#we r so intertextual

[zielenna]

3, 13, and 22 for the book ask :)

hi! :)

3. What were your top five books of the year?

In order in which I read them --

Craig Perez Santos's from unincorporated territory: [Saina], a volume of poetry from a longer series centering on Santos's native Guam. I read this for a class alongside a chapter from Santos's academic book, Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. I am not great with contemporary poetry, but this was by far my favorite. (A book I didn't finish, but also enjoyed reading for that class was John Keene's collection of stories, Counternarratives, marginal entries – fabulations? – into the history of the Americas from the seventeenth century to the present).

Robert Glück's Margery Kempe might be my favorite thing I read this year – partly a retelling of the history of Margery Kempe (a fourteenth-century English lay woman and mystic – and an absolute icon), partly a memoir of the narrator's relationship with a younger man named L. The narrator’s desire for L. is parallel to Margery's desire for Jesus, and throughout it all, there is Glück's desire to make present the distant past. I really loved the sensory detail of this; it felt appropriate – one line from Margery Kempe's real book that I still remember after reading it in 2017, is Christ reassuring her that she is so obedient to his will that she "cleaves as close to him as a skin of a stockfish cleaves to man's hand when it is boiled."

Herman Melville's Billy Budd, to the surprise of no one. The period of the summer when I read it feels like a blur, but reading Melville always feels like a pleasure: it's beautiful, and deranged in a deeply relatable way.

Lauren Berlant's Desire/Love turned out to be a great book to have on a short trip. It is very short and very clear. The part on desire is a very (I know I am repeating myself, but this bears stressing!) lucid synthesis of psychoanalytic explanations of desire, and the part on love focuses on love as a form - a theatrical structure, translated into social and literary forms. I kept going back to this book later this year, reading the reviews of the newest Rooney, and Austen for my class in the fall. Also, with apologies to Berlant, I think that it makes for a good lens for thinking about fic, which is where I interact with the genre of romance most often.

I don't have a strong pick for the fifth favorite book, so I will follow the recency bias and go with the very last book I read, which was Elizabeth Wein's Winter Prince, a 90s Arthurian novel focusing on Mordred (Arthur's illegitimate son with his aunt – following the "canon," such as it is), and his uneasy relationship with Arthur's legitimate children / his step-siblings (invented by the author). I was planning for this to be my comfort (well) nostalgic reading for the holidays & it was exactly what I wanted. I liked the setting - post-Roman Britain, full of increasingly alien ruins (reminded me of Rosemary Sutcliff, another source of comfort reads for me), and how grounded everything felt; and the style - deceptively simple. I mean, it is a young adult novel, but it takes on quite a lot, and handles it with surprising deftness.

Keeping the rest under the cut:

13. What were your least favorite books of the year?

Well. I do try and for the most part manage to avoid books I don't think I'll like (since I read so few), but. Again, in the order of reading --

I didn't like Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as much as I hoped I would. Many (too many?) cool concepts, but they don't feel lived through. A book designed for book clubs.

Pulling from my classes again, Charlie Samuelson's Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature, is an example of the annoying academic tendency to make the term "queer" so "capacious" that it no longer means anything (turns out that any instance of irony, deconstruction, or just intertextuality can be queer). As a class we concluded that we'd be rather reading Carolyn Dinshaw instead.

Elizabeth Mavor's A Green Equinox was an enjoyable read, and doesn't entirely deserve to be on this list, but it was a book I disagreed with: after all the fun, it ends with a celebration of quasi-mystical stewardship over the Land as performed by the British upper classes. (I thought I might be exaggerating, but I just opened it on the last chapter and: "‘Do you think Zeus felt like this when he restored the world after Deucalion’s blood?’ I said he thought they must have" -- this is about restoring a vandalized garden on a National Trust estate).

Charlie Markbreiter's Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella was utterly forgettable. I picked it up for easy reading before bed, and because I am interested in texts engaging with fandom (and Y/N, which I read last year, was great!), but this never went anywhere. There's one funny scene where Nate Archibald (trans) has a breakdown and communicates with the ghost of Lauren Berlant about this – but as I type this I am realizing that this scene, and the whole book, could've been a tweet.

For the fifth book – well, I DNF'd after about fifteen pages, but Allen Bratton's Henry, Henry, the modern AU of Shakespeare's Henriad was a let-down. I didn't expect great, but I was hoping it'd be fun at least – and it felt forced.

22. What’s the longest book you read?

Hm, I'm not sure. By the number of pages, it would be the edition of the Roman de la Rose I read for class, 21,500 something lines of Old French poetry with a modern French translation, coming up to 1100 pages. But by word count, it might be a theoretical history of Poland I read over the summer, Jan Sowa's The King’s Phantom Body. A Peripheral Struggle with Modern Form, which was about 600 pages. And in terms of the time it took me to read it, it was definitely Fredric Jameson's Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, which was more readable than it sounds as it was based on the graduate seminar he gave at Duke – but it still took me a month and a half to finish.

Thanks for asking!

[waateeystein]

Analyzing Nick Dear's Frankenstein (and why we should move on to better play adaptations)

Alrighty y'all, its the long-awaited Nick Dear Frankenstein analysis post! This post is focusing specifically on Dear's characterization of the Creature, and why it negatively affects the play overall (plus some adaption theory added in for funsies). For additional context, I am an MFA candidate studying theatre, and I did this research and the accompanying slides for a project in my graduate-level theatrical criticism class. Basically this post is the text version of that presentation, with some of the slides included, and the fluff trimmed. There is a fair bit of academic jargon in here, but I tried to make it as accessible as possible!

And with all of that out of the way, the Nick Dear Frankenstein deep dive is under the cut! (And citations at the end.)

CW: Discussions of violence and SA.

Before I get into the script itself (which if you are interested in reading it, a PDF version is easily found on google), I want to introduce a fun adaptation theory which is specific to studying Frankenstein, called "Frankenstein Complex Theory." This theory comes from Dennis R. Cutchins and Dennis R. Perry in the introduction section to "Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster's Eternal Lives in Popular Culture." (A fantastic read that I recommend to anyone if your school or local library has it in circulation.) This introduction introduces the "complex" theory, as well as some really awesome ideas that get used and referenced by all of the authors included in the book.

Basically Cutchins and Perry assert that traditional adaptation theory is simple not enough to properly study Frankenstein and it's innumerable adaptations. One might also assert that Frankenstein itself is an adaptation, Mary Shelley published multiple editions of her story, and one could argue that the original story is an adaptation of other stories like "Paradise Lost." Linda Hutcheon, another academic in the field of adaptation studies who also wrote a fantastic book (cited at the end), talks about this idea of "palimpsestuous Intertextuality." I want to first argue here that the original text of Frankenstein and its adaptations (the "myth" of Frankenstein) are palimpsestuous.

And when I say the "myth" of Frankenstein is "palimpsestuous," its basically just saying that the "myth" (tall green guy with bolts in his neck who is mostly non-verbal, going around killing people mostly without rhyme or reason) is the predominate cultural narrative of Frankenstein's monster, rather than how he actually is in the book. All of the cultural ideas of what Frankenstein's monster is are this giant network which interweaves with itself, references and builds off itself, and constantly creates new things from these connections. The book and it's adaptations are not in hierarchy, one is not implicitly better or more important than another, they all work together to create our cultural narrative of Frankenstein's monster. Thus, palimpsestuous Intertextuality.

But what is this "Complex" theory I mentioned earlier, and what does it have to do with Nick Dear? Well, here is a helpful diagram!

Essentially, every piece of Frankenstein media every created, including Mary Shelley's original novel, are all part of the "Frankenstein Network." The complex, however, is personal, it includes anything from that network that you have personally consumed. Some people have a wider complex than others, but nonetheless, most of us have some kind of Frankenstein Complex (if you're this far in the post I'm assuming you have one lol.) I think Cutchins and Perry really popped off when they created this theory, its a fantastic way of studying/teaching adaptation.

But onto Nick Dear. Why did I just spend so much time covering adaptation theory and teaching you all a bunch of academic jargon? Well firstly, I spent a lot of time on that research for class and I wanted to share. But secondly and more importantly, my thesis for this entire post is that Nick Dear, whose goal with his play was to create an adaptation which humanized the Creature and sticks very close to the novel, created something that was unintentionally more a product of his personal complex and the palimpsestuous "myth" of Frankenstein's monster. He wrote a play that deeply mischaracterizes the Creature, and in turn uses violence and SA for shock value rather than substance.

And maybe this is a bold claim, but I think comparing the plot of the novel (from the creature's point of view) and the plot of Dear's play is a good place to start. And for your visual reference, I created a plot diagram for both so that we can compare the two side-by-side. (Thanks Freytag lol.)

The first thing we can notice about comparing the overall plot structure is that they are indeed, very similar. And this tends to be most people's reactions to seeing this play. That compared to most other Frankenstein media, it is super faithful to the book in terms of setting and characters and hitting important plot points. And I too want to praise Dear for that. I think he was extremely smart about what characters he chose to cut or combine, and the plot points he chose to include. I also personally love that despite the cutting of Walton's character, Victor and the Creature still visit the arctic at the end of the play. Dear made so many great choices with his play, but ends up squandering it his mischaracterization of the Creature.

