question, but I don’t think think trust is very straightforward with kass. he’s used to watching his own back and holds most people at arms’ length because true friends in the zhents are hard to come by. he trusts the party insomuch as he doesn’t have any reason to believe they’d betray him at the present moment, or cut and run if things went south (since they very much did the session he almost got killed LOL). but I don’t think he trusts that this will always be the case, even though he likes the party a lot. the one exception is probably pierce, given their history--like obviously he understands pierce wouldn’t stand for him messing with the party for zhent business (like that’s valid lmao), but he trusts implicitly that pierce will stick with him through hell, since pierce already has proven he will.

57. what makes them angry?

kass is very hard to make genuinely angry! his temper has a long fuse, and when he does get upset, it’s usually a burst of emotion that he quickly gets over once the situation has been addressed. one thing that will always make him furious though, given his past, is the issue of wealth disparity (and particularly its effects on children). he generally has no love for nobles for this reason. kass also hates cruel people and bullies, which has definitely made working for the zhentarim...difficult at times.

69. how would they describe their party members?

gwen: “gwen is one of my very favorite people I’ve met recently! she is very tenacious, to have come to the underdark with us for the first time on this mission and kept going even with everything we’ve faced. I think she does not give herself enough credit for how strong she truly is. she seems to be weighed down by her past, and I hope she can leave it behind with time--she seems freer when she does what she wants to do, rather than what is expected of her. she is also incredibly smart--I stand by the ratapult being a work of true genius.”

jolene: “jolene is, I think, a bit more than she likes to project. she is definitely bold and a force to be reckoned with when she puts her mind to something, and both a skilled fighter and musician, which is truly enviable! but I think she tries to hide that her passion comes from a place of caring deeply about her friends like pierce...but I suppose I could be wrong, as we have not known each other for too long. what I do know? her leather jacket is far superior to any other I’ve seen, as is much of her style. oh also! I don’t understand her relationship with the void, but I have a healthy respect for it.”

pierce: “ahhh, it is hard to come up with the best words to describe pierce. he would probably hate to hear me sing his praises, but he is definitely one of the most true men I have ever known--he is the rare breed that tries to always do what’s right for no reason but because it’s the right thing to do, who chooses what is good over what is easy. and he has been that way even since we were kids. I don’t think he values himself enough for that, and I’d like to see him one day really realize his own worth. I do want to know more about what happened to him in the time since we lost contact--he has always been an anxious person, but I wonder if something happened during those years that is still affecting him...also, on a lighter note, he died and came back as a halfling? which I am still wrapping my head around.”

#long post #ask meme

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plays-the-thing · 4 years ago

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Netflix’s Witcher: What Makes a Good Adaptation? – A companion piece

If you’ve somehow found this without seeing the video first, here’s a link:

In this video I analyze the screen adaptations of Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the Witcher series. I use the comparisons of the three to discuss what makes adaptations in general work and to explain why I feel the Witcher is heading down the road to mediocrity.

However, this is a hugely complicated subject, and the works themselves are also complex, especially Martin’s work. I make plenty of claims in the video that a reasonable person could disagree with without any explanation for why I think they are true. Unfortunately, if I were to go down every rabbit hole that I touch on the video would be hours long, so I have to gloss over some potentially confusing or controversial statements.

Enter this post. Here I will be attempting to pre-empt any questions that I think people may have, and go through my thought process on certain claims. I don’t recommend that you read the whole thing. Each explanation will be followed by a timestamp and relevant quote from the video that I am expanding upon so that you can quickly search the page and find what you are looking for.

I’m sure there will be things I don’t think to cover, or things that are poorly reasoned both here and in the video, so feel free to ask additional questions. Just please check to make sure you aren’t asking something that I already covered here.

I will also be attempting to give as much credit as possible to all the wonderful writers and creators who have influenced my thinking with regards to these works. I’ll be linking as much as possible to my sources, as well as to additional content that expands on ideas I mention. Also I’ve included some personal tidbits and commentary, just for fun.

