#but at least there's a vague narrative gloss there

[dandelion-wings]

Killing hilichurls is probably my least favorite gameplay/narrative dissonance in Genshin. :( I don't mind most things, like the additional characters on your team being an entirely gameplay mechanic that doesn't exist in-game, but even before the narrative made it solidly clear that hilichurls were human, it was obvious from their camps and behaviors that they're people, and having to grind them for drops or fight them as random enemies instead of the game letting you make any out-of-story overtures towards them.... :(

#arguably the eremites-as-enemies thing is more racist #(though. lbr. the 'culture' they give the hilichurls with totem poles and such is ALSO pretty racist) #but at least there's a vague narrative gloss there

[borzoilover69]

> BORZOI: Read Homestuck like its 2011 (Part one)

Hi guys, this is me doing long posts while i reread homestuck! Let me get this out of the way first, I'm going to be starting with the alpha kids because i have a LOT to say about them and ramble, but I have read everything up until this point. Long post be aware, lots of meta.

I could probably do a psycho-analysis of these two pages and their blurbs respectively, but what I like about the alpha kids is how apparent their character voice is even in secondary voice than the betas. This isn't flack to the betas by any regards but in terms of introductions the beta sessions sort of wiffle-waffled around it rather than it seem like you were really IN TUNE with their thoughts.

However here with the two's rather lengthy introductions, they list everything and in a way that makes you feel comfortable they're sort of directly thinking it. Whether it's using their slang, with Jane talking about her daunting reputation she feels she has to live up to through the bloodline passed down, and her like for amateur botany (which i completely glossed over and holy COW does it open so many oppurtunities here for it to be picked up post game) to Jake talking about his want to talk about the things he wants to do and share with others, and being generally resigned and saying he doesn't care but acting a lot like he DOES care about his image even with this first approach

" You're known to be found with your nose in a comic book or two not that it makes you a nerd or anything, like you even CARE about that! "

"You bluster frequently of exuberance for FIREARMS and FISTICUFFS and ADVENTURE though have no human company with which to share these interests but who needs chums?"

He emphasises at length to the reader from the get go what he likes and what he really is enthusiastic about, even when its about things he says he vehemently doesnt care about (and he does). And once again, there's that vague sort of. I don't know how to put it, but especially with that last line about a skull being at the heart of any mystery, haunting its every PAGE, it leads to an idea he may be more aware of a narrative that needs to be played out than he usually lets on, which I will extrapolate on later.

Also, I think its so very ironic that Jane despite being a detective is the most clueless out of the Alpha kids on what happens (due to constant brainwashing subliminal messages most likely ingrained since childhood. Its like a subconcious need for her to find out reflecting back on her and her ignorance.

Also another note, upon reading back, is how they quite literally make vague mentions to their classpects, how cool is that? > When it does, you will waste no time in embarking on the games MAIDEN VOYAGE, you are prepared to have the time of your LIFE!!

>There is a good SKULL at the heart of any mystery, haunting its EVERY PAGE. At least, it is what you always HOPE.

4121

Have i ever mentioned I headcanon Jake as a Fil-Aus mix (like me)? Well now you know. Not to mention his planets influence being quite obviously the Luzon rice terraces and the Chocolate hills in Bohol, places I've had the absolute pleasure of visiting and romping around. There's a few hot springs nestled amidst the Rice fields, did you know that? Do you realise what this means? Hell yes. I'm really happy Jake got to visit those too TBH. This man probably tried sinigang and adobo.

4122 and 4125

Another great example of character voice. I'm actually really fond of Jane because of how forthright her character voice is compared to Egbert. SHE'S taking charge of the story, and she's one of the most stubborn opinionated girls in the cast, beside Rose. (Which I will touch on at a later date). A stubborn 16 year old that wants things to be DONE.

I guess another reason I like the alpha kids as characters is because they're so much more openly flawed than the beta kids. You have to work to like and understand them, and even then most of it is lost on the fandom, unless it's Roxy due to how her character plays out, we see her character get BETTER contrasting her friends and how they got REALLY QUITE A BIT WORSE. Also talking so much about her LIFE and how he enjoys it is something i like to read. Shes adding life to her background whether its through talking about her past or life experiences and thoughts, and i find it so interesting that the alpha kids show such deficits later on yet so intrinsically wrapped with their aspects.

Also pointing out what bullshit alchemy systems are. Some of those combos are downright preposterous and it's so bafflingly curious.

Life is clearly a joy to Jane, she gets a lot of sweet loot that keeps her generally accommodated and comfortable, which, I can get. Why would you doubt the things and megacorp applications you regularly use when they're the most prominently focused and promoted in your life? I mean sure you could realise that Google is generally fucked and a giant evil corporate entity and fuck off using it but it's not going to make a lot of people quit it even if its blasting subliminal messages into your head. (Cough twitter cough cough).

4127

She would totally watch Sherlock and Hannibal and Brooklyn 99 she is just a well rounded detective fellow! A television guru. I get her. Eating toast or pancakes while watching these nitty gritty crime shows in the morning and you see a dead body and go "oooh detective how'll we solve this case now." Which brings me up to another point and I guess it's how desensitized a lot of the kids to some degree (BUT MORE PROMINENTLY THE ALPHAS) are with death, and how they deal with it a LOT to some degree. You know in my original notes for this I wrote a lot about dead bodies and how such and such would react but I'll. Save you from having to suffer from that.

I just really like Jane because of how energetic she seems, willing to make jokes and rib on people in playful jest and stuff. A life player is lively get it.

"Comics aren't really your thing but you hung it up anyway because that's the sort of thing you do in a mildly escalating feud of passive-aggressive one-upsmanship. You *own* it."

I laughed when I saw this. If anyone would see something as a passive-aggressive nudge on their psyche, it's Rose and Jane, the two most stubborn #girl characters of the cast adamant to forging their own paths (but never truly being the mastermind behind it). Knowing Jake, it's so totally one-sided, Jake probably really not thinking much of it but a little poke back. God he's such a little freak and a weirdo.

4129

I had to think a bit about this. On one hand, she’s well aware that characteristically speaking, these things line up with her friends, and their interests, and it’s bad manners to buy something for your friends bday that seems more directed towards yourself than at your friend. On the other hand, she sees the sentiment and motion made behind them which is. so sweet.

4130

Really neat parallel between page 28 and page 4130.

And yet again I'm struck by the contrast between the Alpha and Beta sessions. Comparing how the betas session start at spring, a season of starting fresh, where things start to bloom, of hope, of new beginnings and oppurtunities and adventure and exploring a world, to the Alphas session starting in late fall, where the trees lose their leaves, a season represented by the late stages of maturity and decline and decay, especially death. It drives me fucking mental I tell you.

4133

"Looks like somebody is bothering you. He better make it quick! You've got a window to stay glued to."

She's so PASSIONATE about things she wants. I love her.

4135

Clearly, I'm an idiot, because I never noticed the subliminal messages, or rather forgot them, until now. I too have fallen into the trap.

4136 AND HERE WE HAVE IT FOLKS. THE SCRIMBLY SCRUMBO. THE SILLY FELLOW. HIS FIRST TRUE APPEARANCE!! [ APPLAUSE ]

GT: Jane! GT: Forgive my botherations. I know this is meant to be a spanking ripsnorter of a day for you and all. GT: But do you happen to know where the devilfucking dickens mr strider might be?

AND THE FIRST THING HE MENTIONS IS HIS BEST FRIEND. *Rolls around on the floor sobbing.*

I think it's interesting how Jane and Roxy seem rather fond of the autoresponder, but Jake and Dirk to some degree really seem to dislike it (for reasons that become more clear later on), Jake even rebutting what he knows of Dirk to Jane. Maybe it's just musing on my part, but I naturally assume Dirk has aired some sort of frustration about AR to Jake and Jake alone, if it was just Jakes gripes with the thing he would mention it (which he does), but here he mentions Striders distaste for it even though the girls both point out its incredibly helpful.

Just a really funny line.

Jane has a point. Its a passive aggressive poke at Jane to consider.

Did i mention how much I adore the alpha kids in general and their narration? Their voices are so clear. Shes so inquisitive.

4141 and 4143

Hello mister.

4144 AND HERES CALLIE!!!!! :DDD!!!!! :DDD!!!!! >v< >v< Oh you silly GOOBER you. Also be warned for future I'm always so excited to see ALL the alpha kids, and their little quirks that are so fond. I can imagine Callie pacing her room considering how they would say this and writing it all down in that massive tome of theirs.

You're telling me John Egbert was this guy? Ok that IS sort of John like. And rather funny! Hahaha! Hes got such a witty charm to him!

From a youtube comment:

He owned a magic shop in New Orleans during his final years. He was a very good guy, and I think probably one of the more influential characters for me as far as style and humour. The whole show was amazing, although it was every week night it never got old. The show afterwards was always Cheers...which wad good but more verbal than the slap stick audacity in Night Court.

OH HOLY COW THAT IS EGBERT!! WHAT THE FUCK THATS SO COOL! As for the actual Harry Anderson..

Its so fucking cool. Anyways i gotta go get my haircut so imma wrap up here.

#homestuck #hom3stuck #homestuck meta #borzoi talks #borzoi meta #borzoi reread

[lullaebies]

While I know that a lot of the things of the books are vague and therefore are open for different interpretations HOWEVER Ryan's interpretation of the dance is the worst I've seen, and I've seen alot of different takes/interpretations since I've been there in the fandom for like 9yrs, but Ryan manages to come up with the worst. Especially with Aegon's character, like I know Aegon (&his mother &his brothers) plays the role of antagonist or at least the closest one to such role, so I wasn't expecting him to be a jesus-like figure in the show but the way Ryan has made him sooo cartoonishly evil (he is objectively worse than Joffrey) but also so pathetic without any endearing qualities that cool villains have is soo jarring and annoying to me especially when Ryan pat himself thinking that the abomination he has created is some sort of "grey complex character"

See I don't really hate everything on the show; clearly if I did I wouldn't be half as obsessed with it, but I feel they chose one of the most dumbed down options for the Dance in the matter of the political debate and intrigue. If they took the Greens and their concerns any type of seriously we could've had a show more on the level of the first seasons of GOT. Most of the Green characters suffer from characterization issues, Aegon is simply the one you can tell on the most because it's fucking ridiculous with him lmao. (this is not to say TB doesn't suffer from characterization issues, but the vast majority of them are kids rn who frankly just didn't get screentime so that's a damn shame. The adult TB character's suffer more from lack of consequences and critique from the narrative imo). As for the Aegon section of the ask - You know the real kicker is that the use Joffrey in interviews as a measuring stick to say "he's no Joffrey" like... did you by any chance... read what you wrote? As you said, he's worse. And even worse are the inconsistencies - you expect me to believe he goes to fighting pits and rapes girls every sunday before sept mass when this man cries at his mother looking at him pointedly? Like, you can glean characterization off of Aegon, you can make him interesting if you tried, but they did not try to make him any sort of grey character in the first season. (in fact, the sympathetic parts of his story are glossed over and he is villainized over them!) He's just a menace that we are told to watch like: "look at this loser the greens are trying to replace Rhaenyra with". And they set it up from the get go with him as a child being a bully and a pervert, being mean to everyone around him, and I don't need to talk about adult Aegon, do I? I genuinely feel like the first season as a whole did its best to say "he sucks, he has no redeeming qualities, do not support". And it's so stupid, because people would've supported Rhaenyra regardless. She has an actual plight trying to ascend as the first queen in her own name. But the showrunners will masquerade Aegon II as a grey character while writing his actions and words as morally black as the night to act as if they don't have a favorite side. I don't know. I hope Tom managed to plant so ideas in their head as to how to handle him better, I do hope we get some sort of character development after the initial events of S2, but in the matter of being truly sympathetic in any way and morally ambigious they already shot themselves in the foot.

#answered #sorry i got a bit heated i think #hotd critical #i really do think this show would've been more interesting if they actually tried to be more neutral #and not only say that they are

[ticklishraspberries]

hi hello i hope this isn't weird but what do you love about The Great? I finally have hulu and im about to start watching it because of you fr like i dont go there but I WANNA GO THERE // @tickle-bugs

omg hi i love this question!! i'm gonna tell you my favorite and my least favorite aspects so u can make a genuinely informed decision lol!! i believe this is all vague enough to not give anything away but give you a genuine review of the show to help you decide to watch it!! i would LOVE if you watched it, i think if you wrote a fic for this in your gorgeous style, i would DIE bc...i just know you'd KILL IT but also 0 pressure, seriously.

my favorite things about the great are:

the characters are all incredibly well-written, well-rounded, and well-acted - especially elle fanning's portrayal of catherine

the humor is sort of dirty/low-hanging fruit but it genuinely always makes me laugh, every episode, someone will say/do something so absurd or hilarious that it cracks me up

the dynamics between all the characters are fascinating - it takes place in a country/time period where class/status, gender, etc. all are so important to your place in society, and yet, characters often have unlikely imbalances of power and different dynamics that you might not expect

the romance is so compelling, just about every romantic relationship has so many layers to it and plays into many different tropes: you have the doomed-by-the-narrative lovers, the childhood besties to star-crossed lovers, the enemies AND lovers simultaneously...just the romance and the sexual scenes are all so compelling and well-done, they clearly had a great intimacy coordinator on this or smth bc damn

THE COSTUMES ARE SO FUCKING STUNNING, like the costumes are indescribably beautiful and actually breath-taking. the dresses that all the main women wear are like actually perfect, i want to steal them all. elle fanning is so beautiful and they manage to make her look even more amazing, like her hair/makeup/outfits are just incredible, but everyone looks so good.

this show doesn't use "it was a different time period" to justify any lack of diversity - there are characters of all different races, multiple canonically queer characters, women are badass and well-written/represented, and while it does address issues like aspects of discrimination in russia during that time period, there is very little actual racism/homophobia in the show, like the characters who are black or queer do not suffer.

my least favorite things about the great are:

the historical inaccuracy is self-proclaimed, but gets a bit silly at times - catherine the great was so fascinating and well-documented in history, but they really just took a concept and ran with it without even trying to get anything right? there are little things like, the number/gender of siblings catherine had, but then the huge differences like how catherine rose to power and became empress. it makes a compelling story, but if you're a history buff, it can be frustrating!!

on that topic, it does gloss over a lot of the good that catherine the great did in real life as it gets caught up in the drama/comedy/romance of the show and forgets to show her as the genuinely accomplished woman she was.

this is a big one: it got cancelled. i haven't finished s3 yet, but i'm a few episodes in and i'm not confident that it is going to end on a fully satisfying note. if a show being cancelled is a turn-off for you, this one did just end and i'm still not sure if the ending is anti-climactic or not, lol.

lastly, this doesn't personally bother me, but it is extremely inappropiate. there is a lot of violence (not too much gore, everything is either very obviously fake, or not explicit), nudity/sex, and totally vulgar language. there is a lot of infidelity, implied/mentioned SA but no scenes that are violent or explicit, overuse of the word "cunt", etc. so just proceed with caution and consider looking up content warnings if you're wary!!

