#when the media has character with unending devotion to true friends >>>

[astro2astro]

JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, SO I CAN FIGHT FOR IT !

[allgirlsareprincesses]

Why I need Reylo to happen and Ben Solo to live in TROS:

I have two stories to tell that will hopefully explain why I’m not neutral about the ending of The Rise of Skywalker. I mean, I’d love to temper my expectations and say that I’ll be happy no matter how it ends, but that’s not true because this story has become intensely personal for me.

Most Reylos and even many members of the general audience agree that the Sequel Trilogy is being told from a feminine perspective. Maybe you hate it and can’t stop whinging about Kathleen Kennedy’s “man-hating agenda” *eyeroll* or maybe your reaction is more F*CKING FINALLY, but either way, the centering of a female protagonist and the fact that Leia is the only surviving member of the OT trio going into TROS clearly demonstrate that it is their hopes and dreams that are driving the story. We have to ask ourselves, what does Rey want, and will she get it? What does Leia want, and will she get it?

**Major trigger warnings for abandonment, loss of parents, terminal illness, suicide mention, and loss of child. Please take care of yourself and skip this post if need be.**

Rey, we know, is an abandoned child. Left alone on a barren planet to pick through the bones of the fallen Empire, she had to fend for herself when she was at her most vulnerable, with no one to comfort her and only the delusional belief that her family would return for her to keep her going despite the intense loneliness. She did find friends in BB-8, Finn, and Han, but Han was quickly snatched away and she left poor Finn in a coma to go find Luke Skywalker. Her story was clearly unfinished by the end of The Force Awakens, her loneliness unassuaged and her growth merely beginning. If friendship were truly all she needed to be whole, then her story would have been over then.

I have a friend, whom let’s call E, an only child whose mother died of cancer when she was a teenager. Now that she is in her 30s, E’s father just passed away as well. She now finds herself orphaned, except everyone treats her like it’s not as big a deal because she’s an adult. But she has no partner, no children, no siblings, not even a roommate, and even her cat has recently passed away. The remaining family she does have is distant and seems mostly to judge her or to want her to conform to their idea of who she should be, how she should grieve, etc. E does have a few good friends, but they are all married and/or have children and this is a constant and painful reminder to E that she does NOT have a family like this. She suffers daily, furious that people act like she should be content with just friends. She tries to explain over and over that there is nothing that compares to a partner, someone with whom she could share the deepest physical and spiritual intimacy, who would choose her and be devoted to her, and into whom she could pour all of the love she has to give. She tries further to explain that even if she puts her friends first, they can’t put HER first because she is not their spouse nor their children; there is no one on earth for whom SHE comes first. E is on medication for depression and anxiety, and has had to back out of her friends’ weddings when they triggered a panic attack. As her friend, I feel powerless to help her in her bottomless loneliness, because I know I can’t give her the one thing she needs, which is the companionship of a romantic partner.

This is Rey. Scarred by the loss of her family and a lifetime without intimate companionship, she cannot be healed by friendship alone when those friends will still inevitably have families who come first. She can’t find intimacy with people who don’t relate to her infinite loneliness and feelings of worthlessness. She shouldn’t HAVE to hold parts of herself back, to give her heart but not her body, or her powers but not her soul. Rey, as the hero of the story, deserves to have what she wants most, and what she wants is a family. As an orphaned adult, the only way she will have a family is to find a soulmate, someone who will be bound to her in every way, who can give her children and hope for the future. Not every woman wants this, but many do and Rey certainly does. Rey’s journey constantly centers around LIFE and CONNECTION: she is overwhelmed by the verdant green of Takodana, and surrounded always by life-giving, feminine water. She has connections to every person she meets, but especially to Ben Solo, whom she can touch even across space and time, PHYSICALLY touch because that has meaning, more than simply seeing one another. As a character, Rey is written to experience the fullness of life with an intimate romantic partner, and there is only one person in the story who is her equal. Reylo has to happen for Rey’s journey to reach a satisfying conclusion, and for Star Wars to remain true to its message of hope.

Then there is Leia. Throughout the entire saga, she is the symbol of hope. When Padme lies dying, her children become her hope for the future. Years later, Leia carries the hope of the Rebellion as she escapes Scarif with the Death Star plans. She brings hope to her brother Luke. Her hope helps her rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt, and then again help the Rebellion to victory on Endor. Her hope helps build the new Republic, found the Resistance, search for Luke, beg Han to reach their son, and continue leading the Resistance even when they are beaten and dwindling.