Under a cut for length.

INTRODUCTION:

Huge props to the people who put together the behind-the-scenes footage of LOTR. I’ve watched all the bonus footage numerous times in my life. If you have any interest in the nitty-gritty of how movies get made, I can’t recommend it enough. It really shows all the work and complexity that goes into making movies. That they even get made at all is honestly incredible, especially massive undertakings like LOTR.

[3:30] And if you've ever wondered what the hell happened to The Hobbit, to me it seemed like they were indulging all of these worst impulses instead of catching themselves and editing them out like they did in LOTR.

As soon as I saw that they were making three Hobbit movies my hopes plummeted. It just reeked of executive meddling, and of trying to make the story into something it just isn’t. Lo and behold, that’s what we got: sticking in loads of unnecessary and thematically incoherent material to stretch out the runtime and make it more “epic.” I couldn’t bring myself to watch past the first one, but Lindsay Ellis has an excellent video series exploring in detail what went wrong with the trilogy.

PART ONE: LORD OF THE RINGS

[8:40] If you followed the events and the chronology of the book they would just hang out with Faramir for a little bit and then the movie would end

Technically it’s more complicated than this because that’s already following the revised movie timeline. In reality, Frodo would have just left the Black Gate. They *are* moving the events around to some extent, usually by a few of days here and there, but they can’t move stuff together that takes place weeks apart or the whole timeline would crumble.

[9:55] You can call it the theme, the soul, the spirit, the point, or whatever else you want, but the great works of fiction have something at their core that pulls everything together and elevates it into art. It’s a difficult thing to describe, but I think this scene perfectly tapped into the soul of Tolkien’s work.

Huge shout out to Bob Case and his video “Blame of Thrones” for first introducing me to this concept and the language of the “spirit” of a work to describe this phenomenon. In many ways the first two parts of this video are merely building on the LOTR-GOT comparison that he makes in that video, digging a little deeper and looking at more specific and concrete (and spoileriffic) examples of what he’s talking about so that we can apply these ideas to the Witcher…and beyond. Like all his work, it’s excellent. His YouTube is pretty much inactive these days, but he also occasionally writes content for Shamus Young’s blog if you want more of his work.

PART TWO: GAME OF THRONES

Alright, here it is: the section that really caused me to want to make this companion piece. Earlier I mentioned that I have sympathy for the GoT showrunners, and I really do. Martin’s work is incredibly complex, and so this section dominates the blogpost because there is so much to explain and no way that I could explain it all in the video without incredible bloat.

First I should mention that I, and all the writers I am going to credit here, share a very specific interpretation of Martin’s work. This isn’t the only interpretation. I doubt it’s the interpretation of the majority of readers. Obviously, I fully believe it is the correct interpretation, but the showrunners clearly had a wildly different one.

People who have this interpretation express it in different ways. Joannalannister collects hers in her tag #the-meaning-of-asoiaf. PoorQuentyn expresses it here, and in his analysis of Davos, Quentyn, and Tyrion. Other writers express it in their own ways.

With my lit degree hanging over my head, I can’t help but see it as a problem of competing artistic movements. To me, HBO’s Game of Thrones is part of the art movement of the past few decades, namely postmodernism. Art movements are complex, but basically postmodernism is the cynical reaction to the sincerity of modernism which came before it. Cynicism is, I think, the defining trait of Game of Thrones.

But it is NOT the defining trait of the books. In my view, Martin’s ASOIAF is part of the art movement that we are moving towards, which is starting to become known as metamodernism. Metamodernism is a reaction to the nihilistic pessimism and cynicism of postmodernism, and replaces it not with the unbridled sincerity of modernism, but rather oscillation between the two modes. It can be both ironic and sincere, deconstructionist and constructionist, apathetic and affectual. Once you have peeled back all the layers however, it is ultimately hopeful and optimistic. It embraces a sense of radical optimism. In metamodernist works optimism is often radical because the world the characters live in can be so dark. But that darkness serves only to highlight those characters that can hold fast to virtue amidst such darkness.