#ask #the great #tickle-bugs #tickle bugs

[arceespinkgun]

My issues with IDW1's portrayal of queer relationships are a lot more simple. I loved the WLW relationships and thought they did fairly well. It is important to note however, that I am neither a woman/woman-aligned person nor WLW (although I haven't heard any or much criticism from that demographic with the portrayals, besides the lack of fanon content for them in comparison to MLM relationships)

I, however, have many grievances with the MLM representation and the narratives they chose to give them. I understand that in the "grand scheme" of things, no one by the end of the war was "good" but a lot of the MLM characters did terrible things even before the war broke out (whether intentionally or not, through their inherent ignorance and how the system functioned)

There seemed to be a theme of MLM characters being acknowledged as downright monsters or their monstrous being dismissed and the common factor was that they were MLM. One option could be vaguely interpreted as saying “The only thing worse than a war criminal is a MLM war criminal" (whether the authors intended to or not, and they definitely didn't), whilst the second option glossed over character complexity and their active contributions in a prejudiced society in favour of highlighting their queerness. Frankly, I don't know what's worse because at least the first option is in your face and is brought up/criticised, whereas the latter goes unchallenged due to simply being representation that isn't blatantly offensive/damaging

Well, this turned into a whole essay....

(Warning: I make some really harsh criticisms of both IDW1's WLW and MLM representation in this post that I feel like could potentially make people upset. Please know that there are many romantic relationships from IDW1 I like and that I'm glad representation was obvious and present in the series—but I do feel like the patterns probably unknowingly perpetuated by the series deserve critique. My intention is not to make anyone feel like they can't enjoy something.)

I've been thinking about this ask to try and figure out what I think was going on, and this is what I've come up with. First of all, I'd like to say that I personally have plenty of issues with the WLW representation in IDW1, even though I enjoyed all the individual relationships in that category. Second, I understand why you'd say it comes across like "The only thing worse than a war criminal is a MLM war criminal," because of things like Prowl's and Tarantulas's past relationship being both obvious, yet also only implied and referred to through symbolism and innuendos related to horrific acts (for example, Tarantulas's infamous "Come; I want to show you something naughty" line is referring to a completed torture device). Or because of strange details like Ultra Magnus's first condemnation of Megatron when he thinks he's betrayed them being the mild and personal, "He's a serial abuser" of all things. And while I agree that in a lot of instances, writers' choices to have certain really despicable characters be queer (often intensely and obsessively so) was distracting and a really odd choice that added basically nothing to the narrative while from a reader's perspective, playing into offensive stereotypes (also ableist ones because my goodness are so many of the most violently, unforgivably evil villains in late-phase IDW1 mentally ill, disabled, and MLM), I think there's a lot more going on. Because then of course there are plenty of MLM characters the writers want us to root for, whose relationships are shown to be good (even though you or I may disagree). So what does that mean? And how do the WLW relationships factor in by comparison?

Well, here's what I've come up with. I think the trend you're seeing might be that IDW1 generally filters queer relationships through these two sets of stereotypes:

1) Lesbians get married after their first date, and their love is pure, redemptive, and stable.

2) Gays are messy, dramatic, and potentially predatory.

Now to be fair, I don't think this framework was intentional. And these stereotypes aren't reflected in the stories of every single writer. But if you view IDW1 as a single text and try to figure out what it's saying about queerness, the differences in WLW and MLM representation seem pretty obvious. More below the cut:

For example, the only 100% confirmed WLW couple we actually see fall in love and get together is Arcee and Aileron, and while I enjoyed all of their moments together, it happens super quickly, and neither of them had other partners beforehand. Arcee was written with many, many transmisogynistic stereotypes in many of her appearances, but her romantic life was not complicated in this respect. She and Aileron never hit each other in anger like a couple like Cyclonus and Tailgate did, for example.

Every single other confirmed WLW couple was already together by the time they made their debut, and the struggles their relationships face are almost all external. And there are enough WLW ships in this canon that this pattern is really obvious. We don't get to see a love story or longing and desire with Jumpstream/Dust Up, Greenlight/Lancer, or Anode/Lug. Plus, note that if you look at Lug's and Anode's arc, it's the story of two lesbians who end up settling down and deciding to raise a family after a life of danger and adventure.

Think of all the things we DON'T get with the WLW representation (but were involved in the MLM representation). Having a string of partners who didn't last due to death or divorce. Relationships being strained by addiction. Grooming, physical violence, analogues of sexual assault, and mental intrusion towards a partner or potential partner. Nearly getting everyone killed to impress someone who's never noticed you. Queerness being associated with torture. Obsession with someone ending in your own and others' violent deaths. Do I necessarily wish any of this stuff had been attached to WLW relationships? No!!! I think most of these things are rooted in offensive stereotypes. But given that this is how MLM relationships were portrayed, the inequality there contributes to assumptions about WLW and women in general.

And there are things with MLM representation that aren't bad that really show how lacking the WLW rep was. Think about this—we didn't even get something as basic as Drift's and Ratchet's bickering "will they or won't they" romance arc with any WLW representation. That's how little drama and desire was permitted to WLW (I love Lug's bickering with Anode but they were introduced as a married couple).

Now, I can think of one big exception to this rule, and it's IDW1 Elita-1. She's menacing, powerful, tyrannical, somewhat bigoted, has a big redemption through death moment. But the thing is, as far as I can remember, Elita was only vaguely lesbian-coded, and she wasn't obsessively fixated on another woman or anything the way characters like Tarn, Pharma, etc. were obsessively fixated on other men.

And when it comes to why queerness was often focused on above other horrible things characters perpetrated, I think the answer is embarrassingly simple. The writers who wrote the edgiest shit like dramatic gays™️, possibly out of internalized homophobia. Many of the story elements reek of the type of internalized homophobia that results in people thinking MLM stuff is sinful and dirty (Pharma's last words before the drills go into his brain, anyone?)... even though IDW1 also tries to showcase positive MLM relationships at the same time.

I think some people may wonder after reading this post, "But didn't the TF franchise already improve when it comes to this stuff, like in IDW2? Why discuss this and criticize it so harshly?" My response would be to say, yes, it did improve! I'm glad we got to see women like Road Rage and Nautica falling in love over a longer span of time and we got to actually see, you know, Road Rage pining! And I'm glad we got to see Blast-Off have a positive relationship instead of the one involving violating his love interest's mind in IDW1. But I think it's important to know what was lacking in earlier series to remember what to avoid and continue to improve on in the future. We don't want to forget how bad things were in IDW1 and let the bar be on the ground it's so low.

There is a lot more I could've talked about here, like about specific problematic elements in individual relationships and how they relate to offensive stereotypes, or more about transness, or something about how specific writers' takes differed. But I think this tackles the general pattern you noticed.

#my analysis #transformers idw #long post

[anaktoria-of-the-moon]

What would you like in the ideal fae fantasy/romance?

In honor of (hopefully!) getting my AO3 account tomorrow, I'm curious to see what everyone in this community would like to see in a fae/fey/fay/you-know-what-I-mean fantasy/romance, generally the sorts of things you found lacking in SJM's very own fairy porn (if you've read any of it, and if so, my condolences, I think).

For me (as admittedly a pretty non-sexual gay lady who isn't much into romance in the first place - trying to challenge myself by going out of my comfort zone here), my non-exhaustive wishlist is roughly as follows:

Diversity that doesn't relegate diverse characters to serving mostly background roles as convenient exposition vehicles (Nuala, Cerridwen, Alis, etc.) and isn't ambiguous about the nature of their diversity or if they're even diverse to begin with (which seemed to be the case for most of the non-White and/or non-heterosexual characters in the book - did not see any characters who were transgender, enby, etc. to speak of).

Romances (and romantic leads) that don't present unhealthy behaviors and dynamics in a positive light and without adequate nuance - if unhealthy behaviors are involved, they should be treated appropriately, i.e., not glorified and glossed over, at least not by a reliable and ostensibly trustworthy narrator. Above all, no hand-waving away abuse or "softening" said abuse via vague narrative treatments. No trouble showing imperfect or unhappy relationships even among the heroes in stories, but at least observe the imperfections and don't try to spin them as sexy and therefore "actually OK"; no amount of harming the person you claim to love will be sexy (well, sure, there's consensual BDSM, but I'm not talking about very specific and well-bounded roleplay kink scenarios).

Thoughtful, cohesive world-building that respects and appropriately references its mythological inspirations. The tradition of borrowing, augmenting, and recycling mythologies from one narrative setting to another is age-old and storied, but if one must do it then I feel that one does owe it to both one's audience and one's sources to fully consider the origin and interpret it meaningfully in the new work. If there is inter-cultural mixing, try to acknowledge and work in the fact that the one strain of legends is foreign to the other and vice versa. Though putting a new spin on things isn't strictly verboten, err on the side of caution and don't completely butcher stuff you take from existing cultures (especially if their sources do not belong to your home culture(s)).

In general, thoughtful narratives and characterizations that don't do disservices to whatever they're trying to depict, especially in the cases of typically under- or misrepresented groups. I don't want to see a suspicious number of non-White(-coded) characters in handmaiden and servant roles or ambiguously queer characters whose depictions perpetuate various outdated and hurtful narratives about what it's like to be queer. I'd rather see authors skip over that kind of "representation" entirely than tossing it in at the last minute to get points with their audience and completely messing it up (and doing more harm than good) as a result. Of course nobody is perfect, and especially with newer writers stuff like this is bound to happen (and hopefully becomes a chance to learn and grow), but for notably popular, established, and experienced authors (like SJM) I feel that it really isn't right.

Genuinely sex-positive sex depictions. For books that tout romance and "spiciness" so much, you'd hope the actual narrative around sex and sexuality would be welcoming and healthy. The source seems to include a disturbing amount of slut-shaming, sex-for-reproduction, and very formulaic hyper-binary dominant-man, submissive-woman sex (and there is nothing wrong with that last one, but for a series that brags so much about being kink-oriented...). I want to see a variety of different kinks, orientations, and topographies depicted (e.g., polyamory, BDSM, same-gender relationships, etc.) in appropriate and genuine (and fun!) ways. I'm not saying this belongs in every fantasy book, obviously, but half the draw of the series in question has always been the romance and the sex scenes, so...yeah.

Love - not just the romantic kind - illustrated organically and with care. The original series did the sisterly relationships dirty, in my opinion, by sidelining them for romances and this rather disturbing "found family" dynamic that read much more like a cult or a clique than a genuine found family to me (trust me, my entire adult life has been completed by found family - I'm no stranger to that in concept, nor am I anything but adamantly in favor of it). I am not an only child and am deeply familiar with innately rocky - yet still loving - family relationships. I was thus disappointed that the main three sisters as SJM wrote them didn't have all the nuance I'd have liked to see as someone with similar experiences; instead, there was so much cattiness and on-again-off-again plot-mandated drama that I never felt the sisters' bonds (or lack thereof, perhaps) really got to shine.

Compelling, natural relationship and character progressions not bolstered by narrator-engineered character assassinations. There are many places in the original series where I felt that a character's actions and dialogues suggested one thing, but the narration itself editorialized the situation into quite another. Lots of double standards stemming from this. Not a fan of that.

For fae stuff in particular: Fae who, in accordance with the original mythology, are deeply other and possessed of wild and complex natures, instead of being just conveniently human-shaped hot people. Going to have lots of beastly elements in my hot men, from tails to insect wings to horns and beyond, because I can. (I also think the fae are perfect for depicting gender fluidity, bisexuality, and more, because when you’re an uncannily beautiful centuries-old non-human shapeshifter, how much are you really going to cling to some useless notion of a binary?)

Let me know what else you'd like to see and I will happily steal any ideas for inspiration to work into the reimagining I’m currently in the process of writing!

#anti sjm #acotar rewrite

[all-this-panic-still-no-disco]

I heard that you were putting out a new thomastair fic. Do you mind telling me what's it about?

ok lets go lets fuckin do this. bear with me here because it’s complicated as fuck.

so, we begin with alastair carstairs on a bright afternoon. he’s angry. cranky. just lost a case and is pissed at a client. about to smash his coffee mug. (alastair is a barrister, which is just fancy british for lawyer.) so, faced with the possibility of smashing his coffee mug or doing something about his Rage™️, he calls thomas and says, ‘can you get over here and fuck me, please’

spoiler alert! thomas and alastair have been hooking up for eight fucking years after accidentally ending up at the same uni.

thomas comes over, they fuck, it’s very cute and very sexy, but thomas has to leave the next morning as he has a class to teach. (he’s a professor of classics at london college university)

alastair goes back to work, stress and anger freshly fucked out of him, and takes up another case. a young uni student just inherited a fuck-ton of money from his grandfather is having his inheritance sued over the fact that his grandfather was unaware that his grandson was gay and if he did know, he wouldn’t have left him so much money. total bullshit, but the family is rich and they have some serious pull.

so alastair says fuck this, let’s get you your inheritance. he works his fucking ass off and halfway through the case’s first day in court, the prosecution brings up alastair’s ‘impartiality’ on the issue of him having a sexual relationship with another man.

surprise surprise! the daily mail just published an article on alastair’s ‘scandal’ of daring to take a case where a young gay man is targeted for being gay. the case is pretty high profile because of the family’s status. (alastair is also a fucking good lawyer.) pictures are included in the article of him and thomas kissing and getting pretty close to fucking in alastair’s living room. they’re both covered enough in the photos, but they’re a horrible violation of privacy and the whole thing is super shitty.

alastair freaks the fuck out and the trial is adjourned, and he runs home to find thomas in his apartment waiting for him, because years ago alastair gave him a key. (they’re totally just hooking up guys)

alastair’s ‘scandal’ soon becomes vaguely trending. all of their friends find out and it’s fucking chaos. alastair is trying his very best not to loose it but he’s not doing very well.

the worst part isn’t the homophobia of it all or the horrific mess of his private acts being posted online, it’s that his career is pretty much ruined. despite having done nothing wrong, even the slightest rumor of a barrister being not 100% bad rep free means he won’t get hired, or at the very least not as much. people don’t want a scandal-associated lawyer because it might sway the jury against their favor. why contract alastair when there’s plenty of other sex-scandal free options?

so alastair’s freaking out about his job when thomas presents this wonderful idea: fake date.