But how is he mischaracterizing the Creature? Well first, lets look at how Shelley characterizes him in the book, specifically in terms of violence. I argue, that anytime the Creature kills someone in the book, it is a mostly equal/proportionate reaction to the violence done against him. His first murder his killing William, and the subsequent execution of Justine after he frames her for William's murder. All of this comes after Victor's initial rejection of the Creature, and rejection by multiple villages, the DeLacey's and the young drowning girl and her father. Killing William and Justine was his first retribution after all of the rejection and violence against him, which was initiated by Victor creating him and rejecting him in the first place. And this is his only planned revenge at that point, his next move was demanding that Victor create a female creature for him, with the plan to flee and live a peaceful life in South America (whether he actually meant what he said is up to interpretation.) His next murders only come after Victor destroys the unfished female creature. This is when the Creature kills Henry and then Elizabeth. Elizabeth (and arguably Henry) are Victor's partners, and the people he most personally loves. Killing them is direct retribution for Victor destroying the female Creature, who was supposed to be (at least from the Creature's perspective) the Creature's romantic partner. All of the Creature's direct murders are direct mirrors to Victor's transgressions against the Creature. William is killed for the initial rejection and subsequent exiling from society, Henry and Elizabeth are killed for the destruction of his future romantic partner.

Dear takes a different approach in adapting these murders. In his play, the Creature's first murder is not William, but is actually the DeLacey's. After being personally tutored by Father DeLacey for a significant amount of time, the eventual and fated meeting with Felix and Agatha arrives and the creature is rejected by them. Instead of going straight to Geneva, as he does in the novel, he first sets fire to the DeLacey's cabin, killing the entire family inside. To me, this feels like the first instance of spectacle and shock over actual substance. In both Shelley's novel and Dear's play, as the creature learns about humanity and war, he clearly has a distaste for violence and killing. And because of this, I don't understand why the Creature has such an extreme reaction to the DeLacey's, especially in this version where Father DeLacey shows him so much direct kindness, and it is Felix and Agatha specifically who reject him. Why would the Creature decide to kill them all? If Dear wanted to add additional deaths, why not just kill Felix and Agatha and spare Father DeLacey because of his previous kindness? This violence, to me, feels undeserved and does not mirror the violence done against him by this family. From a staging perspective, the visual of the house burning is actually a very impressive collaboration between the set and lighting designers on the giant stage of the National Theatre. But I question why this moment needs to be here, when the rest of the play and it's staging in the premier production already has so much beauty and shock and spectacle. This is also the first moment where I find the Creature unsympathetic, because this action seems overly extreme as a response.

After this moment, the murder of William is different but not too dissimilar in tone to the novel. At it's heart, it is still the Creature's first direct revenge against Victor. After this, our next big departure from the novel is when the female creature is fully brought to life, different to the novel where she is never fully given life. Victor killing her after she has been able to briefly live is a more extreme measure on Victor's part too, which by my own argument, may warrant a more extreme reaction from the Creature. And to be absolutely clear, Victor simply kills/dismantles her, and nothing more. As for the creature's reaction, Henry is a cut character in this adaptation, so we obviously don't see his death. Instead, the Creature kills Elizabeth, but in this version, not only does the creature kill her, he also r*pes her. This is my biggest point of contention with the play. To me, the subtext in Dear's version is that the Creature views both Elizabeth and the Female Creature as some kind of property, and when his property (the female Creature) is taken away by Victor, he takes Victor's property (Elizabeth) away too. Right before her death in the play, the Creature and Elizabeth actually have a really touching conversation, and they seem to genuinely bond. And so when the Creature eventually kills her afterwards, him r*ping her comes completely out of left field. The only explanation to me, is that despite empathizing with her, the Creature ultimately still views her as Victor's property, and needed to take her away from Victor in a way that was more than just taking her life from him. And honestly, it's a really gross interpretation of these characters. And I want to be very clear that I know depiction is not endorsement, and that I also believe there is a time and a place for depicting SA on stage, but this play was not the time nor the place. The creature simply killing Elizabeth is enough to get the point across, the SA seems to have been added for pure shock value, and again, spectacle. One could argue that this action done by the creature is part of his sexual awakening, just as he learns about other aspects of humanity. But again I believe this is not justified by the text of the play, and is written for pure shock value at the expense of another character, specifically a woman. I would call this misogynistic.

And these extreme reactions from the Creature in Dear's play seem to create this hyper-masculinized version of the character and the story. And I think that is a shame considering the original story was written by a woman, and Mary Shelley did a fantastic job of writing a story where the men can exist across a spectrum of masculinity, without needing to be this stereotyped version of hypermasculinity with a desire for sexual vengeance. I mean, Victor creating the Creature is a pretty clear metaphor for motherhood/parenthood, especially considering Shelley's experience with motherhood and the loss of her children and her own mother. And not to say that a cis man isn't capable of writing an authentic adaptation of a woman's story, but here, I think Nick Dear missed the mark, especially in regards to Elizabeth's death and his depiction of Creature/masculinity.

And I don't want to boil this down to, "Nick Dear is a man and therefore his adaption is automatically bad." Because I don't think that's the case, and I think that's an unfair assumption to make. What I do think, is that despite trying to make an adaptation that strove to humanize the Creature better than most other adaptations, Dear instead created an adaptation that fell into the overly-violent monster tropes of the greater Frankenstein Network of adaptations. In essence, Dear may have unintentionally become a product of his own "complex." And unfortunately, that subconscious influence may be partially why we get this interpretation of the Creature, and the unnecessary shock factors added into the story.

So where do we go from here? Chances are, if you see a theatre company putting on a production of Frankenstein, it's probably the Nick Dear version. This was the case for me last October when I accidentally attended a production of this script at a professional theatre company back home in Florida. My hope is that one day we can move on from this script, and find a Frankenstein play adaptation that humanizes the Creature in a way that most audiences (who probably have not read the book) are unfamiliar with, while also not resorting to shock value that dehumanizes the women in the story. My homework for myself beyond this research project, is to read more Frankenstein play adaptations, and specifically ones that are not written by cis men. I think the experiences of women, trans people and disabled people (or obviously any intersection of these communities and identities) could really lend themselves to new and exciting interpretations of the script that bring broader perspectives into context. If you have any suggestions of Frankenstein plays or playwrights who have written Frankenstein plays, I would love to check them out! I also suggest giving the National Theatre world premier pro-shot of Nick Dear's Frankenstein a watch, purely just for the design of the show. Costumes, set, sound and lighting are all really spectacular, and I would love to do an analysis of that aspect of the show one day.

Obviously there was a lot about this show I didn't cover (Cumberbatch, I know), I just wanted to cover the characterization of the Creature at a textual level, because to me that is the most glaring issue with this play. Please let me know your thoughts, and thanks for reading if you got this far!

Citations (I didn't do a great job of referencing these in-text, but all of these sources are great and I highly recommend checking them out!)

Cutchins, Dennis R, and Dennis R Perry. “Introduction- The Frankenstein Complex: When the text is more than a text.” Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2018, pp. 1–19.

Dear, Nick, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Frankenstein: Based on the Novel by Mary Shelley. Faber and Faber, 2011.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Beginning to Theorize Adaptation: What? Who? Why? How? Where? When?” A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, New York, New York, 2006, pp. 1–32.

Jones, Kelly. “Adaptations of ‘liveness’ in theatrical representations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2018, pp. 316–334.

Pfeiffer, Lee. “Frankenstein: Film by Whale [1931].” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 24 Nov. 2023, www.britannica.com/topic/Frankenstein-film-by-Whale.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1831.

[redstrewn]

I have more thots on the pearl thing and this is like completely batshit bc theres no explicit pearl imagery in ts (but there should be👁). Anyway,, heres my two interpretations:

- the initial object landing in the shell (birth and curse) are to be hidden by the layers. The core is always there but it is hidden never to be found (mc is trying to hide the curse with layers of bandages,, layers of persona and emotional walls)

- the core is covered,, but the layers are part of the self. The pearl is an individual object but it belongs to the world too (the shell and pearl are of the same material,, but the pearl is seperate from the shell). The layers are not some false foreign cover, but instead an extention of the self. (Mc accepts themselves but also learns to be in harmony with others and the world)

Theres like so many directions to go with and idk if pearl imagry will ever be a thing,, but I think that by working with symbols we can still grasp the narrative structure (i mean,, narratives are often recycled and intertwined in both a political and intertextual sense anyway) i like symbols bc they create a special new layer of interpretation just for me :)

- musa (the lit student lol)

Also be glad im not talking of lacan bc that bitch is highkey relevant too to ts

I LOVE SYMBOLS TOOOOOOOO OMG URE A LIT STUDENT thank u for providing ur knowledge and skills 🙏🙏🙏🙏 u r cooking w all this. idk what lacan is but at this point we be stewing up anything we can lets get it all out!!

[onewomancitadel]

Ozlem and the romances

Every now and then I go down the rabbit hole of thinking about intertextual influences on R/WBY and then I end up debating with myself how seriously to take Rhodopis, because Rhodopis pretty majorly changes things regarding my OTP. I think I have arrived at a reasonable conclusion which should - and this is the reason I'm writing this - give myself relief. It's a pretty organic conclusion too, because I've otherwise said as much in the past - allusions only matter insofar as they intensify R/WBY's storytelling, not the other way around.

Yeah so this is true for the romances, and Ozlem is the thing motivating the romances - I mean this in the most concrete way, more than I've said as much before in terms of thematic stakes. The allusions in the romances - if used at all - are crafted only insofar as Ozlem matters, because that's the story proper. We know they knew what caused the moon to shatter very early on in the show, so it's probably likely to some degree they knew what was going on with Salem (she was the fifth created character if I recall correctly), but whether the planned canon romances reflect Ozlem or Ozlem reflects the planned canon romances, it doesn't really matter. All stories evolve, and I'm pretty sure the basic roadmap with Salem was clear all along; you can't kill her. I'm only writing this out because I think it's worth thinking about when people want to say that R/WBY isn't 'intentional'; it's a serial work but it's not a serial work without intentions. It's not rocket science.

