#because it wanted to criticize and deconstruct heroic narratives | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dotthings · 4 years

Text

All right let’s do this. SPN 15.10. “The Heroes Journey.”

Look, I have now watched Jensen tap-dancing. A whole extended musical number of Jensen Ackles, dancing. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW, ALL RIGHT I NEED TO GET A GRIP. WRITE SOME META. HERE YOU GO.

How very Joseph Campbell of you, Dabb. Except the irony here is it’s not Joseph Cambell style hero journey exploration that’s being highlighted here, those big mythic gestures--the call, rejection of the call, acceptance of the call, reckoning with the father and so on. This ep tapped into a different heroic theme that has a lot in common with superhero narratives. It’s not the powers, it’s not the mask, it’s not the really kevlar or mecha suit or the cape that makes a hero a hero. It’s who they are as a person when all that’s stripped away. Who are they without that. This ep gave me some some S6 Buffy vibes, or it symbolically pre-serum Steve Rogers’ed Sam and Dean.

It showed their courage and determination and refusal to give up even though they no longer has the same literally God-given, chosen ones blessed luck. It’s not that they didn’t know how to lock-pick or throw a punch or dodge a punch or what to do about monsters any more. They are still highly trained, but none of it was working. I think Chuck didn’t just remove the blessed luck, he gave them an extra zap of extra rotten luck just to be a stinker.

But they didn’t give up and this episode yet again makes it clear--Chuck can fiddle with environment around them, even do stuff directly to people, but he can’t make them feel, he can’t give them feelings they don’t have, he can’t control their thoughts. We started the season with Dean’s doubts about what’s real and whether anything he and Sam have been through has meaning, given the reveal of Chuck as puppet master, but Dean throws down here with a battle cry of it wasn’t all Chuck. It was us. The blood, the sweat the tears.

That’s how this storyline works and the show keeps indicating that’s how it works. They are not without free will. They don’t stop being themselves. They didn’t do everything because of Chuck. They made choices despite the manipulations around them, it was still all them, just trapped in Chuck’s rat maze.

Huh and just an aside maybe Dean really listened to Cas’s speech about that earlier this season, not just to Sam’s, ya think? Considering we’re past the deliberate Cas erasure stage, then we went through the reluctant begrudging actually speaking to each other stage, then we had the pretending not to look at each other yet constantly looking at each other stage, and then we had the ice melting and things are still a mess but the deep freeze is ended. All through that, Dean was thinking about Cas’s words. About how they made their own choices. And “we are.”

This ep self-referentially deconstructed SPN’s own conceits about Sam and Dean. They’re supposed to be these “sweaty overwhelmed hunters” (Kripke) and supposedly regular guys. And yes that has been a massive part of the appeal to me all along, I was never a big fan of Sam and Dean as Chosen Ones or the only guys who can do this. The point is they’re regular guys who are trained and honed into the warriors they became. But here’s the thing, SPN never really did that. The grit was soft focus, Sam and Dean cloaked in fantasy. Perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect manicures. We saw some dirt, some blood, but they’re also the highly marketable leads on a CW genre urban fantasy horror tv series. They didn’t get colds, or cavities, nor did Baby ever break down. I know Baby is an amazing car but if we’re going to talk realism...she would break down at least sometimes. Have they even so much as run out of gas and had to walk 10 miles?

So there has always been this heroic glow around them, an idealization the show itself used, the way they’re filmed and shot. And that’s the thing about many hero narratives...would we really want it another way for some things? Some hero narratives are more genuine gritty. SPN...never was. It occupied a liminal space. It’s gritty...only so far. They’re just regular dudes...not exactly. Not just in the lack of everyday people realism, but their entire story, their whole existence, was revealed in S4/5 as engineered by Heaven. Surely it can’t be a shock the reveal at the end of S14 their whole existence...as engineered by Chuck. SPN already ripped that open, the difference is how far up the power chain the manipulation went. Turns out it went up to the deity CEO not just squabbling angels. They were Special. Chosen. Destined. Play your roles. The Boy with the Demon Blood. The Righteous Man. I have always been a lot more interested in heroes who aren’t the Chosen Ones (although I am a big Buffy fan). I liked that Sam and Dean were regular guys. Which...they are. With the god luck, without the god luck, they are.

They’re no less themselves, they’re not less Sam and Dean, they didn’t retroactively lose their free will, because of the reveal of Chuck as puppet master. They didn’t stop being Sam and Dean because the god luck was taken away. This ep captured that spirit, through the lens of an off-center, comedic meta episode, but that right there, is Sam and Dean’s spirit.

Isn’t it interesting, the ringmaster came up with a marketing hook for Sam and Dean in the fight cage, “The two of you against the world,” when what actually ends up happening is Sam and Dean go all out to save themselves, but it doesn’t actually work, and their friend Garth saves them. Because along with the whole thing about it not being the mask or the costume or the powers that define superheroes, there’s the thing about how heroes need their friends, sometimes they need an assist.

Sam and Dean, alone against the world...ok in some respects, SPN works within that trope, the mythic appeal of that dynamic, part of the hazy glow of fantasy that surrounds these characters, but what have we seen on SPN time and again, and again, and now again in its final season, where it’s a theme shown even louder and it’s been pretty loud for a while.

I can't do this alone Yes you can. Yeah, well, I don't want to.

Think that was just the brothers, off into infinity, no, while that’s a great Sam and Dean moment, that was just the opening notes of this song, it began there with them and kept expanding to include them and their friends and their family. It was all there right from the start. First it was John, not just Sam and Dean. Then it was Bobby, not just Sam and Dean. Then it was Sam, Dean, Bobby, and the Harvelles. Then it was Sam, Dean, the Harvelles, and Cas. Then Team Free Will. Charlie. Garth. Jack. Eileen. Or the Wayward Sisters who, like Garth, saved Sam and Dean because even heroes aren’t 100% perfection who can always save themselves, sometimes they do in fact need some help.

Here’s something else the ep showed us. While Sam and Dean have done all they did with this extra god chosen good luck, all the other hunters took the risks and did a dirty, terrifying, exhausting endless job without being blessed the same way by Chuck. Chuck didn’t care about them, not like he does about Sam and Dean. They are brave and needed and necessary too. Oh I see you, SPN. I see you.

Dean’s utterly sappy soft look watching Garth dance with his wife, continuing on that theme of that longing for...something, someone.

Can’t go wrong with Sam and Dean and babies. Big Sam holding his namesake baby Sammy. MY HEART.

Dean holding baby Cas with Cas’s namesake being a supernatural creature with an intense stare was cute.

Baby breaking down just feels so...emblematic. Because I agree that a show that runs this long will have trouble sustaining itself indefinitely and will decline, it’s an inevitable tv thing. I don’t agree it’s in decline right now or that the quality has sunk. In fact S15 is reminding me repeatedly why I love it so much to the begin with. It’s calling me back in. I wouldn’t be seeing this through to the very end if the story wasn’t pleasing me and it is not only satisfactory, it’s startling me how much it resonates for me now, speaking as someone who’s had some highs and lows with engagement with the show and has criticized it and gotten frustrated, tried to quit, did quit, came back, several times.

This season is also reminding me how deeply I love Sam and Dean and their sibling bond, after some seasons that alienated me from that bond for various reasons, but S15 is...it’s me bursting into tears at random moments because of a Sam and Dean Thought. It’s like that. What even is this. I don’t know I just hope it continues.

#Sam Winchester #Dean Winchester #Sam and Dean: a work in progress #meta #Supernatural #spn #supernatural spoilers #garth fitzgerald iv #with slight nods to ships that i didn't insert the canon did #you'd have to be really REALLY intense about your denial to see what the show keeps pointing towards #the something...someone....

84 notes · View notes

itsclydebitches · 4 years

Note

I’ve been saying this for a while, but I'm always gobsmacked by how many fans of RWBY make blatant misreads of the narrative. Like, any TV/film that’s had a down turn in writing quality (I think star wars, and GOT honestly) their fans have always been able to tell when something due to bad writing decisions. Instead of making horrible reaches to justify it. I always assumed that it was a lack of film literacy, or just the demographic. (1/2)

Thank you! :D

And omg this. Literally every other fandom I’m in---and SW/GoT are excellent examples---the audience is able to critique the story and (usually) still enjoy it, especially when, as you say, enjoyment can stem from the critique itself. It’s not sacrificing one for the other, an ability to go, “Well I adore X but I can also admit that Y was just beyond stupid. They’re not mutually exclusive.” There are always individual outliers and debate about what precisely is “wrong” with the story, but the general consensus when a piece’s quality goes down is that no, it’s obviously not perfect. Why in the world would you try and claim it is? I’ve just lived through this the last few months with Witcher:

I love Geralt and Jaskier’s relationship! ... but yeah I can totally get why book fans are upset at the changes, especially since it was advertised as a book-based adaptation.

Man that’s a fun and enjoyable show... though seriously, those timelines? A bit of a mess. More than a bit, actually. What were they thinking? A few, simple changes would have made that much more accessible.

So was anyone going to remind them that they straight up forgot to age Jaskier twenty-two years? Oh well, at least now we have fun immortality headcanons!

If anything, I’ve noticed that the willingness to admit when something is badly done allows for an easier segue into creativity. Because that’s what a lot of fandom is about: changing/fixing things in the canon. So when the vast majority of a community agrees that yeah, the writers screwed up there, everyone nods in solidarity, gets the frustration out of their system, and moves onto finding a way to explain away and/or work with the issue. RWBY’s fandom, by and large, doesn’t do that. Sure, there are pockets (including my own) that critique it and others (like youtube) that are more broadly critical, but there are still so many people---just enough people---insisting that the bad writing is actually genius that everyone is stuck in a loop of, “How can you see it like that?” It would be like instead of the Witcher fandom collectively spluttering over them forgetting a two decade jump in their narrative and then diving into fun explanations for that, a good chunk of the fandom instead misread and made up moments in an effort to absolve the show of any mistakes. It was perfectly done and you should be ashamed for trying to criticize it... then no one wants to come up with fun immortality headcanons because they’ve been shamed for thinking that was ever a problem in the first place. It’s because the problem exists and was acknowledged that we got the cool fandom reaction to it.

So I think about what the RWBY fandom would be like if it were a little more like Game of Thones, or Star Wars, or Witcher. If when the canon did something stupid the fandom was (mostly) unified behind their disgust of that. If, when Volume 7 randomly had one of the most heroic characters try to kill two protags simultaneously, everyone just went, “Lol yeah what was that?” And then we got to move on. “RWBY screwed up James Ironwood so let’s create something better!” Rather than what we have now, which is some fans just trying acknowledge that it was stupid and getting bombarded with replies/asks/reblogs about how wrong they are. In a really inappropriate way too. I’ve blocked a lot of people this volume because inevitably these “criticisms” move away from the text and become an attack on the person instead. When I post a critique of RWBY, and someone counters, and I counter back that they’re twisting facts and here is my proof to back that up... the next response usually starts including insults and expletives I won’t be repeating here. Which, yeah, demonstrates that a lot of people are misreading the canon---in specific, fact-based ways as opposed to “Yeah you have a point I just perceived it differently” interpretations---and they’re not interested in learning how to accurately analyse a text in a persuasive manner. So when faced with a deconstruction of their argument they fall back on insults. The “analysis” becomes based purely in emotion: I love RWBY and I’m pissed that you would dare say anything bad about it.

But being able to come together around a canon messing something up can be, oddly enough, kind of great... so it’s too bad RWBY doesn’t have more of that.

#rwby #rwde #mymetas #makomint

36 notes · View notes

dgcatanisiri · 4 years

Text

Looking over the Sequel Trilogy as a whole... I figure that the way that polarization has worked in just about everything these days, people will dig in their heels either way, but... The Last Jedi really only works in isolation.

Which is a problem for what was movie two of a trilogy and movie eight of a saga.

More long-winded ramblings behind the cut.

Characters repeat beats, learn lessons that they already knew in TFA. It doesn’t properly set up things for the finale - the ONE thing it sets up is Kylo Ren as the leader of the First Order, but then that plot point really just gets Palpa-jacked. Otherwise... I’ve brought it up repeatedly in my critical posts of the movie, there’s not really a sense of hope at the end of the movie, not for the characters we’ve supposedly been emotionally connecting to throughout it.

TLJ only broadly follows up on TFA, despite picking up almost right afterwards. Luke Skywalker went missing but left a map... to a place where he was waiting to die, alone and forgotten. Finn was critically wounded and left in a coma... then wakes up right away, right as rain. Meanwhile, the guy who got a scar in that same fight gets the emotional weight. Poe sent BB-8 into the desert with the vital intel, knowing that he’d be taken captive by the First Order, tortured and killed, because the mission was more important... then needs to learn the importance of sacrifice from Holdo. Rey becomes determined to reach out to and redeem Kylo Ren... the guy who she watched kill Han Solo, his father, her mentor, and critically wound the first person who came back for her, which was her driving motivation throughout TFA, to return to Jakku because she was waiting for her parents to come back for her.

