#well and i believe human culture and history are older than is commonly believed

[snarltoothed]

yknow i wholeheartedly enjoy conspiracy theories but the only specific conspiracy theory i straight up believe is true is that Minoa was a matriarchy

[candycanesuckers]

A Collective Post Helping Defend and Define Stormfront:

There is a harmful narrative that has formed around a (feminist) character that appeared in the newest season of “The Boys” -- her name is Stormfront. Said narrative is the falsified idea that she is a Nazi. This was started mainly by Anti-Feminists in retaliation to the fact that the character is rather vocal about social injustice. Below are definitive rebuttals to the toxic propaganda spread by these people and the others who blindly took in it.

Defining Stormfront’s Past:

The reason why the slander on Stormfront is as active and believed as it is is because it’s based on the comic (in which Stormfront was a male, and yes, was indeed a Nazi), which then influenced the past of the TV-rendition of the character. In the show, Stormfront use to be apart of Nazi Germany before (assumedly) migrating to America and donning the alias of “Liberty” in the 50s, in which she carried out violently racist attacks behind the scenes.

Something worth noting is that Stormfront is the first ever Superhero created by Vought (the man who created the company was her husband; whether she was injected with V -- the serum to give people these super abilities -- when she was a child or well within her maturity is currently unknown). Because she’s the first ever superhero, she has a unique ability that other superheroes (from our current knowledge) lack; immortality. 

Due to her immortality, Stormfront outlived her peers. She watched as the culture around her changed. She eventually had a daughter, which she then lived past, and she too lived past her husband. This means that she lived past the time where Nazi’s were to some degree a social norm, and lived through the period(s) where people actively fight back against Nazi’ism, racism, and other forms of prejudice. She was thrust into new cultures, and in turn, molded her beliefs into something new over the years she had lived through. She no longer had the leader, she no longer had the support, she no longer had the option to use her voice. And because of that, she learned that her beliefs were outdated.

It could be argued that the point to Stormfront’s character is to reflect the social evolution of America -- from how racism was mainstream to now progressivism being rewarded.

The Accusation That Stormfront Said a Slur Towards Kenji and she Killed an Apartment Complex of Black People Simply Because They’re Black:

In episode three, for those who don’t know, there was a super-terrorist (the title given to super-humans who use their abilities to aid in their terrorism), and The Seven were sent out to capture and put the terrorist down. Basically: they were doing their jobs as heroes. During the attempted capture of the terrorist, Stormfront was ultimately the one to get him.

While she was chasing him, they entered an apartment complex; while on the chase, she most likely would have noted that the terrorist isn’t actually doing any active action of terrorism -- he was just running. While she knew, and The Seven knew, that he was a terrorist, the public would probably see it as a superhero harming an innocent. Of course since he was an active threat, she was fast thinking. While chasing him, she stroke down some casualties and destroyed a portion of the apartment complex building that way there would be visible evidence that the terrorist would’ve been a threat to the lives of the public. And it worked. While what she did was arguably corrupt, that’s not the point here; the show makes a point to say all the heroes are corrupt. 

In her fight with the terrorist, she does say something that features unfavorable language -- she called the terrorist a “yellow bastard” -- and while it’s displeasant, it is not a slur. Yellow is a color, and he was rather pigmented. It’s a distasteful descriptor. And she was right in calling him a bastard. He was a terrorist.

The Accusation that Stormfront Didn’t Like A-Train Because he’s Black:

We can assume that Stormfront has a strong sense of morality due to her past connections to Nazi Germany -- while she no longer holds those beliefs, it would suggest that she places importance on morals due to strong “moral” senses of the Nazi party. With her now being in the modern world, her sense of morality probably evolved into applying to more current issues.

In the show, Stormfront is shown to believe in the superiority of Supes (will touch on that even more later). Due to this, is is likely that she would look down on those who have super-abilities but does stuff that would harm them or otherwise negatively impact the performance of their heroics. In season two, it was shown that A-Train -- whose whole shtick was his extreme speed -- could no longer run to such extremes before triggering a possible heart failure. This would clearly motivate Stormfront to look down on A-Train and see him as a waste -- because he is effectively wasting away his own life.

Her saying “some people have quality, other’s don’t” is a clear reference to the fact that his quality of self-control and self-worth is low. He’s an addict, and has let his addiction ruin his life and multiple lives of the people around him.

The Accusation that Stormfront Thinks Black People are Trying to get rid of White People; An In-Depth Dissection on the Conversation Between Stormfront and Homelander in Which she Explains her Past:

The scene opens with her, Stormfront, finding Homelander alone and solemn overlooking the city. He’s being callous and dismissive towards her, and even says a sly comment in which could be taken as a potential murder threat, which obviously effects her and her future plans (since it’s rather clear that she’s merely using him for her own personal agenda). Because of his cold behavior towards her, she decides to bare her all to him.

“I will never lie to you again. I will tell you everything . . . Starting with this,” She begins. Stormfront hesitantly walks to a large brown box, the stoic look on Homelander’s face never leaving as he pointedly watches her every move. She opens the crate, and in it are numerous aged items belonging to her, including her Liberty attire and a collection of black and white photos.

Out of her collection of items, she picks up the photos due to them being an outline of her history and an easy open door to the unique ability she has (since she’s either immortal or has an extended life quantity).

She shows the first image to Homelander, an image that shows her next to a much older woman (who has previously been assumed by the viewer to be her mother or grandmother). “My daughter,” she begins, “Chloe. She died of Alzheimer's a few years ago.”

Before this scene, her unique relation to aging was unknown to Homelander; the only people who knew were Starlight and The Boys. Understandably shocked, Homelander asks Stormfront just how old is she.

“I was born in 1919, in Berlin.”

There’s beats of silence between them. The information that she just revealed settles, to both Homelander and the viewer, and then she flips to the second photo.

It’s of her, dressed in a beautiful, white blazer dress, standing next to three extremely influential figures from history (further highlighting her extreme age). As she flips to the next photo, she says, “And . . . The most important man in the room . . . “ Homelander looks down, and finishes the unsaid sentence: “Frederick Vought.”

The next portion of the conversation is one of the most important, both in-context of the actual conversation but also in terms of the audience finally understanding Stormfront as a person; it gives us an insight to her mentality, it further explores her history with Vought and the relationship she has with the company, while also showing us what seems to be her intentions with Homelander. “He gave me the first successful V injection. He taught me everything. And then we fell in love, and he gave me a daughter. He made me, and his genius made you.”

This one excerpt shows us an important aspect on Stormfront and her mentality: she glorifies and idealizes Vought. The glorification she has of Frederick Vought consumes her, evident through the passion she has while she speaks on how V made her into who she is. The glorification she has for Frederick then streamlines into the next aspect of what she talks about, which is the superiority that comes from being chosen to be a superhero (which she isn’t exactly unjust in; a separate post to discuss, maybe? Although I feel as if it’s pretty obvious how people with super-human abilities that routinely save the world are clearly above just normal civilians).

Emotions are clear on Homelander’s face as he hears all the new information released by Stormfront: he’s shocked, and really just at a loss for words. He turns away from her, almost in a way dismissing the rest of the photos she has as he tries to process everything. She holds the photos to her side, now untouched for the rest of the conversation, and continues to speak: “Frederick didn’t care about all the fans or stardom or any of that shallow bullshit. We are in a war for the culture. The other races are grinding us down and taking what is rightfully ours, but we can fight back. With an army of supermen, millions strong.”

This four-sentence paragraph is the strongest example we currently have from the show that showcases the sense of superiority Stormfront has due to her super-human abilities. This specific excerpt is commonly used as a dog whistle by Stormfront anti’s to push the narrative that she is a Nazi or at the very least a white supremacist, however with the context of her relation to Vought and the fact that she highlights it being an army of supermen, it’s made explicitly clear that the “war for the culture” is a culture where supes are naturally seen as higher than non-supes and don’t have to fear the possibility of public backlash due to “othering” that’s caused by a public that may be scared of people who are different than them -- which may be why Stormfront finds it so important to build an online following who truly knows her as a person, while still being aware that she ultimately has a platform and is in a position of power.

It could be argued that her current arc and characterization of glorification and superiority is meant to be an allegory for Nazi’ism, however, I will say in my own personal opinion that it’s incredibly weak to claim. Nazi allegories need to have someone explicitly shown to be wrong in their beliefs and ideals; Stormfront though, is justified -- or at the very least has solid ground to stand on. I mean, God, it’s shown that mothers and fathers were offering up their newborns to be injected with compound V. That should speak for itself.

Lastly, after Stormfront bore her history and ideals to Homelander, she says one last thing to Homelander, one last confession full of passion and desperation: “So I love you with all of my heart. How could I not? Everyone I have ever loved is in the ground. And then I found you. We found each other. And now neither of us has to be alone ever again.”

I believe this to imply that her sense of superiority is a front that she puts up and her desire to create a culture of supe’s is to create a new race of people that are similar to her in sense of life-span, that way she no longer has to keep losing those she loves and live a life where pain is a constant. I truly do think all of this is an act of longing for a life of less pain 💔

So in conclusion: her idea of a “war on our culture” is the idea of non-supes against those who are. It’s an entirely separate thing from Nazi beliefs and / or ideals.

Discussing Stormfront’s Feminism and Why it Should be Both Admired and Wide-Spread Within our Culture:

Stormfront is a traditional feminist; she doesn’t believe that women are superior to men, but rather that we’re all on equal footing and it’s our own personality and accomplishments that make us. Quoted from episode two, “Why does it matter whether heroes have a dick or vag? I mean, shouldn’t we all just be competent at our jobs? I don’t think girls do anything better, I think chicks and dicks are in it together.” She’s able to point out the systematic advantages men have and the unfair treatment of women by the media, but she’s still able to recognize that it’s an issue of the system that forms our culture rather than an issue of men themselves. She never takes out her issues on random men, but rather at the men in positions of power who fuel this sexist attitude (and the women who stand next to these men, allowing it).

She knows her worth, both as a person and as a woman. Throughout the six she has shown up in so far, Stormfront has been outspoken whenever she has seen someone reducing women to nothing but vapid sex appeal for the male gaze – such as her call-out in episode two towards the man in charge of story-boarding the commercial. She recognizes her worth and is able to voice the issues she has with the sexist disregard for the female characters.

Unlike a lot of people, she knows when to restrict herself. This is a problem with our culture at large – we reward loud, rude behavior (primarily within men) despite the fact that they’re being unnecessarily cruel towards what is a rather harmless individual (ex: Gordon Ramsay). During the scene where Stormfront is with Starlight doing press for the announcement of her being apart of The Seven, she points out the double standard and false idea of “girl power” being pushed. Despite it being a topic she would be passionate about, Stormfront is able to keep her points restricted purely to the topic at hand that she wants to discuss. Other people would be vicious and violently insult the interviewer, and they would be rewarded for it by getting clout on Twitter with strangers gushing about how she “dragged” someone, but Stormfront addressed the interviewer appropriately – she knew he was just a man doing his job.

Another example is the end of episode three. While it is “terrible” that she called the Asian a “yellow bastard” (although it’s not like she called him a Chink or BTS or whatever), she only did so because she believed that she was alone with him. If there was another individual with them, she would have restricted herself from offensive language. In a culture full of fake feminists that spew offensive language openly, I believe she is setting a standard of what the difference between personal behavior and outwards behavior that would have an impact on the world around her is. No one is effected by her saying “yellow bastard” the way she did, since she was alone. She is aware of her platform (since the introduction of her is with her on Instagram live) and knows what she can and cannot feature on her platform.

In conclusion: Stormfront is a good, self-aware, admirable feminist. Be like Stormfront.

The Accusation That People Involved on the Show Have Called her A Nazi:

It’s true. In interviews, multiple people have referred to Stormfront as a Nazi -- however, an important piece of context that these people who are spreading these quotes always seem to miss out, is the fact that every time they have discussed Stormfront being a Nazi, it’s in relation to her past. They never say that her Nazi beliefs are something carried on from Liberty to Stormfront (they refer to her as Stormfront since it’s simply easier to, though). 

Even with that though, sometimes the intent of an author (or producer, or actor, etc.) does not translate to the actual finished product. What we see has more weight than what we’re told; we’ve been told that she’s a “Nazi white supremacist” but what we’ve seen is a deeply flawed character with a troubling past who’s actively working on making herself a better person. The producers, writers -- whatever -- have not translated their intent properly, so, therefore, it is invalid. Their interpretation of the character is wrong.This is something that happens a lot -- where the author means one thing but the product says another. A good example is JK Rowling; she intended to have Snape die with his sins absolved and being a martyr, but all he ended up being was an abusive creep with a vendetta against some child. Do you get it?

The Accusation That Stormfront Caused A Shooting:

So let’s just be clear: Stormfront clearly condemned the actions by the terrorist who shot the convenience clerk; she clearly doesn’t stand by that behavior nor support it. Using it as fuel for your little Stormfront hate-boner is weird and unfounded.

The Accusation That Nothing Shows Stormfront Had Changed as A Person From When she was Liberty:

A lot of people claim that Stormfront has showed no change from in comparison to her present-self to how she acted in the flashbacks, “proving” that she is still a Nazi. However, there are multiple examples that show she has actively became a better person; there are some major elemental changes to her as a person throughout time -- we know this by comparing what we know of her currently to what she used to be.

Firstly: She explicitly says that she “changed with the times,” which is a clear indication that she’s taken purposeful strides to change her values (since racism is no longer something we deem acceptable).

Secondly: While she had the mantle of liberty, she purposefully went out looking for minorities to brutalize them. While we don’t know if she ever said explicit slurs (such as the N-word or the C-word), she did make it apparent that her attack was on the basis of their ethnicity. However, in modern times, her attacks are purely motivated to fuel the reputation of Vought / because she was told to (and with one exception, which was to manipulate Homelander); this is: when she killed Kimiko’s brother, which was because he was deemed a super terrorist, and when she killed the apartment complex, which was to add to the narrative that he was a terrorist, and the exception is when she pushed Homelander into killing the white man (which was to make Homelander believe that the justice system is unjust . . . Which she is right in, to be fair).

Thirdly: Her study in creating a race of literal super-humans was diverse; it included people of all ethnicities and skin tones.

Fourthly: Stormfront herself shows, although not in a direct way, that she has actively changed. In episode five, Starlight confronts her on her past. Stormfront says, “going against your own people,” and clarifies it even further once Starlight assumes she means ‘white people’ with, “Starlight, superheroes. Don’t be racist.” While she was being condescending in what she said, the weight behind it still remains.

The Accusation That Stormfront Admitted to Being A Nazi by Saying People Love What She Says but Hates the Word Nazi:

In the finale, Stormfront’s past was exposed to the public. Because of how sensitive that information is, she got rightfully mad at whoever it was that leaked it. With the fact that Starlight had already tried to antagonize her before, Stormfront knew it was her. She found Starlight, and the two proceeded to fight. 

However, before the fight, Stormfront said that before her past was revealed, people liked what she was saying. They listened to her. They just simply don’t like the word Nazi. She said it in the sense that “Nazi” is a word used to discredit someone, regardless if their views would make them a Nazi or not. You see it a lot now, politically, the opposing side (on both ends) call each other Nazis simply because they don’t have aligning political views. And because Nazi is such a strong word, calling someone one of them would have an impact on their public reception regardless. Stormfront isn’t a Nazi anymore, but people were still calling her one regardless, so the public reception to her changed. Nazi is a strong word. Stormfront was right -- people did like what she was saying, they were listening to her every word, up until she was slandered as a Nazi.

The Accusation that Stormfront Said A Racist Remark About Edgar:

In the finale, Stormfront and Homelander are privately discussing who they believe could be behind a recent terrorist attack that quite clearly was perpetuated by a Supe. Homelander suggested that it was planned by a man called Edgar, and Stormfront said “it’s possible, he is smart. For his kind.” A lot of people have slandered Stormfront further by saying “for his kind” was in reference to his ethnicity. However, with the audience already knowing her superiority complex around Supes, we can understand the remark was in terms of him not having any abilities (that we know of).

The Accusation That Stormfront Believes in The “Great Replacement” Theory:

In the finale, it’s found that Homelander’s son -- Ryan -- is having issues connecting with his powers and triggering them. Homelander says that he found it easy to use his powers by imagining an enemy, a person he hates. However, Ryan tries to do that too but finds that he really just doesn’t hate anyone.

Stormfront, being quick-thinking, delicately says that people are against them because of their skin color, “it’s called white genocide.” While it was tasteless and questionable for her to tell a child, she believed that Ryan needed a clear enemy in his mind and she was simply suppling him with a vague idea that would trigger his abilities for at least one time. No where does she actually say she believes in the outlandish theory; she was simply saying it because she believed it would help Ryan overcome an obstacle he was facing. 

The Accusation That Stormfront is Named After A White-Nationalist Site:

There’s a lot of discourse over her name; a lot of people think a name is a valid reason to call someone a Nazi. I don’t believe I need to point out why that is insane, but I will explain the reasoning behind Stormfront’s name:

Stormfronts powers are based in electricity. They are bolts of electricity that come from the palm of her hand, and can light things of fire, burn people, throw them around, etc. They resemble lightening from a storm, hence her being called Stormfront.

[tlbodine]

Let’s Talk About Folk Horror

Folk horror, both as a term and a concept, is seeing a resurgence recently. It’s been widely used to describe Ari Aster’s film Midsommar, which may be the first time you’ve seen it. But the sub-genre, like the traditions at its heart, is quite old and rich with examples.

What is Folk Horror? 

Folk horror is a type of religious horror concerned with Pagan or pre-Christian religion as opposed to Christianity. Instead of demonic possession or devilish influence, the supernatural elements of folk horror (if they're present at all) will be rooted in other, older traditions. There's still plenty of overlap between Christian occult horror and folk horror, though, and aesthetically some stories featuring Christian mythology and tradition could fall under the folk umbrella.

Folk horror will often draw on several or all of these tropes:

An isolated setting, most commonly a rural community that's a big "backwards" by modern standards and often populated by unsettlingly eccentric locals.

Cults or cultish behavior, either overtly or suspected.

Blood sacrifice, violent rituals, and other types of murderous mayhem enacted by aforementioned cult members.

A slow-building, atmospheric type of horror rich in detail of the strangeness of the setting/its people.

Ideas drawn from mythology or historical religious practices, especially those of Pre-Christian Europe

An aesthetic that might incorporate Pagan (or pseudo-pagan) motifs, whether or not they’re portrayed accurately or historically - masks, dances, sex, rituals, blood magic, etc. 

Some folk horror is supernatural or overtly occult -- there might be a monster or monstrous god posing a very real and physical threat. But most folk horror is most commonly rooted in fears of the Other, and what happens when an outsider encounters believers of a faith that appears confusing, frightening, dangerous or immoral. 

