#there are of course a number of critiques against the book and it's interpretation of the data

[unofficialoracle]

This is such a great post, because it may actually be possible to pinpoint "where it all went wrong for us", and what we can do about it! I've been listening to the audiobook of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and he has an entire chapter about how a number of factors (one of the primary being social media and smartphone prevalence among kids and teens) have significantly reduced the amount of true Play time children have with each other.

Humans learn how to navigate social situations best as children, when they are Playing with other children, without adult intervention or imposed structure. Human brains are primed to do exactly what OP is describing. Children naturally seek to mediate, to comfort each other, to find mutually beneficial resolutions to conflict that strength the group's bonds. Studies have shown that the strongest neural pathways are created when children get these experiences with other peers, through playing games with rules that the children create and enforce.

Letting children Play in this manner is how they develop both their agency (I feel capable of figuring this out myself) and their community building skills (I support the people around me, and they support me).

The children could not have found the base problem - Jessica was playing by unspoken rules that Arjun broke - had the rules of the game been created for them by OP. The adult rules would be better communicated to the entire group, and likely would have an imposed structure as to how to handle conflict. Much less opportunity for the children to practice their community building skills.

The children also could not have practiced agency had OP been one of the primary humans to engage with a crying Arjun or Jessica. Most kids are going to default to allowing the adult to handle a situation once an adult has decided a situation is worthy of their involvement. When adults consistently step in every time there is conflict, children feel less capable of handling future conflict on their own.

By letting the kids console Arjun, and mediate themselves, OP gave the children an opportunity that has become increasingly less available for them - the chance to figure it out themselves. And they did figure it out, because our brains are primed towards pro-social behavior, and because childhood is supposed to be a time for a human to be Practicing Skills of All Types in environments where failure is expected and low stakes.

These children have watched their parents console their sobbing sibling, they have gotten to continue playing games with their cousins because they successfully navigated conflict before a parent got involved. The behavior has been emulated for them, given to them, and they have done it before themselves. They are learning to Do Things, and they need practice.

We all know how practicing works, and skills are learned best when they are used over, and over, and over again. Children need to have thousands of experiences like what OP has described above over the course of their childhood to become pro-social, well-adjusted adults capable of mediation and conflict resolution. Nothing replaces the power of face-to-face Play when it comes to learning pro-social behaviors, unmediated and unstructured by adults.

In the United States especially (though data shows many other countries are showing similar trends), children don't Play together as much as they used to, depriving them of the opportunity to practice essential skills for navigating our society in a low stakes environment. The cost of failing a mediation when my brother stole my toy at 6, is much less than the cost of failing a mediation with my boss when I'm on a PIP at work when I'm 26.

What do we do about it, as a society? Easy - let those kids play and Figure It Out Themselves! Help them when they ask for it, or when the situation has progressed past their ability level (significant bodily harm has taken place, etc), but otherwise? Let them play, let them console each other and resolve conflict without interference as often as possible. Give them a safe space to practice agency and community building, where they have support and general oversight, and where the cost of failure is low because failure is an expected part of the process.

Perhaps we will find that in 20 years, these children will have grown into adults who feel capable of Figuring It Out because they can do things for themselves and because they have a community who supports them.

watching children successfully and compassionately self-mediate conflict and wondering if it's possible to pinpoint where exactly it all goes wrong for us

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

[gimme-mor]

ACOTAR THINK PIECE: VISIBLE TO INVISIBLE

*DISCLAIMER*

Please take the time to read this post in its entirety and truly reflect on the message I am trying to send before commenting. My goal is to use my background in Gender and Women’s Studies to deconstruct the comments I have seen on social media, bring awareness to the ACOTAR fandom, and encourage critical thinking and self-reflection. I WILL NOT tolerate anyone who tries to twist my words and say I am attacking real life people. In fact, I AM CRITIQUING THE ARGUMENTS THEMSELVES NOT THE PEOPLE USING THE ARGUMENTS.

It’s no secret that SJM struggles with diversity, often opting for ambiguous words like “tan” or “golden skin” to describe her characters. But over the course of her writing career, she has made efforts to write inclusively; and though her representation falls on the side of bad representation at times, she has made it clear in the text if characters are non-white, describing them with varying shades of brown skin or having dark skin in general. As it stands, the ACOTAR world has a limited number of characters of color, so it’s confusing to see them whitewashed in fanart, fancasts, and fan edits. When whitewashing accusations are brought up in the fandom, they are dismissed with statements like:

It doesn’t matter

Don’t like it? Ignore it and move on

This is art and it’s open to interpretation

As a person of color, you don’t see me complaining

This is just how I imagined the character

The text doesn’t say the characters have ethnic facial features

Fans can cast whoever they want to portray fictional characters the way they imagined them

It’s just fancasting, it’s not that deep

Not everything is about race

If you want people of color to be depicted in the books, go read books specifically about characters of color

Fancasting characters of color as white is not erasing anyone’s race because they’re not real

They’re fictional characters regardless of the book’s description, so who cares if people imagine characters of color differently

Western society has grown so accustomed to the media being dominated by white representations that envisioning a character as white becomes the norm, even when faced with evidence to the contrary. Although nearly all of the characters of color in the ACOTAR series have been subjected to whitewashing, only a handful of illustrations accurately depict Vassa as a woman of color. It can be assumed that because Vassa has features society deems as inherently white (i.e. having red hair, blue eyes, and freckled skin), it is acceptable for the fandom to imagine her character as white despite her having golden-brown skin. This mentality is harmful because it suggests that naturally colored hair, light colored eyes, and freckles are exclusively white features and that people of color with these features don’t exist. The act of whitewashing characters of color in the ACOTAR series marginalizes fans of color in a space that is inherently rooted in white-centeredness, and downplays the impact whitewashing has on fans of color. The continued erasure of characters of color in the series not only normalizes the belief that fandom is a space for white people primarily and people of color secondarily, but it perpetuates the notion that whiteness is better and more palatable in visual media.

From employment to education to healthcare to media, race and discussions about race are inescapable because racism affects everything in society. The media has a history of prioritizing whiteness and white narratives often at the expense of people of color. Racebending, which can be understood as changing the race of a character, occurs not only in fanworks such as fanart, fancasts, and fanfiction, but even in visual media. It allows characters that have been traditionally white to be reinterpreted as people of color in an effort to diversify casts and counter whiteness as the default in both visual media and fanworks. Unfortunately, racebending itself gives way for problematic justifications and assumptions. Whitewashing is a form of racebending that erases characters of color from media and replaces them with white actors. The act of whitewashing characters of color is commonly excused with declarations of artistic or personal interpretations of characters despite the text stating they are not white, which ultimately diminishes the impact whitewashing has on people of color. Aside from that, racebending traditionally white characters as people of color has been framed as an issue that is just as offensive and bad as whitewashing characters of color. In the article “8 Things White Fans Can Do to Make Fandom More Inclusive”, it states:

“. . .You could argue that people often reimagine white characters as characters of color (popularly known as ‘racebending’), so why not do the opposite? The short answer is this: When people racebend a character, they create more diversity. If they’re fans of color, they do so to see themselves in the fictional media they love. When people whitewash a character, they decrease diversity. They’re erasing a character of color and, whether consciously or unconsciously, sending the message that they’d relate more to the character if the character was white. . .” (https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/08/making-fandom-more-inclusive/).

The belief that racebending traditionally white characters as people of color carries the same racist implications as whitewashing characters of color is equivalent to arguments that proclaim the existence of reverse racism. Racism and prejudice have often been used interchangeably in society, causing racism to be simplified as one group not liking another. Racism involves the marginalization and oppression of racial groups based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy and it combines with socialized power to carry out systematic discrimination through institutional policies and practices. White people can be victims of prejudice but never victims of racism because, unlike people of color, prejudice against white people doesn’t lead to structural, systemic, and lasting disadvantages in education, healthcare, career prospects, and other societal structures. When the element of power is removed from discussions about racism, the definition of racism becomes overly simplified and ignores the real and damaging impact it has on the lives of marginalized people. The impulse behind reverse racism proponents and arguments against racebending traditionally white characters as people of color are motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by the desire to center whiteness in the media while marginalizing people of color in the process. Whitewashing characters of color is incomparable to racebending traditionally white characters as people of color because whitewashing contributes to the continued erasure of people of color in the media. Moreover, racebending traditionally white characters as people of color would only have the same societal effect as whitewashing characters of color if white people faced the same systematic and institutionalized mistreatment experienced by people of color. 

It’s important to be aware of the ramifications of whitewashing and to not view it as insignificant because whitewashing characters of color is rooted in racist ideals and is a method of preserving white dominance in the media. Whitewashing characters of color in a society that favors whiteness is extremely problematic because: it implies that characters of color are inferior to white characters and aren’t as relatable as them; reinforces colorist views that deem brown and dark skin as unattractive; and feeds into the notion that eurocentric standards of beauty are superior to ethnic features. SJM isn’t always clear with her character descriptions in relation to skin tone but when she is, the ACOTAR fandom should take notice because when characters are described as not white then they’re not white.

[duhragonball]

‘21

Amidst all the popular hype for seeing the end of 2020, it didn’t hit me until about lunchtime what the real highlight is that I’ve been waiting for: For the first time since 1999, the year finally ends in “numberty-number” again.    It low-key irritated me that we had to call it “two thousand three” and I was relieved when “twenty-thirteen” caught on, but it still wasn’t right because it was too short, and now we’re back in the sweet spot, and I should be safely dead by 2100, so that’s one less thing I gotta deal with.

Really, even “numberty hundred” rings true to me.    “Nineteen hundred” sounds like a year.    “Twenty-one-oh-six” sounds like a futur-y year, which is even cooler.   So did “Two thousand five”, until I was actually living in it, and it sounds even worse now that it was a long time ago and adults will talk about their childhood happening in that year.    Daniel Witwicky would be old enough to get married and grow a fancier beard than me.    That’s nuts.    My point is that, honestly, it’s the year 3000-3019 that I have to worry about, so if I ever decide to go vampire, those will be the years I hide in the ocean or force society to reset the calendar, whichever’s easier.  

I spent New Year’s Eve finishing Superliminal, which I bought on Steam after I watched Vegeta play it on YouTube.  It has a similar look and feel to the Stanley Parable, so if you liked one you’d probably enjoy the other, although Superliminal has a different theme.  I kept hoping I’d find some secret passage that I wasn’t supposed to take, and a narrator would scold me for finding the “Chickenbutt Ending”, but it doesn’t work that way.    Superliminal’s all about puzzles and awesome visuals, but it does have the same soothing design aesthetics as TSP.   Honestly, I enjoyed just wandering around in Stanley’s office, and Superliminal does the same thing with a hotel and several other settings.   It’s nice.

This got me thinking about how I kind of did everything there was to do in The Stanley Parable, and I sort of wished they would add new stuff to the game, but I’m not sure there would be much point to that.    I could play the older version, but it presents the same message, just with different assets.   The Boss’s Office would look different, but it’d be the same game.   And this got me thinking about various “secret chapters” in pop culture.  Secrets behind the cut.

I first heard about this idea in the 2000′s, when fans invented this notion that there was a secret chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.    I read a website that tried to explain the concept, and of course it lauded J.K. Rowling with all this gushing praise for working an Easter egg into the book, a literary work of “well, magic.”  

That pretty well sums up my distaste for Harry Potter, by the way.    These days, JKR has thoroughly crapped all over her reputation and legacy, but in the 2000′s it felt like half the planet was in a mad rush to canonize her as a writing goddess, to the point where fans were congratulating her for writing secret chapters that didn’t actually exist.   The idea was based on lore from the books about Neville Longbottom’s parents.    They were patients in a mental hospital, and he’d go to visit them, and they would give him bubble gum wrappers, intended to demonstrate how far remove they’ve become from reality.   The secret chapter lies in those wrappers, which all read “Droobles Best Blowing Gum” or some such.    What if Neville’s parents were only pretending to be mentally ill, so as to throw off their enemies?   Naturally, they would want to stay in contact with their son, so the bubble gum wrappers would have to contain coded messages.    Said code involves unscrambling the letters on the wrappers to make new words, like “goblin” or “sword” or “Muggle” or “Dumbledore”.    The problem is that you can also use it to make other words like “booger” or “drool” or “booobbiess.”   Play with it enough, and you can make the code say anything you want it to say, which means it’s no code at all.   

But the idea was that the not-yet-published sixth HP book would reveal all of this gum wrapper nonsense, and Neville would decode the messages and discover all of his parents’ super-cool adventures.   I’m not sure why we needed a secret chapter if Book 6 was going to explain all of this anyway in several not-secret chapters, but that was the whole point.   Fans didn’t have Book 6 yet, and they were so desperate to read it that they started trying to extrapolate what would happen next based on “clues” from the previous five.    That’s like trying to figure out what Majin Buu looks like by watching the Androids Saga.   I guess some wiseguy would have guessed that he’d resemble #19, but that’d just be blind luck.  

And when you get down to it, this whole secret chapter business is really just a conspiracy.   This is literally how Qanon works.   Some anonymous jackass posted vague “hints” on an imageboard, and people went goofy trying to interpret them and figure out what would happen in the future.   They call it “research” because they spend a ton of time on this, but there’s no basis to any of it.    It took me a few minutes to figure out that you can spell “Muggle” with the words in “Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum”, but that’s not research and it doesn’t prove anything.   But all these guys keep looking for “Hilary Clinton goes to jail next week” and lo and behold that’s all they ever find.   

In the same vein, the gum wrapper thing was really a complaint disguised as a conspiracy, disguised as a “magical secret chapter”.   At least a few fans wanted to see more Neville in their Harry Potter books, they wanted Neville’s parents, or someone like them, to have cool spy adventures or whatever else.   The point is, they clearly weren’t getting what they wanted out of the printed works, but they didn’t want to turn against their Dear Beloved Author, so they started casting about for an alternative reality, one where J.K. Rowling wrote a cooler story and hid it in the pages of the one that actually went to press.    So instead of just saying “Hey, Order of the Phoenix was kind of a letdown, I hope there’s more ninjas in the next book,” they said “Rowling is a genius because I wanted ninjas and she’s definitely going to give them to me, I have the gum wrappers to prove it.”

The same thing happened all over again when the BBC Sherlock show took a turn for the nonsensical.    I don’t know from BBC Sherlock, but I watched the fascinating video critique by Hbomberguy, and it sounds like the show did tons of plot twists until it stopped making sense altogether in the fourth season.    If you skip to 1:09:00 in the video, you’ll hear about fan theories that suggested that season four was supposed to be crappy, as part of a secret meta-narrative plan that would be paid off in a secret, unannounced episode that would not only explain everything, but retroactively justify the crappy episodes that came before.    But it’s been a few years and it never came to pass, so I think we can call this myth busted. 

Most recently, I think we’ve all seen a lot of talk about the final season of Supernatural, where I guess Destiel sort of became canon but only one guy does the love confession and the other doesn’t respond.   But I guess he does say “I love you too”  in the Spanish dub, which means the English language version was edited for whatever reason.    It’s not exactly a secret episode, but the implication is that there’s more to this than what made it to the screen.    So the questions turn to what the screenplay said, what the writers and actors wanted to do, etc. etc.    My general impression is that SPN fans are a bit more used to crushing disappointment, so they’re not quite as delusional about this show being unquestionable genius, like Sherlock and Harry Potter.     Maybe this is an Anglophile thing?   Like, if you suck at something with a British accent, people will accept it more unconditionally?   

I had seen something on Twitter about how there should have been a secret Seinfeld episode in the 90′s.    Someone suggested it at the time, they tape a whole episode, then wait until 2020 to air it, because by then it would be worth a fortune.    But they didn’t do it, because it costs a lot of money to make a TV episode, and if you don’t air the show right away, you aren’t making that money back any time soon.    Yeah, you might recoup a fortune someday, but Seinfeld was making a ton of money then.    It exposes the fannish nature of the idea.    A fan would love to discover a cool secret chapter, but a content creator isn’t necessarily keen on making a cool thing and then hiding it where few people would find it.  

I thought about doing this myself recently.   Maybe Supernatural gave me the bug, but I thought “I’m writing this big-ass story, so what if I wrote me a secret chapter for it?   Wouldn’t that be cool?”     But no, it wouldn’t be cool, because it’d be the same work as writing a regular chapter, and the same stress I feel when I hold off on publishing it.    Except I’d just never publish it, I’d put it in some secret hole on the internet and hope that some superfan who might not even exist can decode whatever clues I leave.  

I mean, it’d be awesome if it got discovered and everyone loved it.    “Hey, I found this hidden chapter!   Mike’s done it again!”   And I could bask in the glory.   But what if no one finds it?  Then I just wasted my time, right?   I want people to read my work.   My monkey brain needs the sweet, sweet validation of those kudos and comments, folks.   Once I realized that, I understood why no one else would want to do a secret chapter either.    Easter eggs are one thing, but the bigger bonus features they put on DVDs were pretty easy to find, and with good reason.