Also this?

This is not the body language of a woman who has met her great true love and wants to save him from himself. This is a predator stalking her prey as she moves in for the kill. That is not intent to fuck, it is intent to kill. And that? That was the last meeting she had with Kylo Ren - a meeting she had every reason to believe would be their last, considering that Starkiller exploded a short time later.

Which is the OTHER big problem within TLJ’s narrative - the First Order is effectively the Empire in it, having infinite resources to throw at things. BUT the First Order was a fringe group in TFA. They were the scattered remains of the Empire who, in secret, managed to develop a planet-buster. This was their big move. But TLJ frames them as already controlling the galaxy.

Trying not to get sidetracked, but that’s why the whole Poe-Holdo thing pisses me off. Based on the First Order of TFA, Poe made a sound tactical call in destroying the dreadnaught, depleting the First Order’s limited resources - that ship had to have thousands of FO soldiers and officers, a powerful siege weapon in its own right, and that’s the kind of mission you use bombers FOR, if they couldn’t handle that, they couldn’t handle any other kind of mission and should have been scrapped for parts. It’s just that TLJ treats the First Order as the Empire at its prime, with the infinite resources of a galaxy-spanning organization built on the bones of a thousand generation Republic, not the scavenged corpse of the Empire.

Starkiller’s reveal in TFA was like saying that some fringe political group got a nuke. TLJ says that, within the space of HOURS, that fringe political group took over the galaxy.

That’s another reason I dislike how this trilogy at large (not just TLJ, though that was where it grabbed my attention) portrays hyperspace travel as virtuously instantaneous, it makes the galaxy WAY too small.

In the end, this is also a story about heroic failure. Like, this is the most downbeat movie of the whole franchise in my book - even Revenge of the Sith feels more hopeful than this, because that last scene, of Owen, Beru, and Luke, looking out to the binary sunset... We have the context for those characters. We know that this is the start of hope, for the characters we care for. The end of TLJ? It ends on some kid we have no connection to staring up at the stars, with our heroes, the last hope against the encroaching Empire First Order all packed in to a beat up weed van. This movie presents the bleakest situation, because that’s all the hope we have, and it’s bitter at best.

All of this, ALL OF IT... The Last Jedi fails to connect to the movie that preceded it. Not only that, though... It also kept its main characters separated. None of the characters we’re supposed to care about are interacting with one another, they’re all in very isolated plots. This makes it hard to connect to their emotional arcs, because they’re not connecting or impacting one another. They spend TLJ isolated throughout the story, off doing separate things. Considering that much of TFA was Rey-Finn, and then TRoS features so much time with the trio, that REALLY stands out, and does so poorly. The core relationship of the previous movie is missing, and the successive movie takes it as a given. That’s a problem, a problem caused by TLJ.

The way I see it, Rise of Skywalker did the only thing it could with the pieces given to it by TLJ, it acknowledged them, but also moved on from them quickly. Because TLJ is not connected to the things that came before it, it hangs in isolation, and to try and make it fit detracts from the work you’re doing in the successive story, which now has to act to basically be a fast-paced part 2 AND a concluding part 3, all at once, because you wrote a standalone and called it a sequel.

Had TLJ existed as its own separate thing, this prospective trilogy that is supposedly in the works, a Star Wars Story movie, a mini-series, something like that, it’d have been better for everyone involved, I think. Unfortunately, that’s not what it was. And that makes it a painful and awkward addition to the saga. I’m not saying that Star Wars can’t be unconventional, that it can’t deconstruct itself, that it can’t reexamine things. But it needs to be done in the proper place.

Part two of an ongoing narrative is not that place. This part two discards and ignores character arcs established in the prior film, and really makes no effort to set up a successive film - again, TRoS is basically doing the work of telling part two and part three in the same film, because hey, stormtrooper rebellion, Jannah revealing that other stormtroopers have broken ranks, breaking the reins that hold them... This SHOULD have been established in the previous movie.

Like, if you cut Canto Bight, you really lose nothing of value to begin with, and if you replace it with an infiltration sequence featuring Finn and Rose, you gain a wealth of character development. But TLJ effectively shoved Finn aside - shoved TFA’s male lead, shoved the black man out of the position - for Kylo Ren, for a white guy.

I imagine that JJ Abrams wanted to do more with Finn (considering he championed for Finn and John Boyega specifically), but he just couldn’t fit it all into the movie as it is - I’m already hearing rumbling that his initial cut of the movie was like three hours, almost an additional hour of film. Which sucks but... I mean, considering the cut down probably happened on orders from the Disney overlords, I figure he couldn’t do or say anything about it.

This trilogy has been very much a disaster on a writing level - trilogies should not be written entirely on the fly, with each film done by different writers. It should have been a singular writer, even if the directors shifted. As it is, I think that TRoS did the best it could with a lot of higher-up handstringing.

#dg rambles #the last jedi critical

7 notes · View notes

him-e · 5 years

Note

Hi, I'm the anon who wrote the 5 asks about the Dany plotline and GRRM. I'd like to apologize to u for lashing out, it was uncalled for and u have every right to state those opinions regardless of what I (or anyone else) think. Feeling hurt by the show wrt Dany's story made me react badly to the idea that it was actually acceptable, especially coming from someone whose ideas I appreciate so much and have spent hours invested on. You can answer them, delete them, idk, I just wanted to say sorry.

No need to apologize, anon! I’m currently on semi-to-full hiatus and that’s why I’m being so slow at answering messages—and yeah, I understand the frustration completely, and I don’t blame you for it. ;))

I’m going to answer your ask anyway. Long reply after the cut:

I hope this doesn’t come off as offensive or confrontational bc that’s not the point, I’ve enjoyed reading your ASOIAF/GoT and TB metas for years and would not reply to them if I weren’t invested on them. That said, I’d like to ask why do you insist on 1) arguing that Dany’s dark turn was reasonable if you don’t hate her and 2) defending D&D and blaming GRRM for what happened on the show. When it comes to 1), sure, Dany might *accidentally* burn KL, but to willingly choose to burn thousands of innocents? She may accept that some casualties would have to occur, but not in the way that the show presented (in that she had the choice to not kill anyone but did). You argue that that direction was valid of because of the recurring theme of how power corrupts, but then I’d argue, what if it were Sansa, another character very much involved in the world of politics? Would you be ok if people argued that it’d make sense for her to give up her ideals and become just as power-hungry and cynic and bitter as Littlefinger? Probably not; what’s the point if those characters become their worst possible selves? Dany was made a villain, was implied to be mad and was called “your satanic majesty”. I really can’t see how you could call those writing decisions valid. When it comes to 2), I’m not saying GRRM is perfect, he’s been quite callous in the book series and especially in F&B when it comes to social issues, but D&D are also professional writers with critical thinking skills and moral values of their own who could have tried to alleviate the problems in the books and not made things even worse. That’s why I don’t get why you’re blaming GRRM for what D&D wrote when the former wasn’t even involved in the ending’s writing process aside from possibly giving them an outline of what happens. GRRM should be criticized for what he wrote and will write, and the finale may have feel been a product of his ideas, but he still has no (moral or legal) responsibility in helping to make the TV show better or worse.

The reason why I maintain that the show’s ending is a (badly written) version of GRRM’s ending is that I can 100% see Martin’s blueprint in the climax+anticlimax structure of the season. The way it twists the audience’s expectations and delves into what happens AFTER the final battle is won, the way it subverts the most reliable narrative conventions and, instead of building up in a crescendo towards a final spectacle where the heroes would sacrifice their lives to save the world in a blaze of glory, it shifts gears almost unpleasantly, slows down to show what happens to them once their heroic purpose is fulfilled and zooms in on their identity crisis, their depression and isolation and sudden lack of purpose… it’s all too deliberate, and IN MY PERSONAL OPINION it’s done with a vision in mind—something I don’t believe d&d would spontaneously put any effort in, especially not if GRRM had already served them a perfectly fine, crowd-pleasing endgame involving Dany’s heroic sacrifice against the Others.

I understand my stance might come across as “defending d&d and blaming GRRM”, but I’m really not? I’ve often repeated how I believe d&d messed things up and that GRRM’s version will make infinitely more sense and be infinitely better written, and I’m sure he will avoid the pitfalls of cynical, circular storytelling, because he’s ultimately a better writer and someone who believes in idealism and true heroism even as he deconstructs it. How can the overall narrative remain uplifting & give a message of hope and faith for humanity while still telling a story that ends with Dany’s descent into “true villainy” (but haven’t we repeated ad nauseam that heroes and villains are too reductive categories for asoiaf?), I don’t know, but it’s not my job to figure it out, and I ultimately trust & respect Martin’s vision and ability to tell the story HE wants.

sure, Dany might *accidentally* burn KL, but to willingly choose to burn thousands of innocents? She may accept that some casualties would have to occur, but not in the way that the show presented

1) I’ve always conceded that, while I think the gist of the storyline is Martin’s, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the battle of King’s Landing will go as we’ve seen in the show, or even happen at the same point of the story (for one thing, Young Griff & JonCon will probably be involved, and that seems more likely to happen before, and not after, the war for the dawn);

2) That said, what I’m relatively confident of, at this point, is that Dany will NOT die in the WftD as a self sacrificial hero (this is entirely FANON SPECULATION, and people treating it like a fixed point in the universe, something the narrative is “inevitably” building towards, is one of the reasons the fandom seems unable to critically analyze show!Dany’s evolution without going hysterical about it and resorting to no true scotsman arguments. I’ve often complained about the dangers of elevating fan theories to canon status, and trust me I never wanted to go full cassandra about this, but here we are). The details and plot points leading up to this might be wildly different from the show’s version, but I think Dany will survive the WftD, which will leave her directionless and purposeless and doubting the truth of her heroic destiny for the first time in her life after she hatched the dragons, and that she’ll cross the ultimate moral horizon in a hail mary to restore that sense of self, that sense of purpose, completing her parabola from princess in rags, to breaker of chains, to conqueror, to savior of humanity, to conqueror again, to TRAGIC HERO. How can this be a valid writing decision, you asked—well, why shouldn’t it? Is something only valid as long as it pleases the audience? What screams tragic hero more than the hero turning into the very thing she swore to eradicate, and realizing it only when it’s too late? There’s something genuinely chilly in Dany’s “if I look back, I’m lost” refrain. This is the mantra of someone who thinks the only way to stay alive is to cross one threshold after the other. So far this coping mechanism has brought her higher, and higher, and higher. But what if it will be her downfall? “I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell”, indeed;

3) Dany’s burning KL *accidentally* is like Stannis burning Shireen “but only if the circumstances are dire enough / the stakes are high enough”. No offense, but this is typical stan logic: you admit the possibility that your faves might go through a dark phase but you don’t want to have to unstan them, so you want them to do bad things for good reasons, or because there’s no other choice, or because “they didn’t know”. That’s understandable, but I don’t think Martin is the type of writer to give his character free passes or soften the blow of their moral crucibles like that. This is NOT to say that the show did Dany’s dark turn WELL, because it DIDN’T—her motivations were all over the place, the turning point (the bells) wasn’t believable because it lacked connection to her character arc, the narrative backed away from showing the attack from her pov which betrays the writers’ inability to make sense of this psychological downfall from HER perspective, etc. But to say “Dany will NEVER! BURN! INNOCENTS! ON PURPOSE!” sounds very, very premature to me.

(re: Sansa, hasn’t power corrupted her too, to an extent? Hasn’t she lied, schemed, manipulated, spilled secrets, in order to restore & secure the Stark hold on the North? Isn’t she queen, in part, because the rest of her family was scattered at the four corners of the known world? I’m not particularly happy with the way she was written this season, and I think some of her choices were questionable; but at the same time I reject the idea that a character ending up more flawed, or morally ambiguous, or less likeable than they were at the beginning must necessarily be bad storytelling)

I’m not saying GRRM is perfect, he’s been quite callous in the book series and especially in F&B when it comes to social issues, but D&D are also professional writers with critical thinking skills and moral values of their own who could have tried to alleviate the problems in the books and not made things even worse. That’s why I don’t get why you’re blaming GRRM for what D&D wrote when the former wasn’t even involved in the ending’s writing process aside from possibly giving them an outline of what happens. GRRM should be criticized for what he wrote and will write, and the finale may have feel been a product of his ideas, but he still has no (moral or legal) responsibility in helping to make the TV show better or worse.

