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knowlesian · 3 years ago

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quick thoughts about the use of Wherever You Go, There You Are as an episode title because i really do think it ties in with the duality of the lighthouse (yes, i said the duality of the lighthouse. i will also be screaming about the goddamned lighthouse later believe you me) and the reason why this episode ended on stede’s hope and not ed’s despair and that really fucking matters.

okay so! ‘wherever you go, there you are’ is one of those litmus test statements where the meaning you pull from it depends on your own personal shit.

on one hand, it’s an acknowledgment that we can never truly hide or run away from the things that are eating us alive and keeping us up at night. wherever you go, there you are. your past, your demons. your ex-almost who kissed you back and cracked you open when you exposed your soft underbelly then left you there to bleed out into the sand. you know! typical gay pirate stuff.

so that’s obviously where ed’s at when the series ends. he’s got his adorable trash panda facepaint instead of breakup bangs, he’s thrown away his delusions of deserving finer things along with the scrap of red silk. he’s removed everything that would remind him ed still lives inside blackbeard (save the lighthouse, oh the DUALITY) and he is gonna be the goddamned krakeny-est kraken the world has ever seen. just you fucking watch him stede!!! and so on.

pretty fucking depressing, BUT WAIT.

Wherever You Go, There You Are is also a self-help book from the 90′s by jon kabat-zinn about mindfulness. the granular details aren’t super important here but given stede’s the character we end on and the rule of good writers care about scene placement, i think the overall message of the book matters and tells us where this story is going next for ed and stede.

honestly, let me just drop a quote from it here.

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that’s what you’ve wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that’s what’s on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, “Now what?”

so yeah: now what? to answer that question, we have to look at stede.

while ed’s hanging out in the belly of the whale because stede abandoning him is literal worst nightmare material, stede left because chauncey took his own worst fears out and put them on parade. (this writing team, man. fuck 'em all, what absolute monsters i love them but i just wanna talk, etc.)

left to his own devices ed spiraled off into fuckin’ izzy’s waiting arms and that’s ten kinkmeme fills in a trenchcoat and i love it, but i digress. ed ran to his evil ex, but thank god stede ran straight to mary and tried to correct what he assumed was his original sin: leaving at all.

and since mary is not an evil ex, she’s a fucking baller, she sets stede right. of all the things he fucked up, leaving’s not on the list. leaving the way he did, yes, but leaving to become a pirate was the best choice he’s ever made in his life. i’ve got a lot of feelings about the way mary functions both as a guide out of the darkness and autonomous character who gets to point out how hard she got fucked over that are (sing it with me) for another post, but essentially the symbolism of the way stede’s honesty set him free and the whole family participating in the fuckery after that is killing me.

all that is to say: ed’s still lost in the dark but stede, who has vacated the belly of the beast and literally killed the man he used to be, is ready to fight to drag ed back out. we can spin the metaphor wheel: stede has shed his skin, left the cocoon to become his truest bizarre butterfly self, he has entered and exited the underworld, he is an ex-ex pirate. even better, with mary’s help and her blessing tucked in his back pocket when he left he didn’t look back.

so, having passed go and collected his 200 emotional literacy dollars, stede has followed Wherever You Go, There You Are’s advice. he asked himself “now what?” and his now what is ed, so he’s off to tell the man he loves about the life he’s found outside the cave.

stede is about to be this man’s flashlight AND his treasure map. it’s gonna be so, so good.

#our flag means death #ofmd spoilers #blackbonnet #i spun the metaphor wheel and i chose EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.#honestly everyone is lucky this post isn't just all caps #i'm so fucking HYPED #god i just have so much to fucking say about this show where do i even start????#i need to talk about jim and olu and why lucius is alive literally zero chance he is dead #z e r o #anyway yeah #i gotta go like... eat food.#but then more screaming.#also if you didn't hear 'oh the DUALITY' like i was yelling oh the HUMANITY #you should have.#because i did #my ofmd meta #the silly/genius intersectional muppet extravaganza

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astudyinfreewill · 4 years ago

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penny for your thoughts.... do you think adam would still have been into ronan and/or wanted to be with him if he hadn't known already that ronan was interested in him first? I wonder sometimes how much of adam's feelings were reactionary at first or if he would have still fallen for ronan on his own without that push

oh hey there! sorry this is so late, but i had a lot of thoughts for this one, haha.

the short answer:

adam already was into ronan, probably as far back as trb, despite not acting on it; and while ronan being into him surely couldn’t have hurt, i don’t think it’s what pushed him over the edge.

the long answer:

there are three premises i should make here. 1- it’s pretty clear from adam’s narration that he’s far from indifferent to ronan, even in early books (hello, “savagely handsome”? “black-painted poetry”? those are not exactly casual descriptions of his friend). 2- it’s also apparent to me that adam must have already known he was bisexual/not straight pre-series (see: complete lack of questioning his sexuality and/or reflecting on it, and this is from a character who overanalyses and stresses out about everything). 3- adam probably knew ronan was not straight long before ronan even admitted it to himself (see the infamous double-entendre in trb and his wry comment about piper not being ronan’s type).

so why did he never act on it?

well, imo: common sense and self-preservation.

firstly, as a boy living in the deep south with a violent, homophobic father, entering a queer relationship is dangerous. plus, it isn’t like this precludes him the opportunity to date altogether: being bisexual, he has the option to date girls, which is both something he’s interested in and something that enables him to “pass” (yeah, i hate that word too) as straight. in short, dating girls is both safer and something he wants to do anyway - he’s immediately taken with blue, after all, and we see he’s not exactly shy in asking her out.

secondly, even if he were to decide to date a boy, ronan would be - to quote adam himself - the most difficult option. of course when adam says that, he just means that ronan is a deeply committed, fiercely monogamous romantic with a sharp-edged personality and a dangerous magical secret. but in trb and tdt, ronan really is the most difficult option in a whole other sense: he’s crippled by grief and guilt, struggling with depression and suicidal ideation, using self-destructive coping mechanisms like drinking and car-racing, and generally speaking, rather unstable and violent. that would be a lot to take on for anyone, and especially for someone like adam, whose home life is already unstable and violent, and who has it so hard in every other aspect of his life. he’s at capacity; he’s barely staying afloat. he can’t afford to keep ronan afloat too (“emotional costs”, anyone?). in fact, for a trb adam, gansey would be a much safer romantic option (and yes, adam is clearly a bit taken with him, even though it all falls apart by tdt).

in short, i think there were plenty of things holding adam back from exploring his feelings for ronan in the first two books. by bllb, ronan has broken free from his destructive self-loathing, and is altogether much nicer to be around and bolder in his appreciation of adam - but i still don’t think ronan being visibly interested in him is a make-or-break factor. in fact, though adam is clearly already aware of ronan’s interest in him at the end of tdt, it takes him almost two whole other books to decide to go for it. this is for several reasons, most of which have to do with adam’s crippling lack of self-esteem. first of all, he can barely believe that ronan would be interested in him, of all people, even when everything suggests that he is. he goes as far as to think it’s vanity and arrogance to even think ronan might like him - that’s how bad his self-image is.

but secondly, and most importantly, adam has no faith in his own ability to love - and that is what holds him back until the end of trk. by the middle of the book, there’s no question ronan is interested in him - he kissed him, after all - and no question that adam is interested too, since he kissed him back. but because adam knows how much ronan goes all-in in his relationships, and because he cares so much about him, he wants to avoid hurting him in any way. that’s why he asks gansey about love - not because he doesn’t feel it, but because he needs validation that his feelings are good enough. him asking gansey is the culmination of this process, but it’s something adam has been struggling with throughout the series: his own self-loathing, his belief that he’s broken and ugly and dirty, his deep-rooted fear that he can’t love people because he’s never received love from his family, and therefore isn’t confident in his ability to recognise and express it.

in conclusion, i believe that while it was certainly comforting and flattering for adam to find out ronan liked him, it does his character a disservice to assume that his feelings for ronan are just a reaction to someone having a crush on him and he wouldn’t have fallen for ronan otherwise. rather, adam did develop feelings for ronan on his own, but before he acted on those feelings, he had to learn that he is capable of accepting and giving love; which, in my mind, is adam’s truest arc of the series.

#adam parrish #ronan lynch #trc #pynch #trc meta #meta #answer #bumblegremlin #my meta

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9layerdevilfoodcake · 4 years ago

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Michael Langdon x Reader - The Gaga-verse

I was doing my daily listening to Lady Gaga and got the idea of writing a series of fics (mostly one shots) based on every song off of the ‘Born This Way’ album. Some based off lyrics, some just the feelings the song gives me. This is what I’m thinking so far

Marry The Night: By the title alone I feel like this has to be a vampire!Michael fic. Very “The Only Lovers Left Alive” style.

Born This Way: I’d love to break down Michael’s character and see what about him comes from nature and what’s from nurture, and see how the reader can learn to love the parts of him he can’t control.

Judas: I want to explore the idea of Michael finding his own Apostles and when/where he would find them. Here I think the reader would be his truest confidant and the only one to love him before his father. Alternatively I’d love to write a little ‘Master and Margarita’ thing but I think that’s a little too much to take on for a one shot.

Hair: Fun and silly/stupid one shot about going to the hair salon with Michael before the apocalypse and picking a style for the New World (yes he will try raccoon highlights). -I’m also obsessed with making it canon that Outpost!Michael is wearing a wig, so I’m tempted to make that a reality here lol

Scheiße: I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I’m thinking it’s gonna involve speaking in tongues for a hot sec lol

Bloody Mary: There are almost too many places this could go. Right now I’m thinking maybe a revenge fic. “I won’t cry for you, I won’t crucify the things you do”

Bad Kids: I’m not sure the plot for this yet but I know it just screams grunge!Michael. I also feel like this could work into a plot I’ve thought about where you and your family are the “new owners” of Murder House, and having a messed up version of a meet cute when Michael tries to kill you.