I think that’s what made the Stanley Parable so appealing to play, because it teases you with the idea that you can “break” the game and find some extra content that you weren’t supposed to see, but as you go exploring all those hidden areas, it gradually becomes clear that this is just part of the game; you were meant to find all these things, and that’s why they were put here.      It’s hidden, but he secret aspect of it is just pretend.   

I suppose that what I like about games like TSP and Superliminal is the illusion of secrets more than the secrets themselves.    I like roaming through the hallways, having no idea what I might find ahead.    I kind of wish I could open all the doors, and not just the ones the game designers put stuff behind, but the reality is that there’s nothing on the other side.    I used a cheat code once  to explore the unused doors in TSP and it’s just a bright white field on the other side.   Interesting to look at, but not much of a reveal.   Honestly, the doors themselves are more appealing than anything that could lay behind them.  

And that’s probably what makes secrets so fun.   They could be almost anything, but once you open the present, the number of possibilities drops to one.   If they had ever made that Secret BBC Sherlock Episode, I doubt it would have lived up to expectations, but fans could amuse themselves by imagining what could have been in it.    In the end, though, things usually don’t justify the hype.  For every Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, there’s a Gobbledygooker debut at Survivor Series 1990.   It’s impossible to manufacture a secret with a guaranteed payoff.   

[apenitentialprayer]

Attacking the Talmud, Attacking the Gospels: A New Polemic

One of the most striking characteristics of the polemic reflected in the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus is the extensive use of the New Testament. The first extant critique of the New Testament by a European Jew is in the eleventh chapter of Jacob ben Reuben’s Milḥamot HaShem (1170); this work, however, deals only with Matthew. On the other hand, Sefer Yosef HaMeqanne, Milḥemet Miẓvah of Meir b. Simon of Narbonne, and the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus reflect an intimate knowledge of all the Gospels and some awareness of the other books of the New Testament. There are certain instructive similarities between Jewish use of the New Testament in polemic and the Christian approach to the Talmud, which became important in the thirteenth century. Both religious had one sacred text -the Hebrew Scriptures- which they held in common, and another sacred body of teaching about whose authority they differed. Traditionally, polemical writings had largely restricted themselves to different interpretations of the text whose authority and divine origin both groups accepted. In our period, however, the usefulness of the New Testament for Jewish polemicists and of the Talmud for Christians began to become evident. There is, in fact, a clear parallelism between the approaches developed by each group to the sacred literature of its adversaries. On the one hand, that literature was subjected to vigorous critique; on the other, it was exploited to disprove the beliefs of its own adherents. Thus, beginning in the twelfth century a series of Christian authors attacked the Talmud as a work replete with absurdities, and in the 1230s, Nicholas Donin asserted that it contained blasphemies against Jesus which made it a candidate for destruction. The Jewish defense presented at the so-called disputation in Paris in 1240 did not succeed in thwarting Donin’s wishes, and within a relatively short time a public burning of the Talmud took place. A few decades later in Spain the Talmud was again the focus of a disputation, but the approach was entirely different. Pablo [Cristiani] maintained that the dogmas of Christianity could be demonstrated from the Talmud; the rabbis, for example, were said to have indicated that the Messiah had already come and that he was a preexistent being. Significant, though less spectacular, consequences resulted from this disputation as well, and the use of the Talmud to support Christianity became a central element of the Jewish-Christian debate in the centuries to come [see Raymund Martini’s Pugio Fidei]. Some Christians [as those in the Disputation of Tortosa] even combined the two approaches, arguing that the Talmud contains both blasphemies and evidence of Christian truths. The Jewish critique of the Gospels had a similar twofold nature. Jews attacked the Christian Scriptures for their alleged absurdities and contradictions, and at the same time they tried to prove that later Christian dogmas are inconsistent with the Gospels themselves. It was, of course, much easier to maintain both Jewish attitudes at the same time than it was to do the same for both Christian arguments, and the dual approach is used without hesitation throughout the latter section of the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus. The knowledge of the New Testament displayed in Yosef HaMeqanne and the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus was at least partially firsthand since there are a substantial number of Latin quotations in both works. Nevertheless, various citations of the opinions of proselytes leave no room for doubt that some of the familiarity with Christian texts and especially with Christian prayers, festivals, and rituals resulted from contact with these converts; [...] Similarly, the Christian awareness of the Talmud stemmed largely from information supplied by Jewish converts. Petrus Alfonsi, for example, had proposed arguments against certain talmudic passages as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, and both Nicholas Donin and Pablo [Cristiani] were recent converts to Christianity when they began their polemical activities.

David Berger (Pages 29-32 of his Introduction to the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus)

[existential-queers]

Our Hero, Satan

A very silly paper written by a very silly person about a very silly poem

Thank you and goodnight

Modern interpretations of Lucifer Morningstar are overwhelmingly that of a sexy, misunderstood bad boy with daddy issues. Look no farther than Netflix's Lucifer or The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for example. While it would be undoubtedly easier to sell one's soul to a tall, dark, attractive, chiseled beefcake, this is not Satan's long-established depiction. From the days of early Christianity, Satan was a monstrous and horrific creature of the deep—not so much tempting as terrifying. The question is then, of course: what changed? Enter John Milton's highly kudosed fix-it fanfiction, Paradise Lost, and its unlikely protagonist, the Morningstar.

Paradise Lost chronicles the biblical genesis from the perspective of none other than he who has been called Wicked One, Adversary, Father of Lies, and Prince of Darkness: ya boi, Satan. From his very introduction directly proceeding the Fall, Satan is undeniably charismatic. He is certainly the most dynamic of the ensemble cast with even some critical claims that “Satan is superior in character to Milton’s God,” an omniscient, omnipotent, all-benevolent, blah, blah, non-human, blah, blah, perfect, blah, blah, flat and boring character (Kaiter and Sandiuc 452). There are no excuses, Milton. In rousing speeches of revolution and sly temptations in the garden, he gains the audience's sympathies, though perhaps not trust. He is still Satan and his words should probably be taken with a grain of salt, or maybe a whole block, just to be on the safe side. Wading through the suave and sympathetic, the question often raised and hotly debated is: is Satan a hero or a villain? 

Satan begins the poem in pain, chained in a lake of boiling sulfur, surrounded by fallen friends. After getting yeeted “headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky,” free-falling through primordial Chaos, and crash landing in the wretched abyss, he is bound to straight up not be having a good time (Milton 1.45). Now you may be thinking: well that’s what he gets for rebelling against God and being, you know, Satan. What, then, would you say about an unsuccessful revolutionary who rebelled against a cruel dictator and was jailed and tortured indefinitely? This is the picture Satan paints, at least. Even after all this, he holds out hope to learn from prior mistakes, gather up his comrades, and

To wage by force or guile eternal war

Irreconcilable, to [their] grand foe,

Who now triumphs, and in th’ excess of joy

Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heav’n. (Milton 1.121-124)

They all live to fight another day, and even in a place where hope cannot reach them, their leader inspires it once more.

This is terribly reminiscent of Greek tragic heroes the likes of Odysseus and Jason. Satan is a brave and clever leader, trekking through Chaos to the garden himself rather than sending a poor redshirt. After a bit of kitty shape-shifting and spying, Satan gets to work on infiltrating the garden in the most effective way imaginable: fighting battle-ready angels head-on. Again. After that predictably fails, he heals up in Hell while the demons build a cannon. A cannon that also fails. Come on, Satan; only a third of Heaven fell with you. Face it, you just don’t have the numbers. Back to pre-Plan A, Satan fits himself with another animal disguise but with fewer limbs this time. There must be something thematic about the number three—wonder what that could be—because it finally works. Humans: tempted, God: thwarted, Satan: could probably use a nap.

Satan may be the protagonist, but that does not necessarily make him a hero. One of the most important aspects of the Greek model of a tragic hero is hamartia. This is not to say that he does not have flaws—of course he does, he’s Satan!—but that his flaws are the same as all of his more admirable qualities. What gives Satan his complexity is his paradoxes and contradictions such that “envy, pride, ambition, [and] self-glorification give the character his singularity and magnificence but also pass the rigorous sentence on him” (Kaiter and Sandiuc 453). He is the protagonist in that he is the main character of the work, but he is also the antagonist in that he “drives the plot with his machinations” (Kaiter and Sanduic 457). Satan is just self-aware enough to realize: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (Milton 4.75). Of course, he tosses self-reflection off the not-so-proverbial garden wall moments later in favor of some mischief, but at least he recognized it.

Satan’s way of fighting what very well may be an authoritarian overlord is petty at best and truly evil at worst. In the narrative, he fights not for justice but for “desperate revenge” through the destruction of innocents (Milton 3.85). The humans were not involved in the first war, but Satan seems to play by the logic that ‘if I can’t play with you anymore then no one can.’ So, like a cat or a toddler lacking enough attention from father dearest, he throws a fit and breaks daddy’s favorite toy. That is if daddy’s favorite toy is an entire species now damned to eternal torment until someone else is brutally murdered. How barbaric. But, to be fair, that last bit is God’s fault. If you’re omniscient and omnipotent, can you not just design a better world? Are you not more powerful than sin, a literal child of your own creation? So then, are you not omnipotent or not all-benevolent? Either way, Satan’s actions are rather villainous.

On a more meta note, it is such an interesting detail that Satan is a supreme orator in regards to Milton’s beliefs on writing. Certainly, Satan had to be a phenomenally eloquent speaker and rhetorician to fit the narrative (i.e. rallying comrades in Heaven to go up against God himself, tricking Eve to eat an Edenic tide pod, etc.), but the way that Milton executes it inspires *chef’s kisses*. Milton, who found the heroic poetry format of rhyming couplets to be constricting, who deliberately chose to write his epic in plain verse, puts the rare and only rhymes in Satan’s speeches. He basically shouts to his audience: I hate when people write poetry in this style, oh and here’s a character I wrote whose speech emulates this style (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). You are not that slick, Milton. Okay, you’re kind of slick.

Milton may have set the precedent of Sexy SatanTM, but that is not all his Satan is. He seems to be in the my-book-started-a-genre-with-flat-tropes-and-cliches-I’m-blamed-for-but-are-not-representative-of-my-book club alongside JRR Tolkein and Suzanne Collins. The Satan of Paradise Lost is more complex than the bad boy who wrote his name on God’s blacklist. Milton “creates a character who is at once someone we tend to appreciate as heroic, and someone we want to see defeated” (Kaiter and Sanduic, 456). Satan is not an Enjolras, but he is not a Hope-less Pandora’s box of pure evil either. In the same vein, Satan is not properly a hero or a villain either. The most fitting label for him may just be that of an anti-hero: one who employs deplorable methods to do what is considered good and righteous but often succumbs to hubris anyway. Milton’s representation of Satan is almost nebulous in motivations and moral center, if such a thing could be said about Satan. While this makes him difficult to pin down, it continues to inspire religious and literary critique to this day.

[yasbxxgie]

Now that the cast is coming together, Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming adaptation of Dune is getting more attention than ever. And with that attention an interesting question has started cropping up with more frequency, one that bears further examination: Is Dune a “white savior” narrative?

It’s important to note that this is not a new question. Dune has been around for over half a century, and with every adaptation or popular revival, fans and critics take the time to interrogate how it plays into (or rebels against) certain story tropes and popular concepts, the white savior complex being central among them. While there are no blunt answers to that question—in part because Dune rests on a foundation of intense and layered worldbuilding—it is still an important one to engage and reengage with for one simple reason: All works of art, especially ones that we hold in high esteem, should be so carefully considered. Not because we need to tear them down or, conversely, enshrine them, but because we should all want to be more knowledgeable and thoughtful about how the stories we love contribute to our world, and the ways in which they choose to reflect it.

So what happens when we put Dune under this methodical scrutiny? If we peel back the layers, like the Mentats of [Frank] Herbert’s story, what do we find?

Hollywood has a penchant for the white savior trope, and it forms the basis for plenty of big-earning, award-winning films. Looking back on blockbusters like The Last of the Mohicans, Avatar, and The Last Samurai, the list piles up for movies in which a white person can alleviate the suffering of people of color—sometimes disguised as blue aliens for the purpose of sci-fi trappings—by being specially “chosen” somehow to aid in their struggles. Sometimes this story is more personal, between only two or three characters, often rather dubiously labeled as “based on a true story” (The Blind Side, The Help, Dangerous Minds, The Soloist, and recent Academy Award Best Picture-winner Green Book are all a far cry from the true events that inspired them). It’s the same song, regardless—a white person is capable of doing what others cannot, from overcoming racial taboos and inherited prejudices up to and including “saving” an entire race of people from certain doom.

At face value, it’s easy to slot Dune into this category: a pale-skinned protagonist comes to a planet of desert people known as Fremen. These Fremen are known to the rest the rest of the galaxy as a mysterious, barbaric, and highly superstitious people, whose ability to survive on the brutal world of Arrakis provides a source of endless puzzlement for outsiders. The Fremen themselves are a futuristic amalgam of various POC cultures according to Herbert, primarily the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, the San people, and Bedouins. (Pointedly, all of these cultures have been and continue to be affected by imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, and the Fremen are no different—having suffered horrifically at the hands of the Harkonnens even well before our “heroes” arrive.) Once the protagonist begins to live among the Fremen, he quickly establishes himself as their de facto leader and savior, teaching them how to fight more efficiently and building them into an unstoppable army. This army then throws off the tyranny of the galaxy’s Emperor, cementing the protagonist’s role as their literal messiah.

That sounds pretty cut and dried, no?

But at the heart of this question—Is Dune a white savior narrative?—are many more questions, because Dune is a complicated story that encompasses and connects various concepts, touching on environmentalism, imperialism, history, war, and the superhero complex. The fictional universe of Dune is carefully constructed to examine these issues of power, who benefits from having it, and how they use it. Of course, that doesn’t mean the story is unassailable in its construction or execution, which brings us to the first clarifying question: What qualifies as a white savior narrative? How do we measure that story, or identify it? Many people would define this trope differently, which is reasonable, but you cannot examine how Dune might contribute to a specific narrative without parsing out the ways in which it does and does not fit.

This is the strongest argument against the assertion that Dune is a white savior story: Paul Atreides is not a savior. What he achieves isn’t great or even good—which is vital to the story that Frank Herbert meant to tell.

There are many factors contributing to Paul Atreides’s transformation into Muad’Dib and the Kwisatz Haderach, but from the beginning, Paul thinks of the role he is meant to play as his “terrible purpose.” He thinks that because he knows if he avenges his father, if he becomes the Kwisatz Haderach and sees the flow of time, if he becomes the Mahdi of the Fremen and leads them, the upcoming war will not stop on Arrakis. It will extend and completely reshape the known universe. His actions precipitate a war that that lasts for twelve years, killing millions of people, and that’s only just the beginning.

Can it be argued that Paul Atreides helps the people of Arrakis? Taking the long view of history, the answer would be a resounding no—and the long view of history is precisely what the Dune series works so hard to convey. (The first three books all take place over a relatively condensed period, but the last three books of the initial Dune series jump forward thousands of years at a time.) While Paul does help the Fremen achieve the dream of making Arrakis a green and vibrant world, they become entirely subservient to his cause and their way of life is fundamentally altered. Eventually, the Fremen practically disappear, and a new Imperial army takes their place for Paul’s son, Leto II, the God Emperor. Leto’s journey puts the universe on what he calls the “Golden Path,” the only possible future where humanity does not go extinct. It takes this plan millennia to come to fruition, and though Leto succeeds, it doesn’t stop humans from scheming and murdering and hurting one another; it merely ensures the future of the species.

One could make an argument that the Atreides family is responsible for the saving of all human life due to the Golden Path and its execution. But in terms of Paul’s position on Arrakis, his effect on the Fremen population there, and the amount of death, war, and terror required to bring about humanity’s “salvation,” the Atreides are monstrous people. There is no way around that conclusion—and that’s because the story is designed to critique humanity’s propensity toward saviors. Here’s a quote from Frank Herbert himself on that point:

I am showing you the superhero syndrome and your own participation in it.

And another:

Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader’s name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question.

At the center of Dune is a warning to be mistrustful of messiahs, supermen, and leaders who have the ability to sway masses. This is part of the reason why David Lynch’s Dune film missed the mark; the instant that Paul Atreides becomes a veritable god, the whole message of the story is lost. The ending of Frank Herbert’s Dune is not a heroic triumph—it is a giant question mark pointed at the reader or viewer. It is an uncomfortable conclusion that only invites more questions, which is a key part of its lasting appeal.

And yet…

There is a sizable hole in the construction of this book that can outweigh all other interpretations and firmly situate Dune among white savior tropes: Paul Atreides is depicted as a white man, and his followers are largely depicted as brown people.

There are ways to nitpick this idea, and people do—Paul’s father, Leto Atreides might not be white, and is described in the book as having “olive” toned skin. We get a sense of traditions from the past, as Leto’s father was killed in a bull fight, dressed in a matador cape, but it’s unclear if this is tied to their heritage in any sense. The upcoming film has cast Cuban-Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaac in the role of Duke Leto, but previous portrayals featured white men with European ancestry: U.S. actor William Hurt and German actor Jürgen Prochnow. (The Fremen characters are also often played by white actors, but that’s a more simple case of Hollywood whitewashing.) While the name Atreides is Greek, Dune takes place tens of thousands of years in the future, so there’s really no telling what ancestry the Atreides line might have, or even what “whiteness” means to humanity anymore. There’s a lot of similar melding elsewhere in the story; the ruler of this universe is known as the “Padishah Emperor” (Padishah is a Persian word that essentially translates to “great king”), but the family name of the Emperor’s house is Corrino, taken from the fictional Battle of Corrin. Emperor Shaddam has red hair, and his daughter Irulan is described as blond-haired, green-eyed, and possessing “patrician beauty,” a mishmash of words and descriptions that deliberately avoid categorization.