Martin is not responsible of the show’s writing, but he is responsible of the outline he gave to the showrunners, and right now I have no reason to believe they didn’t follow it, at least for the most part. For years I’ve been told that “the show is not the books”, and while that’s certainly true, I can’t, and won’t, separate the show from the books when it comes to book speculation, because the show is still for all intents and purposes an ADAPTATION of the book series, and while it’s irresponsible to expect it to be a 1:1 transcription of what will happen in TWOW and ADOS, it’s also equally (imo) irresponsible to act like the two canons have nothing to do with each other and that it’s stupid to use the show as a resource for book speculation. If people want to pretend the show never happened, good for them, but that’s not the way I think, personally. I don’t blame GRRM for the show’s faults, and my reservations are actually 90% about the EXECUTION of the plot which is ENTIRELY on d&d, but there’s a 10% of my concerns that is about the IDEA in itself, regardless of context and execution—the idea of the story ending with a bittersweet anticlimax involving the death/downfall of the MOST PROMINENT FEMALE HERO OF THE SERIES, who is also the carrier of the most subversive anti-establishment political message in the story.

tldr: I’m not criticizing GRRM for what he hasn’t written yet, but I can certainly criticize him for what I think is a (however botched) adaptation of his outline, if the main selling points of said outline are questionable in themselves. No one can convince me that GRRM told d&d that Jon and Dany would die heroically to save the world and they ARBITRARILY decided to fuck it up for shock value or whatever, and just accidentally stumbled onto a more subversive and provocative ending than what Martin HIMSELF was planning. (that would make them two geniuses, even if the execution sucked, lol)

and if i’m wrong about it, well:

but until then…

#anon #asks #got wank #got asks for ts #got discourse #got finale #got negativity #show vs books #dany discourse #dany**#grrm #asoiaf spec #asoiaf endgame

24 notes · View notes

faketextsfromlastmight · 5 years

Text

Best of tags #08

A compilation of my favorite reactions to this blog.

@mangafreakazoid on the problematic aspects of superheroics: (Link)

#bnha#and all super hero media frankly#just take this point and *whoosh* miss it ocompletely#which is a shame! because it's fascinating!#media studies

I’d be willing to bet that Horikoshi has read Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”. The superhero society he describes in “My Hero Academia” is surprisingly layered and complex; it creates a lot of problemetic phenomena and its excesses are frequently called out. I’m not sure the manga is a deconstruction the genre, though. More of a reconstruction. Horikoshi’s part of this generation who digested the grim superhero backlash of the 80′s/90′s and wants to address the criticism rather than handwave it. Basically it comes down to focusing less on what makes a superhero and more on what makes a hero, period. It’s become trendy these days for self-aware superheroes to poke fun at some of the more ridiculous aspects of the genre (if Deadpool’s popularity is any indication) but it’s still very rare to see a comic really delve into how weird a superhero society would be on a sociological level. So far “My Hero Academia” is rather successful in that regard.

@kaeru-hime on a joke about BNHA’s pro hero Shouta Aizawan a.k.a. Eraserhead: (Link)

#i thought this was a fucking david lynch post at first

Yeah, the thought did occur to me too! At first I felt guilty that David Lynch fans (of which I’m part of, incidentally) would browse through the “Eraserhead” tag and not find posts about the movie they love. But then I remembered that eery sense of confusion and absurdity is exactly what David Lynch would want.

@awesome-milkshake-blog on MHA’s society: (Link)

#bnha#the society in bnha is so messed up#and only the villains acknowledge it

I’m not so sure. We’ve seen a lot of criticism from heroic characters such as Shinsou, Monoma, Aizawa, etc. But mostly they’re isolated Cassandras whose voices are muffled by the noise of the superhero propaganda machine. This benefits the villains as they become the only persons loud enough to stand up to the system in any noticeable way. All For One is a villain, he has no ambition to change society for the better. But he’s clever enough to know that this system creates outcasts. By convincing these outcasts he’s the only one able to defend them, he can create an army. And his terrorism creates paranoia in the public, strengthening his “us vs them” rhetoric. It’s textbook terrorism: he doesn’t often attack strategically significant institutions, he instead attacks what will create the most scandalous media fanfare. So of course his first order of business is to engineer a school shooting, for maximum shock. All For One’s followers think they’re part of some great war, but really it’s more of a media compaign to recruit more members into All For One’s cult.

@khirishima on All Might’s merch: (Link)

#all might cereal would be delicious though

They taste like JUSTICE!!! With a dash of pure unadulterated cavities.

@im-no-hero-im-alto on Mari Kondo killing Mineta: (Link)

bold of you to assume Shinsou needed to tell her to do it

From what little I’ve seen of Kondo, she seems to have little patience for mysogynists. So my guess is that she brought Shinsou around to plead legal irresponsibility in the murder trial.

@rosetteskye on Dabi saving his backstory for “someone special” : (Link)

Are you implying that Deku isn’t someone special to Todoroki?!

It’s written in-character. Dabi’s dismissive of Deku’s significance, not me. It’s a joke about how revealing your tragic brackstory is a stand-in for losing your/ oh, you’ll figure it out. I’m going to bed.

@scream-mans-friend on All Might cereals: (Link)

#shut up aizawa theyre busy voring all.might

The only thing anyone’s voring today is my sanity.

@my-minds-cabinet on Mineta becoming a priest: (Link)

#he isnt holy enough#in fact hes not holy at all lol

That’s the only happy ending I can imagine for Mineta. He gets injured, finds God in a near-death experience, and vows celibacy. Then again even if you ignore his sexual deviancy there are still several instances in the series where he’s shown to be a manipulative jerk, even towars his male classmates. So at that point the only way to salvage his character would be a major personality change after a brain concussion.

@salty-cold-medina on collective thirsting over Horikoshi Kohei: (Link)

#what is WRONG with y'all

I blame baby-boomers.

@doggo-city on Aoyama dyeing his costume black for Tokoyami: (Link)

If you paint his belt black he will be able to shoot darkness

By My Hero Academia’s logic... this sounds legit.

@principle-of-parsimony on Toga romanticizing gay terrorists: (Link)

#this is honestly how some people act

My personal headcanon is that Shigaraki mostly recruits his League of Villains by logging into Tumblr and finding the worst “hot takes” imaginable. Tumblr is rife with outcasts who latch on morally bankrupt narratives where their community is filled with heroes who can do no wrong. That fits the League of Villains’ recruitment policies. Toga’s behavior in this ficlet was partly inspired by inane comments I read on the “Rejected Princesses” blog (Link).

69 notes · View notes

lightsandlostbells · 5 years

Note

so, overall, what did you think of season 3 of stranger things?

It took me a while to answer this question because I had to sort out how I felt about this season! I guess if I had to narrow it down to an overall opinion: enjoyable, but very messy. Had some of the series’ best moments but also, while I was watching, I had far more grumbles and gripes than the previous two seasons.

I’ve never really been hung up on whether this show is derivative or plays too into nostalgia or w/e. Plenty of media does that. And despite all the time I’ve spent dissecting micro-expressions and weighty silences in European teen dramas that are filmed for the cost of a candy bar … I am way into genre films and TV shows. I love monsters and superheroes and spectacle! I watched Stranger Things the weekend it premiered because I love ‘80s movies about kids on bikes having adventures, I eat that shit up. So I don’t expect this show to be a hardcore deconstruction and re-imagining of those tropes (though that sounds like a pretty great show), I’m fine with it being what it is: a solid, spooky sci-fi/horror throwback series. What matters most is whether the story and characters work. Personally, I would say whatever criticisms you can make of S1 and S2, they had heart, and unfortunately I think some of that heart was missing from S3. Much of that, IMO, comes from sidelining some of the familial relationships that were at the center of the narrative in S1 and S2, like the Byers family and Hopper & Eleven, and to some degree the important friendships like the party, although there were other friendships introduced in this season so that wasn’t as glaring. It’s not a surprise that one of the best-received parts about this season, Steve and Robin’s friendship, is also responsible for one of the most heartfelt scenes Stranger Things has ever done.

There was also a way larger emphasis on comedy in S3. Comedy is probably my favorite genre, and I did laugh at a lot of humorous moments in this season. But I also felt like there was more comedy for comedy’s sake, like long sequences created intentionally to make the audience laugh. Whereas in S1 and S2, I can’t remember any scenes like that? The comedy was more understated and came from character personalities and relationship moments rather than joke set pieces. That’s perhaps another reason why S3 felt like it had less heart.

My hope for season 4 - and I am assuming there is a season 4, because apparently this show did mega ratings for S3 - is that they don’t add more major new characters (except love interests for the gay characters, go ahead with those, lol) and instead focus on the existing cast, which is already a very strong ensemble, yet many of the characters have gotten pushed to the sides. I would love if they added to the episode count: a lot of Netflix series drag out their seasons, like they have enough story for 10 episodes but have to stretch it out to 13, but Stranger Things has the opposite problem. I feel like if they had 10 (or 11, ha) episodes they could have more time for breather moments and more space for character arcs. This season was really fast-paced in my opinion, and although that’s a positive in many respects, I missed a lot of the down time.

Also, I think every season has taken place over like a week maximum, not including the epilogues, and like … you can make the story last longer than a week! Not everything has to go to hell in like a day or two.

Some more specific opinions underneath, obviously lots of spoilers.

First of all, I gotta say, I feel like a weirdo, because so many of the reviews for this season are like A RETURN TO FORM AFTER A DISAPPOINTING SECOND SEASON and UP THERE WITH SEASON 1 NOT THAT CRAPPY SEASON 2 THAT NO ONE LIKED and uhhhh … I liked season 2 just fine? It’s probably my favorite. There are things I don’t like about it, but the stuff I love is stuff I really, really love. Hopper and Eleven’s relationship, for instance. Steve and Dustin teaming up and Steve Harrington becoming a guardian to four children. Those are not just great elements to the series, but directions that I think only a second season could have taken - Hopper and Eleven’s bond wouldn’t have had half the weight if they weren’t established as traumatized, broken people in S1. Steve Harrington becoming a babysitter would not be nearly so delightful if we had not known him as the popular douchebag stereotype from S1 - if he were just a cool dude hanging out with kids from the get-go, the impact wouldn’t be as great. After S1 used Will Byers as a MacGuffin in S1, S2 gave Will a much larger role and that little actor acted his ass off. His performance generated a lot of genuine suspense and chills. There was Sean Astin being lovable! Paul Reiser’s character being a surprisingly good guy! Yeah, there are big flaws in the season, and you can argue it’s too much of a repeat of S1, but to me it was a version of S1 that made the characters more specific and interesting. I’m just … genuinely baffled by how it’s supposed to be demonstrably worse than the others. Because of the Kali episode? I didn’t think that one was terrible, either. I think it broke up the momentum of the chaos at Hawkins Lab, and Kali’s friends were obnoxious, it’s certainly not the greatest writing of the series, but as a whole the episode is like. Fine. It’s fine. It’s mediocre, not atrocious. It’s not the worst thing ever. It doesn’t ruin anything about the story or direction or the series. Most importantly it’s easy to ignore or skip on a rewatch if you don’t like it. The backlash was way overblown.

My biggest disappointment with season 3 was Hopper. Whaaaaaaat. Whaaaat did they dooooo.

Hopper in previous seasons is a flawed, messed-up human being, but I always knew where he was coming from. When he yelled at Eleven in S2, I still got why he did it. In this season he felt cartoonish. The overprotective paternalistic dad trope is annoying BUT I might have been less bothered had they connected it more to Eleven’s lack of experience with the world, less RAWRRRR KEEP BOYS AWAY FROM MY GIRL. Or if Hopper had not demonstrated like, actual rage toward Mike and we just saw him fuming about it to himself or venting to Joyce, if he was trying to keep that shit under control. (I did laugh at him singing “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” in the car, I gotta admit.)

But his attitude toward Joyce was what really bummed me out. I’m not into this show for shipping reasons, but I low-key enjoyed the possibility of Joyce and Hopper hooking up based on previous seasons. This season felt like they were writing a completely different dynamic for them, one that was much more aggressively obnoxious. I think their intentions were clear - they were going for a Sam-and-Diane relationship, something that was referenced early on in the Bob flashback - but the problem is that their relationship was not like that at all in S1 and S2. When I think of Joyce and Hopper from those seasons, I think about him supporting her after Bob died, or listening to her concerns about her son, or working together to find Will. They didn’t have this combative dynamic! Frankly watching giant-ass Hopper yell at tiny Joyce was viscerally unpleasant. (Side note but in the first trailer there was a shot of Hopper running at the Fun Fair with someone else who I assumed was Eleven, but no, turned out to be Joyce, Winona Ryder is just that tiny next to David Harbour.)

