#queer media critical i suppose?

[thegoldenhoof]

I think about this interview a lot.

I think about how Jenkins thinks queer romances end up tragic/unrequited.

How these queer romantic characters deserve a happy ending.

How he gave this as an answer to the question about the death of the one character whose arc was very much queer and very much not romantic.

Its great to be able to see yourself in fairytale romances.

It would be still more amazing if those of us for whom romance was not in the picture and probably will never be could see our fantastical queer happy endings too....

But of course... How could you possibly tell happy queer stories without romance. Being queer is all about Love is Love after all /s

[keen-eye]

sorry that i can recognize when shipping (w/ or w/o fetishization of) m/m pairs transcends into harmful territory and bad representation when it creates toxic fan bases that bully people for not supporting it and bash on m/f pairs with chemistry solely because of misogyny

[aestheticcrab]

forever annoyed that a lot of queer criticism of Heartstoppers boils down to “these young teenagers aren’t having enough sex”

[imaginative-123]

Vivziepop glazers will basically downvote you and make excuses if you call out the sexist writing on how Viv writes her gay men, btw this is from r/CharacterRant

Edit: Minors do not interact, reblog or like my post bec I will block you.

I'm pretty sure if OP posted it in the main sub Hazbin Hotel, he might as well get downvoted for sure despite being an SA Victim. Viv Glazers surely never failed to disappoint me and I'm so glad Tumblr exist bc this is the website where you're allowed to rant about Viv and her shows. FUCK THIS SHIT MAN. Maybe Viv Glazers should learn that people have different perspectives and actual issues in her works. VIV is not a SAINT OR GOD you GLAZERS! GET THAT IN YOUR DAMN HEAD FUCK I HATE THIS FANBASE IT JUST MADE ME MAD.

Edit: About to go to sleep since I will finish my work tom my comment just got 16 upvotes I guess glazers must've realized I got a point LMAO.

Also the comments that got downvoted who point out the issues in Viv's writing got upvoted including OP's comment on Stolitz in regards to sexual coercion since there's also a person who denied the r@pe got upvoted before hours later got downvoted and it shocked me why people would upvote that comment that screams mental gymastics to defend a Ship that is made through sexual coercion that includes the class difference and power dynamic. The post from CharacterRant sub got people's opinions turn into 180 I guess bc they realized the other people like me who point out the issues and have concerns about the show might as well have a reason the shows that Viv write is not really good most especially when it's related to queer representation and SA.

Lastly the point of this post is to showcase the double standards in the fandom on how they view criticisms most especially when you apply that to stans/glazers who refused to see the actual criticisms and think it's mixed with the so called "haters" when I myself am a fan of Viv's work but also recently gotten more critical bc the roses tinted glass fell off when I start to analyze Viv's behavior online including her shows. So if you think this post is just whiny, egotistical and immature, sure tell me that, I'm not perfect and I accept that but that wouldn't changed my issues with the Standom's behavior that invalidates valid criticisms that critics like me have been voicing for years nor how the Fanbase has gotten even way more toxic over the discourse surrounding Viv's immature behavior including how divided the fanbase is, let's not forget the Standom's cultish behaviour to defend Vivziepop from any form of valid criticism, btw I also don't agree with other critics all the time but I can also see when there is criticism that is valid. So before anyone accuses critics for being "haters" maybe try and understand where we were coming from, the people became critics are also fan of Viv's work, if I was truly a hater then I wouldn't reblogged or like fanarts of the show including listening to musicals from Viv's work, just bc I'm a fan doesn't mean I have no right to voice my concerns over Viv including her work. Sometimes Stans should understand that fans can like the work but also criticize it.

Also the mods from CharacterRant removed the post from an SA Victim, damn for a sub that is supposed to make essays of your issues from any media, they would sure remove a post from an SA Victim's issues with Angel Dust's character. Truly the most Hypocritical moment from that sub.

[piratecaptainscaptainpirates]

Another common way in which I think criticism of OFMD can fall apart is when people don't take the show at its word about what genres it's trying to inhabit.

This was one of the most annoying aspects of the few negative pre-release OFMD reviews, for me. Like I said, the vast majority let us know that we were in for a wonderful treat, but there were a few that complained that it took forever for "plot" to happen, and this is just such a bizarre criticism for me because I find it so hard to believe that someone who professionally reviews media could have so much trouble figuring out what the "plot" of a show is supposed to be.

But then this criticism just kept popping up, and it still makes me roll my eyes. Post-s2, in some Izzy fan circles there's been an argument that Izzy is a more important character than he actually is because "the plot only happens when he's around." And where these analyses fall short, I think, is that they fail to consider that OFMD has always been a character-driven show, not an action-driven one.

There's a difference between the main plot of a show and things that happen in that show. OFMD is a romantic comedy, it exists to tell us a story of Ed and Stede's romance. It plays with the romcom format, and a lot of the humor in the show comes from juxtaposing this with piracy as a backdrop. But piracy is not what OFMD is about; it's about a romance that happens to take place within piracy as a setting. Complaining that there's not enough action in OFMD is like watching Black Sails and getting mad about its overly-serious tone - that's a feature, not a bug.

If you expect OFMD to look like an action-driven story, there's really not a lot that happens, and you'll be disappointed by how seemingly jerky and slowly the "plot" moves. But it's actually a character-driven story, and if you watch for the main characters and the development of their stories, it's a very smooth ride. Bigger background elements, like Chauncey and the Act of Grace and Ricky's attack on the Republic of Pirates, are not meant to be a focus, they're meant to force Ed and Stede into situations that will reveal more about their characters and move their arcs along.

And I can't help but wonder if this criticism of OFMD is so common because people just don't expect a queer romcom to actually be a queer romcom. We're so used to stories where even queer main characters' romance has to take a backseat or only be hinted at. OFMD stands out because the romance actually is the point, and some people, I think, for whatever reason, just can't believe that.

[sapphiresaphics]

^^^———

Okay two things:

1. That’s NOT the lens of season 1? Season 1 discusses the political issues between the cities, sure, but that’s more SETUP and SET DRESSING than anything else.

But whatever, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say that Season 1 actually IS supposed to be about the oppression and inequality between the two cities.

What’s the end of Season 1 say then? Because the end of season 1 is the council agreeing to make Zaun independent and Jinx blowing them away and getting rid of all opportunities to better the two cities. If the show is all about the oppression, what does Jinx blowing up the council when they’re ready to NOT oppress the city anymore mean???

The reason you’re struggling with viewing Arcane through this lens is because it’s NOT the intended lens and it doesn’t match with what the show is doing.

But that also brings me to my next point:

2. If you’re viewing it through this lens, then you understand that you can view it through DIFFERENT lenses, right? Like that’s the basis of most modern day media criticism and analysis isn’t it? Take a work of art and use different lenses to critique it and see how it fares.

So if you agree that lenses can be swapped… why the heck do you struggle with the idea of viewing Arcane through a different lens? Why does it have to ONLY be viewed through this one narrow lens you’ve decided on? Could you also not view it through a queer lens? Or through the lens of civil rights? Or women’s rights?

Or how about… you view it through the lens of the “cycle of violence” which is what the show was INTENDED to be viewed through? Why is that so hard?

If a particular lens isn’t working to view it through, why are you blaming the writers for that? Why wouldn’t your first thought be “hey, maybe I was wrong and this isn’t the lens the show was meant to be viewed through? Maybe I should try another one and see if that’s better?”

You guys all BAFFLE me.

[sophie-frm-mars]

Queer Culture is an orphan culture

Queer people aren't normally born into families of other queer people, so the way that for example the culture of racialised people can pass down intergenerationally, this doesn't happen for queer people. The advice for surviving as queer doesn't pass down to queer kids the way that advice for surviving white supremacy passes from racialised parents to racialised kids or advice for surviving patriarchy passes from mothers to daughters. The way that elders in racialised communities can guide the resolution of conflicts or harmful patterns or older women can advise younger women, we don't have that. We have an orphan culture.

Immediately we will say that this is what queer elders are for, and this is true, but it isn't the same. We aren't raised in families with any kind of consistent framework for what it means to be us, in fact we're often raised by families that try to actively stop us from being ourselves. There will never be as many elders (who are actively engaging responsibly in their roles as community elders) as younger queers and even if there were they can't be in those younger queers' lives in the way that a parent ideally is from birth.

