#also i REALLY like the way his character is executed e.g. so wonderful and appealing but also not at all perfect

[leguin]

on the magicians, mental illness, and media criticism

CW for extended discussion of suicide, suicidal ideation, hospitalization, and syfy’s the magicians.

(crossposted to dreamwidth for readability)

recently i’ve had a lot of time on my hands, and so obviously i’ve been thinking about a comment i saw a few months ago on a magicians instagram post. the comment, which was left in response to an ongoing debate about the season 4 finale of the magicians (and liked by executive producer of the show chris fisher), argued that mentally ill people shouldn’t watch shows in which bad things happen to mentally ill characters because they might confuse it with real life and be triggered by it. the implication of this comment was that criticism of the show by mentally ill people is not worth listening and responding to because it’s unreasonable - because we have, in some way, confused the show with real life, and taken to heart the events that happened in it too deeply. furthermore, it implies that the solution to this is for mentally ill people to avoid being a part of the audience of the magicians.

this is an interesting argument to make given that quentin, one of the main characters in the show, is canonically depressed - very seriously so, at points. if we assume that the comment’s argument is correct, the question has to be asked: who is quentin for, and who is meant to relate to him, if not mentally ill viewers? of course, we also have to ask if this argument is correct in the first place. the answer is that it clearly isn’t, but it seemed to me to be worth some consideration - after all, i spent two or three days after watching the season 4 finale deeply depressed and barely functional, and that’s a reaction i’m eager to avoid having ever again.

so, some thoughts on the magicians, portrayals of mental illness and suicide in media, and criticism of those portrayals:

while thinking about this, i’ve realized that an awful lot of the media most important to me (e.g. flowers, the fall, please like me, wolf in white van, the goldfinch) involves bad things happening to mentally ill characters - including said characters trying or even succeeding in killing themselves. one of the assumptions that the comment’s argument makes is that all approaches to depicting mental illness are equal. but i’d be remiss if i didn’t note that none of these books, shows, or movies sent me spiraling into a depressive episode when i first encountered them, and that they all remain dear to me. i have rewatched/read and enjoyed all them several times, and often felt gratified to see my experiences with mental illness and suicidal ideation reflected in them. to me, this proves that there are responsible, non-triggering ways to portray these difficult, horrible, isolating experiences. (which is not to say that my experience with any of this is universal, but the fallout from the magicians‘ handling of suicide has been much more widespread and longlasting than i’ve seen with any other media concerning similar topics).

up until the season 4 finale, i counted the magicians as one of those shows i could watch to feel less alone. i was especially grateful to see a depressed character who has a difficult history with hospitalization and medication, something i strongly relate to. quentin is a character who makes it through almost four seasons of television by the skin of his teeth, without ever Solving The Problem of his depression, because on some levels it’s unsolvable, but learning and growing and loving all the same. i watched all of this, and thought it was good, and right, and important.

and then the season finale happened, and the magicians amply and unexpectedly demonstrated that there are also terrible, irresponsible ways to write about mental illness and suicide. the morning after the s4 finale i wrote:

i think i’m so upset because every part of quentin’s struggle with depression has been deeply resonant with my own experiences, up to and including his death, and that is not how i want to feel about someone who kills himself! i would like to see differences. i would like to see noticeable and appreciable differences!

and i keep thinking about that comment. wondering if along the way i did confuse something fictional with real life, if i made the same mistake quentin makes in relying too heavily on stories that let him down and make him try to be things he’s not.

but then i think, yknow, quentin is meant to be a character you see yourself in. the magicians was a show that purposefully appealed to people like q - people like me. he’s the audience surrogate, the depressed everyman, the person whose relationship with fiction is meant to reflect our own. he’s the guy who starts the show in a mental hospital. who in the world was meant to relate to quentin if not the people who have also sat on the other side of a desk from a doctor and told lies to try and get out of a hospital ward?

and the writers must’ve been aware of that. i say that not out of optimism, which i absolutely don’t have when it comes to this show, but because as late as the episode prior to the finale, they acknowledged that quentin was a character who was representative of a kind of relationship with fiction that is somewhat maladaptive, but also sometimes absolutely vital to survival. quentin says, in episode 4x12,

the idea of fillory is what saved my life. this promise that people like me, people like me, can somehow find an escape.

