#but like. i sincerely think that 90% of the meta about them (individually + their relationship) is bad lol

[dragonseeds]

what are your thoughts on rhaegar and lyanna?

oh i love them! there’s all this talk of them haunting the narrative and they do, but i’d take it further and say they are the black hole at the center of the story. the choices that they made, starting with lyanna’s decision to defend howland reed and what that meant to both him and rhaegar, who was very likely at his lowest point at harrenhal after the ruination of his careful plans, touched or changed the lives of every character and plot line in the series. the story itself is such a fun mashup of tristan and iseult, lancelot and guinevere, helen and paris, the fall of camelot and all of arthuriana really, the classic trope of the princess in the tower and the dragon and the knight: all of that in one couple and we don’t get to experience any of it with them. we can guess and speculate, but we can never truly know them. we experience their story only through the memories the people who survived the war they ostensibly kicked off, and those memories are all heavily colored by trauma, guilt, nostalgia—alternately faded and sharpened by time. it’s this incredibly fun and brilliant reconstruction of some of the most enduring tragedies in folklore and mythology and i adore it.

hate beyond articulation the way asoiaf.tumblr.edu approaches their relationship and the individual characterizations of both of them, though. just absolutely some of the most insufferably sanctimonious disingenuous decontextualized analysis i’ve ever experienced—much of that coming from people viewing this through a historical lense instead of a thematic one. like, imagine approaching the battle of the trident as “rhaegar is a bad person for fighting for his father who was evil! he lost the moral high ground with that one” as opposed to “rhaegar as a character exists to fail and die; he was the last dragon, carrying the unbearable weight of his family’s legacy and the burden of the prophecy for which they conquered westeros: the end of his life is the end of the targaryen dynasty. he must fail and he must die, so that dany and jon can grow up free of that weight and that power. daenerys gets to redefine what it means to be targaryen on her own terms. she and jon separately and unknowingly do the things that he thought he had to do—the things he was conceived and born to do—but never knew how: they do it because of their circumstances, because of the people that they have grown into, because they believe it is their duty, because they have the power to do it.” also, like, re: interpretations of battle of the trident, is there maybe another battle that occurs later in the series that is exactly the same thematically and contextually? where perhaps a character who was missing for a while shows up on the eve of battle, knowing that the opposition is right and their cause is just but that his family will die if he doesn’t fight with them? anything that adds an extra layer of meaning to what happens, aside from dany’s own connection—which is not as thematically similar but is still incredibly meaningful. like i certainly don’t think there’s any one interpretation of a character or story, but the worst ones are consistently applied to rhaegar.

and then with lyanna in particular, it’s like people cannot stomach her or find her sympathetic as a character unless they’re wallowing in her eternal victimhood. the constant dismissal of the importance of lyanna’s actions and what they meant to rhaegar is pure misogyny, by the way. her choices and her agency, the inherent meaningfulness of the struggle for both of those things in a system that seeks to reduce her to her body and the use men can make of it—all of that is important. the person she was and what that meant to people was important, but from the way i most often see her discussed, it’s like her gendered death is the only thing that matters. it’s okay to lament her because she got crushed by the wheel. if she hadn’t, if she wasn’t a victim to write flagellatory meta about, she would be a hypocrite, someone who needed to learn a lesson—as difficult for some of these people to relate to as dany or rhaenyra apparently are.

like, it’s just wild to me because her kindness to howland reed and her choice to defend him, to disguise herself as the knight of the laughing tree and risk her life and reputation to fight for him—is the answer to and the embodiment of one of the most thematically significant questions in the series. we see it most prominently in dany’s chapters because she asks it directly: why do the gods make kings and queens if not to protect the ones who can’t protect themselves? that’s what lyanna did, when no one else was doing it: she had more honor than any knight at that tourney or any man sitting on the small council, and it meant something to rhaegar. like what about this is hard to understand? i think he must have idealized her immediately: she must have seemed like something out of a song or a story to him, and rhaegar was a singer, a songwriter, a bard: he knows how stories are supposed to go—how to finish a song, or at least he thought he did.

bran, who also loves stories, says it himself: “and the mystery knight should win the tourney, defeating every challenger, and name the wolf maid the queen of love and beauty.” like obviously bran has some critiques i cut out, but he has the ending right—only the wolf maid was the knight, and she couldn’t have won. in the feudal gender prison, women are rewarded for being beautiful and their worth is derived from that and from what their bodies provide. she should’ve won the whole thing, but the system doesn’t allow that, so rhaegar—in a fit of single-minded capital r romantic hero idiocy—dedicates himself to winning the tourney to honor her in the only way he can: the only way the system allows him to recognize her. it was the worst possible move he could make at that time because of the romantic connotations, but i love him for doing it, as stupid as it was and even though there is no way it didn’t hurt and humiliate elia, or make him look terrible when he desperately needed to make a good impression on the lords of the realm—it’s just such a Moment. being reminded that there’s good in the world—feeling hope in the face of endless abject overwhelming despair—how do you express gratitude for that? the idea that he could only doing it by hurting someone who didn’t deserve it and making himself look like an ass is fucking awesome. i’m genuinely so sorry for people are incapable of enjoying that. could not be me!