So, be warned. If you believe that Martin’s work is all about controlling the Iron Throne, and believe that cynicism is for the wise and honor is for fools, we just aren’t going to see eye to eye.

[12:45] Ned is a competent northern politician who has some trouble adapting to southern culture. Through a combination of bad luck, some understandable mistakes, and a misconception about his position, he fails in his goals.

The show didn’t invent the idea of Stupid Honorable Ned. Plenty of people believed this, even before the show. Obviously I believe they are wrong. If you would like to read more about it I would suggest Steven Attewell’s analysis of Ned’s chapters that he does on his blog, particularly Eddard XI and Eddard XIII. Steven does a much better job of analyzing Ned as a political actor than I ever could.

[13:00] Most of these changes are subtle…the best example is the council debate about whether or not to assassinate Daenerys.

Many of the ideas in this section are pulled from two essays by turtle-paced: Poor Doomed Ned and The Argument to Assassinate Daenerys. Turtle goes deep into the details of the differences between the Ned Stark of the books and the show, and I skimmed some of their comparisons for my argument. Steven Attewell’s analysis of this chapter is also worth reading.

[14:09] It’s a good argument, and I think in the books we are expected to mostly agree with Ned, both morally and politically.

When I say “expected” I mean from the authors point of view, which of course relies on me being correct about my interpretation of Martin’s work. Obviously I think I’m right, but if you don’t agree with my interpretation you may not agree with this statement.

[14:16] Notice also that the supporters of the assassination: Littlefinger, Varys, Renly, and Pycelle are all villains (all except Pycelle are trying to destabilize the kingdom), and the people who oppose it, Ned and Barristan, are heroes.

Each of them represents a different sort of evil. Littlefinger is a scheming sociopathic villain. Varys is a well-intentioned extremist whose willingness to commit utterly heinous acts in the pursuit of his goals makes him a villain. This is because, as Huxley puts it, “The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.” Renly is narcissistic ambitious evil, willing to throw a realm into war to satisfy his own ego, and is totally uncaring about the lives of other people. It isn’t precisely correct to say that Pycelle is a villain because he represents the banality of evil. He thinks he’s just doing his job, but he’s morally bankrupt and politically corrupt.

[16:40] It would take too long to list all the ways that Tywin is awful, and everyone knows it.

To clarify, I mean that everyone in-universe knows it. For some god-forsaken reason, some readers seem to think that Tywin was just being effective after he unleashed the Mountain on the Riverlands and violated every military and political norm in Westeros.

If you are going to say that he is “Machiavellian” I would encourage you to actually read The Prince, where Machiavelli says “Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred” and goes into the reasons why.

[17:17] Tywin on the other hand accomplished a lot of short-term gains by being as treacherous and dishonorable as possible. But this has a cost: by proving themselves fair-weather allies they surround themselves with the same. Nobody trusts them, and so their allies scheme and betray them.

Oberyn and Doran are both scheming in their own way to revenge themselves on the Lannisters for the deaths of Elia and her children. The Tyrells poison Joffrey and scheme to spirit Sansa away to Highgarden.

[17:36] Ned failed due to a couple of minor mistakes, some bad luck, and treachery.

I mention a few times that Ned, and more broadly the Starks, get “unlucky.” Again, Steven Attewell does an excellent job of documenting this with his keen eye for how GRRM cheats political realities, but I’ll note a few of the many ways George has to bend over backward to screw the Starks.