it should go without saying that you don’t make that kind of character kill himself  - or, if you prefer, ‘sacrifice himself in a premeditated act that guaranteed his death, after ensuring he wouldn’t be rescued, and after spending a season with serious ongoing trauma he was unable to process.’ you don’t spin his death into something heroic. and you don’t spend a season afterwards having everyone he cared about talk about how trying to save him would be disrespecting how much his death meant for them, as though his life meant less. as though his life didn’t mean anything to him. it feels really obvious, as i type this, that you shouldn’t do that. and i don’t mean that in a moralizing way - we have studies that suggest portraying suicides like this can lead to a spike in copycat suicides. writers discussing these topics have a very real duty to doing so responsibly, carefully, and preferably in consultation with organizations or people who can provide feedback. to the best of my knowledge, the writers of the magicians did not do this.

i’ve become very aware in the last year that there are right ways and wrong ways to write about these topics. and so i find it hard to buy the argument that i’m still so deeply unhappy about the magicians because i’m someone who can’t be trusted to decide something as simple as what media to engage with. i’m capable of being discerning, and i go out of my way to avoid things i think i can’t handle. the magicians didn’t slip through because i thought it’d be fun to add ‘suicidally depressed’ back onto my resume. it slipped through because it started out telling a story in a way that felt right, and then it took an abrupt, awful turn.

likewise, i find it hard to believe that i should be barred from criticizing the magicians because i was hurt too deeply by it - or that my criticism, my unreasonable, illegitimate criticism, is the reason why the show was canceled. there are people who can reasonably be blamed for how and why the magicians ended, and people who can’t be. something else that should go without saying: the actors and the audience are not in that first category. my recognition that the show’s treatment of quentin’s death is a seriously cautionary tale on a number of levels is not a problem. writing that story in the first place, and continuing to defend it in the face of any and all criticism is.

#the magicians #the magicians critical #suicide cw #fingers crossed that the formatting of this stays put

[theneircarebear]

My Infinity War Rant (And MCU Rant, by Extension)

Spoiler-free TL;DR: I’d give Infinity War a 4/10. Pretty action movie with some fun humour, but plot was executed poorly and the current state of the MCU is so annoyingly amatonormative, that I was honestly annoyed and bored throughout Infinity War and unfortunately likely will be for future films.

Some spoilers and expansion on my ideas under the cut. Please note that I am not an MCU expert (I have not seen every single title, nor have I read Marvel comics).

Avengers: Infinity War Critique

Too many characters and, by extension, too many storylines plagued this film. I suspected that this would happen, but hoped for some coherence anyway. Viewers were granted little. I think that a big fault of this film was that the writers/director tried to cram too much into one film. I found a few of the individual plots really interesting (e.g., Gamora and Thanos’ storyline, the execution of the Asgardians and Thor’s mourning over his people and his brother AND ALSO the fancy axe weapon that was not given nearly enough explanation, why exactly Scarlet Witch is powerful enough to destroy the Infinity Stones but no one else), and I would have loved separate movies that addressed these. Because they were crammed into one film, though, they seemed rushed. Loki’s death was sad, but I found that I didn’t really care all that much because Thor was given a five-second sad scene about it and then proceeded to be reserved for the rest of the film. Gamora and Thanos’ relationship was well-explored, and I remember that part of the film best; but I found that the cuts to the other superheroes and their storylines took away from that main story and just made me wait longer to watch the storyline I actually liked. Also, the end of it where Gamora was sacrificed (out of love) was really cheesy and stereotypical. I think that this film could have been decent even with all of the characters still in it, but the problem I had was that too many of the characters got Center Stage. I think that the film would have flowed better and been more coherent if many of these characters took supporting roles instead of being explored just as much as the main ones. Alternatively, since I know that many superheroes owned the Infinity Stones that were crucial to the plot and therefore had to be Center Stage at some point, concentration on those characters and cutting unnecessary other characters would have worked well. Did we really need so much focus on Ironman (and, by extension, Pepper)? No, not really, in my opinion. Did we need to bring Black Panther into the fray when the whole plan of Shuri taking out Vision’s Infinity Stone ended up being a waste of time anyway? No, I don’t really think so. Little scenes that detracted from the overall plot plagued this movie and just made it more incoherent.

