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hamliet · 3 years ago

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Musings on Redemption + Narrative Obligation

This isn’t a meta but rather musings on a disconnect I see based on takes about Ruby’s role in saving Cinder Fall in RWBY, and Deku/Shouto/Ochaco’s roles in saving Shigaraki/Touya/Toga in BNHA.

Of course Ruby has no moral obligation to forgive, or even save (which is not equivalent to forgiving) Cinder. Shouto has no obligation to forgive Endeavor or Touya, and Deku has none to forgive Shigaraki, and Ochaco none for Toga.

But as the main heroine/heroes of a “save the world” story? Narratively, well, yeah. They do. Saving X character is their (literary) responsibility. That is their job.

This is one of the places where people blurring the line between fiction and reality creates disconnect in conversations. Fiction does not occur in a vacuum. It is a part of reality and is influenced by and influences reality. However, it is not a 1=1 parallel to anything in real life. (Like, that’s why books almost always include a statement about how “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”)

So when people talk obligation/how Hero will save Villain (tbh I usually don’t like to use the term obligation because the connotations don’t really fit and bring to mind real world issues that are best left out of it), they’re (mostly) not talking about a moral necessity. The expectations (“obligations”) here are in terms of how writing works, not in terms of how life goes or real world morality . It’s not “they’re a bad person/character if they don’t save X,” it’s “the story doesn’t make much sense if X, which has been set up, does not eventually happen. So here’s how the path might look to get there.” BNHA and RWBY are stories. Stories play with tropes, often following them well. Tropes are like markers that help readers navigate through a story to understand its meaning.

This doesn’t mean I think Ruby should be condemned in story or out of it for however she feels about Cinder, or even for hating Cinder (imo she won’t forgive her, either way). It does mean that people recognize where the story’s trajectory is going, and that Cinder’s arc is set up with classic redemption tropes albeit quite possibly without ending up “buddy buddy” with the heroes (that’s imo for Emerald and Mercury). Same for Deku, Shouto, and Ochaco, even if I do think Shouto and Touya will end up as brothers (Deku + Shigaraki and Ocahco+Toga might end as friendly, but we’ll see).

It’s also foolish in real life and out to assume that people can change without anyone else playing any sort of role. This is a purity culture real-world reflected thing I see in progressive circes (literary and elsewhere) that I think is often harmfully oversimplified. No person is an island. Now, that does not mean every single individual on this earth has an obligation to feel empathy for, much less forgive, even more much less reconcile, with people who hurt them or others. However, it does mean that someone probably will feel this way at some point, and whether it’s romantic love--requited or unrequited (Buffy and Spike, Sonia and Raskolnikov), platonic familial love (Luke and Vader, Nina and Johan), or even just simple pity on the basis of both being human and principles based on that (Tenma and Johan, Sing and Yut-Lung), someone’s gotta reach out to a spiraling person.

Generally characters are main heroes because they are that special someone. They’re chosen as the protagonist for a reason, even if they’re not “the chosen one” (like Ruby, Shouto, and Ochaco; Deku is the chosen one i guess shouto kinda is in his family?). That doesn’t mean heroes do the redeeming for them, but instead that kindness or some other positive trait inspires change. There’s nuance there, but there are reasons people expect this type of thing from a heroic protagonist especially in stories with themes of rebirth and hope. It would be far different if this was a postmodern tragedy.

Stories allow us to portray human nature in a blurry reflection, where there are set paths that there might not be in real life. Saying that Ruby will save Cinder/the BNHA kids will save the League of Villains is not saying that real life individuals are under obligations to save real life people who have hurt them. I get why that is triggering, though, because irl ppl do try to weaponize beautiful things to make sense of the senseless. You are not obligated. Let me be blunt about that. Anyone who tries to force you to do such a thing is wrong. It’s your choice, it’s your power, it’s your human free will that allows you to decide what to do with your pain and how to heal.

But most forms of storytelling, when redemptive tropes like “save the cat” and “stop the cycle of abuse” and themes of hope are introduced, it’s fair for readers/viewers to assume that the writers are doing so because they plan to fulfill these tropes. You don’t hint at something you don’t plan on satisfying; that’s Bad Writing 101 (see, Game of Thrones season 8).

Fans analyzing and predicting based on the narrative set up (as well as contemplating what “needs” to happen for a hero to get to a place of saving someone--it’s called an arc because most protagonists don’t start in such a place of extreme empathy and mercy) are not telling fans that you’re bad or that the characters are bad. (Well, I’m sure some ppl are, but to hell with ‘em). It’s merely a prediction based on story tropes.

#redemption #rwby #rwby theory #cinder fall redemption #bnha #bnha theory

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nyerus · 5 years ago

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His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince of XianLe -- Xie Lian

I wanted to do a little meta for Xie Lian to celebrate his birthday, about why he’s an incredible and unique character! One of my absolute faves. Happy Birthday Lianlian! ヽ(o´∀`)ﾉ♪♬

(Spoiler Warning!!!) (Also: massive length warning--get snacks!)

Xie Lian and The Hero’s Journey

One of the most interesting things about Xie Lian is that his personal arc starts near the end. Meaning that he is already nearly fully-realized by the time we meet him in book 1. He has only a few steps left in his classical Hero’s Journey, since TGCF starts in media res. A lot of his growth has been completed--which we witness more first-hand in books 2 and 4--so by the time we meet Xie Lian, he is already endured the most painful of his trials. It leaves him with the traits readers first pick up on: calm, confident, humble, and kind.

The main steps he has left to complete in his journey are the quintessential “atonement with the Father” and his “return home.” These stages of the Hero’s Journey are actually played somewhat straight in TGCF, and the former stage is actually the main plot of the novel. The stages are not meant to be literal, but metaphorical tools for literary analysis, as most books we read employ them in one way or another. TGCF does so as well, just out of order. So Xie Lian’s confrontation with Jun Wu (atonement), then getting his happy ending with Hua Cheng (return home) are the respective stages we see play out in the “present” narrative.

(However, he does have a “call to action stage” nestled within the present-time plotline. One can almost think of this as one Hero’s Journey nestled inside another.)

Xie Lian and The Heaven’s Will

The Heavens shook spectacularly when Xie Lian ascended. Each ascension, the Heavens greeted him with grandeur, even on what he considered his “fluke” of a second. And on his third ascension, the Heavens announced his return in a way that no one had ever seen before--by astonishing all its residents; bringing down the gilded palaces of other gods, and having the ancient clock sound off so fervently that it broke free of its hinges.

There is a lot of symbolism in this alone.

While Xie Lian’s narration (and the reactions of the other heavenly officials, including Ling Wen) paints his third ascension as a mix of comedic and tragic, we can interpret this scene differently. Xie Lian is the only one to have ascended thrice. He is the only one for whom the Heavens shook so powerfully. It isn’t because he’s a disgraced laughing stock--it’s because the Heaven know his true character, and his true strength.

(As an aside--see this post of mine about Heaven as an entity, separate from the Heavenly Capital and gods therein.)

It isn’t a big stretch to conclude that the Heavens show Xie Lian a particular amount of favoritism that it doesn’t to anyone else. One of the explanations for this could be that Xie Lian is the closest thing to the physical representation of the Heaven’s Will™.

This isn’t to say that Xie Lian is perfect. He isn’t, by any means. But he doesn’t have to be. Further thinking of the Heavens along the classic Taoist principles that TGCF draws from, the point is that Xie Lian tries. He works hard with what he has, embraces his fate and destiny, and makes the best of it as much as he can. Xie Lian himself doesn’t set out to be perfect. That is not his goal. His goal is to be a good person who is able to help people. He is morally upright, sincere, and humble. He seeks to maintain balance. These are treasured qualities.

Ultimately, he is human. He makes grievous mistakes, he makes bad decisions, and so on. But at the end of the day, Xie Lian lacks no conviction about his ideology. Even though he endured hell, and very nearly succumbed to darkness, there was always a part of him that held onto that notion that people were worth saving. Even at his worst, he still hesitated before causing harm. And when the man with the bamboo hat helped him--just a single gesture--it was enough for Xie Lian to rediscover that part of himself. His beliefs were re-affirmed, and he found the strength he needed to carry them.

The Heavens did not penalize Xie Lian for needing help. In fact, they rewarded him with ascension itself. When Xie Lian accepted his grief, he began to overcome it. He refused to fall into total despair--and while the actual nature of his second ascension are ambiguous, it’s probable that this is why he ascended. Not because he fought against Bai Wuxiang (because he wasn’t even the one to “win” that battle physically), but because he stood against him in the first place. Xie Lian’s grief, subsequent resolve, and decision to ultimately oppose everything Bai Wuxiang represented--THAT was his Heavenly Tribulation. And he passed with flying colors (much to Jun Wu’s intense fury).

[CONTINUED UNDER CUT DUE TO LENGTH.]

What it fundamentally comes down to, is that Xie Lian chooses to be compassionate. He does so even and especially in the face of adversity. Choosing to be kind when it is the hardest path of all is the mark of true courage and strength. It can’t be said it enough: Xie Lian very consciously makes the choice to do good even when it is hard for him. Even when he doesn’t want to. Because being a good and moral person doesn’t mean that you never have negative thoughts, and for sure Xie Lian gets frustrated and upse. It doesn’t mean you never make mistakes or never hurt people, because Xie Lian has done all those things before as well. After all, he is human, god or not. Things are not black-and-white, and never will be. But staying true to one’s ideals is what matters.

When Xie Lian made the decision to help Yong’An during the drought, for example, he knew it may be futile. He knew that he was breaking rules, going against what everyone else was saying. But he knew in his heart that it was the morally responsible thing to do. He is not the type of person to sit by quietly when there are people in need. He cannot see injustice and despair, and turn a blind eye to it. It also isn’t necessary (or even possible) for him to help literally everyone--as he learns the hard way. But doing what he can, where he can--that’s more than enough for Heaven to favor him. Because that’s the sign of someone who is genuinely compassionate and just.

So it’s no wonder that the Heavens favored him more than others. With a pure heart and strong sense of justice, while still being humble and patient--that’s all the Heavens need.

It’s even ironic that Xie Lian spoke out against the very “Heavens” themselves in book 2, at the height of his pride. But he was actually speaking out against the institution of heaven, and the overly-conservative beliefs that the gods (Heavenly Officials) held. Xie Lian has an extremely non-traditional view of looking at things.

His ideas go against the grain of what has been held true to the people of the world for centuries, but are actually in line with many modern philosophies--that one should not give much importance to idol worship, and instead focus on doing good deeds. That gods, being immortal ascended humans, should display the same humility and temperance; that they not hold themselves in higher regard or expect others to be subservient or fearful. This could very much be in line with what the Heaven’s will actually may be. Why the Heavens favor him so--because Xie Lian understands, in every sense, that gods are only human.

Xie Lian’s Character Growth

“I WON’T CHANGE! EVEN IF IT’S PAINFUL, I WON’T CHANGE. EVEN IF I DIE, I WON’T CHANGE. I WILL NEVER CHANGE!” (ch.239)

That’s the big thing about Xie Lian. It’s what sets him apart from many other characters. From the beginning to the end of his journey, his motivations and beliefs do not change. Only the nature of his motivations, and the basis of his beliefs change. That is to say, he believed that helping others was the right thing to do when he was 17 years old. 800 years later, he still feels this way. It’s just that he approaches the concept differently.

As a teenager, he was naive and coming from a place of high privilege. He was unable to understand the true plights of the common man, and his concepts of helping them--while still noble and morally just--were often somewhat patronizing. His heart was in the right place, but he was simply too young and too sheltered. He also fundamentally overestimated his own capability to help others, while underestimating the negative forces at play that would actively work against him. But 800 years later, Xie Lian has gone through hell and back. He knows better than anyone what it means to struggle, to suffer, to hope, to persevere. He still wants to help the common man, but now it comes from a place of understanding and humility. (The tragedy is, if he were allowed to grow up “normally,” he very much may have grown out of his naiveté and youthful arrogance anyway, after gaining more worldly experience. He was robbed of that chance.)

So Xie Lian chooses to be optimistic about life in general. He knows that he will get hurt by doing this. That people will take advantage of him. He knows, and yet, he continues to hold true to his principles. He neither asks nor expects people to thank him for it, or even understand him (as many people simply don’t). He does it because what other people think or even deserve is not his concern. It comes down to what he believes. That’s just the type of character he is--which is to say: fantastic.

TLDR; Xie Lian Best Boi!!!

#tgcf #tian guan ci fu #heaven offical's blessing #hob #meta #tgcf meta #Sorry had to repost this!#there was an error in the last one's format...#nyerus.txt #its a bit early for lianlian's bday but idk if i'll be able to post tomorrow so here we are #please DM if you see mistakes in this lol

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spine-buster · 5 years ago

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The President Wears Prada (William Nylander) | Chapter 8

November 10th, 2019

Aberdeen Bloom was in her hotel room.

The Leafs had lost to Chicago. Chicago scored four goals in the first period. It was a shitshow. And although the boys rallied back late in the third period, they just couldn’t get that fifth goal to send it into overtime and at least get a point. William scored two goals – en route to a hat trick – but didn’t get it. He did get third star of the game though. Aberdeen knew he was trying to impress his parents and show off in front of his brother.

The team was spending the night in Chicago before leaving late tomorrow for Long Island, meaning that Aberdeen had the day off and could actually go and explore. She’d never been, and she knew eight or ten hours was not nearly enough to really explore a city, but she thought about taking a city bus tour that hit all the major sites. Truthfully, she was learning more towards just spending the entire day at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was on her bucket list.

After the stress of travelling and the back to back games, she was tired. She’d taken a long, hot shower before putting on her pajamas and slipping into the hotel bathrobe. With her hair wrapped in a towel, she ripped open a sheet mask and put it on, massaging it onto her face. She texted Kasha, who sent her some pictures and videos of Minerva sleeping on her bed, which calmed her down but also made her wish she was curled up with her cat. Eventually, Aberdeen lay upright in bed, trying to get some reading of Women Talking by Miriam Toews done before she fell asleep.

But then there was a light knock at her door.

She was so tired and so annoyed and so engrossed in her book that she didn’t even bother to look through the peephole to see who it was. She forgot she was in her pajamas and bathrobe. She forgot she had an entire sheet mask on her face that made her look like Jason. She just opened the door, not thinking about anything.

Which made seeing William on the other side of the door all the more frightening.

He had quite the amused look on his face. “Hey.”

She shut the door in his face. She turned around so her back was against the door, internally freaking out, looking around for a means of escape. She seriously contemplated jumping out the window. It was only eight floors – that didn’t mean too many broken bones, right? She could…she could…

“Open the door, Aberdeen,” she could hear him from the other side, his voice low but loud enough that only she could hear.

“No,” she said, having the wherewithal to finally rip the sheet mask off her face and shove it into the pocket of the robe. It was still wet, damn it. A sheet mask wasted.

“Come on, Aberdeen.”

“What are you even doing here?” she asked.

“Would you rather Brendan find me outside your hotel room or would you rather hide me in the shower where he wouldn’t see me?” William asked rhetorically.

Aberdeen’s heart and her mind started racing, thinking that Brendan was on the way down to her room or down the hallway or something. She rushed to open the door and stuck her head out, looking down both ends of the hallway. William, for his part, slipped past her and into her room. “Is he here?!” she asked in a harsh whisper.

“God no. Brendan’s asleep,” William said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s eleven at night, Aberdeen. The man needs his rest.”

She looked back at him practically sauntering into her hotel room and shut the door, locking it behind her for full effect. She crossed her arms to make herself appear angry. William still had an amused smile on his face. “I reiterate my question – what are you even doing here?”

“Why wouldn’t I be here?”

“Weren’t you going to dinner with your parents and Alex?”

“That’s done.”

“So, like, don’t you want to spend time with your parents?”

“They have an early morning flight to catch to Dallas to visit Jackie at SMU,” he said. “They went back to their hotel and went to bed.”

“And shouldn’t you be doing the same thing?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Cause I wanted to see you, minskatt.”

A blush overcame her cheeks. “Will, this is really inappropriate,” she said, trying to mask it.

“Why?”

“You’re a hockey player in my hotel room,” she felt like she had to spell everything out for him. “If Brendan finds out he’d freak. If Kyle or Peter found out, they’d freak. Hell, if your teammates found out—”

“Even if they did, they wouldn’t say anything,” William interrupted her.