Also, considering this season ended with his death (and we all know he’s not really dead but OK) it’s such a waste that there were few Hopper&Eleven moments! Only the finale brought some quality content on that front. But otherwise their relationship was out of sight, out of mind for almost the whole season, which wasn’t a great choice, both to maximize the emotional impact of the ending, and to expand upon their situation post-S2. I mean, it’s been months since then, how has their relationship changed now? Hopper’s letter talked about the stuff he enjoyed doing with his daughter - why didn’t we see any of that on screen this season? It could’ve helped with the Mike angle, too, like show Hopper and Eleven watching TV together and laughing and having a good time, and then the phone rings and it’s Mike and suddenly Hopper’s watching TV alone as Eleven’s now focused on her boyfriend, we see his disappointment, etc.

Scoops Troop - Now they were a delight. They had such a ludicrous story but for the most part it worked due to the characters playing off each other and because the writing/acting/directing embraced the silliness.

Steve Harrington is easily one of the best characters on this show. I fucking love that guy. He’s consistently entertaining, he’s had possibly the best character growth out of anyone in the series, he’s evolved from a stock ‘80s asshole stereotype into someone who’s funny and sympathetic and likable. He’s this amazing blend of the ridiculous with the heroic. Steve and Dustin were great together, as they were last season, and I’m cackling that Steve acquired YET ANOTHER CHILD under his supervision without even trying. But the MVP of the season was the Steve & Robin friendship. Holy shit do I love that relationship. Holy SHIT.

Robin herself is a terrific new character, smart and funny and once you know she’s half-Uma, you can’t unsee it. I was loving her already and then the bathroom scene happened and I YELLED. I was so utterly overjoyed. If they had made Steve and Robin hook up, honestly … I would’ve been fine with it, like this show doesn’t need more heterosexual romance but at least they had a fun dynamic, but man, the friendship angle was so so superior. It’s a type of relationship that media is lacking, and the specific circumstances of this friendship made it genuinely moving to me. I keep wanting to write like a meta post devoted to just this relationship because I just have so many emotions about it! But they play well off each other as a comedic duo and as an odd couple friendship, and they’re really what each other needs, IMO. Steve needed this close friendship more than he needed a girlfriend; in this season he’s clearly adrift and we’ve seen the kind of shitty friends he had in like season one, is Dustin the best pal he had at this point? And I love Steve & Dustin but Steve needed a good friend his own age. Robin is a lesbian in small-town Indiana in the ‘80s, and she was clearly full of fear that Steve would hate her if he knew, and for him to accept her so easily, not even making a big deal about it? That’s kind of life-saving, really. I can’t wait to see more of them, if Netflix wants to make the half-hour Clerks-esque spinoff about them working in a video store and shooting the shit, I would be 100% down for that.

I have some mixed feelings about Erica because I think she could have benefited from getting the same humanization as the other kids (and I’m going to leave the discussion of racial tropes gently by the side at the moment but … yeah). The other child characters are played more like actual people with vulnerabilities, which has been part of the show’s appeal since the first season, and Erica was more like the sitcom kid who always has a snarky quip ready; however, she did make me laugh and I like that they tapped into her being a nerd, I wish they’d explore that in future seasons with the character. “I’m ten, you bald bastard” was one of my favorite lines of the season, I lost my goddamn mind.

Billy - Lmao, so Billy in S2 was the woooorst. This dude had ZERO redeeming qualities. His abusive dad creates a smidgen of sympathy, I guess, but Billy goes so far beyond normal teenage assholery that it didn’t make a dent in my opinion of him. You can redeem someone like Steve Harrington, first of all because Steve actually feels regret and works to correct his mistakes, but Steve also didn’t go to a point of no return in the first place. Billy did, for me. Physically and verbally abusing his younger sister? Attacking a black middle-schooler for the crime of being in the same room as his white sister? What a piece of shit.

With that in mind - I have no problem focusing on him as a villain this season, I really don’t. It justifies his inclusion in S2 other than as a human antagonist who’s ultimately not really connected to the main plot, as it retrospectively establishes him as an even greater threat in this season. I also think the actor did a good job with the material he was given. However, ultimately this dude’s arc was underwhelming. The thing is … I can tell they were trying to show Billy struggling with the Mind Flayer, but Billy is so lacking in any positive qualities that it’s kind of like, where does that struggle even come from? Yeah, even the worst people aren’t going to be wild about having a monster from another dimension hijack your body and use it to collect people for spare parts, but this is the same dude who was about to run over Mike, Lucas, and Dustin on their bikes last season for absolutely no reason. He beat Steve to point of unconsciousness and could’ve put him in the hospital. He assaulted Lucas. So I really need some evidence of Billy’s moral compass because it is not inherent and there’s in fact plenty of evidence that it doesn’t exist. I’m not very enthusiastic about redeeming a racist, abusive creep, but I also think if you’re going to go for him helping Eleven at the end … you have to show some current potential for goodness, not just “used to be a nice kid.”

A really glaring omission: the lack of any family/home scenes with him, Max, and their parents this season. We left off last season with Max telling him to leave her and her friends alone. How is their relationship since then? Is there still a lot of friction? Is there a tense peace? Has their relationship improved in any way? We really needed to see that follow-up. I get that Max crying over Billy this season makes sense in that he’s still her family and we can still have love for those who hurt us … but I also feel that we needed something between them to justify her pain, like even just the potential of their relationship being a fraction better, or the suggestion that Billy used to be OK to Max before he went full asshole. And I think we really needed to see Billy’s dad being currently abusive in this season - tbh, missed opportunity that the dad didn’t get flayed like, out of revenge (which would have been both satisfying and horrifying), missed opportunities for suspense when we think Billy might serve up Max and her mom to the Mind Flayer, etc.

Another missed opportunity: drawing parallels between Billy and Will. Both are possessed by the Mind Flayer. Both had shitty dads calling them homophobic slurs. Both could be read as gay (I’m not hungry to claim Billy as LGBT representation or invested in this interpretation but his scenes with Steve in S2 admittedly have that sweaty homoerotic dick-measuring vibe, if you want to take it there). Their names are both William, FFS. The difference is that Will is a sweet and gentle kid surrounded by loving family and friends who fought to save him, and Billy is a violent, cruel dude who probably doesn’t have any real friends, just shallow connections. You could show how the Mind Flayer could more easily possess and manipulate someone like Billy, but that wasn’t really explored.

Also, is anyone going to dwell on the fact that like … Max is living with an abusive man as her stepfather? He’s shown hurting Billy’s mom. Does that not concern anyone that he is very likely to attack either Max or her mom?

Oh, and thank God they didn’t take the Billy/Karen thing all the way. In retrospect, even weirder considering Billy’s mommy issues.

Joyce - I get that it’s a big leap downward in emotional investment to go from “must save my son” to “fucking magnets, how do they work” but I liked that she had her own investigation that wasn’t full of emotional turmoil. Winona forever.

Mike - Everyone is ragging on him but I think he was less terrible than people are making him out to be. He was bratty in a teenage way, but he wasn’t the worst kid ever. I didn’t take his now notorious line to Will (“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls”) as something intentionally cruel or homophobic, just something that came out wrong and that he instantly regretted, and he and Lucas did seem genuinely apologetic over the D&D game and went over to Will’s in the rain out of concern. And the reason he lied to Eleven was because SCARY ASS HOPPER threatened him??? Also, his concern over Eleven overexerting herself was not misplaced, lmao! It really took that long for anyone to go, “Hey, should we be worried about the amount of blood coming out of her nose? Should we be concerned about the effects on her brain?” Sure, Eleven has the final say in whether or not she uses her powers, but tbh… she didn’t have a normal upbringing and her view of her powers is probably skewed. Like, would Eleven have enough basic medical knowledge to be worried about brain damage or nosebleeds, or would that just be the norm to her? Is she making these decisions with a full grasp of the potential consequences? Anyway, I don’t have a more negative opinion of Mike after this season.

Eleven - I loved Eleven a lot in this season. I don’t know if it did a ton for her character arc, but it’s nice to see her slowly develop into more of a normal girl. And the season was rough for her in terms of getting her ass kicked, she goes through so much mental and physical pain! In the end she loses her dad and her powers!

Of course one of the bright spots was her and Max becoming friends! Not gonna lie, there was something a little … simplistic about some of that depiction of friendship for me - just that so much of it was SHOPPING and GIGGLING and BOY TALK, girls being GIRLS, when Max has been portrayed as a tomboy and Eleven is a telekinetic kid raised in a lab, that maybe their interactions shouldn’t have fit the mold quite so much - but it doesn’t truly bother me because they were so sweet and fun. I loved them tracking down Billy together and I appreciate that their friendship carried throughout the season, that Max was the person shown carrying an injured Eleven along with Mike, Eleven comforted Max after Billy died, etc. That was a definite sore spot of S2, the girl-on-girl jealousy and Eleven flat-out rejecting Max’s friendly introduction, and I do think they took that feedback into account for the better here. I also like that Eleven was clearly taking cues from Max, the more “worldly” of the two about boys and clothes and teenage attitudes in general - it gave their friendship a more specific shape.

I cannot WAIT to see her living with the Byers family next season. Like if they don’t spend significant time on that dynamic, it will be the biggest disappointment. There could be 8 episodes of just boring mundane Byers domestic scenes and I would love it, please inject it into my eyeballs, Duffer bros. I want to see her bonding with all of them, trying to fit in at school, attempting the most normal life she’s ever had. Also lmao, she and Will can finally have a goddamn conversation??? I hope they’ve been withholding that relationship because they were planning to go all out with those new sibling vibes in S4. They are the two characters who have been most traumatized by the Upside Down, we deserve to see them connect.

On that note, I have a lot of thoughts about Will in this season! Mainly - underused as FUCK. After all that trauma of being possessed by the Mind Flayer last season, they barely utilize this connection in the second half of S3. Even his Spidey sense hardly came in handy??? Now that was really weird, IMO, because the least they could do was have that feeling alert the others or be useful, but lmao it was practically pointless.

It’s weird because I’m not sure if they just don’t know what to do with Will if he’s not being a victim (which is stupid because there’s plenty you could do with him), but at the same time, he has one of the most poignant subplots of the season. From the reactions I’ve seen, Will feeling rejected and left out as his friends move on really resonated with a lot of viewers. But then this thread is abandoned after episode 3, for the most part. Will cries and destroys the place that represents his childhood, a place that was created specifically in response to trauma (mentioned in S2 that he and Jonathan built it after their dad left), this is very rich emotional territory … and then the show’s just like ehhhhhh moving on. He’s just hanging out in the background and touching his neck for the rest of the season.

And now I gotta talk about that other thing with Will.

I am so confused by what the Duffer brothers are trying to accomplish with Will’s sexuality, because on the one hand it seems like they have a really clear idea about it and on the other hand they’re just like¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The thing is … it seems very obvious they have always thought of Will as gay. This is blatant from the original pitch from the show as well as one of the S2 scripts (the only one that’s available publicly, so who knows what else they’ve written). I accept that people have different interpretations, but The Line this season is far from the only textual support for Will being gay, and I think it makes for a much, much stronger narrative if you read Will as gay in addition to not wanting to grow up as fast as his friends and being stunted from trauma - that is an entire meta post in itself, though.

What gets me about the ~ambiguity is that the Duffer brothers planted the gay hints in the first place! They are absolutely not there by accident! Like I’m not speaking for the teenage actors but lmao, the adults involved in the writing and directing of this series absolutely fucking knew how that “not my fault you don’t like girls” scene would be interpreted, especially considering fans were debating Will’s sexuality from the beginning, based off the many homophobic comments leveled at him in S1. There have been TV shows where fans latched onto gay “subtext” that was likely unintentional, but this isn’t one of them.

IDK, man, it’d just be nice to have some confidence in where this is going. I loved Robin and the bathroom scene made me think that yeah, they might do a decent job with Will’s sexuality, something I might have doubted before. Under no circumstances do I expect a Skam S3-style coming out arc for Will, but I’m also uncertain if I should expect anything from the show on this front at all or if they’ll play it coy to the bitter end. Though I guess I’d still take the ambiguity over giving him a female love interest after everything. Lol, that would be a giant oh-fuck-no.

Real talk, though, let’s discuss what an utter waste it would be to not write a scene where Joyce tenderly accepts her son when he comes out to her. You really aren’t going to bring that instantly iconic moment to life, assholes? You’re not going to provide that for Winona Ryder’s and Noah Schnapp’s Emmy reels? MAKE IT HAPPEN, BASTARDS.