A case study here might be Ruby and Oscar, where the popular frame of reference I see for the ship (as a relative outsider) is that the Little Prince (obvious influence with Oscar) loved a rose. I think they specifically built his character in mind with The Little Prince because of its thematic resonance with R/WBY (if you haven't read The Little Prince, you ought to) which appropriately fitted in with a romance with Ruby, as a consequence of Ozlem. I think it's most obvious that a redeeming romance of Ozlem involving Ozma's final reincarnation is going to happen one way or another, and Ozma himself is the chief obstacle to that relationship (outside of Ruby's own emotional/spiritual development and mother wound). The key here is Ozlem, not that you can solely reason for Ruby/Oscar based off of The Little Prince - because it is really easy to start arguing in one direction or another with the allusions and rely on them too much without considering why they're being used.

For a much more obviously canon ship which is not a point of speculation anymore at all, Blake/Yang more obviously redeems Ozlem than Blake/Sun ever did (if you even want to bring that into the argument here). Beauty and Beast realises and reprises fundamental themes of Ozlem (seeing past the exterior/compassion valued as idealism/spiritual beauty/complicated stuff surrounding towers and imprisonment and freedom, I'm thinking of the unicorn on a leash here, and everything to do with the God of Light lol) and I think there's a reason that the first True Love's Kiss in the show was between Beauty and Beast and that Beauty and the Beast is the romance allusion of two main cast members. It's clearly been afforded real consideration (it is not a cynical realisation of BatB like it's often twisted) and gives us an emotional roadmap as to how the romances should work (the fact they translated the Beast's physical imprisonment into emotional imprisonment means they understand the core message of BatB). But I don't think the sole argumentation for Blake and Yang is Beauty and the Beast (and I would argue that of what I remember of the fandom from Beacon era, this wasn't the only angle they took) but rather that it hits the reprisal of the Ozlem feud (Adam and an emotional imprisonment/curse, allegiances to greater powers, working back from painful abandonment, etc.). I would certainly say the BatB is feeding into Ozlem or vice versa, and it's probably hard to delineate where one begins and one ends, but it's impossible to read why Blake/Yang works so well without Ozlem in my estimation.

Ren/Nora, by virtue, actually gets intense once there's a real confrontation of motivations and self-individuation. They're the lotus, which grows in mud, and is similarly to BatB about a relationship between beauty and ugliness, and so this is similarly reprising that thematic idea of from wholeness comes brokenness... which is why I believe the prominence of Nora's scarring is tied to a love confession (this idea of love and pain is related, I think, and pain and growth; it's very Wound of Love, you have drunk your death, if by my death you mean this agony of love etc.). To this relationship the allusions of Thor and Mulan don't actually matter as much - the symbolic idea of the lotus (pink/green) seems like a bigger idea here, which is much like Emerald/Mercury (Emerald Tablet and Mercury). But despite the fact I've never been able to identify anything outside of the lotus for the ship, I think very few would argue against this ship, and I think its development has been written in respect to Ozlem (confronting disguised feelings actually feels like foreshadowing for future Ozlem development).

It's impossible for me to read any of these relationships without Ozlem; they're metaphorical reincarnations in the story realising, reprising and redeeming it, and no matter what allusions are at play they're beholden to what the romance is actually achieving character- and plot-wise, and both character- and plot-wise Ozlem is a huge deal. Salem's the lead villainess, Ozma is the resident bad wizard along for the ride: however the story eventually finishes, it's going to involve some sort of confrontation between the two, and it would never happen without the main cast. This is the cycle breaker and they're all examples of how it could be 'fixed'.

It's not necessarily going to be pitch-perfect, since the broader ideas of Ozlem are pretty gestural and most of it's pretty Jungian and mythically loaded - and so I don't know if you could, say, exactly predict a relationship solely through how it is or isn't Ozlem---

Ah.

This is the bit I keep coming back to, because so far I can make the case for Ozlem motivating the canon romances (yay structural poetry) and then I get to this point and I'm not sure what to do because I do think the allusions are made more intelligible this way - no more pointless speculation, let's think about how this services the story - and yeah, Jaune/Pyrrha is akin to Ruby and Penny, there is definitely the experience of Ozma's loss hammered in to the characters (and loss generally as a theme), and then I get to fucking this and I don't know what to do. Because I'm wondering if I'm reasoning backwards - Jaune/Cinder is reverse Ozlem, therefore the romances are Ozlem motivated - but this is literally the only way I've been able to parse what is and isn't relevant when it comes to the allusions and the romances and then further when it comes to the actual plot-related allusions. Jaune is Ruby's Huntsman in V9 insofar as he rescues them all from the Big Bad Wolf but he's Ruby's Huntsman in the sense of Cinder's Huntsman (Rhodes), which is a source of disllusionment - so the work being done here is character-motivated (and Jungian), not solely 'did you get it? It's just like in Red Riding Hood!' That's an example I can think of off the top of my head because it's such a recent example with very specific and successful intentions (particularly contrasted against her disillusionment with her Huntress mother - who wielded an axe - it's actually in this whole same episode/sequence this idea is explored. It's intentional).

I don't know. I can't make a case here for Jaune/Weiss because Jaune/Weiss is like, the Old Man and the Winter Maiden, but almost nothing to it is Ozlem in any way that I can think of but with Jaune/Cinder I have this very in-my-face Ozlem parallel I simply cannot ignore. I've gone over in the past why I think a positive resolution works as opposed to a cautionary tale-esque version of Ozlem. Could Jaune/Weiss be made to fit-to-form? I would expect more meat from it personally since Weiss is a major main cast character and outside of her family if she gets a romance that does a lot of work for her character and the Schnees' legacy (particularly a big deal thematically since Ozlem lost their children, the Maidens are surrogate daughters, Salem's all-in-one vessel is her surrogate daughter/she's an 'evil stepmother' as well as evil fairy godmother). How does any of their conflict answer Ozlem? How does Weiss not taking notice of Jaune for eight volumes answer Ozlem? What does it achieve for their characters? Thematically? Plot-wise? It gets Jaune out of his rut, like Sun got Blake out of her rut. I don't fucking knowwwwww. It's not straightforward the way BB, RG, and even to some degree RN are. Sure - sure - I know - it could just be badly written, last minute, a joke, it could simply break the Ozlem paradigm.

But if the Ozlem paradigm justifies the romances - and no, I'm not arguing here about whether R/WBY is well-written or not with morons who wouldn't know the first thing about basic storytelling - and something breaks that paradigm, irrespective of Jaune being one of Weiss' many Huntsmen (I'm not going to go over this again... Yang is one of Weiss' Huntsman with the other Evil Queen/Maiden Raven, Winter is another Evil Queen, Cinder is an Evil Queen - the Maidens are Queens chess-wise, etc. etc. etc.), I need to know if it's Ozlem motivated. So. What am I to do?

I'm back at the Ozlem in reverse with Jaune/Cinder and Rhodopis.

This ended as a true Jaune/Cinder post. I'm sorry. The romances are Ozlem-motivated. The only conclusion I can come to is that Jaune/Cinder being Ozlem in reverse (lovers to enemies -> enemies to lovers) is relevant. (She's even Grimm-cursed, he was the Old Man in the Four Maidens fairytale with team R/WBY as the Maidens). That's why the Rhodopis - (proto-Cinderella) of Herodotus is freed from her second master (Madame, Salem) by Sappho's (Sapphron's) brother (Jaune). If I were writing a secret, twist romance I would absolutely choose a nested reference within a (found on Wikipedia) version of Cinderella not everybody's aware of which I would gradually seed and reference throughout the show, when it is more concretely beholden to Ozlem. You might say that things don't happen exactly as they do in the allusions - and no, they don't (see the thesis of this post), but specific to Jaune and Cinder is that their enmity is the remix. The twist is the romance and the unlikelihood of Ozlem working back their conflict.

I'm not depending upon anybody to figure out the romance through Rhodopis, but it's a pretty good one if you ask me. Ozlem is the secret history of the world, after all. But you don't need Rhodopis to figure it out. It's all there in the text. It's all Ozlem. It's all Jaune's character, it's all Cinder's character, it's all wounded idealism redeemed. The allusion is there for flavour, if you catch it, the way BatB enhances and justifies Blake/Yang.' That's why the Rhodopis - (proto-Cinderella) of Herodotus is freed from her second master (Madame, Salem) by Sappho's (Sapphron's) brother (Jaune). If I were writing a secret, twist romance I would absolutely choose a nested reference within a (found on Wikipedia) version of Cinderella not everybody's aware of which I would gradually seed and reference throughout the show, when it is more concretely beholden to Ozlem. I'm not depending upon anybody to figure out the romance through Rhodopis - or indeed, more damningly, Jaune's role in Cinder's redemption arc (which is as major as the romance itself) but it's a pretty good allusion if you ask me. Ozlem is the secret history of the world, after all. But you don't need Rhodopis to figure it out. It's all there in the text. It's all Ozlem. It's all Jaune's character, it's all Cinder's character, it's all wounded idealism redeemed. The allusion is there for flavour, if you catch it, the way BatB enhances and justifies Blake/Yang.

I don't know what my conclusion is. This post started out as a way to convince myself out of Jaune/Cinder and all it's done is once again drag me back in. SOS, etc.

[weiwhat]

'From LOLs to Legislation: How Memes Shape Political Discourse'

The rapid digitalization of our world has no doubt fundamentally transformed how we communicate, connect, and, ultimately, engage with political discourse. In this evolving digital landscape, internet memes have emerged as a powerful force, shaping political conversations in ways previously unimaginable. Far from mere online amusement, these shareable bits of digital culture have become potent tools for disseminating political messages, influencing public opinion, and even mobilizing collective action (Galipeau 2022). So what is memes exactly? According Shifman, a meme is a picture that goes viral on social media or the internet and can be replicated and repurposed (Shifman, 2014). Simply means, meme is a text-based intertextual mashup of a pop culture snapshot, GIF, or images.  This perfectly aligns with the term "playful politics," where pop culture humor disrupts traditional political discourse (Mortensen & Neumayer 2021).