Folk horror taps into a number of potential primal fears: 

Fears of “otherness” and the unknown 

Fear/distrust of religion or organized belief structures and their power/influence

Fears of social isolation or faux pas; the anxiety of not knowing or adhering to the rules (and being punished for it) 

White guilt, or related anxieties regarding colonialism, lost history/identity, and fear of being punished for the same

In many ways, folk horror is “kissing cousins” with the murderous hillbilly genre: both often tell stories about outsiders who go to a place they don’t belong and suffer the consequences at the hands of the locals. 

More modern iterations of folk horror often side-step the xenophobia by placing the main characters within the culture instead of outside it. These tales are frequently told as historical pieces and may or may not ultimately position Christianity or white imperialism in the villainous role (but not without heavily leaning on the symbolism and aesthetic of the folk elements to provide creepy atmosphere first). 

Another reason folk horror may be enjoying a modern resurgence is because it deals strongly with identity, especially the lost (and reclaimed) identities of old religions and cultures. As “whiteness” as a concept undergoes growing pains and tries to define itself, reaching back to the “old ways” of European folklore (or even early colonial America) can provide a richness and depth of history fraught with potentially horrifying perils and deeply interesting opportunities. Which is not to say that folk horror must by default be about white people...just that white people should probably let other groups handle their own folk horror stories (see previous rant re: wendigo). 

Difference Between Folk, Occult and Gothic 

Occult, by definition, means "supernatural or paranormal.” Stories about magic, demons, witchcraft and possession fall under the occult umbrella. Quite often, occult films default to a Judeo-Christian mythological framework (in the West, at least, Asian occult horror of draws on a different set of cultural influences). Regardless: in occult horror, the occult is front-and-center, and it’s a very real influence. 

Folk horror, by contrast, requires no supernatural elements -- merely a stalwart belief. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter whether the blood ritual actually summons an old god, only that the cult members earnestly believe that it will. 

Gothic, meanwhile, often shares a lot of aesthetic territory with folk horror. But as we’ve discussed before, the defining characteristic of gothic is decay -- locations that were once opulent but have fallen into ruin, beliefs that were once sacred but since have been abandoned (for better or worse). Folk horror is very much alive, and often extremely vibrant. 

A Taste of Folk Horror Media

Ok: So you’ve got a basic understanding of what Folk Horror is about. Now where should you start with studying it? 

The usual recommendation is to start with the so-called "Unholy Trinity" of folk horror films, which really cemented the genre in cinema. Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General, Piers Haggard's Blood on Satan's Claw and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man were released in the laste 60s/early 70s and laid out a number of the tropes you'll grow to find quite familiar later on -- theology, human sacrifice, rural communities, and lots of British weirdness.

Now armed with the basics, you might be better equipped to appreciate more modern films -- let's try a sampler of different flavors.

Try The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers, and follow it up with The Wind, directed by Emma Tammi, for a pair of women-centered historical pieces rooted in early America (colonial and frontier eras, respectively). They draw heavily on the folk side of Christian tradition and are both atmospheric marvels.

Or, here's a trifecta that's fun to watch for compare/contrast: Ari Aster's debut, Hereditary, which combines pagan cults with family drama; David Bruckner's film The Ritual, where a night in the woods is interrupted by an ancient Pagan monster-god; and Apostle, directed by Gareth Evans, where Christian apostasy and creepy cults collide. Finish up with Midsommar if you’re not sick of Ari Aster yet. 

If you're looking at books, Stephen King occasionally dips his toes in folk horror. Pet Sematary dabbles in it, and Children of the Corn takes a proper full plunge. Both were adapted into films, too, if that's your preference. 

Incidentally, The Ritual was also a novel, written by Adam Nevill, and by all accounts it's even better than the movie. If you like that, also pick up his new novel The Reddening. You might also enjoy some of the work of Douglas Clegg, such as The Halloween Man.

If you're done with white dudes for a while, cleanse your palate with some Asian folk horror: The Wailing, directed by Hong-jin Na, combines folk beliefs, Christianity, and virology. Kwaidan, directed by Masaki Kobayashi, is itself a sampler anthology of Japanese folk tales.

If animated features are more your speed, try Over the Garden Wall from Patrick McHale. 

Folk horror even shows up in video games. Fatal Frame straddles the occult/folk line pretty well, especially Crimson Butterly, which delves deep into some cult-gothic territory. Alternatively, try out Unforgiving: A Northern Hymn, a wonderfully creepy game about Swedish and Norse mythology that you will love if you enjoy Adam Nevill's writing.  

And, because I can never plug it enough, Chandler Groover’s short interactive fiction game Taghairm is a magnificent example (warning: playing involves text-based simulations of roasting cats over a fire). 

[soyouareandrewdobson]

The first comic: Maturity or rather the lack thereoff.

Something I commonly saw within the last decade was people arguing that animation has reached a new peak by the amount of quality in storywriting put into them and some even claiming cartoons have become more mature, particularly compared to shows of the 80s and 90s. Dobson too joined the trend and as such made this little comic in 2015 titled “Mature”, in which he argues that cartoons for children are more mature and handle serious subjects better than any media tagged with an r-rating or not following the format of animation.

  While I admit that the comic is not the most offensive and insulting thing Dobson has ever created when soapboxing about nerd/american culture, I do think “Mature”  actually in composes quite a good insight in how Dobson does not understand concepts of storytelling and overhypes the achievements and merits of children entertainment to a degree that is hurting the “cause”. Which greatly annoys me as a fan of storytelling and animation in general and paints Dobson as incompetent in the field of work (cartoonist, comic writer/artist) he tries to engage in. And I can bring this lack of understanding by Dobson down by just one simple question:

What exactly counts as a mature subject here?

 Dobson randomly accuses any form of fiction that is not a children’s cartoon or comic to have no idea how to approach a “mature” subject, but he can’t even give an example of what he defines by this term.

See, for me a mature subject is e.g. an social, emotional or political issue we as humans can correlate to in the real world. Either as a result of personal experience or a bigger picture in our history and culture (such as racism, poverty, existential dreed, personal/emotional growth, any form of oppression etc.) Something that does not only drive a story forward as a source of conflict or a character’s backstory/arc for the sake of entertainment, but may even make us think afterwards.

 And as much as I like cartoons, I do not think this is something children cartoons do most of the time.

 And before I get accused of thinking cartoons are only something for kids or that a thoughtful story can not be told via the medium of animation, let me put a few things into perspective.

Unlike Dobson, I do not have an educational background in animation. However, I grew up with a lot of cartoons, animated movies and comics from all over the world and thanks to the wonders of the internet read up here and there on the different ages of animation and certain tidbits in what went into the making of certain works of fiction and why they may have been a huge thing in the time periods they emerged in.

As such I know that the medium of animation can be used to not only create “child appropriate” content, but also movies like Barefoot Gen, Fritz the Cat, Felidae, Animal Farm and so on, which tackled themes of social issues, political worldviews and personal/historical tragedies.

 Then there is the fact, that depending on the culture, there are very different interpretations in what can be considered “child appropriate” in certain parts of the world and therefore what themes a cartoon may tackle. Like how in European children cartoons such as Alfred J. Quack there was a story arc resembling the rise of Adolf Hitler in power, to tell about the heroes of the show working in the underground against an obvious fascist regime. Or how in certain Japanese children shows the subject of death can be rather common, while in American cartoons just mentioning the word “die” seems a red flag to some studio executives. Lastly, a lot of early animation, (particularly western animation) did not even start off as something targeted primarily at children. Animation started off as a technique to tell a story through “moving pictures” and some of the first animated shorts ever had a huge fanbase of adults and children. “Snow White”, Disney’s first animated movie back in 1933 was a technical marvel at the time. A movie we nowadays mostly consider a children’s movie with a slightly dull story compared to other Disney outings, was back then a risk that earned Disney multiple Oscars and was appreciated more by adults than it was by children, despite being based on a fairy tale. A type of story mostly considered “appropriate” for kids.  

 What I am trying to say is, that I am aware of how not all children cartoons are the same and can vary in terms of “maturity”. Something I think Dobson can’t, because he also can’t see that there is a huge variety of “children” cartoons.

 Despite his background and claims to consider animation an art, Dobson has shown a huge lack of knowledge or admiration for shows/movies that do not fit into the specific mold of “western animation primarily targeted for children and airing on american television”.

And that is not a claim I make half-heartedly. I have done research on the guy, I know how he likes to brag when he considers he found a great cartoon or something interesting. So I find it telling that aside of nostalgia for certain 80s and 90s cartoons we all know, Dobson’s recommendations and taste in shows seems to be primarily focused on just the most recent stuff everybody else likes/a very small pool of rather generic shows. I am not saying he should be contrarian on principal and e.g. dislike Gravity Falls, but he lacks initiative to look out for new and old stuff himself.

I in fact remember when he asked twitter first if he should give Wander over Yonder, one of the best cartoons of the last decade, a chance, cause it seemed he was too chicken to have an opinion on his own.

Then again, weirdly enough, Dobson actually tends to be contrarian for the sake of it, till someone he respects or sucks up to tends to have a different opinion on a show/movie. For example, while he acts like Frozen is a great movie franchise and defends the second movie to the point he becomes anti-feministic when a woman has a different opinion than him on it, he actually gave the first movie a terrible review on deviantart back in 2014. Accusing it of “same face syndrome” and a shame to the name of Disney. Obviously that was also before the hashtag #GiveElsaaGirlfriend became popular and he went so far as to hint he thinks an incest ship with Anna was great. And Legend of Korra? According to first deviantart posts by him garbage. Which was an opinion swiftly changed the moment Korrasami became popular in the fandom by season 3.

 The point I want to make with this digression is, that there are a lot of past actions by him hinting on the fact that Dobson kinda despises animation, when it does not fit within a very narrow niche of things he likes. Further indicated by his disdain for “adult” animated shows or hostility towards foreign animation, except the occasional movie by Studio Ghibli for example.

 Because of this lack of a bigger picture, I do not think Dobson is aware how in terms of story, cartoons can heavily vary. And when it comes to mature subjects, you can’t really engage with them if you lack a story carrying them in turn. Let’s look again at the comic. What cartoon characters do you see in it, when Dobson talks about how he believes children cartoons “treat these (non-defined) mature subjects with FAR more respect than the hardest “dark, grim and gritty” stories”?

Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony, three main characters of Spongebob, Steven Universe, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Blossom from the Powerpuff Girls and Mickey Mouse. You want my opinion on them? None of them are from any cartoons tackling mature subjects in a huge manner.

 However, they are from great shows. (Well, everyone but Steven, but I explain that later.)

See, this is where putting cartoons into perspective within the vast history of animation, comes in handy. Cause looking at them it is undeniable that people put effort into these shows. Effort in the animation and the writing in order to create an entertaining product, decent enough that not only little kids can enjoy it as a mindless distraction, but even older people can find merit in it, thanks to characters with decent personality, good humor, world building and even an engaging story. But all of that doesn’t make these shows or any story necessarily tackle a “mature subject”. Sure, the latest incarnation of My little pony was not as saccharine as its predecessor but rather cartoony as a good 90s show, but that doesn’t mean the new version is the Schindler’s List of animation (excuse the hyperbole). Same for the other cartoons, with Dobson also not acknowledging the fact that Spongebob e.g. had quite some dips in quality over the years (and even made pretty awful jokes about serious subjects such as suicide) or that Steven Universe, while tending to tackle mature subjects for its story (like trauma, war, abuse, self esteem issues, racism, rape and homosexuality) has failed multiple times over its run (even back when this comic was made) to treat these subjects not just as plot and drama points, but also with enough respect within the narrative, to the point a lot of former fans of the show turned their back on it, cause they had enough of the issues they could relate to being simplified and resolved in a cookie cutter manner so Rebeca Sugar could tell a whimsical story about gay space rocks and forgiveness.

 Let us not even forget the fact, that while there is a huge number of cartoons with decent writing and value to them (and that those were not only created within the last 10 years or so), there is also just a lot of garbage out there that counts as “kids animation”. Cartoons and movies that were written with not a care in the world and at times outright more mean spirited as some of the stuff Dobson likely hates in life action. Are you telling me those toilet humor driven garbage piles of creativity are mature?

 The point I try to make is, Dobson’s GENERAL statement that kids cartoons tackle mature subjects better than other form of media, is factually wrong, because a lot of shows don’t even try to be mature in the first place. Which however does not mean, there aren’t attempts made at being mature or tackle a mature subject.

 Growing up with cartoons since the 90s, I saw quite a few cartoons once in a while having episodes with themes to them that were surprisingly “dark”, dramatic or related to issues I and other kids could also see and relate to in the real world. Bullying going out of control, eating disorders, school violence (even school shootings), dealing with the passing of a loved one, to name a few basic ones. Gargoyles and Hey Arnold were two very important cartoons for me in that regard, with Gargoyles showing me how dramatic a good action cartoon could be when compared to other action cartoons at the time (like Ninja Turtles) and Hey Arnold episodes like “Helga on the Couch” giving me a rather somber look into what “therapy” looks like closer to reality, while normally being a show with the slice of life adventures of a kid in the big city.

And I do highly appreciate that nowadays there are more cartoons doing ongoing storyarcs and as a result of actually having more drama to them, adding tension and character development to their plots. Things we did not quite have to the degree we have nowadays back then in the average show. But it is debatable if those things are equal to “mature subjects” such as racism, abuse or trauma. Cause at the end of the day, a lot of kids cartoons tend to only scratch the surface of those things in order to flesh out a plot, instead of making the plot about those issues. Which at times is even for the best if you ask me. Cause we should not forget, these shows and movies are made for kids. And because of their age, a lot of kids lack at times the knowledge and experience in life to properly understand the themes and subjects some people may try to convey with their work. Particularly when you want to tackle subjects such as trauma, abuse and war which lets be honest, a lot of people can’t even comprehend in their complexity as adults. So how are kids supposed to comprehend them? One way, in my opinion, is by simplifying them and turning them into part of a narrative instead of the main focus of the narrative. But that in itself doesn’t always work and can have negative consequences in multiple ways. For example by making the story suddenly non engaging, delivering the subject in such a manner that people can get the wrong message of what you are trying to say or (at worst) simplifying it to such a degree, it becomes outright offensive to others.

A good example that comes to my mind for that would be how Captain Planet back in the 90s tried to tackle the subject of AIDS in one episode. On one hand, considering how the disease was a big deal back then but no one openly talked about it, you kinda have to give credit to Captain Planet to tackle it. On the other hand, is a subject such as a deadly disease that back then was barely researched and killed millions, really something you want to tackle on an overly preachy (but considering whose company produced it, also very hypocritical) kids show, where most of the time the solution to a problem was not even grounded in reality? And spoilers, the episode treated AIDS not even as the big deal it was, but as something the villain would exploit to spread a rumor on the ill kid, because that somehow equaled a chance to pollute the world more. Not really mature, if you ask me.

 What all of this ranting is boiling down to, is that Dobson failed to make a case for how kids animation is able to tackle mature subjects, by not putting his opinion in the bigger context of what animation is/can be and what he means by the term “mature theme”. All he did was just indirectly soapbox that he thinks every other form of media is incapable of being about a serious issue, in doing so also insulting the art of storytelling in itself by disregarding anything not expressed in funny pictures specifically made for children or manchildren on tumblr who want to act they are the big boys, cause a cartoon horse made them feel sad.

He did so by making a very weak argument, not being able to present it in a manner that was hard to debunk and by drawing a comic in which everything looks surprisingly lifeless and like the least amount of quality and effort (things I argued can make a great cartoon) was put into it.

 Which ironically, is the total opposite, of being mature.

And lastly, can’t believe I have to say that, but Dobson, the Pokemon’s name is Butterfree, not Butterfry. Butterfry is what you get when you make a statue of a Futurama character made out of something you put on your bread.

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 1

Master Post

Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 2

Osvaldo Oyola , J. Lamb and Noah Berlatsky (who hates super heroes on principle btw), along with other dumbasses, have often said they are male/white supremacist power fantasies.

Nah fam. They are nothing more and nothing less than a HUMAN power fantasy.

Follow me along here for a while.

Human beings are animals.

We are. That’s a simple matter of scientific fact.

When push comes to shove we are really, really, really smart monkeys who share something like 50+% genes in common with chimpanzees.

As animals and all forms of life the overwhelming majority of us are biologically hardwired towards one ultimate goal: survival.

The desire to survive drives us innately in ways that go unnoticed most of the time. As we evolved into smarter creatures with higher brain functions capable of comprehending the world around us and constructing complex relationships and societies, that survival instinct was reinterpreted through various means.

The survival instinct in human beings and other mammals takes several forms but most commonly can boil down to two things:

a)      Survival through preservation of the individual

b)      Survival through procreation

Type a) involves getting food, shelter, rest, avoiding and recovering from injury and of course defending one’s self from threats, which can take the form of other living creatures, including members of our own species.

Type b) involves spawning offspring and at the same time looking after their wellbeing.

But the survival instinct goes deeper than that because we are biologically hardwired to work towards the protection of our very species. That is the very reason why type a) and b) even exist. By preserving ourselves and our offspring our species survives.

We are also communal animals. Much like chimpanzees and gorillas we live in groups for mutual benefit and protection. Thus, as part of survival of ourselves, our offspring and our species, we have a biological investment in protecting members of our group and of our species.

But seemingly paradoxically we are also hardwired to compete with and fight one another. This likely a by-product of how in the wild we’d have to compete for resources like food and shelter. Sometimes this involves two different groups from the same species competing with one another for survival.

Why am I telling you this? Well, because deep down all those things I have just talked about are innate to 99% of all human beings. It is little wonder that as we as a species evolved we expressed these biological driving forces in certain ways no other creatures could.

This is where the concept of our deities, Gods and figures from folklore and myth come from.

Jupiter, Vishnu, Thor, Hercules, Sun Wukong, Sampson, the Biblical version of Jesus Christ.

Whether they adopt the form of human beings or other entities, virtually every single culture on Earth, even those in isolation of one another, have conceived of beings greater than themselves. Beings with abilities beyond the average human being. And they’ve also conceived of those beings from time to time using their abilities to defy the laws of nature (such as averting natural disasters), combat dangerous or malevolent forces/creatures/individuals, and/or safeguarding the lives of others.

It is a form of explaining the world around us, and an act of wish fulfilment of the human experience.

We want to survive and since we are by our nature group animals we desire to be protected. Thus we conceive beings greater than ourselves who could potentially do that.

We want to survive by preserving our individual selves, so we imagined beings that are so powerful that they are not as reliant upon rest and sustenance like normal people. And who are powerful enough that they either cannot be easily harmed and are are capable of defending themselves from potential threats.