Nancy and Jonathan have a reputation for the most boring plots but they’re fine, w/e. I’m not deeply invested in their romance but I don’t want to fast forward their scenes or anything. Nancy is an underrated character; she’s extremely proactive and always has been, and I enjoy watching her shoot things. I think the best thing they could do for both characters, though, is to separate them next season, not just physically but storyline-wise. Jonathan would be best in a subplot involving his family, because he’s at his most likable as a son and brother, and Nancy should either go off with Mike (a sibling relationship that is VASTLY undeveloped), or she should team up with Robin. I mean it, Nancy and Robin would be a power pairing, let me show you my manifesto. Both are smart young women who are good at solving mysteries. Would Robin think Nancy is a priss after Nancy unloads several rounds into the latest demogorgon chasing them? Would Nancy find Robin a refreshing alternative to the crushing suburban conformity that she claims to want to avoid? Oh, the possibilities. Meanwhile, Steve tags along in the background, all like OH SHIT, my lesbian BFF and my ex-girlfriend are in cahoots!

Lucas and Max were playing relationship counselors to Mike and Eleven through much of the season. Max still had a fair amount to do, but Lucas needs a meatier subplot next time. I feel like they’re not sure what to do with him? I would like to see him and Erica interact more since their dynamic so far is one-note.

There is one hell of a conversation to be had about the Evil Russians of this season, but I’m really not the person to do it.

Also about the depiction of capitalism this season. That’s more thinkpiece-y than I am equipped to do right now.

The product placement is something that should bother me more but I’m just like … shrug. Except that New Coke bit because that was an actual mood-breaker.

Could have done without Russian Terminator guy. That was a blatant ‘80s homage so I get why he was there, he just wasn’t all that interesting. And was that guy supposed to be superpowered or something? Was he getting jacked on Upside Down steroids??? What was his deal???

Alexei/Murray was the true OTP of the season, let’s be real.

The trend of lovable, doomed minor characters continued with Alexei. Props to that actor for making you root for the guy. He even made me kind of love Murray? I was very WTF over that guy encouraging two teenagers to fuck in S2, and I’m still not into his habit of telling people to bang even when they’re adults, but I guess he just needed a sympathetic Russian buddy to win me over.

There were a ton of moments where I felt like the characters made stupid choices as opposed to earlier seasons. Will getting dragged into the Upside Down in the first 10 minutes of the series is an impressive example of a horror movie character doing everything right and making good decisions - a 12-year-old, no less. And he was still overpowered by the demogorgon so it’s not like making good decisions will always save you! Whereas this season I was like LORD some of these characters are drinking dumbass juice.

There was also so much silly stuff happening, like things that are even more far-fetched than previous seasons, but I just kind of went with it. Yeah, of course there’s a secret Russian base under a shopping mall. Sure.

This season is objectively disgusting in terms of gore and yet I was fine with it? And I’m someone who was repulsed by Barb’s corpse in S1. The Mind Flayer being made of people was some nasty shit but effective horror. I felt bad for the poor little rats :( Oh, and the flayed humans, too. Some of them. Was sad to see Mrs. Driscoll bite it but FUCK those cartoon misogynists from the newspaper.

Visually beautiful! Starcourt Mall is an amazing set and I’m rather sad that the mall was destroyed, although that was basically a foregone conclusion. Some great cinematography, too. On a purely aesthetic level I had a great time just blasting this season into my retinas.

I have had the motherfucking NeverEnding Story theme song in my head for almost two weeks and I’m suffering.

#lillypedalsxx #replies #stranger things #also they referenced my university this season so i dug that thx 4 the shoutout

27 notes · View notes

pomegranate-salad · 5 years

Text

Seeds of thought : DIE #2

Hey everyone ! So many works I need to be SOTing right now. I decided to prioritize this, because well, new comic, needs all the attention. Plus, everytime an issue gets sold out, we get a new cover from Stephanie Hans. I live for them now. Anyway, spoilers of course, enjoy my thoughts and opinion under the cut.

HINDSIGHT IS D20/D20

When I was a kid, I had this French comic in which they had a page that asked : “what happens after a movie ends ?” and there were a series of vignettes that answered that question in a proper humorous fashion. For example, one of these vignettes showed the last scene of a movie where a car of the heroic lovers drove in the middle of the road into the sunset onto their bright future. The next panel showed the two lovers in court, and the judge saying : “bright future or not, you crossed the lane line and I’m revoking your licence”.

When I was seven, as most things do when you’re seven, it blew my mind. Nevertheless, this silly comic highlighted the universal, unbreakable truth of all stories : when it’s over, it’s over. There’s no more. And even today, as fanfiction has become its own genre, as no comedy is complete without a fourth wall break, when you close a book, when you turn off the TV, nothing can happen anymore. There is what the story implies will or might happen next, but sooner or later, you reach the point where you exhaust whatever the story contains of foreseeing. Each story writes its own last will ; but whatever happens after that, the story is dead : it still exist, but it won’t move forward, it won’t go back, it won’t do anything at all because it has stopped being able to do anything with itself. The only way for more to happen is for the author to write more. But that inevitably means writing a different story.

And that’s why, as sad as I could have been to leave a story I loved behind, for me there was always a sort of relief that came with reaching the end of a story : the relief that came from complete stillness. Because there’s no more, there’s no more pain, there’s no more stress, there’s no more excitement even, there’s no more reason to be alarmed at all. No reason be involved at all. Only when we reach the end of a story, can we be free from it. Outside of the contraption of the story, the characters’ actions don’t exist. THEY don’t exist. And you definitely know where I’m going with this.

The genius of DIE is not to take us to an elaborate gritty deconstructive fantasy RPG world. The genius of DIE is to take us back to it. Back to the story that’s already ended. Yes, I know I said in my last SOT that I didn’t think the characters were over their first visit in DIE by any means. The story of Ash and the gang is not over (by the way, I’m just going to call him Ash and use he/him pronouns until we get more on this issue, if needed I’ll edit accordingly). But functionally, narratively, the story of DIE the world, DIE the tabletop campaign, is over. The heroes arrived, the heroes did some shit, the heroes left. The story welcomed them and then the story ended. More than that, the story ended and nothing came to replace it. Sol’s speech is not the only thing that happens when thoughts curl up. The entire DIE world the gang is now in is nothing but a giant curl up. A new story did not emerge from the same setup. Sol just dug up the corpse of the old one and smeared make-up all over it.

The return of the heroes in a fantasy world they once knew is not a ground-breaking idea in fantasy by any means – I mean, Narnia did it. But in the usual take on this plot, the trigger element to the world the heroes return to is their leaving the world, not their being there in the first place – or in Sol’s case, staying. The second Narnia book showed us a world in shambles because the heroes saved it then left it, not because the heroes saved themselves and one of them was left behind. And maybe what I’m about to say will be disproved by future issues, but I’m not under the impression that the characters were particularly anything to the world of DIE, least of all heroes. They seem to mostly have been there. Some parts they barely set foot in, and the way they talk about the supposed “big bad” of the first game, the main reason they came after him seems to have been that they prevented them from going home. As a setup, the world of DIE seems to have been a bit underexploited. But come to think of it, was it really that great a setup ? Ash’s narration goes back and forth on the issue. Sol’s imagined world is either described as brilliant or the exact kind of pretentious overwritten stuff you’d expect from that particular breed of teenager (Elves but written by William Gibson is complicated… But is it, Ash ? Is it really ?)

But all of that maybe-not-that-great world, all that hammered fantasy stuff, are rendered new and interesting in context. I’m not the first one to point out that this setting allows characters to offer perpetual commentary on their younger selves. My shots at teenage pretentiousness are fucking text. If nothing else, this is a genius move to deflect any and all criticism of the comic’s take on the RPG genre : if it’s overdone, if it’s overwritten, you’re not smart for pointing that out, that characters are way ahead of you. But more interestingly, this moves every single “big idea” of the “transported in a fantasy world” plot further up the road. The main example is the reality vs fantasy ethical debate. Think how many pages in how many books were dedicated to exploring the ethical ramifications of being in a fantasy world without knowing if what you did was “real” or not. Do you have to be ethical when you play a game ? Would Kant play Grand Theft Auto ? This is a massive debate. In DIE, it’s addressed in issue #2 on one page. But it would be a mistake to think DIE is selling this question short, or “getting it out of the way” : like often with Gillen, the form is the point. The underhandedness of this debate among the characters is what makes it interesting. Because it’s a debate they had before. This is something they decided on. They set rules. They built an ethics system. They also saw the limits of it. Because no matter how lawful good they decided to play that thing, there’s always one player to just do what they want, or there’s always not even that same player doing some stupid wordbinding spell because that’s just a throwaway romance secondary plot, and who hasn’t fucked with one of those before. All the time it would have taken the comic to establish the characters coming to terms with this debate, disagreeing, coming to a solution, is time that can be used to see this solution unfold in glorious consequences. And you know what ? I’m willing to bet that the characters weren’t even that bad the first time around. But they were there, and that’s really all consequences need. Another thing to think about ? Maybe the reason the characters came to having this debate was that at some point, they didn’t think they would ever go home. Maybe the world they moulded the first time around, was the world they thought they would spend their lives in. You’re welcome.

So does that mean DIE is going to leapfrog every single of these important questions to simply present us with the consequences of the characters’ choices ? Probably not. But every single decision and facet of this new story is going to come with its own asterisk : this isn’t the first time around. Everything is loaded. Nothing is ever innocent. This is the Monty Hall problem halfway through : one door has been opened, will you change your choice ? And for us, who didn’t get to see which doors our heroes picked in the first place, that’s going to be a hell of a ride.

WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE

The idea of this section was for me to get a bit more personal about my thoughts, without feeling like I needed to make a big point. So let’s get personal : I do not like Ash. By which I don’t mean I think he’s badly written, I mean I don’t like him as a person. As in, we would not be friends. I already had that feeling when issue #1 came out, but I tried to be generous because we’d seen so little of everyone, but now we’re two issues in, let me confirm : I do not like Ash. I do not like his fake self-flagellation hiding some very real condescension, I do not like his teenage angst with a twenty years old aging flavour, I do not like that he’s introspective in the least interesting way possible, and for someone who boasts that he learned to “tell stories”, good god is he an annoying narrator. Yes part of it is intentional. And no, I do not particularly like any of the other characters either. And you have to take into account protagonist bias, meaning that the character you spend the more time with is the one you have the biggest chance to like, but also the biggest chance to hate instead of simply dislike. But hey, I never claimed to be the perfect reader. And for now, Ash is annoying the shit out of me. To me, he feels as if you’d taken Laura from Wicdiv, kept her just as laborious and self-hating, but removed all the parts that actually made her likeable. Which leads me to ask the question : can I be honest about the quality of an issue if I’m that bothered by who’s telling it ? The answer, as always, is that I can be honest with myself : I’m probably not as high on this issue as many people are. And the principal reason for that is definitely the main character and narration. Don’t get me wrong, this issue is a thrill : the scene with Sol is chilling – I think he might be my favourite character, actually – the combat scene is narratively masterful, the ending is a bit of cheap shot (I’m fairly certain I’ve seen this eyes plotpoint in several other stories) but god damn if it isn’t effective. Oh, and let’s take a moment to praise the art, Lord knows Stephanie Hans needs me, whose stick figures make the Monkey Christ lady look like Michelangelo, to praise her. But jokes aside, I want to give credit to how Hans resisted the appeal of painting the classic huge detailed fantasy world first chance she got. Instead, her vision of DIE is one of a weirdly deserted, bright yet gloom world, which fits the mood perfectly. To borrow from the issue, her use of colour looks like fantasy feels, without feeling the need to overbear on the raw emotions of this issue with more detailed pencils (Ash’s digression about Maria is also probably incidentally the most I’ve ever liked his narration). Best panels for me are of course the ones where you can see the sides of the DIE. Probably because it manages to feel so small and so huge at the same time. I’m a sucker for intimate fantasy.

So, this issue, minus Ash, is nothing I don’t love. But on the other hand, this issue doesn’t really exist without Ash. Try as I may, I cannot deny that part of the appeal of the issue comes from his narration and his personality. Yeah, he’s a whiny controlling drama queen, but I put up with an entire issue of Woden monologuing and this was one of the best things I’ve ever read, so you know what, I can put up with a little bullshit. I don’t think Ash has to be a good person, or even someone I like, for DIE to be good. I guess at this point my problem with him is that I don’t find him interestingly unlikeable, as was the case with Woden. Maybe it’s because unlike Woden, there are several people in my life who remind me a lot of Ash, and since they’re not necessarily assholes, they’re not people I have an excuse to outright avoid and thus with whom I’m much more familiar with. So who knows, maybe I’ll make peace with Ash. Comic’s still young. Meanwhile, my opinion on issue #2 is pretty much the same as for issue #1 : this is remarkable work, brilliant in some aspects, almost irritating in how proficient it is at doing its own thing, and maybe just a touch overconfident in its ability to walk the line between profound and navel-gazing. But when DIE keeps it simple, when it just wants to touch you instead of punching you in the gut, then it’s fucking unstoppable. If you’re not on the DIE train yet – well first, I admire and fear the way you powered through this post, but also, jump in, like now. You won’t regret it.