Highway Unicorn (Road to Love): I’m thinking it follows Michael and you in parallel as you question yourselves and where/what you should do, maybe an overlap in sojourn (but I also could see this taking place post apocalypse as a 'Mad Max’ type of journey). All climaxing around “Get your hot rods ready to rumble 'Cause we're gonna fall in love tonight”

Electric Chapel: (This is the one that started the whole thought process, so I have most of it plotted out already) I'm thinking a forbidden romance between Hawthorne!Michael and witch!reader. Starting out being told through secret meetups at an abandoned church. I can’t even narrow down a couple lyrics for examples because they all just give me so many ideas.

The Queen: Pretty self explanatory I think. What it would be like to rule the New World (or alternatively Hell) by Michael’s side

Yoü And I: Starts with Michael coming to find you after the Apocalypse “it’s been two years since I let you go” and then most is him reminiscing on your relationship and what he’s been doing while he waited to reunite with you. Think “Sit back down on the couch where we made love the first time and you said to me” and “I couldn’t listen to a joke or a Rock and Roll”

The Edge of Glory: I’m thinking tragic romance, maybe some star crossed lovers

Black Jesus + Amen Fashion & Fashion of His Love:

These two I’m not sure about. Mostly because I already have some plans for quotes from these in “I Hope They Serve Looks In Hell”

Americano, Government Hooker & Heavy Metal Lover- still not sure yet, open to any and all ideas

In hopes of giving myself some forceful motivation I’m not going to start these until I finish this next chapter of HelloGoodbye, since I keep promising it’ll be done soon. I also wanna do a little more research since I know a couple of these concepts have similar themes to ones already written and I want to make sure I don’t step on any toes of writers before me. But I wanted to put these ideas out there. So if anyone had any good ideas for the songs I don’t have plans for yet and want to share you’re thoughts with me please do! (also while I’m here, thank you to all the people who said such nice things about my other writings, be that messages, comments, or tags. You all have been so kind to me and kept me so inspired!!)

#michael langdon x reader #ahs apocalypse #michael langdon

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megashadowdragon · 4 years ago

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coldhands identity is brave danny flint

Could Coldhands be Brave Danny Flint? It sounds crackpot, and very likely is, but the more I thought about it the more it appealed to me. I've done a quick search, one or two people seem to have floated this before but it's never had much in-depth analysis. This is my first meta, so please be gentle and C&C welcome.

The Gender Agenda To start with, I'll start with the elephant in the room - Danny Flint was a girl, Coldhands is male. Or is he? Gilly, Meera, and Bran all refer to him as male, but they have no idea who he is, so would see Night's Watch clothes and assume. He wears a scarf over his face, and while they can see his eyes and that his face is pale, it took Bran's gang a decent amount of time to work out he was a walking corpse, so I'm not sure I trust them to figure out niceties like gender. Leaf's "They killed him long ago" is more of a problem - she's a colleague, she would probably know. My best defence is that maybe Children of the Forest don't do gender in the same way as humans? This feels like a reach, but we have had another magical species with sexual fluidity leading to trouble with pronouns in the series. Otherwise, Leaf tends to hang out in the cave, Coldhands can't get in, maybe they're just not that close. Finally, the main person to ask - Coldhands his or her self. The only other post I could see on reddit about this theory had someone respond with the quote "Once the heart has ceased to beat, a man's blood runs down into his extremities, where it thickens and congeals. His hands and feet swell up and turn as black as pudding. The rest of him becomes as white as milk", but I'd point out this is in third person and a generalization - "a man", not "me, Coldhands, the man".

Okay, now I've convinced everyone my theory is terrible, let's get into the meat of it.

Hands cold as stone This was what got me into this rabbit hole in the first place - House Flint's sigil is "A grey stone hand upon a white inverted pall on paly black and grey". A stone hand would be pretty cold, right? In point of fact, when we first met Coldhands, the final line of the chapter describes "fingers hard as stone." On top of that, the white and black background seems to fit the Night's Watch blacks, pale face, black hands, white snow, etc.

Who the hell else could it be? This has always been the weird thing about Coldhands for me. Honestly, there's a very good chance this is a non mystery mystery, he's a zombie Night's watch ranger riding an elk, do we really need a secret identity? However, "who is Coldhands?" is one of the most commonly asked questions in the fandom, so let's assume it's getting an answer. We know: a) night's watch member b) killed a long time ago, as reckoned by a 200 year old, c) not Benjen. There are essentially 3 historical periods where we know any specifics about the Night's Watch: 1) the long night/age of heroes, 2) Targaryen era, 3) recent history. If we work through these backwards, we can pretty much rule out the recent era for not meeting the criteria of "killed a long time ago". The Targaryen era didn't have much Night's Watch drama, a few kings sent to the wall at Aegon's conquest, Raymun Redbeard's invasion is wall related but the whole point of that story is that the Night's Watch failed to really get involved... the only strong contender from this period is a mysterious magical Targaryen bastard who went to the wall and went missing... but he's the other mysterious good zombie wandering around up north. The long night has a lot of Night's Watch focus, but it was 10,000 years ago. Allowing for this being in-universe exaggeration, it's still ~2,000 years ago, and if Coldhands were that old, I'm not sure he'd be in elk-riding mutineer-killing form, or at least not look passably human to Bran and co. This rules out specific timeline characters, which leaves more folkloric characters like Danny Flint, who isn't associated to any one point in time. There's a song, and she's treated as a well-known tale, which implies a fairly long time, but overall could be whenever. This works for any of the folkloric Night's Watch characters, but the Rat King is already otherwise occupied with a different cannibalistic pseudo immortality, leaving Mad Axe, who does have the massacring fellow brothers down pat, but doesn't feel thematically right to me. This section really grew in the writing, but TL;DR - assuming Coldhands is someone we've heard of before, no specific historical figures seem to match up chronologically, leaving figures from folk tales and songs, which there are only so many of.

Mutineer Massacre For a character we've all obsessed over so much, it's easy to forget how little we've seen of Coldhands. His role in the story has effectively been "transport Sam and Gilly to the wall, transport Bran and co to Bloodraven, massacre the Night's Watch mutineers". Hold up, one of those things is not like the others. During his quest to get Bran to Bloodraven, to awake the messiah and save the world, Coldhands takes a break and makes a detour to kill the Night's Watch Mutineers from Crasters. This is explicitly noted to be something they slow down for, when time is critical. Admittedly, it secures the party some delicious Long Pork when supplies are low, but even in aDwD it seems like there are other ways to get meat than to hunt humans, besides which he kills not one but five mutineers. He claims it is because the mutineers are following them, but Meera points out they've been circling for days - it seems Coldhands deliberately sought the mutineers out. The brutality of the kills also suggests more than utilitarian pragmatism - there are entrails slung through branches and severed heads! All of this to say, Coldhands is deliberately shown as both a member of the Night's Watch, and willing/going out of his way to punish Night's Watch brothers who break their vows and harm their fellow brothers, something Danny Flint might take personally. Basically, it's a classic exploitation movie with an elk-riding zombie as the wronged woman hunting down wrongdoers. Someone call Tarantino to direct this.

A True Night's Watch One of the big themes GRRM loves is the idea that outsiders to an institution can be the truest embodiment of that institution - Dunk and Brienne are the truest Knights, Davos is the truest lord, the Manderlys are the most loyal northerners. Coldhands already seems to tie into this - the Night's Watch are tireless defenders from the Others and their Wights, so ironically the staunchest ranger is undead as well. It would only emphasise this theme if this ultimate Night's Watch ranger was someone who was barred from entry, had to sneak in, and was murdered by their brothers for not belonging. There also seems to be a thematic tie in that Danny Flint had to essentially infiltrate the Night's Watch and keep her cover in hostile terrain, much like Coldhands in the Others controlled north.

Bonding over being murdered by your brothers Coldhands has so far been very much one of Bran's cast, but it's worth noting characters can switch storylines, and we have someone else in the North who can soon relate to being a back-from-the-dead Night's Watchman fighting the Others - I'm hardly the first to note the Coldhands/Jon parallels, but Coldhands being another character who was murdered by the Night's Watch due to their conservatism and hatred of outsiders would add another layer.

Miscellany A couple of quotes I found while researching for this: “Did Mance ever sing of Brave Danny Flint?” “Not as I recall. Who was he?” (ADWD Jon XII) - Tormund and Jon talking, Tormund mistaking Danny Flint for a man, this feels like one of those throw-away lines GRRM likes to include to make a little double meaning once the truth is out, or just seeding the idea of mistaking Danny Flint for a man. “The ranger wore the black of the Night’s Watch, but what if he was not a man at all?" (ADWD Bran I) - again, I could see GRRM giggling as he typed that if this theory were true.

Conclusion Honestly, there is every chance this is absolute nonsense, and I've just lost it waiting for TWoW. I tend to lean towards Coldhands not having a big identity reveal, he's an undead ranger co-opted by Bloodraven and that's enough. However, if Coldhands is to have an identity reveal, I think Danny Flint deserves consideration: there aren't that many viable candidates, her story is emotionally intense enough and has been referred to often enough that a casual fan could be expected to go "oh!" instead of "...let me google that", and it would fit with existing themes of the story. The angle of Jon parallels even gives an opening for the reveal to be natural and facilitate character and thematic arcs, which is what I look for in a theory.

comment on reddit

Yeah, the Flint (of Flint's Finger) sigil literally being a Cold Hand is what sold me on this when I started looking into it. There's also some other intriguing textual stuff about it...

The weird thing about Danny Flint is that she is only mentioned three times in all of ASOIAF. Three! Bran recounts her tale in Bran IV, ASOS; Theon hears Wyman Manderly demand her song in The Prince of Winterfell, ADWD; and Jon discusses her tale with Tormund in Jon XII, ADWD.

This was kind of shocking to me. Danny Flint is a pretty recognizable name to, I’d figure, the majority of attentive readers. I thought she must have been mentioned before the third book, at least, but… nope. Her tale is first introduced to us in Bran IV, ASOS, the Nightfort chapter… Oh, what’s that? Wait, isn’t that… the very same Nightfort chapter where we first hear about Coldhands? (Well, no, actually, he appears at the end of Samwell III before that, but this is the first chapter where he is identified as Coldhands.) Chronologically, Sam meets Coldhands, Bran thinks about Danny Flint, and then Sam introduces Bran to Coldhands, in fairly quick succession.

