#posted on anon as it’s objectively bad and unchecked writing

[33max]

In an interview with Autosport Toto Wolff said “We can make accommodations if Max wanted to bring his cats to race weekends.”

However, when asked for a comment Helmut Marko rolled his eye and said “Their hospitality probably smells like dog. The cats wouldn’t like it.”

Or, Sassy Verstappen is diagnosed with asthma and Max takes his cats to a race weekend because he does not trust any other human with them

(ao3 link)

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Would love to hear about your beefs with Lucas because I have beefs with Lucas

(Sorry it took me three thousand years to answer this, anon.)

They mainly fall under a few headings, with the third being the most serious and the thing that I am genuinely irl furious about at least biannually (and feeling unable to adequately sum up The Problem with it after yelling about it so often is a huge part of why this post has been in my drafts for such a long time):

1. His self-mythologising and the subsequent uncritical repetition of his bullshit in the fandom. Obvious lies like that he had some master plan for 10 films when it’s clear he did not have anything like a plot outline at any point. We all know the thing was written at the seat of various people’s pants, it’s blatantly self-evident that’s the case. There’s also plenty of public record about how the OT was written. Even dumber, more obvious lies, like that Anakin was ‘always the protagonist’ and the entire 6 films were his story from the beginning. This is preposterous and every time someone brings it up (usually with palpable smugness) as fanboys ‘not understanding star wars’ because they don't get that ‘the OT is not Luke's story’... Yeah, I just... I cannot.

Vader wasn’t Anakin Skywalker until ESB, it’s a retcon. It’s a brilliant retcon and it works perfectly, it elevated SW into something timeless and special it otherwise would not have been, but you can tell it wasn’t the original plan and there’s proof it wasn’t the original plan. Let’s not pretend. And Luke is the protagonist. No amount of waffling about such esoteric flights of theory as ‘ring structure’ is going to get away from the rigidly orthodox narrative and the indisputable fact that it is Luke’s hero’s journey. Vader’s redemption isn’t about his character development (he has almost none) and has no basis in any kind of convincing psychological reality for his character, but it doesn’t need to be because it’s part of Luke’s arc, because Vader is entirely a foil in Luke’s story. It’s a coming-of-age myth about confronting and growing beyond the father.

All attempts to de-centre Luke in RotJ just break the OT’s narrative logic. It’s a character-driven story and the character driving is Luke. Trying to read it as Anakin’s victory, the moral culmination of his choices rather than Luke’s and putting all the agency into Anakin’s hands just destroys the trilogy’s coherence and ignores most of its content in favour of appropriating a handful of scenes into an arc existing only in the prequels. The dilemma of RotJ is how Luke will define ethical adulthood after learning and growing through two previous films worth of challenge, education, failure, and triumph; it’s his choice to love his father and throw down his sword which answers the question the entire story has been asking. Vader’s redemption and the restoration of the galaxy are the consequences of that choice which tell us what kind of world we’re in, but the major dramatic conflict was resolved by Luke’s decision not the response to it.

And, just all over, the idea of Lucas as an infallible auteur is inaccurate and annoying to me. Obviously he’s a tremendous creative force and we wouldn’t have sw without him, but he didn’t create it alone or out of whole cloth. The OT was a very collaborative effort and that’s why it’s what it is and the prequels are what they are. Speaking of which.

2. The hubris of the prequels in general and all the damage their many terrible, protected-from-editors choices do to the symbolic fabric of the sw universe. Midicholrians, Yoda fighting with a lightsabre, Obi-wan as Anakin's surrogate father instead of his peer, incoherent and unmotivated character arcs, the laundry list of serious and meaningful continuity errors, the bad storytelling, the bad direction, the bad characterisation, the shallowness of the parallels which undermine the OT’s imagery, the very clumsy and contradictory way the A/P romance was handled, the weird attitude to romance in general, it goeth on. I don’t want to re-litigate the entire PT here and I’m not going to, but they are both bad as films and bad as prequels. The main idea of them, to add Anakin’s pov and create an actual arc for him as well as to flesh out the themes of compassion and redemption, was totally appropriate. The concept works as a narrative unit, there are lots of powerful thematic elements they introduce, they have a lot of cool building blocks, it’s only in execution and detail that they do a bunch of irreparable harm.