(i fucking know, right?)

it’s actually pretty smart. fake dating will turn the narrative around; suddenly alastair isn’t the barrister who had some torrid affair, he’s a man who’s private life has been grossly invaded, which is the truth. if they give the story the gloss of a committed relationship and hearts and rainbows, alastair won’t be painted as some overly sexual gay man stereotype. he’ll just be a man in love.

they both acknowledge how shitty it is that they have to do this, but agree. they’ll fake date until the trial ends, which alastair will probably win now that the prosecution has been exposed as cheating, homophobic fucks, and everything will be solved. thomas will also stay at alastair’s apartment through this time for totally ridiculous reasons that aren’t true and it’s just because they want to be near one another.

there’s only one problem.

alastair has been in love with thomas for years and despite knowing his feelings are somewhat reciprocated, (he’s a fucking idiot and thinks thomas’s feelings are a surface level crush and a side effect from fucking), he refuses to do anything about it. he doesn’t think he’s good enough for thomas and doesn’t want to wreck thomas’s life by dating him for real. (yes, he’s being self-sacrificially stupid but this is alastair, guys, what did you expect.)

to make matters worse, thomas, idiot and piner extraordinaire, has been fully in love with alastair since he was eighteen. he kept hooking up with alastair all this time because it was the only way he could be near him.

so we have alastair, in love with thomas but pretending he’s just interested in him for sex, and thomas, who’s fully fucking in love and really bad at hiding it. these two idiots are now fake dating and lying to all their family and friends for the sake of alastair’s career.

bomb, meet lighter. things are about to go boom. i swear, this fic has everything i could cram into it.

angst: angsted.

pining: cranked to eleven.

domestic fluff: sweeter then marshmallows.

sex: hot and dirty as fuck.

welcome to my fucking disaster golden egg.

so far, it has over eighty thousand words and it’s not even fucking done yet.

also, i lowkey think it’s the best thing i’ve ever written and i’m hella excited to share it with you guys. i’m gonna stop typing now bc my thumbs hurt and kudos to you if you read this far. 😚 my current plan is to post the first chapter sometime around august, so get ready!

lots of love,

liza💖

#thomastair #thomas lightwood #alastair carstairs #tlh #tsc #the last hours #the shadowhunter chronicles #chain of gold #chain of iron #chain of thorns #fanfiction

[hollow-dweller]

on the AO3 elections, misinformation, and fandom racism

i hate the way misinformation and disinterpretation function online, and especially in fandom spaces, because if something gets large and abstract enough, there's no way to functionally dispute it.

the Tiffany G situation is a perfect example. they never said they wanted to ban works from AO3, in fact when asked directly they said they did not want to do that. they did not say that AO3 hosted illegal materials or CSAM, only that people think AO3 does, which is true (hence why we can't ever get away from this stupid fucking anti vs proship war). they did not say anything about wanting to make AO3 monetizable or "presentable"--only to clarify what is and is not hosted on AO3, and highlight the work done by other organizations under the OTW.

the full transcript is available here, and i encourage reading through this thread to see further analysis of their comments with a more generous interpretive lens. i also HIGHLY reccomend looking through the comments on their bio post for a great discussion from user Bread about how fandom norms in China versus USA/english-speaking fandom may be contributing to the lack of clarity around their points, and how YES, cultural context and language barriers actually matter a great deal when discussing these matters!!

but now that the reaction has outgrown the initial incident, TG's comments have been extrapolated and warped and used as fuel for a greater cultural war. the criticism has gone from "i see some red flags in their ideas" (a fair reaction, and at least deserving of greater investigation) to "they are a pro-censorship chinese sleeper agent who wants to literally endanger chinese fans' lives and scrub all queer content from AO3".

and what a lot of people gloss over is that racism and sinophobia are now a fundamental part of the narrative. even if you do not literally believe they are a government spy, if you take it at face value that their comments were "pro-censorship", you are buying into a racist mischaracterization of their words. you have already lost the plot, because the fundamental reading of their comments and position has been taken in the worst faith possible, and that lack of grace is something that fans of colour experience disproportionately in fandom compared to white fans, as has been pointed out many, many times by fans of colour here on Tumblr. Writer and media analyst Stitch has also thoroughly discussed this on their website, as a starting point if you are unfamiliar.

so now every post that even vaguely touches on this controversy has this wealth of history behind it, and the vaguer and more abstract they get, the more they obfuscate the very real influence racism and sinophobia have had on this entire incident. posts get spread by people who know nothing about the initial incident, and if they ask, you see people providing them not with a summary of TG's actual comments, but the bad faith mischaracterizations of their comments that have spread so rapidly. and trying to clarify TG's comments and the racialized nature of the backlash means that you get assigned a position in a broader fandom war that is a) functionally meaningless and b) largely irrelevant to the problem at hand (watch this excellent video from Princess Weekes for a thorough analysis of the pro-ship vs anti discourse and its relationship to racism).

if fandom is a community, that means we have obligations to one another, and that means extending grace and compassion to all fans. it means taking a moment to actually examine what ideas are being spread in our spaces, and examining whether they are rooted in harmful rhetoric. it means being willing to bridge cultural and racial gaps in fandom, and it is on white fandom to do that work.

white supremacy is a real and immediate threat to our fandom spaces. if you believe in the power of fandom to foster community, artistic freedom, and collective joy, then there is no fandom without fans of colour.

#fandom racism #ao3 #tiffany g #reminder that the posts linked here are starting points #it is important that white fans actively seek out a variety of opinions from fans of colour regarding racism in fandom #it is on us to do that work and engage in good faith

[theseventhoffrostfall]

Actually, I'm reminded of like my second post on this blog, which was also about star wars. Namely, while there's reams of information about everything from the individual serial numbers on the components of han solo's fucking gun to the full technical data packet of an X-wing, it seems to have always been vague exactly how the Rebels actually got their shit. Maybe this was explained in one of the 450 books in the X-wing squadron series but they kind of gloss over that the Rebellion has at least some ground troops, at least one functioning fleet, and numerous squadrons of starfighters, all trained and organized enough to have actual ranks, callsigns, a dedicated intelligence wing and they award medals of merit like an actual military institution, yet not only is acquisitions not really a factor, the narrative keeps treating it like a tiny insurgency. Character runs off, joins the Rebellion with no problem, ends up a ranking officer because we know his name, and at no point is it ever brought up that maybe he should be trained, or maybe this ad-hoc military can't spare an advanced starfighter for this random dude that shows up

[jayoctodot]

The Silent Patient vs The Maidens

I will start by saying that I understand the appeal of these novels as page-turners. They are easy to read and if you want a twisty reveal at the end, you will probably be entertained and satisfied. That being said, I am SO CONFUSED by the near-universal adoration of The Silent Patient and the reasonably positive reception of The Maidens. The weaknesses of the two are strikingly similar, as well, which doesn’t give me much hope of seeing improvement from this guy, though I am intrigued to see whether he keeps repeating the same (apparently successful!!) patterns. These books were at least super fun to hate.

(For context, I read The Maidens for a bookclub I'm in, because several of the members had read and loved The Silent Patient, and one of them gave me a copy of the latter to read on my own time. I loathed The Maidens and then read The SP for comparative purposes. And because I'm a masochist, apparently.)

SPOILER WARNING! Do not read on unless you've finished both books (or unless you care not for spoilers). Sorry if it gets a bit shouty.

Here are the similar weaknesses I noticed in both:

PSEUDO-PSYCHOLOGY

-> Weirdly similar “group therapy” scenes early on where a cartoonishly unstable patient arrives late, disrupts the meeting by throwing something into the middle of the circle, and is asked to join the group after the therapist(s) speechify on the importance of boundaries (HA! None of these therapists would know an appropriate boundary if it kicked them in the ass) and debate whether to “allow” the patient to join. Both scenes are so transparent in their design to establish the credibility/legitimacy of the narrators as therapists, but instead both Theo and Mariana come off as super patronizing. The protagonists are less and less believable as therapists at the stories progress (though at least Theo’s incompetence is explained away by the “twist” at the end; Mariana, on the other hand, is confronted in the opening pages of the novel by a patient who has self-harmed PRETTY extensively, and rather than ensure he get proper medical attention, she essentially throws him a first aid kit and tosses him out the door so she can pour herself a glass of wine and call her niece... and it devolves from there).

-> Ongoing insistence throughout the narrative that one’s childhood trauma entirely explains the warped/dysfunctional way a character behaves or views the world, which is why the books go out of their way to give EVERY potentially violent character a traumatic childhood; when Theo insists that no one ever became an abuser who hadn’t been abused themselves, I wanted to throw the book across the room. (That is a MYTH, SIR. GET OUT OF HERE WITH YOUR ARMCHAIR PSYCHOLOGY.)

-> Female murderers whose pathology boils down to “history of depression” and “traumatized by a male loved one/family member.” Because, as we all know, depression + abuse = murderer!

-> The “therapy” depicted in both books is laughable and so so unrealistic, mostly because neither narrators function as therapists so much as incompetent detectives, obsessively pursuing a case they have no place pursuing (or skill to pursue - both just happen across every clue mostly by way of clunky conversation with all the people who can provide precisely the snippet of info to send them along to the next person, and the next… until all is revealed in a tired, cliched “twist”). Their constant Psych 101 asides were so tiresome and weirdly dated (also, the constant harping on countertransference got so ridiculous that at one point during "therapy" Theo literally attributes his headache and a particular emotion he feels to Alicia, as though the contents of her head are being broadcast directly into his mind... and I'm PRETTY SURE that's not how it works???)

CHARACTERS

-> Psychotherapist narrators with abusive fathers and pretensions of being Sherlock Holmes, which results in both characters crossing ALL KINDS of ethical lines as they invade the personal lives of everyone even tangentially connected to their cases (and, in Theo's case, violate all kinds of patient confidentiality. Yeah, yeah, by the end, that's the least of his offenses, but before you get there, it's baffling that NO ONE is calling him out on this).

-> All female characters are either elderly with hilariously bad advice, monstrous hulking brutes, or beautiful bitches (except for ~MARIANA~, who is Bella Swan-esque in her unawareness of her own attractiveness, despite multiple men trying to get with her almost immediately after meeting her. I'm so tired of beautiful female characters being oblivious to their own hotness. Are we meant to believe all mirrors and male attention have escaped their notice? If it’s to make them “relatable,” this tactic really fails with me).

-> All characters of color are shallow, cartoonish side characters, and most of them are depicted as unsympathetic minor antagonists (the Sikh Chief Inspector in The Maidens continuously drinks tea from an ever-present thermos, and his only other notable characteristic is his instant dislike of Mariana, whom he VERY RIGHTLY warns to stay out of the investigation that she is VERY MUCH compromising… the Caribbean manager of the Grove is universally disliked by her staff for enforcing stricter safety regulations at the bafflingly poorly run mental institution, because HOW DARE SHE. There's a very clear vibe that we're supposed to dislike these characters and share the protagonists' indignation, but honestly Sangha/Stephanie were completely in the right for trying to shut down their wildly inappropriate investigations).

-> "Working class" characters (or basically anyone excluded from the comfortably upper-crust, educated main cadre of characters) are few and far between in both stories, but when they show up, he depicts them as such caricatures. We got Elsie the pathologically lying housekeeper in the Maidens, who is enticed to share her bullshit with cake, and then a TOOTHLESS LEPRECHAUN DEALING DRUGS UNDER A BRIDGE in the SP. I kid you not, a man described as having the body of a child, the face of Father Time, and no front teeth, emerges from beneath a bridge and offers to sell Theo some "grass." I was dyinggg.

-> There are no characters to root for. Anywhere. Partly because they’re all so thinly drawn — and because we’re clearly supposed to view almost ALL of them as potential suspects, so they’re ALL weird, creepy, or incompetent in some way.

-> The flimsiest of flimsy motives, both for the narrators and the murderers. Theo fully would have gotten away with his involvement in the murder if he hadn't gone out of his way to work at the Grove and "treat" Alicia and his justification for doing so is pretty weak; his rapid descent into stalking and murder fantasy and his random ass decision to "expose" Alicia's husband as a cheater with a spur-of-the-moment home invasion and staged attempted homicide is ONLY justified if the reader hand waves it away as WELP, HE'S CRAZY, I GUESS (after all, he DID have an abusive father and a history of mental illness, and in Michaelides novels, that's ALL YOU NEED to become a violent psycho). I guess we're lucky Mariana didn't also start dropping bodies (because the logic of his fictional universe says she should definitely be a murderer by now... maybe that'll be his Maidens sequel?). But she especially had NO reason to randomly turn detective - and she kept trying to justify it by saying she needed to re-enter the world or that Sebastian would want her to (??), even though she had no background in criminal psychology... or even a particular fondness for mysteries (really, I would've accepted ANYTHING to explain her dogged obsession with the case. WHY were Sebastian and Zoe so certain she would insert herself into the investigation just because one of Zoe's friends was the first victim? WHY?). As for Zoe and Alicia, their motives are mere suggestions: they were both abused and manipulated, and voila! Slippery slope to murder.