And through it all, Leia has suffered loss after loss.... after loss. Her parents, childhood friends, home, everything and everyone she ever knew or loved.... were snuffed out in an instant when Alderaan was destroyed. That’s honestly a loss on a scale that is unimaginable. It’s like being made an orphan a thousand times over, because everything that might have been a happy memory is gone. She suffered repeated losses throughout the Galactic Civil War, and saw many soldiers go to their deaths. Her son was lost to the Dark Side, her brother abandoned her, her husband left, and then her son killed her husband. Next, she lost more loyal soldiers, and when Luke suddenly returned, he passed away, too. Given all of that, what does Leia still want? What COULD she still want?

For years, I have followed a blogger on social media. Let’s call her L. Like E, her life has been marked by loss: she never knew her father, had an absent and abusive mother, became pregnant at a young age by a man who did not stay with her, and so was a single teenaged mother of a baby boy by the time she was seventeen. L experienced failed romances, had more children, stepchildren, and grandchildren, and experienced several of those children pulling away from her. Finally, her beloved aunt and uncle, who had cared for her throughout her difficult childhood and were more like parents to her, passed away within the same year. Only a few months later, her eldest son, now a young man, committed suicide at home.

Many people choose to grieve privately. L did not, and her pain.... there really aren’t words. I felt that I could not turn away, that I had to witness what she shared and know, even a little bit, the depths of human suffering. I have a young son, and as I watched L share pictures of her little boy around a similar age.... I could only think that none of us is immune from such loss. At any moment, our children could be snatched away in the cruelest of ways, and what would we not do to bring them back? Worse, if possible, for L was acknowledging the historic family cycles of trauma that had contributed to her son’s despair. She found herself asking if she shared any responsibility for his death, and wondering if she had failed him as a mother. She knew on a conscious level that his choices were his own, but still the doubt and guilt gnawed at her. Agony upon agony, sorrow upon sorrow, a horrible unending night.

L is very religious. Understandably, she had a crisis of faith after her son’s death, not least because she did not know if his suicide meant they would be separated even in eternity. She studied, prayed, and consulted with spiritual advisors for years, and eventually concluded that his soul is not in her hands, and so all she can do is hope. She will pray and hope that he is waiting for her in heaven, and live her life in such a way that she will be reunited with him after death. L still has doubts and moments of deep darkness, especially as she sees the painful ripples from her son’s loss spread into her marriage, her children’s lives, her grandchildren’s lives. But she survives with hope for reunion, and I believe in a benevolent God who will give her her heart’s desire.

Star Wars MUST give Princess Leia Organa, its avatar of hope, the one remaining wish of her heart. When everything and everyone else in the galaxy whom she has loved has been taken from her, she MUST have this one thing. Her hope for her beloved son Ben must not be in vain. The Force has to reward Leia with everything she desires for Ben: his return to the Light, his return to life, the joy and love which every mother wishes for her child. For all that the Skywalker family has suffered in their long darkness, their last son must live the full life they have all been denied. And Leia - Daughter, Princess, Leader, Lover, Mother - must have the ultimate victory. Nothing else will satisfy.

I know this all sounds very melodramatic but I don’t give a damn. E and L deserve the fantasy wish fulfillment that may not be granted them in this life. Star Wars, at its best, can do this, and that’s why I love it.

[nbtful]

Stuffed Fun

They say never to meet your heroes, but I would add not to revisit them either. Returning to someone or something that you once held in high esteem with the curse of fresh eyes has a similar effect to seeing it up close. It’s much easier to see the whole of something, warts and all, given the benefit of passed time and it’s hard not to take the reality of a former love falling short of one’s admittedly colossal expectations as a personal affront to everything one holds dear. That said, I’ve never been one to follow my own advice, so I recently revisited one of the defining pieces of media from my childhood; Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. Despite the aforementioned tendency for childhood entertainment to not fully realize the rose-tinted memories that they inhabit, Calvin and Hobbes nevertheless seemed as vital as when I first read it. For good reason maybe, as it’s hard not to love Calvin. He’s an effortlessly charming scamp, moving around wildly across the strip, constantly in tow with him is his best friend, a stuffed tiger. It’s all instantly endearing and it’s not hard to understand why people are instantly drawn to inhabiting this world. Still, where other comics derive their following largely from the lengthiness of their run, it’s audience growing through syndication and long-term exposure, Calvin and Hobbes lasted a relatively paltry ten years. Add in its creator’s intense aversion to publicity and the comic’s lack of merchandising and it becomes increasingly strange to take for granted how often people of all ages treat it as a personal touchstone. The comic somehow attained a sustained cultural impact while never resorting to prolonged commercial overexposure. This continued relevance betrays a fundamental difference in the technical makeup of Calvin and Hobbes compared to its contemporaries, a key artistic decision that keeps it sticking in our public consciousness. There’s something at the heart of Calvin and Hobbes that’s genuinely affecting, and much more than say, Garfield. Whatever it is, this crucial creative choice of the series, the element that keeps us returning to it, what is the reason that so many of us care so much about the boy and his tiger?