None of these factors detract from the fact that we are reading/watching this story in present day, when whiteness is a key component of identity and privilege. It also doesn’t negate the fact that Paul is always depicted as a white young man, and has only been played by white actors: first by Kyle MacLachlan, then by Alec Newman, and soon by Timothy Chalamet. There are many reasons for casting Paul this way, chief among them being that he is partly based on a real-life figure—T.E. Lawrence, better known to the public as “Lawrence of Arabia.” But regardless of that influence, Frank Herbert’s worldbuilding demands a closer look in order to contextualize a narrative in which a white person becomes the messiah of an entire population of people of color—after all, T.E. Lawrence was never heralded as any sort of holy figure by the people he worked alongside during the Arab Revolt.

The decision to have Paul become the Mahdi of the Fremen people is not a breezy or inconsequential plot point, and Herbert makes it clear that his arrival has been seeded by the Bene Gesserit, the shadowy matriarchal organization to which his mother, Jessica, belongs. In order to keep their operatives safe throughout the universe, the Bene Gesserit planted legends and mythologies that applied to their cohort, making it easy for them to manipulate local legends to their advantage in order to remain secure and powerful. While this handily serves to support Dune’s thematic indictment of the damage created by prophecy and religious zealotry, it still positions the Fremen as a people who easily fall prey to superstition and false idols. The entire Fremen culture (though meticulously constructed and full of excellent characters) falls into various “noble savage” stereotypes due to the narrative’s juxtaposition of their militant austerity with their susceptibility to being used by powerful people who understand their mythology well enough to exploit it. What’s more, Herbert reserves many of the non-Western philosophies that he finds particularly attractive—he was a convert to Zen Buddhism, and the Bene Gesserit are attuned to the Eastern concepts of “prana” and “bindu” as part of their physical training—for mastery by white characters like Lady Jessica.

While Fremen culture has Arab influences in its language and elsewhere, the book focuses primarily on the ferocity of their people and the discipline they require in order to be able to survive the brutal desert of Arrakis, as well as their relationship to the all-important sandworms. This speaks to Herbert’s ecological interests in writing Dune far more than his desire to imagine what an Arab-descended society or culture might look like in the far future. Even the impetus toward terraforming Arrakis into a green world is one brought about through imperialist input; Dr. Liet Kynes (father to Paul’s companion Chani) promoted the idea in his time as leader of the Fremen, after his own father, an Imperial ecologist, figured out how to change the planet. The Fremen don’t have either the ability or inclination to transform their world with their own knowledge—both are brought to them from a colonizing source.

Dune’s worldbuilding is complex, but that doesn’t make it beyond reproach. Personal bias is a difficult thing to avoid, and how you construct a universe from scratch says a lot about how you personally view the world. Author and editor Mimi Mondal breaks this concept down beautifully in her recent article about the inherently political nature of worldbuilding:

In a world where all fundamental laws can be rewritten, it is also illuminating which of them aren’t. The author’s priorities are more openly on display when a culture of non-humans is still patriarchal, there are no queer people in a far-future society, or in an alternate universe the heroes and saviours are still white. Is the villain in the story a repulsively depicted fat person? Is a disabled or disfigured character the monster? Are darker-skinned, non-Western characters either absent or irrelevant, or worse, portrayed with condescension? It’s not sufficient to say that these stereotypes still exist in the real world. In a speculative world, where it is possible to rewrite them, leaving them unchanged is also political.

The world of Dune was built that way through a myriad of choices, and choices are not neutral exercises. They require biases, thoughtfulness, and intent. They are often built from a single perspective, and perspectives are never absolute. And so, in analyzing Dune, it is impossible not to wonder about the perspective of its creator and why he built his fictional universe the way he did.

Many fans cite the fact that Frank Herbert wrote Dune over fifty years ago as an explanation for some of its more dated attitudes toward race, gender, queerness, and other aspects of identity. But the universe that Herbert created was arguably already quite dated when he wrote Dune. There’s an old-world throwback sheen to the story, as it’s built on feudal systems and warring family houses and political marriages and ruling men with concubines. The Bene Gesserit essentially sell their (all-female) trainees to powerful figures to further their own goals, and their sexuality is a huge component of their power. The odious Baron Harkonnen is obese and the only visibly queer character in the book (a fact that I’ve already addressed at length as it pertains to the upcoming film). Paul Atreides is the product of a Bene Gesserit breeding program that was created to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach—he’s literally a eugenics experiment that works.

And in this eugenics experiment, the “perfect” human turns out to be a white man—and he was always going to be a man, according to their program—who proceeds to wield his awesome power by creating a personal army made up of people of color. People, that is, who believe that he is their messiah due to legends planted on their world ages ago by the very same group who sought to create this superbeing. And Paul succeeds in his goals and is crowned Emperor of the known universe. Is that a white savior narrative? Maybe not in the traditional sense, but it has many of the same discomfiting hallmarks that we see replicated again and again in so many familiar stories. Hopefully, we’re getting better at recognizing and questioning these patterns, and the assumptions and agendas propagated through them. It gives us a greater understanding of fiction’s power, and makes for an enlightening journey.

Dune is a great work of science fiction with many pointed lessons that we can still apply to the world we live in—that’s the mark of a excellent book. But we can enjoy the world that Frank Herbert created and still understand the places where it falls down. It makes us better fans and better readers, and allows us to more fully appreciate the stories we love.

+Dune’s Paul Atreides Is the Ultimate Mighty Whitey

[ponreviews]

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - The Boy with the Lyre

Categories: Greek Mythology, Romance, Action

Overall Rating: 8/10

Synopsis:

Was it fate that brought Patroclus to Achilles? The great warrior in his childhood wasn't always so rough, as evident in the relationship between the two main characters. However, their reputations would cloud their image. Still, their love for each other grows. The war against the Trojans looms over the duo and tests their resolve in their relationship and their status all the same.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Review:

I want to start off by saying that this is an easy read, especially if you're into Greek Mythology and more specifically Achilles's story. If you are unaware, in Greek Mythology, Patroclus and Achilles were close companions. Some argue they are best friends while others claim they were lovers. The book explores the latter claim, with their romance blossoming as they grew up together.

This book is very much one I would consider part of what I would call "The Tumblr Collection" because it reminds me of 2013 Tumblr and how fanfiction dominated the site or at least my feed. The sexual scenes get pretty explicit too, though there actually weren't many. Considering Greek Mythology explores sex a lot, it's a bit surprising how little there was. However, in this story, sex wasn't necessarily the only thing on Achilles's mind.

I definitely liked the choice of telling the story through Patroclus's perspective. Achilles is obviously the more famous one, so having his story told by him is not all that interesting. By having Patroclus, who is much more ordinary than Achilles, tell the story, you get more insight in Achilles's internal conflict of God vs. Human and what he should be striving for. Patroclus being the center of Achilles's internal struggle makes him way more important to Achilles's development. Is Patroclus dead weight in Achilles's quest to be the greatest warrior or is he the reason Achilles is known as the greatest warrior?

In this story, Patroclus brings out the very human side of Achilles that we don't know him for, even though he is half human. We get to see a more vulnerable side to Achilles compared to the epics his story is based off of. He's, dare I say, more relatable and tangible in this narrative in a number of ways. The most notable to me is how restricted he is in the expectation for him to be "great" especially with his mother Thetis. Here, he wants to live a life with Patroclus away from all the fighting, but then gets engulfed in it because of his mother's expectations as well as the gods'.

Now for the cons of the book. One easy one to point out is that the story isn't new. However, that's solely based on preference. Of course the story isn't new if it's based off of Greek Mythology. However, depending on how the story is spun, it can be more interesting than the myth. In this case, it was hard to keep my attention on stuff I already knew about. It's probably the most negligible in regards to my critique of the book.

There's not much else in terms of my critique of the book. However, I wouldn't say this is the book that stood out to me as all that interesting. Again, it was hard to keep my attention. Granted, if I reviewed this book closer around the time that it came out, my critique might be different. Let's say, I reviewed this book around 2013. I would probably be all over this book and give it a 9/10 minimum. My fascination with Greek Mythology was much greater back then, so seeing an alternate perspective would've piked my interest a lot more. At this point though, I've seen a number of interpretations set up similarly.

In no way am I saying that it's bad. All I'm saying is that it fits a formula. 2013 me would rate this a 9, and 2022 me would rate it a 7. Taking that into account led to the 8 rating in this review. Both ratings are still high enough that I may still try reading Circe, another book by Madeline Miller, but that may still be down the line since I have other books lined up. Overall, it was a good read, and it brought discussions about the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Could it have been a close friendship? A romance filled with passion? With your knowledge of Greek Mythology, read on and see for yourself.

[themyskira]

Wonder Woman #50 postmortem: “You know how strident Wonder Woman fans can be”

I want to cap off my readthrough of this unmitigated shitshow with a look at a recent interview James Robinson did with Newsarama, reflecting back on his twenty-issue Wonder Woman run.

I’m doing this for two reasons: One, because having read the full run and formed my own impressions (and, dare I say, some rather strident opinions), I genuinely do think it can be interesting to see what the writer has to say about it, what they were trying to achieve with it and, looking back, how they feel about the run.

And two, because having read what Robinson has to say, HOOBOY, I HAVE A FEW THOUGHTS OF MY OWN.

Newsarama: James, the one through-line of your entire run is Wonder Woman's twin brother, Jason. I know he was the motivation for you working on this book. Did you know the whole story before you started? Or did this story evolve as you wrote it?

James Robinson: I knew to a degree. As you said, I was specifically asked to pay off the gigantic plot point that Geoff Johns had left at the end of "Darkseid War." So it was always part of my plan.

Are. You. FUCKING. KIDDING ME.

The entire premise of this run. The wholesale derailment of Wondy’s Rebirth story. The rampant shredding of her newly-established Rebirth backstory. Sidelining Diana for the better part of a year in favour of a repulsive twin brother and some shit with Darkseid.

ALL OF THAT.

Served no wider purpose.

Was not intended to build towards some Rebirth metaplot or contribute to an overarching Justice League story.

Was mandated, in fact, for no other reason than that Geoff motherfucking Johns wanted to TIE UP A DANGLING PLOT THREAD FROM TWO-YEAR-OLD CROSSOVER.

He goes on.

Originally, I was going to be on it for a shorter period of time. I had originally planned to be on it for about eight issues, I think. And then when I was getting the twice-monthly book in on time (which is tough; they really beat you up), they asked me to stay on.

There are better, more eloquent arguments against the fortnightly publishing schedule — which is incredibly punishing for creators and prioritises quantity ahead of quality — but none, perhaps, are more simple or succinct than James Robinson got to write twenty issues of Wonder Woman because he got his scripts in on time.

And that gave me more time to develop Jason and play with him more.

I was careful to make sure it wasn't only about Jason, however. I was already getting crap from social media about how this is Wonder Woman's book and she should be the center of attention at all time. You know how strident Wonder Woman fans can be.

Well, that’s an interesting and thoroughly disingenuous interpretation of the critique.

The criticism was not that Wondy must be “the centre of attention at all times”, and therefore Robinson was wrong to spend any time developing any character other than her.

It was that Robinson turned Diana into such a passive, reactive — and, frankly, incompetent — character that she became barely necessary to the story at all. You could remove her from most of the issues in the Darkseid arc without affecting the progression of the plot at all, because she never does anything.

Yes, I got irate when Diana would routinely show up in six or seven pages of an issue, if she appeared at all. Funny thing, when I pick up a book titled Wonder Woman, I expect to occasionally see some actual WONDER WOMAN.

But that was the symptom rather than the problem. Because even when Diana was on the page, she was absent from the story.

And part of this is also about the characters Robinson chose to focus on instead of Wondy: Jason, Grail and Darkseid. Three characters that a lot of fans weren’t interested in, didn’t like and frankly resented having shoehorned into Wondy’s story. True, Robinson may have been asked to include them in the story, but it was his choice to prioritise them over Diana, and it was his writing that shaped Jason into such an odious character (something he confirms in the interview: Johns came up with the idea, he says, but “Most of who the character is now is stuff that I've actually come up with.”)

Put it this way: I didn’t see anybody complaining in December 2016 when Greg Rucka devoted an entire issue to Barbara Minerva’s backstory, did you?

But oh, I’m sorry, was that too strident for you?

Nrama: During your run, you tied into several events that were going on elsewhere in the DC Universe. Even this current story arc ties into Dark Nights: Metal and involves the Justice League. Was that a goal, to make Jason part of the greater DCU?

Robinson: Yes. I always do that stuff, though. I always try to tie into bigger stories. Whether it was my stuff at DC or what I did at Marvel, like Fantastic Four and Invaders and what-not, I always enjoy that about comic book universes. I like when writers try to embrace the whole place.

Here’s the thing about this.

I like the sandbox nature of a shared universe. I’m not a fan of event tie-ins, which have a tendency to derail the stories of individual books in order to aggressively market some company-wide crossover that I couldn’t care less about, but I like that there’s this whole wider world of heroes and villains and settings and mythologies that writers can draw on and play with. And you can tell some really cool stories out of the collision of those different mythologies and characters — think Phil Jimenez’s ‘Gods of Gotham’, for instance, where the Wonderfam and the Batfam are forced to team up when some of Batman’s most powerful rogues are possessed by Ares’ children.

That’s not the way Robinson loops the wider DCU into his stories, or at least it wasn’t in Wonder Woman.

Robinson goes for insider references, often obscure ones, of the sort that will only make sense to people who’ve been reading the same comics as him over the past three decades.

In WW #33, he introduced and then immediately killed off a rebooted version of the Atomic Knights in a four-page sequence that added nothing to the plot.

In WW #42, he featured a flashback to Jason fighting the Deep Six, a group of Jack Kirby villains. Ostensibly this is framed as a set-up by Grail to orchestrate her first meeting with Jason, but Robinson milks it to crack jokes about Kirby’s 1970s dialogue — and if you’re not familiar with the characters (as I wasn’t), their inclusion makes little sense.

In the same issue, Robinson also works in the Wild Huntsman… apparently for no other reason than to amuse himself… and again, if you don’t know who he is, you’ll have no idea why Grail is trying so hard to kill him or why you should care.

And then there’s the Metal tie-in.

Like I said, I don’t like event tie-ins, but it is possible to make them work. G. Willow Wilson’s Ms Marvel has been looped into a number of crossover events over the course of its life, and while I’d prefer that clusterfucks like Civil War II stayed the hell away from Kamala and her pals, Wilson has done an effective job of using these events as a springboard for some really interesting personal conflicts and character work. There’s no extra required reading for these stories; she gives you everything you need to know, so those who aren’t following the event aren’t at a disadvantage.

Robinson gives you nothing.

This is how he links the Dark Gods’ story into Metal:

Diana [narration]: Could I really have summoned this? When we wielded the Tenth Metal against Barbatos, it had the ability to wish thoughts into reality.* Ed. note: * See Dark Nights: Metal #6! — Chris

And a couple of pages later —

Karnell [narration]: ...our beautiful world — which you regard as the ‘Dark Multiverse’ — we see as a paradise… where we were more than even gods to our worshippers… we were everything!

I didn’t read Metal and I’m not planning to. That’s not a value judgement, it’s just not something that sparks my interest.

But it means I don’t know who the bloody hell Barbatos is, and I’ve never heard of the Tenth Metal. I don’t know what the Dark Multiverse is, or how it works, or how it differs from the regular multiverse. When Robinson says Diana made an inadvertent wish while she was wielding this Tenth Metal, I don’t know if he’s picking up on a story point in Metal that I need to read up on.

So right off the bat, Robinson has alienated anybody who isn’t familiar with the event comic he’s drawing from.

And what infuriates me is that at the same time as he was doing all this, Robinson was getting muddled by Wonder Woman’s continuity, conflating superseded New 52 canon with (contradictory) Rebirth canon, inadvertently retconning things and failing even to keep his own narrative consistent. I’d argue he needed to spend less time making references to other comics and more time making sure he understood the one he was writing.

Robinson: [...] what I've always loved about Wonder Woman is her strength. Even when she was in that phase in the white costume, where she didn't have her powers, she had great strength.

Oh, you mean this era?

The era where Diana lost not only her powers, but all of her training and skills? Where she became a weepy, insecure romantic heroine, reliant on men to guide and save her from her own inexperience and her uncontrollable female emotionality? The era where she was constantly crying over her latest rugged love interests? That awesome era?

(Also misogynistic, racist and homophobic as fuuuuuck, but that’s another discussion.)

One of the reasons that era ended was because Gloria Steinham [sic] said, "Hey, she's Wonder Woman! She's a superhero and you've taken away her powers!"

