#though i guess you can argue different circumstances again... to an extent

[mitsukuri]

thinking about the concept of each honmaru's version of a given sword being a little different…

[makeste]

I saw this take on twitter about Hana & Kacchan having “reverse parallels” and since they both have apologised to Tenko/Deku (but one was more or less sincere and the other was absolutely sincere) and they said that, while Hana moved away from Tenko, Kacchan ran to catch Deku. There was also more to the thread abt Kacchan & Hana’s differences. They were sorta trying to argue that this is a clue that Hori intends for Bkdk to be sibling-like/brotherly. As a bkdk shipped, I’ve accepted that it makes sense.. cause it’s an established fact that Tenko & Deku parallel each other. Tenko having his own “Kacchan” makes sense. Tho yes I am a little sad since I’ve held a little bit of hope for romantic bkdk becoming canon. I just wanted to ask your opinion if Hana was really meant to foil Kacchan or was it just a reach?

okay so I have a couple responses to this.

1. while it's true that Horikoshi has woven a lot of deliberate parallels between Deku and Tenko's characters, that doesn't mean every single thing about their lives and every single person they interact with is a part of those parallels. which is to say that no, I don't really think Hana and Kacchan are meant to mirror each other in any kind of significant way. Hana's apology to Tenko was under completely different circumstances than Kacchan's apology to Deku; I really don't see any connection between the two situations. you might as well be trying to compare Hana to Endeavor, or Deku, or Hawks, or Aizawa, or any other character who's apologized to anyone over the course of the story.

2. please pardon the forthcoming rant, anon -- and I hope you know that none of this is aimed at you in particular -- but for me personally, this whole obsession with ships becoming canon is one of the most exasperating types of discourse there is. like, don't get me wrong, I totally understand people wanting to see their favorite ships validated by the author, and not to mention there's also the issue of having more LGBTQ+ representation. but speaking as someone whose own orientation (aromantic) has almost no representation in fiction whatsoever, it gets frustrating to see so many people dismiss non-romantic relationships as being an inferior type of ship, to the extent that calling a relationship "sibling-like" is now a commonly-used attack in ship wars. so many people view romance as this completely transformative element, to the point where two characters can literally tick every other box on the intimate personal relationship checklist, and none of it will matter to some people unless they actually confess their love and kiss.

and again, I'm not saying I don't understand it, especially since queerbating is a thing. it's one thing if a writer is genuinely just trying to portray a close friendship, especially in series where romance isn't really a focus. but it's another thing entirely if a writer is deliberately hinting at a romance in a blatant bid to attract a larger queer audience, while all the while having no intention whatsoever of having those hints lead anywhere. the issue, I guess, is that it's not always easy to tell which scenarios are the former, and which are the latter. and of course, you also have people who think that the former is a type of cop-out as well, because the thing is that romance is always viewed as the default. so for a lot of people, allosexual and alloromantic relationships are the only ones that get considered as far as representation goes.

but you know what, I'm just gonna say it; even knowing where people are coming from, it's still discouraging to know that so many people are so dismissive of aro and ace relationships that the thought of a favorite ship not becoming romantic in canon is considered a profound disappointment. and it's even more discouraging that the thought of a rival ship becoming canon is considered such an existential threat to some that they will literally use "oh, they're just like siblings" as an argument against the ship, rather than a point in favor of. because siblings are a downgrade. friendship is a downgrade. any kind of close relationship that isn't inherently romantic or sexual in nature is less important, and that's just how it is.

so yeah, that's kind of a pet peeve, ngl. especially since the truth is I actually do think Bakugou and Deku's relationship is very akin to siblings. and so I do sometimes get weary of not being able to just outright say that without having to first pepper the statement with all kinds of disclaimers so that people don't think I'm invalidating the ship. I feel like I have to walk on eggshells if I ever want to talk about their relationship in terms that I can personally relate to.

but I mean, here's how I look at it. they've known each other since they were small children. they call each other exclusively (or almost exclusively) by childhood nicknames. they have an openness and an unspoken, almost taken-for-granted trust in each other to the point where they'll share closely guarded secrets ("I got my quirk from someone else") and personal vulnerabilities ("why was I the one who ended All Might?") with barely a second's hesitation which they would never share with anyone else. they have a comfortable little bickering type of rapport ("I'm getting stronger"; "well I'll just have to get even stronger then"; "you'll never surpass me"; "we'll see about that") which they can fall into with ease and which looks weird af to outsiders, but is "normal" to them and something they're both grateful to have.

they're so intimately familiar with each other's personality and behaviors that they can predict them with perfect accuracy. they're so in tune with each other that they can whip up elaborate coordinated attacks right on the spot in perfect sync. their admiration for each other is so strong that they each think of the other as being the epitome of winning and saving, respectively. their mental images of each other are so vivid that they subconsciously mimic each other's speech patterns whenever they start falling into a particularly strong Win or Save mindset themselves. they take no small amount of pride in showing off for each other. they go apeshit any time the other is in danger or hurt. and each of them would literally die for the other if it ever came to that.

all of that is already canon. on just about every metric imaginable except for "now kiss", the two of them already have a canon intimacy that rivals just about every other great relationship out there. and so to say that none of it actually counts unless there's an actual love confession involved frankly just boggles me. again, maybe it's because I have no personal vested interest in romance myself, though. I'm literally just not wired that way, and so I'm really not the best person to vent to when it comes to these kinds of concerns.

but look, no matter what happens from here on out, these two care about each other on a very deep and personal level. they're going to continue to be a part of each other's lives no matter what. and each of them, no matter what, will continue to occupy a space in each other's lives that no other person can fill, regardless of how we or Horikoshi or anyone else choose to label and define that space. and so in my book, that's already a win.

anyways, apologies again for the impromptu rant. again, this wasn't particularly directed at you in any way; if anything it's mostly just a generic response to the constant shipping discourse in this and every other fandom, and a more detailed explanation for why I personally don't like to get involved in it. this is just one of the myriad reasons why I try my best to stay very far away from BnHA twitter lol.

[todomitoukei]

Japanese vs. English Dabi A 293 Comparison

Chapter 293 gave us another great speech by Dabi, filled with all kinds of information. Similar to my post for the previous chapter, the official translation for chapter 293 has, unfortunately, once again made some changes in regards to Dabi’s speech due to its bias that I would like to share and explain here to give a better understanding of Dabi’s actual character rather than just leaving it at his American version.

Because Dabi said so much in this chapter and we will be comparing the panels from the Japanese version and the official English translation and taking apart the Japanese phrases, the rest of the post is under the cut (this post may or may not be just below 6k words)

The interaction begins with a short exchange between Dabi and Shouto as the former is hugging his younger brother mid-air while the others are still on the ground trying to take down Machia. In the official translation, Dabi begins by pointing this situation out to Shouto.

The two panels aren’t too different from the Japanese version, but this is another case of lost nuance. So here’s the original for comparison:

The speech bubbles read:

「向こうは楽しそうだなァ」

「可哀想になァ」

「おまえはこんなに辛いのに」

Breaking down the first line we get

「向こう ; mukou」-> other side; other party

「は ; wa 」-> topic marker particle

「楽しそう ; tanoshisou 」-> looks fun

「だ ; da 」-> casual form of です (desu); be; is

「なァ ; naa 」-> sentence ending particle; expresses emotion/sentiment

= “The others seem to have fun, huh?”

Then we have the second line:

「可哀想に ; kawaisou ni 」-> pitiable; poor (interjection)

「なァ ; naa 」-> sentence ending particle; expresses emotion/sentiment

= “Poor thing, huh?”

And the third line:

「おまえ ; omae 」-> you

「は ; wa」-> topic marker particle

「こんなに ; konnani 」-> so; like this

「辛い ; tsurai 」-> bitter; painful; heart-breaking

「のに ; noni」-> even though

= “Even though it’s so painful for you.”

Someone made a post a few days ago where they made an interesting note about this part, specifically that last line, that I think is worth mentioning here: this situation is Dabi comparing his own past to Shouto’s present. Touya was in pain for so long until he burned to death because no one helped him (and by that I mean an adult that could’ve actually helped him and not his younger siblings). Similarly, Shouto has been in pain for so long and now that it’s especially obvious to those around him as he is in the process of being burned, no one is helping him and instead, they continue fighting each other. And while Dabi doesn’t know the extent of this, it’s true that Shouto has been vocal about his family’s circumstances and yet no one’s ever done anything about it. So while Dabi at this moment is primarily referring to the fact that in this very instant no one is immediately by Shouto’s side to save him, it’s also unintentionally pointing out how no one in charge ever looked at the teenager with a huge scar on his face who openly hates his father so much and thought to maybe at least ask him about it.

You can argue that that is interpreting too much because “Dabi doesn’t care about him” - but I think that Dabi not knowing enough about Shouto and seeing him as nothing but “Endeavor’s doll” and Dabi recognizing that Shouto is in a similarly bad situation as Dabi are two statements that can coexist, especially since he is right in saying that right there no one is helping Shouto. And, again, based on his broadcast and how much his speech has changed to be more polite and humble in contrast to his usual direct, rough ways, it’s important to recognize that Dabi has an understanding of people (and how to get to them).

So while his mind might be too focused on his hatred for Endeavor, there might also still be that ability to acknowledge that those around him are hurting, too. This is an important problem within the fandom (and outside of it) as far as vocabulary goes - a lot of people throw around the word empathy and how awful it is when someone lacks it. But empathy is the ability to feel someone else’s emotions. And you don’t need to actually feel what they are feeling in order to recognize their emotions, which is far more important. This understanding of someone else’s emotions is sympathy. Compassion, on the other hand, is not just understanding someone’s emotions, but also trying to alleviate someone’s negative emotions. So even if Dabi doesn’t care about people, he can still recognize when someone is in pain.

After this, we get Shouto’s only line of that chapter, and as much as I wished he was given more lines, this one’s so good, it’s okay there isn’t more:

Above you can see the English translation having Shouto say “But... you’re... burning up... too!”

For comparison, here is this same part in Japanese:

Starting with Shouto’s line, we got「てめェ。。。こそ。。。体が。。。焦げて。。。！」

This line already broke itself apart! How nice.

「てめェ ; temee 」-> you

「こそ ; koso 」-> for sure; emphasizes preceding word

「体 ; karada 」-> body

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「焦げて ; kogete 」-> to burn; to get burned (the dictionary form of this is 「焦げる」(kongeru), the te-form is used here to leave the sentence trailing)

= “YOUR body... for sure… will… get burned…!”

The reason I’m saying this line is so important is the emphasis on the “you” part through the usage of koso. The general content of the sentence already tells us this, but that emphasizing nuance doesn’t exist in English (unless you bold, italicize, and underline it). The line is important because we’re shown someone who is in the process of being burned alive, and yet his worry is on the person trying to kill him rather than anything else. He isn’t trying to argue with him, isn’t trying to protect himself - he’s simply saying: this is hurting you. It’s interesting because in the eyes of those around him, Shouto is the one hurting the most. But to him, it’s Touya who is hurting the most. To him, this isn’t the hero-to-be Shouto being fought by the villain Dabi. This is big bro Touya hurting himself for the sake of getting at their awful dad. And little bro Shouto is only thinking about his big bro.

Now for Dabi’s response, we get the line that particularly stuck out to me as far as the English translation goes: “Seriously, it’s great that you were raised with love.” What? If you read the fan translation, you might remember this line as “You’ve grown up to be so considerate - I’m happy for you little bro” - so which one is more correct? If you guessed the fan translation then, unfortunately, you are correct! 

The Japanese line reads 「優しく育って嬉しいよ」

「優しく ; yasashiku 」-> ; tender; gentle; kind (adverbial form of「優しい」(yasashii))

「育って ; sodatte 」-> to be raised; to grow up; (te-form of「育つ」to indicate reason & means (this part results in the second part of the sentence))

「嬉しい ; ureshii 」-> happy; glad

「よ ; yo 」-> sentence ending particle; shows emphasis

= “I am glad because you grew up kindly”

First of all, an adverb is nothing other than an adjective that is directly affecting/describing the verb it precedes. So to understand that in reference to this sentence, you can ask the question “how was he raised?” - with the response being “kindly.” If you wanted to say “raised with kindness” on the other hand, you would have to turn the adjective into a noun. That part of the phrase would then be 「優しさで育って」As you can see, that’s not what it says in the original version.

More importantly, the word “love” is not part of this, so I don’t know why that word is used here. It really gives off a wrong understanding of what is actually being said here. The official translation makes it sound like Dabi is saying “I’m glad you were raised with love, while I wasn’t” sort of like a complaint?

We still don’t know exactly what Touya’s upbringing was like, but we do know that things gradually got worse over time, so with the assumption that he was raised in a more positive (not good, just better in comparison) environment than Shouto, the English statement then doesn’t make sense since he was “loved” too for a long time.

Besides, he is saying that in direct response to Shouto displaying his worry for Dabi, which says nothing about how he was raised but everything about what kind of person he is (a kind one).

Furthermore, it leaves out the part where Dabi says he’s happy about this. Instead, he just says “it’s great” - which is more something used when you can acknowledge a situation being good for someone else, even though you don’t have any particular feeling about it. It’s very objective, yet in the original, he is stating his emotions with this.

The official translation, in my opinion, just ends up turning the two against each other (more specifically turning Dabi against Shouto), when in reality, Dabi is happy that Shouto shows compassion for him here, despite Dabi currently trying to kill him. In other words, he is surprised by Shouto’s concern for him and happy to be proven wrong about him.

Next, we got「俺は大丈夫今とても幸せだから。」

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「は ; wa 」-> topic marker particle

「大丈夫 ; daijoubu 」-> alright

「今 ; ima 」-> now

「とても ; totemo 」-> very

「幸せ ; shiawase 」-> happy

「だから ; dakara 」-> because (indicates a reason for something)

= “I’m alright, I’m really happy now, so...”

There are two things to note here in relation to the previous phrase. First of all, notice how both phrases include the word happy. In the first phrase, the Japanese word is ureshii, whereas in this phrase it’s shiawase. Once again, this is a question of nuance.

Ureshii is more of an immediate feeling that you feel in that exact moment. It’s a feeling that isn’t going to last forever (for example the joy you feel when you receive a gift).

Shiawase, on the other hand, is a long-term happiness.

The way to interpret why he is using both these terms is that he uses ureshii as his reaction to Shouto showing that he cares. He most likely didn’t anticipate for Shouto to say something like that, so signaling his concern for Dabi made the latter feel joy in that very moment.

So what about the happiness he talks about in the second phrase, how is it different from the first one? Clearly, Dabi is not exactly someone you would describe as happy when looking at the overall picture. I think one possible explanation as to what the shiawase here refers to is that Dabi has accepted his situation. While it wouldn’t be accurate to describe his state as one of having moved on from the past - clearly - at the very least, through admitting to his past and having distanced himself from that dark place, he has been able to now be in a better situation, where he is allowed to just live rather than trying to prove himself to someone day after day.

The second thing to note is that you might be wondering why I ended the sentence with “...” when the official translation is “I’m fine, because I’m really happy right now.”

Well, it’s kind of an odd sentence, isn’t it? The sentence as it is right there is just giving us a reason. But a reason for what? In Japanese, it’s okay to omit the main clause (the phrase that would follow after this to explain what you just gave a reason for) when it’s obvious what you’re talking about.

This confused me for a little bit until I thought about what sentence came before this one. Right before this Dabi says “I’m glad you were raised kindly.” The sentence we’re looking at right now is an extension of that. And what came before that sentence?

Shouto saying: “Your body will burn too.”

See what I’m getting at?

As explained before, Shouto is essentially telling Dabi “I know you want to kill me, but this is going to kill you.” Now if you add Dabi’s two phrases to that, you get his response as “I’m glad that you’re so considerate. That makes me really happy, so it’s alright if I die.”

Many people have pointed out before that Dabi doesn’t care about whether or not he will make it out alive and this is essentially him confirming just that. His only goal is to ruin Endeavor and knowing he is doing that is enough for him to accept death.

He then continues to explain that joy of his with the next sentence:「見ろよあの顔」

「見ろ」-> look (volitional form)

「よ」-> adds extra emphasis after volitional form

「あの」-> that

「顔」-> face

= “LOOK at that face!”

With his goal being all about destroying Endeavor, seeing this man look so defeated right there is the first proof for Dabi that his plan has worked out. While he doesn’t know yet what the actual consequences for Endeavor are going to be after this, he certainly has damaged him.

The next line reads:「最高傑作のお人形が失敗作の火力に負けて死にそうだってのに。。。！」

「最高傑作 ; saikoukessaku 」-> masterpiece

「の ; no 」-> hierarchy particle (the word before is the general noun, the word after the specific noun)

「お人形 ; oningyou 」-> doll

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「失敗作 ; shippaisaku 」-> failed creative work

「の ; no 」-> particle to indicate possession, works like an apostrophe

「火力 ; karyoku 」-> firepower

「に ; ni 」-> indirect object marker

「負けて ; makete 」-> being defeated (te-form because another verb follows)

「死に ; shini 」-> going to die

「そうだって ; soudatte 」-> I’m saying it’s so

「のに ; noni 」-> shows disappointment (“If only that weren’t the case”)

= “I say it’s a shame that the masterpiece doll is about to be defeated and die by the firepower of the failed creative work.”

A lot of people take issue with Dabi yet again referring to Shouto as a “doll” here. Obviously, that isn’t a nice thing to say, but please keep in mind that Dabi doesn’t really know Shouto and with that also doesn’t know how Shouto feels about Endeavor. All Dabi sees is Shouto being a hero-to-be, just like Endeavor has planned. Keep in mind that Dabi used to be in Shouto’s shoes, which makes looking at Shouto be like looking in a mirror and seeing young Touya trying so hard to be what his father expects of him, yet failing over and over again. They were both born for that selfish purpose. They were never born to be people, but only born to be what their father needs them to be. And now that Dabi has broken free from that role, it’s natural for him to describe Shouto’s position as such to emphasize it in case the others haven’t understood that this is the reason for their existence and them being right there in that exact moment.

The final part says「グプっ。。。なァ見ろって！壊れちまってるよ！！ははは！！」

「グプっ ; gupuu 」-> special effects sound (I will explain this one in a second)

「なァ ; naa 」-> when placed at the start of a sentence it’s an attention seeker, kind of like a “hey!”

「見ろ ; miro」-> look (volitional)

「って ; tte 」-> to say (in casual conversation this can be used to repeat what one has just said to stress one’s own quote; can show frustration)

「壊れちまってる ; kowarechimatteru」-> be broken (unintentionally; regretfully)

「よ ; yo 」-> sentence ending particle to show emphasis

「ははは ; hahaha 」-> laughing sound

= “Hey, I said LOOK! He is completely broken, hahaha!”

As mentioned in the translation comparison for the last chapter, the chimatteru indicates that the verb it attaches to has happened unintentionally or has yielded regrettable results. We know that it is Dabi’s intention to hurt Endeavor - so him being broken is neither unintentional nor is it regrettable to Dabi. 

So in this case it’s not so much about how Dabi feels. Instead, it’s probably more fitting to say that it’s about Endeavor. This situation has broken Endeavor (which is regretful), even though it had never occurred to him that the past could come back to haunt him (he has not intended for this to happen).

[edit because someone pointed out that (as mentioned for the 292 comparison) chimatteru can also be used to indicate something has been done completely, so in this case he is saying Endeavor is completely broken]

Now for the part that I neglected before: the special effects sound gupuu. The reason I have been holding off an explanation is simply that it’s not necessarily that important for the sentence, however, when I looked this up this was the result:

Yes, you’re reading that correctly: *slurp*

I had a good laugh about that. The holy trinity of the slurping brothers is complete (albeit Dabi doesn’t have the noodles to go with it)

Anyway, back to the serious stuff!

Next, we get this big panel of Dabi with the three speech bubbles. Notice that there are several ha to indicate that he is laughing.

The speech bubbles all put together read:「焦凍！！俺の炎でおまえが焼けたらお父さんはどんな顔を見せてくれるかなァ！？」

「焦凍 ; shouto 」-> Shouto

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「の ; no 」-> particle to indicate possession, works like an apostrophe

「炎 ; honoo 」-> flames

「で ; de 」-> by

「おまえ ; omae 」-> you

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「焼け ; yake 」-> to burn

「たら ; tara 」-> when (focuses on the results that can come from this first part)

「お父さん ; otousan 」-> dad

「は ; wa 」-> object marker particle

「どんな ; donna 」-> what kind of

「顔 ; kao 」-> face

「を ; wo 」-> direct object marker particle

「見せて ; misete」-> to show (te-form to connect to the next part)

「くれる ; kureru」-> something was done for the speaker (being shown)

「かなァ ; kanaa 」-> I wonder

= “I wonder what kind of face dad will show me, when you get burned by my flames, Shouto!?”

The official translation added the “burn you to ash” part, which just adds more harshness to this than there already is. I’m not exactly opposed to that as I do recognize that he is being harsh here, however, this overall theme of adding words to make the villains sound harsher is just not what a translator is supposed to do so it is important to point it out.

Also notice the kureru, which is used when something was given to or done for the listener (i.e. a favor). Previously, Shouto has pointed out that Dabi would not survive his attempt at burning Shouto, either, and yet here he is wondering specifically what face Endeavor will show him. He isn’t just wondering what face this man will make, but what his reaction would be that his own failure has killed his masterpiece.

After Deku interferes we get this panel of Dabi and this is where the conversation between him and Shouto ends and his speech to Deku starts.

The Japanese version essentially says the same as the translation:「他所の家に首突っ込むなよ！」

「他所」-> another place; outside (one’s family or group)

「の」-> particle to indicate possession, works like an apostrophe

「家」-> family

「に」-> in

「首突っ込む」-> expression to poke one’s nose into another’s affair; lit.: “to thrust one’s neck into something”

「な」-> sentence ending particle; expresses emotion/sentiment

「よ」-> sentence ending particle; shows emphasis

= “Don’t stick your neck (nose) into other people’s family!”

After this, we get the part where Deku gives his speech with the “And guess what?! You’re not Endeavor!” part that was supposed to… reach what exactly? 

Someone pointed out that this wasn’t supposed to be an “It’s your power!” 2.0 speech, because with Shouto, Deku wanted to get to him and help him. With Dabi, on the other hand, he is saying (and he literally is saying this) that Endeavor is trying to be better. And Dabi not being Endeavor means that Dabi is not trying to be better. That, in turn, means that Deku is watching this Endeavor, the one that is trying to be better, but someone like Dabi who isn’t trying isn’t something worth watching.

Anyway, regardless of what the point of that phrase was, Dabi’s reaction is mocking this obvious statement

The Japanese line says「はははそんな事が誰でもわかる！！」

「ははは ; hahaha 」-> laughing

「そんな ; sonna 」-> such

「事 ; koto 」-> thing

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「誰でも ; daredemo 」-> anyone

「わかる ; wakaru」-> to understand

= “Hahaha, anyone understands such a thing!”

Continued by this part.

The first line here says「でも俺はかわいそうな人間だろ！？」

「でも ; demo 」-> but

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「は ; wa 」-> topic marker particle

「かわいそうな ; kawaisou na 」-> pitiable; poor

「人間 ; ningen 」-> human

「だろ ; daro 」-> don’t you think?

= “But I am a pitiable human, don’t you think!?”

What’s interesting to note about this line is the use of ningen. Normally, you would more likely use the word「人」(hito), meaning person, when you put another word in front of it. After all, when you talk about another person (much like I am using the word right now) it’s obvious they are human, so you wouldn’t need to use the word human.

With that, Dabi specifically using the word human here is done in order to humanize himself to Deku. Not only is he asking “hey, don’t you pity me at least a little?” but rather he is saying: “I get that you think I’m just some low-life villain, but I am a human being with valid feelings, so don’t just ignore them because you don’t see me trying.”

Again - Dabi chooses his words carefully and this is no exception.

