#the way morality operates on this show is so fascinating! it needs its own post

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

supernatural was truly just. a fifteen year long experimental study looking into an audience's ability to empathise with the Narrative Scapegoat. the results? most people are still filled with the medieval urge to throw rotten fruit at the resident Freak in the town square.

[fishnapple]

What does it mean when you have venus trine pluto in a natal chart? And having pluto and north node in 8th house?

Hello, Do you have early degree Leo Venus and late degree Scorpio Pluto?

For Pluto in 8H, you can read about it my other post here.

I will talk about North node in 8H in this post.

*Note: it would be easier for me to reply and organise posts if you ask one placement in each ask rather than many in one.

North node in 8th house/ in Scorpio

Personally, I feel North node is a point where we are obsessing over, an aspiration that we are looking towards, but also a fear that we are avoiding. It feels fascinating and holds a great pull over us because deep down, we know we need this energy to expand and grow, but we can feel out of depth and uncomfortable because it's so different from our mode of operation. There's something out of reach about the North node, sometimes we feel like we have finally understood and mastered the traits of the North node, but look closely, we are still acting from our South node. So in a way, we strive to be the North node, by acting with our South node, it's a seesaw energy, we don't completely abandon the South node and embrace the North node, rather, we try to fuse them together. Like the ouroboros, a serpent/dragon eating its own tail.

So North node in 8H and in Scorpio shows you that it's the theme of the 8H and Scorpio that fascinates you deeply, you want to embrace that theme, yet can feel not fully equipped to do it.

Have the desire to go deep into things and people. Want to see the core of everything. Fear/hate being considered superficial.

At the same time, fear falling too deep into everything, because once you go in, you can't go out. It can manifest as surface level of commitment. To fully, truly commit to something/someone is a challenge but also a goal.

Physical pleasure feels hollow without an emotional and spiritual meaning.

Fear of death. Survivor mentality. Want to feel powerful and well prepared for crises. Always on the look out for dangers.

Strong aversion to violence of any kinds.

Loose attachment with material possessions. Tend to be non-materialistic.

Enjoy an ascetic lifestyle.

Fascination with the theme of death and rebirth, of life and growth.

Want to understand the underlying psychology of people rather than just surface interactions.

Suspicious of others' motives.

Like to work behind the scene, in secret, researching, uncovering secrets.

Good at keeping other people's possessions safe, especially secrets and money. People can trust you easily with their possessions.

Tempted by the idea of vengeance, this is the challenge to test your own moral code and principles.

Can be stubborn and too set in one's own convictions.

Want to have a deep connection, a fusion of two people, but at the same time, struggle in sharing yourself with the other person.

Being used to independence, the idea of sharing and asking for help, whether mentally, emotionally, physically or in any other aspects, can be a great horror and fear for you.

Can have psychic ability but sceptical about it, or approach spirituality and metaphysical topics with pragmatism.

Can live a long life. Have great regenerative ability.

[joestarsecrettecnique]

I am so very sick and tired of the toxicity that’s been poisoning the snk fandom as of the last couple years. I gave myself time to digest the ending and my feelings on it, before embarking in a journey to debunk many misconceptions and critiques I’ve seen floating in the fandom.

By the way, by no means I think this ending is perfect. I think this is textbook execution by Isayama to tie together every loose end left behind in an orderly manner, and I think that it was a bit rushed and oversimplified. I would’ve wanted more of Eren and Armin’s conversation, more of the squad realizing what his true goal had been, and some narrative choices I don’t 100% agree with. But still, what I saw in other fans’ critiques post 139 frankly appalled me, so I feel the need to make this. Also, this obviously are my own interpretations, I am not Isayama himself lol

“Ew, so Eren did pull a Lelouch after all”

No, Eren did not pull a Lelouch. While his action and the final result may seem similar, I find very different nuances between the two. Lelouch wanted for the whole world to be united in fighting against him, and thus he made himself the world’s greatest enemy. His will to turn himself into a monster was selfless. Eren didn’t give a damn about the world, he had no noble intentions whatsoever. He said it in chapter 122, his goal was to protect Paradis and, more specifically, his closest friends. He turned himself into a monster, killed 80% of human population, and endangered the lives of those very friends he wanted to protect, so that by stopping him, those friends could be safe. Eren had no intentions to break out of the cycle of hatred or unite the world against himself, he just wanted to give his friends a chance to survive, and that is not selfless, it’s selfish. Eren’s goal was incredibly selfish, and biased, and driven by his feelings instead of rationality. Nothing like Lelouch!

Now this, this I myself am not the greatest fan of. I feel like it makes that great scene in chapter 122 loose a bit of its strength, Ymir obeying the king for 2000 years just because she loved him. Honestly, I always thought there was a bit of Stockholm Syndrome going on, but I didn’t think it would be the only reason. However, like it or not, it’s undeniable that it makes perfect sense in the narrative that aot has always strived to tell. Love has been a theme strongly woven in the story, and it also draws a great parallel between Karl Fritz/Ymir and Eren/Mikasa. Ymir was a slave to her love for King Fritz, just like Mikasa was a slave to her love for Eren, in that she struggled to accept reality until the very end despite the atrocities that Eren committed. Ymir stayed bound by her love for King Fritz, until she saw Mikasa break from her own poisoned love, aknwoledge it, and kill Eren despite of it, or maybe because of it. Only Ymir knows that one, heh. But the point is, Mikasa showed Ymir that she could break free of a toxic love, she was that someone that Ymir had been waiting for to finally free her of her burden.

“What? But that makes no sense!”

Now, on my first read, I simply thought that Eren had ordered Dina to avoid eating Berthold, and that he had made her walk down that road unaware that his mother was trapped (because we know that the Attack Titan’s future memories aren’t infallible, there are still gaps), killing her indirectly. I’ve since then read some theories stating that Eren willingly killed his own mum in orther to give kid himself a reason to feel enough hatred to kickstart the whole story. Honestly, I like this version maybe more! But let me explain to you why this is not a plothole, like many people think. In this same chapter, we have Eren explaining how the Founder’s power works in synergy with the Attack’s: “There’s no past or future, they all exist at once”. This means that time travel in aot doesn’t work in a manner where Eren extracts himself from time and space, and from a separate realm he operates on the past. The way I understood it, the mechanics works kind of like Tokyo Revengers’ time travel. MInd you, I only watched episode one, so my understanding might be jackshit.

Spoilers for Tokyo Revengers’ episode one. In the show, the main character loses consciousness and finds himself reliving his past. He interacts with someone in this “new” past, and when he wakes up again in the present, past events had been over-written by the changes he made. I think this is how aot timetravel works, with the exception that, since past and future (and present, of course) all happen at once, side by side, there is no old past to be rewritten, neither a future to return to, and present Eren wouldn’t be aware of the changes that his future self would make. It creates sort of a time paradox, yes, in the sense that there’s a loop where present Eren’s mom has been eaten because future Eren, in the future, operated on the past by causing past Eren’s mom to be eaten, but all these Erens are one and the same, as all timelines exist at once.

“Boo-hoo they ruined Eren’s character, he’s such a wimp!”

I have to confess (isn’t this appalling, that this is a thing that I have to confess, what the actual fuck), I am an Eren stan. I absolutely do not consider myself a Jaegerist, I think Eren’s option was better than Zeke’s, yes, but it was morally wrong and awful and he absolutely was not only in the wrong, but also if he wasn’t dead I’d want him to be punished for his crimes. I didn’t particularly enjoy him pre-timeskip, and I started to like him because I found his evolution fascinating. I wanted to understand his motives, what was going on in his head, he was a puzzle that I wanted to solve. Maybe because I’m a psychologist, who knows. Anyways, if you’re an Eren stan only because he acted like a chad and now you cry his character was ruined, I’m sorry to say, you never understood him. Eren was not a god, he was not a strategist playing 5d chess with perfect rationality, Eren was the same he has always been. He was a young man spun along by his passions. Eren feels things with burning intensity, he lets himself be driven by his emotions. He almost flattened the world because he was disappointed that he and his friends weren’t the only human beings inhabiting it, for fuck’s sake, he’s always been irrational, selfish, and immature. Of course he doesn’t wanna die, of course he want’s to live with all of them. You really expected a 15 year old hot-headed brat to become Thanos after he suddenly found out he killed his own mum and all his dreams had been crushed? Of course he felt conflicted, of course he suffered, of course he wanted to live, “because he was born in this world”. Honestly, when I read his meltdown, I felt relieved that his character hadn’t been turned on its head, it was heartbreaking to see that he really was the same brat he’d always been, that he’d tried to steel himself to do horrible shit for his friends’ sake and that he felt bad about it! It made me appreciate his character a lot more, I felt nostalgic towards the times when I was irritated by his screaming and pouting. Suffice to say, this is also my answer to all those people that believe his internal monologue to convince himself the Rumbling was what he really wanted were bullshit since he “pulled a Lelouch”. How can it be bullshit? Maybe he planned to be stopped, but he also said that he thought he would’ve still done it if they hadn’t. He also said that killing a majority of the population was something that he wanted to do, not a byproduct of the alliance not stopping him early enough, because with the world’s militaries in shambles Paradis would’ve had time to prepare accordingly. Anyways, of course he needed to convince himself to do this awful thing even if he knew he wasn’t gonna succeed completely, can you imagine how horrible it would be to know your only chance is to kill thousands?

I also maybe think it was because of the spine centipede thingy? When Eren says “I don’t know why I did it, I wanted to, I had to”, he gets this faraway look on his face and we get a zoom in on one of his eyes, which is drawn very interestingly and kinda looks like the Reiss’ eyes when they were bound by the War Renounce Pact? So maybe it was also the centipede’s drive to survive and multiplicate that forced Eren to do the Rumbling so that its life wouldn’t be endangered. I don’t know how much I like this, I feel like it takes some agency away from Eren and also makes it feel like he’s not as responsible for the genocide he committed that we initially though, which mhhh maybe not, let’s have him take full responsibility for this. As I said, I’m not defending Isayama blindly, I do have some issues myself with what went down.

“What the fuck, did he say thank you for the genocide?”

Guys c’mon, this is like,, reading comprehension. Yes, it was poorly worded and a bit rushed, but by now you should have full context to make an educated guess on the fact that no, he didn’t thank him for committing a genocide what the fuck you guys. Armin started bringing up the idea that maybe they should have Eren eaten because he was doing morally questionable things ever since the Marley Arc, which for manga readers was like what, 2018? Isayama has been showing for three years how not okay Armin was with Eren’s actions, how could it make sense for him to thank him for a genocide? You see some poorly worded stuff, and your first instinct is to ignore eleven years’ worth of consistent characterization to jump to the worst interpretation possible? Let’s go over this sentences and reconstruct what they mean.

“Eren, thank you. You became a mass murdere for our sake. I won’t let this error go to waste”. Armin recognizes that Eren had no other choice, but does not condone it. He clearly calls it an error, which feels like an euphemism but for all we know the japanese original term used could’ve been harsher. Point is, he clearly states he think what Eren did was wrong. But he recognizes that Eren’s awful doing opened up a path for Paradis to break out of the cycle of hatred. Not a certainty, but an opportunity. He thanks Eren for giving them this chance, and promises not to waste it, even if it was born out of an atrocity. He thanks Eren for sacrificing himself for their sake, even if he doesn’t agree with the fruit of his labor, so to speak. He’s thanking Eren for the opportunity that his actions gave them, not for the actions themselves! Where the hell do you read “thank you for the genocide” guys, sheesh. I’m mad at y’all.

“How could Eren send MIkasa memories if she’s an Ackerman and an Asian, and their memories can’t be manipulated by the Founder? I call plothole!”

Now, here we’re going into speculation territory, so you’ve been warned. I don’t think that that information they gave us was true, about Ackermans being immune to memory manipulation. We know at least that the clan is in some way subject to the Founder’s power, or Mikasa and Levi wouldn’t have been called in the Paths by Eren multiple times. Stories never being entirely true or false, or relativity, better said, has been a strong theme in the story, we know this by Marley’s and Eldia’s different accounts of history compared to the actual Ymir backstory we got. So who’s to say that the belief that Ackermans aren’t manipulable is the truth? Maybe they’re just hard to control, not impossible. We know that by the Founder’s ability Eren experienced past and future happening simultaneously, so he could’ve very well been trying to send those memories into Mikasa’s head ever since the beginning of the story, only just succeeding in chapter 138. It would at least explain Ackerman’s headaches as Eren trying to manipulate their memories and failing. Of course, we’d need Levi side of thing to know for certain, as he had headaches too and we weren’t shown in the chapter if Eren spoke to him in paths like he did with the rest of the squad. We know he didn’t talk to Pieck, but he even went and spoke to Annie who he basically hadn’t seen since Stohess, so I hope he spoke to Levi too. Who knows, maybe he even spoke with Hanji, but she died before she could remember. I wish we were shown that, honestly, I’m sad that it was skipped, especially after Levi said in an earlier chapter that “there was so much he wanted to tell Eren”. Fingers crossed for the anime to expand on it.

“So Historia’s pregnancy was useless”

What? No, it wasn’t useless! Eren told her to get pregnant to save her life, so that she wouldn’t be turned into the Beast Titan. If she became the Beast Titan, then Eren would’ve had to enact the plan with her instead of Zeke, and yeah, Ymir brought the power of the titans with her, so theoretically Titan Shifter Historia would’ve had her time limit removed, but we saw that the only way for the Alliance to stop the Rumbling was killing Zeke, so Historia would’ve had to die. Useless to say, when Eren talked to her about his plan, she was very vocally against it, so I don’t think she would’ve helped Eren with his plan. It was Zeke or nothing, and the only way for Zeke to keep his titan was for Historia to be unable to be turned, hence the pregnancy. Did y’all read the same thing I read? Anyways, she could’ve definitely been handled better, but she wasn’t necessary to the plot anymore, and her being removed from it in such a way was sad, yes, but it made sense.

“They massacred Reiner!”

Yeah, can’t really say anything about this. I definitely understand the sentiment behind this scene, which I appreciate. It’s to show that thanks to his Titan being removed and the times of peace approaching, Reiner was finally able to shed the weight he bore on his shoulders and “regress” to his more carefree persona he had when he thought he was a soldier, instead of a warrior. I am very happy for him, and I think it’s a nice conclusion to his arc, that he’s finally happy, but it could’ve been portrayed in a less comic relief-y way. It just sledgehammers all his characterization. Feels surreal that we saw him attempt suicide a couple month ago in the anime and now he’s sniffing Historia’s handwriting.

Guys, this absolutely sends me. There are people who unironically believe Eren actually reincarnated in a bird? Guys. It makes no sense, it violates every rule that Isayama established for his universe’s power system. How could he even reincarnate in a bird? Guys, c’mon, this is symbolical! Birds have been heavily used in aot to portray freedom, and this is a nice, poetic, symbolic way to show that Eren who lived his whole life chasing freedom and never actually got it, is finally free, like a bird, now that he’s dead. It’s also a pretty explicit nod to Odin, I think. Aot is heavily inspired by Norse Mithology, and I think there were some pretty clear parallels between Eren and Odin/Loki in the later arcs of the story. Eren has been shown to “communicate” through birds like with Falco in chapter 81, or with Armin in chapter 131. Emphasis on “communicate” because again, this is symbolic, I don’t think he actually spoke through the birds, he simply talked to them via paths, but birds are associated with Eren’s character (see also the wings of freedom, y’know?) and the shots were framed so to give the impression that he was talking through the birds, but he wasn’t. Symbolism. Anyway, I really think they were supposed to be a nod to Odin’s crows.

Aaaaand that should be it! Even though I most definitely forgot some other criticism on the chapter, it’s crazy the amount of negativity floating around. Hope I didn’t bore you!

[katsidhe]

Hello as a long time silent lurker with post notifications on, and someone who has been very into the minecraft roleplay for about 9 months, I am oh so incredibly intrigued on your thoughts! I hope you don't mind if I ramble a little. Sam (both minecraft and spn, but in this context the minecraft one) is one of my favourite characters because he's so incredibly complex. The prison story has sparked so much discussion and conflict in this fandom, so I would love to hear your thoughts if you want to share!

oh noooooooooooo don’t enable me. (Jk <3)

I’m putting this under a read more for those of you who don’t want to be inflicted with my minecraft roleplay brain worms. I would apologize but I think we’re well past that.

So, like, full disclosure that I am pretty new to dsmp and am surely missing out on big ol swathes of Essential Character Content, etc etc. But I do know the basics, and I’ve (naturally) watched all the Torture Box Content, because I mean come on, that’s my brand.

k so First of all, THE most essential part of any media: x-coded y girl. Dream is a textbook Cas-coded Sam girl. Sam (Minecraft) is a Cas-coded Dean girl. Quackity is a Dean-coded Sam girl. I’d say Tommy is Dean-Dean. Techno is, hmm, Cas-Cas. Okay, important part done.

Minecraft Sam is very fun! I find it absolutely delightful that he clings to moral high ground while torturing and starving a prisoner. And at least from what I’ve seen, there’s a lot of room for interpretation as to the level of guilt and involvement he actually feels about what’s being done to Dream. He goes back and forth between justifying the treatment as something Dream categorically deserves, and justifying it as a means to an end. Whether that end is the book itself, or whether it’s Quackity’s cooperation/satisfaction, or whether it’s some twisted and bloody sense of justice and duty, seems to vary wildly. On top of that, of course, is the irony that Dream was the one to give him this commission and this job in the first place: in every respect, it’s a duty to Dream (to punish him; to secure him; to uphold his rules) that Sam’s fulfilling. Dream isn’t the only one to suffer from Sam’s inflexibility surrounding the entire concept of Dream: Tommy and Ponk do too.

And yet it’s not the inflexibility that ends up hurting Dream the worst: it’s the gaps in that rigidity. If Sam had kept the prison operating as apparently originally commissioned, it would be inhumane but just about bearable: hardly the level of absurd, over-the-top war crime that it’s reached by now. His choice to begin starving Dream in earnest seems to have been mostly an emotional reaction, after Tommy’s death. (Ironic, too, that Tommy also suffered the result of this choice.) And this is fine, because it’s not active: it’s passive, something that’s happening by inaction. Same with giving Quackity specially made weapons and total carte blanche.