HOW IT STARTED

-Meme format emerges as attentions microscopically showcase brawl into a showdown (papajahat94)

HOW IT ENDED

-Political 'Memefication' aim to boost name recognition through fervors engagement (fb/Dr.JoohariAriffin)

Top of mind, Malaysian politics provides a compelling example of this trend. Politicians are increasingly using memes and viral trends to connect with younger voters, as demonstrated by Dr. Joohari Ariffin's 2024 Sungai Bakap campaign incorporating the infamous "one by one, gentleman" meme. This tactic effectively leverages the principles of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), where individuals actively engage with and reshape media content. By tapping into existing online conversations, politicians create a sense of shared understanding with voters, fostering a sense of community and belonging.

EFFECTIVENESS OF POLITICAL MEMES

r/malaysia/deleted

Political memes  as suggested by Malik et al. (2013) demonstrate effectiveness across multiple levels of engagement: awareness, attitude formation, and behavioral change (Kasirye 2019). Increased awareness of political memes, often achieved through their humorous and shareable nature, can lead to greater familiarity with political issues (Malik et al as cited in Kasirye 2019). This heightened awareness can translate into increased engagement with political content, as individuals become more invested in the messages conveyed through memes.

-reddit/malaysia/ agodcxMOD

Furthermore, political memes influence attitudes towards political issues. As Culbertson (1968) notes, attitudes are sets of beliefs that shape our judgments and behaviors (Kasirye 2019,). Exposure to political memes can either reinforce existing political views or challenge them, prompting individuals to reconsider their positions. Chaiklin (2011) adds that changes in attitude often lead to corresponding changes in behavior. Therefore, if individuals develop positive attitudes towards political memes and the issues they represent, they are more likely to engage in related behaviors, such as creating, sharing, and discussing memes.

- reddit/malaysia/ZeneticX

Finally, political memes can influence political behavior, including participation in online discussions, sharing political content, and even offline actions like attending rallies or protests as digital citizenship eluded. Huntington (2013) highlights how citizens use memes in both democratic and non-democratic societies to express their views, mobilize support, and challenge power structures (Kasirye 2019). By providing accessible and engaging entry points into complex political issues, memes can empower individuals to participate more actively in the political process. This participatory aspect of memes aligns with LaBerge's (1997) association of awareness with personal experience, suggesting that the more individuals engage with political memes, the more likely they are to integrate these experiences into their understanding of the political world and act accordingly (Kasirye 2019).

IMPACT OF POLITICAL MEMES

The playful, easily digestible nature of memes can conceal a more complex and potentially problematic dynamic (Tuters & Hagen 2019). While memes can foster a sense of community and shared understanding, they can also contribute to what Tuters and Hagen (2020) term "memetic antagonism." This phenomenon occurs when the humor and shareability of memes are used to reinforce boundaries between different groups, exacerbating political polarization (Tuters & Hagen 2019). The inherent simplicity of memes allows for the easy creation of "us" versus "them" narratives, strengthening existing biases and potentially contributing to the spread of misinformation.

In the context of the Sungai Bakap by-election, this dynamic of memetic antagonism could manifest in several ways. Memes might be used to portray one candidate or party in a highly positive light while simultaneously ridiculing or demonizing their opponents. This can create a highly polarized online environment where nuanced discussion and debate are replaced by simplistic, emotionally charged exchanges. Such an environment can discourage voters from engaging in critical thinking about the candidates and their platforms, potentially leading to decisions based on biased or incomplete information.

-TindakMalaysia.com

Furthermore, this extreme polarization, fueled by memetic antagonism, can have a detrimental effect on voter turnout. When political discourse becomes excessively divisive and hostile, individuals may feel disillusioned or alienated from the political process. This can lead to voter apathy and a decline in participation, as seen in the diminished turnout for the Sungai Bakap by-election. The very tools intended to connect with voters can, when employed irresponsibly, contribute to their disengagement from the democratic process. The echo chambers created by online communities sharing politically charged memes can further amplify these effects, reinforcing existing beliefs and isolating individuals from alternative perspectives.

Concluding, a critical examination of memes' impact on political discourse is essential. While they offer a vernacular and accessible way to engage with complex issues, their tendency to simplify can lead to oversimplification and misrepresentation. Understanding the full potential of memes requires a nuanced approach, recognizing their capacity for both constructive engagement and subtle manipulation. The act of repurposing a meme imbues it with new political meaning, contributing to both connection and division within the evolving digital landscape of political communication.

References

Galipeau, T 2022, ‘The Impact of Political Memes: a Longitudinal Field Experiment’, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, pp. 1–17.

Kasirye, F 2019, @inproceedings{Kasirye2019THEEO, title={THE EFFECTIVENESS OF POLITICAL MEMES AS A FORM OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION AMONGST MILLENNIALS IN UGANDA}, author={Faiswal Kasirye}, year={2019}, url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:211480475} }, pp. 44–47.

Mortensen, M & Neumayer, C 2021, ‘The playful politics of memes’, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 24, no. 16, pp. 2367–2377.

SHIFMAN, L 2014, ‘Memes in Digital Culture’, JSTOR, The MIT Press, viewed .

Tuters, M & Hagen, S 2019, ‘(((They))) rule: Memetic antagonism and nebulous othering on 4chan’, New Media & Society, vol. 22, no. 12, p. 146144481988874.

[gotatext]

what brought you back? the smell of commitment wafting from teddy's scrotum?

    “I… What? No. Not every decision I make is based around the actions of others. Y’know, I am capable of choosing my own path yada-yada. Hendrix seemed like the best option for me at the time… fresh start, new tutors, the chance to pick up another language… but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna drop all my friends like Dick Whittington and fuck off to Amsterdam. Corny as it sounds Lockwood’s kinda like home to me. It’s my roosting ground, you know? And that has everything to do with a place and nothing to do with a person.”

[coelakanths]

that episode huh .

[abandonedtennisball]

Y’all wtf do u think we r doing with modern lit if not,,,, creating shit that will be seen as classic in the future. Fr like ??? Do u think turn of the screw or whatever was seen as Great And Important Literature and. It was published ??? Do u think Marie’s lais were?? Nah. It was one last stop. It was the woman in the window. It was spider wick. If ur too high and mighty to think classic lit was at once moder lit u have a classist and racist tick up ur ass. Embarrassing. I’m sorry I’ve had whiskey. Go home. Intertextuality counts with modern fiction cause I say so. I’m done. Love u.

[joneswuzhere]

hello join me in thinking about some books and authors that are, or might be, part of s5′s intertextuality

5.10 in particular offered specific shout outs, and also u know i’m always wondering what might be ahead so i have some ideas on that:

- first, as mentioned in a previous ask post, i know i wasn’t alone in keeping an eye out for 5.10 parallels to the lost weekend (1945) the film that gave episode 1.10 its name and several themes - or to the 1944 book by charles r jackson which the film is based on

- s5 has not been shy about revisiting earlier seasons, especially s1. altho i feel that 1.10′s parallels to the lost weekend centered characters other than jughead (mostly betty), a 1.10-5.10 connection involving jughead and themes from jackson’s story (addiction, writers block, self reflection) seemed v possible if not inevitable

- but like,, , for a hot minute after the ep, i was really stumped on understanding how anything from the book or film could apply, even tho the pieces were almost all there

- jackson’s protagonist don birnam goes thru and comes out the other side of a harrowing days-long drinking binge that could be compared to jughead’s one-night hallucinogenic writing retreat

- but jughead is struggling primarily with traumatic memories, not addiction and self control like birnam. and tho drinking activates birnam’s creativity, it paralyzes his writing as he gets lost in fantasies; he’s never published anything. jughead’s drug trip recreates circumstances that already helped him write one successful book. even the rat that startles him mid-high doesn’t line up with birnam’s withdrawal vision of a dying mouse, symbolic of his horror at his own self-destruction thru alcohol

- and maybe the most visible discordance: in the film there’s a romantic motif around a typewriter. first it’s an object of shame; birnam’s failure to write, tied up with his drinking, makes him flee his relationship. he tries to pawn the typewriter for booze money and finally a gun when shooting himself feels easier than getting sober. but with the help of relentless encouragement from girlfriend helen, he quits drinking, commits to her, and focuses on typing out the story he’s dreamt of writing. rd goes so far to avoid setting any comparable scenario that jughead has brought a wholeass printer into the bunker so there can still be a physical manuscript to cover in blood by the end, even without his own typewriter. the subtle detail of his laptop bg image is a little less noticeable than his avoidance of betty’s gift

- tabitha might be closer to a parallel than jughead is, but she’s still no helen. both refuse to take advantage of the inebriated men in their care, but birnam takes advantage of helen, financially and emotionally. jughead refused a loan from the tate family and now has resolved to deal with his shit before he considers a relationship with tabitha. instead of helen’s relentless and unwelcomed attempts to get birnam sober, tabitha reluctantly agrees to help jughead trip safely bondage escape notwithstanding. she even helps him get the drugs.

- whatever potentials exist for parallels to jackson’s story, they were not explored for this episode. ok so why tf am i even talking about this? what was there instead?