She stopped dead in her tracks. That was not plausible. Any single one of them would go to Brendan in a second if she and Will were caught together like this. In her hotel room. At night. Alone. “I have a hard time believing that.”

“They wouldn’t. They know that I like you, so they wouldn’t.”

Aberdeen couldn’t respond with anything because she could think of anything to say. He flummoxed her constantly. He kept rendering her speechless and she didn’t know what to do about it – didn’t know if she could do anything about it. She watched as he leaned against the TV stand, crossing his own arms over his chest. “I’m asking for a third time now – what are you doing here?”

“Was that a sheet mask you had on your face before?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

She gave him major side eye. “Moisturizing. The traveling is drying out my skin.”

Will let out a slight chuckle. He looked past her towards her bed, and she followed his eyes and looked behind her. “What book are you reading?”

Was he being serious right now? Had he seriously made his way into her room to ask her about sheet masks and books? Not like she’d do anything else with him. But still. “Women Talking by Miriam Toews.”

“Do women talk in it?”

She audibly scoffed. “It’s about sexual assault in a Mennonite community.”

Will’s face dropped. “Oh fuck.”

Aberdeen couldn’t help but snort as she saw the look on his face. She tried to cover her mouth and her smile but the attempt was futile. He looked so embarrassed and it just brought her so much…well, delight. “God, Will,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning back to grab the book. “You are something else.”

“You like to read, then?” he tried to recover the conversation.

“I have a major in English, Will. And I want to become a writer. You can’t become a writer if you don’t read. Well I mean, you can, but you won’t be very good. And beyond that, I’ve made it my goal to read the shortlist of the Governor General Awards and the Giller Prize,” she said. She saw a slightly confused look on Will’s face. “They’re Canada’s highest literary awards. They’re like – well, not really, but you’re Swedish, so – it’s like being a Nobel Laureate, but obviously the Nobel is much more prestigious. I read them too.”

The smile that appeared on his face was so innocent and pure that she wanted to wipe it off his face. She couldn’t handle it. “I remember that you want to be a writer. You told me the first time we met,” he said. Aberdeen shivered. “So what are you doing here with the Leafs?”

“In my quest for any type of job, they were the only ones that called,” she informed him. “No newspapers or magazines came calling, so it was this or bank telling.”

He pushed himself off the TV console, making his way over to sit beside her on the edge of the bed. He looked over at her. “I think you’d make a great writer.”

“Thanks, but you haven’t read any of my writing.”

“Can I?”

“No.”

It was Will’s turn to snort. “Fair enough. Maybe I’ll get to read it one day.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, smiling down at the book as she held it between her hands, being very careful not to lose the page. “How was dinner with your parents?” she pivoted, not wanting to talk about herself or her writing anymore. “I bet you miss them a lot.”

William shrugged his shoulders. “I’m kind of used to it. When I was a kid my dad would be gone a lot.”

Aberdeen thought the worst. “Why?”

William looked at her weirdly. “My dad was an NHL player, Aberdeen.” He saw the shock on her face and couldn’t help but chuckle. “Do you not, like, google these things?”

“Why would I google your dad? I thought he was just…I don’t know, your dad!” she tried to defend herself.

“Well, he is just my dad—”

“But he was an NHL player,” she said. “What team did he play for?”

“A bunch. He was a journeyman. Alex and I were actually born in Calgary, but then it was Tampa, Chicago, Washington, Boston, New York…then back to Washington,” William listed off the cities he’d lived in. “It was a lot of moving around. A lot of back and forth. A lot of missing dad.”

Aberdeen could never imagine moving around that much as a kid. She was very fortunate to have lived in the same house her entire life, however old and small it was. She knew William’s life growing up was probably very nice – much nicer than hers, in the sense that he had a lot more money with his dad being an NHL player and all – but all of that couldn’t make up for missing your dad because you couldn’t actually see your dad. The first time Aberdeen realized she actually missed her parents was the grade nine orientation retreat her school ran, when she went to a camp in Muskoka for three days and two nights and got eaten alive by mosquitos. She couldn’t imagine that feeling happening over and over again. And not just over and over again…but throughout her entire childhood. “But Sweden is always home?” she asked, trying to brighten up the mood.

“Always,” he replied automatically, resolute in his tone. “In the summers, when we’d be all together in Sweden, and it was just…you know, family time…that was the best. Our house in Stockholm, or our house in the countryside…it was always amazing.”

Aberdeen smiled at him. He was so clearly fond of Sweden and fond of his family. If their Halloween talk didn’t secure it enough, this did. She wondered how much he missed his siblings on a regular basis; how geographically, they were so far away from each other, but in every other way they were so close. Much like she and Siena. She missed Siena every day.

“Hey Aberdeen?” Will’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

“Yeah?”

“You haven’t kicked me out yet.”

She gave him a look. He started chuckling at her scrunched up face, still glowing with moisturizer. “Don’t push it.”

***

November 13th 2019

Aberdeen felt both mentally and physically exhausted as the charter plane landed in Toronto just before midnight. The Leafs suffered another loss to the New York Islanders, John’s old team (who booed him every time he touched the puck, the savages), even though they battled back again from a goal deficit. Will scored. John scored too. But it wasn’t enough. Now, the team was officially on a three game losing streak (okay, technically only two if you didn’t count the shootout loss against Philly). Aberdeen was just…tired. She had the day off tomorrow to prepare for the Major Donor Dinner that night, worked Friday, and then – surprisingly – a full weekend off, since Brendan wasn’t traveling to Pittsburgh.

To says she was looking forward to it was an understatement.

“Who’s driving Aberdeen home?” John asked out loud as he always did when they came back from road trips late at night. She didn’t know if he’d taken it upon himself as the team captain to spearhead the movement, but she didn’t oppose it anymore. If they wanted to be chivalrous, she wasn’t going to stop them.

She usually rode into the city with Morgan, with Bee picking them up. Twice she’d gotten driven back into the city with Saylor and Kasperi. She was fully ready to hear Morgan’s voice pipe up like it always did – especially because Bee was always on time and already waiting for them by the time they landed. She even saw him about to say it, but he was cut off. “I’ve got it,” Will said immediately, not even looking at her. Morgan looked back at him, shrugging his shoulders. That was that.

Aberdeen noticed he drove a Volvo – of course he would, the Swede. She put her carry-on in the trunk and slipped into the passenger seat, waving goodbye at Justin Holl who had parked beside Will and was already backing out of his space. Will slipped into the driver’s seat, starting the car. He looked over at her, the smallest smile on his face. “Hey.”

“Hello.”

“You tired?” he asked.

“I’m exhausted.”

“Good,” he said, backing out of the parking spot, making his way out and onto the street.

“Good?”

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for a while,” he said, a smile on his face.

She side-eyed him. What exactly did he think they were going to get up to in his car of all places? She was wide awake now. “Why?”

“You always have your headphones in on the bus or plane when Brendan doesn’t need you.”

“So?”

“So it’s obvious you like music, and I’ve curated a playlist for this exact moment,” he smiled, fiddling around with his phone. He really shouldn’t have been doing that, since he was driving and it was illegal to do so. Aberdeen looked as he swiped through Spotify quickly, obviously knowing exactly where he needed to go.

“What moment is that?” she asked.

“Driving through Toronto at night,” he said, stopping at the red light. She chuckled slightly to herself, leaning her head back on the headrest and looking out her window. Of all the guys on the team, only Will would do something like this. Bee never made any playlists for driving Morgan home in the middle of the night. Hell, Saylor didn’t either. She was more preoccupied with telling Kasperi the exact details of what she’d been up to while he was gone, or telling him where they were going to go for drinks and oysters after they dropped Aberdeen off. “You ready?” he asked, wiggling his eyebrows.

“If you put on Drake to drive through Toronto at night, Will, I swear to God…” she warned.

There was a dramatic pause. The opening notes of Drake’s ‘Passionfruit’ played. Aberdeen overexaggerated her scoff and disgusted face, and William’s infamous laugh was so loud it could be heard over the music. “God, William…” she chastised playfully.

“Oh come on! It’s a good song!” he tried to defend himself.

“It’s one of his better songs, sure. I’ll give you that,” she said. “But what a lousy start.”

Will’s jaw dropped. “Oh, really? You can think of something better?”

“I can think of a million different songs that are better,” she quipped. She looked down at his phone sitting in the little cubby and went to grab it. She scrolled through the list, getting more and more disgusted by the songs and artists he’d added to the playlist. “Your taste in music is awful,” she scoffed again.

“HEY!”

“It’s true!”

“Okay Miss Superior Music Taste—”

“Okay, first of all, if you’re going to choose a Toronto artist to start a ‘driving though Toronto at night’ playlist, it should be The Weeknd,” she began, typing his name into the screen and swiping to add ‘Starboy’ and ‘I Feel It Coming’ to the playlist. “Like, where is Tory Lanez? Where’s Daniel Caesar? And why is it all rappers? This is so stereotypical. You need better music.”

“It doesn’t just have to be people from Toronto,” he said, making a turn. “And it’s all rappers because I li—”

“Seriously, this is awful.”

“You’re really mean when you’re exhausted,” he quipped.

“If it doesn’t have to be just full of people from Toronto then I’m hijacking this playlist and making it good,” she ignored his comment, already swiping her fingers all over his screen and typing in name after name.

Will would glance over occasionally, trying to keep his eyes on the road but finding it hard. She looked so cute concentrating so hard as Passionfruit played in the background. He bit his lip, trying to remain composed. “God, you’re gutting that thing,” he said.

“That’s how bad it is.”

He shook his head playfully. “You better hurry up. Passionfruit’s almost over.” Aberdeen finished off, keeping his phone in her lap as she let Passionfruit end. “It better be good,” he said.

She shot him a playful glare. “It’s awesome, thank you very much.”

As ‘Passionfruit’ ended, ‘Bride’ by San Fermin came on. Aberdeen was immediately pulled into the sounds and beats, closing her eyes and let it wash over her. William, on the other hand, furrowed his brows. “What is this?”

“San Fermin.”

“Who?”

She shot him another glare – how many she’d shot him in this car ride alone, she couldn’t even say. “Can you just listen?”

William gave it about a minute before he began shaking his head again. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

“You’re weak.”

“Put on something good this time,” he said as she picked up the phone again. He switched lanes to get onto the onramp for the Gardiner Expressway. He saw Aberdeen scrolling through the playlist, finally picking a song. ‘Green Light’ by Lorde. “Lorde? Really?”

“Don’t you dare say a bad word about Lorde,” she warned. “She’s perfect. Her music is perfect.”

“You think so?”

“She wrote Pure Heroine at sixteen. Sixteen!” she exclaimed. “I would give my left arm to have written like that at sixteen. I was writing awful, pretentious poetry about stupid boys in my high school at sixteen. And she wrote that entire album!”

William laughed, her clear enthusiasm and love of Lorde shining through in her words. It was adorable. She was adorable. She was many things, but right now, she was adorable. “Is she your favourite?” he asked.

“I have a lot of favourites,” Aberdeen admitted. “But yeah. She’s up there. Do you not listen to her?”

William shrugged his shoulders. “I know Royals. That was the big one, right? That’s basically it.”

“Well, you need to listen more.”

“Not the first time someone’s told me that,” he joked, keeping his eyes focused on the road.

Aberdeen bit her lip. She knew they were in the context of talking about music and her favourite artists, but that was a loaded sentence. When she and Brendan made their way to the locker room after the Islanders game, she could hear Mike Babcock’s voice from down the hallway. She’d watched and listened to some of his post-game interviews, and she wasn’t completely ignorant to the fact that he constantly, constantly, backhand complimented William and his skills. It didn’t matter if William got an assist, got one goal, even two goals – it was like Mike couldn’t say a good word about Will without undermining him somehow. She remembered the season opener, when William told her “I’m used to it” when she asked about it. She shifted uncomfortably in the passenger’s seat. “Will…”

“Hm?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, minskatt.”

She paused to try to collect herself. “What, like…I mean, I don’t mean to be nosey or whatever, or intrude…but what – I mean…like what kind of like—”

“Spit it out, Aberdeen.”

“What’s the issue between you and Mike Babcock?” she finally asked.

Will looked over at her quickly, shocked that she’d asked the question. “Hell if I knew,” he mumbled, shrugging his shoulders. That was a lie – he did know part of it. At least, he thought he knew part of it. “I don’t…I…okay. Last year,” he began, “the 2018-2019 season. It was my contract negotiation year. I went unsigned throughout the summer because I was holding out for a specific number and a long-term deal instead of what we call a ‘bridge’, so like a two or three year deal. I…I didn’t want to be anywhere else but Toronto, no matter what anyone else said. I still don’t want to be anywhere else but Toronto,” he explained. “And so, because of that holdout, I didn’t attend training camp. I didn’t play basically for the beginning half of the season. There…there was a lot of drama. A lot of rumours in the Toronto media – really nasty rumours, some of them. A bunch of talk about trading me. It produced this really…I don’t know, this really toxic, like, cloud surrounding me. A lot of people were angry about it. But I got my deal – I signed on December 1st, the last day legally possible to be able to play.”

Aberdeen thought back to what he told her about his dad. How much Will missed him as a kid growing up because Michael would be travelling for hockey. How much Michael was gone all the time. How every few years, the family would have to pack up and move to a completely different city, in a completely different part of the country, following Michael on his journeyman hockey career. Of course William wanted a long term deal. It was no wonder. He didn’t want to experience what he had to experience growing up – being shuffled around the league – now as an adult.

“The media did their job though,” he continued, breaking her train of thought. “They were relentless. Malicious. They turned a lot of people against me – a lot of fans who were influenced into thinking I was a spoiled Swedish brat. Overhyped, overpaid, waste of money. A plug. Getting in the way of hiring a good Canadian boy, forgetting the fact that I was born in Calgary,” he almost smiled to himself, shaking his head. “So…I don’t know. I guess Mike didn’t get over my holdout. Maybe he feels bitter about it. Maybe he thinks I’m selfish, that I shouldn’t have held out. Maybe he thinks I’m an overhyped, overpaid plug taking a spot from a good Canadian enforcer or something. But it’s all hypothetical. It’s all maybes. I can’t tell you why, exactly, he always says those things.”

Aberdeen didn’t know any of this. She didn’t know William held out on his contract. She didn’t know there was a portion of the city that hated just him specifically. She didn’t know about bridge deals, long term deals, and about him wanting to be in Toronto – nowhere else. She didn’t know any of it. And that’s when she finally realized: that was her exact problem. This was why she kept making careless comments that made Brendan so upset. She didn’t know anything about the team; she didn’t know anything about its members, how they got to Toronto, how they liked being here. She didn’t know the history and barely took time to learn.

“You need to walk into this building everyday knowing and understanding the history of this hockey club beyond just the surface level and what Brendan tells you,” Kyle told her after she went crying to him like a baby. “But you already know what to do, Aberdeen. You just need to find it within yourself and do it.”

She needed to understand the team as an institution, but also as a group of guys creating and carrying on the legacy of that institution.

Now she knew.

“That’s awful,” she said, considering everything he told her. She couldn’t believe a coach would hold something like that against a player. “You…you don’t deserve that, Will. Any of it.”

“I know,” he said, nodding his head slightly. “You don’t have to tell me that, minskatt. Mike’s just…listen, he’s a good coach – a great coach. I mean, he’s won two gold medals. And he has a very specific system—”

“William,” she interrupted him. He looked over at her. “Don’t make excuses.”

He smiled at her – a true, genuine smile. And as he did, the opening notes of ‘Style’ by Taylor Swift began to play, and a shiver ran up Aberdeen’s spine. She had to look away – had to – because if she looked any longer at him, she would spontaneously self-combust. That, or lean over the centre console and do something she would immediately regret. As she looked out the front, she saw them approaching downtown – all the lights and the skyscrapers illuminating the city, and the CN Tower lit up brightly in red. “This is my favourite drive,” she mumbled.

“What?”

“This is my favourite drive,” she repeated, speaking up. “This…the Gardiner going into the city. Swerving through all the buildings. All the lights. And this song is perfect for it. Absolutely fucking perfect.”