WRITING STYLE

-> Incessant allusions to Greek tragedy and myth, apparently to provide a sophisticated gloss over the bare-bones writing style, which opts more for telling than showing and frequently indulges in hilariously bizarre analogies. Credit where credit is due — the references to Greek myth are less clunky in the SP, and I liked learning about the Alcestis play/myth, which I hadn’t heard of before - but OMG the entire characterization of Fosca, who we are meant to believe is a professor of Greek tragedy at one of the most respected universities on the planet, is just absurd. His "lecture" on the liminal in Greek tragedy is essentially the Wikipedia page on the Eleusinian Mysteries capped off with some Hallmark-card carpe diem crap. The lecture hall responds with raucous applause, clearly never having heard such vague genius bullshit before.

-> Super clunky and amateurish narrative device of interludes written by another character; Sebastian’s letter reads like a mashup of Dexter monologues and Clarice’s memory of the screaming sheep, but by FAR the worse offender is Alicia’s diary, where we’re supposed to believe she painstakingly recorded ENTIRE CONVERSATIONS, BEAT-BY-BEAT DIALOGUE, even when she’s just been DRUGGED TO THE GILLS with morphine and has mere moments of consciousness left… and even before that, she literally takes the time to write “He's trying the windows and doors! ...Someone’s inside! Someone’s inside the house! ETC ETC” when she thinks her stalker has broken in downstairs. WHO DOES THAT?)

-> Speaking of dialogue, the dialogue is so bad. Based on his bio, Michaelides got a degree in screenwriting, which makes his terrible dialogue even more baffling.

-> HILARIOUSLY rendered voyeur scenes where the narrators spy on couples having sex. Such unintentionally awkward descriptions. First we had Kathy’s climax sounds through the trees and then the bowler hat carefully placed on a tombstone before the gatekeeper plows a student. Again, I died.

PLOT/"TWIST"

-> The CONSTANT red herrings make for such an exhausting read. Michaelides drops anvils with almost every character that are so obviously meant to designate them as suspects in our minds. There is absolutely no subtlety in his misdirections.

-> The “crossover” scene between the SP and The Maidens makes no sense - when in the timeline does Mariana’s story overlap with Theo’s? They confer just before Theo starts working at the Grove, obviously (though Mariana appears to be the one who alerts Theo to the job opening there? Whereas in the SP, Theo has been obsessively tracking Alicia since the murder and had already planned to apply to work there?), but then are we supposed to believe that while Theo has been psychotically pursuing his warped quest to “help” Alicia, he’s also been diligently treating Zoe, so invested in her case that he repeatedly reaches out to Mariana to get her to visit Zoe and even writes Mariana a lengthy letter to convince her to do so??? And then a couple days after The Maidens ends, Theo is arrested???

-> But the thing I really did hate the most is how Michaelides treats his female murderers (who are both also victims themselves) as mere means to deploy a “twist”; there’s no moment spared to encourage our sympathy for Zoe, who was groomed and manipulated by the only trusted father figure in her life, and even after spending a decent amount of time getting to know Alicia via her ridiculous diary, where it’s so apparent that she’s been demeaned, objectified, manipulated, gaslit, and/or used by EVERY man in her life, she’s sent packing to spend the rest of her days in a coma… HOW much more satisfying would it have been for her to succeed in exposing Theo and reclaiming her voice? But no, she basically rolls over when he comes to finish her off (SPEAKING OF — ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THERE ARE NO SECURITY CAMERAS IN THIS INSTITUTE FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE????), writes one last diary entry, and drifts off forever. And then a couple pages of nothing later, the story is over. GOODNIGHT, ALICIA!

Both books kept me rolling throughout (by which I mean eye-rolling but also rotfl). Maybe I will check out his next effort — I’m morbidly curious what he’ll turn out. It does leave me wondering whether I should give up on thriller novels entirely, though. Are many of the weaknesses of these novels just characteristic of the genre? Maybe I'm just holding these books to unfair standards? I'm mostly only familiar with thriller films — many of which I think are amazing — but maybe you can get away with more in a film than you can in a novel.

...I really only intended to write a handful of bullet points, but more and more kept coming to mind as I wrote, to the point where subheadings became necessary. Whoopsie.

#the maidens #the silent patient #book review #alex michaelides #thrillers #books

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - Islands Apart

Now here is an episode that should be important to the story arc, but winds up being completely pointless to the overall narrative. 

Summary: With an implication from Owl, Rapunzel and Eugene board a hot-air balloon and return to Tirapi Island, where the Lorbs dwell, in the hope of finding Cassandra. However, they instead meet up with the Captain of the Royal Guards who has been looking for Rapunzel for months but decided to remain on the island with the Lorbs. He then introduces them to a four-year-old Cassandra, who appears to be enjoying being with her adoptive father. From their Lorb leader friend, Rapunzel and Eugene learn of a mystical fountain which grants the wishes of those who drop a Lorb coin into it, but on the ninth day, darkness shall descend onto the wisher.

Well This Plot Point Went Nowhere 

What was the point of introducing the memory wipe plot if you were just going to resolve it off screen anyways? Worse than that it’s gets resolved before the mid season finale. This subplot didn’t even last half a season! 

Why waste the audience's time like that? Why try to invest us in what happens to Frederic and the queen if you don't bother to resolve their conflict? But most importantly why should I invest in any conflict the show offers up if you’re not going to have lasting consequences for any of them? 

This Does Not Make Frederic Endearing 

They’re ‘remembering’ the day he re-traumatized his own daughter with the same abuse her previous guardian submitted her to, and later on that same day they tried to murder an orphaned fourteen year old with a lynch mob. A teenager whom they supposedly are now ‘friends’ with again, for reasons.... 

This show is gross. 

This Is a Terrible Message 

Okay first off, Rapunzel’s idea of ‘sticking together’ is bullying her parents into doing what she wants them to do and denying them agency over their own lives. Her manipulation and lack of accountability in season three is to such a point, that I genuinely believe that Frederic doesn’t actually remember anything; he’s just blindly repeating what Rapunzel has told him, and naturally Rapunzel would gloss over the more unpleasant parts of the story because she just can’t deal with crap. 

Secondly, one absolutely does not stick with family if they’re abusive pieces of shit!  Of which both Frederic and Rapunzel would qualify as. 

How Many Months Show?

Okay, so if you’re a regular on any of the Tangled discords or the fandom tags on Tumblr you’ll know that I’ve been having the this ongoing debate with people about the timeline of the show. I’ve been keeping close track of the on screen clues during this marathon, not only to point out how janky the writing is, but also to prove my point about why season three has to be two years. 

We’ve already past Hearts Day, and this episode has to come after that because of the memory loss subplot. We know Hearts Day is roughly seven to eight months past Rapunzel’s birthday because of season one. We also know that Rapunzel’s Return was Rapunzel’s 20th birthday because of context clues given in season two and the episode it’s self. 

That means the Captain had to have been gone for nearly a year or more. He left before Rapunzel’s 20th birthday and we now have to be at least nine months or more past that because there’s been several episodes since The King and Queen of Hearts.  I actually suspect that it’s been over a year since Rapunzel’s Return because of evidence we get in the next episode, but we’ll get to that when we get to that. 

My point is that “months” doesn’t tell us anything. It’s lazy, vague exposition so that the marketing team can go in and shuffle episodes around regardless of the actual story arc. However there’s not many places you can move the episode to because of the previous Hearts Day and the later scene with Cass and Zhan Tiri at the end of this episode, which leads directly into the next episode Cassandra’s Revenge. These mealymouthed ‘hints’ just wind up being pointless. 

Look, If it’s not on screen, then it’s not cannon. Whatever the fuck the story boarders or writers say after the show is over with regarding the timeline does not count, and people taking the on screen evidence at face value is not ‘interpretation’ it’s just fucking fact. And I’m getting really fucking tired of certain fans trying to dismiss me when I point out that the crew did a piss poor job of communicating their story.  

Show, Don’t Tell

Part of the reason for the poor communication is the over reliance on exposition; vague and often contradictory exposition, at that.    

We still don’t fully know the sequence of events that led Cap to this point. The entire Saporian take over was just skipped over in the show; even though getting from point A. breaking out of the dungeons, to point B. where they’ve captured the royals and chased off the guards, would have been a long process with several steps. But we’re just left to fill in the blanks ourselves which isn’t good writing. 

There’s also the question of how Cap found about about Cassandra and the Moonstone. If he just happened to hear about it on his travels from random people on the street then that means it’s no longer a secret. Which means other kingdoms would have gotten involved by now because the Moonstone is a threat to the whole world. Which makes the pervious filler for the first half of this season all the more bizarre. You would think more people would be on Rapunzel’s case about this. 

The Conflict Between Cassandra and The Captain Hasn’t Been Established Enough

There are a lot of problems with this scene, and I do mean a lot, which I’ll be going over one by one; but the core issue with it is the fact that we don’t even know why Cass and Cap are fighting to begin with. 

Why did it take so long for Cass to become a guard like she wanted? Why are we ignoring the fact that she did become a guard and has now given that up of her own accord? Why did Captain choose loyalty to the crown over protecting his own daughter, or was it to protect her?  Didn’t he already apologize for that? Isn’t he and Cass past this already?   And why, oh why, in goodness’s name, would Cassandra blame Cap for what Gothel did to her? She literally saw the man rescue her from an abusive home in the flashback! Why would she be mad at him for that?

I could sit here and come up with theories all day long, but I shouldn’t have to. These are questions the series should have answered as it went along. Me filling in the blanks is just doing the work of the writers for them. 

What Does Any of This Have to Do with Rapunzel?

And of course there’s the bigger question of how does any of this tie into Cass’s petty bitch fight with Rapunzel, and her stealing an ancient world destroying artifact that grants the user earthbending magic?

The answer is, it doesn’t. 

This isn’t Rapunzel’s story. If the writers wanted it to be Rapunzel’s story then they needed to allow Rapunzel to have agency within the conflict. But of course the writers didn’t want to hold either girl accountable for their actions so Cap and Gothel is just thrown into the mix to be scapegoats.  

If You Want Cassandra’s Arc to be About Her Parents, Then it Needs to Actually Involve Her Parents

This is the only scene in all of season three where Cap holds a conversation with his daughter. He’ll make a couple of cameo appearances in later episodes, but he’s not actually involved in the story arc at all. 

You can’t make Cassandra’s parents into the focal point of her internal conflict and the driving motivation behind her actions/goals without including either of those parents in the resolution of her arc. 

Not having Cap be the main one reaching out to her and not having him there when she is ‘redeemed’ is breaking a narrative promise to the audience. It undercuts everything that was being built up to. 

Even The Rise of Skywalker understood this very basic fact, and tied Leia’s and Han’s deaths directly into Ben’s redemption. Yes, you heard me, right. Kylo Ren is a better written character then Cassandra. 

Uh, Last I Checked Show, Rescuing an Orphan and Loving Her As You’re Own Is the Opposite of Being Selfish 

Cassandra knows what happened. She saw everything go down the same as us. More than that, she lived with the man for twenty years! She knows damn well all that he’s done for her. 

The audience has no way of seeing things from Cassandra’s point of view here because the show was too lazy to show it to us. Up till now Cap has been the best parent in the series, and what mistakes he has made he’s owned up to them and more importantly, never did them again. 

Cause here’s the thing, Cap’s not perfect. You could probably go back and dig up crap to hold over his head if you really wanted to, many have already tried, but most of it is only vaguely implied stuff (like communication issues) or things that rest upon Frederic’s hands as well (remember the king ordered her to be sent to the convent, not Cap). And none of it warrant's Cass’s behavior right now. 

There’s this thing called proportional response. You don’t murder someone’s child because they stole five dollars from you. That would make you an asshole. 

Likewise, if you have issues with the man you raised you, you either talk it out like adults or cut him out of you life; you don’t go out and try to murder your best friend and destroy the world. Those two things don’t connect. 

The really frustrating thing here is that they had the potential to tell an effecting story about how even good, loving parents can let their children down and mess them up later in life; but they ruined it by turning Cassandra into the asshole here.  

Cassandra Is Spoiled

Let me remind you that no one’s actually taken anything from Cass. 

Gothel ditched her. Cap and Raps had nothing to do with it. Cap gave her a loving and safe home for over 18 years. She lived a life of privilege as a high ranking noble inside a castle and was offered the most important job in the kingdom short of being a princess herself. She became a guard, just like she always wanted to in season one. Was head bodyguard through out season two, and oh, was the one who choose to throw her life away for a dumb rock. 

A lot of people try to claim that Cass is the victim here because Gothel abused her as a baby and cause Raps is a shitty friend, but no, a few bad things happening to you doesn’t mean you suddenly are the victim always. 

Let’s get one gigantic myth out of the way right now... 

You can be a victim and still be a bully

That jerk who beat you up and stole you’re lunch money in school; he probably had a shitty home life happening at the time. He was still a bully. That Radfem who was assaulted once because she’s lesbian and refused to go out with a guy; she’s still a TERF. That poor person who is disabled and living in a trailer, but voted for Trump anyways because he doesn’t want black people to vote is still a bigot. 

Bad things happen to everyone, and no, being a crappy human being does not invalidate your problems, but it sure as hell doesn’t give you the go ahead to stomp on others. 

Call it ‘punching up’, call it ‘fighting back’, call it whatever you want, but it’s this mentality of ‘I was hurt so I deserve to hurt others’ is precisely what cults count on to recruit people. They target people with vulnerabilities, give them a ‘safe space’, a bunch of false validation, and an ‘other’ to fight back against; usually a some other vulnerable group of people. Then the cult keeps on abusing you and others. 

Maybe this was meant to be Tangled’s lesson all along. Cassandra eerily mirrors a lot of real life bullies who have been very active over the past five years or so, and have grown dangerously powerful to boot. But because the writing is so incompetent the show winds up excusing and even validating her behavior. Which is really fucking scary because this is being shown to kids who are dealing with that school yard bully, who talk with that Radfem online, and who maybe lives with that Trump supporter. 

I’m not saying you should avoid talking about these things in children's media, far from it. But if you’re going to tackle it then you better damn well know what the fuck you’re doing. 

DESTINY IS NOT A GOAL

Why do you want a destiny Cass? What do you think this destiny is? What does the moonstone have to do with it? What are you getting out of all this? 

Give you’re villain a goal to actually a work towards! 

That’s basic writing 101!  

