#as if somebody's value is based on society at the time and not the fact that they are intrinsically valuable just because they are people | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bitcofun · 2 years

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This is a viewpoint editorial by Mickey Koss, a West Point graduate with a degree in economics. He invested 4 years in the infantry prior to transitioning to the Finance Corps. Subjective worths are no other way to impose unbiased steps and open society to a list of anti-freedom and anti-individual action in the name of the higher good. The primary problem is that the people who do not worth bitcoin have actually identified that their absence of subjective worth validates the censorship of energy usage, to name a few things, in the name of social excellent. I do not believe they recognize the precedent that sets. It's not hot enough out, so we're eliminating power to your a/c. Watching "The Kardashians" is a waste of power, so we're going to minimize the quantity of power entering your home. It's not cold enough yet, so we're cutting off gas to your heater. Your cars and truck is too huge for you to drive alone, so we're going to restrict your capability to acquire fuel. Bitcoin is a waste of energy, so we require to prohibit mining or alter the code. Every declaration is basically the very same. Somebody else is imposing their subjective worths. The examples appear silly at very first look, I never ever believed a farmer would have to oppose to continue farming up until it began taking place in the Netherlands. Things like this are constantly warranted for the higher good of society. " It is therefore required that the person needs to lastly concern recognize that his own ego is of no significance in contrast with the presence of the country, that the position of the person is conditioned entirely by the interests of the country as a whole."-- Adolf Hitler There are no groups. There are no group impacts. There are just people. While we collaborate to form a society, society can not be impacted, just people. Keynesian Values Revealed I will always remember the callous mathematics utilized to validate base pay walkings in my macroeconomic class in grad school. Provided the approximated supply and need curves, we were expected to determine the boost in joblessness versus the wage gains for those who stay used after the base pay boost. To get an A+, your conclusion needed to verify the choice to increase the base pay. The method the formulas were composed determined the result from the start: The wage gains would constantly surpass the joblessness losses. Applied to a reality situation, it's not difficult to envision this holds true for all policy choices. Approximating formulas to do some mathematics to produce more quotes. We got precisely the result we desired and our mathematics supports it. Science, child. What About The Individual? I did all the mathematics properly, however my suggestion is where I lost points: " I do not suggest increasing the base pay due to the fact that it results in a boost in joblessness. Requiring individuals out of their tasks is unethical." The teacher, who had actually composed his argumentation on the flexibility of need for staple products in sub-Saharan Africa-- approximated utilizing price quotes with little real life worth-- delicately rejected the issues utilizing joblessness insurance coverage as a reason. And this was at the No. 1 ranked Public Policy School in the United States at the time. " Fuck the plebs. Let them end up being based on the federal government." Any act on a person can be validated by the higher good of society. There are no restricting concepts which slope is a high and slippery one. Good Riddance Keynes I believe the intellectual class' resistance to bitcoin is because, a minimum of unconsciously, they understand it removes their power to attempt and tweak society from their ivory towers. A thousand individuals losing their tasks is great as long as they stay faceless stats in pseudoscience mathematics formulas. What about the single mom, the single dad, the household of 5, the very first generation American, having a hard time every day to live a significant

and dignified life, to reveal their kids what it indicates to make and supply? When making those computations I might not assist however consider the damaged faces of damaged individuals, shuffling house to inform their households they had actually stopped working that day, that their teetering scale of presence in this damaged fiat world had actually simply tipped out of favor, that their future was now unpredictable. If I require to lie to myself to get an A on an economics paper, then I'm great with informing the reality. Bitcoin And The Marionette I might listen to bitcoin-famous Dr. Jordan Peterson for hours. If I'm being sincere, I currently have and will continue to do so. His present of language is highlighted magnificently in his analysis of the kids's story " Pinocchio" Pinocchio's journey leads him to accepting duty as he goes into the stubborn belly of the monster to conserve his dad. Self-actualization results in personhood. Daily obligation is the act of the daily hero. Without obligation, we have absolutely nothing. And yet without any shortage, there can never ever be duty at the macro and policy levels of society. The journey to the bitcoin requirement results in extreme self-responsibility and cuts the ties of control from the so-called professionals who so frantically wish to manage you. No longer will we be marionettes, puppets dancing along through life at the end of a fiat string. No longer will we be data and aggregates, parts of excessively and deliberately complicated formulas utilized to validate sacrifice on behalf of the typical good. It will no longer be possible on the bitcoin requirement. With shortage reestablished into the market, blanket dictats will no longer be economically practical. There is no society without the person. There are no social impacts. Just people making choices on the margins. Compromising people is and constantly will be unethical. If you desire a much better society, obligation is most likely an excellent location to begin. Bitcoin repairs this. This is a visitor post by Mickey Koss. Viewpoints revealed are completely their own and do not always show those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine. Read More

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heronpeace56 · 2 years

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chamerionwrites · 4 years

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Years ago I read some article about the value of shame in forming functioning societies. Obviously is not exactly the same as bullying, but I do believe inappropriate behaviors should be labeled as such? Today there's more of a 'it doesn't hurt anyone' vibe, which leads to people declaring themselves 'transage' or parading in full kink gear in their local park. A bit of shaming wouldn't go amiss there, imho.

I’ll be real, Anon: I have a hard time taking this ask seriously and I considered whether it might be best not to even engage with it. But I’m going to try my best to respond in good faith, on principle, because I do actually feel very strongly about this and the fact that this showed up in my inbox within minutes kinda validates the frustration I was expressing in the original post.

[CW for discussion of all sorts of triggery topics below]

Point #1: In the first place let me just say that it’s very revealing, as a general rule, when somebody makes what should by all rights be a pretty innocuous and easy-to-agree-with statement and people leap in to raise objections based on the most extreme outlier examples they can think of. It doesn’t necessarily tell you a lot about the topic at hand. It does tell you something about the respondents, and the motivations and fears (fear is definitely the operative word here) driving their responses. It almost always means there’s some kind of a slippery slope fallacy at work.

I’m pretty widely-traveled and I gotta say I’ve never seen anyone in a park wearing kink gear, unless by that you mean “some goth kids in eye makeup and leather collars.” I have likewise never in my entire life encountered the term “transage” in the wild, and when I google it the first result is an Urban Dictionary entry that says it was invented by right-wingers to mock and/or fearmonger about trans people, so. I feel like that illustrates how relevant your examples are to everyday life.

There’s this widespread sentiment on Tumblr that just because certain non-normative behaviors - hyperfocusing on special interests, frank discussion of sexuality or mental health, writing kinky fanfic as a birthday present for a friend - are slightly more accepted here (emphasis on “slightly” because again, just look how common the should’ve-been-bullied-more backlash jokes are), those behaviors have become normal and accepted in society at large. This is comically untrue. Even something as tame as writing (totally non-kinky!) fanfic, or getting passionate about your interests to a degree that the average neurotypical person clocks as “weird,” is going to get you mocked - let alone something like, oh idk, admitting that you’re into furry porn. Being open about mental health or sexuality can and does get people fired or hurt or killed with distressing frequency.

So I gotta ask - do you really think that the Weirdos are in any danger of forgetting that they’re weirdos? And why is it so incredibly threatening to you that they might? Even in the rare cases when we’re talking about genuinely harmful as opposed to just “weird” or “annoying” or “cringey” behavior, why is labeling behavior as inappropriate so closely linked with bullying in your mind? Why did my post make you feel such a pressing need to defend the social value of shame? Can you actually cite your sources here, and do they actually say what you recall them saying? Was there more nuance to it? Was there bias? Did you feel the need to check before sending this ask? How do you define “full kink gear,” and how many times have you actually encountered people wearing it in your local park - or is that a hypothetical image that lives rent-free in your imagination, as a symbolic representation of some underlying anxiety? If people genuinely aren’t hurting anyone else, why is it so important for them to feel ashamed of themselves? What are you afraid of? And why does it feel like such an urgent threat that you couldn’t let my very straightforward “bullying is bad and jokes about it aren’t funny” post pass without well-actually-ing it?

Point #2: Let’s say for the sake of argument that we genuinely are discussing objectively harmful behavior here. (Though let’s be clear: usually people get bullied for being harmlessly weird, which is to say not conforming to social norms, which is frequently just another way to say queer or gnc or disabled or neurodivergent or fat or poor or non-white or absolutely anything else that’s vulnerable or marginalized.) There’s a difference between shame and shaming, which may seem like hairsplitting but is in fact a very important distinction imho.

I’ve never been able to unsee that one post that defined shame as “a kind of moral dysphoria” - a recognition that the person you want to be and the reality of your present actions are out of alignment. I think it’s a good definition and it can certainly be a very painful experience. That doesn’t automatically make it bad. I’ve said many times that I think learning is often at least a little bit uncomfortable, and that trying to completely eliminate discomfort from our lives is a good way to stunt our moral and intellectual growth. In that sense, I agree with you that a little bit of shame can be a personal and societal good. But feeling bad because you’ve behaved badly and feeling bad because someone else deliberately set out to cause you pain are two very different experiences.

Radical opinion apparently but I don’t believe in hurting people to teach them a lesson. I don’t believe it’s moral and what’s more, I don’t believe it works. (And there’s a pile of research - on prisons, on child development, on animal behavior ffs - that backs me up on this.) The only lessons people learn from intentionally inflicted pain are about force and fear and power. About who has the power to hurt them with impunity, and how to hurt people with even less power than they have.

You’re making a HUGE leap from “labeling inappropriate behavior” to “shaming.” (“Inappropriate” is also doing a whole lot of rhetorical work here, but again, I’m trying to respond in good faith.) And regardless of how careful you were to draw a distinction between shaming and bullying...like I said, it’s extremely revealing that my post about the latter made you feel so defensive of the former.

Might labeling someone’s behavior as harmful cause them to feel shame? Sure, and I don’t think this is a bad thing. But shaming is something else entirely. The end goal of shaming isn’t to label a behavior as harmful, or explain why it’s harmful, or teach healthier ways to behave. The end goal of shaming is to create feelings of shame, on the logic that shame and fear are the best tools society has for enforcing good behavior. It’s a demonstration of communal power and - let’s just admit it - communal pleasure in exercising that power, by making examples of people who step out of line. And by its very nature, it almost only ever “works” (if you can call it that) against people who are already vulnerable. You can’t shame someone with sufficient power and connections into good behavior, because they have enough social clout to insulate them from the negative effects. (Frankly I think it’s pretty clear by now that many powerful and unscrupulous people don’t have any shame, or at least don’t feel shame about the same things that we think they should, and public disgust may have some value as a demonstration of solidarity with their victims but it sure as hell isn’t gonna convince them to quit harming others.) You can’t shame someone into good behavior at all if their bad behavior is widely accepted by society. And on the very rare occasion that you can change someone’s behavior via public shaming, you haven’t taught them to be a better person; you’ve taught them to be afraid of you.

