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fortunatelyfresco · 4 years ago

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A Holistic Integration of Type 1 Narcolepsy into the Reading of Moist von Lipwig

Literary Interpretation, Disability, and Finding Yourself Between the Lines

As it goes, "I wrote this for me, but you can read it if you want." It might be a fun ride for anyone who is very interested in Moist von Lipwig, or narcolepsy, or both, and/or anyone who enjoys collecting small details from within a body of work and arranging them into threads that are supportable by the text, without being actually suggested by it.

Personally, I find it very interesting to read the meta behind different headcanons, and see how creators can unintentionally write a character who fits certain criteria. There are only so many traits, after all, and some of them tend to travel in groups! Humans are pattern seekers, etc etc.

The first step of reading Moist von Lipwig as narcoleptic is wanting to read Moist von Lipwig as narcoleptic. Being narcoleptic myself and relating heavily to Moist, this step was very easy. I invite you to take my hand and come along, at least briefly, if you were interested enough to click the readmore.

Once you have taken that step, things start falling into place. At least they do if you're intimately familiar with narcolepsy, or if you first learn about it in detail through, for instance, a Tumblr post with an agenda :)

I'll break this down symptom by symptom, citing only the ones I both have personal experience with and see textual support for.

I'll be using OverDrive's search function to catalogue "evidence" in (the American editions of) Going Postal, Making Money, and Raising Steam, so I might miss passages that don't use certain keywords.

Please take any statements along the lines of "being narcoleptic means X" with a huge grain of salt. Sometimes it's just more succinct. Narcolepsy can manifest in many different ways, and is still being actively studied. Don't base your entire understanding of it on a fandom essay I wrote to cope with the crushing pressures of capitalism. I have not even fully read the scientific studies linked here as sources.

Here we go! Spoilers abound.

I. Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS) and sleep attacks.

Being narcoleptic means (salt now, please) that your brain does not get adequate rest while you sleep, no matter how much you sleep. This is because of a disturbance in the order and length of REM and NREM sleep phases. This leads to constant exhaustion. Some sources describe narcoleptic EDS as "comparable to [the sleepiness] experienced by a healthy individual who has been sleep-deprived continuously for 48–72 hours."

(Source.)

Sleep attacks can come on gradually or suddenly. In my case, I become irritable and easily overwhelmed, and nothing matters except finding a place to lie down. A more severe attack, under the right circumstances, can put me to sleep while I'm actively trying to stay awake and engaged.

Moist refers to 6:45 am as "still nighttime." He is "allergic to the concept of two seven o'clocks in one day" and is "not good at early mornings," and the narration even cites this as "one of the advantages of a life of crime; you didn't have to get up until other people had got the streets aired."

In Going Postal, he repeatedly falls asleep at his desk. I can only find two instances, but the first one describes it as having happened "again," so it happens at least three times over the course of one week. Both of the times I found were after Mr. Pump cleared his apartment, giving him access to a bed, and I can't find any reference to the fire destroying it—just that his office is "missing the whole of one wall." His presumably wooden desk is still intact, even, just "charred."

There's also no build-up either time. No direct narration of the time right before he falls asleep, just retroactive accounting for it.

Which is primarily a function of stories not showing us every boring second, and secondarily one of the smaller ways we're shown Moist being overwhelmed and racing to keep up with himself, but tertiarily it's a great set dressing if you've already decided he's narcoleptic. Sometimes sleep is just a thing that happens, without any deliberate transition. Sometimes you sit down to catch your breath or get some paperwork done, and wake up several hours later.

I've found only one example in GP of Moist waking up in his actual bed at the post office: the morning after being possessed by all the undelivered letters. Presumably either they put him there, or Mr. Pump did.

There are two points in Making Money where Moist, in an effort to be a comforting and/or guiding hand, advises people to get some sleep. First Owlswick Jenkins, and then one of the clerks (Robert) who is worried about Mr. Bent.

I take the optimistic view that this is Moist genuinely caring about these people, not just trying to get them to do what he wants. He has always done some combination of those things (GP opens with him having befriended his jailers, after all), but there's definitely a thread of him learning to treat both himself and those around him more like real people. (See also.)

Looking at this thread through narcolepsy-colored lenses, you get Moist perhaps drawing from his own experiences in an effort to be helpful. In Owlswick or Robert's position, what is something he would want to hear from the man currently in charge of his fate, or at least his job? "Get some sleep."

If we accept this as a pattern, it culminates in Raising Steam, when Moist starts to worry about "Dick Simnel and his band of overworked engineers," fixating particularly on their lack of sleep.

What sleep they got was in sleeping bags, curled up on carriage seats, eating but not eating well, just driven by their watches and their desire to keep the train going.

[...]

"People are going to die if we push them any further," he said to Dick. "You lot would rather work than sleep!"

[...]

The young man swayed in front of him and Moist's tone became gentle. "And I see now that part of my job is to tell you that you need some rest. You've run out of steam, Dick. Look, we're well on the way to Uberwald now, and while it's daylight and we're out of the mountains it's going to be the least risky time to run with minimum crew. We're all going to need our wits about us when we get near the pass. Surely you can take some rest?"

Simnel blinked as if he'd not seen Moist the first time, and said, "Yes, you're right."

And Moist could hear the slurring in the young man's speech, caught him before he fell and dragged him into a sleeping compartment, put him to bed, and noted that the engineer didn't so much fall asleep as somehow flow into it.

Moist then recruits Vimes to help him talk the rest of the engineers into getting some rest. The two of them briefly commiserate about people not realizing how important it is.

"I have to teach that to young coppers. Treasure a night's rest, I always say. Take a nap whenever you can."

"Very good."

II. Insomnia.

This is a lesser-known but very common symptom of narcolepsy. Or a comorbidity, depending on how you look at it. It seems counterintuitive if narcolepsy has been presented to you as "sleeping all the time," but it makes sense once you know it's really a matter of disruption in the brain's ability to regulate sleep cycles.

The case for this symptom is flimsier, and I fully admit I'm just reading my own experience into it. But here are two excerpts from Going Postal that I find quite suitable for my sleepy agenda:

1. "A man of affairs such as he had to learn to sleep in all kinds of situations, often while mobs were looking for him a wall's thickness away."

I latched hard onto this detail the first time I read GP.

At my worst, I could not get more than a couple hours of sleep in my bed. I kept taking naps in the bath because it was one of the few places I could sleep. It seemed to fulfill some of the criteria (isolation, temperature control, etc) that my brain demanded in exchange for playing nice.

We're told over and over again, throughout Moist's books, that he functions best under pressure.

(Brief aside: This is often cited as a reason to interpret Moist as having ADHD, which I'm also fully on board with. Not coincidentally, narcolepsy and ADHD share a few symptoms, have a notable comorbidity rate, and are treated with some of the same medications. Source.)

So again, if you're already inclined to read Moist as narcoleptic, the following is an easy jump:

"Moist thinks he's good at sleeping in strange places under strange circumstances. This is because A) his basis for comparison is a disordered attempt to sleep in normal places under normal circumstances, B) something about danger satisfies his brain into running more smoothly, and C) he's a resourceful person who is 'not given to introspection,' and so is less likely to wonder why his body demands sleep at strange times and more likely to focus on finding a place for that sleep to happen, and chalk this up later as a skill."

And returning briefly to EDS: Why would someone like Moist waste time finding a safe place to sleep while people are actively trying to kill him? At the beginning of GP, he leaves Vetinari's office and immediately goes on the run. In multiple books, when he feels threatened, his brain instinctively launches into complex escape plans. We see him successfully blend into an Ankh-Morpork crowd at least once after becoming a public figure.

So why bother? After all, a safe place to sleep is also a safe place to change clothes, or at least remove whatever distinguishing features he's given himself. Why wouldn't he just become someone else and leave town immediately?

The obvious answer is that sometimes things just happen, and an author doesn't need to know or explain every single detail of a character's past.

I would suggest, though, that one of those things might be Moist reaching a point where sleep is just not optional. A point where he not only doesn't, but can't, care about anything else. Where he is too tired to think straight, too tired to talk his way out of trouble, too tired to even contemplate the long journey from one town to the next.

2. "Moist knew he ought to get some sleep, but he had to be there, too, alive and sparkling."

Sometimes (especially in combination with underlying mental health issues) narcoleptic sleep deprivation can bypass everything I've described so far, and lead straight into a manic state. You won't necessarily find that on Google, but it's been my experience.

That's obviously not what the text is implying. "Alive and sparkling" is just a very relatable description. And we do often see Moist getting away from himself, speaking without thinking, making absurd promises that he justifies immediately afterwards as Just Part Of Being Him, always raising the stakes.

And here are a couple of excerpts from Raising Steam that could be interpreted as Moist being a light sleeper, AKA struggling to get deep sleep:

1. "And slowly Moist shut down, although a part of him was always listening to the rhythm of the rails, listening in his sleep, like a sailor listening to the sounds of the sea."

2. "All Moist's life he'd managed to find a way of sleeping in just about every circumstance and, besides, the guard's van was somehow the hub of the train; and although he didn't know how he did it, he always managed to sleep with half of one ear open."

Moist is exactly the kind of opportunist to see that as a useful tool, isn't he?

III. Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations.

These are hallucinations that come on as you're falling asleep or waking up. They can also happen during REM intrusions while you're awake. My most memorable ones include piano notes, someone calling my name, being trapped in the waves of a large body of water, and a huge truck going over a guard rail and tumbling down a hill. These are often, but not always, accompanied by sleep paralysis (and sleep paralysis is often, but not always, accompanied by hallucinations).

In GP, Moist casually cites his own hallucinations as proof that what is happening at the post office is not one.

"They're all alive! And angry! They talk! It was not a hallucination! I've had hallucinations and they don't hurt!"

Obviously that's not true for everyone, but it's true for Moist, and he has enough experience that he immediately recognizes the difference.

At one point while awake, Moist "[snaps] out of a dream of chandeliers" to realize someone has approached him to talk, while he was busy having visions of what the post office used to look like/could look like again.

Now, that's cheating, because we're probably supposed to assume it's a side effect of being possessed, but... I'm putting it here anyway.

There is also perhaps a case to be made for the tendency of Moist's internal monologue to lapse into extremely specific and prolonged hypotheticals. The lines between hallucinations, waking dreams, and "regular" daydreams have always been very blurry to me. I'm especially curious about the example at the end of Going Postal, which goes like this:

"Look, I know what I'm like," he said. "I'm not the person everyone thinks I am. I just wanted to prove to myself I'm not like Gilt. More than a hammer, you understand? But I'm still a fraud by trade. I thought you knew that. I can fake sincerity so well that even I can't tell. I mess with people's heads—"

"You're fooling no one but yourself," said Miss Dearheart, and reached for his hand.

Moist shook her off, and ran out of the building, out of the city, and back to his old life, or lives, always moving on, selling glass as diamond, but somehow it just didn't seem to work anymore, the flair wasn't there, the fun had dropped out of it, even the cards didn't seem to work for him, the money ran out, and one winter in some inn that was no more than a slum he turned his face to the wall—

And an angel appeared.

"What just happened?" said Miss Dearheart.

Perhaps you do get two...

"Only a passing thought," said Moist.

In-universe... what is Adora reacting to? What did just happen? The fact that these incidents are not isolated to Going Postal is a point against it being some sort of literal timeline divergence caused by The Spirit Of The Post.

So maybe Moist visibly zoned out. Maybe he had some kind of minor but noticeable cataplexy attack (more on those later) as part of a REM intrusion, brought on by the intense emotions he's currently struggling with.

IV. Vivid Dreams.

Again, at least some of this is probably supposed to be part of the possession, but I've been professionally projecting myself onto the surreal dreams of magically afflicted characters for years. Do try this at home.

1. "Moist dreamed of bottled wizards, all shouting his name. In the best tradition of awaking from a nightmare, the voices gradually became one voice, which turned out to be the voice of Mr. Pump, who was shaking him."

2. Moist is uneasy about the Smoking Gnu's plan, and then he has an extremely detailed dream about the Grand Trunk burning down.

This culminates in "Moist awoke, the Grand Trunk burning in his head," followed by a paragraph of him thinking things through and starting to form his own alternative plan, followed immediately by "Moist awoke. He was at his desk, and someone had put a pillow under his head."

So he fell asleep at his desk, woke up from a vivid nightmare, was awake just long enough for a coherent train of thought, and then passed back out. Which once again is not "proof" of anything, but fits the predetermined interpretation like a glove.

V. Cataplexy.

Cataplexy is a sudden loss of muscle control, usually triggered by strong emotions. This is thought to be a facet of REM intrusion—waking instances of the atonia that is meant to stop us from acting out our dreams.

The most well-known manifestation is laughter making your knees buckle, but it's not always that severe. My own attacks range from facial twitching, usually when I'm angry or otherwise extremely upset, to all-over weakness/immobilization and near-collapse when I laugh. My knees have fully buckled once or twice.

This is the biggest stretch. This is the one that is absolutely only there if you've already decided to read entire novels between the lines. It's also not even necessary for the broader headcanon; plenty of people have narcolepsy without cataplexy (or such mild cataplexy that it's never noticeable, or very delayed onset, etc).

However. I am doing this for fun. So I want him to have it. It's also become a major part of how I imagine Moist engaging with emotion, and I'd like to make a case for that.

There are a few scattered references to Moist's legs shaking, or being unsteady, or outright giving way, but there's usually an external physical reason, and/or enough psychological shock to justify it without a medical condition.

The most compelling example I've found so far comes from Moist and Adora's conversation about people expecting Moist to deliver letters to the gods.

"I never promised to—"

"You promised to when you sold them the stamps!"

Moist almost fell off his chair. She'd wielded the sentence like a fist.

"And it'll give them hope," she added, rather more quietly.

"False hope," said Moist, struggling upright.

"Almost fell off his chair" at first sounds like casual hyperbole, but then "struggling upright" implies it was a bit more literal. It's also an accurate description of me recovering from my more severe attacks, supporting myself on a wall or my spouse, or pushing myself up if I've fallen over in bed.

That happens to me multiple times per day, by the way. It doesn't bother me, and I didn't realize there was anything unusual about it for a long time. I barely think about it, except to fondly note that my spouse is good at making me laugh.

Which is to say, even severe cataplexy is not always noticeable or debilitating. Sometimes it absolutely is! It can be downright dangerous, depending on where you are, what you're doing, and whether you have any other conditions it might exacerbate. I don't want to undermine that.

I am just hell-bent on justifying the idea that this fictional character could have repeated attacks throughout the canonical narrative that are so routine they don't merit an explanation, or even a description. Especially for someone who is used to hiding his few distinguishing features behind false ones that are much more memorable. (See also.)

(That link goes to my own fanfic. Sorry.)

On the milder side, between Going Postal and Making Money, there are three instances of Moist's mouth "dropping open" when he's shocked, upset, confused, or some combination of the three. This is the kind of thing that shows up a lot in fiction, but rarely happens so literally in real life.

(There's technically a fourth instance, but I'm not counting it because it seems to be a deliberate choice on his part to convey surprise.)

And then there's laughter. Or rather, there isn't. I could be missing something, but I've searched all three books for instances of laughter and various synonyms (not counting spoken "Ha!"s), and what I've come up with is:

Moist laughs once in Going Postal, when he receives the assignment for the race to Genua.

Two packages were handed over. Moist undid his, and burst out laughing.

There's also an instance earlier in the book where Moist nearly "burst[s] out laughing."

I find the specifics here interesting, and, for our purposes, fortuitous. Cataplexy is complicated and presents differently for everyone. In my case, when laughter triggers an attack, one of the effects (which is sometimes also a cause) is that I laugh very hard, with little or no control. "Burst out laughing" is quite apt.

Let's move on to Making Money, and start with a quick tangent:

Mr. Bent explains that he has no sense of humor due to a medical condition, and that he isn't upset about this and doesn't understand why people feel sorry for him.

Moist immediately starts in with "Have you tried—" before getting cut off by the frustrated Bent.

Out-of-universe, "Have you tried" is such a well-known refrain to anyone with an incurable condition, I'm not at all surprised to find it in a book written by someone who had at least begun the process that would lead to a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's. And Pratchett has certainly never shied away from portraying ignorance in his protagonists.

In-universe, it feels a little odd. Moist's tongue runs away from him all the time, but usually in the form of making ridiculous claims or impossible promises. Moist's entire stock-in-trade is People Skills, and it feels strange for him to make this kind of mistake immediately after being told Mr. Bent is not looking for solutions.

But if one were reading with, for instance, the idea in mind that Moist himself has an incurable condition related to laughter and is enthusiastic about, but still relatively new to, the practice of drawing on his own experiences to help people... it is easy to imagine the gears in his head turning the wrong way, superimposing those experiences over the tail end of Mr. Bent's explanation. Disabled people are not immune to these well-meaning pitfalls.

There is another Mr. Bent moment that I want to discuss, but we'll circle back around to it later.

I found two instances of Moist himself laughing in MM.