The message of this film was not readily apparent to viewers. This is a consequence of cramming so much into one film, I think. I noticed that the ending of the film confused everyone in my theatre. Spoiler alert: half of the superheroes disappear into dust (i.e., Thanos wins). The obvious message here is that not everyone wins all the time (and that includes superheroes). I don’t take issue with this message necessarily, because I think it can be good to remind people to be realistic, but I do think that it was an odd direction to take for a movie of the superhero genre, and in the Avengers titles in particular. Superhero movies are meant to be escapist, and people go to watch them to see the hero win through some fantastic fireworks. “Well then obviously this film was meant to counter expectations and subvert the genre, so it’s Art,” you might say. If this was the goal, though, then I think it was executed poorly and with the wrong franchise. The Avengers titles are big frontrunners in the superhero boom of the present. When the average movie-watcher wants to see a typical superhero movie they will probably go to a popular one like the Avengers. You don’t have the art-appreciating people go to these films. Those people go see indie films or films that they already know exist to subvert the superhero genre (the Deadpool films come to mind here - so if the MCU already has a “genre-subverting” franchise, then why would they do that again with something very popular that was never designed to stray so much from genre norms?). I think that Infinity War could have still gotten the “not everybody wins all the time” message across in the film pretty well while still sticking to the superhero formula by having a conclusion beyond the one that we saw. Audience members might believe that Thanos smugly watching the sunset is the end of the movie but SURPRISE, one last battle fixes things or something. That’s something that many other superhero movies make use of and I think is effective. You can still convey the idea that battles are sometimes lost, but the point of superhero movies is to show that, no matter what, the war will be won. OK, so if that was the message the director wanted to go with, I think it was poorly executed mainly because of the ending. But I also think it was poorly executed in its writing and flow of other parts of the plot. I could tell that there was an attempt to focus on relationships between the supers: romantic plots, getting over rivalry (between Captain America and Ironman after Civil War’s happenings, for example), learning to team up with new and foreign supers, etc. Those attempts were all right, but could have been way better if, again, there weren’t so many of these subplots happening at the same time. They also distracted from the main message. Captain America and Ironman got over their differences pretty quickly and with no confrontation, which I thought was strange, even in the “ignore our grievances for the greater good” scenario. Wakanda was very quick to open itself up to participate in a war, considering its history and general distrust of others, honestly. The first thing Wakanda did after opening itself up publicly was fight, which is the absolute last thing anyone wanted to do. Because the film flip-flopped between so many ideas and morals, I found myself getting annoyed or confused or bored with the film because not much progress was being made with the main plot and I didn’t really get what the main message of the film was supposed to be. Every scene in a film should have a purpose, and there were many scenes I watched that honestly didn’t seem to have one except to appeal to niche viewers (that, again, probably weren’t the majority of the population watching this movie).

