#while he views her as an ally but not necessarily a commander; in the classic New Mutants lineup Berto is happy to accept Dani's leadership

[daisyachain]

Dani and ‘Berto had a strong dynamic through New Mutants that X-Force Annual #3 makes a case for reviving. They’re both gregarious, assertive, but pragmatic and compassionate leaders and where they clash is their similarities. Both of them together can accent their worst traits even though they’re the best of the New Mutants (Dani’s authoritarianism and temper, ‘Berto’s arrogance and immaturity). Have them both choose to be co-leaders on a team, force them to both go undercover in the same organization, whatever it is, someone needs to do just what Nicieza does and place the focus solely on their relationship so that tension can be brought to a max

[kendrixtermina]

I haven’t played all four routes yet but from spoilers I do know that Edelgard has some feelings for Byleth regardless of the route. While the shipper in me likes that detail, objectively from what I’ve seen of AM/VW so far I’m not sure why El would feel that way. I don’t want to chalk it up to waifuism right away. Any thoughts on this, since you’ve played all the routes?

Comments on the premise

(Scroll down for an answer to your actual question) 

First of all this “waifuism” thing is exceedingly cynical. 

Male antagonists in huge classical words of art are given a tragic crush or adorable little daughter/sister them all the time so  as to humanize them, give them internal conflict and expose some contradictions about them, and people get how it’s tragic and gives them dimensionality and no one ever says the only reason is so fangirls will think they’re hot. If anyone gets made fun of it’s the fangirls for “not getting the depht” as if that were mutually exclusive. Vulnerability, temptation, struggle for independence... you find that all over the best stories ever told. 

For every damself in distress there’s one dude (her boyfriend) who manages to be a full compelling non-satelite human being despite having romance as a motivator the problem isn’t romance it’s bad writing. There’s certainly a problem if almost every single female character in a setting were entirely by romance but the idea that liking someone is to degrade, flatten and cheapen yourself is just as toxic. It can coexist with other more complex motivations and in fact lampshade them.

You might perhaps call bad writing if it were one of those situations where the villainess has no other motivation than dudes, brings it up constantly or is so defined by it that it keeps her from acting in any self-consistent manner or just isn’t taken seriously as an antagonist.  Not saying she’s a villain at all but you oppose her on the other routes.

I pretty much all the characters like Byleth and express regret when they go up against them... They have a sort of heroic charisma that’s why they’re the main character. (not per se the other way around - you don’t point the camera where nothing interesting/extrordinary is happening. Few stories tell us about a sack of potatoes falling over or people sitting on chairs, and if they did they’d be about pointing out how potatoes or chairs are actually plenty interesting)

They’re described as accepting ppl just as they are with that having been an attitude impressed on them by their father who himself is cool with Byleth’s own oddities, and also described as one hell of a badass field commander.  Also you DO run around all day bringing everyone gifts, their favorite snacks lost possesions and listening to their problems/lifestories. 

It’s not like it’s super over the top in your face it’s like a handful of lines many of which you might not even hear if you’ve recruited certain characters or don#t trigger certain engage quotes, and it ties into her greater characterization as someone with consummate laserfocus dedication who has pretty much given up on anything that doesn’t further her goal even her own feelings.  - having a crush is just one example, she mentions how she’d have preferred a more peaceful life doing idle fun things and did enjoy her time at the monastery where she got to be just another classmate sand fight alongside everybody else as a comrade.

Though she enjoyed her time at the monastery, her resolve doesn’t waver... but now it hurts a bit more to go through with what she had planned all along since it means losing some of the relative normalcy she had not dared to hope for anymore

You actual question (ie what does she like about them)

Crushes, by nature, are just something that randomly shows up and can produce quite a bit of a reaction in a short time. 

Regardless of route you save her from a bandit and there’s all the explore time dialogue and basically lived in close quarters/ saw each other every other day. Even if theyd spend more time with their own class theyd still be around the place doing cool stuff. That would be explanation enough, I mean it doesn’t necessarily mean that something had to come of it, that she wouldn’t get over it or that you’re immediately soulmates or whatever, I mean you can pair her off with plenty of other peeps in her route. 