But the constant refrain that only ageing fanboys don’t like them and they only don’t like them because of their themes or because they humanise Anakin... can we not. The shoddy film making in the prequels is an objective fact. If you want to overlook the bad parts for the good or prioritise ideas over technique, that’s fine, but don’t sit here and tell me they’re masterworks of cinema there can be no valid reason to criticise. I was the exact right age for them when I saw them, I am fully on board with the fairy tale nature of sw, I am fully on board with humanising Anakin- the prequels just have a lot of very big problems with a) their scripts and b) their direction, especially of dialogue scenes. If Lucas had acknowledged his limitations like he did back in the day instead of believing his own press, he could have again had the help he obviously needed instead of embarrassing himself.

3. Killing and suppressing the original original trilogy. I consider the fact that the actual original films are not currently available in any form, have never been available in an archival format, and have not been presented in acceptable quality since the VHS release a very troubling case study in the problems of corporate-owned art. LF seizing prints of the films whenever they are shown, destroying the in-camera negatives to make the special editions with no plans to restore them, and doing all in the company’s considerable power to suppress the original versions is something I consider an act of cultural vandalism. The OT defined a whole generation of Hollywood. It had a global impact on popular entertainment. ANH is considered so historically significant it was one of the first films added to the US Library of Congress (Lucas refused to provide even them with a print of the theatrical release, so they made their own viewable scan from the 70s copyright submission).

The fact that the films which made that impact cannot be legally accessed by the public is offensive to me. The fact that Lucas has seen fit to dub over or composite out entire performances (deleting certain actors from the films), to dramatically alter the composition of shots chosen by the original directors, to radically change the entire stylistic tone by completely reinventing the films’ colour timing in attempt to make them match the plasticy palate of the prequels, to shoot new scenes for movies he DID NOT DIRECT, add entire sequences or re-edit existing sequences to the point of being unrecognisable etc. etc. is NOT OKAY WITH ME when he insists that his versions be the ONLY ones available.

I’m okay with the Special Editions existing, though I think they’re mostly... not good... but I’m not okay with them replacing the original films. And all people can say is ‘well, they’re his movies’.

Lucas may have clear legal ownership in the capitalistic sense, but in no way does he have clear artistic ownership. Forget the fans, I’m not one of those people who argue the fans are owed something: A film is always a collaborative exercise and almost never can it be said that the end product is the ultimate responsibility and possession of one person. Even the auteur directors aren't the sole creative vision, even a triple threat like Orson Welles still had cinematographers and production designers, etc. Hundreds of artists work on films. Neither a writer nor a director (nor one person who is both) is The Artist behind a film the way a novelist is The Artist behind a novel. And Lucas did NOT write the screenplays for or direct ESB or RotJ. So in what sense does he have a moral right to alter those films from what the people primarily involved in making them deemed the final product? In what sense would he have the right to make a years-later revision the ONLY version even if he WERE the director?

Then you get into the issue of the immeasurable cultural impact those films had in their original form and the imperative to preserve something that is defining to the history of film and the state of the zeitgeist. I don't think there is any ‘fan entitlement’ involved in saying the originals belonged to the world after being part of its consciousness for decades and it is doing violence to the artistic record to try to erase the films which actually occupied that space. It's exactly like trying to replace every copy of It's a Wonderful Life with a colourised version (well, it's worse but still), and that was something Lucas himself railed against. It’s like if Michaelangelo were miraculously resuscitated and he decided to repaint the Sistine Ceiling to add a gunfight and change his style to something contemporary.

I get genuinely very upset at the cold reality that generations of people are watching sw for the first time and it’s the fucking SE-except-worse they’re seeing. And as fewer people keep physical media and the US corporate oligarchy continues to perform censorship and rewrite history on its streaming services unchecked by any kind of public welfare concerns, you’ll see more and more ‘real Mandela effect’ type shit where the cultural record has suddenly ‘always’ been in line with whatever they want it to be just now. And US media continues to infect us all with its insidious ubiquity. I think misrepresenting and censoring the past is an objectively bad thing and we can’t learn from things we pretend never happened, but apparently not many people are worried about handing the keys to our collective experience to Disney and Amazon.

4. The ‘Jedi don’t marry’ thing and how he wanted this to continue with Luke post-RotJ, so it’s obviously not meant to be part of what was wrong with the order in the prequels. I find this... incoherent on a storytelling level. The moral of the anidala story then indeed becomes just plain ‘romantic love is bad and will make you crazy’, rather than the charitable reading of the prequels which I ascribe to, which is that the problem isn’t Anakin’s love for Padmé, it’s that he ceased to love her and began to covet her. And I can’t help but feel this attitude is maybe an expression of GL’s issues with women following his divorce. I don’t remember if there’s evidence to contradict that take, since it’s been some time since I read about this but yeah. ANH absolutely does sow seeds for possible Luke/Leia development and GL was still married while working on that film. Subsequently he was dead set against Luke ever having a relationship and decided Jedi could not marry. Coincidence?