First and foremost, Calvin and Hobbes is a traditional, four-panel comic strip. The Sunday strips would push wider, but for the majority of the strip’s run, a simple, black and white four panelled story would be what was offered. It’s important to identify the structure of the comic, as there is a direct link between how an audience consumes a piece of art and how it affects them. Fred Sanders argues that the statements made by the strip obtained a greater impact by its adherence to the traditional comic formula, noting that “Insensitivity to the medium-message connection” is what can cause a piece of art to be “bathetic when it attempts profundity” (Sanders, “What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes”). This “medium-message connection” is crucial to understanding at least part of the strip’s appeal. Much like any other form of media, there’s a set of conventions that the average comic reader has been conditioned to expect. These conventions can either be met or subverted, but what is important is that they are respected. Watterson was adamant in refusing to license his strip for commercial merchandise because, in his slightly dramatic words, all the “licensing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes.” He goes on to say that “the world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize“, revealing his belief that artistic and thematic consistency is key to the success of a piece of art (West, 59). It’s an approach that can provide a richer sense of story and characterization, but it’s also one that demands more from the readership. Since the only avenue with which the public had to these characters was through the comic itself, not through one-joke t-shirts or plush toys, to be a fan of the strip required a greater deal of engagement than it would for other comics. The investment that the strip cultivates was, at least partially, a direct result of it’s refusal to betray the message of its medium.

As compact as that sounds, I can’t imagine that it’s the primary reason for my own unending devotion to the series; somehow I think that the commitment of the comic to its chosen artistic medium was particularly resonant for a six year old. Beneath the purity of the comic as a comic, there’s another, more affecting facet: nostalgia. To some extent this is unavoidable, as comics are largely consumed during childhood and the memories associated with them oftentimes are rose-tinted. Nostalgia is behind all that unending disappointment, the type that springs from the contemporary discovery of something’s true quality. It can also work in the opposite direction, becoming a tool to obfuscate our current experience with the art into a mere recollection of our original experience with it. We are then no longer participating with the art itself, but rather with our perceived reaction to that same art. It makes it hard to detach yourself, from conflating your current opinions with the memory of your past ones. Is there a way to reconcile the sentiment of the past with the critical experience of the present? In “The Ghost of the Hardy Boys”, Gene Weingarten attempts to come to terms with the sheer awfulness of The Hardy Boys, novels that were once, to him, “the pinnacle of human achievement.” He delves into the author’s life story, the publisher’s tyrannical edits, the contexts behind the writing of each book. And while he realizes that the series is hardly superb, there’s always something that “made you turn the page”, an “all-too-brief moment in which the writer seems suddenly engaged” (Weingarten, “Ghost of the Hardy Boys”). While Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t suffer from this problem, Weingarten’s methods in finding his original attraction to the books without the lens of nostalgia lay in looking at the intrinsic nature of the books, the way that the small, engaging details drove the plots. So what intrinsic is hidden in the details of Calvin and Hobbes?

It’s hard to encapsulate a decade’s worth of artistic choices into a few easily digestible points, but some elements tend to stand out. Calvin’s idiosyncratic tastes, from the works of DuChamp to a magazine about bubble gum. The ever changing backgrounds, from completely empty to vividly inked and populated. The tension between fantasy and reality. A potential thread emerges, one of memory; not in the intellectual sense, but in the emotional one. The strip is able to transcend simple “nostalgia buttons” because it doesn’t ask us to remember specific shared moments or events, but rather specific feelings.  We see Calvin being banished to his room and sulking outside his window in an imagined Martian landscape, filled with the brilliant colour and configuration that only childhood loneliness can muster. We see this and we don’t remember this exact event happening to us, but we remember feeling alone, misunderstood, ostracized. And we can remember the methods we used to try to escape from this unhappiness. As Libby Hill puts it in her retrospective on the series, “isolation breeds fantasy, which breeds isolation” (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes Embodied the Lonely Child”). The rejection pushes one inwards and the continued time away from anyone other than oneself causes further rejection. It’s thoroughly emotionally exploitative, in that we can’t help but feel sorry for him. It triggers an uncontrollable empathy, as we’ve all been children and experienced that powerlessness. Watterson is reminding us what it felt like to be completely powerless, completely vulnerable, and completely alone, all within the realms of a four-panel comic strip. It's the kind of juxtaposition that tends to stick with people.