I'm not saying this to undersell the value of found family, or the ways that found family relationships can be robust and long lasting and bigger than interpersonal turbulence the way family is supposed to be. If anything, I want to stress how important the role of queer elders is, because in a lot of smaller queer communities elders just don't exist. A queer elder isn't just a queer person who has been around a while, they're someone who chooses to take responsibility for the younger people around them by sharing the lessons they've learned and providing the benefits of greater life experience to others.

In smaller queer communities, older queers may choose not to act as elders because if they did they would be seen as responsible for everyone. There has to be a critical mass of older queers before all of them feel safe to engage with community as queer elders. I was outlining this to a friend in Seattle, talking about how barren of elder queers most UK queer communities are, and she said "oh yeah I live down the road from an LGBT retirement community. I know a bunch of queers in their 40s and 50s." In more queer friendly areas of the US, communities aren't just bigger: they contain more of our collective gathered knowledge and history.

In some places the orphan culture is more pronounced, and in some places it is partly remedied by the presence of elders. For many queers, we either learn the lessons about the patterns that shape our communities by reading about them in books and online, or we learn about them the hard way - by repeating them.

My dad had a brain tumour that was diagnosed when I was less than a year old. The effects of the tumour and the surgery to remove it completely transformed him as a person. Growing up I got to know about who he had been through stories that people told me. I identified ways that I was similar to him not by seeing him being like me, but from those stories. Seeing social media dissections of transmisogyny, advice columns from queer authors, endless discourses about mental health in queer communities, I feel the same way I felt learning stories about my dad before he was sick.

I think young queer people cling to queer people of note they see in the public sphere in that same way. It isn't an adequate substitute for a parent who can teach you about who you are, but it's often all we have. Even if those publicly visible queers aren't focussed on queer politics, even if they don't give the kind of support that elders provide to communities, even if they have no experience to draw from and no advice to give, they will inevitably be looked up to by a tonne of young queer strangers, because we're all orphans trying to raise ourselves and each other at the same time.

[canichangemyblogname]

Great. The rabid shippers are once again trying to turn this (re-hashed) “fetish discourse” around onto queer men. “The faggots are the REAL fetishizers”— because apparently it’s 1963 again, and a man liking a man is an unhealthy and irrational reverence; an obsession. This originally started out with us pointing out our own invisibility in fan spaces and talking about how many people in fandom who ARE NOT queer men speak over us, write off our lived realities, and rely on harmful real-world rhetoric about us to malign our visibility while building their fan community on our sexualized bodies and their fantasies of our lives. They build their relationship with media exclusively through an obsession with m/m relationships, and—perhaps predictably—then trample over us when we ask for respect.

I suppose part of what’s most frustrating is that when we, rightfully, point out that this—and similar rhetoric— is homophobic, an unfortunate not-infrequent response has been “Pfts— but I’m queer,” as if that excludes someone from being a piece of shit. You all do realize that being part of a protected class does not prevent you from contributing to systems and spreading ideas that harm those in other protected classes or the same protected class, right? “I experience an axis of marginalization, therefore I could not possibly contribute to a system that harms me and others like me,” certainly doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny, not just because it’s untrue, but also because its use here functions as a thought-terminating fallacy, designed to end the debate with a cliché rather than address the point put forth: your homophobia. It is also an Irrelevant Conclusion Fallacy, as the argument that members of a marginalized class are more likely to be sympathetic to members of that same class is certainly valid, and could be argued, but this conclusion does not address the issue in question: your homophobia. It may also be characterized as an Argument from Incredulity, where you cannot imagine that a queer person could be queerphobic, so it must be untrue. Which, of course, I have all seen people point out.

However, now, as if on queue, the next most frequent “come back” is, “So you just want women to shut up and take it? You want to silence queer women?” 1.) The people saying and doing this shit aren’t all women, 2.) The people saying and doing this shit aren’t all queer, 3.) What lead people to call out your post wasn’t anyone’s identity; it was the contents of the post, you are now using identity to shield yourself from accountability, and 4.) This is a strawman fallacy being used to distract from the original critique: your homophobia. It is also an Ad Hominen attack being used to move the focus from your homophobia to the implication that your critic is motivated by misogyny to critique you.

Although, this “come back” is more of a “case in point” at this point when the original argument was about how fans who do not live as queer men (or those adjacent) do their damnedest to speak over and discount the lived realities of queer men (and those adjacent) to instead center our visibility and our representation around the preferences, pleasures, and desires of women. Like— y’all do realize that what started a lot of this “discourse” months ago was a post that quite literally said that mlm visibility/representation has always been about and centered women and their desires in relationships with men, as well as a post where a woman said that if she ever saw a man flirt with another man in public, she’d shoot him, right? You know this, yes?

[ohrightgaypeople]

this chapter defies religion and I love it

I'll start this by prefacing that this is what great character development looks like 👆

and sorry for the tangent/rant is this going to become because, truly, 19 Days has no religious plot or tones, doesn't offer commentary or criticism on it- hell!! it has nothing to do with it at all

yet my hurt heart can help but heal a little bit more every time a queer piece of media has moments like this

ngl, when I started reading the chapter I was nervous, but afterwards it became one of my faves of the series; it gives the same vibe as Charlie's final talk w/ Ben in the Heartstopper series

we, who grow up on extremist religious households, are often groomed to the idea of "always forgiving", always taking the "high ground" and "being the better person" - whatever it even is supposed to be like. and it takes a long time to shake off the guilt of simply not wanting to forgive someone that hurt

because, here's the thing, YOU DON'T!! nb needs to forgive everyone; forget and move forward? absolutely, yes. but if someone pushed you too far and you want nothing to do with them anymore, it's your right to it. you're not going to hell, nor is any other Deity you believe going to punish you for that

it's why scenes like this, specially to lgbt ppl, is so important and will always have a deep impact on me (and a lot of others, I'm sure)

Translation: @19daysmanhua

[candygalaxyyy]

I didn’t know how much I needed XO Kitty until today! I was already anticipating it as an avid rom-com watcher and fan of To All the Boys (especially the first movie). Plus I’m always down for cross-cultural media, given that’s what i study. I just love this show so much, I’m about to rewatch it again after this post. The LGBTQIA+ representation in this show definitely holds a place in my heart. I know its not the most groundbreaking or revolutionary queer media and I’m sure there are critiques to be made, but I’m too happy about it rn to see it in a more critical lense.

I’m just glad that we are getting bi/pan female lead representation and more queer Asian representation in mainstream media. Like yuri being lesbian is everything to me, i love her and I love juiliana as well (I hope we get more of her in s2 cause yay to black queerness). Also, kitty’s story hits so close to home and its comforting to see it being portrayed on a mainstream platform. I just don’t know if I’m team minho or team yuri as of now. I love the tension between kitty and yuri and they have this really comforting vibe when they are around each other, its very cute and cozy. For minho and kitty, the banter and chemistry is so explosive, their jokes just bounce of of each other and its fun to see. AND BOTH STORYLINES ARE ENEMIES TO FRIENDS TO LOVERS CODED!!! Like how am I supposed to choose Netflix?? How??! I’m just glad she broke up with dae, it was the best for the both of them. Now season 2 needs to be about her exploring her sexuality, and i need it to be either minho or yuri, I can’t handle another love interest.

[leandra-kinard]

On Oliver's social media behavior regarding Bucktommy vs. Buddie

Kind of in line with many of the good points raised by @bbbuckaroo in this ask response, but I wanted to make my own post about it.

I, too, have seen posts that prompted this ask - from more well-meaning people remarking that Oliver could/should maybe say something against the toxic Buddie shippers and promote Bucktommy more, to more critical voices saying he's essentially ship-baiting with Buddie because he keeps posting about them.

As the referenced post says, Oliver "knows how important and pivotal the Buddie FRIENDSHIP is".

So let's look at that from Oliver's (and in connection also Ryan's) point of view for a moment here.

You're an actor who's been playing one half of what is one of the most integral relationships on a very successful show. That relationship has textually always been a friendship, but with elements that make it richer and deeper than most regular friendships; it's a sort of family dynamic.

It could be read as having a potential for romance, and you're open to that, should the writers ever decide that's the direction they want to take it. You have said so multiple times, not just to appease a large group of fans, but because you genuinely mean it. You're open to it, but you don't know if it's ever going to happen, nor do you have any power over it.