There’s a lot of blinking red ‘issues with women’ warning signs all over Lucas’s work, but the prequels are really... egregious.

[liskantope]

(Same depression-cartoon anon) Ah, okay—maybe I misunderstood your original post, then. Is what you object to just the idea of encouraging people who barely fit the label to think of themselves as Depressed with a capital D?—Because you fear that this (like the hashtag metoo thing) might lead them to feel more victimized than they would have otherwise? Or is there something else too that makes you wary?

That’s part of it, yes, and it certainly applies to the MeToo hashtag as well. I’ve been bothered for years about the trend towards fetishizing victimization. I’ve written a lot about the reasons I find this concerning on this blog. (I also have reasons in my personal history from long ago for starting to be concerned about this in the first place, which I haven’t chosen to write much about.)

That isn’t even the main reason for being wary that I expressed in my earlier post, though. I’m bothered by the idea that an unchecked norm of encouragement towards erring on the side of assuming that mild depressiony symptoms imply Depression waters down our cultural notion of what clinical depression is. It make it harder to express or conceptualize the distinction between someone being so clinically depressed that they can’t be expected to function without medication and a good therapist, and someone who feels down from time to time in a way that they can’t fully explain but that most of us experience. I’ve watched two of my close family members going through (simultaneous) periods of serious cases of depression (one of them quite severe). It’s very real to me. I’m afraid that pushing for a looser cultural notion of depression (and even emphasizing that sufferers of these very comparatively mild cases are the worst off in a way) muddies the concept of what serious depression looks like and how much harm it does. I worry about people overreacting to a belief that they have depression by trying to treat their condition in ways that might do more harm than good to someone with mild symptoms that could better be managed without medication. I imagine that in many cases there might be a lot more benefit to someone’s mental well-being in hearing that what they’re feeling is extremely common and not really abnormal. And just in general, I tend to prickle at the watering down of definitions that include really terrible things. Lumping in the very mild with the severe seems to be a relentless byproduct of movements to raise awareness about bad things, and I guess there’s no realistic way of changing that, and I typically support the movements themselves, but to me the byproduct is an unfortunate one.

Also, a further effect of watering down definitions is a decrease in the informational content of someone self-identifying under that definition, even to the point that the information conveyed has more to do with one’s position on an ideological spectrum than one’s raw condition. That’s something I was definitely complaining about with the MeToo hashtag, and it certainly applies to identifying as sufferers of the most common mental illnesses. Nowadays for instance I get the feeling that if all my friends were polled on whether or not they Have Anxiety, practically every single one of them who is part of a socially liberal subculture (which is almost all of them) and who doesn’t go against the grain by being conservative would say “yes” (and that this would be the case without Covid or Trump). I often feel like “I Have Anxiety” just doesn’t mean that much anymore besides “I often feel more anxious than I should about situations” or “I often get distracted by thoughts of fearing the worst” or a bunch of other self-descriptions that, without being enhanced in terms of degree, apply to pretty much every one of us. Self-identification under the banner of Depression doesn’t seem quite as universal, but my impression is that it’s not that far behind I Have Anxiety. Such statements no longer indicate that much about how I should treat or what I should expect of someone.

I also worry about the extent of a very broad but very apparent trend towards -- for lack of a better expression coming to mind right now (it’s past my bedtime) -- treating internal experiences as the final word or the purest determiner of what is happening to someone.

This situation is still way, way better than the way things would be (were!) before the modern mental health awareness movement, where conditions like depression and anxiety would rarely be acknowledged and would often be shamed when they were. But if there’s one common thread to all the cultural trends I express wariness about, it just might be the idea that movements are too often fought through rhetoric that never acknowledges that there are dangers in following the ideology of the movement too purely and absolutely without checking oneself by consulting facts or considering the effect of one’s rhetoric on those outside the movement. I have no issue with the cartoon that started all of this, when just taken on its face in isolation, and I think it may be helpful to a lot of people. But I do worry about it as playing a role in a trend of concept creep with conditions like depression, particularly when I see comments under it expressing, “How could I possibly be wrong about the symptoms I experience meaning I have depression?”