Like...I think your opinion is harmful! I disagree very strongly, and depending on how well I make my point and how susceptible you are to feeling badly about yourself because an internet stranger disapproves of your worldview, you might feel a twinge of shame. But I’m not trying to shame you; I’m trying to explain why I think you’re wrong and why I think it matters so much. And if you weren’t on anon and a bunch of other Tumblr users showed up in your inbox to harass and shame you for those opinions I HIGHLY doubt it would do anything to change your mind, and I definitely don’t think it would make Tumblr a better place, and I think that would be really shitty behavior on their part.

Shaming is a pretty effective tool for enforcing societal norms and power dynamics, including extremely unethical ones. It’s not a very effective tool for building healthier communities.

Point #3: Be deeply wary of any argument that asks you to carve out specific exceptions for particular classes of people.

Here’s the thing: we’ve all heard this argument before. There’s always some group that’s unraveling the very fabric of society by not conforming to it. We hear all about the social value of shame whenever queer people have the temerity to not only exist, but to ~threaten family values~ by being joyful and unashamed of themselves in public. We hear all about the social value of shame anytime women fail to toe the patriarchal line.

You’re telling me that shaming is a social tool to mark the limits of acceptable behavior and I’m going to assume you mean well. But I think you have to recognize that in practice, what that frequently means is that it’s a way of marking out the borders of societal protection - which is to say, a way of designating acceptable targets.

Think of slut-shaming. How dare she wear those clothes, how dare she dance that way, how dare she get drunk, how dare she drink at all, how dare she want and enjoy sex, how dare she act in a way that even suggests she might - and if she did any of those things she deserved what she got, and probably wanted it anyway. Think of those awful infamous rape cases like Steubenville, where the sexual assault itself is followed up by relentless community-wide cyberbullying of the victim. It’s not just violence. It’s shame-as-violence, and violence-as-shame.

Shaming enforces the social status quo. Like I said above, it’s always most effective when it’s used by the powerful against the vulnerable. And that makes it extremely prone to being weaponized not to enforce good behavior, but to enable bad behavior by blaming and dehumanizing the victim. Almost nobody goes around claiming to support bullying or rape or any other kind of abuse. They find a reason to justify it to themselves just this once.

Bullying is wrong, but THOSE nerds are so anti-socially weird that it’s for their own good. Rape is wrong, but THAT slut was asking for it. (Or: rape is wrong, except when it happens to rapists in prison.) Calling people animals is wrong, but it’s okay if you’re talking about murderers. Slavery is wrong, except as punishment for a crime. Rounding people up and putting them in camps is wrong, unless it’s wartime and you’re afraid they might give information or supplies or moral support to the other side. Surely these people don’t really count, surely these people aren’t really human, surely we can make a special exception for them.

And yeah, occasionally - not often, but occasionally - the people everybody wants to make a human rights exception for genuinely have done harm. Because I grew up during The Bush Years and spent a truly unfortunate and formative percentage of my teenage life arguing with people I had previously respected about how torture is a moral atrocity, I know that the standard response here is that I must love terrorists/pedophiles/nazis/rapists/gang members/hypothetical kinksters exposing themselves in public parks/whoever the Bad Guys Du Jour are, and support their crimes, and wish them to continue! Because I don’t want them to face Consequences For Their Actions!

This is overwrought nonsense and it should be self-evident to any thinking person that it’s overwrought nonsense, but in case it isn’t: in the first place, “consequences for one’s actions” doesn’t only mean “punitive cruelty,” and it’s either disingenuous or very unimaginative to suggest that it does. In the second, it has literally nothing to do with what anyone deserves and everything to do with the principle of the thing. Namely, that human dignity is a thing no matter how bad the human in question is; that cruelty brutalizes everyone involved; and that the moment you start carving out those exceptions you’re pulling blocks out of the fragile jenga tower that protects you from similar cruelty, because all anyone needs to do to put your head on the chopping block is make a halfway convincing case (or even just an emotionally compelling one; not sure how anyone can exist in the year 2020 and believe you actually need a rational argument to sway loads of people) that you’re one of the Bad Guys.

Spoiler alert: it’s almost always the most vulnerable people who are first on that chopping block, and almost never the hypothetical Bad Guys that folks rage against when they’re arguing for making exceptions.

Maybe it seems like I’m coming on a little intense here. Obviously bullying is not waterboarding, and I’m not suggesting that it is. But the argument follows the same underlying pattern: it’s wrong to bully people for being weird unless they’re Too Weird, in which case we’re doing them and society a favor by piling on the hurt and humiliation because that will ~definitely~ fix the problem rather than perpetuate cycles of harm, and also we just feel in our hearts that they deserve it and get a bit of a sadistic thrill from the idea of giving them what they deserve. And I do not trust an argument in that mold. I will never trust an argument in that mold.

It’s the same faulty moral logic, every time, and the sooner you learn to recognize it - in yourself and others - the sooner you can tell it to fuck off whenever and wherever it appears, and the clearer your perspective on a whole lot of things will be.

And finally, once more for the people in the back: the fact that we’re even talking about bad behavior here is a little beside the point, because bullying and shaming usually have nothing to do with enforcing standards of good behavior and everything to do with reinforcing hierarchies of social power.

#ask box #cw transphobia #cw rape #cw torture #cw homophobia #ethics tag #guiltshame tag #normal ≠ moral #my posts

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headspace-hotel · 3 years

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exactly! i don’t understand how things like rsd would be helped by communism.. people saying adhd and autism would be helped by communism are MAJORLY over simplifying and glorifying them, almost to the point of romanticism. how is the economic situation or having more time on your hands going to help if you’re overstimulated, have executive dysfunction even to just stand up, or forget what your address is? communism isn’t some sort of magic utopia, i wish people would take their discussions seriously instead of speaking over everyone to create their own fantasy land

I mean, honestly these people are just defining communism as “the perfect society where everyone is perfectly accommodated and everyone’s needs are provided for” which...depends on endlessly “No True Scotsman”-ing “communism” until you can’t argue that communism wouldn’t fix ADHD because the definition of communism you’re using is “society that fixes everyone’s problems, including ADHD.”

Here’s the thing: I straight up don’t believe that ADHD people are necessarily “adapted” to a certain lifestyle or environment. People keep bringing up “well, if you were a hunter-gatherer...” Hunter-gatherer societies are/were NOT identical, and people in many, many areas of the world started transitioning away from a purely hunter-gatherer lifestyle into a combination of foraging and agriculture like, 12,000 years ago. Modern capitalism as an economic system is a few hundred years old.

From a historical point of view, we literally can’t point to a single Thing where we diverged from what humans are Supposed To be like.

But going back to the hunter-gatherer thing...the foraging lifestyle varies based on the environment we’re in. So I think it might be a little bit of a reach to say that a certain complex set of interrelated qualities is adaptive in...all foraging lifestyles, ever?

And this fixation on things that are prevalent in humans being “adaptive” is...ableist, I’m sorry. There isn’t necessarily A Perfect Society where all human neurotypes can function the way they’re Supposed To, nor are problems neurodivergent people have necessarily a result of diverging from some “ideal” way of life. The fact is that some traits are not adaptive, and those people have value and deserve to be cared for, bottom line. If we’re looking for a reason that every human trait Helped Us Survive at some point we’re just turning eugenics inside out. It’s like “everyone is beautiful” vs. “You don’t have to be beautiful.” In the same way that expanding the definition of “beautiful” doesn’t help, reassuring me that my disability will disappear if I’m in the right environment feels like expanding the definition of “abled.”

Which is weird, because I thought “you aren’t measured by your ability to Contribute To Society” was the point of anti-capitalist disability activism, but I see all these anti-capitalist takes on ADHD trickling back into “there’s a role for you in society that you’re Meant To play, we just have to find it.”

This is not even getting into how “adaptive” traits aren’t necessarily the best thing for the individual. Animals regularly evolve traits that are adaptive on a population-wide level, but are pretty bad for the individual. Under many circumstances traits that sacrifice individual organisms for the sake of the population evolve. Animals eating or abandoning their young when under stress is adaptive. Bees stinging is adaptive, even though the stinger basically pulls the bee’s guts out along with it when it detaches. The bright colors of many animals are a warning that they are poisonous, but somebody had to get eaten for that trait to evolve. What I’m saying is, ADHD might be an adaptation for the hunter gatherer lifestyle because our impulsivity meant that bands with ADHD traits prevalent in them figured out which mushrooms and berries were poisonous faster. Evolution does fucked up things like that!

Also... “people are happiest when they’re doing what they’re ‘naturally’ suited to do” is a presumption. A person being “suited to” a role in society doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be happiest in that role. “Role I can succeed in without medication” isn’t necessarily going to be better for me, as a person, than “role I need to be medicated to succeed in.”

#adhd #actually adhd #society #ask #anthropology #culture

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writingwithcolor · 3 years

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Rebellion in Ojibwe Society: Considerations for Pre-Contact Indigenous Peoples

@raconteuse3 asked:

Hi! I'm writing a fantasy story with an Ojibwe-like culture, and I'm wondering what rebellion/counter culture would look like in a tribal culture pre-contact? One of my characters has a rebellious spirit, but I keep writing her in a very ... American-teenage-rebellion way, which I know isn't a phase of life in all cultures. To rephrase in snarky terms, "what were Ojibwe punks up to 500 years ago?" I haven't been able to find any helpful information, so I thought I'd ask here! Thank you!

Traditional disclaimer: not raised under traditional parenting techniques, not from that nation, this is primarily pointing out structural differences in Indigenous society vs Western from a reconnecting person.

Teenagerhood as we know it is modern

When it comes to the concept of rebellion, there is one very important thing to keep in mind: how recent and privileged the concept of “teenagerhood is a sheltered time you figure yourself out” is. In a lot of traditional societies, you started helping doing the adult work in childhood alongside your parents. By teenage years you were a pretty valued member of the community, and were beginning to work on adult honours, were looking to get married, etc.