-  i have arrived at the point

- s5 has been revisiting s1, not directly but with a twist. and jughead’s agent samm pansky is back. u may recall, pansky is named for sam lansky

- jughead’s trip-thru-trauma is a story device tapped straight from lansky’s book ‘broken people’

- lansky is like if a millenial john rechy wrote extremely LA-flavored meta but just about himself no jk very like a modern successor to charles r jackson. both play with the boundary between memoir and fiction. lansky is gay; jackson wrote his lost weekend counterpart as closeted and remained closeted himself until only a few years before his death. both write with emotional clarity and self-scrutiny on the experiences of addiction, sobriety, and the surrounding issues of shame and self worth

- i feel like a fool bc after this ep i had been thinking about de quincey and his early writings on addiction (c.1800s), but i failed to carry the thought in the other direction, to contemporary writers in the genre, to make this connection sooner

- lansky’s second book, broken people, follows narrator ‘sam’, mid-20s, super depressed, hastled by his agent to write a decent follow-up to his first book, but too busy struggling with his self-worth and baggage from several past relationships. desperate, he takes up an offer to visit a new age shaman who promises to fix everything wrong with him in a matter of days. not to over simplify it but he literally spends a weekend doing psychedelics and hallucinating about his exes. jughead took note

- unless u want me to hurl myself into yet another dissertation about queer jughead, i think his parallel to sam - who, unlike jughead, has considerable financial privilege and whose anxieties center on body dysmorphia, hiv scares, and his own self-centeredness - pretty much ends there

- But,, the gist of the book could not be more harmonius with a major theme shared by the 2 films that inform the actual hallucination part of jughead’s bunker scene: mentally reframing past relationships to get closure + confronting trauma head-on in order to move forward

- so that’s neat. what other book and author stuff was in 5.10?

- stephen king and raymond carver get name dropped. i’m passingly familiar with them both but u bet i just skimmed their wiki bios in case anything relevant jumped out

- like jughead, carver was a student (later a lecturer) at the iowa writers workshop. also the son of an alcoholic and one himself

- i recall carver’s ‘what we talk about when we talk about love’ is what jughead was reading in 2.14 ‘the hills have eyes’ after he finds out about the first time betty kissed archie (at that time he does not respond as would any of carver’s characters)

- this collection of carver stories deals especially with infidelity, failings of communication, and the complexities and destructiveness of love. to unashamedly quote the resource that is course hero, ‘carver renders love as an experience that is inherently violent bc it produces psychic and emotional wounds.’ very fun to wonder about the significance of this collection within the s2 episode and in jughead’s thoughts. and maybe now in the context of the s5 state of relationships. or, at least, the state of jughead’s writing as seen by his agent

- anyway pansky doesn’t want carver, he wants stephen king

- i have too much to say about gerald’s game in 5.10, that’s getting its own post someday soon

- lol wait king’s wife is named tabitha uhhh king’s wiki reminded me of his childhood experience that possibly inspired his short story ‘the body’ (+1986 movie ‘stand by me’) when he ‘apparently witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train tho he has no memory of the event’

- no mention of that in this rd episode but memories of a train could be interesting to consider with the imagery that intrudes on jughead’s hallucination. i still feel like it was a truck but the lights and sounds he experiences may be a train

- ok now we’re in the speculation part of today’s segment

- if jughead’s traumatic memory involves trains, then it’s possible this plot will take influence from la bête humaine <- this 1938 movie is based on the 1890 novel by french writer émile zola. this story deals with alcoholism and possessive jealousy in relationships, sometimes leading to murder. huh, kind of like carver. zola def comes down on the nature side of the nature-vs-nuture bad seed question (tho i should say he approaches this with great or maybe just v french compassion). also i can’t tell if this is me reaching but, something about la bête humaine reminds me of king’s ‘secret window’ which we’ve observed to be at least a style influence on jughead post time jump

- but wow a late-19th century french writer would be a random thing to drop into this season, right? then again zola also wrote about miners, which we’ve learned are an important part of this town’s history + whatever hiram is up to this time.  and most notably, zola wrote ‘j’accuse...!’ an open letter in defense of a soldier falsely accused and unlawfully jailed for treason: alfred dreyfus. archie’s recent army trouble comes to mind.

- since the introduction of old man dreyfuss (plausibly Just a nod to close encounters actor richard dreyfuss, but also when is anything in this show Just one thing) i’ve been wondering if these little things could add up to a season-long reference to zola’s writings. but i had doubts and didn’t want to speak on it too soon bc, u know, it’s weird but is it weird enough for riverdale??

- however,,,

- (come on, u knew where i was going with this)

- a24′s film zola just came out. absolutely no relation to the french writer, it’s not based on a book but an insane and explicit twitter thread by aziah ‘zola’ wells about stripping and? human trafficking?? this feels ripe for rd even outside the potentials here for the lonely highway/missing girls plot.

- that would add up to a combination of homage that feels natural to this show

- anyway pls understand i’m just having fun speculating, most of this is based on nothing more concrete than the torturous mental tendril ras has hooked into my skull pls let go ras pls let go

[perennialessays]

Week 4

Influence, Imitation, Intertextuality, Reception

This week we shall consider various ways in which the relationship between texts has been conceptualised, and in particular we shall look at the concepts of “imitation”, “influence” and “intertextuality”: what is the difference between them? If we consider the relationship between two writers or texts through one or other of these concepts, does it lead us to understand the literary relationship differently? Does each allow us to see something that the others do not?  What if we put the way the reader reads first - how do the historical, social, cultural contexts in which a text is received affect the ‘meaning’ of texts? How do we understand a particular text in relation to its historical predecessors or successors? What happens if we consider these relationships within a national literature or in comparative cross-cultural and cross-linguistic terms? Do these concepts lead to the exclusion of certain texts? If so, why, and with what consequences? The texts read over the last two weeks will help us consider how these concepts work in practice; we shall return to them again in the following weeks.

Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, Letters XXIII,19 and XXII,2 [Course Pack]

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (introduction) [Course Pack]

Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel (excerpts) [Course Pack]

Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text”, “The Death of the Author” [Course Pack]

Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” (excerpts) [Course Pack]

Some bibliography on Literary History, Tradition, Canon and National Literature

Canon:

Kermode, Frank, “Institutional Control of Interpretation”, in Essays on Fiction, 1971-1982 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). Ross, Trevor, The Making of the English Canon: From the Middle Ages to The Late Eighteenth Century(Montreal, Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill University Press, 1998)

The creation and concept of a national literature and its function

Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Criticism(Oxford: Clarendon, 1983)

Crawford, Robert, Introduction, Devolving English Literature(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). (See esp intro and first chapter; very interesting perspective, argues very persuasively that the idea of English literature originates in Scotland)

Tradition:

Cianci, Giovanni and Jason Harding, eds., T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992

Literary History

Hutcheon, Linda and Mario J. Valdés, eds., Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Perkins, David, ed., Theoretical Issues in Literary History(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991)

Perkins, David, IS Literary Histoiry Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)

Some additional bibliography on imitation, influence, intertextuality

Imitation, Intertextuality, Influence Clayton, Jay and Eric Rothstein (eds.), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) Dasenbrock, Red Way, Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Joyce, Pound (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). (see esp. the intro as a position against the idea of intertextuality) Orr, Mary. Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge: Polity, 2003) Worton, Michael and Judith Still (eds.), Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) A feminist perspective: Rich, Adrienne, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision", in Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition, 1993). Structuralist approaches to intetextuality: Genette, Gérard, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Riffaterre, Michael, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) Riffaterre, Michael, "Syllepsis", Critical Inquiry 6 (1980), pp. 625-638. For those interested in American literature: O'Donnell, Patrick and Robert Con Davis, eds., Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)

Some bibliography on reader response and reception theory

Reader-Response, Reception Theory [for reception of the classics, see under topic 5 Fish, Stanley, Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics”, in Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 21-52. Freund, Elizabeth, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987). Holub, Robert C., Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984). Iser, Wolfgang, The Reader in the Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) Jauss, Hans Robert, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). (See also the section on reception of the classics, including feminist reception, under topic 5)

[annecoulmanross]

Latin Inscription for the Foundation-Stone of Christ’s College in Van Diemen’s Land

Following this brilliant post by @indifferent-century​, I was inspired to translate the entirety of the Latin inscription of the Foundation-Stone of Christ’s College in Van Diemen’s Land, November 7th, 1840, as written by – perhaps – Sir John Franklin’s future son-in-law, John Philip Gell, who was appointed as head of the College. Join me for some Janky-Franky shenanigans, this time in Latin!

First of all, here’s a full translation (rearranged to preserve our English word order, generally, rather than the original Latinate style.)

Sir John Franklin, KCH, FLS, FRGS, Governor of the Island of Tasmania, Dedicated to Christ This House of All Humanities and Sciences, and Ordered that It Be Made, according to the Judgement of the Council and from the Funds of the Colony, and Placed this Auspicious Stone in the Fourth Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria, on the seventh day before the Ides of November, 1840.

Respected men from each of the two councils took part: Sir William Henry Elliott, Military Commander; Sir John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice; William Hutchins, M.A., Archdeacon; Matthew Forster, Colonial Secretary; Adam Turnbull, Colonial Treasurer; Josiah Spode, Chief Police Magistrate; Edward Macdowell, Attorney-General; George Thomas William Blaney Boyes, Accountant; George Henry Barnes, Collector of Customs; Thomas Anstey; Thomas Archer; Charles Swanston; Charles Maclachlan; William Effingham Lawrence; William Page Ashburner; Michael Fenton; with John Philip Gell, M.A., having been placed in charge of educating the youth, and with Alexander Cheyne as the Curator of Public Works.

James Clark Ross and That Companion of His, Francis Crozier, While They Were Preparing to Bring Powerful Science and the Immortal Name of the English People through the Unknown Things of the Northern Ocean, Took Part in this Endeavor under Favorable Auspices and with Enthusiasm.

