#we all know those have loose connections w history and its more of a spiritual knowledge rather than historical etc

[menlove]

the more i read the more i realize just how constructed our view of (monotheistic) religious history is and it drives me more and more insane every single day.

[meggannn]

(based on your previous ask) do you mind if I ask how you feel about lok? is there a general consensus if it's good or bad? youre really insightful and just wanted to know if there were any major issues you had with it

yeah sure, i’ll do my best. if you want a quick answer to your question, here is a link to some of my other korra posts where i say pretty much the same thing as i do here, just in fewer words. cause this post will be mostly an unhappy summary of my experience watching the show. this post will contain spoilers, and disclaimer, i am a really biased, disappointed asshole, so i’ll just admit that now. 

short answer: i liked the concept of lok more than the product we got. a lot of that is because you had a physically buff brown wlw protagonist written mostly by cishet white men and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t handled great. when i think of lok now i tend to fluctuate between bittersweet nostalgia and quiet, simmering rage.

if you don’t care about the show summary, skip at the middle paragraph break down to my tldr.

so for those who don’t know, LOK was really my first “big” fandom on tumblr. when it was announced, a bunch of ATLA purists were already hating on it because 1) brown woman, 2) it was unrealistic to go from ATLA’s technology to streampunk in 70 years, and 3) it wasn’t ATLA, basically. it was my first big interest that i got to participate in as it was airing, and i was really excited about it. i defended it, i wrote meta, i liveblogged, i wrote tons of fic and spammed theories/wants before the damn show even had a release date. all that is to say, i was Invested, and i believed in it before i even saw it. people called me a bnf, i’m not sure if that’s true, but i did gain a lot my followers in my first few years on tumblr by posting korra stuff. a lot of them – hello – i think are still around today (i’m not certain how all the video games hasn’t scared them off yet)

i should say at this point that my opinion of LOK the show has been really wrapped up in the ugly stain left by the fanbase. korra the character has been the subject of tons of racist, misogynistic criticism since the moment we saw her back; when she showed up on screen as a proud young woman who fought with authority and stood up for herself, that was the nail in the coffin for her reputation. i agreed that she had a bit of growing up to do, because ATLA/LOK have always been stories about coming of age and maturing, but i disagreed strongly with this notion that she deserved to be “humbled,” which is what a lot of fans were looking for.

the overall consensus on if it’s “good” depends on who you ask. most people agree that ATLA is better overall: it was better plotted because it benefited from more writers in the room and more episodes to flesh out the world. opinions on LOK specifically range based a lot on their opinions of the K/orra/sami pairing, if they were involved in or what side they were on in any of the fandom wank, and also just complete random chance.

i’ll go more in depth into my ‘history’ with the show below, but i just wanted to mention that all the while the show was airing, korra was being hit with waves of criticism by so-called fans for basically being a confident brown woman who were calling for her to learn her place, respect her elders, etc. another common theme was fandom’s brilliant fucking idea that asami, a light-skinned feminine non-bending woman who was more polite and reserved than korra, would’ve made a better avatar. because you know why. (korra was often described as brutal, rough, unsophisticated, next to pretty, perfect asami. and asami is a fine character, to be clear, but that’s what she was – fine. nothing really stands out about her, which is a fault of the writing, because she had a lot of potential too.) so anyway all of this did sour my mood toward engaging with other fans outside my friend circle.

–

it was around maybe the middle of book 1 that i realized the writing for the show was simpler than what i was expecting – not that it was childish, which it was (because it was written for children, i understood that), but i felt like the plot meandered and the twists came out of nowhere. it felt like they were making it up as they were going, and it opened threads it didn’t answer. one of the biggest threads was the equalist revolution, which was a very sensitive topic that got jettisoned when the leader was revealed to be a fraud, and that devalued the entire movement in an instant. really disappointing, because i was looking forward to seeing that addressed. for a lot of people, this was a dealbreaker, and they started walking. i stuck with it, but loosely.

book 2 aired, focusing on the spiritual world and some really cool history. it still suffered a lot from awkward b-plots and loose threads it didn’t know how to tackle. korra lost her memory and then regained it 2 episodes later with no consequences, mako flip-flopped between korra and asami because bryke don’t know how to write teenage romances without making it a love triangle, and at some point bolin kissed a girl against her will and they didnt acknowledge that at all? i honestly don’t remember. anyway at the end of book 2, even though korra saves the day and prevents the world from descending into darkness for ten thousand years, due to events beyond her control, korra loses the spiritual connection that ties her to all of the previous avatars – aang, roku, kyoshi, wan, everyone. and people hit the fucking ceiling. “korra’s not a real avatar if she lost her connection to the old ones! that’s the entire point of the cycle! this show is bullshit, it’s not canon anymore!” (the entire point that finale demonstrated that korra’s power alone was enough to save the world and she didn’t need anyone else. but people found that ~unrealistic~ i guess). as you can imagine, being a fan of LOK is starting to get a little tiring by now.