William continued to smile at her, looking between her and the road as ‘Style’ continued to play. The riff, the beat…everything was perfect. She was busy focused on the view, and on the beat of the song, singing it lightly to herself, her voice getting above the volume of the song only minimally. She even took out her own phone and began recording the drive and the lights, no doubt to post on Instagram later. She looked perfect. She was perfect, at least to him. He needed to utilize every ounce of self-control he had in him as he continued to watch her. “This is really hard,” he said out loud, breaking somewhat.

“What? Listening to Taylor Swift?”

He laughed. “No. All I really want to do is reach across the dash and hold your hand but I know I can’t.”

She blushed, looking down at her hands instead of looking at him. She always had a few rings on – a few dainty ones, stacked, and one her mom gave her that once belonged to her grandmother – and she began playing with them nervously. He signalled to get off at the appropriate exit. “Will…”

“I know, I know,” he said. He was biting his lip down, hard, probably to stop him from saying or doing anything else. “I’m sorry.”

The rest of their ride was silent, since it wasn’t much longer until he reached her condo. When they finally arrived, she made sure he knew he didn’t have to get out of the car when he popped the trunk for her to get her carry-on. She rolled it back to the passenger window. “Thanks for the ride Will,” she smiled.

“Will I see you at the dinner tomorrow?” Will asked out the window, leaning over the centre console.

She paused for a second. He knew about that? She thought it was an office personnel only event. “You’re going?”

“Of course I am,” he smiled.

She rolled her eyes. “Of course you are.”

“Brendan likes to shuffle some of us out as a surprise for the donors. It’ll be me, John, Jason, and Mitch,” he explained quickly. “So I’ll see you there?”

“Yes. You’ll see me there.”

#william nylander #william nylander imagine #william nylander fic #william nylander fan fic #toronto maple leafs #toronto maple leafs imagine #toronto maple leafs fic #toronto maple leafs fan fic #nhl #nhl imagine #nhl fic #nhl fan fic #hockey #hockey imagine #hockey fic #hockey fan fic #the president wears prada series

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inkykeiji · 3 years ago

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Hi hi! I hope you’re taking care of yourself 🥺 have you been up to anything exciting? I have a question for u.. how do u make ur writing so unique? I feel like smut gets so repetitive and a lot of people use the same descriptions and analogies or whatever. Your stuff is always written so differently, do u have any advice? Anyway, have a good day or night sweetness 💕 - 💸

aaaaaah sweet angel dollars hello!!! <3 not particularly, to be honest!! i’ve been planning out the last few months of 2021 in terms of writing tho and that’s getting me super excited!!

ooh, that is a very good question! and i think that it’s quite a difficult question to answer, because style (regardless of the art medium) is such a personal thing, and every single creator has their very own unique style/aura inherently and irrevocably imbued within their work that is comprised of their personal experiences, feelings, opinions, beliefs, influences, art that has had an impact on them in some way, etc etc etc the list goes on forever. sometimes these styles can be more distinct or noticeable than others, but i genuinely believe everyone possesses one, even if it’s less developed than someone else’s. i’m going to get more into this under the cut because i have a feeling this is going to be a LOOONG answer hehe <3

okay FIRST OF ALL i want to say thank you for your compliment on my smut!!! that means so much to me you don’t even know, because i work so dang hard on my smut (it takes me up to a week to write one smut scene, on average!), so thank you!!! <333

secondly, the reason why i mentioned style above is because i want you to know that you DO possess your own style, just like everyone else, and as you continue to create it will show itself more, and more, and more; it will continue to strengthen itself and distinguish itself (but it is already there, it already exists in your work, i promise!). my favourite thing about creating art is that there’s virtually no cap to it; you’re never going to reach the top or the peak of writing because you will continue to improve and get better for as long as you live (or create hehe).

as such, my primary piece of advice to you is to look through your work and begin analyzing it. what elements do you notice cropping up repeatedly? what themes are present? which literary devices do you seem to gravitate towards? what is your favourite thing to write about? do you enjoy writing prose or dialogue more? where are your strengths? are you happy with them, or are there other areas of writing which you’d also like to strengthen? if so, make a plan on how you’d like to focus on those and put it into practice. when you analyze your own work like this, you really begin to notice the pieces of YOU sewn into your art and what distinguishes you and your style from everyone else.

my secondary piece of advice to you is to pay attention to life around you as well as to continue consuming art of all mediums. inspiration is EVERYWHERE, every single day, you just have to look! it’s in your daily life; in the way your family speaks to each other, the way you interact with others, your friends’ mannerisms, people off daydreaming in their own worlds while grocery shopping, in bits and pieces of conversations you hear while walking home or riding the subway, in your memories, in the WAY you remember things, in your own experiences both good and bad, happy and painful. extract that information, use it, morph it, break it, reconstruct it, collage it, crumple it, make it into something new, make it yours.

the point here is that no one, and i mean NO ONE, will experience the world the exactly way you do; there may be others who experience it similarly, but they will never truly be 100% the same, because THEY AREN’T YOU. you’re a one-of-a-kind, unique individual, with your own thoughts and emotions and opinions and experiences etc and all of these things come together to create your very own unique worldview (and art!). i kind of feel like this mr. rogers post explains it quite well, too <3

additionally, watch movies that you love and analyze why you love them; listen to your favourite artists and ask yourself how they make you feel and why; write yourself a small personal essay or a journal entry on what an illustration or painting makes you feel, etc. i think it’s very important here to distinguish between taking inspiration from others’ style vs imitating their style, purely because imitating their style won’t do anything for yours; it isn’t going to evolve or grow your own style because it isn’t your own style, you know? annie (@/rat-zuki) said this a while ago and i loved it so much so i’m going to repeat it here: creativity works on the basis of inspiration to innovation. which is to say, take those elements that inspire you, or that you really love, and make them your own! you already have your own style, something that is YOURS and special to you, so take these elements and fit/fold/mold them in there! make them special to you, too! your art/style/aura is essentially a whole collage of everything i mentioned above the cut; all of your influences and experiences and inspirations and how YOU see them, how you experience them, how you interpret them, how you feel them, etc. *reminder that we are talking about STYLE here, not plot/story; imitating a plot/story would be plagiarism, which you obviously should never do

as for writing smut in particular, this answer is the best advice i have for you. like i said there, the majority of my smut comes from my own experiences, so it’s a lot of me breaking down those experiences and analyzing them in terms of mood + feeling etc. hehehe (i’ve gotten into the habit of writing down how i felt and what happened after i have really good sex LMAO it always makes my boyfriend laugh)

AAAAH i hope this makes sense!!! i know it’s very long, but this is also a very complex question and i wanted to try my best to make sure i was coming across as clearly as possible. but hopefully this helps you sweetpea <3

#WHEW SORRY ITS SO LONG #IF ANYTHING IS CONFUSING PLS LET ME KNOW #all i mean with the imitation bit is: in the long run it won't do anything for you #it'll just be a cheap imitation of someone else #with no substantial benefits on improving or strengthening your own style #BUT YEAH NOT GONNA RAMBLE IN THE TAGS SINCE I WROTE U A LITERAL ESSAY AHAHA #smut is hard sweetpea just keep practicing <3 #i promise consuming other art will improve ur style in every area/aspect including smut #sending u so so so much love n health!!!#have a fantastic night and pls stay safe <333 #💸.anon #clari gets mail

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miraculousfanworks · 4 years ago

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How To Analyze a Character

Have you ever been reading a fic and found the character is not recognizable that causes you to say “I don’t know who that is in that Marinette suit but that’s not Marinette.”

Or when you’re writing there’s that one character you need and you just can’t get inside their head to save your life.

This essay is going to delve into how to analyze characters and how they work in stories. It will help you both articulate why you do or don’t like a particular character or their interpretation, and help you in your own writing of that character.

Characters, as well as other elements of a narrative, can be broken down into collections of recognizable elements often called “tropes.” (For the comprehensive taxonomy see tvtropes.org.) These commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés can be combined in unique ways. They exist as recognizable and namable concepts because the same patterns are used over and over again in the creation of stories. We can use named tropes to describe what we are seeing in one story and relate it to other instances of the same phenomenon.

The advantage of recognizing the tropes that describe a character means that we can import into our understanding of them all of the other instances of that trope we have come across, and then compare and contrast these characters.

For example, both Chloé and Adrien exhibit the “Well Done, Daughter/Son!” Girl/Guy trope, desperately seeking the approval of a distant and withholding parent. (Faramir in the Lord of The Rings and Shinji Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion are also prime examples.) Knowing that they are both participants in this kind of relationship we can see how it plays out differently.

Gabriel seems like a deliberate ass, but occasionally manifests approval as when he played the duet with Adrien before sending him off to the Kitty Section concert in Capitan Hardrock. Audrey is entirely un-reflexive in her horribleness, dismissive rather than demanding and only ever recognizes Chloé’s worst feature as admirable. Kagami is also a “well done daughter!” girl and it informs how she relates to Adrein, Chloé, Marinette and Ladybug, providing both for character connection and thematic contrast.

On the production side, tropes can be used deliberately to construct a character to achieve a particular purpose. Adrien was created using the standard tropes of the fairy tale princesses beauty, musical talent, kindness to all creatures (even Chloe), kept looked up by an unloving parental figure. By creating a stereotypical Disney princess but swapping the gender it causes us to think harder about the assumptions we make about Princesses.

Symbols work the same way. We use symbolic images and language in media because it allows us to reference all the other ways and places that symbol is used. It becomes a shorthand for much bigger units of meaning. Pure originality would be completely unintelligible.

For example, Marinette displays two flower motifs on a regular basis. One is the cherry blossom spray across her shirt. Commonly this is associated with both love and passion, as well as purity and transitory beauty. In China, the last three are more closely associated with the Plum blossoms that decorate her purse, chair, and diary. Along with the additional significance of perseverance and hope, we can see that her dreams for the future, however heard she works for them, may not turn out as she plans.

The cherry blossom, in China, is a symbol of passion, strength, and feminine power and sexuality. As Marinette has this symbol peeking out from behind her jaket on the left side of her shirt, it represents how her civilian persona hasn’t fully come into the power she displays as Ladybug. Adrien’s kwami was chosen to be a Black Cat specifically to call up all our associations with them and bad luck as a counterpoint to Ladybug and her Lucky Charm.

Pikachu, I Choose You!: Artistic Decisions

You would think this wouldn’t need to be said but remember, remember, remember: these fictional characters are not real people. Why does that matter? Because everything you see on the screen or on the page is the result of a choice made by the writer or artist.

Images and dialogue may be selected deliberately, thoughtfully, thematically, instinctually, carelessly, haphazardly, or stupidly, but they are there because the authors and illustrators and creators selected them to be there.

Remember that the characters only exist to serve the story and everything about them ideally should serve to move the story toward its conclusion.

This is especially pertinent in an animated–and especially a computer animated–show because everything has to be made specifically for the show and they are expensive to make(MLB costs ~$460,000 an episode). That’s why you get only one outfit for most of the characters, except when absolutely necessary.

Saving their production budget for other things is why Theo Barbot has all of the odd jobs in Paris, there seems to be only one cop, Sabrina’s dad, and Alec and Nadja are the only people on TV. If you take a look in Bubbler, the first episode aired in the US, you can see that the school, the bakery, the hotel, and the Agreste Manor are all within one block of each other.

CallMeDale posted this to the Miraculous Fanworks Discord. Source unknown. Image originally from Bubbler.

What this production cost means for analyzing a character (or anything else) is that everything we see in a visual medium is important. Everything about a character has been picked for some reason. How they look, how they move–even how they stand says something about who they are as a person, who they are in their relationships, and who they are as an element of the story.

I did a fairly comprehensive essay on Chloé as a character so I want to walk through some of the things I looked at in order to write it.

Character at First Sight:

First impressions are vital. Because Marinette is picked to be our eyes as the OP starts (“In the daytime I’m Marinette,”) we know she is supposed to be our heroine and point of view. Everything that happens after that is to be judged in relation to her. The first time we see Chloé in the show is a whole 5 seconds into the opening, when she and Sabrina walk past a face-planted Marinette. Immediately afterwards, Chloé runs back in to glomp Adrien and push Marinette out of the way.

From these few brief seconds we know that she is both rich and domineering, Sabrina is walking just behind her with a huge designer purse and bookbag, obviously in a subservient role. Chloé laughs at Marinette, which establishes her as an antagonist to the Heroine. Chloé pushing Marinette out of fram when she comes back shows that she exists in part to block our Heroine from Adrien, our Hero, whose expression shows he really doesn’t appreciate the attention.

Not even three seconds of screen time and we already know who Chloé is in relation to three people: Marinette, Adrien, and Sabrina.

How much time a character gets in the beginning of a story also sets up how much brainspace we allocate them and our expectation of their importance. This is one reason I prefer Bubbler as the “first episode’’ (US viewing order) over Stormy Weather (South Korean/International Viewing order). Stormy Weather spends the first few minutes on Aurore, Mirielle, and Alex before getting to Mari, Tikki, Manon, Alya, and Adrien. Bubbler in the same first minute sets up Marinette, her parents, Adrien, Alya, Chloé, and Nino and all their relationships.

By choosing your descriptions carefully you can get the reader to think of other things without directly mentioning them. Ladybug’s costume, mode of travel and name all callback to Spiderman (she even does the upside down hang in Dark Cupid), and even though the iconic phrase “with great power comes great responsibility,” is never stated its influence is felt in the persistent characterization of Ladybug as ‘all business’ in fic, even though she is more playful in canon. Master Fu is modeled after classic inscrutable mentor Mr. Miyagi from the original Karate Kid movies, it gives him an air of perhaps more wisdom and knowledge than he actually possesses.

Come on Let’s Vogue: How the Look of a Character Informs Us

Now let’s look at what we get from the elements selected for Chloe’s character design. Slender, pale, almost-white blonde hair, sunglasses on the top of her head, lots of blue eyeshadow, yellow jacket over a black and white striped shirt, white capris and black and white flats. All of this says she is the top of the social heap at her school. Combined with her glomping and trying to kiss Adrien and we can guess she is–or at least wants to be seen as–romantically “experienced”. Yellow is a happy color, it’s what makes a printed picture look bright. Often, though not always, it is associated with success and general goodness (i.e. a heart of gold) so she is initially portrayed as a person who doesn’t have any cares. White jeans and shoes point to both her status as someone who doesn’t have to work and a certain level of naivete.

But she also has this very gothy studded belt around her hips. It is very obviously not holding up her pants. This hints at the darker emotions and experiences at her core. The black and white stripes of her undershirt hint at the way she is held prisoner by her past.

Because we have been set up to see Chloé as the spoiled,rich bitch with everything she could want, when the facade cracks and we see just how awful her mother is it hits all the harder for us. Chloé’s invulnerable image is destroyed.

“What’s in a Name?”: Tagging as Character creation

Names are also a good starting place for getting into a character.

Bourgeois comes layered with the connotations of wealth, but not too much, and shallow conformity. Chloé is derived from the Greek Khlóe, or ‘young green shoot’ (of a plant), which can also be interpreted as meaning 'blooming.’ Khlóe is an epithet, or nickname, for Demeter in her aspect of the Lady of Summer. We know the writers know and are thinking of these meanings because of these lines in Sandboy.

Nightmare Adrien: Marinette, for your birthday, I’m going to buy you flowers—

…

Nightmare Adrien: —hortensias, roses and Chloés. (Marinette shrieks)

Not only does her name sound like that of a Homecoming Queen/Cheerleader/trust fund baby, but it also indicates she is immature but with potential to become something more.

Queen Bee is also laden with meaning as it is a term used to describe girls in their teens who are at the top of their social pecking order (see Queen Bees & WannaBes). It perfectly describes bothe how Chloé acts but also how she perceives herself.

The Things You Do to Me: Character Action

Characters in a story are what they do and more importantly why they do what they do. If Marinette becomes Ladybug for the first time because someone needs saving (first Ivan, then Alya), and Adrien becomes Chat Noir in order to escape the gilded cage that is his house, Chloé dons the Bee miraculous in a desperate (and unsuccessful) bid to catch her mother’s attention.

Attention seeking is part of every subsequent time that her hero persona appears in the story. Consider the implications of the fact that the signal on her roof is a Bee signal, not a Ladybug signal. The gestursal tic she has of always examining her nails, often with the other arm folded over her chest, is a visual shorthand for both her self-absorption and that her unpleasant personality is a defence mechanism.