In AGoT Catelyn leaves King’s Landing roughly around the same time that Tyrion leaves the wall, and both are on horseback. In order for them to meet at the Inn at the Crossroads Tyrion has to travel roughly 2,000 miles in the same time that Catelyn travels 400 miles. This is basically impossible, but necessary for the plot so that Catelyn can lose Tyrion at the Eyrie. If she had caught him somewhere further north she could have simply chucked him into her own dungeons and managed his trial herself.

Cersei has been trying to kill Robert for goodness knows how long with just as unreliable methods as “get him drunk on a hunt.” In order for Ned to get screwed she has to succeed in killing Robert at precisely that moment. If it had failed like every one of her other attempts she is most likely dead, because Ned would tell Robert the truth about her children as soon as he got back.

In order for Theon to take Winterfell, veteran military man and castellan Ser Rodrik Cassell has to stupidly empty the Winterfell garrison while he knows that Ironborn raiders are running loose in the North, not even leaving behind a mere twenty-five to fifty men that would have completely thrashed Theon’s assault. If Theon can’t take Winterfell, the Red Wedding doesn’t happen (as Martin has told us that the real inciting incident of the Red Wedding was the fall of Winterfell).

[17:41] However, killing him was a terrible idea, and backfired on the Lannisters instantly.

Continuing this theme, the Lannisters were in an absolutely horrible position at the beginning of the War of the Five Kings. They pretty much just have their bannerman in the Westerlands. Stannis seems to have the support of most of the Crownlands, and he and Renly are splitting the lords of the Reach and the Stormlands (with Renly having the larger chunk). The Starks have all the support of the North and the Riverlands combined. The Lannisters are surrounded by enemies who outnumber them on all sides. Killing Ned immediately jumpstarts a war that will almost certainly crush the Lannisters. That it didn’t took some very thin plotting and improbable developments at times, but overall George made it work. For more analysis of this, again check out Steven Attewell Blog: Race for the Iron Throne.

[17:48] Tywin was killed by both a guest whom he considered his ally, and his son.

I firmly believe Oberyn poisoned Tywin. Here’s a good rundown of the evidence. Beyond simple means, motive, and opportunity it also provides neat answers to lingering odd questions like why Tywin rotted so oddly and aggressively, why Tyrion knew he would find him in the privy, why Oberyn was willing to chuck his life away for a confession before seeming to have secured revenge against Tywin.

It’s also thematically juicy. I love the idea that Tywin, who so egregiously violated Westerosi norms culminating in the total breach of the social contract at the Red Wedding, was a victim of contrapasso. He can’t be protected by social norms, so he gets poisoned by his guest and ally. Did Tyrion know he was dying? Had he put it all together? Was that bolt really an act of mercy? Perhaps it was one final service to the Lannisters, to keep the dream of their alliance with the Martells alive. Who knows, but boy is it interesting to consider.

[18:13] his alliances fall to pieces, and his children are abandoned by even their own family.

I’m referring here to the infighting between the Tyrells and Lannisters (and Martells, though they never had any intent of staying true to the alliance) after Tywin’s death (though there was some before as well, just intensified after Cersei takes over from Tywin). Kevan forces Cersei to take the walk of shame, and Jaime and the rest of the Lannisters abandon her to that fate.

[19:41] Just like Lord of the Rings, and the Witcher, ASOIAF is clearly dedicated to anti-violence. Not pacifism: all three works have heroes dealing out retributive violence in order to try and restore justice.

I understand it might be odd to suggest that three works which feature so much violence can be dedicated to anti-violence, but depicting something is not the same as endorsing it. I would argue in the case of Martin’s work in particular that his depiction of violence, so un-romantically brutal and direct, is intentionally revolting, and therefore is designed to be anti-violence. Martin purposefully makes you want revenge on certain characters, gives it to you, and then forces you to stare at the inhumanity of this thing you thought you wanted. Yeah I wanted Theon to pay, but not like that. Yeah, I wanted Cersei to pay, but not like that. Yeah, I want the Freys to pay, but I don’t think I’m going to like what Stoneheart is going to do to them.