The level of trust that Dream has in Sam’s sense of duty is also fascinating. Even as late as the most recent stream, after the guy’s been permitting him to be tortured for months, Dream appeals to Sam’s need to keep Dream static, in one place as his prisoner, in order to save his life. Incidentally, I do think that convincing Sam to keep Quackity from straight-up murdering him is the only concession Dream was actually hoping to win with that conversation. because like, food and a courtyard visit? after a jail break? Like hell is Sam going to grant that, even before the stunt he and Techno pulled, and Dream knows it. I think that the rest of that conversation was just to deflect, and keep Sam from questioning Dream more sharply about whatever he and Techno have planned. Bringing up Tommy and letting Sam go off on his predictable diatribe about morality and just desserts seemed similarly strategic: Dream knows what Sam thinks about what kind of treatment he deserves. He’s had months to figure it out, and it wasn’t exactly rocket science to begin with.

Anyway, that trust is the same reason Dream appealed (unsuccessfully) to Sam when Quackity first showed up: it devastated him to realize that he’d miscalculated the degree of Sam’s willingness to set aside his duty in this one particular way. Quackity in general represents a HUGE blind spot in Sam’s otherwise completely rigid inflexibility: so huge it’s almost baffling, given what Sam was ready to do to Tommy and Ponk and Ghostbur. But Quackity represents a loophole Sam badly wants. He badly, badly wants some good old-fashioned vengeance, without dressing it up with any pretensions of procedure or justice, but he can’t allow himself to actively act on those impulses—or else he would be Bad, and he can’t have that. He has to believe himself to be Good, and he wants to indulge himself with Dream’s suffering anyway. So he explains that, actually, Dream’s treatment is Dream’s own fault. It’s hilariously deluded.

Which brings me to Quackity, because what makes Quackity fun is that he’s actually NOT hilariously deluded—not about this, at least. Unlike Sam, he’s not laboring under the insane mental acrobatics necessary to convince himself that torture is Good Actually. He knows that what he’s doing is terrible, but he owns it: he’s fine admitting that he enjoys it, that he’s doing this for personal gain and personal vengeance and not for reasons of high-minded civic duty. He’s justifying the torture with brutal simplicity: Dream has hurt him and Dream has something he needs, done and done. He seems to be a firm believer in vengeful and disproportionate retribution, just as with his whole Butcher Army thing. To which I say, neat and fun! I also really really enjoy the power dynamic between him and Dream. Dream is someone who commands respect and fear and power, who could murder Quackity with one hand tied behind his back if they were on equal footing, and who probably barely spared him a thought as a threat. Quackity lives in terror of the thought of Dream escaping and wreaking his vengeance. And Quackity is trying his very best to wrestle that power away from him.

He seems to be pretty unpracticed and ineffective at torture, too—like, yeah, I get this is Minecraft and props are limited, but torturing someone long-term with an ax and a sword is going to be more than a bit unwieldy. and did he even bring in health potions his first day? It’s pretty telling and hilarious that Sam is the one who offers the shears, a far more practical choice of tool. Not to mention that the entire premise of his interrogation gives Dream massive, massive incentive to never give Quackity anything. Quackity straight up admits to Dream that the information he wants is the only reason he’s letting Dream live, which is utterly counterproductive if he wants the book sometime this year. Functionally, he needs to torture Dream not merely into admission, but into suicide. And as the days and weeks and months pass, he’s still got nothing to show for it but growing vindictiveness, paranoia, and frustration. By the time of the latest stream, he’s completely lost the plot—his threats don’t even make sense, his violence is ineffective and unhinged and indiscriminate. He’s lost all leverage and he’s needlessly (re)made a powerful enemy in Technoblade.

So, like, characters like Lucifer are fun because they’re good at torture. Characters like Quackity are fun because they’re bad at torture. But that doesn’t much matter. He doesn’t need to be particularly talented, or strong, or skilled to make Dream’s existence hell: the bare facts of the situation are more than enough for that. What does he learn, over the course of these visits—what skills does he hone, what kinds of violence does he discover that he can stomach? What depths of ruthlessness and creativity and hatred does he discover within himself? What threats does he make that he finds himself following through on before he’s even thought through the implications? It’s a learning curve, for him and Dream both. They’re learning each other, they’re learning the corners of this little hell together. Dream wasn’t expecting him to be capable of this degree of hostility or violence. Quackity is sick of being underestimated.

Which brings me finally to Dream. My general and hastily-gleaned impression of the fandom gives me the distinct impression that there is somehow a school of thought convinced Dream’s earned this treatment? Which baffles me. not only in how its absurd extremity (daily torture in a tiny box for literal months, jesus fucking christ) isn’t something even the most terrible villain could earn, but also in how Dream himself strikes me more as a morally gray fallen/falling antihero type than anything else. I was honestly completely prepared to find him to be a straightforward Bad Guy pre-prison, but that’s not at all my impression. He’s clearly got people and things he cares about and wants to protect, and big picture goals he’ll ruthlessly sacrifice anything to advance (ahem Cas-coded Sam girl). Really, it’s more that roleplays don’t tend to lend themselves easily to those types of narrative classification: nearly every character is a POV character; consuming the content from every perspective is nearly impossible. There aren’t super neat ways to sort antagonists and protagonists in essential terms, only in their relationships to one another. In terms of manipulation, war crimes, power-grabbing, and general destruction, practically everyone on the server is guilty to some degree or another. Dream’s treated Tommy pretty damn terribly, but that hardly makes him unique. What does make Dream unique is that he’s been singled out for near-universally-agreed-upon confinement (which oh so conveniently aligns with him being held as a tool, for information). And that’s neat!

…Look, tldr I just like it when people are in torture boxes. more media should have torture boxes, they are good and fun. 

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Treat Your S(h)elf: A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Jünger (2019)

Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.

- Ernst Jünger,  A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 (2019)

Paris is very much my home these days and so I enjoy reading about the history of this beautiful city. It is difficult to live in Paris today and conjure up much sense of the city in the early 1940s. It is indeed, as it is called throughout the world, the City of Light. But back in 1940 when France fell and Paris occupied until its liberation on 24 August 1944, it was a city in darkness. Like so much else that happened in France during World War II, the Nazi occupation of Paris was something entirely more complex and ambiguous than has generally been understood.

We tend to think of those four years as difficult but minimally destructive by comparison with the hell the Nazis wreaked elsewhere in the country. But as recent historians have shown the Nazi occupation was a terrible time for Paris, not just because the Nazis were there but because Paris itself was complicit in its own humiliation. As the historian Ronald Risbottom has shown in his compelling book, ‘When Paris went Dark’, “Even today, the French endeavour both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philipe Petain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty - known by all as the Armistice - had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.”

It is almost certainly a unique event in human history, one in which a ruthless and unscrupulous invader occupied a city known for its sophistication and liberality, declining to destroy it or even to exact physical damage on more than a minority of its citizens yet leaving it in a state of “embarrassment, self-abasement, guilt and a felt loss of masculine superiority that would mark the years of the Occupation. To this day, more than one visitor or foreigners living in Paris are struck by how sensitive Paris and Parisians remain about the role of the city and its citizens in its most humiliating moment of the twentieth century.

Indeed bringing up the subject with French friends, my French partner’s family, or even relatives (by marriage - such as a French aunt married to my Norwegian uncle or the French partners of my cousins here in France) is like walking on egg shells. It brings up too many distant ghosts for many families. Nearly every household has a story. It can be one of resistance or one of collaboration or (more likely) one of passive indifference and acceptance.

And yet I remain fascinated and intrigued partly because of historical interest and partly out of curiosity about the human condition under stress. In Britain - despite the trauma of daily bombardment from German bombers - the country was never invaded. And so whilst war brings out the best and worst in people, it was altogether a different experience to the one experienced by mainland European countries. I don’t think we British truly have understood of life was really like under occupation and the choices people are willingly or not made just to survive the war.

The history of Paris from 1940 to 1944 gives the lie to the old childhood taunt: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. The Germans for the most part spared Parisians sticks and stones (except, of course, Parisians who were Jewish), but the “names” they inflicted in the form of truncated freedoms, greatly reduced food and supplies, an unceasing fear of the unexpected and calamitous, and the simple fact of their inescapable, looming presence did deep damage of a different kind. It traumatised the city and its inhabitants in ways very little understood by others, especially Britain.

The carefully curated image of French resistance against the Nazis has been asked to serve critical functions in that nation’s collective memory. The manufactured myth served to postpone for a quarter of a century deeper analyses of how easily France had been beaten and how feckless had been the nation’s reaction to German authority, especially between 1940 and 1943. And yet the myth of a universal resistance was important to France’s idea of itself as a beacon for human liberty. It was also badly needed as an example of the courage one needed in the face of monstrous political ideologies.

There remained the ethical questions that would haunt France for decades: Which actions, exactly, constitute collaboration and which constitute resistance? It is still asking these questions over 70 years later. But behind such question lies a deeper and more haunting question of moral culpability that many are quick to throw responsibility - along with their own shame of inaction - onto others but not look inwards at their own guilt and passivity.

But what about the occupiers? What did they feel? Were the German Wehrmacht during the day simply tourists sitting in cafes, dining on gourmand food, buying silk stockings and the latest fashions for their wives back home and by night drinking and debauching on the cultural and seedy delights of Paris?

Moral culpability is a question that Ernst Jünger, the celebrated German author, never asks himself of his time as a German officer in Paris. But culpability is a question that looms large after reading the war journals of Ernst Jünger from 1941-1945, now published by Columbia University Press as A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945. It should have been re-titled as a ‘A German writer pre-occupied by Parisian night life and his navel’.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was what is sometimes called a “controversial” figure. A First World War hero who was wounded seven times, he was undoubtedly uncommonly brave. He also insisted that those who were less brave should play their part, forcing retreating soldiers to join his unit at gunpoint. His 1920 book Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), recounting his war experiences and portraying war in a heroic light, made him famous. In the 1920s he became involved in anti-democratic right-wing groups like the paramilitary Freikorps and wrote for a number of nationalist journals. He remained aloof from the Nazis, however, and, while he boasted that he “hated democracy like the plague”, was more of a nationalist than a racist. 

Jünger spent much of the Second as an officer stationed in Paris, where these war journals are an almost daily record of the views and impressions of a well-read literary figure, entomologist, and cultural critic, now available for the first time in English translation in A German Officer in Occupied Paris. Posted in white-collar positions in Paris with the German military during the 1940-1944 occupation.

Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable: Victor Klemperer and Ernst Jünger. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer.

In the judicious and helpful foreword by San Francisco-based historian Elliot Neaman, who says. “Like a God in France, Jünger operated on the edge of politics in Paris, rather like a butterfly fluttering among the resistors and collaborators. He didn’t trust the generals, who had taken a personal oath to Hitler, to be able to carry out a coup.”

Jünger had visited the city prior to the war, was fluent in French, and now had the contacts and the time to become even more familiar with the French capital. During his stay in Paris he met painters such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso as well as literary figures including Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Cocteau, all of whom figure in his Journals, which reflect a view of Paris that had become a tourism mecca during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To Jünger, Paris was “a capital, symbol and fortress of an ancient tradition of heightened life and unifying ideas, which nations especially lack nowadays” (30 May 1941). After wandering around the Place du Tertre, near the Sacré Cœur Cathedral in the Montmartre section of Paris, he wrote: “The city has become my second spiritual home and represents more and more strongly the essence of what I love and cherish about ancient culture” (18 September 1942). At the same time, Jünger was aware of the “shafts of glaring looks” with which he was sometimes viewed by locals as he wandered in uniform through the city’s streets and byways (18 August 1942, 89, and 29 September 1943).

A German Officer in Occupied Paris is divided into four parts: the “First Paris Journal,” his writings from 1941 through October 1942; “Notes from the Caucasus,” continuing his account through February 1943; the “Second Paris Journal,” covering the period from his return to Paris through the liberation of France in the late summer of 1944; and finally the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” his account of having been placed in charge of the local militia [Volkssturm] and his reflections on the bombings and imminent defeat of Germany.

The “First Paris Journal” reflects the comings and goings of a German officer and writer happy to rediscover Paris at a time when it seemed clear that Germany had won the war and would dominate France and perhaps Europe indefinitely. Closer physically to the fighting following his transfer to the East in October 1942, Jünger devoted greater attention to the fighting and the raw nature of the German-Soviet struggle in “Notes from the Caucasus.”

By the time he returned to Paris and began his “Second Paris Journal” in February 1943, the Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad and it had become increasingly evident that a titanic struggle loomed and that the Germans might well lose the war.

The final section, the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” is set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Germany, accompanied by intense bombing and the destruction of German cities and homes including Jünger’s own, and the seemingly countless numbers of civilian refugees seeking shelter and food. Through it all, Jünger continues his reading, including that of the Bible, his book collecting, and visits to antiquarian booksellers when possible, and his chats with various literary figures in Paris and, at times, in Germany.

Much of the material in the Journals is introspective, with Jünger addressing his innermost thoughts and dreams. Snakes also appear with some frequency in the Journals, for example, in the entry of 13 July 1943, where during a restless night because of air raid sirens in Paris, he recalls having dreamt of dark black snakes devouring more brightly colored ones. In the Journal entry, he linked snakes back to primal forces incarnating life and death, and good and evil. This connection, he noted, was the reason people fear the sight of a snake, “almost stronger than the sight of sexual organs, with which there is also a connection” (13 July 1943). Following a conversation with the “Doctoresse,” the name that Jünger used for Sophie Ravoux, with whom he was intimate and had an affair in Paris, he described his own manner of thinking as “atomistically by osmosis and filtration of the smallest particles of thoughts.” His thought process, he explained, ran not according to principles of cause and effect but rather at the “level” of the vowels of a sentence, on the molecular level; “This explains why I know people who couldn’t help becoming my friends, even through dreams” (22 January 1944). Addressing Eros and sexual organs, Jünger added that he wished to study the connections between language and physique. Colours also had spiritual values, “Just as green and red are part of white, higher entities are polarised in intellectual couples—as is the universe into blue and red”.

Jünger’s position as an army captain gave him a panorama of the war that left no room for heroes. Violence became a grim leveller that made ideologies interchangeable. Germans on the eastern front were reading On the Marble Cliffs as a condemnation of Soviet Russia rather than of Nazi Germany. Hitler had unleashed a dehumanising force on the world, one that made Russians, Germans, the French Resistance and Allied pilots all look the same, locked in an escalating cycle of cruelty. Jünger witnessed Allied planes strafing screaming children in the streets, releasing bombs timed to explode while presents were handed out on Christmas Eve. Accounts drifted in of Parisian friends, who had once tried to transcend national boundaries with him through measured discussion in the salons, being harassed as collaborators. His summary of this second war could have been a reverse of the first: ‘Inactivity brings men together, whereas battle separates them.’

The picture of Jünger’s political views that emerges in his Journals, however, is a highly chivalric and military elitist one in which a small number of bold idealists, for lack of a better term, struggle against demos and technocracy, democracy and technicians, who are destroying the soul of an older European society. Writing while back home in Kirchhorst on 6 November 1944, following the expulsion of the Germans from France and walking around viewing the destruction wrought by the Allied bombs in Germany, he observed: “As I walked, I thought about the cursory style of contemporary thinkers, the way they pronounce judgment on ideas and symbols that people have been working on and creating for millennia. In so doing they are unaware of their own place in the universe, and of that little bit of destructive work allocated to them by the world spirit.”

He went on to criticise “the old liberals, Dadaists, and free-thinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order.” Jünger then referred to Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons, in which the sons of Stepan Trofimovich “are encouraged to scorn anything that had formerly been considered fundamental.” Having destroyed their father, these “young conservatives,” now sensing “the new elemental power” of “the demos,” are then dragged to their deaths. In the ensuing chaos, “only the nihilist retains his fearsome power.” Jünger mentions Hindenburg, and the destruction of the conservatives by the Nazis is clearly implied (6 November 1944).

In August 1943, he described his political views as a combination of Guelph (relating to the medieval supporters of the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor), Prussian, Gross-Deutscher (in support of a Greater Germany including Austria), European, and citizen of the world “all at once.” As he put it, “My political core is like a clock with cog wheels that work against each other.” However, he added: “Yet, when I look at the face of the clock, I could imagine a noon when all these identities coincide” (1 August 1943).

While violence raged all around, Jünger continued his secret diary, for publication after the war. This ended for him when American tanks rumbled through his village in April 1945, Jünger proclaiming that the deeper the fall, the greater the ensuing rise. Jünger survived investigation in the immediate postwar period and went on to become a grand old man of German literature, with a considerable following at home and abroad. A year before his death he was – as the phrase goes – received into the Catholic church. Having lived through a violent century he expired in his bed in his 103rd year.

The war journals is a highly nuanced, albeit self-made, picture of a human being in the middle of World War II, who is a flirtatious fascist, yet who apparently seems to care for other human beings, regardless of their so-called social strata or race. Take for example this entry dated Paris, 28 July 1942, “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported. Such benign individuals would not think of defending themselves, except with reasons. Even when they kill themselves, they are not choosing the lot of the free who have retreated into their last bastions, rather they seek the night as frightened children seek their mothers. It is appalling how blind even young people have become to the sufferings of the vulnerable; they have simply lost any feeling for it. They have become too weak for the chivalrous life. They have even lost the simple decency that prevents us from injuring the weak. The opposite is true: they take pride in it.”

Having said that, I found some of the contents repugnant as Jünger, a devout entomologist, easily writes about finding a new insect while fires are burning all around Paris in 1943. Indeed Jünger paints himself as the detached botanist-scholar, determined to survive and help the world recover in peacetime. For him, the best way to avoid being sucked into the vortex of violence was to disconnect from emotion and group mentalities: to feel nothing and be on no one’s side, only bearing witness. A detached eye in the storm.

His journal is a hedonistic carousel, as he frequented theatres, literary salons and Left bank bookstalls along the Seine, as well as having a meeting of artistic minds with Picasso, Braque and Cocteau. It’s possible to make your way through this collection and have a grand ole time, enjoying the moments when Jünger encounters celebrities like Picasso, or when Monet’s daughter-in-law gives him the key to the gardens at Giverny for his own private tour, or when he describes another gourmet meal with the well-heeled of Parisian society: “The salad was served on silver, the ice cream on a heavy gold service that had belonged to Sarah Bernhardt.” Jünger relishes his name-dropping and his contacts with the upper crust. He sees himself as one of the Übermenschen: “In this country the superior man lives like Odysseus, taunted by worthless usurpers in his own palace.”