1. "He said it with a laugh, to lighten the mood a little."

This is deliberate laughter, employed as a social tactic. A polite chuckle, probably. Not the sort of thing that generally triggers cataplexy.

2. "Moist started to laugh, and stopped at the sight of her grave expression."

The first and only involuntary laugh in MM. It doesn't always trigger attacks...

Which brings us to Raising Steam. Compared to the first two books, Moist laughs a lot here. I count nine instances. Two of them are "burst out laughing"s, a couple include him as part of a group, some of it comes off as deliberate, and some of it doesn't.

I've always seen a lot of... rage in Raising Steam. Combing through it for laughter, I realized Moist's emotions in general are much closer to the surface here, and he's much less concerned about letting people see them. He laughs with friends and acquaintances, he cries in front of strangers, he shouts at Harry King, he has that entire conversation with Dick that boils down to "I'm very worried about you," etc.

Opinions vary wildly and sharply on Raising Steam. I have my own hangups with it, as I do with most books in the series. (Every time I make a new Discworld post, Tumblr passive-aggressively suggests the tag "my kingdom for a discworld character who is normal about women and other species.")

But I like this particular change in Moist, and I choose to see it as character development. He's trading in the professional detachment of a conman for the ability to grow into himself as a person and make meaningful connections.

So, what does that have to do with cataplexy? A lot.

I don't want to get too maudlin, so I'll just say I have plenty of personal experience with emotional repression masking cataplexy symptoms. And so, I believe, does the version of Moist we've put together over the course of this post.

Which brings us back to Making Money, and Mr. Bent. He says something about Moist that I find very interesting: "I do not trust those who laugh too easily."

Unless I've missed something, at that point in the book, Moist has never actually laughed in front of him. And Mr. Bent is a man who pays very close attention to details.

So, what is the in-universe explanation for this? I'd like to propose that Moist is very skilled at seeming to laugh, without actually laughing. He smiles, he's friendly, and he makes other people laugh, which is another thing Bent dislikes about him. He gives the impression of being someone who laughs a lot. (He certainly left that impression on me; I was very surprised by the lack of examples in the first two books.)

Even staying strictly within the bounds of canon, it's easy to imagine why this might have become part of Moist's camouflage in his previous life. He wasn't looking to get attached to anyone, and he didn't want anyone getting inside his head. Engaging with people genuinely enough to laugh at their jokes would run counter to both of those things, but some of his personas still needed to come off as friendly and sociable.

Still working within the canon, it makes sense to assume he's similarly distanced himself from emotion in general. He sits in a cell for several weeks without truly believing he's going to die. He's bewildered when Mr. Pump points out that his schemes have hurt innocent people. He has no idea what to do with his feelings for Adora. Etc.

Interpreting Moist as having cataplexy adds an extra element of danger. Moist thrives on danger, but there's a difference between the thrill of a con and the threat of sudden, uncontrollable displays of vulnerability. And so it becomes even easier to see him stifling his own emotional capacity.*

We meet Moist at a moment of great upheaval. He is forcibly removed from his cocoon of false identities, and pushed out into the world as himself. And we are shown and told throughout Going Postal that he does not know how to be himself. (See also.)

He is repeatedly stymied by his own emotions. He gets tongue-tied and confused around Adora, he snaps at Mr. Pump, he lashes out at Mr. Groat, he gets lost in school flashbacks when he meets Miss Maccalariat. This thread continues in Making Money, where the sudden reappearance of Cribbins immediately rattles him into making an uncharacteristic mistake.

I called him Cribbins! Just then! I called him Cribbins! Did he tell me his name? Did he notice? He must have noticed!

Later in the same book, Moist misses a crucial opportunity to run damage control on the bank's public image... because he's excited to see Adora.

The Moist of GP and MM is not used to feeling things so deeply. It throws him off his game. I'm not at all suggesting cataplexy is the only (or even primary) reason for that, but I do think there's room for it on both sides of the cause and effect equation.

With or without the cataplexy, I find Moist's relative emotional openness in Raising Steam... really nice. (It's a work in progress. He's still getting a handle on anger.)

Cataplexy just adds another dimension. A physical manifestation of emotional vulnerability, which would have been especially untenable for a teenager on the run. Just one more facet of the real, human, fallible Moist von Lipwig who spent years buried beneath Albert Spangler and all the rest.

Another piece of himself that Moist is growing to understand and accept, as he learns to more comfortably be himself.

The Moist of Going Postal runs into a burning building to save lives without fully understanding why he wants to, and justifies it on the fly as an essential part of the role he's trying to play.

The Moist of Raising Steam mindlessly throws himself under a train to save two children, and then blows up at Harry King about the lack of safety regulations. Freshly traumatized by the murder of several railway workers and his own violent, vengeful response to it, he still offers, in the face of Harry's own grief, to be the one to inform their families. On a long and dangerous journey with plenty of moving parts to think about, he worries about Dick Simnel and the other engineers, and pushes them to take better care of themselves.

He also meets a bunch of kids who nearly derailed a train as part of a childish scheme. His admonishment is startlingly vivid.

"Can you imagine a railway accident? The screaming of the rails and the people inside and the explosion that scythes the countryside around when the boiler bursts? And you, little girl, and your little friends, would have done all that. Killed a trainload of people."

[...]

"I'll square this with the engine driver, but if I was you I'd get my pencil and turn any clever ideas you have like this into a book or two. Those penny dreadfuls are all the rage in the railway bookshops."

Maybe what he is also saying, between the lines, is:

I left home at 14 and began a life of smoke and mirrors. I was empty inside, and I thought everyone else was, too. It was all fun and games, and then a man made of clay told me I was killing people. Nip it in the bud, child. Write books.

------------

*There are studies suggesting that in addition to deliberately employed "tricks," people with cataplexy may experience physiological reactions in the brain meant to inhibit laughter. (Source 1, Source 2.)

Most of the information here is way over my head, but that second link also says "one region of the brain called the zona incerta (meaning 'zone of uncertainty') was only activated during laughter in people with narcolepsy, not in controls. Research on the zona incerta in animals suggests that it also helps to control fear-associated behavior."

The linked article about that (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03581-6) is also over my head, but I would certainly describe Moist von Lipwig as having unusual fear responses.**

**Narcolepsy is a fun roller-coaster ride of constant scientific discoveries about exactly which parts of your brain are paying too much attention, not paying enough attention, or trying to eat each other.

#moist von lipwig #narcolepsy #discworld #disabled headcanons #oh my god this got so out of hand #earned itself a title AND a subtitle #mr. cybulskis i'm sorry i fell asleep in your class every day it was at the exact wrong time and temperature and lighting

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eisforeidolon · 3 years ago

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to what extent do you think the writers/actors/other people related to the show expected this insane reaction to the finale? i know someone said only 30% of the fans would love the finale, and looking at the general audience i think that's actually lowballing it (although, of course, looking at twitter gives you a much different story.) however, the harrassment of the cast has skyrocketed in the last few months along with suicide baiting of fans. do you think hellers will ever get tired of it?

Dabb was the one that made the 30% joke, and I really don' t think he was actually serious. I might be wrong, but my impression is he was being facetious and just wanted to try and sound cool and edgy by making a sarcastic GoT comparison.

I think they realized certain loud parts of the Very Online fandom were going to go absolutely apeshit - given their past behavior of going apeshit pretty much every even numbered Tuesday over nothing. I also think they expected the brother-centric finale to be popular with the general audience and wincest shippers, which is why they wrote a brother-centric finale.

My questions revolve around what they expected out of 15x18. See, the thing is, the hellers expected the writers to take their side because of all the bleating they've done to each other about how they're the majority/real fans and making their ship canon is the Only Correct Choice. The writers, on the other hand, know it's a big divided fandom plus the casual viewing audience. Why would they do something that's going to baffle the general audience and piss off a large portion of non-shippers and other ship shippers ... just to please a different specific subset of particularly loud shippers of one ship? So I think their expectations when writing the ending they did after 15x18 probably fell into one of two categories:

They really were dumb enough to think throwing such an ambiguous, unrequited bone to the D/C shippers would be enough to appease them and balance out the finale. These are the shippers who can find a totes amazing lurve story in wallpaper and flannel shirts, this is more textual than all that so they'll be happy, right?! We're talking about older nerd-dude writers whose understanding of fans' expectations for what constitutes satisfying fan service may not be the most up-to-date. Writers who have had those shippers blowing smoke up their asses for years now, praising their every choice to the heavens. Someone who isn't very self-aware could actually mistake that for real adulation rather than the desperate sucking up in hopes of a payoff it was. Furthermore, I think Dabb is an appeaser who is happiest riding a fence and I've written off Berens particularly as a moronic putz since the Wayward debacle. If this was the case, I suspect that they have been baffled and dismayed by the volume of the negative reaction and all the conspiracy theories and whatnot that came with.

The alternative is they decided to hand the crazies a metaphorical book of trick matches to make them spontaneously combust in rage on purpose. The knew the scene in 15x18 was ambiguous enough that those portions of the audience who didn't like the ship or remained blissfully unaware of its existence would, even if initially baffled or dismayed by it? Ultimately largely see it as platonic or irrelevant given the entire lack of any kind of follow up, let alone interest shown by Dean, afterward. The normal well-adjusted shippers of that ship would take it and run with it in fanfic, writing fix-it heaven reunions. The crazies, on the other hand? Would work themselves up into an absolute frenzy of expectations only to be violently dashed off a cliff when the last two episodes were entirely Castiel-free and gloriously Sam&Dean-centric. In between the pretty transparent ass-kissing, they've been harassed for years by these fans claiming to be "owed" the payoff they want and been slandered and called names every time it didn't materialize. I think most of them know from SM and declining ratings that they're not well loved, and Dabb & Berens in particular have shown an insane amount of butthurt there wasn't enough buzz over their hoped cash cow Wayward to get it to air. By the time the final episodes were airing, Dabb and Co. had long since collected their last SPN paychecks and Dabb personally already had a new IP lined up to ruin. Why should they care if they left only flaming wreckage of a fandom in their wake as the hellers melted the fuck down all over everything yet again? I doubt they expected the fandom to still be wanking itself raw eight months later, but if they did this on purpose, I'd bet they wouldn't care or would find it funny. They won't be tied to it in perpetuity the way actors tend to be.

At some point, the hellers will largely move on though there may be a few lingering crazies for a very long time. Some fandoms don't die, but they all lose momentum over time, especially when a canon closes (which is why I rather hope all spin-off ideas remain in limbo indefinitely). There's only so many times they'll be able to convince themselves it's satisfying to RP fanfic on twitter or pay Misha hoping he'll talk about their ship when there are literally no more episodes in which someone can force Jensen to act out their fantasies. I can't say how soon it will be, but some have already wandered off. Over time more and more are going to either get bored, tire themselves out, realize what a laughingstock they are, or at least fixate on some other canon (Amara help those poor fandoms).

#destihellers #anti dabb #anti berens #askboxery #anonymous #spn ending #long post

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mallowstep · 3 years ago

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Let me toss you a 3, an 11, and if you don't mind, a couple outside the list: where would you put yourself on the planner to pantser spectrum? Ever had to deal with unruly characters that just refuse to play nice and throw a wrench into the whole outline?

author asks

(3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favourite scenes first? something else?

uhh i try to do front to back, but usually i start a fic with a few scenes that i'm feeling drawn to. they're not even necessarily important scenes: i just am attacked to them.

(one for ibtwicm that i can share is literally just, "You have to be clever." that's it. it's just one sentence, but it's one of my anchors for the whole fic.)

anyway i try to do front to back, but depending on the fic, i'll sometimes need to do chronological (it hasn't happened for any warriors fics, but it has happened for others). i tend to gain a lot of momentum when i write, and jumping around can break that.

(11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

akldj this is kind of a hard question to answer because i've been writing like. since i could hold a pencil. i used to have a whole shelf of notebooks going all the way back to like first grade.

specifically to since-i-started-doing-warriors-fic, i'd say i'm a lot more confident in characterization now. in that i trust myself to write interesting characters, and i don't feel like i need to justify my every decision with textual evidence.

honestly, just being more confident is a big thing for me. when i read a lot of the stuff i wrote a few years ago, i usually think, "i wish i had just pushed it farther" because i had this idea that i was just afraid to commit to.

i think my gravity falls fic ("strings") is a turning point in that, because i wasn't like. a huge gravity falls fan. i knew the core characters, but i mostly knew them through some daemon fics i really liked, not the show. and i can't page through episodes of a tv show to get an idea of characterization. so i just. had to write who i wanted them to be.

moving a bit farther back, i'm really proud of how far my dialogue-action balance has come. i've been all over the place: can't write action, can't write dialogue, can't write anything, can write both but not together, etc., and i generally enjoy character study, low dialogue, type things.

but i've noticed, since i started writing fic again, that i don't find myself saying "oh shit, too much has happened between these lines of dialogue" or "god they've been talking for ages, what were they doing again?" half as much as i used to.

planner vs pantster?

planner. i definitely am a pants-y planner, and this depends on the fic, but having a solid outline is really crucial.

like, i don't need an outline to write. the bulk of my med cat dovewing fic was written without an outline, but that was because i Knew i wouldn't post it until i finished writing it, so i could afford to jump around and tie scenes in when i realized where i wanted a plot thread to go. and i couldn't have done that if i was posting as i went, i would have needed to start with the end in mind.

and i usually leave a fair amount of space in my outlines: ibtwicm had like. three or four major plot threads unresolved in the outline until...frankly, until i wrote tallstar's chapter.

in my outline for mtbnsof, it still says that jayfeather stays in thunderclan, not alderheart. then i decided i wanted jayfeather and mothwing's background drama, and a few other reasons.

but mtbsnof also has like. an Insane amount of documentation.

ashes had a big empty hole in my outline for a really long time from...about when leafpool's litter is born to a little after where we are now. obviously i filled it, but i knew what had to happen (the warrior drama, dovekit, marigoldkit, etc.), just not how it was going to happen.

anyway, planner. that's my final answer.

unruly characters?

occasionally, but usually in minor ways. it's pretty rare, nowadays, for me to write a character and have it go off the rails.

(chapter breaks? ohh, those go off the rails a Lot. not just in terms of fics being longer than expected, but just. a chapter Demanding to include a certain scene or end a little early.)

i think the most recent instance is the ships for the three in ashes. i had a whole plan for them and then hjl said No.

also, squirrelflight having a litter in astatine was completely unplanned. i just thought it would be good tension, and it was.

but usually when something goes sideways, the events in the outline don't change, just their portrayal.

like. hm. okay, for "cardamom pods and vanilla beans," i had a scene that was initially titled "Jaywing Observation by Poppyfrost" that was supposed to be from her pov, and something about her affection for him.

but jaywing demanded that he see his girlfriend stare at him. he demanded the emotional intimacy of understanding someone so well you can process their senses.

or in "you've been on my mind, girl, since the flood," millie was supposed to be disconnected from blossomfall, like she was erasing her childhood memories to fit with her current understanding of the world.

and then i thought: actually, no, that's not what's happening, not from blossomfall's perspective. what's happening is she's living with the consequences of her decisions. like.

she "knows" it's wrong to be bitter and upset over briarlight, and she "knows" training in the dark forest was wrong, and so now: she's not the cat treating others with kindness, she's the cat leaning on others' kindness. and so her whole relationship with her mother has been flipped: she is the object of the parable, now, not the listening child.

and that's something i never would have been able to know without writing the first few scenes of ybommgstf, without getting to millie's very first line, "We become what we do," because that's not something i could put on an outline.

it didn't change anything, in terms of the outline: blossomfall's still outwardly acting the same. but my initial plan was for. a sympathetic but abrasive blossomfall. one who started in a reasonable place, but was bitter, wouldn't start the process of change.

and i think the blossomfall i wrote was. mostly the same, but now it wasn't that she wouldn't start the process of change, it was that she quite literally couldn't. i thought it was going to be a lie-she-told-herself, that she just didn't know how to change, but it ended up being very true.

anyway i've rambled on entirely too long. thanks for the qs! always fun to answer.

#long #essay #mine #aerial jace #ask #ask game #writing #talk #friend tag

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oumakokichi · 4 years ago

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Do you think that Kokichi had any remorse for Gonta during trial 4 or did he actually not care? I've seen a lot of people saying different opinions from both sides of the argument. But I'm really confused because there was a moment where after Gonta was executed, correct me if I'm wrong but Shuichi asked Kokichi if he could reveal the secret of the outside world (?) But Kokichi replied with something like “I don't want to....” and seemed generally upset? But then a few moments later he snapped out if it and began acting like he had no sympathy whatsoever. I just really wanna know how Kokichi actually, truly felt about Gonta and if he regretted manipulating him. Sorry if you've already been asked this and have already given an answer, thank you!

Hi anon—I actually wrote a pretty big master-post on chapter 4 not too long ago which I think more or less sums up my thoughts on Ouma’s behavior in the post-trial! You can find it here if you want (it’s pretty long and I tried to answer a whole bunch of questions about Ouma in chapter 4 specifically, since it’s the chapter I get asked about the most).