Which isn’t to say that the whole thing is just any old youthful crush. Crush or no crush she really wants them to be allies. 

First of all Edelgard has been describing as being drawn to/ sorta ‘collecting’ people she views as talented and exceptional so if you are a badass she’s gonna like you (just in general not even romantically), and if you’re a badass who’s also her ‘type’ that might manifest itself as a crush as well. 

She says pretty early on that she thinks they have similar personalities, and she clearly looks for like-mindedness in friends and allies as well, of the ones that she gets semi-friendly with even before the timeskip the only one with a significant different outlook/temperament is Dorothea, and everyone likes Dorothea, since she goes out of her way to befriend anyone who doesn’t resemble an arrogant dunce. 

Also, she probably finds the idea of having an ally who is “like her” very enticing. First because she’s used to being misunderstood and someone who is similar might “get” her and relate to her. (Conversely there’s a lot of dialogue where she’s like “I know you’re lying” or “wow you’re telling the truth”... she doesnt find them that opaque/unreadable compared to the other characters. so this also goes both ways... this occurs regularly enough that its even kinda used to hint at who the flame emperor is (”I can tell you dont actually want to join me”)) 

Byleth is just generally described in a lot of scenes dialogues and supports as someone whos pretty accepting of peolples weirdness and quirks. Leonie thinks they get it from Jeralt. That tends to be a selling point for most of their romantic options especially the house leaders

Likewise, due to various reasons relating to her natural personality, station and backstory she finds it hard to step out of business mode, and ppl tend to sort of flinch away from her because she’s uncommonly powerful and also the princess, and she doesn’t like that/tends to feel somewhat isolated because of it.  Even ppl who know Edelgard well enough to have significant insight into her (like Hubert or Ladislava) still speak of her with a kind of awe.

Due to their upbringing away from mainstream society, sorta unphased slightly flippant personality and their own considerable power/competence Byleth is one of the few who isn’t daunted to approach her like any ol regular person. They’re powerful enough for her to approach them on an even level, or even rely on them/ take pointers from them. 

You also see that to an extent with Lysithea (who is not just a fellow experiment victim but also has a similar ‘serious/focussed’ outlook and love of sugary things) with whom she also gets various “I wish you’d joined me/pity that we must fight” sort of dialogue. She’s Edelgard’s one inter-house support (suggesting a similar “I kinda can’t help wanting to get to know you even though I know we might become enemies” dynamic at play) the “free recruitee” on the CF route (whereas the other cases are in situations where they have incentives to flip - Lorenz is only with the empire out of opportunism so why wouldn’t he join the kingdom if they look to be winning? And Ashe was flat out drafted and is only with the Rowes out of obligation) and if you spare her she’ll say that Claude explicitly told her to waive the white flag if things get tough because he figured that Edelgard would be likely to spare her. 

[topmixtrends]

AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION has been about to ruin the country for a long time.

William F. Buckley first sounded the alarm in his 1951 jeremiad God and Man at Yale, and politicians and pundits have echoed him ever since. Soon and very soon, this chorus cries, in unison and across the years, tenured radicals will indoctrinate a generation. Today’s student protestors will capture the commanding heights of American politics and culture tomorrow. Taught to despise capitalism, religion, even Western civilization itself, they will imperil it all.

But the red brigades never take charge. Canonical authors survived the upheavals of the 1960s, and the political correctness craze of the 1990s. Outside of campus, a free enterprise system based on competition and self-interest survived both, too. Perhaps America has her right-wing Cassandras to thank. If not for the occasional broadside like Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, every collegiate football game might begin with a rousing rendition of “The Internationale.”

Or maybe the Cassandras are wrong, and have always been wrong. As far back as 1963, University of California president Clark Kerr was already calling campus radicalism one of the “great clichés about the university.” No matter how wild Berkeley looked on the nightly news (or online today), “the internal reality is that it is conservative.” He was referring to academia’s internal organization, which was and remains steeply hierarchical. But higher education also plays a conservative role in American life. Consider academia’s history or social function at any length, and the cliché of the radical campus becomes difficult to believe. The real question is why it persists.