We have within us a vested biological interest in preserving our species, and so are hardwired to protect members of our family/group; our kin. Thus as part of our human wish fulfilment fantasies we imagine beings we’d like to be who could have the power to protect members of our species.

We then come to the modern superhero.

Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, etc. Fundamentally they are the exact same thing.

Individuals with powers beyond those of the average human being, who use those powers to help and protect people, typically from numerous threats (which most commonly take the form of individuals with malevolent intentions). This can include perceived social ills which plague society and by extension pose a threat to the survival or quality of life of ordinary citizens.

One can exchange Hercules fighting the mythological Hydra for Superman fighting Darkseid or Captain America fighting H.Y.D.R.A. terrorists and it is ultimately the same thing. Batman battling crime in Gotham city fundamentally is no different from Theseus defeating criminals and bandits on his travels. When Spider-Man swings into action to save Mary Jane from the Green Goblin, it is an expression of much the same thing the Indian deity Rama went through to save his bride Sita.

Many super heroes though are also vigilantes, someone who imposes their own sense of morality whilst working outside of the law. Vigilantes in the real world and in myths, folklore, fiction and so on can also be found throughout history. Perhaps the most notable example being Robin Hood, who denounced his noble status to steal from the rich and give what he took to the poor who were being over taxed and oppressed by a corrupt system. Other examples would be the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro.

What I am trying to say is that at their core, modern day super heroes are fundamentally modern riffs of the folkloric and mythic traditions and/or similar expressions of the universal human experience (which are informed by innate biological imperatives).

Ostensibly, in creating Superman (the first true superhero), Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were either:

a)      Consciously/subconsciously influenced by these older mythic stories when they created Superman (and thus birthed the entire genre), or

b)      basically tapped into the same kind of thinking which birthed Robin Hood, Hercules, Sun Wukong, etc. in the first place. Across the centuries great minds seemingly thought alike

Superman in particular was possibly heavily influenced by the figure of super strong Sampson or the Clay Golem of Prague, both of whom are part of Jewish religion and folklore (Siegel and Shuster being Jewish immigrants). He might even be seen as a kind of Moses figure. Someone sent away from his natural people to grow up elsewhere, but nevertheless destined for greatness. Or maybe he was just a messiah figure. Whether Siegel and Shuster had Jesus Christ in their minds at all or not, the Jewish religion does (I believe) talk about a saviour figure and Superman could very well be an expression of that.

Figuring into Superman’s creation was 1930s depression and the shadow of impending global war as Hitler was gathering power and invaded Poland the year after Superman was created. In his debut Superman is not only superhumanly powerful but uses these powers as a vigilante to do things like:

·         stop wife beaters

·         rescue someone framed for murder, whilst apprehending the real murderer

·         capture gangsters and rescue a kidnapped person (Lois Lane)

·         bring a corrupt politician to justice

This was an expression of 1930s fears and frustrations. Of Siegel and Shuster’s desires to right the wrongs of a system which was perceived to be broken…or at least envision someone who could do that seemingly impossible task.

The next year in 1939, Batman would come along and express many of these sentiments even more acutely, in particular when it came to crime.

As time went by and the superhero genre was consolidated and evolved, many heroes had their histories altered in order to make them more coherent. In Batman’s specific case his home of Gotham city was painted as so utterly corrupt from the lowest criminal to the most powerful political figures that Batman was literally the one and only effective deterrent to crime. Hope of legal or political reform was next to impossible, thus Batman’s brand of vigilantism was the only thing which could stand in the way of criminals from just doing whatever they wanted.

Bearing all this in mind the idea that the superhero genre is an inherent white construction (and therefore inherently racist, deliberately or otherwise) is, you know…fucking bullshit.

There is a difference between something defined by someone of one race or another and it being something which in indicative to them ONLY. There is also a difference between something having ‘white supremacist undertones’ and something simply being created at a certain point in time when cultural norms were (sadly) different to what they became later on.

As originally created Superman (and by extension the genre) was functionally the same kind of wish fulfilment expressesed by countless storytellers from countless cultures across human history, all informed by universal biological impulses to survive.

Yes, the superhero genre was created and constructed by white people and is therefore literally a ‘white construction’. Yes there weren’t many (if any) non-white characters outside of horrible racial stereotypes. Yes many of them took the law into their own hands.

But that doesn’t mean they are in support of white supremacist notions ala the Ku Klux Klan.

In fact given that Siegel and Shuster were of Jewish immigrant descent, one could argue that Superman was a reflection of how minorities need to be BETTER than the majority to be accepted and/or he was arguably an expression of their frustrations at being mistreated themselves an minorities.

On the other hand let’s say that ‘white supremacy’ strictly meant that superheroes operated with the belief in white people being the default, and as the majority, they were better than the non-whites. Superman was created at a time of segregation after all.

The problem is there is no evidence I know in support of Superman, by his mere existence, is consciously implying that white people are better than non-white people. I wouldn’t put it past Siegel and Shuster to believe that given the times they were from, but ALL media was like that. To an extent they honestly didn’t know any better. But just because they believed that and the social context of the time informed people of this, that doesn’t mean that those ideas are inherent to the superhero genre.

Because again, the superhero genre ultimately embodies beliefs and practices which date back throughout human history and can be found in many non-white cultures.

Yes. Their brand of heroism and the beliefs about heroism they embody were gifted to them by their white creators. And those creators were informed by white social norms (as in the white society they grew up in informed Siegel and Shuster that wife beating was bad). But that doesn’t mean that the superhero moral compass is inherently something that is itself white by design. Rather, it goes beyond that to form a mostly universal form of morality. And lest we forget American society and its laws were mostly informed by Jewish and Christian religious beliefs and practices, which themselves were not only innovated centuries before American society, but by people who were NOT white.

Yes, these superheroes are vigilantes, many of which wear masks and employ secret identities. But not only is that a matter of practicality within their work, as well as part of generating drama within the narrative, but this does not (as the above mentioned dumbasses believe) mean they are inheriting a legacy from the Ku Klux Klan.

Theseus and Robin Hood acted as vigilantes of a sort who again predate the KKK. The Scarlet Pimpernel is widely regarded as the originator of the secret identity trope, and he was created by a Hungarian born British woman!

Just because a superhero might act as a vigilante and impose their sense of morality outside of the law (maybe even using force to do it) doesn’t equate them with the KKK, because it completely and utterly ignores the specifics of the circumstances. It is like saying anyone who kills is a serial killer, when they might have killed for justifiable reasons. Superman and Batman might be operating as vigilantes with secret identities but we the readers can plainly see that they are genuinely justified in what they are doing.

But that’s because the writer has established that!

I hear you cry.

Yes that is true...so what though?

If the writer has set up circumstances which justify the superheroes actions then you can’t just IGNORE those. You can’t just choose the evidence you take under consideration to fit the conclusion you want. In this case that’d be the interpretation of superheroes are endorsements of white supremacist notions ala the KKK or police officers who abuse their powers.

That’s like desiring to interpret Star Wars as the story of white supremacy because the ‘black’ clad figures of the Empire are ultimately overthrown by the white Rebel Alliance and the ‘light side' of the force. It ignores the respective actions of the Empire and Alliance in-story.

It’s is presuming the Empire to represent black people and the Alliance white people in the first place and then working backwards from there. Equally it is presuming superheroes to be stand-ins for ACTUAL police officers or KKK style vigilantes in the first place.

And that cop analogy inherently doesn’t work because superheroes are only SIMILAR to cops. The analogy ultimately breaks down because they aren’t subject to ANY legal sanctions, many of them do not kill and their crime fighting efforts stereotypically takes the form of them intervening ONLY if they hear about a crime/crisis ahead of time or if they observe it in progress.

I mean one of the above morons conflated Spider-Man’s Spider-Sense to be a stand in for racial profiling which is an utterly inappropriate analogy. The Spider-Sense was originally constructed as a clumsy plot device that first and foremost operated as a personalised danger sense to Spider-Man of threats. Outside of contrived writing it categorically doesn’t alert him to ANY potential crime or criminal. And it doesn’t discriminate the way racial profiling does. It more often than not allows him to pinpoint precisely who might be a potential threat because they ARE a potential threat.

Spider-Man or Superman or Batman in the course of their work have these skills and it enables them to be ABOVE things like racial profiling. Again, taking their stalking of a potential criminal to be a tacit approval of police methods is an interpretation being overlaid ONTO   the superhero and then presumed to be factually what it is.

But it’s not.

It’s just an (mis)interpretation of what is going on informed by one person’s personal experiences and baggage through life. It is the same kind of logic which will take say a female character who has a male love interest as 100% definitely an enforcement of the idea that women ‘need a man’ to validate them when that isn’t necessarily the case of the story at all.

Building upon this is the oft-repeated interpretation that superheroes are fascists and are supportive of fascist values. That is an incredibly simplistic and literal reading of the superhero genre that ignores aspects plain as day on the page of the stories. It again is CHOOSES to see something in the concept which frankly misses the point but is nevertheless accepted as plain fact regardless.

An article in the Atlantic addresses this very eloquently:

This [fascist] reading of superheroes is common but wrong, a symptom of trying to impose political ideology on a universal, fictional myth. Superheroes do say something about the real world, but it’s something pretty uncontroversial: We want to see good triumph over evil, and “good” in this case means more than just defeating the bad guy—it means handling power responsibly.

The “fascism” metaphor breaks down pretty quickly when you think about it. Most superheroes defeat an evil power but do not retain any power for themselves. They ensure others’ freedom. They rarely deal with the government, and when they do it is with wariness, as in the Iron Man films, where Tony Stark refuses to hand over control of his inventions.

Indeed, superhero tales are full of subplots about how heroes limit their own power: hibernating once the big bad guy has been defeated, wearing disguises to live ordinary lives, choosing not to give into the temptation to ally with the villain or use their powers for profit or even civilizational progress. That’s because the creators of some of the most foundational superhero tales weren’t writing solely out of a power fantasy. They were writing out of a fantasy that a truly good people who find themselves with power might use that power only for good—and only in the face of extreme evil.

YES superheroes are a power fantasy.

But there is NOTHING wrong with power fantasies so long as one understands the distinction between the fiction and reality.

More than this...the hard truth is violence is part of being human. We are biologically hard wired to be violent and dominate others. That is innate to us like many, many, many animals. The flipside to that though is what also makes us human is the ability (and perhaps more importantly the DESIRE) to NOT be like that.

Most superhero fiction simultaneously offers us the opportunity to enforce those values whilst at the same time providing us with a safe outlet for our violent urges. We transfer those urges into the heroes and villains fighting one another. Kinda like how in Ancient Rome gladiator fights and other spectacles were used as a way of avoiding the populace of Rome from erupting into violence.

And don’t sit there and tell me that they ENCOURAGE violence.

If someone is going to be violent like that frankly there are almost ALWAYS further underlying factors often to do with their home life And

Human beings have been killing each other and acting in immoral ways LONG before the invention of popular media. Preventing ourselves from being like that is an act of learned control as we grow up. It is otherwise innate to our instincts.

Furthermore the concept of superheroes as being police officers who enforce the status quo and therefore help keep white people in power is incredibly flawed.

First of all Doc Ock nuking New York city hurts everyone regardless of race. Second of all Batman stopping a mugger in the middle of assaulting someone isn’t upholding white power, it’s just safeguarding life. Reading it as more than that is a projection these asshats are injecting INTO the stories themselves when they aren’t warranted.

Finally, the law might be stacked in favour of white power and minority suppression. But that not only has a lot to do with ABUSE of the law, but at the same time large chunks of the law are there legitimately for the well being of EVERYONE. It is illegal to murder someone, to mug them, to exploit them. None of that ensures white power, it ensures the well being of everyone. The problem is that those laws are often warped when being applied to minorities by the police force.

But superheroes don’t represent the police force. They represent something grander than the police force whilst at the same time representing what the police force SHOULD be like. The message isn’t ‘this is what the police are like’ or even ‘the police are heroes so anything they do is therefore a good thing’. It is providing a strong moral ideal and saying ‘You and everyone else should try to be like this’.

It is because of this that the superhero concept REVEALS the warts and shortcomings of the law and law enforcement as it really exists. Which was a part of 1930s frustrations Superman et al were giving vent to. Again, Action Comics #1 showed us corrupt politicians, commentating upon a flawed system.

Basically Superman being who he is doesn’t tell people that a police officer is justified when he racially profiles a black person as a criminal. Quite the opposite, he reveals us that they were WRONG in doing that because Superman would NEVER do that.

Ultimately, yeah these characters were created within a white context, but my point is fundamentally the same thing was created in non-white contexts as well throughout history.

Super Heroes are a HUMAN power fantasy Part 2

Master Post

[chiseler]

When Nature Was Golden

Let’s open with a few passages of deathless prose from the classics.

EMORY’S SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE (18 in.; to 35 lb.) is the only Southwest member of an edible group with long necks and short tempers. Handle with care.

BELTED KINGFISHER Where there are fish there are Kingfishers, beating the air in irregular flight, diving into water with a splash and emerging with fish in their beaks.

THE EASTERN MOLE or common mole makes the mounds that dot your lawn. You are unlikely to see any moles, for they stay underground unless molested.

You saw them in the basement of your third-grade best friend, or in your school library. If you were lucky, you had one or two at home—your older sister read them first, years ago; maybe they’d even belonged to one of your parents. Paperback books just a bit smaller than pulp fiction novels, though equally thick, their illustrated pages of a glossier, higher quality. The typeface was Futura, that design marvel of yore, also seen in the old Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. Insects, Seashores, Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians—which did you have? The Golden Guides gave us our natural world in all its glory, and managed to do it in a singular style, dry yet affectionate, concisely informative and never, ever dumbed-down. They were written for children, but each, too, is a cracking read for any adult eager to learn. Or to remember.

Naturalist Herbert S. Zim, who founded this series of guides and wrote many of them, was born in New York in 1909. Raised there and in Southern California, he finished his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D at Columbia University. He was then a science teacher for twenty-five years—at Ethical Culture schools in New York City, and later at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One wonders where on earth he found the time to crank out so many books. Each was a loving collaboration with other educators, not solely Zim’s effort. But the synthesis of these people, the meticulous research required to bring together all the info, was his responsibility, from 1949 until the early 1970s. Zim, in 1969, was also the editor of an 18-volume set of encyclopedias named Our Wonderful World.

Of the 84 Golden Guides, Zim wrote or co-wrote 24. Is it confirmation bias that makes me believe those are the best of the bunch? The simple style is charming, with phrases like Rock Ground Squirrels, found in the Southwest, are our largest terrestrial squirrels. What grace: with a hint of pride to be from the United States, he said that the squirrels are ours. (I also appreciate that he uses the word “unique” correctly, without qualifiers. The Barn Owl is unique, not “totally” or “somewhat” unique.) The occasional anachronism amuses. Once in awhile Zim tells us which kind of turtle or ground squirrel makes a good pet, if captured.

You have been seeing birds as far back as you can remember and you will continue seeing them wherever you may be. It’s a real pleasure to see them. You can see more birds and more kinds of birds by learning how to look. This book will help you. It is not written for the expert, but for people who want to see birds just for the joy of it.

First become familiar with the mammals pictured and described. Look through the Key to Mammals on the next pages so that you can recognize the major mammal groups. Try to see the mammal well enough to decide, for example, whether it is a rodent or a shrew.

Familiarity with fishes gained by thumbing through pages at odd moments may enable you to make rough identifications at sight. Use this book as an “arm-chair” guide, but also take it into the field with you, for that is where it can be used best. On fishing trips take it along in a plastic bag.

Originally named the Golden Nature Guides, the series name was shortened to “Golden Guides” when they began branching out into other topics—for example, Guns, Sports Cars, and Casino Games. But these adult subjects did not make it into most family rooms, and the more popular guides about flora and fauna, insects, weather, stars, and the like are the ones most frequently found today. The illustrations by James Gordon Irving and others are remarkably detailed, the beauty of pure accuracy from a time when nature photography was rare.

A particularly enchanting feature of the Guides is the family tree, usually a two-page spread of swooping, color-gradated branches, each limb ending in a small picture of an animal in its biological order, labeled something like “Cutlass Fishes” or “Scorpion-Flies.” No less an artist than Matt Groening would eventually parody this format for his Life In Hell comic, describing the evolution of record-store clerks from sullen teens.

Herbert Zim, in his long career as an educator, was the one who brought lab instruction into science courses at the elementary-school level. Anyone who looked through a microscope before they reached ninth grade might have him to thank. And one attribute of Golden Guides is the way they expect one to get involved, not just in the field, but with “amateur activities” like building a birdhouse or preserving animal tracks in plaster. Through such deep engagement, the reader is encouraged not just to appreciate nature, but to discover new things about it, making new contributions to science.

He demanded no less of himself. Going through what biographical information there is on Zim, which is all very straightforward, one notices the list of scientific associations he belonged to, numbering more than twenty. They included the Audubon Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Everglades Natural History Association, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Truly, this was a vigorous and busy man.

Like so many cultural products of their time, the Golden Guides can look antithetical to today’s progressive values. Just ask the Yuman Indian woman who sits weaving cotton, bare-breasted, in one of the pictures in a guide to the American Southwest. In little vignettes we see depicted dozens of trappers, fishermen, tourists, birdwatchers—all white, mostly male. Under the entry for “Other Suckers,” Zim claims “some are so easily caught that every boy knows them.” If the Guides were written just for boys, this is a great shame, though their ubiquity meant that many girls of all different backgrounds would find them. The scientific language is devoid of prejudice, by its nature, and is there for any young person dedicated enough to study it. It prizes the natural world above all. One passage recently took me by surprise for its passion, on a page about the fishing industry: If you are interested in fishes, conservation—the wise use of all our natural resources—is your problem too.

Maybe it’s our current predicament that makes one particularly fond of the outside world, and of non-humans. Back in March, I started watching a live online feed from The Aquarium of the Pacific each night, comforted by the variety of fish, sharks, and rays that swam peacefully by. Curious about a small fish with long, showy gold fins, I consulted Fishes to identify it, and Irving didn’t disappoint. Meanwhile, Herbert Zim informed me that the species, named Lookdown, belong to the mackerel-like family of “jacks” and are fine eating.

In 1934, Zim married the Russian-born Sonia (Sonnie) Bleeker, who had studied anthropology at Columbia. The couple had two sons. Bleeker, too, worked in the book world—as an editor at Simon and Schuster, then as a full-time children’s book author. They eventually moved to Florida. Just like the descriptions in the guides, these biographical facts fall well short of being dull. They force me to imagine how energetic, how full life must have been in the Zim household as the kids grew up; and how many subtropical species kept Herbert company in his later years. After Bleeker’s death, he married Grace K. Showe in 1978. He died at Plantation Key in 1994, of complications from Alzheimer’s.