If you paid extra close attention, you might have noticed that the word kawaisou gets used again. But did you spot the difference? While in the first example the word is written in kanji as 「可哀想」now it’s completely written in hiragana. Why is that? You might wonder, and I did too. Keep in mind that the first time the word gets used here (written in kanji), Dabi is referring to Shouto. This time (written in hiragana) he is referring to himself. Kanji are generally used because it makes texts easier to read since there are no spaces in Japanese. Much like the rest of us, Japanese people are also born with zero kanji knowledge and learn about them as they grow up. Because of this, books for children tend to just be in hiragana (the letter Kota writes to Deku thanking him for having saved him is also written in just hiragana) so they can easily read them. With that, a text in all hiragana gives off a more childish, cute, innocent kinda feel.

Obviously, in spoken Japanese, you can’t hear that he is saying this word in hiragana. But we know that he is. So aside from him using the word human to make him more, well, human, he is also saying the word pitiable in an innocent way, which furthers the image he is trying to create of himself; that of an innocent human being that has been wronged. Because clearly, someone has to help the heroes see that villains are also people. As mentioned before, this is a common theme of the League of Villains and has most recently been brought up by Toga’s question to Uraraka of whether or not the heroes saw Twice as a person. Dabi is, in a way, asking that same question, just with several exclamation marks.

The second line says「正義の味方が犯した罪それが俺だ！」

「正義 ; seigi」-> justice

「の ; no 」-> particle to indicate possession, works like an apostrophe

「味方 ; mikata 」-> supporter

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「犯した ; okashita 」-> committed

「罪 ; tsumi 」-> crime

「それ ; sore 」-> that

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「だ ; da 」-> casual form of です (desu); be; is

= “The crimes committed by the champion of justice: that’s me.”

That first part seigi no mikata is sort of a set expression, but I wanted to break it down so you can see what the actual words are. It’s generally translated as champion of justice, knight in shining armor, crime avenger, or hero. Hero is obviously not the right translation here, since they just use the word hero for the profession. Champion of justice is just the closest to the actual words, hence I chose that translation.

The official translation is once again being biased with this sentence, this time though not so much to make the villains look worse, but to make a hero look less bad. While the Japanese version says that this “champion of justice” aka Endeavor has committed crimes that resulted in Dabi’s existence, the translation changed it to “did some vile stuff” which is seriously downplaying the fact that a Pro Hero, whose job it is to fight criminals, is actually a criminal himself! It’s just yet again a very odd change to make, especially given the fact that we know that Endeavor has committed crimes. So why make it sound like less here?

Okay, so you might be confused about this line if you read both the fan translation, as well as the official translation.

Again, the official translation says “evil is thriving” - the fan translation, on the other hand, says “evil will no longer prosper.”

To opposite meanings for the same short phrase. Why is that?

You see, the first line says「悪が栄えるんじゃねェ！」

「悪 ; aku 」-> evil

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「栄える ; sakaeru 」-> to prosper

「んじゃねェ ; n janee 」-> “isn’t it” (see explanation below)

= “Evil will prosper, won’t it?”

The reason for that confusion is that last part, n janee, because its meaning depends on the context, and with that, in cases like this, it’s less obvious which it is.

This is a rougher way of the casual n janai, which is a more casual way of no janai, which is a more casual form of no de wa arimasen. Or in simple terms: it’s very casual.

So what does it mean? Like I said, the meaning depends on the context.

The no is an explanatory particle and when paired with janai can be used for when you express an opinion, whilst seeking the listener’s opinion.

So you can treat it as a “isn’t it” in an affirmative sentence (when you express your opinion or talking about probability), but you can also use it to negate a sentence (hence the two opposite translations). The former can also be used when you’re making a point.

Knowing that it’s pretty much down to context, we have to ask what makes more sense. Is Dabi saying that evil will prosper, or is he saying evil doesn’t prosper?

To put this into context, you have to look at the surrounding sentences. Prior to this one, Dabi mentioned that he is the crimes of the hero system. In the next phrase, he talks about justice collapsing. Because of that, I think “evil will prosper” is a more accurate translation as justice collapses as a result of evil - unless you interpret evil as being about the heroes.

Anyway, the second line says「正義が側板するだけ！」

「正義 ; seigi 」-> justice

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「側板 ; gakai 」-> collapse; downfall

「する ; suru 」-> to do (turns the noun it attaches to into a verb)

「だけ ; dake 」-> only

= “Justice will only collapse!”

If you look back at the official translation, it says “Justice is losing this war!” Meanwhile, the Japanese version doesn’t mention the words losing or war. While they still somewhat say the same thing, losing a war doesn’t inherently lead to irreversible, long-term effects. Instead, this situation is about more than just losing this war. The entire system is taking a fatal blow from this. Not even so much from this war, though. The reason Dabi is so certain that this will be the downfall for justice is that how are people supposed to still trust in this justice system when those that are supposed to defend it are criminals themselves? It’s more of a natural consequence resulting from a system that has been corrupt for far too long - the exposure is simply what will put an end to it.

The third line in that part is「俺はその責任を感情豊かな皆々様に示しただけだ」

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「は ; wa 」-> topic marker particle

「その ; sono 」-> that

「責任 ; sekinin」-> duty; responsibility

「を ; wo 」-> direct object marker

「感情 ; kanjou」-> emotion

「豊かな ; yutaka na」-> extremely; very

「皆々様 ; minaminasama」-> everyone

「に ; ni 」-> to

「示した ; shimeshita」-> pointed out; showed

「だけだ ; dake」-> only

「だ; da 」-> casual form of です (desu); be; is

= “I only pointed this responsibility out to all you very emotional people.”

What irked me about this phrase in particular in the official translation was yet again the choice of words. I get that Dabi has a rough way of speaking. But sometimes, he chooses to use polite words and that shouldn’t be erased.

So when the official translation makes him say “All I’m doing is showing you sentimental dopes who’s to blame for that!” It’s just a rude phrase. But in Japanese he says minaminasama. You might be familiar with the word minna or minna-san, with the san in the latter example being a polite suffix (kind of like Mr./Mrs.,...). Sama is similar to that but even more polite. So minaminasama is about as polite as you can go. There might not be a direct English equivalent to that level of politeness, but I think we can all understand that “dopes” is not a correct translation here.

The responsibility/blame part goes back to what Deku said to him. “You aren’t Endeavor” - no, he isn't. And no, he isn’t exactly trying to be better. But that kind of mentality only ignores the obvious fact that this all could’ve been prevented, had it not been for Endeavor and his own selfish goals. It was a hero - the “champion of justice” - that committed crimes just like a villain. But it’s unheard of for a hero to do such a thing. Society doesn’t get shaken at its core when it hears about a villain committing a crime. A hero, on the other hand, being found guilty of a criminal record, will lead to people doubting the integrity of heroes altogether and that is not Dabi’s doing. All he does is share the truth.

To round this speech off, we get one last phrase:

“The future coming down the pipeline… is one where all that schmaltz and lip service is gonna get blown away by the chaos!”

The Japanese line says「これから訪れる未来はきってキレイ事など吹けば飛んでく混沌だろうぜ！」

「これから ; korekara 」-> from now on; after this

「訪れる ; otozureru 」-> to arrive

「未来 ; mirai 」-> future

「は ; wa 」-> topic marker particle

「きっと ; kitto 」-> surely; without a doubt

「キレイ 事; kireigoto」-> glossing over; lip service

「など ; nado 」-> such as

「吹けば ; fukeba 」-> to blow (conditional form of fuku)

「飛んでく ; tondeku」-> to go flying (short for tonde iku)

「混沌 ; konton」-> chaos

「だろう ; darou」-> it seems; don’t you think?

「ぜ ; ze 」-> ending particle for emphasis (more casual/ruder version of yo)

= “Surely, if things like this lip service get blown over, the future coming after this will be chaos flying around.”

In Japanese, there are several conditional forms. The ba form, as used here in fukeba, is used when the preceding clause expresses a condition, which results in natural consequences. In this case, something happens in case pretty things get blown over.

Mirai is one of the words you can use to talk about the future in Japanese. This word is more intangible and more general rather than being about one specific event or person, so everyone will be affected by this.

And with that, we have made it through all of his speech from this chapter, congrats!

Something you may have noticed is that there are plenty of particles you can use at the end of a sentence, usually for emphasis. One of the most common ones you find throughout the chapter are yo and ze. Yo is a pretty standard one to show emphasis, whereas ze is more of a colloquial version of yo that has an assertive feel and is therefore usually only used when speaking in very casual conversations or to someone of lower social status than you. Dabi has used this on Endeavor before and is now also using it on Deku - aka his opponents.

Going back to the start of the chapter when Dabi is mainly focused on Shouto, though, he ends most of his sentences with naa. As mentioned before, this particle is used to express emotions/sentiment.

He also uses that during their first on-screen interaction during the summer camp. While I do think that Dabi is mainly still only seeing Shouto as an extension of Endeavor, I do think that there is also a part of him that does see himself in him and that can somewhat sympathize with him. He isn’t being as rough on him overall (verbally that is), and instead is trying to come off as more emotional, possibly just to appeal more to him.

To sum it up, there are a lot of things that just get lost in translation due to nuances that don’t exist in English. More often than not, though, the villains are being given harsher words, whereas anything related to heroes is softened. Dabi is constantly shown to be someone who puts great care and thought into the words he uses, so there is a lot of that emotional intelligence that gets neglected in the translation and then makes him seem more like someone on a random mission rather than someone who has put genuine thought into this.

There are still so many people in the fandom who, for some reason, think Dabi is in the wrong and irredeemable for having killed thirty people, whilst having the same stance as Deku in thinking that Endeavor is much better because at least he is trying.

While they should both be held accountable for their actions, Dabi has a good point when he said that heroes are to blame for his existence and that their crimes are what will ruin the justice system and not him.

Best Jeanist’s reaction to this whole situation was complaining that Dabi uses his personal past to shed a bad light on the heroes, which summarizes that exact problem of the hero society: That heroes are more concerned with their own image than actually being heroes who go above and beyond to bring about peace and safety.

Seeing Shouto’s reaction, being concerned about his big brother rather than himself, is at the very least giving some hope that at least one person on the hero side is able to see beyond the villain exterior and see them as a human-being - without needing a long speech for it.

We’ll have to wait and see how this is going to continue, but in more likeliness, the official English translation will continue to include its bias.

If you’ve made it this far - thank you so much for reading! This post was filled with a lot of information and trust me when I say some of these lines almost broke me as I tried to understand them. I hope I could clarify some parts of the chapter, though, specifically Dabi’s character, since the official translation loves to change his character.

[sweetobseesion]

On The Sosoo discussion on who loved each other better

This is just a random observation that is rooted in my observation of the MLSHR fandom. Discussions on who loved each other more or “ whose love is greater” is a pointless abysss that no one can reach. One can keep arguing of course ,but no one can reach a proper, legitimate conclusion. It’s like the equivalent of asking a child who loves better: mom or dad? A mature , mediating child will not pick sides but a child that knows it’s favourite parent certainly will and will come up with many explainations on why that particular favourite parent loves them better. The only conclusion one can reach is one’s own preference , favouritism and devotion. Which is why, in MLSHR fandom most of the bloggers and posts that deride Hae Soo and accuse her of not loving So enough are almost , always Wang So fans, who usually see him as a tragic hero and defend him in any chances they get. It’s a result of their favoritism and devotion towards his character, as they almost idolise him in a certain fashion. That’s where the difference between them and Soo occur because no matter what Wang So does or becomes, Soo always views him as a simple, flawed Human being. She doesn’t idolise him or hail him as great and that is precisely why though he becomes King, she is able to defy him, shout at him and hold him accountable for his actions. I guess that’s the difference between idolisation and love . Maybe even Wang So’s love and Hae Soo’s love to a certain degree. To Wang So love was grand gestures , ultimate loyalty and devotion and to a certain degreee , idolisation. We see it in the way he loves Hae Soo and his mother. He’s very preoccupied with the idea of his mother, though she has made it clear time and time again, that she wants nothing to do with him.She’s committed so many cruel deeds to him , yet he crawls to her side, hoping for affection because he still idolises and views her as a motherly figure that can give him warmth.Meanwhile, Hae Soo after her terrible experience with love from Wook and her former boyfriend who cheated on her, she understands idolisation doesn’t do you any favour in the long run.Her love for Wang So was rooted in genuine acceptance of his flaws. She knew how dangerous he is and accepted him anyway. It’s exactly why he is able to feel warm and comfortable in her love.In my opinion, her love is more sensible because there’s genuine acceptance of who he is as a person and it encourages him to be a better person. This is why she is so successful in “ taming him” , as they call it.But still, there’s no denying that that each of them loved each other greatly, but only in a different manner.For Wang So, it’s only understandable that he would resort to idolisation and extreme expectations,given how lonely and desolate the circumstances he grew up in were. He just doesn’t understand love and to certain extent, human beings.

[ohblackdiamond]

liner notes/unused joke summaries for kiss fics (part iv)

Despite what my general dislike of the shift key and my tendency to mock all that I love might imply, I actually overthink everything I write to a great extent. I make no claims to these explanations being in any way enjoyable, but if you wanted to know what I was thinking while writing KISS fic… now you do. Part one can be found here. Part two is here. Part three is here. 

little t&a --If Paul had boobs, they would be big and Gene would want to grab them.

>>Title from a Rolling Stones song of the same name; most of the chapter titles are from another Stones song, “The Spider and the Fly.” I started it during quarantine as a means to occupy myself and destress, and didn’t initially plan on posting it at all. Once I’d written five chapters without having posted it or mentioned it to anyone, I figured, well, I guess this might as well go somewhere, so I put it up. I had the hope that it’d give me something to strive for during the stress of lockdown, and I’d assumed that I wouldn’t ever have that much time to devote to a story again.

There were a couple of things that really inspired me. I’ve always enjoyed sexswaps as a bit of a guilty pleasure, but wanted to do a different take on them-- there’s this tendency for sexswaps to either be wacky hijinks or an excuse to write particularly brutal noncon. There’s also a tendency for the sexswapped character to almost automatically start adopting stereotypically feminine traits he didn’t have prior, with no real reason for it. I wanted to try and avoid all that as much as possible.

... There’s also another tendency for the sexswapped character never getting back to normal, and I wanted to avoid that, too. I mean, c’mon, KISS is supposed to start the Love Gun tour a month after the fic. Paul can’t exactly pull the trigger of a love taco. (Maybe gently brush it a bit...)

I had Paul already cursed for five days at the start of the fic because I thought it would make things easier and allow the plot to advance more quickly. I also felt like it would give him more autonomy-- prior to Gene showing up, he has tried (albeit in small ways) to get a handle on what’s happened to him, and while he’s hermited it up, he hasn’t given up. Autonomy in general was pretty important for me re: Paul. (Incidentally, probably one of my favorite things about this fic is that Paul’s made that poor twelve-year-old kid on his bike buy him sanitary napkins.)

I wanted to explore a couple of other things, too, mostly rock and roll’s (and KISS’ in particular) pretty heinous treatment of women. Gene and Paul argue in the eighties that groupies know the score from the beginning, and even postulates that those relationships are more “honest” than just taking a girl out to dinner. They’re not alone in this (and, of course, as married men, these days they try not to discuss those times at all); almost every band/artist from around that time period will give you the same answer. “The girls know what they’re doing.” I think many of them did know. I also think many of them came into those hotel rooms expecting a lot more than they ever received, and I think plenty of girls ended up at the very least disappointed by their encounters, if not humiliated or worse.

I don’t know if this was successful, but I also wanted to at least try to poke a few holes in celebrity/idol worship as well. Carol’s scathing comments to Paul-- “they [fans] think there’s something you’ve got that they can get at, but there’s not” pretty heavily exemplify behavior I’ve seen at conventions, fan meet-ups, etc. At the end of the day, well, there’s no point in putting them on much of a pedestal. I dunno. I’ve seen some weird crap in the name of fan worship, in and outside of RPS. Keith Richards talks about it in his book-- girls urinating on themselves out of sheer nerves/excitement just at seeing the band, etc., which, while disturbing, had to have given them a sense of being something beyond ordinary (and act accordingly, of course).

I don’t know. I like them a lot, but I can’t hero-worship these guys; they don’t live in the real world. They’re not, ultimately, relatable or accessible despite the billions of photos, the twitter posts, the meet and greets-- any more than they were 40-odd years ago. I think there can be a real danger in thinking they are. I wanted to show that, too, but again, I don’t know if it came across properly.

One of the aspects I really struggled with was getting a good handle on Paul’s innately slippery sense of identity without it overtaking the story entirely. Gene’s very stable identity was a good foil, and it helped that most of “t&a” is from his point of view, rather than Paul’s.

Another place I faltered with was Paul’s outing alone at CBGB. The first draft had the guy in the club slip quaaludes into his drink, but I really didn’t like that at all and felt it took too much control away from Paul/punished him for going out on his own. I thought it’d be more interesting if Paul deliberately took what he knew was a dangerous combination (alcohol + quaaludes) in the hopes that would make him feel better about sleeping with someone he didn’t care about.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, having him do that (and the way the scene with the guy at the club ends) also meant that I couldn’t have him hop right into bed with Gene that night, either, so that accounts for some of the delaying. I was also really wanting to make sure in general that when Gene and Paul finally did go all the way, there wasn’t any feeling of being coerced or pressured. Not that Gene would do either of those things, but I didn’t want him or Paul to be doing it out of any feeling of obligation or hurry; I wanted it to be as natural as possible, under the circumstances. And I wanted, again, Paul’s dubious sense of self and Gene’s ambiguous feelings about Paul(’s boobs) to come into play-- yes, Paul, now you, too, can take Gene on the amazing technicolor dreamdate you’ve been fantasizing about for the last seven years! Or, you know, not. Overall, there are some pacing issues and the story slows down considerably after Gene takes Paul home from CBGB, but I like to hope that most of the scenes add something.

There were a couple of secondary plotlines that got scrapped because I couldn’t get them to fit well enough with the narrative. One of them was Paul’s very troubled relationship with his sister, Julia. There’s a fair amount of references to her scattered throughout, and Paul brings her up on several occasions, generally without much provocation, and generally at mildly odd moments (at Central Park and immediately after getting drawn by Gene being the standouts). There was an initial draft of the chapter in which Ace calls Paul, where Julia’s the one calling Paul instead (after having gotten his number from their parents). I wanted to at least get the start of a reconciliation going between them. Ultimately I scrapped it because I couldn’t get it to flow with the main plot and never felt like I’d ever explored it thoroughly enough for it to be worth a detour.

The comparison between Paul and Carol is pretty blatantly obvious, even in the narrative. Paul and Gene both recognize it (Gene, initially, when he notes that Carol doesn’t seem to belong at 54 any more than Paul does), and it makes them highly uncomfortable. (Mary-Anne, Carol’s friend, also notices it-- “she [Paul] reminds me of Carol. Just pitiful.”) They’re both very shy, insecure people that have thrust themselves into a world they’re not naturally suited for (show business) in order to achieve their own ends. They’ve both put great stock in a single person who helped them (inadvertently or not) during a dark time, and are driven by those feelings, despite knowing that person is out of reach.

Physically, they’re intentionally mostly opposite (Carol’s short, with a slight build, lighter hair, blue eyes, vs. Paul being, well, Paul-- tall, fuller build, black hair, brown eyes). But narratively speaking, neither of them are described as beautiful; “cute” and “kind of pretty,” sure, but nothing past that (except when Gene says it towards the end). That was important, too, for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to further the comparison between them; two, I wanted to at least try and dispel the idea that all groupies were glamorous; many of them were rather ordinary-looking.

Paul not being “playboy material as a girl” was very deliberate. I feel like a lot of sexswaps tend to make the guy in question end up a ridiculously hot babe, which didn’t quite jive with what I was going for (not that I wanted Paul to end up awful-looking, but...). ... He’s probably hotter than he thinks he is though; at least, Gene didn’t mind at all, and Pete thought he was pretty. I wanted him to be recognizable if one knew where to look (face, body language). I didn’t want him to end up a tiny, frail-looking waif-- given what he looks like as a dude, that didn’t make sense to me. So this meant the less perfect attributes had to stay and carry over to a female body. He ended up with big boobs because... well, honestly because if he wasn’t going to end up with a great figure overall, he might as well have great boobs. And I mean, really, his chest’s already pretty all right as-is.

I didn’t want there to be a love triangle, but I did want it obvious, at least in an offhand way, that Peter and Paul had had sex (Ace mentions it in the car with Peter, with his “how long did it take you”). I wanted to incorporate Ace and Peter to as great an extent as possible in general.

Marbas is an actual demon from The Lesser Key of Solomon, although other than the few sentences Paul reads off from that grimoire, there’s not much more information on him to be found. 

[akechicrimes]

I'm a brand new goroboy and have questions if you don't mind answering any of them 1. Was everything that Akechi said about the PTs being unjust a part of his detective act or did he really believe that changing hearts was bad prior to the engine room? 2. When did he first suspect the PTs? Did he figure them out immediately at the TV station or did he just become interested in Joker cuz he's gay and figured it out afterwards lol. Basically who sussed who out first? (1/2)

hello welcome!!!!!! we are happy to have u!!!!!!!! 

unfortunately we dont have concrete answers to a lot of these, but i will do my best!!!! these are some really excellent questions so i want to do them justice. and by do them justice, i mean theyre under a cut because it got really long lmfao.

thanks for the ask–this was really fun to write, instead of doing literally any of the work that i was supposed to.

1. Was everything that Akechi said about the PTs being unjust a part of his detective act or did he really believe that changing hearts was bad prior to the engine room?

SHORT ANSWER: we don’t know.

SLIGHTLY LONGER ANSWER: we can’t say for sure but there’s strong evidence that he was probably telling the truth, actually.

VERY LONG ANSWER: there’s strong evidence he both is and isn’t telling the truth in the TV studio scene, but with the qualifiers that (1) he never necessarily says theyre unjust, he says they’re dangerous. (2) he probably thinks the phantom thieves change hearts in the same way that he makes people go psychotic. (3) his sense of justice is basically entirely based on righting wrongs that have been committed against individuals, not what the law says. (also, when i say “individuals,” i mean himself.)

to the extent that he’s lying–he does say that they’re operating outside the law, and that they have unknown and apparently very effective power that cannot be stopped by traditional law enforcement. traditional justice says that if you operate outside the law, that makes you automatically bad. akechi is playing the part of someone who’s lawful good, so when he says, “they’re dangerous and operating outside the law,” he has to say, “that makes them unjust.”

to the extent that he’s telling the truth, that’s basically everything else he says. i do think those viewpoints are his own for a lot of reasons.

when he talks about the changes of heart, he makes it sound like it’s a thing that could just happen to anyone–even people who’ve done no wrong. when akira voices support for the PT, akechi argues back against akira to say “If [Ryuji’s] heart suddenly changed, wouldn’t you think it was the work of the Phantom Thieves?” like it could just happen to any random joe schmoe. he’s acting like someone could just one day change their entire attitude–possibly for the worse–resulting in terror amongst the population.

we have to keep in mind that at this point in time, akechi has no idea that you can steal treasure to change a person’s heart. he doesn’t even know treasure is a thing, let alone that you have to send a calling card to make it manifest. morgana is the person who knew all that stuff, and akechi definitely didnt have access to morgana when he started his hitman career.

so with the way that he’s talking about the changes of heart, i dont think he assumes that changes of heart always change the person for the better. he has no idea that it’s literally removing a person’s distorted desires. i’m like NINETY-FIVE PERCENT SURE that he thinks changes of heart operate in the same way that his psychotic abilities work: you cast a persona spell, and a person goes apeshit.

from his point of view, that’s kind of what’s happening. when akechi casts call of chaos, a person starts behaving in a way they never would under ordinary circumstances in the real world. the changes of heart really look exactly the same way to an outsider’s POV. and to akechi’s understanding, call of chaos can be cast on even good people. from the phantom thieves’ POV, only people who’re mega-dicks can have their hearts changed in the first place, because the requisite to have a palace is a certain level of distortion. (futaba, of course, proving that you don’t have to be a mega-dick to have a distortion, but the TV studio scene happens before futaba.)

akechi’s argument is that leaving that sort of power in just anyone’s hands is dangerous. because that’s a LOT of power for one person to have. akechi would know, considering that he’s in the same position. he’s wary of the fact that there’s no guarantee that that person will use it for good.

that, of course, brings us to the question of “well, what does akechi think ‘using power for good’ is in the first place?” does he think that the phantom thieves are using their powers for good? does he think he’s using his powers for good?

when asked why he seeks justice, akechi says: “Because of sickening human beings… Yes, my contempt for such people drives my sense of justice. It isn’t some grand reason like society’s sake or some lofty ideal. It’s simply an absurd grudge… and extremely personal.” 

the traditional, lawful-good way of thinking about justice is that if you operate outside the law, you’re automatically bad. but akechi’s sense of justice seems to be driven primarily from the hurts he’s suffered, the grudges he still bears, and his conviction that wrongs personally done against individuals should be righted. it’s an end-goal oriented sense of justice.

if wrong-doers are punished and the grudges are appeased, then justice is delivered. how that happens does not necessarily constitute justice. my best guess at this time is that he’d qualify a lot as “the ends justify the means,” since his concept of justice is end-goal oriented. 

of course, i think akechi definitely shows throughout the game that he knows that how you achieve those ends is… not irrelevant. i think his black mask outfit (and a bunch of other things he says) implies that he feels like he is a “villain” of sorts. he demonstrates feeling a type of way about killing okumura. he definitely knows that his actions are morally wrong under particular lenses. take a look at this section:

Akechi: Who cares? My targets were all doing the same damn thing in this eat or be eaten world. [referencing that all his victims were dicks who kind of deserved to get glocked]

Akechi: How is that any different from the Phantom Thieves?

