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transmutationisms · 1 year

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HI really love your thoughts on stuff. do you think succession - as a tv show with a script - makes all of its negative statements negatively or positively? this is something im having trouble with, specially with shiv and the overwhelming misogyny. i understand its quite literally real life. but they know the importance of media as a statement that defines real life - its sort of meta, but the whole thing with whether or not calling mencken, knowing it would affect politics, is something that can reflect on the show itself. i dont think i fully agree with what they do to shiv in the way they portray the misogyny. it feels like a "and thats how it will always be" more than "thats how its been". idk. maybe I just hate misogyny and cant stand to see that. but everything is a statement. what do u think?

well in general i agree that, yeah, the show is more interested in satire and criticism than offering any kind of imaginative solution or alternative. so, if you want to watch something that suggests alternatives to logan-style misogyny (& i'd understand why) then i think you're going to be dissatisfied with this show. like, obviously even with logan gone, his influence still haunts the company and the family, and anyway the broader structures of capitalism and its use / exploitation of women were always much larger than logan alone. all of this also applies to how roman and kendall (& to a lesser extent connor) are punished for failing to live up to standards of masculinity; logan feminised kendall to punish him for business failures and derided roman for what he saw as a more innate femininity that made roman disgusting to him.

i actually think gender is a strong suit for the show. it's very deeply interested in how they each relate to standards of bourgeois masculinity and femininity, and how these strictures are confining and punishing (often literally, as logan used them as tools of his abuse). for shiv she lived up to some of logan's femands for an heir (her emotional repression, flashes of killer instinct) but was ultimately always doomed by the fact that logan saw her as permanently being his little girl, denied a body (bc this was less disgusting to him than thinking of her as a woman) and never the right fit for his corporate mould, even when she was trying her hardest to fit it. roman and kendall ofc pick up on this and the way her gender can be used in itself to lock her out of the upper echelons of power (a walking pair of teats, all the men got together in man club). but ultimately this is a dissection of misogyny and masculinity, not a suggestion for escape.

i have mixed feelings about the sort of ethical argument here. it is fair to say that succession has a fundamentally conservative ethos in the sense that the satire and snark angle is uninterested in offering solutions or imagining alternatives. it's grounded in exploring capitalism, fascism, the resulting gender politics, &c, and to the extent that it challenges these things, it's by portraying them as worthy of mockery. it's not a leftist political treatise. but like, i think there's a can of worms to open here in terms of asking how revolutionary a television show is capable of being simple by virtue of the medium. like, even if the content is radical internally, does is matter that the form is still one embedded in capitalist production, ie, that the show is a commodity on the same market? i identify the root of misogyny within the capitalist mode of production; how far is something made within these parameters capable of going in offering any kind of alternative? and also, do we care? like, am i watching tv because i'm looking for radical politics? again, this doesn't negate the critique of succession's critique. but i do think it's a bit... trite? to ask tv to be some kind of moral guide---particularly on a show where the premise is such that any 'challenge' to misogyny would still be constrained within the bourgeois world the characters inhabit.

#he doesn't even trust water

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signalsandsoundwaves · 7 years

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k so i finished drakengard 3 this afternoon (F I N A L L Y) so i just wanted to organize my thoughts on it and i put it under the cut so ur dash isn’t clogged up by my rambling (spoilers)

Okay so first off: As much as this game seems feminist enough to me (in that it portrays the women exactly as it would portray male protagonists in a game in the same genre)(okay so the women in this game do usually wear lingerie armor but im a glass half full kind of person okay) the argument can totes be made that this is a feminist game as told through a male perspective: Zero was a sex slave when she was alive, and the novella actually kind of treats her attitude towards her situation realistically--She’s angry, tired, feels powerless, none of that hentai shit! Her relationship with her mother, who sold her into prostitution, was fraught at best and downright abusive at worst, but Zero, as much as she hated her mother, also understood?? I mean Zero’s a product of rape and her mother’s parents were abusive too, so Zero kinda gets how the cycle of abuse can self perpetuate. But damn do people treat her like shit, so it’s not hard to see her progression into a wandering murderer, but even with that she often just kills people without justification.