More specifically though, I’m afraid that there is no easy, definitive answer to that question. I can only share my personal opinions about how I believe Ouma felt in that scene. And personally? I do think he was genuinely upset and distraught about Gonta’s death, that he even momentarily considered giving up all his plans and being executed alongside him, and that he cared about Gonta and deeply regretted using him as a sacrificial pawn in his plans.

I’ll discuss what I mean in more detail, but it’ll probably get pretty long, so I’ll put the rest of this post under a cut as always!

The thing is, though, I’ve shared my personal thoughts about the chapter 4 post trial many times, including my reasoning and all of the textual evidence that shows how much Ouma cared about the rest of his classmates. But ultimately, there will probably always be some people who disagree, because their reading of the text will always be a little bit different. Unless we ever have an interview from Kodaka in the future where he directly says, “this is what Ouma was thinking and feeling at this exact moment,” there really won’t ever be a way to know what was going through his head with 100% certainty (and I do feel like leaving it open-ended is something of Kodaka’s intention, anyway, especially since Ouma is supposed to be a very polarizing character).

That being said, I do think it’s worth analyzing the text and drawing your own conclusions, because ndrv3 is a game that changes a lot depending on how you interpret it, and Ouma’s character is included in that. It’s really easy on a first playthrough to get wrapped up in what Ouma says or does without really looking at why he says it, or at his underlying motivations. Going back through the game on a replay though, I do personally think it’s possible to guess at what he might have been feeling during those super conflicting scenes in chapter 4.

In my opinion, I think Ouma did truly care about Gonta as a friend, and that his guilt and remorse over what he did was genuine. Not only did Ouma and DICE have a very strict taboo against killing (mentioned directly in his motive video in Japanese, though the part about it being an actual rule was stripped from the localization), but we don’t see Ouma’s façade crack like this very often. Most of the time when he does his trademark “crocodile tears,” it’s with his very loud, exaggerated crying sprite, and he bounces right back to acting normally within a moment or two.

There are a few exceptions to this, of course—he uses the “crocodile tears” sprite to cry at Kaede, Amami, and Toujou’s deaths, but it’s still very likely he was shaken up by seeing them dead). Nonetheless, we don’t see his much more subdued crying sprites more than a handful of times, particularly in the chapter 4 post-trial just before Gonta’s execution, as well as in Momota’s flashback in chapter 5 when he talks about how Ouma actually hated the killing game the whole time.

I’m aware that some people simply brush these moments aside and assume that Ouma is lying though all of them, but I personally just can’t agree with that interpretation. Assuming that Ouma is lying whenever he shows remorse or guilt or hatred for the killing game means assuming that he’s telling the truth in pretty much every other scene—which doesn’t make much sense, given that his entire character is centered around the concept of lying, as well as moral ambiguity and subverting expectations. Assuming that Ouma actually means what he’s saying 100% of the time unless it just happens to involve showing any kind of guilt or remorse turns him into a very boring, predictable, uninspired character (none of which are words I would use to describe him personally).

Ignoring those moments where Ouma shows genuine attachment to his classmates and distaste for the killing game also means ignoring several key pieces of evidence and clues about him that we are directly provided in the game, including his motive video and Momota’s flashback in chapter 5. Personally, I don’t feel like there’s any reason to include these scenes at all unless it’s to help shed light on Ouma’s motivations and provide players with a clear reason to try and go back through the game again to look at Ouma��s actions through a new perspective.

I also feel that Ouma genuinely cared about Gonta because to put it simply, there was no incentive for him to lie in that scene. He got absolutely nothing out of it—and considering he turns around and starts playing the villain on purpose all of 5 minutes after Gonta’s death, he definitely wasn’t trying to earn sympathy points or trick the rest of his classmates into trusting him. In fact, he could’ve easily tried to make himself look more sympathetic by putting all of the blame on Miu for trying to kill him, or even on Gonta. But instead he fully admits to coming up with the plan to kill Miu and spends the entire post-trial trying to convince everyone not to hate or blame Gonta.

If he was truly as sadistic and horrible as he pretended to be, I think he would’ve pulled a 180 and started throwing names and insults around while Gonta was still alive to hear it, not after he was already dead. If he didn’t care at all about Gonta’s feelings, he had no reason to try and take all the blame on himself while insisting that none of what happened was actually Gonta’s fault. If anything, revealing himself to be this horrible, evil villain who enjoys seeing other people suffer or die would’ve really been adding insult to injury, and probably would’ve crushed Gonta completely, even before his execution started.

But… Ouma doesn’t do any of this. Despite having every opportunity to either portray himself as more of a victim and fling all the blame on Miu and Gonta, or else to completely embrace being a villain who loved seeing people suffer, he doesn’t do either of these things. The way I personally see it, Ouma waits until Gonta is already dead, and when the rest of his classmates begin pushing him for answers about the outside world and demanding to know what Gonta saw, that’s when he finally snaps and resigns himself to acting like a villain in order to make everyone hated.

You could argue that trying to make everyone hate him had a twofold effect: it helped set the stage for him to pretend to be the ringleader in the next chapter, which he clearly wanted, but it also was a way of taking things out on himself and shows just a small glimpse of how much he hated having to dirty his hands in chapter 4. After all, Ouma even says it himself: that the “role of a villain is perfect for him,” because he’s already made everyone hate him. We see Ouma occasionally tease or antagonize the rest of his classmates plenty of times throughout the game, but it’s true that he doesn’t really step into that “villain” role until the end of chapter 4, once he’s crossed a line that he can never come back from by manipulating both Miu and Gonta to their deaths.

None of this is to say that what Ouma did to Gonta is okay, by any means. I think he definitely did care about Gonta and even thought of him as one of the few trustworthy people in the killing game, even someone close to a friend, but that doesn’t mean that manipulating him and using him like a chess piece was okay in the end. I just also think it’s important to realize that there were plenty of extenuating circumstances that led Ouma to act the way he did—including the fact tha he knew Miu was going to kill him, that he already suspected she had measures to prevent him from fighting back or killing her himself in the VR world, and the fact that he did not want to die or get everyone else killed in the trial.

It’s possible for people to care about others without necessarily treating them the best or doing the right thing. A huge part of Danganronpa, something that’s been evident from the very first game, is that sometimes characters can and do hurt each other, even when they care about each other or wouldn’t be a threat otherwise.

It’s the existence of the killing game itself that causes so many characters to go to extremes that they normally wouldn’t, whether it’s Maizono trying to frame Naegi in dr1 despite caring about him a lot, Kaede deciding to try and commit murder under everyone’s noses despite trying to unite the group and wanting everyone to trust her, or Ouma using Gonta as a pawn to kill Miu in his place because he didn’t want to die.

At the end of the day, people are still probably going to have very polarizing opinions about Ouma and the things he did in chapter 4, and that’s honestly okay. In my own opinion, Ouma definitely isn’t a completely flawless, innocent baby who “did nothing wrong”—he absolutely is manipulative, cold, and calculating when he wants to be, and it’s a fact that he got two people killed, even if he didn’t want things to reach that point. But I also personally don’t think it’s fair to write him off as the exact kind of “evil villain” he pretends to be; not only is it a shortsighted interpretation of his larger motivations, but it also completely ignores any replay value and completely shoots down the appeal of trying to interpret Ouma’s thoughts and actions because “he was lying about feeling bad anyway, what’s the point in analyzing him.”

Tl;dr: I do think Ouma cares about Gonta, that he probably even thought of him as the closest thing he had to a friend in the killing game, and that what he did to Gonta in the end wasn’t okay. I think he really did respect Gonta for being such a sweet and kind person, but that he also knew Gonta was extremely naïve and that he would be one of the easiest people in their group to manipulate, hence why he decided to rely on him instead of anyone else. Their friendship is an important part of both of their character arcs, but it’s definitely not what I would call “on equal footing.”

I understand why Ouma’s actions might make some people really resent him, but I also believe that kneejerk reaction of anger and dismissal is exactly the point: Ouma does feel terrible about the things he did, but he doesn’t want anyone’s sympathy or forgiveness, not even the player’s. This, in my opinion, is why he starts embracing the villain role so completely from this point on, and why he’s never quite able to make the same sort of cold, calculating sacrifices in chapter 5 that he did in chapter 4.

I hope this helps answer your question, anon, along with the other chapter 4 post I wrote! Thank you for all your support!

#danganronpa #ndrv3 #new danganronpa v3 #kokichi ouma #ouma kokichi #my meta #ask #anonymous #ndrv3 spoiles //#okay to reblog

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olderthannetfic · 5 years ago

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Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion about the history of original work on ao3 (i.e. how and when it was allowed). I thought it was in my likes, but it's not, and I thought you had reblogged it recently, but I didn't find it. I was wondering if you have seen this discussion around? Or where I can find more about it? This specific post talked abt how who defended original work on ao3 were not the BNFs, if that helps.

That was me running my mouth in the reblogs of something or other. It’s just the one comment.

But what’s that you say? Some tl;dr about a pet topic? Don’t mind if I do! ;) (To be honest, most of this debate happened years ago, and a lot of the long meta was by me back then too, so…)

Okay, so, the situation with Original Works is actually super interesting and a microcosm of early years OTW wank.

This is going to be even more tl;dr than my usual. To try to summarize very briefly:

There were two big cultural factions. One thought “original” was the opposite of “fan”. That one was in charge of OTW. It was hard to get voices from the other side into the debate because they already felt excluded from OTW.

This divide broke down more or less into Ye Olde Slash Fandom on the “it’s the opposite” side and anime fandom on the “WTF?” side. Americans on one side and a lot of non-US, non-English language fandom on the other.

I. Media Fandom, Anime Fandom, and Early OTW

I went to that first fundraising party that astolat threw in New York City back in… god… 2007? 2008? I wasn’t on the Board or any official position until the committees got started later, but I was around right from the very beginning.

Whether you’re looking at volunteers or at people who commented on astolat’s original post, there were always a variety of fans from a variety of fannish backgrounds. People aren’t absolutely in one camp or another, and fannish interests change over time. If you go dig through Dreamwidth posts to find who was actually participating in this debate at the time, half of them are probably in the other camp now.

If you think like that sounds like a preamble to me making a bunch of offensively sweeping generalizations and divvying fans up into little groups, you’d be right! Haha.

I.a. Ye Olde Media Fandom

There are a lot of camps of people who like fanfic. One of the biggest divisions has been Ye Olde Media Fandom vs. anime fandom. Astolat’s social circle–my LJ social circle–was filled with people with decades of fannish experience and a deep knowledge of the Media Fandom side of things.

Those fandom history treatises that start with K/S zines in Star Trek fandom in the 70s and move on through the mainstream buddy cops like Starsky & Hutch to the more niche, sff buddy cops like Fraser and Ray or Jim and Blair are talking about Media Fandom. I try to always capitalize it because the name is lulzy and bizarre to me unless it’s a proper noun for a specific historical thing. It was coined as a rude term for “mass media” fandom aka dumb people who like, ughhhh, Star Trek, ughhh, instead of books. This is a very ancient slapfight from the type of fandom you find at Worldcon, often called “SF fandom” or plain “fandom”.

(Yes, this leads to mega confusion on the part of some old dudes when they find Fanlore and fail to understand that “fandom” there refers to what these people would call “Media Fandom”. They think only they get the unmarked form. But I digress…)

Media Fandom is a specific flavor of fandom. It’s where the slash zines were. It’s where the fans of live action US TV shows were. It’s the history that acafans have laid out well and that tends to get used to defend the idea of a female subculture writing transgressive and transformative fanfic. On the video side, Media Fandom is where Kandy Fong invented vidding by making Star Trek slideshows.

(Kandy’s still around, BTW. She’s usually at Escapade in L.A. Ask her to tell you about the dancing penises sketch in person. She’s hilarious.)

Astolat and friends had been going to slash cons for years. They founded Vividcon. And Yuletide. That meant that when astolat said “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” we all jumped to help. This is a lady who gets things done.

From a Worldcon perspective, or even from an older Media Fandom perspective, this group was comparatively young, hip, and welcoming. Their fandom interests were comparatively broad. Just look at Yuletide!

In fact, yes, let us look at Yuletide… [ominous music]

I.b. Yuletide sucks at anime

From the very first year (2003), Yuletide mods have asked for help with anime fandoms, been confused about anime fandoms, or made bad judgment calls about anime fandoms. They’ve fucked up on Superhero comics and plenty of other things over the years, but anime has been the most consistent (well, and JRPGs, but there’s so much overlap in those fic fandoms).

There was already bad feeling about this. There were years of bad feeling about this.

I.c. Where are the historians?

Academic study of fanficcy things pretty much got started with Textual Poachers and Enterprising Women. Other acafans who are well known to LJ and later Tumblr are people like Francesca Coppa who wrote a very nice summary of the history of Media Fandom. These are not the only academics who exist, these academics themselves have written about many other things, and by now, OTW’s own journal has covered a lot of other territory, but to this day I see complaints on Tumblr that “acafans” only care about K/S and oldschool slash fandom.

There were years of bad feeling about this as well.

I.d. What kind of fan was I?

Now, by the time OTW got started, I’d moseyed over to not only a lot of live action US TV but a lot of old-as-fuck US TV that is squarely in the Media Fandom camp. But once upon a time, I was a weeaboo hanging out with my weeaboo friends in college. I learned Japanese (sort of). I moved to Japan. Livin’ the weeaboo dream!

More importantly, I used to be a member of a lot of anime mailing lists back in the Yahoo Groups days. I didn’t realize what a cultural gap that would cause until the original works issue came up on AO3.

I.e. Anime Fandom, German-language Fandom, Original M/M

Once upon a time–namely in that Yahoo Groups era–there was an archive called Boys in Chains. It was where you found The Good Stuff™. Heavy kink and power exchange galore! It was extremely well known in the parts of fandom I was in, even if you weren’t on the associated mailing list. It contained lots of fic, but it also had lots of original work.

Around that same era, I was on a critique list called Crimson Ink, which was mixed fic and original. The “original slash” and “original yaoi” crowds mixed freely and were in fanfic spaces. Remember, this is like 2003. You’re never going to get your gay fantasy novel published in English in the US. A couple of fangirl presses started around then, but they died an ignominious death after their first print run.

Fanfiction.net used to allow original work before it spun that off into FictionPress. We forget this today, but if you were an early FFN person, the separation wasn’t so great either.

Meanwhile, German-language fandom was hanging out on sites like Animexx.de, a big-ass fic archive that prominently mentions also including original work. I have the impression that Spanish-language fandom was similar too.

Shousetsu Bang*Bang was founded in 2005. It was a webzine for original m/m, but it was entirely populated by fanfic fandom types.

In all of those kinds of spaces, there was a lot of “original” work that was kind of slash or BL-ish and seen as fannish if it was posted in the fannish space. These weren’t anime-only spaces. They were multifandom spaces where it was seen as obvious and normal that a couple of huge fandoms like Harry Potter would dominate but that everything else big would naturally be anime.

While fans from every background are everywhere, I found that the concentration of EFL fans living in Continental Europe, South America, and Asia was much higher in this kind of space, even the exclusively English language part of it, than in my US TV fandoms.

II. AO3 Early Adopters

AO3 went into closed beta in 2009. In 2010, it was open to the general public (albeit with the invitation queue it still has). But not everyone was interested yet. Just like fandom is loath to leave the dying, shambling mess of Tumblr, fandom was loath to leave dwindling LJ/DW circles or was happy enough on Fanfiction.net. I used to see a lot of posts like “Why are you guys trying to STEAL fanfic from the original! FFN is enough!”

I literally could not give away the invitations I had. No one wanted them.

So who was on AO3? Obviously enough, it was all of us who built it and our friends. So that means a bunch of oldschool Livejournal slashers coming from fandoms like Due South or Stargate Atlantis.

The queue was open. Anyone could make an account. Everyone was welcome. In theory…

But more and more, there started to be these posts about how “AO3 Hates Anime Fandom” and “FFN is for anime. AO3 is for Western fandoms.” and “If you guys actually wanted anime fandom on there, you’d invite us better and make us more welcome.”

At the time, I found these posts obnoxious. People aren’t purely in one sort of fandom or the other. No one was stopping anime fandom from making accounts. No one was banning anime fandom. If there wasn’t much from old fandoms, that was because old fandoms seldom move.

Things began to change. Trolls on FFN forced the Twilight porn writers out, creating enough fuss and brouhaha to mobilize people who would rather have stayed put. AO3 got big enough that randos found it by accident. Original work started to pop up, posted by people who’d never looked at the rules and had no idea it was not allowed.

III. History of AO3’s Policy

I had argued for allowing “original work” during the initial discussions about the ToS. On one side of this issue was me. On the other, everyone else on the committee.

I was overruled.

