#overlong meta

[transmalewife]

this is little more than a personal headcanon but i just find it so annoying when people equate anakins experience with language to that of a modern third culture kid. framing huttese as his native tongue, a part of his culture and personhood, with basic as an addition, something foreign that he had to learn to assimilate into the order/function in the galaxy, when really its the other way round! huttese is the language of his enslavers. basic is his mother-tongue, literally, its the language he uses with shmi. she has an accent so it might not have been her first language but afaik the story is she was kidnapped by pirates as a kid so even then her native language sure wasn’t huttese.

i think trying to map the experiences of someone from an ethnic or national minority moving into a more powerful nation as a kid in our world onto anakin is just bound to fail because the culture he’s being taken away from was not his in the first place. it’s a culture from which he was explicitly excluded, a place and system and language that denied his personhood.

it’s not the tragedy of someone struggling to hold onto their roots while a stronger culture threatens to sweep them away, it’s being denied any culture of his own. it’s the tragedy of a mother speaking to her son in the lingua franca of the universe because she knows her own tongue will not be useful to him in the life they live. if she even remembers it, if the memories of her free childhood aren’t too distant and too painful.

it’s someone who’s first language is the second language of the whole galaxy. whose second language is that of his enslavers. who then joins an organization that unifies its members as its own culture, but unlike other jedi, he wasn’t raised in that culture either. we see jedi like ahsoka or luminara maintain connections to their cultures of origin despite leaving them as babies, but what exactly does anakin have to anchor him? the culture of the place that subjugated him and killed his mother? or the culture of the jedi from which he will always be a little excluded because he doesn’t have the same experiences as those who grew up in the order

[secretmellowblog]

Sydney Carton IS who the fandom wants Grantaire to be and you should say it!! Wisest words I have heard all week! (ready or not the fandom should hear this)

AJJSJDD thank you; thank you. 😂 I think the only reason no one else has pointed this out is because so few people care about a Tale of Two Cities anymore. : P

One day I Will write an overlong meta post about Sydney and Grantaire. For now I’ll just say….there are so many times when I read Les mis fanfic and am like “well this isn’t book Grantaire at all, but it is an absolutely perfect characterization of Sydney Carton.” XD ( I love the Les Mis fandom’s collective fanon universe though, it’s fun.)

I think it’s just. If you take Grantaire, and then sand away all his rough edges until he’s a handsome young scruffy clever competent kindhearted lonely friendless snarky witty ambiguously-fruity whumpy hurt/comfort alcoholic classic lit sadboi in unrequited love, you get Sydney Carton. He’s great. This is why I was obsessed with him in high school.

While this is another tangent, there are so many super interesting parallels between A Tale of Two Cities and Les Mis! I’m hoping to write a post on that eventually too so that my high school a tale of two cities obsession has meaning. The parallels are fascinating because it shows that Dickens and Hugo were attempting to comment on the same social issues (ex: Valjean and Manette are their attempts to comment on France’s harsh long prison sentences.)

The main difference between Les Mis and A Tale of Two Cities is that Les Mis is good.

OK I’m joking, I’m joking. As someone who can recite passages from ATOTC by heart— I dislike how it has become The iconic piece of classic lit about the French Rev when it really should not be, at all. XD it’s not a very deep political commentary, in the scattered moments when it’s trying to be— and for a great deal of the time it isn’t even trying to be. But that’s another tangent.

To me the thing about Dickens (having read nearly all his books) is that he’s great at doing character studies/writing weird memorable quirky characters! But his overarching plots are often pretty weak. His stories were like serialized soap operas, essentially, and the “plot” is rarely the point so it’s also rarely good. Like I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Dickens’ most well-loved popular work, a Christmas Carol, is literally just a character study. Because it’s what he’s best at! And his brand of social commentary also works a lot better when it’s just “show us the life of a character who’s been affected by these issues and let us draw our own conclusions” ahsjdjjdjd)

This is all a long winded way of saying….A Tale of Two cities may not be as “good” as Les mis BUT it does have some fun characters, including ultimate whump fanfic sadboi Sydney Carton. (Not to mention Madame “tell the wind and fire where to stop” Defarge.) and clearly people think Sydney Carton should be in Les mis too, given how the Fanon Grantaire we collectively came up with accidentally ended up being Sydney Carton 2. But eyy! One day I WILL write the fanfic idea that’s been kicking around in my head where an elderly Sydney Carton (who was miraculously rescued from the guillotine) meets Les Amis and helps give Grantaire some handy life advice…..one day 😔

[stuff-diary]

X

Movies watched in 2023

X (2022, USA)

Director & Writer: Ti West

Mini-review:

Wow. That was really good. Despite the glowing reviews, my expectations were not particularly high, for some reason. So, color me surprised. For starters, I loved the first half of the movie. In a lot of cases, that period where horror movies set up the characters and their environment ends up feeling tedious and overlong. But this time, I was thoroughly fascinated, because the writing is very strong and the cast is absolutely pitch perfect. Extra kudos go to Mia Goth, who's mesmerizing throughout (and I was blown away when I realized that).

Once the slasher part begins, the movie quickly starts to fire on all cylinders, equally bringing scares, thrills and laughs. In fact, one jumpscare in particular almost gave me a heart attack, which is not easy. And speaking of laughs, I loved the film's self-referential, meta humor, which is spot on for a movie with so many homages and callbacks. To sum up, X is a slasher that knows how to pay tribute to the classics without forgetting to bring new things to the table. The writing, the acting and the editing more than make it worth a watch.

[aflo]

this has a high potential to break the game. im seeing a world where this becomes the new borrowed time, where every player has to bring this because it is in all players best interest for everyone to have it. strategically unhooking someone on 2nd hook and taking that hook stage has the potential to completely counter tunneling, more so than any combination of anti-tunnel perks in the game right now.

this will warp the way killers act while they have a hooked survivor, because it forces the killer to prioritize hook trades. the assumption is that as soon as you put a survivor up on second hook, someone with shoulder the burden will come and trade hook stages with them, and you need to be within 20 seconds of distance, give or take a BT hit, to capitalize on the exposed on that player and not lose pressure from the trade. that means you have to camp, but anticamp and the newly extended hook timers punish camping, so you have to hold a tight proxy camp. with already overlong hook timers, and perks like kinship and reassurance, killers can easily get locked in a lose/lose scenario where leaving to pressure gens will lose them a confirmed kill, but staying to confirm the kill will lose them gens.

so what's the way forward? well i can tell you straight out that teleport killers gain a lot from this. hag and unknown especially, but but also xeno and dredge will be the best killers to punish the 20 second exposed on this perk. for m1 killers, fairhooking may be their only option, which means we're walking into another pain res/grim embrace meta. high lethality killers might not be hurt too much by the extra 1~3 chases you have to do per game, but it will still make close games feel insurmountable to win.

so let's talk about the elephant in the room. why not slug them? there has been a lot of discussion lately on slugging vs hooking, and the data shows mostly equivalent kill rates, sometimes higher than average based on the individual killer, with significantly more salty and tilted survivors. the introduction of this perk could be the push that makes some killers focus solely on slugs as a win con, and that will be seen as a major source of frustration for the playerbase. shoulder the burden/unbreakable meta anyone?

am i blowing things way out of proportion, or have i not gone far enough yet? will mori killers like myers, pyramid head, and devout fervor builds be the only path forward? will killers give up on plan a entirely and bring noed/no way out endgame builds? or will the perk have no impact at all because solo queue players are selfish and only care about their own escape chances? let me know what you think about this perk.

[alwaysalreadyangry]

due south & ghosts

a list of ideas, thoughts, and questions, not an essay but making gestures towards one:

1) what do ghosts mean? what do they signify? do they want anything? why do ghosts exist? are they borne of violence, or of uncertainty? 

2) is the only reason bob fraser sticks around, then, because he needs to see justice done? and not for his own murder, but for his wife’s murder? think of the ending of his plotline – when caroline comes to take him – home, to the other side, to the afterlife or whatever you’re interested in calling it. and how fraser says – i thought you were permanent. but he wasn’t. it was a rupture; not a final state.

3) in what sense is benton fraser a ghost, or can we understand him to be a ghost? i don’t mean that ht’s dead. i mean – he is out of place, out of time (the show determinedly shows us how much of an anachronism he is). he is in chicago in the first place because he has to right an injustice; and then he sticks around until he solves the other, submerged, hidden other half of it. the final act which frees his father’s ghost is also the act that allows fraser to return home. they both cross borders; they’re just different ones.