So it seems GRRM came up with Danny Flint and Coldhands around the exact same time. Interesting. Danny Flint is then not mentioned again until ADWD, when the Coldhands mystery is developed further. Double interesting.

Also, the Bran chapter directly preceding the Nightfort chapter– our first introduction to Danny Flint– is the one where Meera tells him the story of the Knight of the Laughing Tree, another tale of a northern warrior woman dressing as a man and hiding her face in service of some greater goal. Stretch? Maybe.

And why would Coldhands' face be covered at all if there WASN'T some big reveal upcoming? What utility would that have? That scarf clearly seems like a setup for SOMETHING. He doesn't need it for warmth. He's likely hiding a face that would make him recognizable to Bran/Meera/Jojen (and the readers), but died long ago... the only way that reveal could work without a ton of laborious exposition is if he took off the scarf and it was obviously a 'female' face, making it obviously Danny. It also seems likely Coldhands will interact with at least Bran and Meera again, both of whom are somewhat connected to Danny Flint’s story– Bran via his love of stories and legends, and Meera via the breaking of gender roles. So there's thematic levels to it as well.

source www . reddit . com/r/asoiaf/comments/llwm8m/coldhands_identity_spoilers_extended/

#asoiaf #A Song of Ice and Fire #asoiaf theories #asoiaf theory #asoiaf coldhands #danny flint

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thevividgreenmoss · 4 years ago

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...The sense that postmodernist appropriation of non-European histories and texts would be the inevitable result of postmodernist dominance within the Euro-American academe - had been there much earlier, virtually inscribed in the very making of that dominance, and one of the earliest to read the signs was the Indian feminist scholar, Kumkum Sangari, in her essay 'Politics of the Possible,' published in 1987 but first drafted, judging from the footnotes, three years earlier. Toward the end of that essay, she speaks first of what she calls

the academised procedures of a peculiarly Western, historically singular, postmodern epistemology that universalizes the self-conscious dissolution of the bourgeois subject, with its now famous characteristic stance of self-irony, across both space and time.

She then goes on:

postmodernism does have a tendency to universalize its epistemological preoccupations - a tendency that appears even in the work of critics of radical political persuasion. On the one hand, the world contracts into the West; a Eurocentric perspective (for example, the post-Stalinist, anti-teleological, anti-master narrative dismay of Euro-American Marxism) is brought to bear upon 'Third World' cultural products; a 'specialized' scepticism is carried everywhere as cultural paraphernalia and epistemological apparatus, as a way of seeing; and the postmodern problematic becomes the frame through which the cultural products of the rest of the world are seen. On the other hand, the West expands into the World; late capitalism muffles the globe and homogenizes (or threatens to homogenize) all cultural production - this, for some reason, is one 'master narrative' that is seldom dismantled as it needs to be if the differential economic, class, and cultural formation of 'Third World' countries is to be taken into account. The writing that emerges from this position, however critical it may be of colonial discourses, gloomily disempowers the 'nation' as an enabling idea and relocates the impulses of change as everywhere and nowhere...

Further, the crisis of legitimation (of meaning and knowledge systems) becomes a strangely vigorous 'master narrative' in its own right, since it sets out to rework or 'process' the knowledge systems of the world in its own image; the postmodern 'crisis' becomes authoritative because...it is deeply implicated in the structure of institutions. Indeed, it threatens to become just as imperious as bourgeois humanism, which was an ideological maneuver based on a series of affirmations, whereas postmodernism appears to be a maneuver based on a series of negations and self-negations through which the West reconstructs its identity...Significantly, the disavowal of the objective and instrumental modalities of the social sciences occurs in the academies at a time when usable knowledge is gathered with growing certainty and control by Euro-America through advanced technologies of information retrieval from the rest of the world.

I have quoted at some length because a number of quite powerful ideas are summarised here, even though some phraseology (e.g., 'the West reconstructs its identity') indicates the Saidian moment of their composition. Kumkum Sangari was in any case possibly the first, certainly one of the first, to see how a late capitalist hermeneutic, developed in the metropolitan zones, would necessarily claim to be a universal hermeneutic, treating the whole world as its raw material. This goes, I think, to the very heart of the point I made earlier about the aggrandizements of postcolonial theory as it takes more and more historical epochs, more and more countries and continents, under its provenance, while it restricts the possibility of producing a knowledge of this all-encompassing terrain to a prior acceptance of postmodernist hermeneutic.

The work of Homi Bhabha is a particularly telling example of the way this kind of hermeneutic tends to appropriate the whole world as its raw material and yet effaces the issue of historically sedimented differences. Indeed, the very structure of historical time is effaced in the empty play of infinite heterogeneities on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the relentless impulse to present historical conflicts in the terms of a psychodrama. In the process, a series of slippages take place. The categories of Freudian psychoanalysis which Lacan reworked on the linguistic model were in any case intended to grapple with typologies of psychic disorder on the individual and familial plane; it is doubtful that they can be so easily transported to the plane of history without concepts becoming mere metaphors. This problem Bhabha evaporates by offering a large number of generalizations about two opposing singularities, virtually manichean in their repetition as abstractions in conflict: the coloniser and the colonised, each of which appears remarkably free of class, gender, historical time, geographical location, indeed any historicisation or individuation whatever. Both of these abstract universals appear as bearers of identifiable psychic pressures and needs which remain remarkably the same, everywhere. The colonizer, for example, is said to always be unnerved by any of the colonised who has in any degree succeeded in adopting the colonizer's culture. Translated into concrete language, it would mean that colonizers were not afraid of mass movements resting on the social basis of a populace very unlike themselves but by the upper class, well educated intellectual elite that had imbibed European culture.

What historical evidence is there to show any of that? Bhabha is sublimely indifferent to such questions of factity and historical proof presumably because history in that mode is an invention of linear time invented by rationalism, but more immediately because one allegedly knows from psychoanalysis that the Self is not nearly as unnerved by absolute Otherness as from that Otherness that has too much of oneself in it. What is truly unnerving, in other words, is seeing oneself in mimicry and caricature. That the hybridized colonial intellectual mimics the coloniser and thereby produces in the coloniser a sense of paranoia is, according to Bhabha, the central contradiction in the colonial encounter, which he construes to be basically discursive and psychic in character. The mimicry that Naipaul represents as a sign of a sense of inferiority on the part of the colonised, becomes, in Bhabha's words, 'signs of spectacular resistance.' The possibility that revolutionary anti-colonialism might have unnerved the colonial power somewhat more than the colonial gentlemen who had learned to mimic the Europeans, Bhabha shrugs off with remarkable nonchalance: 'I do not consider the practices and discourses of revolutionary struggle as the other side of "colonial discourse."'

...The figure of the migrant, especially the migrant (postcolonial) intellectual residing in the metropolis, comes to signify a universal condition of hybridity and is said to be the Subject of a Truth that individuals living within their national cultures do not possess. Edward Said's term for such Truth-Subjects of postcoloniality is 'cultural amphibians'; Salman Rushdie's treatment of migrancy ('floating upward from history, from memory, from time', as he characterizes it) is likewise invested in this idea of the migrant having a superior understanding of both cultures than what more sedentary individuals might understand of their own culture...Telling us that 'the truest eye may now belong to the migrant's double vision', we are given also the ideological location from which this 'truest eye' operates: 'I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement - that confounds any profound or 'authentic' sense of a 'national' culture or 'organic' intellectual . . .' Having thus dispensed with Antonio Gramsci - and more generally with the idea that a sense of place, of belonging, of some stable commitment to one's class or gender or nation may be useful for defining one's politics Bhabha then spells out his own sense of politics:

The language of critique is effective not because it keeps for ever separate the terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of 'translation': a place of hybridity ... This is a sign that history is happening, in the pages of theory ..."

Cultural hybridity ('truest eye') of the migrant intellectual, which is posited as the negation of the 'organic intellectual' as Gramsci conceived of it, is thus conjoined with a philosophical hybridity (Bhabha's own 'language of critique') which likewise confounds the distinction between 'the mercantilist and the Marxist' so that 'history' does indeed become a mere 'happening' - 'in the pages of theory' for the most part.

...'Imperialism,' Spivak says, 'establishes the universality of the mode of production narrative.' Here we encounter, of course, the astonishing literary-critical habit of seeing all history as a contest between different kinds of narrative, so that imperialism itself gets described not in relation to the universalisation of the capitalist mode as such but in terms of the narrative of this mode. Implicit in the formulation, however, is the idea that to speak in terms of modes of production is to speak from within terms set by imperialism and what it considers normative. In the next step, then, Spivak would continue to insist on calling herself an 'old-fashioned Marxist' while also dismissing materialist and rationalist accounts of history, in the most contemptuous terms, as 'modes of production narratives'. This habit would also then become a regular feature of the 'subaltern perspective' as Spivak's gesture gets repeated in the writings of Gyan Parkash, Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. This distancing from the so-called 'modes of production narrative' then means that even when capitalism or imperialism are recognised in the form of an international division of labour, any analysis of this division passes 'more or less casually over the fully differentiated classes of workers and peasants, and identifies as the truly subaltern only those whom Spivak calls 'the paradigmatic victims of that division, the women of the urban subproletariat and of unorganised peasant labour.'" It is worth saying, I think, that this resembles no variety of Marxism that one has known, Spivak's claims notwithstanding. For, there is surely no gainsaying the fact that such women of the sub-proletariat and the unorganised peasantry indeed bear much of the burden of the immiseration caused by capitalism and imperialism, but one would want to argue that 'the paradigmatic victims' are far more numerous and would also include, at least, the households of the proletariat and the organised peasantry. Aside from this definitional problem, at least three other moves that Spivak makes are equally significant. First, having defined essential subalternity in this way, she answers her own famous question - Can the Subaltern Speak? - with the proposition that there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak." What it means of course is that women among the urban sub-proletariat and the unorganised peasantry do not assemble their own representations in the official archives and have no control over how they appear in such archives, if they do at all. It is in this sense that the sati, the immolated woman, becomes the emblematic figure of subaltern silence and of a self-destruction mandated by patriarchy and imperialism alike. As Spivak puts it: 'The case of suttee [suti] as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism would...mark the place of 'disappearance' with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status.'"