But I actually thought her lacking powers was like saying, I don't need them to be a strong woman. And I think that was almost a more powerful message. I was surprised Ms. Steinem didn't get that, to be quite honest with you.

This is a characterisation of Steinem’s role in that period of Wondy’s history that I’ve seen before (always from men in the comics field), and it’s never sit well with me. It carries an unpleasant shade of gatekeeping.

The implication is that Steinem’s feelings about Wonder Woman (a character had loved since childhood) were less valid or even flat-out incorrect because she hadn’t read the right comics, that she was an ignorant outsider who ruined a good thing by coming in with a political agenda and trying to make Wonder Woman about feminism, that she didn’t have a right to complain about the comic because she wasn’t a ‘real’ fan.

And what Robinson doesn’t mention, as critics of Steinem and Ms. Magazine’s lobbying for a return to the classic Wondy rarely do, is that this campaign was set against a backdrop of unimpressive sales numbers and a struggle over the new direction that eventually gave rise to an ambitious and quite likely divisive ‘women’s lib’ arc written by African-American sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany, which was intended to culminate in Diana triumphing over a group of male thugs attempting to shut down an abortion clinic run by women surgeons.

I have no doubt that Steinem played an important role in the way events panned out, but I’m also not surprised the ‘women’s lib’ arc never made it past its first issue.

(It was a truly dreadful first issue, btw, though the whole story behind it and what Delany was trying to do with it is fascinating.)

But that didn’t stop DC from kicking off Wondy’s superpowered return with the murder of a composite character representing Steinem and female DC editor Dorothy Woolfolk (whose name had previously been floated as editor for the book).

Then as now, Steinem got blamed by the gatekeepers for daring to interfere with Wonder Woman.

Nrama: Do you think Jason picked up some of her strength over the course of his story arc during your run?

Robinson: I think so, at least at the beginning as he was starting to develop. Now, technically, I suppose he's more powerful than her in that he has the power of their father Zeus and the power of storms and air control and things like that.

I like the fact that when he's given this armor, he realizes that his sister should have gotten it.

And he knows that the powers he has do not make him the better hero.

He knows his sister is the better hero.

So by the end of it, he just wants to be worthy of her, which I think was a nice character arc for him.

I can see how Robinson tried to achieve this character arc, but I wouldn’t call it anything close to a success.

Jason started as a deeply, deeply unlikeable character. He’s deeply selfish and emotionally immature. He doesn’t think about the consequences of his actions, mostly because he’s only ever concerned about how things affect him. When he learns about the mother he never met, when his adoptive father vanishes, every time Hercules leaves on one of his journeys, as he follows his twin sister’s heroics through the media — his thoughts are never about them and what they’re doing, or how they’re feeling, or if they’re okay. It’s always about how they’ve failed him, wronged him, abandoned him.

When we first meet him, he is helping goddamn Darkseid to systematically murder his own siblings. And it’s not because he’s being mind-controlled, or elaborately manipulated into believing that Darkseid is the good guy. It’s because he hates the guts out of Diana, the sister he’s never met, because he believes he’s entitled to the life that she has, and he wants to kill her for it.

If you want to get your readers past all that, you need one hell of a redemptive arc, and that’s one thing Jason never gets.

Because what happens next, after Jason gets an attack of conscience and switches sides, is that he freeloads off Diana, trashes her house, guilt trips her when she tries to set boundaries, and then when, heroism and glory don’t immediately come easily to him, runs away from home in the middle of the night.

The next time we see him is when he returns with the armour and a personality change. He’s still inexperienced, brash, impulsive and annoying, but that’s more or less the extent of it — he’s no longer the thoroughly objectionable character we saw in his first seven issues, and there’s no real explanation for the change.

Really, the vast majority of Jason’s character development takes place in the space between his disappearing at the end of WW #40 and reappearing at the end of WW #41.

Nrama: Wonder Woman #50 definitely feels like it's an ending to your time on Jason's character, and even his time in the book.

Robinson: It definitely has an element of finality to it, but Jason can be there for other writers, or indeed me, if I ever got to write him again.

Excuse me? If you ever got to what now?

Nrama: Is that a hint?

Robinson: I do enjoy writing him. I have this vague fantasy of one day doing a story and calling the comic Jason's Quest, which is an old DC title.

But no one's asked me so far and probably won't. So it's just something in my mind right now.

please, dear god in heaven, please let it stay there.

[pho---to---graph]

Henry Fox Talbot – The Haystack

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Steve Middlehurst In April 1844 William Henry Fox Talbot set up a camera loaded with light sensitive paper and photographed (i) a haystack on his country estate at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. The haystack had presumably been constructed in the summer of 1843 but as we have no clue to its original size we cannot tell if it has been used to feed livestock all winter or only recently opened. A ladder leans against the stack, blocks are obviously being cut starting from the top down and we can see that the hay knife has been left high in the stack to the left of the ladder (ii). We can see how the stack has been designed with an undercut to minimise rising damp and painstakingly thatched to protect the valuable crop from the rain. Another thatched roof can be seen behind the stack but this looks more likely to be a barn. I partly chose this image because I lived in rural Italy for a number of years and stacks not dissimilar to this still exist in the mountains of Abruzzo, I found an ancient hay knife in the outbuildings of the house we lived in. This, of course provides a punctum (1) in this photograph that is quite personal to me.

Overall the composition has a strong geometry with the bright ladder and its dark shadow  providing contrast to the mid-tones of the hay. The Haystack is a study of light, tone and texture with the shadows of the ladder, the eaves of the thatch and the undercut all playing important roles in defining the significant and detailed forms in the scene. The dark leaves overhead provide a contrasting backdrop to the stack.

Such a stack would have been common place in rural England in the 1840s, unremarkable, probably identical to many other stacks in the Lacock area if not on the estate itself. This leads me to wonder why Fox Talbot photographed this particular stack, what did he want to communicate to his audience and who did he perceive that audience to be? Because this is a well know photograph, one of a series that Fox Talbot published in The Pencil of Nature in 1844 (2) (iii), it has been analysed, considered, critiqued and interpreted for over 175 years.

In fact it was whilst quite casually turning the pages of Ian Jeffrey’s How to Read a Photograph (3) that I paused to read his interpretation of The Haystack and began to think about the variety of ways in which we can read this calotype and how those readings have probably changed over time. It is interesting to consider such an old image in this way because, whilst we feel compelled to label it, there were no strongly established photographic genres in 1844 and no history of this type of image to speak of so Fox-Talbot only saw his work in the context of his drawing, his scientific research (iv) and as a commercial opportunity. He did refer to his calotypes as Art saying in his introduction to The Pencil of Nature that the book is a “first attempt to exhibit an Art of so great a singularity”  and refers to the process as “Photogenic Drawing” (v) but I cannot shake off the feeling that the practical process or the commercial potential was more interesting to him than the end result.

Fox Talbot, like many educated men of his time, maintained regular correspondence with contacts all over Europe and from the letters held in the De Montford University archive (5) it is possible to find many references to his photographic work but the ones I found (vii) were predominantly practical, or scientific in nature; and perhaps not surprisingly he was very interested in arguing the advantages of his Calotype process over the Daguerreotype. The discussions he was engaged in rarely touched upon the aesthetics of his or other photographer’s work and one letter from Fox Talbot to William Jerdan, the Editor of the Literary Gazette (vi), is particularly revealing; he wrote “The Complexity of the Art requires a division of labour; one person should invent new processes while another puts in execution those already ascertained, but hitherto I have been the chief operator myself in the different branches of the invention.”

We do know that Pencil of Nature is as much a catalogue as a photo book. Fox talbot selected subjects that showed the potential uses of photography; a photograph of his china collection is accompanied by a text explaining how this would help recover them if they were stolen, the leaf of a plant is contact printed as a botanical specimen, and the haystack is included to show how well photography could record “a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature.” He also places some photographs into the context of schools of painting, his famous Open Door is referenced to the “Dutch school of art”. All of which supports Gerry Badger’s description of the book as “an advertisement, a calling card, an experiment, a history, an aesthetic achievement and a manifesto” (6).

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Ian Jeffrey looking at The Haystack with a post modern eye suggests that the ladder has been placed here to provide human scale, “it serves as an attribute, making practical sense of the haystack”. He goes on to say that the sparse composition leaves the audience focusing on the items that are there so the ladder becomes suggestive of Jacob’s ladder which reached from earth to heaven. All valid points from a highly respected critic; I don’t see the ladder as being “placed” by the photographer, it is logical to me that it has been left here from the last time they cut into the hay which also explains why the hay knife has been left so high on the stack. I didn’t find the ladder suggestive of anything other than a practical way of accessing the hay.

When Fox Talbot photographed The Haystack, his intent appears to have been to show how his new process could capture the infinite detail in a large and recognisable object. He created a pleasing composition and may or may not have had one of his farm labourers bring a ladder and hay knife into the scene to add human scale or human interest. His message was primarily concerned with the functionality of the Calotype; his audience was probably a mixture of the scientific establishment, the British artists he hoped would “assist the enterprise” and the middle-class buyers who, not being able to afford a Constable, might buy a Fox Talbot instead.

Jeffrey sees the photograph as an example of the conceptual game “in which one step forward delivers things and words and one step back discloses the scene itself in all its natural complexity” (3). One the one hand I see it as a romantic view of rural life that has personal links to my life and on the other hand as a photograph taken by someone more interested in process and technology than the picture, rather like those internet conversations about pixels that appear to reduce photography to a technological arms-race. But, my interpretation is no more right than Jeffrey’s nor has this eminent art historian and critic has in any way missed the point, far from it.

The haystack is a prefect example of the practical application of Roland Barthes concept of “The Death of the Author” (7) and the idea of “Creative Attention” as proposed by Ainslie Ellis and Jonathan Bayer (8). (These ideas have been discussed in previous essays – see note viii below)

The post modernist view which is strongly based on Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author argues that whilst “the sway of the author remains powerful” the viewer is the primary controller of Art’s meaning. Barthes argues that reducing the influence of the author “utterly transforms” a piece of art and The Haystack is a perfect example of this process. Its power as a photograph is built upon a complex combination of its original context including the history of Fox Talbot and his competition with Daguerre, the mysteries and ambiguities that exist inside the frame and its aesthetic appeal but this is only relevant as a springboard for the ideas the viewer creates by engaging in a dialogue with the image. Harking back to Bayer’s idea, The Haystack releases its meanings slowly and has been doing so for over 175 years.

(I have also looked at this photograph in the context of semiotics here.)

Notes on Text

(i) Fox talbot patented the calotype in 1843. Light sensitive paper was exposed in a camera, developed and fixed to create a negative. A print was made by exposing another sheet of light sensitive paper placed in contact with the negative. (1) I was intrigued to find a letter in the de Montford archive where he uses the term “photograph” as a generic term “Several photographic processes being now known, which are materially different from each other, I consider it to be absolutely necessary to distinguish them by different names, in the same way that we distinguish different styles of painting or engraving. Photographs executed on a silver plate have received, and will no doubt retain, the name of Daguerréotype. The new kind of photographs, which are the subject of this letter, I propose to distinguish by the name of Calotype; a term which, I hope, when the become known, will not be found to have been misapplied.” (

(ii) Since the advent of silage hay is is used far less for animal feeding and when it is used it is bailed and stacked as opposed to just stacked. The art of making a haystack has nearly disappeared in England but in many parts of Southern and Eastern Europe both the stack and the the unique triangular knives that are used to carve out the hay are still common.

(iii) Fox Talbot’s great contribution to the process of photography was the concept of printing multiple copies of the same picture from a single negative. The Pencil of Nature was the first ever photo book and ran to to six separate volumes that in total contained twenty four calotypes.

(iv) By all accounts Fox-Talbot was a brilliant man, as a gentleman scientist he explored many fields and was awarded a honorary Doctors of Laws degree by Edinburgh University not for his contribution to the arts or even his political career (he served in Palmerston’s government when the MP for Chippenham) but for his many contributions to science. In mathematics there is the “Talbot’s Curve”, in physics “Talbot’s Law” and the “Talbot” is a unit of luminous energy; there are two species names after him in the filed of botany and for good measure there is a Talbot crater on the moon. (4)

(v) He also points out that “you just can’t get the staff” saying that the chief difficulty he faces is the “paucity” of “skilful manual assistance”.

(vi) The full text reads: “I intend sending you a Copy of my new work the Pencil of Nature which I expect will be published tomorrow. I have met with difficulties innumerable in this first attempt at Photographic publication, & therefore I hope all imperfections will be candidly allowed for, and excused – I have every reason to hope the work will improve greatly as it proceeds, & that British Talent will come forward and assist the enterprise The Complexity of the Art requires a division of labour; one person should invent new processes while another puts in execution those already ascertained, but hitherto I have been the chief operator myself in the different branches of the invention.” (Document number 5013 in The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot held by the De Montford University (5))

(vii) It is important to recognise that Larry J Schaaf has recorded approximately 10,000 letters to and from Fox Talbot so it would be quite wrong to give the impression that I have done anymore than skimmed the surface of this resource. I concentrated on reading the letters written between early 1843 and late 1844 which covered the period of The Haystack photograph and the publication of The Pencil of Nature.

(viii) The Death of the Author is discussed in two essays about post modernism here and here and the ideas of Ainslie Ellis and Jonathan Bayer are looked at here and here)

Sources

Books

(1) Barthes, Roland. (1980) Camera Lucida. London: Vintage Books

(3) Jeffrey, Ian ( 2008) How to Read a Photograph: Understanding, Interpreting and Enjoying the Great Photographers. London: Thames and Hudson.

(6) Badger, Gerry (2007) The Genius of Photography: How Photography has Changed our Lives. London: Quadrille.

(7) Barthes, Roland (1968) The Death of the Author. (Included within Image, music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (1977)) London: Fontana Press

(8) Bayer, Jonathan (1977) Reading Photographs: Understanding the Aesthetics of Photography. The Photographers’ Gallery. New York: Pantheon

Internet

(2) Fox Talbot, William Henry (1844) The Pencil of Nature (accessed at PCCA 6.7.15) – http://www.photocriticism.com/members/archivetexts/photohistory/talbot/talbotpencila.html

(4) Schaaf, Larry J. The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot (accessed at the de Montford University Fox Talbot archive 6.7.15) – http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/talbot/biography.html

(5) Schaaf, Larry J. The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot (accessed at the de Montford University Fox Talbot archive 6.7.15) – http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk

[gravitascivics]

HOW ACADEMIC SHOULD PUBLIC SCHOOLS BE?

The last posting began this blog’s effort to relay a developmental description of how America, from its origins – its colonial past – to the years following World War II, held onto a version of federalism.  That version, this writer calls parochial/traditional federalism.  It held – more than any other perspective – on how Americans viewed governance and politics.

As any theoretical approach, this version promoted a set of values and beliefs that were not at all times consistent or even pristinely logical.  And, during its years of dominance, people varied in how exactly each interpreted its tenets.  Generally, the view upheld the values of cooperation, collaboration, and community.

         It is these values, among others, that one can detect underlying the principles of the US Constitution as the founding generation came together and formed the nation’s government.  In a public relations coup, the faction that proposed and argued for the ratification of the Constitution took on the name, the Federalists, even though the term today is associated with local or state governments.  This cast their opponents as the Anti-Federalists who argued for maintaining the bulk of power at the state level.  

But at its heart, the term federalist fit the national effort because what the new agreement was calling for was a federated relationship among the states and the people of the United States.  And to be federated means that those entities were committed to work toward cooperation, collaboration, and community.  But a problem remained:  who constituted “the people”?  Since the original settlers in the eastern seaboard first arrived, there were already a slew of “Others” who had arrived by 1800.  

Mostly, this consisted of voluntary immigrants, but some were forced.  By the time of the Constitution, many immigrants from a variety of European nations had made the trip over the Atlantic and the pure Anglo makeup of the American population already had become significantly mixed.  Of course, the forced element consisted of African slaves who began to be brought over in 1619 and by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the slave population was at 500,000, a significant number since the population of the nation was roughly 3.9 million.[1]

Americans – its original Anglo contingency – were more or less forced to accept the other European nationals and by the late 1700s, when several generations of this mixing had transpired, they defined the white population of the US. But this was their extent of inclusion. Even those who opposed slavery, by and large, saw the acceptance of blacks as an inclusionary step too far.  For them, one can detect a bigoted view of Africans which was extended against indigenous peoples and the Asians that began making their way here in the 1800s.  

Racism, under parochial/traditional federalist view was alive and well.  And one can to a degree see this racism being detrimental to the survival of this view. With the New Deal in the 1930s and its limited efforts to deracialize federal policy, then with the contributions of blacks during World War II, and desegregation of the armed forces under Truman’s administration, the undermining of legal segregation began.  

And these democratizing developments debased the legitimacy of the parochial/traditional federalist view and bolstered the popularization of the natural rights view.  But the challenges to this earlier version of federalism did not begin in the 1930s. One subplot of the American story, according to this writer, is this building criticism of federalism, some of it reflected in public policy, some of it in the form of social developments.