but that’s just my interpretation of what happened at harrenhal. like i said, part of why i like them so much is that we truly don’t know. while i love darker relationships in general, the idea that he crowned her at harrenhal because he wanted to impregnate her then does not work for me. it’s a popular theory, but it renders some of the very few contextual clues we are given about what happened meaningless. for one, he didn’t know that elia wouldn’t be able to have more children at that time. this was discovered after she gave birth to aegon, and that is the point at which the question of the third child appears to have become a motivating factor for him. i personally think he left for the riverlands to consult with the ghost of high heart—the one whose prophecy is the reason he was born, the reason is parents were forced to marry, the reason his family burned alive the night he came into the world—and ran into lyanna somewhere near harrenhal. it’s possible he had been in contact with her prior to this (how? without her family knowing? what are the logistics of that?) but i think it’s just as likely it was pure chance. i really like the idea that his crowning her queen of love and beauty caused lyanna’s father to set a date for her wedding to robert or talk of moving it up, maybe even suggest a double wedding at riverrun, which would have almost certainly caused her to balk. either way, high heart is located between harrenhal and riverrun. arya also stops there while she’s kidnapped by the brotherhood without banners on the way to ransom her to her family at riverrun, and they trade songs to the ghost for her dreams and prophecies. i think it’s worth noting because arya’s journey in the riverlands mirrors lyanna’s right down to her “death” as arya stark when she leaves for braavos, paying the ferryman’s fee with the coin jaqen h’ghar gave her—just as jon’s journey at the wall mirrors rhaegar’s in many ways right up until his own death.

i also don’t think rhaegar and lyanna eloped because they were in love—this is implied by lyanna’s famous quote—but that they did come to love each other deeply, which is suggested by the way they died: her roses and him saying her name. notably, rhaegar did not leave the tower of his own volition—someone had to come and get him with news of war, which is hilarious because i think the tower of joy is right in the middle of like three major battles of the rebellion? like quite frankly, if he didn’t love her or care for anything beyond the prophecy and if she didn’t love him despite how badly things went wrong, then where in their story is the heart in conflict with itself?

i do want to clarify that i love the tower entrapment and the power imbalance aspects of their relationship as much as i love (what i interpret as) the genuine respect for each other that grew into love: it’s really the tension of those disparate elements that interests me. a dragon can love the maiden, but he’s only ever a dragon—still liable to hoard her like treasure or burn her up and rip her open trying to be gentle, to protect. that FUCKS, sorry! love is sweet and hopeful, but it’s also at exactly the same time horror, consumption, destruction.

idk it’s myopic to act like the beginning or the ending of their relationship—of their lives—is the summation of it. i think people want their story to be easy when it’s not: a clear case of a villain and his victims where everyone knows who to root for and no one has to think too much about things that are difficult or uncomfortable, questions where there probably isn’t an answer that doesn’t hurt someone. what a sad, tedious way to approach any text, but specifically this one. i’ve sometimes seen it suggested that if their story is romantic then it’s an endorsement or justification of all the “bad” things that happened because of it, and that’s also stupid. grrm as an author is never going to be someone who tells us how to feel about anything: he presents these characters and situations, often as a means of exploring certain facets of the human condition, and each of us has to come up with our own answers and find our own meaning. i don’t think he always knows what he means, or what those answers are, you know? but for me rhaegar and lyanna are one of the most fascinating parts of story, and whatever the truth is—if we ever find out—i can’t imagine a scenario where i don’t love them or find them really interesting and wonderfully sad.

#lyanna stark #rhaegar targaryen #rhaelya #i’d apologize for this being so long but u have got to all be used to me by now #like i couldn’t be succinct at gunpoint #or coherent apparently #and especially not about this like i’m not normal about either of them #also just to clarify because this kind of turned into a rant: none of this applies to people i follow #but like. i sincerely think that 90% of the meta about them (individually + their relationship) is bad lol #and part of that is bc so much of it is based on fanon instead of what is actually in the books #and that frustration really comes through in this post and i regret that but it’s out there now lol #asoiaf

[wheatbeats]

2018 is over and I feel compelled to write a retrospective of sorts, but since I don’t feel like talking about myself I’m gonna talk about Every Anime (Series) I Watched in 2018. Each one comes with a numerical rating out of 10 and a short blurb of what I thought about it.

Recovery of an MMO Junkie - 9/10 - Incredibly sweet and heartfelt, with mature adult characters who act as such. Drama and comedy both are mined from real issues rather than petty miscommunication, and is all the more compelling for it.

Land of the Lustrous - 10/10 - A delightfully unique setting with an enrapturing story and fantastically constructed characters. The moments of levity and sweetness only serve to make the deeply engrained sadness and loneliness more poignant. The CGI animation is shockingly gorgeous, and a triumph of the medium.

Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World (2018) - 5/10 - Certainly entertaining in spots, but ultimately rings rather hollow. Not really an improvement on the original in any respect.

Princess Principal - 8/10 - An absolutely gorgeous setting brimming with atmosphere and style, and a fun ensemble cast. The series-wide arc is a little hard to follow or understand, but each individual episodic plot is really enjoyable and engaging.

The Vision of Escaflowne - 8/10 - A well-built fantasy that’s occasionally ridiculous but never not fun. The new dub is really slick and helps the series go down nice and smooth.

A Place Further Than the Universe - 10/10 - Extraordinarily sweet, earnest and heartfelt. Deftly written, smartly directed, and masterfully executed. I cried really hard, a lot. 

Tsuredure Children - 8/10 - Cute, ridiculous, and eminently relatable. If you’ve ever had a crush, you’re bound to identify with at least one character in this series.

From the New World - 5/10 - Had a glimmer of potential, but mostly ended up fake deep, poorly paced, and fucking ugly to look at. The more I thought about this series the less I realized I enjoyed it.

The Ancient Magus’ Bride - 5/10 - An extraordinarily promising start that’s disappointingly squandered by wildly inconsistent tone, static plots, nonsensical character arcs, excessive cliffhangers, and hollow stakes.

Princess Tutu - 10/10 - An expertly built deconstruction of fairy tales as well as a sweeping, gorgeous love note to ballet, classical music, and romantic storybook heroism. Wonderfully intricate plotting and stunning character work, a true gem.

Kaiba - 8/10 - Brilliantly unique and emotionally engrossing, if not a bit obscure and hard to follow at times. You never have, and probably never will again, see an anime quite like this.