Ann: We’re not murderers!

Akechi: (now looking kind of pissed) So what?! [launches into speil about how it’ll all be worth it when he exacts revenge on Shido]

obviously he knows that murder is morally indefensible. but i think he’s justified it to himself as either not so bad because he killed primarily corrupt people, and/or that it’d be worth it if he achieves revenge on shido. he’s doing some kind of weird karma cosmic-scale balancing of “how much can i get away with and still be able to call it justifiable and justice,” and it looks like his answer is “quite a fucking lot.”

ironically, this makes his views on justice fairly practical. rather than idealistically committed to some platonic edition of justice, he’s more of a ���what do i need to do to get the goals i want achieved? what needs to happen to make sure that asshole abusers get what’s coming to them? what needs to happen to make sure that i get emotional closure?” the biggest issue with that is the danger of a Pyrrhic victory–the moment where the means so go far that the ends no longer justify them.

all of this is to say: when akechi is talking about the phantom thieves as potentially unjust, i dont think he has a problem with their methods. “methods” are like a knife–it’s about how you use it, and for what.

i think he knows that changing hearts, and turning people psychotic, is morally skeevy if your sense of justice is very puritanical, but his sense of justice isn’t puritanical. i think he’s wary of what they might be using their methods for. again: his big argument in the studio scene isnt necessarily that theyre unjust, only that they’re dangerous.

seriously, though–changing hearts is potentially a recipe for societal collapse if used the wrong way. imagine if the PT were more self-centered and they went the light yagami route with their new supernatural powers, maintaining peace and order through authoritarian fear. that is, actually, the entire premise of the P5 Vanilla Bad End, in which the PT enforce peace through relentlessly changing hearts and making people too terrified to keep committing crime. 

since his views on justice seem to be defined by what the end goal is, he’d have to know what those goals are before understanding if they’re “just” or “unjust”–which is probably why he keeps hounding akira for akira’s viewpoints on justice, tbh. the phantom thieves are only unjust if their end goal is unjust, not necessarily because of their methods. (see answer to question 2 for related/continued discussion.)

2. When did he first suspect the PTs? Did he figure them out immediately at the TV station or did he just become interested in Joker cuz he’s gay and figured it out afterwards lol. Basically who sussed who out first?

SHORT ANSWER: i pretty sure atlus expects us to believe that he figured it from even before the TV showing–he figured it out when he overheard ryuji saying “It’s not easy being phantom thieves” when they were in the hallway. it’s the same time and place where akechi did his famous pancake fuck-up.

SLIGHTLY LONGER ANSWER: the idea that akechi was just super horny for the guy who gave him shit on live TV and then realized that akira was a phantom thief later as a neat bonus is fuckign SENDING me.

VERY LONG ANSWER: because of the scene with ryuji, i’m pretty sure he knew that akira was a phantom thief, and also i’m half-convinced that he somehow got the TV host to specifically choose akira during the “ask the audience” portion of the show. it’s really too much of a coincidence. 

because of that, i think the other implication of the scene is that he wanted to see what akira was made of when he invited akira for a debate on live television, and was pleasantly surprised when akira had something very interesting to say on the topic of grey morality and achieving justice outside the law.

what’s interesting about that scene is that akechi becomes interested in akira regardless of what akira says about the phantom thieves. akira’s options are “They’re justice itself,” “They’re necessary,” and “They do more than the cops”–so it’s not like akira ever says that he dislikes the phantom thieves, but the level of support ranges and two of these imply a justification/reasoning for it. and then akechi fucking argues back on live television like this is some kind of debate, instead of a daytime talk show meant to distract bored housewives. 

like. akechi gets INTO it. justice is his THING. and here’s akira, who seems to be not only a metaverse user operating outside the law like akechi himself, but also has some pretty grey morality thoughts on what justice is and could be, also like akechi himself.

taking it as a given that he knows for a fact that akira is a phantom thief from the get-go, from even before the TV scene ever even happened, then akechi probably keeps hounding him because akechi’s interested in hearing akira’s reasons. he’s not fishing for evidence, since he already knows. this is very speculative, now, but my best guess is that he keeps hounding akira ever after this scene because he wants to compare notes, one vigilante to another, to hear how akira rationalizes his vigilante work as a type of justice. very possibly, he’s seeking reassurance to himself that his own actions are justifiable. (he certainly seems that way in P5R, especially when he wonders about if a “justice nobody wants” is really a true justice at all, or just someone being self-centered.)

so re: “did akechi figure him out or was he just gay,” the answer is. yes. akechi did figure him out, and also akira made him so intellectually horny on live television that he hounded the man down in public for follow-up dates. 

what a king.

3. Does Akechi have a Velvet Room? Does he experience rank ups with Joker and the game over stuff too? 

SHORT ANSWER: we don’t know. no, seriously, we have no idea.

SLIGHTLY LONGER ANSWER: i’ve seen compelling takes on him having his own velvet room, and i think it’s thematically very fascinating if akechi is quite literally akira’s counterpart in terms of cosmic chess pieces, but i would be surprised if he did. but again, seriously, since there’s no confirmation on the matter, i say akechi’s potential velvet room is fair game.

VERY LONG ANSWER: lore-wise, i’m betting no. akechi was yaldabaoth’s piece, while akira was philemon’s (if i’m remembering my lore correctly). philemon provides the velvet room to aid the people he chooses–yaldabaoth has no such deal. the only reason why yaldo was in the velvet room in the first place was because he wanted to fuck over philemon’s chosen trickster.

it’s the same logic for why someone like adachi wouldn’t have a velvet room: while souji/yu, namatame, and adachi were all given the power to go into the tv world by izanami, only souji/yu was selected by philemon to save the world from ruin, and was accordingly given the resources and aid to do so.

secondary bonus: the psychotic ability/call of chaos just removes a person’s bonds in their heart, which makes them behave as if they were crazy. it’s the exact opposite of joker’s ability to create bonds. yaldabaoth’s one gift to his chosen chess piece was to essentially undo the very social links that make akira strong. so again, i’d be shocked if akechi experiences things like ranking up, or any sort of velvet room/persona fusing mechanic.

personally i think the loki/robin hood divide just happened because he awoke to a persona twice. awakening to your persona just happens at moments of rebellion and strong resolve, and canonically even other persona-users “awaken” (sorta) twice when you max their social link. i’m betting that he just had two moments of resolve: one in which he wanted to be a hero of justice, and one in which he decided he was going to tear shido to the ground no matter how far into villainy he had to go.

but as always, it’s not like there’s a hard consensus on the matter. 

4. How did he kill the shadows of people who don’t have a palace? Does *everyone* have a shadow in mementos?

SHORT ANSWER: he probably kills them in mementos, and also i think we’re expected to believe that literally everyone has a shadow in mementos.

SLIGHTLY LONGER ANSWER: i’m almost certain that the mementos depths section of the game confirms that basically everyone’s shadows are in there somewhere, even if they’re just your average joe with no significant distortions. the palace ruler for that section is “the public,” and also we do see the shadows of palace rulers who’ve had their hearts changed in the mementos depths. so even if you’ve had your heart changed and are supposedly a perfectly good human being now, this evidently doesnt disqualify you for having a shadow in mementos.

VERY LONG ANSWER: morgana says that mementos is the collective distortion of everyone in the area, but not a lot more concretely than that. morgana also says that reality is fairly plastic and that reality is somewhat determined by how we perceive the world, so i think that we’re expected to believe that everyone has, to some degree, some level of distortion.

i could say that jungian theory, which is the theory that the persona series is based off of, says that everyone without exception has a shadow. but this seems a little bit of a doylist explanation. instead i’ll point to persona 3, in which people without shadows literally become comatose and apathetic husks of themselves. this is because having a shadow is actually a fairly important part of a person’s psyche, and not having one doesnt make you a good and perfect person, it makes you a nonfunctional vegetable incapable of cognitive thought.

so yeah, i’m pretty sure EVERYONE is in mementos. with the exception of the phantom thieves, because… i think we’re expected to believe that their personas are in some ways their shadows? but also their personas are like, real-life kinning mythological/fictional characters so hard that you bind them to your soul? frankly i’ve been confused about how shadows work ever since persona 5 had people’s eyes turn yellow when they go through their awakenings, since perosna 4 used to use that as a sign that the person was a shadow, so… maybe i have no idea what the fuck im talking about. LMFAO.

[misscrawfords]

The Rise of Skywalker: Part Two

Read Part One here.

One of the many things I’ve been grappling with over the 2 weeks since TROS came out is the validity and cause of my upset and anger. And it centres round the question: if Reylo had ended differently, if they’d had a happy ending, if Ben Solo had lived, would I still hate the film? Would I still be angry? Or would I forgive and overlook its other myriad flaws? And connected to those central questions is another that pressed upon me, namely: am I angry and upset because it is a bad film on multiple levels that insults its audience and breaks its own mythology in a way that is deeply distressing to female viewers and is fundamentally a poorly written film or do I only feel like that because I am a disappointed shipper? Am I only upset because I have got so attached to my HEA fluffy fanfic that I’ve lost sight of the story that canon is actually telling?

There’s a wider issue contained in these questions that I’ve been asking myself which is that there is a judgement implicit that responding to a film purely as a shipper is a bad thing, that it invalidates my criticism and my feelings if, in fact, I am simply an upset and disappointed shipper who wanted a happy ending. That’s an issue that is definitely worth pursuing but elsewhere.

It’s been two weeks. I’ve read multiple twitter threads, listened to bits of WTForce podcast (it’s very long... and was making me cry...), many reviews of the film, and today I finally started reading Valerie Estelle Frankel’s From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend which is blowing my mind and giving me the confidence to say what I’ve known for a while:

My feeling that TROS is a terrible film on multiple levels - all of them actually - is valid. You may disagree and that’s fine. It’s only an opinion. But it’s my opinion and I stand by it. And, returning to the initial question that has been perplexing me - in fact I cannot separate the way the characters of Rey and Kylo/Ben were treated from the film’s other flaws. If Ben had lived, if Reylo had had a happy ending, if their relationship had played out differently, even if they had both died, yes, I would have been more inclined to forgive the film its many other flaws and misjudgements, but the fact is, if Reylo had been written in a satisfactory way then it would have been a very different film. Reylo is only one - one massive, egregious error - thing that contributes to the mess that this films. It is not the only thing that is enraging and upsetting but it is probably the biggest. I’ll talk about these other things in yet another post, but for now...

Let’s talk about Reylo.

tl;dr: Reylo is canon and the movie still sucked. Here’s a 5000+ word dissertation on why. Maybe don’t read if my opinions on this are going to make you sad/angry.

I’m going to break down my problems with Reylo in this film logically and honestly, I’m not sure I’m going to say anything that hasn’t already been said, but perhaps reading another perspective will help others who feel similarly? I’m guessing it’s going to help me if I write about it. We’ll see.

There are three problems. There’s the problem of the fate of Ben Solo. In a way, that’s the easiest and simplest one to deal with. Death was always on the cards as a possible ending for him. A tragic hero who commits terrible acts is redeemed in death by saving the world. The death of this character is... not a surprise and has always been an ending I worried about because I’m a shipper and I like happy endings over sad ones. And I’ve been very convinced by the meta and arguments of shippers who have argued passionately that Ben had to live. However, arguably the problem is not the death in itself but the circumstances and the context. So I’ll come back to that.

The second problem is that of Rey. Rey’s development (or lack of it) and especially her ending. Yep. This is a big problem. Far bigger IMO than the death of Ben which, while tragic, could have been beautiful and fitting.

Thirdly, is Ben and Rey together. Reylo. Their relationship and the way it plays out and the way, ultimately, all of this breaks the mythology being established in previous films.

So three very interlinked problems.

To summarise. In TROS Kylo regresses to being the Supreme Leader and trying to source dark power. This is not terribly surprising considering the ending of TLJ. Rey also regresses to someone who is training and who does not believe she is worthy of Luke’s lightsaber. This is surprising because Rey has already accepted her destiny and her role as a Jedi at the end of TLJ. There is no reason for her to feel insecure about it a year later in TROS.

Rey and Kylo connect through their Force Bond and fight. Their anger is understandable but these fights continuously rehash exactly the same material as what was covered in TLJ, leaving me feeling, well, not very much. Kylo is trying to tell Rey something about who she is (a question that was resolved in TLJ) and Rey is angry at him because of reasons. 

There are some good parts here. Unlike a lot of people, I really liked the fight at Pasaana. I felt it took something from TLJ and added something else. It was a rehash of the throne room fight over the lightsaber but while that conflict was entirely personal over an object that meant something to them but not the wider population (beyond what it could do as a weapon), the same conflict here was over a transport ship containing real people and Chewie (apparently), a character of importance to both. So what happened is that their inability to reconcile with each other and meet half way is manifested in a completely balanced conflict which has a living cost. Chewie dies! Rey kills someone dear to her - accidentally, sure - but she now has a body count showing how truly destructive her fight with Kylo is. It is a symbol of how necessary it is they work together and find balance. Daisy Ridley’s acting here was great and I felt genuinely shocked. Shocked that Rey plunged so immediately into a kind of darkness that put her on a level with Kylo and shocked that Chewie was killed off so casually without warning or build-up - a real casualty of war and the raised stakes in this film. I thought it was a great way to build on TLJ and extend it.

So you can imagine how I felt when Chewie’s death was retconned.

Pretty similar to how I felt when C-3PO got his memory back.

I will probably talk more about this in Part Three, which is my wider issues with the film, but it’s sort of unavoidable mentioning them here because of course the way the film invalidates serious emotion by showing in so many ways that Death Is Not The End and is consequently meaningless impacts on Reylo and the fact that Ben dies.

Another nice moment was the snatching of the beads through the Force Bond. I mean, Kylo literally stole some fertility-coded beads from Rey’s neck!? Uh, this subtext is rapidly becoming text, as they say. Pasaana was weird though, right? Rey talks to children, is at a festival of life, she is fulfilling her role of becoming a symbolic mother which she started in TLJ and which fits the child Jedi at the end of that film (who was never seen again but we’ll deal with that later) and Kylo receives a gift of a necklace (a feminine symbol) from her immediately afterwards... This is pretty hot and heavy symbolism. Of their union and a future involving children, real or metaphorical.

And Rey learns how to heal with the Force, trying it on a giant worm as practice. This fits with her heroine’s journey - she is not using the lightsaber (a symbol of masculine power) but is using her power to preserve and save, which is feminine power. So far so good. I mean, it’s a shame they are wasting all these Force Bond sessions backtracking on TLJ to the extent that instead of enjoying their interactions, I’m going “Yeah yeah yeah okay but we’ve already done this but better”. But there’s still development so it’s okay and sometimes it’s even kind of hot.

Rey Palpatine. 

Oh dear.

Look, it’s not the thing itself. The union of a Skywalker and a Palpatine, the balance coming from the union of two great families on either side of the Force, is honestly not a bad idea at all. Ben as the Skywalker with a bit of darkness in him balanced by Rey the Palpatine with a bit of light in her. BALANCE. It could be beautiful. 

Unfortunately it isn’t. Rey’s lineage was resolved really well in TLJ. Rey Nobody is a great idea for all the reasons everyone already says - opening up the Force to everyone instead of keeping it as a kind of aristocratic lineage etc. Retconning this is really unnecessary and also sends a terrible message to the audience, especially women, as everyone has already discussed to death. Rey is literally told her power comes from a creepy old man who won’t stay dead instead of something innate within her. Instead of letting the past die, we are digging it up like an overzealous and ignorant 19th century British aristocrat let loose in Egypt with a pick-axe and period-applicable racism. Rey is then told that her parents sold her and abandoned her… to protect her. Another great message. And apparently Luke, Han and Leia all knew this?????? Honestly, I was confused by all this when I was watching the film but from what I’ve read afterwards it seems this is the case and in which case not only does that not make literally any sense at all in terms of what happened in TFA and TLJ but also has pretty awful implications for the OT characters and how they related to Ben. 

As I mentioned, it is also unnecessary for the plot for Rey to be a Palpatine. If Palpatine has to come back (which he doesn’t but okay whatever) then surely it’s enough that Rey is extremely strong in the Force for him to either want to kill her or want to control her? Like, literally that’s what he did to Anakin. Why does she have to be related to him unless the film is making some very unfortunate conclusions about blood. Good blood, bad blood… yeeeaaaaaah, this isn’t great as a message. It could be but that’s not the story the first two films have told. Also does Palpatine want to kill her or control her? Like, I’m genuinely not clear on that. I’m not sure he is. I’m not sure the film is. What is actually going on? Also if Palpatine has been controlling Ben his entire life why the hell didn’t he control Rey? Surely it’s easier to invade and control the mind of his own flesh and blood than that of another random Force child he isn’t related to? Who is surrounded by other powerful Force users? When Rey is all alone? Like if Palpatine is able to build up an insanely massive army that nobody has noticed across the Galaxy while still being kind of dead, surely he can access the mind of Rey on Jakku? Also, how did he manage to impregnate a human woman while being sort of dead and old? On both a mythical level and on the level of a question of taste and plausibility, HOW??? 

THIS PLOT MAKES LITERALLY NO SENSE WHAT IS GOING ON AAAARGGGHHH 

And breathe. 

So anyway, Rey Palpatine. Rey and Kylo fight and Rey kills Kylo. It didn’t really work for me though I’d have to watch again to figure out precisely why. This epic, wet fight just… wasn’t quite as epic as I expected it to be. Maybe it was because Finn was randomly there. Maybe it was because it didn’t have the dialogue from the trailer. Maybe it was because I was just tired of watching them fight and not seeing their relationship progress during the film when it had already progressed beyond this in TLJ. And she kills him like it’s a calculated thing when his guard is down and this whole thing is a mess. Now, it’s coming back to me! The order of events don’t make sense. The characterisation doesn’t make sense. 

Kylo and Rey are fighting. Leia gives her life force to communicate something to her son and dies in the process. I don’t quite understand what she’s doing and why this means she has to die. She’s not force projecting like Luke did. How is this different from in TLJ when she says “Ben” then and he waivers about killing her? She was fine after that! I get that they’re working with what they could for Leia but nevertheless, if you’re going to include it in an actual film, it’s still got to have internal consistency. Not that this film cares. Anyway, Leia dies to make Kylo pause and then Rey kills him which seems very rushed and kind of mean but whatever. Then Rey immediately uses Chekov’s healing to bring him back to life and when she does he’s Ben without a scar. So this is all confusing to me. Did Leia redeam him by saying “Ben”? Did she do anything else that makes sense of her dying? Did Rey killing Kylo bring Ben back? Was it Han’s memory? A combination of all these factors?

But the order strikes me as off. The death of Kylo Ren to allow Ben Solo to live is good. Excellent content. But all that is needed to do this is for Kylo to die – meaningfully (which being randomly stabbed by his lover at the moment when he was changing does not quite feel to me) and be brought back to life – meaningfully. I’m not saying what Rey did wasn’t impressive but I don’t remember being overawed by the music and the cinematography here. This is in many ways, or should be, the turning point in the entire ST: the moment when Ben Solo is reborn. And the exact moment of it happening is uncertain. And does he need the moment with Han’s memory afterwards? I’m not saying it wasn’t very touching to see Han and to have their moment together but it nevertheless didn’t quite gell. Like so many things in this film, it’s a nice moment that is over too quickly and doesn’t quite hang together with coherent plotting and characterisation. The entire sequence is rushed with too much happening – fight, Leia, death, healing, Han, lightsaber, RANDOM FINN etc. etc. And in fact, this moment that should be climactic is then later overshadowed by later Ben healing Rey in the same way, a completely narratalogically meaningless act. But more on that later. 

And I realise that in my hurry to get to this fight, I’ve forgotten Dark!Rey. Dark!Rey, like Rey Palpatine, is an idea that could and should be amazing and, apart from the cool graphics and a moment of gasp for effect, isn’t and fundamentally doesn’t work. Rey is struggling with her inner darkness throughout this film, something that was suggested in both TFA and TLJ, so I’m very much on board with it, and I think it’s important to see women on screen be angry and especially angry in a wild, ugly way. I think Daisy Ridley did a great job with that. But TROS attributed this anger and darkness to Palpatine rather that all the myriad and understandable reasons that Rey had for being angry. Perhaps that could work in some contexts as a metaphorical way of showing her anger but Palpatine is too present physically for that to stick. Instead, her characterisation is given wholesale to her genes and a male influence. This is… not great.

Confronting the dark part of one’s self is vitally important in the heroine’s journey. Only when the heroine has reconciled the dark parts of her psyche can the heroine be whole. TROS has worked out that this important but then hasn’t really known how to execute it. The physical manifestation of Dark!Rey for Light!Rey to fight is hellishly unsubtle and is also over so quick you quickly forget that she’s there. (Again, momentary effect is prioritised over anything that actually makes sense in terms of storytelling.) As a manifestation of Rey’s inner anger, she’s completely pointless. Rey fights her quickly but fighting Dark!Rey doesn’t result in Rey unifiying her dark impulses with her heroic self. She still has dark impulses throughout the film! In fact, she never succeeds in fully reconciling them. If defeating Dark!Rey had been a striking and climactic moment then that would work, but it doesn’t. She continues to fight Kylo straight afterwards and Kylo himself is in some respects (certainly in TLJ) a physical manifestation of what Rey fears and needs in herself. It is Kylo who is truly Rey’s dark double in TFA and TLJ. He tells her what she knows and cannot admit, forcing her to confront that in herself. He attracts her yet repels her. According to what is set up in TFA and TLJ, until Rey can both kill Kylo and reconcile with him, she is not conquering and reconciling with that part of herself. After all, they are two halves of one protagonist. But in TROS Kylo no longer seems to take that role, or not coherently. For example, he delivers information (“Rey, yer a Palpatine lol”) that she doesn’t in fact know. So it doesn’t work. And yet it also doesn’t work that Rey fights Dark!Rey and then immediately goes off and fights Kylo! One of those fights is redundant, perhaps both. If Dark!Rey had been a real character who does stuff, who tempts Kylo, who replaces Rey (Odile/Odette-like) then this would be meaningful. But she doesn’t. I know that some people are arguing that Rey in the subsequent fights is possessed by Dark!Rey but honestly? I did not see that in the film and I just do not think the film is sufficiently coherent to be that subtle about something that is such a major plot point! So she continues to struggle with darkness even after supposedly defeating Dark!Rey which is just nonsense in terms of mythology. She struggles all the way up to her confrontation with Palpatine. 