4) so then in what sense can we understand fraser as a spirit – of justice, mercy, kindness – who haunts chicago, who haunts this particular group of people. the mechanism keeping him there is obscure, but strong. he interferes in other people’s lives, and his own life is rarely affected. think of the scene in they eat horses, don’t they? when he and ray are in the dumpster, and ray asks why none of the gross dumpster dirt is sticking to fraser, and fraser is like oh, i don’t know, it’s always been this way. fraser is alive and physical but oddly unstuck. things slide off him (except for when they don’t). and he is something of a rupture in the physical, realistic world. he doesn’t operate on a realist plane of reality. he changes the world around him as he passes through it. this is ghostly.

5) what does a ghost want? a ghost traditionally wants something intangible, an act rather than a thing. and so here fraser wants justice, just as his father (the actual ghost) wants justice. and when they get it, they are both able to return from exile to their true home – the land of the dead vs canada. yes, they cross borders. and both also go with a person they love – caroline vs ray kowalski. 

6) there is something here about people not being things, and about voyaging out into the unknown with another person as an act of radical love. there is something about how ghosts are spirits who hold on perhaps for too long; and about the value of the next move, the journey out.

7) the end of due south then is both a return home and a voyage out, a journey into the unknown. for both bob & benton fraser. one of them a ghost who has been haunting the land of the living, and one of them – who has been out of place in chicago, haunting a series of friends and acquaintances in order to make them better people, without truly leaving much of himself behind.

8) fraser is most at home in the journey, in the voyage, in the discovery, in being un-stuck. 

9) fraser taking another person with him on the voyage is an intimate, loving act. i think ray understands this; and i think ray sees love as an adventure. yes: to ray love is an adventure; to fraser, adventure is love. they meet in the middle.

10) think of ray saying that when faced with death he sang. think of ray, faced with death, saying he regrets not going on an adventure when he had the chance – and that now it might be too late. and then when his life is saved, he actually decides to act on this impulse. he has been changed by that moment; by facing death, and singing. he has been changed by coming close to that spectral border. by facing death. it’s a moment of clarityl what he wants most is adventure and love. please note that the mention of abba spoiling the “romantic effect” is not a throwaway line; for ray kowalski, adventure and risk are romantic, they are the stuff of love.

10) hart crane, from voyages:

And so, admitted through black swollen gates   That must arrest all distance otherwise,— Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,   Light wrestling there incessantly with light,   Star kissing star through wave on wave unto   Your body rocking!                            and where death, if shed,   Presumes no carnage, but this single change,— Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn   The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands …  

11) from the devil’s backbone:

What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.

12) think, then, of due south as a ghost story which ends with the end of that instant of pain, with that emotion un-suspending itself. think of it as a loop of thread which is finally tied off, an insect which is allowed to rot. it is an exploration, a descent, a meditation, and there is a final confrontation of what was hidden. 

13) think of how the show’s final episode acknowledges, no, confronts the unstable state of the ghost. it reveals the original trauma/pain which caused the ghost to exist; and it ends by showing the true beauty of moving on. the ghost was not permanent; nothing is. it was a rupture. it was its own exorcism.

14) voyages, again:

Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;   Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:   Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

15) think again of fraser in the dumpster, clean. think of what does not stick to him – and think of what does. the relationships, the people. the bullet. and how is a ghost because of how he functions in the story, because of his story, because of how he mirrors his father’s own journey. think of how he’s a ghost who can affect those around him without, necessarily, being affected back. and how when he returns, he is in one sense unchanged – he is almost going back to where he started from. but how it is kindness and love which has been repaid to him that has changed him; he has changed spiritually. ray kowalski is a symbol of this. but he’s more; he’s also himself, and he’s also an ongoing love.

16) the ghost does not have to be avenged. loving it is enough.

[artbyblastweave]

Hi! I've been reading a lot of your thoughts on superheroes, and wanted to ask you a question if that's okay.

I've always been interested in the genre, but lately I've gotten frustrated with how "safe" the entries play it. No matter what, there's always a Justice League, a world built on superscience, and most "importantly" of all, a Superman. I wanted to ask if all of these things a required for a superhero story, and if so, how far can they be stretched while remaining within the genre?

My conjecture is that from a bunch of directions, it’s a legibility issue. 

Long swaths of rumination under the cut.

The superhero genre, out of all genres, is one of the most self-referential; it’s subject to an exaggerated, snowballing and self-reinforcing instance of the Mount Fuji Problem, as laid out by Terry Pratchett:

“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”

Superman is Mt. Fuji. 

Superman is enormously popular. The first modern superhero, the one the rest of them are patterned on or in conversation with. In the early days, a lot of superheroes were just naked attempts to cash in on Superman, to the point of IP slapfights (This is how DC acquired the rights to Shazam/Captain Marvel.) In the interregnum period caused by the Wertham Scare, he was one of the only superheroes that survived and saw continuous publication. As a result of this bottleneck, superheroism is a genre monoculture; all characters conceived of as “superheroes” are only a couple of creative generations removed from Superman. All of this gives him- and characters patterned directly on him- an outsized influence in both the public and authorial perception of what a “superhero” looks like. 

So fifty years down the line, when you’ve got creatives crawling out of the foxholes to try and make some superhero things that are new and innovative or parodic, a few things start happening:

Number 1. Superman is Very Legibly a Superhero. Superheroes, up until the MCU boom, were pretty niche in the mass market; a lot of pre-MCU films (and actually a lot of MCU films, this is my perennial beef) are structured in a way that makes it seem like they’re apologizing for daring to be superhero properties. Note the aversion to code names, the costuming choices made in the X-Men films, the irony poisoning. Superman was one of the exceptions to this, (Others being Batman and Spider-Man;) he’s too iconic. He’s one of a handful of characters who’s clearly a superhero and nothing else. (I’m going to return to this point later.) So if you wanted to invoke superhero at a glance in a mass-market property, making them have costumes and/or powers like Superman (sometimes with hints of Batman) was a fast way to communicate this. As the number of works that do this increase, the gravity of the bias swells because of the pool of precedent- the likelihood that your audience has seen not just Superman, but numerous parodies of Superman. (I was friends with a woman once who knew almost nothing about Superman beyond the fact he existed, but upon being told the broad strokes of his backstory, said, “oh, like in Megamind!”)

Number 2. Superman attracts the interest of Creatives and Iconoclasts. This is the non-cynical take on the above; Superman’s outsized presence in popular culture means that inevitably, a lot of really competent writers are exposed to him, grow up with him as one of their blorbos, and rotate him in their head non-stop for years until they’re finally in a position to write something. The Superman pastiches in Astro City and Irredeemable and Supreme Power and Invincible and Jupiter’s Legacy and The Authority and BNHA and Powers and on and on and on- they’re in there because the writers wanted to tell a story about superheroes, sure, but more specifically they want to yell their hot takes about Superman, who they love, out to the world. And many of these stories are thoughtful and reflective of the human condition or whatever, and so the canon of “Oh my god you have to read this” superhero works, inevitably start to contain tons and tons of Supermen pastiches. (And Batman pastiches; he’s subject to a similar dynamic.) The effect is reinforced.

Number 3. Even in niche or fan-oriented superhero works that don’t suffer from the above-described marketing pressures, familiar character archetypes are useful shorthand that lets you get to whatever novel point you’re trying to make faster. This applies to Superman, who I’ve focused on up until this point, but this is also a good point to start talking about one of the other things you mentioned, the Justice League. 

In Invincible, the Guardians Of The Globe, world’s premier superhero team, are 1-to-1 pastiches of the classic Justice League Lineup. I own the ultimate collection in which Kirkman explained that choice; beyond the fact that they were very powerful heroes, and that it was very very bad for the world that they were dead, the actual nature of the Guardians was immaterial to the story. All things being equal, it therefore made the most sense to him to just piggyback off pre-existing comic book fan affection and reverence for the JLA, because his editor was breathing down his neck to get the actual story moving after the six issues of relatively low-stakes adventure that Kirkman had insisted on in order to make the reveal hurt more.