Girls’ Last Tour - 7/10 - Deeply atmospheric and sometimes quite poignant, but also dreadfully, awfully, agonizingly slow.

Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto - 9/10 - A smooth and even mix between laughable absurdity and actual real emotional stakes. Somehow, I feel like I learned something about myself.

Megalobox - 8/10 - Briskly paced and action-packed, but by far the biggest draw is a classic 90s aesthetic reminiscent of pre-digital legends like Cowboy Bebop. This series lives and breathes style.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These - 6/10 - Would have the potential to be interesting if it wasn’t so hollow and boring. I wanted to get more engaged in the politics of this complicated war, but the plot is held at arms length and the characters are more like walking philosophy textbooks than actual people. That said, the ship designs are pretty cool.

Hinamatsuri - 10/10 - Sweet, pure-hearted, and gut-bustingly funny. Any moment I wasn’t laughing until my sides hurt, I was near to tearing up from actually caring about these characters so much. Each episode was a joy and I loved every second of it.

Golden Kamuy (S1) - 7/10 - Absurd, charming, and goofy, with a surprising amount of gore. Seems to care more about food than plot, but I’m kind of into it.

Revolutionary Girl Utena - 9/10 - Brilliantly dense, symbolic, and metaphorical. Sometimes hard to understand, sometimes hard to watch, but always excellent.

Dragon Pilot: Hisone & Masotan - 7/10 - Gorgeously animated and undeniably charming, but still a little awkward, garbled, and uncomfortable at times. The most earnest vore anime I’ve ever watched.

Steins;Gate 0 - 4/10 - A total, utter, crushing disappointment. Follows up a spectacular prequel with a nonsensical, contrived plot, inaccurate characters, and piss-poor visuals. This series is only carried by its relationship to the original. I will never trust again.

Princess Jellyfish - 7/10 - Charming, varied characters populating an unfulfilling narrative.

The Big O - 6/10 - Plenty of goofy, stylish fun, but slowly devolves into an inscrutable, incomprehensible mess. R. Dorothy Wayneright is the best part of this series by far. Roger Smith is a louse.

Aggretsuko - 7/10 - Fun and relatable, if a bit simple. 

TOP 3

3. Hinamatsuri - This series came totally out of left field for me. I usually don’t emotionally respond to comedies very well but this one somehow hit all the right buttons. None of the humor was mean-spirited or put anyone down, the situations were absurd but didn’t cripple me with secondhand embarrassment, and on top of it all I really started to care about the cast. I wish I could get surprised like this more often.

2. Land of the Lustrous - As you can tell if you’ve been following me at all recently, this series has been absolutely consuming me from the moment I watched it. The plot is gripping and excellently paced, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been invested in another main character quite as much as Phos. It’s plenty easy to get wrapped up in thinking about the plot and the character arcs and the meta, but then when I go back and watch the series again I’m shocked by how good it is on a technical level, too. The CG animation is beyond gorgeous and the technical grace of each scene, the pacing, the colors, the music, the character animation, the voice acting, are all stellar. If this anime had more of an ending it would absolutely be my number 1 pick, but for now I just have to read the manga (AS SHOULD YOU, YOU COWARDS. IT’S EVERY BIT AS GOOD AS THE ANIME).

1. Princess Tutu - I, like many people, I think, reacted with derision at the title of this series, but by the time I was done I was completely blown away, and every time I thought about it more I was even more shocked. Every inch of this series shows some of the smartest construction I’ve ever seen in fiction, every layer is filled with stylistic flourish, brilliant writing, and metatextual commentary. You can dig as deep as you want and Princess Tutu will always have something to offer you. It’s been less than a year, I’ve already watched it twice, and I’m still discovering new things about it. A story this brilliant would be a once in a lifetime experience on its own, but Tutu is fulfilling on the surface level, too. Even if you’re not diving deep into what the series means you can still be just as enraptured by the characters. Fakir probably has the best redemption arc this side of Prince Zuko, and I could sing the praises of every other major cast member. And the music, the music! I was doomed from the start the moment I heard both The Nutcracker and Pictures at an Exhibition in the score. Princess Tutu takes some of the greatest masterpieces of western art music and builds off them, creating a sense of atmosphere as deep and vast and dramatic as the finest opera or ballet could ever be. Princess Tutu is one of the greatest works of fiction I’ve ever consumed, and absolutely the best I’ve watched this year.

BOTTOM THREE

3. From the New World - Immediately after I stopped watching this series I actually sort of thought I’d liked it, and I think the reason for this is because From the New World tries its very best to engage in ideas a bit deeper and more ambiguous than a lot of other anime do. But the more I thought about it, the more I disliked this series. Everything about the plot was confusing and off-putting, I didn’t find the characters particularly charming, and perhaps most of all, this series is butt-ugly. It might have a high score of MAL. but my advice is to give this series a hard pass.

2. The Ancient Magus’ Bride - I wanted to like this series so fucking bad. I fell in love with the prequel OVA and waited anxiously for each new installment to come out. I even bought tickets to my local Artsy Fartsy Theater to see the first three episodes when the screened there. And I liked them! Finally, an anime engaged in Celtic and English mythology, some of my favorites, and a protagonist with a truly gripping internal struggle. I was certain from the very first moment that this series would sit in my Top 10 list, and that Chise would be one of my favorite protagonists ever. And then it... didn’t happen. As the episodes unfolded I was treated to a series that had no idea how to establish or maintain stakes, how to relate its two main characters to each other, or how to use the wealth of mythology it was referencing and drawing from. How am I supposed to care when Chise gets stabbed in the chest every 2 episodes and then just kind of shrugs it off for the sake of drama? How am I supposed to be interested in the mythology when it’s all just watered-down fantasy archetypes with giant boobs? Don’t even get me started on the main villain. I feel very betrayed by this series and honestly I’m still bitter.