There is a certain amount of this in the Witcher as well. I can specifically think of one scene in The Blood of Elves, but I promised no Witcher spoilers.

The violence in LOTR is much more romanticized, but as Faramir says: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” The hero is still Frodo, who doesn’t fight anyone or anything in the whole story. Frodo is a pacifist, but his pacifism is enabled by others who are willing to fight.

[20:07] In a Dance with Dragons Daenerys allows the old slave-holding class to maintain too much power and so they immediately attempt to continue the old violence of slavery. Daenerys did not commit enough violence against the slave-owners, so they were allowed to continue existing, and as long as they existed they were always going to abuse and oppress the ex-slaves.

A couple years after the release of ADWD, an obnoxiously wrong and poisonous idea began to creep into the ASOIAF fandom: Daenerys’ violence against the slaveowners in Slaver’s Bay is dangerous and immoral, and peace is the better option. This idea was most persuasively argued in the Meereenese Blot’s series of essays.

I’ll quote some of the conclusion here:

“They are supposed to feel this generic distrust for everyone, and to fail to grasp that their peaces were actually quite successful. Dany is supposed to conclude — wrongly — that her behavior through most of the book was silly and foolish. And if you came away with those impressions too, it’s perfectly understandable…The whole plotline is designed to maneuver Dany into a mental place where she’ll decide to sideline her concerns for innocent life, and take what she wants with fire and blood.”

This idea, much like the idea that Daenerys is some sort of unhinged fascist just waiting for the right trigger, makes me unbelievably angry. This idea that I am supposed to value the life of the slaveowner and the slave equally, and that maintaining a “peaceful” slave-owning society is an acceptable alternative to violent revolution is so fundamentally revolting to me, that it turns my stomach even to write that sentence.

Some fans went even as far as to suggest that Daenerys’ occupation of Meereen was a parallel to the US occupation of Iraq, and that she was engaged in erasing an authentic slave-owning culture that she despised. If you read the above series of essays, you can see that they are, at the least, enabling that kind of thinking.

To be clear, I do not consider any slave society to be worth a damn thing. Anything that continues it is evil and all that attempts to destroy it is good. That being said, once again Steven Attewell does a better job than I ever could of rebutting the ideas of the Meereneese Blot, and explaining how the correct parallel of Daenerys’ actions in Meereen is the American mistake of abandoning radical reconstruction. He describes her actions in Meereen as abandoning a revolution half complete. I highly recommend reading it, especially if you are American.

Martin is not a pacifist. He has said he would have fought in WWII. He demonstrated against Vietnam. As far as I know, the first time George ever used the words “Fire and Blood” was in a book released in 1982 called Fevre Dream:

“I never held much with slavery […]. You can’t just go… usin’ another kind of people, like they wasn’t people at all. Know what I mean? Got to end, sooner or later. Better if it ends peaceful, but it’s got to end even if it has to be with fire and blood, you see? Maybe that’s what them abolitionists been sayin’ all along. You try to be reasonable, that’s only right, but if it don’t work, you got to be ready. Some things is just wrong. They got to be ended.”

Daenerys is a slave-freeing, slave-owner-killing Hero with a capital H. She has made mistakes. I weep for the lives of the slaves that she has thrown away by abandoning her revolution, by failing to give the people of Astapor the strength to defend themselves, by maintaining a false peace that allows the Meereneese KKK to kill ex-slaves in the night. I shed no tears for the slaveowners that she has killed. When you treat other human beings as property you forfeit your right to Prosperity, Freedom, and Life. Preferably in that order—I would prefer that a slave society could peacefully transition, that those who attempted to continue it could be locked up, and that bloodshed could be avoided. But sometimes violence is necessary.

Daenerys will make more mistakes, I am sure. I believe that she will swing too far in the other direction, temporarily. But that’s a topic for another time.

[20:57] She comforts the hound even as he threatens her and helps him on his path from violence to peace.