LIVE OAK has become a symbol of the South. The low, spreading tree, often covered with Spanish moss, marks old plantations and roadside plantings. The elliptical, blunt-tipped, leathery leaves are evergreen—that is, they remain green and on the tree throughout the year. The acorns are small but edible; wood is used for furniture. Two other southeastern Oaks (Laurel and Willow) have leaves of somewhat similar shape, but they are thinner and more pointed than Live Oak. Several western Oaks are evergreen. Botanists apply the unqualified name Live Oak only to this species. Height 40 to 60 ft. Beech family

In a Manhattan backyard in the middle of June, a couple of mourning doves fly between the trees. I’m aware that the gentle woop-woop-woop sound they make is not their voices but their wingbeats. The dogwood’s cream-yellow blooms have begun to fade, as is proper at this time. Above me a juvenile blue jay, still fluffy, shrieks out his typical noisy cry. I’m intrigued to see a red speck moving among the hairs on my arm—it’s a clover mite, an insect I haven’t noticed in decades. As recently as 1982, I was a four-year-old marveling at the rolling movement of clover mites on a windowsill—smaller than pin heads, bright candy-apple red. Somewhere along the line they stopped showing up, at least with the frequency they did back then. Now, seeing even one evinces a swell of emotion. (Incidentally, the same is true of another brightly-colored beauty, the red eft, which used to be so numerous in summer that we had to tiptoe on New York State gravel roads to avoid stepping on them.)

We learn more from Zim’s texts than he bargained for. His Golden Guides speak of a midcentury United States where all these animals and plants were still commonly seen. Just based upon my memories from the past 20 or 30 years, there seem to be fewer animals everywhere; in the 1950s, then, was the Earth just teeming with them, in every corner of every suburban lawn? Having learned that the biomass of insects, in particular, has started to fall fast, I yearn for the spectacle of clover mites and hastily do a search for them. Yes, the internet reassures me: we in New York City still have lots of the red bugs, enough to warrant a FAQ page from a pest-control company. They’re harmless to humans, pets, houses, and furniture. They munch grass and reproduce parthenogenically, which means every individual can lay viable eggs, without mating.

Of course, the sites telling me this haven’t worded their data quite as eloquently as Herbert Zim would have. Still, I thank him for the spark of curiosity that got me there at all. He taught me not just how to identify a clover mite, but how to care about her.

by Amanda Nazario

[laranjatoranjalaranja]

Aesthetics and History of Art: what is their role under fully-automated luxury communism?

Aesthetics has become unpopular among the left. Today, it is commonly associated with fascism and right-wing manipulative propaganda tactics. Walter Benjamin’s famous text about the modern reproduction of artworks can be credited with laying out a great part of the structure and terms of this discussion. In his work, what he calls the “aestheticisation of politics” is famously associated with fascism, while art, understood as a kind of aesthetics that has been politicised, is contrarily and positively associated with communism.

The main reason why this text acquired the cult status it has today, within the artworld, is because of the way in which it defines contemporary art as inherently revolutionary. Benjamin believes that, thanks to recent advances in its technological reproducibility, truly contemporary artworks were finally freed from old hierarchical ideas of originality, and thus acquired a new and enhanced political potential, particularly suitable for the communist political project.

Aesthetics, on the other hand, without the politisation that would turn it into art, becomes simply the domain of appearances, simulation, and spectacle in the Debordian sense. And this is where this theory starts to show its fragility. 

A closer look at Benjamin’s theory reveals it to be susceptible to the same criticism as Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. As Jacques Rancière has pointed out in The Emancipated Spectator, the separation between the simulated appearances that seduce the masses, and the true reality only accessible to some, is unfounded and misleading, despite being commonly understood to be a fact of life. 

The legitimacy of this separation depends on a thriving platonic idealism that often affects both right and left of the political spectrum and which is particularly prevalent in the Western world. According to this ideology, the mind and the body are hierarchically separated. While the mind is our reliable means of accessing the truth, the body is the deceiving realm of flawed sensorial perception which is completely unreliable unless previously subjected to correction by reason.

If we understand aesthetics in its broadest possible form, as simply that which relates to the senses, it inevitably falls into the suspicious second half of this division. But art can still be saved if it is not understood in aesthetic terms but as politicised aesthetics. The politicisation of aesthetics entails fighting ‘the spectacle’, by subjecting the ‘simulations’ our body perceives to the political ‘corrections’ of our intellectual reason.**

To further clarify why this kind of framework is flawed, it becomes useful to make a quick detour to the work of another author. In Pedagogy of The Oppressed, Paulo Freire defines praxis as a dialectical union between theory and practice. This means that, while our theory can, and should, inform our practice, this same practice also needs to inform our theory, thus making sure it matches our actual, lived reality. This means that the relationship between mind and body, theory and practice, reason and senses, is better understood as one of cooperation and mutual dependency than one of hierarchy and antagonism. It also means that aesthetics, broadly understood, plays an essential role in this dialectical process.

But, going back to Benjamin, I have said that the main reason his theory got so popular within the artworld is because of the revolutionary character he assigned to art. But this is not the only reason. Complementing this idea, we have a second one which relates to the phenomenon of demonization of aesthetics I mentioned in the very beginning. 

It is becoming increasingly hard to ignore the fact that the art faces serious, and inherent, issues and contradictions. The complementing aspect of what makes Benjamin’s argument appealing is that it allows us to keep our faith in art, while also feeling like we are targeting the problems that ‘threaten its purity and integrity’. These problems are thus presented as non-inherent, originating from external sources, and a great deal of what made this ‘outsourcing’ possible has been the use of aesthetics as a scapegoat for the issues affecting art in general.

Aesthetics has proven to be a particularly good fit for this. This is because if, on the one hand, some people felt suspicious towards art because they thought it was shallow, futile and even deceiving, we could argue, like Benjamin, that this was a problem of aesthetics and not art. Although this ‘futility’ argument is relatively common, it is not a very strong one (as I have tried to show when I mentioned Ranciere’s critique). A strong argument that can be directed against art, on the other hand, would be that it is a historical invention of the modern West, which means it has not always existed and, therefore, the usefulness of its continued existence becomes open for debate. But this critique too can be diverted towards aesthetics. 

In fact, aesthetics much more that art, was accused of being something made up in the 18th century by Western white males unaware of their privilege, to create rules that would validate what they thought of as beautiful and worthy of attention. Aesthetics, as a discipline, deserved all the criticism it got. More recently, the art market and the ‘artworld’, where also targets of a similar critique which, was also perfectly valid but, for some reason, continued to assume that all these things can be separated from art itself. As if art could ever have come to existence, and continue to exist, without them.

This criticism of aesthetics as an academic discipline, the art market or the artworld, is usually done using a leftist discourse. But critiques that extend to the notion of art itself are rare. 

Occasionally, more radical leftists will become interested in topics like art. And many of them do end up realising, half way through their own research, courses or degrees, that all these accusations often thrown at ‘aesthetics’ are just as applicable to our notion of art. Frequently, these people end up being the ones who are more dismissive and suspicious of our contemporary cultural institutions in general. They often believe that art, like most of our contemporary culture, can be categorised as ‘capitalist spectacle’, and therefore should be understood as a distraction to be ignored. 

These people can be easily convinced that art is a capitalist invention of the modern West. But the conclusion they draw from this is that the best thing to do is to dismiss all the things presented as art by our artistic institutions as capitalist distraction tactics, meant to divert our attention from the ‘real’ issues. What they fail to recognise, on the one hand, is that art is not a distraction to be ignored, but a weapon to be fought. And, on the other hand, they make the mistake of accepting the terms in which the capitalist artworld defines what aesthetics can be.

Capitalism knows well how to use aesthetics to its advantage. It has developed things like marketing and branding, as well as art, which are complex and highly effective techniques designed to work specifically to its own advantage. It knows how to tell the seductive and persuasive story of its own triumph and legitimacy. 

This left, on the other hand, has little more than outdated ideas of communist propaganda, which are literally from the last century. And this is because, today, the left often conceives of aesthetics as either evil or merely secondary. We haven’t taken any time to develop an alternative way to understand this other part of us, the one that is more connected to the senses and which is equally essential to understanding the world around us.

While part of what I will do here is question the validity of, and politics behind, our modern notion of art, I also want to argue that aesthetics is, actually, not necessarily susceptible to the same criticism. Unlike art, the artworld and the art market, the word aesthetics can have an older, broader meaning. Aesthetics, as that which simply relates to the senses, is not susceptible to the same criticism as its modern academic homonym, or as art, because it is not to be understood as a Human creation. It is not connected to any idea of ‘what it means to be Human’ or any ‘essence’ of Humanity. So, in this specific sense, aesthetics can be said to be an a-historical concept.

The prevailing platonic idealism I mentioned previously, leads people to prefer thinking in terms of Art and Humanity, rather than in terms of aesthetics, which would imply the recognition of a common ground, shared among us and all the other animals.

Aesthetic sensibility, understood in this way, is possessed by anyone and anything that simply possesses senses. From humans, to animals and maybe even other kinds of beings. While we can say that not all cultures have art because the concept of art is an invention of the West, we cannot say the same of things like aesthetics in this broad sense.***

Rather than dismissing aesthetics as a product of capitalism or a more or less futile thing to be dealt with ‘later’, we need to recognise that capitalism will thrive as long as it continues presenting itself as the best, or even the only, materially realistic, viable, alternative. No matter how many theories and manifestos the left has, as long we are not capable of presenting aesthetic alternatives to what capitalism has been imposing, none of it will feel, or even be, translatable to real life.

The left cannot go on pretending like aesthetics is a dispensable, secondary issue. Aesthetics is not a distraction, it is an essential part of how we experience our lives and therefore it too deserves a pride of place in our political agenda. Ignoring it will not make it irrelevant.

At this point, I have been studying History of Art in academia for 5 years, and it strikes me how, despite appearances, truly revolutionary History of Art barely exists. Despite the overwhelming number of so-called radical journals and other kinds of left-wing publications, most of it is actually liberal. What I mean by this is that most of the people who write for these publications seem to share a common goal: to free art from the elites’ domination (much like Benjamin). This is a liberal goal because it aims at reforming rather than revolutionising the existing system. It aims at saving art at all cost and it rules of even considering that its obvious and persisting problems might be inherent and that a possible solution would be to replace it with something radically different. Related to this, is another striking problem which is the prevailing assumption that art and the elites are separable to begin with.

I want to make it clear here that art cannot be understood (especially within academic contexts) as a human constant. Studying the history of art implies that art has a history and, therefore, a historical origin. Humans were not ‘artistic’ by nature, since the beginning of time. Art is a concept created by the modern West. There were no actual synonyms to the word Art in non-Western cultures and no one in Europe was even talking about such a thing until the 18th century (see Kristeller’s The Modern System of The Arts (pt. I and pt. II) and Shiner’s The Invention of Art*). 

It is irresponsible and anachronistic for Art historians to say or imply that art is something that humans have always done. This is an imperialistic tendency that we need to, not only distance ourselves from, but also actively fight against. And I stress actively fight against because these things I am writing about here have already been mentioned in academic publications from decades ago (Kristeller’s first article was published in 1951).

Since its creation, Art has existed to serve the capitalist elites (see Taylor’s Art, An Enemy of The People*). It was created by them, for them. To both serve and represent their interests. 

I say capitalist elites, specifically, because the works commissioned by the traditional nobility did not fit with our modern idea of art in their original contexts. The treasures of the French monarchy only became Art when the bourgeoisie took over and made them what they are today - the collection of an Art museum. These objects were stripped of their original meanings and functions and became targets of ‘disinterested contemplation’ and those who see this as a revolutionary triumph over an oppressive regime conveniently forget that the reality is more complex and the same thing was also done with foreign objects stolen by the French colonisers, shortly after.

Today, many people are still wondering why is Duchamp’s Fountain Art. The answer is, mainly, because this is what the elites behind our art institutions decided is art. The line between Art and non-Art is merely an institutional one. Art is an institutional system. And this is a system whose tables cannot simply be turned because, in order for Art to exist, it needs to distinguish itself from other modern categories like crafts and popular culture. The category of Art depends on this hierarchical distinction because, simply put, Art is High Culture.

This means that as long as art, as we understand it today, exists, there must also exist a privileged group that gets to draw the line between High and low culture. The cultural identity of these elites might change overtime, but their status as oppressors will always remain, within this structure. This is why the quest to ‘democratise’ art is merely reformist rather than revolutionary. 

I am not advocating for the burning of museums, Futurism style. I do think museums are important sources of information that should be free especially when they are public. What I am saying is that when these museums exhibit things that were not originally intended to be art as if they have always and unquestionably been so, they are making a serious mistake. They are silencing alternative narratives and disrespecting the people who created the objects they claim to be spreading knowledge about. They are suppressing aesthetic diversity, not promoting it.

Regarding contemporary Art museums and galleries, I think it would be fair to say that they are mostly bullshit. I make intentional efforts not to give any of my money to them (this also applies to academic Art Schools). I sometimes visit them, when they are free, because I want my opinions to be informed. I don’t usually pay for any tickets (they are usually even more expensive than regular museums anyway) nor do I let myself be troubled by those who believe I cannot be an expert on Art with a proper opinion, if I don’t go to all the ‘landmark’ cultural events. I try not to let art snobs like Jonathan Jones dictate which cultural events are or aren’t worthy of attention.

To conclude, History of Art as an academic discipline still has serious issues. Real History of Art should recognise that Art has a specific historical origin, and not treat it like a mysterious (mythical) part of ‘Human Nature’. 

To do leftist History of Art, nevertheless, we need to take this even one step further and study the consequences of the capitalist origins of this phenomenon and how it developed from there. The impacts of its structure, the way it works, how it legitimises itself, its weaknesses, all these should be analysed in ways that will allow this phenomenon to be coherently perceived through a left-wing lens, subsequently enabling us to imagine viable alternatives to the current Art system (Richard Sennett does something like this in his book The Craftsman. If you don’t feel like reading, he also explains it beautifully in his lectures on craftsmanship available on youtube).

Also, I feel like I should mention that the mythical treatment Art historians give their subject, either emphatically and intentionally or through the passive and implicit acceptance of this mythical definition, is probably one of the things that mostly contributes to the much criticised workings of our contemporary art market. Surely, one of the reasons why artworks are sold at such exorbitant prices is because what these people are buying is not just good looking paintings. These objects are being sold as the latest, most recent pieces in the important puzzle that is Human History. Once gathered all in the correct order, these pieces are thought to reveal what it means to be Human. The ‘History’ of Art I’ve been criticising here is largely responsible for the maintenance of this profitable myth, that has been giving the powerful disproportionate control over the narratives of our collective existences.

Notes:

* If you don’t have access to these texts via your public libraries, genesis online library should have it for free download, just click here and try following the links presented (they are forced to keep changing domains because certain people don’t like it when information is too accessible).

** I do believe there is something more to be said about this politicisation of aesthetics. I think it can be a very useful and interesting terminology, but it needs to be conceptualised outside of this limited ‘reality versus simulation’ framework.

*** Or, for example, of something like venal blood. All people and animals with venal blood can be said to have venal blood, despite understanding or not what this means. A culture which does not understand what we mean by ‘art’ today, cannot be said to have it (they will have other things, which they will understand in different terms, and which, I want to emphasise, are not of lesser value just because they won’t fit our ‘artistic model’).

[michael-radi-the-glamorous-life]

Words Words Words

Words matter. Word choice matters. And context is everything.

I have often heard the saying that “words are magic,” and it’s difficult to disagree.

We can utilize language to create so many things:

We can create visuals to be imagined.

We can conjure emotions.

We can make peace.

We can force conflict.

We can make art.

We can tell stories.

We can build entire worlds.

Words are extraordinarily powerful, and it’s good to occasionally take stock and think about the way words affect our lives and the world around us.

Plus, it just might help your art as well. 😉

Choice

The English language is a fantastic and strange little mixture, made up of Germanic Anglo-Saxon roots with heavy borrowings of Old Norse, Norman French, Parisienne French, Latin, and oh-so-many more languages throughout time.

Basically, it’s language stew.

But that means that - unlike so many other languages around the globe - English has a built-in flexibility to adopt words, which expand its vocabulary and allow for nuances in its synonyms.

We can say essentially the same thing in multiple ways, but with each way meaning something only slightly different.

In other words (ehn? see?) - Word Choice Matters.

Let’s look at an example.

The following three phrases say, at their core, the same thing:

Killer Kitties

Fatal Felines

Deadly Cats

All three of these phrases are expressing something that means “some form of feline creature with the ability to kill.” However, due to the slight changes in the word choice, they each give off a slightly different intention in their meaning.

To me, “Killer Kitties” sounds either like a YouTube compilation video of extremely not-so-ferocious kittens trying sooo adorably hard to be predators, or like an anime series of a cute, crime-fighting cat squad.

“Fatal Felines” sounds like the title to a bad film noir starring actual cats, or some Natural History Museum exhibit on the world’s various cat predators.

And “Deadly Cats” sounds more factual and almost boring in comparison to the other two, like a half-hour filler program on NatGeo airing at 11am on a weekday.

Three phrases that all contain the same information, yet they create such different results. Words matter.

Context

Context is Queen. She rules all.

As great as word choice can be in conveying a thought the way that you specifically intend, the context in which it is said can alter every intention you had.

And to clarify, by context I mean: Who is saying it, To Whom it is being said, Where it is being said, When it is being said, Why it is being said, and How it is being said.

There are a lot of variables, which is exactly why context can be so tricky and important.

Let’s take a simple, often-said phrase as our example:

I love you.

“Aw, what a lovely choice of words for an example, Michael!”

Or is it? Dun dun dun.

The utterance of this phrase from one human being to another in various contexts has been the driving force behind a mass of storytelling and media throughout humanity’s recorded history. It’s a powerful phrase that can change drastically dependent upon its context.

Who Is Saying It

Let’s begin with Who is saying it:

A small child?

A parent?

A friend?

A significant other?

A lover?

A friend who wants to be more than a friend?

A stranger?

You may have noticed that you felt fine with the options at the beginning of the list, but felt less so by the end. And you see how expanding on the idea of “a friend” into “a friend who wants to be more than a friend” changes the context?

Well, what about if we do the same thing to “a stranger”? I’m assuming you didn’t feel great about that one upon reading it, but let’s expand our word choices to be either:

“A stranger you’ve been on five dates with, been flirting with for a month, and has now completely opened up to you and said ‘I love you for the first time.’”

“A stranger you’ve never seen before in your life trying to follow you home from the bar.”

The meaning of “stranger” is suddenly different based on its own context and who is saying the word. Context is powerful.

To Whom Is It Being Said

This one is fairly intuitive.

