#which at least bespeaks an awareness that the relationship is narratively important

[bestworstcase]

your point about team rwby being the maidens’ liberators made me think - do you think blake is going to have a special connection to the summer maiden? I noticed that she’s the only one who hasn’t been close to a maiden yet

i think gillian asturias is the summer maiden (and this post is hysterical in hindsight. at the time i wrote it, the full-length v9 epilogue hadn’t been released yet so we’d only seen qrow’s section and about half of winter’s – hence my pausing to lay out the argument for salem going to vale next and making a pretense of hedging my bets on the crown being narratively central in v10. lol)

now! with regard to blake and the summer maiden, the common thinking here seems to mostly run along the lines of “…and that’s why summer maiden ilia,” or the more general speculation that the summer maiden will be a faunus character.

to this i say:

it’s a fallacy to conflate “blake will probably have a strong narrative connection to the summer maiden” with “the summer maiden necessarily is or will be blake’s old friend,” and the argument for ilia being due for maidenhood is quite thin otherwise, and

blake can and does have important narrative connections to characters who aren’t faunus, and it’s a weird to presume that in order for the summer maiden to have a meaningful tie to blake, she must be a faunus herself.

to expand on that first point, let’s consider the personal relationships between each of the maidens so far and ruby / weiss / yang:

pyrrha -> ruby’s friend

cinder -> ruby’s personal enemy

raven -> yang’s estranged mother

penny -> ruby’s friend

winter -> weiss’s beloved sister

the takeaway here – other than that if you’re ruby’s friend and someone offers you to become a maiden you should refuse – is half the relations between maidens and members of team rwby are antagonistic. (raven seems likely to at least try making amends with yang in v10, but as it stands in the narrative right now things between them are very fraught.)

it is just as likely that blake’s narrative connection to the summer maiden might develop through a personal conflict between them, rather than friendship. yes?

and, if i’m right about gill being the summer maiden, well—stop me if you’ve heard this one: a girl with a driving, passionate ambition to uplift her people from the ashes of centuries of conquest and subjugation is radicalized by a boy she loves who pulls them both deeper and deeper into violent, spiteful extremism that ultimately harms the very people they claim to fight for, until he finally crosses a line she can’t accept and she says no i will not.

that’s blake and adam but it’s also gillian and her brother. the difference between them is that blake’s red line was adam glibly revealing that the train heist was actually intended to be a massacre whereas gillian’s was jax stating his intention to commit suicide rather than retreat and live to fight another day; she helped yatsu subdue him specifically to save jax’s life, not because she had a crisis of conscience about their movement.

(there is a certain—really irritating—contingent of CFVY novel readers who project their own dislike of jax onto gill and insist that she turned against him because he demanded she ‘sacrifice her life’ to save him, which 1. he didn’t, he asked her to give him all her aura and then bodily shielded her because he’s physically bigger than she is so this was at worst a “if we’re going down together, i’ll make them go through me first,” 2. if gill only wanted to save her own neck all she had to do was rip her aura out of him and bounce, and 3. she explicitly says that the reason she did what she did is because he’s her brother, she loves him, and she couldn’t let him die.)

the point being, gill is still a radical; her soft betrayal of jax revealed her priorities in that she loves her brother more than The Cause, but in no way did it represent a break from her belief in the cause. if the epilogue is any indication, she’s just as committed to overthrowing shade academy as before. (and i think there’s a real chance that her actions will have improved her relationship with jax to some degree, because he believed she didn’t care about him at all! he thought she only stuck with him because his semblance compelled her to do so! and then gillian exploded his mind by revealing that his semblance straight up doesn’t work on her and she just loves him. which, if the twins are on the same page now, cuts down on the internal tension and likely makes them more dangerous adversaries to the coalition.)

but her history, the way she became like this, is eerily similar to blake’s radicalization in the white fang, and i think blake would certainly be able to piece that together. she’s also by far the member of team rwby i would say is most likely to recognize and relate to the genuine pain at the heart of the crown’s movement—vacuo has suffered.