Admitting to Your Bad Writing Does Not Make It Any Less Flawed

That person wasn’t Cassandra.

There. Right there! That’s the problem. Cassandra is no longer Cassandra. She’s been reduced to a dumb puppet for the sake of plot. 

Just because it was a deliberate decision to write her like this, does not mean it was a good decision.  

And even then the intent is poorly communicated. 

Cassandra isn’t possessed. She’s not under the influence of anything. Most of her more violent actions are her own decisions, and she is still capable of critical thought when she wants to be. She’s not at any point beholden to Zhan Tiri; she’s just stupid. 

Cap Is Not Responsible For Cassandra’s Decisions 

I get why Cap would blame himself. I’m sure many a parent has questioned themselves when their child does things that get them into trouble. But at the end of the day, your kid is still their own person with their own autonomy; especially if they’re an adult. 

Cass is 24 going on 25. She’s old enough to be responsible for her own choices. Cap has nothing to do with that. 

So while I can understand his thought process here, it angers me that no one points out this very simple fact to him. 

This Whole Episode is Just an Excuse to Skimp on the Budget 

Ironically this is one of the better episodes because its one of the few to tie seasons two and three together, but it only does it so the writers can reuse assets. 

The threat here with multiple Cassandra’s is also just because they wanted to reuse character models. 

Now I wouldn’t be so hard on this money saving decision if it wasn’t for the fact that so much money was wasted on earlier episodes; like with unneeded new character models, the filler that was the majority of season two, and the songs that added nothing to the story no matter how nice they are to listen to. 

You wouldn’t have needed budget cuts like this if the show had been better managed from the get go. 

This Is a Good Start...

I get the feeling that at least one person in the writers room had the emotional maturity to understand how conflict resolution is suppose to be handled. It’s why we often get dialogue like the above that sounds reasonable on the surface of things, like acknowledging another’s feelings or calmly stating your point of view. But because they have to work within the framework of this very stupid plot, the scene no longer holds up within context. 

... And This Is Where It Falls Apart

Once again, neither Cap nor Rapunzel is responsible for what Cass chooses to do, and moving on from someone who hurt you is not a bad thing. Moreover, simply ‘remembering’ who Cassandra used to be does nothing to fix the current situation. 

The series is ignoring the real issue here, Cap living in a fantasy to forget his pain, in order to justify Rapunzel’s obsession for the person who dumped her. It’s just telling Cap to give up on one fairy tale for another, equally harmful, fantasy. 

Oh Shut Up Rapunzel!

This is the same woman who abandoned a young teenager for three months.

No, I’m not letting that go. 

Until Rapunzel verbally admits on screen to what she did wrong, then all of her speeches about what others should and shouldn’t do regarding relationships are full of shit. 

Once Again, Cap Has No Part in Cass’s Actions 

How Cass was raised doesn’t absolve her of her actions. 

Furthermore, what could have Captain done that would have made a difference? Honestly, we don’t know because the show won’t tell us. I mean I could guess, but that’s not my job; it’s the writers. 

Wasn’t Eugene Brainwashed to Like Cassandra Earlier?

I haven’t shown it much, but all though out the episode Eugene is throwing snarky insults at Cass even when she’s not there. Because, that’s what Eugene does, right? 

Well no; we spent a whole episode brainwashing him to kiss Cassandra’s ass the same as Raps does, and after this episode he more or less goes back to being a doormat. 

 It’s ironic really. This is easily Eugene’s best story this season as he is allowed to be himself and contribute to the plot, but it also means that he’s being written out of character now. 

Man, No Time Like the Past, really shouldn’t exist, should it. 

I Repeat, What Cap, or Anybody Else For That Matter, Does Has No Impact on Cassandra’s Choices

Remember the season one episode, Big Brother’s of Corona? Remember Rapunzel telling Eugene that he couldn’t change people and he couldn’t force his help onto to others who didn’t want it? Remember that lesson? Cause the writers sure don’t. 

This Doesn’t Make Cassandra Endearing 

Yeah it’s not actually Cass, but neither is Cassandra in season three. This is very much the same bullshit that they’ve forced into Moonandra’s mouth to the point where the fake is indistinguishable from the real thing. 

And it’s not compelling. Who cares if one grown woman is bitchy to another grown woman? Why doesn't one of them just drop it and leave like a sensible person? Why are we dragging this bullshit out when we could be focusing on real stakes, like saving the world? And why did the writers ever think this would make their main characters likeable? 

This Is a Broken Narrative Promise

May I remind you that Cap is nowhere to be seen when the real Cassandra shows back up in Corona. In fact the next time we do see him he’s nopeing the fuck out because he can’t confront her. 

Don’t have the character’s state one thing, to not only not have them follow through with it, but receive zero consequences for not making good on their promise. 

More Broken Narrative Promises

And then they didn’t. 

At no point do the heroes go searching for Cass, 

Even when she shows back up and they know precisely where she is, they still sit on their asses for months.

What Are You Even Planning On Doing Once You Do Find Her?

What do you think finding her is going to do? What’s you’re plan here? Yell at her? Hug her? Talk reason to her? Kiss her ass? 

Not only are none of those things going to work, and haven’t worked thus far, but you’re not even making a concrete plan to deal with shit. You’re not prepared to actually deal with her issues, nor are you considering what should be done in a worse case scenario. 

This statement is nothing more than an empty platitude and wishful thinking. 

Umm, No They Weren't 

There’s a whole bunch of scrolls lying right in front of you and we can clearly see the incantations written up on the wall. Even the Great Tree still looks fairly intact. Also at no point was the hurt incantation scroll destroyed as Adria just knocked it out of Raps hand when she tackled her. And I must assume that’s the only incantation you’re talking about because it’s the only one you’ve come across at this point. 

What Happened To the Moonstone Being Controlled By Emotions?

Speaking of contradictions, if the moonstone is controlled by Cassandra’s emotions then what does she need the hurt and heal incantation for. Also there’s no mention of a third incantation yet, so what they’re talking about here has to be those two, which gets retcon in the very next episode. 

Oh and we still don’t know why the moonstone stopped working for Cass in the first place cause she could use it just fine in Rapunzel’s Return. 

The Lore Still Doesn’t Make Sense

I went over this back in season two, but it still doesn’t add up that Demantius and Zhan Tiri are over a thousand years old. Not when the sundrop and moonstone are said to be only a 1,000 years old themselves, and everyone acts like they couldn’t find them in that time. Yet someone had to in order to study them and write the incantations and so why does Demantius have it not Zhan Tiri!? Espically when the Great Tree was suppose to be hers? When do the disciples come into play? What about the first Coronian and Saporian War? How does any of this connect? 

This Isn’t the Face of Someone Who Is Being Coerce  

Let it be known that going after the scroll in Corona is 100% Cassandra’s idea. Zhan Tiri didn’t know that it still existed. Nor do we see Zhan Tiri really assisting in Cass in Cassandra’s Revenge but we’ll get to that. 

The point is, Cassandra isn’t being manipulated by Zhan Tiri into doing bad things. She’s choosing to do them of her own accord. If the writers wanted Cass to remain sympathetic then they needed to stop giving her scenes like this where his act’s like a ‘hot bad bitch’ for no adequate reason. 

Conclusion 

This is one of the better episodes of season three, but the surrounding arc drags it down. Not to mention that it’s ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things. 

Next time we’ll start in on Cassandra’s Revenge. Until then I’ll be finishing the final chapter of the first season of Rocks and Robots. 

 https://archiveofourown.org/works/23068177/chapters/55177498

If you want to see a better rewrite of both Tangled and Big Hero Six’s final seasons then check it out. 

You can also follow me on my discords 

Rocks and Robot’s discord https://discord.gg/j3Ua2YQN

Salt Marathon https://discord.gg/Bk9nhNfj

And you can support me on both Kofi 

https://ko-fi.com/rachelbethhines

and Redbubble 

https://www.redbubble.com/people/RBH129/explore?page=1&sortOrder=recent

#tangled #anti-tangled #anti-cassandra #anti-rapunzel #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure

[thewhitefluffyhat]

Ryukishi Pulled a Beatrice Again

The interesting thing about how Gou struggled to convey Satoko’s motivations is that it’s almost exactly the same as the difficulties many people have with understanding Beatrice’s heart.

(Major spoilers for Umineko’s main mystery!)

...And by Beatrice I mean Sayo.

See, when I first read Umineko, I found Sayo’s motivations to be super disappointing and underwhelming.  That was because I was only paying attention to the surface narrative, which you can trivialize as “Sayo had a sad because Battler didn’t love them back.” “Why didn’t they just leave Rokkenjima, if they hated it so much?” I thought at the time.

We can see a direct equivalent to that with Gou - the common trivialization that “Satoko just didn’t want to study.” And then the followups - “Why didn’t she just drop out and go to another school?” Or, “Why didn’t she just use her looping powers to do well at St. Lucia?”

If you’re asking those questions (as even I have!), I think that might already be missing the point.

With Umineko, I went on to read fan analysis that explored everything going on under the surface with Sayo and OH. Now I really love them, and what Umineko was doing as a whole!

Because the thing about Sayo is that Battler and whether they can leave Rokkenjima are just the tip of a giant iceberg.  If anything, I’d say that their issues with their body and their horror regarding their origins are much more crucial to sympathizing with them and understanding what pushed them over the edge.  Despite that, Ryukishi glosses over those aspects of their motivation very quickly in the VN - just one quick flash of their despair - and leaves it to the reader to tear out those bleak guts.

And I think the same thing happened with Satoko in Gou.  St. Lucia is just the surface problem - what’s festering under the surface is that Satoko discovered Rika isn’t who she thought. Now she believes the real Rika looks down on her and is a selfish liar only concerned with herself.  And as with Sayo, the scene portraying this ugly underbelly is extremely brief and underemphasized: it’s Satoko watching all of Rika’s Fragments.

A knowledgeable viewer can connect the dots - before this scene, Satoko was still mostly trying to reason with Rika, but then after the Fragments, she’s completely changed her tone. And if you think about Rika’s actions during OG Higurashi, it’s not hard to see why.

Outside of Minagoroshi (which was 90% Keiichi anyway), has Rika ever intervened to help Satoko during the loops?  She had many chances to prevent Satoko and Satoshi from destroying their family, and never did.  She had many chances to save Satoko from her uncle, and never did.  She could at the very least have warned Satoko about Shion or Rena or the mystery assassins who ended up being the Mountain Dogs… and never even thought about Satoko also being in danger. And so Satoko gets blown up, tortured to death, or used as a lab rat by Tokyo when Rika might have saved her.

And if that somehow wasn’t enough, Satoko now knows that Rika was constantly, shamelessly lying to her about critical aspects of her own life, from Satoko’s brother, to Satoko’s own health, to the fact that there was another person living in their house… to even Rika’s true personality and the nature of their imbalanced “friendship.”

After all Satoko has seen, what reason would she have to trust Rika any more?  

Now that’s a motivation that explains Satoko’s desire to reconstruct the Hinamizawa birdcage.  It may even be the “karma” of Gou’s title - Rika is reaping the reward for her callous passivity, not just at St Lucia, but in all timelines.

If only Gou had properly conveyed that!  

I wonder, actually, if Ryukishi won’t regret his vagueness in Gou just like he did with Umineko.  Umineko’s manga is a lot more explicit about the other half of Sayo’s motivations - perhaps the Gou manga will do the same elaboration for Satoko.  Everything I’ve heard about it suggests the manga is doing the anime arcs even better, so who knows?

#when they cry #higurashi #higurashi gou #umineko #umineko spoilers #higurashi gou analysis #higurashi gou critical #gou cour 2 analysis finale #my ramblings #houjou satoko #furude rika #satokowashi #beatrice #oh geez I need a tag for the character I discuss in this #UHHH #heart of beatrice #sure that's kind of cute I think #my higurashi gou sotsu meguri thoughts

[bigskydreaming]

Fandom Stuff To-Do List (basically just stuff I want to get to this week in any order, now that I have Completion Capabilities. Not meant to be a promise of any specific things on this for sure getting done, just these are stuff on my mind to get around to when I have the chance)

- Finish meta post about the wings fic AU and how peoples’ wings are affected by massive physical or emotional trauma that changes them as a person (aka do Babs’ wings change when she becomes Oracle). Which will of course segue into a mini-rant about how our culture tends to view trauma and the acquisition of physical disabilities as something there’s no coming back from, like there’s a ceiling on how good a person’s life can ever be after certain things happen to them. 

And that’s why so much of our media content is geared towards treating disabled people and survivors almost more as resources to ensure ‘the same kind of thing’ doesn’t happen to people it hasn’t happened to yet and thus ‘can still be saved/protected.’ Rather than people just fucking acknowledging that trauma is just destructive change that’s impact is relative to how many resources a person has to cope or deal with that change and incorporate it into their life. And that people don’t need to be protected from trauma or accidents as much as is hyped because its literally impossible to ever prevent anything bad from happening ever, so rather than hyping the illusion that ‘this sort of thing could never happen to you as long as you do xyz and don’t do abc’ more attention and focus should be shifted to acknowledging that its still gonna happen sometimes no matter what people do to prevent it or keep safe from it. Because these sorts of trauma ARE EXTERNALLY ORIGINATING and thus there’s literally only ever so much people can do that’s originating within the self to control/protect from being affected in certain ways by stuff originating from outside the self, aka inherently OUT of our control. 

And thus IMO we’d all be better served as a society by paying less lip service to the idea that people can be guaranteed safety or protection from various things and instead have more of that focus and attention shifted over towards the acquisition and building and distributing of more resources to help people in the EVENT of certain things happening to them anyway. Which in turn helps spread the narrative that you know what, even if these things happen, even if you are disabled, even if you are traumatized, that’s not the end of the road, that’s not a dealbreaker, that’s just a CHANGE that we as a society are here to help you through. It just means that your life is different now, that you may be different now, but different doesn’t have to be bad, it doesn’t have to come with a ceiling or limitations, it just means a change in perspective. 