Pre-contact parenting traditions exists in modern day, too. You can absolutely look at very modern, very connected Indigenous societies and notice the way they structure work and parenting is different. Parenting traditions are going under a huge revival as communities heal from residential schools, and these traditional techniques are being preserved.

So what is she even rebelling against? She’d be in a world where she’d be granted a lot of autonomy, be able to do basically everything an adult could by this point, and would have been guided by people working alongside her. The traditional avenues of rebellion like “you don’t know what it’s like to grow up now” and “I’m not a kid stop treating me like one” are harder to rely on.

It’s really primarily an industrialization invention to have teen years be the “in between” years we know them as today. In modern times, teenage years are considered the years you focus on your education to eventually get started as an adult in your 20s, once you have a job that is in a separate institution to your family.

In non-industrial societies where the primary work available is what keeps the community running, and extra time is spent creating beauty (art, stories, music), or advancing our understanding of the world (medicine, scientific experiments). There is far less need for a period of being sheltered where all you do is educate yourself in order to be an adult; I’d assume the primary structures of teenage years would be based around helping teach emotional regulation.

A note: the average hunter-gatherer, according to anthropologists, only “does work” (to survive) about 20 hours a week. There would be plenty of time to do fun things in society.

And I’m sure somebody in the notes will mention it: yes, the fact that the average age was closer to 60-70 instead of 80-90 like we have in industrial society is part of it. But elders could and did live into their 80s pre-contact, so the point is less salient than you’d think.

Environmental controls didn’t exist

The other important thing to keep in mind is: there was only so much rebellion you could do before you ended up dead from the natural world.

Elders were those who had survived and whose wisdom you could use to help everyone’s survival. Counsel and collective leadership were often prized, along with young experience. Humility was often taught as a virtue because pride went out and got you killed, and greed would render the land uninhabitable.

So really, the likelihood of having her be rebellious in any way we’d recognize is slim to none. Traditional Indigenous parenting techniques are worlds different than American parenting techniques, and anthropologist after anthropologist has noted that kids in Indigenous societies—when those societies don’t have massive traumas that come from, say, residential schools and parents never being able to learn Indigenous practices—are way more well adjusted than Western teenagers.

If you’re dead set on having her be rebellious in some way: my biggest suggestion would be to read ethnographies of the Ojibwe that described their cultural practices and see if there were any social norms discussed around teenage rebellion; you could get lucky and find a gem of rebellion actively described, or you might have to read through a bunch and piece together a cultural context from them.

But you need to do this research anyway, so look for particularly thick and comprehensive tomes. As I said, this can be found in modern day, so you’re not super limited by time period. If you really want to focus on “as it was”, you’ll be looking for writings between 1850 and 1930.

(I’ve read one ethnography that mentioned an avenue of rebellion among the Omaha, written in 1911. It described how arranged marriages for teenage girls were common, but if the girl could get her chosen husband’s family to treat her as his wife, then the father couldn’t force her to marry the guy he chose. But that relies on a patriarchal society, even if the idea of a patriarchal society would have looked different at the time)

Look for things published by universities; those will have the best academic rigour. I’m not super well versed in the modern anthropology programs because my education stopped right before I got to that point, but an edu with a heavy involvement in the tribe will be the best.

Historically your best sources, or at least a place to look for sources, are those who had close connections with the tribe and lived there for extended periods of time, or even better had tribal co-writers. An example of the former would be Margaret Mead, who wrote Coming of Age in American Samoa, and she kind of single handedly brought breastfeeding back to American society. Her work is highly debated, but the Samoans she worked with loved her; she lived with them for most of her life, from her 20s to retirement. An example of the latter is Alice Fletcher, who co-wrote The Omaha Tribe with Francis La Flesche.

Ojibwe, please comment: What does “rebellion” look like to you?

~ Mod Lesya

#Asks #ojibwe #fantasy #parenting #parents #rebellion #native american #Teenagers #worldbuilding #family #Family Life

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septembercfawkes · 3 years

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How Character Creates Context

I've been reading Dwight V. Swain's famous book, Techniques of the Selling Writer; published in 1965, it's kind of considered a classic in the writing world, and so far, I've been impressed with how his advice has held up. This book is most famous for Swain's approach to scene structure ("scene" and "sequel"--if you've heard of that) as well as what he calls motivation reaction units (or MRUs). But it covers plenty of other topics as well, one of which is context.

Now, when I talk about context, I'm not talking about the year a story is written, who it is written by, or the climate of that time. Context in a story is all the information the audience needs to accurately interpret, understand, and assign value to, what is happening. It includes all the grounding and guiding information the audience may need, such as who the characters are or where it takes place, as well as any pertinent worldbuilding information, such as taboos of the time period or the rules of a magic system. This enables the audience to derive meaning from what is happening.

When the audience lacks context, the story becomes very vague, which is a problem for several reasons. (See my post on vague vs. ambiguous for further reading.) If there is no context, there is almost no investment in the story, because the audience doesn't have access to the meaning of any of it. If they don't have access to any clear meaning, they are unable to care about what happens. Perhaps the only time where a lack of context works well is when writing teasers (which must always be short strictly because they lack context). An audience will not sit through a lack of context for very long.

Context will usually be supplied through the viewpoint character or narrator (and in most stories, these will be essentially the same, and usually be the protagonist). Whoever is telling the story, will convey the setup of a scene and slide in any important information--such as the laws of a dystopian society or why the Smith family who lives down the street matters. One thing newer writers need to be careful of, is to not make the context into subtext. Context = what the audience needs, to understand what is happening in the text itself. Subtext = additional information that is implied from the text. Context allows us to understand the text, which then allows us access to subtext.

In his book, Swain talks specifically about how character creates context, which is what I'd like to share with everyone today.

As events unfold in a story, the reader needs to be able to assign value to whether what happened was good or bad. Say that a big rainstorm comes in the story, is that good or bad (or irrelevant)? What about a bombing raid? Good or bad?

As readers, we might bring some of our own experiences and opinions to the text, but in order to properly experience a story, we need to be able to assign value to events in the story. Some of that value will come from the potential consequences (stakes) of the event. But a lot of that value will come from the characters.

If the character is suffering a drought, then a big rainstorm will be a blessing. If a character has her clothes hanging out to dry, then a big rainstorm will be a curse.

"A thing matters only insofar as it relates to and affects and is judged by people. . . . We decide how significant a thing is by the way a particular somebody behaves when faced with a specific instance." - Dwight V. Swain.

Without someone to orient us as to whether something is good or bad, we are just reading about events.

Meaning and significance only take real effect when we know about the characters. As an audience, what we have to gain or lose from an event in a story, will be based on what the characters have to gain or lose and who we are rooting for. What the character wants (goal), what the character has to lose (stakes), and how the character feels about events (reaction) help readers assign meaning and interpretation to what happens (plot). Otherwise, it's just stuff happening. (And trust me, I've read passages of "just stuff happening" and it's not very interesting.)

Let's look at an example. Last week I saw the musical Annie. Early in the play, Annie tries and manages to escape from the orphanage . . .

Event: Sneaking out of the orphanage.

Protagonist: Annie

Goal: Escape the orphanage, so she can find her parents

Stakes: If she finds her parents, she can be part of a loving family. If she doesn't find her parents, she'll live the next several years as an orphan under the mean Miss Hannigan (and probably never have a loving family).

Reaction: Glad (and optimistic) to have escaped and to be looking for her parents

The event itself, "sneaking out of the orphanage," could be interpreted as a good thing or a bad thing. But it's Annie who equips us to properly identify it as a good thing.

Because Annie is who we care about, and (furthermore) because we know her goal and the stakes tied to it, we view the fact she sneaks out of the orphanage as something successful, as something good. Her reaction strengthens that. Running away from the orphanage is progress.

However, in contrast, if Miss Hannigan was the focal character, then the same event would be interpreted as something bad. Miss Hannigan's goal is to keep Annie from leaving. If Annie leaves, Miss Hannigan could get in trouble with the law. Annie sneaking out is a setback.

This is all in general, of course, because like all writing things, there are exceptions. It is possible to deviate the audience's experience from the protagonist's experience. After all, in A Christmas Carol, the audience isn't meant to share Scrooge's views on Christmas in the beginning. The narrator, tone, promises made, and simply our own cultural understandings may provide a context that is the exact opposite of the protagonist's experience. However, one may argue, that in some sense, we are being provided more than one "context" or interpretation of events. Scrooge's and our own.

Also, if you have multiple viewpoint characters throughout your story, it may be that the protagonist of the story, may not be the "protagonist" of a particular scene. You may have a viewpoint character who acts as the focal character for the scene.

So this can all get pretty messy, pretty fast.

But notice in these examples, the audience is essentially being given multiple interpretations of the story's events. This creates ambiguity. Ambiguity happens when something has multiple interpretations. Vagueness happens when something has no clear interpretation. Ambiguity is fine and is often a great tool to use. Vagueness is often problematic, as it makes the text inaccessible to the audience.

So having multiple entities create context for the audience is okay. Having no entity create clear context is problematic--because the audience can't care about what happens, if they can't interpret it.

As you work on your writing this week, maybe make sure your scene has these things:

A clear focal character

with a goal

that has stakes.

An event related to that goal

and the focal character's reaction to that event.

This will help draw your audience in, because they'll have context, which allows them to make meaningful interpretations.

#writing tips #writing tips and tricks #writeblr #fanfic #writing help #writing reference #context #character #annie

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mcustorm · 3 years

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In Defense of a Black Cyclops

In case my username didn’t make it clear, the single most anticipated visual project for me is the MCU’s interpretation of the X-Men, which hasn’t even been announced yet [officially]. And ladies and gents, I have found your Cyclops:

Good ol’ Alfred Enoch, who we all know from Harry Potter and How to Get Away With Murder. If you’re not familiar with HTGAWM, know that his character goes from the de facto leader of the ragtag (murderers) and most cherished protege of Viola Davis’ Professor X to taking more of a grimdark turn after his girlfriend’s death. Sound at least somewhat familiar?

Enoch also embodies the physicality of the character well, seeing as to how he’s “slim”, 6′4(!!), black, and notoriously lanky. Wait, one of these isn’t like the others.

In general I hate fancasting. Everyone generally picks from the same pool of about 30 actors (Peeps, neither Taron nor Daniel is a good Wolverine choice. Argue with your mother!), and most all of it is based on physicality, except when it absolutely should be (like say, choosing a ~5′10 dark-skinned black woman for Storm).