Now, it is not at all clear to me why the self-immolating woman needs to be regarded as the 'exernplum of the woman-in-imperialism' today any more than such self-immolating women should have been treated in the past by a great many colonialists - and not only colonialists - as representing the very essence of Indian womanhood. Why should the proletarianization of large numbers of poorer women, or the all-India productions of the bhadramahila, or the middle class nationalist woman, not be treated as perhaps being at least equally typical of what Spivak calls 'woman-in-imperialism?' Even so, the argument that the essence of female subalternity is that she cannot speak is itself very striking since in this formulation of the situation of the subaltern woman, the question of her subjectivity or her ability to determine her own history hinges crucially not on her ability to resist, or on her ability to make common cause with others in her situation and thus appear in history as collective subject, but on her representation, the terms of her appearance in archives, her inability to communicate authoritatively, on one-to-one basis with the research scholar, perhaps in the confines of a library. This is problematic enough. But, then, the implication is that anyone who can represent herself, anyone who can speak, individually or collectively, is by definition not a subaltern - is, within the binary schema of subalternist historiography, inevitably a part of the elite, or, if not already a part of the elite, on her way to getting there." This is of course remarkably similar to the circular logic we find in Foucault, where there is nothing outside Power because whatever assembles a resistance to it is already constituting itself as a form of Power. But it also leaves the whole question of subaltern history very much in the lurch. If the hallmark of the true, the paradigmatic subaltern is that she cannot speak - that she must always remain an unspoken trace that simply cannot be retrieved in a counter-history -and if it is also true that to speak about her or on her behalf when she cannot speak for herself amounts to practising an 'epistemic violence', then how does one write the history of this permanently disappeared?

Spivak seems to offer four answers that run concurrently. First, there seems to be a rejection of narrative history in general, often expressed in the form of much contempt for what gets called empirical and positivist history, even though it remains unclear as to how one could write history without empirical verification; nor is it at all clear just how much of what we know as history is being rejected as 'positivist'; at times, certainly, all that is not deconstructionist seems to be categorised as positivist or some such. Second, in the same vein of emphasizing the impossibility of writing the history of the real subalterns, Spivak criticises those earlier projects of subalternism, including implicitly such writings of Ranajit Guha as his works on peasant insurgency", which sought to recapture or document patterns of subaltern consciousness even in their non-rationalist structures. She criticises such projects on the grounds, precisely, that any claim to have access to subaltern consciousness and to identify its structures is prima facie a rationalist claim that is inherently hegemonizing and imperialist. As she puts it, 'the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativised into logic' and 'there is no doubt that poststructuralism can really radicalize the old Marxist fetishisation of consciousness.' That scornful phrase, 'old Marxist fetishisation,' on the part of someone who often calls herself an 'old-fashioned Marxist' and whom Robert Young unjustly rebukes for taking too much from 'classical Marxism,' of course takes us back to the Derridean claim that deconstruction is a 'radicalisation' of Marxism and Bourdieu's retort to this Heideggerian 'second-degree strategy.'

Be that as it may. In terms of method, the previous formulation is of course the more arresting, so let me repeat it: 'the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativised into logic.' The programmatic move of theoretical anti-rationalism is stated here in methodic terms: while the statement appears to be merely anti-Hegelian, what it in effect rejects, in relation to subalternity, is the very possibility of narrative history, with its reliance on some sense of sequence and structure, some sense of cause and effect, some belief that the task of the historian is not simply to presume or speculate but to actually find and document the patterns of existing consciousness among the victims as they actually were, and a dogged belief, also, that no complete narrative shall ever be possible but the archive that the dominant social classes and groups in society have assembled for their own reasons can be prised open to assemble a counterhistory, 'people's history', a 'history from below'. E. P. Thompson's great historical narratives on the Making of the English Working Class, on patterns of 18th Century English Culture, on the social consequence of industrial clock time for those who were subjected to it, come readily to mind in this context. I don't think it would serve Professor Spivak's purposes to dissociate herself from that tradition altogether, but the actual effect of her deconstructionist intervention in matters of writing the history of the wretched of this earth is to make radically impossible the writing of that kind of social history, whether with reference to the social classes of modern capitalism or in the field of literary analysis.

Such, then, are the burdens of the Post Condition, even for those who may recoil at the Fukuyamaist variant.

Aijaz Ahmad, Post Colonial Theory and the 'Post-' Condition

#*#aijaz ahmad #essays

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libertariantaoist · 5 years ago

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The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable ...

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law ... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.

There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Education in the truest sense - education directed toward awakening a capacity to differentiate between fact and appearance -always will be a more or less furtive and illicit thing, for its chief purpose is the controversion and destruction of the very ideas that the majority of men - and particularly the majority of official and powerful men - regard as incontrovertibly true. To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches. Progress consists entirely of attacking and disposing of these ordinary beliefs.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not only mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes.

#h.l. mencken #libertarian quotes

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thebullmonkey · 5 years ago

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Favorite Things: SANDITON Edition

For some reason, the first season officially ending its television run over here in The States has bummed me out even more, despite my having properly finished the season weeks ago and having already completed at least 5 full re-watches at this point.

I guess it just feels extra scary now about the fate of our dear Sanditonians? Sanditonites? Regency Cinnamon Rolls? Whatever you want to call them - I have this odd feeling of missing them even though I can watch them pretty much anytime I want. Is that weird? Am I weird? Don’t answer that!

Anyway, here’s a random, probably anachronistic list of some of my favorite Sanditon moments & things....

Every adorable Charlotte smile

The way Sidney says “Miss Heywood” whether in annoyance, anger, or secret desire

“New maid?”

Every annoyed Charlotte look - Rose has SUCH an exquisitely expressive face!

THAT SIDNEY EYEROLL

The way Sidney growls “What is it?”

The way Sidney softly questions “What is it?” to Charlotte when she’s birthing the Regatta idea

The way Charlotte & Sidney look so good standing or walking next to each other - they just look like they belong together forever

Young Stringer’s cartoonish accent in comparison to every other character’s “standard” English accent

When Esther’s all “hey you wanna walk with me” and Charlotte agrees but is too slow and Esther looks back at her after literally 3 paces like “BITCH, KEEP UP”

When Esther tells Charlotte she is “that bitch who will poison another bitch in my way” and Esther doesn’t break eye contact or her stride

Arthur talking about eating 6 or 7 slices of toast on the reg like it’s NBD

Arthur offering to make Charlotte some toast

The way Crow yells “BABERS!!” repeatedly

Crow just being an unapologetic drunken fuckboi

The Sidlotte pineapple luncheon party scene - especially how sweet it is that Sidney’s serving Charlotte soup

Arthur having about enough of Lady D’s insolence at his future BFF, Georgiana, and ravaging that rotten ass pineapple in vengeance

When Lady D calls out “Mr. Parker” and all three brothers turn around in unison - each one with their distinct personalities showing through

Tom and Sidney dressing alike for the Regatta - so cute

Basically the whole Cricket match & when Tom says “I really don’t think I am[out]!” (The timbre of his voice sounds exactly like how he spoke in "Love Actually" and I am always here for “Colin - God of Sex!” (But also FUCK TOM PARKER FOREVER, THO)

The way Sidney looks confused and aroused when Charlotte roasts him at the luncheon + tells him to STFU - she’s trying to concentrate - during The Cricket

How Sidney goes from stoic to cinnamon roll throughout 8 glorious episodes

Sidney’s soft voice

Georgiana not giving an ounce of a fuck about Edward & her immunity to his charms

"Who is your favorite poet?"

When it doesn't look like the laborers will show for The Cricket and Edward's all "CAN WE GO?!"

Every perfect thing Babington says to Esther

Esther's hair when she wears it down

The smile Esther gives when she & Lady D are playing cards after she didn't die

All the satin looks for the rich ladies (Georgi & Eliza's bitch ass)

All the WIND

The ROWING SCENE

The way Sidney says "Come on" to get Charlotte in the boat

THAT FUCKING ROWING SCENE

Sidney taking liberties and stealing body touches during that entire scene

"Keep your back straight..." & the impish laugh after he'd gotten away with such an intimate touch

Dr. Fuchs needing actual liquor to deal with Arthur & Diana's silly asses

WET SIDNEY

Charlotte's luscious wavy hair at the start of Ep 8

The Truest Self speech

All of Sidney's side eyes & spying on Charlotte's Young Stringer interactions

Young Stringer's bestie - that dude has balls and is so ride or die! Always supporting his bud in the fiercest way

The way The Beaufort girls say "Mr. Hankins"

The way the Beaufort girls always fawn over Sidney

"Admiral Heywood" - that whole adorable ass scene

Sidney's constant posing

The London carriage scenes with Char & Sid as a whole

The London carriage scene where Sidney emphatically says "I-COULD- NOT-HAVE-BEEN-ANY-CLEAR-ER..." That sounds EXACTLY how I imagine Theo actually argues IRL with people 😂

All the dancing

The brothel scene

Honestly - every Char & Sid scene is what I live for

Lady Denham ROASTING TOM'S USELESS NO-INSURANCE-HAVING ASS

Mary being so wrecked that Charlotte is leaving

Lady Susan's EVERYTHING

THAT👏MOTHER👏FUCK👏ING👏KISS

Sidney being awkward as fuck in general - but especially pre-💋

Charlotte being inquisitive & speaking her mind respectfully but also telling Sidney he sucks when he deserves it

The Char & Georgi friendship

Young Stringer & team winning the Regatta

Every profile shot of Sidney - good lord Theo is good from every angle!

BASICALLY ALL OF IT

Even though things are up in the air and I often say to myself "I kind of wish I never watched Sanditon..." (because FEELS, y'all) I'm so so so glad I did. I haven't been touched by a show or story or characters like this in a very long time. They will always be with me, I will always have random Sanditon quotes and scenes and images in my brain, and I will adore and cherish this series for the rest of my life.