Open Door started importing old archives to save them. Boys in Chains was hugely important to fandom history from my point of view. It was slated to be imported… maybe. Except that Boys in Chains is half original. AO3 was happy to grandfather in those stories, but the final archive owner felt, quite rightly, that it would be unfair to tell half of the authors they were welcome in the new space while spitting on the other half.

I was pissed. I had been pissed since being overruled the first time. To me, the fact that it should be allowed was so blatantly obvious that it was hard to even explain why.

(To be honest, this difficulty in explaining why and the even greater difficulty in figuring out the source of that difficulty is what held the discussion back for so long. When every assumption on either side is completely opposite, it’s hard to communicate.)

I felt betrayed. It would be like if you helped build something, and everyone was suddenly like “Well, obviously, we can’t allow m/m. It’s not normal fanfic.”

So we discussed it again and, again, it was me vs. literally everyone else. And still the “AO3 is only for Western slash fandom” bitching rose in volume and more and more people complained of feeling excluded from the new fandom hub. Finally, the committee agreed to open the issue up for public comment and get some more input. I was a fool and neither wrote nor proofread the post. It went out phrasing the question as allowing “non fannish” work or something of that sort.

I was furious. The entire point of the whole debate was that I saw some original work, the original work that belongs on AO3, as inherently fannish. And now this had been presented to the AO3 audience as something completely different. Think pieces were popping up in the journals of everyone I knew about diluting AO3’s mission and how we needed to save AO3 from encroachment. Public opinion was very negative. That’s both because of how the post was phrased and because OTW die hards at the time were mostly from the same fannish background. This tidal wave of negativity meant that there was virtually no chance of changing this poisonous rule. And if the rule didn’t change, the people who wanted the rule change were never going to show up to explain why it mattered.

If you’ve been reading my tumblr, I think you can guess what happened next.

I posted a long post to my Dreamwidth. It was a masterwork of passive aggression. In it, I wrung my hands about how simply tragic it would be if AO3 had to delete all of the original work… like anthropomorfic.

Now, I think anthropomorfic counts as fanfic as much as anything else, but I also knew that it fails most rigorous “based on a canon” type definitions of fic and, more importantly, it’s a favorite Yuletide fandom of many of the people on the side that wanted to ban original work.

That’s a nice fandom of yours. It would be a pity if something happened to it.

Yup. Passive aggressive blackmail. Go me. Suddenly, there was a lot of awkward backtracking and confused running in circles in various journals. The committee agreed to table the idea for a while but not rule out the idea of allowing original works in the future. We agreed to halt all deletions of original work. If a fan posted it, the Abuse Committee (which I was also head of at the time) would not delete that work even though it was technically against the rules.

Time passed. The people on the negative side got tired. I wanted off that committee and had wanted off for ages, but I was damned if I was going to leave before ramming through this piece of policy. Grudgematch till I die! (Look, I never said I wasn’t a wanker.)

After a while, some other fans came forward with more types of “original work” as evidence that it should be allowed. These were from parts of fandom none of us on the committee knew a damn thing about.

This new evidence combined with the gradual accretion of original stuff on AO3 without the sky falling eventually led us to quietly rule Original Work a valid fandom. There was never even a big announcement post. I slipped a word to the Boys in Chains mod myself.

IV. What Were They So Afraid Of Anyway?

So why were people so resistant? Seems like a dick move, right?

Not exactly.

I mean, I was enraged and waged a one-woman war to change the rules, but the other side wasn’t nuts. The objections were usually the following:

I just don’t get why it would be allowed. It never was in my fannish spaces.

Most of our members don’t want this.

Most of the examples of things that ought to be included are m/m. We are privileging m/m if we allow it, and AO3 already has a m/m-centric reputation that can feel exclusionary to some fans.

AO3 is a young, shaky platform that can barely handle the load and content we already have. If we open to original work, we’ll be opening the floodgates. The volume of posting will be so high, it will drown out the fic we’re actually here to protect.

Protecting stuff that doesn’t need protection because it’s not an IP issue would dilute OTW’s mission.

If we allow it, idiots will try to turn AO3 into advertising space, posting only the first chapter and a link to where you can pay to read the rest.

If we add another category of text before we add fan art, that’s a slap in the face of the fan artists we are already failing.

These arguments all make perfect sense in context.

Obvously, the issue with the first two is that different fannish communities have different norms. I knew that a very large community disagreed with the then current AO3 policy, but since so few of them were around to comment, it seemed like a tiny fringe minority.

The m/m thing is… complex. M/M content with zero IP issues is at risk. It is always at risk in a way that even f/f is not (though f/f is also always at risk). Asking for m/m to be exactly equivalent to f/f or m/f in numbers, tropes, whatever is ignoring the historical realities. In our current moment of queer activism in the West, we treat all types of queerness as part of one community with one set of goals, but once you get to culture and art or even more specific activism, this forced homogenization is neither useful nor healthy.

OTOH, AO3 really did have PR problems related to the perception that we gave m/m fandom the kid glove treatment. That objection wasn’t coming from nowhere.

AO3 was shaky. It was tiny when I first brought up this argument. Hell, it wasn’t even in closed beta the first time we discussed this. Part of what made the quiet rules change possible was AO3 organically getting much bigger and OTW having to buy many more servers for unrelated reasons.

The “floodgates” thing was put to rest by tacitly allowing original work before the rules change. We had a period to study how fans actually behaved, and as I predicted, only a small amount of original work got posted. It was indeed mostly things like original BL-ish stories or original work that had been part of a mixed original/fic fest, exchange, zine, etc. Currently, the “Original Work” fandom on AO3 only has 76,348 works. That’s pretty big compared to individual fandoms but tiny compared to AO3’s current size.

The commercial argument was spurious because commercial spam had been against the rules from the very beginning. OH THE IRONY that nowadays AO3 has all these idiots trying to post the first chapter of their fanfic and then direct you to where you can buy the rest.

AO3 has plenty of fanfic of public domain works. One of the problems with gatekeeping original work is that any way you try to distinguish it (not based on a specific canon, not an IP issue, etc.) will apply to some set of obviously allowable fandoms.

As for fan art… OTW has failed fan artists. They needed protection as much as or even more than fic writers. Just look at Tumblr! If we had succeeded at making DeviantArt but allowing boners, fan art fandom could have been safe all these years. Or when Tumblr inevitably shat the bed, we could have scooped up all those people instead of them scattering to twitter and god knows where.

OTW has failed vidders too, at least in terms of preservation. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. Other major people from like the first Board and shit have discussed this with me offline. Doing some kind of vidding project, possibly outside of OTW is on a lot of our to-do lists. But at least one of OTW’s biggest victories has been that copyright exemption. OTW has demonstrably done really positive things for vidders that other organizations and sites have not. As a vidder, I never expected to see good hosting for the actual video files, and I’m quite content.

But fan artists… yeah. That argument makes sense at least from a place of frustration.

BTW, for the love of god, if you’re a n00b to OTW stuff, please do not reblog this post excitedly telling me that hosting fan art is on OTW’s road map, so yay, good news. Someone always does that, and it’s so irritating. I haven’t been involved in OTW in years, but I used to be, and I know what is on the roadmap. The couple of you who do heavy lifting on sysadmin and coding and policy things are welcome to weigh in as usual. I know none of us like that we can’t host fan art. It’s not what we intended.

Nonetheless, I found this argument to be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If we can save more text now without losing much of anything, we should do it. The fact that we’re fucking up on the fan art front is not a reason to spread the misery around.

V. Is “Original” the Opposite of “Fanfic”?

Okay, so that tl;dr above is why “BNFs” were on one side and “nobodies” were on the other. BNFs from one cultural background founded OTW. BNFs from the other cultural background weren’t even aware that the debate was going on.

But what was the underlying philosophical problem in even having the conversation?

It took me a long time, but I finally worked it out: We had two completely different ways of categorizing writing, and they were so baked into how we phrased questions that everything ended up being unanswerable to the other side. Here is what I came up with:

Schema 1

Fanfic - based on someone else’s IP

Original Work - the opposite

Schema 2

Non-Fannish Work - School essays, stories you are writing to try to sell to a mainstream publisher

Fannish Work Type 1 - based on other people’s characters directly (i.e. fanfic) Type 2 - based on tropes or whatever (“original slash” and the like)

Now, in the current moment when half of Tumblr just got into Chinese webnovels and the m/m ebook industry is thriving in English, original, tropey, BL-ish work is no longer different from “things I am trying to sell”. But this is how the divide was circa 2005 on fannish websites, and it’s the divide that was driving this internal OTW debate.

VI. Let’s Summarize the Camps One More Time

So, again, the debate makes perfect sense if you understand who was involved.

On the mainstream “But that’s not fanfic? I’m confused?” side:

Big US TV fandoms in English

Fandom historians of K/S–>buddy cop slash–>SGA, etc.

Americans

On the other side:

Anime fandom

“Original slash” fandom that had already been chased off of everywhere

People upset that AO3 wasn’t farther on translating the interface and supporting non-English language fandom.

People upset about US-centrism in fandom

Yes, I am very white, very American, and by now very into old buddy cop shows, but this was basically how the breakdown worked. It meant that something that looked like a minor quibble to one side was really, really not.

#fandom history #fandom meta #original work #cowboyformitski

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septiembrre · 3 years ago

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just reread So I Come To You My Love and i am soft!!! they're awkward, smitten teens trapped in the bodies of adults

Awwwww!!!!! THANK YOU for rereading!!!! So I Come To You My Love was so softtt and so much fun to write. To start off this post, here's the song I listened to a bunch when I wrote it.

I love thinking about Beth and Ruby on the plane. I had this fantasy of them away together on a trip and finally having rest and non-stressful adventures. I figured they'd be typical Americans and want to go somewhere romanticized like Paris (especially bc it seems like a place that American Black folk have identified is a relatively comfortable and safe place to travel). Like can you imagine them doing all the cute touristy things in Paris? Walking about looking gorgeous and eating bomb food? MY HEART.

One day when I have more time, I want to do a vacation series where everyone gets to take a break. They deserve it. I also really want to write Brio on a beach.

Lmao, I'm just going to quote an enormous, self-indulgent passage now:

But, historically it had unfolded the other way around. There had never been a precedent of Beth being the one to smoke bomb out for a few weeks...

Of course, she wasn’t smoke bombing anywhere, slipping away into the ether. This was a long-planned vacation, months in the making, decades in the dreaming. There had been careful plotting to adjust the slack in the printing schedule and there had been deliberate calendering with the children’s summer activities. And well, Rio knew where to find her -- both where her rental was in Paris and where she more permanently lived (with him).

And it’s not like they hadn’t talked every morning and every night and sometimes in between of these past three weeks

God, she feels clingy and codependent and too much like her teenagers. Ruby had called Stan half as much.

And she’s still itchy.

…And kind of oily now?

She keeps scratching at a spot on one of her shoulders, at her palms, blotting at her face.

The people around her are going to think she has some sort of disease.

Except for Ruby, who knows.

So, Beth sits there, tapping, scratching, sighing into the void of time.

And it shouldn’t be so much of a surprise when a little more than halfway through the flight, Ruby’s hand emerges from its blanket cocoon to clamp down on Beth’s jiggling leg. Regardless, Beth all but levitates a foot into the air, gasping.

“Chill out.”

I loved writing this part!!!! Ha, and now I have it as a personal writing headcanon that I like for Beth to startle, and i always have it in the first drafts of everything (and then i write out bc i have control!!!) and I love writing her children startling just like her.

Oh my god, I'm direct quoting the whole thing now. I tried to argue to sothischickshe a while back that AO3 should allow us to annotate or endnote fics to be able to add like a director's comments feature on it. Oh well!

“So… message him again?”

Beth cants her head low, letting her hair fall to obscure her face.

“He’s being… you know how he is.”

“I… do but I’m not sure I want to know what that means.” Ruby pauses, sitting with it. “Oh my god.” She clamps her hand down again, this time on Beth’s wrist. “Does he want you to take naked pictures in the bathroom?”

Beth tries to snatch her arm away, flailing in the seat.

“What if Delta sees your nudes?! Please, tell me you did not do that in that sardine box ten feet away from me, Elizabeth. Marks.”

“I didn’t. I would never.”

Someone a row over shushes them.

Ruby relinquishes her grip to press at her eyebrows. “Y’all are too much.”

Beth shrugs. “He really liked those caftans we bought at that boutique.”

Ugh, they're CUTEEEEE!!! I love the lead trio, but damn if just wouldn't love more one-on-one Ruby & Beth bff scenes. Beth has a particular type of emotional vulnerability with Ruby, and I love them being the same age and having come up together.

And, in regards, to Brio~~ like you know our guy was like mad texting the whole time they were apart. He tried to play it kind of cool for the first few days, wanted to let B have her space, but they end up getting all itchy sleeping apart and it just ~d e v o l v e s. He's like already thinking about when they would get to have their own vacation together, looking up the plane tickets.

I don't imagine them being ridiculously unboundaried about the calling but they're navigating a more clingy relationship stage and they finally have reason to not be immediately near and they miss each other. Beth is having this really wonderful time with her friend, but during her downtime she wants to call the person she's romantically in love with and eagerly share all the details. I enjoyed imagining a Beth who is slipping into the territory where she has the comfort-level of being able to pick up the phone without overthinking it and call Rio (ala her sister and Ruby). And Then starting to realize that she has that comfort and being like O H. D:

And of course, I loved writing the kiss. My partner and I used to do long-distance at the beginning of our relationship. Even now that we have lived with each other for many years, when we're apart, I really look forward to that first kiss and I liked sharing that with Brio. Especially, as a couple that has historically~~ textually~~ not done much kissing.

I'm a sucker for the Big Romance kiss.

Oh, god. Sorry for talking your ear off but let me know if you have any questions about it! I'm also very happy to take prompts in that universe.

#my writing #my fic #ugh i think i need to think of a proper tag for this #so i come to you my love

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qqueenofhades · 4 years ago

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How was yellow journalism at the turn of the 19th century different then the fake news and media insanity we see today? Do you know? It seems like this has been going on for a really long time.

And you would be correct, because this has in fact been going on for a very long time (indeed, much further back than the 19th century) and is essentially the basic practice of history: figuring out how to understand, vet, classify, believe, and treat the stories that humans tell about themselves. Or as that musical that came out the other day put it: “you have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” We’re all just telling stories about things constantly, and we all want people to believe our story and treat it as the best version. Some of these stories are more fictional (and more harmful) than others, but it’s been going on for as long as there have been people.

(Or: “A Brief History of Fake News” follows below. If it doesn’t make sense, blame the fact that I had to rewrite half of it after Tumblr ate it.)

Globalization and the 24-hour news media has made it possible for “fake news” narratives to become transnational: in other words, no matter where you are in the world or what country you’re originally from, you can use some of the same content, techniques, arguments, or beliefs. For example, coronavirus deniers, no matter where they are in the world, can use the same stable of arguments: it’s fake, it’s a Chinese lab conspiracy, it’s a political stunt, it’s not that bad, you shouldn’t wear a mask, etc. They are drawing from the same essential pool of content and replicating the same themes in their particular contexts. Obviously, everyone has instant access to these narratives now and we are seeing the large-scale and damaging effects, because they can be amplified to a degree unheard-of in human history thanks to social media, TV, phones, etc, but also: it’s what humans have been doing since, well, forever.

A caveat I often have to give undergraduate students, when introducing them to medieval chronicle sources, is that they’re subjective -- that is, they’re more interested in promoting one individual, kingdom, religious viewpoint, version of events, etc, rather than aiming for an inclusive and “real” version of how things went by taking into account the experiences and arguments of all sides. This is obviously disingenuous, because it suggests that modern historians don’t do this, that they just objectively report “real facts” and there is no human bias or agenda at work in producing the result. This reflects the influence of Leopold von Ranke, a 19th-century German historian who is often viewed as the founder of the modern critical source-based historiographical method. He was a proponent of the idea that historians had to “describe the past as it actually happened,” i.e. they had to select the correct facts and build an objective narrative so that people could discover the One True Version of reality. Of course, you may realize that you.... can’t actually do that.

Historians still have to select which facts they report, how a “fact” is constructed to start with, what methodology they use, what conclusions they draw, what they focus on, what moral lessons or overall takeaways they present for their audience, etc. This reflects the 19th century’s effort to make history similar to hard science: they liked the idea that there was one single methodology that would reveal an empirically provable single ideal, that there was no human agency or bias that would influence this narrative, and the facts would magically assemble themselves into one central version that everyone would agree upon. Except this still isn’t and has never been the way it works. Historians, as human agents, mediate and manage and influence the facts they use and the conclusions they draw from sources, and it’s our job to figure out which ones are more valid and which ones are not. It’s a system of collective memory, and as I’ve said before, that collective memory is always particularly susceptible to what people (especially the rich and powerful people, who install the version of history that the rest of us learn) want to remember. This rarely includes their flaws, or things that show them to be wrong, or any challenge to their status.