Bad things will still happen, just like bad things still happened before your Big Change, and its important to remember not to glamorize or romanticize the Before time because that tends to gloss over the fact that nobody’s life was ever perfect before big change or trauma hit anyway. So why on earth should it be a surprise (or any different from anyone else’s life) that life isn’t perfect after big change or trauma? That doesn’t mean it can’t still be GOOD. That you won’t still have good days, good surprises, happiness, friends, joy, laughter, that maybe it takes more resources or just DIFFERENT resources to get there than it did before.....but everyone’s life is different and everyone requires different resources to achieve various desired results or experiences in the first place, so its not the end of the world to have to switch your focus and look in different places for different resources now. 

There needs to be less focus on what HAPPENED to people and more focus on what EFFECT it had on them, specifically. On how it changed them and what those changes mean they require now in order to live their life fully and happily,  that just might be different from what they needed before. There needs to be a shift in focus from just the trauma or accident or THING that happened that changed the course or direction of a person’s life as like....the definitive point their life changed, because that THING that happened was still just a THING. It came from the outside. It was external. It literally WASN’T ABOUT THEM, and thus focusing on IT can only ever reveal so much about the PERSON it happened to. 

No, the point of focus for a person’s life changing in the wake of massive trauma or an accident isn’t WHEN that happened, its when in the aftermath of that, however long it took, when that person, that survivor, finally got up one morning and realized they had a new normal. That they weren’t the person they were before, but they aren’t aimlessly lost in a single long-lasting trauma response searching fruitlessly for personal landmarks to reorient themselves when those landmarks simply don’t exist anymore, because they don’t HAVE to find or lean on those old familiar landmarks anymore. Because they’ve found new ones, found their footing in a new landscape, a new approach to living and perceiving the world around them and how it impacts and intersects with them. 

Gimme a change in focus to how recovery isn’t a thing you can ever FIND, that you can ever ACQUIRE by searching for it...and so its less vital that we hold up the idea of it as some kind of semi-mythical Holy Grail its okay to send knights eternally questing for on just the possibility of its existence because hey at least its something to shoot for, when not so deep down a lot of people shelling out advice for recovery that isn’t rooted in their own experiences or utilization of the same advice they’re selling but rather is born of ‘eh, you want something I can’t give or help with and that’s making me uncomfortable so lemme point you in a direction just vague or far away enough that I don’t have to worry about seeing you and your aura of Making Me Uncomfortable around for awhile’....

.....nah, instead how about looking to how resources might be better utilized just....supporting people until they can reach that point of recovery in their own time and their own ways. Because by its very nature, you can spend years working on recovering, on finding a new normal, a new sense of stability in your life, but you’re only ever going to ‘find it’ the day you realize that you’ve ALREADY found it. That you don’t have to go searching for it anymore because its already there, you settled and replanted yourself without even realizing it. Recovery in the wake of trauma is about searching for a way to feel better, to heal, to move past something, and the answer to that need is a feeling of no longer needing to search or find that ephemeral something, because you’re content, you’re okay with who and what you are now. And you don’t need to look anymore for something you wake up and realize you’ve already found somewhere along the way. 

Being disabled, being traumatized, being hurt, being CHANGED by some kind of big ass fucking Meteor Of Suck smacking into the planet that is your life and wiping out the fucking dinosaurs of this weirdo metaphor, like....yes, it leaves a mark, makes an impact, oftentimes a BIG one. But like, without the meteor that ended the dinosaur age or whatever, none of us would even be here because the point is just life goes on, and there’s no predicting what it will look like tomorrow, so yeah it could be worse and maybe it’ll never be like it was before, but there’s absolutely zero proof it couldn’t maybe be BETTER, even if it doesn’t ever look the way it was before. 

Change is just change. Its not the enemy, its just the point of life. Like we’re born and then things change every single day of our life however long it is and then we die. Birth and death are the bookends, and constant change is every single page of the book in between that. Change isn’t the villain of our story, change IS our story. 

And its OUR story, so it never gets to be defined by what someone else does to us in the story, because the hero’s journey isn’t about what MADE the hero set out on their quest, its about their QUEST itself, its about their TRIUMPH, its not about what happened its about what THEY decided to do NEXT because of it. Its not about the catalysts for our changes, its about what we decided to DO, who we decided to BECOME, once those catalysts hit the page and necessitated further change. 

Your trauma, your change, none of those are YOU, because YOU are the person you see when you look in the mirror and take all of that in, view it as part of you, your story, something that left a mark just like every single experience of your life has left SOME kind of impact no matter how small, and who you changed into, decided to become, how you incorporated all those marks and changes and experiences....THAT is you. The ENTIRETY of that map, not the single markers along the way, no matter how loud or dramatic or attention-grabbing they try to be. 

You are the map of your experiences and you only look to a map, a map only matters to you when its about leading or finding the way to where YOU want to go, with intent. No road map gets to take the wheel of the car just because you aren’t going in the direction it said you were supposed to go originally. If you get lost, you get lost. If you end up somewhere you didn’t expect, you end up somewhere you didn’t expect. If you realize you no longer want or need to go where you were setting out to originally, if you change your mind or decide another destination is better suited to you, you get to look to your map and draw a new route accordingly, because its YOURS, it only exists because of you, not you because of it. 

Your trauma or whatever else is fucking up your life may be big fucking pieces of the mosaic you are when you see yourself in the mirror metaphorically speaking cuz I want this analogy to be inclusive for blind people too and I just realized I need to spend more time thinking up alternative ways to express that sentiment that don’t rely on a singular axis of experience to convey it, because that’s kinda the point in and of itself: 

We’re all born with toolboxes that give us a variety of tools to approach life with, to build things out of, to build OUR life out of. The aim of civilization, of society, of being a species that only made it this far by being communal and building things together, pooling our tools to build things none of us were equipped to build with just what we already had...is that ideally, the toolbox we’re born with gets added to by others around us. Our parents or guardians or teachers, our friends and loved ones, the random person at the store who saw someone was a dollar short at the grocery store register and offered one of their own or the way we can add to someone else’s toolbox by simply asking if they’re alright when we can see they’re not and then just like that they have the added resource of the knowledge that someone cares enough about them to want to know what’s wrong. 

And none of our toolboxes are identical. None make it all the way to our deathbed with us while containing the exact same tools we started with, some are missing, some are added. Some we didn’t even realize we had. Some we never even used. Some we used the hell out of and are worn to pieces and some are shiny and new because we wore out the older version of them and needed a replacement. And sometimes big fucking meteors of suck smack into our lives right when we’re just minding our own business and enjoying our own jurassic age and everything changes forever, but millions of years later we might still be around and now we just look like chickens and alligators and sharks and all the other creatures that are basically just dinosaur descendants in a different form because we’re hardy as fuck and damn I really need to get over this metaphor it is not the analogy I’m looking for but oh well. 

Point is, sometimes Change happens and the tools we’re used to leaning on when building our better, ideal lives and optimal experiences, like....maybe they just don’t work for us anymore. Maybe we can’t grip the old familiar ones the way we used to, maybe our eyes have gone to shit and we can’t wield the more precise instruments with the precision we’re used to, maybe the nails we were using to build stairs in our dream house are fucking useless cuz they’re not the right size when building the wheelchair ramp our new dream house needs instead.......and so fucking what? What does any of that actually say about US, about who we ARE, about what our life could be or how good it could get? 

Absolutely nothing. Because the toolboxes we were born with were still only ever just tools. What we ARE is what we make with them, what we build out of ourselves, what we choose with intent to become. So what if our old tools aren’t up to the task of actualizing our new dreams? That’s what we need other people for. That’s what society SHOULD be for. That’s when what we need is not to be FIXED, not to be restocked with what we had originally but is now no longer of use to us or what we need or maybe even not what we want.....no, all we need is....new tools. New resources. New kinds of help. 

And again, that’s what society is SUPPOSED to be for. To help us define ourselves not by the problems we face but our solutions to overcoming them. To help give each other new tools and teach each other how to use them when change necessitates hunting around for something that’s easier to grip now. And if we all come into the world starting out with different tools than everyone else anyway.....what does it MATTER if somewhere along the way we have to swap out the old familiar ones we started with and look for new ones we didn’t need originally? 

A cane is just a cane to help someone walk because for whatever reasons, their legs or spine need that tool to help get them where they want to go. A cane is not proof that it will never take them to a destination where they’re every fucking bit as happy as people who made it to the same place without the use of one. A cane is not THEM. Its just a fucking cane. Same thing with glasses, with wheelchairs, with prosthetic limbs, with hearing aids. Same thing with support groups, with therapists, with trauma centers. 

Like do people ever think about how fucking AMAZING it is that we have prosthetics at all? That somewhere along the line, people saw a problem, saw a need, that was not ‘oh this person (or maybe even ‘they themselves’ because let’s not go the saviorism route and forget that disabled people have had plenty the fuck to do with designing or dreaming up or building the tools disabled people use to navigate life while working with a different set of physiological tools than most people are equipped with. Like this isn’t a ‘oh look how good other people are to people in need’ point but more just a ‘people-as-in-society-overall-which-includes-both-able-bodied-and-disabled’ point). 

Like the point is the response to seeing that was not just ‘oh so and so or maybe even me is damaged beyond repair,’  no instead it was just ‘this person’s legs aren’t currently equpped to do what this person needs or wants them to do.’ And people said okay the solution, the answer, the RESPONSE to seeing that problem or need was not to sit back and think about how much it sucks that this person can’t walk on their own and how limited or ‘lesser’ their life will be than other peoples’ because of that, no they said instead, hey, what if we just BUILT THEM DIFFERENT LEGS. Like, just THINK about that. We, as a people, communally, as in more than one, pooled resources to BUILD PEOPLE NEW FUCKING LEGS. 

And all it ultimately took, the catalyst for THAT, for changing the lives of people who use prosthetics as tools in their day to day lives....the catalyst for that CHANGE was NOT in fact....whatever happened to make various people need prosthetics in the first place. No, the catalyst, the change that got us to the point of people having the OPTION of prosthetics at all, was the point in time where people saw a need, and came up with the solution of prosthetics to address that need. When they said not oh that’s a problem or oh sorry you have that need, but oh I have an idea, or oh here’s what we can do about that. The defining element wasn’t that something needed building. The defining element was WHAT PEOPLE CHOSE TO BUILD BECAUSE OF THAT. 

Just like severe trauma is a catalyst for change in a person’s life, a meteor that no one saw coming and can dramatically reshape the landscape of their life, wipe out familiar comforts and landmarks they use to orient themselves.....but at the end of the day, that person is not the meteor itself. We don’t call them whatever we call that meteor, we call them by their fucking name because they’re still the same fucking person, just in a different place now, with different needs, with different dreams or wants or goals. Who they are isn’t how rough they have it while they’re going through the most....because how much a trauma shakes up a person’s life is directly relative to how equipped they are already to deal with that particular trauma or change. 

So by its very nature the ‘worst’ or most changing traumas are the ones that we’re personally LEAST equipped to deal with at that particular time on our own, and how fucking stupid is it to try and draw conclusions about a person based just on how they react in the immediate aftermath of an event whose defining element is that it was a destructive change that was uniquely impactful because it hit them where they were least equipped to deal with it? 

Like, NOBODY is equipped to handle well, like, an event that relative to THEM SPECIFICALLY, like....is something they’re not equipped to handle. LOL. Like, that’s so fucking dumb, but that’s who we ALL are when in the midst of massive trauma responses - just people hunting desperately for new normals, new landmarks, new awareness with which to recenter ourselves, reorient ourselves, redefine who and what we are in relation to our lives and society and our loved ones in the wake of a massive change that shook things up and required repositioning ourselves because the spot we used to be positioned on no longer exists.

And what the fuck can you learn, can you actually KNOW about a person based solely on the fact that ‘oh this person is having a hard time dealing with something that there’s literally NO good way to deal with?’ 

People talk a lot about how revealing trauma or tragedy is, that you can learn a lot by seeing how someone handles a huge trauma or tragedy being thrown at them, even in fiction. But y’know what? There’s a ceiling on how much that alone can ever reveal, especially if the lens of time through which you examine that person or character is limited just to the aftermath of the trauma, the thing that HAPPENED to them. Rather than focused on the beginning of their new journeys, once they’ve reoriented themselves, acquired new tools, picked new destinations or goals for their lives and set out to now make THOSE a reality....just like people before or without massive trauma or tragedy are similarly not defined by the LACK of what didn’t happen to them, but simply by......what destinations or goals they pick for their lives and their journeys to get there and what they do and what choices they make along the way. 

Nah, if you ask me, a person’s truest essence isn’t revealed by what they do with whatever limited tools or resources they have when struggling with a massive trauma or tragedy that’s only massive specifically BECAUSE it hit them in a way or place they were ill-equipped or unprepared to deal with. Because the essence of that person, the truth revealed by examining that struggle, the answer in focus when looking through just that finite lens....can be boiled down to the exact same thing, no matter WHO you put in that place. 

What they do in the wake of a massive trauma is simply ‘as much as they’re capable of given their limited resources or capabilities at THAT SPECIFIC POINT IN TIME.’ Which is inherently....not a lot. Completely subjective and relative to every individual, given the different traumas, resources and needs or injuries relative to every individual while they’re going through their fucking worst....but that’s still the point. 

A person struggling with things beyond their capability to handle well at that given moment given their current state or resources.....is ultimately never going to appear as anything other than.....a person struggling with things beyond their capability to handle well at that given moment given their current state or resources. Wow. Really pegged that person huh. Got them all summed up, totally differentiated from every other person to ever go through shit, just by seeing them.....not handle it great when by its very nature of fucking course they’re not going to handle a trauma they’re not prepared for with any degree of ‘great.’

Like, is it any wonder our society has this built in presumption that experiencing certain traumas or tragedies just fucking CONDEMNS that person to from then on live a life that will never actually measure up to being as optimal as it maybe could have been if that hadn’t happened? What other conclusion are you gonna draw, about how good or not a person’s life is in the wake of massive destructive change....if you’re only ever focusing on or looking at how they react at the specific point where they’re LEAST equipped to deal with that trauma or tragedy well?

Because thing is....that’s not a person. That’s a snapshot of a person. Try and define me or sum me up by looking at a fucking Polaroid of me when I was ten or whatever. Go on. See how revealing that is. Tell me what that says about me.