Which is actually an interesting point in itself where the woman in this story (and most of zero’s sisters later on) are freely portrayed as terrible people?? I mean the whole game’s plot is just terrible people against even worse people, so zero’s not really the protagonist in this game so much as an anti-hero. But on one hand it’s kind of refreshing having female characters act like terrible people that are surprisingly developed personalities? Usually games (or, shit, most any form of media) have the female characters either just nameless figures killed offscreen asap to jumpstart the plot, or the ‘stupid precious lamb sacrifice’ who only has meaning in death, or the protagonist’s love interest or relative that isn’t ever really given any character development and only serves to round out the hero’s personality, or m a y b e we get a villain who is always redeemable and ‘her actions weren’t really her fault, it was because of x/y/z!’ (i’m looking at you, pokemon sun/moon) and the victory just seems lame because women are never really allowed to be truly evil or be bad in media despite the fact that we’re invariably either ‘evil and the root of all sin’ or put on a pedestal and not allowed to have much of any hand in our own lives in real life.

But seeing a character like zero who’s doing all of the wrong things for the right reasons is actually kind of nice. She’s a terrible person who’s ultimately saving the world even if it means killing their ‘gods’ and yanking the wool from their eyes. Even if saving the world in this instance is really just fixing her own mistakes. She’s an abrasive sardonic personality with an undercurrent of fury and bloodlust but sometimes she can smile too, and has learned to never trust people but slowly, surely, she does learn to trust the dragon Mikhail. And her sisters are more or less all terrible people: Five’s a damn child rapist and is creepy as f u c k (she’s obviously meant to be a fan service character, but is also an interesting subversion of the trope in the game?? the other characters have no qualms telling her that she’s a creepy piece of shit to her face), four’s seems alright at first but is a sociopath underneath everything, three’s a grave robber and mutilates bodies, only two seems to be an actual cinnamon bun. I wish One had a little more character development, since she had the same goals as zero and the same realization as to the flower’s corruption and inevitable destruction of life on earth if nothing was done, so I do wish there was some more talking rather than fighting there, and it would have been super interesting to see whether she was able to resist the flower after all.

(shit, this makes me want an alternate ending where you play as one after killing zero and trying to fulfill her goals)

But one reason why I thought this was an interesting and somewhat feminist game was the fact that Zero basically takes her sister’s disciples for her own personal harem, and doesn’t get portrayed as a stereotypical slut or anything for it!! Female characters that act on their libido are so often either just fanservice or considered a ‘tainted’ slut or otherwise impure, and the whole harem sex every night thing is played for laughs in the dialogue once or twice in the game, but it’s not really made that big of a deal of it (and certainly no gratuitous cutscenes showing it on or offscreen thank god) and it isn’t used as a character flaw for Zero at all. This, and the fact that Zero was actually able to get shit done in the plot on her own without too much help from her dragon--Drakengard 1 and 2′s male protagonists used Angelus and Legna quite a bit, but Zero barely uses Michael/Mikhail at all apart from the dragon battle with three and taking down gabriella, and using Mikhail to kill Zero and the Grotesquerie Queen in Branch D’s final boss, but that last one was kinda the goal all along anyway.

so i guess in summary while this is a sort of feminist tale as seen through a male perspective, which does kinda negate the whole feminist thing (since one of the tenets of postmodern feminism is to allow women to have as much say in their portrayal as men have in their portrayal, and since this game was mostly made by and written by men ((gee, square enix :/)) it’s definitely arguable as to how feminist this game can be if not too many women were involved in the making of it), it is an interesting move to elevate female protagonists and villains to have self agency and share more and more qualities with male protagonists and villains, and to portray women in the plot just the same as men, for all the ridiculousness that that entails (harems being only the tip of the iceberg)(trust me this game is bonkers there’s a dragon rolling around in its own shit in it it’s a weird game but it’s also pretty interesting)

#i dont mind if u read this #personal #just organizing thoughts and kinda brimming with an intense affection for this game #especially because the protagonist has white hair and i love white hair so much!!#and shes so pretty and i like pretty protagonists #spoilers #gosh i liked this game i should probably also play nier automata since apparently the plot makes no sense without it #and the protagonists have white hair in that one too i think #god im biased for white hair

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