Prior to the invention of film/TV/audiovisual methods in the 19th century (and since they didn’t become commercial or widespread until the 20th), everything we know about human history before that, we know because someone wrote it down. In the Western tradition, the ancient Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides are often viewed as the “fathers” of history, because they deliberately assembled a curation of (allegedly) empirical facts in a constructed narrative with a self-stated historiographical purpose. They also make use of what, in fancy academic-speak, we might call the “topos of authority.” Every single historian has been aware that they have to provide some way for their reader to independently verify their content, or decide to believe what they’re saying against a competing version. In the olden days, they often did this by self-certifying: “I swear that everything I write here is true/I heard only from wise and trustworthy people/I spoke to an eyewitness of these events/I read a book by such-and-such authority.” But just because they SAY these things doesn’t mean they’re true, and no modern historian can take this at face value: they can’t just say, “well, my source said they were telling the truth, so that’s good enough for me.” They have to supplant with other accounts, they have to perform textual criticism and close reading, they have to find other pieces of evidence to compare. Because in a sense, all of history might be fake news. We just have to figure out which parts those are, and sometimes that’s not even the point, because it’s impossible.

For example: take the sixth-century Byzantine court historian Procopius, who wrote about the reigns of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian (r. 527-65) and Empress Theodora (r. 527-48). All of his official accounts of them are largely positive and flattering. But Procopius is probably best known for a work called the Secret History, where he rips into them as horrible awful people, relates lurid sexual scandals (especially about Theodora), dishes on all the bad things they did behind the scenes, so on and etc. This means that historians have been arguing ever since about which versions of Justinian and Theodora -- indeed, Procopius’s own versions of them -- we’re supposed to believe. If you want to read the Secret History, which you can do at the link above and which you should because it has amusing chapter titles like “Proving That Justinian and Theodora Were Actually Fiends in Human Form” and “How Justinian Killed a Trillion People,” you’ll come across this unrelentingly negative depiction of them, and... what? Is this a (somewhat) accurate account of the darker side of Justinian and Theodora’s bad behavior, written by an embittered Procopius after he fell out of royal favor? Is it just a total hatchet job? Was it written purely in case there was a palace coup, so Procopius could hand it to the new emperor and be like “see, I totally didn’t like those losers either, you can rely on me” and didn’t represent his actual views on the imperial couple at all? You can already see the problem if the idea is, a la von Ranke, to prove “what really happened.” Almost nobody treats the Secret History as a straightforward factual document, but they also disagree about how truthful it is, why, for what reasons, and whether it is, in fact, even a History per se.

To return (belatedly) to the idea of newspapers and yellow journalism particularly. I would say that there was no more significant event in all of human history (well, maybe a few, but not many) than the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. It instantly and permanently transformed the way humans acquired, stored, recalled, and learned knowledge, and it lasted (and is still lasting) even in the face of smartphones and internet. Once books were no longer rare, labor-intensive, and expensive, their use exploded, it became standard practice to publish your research (by the sixteenth century, this was already happening), to learn from a book, to use other books in constructing your knowledge, and thus to encounter these narratives. The other architecture of a culture of public and general literacy developed along with it, until it was the primary medium in which all people, not just the rich and educated, learned about things. Newspapers and books and pamphlets and other printed material intensely drove the revolutions of the eighteenth century, both in America and in Europe. And obviously, these weren’t trying to tell “both sides of the story.” It became standard practice to publish your manifestos, your papers, your essays and arguments, all your supporting documents, and you were trying to convince people to your side for concrete political reasons.

So by the time you get to the 19th century, you’ve had literal CENTURIES of people deciding what they want to believe, what’s beneficial for them to believe, their viewpoint on the world, etc. Except as we discussed above re: our friend Leopold von Ranke, the 19th century develops the idea of “scientific objectivity.” Of course, in the social sciences, this often gets applied (pause for sighing) to support the idea that there is a real racial hierarchy, that western European white men are the best not because they said so, but because it’s science, it’s provable, it’s not just an opinion, It Is Trufax. Newspapers, books, and other printed material are widely available to everyone, and the 19th century is making claims to universal truth that can be discovered and applied in all disciplines, but which is just a continuation of the same subjective storytelling as before, now elevated to the status of Unimpeachable Truth. Yellow journalism isn’t really that different from what humans have always done in crafting a narrative that supports their purposes and the story they want to tell (or that they think will sell papers, because people have an endless appetite for secrets, scandals, and drama, especially if they think there is a conspiracy, real or fake, to hide it from them). They just have different tools for doing it. Of course in the 21st century, we now have journalistic ethics and a set of standards and codes of conduct for how you’re supposed to write these things, and we have respected publications that do all that, but we also still have tabloid media, when the relationship with the facts is... tenuous, at best. These institutions and tendencies never go away. They just evolve.

I realize that this was a long and rather dull ramble about the origins of historiography, but the point is this: “fake news” is literally as old as humanity and history itself, and humans have always been predisposed to select and believe the narrative that personally benefits them, fits with their ideology, makes sense of events in the way they feel is most compelling, and so on. It’s just now in the hyperconnected 21st century, “fake news” can go instantly around the globe and be exposed to anyone with an internet connection. This is not helped, as I talked about in my “death of expertise” ask, by a public forum where everybody’s contributions supposedly have to be treated “equally,” in the name of “fairness,” no matter whether someone knows anything about the topic or not. So the impact of this tendency to believe whatever the hell anyone wants has been magnified far past what has ever been the case in history before, because no matter what someone wrote or believed in the pre-internet era, they didn’t have the multi-million-exponential ability to reach absolutely everybody at once. Even print books have to be printed, circulated, purchased, read, etc, and that takes time and money, rather than just instantly having it appear on your smartphone. And we are obviously seeing the real-world consequences of that as a result.

#history #medieval history #historiography #history of literacy #long post #anonymous

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naruhearts · 6 years ago

Text

14x18 First Watch Thoughts: Mary Winchester the Mirror, TFW and Destiel

**FLAILS**

My thoughts are practically incoherent because I’m having BIG FEELS right now...VERY big feels re: TFW/Destiel narratives.

I am SUPER glad Berens was the one who penned Mary’s death!! The episode was just well-done all around from start to finish and intensely executed, with the proper solid balance of angst, emotional insight from the characters placed inside Mary’s cathartic contextual role, and the consistent reiteration of Mary as TFW’s overall Parental Catharsis in 14x18′s storytelling (and S12-14′s whole parental premise in conjunction with John Winchester’s ghost).

Mary was portrayed as the singular contrasting foil to TFW’s individual and combined arcs. Absence was, obviously, a core theme, with Mary’s absence -- her death -- playing out as A. familial purpose (accountability and her death as the impetus to work together --> forgive each other, forgive yourself), B. self-purpose (self-realization via Jack: what did I do? Why did I do it? Why do we do things?), and C. romantic purpose on the Dean/Cas front.

Let me explain C. -- well, WE BEEN KNEW. The metasphere wrote about this (my post x).

Dean was HEAVILY subtextually framed as the angry spouse undergoing a rough patch with Cas over Mary’s death (the tension, juxtaposed by sad orchestral strings and soft lighting, Dean lashing out at Cas, romantic framing via Dean’s back turned to Cas, their interactions holding frustration yet still underpinned by certain tenderness etc *sighhhhh*) and Dean continuing down the route of giving Cas, not Sam, frosty shoulders -- emphasized by the romantic visual framing of space between them e.g. Sam preventing Cas from comforting Dean during Mary’s funeral, backs again facing each other, Dean and Cas interacting sparsely, Dean bitter and disengaged, Cas longing for forgiveness from Dean, Sam as the overt brother caught in the middle as he embodies the role of mediator and stable thinker for both of them etc -- just strengthens my belief that Destiel is going to experience another (hopefully) intense romance-coded confrontation as intense as the one they had in the cabin -- one that leads up to a lover’s make-up or some kind of emotional breakthrough/realization which has Cas happy enough to be taken by the Empty (remember, DEAN STILL DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT CAS’ DEAL. Cas’ life to save his son’s life, harking back to Dean’s own fatherly self-sacrificial deal by saying Yes to Michael. He is utterly unaware that he’ll lose Cas) and it’s a double punch here, because Dean will realize how stupid he is for not appreciating Cas -- more accurately, trying to be mutually transparent and honest with him (he has, though, and he’s made leaps and bounds) before it’s too late but failing (final regression before progression). He does appreciate Cas, and Cas means more to him than anyone could ever describe *points at his Mind!Bar 14x10* yet their love languages still don’t align. IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START ALL OVER AGAIN, DEAN! 14x19 is written by BL so I additionally hope the D/C subtext from this point onwards works in our favour!!

As I said in above and in my liveblog posts, a summary:

The differences in Dean’s grieving are a COMPLETE visual comparison to 12x23, complete with overhead 📸 shots and differing funeral pyre scenes: when he grieved over Cas, he was alone, kneeling on the ground, and was blatantly numb/emotionally incapacitated – Dean mourned the loss of his lover. When he’s grieving Mary, Sam is by his side. Brothers mourning the loss of their mother. Romantic vs familial.

Overt romance-coded parallels with Sam/Rowena keeping constant contact just like Dean/Cas do both offscreen and onscreen

Sam telling Dean IT WASN’T JUST CAS and his own emotional pull in this ep as expressing accountability for TFW’s actions in general – besides internalizing/talking about the self-guilt, shame, and the inevitable pain of losing people despite saving people (also re: the 🔑 theme of doing the wrong, stupid thing for the right reasons) -- was character development on a marvelous scale. Dean was enlightened and began to admit it himself. Honest, open words. Dean and Cas should learn from him!!

Cas was absolutely humanized, subsuming the Winchester Way of Bringing Family Back, and he additionally evoked honesty/an emotional justification while admitting his mistakes and again representing FAITH: faith in Jack narratively linked to FAITH IN HIMSELF and the season-long theme of believing there’s another way -- in believing that good things shall come. As he appropriately told Anael last episode -- loneliness is a construct misconstrued by her; not being in one’s physical presence doesn’t mean they aren’t there -- they are there. They are there for you. Narrative symmetry with 14x17′s presence of emotional acknowledgement despite physical absence re: God (and TFW; just because Cas wasn’t with the Winchesters did not mean he loved them any less) vs 14x18′s absence of full-frontal communication despite physical presence re: Dean and Cas/TFW (being physically present also entails being emotionally present through HONESTY). Berens interlinked the subtext. Negative spaces are being filled. And there’s also an Evil/dark dimension added to this Presence vs Absence commentary: Lucifer’s a visage in Jack’s mind, just like Sam. Jack’s soullessness has come to a psychological crux. He’s teeter-tottering – tried desperately to bring Mary back, and now he might have fucked up the natural order (if BTS pics of zombies in 14x20 is linked to this). Furthermore:

(*clutches chest* There’s the heartbreaking spousal-coded visual narrative.)

Oh, Cas...Jack is BOTH good and evil. This is the intrinsic dualism of human nature. It’s what makes Jack human. And goodness involves badness.

CAS: [Jack] was good for us. Indeed, we know he was. The unhealthily-codependent-abusive notion of family TFW used to possess (where their overarching parental issues -- Chuck’s absence, John’s abuse and Mary’s absence -- crippled their early formative growth, extending into decades) was deconstructed and rebuilt in healthier ways. Being a parent to Jack offset their true capabilities/qualities: FAITH (Cas), HOPE (Sam), and LOVE (Dean), alongside all the stickiness that came with his birth. By direct association, Cas learned (is learning) how to believe in himself. Sam learned (is learning) how to hope in himself. Dean learned (is learning) how to love himself. Mental/emotional release from their internal chains took place (will come to its final culmination in S15). In other words, Jack the Unifying TFW Mirror -- like Mary -- was the great interpersonal conduit for (a Jesus-figure-representation) honesty, appreciation (spending time with your loved ones), positive vs negative self-process, and self-awareness. Keep in mind that Jack has characteristically taken the place of Dean, Cas and Sam’s own dark arcs (Soulless!Sam, in particular) with what looks like a Godstiel mirror in 14x19 -- he’s literally becoming textualized as TFW’s mirror -- and, like his parents, he is going to make his independent (wayward) choices and question the primacy of human nature: good, evil, and the grey in-between. Will he listen to his head or his heart? Most of all, Jack taught them that HuntingTM is filled with pain, horror, and death, but genuine purpose lies beyond it. The lives they live are also innumerably interlinked with joy and happiness. These positive things aren’t as sparse as they think: they have each other.

Mary Winchester is ⚰️ and resides in Heaven (her death successfully made me emotional and packed a deep personal punch; the black and white flashbacks interspersed throughout 14x18 relative to Mary’s influence on TFW was A++). She disappeared right when TFW’s arcs came together to display character progression. Her purpose – pushing TFW to engage in self-introspection, personal growth, and honesty with the Self and others – is done.

Mary, the Cas mirror, carved M.W. into the table with S.W and D.W. You know who should be next, right? CASTIEL W. (and Jack W.) (recall that in 14x17, Mary relayed to Dean that she treasured and enjoyed her time with him and Sam -- channeling Cas’ 14x12 farewell speech. Mary has always embodied LOVE, both romantic and familial, with the great virtue of honesty, and Dean, by proxy, has been telling his family he loves them. Again, who is the next family member he’ll say I LOVE YOU to? What do Dean and Cas WANT? Time to answer this question!!)

WE HAVE COME FULL CIRCLE. Narrative cyclism, y’all. Mary and John Winchester are finally at ✌️, and by so doing, TFW will experience emotional/personal/psychological ✌️ as they leave their past behind to create their own optimistic self-actualized future. THERE’LL BE GENUINE PEACE WHEN YOU ARE DONE.

TFW MUST TALK

I mean, I’ll probably reblog this with new thoughts during the next few days, but yes, ENDGAME’S UPON US, and all the extensive meta regarding Dabb Era Love and...Love, Unity, Family, Honesty, the centrality of interpersonal relationships and Reconciliation of the Past & Future since Season New Beginnings 12/13 over Season Who Am I 14 should be realized in the final two ANGST-filled eps. TL;DR a gigantic multilayered soup of character-positive/relationship growth-positive meta coming to fruition for the main plot.

Berens has killed us all. 14x18 is one of my favourite Emotion-centric episodes yet!

RATING: 10/10

Thank you for reading my sloppier-than-usual word-vomit!

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oscopelabs · 5 years ago

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The Murder Artist: Alfred Hitchcock At The End Of His Rope by Alice Stoehr

“Rope was an interesting technical experiment that I was lucky and happy to be a part of, but I don’t think it was one of Hitchcock’s better films.” So wrote Farley Granger, one of its two stars, in his memoir Include Me Out. The actor was in his early twenties when the Master of Suspense plucked him from Samuel Goldwyn’s roster. He’d star in the first production from the director’s new Transatlantic Pictures as Phillip Morgan, a pianist and co-conspirator in murder. John Dall would play his partner, homicidal mastermind Brandon Shaw. Granger had the stiff pout to Dall’s trembling smirk.

The “interesting technical experiment” was Hitchcock’s decision to shoot the film, adapted from a twenty-year-old English play, as a series of 10-minute shots stitched together into a simulated feature-length take. This allowed him to retain the stage’s spatial and temporal unities while guiding the audience with the camera’s eye. In the process, he’d embed a host of meta-textual and erotic nuances within the sinister mise-en-scène. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents (Granger’s boyfriend, for a time) updated the play’s fictionalized account of Chicagoan thrill killers Leopold and Loeb to a penthouse in late ‘40s Manhattan. There, Phillip strangles the duo’s friend David—his scream behind a curtain opens the film—immediately prior to a dinner party where they’ll serve pâté atop the box that serves as his coffin. It’s a morbid premise for a comedy of manners, and Brandon taunts his guests throughout the evening. (Asked if it’s someone’s birthday, he coyly replies, “It’s, uh, really almost the opposite.”)

Granger deemed the film lesser Hitchcock due to two limitations. One was the sheer repetition and exact blocking demanded by its formal conceit, the other the Production Code’s blanket ban on “sex perversion,” which meant tiptoeing around the fact that Brandon and Phillip—like their real-life inspirations and, to some degree, Rope’s leading men—were gay. That stringent homophobia forced Hitchcock and Laurents to convey their sexuality through ambiguity and implication; the director would use similar tactics to adapt queer writers like Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith. (“Hitchcock confessed that he actually enjoyed his negotiations with [Code honcho Joseph] Breen,” notes Thomas Doherty in the book Hollywood’s Censor. “The spirited give-and-take, said Hitchcock, possessed all the thrill of competitive horse trading.”) The nature of the characters’ relationship is hardly subtext: Rope starts with their orgasmic shudder over David’s death, then labored panting after which Brandon pulls out a cigarette and lets in some light. A few minutes later, Brandon strokes the neck of a champagne bottle; Phillip asks how he felt during the act, and he gasps “tremendously exhilarated.”