books 3-4 is where the korra haters got to love the show again, because they were both straight-up torture porn. after everything she did saving the world, this is the arc where korra got beat down, tortured, dragged into the dirt, swallowed and spat back out. book 3 is a lot of people’s favorites because it was the first book that felt fully plotted out before it was put on air, which is why i enjoyed it too. but for me it was difficult to see a girl, whose identity revolved around being the avatar after being raised and sheltered to think it was all she was good for, effectively abandon her life and even her name by the beginning of book 4 because the events of book 3 were that traumatizing for her. somehow this was character development. we were encouraged to stick with it because we hoped korra would find herself again. and she did, sorta.

but it makes me furious that people who had quit in books 1-2 came back during 3 because they heard these books were better – aka book 3, the book that featured korra the least, and books 3-4 in which korra got her ass handed to her in some of the hardest fights vs some of the cruelest villains of the series. (nevermind that the book 3 villains suffer from the anime villain curse: they quickly went from “cool character design” to “wait, how does this rando group of villains show up with powers literally no one in the universe has ever heard before?” – questions no one ever answers)

anyway book 4 is a mish-mash of… i’m not sure. i’ve rewatched all the books but i don’t know if i’ll ever touch this one again. the culturally appropriating airbender wannabe, zaheer (a complete rando who somehow masters airbending enough to fly, which was a huge middle finger to airbending masters aang and tenzin for no reason) a guy who literally tortured korra one season before and put her in a wheelchair, is the one who the writers send korra to for her spiritual awakening that lets her save the day. not tenzin or jinora, her spiritual teachers with whom she has positive, healthy relationships – they send her back to her abuser who terrifies and degrades her a bit more before deciding to help. this was a pattern: the writers made both korra and asami face their abusers (in asami’s case, her father) for catharsis instead of gaining peace over their trauma another, healthier way because…. i’m not sure why. there is no reason why. and then there’s the guilt tripping nonsense of asami feeling as if she had to forgive her father, who tried to kill her, because he said he was sorry and sacrificed himself for her in the finale. it’s angst galore, if you like that kind of thing, which i normally do, except this is less angst and more just the writers trying to hammer in torture porn, grimdark, and poor attempts at morally gray nonsense into their finale season.

anyway at the end of her journey, korra, our buff brown woc, learns that she had to suffer to learn how to be compassionate and relate to her enemy. i’m not exaggerating, she literally says that. which is lovely.

–

tldr: i wasted a lot of emotional time and energy into this show and was extremely disappointed when some of the ending’s notes were “you had to suffer to become a better person” and “forgive your abusers/villains because aren’t we all the same in the end?”

but also on a strictly narrative level, LOK also bit off way more than it could chew both emotionally and thematically. it had an amazing premise, but it was not committed to

utilizing the steampunk genre to its best potential in the bending world (after the creativity in the rest of the worldbuilding, the LOK series finale was literally fighting a giant robot – seriously?)

giving its hero the respect and character arc she deserved. and i don’t say that because i think korra had no growing up to do in b1, she did, but she didn’t deserve for it to happen like that.

so basically i realized that a lot of the writers that made ATLA great weren’t brought back for LOK, and it showed. i realized that the LOK writers, when they listened to fans, were listening to the fans that whined the loudest, or (more likely, since they plan seasons years before we see them) they thought from the beginning that it was a good idea for korra to go through years’ worth of pain just to be spat out a humbler, “better” person

the reason i told you all that about me defending LOK in the beginning is because i need you to understand that i believed in LOK longer than i probably should’ve. i wanted it to be everything i was expecting in a diverse children’s show with an unorthodox female protaganist. but just because they had a brown wlw heroine doesn’t mean that they deserved to be praised for it when they treated her like garbage.

and korra and asami walk into a beam of light together in the last second of the show and i’m supposed to applaud the writers for their bravery or something

[topmixtrends]

IN THE SUMMER of 1989, 45-year-old Bruce Kuipers bought a 95-acre deer-hunting camp just north of Muskegon on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan. The recently divorced father of three young men ��� 25, 20, and 18 years of age at the time of the acquisition — Bruce was best known to his family for his love of hunting, his perennial philandering, and his stubborn adherence to doing things his way. For his sons, this paternal inflexibility had long since manifested itself in Bruce’s dogged adherence to at least the stated tenets (if not the practices) of the Christian Reformed Church, and a particular — one might even say a compulsive — approach to hunting and fishing. As kids, the Kuipers boys were encouraged more than shown how to catch trout and kill deer. Their successes brought out their father’s unbridled pride and enthusiasm; their failures earned his scorn and ridicule.

Bruce’s compulsivity and intransigence were on full display during his first year of his ownership of the deer camp. He insisted that the cabin curtains be kept drawn at all times, lest a human silhouette spook a stray deer months ahead of hunting season. The sons were forbidden from lighting cigarettes outside, or letting their dogs loose on the land. Any and all ecological aspects of the property were also deemed untouchable, even though alterations to the land — particularly its sandy soil composition — were the best bet for enhancing the local deer population.