Sandor did not die, despite what the Elder Brother told Brienne. He uses his words very carefully, to suggest that the Hound is dead, but that Sandor Clegane the man is simply “at rest.” He has become a brother of the isle.

“On the upper slopes they saw three boys driving sheep, and higher still they passed a lichyard where a brother bigger than Brienne was struggling to dig a grave. From the way he moved, it was plain to see that he was lame.” - Brienne VI, AFFC

[21:40] If they don’t understand why Tywin is a villain then of course they won’t understand why the Others are the main villains of the series, and will probably replace them with some blonde queen. And if you don’t understand that the cold of the human heart is the real enemy than of course you’ll think you can stop winter by just stabbing it. Like Tywin would.

In the books the Others are the villains. They are what the whole story is building towards, much like in LOTR the story builds towards Frodo casting the ring into the Fire. Martin has said that he thinks that the finishing chapters of LOTR, like the Scouring of the Shire, were important, so we may see something like that, but the clear emphasis will be on the existential evil, and cleaning up Cersei or Aegon “Targaryen’s” mess will be a clear step down in importance. It’s something that the heroes have grown beyond, but still need to handle, just like Saruman in the Shire.

[22:04] There’s nothing wrong with liking Game of Thrones, or disliking Lord of the Rings, or anything else.

I really do mean this. I am going to be critical of things you like, and am going to praise things you love. People are different, that’s to be expected. I am not here to pretend that people should only like the things I like. I’m interested in what makes these stories work. I said much the same thing in my last video about some of the new Star Wars properties. People tend to get really attached to the media they like (I’m no exception) and that can color our perception of criticism. Do try to keep in mind that if you like something I criticize it isn’t an attack on you. You have a sacred and personal relationship to the things you enjoy that no one can take from you. I like all kinds of stuff that other people might consider bad, and that’s okay. Actually it’s great, because it gives us something to talk about.

I may genuinely hate Game of Thrones because it butchers something I came to love, but that doesn’t mean I have anything against the people who do like it for their own reasons. We’re all just out here enjoying what we like.

PART THREE: THE WITCHER

There is less in this section for two reasons. First, I promised not to spoil anything past the material covered in the show and I’ll stick to that here. Second—full disclosure here—I haven’t read all of the books because after Blood of Elves I got pretty bored and from what I had heard they did not improve in quality, and if anything got worse. Having already felt that going from the anthologies to Blood I was happy to end my reading there.

If something I say is contradicted by a later book that I didn’t read feel free to let me know.

[23:31] First I should mention that Sapkowski’s works are not on the same level as Tolkien’s and Martin’s, who are the best and second-best fantasy authors of all time. I have enjoyed the Witcher books that I have read, but they are not anywhere near as complex or beautifully written.

This is just my opinion, see above paragraph. I really do think that it’s a pretty common opinion though. I’ve read it before, and you often see people recommend the first two Witcher anthologies in a “if you like it maybe see if you like the rest of them?” sort of way. Book sales numbers also support this, though by all accounts they are exploding in the wake of the show.

But, one potential issue is that I’m reading a translation so I have no idea how good Sapkowski’s prose actually is. You get a lot of sentences in the US edition like: “it must be both bothersome and irritating.” Translation is art, not science, and passages like these make me worry that the translator is just translating each phrase without worrying about all the subtlety that makes language beautiful. These are minor examples of course, but they worry me about what else might be changed. So take my criticism of his writing with a giant, translated, grain of salt, in that I don’t read Polish.

[23:58] Despite this, Geralt the Witcher has been worming his way into popular culture for years, interestingly on the back of a series of video games

Google trends clearly show that the video games are what primarily generated interest in the character before the show. There were no English editions until around the time the games started coming out, and the US editions all feature concept art from the games on the covers. The release of the subsequently translated books after the games received very little attention in comparison to the games.