You do love the way fans are celebrating this relationship though - whether they highlight the canonical platonic aspects or take it a step further. You "love the love" (as Ryan has put it). It's great, it's heartwarming, it's moving because the potential of that romance and your character figuring out he's bisexual means so much to queer fans who are looking for good queer representation (which your show already has, but there could always be a bit more, right?). You see and want to acknowledge all the creativity people pour into it.

But you're careful after a while, because, so far, that relationship has only textually been platonic, and some fans are accusing both the writers and you of queerbaiting.

So you take a step back, do less social media for a while. You don't want them to think you're confirming anything just because you see value in certain fictional interpretations of the text.

But then you are told that your character is supposed to come out as bisexual; he'll have a romance with a background character they're bringing back for a couple of episodes. While that's not exactly the relationship many of the fans hoped to get, it's still amazing. It's the right representation of bisexual characters that is very rarely done right, and it'll confirm that they always read your character correctly as bisexual. It'll be so validating to the fans to know they didn't misinterpret that, and you're very happy about that.

But you still love the family-like, platonic relationship you've built with the other character for 5 whole seasons before this. And you love the relationship your character has with his son, too. (In a way, Buck is to Christopher what Bobby is to Buck - a father figure).

You want to keep celebrating that because your new romantic relationship doesn't replace the year-long friendship with Eddie. You want to show fans that 'hey, even though this isn't exactly what you hoped for, it's still great; it's important. Eddie and Chris are still and always will be a huge part of Buck's life. Don't worry. Buck will not abandon them. I still see you and acknowledge you, but let's focus on the textual friendship and platonic love here. Which is also very, very important, and very dear to me personally."

And there isn't that much to share about a romantic relationship that's just begun yet anyway, especially with the season being so short and packed with multiple story arcs around the main characters. It's all still at the start, and while it's great, exciting and has the potential to become something lasting, nothing's set in stone yet. You probably also don't want to have people get their hopes up that Bucktommy is 'confirmed' as endgame; and you don't want to put a main character who has his own, very complex story arc going on this season on the backburner.

You've obviously 'done it wrong'. But no matter how else you could have done it, it would have been wrong as well. You probably know this by now, because no matter what you did in the past, there were always people who interpreted your actions and words in bad faith to confirm their own agenda.

So what the hell are you supposed to do other than what feels good to you while applying a little bit of caution?

---

Oliver CANNOT get it right. It's simply impossible. If he didn't post at all, some fans would be mad that he doesn't say anything. If he only or primarily promoted Bucktommy, they'd be mad that he ignores Eddie and Chris entirely. If he only promoted Buddie (platonic) and Chris, they'd be mad that he's ship baiting. And if he goes for the balance of putting his character's 6-year history with Eddie+Chris and the newly developing romance with Tommy in perspective, i.e. what he's doing right now, they're still mad.

In any potential scenario, the loud and obnoxiously entitled portion of the fandom would find a reason to criticize. It really does not matter what he does.

So, where does that leave us? Personally, I'd say leave the man alone. Let him post and say what he feels is best, and don't try to look at it under any 'bad faith' lens. He's probably given it sufficient thought and does what he thinks is best and feels right.

[vvatchword]

In Defense of BioShock Infinite

Although I had preordered BioShock Infinite with all its bells and whistles, I did not actually play it until January 2023. And lordy, I had me another Experience with a capital E. How the hell a bunch of urban Yanks could capture my experience as a queer democratic-socialist atheist struggling with her roots as a rural evangelical-cum-fascist is kinda magical, honestly. As to the game itself, it didn’t hurt how good it looked—the kickass skyhook gun battles—that novel setting—the complex characters—that delicious historical setting—that bloodthirsty critique of America—and to top it all off, they had pulled yet another Cassandra. Hell, speaking of which—not only was the game fun, it was fucking smart. It was intelligent, memorable, and meaningful in a way I hadn’t experienced in video games for years.

Now, back in 2013, when I had realized that I would be spoiled for Infinite, I left the BioShock fandom. After completing the game, I headed to Tumblr to re-engage, wagging my whole body like an excitable golden retriever, only to discover that BioShock Infinite was remarkably absent, and when mentioned, brutally derided. 

“I hate BioShock Infinite and all my friends do, too,” someone said in the tags under a post. 

I was utterly befuddled and deeply sad. I wanted to talk about BioShock Infinite! I wanted to dig into it, uncover unexpected ideas, learn new things, talk shit, make new friends—the full fandom experience. And instead I kept stumbling into hateful diatribes and super-charged disgust.

Obviously, I first looked at myself and my own judgment. Had I missed some obvious problem or misread some theme or dialogue? This wouldn’t be the first time I’d snapped down on a hook. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

There are two parts of BioShock Infinite that are unquestionably terrible: the fridging of Daisy Fitzroy and the false equivalence of violence between haves and have-nots (lol what are the have-nots supposed to do, ask nicely?). Additionally, one could look at the use of real Native American tragedies as tasteless. Personally, I do not—in the same way that I don’t find it tasteless that real war victims were used as inspiration for Splicer deformities. This is what really happened; this is commentary on events that really happened to real people. 

At this point, I’m sure I don’t have to explain why two of these themes are Unequivocally Bad. 

Anyway, I thought that perhaps these were the reasons BSI had been condemned to Super Hell.

I was wrong.

How Criitcsim Werk

This wasn’t the fandom I’d made friends in over 2010. Hell, this wasn’t the fandom of 2013. This was a fandom made up of Babies. They were making their first coltish stumblings into media criticism and with it, dredging up the same brain-dead bullshit from Tumblr circa 2008.

Suddenly I was brought face to face with people who seemed to think that if a character couldn’t be likable or good that the story itself couldn’t be likable or good; that one bad element means the story is unsalvageable (lol u pussies); the implication that one is bad for liking it; the destructive juvenile insistence that media accurately measures its fans’ moral qualities en masse like an astrological sign. This goes far beyond simple like or dislike and plunges head-first into Puritanism: praying loudly on street-corners instead of quietly in a dark corner where God might hear you.

At one point I had a kid go off about how they wouldn’t take time to understand Booker DeWitt’s perspective because he had (fictionally) taken part in a genocide. (That same person said the Native American element had been employed for shock value, a thought that sometimes keeps me up at night, because it is legitimately one of the dumbest criticisms the game has ever received.) At another point I saw someone acting personally offended that (fictional person) Dr. Suchong’s (fictional) data was being stolen (in a fiction) by a (fictional) racist who would (fictionally) take credit for (fictional person) Suchong’s (fictional) inventions “while calling him slurs”. Sure, a better question would have been, “Why would the creative team opt to do this” rather than assume intentional racism from a Jewish creative director with an in-office multi-ethnic team in the year of our lord 2013, but why not handwave the choice with prurient moral dismay so your audience won’t beat you to death with bats? 

It was as though fans were treating these completely fictional characters as real people whose personal gods had opted to torment them, and that their tormentors merited the kind of censure that psychopaths should receive. As I hope all of you understand, this is fucking madness.

More than once I saw people posting about hating the studio or the creative director in ways that seemed intense, unreasoning, and excessive—notably an “I Hate [Irrational Games creative director] Ken Levine” stamp (rofl the more things change amirite). People get so performatively moralistic about it that I started wondering if I missed something big along the way. Was there some secret Voxophone I missed swearing fealty to baby Hitler or some shit?

Double Standards

At the same time, I was utterly confused. BioShocks 1 and 2 both featured some absolutely ghastly bullshit based on real-life horrors and a thick mix of complicated human beings—many of them victims who have become monsters. The fact they are grounded in historical tragedies is a huge part of their appeal. Hell, I don’t think those games would have had half their meaning without World Wars I and II and the threat of a third.

A gay man who feels so cursed by his orientation that he is incapable of intimacy and systematically destroys his ex-lovers—including the man he loves the most. A Korean who survived Japanese occupation and a Jewish Holocaust survivor repeat the violence and traumas exacted upon them and their people, subjecting a new generation to agonies unthinkable. Chasing the shadows of Bolsheviks, a Russian citizen becomes the brutal tyrant that he loathed. A rich lawyer with an easygoing drawl designs a concentration camp and systematically harvests hundreds, if not thousands of political prisoners, selling them out to medical testing for a quick buck.

But a Native man who destroys his own people and class to ensure his own survival and social acceptability is too far? This character is where people drew the line, so much so that the entire game is disavowed? Hell, if you’re just talking about Booker (rather than Comstock), he doesn’t have anywhere near the largest bodycount. If we were to judge on the metric of human misery alone, Booker wouldn’t even hit the top ten. 