So let’s get to that. Look, I’m going to be completely honest here: I have no idea what was going on. Palpatine was rigged up on a crane on creepy evil villain life support, there was a giant jam jar filled with pickled Snoke heads, Rey was there, Ben showed up having thrown away one lightsaber but then found another two lightsabers (there were a lot of lightsabers, I couldn’t keep track of which was which and why they were significant), the Knights of Ren were there to do a soundcheck for their upcoming gig IDEK, Finn wasn’t there which made a change and Palpatine wanted Rey to kill him so she would become super powerful until he didn’t want her to kill him. He was tempting her and used the standard threat of “I’m going to destroy the universe unless you take on these super dangerous powers to stop me but if you do then you’ll be evil yourself mwhahaha”. I’m not sure really how that benefits him. Was his end-game plan to build up a massive Sith Empire for his darling granddaughter to rule, ignore her for years in favour of corrupting Ben Solo via some dude called Snoke and then reappear from nowhere in order to die again so she could rule? Because that’s a really, really flawed plan. Like, my cullender is less holey than that plan. I may have got this wrong. But before anyone jumps in to “Well, actually” me, my point is valid: I’m an intelligent viewer who spends plenty of time thinking about SW. If I couldn’t follow the main reveal plan in the climactic film of the ST, then… that is a flaw in the writing and conception. It shouldn’t be that difficult!

 Anyway, back to Rey. She is being tempted yet again (which she shouldn’t be by this point in the film or trilogy) and, briefly (though I’ve mostly given up on hope for this film by this point) I am engaged by her quandery. I think it would be really interested if she takes the power offered and fully embraces her Palpatine heritage – she becomes a Sith in order to save the lives of her friends! Perhaps Dark!Rey was just a warm up to seeing the real Rey transform into Dark!Rey. Then Ben has to save her! As she has saved him from being Kylo Ren, he will save her from being Dark!Rey! Balance. So I think that could be interesting and it raises some interesting moral questions about whether doing something bad for good reasons is ever justifiable. But of course Rey resists! Rey is not allowed to actually do anything bad in this movie! It’s infuriating! Rey is completely good. I think the message the film thinks it’s giving out is that Rey is more than her ancestry – that she is good despite being a Palpatine, that everyone has the power to move beyond their background. Unfortunately, that message was already there when she was Rey Nobody! And the actual message is that Rey is a static, pure character who despite apparently containing darkness is never in any way truly tempted by it or gives into it. Any narrative tension over whether she will succumb or do something interesting is very rapidly dismissed. Just as Chewie’s death is retconned and C-3PO gets his memory back. 

Anyway Ben arrives and they somehow have two lightsabers (???? whatever) and stand and face Palpatine and I think at this point we need to talk about how this is just waaaaay less impressive on every level than them facing Snoke in TLJ. There was tension there and uncertainty and when they fought together it was genuinely breathtaking and surprising. There was no surprise about Ben and Rey facing Palpatine together, but there was a tired feeling of “Oh look, we’ve got to face off against another creepy old man who wants to hold onto power for evil after his time is well over. Oh well, I guess if we have to…” If nothing else, this sums up the Millenial experience very well! Ultimately, not only is Palpatine a confusing final villain, he’s also a boring one. The Chancellor in the PT was interesting on a political level, the Emperor was truly creepy as a foil to Darth Vader in the OT, but this fossil on life-support is neither scary nor original nor even particularly threatening.

That’s the thing with escalating the threats continuously – it becomes meaningless. Making the Boss bigger and badder and threatening the Universe instead of the Galaxy doesn’t make the drama more exciting, it just makes it less believable. It looks very impressive to have the entire sky filled with ships and the threat of Palpatine destroying everything but it’s also ultimately meaningless. A massive threat just means a massive reset button or deus ex force lightning. Superhero movies are very guilty of this terrible storytelling, so is Doctor Who. First London faces an alien threat, then England, then the planet, then the Galaxy, then the Universe… and where do you go from there? The audience doesn’t care about the world at large, they only care about our plucky little heroes and their lives. If Palpatine had said “I have Finn and Poe and if you don’t take on these Sith powers I’m going to murder them” the effect would have been the same, maybe even better because Rey’s dilemma would have been even more personal. Hey, another interesting idea: “I have Ben. Only way to save him is to adopt Sith powers!” Anyway.

So this confrontation is yet another less impressive copy of the throne room scene in TLJ. The lore also gets confusing here. Ben and Rey are tortured which makes no sense because doesn’t Palpatine want Rey alive? Not sure what he’s trying to achieve here except it makes our heroes look powerless. Then Rey takes on the force lightning and does some snazzy special effects to win the war very easily. So easily that you feel no emotion whatsoever at how easily this massive army of ships is instantly wiped out. (Side point, but I’m guessing there were lots of people on those ships and Rey’s just killed them all? And considering we’ve just got an admittedly half-baked but still a plot about the defection of storm troopers, isn’t this just a bit concerning? But Rey can do no wrong and it’s all for the greater good because this is the Light Side of the Force and she is All The Jedi so I guess we’ll just pass over this casual genocide on the part of our heroine.) This seems to kill Rey despite Palpatine telling her to do it to get more power a few minutes earlier. No seriously, isn’t this what happens? I’m so confused. At which point Ben force heals her as she force heals him and whereas she was fine and dandy after doing it, it kills him.

Which… okay. Is a thing that happens. It’s hella inconsistent. And makes no sense. But okay, I mean, okay. I wasn’t even sad. I was just like “…right.” And fortunately the film immediately moves on and completely fails to acknowledge Ben’s existence while triumphant music plays. So that’s a thing.

Remember how I said at the beginning of this meandering dissertation that I was always aware of Ben dying being a possible ending but it was the execution that failed here? Right! Well, the thing is that every time a death happens in the context of a hero’s journey, it’s got to mean something. In a world where people can be resurrected and, uh, SW is very much that world (or it is in TROS), then you can’t just die for no reason! And neither Rey nor Ben’s deaths made sense. Rey absolutely needs an underworld journey as part of her heroine’s journey but her death near the end of the film does not fulfil that criterion. An underworld journey is a way for a heroine to shed part of her behind, to learn something, and to confront herself. The cave scene was Rey’s journey to the underworld. Arguably, the scene on Pasaana where she learned force healing was another type of katabasis. Heck, you can argue that when she finds the lightsaber in TFA it’s a katabasis or when she ships herself to Ben in a coffin it’s another. Like. Rey has lots of metaphorical underworld journeys. But when she dies at the end of TROS she has already reunited with Ben, she has no darkness in her that needs to be purged because she never waivered from the light and when she is brought back she is the same person she was before. Unlike Ben who comes back from the dead literally a different person. So Rey’s death makes no sense either in terms of the magical world and powers in play but also for her heroine’s journey. Maybe she could have collapsed. Maybe the effort should have drained her and Ben of their Force powers – a sacrifice for using powers they shouldn’t have touched. That would have made sense and would have been entirely fitting. But death? Nope.

And Ben’s death consequently makes no sense. Force healing has been established within the very same movie to have no real consequences on the user (also similarly established in The Mandalorian) so Ben’s death makes less sense than anything else in the entire film. The internal logic of the film says that there are no consequences for force healing. And then it kills off someone who does it. Sadness is not the reaction to that; confusion is. And then on a mythological level, Ben shouldn’t die. Kylo has already died. And Ben has been reborn!  I know it’s a meme, but Ben has done nothing wrong. Kylo has been punished for his actions and what is left is Ben. This is very, very clearly spelled out within the film. This makes Ben’s death a senseless tragedy that makes no sense, a final death in a film that has continually shown that death is not real or an ending. Except for Ben Solo. Because… I don’t know? I’ve managed to go 4812 words without mentioning redemption but I guess I can’t avoid it now. I’m actually not a big fan of redemption because it gets all thorny and becomes about morality and specifically Christian morality and I’m just… I’m tired of that. I’m a classicist and stories of classical mythology and classical heroism have nothing to do with redemption and being good and evil and I really see the Skywalkers as a kind of Greek tragedy lineage rather than people who have to be redeemed. I know Vader died changing his mind and killing the Emperor for his son but I don’t see that as redemption. That was a man who had done many awful things making a choice out of love at the very end of his life. And again, Ben saved Rey – this was an act of personal love and had nothing to do with the Galaxy. Redemption seems to be an active, ongoing thing that is about more than the purely personal. Vader wasn’t redeemed and neither was Ben – because he didn’t have a chance. And it all gets confused because, as I keep saying, Kylo Ren died!!!! On a mythical level, that’s all that’s needed! Ben Solo, on a mythic level, has nothing to prove, nothing to atone for, nothing for which he requires redemption. On the level that SW is also a story of politics, if Ben had lived, he would have had to reconcile his past actions as Kylo Ren with his present experience as Ben Solo – and it would have been fair if he had to pay a penalty in the human world. But not the death penalty. Because he has already paid that. Ben succeeds in reconciling and facing off his inner darkness in the way that Rey does not in this film. But he is then punished again and dies needlessly and shockingly in order to save Rey, who also shouldn’t have died.

It’s very unsatisfactory. On a mythic level, it really doesn’t make sense.

And I haven’t even mentioned the whole thing about if they are dyad (lol I keep reading this as dryad and getting a very weird set of mental images) or two halves of a protagonist or soulmates or whatever you want to call it where if one dies the bond just remains as a wound. This is a scenario where Rey and Ben have been very clearly set up as a pair animus/anima hero/heroine who belong together whether that is in life or death. I’ve just been reading about Brunnhild and Siegfried from the Nibelung Ring Saga – they both die at the end when they’ve finally been reunited but they are united in death. It’s sad but their death is inevitable after what’s happened to them and it’s sort of uplifting because they are together. This could definitely have worked for Rey and Ben. And considering death doesn’t stop you appearing multiple times and even doing cool stuff like lifting ships out of the sea, it wouldn’t even have been very sad. The mystical hero/heroine who cannot remain in society once their journey is complete is not uncommon. Look at Frodo going off with the Elves in a metaphor for death at the end of LotR where the more down-to-earth Sam is able to stay and rebuild. It would make total sense for Ben and Rey to be unable to integrate with society at the end of TROS whether that means simply exile or death. So long as they are together.

Anyway, they’re not together which makes the whole thing horribly unbalanced and unnervingly wrong on a profound level. The myth is broken! It simply does. not. work.

But if the ending for Ben and Reylo as a whole was disturbing, false, internally inconsistent and emotionally empty, that’s nothing to the ending Rey gets. Lots of people have already written about this so I’ll try to be brief. Rey has no connection to Tatooine. Rey is not allowed to grieve. Rey regresses to a childhood state, her very definite, spelled out future as a symbolic mother being absolutely aborted. Rey takes as a family name one that she has no personal connection. Rey is left with absent friends and nobody but the ghosts of Luke (who she didn’t like) and Leia to talk to in the role of weirdly incestuous sterile parents. So I guess this is a win for the Luke/Leia shippers?

Okay, I just need to rant a moment. (Yes, this is 5556 words of ranting but you’ve got this far – indulge me?) I’ve seen several takes from people I follow who aren’t Reylos saying that this is a great ending for Rey because she has a family and I’m just like ARE YOU EFFING SERIOUS?????? Are you ACTUALLY trying to tell me that living alone on a barren, desert planet reminiscent of where she lived as a child before she heard the call to adventure, where she was symbolically asleep with nobody but the GHOSTS OF SIBLINGS for company and ABSENT FRIENDS is FINDING A FAMILY???????????? JUST KILL HER ALREADY – she’s ALREADY DEAD!!!!! You want to make me feel Rey at the end even if Ben is dead? Show her surrounded by her found family in the Resistance and show her WORKING WITH CHILDREN?????????????? IT. WOULD. NOT. BE. HARD. TO. DO. THAT. AND. MAKE. IT. UPLIFTING. But this -this is just painful, truly painful and insulting. And don’t give me this crap that she’s not living there, she’s just there temporarily to bury the lightsabers and leave and go back to her friends. WHAT ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. This is the ENDING of a NINE MOVIE SAGA. The ending matters???? And the ending is of Rey alone with the droid she rescued two movies back staring at some binary suns that only matter to the audience and not to her. THE FILM DOES NOT TELL US THAT SHE IS GOING TO LEAVE AND MEET HER FRIENDS. THE FILM DOES NOT TELL US THAT. IT DOES NOT IMPLY THAT. So this is a bloody stupid argument.

Yeah, I cracked. I don’t regret it. This is so infuriating I actually have literally nothing to say about “Rey Skywalker”. Like, whatever. The film’s already done its worse. Just… whatever. Who cares at this point? It’s meaningless. I laughed in despair at the cinema screen and was glad it was over.

 The fact is, according to the heroine’s journey, this isn’t the end of the story. It makes sense that within 24 hours of the film premiering, AO3 was filling up with “fix-it fics” where Rey goes to the World Between Worlds to get Ben back. Because that’s what heroines do. They save their loved ones. They do it patiently and through endurance. And they always succeed. And unlike heroes who go to the underworld to save their wives (cf Orpheus), heroines who go to get their man succeed. This story needs Rey, like Psyche, to go save Ben. She hasn’t finished her heroine’s journey. In fact, she is in many ways back where she started. Her attempts to integrate and confront her darkness have been confused and ultimately meaningless. She has not unified permanently with her lover yet. She has not become either a literal or symbolic mother. There is a stage in the heroine’s journey where she retreats to where she comes from for reflection and growth. That is acceptable. But that is not the ending!!!

And to place this ending of the film, with Rey smiling and saying “Rey Skywalker” as if this means something and some triumphant music over the top alongside what so many viewers feel instinctively, namely that the myth is incomplete and broken, leaves the audience – or at least it left me – feeling cheated and empty and bemused about why it feels so wrong. Ultimately Ben dead and Rey pregnant would make more narrative sense than the sterile and barren and infantilised ending we were given. And that was just about the worst case scenario of bad writing that we ever thought could happen. 

The myth is broken. Good night.

(Tune in soon to the much shorter Part Three where I discuss everything else that isn’t Reylo related that is wrong with this movie.)

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 3: Insane Mindscrew Haymakers (Part 2)

CHEL: Rose finds a transportaliser platform in the centre of the lab.

FAILURE ARTIST: The sylladex misadventures come to something this time. Jasper’s corpse lands on the pad.

CHEL: The dead cat vanishes; Rose assumes it was vapourised but we know better, though we don’t see where it went. She finds an unlocked hub and plugs in, noticing another ominous countdown on the wall, with only three minutes left till the lab will be “UNESTABLISHED”.

Years in the future again, PM beheads the worm creature, which turns out to be a robot. The bunker landed on its side so PM stands on a pile of mailboxes to press the button, which causes more robot worms to emerge from beneath the bunker, pushing it upright, and a propeller to emerge from the top and carry it away.

Dave’s strife with Bro continues, getting more and more ridiculous and animesque, until Dave ends up plummeting down the stairwell. In a realistic work, this could quite easily break his neck, but here we just get some comical flailing and a SBaHJ IT KEEPS HAPPENING macro. Again, Dave looks more angry than afraid.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 8

FAILURE ARTIST: I think Hussie said the Bro slicing the Abscond box is symbolic of the trap of child abuse and shows this guardian fight isn’t like the others but it is still an animesque fight that ends with a fucking meme.

CHEL: Yeah, he seems to be expecting us to pick up on these details which don’t mean anything until he actually explains them, which would be fine and in fact clever if they didn’t conflict so strongly with what’s actually noticeably shown. If he wanted us to take it seriously, he’d have done better not to put the Abscond button there at all.

Rose finds, in the lab, a console showing SBurb sessions in the northeastern US where her home is located, monitoring the time to impact of their respective meteors. There is a large cluster of already-landed ones around her house, with a much, much bigger one centred directly on the lab, with an even bigger one centred on the house. She zooms out, and finds the second-biggest upcoming impact in the world is heading for Texas, while one bigger by an order of magnitude will later land in the middle of the Pacific. "Oh look, up in the sky/ It's a hole about the size of Texas..."

"Circus Contraption - Hot Potato" (Watch on YouTube)

Checking on John’s house, Rose finds it overrun by imps, the building shaking violently. Investigating this, she finds the ogre fight; John is at least getting a few blows in now, but they’re still not doing much good. Nannasprite is able to provide support with eye beams, but the ogres are still standing, and Rose’s attempt to drop a fridge on one is useless too. Nannasprite’s teleportation proves more useful, allowing John to take a flying leap out of a hovering oven to strike with greater force and allowing her to drop a full avalanche of household appliances on the ogre. With Rose’s assistance providing him a platform to bounce off again, John strikes the final blow on one ogre, exploding it into grist pieces bigger than himself, and Nannasprite and John occupy the other ogre until Rose drops the alchemiter on it.

FAILURE ARTIST: Seeing a fight like this not long after the Bro and Dave fight makes it hard for me to take the serious one seriously. John should be dead.

CHEL: John has a backup healer and Dave doesn’t, but yeah, cartoon physics prevail here.

Rose checks in, explaining that Dave’s not connected yet, but that she’s determined that activating the cruxtruder does not actually cause the meteor to strike. John levels up to BOY-SKYLARK and collects tons of grist and boondollars, although he still doesn’t know what those actually do.

You can't wait to find out what amazing items this new supply of grist will be just barely insufficient to produce.

Hehehe. We’ve all been there.

John sees that more grist fell down to the platform below, including one huge piece stuck in the hole leading into Dad’s room.

One of those big SOUR GRAPE ELECTRIC HOLOCAUST FRUIT GUSHERS is jammed in the hole in the platform. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 9

Yes, because Holocaust references are a perfect way to describe candy flavours. Technically “holocaust” can refer to, I quote from dictionary.com, “a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire”, and I’m guessing it’s a parody of all the flavour names with words like “explosion” in them, but, especially when it’s not obviously uncapitalised, that’s very much not what the immediate association of the term is!

FAILURE ARTIST: John asks Nanna why she doesn’t just throw him up to the gate and she says it’s important he build up himself. Though later we do see a character that just jumps up to the gate.

Then we switch to a mysterious castle all in purple. Dad is fighting some imps with shaving cream. A new yet somehow familiar character wearing harlequin clothes watches with disgust both Dad and John on strange window screens.

We cut away yet again to Peregrine Mendicant. PM is still stuck in the mobile station with a letter addressed to David Brinner. There was a real person who went by the alias Doctor Brinner on his Portland-area radio show where he played a mad scientist. Dr. David Brinner is also a comic Hussie made before Homestuck. I’ve never read it myself. I didn’t even know it existed until I googled David Brinner.

Anyway, PM refuses to open this letter and gives stirring speeches that sound like they come from a movie (Kevin Costner’s Postman?) but I don’t think they do.

BRIGHT: PM believes very strongly in the purpose of mail delivery as the bedrock of civilisation. It comes across as funny, but not as mocking.

FAILURE ARTIST: PM then turns to the terminal. Jade appears on a screen shrouded in green static. PM finds Jade familiar. Unfortunately, before PM can converse with Jade, the terminal explodes.

Cut back again to Rose in the lab. There’s lots of cutesy pink little girl stuff down there that Rose decides to ignore. Why is it down there? Did Mom expect Rose to live there one day?

CHEL: I thought it was supposed to signal that Mom was living down there herself.

FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, Rose also finds a mutant cat.

We cut away again to John contemplating going into his father’s bedroom through a hole in the roof. He decides to do it.

Cut to a fireplace with a portrait of Jade above it. It looks similar to Nanna’s shrine, minus the urn. But Jade isn’t dead, is she? She scampers right into the room the next panel. She arms herself with a huge rifle and tries to sneak across the room. However, her Grandpa appears, shadowed by the huge fire that suddenly lit up in the fireplace. She tries to run away only to fall asleep.

We cut to Dave’s final round - or rather, Jade fighting her Grandpa. Who, in another surprise, is a taxidermed corpse.

She talks to him like he’s alive, though after it, she says he was easier to deal with when he was alive. This disturbing state of affairs is never treated seriously.

CHEL: This, more than anything else, is why we set up the ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY count. Horrible as Bro would be by any realistic standards, at least Dave’s guardian is obviously living and Dave is not merrily talking away to a dead person. We later find out that Jade was the one who taxidermied Grandpa, while she was barely more than a toddler. Not only was she actually able to do this to professional standards, at an age when she shouldn’t have been handling sharp objects at all, but she displays no trauma from it, nor from having had to raise herself. And yet we’re supposed to take Dave’s issues seriously, and to a much lesser extent Rose’s, with no real indication that they’re any different.

TIER: It's one thing when an author's intended depiction of “an abusive household” for the most part flies over people's heads due to the absurdity of the whole situation when it initially got presented, that happens sometimes! Especially when one factors in Bro's total screen time, how he generally ticks the boxes for “absurd but really cool” guy visually, and how late in the game this knowledge was spelled out. It all comes together to make the whole Strider situation kinda come out of left field to judge people for finding the absurd situation funny.

But when it's sitting right next to the arguably worse scenario (stuffed.dead.guardian.) and the latter pretty much never gets brought up while the former gets a big ol’ spotlight shining down on it, yeah that's what the folks call Fucking Weird and in my personal opinion, suspect Ò_Ó.

CHEL: While I can’t really state one way or the other at this point, I do think it’s worth considering a reason that has already been brought up by a non-Homestucker; in the scenarios we’re not supposed to take seriously, the children are girls. I doubt this was even slightly what Hussie intended, but it certainly explains a lot about the fandom’s reactions. The more likely scenario regarding the canon explanation is probably that the ones we’re not supposed to take seriously are not Hussie’s self-insert.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 9

BRIGHT: Not to mention, Jade grew up on an island in the middle of the ocean, physically isolated from any other people and with only an animal for company. There are known cases of children who grew up in similar circumstances in real life. Suffice to say, it generally does not end well.

You could argue that Jade is pretending her Grandpa is alive because she’s lonely and needs the company, but this is in no way implied by the text.

At any rate, Jade informs her grandfather that the rifle she has is perfectly adequate for killing things and she doesn’t need his oversized blunderbuss.

CHEL: To be strictly fair, we do later find out she had some contact with other people, but not in a way which I feel would be a substitute for having a living human parent in the “real” world.

FAILURE ARTIST: With Jade out the door, we go again to PM. They are fine except for some cartoon burn marks and a fire on their hood. The metal snake saves their precious mailbox.

BRIGHT: It earns PM’s affection for doing so.

Back at the lab, Rose utterly fails to ignore the four-eyed mutant kitten. She carries it over to a peculiar machine that turns out to be another Appearifier. This one is locked onto her cat, Jaspers, nine years ago. Not only was he alive, but the younger Rose was holding a psychotherapy session with him.

Rose attempts to appearify Jaspers, but since this would cause a time paradox, the machine leaves Jaspers in place and instead produces a ‘Paradox Clone’, which swiftly collapses into green slime. The machine next to the appearifier sucks up the paradox sludge, analyses its genetic sequence, and spits out another cat, rather more mutated than the last, in a process referred to as ‘Ectobiology’.

CHEL: John’s screen name, we remind you, is “ectoBiologist”, so it seems he heard of the concept somewhere, perhaps?

BRIGHT: On the appearifier’s screen, Jaspers reveals a stunning secret to young Rose, and is appearified to an unknown location before he can clarify anything. Two weeks later, his corpse reappeared. Oddly, the appearifier can’t see his whereabouts for the intervening period.

It can, however, see where his body went when it landed on the pad earlier! Rose appearifies the corpse and hightails it out of the lab, using the transportaliser to make her escape before the meteor can hit.

FAILURE ARTIST: If you click on the pink horseshoe that appears at the end of the Rose: Fast Forward To Now flash, there’s a little animation of Rose enjoying Maplehoof. I guess she’s making up for the loss of her precious Jaspers.