Strong Female Protagonist is (was?) a webcomic about the world’s most powerful superheroine sliding into semi-retirement after neutralizing all the superheroic threats and realizing that her actual toolbox with which to enact lasting societal change is pretty limited. There are a lot of powersets you could give to the most powerful hero in your setting; a lot of aesthetics you could give her; actually, by making her a woman at all you’re already breaking the mold. But there’s utility in starting somewhere bog-standard so that everyone’s on the same page when you start doing the social commentary.  

Black Summer is a story about John Horus, the most powerful hero in the world, deciding that the only way to stay consistent with his commitment to evenly applied justice is to execute George Bush for War Crimes, explain why he did so, present the evidence, and ride off into the sunset; his five surviving teammates are then left holding the bag as a pissed off military closes in. The most powerful hero in this case is pointedly designed to look more like Magneto than Superman, but the seven-person team dynamic is clearly meant to broadly invoke that of the Justice League; this gives the readers somewhere to start when picturing what the team dynamic looked like before it collapsed, and it makes the ways in which the group is really obviously not at all like the Justice League pop.

Superhero story which are about someone needing to replace the world’s greatest superhero? Often rely on this fan-legible shorthand. (BNHA, Dreadnought, a couple others.) Stories in which the most powerful hero died as part of the backstory and left an imperfect world for the survivors? Often rely on this fan-legible shorthand. (Welcome to Tranquility, Renegades, etc.) Stories about the kid of the world’s most powerful hero trying to live up to their expectations? Often make use of this fan-legible shorthand (Sky High, Hero, etc.)

Extend it to other individual superheroes. You want to critique the economic injustice implied by superheroism, or the ways in which it would physically and socially destroy you? It’s efficient to invoke Batman or Iron Man, quintessential billionaire powerless capes, and go from there. You want to examine the hellish existence of the working-class teen superhero? Efficient to invoke Spider-Man and go from there. You want to examine the uphill battle of the female superhero in a male-dominated field? Efficient to invoke Wonder Woman and then go from there.

When you can simultaneously save time and creative energy AND demonstrate to your audience that you know the genre canon, the shared referents, the in-jokes- why reinvent the wheel? 

The effect is reinforced.

Number four. In works that are about a more unconventional or unique superhero, A tertiary Superman-figure can be a useful genre signifier.

So, the obvious rebuttal you could provide to everything I’ve said so far is that the superhero genre is obviously, comically, massively more diverse than just Superman and copies of Superman. You can make a superhero based on almost anything, intersecting with almost any genre. This is, in fact, the key to the genre’s longevity; the degree to which “Superhero” is such a nebulous genre category that you can cram basically anything into it and have it work. You can remix it forever.

However, this is a double-edged sword; while a superhero universe can accommodate literally anything, many of the resultant “superheroes” are superheroes purely because they exist in the context of a superhero universe; they stop existing as such if removed from it. Blade is a superhero, but the Wesley Snipes Blade films are not really framed as superhero films. Doctor Strange, extracted from the rest of Marvel, could just be an Urban Fantasy property. Green Lantern and Nova and Captain Marvel could be yoinked out and reframed as participants in the Space Cop flavor of Space Opera. Context-scrubbed Thor could be high fantasy. Context-scrubbed Hulk could be a monster movie. Context-scrubbed Guardians of the Galaxy becomes Space Opera. Ant-Man wasn’t originally a superhero; Hank Pym debuted in a one-shot horror/adventure comic about a scientist who nearly gets killed fucking around with a shrinking formula and an anthill, and then he got retooled when Marvel realized superheroes were coming back. Logan was a fantastic film but like many X-men films it divested itself from the framing of superheroism as much as it possibly could. On the opposite side of things, you could take a property like Buffy The Vampire Slayer- generally not viewed as a cape thing- and slot it into the Marvel or DC universe without having to alter anything. If someone like Shepard from Mass Effect, with their armor and future-weapons and/or their biotic powers, crash landed on Marvel or DC Earth, they’d transmute into a superhero just by virtue of who they’re now standing next to when shit starts going down. (This is the backstory of at least three superheroes, probably more.) Superheroism is incredibly fluid. It’s incredibly modular. It’s incredibly contextual.

There are a handful of characters, though, for whom this isn’t true; as I mentioned above, they’re superheroes and nothing else. They’re the platonic implementations. Batman is one example; the most grounded and gritty version of the character ever put to film still couldn’t get around the fact it was about a vigilante in a bat costume beating up the mob. Superman is another; It’s basically impossible to make a Superman film that downplays the iconography, the power, the social position and license of the superhero.  The social position and license are huge parts of this!

So, if you’re gonna write a story about a unique superhero- a superhero with a cross-genre origin, or an unconventional aesthetic, or really esoteric powers- a way to keep your story anchored in the genre is to include a Superman-style figure or a Justice-League style organization as a tertiary presence within the worldbuilding, in order to make it 100 percent clear to your audience what lens they’re supposed to view this story through, and to emphasize the contrast posed by your esoteric cape. Worm does this, juxtaposing a protagonist who controls bugs and thus has to fight like a maniac for every victory against an all-powerful Superman-analogue who exists in the background of the setting (although he swells in narrative importance in the back half.) Another example is The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang, which is a comic about a Chinese-American vigilante in the 1930s who, due to a poorly worded pact with a spirit, becomes invulnerable to bullets and nothing else; a more traditional Superman Analogue called “The Anchor of Justice” exists in the background of the setting, only getting a couple of speaking lines, and is mainly used to demonstrate the double standard society applies to superheroism when someone other than a white guy starts doing it. Incredibles does this as a background gag, with the sheer number of heroes in Edna’s “no capes” montage who were clearly trying to fill the Superman niche but continuously couldn’t cut it.  Valiant comics did this. Wild Cards I think did this. City of Heroes I think was doing something like this by having prototypical flying-brick Statesman as an NPC while all the PC heroes were (by virtue of being PCs) significantly more diverse and outlandish in powers and presentation. There are other examples of this juxtaposition trick that I’m not thinking of.

So, what are some works that don’t do this?

Here’s a non-comprehensive sample of works that unhook themselves from the standbys;

First off, The Marvel Universe. I think I’ve talked a few times about how the Marvel superhero community is pretty heavily dysfunctional, disjointed and fractious in comparison to the DC superhero community; The Avengers are an absolute shitshow in comparison to the Justice League, as individuals and as an organization. It’s easy to forget due to their total conquest of contemporary pop culture but Marvel was churning out unconventional cape after unconventional cape for years without stepping on DC’s toes; for a long time they were the answer to this question. Any time that Marvel has played at adding a Superman analogue to the setting, it’s usually in the context of pointing out how radically different the setting would work if there was a number-one top-tier hero like that running around.

Heroes, the first season at least, is heavily in conversation with traditional superheroism without actually featuring any of the aesthetic markers within the show itself; no costumes (because supers are simply too new as a widespread phenomena to have the institutional backing for that) no obvious Superman figure (one power per person) and the handful of cast members trying to behave like superheroes are explicitly doing so because of the existing cultural referents of fictional superheroes; by the end of season one nobody has made it all the way to the finish line in terms of costumes and codenames.

Absolution, a comic miniseries by Christos Gage about a superhero who snaps and starts playing Dexter, using his versatile forcefield powers to emulate dozens of different murder weapons so that the killings can’t be traced back to him. The setting is aggressively and deliberately street level, with almost no obvious character analogues, a host of novel powers, and “superheroes” that are universally incorporated into police departments as superpowered SWAT teams. However, the books politics are noxious; it seems that the author’s objection to the police is that they don’t kill enough people. But I bring it up because it’s visually clearly a superhero work while still having a strong aesthetic aversion to all of the tropes you specifically mentioned.

No Hero by Warren Ellis, which is about a superhero team created in the 1960s by a counter-culture chemist who stumbled upon a psychedelic drug that provides superpowers. The team is, in universe, very visibly attempting to carve out an aesthetic identity independent from that of traditional superheroes, brutally fighting crime in varied combinations of gas masks, latex, and evening wear; the group is also tiny, due to the team’s founder being rightfully paranoid that the government is going to jump on his secret recipe. It’s also an incredibly visually horrific book. Body horror galore. 