What’s significant about this specific type of juxtaposition is its usefulness in fostering both comedic and dramatic material. The incongruity can be mined for laughs, like Calvin tracking polls for his father as if he was a presidential candidate, or moments of almost unbearable resonance, like the repeated collision of Calvin’s hyper-vivid daydreams with the mundanity of his schoolwork. It’s non-escapist fantasy, the type that is fully inhabited by a dreamer who is nevertheless completely self-aware of the context of their situation. It’s reminiscent of early Simpsons episodes, where the family dynamic is grounds for great humour, but the creeping shadow of a burdensome reality consistently threatens to dramatically tear down the surrealist facade that has been ever-so carefully constructed. It was not uncommon for The Simpsons of the early 90s to have an average, slice-of-life storyline (like a housewife needing to get a job in order to make ends meet) that was punctuated by instances of brilliant absurdity (like that same episode featuring a 50 foot tall Marie Curie and a Scottish groundskeeper wrestling a wolf). Calvin himself best resembles a tragic combination of The Simpsons’ two child protagonists. Bart Simpson is the devious prankster, tirelessly putting every ounce of his energy into the next meaningless act of destructive mischief and Lisa Simpson is the isolated intellectual, forever an outsider because of her contextually inappropriate sophistication. Both The Simpsons and Calvin and Hobbes are consistently held up as all-time greats in their respective fields of entertainment, but unlike the latter, The Simpsons doesn’t have the benefit of an expedited run to sweeten the memory of its early quality. Indeed, the common rap on The Simpsons is that its creative decline came around the time when it started priding outlandish storylines over more emotionally grounded plots (Sullentrop, “The Simpsons”). Its downfall, according to the detractors of the show’s later years, came from the move towards treating its characters as a tool to deliver quirky jokes instead of treating them as a realistic family. Perhaps some of Calvin and Hobbes power is derived from the strip’s laser-like focus; it never forgets who or what is at it’s centre. While it deals with many topics, the power of imagination, the peculiarities of growing old, the fleetingness of the good times, the core of the strip is a young, confused, surprisingly wise little boy. The tragedy of Calvin’s character is that he lacks the inhibition or self-agency to prevent himself from slipping in and out of his chosen reality, but he’s granted the intelligence to be painfully self-aware of his circumstances. He’s been put in a world he can’t hope to understand or change and he knows just enough to realize the full extent of his powerlessness.

There’s a Sunday strip from 1989 that I think defines the entire series, as it’s one of the few moments where Watterson lets the curtain of imagination completely fall away. On March 26th 1989, Watterson, for the umpteenth time, showed us what an average day was like for Calvin, except this time, Hobbes is nowhere to be found. He starts his day off being yelled at by his mother to get out of bed, then he’s being berated by his teacher for not knowing the answer to a math problem, then he’s being threatened by a bully, then there’s homework, bad food, bath time, a turned off TV, and then back in bed again. His mother kisses him goodnight, reminding him that “tomorrow’s another big day!” And all alone in the dark, he sighs, broken and thoroughly sad. This is a terrifying comic strip. There is not even an attempt at humour here, no half-hearted jokes made, just full-bodied, unencumbered, childhood angst. This is a child that is dreading his every waking moment and finds the world he inhabits unbearable. Is it any wonder he needs a friend entirely of his own control and creation? This is a strip that best exemplifies how, according to Hill, Calvin and Hobbes “normalized the inherent loneliness that childhood can bring”, how the lack of any kind of control can lead almost inevitably to feelings of extended solitude (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes”). This one strip is perhaps the series’ most devastating, precisely because of how it normalizes isolation, how it presents loneliness as life’s fundamental feature rather than an easy-to-avoid pitfall. Instead of asking how to deal with the death of our loved ones, it asks us about the death of desire, our motivation to wake up the following morning.