Dialogue clues are also important, especially things that come up more than once. Chloé’s persistent lack of remembrance of the Concierge’s name (Jean-whatever) shows her to be dismissive of the people she believes to be “beneath her” which becomes horribly ironic when we find out her mother doesn’t seem to remember her name. That Marinette is always Dunain-Cheng, emphasizing her parents status as tradesman and that Marinette is not pure French operates as a persistent put down.

Chloé is a Hero with an F in Good, primed by the writers for the Face–Heel Turn which happens in Miracle Queen. They telegraph this event by the choice to echo her “once a monster always a monster,” line from Stoneheart, in the S3 midseason Stormy Weather 2. There she mocks Aurore with “once a villain always a villain.” Highly ironic given the number of times Chloé has been akumatized and prompted it in others. Her bad heroing serves to show that actions and motives are not always aligned and to highlight the selflessness of the other heroes.

A great example of showing character through dialogue is Nino’s conversation with Gabriel in Bubbler. Nino was given a very distinctive, persistent, and casual speech pattern (“dude” in English), It’s so distinctive that Alya immediately recognizes that he is Carapace. The fact that he makes an effort to suppress it when he is trying to persuade Gabriel to let Adrien have a birthday party shows how much he cares about giving Adrien this gift. It’s part of what establishes him in our minds as such a great friend for Adrien (King of Bros!). Giving characters individualized vocabularies and speech patterns is one of the best ways to help distinguish them in both your, and the reader’s mind.

All Together Now!

As you read and experience more stories, you will recognize more and more common elements across the characters, places, events and ideas that make up the stories you read. As you recognize these building blocks, and how they can be combined and manipulated, they will help you understand better why certain characters do what they do in the story. You can then deliberately select them as you create your own stories to highlight desired themes, set up conflicts or call cultural resonances to your readers’ minds. Remember what you write is a conversation between you, your reader, and the world around you. The more of the world you can bring into your writing the deeper it will impact your readers.

#tag: guide #tag: submit #submission

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scarytheory · 5 years ago

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James Bond conquers Czechoslovakia (or not?)

In the sixties, James Bond was everywhere. But even though it was a big worldwide phenomenon, it was hardly accessible to everyone. Czechoslovakia was a socialist country with a strict regulation system for film industry, so it is not surprising that James Bond films were not screened until the end of communist regime in the early nineties. But somehow James Bond had a notable presence in Czechoslovakia. It was a name known to average film fans. They heard about Sean Connery, Bond girls, and some of them could describe a detailed plot of the movies. How is it possible? This article discusses media discourse about James Bond, and how it created a basis for a familiarization with the James Bond film franchise.

The Czechoslovak film industry was centralized in the state-controlled institution between 1945 and 1990. Every imported film was approved by the state. Very broadly speaking, genre cinema from the Western countries wasn't ideologically desirable. Only around 5–10 British films were screened every year in Czechoslovakia in the '60s and '70s . Mostly they were kitchen sink dramas (A Taste of Honey or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) or literary adaptations (Tom Jones, Far from The Madding Crowd). The action adventure genre was presented by French comedies (super popular Fan-Fan the Tulip and similar films) and by French art films (Breathless, Pierrot le fou). Important were leftist qualities of these movies. Approved were also some James Bond knock-offs, for example West German movies about FBI agent Jerry Cotton. Some people would say that James Bond and similar films could not be shown because of censorship, but that is not true. These films were not screened, because they just were not bought into the Czechoslovak distribution. There were, of course, reasons for that.

So what exactly was problematic in James Bond films? First, it was simply a country of origin. It was not just that Bond was British (= Western country). In Czech press were Bond movies often described as American, which is at least partly true: distribution rights were owned by the American company United Artist. Also values presented by the films were values that were in Czechoslovakia identified with capitalist countries, especially with the United States. But mostly, Bond wasn't a preferred type of a hero for a socialist audience. He was rich, obsessed with expensive cars and clothes, violent and sexual. He was not nice. He was not a socialist hero. A Polish film historian Jerzy Toeplitz wrote about a bad influence of James Bond books and films, and the article was translated for Panoráma zahraničního filmového tisku in 1966. He wrote that James Bond books are meant for a Western reader who is “succumbed to the amuck of accumulating consumer goods.” That is related to the fact that the film series itself was perceived as existing just with a goal of gaining money. A lot of articles were stating (and mocking) the way the films were used for merchandise.

James Bond was a perfect picture of a capitalist country: cruel, brutal, too erotic, sadistic and racist. Which are all fair points, but they weren't said with an aim to open any kind of discussion. The goal was purely ideological. “We must build a hero – either a man or a woman of our time who upholds our humane socialist morale – and pose him or her against this mythical hero who can do anything, nothing is a nuisance to him, who overcomes everything smoothly and – like James Bond, for example – has the right to commit senseless murders. This represents an ideological conflict with the bourgeoisie, one that is essential and without compromise.” (Film a doba, 5, p. 243).

Perhaps the most interesting aspects were constant mentions about racism. However a language that was used to describe racism in James Bond films was very racist itself. That is actually not surprising because Czechoslovak people had – and still have – lots of racist issues. Lubomír Oliva, one of prominent Czechoslovak film critics, described James Bond this way: “James Bond embodies a new type of Superman. He is coldy cruel and dismissive of the weak. He kills without remorse, because that is his job. Multiple scenes from the trilogy show racism, which is subconscious, automatic, and therefore more insidious. Is he the Tarzan among nuclear weapons? Or perhaps he is a different but more dangerous type of a primitive: a close relative of the Nazi Übermensch.” (Kino, 1965/11, p. 13). It is also very telling to look closely at the photos used in that article – Bond shoots, Bond fights, Bond smiles like a crazy lunatic while he kills people. The writing itself is very suggestive, evocative and even vulgar. Oliva loves to mention every specific and cruel thing Bond does in the films in details. One has to ask – what if the effect of listing all the bad things was quite opposite? Was not public more curious to watch it?

Maybe the screenwriter of many amazing Czech genre films (Adela Has Not Had Her Supper Yet, Lemonade Joe) Jiří Brdečka was a little bit fond of Bond, right? Well – not really. The most problematic part of Bond films, according to Brdečka, was their anti-communist aspect. A majority of the villains were communists and often from USSR, which was not acceptable. In Brdečka's article in Divadelní a filmové noviny he compared people of color to communists. James Bond films are full of prejudice against both, and that is simply bad. He also wrote: “This hero is deeply engaged and his engagement compels him to eat communists and colored people for breakfast – both at the same time if possible. This tells us that James Bond may not find fertile soil around these parts.” But Brdečka at least acknowledged that the films were really well made. And concluded with: “[The films] are excellent crap, with an emphasis on crap.” (Divadelní a filmové noviny, 1965/9-10, p. 10). Galina Kopaněva (another a very prominent and very popular film critic) took one step further. Not only the films themself are bad and stupid, the loving audience from Western countries is stupid as well: “[young people] devour the elegant Bond and his precise punches to the stomach. They loosen their ties a la Bond when they see the closeups of of Bond girls’ super-breasts, they bray with enthusiasm when there is an especially well done murder, they clench their fists as they watch crazy car chases on serpentine mountain roads, and they succumb to the pleasant shivers caused by torture scenes.” (Film a doba 1965/6, p. 323). The infantilization of audience was sometimes used while describing popular culture but was not broadly used for describing James Bond.

So, now we know that James Bond was bad for Czechoslovak people. Or at least according to the prominent film critics and state-run film industry. But how is possible that James Bond became a well known phenomenon in communist Czechoslovakia? It was not allowed to show James Bond in the cinemas but somehow people knew who James Bond is. There were also special namings for James Bond films – bondovky (that is used still today) and bondiády. People were obsessed with them, even though they did not have an option to watch them.

The most obvious answer for James Bond popularity is that he was a constant presence in the Czechoslovak film press. He was – in his invisibility – totally visible. Bond films were often mentioned (and sometimes analyzed) in the press targeted towards film professionals (Interpressfilm) or “smart” film fans (Film a doba, Divadelní a filmové noviny) and in popular film magazines (Kino). Almost every Czechoslovak film critic had an opportunity to see a James Bond movie at some international film festival or in a cinema abroad. That means that they wrote reviews for Czechoslovak magazines. But the reviews were not only about qualities of the films. More often the critics retold the plot with every possible detail (including the ending of the film). The magazines also published spreads about James Bond phenomenon in general (including lots of photos), interviews with actors or directors, short notes about upcoming films or about changing of the actors. The articles were a weird mixture of positive and negative. For example, you would have a long text about Sean Connery, and in this article author would write about how wonderful actor Connery is. But they would also mention that Connery deserves better than Bond. Or you would have a big spread about a James Bond movie premiere, and author would mention that film is spectacular and fun to watch, but also that it is still a low and decadent film.

Another way to get familiar with James Bond were the books by Ian Fleming. Three of them were published in Czechoslovakia: Dr No (Doktor NO, 1968; both Czech and Slovak version), View to a Kill (collections of short stories Ve jménu zákona, 1969) and Goldfinger (Zlatý fantóm, 1970, with a film cover and a lot of photos inside the book). The rest of the stories was published after 1990.

Of course in Czechoslovakia were some people that managed to see a James Bond film in other countries (travelling was complicated but not absolutely impossible). Ivan Soeldner said that people used to visit strip clubs while abroad, but suddenly it was a necessity to go see a James Bond film instead. He also stated that Bond (and strip clubs) are highly overrated (Kulturní tvorba, 1965/33, p. 14). But Bond films became word of mouth sensation – not just because they were entertainment films but because what they meant. Bond films were in a way similar to popular American music or Coca-cola. People heard so much about it that it became its own animal. The efforts to minimize and ridicule Bond in press actually created by mistake an unique mythos of James Bond – almost a symbol of anti-sovietism and anti-communism, something like a forbidden fruit.

James Bond obsession calmed down a little bit with a departure of Sean Connery. Some articles were still occasionally written but not with so much passion as it used to be in the '60s. But a new opportunity to see James Bond films arrived to a Czechoslovak audience in the '80s. Videorecorders became more affordable and in 1985 there were around 80 000 of them. For Czechoslovakia was a very important phenomenon an unofficial “pirate” dubbing. So suddenly, for some people was a possibility to borrow VHS with some movies that were unavailable before (including Bond films).

The communist regime ended in Czechoslovakia in 1989 and Czechoslovak film industry started to transform. The process was slow and messy. But finally, a first James Bond film was shown in Czech and Slovak cinemas: The Living Daylights in 1992 (in English original with Czech or Slovak subtitles). This film also had a special bonus for the viewers – it took place in Bratislava, Slovakia (but it was actually filmed in Austria). A lot of older Bond films also appeared in official VHS market, and the “black pirate market” was still quite proficient during the nineties.

The aim of this short overview was to show the ways James Bond appeared in the Czechoslovakia for the first time. It was probably very similar in other socialist countries (Poland, USSR,…). I think that it is important to ask questions about what Bond actually meant for a different types of audiences, and how it changed over time. The answers are still relatively vague (and maybe even banal), more answers could bring complex research in daily press or oral history.

My sources: I did a quick research using a lot of articles from the '60s till early '90s. Big thanks to National Film Archive that has everything scanned in the digital library.

Periodicals: Divadelní a filmové noviny, Film a doba, Filmové aktuality, Filmové informace, Filmový přehled, Interpressfilm, Kino, Kinorevue, Kulturní tvorba, Panoráma, Panoráma zahraničního filmového tisku, Záběr

I also used my own knowledge of Czechoslovak film industry (so you need to trust me that it is all true). I tried to put all this together, and the conclusions are my own. Hopefully, it all makes sense (I didn’t went too much into details because well, this is not some kind of complex research, it is just something I did for fun)

And thank you to amazing @slippingintostockings who helped me with the translation of Czech reviews from the sixties.

#007 fest #007 fest 2020 #teamcivilian #meta #james bond #classic bond #sean connery #czechoslovakia #čumblr #I's not so boring how it sounds I promise!#maaaybe just a little bit #it's niche #but I really wanted to write this #mine

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lunarianborn · 4 years ago

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☾ @roseofbaron: aloe, belladonna, chrysanthemum, gladiolus, hydrangea, lavender, magnolia, oak, sage, zinnia ☽ BOTANICAL HCS : accepting

aaahh a true bouquet ! watch me doing all of these I haven’t replied to yet because, one i’m thirsty for more chances to throw hcs at the dash, two the meme is good and all the questions are pretty interesting, tysm <3

belladonna : how does your muse respond to silence ? do they take comfort in soundlessness , or seek to fill the void with noise ?

He responds to silence quite well and always seemed to do as such, he enjoys peace and quiet and always did ever since he was a child. Having been raised inside a king’s castle must have been quite the experience for him, as a kid -- for it would rarely be completely silent and quiet as an ambience. Between meetings, feasts, banquets and all ceremonies and occasions pertaining to a monarch’s life, and Cecil growing up there from the very start, I can’t imagine him having the chance to enjoy silent spaces much; still -- ! his bedchambers reside on the west tower, the highest of the castle, away from sources of noise. It’s quite the solitary place too, away from the main halls, engulfed in silence basically all the time; having been its resident from childhood, Cecil grew to tolerate the tranquility it could offer him - while studying, while reading or thinking, or even practicing with his sword.

I’d call it comfort, simply because that’s the way he always lived. This doesn’t mean Cecil doesn’t enjoy the lively atmosphere a mundane / royal life could offer him, but being the reserved and quiet person himself, I see him enjoying peace more.

chrysanthemum : how does your muse express romantic love ? how do they feel about love as a concept ?

If Cecil represented a romantic concept, I’d say he could as well be courtly love personified. And I know it may sound boring and oh so called for, but I MEAN. He’s Cecil. A knight in a medieval setting who is feeling, at first, that he cannot be with the girl he loves for whatever reasons, that saves her life and rescues her from her kidnappers, to swear unending love by the end of the tale. A classic, Cecil would be a classic haha. So, I guess the term courtly love partly fits him.

By courtly love, though, I don’t refer to the literary or epic kind; he’d simply find love as a form of pure devotion, not assuming control of his heart in an impetuous or rebellious way -- which is nice regardless, he’s a kind type of lover, courteous indeed. For example, when he used to be a Dark Knight, he was not expected to stay with the one he loved; instead of rebelling against such rule, he simply accepted it, bowing his head for the ‘greater good’ and for peace and in the name of traditions; BU,T in his heart, he was still in love. And the feeling is there to stay...

Canonly, by what Kain says in the novel, actually, it seemed Rosa was the one to take the first step, when she started ‘looking at Cecil in a way she never did’, presumably when they were young teens. Cecil, at some point, with age, did come to realize he too felt something more for her; the curious thing, though, is that they never actually confessed. Maybe, true courtly love would have the knight confessing his passion, but Cecil doesn’t. He misses the chance and things get worse when he gets knighted a Dark Knight, at 15yos, the age where Baronian kids seem to reach adulthood officially. No, he kept the true nature of his feelings for himself, despite the truth being rumored and known. Kain knew it, Rosa’s mother suspected it, everyone could have seen it.

So, in these terms, it’s safe to assume Cecil keeps being the soft-spoken, tranquil lover. He doesn’t reveal his feelings if not at the very end, because he fears what it’d mean for the other’s reputation and honor -- those are pretty important things, for he would not tolerate himself or his love to be cause of pain or struggle. And so, being the reserved kind, he’d resort to subtle ways to express love, to court someone. Lingering gazes, gifts, to try and spend most of his spare time with them... you know he’d try to play or sing something, he’s no bard but he is the type.

Love is devotion and its shades and sides to permeate his life. Love for his partner, for his home, for his child, and for his brother too, nonetheless. He commits to it and seeks to protect it at all costs, sometimes even resulting as a bit oppressing -- but he’s on the purest and best intentions whenever that happens. Love is bliss. For someone who believed all his life to having been abandoned by his family, he finds the concept of love to be light incarnate too. After all, hadn’t his father loved him so, he wouldn’t have never become a paladin eheh

gladiolus : describe a moment from your muse’s life that they will never forget.

One moment he’d never forget must definitely be the day when he officially went from being a squire to a knight. The same ancient trial all boys of Baron, while hoping to enlist into its military ranks, must partake at the coming of their 15th birthday - the same one Ceodore insists being part of, despite his title as prince. The task is not as simple as one would believe, especially for a kid so young and barely skilled with the true art of the sword: he must enter a cave, grab the so-called Emblem of Knighthood inside, defeat its guardian and emerge victorious, a true knight to Baron.