Uber by Keiron Gillen is an alternate history in which World War 2 was fought by super soldiers, developed initially by the Axis and then by an increasingly-panicked America and Britain. The project of the comic was to repudiate the idea of the superhero as an individualist figure who can overcome anything through grit and moral righteousness; in the words of Gillen, it’s a comic about how Galactus is going to beat Spider-man, every single time. In keeping with this, the superhumans are fairly cookie-cutter (developed in batches down known lines of research) the outcome of superhuman fights are determined purely by which of the two superhumans were better made, and as military projects the “heroes” are named using the same conventions as battleships (USS Colossus, HMS Dunkirk, etc.) 

Watchmen is an interesting situation. The one powered hero, Dr. Manhattan, is mainly used as an exploration of Superman’s geopolitical impact- the effects of the most powerful thing in the world being an American agent. But in terms of actual origin and aesthetic Manhattan is primarily in conversation with the Marvel Stable; a lab-accident origin, space-age energy powers, presence within the setting’s second wave superhero resurgence rather than having gotten in on the ground floor. That one is picking and choosing recognizable elements in order to do a bunch of different things at once.

Most of these tie back to the Mount Fuji thing; the absence of immediately recognizable figures in these works are, due to the volume of precedent, themselves a very pointed and noticeable choice. Sometimes even a choice the characters themselves are making within the story. And this presents a challenge to any capefic author who deliberately eschews familiar archetypes because they’re sick to death of them; go too far out of your way to excise Superman from your story, and you run the risk of just providing implicit commentary on his ubiquity instead. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

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One last note; you clarified in DMs that the “super science” you were referring to was that of the crop of pulp heroes; Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Phantom, et al et al. I think something different is going on here from everything else I’ve been going on about. When superhero settings incorporate these proto-heroes, it’s part in-joke and partly a nod to legacy; these were the characters immediately preceding Superman and Batman, the prototypes, the incubators for a lot of ideas and aesthetics that later superheroes would take and run with. Many 1930s-1940s superheroes are visually the “missing link” between the two genres; examples of this include The Spirit, The Sandman, and The Green Hornet. In superhero settings that are built “from scratch” outside of the big two, with a setting history that stretches back before the 1930s, it’s therefore common to incorporate a few figures patterned along these lines as a form of tribute. The flip side of this is that the archetype is also very easy to attack and parody; many of the pulp “men of science” were predictably tied to very yikes-inducing ideas about race, gender, and so forth, and thus if you want to criticize the basic assumptions of heroism, one way to do this is to take the archetypes at the root of the genre and then make them period-appropriate jackasses.

I’ll cop to being significantly less informed about this last bit, and thus significantly less confident in the conclusions I’m drawing about it; I’m therefore going to refer you over to @maxwell-grant, who’s very into the pulp hero side of things and can probably give you a more informed perspective both on how the science hero types informed the development genre, and the varying degrees to which they’ve hung around as both objects of tribute and parody. 

[lies]

I liked “The Queen’s Gambit” a lot. It reminded me of the movie 42 (which I also liked a lot) for a particular reason: In each case I had a strong positive response to the movie/show that I subsequently came to question due to my realizing the problematic nature of things I at first glossed over.

In the end I still liked it a lot, even loved it. But it’s a love colored by questions I have about the sources of my own appreciation.

Is my personal take on this something you’re actually interested in knowing more about? Read on after the cut!

Note: spoilers.

What I liked most about “The Queen’s Gambit”:

* The treatment of chess. They obviously cared deeply about getting it right, and went to obsessive lengths to do so. Most of their audience (including me) would have no real way to tell the difference without being at least decent chess players, but as far as I can tell (from the reactions of people way more into chess than I am) they met that standard. That kind of over-the-top attention to detail is something I care about. That the chess was (mostly) anatomically correct, down to the level of being based on actual grandmaster-level games that were reflected accurately in the characters’ emotions and actions was awesome. Idiot lectures were minimal. The depiction of tournaments was mostly accurate (albeit with some story-serving anomalies like players occasionally addressing each other directly). Besides that realism, the presentation of the games was really well done, in the sense that they didn’t repeat themselves stylistically. We saw lots of different perspectives on the games. There were medium shots of players and boards. Tight close-ups of the player’s hands, or their faces. The audience watching. Tournament staff repeating the moves on a big board. It was always interesting, even absorbing, and I’d blink and realize whoa; they’re actually showing a chess game. And it’s intense.

* The way Beth’s substance abuse was portrayed. There were points in the series where I grew concerned that we were going to trope-land, where the troubled genius spirals down into pills and alcohol, and it would have been boring. Trite/easy/exploitative. And then... they didn’t do that. When young Beth pulls off the big pill heist I was concerned that’s where we were going. And then the way they resolve that, with an over-the-top bravura climax to the whole young-Beth arc, it was breathtakingly good. The same with the latter parts of the series, as she deals with her addiction issues during the tournaments in Paris and Moscow. There was a trite version of that story, and they very much did not tell that version. Instead they gave us something that felt true, as Beth deals with her issues the best she can, with help from others at key moments. It was a positive story that nevertheless didn’t minimize the problem.

* The basic narrative structure, of the young orphan, the weird kid beaten down by the world, learning and growing and eventually triumphing, worked really well for me. I related to Beth, and especially as the show goes on it was exciting to see her become more capable and self-assured. In the scene with her adoptive father when he reneges on the house arrangement you realize that oh; Beth is approaching it as a chess match. She sees the board, is way ahead of her opponent, and is ruthless about pressing her advantage. The look her lawyer gives her at the end of that scene was great.  

* The deeper theme of her found family was beautifully realized, right up to the final scene in the park. Taylor-Joy sold all the key moments in that journey so well, and it made that conclusion completely satisfying and earned.

* There was more that I loved: The period details, the clothes, the cars. Though with the cars, there was a specific thing that was bugging me until I figured out what it was. I grew up watching period pieces from times before I was actually around. But this show, set in the U.S. of the late 1960s, is showing a place and time I actually lived in. So details matter. And with the cars, there was a subtle artifact of unreality: Everyone was driving cars that weren’t actually accurate depictions of what they would have been driving. Instead they were driving cars of that era lovingly restored (and beautifully shot), but still recognizably 21st-century cars. When Beth and Benny drive to New York in Benny’s car, it was the right car (a 1966 VW bug; actually the first car I owned). But it was a ‘66 bug as it looks today when restored by a collector. It wasn’t the version of a ‘66 bug that Benny would have been driving. It should have been scruffier (just like him and his apartment). That was a cheap car at the time, and the right car for his character to have, but it didn’t look like a cheap car. I guess it would be asking too much for them to have gone to the level of not just getting the right car, but of distressing it to look appropriate. I don’t know; as with Beth’s journey toward glamour the cars (and clothes) were treated as eye candy. And on some level I’m sure that was working for me, so maybe I shouldn’t complain.

But that brings me to the thing that I realize was problematic:

* The series at times was super male-gaze-y. The depiction of Beth’s relationships was good, and realistic to who she was. But at a certain point in a series created, written, and directed by a dude, the dude-specific viewpoint was bothersome. And I get that this was part of the story being told: Beth is operating in a world dominated by men, and her reactions to that were interesting. But is that really worthy of elevating as the default frame? The exceptions to that (her relationships with her friend Jolene, and with her adoptive mother) were good, but at times felt peripheral to the main focus, which was on the men dealing with/reacting to Beth. And that’s where it reminded me of 42, with its white-savior narrative that at times seems to focus more on the white characters around Jackie Robinson like Dodgers owner Branch Rickey and shortstop Pee Wee Reese than it does on Robinson himself. And I get that that’s probably a significant part of why the movie (and “The Queen’s Gambit”) worked so well for me in particular: I’m a straight, white, heterosexual dude. So I invest in the drama of the white people around Jackie Robinson, or of a male chess nerd staring slack-jawed at Beth Harmon dancing in her underwear. It works for me because it’s designed to appeal to my perspective. And in each case it’s also a good story with transcendent performances from Chadwick Boseman and Anya Taylor-Joy. What they (and the rest of the people who made these creations) are doing is great, and rises above the limitations of the framing. But I can’t stop myself from wondering: Is it really as good as it seems to me? Or does it just seem that good to me because of who I am?

