#and then also often add moral implications to it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

iwritenarrativesandstuff · 7 months

Text

I'm probably going to do a terrible job of articulating myself here but every time I think about the worldbuilding in Hatoful Boyfriend, I think about the implications of having the birds simply have adopted the structure and policies of human society and go insane.

It's clearly originally just for the ridiculousness of it all for the players, but AGH it explains so much regarding the extremely rampant classism/racism/speciesism and how apparently normalized it is. It also, to me, adds a bit of moral nuance to the Dove - Hawk Party conflict.

(Long post under the cut. I'm so sorry I just kept going.)

First off, I'm obsessed with the concept of the birds becoming sapient and simply... taking over a society that was not structured for them. It leads to difficulties in universe! Bird wings are not made for doing tasks that human hands can do naturally - there's a couple instances where the characters ask for Hiyoko's assistance or express envy since she can just do the task more easily than they can. The birds are outright disadvantaged in certain areas of life, and yet, the society is in such turmoil due to the newness of it all that there still aren't really any workarounds for stuff like this.

Not that there haven't been any suggested solutions, such as the Labor 9 series, put forward initially by the Dove Party. Yeah, you know, that one throwaway line about how the party that up until this point have been the "good guys" wanted to take still semi-conscious human brains and make robotic slaves out of them Cyberman-style? What the hell. And what gets me is that Shuu was able to find the initial proposal, which he really only made tweaks to, which means that the project was at least close to being finished on the conceptual/planning/design phase before somebody went "hey this is a little fucked up actually".

The Dove Party wants peaceful coexistence with the humans, while the Hawk Party wants to eliminate humanity entirely. But we don't really go into how these two lines of thought evolved. I believe I have a suggestion for at least one part of the puzzle though.

Of all the birds in Hatoful, who enjoys the most privileges and the highest status? Fantails, it would seem. A breed of pigeon that is popular as a pet, considered beautiful and sought after, and achieve high accolades in shows and competitions - for clarity's sake, fantails were valuable in human society, and this status appears to have transferred when birds became sapient and took over. Conversely, which birds are ranked lower and often blocked from entering certain higher class places? Rock doves, who, in human society, are given an unfairly bad reputation, and considered anything from unclean and dirty, to nuisances, to pests. Again, this status transferred over when the birds took over.

So, while we don't know too many of the birds who make up the agents of the Dove and Hawk Party, let's take a look at who we do know of.

Fantails (Yuuya, Dove Party) are considered valuable over other doves and pigeons for being specially bred for their striking tail feathers

Cockatiels (Leone, Dove Party) are some of the most popular and beloved companion birds, kept as pets and considered very friendly

Rock doves (Ryuuji, Hawk Party) are considered unclean pests who receive a bad reputation, and are generally not treated with respect or appreciation <;- notable thing to mention here is that Ryuuji actually does like humans - I think he was only Hawk affiliated for the grant money and research facilities, which... fair enough man.

Chukar partridges (Shuu/Isa, Hawk Party) are game birds, specifically bred and released to be killed and eaten, and considered a delicacy

...do you... see what's going on here?

(I haven't mentioned Tohri as he's a special case. Give me a minute and I'll get to him!)

The birds we see in the Dove Party are those birds that were already viewed in a more favourable light by humans, a favourability that transferred over to their new society. Of course they are more likely to advocate for coexistence! They have less to lose, overall. And the Labor 9 series, and how that could've ever been suggested in the first place, suddenly makes a lot of sense. For many of these birds, society the way it exists now benefits them. Some of these high ranking Dove Party folks may be less about actual peace and justice (like Yuuya or Leone) and more about maintaining the current order of things - humans coexisting under their control, while they get to maintain their status... which is itself a product of human invention.

The birds we see in the Hawk Party, by contrast, are looked down on or hunted. Historically, even before bird sapience, they did not have a harmonious relation with humans - and it's likely this status carried over to their new society also, with many of these birds being more likely to have been disenfranchised. Their goal of elimination is therefore reactionary towards perceived threat. After all, the people who suffer when things go wrong aren't the ones at the top - it's all the people who sit at the bottom of the social rung; the vulnerable members of society who do not enjoy the same advantages as others.

Of course, the Hawk Party has built itself up into such a powerful group that they may have lost touch with this starting foundation - the only thing that remains is likely that reactionary fear. After all, people caught up in the actual conflict - Nageki, Hitori, Ryouta, and Hiyoko - see this kind of horrible bloodshed firsthand (firstwing?) and just want it to stop.

Again, it's not usually the people in these political factions who are the ones caught up in their conflict. It's the individuals who lack power or influence.

But that's just the political groups themselves. On an individual level, it's kind of interesting to look at and theorize where along the spectrum our core cast falls based on their species/breed.

Ryouta (rock dove) is actually rather indifferent towards humanity as a whole - he just likes Hiyoko. However, his witnessing of the Heartful House tragedy led him to abhor violence and unnecessary loss of life, and I'd imagine his mother's later illness solidified this. Ryouta doesn't seem overly interested in political struggles or the broader implications of a lot of things - he's actually a rather self-oriented character when it comes down to it (this is not a judgment, nor a bad thing! I love my boy!). Ryouta just doesn't want to lose people, really. A conflict would mean more loss, and rock doves seem to have to struggle enough as is.

Hiyoko (human) is the daughter of two diplomats, but interestingly, we don't get to see much of her political views on things - perhaps because even if she expressed them, it wouldn't really matter - she's not herself a diplomat, and humans are the lowest of the low - her going to a fancy school doesn't really change that. Social-wise, except with her friends, she is tolerated, not accepted. Yet, it's safe to say that Hiyoko strongly disapproves of people who flaunt their status - she's quick to not take crap from Sakuya, to get angry on behalf of Ryouta and herself over the gull clerk's assholery, and also to defend Miru and Kaku as living beings worthy of respect. Interestingly though, she also uses Okosan's status as a fantail to get Ryouta to let go of him and let him do whatever he wants so... it's kind of unclear what her firm beliefs are. Perhaps, as a human, she still values fantails more highly. I don't know honestly. Implicit bias?

Sakuya, Yuuya and Okosan (fantail pigeons) may share the same breed, but their experiences are highly different. Sakuya is largely separate from the human-bird conflict, as he is unlikely to be directly affected by it. As such, a lot of his story and development has to do with actually learning and un-learning about the world outside of the limitations of his "father's" classist views, which he simply mimics without understanding the larger implications. Yuuya and Okosan, on the other hand, may be fantails, but are also looked down on and often treated as inferior - Yuuya for being a "half-breed" and for his reputation, and Okosan for being closer to feral than a lot of other doves. Interestingly, these two show more interest and respect for the individual than Sakuya does, who often makes sweeping generalizations based on status - which makes sense to a degree, as they've been on the receiving end of this kind of treatment, whereas Sakuya hasn't. Okosan believes that each person has their own "wonderful names" (read: identity outside of breed or status), while Yuuya is a genuine fighter for justice who is able to get to the heart of people, especially in Holiday Star. However, even though they have experienced classism, they still have certain privileges with regards to species/race - take Okosan's shock when Hiyoko and Ryouta are barred entry from his favourite store. None of them are quite as out of place in everyday society as some of the other birds here, and it's notable that "diverse" St. Pigeonations still apparently has a significant fantail student population.

Shuu (chukar partridge) is really interesting, as he doesn't particularly care for the politics of the Hawk Party, and yet his role as a killer/hunter of both his fellow birds and humans is an interesting reversal of the chukar being a game bird. Shuu also has a disability (his semi-paralyzed right side) which hinders him in bird society even more than most. His extreme, yet coldly logical solution to kill all humans to stop the fighting between them, could be as much his rationality, as his joy in the sadistic, as a reactionary survivalism (remember he was caught up in a human terrorist attack as a child - while overall he considered this beneficial to him, he also did lose much of his colour vision and the use of his right side, so it did leave him weakened). Shuu attains control by "flipping the script" as it were.

Tohri (golden pheasant) starts out in the Hawk Party, but much like his colleagues, doesn't seem to care much for their politics. Golden pheasants are game birds whose eggs can be eaten, but are more often bred and kept for their plumage - they're not prey, but they're not exactly pets either. All this puts Tohri in this interesting position of being somewhat in the middle of this conflict, and indeed he goes on to be a part of (found?) the Crow Party - an opportunistic group that seeks to benefit from the overall conflict. Golden pheasants are birds intended to be admired for their beauty and intelligence more than anything else, benefitting in some ways from humans without a strong connection or a reliance, and Tohri's opportunism fits nicely with that. (As an aside, our sole crow character, Albert, is also something of an opportunist, being an assassin on the fringes of society.)

Hitori and Kazuaki (button quails) are somewhat interesting. It would be both expected and understandable if Hitori held hatred for humanity after the Heartful House incident, or even before then, considering they were all war orphans. Instead, he doesn't seem to harbour any particular ill-will - he seems totally fine around Hiyoko, and her being a human has nothing to do with his reticence with letting Nageki hang out with her in the shrine universe. Kazuaki, too, doesn't seem to mind Hiyoko being human and isn't afraid of her any more than he is anyone else. While quails are game birds, with both meat and eggs being eaten, button quails are too tiny for that and are mostly kept as pets - they are considered cute, silly, and entertaining, though a bit too jumpy to be outright companion birds. The quails don't seem to experience too much in the way of speciesism (except arguably with the whole mistaken identity of Kazuaki's corpse... there may be a bit of an "all quails look the same" thing going on perhaps). At the very least, they are able to occupy teaching positions at a renowned school as respected intellectuals, and did go to university. Still, it's kind of a known thing that you don't put button quails with bigger, more dominant birds, since larger birds will often pick on them or even outright try to kill them simply because they're small and shy - this may, in hindsight, explain some of Kazuaki's demeanour.