Perhaps not surprisingly with such strictures in place, the author, Dean, his middle brother, Brett, and their youngest brother, Joe, spent little time at their father’s deer camp. But over the course of the next 20-odd years, the Kuiperses’ acreage became a site where familial relationships were recast. Haunted by depressive and suicidal episodes as a young man, Joe found solace hunting and fishing with his father; Brett would end up getting a master’s in woodland management, which enabled him to re-envision the possibilities of the family’s land holdings, even as Bruce remained — for some time — resistant to his proposed innovations. Dean, meanwhile, worked as a journalist based first in New York and subsequently in Los Angeles, often penning stories about environmental activists and movements, but increasingly finding himself back in Michigan, at the deer camp where his brothers, wife, and — eventually — their children also found themselves drawn.

As the Kuiperses’ family history unfolds, a reader is reminded a little of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, with the ecological sensibility of Edward Abbey hovering in the background. Initially, men in this family are most at ease sitting silently in deer blinds. As their time together increases, though, the brothers begin to learn, with some good-natured laughter, how little they actually know one another. At one point, Dean observes retrospectively that he and his brothers were in suspended animation, waiting throughout much of their adult lives for their father to grow up so they could follow suit: “[W]e were like him. We were all living some version of the childish adult and were as lost as he was. We needed to see him mature so we knew the way.”

As affecting as the Kuipers family evolution is, what makes The Deer Camp so memorable and engrossing is the wider environmental frame by which the author asks us to think about relationships. What brings the Kuiperses together, quite literally, is the acreage they return to year after year — through which they engage with one another and the ground. In a revelatory, understated way, The Deer Camp thinks through environmental subjects like restorative farming and ecopsychology in order to reassess how people interact both with others and themselves.

Early on in The Deer Camp, when Dean is in the midst of cleaning out his childhood closet, he comes upon a quote from the ecologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson that he had kept taped to his dorm room in college:

You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system of Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated into the larger system of your thought and experience.

Bruce, Dean, Brett, and Joe all face, at different points in time, mental disquiet and anguish, as does the boys’ mother on the heels of her abrupt divorce from Bruce. And these bouts isolate each of these family members, drawing them into enclosed spaces where they become lethargic and passive.

Another book that lurks within The Deer Camp is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, through which Dean reads the effects of his father’s land purchase on the Kuipers family. Leopold, one of the founding figures in the field of wild game management, tells the story of his own family’s efforts at restoring decayed cornfields on their property. As Dean recounts Leopold’s story, “The more the place responded to their restoration work, the more they all loved it. It wasn’t an economic transaction; it was a love relationship. It was relatedness. The love they felt for each other came partly from the land.”

As Brett becomes more knowledgeable about land management, he and Bruce clash over the Kuiperses’ deer camp. Brett believes the sandy soil can be rectified with ample fertilizer and lime, and that the towering Scots pines on the property need to be replaced with aspens (it turns out aspen trees provide the ideal habitat for white-tailed deer). Bruce remains convinced that the soil on their property is simply bad, that razing the pines will leave the land barren, and that overfertilization will only further burn out the sand. Half-measures fail, but when Brett’s plan is adopted in full, when Bruce steps back and cedes control over the deer camp, the results are staggering:

One- to two-foot-tall sapling trees stood thick like a field of grass, thousands and thousands of them, glowing incandescent green and yellow-white and magenta where they jutted up through the bracken fern and knapweed and foxtail. The new trees were backlit by the last of the spring sun and caught midleap as they busted out of the sandy earth. The dinner-plate-sized stumps were barely discernible, turned gray and brown by winter, buried under the flags of new saplings. Just about every inch of orange, pine-needled sand displayed new trees.

For those of us old enough to remember the 1970s, it was not unusual back then for ecologists to sound a little like mystics. The subsequent balkanization of conversations about the health of the planet have largely left behind the richness of this past discourse. Instead, we are more inclined to hear “scientists” face off, helplessly, against “deniers” of global warming.

The Deer Camp harkens to an era in which science and spiritualism were viewed as symbiotically connected. Late in the book, Dean dips back into A Sand County Almanac when he reminds us of Leopold’s musings about geese:

[S]omehow, geese returning to Wisconsin from the subtropics predict with great accuracy when the ice is off the ponds back home. They don’t return on the same day each year, but only when they are certain of the ice-out and their own safety from winter-sharpened fangs. These geese are too exhausted from the journey to turn around and go back south again if they’re wrong. “His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges,” Leopold wrote.

Without being too heavy-handed, Dean braids his belief in landscape with his reflections on the winding, bumpy path his own family took toward growing closer. His book is a scientifically and personally grounded treatise that asks us to take the notion of an “ecological unconscious” seriously. The Deer Camp is a captivating exploration of what one can learn from the natural world, and our dependence on this knowledge for our own well-being.

¤

Douglas Trevor is the author most recently of the short story collection The Book of Wonders (SixOneSeven Books). He is a professor of creative writing and English literature at the University of Michigan.

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from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2K05SrL