[phantombs]

His voice is just so charmingly sleepy and calm....  I love his little habits of making those ‘yes’/’neh’ affirmations, because Cường does them a lot himself, but with ‘uh’ as locals in Vietnam tend to use for ‘okay’, often in succession--’uh, uh’. He also hums as a speech habit, too, and it shakes his way up his throat like he hasn’t walked his sleep off fully, yet. It’s so full of sighs, and he often makes noise when he’s thinking of what to say regardless if it’ll make sense to the next person or not.

[alicedrawslesmis]

What is going on with BBC les mis hypotheses #5061832 - the structure problem

First things first, this is not comprehensive, this is not deep. I'm gonna try to make it more well rooted next time. I'm judging it from what was given us, so how the characterisation and the events translate from the book is not what I'm concerned with, just the structure of the show.

Hypotheses: BBC les mis is too long for it's own good.

It feels very weird to say this, because it's les mis we assume the longer the series the easier it is to make it more like the book, right? Well turns out that not so much.

They have a story and they have 6 hours to fill, but each hour has to have a compelling structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end (not that the story needs to end but the episode needs to feel like a chapter in itself) that engages the viewer for the full hour plus makes them tune in next week. The brick is not like that because it is a novel, different medium = different viewer engagement. Plus it has lotsa digressions, and that can be engaging to a reader, while a show can't just suddenly stop dead to start a documentary on Argot.

I mean it could. And it would be awesome pls do that

But anyway that's not what the usual BBC drama has and viewers don't expect that, neither do the creators, specially if it's no one's dream project and they don't particularly feel like reinventing the wheel as far adaptations are concerned (that's what I got from interviews and stuff anyway).

So what we're left with is a show that... has timing problems. To say the least. And structure problems. Not considering the bad characterisation, the show has a main structure, and a lot of useless additions to make it closer to the book that honestly get in the way of the main story they are going for. And so the additions feel like padding. They are repetitive and weird. Why have a million scenes where Javert is lusting for Valjean when you can have just one? Or why have Valjean keep being shitty and then feeling bad about it when once is enough to show that yes, he feels guilt? We don't have to have him feel guilt in every scene to understand he feels guilt.

I suspect they did that because there is this truism on television that you need to repeat things all the time for the casual viewer that just tuned in to know what is going on. But like, dude, telenovelas know how to do that much better! Learn from us latinos Andrew, we know how to make things repetitive AND interesting. Also we know how to film it so it's immediately understandable. Come to Brasil, AD! We'll teach you!

This is not really true to TV anymore since people will likely watch the shows via streaming. I mean, I'm not sure about numbers but I assume people rarely catch episodes of things out of context on their TV, and if they do they're probably not gonna be the dedicated viewer you want to captivate with your drama, you want those millennials and gen z's to watch your thing! They buy things and post things on the internet and that creates more interest! Shorter GIFable sequences also go a long way! Not that I like this but it's the state of the world now, peeps

Anyway, again, back to the original point: the show is 6 hours long. There are movies with more plot points from the book and shorter time that feel like they are longer so why does this show feel so confused? Because they didn't know how to neatly pack les mis into six 1-hour-long mini-packages. The result is that the plot and pacing get confusing, the timelines are off-the-rails crazy, and the characters not very likeable...

I know that theme-wise Fantine's backstory was all over, but I think hers plus Georges Pontmercy's backstories were the better made parts, because they were where AD had more creative liberties and the director got to have fun with how they filmed everything, and they invented sets and scenes and characters for the show (granted I haven't seen the latest eps with the barricades yet, possibly won't, we'll see bout that).

Our author VHugs is a man that likes to create theatre scenes, and every element is placed in space and time more or less like theatre is - I'll probably have to expand on that literary analysis at some point in my life, but not in here - and there is really no escape in an adaptation to how the scene is constructed. The tension is built not just by prose but by the placing of certain elements in a certain place and a certain point in time. AD is a smart writer, maybe not a good one but he is smart, and he realises this Hugoan inevitability. He called it bad writing. That's why I think he went on and on about the changes he made, that wet dream, the strip-tease, the pissing scene: because it's a way to challenge to Hugo's control over everything that is happening in the plot. Change of any element has to be very well thought out or else the story breaks apart.

Again, Shoujo Cosette. Knows. How to adapt. It has short episodes dedicated each to a small sequence of events. Even having time to make new stories that further their adaptational needs. Absolutely brilliant. And a catchy theme song.

I also Love how the 1982 Robert Hossein Les Mis makes photographic montages to show the passage of time. Marius and Cosette standing still while the seasons change around them in the garden is amazing. Kudos Robert.

It all boils back to "Les Mis is a difficult book to adapt" in the end. Don't adapt les mis if you're not into it. It's hard work my lads. It'll wear you down faster than you can sing Waterloo

[ashesandhackles]

The Abandoned Boy And His Problematic Fathers: Snape with Voldemort & Dumbledore

"He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, all found home here..” - Forest Again, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

This comparison line of Harry, Snape and Voldemort being abandoned boys is not an accident. There is an intentional parallel being made between three of them - not only in terms of their parallels with the Hallows (as Tumblr has astutely pointed out), but also the commonalities in their upbringing. Given that Harry empathises so deeply with both of them, I am going to argue one of Harry’s attributes was present in all of them. We know that as an abandoned boy with lack of male authority figures to model after, Harry strongly craved a father. Here is a meta by u/metametatron4 that tracks Harry’s feelings about James (and Snape) through the series.

In Voldemort’s case, Tom believes his father to be the magical one and keeps his father’s name until he could no longer prove that it was his father who gave him his “special” lineage. He goes as far as searching Hogwarts records for his father because in his mind, his mother was “weak” to die. Once he is forced to concede that his mother is the magical one, he chooses to emphasise her ancestry in a paternal sense - “Salazar Slytherin, greatest of Hogwarts four”, tying himself up in grandeur. He also killed his father and his own paternal side of the family, his source of rage and shame. He sheds his father's name and becomes someone else, only known by his "special" magical lineage - cutting off that undesirable part of himself. Voldemort’s reaction to both his parent’s abandonment is to be special in every way, and choosing to discard love and seek power and control - a place where he is not rejected at all.

Snape is different from both Harry and Voldemort is that he specifically rejects his abusive father, having known him. As a child, he is seen wearing his mother’s clothes, only with an overlong coat that might belong to his father on a hot sunny day. As per Pottermore, he occasionally got whipped - so one can assume the coat is to hide that. Harry identifies strongly to Snape wearing overlong clothes that don’t quite fit him - a clear sign of neglect, if anything else. The fact that he wears his mother’s smock (and is willing to comfortably wear it in private with Lily in the scene before Hogwarts express) is an interesting detail to me. It feels like a rejection of his father and a sense of identification with his mother. With a person who he is comfortable with, he cuts an "impressive figure" with his smock. We see this detail pop up again in his textbook - where he is proud of being “Half A Prince”, emphasizing his magical lineage, his refuge in a violent, neglectful home.

Snape rejects his father (implied to be a violent man) by also rejecting hypermasculinity - as he tells sneeringly to James Potter: “If you’d rather be brawny, rather than brainy-” and by mocking “foolish wand waving” and how Potions is much more complex than that ("bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses" - thanks for some sensual imagery, Snape :D). His skillset, with the exception of Sectumsempra, is further testament to his rejection of hypermasculinity: Potions (a witches’ brew), spying (again, noted to be something women were famous for in war), branches of mind magic such as Occlumency. He is also strongly associated with mother figures - Eileen Prince (by his own admission), Lily Potter, Narcissa Malfoy. He has a feminine Patronus, in memory of his love and devotion to Lily. The insults also thrown his way are also emasculating: “Snivellus” “a lapdog”, and Dumbeldore’s own “a basket dangling on the arm of Lord Voldemort”. So if he rejects his own father, who does he look to as a male figure to model himself after? After all, he does discard the smock quite eagerly when he gets on Hogwarts Express - so he is keen to perform masculinity.

But we see that teenage Snape and Adult Snape are entirely two different personas. Teenage Snape is anxious, twitchy and walks around like a spider. He swears, he is barely in control of his emotions, is often rendered incoherent when he is emotional and lashes out. And he lashes out in ways that is reflective of a power dynamic he models from home: he feels small, so he will look for someone else to make feel small.

Adult Snape, save for being around Harry where he regresses, is the opposite. He glides when he walks or "swoops like a bat" and if you see him in scenes apart from Harry’s, he is very in control of himself and his jabs are intended to discomfit rather than lashing out. (See the Bellatrix scene in Spinner’s End).