1. Steins;Gate 0 - This series is as much a lesson in betrayal as Ancient Magus’ Bride, but I think this one stings worse because it’s preceded by Steins;Gate, and anime I love dearly. I sincerely believe that the original Steins;Gate is one of the best anime ever produced, and this sequel struggles to live up to even a single aspect of it. As it began I was hopeful- I liked the darker tone, I liked the idea of a story within a failed timeline. But as I kept watching, I realized something awful: I was bored. All of the charm and intrigue was gone. The characters were all acting different, all looked different (why are all the girls wearing skintight winter coats? Why have their chests all inflated three sizes??), and there was no impetus for the plot. Steins;Gate was driven by simple goals; in the first half, it was to build a time-leap machine. In the second half, it was to save Mayuri. In Steins;Gate 0 the impetus is to... watch Okabe be sad. Hope he gets less sad. There’s nothing to keep the plot moving, and this listlessness was so overwhelming that the random bits of unforeshadowed action and unprecedented (for this franchise) violence felt cheap and confusing after the doldrums we just sat through. By the time the plot finally, finally, picks up towards the final quarter of the series, the damage is done. I don’t care anymore, I can’t figure out what’s going on, and I’m just so done with a franchise I used to love. One day I’ll go back and rewatch the original Steins;Gate and remind myself why I cared so much, but for now I’m nursing wounds. If you say the name “Kagari” in my presence, I’ll probably blitz the fuck out.

Here’s to a good 2019!

#princess tutu #land of the lustrous #hinamatsuri #the ancient magus' bride #steins;gate 0

[alixofagnia]

Get to know your fellow Reylos meme

This will be fun! Thanks for the tag @emperorren.

Answer these 10 Star Wars related questions, reblog and tag your favorite Reylo blogs to join in!

1) Who is your favorite Star Wars character of the new trilogy (excluding Rey and Kylo)?

Wow, that is so unfair because Rey and Kylo are truly my favorites from the ST so far.

Since TLJ came out, I would say Holdo. I love how she was introduced: you didn’t quite know what her deal was (or if that was all just in Poe’s head), but you gradually understood that there was way more to her than met the eye. Some people think she was a wasted character –because apparently showing up for the first time and then dying in the same movie amounts to a wasted, pointless character (Qui-Gon, hello, is that you? Rogue One squadron, are you there?). But I saw TLJ four times in the theater and every single time people literally gasped into the silence of Holdo’s death.

So, yeah, fuck off.

2) What is/are your favorite quote(s) from a Star Wars movie?

The OT movies were my “stay-home-sick” movies when I was a kid – I played the shit out of those VHS tapes, let me tell you. So, there are a lot of quotes from the OT that are just kind of pure nostalgia for me. I’m not a huge fan of the PT and since dialogue is one issue I take with them, I hardly ever quote them except to mock “she’s lost the will to live” because I find that line so problematic, and I just hate it.

It hasn’t been until the ST that certain lines of dialogue have actually resonated with me, probably because I’m seeing them as an adult. There are a lot of terrific quotes from TLJ, but I gotta let them stew a bit longer. So the two I picked are from TFA:

Maz Kanata: The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead. I am no Jedi, but I know the Force. It moves through and surrounds every living thing. Close your eyes. Feel it… The light… it’s always been there. It will guide you.

My liking this quote probably has a lot to do with Lupita N’yongo’s lovely voice and line delivery, because I remember tearing up in the theater when she started talking about the Force, and I swear to you I was not high. I just think it’s so beautifully spiritual, and when you put it into context with Rey’s journey and Kylo’s journey, or any SW character’s journey, really, it carries this deeply profound message of hope and faith.

The entire bridge scene dialogue, but mostly the moment when Han touches his son’s face:

I know it’s not a quote, but so much is contained in that single gesture.

It wasn’t shock at Han’s skewering that made my breath catch and bring a tear to my eye. It was the utterly heartbreaking grace of his final action. It’s such an unexpectedly visceral reaction and, actually, far more profound than I previously believed Han Solo capable of since he was largely a one-note character over the course of his SW career. This moment has taken on much more depth and meaning since TLJ’s release, in terms of Ben Solo’s arc, and I think it will continue to do so after Episode IX.

3) Do you think Kylo/Ben will survive Episode IX?

I have a lot of thoughts about this. Well, mostly just one.

YES.

As is obvious, Kylo Ren is one of my favorite new characters. That has nothing to do with Adam Driver, whom I had never watched before, and nothing to do with what I knew about the character, which was zero. [Srsly, I was in such an ‘I heart SW’ bubble for TFA that I did not even think about, let alone suspect, his heritage until literally the moment he was talking to Vader’s helmet.]. 

No, it has everything to do, instead, with the complex villain story-line and Byronic heroes. I love complex villainy. I adore Byronic heroes, with their tortured souls and black clothing. OF COURSE I was going to fall for Kylo/Ben. Just a bit.

But he’s also the son of Han Solo and Leia Organa and I love them, too. So, out of loyalty and like the good SW fan I am, I care about their son and what happens to him, and there’s just no hope to be found in Kylo’s death. There’s no good message in it. Even say that he’s “redeemed” or finds salvation or suffers through atonement, fine, whatever. Death is too simple. Vader was not a complex villain. Maybe in his youth he was supposed to be, but after his fall? No. He made his choice, and he chose the wrath and the Dark every day for 20 years until his son came along to rile up the long-buried conflict in his heart. No one conflicted Ben Solo more than Ben Solo himself. He’s his own worst enemy, as we all can be at some point in our lives. 

It’s repeated all the time, so I’ll say it again: 

Star Wars is a saga predicated on hope. 

The message with a dead Ben Solo at Episode IX’s end is simply that of ‘well, you can find a way back from hell, but only if you die’, and that’s really bleak. Yet, it worked for Vader because, in the OT, he was largely an unsympathetic, “more machine than man” character.