Nageki (mourning dove) and Anghel (luzon bleeding heart dove) are the two who are uncommon bird species in Japan. Nageki is another war orphan, who would be forgiven for harbouring resentment for humanity, but instead is appalled at the violence and made a huge sacrifice to get it to stop. It's kind of unclear how Nageki fits into this society, as mourning doves are not prey or pets - they're wild birds. They live on the outside of the human world, and while Nageki exists within current bird society, he likely doesn't have a designated status within it. Nageki is unfortunately also alienated from much of the action due to his illness and later his untimely death - this is why a lot of Nageki's thoughts are somewhat from an observer's perspective, with his most emotional moments being derived from his rare direct experiences - specifically the Heartful House tragedy and the human killings he was forced into, which solidified a really firm stance of not wanting anyone to suffer like that. Anghel is another outsider, this time genuinely a foreigner, as opposed to Nageki. Again, Luzons are wild birds, not prey or pets, and so it's a bit unclear what his status is. This might explain why Hiyoko repeats Sakuya's remarks towards him without apparently realizing they're actually insults - Anghel is removed enough from the conflict she is familiar with that it seems she doesn't quite... get it. Again, Anghel's role is as this strange kind of omniscient observer, whose perspective is closer to the player's than to the rest of the cast. He definitely frowns on the Hawk Party's overall goal - the Demon Spores are evil to him, and his main objective is to stop them from spreading, as they would cause damage to both birds and humans. I attribute his morals to his mother having raised him right lol. The lack of a clear status for both of them may be why they appear to take the stance of judgment based on individual actions, but are not heavily involved in the conflict itself - while humans tend to like mourning doves and luzons, there isn't much interaction that goes on between them. Nageki and Anghel are simply less embroiled in bird society's human-derived status conflict, which makes them both outsiders and observers.

As a bonus note, Azami, Rabu and Kenzaburou are all species of birds that can be kept as pets (java sparrow, budgie, parakeet), which may account for some of their friendliness towards Hiyoko, and Kenzaburou's willingness to hire her. Kenzaburou is even a bit old-fashioned it seems - he sleeps in a cage, which implies his ancestors were probably pet birds themselves. It's likely he, in particular, has more positive views on humans.

...Please tell me I'm not the only one who spent ages thinking about the implications and workings of a fictional post-apocalyptic bird society. Also I hope this made sense I kind of went off the rails here.

#storyrambles #anyways this was supposed to be a quick write up. yet here I am three hours later. does this even read properly anymore. help.#the one thing i'm a little unclear on here is how the ichijou family fits into all this. ichijou mino the headmaster was a nicobar pigeon #i find it likely mino was hawk affiliated if we're going with the trend here (nicobars are heavily exploited for food/#gizzard stones/zoos/illegal pet trade) and also note that he signed off on the human representative directive #but i want to know how shuu fits into that as he was formerly ichijou utsuro. who has the ichijou name? why different species?#are they prominent benefactors of the hawks? interesting to think on #also i was thinking about the gulls - they seem to be fairly high class but gulls definitely do not have a good reputation with humans lmao #however gulls get to do whatever they want a lot of the time because they are loud. and like to bully others (including humans)#i hereby propose they gained power by doing much the same once birds gained sapience hjfhbdf #hatoful boyfriend #hatoful spoilers #holiday star #hatoful meta

151 notes · View notes

artemis-pendragon · 1 year

Text

Red and White: A meta analysis of color and the subversion of morality in Martin Scorsese's Goncharov (1973)

Katya Goncharova

By now everyone knows that Katya is the Woman in White. Aside from the obvious ghost/haunting implications of this color scheme, white can be used to signal purity, something Katya should, by all accounts, have left far behind.

So is this a subversion of a cliche and outdated ideal of purity (although not at the time of the film's creation, making this possibility even more daring and subversive), or is there another meaning? Virginity and innocence are only two types of purity. There is also love, and the complex purity that often accompanies it. Katya is, at her heart, a very emotional and loving person. She may not show it as openly or loudly as Sofia, but it's undeniably there: her love for her husband, and, of course, for Sofia.

It's also an interesting departure from the red/black femme fatale/black widow color schemes of Soviet women spies and assassins in films made around the same time. Katya is a killer and a player in this deadly game, yes, but at her core she wants so desperately to be a good person, to escape the life her husband has condemned himself to. Katya hopes, against all odds, that love can redeem her. Perhaps her insistence on always wearing white is meant to hint at her longing for innocence and purity, even though her hands are already stained red.

Love and its complexities, as well as the discussion of traditional red and black color schemes used for femme fatales brings me to

Sofia

Sofia is both Katya's foil and mirror. She challenges Katya's morality by upholding her own, living off a value system that, while twisted in its own way, is ultimately one of the strongest moral compasses in the film. Her descent into the role of killer is not only Katya's doing; Sofia was destined for bloodshed long before they even met, and only comes into her own as a real player after the cocktail scene. This is demonstrated through Sofia's red and black color scheme, which, as I mentioned earlier, is typically associated with femme fatales and black widows.

However, Sofia also wears white, notably at the end of the film after the Boat Scene, after her descent into destruction and The Life. This shot is especially powerful, as it uses a red backdrop to emphasize the change that Sofia has gone through, and her merging with Katya while also retaining her own history and morality.

While she starts out as Katya's foil, over the course of the film the two women begin to merge, their twisted morality aligning until Sofia's femme fatale false persona become her truth. It is only then that she comes into her own and begins wearing white, and, interestingly, that half white/half red color pink: the mixed feelings and emotions of a changing woman.

Ultimately, color plays a critical role in Goncharov, especially in the portrayal of Sofia and Katya and their complex, emotional, and ultimately tragic joined fate. Sofia loses the vibrant reds and deep blacks of her scheme after the Cocktail Scene, which is when it seems that she's finally accepted her feelings for Katya and lost herself to that lifestyle. She has spilled blood, and the red of her clothes becomes the red on her hands.

For example, this is Sofia's outfit before and during the Boat Scene:

This is her outfit directly before the Cocktail Scene:

Tumblr won't allow me to add another image (reached my limit ranting it seems lol) but in Sofia's final scenes, she is seen in all white, just like Katya.

Winter has, truly, come to Naples, and it has swept Sofia up in its bitter white embrace--the embrace of a colder, more calculating mindset and morality, as well as the literal embrace of Katya Goncharova, her salvation and her doom.

#(i couldnt find a reference for Sofia so i picked Kathleen Turner because i think she has Sofia vibes lmao)#Goncharov #goncharov 1973 #mafia wives #katya x sofia #goncharov meta #sofya #unreality #tw unreality

556 notes · View notes

niteshade925 · 1 year

Text

Just a short post on the topic, since I intend to reserve the long version for my culture sideblog where this kind of post should belong:

Since many people (esp people in the west) tend to misunderstand what “Mandate of Heaven” really is, I’ll just explain it in a concise way. “Mandate of Heaven”, or 天命, which really should be translated as the “Will of Heaven” or “Heaven’s Will”, actually reflects “the will of the people”. I’m too lazy right now so I’ll just copy paste what I wrote in an addendum to someone else’s post:

Instead, "heaven" is better understood as "nature", one which can "reflect" the opinion of the people like a weird mirror of sorts. To understand what Mandate of Heaven means, one absolutely must understand what "Unity of Heaven and Humanity"/天人合一 means. In this concept, the opinions, thoughts, and actions of humans (not just ruling class people) are echoed by "heaven". Which means that, yes, this concept is really all about the people. Ideally, anyway. This also means that every time a natural disaster happened, it was seen as the people's discontent or the ruler's mistakes/wrongdoings reflected in nature. Thus, we see that when natural disasters happen in history, the emperor might issue a public confession (called 罪己诏, or "Edict of Self-Blame"), in the hopes that "heaven" (people by extension) might cease its wrath. Sometimes these "signs from heaven" were also used as justifications for rebellions and uprisings like OP mentioned above, sometimes also usurpations.

And:

Now we come to the part of why I said "ideally". In ancient China, there was a special social class that held just as much power as the emperor (sometimes even more than the emperor, for example the Three Kingdoms period). This class was called shi/士 (sometimes translated as "scholar officials" or "literati"), and may be understood as the class of "elites" in ancient China. Shi elites often exist in the form of clans or families who have a sort of "monopoly" on governmental positions, and they are not simply rich people or landowners or nobles. Most importantly, they have knowledge, and they can control the dispersal of knowledge. It was the shi elites who came up with this concept of "Unity of Heaven and Humanity", which meant they have the final say in what the "signs from heaven" actually meant. In theory, the "humanity" in this concept should encompass all people, but in practice, it really only meant the shi elites. So in the end, it was a nice idea, but its overwhelming reliance on human interpretation made it so historically the situation often became a tug of war between the ruler and the shi elites, and not the people putting a check on the actions of the ruling class.

To add on to that, here are more concepts associated with 天/Heaven:

天 (Heaven): Heaven in traditional Chinese thought represents the supreme morals and natural laws of the universe, and is not a god (which means it is also not “the” god). It’s above all gods. It does not have a form and unlike many other deities in Chinese religions and culture, is not visually anthropomorphized. It is also different from 老天爷 (”Old ‘Ye’ Heaven”) in common vernacular.

天道 (Heaven’s Way): the natural laws by which everything in the world exists, operates, and changes. Can also mean causality, as in the phrase “天道轮回，报应不爽” (”The Way of Heaven cycles around, and retribution will come sooner or later”; the implication is that if one does bad things, because of this cause and effect it will eventually come back to bite them in the ass).

天行 (Heaven’s Workings): literally the way Heaven operates, or just the laws of nature. As in “天行有常，不为尧存，不为桀亡” (”Heaven’s Workings is constant; it shall not exist because of a benevolent ruler like Yao, and shall not disappear because of a tyrannical ruler like Jie”) from 《荀子·天论》.

天理 (Heaven’s Principles): the natural laws of the world, the supreme morals, and the ultimate truth. Often used as the ultimate moral basis, as in “天理昭彰” (”Heaven’s Principles are clear and evident”; means that Heaven will uphold justice, punish those who are evil and reward those who are good).