No child is told of said guardian though, it usually being a big sandworm trained to react and attack whenever anyone is about to pick the emblem. And, even better, no kid is told the famous emblem is nothing more than a mummified rat’s tail.

Eager to prove his worth, Cecil waited for the fated day with high expectations and premises, only to almost risk his life against the sandworm. He doesn’t remember much of that fight, but he does recall the final blow at the beast’s hellish muzzle and the initial disappointment in finding the tail; but the moment he returned home, to be officially and solemnly invested a knight by the King, -- ceremony followed by a banquet and feast, as tradition commands, especially for residents of the castle -- everything changed.

It was a big deal. The boy that always felt a foreigner, one of the very few lucky one to have been granted so much for so little in return, does finally feel part of the city, of its community and its military ranks. Plus, his adventure in the cave was a good story to tell companions and friends !

hydrangea : how much does your muse value communication in their relationships with others ? are they prone to being misunderstood ?

Quite a lot, but he wasn’t very skilled with words when very young. He got better as years passed, but his character too didn’t make things easier; he thinks communication is the basis of every sane and good relationships. Even in-game and ‘in-novel’, with Rydia, the first thing he does, when fleeing with her to Kaipo, is to try and communicate. To console her, to cheer her up the best he could -- despite the child’s reluctance and silence.

Even as king, he found the importance of communication to reign over mostly all of his relationships -- from work, to family. I’d say his toughest challenge on that front came from his son and his character, his ideas and projects for his own future; while on a side it makes him happy to see Ceodore growing up so sure of his own thoughts, despite his title and familiar ties, it also pains him to not being able to speak as much / of what he’d like to him (heart-to-heart types of conversations, I mean - in the novel, Ceodore admits he never saw his father weak or tired, and that they never talked much of very personal matters).

I don’t think he would be easily misunderstood though. He learnt how to act as a leader early on, and the role only got enforced once king. He is supposed to be clear, and he’s supposed to be listened to, especially when his role(s) demands him to be.

lavender : how easy is it to gain your muse’s trust ? once their trust is broken , how might one go about mending it ?

It’s quite easy, honestly. He tends to see the brightness and positivity in everyone he comes to know - especially during his journey, and tends to form bonds of trust when felt or necessary. It’s not that rare, honestly, the only true exceptions come from individuals who are obviously ill-mannered or plain evil and suspicious !

And it takes a lot to break his trust. Overall, he’s a very pure man, trying to find light even when it is scarce indeed -- he’s a good man. When Kain does take the last Underworld’s Dark Crystal to give it to Golbez, everyone in the group starts doubting him again. And yet, Cecil doesn’t give up on him (and remember it’s the second time he gets ‘betrayed’ -- although the novel explains what is really going on inside Kain’s head, and by that point, he was just acting as a bait...) and tries to think of why Kain had “betrayed them again”. He even omits to tell Giott of it, in fear Kain would have been branded a traitor and sentenced.

“Cecil told him everything. Of how they had successfully reached it [the Crystal], and of how Golbez had appeared to rob it. He never mentioned Kain’s involvement. Although he had betrayed them, he still believed there was good in Kain’s heart. He considered him a friend nonetheless, and believed the darkness to have gained control of his mind, back in the cave. He didn’t wish for him to be called and considered a traitor.”

magnolia : describe your muse’s relationship with nature & the natural world.

It’s ironic, because Cecil -- hadn’t his parents died before having the chance to meet and raise him like they partly did for Theodor, would have grown up in a small woodcutters-like village amidst the forests next to Mysidia. Baron too is surrounded by green plains, lakes and rivers, it’s beautiful to see - truly, but he didn’t have much time or dedication to spare to the city’s surroundings. As a child, perhaps, he could have hoped to train or venture outside the city’s walls more often. Since a chocobo forest is nearby, I like to think Baron youth do actually learn to ride the birds out in the open, where there’s plenty of space and green to practice.

Being son of Kluya, the very Lunarian who introduced magic to humans, I think Cecil was born with a natural aptitude for magic; his legacy as a knight didn’t allow him to put those hidden qualities into any practical use, and the few white magic spells he knows as a Paladin are, also, rather weak (which is, ironically, the complete opposite of Golbez’s case). To hone one’s own magic, the user has to have a connection with the natural world, which is the primary source of energy needed to cast spells. This is why I think, albeit having little chances and few true opportunities to venture outside for leisure - Cecil has a subtle, inborn link with nature (as many mages do too) and would find great pleasure in nature and its joys.

oak : who would your muse consider the strongest person they know ?

I believe he’d see Cid as one of the strongest people he’s ever known, even before the whole ordeal narrated through the game and his ‘sacrifice’ could be the nail sealing the whole deal, here. Having been raised without true parental figure, it is easy to understand why a child like him could have found comfort and warmth in such the extrovert man -- Cid acted like a father to him and never truly stopped, haha, he’s even there offering moral support (and some doses of panic too) when Cecil is literally becoming a father. Despite Cid having a family of his own, and a daughter too, he showered Cecil with attention and affection, like a true father would have...

I could argue Cecil did see a rather strong presence and soul in the late King of Baron, for very similar reasons. Minus the affection part (due to maybe king’s duties, prejudices, Cecil being a ward and not the UMM probably-long-lost-son-of-the-king’s-teen-crush, not officially at least) I believe, the two men are seen both in the highest regards from the man, he would manage to choose one between them. They both possess a spirit of sacrifice for the greater good, admirable values (till Cagnazzo enters the stage, at least) and morale, and both served as cardinal points for Cecil’s growth and childhood.

sage : what is your muse’s legacy ? what do they want to be remembered for & what might they actually be remembered for ?

Cecil is such a humble man, I doubt he would ever think stuff like ‘ah yes, and I’ll do this so that everyone will remember me for it’. But for everything he has accomplished and done for Baron, for the one he loved and from himself too, it is inevitable his name will long keep ringing in bards’ songs and in his people’s tales long after his life is spent. His legacy is Baron itself. The restored town, with its ancient monarchy and the promise of the star not being threatened anymore by the ambitions of a wicked Lunarian. His is a legacy of bountiful peace and prosperity, worthy of his courage and of all the pain he had to endure because of it.

Cecil also carries the hopes and dreams of his other people, the Lunarians. He incarnate all that is good and hopeful in such a difference race, not to mention - with hi brother, he is in fact the incarnation of their union (after all, Lunarians saw humans were still developing and growing, and felt their technological prowess and knowledge could have altered their natural evolution and development if forced upon them through cohabitation -- so they never truly invaded Gaia and remained on the artificial second moon, promising to find a way to coexist together only when humans would have reached their same intellectual level.)

He wouldn’t want to be remembered anyway else. He’s a brave knight, a loyal friend and a just king. It may not seem as much, but it is plenty enough for one of the savior of the star, haha! Which is also the cause of such big expectations being placed on Ceodore’s shoulders so early on too... it’s sad to think about, actually.

zinnia : how has the loss of fallen comrades and/or loved ones affected your muse ? has it taught them anything or given them any new perspectives ?

I think the losses made him more aware of the big role he had to, willingly or not, play for the salvation of what he held dear, and of the star. From the King being made puppet of a hellish demon, his body tossed unceremoniously in a hidden room on a mocking fake throne... to Yang and Cid temporarily disappearing and being believed dead... the twins turning into stone to save the other’s life... Tellah, but also the found truth about his father and mother’s deaths (novel explains that, for the longest time, Cecil believed to have been abandoned in the woods as an unwanted child... it’s heartbreaking, really, for he is sure of it and even says he doesn’t blame his mother for it. When he finds out she died of childbirth he is devastated also for having thought such a thing about her...) all shaped him into the rather firm young man he is by the end of the story.

And while not a loss per se, Golbez leaving the star to join Lunarians in the sleep and Kain disappearing for almost 15 years after the events of the game also happen to be strong moments for Cecil as well -- yes, almost as strong as true deaths would impact him and his psyche.

The sheer fear of losing his family and friends shapes him to the point he straight up refused at first to have the girls, especially Rosa, follow him back on the moon. The love for what he cannot ever afford to lose is what brings the light in his empty husk, during After Years, to defend Rosa and Ceodore before his ‘shadow-dark-knight self’. The tragedies, the scares and the moments of grief he lived through did make him a more responsible individual, a better fighter and even a more devoted man than he who was already; simply because that’s his entire world, and to know of his loved ones being safe is his true main concern...

#▐┊ headcanon.#roseofbaron #[ this took me TOO LONG but ]#[ i appreciate this bouquet aaa ]#[ and all chances to gush out my cecil hcs ;__; ]#[ so ty sooooo soo much aaa <3 ]#long post under cut omg #[ this is why it took months HHH jk... ]

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promethes · 4 years ago

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Grief is as human an emotion as joy or melancholy. To live is to grieve and be grieved. If other emotions are ponds, grief is the Mariana trench. More “common” everyday emotions (happiness, sadness, excitement) can be expressed in a myriad of slightly differing ways. With one word, we can distinguish not only an emotion but specify how that emotion is felt. The umbrella of “happy” covers everything from pure joy to cheerfulness to contentment. “Sadness” can come in forms of melancholy or sorrow. Grief, on the other hand, is such an all-encompassing experience that it can’t be boiled down into a single simple word. While that may work to describe other feelings, no one word will ever be able to come close to describing grief. No matter what, any word used will fall short of capturing the profound feelings of loss humans can experience. Grief is immeasurable and indescribable which is why it is such a powerfully poetic experience.

Just like there is no one way to experience grief, there is no one way to write a poem. Poetry has no limits or qualifications. Ten-page ballads can be just as poetic as single word expressions. As long as it has a root in something innately human, almost anything can be described as a poem. The humanity of it is what sets poetry apart from prose, which is why such a deeply human experience like grief is poetic.

Perhaps one of the best examples of the duality of grief is Yusef Komunyakaa’s “The Towers”. Though the poem is explicitly addressed to his deceased son in the first line, most Americans who read it can relate to the hopelessness conveyed in the poem. Komunyakaa’s focus is on the death of his son which was a deeply personal occurrence. No person on this planet felt his son’s death the same way he did. However, he framed his son’s death with an event so widely felt that it’s still remembered every year almost two decades later. 9/11 is so ingrained into American culture that even people who were months old when the tragedy occurred still feel the residual grief from the massive amount of deaths incurred. We can see that Komunyakaa made a deliberate choice to frame the poem this way since his son didn’t die during 9/11. If he was confined to using prose to describe his son’s death, Komunyakaa wouldn’t have been able to tap into the grief of an entire nation to compare to the grief he felt like the father of a dead child. By moving away from the literal emotional pain of losing his child and using the more abstract pain felt from a national tragedy he made his pain clearer to a wider audience. Not everyone has experienced the loss of a child, but we all feel the effects of 9/11.

Using poetry to convey his grief was a perfect choice for the audience to truly understand what he was going through. It was also a good choice for Komunyakaa himself. By tapping into his emotions and putting them into words, he must have relieved some of his grief and come closer to closure. By the end of the poem, it seems as if Komunyakaa is finally letting go of his son when he writes “No, I’m not Daedalus, but I’ve walked miles in a circle, questioning your wings of beeswax & crepe singed beyond belief.” He acknowledges that he is still mourning, comparing it to walking miles but ending up in the same place again and again because he is stuck in the cycle of grief. His use of past tense (“I’ve”) shows that he’s since stepped out of the circle, perhaps because he’s finally found the answer to his son’s singed wings of beeswax and crepe. Like Daedalus, Komunyakaa, too, had to work through his grief to keep flying. He lost his son so early that he used the poem to breathe life into him one last time. For Komunyakaa to get closure, he’d at least need to see his son thrive in some way before the child was finally laid to rest in his father’s mind. He gave his son “wings… agile & unabashedly decorous,” literally letting his son soar and thrive in poetry the way he wasn’t able to do in life before his wings turn to “beeswax & crepe singed beyond belief” and his life ends.

Poetry is so profound that even just a couple of lines detailing a simple step by step routine can be turned into a deep look into severed relationships. Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is really about just that: his speaker’s routine on Sunday mornings during the winter. It could be read as prose, but that would be doing an injustice to the work. Yes, the basis of the poem is the literal things he and his family would do, but the spacing of the lines combines with the tone of his poem to create the scene of an emotionally strained family. In a way, Hayden’s speaker uses the poem to mourn his relationship with his father. Though he is not literally dead, his son still grieves his father’s life, one that has been spent on labor so grueling that his “cracked hands… ached”. We know that the speaker is talking about the past, and he acknowledges that he did not have a close relationship with his father. Instead, he’d speak “indifferently to him,/ who had driven out the cold/ and polished [his] good shoes as well.” Though at the time the speaker did not mourn his father and their relationship (which we can ascertain from his indifference towards his father), we can see that he feels that he should have been mourning the relationship at the time, maybe just so he could appreciate it while he had it. Obviously, he did not understand the father who would wake so much earlier than his son simply to warm the room and polish shoes. At that time in the past, the speaker couldn’t comprehend that that was the way his father showed his love. Later in his life, he finally understands, but perhaps too late. He ends his poem by saying“What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” implying that he never was able to understand his father’s displays of affection in time to return the feelings. Though we don’t know that his father is dead, we can glean that he is no longer in contact with him. With the short, blunt sentences Hayden uses, he casts a bitter tone over his wasted relationship with his father. The way he ends the first stanza sets the tone for the entire poem: “No one ever thanked him”, “him” being the speaker’s father. All of these factors come together to show a man grieving not only his separation from his father but the life his father lived with a son who spoke with him coldly and didn’t consider the sacrifices that he made for him. The son mourns the relationship that could have been if only he had seen how much his father cared for him earlier. This poem is a perfect example of how poetry can be used to work through several kinds of grief, including grieving what could have been: a healthy relationship with one’s son, a life spent on the kind of love that inspires community rather than isolation, or maybe even simply a life that consists of more than hard labor and waking up early on your days off for an unappreciative son.

Poetry can even be used to grieve one’s own self. The previous two poems mentioned both showed the grieving of those who have passed away and the more abstract relationships that could have come to be. Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” is much more poetry-like than “The Towers” and “Those Winter Sundays”. The first two detailed things that actually happened and arranged them into a way where they were more poetry than prose. If a few of their words were moved around and rephrased, their poems could possibly lose the strangeness that makes them poetry and become simple prose that doesn’t come close to conveying the emotions they convey in their poetic forms. “Keeping Things Whole” is pure poetry. If there was a physical scale of the literary versus the literal, his poem would drop the literary side faster than a brick. Every poem has some sort of “strangeness”, and when it comes to this one, that “strangeness” is basically the entire poem.

“In a field

I am the absence

of field”

can’t be twisted into something that actually happens. The fact that it is untouched by the literal makes the poem so purely melancholy that it inspires weeping in some readers (including, as you know, the author of this paper). When I try to think of the thoughts that would inspire poetry like this, I picture someone who feels grief so deep that no real-world comparison will do. Though it’s never explicitly stated, Strand perfectly conveys the emotions of someone grieving themself. Technically none of it makes sense, but the second one starts thinking poetically, the lines scream that the poet feels like he is someone who is fundamentally missing. He grieves himself, and the fact that he cannot seem to find himself, and “This is/ always the case”. The final stanza is especially raw and wrought with emotion:

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

Not only does he convey the grief that he feels, but he also makes the reader grieve him. The image of someone who feels so empty that they see themselves as what is missing is so profoundly sad that I can’t come up with words that do it justice. The reader’s mourn along with Strand for the selfless person who never lets themselves stay in one place too long and find himself for fear of being “what is missing”. Someone who keeps moving to allow the air “to fill the spaces/ where [his] body’s been” is so self-sacrificing that they would rather never find themself to keep the world whole for others rather than cure his sense of self-loss. The way that he mourns himself paints the picture of someone who could be so valuable to society if only he would allow himself the chance to find a community. It’s hard to stop one’s self from grieving along with Strand for someone who so obviously cares about others but can’t find enough of themselves to know, let alone care for.