Consider: How was Darth Vader going to find salvation and atonement for 20 years’ worth of galactic terrorism and oppression?

Answer: He wasn’t. His crimes were so great and extensive that 10 minutes of “goodness” couldn’t even begin to ease them. Narratively-speaking, his story was complete and it was time for him to meet his end. Character-wise, fueled as he was on hate and anger, and sustained by machinery for so many years, you have to also wonder if Vader wanted to die, ever since the moment he was told that he’d killed his wife and, by extension, his child[ren].

This greatly contrasts with Kylo Ren.

Consider: How is Kylo Ren going to find salvation and atonement for 6 years’ worth of galactic….wait, what?

Answer: The FO as a military and political threat is fairly new. It was not a fully realized organization during the events of Bloodline, though it was (if I remember correctly) in progress in the far regions of space. Ben, aged 23, was still with Luke at this time; he’s 29 by the start of TFA. So, in the span of 6 years, Kylo Ren canonically

destroyed a temple, killing a handful of classmates

started training under a Dark side master

became the leader of a mystery group

killed an old man from his past for withholding information during war time

ordered the mass killing of a small village during war time

interrogated some prisoners during war time

committed patricide during war time

fired on his mom’s ship during war time

killed his abusive master

led a full-scale yet futile attack during war time

tried to kill a projection of his uncle during war time

all while exhibiting acute internal conflict. It’s important to consider the majority of these crimes strictly within their context of war, primarily because it’s in the damn franchise title, but also because it again contrasts with Anakin’s crimes, which were not always within the context/name of war. It’s such a different villain treatment from OT Vader that I think Kylo not only deserves, but demands an equally different resolution. 

Therefore, here’s a much more hopeful message on which to conclude the complex villainy of Kylo/Ben and, thus, the entire Skywalker saga:

You can find a way back from hell, if you live well.

4) What is your favorite scene featuring Rey and Kylo?

Ah, shit.

Well, the throne room battle was amazing and the closest to definitely-on-the-same-page as they’ve ever been to date. But I think I have to say the fourth Force bond scene. Hand making-out aside, this scene truly can be read as merely platonic, which I actually love because it’s another example of how this movie as a whole is so versatile and open for varying interpretations and discourse, for years to come! 

AT THE SAME TIME, I personally feel that the hand touch (from the skin-on-skin contact, which the camera lovingly and reverentially sexualizes, to the forbidden connotation of Cock-block Luke) sent these two really rolling on a romantic trajectory. This scene also won over many viewers, whose previous feelings about Reylo were lukewarm at best and are now overwhelmingly positive. And that’s because of one undeniable thing: 

This is the most emotionally vulnerable we’ve seen either Rey or Kylo.

It’s a major turning point in both their shared interactions and as individual characters. There’s a lot of amazing meta out there right now about Rey and Kylo, articulated far better than what I can produce. So, what I want to quickly add is that, for me, this scene reveals how utterly unselfish they can be with one another. Born from a place of intense, mutual knowing, they offered one another sincere support and reassurance from opposite sides of a political and ideological war. We later learn that this moment of reaching out yielded a shared vision, one where they saw themselves together. 

A key takeaway is that they not only acknowledge this vision as truth, but earnestly –almost desperately– welcome it.

For me, this scene alone transcends the depictions of other cinematic romantic pairings within Star Wars itself, the wider genre of sci-fi, and the scale of big-budget franchises. I know I’m biased, but it’s quite frankly unbelievable how much was established and advanced between Rey and Kylo in two and a half hours of screen time, which they had to share with two other interwoven plot lines. For comparison, we have a good 80-90% of AotC entirely devoted to Anidala, and the most I’ve ever felt for them is a tepid interest because George Lucas and the OT said I had to. Written on paper, the Force connection scenes honestly sound super corny, this one especially. That they’re actually some of the film’s strong points is a testament to the story-telling/directorial abilities of Rian Johnson as well as the chemistry and talent of Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver, of course.  And the great thing is Reylo isn’t even over! Think how much screen time will be devoted to them in IX and what they could do with that! 

This is bound to change upon repeat viewings and/or after IX comes out. But for now, yeah, this is my favorite Rey and Kylo scene.

5) What order did you initially see the saga films in?

I think I was 5 or 6 and I think it was Return of the Jedi first, then A New Hope and Empire (in that order) shortly after. The rest I’ve seen as they’ve been released.

6) If you had a lightsaber, what color would you want it to be?

Maybe like an ice white blue…I’m not much of a lightsaber gal.

7) What are your top 3 favorite Star Wars films?

I’m tentatively going to say Empire, Force Awakens, Last Jedi.

8) Which droid would you most like to own/ have as your sidekick on intergalactic adventures?

What’s that Empire/FO “mouse” droid called? Maybe that one.

9) Which Jedi master would you most like to train under: Luke, Yoda, Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan?

Pfffft. Please. Reylo, obviously.

10) What is your ideal ending for Reylo in Episode IX?

So, I really try not to look at a Reylo ending through rose-tinted glasses. Reylo is a pairing that at this point cannot be taken lightly: it’s dark, it’s deeply complicated, and it’s very imperfect. In other words, it’s an honest, unfeigned pairing and I identify with it so much more because of its mesmerizing humanity.

We inevitably hurt the ones we love; shit happens, people miscommunicate, feelings get hurt. Kylo and now Rey have exercised misguided, even manipulative, behavior toward each other and failed in basic ways to understand and accept one another’s differences despite having shared and attained a powerful moment of clarity in their way forward. People call this ship abusive; I’m not that sorry, but they’re wrong. At worst, it’s unhealthy.

Well, guess what. You can get healthy.