天命 (Heaven’s Will): the will of nature (which includes all people). See above.

#mandate of heaven #chinese philosophy #chinese culture #天 #天道 #天行 #天理 #天命 #may delete when i actually come out with the longer post on the sideblog

295 notes · View notes

artbyblastweave · 9 months

Note

As a big superhero guy, I have a question: Why do you think it's so common to show Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Hank Pym, Hank McCoy (ESPESCIALLY those last two) as, at best, morally ambiguous and at worst, downright awful in modern portrayals? Is it standard American anti-intellectualism, tied into our growing distrust of science and technology, or is it just that they seem kinda bland?

I don't think it's anti-intellectualism per se. For three of the four I think it's just a consequence of contemporary writers being Allowed To Notice And Unpack Things.

For Reed Richards, it's the result of fans and writers applying a level of scrutiny to early plots and character beats that weren't intended to stand up to any real level of scrutiny. He's a guy who got all his best friends horribly mutated by taking them up in an untested spacecraft. He's a guy who brainwashed a bunch of captured skrulls into thinking they were cows. He's a guy who keeps whipping up extremely specific technological solutions to the problem at hand, which never seem to trickle down to the consumer market- hence the "Reed Richards is Useless" trope. And he's gotta dodge and weave around patriarchal accusations vis a vis a lot of the casual sexism of early FF, where Sue had limited combat utility and was often in the mix as the Damsel-in-distress classic. And obviously excising the unconsidered sexism from the dynamic is the right way to go, but treating that early recklessness/ruthlessness/callousness seriously, as an actual personality flaw that he has, and has to work around, is significantly more interesting than just rewriting the character to not behave like that.

For Iron Man it's the result of people starting to take more seriously the moral implications of the fact that he's an arms dealer and a billionaire. (Apocryphally, Stan Lee did this to see if he could create a character who would be popular with his left-leaning audience despite being everything they hate ideologically, but I take this with a grain of salt.) Another element, I think, is that in preparation for the release of Iron Man, Marvel made him a headliner in Civil War in 2007; the nature of Civil War lent itself to him doing a lot of authoritarian bullshit, and said bullshit sort of set the bar for his capacity for extreme behavior when pressed. Put Iron Man in any situation, try to determine the extent he'll go to in order to resolve it, and you have to take into account that time he was sticking his colleagues in virtual-reality prisons on behalf of the government. A demonstrated willingness to do atrocities for what you think of as the greater good does add some flavor and tension, I have to give them that!

For Hank Pym, it's totally down to the midlife crisis arc from 1981, where he rebranded as Yellowjacket, got drummed out of the Avengers for using excessive force, and battered his wife Janet when she tried to. You know. Talk him out of building a robot to perform a false flag attack against the rest of the team to get back in their good graces. The whole arc was supposed to be a very deliberate tragedy about his mental breakdown but it kind of poisoned the well on the character and became the thing future writers endlessly relitigate, either doubling down on it (The Ultimates, Marvel Zombies) or trying to repudiate it (Mighty Avengers, Avengers Academy.) Even before that, though, he had a pointed loose-cannon mad scientist situation going on even in comparison to the others on this list- his debut was a Twighlight zone-style horror story where he nearly gets himself killed testing the shrinking formula, and he also created Ultron and nearly got everyone killed that way!

I have no idea what's going on with Hank McCoy. I don't think I want to know what's going on with Hank McCoy. Every time I turn my ear in the direction of that corner of the fandom these days, all I hear is screaming. Are you guys alright

#asks #thoughts #comics #all positions outlined here are tentatively endorsed

87 notes · View notes

sokkastyles · 2 months

Note

personal opinion, I dont like how the comics made ozai and usra relationship. I always headcanon that they were in love and happy at first but slowly ozai became more greedy and abusive to his kids and kept playing mind games with them. I think Ozai does love usra but he loves power more and is willing to sacrifice anything to get it. I know everyone hates the live action, but I like it because they give ozai some dept. He's still an abusive asshole. But an abusive asshole that does have love for his family. Or did. But he cares more about power. And is willing to do anything to get it. I feel like with abusive parents they always make it seem all black and white and stuff when its not.

I didn't hate the live action and I do think they were attempting to give Ozai more depth, but I think they weren't successful in this, partially because I think there's a misconception about what "depth" means, especially when it comes to morally black and gray characters.

Original Ozai does have depth. It is hinted that he loved Ursa, and I think that he would say that he loves his children. Even when Zuko confronts him with what he did to him, he doesn't just laugh evilly, he justifies himself, and looks outraged by Zuko's accusation that what he did was cruel and wrong.

My problem with the attempts to give Ozai, and Azula to an extent, more "depth" in the live action is that they seem to mistake depth for sympathy, and it's not the same thing. The show kind of attempts to "explain" Ozai in a way that actually flattens the character, in my view, and misunderstands how abuse and abusive people work. Ozai isn't playing mind games with his children because he's looking for a "strong" heir (although he may tell himself that.) He's doing it because of his own insecurity and deep need to feed that insecurity. It's all about him.

I think he loved Ursa because she belonged to him, and loved that his children also belonged to him. I think he started to resent Ursa after she had children, actually, at the same time that his view of ownership strengthened. Because having his children both affirms that she is his and, simultaneously, means that he has to share her with the children, who demand so much of her time. I think this is at the heart of his resentment for Zuko (Ursa's firstborn and a boy, who Ozai sees himself and his own weak need in) and his to mold Azula in his image and distance herself from her mother (because he won't make the same mistake he did when Zuko was born, and because Azula is a mini version of her mother that Ozai can mold in the way he can't an adult Ursa.)

This is pretty psychologically complex stuff, which I feel adds more depth to a character than attempts to rationalize their actions, which often fall flat, particularly since Ozai's behavior should not be rationalized. I don't love the explanation the comics give of Ozai and Ursa's relationship, but I'm not a fan of the idea that they were in love, either, especially with the implication that Ozai might have once been a good husband, because like, there are people like this in the real world who never once had good intentions. There are people who get into relationships like this all the time. I believe Ozai would have been capable of charming Ursa once, but does that mean that the relationship was ever good, or does it just mean that Ozai is a good manipulator?

I actually think that the situation was probably similar to what we see Zuko (and Azula) slowly come to realize in the show: that the relationship was never good, but Ozai was good at convincing his family that it was good or at least, that he knew what was best for them.

I mean, Ozai was able to convince Ursa that the only way out of her situation was to commit murder, an act that would brand her as a traitor, put her out of her children's lives forever, and give Ozai everything he wanted. She was being manipulated in much the same way that Zuko was manipulated - banished and made to think it was her fault, made to be complicit in Ozai's crimes.

That tells me more about their relationship and about Ozai as a person than the comics or the live action do with, as I said before, much less exposition.

#ozai #ursa #atla live action #zuko #azula

39 notes · View notes

wetcatspellcaster · 3 months

Note

Did you see Neil Newbon’s take that Ascended Astarion is the real him free to act on cruelty and violence and the spawn is the one with the mask? Yeesh.

Ooooooh, THAT'S the disk horse that's happening right now!! I knew something was happening (I felt a tremor in the waters) but I had no clue what it was lmao, I don't follow cast stuff.

I will try to respond to this in good faith, but I'm not very good at fandom discourse and so I'm afraid it may not be the answer you want.

I can see why that reading might make people angry, but I dont have strong feelings about it. Obviously, it's not my take on Ascension, but from the beginning I've been very upfront that my take is serving the genre I'm writing in and the ship dynamics I find hot. My Tav is lawful good to an unhealthy extreme, and that was how she was conceived in her Early Access bullying phase. And meanwhile, I wanted to be in a Gothic horror where he's obsessed (morality chains will do that to you) and they beat the shit out of each other. I have to make the Ascendent a monster, for that to work, and for people not to feel guilty every time they enjoy watching him getting stepped on lmao.

But I do feel like there is a morality policing around Astarion's ending that I don't want to partake in. This might seem dumb for me to say, given that my Tav is a veritavle walking moral policeman, but that is bc I fucking love Villain/Heroine ships, so I am literally right there, at the Devil's Sacrament with everyone else.

While I like the good ending and prefer it for many reasons, I would agree with a reading of Newbon's words that it could be read as a mask. This might be bc I mask with the best of them, am doing it right now even as I write and edit this ask 20 times. There's masking as an outright lie, and then there's masking as 'gotta get through day to day life as a functional adult without everyone suddenly deciding they hate me'... I personally think its nice that spawn!Astarion cares about other people, and cares about being a functional member of society at all! It shows he's no longer a lonely outcast.

I could also go deeper (the autism really shining through in this reply) and say it's a mask, in the sense that this has been deemed the 'polite' and morally correct ending, that is acceptable to others and enables the player to feel good about themselves. Which is often a way we derive pleasure from media, and not wrong in and of itself! Making Astarion good makes players feel good - that's not wrong, but if we're comparing endings, we have to acknowledge it. An Ascended Ending doesn't really cater to that impulse... unless the player really likes to be dommed (more power to them).

Unfortunately anon, I can't sit here with my most popular fic being an Ascended!Astarion fic, and pretend that there isn't a bunch of fascination or interest surrounding the Ascended version of his character. People clearly want to explore the implications of his evil ending and indulge in the excess of it, but feel bad doing so. People don't ascend him in-game, but they go to my fic and other people's fic because they want to have some space to enjoy the implications - in the sexiness, in the timeline where Astarion has revenge, in a timeline where he is obsessed with Tav etc. I mean, just look at me, I can't sit through the Ascended scene, but I'm here writing a fic about it!!

The fact that it seems to happen more in fic than in playthroughs tells me, if I was to get super deep in a tumblr ask, that people feel guilt about it. Some kind of mask is being employed, by someone, somewhere, in that mix. So I'm not about to add to any of that kind of policing. It would be pretty disingenuous of me to get my most feedback from an Ascendent fic I am writing, and then judge people for liking Ascendency narratives...