We don’t know too much about this phase of life - we can only speculate. Adult Snape has choice words to say when he witnesses Harry's lack of control over his emotions. He may have been speaking of himself: "Fools who wear their heart proudly on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions, who wallow in sad memories and allow themselves to be provoked so easily - weak people, in other words - they stand no chance against his powers!"

Speculation aside, what we do know is that teenage Snape shows signs of unstable identity, insecurity - all prime for grooming into a cult. He also shows a disorganised attachment style. His caregiver, his mother is too preoccupied by her own abuse to be there for her son - we see this in glimpses Harry sees in OOTP: " woman cowering" where a man shouts at her, and a young, neglected Snape cries in the corner. Children born in homes like this have trouble regulating their emotions, simultaneously displaying tendencies to aggressively lash out or show disassociative symptoms. Both of which Snape displays. Statistically, this is also seen more in low income households where economic instability and resulting domestic instability creates an unsafe environment for the kids to safely form ideas of their identity, or express emotions in healthy ways, modelling instead out of behaviour seen at home.

I believe Voldemort, as the man who has experimented with boundaries of magic in ways no one else has, is an attractive father figure for someone like Snape ( and Barty Jr. as well). After all, Snape spends his spare time inventing hexes, making great shortcuts to Potions. He has a genuine thirst for learning and is inventive and original. In SWM, we see that he has written far more longer answers than anyone else, he is poring over his paper after exams. Voldemort, as a man who pushed boundaries, is an attractive mentor who shows him a new path. Joining a cult not only gives you power and protection (one he desperately needs because of his social inferiority and as someone who is relentlessly bullied), but it also gives you an identity.

Cults usually instill a homogenous, stable identity centered around charismatic leader. Cults turn your unbearable feelings (sense of rejection, social inferiority), and externalise it and manage to a higher purpose. A cult acts as a safe container for people who cannot understand their trauma or overpowering feelings. As a boy with an unstable identity, it is easier for him to project on Voldemort and re-enact an attachment that he has rejected in early childhood: the one with his father. Voldemort also reinforces a world view that the system had taught a half blood working class boy with nowhere to go arrives at: "There is no good or evil. There is only power and those too weak to seek it".

And then, Voldemort does something Snape doesn't believe a father figure could do, something he cannot conform to or abide by - he threatens the only relationship in his life that he puts on a pedestal. To ensure Lily Potter’s survival beyond asking Voldemort (who he no longer trusts to keep his word), he goes to Dumbledore. Why doesn't he trust Voldemort to keep his word? We don't really know, but given the dynamics we see at play in the first chapter of DH, where Voldemort employs Legliemency to confirm the information from Snape, the trusted spy who at that point had killed Dumbledore - it is safe to say ruling through absolute control can only take you so far. Contrast this with his later scenes with Dumbledore, where Dumbledore trusts him with magic he does not trust himself with: "I am very fortunate that I have you, Severus" .

But before we get there, we see their first scene. In his very first scene with Dumbledore, there is a power dynamic established. He visibly shrinks from Dumbledore’s judgement: “you disgust me”. He is also "stricken" when Dumbledore says "perhaps we sort too soon" - indicating a need for Dumbledore’s approval and validation. (Dumbledore’s own reaction to Snape is interesting - he doesn’t express this kind of strong disgust with Fenrir Greyback in HBP, for example. Perhaps he sees something of himself in this man who lost his way?)

Their next scene together is a grief stricken Snape, who has turned his misery and self loathing inwards and wishes to die. Dumbledore is cold, harsh: “What use will that be to anyone? If you truly loved Lily Evans, your way forward is clear”. Once Snape accepts the path of atonement Dumbledore lays out for him, Dumbledore is demonstrably gentler with him and is even exasperated that Snape asks him to keep “the very best of him” between them.

Once Dumbledore becomes his new father figure, Snape’s loyalty to him is absolute. He will back up and defend Dumbledore where it is not even required - when people accuse Dumbledore in GOF of being unfair, Snape is quick to say: "Don't blame Dumbledore for Potter's lack of respect for school rules. Potter has been crossing lines ever since he first came" (Defending Dumbledore and insulting Harry, he has a talent lol). And at the end of GOF, he shows his Dark Mark to Cornelius Fudge, essentially outing himself as a former Death Eater, to back up Dumbledore's claims because Fudge was insulting him. Even in front of Bellatrix, he emphasises: "Dumbledore is a great wizard, yes he has - the Dark Lord acknowledges it".

He is also resentful of Dumbledore's trust in Harry with secrets that he is not privy to. He enjoys being Dumbledore's closest confidant..("why may I not have the same secrets?" "You trust him, you do not trust me"). It's a less intense version of Harry's "This isn't love, this mess he has left me in. He shared a damn sight of what he was thinking with Grindelwald than with me”. He angrily tells Fake Moody that Dumbledore happens to trust him and he "refuses to believe" he gave permission to search his office. Similarly, he tells Umbridge "jerkily" to ask Dumbledore why he doesn't have the DADA job. Snape is offended at any suggestions of Dumbledore's lack of trust in him.

He also has a similar disillusionment like Harry's with Dumbledore - "you have used me. I have spied for you, lied for you, all intended to keep Lily Potter's son safe and now you are telling me he is being raised like a pig for slaughter". All of this and yet, just like Harry, he chooses to do what Dumbledore would have wanted of him. He goes as far as committing a sort of patricide, just like his former father figure (who did it for different reasons) on the wishes of his current father figure.

And ultimately, he chose Dumbledore's plan of Greater Good rather than Lily's fierce intention of keeping her son alive. It’s also interesting that Dumbledore, a queer, non conforming man is what Snape ultimately chooses as a father /mentor to his path of atonement.

There is a cyclical projection of father among all three boys: Harry inadvertently projects a desire for a father figure on Snape when he wishes that the Half-Blood Prince was his dad. (Read more about Harry’s relationship with Prince in wonderful meta by @thedreamermusing here) Snape projects a wish for a father figure by projecting on to Voldemort. Ultimately, both of them project this desire onto Dumbledore, and it is Dumbledore who ends up being the ultimate guide and father figure for both of them, guiding them through their respective roles in the war.

Thank you to @thedreamermusing and pet_genius for the inputs for this post 🌻 here is a suggested reading from pet's treasure trove relevant to this meta: Death Eaters As A Cult.

[anneapocalypse]

At some point I'll actually do the obligatory ~Thoughts on Anders~ post, because I like to suffer, but because I also love myself, I will in typical Anne fashion be sure to make it an absurdly overlong meta post full of long-winded bullshit to make sure no one will actually read it. 👌

[secretmellowblog]

Me: I need to stop feeling like I have to publicly Perform my love for every show/movie/book I enjoy on social media— I need to repair my relationship with the internet by engaging with media on my own, without posting about it. I need to relearn that my emotions don’t need an audience to be real, and my experiences don’t need to be turned into polished bits of writing for other people’s consumption to be sincere. I can experience things Just For Me

Also me: buT the show about the Flags that Mean Death was so GOOD !—

[daenerys-targaryen]

As the resident daenerys fan, can you please share some of your fav book!moments where she cares for the smallfolk? (with quotes that would be amazing but if not, it’s ok!) I know she does, but I can’t think of a concrete book!moment (it’s been a while since I read them). Thank you!!

(I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m sarcastic or something, I like Dany!)

You're saying I'm THEE resident daenerys fan? What a badge of honor! I am no longer active in the asoiaf fandom, and I think there are plenty of dany centric blogs who are still going strong for her daily on here, but thanks so much for saying that!

The first instance I thought of is in a dance with dragons when she risks getting sick by giving water and feeding the sickly in the streets of Meereen.