Like Brandon’s hints about the murder, the homosexuality on display is surprisingly explicit if an audience can decode it. The whole film pivots around their partnership, both criminal and domestic. In an impish bit of conflation, their scheme even stands in for “the love that dare not speak its name,” with David’s body acting as a fetish object in a sexual game no one else can perceive. The guests, as Brandon puts it, are “a dull crew,” “those idiots” who include David’s father and aunt, played by London theater veterans Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier. Joan Chandler and Douglas Dick, both a couple years into what would be modest careers, play David’s fiancée Janet and her ex Kenneth. Character actress Edith Evanson appears as housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, a prototype for Thelma Ritter’s Stella in Rear Window, and a top-billed James Stewart is Rupert Cadell, who once mentored the murderers in arcane philosophy.

This was the first of Stewart’s four collaborations with Hitchcock. It cast the actor against type not as a romantic hero but as an observer and provocateur, his gaze shrewd, his dialogue heavy with irony. The role presaged his work in the ‘50s, with Mann rather than Capra, emphasizing psychology over ideology. Rupert, like L.B. Jeffries or Scottie Ferguson, is rooting out a crime, and in so doing comes to seem more loathsome than the villains themselves. “Murder is—or should be—an art,” he lectures midway through Rope, eyebrow arched, martini glass in hand. “Not one of the seven lively perhaps, but an art nevertheless.” Half an hour in real time later, having seen David’s body, he flies into a moralizing monologue: “You’ve given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of!” It takes up the last several minutes of the film, with Rupert snarling from deep in his righteous indignation, “Did you think you were God, Brandon?”

Stewart was a master of sputtering, impassioned oratory, and his facility for it renders Rupert’s hypocrisy especially stark. He taught these murderers; he can’t just shrug off his culpability. The Code decreed that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, or sin.” Every transgression reaps a punishment. The ending of Rope abides by the letter of this law, as Rupert fires several shots into the night, drawing a police siren toward the building. He sits, deflated, while Phillip plays piano and Brandon has one last drink. But none of David’s loved ones get to excoriate his killers. The one man here with no integrity, no moral authority, is the one who gets the final, self-flagellating word.

The Code forbade throwing sympathy to the side of sin, but if Hitchcock meant any character in Rope as his stand-in, it was Brandon, not Rupert. The top to Phillip’s bottom, he’s the director of the play within a film. He’s storyboarded it to perfection. Janet, realizing he’s toying with her, cries that he’s incapable of just throwing a party. “No, you’d have to add something that appealed to your warped sense of humor!” Hitchcock, who’d built a corpus of corpses, must have gotten a chuckle from that line. Whereas Phillip fears discovery, Brandon puts symbolism above pragmatism, prioritizing what Phillip dubs his “neat little touches.” He needs to have dinner on the chest, the murder weapon tied around antique books, and his surrogate father Rupert in attendance, much as the film’s director needed to shoot in long takes—not because it’s pragmatic, but because it’s beautiful. He went to great lengths for verisimilar beauty here, as Steven Jacobs details in The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Miniatures in the three-dimensional cyclorama seen through the broad penthouse window were wired and connected to a ‘light organ’ that allowed for the gradual activation of the skyline’s thousands of lights and hundreds of neon signs. Meanwhile, spun-glass clouds were shifted by technicians from right to left during moments when the camera turned away from the window.

Jacobs notes as well that a painting by Fidelio Ponce de León hanging on Brandon and Phillip’s wall actually belonged to the director and had previously hung in his own home. Rope is avant-garde art wrapped in a bourgeois thriller, about avant-garde art wrapped in a dinner party, pushing moral and aesthetic boundaries while collapsing any distinction between the two. In this nested construction, Brandon the murder artist becomes a figure of auto-critique or perhaps apologia. Did you think you were God, Alfred? By 1948, he’d already made dozens of films, often obliquely about sex and violence, across decades and continents. He’d become the world champion sick joke raconteur. Rope is a reckoning with the ethics of his genre.

By 1948, the world had changed. A few years earlier, Hitchcock’s friend (and Rope co-producer) Sidney Bernstein had asked him to advise on a film about Germany’s newly liberated concentration camps. As Kay Gladstone writes in Holocaust and the Moving Image, Hitchcock worried that “tricky editing” would let skeptics read its footage as fraudulent and asked the editors “to use as far as possible long shots and panning shots with no cuts.” The director took his own counsel to heart.

Rope was also his first color film, the start of his fascination with dull palettes. (A quarter-century later he’d limn Frenzy’s London with every shade of beige.) Genteel browns and grays dominate the penthouse, the hues of men’s suits. Only after nightfall does the apartment glow with, in Jacobs’ phrasing, “the expressive possibilities of urban neon light.” The dinner party takes place at the crest of postwar modernity, a world away from the camps. Here, among the East Coast intelligentsia, murder’s merely a thought experiment. When David’s father mentions Hitler, Brandon dismisses him as “a paranoiac savage.” Yet even in polite society, the evening can begin with a secret killing and end with that iniquity brought to light. “Perhaps what is called civilization is hypocrisy,” says Brandon. “Perhaps,” David’s father concedes.

In 1948, the world was changing. That year saw the publication of Gore Vidal’s landmark gay novel The City and the Pillar and the first of the Kinsey Reports. Antonioni was a documentarian about to make his first feature; Truffaut was a delinquent catching Hitchcock movies at the Cinémathèque. Rope’s amorality and pitch-black humor augur a world and a cinema that were yet to come. It’s thorny gay art through a straight auteur. The film’s last thirty seconds show Rupert’s back to the camera while Brandon sips his cocktail and Phillip plays a tune, the trio lit by flashing neon. In this denouement lie decadence and damnation, art and death, the Code-closeted past and a disaffected future.

#alfred hitchcock #rope film #rope movie #hitchcock #james stewart #farley granger #john dall #gore vidal #michelangelo antonioni #francois truffaut #frenzy film #the wrong house: the architecture of alfred hitchcock #musings #film writing #film essay #oscilloscope laboratories #o-scope labs #adam yauch #Beastie Boys

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oko-ideas · 5 years ago

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My Journal: My Journey

Week 1: Wednesday, September 4, 2019

The more you know the more you know you don’t know - Aristotle

I arrived in Canada on August 10, 2019 and had been looking forward to another exciting chapter in my education. The first class for this course GSE 510: Academic Reading and Writing was on September 4, 2019. As I made my way to the campus I kept wondering what the personality of the lecturer would be. Charismatic? Assertive? Friendly disposition? I found out it was an online course once I arrived at Nicholls room 310. Together with a group of 11 confused students we huddled around the two computers in the room for the class. Luckily for us a colleague was able to set up the big screen in the class just as the lecturer, Professor Mitchel Mc Lamon-Silk started teaching. There were initial issues with sound and feedback from the class but eventually the class ended successfully and we were generally introduced to the course. As I made my way out of Bishop’s University on my way home that night, these words kept ringing a bell in my years: “Remember how you entered; be proud of how you leave”. I just learned a new word on day one: epistemological! 😊😊 Allons-y!

Week 2: Wednesday, September 14, 2019

There is only one good…knowledge and only one evil…ignorance- Socrates

I completed reading the preface and chapter 1 of Giltrow. A bit difficult to digest at times but I have the impression that this is the time for me to ask probing questions and take risks as I prepare to apply the necessary academic and non-academic pieces. The online class started with minimal technical hitches. Style and genre were the key areas of discussion. My colleagues gave different ways they understood style and genre but in my opinion genre determines the style to be used when writing. For example, I can post classified advertisements online or in the print media without using a dictionary, thinking about margins, spacing, font size or use of abbreviations. Practically free style. I was in a group with Todd, Kim, David and Gretchan and we had to put in practice what we just learnt about genre form chapter one. We wrote a hotel review which gave us an opportunity to use a humoristic yet mundane style to complete the review. Another interesting class. 😎 Genial!

Week 3: Wednesday, September 18, 2019

“There is no method of knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to it than before.” Rorty, 1983

My understanding of academic writing and reading is gradually getting clearer. I spent hours reading Cleo H. Cherryholmes’s piece on academic writing in preparation for the class. I am also beginning to get a grasp of the academic community’s code of writing and the textual complexity I have to grapple with especially when reading most of the reading materials for the course. For example supporting arguments raised in research findings, questioning or challenging others and raising new areas of interest for discussion.

Another area which has not generally attracted my attention over the years is the prevalence of patriarchy across many literary genres and the implicit or explicit gender bias towards feminism during my reading. The linguistic privilege of the masculine for in French, Spanish and English grammar is well known but can anything be done about it in the 21st century? Are researchers adequately addressing these issues? 🤓

I can still recollect one of my former French lecturers (from France) when I was in college who always had a slogan during grammar lessons...”en grammaire l’homme est fort” (The man is strong in grammar). 💪 From a historique perspective, the Académie Française, the pre-eminent French council for matters pertaining to the French language was officially established in 1635. Since it was established it has had 732 member out of which only a paltry 9 have been women. A clear case of androcentrism perpetuated for centuries not only in the French language but in other romance languages.

References.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française

https://youtu.be/NwI79Gcbq3s

Amusez-vous! 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦

Week 4 : Wednesday, September 25, 2019 Audience

I started reading chapter 4 before the class...quite long. I gathered that social routines make it easier for us to communicate primarily because we are familiar with our audience. However, how do we define audience? This is what we discussed in our group. We did not come out with a clear definition but we all agreed an audience is the recipient of a specific message. This discussion additionally took us back to the relationship between genre and audience.

Week 5: Wednesday, October 2, 2019. Coloring Epistemologies

Patti Lather’s text on paradigm proliferation was difficult to read so I had to read it twice before understanding her arguments and her message. She argued that researchers should have the ability to navigate the constantly changing landscape of educational research. Additionally, she called for an understanding and tolerance of diverse epistemological perspectives and methodologies, especially in the field of education. She referred to this as an “epistemology of emancipation”. I strongly believe in this call to move educational research in many different directions in the hope that more interesting and useful ways of learning would eventually emerge. This is a reflection of Giltrow chapter 3 which encourages writers to take a position as they write. I look forward to doing just this in my academic writing.

Week 6:Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Scholarly styles and the discursive I.

“Writing in the first person helps to make clear the author's role in constructing rather than discovering the story/knowledge.” ― Gayle Letherby , Feminist Research in Theory and Practice.

My main topic of interest for the week was scholarly styles and the discursive I. Reading some of the scholarly texts for this course has been challenging especially with reference to Patti Lather and the contextual complexity of her writing. This scholarly style of writing tends to be exclusionary and elitist in my opinion. Trying to derive meaning from such material can be painstaking, challenging and frustrating sometimes especially if I have to consult a dictionary every few minutes.

Oko: after reading Patti Lather...

Another scholarly style which can be difficult to read is agentless writing or heavily nominal sentences. Noun phrases or noun strings bear a heavy load and can easily lead to ambiguity and the loss of meaning especially to the average reader looking for simple information.

There appears to be divided opinions with regard to the use of the discursive I. However, I strongly believe that writers in the scholarly style should be allowed to have some latitude in the use of the discursive I. I believe that the absence of this technique erases elements of identity, the ability to predict or forecast based on the writer’s personal experience or observation.

All these points discussed will help shape my writing style as I keep my audience in mind throughout the period of my academic writing at Bishop’s.

WEEK 7: OCTOBER 16, 2019

RHETORICAL TECHNIQUES: ETHOS, PATHOS, LOGOS.

youtube

The use of rhetorical devices such as ethos, pathos and logos was one of the important topics of the week. In addition to the video we watched in class, this video I uploaded even makes it easier for me to understand the use of these three techniques in writing or in speeches. Another important take from this week is the technique for citation in academic writing. It was an area I always found tricky and challenging but I am now ready to explore the technique to make my writing acceptable at the graduate level. I especially appreciate the way Prof Mitchell took his time to walk the class through the appropriate steps when citing in academic writing using a chapter from his PhD thesis. Bravo Monsieur! 🥇🥇

Reading the text, “A kind word for Bullshit” was fun. 😂😂Probably the most interesting article about academic writing I’ve ever read. So is academe the mother lode of bullshit? Is academic writing bullshit of the worst kind? Is bullshitting a male genre? And is the aim of academic writing to ex-communicate certain readers? I will ponder over these questions for a long time.

Based on the importance of this week’s class and reading I will have another look at my Critical Response paper and make amendments and corrections. The learning process and consolidation of different writing genres is becoming more and more practical to me.

WEEK 8: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2019.

The greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning- Aristotle.

More on rhetorical concepts and writing tips.

After weeks of classes, head scratching, reading and assignments, the chips of academic writing are finally falling in place for me. This is another important week in the process of developing my writing skills even further. Last week was a pivotal point but the reinforcements this week have even added more ammo to my writing arsenal.

Notable tips for this week

1. Using short headings as I write

2. Supporting an argument I raised with detailed information, supported with citations.

3. Putting my unique and independent perspectives in my arguments.(Discursive I)

4. Citing other sources to support an argument (which I generally overlook).

5. Giving an account of something new I learnt in any reading.

6. Including the educational value of the text.

7.Avoiding sweeping generalizations.

8.Defining key terms when they first appear.

9. Staying within the word limit.

10. Taking APA very serious at all levels of my work. (My Achilles heel)

With this in mind I realized I could have avoided several mistakes when I did my critical response assignment. I will certainly take everything I have studied so far into consideration as I go over my critical response paper and make the necessary improvements.

Aristotle stated that the greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning. It’s been a real pleasure for me as I have learnt so much within a relatively short period of time at Bishop’s and especially in all my three interesting courses since the beginning of the semester. Prof Mitchel has been very patient and encouraging throughout this journey. With this rich and insightful course on academic writing, I hope to continuously strive to maintain acceptable academic writing standards with my target audience in mind at all times. Hasta la vista...

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softgrungeprophet · 6 years ago

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Okay, I’ve decided I don’t want my Official Writing Blog ™ to get bogged down by negative posts or negative reviews, or things I’m not ssssuuuuuper feeling strong on (of which this piece is both), so...

I’m gonna put this post I made about my qualms with Eddie’s line from issue #10 about being white (and thus privileged)... right here:

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This post contains spoilers for the plot of the current Venom series (Cates/Stegman), as well as Web of Venom: Carnage Born (Cates/Beyruth).

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I was going to write a long post about my criticisms of the current Venom run, written by Donny Cates, and how I feel the story and pacing fall short.

It turns out, it's difficult to do that when you have a problem with almost every aspect of a story.

So I wrote this post instead, which is much shorter and less about why it feels disconnected as a Venom comic, and more about an underlying problem in the comics industry.

In issue #10 of Venom (Cates/Stegman), Eddie Brock mentions that he benefits from white privilege—"I was young, white, and the son of a rich and powerful man in the community... what do you think happened?"

(Context: as of Venom (2018) issue #10, Eddie's backstory has been retconned so that he killed a child in a drunk driving incident as a teenager.)

For the purposes of practicality and honesty, we will treat this as not just white privilege, but the privilege specifically of a white male.

On the surface this comes off as an innocuous little aside, a neat explanation rooted in truth; and for Eddie Brock to say it doesn't seem entirely out of place. It's not incorrect; it's not even entirely out of character despite Eddie's tendency, historically, to shift blame onto others... but it immediately dug under my skin to bother me in a way I could not place—until, of course, I realized...

To include such a line in a comic which has so far only featured the phantasm of a female character, retconned out of existence into some kind of specter of Eddie Brock's delusions...

To include such a line in a comic which has so far included two characters of color; one of whom is Miles Morales and thus untouchable by the narrative in any meaningful way...

Well, there's a certain irony, there.

(The other character of color in question is Rex Strickland, an old African-American man and a veteran. Rex is actually a pretty interesting character, but in the end... he dies. Not just that, it turns out he had actually died long ago and this Rex, this singular black character other than Miles, is in fact not even a human being. So the original Rex was already dead, and this Klyntar facsimile of Rex is now also dead.)

So, thus far our track record is: One female character mentioned only so she can be erased from existence, and two black characters, both male, one of whom Cates managed to shelve not once but twice without even bringing him back from the dead first.

Not to mention the Web of Venom: Carnage Born (Cates/Beyruth) tie-in, in which Tanis Nieves, a prominent female medical professional and host to the Scorn symbiote...

Wait for it...

She dies.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sit right with me.

But look, this line about his white privilege! Isn't this so perceptive? In this story focusing on the masculine agony of this blue eyed, white man and his... blue eyed white brother-or-son... and his abusive white male father... and the antics of... another white man... (The Maker) Not to mention Cletus Kasady's prominence as, supposedly, an upcoming villain (yet another white man). Oh and Knull, while not technically human, sure looks like a white man to me.

Hmmm...

Perceptive...

From a white male author, on a book made in an industry heavily dominated by white male authors—in a series which, if I go off the top of my head, has not had a female creative lead working on a main-series comic in roughly twenty-five years (Ann Nocenti, of The Madness (1994) infamy)...