Keep in mind that the most-discussed BioShock game on Tumblr is BioShock 2, and that one of the biggest fandom favorites is Augustus Sinclair—the easy-talkin’ Georgia lawyer who sells your character into horrors past all human comprehension, as he sold hundreds before and after you. Sinclair is a motherfucker so vile that BioShock 2 gives you no choice but to murder him. But Sinclair is also pleasant; good-looking to some; spends the whole game making sweet love to your ear; is one of the only true positive experiences you experience in a horror story. Unlike DeWitt, a man who is brutal and awful from step one, Sinclair is smooth and sweet. Unlike DeWitt, Sinclair’s victims are faceless, completely fictional, and carry no political or social baggage.

People fuckin’ ship this guy with Subject Delta, his explicit victim. He’s usually described as a squishy cinnamon roll. In most fanfiction, he often gets to escape to the surface and fuck Delta while helping raise Eleanor as Dad 2. It is rare that I find fanfiction that acknowledges his monsterhood in all its glory. In fact, I can only think of two.

Literacy Comes in Levels

My problem with the over-the-top hatred of BioShock Infinite is along the same lines as my confusion at Twilight and Harry Potter hate: there is so much worse out there (how much do the haters actually engage with media if they think this is that bad—yes, even considering the shitty creators themselves!), the hatred far outweighs the sin committed (in BioShock’s case, the truly bad bits are not central enough to derail the larger narrative), people don’t seem to hate it so much as they want to be seen hating it, fans want to enforce an unspoken rule hating it (bitches this is poison. Stop this), and there’s something about the hate that stinks of poor reading comprehension.

A great metric for general literacy is the newspaper. In journalism, you’re writing for the lowest-common denominator, which for years here in the USA has been about a fifth-grade reading level (about 10-11 years old, for my non-American readers). The AP posted an article a couple years back about how the general reading comprehension of Americans needs to be dropped to a third-grade one (8-9 years), and baby, I’m here to say it’s true. 

Most of the problem is that the American education system is shitty as fuck. The rest of it is from an extremely American disdain of intellectualism and the arts. People are not taught how to interpret art or literature—a difficult and subtle skill which involves accepting such truths as “multiple contradictory readings can exist and yet be simultaneously correct”, “the author can be a complete tool and still be right about things”, “the author can be a great person and still write horrifyingly incorrect bullshit”, and “worthwhile works can be ridiculously long and it really is your fault for not having an attention span”. 

Media criticism must be learned through trial, error, asking questions, confidently swaggering into a public space to announce your brilliant insight only to have your ass handed to you (usually by your older self ten years later), being willing to admit you swaggered confidently into a public space to state bullshit and then amending your bullshit only to produce more bullshit, and otherwise making a complete and utter cock of yourself. We are taught to fear and flee pain and failure, despite the fact this is how we learn and improve. Because we judge our value by whether or not we are “smart,” we are afraid of displaying that we don’t know something or might be mistaken–better not to try at all than to reveal ourselves to be fools. And yet the best way to learn is to crash up against someone else and be proven wrong!

American parents are terrified of hurting their children to the point that they spare them cognitive dissonance of any kind, disavowing difficult art—without any appreciation for the fact that art is how we provide safe spaces to explore key human experiences, better preparing us to face those difficult subjects when there are real-world consequences (sex, gender and social expression, grief, violence, predation, illness, interacting with people of different ideologies, whatever new issue is pissing off some smooth-brained old motherfucker somewhere). 

If parents and teachers aren’t teaching us how to interpret art, we’re probably never going to develop the skill at all, or crash unsubtly into it in a piecemeal fashion (hello it me). Another unfortunate side effect is that these readers tend to be blitheringly superficial: they are literally intellectually incapable of reading deeper than the uppermost layer of a text. The curtains are always blue.

And let’s not forget the role moral performatism plays in media criticism, which although faaar from new, has reached hilarious levels in the age of social media. What’s important isn’t understanding something, it’s finding something to symbolically burn at the stake so everyone knows God loves us: please keep loving me, please don’t hurt me, please don’t throw me on the fire—for performatism is not for outsiders. We long for human connection so fucking much that it’s more important to destroy what might point out our fallibilities than it is to let ourselves stand in the furnace and burn out the dross.

What do you think the point of BioShock Infinite was?

Emotional Machines

Let’s face it. Human beings give a lot more credence to how something makes them feel than they do its complex invisible reality. We are not logical creatures; we are emotional ones. Our logic is too new a biological mechanism to override something as powerfully stupid as our primal lizard brains.

Knowing this, let’s take BioShock’s most popular characters. The first two are Subject Delta and Jack Wynand, the protagonists of BioShocks 2 and 1, respectively; and why not? They’re the characters we play. In the first two BioShocks, whether or not you kill Little Sisters determines the ending you receive. In other words, Delta and Jack can only be as “wicked” as the players are. 

How do people want to see themselves? As good. What do people want to see around themselves? Good. (What is “good”? Uh, well,,,,,,) What do they want? Simple moral questions with simple moral answers. And in the first two BioShocks, what is moral is obvious: don’t kill little girls. It’s actually kind of insulting once you say it out loud.

In-fandom, Jack and Subject Delta are almost never painted as murderers or monsters, but as victims and heroes; I saw someone musing about putting Subject Delta on a “gentle giants” poll and I nearly choked on my own tongue. I only saw that musing because someone put Subject Delta and Jack in a “Best Fathers” poll. Nobody in-fandom really considers the “evil” or “complicated” endings as canon choices, despite those versions being fully understandable alternate readings, with a story that doesn’t make sense without them. (I don’t believe Burial at Sea is necessarily canon; in fact, I would bet good money that it is a huge middle finger lol, mostly because a number of brain-dead motherfuckers won’t take unhappiness for an answer.)

Most fandom art and writing is gentle, sweet, good: the symbolic healing of the damaged, the salvation of innocents, the turning of new leaves. These things are not just saccharine sweet—they tend to be unrealistically sweet. Now, far be it from me to demand these works cease. There’s a reason they exist. People write them because they need hope and happiness; I have enjoyed them greatly myself and intend to enjoy them in the future. But if y’all get to have your dessert, I demand the right to have my dinner.

The Colours Out of Earth

Let there be media where the opposite can also be true: where everything is unbelievably complicated and unforgivably fucked-up. Let there be characters who slide slurs into their speech without thinking. Let there be characters who destroy themselves in a thousand different ways, not all of them obvious, some of them horrifying. Let there be well-meaning people struggling with all their mights to do what is right only to destroy everyone around them and then completely miss the fact it’s all their faults. Let there be wickedness painted as goodness, superficial appearances accepted over essential and inherent values, denial of change and transformation, failure to accept that what is old must die and what is new must live, human stupidity and short-sightedness and cruelty in all their flavors. Let’s smash it all together and see how it plays out. 

Oh, badly? No shit! But “badly” isn’t the point. How does it play out?

Let there be a world of gradients—a place I can float from color to color, hue to hue, value to value, while attempting to figure out where, why, how, and by whom they transform—to taste concepts in a hundred different ways, test their textures by a hundred different mediums, insert them into a hundred different contexts. I need to understand why I feel the way I do; I need to understand morality in all its hideous, fragmentary glory. For I have been sold to a ideology of blacks and whites, and let me tell you: it prepares you for nothing, and it will always destroy what is most precious about human life.

I can no longer believe in a world where what is lost always returns, because that world does not exist. I have a reflexive need to come to terms with Finality: what I have lost, what I have destroyed, what will never return, what will never be better. I have a reflexive need to understand Transformation: what I am now, what is as of the present, what has risen shambling from the ashes, what turns to gaze upon me in the darkness. I need to understand what is wretched about me as much as I need to heal myself. How can I heal if I can’t understand how I have hurt and been hurt? 

I need to shine a light in the dark. Not to remodel it, not to destroy it—because I also can’t believe in a world where the wicked is destroyed forever—but to behold it, to learn from it, to view my own impact upon it, to accept how it has become a part of me, to learn how to do my best (because that’s all one can do). I must learn to love people more than causes, I must learn to love people rather than the act of winning, I must learn to love people rather than battle. I need to stand in that endless black with the lamp off and my eyes closed, letting the agony roll over me, burning with a fire that throws no light, rolling back and forth from an intense self-loathing to a fury at a society that destroys what is most valuable because it didn’t make them feel the way they wanted.