So while I don't have much interest in pretending the evil ending isn't the evil ending, that doesn't sound to me (second hand, through you, with my brain seeing 7 or 8 different implications) to be what Newbon is saying. He's just saying that the Ascendent is the less palatable Astarion to other people and that spawn!Astarion still has some kind of mask or a politeness filter on. Which... yeah. Kinda. In my world, I like that Astarion decides its worthwhile to restrain himself, because he has things to care about potentially ruining. But that's still in many ways employing restraint. People don't just stop masking, they learn to care about what others think in a healthy way. They have friendships, relationships, other ties to the world, that make them want to be something other than a cruel or violent or evil version of themselves. I think that's nice, and far less lonely but um... yeah. I can see Newbon's point, even if I don't want to like, live or die by it.

#i can't do discourse don't make me do discourse I'm sorry if you just wanted me to agree and i ended up making it deep #asks #anons #wip: pieces still stuck in your teeth #i think the morality of both endings is pretty cut and dry #its the 7000 murders for me that makes that clear #but in terms of interpreting Ascended!Astarion i doctored my reading heavily to achieve the story i wanted to tell #i dont consider it canon or anything approaching canon

26 notes · View notes

girlfromenglishclass · 10 months

Text

The reunion of Penelope and Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey is the culmination of a romance that's kind of grand in scale, so it makes sense that it's been fixated on in artwork. But in the scene, there is the question of the whole slaughter that just happened. There are plenty of relatively moral justifications for it, but there remains the question of Penelope's reaction.

Penelope's reaction to the bloodshed changes the interpretation of the ending, and it's often skipped over in favor of the classic romantic fade-to-black ending. We have three options.

Option #1) Penelope has no reaction to the slaughter/doesn't care. This is the one favored in more cinematic/simpler looks at the story. It's also the closest to what you will find in-text, as they don't necessarily have a discussion about it. Admittedly, it does work best if you're focusing on Odysseus as a romantic hero, fighting to return to his wife. A ten year voyage to get back to her should end in their touching reunion, and a moral debate dampens the climactic end of the story. However, this ending removes Penelope's agency from the plot.

While Odysseus has been outwitting monsters and seducing a goddess, Penelope's role in the story is fixed in her home. (This is entirely fair given the original audience's perception of female virtue) So this means that the suitors and their occupation of the palace is basically her primary concern. We learn about her cleverness and cool head by her ability to outwit them, same as Odysseus with his trials. So for her not to react to the killing of the suitors takes her opinion out of her own subplot. So, verdict: good for a romantic climax, bad for Penelope's character.

Option #2) Penelope is angry about the slaughter. This option does cast a pall over the idea that Odysseus has been toiling away trying to return to his lady love. It says that he'd do unspeakable things for her, but she will cease to love him for it. However, this option definitely offers the most drama. Odysseus returns, but not the same husband she once knew. In fighting his way back to her, he has become a creature of violence. This also could add to the tragedy of the maids who were hanged simply for cooperating with the suitors. The downside is that it completely changes the tone of the ending. Odysseus is given a kind of pyrrhic victory. Also, this is the least in line with text, since Penelope is quite happy to have Odysseus back in canon (once she knows it's him). So, verdict: the most bittersweet ending, most drama, least in line with Homeric canon.

Option #3) Penelope is glad the suitors are dead, and that her husband killed them. Not to be biased, but this one is the most fun. It also is compliant to a canon interpretation, for the same reason listed above. This makes sense with Penelope's predicament. As a woman in Bronze Age Greece, her home is where she has the most influence and power. With her husband away, she has more authority over it than ever. (See Clytemnestra's control over court in Agamemnon's absence) However, the suitors exist as an occupying force. They have taken away her authority, plotted to kill her son, and made her life miserable. In her position, she cannot take revenge, but Odysseus can. In this interpretation, Odysseus frees Penelope and in taking his place as king, returns her dignity as queen. Many readers presume that the primary motivation for the slaughter was that the suitors were, well, suitors. They were here to marry his wife, which he's understandably displeased with, so off with their heads. But really, the suitors are closer to an invading army. One houseguest is annoying; one hundred and eight houseguests is an occupation. The downside? It solidifies Odysseus and Penelope as a murder couple, and depending on your opinion of the morality of it all, implicates her in the crime. So, verdict: the bloodiest, possibly most fun, keeps Odysseus the hero, but does give both characters a sense of brutality.

#the odyssey #odysseus #Penelope #tagamemnon #I'm on tumblr because I miss writing essays for college

129 notes · View notes

koiwynn · 8 months

Text

i’m your man by mitski makes me think of rin reflecting on her relationship with kitay.

You're an angel, I'm a dog

Or you're a dog and I'm your man

in the books rin frequently speaks of how good-natured kitay is. this fits the “you’re an angel” line. rin being… well, rin, views his kindness and mercy as being weak-minded. also rin in contrast to kitay, is very cruel. she’s also commonly viewed, treated, and referred to as a dog by people around her. all this adds context to the “i’m a dog” line.

typically, dogs are known as “man’s best friend”, so the line “you’re a dog and i’m your man” can symbolise their remarkably close and affectionate bond.

You believe me like a God

I destroy you like I am

the former line can allude to kitay’s unwavering loyalty to rin. also his undying faith in her goodness even though it gradually wanes as the story progresses. because despite everything he never ceases to hope/want her to ultimately choose the morally upright choice in any given situation.

“i destroy you like i am” illustrates how rin, with her destructive powers, beliefs and mindset, pulls kitay into a morally ambiguous role as her “right-hand man” (no pun intended).

by standing by rin, kitay becomes implicated in all her morally apprehensible deeds.

I'm sorry I'm the one you love

No one will ever love me like you again

So, when you leave me, I should die

I deserve it, don't I?

do i even have to elaborate on these lyrics? this part of the verse is basically rin “coming to terms” with the fact that nobody has loved her, or will love her, as purely as kitay. kitay was the first person to see her as human; perhaps arguably the only one. he was also the only person to always choose her above everything else. kitay was by her side when she had nobody else to turn to. rin is aware of her destructive nature, how she destroys everything and everybody in her path; even those she holds dearest. she anticipates she will destroy whatever delicate, precious thing she shares with kitay. it’s what the Phoenix does, and therefore what she does.

“no one will ever love me like you again” rin knows nobody will ever love her as unconditionally as kitay. she knows nobody else will dare challenge her like him. heavy emphasis on that because ppl tend to forget how often kitay goes/argues against her.

the final two lines makes me think of the final chapter of TBG. when it dawns on her that she’s hurting/attacking the person she loves the most, her tether to reality. the person she loves too much to even playfully spar with because neither of them can bear the thought of hurting each other by their own fists.

this scene in particular comes to mind from these lyrics:

rin realises that she can’t go through with this because she can’t bear the thought of living in a world without kitay’s love. she can’t go through with it. they’re too dependent on each other. in a moment of clarity she realises that she’s too far gone and has to die. and kitay is fine with letting her kill them both. he’d rather die with her than continue living in a world with her hatred and anger. he’d rather die hating her than continue living without her. and rin would rather die than live in a world knowing she has betrayed kitay and lost his love.

You believe me like a God

I betray you like a man

rinkitay’s convo in The Burning God 592p-596p chapter 33. i’m not gonna go in detail. just that scene dude :,)

“You’ve abandoned me. You thought you could fool me, but i know your soul. And if you’re not with me, you’ll burn, too”

btw stream the land is inhospitable and so are we by mitski ☆

23 notes · View notes

albertonykus · 11 months

Text

You Wouldn’t Really Know Shizuka from the Doraemon Movies

If you’ve experienced enough Doraemon media, you’ve probably noticed that the movies tend to emphasize the main characters’ positive qualities, which often paints a very different picture of them from the regular manga and episodes. The contrast is especially noticeable with Nobita, Gian, and Suneo, who in the mainline series are frequently cast as anti-role models to show children how not to behave.

Shizuka, on the other hand, is already kind and morally upstanding by default, so it’s only natural for the movies to continue portraying her that way. That makes Shizuka pretty much the same between the regular series and the movies, right? I would argue not exactly, and unfortunately her character in the movies suffers for it.

It’s not that the movies never characterize Shizuka well. She’s had very important roles in some of them: in my reviews, I counted at least eight films in which her actions are critical to resolving the plot. Certainly one can gather from the movies that she’s compassionate, quick-witted, brave, and adventurous, and all of these things are true about Shizuka in the mainline series.

However... if you only watched the movies, you might not realize that Shizuka also enjoys messing with other people for fun...

... or can be very blunt towards her friends...

... or participates in schemes to get even with people who have wronged her...

[A short time later...]

... or becomes disproportionately violent when she’s upset (“Janie” being one of her dolls)...

... or lies to get out of things she doesn’t want to do.

(If any of this seems like it conflicts with Shizuka’s usual characterization, I don’t think it does. When I was Shizuka’s age, I was also a “good kid” who stayed out of trouble and got along with most of my peers, and I still did every one of these things.)

From the movies alone, you might even miss that Shizuka is supposed to be bad at playing the violin, which is her one “flaw” that the franchise likes to highlight with any regularity. Her violin playing has shown up in two movies so far (Nobita and the Knights on Dinosaurs and Nobita and the Kingdom of Clouds), but only in very brief scenes where we don’t see anyone else reacting to it.

Of course, there are other ways to add dimensionality to a character besides giving them flaws. However, Shizuka in the movies almost never exhibits quirks of any kind, except maybe for being just a bit too obsessed with bathing. (Now that they rarely neglect to include in the movies, for some reason...)

In the main series, Shizuka is often the voice of reason who is strung along by the foolishness and craziness of the others around her, but she still gets her kicks. When the kids test out Doraemon’s Mysterious Trash Chute, there’s the implication that she goes the extra mile to throw in a concrete beam. (As far as I know, none of the animated adaptations of this story have included this particular detail, which is disappointing.)

There’s also the time she hesitates to partake in karaoke, only to have trouble putting down the mic once her turn comes around.