We may often say “I love you” to people in our lives, but we mean it differently depending on who we are speaking to.

And this is mostly because the love we feel for various people in our lives is different. Love is a large conglomeration of complex emotions and there are many nuances.

Think about how the meaning of that phrase would change if you were to say “I love you” to:

A colleague

A friend

A parent

A friend’s parent

A grandparent

A teacher

An acquaintance

A date

A boyfriend/girlfriend

A spouse

An ex

A boss

It can just keep going

How deep is the love you’re expressing? Are you just expressing, or do you want something in return? How would you define that specific love?

All of these can change depending on the person you are speaking to.

Where Is It Being Said

Many a sit-com episode and rom-com film have had climactic scenes based on this idea, particularly when “I love you” is being said romantically between two people for the very first time.

And this is again fairly intuitive.

It’s quite different to tell someone for the first time in the middle of a candle-lit dinner date than it is to say it for the first time in the middle of a break-up.

But even with dramatic situations aside, where we say it can still alter the strength and meaning behind what we say.

For instance, let’s assume you are with a friend you love deeply. How does saying “I love you” change in depth and meaning when either:

They’ve just made you laugh raucously with a joke that only the two of you would get.

You’re comforting them at a funeral for their older sibling.

Oof. Context matters.

When Is It Being Said

Let’s use the example I mentioned above of saying it for the first time during a break-up.

Even in the midst of a single conversation, when that phrase is uttered can make all of the difference. For this example, let’s assume the person in the couple saying it for the first time is the person being broken up with.

Here are three thoughts:

If “I love you” is the first thing said in the break up conversation, perhaps it was said with joy and expectation, but it instead becomes the impetus for the conversation and the break-up itself.

If said in the middle of the break-up conversation, perhaps it becomes part of the person’s argument as to why this break-up feels sudden and has taken them off-guard.

If said at the end of the conversation - even as the last word - perhaps it becomes a desperate, last-ditch effort to get the other person to stay.

Small changes to the When can alter the emotional state both people are in, and therefore change the intention behind the words.

Look for this the next time you watch a romantic comedy - it’s kind of fun to analyze!

Why Is It Being Said

Ultimately, the Why is attached to the combination of Who-To Whom-Where-When. Not that it isn’t important to note, but it is often generated by the surrounding circumstances.

We rarely say things just to say them - there’s usually a specific intention behind it.

To continue with this idea of love, we don’t stop loving people just because we aren’t saying it every second of every day. Which means that there must be an environmental reason that we choose to say “I love you” when we do.

Here are a few examples:

A parent tucking their child in for bed after a particularly difficult day for the two of them.

A just-married couple sitting on the bed, taking off their shoes, and exhaling, being alone for the first time since the reception ended five minutes ago.

A friend to their best friend who just delivered the goofiest and most public prom-posal in the middle of the school cafeteria.

With the remaining context, the why becomes apparent. What motivates us is fodder for good stories.

How Is It Being Said

More than anything, the way we say something is a window into our current emotional state.

People often believe that the way they speak tends to be a reflection of their current environment.

How many times have you heard a teenager say that they’re only being defensive with their parents because “they’re just so annoying” or “they keep asking so many questions”?

But the way we say something isn’t based upon the outer environment, it’s a reflection of how we feel internally.

Perhaps that teenager is being defensive when asked about how much homework they have because they’re feeling entirely overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do, and it’s difficult or them to speak about. Or perhaps it’s because they plan to never do it, and parents can’t know that if they never knew how much there was in the first place.

The other side of How has to do with inflection and intent.

Context matters to determine the meaning behind word choice, but words have different meanings and connotations to each of us individually and culturally. An extreme example of this is how the “c-word” for female genitalia is a highly-charged and taboo word in the US, but a commonly used utterance in the UK.

And this is also where the internet and social media becomes a tremendous issue.

Ever gotten reprimanded on Facebook or into an online argument with someone who cannot understand the context behind your words?

Or have you ever gotten angry at someone because you saw something they wrote and you put your own tone on their words, making it become inflammatory?

The internet is great for communication in so many ways, but it makes context difficult and intended inflection almost impossible.

The more contextual information we have, the better off we are.

So perhaps the “kids” really do have it right by communicating mostly through Facetime, Instagram, and Tik Tok. Who knows?

And So

I love words. They bring me joy and they are the basis of both my art and my career.

But remembering their power and their importance is necessary to good communication and also to building a better world.

Take that extra time to think through your word choice and the context - and not just the context for you, but for the other parties involved as well.

You may just find a better balance in the world you create.

[armsdealing]

MYTHS FROM THE OTHERWORLD: THE WEREPUMA, a comprenhensive text.

I. the how.

magic came from the soil. it came from the earth. it came from the trees and the rivers and the sunlight, and we came from the magic. these words, and variants of it, were the words hernando sain reyes would give his children when questions about their origins bubbled up in their young minds. with those words, he would hint to his parents’ beliefs, and their parents’ beliefs regarding the first appearance of the people with gifted-blood -- los hombres con sangre dotada, they’d say to him, when not using the local phrase: pquyquy chie, bright hearts.

the details would be muddled up with time, not only in hernando reyes’ mind but in the minds of his progenitors and their peers. there’s no certain recorded origin for the werepumas and there probably never was, since pumas are ubiquitous to the americas and there’s no shortage of myths surrounding them. this is best exemplified with the name -- it might be one of the felines, of not one of the animals, with most number of names, puma being a quechua word integrated into the spanish language, and cougar being a word bastardized into the english language, through the french language, from the portuguese, who call pumas suçuarana, a borrowed word from the tupi people. other words include: miztli (náhuatl); koj (mayan); chihisaba (muisca), pangi/trapial (mapudungun); Jagua pytã (guaraní) and onça-parda or leão-da-montanha in portuguese. in english, they’re called panthers and/or mountain lions. naturally, the diversity in names hints at the diversity in the origin stories, 

the most popular theories tend to revolve around the chichí plant, a plant just as ubiquitous as the felines themselves, and how only a few chosen individuals would be able to handle it properly. those able to do it, became the werepumas. some groups went as far as to say it was direct consumption of the flowers what gave these people their gift, when the flower’s toxins didn’t cause them to die (as it normally would on a regular person). the flower did not discriminate on who it deemed “worthy” enough to receive its gift, though it would eventually prevail the theory that it favored “people of pure character”. hence, the muisca would refer to their chosen few as bright hearts. many of them would go on to become warriors and protectors. the incas, who consider the puma a sacred animal valued for its might and strength (as well as the symbol of life on earth, kay pacha), held the werepumas of their communities in high regard.

just like it’s hard to peg down a how, it’s hard to peg down a when. it’s believed that werepumas have been around for at least a thousand years, or for however long pumas have existed (which would put them at 8000 BC, minimum). it’s generally agreed, however, that as far as supernaturals go, they’re a pretty young species.

ii. numbers.

historically, in south america, werepumas were killed routinely by monteros, the colonial equivalent of today’s hunters (up north they were hunted down by the same people that went after witches). even previous to the spaniards’ invasion it was known that pumas could hold very erratic temperaments that would make them conflict with other authorities in their communities, and it could actually result in exiles or executions. despite their high status, they often eventually would fight amongst themselves for territorial reasons and wind up isolating themselves from their human peers and leaving for nature. this amped up the myth and mystery surrounding them, and started some strings of lore that actually referred to their qualities as the curse of solitude. pumas are not a pack-minded species, and their growth for much of their history was through consumption of the plant (which would turn only one of the two hundred men it was fed to and kill the remaining one hundred and ninety-nine) and slow paced reproduction. the last one turned out more successful since they could reliably reproduce with humans. still, it should be noted that for the billion humans living in the americas there’s only around 4 million werepumas peppered throughout the continent, and that’s for several reasons: 

they are exclusively a species found in the americas. nowadays, of course it would be easier to find werepumas in other parts of the world, but it would not be common at all (local magic feeds best on local soil, after all). other supernaturals would find them to be an oddity (just like werecats are in general).

pumas are practically unable to change human beings by bite. the same can be said about any other werefeline. such events are few and extremely far between, since a werepuma biting someone with the intention of turning them usually leads to the person’s death. even then, if it does get accomplished, bitten pumas present no advantage over blood ones, and can even present themselves as a little less powerful compared to them. unlike werewolves, they can only grow through reproduction. as it’s been explained, this greatly diminishes their spread.

werepumas do not naturally form “prides” or colonies. once a were has grown the appropiate amount, they will usually try to become independent and establish their own territory. this is, of course, affected by human bonds and culture (which is a key defining factor), so they may stay close to their parents and siblings and instead expand the territory – turning into a small community.

werepumas are instinctively aggressive to each other, a mirror to the animal’s intraespecific competition. pumas are not social creatures. when a puma enters another’s territory, if they are not blood related (or even if they are, and aren’t familiar with each other) the most likely reaction will be an attack, and promptly an altercation that can turn deadly. in order to avoid this, the intruder would have to yield and show deference. alternatively (but more rarely, as they tend to feel slighted), the invaded party would have to stop aggression. this is not an easy task at all (even for very friendly pumas, like marcelo), and in special cases (like when the invaded puma has children), it is close to impossible.

pumas unrelated to one another that meet in territory not firmly established by either as theirs still can very easily get into altercations, but it is also easier to snap out of them – as long as both are willing to drop it. it helps that, in any case, pumas tend to avoid each other before it can get vicious.

although pumas can live up to hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years, they have a pretty human average lifespan, overall. pumas most commonly mate with humans, less so with other pumas, and they will normally mate for life. the toll of losing their mate will affect pumas, sometimes so intensely that they will become unhinged. in cases were this doesn’t happen (or the puma just doesn’t mate), then the older the puma becomes, the more reclusive and aggressive they might grow to be. because of this, the primary reasons for older pumas dying stems from violence and recklessness – either through contact with other pumas, or other creatures, like werewolves and vampires. the more social weres can avoid this, but they are a rarity.

because of the hundreds of years of persecution, pumas are incredibly secretive, having even built-in magic that protects them from the human eye. even if you’ve met one, they might not disclose their status to you. exceptions being if you too are a supernatural being.

iii. behaviorisms

the werepuma's habits greatly resemble those of the fully animal counterpart. it’s a solitary creature that will usually only form a unit with their mate and young, until they too are old enough to become independent. there have been instances of “puma prides”, but even then they are small, and usually bound together by consanguinity. the same can be said about other werefelines, with the exception of lions and domestic cats, who naturally form prides or colonies respectively. 

as far as temperament goes, the werepuma is guarded, which can be misinterpreted as shy. they’ll conceal their status as much as possible, but they will retaliate viciously when threatened. as mentioned, they staunchly defend their territory from outsiders, and they have been known to kill without hesitation when their young are seemingly threatened. outside of perceived threats to their lives or authority, the puma tends to be agreeable and even affable as long as you’ve made it clear you mean no harm. in which case, they are not big on starting disputes and are, in fact, quite clever when it comes to avoiding direct conflict with humans or other species. 

on the other hand, fights between pumas are a little more common because of their possessive natures. in fact, they often instinctually dislike one another, and the fight instinct will usually override them if one doesn’t back down first.

common puma body language involves eye contact. dominance challenges usually can take the form of staring contests before they devolve into blows. they can purr when content, and growl in warning. grooming and playing, as well as soft nips are known bonding/affectionate activities. 

as nocturnal creatures, they’re made more powerful by the night time, though they are not moon called. full moons enhance their abilities, but they are not forced to change. only stress or the influence of a blood bind can forcefully induce the change.

iv. anatomy and appearance

werepumas count with three forms: the human form, the animal form, and the bipedal or humanoid form, which is a mixed state of the former two, or a half-beast shape product of morphing halfway through. 

in the animal form, they are bigger than normal pumas, but the sizes overall can vary from just mildly bigger than the real animal to being slightly bigger than a horse, and their weights can vary from 900 lbs to 2000 lbs. they’re quite muscular, though less study than jaguars since they are built for dexterity, with powerful forequarters, necks, and jaws as well as four retractable claws on their fore paws, and also their hind paws. their hind legs are slightly longer and stronger than the front legs to enable for great leaps. 

werepumas can be in a variety of climates, and in cases of living in mountainous regions they count with thick fur coats. the coat color can change depending on their environment as well, tending to be lighter in cold climates and redder in warmer temperatures. eye color similarly can range from light gray to amber, or a grayish green.

in their humanoid form, they also turn bigger and heavier, easily going over seven foot in most cases. their teeth and shape, which can be selectively grown from the human shape, are much less elegant looking than vampires’, and not designed to delicately pierce through flesh, but to cut through meat and tendons. the top and bottom canines are quite long and impossible to hide, since they will force the jaw to stay loose in a snarl. size wise, they’re bulky and covered completely in fur. their eyes will usually glow in an amber hue. 

v. physiology

werepumas are born blind, and usually gain sight gradually between the first 12 and 24 four months of living. they’re expected to grow a little before shifting into their puma shapes (they need to do so consciously), but they don’t have to wait until puberty. they start changing at will at around 4 years old. at these ages they can’t fully control themselves and their strength, so they may be especially impulsive and feisty. it’s important to work patiently on their self-control.

they will age up normally until they reach their mid to late thirties, in which they get stuck physically for most of their life cycles, progressing very slowly from them on. there’s been records of pumas living hundreds of years, but the average puma usually has a very “human” lifespan of 70-140 years, usually dying in altercations. this being because the older a puma gets, the more primal they tend to become, usually wearing off their more human instincts as they turn more reclusive and reach a hundred years in age. a puma who constantly socializes could avoid this.

other qualities involve: 

enhanced strength. werepumas count with enhanced physiology in all aspects. they’re stronger than humanly possible, capable of deadlifting 4000 lbs minimum, enough for a sizable SUV. it’s important to note that the strength does not equal to higher density/weight, unless he’s in his humanoid or animal shape, so there’s some feats they could not reasonably do as humans even if they’re quite strong. 

particularly strong pumas have been able to fight up to three werewolves simultaneously and win, though they usually lose to more numerous groups. on the other hand, it’s widely believed that a “pack” of five well-trained, well-socialized pumas could take down a wolf pack three times its size.

enhanced condition: reflexes, speed, dexterity, balance, stamina. werepumas inherently counts with all the feline physically aptitudes that characterize their animal form: sharp reflexes, unmatched balance, and peak dexterity. they can run much faster than the average human and maintain that speed for far longer, and it takes a lot of effort for him to tire. he can jump incredibly tall heights, as well, close wide distances with a single leap or sprint.

enhanced senses: hearing, sight, smell. things that most wouldn’t be able to see, hear, or smell, werepumas can. Perhaps a little less so than the wolf counterparts, but still strongly enough for him to easily tell when a foreign party has stumbled nearby, even if said foreign party has tried to be quiet. you can’t whisper in someone’s ear around them and trust that they won’t hear it, either. can’t carry a concealed gun and expect that he won’t smell the powder. just a little fine tuning and focus is all it takes for them to detect what is usually undetectable.

enhanced healing and durability. though not anywhere close to a vampire’s, werepumas’ regenerative ability is right on part with the werewolves’, if not in speed, then in reach and intensity. they can walk off lethal injuries just fine and even overcome dismemberment (so long as the lost limb is retrieved), and they won’t bleed out no matter how much blood they lose. since they’re durable, it’s also pretty difficult for something to truly hurt them in first place. his healing speed is directly proportional to the size and level of injury sustained — in other words, the bigger and more gruesome the wounds, the longer they take to heal. third degree burns take hours, days if they occupy over 50% of his body, stab wounds take everything from 5 minutes to an hour depending on placement and depth (and quantity), bullet wounds on the body take about the same, bullets fired at the head are trickier, but they can survive them.

it’s a lot faster to heal in the feline form, and what takes days can take hours in it, what takes hours minutes; the change is often forced onto them in cases of great injuries in order to allow their bodies to recover, even though the change in itself, while the body is in tough conditions, can be insanely painful. however, not only do they heal faster, it’s even tougher to hurt them in in the first place, rendering conventional weapons (like guns) useless to combat them in this form. as it stands, the only ways to kill a werepuma are decapitation or sustained fire. they are also vulnerable to high level magic. 

tldr; he’s sturdier than werewolves, in any given shape, period. it takes a lot more to injure them, and similarly, it takes a little more time to heal when they’re actually hurt.

night vision. in dim lightning, they have no problem making out outlines, colors, movement, and their vision in pitch blackness, the one that involves his puma eyes, is not unlike those of specialized cameras — without the presence of any light whatsoever, he sees the world in a washed out monochrome, a misty light grayish blue.

efficient thermoregulation. werepumas are comfortable in both warmer and cooler temperatures with perfect ease. while humans have a narrow window wherein they control their body temperature, the pumas’ window is a lot wider and a lot more effective. they’re not hotter or colder than normal, either -- as a rule, they’re pretty warm, but in hotter temperatures they may be fresh to the touch (they never quite reach ‘cool’ though). 

vi. magic

werebeasts are magical creatures, with their magic usually limiting to themselves (like the change) and members of their same species (the ones that affect a pack’s dynamic, for example). in the puma’s case, magic takes the shape of:

charm: pumas have a natural charisma that draws people to them, or makes them more responsive to their words. it’s nowhere near as strong as a compulsion or mind control, and they can’t bend people’s will, but they are inherently more skillful at persuasion, people inherently want to listen to them. the charm can take the form of friendliness or assertiveness/dominance. it can lure people or it can drive them away.

blood binding: pumas don’t form group units, but they can still establish strong social bonds. in the case that they do, they will enact a blood bind with the object of their care. it entails drinking their blood and them drinking the puma’s. thereon, a special connection will exist between them not unlike the one naturally found in packs — the puma will be able to sense when the other person is in danger and vaguely where they might be, and they will be able to elicit responses in each other. the other person will be able, for example, of snapping the puma out of a primal state, and in select cases (where the bond is strong), push or force changes. 

glamour: not exactly a glamour, but a magic that helps pumas be more easily overlooked in urban settings. when the ordinary person sees a werepuma, they will usually not believe what they see, and their brain will happily rationalize the sight, usually into a very large dog or trick of light. of course, this works mostly with glimpses or brief sightings, and continuous interaction will break the spell.

psychic immunity. it doesn’t work with all psychic attacks, but werepumas’ minds can’t be persuaded or altered in any form (it’s suspected that since they’re immune to chichí, a powerful hallucinogen that can be used as a tool for mind control, they’re also immune to mind control attempts from other magical creatures). it’s important to note that they can be persuaded through chemicals, particuarly phermones, to feel certain things, but they can’t be made to think certain things.

vii. interactions with other magical creatures

as a rule, pumas don’t get along well with other werebeasts without some effort. it’s easier with other werefelines, specially the similarly-made werejaguars, but it can’t be immediately guaranteed. for the longest time they also represented many human communities’ first line of defense from everything they considered dangerous, including other, more malignant creatures. in other cultures, they were considered harbingers of death because of the ease with which they killed. 

they can get along well with witches and fae, to an extent and as long as they’re somewhat benevolent. nature spirits, mermaids, and sirens, may have positive relationships with pumas either because of their high sensitivity to pheromones or because of shared respect towards their environments. 

they don’t usually get along well with vampires and werewolves, and they hold a natural rivalry with werewolves not unlike their animal counterparts. werepumas dislike werewolves and will frequently clash with them for territorial reasons and an inherent distaste for each other. there’s stories upon stories of werepumas killing werewolves, and werewolf packs killing werepumas, especially when european werewolves became more common (considerably so, in north america). 