The Unforgivable

I believe that there are only two differences between Booker DeWitt and his equally cursed cohorts.

In the Hall of Whores: The Unmarked Slate

First, unlike the previous two games, where you enter the world as a tabula rasa and might roleplay as what you perceive as a good person, you are explicitly put into the shoes of a monster, and nothing you do can save you.

With other shitty BioShock characters, you are passively watching other people, and you are able to hold yourself apart. Sure, everyone else is crazy as fuck from using biological Kryptonite, but you’re too smart to end up a crazy fucking asshole like them! Sure, you are now technically a mass murderer, but those fuckers deserved it, damn it! 

“Look at this crazy bastard!” you say, rolling your eyes at the Steinmans and Cohens and Ryans and Fontaines. “It sure is a great thing I’m not a crazy bastard!”

You are able to escape acknowledging that you, too, in certain circumstances, might be the crazy bastard. You are being challenged to stand in the body of a person who has committed unforgivable sins. Imagine if you yourself committed those sins. Imagine what sins you have already committed. Imagine what brutalities you cannot take back. Imagine what horrors you have wreaked just by breathing.

“Ahhhh!” said players, probably. “What do you mean I’m not allowed to be good?”

Because that’s what the game was designed to do. Because “good” is a fucking cop-out and if it’s how you live with yourself wait until you find out you’ve been doing horrifying bullshit all your life without question. You can be evil by association through no fault of your own.

Original Sin

Second, the plight of Native Americans is a sin that non-Natives will always carry, and the socially conscious are aware of this even if they don’t know how to put it into words. The state of affairs being what it is, it is unlikely that First Peoples will ever be treated humanely, much less have their land returned. They must struggle for scraps of what is rightfully theirs while we lounge on their corpses. We cannot help but benefit from their destruction; we are made unwitting partners with our forebears; we steal the fruits of their lands and make mockeries of their faiths and identities. We have destroyed part of what made this world fascinating and unique and most of it can never be returned. Even if everything were to be made right tomorrow, their genocide is a sin that we will carry until we die, because the only reason we could be here at all is because they were killed. 

The obvious solution stands before us, but the powers that be are so much greater than we that we are effectively powerless, and achieving anything less than total restoration smacks of anticlimax. 

This is unbearable.

How can one think of oneself as a good person if one sees the good that must be done, but cannot achieve it? If one’s actions are meaningless? Goodness without action is pretension.

We are all Booker DeWitt. We have all set fire to the tipi. We swept the ashes away, we ignored the sizes of the bones, we built a CVS on their graves, and then we made statues and holidays commemorating Native Americans like the world’s cheapest “Thinking of You” card. We have de-fanged them, transformed them into cardboard cutouts, and set them up as cute little side characters in our sweeping American dream.

Booker is not a man. Booker is America and Americans—and America and Americans are monstrous: one part hypocrisy, two parts incessant violence, three parts constant peacocking, and four parts dumb as a stump.

The Monsters We Make

Outside of the message about “choice,” an enormous part of BioShock’s thematic ensemble is the creation of monsters. How are monsters created? Who or what is responsible for creating them? What do the monsters think made them the ways they are? Can a monster be saved? How? Is it enough to acknowledge you did wrong and want to be a better person?

Maybe most people are aware on some instinctive level of what facing one’s own monsterhood means. No one wants it. It’s not fun. It hurts. It’s embarrassing. It’s destructive. It’s admitting you don’t have it all together and might never, ever—that despite your best actions, you can have it horribly wrong at any point. In an age where we demand moral perfection, it demands vulnerability: you must admit that sometimes you’re the racist, the transphobe, the sexist, the nationalist, the classist, the homophobe, the violent, the wrong, the dumbfuck. 

Human beings are not built to be moral; human beings are built to survive. We so rapidly learn how to deal with our contexts at such young ages that we don’t have the time or capabilities to question why those contexts are the ways they are or why it is demanded we perform the ways we do.

In a very real way, BioShock Infinite demands vulnerability of us. It demands you look in the mirror and see what is monstrous in you—how you have been created—manufactured—a tool, a machine, a trained animal. It asks you to recognize that you can be a monster simply by association. And if we can’t look into the mirror and truly acknowledge that monsterhood, we run very real risks of becoming or enabling those monsters in one way or another.

Worst of all: perhaps monsterhood isn’t optional. Perhaps the monster was inside of us from the very beginning. It’s not a matter of if you become a monster, but when, under what circumstances, by whose hand. What is more, believing the “right” moral stances will not save you. Monsterhood can afflict anyone, in any ideology, any political stance, in any social movement, in any faith. The only element that can save you is to truly love other people, and even then, you can fail, for there can be states where there is no winner and ways to misread how best to treat another person.

Environment and Society: Context Will Not Be Denied

BioShock 1’s original ending is Jack-as-monster, regardless of how many children he saves, regardless of your feelings as player. He passes through the gauntlet of Rapture, but he has supped of its poison. And he wasn’t poisoned when he entered Rapture the second time—he was poisoned the minute he was conceived. He was born of it. He had no hope of ever escaping it—he never could have—he’d never had a choice to begin with.

No matter what choices you make in BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth will always kill you. Why? Because she has seen every world—every context—every limitation—every boon. And there is no way to stop what has been; there is no way to undo what has been done. The minute you have committed to a decision, you have split the universe; there is no telling what kind of person it will make you. In fact, there’s no telling which of your decisions will matter at all. Only Elizabeth can see because she is the unlimited future: your offspring stands before you, judge and jury, and you will have no choice but to accept her verdict, for despite your name, you are incapable of controlling how you are interpreted. 

Elizabeth sits across from you in the boat and stares without blinking. She sees a million million similar Bookers. Some are a little bit taller, some a little bit shorter, some a little heavier or lighter. Some more-resemble one grandparent or another. They have different colored ties. This one blinks when rain hits him in the eyeball. That one took a brutal beating back on the airship and one eye is swollen shut. That one can’t stop shaking; this one is unable to speak at all; one hasn’t yet lost hope, although even he doesn’t realize it.

They all lowered the torch to the tipi.

The baptism determined Comstock; what determined Booker?

Why Booker Is

In BioShock 1, characters are often stand-ins for larger concepts. Thus Ryan stands in as Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Ubermensch; Bill McDonagh as Andrew Ryan’s conscience; Diane McClintock as the citizenry of Rapture; Captain Sullivan as law and order; Frank Fontaine as the truest expression of Objectivism in its distilled form.

Who is Booker? Most importantly: why is he?

Booker is a fictional character with a brutal background based on historical events, alternative and true. Booker might be Lakota; Booker might have undergone forced Anglicization; Booker might have been ripped from his parents; Booker is a product of violence, perhaps literally. Booker is American exceptionalism distilled. Booker is the past in constant judgment of itself, unable to live with itself and unable to die. Booker destroys what is best in him and around him in exchange for belonging. Booker has sold the future to absolve his sins. Booker has sold his daughter because he is a fictional character in a work of fiction who needs to be propelled.

Booker is a shell, a sluice, an environment. Booker is the broken shape you are meant to fill, horrified. His internal shape should torture you as it has tortured him: the messy slaggy soul of a shitty tin soldier.

Does Booker take the baptism and become Comstock? If so, it might be his second one. His last name literally means “the white.” His first name can mean “author.” It is most likely his second name: an attempt to rewrite himself. And when he was unable to rewrite himself the first time, when the cognitive dissonance boiled at the edges of his skull, he found there was only one way to cleanse himself the second: to remake the world entirely. To force transformation on everyone else. To take vengeance on a world that could never love him, never want him—to create a world that has no choice but to love him. If he can’t change the world’s mind, he’ll change the world.

Note what he opts to do: to take the fight to the environment–to the unyielding universe.

Context Is Everything

It is no mistake that BioShock Infinite occurs in 1912: the sinking of the Titanic is often credited with ending an unfettered optimism, a period when the Western world believed technology had brought the human race into a golden age. With World War I—which would follow a mere two years later—came modern warfare and all the horrors thereof, not the least of which was the realization that humans had created a kind of war that could destroy the entire world. World War I also seeded the rise of the United States: much of the wealth of warring Europe—itself fat on the blood of subjugated peoples and stolen lands—would rattle into America’s coffers.