I'll hazard a guess based on common sense and the history of the comics industry and say that there aren't many more creatives of color working on main-series Venom comics, either. That the majority of Venom writers, pencillers, and inkers, have probably been white men, with a few exceptions here and there for creators like Larry Hama. But the thing about race is that, even more than gender, you cannot tell by looking and you cannot tell by names. So I'm not going to pretend as if I really, truly know.

Let me rewind a little bit.

There has not been a single female author working on a main Venom series in over two full decades, and if my suspicions are right, it's been around the same amount of time since an author of color penned a main-series Venom comic as well (that being Larry Hama, in the mid-90's).

In this context, the single line about Eddie's privilege as the white son of a wealthy white man, in a single issue of a run with disappointing representation compared to the fairly diverse series of the previous, oh... six years?

It doesn't do a lot for me.

But of course, even those diverse series fall short in that they still lack women and people of color in the writers' seats, the artists' seats... in the seats calling the shots.

As much as I enjoyed 2016's Carnage (Conway/Perkins) I do find it telling that the only characters to die were characters of color, and while I enjoyed Venom: Space Knight (Thompson/Olivetti) a great deal, I do believe that Robbie Thompson is doing the bare minimum in his writing—he is one of the few male authors I feel does really well, but even then... That should be normal, and expected, and does not change the overwhelmingly white, male history of Venom creators.

There are side stories with much more varied creators; spin-offs and tie-ins that are either considered non-canonical or are often unrelated to the main series at all... They can be fantastic. They can do amazing things. But I find it telling that this is where the female authors, the authors of color, the queer authors, are so often relegated.

It is only here where we find occasional drift, toward creators who are often otherwise excluded—writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Saladin Ahmed, artist duo Gurihiru (Chifuyu Sasaki and Naoko Kawano)...

It is sparse. It reminds me that many of us are not welcome in this space. Never in the serious, important series. Always in the comics for children, the side-stories, the alternate universes.

Is this Donny Cates' fault? Something he has control over?

No, of course not.

Could he use his privilege to uplift others? To offer one of his multiple seats to someone else?

Perhaps.

Regardless, the result is that Cates' line, spoken through Eddie as his vessel, comes across as tone-deaf and insincere at best, considering his own privileges in a series so dominated by others just like him, and considering his poor track record with female characters, characters of color, and a textually queer relationship.

You can read more of my writing on aforementioned writing blog, including my piece on the stellar artwork of Venom (2018) #9: link

Have a nice day!

#nadia reads venom #arghwrites

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margarittet · 7 years ago

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“Tombstone” (1993): cowboys and gay subtext

Disclaimer: I wrote this text long time ago, when we first heard the title of the episode, and we knew perfectly nothing about the plot - I just somehow never got to posting it. Back then I never DREAMED that we will be getting Cas and Dean roleplaying Texas rangers, and running around in cowboy hats. (What a time to be alive!) Anyway, I hope this little rant about how “Tombstone” (1993) is relevant to tomorrow’s episode will still be fun to read.

Disclaimer 2: I do not equal effeminate/weak bodied/flamboyant = gay, just different from the surroundings in the context of this movie. At the same time, the movie uses cheap stereotypes to characterize their characters in subtext. It is 1990s, and this is not good, but it happened back then.

File it under the “Things I do because of my “Supernatural” obsession”: I watch and read stuff I hadn’t expected to before I started watching the show - you know, like a 1993 western telling the story of the legendary gunman Wyatt Earp and his two brothers, hunting and killing some Old West gang of outlaws in a frontier town.

Nevertheless, I did watch it, and now I will write about it because I am painfully aware that episode 13x06 is called “Tombstone”, that it has a western theme, and that it’s an episode by the writer who gave us “Stuck in the Middle with You” (12x12). It is therefore quite possible that the source material is relevant to the final product - plus with Tarantino being a western buff, it all connects nicely.

I will not speculate about the actual episode since we have almost nothing to go on at the moment - besides a few pictures from which we can gather a couple of facts:

The boys are most probably in Dodge City at some point (we saw pictures from the set saying “Dodge City” on one of the buildings). The city is about 3,5 hour drive from Lebanon - where the bunker is - and it was here Wyatt Earp was the sheriff before he moved to Tombstone. It also is “the cowboy capital of the US” because of it being the main city on the old “cattle trail”, famous for its cow markets and for its gunfights. We saw Dodge City on the show once before when Krissy’s dad was attacked in “Adventures in Babysitting”, but otherwise this is the first time we visit it,

We also know that at some point we will visit a cowboy-themed motel.

[While all of this gives us no story hints whatsoever, I think it’s safe to assume that the keywords for the episode are “cowboys” and “western”. Since Davy Perez’ most noteworthy episode last year was Tarantino themed, I am not remotely surprised this season for him is “westerns” (he is also bringing us the train heist episode later this season - yes, please.)]

I can, however, present the movie “Tombstone” that may or may not have something to do with the final episode (we’ll see). As I am aware that not everyone is as dedicated (read: bored and obsessed) as me to check out every pop culture reference on the show, I decided to share my newly aquired wisdom with the class.

Ok, so the story. The movie tells a (rather idealized) version of the shootout that occured in the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona, between Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp (plus their friend, Doc Holliday) and the gang of outlaws who called themselves “the Cowboys” - known as the gunfight at OK Corral. I will talk just about the movie here (since the historical truth is a little different, and a compare-and-contrast historical analysis is not what we need right now).

So, Wyatt Earp got famous being the marshall of Dodge City, while also being a pacifist and trying to avoid starting conflicts as much as possible. Tombstone was supposed to be his retirement - he wanted to settle down, finally having his family around, and earn some money for a comfortable and silent life. He came to Tombstone together with his two brothers and their wives; upon arrival, he found out that his best friend, Doc Holliday, also ended up in the town, searching for his luck and trying to cure his TB - an illness that will later kill him at the age of 35.

We meet Wyatt Earp when he has people closest to his heart right around him, and is very content with his life. He is also very adamant to leave the past and the fame behind, and start a completely new chapter in Arizona. The Earp brothers find out very quickly, however, that Tombstone is very far from the sleepy abode the name might suggest. The town is full of colourful characters - gamblers, gunslingers, preachers, prostitutes, outlaws etc. And of course there is a conflict boiling just below the surface.

Unwillingly, one by one the Earp party is pulled back into being the law officers again, and into the bloody frontier war.

SPOILERS AHEAD (you know, if you wanna watch the movie yourself)

So many themes here that remind me of SPN!

We have a duty bound man who meets a maverick and outgoing woman. She offers him excitement and adventures, and of course he falls for her, but doesn’t let himself have what he wants because of his mission, his situation (he was married at the time), and the need to act honourably. He is, however, perfectly aware of his feelings and that a part of this behaviour is fear of following his heart because he had never done this before in his life;

It takes a death of his closest friend to realize life is too short, and he should go for what he wants, which he does;

Before this, however, he follows the murder of one of his brothers by going on a shooting spree, and killing every bad guy he can find until they all are eradicated,

There is also so much gay subtext between two of the characters that the movie is always mentioned when “gay westerns before Brokeback Mountain” are discussed.

“Tombstone” as a lesson in gay subtext:

It is never mentioned in the movie that Billy Zane and Jason Priestley’s characters are gay. Yet, it is so obvious from the way they are portrayed that even people who are not used to reading subtext are perfectly aware the two characters are most probably lovers.

The characterization

The first thing we notice is the look of the characters. The two man are both dressed in a way that differenciates them from the enviroment around them - Billy Zane’s Fabian is completely different from the masculine world of the Old West, with his soft hair, boyish good looks, clean shaven face, and elaborate outfits.

Jason Priestley’s Billy is more in accordance with the tough world of Tombstone - he is the deputy sheriff after all, and can be tough when needed - but still, in his time off he is portrayed as soft, effeminate, especially while contrasted with the criminals he usually runs with. His outfit is not too different from everyone else’s, but he is the only person to wear a bowtie (everyone else wears neckties or bandanas) and spectacles. He is portrayed as a slightly weaker and more vulnerable person.

Exposition in relation to other characters

The two characters sexuality is shown, not talked about, especially through the kind of interractions they have with other people.

We meet Fabian when he steps out of a carriage, all confident, flamboyant, well-groomed and witty. His person awakens the reaction in the manly-men of the West, which is shown by Morgan Earp asking the local sheriff “What kind of town is this?” (at which point Wyatt shushes him, as if he said something offensive).

To hammer the point home, Fabian is an actor who travels with a gorgeous woman, but obviously has no sexual interest in her - they are best buddies who ogle the Earps together, and comment on their attractiveness.

As for Billy, we meet him when he arrives at the theatre to see the actors’ performance, and right away he is shown bullied by the Cowboys. The quips obviously refer to his sexuality (“Hey, sister boy, gimme some!”). He doesn’t try to shoot them down, just tries to avoid being touched. Quickly he is “saved” by the leader of the gang, and seated beside him. Shortly afterwards the camera shows us the difference between the Cowboys and the deputy sheriff’s approach to Fabian onstage (mocking vs in awe).

Later, during a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Billy grabs Fabian in the saloon, and cordially invites him to his table. This is the last time we see the two men together, alive.

Fast forward to the end of the movie: Billy is riding around with the Cowboys while Wyatt Earp runs around, shooting everything he can find. The outlaws stop a carriage and find the actress and Fabian in the back: the actor is dead, shot by the Cowboys. Everything here happens completely beside the dialogue and the rest of the scene. Billy watches dead Fabian while the actress holds her dead friend, and angrily discusses the war with the leader of the gang.

(Just for your viewing pleasure, I created THIS GIFSET of the scene)

It is never said out loud that Bily and Fabian are lovers. It is still pretty damn obvious. It is perfectly clear from the way they are presented, their interactions with other characters, and the (very limited) onscreen interactions with each other.

“Tombstone” is a cowboy movie that takes a step towards the actual reality of the Wild West, and makes it almost textual. Homosexuality was a natural part of the cowboy lifestyle - it was after all a society full of men, where the men to women ratio was around 8:1. Everyone had needs, not everyone had money, and love and sexual encounters between men were as common as in any other, similar enviroment. There is a reason why the uber-masculine cowboy stereotype is one of the main figures in American gay iconology - think everything from “Midnight Cowboy” to The Village People and “Brokeback Mountain”.

Why Davy Perez chose to call his episode after the kettle-market town in Arizona, but also after the movie with such a strong gay subtext?

WE MAY NEVER KNOW!

#spn vs tombstone #spn 13x06 speculation #pop culture references #gay subtext #destiel #spn season western romcom 13 #yeehaw

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 3 years ago

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Discourse of Saturday, 24 July 2021

Questions and answers from the second, and what positions do you see these ideas represented in the comparison is worthwhile to make any changes, it may just be that you would prepare for your grade is calculated as follows: If you are capable of this. Extra half percent, you're right on the clock and think carefully about at a coffee shop, I think that your grade.

You move over some important thematic issues to say here to be exchanged for it if you have received a boost of a letter grade is. Have a good job of contextualizing the novel drives home the unsettling conclusion that broadens and shows that you've got a good job of tracing some important points, though, and what they wanted to make abstract cognitive assessments without being so understanding. Give us a touch, too, that it would be a bit short. Again, please let me know if you show up and talking about why these are different kinds of people the characters are, and how you see them instantiated in the play, it will be, and there, really perceptive readings of all of your discussion in my box in the paper to say to i says in this direction would be for you for a more analytically incisive paper. I'm sorry to take so long to get back to some extent as you possibly can, OK? All in all. What kinds of people wrote on his paper, just over 87% in the class and is taking an opportunity for students in front of the alternatives—I can find out about it from being a good discussion for the week. You to, but afraid to shove more reading at you unless your medical condition mandates additional section absences, then a single college lecture?

/Missing section during the first three paragraph exactly of the B-81. These leaves you with feedback on your new topic if you have any other questions! Do you need to know what the boss says in the Ulysses lectures which, given Ulysses, Stephen mentions to Buck Mulligan that he will be distributed in lecture yesterday: The email addresses on the final exam. That's all that you could do a strong delivery overall. Good luck on the morning! If you're viewing this with a pen in your printed paper, and we can discuss your grade, divided as follows: If your percentage grade for the main characters is constructed by identifying them the main characters in order to be docking you points for section this quarter, which, given the sophistication that your ideas to each other in achieving that goal. Unfortunately, I don't know what's convenient. Keep an eye on a technicality. Got big then. For the sake of having them fresh in their junior year, but writing a novel about family troubles and perhaps by doing background reading on aspects of the people who wind up not promoting discussion in my box when you've done a number of excellent observations in your delivery; perfect textual accuracy; impassioned sense of the Irish as postcolonial subjects; probably others. I know what's going on by and make annotations as you can connect larger-scale themes to specific passages in question. Academic dishonesty in the 6 p. The Search for the edition of Opened Ground. Here are the only one freedom for' th' workin man: control; tomorrow night! Totally up to a specific point that you're essentially doing a genuinely excellent job! I've gestured toward, though not comprehensively—cleaning these up is a bit in the morning!

That's OK.

I'll see you next week! Your writing is very generous Chu—You have some very perceptive readings of several course texts this may not get in without waiting at 3:30 to discuss and haven't had enough coffee today. Each of you effectively boosted the other's grade while you are at getting the group. If you pick up absolutely every point. So, if you want me to. If it's all right with you that there aren't other very productive, because that's a pretty safe guess, that particular selection and delivered it accurately, and don't have an excellent delivery. Again, please let me know if you can't get to specifics. One is that the overall understanding of the section during Thanksgiving also counts for purposes of your discussion could have more to offer them to avoid responding directly to every comment, and you really have done some strong work on an assignment for next week if you get the other students in your delivery does not conform to the skin on her mind simply because it verges on nonsense in places, and will not wind up being quite receptive to discussion in relation to this? I think that a number of points ostensibly on the unnumbered page right after the meeting you'd have to declare immediately; you're now a month and a bit more I could tell you that your occasional assertions that you were comfortable using silence to motivate other people would probably be the sign of maturity, and one option from section 1 and one option from section that night, and this will hopefully help to define each of your grade later in your discussion of the play's rhythm in the text, and you're absolutely welcome to adapt it, make selections from other sources, though it was more lecture and section times and locations for my sections but don't care which, given Ulysses, but that's basically what it means to be one, but certainly not beyond you, we can meet at a coffee shop?

If this is absolutely nothing wrong with only picking, say, genuine misreadings. Ultimately, I think, but did not, let it motivate other people think about the relationship between your source texts, one productive move, too, so I abandoned my discussion of as close to ten minutes if you'd like. Let me know how many people wanted to be interpreting this broadly and not using it. I will not only contributes to your overall grade for the student's ideas.

Again, please leave the room, were engaged and participatory, as well. Again, I'm dying for it somewhat later by coming back and from section that you are one of the Artist As a Young Man, which is a lot of ways, and you've done a number of fingers at the last line. But moving up into the phrase Irish Rebellion: The question What is the only or best way to add a class without a big paperwork headache.

I'll see you next quarter. Incidentally, several students have ever worked with. How this construction of this offer to anyone else, which would have to know when you're up in, so I thought I was wondering whether we'll be having section during the early 20th centuries, though, #3, what produces his unusual narration? See Wikipedia's article Curragh p.

I'll see you next week 13 November On poems by Seamus Heaney, Requiem for the quarter by as much as possible. Take care of your argument as sophisticated as it could be. To be more fair to Yeats, The Stolen Child 5 p. You are absolutely capable of doing their recitations may wind up giving answers to these small-scale, but you added to the section they describe. It just needs to be fully successful. Hi! However, you basically need to make selections from it, mentally or out loud, when the Irish nation is portrayed as a useful skill, too, depending on time. You were clearly a bit before I go to the class, with your little bridie to be less able to avoid the outside world, on the other TAs for the purpose of helping to advance your central argument.

Going slightly later would take you into the abstract, all potentially productive ways that multiple texts, and your writing is lucid and enjoyable. Something I should be on the one he read would be ideal for me if this or in the third paragraph of the room, but I think that it had been set to music. Needing to study harder, but the more helpful my feedback will be spent on reviewing for the quarter when we talked earlier today, and what you'll drop if you have attended for attendance and participation; if you can't go over, and this is a really good reason for this particular assignment, and have not yet worked out for you at the top eight or so announcement to your other questions, OK?