[readingwebcomics]

Analyzing Questionable Content: Pages 51-100

No Faye, it only looks that way because he’s playing Final Fantasy X-2. Good God, I just realized that Final Fantasy X-2 is someone’s first experience with Final Fantasy. That’s a depressing thought. Although someone starting out the series with Final Fantasy XIII is probably way worse, now that I think about it. At least X-2 had fun.

…huh? Oh right, the comic. You sure you’d rather not listen to me write an essay on Final Fantasy, instead? I have this great point about how Final Fantasy IX has the most emotionally impactful narrative but as a game it only really clicks with long-time players of… no? Okay fine, let’s get back into QC.

The very next comic has Marten getting a tax return check for $1,100, and being the wise adult that he is, decides to spend that money on a new guitar. Tagging along, Faye brings up something that gives us new insight on her character:

And clearly didn’t bore her, considering how much of that information she retained. Here we have yet another example of a shared interest between these two, Marten clearly being into Guitars if he’s invested enough to blow a fat wad of money on it and Faye carrying around quite a bit of information on the instrument herself. I’ve made the point in the last post, but to reiterate – at this point in the comic, it’s clear these two are clicking as far as interests go. They can keep up with each other, can and have provided support for one another, and challenge one another… okay granted that last one isn’t entirely true, it’s clear Faye challenges Marten more than vice-versa, but still. There is a clear, acting relationship dynamic between these two, whether platonic or romantic. The reason why early QC works as well as it does is because these two have clear characters to them and their relationship FEELS real – they feel like people you’d know who’d really be friends – or maybe more than friends. This is Jeph’s character writing at… well I hesitate to call it at its best because to imply he peaked as early as the 53rd comic would be an insult to him as a writer, and I’m not looking to do that here.

I’m looking to do that a little bit later on in this part when we discuss Faye’s “character quirk.”

Before that however, we’re going to get a little bit on insight on Marten:

The story is elaborated on in a future comic, but here we get Marten’s backstory – traveling across the country for a girl, the relationship falling apart and leaving him stuck in this part of the country. This will go on to explain several of his character choices, including Pintsize (although that’s something we’re not going to approach until MUCH later on). It also further elaborates on Marten’s character as a whole: He doesn’t make many active actions as a whole, but when he does, it tends to shift the entire dynamic of how he lives. He decided he wanted to follow this woman across the country, and that action ended up completely upending his life. Could this be part of the reason why Marten is so passive? Does he skew towards this lifestyle because he’s been “trained” to take any kind of affirmative action as an intense, life-changing event?

While I’m not certain myself, and I have a damn good feeling Jeph wasn’t thinking that far ahead when writing Marten’s character, it’s an angle I’m willing to continue exploring as we further our journey down this comic’s history.

This comic was written in 2003. I’m half-tempted to believe Meme culture can be tracked by indie bands now. Wonder if there was any zeitgeist with neo-nazi indie bands ten or fifteen years ago then, if that theory holds true?

…I just made myself really, really sad.

Later on, Pintsize proceeds to eat a cake when he really shouldn’t – again – and we are gifted with… this lovely image.

Okay. I understand Pintsize is an AI, so it makes total sense for him to be able to be uploaded to a PC like this (ignoring for the moment modern commercial hardware can’t possibly support the resources necessary to maintain human-level sapience and ESPECIALLY not in 2003), but this is one of the freakiest fucking things I’ve seen from this comic. Mostly because at the time of writing we’re on comic 4000 and AI as a whole take an entirely different turn in the world of QC around that time, so… this is just kinda surreal to look at.

…We’ll get to AI in regards to QC’s universe later on when it becomes more relevant. Needless to say, it becomes one of the core “themes” of the comic as a whole.

The narrative reason for this turn of events is simple:

Pintsize is now in a new visually appealing model, capable of moving his joints around so he can do more than just stand around and talk!

…also one that has a horrifying government-level laser built into it! Believe it or not, this DOES become a relevant plot-point later and it’s not just for the sake of a gag. This is a great example of Jeph taking a tiny detail he may have originally written in as a joke and building off it to create conflict… although I’ll be getting more into that later on when it actually DOES become relevant.

Pintsize agrees to turn the laser off, and a few comics later Marten and Steve go to the bar to discuss their lives – specifically Marten’s love life.

Further showcasing of Marten’s passive nature and his straight-up lack of confidence.

Say goodbye to Sara everyone – for real this time, I’m fairly certain this is the very last time we ever see her. I could be mistaken, but I highly doubt it. Plus, while we don’t see it in detail we get enough information to gleam Steve as Marten’s exact opposite – charming without being overwhelming, confident without being cocky. Steve is just straight-up a cool dude, and it’s easy to see how he can easily get into relationships while Marten stays there floating along, too scared and/or passive to make the move that comes to Steve naturally.

Wait. Shit, I may have the hots for Steve. Abort, aboRT, ABOR-

I’m showing this in part to showcase the next point of conflict and also to draw attention to the new style Jeph is trying. He’ll do this throughout the run of QC, trying out brand-new styles to see what fits and what doesn’t. I’ll be including this in my comparison pictures at the very end of this post to give a clearer image of what changes and how he improves… although you can see even in this comic he’s struggling against old habits as Marten’s face in the final panel looks drastically different than in the rest, looking more akin to how he looked in older comics. That’s okay! Habits die hard, it’s worth applauding the fact that Jeph is trying. God knows I can’t draw to save my fucking life, so I’ll always support artists trying new things.

I’m mostly including this panel for two reasons: The fact that Faye’s stuck in the closet right now – if you don’t get why that’s funny, you will in about 3700 comics from now – and the way she’s talking. Do you notice something different about the “feel” of Faye’s dialogue? Keep an eye on it, I’ll try to include more panels of her talking from this point onward.

Anyway, Marten dismantles the previously established conflict by revealing he managed to get Faye’s prescription for her and got her a new pair of glasses.

Mark this as the second time Faye has actually displayed real physical aggression against Marten.

Again, depending on how much you know about AI in QC’s world from future comics this could either be a lot funnier or a hell of a lot less funny. Although… the subject of AI mortality would make for an EXTREMELY interesting plot point in more recent comics. Remind me to touch on that when we get further along.

Again: Pay attention to Faye’s dialogue in this comic, especially in that last panel. You’re noticing it, aren’t you? The fact that she sounds a little… different? Give me a little more time, I promise I’ll touch on it a little later.

Hey, guess what? It’s later!

Faye does not punch Marten whenever she says something nice about him. In fact, she has ever only assaulted Marten twice – both times for completely arbitrary reasons not related to her saying anything to or about Marten. Nor has Faye ever spoken completely without contractions, as you see she’s doing now. Later comics will go on to point out how odd it is that Faye only speaks with contractions when she’s drunk and dips into her southern accent… when we’ve seen in previous comics that she is capable of speaking with contractions and talking like a normal human being. This change has shifted the entire “feel” of every line of Faye’s dialogue, as she no longer “sounds” like the Faye we started the comic with.

These are both examples of a writing mistake that a lot of long-form regular updating writers make, be it fanfiction or daily comics – retcons. If you’re reading this, you most likely know what a retcon is. For the few of you that don’t, a retcon – short for retroactive continuity – is the practice of in later works of an ongoing series introducing a fact that changes what was previously established in previous works. This is most commonly seen in Superhero comics from Marvel and DC, but the kind of retcon I’m talking about is more common on smaller scale works, like fanfiction or unedited novels or ongoing RPs.

See, when the writer realizes they wanted to change up something, introduce a plot element that would require them to go back and change something previously to make it make sense and find that for whatever reason they can’t, they may go ahead and introduce the plot element anyway while assuring the reader that no, of course this element was always included. That’s what’s happening here – Jeph had an idea for a plot element he wants to include, realized he can’t exactly go back to older comics and change them considering it’s a regularly updated webcomic, and so decided to retcon these facts by introducing them like they’ve always been a part of things and assert their truth while continuing on.

Not that I can necessarily blame the man – in a situation like this, realizing there’s an important plot element that you want to work with but can’t due to you leaving it no room in what you’ve previously published, there’s not much else you can do besides either retconning things or accepting you can’t introduce that plot element and just move on. However, there are other ways you can work with this that abide by previously established continuity and lets you introduce a plot element you want to introduce. For example, Faye punching Marten: You could introduce it as something she feels more comfortable doing the longer she’s around him. Have more frequent comics of her following saying something nice up with a punch, let us see her actually assault him more, and draw a correlation between her getting more comfortable around him and her getting more physically aggressive – something Jeph does touch on later, so it is entirely possible to introduce this new dynamic without asserting things have happened that we clearly see haven’t happened.

…as for Faye not speaking in contractions however, that’s just stupid. It’s a gimmick for her character, plain and simple, without adding anything to her as a character. If you want something big to showcase she’s keeping herself restrained, just continue as you were, having her speak in a southern accent when she’s drunk. That works as a fun gag to attach to her character without seeming like a dumb gimmick. And I’m sorry to say… this whole “Faye doesn’t speak in contractions” thing? It’s a dumb gimmick.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that all off my chest, let’s introduce ourselves to the new main character of QC…

This is Dora, the owner of the Coffee Shop that Faye works at. She’s a cool cat and (seemingly) supremely chill. She’s introduced as another secondary character like Steve, but will swiftly become a mainstay character and join what will become a growing ensemble cast.

Also, potential conflict is seeded when it’s revealed she’s totally crushing on Marten.

And if you doubt Faye’s assessment, let’s hear it from the woman in question herself.

Also say hello to Dora’s cat. The cat has a name, I just can’t remember it for the life of me considering the little fella joins Sara on that island eventually. But yeah, Dora DEFINITELY has the hots for Marten, sewing another potential seed for conflict later on – Marten and Faye are certainly in the “will they or won’t they?” phase, and here sits Faye’s own boss with a clear, vested interest in Marten. Will she make a move and push Faye to take action? Time will tell.

Jeph enjoys trolling his audience, and Marten is suffering because of it.

Dora goes on to establish herself in the reader’s minds by having a clear, distinct personality that bounces off Faye’s beautifully. They banter so comfortably with one another it makes it so much fun to read, which goes on to make Dora a more appealing character to the reader. The more she talks, the more you want to see her because she’s such a genuinely charismatic individual… which can further serve to establish her as a very real conflict in the potential Marten and Faye relationship. After all, what’s a greater spanner in the works of this “will they or won’t they?” relationship than a character who will gladly say “Yeah, I will” that the audience likes enough that they are completely on-board with seeing go through?

The most dangerous thing to a romcom relationship is a third wheel that a good portion of the audience prefers over the teased relationship, and that creates good drama.

(Also Sara’s name is spelled wrong but eh it’s not like she’s around to complain anyway)

…that said, Dora goes on to assure Faye that she has no intention of swiping Marten off his feet away from her when it’s clear Faye’s interested in him. Then again… the more Faye insists she’s not interested in him, the more likely it may be that Dora believes her.

True story, I found this concept so funny that in a campaign I ran a few years ago, I actually had one of the players – who was supposed to be stuck as a worker in a dreary 9-to-5 job that he’d desperately want to escape to go onto adventure – be labeled as the Office Bitch. My only regret is that I didn’t print out a real business card for his player. That either would have gotten a laugh from the table or gotten me punched.

This here is Scott, Marten’s boss. He’s a cool dude, but for reasons that will become evident later on we don’t see very much of him. At first, I thought he was going to end up being the future husband of Marten’s father – and if you haven’t read through QC yourself that sentence will probably completely catch you flat-footed – but looking it up later I found that Marten marries a man named Maurice, not Scott. I only thought they were the same person because they’re both blonde and the art style changes so much later on anyone could look like anyone else.

Actually, fun fact: I started reading QC when 2512 was the most recent comic, so before she was introduced I thought Faye and Marigold were the same person because of how drastically the art style changed and I only recognized “curvy white girl with glasses and brown hair”.

Anyway, Scott’s pretty chill and… yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. He’s a chill dude to work for, and that’s probably the only reason Marten hasn’t outright quit his job yet. The worst job in the world can be made tolerable with a good boss, and the best job in the world can be made unbearable with an awful boss.

Further evidence of the lack of contractions hurting the way Faye’s voice comes across than anything else. Seriously, is it just me or does this not sound like Faye? Like, at ALL? I’m open to being told I’m wrong, just… seriously.

Aaaand here we have Steve officially having broken up with Sara. Also, it’s a small thing but like I’ve said, I’ll give Jeph credit where it’s due – that visible wince on Marten’s face is the most expressive any of his characters have been thus far. Good work man, I’m happy to see you improving with your art!

After drinking together, Marten and Faye decide to go to an all-night diner for some drunken late-night pancakes when we get this bit of information from Faye:

That is Faye, if you can figure out which of the two Martens your fist will connect with. But yeah, the fact that Faye speaks in a southern drawl while intoxicated went from a joke to actual character – she’s legitimately from Georgia and that’s her natural way of speaking. Which may raise the question to the reader, why does she repress that voice so much? Don’t worry – they touch on it in later comics. For now though, another round of applause to Jeph for slowly and organically creating new information about his characters.

Faye is clearly not telling the whole story – the lack of eye contact being a key indicator of just that. Still, we’re getting a little bit more information on her, and the fact that she kept her wording vague leaves a lot to still explore in her future. Needless to say… it was a LOT more than just her mother being over-protective that led her to moving up north.

Marten’s just kind of accepted his lot in life by this point. Although when I was first reading through these I honestly thought this was going to be the headbutt-into-crotch moment.

Once again, if you haven’t read through QC yourself that sentence made zero sense to you. I’m kind of giggling at the thought of someone reading that and doing a double-take, actually.

Finally, we have the last comic of this batch, setting up a bit of conflict for our next batch…

Wuh-oh! Marten walked in on Faye changing! One really nice detail is that you can see the scar on Faye’s chest right there in the first panel, which means Jeph had a LOT of Faye’s backstory already planned out while he was drawing this stuff. Which just leaves me to wonder… how far back did he have this planned? When Faye first showed up in the third comic? When he had her start speaking in a southern accent while drunk? When he decided to have her stop speaking in contractions? I’d love to ask him, but I know for a fact he wouldn’t give me the time of day. Oh well, either way: He’s got shit planned out, shit that we won’t see until Comic 500 or so, and that’s always good for a long-form comic like this.

Like last time, let’s do some quick comparisons between the first comic of the batch, the comic where Jeph made a clear and active effort to change the art style, and the last comic of the batch:

It looks like Jeph found a happy medium between the style he was originally going for and the newer style he tried to incorporate, keeping the relative size and position of the characters’ facial features while rounding out everyone’s faces, making things much less angular than previously. The bodies are also beginning to get some real texture to them, looking closer to real human bodies than stick figures with a shirt.

Overall, what did I think about this batch of comics? Well aside from my complaints about Faye’s lack of using contractions and the sloppy way Jeph tried to incorporate that into the narrative, I thought it was better than the first batch! Marten and Faye are getting into a comfortable rhythm with each other, and we’re falling in-line with that rhythm ourselves. We just met a new character who’s going to be a mainstay of the series and in the few comics she’s shown up in, she’s made her presence stick with the reader. Even if I didn’t know how important Dora would become, I’d be saying I’m looking forward to seeing more of her.

You know what time it is now? That’s riiiiiight! Data compilation time!

Between comics 51-100, the following characters’ proportional “screen time” as it were are as follows:

Marten: 46/50 – 92%

Faye: 45/50 – 90%

Pintsize: 12/50 – 24%

Dora: 8/50 – 16%

Steve: 6/50 – 12%

Sara: 2/50 – 4%

Scott: 2/50 – 4%

Dora’s Cat: 1/50 – 2%

And the grand total of each character’s screentime, not including non-canon or guest comics, from most to least time shown:

Marten: 91/100 – 91%

Faye: 83/100 – 83%

Pintsize: 27/100 – 27%

Steve: 14/100 – 14%

Dora: 8/100 – 8%

Sara: 7/100 – 7%

Jim: 2/100 – 2%

Scott: 2/100 – 2%

Raven: 1/100 – 1%

Dora’s Cat: 1/100 – 1%

Yes, I’m counting Dora’s cat among the statistics. I’ll change the name when I learn what the critter’s name actually is. Also, I was reminded that when the Secret Bakery becomes a thing later on in the comic there will be another character named Jim, with this particular construction worker being called Jimbo instead. I’ll change the name properly when he’s called “Jimbo” proper in the comic, don’t worry. I’ll be doing my best to keep this list from getting confusing… it’s in as much my best interest as yours seeing as I want to keep track of everyone properly.

Tune in next week when we see the exciting conclusion of this spicy “Marten happening to walk in on Faye undressing” drama! And Dora flashing someone. See you then.

[letmerambleaboutmystories]

I’ve already got stuff to tell.

This came about from rambling to my friend about one of my worlds, Cyorthi. Pretty much directly copy and pasting the stuff I said +extra visuals and tweaking when needed.

Alright! i'm gonna start at the race. the first character I posted was a character named Vitiya Wei Southsoar and he looks like this in that picture:

(referring to this picture) 

he's a species called Flosck, which have their own language (I have TOO much written on that language and it's called Fleiin) which are close to extinction due to a war that was called "The War of Hui*," Which resulted in the breaking and near extinction of the Kingdoms of Flosck close to 500 hundred years ago or so.

There are close to dozen different species I've been drawing up in this world, which is much larger than earth. I don't have a map yet though, unfortunately.  

So nowadays, Flosck are very commonly hated and not liked despite the generation that was IN the war in the first place being dead now, and are used for all sorts of things. They aren’t always acknowledged as a species anymore, used as slaves even in some places.

They no longer have their homeland, and have lost most of their culture by this point 

How Flosck look like-- They're pretty much bird people, but during their prime look much more human. Older looks a lot like giant birds and babies are like tiny fur balls. they can also retract and shrink their wings into their back.