Next, the original text: this Latin wording comes mainly from this typeset transcription, with some emendations from the handwritten notes of Eleanor Franklin, which you can read here. (Both of these sources were found and linked originally by @indifferent-century​ – thank you!) 

Christo Dicatam Hanc Omnis Humanitatis et Scientiæ Domum Johannes Franklin (1) Eq. PH., (2) Eq. R., (3) LL.D. (4) R.S.S. (5) Insulæ Tasmaniensis (6) Præses [e] Consilii Sententia (7) Impensis Coloniæ (8) Fieri Jussit Lapidem Auspicalem Posuit Anno Victoriæ Quarto vii Id. Nov. MDCCCXL. (9)

Interfuere Viri (10) Spectatissimi Ex Utroque Consilio (11) Gulielmus Henricus Elliott Eq. H. Milit. Præfect. (12) Johannes Lewes Pedder Eq. Aur. Justiciarius Principalis (13) Gulielmus Hutchins M.A. Archidiaconus Matthias Forster Secretarius (14) Adam Turnbull Thesaurarius (14) Josias Spode Irenarches (14) Edvardus Macdowell Procurator Regius (14) Georgius Thomas Gulielmus Blaney Boyes Rationalis (14) Georgius Henricus Barnes Portitoriis Conquirendis Præpositus (14) Thomas Anstey Thomas Archer Carolus Swanston Carolus Maclachlan Gulielmus Effingham Lawrence Gulielmus Page Ashburner Michael Fenton Juventuti Educandæ Præposito Johanne Philippo Gell M.A. Operum Publicorum Curatore Alexandro Cheyne

Jacobus Clark Ross Et Huic Comes Franciscus Crozier Per Ignota Septentrionalis Oceani [Scientiam Efficacem]  Anglorum Perenne Nomen Laturi Incepto Bene Auspicato Lubenter Interfuere (15)

And last, as per the previous discussions on this inscription, I also have footnotes.

(1) Yes, "Johannes Franklin” is our Sir John. Yes, this would be a reasonable, etymologically valid version of his name (or his first name, at least) in Latin. Yes, it’s uncomfy. So is “Franciscus Crozier.” As @catilinas​ said, “utterly terrible.”

(2) Amazingly, the translator (or author-translator) of this inscription has rendered Sir John’s post-nominal letters (indicating his knighthood, and membership in certain societies) into Latin and then abbreviated them back to letters. This cluster, “Eq. PH.,” equates to the English ‘KCH’ or Knight Commander of the Royal Guelphic Order of the House of Hanover, and should probably be lengthened to something like Eq[ues] P[raefectus] H[anoverianus] meaning “Hanoverian Knight Commander.”

(3) Our next letter-cluster is “Eq. R.,” which I’m finding terribly confusing. “Eq.” should, in theory, correspond to another knighthood – it lengthens to “eques,” which is classical Latin for “knight,” a middling elite honorary position, but I don’t know about the “R.” It does seem that Franklin was knighted by King George IV in 1829 before he was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1836, so perhaps we should read this as something like Eq[ues] R[egalis] / R[egius] meaning “Royal Knight” or thereabouts?

(4) Now we’re back to normal post-nominal honors – “LL.D” must correspond to Franklin’s membership in the Linnean Society, normally indicated by the letters “FLS,” or “Fellow of the Linnean Society.” I’m not entirely sure how we get from FLS to LLD, but perhaps LL[inneaniorum] D[ominus] meaning something like or “Master of the Linneans.” (Note that a doubled letter can be used as an abbreviation for a Latin plural genitive like “Linneaniorum,” as one can see in the Latin terminology for Bachelor of Laws, i.e. “Legum Baccalaureus,” or LL.B.)

(5) Similarly, I’m willing to bet that R.S.S. corresponds to Franklin’s other common post-nominal honor, his membership in the Royal Geographical Society, typically abbreviated as FRGS. One might try to expand “R.S.S.” to R[egalis] S[axiologorum] S[ocietas] meaning “Royal Society of Stone-studiers,” perhaps. I really, really wish I knew who translated these abbreviations and what their thought-process was.

(6) Watch Lady Jane sneak in her new name for Van Diemen’s Land here! (For the uninitiated: Lady Jane and James Clark Ross collaborated to have Van Diemen’s Land renamed – or at least re-popularized – as “Tasmania.”)

(7) Fun facts: I can 100% prove that Eleanor Franklin knew some Latin! In her transcription of this text, she places a macron (a little ^ hat) over the final ‘a’ like this: “sententiâ,” which means that she correctly identified that this word (meaning “judgement,” or “opinion”) is in the ablative case, rather than the nominative case. No macron would have appeared in the inscription; it would have been highly unusual for any inscription in Latin from any time period to have a macron, so this is all Eleanor’s doing, but she’s right to do it. Eleanor also adds that slightly unnecessary but not incorrect “e” (meaning “from, out of”) before the word “Consilii” in her transcription.

(8) It’s a little weird to point out that Sir John didn’t directly fund the construction of Christ’s College but rather arranged for the funding to come from the income of the colony itself. This would look really out of place in a commemorative inscription from the classical period.

(9) This date does in fact convert to November 7th, 1840, but it’s not as simple as the Roman numerals VII (=7) make it look. To get this date, we actually have to count backwards from the Ides of November, which fall on November 13th, but the Romans count inclusively, so thirteen less seven actually equals seven, rather than six. I know. I hate math too.

(10) Eleanor Franklin writes this word (“viri”) twice, once at the end of one line, and again at the beginning of the next. As for the translation of this word as “men,” yes, it’s exclusively male-gendered in the Latin.

(11) I think “from each of the two councils” refers to the Legislative Council and the Executive Council, the two governing bodies of Van Diemen’s Land before the establishment of the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1856. Take that with a BIG grain of salt. It’s also particularly interesting to note that many of the men here named became embroiled in the huge political mess that resulted in the ignominious end of Sir John’s term as governor – this list represents both the pro-Franklin and anti-Franklin sides of the conflict.

(12) The title “Milit. Præfect.” or (something like) Milit[aris] Præfect[us] reflects Sir William Henry Elliott’s military role as the Lieutenant-Colonel of Van Diemen’s Land, while “Eq. H.” is most probably Eq[ues] H[anoverianus] or a way of denoting Elliot’s knighthood in the same Hanoverian order as Sir John, though in a different capacity – Knight / KH to Sir John’s Knight Commander / KCH.  

(13) The title “Justiciarius Principalis” is a clear Latin translation of Johannes Lewes Pedder’s legal role the first Chief Justice of Van Diemen’s Land, and “Eq. Aur.” seems to allude to a  knighthood conferred via the Commonwealth nation of Australia, perhaps? 

(14) Some of these titles are deeply weird ways of rendering colonial government positions into Latin: “Portitoriis Conquirendis Præpositus” for “Customs Collector” is A Lot – the literal translation would be something like “President for the Things Connected with Import or Export Dues that Must be Collected.” Confession: I took most of the English titles directly from the relevant entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, all of which are linked above, in the translation.

(15) For more on this Ross & Crozier section, see this post. Also, note the major stylistic change in these last four verses: lots of intertextual references, and more poetic language – much of it Augustan (aka mainly from Ovid and Vergil) as @kaserl​ pointed out! It’s a conspiracy theory, but I think we may be looking at a different author altogether: Lady Jane prefiguring her role as ghost-writer of “Thy bees are frozen, and thy crook’s a name,” we might imagine?

Thank you for joining me on this very weird Victorian neo-Latin journey!

[missroserose]

Hey! 7 &17? Its so hard to choose!

Aww, Natalia!  Your enthusiasm gives me life, thank you. <3

7.  What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style?  Would others agree?

Hrm, this is an interesting one to consider.  I tend to favor intricately constructed plots with lots of moving parts that all affect each other (sometimes in unexpected ways), but I don’t know that that’s something anybody else has really seen yet—all of my previous efforts have ended up unfinished, and all of my posted stories are a little too short to really demonstrate what I’m talking about.  I do think that my posted work shows how I need a strong emotional core to drive the characters forward—I’m interested in what happens plot-wise, sure, but not half so interested as I am in what’s going on in their heads and how they react to the plot events.  Keeping that balance is occasionally tricky for me, as not every character is going to be self-aware enough for the sort of extended navel-gazing I sometimes overindulge in, so I often cheat a bit by having the external events mirror the internal ones.  I’m a huge fan of the capital-R Romantic trope of making the weather reflective of a character’s mood, for instance.

Stylistically I have a few quirks—I like to string a few sentences together with the same subject, and then keep the subject implied after the first sentence (example:  Kamil takes a deep breath as he steps into the pond.  Notices the freezing burn of the water against his skin, clear chips of iceberg bobbing small warnings along the surface of the water.  Wonders, as his feet numb, if he could cut the sole of his foot open against a rock without feeling a thing.)  I’m also fond of using (arguably overusing) the emdash—I blame being exposed to Virginia Woolf, and specifically Mrs. Dalloway, at a formative age.  Which probably ties back in to the internality thing again; our thoughts are rarely expressed in full sentences, and separating them by emdashes both gets across their fragmentary nature as well as giving the prose a kinetic feel, like it’s constantly pressing forward.  I wrote a whole story in that format once, just to try it out, and was rather pleased at how well it worked.

17.  Do you think your readers perceive your work—or you—differently to you?  What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

Hrmmmm, that’s a complicated question. 