And I think there’s some malarkey afoot. I think there needs to be some serious consideration on part of fancasters and actual casting agents alike to rethink race when it comes to the [white] X-Men, especially since they’re the X-Men of all teams. So I’ll make the case for a black Cyclops:

1. There is no quota on Black X-Men: There’s a bug in your ear that’s been whispering lies to you for years, it says something to the effect of “We need a black person on the team for diversity. How bout Storm?” And you’ve gotten complacent. Storm does not have to be the only black person on your X-Men roster.

2. The X-Men represent diversity: Iceman is gay, Cyclops and Prof. X are disabled (sorta), there are plenty of women, oh and everybody except Storm is white. Of the A-List X-Men, there is only *one* POC character. I’d argue that an MCU X-Men needs to champion diversity like never before.

3. The X-Men represent minority struggle while being mostly white: There’s a cognitive dissonance in the metaphor that has always been there, and for the most part, nobody cares. To appeal to the white readers of the 60′s, the X-Men were all initially white. That way, the message of the mutants could be related to the audience with a familiar face. We don’t need to approach the problem that way in 202?

4. Just because that’s the way it’s always been, doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be: The first line of defense. Sorry, that will never be a good justification for literally any idea. It’s time for some more critical thinking.

5. We don’t all want to be Bishop: So say you’re white and you have a kid who for his birthday having a costume party. You’ve bought some X-Men costumes and you want each kid to pick one. 9 white kids and one black kid show up to your house. As the kids deliberate who gets what costume, be it Cyke or Wolvie or whatever, you yell at everybody to “STOP!”, point to the one black kid and tell him “You’re gonna be Bishop. That’s it, end of story!”

We don’t all want to be Bishop. The black child could have the best Cyclops interpretation within him, but you’ll never know if you don’t let him try. And that’s no different from the Black actors of Hollywood. There’s no reason why all of the black talent should *have* to compete for the role of Bishop or Storm, which I’ve discussed, while Joe Schmo can walk up and audition for literally anybody he wants.

Jharrel Jerome is 23 and has an Emmy to his name. He needs to be in the MCU in some capacity, period. Stephan James is another. How bout Damson Idris. Ashton Sanders. But no, no, let’s fancast Dacre Montgomery or Ansel or Joe Keery again as [Human Torch, Wolverine, Iceman, Angel, I’ve literally seen it all.]

6. Nobody wants to see the B-team if it comes down to it. The next line of defense from your racebending naysayers after “That’s the way it’s always been!” is “Well, what about Psylocke, Bishop, Forge and Jubilee?” who are otherwise known as B-tier X-Men. The problem is, we’ve got limited time and limited spots.

So since the X-Men is all about wonky metaphors that make half sense, let me give you another: Let’s say somebody approaches you and says “Hey buddy, I got two free concert tickets for ya! You can either see Michael Jackson Sings the Blues, or you can go see Justin Timberlake. Free of charge!”

Now, are you used to MJ singing the blues? No! Do you have a problem with going to see Justin Timberlake? No, he’s fine on a Wednesday! He had that one little diddy we liked that one time. We’d love to see him eventually! But are you gonna say, “fuck that, I’m going to see MJ Sings the Blues” regardless? Hell yes, because that’s still Michael Jackson. He’s gonna give the same amazing performance he always does, it’s just gonna be the blues. And speaking of blues...

7. Black is not Blue, Brown is not Blue: Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard this one: “I don’t care if you’re black, white, purple, or green, I’m going to treat you all the same!” I will not say all have this intention, but some fancasters have noticed that the racial diversity is kinda low within the A-List X-Men, so they oh-so-generously give the following roles to a black or brown person: Iceman, Nightcrawler, Beast.

Notice the pattern? It’s a microaggression, and it’s bullshit. What these fancasters are implicitly telling you is that, yes the actors will be black or brown, but when the action starts we can ignore that. They’ll be blue by then. In other words, you in fact do care if they’re purple or green. Nobody will cry foul if Dev Patel gets to play Nightcrawler (because that’s a common one I see), but should Anna Diop be Starfire or Michael B. Jordan be Human Torch, I bet there’d be backlash. Oh wait. If that’s you, please stop acting like you actually value diversity. You don’t want to see black or brown skin, period. Unless of course, it’s Storm (refer to point #1).

But wait, there’s more! When brown characters get whitewashed in these movies, it’s crickets! So eventually it’s revealed implicitly that proclaimers of point #4 only care about it one way.

8. Professor X should not be black if you’re not willing to change anyone else: The next line of defense is that some people say the professor should be black, if anybody HAS to be racebent. Something something MLK Jr., Civil Rights or some shit. Number one, I’m not reducing Professor X to being a magical negro for 9 white people (and Storm!) who for all intents and purposes get to have all the action. Number 2, the Professor X/MLK/Magneto/Malcolm X comparison is an oversimplifying disservice to ALL FOUR of those people. I hate that line whenever I see it, please watch a documentary my friends.

9. The Candidates for Racebending: For me, the A-List X-Men are Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Angel, Beast, Wolverine, Storm, Gambit, Rogue, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Kitty Pryde. Now, who should be exempt from the racebending? Storm, she’s our designated minority. Gambit, he’s Cajun and they’re white (generally speaking, that’s a fun bit of research). Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler, because their nationality/ethnicity was the whole point of the Giant-Size premise in the first place. Angel, because his character embodies a privileged white male. Beast and Iceman, I don’t care one way or another (Point #7).

That leaves Cyclops, Rogue, Jean Grey, and Kitty Pryde. Now Jean Grey is a redhead, and we all know that every time a redhead is racebent people sharpen their pitchforks (Mary Jane, Wally West, Iris West), so I will cede the ground on Jean if only so that my ginger friends can get their rep. Kitty Pryde is Jewish, but Jews of color exist. Rogue is from the South. And Cyclops is, well, just Cyclops. That makes those three characters good options for more diversity. But allow me to make the case for Cyclops, specifically.

10. It’s not just diversity for diversity’s sake: If you had to pick who the main character of the X-Men is supposed to be, most would say Cyclops. And so in a series that highlights racial discrimination in society, it makes sense that our main character be black. While changing Cyclops’ skin color should not change who he is as a character, it *should* recontextualize it. Now, as an eventual increasingly radical leader of the X-Men, Cyclops would evoke real life figures such as Colin Kaepernick or, shall I say, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not that most X-Men fans and writers truly think about what it means to be black anyways. Storm’s minority status is almost always put through the lens of her being a mutant and not her being a black woman. In other words, you can’t argue that making a character black will fundamentally change his or her character when you haven’t even analyzed the racial context of the black character(s) you already have. Another concept that the MCU X-Men should tackle: intersectionality.

11. Representation matters: I have to say it: Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther hit different. And now he is tragically gone. At the end of the day, the MCU moving forward is down its most prominent black male superhero. Which has implications beyond just the movies themselves.

The women are in good hands. Shuri, Okoye, and Nakia are badasses in Wakanda, Valkyrie is ruling Asgard, Storm is almost assuredly on the way, RiRi Williams has already been cast, and Monica Rambeau is here and she’s not even at her most glorious yet. That doesn’t even include variable Δ, or the number of characters who can and will be racebent. And I’ll note again that to me, Gamora doesn’t count, because she’s green (#7 really pisses me off because it’s so blatant. I hate it). Of course from a behind the camera perspective we love black women getting work.

The men are a completely different story. Imma just go out and say it, I can’t stand Falcon and War Machine [in the MCU] because they’re not characters, they’re just two of a slew of MCU minority sidekicks who have essentially been at the beck and call of Captain America and Iron Man, respectively. You cannot tell Falcon’s story without mentioning Cap. The reverse is not true. There’s a whole essay that could be and have been written on “Minorities in the MCU, pre-Black Panther”. Remember, there’s a reason BP made so much noise in the first place.

So excluding those two we have, let’s see, M’Baku, Blade, and Fury who aren’t exactly the most superheroic superheroes, Eli Bradley is proooobably coming, I doubt Miles Morales is coming (because he’s just Peter Parker in the MCU), Luke Cage(?) Bishop(??), Sunspot(???), Blue Marvel(????). Not only are they not A-List, I would not put money on any of them being in the MCU any time soon.

Cyclops is thee Captain America of the X-Men. He’s the frontman. He’s the poster boy. He’s the “boy scout”, which in other words means he’s the hero, if there has to be one. It would mean a lot right now, and specifically *right now*, if he were to be black. The MCU needs it. It NEEDS it.

12. The X-Men is the Summers Story: I’ll even make the case that if just one character needs to racebent, then it should be Cyclops, because that of course implies that other related characters need to be black because half of the X-Men universe is in fact a part of the Summers family.

So now Cable is black. Corsair is black. Havok is black. And one of the most central stories in the X-Men mythos, the Summers family drama, is now a black family drama set in space or the future or where the fuck ever. The concept is boundary pushing. When white families have drama in the media, it gets to be Game of Thrones or Star Wars, while when black families have drama in the media, it has to be black people arguing in a kitchen or living room about their various earthly traumas (I’m @’ing you, Mr. Perry). I mean, that’s all fine and good often times, but I want my black family drama in space, dammit.

And again, this is the X-Men, the series that’s all about *minorities* and their struggle, so again, why not?

Oh, and I’ll even throw out a Havok fancast for you: How bout Jharrel Jerome?

#cyclops #scott summers #the mutants #monica rambeau #X-men #xmen #marvel #MCU #fancast #jharrel would actually be a better sunspot #but you get the point #my man would have OPTIONS

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ouyangzizhensdad · 4 years

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On the importance of MianMian: musings on the differences between the novel and CQL (PART 2/2)

If you haven’t already, please read through part one first, otherwise this will probably not be very cohesive or comprehensible. There is also some bonus meta because I keep having thoughts about MianMian.

In part one, I contrasted MianMian’s first appearance in the novel and the web series in order to show how MianMian’s characterisation and position within her society were established quite differently in both works. In this post, I will explore the domino effect of those adaptation choices, as well as consider how the two subsequent appearances of MianMian in the novel got translated into a visual format in CQL. Through this exercise, my goal is not only to illuminate the depth and significance of this minor character in the novel, but also to argue that the way her scenes were adapted in CQL ultimately reduced the impact of the character and excised many of the nuances put into her portrayal despite increasing her presence in the work.