The effort here is to take note of the major events and the development of ideas that led to this shift.  And this blog has chosen a telling story concerning American public schools to initiate this effort.  The choice is not because this story happened first, although this writer has shared a Tocqueville account of 1830s America,[2] this story reflects America in the 1840s.  These accounts provide evidence of what is generally being claimed in this blog:  that federalism held strong till the years after World War II.

The last posting began that history with an introduction to Horace Mann and his work in Massachusetts to establish its public school system.  That posting related that under Mann’s leadership, that system encouraged and advanced defining the profession of teaching as one that should be “manned” by women.  At its base, the reasoning seems to have been motivated by funding considerations – simply stated, one could hire women at a cheaper rate than men.

Beyond funding, the policy also reflected Mann’s sexist beliefs that were described in that posting.  What should be mentioned, was that he was not alone in these beliefs, they were generally accepted to varying degrees among Americans, including women.  One of his main advisors was a woman by the name Catherine Beecher.  She promoted women’s role in education and, in time, was instrumental in getting women to go out west and fill teaching positions across the rough western communities in what is now considered the Midwest.

She supported Mann’s initiative to shift the occupation of teaching as being defined mostly as a female profession.  They fought against certain prejudices that held that if teaching was feminized it would lead to weaken academic standards and debasing school discipline especially among male students.  Mann defended his policy by various arguments, but somewhat central, beyond the $11,000 (worth $329, 334.94 today) female teacher corps saved Massachusetts’ taxpayers in an 1800s’ budget, by writing:

As a teacher of schools … how divinely does she come, her head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on which she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue![3]

         As an ideal one can detect some biases and presumptions about teaching.  And these views reflect religious leanings.  To remind the reader, from the last posting, the connection was made between federalist thinking and Puritanical/Calvinistic beliefs. In all of this, while congregational thinking of this tradition affected constitutional thinking in all American states, it was strongest in the New England states.  And in this, there is an irony.

         Initially, Mann rebelled against Puritanical, religious thinking and adopted phrenology (a belief that physical features affect behavior).  By diminishing predestination, Mann saw phrenology as beliefs that led to proactive education to meet the shortcomings of young people.  But in this, which was ironic in of itself, he downgraded the importance of academic goals in educating the masses.

         His view of public education emphasized the social – congregational – qualities that led to a cooperative, collaborative, and communal population with a religious bent. The overall purpose of public schooling should promote students’ “affection outward in good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to God.”[4]  This stood in counter distinction to European public schooling.

         For example, Prussian schools – of which Mann saw through admiring eyes – upped teacher salaries to hold on to their male teachers and French schools promoted high academic standards with secular content (the French were prone to critique German school curricula as being too religious).  

         Next posting will look at what Mann’s contributions meant to the religious, parochial foundations of American federalism as it was considered in the early 1800s.  This writer hopes he is expressing that a culturally based idea with its associated ideals of governance and politics is not a well thought out ideology.  

It is instead a mixture of beliefs and emotions that are expressed in a more or less logically congruent argument about how and why a polity exists. But that level of coherence is enough to project a clear sense of what is considered politically legitimate. And in the 1800s it was securely considered legitimate for schools to promote a view of morality.

[1] “How Things Have Changed in Philadelphia Since the 1787 Convention,” Constitution Daily (May 25,2016), accessed January 21, 2021, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-things-have-changed-since-1787#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20the%20United,were%20being%20held%20as%20slaves.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation: Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  See pages 78-79.

[3] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 27.  The historical information concerning Mann in this posting is drawn from this source.

[4] Ibid., 28.

[semi-imaginary-place]

three houses blogging 7

So I’m playing maddening again and I forgot to grab the knowledge gem in the sothis paralogue. rip

Remember when i made claude a brawler? Well now im paying for it in hunting by daybreak where he cant use fists on a wyvrn.  Problem was i didnt have any bow abilites so his avo dropped like 30 points.

My “canon” recruits

VW: Shamir, Cyril, Felix, Sylvain, Linhardt, Dorothea, Petra, Hanneman, Flayn, Setheth

CF: Manuela, Hanneman, Sylvain, Felix, Mercedes, Marianne, Lysithea

AM: Ferdinand, Caspar, Bernadetta, Catherine, Gilbert, Lorenz

SS: idk all of them?

A quick comparison of the cavalier units Ferdinand, Sylvain, and Lorenz. All three are from some of the most powerful families in their countries if not the continent. They’re all kinda entitled bastards and they all start off still stuck in the mindset of nobility. You can really see this in part 1 Lorenz and Ferdinand where they’re obnoxious about their “noble obligations”. 

With Sylvain its more that he resents the crest-nobility systems but has resigned himself to suffer under it, he doesn’t think he can escape and thus takes out his frustration on women and himself. With the women he pursues, Sylvain sets himself up for failure. First is that he sets up for himself a reputation of unreliability partly as a rebellion against the expectations his family has set for him. His family expects him to be the perfect noble and thus Sylvain downplays his competency whether that be his intelligence or martial prowess. He pretends to be the vapid noble with nothing in his head. Next, Sylvain advertises himself first with his family name and crest and second with his body, thus attracting people who want him for these superficial characteristics. He then can accuse them of only wanting him for these things, shutting down any possibility of there being anything more and driving people away. The cheating also acts as a means to drive people away. He then can take that as evidence that people only want him for his family, crest, etc. Its a self fulfilling prophecy of self destruction and emotional self harm. Sylvain has essentially shut down his ability to form new relationships. (i need to write that sylvain essay)

By comparison Lorenz also disrespects women (by refusing to take a “no”) but why he does so is vastly different. Lorenz never fully questions and turns away from the nobility system the way Ferdinand and Sylvain can. His rebellion is against the selfishness of his father because Lorenz under all the noble bullshit is actually a decent guy. Count Gloucester cares only about House Gloucester, its reputation and prosperity. To the ends of House Gloucester he is willing to assassinate rivals and kill any merchant that brings that rival prosperity, and take any side such as the Empire’s to ensure Gloucester’s survival. Lorenz disagrees thinks those in power must consider everyone, not just their own benefit. Lorenz is the game’s strongest supporter of the Alliance as a governing system. He genuinely values a non-monarchy. Lorenz puts what he believes are his noble duties above his own preferences. For example praying because that its what a noble should do instead of because he’s religious or actually believes in the Goddess. This extends to his attempts at dating. At the start of the game, Lorenz’s perspective is that it is his duty to ensure the prosperity of his house and this include a strong crest bloodline and someone in the role of “wife” that will benefit House Gloucester. Stuck in this mindset he totally disregards the women he’s pursuing. He grows out of this with help from his supports.

Ferdiand has one of the stronger character arcs in the game (but nothing will top Marianne) where he starts off incredibly naive and ignorant about anything outside the life of a Fodlan noble, hits existential crisis will Edelgard’s war, and rebuilds himself from there. Throughout the entirety of the game he actively tries to broaden his horizons and improve himself. Ferdinand’s relentless optimism really is admirable. As in Petra’s support shows, he starts off assuming Fodlan weapons and armor are the best (its Fodlan exceptionalism) because the books he read only talked about Fodland weaponry and spoke from a Fodlan perspective. Ferdinand believes in destiny, in purpose as shown in his Marianne supports. He’s written this narrative for himself as the esteemed scion on Aegir destined for greatness, where he will surpass Edelgard as her rival, and reform Adrestia and the nobility. But discrepancies keep cropping up, he can’t beat Edelgard in combat, Edelgard start a revolution while at the Academy and ascends as emperor, his noble title and assets are taken and his family disgraced. Ferdinand turns his frustration and loss inwards and uses it as fuel to shape a new path for himself.

the chad ignatz vs. the virgin lorenz

A supports that shouldn’t exist:

Claude and Ingrid. this feels like a B support that just keeps dragging on

Linhardt and Annette. a lot of linhardt’s supports take a sudden romantic turn in the A support. am i the only one that finds it weird?

They should have another support:

Hilda and Annette ! support. They are SO cute together. imagine them doing each other’s makeup!

Sylvain and Dimtiri A support

Sylvain and Ignatz B support. i just want more Sylvain ok

Byleth and Jeralt. no dad support? heresy

Balthus and Manuela. they can be disasters together

Balthus and Holst. I just want  holst

Raphael and all the blue lions (Felix, Sylvain, Dedue, Ashe, Merdeces, Annette)

all the church people will all the other church people

So a lot of people see AM as Dimitri’s journey on recovering from trauma and while that’s not a terrible interpretation-- I think a narrative about living through trauma and the slow decades long healing would be excellent --azure moon botches the execution and I'd argue that's not the authorial intent here. (a rare case where I like fandom interpretation better than what is canon). but hold on i need to back up.  So Japan's had these cycles of xenophobia and... fanaticism??? with foreign culture and at several points absorbed a lot of chinese culture. One greatly influential work was the Romance of the Three Kingdoms which cemented in the japanese consciousness the narrative that... hmmm how to say it.... unification is how things should be... that unification is what makes a good ending. Some people pointed out parallels beforehand, but the an interview with the developers confirmed that 3H was heavily inspired by Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I don't exactly expect a nuanced and sensitive discussion of mental health from any jrpg i play (or any game really) and that mostly applies to 3H as well, sylvain's self destructive tendencies are glorified as loyalty in his byleth s support. Bernadetta's trauma is used to up her moe factor (to great success given how high up she is on the popularity polls), i tallied the number of abusive families each of the students some time ago and the sheer number of female students with tragic or abusive backgrounds makes me suspect it was done for drama.  Azure moon was never quite meant to be a story about the the real life effects of actual trauma, which is why its so wonderful that so many people could create their own interpretations of azure moon that reflected their experiences. What it was meant to be was a story of the rightful king reclaiming his throne to the backdrop of how the past can weigh you down and affect the present. Its related to the concept of mandate of heaven in that when the rightful ruler is absent (no dimitri), the country is in shambles, people are starving, war rages, everyone suffers, etc. but with the ascension of the rightful king everything flourishes, the people are happy, faerghus has a bright future etc. If you look at it rationally a lot of what the blue lions suffered under is systematic. Faerghus is basically a death cult glorifying dying in battle and sacrifice such that children are trained to fight as soon as they can walk (ingrid and felix byleth supports), children are used as soldiers (dimitri and felix), martial training rules their lives above all else (dimitri-annette supports), religious fervor fueling all this etc. But in Azure Moon, non of theses systems (nobility, crest, chivalry, church, etc.) are critiqued or dismantled and it leaves the cast of the blue lions hanging. If anything, under a new charismatic archbishop (byleth) some of them might strengthen, and the only empowerment of the people comes from the top down (dimitri allowing greater participation in government) rather than the people raising themselves up. On another note, despite many cutscenes in part one about dimitri finding out how sketchy Arundel and and Patricia are, nothing is done with that in part 2 and there is no resolution to the Agarthan problem. But back to what I was saying Dimtiri’s life is controlled by the death’s of his family and Glen, Felix puts it best in that Dimtiri strings tombstones around his neck. So the aftermath of Rodrigue’s death and Byleth’s pep talk act as the turning point for AM. Dimtiri stops rejecting the throne and is welcomed as king to a joyful crowd, he is instantly forgiven by everyone (despite wandering around as a murdering beast for the last 5 years, not doing anything to help faerhgus, and torturing people), because of course he is, via the mandate of heaven now the the proper king is on the throne everything goes right. And I hate that narrative. The game frames dimitri accepting his role as king as incredibly positive from the cheering crowd to the support of all the other characters. AM tries to tie a political position to an emotional narrative and i don’t like it. (I also just don’t like dimitri on a personal level, he’s meh, and combined with this is why AM is my least favorite route).

My favorite supports: Claude+Shamir B, Linhard+Lysithea A, Sylvain+Felix A+, Hubert+Hanneman B, all of Petra+Claude.

long long ago .  humanity was ruled over by god kings, the nabateas/children of the goddess/dragons who saw it as their divine right and duty to rule, protect, and watch over humanity. But some of the humans wanted self rule, they saw the nabateans as tyrants imposing their will over another species, and they wanted freedom. "Humans should be able to decide their own path" they cried. The progenitor goddess Sothis had fallen into a long slumber after her efforts and her children ruled in the belief that she would one day return to rule them and they they were simply holding the spot for her. It is unknown if sothis was actually dead at this point or in a regenerative coma. Nemesis was either hired as a mercenary/thief to steal Sothis's remains, or the location was purposefully leaked to him. After stealing the Goddesses' body, the humans crafted her body into the sword of the creator and her heart became its crest stone.  Nemesis then led the invasion of Nabatea and killed the nabateans using a weapon made of their goddess and progenitor's body. The bodies of the nabateans were made into more weapons and given to the 10 elites as weapons in the war against the remaining nabateans and their human allies. Nemesis was then raised as a figurehead of the war, a symbol of the Liberation of humanity from grasp of the dragons. Humanity saw him as their savior king and the 10 elites as heroes liberating them from the dragons. Seiros founded the Church, raised an opposing army and the War of Heroes begins. Seiros eventually defeated the human resistance army and its remnants fled underground becoming the Agarthans. Church became a governing body in Fodlan as the remaining Nabateans again awaited the day Sothis would return to rule them (and one failed attempt at resurrecting her). The Agarthans attempted to preserve what technology they had left and continued to develop Heroes Relic technology eventually creating artificial heroes relics such as Aymr.  It is unlikely that Nemesis was ever the brains behind the operation, just another cog in the machine. The Nemesis you fight in game is either a zombie preserved in a cryostasis pod for millennia or a clone. it is unclear.  The nabateans had seen themselves as as benevolent rulers, like parents fostering children. (you can see where this gets patronizing). So some of them like rhea saw humanity's rebellion as a betrayal

Edelgard is probably the best character in the game even if on a personal level, I don't like her too much. By which i mean she's the character that adds the most to the game from her character writing to her role in the story.  Edelgard is straightforward and stubborn. She has her opinion and not only will she not change it, she'll dig her heels in and double down on it.  She's committed... but that bites both ways. Allowing her to accomplish much, but keeping her from changing her course in the face of new information and circumstances. Inflexible.  yeah edelgard likes to be in control. its the if you want something done right you've got to do it yourself mentality. She believes herself to be the right person for the job and because of the stubbornness i mentioned earlier will not back down no matter what even if that means massive loses and her death. on non CF routes Edelgard provides an excellent counterpoint to byleth and the church, its really well done

both caspar and ferdinand would get into a bar fight. nnnnnn ferdinand tries to be a prim proper noble but he's a hotblooded shounen hero at heart. like how he chase linhardt all around the campus. i don't think ferdinand could see a fight and not think hey i should stop this and end up getting involved. like caspar he's got a strong sense of what's "right" or "what should be done" which is why he hits existential crisis in the war. Ferdinand (kinda like edelgard really) had written himself this narrative of his life, that he was edelgard's rival, that he would ascend to Prime minister and do it better than anyone before him, that he would correct the misdeeds of his father and bring glory to the aegir name, that HE not edelgard would be the one who brought Adrestia into a shinning new future. And edelgard (not out of spite or anything, it was nothing personal) brought that ll crashing down. And ferdinand doesn't know what to do with himself, what is up and what is down, what it just and right and what isn't.

i like how each route does its own thing. GD/VW is a mystery about what is really happening. BE/CF is a political thriller and has a kinda sinister tone. BL/AM is more character driven about the personal costs. a good example of this is the mutiny in the mists chapter. for gd, it introduces the mystery of heroes relics, in be it introduces the injustice of the church, bl: it sucks to be ashe. Silver Snow gives us Byleth's seach for identity set to the backdrop of the morality of the church. this is one thing i don't like about blue lions. white clouds sets up how arundel is very sketchy and the flame emperor is working with an evil third party, but then azure moon completely drops that. Compare this to golden deer part one introducing the mysteries of the relic weapons, the connections between relics, demonic beasts, crests, the children of the goddess, and church and in verdant wind that pays off as you go into depth about those things. meet up to 5 children of the goddess and the creators of the relic weapons. CF also continues what it started in white clouds by killing the head of the church. cf and ss are mirrors of each other so you need both to understand rhea and edelgard.

also interesting note remember how after jeralt dies each lord has a couple unique scenes? the advice each of them gives you is the same thing they repeated to themself to get through their trauma. Claude dealt with trauma by never letting his enemies know they had hurt them, don't give them that power over you mentality. Put on a smile and face the day, you must. Edelgard dealt with trauma by hardening herself and focusing all her energy into a goal, pick yourself up and be productive, moping around does nothing and helps no one, do something about it. Dimitri I remember the least well, one half of it was a just point me in the direction of your enemies and i will help you rip them to shreds, and i don't remember the other half. I do remember he tries to goad byleth into taking vengeance, which made me very uncomfortable the other thing i remember is that they all kinda had a point, but none of it might have been what byleth needed to hear. How they react to Jeralt’s death is another point of foiling for Claude and Edelgard, both try to do something productive, while Dimitri commiserates and grieves with you.