Even the manga counterparts to the movies sometimes contain facets of Shizuka’s character that weren’t adapted into the films themselves. (Perhaps that’s not a surprise considering that the original author had a more direct hand in the manga.) Nobita’s Three Visionary Swordsmen is already one of the best movies when it comes to Shizuka’s portrayal, but if you’ve never read the manga version, you probably wouldn’t have known that she aspires to be a diplomat working for world peace.

Then there’s this moment in Nobita and the Tin Labyrinth, where she makes a bet with Suneo over whether Nobita is lying to them. This conversation does happen in the movie, but the film version doesn’t quite get across just how smug Shizuka looks when she takes that bet.

And check out how pleased she is to be eventually proven right! (This expression didn’t make it into the movie either.)

Nobita in the Robot Kingdom was not written by the original manga author, but I’ve discussed before how the manga version of that story gave Shizuka an important part that was unfortunately cut out of the film.

Is this really a problem? After all, it’s well established that the other main characters in the movies don’t act exactly like they normally do in the manga either. With the others, however, subverting their usual roles is precisely what gives them character depth. Relegating Shizuka solely to being “the nice one”, which she already comes across as most of the time, makes her feel much more static by comparison.

An understandable concern is that swinging the pendulum too far in another direction might erode Shizuka’s kind image, but this need not be the case. Like anyone else, nice people can say and do some very un-nice things, and the trick for a storyteller is to interrogate what might lead them to act in such a way. I think the Nobita in the Robot Kingdom manga does this very well, but an example found in the films themselves can be seen in Nobita and the Steel Troops.

In this movie, (SPOILERS) Shizuka rescues a severely damaged robot spy, Riruru, and works on nursing her back to health. After Riruru explains the history of the robot society that she belongs to, Shizuka observes its parallels to human history. However, Riruru, who is still operating under a belief in robot supremacy, takes offense to this comparison and tries to shoot Shizuka, which results in Shizuka expressing regret and bitterness over having saved her in the first place. Shizuka gets over this very quickly and it’s not explored much further, but this still a rare deconstruction of her role as “the nice one”. Sometimes, being kind is hard.

Overly-long story short, it would be nice if the Doraemon movies let Shizuka do more “bad” (or mischievous, or just plain weird) things, especially for the sake of good.

#Doraemon #Manga #Anime #ドラえもん #Long post

36 notes · View notes

its-tea-time-darling · 1 year

Text

utilitarianism vs. deontology - the significance of the (non)existance of a cure in the maze runner series

a sunny monday afternoon, what better time to dish out the tea on the morality of tmr. (this started out as a rant in the tags, but it got so long i realized it needed to be its own post lmao.)

this is about the movie/book difference that there, in the books, is "no goddamn cure" (movie!thomas' words, poor guy). i can understand why the choice was made in the movies to add one--it certainly added a twisted terrible hurt + irony to newt dying when thomas actually could have saved him.

but to me, the books are much more interesting, and imo also teach a much more valuable lesson about ethics. let me elaborate.

in the following i'll use the words 'utilitarianism' and 'deontology'. those are ethical principles on how to act morally. broken down very roughly, utilitarianism is about the outcome of actions, and increasing 'good' in the world. in the case of tmr, if you have to torture some immune kids to save billions of flare infected people, it's worth it, because you are maximizing the 'total good' in the world. deontology on the other hand focuses on the nature of the action itself. in the case of tmr: torturing kids is bad. you are not allowed to do bad things, even if it would do a lot of good. hence no torturing kids. wicked's stance is a utilitarianist one, whereas the gladers' stance (and the right arm's in the movies) is a deontological one. there is loads of other examples for deontology vs. utilitarianism, there's tons if you google.

now that the definitions are out of the way: imo the whole point of the books was to show that a utilitarianist approach to ethics is often flawed because the causality might not be as direct as you think it is. case in point the wicked pov of torturing some kids to benefit the disproportionately bigger population of the infected for a cure, when, in the end, such a cure does not exist. so the horrible action of torturing immune kids had no justification, and was a terrifying waste of human lives and integrity.

(and actually i could go on a whole other tangent that wicked as an organisation was severely biased by the fact that none of them were immune, so they had the non-immunes' well being as their highest goal, as opposed to the arguably more important one: the survival of the human race as a whole. if they had the second one at heart, equipping and sending off some immunes to a safe place to rebuild a society from the ground up from the start would have been a shared priority to finding a cure.)

to me, the sinking feeling of 'fuck, none of what they did was "worth it"' we get at the end of the books is much more impactful--or i should perhaps say more valuable--to the audience than the reveal that there was a cure, because the implications are broader. it raises questions about how a society as a whole tries to cope with problems (and which part of the population we are prepared to let suffer for our goals), and just how big the cost of falsely assumed causalities can be, as opposed to telling a story whose primary impact is the emotional blow to an individual.

to wrap it all up on a more lighthearted note though: maybe getting two versions of the same set up play out in diametrically opposed ways, that both hold their own type of impact, is actually a unique blessing that doesn't often happen this way in media, and that provokes us into thinking about the series in more detail. (possible case in point: this post.)

#long post #maze runner #the maze runner #tmr #THIS GOT SO LONG #lmao

24 notes · View notes

potatopossums · 1 year

Text

partnered aro here.

i have been having some thoughts about what it's like to be in a relationship, even if it's difficult to label what type of relationship it is (romantic, queerplatonic, alterous, etc.). I've also been having some thoughts about my queer identity in regards to how my aromanticism affects my lesbianism and vice versa, and their relationship to gender. it's probably worth a larger post, but if anyone is curious or has comments to add about their experiences, please feel free to ask/comment/reblog/direct message.

incompletely, things I've learned so far whilst in a partnership:

Sex is cool to think about but not so much fun in practice..... irl, it can be absolutely fabulous; it can also be alright; it can also be a little boring and uncomfortable. the best part is, i don't have to do it if i don't feel like it. that's pretty cool. who cares if my medication is lowering my libido (and who cares if my meds aren't the problem, and I'm just a sex-favorable/neutral ace).

Sex usually consists of me pleasuring my partner and jerking myself off afterward, and I'm okay with that...... it's not always one-sided giving (and if you honestly think that giving to your partner is one-sided by default, as if you're suffering through the giving and waiting painfully for your turn, you really need to reevaluate how you're doing sex, because I'm sitting there enjoying watching my partner, exploring her body, listening to her breathing, reacting to her movements, and all of that is very enjoyable for me while I'm giving. orgasm is not the end all be all of sex). plus, i don't tend to receive orgasms because i have vaginismus, which doesn't allow others to penetrate me. i can penetrate myself and achieve orgasm when I'm controlling everything, but it is uncomfortable and painful still for others to control penetration, which is required for my orgasm. that said, i also receive external, non-penetrative touch and stimulation (such as receiving head: wowie 😵‍💫🥵). for where i am, I'm comfortable with things, and that's great.

Sex with myself is so good..... my brain has always been really good at thinking up fun scenarios that excite and turn me on. i know exactly what images push me to orgasm. i like orgasming. thanks to my medications, the orgasms aren't as strong, but i know what time of day to masturbate so that i actually can orgasm. i don't always masturbate nowadays, but when I do, it's a really lovely self care moment, and i wish masturbation was talked about that way more often. it's not for everyone, but I've definitely heard masturbation referred to as anything from "something lonely, loser singles do" to "not nearly as good as being with someone" and i honestly beg to differ on both of those. masturbating is not an indicator of loneliness or inadequacy, and it's not some second-rate pleasure in comparison to sex with a partner. masturbation is its own action, its own thing, and it has no moral or status implications. i love doing it, and i always have, and i love doing it alone.

I get the most out of sex when it's framed as a sensual experience, rather than a sexual one..... like ok, I'm not the best at figuring out the difference between sexual versus sensual, but I'm mostly interested in what feels good. if the only thing that separates them is genital touch or sexual arousal, then fine. but sometimes non-sexual touch arouses me sexually! so, in my mind, what is the point of separating them, i ask! if sex feels good, then it was a good sensual experience. if you're not paying attention to how things feel regarding your five (5) senses during sex, I'm not sure what else you're paying attention to? i mean, no shade to paying attention to other things that don't fit in the senses category, and no shame to people who categorize these experiences differently. those experiences and perspectives are valuable and wonderful! for me, it's just all sensual, even if it's sexual too. sexual gratification, for me, is in a sensual category (and also a mental one, but usually my mental additions to sexual experiences are visual in nature, such as picturing a scene/location or a fictional character).

this is all i have for now, but if i think of more things, I'll reblog and add more to this list.

as always, i welcome discussion on these topics, as it is so important for our community to share and connect over similar and differing experiences! celebrating these things about ourselves is essential to our pride, and we deserve to be ourselves fully and openly.

#aromantic #queer #alterous #personal #queerplatonic #gynephile #aromantic lesbian #agender lesbian #friendship #asexual #agender

35 notes · View notes

afatlotofchance · 9 months

Text

7 deadly sins: All about gluttony (2)

WARNING: I get quite darker with this post. Mentions of murder, rape, incest, and eating disorders await! Those who have a slob kink or a corruption kink will certainly be pleased

III) Some context and consequences, to better explain gluttony

We talked about what gluttony was in essence, we talked about the most commonly shared classification of gluttony and its implications, but there is still a lot to add to fully understand and comprehend gluttony as it was conceived and perceived for centuries and centuries. So here is a little selection of various points:

1) The sin of gluttony was a criticism of Roman society. If you do not know, before the Roman Empire became the first Christian Empire and helped spread the religion throughout Europe and Northern Africa, the Romans were the biggest persecutors of Christians, and they were perceived by the early Church as their number 1 enemy. Heck, it is thanks to the Romans that Jesus got crucified! And so, the early list of the seven deadly sins (which were eight before) was designed to actually criticize and condemn the Roman lifestyle and morals. Gluttony is the most obvious of these attacks, because the Christians were actually demonizing the Romans’ habit of lavish feast and banquets, regularly held in upper classes and as a typical social entertainment – the famous “orgies” we know today. The Romans had cultivated a true aesthetic of the excess, and this was what the original Roman orgy was about – to have the best party of all times, you need to eat a lot, and drink a lot, and have sex a lot. The Christians were especially shocked by one habit of the Romans, something that heavily influenced the “overeating” part of gluttony: the vomitorium. To keep having their orgies, the Romans invented this small room or area in mansions, where the guests of feasts and banquets, feelings too stuffed or too full, went to make themselves vomit, all so they could return to the table and keep eating with an empty stomach!