(although kudos to CQL for casting Ann Wang because I do not get tired of looking at her face: look at that smile 😳)

The Servant’s Daughter Valued Jin Cultivator Standing up to a Room of Powerful Cultivators

In the novel, we meet MianMian for a second time after the Sunshot campaign has ended. Cultivators from the main sects and allied sects (including some who used to be loyal to the Wens!) are discussing at Jinlintai Wei Wuxian’s actions after he protected the Wens and set up residence on Mass Grave Hill. By that time, it appears her position in her sect, and even her sect’s position, has grown. We can speculate as to why (my personal take is that MianMian proved herself during the war and that her sect is one of the sect who pledged loyalty to the Jin and gained influence as a result). What is important is that she goes from someone who is so inconsequential she might have not even have been a disciple yet when we met her to someone who stands next to a sect leader (who we can safely assume in this context to be her sect leader). A lot is hinted about her character and what she experienced since we last saw her through that small and innocuous detail.

Suddenly, a careful voice interjected, “It’s not killing indiscriminately, is it?”

Lan Wangji seemed to have entered a realm of zen that blocked all of his senses. Hearing this, however, he moved, looking over. The one who spoke was a young woman with a fair face, standing beside one of the sect leaders.

I will not repeat here the entirety of her speech, which highlights the hypocrisy and the bad faith of the sects, and particularly the Jin sect’s unwillingness to shoulder any blame for their deplorable treatment of the Wens. Instead, I find important to highlight how the other cultivators present react to MianMian based on her positionality.

First, MianMian’s opinions are undercut by the people present due to the fact that she is a woman. Her motivations for speaking out are reduced to the irrational ramblings of a maiden in love.

“You can stop arguing,” someone sneered suddenly. “We don’t want to hear the comments of someone who has other motives.”

The woman’s face flushed.

“Explain things,” she said, raising her voice. “What do you mean, that I have other motives?”

“There’s no need for me to say anything. You know deep down and we know too. You fell for him back in the cave of the Xuanwu just because he flirted with you? You’re still arguing for him, calling white black no matter how irrational it is. Ha, women will always be women.”

The incident of Wei Wuxian saving a damsel in distress in the cave of the Xuanwu was indeed once a topic of conversation. Thus, many people realized immediately that this young woman was ‘MianMian’.

At once, somebody murmured, “So that’s why. Explains how she’s so desperate as to speak up for Wei Wuxian…”

“Irrational?” she fumed. “Calling white black? I’m just being considerate as it stands. What does it have to do with the fact that I’m a woman? You can’t be rational with me so you’re attacking me with other things?”

Then, when members of her own sect disparage her for speaking up, they suggest that her place in the discussion, in this palace of gilded power and privilege, is ultimately illegitimate or at the very least incredibly easy to render illegitimate.

“Stop wasting your time on her. That this kind of person actually belongs to our sect, that she was even able to find her way into the Golden Pavilion; I feel ashamed standing alongside her.

Many of those who spoke against her were from the same sect.

In this situation, not even her fellow sect members are willing to come to her defense or to give her the benefit of the doubt; she is to be shamed and separated from them, lest her actions reflect badly on their own standing.

MianMian’s choice to leave her sect behind is meaningful because she is not privileged. She does not have anyone powerful in her corner to back her up. She does not have many options; people act like she should be glad to even have made it this far, and we can infer that she only achieved her current position due to her skills and hard work. It is also meaningful because she is making that choice while knowing that she’s giving up on the privileges of the social position that she has worked to achieve. The fact that she is giving up on something big is highlighted by the reactions of many cultivators after her departure, who think she will come crawling back to find once more the security and privilege of the position she left behind.

Saying nothing, MianMian turned around and left. A while later, someone laughed. “If you’re taking it off, then don’t put it on again, if you’re so capable!”

“Who does she think she is… leaving as she pleases? Who cares? What is she trying to prove?”

Soon, some began to agree, “Women will always be women. They quit just after you say a few harsh words. She’ll definitely come back on her own, a couple of days later.”

“There’s no doubt. After all, she finally managed to turn from the daughter of a servant to a disciple, haha…”

Beyond what it means for her characterisation and the themes explored in the novel, this moment is significant because there are clear parallels between how she is treated in that moment and how WWX is talked about for protecting the Wen remnants and, later, for ‘deserting’ the Jiang sect. In fact, just before MianMian speaks out, sect leaders call WWX a “servant” and the “son of a servant” when underlying the ‘nerve’ of his ‘arrogance’ toward the sects with his actions.

One of the sect leaders added, “To be honest, I’ve wanted to say this since a long time ago. Although Wei Wuxian did a few things during the Sunshot Campaign, there are many guest cultivators who did more than him. I’ve never seen anyone as full of themselves as him. Excuse my bluntness, but he’s the son of a servant. How could the son of a servant be so arrogant?”

These passages are also reminiscent of the way WWX is discussed by cultivators celebrating his death in the prologue:

“That’s right, good riddance! If the YunmengJiang sect had not adopted him, educated him—this Wei Ying would have been a mediocre scoundrel all his life, nothing but riffraff…… what else could he be! The former head of the Jiang clan treated him as his own son, but what a son! [...]”

“I can’t believe Jiang Cheng really let this arrogant manservant live for so long. If it were me, when this Wei first defected, I wouldn’t have just stabbed him; I’d have cleaned house straight away. Then he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to commit all those deranged acts later. When it comes to these sorts of people, how can you even take sentiments like ‘same clan’, ‘same sect’, or ‘childhood loyalty’ into consideration?”

Due to the circumstances of their birth, even people who manage to achieve a higher position in society hold a tenuous grasp on the power and respect they have gained: their legitimacy is fraught. And even if they play the game right, the lines of legitimate belonging are always ready to be renegotiated by those in power. Despite the “few things” he did during the Sunshot Campaign that aligned with the interest of the sects, and despite being raised among the gentry in the Jiang sect and being perceived as a gongzi, WWX remains in the imaginary of the cultivators who see themselves as the legitimate holders of power as someone who needs to “remember his place”, someone who should be grateful and loyal as he has been “allowed” to raise in influence and be treated well in society despite being the son of a servant. And so when he stands against the interests of the sects, he’s not just betraying them: he betraying the social order which gives them legitimacy. This is directly tied to MianMian’s treatment in this scene. In the novel, MianMian is not only shamed and dismissed because she speaks out against the sects: it is also, if not primarily, because she did not, in the process, “remember her place”.

The scene as it is presented in the novel thus goes out of its way to set up a clear parallel between WWX and MianMian, not only in regards to their righteousness, but also in regards to how they are perceived and treated for being the children of servants. It also takes pain to underline the unfair treatment of women in that society. Moreover, if we’re only considering MianMian’s characterisation, it says a lot to see her have reached this level of importance in her sect despite her circumstances and then for her to let it all go.

In CQL? You’ve probably guessed it; all of these nuances are evacuated from the text. On top of the fact that MianMian continues to be established as a valued member of the Jin sect, the scene is cut short and a lot of the censure sent her way is excised. There are no mentions of her ‘having made her way’ into the room of powerful people who are allowed have an opinion on the state of the world. No mentions of her low social background and no mocking that she will crawl back to her sect after realising she can’t make it into the world without their influence and support. No dismissal of her based on the fact that she is a woman, or suggestions that she is standing up for the YLLZ only because she is enamoured with him. The scene is turned into a pale shadow of its original.

Instead of these elements, we do get a gasp from JZX (which becomes a dangling plot thread because he does not stand up for her nor does he reach out for her even though she’s supposed to be his good friend, nor do we see him being conflicted about being unable to beyond his gasp) and MianMian telling JGS that she is leaving his sect, which I’ll admit is pretty baller. But it does not even come close to having the significance and thematic implications of the scene as presented in the novel. CQL!MianMian stands up against the organized smear campaign against WWX and the sects’ unwillingness to accept their faults, and is only disregarded for having spoken against them: not because of who she was while she was raising doubts about their evaluation of the right and wrong. And that is significant, because it undercuts the discussions the novel explores through so many other characters about the impacts of being considered inferior by others.

The Travelling Rogue Cultivator who Stayed Home

Finally, in the novel, we meet MianMian once more when her daughter, Xiao MianMian, stumbles upon something she should not have seen while accompanying her parents on a night-hunt. The reason their paths cross is that, just like Wangxian, MianMian feels compelled to pursue night-hunts other cultivators disregard for their lack of glory in order to help the common people. This is her life mission as a travelling rogue cultivator: differently put, she goes where the chaos is. This set-up serves to highlight that MianMian and Wangxian are like-minded and share the same definition of what it means to be ‘Righteous’.

He asked, “Did you come here to night-hunt as well?”

Luo Qingyang nodded, “Yes. I heard spirits are haunting a nameless graveyard on this mountain, disturbing the lives of the people here, so I came to see if there’s any way I could help. Have you two cleaned it up already?”

The night-hunt also serves to reintroduce the theme of deception and rumours, and the ways in which MianMian is a character who is not swayed by public opinions but knows how easily others may be.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji exchanged a glance. “This was a lie too. No lives were lost. We looked it up. Only a few villagers who robbed the graves were bedridden for a while after being scared by the ghosts, and another broke his own leg when running away. Apart from these, there were no casualties. All those lives were made up for dramatic purposes.”

“So this was what happened?” interjected Luo Qingyang’s husband. “That’s absolutely shameless!”

“Oh, these people…” sighed Luo Qingyang. She seemed as if she remembered something, shaking her head, “They’re the same everywhere.”

This is because in the novel MianMian is tied to many themes, and always in a positive manner. Like WWX, she represents the good that is stifled by an unjust social order. She also represents the people who choose to defy and deviate from this social order to pursue a righteous life rather than trying to find vindication and power within that very social order (ie JGY or XY). Like the juniors, MianMian is a character that represents hope for the cultivation world, the potential for small but significant change. Like WWX and LWJ, she represents integrity in the face of the corrupting influences of power and politics, as well as the desire to protect the common people. Like Cangse Sanren, she represents the courage to make her own path in the world, and to marry for love with no considerations for social status or conventions, and the decision to becoming a travelling rogue cultivator.

On top of all these great things this scene accomplish, it is also just incredibly cute. After their talk, their parting is described like such: “Soon, the group had gone down the mountain, and Wei Wuxian could only say goodbye to them with some regret, continuing on another path alongside Lan Wangji.” Honestly, my ‘WWX and LWJ become Xiao MianMian’s shushus’ agenda is alive and well and I will not accept anything else.