(because I don't want to have to draw them all the time)

Vitiya himself goes through a lot of different phases in his life but when he turns to his actual prime years, 22-26 or so?? He starts to build up a clan of sorts and bringing together members of his species to actually live and thrive together

(side note, Flosck are VERY family oriented and will often create flocks no matter their type)

(another side note, Flosck are also defined by the type of bird they are. see above, Vitiya is a Raven type mixed with something else)

More groups of Flosck start to group up like this in flocks and such, most of them categorized by their sort of magic. They have something called a blood gem that is directly correlated to their mental health.

visuals as seen below;

Some of these are falsettos*, (most of them are actually) but they do the same thing

The ones that are truly connected and you can not break them or you will go crazy, are the ones that can be connected to a bit of metal that will meld onto your chest*

the metal part will usually be around the collar bone but can be pretty much around any part of them

also another note, Flosck are gender-less, any of them can bear children, but they tend to go by certain pronouns (I. E. Vitiya refers to himself as He/Him)

So, some of them can actually have bird tails but this is also retractable, the lady in the second picture I posted was also a Flosck, her name is Oria Tiana She’s a peacock Flosck, here was her initial concept

Not too different from her recent picture, but different enough, here are the flats to the second pic for comparison

Here is the colored picture

She's the Queen of one of the NEW Flosck kingdoms, which came about in the "War of Dreval*" in which the Dreeigni (a different species) came to try and wipe out the last of the Flosck. Their excuse was that if they were to ever regroup, it would be a danger to everyone. And they were right.

Flosck are one of the most powerful species in Cyorthi, strong apart and stronger together, this was the initial reason they weren’t fully wiped

In the War of Hui, there was MULTIPLE kingdoms cooperating together against the flock.

The reason why the war started in the first place technically was because the Flosck had began to invade too many territories and were becoming increasingly corrupt in their leadership

Friend asks, “how difficult is it to break a blood gem? cause that seems like a pretty glaring weakness,”

Good question.  it depends on the person! For example, how strong is your will power? how strong is your will to live? How strong is your defenses against near psychological torture? It also helps that Blood gems can heal too. Vitiya's, for example has been shattered before.

“Ok, so the strength of the Flosck comes from their magic?”

Yep, pretty much! Their magic strength actually can also be told by their gem too, with paler more pastel/brighter colors being much more powerful

Using Vitiya as a reference again-

-his is neon pinks blues and purples,  Which is a symbol of the strength of his magic.  combined with the fact that necromancy and ravens go together very well, he's extremely powerful. Which is another reason why he ended up becoming a leader. --- In the War of Dreval, the second major war of the Flosck (technically third but the first one isn’t too important yet) The Flosck are forced to bind together again and end up being chased down and hunted by the Dreeigni side note, (Dreeigni are like these weird lizard folk that can also fly and breathe fire. Kind of like dragons but not quite. Their types are based of elements and rocks) After getting cornered into an old abandoned kingdom, the largest group of Flosck to be together in a while (flocks average 10-20 people, this group which they called Revi* where close to 9-8 flocks put together) they blockade themselves into the old throne room. It turns out! this is the main kingdom of Flosck before the War of Hui and it still contains the ghosts of the previous kings and queens. now, i don't have too many details on this part of the history, but basically, the kings and queens of the previous time had struck a deal with a twisted god(s) of "harmony",  The Trinity.

What ends up happening is that they have to pick at least temporary leaders right at that instant which end up getting?? Blessed?? Sort of by the trinity and possessed by the ghosts of the past. Then they make their final stand which ends with them literally breaking off that piece of the land with the kingdom and shoving it far into the ocean via la avatar kioshi's island way in the last airbender

Except, these leaders end up having to be permanent since well, The trinity is kind of an asshole and pretty much permanently "upgraded* these people.

By now, they have settled and have begun rebuilding their kingdom and the chosen kings and queens choose their Royal Magister/Mage and General which end up also getting "blessed" by the trinity. The Trinity are supposed to be implied to be....strange. It's not quite clear whether it's a benevolent or malevolent deity.

Thus starts the Court of Kings comics that I am working on!

Last note,  they also are slowly regathering the original kingdoms and putting them in the ocean

i only have the names of two of these kingdoms but the names are;

Dreilaifa, the kingdom of sacrifice and rebirth and Muakaaoda, the kingdom of transformation and creation.

---

Hui* - Hui was the name of the king that started the war in the name of peace and his Deity.

falsettos* - A Falsetto is well, already a term irl but also used to describe a false gem that mimics the real blood gem. When these are broken, they let out an unnaturally high pitched sound.

are the ones that can be connected to a bit of metal that will meld onto your chest* - These are not man made and are actually organic, Flosck bodyies produce certain amounts of metal for currently unknown reasons.

Dreval* - The name of the prophet that believed Floscks would destroy their kingdom.

Revi* - A larger group of Flosck, around 100-300.

[whatismeta-blog]

To the Anon, who Asked the Asks

1) what was your first delusion

Honestly, I think I might still be working through it. But like it might not be, so like...

Welcome welocome, the answers get better I swear

2) have you ever had your choice taken away by the psychiatric system

: Not really, I never really spent to much time in any systems due to paranoia of the system, probably because of the stigma around it and pop culture fueling a strong sense of danger in it, and just my lack of any real wealth in my past and present

3) how do you cope with your hallucinations

: Painfully ignoring them in almost everyway I can, which, has often lead to me ignoring something happening around me, or directed at me cause I thought It wasn't real. Other than that I find physical grounding, and specifically martial arts helps make my overall disorder more positive in tone

4) are you professionally diagnosed with a psychotic disorder

: I was professionally diagnosed back when's was about 14 or 15, after a few sessions the doctor said I probably had schizophrenia and prescribed me some anti psychotics

5) how often do you shower

: About once (1) or twice (2) a week honestly, I need to take more. But I've been getting better

6) to what extent are you "out" as psychotic

: I'm about half way, most of my old friends and family have no knowledge, but my current living people all know, my boyfriend knows, and a couple people the I've had some long nights with know, and my entire blog

7) have you ever had a funny or cute hallucination

8) how old were you when you were first diagnosed (or figured it out yourself)

:when my sister went to North star when I was in like 3rd grade, and my mum tried to explain it to me why my sister was inpatient, I specifically remember that imentioned i thought something might be wrong with me too, but since I was outwardly disruptive, just "quiet" my mum found no need

9) how old were you when you first started having symptoms

So issues with Speech is a commonly overlooked symptom of schizophrenia, as a in my case I feel more cognitive issue, and I think that my early childhood and that I had a speech therapist cause of my young selective autism, and just inability to speak right might've been my first symptoms

10) do you reclaim any words associated with your disorder

: I honestly don't really think I do, I want to though -> Paranoid, I use a lot though, caus like Fuck am.I paranoid, and psychotic, but I use that more clinically,

11) do you feel emotions intensely or hardly at all

: Harldy at all, I just, I may only be 22, but I'm just really tired and old, but if an emotion can start shining through strongly it kind of starts to engulf me, especially at night

12) do you have a hard time making yourself understood

: so much, it's lessened some over the years, but so many times after trying to get words out, (I tend to speak fast and with a sometimes interesting vocabulary) and I'm just still really bad at using English to express specifically emptions, which only makes me feel worse cause wow have I fucked things up trying to say something and someoneisunderstanding me

13) which symptoms of your disorder impair you the most

: negative symptoms, that cause me to just be very distant as a person mentally and presently, and I think overall paranoia, or even sometimes like, meta-paranoid <-

14) do you usually have some insight when you're actively psychotic

:When I'm hallucinating, I'd say I generally do, but when I am delusional, I usually don't, but I kinda always think that there is a chance I'm being psychotic so I try and stay on my toes. If ya know what's mean

15) is there a situation you can laugh at which was a scary time

16) do you think your psychosis is related to trauma

: it possibly could be, but I don't believe that if I didn't have trauma that I wouldn't still be psychotic

17) do you have any co-morbid disorders

:probably, I try not to worry to much about what's all wrong. I just try and make it all work together

18) what is you're exact diagnosis if you have one

Do to the people who diagnosed me as schizophrenic loosing their thing. Due to.insurance purposes, I have no diagnosis on file. Last time I went in a couple years back to a new doctor they said I should get evaluated, but like, I could barely afford what I had already been there for

19) when did you start think you might be psychotic

Before I can remember

20) is there a history of psychosis in your family

:I've don't know to much of my family or their histories, but my mum is paranoid and has anxiety. And my older sister is autism spectrum, and so mental health is in the family

21) do you have inappropriate emotions or reactions

Less inappropriate as in lewd, but more of, absent, or like, when I first was told someone close to me (human) died, I didn't ever cry once for them, I don't think I have to this day, not to say I wouldn't cry for everybody close to me, but like yeah, and like when answering personal questions I think I react a lot more deflectively. Or like, hell, my partner told me they loved me for the first time, and though I honestly wanted to say it back, I just didn't, I honestly don't remember what I said. And Tbh still kinda feel shitty about that interaction..

22)do you relate to any characters bc they might have a psychotic disorder

Fucking,

River tam from firefly, (like yeah, she has like actual powers and shit, but Damn, it kinda affects her similarly)

23) do you have a song you listen to when.you need to calm down

Lullaby for a stormy night, ever-changing by rise against

24) do you have a song you relate to psychosis

:first one I could think of is "World in a bottle" by Anavae

25) what traits do you want to see in a canonically psychotic character

Negative symptoms, dissociation, And a few happy Fucking stories for us please

26) do you have a recurring delusion or hallucination

:oh boy do I, I'm honestly still coming to terms with a long time life held delusion, and that's a fun thing to do without therapy let me tell you, here do come Nov. 17

27) would you get rid of your psychotic disorder if you.could)

: if, it could be a little more manageable that would be nice, but, honestly, not being psychotic ever again.. now that sounds kinda scary too

28) do you take anti-psychotic, why?

:no prescription grade, but I do my best to self medicate, if you can, don't follow my example

29) how is your memory

:well I've been going back and forth writing the numbers and questions now, and I read the ask, switched form my photos to the tumble app, and then forgot, so. Bonus fact, this is the first ask i answered in this line

30) what how through your head when you hear "cute but psycho"

Honestly I see hear the Word psycho and almost every time I get upset, but like unless they're psychotic, and okay with you referring to them as such. It just makes me upset

31) do you experience time distortion

According to general laws of physics time dilates, so yeah I do what of it?

Serious answer though, yeah,

Like say my first 4 month into being in my current city, I had a mental fall back, and went back home for a 2 maybe three months,

That first fronts in this city, was actually 4 days, and part of my waking routine is checking the date and time to make sure that I am in the know on what year and day it's supposed to be

[shintowitch]

FORGOTTEN OBJECTS

TSUKUMOGAMI

Tsukumogami are a relatively well-known type of yokai (unearthly creature/“monster”) from Japanese folklore which I would define loosely as “old/forgotten object spirits.” It was once commonly believed that all things have an inner spirit, and these tend to become more powerful with age. Superstition has it that tools, utensils, instruments and other man-made items that have reached 99 or 100 years of age become powerful enough to become sentient and self-aware, and gain supernatural abilities.

Through being forgotten, abandoned, broken, replaced, or otherwise treated poorly, angry and vengeful tsukumogami can manifest. It has also been said they can manifest if an object has witnessed or been in the vicinity of a terrible crime or great spiritual impurity. Two of the most commonly depicted tsukumogami in Japanese pop culture are umbrellas and paper lanterns – not surprising given how often and easily they break.

Most tsukumogami are relatively harmless, and there are even folk tales of some friendly tsukumogami enjoying playing games with children. Others, however, can be disruptive and even dangerous and bring about a great deal of trouble. It all depends on how they were treated. The longer these objects are left untended, the more negativity can build up around them.

PREVENTING NEGATIVITY

🏮 The easiest preventative measures are not glamorous witchery, but they are important. Repair, recycle, repurpose and regift rather than thoughtlessly throw items away or leave to rot. This has the added bonus of being environmentally friendly and sticking it to the hell-pigs running this bloated consumerist culture of ours.

🏮 Be mindful of where every component of everything you own comes from, and grateful for what they do for you. Give thanks and blessings to the objects you use day by day. Those who give offerings to and maintain a relationship with their house spirit/s – you may have this covered.

🏮 When something you own has irreparably run out the course of its life and must be disposed of, be sure to show appreciation in whatever way makes sense to you. There are still jinja ceremonies held in Japan today to pacify the spirits of forgotten or broken objects such as Hari-Kuyo, the Festival of Broken Needles.

🏮 Dispose of items responsibly – take responsibility for your belongings and your actions! If you toss a refrigerator into a river to save yourself some trouble, frankly, you might just deserve to get a bit haunted. 

MANIFESTATIONS

🏮 In visual mediums, tsukumogami have historically been depicted as looking similar to the object itself but becoming monstrous, sprouting eyes or mouths or limbs or other human/animal features. This could be symbolic of the items “coming to life,” of course, but then who knows what your things get up to when you’re not looking? (Toy Story: a cautionary tale of demonic possession?)

🏮 A rotting smell that comes and goes, a creaking or jangling or scraping of rusty spokes, flashes of imagery, or perhaps just a sense that touches on the back of your subconscious that speaks of corrosion and decay. Everyone’s intuition is different, but almost anyone can pick up on these things if they pay attention.

🏮 The actions of malevolent tsukumogami in folklore run the gamut from simple mischief (hiding and moving things, minor illusions) to iller omens (nightmares, attracting ill fortune), and in extreme cases can get into the dangerous.

🏮 Even small and seemingly unimportant objects can become powerful tsukumogami under the right circumstances. It is not the object itself but the spirit that is the factor in this, especially in terms of age and negative experience. Don’t let expectations misguide you.

🏮 It is a widely held belief that electronic devices cannot become tsukumogami as the electrical energy drives spirits away. However, depictions are becoming more common (perhaps the idea is that spirits are adapting), and once an item is broken and no longer powered by electricity, it likely isn’t protected that way any more.

MAKING AMENDS

If you believe a tsukumogami is causing problems and you wanna witchcraft your way out of it, logically, the easiest starting point is to find out which object it has manifested from. Older objects are much more likely to manifest in ways that are troublesome, being more powerful, but there are other factors that can also bring about a manifestation. Discern and study. Find the source of the issue. And then?

Remember what’s forgotten. Find what’s lost. Fix what’s broken. This is all a witch’s work, or part of it. What, you were hoping for a lightning-throwing demon fight rather than what sounds suspiciously like household chores? If you can’t get to grips with this part of the work, you’re not ready for spirit work. That’s right. I went full Mentor.

Sometimes, though, it’s more difficult to figure out exactly what the spirit wants or needs. Discernment skills and common sense are your best friends here, as is any means to communicate with spirits that you may have. I mean, it could simply tell you what it wants and you could strike up a deal to end the trouble there and then. Perhaps you’ll learn something interesting from it. Don’t doubt the advice a lowly watering can might give you…

If the tsukumogami is angry and not in the mood to resolve things for whatever reason, typically the next step is to try and appease it. This can be done through ritual, through remembrance and prayer, through offerings – there is no one-size-fits-all approach. By all accounts, a bit of improvising/adapting to account for the foibles of each spirit is always involved, and it will depend on you and your practise too.

Banishment is the last resort, to be used only if the spirit seems inconsolable or is too powerful for you to walk back. Do not just drop kick the affected object into the nearest trash compactor – you are either passing on a bigger and angrier problem to someone else or setting yourself up for some Bad Vibes, a stain upon your soul, a hex upon your house! Holding a “funeral” bound by some spellcraft is a nice, gentle way of laying an object and its spirit to rest, and the jinja ceremonies I mentioned before are typically framed like funerals.

Less nice and less gentle means may be necessary sometimes, but forcibly driving a spirit out of a “possessed” object is something I won’t go into it here. That’s not a game… if sources are to be believed. Just fix your shit!

REMEMBRANCE

Some lost or forgotten objects are worth finding, keeping and cherishing. Some can find new life with a new owner, or be broken down and used for parts for something new. Others need laying to rest. From a bicycle rusting away in a ditch to a hand-me-down with an uncertain history mouldering in one’s attic, the man-made things that surround us are as part of this world as the natural and they are our responsibility. You are beholden to the tools that improve your life – we are all beholden to our shared environment.

These items came from nature one way or another, as everything does, but they were shaped anew by humans. Alchemy! Why wouldn’t they bring a spark of their soul along? Some negative tsukumogami can be dangerous, but it is often the neglect, carelessness or arrogance of humans that create the “worst” tsukumogami in the first place.

Our planet is reaching critical mass with the amount of unnecessary products being created and churned through production lines, corporations, consumers and then into landfill sites. Tsukumogami have long since been regarded as monsters and demons in folk tales and superstition, but perhaps in a way we need them now more than ever…

(Disclaimer: like all folklore, there are many variations and interpretations and ideas surrounding these stories and occurrences. I’m just writing down some of my own research, experience and UPG with a touch of the lessons I personally take away from these folk tales. Peace!)

[sgreffenius]

Free speech and thought control

Why would anyone think that restrictions on speech, regulation of gatekeepers, extreme disapproval of individuals whose speech you do not like will work. Why do you suppose one would regard these as solutions to problems we perceive in the public square?

What are those problems? I can think of half a dozen categories constantly on the tongues of people who profess concern:

Hate speech, and hateful or offensive speech

Conspiracy theories

Deceptive statements, sometimes called spin

Disinformation

Misinformation

Out and out lies

Unsubstantiated claims, wherever they arise

Gossip

I would like to discuss these categories more - that is, give examples of speech that might fall into one or another category - but not tonight. I expect you can think of examples and categories of your own, based on hard experience and observation. These eight get us started.

The key point for analysis stays with us: why would remedies proposed make a difference? We mention three broad remedies in the first sentence: censorship, channel regulation, and ostracism. All of these appear based on the idea that the speech supply is like the water supply: if you tend to its purity, you can make it safer. Don’t let sewage into your drinking water, and you can prevent outbreaks of typhus or cholera. Similarly, if we protect ourselves from bad speech, we will be safe, and happy.

I have to ask again, who actually believes nonsense like that? Does anyone think that we, as human beings, will change the way we communicate because bands of social improvers believe they have found a better way? The improvers think, “Well, if we control what people say, we can also control what they think. If we get rid of these destructive falsehoods, malicious thoughts, and base aggression, we can make people better, and our whole community happier. No one need feel left out again, for we will not permit speech that leads to division.”

I hardly need to point out the fatuity of this argument but someone has to do it. We do not see anyone in Congress, in the academy, in the media, in business, in government, or even in the church stand up to say the obvious: “You cannot tidy up human speech, or human interactions based on speech. No attempt to do so has ever worked. Such attempts always create new problems, explosive ones far worse than the difficulties in front of us.”