The author himself gets lost in the fog of mystic self regard as all artistic writers are prone to do and confesses that in an entry labeled 26 Aug 1942: “At times I have difficulty distinguishing between my conscious and unconscious existence. I mean between that part of my life that has been knit together by dreams and the other.”

To read the diary in chronological order is to realise that Jünger’s submersion in art and literature was his way of preserving his humanity while serving the machinery of a lethally violent state. One way of doing this was through a voracious program of reading, chiefly literature and history, often reading two or three books at once. One is not surprised at the German and French reading but at the abundance of English writers, whom he read in the original—Melville, Joyce, Poe, Conrad, Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, the Brontës, ad infinitum. The range is also remarkable. Jünger pivots from the 1772 fantasy Diable amoureux to a biography of the painter Turner to Crime and Punishment. And throughout the entire diary, one finds him reading the Bible, cover to cover, which he began shortly after his posting to Paris.

Over and over again I had to remind myself this is a diary. Diaries by definition have one eye on self serving posterity.  

So it’s not surprising that Jünger would tweak reality to create this image of poetic detachment. With his constant  stories of indulgence in Paris, the reader might assume he had no job while he was  there. In fact he was censoring letters and newspapers, a cog in the Nazi machine he so despised. He omits anything that would make him appear a villain. An ongoing extramarital affair in Paris is barely hinted at. But neither does he try to look a hero, omitting how he passed on to Jews information of upcoming deportations, buying them time to escape.

Should he have continued to enjoy his life as a flâneur for so long? He had solid proof of what was going on, debriefed as he was on the mass shootings and death camps on the eastern front. Throughout his career he had railed against inertia, lauding men of action who sacrificed themselves for a just cause. And then such a cause presented itself. Jünger’s colleagues in Paris were involved in the Stauffenberg plot of 1944, and asked for his help. He was one of the most influential conservative voices in Germany at the time, one of the few that Hitler’s followers might have taken seriously. Yet he refused to commit himself during the chaos. Instead, Jünger waited for evil to destroy itself: a fireman who fought the blaze by waiting for the building to burn down. As usual, he inhabited a grey area.

Jünger remains a problematic figure of controversy, perhaps even emblematic of the aged old question how does one respond to brutish evil? There are no easy answers. Addressing the French who collaborated with Germany during the war Robert Paxton, a well regarded historian of Vichy France wrote, “Even Frenchmen of the best intentions, faced with the harsh alternative of doing one’s job, whose risks were moral and abstract, or practicing civil disobedience, whose risks were material and immediate, went on doing the job. The same may be said of the German occupiers. Many of them were “good Germans,” men of cultivation, confident that their country’s success outweighed a few moral blemishes, dutifully fulfilling some minor blameless function in a regime whose cumulative effect was brutish.”

Was Jünger one of those they called a ‘good German’? Eating sole and duck  at the famous Tour d’Argent restaurant, while gazing down at the hungry civilians in the buildings below was the choice Jünger made. In his 4 Just 1942 diary entry he wrote, “upon the grey sea of roofs at their feet, beneath which the starving eke out their living. In times like this - eating well and much - brings a feeling of power”.

We are always told to speak truth to power. Before we can speak one must think. But thinking truth to power is never enough in itself unless one acts out truth to power. Words without action is nothing. So the question one has to ask even as one reads from the detached safety of distance and time: how would one act in his shoes or indeed a Frenchman’s shoes?

More than anything, the diary raises, for me at least, the question of moral culpability. It’s impossible to tell what Jünger was really thinking, and so perhaps one tantalising aspect of these war journals is psychological more than anything else. All this stuff is swirling around his life but we hear about the harmless social fluff for the most part. For example, he notes “In Charleville, I was a witness at a military tribunal. I used the opportunity to buy books, like novels by Gide and various works by Rimbaud.” I wanted to hear about the tribunal, but alas, it vanished into Jünger’s damn book buying.

And yet if you judge Jünger by his diary entries alone then it would be very easy to find him guilty. But diaries conceal as much as they reveal. For all the criticism that Jünger has served up a self-serving exculpatory diary, the truth is that he leaves his most selfless acts unmentioned. It is known that he gave advance warning to Jews facing deportation: The writer Joseph Breitbach was one, as he subsequently confirmed, and Walter Benjamin was possibly another.

None of this, for obvious reason, could be committed to paper, nor could the names of Adolf Hitler or any of his henchmen. Instead, their appearances are marked by Jünger’s felicitous code names. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, is “Grandgoschier,” a character from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel meaning “Big Throat.” SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is “Schinderhannes,” the name of a notorious German highwayman but also a pun on horse knacker. And Hermann Goering is simply “Head Forester,” citing the most fatuous of his many official titles.

Jünger thought a great deal about the mystic and symbolic power of sounds, and he reserved his most apposite pseudonym for Hitler, “Kniébolo,” a name that is at once menacing and absurd. It suggests a kneeling demon (Diabolos), a leitmotif of the diary as Jünger became ever more convinced of Hitler’s essentially Satanic character- in the literal biblical sense.

So grey areas get more grey when we either try to step back and be detached to render a verdict on Jünger or if we step into his shoes to get inside his head. This is the limitation of a secret and coded diary, no matter how scrupulously written and how fascinating they are to read. Diaries are written for oneself or an imagined other; they play on the satisfactions of monologue. Letters are shaped by the contingencies of distance and time between writer and recipient; they become over time scattered in various places and must be "collected" to form a single body of writing.

Diaries are shaped by moments of inspiration but also by habit; they are woven together by a single voice and usually are contained between covers. Diarists play with the tension between concealing and revealing, between "telling all" and speaking obliquely or keeping silent. Like letter writing, diarists inscribe the risks and pleasures of expression and trust. The diary is an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historic writing. The diary belongs to the woman where history and literature overlap. So it’s easy to conclude that we will always have ambiguity and tension between these two polar opposites.

After 1945, Jünger again withdrew into private life, but continued to publish. Seclusion encouraged attention. His reputation grew. Scholarly editions appeared. In three last decades, doubters aside, he enjoyed growing recognition, travelled the world, deepened his knowledge of nature and voiced concern about human damage to the planet. Jünger poured out books late into his nineties. By then he had swept Germany’s top literary prizes and been visited in his Swabian retreat by the statesmen of Europe, including Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand.

Jünger’s experience of life did little to dent his loathing of liberalism and democracy. On a country walk along a bomb-pitted road near his home late in 1944, Jünger indulges a moment of conservative relish, telling himself that it is liberals who are to blame for all that has befallen. How wonderful it is, he writes sarcastically, “to watch the drama of the old liberals, Dadaists and freethinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”&#157;. “Blame the liberals!”&#157; was the reactionary’s charge at birth (there is a profound difference between true conservatism and the extreme reactionary). It hobbled the Weimar Republic and bedevils politics today. Politically, he had learnt nothing. Today Western Europe society is eating itself inwards through the corrosive influence of the woke-ness of cultural Marxism and the conservative now finds himself/herself in the sweetly ironic position of defending the tenets of true liberalism.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer. These diaries are invaluable about the man and his times. Jünger is nowadays probably less read than read about. So these war journals are to be welcomed and to be read with great interest. 

For some these journal entries alone will still provide material to debate the moral choices made - and evaded - by Jünger. To critics, Jünger participated too much and judged too little. To defenders, he was indeed on the hard right, but no fascist and, besides, his prose was what mattered, not his politics. Not to pity Jünger’s personal travails would be defective. Not to respond to his prose would be deaf. But all of us can ponder Jean Cocteau’s final verdict, who liked Jünger and considered him a friend but whose aloofness troubled him: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” Jünger may have washed his hands of his time in Paris but the hand of history forever tapping on his shoulder is less forgiving.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Is It Really THAT Bad?

Dr. Seuss is no stranger to cinematic adaptations, and even less of a stranger to animation. And whenever Seuss gets animated, you can typically expect good things, as opposed to when his work is live action, in which case you can expect…

Yeah…

Anyway, imagine the excitement people must have felt when the creative team behind Despicable Me and the writing team behind the underrated gem Horton Hears a Who got together to do a fresh new take on The Lorax! This was in Illumination’s heyday, before they ended up showcasing that they’re more interested in churning out cheap products for maximum profit, so there was plenty of hope that this could be good. Then came all the commercial tie-ins.

Now, this alone shouldn’t be indicative of the final product. Maybe stuff like this is just a bunch of suits horribly missing the point of the original story! Maybe the actual film will be better! Well… while the film was no flop, and while it certainly got a better reception than most of the films I’ve talked about here, the film was derided by many for being an extremely shallow and lacking adaptation that adds unneeded junk to a story that didn’t need it in such a way that ultimately dilutes the message. It turns a story that operated on shades of gray and turned it into a cartoonish spectacle that would make even Captain Planet blush. Not helping was the rabid fanbase on Tumblr who shipped the Once-ler with… himself… or Jack Frost… forever tainting the film in the eyes of those on the internet.

Things got so bad eventually even the [REDACTED] Critic reviewed the film in his usual over-the-top, accentuate the negative style, and as some people still treat his word as gospel, this has most likely colored the perception of the film. So while it’s certainly not to the same level of infamy as the usual subjects of Is It Really THAT Bad? I still wanted to put this movie on here and ask one simple question:

How ba-ah-ah-ad can it be?

THE GOOD

So let me just get it out of the way: the movie’s villain song, “How Bad Can I Be,” legitimately is awesome and is frankly one of the best villain songs ever. No, I’m not kidding. It’s just a fun, rocking number with some neat visuals, and while it’s a shame the cut rock opera-esque “Biggering” is probably the better song, this one is definitely more fun and meme-worthy. Shake that bottom line!

Now, the casting is, for the most part, pretty fantastic. Minor characters like the grandma played by Betty White are a lot of fun, but really, the main piece of awesome casting is Danny DeVito as the titular Seuss creation. DeVito as the Lorax is just so incredible, perfect, and inspired that it boggles the mind how anyone could possibly come up with such amazing casting.

As far as antagonizing forces in the film go, the Once-ler’s awful, vile family are enjoyable in a “love to hate” sort of way. While it’s certainly kind of iffy that they felt the need to give the Once-ler more of an excuse for his actions beyond just simple greed, it isn’t so bad that what they came up with was familial pressure. In fact, they’re actually much better at antagonists than O’Hare, the actual villain of the film, and the fact the movie give him so much focus despite having such fascinating characters that would have had a really great thematic purpose; hell, they should have been the rulers of Thneedville instead og O’Hare! There’s so much untapped potential with these, quite frankly, very interesting characters.

I guess I should say the Once-ler is a pretty decent character in and of himself, but he very much suffers from the same problem the Jim Carrey Grinch does – he’s a good, enjoyable character in his own right, but he’s not a very good Once-ler. In fact, he at points borders on “in name only” territory. Still, he does have a pretty solid arc, and that villain song slaps, so… I think he’s solid, and Ed Helms does a good job voicing him.

THE BAD

Jon Lajoie, while in character as his misogynistic moron rapper MC Vagina, said this:

When I first heard this lyric, I didn’t understand it… but his words were a prophecy, because that is, in all honesty, the plot of this film. Our flavorless protagonist Ted really just wants to get the Truffula trees back so he can get into the pants of the local smoking hot redhead hippie, Audrey. It gets to the point where Ted’s motivations are so boring and shallow that Audrey actually would have made a far more interesting and compelling protagonist, seeing as she already has an inexplicable knowledge of the trees and cares about nature. When they already changed so much in the story I don’t see why they couldn’t just make the protagonist a girl while they were at it. As it is, she barely has any presence and feels like a waste, which becomes all the more awful when you know she’s being played by a stunt casted Taylor Swift instead of an actual voice actor or even an actor period. At least Ted is Zac Efron, an actual actor, though he doesn’t do a particularly good job himself.

Then we have our villain, O’Hare. O’Hare has all the subtlety of a Captain Planet villain but none of the cheesy goodness and fun. Sure, Rob Riggle does some good delivery and gives O’Hare some memetastic moments, and sure, his selling of canned air is oddly prescient of things that happened in real life in India (though technically President Skroob Spaceballs beat him to the punch by a few decades) but it doesn’t really redeem O’Hare from being an excessively weak villain who is shoehorned into the plot solely to turn the story into a black and white morality tale. It… doesn’t work at all. What also doesn’t help is that O’Hare has an absolutely repugnant character design, looking like if Edna Mode got mangled by a sixteen wheeler and left in a ditch on the side of the road.

Finally, this movie just doesn’t really respect the story to any great degree. As mentioned above, it waters down a story that presented arguments from both sides and, while still ultimately showing the Once-ler to be wrong and shortsighted, did have him make some valid points. Here, the story is presented as there being a clear cut good and evil in a horrendously unsubtle and unpalatable way. Yes, we get that extreme deforestation and overuse of resources is bad, you don’t need to beat us over the head with it. It doesn’t help that the film also crams in a bunch of cringeworthy pop culture humor that really doesn’t add much to the story; say what you will about the anime scene from Horton, at least there was a bit of substance and reason for it. Having characters sing the Mission: Impossible theme is just making a reference for the sake of making a reference.

Is It Really THAT Bad?

So I’m gonna say that I don’t particularly find this movie to be good, per se. It’s very dumbed down and more than a little undermined by the various brand tie ins. It is a poorly executed black and white morality tale that was crafted from a very deep and engaging piece of children’s literature, and on that level, I don’t think this movie works even a little bit. Still, there’s some enjoyment that can be mined from this, particularly from some of the more so bad it’s good moments, as well as DeVito’s performance and some actual good moments of story and character. There’s some stuff to like here if you dig a bit, but really, I don’t think you really should have to do a deep dig into The Lorax to get some enjoyment.

Overall, I wouldn’t really say this movie is totally bad, but it’s definitely not good, either; it veers more into the territory of “so bad it’s good,” which is a shame but also kind of refreshing. It’s definitely an interesting film to talk about, and there are a few things about it that work, but ultimately it’s not enough to really raise the film to the level of the classic animated Seuss adaptations or even to the level of Horton. At its best, it’s okay, and at its worst, it actively undermines its own messages. I think the 6.4 it has is pretty fair… maybe a bit too fair, if I’m being honest. I’d give it something like a 5.7 or 5.8.

Again, it’s not the worst thing ever like some might tell you; hell, the adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas Illumination would go on to make is probably a worse movie. But it still doesn’t really do anything that adds to the story its telling, and it ultimately comes off as saccharine, forgettable childish fluff. It’s really a harmless movie, but it’s still probably gonna grate on anyone who holds the original story in high esteem. The {REDACTED] Critic was a bit hyperbolic in his review, but I do think he was right in principle. This movie feels like a calculated, corporate adaptation meant to be as inoffensive and marketable as possible much like every Illumination film post-Despicable Me. And if there’s one thing The Lorax shouldn’t be, it’s “inoffensive and marketable.”

[loopy777]

Is Deus Ex Machina always a bad thing? People who didn't like the finale of Avatar are always quick to point out the lion turtle, but I think we both agree the ending was both emotionally and thematically satisfying, and to me that's the most important thing. But my question is: if it IS satisfying, is it still a DEM? After all, DEM usually carries this idea that the ending is ruined and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, which the Avatar finale doesn't.

Coincidentally, I was thinking about this just the other day, although I wasn’t considering making a post on it.

I think what makes this discussion troublesome is that there are two very different operating definitions for “deus ex machina.” I tend to think of it in terms of the classical definition, so I don’t personally have any problem with it when it’s done well, but most people seem to be operating with something like the same kind of shorthand that has turned “Mary Sue” into a meaningless complaint.

The term translates to ‘god from the machine.’ Wikipedia can give a functional summary of how it was originally employed and the criticisms that arose about it even amongst those old-timey Greeks. My own take is informed by those origins and the Greek myths that I’ve loved since I first learned about them in grade school. In a setting where gods and magic are in play, I don’t see a problem with a god being so moved by the events of the story or the character of the protagonist(s) that they intervene in otherwise impossible scenarios. The key here is that the story needs to justify why the god/power is intervening here and not in all kinds of other situations; if a god comes along and raises someone from the dead, or hands over a magic sword, or whatever, then it needs to be clear why people still die and magic swords aren’t sold at every corner market.

The Lionturtle is indeed a deus ex machina in that it is a god-like power suddenly entering the story to hand Aang knowledge that he would not otherwise have been able to attain. However, AtLA firmly establishes that there are spirits in the world with god-like power. Hei Bai is the first at a relatively small scale (and was another spirit moved by Aang’s steadfast purity to enact a happy ending, hmmm…), but we also see Koh having knowledge that predates the existence of the moon and the ocean, Koizilla being able to smash a whole fleet with the help of the Avatar State, Wan Shi Tong being able to move an infinitely-large library between the spirit and material worlds, and an eclipse of the sun shutting down all Firebending. These are all powers that the normal humans of the setting do not have, but they are all exercised as a result of the intervention of the protagonists, so I think they’re perfectly fine elements to have in the story.

Just about the only thing that might separate the Lionturtle from these other examples is that it seeks Aang out, rather than the other way around. However, I think that’s an oversimplification of the situation, in which we had just gotten an full episode of Aang holding fast to his belief in the sacredness of all life, despite disagreement and harassment from his friends. He meditates in search of an answer, and it’s then that the Lionturtle reaches out. So I think Aang ‘earns’ its attention by his unique beliefs, his steadfastness in the face of painful opposition, and his action in seeking a solution via meditation.

Why does the Lionturtle not reach out to other people? Well, the only pacifists in the franchise are Air Nomads like Aang, and there’s possible evidence that they weren’t all as steadfast when push came to shove. However, I don’t think the fate of the world hinged on whether Gyatso or some other random Air Nomad killed an enemy while fighting; Aang is in a fairly unique situation in that regard. Theoretically, a previous Avatar might have faced the same dilemma that could have been resolved with Energybending, but as we saw of Yanchen, perhaps those Avatars didn’t really seek out another solution besides violence. The Kyoshi novel does a great job handling this, showing Kyoshi struggling with similar questions but finding her own answers that do not match Aang’s. Perhaps Aang really is the first person in an Age who merited the Lionturtle’s intervention. It helps that the intention at the time of writing was for it to be a technique only available to the Avatar, so that definitely limits the potential situations where it might have been relevant.