#diecomic #seeds of thought

21 notes · View notes

tudorstuart · 5 years

Text

Last thoughts on Game of Thrones

(probably)

Now that the show is done, and GRRM will probably never finish Book 6, much less finish the series, what are we left with?

I’ve read the five books that are out. I haven’t read the Dunk and Egg stories or any of the “historical” material that GRRM and his enablers have put out. I loved the first book, liked the second and the third, and struggled through the fourth and the fifth. The series as a whole is okay. The show is one of my favorite shows.

My thought after reading A Storm of Swords was that GRRM had broken the narrative so hard (RW, Dany ruling in Essos, Stoneheart) that he had effectively written himself into a corner that he would be hard pressed to get out of. So far I have been proven right: not only has his writing pace slowed considerably but the narrative of the books themselves has ground to a halt. He has deconstructed the tropes of epic fantasy so thoroughly (and in some instances needlessly) that his characters are left to wander through increasingly bleak landscapes and environments with no plot to anchor them. This would, I suppose, work if GRRM was a prose stylist of enough skill to keep me interested regardless of the lack of a plot. Just look at The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry to see how this can work. But he’s no Tolkien or Erikson, and we are far away from the Tower of Joy, one of the most stylistically rich passages of the first book.

I bring all this up for two reasons: to say (1) I don’t have the same attachment to these books that a lot of my fellow nerds do; and (2) to point out the textual difficulties involved in adapting this material.

(1) means I don’t care that the King of the Iron Islands sits on the Salt Throne instead of the Seastone Chair. I didn’t tally up the differences between the show and the books while I was watching. I was interested in the world and the characters but what I really wanted was good TV and a good story. I got those things.

(2) The show came out right after Book 5 was published. Was GRRM’s plan that he would stay ahead of the show since there would be at least five seasons directly adapting his books before the show got ahead of the books? Until he tells us, we’ll never know. We have since learned that GRRM was in regular consultation with the writers about the structure of the story after Book 5, so I would be very surprised if the major beats in Books 6 and 7 don’t look very similar to the major beats in the show. I’ll eat crow if I’m wrong!

I’ve been thinking about this show in two different frames: 1) Prestige TV and 2) Epic Fantasy. I think these two frames help us understand, or at least help me understand, why the show developed the way that it did.

1) Prestige TV: After The Sopranos ended, HBO badly needed another critically acclaimed, watercooler show that would bring in the ratings. In that respect, Game of Thrones would allow HBO to live up to its original premise-- “it’s not TV! It’s HBO!” and create a show that simply would never air on network TV. Epic Fantasy! Boobs! Dragons! Direwolves! Classically trained British actors! Prestige TV also relies on shock value, and in this sense too the GoT narrative was perfect for HBO. But in another sense the budget GoT required as the narrative expanded and the scale broadened was an outlier; none of the other shows HBO is hyping now, not even His Dark Materials, require the kind of dollars GoT hoovered up (that might change in the third book of HDM). In that context I can see why things got more constrained for the show. 2) Epic Fantasy. But from another perspective I would argue that the accelerated narrative of the final two seasons actually works to the story’s advantage. I think of the show as a whole as a narrative in three parts. Seasons 1-4 are Part One: we’re introduced to all the major players, the two major conflicts (the Iron Throne, the White Walkers) are set in motion, and then a series of deaths in S4 move most of the remaining players beyond Westeros. 5-6 are Part Two: Realignment. The surviving players try to pick up the pieces and create new identities for themselves. By the end of part two, Cersei is (seemingly) on one side and everyone else is on the other. 7-8, Part Three: Conclusion. With the battle lines drawn, all is action. There’s not as much intrigue and conversation because, well, the promise of violence between good guys and bad guys and worse things has to be fulfilled.

There are lots of people right now making parallels between GoT and some period in late medieval and early modern history, because the first book looks like the Wars of the Roses plus Mongols plus dragons, but to me that’s the wrong frame (not the least because GRRM got a lot of his history from weird sources). This is Epic Deconstructionist Fantasy in the modern, Tolkien-esque vein. What does that mean? A lot of modern fantasy falls into one of three categories: 1) Heroic Fantasy (where everything is basically okay at the end; nothing much changes: Harry Potter, Tad Williams) 2) Grimdark (the opposite: Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence) 3) EDF (Tolkien, LeGuin, Zelazny, Erikson) GRRM’s books are largely grimdark - for now. We don’t know how they’ll end. GRRM has teased for years that the seventh book will be nothing but the wind whistling over the graves of the main characters, but there is no way HBO was going to greenlight -that-. The show followed the grimdark trajectory throughout Part One and Two. But after S6 the show couldn’t go that route anymore. It could go Full Heroic Fantasy and crown Jon or Dany or both, or it could go the more interesting route and embrace the EDF narrative. EDF requires that most conventions of the genre be upended and the world be changed substantially. Its endings are usually bittersweet. People we want to be good turn out to be bad, or at least messily human. Dany’s turn towards villainy echoes similar transformations in Tolkien and Keyes (The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone). Jaime struggles with the better angels of his nature but loses out to his demons (and at the very least keeps Brienne out of King’s Landing) ala Boromir. Jon Snow reminded me profoundly of Ged at the end of The Farthest Shore: “he is done with doing.” Sansa and Arya are free to choose their own paths (like Corwin in Zelazny’s Amber), unburdened of the expectations placed upon them by the patriarchal system -- because with the election of Bran to the kingship, that system has been dealt a mortal blow! Power now rests with a bunch of up-jumped commoners (no, Tyrion and Brienne are not commoners, but they are outsiders in other ways). The ending reminded me of nothing so much as Lloyd Alexander’s The Beggar Queen: a new system is in place, but it might all come crashing down! Hence the ambiguity of Tyrion’s answer to Jon’s question: “ask me again in ten years.” (also, back to point #1 about Prestige TV, if HBO decides to go back to the GoT well, they need the Starks alive and out of the Seven/Six kingdoms) Those are my thoughts. The narrative started as a grimdark fantasy but ended as something significantly different, because its genre allowed for, if not demands, a bittersweet, non-heroic ending. And it worked. For me. It was certainly one of my favorite shows of the last several years.

#game of thrones

3 notes · View notes

emperorren · 5 years

Note

From your post: I do sometimes wonder if they aren’t going to handle those tropes in a yikesy way, or go in the opposite direction and pander to purity culture in an attempt to prove themselves as /progressive/. | This is honestly my biggest concern for IX, that they might go in a facetiously “empowering” direction by having Rey reject even a redeemed Ben or go a “lone hero” route, or making a point of Look How Woke We Are by hammering in a cautionary tale. That’s my #1 worry for the ending.

I’m not sure, either. JJ and Rian have given no indication that they’re professing particularly reformist feminist ideas or rejecting the sort of moralistic strain of modern feminism where women’s empowerment is allied with assuming a masculine heroic position and pushing aside “traditionally feminine” behavior/relationships. Like both the directors of the ST seem well-intentioned, but very much like typical upper-class white guy liberals, so I’m not too trusting of Reylo’s direction right now.

My number one worry for the ending remains Ben dying. The above could be my #2, though I’m going to give a shot at optimism for once in my life and say that it’s not a big concern in an absolute sense, to be honest. It’s like, a thought in the back of my head. Present, but not intrusive. Why am I moderately optimistic? Well:

JJ and Rian have given no indication that they’re professing particularly reformist feminist ideas

No, they haven’t, and I’m thankful for that. I don’t need them to use this story to profess any particular “feminist” statement, be it reformist or else (which in their hands would be likely hamfisted and patronizing, not because they’re bad writers, but because they’re men. I mean If LF wanted a story specifically geared in that direction, to make a political statement, THEY SHOULD HAVE HIRED FEMALE DIRECTORS. Period.) I just want them to write a good story worthy of star wars-levels of epicness, and treat the main heroine with the same respect and love they’d use for a male hero. And so far they seem to be doing a decent job.

or rejecting the sort of moralistic strain of modern feminism where women’s empowerment is allied with assuming a masculine heroic position and pushing aside “traditionally feminine” behavior/relationships

Here’s the thing, though. They kind of have. They have freely, deliberately made the creative decision to use the Heroine’s Journey for Rey’s arc, rather than a slightly tweaked version of the Hero’s Journey à la OT Luke. This is, in itself, a pretty big statement if you want to look into it. Like the entire Reylo dynamic is modeled on the heroine’s journey and on concepts like the reconciliation with the Shadow and the archetypal “dance” between the Masculine and the Feminine. If they wanted their heroine to embody a traditionally “masculine” heroic position, they would have used the Hero’s Journey, simple as that, without embarking in dangerous explorations of the female gaze, without making Rey’s relationship with every older male authority/fatherly figure bumpy and ultimately disappointing, and most importantly without making her villain a sympathetic “fallen” hero, a lost child, someone who draws her secret desires and fears out of her, and not to tease or taunt her, but because he mirrors her so perfectly and intimately. Like… I don’t wanna harp always on the same things but there was no reason to frame Rey’s story this way. No reason unless your entire selling point is deconstructing the romantic genre and taking jabs at its tropes, but this sort of snide cynical dismantling of stuff women have always found entertaining might be appealing to indie writers but is honestly no material for a trans-generational fantasy saga for the masses like SW is.

Never mind that rejecting compassion is, as a concept, completely at ODDS with the Star Wars narrative. So why put our heroine on an arc that supposedly makes her “big victory” all about “rejecting compassion and *traditionally feminine* behaviors”, when you could have easily just… made her a Skywalker, made her villain a random guy whom she maybe has history with but not in a romantic sense, and go on a smooth path following the Hero’s Journey rather than the Heroine’s?

Anyway, my point is that if JJ and Rian were indeed buying into the whole white lipstick feminism discourse, or caring at ALL about giving *romantic advice* to their female viewers through cynical subversion of romantic tropes, at this point we’d know it; but there’s nothing in the text or in the commentary suggesting they are. I mean, Rian even directly addressed some of the faux-progressive anti-tlj, anti-Kylo criticism on Twitter and his response was basically “I get what you’re saying, but we’re trying to tell a larger story here, Anne” (lol, almost literally).

So: stay alert, but also, don’t overthink it. The fact that JJ and Rian *look* like fake woke dudebros doesn’t mean they’re gonna write like fake woke dudebros.

#anon #asks #star wars worry #reylo negativity bs #tropes #fanwank

11 notes · View notes

embrcs-blog · 5 years

Text

i think i’ve managed to compose my thoughts on kairi enough into semi-coherence. so, let’s chat. spoilers.

something i’ve learned about kairi through considering my portrayal in 2014 / 15, compared to how i think about her now, is that i didn’t give her the credit in the past that i now do for her social intelligence, and her inherent understanding of her friends.

i still hold to the criticism that kairi has been engineered into a plot device for sora to follow through on his self-facilitated hero’s journey. i believe kairi’s rendering as a goal, and an ultimate reward for sora, functions more within the narrative that sora is attempting to create for himself.

sora is obsessed with becoming a hero, because his greatest fear is to not be needed; to be forgotten by his friends, and to lose his standing in the hearts of others. ( this is something that is explicitly drawn to attention in the exchange between sora and pooh in the hundred acre wood. )

we are explicitly shown by the game that the over-arching theme is love: romantic. platonic. familial. above all, unconditional. he reflects upon these displays of unconditional love that he has witnessed, and perceives this to be the goal: this is how his narrative is resolved. thus, he projects these feelings onto kairi without truly understanding what unconditional love really feels like.

this isn’t farfetched, and i don’t think it’s an inherent flaw? who can really say that they know, without a doubt, what it feels like to love someone unconditionally? for sora, however, kairi is the closest equivalent. she has been the central peril to his persistence in conducting dramatic rescues to the point where he is subconsciously benching her, and undermining her attempts to break the cycle of risk and rescue.

kairi is, to me, the only person who isn’t actively enabling sora to participate in his heroic fantasy. everyone else around him, even riku, will not tell sora that his decisions are rash, that he chooses his battles poorly, or that he needs to collaborate more willingly with others. kairi is an intuitive person who interprets and understands the motivations of her friends; while she is able to unfailingly see good in others, she is conscious of those traits, particularly in sora and riku, that will undermine them in some way.

as for kairi’s lack of proficiency in combat compared to her peers... i believe that she was never meant to be combat-proficient, in the context of her own narrative, and not necessarily the meta narrative. kairi has the ability to wield a keyblade, but that doesn’t mean she was always destined to become a champion. we first see her summon it because she feels that she needs to physically protect sora from making a potentially hazardous decision. she goes off to train because she doesn’t have a resounding faith in sora to choose his battles wisely, and to understand that she isn’t something that needs to be guarded and monitored at all times.

sora enforces this narrative of end-goal, unconditional love on kairi throughout their entire relationship as depicted by the games. he explicitly tells her in kingdom hearts, when she expresses a desire to go with him to the end of the world, that she would “only get in the way.” ( despite kairi’s magical heart powers that could keep you alive, SORA. ) during kingdom hearts 3, when they’re about to share the paopu fruit, kairi actively rebuffs sora’s further insistence of this narrative by insisting that she wants to protect him.