People can’t be defined by negative space. By what they’re NOT. By all the ways in which they can’t be what they MIGHT have been had something happened different, or all the things they COULD be if they were born into different circumstances. You do that, you’re not describing a person, you’re describing hypotheticals that you can apply as desired to ANY person, with just a few tweaks here and there, and thus always find a way to picture them as you want to for your own personal purposes, agenda or comfort, rather than gaining any insight whatsoever about who they are as defined by the space that they DO fill up, with intent, by their choices.

We don’t look to the early history of our species and talk about all the people who DIDN’T discover fire, maybe even just because they were born in a fucking wet climate or whatever where it was inherently more difficult to happen across the realization that striking sticks or stones in certain ways can make a very useful and helpful flame. With the point being that even if we DID talk about those early humans as much as we did the ones who got actual bonfires going, the fact that they simply ‘weren’t the ones to discover fire’ actually would reveal shit about them in and of itself, because who’s to say that the reason, the ‘culprit’ for that was that they were simply too dumb or whatever to figure that out instead of just being they lived in a climate that made that discovery particularly difficult or less likely to happen by chance? Y’know? 

But no, anyway, we talk about the ones who DID discover fire, because the turning point for our species which that was, like, we don’t look at it and define it by the lack of it happening sooner, at the problem that not having fire was for the people who came before that discovery. It was the triumph that mattered, it was the choices made in the wake of that discovery, it was how people put that new tool to work and not oh how revealing it is about the rest of early humanity that they didn’t put that tool to work in similar ways because it simply wasn’t even a possibility for them when it was simply a resource they didn’t have.

Nah, IMO a person’s truest essence is revealed not by their problems or their lacks, not by the hypothetical maybe me they could have been if they went through life without anything bad ever happening to them and thus who they’ll never actually be now. Its not revealed by taking a snapshot of them in the moments or days or even weeks following a trauma or tragedy that struck with an accompanying seismic shake-up of all their existing stability and support systems that ultimately limited how much or many of the resources they’d previously acquired or built could even be of use to them in dealing with things now. You don’t learn anything substantial by putting people in a room with only two exits and one of them locked and then act like its an insightful revelation that they ultimately make their way out by means of the finite options available to them when their options have been actively limited by forces outside them and their control, even if that wasn’t the ‘optimal’ answer to that predicament and you wanted them to make other more ideal choices without acknowledging they literally were limited to the most basic of fucking choices available. No, IMO the actual revelations about people come in their declaration of a new want or wish or ask or goal AFTER they’ve found their footing and are ready to live again rather than just cope. 

Why define ourselves by our needs when we’re most ourselves when dreaming of our wants?

You don’t gain the most insight by watching someone flail about when they’re at their lowest and just floundering. You want insight, you look to see what tools they use to pull themselves upright, what resources they ask for or seek out in order to build something new that they can place upon their new shaken-up-and-reformed foundations and from there find some stability with which to pull themselves FORWARD. Instead of just clinging to the shattered remnants of whatever their source of stability was previously but is no longer useful for that purpose, maybe not even because they WANT to cling to just that or are afraid or unwilling to move forward, but because they simply can’t reach any fucking resources with which to do anything BUT just cling to what little they could grab, and what they actually need is just someone to offer them said resources instead of just acting like they really did something by looking at a person lacking in resources and then judging or defining them simply by all the things they AREN’T doing to better themselves or their lives, WHEN THAT’S ONLY BECAUSE THEY’RE LACKING THE FUCKING RESOURCES TO DO ANY OF THAT.

You see who a person is not by comparing them to who they MIGHT have been before, because who can say with any certainty what person they might have been the day after that massive trauma or tragedy, had said trauma or tragedy never actually occurred? Who can guarantee that person, that hypothetical maybe-me is ACTUALLY better than who they are or can become now?

Nope. You wanna know who that person is? That’s who they declare themselves to be the second they stop trying to define themselves by who they WERE and thus who they’re not anymore....but rather by who they are NOW, and who they want to be from here on out. You don’t look at the person who’s been pushed to the ground and say oh that’s that person, that’s who that person is. No, all that tells you is that person was pushed to the ground by an asshole, and surprise surprise, they fell because that’s what fucking happens when someone pushes you to the ground, lolol. That’s not the nature of a person, that’s the nature of physics. Wow. Person A is affected by gravity and the forceful aggression of assholes in their vicinity. The uncanny insight of it all.

You wanna see that person, you look at who they are AFTER they’ve pulled themselves back up. You see what they do THEN. Once they’re back in control of themselves, their life, in the driver’s seat.

You can’t define people by the lack of something. A lack of control, a lack of choice, a lack of resources. Because we are our choices, we are the journeys we take, we are what happens on the next page of our story because the next page of our story only EVER happens because each and every page we decided to MAKE something happen next. 

And we can only MAKE those choices, versus have them made for us and which thus says more about the person who forced those choices on us than it does us for simply being unable to stop that, we can only TAKE those journeys, versus being forced into certain directions and paths and down certain roads by limited options that say more about how little a person can do with only finite options available to them rather than say anything substantial about what directions a person might go in if they had actual options and choices available to them beyond just being presented with two routes that both equally suck, we can only do anything substantial with any of that, anything that says anything about US rather than just descriptive of our circumstances....

We can only do anything with all of that AFTER we’ve gained or taken back or regained control over our lives. AFTER we’ve found our footing. AFTER we’ve said well guess what, this happened then, but guess what else happened today? I got out of bed and said okay so we’re just not gonna worry about that because its over and done and it doesn’t get to be the only thing that matters about us. So instead, how about what matters right now is whatever the fuck I choose to do today, because THAT is up to me, THAT says something about me, THAT is not just some random rock crashing into me from outer fucking space and saying knock knock, fuck you. THAT is ME, saying with intent, THIS is who I am now and THIS is what I’m going to do today, and THAT’S an actual story about me and my choices and my PERSONHOOD. Versus just a summation of how shitty I looked while being smacked in the face by a mountain of bullshit and me without so much as an umbrella.

THAT’S a story about a person. That other thing, that fixation on the rock that crashed into them without warning? Its ultimately never going to be anything other than the story of how a person got hit by a fucking rock.

All of which is to say, so yeah, in that wing fic AU, Babs’ wings do change after what happens with the Joker, even though her wings had already settled.

BUT, the key thing about that is....the point of CHANGE for her wings was NOT when the Joker shot her. Its not when her life, when SHE changed, ‘because of that.’ Because maybe her wings didn’t work the same way anymore after that happened, because they represented who she was before that. And before that she was and thought of herself as someone who could grapple between buildings, flip kick into bad guys, do cartwheels across rooftops, and she can’t do those things anymore so maybe her wings don’t work for her in the way they used to because they were ‘designed’ for someone who lived life in a way she was no longer capable of. 

But her wings didn’t just change then and there, they still remained the same as always even if they weren’t as useful because maybe she could still fly perhaps, but not land in the ways her wings were designed to do that, due to the changed capabilities of her legs and spine which were meant to work in concert with her wings. 

See, because the point is.....if the wings are the ultimate expression of the self, even acknowledging that she was in fundamental ways CHANGED at that point (not lessened, but changed, made different, needing different things and having different wants).....the point is, at just that specific time, in the immediate aftermath of that trauma, what would her wings have changed into? What would they LOOK like, simply because say, two days ago, the Joker shot her and now she’s paralyzed? If she’s no longer the old her, how could the new her POSSIBLY be defined by that little data, that little definition, that small an image or encapsulation of everything she still MIGHT yet be or become once she’s out of bed, out of tears, out of grief for the goals that are no longer viable and now ready to say okay, now let me decide what DOES come next for me now.

So yes, Babs’ wings do change after the Joker shoots her, but they remain as they were for awhile. Just not as useful to her now that her toolbox of physical capabilities was less equipped to accommodate her newly changed needs and approaches to life.

When they change, its because she’s already become Oracle. That’s who she is now, Batgirl is a part of that but more about who she was. It’s part of the foundation she built her new self atop, its never going to not be a part of her, never going to leave, it still matters....but it is not the building itself anymore, it is the bedrock that made it through the seismic upheaval of her life and thus was sturdy enough she felt safe building something new on it, something that could ride out further earthquakes thanks to having it to ground her. But as integral as it is to what she built in the wake of her big quake....it is not the house she houses her self-image in. That’s Oracle’s domain now.

And so when her wings do change, it happens overnight, while she’s asleep. Dreaming of everything she wants now, everything she wants to become. They change not in a ‘this is happening’ sense, much like we’re never fully aware of how far into our recovery process we are.....instead, they change in a ‘huh, so this happened’ sense. Just like we only realize how much we’ve recovered, how much we no longer need to define ourselves by a quest to be better, happier, more alright...once we’ve already found that happiness or contentment and realized the reason there’s no longer the same drive to pursue some abstract image of recovery is simply because we no longer need to go anywhere to get that, we’re already there and this is what that looks like.

And so when one day Babs wakes up feeling different and looks in the mirror to see her wings no longer look like they used to but rather seem much more suited to the woman she is now, the woman she envisioned in her mind as a new goal or destination of self-determination, that she chose to become with intent, that she worked to become so she could be defined by something other than what some asshole did to her, so that she could be the sum of her deeds rather than the snapshot of her tragedy.....its a sign of change. Of her change, and proof that her life is not now what it once was, and never will be again.....but its not some big momentous reveal, more just an exhale of affirmation for something she’s already known for awhile and just now has the distance and perspective to see actual proof of. 

Its the marker of the fact that actually she’s okay with it, she’s okay with herself, her new self, because she doesn’t need to be who she might have been without that trauma, she doesn’t need to be a maybe when who she is? Has no more of a built in limit or ceiling or cap on happiness and success than the woman she was before her trauma had. She doesn’t love what happened to her, but its just something that happened to her. Its not who she is, THIS is who she is, this is THAT, and this she’s more than okay with, she’s proud of, she’s like damn I look good. Life threw a punch at her and she got into a wheelchair and rolled with it, and if you’re busy looking at the bruise from that punch because you’re so focused on the fact that it happened, you’re missing the real story. 

And that’s the way she pulled herself out of bed every morning for a year and into her wheelchair to train with escrima sticks in whole new ways of fighting so the next time the Joker tried knocking on her door, he wouldn’t get to pull the same shit twice. Because she’s not the same woman she was then and anyone focusing on THAT instead of watching out for all the ways she can still kick ass, some old, some new, some that she invented herself because necessity is the mother of invention and Babs has always been driven to be the top of her class for reasons that have everything to do with just HER and absolutely nothing at all with what happened to put her in a class where fighting from a wheelchair was a tool she felt she needed -

Well maybe they need to get clocked across the head with a stick to drive home that they’ve missed the entire point, that if you’re there looking to see a tragedy you’ve got the wrong fucking address cuz she’s doing just fine.

And so she wakes up one day and looks in her mirror and sees her wings have changed overnight and they look nothing like she remembers but tbh, she likes these a lot better, likes the way they feel, the shape of them, they just FIT....and then she just nods her head decisively, quietly pleased but in no rush to make any big announcement, because for her, this changes nothing. Its just a sign that change has already happened.

And its like....duh, she already knew that, and she’s more than okay with it, so semantics can wait for another time. She’s Barbara Gordon, the Oracle of Gotham, and she’s got shit to do.

And okay, so clearly, I ended up just writing that post instead of writing the rest of that to-do list, so I’m gonna now go make another post with the ACTUAL to-do list, and like, yay, I can cross this off I guess? My process is so mysterious, oh unknowable ways.

[andytheaverage]

The Green Knight (2021)

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

The Green Knight (2021), with its excellent cast and feast of visual storytelling, does cut a pretty trailer, but it’s hardly the adaptation we’ve all waited nearly 2 years to see. Rather on the slow side, there is plenty of breathing room (often to excess), but often feels wanting. The performances are well-played, albeit terribly subdued, which create interludes that feel tedious. Dev Patel has proven himself time and again that he has the capacity to play a nuanced lead, and he does well here, but it is the side characters that break the monotony and steal the show, most notably Joel Edgerton (Lord), Erin Kellyman (Winifred), and Barry Keoghan (Scavenger). 

David Lowery’s “adaptation” explores the journey of an untested and somewhat undeserving not-quite-Sir Gawain, a far-cry from our Hero in the text, more akin to Prince Hal. This change adds elements to the character with which an audience might more easily identify, and should make this a coming-of-age tale, as well as a moral one; though, this film fails as both. 

As a coming-of-age tale, Gawain never quite gets there, and it almost doesn’t matter if he does, because it's not really his tale at all. Nor is this film about morality, not even as a cautionary tale. Perhaps it's more accurate to call it an instance of ‘careful what you wish for’. Gawain doesn’t seem to know what he wants. Does he really want to be a Knight? Is this about living an honest life or living up to familial expectations, particularly your mother's? Hard to say, as many of the female characters, including Gawain’s mother (Morgause and Morgan Le Fay made one), are treated as mystery elements themselves. It’s also not clear just how far her control extends, if it has any limitations. Is there anything in this world that is true?

Perhaps we'll never know his mother's true intentions; it clearly wasn't for her son to be his own person and make his own decisions. A man simply doesn’t become a Legend without his mother’s entire fabrication of the quest, it would seem. Does Gawain feel so out of place in his own story because it’s already set out for him? Was Morgan Le Fay simply Lowery’s segue for the concept of Legend as a set path for Gawain to follow? But as such, Gawain’s tale of morality isn’t what it seems, as he doesn’t even have the illusion of choice. Or was it all just a journey back to nature, back to green? Lowery never lets us forget just what color matters most here. There’s even a fun monologue about it! Even the design of the Green Knight is just a little too on the nose; his appearance essentially being that of an ent. 

About 2/3 of the way through, The Green Knight actually shows a hint of promise, but it is short-lived. In case you haven’t already lost interest with the lengthy side quests; everything turns sour at the arrival of Lord and Lady Bertilak’s castle (simply titled Lord and Lady), and what should be the bulk of our story, the “exchange of gifts” and Gawain’s true test of morality. The “exchange of gifts” is glossed over for a taste of something completely different, as it takes major liberties with not only a core part of our tale, but arguably what’s most memorable about the original. It becomes Lowery’s convoluted vision of a different sort entirely, one where Gawain seemingly refuses to take part in his own story. While possibly an interesting take in itself, it does a disservice to the text, and accomplishes nothing other than an attempt to be shocking. 