Since I can’t even begin to predict or shape an ending for Reylo, I would just say that I wish for them to be sound in body and sound(er) of mind, and preferably together in some way. I personally want to see that union be romantic, but I will also accept a platonic union. I love and respect these characters so much that, honestly, I just want them to finally find what they’ve been longing and suffering their entire lives for. Now that they’ve at least partially found –and briefly possessed– that, I hope they also find a way to hold on to it in whatever way they can.

So much for not looking at it through rose-tinted glasses.

Tagging:  @maleficentrox; @crez0le; @reylotea; @adambenkyloren; @paper-radio; @violet-is-maybe; @mooshygirl; @dr-porkchop1; @him-e

#reylo #rey #kylo ren #ben solo #star wars episode ix #can you guess at what i actually wanted to talk about #complex villains #byronic heroes #humanity #meta

[jmrphy]

Meta reflections on Jesse Pinkman’s new book, Enlightenment Now, with a special focus on the Joe Rogan chapter

Warning: This was supposed to be a really quick thing about the reception of Steven Pinker's new book, in part just to rev this blog back up as an easier-going place for short, fun stuff. Accidentally it became a 4k-word world-historical meta-narrative about the changing political coordinates of contemporary intellectual life on a razor-thin evidentiary base.

I just read RS Bakker's thoughts on the new Pinker book. I thought they were very stimulating and seemed important/credible—although I didn't grok everything in my one time through on the train. They did, however, motivate me to jot down a few thoughts that have been recurring to me lately. They're not really related to Bakker's post.

I'm not going to comment on the Pinker book, first because I haven't read it; second, because I don't like playing in already overpopulated peanut galleries, it pains my frail ego; third, because, as with many things today, it seems to me the real theoretical points of interest are at a meta level. There's a time and place to use proper names, no doubt, but individuals and their particular products are often red herrings, I think. If I use the name Pinker below it's just for shorthand; this will really be about the larger class of prestigious public intellectuals of which he is only one example (as opposed to, say, the high-brow but unpaid batshit blogger class, the personal-brand-with-a-patreon class, the Youtube philosophy for dummies educator class, the Alex Jones balls-to-the-wall flight from Earth class, etc.). It turns out there are wayyy more ways to be a famous and influential intellectual than anyone could have known when they were in grad school in the 70s or 80s, or even the 90s really.

In fact, I won't even use Pinker's name, to emphasize that I'm really not out here trying to ankle-bite this great and good scientist who is much smarter and more accomplished than myself. Wherever I might want to refer to Pinker as an example, I will instead refer to Pinkman. That way you'll think of Jesse from Breaking Bad, in the form of a prestigious social scientist instead of a meth kingpin.

Highly successful and publicly influential academic intellectuals are playing a very particular kind of game. The logic of this game made sense even ten years ago, but I'm not sure it does anymore. The logic is something like this "Get really smart, make real scientific contributions, earn legitimate credentials and status, then leverage this elevated status to shape the body politic toward the Good (and also be handsomely remunerated, admired, etc. — but hey, fair enough.) I've never met Pinkman or many other famous scientists but my sense is they have given much of their life to some version of this noble vocation. This is an archetypal Liberal identity-mold, a tried and true, recognizable Calling, in a world where such things are increasingly hard to find.

Well, the past decade has thrown up some data points that really make you wonder whether the basic terms of this model still obtain. A few things lately have given me the bad feeling that someone like Pinkman may have invested most of their life in a certain kind of bargain with Liberal Society that, sadly, Liberal Society has now reneged on. I say this is a bad feeling because, if true, it's very unfortunate and I genuinely feel for them.

So what's this bargain I speak of, in a little more detail? First, for background, remember that for much of our history highly talented and creative individuals are typically punished by their groups. Reverse dominance hierarchies, etc., you can't let super talented people get too ahead of the others because then they'll dominate, or group morale suffers, or the group disintegrates, or whatever. Bad things will happen. So they'd cut you down to size at every opportunity. But liberal society was willing to offer super smart and able people a bargain: If you're really smart and able, then you can go off and cultivate your smarts but only on condition that you respect Liberal Society. It's a pretty genius solution actually: let the ablest flourish above everyone else but make them pay a cut of their gains to the cohesion of the whole. Win-win. The society got all the benefits of crazy geniuses solving problems, without them dominating or collective cohesion suffering. The geniuses not only got to enjoy their objective superiority on full blast, they also got to feel like it was all about doing good for others. And maybe it is.

It is the right to generously bestow social improvement that is one of the great joys of being a prestigious intellectual--could you imagine how exhilarating it must feel to have earned, through a life of study, the exalted role of institutionally sanctioned Society Improver at grand scale, how genuinely good it must feel to know that all of your sacrifice and hard work now empowers you to improve the knowledge and character of millions, and the political health of a whole society? Understood a little more rational-choicely, this is one of the key income streams that liberal society pays to its most prestigious geniuses, in return for their lifelong loyalty to all of the official tenets of harmonious Liberal Society. I think the data is pretty obvious in showing that no matter how genius you might be, if you go off the rails of "reasonable discourse" beyond a certain degree you quickly lose all of your standing and influence (on this model, anyway.

(Note that the newer classes of public intellectuals have figured out that if you decline the liberal institutional bargain, then going maximally off the rails can be its own direct path to extraordinary intellectual influence and economic reward. But more on that later, let's stay on track understanding the fine print of the liberal intellectual's bargain with liberal society).

Here's where things get a little shadowy because the harmony of Liberal Society is quite sensitive. It's kind of like a precious baby, and we love babies and would do anything to protect them, but this is how hypocrisy enters in automatically, because Liberal Society requires everyone to presume everyone else is an adult, and to treat everyone as such. For instance, when two groups violently disagree over certain deep moral questions, well, liberal society doesn't allow them to deal with it violently (a good thing perhaps, as Pinkman has amply documented). But what does it do instead?