It is also no mistake that BioShock 1 directly follows World War II. With WWII came a heightened terror—that this war is not the last war, that there will never be an end to war, that war will go on expanding and expanding until it has consumed us all. World War III would not be denied: prettily packaged in the ideals of its children, it simply followed the utopians down to their underwater tombs. According to BioShock 1’s original ending, World War III is not a matter of if—it’s a matter of when.

But even more important than the history in the BioShock games are their settings. Mute leviathans, Rapture and Columbia determine all of your behaviors: from where you can exist in space to all of your desires and goals to how you choose to present yourself to how you opt to behave. Isolated in extremism—whether that extremism is the crushing depths of the ocean or the unbearable lightness of the air—most of their power is that they simply cannot be escaped. You can’t outrun them. They are everywhere. They are everything.

Like Lovecraft before it, BioShock acknowledges the greatest horror of all: you cannot escape your context. Your context does not only involve your immediate surroundings. It is also historical; contains zeitgeists from various cultures and subcultures; is filled with pressures both personal and impersonal, human and nonhuman. Many of these forces can hurt you. Many more can destroy you. What you do to survive depends very much on where, when, and with whom you must live.

Human beings are not built to be moral.

The Death of the Future

In the film Operation, Burma!, a soldier asks Errol Flynn: “Who were you before the war?”

“An architect,” says Flynn.

Who were you? Because that “you” doesn’t matter now. That “you” is irrelevant. So you’re an architect. What the war does to you; what these deaths mean to you; your past, your education, your loves and desires and forward motivation, the you that could have been outside war, the you that slogs alone into the brutal future—all completely irrelevant. Your forebears don’t care so long as you can bleed. 

Children are the manufactured tools of their creators—helpless before the enormous strength of their elders and the zeitgeists that enclose them, poisoned by their parents’ insecurities and flaws, utilized like weapons regardless of the cost—often with great love.

Consider something more than the traumatized culture: consider the society filled with traumatized children; consider the traumatized society. Consider channeling children through that trauma over and over and over again, if you can. Poisoned—poisoned—poisoned—all of us poisoned. Poisoned by those who loved us most. Poisoned by the people we trusted. Poisoned by the people who meant to make a better world.

I believe it is notable that creative director Ken Levine is Jewish; I have read from multiple accounts that the European Jewish diaspora was uniquely traumatized from the Holocaust and passed that trauma down upon their own families. I sometimes wonder if he saw that firsthand.

The fathers eat sour grapes; their children’s teeth are set on edge.

Choice: Player Expectations and Entitlement

For players who experienced BioShocks 1 and 2 with their multiple endings (Good, Bad, and “ok bye then I guess” respectively), it must have been jarring to suddenly reckon with being a monster. How often I see players grousing that nothing they do will change their wicked pasts! These players completely miss that the only meaningful choice had already been made, that it had nothing to do with the player at all, and even if they had been there, DeWitt was still unforgivable. The only way to go on was to bow out and allow the future to redefine herself.

Nobody was ready for that shit. 

Like it or not, BioShock 1 had set a precedent. Not everyone’s going to read up on creator intentions. If any keyword came blaring through the noise, it would have been “choice.” Most players only recognize choice by the ability to make it, not the absence of it, and most of them weren’t equipped to recognize that its lack was the point. The meaningless choices were commentary, and they were as much about the player as they were about DeWitt himself. Not every choice will be meaningful, will it? And there will be choices you make that will be momentous, but they will seem very small when you make them.

Because most players had experienced what they thought was a basic moralistic tale in the first two games, and would see Infinite not as reflection upon America’s destructive personality, its obsession with a meaningless Good/Bad duocracy, and the infinite, cyclical nature of violence, they saw Booker’s death as corrupted artsy claptrap.

“I did the good schuut,” they say. “I want the good schuut end. Where happy end??? Where treat :(”

Bitch the future is here. 

Time to die.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

Generally I despise essays that end with, “But the real fault lay with the clueless motherfuckers who played the game!” Often, if enough people complain, there’s something to it; the message has been obscured somehow. Details or explanations weren’t clear or intuitive enough, some mechanism isn’t working somewhere, some character needs to talk more or less, some setting needs to be transformed. O artist: stop whining and get cracking. If everywhere you go smells like shit, it’s time to look under your shoe. 

But sometimes it’s true that a piece of media is on a level folks aren’t equipped for. Think of every literature and art class you’ve ever had, if you’ve been fortunate enough to have one. There’s always someone scoffing in a back row, like here are all these jokers making more of something than they should. Similarly, some of you have been arguing with me this entire time, saying: “I just wanted a video game. I just wanted to shoot something and feel better and instead I get this bullshit ending that makes no sense.”

First of all, smart bullshit (and even fucked-up attempts at smart bullshit! Hi BioShock 2) gets to exist on this Earth along with Gmod and Roblox or Schuut Big Tits 84 (there are 84 tits and you must shoot them all. They explode into smaller tits) or whatever-the-fuck-else you think is a worthwhile gaming experience. Second of all, miserable bullshit also gets to exist, and what did you fucking expect if you played through either BioShocks 1 or 2? When you hear a football player quavering out in the darkness for his mom to pick him up, how’d that make you feel? What did you think was going to happen to Jack after pounding back the entire Plasmid library, the cancer cocktail that explicitly destroys the fuck out of its users? Third of all, if you missed the smart bullshit going on in BioShock 1 and didn’t think BioShock Infinite might be larger in scope in more ways than one, that’s on you. Fourthly, if you were simply satisfied with saving like, 15 kids from a violently-perishing city of thousands and call it good, I mean… is that really where your thoughts end? Are you really that fucking small?

It’s Not You, It’s Me

You ever meet those motherfuckers who talk shit about Shakespeare or modern art? And you’re just left there staring with dead eyes at this poseur who mistakes playing devil’s advocate for intelligence, cheek resting on your fist, thinking about the fanfic you’re writing, wondering who it’s for, remembering that all your smut-writing friends get ten times the viewers, and considering throwing yourself in front of a bus.

Yeah, there’s a personal element to this: the fact that BioShock Infinite is the kind of art I like and long for and want to make myself, the fact that the game was successful and yet the studio was closed, the way its DLC was so rushed that the story plopped out like half-baked mystery meat—realizing that the same forced rush was at 2K’s behest for BioShock 2, as well, and wondering how good art can ever be made in this unforgiving capitalist hellscape. The game was weirdly niche and I’m not 100% sure I’ll ever experience anything quite like it again. And with the whiners in this fandom, the loud ones controlling the narrative, some fresh brain-dead exec in some brain-dead publisher might be like: “We must keep it safer and simpler for these fuckin babby adult!”

Nah bitch nah. Naaaah. Cry some more while I enjoy me my fucking dinner. I’ll eat it while making loud smacking noises and keeping unbroken eye contact. Come here. Let’s look at each other. It’ll be like Lady and the Tramp but we want to punch each other. What truer form of love can there be here in the modern world?

I keep having to remind myself that this response isn’t new. I keep having to remind myself of my place. I keep having to remind myself why I write, why I read, why I like to experience art to begin with. It’s not for the reasons other people do it. Oh, I want the same emotional release as everyone else, I want the same rollicking plots, I adore the same tropes. I seek out everything and anything for a good time; I’ll read Moby Dick today and a smutty 5,000-word abortion with the world’s most suspect grammar tomorrow. I don’t give a shit if it’s low- or high-brow; there are all kinds of ways to have fun and there are all kinds of ways to engage with art, and lord knows I’ve done my share of smooth-brain criticism. The problem is that I’ve always wandered off by myself, sunk into an all-consuming reverie, on tracks that no one else ever seems to be on, and then looked up to talk excitedly about something only to realize I’m alone. And whose fault is that?

By the same token, maybe I haven’t talked enough. Maybe I spend too much time with my mouth shut. Maybe I haven’t stood up enough for things that are worth our time, worth talking up, worth setting on pedestals.

I tell you, BioShock Infinite will stand the test of time. It’s too good for this. It’s too good for you, warts and all. Some of you will grow to understand that; some of you won’t; many of you will shrug and go on with your lives (and this is fine; it is only a video game). But I’ve truly not seen anything like it. I can’t believe a mainstream video game was allowed to be so fucking brutal about the American juggernaut, and what’s more, that it sold like hotcakes. Plus, I can’t think of any works in recent memory that have struck me so close to my own heart. No creative work has made me start beating a monster’s face into a washbasin for ten hours only to lift her by the scalp and see my own eyes looking back.