[24:15] In my opinion, that decline of focus on Geralt was the greatest weakness in the books, and the focus on Geralt is the greatest strength of the games. Because Geralt is at the core of what made Sapkowski’s story and world engaging in the first place. He is a fascinating character in a way that Ciri, who is a fairly standard fantasy “chosen child,” could never be.

This is just my opinion, and I explain why I think Geralt is so great in the subsequent paragraphs. Reasonable people can disagree on this, but I’ve come across more than a couple fantasy characters who could be generically described as “royal orphans with special powers.” It’s not exactly novel. Geralt is pretty novel, at least in terms of what I have read.

[24:49] He suffers many of the same psychological problems that characters like Tyrion and Brienne suffer from in Martin’s work

The technical name for these kinds of issues is “internalized bigotry.” This happens when you get treated consistently horribly by the society you live in due to some fundamental fact about yourself that you didn’t choose, and eventually you begin to believe and “internalize” their opinion of you. For example, people expect Tyrion to be unlovable, conniving, lecherous, and debauched. Eventually he simply leans into these characteristics, because in a way it’s almost easier to be what people expect you to be.

[25:48] To top it off, he hides all this inside a cynical and nihilistic exterior, he pretends he doesn’t care when in fact, he cares more than anyone.

The shot that accompanies this, of Geralt looking intently at what’s happening in the room while others tend to be watching with a sort of mild curiosity like you might at an unexpected circus performance, did an awesome job of conveying this idea.

[26:36] This was kind of a cool idea, but predictably their scenes ended up being generally less interesting and engaging then Geralt’s. Yennefer’s were sometimes fantastic but Ciri’s rarely were.

This was the opinion of fans that I most commonly observed. I don’t have any empirical evidence of this. If you have any that either supports or contradicts this please let me know, I would be fascinated to see it. I could see someone really loving Yennefer’s scenes, and I personally enjoyed a lot of them, but I don’t understand how someone could walk away from the first season with Ciri as their favorite character of the three. I’ll come back to this in a later section.

[27:40] In many ways the first two books, and the games, have more in common with Sherlock Holmes than they do most other fantasy stories.

Really a more accurate comparison would be Philip Marlowe since Geralt is definitely more of an American Pulp detective than a British one. I do love the similarity between Geralt’s Witcher Senses in The Witcher 3 and Sherlock’s detective vision in Crimes and Punishment. I can’t make the same comparison to a Philip Marlowe game, because no one’s made one yet.

Actually that’s not strictly true. There was one game that came out in 1996.

[28:12] But Netflix’s Witcher has barely a whiff of detective fiction anywhere. I think this has caused a lot of fans to feel alienated by the show, even if they can’t explain exactly why.

It’s not reasonable to expect people to know why they like or don’t like something. It’s a feeling, and unless they have experience with writing, narratology, literature, film studies, or just read a lot of tvtropes.org, they are not likely to be able to put their finger on what it is. This causes people to disproportionally blame the things that are most obviously wrong. The premiere example of this is Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. Jar Jar was obviously bad, but he doesn’t even come close to the top ten biggest problems with the movie. It was much worse that there was no main character or understandable plot and drama. Check out Red Letter Media’s legendary review for more on that.

I think a similar thing happened with Ciri, in that her story was sort of obviously underwhelming and so received a lot of flak, but there are deeper problems with the show.

[32:04] The third change is more subtle, but I’m worried that this Geralt genuinely believes in neutrality.

Just like Ned, the showrunners would not be the first to espouse this view. This quote in particular about “evil is evil” is obnoxiously peddled about as a justification for fence-sitting despite the fact that Geralt’s actual behavior doesn’t support it at all.

I don’t know for sure if the showrunners genuinely think Geralt tries to be neutral. There’s some evidence for yes in the first episode, the Borch episode, the Striga episode, and a couple of others. There’s strong evidence for no in the Duny/Pavetta episode. We’ll just have to see.