The simplest way to summarize all of the things that Liberal Society does to reduce violence: It papers over the conflicts, which is maybe a brilliant solution, or maybe an insane, explosive solution that simply hasn't exploded yet — the jury is still out on that one. If Group A thinks abortion is murdering babies, and Group B thinks prohibition of abortion is enslaving women, the only way to deal with such profound and high-stakes ethical disagreement, other than civil war, is to derive some symbolic artifice(s) that will let both groups live peacefully with the other. Hmm, thinks Caesar, do we have anyone around here good at generating clever symbolic artifices? In swoops the knighted genius. The genius is delighted to take a break from self-cultivation in order to contribute to Harmony, and Caesar, as well as the common people, are happy to have someone on hand to explain why I don't have to worry if my neighbor is Evil. Win, win, win.

Thus baked into the vocation of the modern liberal intellectual is, from the get-go, a highly dissimulated condescension and hypocrisy. The liberal intellectual gets their status precisely from a superior ability (earned or inherited, doesn't matter) but they are contractually obligated to treat the normal masses as equals, when they know damn well that in fact, the normal masses are dumber, more dangerous, and in need of Harmonizing by institutions (paper). Also, remember that the genius wants to help, it's extremely rewarding to sincerely help society, but the noble sacrifice the genius admirably contributes to the social good is precisely the papering over, of whatever the normal masses need papered over for their well-being. This is how a basic minimum of dissimulation, condescension, and hypocrisy is structurally embedded in the vocation or calling of the modern liberal intellectual. We might note in passing it's also an avatar of Plato's Philosopher-King, a conceptual-political thought-rut that many progressive intellectual personae tend to inhabit in one way or another (and yes, here, Pinkman is a Progressive, despite some infamy among SJWs).

OK, so the modern liberal intellectual might be forced to pay lip service to a few small Noble Lies, but it's soooo much better than all that homicide and war in the earlier chapters of Pinkman's violence book, that it seems like a no-brainer. "There are political realities, it's not my fault, all I can do is speak the truth in a way that helps society the most. If that means I have to use my words judiciously, is that really so bad?" an elite cognitive scientist might reasonably ask. The only problem is that this entire model presumes that the speech of the prestige intellectual will remain highly weighted relative to the speech of anyone else who might take it upon themselves to explain things publicly.

What if external circumstances change in such a way that the masses start to intuit that the knighted geniuses have quietly been playing a political game all along? What if, empirically, things just so happen to play out in such a way that a critical mass of pretty average people (on the right and the left, and in their own languages and for their own reasons), quietly update their mental and behavioral models of the world in the realization that: "Eureka! I have a strong suspicion that some really serious issues have been papered over for some time now... and I'm not going to be a dupe any longer. I see what's going on, and I can play this game, too..." Well, one thing to note is that if this updating were to occur, even on a massive and rapid scale, there's no reason to believe we would know it anytime soon after it occurred. The next thing to see is that, suddenly, the entire bargain that the prestige intellectual based his whole life's labors on would suddenly be off the table.

So long as your pronouncements are weighted well by institutionalized attention monopolies, your lifelong service to science mixed slightly with Harmony-producing fluff was a reasonable and even maybe noble project. If your prestige loses its weight, then tempering your extreme intelligence with little white lies would be all for nought, because you're about to be left in the dust by new startups who specialize in unreasonably extreme truth-telling ("red pills" and many other colored pills now available) and also unreasonably extreme hypocrisy (self-help bullshit, SJWism, etc.). You'll still have your niche, but your effect on people and society will rapidly fall towards zero (along with the overwhelming majority of other people, including most smart people).

It seems to me that as a sociological phenomenon, Pinkman's recent book dramatizes a lot of what I'm modeling here. I think the world has changed a lot very recently and with many things we're like the roadrunner who's already off the cliff, but we haven't yet looked down to see the vast empty space beneath our galloping gait. In a strange way, I think dumber people have been doing more correct updating as of late, and some of the smartest people have been stubbornly failing to update lately. Dumber people have updated to not listen to a word of what the mainstream intellectual culture says, but smart people have not yet been able to update in response to this updating by dumber people (in part because smart people don't have any way of hearing about how dumber people are updating, and they're not exactly accustomed to caring about it). The inertia of media representations enforces a substantial lag between increasingly rapid techno-economic changes in the distribution of powers and our meager human mental models of where that power is.

All of this has been quite abstract, and I mentioned above that I have some data points, so I'll just end with those. I might have tricked you, accidentally, because to be honest, I've extrapolated this whole bonkers historical meta-narrative from a few very measly anecdotal observations. Well first, I kind of had in mind things like Trump and Brexit, i.e. signals of widespread mistrust of dominant institutions and respectable liberal wisdom. So those are pretty big and real data points for the kind of perspective I'm articulating here. I also have a few more specific ones, although they are very tendentious.

The first one is so silly, you're really going to laugh at me for writing this long post in part because of this ridiculously tiny and personal anecdote. You can write your own blog, I for one sense significant causal evidence in this little story. Basically, I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with Pinkman about his new book and... Pinkman was fine, he's a brilliant and likable guy... but... something was wrong. Very wrong. Don't tell anyone because it's kind of orthogonal to my personal brand and I have to stay on point, but I've listened to many, many Joe Rogan podcasts. And I'm a professional social scientist mind you, so if anything the Pinkman podcast should be more interesting and effective on me, relative to the average episode. But it was just so... "boring" is not even the word. Flat? Anachronistic? Bloodless? Zombieish? None of these quite convey it, but together they give some sense. The point is that, as a minor young academic but a relative connoisseur of the new media, for me something really significant in the machinery of intellectual experience was failing to fire, so much so that it was quite strange. I was surprised and confused. But now I think I understand it; it's everything I've said above.