Small historical edit: I checked back and the “vomitorium” is actually a legend propagated by Christians themselves. Don’t get me wrong – Romans did purge themselves and forced themselves to vomit during their orgies and banquets so they could eat and drink more, this is historically attested. But the “vomitorium” wasn’t a room in the house dedicated to vomiting, unlike what the Christian historians said – in truth it was just an entryway of the house, metaphorically “vomiting” the guests in the main room.

2) Speaking of orgies, Christianity strongly believed that Gluttony and Lust were two deadly sins that went together hand in hand. For Christian thinkers, gluttony always led to lust – again the influence of the Roman orgies, that started as sickening banquets and often turned into sex parties, is felt. Christians classified both gluttony and lust into the “material” sins like greed, as opposed to spiritual ones like anger, pride or envy. But they sub-classified these two as the “sins of the flesh” since both were tied to the body. Even more, theologians and moralist had clearly noticed how these sins “seated” in parts next to each other: gluttony’s stomach and belly area being located right above the genitalia, the “underbelly”, the realm of lust. So it was thought that gluttony always led to lust – and remember when I said the Church had a thing against sauces and spices? Well they truly believed sauces and spices were one of the reasons gluttony turned into lust, since they were convinced (based on the aphrodisiac property of some spices) that sauces and spices were by nature designed to excite and inflame the sexual senses and desires.

3) Tying back into the previous topics: gluttony being related to the Roman orgies, gluttony being thought to lead to lustful and lecherous behavior, gluttony making a man into a beast walking on all fours and rolling under the table… This was being gluttony wasn’t just about food – it was also about alcohol! Drunkards were a type of gluttony sinners, and the excess of alcohol was just as condemned as the excess of food. In fact, it is quite interesting to see how gluttony “evolved” depending on which social class you wanted to mock or criticize: when you did a caricature of the glutton as a rich lord, wealthy merchant or fancy bourgeois, it was all about food (especially since the rich were accused of taking away the food of the poor and the needy below them), but when the peasant, the villager, the low-class man was accused of gluttony, it was him being a drunk – since they were too poor to have lavish feasts, and everybody knows the age-old stereotype of the lower class alcoholic.

4) Gluttony was thought to make you stupid. I talked before of the various “endings” of the “gluttony game”, ranging from bestial behavior to lustfulness. But one recurring belief was that gluttony actually destroyed or remove a person’s intelligence, and made them idiots. Saint Thomas of Aquinas (him again) listed the “five flaws” born out of gluttony as: witless joy, buffoonery, impurity, jabbering, and stupidity of mind. Beyond impurity, all these flaws were basically different ways to say: being a glutton will make you idiotic. Sure, eating and drinking will make you joyful and merry – but it will be the superficial joyful stupor of being full and drunk, not the true, deep, philosophical happiness of living and existing that Christianity keeps searching for. By spending your time eating and drinking, you remove time from more intellectual activities such as reading or studying. Only concerned with satisfying yourself through your body functions and through culinary pleasures, not developing any social existence or craft whatsoever, living in a superficial, temporary and instant happiness that is not true or lasting (since it stops by the next hunger pang), you slowly lose your wit, your caution, your prudence, you stop concerning yourself with higher subjects or topics, you get accustom to acting silly or stupidly due to the weight of all this food on your body and mind, or due to the drunkenness becoming your by-default state of being, and basically for the Christian theologian you become a brainless, smiling blob. A “cow-like stupor” to take back the words of a fellow kink writer. Eating too much and drinking too much makes your thoughts rusty, your movements clumsy, removes reasonable boundaries and cautions (think of the drunk who starts talking about things he shouldn’t talk or spill secrets he shouldn’t spill), and encourages a form of pure disorder – the “buffoonery”, where nobody waits for anything, nobody cares for anything, and everybody just act like drunk clowns and fools in a big sloppy feast.

A sloppy and dirty feast – because as I said, “impurity” is also there. And impurity is here to understand in the sense of “dirtying” and “soiling”. Thomas of Aquinas raises up the topic of making oneself vomit – either unconsciously, just as the result of eating or drinking too much, either purposefully, to have more room to eat afterward. For him this is the ultimate symbol of gluttony, as the glutton literally soils himself to be able to eat even more, abandoning his health and dignity in the process (as you can see, the early Church was actually an anti-bulimia militant). But more generally, it was all related to the “bestiality” of gluttony and gluttony as a “sin of the flesh” – theologians and moralists disliked gluttony because it reduced the human to a mere body, to a mere set of organ, to a digestive track. The glutton, by spending his time drinking and eating, turned himself into a poop-and-piss machine, because all this food had to come out one way or another. It reduced the man to the bodily functions of ingesting and expelling, and it multiplied all the dirty substances a body can produce: urine, feces, saliva… I hear all those who have a “slob” kink screaming in joy in the background, but yes, this was the horrible picture of gluttony for these moralists. I think the video game “Dante’s Inferno” translated this Christian vision of gluttony perfectly well, taking back the idea that this sin turned a human being into a walking digestive system to decorate the level of Hell of gluttony: their idea of the third circle of Hell was a gigantic stomach filled with gastric acid, hungry maws gnawing, tapeworms vomiting everywhere, puddles of feces and even anuses constantly expelling nauseous gazes and fiery farts…

5) While gluttony is a strong criticism of the Roman culture, its roots are to be found in the philosophies and morals of Ancient Greece, more specifically in the system of vices and virtues codified by Greek philosophers such as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. Aristotle had a system of virtues and vices in three parts: for each domain of the human existence (honor, social conduct, shame, fear) Aristotle considered that there were two vices corresponding to the two extremes of this domain (too much or too little), and one virtue that was the just middle. He considered what Christians called lust and gluttony to be part of the same field of action: the one of “pleasure”, where the first of the two vice was an excess of pleasure – licentiousness, and pure, undiluted self-interest. A selfish debauchery where you are only concerned with your earthly pleasures, such as eating, drinking, having sex… Its twin vice being a lack of pleasure, what is often translated as “indifference” or “insensibility”, a complete rejection and ignorance of the things that physically make life enjoyable and nice. The virtue, right in the middle of the twin vices, was temperance. [And it is very interesting because, as we will see in the next part, the Church itself while fighting licentiousness was often guilty of the vice of insensibility, at least by Ancient Greek ethics). Plato also had some things to say about gluttony: more precisely he explained that eating and drinking in itself was fine. Plato held in his belief that when a man ate a good meal, and drank some wine, it made him more sociable and more thoughtful – as in, it encouraged conversation, it encouraged sharing, discussing and debating, it allowed the thought to be sharper as you lost some of your shyness or inhibitions that wouldn’t have allowed you to say the truth or interesting things… But Plato also pointed out that when a man ate too much, and drank too much, this was where everything was spoiled – when a man made himself heavy, nauseous and drunk, his speech became disorganized and incoherent, his thoughts blurry and foggy, and all he did was fall under the table and roll there like a mindless beast. A bit of food and wine sharpens the wit ; too much food and wine blunts the mind.

6) Gluttony might be the worst of all the sins! At least according to some theologians. You see, there is an Original Sin in the Christian religion, the sin that introduced evil into the world and that doomed humanity: Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. And there is a VERY big debate in the Christian religion as to what exactly is the nature of this original sin. For some it is the sin of pride (which is classified as the king and roots of all other sins), for others the original sin was rather disobedience – but there is a firm position and a large group of theologians that rather claimed the Original Sin was the sin of gluttony, since it was about eating a fruit… This interpretation did not really stick, but it exists, and so if you ever want to include gluttony as a theme in whatever fiction you want to write, you can imagine it as the original sin that doomed humanity if you wish it so, or at the first and oldest of the seven deadly sins!

In fact, there is an English legend that does depict gluttony (in its drunkenness form) as one of the worst sins of all: it is an obscure medieval legend surrounding the figure of saint John of Beverley. According to this tale, before John was a saint, when he was still a regular man, he met the devil and the devil forced him to choose between three sins he offered him: drunkenness, rape and murder. John thought he could trick the devil and so instead of becoming a rapist or a murderer, he chose to be a drunkard, thinking it would be the lesser of the sins. But he didn’t know that gluttony always led to lust and rage… He ended up in such a drunk stupor and such a drunk state that one day, when returning to his bedroom, he entered the wrong room, and found in what he thought to be his bed a woman asleep… Overtaken by lust, John forced himself upon the woman, and when another man entered the room to stop him, John killed him in a drunken rage. Only once the fumes of alcohol had dissipated did he realize he had raped his mother and killed his father… There is a less Oedipian variation of this legend, where the victim of both John’s rape and murder is actually his own sister – but the message is the same. Gluttony might look like a lesser sin, but it always leads to darker and more dire consequences.

IV) Gluttony, through religion and society

As I said above, gluttony is a very social sin – and so to fully understand it, we must understand how it impacted or was influenced by the way Christianity lived and existed, and the way medieval society organized itself. Because back in those days, religion and society made one.

1) Medieval Christian society was suffering from a massive eating disorder. This tongue-in-cheek affirmation actually reflects something very true: the way the medieval European society had organized itself, based on the religious principles of Christianity (Catholicism to be precise), created a cycle of under-eating and over-eating which, in light of the theologians’ view of gluttony, allows one to understand the particular relationship these people had towards food.