So we’re left with the question of whether Energybending itself conforms to the established rules of the setting. I personally think it does, quite handily. We saw examples of bending being taken away before, at least on a temporary basis. The death of the Moon Spirit takes away all Waterbending. The eclipse on the Day of Black Sun takes away Firebending for its duration. Ty Lee pokes Qi-points to disable bending even while leaving limbs otherwise functional (sometimes). Those all help clearly establish that bending is tied to the physical body, and specifically the Qi energies flowing through it. We see esoteric manipulation of those energies by way of Waterhealing, Lightningbending, and the time Aang’s spirit is knocked out of his body by physically crashing into a bear-shaped shrine/idol.

So yes, the Lionturtle is a newly-arrived god who imparts special magic to solve a problem that couldn’t otherwise have worked out so neatly, but all the elements are there to make it a workable plot element. If the Day of Black Sun had worked out, would people be complaining about how Deus Ex Machina it is for the gAang to stumble across information on an eclipse coming before the return of Sozin’s Comet that will take away Firebending and allow Aang to confront Ozai without training up to the a higher fighting level?

Well, not if Aang kills Ozai in that scenario, I expect.

The root of the way most people use ‘deus ex machina’ in modern times, I think, links to what Aristotle is said to have been alluding to in that Wikipedia article, and what Nietzsche also seems to be getting at. Specifically, they seem to think it’s better when a tragic story is allowed to end in tragedy, rather than an audience-pleasing happy ending getting tacked on in an act of weakness and cowardice. It’s fair to criticize this (I enjoy tragedy as well as happy endings, when it’s done right), but I think it can be taken too far into a desire for bleak endings in general. It would be more ‘mature,’ the thinking goes, for Aang to have to kill Ozai, be tainted, scream his angst to the sky, and show the audience that Life Is Dark even though it’s a trite message that doesn’t really follow from anything that came before. The thing about Tragedy that a lot of people forget is that it needs to be set up with as much care and earnestness as Deus Ex Machina, or else it’s just as hackneyed and immature.

AtLA is not a tragedy. It is not about the mistakes and flaws of the protagonists piling up into chaos. So the complaint about ‘deus ex machina’ doesn’t even really apply, according to the original controversy about it. Aang is not freed from the consequences of a flaw, because his desire for peace and life is something that’s consistently portrayed as good throughout the rest of the series. It’s built up in his culture, the appreciation for the Air Nomads that’s conveyed despite their flaws, the focus on his being the last survivor of a genocide, and even the subtitle of the series (providing you don’t live somewhere that got the much more generic “Legend of..” title that fits Korra’s more generic legend so much better). It’s not a tragedy if everything is working out until a last minute swerve when all the good things suddenly become bad.

That’s a Comedy, according to certain modern definitions. ;)

The only story that could end with Aang giving up his ideals to kill Ozai using the philosophy and ways of the Fire Nation is a story about how the Fire Nation is right- that morality is secondary to strength and necessity. And if that’s the story being told, wouldn’t it have been easier to just make the Fire Nation the heroes in the first place, slaughtering corrupt pacifist hippies who would rather we all die than fight to improve the world?

No matter how you look at it, people who criticize AtLA’s ending by calling it a ‘deux ex machina’ aren’t doing so by using the text of the story at all. They’re either glossing over how the setup for all the plot elements is all right there in the story, or else they’re doing exactly what the ancient Greeks criticize bad deus ex machina for in the first place by putting the wrong ending on a story. So most who use ‘deux ex machina’ as a criticism aren’t thinking about the nature of Story at all, I think. They’ve heard the term, mistake it for general criticism of ‘unearned’ plot points, and/or use it as justification for their own pretentious fascination with bleak endings.

So, to summarize my answer- yes, DEM can be a criticism in and of itself, depending on the definition in play. It can apply to AtLA, also depending on the definition in play.

But applying DEM to AtLA as a criticism just doesn’t add up.

[inspector-montoya-fox]

let’s talk about the themes of the Sly games

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (2002):

Paris: this might not be the game’s main theme but it’s the theme that is most omnipresent. Paris is the glue that connects everything together. it immediately has such an impact on the player, even though it’s just the tutorial and the gang’s base of operations. Sly being a thief but also living in Paris just sounds so right, like it’s the way it should be. it fits. 

The Thievius Raccoonus: this is the main theme and what provides the game with its premise. it’s the book that needs to be glued back together and its importance is highlighted throughout. almost every level has a page included so we’re constantly reminded of its significance. the skills we earn by retrieving the main ancestors’ pages elevate the gameplay and force the player to respect it. other than that it’s a clever way to spotlight the ancestors and establish that Sly does come from a long line of thieves.

Family: this doesn’t need much explaining but i’ll do it anyway. we start off with Sly’s parents getting killed and him landing at an orphanage where he creates a new family for himself with Bentley and Murray. you’ve got 3 different types of family: (A) Connor and Sly’s mom getting murdered and Sly’s aim to avenge them, (B) Bentley and Murray being true brothers when Sly was left with no one (i’m tearing up), and (C) the ancestors, which are explored more in-depth through the theme of The Thievius Raccoonus. Family as a theme explores Sly’s motivations and drive, even though Connor’s role is minor, especially in comparison to his role in Sly 3

Morality: Sly 1 is rudimental in its gameplay. it was a little game with a big promise at the time it was released, hoping to serve Sony and the Playstation 2 with a worthy mascot and an even worthier title. but right off the bat the player is bombarded with a shit-ton of lore about the world Sly lives in and how he operates. we immediately find out he’s an antihero, an honourable thief who has a code of conduct. this comes into stark contrast with the game’s villains who are basically filthy crooks. thief takes down thieves and the theme of Morality is SP’s attempt to make the player distinguish between good criminal and bad criminal. Morality as a theme is spotlighted immensely in Cold Heart of Hate when Sly saves Carmelita because he truly is the good guy, but also when it’s revealed that what’s been keeping Clockwerk alive all these years is the lack of morals and the hatred. the game establishes Morality as the outlining theme of the entire series, placing Sly on a pedestal because he’s honourable. morals trump hatred, so fuck off Clockwerk (even though ‘perfection has no age’ might be one of the coolest lines in the game lol)

Sly 2: Band of Thieves (2004):

Paris: this is the theme from the first game but on steroids. like make it x10. when you take the plot of Sly 2 and boil down to its core, it turns out to be a full-on race against time to save Paris. it provides both a nod to the first game and a sense of closure at the end: the game begins in Paris and ends in Paris. It’s both a setting and a catalyst, and it is absolutely brilliant in the game. you spend most of the game globetrotting, away from home but as soon as you find out ClockLa is on her way to unleash her psychotic brain waves and turn the city evil, you find yourself at the edge of your seat, caring more about Paris than anything else. it’s omnipresent and powerful and i don’t know why but i love it.

Spice: if you wanna be my lover. here’s an amazing replacement for drug trafficking as a plot device in a children’s game: spice. the spice trail is what pushes the narrative forward but also gives the gang something to face before the pieces fall into place and the larger scale of things is revealed. before ClockLa steals the show, spice is the main antagonist in the game. it brings the villains together, leads the gang from one location to another, provides some memorable missions and obstacles (Spice in the Sky and a raged, spice-infused Murray). but it’s not to say that it fades away in the long-run. Spice is actually the subtle thread that connects the episodes together but also is significant to the final master plan of hypnotising Paris.

Deception: obvious one here. Neyla pretending to be an ally is the major example. we’ve got the Contessa pretending to be loyal to Interpol, we’ve got Arpeggio seemingly being the mastermind behind everything (which he kinda was until he wasn’t), we’ve got the whole evil plot reveal on the spice, we’ve got Neyla ripping off Arpeggio on her journey to become the most well-written villain in video-game history. lots going on here. overall great theme. on a wider scale (and i’ve touched on this before in some recent posts) we’ve got SP deceiving the player into thinking the plot is all laid out at Rajan’s ball until it all turns to shit and nothing goes as expected. Appearance V Reality is a sub-theme that pops up when Bentley fights Jean Bison and Bison constantly underestimates Bentley until the turtle fucking blows his lights out. it’s not an instance of Deception per se, but it’s worth mentioning

The Past: Clockwerk’s return makes this a theme instead of a motif. before ‘saving Paris’ becomes the main objective, it’s Sly’s determination to prevent Clockwerk’s revamping that kicks off the game’s events. the events of Sly 1 play a pivotal role here as they lay the groundwork for the plot of Sly 2. it’s not just Sly 2: The Sequel. with its own set of characters and an intricate story it becomes its very own thing. but Clockwerk is the link that connects everything.

Morality: this one sneaks up on you in the game’s second half and just bites you right in the ass when you least expect it. Contessa, who until her boss-fight seems to be just another selfish spider bitch witch, manifests into this advocate for Sly’s inner demons through simple dialogue. fucking brilliant. ‘You’re an ignorant child playing dress-up in his father’s legacy’ (in my opinion, the best line in the entire series) kicks it all off. and then the theme becomes obviously present throughout. it explores the fine line that Sly walks between robin hood and scumbag thief, it shows how the villains are down-right criminals who want to benefit from their crimes, it cracks black and white into a million pieces because in a single game there are like a million layers of good and evil: Barkley at the very top as the authoritarian white, Carmelita as a sympathetic cop who tries to grasp onto her own code of ethics while occasionally running with the thieves, Sly and the gang as antiheroes, the villains as... villains, and Neyla as the embodiment of satan. it’s a scale and the game spotlights this. i had a different bullet point for Justice but i think it falls under Morality. basically, Carmelita’s story arc in Sly 2 deals with blurring her views a bit and re-defining justice

Sly 3: Honour Among Thieves (2005):

Ancestry (Cooper Vault): this is what the game is all about, or at least the premise. after stitching the cottdamn book back together by the end of the first game, Sly 2 doesn’t give any attention to the Thievius Raccoonus. in fact, Sly 2 exists on a completely different plane, using its amazing plot to elevate itself away from the lore of the first game. ancestry is rarely mentioned. flashforward to Sly 3, where SP takes us back to the mythos for a new caper involving a new reveal: the Cooper Vault. what we thought we knew about the ancestors is thrown out the window to pave the way for this mystical place where the Coopers buried their secrets and their loot. i’d like to point out that the theme of Ancestry is great and all but SP does a shitty job in spreading it throughout the game. whilst recruiting the new gang members we often forget why we’re doing so and it’s not until the last episode of the game that we get the fulfilment of the theme’s promise. it’s also worth mentioning that the theme pops up in A Cold Alliance when Tsao is comparing himself to Sly and he speaks of his ancestors but we somehow get the feeling that his ancestors were all colossal jerks like him and had absolutely 0 honour

Family: this is not the same as Ancestry. the new gang members could have very well been distant with each other if not for the adventures that made them bond. Bentley’s fascination with the Guru, Murray being the Guru’s apprentice, Bentley falling for Penelope, Penelope and Panda King helping Murray with the van, Panda King and Sly working alongside each other to kill vampire mantises and the Crusher. these are all moments that helped sell the ‘group of thieves’ aspect of the game. but Family also explores the bond of the original trio and how, even when they face their differences (Bentley and Murray living in the shadow of Sly), they can still make it through, even stronger than before. other references here might include: Panda King and Jing King, Dimitri and the Lousteau diving legacy, Dr. M and McSweeney being Conner’s “sidekicks”

Honour: this replaces the theme of Morality from the previous two games as the situations the characters face allude to honour (doing what’s right for the greater good) rather than morality (black and white, good vs evil). what i mean by that is SP making an effort to distinguish why Sly is a different thief and ultimately an antihero. this was sorta explored in the previous games by having Sly put an end to the villains’ various operations but the overall plot overshadowed those instances. Sly 3 on the other hand fully explores the theme of Honour by including the word in the title and having the gang save the day in every episode. stopping harm to the environment (polluting the Venice canals, destroying the Australian outback), helping Penelope come to terms with her inner demons by encouraging her to drop the facade of the Black Baron, saving Jing King from forced marriage, etc. the theme also ties into the theme of Redemption (below) but what i’d really like to point out is that Carmelita gets in on it as well. i can’t think of a more honourable moment than when she finally, after 3 games, puts the petty cop bullshit aside and comes to Kaine Island with her squad to save Sly from Dr. M. she makes Sly’s battle her own and doesn’t give up, showing up at the very end to save him from Dr. M’s horrific boss-fight (ugh)

Deception: although not as major as in Sly 2, i’ve said this time and time again: Flight of Fancy perfectly encapsulates the theme of Deception. Penelope dressing up as the Black Baron is not the only instance of deception. you’ve got Bentley and Penelope blowing their online avatars out of proportion, you’ve got Dimitri who was initially a villain finally turning sides, you’ve got an episode card full of sunshine and bright blue and gold fonts for a hub that’s all gloomy rainclouds. beyond Flight of Fancy, i can think of a few more instances: some Shakespearian shenanigans when Carmelita disguises herself as Jing King, or when the gang doesn’t reveal their Dead Men Tell No Tales plan to the player and we’re left thinking that Sly is going to get eaten by sharks

Redemption (Choices): speaks for itself, really. this one ties in with Honour and is a sub-theme, maybe a motif. we’ve got Murray’s desire to redeem himself for feeling guilty over Bentley’s accident. we’ve got Dimitri and the Panda King joining the gang after previously being villains in the series, and eventually redeeming themselves through helping with the heist. we’ve got Penelope redeeming herself as the Black Baron by joining the gang. i also named it Choices because these characters chose to redeem themselves. Choices are all over the game, whether its the lack of free will or the sacrifice characters make: Jing King isn’t in a position to choose whether or not she gets married during her capture, Sly sacrifices his cane at the very beginning of the game to save Bentley and then jumps in front of Dr. M’s shot to save Carmelita (!!!)

Closure: or the lack of, smh. SP’s trilogy comes to a close and therefore the theme has to exist even if the game doesn’t provide the player with mass satisfaction. Sly finally gets together with Carmelita, Bentley finally gets over his fear and self-doubt and lives the good life (with Penelope), Murray kicks off his racing career, and we get happy-ever-afters for the rest of the gang as well

[aion-rsa]

My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 22 Review: Sad Man’s Parade

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This My Hero Academia review contains spoilers.

My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 22

“Even if you stumble in life, you can pick yourself back up again.” 

“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy.” That’s the central question that the Joker poses in Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke, but it’s a concept that’s been prevalent throughout the histories of many of My Hero Academia’s villains. The events of “Sad Man’s Parade” explore how Twice’s life in particular has had a dark domino effect that progressively pushed him to his life of crime. This style of oppressive morality play can begin to feel melodramatic when it’s overdone, but what’s important about Twice’s situation in “Sad Man’s Parade” is that it also continually pushes the message that it’s never too late to turn your life around and that redemption can be right around the corner. 

This is an optimistic virtue that’s evaded and crushed Twice in the past, yet it’s something that many of the head figures at the League of Villains are currently wrestling with in the tail-end of My Hero Academia’s fifth season. “Sad Man’s Parade” is an episode that lets a lunatic run the asylum, but the operation is such a success that maybe the League of Villains should let unstable trauma victims lead the way more often.

Twice has always been one of My Hero Academia’s most fascinating and frightening characters because of the frayed state of his mind and how the use of his Quirk appears to only make him progressively more unstable. The series has never necessarily made previous comparisons between the character and DC’s Clown Prince of Crime, but in terms of karmic mayhem it’s apt. “Sad Man’s Parade” pulls the trigger of removing Twice’s mask, but then sends the character into a dangerous tailspin when he confuses Skeptic’s puppets with himself and believes that he’s the one that’s hurting Toga. This difficult realization makes Twice even more erratic than normal. He’s a character who’s always stuck in some level of an identity crisis, but “Sad Man’s Parade” depicts him at his very worst. And then he reaches peak performance. 

This glimpse of the villain’s rock bottom is only fitting since the episode largely fills in the blanks surrounding Twice’s origins. This information is satisfying and helpful regarding Twice’s future, but it feels even more appropriate following the looks into Shigaraki and Toga’s backstories that have been provided in the previous installments. This “My Villain Academia” arc continues to unpack the layers on My Hero Academia’s deadliest characters and “Sad Man’s Parade” results in another disturbing, emotional home run for the anime.

There’s a compelling juxtaposition in play through “Sad Man’s Parade” between Skeptic’s control over his puppets and Twice’s own duplications and how these comparable abilities contrast in slight, yet vital ways. Ideally, Skeptic wishes to absorb Twice’s Quirk and have a replication and puppet Quirk that’s even more advantageous than what he currently wields. This sinister master plan involves eradicating what’s left of Twice’s fractured mind so that his Quirk can be used to proliferate Re-Destro and make a whole team of copies for this volatile villain. So you know, it’s basically Multiplicity, but with a whole lot more genocide. 

Every detail that’s provided on Twice’s past is fitting and succeeds in its mission to humanize this hyperbolized wild card from the series. Twice only started to clone himself in the first place because he suffered from crippling loneliness, not because he possessed any malevolent intentions to improve his Quirk. It’s such a simple, human piece of backstory that does more for the character than what a verbose monologue would provide. Twice is currently stuck in an incredibly dangerous situation, but the initial desires that push him down this path to villainy are highly relatable. 

Much like with what’s learned about Himiko Toga in the previous installment, “Sad Man’s Parade” presents Twice not so much as an evil mastermind whose purpose is revenge as it paints him as a scared, hurt victim of circumstance. He finds comfort in the League of Villains because he’s vulnerable and without confidence, just like Himiko Toga, not because he’s fueled by a bottomless pit of rage. What’s just as moving as the circumstances behind the genesis of Twice’s Quirk is him finally regaining his confidence in the department. Twice has been paralyzed in fear over his Quirk after he witnessed some of his clones eliminate each other, planting seeds of doubt in his mind if he’s actually the original version of himself or just another clone. 

This is some of My Hero Academia’s deepest material and “Sad Man’s Parade” provides Twice some closure in this area that’s incredibly cathartic and also allows him to passionately embrace his powers again as he gets his groove back. It manages to be just as inspirational as the moment when Shoto Todoroki takes ownership of the fire side of his Quirk and he moves out of the shadow of his father’s trauma, which is saying something for a secondary villain. It’s so satisfying when Twice’s clones are able to overpower Skeptic’s puppets and he can take solace in his powerful Quirk rather than allow it to control him through fear and doubt. 