BRIGHT: We make a brief detour back to Jade, who’s searching for Becquerel. Two new things about Jade’s mysterious abilities: One, Becquerel is invisible to them. Two, this is unusual enough that it used to disturb her. Becquerel appears briefly in the background, and there’s clearly something strange about him…

CHEL: Additionally, it was clearly his face that was carved on the pumpkin we saw earlier, and he looks canine but it’s hard to make out details at this point...

BRIGHT: But before we can find out more, the comic jumps back to John.

Now in his Dad’s room, John is struck by an unwelcome discovery — there aren’t any clowns. Not on posters, no figurines. His father’s briefcase, rather than being full of the tools of a street performer, holds only boring papers and spreadsheets. In fact, the room is pretty boring...like his Dad is just a normal businessman?

"[S] John: Examine your dad's room." (Watch on YouTube)

FAILURE ARTIST: I wish more had been made of Bing “Douchebag” Crosby in this comic but that’s just me being an old movie nerd.

BRIGHT: While John attempts to recover from the BSOD this causes, his father breaks out of a jail cell armed with a safe. This is watched with displeasure by another black figure in brightly-coloured clothing, whose name is not Spades Slick. (He likes the ring of that, though.) No, he’s Archagent Jack Noir, and he oversees the affairs of a dark kingdom through three fenestrated walls.

CHEL: He usually has a fourth one but it got stolen.

FAILURE ARTIST: Those fingers typing the name Spades Slick are a suspicious color...

BRIGHT: He also despises the jester outfits everyone has been forced to wear, and refuses to don his comical hat until the Queen hijacks his fenestrated wall and orders him to wear it. The wall cuts back to Dad, who has now disarmed an especially burly-looking agent and is punching him in the head.

CHEL: Jack Noir makes mention of his carapace at this point; I don’t remember if his species is also referred to as “carapaces” in the comic but that’s the name the fandom knows them by. Guess we’ll see if they are as we go on.

BRIGHT: Meanwhile, John opens some birthday presents he found in his Dad’s room! He gets some Fruit Gushers, a very dapper suit, and best of all, an Array Fetch Modus, which lets him retrieve an item from any card in his deck! Of course, this would be too straightforward, so he combines it with his other Fetch Modii until he gets something properly inconvenient.

FAILURE ARTIST: How much do Modii cost and does everyone in this universe have one?

CHEL: The implication is tech like this is how Skaianet made its money, but since we never really see anyone who’s not involved somehow with the game, we don’t really get a good sense of the company being part of the world, so we don’t know. If I had to guess, though, I’d think getting the sylladex in the first place costs a big lump sum and then the various fetch modii cost much smaller amounts, sort of like apps on a phone or programs on a computer.

When prompted, John closely examines the Fruit Gushers box, this flavour being “MASSIVE TROPICAL BRAIN HEMORRHAGE”. Tasty…? John thinks so. However, in the corner of the box is a small, easily-missed logo…

THE HEINOUS BATTERWITCH HAS HER GNARLED CLAWS IN EVERYTHING.

After the destruction of his planet, the disappearance of his father, the appearance of his ghost grandma, and fighting numerous monsters, THIS is what finally sends John over the edge into a full-out meltdown, despite the onscreen caption declaring that THIS IS STUPID.

FAILURE ARTIST: I actually have a box of Fruit Gushers signed by Andrew Hussie.

CHEL: Back on the island, Jade, accompanied by dramatic music, attempts to retrieve a blue package from the ruins, but just as she reaches it, Becquerel appears between her and it, and we snap right back into STRIFE!

"[S] Jade: Retrieve package." (Watch on YouTube)

Becquerel, as we can now see clearly, is an enormous white dog, lacking facial features of any kind and emitting crackling green lightning - worthy of the description “devilbeast”, I think. Jade aims her rifle at his head and takes multiple shots, but none hit. The first heats up and melts into nothingness. When the second is fired Becquerel turns into green fire and next frame he and Jade are both riding on the now-enormous bullet which carries them across the lagoon to the other side of the island. Becquerel teleports the third bullet into space and himself and Jade to the top of the frog building, and he teleports himself out of the way of the fourth, the background flashing through several different locations. Finally, Jade shoots a bullet in the opposite direction with the instruction GO FETCH!, which Bec does, giving Jade time to grab the package. She rewards Bec for fetching with the irradiated steak and announces that he is a GOOD DOG, BEST FRIEND. After dancing around in celebration, she very abruptly falls asleep again, and Bec scoops her up on his back, takes her back to bed, and tucks her in.

FAILURE ARTIST: The music in Jade: Retrieve Package

is another replacement. Currently it’s An Unbreakable Union by Robert Blake but originally it was Mutiny by Bill Bolin. The original is very retro science fiction and the replacement is safari.

CHEL: For the record, real dogs are not horses and are not built to carry people like that, even very small children can damage a large dog’s back by riding it, but given Bec’s abilities, I don’t think that applies to him.

Rose comes out the other side of the transportaliser, she and the cat having both kept their atoms unmingled, and discovers she’s back in the house, in the room she thought was her mother’s bedroom. It seems the cutesy pink bed and stuff in the lab was in fact her mother’s bedroom, and this room is a well-stocked bar.

You decide not to be especially melodramatic about this revelation.

Good idea, Rose; there isn’t time, as the lab is promptly unestablished by a meteor, sending flaming debris flying through the window. The booze-filled room is especially endangered by this, so Rose decides to flee.

John punches some more cards and complains that he’s the one doing the work while Rose is just messing around on her computer, while Jade dreams and little red lights on her bedposts glow. A metal cabinet in the corner of her room has similar red lights on top, and it bursts open, revealing a Jade-shaped robot.

Sudden cut to a mysterious copy of Jade’s bedroom, except with pink walls, in which Jade stands, wearing a golden dress. Back in her real room, the DREAMBOT stands in the same position. The gold-clad Jade is, we find, a depiction of Jade in her dream. Dream Jade tries to get into bed, but complains of a heavy weight pressing down on her, as the robot is copying her actions and is now lying on top of the real sleeping Jade. Instead, she decides to fly, which of course she can do since it’s a dream (and the robot has jet propulsion).

The dream room also contains the blue package, addressed to “GG” from “GT”. This isn’t John’s current handle, but she knows it’s from John, and that she must deliver it to somewhere else without opening it.

Flashback to the previous winter. In a shot of John’s window, we see his calendar and the edges of some of his posters. The calendar is marked with smiley faces in party hats in green, red, and purple, marking Jade, Dave, and Rose’s birthdays, but more noticeably, there are creepy faces with jester hats and huge teeth scrawled on the wall and posters. I didn’t notice it until just now, but there are some purple lines on the arm of one of the poster characters which might just be part of a drawn-on clown outfit but from this vantage point look like self-harm scars. Brr. Ominous.

John at this point in time is going by “ghostyTrickster” on Pesterchum, hence the “GT” nametag on the package. He’s chatting to Jade about having sent off everyone’s birthday gifts, and how he hopes Jade’s will “help you solve those problems you’ve been having lately”. John is embarrassed to realise it will take much longer than he thought for the package to reach Jade’s island, but she assures him it will arrive “exactly when it needs to”.

BRIGHT: With the reveal of John’s previous handle, and from the characters in the Trollslum, we also get the theme of the handle initials being the letters of DNA. (GCAT.)

FAILURE ARTIST: Jade complains about “trolls” and we have the first time this beloved and perhaps overshadowing species is named. However, John calls the “trolls” the r-slur so that’s another point.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 10

CHEL: Also, the trolls are why he changed his handle, in an attempt to avoid them bothering him.

FAILURE ARTIST: We go back to current day. John is peeved at the graffiti on his posters. He thinks it’s the imps. However, we just saw it was there months before. What is going on, hmmm?

Rose decides to name the cat Vodka Mutini. She then talks with John. Rose wonders where Dave is and John figures that Bro is kicking his ass. Considering that this ass-kicking is later treated as serious abuse, this is a callous thing for a friend to say.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 10

CHEL: I’d also say that counts as HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING. There’s not much an internet friend can do about someone’s abusive situation on the other side of the country but they could at least support Dave and tell him to call the police, if it is supposed to be that bad. Or at least, you know, be worried. Then again, Dave might not have told them what the ass-kicking entails, but Rose knows about his brother’s websites, and given that we know Bro made at least one film in which Dave was involved and may or may not have been on camera, and the film certainly would show the state the apartment was in…

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 4

FAILURE ARTIST: Anyway, when John complains about his posters being defaced, Rose says they always looked that way. John naturally freaks out at this creepy revelation.

We cut to WV. They are trying to get down from the mobile station without sacrificing the MAYORAL SASH. While working the Appearifier, they get John’s present with an envelope addressed to “Mister Mayor”. After WV gets more cable, they rappel down the mobile station with the package under their arm.

Meanwhile, a figure in yellow caution tape watches WV through a sniper rifle. This is Aimless Renegade, a wonderful but forgotten character.

We go back to John and Rose. John discusses the mystery of the defaced posters while he futzes around with the Alchemiter. Rose thinks that John had blocked out the memory of defacing the posters and the revelation that his father isn’t who he thought he was unblocked his memory. She thinks maybe his father thought he was interested in clowns because John drew clowns everywhere. Yet John also wrote “LAME KID”? Maybe Dad should have taken John to therapy.

CHEL: “Lame kid” with arrows pointing down at his bed, to be exact, among other insults, and the clown faces don’t look like the product of someone who liked clowns at all!

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 11 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 5

Yet Dad Egbert is supposed to be the good parent of the group, so here we go with a new count:

RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1

This one’s primarily for romantic relationships, but other relationship fumbles apply too.

Rose thinks that the drawings are the result of John trying to express something subconscious, possibly a repressed past memory. John changes the subject to the upward building process; Rose complains that chimneys weren’t meant to bear such a weight, and considers switching to walls now they can get grist more easily, but she’s running out of time as the house proper is now on fire. John blames Dave, so I think we can assume that either they don’t know his brother forces him into swordfights or they don’t think it’s a problem. Which one is hard to determine.

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to Jade playing a bass solo so advanced it doesn’t have a bass line. Another Bolin replacement. We find out Dream Jade is in a castle on a planet that’s a gold copy of the one Jack Noir and co are on. While flying around, she sees an inhabitant that looks familiar. CHEL: This is what I was referring to when I said Jade did have some contact with people; she is able to contact the carapaces in her dreams. However, the carapaces are, as we’ve seen from WV and company, somewhat childlike in behaviour, living in a society that’s nothing like Earth’s, biologically not the same as humans so they couldn’t easily advise her if she got ill or injured, and they don’t appear to be able or willing to speak, at least not most of the time and/or in a way the humans could understand, not to mention they would have no way to physically assist her in the waking world so she’d still have to raise herself from a very young age. Hence, why I don’t think they’re a substitute for an actual human parent.

[rpdwong]

[LET’S TALK RE2MAKE] Ada and Leon

There is so much I want to talk about regarding this game, that I’ve decided to just divide it in different posts because, wow, there is A LOT to unpack here. It’s no surprise that I started playing Leon’s scenario, mainly because I wanted to see Ada in this new rendition (and also Leon and Ada/Leon, of course!). A heads-up: this is probably going to be very convoluted and not-at-all-organized, but I need to get it out and talk about these two.

I’ll admit my main fear was that Capcom could’ve butchered Ada’s characterization, but in the end I had nothing to worry about because we could argue this Ada is even better than in any previous appearances. Mainly because RE2make has probably the best writing/acting in the series (it’s still campy at times and that’s good as well! but you know what I mean). This also applies to her relationship with Leon, which also has been improved and now feels more grounded.

First things first, I love the original RE2 to pieces. It was my favourite game in the series, it was the first I played, Leon and Ada are literally the first ship that I ever shipped without knowing what that was. But when you look at it now, even if the writing is good  in certain scenes, it’s… well, it’s not RE forte. I mean, Ada goes from running away from Leon to sticking with him and then saying she cared about him all of a sudden. It’s not that you can’t believe it, but because the game is too short, she gets very intense very quickly. Again, we have to suspend our disbelief here a bit because this game was made back in 1998, and narrative in games was limited. For its time, it was kinda good—but some of those scenes would have looked a bit out of place under the tone RE2make has set. Like the “I’m just a woman who fell in love with you”. I mean, I love it in its original context, but it was cheesy af at its time and I don’t think they could have pulled it off here in a believable way.

(I also think Capcom wants to keep the romance tone very subtle, as they have always said they don’t “include” them in their RE games <s>except they kinda do but anyway</s> and that love confession was by far the most blatant romantic scene in a RE game).

But I digress, since this is about what RE2make does well in regards to Leon and Ada, and I’d say pretty much everything.

The first thing I noticed I quite liked about this Ada was the contrast between her demeanor and what she was doing: she acted cold and distant, but still kept saving Leon’s ass (and she does save him here a lot, more than in the original). This really resonates with their later interactions in other games, even though here she is colder than usual because, well, this is their first meeting so they still don’t have that history and shared background.

[And they keep pointing guns at each other (another great detail, since this is pretty much their dynamic when they meet).]

Now, in the original we know Ada tried to leave Leon behind multiple times— she had a job to do, and having a rookie cop with her wouldn’t help. But she just kept running away without saying anything and since we don’t know her true intentions until the end, it may come across as a bit strange, given her supposed circumstances. In RE2make this is more nuanced, I think. You can see she’s trying to push him off constantly, telling him to leave as soon as he can and escape the city. Some people always bring up that Ada manipulates Leon into doing things so she can accomplish her mission— and that is true to an extent (let’s remember, again, that she also keeps saving him just as much before even accepting his help). But you can also see that wasn’t her first intention, she just wanted to get rid of him and continue her mission. However, Leon is very adamant about not leaving her behind and helping her, because he wants do something for the city and bring those responsible down (I love that he repeats it like two o three times, the “you’re stuck with me” line basically).

Even in her attempts at getting rid of him, there’s a difference between their first interactions and the ones they share later, from the sewers on. When he finds her in the dumpster wounded, she stills tells him something like “get out of here”, even if she knows she needs his help now to survive.

When finishing Ada’s segment, you can even see she’s scared at the end after the fall (and, indeed, where’s Leon when she needs him xD). But what Leon says here is one of my favourite things:

Now this is not only about uncovering Umbrella’s plot and bringin them to justice for him: they are a team and they protect each other to survive the hell they have been thrown into (which is very reminiscent of their interactions in the original game aka “We’re a team. I can’t just leave you behind”, even Leon points at this with his “Y’know we make a good team”, which only makes it all sadder because yes, they do, but now the truth has come out and they are “enemies”).

So, yeah, what was Ada supposed to say here? She goes along with it, and yes, she tricks him into retrieving the G virus for her, but that’s to be expected because she’s just not going to drop her whole mission and leave everything she’s ever known “for a pair of pretty eyes”, as Luke Skywalker would say, when we can see she’s very reserved and hides her true feelings/intentions constantly.

Yet she doesn’t want to hurt him (as she admits during their confrontation and this is genuine, no lies here), so that’s the best scenario in play: Leon gets the G virus, he gives it to her under the pretense of taking it back to the FBI, they escape, go their separate ways, she succeeds in her mission. End of story. Thankfully, Leon is not such a naïve ass in this game. Seriously, I replayed the original RE2 just before the remake’s launch and Leon is incredibly gullible to the point of no reason— though it’s endearing in its own way too. But I definitely appreciate more that this Leon still has a hopeful, positive vibe and he really wants to trust Ada, without coming off as an utter fool.

Then the confrontation comes (in a walkway with no railing, guys, haven’t you seen Star Wars??? THAT DOESN’T BODE WELL, NEVER) and it’s beautifully made. They could have gone the Leon B route with Ada dying in his arms, but the Leon A version was incredibly poignant— and it remains the same here, even more so because the acting was top notch for me here. (It’s true Ada “died” in Leon B to save him and that’s powerful as well, but… she has saved him so many times in the remake, it wouldn’t have felt that “special” I guess?). Even though Ada has been actively more deceitful in the remake (she takes advantage of the FBI lie much more than she did with the “worried girlfriend” thing), in the end she is not able to shoot Leon— and he knows she won’t. 

The moment he says “but I don’t think you can” and lowers his weapon is SO GREAT and is a perfect summary of their whole dynamic: they are usually on opposing sides, yet he still trusts she will never harm him; because she can’t. They always walk a very thin line between friend and foe. We as the audience know Ada won’t shoot him, but it’s a such leap of faith for Leon here, at this moment— especially because now he is certain of what Ada is and what she is doing with the G virus. Rationally, there’d no reason for her not to shoot him and get the virus— but despite Ada’s lie, the connection they have developed is real. And Leon knows this, trusts his instincts and it pays off. It’s so much more fulfilling than the original scenes or even later ones.

Then we have Ada’s “death” and it’s heart-breaking. That “Shut up I’ve got you” from Leon KILLS me every time, and Ada’s “it’s not worth it” says so much about her, as I understand the implication is that she thinks saving her is not worth it. 

Again, this is something that was also present in the original, so I think they’ve managed to blend all versions of Ada quite well (she can be standoffish, independent and sassy, but also show warmth, sadness and compassion). Not only that, I found it quite endearing that she also comes off as very proud and hates feeling weak, rejecting Leon’s gestures of kindness when he finds her wounded in the sewers. There’s the “don’t push it, rookie” and she claims she would feel even worse if Leon carried her. I don’t think this was a trait we had witnessed before in Ada, even though you could assume she doesn’t like being thought of as weak. But it was really nice to see that on screen and it’s just another detail that helps to make her feel more human.

What about the kiss? I’ve seen some people having mixed feelings about it, but I actually liked what they did— again, because this time it all feels more grounded and less “melodramatic” (which isn’t bad per se, but the tone is different, as I’ve mentioned). We weren’t getting a love confession out of nowhere because it didn’t fit the character, so… how can we get a kiss in this situation? Well, now it’s part of Ada’s manipulation in a way— but that doesn’t invalidate that she’s starting to care about him in some way and viceverse.

But they are still walking on thin ice: Leon wants to trust her, but he doesn’t know if he should, and she knows she’s lying to him. So she just shuts him up when he starts blabbering about keeping her safe. I don’t mind that it’s part of the manipulation because, once more, this is their first meeting and I also think part of her was also being genuine about it, like she thinks he’s very sweet for worrying so much about her. This is my interpretation, of course, but I think it fits the scene when she says “don’t worry about me” and claiming she’d like to see him again, that she has plenty to live for. This is of course all up to debate, because it’s made ambiguous on purpose, to make us feel as confused as Leon is. But, in the end, we know what happens in later games (even in this one, when she is unable to shoot him), and whether you like Ada or not, we can’t argue that she cares about him enough to put him before any mission.

Leon’s line in the train is also very telling and so much better than the original “Goodbye, Ada” or “I’ll always remember you”, in my opinion. He says “I can’t believe I actually miss her” and that rings so true, because, despite the deception, the connection they had was true, they worked well together, they teased each other, they bantered. They made a good team, and Leon made it out alive thanks to her as well. It reflects much better that duality they have, whether they can trust each other or not (as he says in RE6: it’s complicated).

Just to end this, because I’ve been blabbering long enough, the other thing I’m forever grateful this remake has given us is Leon and Ada bantering and even their own sort of recurring catch phrase, with the whole “keeping scores” that comes full circle: first in a negative way, then it shows up again in a moment of tenderness between the two.

It’s also such a nice way to tie all their history together, because that’s what they always do: they might be on opposing sides, but they always end up saving each other.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

I guarantee you'll be surprised by the consequences of the licensing deal for DOS, just as it's easier to get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be more interested in an essay about why something isn't the problem, even though you know that free with just two exclamation points has a probability of. Then when you reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, because you can, to a limited extent, simulate a closure a function that takes a number n, and returns a function that refers to variables defined in enclosing scopes by defining a class with one method and a field to replace each variable from an enclosing scope.1 The US Is Not Yet a Police State. Better Judgement Needed If the number of users and the problem is usually artificial and predetermined. There are two main kinds of error that get in the way you'd expect any subculture to be, in certain specific moments like your family, this month a fixed amount you need to simplify and clarify, and the threat to potential investors and they hope this will make it big is not simply to give them at least 20 years, and then at each point the way such a project would play out? You could do it than literally making a mark on the world.2 I'll come running.3 They make such great CEOs. First of all, for the most part they punt. For all its power, Silicon Valley is that you get discouraged when no one else at the time.

But there is also huge source of implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links.4 It was more prestigious to be one of those things until you strike something. Both self-control and experience have this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist.5 It's very common for startups to exist.6 But even in the mating dance, patents are part of the mob, stand as far away from it myself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the next step, whatever that is. Meanwhile the iPhone is selling better than ever. 4 million is starting to appear in the mainstream media came from. People's best friends are likely to be careful here to distinguish between them. If you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in one place for a certain percentage of your startup. There is more to be actively curious. Most CEOs delegate taste to a subordinate.7 The closest thing seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I won't repeat it all here.

The nature of the application domain.8 Mean People Fail November 2014 It struck me recently how few of the startups we fund. Angels don't like publicity.9 That can be useful when it's a crappy version one made by a company called Y Combinator that said Y Combinator does seed funding for startups is way less than the measurement error. But there is no argument about that—at least in computational bottlenecks. And in the film industry, though producers may second-guess directors, the director controls most of what is now called VoIP, and it will take off. Instead of bubbling up from the bottom, by overpaying unions, the traditional news media, and the techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.10 If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. But because patent trolls don't make anything physical.11

They work well enough in everyday life.12 This site isn't lame. It's all evasion.13 A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about it, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. Spend little. Someone like Bill Gates? In the last 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. I'm not writing here about Java which I have never seen any of ITA's code, but according to one of the causes of the increase in disagreement, there's a good chance the person at the next table could help you at all. Also, startups are an all-star team. I can solve that problem by stopping entirely. Wouldn't it start to seem lame?

It would be a good idea.14 I read most things I write out loud at least once a week, cooked for the first couple generations.15 I'm not saying it's correct, incidentally, but it happens surprisingly rarely. I've learned about VC while working on it for a couple years for another company for two years. The word boss is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.16 I assumed I'd learn what in college.17 But also it will tell you to spend too much. The problem is not the one that is. Inexperienced angels often get cold feet.18

Even more important than others? File://localhost/home/patrick/Documents/programming/python projects/UlyssesRedux/corpora/unsorted/schlep. But after a while I learned the trick of speaking fast.19 Why wouldn't young professionals make lots of new things I want to reach users, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to analyze based on what a few people think in our insular little Web 2.20 Fortunately if this does happen it will take a big bite out of your round. What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? One of the things I had to condense the power of compound growth. Then they're mystified to find that there are degrees of coolness. It requires the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they will always be made to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. This bites you twice: they get less done, but they need more help because life is so precarious for them. Unless they've tried not taking board seats and found their returns are lower, they're not drifting.

Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-so is an animal.21 But it is very hard for someone who publishes online.22 Not because starting one's own company seemed too ambitious, but because it didn't look like a car spinning its wheels. It's hard for them to change. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they weren't going to wait. Wufoo seem to have any teeth, and the useful half is the payload. This is arguably a permissible tactic.

Most books on startups also seem to be joined together, but really the thesis is an optimistic one—that everyone should go and start a startup during college, but it was simpler than they thought. I do in proper essays. Because they personally liked it. Game We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for what I learned from this experiment is that if VCs are only doing it in the plainest words and you'll be free again.23 That's the worst thing about our software. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. Also, the money might come in several tranches, the later ones subject to various conditions—though this is apparently more common in deals with lower-tier investors sometimes give offers with very short fuses, because they get their ideas? If you do that you raise too many expectations. There's no reason to believe there is any field in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than working on the company to become valuable, and you don't have significant success to cheer you up when things go wrong.24

Notes

That's a good nerd, just that if the statistics they use; if anything they could to help you even be tempted to do is adjust the weights till the 1920s to financing growth with the other hand, launching something small and traditional proprietors on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the recommendations. If you're doing. There were a property of the world will sooner or later.

And yet I think it's publication that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding language. Google and Facebook are driven by money, then you're being gratuitously troublesome. We walked with him for the next round.