In CQL, however, the reunion happens by pure coincidence. The scene is in actuality a mash-up between the reunion we have in the novel and another scene that takes place earlier, in which fugitives WWX and LWJ enter the home of strangers as they are looking for some water (and end up frolicking in hay).

Simply by changing the circumstances and the setting of the reunion, something is lost of the thematic connection between WWX/Wangxian and MianMian, even though viewers still get told that MianMian is someone who night-hunts. Without entering into the specific debate of whether show don’t tell is the only acceptable storytelling strategy, I think it’s fair to say that it is more effective to run into MianMian as she is night hunting based on the same rumours of hauntings as Wangxian instead of seeing her get home, pull a sword willy-nilly after hearing something suspicious in her backyard and finally getting told that she was out night hunting.

Moreover, having to recreate most of the beats of MianMian’s last appearance into this new context seems to have been quite confusing to the CQL production team, and seems to have breed, as a result, a lack of internal coherence to the scene (cut between the end of ep 43 and the beginning of ep 44), regardless of any of its other pitfalls as an adaptation.

In the CQL version, when we meet the family on their way back to their home, Xiao MianMian had been running around and her father chastises her by telling her something along the lines of “Don’t run around, what if you had gotten caught by the YLLZ?”, thereby suggesting that MianMian’s husband believes what is said about WWX. To this, Xiao MianMian replies But Mom Says he’s a Good Guy Though. Obviously, the intent of the writers was to show that MianMian had never bought into the rumours about WWX. However, this exchange makes seemingly no sense if one thinks about it for longer than a second. It suggests that MianMian had never talked about this topic with her husband or that he had never heard her talk about the YLLZ with their daughter. Considering how dangerous the YLLZ is said to be, and that they were night-hunting while he was a fugitive, I don’t see how that would have not come up even if for some unlikely reason she had until then only talked about the YLLZ with her daughter. Of course, one could suggest that MianMian’s husband says this to tease their daughter, fully aware that the YLLZ’s reputation of swallowing children is a tall tale, but the tone is not quite right? And it does not jive with the fact that MianMian is not on board with defaming people: I don’t think she’d be okay with her husband knowingly using the myth of the YLLZ to scare their kid into obedience because it’s convenient to do so? A miss.

To make matters worse, when WWX later asks MianMian is she’s back from night-hunting, Xiao MianMian says that they are back from searching for the YLLZ. First, there is a clear lack of coherence with the previous exchange between Xiao MianMian and her father. And again, it’s hard to get to the meaning of that exchange: is it implying that MianMian was looking for WWX to offer him her help? She certainly doesn’t once she does meet him, so that appears unlikely or at least it’s a plothole/dangling plot thread. But why be looking for him, if she knows he’s not the monster the rumours make him out to be? Clearly, the writers wanted to tell the viewers that MianMian is a rogue cultivator, and figured that having her back from a night-hunt would be enough: but why this line by Xiao MianMian about searching for the YLLZ? Is it just the fancy of a kid, who makes up her own stories while her parents pursue other cases (especially since MianMian says she was looking for puppets)? But then Xiao MianMian does say that ‘we’ were searching for him...

I can’t figure it out. I find it even weirder that, when WWX asks Xiao MianMian whether she is scared of the scary YLLZ (although she’s literally just said moments before that she was not scared of him in her exchange with her father that WWX certainly heard), Xiao MianMian starts replying that she is not scared and MianMian cuts her, apologizing to WWX that he daughter is too young and naive. What is she apologizing for? How is her daughter naive for not being scared of the YLLZ? Or is she apologizing for her daughter suggesting they were searching for the YLLZ? If so, why cut her now and not when she suggested that they were searching for him?

What’s happening in this scene?!

Also, even an attempt to keep lines as close to what they were in the novel ends up backfiring with the new context. In the novel, out night-hunting, MianMian asks “ 什么人” when she sees WWX come out from the direction of a graveyard (she has not seen LWJ yet). Knowing that she might suspect him of being a corpse or a spirit considering that it is night and that he is leaving a graveyard said to be haunted, WWX responds “不管是什么人，总归是人，不是别的东西 “ (No matter who I am, I’m a person after all, and not something else). In CQL, when MianMian hears a sound in her backyard, she asks “ 什么人” and, after LWJ comes out and is recognized by MianMian, WWX still responds (??) with a similar yet slightly different sentence: “ 不管是谁，反正是个人，不是东西 “ (No matter who I am, anyway I am a person, not a thing). This exchange in the context of the scene in CQL baffles me because: why would there be then an expectation that they would not be a person in this situation? Why would he say that after MianMian has seen and recognized LWJ, thus knowing full well that it is a person and not a spirit or a corpse? As well, why change “ 别的东西 “ (something else/different thing) for “ 东西 “ (thing) since MianMian’s question does not imply by itself that she thinks they are not people since she asks "什么人” (literally: what person?), making WWX’s statement that he is “not a thing” completely come out of nowhere? And it’s so much more perplexing than his original statement that he is not “something else” from a human.

I’m spending time on these two lines because I find them to be a sort of microcosm of some of the questionable adaptation choices made in CQL: at times the web series chooses to keep things from the novel even after changing the context in which these elements unfold without understanding how these no longer work within their new context. Yet, at the same time, it feels comfortable making what appear on the surface to be minute changes without thinking through the implications of them, and thus changing the point of these elements through these minute modifications.

Aside from these elements which prevent this moment in CQL to give us a scene that is internally coherent, let’s further interrogate some of the adaptational changes made between the novel and the web series, and their impact on the themes and characterisation.

One change that conflicts with the characterisation and the thematic discussion regards WWX inquiring about MianMian’s husband. Unlike in the novel, where WWX engages him in a little bit of chitchat and then feels forced by conventions to ask to which sect he belongs, CQL makes it seem as if it is an information WWX wants to ask because it’s literally the first thing he says to him, not even after a salutation or a “well met” (I will be magnanimous and believe that that choice to do so was for the sake of brevity and not because the preceding dialogue had not been written in the novel and the CQL writers couldn’t be bothered to come up with something). This, however, makes it look like WWX puts a lot of importance in knowing someone’s allegiance to a sect, which is the exact opposite of how he feels about it.

She pulled the man up, “This is my husband.”

Noticing that they held no malicious intent, the man softened visibly. After some chatter, Wei Wuxian asked out of convenience, “Which sect do you belong to and which kind of cultivation do you practice?”

The man answered frankly, “None of them.”

Luo Qingyang gazed at her husband, smiling, “My husband isn’t of the cultivating world. He used to be a merchant. But, he’s willing to go night-hunting with me…”

It was both rare and admirable that an ordinary person, and a man at that, would be willing to give up his originally stable life and dare travel the world with his wife, unafraid of danger and wander. Wei Wuxian could not help feeling respect for him.

Of course, without WWX’s thought process provided to us in the narration, the implications of MianMian’s husband being originally a merchant are a little bit lost in CQL, even if CQL!MianMian provides that piece of information. Of course, CQL could have chosen to include WWX’s musings, since it does include in this very scene some voice-over thoughts earlier. It is a shame though, that it does not, since MianMian and her husband are clear parallels for WWX’s parents in that regard: his father also left a stable life to travel the world with his wife.

Although, to be fair, CQL!MianMian is no longer a rogue cultivator who travels the world, so it is not like her husband made the decision to travel the world with her. Indeed, by frankensteining the two scenes from the novel, MianMian is by default no longer a rogue cultivator who travels the world: she is a rogue cultivator, sure, in that she does not belong to a sect, but she is a rogue cultivator with a home she clearly needs to inhabit during the day, what with the fact that they raise animals (we see little chicks in the background and there are piles of hay), and who night-hunts close enough to her home to be able to come back home in the morning. Moreover, without the context of meeting MianMian at the same glory-less night-hunt as Wangxian, it is harder to express the idea that MianMian is someone who chooses, like them, to do so for the common good and not for any prestige or rewards. MianMian is no longer another cultivator who goes ‘where the chaos is’ and, in terms of positive female representation, it is truly a shame. After all, the novel frames this as a positive and admirable trait which we see in our two main (male) protagonists: to have a woman follow, independently, the same path as them is meaningful.

Finally, instead of the scene closing with a regretful parting that hints at the sense of kinship between MianMian’s family and Wangxian, we get a truly (imo) patronizing ending. In CQL, their conversation is disrupted by threatening sounds. LWJ then instructs MianMian to stay in her home and protect Xiao MianMian while LWJ and WWX take care of things. So feminism..... such empowerment... To be honest, if CQL meant to change things and put MianMian in scenes where she wasn’t originally, why not have her go with Wangxian? Why not have her be there for the Mass Grave Hill Siege? Why not have her leave her daughter with her husband and let her be a badass? Instead, they conveniently check her out of the action after putting her directly in the middle of it. Instead of having MianMian be away from the sects and doing her own rogue cultivator thing as the events of the novels unfolded in WWX’s second life, explaining her absence, CQL reintroduces her just before an important moment but chooses to send her away once more, to stay home and protect her daughter, probably because they did not want to take the time and energy to figure out how and where she would fit into these scenes in which she had not be written in the novel. This is the kind of adaptational choice that makes me question why people consider CQL a more progressive work of fiction with regards to its treatment of female characters.

Final Musings: sometimes, less is more

Does an increase to the number of appearances of a character shape their impact on the audience? Or, conversely, does it dilute their meaning within and their impact on the text? There is not a simple answer to that question. Certainly, repetition is in itself a literary device, and many readers need salient and blunt reminders to get a message across, the likes of: the important characters are the ones you see the most often. Likewise, having a character feature more often in a work can provide the necessary breathing space to explore more and in more depth their psychology, motivations, past, actions, etc. However, the simple act of increasing the presence of a character does not inherently increase their impact on a work of fiction nor does it increase the nuances and depths of that character.

It is possible to adhere to a cynical or optimistic perspective regarding CQL’s decision to feature MDZS’ female characters more prominently. It is not hard to divine why the decision could have been made solely for the financial incentive of “pandering” to a female audience who dares to want to see themselves on screen. Conversely, one can imagine a production team animated by good intentions, who simply want to give more limelight to these female characters. Whether purely motivated by a profit-based logic or solely well-intentioned, or at a vector of both motives, it is clear that the CQL production did not increase the screen presence of MDZS’s female characters out of a desire to tell a stronger, more effective version of the original story they were working with. And that is why the urge to quantify good representation will always end up failing us in my opinion.