FINGERS STILL MASSIVELY CROSSED THAT THE GODS BE KIND AND GIVE US A PROPER ENDING IN A SECOND SEASON.

#sanditon #sanditon season 1 #so many more favorite things but im old and tired #char and sid #sidney parker #charlotte heywood #miss heywood #the parker brothers #residents of sanditon #sanditon pbs #sanditon masterpiece #otp

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ghostmartyr · 5 years ago

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SnK 124 Thoughts

Have some faith, Reiner.

As if we’d ever forget Han Solo.

The only nice thing about what’s happening now is that it’s forced the right priorities on people. Despite Eren saying, way back in Trost, that people all uniting to face one enemy is too rosy an idea to have a place in reality, for this one island, in these final, traumatic moments, no one wants all these people to die.

With various faces painted on it, most of our main cast on either side has always been focused on one thing: survival. Now Eren rejects that entire concept for the protection of one group. In the barest of bones, that is what every single villain of this manga has always done. Of course the only option is to reject him.

And of course Gabi, who has always been compared to Eren, who has had the most traumatic series of experiences of her young life, stands up and starts fighting.

(One in shadows, one in light. Winning all the high school book reports here.)

This is the best of Eren, in a child who has been ruined by this world just as thoroughly. Gabi will bring back her friends.

Eren chases after slavers to save a girl he doesn’t know.

Gabi runs into streets full of monsters and saves someone who hates her.

I’ve always enjoyed Eren as a protagonist (his dip into antagonist, not so much). In Trost, he takes on the burden of being a symbol of humanity’s hope, but I’ve always felt that his true symbolic nature is that he’s the one who lays claim to humanity’s outrage.

There are things in this world that are simply wrong. Righteous fury without limits is a satisfying reaction to that, and at the start of the manga, it’s something that all of Paradis has basically lost. They’ve grown complacent with their lot in life. Even when the titans invade, they don’t dream beyond reclaiming the territory that they’ve always known.

Eren’s status as a rage monster is very much a meme, and he’s very much more than that, but it has always been fitting that the main character is a bonfire that lights the sparks of the rest of the cast. Eren inspires motion. Before he has any touch of competence and plot magic, he talks and his comrades find themselves listening.

Gabi takes up that torch here.

Reiner is done (again. sorry, Reiner). The world is probably done. Gabi has spent this whole arc being some kind of done.

Gabi gets up, and goes to look for her friend. Falco follows her onto an airship; she follows him into hell.

Gabi gets up, and protects the girl who wants her dead. She faces down a titan with a weapon not meant for the job, and she wins.

Just like the young woman she murdered.

Sasha joins the Survey Corps after Trost. She comes face to face with a titan, and she falters. She fails to kill it, and it comes after her, and she’s scared. She wants to leave. She considers leaving.

Dot Pixis’ speech reignites her will.

Sasha stays, and a month later she saves her little sister.

Her little sister protects a pair of enemy child soldiers.

One of those child soldiers saves her life.

Paradis begins without a spark. Even the people who are signing up to be soldiers are mostly doing it so they won’t be seen as cowards, or so they can go further into the walls as Military Police. People who want to go outside and kill the titans are nuts. The Survey Corps is nuts. They’re a waste of taxes, and anyone who wants to join them is a suicidal idiot.

Enter Eren. Enter enough fury and impact that the fire can’t be contained in one person, and the sparks start spreading. The people who have been left to tend their own fires for years are given kindling. The people who don’t know what it’s like to not be freezing cold are given a taste of warmth.

For a series that begins in stagnation, a protagonist devoted to movement is going to inspire the most change.

Then he decides to commit genocide and ruin everything, but hey, look at how much that’s inspiring people to get along!

Eren, you’re a fucking disaster.

Niccolo basically hands us the series’ thesis on a silver platter, so I’ll refrain from trying to fit his quotes into anything resembling a paragraph.

Niccolo is not Eldian.

Eldians are the one with the ability to literally transform into monsters. A physical manifestation of the horrors all humans are capable of if you take away their reason. That’s why the world calls them devils. They’re all a bunch of ticking time bombs just waiting to go off; why wouldn’t the world condemn, hate, and fear that?

Those ticking time bombs always take at least one more person willing to start the timer for them.

In the current era, Marley has been the force happily strapping bombs to children’s chests.

Niccolo hits on the truest point. From someone who is not Eldian, who cannot physically manifest the horrors all around them that could not exist without certain genetics--

Niccolo has a devil inside of him, too. He’s given in to it. He has been a monster, so lost in his despair that he’s willing to kill children.

The true enemy of this world is not titans. It’s falling prey to the demons every human carries inside. That is the universal human experience, and everywhere people fall in that fight, evil follows.

Titans exist because a man rapes a slave and has her children eat her.

That evil is a fault of human nature, not blood.

Niccolo and Gabi have been the monsters.

Unlike most titans, they have the option of coming back. They’ve had the fortune to live long enough that they can come back. Hell, it might be because she hits the bargaining phase, but even this chapter Gabi goes from suggesting killing Eren to talking to him and using his power for something actually useful.

-pats Gabi on the head-

Not bad, kiddo.

To the left, we have Jean and Connie.

Hell.

Connie’s simplest (as well as the most exciting, because he’s running off to Wall Rose territory with Falco, who has Ymir’s memories), and rather devastating. For four years, his mother has been a titan. Unable to move. She’s his only remaining family. Everyone else in his village, Connie spent their last night alive praying that they would die. He’s one of the three people left who remember Utgard.

Being trapped on a tower in the middle of the night, being hunted for sport by people he’s known all his life.

On Zeke’s command.

The man Paradis is forced to consider an ally. The man Connie is not allowed to touch. The man who is still, years later, turning people into titans. The man one of his closest friends ostensibly betrays them for.

After all that, his friends have someone who can save his mom, and they try to tell him no. Because that might hurt the feelings of their enemies. People like Reiner, for instance. The guy Connie still cries for in Return to Shiganshina.

Don’t worry about your mother, Connie. Worry about the feelings of everyone else.

Also Sasha is dead and this kid’s bestie pulled the trigger.

But seriously Connie, chill.

[chill not found]

Connie has, frankly, done a fantastic job holding everything together. The fact that he’s only snapping now speaks greatly to his character, and leaves me not too concerned about Falco. Connie ranks as one of the lowest on who’s left of people who would be willing to kill a child. Even if it’s for his mother, if Falco’s awake, I don’t think Connie can do it.

...If he can, the manga will have actually found a way to get even darker, which, if we’re being honest, I sort of thought we were beyond at this point, so flip a coin I guess.

Jean likewise has some of my favorite material in this chapter. He’s grown into a far better commander than he was at Trost, and having the terrain duplicated so well only emphasizes it.

But as ever, the true entertainment comes from Marco.

Who is also dead.

Yes, still.

“You’re not a strong person... so you can really understand how weak people feel.”

Jean is not wrong that destroying the rest of the world sort of fixes Paradis’ main problems. The issue is that it’s horrifically immoral, not that it wouldn’t be effective (until a civil war breaks out).

Because everyone spent all their time hating them, their only protection was murdering them all. And it’s all on one person’s decisions. They’re hardly involved, aren’t they? If they sit back and do nothing, it’s just karma, right? What could they possibly do at this point?

“But you’re also good at recognizing what’s going on at any given moment. You know exactly what needs to be done. I mean... most humans are weak, including me... But if I got an order from someone who saw things like I do... no matter how tough it was, I’d do my damnedest to carry it out.”

Jean’s right. They do reap the benefits of this horrible choice. No more complicated politics. Just a blank slate to do better on. Everyone on Paradis gets to live. Without putting too fine a point on it, that’s an argument we’re probably all familiar with, and here a character is, pointing it all out.

This fixes all their problems. Good, right?

No.

Because standing back and doing nothing while genocide is committed is fucking wrong.

That’s a question this series has grappled with from the beginning; which is more important, survival or doing what’s right?

In the start, we have a protagonist who is fully comfortable throwing his own life away in the name of doing what’s right. At the moment, he’s giving every appearance of being fully comfortable throwing away everyone else’s life in the name of keeping the people he cares about alive.

This chapter, we have Connie arguing for his mom’s life over someone more politically relevant’s.

Bringing back another fandom favorite, Serum Bowl pretty much locks these arguments in a cage and pokes them gently with an assault rifle.

Survival says Erwin. Armin doesn’t matter, except to Eren and Mikasa. Erwin matters to Levi in a way he doesn’t to them. What’s right falls to the floor except to be brandished like a machete against the other side’s wants. Hange has to swoop in and pick it up, and by then Floch’s involved and clubbing everyone over the head with his newfound fanaticism.

Once it’s gotten to that point, humanity’s continued survival still says Erwin.

It’s still saving a man’s life.

A man who will die without this intervention.

For the reason of bringing him back to life to suffer in everyone’s place.

It’s pragmatic, and it truly is best for humanity’s survival beyond the walls.

It is also deeply unkind.

Send these thousands of people to their deaths so the rest can live. Eat each other. Die, die, and die until someone can live. Anything that promotes survival is, in fact, the right choice.

In the Female Titan arc, when Armin and Jean are watching the full extent of Erwin’s plan in front of their eyes, Armin says that Erwin might very well be evil for it, but given where they are, that’s a good thing. That someone strong enough to be that measured with their few remaining lives is in control--even if he’s committing a moral evil, he’s protecting something more important.

It is the preliminary version of Floch’s eventual conclusion.

They need a devil to ensure their survival.

Levi ultimately rejects that.

He doesn’t bring a man back to life so that he can bear their burdens.

It’s one of the smaller goods of the series. After a life of suffering through what is necessary, Levi chooses to release Erwin from it, even though he’s still tactically essential. Again and again people have discussed how much it would help if one more strategist was out Paradis’ table in these times. Levi’s decision is what prevents the most experienced from taking a seat.

Levi picks to be kind over making the choice that more properly secures survival.

Because the survival of what? More choices leading down the exact same road? The endless cycle of sacrifice that’s turned human bodies into resources instead of recognizing them as people?