I’ll admit that despite my attempts to disentangle myself from the nostalgic web Calvin and Hobbes weaves, this strip is still distressingly evocative. Yes, the routine portrayed in the strip contains the average, normal events that all children go through. But it’s the mundanity that makes it worse. If we can’t deal with the everyday, what hope do we have to cope with everything else? And by not judging Calvin’s adverse reaction, Watterson provides validity to all forms of stress, regardless of age or status. Tony Kushner. in reference to Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, once said that “for the great adult creators of children's books, the work at hand is a reclamation, through the difficult exploration of feelings most people have forgotten, of the past” (Kushner, “How hard can it be?”). Reclaiming the feelings of the past is exactly what’s happening here. In revisiting Calvin and Hobbes, I tried to confront my hero. I tried to deconstruct it and see what made it tick. But maybe all I was doing was trying to reassert what Calvin represented, to stake a claim in rebelliousness, whimsy, and crushing loneliness as the tenets of childhood. Maybe the series was like a companion, providing hope and comfort by showing us the universality of our feelings of solitude.

While there is undoubtedly a cathartic sense of relief that the series grants, there’s a nagging doubt that stating this is somehow antithetical to the core of the comic. Looking at other bastions of slightly melancholic children-oriented media, like Charles Schultz with Peanuts or Maurice Sendak’s aforementioned Where the Wild Things Are, there’s a tendency in them to portray children and adults as fundamentally different. Sendak’s adults were authoritarian figures and the Peanuts cartoons famously had a teacher communicate literally incomprehensibly through the nosies of an unidentified brass instrument. Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t really do that. The dichotomy between adults and children fades, where one finds instances of Calvin’s father being just as prone to staging a scene in a grocery store as his son is. The lack of distinction between the two seemingly disparate groups suggests something. Furthermore, the huge popularity of the comic strip suggests that there is a a deeper connection being forged than one borne out of surface-level enjoyment and to find it, we can revisit Kushner’s quote about Sendak. He specifically mentions how the work of the “adult creators of children’s books.” In a field where the best work regularly incorporates serious subject matter in an accessible way, their work is not simply an exploration or a celebration, but first and foremost a reclamation.

Think about the word “reclamation”. It’s not just taking back something, it’s about reasserting that it was always yours. Despite efforts to the contrary, whatever it is that’s being reclaimed has always been there; lurking in the shadows perhaps, but still there. One might immediately associate ”reclamations” with “reminders”, but in this instance, it’s more precisely related to a “realization.”  A realization that we still have what we once had and that it never truly left. In the case of Bill Watterson, one needn’t look too far to see what he is making us realize.  Hill’s assertion that her attraction to Calvin and Hobbes was “seeing a child…struggle with the world he inhabited” makes all the more sense in this light (Hill, “Calvin and Hobbes”). It’s the struggle that binds us. Regardless of age, creed, or affiliation, we all struggle everyday. Watterson reclaims that struggle by showing it through the lens of one intelligent, imaginative, and lonely child. The problems that Calvin go through are always articulated in a way that is not only widely accessible, but widely applicable. Take a strip from December 1987. Calvin is musing to Hobbes that he doesn’t understand the concept of Santa Claus. “Why all the mystery?” Calvin asks. “If the guy exists, why doesn’t he ever show himself and prove it?” And just in case the implication wasn’t clear enough, he ends the strip with admitting that “I’ve got the same questions about God.” That’s childhood pre-holiday anxiety combined with a grown-up crisis of faith. It’s an unending struggle that the comic reminds us doesn’t really go away.

When we’re confronted with the harsh realities of whatever situation we finds ourselves in, a natural reaction can be to ignore them. It can be overwhelming to have to deal with all of the troubling issues in the world and it’s all too easy to disregard them entirely. But Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t promote apathy. If anything, Calvin’s interest in such issues as environmentalism, mortality, and religion all point towards a call for a greater interest in pressing social matters. What it doesn’t do is offer pat solutions for how to deal with all of them, how to reconcile our struggle. Sure, sometimes it can help just to talk to a friend, but all too often we’re left alone, staring out the window at our blasted Martian dreamscape. And for Watterson, that’s okay. If Calvin can be said to be one thing, it’s persistent. We might be powerless, but that isn’t an excuse not to try. As long as we keep fighting, keep struggling against the issues, against the way we fit in the world, we have a reason to wake up. Tomorrow’s another big day, after all.