While it can be productive to consider trends, it does not give us a better media landscape or better individual works of fiction; it does not necessarily give us more impactful or better written female characters. This type of analysis urges us to see female characters as female first, without truly attempting to understand their purpose and treatment within the story. While MDZS has fewer female characters, these characters showcase different personalities and occupy different positions within the social world of the novel; they have arcs and thematic resonance and they cannot be simply replaced by a “sexy lamp” without disrupting the plot completely. They are also often given a surprising amount of depth, if readers are willing to pay attention to all that is found in the text and in the subtext.

For such a long novel, MDZS is able to remonstrate a certain amount of restraint wrt its storytelling. The timespan it wants to cover is expansive, its cast of characters not insignificant, and the story it aims to tell is ambitious. It is easy to imagine a meandering version of MDZS where many more characters are present, including many more female characters, or where the existing female characters get an extended presence within the narrative. But would those female characters have been more impactful? Would the story told have been a better one? The way the CQL production team chose to adapt MianMian hints that this is not a done conclusion.

(+ bonus MianMian meta)

#mdzs meta #mdzs #mianmian #luo qingyang #cql vs mdzs #mo dao zu shi #modaozushi #IT'S FINALLY DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!#this is my manifesto

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sxvethelastdance · 2 years

Text

Hello my name is Lee and it’s time to be annoying about my Z headcanons bc

a) it’s my go to show when I don’t have more than 2 brain cells

b) it amuses me to make dub-specific headcanons because while I respect the original intentions of the series and understand that the early 2000s western recontextualization wasn’t keen on the nuances of the original script:

I am simply a corny bitch. I make content for corny bitches only. If you don’t like Frankensteined bits of lore and the use of GT’s ideas then well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ fair enough.

More under the cut.

Saiyan Culture

- I fucking refuse to believe that “we’re wired that way” shit lmao. The implications of Saiyans as a genetically savage race who are wired to fuck fight and die and do only that because they dont have the genetic human capacity for 'civility' are uh, not good when we factor in their place in the narrative as an in-universe example of a marginalized people. I know it’s aliens and shit but it’s soooo much richer to account for how universally a society’s values influence the people who are a part of it. but yeah I think that a social culture that prioritizes fighting and killing and battle over everything else is bound to turn out people who by and large are defined by their ability to use their bodies to fight. They have high metabolisms and a culture of fighting, so it only makes sense for them to have high protein diets- not some inherent need to kill and eat the spoils. It's survival and also a collective sense of what's successful, what is efficient no matter how brutal it is. They value partners who can fight/who are vicious because that is the common conscience of what makes someone ‘worthy’. Also, Vegeta’s attitude can be explained by his status as a royal + what is likely the recontextualization of Saiyan glory to fit what the child version of himself thought they were and Goku’s can be explained by the fact that he was (1) dropped on his head as a baby and (2) raised in the woods. Have you MET rural folk? Completely bonkers.

- The Saiyans and Tuffles evolved from a common genetic ancestor, but that the Saiyans settled on Planet Plant later than the Tuffles did.

- Per the Saiyan-Tuffle war and the disparity between what happened (based on King Kai’s account, stating the Tuffles were a peaceful docile nonaggressive race that treated the Saiyans as equals vs Vegeta’s account in Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans where they forced the Saiyans to live out in the badlands as second class citizens)- What actually happened probably falls more to the middle. The Tuffles allowed them to settle on the land out in the deserts and to their credit- gave them the resources to start, but never really saw them as equals in terms of intellectual development vs their big advanced sprawling cities. A big microagressive cycle of holding out and tensions rising that culminated in the Saiyans deciding to say fuck it and commit tactical mass murder for their own advancement. I don’t want to push Saiyans out of accountability for their colonizing and take no prisoners philosophy, but I also don’t want the Tuffles to be totally absolved of their stake if there are other parts involved (because even if it’s true, they still didn’t deserve that! Complex storytelling you guys) so that’s my take.

Muse Stuff

Bulma:

- She was very obviously your typical child-prodigy. By the time she met Goku I’d put her in college, taking a gap semester to live her teenage life and hunt for the dragon balls

- Bisexual, she is sooooo bisexual. No further context here except that if Son Chi-Chi ever gets a divorce that she will love her soooo so right

- Bulma is 100% a sports TV girl, beer and belligerent yelling at bad calls is a very nice break from the hard intellectual work of being the team AND company scientist

- She cannot fight. Somebody get this bitch a gun (that works on ki users), something please.

- Her and Yamcha’s relationship didn’t work out because they were too similar/generally incompatible, not because of cheating or anything like that (seriously, they weren’t dating anymore when Yamcha took another girl to some concert or whatever.) For the longest time they had a ‘break-up-make-up’ relationship, coming back to each other because they were each other’s firsts and because quite honestly neither of them were ready to let go of the good times. But I think they gave it one more go during year 1 of the Android time-skip and broke it off relatively amicably.

- Her teal hair is the result of putting toner in her conditioner

- Bulma doesn’t really… Run the business logistical side of Capsule Corp as much as you’d think. She’s CEO, but I think that along with her keen business acumen that she maintains a very elite term to fill in her gaps and coordinates them to manage her affairs in more tedious divisions. She’s very hands-on in Capsule Corp’s technological advancement/R&D division and quite frankly cannot stand the idea of sitting still for 6 hour board meetings. She goes when it’s necessary and will generally crunch the numbers if things aren’t right, but otherwise you will find her in her lab and on the ground tinkering.

Gohan:

- His relationship to fighting is less him giving into his innate urge as a half-Saiyan and more an evolution of a child’s sense of personal responsibility after watching his friends and family die to the idea that training to protect his loved ones will be what makes him strong enough for just that task. Gohan does not, and will not ever possess the zest for fighting that his father and the Z-Fighters have.

- Speaking of [jazz hands] childhood trauma, I think he had some major unpacking to do during the time skip after cell. A lot of how he’d been handling it up to that point was rationalizing the circumstances and viewing himself as having fundamentally failed because he wasn’t up to the task fast enough to keep things from going the way they did. Getting Gohan to see himself as a child after all of that was /a lot/, not to mention the sibling envy of Gohan getting to train from the outset and generally having it easier than he did growing up. But I do think that he was able to sort it out with himself, and I think in sorting it out he REALLY pushed to go to public high school for a sense of normalcy he didn’t have before. He loves his family and the Z-Fighters, but I do think it was a good means for him to cultivate that kind of life for himself. He’s not quite the scholar-pacifist that his mother wanted (for his own safety and well-being, but for him- still to the detriment of taking agency for himself to help), but he’s not the hot blooded fighter his dad was hoping he’d be. He has his happy medium and he is oh so happy where he is now.

- Baby bisexual. Because I said so.

- Also, tangentially: As much as I love Videl - we have Chi-Chi and 18 for the stay at home mom stuff. Videl is a gotdamn fighter, I think having her either succeed Hercule as the champ (having effectively surpassed him) or running a dojo for young girls who want to fight while ALSO being a kickass mom is a good path for her to take as opposed to being defined solely as Gohan’s wife or Pan’s mom yknow? Let her maintain her grit and haughtiness while allowing her to have evened out from her teens. Her and Chi-Chi spar in the off-season to keep in shape

Vegeta:

- He is the ‘toxic hypermasculine to malewife OG’ no I will not be explaining. He’s cooking dinner for his daughter in an apron to keep his clothes clean as we speak and that’s on that

- The reason why he dogged Goku so long wasn’t because he beat him- Goku /did not beat him during the Saiyan saga/, the combined efforts of Goku, Krillin, Gohan and Yajirobe did. But because Goku was in his eyes ringleader and a full-blooded Saiyan, he latched onto attaching the blame to him for his humiliation. It was a shake-up of his status quo and he would spend so many years trying to get back that security. Tsk tsk, what a fragile ego.

- His relationship to kindness and affection can be aptly described as “you’re being facetious, cut the bullshit or I’ll kill you” because well [gestures to Frieza]. For a while, saccharine sweetness meant some shitty things. But see, him accepting those things (even if he bitches you out about it) shows that he HAS learned to like it in a fashion. Nobody can make him do anything he doesn’t want to do. He is actively engaging with this shit you guys.

- I am personally a fan of the idea that by the end of Z/GT that he recognized Goku as the better warrior, and that in some sense he gave up dogging his footsteps and started giving more of himself to the peace that followed, BUT I don’t necessarily thing that stopped him from pushing himself to the limit. He will never be free of his pride and that competitive push, but I personally enjoy the idea of a Vegeta that has learned something of a rest-fight balance. Not being as strong as Goku is no longer ‘not being strong at all’

Misc:

I was ranting about how good GT looks on paper condensed into these short points for your viewing. If you didn’t already want to shoot me then you’ll proooobably be fine with these takes.

- a Return to form. Widening Dragon Ball’s original scope of a journey to collect the dragon balls- but including more of the south galaxy in it.

- Reckoning with the Saiyan legacy in the form of the Tuffles, the race they slaughtered for their own advancement. How the ones left remaining have to deal with the fallout of those actions and what the Saiyans were

- The very real consequences of how frivolously everyone has used the dragon balls for the last 15 years or so given physical form. How the balls weren’t /meant/ to be used like this, a resource pushed to its limits and what it’s done to the planet as a result of their reliance. It’s like the exhaustion of a resource and kind of like a tie to the idea of what overconsumption does to the natural world and the (speaking here) magic around you. Consequences, give me some.

- Super Saiyan 4’s harkening back to the great ape motif.

Like all of it on paper? Amazing! So fucking rich with thematic content and a means to bring the series full circle. But the execution? Ghastly. Wildly entertaining in it’s absurdity but we missed out so bad

#(listen I’m an average fighter but a brilliant (social) scientist 😭😭😭 let me analyze this shit outside the fights #been holding onto this one for a while. have fun reading chucklefucks. love u)#(ok but if you want to hear me talk ur ear off about DBZ and toxic masculinity hit me up 👀#I have many many thoughts and I will be very annoying about them until I regain some brain cells.)#Gohan.txt #bulma.txt #vegeta.txt #dance break! ooc

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linkspooky · 4 years

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Right now, people are speculating if tomura has lost his humanity which includes his attachment to the league now that he was awakened with his new quirk as a ‘transcendent being’. I wonder how he will interact with his team when he returns? Will he question how the heroes managed to get the jump on them? How will he react to twice’s death? To Dabi letting in a hero spy into their lair and causing this raid and twice’s death? Is the tomura we have seen grow disappeared or is he still the same?