There’s a powerful symmetry to the episode where Twice’s growing confidence mirrors the unshackled nature of his Quirk, leading to the extraordinary culmination of Infinite Doubles. My Hero Academia wisely doesn’t undersell this moment and it’s a visual extravaganza as the streets are literally overrun with hundreds if not thousands of Twice copies. The icing on the cake is that the rest of the League of Villains can’t believe their eyes over Twice’s comeback. 

A promotion may be on the way for the masked weirdo who seems to have left some of his emotional baggage buried under countless duplications. “Sad Man’s Parade” functions as a celebration of Twice, but also his strong connection with Toga and why they need each other. It ends with both of them more empowered than ever before and it makes both “Sad Man’s Parade” and last week’s “Revival Party” two complimentary sides of the same story.

This is Twice’s episode to win, but Dabi, Mr. Compress, and Spinner get to show their skills against the Meta Liberation Army’s ice-based Geten. The battle brews in the background and it still offers some fun variety that breaks up the episode’s focus, but it’s largely inconsequential. It just provides more stunning action and an opportunity for Twice’s story to breathe. The final stage of Twice’s plan where Twice produces clones of Shigaraki, Dabi, and Mr. Compress is the perfect climax to all of this even if Re-Destro’s Tetsuo-esque Akira powers make swift work of them. 

Re-Destro and Clone-araki’s fight is brief, but well choreographed and benefits from how it’s just as much a battle of values as it is of Quirks. Re-Destro continues to preach over how the very perception of Quirks in society is broken and beyond repair. On that note, it also sounds like Yuki Hayashi’s theme music for Re-Destro kicks in once he reveals his motivations to Shigaraki and it’s a heavy, intimidating tune.

There’s a broad vein of wild comedy that runs through “Sad Man’s Parade,” but it’s also a surprisingly brutal episode that doesn’t shy away from the visceral nature of breaking Twice’s arms and legs, as well as what nearly happens to Toga. My Hero Academia has steadily grown more adult, especially with how far it’s willing to go with its violence, but it means even more that this prolonged focus on the villains doesn’t present a sanitized version of the anime’s action. 

Similarly, Shigaraki and Twice are so specific over how they’re the ones to kill Re-Destro and that they want his death to be personal. Their involvement in his execution is as important as the outcome. It’s significant that they’re reached such a place of animosity and aggression for their enemies. Shigaraki currently seems to exhibit more hostility towards Re-Destro’s Meta Liberation Army than he does for All Might and U.A. High’s heroes, which is fascinating.

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Every time that My Hero Academia devotes an episode’s worth of backstory to a character it runs the risk of spoiling what makes that individual compelling in the first place, yet “Sad Man’s Parade” is an effective example of how character development and plotting can work together. Twice suddenly evolves from a loose cannon into a top tier villain in a manner that doesn’t just feel believable, but is also genuinely inspirational. The series’ prolonged shift in perspective over to the bad guys continues to be one of My Hero Academia’s best decisions. The stakes that surround the conflict between the League of Villains and the Meta Liberation Army are so engrossing that a return to Deku’s schoolyard shenanigans suddenly seem a lot less important. 

The post My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 22 Review: Sad Man’s Parade appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[badkatdesignsmastersblog]

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cuddy, Luke. BioShock and Philosophy : Irrational Game, Rational Book. Chichester, West Sussex, Uk ; Malden, Ma, John Wiley And Sons, Inc, 2015.

This book is one of my favorites for discussing the inherent political and philosophical issues in games. The Bioshock franchise has a lot to say about rejecting control and programming, be it the programming of polite society (“would you kindly”) or the more metaphorical rejection of a tyrannical parent’s expectations (Elizabeth Comstock’s entire character arc), and these myriad messages are parsed and considered through numerous philosophical and sociological frameworks. It constantly questions the ethical and moral implications of the many decisions a player can make in these games and pushes many varying views on the arcs of the different characters. It is a fascinating look at how games can help develop a critical mind towards structures in power through consistent diegetic writing and references to prominent (and wrong, in Ayn Rand’s case) thinkers in its scant dialogue.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig De Peuter. Games of Empire : Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, University Of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Yet another book to feature leftist views on the history of gaming (this entry was written like third to last chronologically), this one is more concerned about how technology that was once used to code subversive counter-culture gaming experiments in the 1970’s has since been expropriated to further capitalist and neocolonial interests and goals. As visual mass media like films and video games and TV has since supplanted print media (posters and print ads), all sorts of insidious agendas and troubling trends can and have been implanted subtly into what we normally consume, such as the glorification of warmongering and conquest games that then link through to the literal army website for enlistment.

The book itself is a critique of late stage capitalism and neoliberal interests that have made up the backbone of real-life simulation games like Second Life and America’s Army, and a galling look at the slimy ways we are fed ideology through games. 

Guillaume De Laubier, and Jacques Bosser. Sacred Spaces : The Awe-Inspiring Architecture of Churches and Cathedrals. New York, Abrams, 2018.

Growing up in a majority Catholic country with a highly devout grandmother and many aunts and uncles subscribing to that grift masquerading as a religion meant getting dragged to upwards of 40 church ceremonies and a lot of subtle proselytizing and covert conversions. All it did for me was make me fall in love with the gaudy excesses of its aesthetic sensibility. This book feeds my irrepressible need to look at Gothic architecture and stained glass and informs a lot of my aesthetic choices. The photography of church interiors and descriptive passages of the historical significance of Gothic architecture in relation to churches constantly informs my many aesthetic choices as both a goth and an agnostic/Jewish designer fascinated with the aesthetics of high Catholic camp and excess.  

Hernandez, Patricia. “The Cyberpunk 2077 Crunch Backlash.” Polygon, 7 Oct. 2020, www.polygon.com/2020/10/7/21505804/cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red-crunch-youtube-jason-schreier-labor-the-witcher-3.

DISCLAIMER: While I am aware of the opinions surrounding Polygon and its purported corporate agenda, I have elected to source this article regardless, as it is reporting on an important aspect of the industry and the future we as designers have to look forward to as crunch becomes more and more normalised.

This article details the ways that CDPR (CD Projekt Red) treats its designers and developers, with six day work weeks and broken promises of ending crunch. It also shines a light on how netizens and players respond to negative reporting of this trend and how worryingly apathetic and downright disdainful the responses are. Exploitation isn’t new in any industry, but it scares me that someone could die of overwork and the people they’re slaving away on a game for wouldn’t care because “that’s just the way the industry is”.

Kakutani, Michiko. The Death of Truth. London, William Collins, 2018.

This text is invaluable for anyone who cares about how biases in the media they consume changes and warps news based on what they care about, while also addressing the trend of fully fabricated news to scare less informed (and often conservative) constituents further into their holes of prejudice and uneducated opinions. As a media student it’s fascinating to consider, but as a person living in the world it’s downright necessary. The sooner a person is aware of the biases in the media they consume, the faster they can learn the importance of diversifying the voices they listen to and address the blind spots in their information pipelines, and this book is really good at diving into the kind of language and rhetoric to be on the lookout for to parse out bias, which keeps me on my toes about the media I want to put out in the world.

Löwy, Michael. “Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber.” Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60–73, www.urbanlab.org/articles/moneyspeak/Lowy%202009%20-%20capitalism%20as%20religion.pdf, 10.1163/156920609x399218. Accessed 28th November 2020.

This article attempts to interpret one of the socialist critic Walter Benjamin’s reflections on capitalism as a societal framework, and how it had at the time of writing (1920s) come to resemble something closer to a religious cult. The unpublished paper makes allusions to Max Weber’s book The Protestant Work Ethic and The “Spirit” of Capitalism and Ernst Bloch’s (then unpublished) Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution.

Currently I believe this critique of capitalism has only become more relevant. He couldn’t have predicted the ravenous cultlike behaviours of Apple fanatics but that’s nothing more than the end point of the behaviours he was critiquing a hundred years ago come to roost. It’s important for people involved in games to understand this and take it to heart if we don’t want the industry to be more overrun with triple A yearly sports releases and the latest instalment of “grizzled white guy with gun and traumatic backstory”.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show : A Cultural History of Horror. New York, Faber And Faber, 2001.

This work is basically a historical look at the western media’s depictions of its greatest monsters, often discussing contextually as part of the cultural zeitgeist of any given time. It’s a fascinating look at the intersection of fear and semiotics in our current cultural landscape and additionally details the creation and eventual decline of the Hayes Code and normalisation of queer-coding villains, although my personal viewpoint on the matter is that it would have benefited the text to have delved into monsters and their depictions across nonwestern cultures, because fears (outside the unknown and darkness) aren’t really universal, and it would have made an interesting contrast to see the differences between a traditional western vampire and a manananggal, but I digress.

Unrelated to its cultural discussions, it also serves as a pretty scathing report of theatre writer pettiness and old Hollywood drama.

Weber, Max, et al. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. New York, Penguin Books, 2002.

This seminal work by turn of the century German theorist Max Weber proposes that a line exists between the puritanical beliefs that heavily relied on working oneself to the bone to be considered a moral person in the eyes of the lord and the eventual rise of industry and capitalism in western Europe. He juxtaposes the Protestant beliefs in productivity for its own sake to wash oneself clean of sin with the way that work under capitalism is presented as a way to contribute to society and, in some instances, repent and atone for transgressions and wrongdoings, arguing that one indelibly led to the other.

As a socialist (and non-Christian) myself, I believe I should be able to critically analyse the ethics of working myself (and others) to the bone, and why we’re taught it’s good and moral to push ourselves to physical and mental exhaustion. I don’t want my work to be created under conditions that are both spiritually and physically crushing, and this text is paramount to the analysis of so-called worker-oriented games companies and their policies towards worker welfare.

Woodcock, Jamie. Marx at the Arcade. Haymarket Books, 2019.

As a socialist myself I found this book to be a great insight into gaming as transgression from the systems of hierarchy around us. In a world where all anyone cares about is money, capital and the almighty bottom line, the idea that taking time for yourself is a revolutionary act fighting capitalism is definitely an interesting one. Yes, there are systems to serve within the game, but it’s a fascinating look at what we can consider transgression from the oppression of real life. Gaming is, according to the writer, an inherently unproductive activity where capital is not served (unless you work for a warcraft gold farming operation), and therefore a revolutionary action where you put yourself first. It can be an outlet for passion, and in some cases a coping mechanism for mental issues. It really made me hopeful in the industry I want to work in. (Disclaimer: I realise this barely scratches the surface of the book but it’s what stood out to me the most and what resonated with me the most.)

Wright, Alexa. Monstrosity : The Human Monster in Visual Culture. London, I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Another look at monsterhood, this time analysing our fears through personhood and how we as a culture project our fears on those who are different from us. I did a lot of research on monsterhood and how we see the other as inherently frightening for my final paper for university (which I will eventually upload as a reflective post because I still stand by a lot of it), and I think it’s valuable to know why we’re afraid of things so we can begin to unlearn harmful misconceptions of people who aren’t like us. As someone who wants to work in games art (focusing mainly on character art), I personally want to challenge the fear of the other through my work, and I want to use signifiers that are traditionally thought of as fearful to create more thoughtful art and hopefully help humanise that which was once considered hateful and gross.  

[ladyloveandjustice]

Summer 2017 Anime Overview: Made in Abyss

With this post, I will finish off my overview of the Summer 2017 anime season.

 In my previous posts, I discussed what I considered to be the weakest anime I watched, then the middling anime, then some Really Good anime....and with my last post, I discussed one of the best anime I watched this season, Princess Principal.

Now here’s what I consider to be the other best anime of the season:

Made in Abyss

Made in Abyss takes place in a town whose way of life revolves around a mysterous abyss. The abyss has several levels, full of incredible creatures and properties, and only the best explorers can go deep into the abyss and live- and those who go all the way to the bottom are unable to come back to the surface ever again.

A young girl named Riko is an explorer in training fascinated with the abyss. She’s eager to follow in the footsteps of her mother, a top-ranked explorer who has been missing in the abyss for a long time. She discovers a robot boy named Reg, who came from the abyss but has no memory of it. Together, they decide to journey into the abyss to find Riko’s mother and discover Reg’s origins.

Hoo boy. Okay, so this show is very, very good. But do NOT let the cutesy art style fool you. IT IS DARK. and brutal. and bloody. It will absolutely not be for everyone. There’s a ton of shit to warn for. But for some of you, the positives will way outweigh that.

Made in Abyss is a show that just really blows me away with its world building. If you want intricate and gorgeous fantasy worlds (that are still terrifying and full of gritty danger), man does this deliver. Each layer of the abyss has so many rules and scary pitfalls, there is SUCH a variety of creatures and technology and the world and society Riko comes from is so well thought out in general- it’s detailed world building on the level I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do as a writer. Add a gorgeous soundtrack and breathtaking animation, and you’ve got yourself a masterpiece.

And that’s not even getting into the characters. Riko is an incredible and inspiring protagonist. The sheer force of curiosity and willpower is overwhelming. She idolizes her mother and is determined to follow in her mother’s footsteps

She’s drawn to the abyss and as the story goes on, her connection just gets more and more complicated. She’s very smart and scrappy and is an observer, a scientist, and an explorer. She’s cautious and reckless at the same time, and her drive to succeed is almost scary. She’s also very blunt and ill-mannered and doesn’t have much in the way of boundaries. She’s willing to undergo any trial and endure ANYTHING to complete her goal. Definitely one of the toughest ten year olds in all of fiction.

I also really like that she’s the product of a mother-daughter legacy. She’s driven to both meet and be like her mom, who was one of the top explorers of all time- she was called “Lyza the Annihilator”. Riko’s dad (a lower-ranked explorer) died when she was young and is very incidental to the narrative and her mother left her in the care of others so she could go on a journey in the abyss. 

This REALLY excites me, because it kind of narrative is always a father-son narrative. The Absent Parent Who Left to Go on a Journey/Do Something Important and the other Parent Who is Just Dead- in most narratives the former is the dad and the latter is the mom. Men are the ones who get to abandon parenthood and do world-saving/cool explorer shit that’s relevant to the plot, women are the parents who just end up dying.  See FMA, HXH, like almost any shonen, really. There’s a reason if a dad is absent he’s typically doing Plot Relevant things and if a mom’s absent she’s dead- women are expected to nurture, men can do other things. 

But no, for once it’s the woman who’s the important and active source of mystery.  And this time, it’s a young girl who’s determined to partake in the adventure and find out about her missing parent, and what’s more, she wants to live up to her. It’s a serious mother-daughter legacy story, and anyone who follows me knows how excited I get over those rare, rare stories. 

And the mystery surrounding Riko’s mom is HUGE. in the middle of it all is Reg the robot boy. Reg’s also a great character, and despite being a super strong robot, he comes across realistically as a struggling, vulnerable child. it’s easy to feel for him.

As a super-strong robot, Reg tends to do most of the fighting and stuff and there’s an emphasis on he feels a need to physically protect Riko- however, I think that’s balanced out by the fact he also wouldn’t survive if it weren’t for Riko’s strategy and direction. Riko is basically Reg’s battlemaster. Plus-there’s plenty of physically strong women in the show- Reg’s greatest challenge is a very terrifying, morally ambiguous woman and Lyza is implied to be a hyper-competent fighter too. Riko’s age and human vulnerability seem to be why she need protection than her gender, within the context of the show’s world. Riko is definitely scrappy and willing to step up to fight as well, and I have no doubt she’ll grow a lot as the story goes on.

Also, as a child, Reg quickly finds out it’s pretty impossible to protect Riko and himself on his own. Which is where the third protagonist, Nanachi comes in. Nanachi doesn’t come in until the end of the show, and it’s hard to discuss them without spoilers, but they’re an interesting character- smart, competent, loveable and with one hell of a backstory. They are also an intentionally gender-neutral/agender character, which is nice. There’s also another character with an ambiguous gender identity in the show, and they’re hecka cute.

The world of Made in Abyss is a vibrant and full one, full of intrigue and many incredible surprises and mystery upon mystery. But it’s also an incredibly brutal world. The show makes it clear from the beginning the Abyss is a harrowing place full of dangers, and the show REALLY doesn’t let you forget it. There’s an episode of the show- and everyone who watches it knows what i’m talking about- that is so incredibly disturbing, both in the sense of uncomfortable-to-watch gory body horror and general emotional discomfort- that I actually had to cover my eyes a few times. It is rough. 

And every indication is that things are going to get worse rather than better on that front. Nanachi’s backstory in particular is both horrifying and heartwrenching. It’s brutal and bloody and I nearly teared up.

I wouldn’t blame someone who considered Made in Abyss torture porn, because it is very intense suffering shown very rawly, and especially uncomfortable because it happens to children.

However, it doesn’t quite feel like torture porn to me and I’m not sure why. Maybe because there’s always a sense of hope that a lot of torture porn lacks. Maybe because there’s kind of a focus on the harshness of nature that the brutality seems to go with it.The show definitely wants you to be horrified and feel things, but it seems like part of journey rather than suffering for the sake of it. The character’s determination and struggles seem to be at the center of the suffering. 

And the suffering is never so much and so relentless that I give up hope or stop caring about the characters, which are problems i ran into with narratives like Game of Thrones or Attack on Titan. I still care about these kids and feel they can come out of this journey scarred but stronger. That may change later in the narrative, but that’s the sense I get so far. The gorgerous, intriguing elements of the show balance out the pain and darkness for me right now.

However, that’s not going to be the case for everyone. What constitutes torture porn is a very ymmv thing. So someone sensitive to that absolutely should not watch this show, I cannot overstate how hard it can be to watch.

Another big thing to warn for with the show is some unfortunate fetishistic undertones with the young cast. The characters tend to end up naked every few episodes- and while it’s not framed lasciviously and seems to go with the brutal natrualism of the world, when it’s coupled with enough uncomfortable running things it becomes a bit suspect. 

One running bit is an element of sexual humiliation with these young characters-specifically with Reg it’s noted several times that he does has a penis despite being a robot- the first time it’s mentioned is in the context of Riko examining him, where she blithely mentions stripping him, seeing it and testing whether it would break- this seemed to be a bit of a character note highlighting Riko’s naivety in her lack of understanding of boundaries and sex stuff and how she views things in a rather detached and scientific way. But it got downright inexcusable when an ADULT character who should know better checked whether Reg had one and humiliated him, which was done as a matter of fact lighthearted thing, despite being pedophilic sexual assault. Alongside this there’s this running idea that the main punishment in the orphanage Riko comes from is being “strung up naked”.