If you want to ruin a society, set upon people whose speech you do not like. No matter what your motive, no matter how pure or laudable your intentions might seem, you will find you have made a grave mistake. You can meddle in other people’s affairs a fair amount, without consequences so terrible. Your targets may not notice your interference, they may tolerate it, they may work around it, they might find a way to turn you back. That’s how we deal with nuisances.

These possibilities do not exist when you enter into the area of thought control. When you try to do that, people recognize a direct threat. Toleration and workarounds do not offer protection. The people you want to control must resist. If they do not, they cease to be human. They will find a way to defeat your efforts, no matter the cost to you or them. What seems a path to utopia and social equity for speech enforcers raises a hellish prospect of slavery for subjects - those subject to thought control.

That control emanates from enforcers who regard their targets as sub-human to begin with. If that seems an overdrawn charge, consider these two windows into the way enforcers think: erasure and toxicity. The two do go together.

Erasure finds its expression in ostracism, cancellation, bullying, banning of books, Twitter mobs, actual mobs, and a mode of expression that never listens. It finds further expression in destruction of individuals, families, property, statues, norms of civility, traditions of forgiveness, and every hope that we can make something better for ourselves. Erasure involves more than invisibility. It requires amnesia as well.

Toxicity is a little harder to see, but after you recognize the role it plays in the woke social critique, you see why the concept is significant. Over and over, you hear the enforcers say: “He’s toxic.” “Men are toxic.” “He creates a toxic work environment.” The word is standard issue in the woke vocabulary. Commonly it refers to white males, toxic by definition because they share in white privilege. White privilege comes in handy when you want to say white supremacy, but take a bit of the edge off.

What does toxic actually mean? It means poison. We kill rats and other vermin with poison, don’t we? Well if the white male who runs our workplace cannot see what a threat he is to our well-being, we will show him. We will call a struggle session, where he will reform and beg mock forgiveness, or have his livelihood destroyed at the hands of a polite but firm mob. Call it strength of numbers and solidarity, as well as ideology that serves to justify every thought you have. After you take a few people down, toxic white men do not question you again.

Momentary redemption, however, does not mean salvation. Once the enforcers tag you as an enemy, you can expect another visit at some point down the line. Call it the Washington effect. “If we can destroy statues of Robert E. Lee with impunity, why not Washington and Lincoln? They are all problematic. They all deserve to be erased.” They all pollute our water supply with their poison.

Do not regard the passion for thought control as a passing phase of our long-running culture war. These ideas and practices incubated on our campuses for decades. Few thought in the 1980s that these plagues would jump the natural barriers of their academic hothouses, but in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, these deadly constellations of coercive thought have done exactly that.

You almost feel that campus radicals and their heirs decided they would place the mean, intolerant tactics of George Wallace at the service of Martin Luther King’s ideals. Wallace softened his segregationist views as he grew older. King died young at age thirty-nine. Young and old, current enforcers will not relent during our lifetimes, unless some counter-force hands them a decisive defeat. At the moment, they have the field, they have mobilized their soldiers, they have weapons they need, and they have sympathies of many.

Like Napoleon’s armies, they may roll from victory to victory against discouraged opponents. Discouraged or not, people who value their independence must battle for their humanity. Enforcers conceive that their safety depends on making certain kinds of speech disappear. Freedom loving people conceive that their identity and their future depend on unrestricted thought. I wish I could say with confidence that the latter will eventually prevail. They will prevail, but human history suggests that eventually could last a long time.

[babymilkaction]

Is Danone a good model to follow? IBFAN questions Dr Mark Carney

The 2020 Reith Lectures, aired on BBC Radio 4 in December, were inspiring and enlightening on many levels. However we were surprised to hear Dr Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Change and Finance, praising Danone as an example of an ethical company that “‘has totally re-oriented itself and shifted along that continuum towards re-balancing purpose and profit.”

We felt the praise was unjustified and that we should write to him to let him know why.

IBFAN letter to Dr Carney 

Dr Mark Carney

United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance

The UK Prime Minister’s Finance Advisor for COP26

Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS)

1 Victoria Street, Westminster, London SW1H 0ET

20th January 2021

  Reith Lecture 2020 ‘How We Get What We Value.’   Is Danone really a good model to follow?

  Dear Dr Carney

We are writing on behalf of the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), the 40-year old global network of 270 citizens’ groups who work in over 160 countries to protect breastfeeding and young child health through the ending of harmful marketing.[i]

  We listened to your 2020 Reith Lectures and found them inspiring and enlightening. Thank you so much for focusing your talents and energies on Climate Change. However, in the discussion after Lecture 1 we were surprised to hear you cite Danone as an example of an ethical company that “‘has totally re-oriented itself and shifted along that continuum towards rebalancing purpose and profit.”

  We believe this praise to be unjustified and would like to explain why.

  IBFAN has monitored company activity and assisted governments in bringing in regulations before and since the 1981 World Health Assembly adopted the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. 19 WHA Resolutions have been adopted that clarify and strengthen ambiguous points and address emerging health problems. These resolutions are integral to the Code, have the same legal standing and should be read with it.[ii]  ‘The Code’ is a minimum standard for all countries and is a regulation in a class of its own under human rights law.  States have an obligation to implement it and companies have obligations to comply with it.[iii]

Legal status aside, leading mother and child health experts are agreed that the Code is a critically important safeguard for infant and young child health and survival. It does not prohibit the availability or use of breastmilk substitutes, but protects the rights of all parents and carers to make fully informed decisions, free from commercial influences.

Despite being a late entrant to the baby food market, Danone is now the world’s second largest manufacturer, a status it has achieved through persistent flouting of the Code. Danone leads the baby food industry in its misinterpretation of the Code that ignores most of the WHA Resolutions and its undermining of governments attempts to regulate in the public interest. To date IBFAN’s independent monitoring has been unable to find any sign that Danone is changing its marketing strategy for its ‘Early Life Nutrition’ range (which forms 23% of its business).[iv] Its policy continues to be substantially weaker than the Code in terms of scope, reach, conflicts of interest, promotional claims, donations, gifts and sponsorship. Each weakness undermining sound infant feeding practices and support and risking child health and survival.[v]

Danone’s undermining of breastfeeding, in itself an ecological act, has a negative impact on Green House Gases (GHG), water conservation; bio-diversity, deforestation, waste and pollution.

Below we cite just four concrete examples:

Danone has exploited the Covid-19 pandemic, including the publication of a misleading YouTube ‘advice’ Channel for Indian mothers. This ‘advice channel’ violates the Indian law as well as WHO and UNICEF’s advice on COVID-19 and Conflicts of Interest.[vi],[vii]  Danone also sponsors conferences and seminars for health workers in India, violating labelling norms and giving incentives to increase sales.

Danone uses social media in In South-East Asia to promote products to mothers and then exploits them to create online marketing material.[viii]

Danone attempts to weaken CodexGlobal Trading Standards Danone knows that Codex standards have a long lasting influence on national legislation and public health, yet it ignores the concerns of WHO, UNICEF, many governments and IBFAN about the health implications of its globally traded sweetened and ultra-processed foods (UPFs) for older babies. These unnecessary products are not covered by Danone’s policy and are deceptively branded to resemble infant formula for newborns (products needed for babies who are not breastfed).[ix],[x]  UPFs also harm the environment as the links below show. As Dr Julie Smith, of the Australian National University, found: “The most alarming finding in our latest research is a very large proportion of greenhouse gas emission impact is associated with the so-called growing up milks or toddler formula … In China, nearly half of the sales of milk formula is toddler formula.” [xi]

Danone bases its claims to be Code-compliant on compromised assessments such as BCorporation Certification, including its bottled water and Early Life Nutrition businesses in China, Italy and other countries.[xii] Danone uses BCorps and the Access to Nutrition Index, Danone presents itself as a trustworthy partner in nutrition – a tactic commonly used by many corporations.[xiii]

We would be happy to discuss with you or provide further information if you believe we are mistaken in our assessment. Our concern is only to ensure that information on these matters is fair and correct.

With many thanks for taking the trouble to read this letter and hoping you will take our concerns into account in your important task ahead.

Patti Rundall and Dr JP Dadhich on behalf of IBFAN’s Global Council

CC:

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General, WHO,

Henrietta Fore, Executive Director, UNICEF

General Qu Dongyu, Director General, FAO

  [i] 2020 WHO/UNICEF/IBFAN report on the Code implementation. To date 70% of countries have some legislation based on the Code

[ii]  19 WHA Resolutions have been adopted since 1981. Eight resolutions have called for conflicts of interest safeguards..

[iii] UN CRC General Comment no. 15 and 16 (2013) and UN ECOSOC General Comment no. 24 (2017) in combination with International Court of Justice Judgement of 30 November 2010 concerning Ahmadou Sadio Diallo (Republic of Guinea v. Democratic Republic of Congo). Also see Extraterritorial Obligations and the Code_Feb 2018 Discussion paper, February 2018. The Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. Independent Review Panel of the UN

Secretary-General’s Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health (2016-2030) recommends developing a global human rights framework to address harmful marketing of foods for and to children

Shubber, S.: The WHO International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes: History and Analysis. Pinter & Martin Ltd. 2011.

[iv] Danone Home Page Danone’s Commitments (accessed January 2021) show the limited nature of its policy.”

[v] Breaking the Rules Stretching the Rules (BTR) IBFAN/ICDC 2017 see Danone  Profile pages 24-29 BTR 2017

[vi] Marketing of breastmilk substitutes during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lancet, 8.10.20 India’s efforts to promote breastfeeding are threatened by covid-19, as misguided fears of infection see newborns separated from mothers and formula milk promoted” BMJ 2020;370:m3316 

[vii] How companies are exploiting COVID19. Some visual examples

[viii] The baby brands turning Indonesian Instagram into free formula ads, R.Furneaux, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 30.7.20.

[ix] Exporting countries put trade before the health of the planet and children, IBFAN Press Release, 4.12.2019, Trade body tackles misleading labelling of look-alike milks. IBFAN Press Release Dec, 2018,  French and US Trade delegations put child health at risk, Dec 2017

[x] Articles and reports relating to Ultra-processed foods   Marketing and Conflicts of Interest in Science of UPFs   Policy responses to ultra-processed foods in global context UPFs, Background, concepts,and scientific evidence How to identify and reduce consumption of UPFs

 [xi] Articles and reports relating to environmental impact of milk formulas:

Calls to curb infant formula’s carbon footprint, December 4, 2019,   Carbon Footprint Due to Milk Formula. A study from selected countries of the Asia Pacific Region  IBFAN BPNI  Greenfeeding Report cards on 10 Asian countries. A commentary on the carbon footprint of milk formula: harms to planetary health and policy implications, Smith, J.P. Int Breastfeed J 14, 49 (2019).

[xii] BCorps assessment of Danone Early Life Nutrition in China..”The Chinese infant nutrition market holds great growth potential for Danone”. The Access to Nutrition Index (ATNI) claims to be ‘independent from the companies it assesses.’  However ATNI closely collaborates with these companies on the methodology and presentation of its results. Such collaboration is in direct conflict with WHA Resolution 49.15 that calls for monitoring to be “…carried out in a transparent, independent manner, free from commercial influence.” ATNI criteria is also weak in key areas, especially on conflicts of interest. Danone -highlighting its top BMS company status  Danone’s use of ATNI   Danone UK engaging HSG to launch a consumer care line  

[xiii] Interference in public health policy: examples of how the baby food industry uses tobacco industry tactics. World Nutrition 2017

Is Danone a good model to follow? IBFAN questions Dr Mark Carney was originally published on Baby Milk Action

[femersonfmp]

Research

Instead of being categorised by genre, contemporary theatre is defined by the time at which it was written and first performed, that being from the mid-20th century to the present (anything before that but not before the late 19th century is considered a 'modernist' play). This is because contemporary theatre covers all genres, but with a different approach to them to modernist and older playwrights. An approach that causes contemporary theatre to be incredibly distinct.

One way in which this contemporary approach manifests itself is in the form of Postmodernist theatre. While classic realism, a more modernist technique popularised in Russia and centred around making a play as Stanislavskian as possible, was popular among early contemporary playwrights, a lot of contemporary plays use Postmodernism or American Realism, a technique centred around the 'American Dream' of a stable, well-paying 9-to-5 job, a nuclear family and a large house in the suburbs, or a mixture of the two, depending on where the play was written. Postmodernism, although overlapping the modern and contemporary periods of drama, is far more prevalent in the contemporary period now that Russian influence isn't as frequent anymore. 'Postmodernism' refers to the revolutionary philosophical movement that draws upon the thoughts that are often present in our intellectual lives (examples including philosophy, literature, art and creativity), but is rooted in human history, therefore is difficult to give an exact definition. This movement manifests itself in theatre through practitioners such as Brecht and Artaud, who both take a far more abstract and Avant-Garde approach to their style of theatre as compared to practitioners popular during the modernist era like Strasberg or Grotowski.

Another politically affected way in which contemporary theatre can be recognised is a significant increase in diversity from the modernist theatre. This comes with the increase in migration from former European colonies - a lot of which have become almost destitute after having their resources stolen as a result of colonisation - in the mid-20th century, more commonly known as the 'Windrush' in the UK. This influx of mass migration left a great impact on the cultural landscape across Europe and the theatrical element of that was no exception. Despite systematic reprisals, immigrant theatre-makers were soon making a huge impact on the theatrical scene, creating and performing plays that would be relatable to an audience of newly migrated people. A play that's an excellent example of this is Barber Shop Chronicles written by Iuna Ellams which toured many UK cities in 2019. It follows a selection of different barbershops in several different cities including Peckham, Johannesburg, Lagos, Accra and more. All of these barber's shops are connected in the play's overall plotline. Beyond the obvious, Barber Shop Chronicles is a very distinctly contemporary play from its use of theatre in the round to the choreography, typical of the cultures of the countries in which each barbershop is set, to the minimal staging. 

However, the play we're performing isn't as contemporary as The Barber Shop Chronicles and other similar plays. One Man Two Governors is a loose translation and adaptation of Corlo Goldoni's play 'The Servant of Two Masters', originally published in 1746. The Servant of Two Masters is a play sticks strictly to the style of Commedia Dell'arte and its distinct conventions, although the setting and time has changed in this adaptation, One Man Two Governors kept true to this. Commedia Dell'arte is a satirical and slapstick Italian theatrical form that was at its most popular between the 16th and 18th centuries. This was then naturalised when the style was introduced in the UK and became what we now know as the pantomime and the 'Punch-and-Judy Show', two staple theatrical styles in the UK. Before that, however, Commedia Dell'arte was defined by its improvisation around a set framework of archetypal characters and stock situations and plots, which were often borrowed from the literary tradition 'Commedia erudita'. 

Although the true origins of Commedia Dell'arte aren't known for sure, theories suggest that its inspiration came from classical and preclassical mime and farce pieces. However, what is considered to be true is that Commedia Dell'arte arose from regional dialect farces in Italy dating back to the Middle Ages. Professional companies, consisting of unorganised street performers, acrobats, strolling players and educated travellers, took the style of these plays and made them more comprehensible and entertaining to the general Italian public by translating the plays from their original dialect, which was hard for a majority of the Italian population to understand, and experimenting with popular forms. These performances included a plethora of comedic action and slapstick, exaggeration both in almost every element of the play and archetypal characters. All of which was done with little scenery, props or costume, to leave as much room for improvisation as possible, which is what ended up defining this style. Some of the most famous Italian Commedia Dell'arte groups of the time are the Gelosi, who performed between 1568 and 1604 and were the most famous early group; the Comici Confidènti, active from 1574 to 1621; the Accesi and a second Confidènti group active in the 17th century. There were even reports of Commedia Dell'arte groups in other European countries, particularly France after the king summoned the Gelosi to Blois in 1577 and later Paris. The French adored Italian theatre and soon enough, French Commedia Dell'arte groups were performing their adaptations with added original French characters. This continued until Louis XIV outlawed Italian theatrical tropes in 1697.

In classic Commedia Dell'arte performances, each actor would play a specific archetype (0therwise known as 'masks' since each character was performed with a mask, sans the lovers in the second act) that they specialised in. This character would be the only character they would be cast as, so that they can perform to the highest comedic potential, knowing exactly how to play that archetype to perfection. These archetypes are:

The Arlecchino, more commonly known as the Harlequin: the most famous of the Commedia Dell'arte archetypes, Arlecchino is a servant (or Zanni) who is equal parts dexterous and idiotic. This character will end up accidentally getting involved in many elaborate plots, not out of mal intent rather than pure stupidity and scatterbrainedness. In original Commedia Dell'arte, this character could be identified by his costume that consisted of a skin-tight bodysuit covered in brightly multi-coloured patches. In One Man Two Governors, the character Francis Henshall is the Arlecchino.

The Innamorati are the lovers of the production, hence why they wouldn't wear masks, letting their faces be free. They would wear exaggerated makeup and the latest fashions. Their exaggerated affections for one another is what makes their characters so comedic. In most Commedia Dell'arte, the Innamorati have to overcome a significant obstacle to be able to be with one another, usually their parents' disapproval. In our play, Alan and Pauline, who are the Innamorati, have to deal with Roscoe's 'rising from the dead' to marry each other.

The Capitano: this character is a coward who puts on a confident and brash facade to hide that fact. Often recognisable by his puffed chest and booming voice, the Capitano will promise great things, yet find excuses not to act upon them. The humour of his character comes from other characters showing him up. Stanley Stubbers and Alan are the characters in our play that fit this description best, in my opinion.

The Pulcinella: a parody of the poor and oppressed workers of the day and he's deceitful because he has nothing to lose. Pulcinella is a hunchback with a hooked nose and a potbelly. The character who best fits this description is Charlie, although his physical appearance doesn't match that of Pulcinella, he does lead Rachel (or 'Roscoe') into believing he can deliver her the money she needs when he doesn't even have it.

The Coviello: Coviello is Pulcinella’s lower-class double. He is a grimacing and playful servant with flushed cheeks and a nose the length of his face. The only character from One Man Two Governors that I think could fit this archetype is Lloyd.

The Pantalone: an incredibly affluent retired merchant whose disoriented brain is controlled by lust. He can be recognised by his bathrobe-like coat paired with a tight red vest and comfortable slippers, he also sports a scraggly and unkempt beard. He usually ends up as a puppet to everyone, despite being the superior of his household. There aren't any characters in One Man that particularly fit this archetype though.

The Dottore: Pantalone's friend and confidant, he's pretentious and pompous about his intelligence wearing an academic's robe around. However, in his learning, he's about as fruitless as you can get. He's known to blurt out inappropriate and poorly pronounced Latin phrases that he doesn't have a complete grasp on the meaning of, something that the One Man character, Harry Dangle tends to do, although he isn't as unsuccessful as Dottore.