There’s something richer in the “exchange of gifts” simply not explored in Lowery’s version, or the compulsive need to “subvert”, and the film is poorer for it. How can you even subvert something which you refuse to touch upon? It’s also extremely odd and honestly baffling, that in this day and age, homosexual themes and undertones would be downplayed or outright rejected (as they are here), rather than embraced and explored. Altogether, this omission seems a poor choice and a clear indication that Lowery holds little to no affection for the original text. Disregarding the “exchange of gifts”, the journey becomes something vain and hollow; perhaps intentionally, but doesn't serve anyone, least of all the story. 

Following the tale’s example, the girdle (sans the accompanying scar) is the all-encompassing symbol for Gawain’s shame, but Lowery takes it a step further, in which he is so seduced by its promise of protection that he literally soils it with his lust. But this scene is so abrupt at the all too brief “exchange of gifts” (in a film that stretches everything to excess) that it seems to lack consideration and its only purpose is to disturb. The girdle furthermore becomes a symbol of his unearned and unholy life (which we’re shown), were he to continue to fail to accept his fate and his test, although this too seems superfluous. What’s interesting here is that in either scenario, Gawain remains undeserving. He is not especially virtuous, he’s not even decent from what we can see, and has failed in almost every chivalric aspect; after all, he is “no knight”. Even so, in the original, even the Green Knight can’t begrudge his lack of fidelity in this one aspect; “because you wanted to live, so I blame you the less”.

A message of The Green Knight seems to be acting out of selflessness as the only indicator of a truly good deed, with no expectation of reward. This is evident in the dismissal of the “exchange of gifts” and Winifred’s admonishment, "Why would you ever ask me that?", but this message is so muddled within the world of the film, that it’s somehow also completely out of place. After all, Gawain is rewarded in a way, with several of his trappings, which are returned to him after being stolen. Speaking of rewards for good deeds, religious themes are also notably lacking, favoring the pagan angle (as expected of A24), though which is never expounded upon. There is the decision to keep some not-so-subtle imagery of crippled Christianity; i.e Gawain’s shield (with Mary’s visage on the inside and a small pentangle on the exterior) and a cross at the Green Chapel. 

Lowery gets too hung up on a confused mix of vague and painfully obvious ideas of symbolism and makes huge, unwarranted leaps. His work here reeks of self-indulgence, to the point of parody. It’s also simply never clear what anyone’s intentions are, his least of all. His ideas are so flighty and changeable that contradictions abound in the finished product (It’s clear why he needed all that extra time to re-cut). The whole thing is so nebulous that it may fool some into thinking it’s beyond their grasp, but it just reads as pretentious. The thing is, The Green Knight tries to be too many things at once, and in doing so, fails at all of them. Lowery lacks the conviction to support anything he presents and has no sense of narrative structure. Simply put, this film lacked proper direction and would have greatly benefited from fresh eyes on the script.

The Green Knight may question 'What is Honor and if it does exist, what is it worth? For even if there comes a time to prove yourself for Honor’s sake, what is it all for? “Is this all there is?”’, but Lowery drops the concept of Honor as soon as he picks it up and chooses to explore Legacy and Legend, and while it leads us on an interesting journey of interpretation, it’s very heavy-handed. It’s also difficult to answer any of these questions because Gawain is simply not worthy of anything. It’s not just that he is imperfect; he is not good and never acts out of selflessness or for the actual sake of Honor. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. The original text asks us to stay true, true to our word and our values, in uncertainty and despite our fears (as a Good Knight should, and which Gawain ultimately is.) Lowery, on the other hand, begs us to forget the narrative, because he doesn’t know how to do it, and the search for meaning, because there is none. I’m not even sure he knows what he’s made.

Overall, though heavily burdened by its sluggish pace and lack of structural integrity, The Green Knight, at least on the surface, appears to be a somewhat earnest attempt at exploration within the fantasy/horror genre, asking a lot more questions than it answers. But while its visuals may dazzle, it’s a cold and unfeeling thing, devoid of all charm of the original tale, and can hardly be called an adaptation for many of its choices.

Source: https://letterboxd.com/avega007/film/the-green-knight/ 

(I wasn’t expecting to go off when I just got a letterboxd, but this film left me heated.)

#the green knight #sir gawain and the green knight #david lowery #dev patel #I really wanted to like it #but it disappointed me #spoilers

[snarktheater]

re: part of the Electric Heir's ending being hard to find realistic, yeah, the author said they gave that ending on purpose as a sort of 'best case scenario' for Dara and Noam. If you put 620950051550789632/ behind his blog sosaidvictoria on Tumblr, you can see them put it a lot better than I could.

Really glad you liked it though! They're some of my favourite books ever.

(Victoria Lee is bigender and uses she/he/they currently btw in case my switching between them was confusing)

wow you were really on the lookout for when i'd finish the book huh

(link for those who are curious, I haven't properly posted about the Feverwake books so spoilers if you do click. And also spoilers on this post, probable. And since this is in response to my Goodreads post, link to that as well)

Honestly I'm not really criticizing the book for going down this road. I certainly agree that it makes sense to forego the planned assassination for the sake of the protagonists' arc. I also agree with the notion that executions are Bad, Actually, especially for a book that explicitly seems to favor an anarchist or at least pro-anarchist belief system.

I just, you know. Have trouble believing that just because he was temporarily incapacitated while documents of his crimes were leaked, it would sway public opinion fast and hard enough to lead to heavy consequences. Lee's post compares it to Weinstein, and like, I can get behind the reasoning that she wanted her villain held accountable, but that glosses over the fact that Weinstein is 1) a massive outlier in terms of consequences faced and 2) a producer, a nebulous behind-the-scenes guy who didn't really have a lot of public opinion in his favor, and not a wannabe tyrant with massive, established popular appeal.

That's why I drew a comparison to Trump; and obviously he's not the only existing example of that, only the most recent and also the one that got impeached twice but faced zero consequences for it. And that's also why it felt too simple to me, even if, again, I can respect wanting to have it be better in your fiction. That's why I didn't penalize the book for it; it's also for similar reasons I loved Red White and Royal Blue enough to read it twice in as many years, which, if you check my history, I don't do with many books. But the thing is, Feverwake as a series was a lot more politically engaged than RWRB, which is a romcom with some very vague liberal feel-good "your identity is valid" stuff, so ending on what feels like a simplified fantasy feels more jarring here than there, if that makes sense.

It might have to do with the story structure as well. Maybe it's just that it felt unclear on the temporarily part due to how the resolution was presented—an interesting stylistic choice and one that I feel really captures the chaos in the moment but sacrifices clarity for it. Maybe the sequel novella will clarify things. But it felt like the book's climax ended with a ticking time bomb that needed further resolution, and then, time skip and everything is settled.

Anyway, point is: I'm conflicted over that ending, because while it's fine (if flawed) from a narrative standpoint it kind of ruins the applicability of the text when it was intentionally drawing connections to real world politics until then. It's not bad, and tbh I understood the reasoning even before I read the blog post. It's just a thing I noticed.

#feverwake #victoria lee #the electric heir #st: other posts #ask #anonymous

[nzvalley]

The “Broken Bow” Novelization, Part 2

The Klaang Situation and First Impressions

Archer’s first impressions of T’Pol

I always thought that Archer and T’Pol must’ve at least interacted before, been in the same room. The novelization suggests otherwise. Like in the pilot as aired, Forrest’s opening words to Archer, that he knows everyone in the room, implies to me they’ve at least seen each other.  However, a few seconds later, right after Archer learns the word Klingon, we get this moment:

He started to say something, possibly rude, when a movement behind the two Vulcans caught his eye. Another Vulcan. A woman. Wasn’t anybody going to introduce her? Or were the Vulcans so advanced that courtesy didn’t involve women? (p. 24)

In the pilot, instead of this moment where Archer notices T’Pol, we cut to a wide shot, from the interior of the infirmary, of the whole group looking at the Klingon.

Great, snarky line on the same page, from the interior monologue of Archer:

He knew that tone, that inference... good thing he was well enough educated to understand the subtle nastiness as wielded by the pointy among us.

The novelization makes much clearer that Archer is immediately impressed (in a grudging, adversarial way) with T’Pol.

The Vulcan female stepped forward, quite suddenly, right through the two elder ambassadors. She was the only one with the guts to say what she was thinking. “Until you’ve proven you’re ready.” ...

“Ready for what?” Archer asked, even though he knew. Hell, everybody knew, but he wanted to maker her say it. “To look beyond your provincial attitudes and volatile nature.” The elegant female had a firmness in her eyes. She was playing his game. She darn well comprehended the triteness of her own declaration. Maybe she was waiting to see how far Archer could be pushed. (p. 29)

and

Eyebrow raised, she looked at him in near enjoyment- was that right? There was a glint in her eye, despite her mosaic stillness. He got the idea that she might not like what she heard, but did like hearing it. Very few humans talked back to Vulcans... yet. 

This Vulcan seemed subtly different from the other two- almost as if she were able to imagine Archer actually trying to knock her down- and finding humor in what would, of course, be the inevitable result of any human attempting to overpower any Vulcan. (p. 29-30)

And Archer notices T’Pol, still unintroduced and unnamed, one more time as the Vulcan delegation departs.

The Vulcans, realizing that Forrests’ resolve could not be shaken, departed in stoic silence- not before the female shot him a curious glance. Archer almost smiled, but managed to bury it. Score one for the amoebas. (p. 31)

 The crew’s distrust of Vulcans

There is a deep general distrust of Vulcans among the crew, at least the senior officers. Trip speculates that T’Pol is everything from a spy to a saboteur to an assassin.  And it’s not a fleeting distrust, well into the third act Trip is seriously considering the possibility that T’Pol engineered a conspiracy to incapacitate Archer. Even Hoshi openly says she dislikes T’Pol.   

Malcolm and Trip look into T’Pol’s background to make sure she’s not too dangerous. What we learn about her background is pretty different than what developed later. 

“Have you and Reed found out anything?” “She’s clean and normal right up until she gets the scholarship that put her in Soval’s office. Then, her records start getting real terse and kind of vague.” (p.173)

On top of depicting T’Pol’s time on Earth as being brief and sporadic, this suggests that either her comportment was declining... or something else is going on.

 Testing T’Pol’s Loyalty

Archer yells at T’Pol for questioning the mission and his authority, and he reprimands T’Pol for hiding/not divulging information. The novel expands that scene quite a bit, and depicts it initially from Trip’s POV. 

“Then again,” [Trip] added resentfully, “loyalty’s an emotion, isn’t it?” She looked at him, and he could tell a response was forming- what would she say? Under that stony façade and the gloss of having a “mission” of her own, what did she really think of Jonathan Archer? 

There’s a whole other scene’s worth of interaction from the end of their confrontation scene that wasn’t included in the Pilot. After Travis affirms Archer’s orders, Archer and T’Pol have a serious argument. 

Turning to T’Pol, Archer strictly said, “You’re going to be working with us from now on.” She paled a little, but owned up to her reasons. “I’m sorry you feel slighted. But I agree with Ambassador Soval’s restraint in giving Earth too much information. Perhaps the last thing we need is another volatile race in space with warp power: You may easily go out and get yourselves killed. It may be a mistake to have helped you so much, to give you so much before you’re ready.” “So much?” Archer barked. “You’d better use the next portion of your long lifetime to go back over the records and see just how much we’ve done on our own, in spite of your cultural cowardice.”  “Cowardice?” Her eyes widened. Over to the side, Tucker smirked and pressed his lips flat with delight. (p. 117)

The argument goes on for pages, amounting to what would probably be a five minute scene. It’s actually fairly important, in terms of additional context for why T’Pol began to shift her opinion in the next few scenes on Rigel. It also shines a lot of light on Archer’s ruminations about Vulcans, including why they are behaving so strangely and illogically. 

“...You’re dragging behind, and now you need us more than we need you. Why else would you want to come and teach the apes how to sew? I think all this is happening because you’re plain scared of being out here alone anymore.”  Stunned, T’Pol parted her lips again. Nothing came out this time. She never blinked, as if staring at a flashing billboard declaring his words to the known galaxy. He was saying the Vulcans were doomed. Nobody had the guts to say that to their faces.  Archer backed off now, but pointed at her with a determined finger. “You get on that warp trail. And you’d better find something or be able to explain why not in very clear terms. Dismissed.” T’Pol blinked almost as if he’d slapped her. She turned on her heel and exited without a word, taking a cloud of confusion along on her shoulders.”

Then there’s a few more pages of just Trip and Archer, where they discuss the possibility that the ship was infiltrated before it even launched. They also talk about T’Pol, going over whether she’ll work with the crew or continue to be the High Command’s agent. Archer actually gives her credit and tries to see the situation from her perspective.

“She’s my science officer now, not Soval’s patsy. She’ll learn that lesson over the next week if I have to tattoo it on her tongue.” “Good thing it was you chewing her out instead of me. I’d have punched her in the nose.” “She’d hit me back,” Archer said. “And she’d probably break my jaw.” Tucker grinned, rather drably. “She, uh... she came on the ship about the same time as all our little troubles started...” He broached the subject, then let it hang there. He didn’t seem to have quite the conviction for a direct accusation. Archer accepted what the engineer was saying. The ideas wasn’t new to him. He’d be silly to ignore it. “Well wait and see. Vulcans are reserved. They don’t converse. She’s just learning about us. As Vulcans go, she’s very young. I get the feeling she’s as much in the middle as we are.” (p. 121-122)

So a big chunk from the middle of the narrative has been cut out in the aired Pilot. This is the portion of the narrative where T’Pol has to either stand rigid in her loyalty to High Command and Vulcan values, or adapt a little and embrace her ability to work with humans. At this point I wouldn’t say her loyalties have shifted... but her curiosity has been piqued. The differences Archer noticed in her are really there, and she has noticed some differences about him too. 

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

#Star Trek #Star Trek: Enterprise #Broken Bow #Jonathan Archer #T'Pol #Diane Carey #Broken Bow Novelization #Trip Tucker