Poetry is perhaps the best way to put grief into words. For Yusef Kamanyakaa, he was able to change his son’s death from a “sad” event to something that inspired the image of “throbbing searchlights”, conveying a hopeless tone that the literal words with the same tone (like “hopeless”) would never be able to convey the same level of loss he was experiencing. He was able to not only work through the literal grief for his son but also to put it into words. Hayden grieved his relationship with his father and Strand his relationship with himself, both leaning into the poetic to fully convey the depth of their grief. No amount of technical language would ever be able to come close to even a single line of poetry describing profound emotions, especially grief. To mourn is to tap into humanity, and to write poetry is to let that tap run.

#jfc this is actually so bad i wrote it day of #but the idea behind it was spicy #written one yr ago #og #emptying notes #essays #long post

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jenner-benjamin · 5 years ago

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Cecil Touchon

‘Fusion Series #3582′ by Cecil Touchon, 2015 - collage on paper.

Touchon is a well known artist in the asemic writing field though he is mostly known for his typographic abstract works. These are comprised of collaged letters whose geometric shapes are employed to create unique abstracted forms. This iteration of visual poetry reduces the lettering to an abstracted composition that, similarly to asemic writing, relieves them of their semantic content. Until I found Touchon’s work I had always read that asemic writing had its literary meaning stripped or obscured, but he explains how he sees his work has liberated language from its burden of being bearers of meaning; and as a result it liberates the reader from the task of deciphering and investigating the work. They are no longer bound to being literate and can enjoy the language solely as visually stimulating.

The typographic works by the very nature of collage seem to explore the dismantling and reassembling of the printed word whereas asemic writing by definition is typically characterised by an innate flow of calligraphic gestures. The common ground between the two seemingly opposing practices is the exploration of language. There is a tension between language as a tool for understanding, and an inquiry in to the composition of language in a more expressive way that does not abide by the conventions of what the written word means. It is this line of inquiry that interests me, though I strive to find a way a way that playfully explores the composition of the written word as well as using this language as a means to communicate to an intended audience.

‘Palimpsest Asemic Poem #2011.006′ by Cecil Touchon, 2011 - ink on paper.

‘Fusion Series #3638′ by Cecil Touchon, 2015 - collage on paper.

#influences #cecil touchon #asemic art #asemic #asemic writing #vispo #visual poetry #poetry #collage #typography #printmaking #masters #mamdp

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kabane52 · 5 years ago

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The Covenantal Basis of Sacramental Validity

Good question:

Do Oriental Orthodox have valid sacraments? What about the Anglicans or the Assyrian Church of the East. Where do you draw the line? Much appreciated!

I believe the Oriental Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Roman Catholic Church have a valid priesthood and sacraments. The reason I say so is that the formal teaching of the Church of England after the Elizabethan reforms preclude the sort of priestly charism whose transmission is the essential purpose of the sacrament of ordination.

But we ought to be precise about what it means for a church to have valid priesthood and sacraments. Indeed, what is the theological basis for such things as a valid baptism? The apostles, particularly Paul, closely associate the faith which justifies the Christian with the mystery of baptism. Romans 6:7 says that a person is “justified” from sin in baptism in the same letter where justification by faith is a major emphasis. A person is justified by faith in baptism. We can also compare the language of Ephesians 2:8-10 to the description of baptism in Colossians 2 to see the key connection. I believe the most helpful text in this regard is Acts 22, where Ananias says to Paul: “rise, be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His Name.”

The phrase “calling on the Name of the Lord” is first used in Genesis 4 and is echoed throughout the law, the prophets, and the New Testament. Its use in the New Testament principally derives from the text in Joel 2 where we are told that the Spirit will be “poured out on all flesh” so that “all who call on the Name of the Lord” will be saved. Notice that there is a very close conceptual link between the words “Name” and “call.” The word “call” is frequently used in scripture to denote the verbal act of naming. In one respect, then, the phrase means “Naming the Name of the Lord.” In baptism, we are given a new name through death and resurrection by being baptized “into” the Name of the Lord. The genealogy that begins with the son of Adam who initiates “calling on the Name of the Lord” is brought to a new beginning with Shem- whose name means “name.” Shem’s genealogy is brought to a new beginning through Abram, whom God promises to give a “great Name” and who receives a new personal name.

What, then, accounts for the connection between these two words? To grasp this, one must attend to the biblical freight of the “Name of the Lord.” In scripture, as in traditional societies, a personal name expresses the intrinsic qualities and character of a person. God thus “reveals” His Name “Yahweh” (“the Lord”) for the first time in Exodus because it is in the exodus that the quality of God signified by this Name “Yahweh” is covenantally revealed. In the patriarchal period, God’s preeminent name was “God Almighty.” The word “Shaddai”, based on other Near Eastern cognates, seems to relate to the mountain, both in the greatness and power signified by the mountain and also from the mountain’s relation to the human breast. While this might sound bizarre, consider the contexts in which God is revealed as “Shaddai.” God is “El Shaddai” when He makes prophetic promises which appear to be, at first glance, extremely unlikely. God promises the barren and decrepit that they will have countless children. How can we trust this promise? Because God is mighty as the great mountains. And what is being promised? A family- God will give the family of Abraham a fresh birth and nourish them with milk in their promised land. The imagery of birth is used in Deuteronomy 32 among other places: the Lord “gave [Israel] birth.”

The God with the power to give birth through the barren and do the impossible is the God who is the living and regenerative Almighty.

“The Lord” is revealed in exodus because the word “Yahweh” signifies the One who actively fulfills the promises made. The phrase “I am who I am” is transtemporal and can be read “I was who I was”, “I am who I am” and “I will be who I will be.” This is why in the Apocalypse, the Lord God is described as He who “was and is and is to come.” When Yahweh reveals the Name to Moses, He does so in the context of revealing the imminent fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise in Genesis 15. The enactment of the exodus is the public revelation of the God of Abraham as the Existent One, He who is sovereign in all things and does according to His will to be gracious to a sinful nation and judge the wicked. Moses tells Pharoah that God does these things precisely in order that “my Name might be proclaimed throughout all the Earth.” The tabernacle and temple is described as a place where God sets the Name. Israel may build altars wherever the “Name” is remembered. In Exodus 32-34, we read the most important text in the whole Hebrew Bible concerning the revelation of the Name. Israel has sinned against God and has made His dwelling personally in their midst dangerous. Moses ascends the mountain, the Lord tells him to enter into a cave, and we are told that the Lord “descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the Name of the Lord.”

The proclamation of that Name is a proclamation of God’s character governing His relationship with the creation and undergirding His gracious renewal of the covenant with Israel. He is full of steadfast love and faithfulness, pardoning iniquity, showing His grace to thousands of generations, but also judging iniquity to the fourth generation. This text is echoed throughout the prophets and the New Testament. The statement that Jesus is “full of grace and truth” echoes Exodus 34 in its Greek translation. God’s love is more ultimate than His judgment, but His judgment is a real and sobering reality to which we must attend. The revelation of this Name in divine glory transforms Moses. His being placed in the cave signifies death, going into the Earth. The hand of the Lord is upon him, creating a bond between the Lord and the prophet. And when Moses descends, his face radiates with the glory of God, so that Israel exhibits the very same fear they exhibited when God descended in glory on Sinai. Moses is veiled just as the Lord is veiled. The revelation of the Divine Name is such that it recreates the person by their being drawn into that Name, sharing in these qualities.

It is the promise of divine faithfulness which is most relevant in considering the theology of the sacraments. Throughout the scriptures, the “calling on the Name of the Lord” occurs in a liturgical and ritual context. In Genesis 12:8 and 13:4, Abraham calls upon the Name of the Lord at an altar. The same thing happens to Isaac in Genesis 26:5. Moreover, these altars are built in the immediate context of God revealing Himself and making a promise. When Elijah builds the altar at Carmel, he challenges the priests of Baal to “call on the name” of their god as he will “call upon the Name of the Lord.” In light of everything we have seen, “calling on the Name of the Lord” is best understood as a ritual expression of trust in the divine promises. God has promised to act in a specific way and He will always fulfill that promise.

The altar is a liturgical symbol of the holy mountain, after all, a ladder to heaven through which the glory-fire of God flows to Earth. It is at the altar that the person comes to meet God. The underlying logic of the sacrificial system depends on these expressions of faith. The ascension offering of Leviticus 1 symbolically re-enacts Israel’s exodus from Egypt and covenant with the Lord at Sinai. An Israelite who wishes to manifest or restore his relationship with the gracious Lord performs certain actions as the Lord commanded. Having done what the Lord commanded, He trusts that the Lord will do what He has promised to do when these commands are followed. To “call on the Name of the Lord” is to ask the Lord to fulfill the promises He has made. The Name which is called upon denotes this particular fidelity.

In Zephaniah, we are told that God will change the lip of the nations to be a pure lip. The word “lip” does not principally denote a national language. Its usage throughout the Hebrew Bible reveals the lip to be the instrument by which one calls upon one’s god. As David says of the false gods: “their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out, nor take their names on my lips.” Isaiah 19, prophesying the healing of Egypt and Assyria, Israel’s oppressor nations, states that four out of five cities will speak one lip with the redeemed Israel. And in Genesis 11, we read that the human family was both of one lip and one language. The twofold nature of the Babel-project was sacral and cultural. There was a tower (a temple and ladder to heaven) and a city. There was both a false profession and a false, undifferentiated unity. Both are scattered. God creates a plenitude of nations and turns the idolaters against one another. The builders sought to utilize this false religion to exalt themselves, giving themselves a “great Name.” It is in the aftermath of the collapse of the Babel-project that God promises Abraham a “great Name” in the city which is to come. Abraham builds a true altar and calls upon the Name of the true God.

Zephaniah 3 thus speaks of the gathering of the many-tongued nations around a single, true altar, at which the pure lip of divine worship is restored. All nations “call upon the Name of the Lord and serve Him with one accord.” (Zephaniah 3:9) In light of the literary unity of the Twelve Prophets (Hosea-Malachi), we see this to be a further exploration of the word given to Joel. God will “pour out” His “Spirit on all flesh.” It is on that day that “all who call on the Name of the Lord will be saved.” The Spirit of God descends to create a family of nations attached to Israel as the heirs of promise, a family brought into One Name and reborn in and through that Name. Through the Spirit, men “call upon the Name of the Lord” and are saved. Indeed, Joel 2:32 uses the very same word in both directions: “all who **call** on the Name of the Lord will be saved” and “among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord **calls.**” [In context of the Twelve, the survivors refer to people who are redeemed through the world’s being turned upside down. Being redeemed, they come to Zion and are made holy, in the direct presence of God.]

As Paul says in Hebrews 11, we are promised a beautiful inheritance. The possession of that inheritance comes through walking with God through faith. “Whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.” God has promised to forgive our sins when we repent. He has promised the indwelling Holy Spirit who will engrave the words of the Incarnate Word on our heart. Faith means trusting that God will be faithful to give everything He promised. To “draw near” to God means to enter into His presence. The “city which was to come” spoken of by Paul is the city suffused and irradiated with divine presence. It is that very city on Zion to which the nations who call on the Name of the Lord are gathered.

Baptism and Eucharist are the preeminent acts by which we liturgically “call upon the Name of the Lord.” In both cases, we have direct instructions from Jesus Christ. We are to baptize in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are to “do” the Lord’s Supper as the covenant memorial of Christ’s work. Faith undergirds baptism precisely because it is faith which trusts that God will do exactly what He said He would do in the baptismal waters. God said “if you do this, I will meet you here.” And it is in that meeting that we are given the new Name in His Name, reborn unto a resurrected and glorified life. Baptism is usually not attended by a dramatic and visible sign of God’s miraculous presence. Faith affirms that He will do and has done precisely what He promised in the waters of baptism. The same is true of the Eucharist. In the celebration of the Eucharist, the Church joins its work to the perfect work of Christ. Christ gathers up all creation into His Memory and wholly offers it to God the Father. That a human being made this perfect offering repairs the rupture which came in the fall. When joined to the offering of Christ, the ubiquitous imperfections in our offering die with Christ so that only the gold remains. The Church gathers up the manifold wisdom of God throughout the cosmos and offers it, in glorified, transfigured form, to God the Father, fulfilling the divine purpose given to the human family.

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bangali-ray-blog · 5 years ago

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Book Review "RAM: The Scion of Ikshvaku"

“You live in Ram’s kingdom, hold your head high. Fight for justice. Treat all as equal. Protect the weak. Know that dharma is above all. Hold your head high, You live in the kingdom of Ram….. “

The COVID-19 Pandemic has proliferated around the world in 2020 spreading the sense of despondency throughout humanity. Even in such dark times there have been several interesting developments happening all around world. One such instance has been the resurgence of public interest in India for the ancient Indian chronicle of "RAMAYANA". The re-telecast of the 1987 television series based on the account Tulsidas has emerged as a surprise winner when every telecasting platform has been trying to grab eyeballs amidst the lockdown. Hence it is the most appropriate time to revisit another successful attempt of retelling this tale by India's literary popstar "Amish Tripathi".

SCION OF IKSHVAKU, the first book in the Ram Chandra series by Amish Tripathi gives an amazing mythical re-imagination of the Ramayana without losing the essence of the story. Amish tries to keep every character in the book as real as possible with no traces of Godliness or the magical powers that we are accustomed to knowing in the epic saga. Just like his previous book series "The Shiva Trilogy", here too a great attempt has been made to present the readers with the set-up of the story and world it is set in. The intricate details of the society gives the modern day readers and context for the world in which the tale is set in.

Although the storyline is the same as the well known classic tale, but it still breathes of freshness. One of the unique feature of Amish’s writing is that although he’s rewriting mythology, but he never resorts to equip any of his characters or the environment with any magical or divine power. He attempts to back up the mighty powers and things in the story with science and technology and it works, it works well. Ram is neither born through divine means, nor portrayed as the apple of everyone’s eye. In fact, the first and greatest point of difference between the traditional Ramayana and Amish’s retelling of the tale is the depiction of Ram as an unloved prince. His father, King Dashratha, considers Ram’s birth inauspicious and blames him for all his misfortunes. So, the fabulously powerful and wealthy king of Ayodhya is shown to be a defeated old man ruling over a crumbling kingdom. The very foundations of the epic are laid differently in this story. Even Manthara is depicted as a powerful merchant of the Sapt Sindhu. Her actions are justified in the lieu of her daughter's murder which instigates her hate for Ram.

Amish also makes use of the feminist wave (on purpose or not), is the portrayal of Sita as a ‘physically’ strong women with scars as opposed to the delicate nature deserves a thumb up. We all know Sita is a strong character, but here Amish pushes the envelope by appointing her the prime minister of Mithila. Even the reasoning why Dashratha was devoted to Kaikeyi, and later forced to grant her, her wish is ratiocinating.

At times, the narrative of the book feels like Tokiens. There are points where the creative brilliance shines bright. The description of the city of Mithila is breathtaking. The author jots down minute details about the skills of Archery or the muscular movement in swordsmanship. Also philosophies and ideas from his previous books is also sprinkled here and there.

Many of the well known characters of the fable gets a bit of makeover. Here Bharat is presented as something of a “ladies’ man”, a foil to the stoic Ram. Vishwamitra, the sage, becomes a conspiring sarcastic leader of a clan and Jatayu becomes a Naga and so would any other characters too with any resemblance to other animals. Ravana loses nine of his heads in Amish’s version and gets a horned helmet instead. The story is told entirely on third person objective and most of the inner struggle faced by the Maryada Puroshottam by the strong resolve abide by the laws is Lakshman’s respect and love for his elder brother Ram, Sita’s strong character, the mutual respect & trust between Sita and Ram etc. has been presented to the readers.But on an overall basis the creative genius of Amish is at play. The books clearly creates a parallel Ramayana and many interpretations of known beliefs are intriguing. All in all this is a light read and interesting book. The first paced narration will keep you occupied for hours. The twisting and the interesting characters sets a strong stage for the remaining books. The book is a pure enjoyment and will leave you refreshed and wanting more.

#Ramayana #AmishTripathi #Book Review

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cavitymagazine · 5 years ago

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Haptic Narratives: The Absurdly R EA L Artifacts of Dale Brett / / / [part 2]

[D]: Lately though, most of my influence has come from other forms of media opposed to writing. I have found the more I write, the less I read – at least long form. Music, animated series/films - both Japanese anime and stuff like Adult Swim and internet culture - all of these things come through in my work.

[W]: Music.