Assuming I’m parsing the first question correctly (I’m pretty sure what they’re asking is “do you think your readers experience your work, or your personality, differently than you do”), well, the answer is pretty clearly “of course they do”, because my readers aren’t me.  In high school one of my English teachers introduced us to the concept of intertextuality, which is the idea that no text stands on its own—it’s always shaped by the literary culture surrounding it, by other texts that came before that it references or alludes to.  Similarly, the experience of reading a story is never going to be the same for any two people, because they’re each bringing their own experiences and prejudices and preferences to the text.  I’m a big believer in the collaborative model of art:  there’s what the artist puts out into the world, yes, but there’s also what the audience brings, and the experience is going to be new and different for each person every time.

As to the second question, that’s...actually a really good question.  If anything, I feel like I overshare about my writing process sometimes—though presumably the majority of my readers aren’t constantly stalking my Tumblr, haha.  I imagine that a lot of readers don’t realize what a tiny section of my writing actually makes it to completion; perfectionism is tough to let go of (though I’m getting better about it).  I suspect many don’t realize exactly how much effort I put into story construction, either; I’m not trying to say this in a “nobody appreciates me!” kind of way, it’s just human nature that we don’t think about effort that we don’t see (and, as any artist will tell you, one of the signs of truly excellent art is that it looks effortless). 

On the subject of motivations...I grapple with writing scenes that’re more horror-oriented in part because I have some deeply internalized messages about how “only horrible people focus would want to focus on terrible people, or people making terrible decisions”.  Obviously that’s not true, but man do those voices have a tendency to sneak up on me—and the small-but-highly-vocal contingent of Tumblr that seems to agree doesn’t help either.  I wonder if that isn’t a big part of why I have so much trouble with perfectionism; some part of me feels like, if everything I post is professional-level, I’m less likely to be targeted by the morality police because it’ll just look like they’re bitter that they can’t write as well.  Which, wow—now that I look at it, that’s a pretty fucked up dynamic, but I never said my subconscious was free of gremlins, heh.

ask me about my writing!

[thedarkivist]

2, 3, 18 & 20

Thank you, @vanfontheweg ♥

Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

There are many scenes I was looking forward to in To Speak Once More (convin), though only time will tell when I actually get back to this fic. Been feeling all sorts of weird about it lately :/ Writing isn’t going great these days, so I’m focusing on reading and doing things to ‘recharge’ now. Let’s hope it works!

What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

I usually try to use ideas when I actually get them (#minimalism), but I have a concept that’s basically TMA but the useless avatars we never get to hear about gang up to protect Jon, because for various reasons they’d rather avoid the Eyepocalpse. They’re not doing a great job. One particular thing I wanted to do there was a Vast avatar yeeting a copy of Ex Altiora into The Coffin to turn it upside down. I just think it’d be neat.

Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Too Close to Home (convin) would be twice as long if all the scenes I meant to put in made it to the final cut! There was some forbidden Jade Locard backstory, some forbidden handholding, and Gavin sharing an embarrassing story from his childhood for... trust purposes... ;););) Everything leads to handholding here, you see.

Light Pollution (The Magnus Archives) was very different in the initial planning stage. Lots of details changed over time, of course, but the ending was different too. The original ending was here to suggest that Tim did survive the Unknowing in the end, because an entity took a shine (hehe) to him. It was all poetic and shit, too.

Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

There is always symbolism with me, lol. I hardly know where to start and when to stop with this question, but I’ll try to restrain myself because I rambled a lot already. I don’t know, I just like to ‘reward’ people who might want to revisit a fic with details and allusions, hidden references and foreshadowing. Light Pollution is l i t t e r e d with intertextuality. Like, some of that shit was so blatant it’s not even funny, especially all of the Sleeping Beauty stuff and the many references to “The Lady of the House of Love”, especially in the last chapter. 

Conversely, readers sometimes mention my stories have a really tense/ominous/creepy atmosphere. It’s not even on purpose most of the time.

[elenatria]

In a nutshell: The Terror is also about real people, who've been dead for a long time. Some predicted the Terror fandom would move to the Chernobyl fandom because Jared Harris and similarities in narratives (it ends badly for everyone, they all die, etc.). Mostly, this happened. Some Terror fandom people think that Chernobyl should not be shipped, because it's about real people, who've been dead for... less long? The fandom is pretty much split on the question, afaik.

… Tell me moar! 

Oh, the delicious hypocrisy of the purity police.

Lol, and they’re calling me a hypocrite because I think most hetero pairings on tv are badly written and lame “but I ship men in romantic situations all the same”. As if it’s impossible for them to consider the “forbidden” aspect of it as well as the kink factor, which is still freedom of thought and it’s h-a-r-m-l-e-s-s. And the fact that men were always allowed to enjoy woman-on-woman pornography, no one bats an eye when they do, and that lesbian kisses are still way more common on tv than gay kisses because patriarchy, because men kissing are still a taboo. But let’s not even go there, shall we? Let’s not even touch the subject of how misogynistic and racist “smut boys for white girls” sounds. 

The few times the antis do try to process the kink factor they say we “objectify” men. Laughable, as if I have Legasov and Shcherbina locked up in my basement, as if I profit from “objectifying men”, as if headcanons and fics and fanart in a random blog on tumblr are harming men in any way.

But the purity police were always a hypocritical, self-righteous and narrow-minded bunch, always eager to tell others what to do.

Exactly lol, Legasov and Shcherbina shouldn’t be touched because they have been dead for less long than the people in The Terror, also they’re not in period costumes but they use phones, cars etc etc so somehow Terror/Chernobyl fans think that “hey, this could be my self-sacrificing grandfather right there”. Guess what, he’s not. Guess what, we ship his fictional counterpart. Guess what, he’s dead and he doesn’t see what we do. If antis feel offended on the dead people’s behalf  it’s because THEY feel offended and project their own feelings on those people’s families. Families that have much bigger problems than a bunch of people shipping their dead relatives I’m sure. Families that do not have first world problems but REAL ones, to this day. 

But what do antis know of real problems? If they had them, if they faced them daily, they wouldn’t be here bitching and wagging their  finger to total strangers.

Look, I’ll even make it easier for them: Valoris haters are okay with The Terror because those guys didn’t sacrifice themselves to save millions. In that sense Legasov and Shcherbina are saints to them, and no one ships saints, right? Because taboo. Because saints are not supposed to have sex (Virgin Mary and all), because saints are not supposed to be used in people’s fantasies. Because mere fantasies are also a taboo. Still a taboo.

I’m guessing antis have no idea what intertextuality is so here, let’s throw them a bone of knowledge straight from Wikipedia.

“Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience’s interpretation of the text. Intertextuality is a literary device that creates an ‘interrelationship between texts’ and generates related understanding in separate works. These references are made to influence the reader and add layers of depth to a text, based on the readers’ prior knowledge and understanding. Intertextuality is a literary discourse strategy utilised by writers in novels, poetry, theatre and even in non-written texts (such as performances and digital media). Examples of intertextuality are an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text, and a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another.”

See? Fanfiction writers have at their disposal a literary tool that has been used by writers for centuries and they didn’t even know. And the antis think they can stop them? Lolz.     

Here’s the sad truth: antis watch a show and suddenly feel like they know the characters, like they own the characters, fictional or not. So they go googling them. So they go to tumblr, go to the “Chernobyl” tag thinking that it’s “safe”, thinking that it’s Wikipedia or something, thinking that they’ll only find their classmates in there. Dude, you’re not in your classroom anymore. They like to say “this is the internet” (so accept my bs) but they forget that this applies to both sides, yes this IS the internet and the internet is full of a million voices, a million opinions. 

What are they gonna do, shut down all those they don’t agree with? Only  fascists do that and I’m not giving a single inch to people who think like fascists. No one should.

[onewomancitadel]

Hello again! I've been meaning to ask you this for quite a bit, but what are your thoughts on Cinder and Pyrrha as foils to one another? I've read some interesting discussion about how Cinder and Pyrrha could be interchangeable as Achilles and Hector (essentially Cinder is more accurate to the mythical Achilles while Pyrrha is more akin to Hector). I know your blog is primarily focused on Cinder/Jaune, but Pyrrha and Cinder are two of my favorite characters, and I'd love to hear your thoughts <3

Hi, it's lovely to hear from you.

I discuss Knightfall, yes, but I do discuss Cindemption, and this is related, so I welcome the question. For full disclosure of bias on my part, I like Pyrrha's role in the story, but I've never exactly been a fan of her character, and find the glorification of her character endlessly annoying; I also generally hate Best Girl bait, and don't like characters whose worst problem is being perfect and never being bad.

In Pyrrha's case, she's interesting because the only way for her to suceed was in a sick way to fail; she's interesting because the characters who survive are imperfect. The people who prop her up as the perfect Maiden candidate (gamifying something magical and special) are actually profoundly wrong, and that's part of the tragedy of her death. Ordinarily a character I'd hate, whilst in R/WBY, I think she's great - particularly as, since you open here, she's contrasted with Cinder (who is very imperfect and has worked up from nothing. Evil, sick, irredeemable, broken, cursed).

I'm not sure that you'd love to hear my thoughts though, lol. I don't like the sound of this theory at all.

I don't buy the swapped Hektor and Achilles angle, that doesn't make sense to me. I did consider Cinder as Hektor, but I don't buy Iliad!Achilles as the Achilles we had in R/WBY altogether (as you've seen my post, I think Odyssey is most fitting), and Cinder really doesn't make sense as Hektor any more than a cursory 'main hero of the other side', which doesn't really work. It might as flavour, but I don't think Cinder is literally Achilles or Hektor.

Are you saying more accurate in the sense of temperament? Because Pyrrha fitting Oddysey's Achilles is most damning to me.

I also would really want to know the angle of Achilles/Hektor being swapped. Usually with R/WBY intertextuality there is a thematic thrust to the way other stories are used, and with Pyrrha what I can discern is that it's exploring the more melancholic angle of Achilles and the cost of death (in service to Ozlem), and most importantly to me the idea of a 'good death'.