vacuo wasn’t even a state until the end of the great war. it was a mistrali territory. its people were enslaved and worked to death in a systematic and horrifyingly effective project to extract every last speck of valuable resources from the region, and then even statehood was a slap in the face because they were left to fend for themselves in a barren wasteland whose ecosystem had been completely and utterly destroyed.

the crown is a mirror held up to the white fang; blake is insightful and empathetic enough to realize these similarities and see herself and her past mistakes reflected in gillian, but this time she’s an outsider to the movement—she can’t effect change from within or reclaim the true, important work from the vengeful extremists. so she’s limited in what she can do, practically, even as it’s going to be painfully clear to her that the crown is falling into the same trap adam did.

and at the same time, the new white fang will in all likelihood either be in vacuo or show up to join the coalition in v10, so blake’s part in her own movement, her place in her community, can be directly juxtaposed with her opposition to/empathy for the crown.

v9 sets up for this with blake’s advocacy for the afterans—v7-8 do as well to a lesser extent, because blake is still dealing with the personal fallout of v4-6 and thus is quieter about mantle than say, nora is, but like. blake draws a comparison between her experiences in the white fang and with adam and the moral compromises ironwood starts making after the election. it just seems… pretty clear to me that the narrative has been setting up blake to play a pivotal role in relation to the crown since at least v4 if not earlier, depending on how granular the vacuo outline was during v1-3.

so this is a narrative connection i very much expect blake to have with gillian regardless, but… if gill is the maiden…

well, she’s certainly not trapped inside ozpin’s vault/key maiden paradigm! so in that case what does it look like for a member of team rwby to fulfill this narrative role of liberation? probably something like de-radicalizing her and her brother by convincing them there is a better way forward than their divisive, violent, paranoid ideology. and blake is unquestionably the member of team rwby best equipped to get the ball rolling there.

further, blake’s semblance is a really strong counter to gill’s – that’s true of ruby and weiss as well, because gillian has to touch a person in order to steal aura and so agile, fast opponents are going to be tougher for her in general. but blake has two more things going for her beyond the basic mobility advantage, vis-a-vis making it personal:

the illusionary aspect of blake’s semblance will allow her to create decoys, which is a very powerful tactical advantage against an opponent who really wants to grab her, and

blake’s girlfriend is a hand-to-hand fighter, and an incredibly brave one with an intense protective instinct at that.

clears throat. we all remember yang getting possessed in rwby x jl part 2, yes? and blake clocking it instantly? well.

if blake and gillian are meant to be not just foils but personal adversaries in the vein of ruby and cinder—yang’s gonna get got. agile though she is, as a hand-to-hand combatant yang is unavoidably much more vulnerable to the twins’ contact-based semblances than the rest of her team, her personality will make it very hard for her to play it safe and stay back if it comes to an open fight, and there is nothing the narrative could do to lock in that personal enmity that would be punchier than yang being compromised.

even if gill as a personal adversary to blake isn’t in the cards i expect yang to get got anyway because, let’s be honest: do we really expect crwby to set themselves up with a golden opportunity to do a climactic love-overcomes-mind-control scene with the bees in v10 and then not take it? with how nuts the entire creative team goes for these two? after the climactic battle in ice queendom hingeing on yang being able to free blake from a nightmare with the mere lesser power of unrealized lesbianism? do we reeeally believe they would pass that up? lol.

[popmitzvah]

Now I Am Become Slut, Destroyer of Worlds

The host is alive. She is sentient. She is self-aware. And she knows you have programmed her to attack herself and the others.

Nope! Not a blog about Westworld! At least, most of it isn’t. I want to talk about The Bachelor and I want to explain why this show is the place to be, if you’re into the shock of watching creations outsmart their creator-controllers.  The more I read this Bach season as a rumination on feeling fictional and clawing for “reality,” the more I was reminded of HBO’s ambitious series on gnosticism, humanity, and the function of storytelling. Might even go so far to say that these two shows share a soul; Dolores Abernathy would be right at home at a rose ceremony!