The Christian year had two big forty-days period during it, that were fasting periods, where all the Christians had to abandon meat, eggs and other rich products, limit their food intake, reduce their meals, and live a very dry and hungry life. The most famous of those two periods, because it is still practiced today, is of course Lent, which is still known as the “grim and sad part of the Christian year”, and the other is, quite surprisingly, the Advent. Today we think of the Advent calendar with its chocolates, but in older times, the Advent was just a wintery Lent. Officially, these forty-days of fasting existed to commemorate the sacrifice and suffering of Christ and affiliated characters, and to prepare the Christians for the big religious holidays that came afterward (Christmas for the Advent, the Holy Week/Easter for Lent) – but historians and sociologist know today that unofficially, these two-fasting corresponded to the most infertile and hungrier part of the year, where food was very scarce and famines were most likely to explode. So it was actually kind of a religious excuse for the lack of food due to the poor climate and bad harvests.

But in return, each of these fasting periods was cornered by celebrations of overeating, where everybody stuffed their face as much as they could – people stuffed their gut before undergoing the fasting because they knew it was their last time eating good things, and then people busted their bellies once the restrictions were over to celebrate the return to “normal”. The Church of course heavily criticized and complained about these explosions of gluttony, but they realized it was kind of needed for people to swallow the pills of Lent and Advent. As a result, we had the apparition of Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”, the last day of eating meat and fat before Lent, where people guzzled down as much meat and butter and fried stuff as they could, while Easter at the end of Lent was all about a large meal with multiple course, beautiful roasts, and lots of eggs and chocolate. Similarly, the fasting of the Advent was part of why Christmas became a jolly and merry feast where people stuffed themselves as much as the animals they ate, and got severely drunk. As for the last of the “four corners”, it would be Saint Martin’s Day, a Christian feast day that fell in the days preceding the beginning of the Advent and which was known as “The Day of the Pig”, since each farm and household had a pig they had fattened up throughout the year, and on Martin’s Day it was time to kill the pig and turn him into all sorts of meats and delicatessen – a killing that was celebrated by enormous banquets and large meals of ribs, sausages, and other forms of pig meat. So, to summarize it all, the Christian medieval society kept oscillating between belly-bursting festivals and monthly strict diets, switching very brutally between gluttony and hunger.

2) Beyond these big events of the calendar, the regular Christian medieval life was very… problematic when it came to food, and encouraged some strange behaviors.

Many people think that of the three Religions of the Book, Christianity is the easiest when it comes to food, due to lacking the strict alimentary restrictions of Judaism and Islam. But it wasn’t always like that, and Christianity used to be very big on limiting and forbidding food. As you might or might not know, since Christianity demonized gluttony and made of temperance a virtue, for it the practice of fasting was a good and holy thing. Before great religious rituals or important holidays, people underwent some fasting to purify themselves. You were forbidden to eat or drink before mass, so that the ritual wouldn’t be “soiled”. Priests and monks and men of the Church limited their food intake, regularized their meals and did frequent fasting to keep their mind clear and their thoughts sharp. Fasting was also a common penance after confessing a sin – it was a way to clean one’s soul for whatever petty or venial evil you committed. This was tied to specific religious bans on certain foods – you might have heard of how up until a very recent day, Christians did not eat meat on Fridays, rather going for fish due to religious reasons. The ban of meat on Fridays was a very big thing in medieval societies, so much that there were big religious debates about what kind of animal you could and could not eat in Fridays (for example, powerful lords managed to tweak the religious rule by convincing churchmen to claim that swans were not actually true birds, and rather counted as fishes due to living in the water – so that Christians could still eat some meat on Friday). During the Renaissance, as cooking became an art and chefs were recognized as artists, a new trick developed itself: the disguising and sculpting of food. For example, some chefs cooked and reshaped fishes into the shape of a ham or a roast, so that nobles and aristocrats could still have the illusion of eating meat on Fridays.

I know, I know – all these peculiar food obsessions and picky eating are literally the kind of gluttony I described at the very beginning of my last post, the people who are obsessed with limiting their quantities and measuring their portions… It was! But in the Middle Ages it was thought to be a good and virtuous behavior, and we had to wait for our modern times for people to realize that maybe it was just as obsessive and unhealthy as the overeating gluttony. And this unhealthiness notably showed up in the Church itself…

3) You see, originally monks and priests, in the early Church, were really, REALLY hating gluttony’s guts. Being a man of the Church was basically starving yourself constantly.

The first monk who created the list of the seven deadly sins, Evagrius Ponticus, was part of a community that lived in the desert, far away from fields, farms or cities, isolating themselves in a dry and arid land purposefully to find God. This reduced them to a very poor and lacking life – and Evagrius based his original list of vices based on the flaws he noticed among his fellow desert-monks. Gluttony was then a big problem because these communities purposefully secluded themselves in a life with limited rations of food, and so whenever one monk hogged it all to himself, he condemned the others to starve.

For a very long time, the Church was so intensely decided to fight off gluttony they want to the extreme of declaring that merely enjoying food was bad! Yep, they were convinced that (just like with sex) if you felt the slightest pleasure or joy when eating, you were a sinner doomed to hell. Eating (again, just like sex) was supposed to be a body function like breathing, and thus not supposed to be enjoyed. Eating was supposed to be merely to survive, it wasn’t supposed to be a game, an entertainment or a passion. For these fanatics, the pleasure of eating was in itself a sin of gluttony, and food had to be swallowed, not tasted, eaten but not enjoyed. Saint Augustin for example (yet another big authority on the deadly sins) held this belief, that finding pleasure in food was an insult or offense to God since (in his very warped view), one should only find pleasure in God and nothing else.

This resulted in extremely strict table etiquette in monasteries – for example in some places you were ordered to chew your food a given amount of time before swallowing it to avoid yourself becoming too “fancy” when eating. In many orders you only had two meals a day, in the morning and evening, with a ban on all meat (or just the meat of four-legged animals), and an interdiction to speak during the mealtime. In order to avoid those harsh restrictions, monks found a ruse, especially those of the Saint Benedict order, that created in their monasteries a special room called the “misericord”, a room inside the religious building that was thought to represent and embody, the outside, secular, non-religious world. As a result, since the food restrictions were only supposed to be applied INSIDE the monastery, the monks could go in this room to stuff their face and eat the forbidden food, since this room was technically “outside” of the building.

Of course this rejection of food did cause a problem to all those church men and friars when they were invited to a feast or a banquet by a lord, king or nobleman, since they were forced to eat, it was the rule of hospitality – if you rejected your host’s food, you insulted him… Saint Francis of Assisi, who founded the mendicant order (begging friars) of the Franciscan, was especially concerned with this, since his entire religious model was based on depending on the charity and generosity of others, and when the others wanted to thank you with large, fatty, heavy meals, it was the road to gluttony… So he invented the solution of carrying with him a bag of ash everywhere, so that when he (or his brothers) were given a meal too rich for them, they would sprinkle the ashes on top. Like that they could eat everything… But without enjoying it! Because again, the Church has a massive obsession with just not enjoying food. This was the early times of the Church and the Middle Ages, when monks and priest were basically walking colorless skeletons… The perfect image of Lent. In fact, this was something very specific to monks: “the perpetual Lent”. Monks were forced into an eternal state of Lent, which meant they could never in their life eat things such as meat or butter.

Things changed when we reached the late Middle Ages! Things changed a LOT. On one side, the Church became more lenient towards food stuff. The eternal Lent vow was removed, so that monks and priests could eat meat and fatty products. The Pope Innocent XI asserted that no, enjoying food was NOT a sin, that it was natural to enjoy food, and that it was impossible to eat without some sort of pleasure – and that saints like Augustin might have been a bit too fanatical. Plus, if food was placed on Earth by God, and if God created our bodies so we had to eat, and if God organized things so that we would enjoy food, it doesn’t make sense – and is almost heretical – to believe enjoying food as God planned would be insulting God… Innocent clarified that it was normal to feel pleasure and joy when eating good and tasty food, and that the real sin derived from when people enjoyed food that was not good, pleasant or morally acceptable – and that similarly, meals were to be enjoyed, and only became a sin if you partake with enthusiasm in a “wrong” meal (organized for the wrong reasons, at indecent times, etc…).

Finally, the Church became filthy rich, as they became vast land-owners, turned into merchants (since monasteries were farms and craftsmen shop), seated with lords and noblemen in their castle, and imposed taxes left and right. So, less food restrictions, their boss telling them it as okay to enjoy eating, and a new wave of riches… The “fat monk” comes in. This very famous and widespread cliché of the monk as a fat drunkard was a stereotype spread by the very literature and arts of the late Middle Ages, but it was because indeed monasteries started to become embodiments of gluttony, as the monks started to feast and party on all the good food they had, and since all they did all long was sit around, pray and read, all this excess of wine and food quickly went to their waistline. It was actually part of a wider phenomenon where the Church through corruption became its own antithesis, since monasteries also started to have monks inviting women or prostitutes in, and the higher-ups of the Church being bought with money. In fact, it was this burst of gluttony, lust and greed that was part of the Reformation and the Protestants splitting from the decadent Catholic church: Luther criticized the theologians that had turned into “theologastrists”, worshippers of their own belly who wouldn’t recognize Lent even if it hit them in the face, and who celebrated masses in their kitchen.

4) Another example of how the early extremes of “sacred starvation” were VERY unhealthy, and it is a good thing they changed, is the case of a few saints, female saints, known today as the “Holy Anorexics”. Back then, these women were heralded as saints for taking asceticism to its most extreme, but today we can look back and identify all the symptoms of anorexia, that religion wrongfully glorified. You can find it under the term “Anorexia mirabilis”: it was this firm belief by young girls and women that by starving themselves they could share and honor the suffering of the Christ, and the practice of creating hunger-induced hallucinations to have visions of the “glory of God”. The most famous of those “anorexic saints” was Catherine of Siena, who rejected all forms of food to stay pure, only ate what was given to her at the Eucharist, refused to obey her superior’s orders to eat (since they saw she was getting ill and told her she was going too far), and even induced vomiting with a twig. This was the extremes the fear of gluttony could bring one to.