honestly i think raphael had some of the best advice for grief. i mean... if all you can bring yourself to do is the small stuff then take things one step at a time, take care of your body. exercise really does help your mental health. its like i keep yelling at people, raphael is probably the most emotionally mature of the students, he's grounded. If i had to choose someone to mentor dimitri, I'd choose raphael. which is why I am so disappointed in their support. Raphael is such a good boy, endlessly compassionate and wanting the best for everyone, the heart of a golden retriever.  and the devs are a bunch of cowards who won't let me s support him with male byleth. like so many characters are pretty means to him at various points and he doesn't take it personally, just takes it and tries to help them through whatever they're going through. a good boy

on a side note intsys disproportionately gives shitty tragic backstories to their female characters and it feels icky. i went and counted the number of terrible things female characters have been through compared to the male cast (i have that list... somewhere...)... and a way higher percent of female characters were tortured/kidnapped/forced into marriages/abused/etc. compared to the percent of male character with tragic backstories

jeritza ... .... certainly is a character. a shame that i like his character design but that I don't like him. he and hubert are in a single elimination tournament to determine who gets to walk away with the title of Edgiest FE3H Character. "death knight" or shinigami kishi   and wears black spikey armor and says shit like "this dance of damnation!". he's a decent unit, but a bit underwhelming compared to when he's an enemy. i suppose it would be game breaking if he had that dodge and crit as a player unit... and he's a not a bad unit... i found him to be quite good really... but it just cna't compare

an excellent character. One of the things I like about her as a character is that her character archetype is quite rare and its refreshing to see it done well. Right? so in jrpgs over the years a lot of tropes and archetypes have accumulated. And Edelgard adds so much to the story as the main antagonist for most routes, as a foil to byleth and rhea. a counterpoint to the church. Its real good. and then you get to join her for one route??? Love it. As a person, i can appreciate how raw she is as a person. As with all the lords her character development is excellent. When you meet her at the beginning its all serious business all the time. She takes everything seriously and she's trying very hard to be taken seriously. No chill what so ever in part 1. But by part 2 she's just tired. edelgard is very human. flawed. and whether her actions were "right" is up to a lot of debate, but she cares a lot (i personally think its was wrong to start a continent wide war). i think a lot of people in the West have forgotten how utterly horrific wars are. and yes she's pig headedly stubborn. the break not bend type

I really like bernadetta and caspars supports. Dorothea aggressively trying to befriend petra is great. and I did not expect ferdinand and hubert's supports to go like that but they're also really good. I think the ferdinand/hubert supports are another one that has multiple versions (b? a?) depending on when you get it in the game

I'm one of the few who likes the split route structure haha. it has its drawbacks yeah like how splitting up content means a good chunk of people will only play one route and judge the whole game based on that one route (and get angry on the internet about it  ). But i really liked being able to follow the different factions around (fe3h still need a rewrite, but i love the concept). the complex multifaceted ways the same event can affect different people. You need to play cf and one other route at least to get a basic understanding of whats going on in three houese

interesting thing is that the battle dialogue is also route locked. Like I went dialogue hunting last route in vw and got nothing. attacked dimtiri and sylvain with felix and ingrid and got nothing. Attacked edelgard with petra and ferdinand and got nothing on both maps annette and mercedes also got nothing. while i know in other routes all of them do get dialogue

What you get out of rhea in the last chapter of vw is likely accurate to the best of rhea's knowledge. Rhea knows she's dying here and likely dies soon after the game ends and nemesis is coming so she has little reason to lie. that doesn't mean what she says is true just that she has little reason to lie The church acts to maintain power and influence and shelter the nabateans who head the church by obscuring information on them. Contrast this with edelgard who got the truth of the church from her father but viewed it using the lens of the agarthans. The agarthans saw rhea and the nabateans as tyrants oppressing humanity and their views influenced edelgard. They aren’t wrong…. But there’s more to it than that (seteth’s supports)

so for some of the npcs, the ages from the datamine are more age of appearance or what age a stranger would think they'd be at first glance.this is why Sothis is listed as 9, jeralt as 45, seteth as 26, rhea as 28, and cornelia as 30 eventhough all these characters are older than that

Why Dont Ashe And Yuri Have A Support Chain. They Even Both Love Cooking And Set Up Inns In Some Of Their Endings!!!! AND LET HAPI AND CLAUDE GO STARGAZING TOGETHER

[chatalyst]

(It’s not allowing me to tag @skystorm14113) @allisonpick

I think I should’ve been more clear.

I don’t draw the line at monetary gain. The issue I’m seeing is: unless someone asks for critiques on their fan work, you shouldn’t give it. That’s why people have beta writers and notes at the end where they can welcome critiques. But if someone’s doing it simply for enjoyment, I don’t see why it would be controversial to say “hey fix it fics are kind of fucked up especially since they didn’t ask.” It’s not that I’m upset that my work is being critiqued - I do professional theater outside of my work; I understand what it means to get critiqued and I understand any creative hobby will come with that - but there is a line when I’m doing something for fun. I would be excited to be with my creative team and hear them say that there are ways to make my music/performances better, vs. me singing at a karaoke night and someone coming up and going “wasnt that fun! Now no offense, but I think you could’ve sang this part different. Here’s how I would’ve sang that number if I were you.” It comes off as condescending, and sometimes I just want to sing a song and not have to worry about it being absolutely perfect.

Same thing with fan works! I do it because I love writing and I’m not focused on publishing an original story.

Yes, I would take it as a personal attack if someone wrote an entire fix it fic for my work. Not because I don’t understand how critiquing works, but because I simply didn’t ask. I’m doing this for fun. I’m not a professional author and I’m not claiming to be. If I ever become a published author and this is my career, yes, of course I would have to know about the creation of fix it fics. I might not LIKE them, like you said, but it’s not the same thing. Any fanfiction (ANY fanfiction) is going to tweak canon in a little way at LEAST, that’s the reality of fan works.

My line is this. Authors are not allowed to read fan works. Their critiqueing comes from their editors and publishers in order to make their books more marketable and digestable to readers. Yes, they can do this for fun, but there still exists the line of them doing this and then having in place protections against anything they don’t want to/cannot see. Versus a fan doing this for fun, they HAVE to see it because the “fix it” person exists on the same platform as them.

So my line is this. Bottom line, authors don’t have to see fan works. This has negatives and plus sides, for this argument it’s a plus side because they don’t have to be exposed to someone saying “I think you were wrong here’s MY interpretation of it”. Versus someone doing it for fun, who DIDNT ASK for critiques because they

Have a critiquing system already in place through beta readers before they publish a fic, and didn’t ask

Don’t have a critiquing system but don’t really care

Didn’t ask for critiques anywhere and it’s none of your business

TL;DR If someone welcomes critiques and asks for your input, by all means. But they usually have a system already in place for that, and so if they didn’t as your input is not welcome nor is needed. You can be upset with the way they handle something, but unless you ask beforehand, jumping into making a fix it fix would be such an asshole thing to do. An author, in comparison, is not even allowed to consume content that would “fix” their works. They might know it’s there, but that’s different than having it delivered to their door because one of their professional writer friends said “I didn’t like how you handled xyz, here’s my interpretation. Hope I’m not overstepping!” You already overstepped, my good dear. You might see this as hypocritical, but I’m saying one doesn’t have to see this if they didn’t ask, the other person has NO CHOICE, PLUS they didn’t ask.

this might be an unpopular opinion but “Fix it” fics for fan fictions that are by regular people who do it for enjoyment are so evil oh my god if someone made a “fix it fic” for a fic I wrote I would skip all stages of grief and jump immediately to kill mode

[nonoboymusic]

Blackface in the Camps

Some of the most complex and interesting performances in the camps were those which featured young men and women donning blackface. This happened on at least two separate occasions during the internment of the Japanese-Americans and provides a lot of food for thought concerning the performance of race and nationality in the camps. It also points to a still lingering issue of anti-blackness, or at the very least, ignorance towards black social issues in not only the Japanese-American community but the Asian-American community in general.

One scholar recently took up the topic of blackface in the camps. In their article, they argued that performances of blackface by teenage girls were acts of “resistance" against their unjust imprisonment by the US government.  A performance of a minstrel version of Cinderella called “Cindy Ella" which was performed at a “Southern Jamboree” themed talent show was regarded by this scholar as a critique of Japanese and white American racial codes. They wrote, "Therefore, when young Nisei women interned in a government assembly center as an enemy race decided to apply blackface to perform the Cinderella subject, this audacious theatrical gesture potentially laid claim both to Cinderella’s mobility (usually denied to nonwhite Americans) and to an interpretation of racially stereotypical icons (like minstrelsy itself) as soot disguising the true worthiness of those deemed “the colored races.” In so doing, the performers suspended dominant narratives and representations long enough, perhaps, to begin demystifying the blackface commodity and Cinderella as a commodity of whiteness. Emptying either commodity fetish of even a modicum of its usual exchange value could have marked the entire spectacle with critical intentionality.”

To this scholar, these girls were able to use the practice of blackface to stand against the injustice of their imprisonment. If this is what actually happened, it would have been a lovely story, incredible really. But this isn’t what happened. This was not the intent of the teenage performers, and the author’s reading of blackface as resistance because this makes for a more interesting and publishable argument is wrong and irresponsible and obscures the real conversation which should be going on. In actuality, these performances of blackface (like the ones we still see today in the head-slapping halloween costumes which make national news every year) were soon-to-be embarrassing moments forever preserved in photos of a group of regrettably ignorant teenagers who, by simply regurgitating popular (racist) culture, put on a show using blackface performance which was still en vogue in 1942 (see Holiday Inn starring the ubiquitous Bing Crosby).

Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn, 1942.

I really can’t begin to tell you how frustrated I got reading this article and its misguided defense of blackface.

The most glaring problem with the article-which-shall-not-be-named is that, aside from one sparsely quoted letter from a teenage girl to a favorite teacher back home, the author uses no quotes from girls who were a part of or saw this performance, nor does she interview any Nisei (second gen Japanese-Americans) who would have been the age of these performers in the camps to get a better idea of the mindset of these performers. The following lines of text from Fusa Tsumagari to Clara Breed, along with a program from the performance (which features a super racist drawing of a racist stereotype of a black child eating a watermelon, is pretty much the entire evidence for the scholar’s entire argument: ““Cindy Ella" a blackface story of "Cinderella." It was cute and very well acted. It was modernized with a geta for the slipper.”

Had the author interviewed people instead of relying on an arsenal of “what if” conjectures based on looking at photos, a couple of camp newspaper clippings and their imagination, or had they contextualized this performance within the long and lingering Japanese American (JA) community history of anti-blackness, there is no way, outside of a captivating short story or novel, these girls who put on this play should be granted the political awareness which would have redeemed this racist performance as resistance. Every Nisei I’ve talked to, most of whom were musical performers in the camps, said politics was hardly ever on their minds, that they were “naive.” This “Southern Jamboree” was less a “carnivalesque” “tactic” as the scholar claims (trying to stretch theory to defend this indefensible claim), and more of a modern day sorority or frat party with a “white trash” or “indian” or “mexican” theme in which blackface and all other manner of appropriation occur. I mean we still have fucking Coachella... that’s how I think of this Cindy Ella performance. (shakes head)

I don’t want to name this scholar, because 1.) I hate how people drag others through the mud in academia without knowing them personally (I asked around and apparently this person has many good qualities, but their work on Japanese Internment has not been so great, and 2.) no one should waste their time reading this trash because, as the only major publication on this subject, it as of right now, has the last word and is dangerous to teach to a college class. As this is the only in depth word on blackface in the camps, I want to refute it heavily and state that, to read blackface in this context is misinformation.

I get the author’s intent, they (being not Japanese, Asian, or a minority) want desperately for a liberal, progressive social justice fairy tale to be present in this deeply complicated Cinderella story. But they’re assuming a set of identity-politics which doesn’t yet exist for the Nisei in 1942, and an understanding of black culture and struggle which still alludes a lot, if not most of us in the Asian-American community. But lest I am too heavy handed in my criticism, it’s important to note that, in one way, the author is right: these girls are having fun, and that production of fun, despite the racism inherent in their performance, was an important thing in the Santa Anita Assembly Center. Putting on a show and helping people in a terrible situation forget their worries was an honorable and commendable and inspirational act. But that’s where any “resistance" to internment stops. They resisted boredom, sure, and a lack of theater events and fun within the sad, pathetic confines of the Santa Anita race track, but there is no political critique of their situation happening, as nice of a fairy tale as that would be. 

A year or so after the Santa Anita “Southern Jamboree,” in the Minidoka, Idaho camp, there was a girls club called The Bojangles who appropriated black and Indian culture in a much more absurd performance centered around the production of chaos at a dinner in their block’s mess hall. This performance, which had no formal staging, seating, or program and no real plot or point; this performance of live wire nutso, mismatched clothing, unconventional and half completed makeup, I buy more as carnivalesque resistance because of the unmanaged bat fuck crazy chaos which the Minidoka Irrigator reported. There was no applause, but confusion. 

Cindy Ella, not so much. The Southern Jamboree girls, like the majority of Nisei, and their parents, were putting on a, to them, innocuous au currant play,  having fun at the expense of black culture by employing a minstrelsy which they didn’t even really understand could be offensive. A large part of all second generation immigrant kids want desperately to assimilate into the mainstream culture around them. Anti-blackness/white supremacy was an underlying part of the 1930s and 40s culture in which these Nisei were raised. So, of course they didn’t bat an eye at putting on blackface when Bing Crosby spent a whole number in it in a hit film that same year! And another thing, the author failed to contextualize is that there was a tradition of Japanese-Americans performing blackface before the camps, done not by ignorant teenage girls copying mainstream culture, but by large troupes of adults.

Minstrel Show, Seattle, 1929. Courtesy of Densho.

Like Eric Lott points out in his book Love and Theft, minstrelsy is a complicated performance practice which arose not only out of bigoted racism, but also fascination, attraction, admiration, and confusion of whites towards black culture and music. Dark and complex. In the case of Cindy Ella, there was both a mimicry of white (predominately male) culture’s longstanding performances of black face and a continuation of a legacy (although not as strong) of Japanese-Americans performing in minstrel shows. On one level, the JA girls who put on Cindy Ella, were just having fun, unaware of the head shaking, and flat out wrong performance of blackface. Their performance was an echo of grown ups around them, white and Japanese, a distant, peculiarly staged mimetic of the original 19th century white male performances of blackface, which, in a lot of ways, is just what people do. We imitate, sometimes without giving enough thought to the work we are imitating. But it’s hard to really make any readings of such a bizarre performance, especially when we can never go back and see the thing. The Santa Anita Cindy Ella performance does add to the evidence that the camps were culturally complex places, with staged performances not just pulling from white American culture and what Japanese culture was permitted, but from aesthetics and styles and genres from all over the world, often warped through racist appropriation, by a community which was forced into camps by unchecked racism at a massive state endorsed scale. Layers, complex layers.

CABARET INTERNATIONALE 

Yuki Shimoda does an imitation of Carmen Miranda's "Mama Yo Quiero.” Tule Lake, 11/1/1942. 

The Cabaret Internationale, debuted November 1, 1942 at Tule Lake was a huge success and subsequently toured around the camp, playing at different rec halls for 10¢ a pop. It needs to be stressed that the “cultural appropriation” in these performances works on many levels, and I believe is different than the blackface performed by children in Santa Anita and later at Gila River in the Harvest Festival parade. 

Star Yukio Shimodo’s portrayal of Carmen Miranda, was actually a recreation of Jerry Lewis’ drag sendup of Carmen Miranda from the film Scared Stiff, also starring Carmen Miranda. Known as “The Brazilian Bombshell,”  Miranda, born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha, was born to white Portuguese settlers. So, in Shimodo’s performance, we see a comedic recreation of Lewis’ drag version of Miranda’s over the top, exoticized fruit hat, and seductive wardrobe originally performed in a movie which Miranda herself appeared in. 

Jerry Lewis in Scared Stiff, 1953.

Here, might be a case of appropriation taking on a more potent political meaning, in that an Asian man was taking a star turn by both parodying and paying tribute to (Love and Theft) two white entertainers. Of course those white entertainers were a Portuguese barber’s daughter born in Brazil and a Russian-Jew from Jersey. Further complicating this is the fact that front row seats were given not to fellow internees, but from photographs we see white camp administration taking up the front row of the Cabaret. Of course, it could have just been a dude who wanted to entertain people, or it could have been something in between. It’s tempting to try and think of Shimodo expressing some kind of queer identity in this performance, and then this would be really political, but we don’t have that information, or, at least, I don’t right now.

THE “SIAMESE” DANCE

Japanese-American women do a “Siamese” dance at the Cabaret Internationale. Tule Lake, 11/1/1942.

I find the “Siamese” dance which was also performed at the Cabaret Intenrnatioanle, fascinating because of the implications of women of Japanese descent performing in the style of a country/region (Thailand/SE Asia) which the Japanese Empire was currently invading. A military invasion which established prison camps all over SE ASIA, while at the same time, these prisoners of the American government were dancing in the style of southeast Asian women... The ideas of empire and nationalism, Thai v. Japanese, Japanese v. American, White-American v. Japanese-American, all of this is fascinating to think about when we consider the layers involved in this performance. Can us Asians borrow from other Asians moreso than borrowing from black folk or latin folk? What if our country of origin is taking over the country we’re borrowing from? What if we are now Americans and at war with our old country? Are we then allies with our oppressed Asian?