¤

With no less vigor than Buckley, Mac Donald charges higher education with corrupting the youth and endangering Western culture. While he decried atheism and collectivism, she singles out race and gender studies, which in her mind “dominate higher education.” Today “the overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people […] to view themselves as existentially oppressed.” True to the old formula, Mac Donald warns that what happens on campus won’t stay on campus. Those who cry #MeToo and chronicle microaggessions will one day “seize levers of power.” The stakes, as always, couldn’t be higher: “[A] soft totalitarianism could become the new American norm.”

Trained as a lawyer, Mac Donald offers a one-sided brief, a classic polemic. The book is full of anecdotal evidence and statistical sleight-of-hand, with partial truths and gross distortions on almost every other page. Mac Donald is aghast, for example, when UCLA’s English Department drops its Shakespeare requirement, detecting “a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past — and to civilization itself.” She never mentions the department’s extensive historical requirements, or the fact that it will offer 16 courses on Shakespeare this academic year. Outside of higher education, the National Science Foundation is “consumed by diversity ideology” because it offers a few $1 and $2 million-dollar grants for implicit bias research and promoting women and minorities in STEM fields. For context, the NSF’s 2017 budget was $7.4 billion.

In any case, the real problems with the book go beyond shoddy sourcing. Start with the “dominance” of race and gender theory. Departments like African American and Women’s Studies tend to be relatively small, and although race and gender are popular topics across the humanities, an honest look at top university presses, as opposed to small and specialized journals, would find nothing close to dominance. (Harvard University Press’s winter catalog opens with a biography of Charles de Gaulle.) Nor are these issues omnipresent on campus. Mac Donald describes higher education as something like a one-party state, but aside from the occasional banner celebrating “diversity” or a poster asking students not to don a sombrero this Halloween, the supposed ruling party has a suspiciously light touch. From community colleges to the Ivy League, the vast majority of teaching and research proceeds without any reference to race or gender whatsoever.

But surely the professors are as radical as ever, poisoning young minds? It’s true that the professorate sits to the left of the general population, especially at selective liberal arts colleges. But in the most comprehensive survey of higher education available, conducted by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in 2007, more of the faculty was “moderate” (46 percent) than liberal (44 percent). And while 17.2 percent of older faculty claimed to be “liberal activists,” the percentage of young faculty members who said the same was minuscule: 1.3 percent. Even if the number of activist professors has grown since 2007, they aren’t necessarily radicalizing their students. A good deal of research suggests otherwise. According to the political scientist Mack Mariani and education specialist Gordon Hewitt, students become slightly more liberal during college, but no more than their non-collegiate peers do during the same time period. Fearsome as they seem to Mac Donald, student radicals are like their mentors: met more often online than on campus.

But wait, Mac Donald might reply, what about those posters and banners you mentioned? Like the ones at Berkeley reading “I will acknowledge how power and privilege intersect our daily lives,” or “I will be a brave and sympathetic ally.” Or what about Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion with its bulging staff and $20 million budget? In Mac Donald’s lone innovation to the campus polemic genre, she pays more attention to administrative press releases and campus decorations than she pays to professors’ books. Yet while diversity initiatives (and bunting) are indeed prevalent around many campuses, she misunderstands them. She believes that they reveal “the contemporary university’s paramount mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood.” What they really reveal, although indirectly, is the present state of one of American higher education’s oldest and most intractable tensions.

Professors and administrators may consider themselves egalitarians, but especially in the top tiers, their schools create elites. As Paul Mattingly writes in American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education, colleges and universities have long been “highly selective devices for producing not only trained minds but also a social leadership class […] in a society formally committed to democratic equality.” Back in the early 1960s, Berkeley’s Kerr thought he had a way to ease this tension between elitism and democracy. “The great university is of necessity elitist — the elite of merit — but it operates in an environment dedicated to an egalitarian philosophy.” This prompted a question: “How may an aristocracy of intellect justify itself to a democracy of all men?”