This brings me to my issue with the MCU in general, and with much of other media (it wouldn’t be fair to say only superhero movies have this problem): unnecessary romantic subplots and pretend feminism. Man, was I completely bored with Scarlet Witch and Vision’s relationship. Man, was I so annoyed that nearly every single main female superhero was paired off at some point in the MCU. Black Widow had a completely unnecessary stint with the Hulk. Scarlet Witch pretty quickly shifted from mourning her own brother to pursuing a romance with an AI. The idea that every female needs to have a romantic relationship is annoying and, frankly, unrealistic. As someone who identifies as aromantic, as well, I am so tired of seeing many of the superheroines I admire be forced into random relationships. This idea is harmful even for romantic people: romance is not the be-all-end-all of life. I didn’t take issue with Wonder Woman’s pursuance of romance. It was realistic and made sense for her character, and it was also not her character’s defining role in the story. It was also afforded a lot of development relative to the random romances we have seen in Marvel’s titles, namely the Avengers ones. I’m tired of films bowing to amatonormativity, and giving characters love interests when there aren’t any coherent logical bases for them. Individual superhero movies (like the Ironman titles, for example) can [more] successfully develop relationships, but in action-centered titles with a tonne of characters (like Avengers), there isn’t the time or place to be dealing with such things. Scarlet Witch and Vision’s relationship (as much as I hated it existing in the first place) felt incredibly rushed in the film. Ironman’s random kissing scene with Pepper was not important to the film at all - Pepper made little to no further appearance in the film later on. Her concern over the phone was enough to let us know that Ironman’s superheroing bothered her and put strain on their relationship. We didn’t need an additional scene to reaffirm their relationship, or establish it because, let’s be honest, Infinity War was not made to cater to audiences that hadn’t seen any of the previous films. Now the pretend feminism. Giving every female up to romance is one way the MCU perpetuates stereotypes that every girl wants to be in a relationship. But another big thing I have seen in many recent Marvel films (and other superhero films or just films where women are fighting anything) is that women are almost always and exclusively paired up to fight other women. The main villains are predominantly male, and the male superheroes get to fight them. One particular scene in Infinity War comes to mind that really gets at this well. Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, and Okoye are all fighting a female baddie. Just before this fight sequence, Scarlet Witch got to show off her incredible power by wiping out a large portion of the enemy horde sprinting into Wakanda. Okoye’s comment about Scarlet Witch’s power made me think that now that she’s on the field, the lads can have her help to take everyone down. But she doesn’t do that. Instead, she’s made to fight the female antagonist. If Scarlet Witch had such power, why wasn’t she on the team to go fight Thanos? Especially if she has enough power to destroy the Infinity Stones. I suspect it has something to do with the relationship she has with Vision and wanting to stay near him, which I think is a mightily convenient excuse and kind of boils her character down to one that will put romance above everything else in her life. This fight scene isn’t the only time Marvel (and many other films) does this female vs. female thing. I find that while these films claim to be feminist because they have literally super strong female characters, they very quickly send the women away to fight other baddies while the men get to deal with the main threat. I still see women being saved by men way more often than I see the other way around in these films. It’s like, women’s strength is being acknowledged but still laid inferior to men’s.

Something more subtle that I noticed (that is unconfirmed, btw) was in the post-credits scene Marvel always does. Audiences saw the Captain Marvel symbol flash on the screen, likely signalling that Captain Marvel will fix the whole situation. I had a few issues with this. 1. I thought that including some sort of hope like that would have better fit in the movie proper, but 2. I recognize that only non-casual Marvel fans (i.e., people who know the comics) would even recognize that symbol anyway. And also, 3. When I looked up Captain Marvel to see how the character could possibly fix the wacked up situation Thanos caused, the most popular result was the female Captain Marvel (Ms. Marvel) and she does not seem to have any sort of powers that I can imagine would fix everything. But, upon further reading, I found out that there is another version of Captain Marvel (male) who fixes the Thanos problem in the comics by essentially turning back time to before Thanos caused everything to go to shit. That’s great! And apparently there’s a Captain Marvel movie in the works (keeping Captain Marvel female, instead of making her male like the alternate comic version... right?). However, with this, the MCU is adding another character to the already confusing mix. We’ll have to watch her movie to understand her. This is a money grab. I know that it’s always been a money grab, but this is a little silly.

There were many points in Infinity War where the protagonists almost defeated Thanos, but were deterred because of too-convenient reasons (Starlord, I’m looking at you). There were many points in Infinity War where I or my friend sitting next to me thought of a much easier way to solve the problem and defeat the baddie than the characters did. As a result, I felt more and more disconnected from the characters, because so much of what they were doing wasn’t logical and I wasn’t entertained. Doing illogical things for the flashiness is fine, but in moderation. There was unnecessary drama in the fight sequences, and also not enough drama from other parts of the movie, to the point where I was so incredibly bored unless I was watching an action scene, which never really delivered completely because most of them were failures. I felt like I was watching amateurs, not seasoned superheroes.

The film started off decently, and it did have some good scenes, but I was overwhelmed by unnecessary plotlines and scenes, too many characters, and constant failure to really enjoy the movie past the first 45 minutes. I love action and superhero movies, but this one was one of the worst I’ve seen in recent years. You could have done better, Marvel.

#avengers #infinity war #rambling #annoyances #i don't know what else to tag this