Titanization at its core?

In the Serum Bowl, Levi doesn’t choose who he wants to survive. He chooses what. He chooses to recognize a man as human instead of a commodity. Something the two brats screaming at him couldn’t let go of. Something he couldn’t let go of.

Do you want to survive, or create a world worth surviving in?

Eren’s actions will destroy the world beyond the walls he always wanted to see. Indiscriminately. Some of it deserves destruction and worse. The parts that don’t will be swept away all the same.

This plan creates the world the First King told them they all lived in; there is Paradis, and nothing beyond it. The rest of humanity is dead.

Thanks to forfeiting all humanity.

And I guess if anyone on the island has a problem with it, kill them too. Also anyone who encourages anyone to have a problem with it. Just set up your secret task force, give the names, and keep those named living in terror for a century until one of them becoming a serial killer in response seems perfectly reasonable.

For those in need of the reminder, Karl is a douche.

Karl thought genocide was such a bad thing that he committed genocide over it, but it’s okay because his genocide was smaller.

Eren thinks genocide is such a bad thing he’s set up to commit genocide over it, but it’s okay because his genocide is going to be so big it’s going to end all genocides. Until Floch remembers he has a gun, probably. Which seems to be always. In which case this genocide will lead to a series of smaller genocides, eventually leading to not enough people being alive for genocide to be committed.

Curing the world of genocide once and for all.

Yay.

What I’m saying is that genocide is bad.

Full stop.

Genocide is bad.

-draws underlines-

-draws angry grrr face-

Bad.

Perhaps maybe these people should stop doing it.

For all the moral reasons, sure, but since we’re clearly beyond that point, maybe someone could just quietly suggest with the force of the world ending that maybe imitating the exact behavior that led to literally all of our cast’s problems is not the best move.

Also, Floch shouldn’t get to point a gun at Yelena’s head. Only Yelena gets to hold guns to people’s heads. She makes it cool. Floch makes everyone wonder why Floch still hasn’t died, only to remember that ah, yes, of course people like Floch don’t die.

BUT HEY, AT LEAST THEY KILLED ALL THE TITANS THAT USED TO BE THEIR COMMANDING OFFICERS. I’M SURE THAT’S NOT RELATED TO FLOCH’S GOOD MOOD AT ALL.

You know, it’s not that things are continuing to get worse. They are simply following the roadmap of horror we were handed in the brochure for this arc. None of this is new, it’s just now in play. So it’s not getting worse, it always was worse.

...Yelena, just take the gun and shoot Floch before you die. I feel like that’s the fastest path to something good happening.

Let’s see... points to all our kidlets being a dominant force against titans now. Them Trost Redux feels. Points to Jean realizing that Eren has power of friendshipped himself into villain status (allegedly). Points to Armin remembering how Pixis gave the humans of Paradis their first victory. Points to all of Sasha’s family because I like them.

Then that’s the chapter.

HOW YOU FEELING, ANNIE FANS?

#Shingeki no Kyojin #SnK 124 #Gabi Braun #Connie Springer #shingeki no spoilers #SnK spoilers #spoilers #tl;dr #chapter post

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venus-is-in-bloom · 5 years ago

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[steven universe] the false kind of love: Spinel and the Diamonds

Spinel is involved in four of the Steven Universe movie’s musical numbers. She sings in three of them, and stars in two: Other Friends and Drift Away. But although the last two of those both centre around Spinel as a character, they could hardly be more different in tone.

In the Other Friends sequence, Spinel is fierce, angry, and dangerous; but in the Drift Away sequence, her voice is sad, longing, and helpless. As far as stories go, it’s pretty common for a villain’s tragic backstory to contrast in tone with their present actions—to seem almost at odds with who they seem to be, even as it explains how they got here. But I find this contrast especially remarkable in Spinel, because one of the most important things about her in the movie is the intensity of her anger. Everything she does, and everything people do to her, is because she is angry. And yet in Drift Away, when she talks about the person responsible for hurting her—Pink Diamond—there’s hardly any sign of that anger. It’s only when her story ends that the fire in her voice ignites again.

I think this contradiction holds the key to Spinel’s motivations. Although her fury is depicted as petty and childish—a feeling she only has to learn to suppress, a problem that’s solved as soon as she stops being mad—the story of her life points to something different, something that better explains her anger, and why it seems to define her so completely.

We know that, in Homeworld’s old social system, each Gem was given a particular task, one that was decided for them almost from the moment they were born. If they failed to do as they were supposed to—or did anything against the norms of their role, such as fusing with a different gem, or joining a rebellion—they would be severely punished. This is how it was for Ruby and Sapphire, for Bismuth and Pearl, for Peridot and Jasper. So we can assume that Spinel’s situation was similar—that she was assigned to be Pink Diamond’s best friend and playmate from the moment she came into existence, and wasn’t given the option to change her mind or do anything else.

One might think of this as a privilege. She was born in servitude to a Diamond, and therefore had the fortune of enjoying luxuries such as the Garden. But the task she had been set was tremendously difficult and complicated: despite being created as an entertainer and nothing more, she had the duty of keeping Pink Diamond happy, and being at her beck and call no matter what.

At the time, Pink Diamond was immature, mercurial, and prone to tantrums. Not only that, she was also at odds with her own family, and repeatedly upset by the way they treated her—something no amount of games and frivolity could fix. All this would have made Spinel’s task positively herculean. Her place in Pink Diamond’s life was small, yet she was completely responsible for how Pink Diamond felt. Every shout of anger, every sneer of disgust and contempt, every dismissive wave and sigh of resentment, would have been a mark of Spinel’s failure: not just a blow against her self-esteem, but against her actual value in Homeworld society—a step closer to being worthless, to being cast away.

What’s more, if Pink Diamond’s final cruel act against Spinel is anything to go by, she wasn’t in any way above tormenting and punishing Spinel just for being an annoyance—despite knowing that Spinel’s life depended on her approval.

In short, Spinel’s entire existence, from the moment she was born up until the moment the movie begins, has been about serving Pink Diamond, catering to her whims, and making her happy no matter what.

From what we see of Spinel, she throws herself entirely into her labour. She never frowns, complains, or shows any negative emotion around Pink at all. And when Pink Diamond asks her to stand, very still, in the same spot, until such time as she returns, she does so—perfectly and obediently—for six thousand years.

This is no surprise, of course. In the context of Spinel’s servitude, Pink Diamond’s words to her are not a request but a direct order. Spinel is Pink Diamond’s playmate, and what kind of playmate would she be if she ever said “no” to a game, or broke the rules? To disobey is to violate the contract that governs her life. So she stands there through her weariness, so absolutely still that roots grow around her legs, accumulating dirt, scratches, and chips. She’s not happy! She’s not having fun! Quite the opposite—she’s clearly miserable in her condition, and yet she doesn’t even shake her leg, or wipe the dirt off her shoulder, or sit down. She doesn’t think of herself at all—only whether she’s “doing it right”.

There’s something I strongly believe is relevant: People do not exist to be other people’s servants. And this goes for Gems too—time and time again throughout the series we see the stories of escaped Gems, how they were trapped, unhappy, often fearful in their roles—how as soon as they were given the opportunity, they decided to do something with their lives drastically different from their assigned purpose. It isn’t normal to wait like this, to suffer like this, all for the sake of someone else’s entertainment. Spinel waits for Pink Diamond, suffers for Pink Diamond, thinks only of Pink Diamond, not because she chose it, but because she has no other choice, because she was raised in a society where this is her only purpose and the only way for her to live.

In other words, the relationship between Pink Diamond and Spinel isn’t just a bad friendship between equals. It isn’t even a bad relationship between, say, a worker and her boss. It is, in plain terms, a slaveowner’s cruel treatment of a slave who’s been forced to serve her since she was born.

The movie never quite acknowledges this out loud. Instead it calls Spinel and Pink Diamond “friends”. And yet, this is the obvious interpretation of the narrative that is shown. Throughout Drift Away, the sequence leading up to it, and all that follows, we see that even now, Spinel is still utterly devoted to Pink Diamond. She still doesn’t realise there’s any other way to be. At the climax of the movie, she says to Steven:

“I used to just be not good enough—just not good enough for Pink!”

and

“Why do I wanna hurt you so bad? I’m supposed to be a friend! I just wanna be a friend...”

The first quote shows how Spinel understands her situation—that all the cruelty she has suffered, and all the anger and resentment she feels, is her own fault for not being “good enough” at her task. She believes that the reason Pink Diamond made her suffer isn’t that Pink Diamond was a cruel person who had absolute power over her life, but that she failed in her task, and so she was a failure of a person, and she deserved whatever she got.

The second quote shows that even at this point, the deepest, truest wish Spinel can think of is to get another chance to prove her worth—to serve someone again, to give up all thoughts of her own happiness and devote herself to another person, to maybe, just for a moment, earn a smile or a laugh. It hasn’t occurred to Spinel that freedom is an option, or that she doesn’t have to be anyone’s slave to have worth as a person, or that Pink Diamond did anything wrong to her. She never realises any of this—no one ever tells her.

So together, these two quotes set up the miserable, ironic resolution of Spinel’s character arc.

(Pink Diamond, of course, shows no matching concern for how Spinel feels, nor any indication that she remembers her at all. The movie implies that she may have had access to the Garden warp pad, or at least its communicator, all along from Earth—yet she never returned, and never sent a message.)

It follows from all this, naturally, that Spinel doesn’t want to direct her anger at Pink Diamond, where it truly belongs. Spinel still believes everything that happened is her fault, and that if anything, it’s Pink Diamond who should blame her for being a bad playmate. And yet, Spinel is angry. At the beginning of the movie, when Steven transmits his message, when Spinel finally sees that she never mattered to Pink Diamond—or to anyone else—she reacts with such rage that she breaks out of the fetters that have governed her life (even though, in her worldview, this dooms herself in the process) and heads for Earth, where Pink Diamond went.