There also a few times sexual elements are introduced among the young characters- a hot springs scene where riko reacts with confusion to Reg apparently getting a boner at the sight of her naked, or one where Reg mistakes Nanachi taking off Riko’s clothes to operate on her as something sexual. These moments are hugely uncomfortable to watch considering the characters age, and there’s no reason they should really be included- while again, the moments aren’t constant and aren’t framed lasciviously, the fact they exist makes nudity that would otherwise have just struck me as incidental seem suspicious.

For me, it’s mostly ignorable- other than the hot springs scene and the inexcusable bit with the adult and Reg it honestly would have gone completely over my head- but it’s something to watch out for. Other people have also pointed out some other potentially fetishistic stuff that again, went completely over my naive head (i really often forget piss fetishes even exist). I think how blatant the whole thing is is really ymmv, but yeah, defintely something I have to mention, especially since it involves potential pedophilia.

It has some major bumps, but Made in Abyss is honestly a robust, beautiful, fascinating story I wouldn’t hesitate to call a masterwork. The visuals, the characters, the soundtrack, the worldbuilding, the details- it’s stunning. It’s not among one of the stories that has carved out an official place in my heart yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it really did just click with me as it went on. I can’t wait to see more of it, and if you think you can stand the elements I mentioned earlier, I encourage you to give it a shot. 

[helloaymawkward]

Ghost of Future Past

“So, it’s your last day here?” I asked the senior lab tech training me for the day. I asked myself as well, for the umpteenth time.

I’ve been contemplating on handing out my resignation letter since the first week of my first “real-world” job. How unappreciative, right? I should at least endure a year!

Well, that was my plan even while I was still an intern. When my ghost of future past would haunt me, I would remind myself to:

Experience the actual med tech life, save up, and maybe love the job on the process! Plus, almost everyone who knows about my dual citizenship, says I’m so lucky to have an easy path to their ideal job. I would just be like that exemplar alumni who now lives the American dream life.

The American Dream life was my new aspiration. The former one was "to become (ehem) a NeUroSurGeon" when people asked the ultimate question after high school. The younger me - who didn't know her limitations yet - thought operating on brains would not only make me rich, it would also make me cool.

Why not? I was a salutatorian. I could do anything! 

Being a neurosurgeon was the best field I could think of that is related to my interest.

I was (and more so am!) very fascinated by a person's values, morals, emotions, and way of thinking. I thought all of which has a common denominator: the mind, the human brain. I took up the supposed best pre-med because I was for sure taking the straight path of studying brains as med subspecialty. 

However, after being placed in environments where I was not always at the top, and often at the bottom instead, I somehow had let go of the Neurosurgeon “dream”. 

 It turns out that I can do anything, but not everything.

(Click Video Link below to see if how I would be if I were a doctor.)

https://streamable.com/0ly3pn

I seriously considered shifting to Psychology at the end of my third year. I even consulted the college’s guidance counselor (which was of no help because they only cared about students who are suicidal or, with absolute failing grades). There were days I balled my eyes out because my study table was far more interesting than the lessons I had to master.

I hated myself for changing so much. I thought that my prudent high school self would be more suited for my college life. She was studious and focused. She knew her priorities. She seemed wiser too.

She once said on her salutatory speech that “This stage is our port, and our diplomas are passports to our respective life destinations.”

With those flowery words, one would think so. But I realized then that my high school self was also none the wiser.

For her, life’s destination were stability and success. She only knew she needed to escape. So, she bought the ticket for the number one tourist spot for premeds. She didn’t care if she barely heard about her first stop; wrote Bachelor of Science in Laboratory Medical Science instead of Medical Laboratory Science on her enrollment form. (I applied originally and got accepted for Psychology. I only had a full spell out of the course during enrollment hehehe)

Apparently, I bought the wrong ticket. Still, I endured my premed major. I was already in it. I didn’t want to waste the money, time, and effort I invested for the past 2 and a half years.

It helped that my mom’s mantra “You can do it! Ikaw pa! Fake it ‘till you make it!”, my aunt’s “Your problems are nothing compared to what we’ve been through.” and my grandma’s “Quitting is hopelessness, and hopelessness is the devil’s work. You just need to pray more.” were constant reminders that made my ghost hide somewhere in my subconscious.

Plus, finishing one more year of my bachelors, find a good job as soon as I can, and finally be an independent and professional adult sounded more ideal than “spending more time in school.” 

To become one less mouth to be fed from the many who are so dependent on my mom (and in turn equals dad), to be able to give back to my parents (who I feel so indebted for since I'm not exactly my step dad's responsibility), and to my Mama Lola as soon as I can was a better motivation than “I want to help better people’s lives.”

I didn’t know I was a Gang Tae. The loved ones I look up to are Gang Taes. In turn I became one. My motivations were worthy of what I presumed was a (for the lack of better words) heroic sacrifice.

I wanted to take my Mama Lola away from our seemingly perpetual suffering that close-knit Filipino family seem to excel at.

I was afraid to be stuck or get swept by my current circumstance. I still worried for my past, that the changes that lead to the present weren’t genuine, and people would eventually fall back to their old habits – their unchanged selves. Most specially, I feared becoming just like them.

I had to be independent as soon as I can.

AS SOON AS I CAN.

Now some parts of Soon has come:

·        finish my bachelors

·        get a good job

Parts of Soon that hasn't come, yet:

o   Becoming an independent adult (I still live with my parents, and they I still provided for my meals. Heck, my dad still even drops and picks me to and from work!)

o   Take my Mama-lola away from her stressful sons by encouraging her to go here in the US (I know she'd be more comfortable when I'm with her in a country where she repeatedly described her life would be as FOREIGN, LONELY, and ISOLATED.)

o   When worse comes to worst, be financially stable enough that no matter how messed-up my family and extended family may become, I will be able to survive on my own without bother.

You see though, after I checked the first two, my ghost of future past kept knocking on me; keeps knocking on me...

Particularly when internet algorithm keeps suggesting personality and career tests with results that exactly fits (and unbeknownst to many) what I truly value , and shows me this quote:

 Or Vlogs like: (watch whole vid at the end of the post.)

And this Ted Talk: 

My mom asked me several times, “What's your plan? Don't you want to grow?” When I was still applying for jobs.

I had different a answer. But if I were to say what I truly felt I would reply:

"Yes, this is part of the plan. But I don't know if I'll grow here - if I even want to grow. This plan is a practical and quick sacrifice. I'm just following it. Not pursuing it. Of course! I want to grow! *pun intended* but not on this career path."

Hence, my ungrateful thoughts of burning my first bridge even if I barely started building it. I really thought I’d learn to love it when I start living it, specially if it’s the “ideal life”.

Apparently, like the words affect and effect, “The Ideal” and “The Fulfilled” - what’s “interesting” versus what’s “valuable” - are often confused. This most specially occurs when one’s justifications root from fear (or need to escape) and envy (or envisioning someone else’s exemplar life.)

 “Fake it till you make it.”

 “A shallower problem…”

 “Quitting is hopelessness…”

 “You’re so lucky, you’ll just become like her..”

 “As soon as I can!”

 These are the words that make me treat what I find valuable, as something that I should fear. I try to ignore it, but my mind conjures almost everything I see, or that happens as a sign – as its face, as my ghost.

My coworker training me (among all four trainees) on her last day, and finding out that after 30 years in our laboratory she is still transferring to the company she first wanted to work for, is another face of my ghost.

A ghost telling me that, no matter how far I’ll make it, if I faked my way, in the end I’ll still long for what I truly value.

That my dilemma isn’t shallow. I am aware of my privileges. I may have it better than others, but it doesn’t mean what I seek is invalid.

That quitting,  or changing a path isn’t hopelessness, or laziness. Sometimes, it’s the most unexpected detour I didn’t think I need. 

Above all, it won’t make me the kind of person who is among my greatest fear of becoming. (More of this on another story.)

That I don’t want to become “just like her.” I am grateful, and I am indebted to what others call as “luck.”

Nevertheless, I want to become the person I wished I had when my mom was still a mess. I want to be the guide that my younger cousins, and other neglected children and young adults can confide to and can listen to. I want to be the person whom adults can trust and lean on as if they were children, so they can become better adults. I want to be the mentor I wish I had in school, and I wish to have in life.

That I should stop thinking “As soon as I can!” Because, I am not delayed. I should not be in a rush. I don’t need to be my or society’s “ideal”. Whatever I decide to do, it is best to be done at the present since it’ll only fundamentally affect me (unlike when I’ll act on it if I have children, or debts.)

Or am I getting ahead of myself again? Am I putting meaning into nothing? How can I find work that is related to what I value, especially during a pandemic? Should I hand in my resignation?

I ask myself these as I try to conclude this blog (Again! I thought I arrived at a conclusion yesterday), on an unexpected day off because dad’s car suddenly died last night (for the first time since they got it, and as I was waiting for another sign), while eyeing Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” (the book just got delivered this afternoon.)

  ***Originally written on: 08/17/2020***

[readyaiminquire]

Rehabilitating cyberpunk: Altered Carbon, past critiques, and a call to nature.

Note: Some spoilers head.

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

              Gilles Deleuze

  We’ve seen a re-emergence of cyberpunk over the past few years. From the sequel to Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, to the upcoming videogame Cyberpunk 2077, the genre appears to be making a come-back. What might cause a genre like Cyberpunk, distinguished by its cassette-futurist aesthetic, its grittiness, and overall negative view of the future, to re-emerge? While it reached its zenith in the 90s, it largely faded from popular view throughout the 2000s. It is important here to distinguish between the ‘original’ cyberpunk genre, a deeply ambitious project to produce societal and cultural change, and the cyberpunk aesthetics we see today. As someone extremely interested in these ideas and imaginations of the future, cyberpunk is infinitely fascinating, and though I revel in its new popularity, I couldn’t help but notice a strong thematic shift away from cyberpunk’s original ambitions and towards a much more vapid and generalised aesthetic. Most recently I found myself puzzled by Netflix’s adaptation of Altered Carbon. Season one seemingly had everything and remained largely true to its genre’s root. This all changed with season two, by bringing out an undercurrent that had been present throughout the first season without being made a central plot point: that of technologically induced immortality, and humanity’s ‘natural’ state of existence. In this post, I want to look at this thematic shift in the genre, and its implication to the wider cyberpunk project. I also want to consider the implications of ‘declawing’ a subversive genre as it re-emerges a mere simulacrum of itself. This is by no means unique to cyberpunk as a genre, but I wish to use it here a more general example, with the show Altered Carbon more specifically as a case study. It is time to investigate how a subversive genre is culturally rehabilitated.

As a genre, cyberpunk has its roots in the 1980s and can be said to have been a reaction against the corporate aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s. It arose as a form of cultural critique against the global-unity-through-consumerism-narrative that gained traction around this time and took off after the fall of the USSR in 1991. William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer is widely credited with solidifying the themes, tropes, and aesthetics of cyberpunk, though it is by no means the first cyberpunk work created; Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner comes to mind. Some cultural theorists have argued that the most important aspect of the genre, and why it gained such a large and diverse following, stems from it being set in the future. Typically, historical novels critique contemporary society through the lens of the past, whereas cyberpunk imagined a future through which it critiqued the present. Cyberpunk was thus unfettered by needing to be framed in the past allowing it to simultaneously appear hopeless and dystopian, while offering hope for the future – as what it portrayed could still be chaged.

Though I can’t give a complete and detailed rundown here (this video does a good job of that already) it was cyberpunk’s flexibility to be a type of roadmap for the future, that both broke down barriers and allowed a contextualisation of the present that made it both an ambitious and powerful project. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once wrote of technology, that “there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”, that technology was neither an oppressive or liberating force, but simply a force of change. What we needed was to look for new ways to operate within a social, cultural, economic, or political framing changed by further technological development. As a result, cyberpunk authors, artists, and scholars often looked to break down barriers, in a double sense: through interdisciplinary and shared work, but also in the work itself. Such a breaking down of barriers is exemplary in the image of the cyborg. The cybernetically enhanced human – part human, part machine – became a powerful image for how we can consider ourselves, and played with the very concept of the ‘human’ as a specific thing. As anthropologist Aaron Parkhurst points out, there’s a deeply ingrained idea that the body is a sacred entity in itself, and as a result, joining the body with anything external (e.g. digital technology) corrupts it; makes it ‘unnatural’. This distinction is fickle, of course, and is fundamentally challenged by the image of the cyborg. As Donna Haraway argues in her seminal work A Cyborg Manifesto, that our sense of belonging and affinity ought to come not from sameness, but through differences.

People already suggested I watch Netflix’s Altered Carbon while researching my master’s dissertation, as it appeared very relevant to the research I was, and still am, interested in. As a disclaimer, what I cover here is the Netflix adaptation of Altered Carbon, I have not read the novel published in 2002, so I, therefore, can’t comment on that. The discrepancies in the show are most evident in Season 2, but first, we must understand the central technology in this universe: the ‘stack’. Stacks are disks inserted into your neck shortly after birth, and stores your consciousness. Through the stacks, humanity has invented its own immortality. Despite such technological developments, however, all’s not well in the world. As this is cyberpunk, corporate greed, corruption, and social strife are all widespread. This brings us to the rebellion. Led by Quellcrist Falconer, this revolutionary gang is not so much against the aforementioned social strife and hardship, but instead seek to undo the stacks, to undo immortality.

This is exemplary of the thematic and tonal shift that has, for lack of better words, rehabilitated cyberpunk as a genre. Falconer’s reasoning, condensed, goes thusly: the stacks were invented for good, the world, as it is right now, is not good, in fact, it appears to have gotten worse and multiplied human suffering across several lifetimes. It is the stacks that are the problem, or: it is humanity’s foray into the ‘unnatural’ state of technology-induced immortality that is at fault. We have, in a nutshell, our unnatural state of being to blame for the strife, and must, therefore, seek to return to nature in order to again find an acceptable balance. This ignores one key issue, however: the social structures that were present before the stacks have themselves been amplified by the technology. From Falconer’s perspective, what she wants to return to is not a time when there was no suffering, but rather to a time where she was ignorant of it.

Seen from this perspective, Falconer’s revolutionary project is a remarkably conservative one, though I’m not sure this was at all intended. But more nefariously, by pointing to humanity’s foray into a state of unnaturalness as the focal point of all the badness in the universe, it implies that the structures present prior to its invention are themselves in balance with this imagined state of nature. In other words, the social hierarchies, economic injustices, and political repression are painted as being natural. Through this naturalness they are implied to be if not something good, merely something morally acceptable. The themes that cyberpunk set out to critique has folded back on themselves, and it suddenly defends what it once criticised and rejects what it once embraced.

Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism, argues that neo-liberal capitalism’s apparent longevity, despite its tendency towards economic crisis and social strife, is rooted in its ability to repurpose critique against the system, incorporate the critique on face-value, and by extension ‘declawing’ it. It is worth noting that this is not uique to the cyberpunk genre, as Fisher writes that most, if not all, cultural modes are often repurposed in this way. By producing pop-culture that appears to be critiquing the system as we consume it like a commodity – participating in the system – we buy not only entertainment but more specifically we consume moral relief. The paradox, thus, is that by partaking in the system we wish to critique we trick ourselves into feeling as if we have critiqued the system, leading to a sense of empty fulfilment. My favourite raccoon-turned-philosopher Slavoj Žižek puts this in even starker terms, with Starbucks. By paying more for a cup of coffee, but being told that part of the excess we’re spending goes towards fair trade coffee we are not simply buying the coffee, but we’re buying moral relief.

In this sense, resistance itself becomes central to the system, ironically because there are always new (and pre-packaged) battled to be waging. How would this relate to technology? And more specifically: technology today? The rise of modern cyberculture is itself rooted in the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 70s, and our collective ideas of technological progress hinge in ideas that technology must fundamentally be liberating, a remarkably subversive ideal. We’re getting more and more used to living in a world where the likes of Facebook, Google, or other major corporations carry out data breaches, leak data, lose data, sell data, try to influence our lives, politics, and so on. How our lived realities function is changing. Thus, reinventing a genre subversive to its core (and why a genre needed to be re-invented rather than something new emerging entirely is another interesting discussion, relating to Mark Fisher’s ideas of cultural hauntology. I’ve written something, but not completely related to this here), but shifting the focus away from the socioeconomic system and debate of technology vs. nature fulfils both the need for resistance but also serves to declaw the potential such resistance may have altogether. In the end, Altered Carbon sends a message that it’s not the political system in which they exist that is the problem, but rather technology; and even then it is not that we are going to be convinced to stop using Facebook any time soon.

  Selected references

FISHER, M. 2009. Capitalism Realism: Is there no alternative? London: Zero Books.

TURNER, F. 2008. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

DELEUZE, G. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59, 3–7.

HARAWAY, D. 2014. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble. Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Presentation).

ŽIŽEK, S 2012 A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (transcript/subtitles).

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

Here's the thing to understand about this commentary since I began it in 1981 is that I am literally a League of Nations Wilson and John Bolton's entire career has been dedicated to restoring the primacy of the American foreign policy established by Henry Cabot Lodge's success at vetoing the League of Nations.

If you want to understand the difference between an Eisenhower-Romney Republican and a Joe McCarthy Conservative. We are poster boys for the politics in the GOP coming out of Nixon-Brezhnev Detente and Mao-Nixon Leakey Umbrella Summit. I went to Vietnam as an instrument of whatever POTUS had in mind for the safety and security back in The World.

When I got to Vietnam in 1970, just after Kent State, John Bolton was in his last year of his draft deferment as a cadet in the Harvard ROTC program and he was scared shitless of going to Vietnam (which is another way of saying he had other priorities than military service, except he had a military obligation from being able to avoid being drafted for an undergraduate degree, just like West Point.

John Bolton, being a certified white guy with extensive political connections and a daddy rich enough to pay for Harvard Yard, found a slot in a National Guard unit and was in for 6 years, like GW Bush and Dan Quayle, protecting the women and children on the home front. I appreciate his service: The World had been nice and snug for everyone when I got back and John Bolton was waiting for me in an agenda committed to blow up everything Eisenhower set into motion with his 1956 Presidential Platform, including Nixon's foreign and domestic programs. That's what Supply Side economics is all about.