[D]: Definitely music. I often try to write with a type of musical style I enjoy in mind. This is, believe it or not, one of the reasons I decided to re-commence writing fiction. I was sick and tired of googling combinations of "vaporwave + fiction + dream" or "shoegaze + literature + drugs" to try and find works that fit a certain aesthetic that did not exist. So why not create them myself? For instance, ambient and to a lesser extent dreampunk, would be the genres I was trying to build on in Faceless in Nippon. With Ultraviolet Torus it is no secret that it is my shoegaze project. As you know with our mall collaboration [cloud mall and maze/mall], this will be vaporwave-heavy in aesthetic and theme. I think these musical styles also take me right back to the original interests that I have garnered from literature: how to feel and express oneself in light of the consumerist dream, how to find meaning in the face of a constant blurring reality. I want to produce words that create a sensory experience. Words to touch your skin, words to make you see refracted colours, words to make you realise life sucks but it's all okay.

[W]: Aesthetics are important to me as well. The depth of the surface. The synthetic, simulacra. I suspect any "honest" portrayal of our day-to-day life, even a so-called "realist" presentation, would be sci-fi, at least in part. The kitchen-sink realism of today would include game realities and all sorts of "tropes" – or what one used to call tropes – of sci-fi. DeLillo’s White Noise is a big work for me, related to some of the consumerist themes. The three layers you refer to are impressive – you've put a lot of thought into where your work comes from, what it's shaped by. I've never thought in those terms really. Although "Pessoan cyberpunk nihilism" as a blurb would have me buying whatever that book is. Abe's The Box Man - I read that in I think 2015 or so. I see Abe's tone in some of your prose. That is a hard tone to tap. It's soft and dislocated. Requires a gentle hand, and a kind of amorphous thought process. In recent years I've taken influence more from video games and commercials and music than anything textual. I assumed your influences now were primarily visual. Graphic novels, anime, bad TV movies - I cull more from kitsch than I do from literature now. Would you tell me a bit about your time in Japan? And how would you describe Faceless in Nippon to a reader who knows literally nothing about it?

[W]: I relate very hard to your not being able to google, say, "vaporwave + dream + fiction" and get a hit. You had to create your hits. I feel the same way. It's like I want "Borges + USA Up All Night" or something similarly niche and not-quite-available-elsewhere. The established subgenres you mention, like dreampunk, are still these largely unexplored parks of the mind. There aren't a whole lot of titles. Do you view Faceless in Nippon as your first book and Ultraviolet Torus as a sophomore effort?

[W]: One aspect of your work that struck me right away is its sensory nature, and its desire to make complex emotions like melancholy or lostness more tangible or tactile.

[Ed.: racetams with caffeine are ingested.]

[D]: I really like your description – “the depth of the surface.” This really fits what I’m trying to achieve with writing. I try to attain a certain sensory experience with abstract imagery, but endeavor to maintain a somewhat conventional narrative or “everyday” story underneath. For instance, Faceless in Nippon was always meant to mimic the feeling of floating in/on water, gently bobbing through society’s ambient capitalist waters attempting to find a purpose. This incorporeal imagery juxtaposed with the more straightforward vignette format and story arc of a young western male living abroad. With Ultraviolet Torus, the prose and format are more unconventional – it was designed to mimic gemstone/mineral structure and shoegaze music, with the narrative underpinning the imagery taking the form of the rise and fall of a standard relationship. I agree that even a “realist” presentation is somewhat sci-fi these days – it is unavoidable. Our friend, contemporary, and collaborator James Krendel-Clark and I have often spoken about how the only thing left for sci-fi is this almost meta-sci-fi angle, where all the tropes have become so cliché and ingrained that really any attempt at sincere “world building” is futile. It’s better to experiment in syntax and delve into what another contemporary of ours, Nick Greer, likes to call “hyper-genre”. Use the tropes, but explore them linguistically, see what they do for the reader sensorily, opposed to using them as the building blocks to create another mundane genre narrative. I have certainly done that in shorter form through the Concentric Circuits: CODA stuff on Surfaces. I think my sci-fi influence comes through in both Faceless in Nippon and Ultraviolet Torus, certainly in the way that I frame the setting or landscape as a character almost, similar to how Ballard and Gibson craft their prose. I have had a lot of time to think about the aforementioned literary influences. I am slightly OCD too, so I often create these massive lists and Venn diagrams and shit of artists/works with certain styles and aesthetics that overlap. I do like to think of myself as a modern-day Walter Benjamin in the way I compile notes and lists and memories that form the basis of my artistic and existential exploration. I think Benjamin would have had a hell of a time with the notes app of a smart phone.

[D]: Regarding Kobo Abe, you are correct, certainly not an easy tone to master, and one that I definitely have not. My writing is not as sound as a master like Abe, which I think is why I subconsciously fall back on the sci-fi landscape syntax/prose mentioned above and the more colloquial twenty-first century alt-lit style to strive forward in my work. I am still developing though, and hopefully, opposed to just replicating Abe’s tone, one day I will be in a position where people are speaking about a tone entirely of my own that others will use as an influence. Abe is also a good segue into other forms of media that influence written work, as he has often been an inspiration to artist’s in the visual field such as filmmakers and video game creators. It is no secret that he is Hideo Kojima’s favorite author.

[D]: Since re-commencing my fiction-writing, which was at the beginning of 2019, you are accurate in your inference that I have primarily relied on other forms of media to influence my work. I have barely read any novels at all in the last couple of years comparative to the previous decade of reading. I garner much more from music, anime, and internet culture these days. I am glad you brought up the influence of commercials – I think we certainly share an avid interest in exploring the consumerist sphere and its effects on art and society. There are a number of important moments in Faceless in Nippon dealing with commercials, products, stores and their underrated aura. Hell, I even created fictional beverages and advertisements for the book.

[D]: My time in Japan was an incredibly formative experience for me. I really only returned to my home country, Australia, when my wife became pregnant. Otherwise I would probably still be there, cruising around upper-class malls, lower-class malls, drinking massive cans of Asahi on the train, staring at LED signs from concrete overpasses at night interminably. I certainly still yearn for my time there. I did go back to visit friends recently and it was a strange experience, like I could not re-create the feelings of my time there in the past no matter how hard I strived. It became apparent that my yearnings were purely for a time in my life while stationed there, opposed to the setting itself.

[D]: I would describe Faceless in Nippon as a meditative, aqueous travelogue on what it means to exist as a middle-class person in the twenty first century, the entirety of which is set in urban Japan.

[D]: I really admire artists that have an unmistakable aesthetic stamp on their work. Auteurship, if you will. For what it’s worth, I think you are one of the few that has a singular, univocal voice in the online “outsider” lit community or whatever you want to call it. I would like to think mine is the same. That people will read it and go, “Oh fuck, that’s Dale alright.” I have been told before that my work reads like MDMA. I am exceedingly happy with that comparison. I would be pleased if that was how I was known as an artist after my “career” or whatever you want to call it is over. Basically, I want to create things that are uniquely my own, things that have not been attempted before. Another reason I think that you and I gel well together as creatives is that despite our many differences in aesthetics, we are enamored by the depth of so-called low culture and continually mash it together with the supposed “high culture” of literature.

The "Borges + USA Up All Night" example illustrates this perfectly.

[D]: Both Faceless in Nippon and Ultraviolet Torus will be available at similar times. However, there is no doubt that Faceless is my first book. It is the first thing I started working on when I didn’t know it was going to be what it became. Torus was a more experimental foray into the literary field. I compiled Torus, an exploration of gemstone and dream imagery, between drafts of Faceless. I was particularly taken by crystals, shoegaze, and giddiness over my interactions with some beautiful people on the internet at the time. It proved to be a fruitful break from Faceless rewrites, as not only did I let the novel marinate and become better before publishing it, I also gave birth to another creative treasure.

[D]: Making emotive words tactile, rendering the textually intangible tangible. This is something I want to see extended even further as we continue collaborating on our mall project. I want to delicately wrench the phaser knob on these effects and really see where we can go with our adventures in the literary sensorium.

[W]: I remember you saying you wanted Faceless in Nippon to "feel like floating in water." It made me think of a novel as a kind of sensory deprivation tank, the floating and the effects. Did you think of Ultraviolet Torus as a gem, in the abstract, or was the structuring of it more precisely gemlike? James [Krendel-Clark] and I wrote the rough draft of this Blanchot-bodyhorror, broken-videogame-reality novel called Cenotaph, and much of it deals with irrational spaces and Phildickian pulp. As far as sci-fi goes, the more subjective my take, the more "sci-fi" it seems to become. Just last night I drifted between three realities - one in which I was an unemployed writer living under Covid-19, one in which I destroyed an organic ship/braincraft with a cyber-tank, and another where I trained as a druid mage in a treacherous cursed desert. Of course these last two were games and that doesn't even entail any other branching realities that came about as well with regard to books, narratives, televisual influences, lies we tell ourselves, 5G brain-attacking waves, et al. It's late and I'm stoned and tired but yeah. Nick Greer is a fascinating individual. I didn't know you knew him. We spoke about set theory once. Gödel. I read very little, yeah. Or I should say I don't sit and read a physical book as often as I used to. I read rigorously for a good 20 years. If I'm awake enough to read, I usually would want to spend that time writing, or perhaps gaming. Or dreaming. All of these beats - the fictional beverages and ads and playing metafictionally with products and whatnot - I kind of live for that shit. I do that more and more. And it's not even a critique or any kind of satire of it for me - like the low-rez haze of 1-900 commercials was a fuzzy heaven in a box for me as a kid. The K-Mart cafeteria did possess a unique and strange power. I think we're kind of on the same page here as far as we share a kind of reverence for the artificial, the things rendered meaningless through mass production, and other similar slippery intangibles. There is a wonder here that sets it apart from, say, a satirical/scathing view of consumerist life. God, yeah, your experience in Japan. I think I've experienced similar stuff. I remember a time in 2000 when Boca Raton, Florida, was kind of magical for me. I went there a few years back; it's just any place now. Such a strange thing. And sad too. This is the only kind of interview I'd conduct, one with a writer whose work I think truly good. You might've remarked upon the melancholic allure of vending machines coding out at night. Or something similar. It's that sort of sentiment I recognized straightaway as what I consider tuned-in to a cryptic aesthetic I love. I was relieved to discover your wordcraft was honed – that's usually the big problem for me liking someone's work. One of the big draws for me about your work is the stuff you're able to do that I really dig but am not really suited to pull off myself, such as the MDMA vibe, or the ennui mixed with light, hope, etc. There are a dozen or so singular voices around in the online outsider-lit community/whatever, voices I'd consider distinctive: you, Clark, Elytron Frass, Durban Moffer – a few others.

[W]: Your themes I would say demand nuance and control. We've talked about how our mall project is slow-going because it seems very painstaking, almost like etching or surgery or something. Introspective, in any case. Although I just sort of dismissed reading a second ago, I do believe that a unique body of work is made unique by a dizzying variety of blendered influences. I had that 15-year stretch in the suffering cubes to read pretty much constantly, and haphazardly, as far as selection, in a lot of ways, so my influence map is like really fucking bizarre and extensive, which I think makes my stuff appear unique, when all that is unique about it probably is my little perspective or whatever subjectivity is injected into this array of eclectic influences.

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teamoliv-archive · 5 years ago

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I don’t have much for unpopular opinions, but I’ll try this instead: what’s your take on the whole situation regarding RWBY and their recent decisions in the latest season? (Frcstbxte)

send me controversial or unpopular opinions and I’ll tell you if I agree or disagree 🐸 ☕️

Hoo boy. People are going to unfollow me for this one guaranteed due to how may super strong opinions people have about this. This one’s getting a cut to avoid drama.

I do want to stress that I don’t want to devalue or invalidate anyone’s complaints regarding the show. Enjoyment is a highly personal thing and if you’re frustrated, upset, disappointed, or otherwise had negative feelings don’t let this convince you that you’re not allowed to feel the way you do about the volume.. My gripes are more on the mechanical and storytelling aspects of things and with the arguments used to criticize the volume. I only hope I can make my case on why the commonly complained about parts of the show don’t warrant the vitriol in my opinion. I likely won’t convince too many people, but I’d like to make my case here anyway.

I honestly believe a lot of the complaints about the latest season from a writing standpoint are short-sighted, lack scope, and/or just miss the point of what we’re looking at. From an overall storytelling perspective this was definitely the most well put together season the show has had so far and a lot of the complaints only address individual concerns that some fans had regarding things not happening the way they wanted to without a regard for the overall plot. This is why I think a lot of the complaints don’t measure up and where my actual gripes with the part lie.

1. Theme

You cannot consider yourself to have analyzed a work without first looking at its overall theme. RWBY’s structure doubles up on this as not only does the show as a whole have its overarching themes and plot, but each individual volume has their own to deal with as well. Here the theme is trust, as directly stated in the opening lyrics and it’s a common source of problems and solutions throughout the the show.

From an overarching standpoint, we have Salem doing her darnedest to break apart any alliances that could be formed against her. I do not believe this is because she fears humanity in terms of tactical numbers. This simply isn’t that kind of show. The writers have said in interviews that they take most of their story and theme cues from the magical girl genre. You know, the same “love and friendship conquers all” magical girl genre that all those shows not named Madoka Magicka use as the basis for their protagonists. The silver eye power seems fueled by that exact sentiment and I think that’s going to be a huge factor close to the end. This is not a setting where pragmatism and strategic thinking will carry the day- keep that in mind.

2. RWBY vs. Ironwood

This is the part everyone’s been talking about and I think a lot of the hard-line side-taking in either direction is missing the point entirely. This conflict was always going to happen and both sides have fault to bear.

The two sides can be seen as having their own character arcs on a macro scale. Individual character motivations weren’t nearly as important as they were in previous volumes and it helps to see them mostly through the lens of Ruby and Ironwood. The basic core of the problem throughout the series is this, Team RWBY has decided to go along with Ironwood’s plan for lack of one themselves, but don’t trust him with the whole truth until they know how he’ll react to it. This is a man with an army and a paranoid streak after all. This, of course, is a decision that winds up instrumental in triggering Ironwood’s paranoid shitstorm later in the volume.

That said, I don’t believe the problem is Ruby’s decision making- It’s the narrative. The whole reason this comes across as weird and contrived is that we are never told the reason Ruby and co. don’t trust Ironwood with the information from the lamp. By all accounts up until this point there was no visible reason for them to do so and we’re simply never told WHY. Answering this simple question would have made the entire rest of the narrative make a lot more sense were she just given a believable reason to hold the info back, let alone any reason at all.

Now let’s bounce back to Ironwood. I’m going to just go out and say I grew tired of the “Ironwood did no wrong.” discourse pretty quickly because, again, people are missing the point. For this one, we have to look back into the theme- trust. When Ironwood has his breakdown, he not only turns his back on Ruby and her team for lying to him, but he goes right into his martial law plan also betraying the trust of the council, Robyn, and the people of Mantle who are now going to be sacrificed for the sake of salvaging his original plan. Despite Ruby and co’s actions making the situation worse, we aren’t meant to see Ironwood’s new solution as a better alternative purely on the moral cost of what he’s doing. This is what is called in screenwriting the “Moral Line” defined as a vision of right and wrong as told through the protagonists. We’re meant to sympathize with Ruby owning up to lying to Ironwood and trying to move forward despite the setbacks, not cheer for Ironwood calling them out and forcing out a more pragmatic path.

To me, I think this stems from a common sentiment shared in a lot of popular media and deconstruction of tropes that idealism is a naive and childish flaw and that proper strategic logic is what solves problems. Again, I predict that due to the genre inspirations of this story, this won’t be the case at all. Ironwood is going to fail because he turned his back on moral idealism, trust, and friendship in favor of planning and decisive action no matter the cost, not despite it. Harriet summarized the entire philosophy well during her fight with Ruby:

“It’s not excessive if it’s necessary!”

This line feels, to me, like a reflection of everything that Team RWBY is now fighting against and we should be able to understand as an audience from a moral standpoint why this is the way it is.

As a small aside, let’s cap this off with the RWBY vs. ACE-Ops fight. A lot of people called foul because the ACE-Ops lost and I just don’t understand why. The moment the fight started, I knew what the outcome was going to be purely because the story as it was set up simply couldn’t progress otherwise. Much like Mercury and Emerald in volume 5, RWBY matching and defeating the ACE-Ops shows the progression of the main characters. Them choosing to fight also shows RWBY the final stakes moving forward and symbolically shows them that the might of the entire Atlas army is now their enemy moving forward.