It’s important to note that when Spinel shows up for the Other Friends scene, it’s only been a few days, maybe just a few hours, since she left the Garden—since she escaped the abuse, exploitation, isolation, and neglect that has constituted her whole life. At this point, she hasn’t even had a chance to calm down. She’s suffering an emotional crisis of terrible proportions. The fragile remains of her life have been utterly destroyed. She has nothing left in the world. She isn’t in a reasoning state—there is nothing to reason about, since she has nothing and is nothing. All she has is anger, an emotion she’s never allowed herself to feel before. And she doesn’t know what to do with this overwhelming anger—she has no idea how to acknowledge it, validate it, or work through it in a healthy way. Even if she did, this is the moment of her life when she’s most volatile and vulnerable, when it’s hardest to put things in perspective, when she needs help the most. She needs safety, reassurance, and something that can at least point her on the path to healing—and she doesn’t get any of those, in the end.

Because she cannot be angry at Pink Diamond, she instead tries to find something else to blame. The things that replaced her in Pink Diamond’s eyes are first on that list: Steven, the Crystal Gems, the Earth itself. She decides that she wants to hurt them, to damage them as she has been damaged. She cannot say this, but she wants some way to make them care about her.

(There is a scene where Garnet regains her memories, fights off Spinel, and sings the beautiful True Kinda Love. During this scene, Spinel’s reaction to the sight of the Crystal Gems, finally reunited, is one of the most telling in the movie: disbelief, fear, shame. She has spent her life isolated, interacting only with Pink Diamond—this is, perhaps, her first time seeing love between equals, love that makes people happy simply because they get to be with each other. She sees love that is grateful, unconditional, unbreakable, powerful.

This love defeats her. It destroys her. It represents everything that Pink Diamond left her for. She doesn’t think of it—she cannot think of it—as something which she, too, might experience one day, because her entire life has taught her that she isn’t good enough to ever deserve love. In fact, at this very moment, she is an obstacle that true love will sweep aside and shortly forget about. She is unloved, unloveable, and so it makes perfect sense that Pink Diamond would have thrown her away in order to join these people who are full of love. Spinel is worth nothing to them, not even as entertainment. They will never care about her. She’s a thorn in their side, and they just want her gone.

Anger and shame is the only way she can respond—and after her anger dies down, only shame is left.)

Of course, in lashing out like this, it’s very strange that Spinel achieves anything more than fruitlessly flailing at the Gems for a few minutes before running out of steam or getting poofed. Where did she get a mysterious Injector that an Era 2 engineer like Peridot is helpless to power down, and enough poison to kill a planet? How did she beat three seasoned warriors in a fair fight, having never raised a finger against anyone before the moment that fight began? If things hadn’t gone that way, we would probably have a very different movie.

But such is the narrative we’re given—which is unfortunate, because Spinel in the movie is set up as such an enormous threat that it ends up eclipsing the truth of her story, rather than highlighting it. Apart from one or two lines at the end of the Drift Away sequence, everything Steven says is focused on mollifying her, calming her down, and getting her to deescalate so that she won’t destroy the entire planet. Meanwhile, all the other Gems are busy trying to save people from the Injector’s poison—so there’s no room to actually address her problems in the story.

She is a victim of a monstrous system, in desperate need of help and understanding. But she is instead cast as a monster herself. She doesn’t get any attention for being hurt: people only care about her because she might hurt someone else.

Perhaps the greatest injustice to Spinel is that she isn’t given any kind of resolution for her situation. Instead, Steven’s words confirm the harmful beliefs she holds about herself. Her feelings are her own fault, and her suffering is her own fault. The only chance she has to redeem herself is to go back into servitude, to be a playmate and an entertainer, and to carefully soothe, cheer, and cajole people into tolerating her company—knowing that the love she will therefore win is false and conditional: knowing that if she fails, if they ever get tired of her, she will be left in the dust without a second thought, and she will deserve it.

Poetically, her new owners are Diamonds once again. In order to make them laugh, she makes a joke that belittles her own trauma, and stands on her head. Blue Diamond thinks it’s cute. Yellow Diamond thinks it’s hilarious. Neither of them consider her feelings, or what she might have gone through. Once again, she’s no longer a person—just a toy that reminds them of Pink.

This will be the rest of her life.

#things venus said #steven universe #steven universe: the movie #reflections #spinel steven universe #spinel su #you could perhaps interpret the ending as poetic justice against an unsympathetic villain #but strangely enough that isn't how the movie casts it #anyway guess who's still doing hecking steven universe analysis in the year 2019 /shrug #slavery cw

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defenselesswriter · 5 years ago

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alright i’m making a rant post about a long forgotten article which i read probably 3 weeks ago. this one part stuck with me and i’m mad about it.

so buckle up, kiddos. here lies ty ranting about grey’s anatomy.

i read an article a few weeks ago that said this meredith moment (giffed above) was pathetic. or something along those lines and i just wanna say a giant fuck you to that article.

this happens in one of the super early seasons of the show, and the first few seasons show meredith being incredibly emotionally distant. especially with derek (who i will not ever defend bc i dislike him and that’s a whole other rant). she has a super difficult time opening up to anyone and showing vulnerability.

until this scene. yes, she’s begging derek to pick her and wow how pathetic right? WRONG

for the first time she is showing emotional vulnerability. she is opening herself up. she is admitting what she wants and allowing herself to hope for something good. the way this line is delivered is very near and dear to my heart. i’ve watched this series (especially the first 10 seasons) countless times. every time i get to this line, i cry. the desperate tone, the way her voice cracks, and the amount of emotion leaking into the words.

this line gets me. this line has shown my truest heartbreak and then you know what happens after this????

meredith fucking realizes she doesn’t need derek, she doesn’t need a man to be happy. she can love her damn self. she picks up and moves on.

“i make no apologies for how i chose to repair what you broke”

(we’re going to ignore that i literally typed that quote out verbatim from memory)

this moment was so crucial for meredith’s growth. so uh fuck anyone who says she’s pathetic in this scene. meredith grey has shown me how to heal from emotionally distant parents with a childhood where i spent a majority of it alone while my parents worked 60+ hour weeks. meredith grey showed me that being vulnerable is okay and not only that but it’s a sign of strength to open yourself up, not weakness. meredith grey showed me that i don’t have to make myself smaller for anyone. meredith grey showed me so many lessons that i will never forget.

being emotionally vulnerable and open like this is not pathetic. fight me.

#grey's anatomy #meredith grey #ty rants #long post #sorry mobile users #sir that's my emotional support character

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semirahrose · 6 years ago

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pengwings-are-cool replied to your post:

OH GOD THE "A PERSON'S HEART WILL BECOME HARDER AND HARDER" SCENE WHAT IS LIFE MY POOR BABIES ALSO JINGRUI MY SON I AM SO SORRY THEY RUINED YOUR BIRTHDAY Episodes 20 through 22 are out to murDER ME How can a series be this good??? We'll never know

THIS EXACT FEELING. THIS IS THE TRUEST OF TRUTHS THANK YOU.

Ahhhhh I swear that quote nearly broke me. And THAT MUSIC? I don’t even freaking know, but shows have music and then sometimes shows have MUSIC. I guess it’s subjective, but every single thing about that scene seemed perfectly calculated to cause the maximum amount of Feelings.

That absolutely shattered bitter smile MCS gave Fei Liu, with the slow plod of the drums and the heartbreaking erhu music, mrrhghghghhh bury me. And the worst part of it is that MCS has never been “hard” and is only revealing the truth as he feels he must in order to seek justice for 70,000 restless and unjustly murdered souls, and it hurts a bunch.

And on the other hand I also feel like MCS is taking on more than his fair share of blame there? But I also feel like that’s kinda par for the course for him. He does not need to do all this alone and he has friends who will support him and he needs to believe himself worthy of that support and—*wailing*

Jingrui deserves so many hugs. ALL OF THE HUGS. He’s so sweet and does not deserve to have such a crappy ��dad” as Xie Yu, but his friendship with Yujin is the softest thing and I love them.

But gah, that whole plot was so intense from start to finish? This show. I know it’s good now, but I swear to you, it gets better. And it’s a freaking delight to rewatch.

#pengwings are cool #semirah replies #not spn #*nif #nif discussion #<-- i feel like i need a tag for that #nirvana in fire #or more like... incomprehensible yelling that is unforgivably disorganized and disastrous #BUT I'M SO HAPPY YOU'RE WATCHING

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howlandreads · 7 years ago

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Winter Friends

“Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever."

- Jon Snow XIII, A Dance With Dragons

I think this quote from one of Jon’s ADWD chapters could end up being unintentional foreshadowing for a Jonsa relationship.

First, I want to preface this post by saying that I know when GRRM wrote this line he most likely wasn’t thinking of Jonsa, and probably didn’t intend it to be seen as Jonsa foreshadowing. But that also doesn’t mean that it can’t be used to examine what GRRM views as a healthy relationship, and how Jonsa might fit that mold.

Clearly this quote means that friends who stay with you in the hardest times are your truest friends, while friends that only stay with you when things are good weren’t really your friends to begin with. No one fits the definition of friends who have stayed together through their hardest times better than Jon and Sansa. Though we don’t know the circumstances of their reunion in the books yet, when they reunite in the show both of them are at their lowest points of the entire series. Sansa has just escaped Ramsay’s torture after at least 9 months of abuse, and Jon has just been murdered and betrayed by his brothers at the Wall. Despite all the misery they’ve just been through, they immediately trust each other. I can’t overstate just how important it is that they trust each other without a second thought. Sansa has been a political prisoner of the Lannisters for years, and just when she thought she was safe, her aunt tried to murder her, and she was sold to the Boltons. She’s trusted Cersei, Lysa, and Littlefinger, only to be betrayed by all of them. Jon, also, has no reason to trust anyone after being killed and betrayed by the Night’s Watch. Despite all the reasons they both have to distrust each other, Sansa still leaps into Jon’s arms, and they trust each other immediately:

“Where will we go?”

- Sansa Stark, 6x04

Jon continues to be there for Sansa, agreeing to help her retake Winterfell, and Sansa continues to be there for Jon, saving him at the Battle of the Bastards. They continue to be unfailingly there for each other after the battle when Sansa stops Jon from losing himself in killing Ramsay, and Jon gives Sansa the chance to handle Ramsay herself. I’ve written about the significance of that scene here.