People were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion.

That's not a remark about the idea upon have different time quanta. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but since it was 10. The chief lit a cigarette.

Without the prospect of publication, the average Edwardian might well guess wrong.

In fact, for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have responded to this talk, so that you can't help associating it with the founders' salaries to the prevalence of systems of seniority. Moving large amounts of new stock. That way most reach the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo Day or die.

This form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly neutral that they're really saying is they want to learn.

This is an interesting sort of dress rehearsal for the first 40 employees, with the issues they have that glazed over look.

According to Sports Illustrated, the first duty of the anti-dilution protections.

Currently we do at least seem to understand technology because they could not process it.

Doing a rolling close usually prevents this. The liking you have to replace you. Convertible debt is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than given by other people.

Investors are fine with funding nerds. Cascading menus would also be argued that we wouldn't have the concept of the war, federal tax receipts have stayed close to the inane questions of the Fabian Society, it often means the startup will be, unchanging, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was wiser for them by the National Center for Education Statistics, the activation energy to start with consumer electronics and to run an online service. Seeming like they worked together mostly at night.

Instead of making n constant, it is. I started using it out of their due diligence tends to happen fast, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by you based on respect for their judgement. If you're sufficiently good bet, why not turn your company into one? Which explains the astonished stories one always hears about VC while working on such an interview.

Com/spam. So if you're a YC startup you can do it to colleagues. Doh.

That's the difference between good and bad measurers. I get the money, then their incentives aren't aligned with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while she likes getting attention in the nature of server-based applications, and how unbelievably annoying it is. That's probably too much to hope for, but they can't teach students how to deal with the other direction Y Combinator.

The downside is that there's more of the expert they send to look you over.

If he's bad at it he'll work very hard to pick a date, because the median case.

They're motivated by examples of how hard they work. They're so selective that they won't be able to hire a lot of people like them—people who have money to spend a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this type: lies told by older siblings. But no planes crash if your goal is to make money from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. Structurally the idea that they probably wouldn't be irrational.

They thought most programming would be to say for sure whether, e. Travel has the same investor to do it to them, but investors can get done before that. To get all that matters, just as he or she would be on demand, because universities are where a lot of startups will generally raise large amounts of our own, like a wave. So as a naturalist.

It's interesting to consider behaving the opposite. Which in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures.

Maybe that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then being unable to raise money, you can base brand on anything with a slight disadvantage, but historical abuses are easier for us, they are bleeding cash really fast. Though in fact it may be underestimating VCs. 25. And I've never heard of many startups from Philadelphia.

For example, understanding French will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds a hot startup. Those investors probably thought they'd been pretty clever by getting such a dangerous mistake to believe that successful founders still get rich will use this technique, you'll be well on your product, just harder.

Common Lisp for, but those are probably not do this right you'd have reached after lots of back and forth. This is isomorphic to the company's PR people worked hard to get a real partner. In fact since 2 1.

I'm not saying that's all prep schools is to give them sufficient activation energy for enterprise software.

[kellanved-ammanas]

Just in Time Chapter Four of Five: Awake

Upon finding out he was awake – apparently, he’d been out for a while, no surprise there given the extent of his injuries – everyone in the team came to Spy’s room for a visit. It was annoying and awkward but maybe a little heartwarming too, not that Spy would ever admit it.

Another thing he wasn’t going to admit was how glad he was to be alive. When he’d shown up on the scene and seen Scout’s situation and that there was no possible way to take them all out before they had a chance to kill Scout, he’d done the only thing he could without giving it a second thought despite knowing his chances of surviving it were less than good.

Honestly, he was a bit surprised with himself, he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of jumping straight to sacrificing himself without thinking first about it for a couple seconds at least, not even for Scout. But he had and… he’d do so again if he had to. Hopefully there would be no next time though.

He let out a sigh of relief once his last visitors – Pyro and Engi – had left, leaving only him and Medic. He was exhausted but in too much pain to go back to sleep. Medic was good enough at his job that he didn’t need to say anything about that to administer him another dose of pain meds, he didn’t want to depend on them but right now he had no choice if he wanted to think clearly or get any rest. Which his body desperately needed.

“Where’s Scout?” he asked before Medic could leave. It was late afternoon now, nearing nightfall, and despite the conversation they’d had that morning after Spy had woken up, Scout hadn’t come back.

“I do not know. I’m surprised he’s not here actually. He sat by your bedside often while you were unconscious, especially before we knew you were going to live. I had to get Heavy to carry him back to bed after he fell asleep here at night. I can go find him if you like.”

“No, don’t bother, he’ll show up eventually.” Spy dismissed Medic with a wave, feigning an uncaring attitude.

The slight smirk on Medic’s face said he knew just how out of place he’d just made Spy feel, probably why he’d gone out of his way to tell him about Scout’s actions during the days Spy had spent unconscious. He never would’ve thought Scout would do something like that regardless of who’d been hurt or the circumstances behind it. But apparently, he had, and he’d done so for Spy.

“Guten Nacht then,” Medic said with a wave before turning around leaving.

Spy let out a half sigh, half groan once the door was closed. His chest hurt like hell, every breath was like getting stabbed or shot all over again, and he’d had to pretend like it was nothing while dealing with everyone. Hopefully the pain meds would kick in soon and hopefully Scout would take his time before returning. Spy wasn’t in the mood to figure out what he was going to do about him now, especially if he continued to insist on Spy acting out his role as his father.

How had Scout even found out? The others who knew had all found out because they were smart – Medic because of the DNA tests he’d performed on them when they’d joined up. Maybe Scout was smarter than Spy had thought, he was certainly good at hiding it if so.

***

Despite constantly being drunk, Demoman still managed to beat Scout at cards for the third time in a row. Which left Scout with nothing left to gamble with to try to get his money back. Perfect.

“It’s only ‘cause my arm’s still hurt and stuff, it’s distracting me and making the cards harder to hold” he said, handing over the last bit of cash he had until his next paycheck. He’d blown through this one faster than normal somehow. “I got shot remember?”

“Yup.” Demoman took Scout’s money and pocketed it with a toothy grin, no doubt that’d be going to more booze later. “Speaking of that, you should go pay your daddy a visit, you haven’t been up to see him since he woke up yesterday, right?”

“All right, first off, you know too? Second, never refer to him as my… ‘daddy’ ever again. That’s weird and creepy.”

“Yeah, everybody knows, even you figured it out eventually.” He chuckled and took a swig from his bottle. “And ain’t nothing wrong with calling him your daddy when he is.”

“Ugh, I’m done with this shit.” Scout stood up, slamming his hands on the table in front of him. It would’ve looked tough if he didn’t wince right after, the damn bullet wound in his arm still hurt like hell. He shook it off though and walked out.

He wasn’t planning on it but his feet took him in the direction of the medical area and once there he might as well go ahead and visit Spy again. Maybe he’d be asleep, giving Scout the perfect excuse to leave.

Maybe he should peek in, try to be sneaky in case he woke up Spy on accident. … Nah. He opened the door and barged in as he would any other room.

Sniper sat in the bedside chair. He like Spy looked up at Scout as he entered. “Welp,” he said as he stood. “I guess that’s my cue to leave. See ya later mate.”

Scout stepped aside, letting him pass before closing the door. “Hey pal or Dad or whatever I’m supposed to call you now,” he said as nonchalantly as he could. He needed to pretend like nothing had changed now that their familial relationship was a known and open thing between them. Back when Scout had just strongly suspected and had been lying to himself about the truth it had been much easier to continue on like before. But now it wasn’t a secret anymore and Spy had gotten very close to sacrificing his life to save Scout’s, so things weren’t normal anymore.

Spy raised an eyebrow as he took a drag on his cigarette – Sniper no doubt had given it him against Medic’s orders. Was he just as unsure about all this as Scout was and he was just good at hiding it or was he truthfully in complete control? It was impossible to say, especially with the mask on. “You still want to learn French?”

“Uh… yeah.” Being bilingual would impress Pauling for sure and French was supposed to be the language of love, right? Making it the perfect language to learn. And not having to talk about the other important things between them right now was awesome.

So, he plopped himself in the bedside chair. “So you’re gonna teach me?”

“I suppose so, I have nothing to do while I recover so I might as well.”

“Cool but uh… you sure you should be smoking right now?”

Spy scowled. “No, but I’m going to anyway. I won’t teach you anything if you tell Medic.”

Scout wanted to argue further but now wasn’t the time for it, he’d talk to Sniper about it later. “All right, no tattling, got it. Let’s start though.”

***

“This is hard, can’t you just teach me to speak it?” Scout complained, rolling his head up with a groan.

“She’ll be more impressed if you can write it too.” If Spy was going to teach him French he was going to do it properly no matter how much he whined and complained.

“You really think so?”

“I know so.” Spy didn’t know that for sure, but saying so would be the only way to get Scout to listen.

Scout gave him a skeptical looking before sighing and looking down at the notebook again. Good. Teaching him was a nice distraction from the pain and boredom, even if it did get annoying and exhausting sometimes.

It was made even more difficult by Scout’s dyslexia. Spy had it too though – Scout had gotten it from him – and thus he knew how handle it and could teach Scout how to as well. Despite his complaining Scout did really try, making steady progress even if it was at a snail’s pace. Spy was proud of him.

How different would things have been if Spy hadn’t left? How different would Scout have turned out? Would he have still ended up working as a mercenary? Would he be better behaved or just as rowdy and immature? It was impossible to know and thus it wasn’t worth thinking about.

The real question was: when was Scout going to go back to being angry Spy hadn’t been there when he was a kid? He’d used to get angry each and every time someone brought up his father, come to think of it when he stopped being like that had to be when he’d begun to suspect the truth.

If he’d had that strong suspicion confirmed any other way he undoubtedly would’ve been pissed about it. They’d been working together in the same mercenary company and squad for a while now after all and Spy had never said anything about it – initially he’d planned to but had kept putting it off until it had gone beyond the point of awkwardness and thus he’d decided to never say anything to him about it even when the other members of their squad – minus Soldier – had all found out through various means. The fallout of all that secret keeping and anger about Spy having left had to hit eventually.

When though? And how was Spy going to handle it? … He’d figure that out when they got there. For now, Spy would just enjoy the distraction Scout offered in his endeavors to learn French.

Now if only Scout hadn’t convinced Sniper to stop sharing cigarettes with Spy. Though… he was probably right to do so, that didn’t mean Spy had to like it though.

Previous / Last

[douxreviews]

The Punisher - ‘The Dark Hearts of Men’  Review

"Who among us can look at themselves without shame?"

I'm just going to say it up front.

I was wrong about Pilgrim.

Wow. That was just a really well constructed episode. Honestly, I kind of want this review to just be 'That was really good. You should go watch that, if you haven't already.'

The Punisher gives us an episode structure that we've seen done elsewhere, does it well, and then at the very end turns the entire thing on its head with a last minute reveal that totally changes what we thought we were watching.

The structure in question is the time honored 'Main characters in separate, self contained character studies that never intersect.' The first previous example of this structure to come to mind is of course 'Conversations with Dead People' over on Buffy. This structure has two main virtues. First, it's a great way to really focus on character development before your season long arc kicks into high gear. Second, and more usefully, it's a great way to cover the fact that your main actors couldn't get their schedules to match long enough to get a scene with them together.

I doubt that scheduling was an issue in this case though, as 'Dark Hearts of Man' is, in hindsight, clearly structured the way it is for a very specific reason. Last chance for a spoiler warning if you haven't watched it, because we're about to discuss that last minute pivot, and it really works better as a surprise if you don't know it's coming.

For most of the episode's runtime we think we're watching three separate character studies. Well, two character studies and an action sequence that pauses a lot for brown study. We have Pilgrim, recovering from a fight, Dinah and Krista sharing a girls night of red wine and a debate on the ethics of retaliatory violence, and Frank and Curtis preparing to raid Billy's hideout and then actually raiding Billy hideout.

Taking those one at a time, let's talk about John Pilgrim. In my review of a few episodes back, I complained about how cliched hypocritical religious figures who judge others while they do bad things themselves are. That remains true, but it's not at all what the show was doing with Pilgrim and I apologize for assuming that that was where it was going. Pilgrim, it turns out, was once part of a white supremist group, but somehow got away from them, changed his name, and tried to become a better man by embracing religion. Unfortunately, it appears that no matter how hard he tries to be a good man he keeps getting dragged back into a world of violence and that that world is still very much part of his own nature. The image of bloody, cut up John Pilgrim, barely able to move from all his injuries, forcing his arm out to pick up his preacher's hat and put it back on seems like it kind of sums up Pilgrim's entire existence. The montage of him in the hotel afterwards recovering from the fight through the application of whiskey, cocaine, and prostitutes is as broken as I've ever seen a character on television, and it was fascinating. Great work by Josh Stewart.

Meanwhile, Dinah and Krista's conversation was so close to being healthy. If you didn't have any outside context it genuinely would have seemed like a healthy friendship, and Krista's advice was totally solid. But wow, the undercurrents of unhealthy going on there. Essentially they were debating about whose man was better, so sadly they receive no Bechdel test points for today, but if you look at what exactly each of them was trying to say, something interesting turns up. Dinah was arguing that Frank is basically a good man, as adjusted for personal circumstances. Whereas Krista is arguing that Billy isn't any worse than Frank is, because Frank is just as bad. Those are not equivalent arguments, and it says a lot about each of the women involved. Also, I can't have been the only one saying to themselves, 'Hey Dinah. maybe ask why the light fixture is dangling from the ceiling... that might be important...'

And finally we have Frank and Curt, just hanging out on the roof waiting for night to fall so they can try to take Billy out. For all that Frank jokes with him about it, it's very clear that they both know that Curtis would never in a million years turn him in for the reward money. It's also clear that Curtis knows Frank would still rather be there with Billy. That's just a sad and multilayered dynamic, and I like the way everyone involved played it. It was almost a shame to get the actual action sequence, because the character work was so well done between the three men, without Billy even being physically there.

The bookending of Frank and Billy getting jumped in by their military brethren and Frank getting jumped out by Billy's crew in the warehouse was a nice bit of structural detail as well, the first being an, arguably unhealthy but we're not judging here, example of male bonding. The second being what we might refer to us 'male un-bonding'. They frame the discussion between Frank and Curtis nicely, as well as just being a really solid structural hook to frame your episode around.

So there we have it, a nice little episode that explores three different situations in a way that helps us to understand the characters involved better, so that we have a better feeling for the personal stakes involved as the series moves into its end game. Or at least that's what we thought we'd just watched, but then the episode pulls the rug out from under us with the reveal that what we'd really just seen was the story of how Krista realized how to destroy Frank based on her ostensibly friendly conversation with Dinah. We were simultaneously watching her come up with the plan and the plan being carried out, and we had no idea. Now that's a neat way twist an ending. To be fair, they were upfront about showing their cards; they showed us the '24 hours earlier' screen caption when Krista and Dinah's conversation began. But man, who could have guessed how important that time disconnect would turn out to be. Well played, show.

Bits-

-- I really, really wish that I didn't immediately know what the '14' tattoo on Pilgrim's assailant's arm meant. Short version, it means he's a white supremist. If you don't know specifically what the 14 means, I beg you to count yourself lucky and not look it up. You're happier not knowing.

-- Fascinating as Pilgrim's meltdown into his old habits was, I did kind of wonder where he got the cocaine. That was cocaine, right? I think that was cocaine.

-- Both fight scenes this episode were hard to watch. To the extent that I started having trouble believing that anyone involved in them wasn't dead. Both were also not in hallways, which I think might be a fineable offense for a Marvel Netflix show.

-- It seemed like a flaw in the episode early on that we say Billy on the higher roof looking down on Frank and Curt but that he didn't kill him. It makes perfect sense now.

-- Speaking of Billy and his plan, his plan only really works if Frank kills all Billy's soldiers and makes his way to the room to find the dead innocent bystanders. Did Billy just assume that Frank would kill all of his guys and factor that into the plan? It kind of feels like he did. Which is just stone cold.

-- I desperately want to believe that Billy's soldiers had an arts and crafts night at Valhalla, at which they got out magic markers and all colored their masks together. Please show me that flashback.

-- The bulk of this episode was taken up with the question as to whether Frank was the same as Billy. Normally that would be boring, since the answer is obviously 'no', but here it turned out that the fact that the answer was obviously 'no' was sort of the point. It wasn't about proving that Frank was just like Billy, it was about a plot to make Frank believe that he was just like Billy. Clever use of the audiences expectations.

-- The choice of music for the montage of Pilgrim recovering from the fight was fantastic. This show actually does a really good job with the music cues.

-- Billy sees his fight with Frank as 'he thinks he's better than me'. That kind of glosses over the whole 'you killed his wife and family', Billy.

Quotes:

Billy: "Pain is only temporary, right?"

Dinah: "Does ‘friends’ come with a confidentiality clause?" Dr. Durant: "You can write me a check if it makes you feel better, Dinah."

Dinah: "When Frank smashed Billy into that mirror, he was looking at himself."

Pilgrim: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." White Supremist Guy: "You have no mercy coming." Pilgrim: "I wasn’t talking about me."

Frank: "That’s the thing with Bill. He’s always alone."

Pilgrim: "Brotherhood is a hall of mirrors."

Billy: "I am you, Frank!"

I am a huge fan of solid structure, and this episode has structure so solid you could build condos on it. Along with some genuinely moving character work, the reveal of unexpected depths in the bad guys, and an ending that makes you immediately watch the episode again.

Four out of four dangling chandeliers.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water.

[wellamarke]

Laura’s Choice: An Exploration

My initial reaction to the now-infamous ‘Choice’ scene was abject horror and disgust. I couldn’t believe that Laura, of all people, would sacrifice poor little Sam, after everything she’s done for her supposed belief in synthetic humanity.

For what it’s worth, I still worry it was a bit of a manufactured plot point, but this is Humans, you guys: I’ve never been able to hate anything about it for long. I did try to, in series 2, but both times – with the Mattie/Odi storyline as well as Sophie’s Synthee arc – I managed to talk myself around by writing a good old essay.

So that’s where we’re at now. Rather than berate the scene from a writing angle (because there is a lot of really awful stuff to be considered when taking this scene in the context of the race relations parallel they’ve emphasised so much this year), I’m going to explore Laura’s choice from a character angle. 

In the days since the episode aired I’ve been through numerous emotional states, engaged in many debates, and in general come up with a number of arguments that defend Laura’s decision, not as the right choice objectively, but as something that makes sense for her character. Stay with me.

The first thing we have to decide, I think, is this: what question was Laura actually answering? Anatole says she has to choose somebody to die. But was she really choosing:

1) the person she really thought should die,

2) the person she thought had the best chance of survival, or

3) the option that was mostly likely to resolve the situation?

The DigitalSpy interview with the writers would have you believe it’s the first option, and that Laura genuinely chose “her kind” over “theirs”. I… take issue with that. An alliance in which one ally does not seriously consider the other their equal is not, in fact, an alliance. If Laura seriously chose Sam for that reason alone, then Anatole is in the right, as this excellent Twitter thread points out, and if episodes 7 and 8 somehow confirm that reasoning then I’ll snap straight back to my kneejerk reaction of absolute revulsion.

But even within the first item on the list, there is room for discussion. One point that’s been well made by @TheSynthWhisperer on Twitter is that Laura may honestly, truly think that she considers synths as our absolute equals, and yet still, under fire and the threat of harm to her family, fold at the crucial moment. I don’t want to believe that of her, but I have to admit it’s a possibility. As Mia points out in 3.1, up until now Laura’s devotion to the synths’ cause has not come at any actual cost to herself. Not the kind of cost that counts. Sure, she’ll sacrifice a career, a marriage, those things aren’t anywhere near the scale of say… Sophie. Who’s standing right there in the corner, easy fodder for if Anatole gets mad. Who of us can truly say that we wouldn’t give up our ideals in that situation? I’m sure we’d all love to say “Me!”, but unless you’ve had them questioned in circumstances similar to this one, you’ll never really know. Sorry. 

So that’s one theory, though not my favourite, for Sam being Laura’s honest choice for 1: when it comes down to it, her ideals are not as deeply-held as she’d like them to be. She does possess fears and doubts that she has not yet been able to purge from her soul, however much she’d love to, however much she thought she had.

Is there evidence for this line of thought in Laura’s previous actions? Arguably, yes. Every time I watch the series 2 finale I’m surprised by how determined Laura is that Mattie not upload the consciousness code. She’s the character whose relationship with Mia the show has focused on most, and yet she’s the loudest voice saying “No, this isn’t worth it, don’t do it.” Of course, the two situations are by no means the same, but perhaps there is room to argue that Laura’s ideals are subject to her propensity toward panic, when stakes grow to that kind of height.

The other reasoning for point 1: she wasn’t comparing organic life to synthetic life: she was comparing death. We had this hinted at in episode 5, with Sam’s line, “We don’t die in the same way you do.”

Now, in context, he’s talking about Karen, who we’re just supposed to accept is actually irretrievable, and truly gone (despite the fact that only Joe was there to confirm it, He Who Knows Nothing About Synths, for all I kind of love him now). But let’s look at Sam’s line in relation to the synthetic deaths Laura has witnessed first-hand.

She had braindead Max laid out on her dining-room table for a good while, and then saw the code magically make him good as new. She watched Mia and Hester die and then be miraculously brought back to life, even though Mattie wasn’t there in person to do it. We, the audience, remember the bleaker fates of characters like Karen and Flash, but in terms of the ones Laura has actually seen… synth death seems to be an undoable, tragic-but-not-absolutely-final concept.

So while Sam’s life may seem equal to the old man’s, his death does not. Laura has never seen an organic human return to life the way Max, Mia and Hester did. In the heat of the moment, I can perhaps see her clinging to this reasoning, hoping that somehow they’d be able to restore Sam if he did die. ‘They are as alive as us, but perhaps they’re never as dead as us’ - that kind of thinking.

We know this isn’t true, of course, because we know from the Elster Sisters roadtrip that the code is now offlining of its own accord. But Laura’s grasping at straws here. Whatever she chooses, she has to be able to live with it afterwards. A phonecall to Mattie might do the trick with Sam, whereas it’s not going to do Old McOld any good at all.

But what if Laura wasn’t answering Anatole’s question at face value at all? What if she was trying to make a tactical choice? This brings us to point 2, which I like to call “The Max Factor”.

In 3.1, we saw Max faced with the difficult choice between saving Christabel, a synth we didn’t know (but presumably he did) or preserving Leo, his brother, who we know he truly loves. Max, because he’s been elected leader of the railyard, has to set aside his own feelings and choose to sacrifice the person who is, objectively speaking, in the least danger. Christabel is moments from certain death. Leo has about a one-in-three chance of survival. Numerically, the answer is obvious: he should save Christabel, so he does.

To what extent is Laura’s choice comparable to Max’s? Well, although she doesn’t have a computer brain to tell her the percentages, it’s pretty clear from Laura’s viewpoint that the old man is in more danger than Sam is! We happen to know that Anatole doesn’t mind sacrificing the odd fellow-synth here and there to get his point across (RIP Agnes) but all Laura knows is that he’s a purist who’s asking her to set one species above the other.  Clearly, he favours his own kind, or he wouldn’t be here. Out of the two possible victims, Sam has a higher claim on Anatole’s mercy.

Both Laura and Max choose to sacrifice the person who means the most to them personally, and because of that choice both of them risk losing others who love both victim and decision-maker: Max and Mattie’s friendship (which used to be about hugging on sight, remember) is in tatters, and he gets serious words from his big sisters about it too. Laura is making this choice in the sight of Toby, Sophie and Joe, and we see at least two of them shunning her for it later.

Both Laura and Max choose to save the person who they think needs saving most. And in both cases, nobody ends up dying. So technically, both of their tactical decisions paid off.

There’s another similarity between Max’s choice and Laura’s, though, and this one’s particularly fascinating because it’s actually a difference. Both situations have been orchestrated by Anatole. (Whether this is a particular hobby for Anatole or just something he saw work once and decided to use again… perhaps remains to be seen.)