Please follow me, down into a fake mansion that houses a harem, where we can take a closer look at the things that made The Bachelor so distinctive in its 21st season: existential female anxiety, textual reflexivity, and the peculiar journey of Corinne, a single trope that managed to awaken and rewrite herself.

Born into an apocalyptic Trumpworld, this iteration of The Bachelor became something kind of dark, dreadful, and a little bit out-of-control. Of course, The Bachelor is always a circus, and that’s why so many people hate it: for a television fan, it takes a strong set of stones to follow something so vapid, so dependent on tired stereotypes and romantic wish-fulfillment, so misogynistic, so corporate and disingenuous. How many different ways can producers arrange 30 beautiful women in a Love Thunderdome as they compete for the affections of one bland white man? But there was something poisonous in American culture at large that made Season 21 into something else, something crazier. Perhaps the 2016 election left a vacuum of hope that encouraged The Bachelor producers to lean into self-destruction as an aesthetic. Perhaps we, the audience, are evolving to watch ourselves watching TV, and we prefer everything to be kind of about storytelling – ergo the timely popularity of diverse “meta” shows like Westworld, American Horror Story, Fleabag.

Either way, the new Bachelor was defined by these new and distinctive notes:

Contestants who bristled inside their assigned story cages and pointedly drew attention to the process of being written as characters.

The season’s primary “villain,” Corinne, who transcended the confines of the Bach with a Joker-like sense of chaotic sexuality and stunningly re-branded her arc as sex-positive feminist heroism.

An unwilling Bachelor whose weird charisma relied on his apathy, nihilism, and constant critique of the format. Nick undermined our reception of the Bachelor experience by positioning himself as a bored observer – distancing himself from the contestants and the ideological underpinnings of the show.

First, I want to take on Bullet Number One – the Westworldian crises of self that entered this season of the Bachelor early on and began the process of destabilizing narratives and the women forced to live them. Take a look at what happened to Jasmine G on Night 1. Now, it’s not unusual for Bachelor women to immediately recoil from the uncanniness of this environment –  to be a Bachelor contestant, to be on a reality dating competition, is to be subjected to spirit-breaking. These women are tested every moment with the pressures of self-criticism, of being filmed, of being beautiful, of being charming, of systematically attacking and defeating your stunning competitors. But something about Jasmine G’s body language and wording struck me as a crisis of self, a dissociative episode which bespeaks her sudden awareness that she is performing and this whole thing – maybe any love-hunt – is theater without meaning.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s out of my control. There’s nothing I can do. Holy shit. Who the fuck am I? I’m blown away right now. Who am I?”

Night 1 would be the first of Jasmine’s many system failures, glitches in her personality and physical affect which provided an alarming counterpoint to the self-policing composure we’re used to seeing on these women. Nick eliminated her because of her unpleasant urge to question the “realism” of herself, of him, of the experience. And this was not the only instance of unusual meta-awareness amongst the women. Many of the others expressed a certain repugnance at the roles in which they were pigeonholed – at their status as storylines. Liz’s only mission, with mounting desperation, was to rewrite her way from Nick’s opportunistic ex-fling all the way to romantic legitimacy. Taylor realized too late that her Bachelor persona and “real” professional life were being mapped onto one another and she’d dug herself into the “bitch bully” hole (with the help of her nemesis Corinne). Taylor also literally theorized that some women are better-programmed for love! What could be more Westworld than attempting to parse the resident slut’s “emotional intelligence”?

So there was a significant change in the show here, in which the women’s grasp or ignorance of “being produced” was of paramount importance to how we perceived them. To compare these women to WW characters like Dolores and Maeve – remaining basic, guileless, and easily overwritten ensured a measure of success in the competition and preserved their classic Bachelor likeability factor.