And this allows me to fall back on a fascinating parallel: the destruction of one’s body. This is one of the argument that the Church raised against the sin of gluttony, that one of its nasty effects was the sickening, soiling and destruction of the body, which is supposed to be a gift of God and a thing one should take care of. Nausea, digestive problems, diarrhea, gout, obesity, indigestions, heartburns, heart and liver diseases, were all condemned as the “evils” and “diseases” of gluttony by religious men and doctors alike. This was one of the warnings against gluttony: do not keep on this path, or you’ll end up in a bloated, sick and painful body. But in a paradoxical way, the destruction of the body was also the argument that served to destroy and oppose the opposite extreme the Church went to. Continuing with the topic of the “holy anorexics”, they were very divisive cases because very often they became very obviously sick, and by their stern refusal of eating they doomed themselves to die. While some glorified them as “saints”, another part of the Church rather condemned them as doing the exact same thing gluttons did with their body, ruining it and self-harming it due to an obsession with food. In fact, in the Renaissance, there was a group of theologians that created a specific sub-type of gluttony focused on phenomena such as this “holy anorexia”.

It is a lesser, not-well-known type of gluttony known as “spiritual gluttony”. It might seem very abstract for non-religious people, because its official definition is “seeking in exaggerated and obsessive ways the pleasure of God and the comforts of God, the same way gluttons seek obsessively and exaggeratedly the pleasures of food and the comforts of meals”. What does it mean? In practice it means for example – accumulating fasts and keep fasting despite your religious superior or religious authority’s orders of stopping, because it is clearly bad for your body. It can also mean, keep accumulating penances, even when you don’t need it anymore, just for the perceived pleasure of “purifying” yourself through them. It can also be translated as, for example, continuously praying and praying so much you start ignoring your actual job or your other duties; or, reading so much religious texts and studying so much religious topics you neglect your family, your friends or the human/social aspect of your life. Or growing an addiction to things such as confession, never getting enough and constantly getting confessed. This is very interesting because it shows that the Church itself, through time, ended up recognizing that gluttony could exist outside of food and drinks, under the shape of forceful and obsessive accumulations and addictions to pleasurable and comforting things. Because it is the very essence of gluttony: self-pleasure, self-comfort, but taken to such a point, such an extreme, that the pleasure becomes nauseating and the comfort harmful or wasteful.

5) More of a trivia than anything else, despite the early Church’s hatred of food and eating, the New Testament (aka the purely Christian part of the Bible) is notorious for being filled with banquets scenes and descriptions. Some people go as far as call the Gospels “the books where people eat all the time”, and Jesus himself is noted to take part in a lot of those feasts. There’s the Wedding at Cana where the Christ turns the water into wine, there’s the feast at Zaccheus’ house to which the Christ participates, and there’s of course the miracle of the multiplication of breads and fishes to feed the crowd… But, as theologians observed, in the last example, despite Jesus summoning enough food to leave an entire crowd satisfied, there are still leftovers once everyone’s hunger is satisfied, and people do not force themselves to continue eating. The crowd eats its fill, enough to not be hungry anymore, but doesn’t just devour everything gluttonously. Heck, the first temptation Satan uses against the Christ when he spends forty days in the desert (the forty days commemorated by Lent), is the temptation of food, as Satan suggests Jesus could just turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger – showing that Jesus was a guy who could be won over by food.

Theologians did use stories and tales from the Bible to illustrate the sin of gluttony – but they usually did so by taking elements of the Ancient Testament, not the New one. The most famous “gluttony stories” of the Bible are Esau selling his birthright for a dish of lentils, Holofernes’s love for drinking being used against him by Judith, and the drunkenness of Noah which led to him humiliating himself and then cursing his own children. Given we are on a kink topic, I will also mention a fascinating secondary character of the Ancient Testament, which also embodies gluttony: king Eglon, who was a notorious glutton only living for eating, shitting, and then eating some more, and renowned as massively obese. When he was killed by a murderer who plunged his sword inside his belly, the sword was literally sucked up in the fat of the king, his murderer unable to retrieve it – but this also made the weapon of the crime disappear. And the death of the king wasn’t even noticed for some times, as his servants mistook the position and behavior of his dead body, hunched over his chair, for their king relieving himself as he so often did…

#seven deadly sins #gluttony #christianity #history of christian #christian theology #medieval society #medieval calendar #greek philosophy #biblical stories #eating disorders #vices

11 notes · View notes

watching-pictures-move · 9 months

Text

Movie Review | Oppenheimer (Nolan, 2023)

While the strength of the editing in Christopher Nolan’s work has been up for debate, I think it’s pretty undeniable the extent to which editing as a storytelling device has been key to his work. You can take the chase scene in The Dark Knight, which you could if you wanted to pick apart as a nightmare of logistics and visual continuity and could cite as a terribly edited sequence, but which nevertheless manages to be thrilling because of that same editing style, which gives it a certain surging momentum. That same trailerized editing style shows up here, serving a few crucial purposes. Nolan assumes most viewers don’t have a background in nuclear physics, so he uses it to evoke the thrill of scientific discovery. He also uses it to give the proceedings a sense of urgency. The Germans are trying to make a bomb and are far ahead of us so we need to make it first and work a lot faster.

In doing those things I think it also captures a certain solipsism, a “technical arrogance”, to take a phrase used by Freeman Dyson in the documentary The Day After Trinity, a concept best explained by another great mind, one with a background in chaos theory, Dr. Ian Malcolm: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” The movie is very much about grappling with the moral implications of making the atom bomb, and is astute about the ways in which such grappling was compartmentalized (the lines about compartmentalization being protocol play as double entendres) and the wartime and political context was conducive to a certain tunnel vision until the bomb manifested into reality. The structure, of multiple timelines playing concurrently, adds to this quality. There are layers to this movie’s crosscutting.

There’s also an experimental streak in the visual style, one which brings to mind the fractured editing style favoured by Nicolas Roeg, which presents us initially with beautiful abstracted glimpses when the bomb is still very much a matter of theory, but later on renders it in horrifyingly tactile terms, a lecture scene with pulsing shallow focus, blinding white light, peeling flesh and charred corpses intruding upon literal reality, as the consequences of Oppenheimer’s efforts finally sink in. This review from Letterboxd user Macrology I think wonderfully summarizes the impact of the test sequence, which the movie lingers on for an entrancingly and then disturbingly long time, the explosion seen initially almost as the texture of a strange and beautiful surface, until we’re hit with the ear-shattering sound that follows after a prolonged wait. I saw this in a 70mm screening, and although the screen was not of above average size, I’m still glad I came out to the theatre for this if only for this sequence.

I think Nolan has often been concerned with the intersection between the personal and the…let’s say mechanical, for lack of a better word. Here, it’s seen in the way the protagonist’s personality and beliefs are juxtaposed not just against the development of the bomb, but also the entire American security apparatus, of the procedures around security clearings and confirmation hearings, and the ideologies involved. And I think there’s an appreciation for the fact that individuals cannot be fully reconciled to these things, and that they can’t be entirely explained away as cogs in a machine. Between that and the sympathetic ear it lends to unionization efforts, the movie does play interestingly at this moment given the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes going on right now. While I wouldn’t call the movie a political screed, I think it is basically sympathetic to left wing ideas while being distrustful of dogmatism, showing both Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty having been disillusioned with Communism after the death of her previous husband in the Spanish Civil War, and the way rabid anti-Communist fervour was weaponized against Oppenheimer. (Which might make it all the more surprising that James Woods is an executive producer on this, given his views. But I did see a Tweet from him indicating he’s supportive of the strikes, so perhaps there is compartmentalization in his politics.)

Additional scattered thoughts:

The cast on this thing is insane. Even putting aside the excellent central performances (and on that note, it’s nice to see Robert Downey Jr. actually get to stretch his thespian muscles again), practically every scene you get another recognizable actor in a new role, pretty much all deployed for the sharpest impact. To list all the great roles I would probably go down most of the cast list, but I greatly enjoyed seeing James Remar as Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. To be honest he mostly looks happy to be there, but that bomhomie is subverted with the chilling calculation he presents to Oppenheimer, of picking targets on which to drop the bomb. To be honest the only bad performance here is by Gary Oldman as Harry Truman, hamming it up under layers of makeup. While the movie arguably doesn’t spend much time entertaining the (still horrible) strategic calculation involved in dropping the bomb to defeat the Japanese, this scene plays as more glib than it should even putting aside Truman’s callousness.

I probably shouldn’t project here, but I do wonder if Nolan sees a bit of himself in Oppenheimer’s quirks. With his engineer-like approach to narrative, I’d wager he has a great deal of respect for scientific minds, and we’ve all seen that video of him at the Eminem concert, so he perhaps identifies with his awkwardness as well. In that sense, it’s probably a bit of flex to focus on Oppenheimer’s womanizing, although one could argue there’s some self critique in the handling of Jean Tatlock compared to his frequent use of dead wives as motivation. I do think some of the other Nolan-isms here (the exposition when Downey's Lewis Strauss explains his plans) are clumsy, but I'm willing to forgive them when the movie as a whole is this strong. I'm also pretty thoroughly in the tank for Nolan already, so take my assessment with a grain of salt.

The way I’d heard the sex scenes discussed I’d assumed they’d be like the ones in Munich, Oppenheimer thrusting vigorously while we cut to scenes from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seeing the actual movie, I can only assume that sex scenes in major American movies of sizable budgets are so rare these days that most people’s brains have been broken by the ones here. Now, because this is a judgment-free zone, I would like to state for the record that I thought they were pretty hot. I didn’t hoot and holler during my screening, but had I seen this at a drive-in, I would have definitely honked my horn. Leave it to a director everyone assumed was a sexless weirdo to turn out something this weird and hot.

#film #movie review #oppenheimer #christopher nolan #you could say the movie was... da bomb #i wasn't bohr-ed for a second #fun for the whole fermi-ly

4 notes · View notes