This all goes back to William F. Buckley's heroic self-image of standing on the wave of the future, shouting "STOP!"

Buckley was what the Soviets referred to as "reactionary" and "anti-revolutionary", These were the people the Kymer Rouge classified as a political crime in the Killing Fields.

Here's how things get a little twisted when you are dealing with applied Fascism: in Vietnam before 1962, the Counter-Insurgency processes of the Green Berets was literally "anti-revolutionary" behavior in terms of the godless commie cocksuckers in Hanoi who were losing to American democratic socialism and the entrepreneurial society of Paris after the war. In 1962, the Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of Korea were both works in process, but they exhibited very similar digestive transitions going from the powers-that-be at the end of the war to post Sigmund Rhee and the Diem brothers.

My thesis long before I actually got to Vietnam was that America lost the battle when we assassinated the Diem brothers. It is a moral failure we are still paying for because assholes like John Bolton in the Joe McCarthy Conservative coalition that has assembled itself, ideologically, around Buckley's 1960 Fascist manifesto, the Sharon Statement. Of course, two years later the Students for a Democratic Society published the Port Huron Statement, a civil-rights/anti-war manifesto that adopted the political stragety of the Trotsky Insurgency Process, one of the things the Green Berets all over the world were deliberately committed to neutralize with the Counter-Insurgencey technologies David Petreaus resurrected to begin to re-orient the military aspiration towards the peace-keeping and stability operations of conflict resolution, In other words, the SDS set a process in motion leading to violent revolution and, by 1969, the political power in the class struggle between the Jocks and Greeks on one side, which had dominated the American campus since Jefferson was at William and Mary and what we called "Green Baggers" at IU to identify the liberals and non-greek nerds who were on campus to get an education and carried a local symbol of a wonderful waterproof green sachel so you could get to class in the rain.

I had a green bag and I was both a Greek and a rugby jock. I was actually at IU to get an infantry commission, but I had to carry academic classes because they didn't have an ROTC degree. I expected to go to Vietnam when I started my freshman year and I had as little to do with campus politics as possible, but by the time I graduated, the biggest stud in the SDS, Guy Loftman, was Student Body President and the Tucker Carlson-Kellyanne Conwary demographic were the neo-"Green Baggers".

John Bolton was part of the Tucker-Carlson-Kellyanne Conway demographic displaced by the Trotsky Insurgency Process. I wasn't part of either campus coalition. As an Army brat, campus society was just an extension of the school yard social agitation I did my best to avoid in the civilian community, When you are an Army brat, you are in a state of constant social turnover and the sort of socio-politico patterns of the civilian community off-post didn't exist in the Army community. It was like the difference between "West Side Story" and the crew of Starship Enterprise. In Germany, we had evacuation drills. In 1962, the Army evacuated all its dependents in 24 hours after the Viet Cong started tossing hand grenades into Saigon movie theaters. And the cultural revolution on campus from 1965 until 1969 was just more of the crap I avoided as best as i could in high school. It was Black Board Jungle with a Diliverance drawl.

I had a couple of classes with Guy Loftman: one in military history and one in an english seminar and we had a certain nodding acquaintance. I had to come to class in my ROTC uniform of the day one day of the week and it was never an issue. The core justification for the anti-war movement was draft avoidance, or, at least, the essential emotional driver of the movement. I still find it hard to believe that white Americans growing up playing football wouldn't want to soldier for a couple of years, just to play in the big leagues. So, I didn't buy their bullshit any more that I did the crap coming out of people like John Bolton and Pat Buchanan and that whole strata of chicken hawks who have been committed to blowing up everything I went to Vietnam to serve and protect. Including their personal life style of the American Endless Summer. I mean, you can compare the careers arc of John Bolton and Bret Kavanaugh and that was the expectation of the Jocks and Greeks of the Tucker Carlson-Kellyanne Conway demographic in 1965 and, by 1969, Guy Loftman had turned things on the American campus on its head, like Marx proposed to do to Hegel.

And, when I got back from Vietnam and moved to the District of Columbia, the GOP had two distinct agendas: the critical path set into motion by George Washington and a reactionary path diverging at a right angle from the critical path, the political agenda of the Joe McCarthy Conservaties emerging from William F. Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom dedicated to turning Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform on it's head. In the Nixon White House, there were the Eisenhower-Romney Republicans (including Nixon) and the Plumbers, the pre-cursor to the Joe McCarthy Conservatives who came to town with Reagan and began to dismantle everything that was connected to Nixon's domestic and foreign policy programs.

People like John Bolton. Bolton is trying to fade into the background noise of the liberal media enough to get back unto the talk show circuit to flog his PAC. He is a very skilled bureaucrat but he is sheer poison for the Presidential critical path currently being dangerously diverted by Donald John Trump*.

Here's the thing: the influence of Peter Navvaro's agenda to regress the American economy to 1955, when an American businessman coul get a blow job in Berlin for a loaf of bread, is evident in Donald John Trump's fascination with the size of the nuclear arsenal and his proposed budget to restore the aresenal to its level in 1969. It's one of those things that just grabs him by his pecker, like the idea that a tariff war fills a similar need, And John Bolton and the Joe McCarthy Conservatives made POTUS Pencil Prick possible.

John Bolton is a major generator of the disinformation of the Joe McCarthy Conservative communication strategy, He's like David Brooks (not David Brock): he will never not be a crypto-Fascist operative. He's hard-wired the way he is. It's the Fascist Voluntary Derangement Syndrome: the ability to deliver ideologically driven narrative without the slightest existential basis in their sleep.

This is why John Bolton is able to commit his political career to advancing Henry Cabot Lodge's anti-League of Nations foreign policy agenda. Like Richard "Dick" Cheney, America's favorite war criminal, John Bolton has never felt the lash of combat on his own back. 911 gave America a itty-bitty taste of the lash of war and it should have scared Joe McCarthy Conservatives straight, but, like their predecessors who though the Bay of Pigs was a good idea and were involved in the Diem assassinations, the only lesson they seem to learn is the practicality of plausible deniability in a strategy of accountability avoidance.

Like Bill Kristol and the members of the Lincoln Project, John Bolton has created a lucrative career with a wake of policy failure that includes the invasion of Iraq, the 2008 Mortgage crises and, now, Donnie the Duckass. What needs to happen is for Clinton voters to recognize and ignore the voice of disinformation coming out of the Joe McCarthy Conservatives and vote for the (Democrat to be named later). Any of these men and women will do just fine if only because they aren't Joe McCarthy Conservatives and their administration will begin to flush the Joe McCarthy Conservatives out of the federal government, beginning with the Schedule C presidential executive appointments. Whatever success the economy is enjoying under Trumponomics started from the Bush-Obama structures that set the current Bull Market in motion. I mean, it will be a real novelty for a Democrat administration to inherit a national economy from a Republican administration that isn't a total basket case if Potus Pencil Prick hasn't fucked things up so badly, globally, My vote, at this moment, in a rational world, would be for Biden's resume and the Green New Deal Platform, which has been hanging fire since 1981, when Joe McCarthy Conservative assholes like John Bolton began installing Supply Side economics.

Right now, Mitt Romney is the last of the adult leadership in the GOP that worked on the legacy critical path of Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform and he's the only one who voted for the values I went to Vietnam to advance and John Bolton began to destroy while serving in the National Guard.

Mitt Romney and I are the last of the Eisenhower-Romney Republicans and John Bolton is a poster boy for the Joe McCarthy Conservatives

[tumblunni]

Okay, I’m gonna babble a bit about playing Oneshot now!! So umm, under a readmore if you dont like long posts. Sorry!

* Man, the setting is just so FASCINATING and MYSTERIOUSSSS! You’re sent to save this mysterious world, and its kinda this unique setup where you start the game with the thing you need to fix it, and you just need to go on this big journey to get it to where it needs to be. And its all fun and cool and surreal cos you’re literally carrying The Sun, which for some reason is a magic lightbulb?? This place is so strange and charming like that, there’s this mix of robots and magic and stuff thats just accepted as normal here. Like... humans MADE robots, but all this weird mechanical-biological combination stuff was always here and they react like ‘WTF’ if you mistake it for a robot. It kinda makes a lot of sense that they’d have such advanced robots even in the most rural areas when the laws of their reality seem to already work like machines in the first place. I mean, some humans just randomly have objects for heads?? That’s just... a thing?? Big metal heads?? ‘Of course I’m not a robot’. This is just like some sort of medical condition I guess?? i was surprised when I finally actually saw a robot with an object head in the very last area, lol. ‘WHOA BUT YOU LOOK LIKE A HUMAN’ xD

* And there’s the whole biological system and economy and etc revolving around blue/green/red phosphor, which is why losing the sun means the end of the world for these people BUT they’re able to survive for a while without it. This stuff just exists that absorbs sunlight and can store it like batteries, but its like a naturally occurring tree sap?? Big glowy cyberpunk tree sap, from trees with neato glowy patterns instead of leaves. And from ALL SORTS OF other biological sources, like being honey secreted by microscopic starlight shrimps, and their land equivelant the phosphor flies in the next area. Its like if solar panels were things you could mine up from fermenting goddamn apples! ITS SUCH A UNIQUE COOL IDEA!!!! And its got so much detail into this worldbuilding and it all looks so pretty and surreal to see these things scattered around the world providing the light and power for every town you find. Its like... there’s always a realistic reason why this person is here, there’s never a single gap in the constant decision to ALWAYS explain the phosphor source for every single room. And it just looks super pretty cos you have these glowy things stacked on bookshelves and in lil tanks and in lil jars and just ITS GREAT how you can even see the differences in each area’s version of the technology?? Like in the Barrens where everyone is robots, there’s very little light at all. All the phosphor sources are mined and installed into generators that in turn power all the robots. They dont need as many light sources cos they emit light themselves, and their vision probably doesnt even work the same way as humans. So its really subtle and sad that you only see a large number of the jar lightbulb thingies in areas that are said to be abandoned human settlements. Its so messed up to think that the robots are trapped by their programming to keep refilling useless lights in places they dont even occupy, wasting their limited power source even faster... And in the Glen because its a more rural area that provides all the farming for the more technologically advanced main city, you just see more ramshackle home remedies for phosphor. There’s robots and technology everywhere but they arent really used by the locals? its like all these facilities have been built on their land by the Refuge citizens, and all the robots are government workers who dont even talk to the citizens. And guards keeping people from going to the Refuge until they work up enough money to afford a visa, and then theyre kinda never allowed to return, it seems?? That would have been messed up even when the world was functioning correctly, but its super disturbing now that we’re all doomed and the Refuge is literally being advertised as the only safe place to live. Which just makes it sadder when you get there and its suffering just as many problems as everywhere else! But just seriously, if it actually WAS the only safe place and they’re sitting here sustaining themself on work from the Glen and the Barrens and keeping all these people out even though without them the place wouldnt frickin BE safe to begin with! GAHH MORAL QUESTIONS, I LOVE THIS WORLDBUILDING GAHHH. And its so nuanced because none of this stuff is ever outright stated, all the characters act like its a normal way for society to work, and Niko is so young they dont really understand it anyway. Its just this sort of thing you realize after a while and it makes it all even sadder. And especially because all the people in the Refuge are just ordinary citizens too, and theyre not even living in the luxury they were promised to begin with. There isnt even really any clear person who upholds the status quo, they dont seem to have any government? Its just like everyone is running on the laws and programming left behind by someone long gone, and they dont have the capacity to question it. And its falling apart because nobody even understood that person’s reasons for making things this way in the first place. Like how the Barrens was meant to be an operation to extract blue phosphor to deliver to the Refuge, but the degredation went faster than expected and all the humans had to withdraw back. So now its just a bunch of robots continuing this mining operation with no end goal, as they slowly break down. They’re just expending energy to mine more energy, which sits there waiting to be delivered to no-one, because their programming is all ‘humans first, robots have no free will’. They’ll keep doing this stuff thats supposed to benefit humans, rather than looking after themselves! And at least they have Silver the one robot who broke her programming and acts as sort of a mayor to the rest. But she’s chronically depressed and alone and even with her help they werent able to fix the generator until you came along, and even when you fix it you’re able to bring some robots back to life but others are just empty background scenery that’s too broken to move T_T And... like... it seems that robots literally cannot become ‘tamed’ unless they interact with humans? Nobody seems to be able to explain how you ‘tame’ a robot, but it seems they gradually learn to step outside their programming and form more of a personality through just... being loved enough. And seriously even if they say they’re unable to feel emotions, all the un-tamed ones still seem to express their own personality and its just like they’re stuck unable to disagree with a bunch of laws that keep it restrained. I FEEL SO SAD FOR THEM! I miss the prophetbot, they were my first friend in this world and i cant do anything for them except give them one nice conversation before i have to move on. They’re unable to move on! Their programming literally stops them from leaving that one tutorial spot, stops them from talking to anyone else except the destined hero. the other robots talk about how prophetbot struggles to try and talk to them when they visit them, but they have ‘great difficulty’, and just... goddd, how chipper and helpful they are to give you the tutorial... god i was the first friend they had in centuries... I hope they get some sort of epilogue maybe in the credits??? SORRY, WHERE WAS I? Oh yeah THE WORLDBUILDING IS REALLY GOOD And anyway, the Glen people live on raw phosphor in sort of local homeopathic equivelants. No phosphor generators outside of the areas that’re occupied by Refuge robots doing research and such. They just have cute lil jars filled with fireflies, and they use the light of un-harvested phosphor trees. Which makes it even more skeevy that the refuge is using them to harvest this stuff, seriously?? And its SO FUCKIN SAD to see that one farmer who has their farm surrounded by tiny pot lights and has faith that eventually something will sprout even though they dont have any sun. And its all so much more sympathetic because they’re cute spoopy shadow bird people! I’m really glad the game gave plenty of cute designs to the normal humans when we finally got to them, cos they’d be so much less interesting compared to all these bots and cool magic people. Hooray for unexplained object heads! And then when you get to the Refuge its constantly bathed in ominous red light! (or a more calming pink in the less spoopy areas) Cos like 80% of all the architecture is just big water generators, its like venice but with blood red glowyness! And apparantly even though they’re burning all this high energy red phosphor constantly, its still barely enough to keep the city running. And they’re trying to run these labs to research stuff in the other cities, and they’re trying to find a way to recall and repair the Barrens robots, and they have loads of machinery that’s sustaining the state of the whole world. So its not like theyre COMPLETELY abandoning everyone else, but still its so creepy and sad to hear some of the scientist npcs talking so casually about their cameras showing that so-and-so area is ‘degrading’ at a certain rate, and oh this particualr robot somewhere far away just died. God, I really hope you didnt mean that exact boat-rowing robot that I met in the first area, you bitches! T_T But anyway it was really interesting to find books with little artworks and bonus worldbuilding on how exactly the three types of phosphor work. The design for the phospor shrimp is SO ADORABLE!! They have little goopy bubbles surrounding a more fragile inner body, they look just like the sparkly pools you find them in! Btw thats the best part of the first area, its this cool eternal night in a desert which makes it look like the surface of the moon, with these small crater-like lakes thatre all that remain of the once vast sea. And the phosphor shrimps inside them glow like stars! I wish i’d taken more screenies when I was playing that part!! And there’s stuff about how red phosphor is the best at generating energy, but it has the shortest lifespan and needs to be constantly in motion to work, hence the canals of water swooshing these crystals around the city. ITS JUST SO FUCKIN FASCINATING AAAA

* and just GODDDDD the REALLY UNIQUE SITUATION of the GAAAAAME Its just this.. like... inevitable doom?? There’s no immediate threat that you can fight, no combat, no villain causing this tragedy. Its just a slow death by lack of resources, and one very tiny shred of hope that this legendary prophecy person might be able to save us all. You have to very personally see the suffering of all the people affected by this, because the premise is going on a pilgramidge to reach the place where you can save the world. you have to walk through every city and you have to trust in these people in order to move forward. You have to get fuckin sad about every single one of them! And its just... not even an ordinary destroyed world. Its this half destroyed world where people are trying to go on with their lives, people are all working together to fix what they can. Its just the inevitable knowledge that ultimately nobody can fix the underlying problem, all they can do is stubbornly cling onto what time we have left, instead of giving up. It reminds me a lot of when you get to walk through the destroyed Lindblum in FF9, and see everyone rebuilding and banding together even as they’re being occupied by these enemy soldiers and forced into obedience. At that moment it feels like it could have been the end, but everyone’s bravery motivates you to keep going, and it just becomes so heartwarming to see the place slowly getting rebuilt in the later stages of the game after the war ends. Its neat that it never fully gets back to how it was, but its something different, yknow? And you get little npc stories like the sweet grandma who was sewing her granddaughter a dress with the last of her savings, then got blinded in the attack on the city and could never see the kid get to wear it. And she’s always going to be disabled now, even after you save the world, but it hit me right in the heart to know i had the power to give back hope to that grandma and make her life just a little bit less painful. It was nice to see all the npcs become more positive again as the place was rebuilding. I wish you could have walked around the game again after you finish it, and see what everyone would be like in the epilogue, yknow? ANYWAY, Oneshot is a whole game that captures that unique sadness, in my opinion! though you dont get to see the cities before theyre destroyed, it can still be equally sad in a different way to come into this situation blind and see everyone dealing with horrible trauma as if its normal, with barely anyone remembering the old world... :(

* And I am SO ON EDGE about the possibility that i might not be able to save the world in the end! There’s a lot of more pessimistic npcs around the world who believe thats gonna be the ending. Maybe I can restore the sun but maybe it’s too late, and the world has been too damaged. I mean... I can’t reverse what’s happened to anyone. The first area reminds you of that very painfully with how some of the robots dont wake up when the generator is fixed. I dont know if the place is too broken for these people to pull it back from the brink, even if i restore light and warmth to it. But like.. even if thats true, I still want to do it! Even if all I can do is just make everyone happy again, and let them pass their final days in peace instead of being afraid right up to the very end. Even if all I’m doing is saving THESE people, saving the ones I met and grew attatched to, but knowing probably the world will still die at some point in the future. Or even if its gonna be faster than that, yknow?? I just want these people to not be sad when they die. if thats all i can do then i still wanna do it, its better than giving up. I dont agree with the one cynical person saying ‘its better to die quick than keep fighting’. :( But still i hope there’s a happy ending somewhere in the multiple endings stuff. :(