I hope I'm not being mean about a theory you like, but to be quite frank - since you sent an ask about to me lol - it sounds like the type of thing fan fan theories go for, which is trying to be clever without a direction. It's important to think about what would be the purpose of making the completely Achilles-outfitted character secretly another character, and Cinder actually, truly Achilles. What does that mean?

Really, the questions I'm wondering about Cinder and Pyrrha's narrative roles are what they're servicing to the story in the sense of sacrifice, power, and destiny. The reason I'm so insistent about the non-tragic end of Cinder's story is precisely because the story began with that tragedy she enacted; I don't want to see her worldview validated (that it's kill or be killed all the way down). The seasonal theming of their character interaction (well - the link between Ruby, Pyrrha, and Cinder, and why all three were at the top of the tower) is enough to offer structural satisfaction to me, with linkage to Ozlem. Once you start trying to figure Homer in Cinder and Pyrrha, where does Ruby figure in?

Now, from the perspective of Cinder and Pyrrha narrative foiling, there is certainly such. I just don't think it's from the perspective as Pyrrha as the main character/protagonist, it's from Ruby and Cinder. What I would be wondering is what does Pyrrha's death and ideals mean for them. In this case, Pyrrha's death is the not final answer or protagonistic ideal, but something to be redeemed in the future. This is also why, once again, excluding Ruby means you get a more narrow analysis.

Part of what really gets to me is that Pyrrha was never supposed to be the Fall Maiden - supposed to in the sense of morally right/destiny reasons. The power is complicated because in trying to control it, and to mould the perfect warrior, they've actually already effectively failed. That you get a redemption and reformation of the way the Maiden power is conceived of - through our eyes and Cinder's - is extremely interesting. (That Cinder is an agent of preventing that harm, also with Fria, is very interesting). Do you see where I'm going with this? I don't know where Hektor and Achilles figures in here, unless we're going for the angle that Iliad depicts Trojans sympathetically to our modern tastes and narrative preferences, in which case perhaps we get a shred of that with Cinder as the Byronic heroine of the other side. But I don't know what it's offering to anything explored with these characters beyond that.

This is my problem with analysis such as this because I don't know what I'm learning or being told about what the characters are doing and why. R/WBY does use a lot of intertextuality for flavour purposes (I admit that readily) but I really do not understand this angle of arbitrarily swapping the influences of the characters. It's kind of absurd to me. I guess because Cinder is sometimes angry, and Achilles was famous for his rage?

Then again, in being fairer, I think sometimes the intertextuality as used in R/WBY is at times unclear and people trying to figure out where and why it works (what it's beholden to) means it's ripe for grounds of interpretation and trying to make stuff fit as much as it can. Pyrrha isn't angry, so she can't be Achilles, so I guess she's Hektor, but Cinder is angry, so I guess she's Achilles? I don't understand how the themes of Iliad are really working here, because it's all over the place (Achilles kills Hektor vengefully and spitefully, so this might be part of the reassignment; Cinder is neither vengeful nor particularly spiteful, in fact it's an oddly comforting kill, overall impersonal). Admittedly, I'm hearing this secondhand, so I may be doing diservice to the idea trying to piece it together; that being said, I'm not interested in reading about it any more than I already have here, because it sounds like something I'd fundamentally disagree with the methodology of and don't find the idea interesting.

But this is why I'm interested in figuring out what it's all beholden to. Pulling back from Homer, team JNPR comprises cross-dressing mythic/folkloric figures, which to me is part of the team exploring gendered ideals of behaviour (and going with them or without them). Part of what's interesting is that Pyrrha's masculine self-sacrifice then inspires Jaune's, whose stunt is promptly refuted by Cinder. I don't think Pyrrha's sacrifice is wholly endorsed by the narrative. So rather than just trying to figure Homer in, I want to know exactly why Pyrrha's story is the way it is, and what the ultimate answer is (in Jaune's case, a subsequent story about nonviolence and healing, and refusing suicidal intent). That you've got Jaune linked to Cinder is part of the thematic key here.

In summary, I don't think it's absolute to begin with (Cinder is neither a Hektor nor Achilles, maybe for a brief moment in Pyrrha's story, but only as flavour - she's Rhodopis/Cinderella, and no one has allusions so thematically contradicatory), and the idea of swapping the two doesn't make sense to me at all. I think you can explain their relationship through the autumnal theming and the would-be Maiden and the actual Maiden, and the ideas of life/death in Ozlem (and restoring that pattern). That, to me, is much more serviceable - plus, the overall ideas about sacrifice, power, and destiny. Is Cinder right?

At any rate, I hope that explains my approach - and explains, partly, why I keep to myself, lol. Thank you for your ongoing support with my blog, and I hope my answer is not too disappointing (it probably is). I don't know if it would have been more appropriate to self-censor and try to be more polite, but if you do think this theory is valuable, I'm certainly not stopping you finding it interesting or thinking about it. I'm not sure that I'd want to discuss it any more, though. For what it's worth, if someone who propagated the theory reads this post (or, additionally, you resonate with it), and I represented your assertions unfairly, I apologise but I find this angle of analysis fundamentally uninteresting, so I recommend making a vague, passive-aggressive post about me instead. It's what I do, trust me.

The bit I think a lot of fantheories miss out on is what's most economic and functional from the storytelling perspective.

The damning thing - the most damning - is that this idea is too fucking confusing.

It's why I like more simplistic structural ideas (and why I like Jung/monomythic storytelling/Ozlem) that are functional to the storyteller and are an interesting way to tell a story, looking at the goings-on under the bonnet. I understand that to some people my perspective is potentially more complicated or 'reading into things', but if anything I'm more interested in getting to the thematic, purposeful heart of something. I might be wrong, but I am trying.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

In an infamous Newsweek cover story in March 1990, beneath the strapline “Rap Rage”, journalist Jerry Adler laid out the case for the prosecution against the corrupting influence of hip-hop which, even by that stage, had become wearyingly overfamiliar to its many fans. The broad brushstrokes of the charges were aptly satirised later, in the voice of Marge Simpson: “Rap music belongs in the rubbish bin: it encourages punching, boasting, and rudeness to hoes.” But in the midst of this archetypal George Bush Sr-era moral panic, the article made another criticism that sounded rather more accurate. Hip-hop is, Adler wrote scathingly, “music so post-industrial it’s almost not even played, but pieced together out of pre-recorded sound bites”. In the Chicago-based writer Roy Christopher’s Dead Precedents, we have an enjoyable, pithy account of why this isn’t a criticism at all.

Written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic (he is both), Christopher explores the idea of hip-hop as “black cyberpunk”. His argument is that rap and cyberpunk were twin movements, in which technologically liberated renegades created the future by reinventing the past, building new worlds using DIY ethics and freewheeling bricolage. Like hip-hop itself, his book is layered with overlapping references and allusions, quotes and “samples’” proudly standing on the shoulders of giants.

A typical chapter takes us on a tour around four less discussed pillars of hip-hop: recording, archiving, sampling and intertextuality (MC-ing, DJ-ing, B-boying and graffiti writing are the standard quartet) – and draws on reference points as broad as Edward Snowden, Walter Benjamin, De La Soul (pictured) and Blade Runner, to discuss the hacking, reworking and the conflicted relationships rap has with history, memory and the vast libraries of cultural products now available to draw on. Perhaps we all now function in this way – perhaps we are all cyberpunks, constantly reconfiguring an unstable, half-remembered archive of clips, snippets and sounds.

Christopher quotes Adbusters magazine founder Kalle Lasn, who takes this further, and says digital citizens have been brainwashed by consumer capitalism’s onslaught, and all now “speak a kind of corporate Esperanto: words and ideas sucked up from TV and advertising”. This refusal to believe that younger adults have the agency – and cynicism – to critique, let alone transcend, the bombardment of messages thrown at them in the 21st century would at least explain why his magazine is full of sixth-form, Banksy-esque “subvertising”. Christopher knows better than this, and sees the bricoleurs as pioneers, not dupes.

Christopher’s achievement is to avoid making the connections between his two great interests, hip-hop and cyberpunk, seem forced - and to be fair, they really don’t need to be. They emerged in the same 1980s context, in a moment of intense post-industrial decline and technological upheaval; they are both reliant on a bedrock of “codes and signs to hack [and] meanings to hijack” – as acts of subversion, whether playful or polemical. There is even the Afrofuturist style of early hip-hop: its goggles, gloves, mohawks and leathers; looks “cobbled together from the fragments of past fads and fashions” – emerging in Robert Moses’s New York, a South Bronx of broken windows and social decay, devastated by “highway-bound white flight”. When Ronald Reagan visited on the campaign trail in August 1980, he said the area looked like it had been hit by an atom bomb. Looking back, it makes a certain amount of sense that the first two Mad Max films had come out either side of this visit and that year’s epochal US presidential election.

Dead Precedents is almost pamphlet-length, barely 150 pages long – although accompanied by extensive notes, bibliography and further listening, appropriately – but it is no less emphatic in its argument that the 21st century truly began with these twin movements. And even if the cyberpunk moment encapsulated in the thrilling writings of William Gibson, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling has passed, its spirit lives on in the Afrofuturist R&B of Janelle Monáe or the beats of Flying Lotus, the films of Boots Riley, the Afropunk festival, and a thousand other bionically blooming flowers of hip-hop culture. And this is before we even contemplate what the young people growing up on Black Panther will go on to create. Grandmaster Flash was “hip-hop’s first hacker, its first cyberpunk”, Christopher contends at one point; he will not be the last.

Dan Hancox is the author of Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime (HarperCollins)