So with that said, I’m dying to get back to Corinne. Here was a contestant who really jumped off the screen for reasons I’ve never seen an antagonist “pop” before. Unlike a villain such as, say, Season 20’s Olivia, Corinne worked to distinguish herself as a breakout character – not just through behavior but through actual world-building. Starting the show out by mentioning her current nanny Raquel was a stroke of genius; Raquel was a framing device that indicated Corinne inhabited a bizarre fantasy world inside and outside the show. In so many ways. Corinne deliberately ate endless blocks of cheese on camera. She feigned naps, eyes closed, smiling beatifically as she “dreamed” of Nick. She self-consciously and joyfully delivered dialogue she knew would light up the internet. Clutching her breasts and huffing, “Does this seem like someone who’s immature?” Staring soullessly into the lens and intoning, “My heart is gold, but my vagine is platinum.” Luring Nick into an inexplicable bounce house and toplessly dry-humping him with abandon. Corinne’s promiscuity, and her persona, were over-the-top but deliberately, defiantly, and delightfully self-choreographed. We know the floozy never wins, but when the floozy knows it, ignores it, and enjoys her role, she transcends happy endings.

And most interestingly, Corinne elevated her self-awareness and self-programming into a magnificent final act. During “The Women Tell All” (a reunion episode which airs before the finale) Corinne, in one fell swoop, ret-conned her entire Bachelor journey as a feminist rumspringa. “I was just doing me,” she demurely insisted, while the other contestants fought to defend her sexual agency. They leaped to defend the resident slut as the bravest and most authentic person amongst them. Corinne sat, resplendent, her eyes bearing no trace of the mischief and malevolence that had been her character cornerstones. She’d accomplished a rewrite akin to “it was all a dream.” Later, women sobbed while Liz declared her sexual encounter with Nick had not “defined” her, and they took turns praising their sister for her humanitarian work. The thematic tide-turn from “a search for true love” to “an inner journey toward female unity and empowerment” made for the most overtly political and topical episode The Bachelor has had, maybe ever – and it bespoke the malleability of reality fiction in a way the show has never previously approached.

In many ways, it was Bachelor Nick’s abdication of his role that allowed the TV text to refocus itself on the women “waking up” and growing through their relationships to one another. It’s hard, as a viewer, to engage with story about passive female players being driven toward romantic fulfillment, when the end-goal is a guy who’d be content to go home immediately and eat cold pizza. As we know, the guy had already been through two seasons of The Bachelorette and one summer of Bachelor in Paradise – his entire narrative was “last-ditch effort for love.” Nick made it his business to call out the fakery of The Bachelor, and the futility of it: “Let’s try to be as normal as possible in an abnormal environment.” “I’ve been in their shoes, and I know how much it sucks.” I certainly like Nick as a person – I like that he cries when he feels stuff, and I like that he hates being The Bachelor but loves being famous, and I like that he let women who were too good for him go, so they could fly and be free and be the first black Bachelorette. But if Nick did anything other than represent a neat resolution of the presented Bachelor narrative, he effectively denied our suspension of disbelief and exposed this particular season as “reality farce with no point.” Prince Charming was just in it for the international travel and the free food. I sympathize. And it’s fun to watch The Bachelor pretend that this isn’t a huge problem.

SO! I posit here that, at least for this season, The Bachelor evolved beyond the story of single women and their search for love. You might say that instead of being about singlehood, this show became about “the singularity” – that moment when program/character/trope/story/world comes alive and begins to adapt and change itself. I wonder: is it a better ride for the reality-consuming audience, when “we know they know”? At what point does watching a character with meta-awareness become confusing, or tiresome, rather than thrilling? And most importantly, what are the differences between watching reality television and prestige drama when we’re grappling with these issues? This question, perhaps, is of paramount importance for TV fans as we go forward; if there’s something in the water that’s poisoning every genre of narrative experience (or making it tastier), we have to put our fingers on it. Why do I watch so much television about women in traps, whose self-actualization and creative escapes are catalyzed by patriarchal violence? Why is it so easy to find that story?

I think it’s easy to brush aside shows like The Bachelor precisely because they are so heavily consumed, across political and cultural lines, and “mass appeal” television has the reputation of reifying harmful structures of power. For really good reason. But it’s important to locate these small moments of medium-transcendence within these TV texts. More and more, the characters we use and abuse are turning directly towards us. These fictional delights have real ends, and it’s never, never about the final rose.

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