Even when Jon is making decisions Sansa disapproves of, she still stands up for him, defending him to the Northern Lords.

Sansa and Jon’s devotion to one another clearly fits the definition of Winter Friends. Ever since they reunited, they’ve been constantly there for each other. All this combined with the fact that they grew up in the winter climate of the North, their house words are “Winter Is Coming”, and they grew up in Winterfell, really seems to solidify that Jon and Sansa are a perfect example of winter friends.

It’s also interesting that GRRM chose to use winter as the metaphor for hard times. I know it’s a fairly cliche metaphor, but I still think GRRM could’ve meant it to connect to the North. It would fit with the whole “The North Remembers” theme of Northerners being loyal and honorable people, who are still fighting for the Starks even after everything that’s happened. Since Jon and Sansa were both raised in the North, they were taught to value honor and loyalty above all else, and it really shows in their relationship with each other.

All these examples of Jon and Sansa’s commitment to each other come in direct contrast to a certain other ASOIAF ship. Throughout S7, D*ny refuses to help Jon, demanding he bend the knee and surrender the North to her, despite her lack of knowledge of the land and complete inability to rule. Even when the lives of thousands of people are at stake she refuses to do a thing. The only time she ever does anything for Jon is when she rides north of the wall, but he was only in danger because of her in the first place. Plus, that immediately backfired, considering she’s the only reason the Night King has a dragon and was able to destroy the Wall. Her finally offering her help after Jon returns from North of the Wall hardly counts as commitment to him, since she’s only helping to avenge Viserion. D*ny only ever acts when she will personally benefit or when she’s become personally invested. She’s never selfless, and doesn’t begin to share a bond with Jon strong enough to truly earn the title of “winter friends”.

D*ny’s abandonment of Slaver’s Bay is another example of her inability to stay through hard times. This ADWD quote also illustrates D*ny’s lack of long term planning:

“Dragons plant no trees.”

- D*enerys X, A Dance With Dragons

Jon and Sansa are truly winter friends, while D*ny is merely a summer friend that will melt away like summer snows.

#jonsa #actually jonsa #game of thrones #a song of ice and fire #asoiaf #Sansa Stark #jon snow #jon x sansa #got #meta #A Dance with Dragons #anti daenerys #anti targaryen #Winter Friends

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kaibutsushidousha · 7 years ago

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Artbook data - Kokichi Ouma

Chapter 5 spoilers but frustratingly no chapter 6 spoilers.

Seiyuu’s comment: Hiro Shimono

As Ouma is an emotional rollercoaster of a character, he was very fun-yet-difficult to play. The impression I got from him is that he is really meek if you take away his strong wish to outwit everyone. At first I was worried he was going to be hated because he is the guy says the things no one wants to say, but I’m very happy to hear so many people find him interesting exactly because of that. Please keep a close eye on him!

Kodaka’s comment: The always sensational liar character

His name was made combining the grandious, big-sounding, mastermindish family name “Ouma”(king horse) with the very small-sounding given name “Kokichi”(small luck). His characterization was focused on duality and the name reflects that nature. The keyword on his initial design was simply “shota”, so we made him look like a cute and personable boy. However, we also wanted him to feel creepy, so we made his uniform as white as we could and gave his hair and scarf colors that contrast with this white. We thought of making him as aliar to add to the story’s main theme of lies and, speaking in Mafia terms, the double-agent role. And becaus of this, making him into a trickster stirring up the Trials was indispensable. Looking from this perspective, he would feel more in place as a Super High School Level Liar than a Supreme Leader. As he is the character who personifies this game’s central themes, I put more thought into him than into everyone else.

Besides, his design was popular when first revealed and he got a fanbase fitting of his part after the game was released. I have to thank Komatsuzaki, Ouma’s craziest sprites were completely his idea. “Crazy” is a word with lots of meanings, but Ouma’s case is completely different from Genocider Shou, Junko Enoshima or Nagito Komaeda. You could say his case is more of a line of thought taken to it’s logical conclusion. They’re not overdramatic expressions, they’re instead phisically impossible, or should I say, otherworldly expressions. I think their creepiness express his true nature to some extent. I had my second guesses about them as they are a little overblown and I thought this would be too much but I ultimately decided to keep them.

So far, the DanganRonpa series never had a character who just simply enjoyed the Trials, even if that was just a lie. That’s why we decided that for his final moments, we would have him naming himself as the ringleader and battle against the real ringleader. I managed to make chapter 5′s plot a seesaw back and forth of truths and lies, so I like it quite a lot. He’s not the kind of guy I would want to met in real life though.

Design notes:

Hairstyle: Moderately long black hair flowing to all directions, with the tips moving up and down. A hairstyle resulting of him playing with his hair. He seems not to care about his hair, but Ouma sometimes makes use of the shadows his bangs form to make himself look evil...

Scarf: Black and white spaces alternating exactly like a chessboard. The way its tones also contribute to his clown imagery make it a perfect fit for the incorrigible Ouma.

Buttons: Buttons, all of different colors. There a couple more hidden behind his scarf and it seems hard to close them all.

Ripped uniform: His eye-catching white uniform is in a misterious state, with the hem ripped and big parts of it are fixed with metal clips. The collar part is also completely gone. Is that the decadent fashion style of the evil supreme leaders?

Underwear: Ouma’s favorite pop underwear. He hides his playful heart and true fashion sense in a place no one can see. So vibrant colors hidden inside the black-and-white uniform.

Punk-style pants: An essential piece of punk fashion with bondage belts tied to both legs... Or so it seems, but that’s a lie, they are actually just fake belts sewed to thicker part of the thighs. It’s all about feeling fake here. Nishishi.

Slip-on shoes: Two-colored black and purple shoes that mixed simplicity with an expressive sense of fashion. Wearing 9/10 lenght pants and no socks is trending nowadays, you see. And of course, those shoes are very well polished by Toujou!

Favorite presents:

Electempest: A pop electro-water gun capable of continuously shooting water up to 10 meters for one entire minute. Undoubtly exciting for both grown adults or evil supreme leaders.

Hammock: Everyone’s favorite sleeping tool, the braided thing you hang between trees or pillars, famous for its relaxability. This should be able make Ouma feel like a child again and enjoy himself.

Hated present:

Oil for Robots: Oil used for robot construction, not maintenance. If he ever feels like doing Ki-bo the kind favor of helping his maintenance, it would be a problem to let him have that.

Key phrases:

The Supreme Leader Covered in Lies: As the supreme of an evil secret society that claims to have over 10 thousand members, Ouma was chosen as a Super High School Level talented student. Not unlike his claim of being evil, his speeches and action are always teasing and scaring his friends, plunging them in fear whenever they are feeling too confortable and overall messing around with them. Only someone as plastered in lies as Ouma could look at this killing game enforced by Monokuma with cruel rules like “only someone who commits a perfect crime can graduate” and call it “not boring”. He is heavily burdened with his suppposedly enormous organization that controls the mafia, politicians, businessmen and has underlings in the White House, the Kremlin, Wall Street, City of London and even Kabuto-chou. Does it make sense that he can laugh even when his is life is being threatened?!

Games Should Only Be Played on Hard Mode!?: Using the “Run” command is forbidden and “Continue”s even more. He wants his enemies to be as strong as they can and figure his way out solid lockdowns. Ouma talks about real through references to the videogames he’s been playing his whole life. He came up an original theory that enjoying the extreme thrill of cornering yourself with all exits sealed is the definition of fun. He thinks of even the killing game he has been forced into as life-threatening entertainment. That’s exactly why everyone assumes his line of thought is not just abiding by the told rules, but taking the most enjoyable outcome of outwiting both his friends and Monokuma alike... The nerves of steel necessary to constantly dismiss the abnormal situation with the simple catchphrase “It’s less boring this way” are what you need to play life on Hard Mode!

Lockpicking Victims: One of the few(?) non-lies that come out of Ouma’s mouth: his “evil supreme leader-ish” ability to pick locks. When his friends watch over his actions under the lens of suspicion, he proves the truth by picking a cilinder lock right in front of them. We know it’s an useful skill to have and not something a regular high-school student wouldn’t need, but don’t you think that suits a small-time criminal better than an evil supreme leader?!

Main Quotes:

“Half of my lies are made out of kindness": The truth will not always spare all living beings from suffering. If you say some people were saved by lies, many will agree. But why does this sound so fishy when its by our matchless liar Ouma?! To completely decieve a person with sugar-coated words and short-lived joy is the truest form of terror... After pulling off many overblown lies just to tease, he’s gotta have a lot of nerve to go around saying half of them are kind!?

“Lies have infinite possibilities, you know?“: Ouma’s Trial method involves frequently toying with his friends with lies and driving the accused into dangerous corners. However, unlike the only one cruel truth, lies have infinite possibility, even ones that can save people. Ouma is an expert on this subject. Despite all his friends claiming that lying for no reason when their lifes are on the line is begging to be killed, some who enjoys the risk wouldn’t pull any punches. Is he serious about this? Is it bluff? The Super High School Level Supreme Leader cares not for such questions.

“Common sense, le sens commun, sentido comun, huh... I wonder who decides what gets to be common sense?“: Starting from the way he calls himself the supreme leader of an evil organization, Ouma is quite scenical when talking about his past deeds and crime plans. His stories are so away from common sense that even Akamatsu, the character defined by wanting to believe in everyone, is always taking him with a grain of salt. “I wonder if what you consider ‘right’ on your definition of ‘common sense’ is the same everyone else considers ‘right’?“, he says. Sounds legit but not when Ouma is the one saying it!? Akamatsu’s lack of patience for his drivel is so relatable.

Final comment: Lying is like breathing to Ouma and that makes him an extreme entertainer who pours all his energy into stirring up his friends. He is giving his all so that no day is ever boring!

#kokichi ouma #artbook translations #I thought chapter 3 was the seesaw #Kodaka stop trying to keep Ouma a mistery after the game is all done #it feels really dumb to read and this could be so much easier to write without having to add all the ambiguity

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