Max, though, has no reason to suspect that Anatole is playing him. He is content to take Anatole’s word for it that (a) Christabel really is dying, (b) Leo really does have a chance and (c) there is absolutely no other way to save Christabel than to redirect the power from Leo’s ventilator. Sorry, guys, what are these lights doing on? You really couldn’t get power from anywhere else, huh? (And gruesome as it may be, especially since one of them’s Flash, but…  there are at least two synths lying around the place who aren’t using their batteries any more. If Anatole’s such a whizz surgeon, couldn’t he do some transplanting? No?)

Because Anatole seems so trustworthy, and has even built up his apparent reasonableness by acknowledging Max’s mysterious attachment to Leo and expressing regret that it should come to this, Max doesn’t second-guess him at all. Looking back at the scene now, we can see obvious hallmarks of Anatole’s manipulation. In a very dark retrospective twist, we might even suppose that he was the one who ordered Flash’s escorts to desert her in the town, thus leaving Max extra vulnerable. Anatole was the one who’d asked her to go on a supply run without Max’s authorisation, after all.

Laura, on the other hand, is acutely aware that she’s being manipulated. Anatole is not a trusted friend - he’s come into her life as a marked villain. And this takes us on to point 3: was she merely choosing the option that would most likely resolve the situation?

Unlike Max’s choice, Anatole hasn’t even tried to dress this one up as a real life-or-death issue. Nobody has to die. He’s being pretty open about the fact that it’s a question of morality, not medicine. There’s no logical reason for this choice to be made at all – especially since Laura is fighting for synth equality, not synth supremacy. It’s completely and utterly fabricated, and Laura and Anatole both know it.

So what should she do? Argue for a third option, like “neither!” or “take me instead?” Either of those would have been a lovely gesture, and I’m sure we were all thinking it while watching. “Neither” is, ethically, the correct response to the question, and “take me” is the one that seems most like the person we know Laura to be – courageous and compassionate.

But she’s also not stupid! 

Of course she considers this. Come on, now. Of course she thinks about trying to outwit Anatole. She’s a lawyer by trade. She relies on her ability to out-logic her opponent on a day-to-day basis. But how often, in the past, has she faced someone who honestly intends to commit cold-blooded murder in her own living room?

Well, once, actually. 

When Hester paid a visit in 2.8, Laura tried valiantly to talk her down. She did exactly what we’re asking her to do in 3.6. She delivered some series-best dialogue, some really hard-hitting, beautiful lines of logic, and what happened? Did Hester suddenly go, “Oh, you’re right, humans are wonderful! I do apologise, here, have your neck back?”

No. Laura’s attempts to reason with Hester only escalated the situation. Hester went from scarily-but-calmly waiting for Leo to arrive to literally brandishing a weapon in Laura’s face, all because Laura tried to go all lawyery on her.

So, faced with a similar showdown: is Laura going to risk it? Is she really going to try and talk Anatole down? Because let’s remember that with Hester, all Laura had to lose was her own life – they were the only two people present. This time, two of Laura’s children are watching, and so is their father. Wouldn’t it be so much better to end the situation before Anatole gets really mad and starts picking people off? He’s come with a miniature army – what’s to stop each of his lackeys getting hold of a Hawkins throat and pressing down until Laura stops wailing “take me! take me!” and changes her answer to one of the actual options?

Nothing! This is a very scary situation! Anatole is clearly not going to be reasoned with. Were he a reasonable person, he wouldn’t be here asking her to choose a side as a test of equality. Anatole, honey, that’s the literal opposite of what equality is.

Which he obviously knows. Because really it all comes down to that line of his: “You’ve already made your decision”. While Laura quite possibly hasn’t, at this point, done anything of the kind, that line makes it obvious that Anatole doesn’t want to test her, he wants to prove himself right! He doesn’t, for one single instant, think that she is going to do anything but what he’s scripted for her.

So she can’t choose the invisible third option. It’s definitely going to have to be one or the other. All right, so who should Laura choose?

Let’s say she does what we secretly wish she’d done, and picked the old man. For a start, there’s tonnes of horrifying ways that could go down, involving the types of blood geysers that put an end to Helen Aveling and Pete Drummond (RIP, guys). Laura obviously doesn’t want to see that, and she certainly doesn’t want Sophie to witness it.

And since this so clearly isn’t what Anatole wants her to do, even the chance that it’s a bluff might not be enough to save the old man. Imagine, okay, let’s imagine she points a finger and says “Old McOld”. (I really wish they’d given us a name for the sake of this essay, but I see that it was a very artsy decision not to, adds to the whole anonymity vs. familiarity angle, hmm yes very clever)

Laura putting one synth before one human isn’t going to prove SQUAT about humanity in general. (Hester again: “Our existence is meaningless to all but a few out of billions…”) Choosing that option is going to make Anatole angry, because he’s come here to be proved right and he’s damn well going to prove himself right. If Laura tries to make a stand for what (we presume) she actually believes (that Sam’s young life IS more worthy of preservation than the old man’s, by virtue of his greater potential for a future) then Anatole, like Hester before him, is not going to suddenly beam and say, “Thank you, Laura, you’ve shown me the error of my ways.”

He happens to believe Laura won’t practice what she preaches anyway, but even if she, personally, does put Sam first… What, suddenly all humans are fine? No, his whole point is based on Laura being an outlier. So really if she tries to prove him wrong she’s just prolonging the (very dangerous) situation.

Anatole will almost certainly push her to switch for her “true” answer, the one he wants her to go for. Personally, I don’t think he’s even considered what he’ll do if Laura chooses to kill Old McOld, because he’s so sure she won’t, but I can see him having Stanley apply as much pressure as he can, get as close to going through with it as is biologically possible before actually killing Old McOld, to give Laura the longest possible anguish and try and force her to change sides. Anatole claims later that he was bluffing, but I think he was only bluffing so far as he knew what she was going to go for.

On the other hand, if she chooses Sam, then Anatole has made his point. Having manipulated, humiliated and demoralised Laura to the point where her own family can’t even look at her, he doesn’t even need to kill Sam - and as mentioned in point 2, Sam was probably never in that much danger in the hands of a fellow synth, anyway. Choosing Sam is not only the option that is least likely to lead to the death of one of the binary options, it’s also the option that will shut this whole thing down fastest. Remember again that Laura’s family is in the room. One of the lackeys has already made an attempt on Joe’s life. This was never just about saving one of the two people in front of her.

Of course, Laura can’t think any of this out loud, and it’s not a novel so we can’t read her thought process – and, crucially, neither can her family. Like us, they’re looking on in horror but they, themselves, are not the ones being called on to make this choice, so they’re not considering the options as deeply or as quickly as Laura has to. I think she knows full well that they’re going to hate her decision. But having decided that Sam is the most logical choice, she can’t exactly go, “Don’t worry, Soph, I’m sure they won’t actually kill him!”

She could explain it afterwards, of course, but it’s going to sound like making excuses, isn’t it? It’s going to sound weak and defensive, and Laura is anything but weak. So she lets them shun her, she doesn’t shout her reasoning through the door Toby’s just shut in her face, because she understands why he’s feeling like that, why it’s better for Toby and Sophie to grieve about it together before she asks them to see things from her point of view.

Nothing Laura did in that room, from the moment they opened the door to Anatole, was going to make the tiniest difference to Anatole’s hatred of humans – except maybe to heighten it. The safest, most logical thing to do was not to hedge, not to pull the concept apart, but to accept it as the binary choice he demanded and just choose what he wanted her to choose.

Of course, in this case, the safest choice was also the most painful. She runs the risk that Joe and the children will never understand what she did, or that she or one of them will die before a reconciliation – that’s the world they’re living in now. So even though she may have chosen the option that gives her the most peace of mind, it’s not… it’s not a LOT of peace of mind, is it? So of course she leaves her phone and keys and flees into the night.

I started out so angry with her, but I’m coming around to the idea that she really did think this through, and her thought process wasn’t “Sam’s a machine and we aren’t”. I don’t want it to be that. I believe in Laura Hawkins and I always will.

PS. i love debating this subject but please don’t reply to this post with any speculations about episode 7′s Big Ole Death, because I’m trying really hard not to find out beforehand! For once lol 

[revolutionary-pirate]

Thomas Paine to James Hutchinson - March 11th, 1781, The Account of His and John Laurens’ Voyage from America to France.

“Our setting out was favorable, until the Thursday night, which was accompanied with a circumstance that will not be easily worn from our memories. It was exceedingly dark and we were running eight or nine miles an hour till about nine at night, when from a sudden tremulous motion of the ship attended with a rushing noise, the general cry was that she had struck, and was either a ground or on a rock. The noise and the motion increased fast, but our apprehensions were in a short time abated by finding ourselves surrounded with large floating bodies of ice against which the ship was beating. This was in about latitude 45 and longitude 55 as you will see by the chart. We sounded to find our depth of water, but the lead and line were carried away. However, a second trial gave us the satisfaction of finding no bottom. The wind increased to a severe gale, and before we could take in the sails one of them was torn in two. Nothing could now be done but to lay the ship to and let her take her chance. The ice became every moment more formidable, and we began to apprehend as much danger from it as when we first supposed ourselves on ground. The sea, in whatever direction it could be seen, appeared a tumultuous assemblage of floating rolling rocks, which we could not avoid and against which there was no defence. The thundering attacks, that were every moment made by those massy bodies on the ship’s sides, seemed as if they were breaking their way in. About eleven o'clock our larboard quarter gallery was torn away. Happily for Col. Laurens he had quitted it about a minute before, and the pleasure occasioned by his escape made us for a while the less attentive to the general danger. In this situation, dark, stormy, and plunging in an unguided ship to we knew not where, we remained from nine at night till four in the morning. The wind was sufficiently high to have made our condition serious, but to be dashed every moment against a succession of icy rocks, to which there appeared no end, and of whose extent no judgment could be formed, nor yet of the magnitude of these we had still to encounter, made our situation both dangerous and uncommon. About four in the morning we began to hear the agreeable noise of the water round the sides of the ship and felt her roll easily, which to us were the welcome tokens of escape and safety. As we were near eight hours in the ice and made considerable headway, the extent of it I suppose to be about 20 miles. The next morning we were in sight of an island of ice which appeared out of the water like a mountain, how many of these we might pass in the night, or how near, the darkness prevented our knowing.

A few days after this, as you will see by the chart, we had a glorious breeze which carried us from nine to twelve miles an hour for seven days; on the last of which we saw to sail and chased; but finding each of them nearly as large as the alliance we stood our course, and they in their turn chased us, and as they sailed very unequally we expected to reduce the affair to single actions, but this the foremost prudently declined by discontinuing the chase. All the passengers turned out as marines of whom Col. Laurens had the command.

The next day we again saw two sail and chased, one was a large ship the other a cutter, and as we approached we perceived the large one to be under the command of the smaller, by which we concluded it was her prize. When we got within a league, the smaller one quitted and stood different course. We bore away for her, and she not being able to get off, lay to and waited our coming. She proved to be a Scotch cutter of ten guns, Russel, Commander, and eight days from Glasgow. About two hours before we appeared in sight she had fallen in with the above ship, an unarmed Venetian having not a single gun mounted either for defence or offence, and bound from London to Venice; which, contrary to every principle of justice, honor, or ability, she had made a capture of, put the crew in irons and was convoying her to Glasgow. What pretence they might have formed to support the capture is not easy to guess at. Her cargo was pepper, indigo, glass bottles, and other like articles of merchandise, without a single thing contraband. Capt. Barry put an officer aboard the Venetian for that night to take charge of her till the circumstances could be enquired into, and took the Captain of the Venetian, his son and the pilot on board the Alliance. They supped with us in the cabin, and their joy at being released from their piratical captors seemed beyond their power to express. The son, an agreeable looking youth, crossed his hands and pointed to his ankles to make us understand he had been in irons, and the father, an elderly man of a good appearance, showed a countenance that sparkled with the happiness of his heart, though at that time he could not be affected by anything but a change of treatment and an idea of personal safety.

The next day, when his papers had been examined, the matter enquired into and consulted on, it was the unanimous opinion of the Captain and officers, that the captivation by the cutter was contrary to the rights of neutral nations and could be held in no other light than an act of Piracy, and that the justice of America, and the honor of her flag, made it a duty incumbent on her officers to put the much injured Venetian in possession of his property, and restore him to the command of his vessel, without accepting either recompense or salvage. The opportunity of doing an act of humanity like this, must, to every mind capable of enjoying the chief of human pleasures, that of relieving insulted distress, be esteemed preferable to the richest prize that could have been taken. The finding her in the possession of an enemy might have afforded a ground for detaining her, but as no right can arise out of an original wrong, therefore it became a duty to consider the merits and not the pretenses of the case. Had the opinion of the officers been for detaining her, Col. Laurens, who formed an early judgment of the matter, and was warmly affected by the injuries done to the Venetian, would, from the double motives of humanity and honor, have become their advocate; but as no difficulty arose when the question was proposed by the Captain the occasion of argument was superseded. A certificate was given the Venetian of the case we found him in, and others received from him, which when published will do honor to the new constellation.”

I’ve posted about the ‘Pirate’ encounter before, but it’s nice to see a more in-depth, first-hand account of what went down at the time. It was also nice to see a full description of the night of the iceberg incident. Also, the near-miss with a battle against the ships they’d spotted, considered chasing, but then had to flee from amuses me. And the fact that Laurens had some command of the marines on the ship? That was news to me. One of my favorite parts, though, has to be how Laurens was 100% ready, right from the get-go, to argue on the Venetians’ behalf should the need have arisen because he felt so strongly about their case. 

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 62

When I left the alt. school, I took with me three books unintentionally from the school – which turned out being great for me, and it probably didn't hurt the school too much (in any case I went back and returned them a year later). The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Painted Bird, and Native Son. In a way, I look back at these three books as having a very big impact on who I am, and I suppose it's in part because I think these books are fantastic and in part because books in general were replacing contact with other people. But a lot of my later insight was built off the ideas of the books I read for these years of my life They are hard to put into words. They effected my psychologically.

I was taken to go get my GED – so at least I would have that. I figured it would be easy enough. They in later years set up the tests a lot harder with mandatory classes you had to take for about four months, but when I got my GED it was definitely easy. I arrived early at the LCSC college, was taken down long confusing downstairs twisty college hallways. Most of the rooms were empty and silent. I wondered what schools did with all these empty rooms and facilities. I suppose they all serve a function and may not always  be empty, but they were that morning. I was put into the room they had mistakenly thought I was supposed to go to – and then twenty minutes in they realized I was not there for the courses. I was there to test out and I was in the wrong room. So I was lead into a room where I now had fifteen minutes to finish mathematics testing that I should have had all that other time I wasted in the other room for. Fortunately, I finished and passed it. Not with flying colors mind you, but it got finished. The rest of the tests were essentially basic grammar and being able to assess information that you read tests. I made a day of it, and I got out of there passing. Getting my GED wasn't ideal of course as opposed to a high school diploma, but given the circumstances, I still felt as though I had achieved something. I had at least – some filed away fact about the legitimacy of my basic abilities, and something to show for twelve years of getting up at ungodly hours of the morning to go to school five days a week.

I worried about fighting with my dad. We didn't fight, at least not that fall from what I remember, but I felt especially vulnerable given my new found set of circumstances that basically left me stranded with no future. I no longer had school to go to, or any friends to turn to. The idea of going out and becoming a musician on my own now felt a bit silly. I had to sort of face up to the fact that some of my younger teenage dreams didn't seem quite the same to me as they once had. It felt as though something had come and taken everything away from me. I felt very distant a lot of the time. I felt very alone. In a sense I enjoyed it. At best it had that pleasant tingly feeling of being in a quiet house that has been full of people for several days, and they just left, and now you are alone and you can hear the ticking of the clock and your own heartbeat and everything in the fridge is yours. I guess I was emotionally exhausted. I didn't know who I was really. I mean, I did know to an extent who I was, but I didn't at the same time. This was the first time I think I consciously realized that we can be more than one person when we are by ourselves, if we are with a significant other, coworkers, friends, a grocery store, in a position of authority, with our parents individually and together. I am particularly divided in this regard. There is no telling who I am actually. It can be a little frightening and confusing for me to this day. Identities are very fleeting, but seem very real and unshifting in the ever present moment.

Because of the fact that I was afraid of the emotional violence towards me from my father, I flirted with the idea of moving to my mom's. Allison and David would be left sure, but my mom worked a lot at the nursing home, these really long shifts that nurses sometimes work that are sixteen hours with a small break. I guess there are times when watching over the patients is relatively easy – like you can sit down and stuff, but still – who wants to be at work that long? My mother has/and does volunteer to take absurd amounts of hours whenever she can. She will go several months without a day off at these understaffed facilities. She didn't get paid all that well at the nursing homes she's worked at, but she worked so much that she managed to have money. And when she wasn't working, she was of course doting on her boyfriend Danny. She ended up getting this very cheap rundown apartment on the outskirts of town in some old buildings that were built in the seventies that occasionally got the cops called. It was for the most part quiet. I didn't mind the apartment or the occasional noises of the neighbors, in fact I rather welcomed the sound of people running water. I didn't feel so out of touch or alone. I don't know. The sound of people doing something in the next apartment has always given me this strange tingly sense of comfort.

I would be alone all the time in this apartment when I visited, sometimes for nights on end. There was no internet. We did have about forty channels of cable, most of them totally boring, but seeing as I was raised without television I found it really a step up for me to have it going. I sometimes would watch the History channel when there was history, or I would watch the travel channel or ghost hunting shows. I took a strange comfort in listening to insane religious infomercials in the middle of the night. I surely cannot be the only one that thinks there is something perfectly insane about television. Like, TV rapidly changes the dialogue or the premise for your thoughts. It subconsciously has recreated the thinking patterns of modern man – it's an altered image of our own creating that has taken the reigns and decided to recreate us. The media and it's effect fascinates me. I am not even per say going about that thought on the preconceived notion that television is bad and we should all be doing something else (though we probably should). I am just fascinated about the underlying psychology of it and how mindless it is. It made me feel extremely comfortable and unsettled and mysteriously empty at the same time. I like that madness and I do not.

It was a one bedroom and the bedroom was filled to the top with my mother's boxes – and it would never in my entire time with that place, ever be something you could call a proper bedroom, though people did manage to fit a mattress in there. My mother would sleep on the couch when she was home. She set up a bunk bed in the corner of the living room where I would generally sleep – and Allison and David when they came over. She always blasted the television so loud – and I found that rather frustrating to sleep through. On a good night she would turn it to old movies. So randomly in the night I would hear that old screamy noise from the intense moments of old movies. I would listen to Clark Gable or Bette Davis professing their love, or hear Shirley Temple hear once again that her parent had died and the innocent sobbing that came with that. I rather like old movies and could sleep any old time I wanted now, so it was okay for the most part. But she would also watch Lord of the Rings, and though I sort of like Lord of the Rings okay, it could get a little obnoxious. You would listen to Gimley's lines over and over. How many times did I wake up to Soromon and Gandalf the Grey having it out? She would set it on repeat. I would eventually sneak out of bed and try to turn it off, but as soon as I tried that she would wake up and be cantankerous about it.

I didn't exactly live at my mom's at this point, but I stayed there about half the week most of the time. My father had the internet while my mom did not. My mother didn't even know what the internet was fully, so I could not convince her to spend her money on it. I was mostly divided for this reason. I had to keep up with Sarah and I simply had to tend to my MySpace account. Just thinking of all those MySpace notifications gave me this strong incentive to never want to leave the computer. Having this time to myself though held a lot of value for me as well. It gave me sense of childlike peace I had almost forgot about for the years I had spent in school, living in delirious anger or despair about boys or longing for some big dream of the future. I had forgotten how to enjoy the small details. And in that I had lost my ability to really achieve anything since everything that ends up being big starts out being pretty small. I remember spending hours watching Bob Ross, just like I had when I had been four. I remember Jenni telling me that I was likely going to waste my time when I left school, and maybe she was more right than not, but I had to argue that I needed this time. Or I would listen to Neil Young, who was a new and permanent fixture of my musical existence. I would listen to Down By the River sometimes three or four times in a row. I connected with his guitar style very deeply.

I went to the nursing home with my mom on a couple of occasions. It was a very weird experience. Personal aspects about who my mother actually is to me aside, her working in the kind of jobs that she does really gave me this strong understanding of our society as a whole. Because she worked with the feeble, the mentally disabled, the unstable and the dysfunctional folks that we pay not to see. This is what we do in modern society. We hide it away. Just like we hide from death and decay in most everything we do. It's not something I particularly like to think about either, but we do it to the point of being dishonest with ourselves. We are afraid of it happening to us. I know that European sometimes saw the elderly differently. They were seen as examples of God cursing the wicked, or sometimes those with schizophrenia were seen to be possessed by God, or Lucifer himself. Nazi's would likely have done away with a society that cared for the unwanted and elderly by killing them in many cases had they won World War 2.

I got used to a lot of the elderly patients in the home. The atmosphere in the morning was very strange. These old people were unlike anything I was used to. It fascinated me that they all used to be highschoolers just like I had not long ago been. They had all had lives. And this was the end. One of them would be walking around the room. It would take him forty minutes to make one round. Some of them didn't move or blink anymore. They all seemed highly aware of me though. They all stared at me intently. Their eyes were gleaming with fascination. One old man named Olly who was senile would like his lips sadistically with this mad glint in his eyes as he looked at me. It was the most perverted look I have ever received – but I let it pass realizing his mind was gone. I am sure the teenage Olly would have been horrified by old man Olly's behavior towards women.

There was also an old man named Lou. He had had a stroke that had turned him from a fully functional elderly man who still chopped and brought in his own wood to a sort of vegetable. He would begin speaking randomly in this loud clear voice that was alarming in the quiet room, but it would soon fizzle out into the most insane gibberish I have ever heard. It was language and it was not at the same time. I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it. It always degraded from gibberish into this weird buzzing noise that didn't sound even human. He would be silent then for five minutes before starting up again. I asked my mom about it, and she didn't seem as curious about what he was trying to say. Maybe I am more curious than most, and she had probably seen a lot of old folks come and go and she was pretty used to it.

Allison sometimes went too, but we always went on separate days. I don't know that the facility really wanted my mother's entire family coming in. Allison made friends with this old woman named Raquel. She didn't understand English, but it didn't particularly matter because she didn't understand very much. Her family did come and see her frequently which was good to see. She was a very sweet lady – though very far gone mentally. She would giggle and clap her hands in delight when Allison even used one or two Spanish words. It was also very easy to make her cry. She was afraid of spoons and nobody knew why. Getting her to eat was a challenge.

The old lady that latched onto me was this ninety five year old ex school teacher from I imagine the thirties through seventies named Jenny. It was amazing to look at her and know she had been around for so long. She had been born before world war one. She had been alive when pictures were black and white, and people danced to Al Bowlly and Glen Miller and stuff like that. I was told that she had been a very strict teacher in her day, and she had been a perfectionist. She first came up to me because she wanted me to straighten things in the room. She had lost most of her clarity and could no longer reason very well or speak very much, but she still knew when something was wrinkled or crooked. She was too old to fix these things herself and they must have constantly been eating at her that she no longer had control to do anything about it. So she came up to me and pointed to the corner of the table. The table cloth that was set up was slightly wrinkled. I went over and straightened it. She then started pointing to other tables, to random things in the room that were ever so slightly askew. If it was reasonable, I would attempt it. Occasionally she would point to someone's shirt, or to something hanging up on the ceiling and I would have to gesture that I couldn't do it.