I also think about a girl I once dated, who used to do this really annoying “Siamese” type dance, which she (and another friend she used to doit with) thought was really cute. She’d close her eyes to a squint, tilt her head to the side, purse her lips into a smile, and put her palms together in front of her chest. She wasn’t racist, and she probably had only seen echoes of any kind of original Thai or Burmese dancing, but still, she was dating an Asian dude. She was an ignorant Wyoming girl who’d never really been anywhere in the world, not unlike the girls in this dance, or the girls in blackface. Can’t be too hard on any of them, but you can shake your head, and try to think through how that girl in Wyoming (I love Wyoming by the way, and have worked there for five years, but it is super insulated and super white) ended up making a damn fool of herself, or likewise, the gals in the camps. I’m very much of the mind that it is not a big deal and also a pretty big deal. Different levels. Can’t get too hung up, but you can’t let that shit slide. People using cultures as accessories as mediated to them through mass media in the wake of empire... (shakes head). 

This cabaret was performed in the same mode as the Southern Jamboree, meaning, the intent was to entertain. It’s important to note however that different performances of appropriation or mimicry or tribute or whatever you want to call it, operated on different levels, reflecting how intertwined the world had become in some ways by WW2 through the transmission of culture. No answers on what was less offensive (was it better for Shimodo to take a star turn in Jerry Lewis’ drag but perform directly for his camp director, or for little girls to entertain each other in blackface? There’s no better or worse. And what was with the “voodoo” performance mentioned in the Cabaret writeup?), only that there were many complicated, interesting, questionable, and fun performances in these camps showcasing a wide range of “cultures.” Yet, situated in the United States, there is something particularly troubling, something a little bit more rooted in blackface being performed in these camps which makes me cringe a bit more than the Siamese dance or the Miranda impersonation.

***To my main research interest, it should be noted that Woody Ichihashi’s jazz band provided music that night. Interestingly, the jazz bands in the camps, predominately favored repertoire performed by white jazz bands, with only a few of the more serious players being well versed in the black jazz greats.***

CONCLUSION

To be sure, there were actual acts of resistance in the camps, such as riots, strikes, draft dodging and random violence, as well as artistic performances such as the Bojangles girls and boys at Heart Mountain who scratched graffiti onto bathroom stalls which veer more towards the resistance the scholar-who-shall-not-be-named was seeking, through the disorder and chaos of their acts. But, to the point that the Nisei as a whole were shifting their political views towards being radical enough to employ blackface to make an anti-imperialist, anti-racist statement, or that they, as a generation were gaining some kind of agency and affinity for social justice within the camps, is bull. It’s their kids that would buy into social justice rhetoric and as the kids say, get woke. We can in fact point to the continued ignorant and racist leanings of large sections of the JA community by the fact that minstrel performances by Japanese Americans continued outside of the camps after the war. In the photo below, five little girls, who no one could argue are old enough to be making a statement resistance, perform a minstrel number in a Buddhist church in Portland, circa 1950! And, as we know, the model minority myth which a lot of East Asian-Americans have made self fulfilling is in many ways anti-black (and other races). 

***To be fair, there are a lot of Asian-Americans today who get that the persecution they and their ancestors have faced, whether it was through Japanese Incarceration, Chinese Exclusion, or American Imperialism in Asia, or less state-sponsored acts of racism, is linked to the histories of suffering which other communities of color have lived through.***

Five unidentified girls have their faces painted black and are dressed up in large white gloves and patched jeans... performing a tap dance at the annual talent show hosted by the Oregon Buddhist Church, c. 1948-1954. Courtesy of Frank C. Hirahara Collection, Oregon Nikkei Endowment

This scholar, who frustrated me for 20 or so unrelenting and exasperating pages which I hope you never have to read, wanted so desperately for these blackface performances to be, not only excusable, but justifiable and brave. They weren’t. They’re embarrassing, but they remind us (especially us Asians) of the complicated legacy we have with racism in this country both as victims and perpetrators, or at least, ignorant bystanders. These pictures are complicated. They hit on a lot of stuff about race, gender, generations, nationality, etc. worth pulling apart. But, let’s have some real talk, when it comes down to it, it was just dumb and racist. Even at the deepest level, it was not excusable, and there is a deep sadness in these photographs. Just because a group suffers some of the most extreme forms of racism, doesn’t mean they can’t be racist themselves.

In order to understand the camps better, to humanize these evacuees, or prisoners, or whatever you want to call them, to me, it’s important to not sugarcoat it. Certainly, I celebrate the survival of many of the people I’ve met, the musicians in particular, who lived through these camps. But you have to call bullshit on certain things too. There’s been a lot of airbrushing when it comes to the telling of the internment, whether it’s excusing blackface, ignoring the native history that is intertwined with Poston and Gila River, or privileging the voices of the patriotic over those who actually resisted. Man, that does no one no favors. In the same way that it is important for all Americans to learn this history as to not let it happen again, it’s important for Asian-Americans to learn our own history more fully, as well. Especially when we see ourselves in blackface in pictures 75 years old and to this day, are still largely ignoring the plight of the black community.

Gila River, Harvest Festival Parade, 1943. Courtesy of the National Archives.

[thinkveganworld]

I wrote the following article about the mainstream media many years back, but the information is more relevant now than it was then.  My article appeared in several online publications and was well received by journalists I respect.  When I hear people today claim establishment media outlets are honest and reliable, I cringe knowing they have been fooled by propaganda and feel obliged to help dispel the myths.   

In the article I spoke out against the Bill Clinton impeachment.  I did this not to defend him personally but to expose the false narrative behind the impeachment  and offer it as an example of the corporate media’s untrustworthy nature.  I’ve written dozens of articles on mainstream media based on my reading hundreds of books on the subject.  If you read only such book, please consider Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality: The Politics Of News Media - a classic timeless critique.  Here’s the article:

This is an open letter to the mainstream news media. It is especially directed to those TV pundits who squint and strain to understand that anthropological oddity, the American people. On Sunday morning news talk shows, pundits ask one another through scrunched brows what the public could mean when we ask for media reform. It's as if insulated Beltway journalists view "the American people" who live outside the Beltway as loincloth wearing savages who eat live insects and know nothing of civilization's wonders -- tap water, airplanes, the splendor of reading a Thomas Jefferson or listening to a McLaughlin Group. My letter explores the distance between the mainstream media and the public and tries to explain what we need in the way of a free press.

We have a free mainstream press in this country. It's just not free enough. Thomas Jefferson said we can preserve democracy only with a fully informed electorate. If the media had fully informed voters about the antidemocratic nature of Iran-contra would people have lobbied political leaders to alter its course? If the media had informed the public about the savings and loan scandal in a timely way, would taxpayers be burdened with the economic repercussions?

Here's a test to determine whether the media have done a good job conveying all the news most Americans need to know about any given important news story: (1) Is that story fully understood by most Americans? Is it common knowledge? (2) Do most Americans understand the news story's meaning and significance -- in depth and detail? Do they see how the story relates to their daily lives?

How many ordinary Americans do you personally know who fully understand the savings and loan scandal? How many do you know who understand Iran-contra in depth including its meaning and significance? Do enough Americans completely understand the role certain Clinton political enemies played in disrupting the president's term?

The Arkansas Democrat Gazette's Gene Lyons says the nation's most important business now is exposing the "Shiite Republicans" who pushed the trivial, partisan Clinton impeachment. He writes, "Unless and until the well-organized, ruthless, right-wing attack machine is dragged out into the open, confronted and defeated, little of any lasting political and social consequence can be done in this country anyway." The problem is, Lyons and the few others like him can't do the work all by themselves.

We Americans grew up with TV and movie images that glorified journalists as social workers in shining armor. We learned from the entertainment industry that reporters are like ancient Roman tribunes who advocated the rights of plebeians, or at least something like TV's Lou Grant. Some print journalists have the tribune's soul, but their voices are lost in the drool and din of Celebrity Journalists -- those noisy TV pundits whose rampageous shouting over guests mirrors their chaotic interpretation of news.

Washington Beltway pundits run neck and neck with Shiite Republicans in a race to determine which group is more out of touch with ordinary Americans. Hard-line Republicans dismiss public opinion polls and claim voters have short attention spans and won't remember impeachment by the 2000 elections. Beltway pundits claim public opinion is simply a result of White House spin and say the public is easily manipulated.

We have short attention spans? We're dupable dullards stumbling into walls and forgetting to put on our shoes until we wake up from a fog barefoot at the mall? This is what Republicans and Beltway pundits think of us?

Let me tell you what we (many of us non-partisan, outside the Beltway people) think of them. We see GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee who claimed they only "voted their conscience" on impeachment dressed in short skirts and six-inch heels cooing at corporate campaign contributors asking if impeachment was good for them and whether they got their money's worth. We see Beltway journalists dressed in the same garb withholding important news stories from the public because they might offend corporate media owners or advertisers, while saturating the public with endless scrutiny of Clinton's every dust speck flaw.

Everybody expects certain politicians to flack for corporate contributors, but the public expects the mainstream media to be democracy's watchdogs -- just the way TV and movies have portrayed the noble journalist. How can thoughtful, reflective journalists compete with Beltway red light district pundits who sell corporate spin with Vegas showman's fervor, spittle flying from their mouths as they explode in outrage about the president's semen -- no, no, it's-not-the-semen-it's-the-lies-about-the-semen! Now that's entertainment.

Mainstream news organizations perpetuate the civic-minded journalist myth. When challenged, mainstream journalists are often defensive and admit no wrongdoing. The rare times mainstream news folk self-criticize they still don't get to the heart of the matter. A recent study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) shows readers are concerned about newspapers' spelling or grammatical mistakes and about factual errors, accuracy, bias, spin, and special breaks for powerful people or organizations. Edward Seaton, president of ASNE, says he wants to "rein in the pundits" and reconnect with readers.

How can news organizations connect with readers when corporate moguls who own the media often stand between reporters and readers? In a July, 1986, Cosmopolitan interview, media mogul Rupert Murdoch was asked to what extent he controls his newspapers' editorial position. Murdoch, who described himself as a "radical conservative" said: "Considerably. The buck stops on my desk. My editors have input, but I make final decisions." If Murdoch at times acts as a defensive back, blocking his subordinates' efforts to pass to the public any version of the news that hurts his financial interests, we need a whole new kind of journalistic ball game.

Concentrated corporate ownership affects the quality of journalism. The people-friendly press has been replaced by corporate-friendly conglomerates. Family owned newspapers -- papers that once took up for interests of average Americans -- have virtually disappeared due to a declining marketplace.

The corporate-friendly press puts profit ahead of public service. Corporate owners don't spring for costly investigative reporters -- especially not ones who make waves with business advertisers or very powerful public figures. Here is the heart of the matter: "News" washed clean of the real corruption in society -- in other words, news that omits misdeeds of those wealthy and powerful public figures with the most clout -- is anemic disinformation. The public can't connect with it because whitewashed news is nothing we can use. It doesn't link with our daily lives.

Corporate-friendly (as opposed to people-friendly) media do more than limit ideas. They often advocate or emphasize only ideas that benefit corporate owners. Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch have an obvious economic stake in a certain political agenda: fewer taxes on the wealthy; fewer regulations of business and so forth. Media giant TCI's John Malone stated Murdoch would likely be glad to keep Fox News Channel on the air even if the network didn't make a profit -- for political leverage alone. If networks are used for political leverage by media owners whose economic interests clash with the interests of average taxpayers or labor groups, the public needs to seek alternative sources of information.

Media decision makers often deny they are controlled by corporate media owners. But subordinates no doubt anticipate how far they can push the envelope and then censor themselves. Network news directors rarely pound away at stories that seriously jeopardize wealthy and powerful villains -- at least not those with the most wealth and clout (meaning the ones who can do the most damage.) Journalists are sometimes fired or harassed for challenging the rich and powerful. Media critic Michael Parenti ("Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media") offers a number of examples, among them: Reporter Bill Collins was fired from the Winston-Salem Journal for "union activity and writing too much about labor." An NBC reporter, Jon Alpert, was fired by NBC's Michael Gartner when Alpert brought back Gulf War footage showing damage done to civilian areas by U.S. aerial attacks. New York Times columnist Sydney Schanberg's column was canceled by publisher Sulzberger when Schanberg wrote too much about the greed of New York's bankers and other moneyed interests.

Mainstream news organizations have generally ignored the Richard Mellon Scaife story. A federal grand jury is investigating whether billionaire Scaife funneled money to key Whitewater witness David Hale. Scaife supported a calculated effort to disrupt Clinton's presidency by diverting $1.7 million through The American Spectator to a project created to dig up dirt on Clinton. He gave millions to organizations (such as the Landmark Legal Foundation) run by people who appeared on talk shows night after night suggesting Clinton should be impeached or resign. For mainstream news organizations to ignore Scaife is the equivalent of ignoring the sudden appearance of a large rhinoceros in the living room. When the public sees the "rhinoceros" but the pundits ignore it, the result is a gaslight effect. It's no wonder many Americans doubt their own perceptions about current events.

Corruption involving society's wealthiest and most powerful miscreants is the very kind of corruption that most affects our daily lives and is the kind that most needs to be corrected if the country is to improve. This is not a plea for scatter-gun scandal-mongering or random smear campaigns aimed at ruining wealthy public figures without just cause. However society's most insidious corruption often originates among the wealthiest one-percent of Americans (whose total net worth is greater than the total net worth of the bottom ninety percent) and among the corporate media moguls who flack for them. If mainstream media won't fully cover union grievances because it offends wealthy corporations, or won't cover war-time abuses because it offends arms manufacturers, or ignore Wall Street's greed because it offends bankers, or neglect to cover billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife because it offends -- Richard Mellon Scaife, then we need new sources of news media.

If news organizations want to convey news that matters, it's not enough to offer occasional stories in piecemeal fashion on important issues. For the public to grasp the meaning and significance of news stories, the media must go beyond casually tossing out first one random piece of a puzzle and then another -- sometimes publishing or airing one piece of the puzzle weeks after the first piece appears. When a meaningful, complete puzzle exists responsible media should present the whole picture to the public -- all at once and often.

Some journalists claim it's not their job to clarify meaning and significance for viewers or readers and that they have no obligation to put puzzles together in a truthful, public-advocating manner. However, media organizations do piece news stories together in ways that promote corporate interests.

Michael Parenti says the way news is framed is all-important. Framing involves "the way news is packaged, the amount of exposure, the placement (front page or back, lead story or last), the tone of presentation (sympathetic or slighting), the accompanying headlines and visual effects." During MSNBC's relentless coverage of the Clinton scandal, the network repeatedly juxtaposed a picture of the president with the caption "High Crimes and Misdemeanors." It might as well have read: "Guilty as Charged." Around the same time, the same network also repeatedly ran a film clip of the Clintons walking into church with a voiceover mentioning that after church on Easter Sunday Clinton met Lewinsky for a sexual encounter. Propaganda is more effective when done with framing than with obvious coercion.

If the media cared more about public service than profit, what difference would it make to ordinary Americans? If we'd had truth telling mainstream media when the savings and loan crisis started or during Iran-contra, might ordinary people have banded together to help avert those blunders? Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-TX) testified as early as 1982 before the House Rules Committee, warning of the pending S&L disaster. Gonzalez , who is now retired, is a rare breed of politician who worked on behalf of the public and not exclusively for corporate "clients." Although his speeches appeared in the Congressional Record, and while thousands of political reporters knew of the coming S&L disaster, virtually no reporters covered the story. Gonzalez called a press conference in the spring of 1988 in a near panic about the coming crisis. The only press people who showed up were a few from the financial industry trade papers and some Texas reporters. (Bill Greider, "Who Will Tell the People," 1992.)

The mainstream media never explained the S&L scandal to the public so that its details became common knowledge, nor did the media clarify Iran- contra. Tim Weiner writes in "Blank Check," the book based on his Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper series on the Pentagon's black budget: "No one ever stood trial for the true crimes of the Iran-contra conspiracy. No one ever will. The White House, the Justice Department and the CIA made sure of that." Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and certain national security officials declared important facts regarding the case to be sensitive secrets. Those secrets -- including key defining details -- were sealed, allowing prominent Iran-contra figures to escape scrutiny and prosecution. Independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh said the sealed material amounted to "fictional secrets."

Nothing has been done to discourage another Iran-contra. Ronald Reagan and Oliver North escaped serious media scrutiny, and Congress hasn't enacted a single preventive measure. Why didn't the media (on the whole) do a better job reporting the S&L scandal and Iran-contra? Many reporters who knew about the savings and loan story were focused on relatively trivial matters, for example on lighter aspects of the 1988 presidential campaign. Some news organizations caved to pressure to give only the military-intelligence version of Iran-contra according to former Newsweek reporter Robert Parry ("Fooling America," 1992.) However a key underlying reason those and other important news stories are neglected or covered in misleading ways is that, in general, mainstream media primarily serve interests of the wealthy and powerful -- often at the expense of the rest of us.