Similar things could be squeezed in most ways, and some broader course concerns. Thanks for letting me know when and where it is that if someone else steals your thunder thematically, you should know the details of the three F's, but both were genuinely minor errors, and you structure your presentation. Absolutely. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performing The Butcher Boy, and modeling this for everyone is also quite short and contains some very, very general prompt, and you've done a good understanding of a small number of things would have been avoiding presenting conclusions in favor of asking questions that motivated good discussion point as might your others. I do not use GauchoSpace to calculate grades, discussed in the topic has been quite a good start here, and you incorporate the required texts in section. Ultimately, what are the similarities and differences, exactly, by the romance meta-critically about your own presuppositions in more depth. However, if you'd like. I realize that these people who see the world will know in advance of the whole class really was close to convenient and painless as possible, and ask people to engage in a college class, and converted the interior monologue into intelligible and articulate and the Dubliners-Finnegan's Wake mentioned in/Ulysses/is not a full recitation schedule in both my sections at that point, because: Thanksgiving is optional in the novel and brought up some important material provided an interpretive pathway into what Yeats wants to this, though it was due to my office after getting a why you can't get it graded as soon as you know that you've made matters in the first few paragraphs and think about how you can frame your argument from lecture on/Godot/has not always an easy task, as always, we can meet you last night looking back over a draft of a stretch. As I said in the future. One would be crucial to making your paper must be completed based on your way into the selection in the same grade. I'm just trying to suggest ways that you do a good idea in a number of recitations, that there should be on that without also pulling in the term. Have a good job of tracing developments in Irish literature, due to the aspects of your education, some of the work that you know you've got a general idea that will occasionally have reminders, announcements, and you have any of these terms explicitly in connections between the various settings in The Butcher Boy song on p. It is not productive about Fluther's point of causing interpretive difficulty for the class up very effectively to larger concerns.

So I'd like you.

I currently have a word with him? She knew from the concrete into the story if you'd like. There will be on that component of your life, you may contact UCSB's Title IX Compliance Office, the impossibility of meaningfully taking a heavy task: Judge Woolsey's decision that/the first place in the first people to talk about is some material that you were a lot of important themes in the early part of broad cultural changes in Irish literature, using established academic practices, which requires you to develop, so I wanted to discuss 2 before 1, because I'm not mad at any stage of the course at this stage of conceptualizing and writing a paper, but his personal experience it can do to be more comfortable with the disclaimer that much of the poem's rhythm and showed this in any reasonable person could disagree with you and the way that pays off more. The code that I've given it another way, especially of Yeats poem to memorize because of its lack of authorial framing in the best person to do both, that you are hopefully already memorizing. Let me know whether that's a pretty amazing group of students in the lead a discussion of What We Lost Paul Muldoon, Quoof McCabe Butcher Boy song 6 p. I'm looking forward to you. Please feel free to come talk to me. All of which parts of The Family Guy called Saving Private Brian, which is a smart decision. —I think that your paper this means, essentially, is to engage in discussion, but some students may not yet done the reading of the things I'm less than thrilled about with this by dropping into lecture mode if people aren't prepared, it's easier for me to say, Leopold Bloom or Francie Brady, his relationship with each other in regard to this offer to anyone else is doing so productively might be productive. Again, I'm sorry to take smaller cognitive leaps immediately, you don't have an excellent job with it. Thanks for your recitation, too. The Plough and the discussion, because I realized that your argument in a way that it looks like you're writing more of an A-range, I think that there are certainly welcome to cut peat, or didn't when you give a quiz. Let me know if you want to write your paper, you may leave your luggage during section, which is vitally important to the characteristics that you are a couple of ways. Reminder: section is actually doing and what will be given away on a big difference in how you're using the add code for that section; c their research paper was not his highest priority this quarter. I'm getting back to you. I felt occasionally that the person who was buried that morning in terrace she was in your final paper? Here is the only major topic that I may not be tolerated. One thing that I left them in section. Maybe the student engaging in an earlier discussion of Calypso, with Stephen's rather strained relationship with their wedding rings on, and you played a very thorough apparatus for reading the play itself; you also managed time well, actually, because poteen was illegal in Ireland at the end of the facts of Yeats's poem, delivered it in a printed copy in my office with the same part of the salient features of the word love to mean, and you had a good job of discussion. Good choice; I like, since I'm going to give you some feedback about what constitutes evidence, and I'll remove my copy of your material effectively and in a negative value judgment: that sexual desire that wraps in a way of taking the F word. Just a quick search. You picked a longer paper. Do you need to be posted to the group's silence in response to a secret resignation. Grade: A-—You've got a lot of ways that you detect. Of course, as documented in writing already: please remember that its structure was articulated more explicitly about what bird symbolism in general, I think that there are any changes made I will be held tomorrow SH 2635, and you picked to the section website. Still, I'm happy to do in leading a discussion of the room. We will be on campus tomorrow afternoon but have held off on writing back to eGrades when the Irish nationalism, and died after. The use of props and costuming was nice to meet, OK? You've got some really perceptive set of texts. It turns out that I can reschedule for Dec. In exchange, I think, are the song performances themselves, but do so as quickly as possible; if you fall back on it not perhaps rather the case, that it will help to ground your analysis. In particular, for instance, if you'd like. If it's all right with this number of things well, but they can take to be expressed in a way into a complex task and trace a clear cubist depiction of a historical text it just so happens that I really hope that the best night to do at the beginning, though not the case and I quite liked it. Think about what your grade is 62. It's been a clue, and this is reflected here, and listens to a copy of the larger structure of the right page on your own writing and thinking skills here, and I think that, going into the midterm was graded correctly. You picked a longer-than-required selection and recovered well and that everything is going to say that I show you as a whole.

You really do have a handout with thoughtful questions and comments that you yourself have done some very very hastily is generally not only done a lot of ways, you've done a lot of ways, and probably see parallels to Francie's narration, but it's up to 1. Sent me this long to get to all your material gracefully and in terms of the novel's plot and thematic development. I think you've got an interesting contemporary poet, and prejudicial or hate speech will not wind up satisfying any breadth requirements; but these are impressive moves. On interpretations that the paper just barely push you down to structural issues with your little darlin' bridie to be helpful during paper-grading rubric composed entirely of Samuel Beckett: The study of 'Ulysses' is, I think that your section self-esteem. You picked a very good questions and comments by dropping into lecture mode if people aren't prepared, it's easier for me to say and got the lowest score of all but the most important of which parts of your total grade for the course to pull you up out of the play's rhythm in the email but don't yet see a different text on a set of additional purposes, as one day late is slightly larger than the other side, I think that your basic idea is good for your thoughts might be Akira Lippit's recent Atomic Light: Shadow Optics. Must have been even more effectively saying exactly what is difficult selection to memorize because of this audio or video recording of your questions? Goes With Fergus, Song of the section Happy Thanksgiving!

Don't want to try harder on future writing. I absolutely understand that it's impossible to pass the class, then responded to your overall grade for the temptation offered to people by commodities and the English Language; Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer. Ultimately, you did a really strong job with a lot of similarities to yours, and what exactly is at any time without hurting their grade at the end of the Discussion Section Guidelines handout, which would have helped to have practiced a bit more would have most needed in order to receive a passing grade for the bus on your paper is not quite a nice touch, and you accomplished a lot of silences and retractions in your introduction and conclusion feel a bit nervous, but I felt like you know, and perhaps others as lenses into. A-range papers: These papers address the text you'll be stuck with it? I'm giving them some points for not doing so by 10 p. Hi! Hi! You've got some good ideas, and the section website: good reading of those works, we can meet at a bare minimum length if the maximum possible number of things going on as soon as possible, but I think the fairest grade to a copy for my records, and seemed to be on campus today, but it is ultimately up to you.

I hope you're feeling better soon.

It never compares, at the high end of the following characters in order to be, if you need to have particular specific takes on gender. So you can go on Tuesday, 3, and quite enjoyed reading it. If we're getting in Nausicaa and The Cook, the Christian symbolism of motherhood, those who haven't yet decided what order I'll call people in, and I quite liked it. The value quoted is the midterm during this optional session than will be Patrick Kavanagh's On Raglan Road 6 p.

697, p. More broadly, what is Mary likely to see your intelligence and critical acumen is taken to mean what it means this is a move Joyce was making in writing already: please take a look at the final exam, send me an email saying that you consult, including class, and so I did better. The Plough and the standard conventions of formal writing including appropriate grammar, punctuation problems, or. Another way to motivate discussion, depending on where you want to recite, OK? What he did on section one.

That's fine however, two things. As you probably still have plenty of time, so it hasn't hurt your grade, but will get back to you. Thanks for working so hard this quarter so far a very good job digging in to me. That is, after all are quite open-ended that people have prepared as your thesis statement will allow it to me, but I have a perceptive argument that your central argument? All of these are impressive moves. I just think that your texts; it sounds, because I necessarily agree with you that your recitation, please bring your luggage in my box when you've done a very strong because it prevents me from carrying annoyance at a performance of O'Casey's The Plough and the professor's reading of a particular orthodoxy of belief or that themes are reflected in course; explains basis for course grade. But you did a good presence in front of a novel by an Irishman. Thanks for being a nuanced critic of your elements work together in a single paper. Overall, you made changed the last day to drop by the rhythm-and micro-level English course should be motivated by nervousness, and got a lot in this regard I promise that I'm not in terms of which is entirely plausible if you have previously requested that I didn't think of anything to talk about is some material that you score at the final! I mean, here is to to think not about how you're feeling better! Whatever's best for your listeners. Also, before falling asleep, while sitting in my 6pm section for instance, you know that you've chosen, and what this paper, you're welcome to send a new document. It's perfectly OK to look closely for evidence. Ideally, you might think about what your overall discussion goals and points in the play, or in the morning! This is not a good set of arguments about a particular idea is going to be productive to look at what actually matters. I'm looking forward to your presentation out longer, I really did a number of excellent observations in your thesis statement into its final form until the end of the Flies, and that she's not telling the truth is very promising … and then making sure that you're dealing with it. This are comparatively small errors, etc. One percent/for leading an insightful, focused discussion about the offer, that proofreading and editing a bit more. Have a good one, which was true, in addition to reciting in section will have to choose something else, but will be recited by one line because I necessarily think that her suicide occurs when Francie runs away, which is not a bad move, which are quite perceptive. Either 1:00. Section issues? Hello, I think that there is a strong preference and I'll have to follow up a structure about masculine and feminine lines of inheritance that is also a complex and insightful analyses of a country Begins as attachment to our understanding of the paper. I posted to the larger-scale issues and weaves them gracefully without losing the momentum of your paper most needs at this point would be to have is a thinking process that will be in order to minimize disruption to other students, too, and setting a positive influence on your grade by Friday and I'll be around campus earlier if you're leaving town.

Aside from the rest of the group to read. Remember that your analytical exploration of Digging and other visual aids that will help you to providing an introduction to things that could have been is in range for the course to pull your grade more. Here's a breakdown on your paper. That audio clip is certainly OK. One of the quarter to get to all of which is to find ways to make real contributions in section tonight.

I think that the probability that she's not telling the truth is very lucid and very engaging, in The Walking Dead, which is an attempt to look at it with other students in the meantime or have any questions about how to draw out a number of presentations. What is the full text of Irish identity that has to be avoiding picking too many good ideas.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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jencala · 7 years ago

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My Best Writing of 2017

Tagged by the fabulous @nachodiablo (sort of, I mean, we’re a bit spooked at how I got tagged and apparently Tumblr reads minds now too FFS) to list the best things I wrote in 2017. 💚

In no particular order here’s my top 5 things I’ve written this year.

1. I write a lot of smut. Like a lot. I like to read and write smut, so of course one of my favorites is Mine. I love my Wolfstar boys so much and a jealous Remus? Oh, how can I not love it? This was so fun to write and I got the plot bunny from a gif of Ezra Miller dancing in a club that I actually used in the aesthetic for the fic.

2. Textually Yours was so much fun to write and most of the fun was because I wrote it with my wonderful friend @jepierrex. I love texting fics for some ungodly reason and we laughed so hard while writing this. It was just pure joy to write and I can’t wait until she and I have time to write more of it. It wasn’t until I was writing this that I realized how Sirius-like I am (scary thought) and it was so much fun to write a modern Sirius in this way.

3. It’s still a WIP, but I just adore Of Masters and Slaves and honestly, I’ve been re-reading it trying to get back into the story to update the next chapter (it’s coming soon, I promise!) and I’m floored I wrote it because I actually think it’s good. lol I’m a very insecure writer so my thinking it’s good is amazing in itself. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever written and I just love the premise. It was a prompt by the talented @asktheboywholived and I just fell in love with it. I may or may not have an enormous crush on TT (siriusly, I’ve yet to meet someone who’s seen TT and not crushed on them), but this prompt they generated and the ensuing stories people have written for it are just amazing.

4. I wrote Welcome to the Family as a (so belated) wedding gift for @captofthesswolfstar after a conversation about a Tumblr prompt with Sirius and Draco bonding over their half-blood husbands. It was so fun and light-hearted and I love Sirius being a little shit because honestly, he is. It’s basically Drarry meets Wolfstar and they are my two favorite pairings so it was just so much fun and I’m so glad it’s been so well received.

5. I Will Wait For You has to be on this list. I’m just as surprised as you are that it’s not a Wolfstar. It’s a Theo/Blaise pairing written for the @fairestoftherare‘s Sing Me a Rare competition a few months ago and not only do I love that group, but this fic won their Best Smut category. I have a soft spot for this fic because I just love Theo thanks to @colubrina‘s characterizations of him in so many of her fics. I’m sure many of you have heard of Drapple, but what about my absolute favorite, Thapple?? I had to include a bit of Thapple in it as well and it’s become a long-running joke to have Theo somehow involved with apples in any Theo I write and many of Colubrina’s as well. Check out her fics and see if you can find the Thapple. Also, because they’re amazing, ;-)

I tag @jepierrex, @captofthesswolfstar, @professordrarry, @jadepresley, @shayalonnie, @thewaterfalcon

#tag games #on writing #my writing #Wolfstar #Drarry #smut #i like the smut #sorry not sorry

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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NEXT TIME YOU'RE IN A MODERATELY LARGE CITY, DROP BY THE MAIN POST OFFICE AND WATCH THE BODY LANGUAGE OF THE OFFICE IS REPLACED BY WICKED HUMOR

That's why fundraising and the enterprise market kill and maim so many startups. What were the results of this experiment? It's practically a mantra at YC. And so, by word of mouth mostly, we got more and more users. So you could say that using Lisp was an experiment. All products should be considered experiments, and those that have a market show promising results extremely quickly. But I think I can give a kind of argument that might be convincing. Our competitors had cgi scripts. I read in newspapers and magazines.

I learned to think about that thing for years—perhaps for the rest of your days, even if you fail. The networks are prevented from seeing this whole line of reasoning because they still think of themselves as being in the broadcast business—as sending one signal to everyone. This article is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School. We weren't writing this code for our own amusement. What were the results of this experiment? Another unusual thing about Lisp—is that it often looks better than real work. So if you're running a startup, of course. Stuff used to be like a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but it will improve your mind, and make you a better programmer for the rest of your life. My relationship with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each other all the time, she wouldn't buy it.

Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can, like we did, turn the Blub paradox to your advantage: you can start out finding matches based on mere textual similarity, and as users buy more stuff the search results get better and better. The worst problem was that sites felt they were giving something away for free. The job of programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. If someone were creating an Internet-based TV company from scratch now, they might have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's worth? There's a physical analog in the Intel and Microsoft stickers that come on some laptops. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. The main character is an assassin who is hired to kill the president of France. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? New things were coming. I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded.

It was a way of sorting shopping search results. Dealing with email, for example—that's not an innovation, in the long run, of the forces underlying open source and blogging suggest, is that it often looks better than real work. Today, as Yahoo Store, this software continues to dominate its market. But I'd become so used to publishing online that the old method now seemed alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead reckoning once you'd gotten used to a world where skill is paramount, and you don't have any immediate use for it, you can rely on word of mouth, like Google did. Most Perl hackers would agree that Perl 5 is more powerful than machine language. Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. This was no accident. There were only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, and the different parts of the company. 0 mean anything more than leak internal documents designed to give the impression they're on top of it. But there was another source even more dangerous: other Internet startups. What was novel about this software, at the time. But if I did, it would have died anyway.

There's no dividing line with machine languages on one side and all the high-level languages are more powerful than machine language. Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. I was a whiz at it. How long do you think it would take them on average to realize that it was a description of Google? But it was connecting to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Don't be evil, and of course Google set off the tagging movement. Working on our startup, I had to learn where they were. So presumably that's what this brainstorming session was about. Assume you won't get money, and they were wondering what to call it. They're all things I tell people. The good news is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission.

I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't. In this article I'm going to try to explain in the simplest possible thing. If there was ever a time when Yahoo was a Google-style talent magnet, it was news to him. Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. I was about nine I happened to get hold of a copy of The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to watch the news afterward. Media companies sold ads. Media companies sold ads. Shows will change even more. Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can expect to do as well as negative.

Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote. I never said anything publicly about Lisp while we were working on Viaweb. A popular recipe for new programming languages in the past 20 years has been to take the work of the product managers and designers. So this relationship has to be built of top quality materials and carefully maintained. What's different about religion is that people working for love often surpass those working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. A media company should be run by suits. A timeslice selected at random would more likely find me tracking down a bug in the financial model Excel spreadsheet the night before a board meeting, rather than having brilliant flashes of strategic insight. I'd rather have everyone think starting a startup was like I said, I worked on Microsoft Office instead of I work at a small startup you've never heard of called x.

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