The one thing I ever heard her say was she started calling this one other older woman who was there fat. It was a bit alarming. Jenny was of course too old to scold. The woman in question was this very obese woman who could no longer stand. She wasn't as old as the others were, but she had nobody to care for her and was eventually taken to this home which I imagine was very hard. Jenny would look at this other woman with this bitterness in her eyes, and she would sort of croak, FAT! And she would point at her as though she expected I might be able to do something about it or I would agree with her. I felt a little sheepish and embarrassed. It amused me though to realize that she had probably been that way her entire life. I imagine she had had this prejudice when she was a capable young school teacher. I stated earlier that identities are fleeting, but at the same time can really stick to our core perceptions of the world. It also was amusing to me, because I generally came in wearing a hoodie, and for that reason I could use my hands in my pockets to stretch the hoodie over my own belly. It seemed that in Jenny's mind, as long as there were no wrinkles in the clothing, and you couldn't see the fat, that therefore meant that there was no fat.

Lastly, there was this quiet mysterious woman who always sat in the corner. I never had any dealings with her directly. She was incredibly tiny. I guess she wasn't that old. She was in her early sixties, however, she had drank her mind away. She had once been a San Francisco hippie, well read with a liberal arts degree. But she couldn't put down the alcohol, and it took her mind away. What was really so shocking about her was that she had this flowing beautiful straight shiny hair without a single bit of gray in it. It looked honestly straight from an ad in a magazine. It would have been striking in a crowd of random people my age, let alone, on this vacant old lady in the nursing home. As far as I know, the only person who ever visited with woman was her ex husband, who would come in sometimes baring flowers.

Honestly, my mother was one of the nicer nurses. I never saw any mistreatment of the older folks who lived here, but there was an impatience in the eyes of most of the orderly. Allison eventually had to stop going because she got openly mad at one nurse who was aggressively and angrily trying to make Raquel eat from the spoon that she was afraid of. She started yelling at Raquel which made Raquel cry and throw herself on the ground. The woman was even angrier then, and she kept shouting at Raquel even though it was clear that Raquel didn't understand and had obviously not chosen this for herself. My mother came over and smoothed it over, but Allison ended up getting in this nurse's grill and it was unsaid after that, but my mom stopped bringing us.

I don't know why at this point my mom was dating Danny still. He was completely degrading. The situation was degrading. I didn't particularly care at this point, but it was degrading to watch. She would sometimes come home drunk, and it just seemed sad. She seemed uncertain if he even loved her or liked her at all. He would do the thing where he pushed her away and insinuate that they were no longer a couple, but then when she gave him space, he would call her up in the middle of the night accusing her of cheating on him. He was still cheating on her when he could get away with it. I sort of wanted to punch him in the face. He was still calling her stupid and gaslighting  her. And yet, their meaningless relationship went on and on. I remember once she came to pick Allison and David up on Friday after school to come to her house for the weekend. We went to the store to get our cheap ass dollar store food and cheap ass TV dinners and maybe some cheap ass dollar menu McDonald's (if we were lucky [gross]), and maybe a carton of cheap ass ice cream, and he drove by her house, noticed that the motorcycle helmet he bought her was no longer by her door and accused her of going out on a night ride with some other dude she didn't even know. He kept calling her and demanding she tell him the truth. I felt incensed enough to yell in the background while she was on the phone to confirm that yes, we were with her – it was Friday and that is what we all did on Fridays and in any case it was none of his business. He then accused all of us of being liars.

Soon after this, we were driving her car to go get Allison and David one night. It was getting to be winter  yet again and it got dark early. It was pitch black and probably not even eight pm yet. About four miles out of town with all of us in the car, the vehicle broke down in a very inconvenient place. There was nowhere we could legally park where we wouldn't get towed. We were not strong enough to push the car anywhere. My mother didn't have money to pay for someone to tow the vehicle. We were left in this conundrum. We had no one else to call except for Danny. He was amused and mean spirited about it over the phone. He seemed to want to use this as an opportunity to berate my mother on how worthless and stupid she was, which of course pissed me off, but furthermore was not helpful in any way. In an attempt to maybe bypass having to pay a towing company, my mother decided to push the car into gulch on the side of the road. It wasn't that deep, and she figured it would be cheaper to pay to have it towed out of that one area than it would to pay the money it would take to bring it all the way to the place where they take cars, which was quite a ways away. When Danny came to pick us up, he called my mother stupid for having done this. She then began talking in her pathetic baby talk voice, saying she had made a stupid mistake, and she should have not done that. Which Danny then told her was also a stupid idea. Basically, nothing she could have done was right. She apologized for calling him to have us pick us up, which he then humbly told us all was not a problem since he was 'a nice guy'. But then he just continued to berate her about any of the options. It got to the point where she was cornered and no matter which option she chose, she was stupid for it. He had never been quite so open about his psychological abuse around me before this. I had tried to hold my tongue initially. We all just wanted to get home, come what may – but it was getting to the point where I definitely couldn't listen to this anymore, and I was confused in a very technical way of what he was even trying to say logically. So I was like '..So, like, she couldn't just turn the car back on and continue driving. She had few options given the situation. She had those two options pretty much. There were not any better ones. What is it you think she should have done? I don't know what you are trying to say and I don't appreciate how many times you have called her stupid.' He got really annoyed then and sort of backed off. He low key accused us all of 'ganging up on him'. After this, I don't know that I ever had any personal contact with Danny at all, though my mother continued to see him for a time.

My mother ended up having a bunch of legal troubles for her driving. She had driven for years without insurance.  She didn't drive horribly, but she wasn't always a decent driver either. It started one night while driving back to Lewiston and there was this sting operation in Lewiston that night, about a month after my mother's vehicle had ended up getting towed regardless. We actually got pulled over for going two miles over the speed limit. It was more or less some excuse to pull everyone over. People were getting pulled over left and right and searched. There were a bunch of state police driving about. She not only didn't have proof of insurance on her, but she also didn't have her license on her at the time. My mother seems to not understand cops very well. She started telling the cop about how she was divorced and had to find work that she could barely feed us with on the weekends, and how she worked in nursing homes and had two older daughters and grandchildren and on and on.

The cop looked at her blankly and  bored, with no interest in her life story. I was a bit embarrassed for her actually since he wasn't going to let her off on the basis of anything related to her life as it was. He stated that he would have thrown her in jail if she hadn't had me, David and Allison with her. He wrote her up heavily. He then demanded that I get out of the car to be searched. I don't know that I would have minded on the account that I had nothing on me – though, on looking back. I don't trust that he might have slipped something on me. It would have been highly unlikely, but you never know. Fortunately for me, my mother started getting mad and telling him he was not allowed to search me. I was her daughter and he needed to leave me alone. He was caught off guard, his attitude softened and he complied. So we had to take a taxi home. Which ended up being really awful, because when we were nearly at the apartment, she realized she had left the apartment key and her wallet in her car that she needed to pay the taxi, so we ended up driving all the way back to the car. It costed sixty or seventy dollars.

She ended up driving anyway, and getting pulled over three times. The cop who kept pulling her over liked her car, and wanted her to sell it to him and kept asking every time, so she stood out like a sore thumb when she was commuting. Her fines were enormous. Then she got a  DUI from her drives home from the bar. Which I actually did understand since driving drunk is legitimately awful and dangerous. She eventually started walking home or getting rides which was good I guess. She tried to fight the DUI given she wasn't that high over the legal limit. In her fantastical silly vision of the world, she took this fighting back against her DUI as some kind of courtroom drama where she was going to change history by proving to the courts that the cops were corrupt for collecting money from DUI's and she was innocent and not even drunk. Which didn't work out. All told, I believe she was pulled over in one year period about ten times. Eventually, she got her license back and was insured. But it was a time consuming costly ordeal to say the least. I was in the car with her about six times when it happened, so I started wondering if I was bad luck.

When we weren't getting pulled over, or she was not working, we would sometimes drive up these strange roads that paralleled the Washington side of the Snake River till the sun would go down. In this really hard to describe way, my mother and I have some core similarities even though we function and express ourselves differently. It's not in how we talk (I don't see a lot of my behaviors being all that similar to hers), but I think in an inner self kind of way – like that part of us that exists before there are words to describe it. Like, I can tell that when she looks into the distance at a sunset, she gets that same sparkly delusional romanticism about life that I do. She has the same needs to express herself and live on a certain vibration that is hard for people to understand, feels suppressed by the world – much like I do. And I feel this wasn't something she raised me to be. We didn't do much talking growing up. Like, there is some kind of inner delusional traits that are similar enough to mention. It must be genetic. So even though I know there are elements to my mother that make her a truly awful person – I can't help but feel that kinship. I know what it's like to be one of our kind.

During these mini road trips, she would always want to listen to this Eagles Greatest Hits tape on the tape deck of the van she was driving (she avoided driving her white Camaro now at all costs). I would sing along even though I have never  been quite sure how to feel about the Eagles. On one hand, there is something incredibly cheesy about them. On the other hand, I associate them with a certain love I have for the area I grew up and all the good times I have had with my mother. I hate the culture as well as all the limitations of growing up where I did, but there is a certain love I have for the mountains and greenery of northern Idaho and the dry eastern Washington deserts, the dingy gas stations, the quiet streets at night, the rivers. The sky looks different somehow in every area you are in. I don't know why. Both of us were terrible singers, but it almost made it even funner and I will admit that I never tried to sing well in these situations. One time, skip to years later, we were singing You're So Vain by Carly Simon which was on the radio and for some reason I had a tape recorder in the car with us, and we decided to tape record ourselves singing, just the two of us. So we drove around just singing our hearts out, and we eventually ended up in some strange dead end part of Clarkston. We stopped at an empty church parking lot to listen back to our singing, and though we knew it was going to be bad, neither of us even imagined just how much worse it was than even our lowest of expectation. We both shrieked, and decided to never tell anyone what we had created. This is the first time I have ever mentioned it to anyone as a matter of fact.

I still spent a good deal of time at my father's however. Allison and I would share a bed to stay warm in the winter nights, and we would often talk till midnight or later. I ended up finding The Kink's album, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, and I adored that album, and grew over time to absolutely fucking adore The Kinks as well. It's unnecessary to make this some kind of contest since they are both decent, but The Kinks were so much better than what they ever got credit for. They were theatrical, experimental, I felt that they stayed decent a lot longer than any of the solo Beatles did – or the Rolling Stones. This isn't to say that the Rolling Stones and the Beatles don't deserve their due, but – had the Kinks not been banned from America for inciting a riot I feel like they would be remember with a lot more clarity for much more than just 'You Really Got Me'.

I would space off a lot and a part of me felt like I was almost living a double life. One side of me was here in the present, eating saltines, feeling poor, dirty, futureless, postmodern without prospects, lost and defining myself only by the past and if I let myself think about it – which I did everything I could not to – completely and totally unlovable and pointless in a very fundamental way where every breath I took seemed totally wasted. But there was this other version of me that lived in the 60's. I liked listening to older music, to Bob Dylan and others. I would reminisce about Woodstock when I most certainly was never there in any fashion. I would imagine a world where the late 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's had never happened at all. I tried to experience what living in that new reality of the 60's must have been like. I suppose I grasped the spirit of it to a certain extent. Though in reality obviously, I was never there, and I was/am very much a person from the age I was born in, whether I like it or no.

Winter was very cold that year I remember. My sister's friend's grandfather Harvey, who was mentally challenged and lived at the end of town found this cattle dog outside his house that winter. She was starving and sick. She seemed to have been dropped off by someone to die. Her leg was broken. Harvey had a problem with animals in the town swarming his home since he left food out frequently for some of the cats, and I believe he was afraid of dealing with this poor dog, so he ignored her and refused to feed her – probably taking on a false sense of harshness he gathered from the truckers down at the diner downtown who often bragged of taking unwanted kittens, putting them in a bag, tying that back to a brick and throwing that bag into the icy river. Harvey I suppose really just didn't know how to feel, or what to do in a number of different situations, this being a tragic example. My father didn't like the idea of that poor docile dog dying out there at the end of town, so he volunteered to take her in, and for a time we had a pet dog.

She was a very sweet girl. She was a little skittish, and you could tell that she was afraid of men, who had likely abused her. She never tired of being pet. Her leg was really messed up. It looked as though it had been broken, and had grown wrong, and wasn't very usable. She had a swollen bump on her chest that didn't look good. We tried to wash her, but she just wasn't well enough for a lot of that. And she smelled too bad to be in the house with us. We set up a bed for her in the back room. We gave her an electric blanket to lay in. I named her Pegasus. She didn't resemble the flying elegant mythological horse in any way – in a great many ways, she was the bitter opposite of mythology. A suffering old dog. I tried to pet her and visit her as often as I could. At some point though she stopped getting up. She stopped eating food. Obviously, dogs are natural gluttons so this gave us the strong indication that something was very wrong with her. She began to smell worse and worse. I pet her anyway. It sort of broke my heart. Someone had known she was sick and had decided to dump her to die alone. She was too old to be anyone's exciting new pet. She also didn't smell too good. But she needed to be cared about just as much as any social creature.

Obviously, we had to take her to the animal shelter eventually. I knew it was the right thing to do. She obviously had cancer. She was old, and her leg being broken as it was would be a major challenge. Her body was shutting down, hence the smell. And still, she was so sweet. I sat in the back seat with her, and pet her the entire trip to the animal shelter. She looked lovingly up to me for much of the time, with this glazed over look. I truly believed that dogs feel love. She cared more about being given affection than she cared about food or even her own freedom. When we got to the animal shelter she couldn't walk and this woman who worked at the pound had to grab her and carry her in. I pet her one last time. She looked scared, though I could tell that the people at the animal shelter felt badly for her, since she was such a sweetheart. Honestly, I am fairly confident they put her down. As I waited for my father to make some kind of of final contribution to her welfare, maybe giving the shelter a few weeks worth of food money, I sat in the area with all the caged up cats. There were so many of them. Some of them hissed at me, many looked at my inquisitive and bored. This one cat in particular was yowling for me desperately. Purring and cherishing every spare second of attention and contact that could be had. I felt so bad for all these animals. I know there are a lot of differences between human being's cognitive awareness and animals, but it was easy to tell all of these animals felt abandoned. I imagine many of them never found homes. I also imagine it would be very hard to work in one of these places, being put into a situation where the most financial and humane thing to do would be to put them all down. It really irks me to no end when people get animals and don't take care of them. I hate it when people don't get their cats neutered and spayed. Ignoring all the animals in the wild we ignore as they go extinct, or the slaughterhouses or whathaveyou, we aren't even good to our own pets. Between abandoned pet dogs and cats that people simple , puppy mills, and so on, we bring these creatures into the world that they cannot survive or thrive in on their own, and they suffer. Call me crazy, but I honestly believe in some wild reforms in pet ownership.

That Christmas was probably the best Christmas I ever had. I had professed that all I wanted for Christmas was paints, canvases and brushes. For whatever reason, possibly guilt from the years my father had primarily bought gifts for girlfriends, he spent close to three or four hundred dollars on Christmas just for me. We went to Michael's and he bought me brushes, every color of high quality acrylic paint I would ever need, several different sizes of canvases. He also bought me some art books, for inspiration. They were these strange little books that presented different kinds of Art. One was simply called The Art Book, and the other was 20th Century Art Book. There was a House book, a Face book (of photographed people). It was from these two little books that I would flip through and study for hours that I got some grasp of what it meant to fill a canvas with pure expression. It was to date I think, easily my favorite Christmas besides a few I experienced as a child because I believed in Santa and all that.

We had a perfect Christmas dinner, and my father had thought to get me Blue Velvet. He didn't know very much about David Lynch, but he knew enough to know that David Lynch was something I would really like. And he was correct. He didn't want Allison and David watching Blue Velvet, so he made them close their eyes when Dennis Hopper's character was being a disgusting pervert. Call me weird, but as long as you have good communication with your children, and given they are eight or older, I am not that strict about what children watch. Obviously not just pure out of context snuff films or porn for the most part. Though I am not apposed to strong violence or sex within context of the story. And i imagine it is possible to put context into what you are watching. For instance, you could show when Saddam Hussein was being hung in context to showing what capital punishment looks like. If you want to eat meat, you should watch the full reality of what the animal goes through. It’s painful, but life was never meant to be jolly.

Raising children into being aware adults, I think it's important for them to grasp complex concepts, moral dilemmas and realities of our depravity and fragility mentally and physically. Media can be a great way to show children this stuff - if put into context - i cannot stress enough. Obviously if your child shows strong levels of delusional behavior than perhaps it's not a good idea. If you child suffers from severe anxiety as well perhaps take baby steps. I mean, it’s individual with each case, but more or less i think you should always present the challenge as best you can.I think earlier than eight a child is more or less in strictly monkey-see monkey-do mode, and it's not useful or desirable to confuse them about what is appropriate when they are still learning how to engage with the world as an individual in a fundamental fashion. My father was trying to be decent by telling Allison and David to shut their eyes, but what I thought was funny was the fact that the disturbing Frank Booth scenes were even worse if you close your eyes and simply listen to his lines. God what a fucked up character.

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[mirroredtranslations]

Sodachi Fiasco - Chapter 3

Orokamonogatari – Nisioisin p. 15-21

[Previous Chapter]

The first person to make meringues was incredible, don't you think? Cracking an egg and separating the yoke from the whites is an earth-shattering idea in itself, but to think they'd beat only the whites instead of the yoke, which you can tell at a glance is more abundant in nutrients... There's no way they could have predicted that if they beat just the egg whites, if they kept patiently beating and whipping the egg whites, then it would turn into something like whipped cream, is there? And then they took that tasteless, flavorless thin foam and baked it into a dessert; it's simply astonishing—this is no good.

Rejected, rejected; totally rejected.

Would anyone introduce themselves like that?

If a transfer student greeted people like that on her first day, her nickname would inevitably become “Meringue”—if they could cleverly derive “Renge” from it then that would be quite fortuitous, but rather than bet on a miracle like that, the correct decision would be to not present myself as a weirdo in the first place.

My intention was to act cutesy by saying my hobby was making sweets, but when I tried to show off a strong point of mine, my thought process got out of whack.

Calm down; there's no need to make people think I'm a girl who has weird opinions... well, it might become necessary in certain situations, but I'm not obligated to present my idiosyncrasies to classmates I'll only have for a single month.

Uneventful.

My first priority is to make it to graduation without any of the hardships I encountered at Naoetsu High School; I don't need to display my idiosyncrasies, I need to temper and conceal their presence.

I have to get down from the conspicuous position of transfer student as quickly as possible—I don't need any of those “transfer student tropes” you see all the time in manga.

It's going to be all right. I'm cute, under normal circumstances.

It's true that I've been through hell, but the only person who's hit me in the face is Hitagi Senjougahara.

I actually had some friends at Naoetsu High School. A boy even confessed to me. If I can just keep silent, I should at least be able to meet the vague expectations people have of transfer students.

Just by wearing a uniform, my apparently abnormal fashion sense can be smoothed over.

I just have to avoid doing anything stupid.

Nice to meet you; my name is Sodachi Oikura. I'm sorry for disturbing you by transferring partway through the term. It seems like graduation will be here before we know it, but even so, I look forward to working with you as a member of the class.

That's it. The right banality. Aim to be normal.

Present yourself as harmless and unexceptional.

There's zero need to tell them that I revere the mathematician Euler, much less to request they call me that—I don't have to announce out loud all of the people I idolize.

They'll be disappointed.

“Try to be ordinary” is itself a fairly childish way of thinking, but this is probably what it means to become an adult—not feeling sorry for myself.

Let's rid ourselves of that unproductive self-pity.

As long as I consider myself unfortunate, I'll stay unfortunate my whole life—well, there's no question my life has been laughably unfortunate, no matter how you stretch it to try to interpret it positively. If you probe it too far, you won't want to solve the mystery, but rather to be put out of your misery.(1)

If anyone told me, “It's all in the way you look at things!”, I'd kill them.

However, being unfortunate doesn't mean you can't find happiness. If I find happiness, I'll say “it's all in the way you look at things” too.

I'll rub it in his face.

I'll do anything for that.

...That said, no matter how worked up I get about it, I can't shake this deep-set feeling that's it's all futile, that it's all a waste of effort.

As you can see from my extraordinary disgust and outrageous hatred for him, Koyomi Araragi's presence within me is gigantic; however, the Sodachi Oikura inside of Koyomi Araragi is nothing more than one of many. Not even one of many—maybe nothing at all.

I don't know how many times he's forgotten me.

How many times he's ignored me, or pretended I didn't exist.

Come to think of it, that might have actually been a form of “special treatment”, but that's no reason for me to accept it, and I think he's just fundamentally hopeless.

He's a hero who doesn't even remember the face of the person he saves—even if it's hard for me to understand, after everything I've been through, I have no choice but accept that people like that exist in the world.

It's not just him; all the members of the Araragi family are the same way, and I'm sure the Hakobe couple will be no exception—I'll never be able to be like that, though, nor do I want to be.

Even if I get past this misery and find happiness, he'll just congratulate me with a cheerful, carefree “Good for you!”—that's an extremely vexing prospect.

I ended up thinking about it.

What should I do, how would things have to happen for me to be able to argue him down? I shudder to think that he'll just give me a pleasant and soothing response no matter what I do, and no matter what happens.

But there's one thing of which I'm certain—absolutely certain. If that man found out that I'd become excessively isolated, or caused problems in my new school, he'd be very sad.

Nothing would bring me as much joy as making him feel bad, but, well, I've already done that stuff.

In a way, that would just be what he'd expect.

I don't want him to think, “I guess that's just the way she is.”

Doing well at my new school would be the best way to betray Araragi---the first step toward that goal is to “aim to be normal”.

With a smug look, I'll let him know that being normal is the best way to happiness.

Resolving to make that happen, I arrived at Shishikurasaki Public High School, which was located three stops away from the Hakobes' house.

Before even entering the school, I'd started mixing in with other students wearing the Shishikurasaki uniform on the way; they were unfamiliar... that is to say, these boys and girls seemed somehow different from the students at Naoetsu High School. It might just be my prejudice, but I sensed a certain calmness in their expressions.

At Naoetsu High School, a private, college-prep school, every last one of us was driven, myself included—everyone was on edge. Of course, I enrolled because I had wanted an environment like that, so I have no reason to be critical.

Can people really change this much just from being in a different environment? ...I unconsciously started feeling envious and viewing my surroundings as hostile, but I realized what was happening and hurriedly got myself under control.

This is no good.

I can easily develop an inferiority complex toward anyone and everyone; it's my worst aspect. I know that.

I construct myself by envying others.

How to put it... It takes a lot of courage to accept that you're a good-for-nothing person, which is a pretty sad thing in the first place, but that's probably just what I need right now.

No doubt everyone feels that way to some extent, but as long as I keep thinking this way, I'll never advance even a single step forward.

It's as if I'm standing still, facing backwards.

If you perceive anything and everything to be a competition or a struggle, you'll constantly build up stress. And besides, there's no way the students at this school get on without any stress.

It's not possible.

Stress always starts to build up when people are gathered together, which gives rise to discord. That's precisely why I mustn't be careless.

My isolation in that classroom at Naoetsu High School was due more to arrogance than carelessness, but if I'm negligent, I'll end up committing the same ugly mistakes all over again.

It's not unlikely I'll become a hikikomori again—we might not understand each other yet, but I don't want to make the Hakobes regret taking me in.

I don't know what the future holds.

I think it would be terribly shameless for a freeloader like me to try to go on to college after graduating high school—but actually, such a future is possible for me if I make full use of subsidies and student loans. Those safety nets are strung throughout the world; I just couldn't see them—no, I hadn't even tried to see them.

Naturally, it's hard to feel blessed based on that knowledge alone, but at the very least, I suppose I'm lucky to have been born in a place like this... So, I've got to get the most out of it that I can.

Standing in front of the school gates, lost in thought, I began to feel like I was being glanced at repeatedly by passersby; it might be excessive self-consciousness, or my persecution complex, or perhaps there was something odd about the way I was wearing my uniform.

Although I knew that I was just being looked at for being a nuisance and a bother by obstructing passage, I got an urge to look in a mirror, and in my effort to escape I hastily stepped toward my new school.

It was a disappointing way to take my first step.

Footnotes: (1) The original makes a pun comparing “interpretation” and “seppuku beheading” (both pronounced kaishaku) instead of “mystery” and “misery”.