Many politicians listen only to their wealthy corporate contributors and disregard the views of the rest of the electorate. Considering politicians' indifference to public opinion, would it have mattered if the news media had reported the savings and loan scandal and Iran-contra in a way that made the details fully understood by most Americans? Yes, it likely would have made a difference. If the general public had known the implications of the pending S&L crisis or the reasons Iran-contra figures escaped scrutiny, people might have chosen to respond. At least, armed with information, the public would have stood a fighting chance to act on our own behalf.

If the news media had fully informed the public, more people might have bothered to vote in order to eliminate (vote against) politicians who participated in the S&L scandal and Iran-contra. People might have formed legitimate grassroots groups or joined existing organizations to work toward preventing similar events in the future. Public figures often complain that few Americans vote or participate in politics. More people would be inspired to vote and participate in public affairs if the mainstream media conveyed news fully and clearly, showing the public what is at stake. An informed electorate is an empowered electorate.

Robert W. McChesney, Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, says that when Ben Bagdikian's "The Media Monopoly" was first published in 1983, all U. S. mass media were controlled by around fifty corporations. Today approximately ten firms dominate all mass media. Various media owners are involved in joint ventures with their "competitors." Those joint ventures reduce real competition and create monopolistic tendencies. A virtual media monopoly obviously curbs the range and scope of ideas flowing from mainstream media to the American people. Yes, a few news organizations offer an occasional "people-friendly" expose of corporate misdeeds, and there are good journalists who tell the truth and do an excellent job. The public could seek them out. Here's the problem:

(1) When people believe we already have reliable mainstream media, they don't seek supplemental news. Many Americans believe the myth of the noble tribune and think if a news story were important it would be mentioned often on network TV or reported daily on the front pages of their newspapers and in every issue of prominent news magazines. Most Americans don't work to unearth key news stories (in other words, do their own investigative journalism) because they buy the myth that caring journalists will do that for them. Some people believe in TV's Lou Grant the way they once believed in Santa. Americans must shake off the illusion that the mainstream media serve "the people."

(2) Most news organizations drown the public with corporate-friendly propaganda and offer only rare moments of dissent. For example, MSNBC offers one or two hours a week of Charles Grodin's public-advocating view of current events, while it runs hundreds of hours a week of opposing views. How often does Ralph Nader or Gore Vidal appear on your TV screen? How often, by contrast, do you see mouthpieces for the wealthy like the Scaife-funded Ann Coulter or the Wall Street Journal's John Fund? People-friendly reports are lost in an avalanche of corporate spin.

During a discussion about the American people's thoughts on impeachment, Washington pundit Sally Quinn asked C-SPAN's Brian Lamb if Beltway insiders are "the people" too. Yes, Sally, you are. But what serves you D. C. insiders often injures roughly ninety percent of the rest of us. Quinn said in a column about her Beltway friends that many -- including Senator Joe Lieberman, journalist David Broder and CNBC's Chris Matthews -- are disappointed in Clinton and want him to continue apologizing, to resign or to otherwise stay distracted with impeachment. We outside-the-Beltway folks don't get the kick the pundits get ruminating on Clinton's shortcomings. We'd rather not distract the president or the country with minor personal complaints when we could instead let the president and the nation focus on why forty million of us don't have health insurance or on ways to keep corporations from shifting their tax burden onto average taxpayers.

The president has been impeached for partisan reasons and most of the mainstream media either slept through it or joined the wild-eyed vigilante hoard screaming month after month about sex lies as if those "offenses" amounted to mass murder. During those months ayatollah-pundit Chris Matthews (and other talking heads) pumped out more hysterical anti-fornication rhetoric and unfounded rumor-mongering than the rest of history's puritans and witch hunters combined. Back in average America, the rest of us now slog through Hurricane Ken's wreckage, trying to find what remains of our homeland and national sanity.

Ordinary Americans need truth telling, public-advocating mainstream media organizations with their finger on our pulse and corporate America's chains off their backs. We are not likely to get them. We'll have better luck strengthening the country's alternative media -- those publications not entirely controlled by corporate money and profit motive. A public sponsored all-news television network might be a good start (a sort of all-news PBS that thrives only on private and not corporate contributions.) Those people who trust the mainstream media won't bother to seek news elsewhere. What the public needs most is to enlist educators and others to spread the word through society that the mainstream media can't be trusted to provide all the news Americans need if we want to be well informed enough to keep democracy.

Michael Parenti quotes journalist John Swinton who attended a newspaper editors' banquet in the early years of the twentieth century. Swinton responded to a toast to the free press this way: "There is no such thing in America as an independent press....You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print....We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

The recent Judiciary Committee hearings on impeachment spotlighted how antidemocratic the far right in this country is and how powerful they have become. The antidemocratic right has made its way into the Congress of the United States and has succeeded in impeaching a president for trivial causes. The mainstream media are complicit because of their negligence and deceptive framing of the scandal. It's time the American people banish the myth that we have a free (enough) mainstream press and see most mainstream media organizations for what they are. Unlike the proverbial Emperor, these media posers do wear clothes -- short skirts, six-inch heels -- but they wear no shame at all.

[mild-lunacy]

stranger in a fannish land 2: the unpopular opinions

So there's a meme where people are weighing in on what they'd change about The Raven Cycle and it's like.... Many people in fandom really have no sense of what's 'good for the story', or the difference between your personal satisfaction or reaction and 'a good idea' for the plot. Like, I realize that some things are sad, or unfortunate to have happen. But like, just because it's unfortunate (for ex, a character-- say, Noah-- doesn't get a happy ending) doesn't mean it's better not done in fiction. Alternatively, just because you can imagine it, doesn't mean it's even remotely a good idea for the fictional situation and/or characters as they stand. I mean... anything *can* happen, but not everything *should* happen, given you're trying to justify it as a Good Idea in the first place.

Sure, Ronan could've been together with Gansey, or even Kavinsky before Adam. Why not? He also could've been kidnapped by a pedophile as a child, or he could've been hit by lightning and got grey hair, or he could've been born on Maui and never met Gansey. He simply could've died as a baby, etc etc. If you're actually talking about desirable outcomes or things helpful to the relationships between Gansey, Adam, Ronan and Blue, you have to limit these potentialities and look at what *ought* to happen to preserve their dynamic, though. So yeah, Ronan/Kavinsky would be especially destructive to every major relationship in the books, and any hope for growth Ronan has, and in that sense it's equivalent to Ronan being born in Hawaii or dying as a baby. But Ronan/Gansey is just differently destructive to the group dynamic as we know it, with the characters as we know them. It would mean Ronan isn't so romantic and innocent, either, so his whole characterization changes, or it means they're not simply best friends. I mean, you can't 'just' casually have a crush on your closest friend if you're a romantic. If you do, it's usually not something one quickly or easily gets over to move easily onto the next friend, whether that's Blue or Adam. Further, Gansey's power over Ronan would start being really questionable all of a sudden, to the point where you'd have to wonder if Kavinsky was right. Jealousy and weird unrequited feelings would probably threaten the boys' connection with Blue, and this would probably change both Gansey's and Ronan's relationship with Blue. Regardless, an actual canon attraction or relationship between Ronan and Gansey, or between Henry, Blue and Gansey, is not just a fun, sexy little detail you can easily insert at any time. Every choice has consequences like ripples in a pond. That's how life works, but more importantly, it's how fiction works. This is the very thing that fans seem particularly oblivious of.

In general, my point is that just because you have a preference for X thing, or you react in a negative way to Y plot point, it doesn't mean that said X is good and Y is bad. I dunno, I feel like I'm stating the obvious. These aren't super-deep thoughts, are they? I mean, it's actually really blatant that say, Noah had a great arc and/or served his purpose wonderfully in the books, and yet maybe 5 people out of 100 seem aware of this in Raven Cycle fandom. Almost every post complaining about TRK states Noah's resolution sucked 'cause he 'deserved better'. I'd understand if 6 year-olds said that sort of thing, because it takes a while to understand dead people don't get better, but otherwise, I don't see how ghosts deserve happiness. Like, they're already dead, basically. Noah started out dead, and this had a major purpose in that plot. And dead is dead, man. That's kinda the *point* of being dead. It's both permanent and unhappy. As far as being dwelled on afterwards, none of the events of the climax got dwelled on afterwards. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, so the number one thing that drives me batty in fandom is people ignoring the entire idea of characterization or plot requirements in the story and assuming any old thing or headcanon that they wanted could actually somehow work. I dunno if these fans even think in terms of things 'working', though maybe I should be more optimistic. Like, for example, even agreeing it'd be great if Gansey also kissed/liked boys and was bisexual... why would he *randomly* kiss his friends? Who in the world does that outside pure romantic/sexual fantasies? Why not at least ask the question of 'why Gansey' first? Or why not demand Adam kiss random boys, 'cause at least he's confirmed to be bisexual in canon? Is there any other point except that everyone needs to be queer at all times? Even individual fanfics would usually at least try to make sense, rather than randomly putting in an assortment of happy headcanons. (Granted, I've seen fics that claim to incorporate an assortment of headcanons, but this isn't typical.) Who really wants books to be a collection of politically correct boxes checked, double checked and triple checked? Honestly.

What really drives me nuts is not really the fact that people want these counterproductive things to be canon, because surely the heart wants what it wants. It's the misunderstanding of the way fiction works, and consequently that these posts blame the writer(s) for their so-called failure in delivering what makes no sense in the first place. Like, some critiques are valid, obviously, even though I don't think the characterization of either Ronan or Adam (as it stands) easily transfers onto a POC character. Their background would need to change to some degree (particularly Ronan's, being Irish as a matter of characterization), so essentially it'd be a different character (though Blue is different). Anyway, so one can certainly critique that, as well as the pros and cons of labelling Adam bisexual more explicitly and so on. But stuff like randomly bi Gansey or happy Noah are just headcanons and pure wish-fulfillment. And my issue is that fandom doesn't draw any kind of serious line between these two kinds of 'critiques', in part because they often use the same lingo. It's literally like no one is aware that say, polyamory isn't really even in the same box as racial and sexual diversity representation, so Stiefvater had no responsibility to include Sarchengsey. Just because you care about that headcanon and/or real life issue doesn't make it a *social justice* responsibility that needs addressing in the media. I would think that's obvious, but it definitely isn't.

I think the underlying problem in my relating to fandom these days is that I don't... 'read' characters any particular way. Like, I may have interpretations about what happened and guesses as to what will happen, as well as hopes, but I don't just *decide* things. I never personally decide to read a character as gay, trans, ace, or a POC (let alone polyamorous), unless they're stated or super-heavily implied as being intended as any or all of the above. That is not a thing that happens to me. Of course, 'implied' kinda means that canon can get fuzzy to me, which is certainly true. Usually I'm just aware 'this is fuzzy'; maybe it's that even if I do go further, I don't fill in blanks with personal experience on any conscious level that I've ever noticed. It's not that I'm (that much of) a canon absolutist; I'm just unlikely (and indeed almost incapable of) making leaps that aren't ultimately suggested by the text. I'm also definitely irritated by many people who *do* make such leaps in a preachy, pushy, in-your-face way, like canon is irrelevant and fanon is the Only Truth needed (and if you disagree, you're the problem). If it's subtle but still intentionally textual, I'll (eventually) see it. If it's not textual... I probably won't. I don't read against the grain, basically.

It wouldn't be so bad (my mental dissonance in fandom, I mean) if not for the pushy holier-than-thou posts about the Truthiness of things which are absolutely Not Canon, which are always at the back oh my mind. So I guess I can overreact to some innocent wish-fulfillment stuff sometimes. I don't mean Truthiness like those (wanky and unfortunate) old debates about canon Johnlock or even (apparently) whether Victuuri is canon. That's actually less weird 'cause at least I can see people genuinely reading the text differently in that case, for whatever reason. Like yeah, I mean, I think denying Victuuri is canon is ridiculous and I haven't even watched Yuri on Ice. But at least those people seem to have some sort of reasoning as to *why* they think Victuuri doesn't exist, even if it's bad or homophobic reasoning. What really frustrates me the most is the growing fandom trend of people who wilfully ignore canon and the very idea of interpretive/headcanon plausibility without even acknowledging there's a deeper disagreement.

Like, we're talkin' the level of the folks who go beyond 'let's racebend Ronan Lynch' (ok, sure!), through the valley of 'you better racebend him or you're Problematic' (um, are you sure? I think I'm going to go with 'strongly disagree') and into the shadow of 'Ronan Lynch *is* black, and if you *deny* it you're Problematic'. I know it's all fun, games and headcanons, but when you're trying to get other people to replace their idea of canon with your headcanon, or trying to justify it in general, eventually it becomes all too easy to forget you'd ever even noticed that, say, Ronan is white while reading the books. And in fact, many people seem genuinely confused about that aspect of canon reality at this point, which is kind of terrifying to me. I value my ability to process the text correctly, pay attention to basic facts and, well, perceive objective reality in general. And yes, white Ronan Lynch is objective canon reality. You can certainly mess with it in fanworks (that's what fanworks are for!), but it remains canon, and no headcanon is morally superior enough to canon to *have* to be the preferable choice, let alone actually *replacing* it. In fact, the very idea that the more morally superior thing is somehow more 'correct' on a literal level is... Problematic. At least, to me. Not least because I think that although we do definitely need more representation, fellow fans cannot have a responsibility to invent it where it doesn't exist. Ability is not *responsibility*.

Basically, while transformative readings and headcanons are a great outlet and a fundamental part of fandom, it's not the *responsibility* of other character fans or fellow shippers to follow them or even support them. To me, that's really basic stuff that's long made fandom function on a fundamental level (on par with 'ship what you like'), and the fact that it often seems the majority of Tumblr fandom disagrees is making participation near-intolerable, at least in The Raven Cycle (the most extreme examples of this type of wank are concentrated in book fandoms, it seems, 'cause I think actors are more 'real' to people visually). It should just always be unnecessary to even say that if you don't want to slash, or racebend, or even ship outside of the canon sandbox (or you want to sometimes but not others), there's *nothing* wrong with that, as long as you accept that others won't have the same preferences. I really can't believe I feel I even have to say so, but I know I do. There's nothing wrong with preferring or enjoying canon as is. That's the basic level of the meaning of being fannish, surely. You like the thing you like! Liking it the way it is in canon cannot be considered the *inferior* way of liking it. So yeah, the mental dissonance can get very, *very* intense for me.

Essentially, good characters (especially ones I care about at all) and their core emotional responses and frameworks are real to me: Ronan is an individual. He's white, he's Irish-American, he's a Southern boy, he's got blue eyes. He's also angry, depressed, idealistic, loyal. Sherlock is an individual. He's also a white male, he's a Londoner, he's got dark curly hair, a low voice and many chins. And he's analytical, sensitive but interpersonally oblivious in some ways, obsessed with John, jealous of Mycroft, etc. You *can* certainly change most of this in a fic, but this doesn't mean you *should*, certainly without acknowledging the broad-ranging consequences. In a good and IC fanfic, you would have to acknowledge that those core traits are still the basic starting points, part of the definition of the character. Basically, as anyone who knows me will know, I've got an unholy obsession with ICness, even/especially in the context of fanon pairings, settings or situations like AUs. The characters and their core motivations are simply not fungible or interchangeable to me. This isn't really a failure of imagination ('why can't you just imagine whatever?' you say), but rather about seeing an imaginary person *so* vividly in my mind they they become effectively real.

In a way, this sounds similar enough to what people say happens with various projections and headcanons, but the process actually seems rather different, 'cause I pay attention to the text and not just my reactions to it. I love to imagine, to build upon the possibilities of the canon world, of course. I just... have to have a foundation. I can't imagine being *any* kind of fan without paying close attention outside of myself and caring about what I find there, in the text. Fanon and canon have to be separated for *either* to have true meaning.

In any case, in a broader sense, I do think I understand what happens to the people who get hung up on their headcanons and start insisting on them. My imagination is always something that starts out broad and open and ends up cast in stone, once I feel I've figured out what the relevant 'truth' is, in context. I can certainly settle on an interpretation and get pretty hardline about it, which happened to a large extent with my ideas about canon Johnlock (though I was always aware what's opinion and what's fact, I became very certain about my reading and I definitely got pretty easily frustrated by people who ignored the 'obvious'). That's why I separated a close reading or interpretation like canon Johnlock and even Victuuri from something like racebending Ronan Lynch, though. That's not a plausible reading or interpretation; rather, it's a simple denial and substitution of canon (which, as I've said, I never do). Telling me that doing it would be morally preferable doesn't really help (to say the least), although the process of how people get to this point *is* familiar to me.

I can and *do* often enjoy AUs or graphics where there's a new context for the character (say, edits where Ronan is Korean or Mexican-Irish have been cool). Not all AUs are created equal to me, though, 'cause not all AUs or fanon scenarios work with the characters' core traits, as written. Sometimes, though, fanon ships (a form of an AU) do work on the level of potential, like the Road Not Travelled By. You can sometimes imagine the canon arc splitting off at some crucial point, so it bends but doesn't break. This can be complicated stuff, but it's how I intuitively think of it. Generally, I'd need a sense of broader changes to who they are as a result of a new life history, but that's still an agreed-upon suspension of disbelief. Consequences, in other words.