Ser Barristan watched with ill-concealed apprehension. “You should not linger here overlong, Your Grace. The Astapori are being fed, as you commanded. There’s no more we can do for the poor wretches. We should repair back to the city.” “Go if you wish, ser. I will not detain you. I will not detain any of you.” Dany vaulted down from the horse. “I cannot heal them, but I can show them that their Mother cares.” Jhogo sucked in his breath. “Khaleesi, no.” The bell in his braid rang softly as he dismounted. “You must not get any closer. Do not let them touch you! Do not! Dany walked right past him. There was an old man on the ground a few feet away, moaning and staring up at the grey belly of the clouds. She knelt beside him, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and pushed back his dirty grey hair to feel his brow. “His flesh is on fire. I need water to bathe him. Seawater will serve. Marselen, will you fetch some for me? I need oil as well, for the pyre. Who will help me burn the dead?" By the time Aggo returned with Grey Worm and fifty of the Unsullied loping behind his horse, Dany had shamed all of them into helping her. Symon Stripeback and his men were pulling the living from the dead and stacking up the corpses, while Jhogo and Rakharo and their Dothraki helped those who could still walk toward the shore to bathe and wash their clothes. Aggo stared at them as if they had all gone mad, but Grey Worm knelt beside the queen and said, “This one would be of help.” – ADWD

But here is a great meta that has more of her dealing with smallfolk / just being a kind and caring person in general

[decepti-thots]

how much do i love rewind? well i can turn a shitpost about ppl calling him skinny into overlong rambling meta nonsense in like, three reblogs, so i guess a lot, huh

[alwaysalreadyangry]

due south: the ladies man (redux)

In the fall of 1998, I was a student of Derrida’s in his seminar at The New School for Social Research, “Justice, Perjury, and Forgiveness.” Despite the ambitious title, Derrida’s singular focus that semester was forgiveness. He was particularly interested in the notion that to be pardoned or forgiven is only actually meaningful in the face of the unpardonable, the unforgivable. To forgive someone for a minor mistake, or to say “pardon me” when accidentally bumping into a stranger on the street, is perhaps a nicety, a well-meaning mannerism or gesture, but where forgiveness is really needed — where it actually changes human relations — is where (and when) it is given to the unforgivable. In this way, the power of forgiveness depends upon the unforgivable.

Since then, I have maintained a correlated interest in the acceptance of the unacceptable, in the toleration of the intolerable, pairings that indicate a deeper problem; deeper in the sense that humans regularly accept the unacceptable (unlike forgiving the unforgivable). People regularly accept theoretically changeable facts of the world that are, even by their own accounts, totally unacceptable. Adjustments and acquiescence to unhappiness and dissatisfaction are common expectations of a practical life of “doing what one has to do,” and yet, it remains a basic ethical instinct to say that we should not accept a life that does us and others real measurable harm — at home, at work, in school, in society. And yet we regularly do. We do, that is, until there is a revolt against the unacceptable, against the intolerable.

richard gilman-opalsky, specters of revolt

this is an interesting section in the introduction to the book i’m reading. the book is mostly about revolt and its possiblities -- both the possibility of revolt haunting the capitalist world, but also the possibilities of what revolt can do.

but i think there’s something interesting in this passage -- and as someone who really struggles with derrida that’s not something i expected to find myself saying. after these two paragraphs, gilman-opalsky starts talking about revolt. which i am also interested in. but i do find myself thinking about the moments before. all the unforgivable moments before. before revolt; when revolt is a ghost, a potential body rather than a real physical force. and then i also think a lot about the idea that forgiveness given to the unforgivable has the power to change human relations.

which all relates back to my meta on what the ladies’ man in due south says about law enforcement and the US “justice system”.

because the bit i was struggling with the reading of the most was: the scene between beth botrelle and ray kowalski at the end of the episode. it’s not that i found it hard to reconcile it with the rest of the episode; on an emotional sense i understand why that scene is there. it’s about the system, not him. she understands... and also, it’s him facing a final, impossibly hard emotional truth. and... it’s ray giving the crime scene back to her, and making it back into a personal tragedy. or the scene of the crime done to her.

but on a craft sense; or on an ideological sense, i wondered exactly what the final embrace between them was saying. ray apologising multiple times; beth botrelle hugging him, and kissing him on the cheek. it’s a brutal, beautiful moment; why?

so i’ve been talking with @zielenna about this episode, and one of the other things that came up was the way in which it talks about masculinity, but especially through this very male police hierarchy. all of the cops around and especially above ray are men. the woman he has to fight to exonerate and her lawyer are both women -- and this is not a coincidence. no, it’s very much about patriarchal systems... the patriarchal arm of the state and the ways in which masculinity & homosocial relations are used to keep men in line, to keep them as enforcers of it.

there’s something also interesting that the dead guy is a male cop -- and a male cop who is named, in the episode’s title, as a “ladies’ man”. no, not a ladies’ man. he was “the ladies’ man”. there’s something there about virile masculinity, about how men admire other men who treat women badly.

and so when ray dissents from the ways in which the basic instinct of the police force is to cheer the woman’s execution, to bray for her blood (dewey operates here as a stand-in for the force at large) -- there is a sense in which that can be seen as a rejection of these structures of male power. by which i don’t mean that i’m reading ray as a radical feminist. but if we’re thinking about human relations, and the act of changing them at a time of emergency (and this episode is absolutely about a state of emergency), then it bears teasing out. he is absolutely rejecting a system of male power and personal relationships that intersect with and help strengthen this power. 

this episode gives us a male mentor for ray kowalski, who up until now has had very little past beyond his family and ex-wife. a workplace mentor; a mentor who pretends to be supporting ray as a friend, but is actually out to save his own skin and consolidate his own power, his own power-network. 

this is important; it shows us the figure of ray in a long line, in a huge interconnected network of men who will let this sort of thing happen. and it also shows the ways in which personal relationships between men will be used to strengthen this network; and the ways in which women and those who are outside and marginalised by the network... can and will be crushed by it.

ray’s only one link; when he consciously shatters that link, the network doesn’t fail. but he is able to save one person, in the face of this huge monolith.

so, let’s look at beth botrelle. in the first scene we see her in, her lawyer reinds her that she does not have to see ray. she can turn him away. not only does she choose to see him -- she insists that it’s alone, one-on-one. no lawyer, no fraser. it’s a personal connection. two people who can’t forget each other; and two individuals in a system that’s out to crush one using the other.

then there’s this:

Beth: So, you're looking for forgiveness? [Ray still does not meet her eyes.] Ray: Is that what you think?

ray does not ask for forgiveness. she doesn’t give it. what she does do is try to give him some kind of easy absolution, or a way to clear his conscience. “any cop could have taken that call,” she says. but ray knows that. and then she tells him that she killed her husband; and as soon as she says it, ray is certain that it’s not true. so she hasn’t given him absolution, or forgiveness. in lying, she has given him the truth -- or some portion of it.

let’s contrast this with the end of their final scene:

Ray (softly): I'm sorry. Beth: No. Ray: I am. I'm so sorry. Beth (tearfully): No. [She cups his face with one hand, then kisses his cheek.] Beth: Thank you, Officer Kowalski. [They embrace.]

there is one constant; beth botrelle is saying “no” when ray apologises, taking the responsibility upon himself. this isn’t so different to the way she tries to absolve him earlier. only, in the earlier scene she gives him all the cop platitudes she knows from her husband -- anybody could have taken that call, don’t let it wear on you. she lies. she is all give, willing him to take what she’s offering.

but it’s false; ray hasn’t done anything to earn it. he doesn’t take it; he can’t take it. she is the prisoner, and he is the cop. she’s an incarcerated woman, he’s the man whose role as a cop put her there. and not only is she incarcerated, she’s being touted everywhere as a “cop-killer” -- the people the system hates the most, because they have targeted the officers of that very system. even if, as beth botrelle didn’t, they did no such thing. despite beth asking that they be alone together, they can’t change the nature of their relations to each other.

in the final scene, everything has changed; except nothing that happened to beth has been taken away or removed. she still lived through an atrocity; she still had eight years of her life stolen from her. and that is -- unforgivable. both in the basic sense that it’s an awful, unimaginable thing that has happened to her. that has been done to her. but it is also unforgivable in the sense that she can’t forgive it; it’s impossible to grasp the totality of it, and all of the different people and systems and -- nodes in the network of power that created her fate. she can’t forgive it because they are not all there, it’s impossible to face them all. and it’s also unforgivable, specifically with ray kowalski, because he was one part of the larger system which failed her -- and not all of it. he is complicit, but he is not the root of the corruption.

does this make sense? i find myself doing that old essay trick of looking up the different, interconnected meanings of the word “forgive”. forgiving debt, giving up resentment towards -- and then. to pardon an offender.