( remember that, especially in these games, protection is never necessarily physical. kairi is expressing here, especially in offering the paopu to sora, that she wants him to put her safety and well-being to the back of his mind, to focus on making correctly-motivated decisions, and to let things be, if they don’t turn out well for her. )

because kairi is at peace with how she regards sora. kairi knows she loves him; but love, to kairi, looks and feels substantially different to how sora envisions it, and it means something entirely different. kairi is a rational, emotionally mature person who believes in supporting the best in people, but is not afraid to demonstrate to them that they need to rethink themselves, at times. she does it to riku, she does it to lea, and she’s trying to do it to sora by removing herself from this ideology that she’s been placed in.

so, while riku and sora actively build one another up and reinforce their perceptions of one another, kairi is trying to actively deconstruct the hero’s journey that sora has paved for himself. she stands to represent that the people who truly love him will never forget him, will always support him, and will always be there; she resorts to engaging in a role that she isn’t comfortable with in order to distance herself from the role that sora has assigned her.

this is not to say that i dislike sora in any capacity. quite the opposite. the way i read his arc is not to influence others’ readings; i feel that by exhibiting some of his most endearing traits as some of his greatest flaws make sora that much more human. he’s still a kid who shoulders a tremendous amount of responsibility, which has led to him understanding his place in the world within this very narrow framework influenced by the worlds around him.

kairi suffers for it, just a little.

#╰ ♔ —— out .#this makes no sense this is just thoughts into thoughts into thoughts and i would like to come back and structure this properly #kh spoilers /

2 notes · View notes

millicentthecat · 6 years

Text

Why The Last Jedi is a Reactionary Propaganda Film

I've been waiting for my thoughts to coalesce (and for the "spoiler" window to pass) to make a unifying analysis of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. This is not a position piece on whether you should or should not enjoy the movie. It is not any kind of call to action. It is only an analysis on how The Last Jedi works as a propaganda film. It’s my personal interpretation based on my experience with assembling message. This post is tagged "tlj critical" and "discourse" in hopes that will assist people in finding or blocking the content they wish to read.

To begin:

As important as diversity in representation is, so too is balanced programming of message. Programming message involves building value by presenting the very ideologies and mechanisms which sustain paradigms of injustice. Will these be established as inescapable, natural, desirable, or effective? The Last Jedi (TLJ henceforth) promotes integration with these ideologies and mechanisms. It does not promote Resistance.

There are three central messages repeating in TLJ. They are:

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

1. Respect and trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy

After The Force Awakens, my understanding of Poe Dameron's character was that he was designed as a classic rogue-individualist pilot--a hotheaded "flyboy," as it were. This was not the fanon interpretation, which is understandable; The Force Awakens gave us a lot of poetic material to take in different directions. I felt my interpretation was valid as it was supported by the visual dictionary (which calls Poe a rogue, I believe) and a line in The Force Awakens novelization about how some people are inherently more important than others.

In short, Poe Dameron was an individual who trusted his own instincts more than others and didn't believe in always playing nice. In TLJ, this manifests in his relationship with a new character: Vice Admiral Holdo. Now one of the only things we know FOR SURE about Poe Dameron is that he has no problem taking orders from women, respecting a female General, and trusting her experience. This is demonstrated by his relationship to Leia, who he knows. Holdo is a stranger who Poe has never met. She is not just a woman, but an unknown woman. EVEN SO, Poe is willing to trust her (at first) by sharing his assessment of the situation--essentially, submitting what he knows for her consideration, sharing his thoughts. She responds to this by withholding information, reminding him of his recent demotion, and calling him names. She responded to his gesture of openness and respect with domination and authority.

This is well within her right, as established by both in-universe and our-universe rules of institutional hierarchy. Poe, however, does not blindly trust authority figures OR institutional hierarchy more than his own instincts. It's actually pretty unusual for a protagonist in this universe to do that, for reasons.

Later, General Leia reveals to both Poe and the audience that Holdo had information she was not willing to share. She is strongly moralized as having been "right" about her plan: Poe takes his reprimand from Leia like a boy accepting a scolding. Holdo is martyred and established as an example of strong leadership. Her decision to withhold information from her subordinate is never highlighted (by a narrative authority or third party, such as Leia) as a mistake. In our society, the rules of hierarchy dictate that "superiors" do not have to share what they have with "inferiors" or treat them with respect. Those with more power are not beholden to those with less. Poe is reprimanded for challenging that.

I was almost willing to overlook this deliberately moralized messaging as a botched attempt at a feminist moment before encountering the reviews about TLJ. In general, there are a large number of reviews for this film which insinuate that most of the people who dislike this film are white male bigots, threatened by the presence of women. (a, b , c , d , e , f , g , h) . This is not my experience. The other thing many reviews point to is how Feminist this film is (as a selling point.) It is an eerily unanimous opinion in mainstream, corporate media that Poe mistrusted Holdo because of her femininity--not her behaviors. On social media where unpaid people are speaking, many young women are challenging this. The shouting-down of women's opinions by accusing us of misogyny is a separate topic, but I did want to call attention to the discrepancy between the corporate media response and the social media response. To me this is evidence of a deliberate misdirection.

Another story arc which enforces the position that we should trust authority figures and institutional hierarchy is in the reestablishment of the Jedi Order, via Luke, Yoda's Force Ghost, and, more significantly, Rey. Now, much has been written (on this blog, and in many more prestigious place and by better known writers. See Tom Carson's "Jedi Uber Alles," for instance) in the way of criticism of the Jedi. The child abducting, the mind control, the over-extension of executive powers, the militarized cult status, the extermination of the Sith race, the monopolization of the Force; their crimes go on and on. Moreover these are not just mistakes the Jedi made--crimes secondary to their nature--but rather these are the very nature of what their institution stood for. The Jedi are not "the Light." They are a specific religion with specific, inherently problematic practices and ideologies.

The Last Jedi is literally a movie about how it's ok that there are going to be more Jedi.

Luke's not on board with that, at first. Master Yoda (from beyond the grave) reasserts the divine right of the Jedi to rule, as badly and indefinitely as they like. Because even their failure is valuable. Try try again, one supposes. Whatever happened to, "there is no try?" Oh yes, I remember. The laws of the privileged do not apply to them.

Last but not least, the character most overtly challenge institutional hierarchy in TLJ is Kylo Ren, when he kills Supreme Leader Snoke. This move is not specifically negatively moralized (unless you read Kylo as the villain, which I prefer to) but it also very clearly does not result in a positive or progressive change for Kylo. At the end of the film, he is miserable; his coup changed nothing.

2. Girls like guys who Join (the military)

"It's all a machine, brother," slurs an alcoholic loner-character known as "Don't Join," sometime after dropping the news on us that Good Guys and Bad Guys buy their weapons from the same arms dealer. His general sense of hopelessness rubs off on Finn, who grows in his story arc from being willing to Unjoin, himself (as a deserter) to throwing himself into a suicide run for the Resistance. What stops Finn from a kamikaze end is Rose: she saves him. For the young viewer who agrees with DJ and sees machinery in war and capitalism, this suicide run represents the realistic (and popular trope) outcome of "joining." War leads to death. Capitalism leads to death. Our generation knows this and we ask, as many before have asked, "why should I be a hero? I'll just end up dead!"

The Last Jedi does what every great work of propaganda targeting young men does. It gives a reason. Why be a hero? Because girls, that's why.

Before this pact is made, however, there needs to be a little softening-of-the-way--a little grooming. The word "hero" has been deconstructed in the language enough that people know to associate it with self sacrifice. We are wary of heros. The Last Jedi substitutes the word "leader" to mean what hero once meant: a person in power whose sacrifices are gratified with moral rightness in the narrative. This subverts any counter-programming people were able to apply towards "heroic" stories. Leadership is presented as an inherently positive and desirable quality, linked to selflessness, sacrifice, martyrdom, and rewarded with female attention.

This same re-programming wordplay is employed in Rose Tico's call to action: "not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love!" Question: if the behaviors and outcome are the same, does the mental engineering matter? Is a Rose by any other name still a Rose?

Is war still war if you call it love?

At this point I also want to call attention to the fact that there is AGAIN very little opportunity in this film where to SEE the First Order committing atrocities: abducting kids, repressing a labor uprising, etc etc. The First Order is never called fascist (nor, if I recall, are they referred to as an actual nation.) Their politics aren't even alluded to. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the film implies it doesn't matter which side you join, but I think there's definitely an argument that being involves with one side or the other is lauded more highly than staying neutral.

Worth mentioning: "Girls like guys who Join" is also the message of Luke's story arc. Both Rey and Leia wanted Luke to rejoin the arena. Rey even expresses a willingness to get closer to Kylo--while he is acting like a Joiner. The minute he makes it clear that he wants no part in either side of the conflict (No Jedi, No Sith, no ties to the past, etc) Rey's trust is broken. She leaves. Her rejection IMMEDIATELY follows his insistence on leaving tribal war in the past. It does not correspond with any immediacy to his acts of violence, nor to his stubborn declaration that she "will be the one to turn."

A brief note. Army enrollment messaging is a necessary and functional part of maintaining an imperial state. The in-text discourse positions an offensive/insurgent military organization against a defensive military organization, during combat. "Join up" is therefore an aggressively interventionist and arguably imperialist position.

3. It is the work/role of women to be caretakers and educators (for men)

This is one of the oldest motifs in storytelling, so when I say it's conservative I mean really, really conservative. Traditional gender roles and traditional family values are just that: extremely traditional. Many people find comfort in them and are extremely threatened by their breakdown. For this reason, storytellers are authorized to hand-wave or sexualize an inordinate amount of violence toward women in order to keep paradigms of labor as gendered as possible.

First of all, there are literal feminine-coded creatures on the island of Ahch-to called "caretakers." These aliens watch over the island and look after the hutts where Luke Skywalker has taken up residence.

Second of all, Holdo's arc with Poe and Rose's arc with Finn are full of nods to the idea that women must teach and lead men. Men (who are inherently dogs, apparently) will speak over us, desert us, aim guns at us, and otherwise challenge us, and it is our duty to keep them in line. This is to be expected. Flyboys will be flyboys.

Third, it is Rey's sacred duty to prepare Luke to return to the arena of battle. When Luke fails to step into that role, she turns to Kylo Ren. Rey and Leia both possess Force-related powers. Both spend most of their time directing these powers to trying to save, protect, or heal male warriors around them. When they do fight, rather than act themselves as subjects, they punish men who objectify them inappropriately as a corrective measure.

To be fair, Admiral Holdo and Paige Tico both act directly against the enemy. They also both have close mentor relationships with other women. However, Paige and Holdo both die in the course of the film.

A final personal note: in my opinion, there are many ways socially problematic and coercive content offers comfort to a population where uncomfortable traditions feel like the only option. However, this way of life is not the only option, and this media is not comforting to everyone.

#tlj critical #the last jedi #discourse #star wars #rey star wars #poe dameron #meta #amilyn holdo #kylo ren #luke skywalker #rose tico #paige tico #hating star wars like a star wars fan #contributing to the critical community i guess #star wars: it got wars in it #a paper by me

35 notes · View notes

ramrodd · 5 years

Video

youtube

What Did Jesus Mean When He Said He Would Fulfill the Law?

COMMENTARY:

Aron just claimed on Twitter that there are more than 7 signs in John. I challenged him to name them and to number how many there are. You guys seem to be profoundly ignorant of the numerology of the Bible, so this could be a teachable moment.

By the way, all Pro-Life Evangelical Spiritual Warriors defending the Salvation Gospel should be wearing your MAGA hats so we know whose team you are on. If I still had a hat, it would be a black Ranger beret I wore on patrol on the Ho Chi Mihn Trail, but I left it down at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial because .... well, because.

Like the doctrine of Solo Scriptura, the Law of Moses was an empty vessel. It was designed to illustrate what the spirit is not and deliberated left what the spirit is a void to be filled later. The Holy of Holies, with its carpet-thick veil, was an empty space for the spirit to occupy. It's like the empty chair at a seder, in case Elijah is party hopping and happens to stop by. Or the box the Aviator drows for the Littel Prince to keep his lamb safe.

Jesus is a test-tube baby, the catapillar in Plato's Cave who dons a chrysalis and emerges in all His Glory three days later as a butter fly.