To be clear, when I mean “neutral” I mean in the face of immediate violence or injustice. Geralt often doesn’t care who is king, as he explains to Ostrit. But he won’t let a Striga continue to kill people just for coin.

[37:20] When the writers took away Ned’s best arguments for his actions, when they took his story of existential triumph, of not compromising his morals, and turned it into a simple tragedy, they showed they clearly did not understand his heroism.

See PoorQuentyn’s explanation of existential heroism, and how it applies to ASOIAF.

[37:58] In the books, Ciri and Yennefer are included in the story through their connection to Geralt, because he is our hero and the foundation of our connection to the world. In the show they are included before ever having met Geralt, and they take up time that could have been spent focusing on those devilish detective details that make Geralt’s stories and character work.

Originally this video had a lot of discussion about how well these two other characters worked, but it ended up being kind of useless because it comes down to personal opinion, and the writers failure to properly use Geralt massively overshadows whether or not someone liked or didn’t like either of the other two leads. Again, I get why someone could like Yennefer’s scenes. I get why someone could maybe even like her scenes more than Geralt’s. Anya Chalotra did great. I thought the writing was a little weak at times, but on balance pretty decent. Geralt gets the benefit of all his stories being straight adaptations, and she didn’t, so it was a pretty decent job.

On the other hand, I thought Ciri’s storyline was a giant waste of space. When I think of all the best moments in the show, Ciri doesn’t show up in any of them. She spends the entire season running away from and interacting with fairly minor and forgettable characters that did not need to be introduced in this season. Calanthe, Eist, and Mousesack were great characters and the actors gave great performances, but that did not make up for the fact that her storyline went nowhere and did nothing to justify its inclusion. If someone loved Ciri’s storyline I would genuinely be interested to know why.

[39:10] I do have some sympathy for the writers of the Witcher.

Many times in this video I mention sympathy for various writers. Moviemaking is a massively complex undertaking. If you know anything about the difficulty of getting these things together you’ll know that it’s an absolute miracle any movie gets made and takes herculean effort from everyone involved. Television series are arguably even worse because they are longer, more complex, and often have a lower budget despite that. The people involved are honestly doing their best, and I recognize that, even if I criticize the product.

[39:47] They are in this unfortunate position where they can’t really pull the majority of their writing straight from the books because the material isn’t really strong enough by itself.

The books are very dialogue heavy. As I allude to, the one scene that was very close to the book is that scene with Filavandrel and it’s just obnoxious because the two characters just dialogue at each other. It goes on even longer in the book. How well that works in a book is up for debate but it wasn’t going to work on the screen, and it didn’t.

These problems are not insurmountable though. You can put other footage over these monologues. You could have included some footage of Elves fighting in their war. You could have footage of the “cursed” daughters of Lilit being locked in towers or autopsied while Stregobor explains it. I get this is more budget, but that budget went other places.

On the other hand some great scenes that I think would have translated excellently shot-for-shot from the book with little additional budget, like Renfri and Geralt in the Alderman’s attic, are entirely cut. Ah well.

[40:25] Well, I have my theories, but it in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I have a sneaking suspicion that somebody thought it needed to be more “epic” than the first two books are, so we got all this princess and political stuff in early. If there’s any merit to the idea that this series “copied” GoT, it’s somewhere in here, just like how the Hobbit got poisoned with all of the “epicness” of LOTR.

[44:54] Lastly, I’m gonna do my best to put out more regular content going forward. I’m aiming for at least one video a month.

I place no limitation on topics. It’ll probably be mostly media analysis, but if I’m honest I’m just going to write about whatever interests me. That’s the best way to keep myself interested.

That being said, if you have something you think I should analyze let me know. If I’m interested, I might do it.

#witcher #netflix witcher #lotr #asoiaf #game of thrones #anti-got #lord of the rings #adaptation #video companions

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