because beth was thought to be an offender; she wasn’t one. because it’s the system and the state that can forgive offenders, and beth is a victim (a survivor) of the state’s violence. because ray did not commit an official offence against her; because those that did (the higher-up law enforcement officials) are not there. for all of these reasons, too, she is not able to forgive ray. because of the systems they exist within; because of the systems that shape their lives, and how they relate to each other.

and also just because of the unimaginable, horrifying scope of what was done to her, the way in which her life was destroyed.

so what does she do? she thanks ray. she kisses his cheek. she embraces him. this is not the words “i forgive you” -- and in fact, in the use of the repeated “no” we see her trying to absolve, rather than forgive. the idea that you have nothing to be sorry for equals i don’t need to forgive you.

but the first thing she thought ray was there for was forgiveness. and the last thing she does is she thanks him, and embraces him. a gesture of love; a gesture that nobody could have expected, a gesture that nobody outside the situation could perhaps easily understand.

so, i’m not a derridean, and if you’ve made it this far then you’ve probably guessed that? i’m not good with theory and i’m sure the phrase “human relations” has had a lot written about it (without even getting into the idea of forgiveness). but i’m not backing out from this now. in this passage, we see derrida’s ideas that forgiveness matters most in the face of the unforgivable; that this is when it is a radical act that can change human relations, which i read as relations between humans.

is her thank you and embrace -- forgiveness? is it absolution? does one have radical power that the other does not? or do both have a radical power in the face of all that has come before this moment? we have seen ray splintering the network that he was part of, that other male cops were trying to coerce him to remain committed to. and here he is, to a certain extent, cut loose from that. he is a person, again. alone with another person. 

knowledge of the past power relations haunt this scene -- and of course there is still a power imbalance between them, even now. things have changed, but they have not changed enough. ray did all that he could; he is no longer slumped over in a chair in a prison. he has done something. he has changed something.

and it’s not enough -- because nothing could be enough. forgiveness is impossible. but in the face of the power relations that both hold them still, and haunt them, we see a radical act; an embrace. tenderness. halting, emotional honesty -- contrasting with the comforting lies she tells in the earlier scene. in the face of this system, which can perhaps only be saved by its total destruction, by revolt, by a radical, collective act -- this is what can be done to change power relations. an embrace. a few words. it’s not quite forgiveness; he still does not ask for forgiveness. he does not ask; she bridges the gap. personal tenderness; two people, who are trying to live as best as the world will let them. who are trying not to be defined by the roles in which their relative positions of power would have them. embracing in a way that is not about desire, or about one person’s power over another; embrace as transmission of emotion, empathy, understanding. when i started writing this, i thought it was forgiveness. i don’t think it is forgiveness; i don’t think it’s less of a gesture on beth’s part for that. because --

it’s not enough, and it’s not enough. of course it’s not enough; between two people in this situation, enough is not possible. between any amount of people in this situation, enough is not possible, because the atrocity was already committed. what is so upsetting, the reason why ray cries, is because her tenderness with him is not justified, is not reasonable. the maybe-forgiveness, the attempted-absolution. she can’t give it; and yet she gives it, or something like it. ray has done all that he can, and he does not deserve what she is giving him in return. what she is giving -- an act of love -- is radical in a way that he can’t answer in kind. which is why it’s so beautiful, which is why it’s so sad.

ray can’t be forgiven because he’s not responsible; and he can’t be forgiven because he was complicit. it’s a double-bind. and in the face of that knowledge; love. understanding. thank you. gratitude. 

at the end, it’s gratitude. what is gratitude? kind words said, in earnest, in response to an imbalance -- in response to kindness, specifically an act of kindness which creates an imbalance between two parties. but here, the imbalance is insurmountable. the gap is so wide. it can’t be breached

the words fly tenderly across that gap anyway. thank you.

and so we have ray crying in his car -- we return to that image again. and of course there is so much more to be said about masculinity; about the ways in which it has been shed, and changed by ray’s relationship with beth. this is what a change in human relations means, this is what it can look like. so i have to end on it. ray, sobbing, unconsoled. 

what is unforgivable cannot be forgiven; but that doesn’t mean it’s not a radical act to try.

[myassbrokethefall]

This is kind of silly but I'm gonna post it anyway, what the heck.

Also it got very long of course, so here’s a cut. 

FYI this is about me, it mentions the fandom community but is not an addressing of a particular issue, it is about me me moi.

There was a lot of anger and upset in the ol' tumblr xf fandom environment yesterday. I try not to get too involved, and I try not to get too emotionally involved because (a) it's not worth it and (b) I have been in fandom a million years and none of it is new. It does affect me, though, and sometimes it takes a lot of energy (sometimes more than you realize at the time) to draw down boundaries and walk past negative things without letting them get under your skin.

Quite unexpectedly, last night, after I pretty much had shut Tumblr down for the evening and was getting ready to be sleepy, I just had this sort of wave of affection for the friends I have met on here, and not just the people I consider close enough to be full-on friends, but all the folks I have had exchanges with over the years, who have liked/reblogged my posts or whose posts I've liked/reblogged, who I follow or who I don't follow (I don't follow very many people), who have sent me nice little messages or comments that I sometimes don't reply to even though I mean to or who I've sent nice little messages or comments to (less frequently than I should) and who sometimes kindly respond and sometimes don't respond and I always wonder if they feel bad about not responding and always hope they don't because I know that feeling so well. All those people. It kind of came out of nowhere, this good feeling, this feeling of appreciation, and I really needed it. I don't know if it was just tension leaving my body or what, but I got teary about it and it was very welcome.

I sometimes joke that, reality-show-style, I am Not Here To Make Friends, and it's really true -- people use "social media" in all different ways, but generally speaking, when I join a social media/online forum type of thing it's for the reason of some interest that I have (I mean, usually XF, there's no need to be abstract about it, haha), and I want to talk to people about it, but I don't necessarily have the goal of "meeting people" or making friends. I don't care about (and sometimes actively resist any sign of) being "popular" (and I think I react badly sometimes when that term is thrown around, partly because that term to me conjures up middle/high school and a time that I was not in the least bit "popular" and that still feels far more like reality to me than any overlaying temporary reality that might be fleetingly associated with any particular subset of a subset of some virtual community). I am kind of a lone wolf, I live by myself and like it that way, too much socializing tires me out (and often befuddles me), and sometimes on Tumblr (or all over the internet) (or the world) all the HI MY NAME'S KATRINA! AND MY NAME!! IS HUGH!!!! stuff makes me (at best) amused and baffled and (at worst) irritated and impatient.

And yet...I do make friends. Because other people are nicer than me and better at reaching out than me and more open to the idea than I am, and people will reach out and I'll respond (sometimes; I am bad at responding) and then, sometimes, I end up with a new friend or group of friends, and I'm always surprised. This has been happening to me for however many years (in online spaces, I'm specifically talking about, but it will happen to me in real life too) and I'm surprised and grateful every time. It's like I march into a space and am all excited about Things and Facts and Content, and eventually I look up and there are other people there, and a lot of them are nice, and I like them, and they like me. That just isn't something I really ever seek out, and I don't know if it's because of some insecurity I have (I definitely have those) or because I just don't have that social of a brain or a combo or what. But it's like a little miracle that has happened over and over. And I really am so grateful for it, because I love having friends (I haven’t always had them), and I love having moments of connection with people, online or in real life (or from online to real life), and I don't really ever seek that out for myself, whether because I don't know how to do it or because I don't have sufficient drive to do it or whatever, but when it does come to me, I appreciate it so much, and it's new and unexpected and extraordinary every time.

So last night, for whatever reason, when I was feeling kind of drained from the grind of tumblr and and a little pelted by the negativity and tired and over it, that feeling just came over me from I know not where, this affection for one or two people that just kind of gathered strength and turned into a wave of feeling that left me feeling much more peaceful and happy, and that has lasted through today so far. (There’s still time, lol)

So I just wanted to say that, I guess. I know things are negative around here right now, and people are having all kinds of feelings, and I wanted to say that I appreciate this place overall and I appreciate all the individual humans who make up this place. I hope that the current wave of negativity loses its grip soon. I hope people who are unhappy are able to find something that makes them happy. I hope people who don't feel at home here are able to find their place. I appreciate that the universe gifted me with some good vibes yesterday and today and I’m turning them back outward, and I’ll continue to try and do the best I can to be kind.