* oh and seriously WHAT IS UP WITH THE SQUARES Thats the biggest creepiest part of the whole ‘biological technology’ aesthetic here, the degredation of the world is personified as videogame glitch type effects. But the characters make it clear that this is actually happening in-universe! they dont even have words for pixels, they just know that stuff is all losing its durability without the sun, and falling apart into ‘squares’. Like... everything. EVERYTHING. Natural rock formations, just flaking apart in these unnatural square patterns. Trees and buildings and everything! Robots malfunctioning cos some part inside of them has become pixels, their entire mainframe has magically poofed into the rawest of raw materials as if it never existed. Like it would be bad enough if it was just gears poofing back into raw metal or something, but SQUARES?? Its like if everything suddenly turned into dust regardless of what it originally was. Its the same visceral creepyness as flesh turning to stone! And the pixels seem to be like.. semi-sentient somehow?? or at least mobile and capable of actively spreading outwards whenever they appear. There’s some places that’re just plain square-shaped holes in things, and then there’s some where there’s pixelized light projections spilling out from the broken thing and creeping like moss to envelop and destroy anything else that touches them. Thats why its so important to immediately shut down any ‘square anomoly’ whenever it appears, and like.. still, even if you stop it from spreading you cant fix whatever got square’d. You just have to toss away all these materials and keep mining more of them to replace everything. Everything just has this random chance of being permenantly destroyed out of nowhere, with no chance to predict it or prevent it. It probably makes it feel like ‘why even bother putting effort into anything’. Life is just constantly about replacing and maintaining what already exists, with no chance to progress beyond that. No wonder everyone loves the mysterious Author’s books, its not like there’s much time to create their own books, yknow? (tho i feel really sad for the one librarian who actually is writing their own books and nobody notices them because The Author has become the expert on everything now...) And like... they say that AS FAR AS ANYONE KNOWS, the square degredation has never affected a living person. Yet. But like.. its still happening to robots! They already get to experience a preview of the horror of seeing your own hands fall apart into pixels as you beg nobody to touch you or else they’ll die too. YOU GET TO SEE NPC ROBOTS GO THROUGH THIS. They just beg you not to stand close to them, as they die VERY SLOWLY, and there’s nothing you can do to help! At least it seems like robots can be saved if the squares are caught fast enough, if you remove and replace just the squared parts, before it spreads to the rest. But not every robot is lucky enough to be considered important enough to be repaired, and ones out further away from the Refuge have absolutely no chance... And.. like... everyone is just so casual about this?? It seems its been happening constantly throughout all of living memory! And everyone just acts like its common sense that this is caused by the sun dying, and it’ll stop when Niko brings the new sun to the tower. But I kinda... really dont know?? Is this gonna be the bittersweet part of the ending? This stuff keeps happening even though i can fix every other problem. I mean man it would make a lot of sense that this is what caused the sun to be destroyed in the first place, rather than being caused BY the sun being destroyed. But what caused this to happen??? GAHHHH MYSTERIES I hope at least some of them are answered by the end!

* And OKAY THE BIGGEST MYSTERY Who on earth is The Author? I’m starting to suspect maybe he’s the same person as The Entity?? There’s this mysterious voice you hear on computers that talks to you the player instead of Niko, and does all this random creepypasta nonsense like changing your desktop background and you have to look at that to solve a puzzle, blah. I really dont like that stuff, it just feels pointless and un-fun and like its supposed to be just a novelty that the programmer find a way to do this. And all this OOOO SCARY blablabla doesnt really gel with the more subtle scaryness of a world slowly dying. Plus generally the puzzles are the worst part of the game, no offense. Its always just wandering around a really big and akward place trying to pick up every item and use every item on everything and combine every item. Its like a point and click adventure with a more hard to control interface :P I’m totally here for the story and not the puzzles, i’ve never liked this ‘rpg horror standard’ kind of thing. But anyway I had to mention it cos ‘The Entity’ is kinda integrated with this gameplay mechanic. BUT YEAH ANYWAY Its a mysterious semi-antagonistic-semi-helpful voice that gives you tips for puzzles in a really passive aggressive scary way with interface madness. And even though its helping you it’s constantly being like YOU SUCK and THE WORLD IS DOOMED GIVE UP and EVENTUALLY YOU’LL BELIEVE ME. So i dont really know if this is some sort of final boss villain who caused the pixel infection, or if its some worn-down antihero type who wants to help but has lost faith in the world ever being saved...? I mean.. the only evidence I have for The Entity being the cause of the pixels is literally just ‘it communicates with you via computer, and they’re pixels’. But i dont even know if its literally a talking computer AI thing or its just a guy hacking computers to send you messages... And I’m starting to suspect that this mystery voice might be the same person everyone else knows as The Author? I mean.. you hear about him but apparantly nobody has ever seen him, and his books just constantly keep appearing in the library at a rate faster than you’d think anyone would be able to write. And he knows all this stuff about how the world used to be before the sun died, as if he was there...? And he can apparantly travel everywhere even though nobody else can travel across all these lost wastelands. And everyone thinks he must have a flying machine, but it could also make sense if he was some sort of mystery digital conciousness that can observe everything and manifest via any form of computer screen, yknow! Like.. maybe he is this world’s ACTUAL god?? And I’m just like the only replacement they can get, after he gave up. Which explains why I’m completely fallable and I know nothing about this world even though everyone tells me I’m their god. Me as a characetr is just... me as a person. I’m not even really me in the role of their god, I’m just a player who’s made contact with this other world and has been mistaken for god because god is gone. And I have to do the best I possibly can, to fix the things even god couldnt fix... And its just very mysterious cos some of the books you can read say stuff that outright contradicts the world?? Like, The Author wrote about knowing the head librarian George, even though she says she’s never met him and his manuscripts just appear on her desk very morning. And this part of the book also says how she ‘believed fate was like rolling dice’, whereas the george you meet literally IS a dice-headed human. You’d think it would be weird to even write that down as if it was something out of the ordinary? So like.. maybe this George is some sort of reincarnation or replacement for another one who died??? Maybe all the object head people are actually hyper advanced robots and just dont know it. Like.. Silver looks completely human aside from her glowy armoured body and metallic skintone. And robots are apparantly completely able to become sentient just like humans after being ‘tamed’. As far as everyone knows Silver is the most advanced robot that exists, but maybe like... the object-headed people are her prototypes, and the regular human-looking people are actually all finished robots?? And like.. the world has already died and we’re just left with robots that they tried to make to replace themselves, or to hold their souls or something, and now even they are beginning to fall apart, starting with the least advanced robots. So the pixelization is maybe just like the robots’s glitchy perception of what’s happening when stuff breaks down, or something? Though that’d be sad cos it’d mean even Niko is just a robot designed to be the messiah, and their memories of having a family in another world are all faked to give them a motivation to wanna finish the quest... But whatever, this is just a wild random theory lol. I’m pretty sure the actual ending will be something completely different that makes me laugh at this post in retrospect!

[keshetchai]

Hi @princessnijireiki THESE WERE MY THOUGHTS IN RESPONSE TO UR AMAZING THOUGHTS

  And I just sort of thought, if God is traditionally in all things, including us in terms of souls, etc., God cannot be separated from pain; God IS us & God IS healing & God is also suffering in and of itself… not that pain is divine or being in pain is a path TO God & understanding (though that is some OLD SCHOOL Christian meditative practices), but that God hurts, too.

 BUT that also reminds me of the explanation of Martin Buber's I-Thou philosophy. i’m putting this under a cut because it’s SUPER LONG but yeah. good stuff to think on imo.

Granted, I haven't read the book, I've only read summaries of his ideas, so I'll just briefly summarize what I understand. Buber proposes there are two types of 'relationships' the "I-It" and the "I-Thou." In the I-It relationship, it's sort of...between the self and another objective entity (so like self-object/objectified entity relationship). Like othering someone, or having an Other is an I-It relationship. But the I-Thou is a different kind of relationship: "By contrast, the word pair I-Thou describes the world of relations. This is the "I" that does not objectify any "It" but rather acknowledges a living relationship. I-Thou relationships are sustained in the spirit and mind of an "I" for however long the feeling or idea of relationship is the dominant mode of perception." So I-Thou is a relationship where a person relates to another entity as whole and complete (subject to subject relating as opposed to subject-object). 

Another website summarized: "In contrast to this the “I-It” relation is driven by categories of “same” and “different” and focuses on universal definition. An “I-It” relation experiences a detached thing, fixed in space and time, while an “I-Thou” relation participates in the dynamic, living process of an “other." Buber calls God the Eternal Thou - an I-Thou relationship being without barriers and in all people and all things. Or basically: "One who truly meets the world goes out also to God." 

 So yeah! It can be a suuuuuuuper Jewish idea to say that God IS us, in ALL things, without being divided or divisible, God just is in everything. God is the Eternal Thou. Buber (from what I understand) believes all I-Thou interactions ultimately brings us into the ultimate I-Thou relationship with God.

 > If we are to accept at face value that we are made in the image of God and act as stewards in a world which we not only interact with, but are not above— we’re still a PART of the world, ecosystem, etc.— God as sort of Itself AND this legion mass of the UNIVERSES, in each individual part & in whole, including us, then God is complicated & probably not always okay. 

 THERE'S ALSO LIKE the idea that not ONLY do we exist in God's image, and therefore we can "see" the image of God in all people - compelling us to (hopefully) treat other people with respect/dignity/compassion/etc -- but ALSO that we were given God's breath/spark/light to carry within us. There's like midrashic stories about God bringing light into each individual (since God is one and in everything), but also the fact that God "-formed man of dust from the ground, and He breathed into his nostrils the soul of life, and man became a living soul." So God's breath is given to the first human - the existence of God is also many, many things at once. Allll the time. 

 Plus like we (as humans) often try to ascribe morality to things that aren't necessarily going to have human morals anyways. Does the tsunami that murders millions of innocents really operate on a level of being good or evil? It's a force of nature. It doesn't respond in Good or Evil terms, it exists as a natural part of the universe. A volcano isn't good or evil, it just is, and it exists, and it has its own internal code of existence and purpose. God then, presents an interesting issue like -- God (at least in the Torah) outlines a code of ethics for humans and humanity. 

And it's when God proposes A.) going against God's own previous promise after the Flood and B.) suggests something against the principle of the Ethics God has been slowly giving to humanity -- THAT IS WHEN Abraham tells God something is wrong "Far be it from you!" Does God exist beyond human ethics UNTIL God created human ethics, which humans then expected God to also adhere to? (Hypothetically, If you assume God exists exactly as they appear in the Torah) Or did human ethics define the parameters of God's Ethics/Morality? Or is God just a force of nature which exists beyond our limits of morality -- but whose purpose is the creation of the world, the continued existence of the universe, and the formation of humanity and human ethics -- in the same way a volcano exists and is able to erupt or go dormant, but can also create magma and lava, can enrich soil, expand land masses, super heat the local land and make things like obsidian, etc. 

A LOT of the WHOLE IDEA of a covenant with God implies that with God's giving us commandments and moral laws....God must also uphold themselves/their end of the bargain which is....fascinating. IDK IDK God vs. Ethics vs. Humanity is FASCINATING and how it can even be approached is so wildly different for everyone's understanding of God and how God should or shouldn't "act."

 > And between that and then also different ideas on like— if that DOES matter, and why (in terms of a “design” or “fate” to everything, or bad things happening MUST serve a greater purpose, or even just “this will be tallied up to determine my afterlife” vs. the idea of divine judgement as sth possibly more complex or less “just” than that, or the afterlife as it’s commonly thought of as nonexistent), it indicates more of that same hierarchical view of theology & faith that non-Christian & non-diasporan/non-syncretic religions handle very differently? 

 YUP. It's like....well no, we don't NEED to suffer to achieve something better after death or to become "better" people. But in reverse we can become better people if we better the world, and the world is bettered when there is less suffering. (Aka Fuck off Mother Theresa).

Or like the idea that God or gods are static, vs. a force that evolves even with atrocities & pain… like there are New World exclusive orixas & loa in contrast with Yoruban sourceland practices, specifically created & responded to as a force in reaction to both fusion with/forced containment masquerading as Catholicism, and to the Middle Passage itself… or on a lighter note, how Hopi Sacred Clowns literally change to reflect the times, not in “spirit,” but in execution & appearance, in the same way as those comparison photos of people reading newspapers on a train and people on their smartphones. Which are admittedly examples from faith practices where “God” or a Godhead or spiritual holy entities are not necessarily or inherently all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing by design; nor is that demonized. But New World vodou & santerx practices ARE often specifically linked with Catholicism, even when they seem at odds with each other. 

 BUT THAT ALSO HAPPENS IN TORAH!!!! Someone a little bit back made a post about decolonizing our Judaism and our relationships to Judaism and it's like....well, shit, yeah. Colonialism and Christianity go hand in hand in the modern world, and Judaism is often obscured by Colonialism's misuse and abuse of the "Old Testament." 

 ....But well, it's an indigenous religion of a tribal people who've always lived in/related to a specific land, used a specific language, and shared a base culture/customs with regional variations. (I love visiting the Ancient Israel/Canaan wing of the museum I work in for this reason it's so....awesome to see the objects that came out of this time period TBH). So you've got this religion which frankly really truly reflects the needs of its people and the existence of its people. It's why so much of Torah seems weird or outdated or what have you to people today! Like of COURSE we may not relate to the lives of a bunch of people living in Israel 3,000 years ago as a nomadic people. Of COURSE some of the laws seem bizarre - the first five books talk about the lives of people living outside of the very first cities, practicing a type of religion (monotheism) which really, didn't exist elsewhere.

 Judaism gave Israelites an ancestral God, but one that was shared amongst ALL the tribes. It was a God that existed before the nation (so not a national pantheon) and yet the tribes became the nation-kingdom of Ancient Israel, so the religion preceded the state. AND yet, ancient Jews could (and did) live in other states and maintained their ancestral religion. And despite the fact that so many of the holidays are tied to life in Eretz Yisrael, they were maintained in diaspora!!! (RELATED: It's Tu B'shevat next week i think, so happy Birthday to the Trees. It will be a time to plant trees in Israel. Or like, anywhere, you want, I guess.) Like we still celebrate the harvest season in Israel across the world - so parts of the religion are so directly tied to life in Israel, especially an agricultural life which has been on-going forEVER, and yet is has evolved so so so much to grow and expand and exist beyond that. 

The concepts of God grew and changed with Israel (both the people "Israel" and the land by the same name) just as much as religion itself did. And that's even seen in the growth/change/manifestations of God in the Torah - like God starts out in the garden and makes Adam and Chava (Eve) clothing before they leave the garden. God/Angels later visit Abraham as travelers to be met outside his tent. God wrestles Isaac. But then God shows up as a burning bush. God shows up as a voice. God becomes a pillar of WHIRLING FLAMES. God is a guiding pillar of light and then a huge cloud of shade for the wandering Israelites in the desert - which is very different from the God that, in Eden, made Adam and Chava clothing to wear. God evolves not only for the situation and context, but for human needs (light, shade, water, protection, as a friendly stranger, etc.) God was never static even in Torah, even in the Tanakh as a whole. I mean God literally for a long time becomes an entity which "rests" in the Ark amongst a nomadic people. It's a God box that goes with them in a literal, physical way. But then the Temple is built, and God's throne is there - but also God remains with the people still, simultaneously. 

It again, feels like God exists everywhere, but appears/materializes in ways that humans want and feel comfortable with and/or however they most need. Adam and Chava needed the God who would make them clothes before sending them out of Eden. When God needs to be a supernatural force of miracles and wonder - then God is a bush on fire speaking to Moses - THAT is a God that is not being anthropomorphic but instead otherworldly - a God that can and will bring about a massive change in the social order and make possible the "impossible" - liberation from slavery. Then again, the Israelites need something that will lead them through the desert - a pillar of light, a cloud for shade and resting that quite literally leads the way - a God that guides them but also is portable and goes with them places -- until they settle into a kingdom, where God can also "settle" on the Temple Mount. 

 But anyways yeah it's....definitely a God which can relate to humanity in many different contextual ways and isn't some huge authoritarian UNCHANGING being. God, for better or worse, also seems to be learning how to be God to humans (Justice requiring mercy, requiring empathy, and understanding, learning....patience, lmao...) as much as humans are defining what they need from God. And like, that, I feel is part of the issue of "well Jewish God is an indigenous concept/God figure to Israel (the people/land)" versus "Christian God, which layers on the lens of the 'Old Testament' vs 'New Testament' is a God that is explicitly, and (I would argue foundationally) a part of Western Colonialism." Christian God was utilized as an authoritarian figure in colonialism to create it, to perpetuate/sustain it, and to legitimize it. 

The Colonial Christian God exists with all these problems that really can't (in my mind) ever be fully or completely solved with a definitive answer. On the other hand, post-colonial, syncretic, and indigenous religions either create answers or ways to "mend" over them, or don't see it as a binary either/or issue. In Judaism, the way to "solve' the problem of All-perfect/all-good/all-knowing is usually "Let's keep asking these questions. It's okay to ask them, and we may have many possible answers. If God is not these things, then what do we demand of or expect from God?" BUT a religion which is being appropriated for Colonialism cannot really allow so much questioning to be asked or consideration of alternative routes or answers because then the Colonial power [here, the Church] loses its authority and control over the people it is subjugating.

 Like you said, "that structure is the “universal” norm which has survived & outlasted other “versions” of Christianity because those other interpretations were discouraged, removed from holy texts (the history of the Christian Bible & its translations through history is WILD), or persecuted (sometimes violently), on purpose." It NEEDED to remain as a structure in Christianity. Where Christianity survived and spread through this framework of a particular version of God, particular morals, "saving" or "damnation," etc -- Judaism survived (in many ways) on the exact opposite - to maintain itself it simultaneously became regimented/structured, and "set" in very specific rules, but ALSO it was fluid, adaptable, and changing. The legalistic mindset of Jewish law means that what is said to be "clear cut" in one place is actually debated over millennia, with rulings that can affect local communities differently, or with authorities being decentralized, and that questioning, debate, argument, AND tradition go hand in hand in a way that keeps it sustainable.