With this in mind, I want to go back to Ironwood’s martial law plan and defend some aspects of his character that should be. Up until the point of Ironwood’s breakdown it was seriously and soberly treated as a last resort option with a clear understanding by Ironwood, Winter, and the ACE-Ops that they knew exactly what was it was going to imply. This does not make them evil and it’s important to understand that. However the Tin Man needs a heart and this brings us to Ironwood’s fatal flaw. The real bad decision was that the martial law plan was enacted despite already having the unity of the people of Mantle behind them. He lost far more than the stands to gain with his decision, thinking only from a tactical and strategic standpoint regardless of what he has to sacrifice to get there. Those sacrifices have already all but left him facing Salem alone. If he survives next volume, I’ll be surprised.

3. Qrow and Clover

For a few moments, I do want to discuss Clover and Qrow’s dynamic because it’s very important to Qrow’s story throughout the part. Regardless of how you choose to interpret their exchanges, the important takeaway here is that for the first time in possibly decades Qrow had a friend he can talk to as an equal and not have Ozpin’s plans or a generational gap in the way.

Ever since we were introduced to Qrow, he’s shown himself to be a dysfunctional loner who is only just recently trying to seriously pick himself back up off his feet. I believe the fact that he was finally shown that he can actually have friends is a huge factor in this. His life has always been dominated by his feelings and doomsaying. He spends every interaction waiting for the other shoe to drop and uses his own semblance as an excuse to perpetuate that worldview.

And this is why I think Qrow’s fight with Clover makes total sense to have happened. He’s one of Oz’s main team and also has a fatal flaw.

The cowardly lion needed courage and he died for his cowardice.

The tin man needs a heart and lost all his allies in the pursuit of his goals.

The scarecrow needs a brain and his emotional decision-making cost him his friend’s life.

This is a genuine tragedy, literary-speaking in fact. Qrow’s awful situation was one of his own making and he knows it, but I can’t imagine him doing anything else. One thing that I’ve seen throughout the show about Qrow is that he’s never given up trying to stop Salem- he’s an idealist like Ruby and in my opinion has been subverting the mentor archetype beautifully. However, every time he’s made a major decision in the series, he’s done it on an emotional or practical level. No real thinking ever goes into what he does. When Clover calmly announces to Qrow what was just ordered and Robyn summarily attacks him, his first instinct is to try and stop the fight.

I’m going to break here to discuss Robyn’s actions at this moment- another common complaint. Would we really expect someone like her to have done anything different with the news that the city she’s worked so hard to work with all those years was just cast aside? This would have been seen to anyone in her position as nothing less than a double-cross given how just a few hours ago everything for the evacuation was moving apace. From a characters standpoint, I don’t get why anyone would fault Robyn for being furious at this aside from “It’s not the smart thing to do right now.” No, it’s not, but I’m also very tired of seeing people complain about characters making non-optimal decisions. Not everyone things with perfect logic, strategy, or sense at every given moment. This is a perfectly human response to finding out your loved ones were just given a death sentence. She lashed out at Clover over lack of Ironwood face to punch.

With this in mind, Qrow’s decision to fight Clover is a bit more personal. He’s treating it more or less the same way that he treated Raven joining with Cinder a few parts ago. Qrow is clearly very much against the idea of leaving what’s left of Mantle to die and now has a lot of aggression to take out seeing how calmly and without complaint Clover takes the order. The only friend Qrow’s had in a long time chose his duty over him and he doesn’t know how to take that- so they fight. It’s safe to assume that Qrow is likely in a highly emotional state and, as we’ve established before, not thinking about what he’s doing. Robyn is passed out in the wreckage, Tyrian is left unattended, and they’re miles away from any real contact from anyone. Bluntly, he screwed up, he screwed up big time, but his character leads me to believe he wouldn’t really have done anything else.

Then we see Qrow in engage in a little something we in the literary community call “seriously fucking up.” In the heat of the moment, he decides to trust Tyrian at his word and it ends about as well as to be expected. Qrow made a mistake, one of the biggest mistakes in the entire series and one that looks plainly obvious and avoidable to the audience, but only when you consider it through the lens of someone who’s making calm and rational decisions. Yes, Qrow fucked up, I’m not defending his decision making; I’m defending the scene and why that faulty decision making was the only thing that could really happen.

4. Winter and Penny

The biggest complaint regarding these two is Penny leaving Winter behind at the end of the part. Frankly, for this one I’ve got nothing so I’m not going to pretend I have an answer to the complaints. Much like Ruby early on, the show just outright refuses to give us the reason she left. Winter getting the maiden powers might have been part of the plan, but I don’t think Ironwood would be so inflexible as to not settle for Penny getting it instead. The only thing I can imagine that could be going through her head is that she still wants to try and save Mantle and live up to her title, trusting Winter can handle herself. However, again like with Ruby, I don’t believe that the character is to blame here, but the narrative just refusing to give us an explanation and leaving us to sit there in frustrated confusion. We might get it next part, but I don’t like that...

5. Can I Talk About Watts Now?

With that out of the way, I do have one really bizarre complaint regarding the part that no one else seems to talk talk about.

I am very disappointed with Watts. This is mostly just be griping about lost potential so bear with a small rant.

There was a lot of setup regarding Watts as a threat and when he got the codes. We’re told that given time he could control literally all of Atlas (because apparently two-factor authentication and dead man’s switches don’t exist but that’s a logical gripe for another day). My question is why this wasn’t capitalized on. I wanted a repeat of the mechanical soldiers turning on the Vale citizens. We could have had automated vehicles wreaking havoc, fights between people and robots, and all sorts of fun stuff. You can argue that Watts was distracted by Ironwood’s trap and didn’t have the time to really cut loose and I’ll accept that, but I just wish we could have seen more. Any Watts RPers out there who want some ideas, you’re free to steal this one.

#ooc #munday asks #discourse #RWBY vol 7 #Anonymous

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snicketsleuth · 6 years ago

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Slackin’ with the Sleuth: reviewing Netflix’s “The Penultimate Peril”

One of the difficulties befalling any adaptation of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is that you're actually putting three stories on screen: there's the conflict between Olaf and the Baudelaire orphans, then there are the obscure, offscreen manipulations of V.F.D. in the background, and finally there's Lemony's own past which is only alluded to through brief glimpses in his narration. We saw that the Netflix series, particularly in Season 2, sometimes extended the V.F.D. subplots at the expanse of the main Baudelaire story. Fortunately, the long pay-off of Lemony's elusive past is considerably more well-handled as it comes to a close in Netflix's version of "The Penultimate Peril". Let's analyze the writers' best effort under the cut.

The chronology of "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" is, to put it simply, a mess. Part of it is the consequence of Lemony's deliberately opaque style which makes it difficult to determine which characters he's really talking about, or when and where each event of his past is supposed to happen. The datation of Olaf's parents' murder, for example, has been a topic of contention for years amongst fans. Streamlining the entire sequence of his life into something more straightforward is far from a bad idea for this adaptation. "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" wasn't written to be read, but rather to be re-read. Understanding the bigger logic of the books' subplots is a reward for the more careful, compulsive readers. It's essentially marketed to bookworms and people whose idea of fun consists in literary commentary. But while readers alays have the opportunity to put down their book and search for earlier passages in order to understand his ramblings, the framework of a Netflix television show doesn't really lend itself to that. While it's always possible to binge-watch and rewatch, searching for individual scenes is more of a chore. In order for viewers to even engage with Lemony's complicated backstory, a more accessible timeline was essential. From the reactions of several watchers who have not read the books, the Netflix show is succesful in this attempt. Most show-only fans agree that the late-series are interesting and make mostly sense. Their experience is definitely less frustrating than the readers' post-series backlash a few years prior.

The opera house sequence is the series' most ambitious scene yet. It combines a great number of separate events into one: there's the obvious murder of Olaf's parents, of course, but also the theft of Esme Squalor's sugar bowl, Kit's romance with Olaf, Esmé' and Olaf's start of darkness, Lemony's decision to flee after being framed and his break-up with Beatrice. All of which happened at different in the books' timeline. It's a simplification but it's a highly effective one (as show writer Joe Tracz explained (Link), Bertrand was left out of the scene as it already had too many characters).

Ambiguity and unknowability are essential themes in the original series, but this vagueness came at a cost, namely that of character development. Even if these mysteries are mostly treated as jokes and McGuffins, the fact remains that many important characters (Olaf, Kit, Dewey, Esme, Lemony, etc.) make their decisions based on the answers to these mysteries. So it's difficult to empathize with them when we can't understand them. The chase for the sugar bowl is absurd, and therefore their actions are absurd. This, we think, is the real reason why the end of the series displeased so many fans. Not because it left us with mysteries, but because some of these unsolved mysteries actively removed us and disengaged us from the narrative. Why should we care about Lemony's tragic devotion to the woman he loved when we don't event know why the break-up happened? What are we even supposed to think about Esme's character when she won't reveal why the sugar bowl is important to her? How can we make our own opinion of the Baudelaire parents when we don't really know why they killed, or hat kind of persons ther victims were?

The Netflix series elegantly solves these issues in short scenes. There's still enough ambiguity here; Esme's personality can be interpreted in different ways, for example. On one hand, fans could say she's a shallow, materialistic woman who genuinely refuses to let go of a sugar bowl on the basis that it's hers, hers, hers. On the other hand, one could say the sugar bowl is just a totem, a symbol: what Esme is truly mad about is that people dismissed her as an idiot who couldn't take care of the sugar bowl properly, that her friends distrusted her and betrayed her, and that Beatrice/Lemony despised her enough to try murdering her. Same goes for Beatrice: sure, the death of Olaf's father was a tragic accident, but she still tried to kill another person. She can't reasonably be called innocent. So in that respect the writers gave the characters enough reality to flesh them out while preserving the moral ambiguity of their backstory. On that aspect, we do have to admit that the series is truly superior to the books. It's just as thought-provoking, but also more humane.

Less succesful is the writers' decision to give a resolution to the mystery of the sugar bowl. This is not a mystery which particularly needed solving, because it's not rooted in the characters' actions and motivations. All we really need to know is that the sugar bowl is "the most important thing in the world", and that's it. People want it for different reasons which are theirs and theirs alone: once you possess "the most important thing in the world", all your dreams can come true. As we've seen, the character who wants it the most is Esmé, and understanding her motivations does not necessirally require us to know what's inside it. Fear of abandonment, feelings of betrayal and pettiness are enough to explain her obsession. It's not the sugar bowl, it's what it meant to her.

More irritatingly, I very much doubt that the answer given in the series came from Daniel Handler himself. We have to remember he was "fired" from the staff of writers on Season 3, something he was oddly nonchalant about. This is strange considering he's spoken at length about his (understandable) bitterness after being fired from the writing staff of the 2004 Paramount movie. It's becoming clearer and clearer that somehow the decision suited his own purposes.

My own hypothesis is that Daniel Handler actively wanted to detach himself from Season 3 and that the "firing" was more of a mutual decision. We can only surmise what happened, but it's very probable that the other writers wanted to solve certain mysteries he preferred to leave ambiguous. The fact is that, if the author had wanted to give a clear-cut answer to the sugar bowl mystery in the books, he would have. He had a choice between resolution and ambiguity, and he made it. Though he revealed that he had his own opinion on what the sugar bowl really was, and that "one fan a year" usually finds the "real" solution, the mystery was written in a deliberately ambiguous way which allowed a multitude of answers. The author enjoys fans ho find the "real" solution and fans who come up with their own unique, personal ideas equally. It's his idea of fun, because literary analysis should be fun, and if there's one thing he enjoys, it's literary analysis. He doesn't want the conversation to end. So although he'd be willing to recognize that he kind of messed up by not developing some characters enough, it's extremely unlikely to us that he would write an obvious answer to something that he himself aknowledges as a MGuffin. Hence his decision to leave the writing staff after Season 2, as a way to disengage himself from whatever the writers wanted to include, and to preserve the intended ambiguity of the books' ending. It was also a tactful way of not throwing his fellow writers under the bus, as he respected their personal intention to solve the mystery. A clear case "I'm not going to stop you, just please leave me out of it and we can remain friends".

[Update: Liam R. Findlay from 667 Dark Avenue mesage board talked with show writer Joe Tracz (Link) and confirms that Daniel Handler never told the other writers if their solution was the correct one. It's a reliable source, though by no means official]

[Update: Here’s an interview where series showrunner Sonnenfeld clarifies that the solution given in the show was not confirmed by Handler (Link)]

The question remains: did the writers ask Daniel Handler what the sugar bowl contained, and did he even answer? We personnally doubt it. The canon of the series has been entirely reworked at this point. It's faithful to the books when it comes to themes, emotional resonance, political messages... but it's UNBASHEDLY unfaithful when it comes to plotting. Take Jacquelyn, who's revealed to be the infamous Duchess of Winnipeg. Now, in the books, the first name of the Duchess of Winnipeg is an unsolved mystery. Did the series solve it? No, because fans of the books know that canonically Jacquelyn was only created for the Netflix show and that the first name of the Duchess starts with an "R." It's show-canon, not book-canon. By that standard, we shouldn't trust the show to give us any supplementary information on the books. The show did not solve the sugar bowl mystery any more than it solved the mystery of the Duchess' first name.

On top of that, the explanation given in the show is not even that good from a purely internal perspective. If Beatrice wanted access to the hybrid, why couldn't she just steal some sugar from the bowl then give it back to Esme? If Kit had a cup of tea seasoned with the hybrid at the opera house, shouldn't she have been immune to the mushroom when she arrived on the island? Knowing Esme had tried to immunize her, what did she have to lose by drinking it? And if Beatrice succesfully managed to replicate the hybrid, why is the capture of the sugar bowl still so important? Its content could have been replicated by everyone! The idea that the sugar bowl contains an antidote to the Medusoid Mycelium is a popular hypothesis amongst fans, but a very flawed one. It's of course possible that Daniel Handler committed bad writing and that his own solution to the mystery is full of plotholes. But it sounds more likely that the Netflix writers just looked at a page of popular fan theories and just picked the one they liked the most. What tips it off for us is that supporters of this theory usually posit that the sugar bowl contains a bitter apple core hich was used to replicate the hybrid... while the show writers complicated things by saying it contained sugar made from the apples. This sounds more like another fan theory which proposes that the sugar bowl is a decoy used to deceive the other side of the Schism and that it only contains bland, normal sugar. So what we're dealing with here is probably the awkward combination of two popular fan theories which don't really make sense when taken together. Why would the writers choose to do that? My personal guess is that Handler truly didn't tell them and that they tried to combine the two most popular fan theories in order to please a maximum number of people. It's not a case of show canon extending book canon, it's fanservice. Not that fanservice is necessiraly bad, but you have to aknowledge it at what it is. We just wish the writers had integrated it a little better within the canon of the show's universe. It's possible they argued about which theory was better, just like the fans. And instead of a Schism, they had to settle for a compromise.

Speaking of compromises, the Netflix writers also decided to stop all pretense concerning the identity of the mysterious taxi driver. It's probably a good call, as they had already shown Lemony's face throughout the entire series. It's too difficult to engage viewers for hours of content if the "voice" of the series is faceless. An actor like Patrick Warburton was desperately needed to elevate the deadpan narration of Lemony Snicket. The grounbreaking, surreal nature of the encounter is intact as we get to see fictional protagonists (the Baudelaire orphans) suddenly interact with their equally-fictional author (Lemony). But this time, the writers make up for the loss of ambiguity by bringing something more to the table as replacement. We get to see a young, unaware version of Lemony speak with his sister Kit, and later Justice Strauss. These scenes include some of the series' best writing and will produce a lot of waterworks for sure. It's the perfect way to explain why Lemony decided to dedicate his life to the Baudelaire chronicles: it emerges diegetically from the onscreen plot itself. Justice Strauss passing down the torch of chronicling the Baudelaire orphans' lives to Lemony makes perfect sense: if there's someone who tried to shed some truth and justice on the Baudelaire case, it's her.

But as we approach the end of the Netflix series, we must look at it as a whole: was the denouement of this penultimate episode sufficient for the emotional pay-off of “The End”? More on the next review.

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