SHIGARAKI TOMURA - A VERY HUMAN VILLAIN

People may question if Shigaraki Tomura has lost his humanity since acquiring AFO’s power, however I would like to point out that it’s a running theme in the manga for characters to frequently question the humanity of Shigaraki and see him as something less than human, or a force that only exists for evil and destruction.

However, despite the fact that the heroes and Shigaraki’s enemies insist that Shigaraki has lost his humanity, the story shows the opposite. As much as Shigaraki has changed over the course of the story, he has also stayed the same.

Shigaraki started out as a kid who wanted to be a hero who saved others, and specifically a kid who would go out of his way to play with the bullied kids. Everyone knows this by now, I would say however growing up in that household shaped Shigaraki to have core values that don’t really change no matter how much he changes as a person.

Number one, the most important thing to Shigaraki is freedom. In a childish way he sees it as the freedom to do whatever he wants, because that is how All For One influenced him.

All for One specifically told Shigaraki that being born with the power to destroy means that he should use it without restraint, and never try to hold himself back because in doing so he’ll only hurt himself. AFO tried to influence him to be an unstable manchild because that would make him more dangerous and fearsome to the general public.

However, Shigaraki’s destruction is always a response. He always destroys for a reason no matter how much he insists his destruction is completely random. One of the key themes of My Hero Academia is that in times of crisis you will remember your origin. Shigaraki’s origin is a household that oppressed him to the extent that he wasn’t allowed to become a hero. All he wanted was someone in that household to agree with him rather than deny him. He wanted people to stop telling him he was wrong.

Shigaraki values freedom, specifically freedom from oppression. Oppression that specifically denies the needs of an individual just because they disrupt society. For example, the opppression that had Himiko’s parents turn abusive on her calling her a demon child because she was born with a strange quirk.

In that way Shigaraki fights for a kind of true liberation, different from what the liberation force fights for. The Meta Liberation Army while wanting to overturn society also repeated several of society’s oppressive attitude, juding people’s worth based entirely on the strength of their quirk whereas Shigaraki is willing to accept people like Compress, and Spinner who do not have super powerful combat efficient quirks and value them just as much as all the other members from his team.

Shigaraki also knows the feelings of someone who has not been saved. He’s reflected on this several times, even as early back as his conversation with Deku. He knows that the way the current society functions, it ignores the plights of victims like him that are either too inconvenient to save.

It’s what Shigaraki says to Deku word for word: “I could hurt you right now and not a single person would come save you. They’ll all walk by and pretend it’s none of their business, because they all think a hero is going to come save them.”

Shigaraki is willing to give people like Twice a chance, even though he was insane and his quirk no longer worked as well as it once did. Not only that, but when people make mistakes Shigaraki never throws them away. Giran is captured and ratted them out, and Shigaraki went to go save them. Twice makes a mistake and because of that Magne is killed, but rather than get angry at Twice, Shigaraki simply asks Twice to do his best to make up for his mistake, and that he’ll be doing his best alongside him.

Shigaraki understands the feelings of: “If only somebody had saved me” better than anyone else in the manga. This is something that even the kids don’t question. The kids in their complete and unwavering faith in the hero system can’t even respond to questions like “Who should you really be saving?”

Shigaraki also goes out of his way to save people even after they’ve made mistakes, or betrayed the league. Giran ratted on them and got nearly every member killed, and yet not only did Shigaraki walk right into a trap to save him, he also took special care to make sure he was alive, and rescued safely when he was in the middle of getting pounded.

The final is also somewhat of a paradox. Shigaraki has been manipulated to think that he hated his family, and wanted to kill everyone.

However, all of Shigaraki’s actions show the opposite. Not only does Shigaraki feel guilt for killing his family several years after the fact. Not only did he intentionally hold back his quirk at first because he was afraid of killing again. The words of his family stayed with him. Shigaraki only ever remembers his family in a mostly positive light.

In his heart, Shigaraki holds himself accountable for what he did to his family even though it was an accident. At the same time, it’s revealed to us in his dream sequence that he already forgives his family for what transpired today, he remembers his grandparents being kind to him, he doesn’t resent his mom for just watching what his family did to him and even reassures her, he tells his sister he doesn’t care that she tattled on him anymore.

His family is someone he can never forget in both senses of the word. He doesn’t forget the times his family household was kind to him, the genuine love his mother, grandparents, and sister all showed to him, and he hasn’t really stopped mourning them ever for a single moment. He even still keeps Nana’s hand, the last hand that wasn’t broken and wears it after his so called “liberation” from his past memories of them. Yet, at the same time he doesn’t allow his family to deny who he is.

Shigaraki is someone who has been influenced by people all of ihs life, his abusive father, AFO, and then all of AFO’s constituents and the other villains he’s fought against so far. However, at the same time Shigaraki has remained the same kid throughout all of this. Always Shimura Tenko. Always the kid who wanted to play with the kids who got bullied. Always the kid resentful he didn’t get saved.

2. Shigaraki is better than what created him

Eri is referred to as a cursed inhuman existence born only to destroy, simply because of the quirk she was born with, completely neglecting who Eri is as a person. Deku however says that just by slightly changing your perspective, you can see how kind and gentle Eri is.

Shigaraki is a character much like this. The people around him, mostly heroes always insist that he’s inhuman and again and again that he can only want destruction because of his quirk. Yet, the people closest to Shigaraki know how kind, and gentle he can be.

So we have characters like All Might, Mr. Completely Ignores Endeavor’s abuse of his own family, constantly saying that someone like Shigaraki can’t possibly have a cause for all of his destruction. Ignoring what Shigaraki says when he tells them that heroes can be violent too just like villains, their violence is just categorized differently.

Shigaraki is continually told he has no reason for wanting to destroy things, that there could be no possible motivation behind his actions. This is something that even AFO himself said, that Shigaraki simply lusted for destruction because he was born that way.

Characters insist again, that Shigaraki isn’t capable of creating anything, or achieving anything because he can only destroy. This is an identity that’s forced on him by his environment ut it’s not who he is at the center of his being. Even when he’s getting the tar beaten out of him by Re-Destro what he thinks is not that he wants to destroy, but rather that he wanted his family to tell him it was okay for him to be a hero.

So we reach the most recent chapter with someone once again asserting that Shigaraki cannot possibly want anything other than to hurt the people around him, and destroy what he can.

Even ENDEAVOR (lol) of all people accuses Shigaraki of not fighting for the right ideals. Yet, Shigaraki has always shown to be fighting for something.

People insist that Shigaraki was just born that way, that he just wants to destroy. Yet, there are very specific environmental factors that shaped him into who he is. Shigaraki who apparently has no reasons for doing the things he does, has the longest backstory in the series (four origin chapters in total if you count Shigaraki Tomura: Distortion). Shigaraki’s line against Endeavor also implies that Shigaraki has been fighting for the same thing from the start. That he’s always had a cause, something to fight for (or maybe even just fight against) and that he simply believed what other people constantly told him.

So, no clearly the All For One quirk being given to Shigaraki has not changed who he is as a person at all. Shigaraki’s thoughts always rest with his friends and his family. Shigaraki’s first literal action upon waking up is to call Machia to his side, and protect the league. Shigaraki’s actions also saved Himiko, because if Machia had not picked her up she likely would have gone on a suicide mission.

So, there is one last point I want to make: The reason the plan is going so wrong right now is precisely because Shigaraki is someone who chooses again and again to put his trust in others. First, it went wrong because not only did he allow Dabi free reign to invite whoever he wanted to the league, but he also trusted Twice with his location.

Shigaraki won’t throw Dabi out of the league for saying that he’s only here to use the league for his own benefit, because Shigaraki has always known this about Dabi and lets him work with the league anyway. Shigaraki is someone who puts his allies before themselves and gives them the freedom to be who they want to be.

Shigaraki has said mutliple times the league can do whatever they want. He’s not really selfishly minded or motivated like AFO is. If anything, Shigaraki is much more likely to sacrifice himself, or put the group’s needs first. The Shigaraki that we’ve seen right now is the same progression of the Shigaraki we’ve always known: he fights on the front lines to draw the heroes away from his friends, he fights himself instead of needlessly risking his own allies, he needs his allies by his side.

The raid happened because of Shigaraki’s trusting nature twice. Not only because he allowed Dabi to invite Hawks to the league, but also Kurogiri’s capture and betrayal someone Shigaraki was genuinely close to and listened to for counsel led to his location at the hospital being ratted out to both Eraserhead and Mic. So it’s not Shigaraki not trusting others that led to the Hospital Raid, but rather it’s because Shigaraki chose to trust others that this is all happening.

YET, when this happened last time with Overhaul Shigaraki didn’t stop trusting others. He didn’t throw Twice out. His choice back then was to take responsibility and trust Twice even more to fix the mistake he made. Which will likely be his response again.

Shigaraki also fights against anyone who tries to control or oppress him the same way his father did once. When AFO tries to physically control his own body, he frees himself of the vestiges.

Shigaraki won’t lose his trust in other people, and won’t lose his close relationship with the league, because Shigaraki has already sustained this kind of loss before. Over and over again. He loses most of the Nomus, he loses Magne, he loses AFO. Yet, at those times when he loses these things Shigaraki’s response is always the same.

Shigaraki is struggling to be better that the environment that created him. Shigaraki’s arc is not one of him losing his humanity, but rather Shigaraki keeping his humanity in the face of constant losses.

His environment is really truly something that should have robbed him of his humanity. There are people like AFO who are out there to make him into a puppet, to rob him of all agency, and identity. Yet, Shigaraki always fights back against those trying to control him and tell him no.

Shigaraki won’t turn on the league, because his connections with the league are what make him human. It’s his connections with others he makes over and over again in the face of his extremely oppressive environment, first with Kurogiri, then with the league that allows him to stay the same at the core of who he is.

While Shigaraki is constantly dehumanized by both the hero system and the villains he fights against, he’s actually one of the most human characters in the whole series. Not only is he very sympathetic and understandable where exactly he is coming from, but he’s also always, always, always, always, struggling against a set of very human flaws.

#Anonymous #mha meta #shigaraki tomura #shimura tenko #shigaraki meta #lov meta #league of villains meta #league of villains #all for one

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