Yale and Harvard once groomed the sons of the nation’s great families, Bushes and Cabots and so on. In postwar America, Berkeley would justify itself on the grounds that it produced “the elite of merit,” a meritocracy. Kerr’s vision of the university is now a reality. A college degree is all but necessary for entry into managerial, professional, or creative fields, which comprise the heart of the nation’s upper middle classes.

The trouble is that in order for a meritocracy to be fair, the competition has to take place on a level playing field: in order to have true equality of opportunity, one’s background shouldn’t determine where one ends up in life. In the United States, it largely does. According to studies headed by the economist Raj Chetty, America’s social mobility rate lags behind that of Canada, Denmark, and even the United Kingdom, a famously class-bound society. Although college admissions looks like a level playing field (anyone can apply to Harvard), SAT scores follow family income, and the overall admissions process favors those who can pay the sticker price, even after taking affirmative action into account.

Once enrolled in selective institutions, students compete with each other again — for grades, prestigious extra-curricular positions, and internships. They build social networks and learn to work and behave in line with the norms of the upper middle class. After graduation the victors, bedecked with honors, can pursue lucrative careers, or even rise to positions of prominence in American public life. But despite all that competition, a 2015 Pew study still found that “a family’s economic circumstances play an exceptionally large part in determining a child’s economic prospects later in life.” To the extent that its sorting process reflects existing inequalities, higher education can’t help but replicate and thereby reinforce inequalities in society at large. There’s a word for an institution that does that, and it isn’t radical.

In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again. The promise of affirmative action is that it will work against this tendency, at least a little. Affirmative action policies often assist students from poor families, and after college they do about as well as their wealthier peers.

There’s a rich irony at the heart of the old radical campus cliché. During the postwar period, conservatives feared that higher education was fomenting leftist revolution. In reality, elite institutions like Berkeley and Yale were enshrining meritocracy as the official rule of American life, while more quietly preserving the advantages that come with money. Higher education prepares students to succeed within a competitive, stratified American society, not change it. The fear is always that today’s radicals will implement their ideas tomorrow. Or, in Mac Donald’s words, “a pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media.” But will those who attain “the highest reaches of government and media” really be interested in tearing the heights down? It didn’t happen in the 1960s. It didn’t happen in the 1990s. Don’t count on it this time, either.

So why does Mac Donald insist otherwise? Why are conservatives still so afraid of higher education after all these years? Most obviously, demagoging higher education works political wonders. It’s not only Buckley and Mac Donald who sell books against higher education; politicians from Nixon and Reagan to Scott Walker and Donald Trump have sold their campaigns that way, too. While lambasting egg-headed professors, they can both pose as populists and promise tax cuts for the rich.

Even more, though, precisely because higher education turns out the American elite, small disturbances in academia resonate deeply within the conservative soul. The political theorist Corey Robin has argued that reactionaries draw their energy from “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Whether it’s Burke horrified by the fall of the Bourbons, or Buckley opposing the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, conservative movements thrive on imminent threats to existing hierarchies. Imperiled, they sound the alarm, rally the troops, man the battlements, and eventually ride out to conquer. Robin has suggested that, despite its seeming strength, American conservatism is actually in disarray because it lacks a worthy antagonist. Numerically speaking, the socialist left is tiny, while the Democratic Party embraces “market-based” solutions to health care scarcity and global warming. Without a suitable enemy, the whole movement could collapse.

But what’s that sound? A handful of protestors on the quad? They’ve arrived in the nick of time! Never mind that they’ve been showing up since the 1950s. This time, it’s different. This time, the threat to “our culture” is real. If so, then even modest reforms — meant to do nothing more terrible than diversify the upper middle class — must be opposed as if they were threats to civilization itself.

¤

Paul W. Gleason teaches in the religion departments of California Lutheran University and the University of Southern California. In 2017, he received the National Book Critics Circle’s “emerging critic” award.

The post Why Are Conservatives So Afraid of Higher Education? appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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