Look into those eyes. See your own stupid impulses pouring out. Your own stupid excuses, your violences, your sins—your claws, your teeth, your costumes, your hilarious attempts at interpretive dance. The beast doth protest too much.

O, monster—behold thyself—and tremble.

[biconickyoshi]

Okay y’all… I was very critical of eps 3 & 4 (especially 4) of NAtLA. Then all of a sudden eps 5 & 6 kinda slapped me in the face with how much better the show suddenly got.

Spoiler-free thoughts first:

Zuko, Iroh, and Aang have cemented themselves as the best parts about this adaptation - which is really funny considering I’m currently writing a longfic AU where Zuko and Iroh discover Aang in the iceberg right after Zuko is banished at age 13 and end up becoming the first members of the Gaang (albeit reluctantly at first lol). Episode 6: “Masks” (the Blue Spirit adaptation) was so good, I’d venture to say that it actually improved and fleshed out some things from the original series.

Episode 5: “Spirited Away”, while not as good as E6, was not as bad as I heard people say it was going to be. I think that the changes they did make didn’t bother me nearly as much as the changes they made in the last episode, and it was actually entertaining.

There were several scenes that made me cry in both of these episodes (moreso in episode 6, which I’ll get into further down in the spoiler section). These are the scenes that I feel like really tapped into the heart of the original show rather than feeling like a soulless remake.

Now for my in-depth thoughts (INCLUDES SPOILERS):

EP 5: “Spirited Away”

- Staring out, I was bummed because I had just rewatched the first two eps of the original animated series lol.

- It was an interesting choice to have all three members of the Gaang get stuck in the Spirit World, but I think it worked.

- Wan Shi Tong just showing up randomly was a bit unnecessary, but I suppose it will be kinda interesting to see him again in S2 since he’s already met the Gaang

- Hei Bai plays a much smaller role in these eps, but I strangely didn’t mind that either?

- Seeing Katara’s last memory with her mom was devastating, especially the fact that she had to witness her death and hide in the igloo with Kya’s charred body :(( she definitely has severe PTSD.

- Even Sokka’s memory made me tear up a bit

- Koh being the villain and a soul-eater or whatever was a bit of an odd choice, but I guess I can see why they did it. I do prefer him just being an asshole who steals ppl’s faces lol

- Appreciated the Fog of Lost Souls reference from the LoK lore

- Aang reuniting with Gyatso made me cry. I know some people didn’t like him being in the Spirit World, but I really liked it. Also, the fact that Gyatso was the first person to tell Aang that it wasn’t his fault the Air Nomads died, and that if he had been there he would have died too? THANK YOU! My poor boy has been berated enough for “abandoning” the world.

- We got some interesting lore about the afterlife for humans from Gyatso and Aang’s convo, which we’ve never gotten in AtLA media before. Idk if it’s just for Air Nomads, but Aang mentions that Gyatso stayed behind instead of “seeking enlightenment”. I know that the end goal in Buddhism is to reincarnate until you eventually achieve nirvana, so I wonder if that’s what they were alluding to (I’m not an expert on religions so pls correct me if I’m wrong)

- Oh yeah, I forgot June is here lmao. As a queer person I loved her (bc beautiful goth woman) but I didn’t like the weird choice to make her hit on Iroh - I guess to contrast the Iroh being creepy towards her thing in the OG series. I wish they would have just had them interact normally tbh, no weird “flirting”

EP 6: “Masks”

- Here we go y’all. The best episode in the show so far and probably the best the show is gonna get this season. I’m still pretty shocked at how good this one was.

- I think the decision to include flashbacks to Zuko’s Agni Kai was a good decision here. It felt like an appropriate episode for them and the flashbacks were very well done.

- In general, Dallas is doing a phenomenal job at portraying a Zuko who is angry and aggressive, yes, but also so very sweet and compassionate at his core. I love when little inklings of his true self shine through.

- Roku was… not what I expected. He was very much more of a lighthearted and jokey person… I didn’t hate it, it was just unexpected lol. I wonder if they did that to contrast him with Kyoshi. Which, speaking of, I’m glad Roku clarified that Aang doesn’t just need to be a merciless warrior (and that he didn’t berate Aang for “abandoning” the world like she did). But I still am annoyed about the mischaracterization of Kyoshi in general.

- RIP Shyu :/

- Thought it was kind of strange how June captures Aang at Roku’s temple lol. Like how did she get on and off the island??

- Zhao continues to feel like a completely different character to me lmao. I think this version is pretty funny, but it’s so weird to see Zhao being portrayed as so goofy and incompetent when he was such an intimidating force and the main villain of Book 1 in the OG series. Just a weird direction they went with his character.

- The Yuyan archers look cool as fuck. 10/10 no notes

- Still not sure how I feel about Azula already being this insecure and jealous of Zuko. I think it makes her feel a bit more realistically like a child, but the whole point of Azula’s character is that she is really good at maintaining this cool and calm persona on the surface, which she uses to scare and manipulate people. I can see her maybe getting to a point later on to where she hardens herself into that though. We’ll see.

- Baby Zuko asking Iroh how he looks and his little smile 😭😭😭😭 I had a physical “aww” reaction to that. THAT’S MY SON (me and Iroh shouting in unison)

- War Room scene was handled very well. No complaints. I like how Ozai tried to test Zuko with battle strategies.

- Blue Spirit break out scene was extremely close to the original, and it was really good. They adapted it almost shot for shot with all the important parts.

- Here’s probably my favorite part of the episode: Zuko and Aang’s talk inside the abandoned house after they escape from Pohuai!!!!!! Gahhhh I could gush about this scene all day. I love how they expanded it to be an actual friendly conversation between Aang and Zuko. Like we get to see Zuko’s true self coming through - the sweet, kind boy we know he is. Zuko and Aang just have such great chemistry as well, wayyy more than Aang has with either Sokka or Katara. Like I adored them bonding over painting and caligraphy!!! I think this is the best acting we’ve seen from Gordon so far, and Dallas did a phenomenal job switching back to that hurt, angry version of himself (of course a trauma response). And the fact that Aang said “sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you” when he blocked Zuko’s firebending attack??? My sweet boy 😭

- The final flashback to the Agni Kai was really well done too. I’d already heard Zuko fights back, which I wasn’t sure I’d like, but I actually didn’t mind it. I really liked that they showed Zuko’s hesitation whenever he did actually have an opening, and that was what angered Ozai the most - Zuko showing compassion, “weakness”. Daniel Dae Kim is of course doing a phenomenal job (no surprises there), and I really liked that Iroh actually attempted to stop Ozai at one point. It also looked like young Azula had tears in her eyes, which I again actually liked because it humanizes her.

- I loved that Aang was still there when Zuko woke up on the boat 😭 he wanted to make sure he was okay!! I full on started crying when we got the “do you think we could have been friends too?” lines from him. Again, Gordon killed it. I love how you can tell that Aang knows Zuko has been hurt and that’s why he acts the way he does. He doesn’t blame him for any of it. 10/10

- the last flashback to Zuko in his bed recovering from the burn… god the tears just kept flowing. I really liked the choice to have Ozai almost give Zuko a chance to like… idk understand why he did what he did, and how compassion is “weak”?? And then Zuko’s response to give people a chance 😭😭😭 as if I couldn’t love him any more!!! And then of course Ozai gets pissed. But seeing baby Zuko just cry in his bed UGH I’m dehydrated at this point

- Of course I can’t finish this review without mentioning the 41st division. What an incredible way to expand upon the source material by making them Zuko’s crew!!! It shows just how much Zuko truly cares about others and it moved me so much (once again to tears).

I don’t have high hopes for the last two episodes, but honestly, if this is what the live action can be, it gives me a bit of hope (at least for future seasons). I really think that Dallas, Gordon, Paul, and Daniel were the stars of this ep and are a big part of what made it so good.