[biwomensupport]

'Good survivor' anon from earlier, I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your response and how thoughtful it was. When I saw the abuse anon's Q, it sort of resonated with me--the guilt of being unable to cope, or the fear of being a toxic influence to my loved ones bc of my rape. Normal post-trauma feelings--anger, guilt, shame, fear/paranoia--seem like a fault, something to be at blame for--maybe something to atone for, because the pain I feel is something I've exposed others to. (1/3)

(2/3) To see mods and that anon themselves assume so quickly that they’re an abuser for normal, however scary and confusing, post-rape feelings+behaviors, just points to how badly we want to see bad people be exposed and punished, and how trauma twists our perception of our own feelings and actions. When it comes down to it, though, I think abusers don’t often fear that they’re abusive, and survivors are often guilty for things they aren’t at fault for, now matter how terrifying our pain is.

(3/3) Anyway, I apologize for ranting in your inbox, but abuse anon and your response got me thinking and I really, deeply appreciate how thoughtful your response to my ask was. Of course we can’t read anon’s minds, but I dont think we need to give survivors more reason to doubt themselves, hate themselves, or have fear of using their support systems. It is normal to have fear/distrust/anger after being raped, but knowing it’s okay to express it and feel it and tell others is key to recovery.

Hi again Anon,

I am glad to be able to assuage your concerns with regards to the amount of thought that went into the previous asker’s question and yours. We appreciate our follower’s input greatly. Thank you for reading and for sending a kind and understanding response in return.

At the risk of being redundant, I am going to try to address everything you have said in this ask as well for readers just joining.

First off, the tone of your initial ask was noticeably different than the asker before you. The language you used- the guilt of causing pain and accepting responsibility for it- was very different, and as you suggested, would have warranted a very different type of answer. 

I believe most if not all survivors at some point worry deeply that they are being abusive simply by virtue of being in pain. I would be lying if I said that the fear of harming ones support system did not initially resonate with me as well, before the conscious choice was made to answer in an objective manner that took the words only at face value. 

It is undoubtedly true that we survivors may and do at some point hurt someone by reacting to them in a way that is unwarranted on their part, but ingrained on our part. The crucial differences between that and abuse are that:

a) The harm we did was not an unforgivable and unreconcilable violation of someone else’s human and bodily rights (for example, sexually assaulting someone one time is never okay just because it only happened once). b) The harm we did was not and does not become part of a pattern of behavior that we continue.  c) We feel guilty about the behavior and take full responsibility for it (and do not relabel it, or diminish it, or push it onto a third party). d) We take immediate steps to resolve the harm done by the behavior and ensure it does not happen again.

We all make mistakes, and we all do need to atone for them at some point. As you aptly pointed out, no one is a ‘perfect’ survivor- but again, this background does not give us a free pass for mistreatment with no effort on our parts to make up for it. If we are part of a strong and healthy support system, those around us will forgive us for the small amount of mistakes we make, as long as we show that we are growing from it and actively working to make up for their pain. A healthy support system does not, however, allow survivors to continuously and shamelessly harm others unchecked simply because they are survivors. Striking that balance between understanding where survivors are coming from but holding them responsible for their controllable actions isn’t easy by any means, and decisions obviously must be made on a case-by-case basis. 

It is important also to note that the post-trauma feelings you listed and correctly described as absolutely normal- “anger, guilt, shame, fear/paranoia”- are not in any way inherently tied to lashing out at others with those feelings. There are many ways to feel and openly express these feelings without mistreating those around us. For example, instead of shouting at someone or insulting them when you are angry, one could do the following: 

Verbally express it; “I am very angry with you, so I need to take some time away to calm down and then we can talk.”Express it through writing; using a diary entry (private), or a letter to them (gives both parties time to think and review what they say). Physically express it; by yelling into a pillow, cooking to distract oneself, making angry art. 

You can find more suggestions for healthy expressions of trauma-based feelings in our tags. Finally, it is true that abusers don’t often fear that they are abusive. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t know they are, and it doesn’t mean they don’t fear being caught out at it. Some abusers even talk about their abusive behavior constantly in an attempt to normalize and minimize it, and be validated for it. So in general, one cannot use the mere occurrence of someone talking about their own abusive behavior as a litmus test to prove for sure that they are or aren’t abusive. 

Our intention is never to tell survivors not to feel or express negative feelings, and we hope that this ask and others help to clarify that. But there is a difference between feeling those feelings and harming others with them, and we are always working to find the balance between validating survivors and holding them accountable for actively harmful actions they may present us with. Individual readers may have chosen a different balance, and we welcome their input on our questions.

BWSN