The Beatitudes weaves a similar chrysalis around the spirit of the servant leader. The Sermon on the Mount is a TED Talk on becoming a servant leader, what those attributes are. They don't connect, logically, per se except that they each connect with the spirit of the servant-leadership. Like the balance of the biblical narrative, the Gospel of Mark advances the themes of the inerrancy of God's faithfulness. the epistemology, ontology and ethic of the Law of Moses, and the nature of duty, as examined in the sacrifice of Isaac and Abraham's duty to Sarah in regards to Hagar. The Gospel of Mark adds the living archtype of the Servant-Leader as the nature of command in a milieu of secular humanism, such as the Roman empire in 1st Century Judea. Jesus is the model of Servant Leadership of West Point with it's priorities of Mission:Men:Self of the Liberation Gospel.

One of the reasons why Christian apologetics has been operating at a disadvantage to Muslim and anti-theist critics is it's superstitious embrace of Solo Scriptura as the only source of High Criticism, much less personal spiritual growth. It's a forensic format, lacking the spirit. It's a deliberate appeal to what has become the post modern dialectical deconstruction that characterizes Marx's examination of Hegel and is basically an adversarial legal argument. I mean, when you start talking about gaming out the Lord's Prayer, it's an indication you have completely lost your way, theologically,

The good news, I suppose, for you is that you arern't alone. N.T. Wright has fallen victim to the same process fallacy. He has a real hard-on about the decadent influence of the Epicuriean ethos of the Enlightenment. He's never come out and said it, but I assume that he believes Christian Stewardship is defined by the many stoicism of Paul cruising the highways and biways of Asia Minor.

Zeno's discussion of stoicism and Epicurus and his Epicureanism are studies of the aspects of the spirit of Duty. Everybody is talking about Duty before Socrates defines Duty as a citizen existentially by drinking his Hemlock shooter. Melchizedek figures into this mix in some manner in the Mediterranean that begins the transition from societies based on Aesthetics of the theocracy to the Ethic of secular humanism. At 2000 BCE, Egypt was proving to be an epistemological dead end. It had all the social organization necessary to put a man on the moon, but they had wrung about everything they could out of the technology they used escaping the stone age but had stalled doing it bigger and better.

Unlike the author of Hebrews, I think Melchizedek is human and is a member of the same guild who would send wisemen to Bethleham 2000 years later to determine what they had wrought along this critical path. A similar critical path was set in motion across the Mediterranean into the Greek Penisula, the Etruscans and Carthaginian enclave in North Africa and it all came into focus with the Praetorian Guards of the Roman Republic. And the Holy Catholic Church of the Apostle's Creed is the synthesis of those two social spheres, the Law of Moses and the Roman rule of Law completed the transition from the Aesthetic of the Heroic societies of the warrior states, on the one hand, and the Ethical Aesthetic of the Jewish theocracy, on the other, to the secular humanism Paul's legal arguements in Romans suggests to his Roman interrogators during his first imprisonment.

And Duty is the one inerrant element of both social apparatus. Jesus clearly sees Himself acting to the same moral authority as Socrates and, this is essential to understanding the servant-leader ethos of the Gospel of Mark, the centurion in Matthew 8/Luke 7 recognizes the submission of Jesus to an identical moral authority he, the soldier, pays to Caesar at the top of his chain of command. It is exactly the same moral authority I voluntarily submitted to as a commissioned officer. Duty. And behind Duty is Yaweh, Queen of Battle. This is the essence of the Liberation Gospel.

So, this dilemma N. T. Wright perceives between Stoic and Epicurean philosophies is an example of the nature of the Fascist construct result from post modern dialectical deconstruction. It's like Supply-side economics: you begin with a dynamic whole, which may be paradox, such as the paradox of the Stoic-Epicurean aspects of Duty, and devolve them to dilemma and then forcee a choice between the horns of the dilemma. In the case of the dynamic relationship between Supply-Demand, you determine that Supply and Demand repesent systemic contradiction and force a choice to eliminat the contradiction, in the case of the Dialectical Materialism of Marxism you chose a Supply-side construct for social organizaton, and in the case of the Stoic-Epicruean aspects of Duty, you declare the decadence of the Epicrurean of secular humanism.

The confusion is caused because the spirit of Duty as the common anchor for either side of the dialectic. Fascism occurs when a synthetic process is delayed or prematurely terminated.

When I was going through the Ranger School, there was a motivational poster in the City Phase at Harmony Church with the legend: Instant Obedience - Self Discipline. These are the ideals the Ranger strives to exhibit by his/her commitment to Duty as defined by Duty, or, as a result of submission to the authority of the US Constitution. This is what the centurion recognized in Jesus. "Instant Obedience" occurs in the existential NOW in the manner that Abraham immediately began to make preparations to sacrifice Isaac. That's the Stoic side of the equation. "Self Discipline" is the state of constant high dressage necessary to ensure the efficacy of that "Instant Obedience". That's the Epicurean side of the equation. The "Eat, Drink and be Merry" side of the Epicurean life style is like that Zen proverb: "Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water". It is a life style that reflects the ""semper vigilans fortis paratus et fidelis" context of the Republican servant leader, ancient and modern, which includes the contingency "For tomorrow, we may die" of the Liberation Gospel.

See, the thing is, I went to Vietnam on the basis of the Liberation Gospel and the people who had other priorities than military service or were scared shitless of going to Vietnam stayed behind with the Salvation Gospel of the Young Ruler who wanted to follow Jesus but went away in sorrow because he had great wealth. Salvation is the context of the republican servant leader engaged in the Liberation Gospel. It's why the motto of the US Army Infantry is "Follow Me!": when Duty calls, the ululations of Yaweh, Queen of Battle, demands "Instant Obedience" of the heart.

"Not in all of Israel have I found such faith": the most important verse in the Bible for the Liberation Gospel of the servant leader.

Jesus fulfilled the Law of Moses with absolute, existential clarity. That's what "Instant Obedience - Self Discipline" means if you have a Ranger Tab. If you're a Pro-Life Evangelical Spiritual Warrior, that's why you need to put on your MAGA hat when you're selling your version of Jesus: a little truth in advertising if you're selling the Theological Narcissism of the Salvation Gospel.

#transfromingamericafirst

0 notes

seanchou77 · 5 years

Text

Broken Prams

Death is the scariest thing you could dream about. For other people, it’s falling or being chased. But I hate dreaming about death. And I’ve dreamed of the worst kind - children dying, in the most violent ways. They get run over by trains or cars. I never see blood or their bodies properly. But there was one time when I saw a broken pram getting picked up from the side of the road and you could tell it was run over. It was goddamn awful.

Every beginning knows its own end. According to Sigmund Freud, without death, there wouldn’t be growth; the same growth principle which allows the organism to break out of the constancy principle must eventually resolve its ontological contradiction and die.

With that sentiment in mind, this essay will be discuss about death and what it means, inversely, for life. Discussions on death have taken place in a lot of quarters; while this essay will approach it through mainly a psychoanalytic lens, it will also borrow voices from philosophy and religion to add a more nuanced perspective.

Firstly, death is tied into long-held views about our mortality, impermanence and transitional status as human beings on earth. Whatever views we have on the after-life, it’s clear in our modern day, secular society such views do not hold traction for a lot of people.

Schopenhauer provides a modern perspective on death, through his transcendental metaphysical theory called, ‘will-and-representation’. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that everything in the world could be divided into subjects and objects, but that they were byproducts of an anonymous force called the ‘will’. This creates an active/passive binary, where ‘representations’ are byproducts of a ‘will’ which drives us as subjects; we feel this in our passions, desires and emotions.

As a result of will, we desire and suffer when our will is frustrated. Schopenhauer compared human beings to blind mole rats, digging underground without vision or directionality. This pointless suffering can drive us to despair, disappoint our expectations and leave our desires unfulfilled.

Schopenhauer argues instead we should accept the dissatisfaction of our will; instead of the temperamental and fickle nature of our will, we should accept pain as a constant and practise life through non-attachment. Only through aesthetic experience, in arts or music, could we temporarily transcend our direct experience of space and time towards a more perfect, timeless universe.

Schopenhauer must be understood for our next theoretical steps. To really understand Nietzsche’s work, he must be read in conversation with Schopenhauer. Friedrich Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer in his early 20s but then quickly abandoned him - he cried when he learned he had been living his youth like he was already old.

Nietzsche disagreed with Schopenhauer. He thought he was too pessimistic and neglected questions about power and self-transcendence. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was another example of a philosophical ascetic: self-denying the potential for human beings to live self-generative and flourishing lives through the will-to-power. According to Nietzsche then, our understanding of death shouldn’t be understood as just as certainty - this was true, as ‘God is dead’. But Nietzsche understood that it was a greater fault to live our lives as if we were already dead and deny our living potential; instead, we should embrace our heroic drives and attain the Superman status which exceeds previous horizons of outstanding achievement. Thus, through the transvaluation of all values, we can create new values.

The discussion between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche reveals several things about death. Firstly, we should be concerned about what it means for our phenomenological existence and selfhood; it can be self-defining and constructive of wider life missions. Furthermore, it could be understood as a self-transformative process, where the self achieves spiritual enlightenment (for Schopenhauer) or self-transcendence into Superman (for Nietzsche).

So far, the subject/object binary and notions of the self have been taken for granted.

Lacanian psychoanalysis can help to deconstruct these notions. Jean-Jacques Lacan introduced ‘mirror theory’ as a type of mimicry; Lacan argues that the self is introduced to the child during the ‘mirror stage’ between the age of six to 18 months, as an image or signifier which stabilises their notion of personal identity. The self therefore cannot be understood in isolation, but as a construct which must be stabilised within a wider language context of signified chains of meaning.

Julia Kristeva was interested in stages of child development prior to the mirror stage. Kristeva introduced the notion of the ‘semiotic’, of meaning as continuous, undemarcated and fluid - similar to the fluidity of a child being in the mother’s womb.

Both provide contrasting perspectives on death. Lacan argues that death should be accepted and internalised as the No-Thing; later on, Lacan replaced the ‘No-Thing’ with petit objet a (or the ‘object of desire’) and argued that jouissance helps us to overcome transitional, changing desires with permanent drive towards jouissance. For Lacan, drive is the horizon which already anticipates its death but envelops everything into a single plane.

Kristeva however suggests that death is one of many meaning-making exercises. We should be more interested in how the Other is constructed in opposition to the Self. The Self already recognises its death because it sees it in the Other and rejects the Other for that reason; the Abject Other suggests a fear of death is needed to stabilise a symbolic hierarchy of meaning. We could escape this instead by inverting, destabilising and playing with the meanings of things like death which would otherwise indicate notions of permanence and prescribe strict, disciplined action.

Lee Edelman helps us to understand how death can be queered. Death is an affront to heteronormative society, which builds a teleological narrative of families and future generations, who inherit what has been accumulated and preserved for the future. Edelman criticises the heteronormative assumptions of this narrative, which depend on the bio-power, reproductive force of straight, monogamous couples to perpetuate their lifestyles, at the exclusion and Otherising of alternative queer relationships.

Queer experience and identity can be constructed on alternative readings of death. Instead of death fitting into a linear timeline of marriage and having children, queerness means to explore alternative metonymies which can frame our identity: our creative pursuits can be our most powerful voices, but to also fundamentally retain our critical engagement skills to critique a heteronormative society which systematically excludes or assimilates us. Like Adonis, we are born through cycles of life and death and know no generation to inherit our legacy onto; our stories are tragic and beautiful.

But we could find an alternative understanding of death without pandering to pessimism. An an analogy in psychoanalysis on death runs like this: death is the bones which frames the flesh it upholds; without the hardness of death, our lives are supple, docile and lack self-definition.

Ernest Becker discusses this in his thoughts on heroism, as response to (and denial of) death. Becker argues for the need for genuine heroism where the individual is led, through self-acceptance and non-attachment, to accepting the reality of death but feeling inspired by the awe and opportunity of living even temporarily in the wide expanse of the universe and the mystery of the cosmos. We are not driven by the conformity of cultural heroism or the excess of personal heroism, but simultaneously humbled and driven to make the most of our time here.

Thus, this essay has touched on multiple perspectives on death. We could understand it as an elaboration of contradictions in our phenomenological experience; as a semiotic interplay between semantic systems of meaning; contrast desires and drives which arise from death; which lead ultimately to maturity, spiritual enlightenment and acceptance which opens our abilities to self-flourish and be responsible towards others.

***

I’ve had moments when I’ve been too scared to say anything or do anything.

I just feel so self-conscious, like my face is burning and my palms creasing with sweat.

I feel like I’m always being judged and I’m scared I won’t be good enough. It’s moments like that when I don’t want to do anything at all; I just want to feel invisible and hide. Maybe it’s because it feels like I’ve already died inside. Everything now is just the excess you want to scrap off your plate and pretend you never asked for. Actually, I didn’t ask for any of this.

I want to escape from all my responsibilities.

#rem #rem1

0 notes