[ihopesocomic]

It's such a shame how many good brother-brother duos or sister-brother duos there are compared to sister-sister duos

I know it stems from writers always feeling the need to add a man in every woman's life

A lot of writers can only make a character who's a sister if she's a sister to a brother and it's a real shame

Honestly I think Nothing from MP is a pretty good example of that

Look at her relationship with her female siblings/cousin vs her male siblings/cousin

Fire ended up being horrible and Feather is a toxic positive "lemme make you feel bad for wanting to change your ableist name even though it literally doesnt effect me" dirtbag

But Nothing had a better relationship with vs her younger sisters/cousins

Farleap and Silentstalk bullied her and Feather's sisters thought she was weirdo though they like literally never interacted

It's just always suspicious when a writer seems to prioritize a female character's relationship with guys over her relationship with girls

Like their gender shouldn't matter but they'll always pick their male characters first

The sexism in writing still to this day is wild. Especially where so-called independent creators are concerned. Because I thought the whole point of being indie was creating stuff you wanted to see in mainstream media but didn't get, but a lot of it is just more of the same crap you get from bigger productions. So either people want more sexism, or its just baked into their brain and they don't even realize it.

A lot of better stories out there are about brothers (well, I could argue that a lot of it is lazy and that there is no point to the characters being brothers, especially when strong emotional friendships between men are practically nonexistent in media.) and anything having to do with sisters is as I said, either petty nonsense or there's no point to being sisters at all.

And then there's as you said, an inherent need by creators for women to have men be relevant in their lives when that same standard is not applied to men. You can throw a rock and hit a movie or show with a female pov where her only motivation has to do with a man. Father, son, brother, husband, boyfriend, abuser. Whatever.

That's not to say any of these are bad stories. But when its the majority of supposed woman-focused media, it loses its edge as woman-focused when the women in question are focused on men. The writers either consciously or subsconsciously don't get that women have motivations beyond men. This even happens with lesbian characters, where men should have even less relevancy? LOL And it doesn't even matter who the writers are, whether they're men/women, cis/trans, straight/gay, everyone does this. You'd expect better from queer creators but even then there's a clear preference. And they're wont to bring up that "gender shouldn't matter" but only when it pertains to asking why they're so opposed to women being the focus. Its quite interesting.

MP is in an interesting position of hating both men and women at the same time while not commenting on how the patriarchy has negative effects on both men and women. Not an easy feat but Tribble sure made it look easy. She made Feather Nothing's prime motivator for leaving the pride, and while I have my own criticisms of Nothing's "subtle" motherlyness towards Feather, that wasn't extended to the female cubs. Fire is Nothing's other motivation for leaving the pride, and then he turned out to be a wannabe dictator. Quickmane was shown to be a sympathetic and caring mate who definitely wasn't homophobic, but had no qualms about killing children. And then there's alllllll the women who are meant to be oppressed to the same extent as Nothing, but they all somehow manage to be even worse because the narrative wants us to side with them.

And even Nothing's abusive relationship with Quickmane as we've stated in our review is arguably less fucked up than the relationship she has with her own mother. Because we know what they think about each other, and Powerstrike still insists that Nothing's existence is a burden on her soul or whatever. Like what the fuck is up with that?? I'm sure they could've made Powerstrike less-bad than Quickmane, was this some sort of weird equalizer of the sexes? And you can count Nothing's relationship with Sharptongue if you're so inclined to, but even if you ignore everything else she did, Sharptongue would still be the only positive female influence in Nothing's life. But not a key motivator in Nothing's story. Like not even a little bit.

[olderthannetfic]

https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/758964492351799296/ httpsolderthannetfictumblrcompost75863697332#notes

preface, I'm not arguing about the current ongoing war situation. I only mentioned war so that people who filter out the word have their filters catch it. I'm also only commenting on XJZs behavior on the basis of using that kinda language. One bigger incident I've seen of XJZhao getting a massive wave of criticism was using "blood libel" against a Jewish follower, when they said they wouldn't buy their next book. XJZhao: "I don't want your blood money." Once again, think what you may of the current situation, or if you're on either the person's or XJZhaos side.

All that said, using a stereotype or a racist slur against someone because you feel they (as an individual) are an appropriate target is not ok. You don't get to replicate racist, discriminating, hateful and damaging words, phrases or stereotypes which attack an entire group, just because you're mad at one specific person, and then pretend it doesn't affect an entire group of people. No not even if you're POC, you don't need to be a armband wearing moron or a white hood cross burning swine to be sit at that particular kinda table.

If you're angry at a black person and use the N-word. If you're angry at a single queer person and use the F-word. You catch my drift, that's unacceptable, and would immediately get you labelled, and rightfully so, a racist, or queerphobe. Before anyone pulls that maybe they didn't know card, if someone unknowingly says something racist or queerphobic, do we just give them as pass, or do we call these people out? We still criticise people who use racist stereotypes, even if they didn't know, because this stuff should be called out regardless. Apparently that caused quite a stir, especially completely unrelated Jewish followers. Even those that are neutral/non-political or even on XJZhao's side. 👁👁

And obviously their ongoing beef with random people who criticize their online presence. XJZhao's main tool has been making tiktoks, and insta posts where they take screenshots and post the full online name and clearly invite their followers to harass them, or even tell them to blacklist and find people related to the target. Even sending their followers after someone who basically repeated exactly what XJZhao said themselves, that they missed deadlines and started fighting with their publisher. Just that they also pointed out how much leeway XJZhao was given compared to what's normal, and was still complaining. 🐧

Some of their tiktoks against the criticisms have also been just been very petulant. This one I relate to a bit lol 🤔 Such as the tiktok/yt short where they tell everyone who criticised or commented on the very blatant Darling in the Franxx story beats that "Akshually, the makers of DitF said I was all good." Yeah, that's fine, most people don't care about that though, they're commenting on how obvious the story elements were copied. It isn't always bad, many reviewers were neutral, some critical on how blatant it was. It doesn't matter if you got the green-light, it's still going to be something that might irk people because anyone who copies another story's story beats in such an identifiable way is gonna be called out at some point. That literally happened to every Hunger games, Twilight and HP clone. 🤷‍♀️

--

My dim memory is that XJZ literally said the initial plotbunny was a response to Darling in the Franxx in a youtube video long before the book came out. I think they should calm down and take some time away from toxic social media for their own good. (And yes, I do think they're acting antisemitic and getting a pass because online lefties often give people a pass for that when they wouldn't for other bigotry.) But I don't think it was any kind of secret that it's a blatant response to that series.

I haven't read the actual book. Does it come across as just a repeat? My impression was that it was supposed to be more of a critique/reaction.

[spacelazarwolf]

Forgive me if I'm wrong about anything. I'm not Jewish but I was raised for a good part of my life by a Jewish stepmom and am planning to convert when my life offers me that stability. But. Something I notice relating to the "Hitler burned queer stuff first" and j general desire to make oneself a victim of Nazism is that American kids are mostly taught about Judaism through like, media that is targeted at non-Jewish people and is trying to almost beg them for empathy. Average gentiles have very little knowledge about Jewish life - both joy and suffering, something that came as a bit of a shock to me as gentile who grew up with stepsiblings/mom celebrating holidays, going to temple, having a sense of community, and being aware of the levels of antisemetic violence in their area. My point is that a lot of people on the left tend to think of Jewish people as like. white people with a different religion. Instead of members of a complex culture. Thus, it's easy to ignore people like Magnus Hirschfield or pretend you could be someone the Nazis targeted. Does any of that make sense? Sorry. U probably know all that already but I'm tired of yelling it at my Catholic friend hehe

oh 100000000% this.

i feel like one piece of media that really portrays this weird attitude of victimization that a lot of white non roma gentiles have when it comes to the holocaust (and before anyone comes for me, i'm not saying queer and trans people aren't targeted by nazis) is "boy in the striped pajamas." it's a film that has been widely criticized by jews and scholars for misrepresenting many elements of the holocaust, and because the main message of it is "wow isn't it sad that this poor little gentile boy died??????" you're not supposed to be sad that millions of jews and roma were being murdered, you're supposed to be sad because bruno's not a jew or roma and was killed on accident. and i feel like that really feeds into this mindset of "it could have been me!!!!! therefore this is actually all about me!!!!!"

i often see queer people say things like "well the jews were released immediately after the war ended but queer people were kept in prisons!!!!!!" as if jews and roma got to just go about their normal lives. what actually happened is that several thousand of them died from health complications caused by starvation and poor living conditions in the camps, and the ones who survived returned to their homes only to face more pogroms, discrimination, or complete denial from their gentile neighbors who had turned a blind eye.

what queer and trans gentiles really need to realize is that when it comes to the holocaust, hitler's targeting of queer and trans people is entirely inseparable from antisemitism. i mean even a lot of modern anti trans sentiments are ultimately rooted in antisemitism. the sooner they realize that, the sooner they can stop acting like we can only care about one group at a time.