The world that Pinkman seems to think he is in, is not the world we're actually living in now. The book will be successful economically of course, but it has no affective-identity constituency, other than people who are already socio-culturally neutralized or priced-in by the current equilibrium. It's hard to see how anything will move or shake from this type of project anymore. Most intellectual figures preach to a choir, of course, so Pinkman is no better or worse for that — but some choirs move and shake and generate novel ripples on world history, while others just sit there doing nothing other than precisely what was yesterday's world history. Some books and podcasts and youtube videos make people want to leave their friends and family to join a jihad, some give you strong confidence that a reality-TV star would make a great president, some give you the extraordinary realization that all of society is controlled by a white supremacist patriarchy; all of these lead to novel, unpredictable schisms and re-aggregations, new social formations and subcultures, which in their affective vitality bubble up, viralize or mutualize or enter into arms races, and end up producing system-level outcomes such as electoral victories, migrations, communicating-contagion shooting sprees, various contagious mental pathologies, as well as genuine self- and community-improvement dynamics, unequally distributed. There's nothing better or worse about the Enlightenment Is Cool niche; it's just that it's identity-affective character seems predicated on precisely what we've recently realized is already gone, as demonstrated by the whopping piece of incontrovertible evidence that was my personal lukewarm reception of Joe Rogan's podcast with Steven Pinkman.

You can say I should not generalize from my personal affective experiences, but my personal position seems like it'd be most conducive to liking and being affected by the Pinkman podcast! I'm not talking about the content of his book whatsoever, I'm talking about the reality he takes himself to be playing in. I don't think it's here anymore. First of all, the halo effect of prestige markers is weaker than ever I think. Once upon a time his prestige would have increased the excitement of listening to him. Today, much less. Second, all of the intellectual action today is coming from unique combinations of intellectual horsepower with identity alignments. Jordan Peterson is blowing up in part because he's a smart, credentialed intellectual with a message but specifically because he gives an image of admirable life for a certain type of person. It's not that JP lovers are now changing the world in a way Pinkman lovers will not, it's that JP's identity-affective alignment is not already priced in by the status quo from which Pinker's authority derives (JP tapped emotional needs not already being supplied, through new media, not prestige; hence the socio-political splash). Hell, Joe Rogan himself, who no Serious Intellectual would even call an intellectual, is making similar waves in the intellectual ecology because his basic intelligence and character combine with a certain affectively attractive performance of life that he offers to certain types of people. I could go on.

The problem for traditional public intellectuals on the Liberal Vocation model is that the image of life they herald is radically unavailable to most people so the aspirational inroad to affective alignment is close to nil; it's actually genuinely contemptible to many people (and this is getting worse as the very real racket-nature of much academia is becoming increasingly transparent; ironically the hard-science backlash against postmodernism might have unintended consequences in this regard); and the information they're able to share with the unwashed masses tends to be freely available anyway. Or worse, listeners/readers can usually find someone rehearsing the same information who also offers an identity-performance more affectively aligned with their own temperament and social position. So vanilla prestige intellectuals don't have a monopoly on the information, they no longer even have an advantage on trustworthiness given widespread mistrust toward most institutions, and they uniquely, sorely lack one of the biggest drivers of intellectual impact in the new ecology: affective-identity alignment with moving and shaking niche audiences. (Although note that, with the global internet, "niche" can very well mean several millions of people). To make matters even worse, their cultivated knack for walking the line of polite respectable "good taste" is actually a negative on the balance sheet of their social influence.

Here's another data point. I was struck by the nearly instant appearance of so many reviews and commentaries, almost all of which were ideologically colored. I don't mean that in a bad way necessarily, I just mean so many of the usual suspects were saying things to the effect you would expect them to say. And when most of those items would appear on my radar, my eyes would just glaze over. But think about the commentary that most struck me, and by "struck" I mean this combination of intellectual horsepower plus temperamentally conditional excitement. I'm talking about the post by RS Bakker that inspired this post (by the way I really wanted to just hammer out a quick 500-word thing, but this always happens, which is why I can't let myself sit down to "write a quick 500-word thing" very often). As I said, I read it quickly on the train, and at this point I don't even really remember what it said. All I know is that it had intelligent comments about Adorno and Nietzsche and their critiques of Enlightenment modernity. It was scientifically competent as far as I could tell, and then it had some kind of batshit scientific extensions I didn't really understand but which seemed promising maybe. It was only after I read the post that I wanted to see who this guy was, and from what I could grok apparently he writes fiction but also co-authored with someone in Nature? (!).

So just reflect on this for a moment. Prestige scientist I admire writes book about philosophical/political topics I am highly interested in, he does a podcast that has no effect on me, a million reviews from prestige outlets come out and I can't feel any reason to care about any of them, and it just so happens that the one item in the intellectual ecology that affected me (e.g. motivated novel production on my part), was maybe the one fiction writer in the world who has a publication in Nature writing something on his personal blog (and I didn't even know anything about him until after I read the piece). That's so strange... or rather, it would be strange if we were living even in the 1970s or even the 1990s, but it's not at all strange today. Of course there exists in the world some scientifically sophisticated blogger able to talk deeply about Adorno and Nietzsche, of course he has a blog, and of course it would find its way onto my radar. Of course it would strike me, and of course as a young academic myself right now I am more motivated to write long blog posts than do my institutional duties. Of course, this is the new reality. The real puzzle is how and why the respectable prestige dancehall of liberalism v1.0 is still populated with a good number of really smart people, when all of the music is clearly pumping out of a variegated, thousand-room warehouse of the less compromising... liberalism flatlining at degree zero.

#theory #history #intellectuals #joe rogan #steven pinker #science #jordan peterson #enlightenment

[jaigeddes]

Service Industry Failure – Happy Holidays

Normally this time of year I am thinking about what sort of Holiday themed architectural posts I can share with people. Normally these are pretty silly and represent a Sunday afternoon spent making myself giggle. I’ve written posts on the best and worst Christmas songs, Christmas cards from famous architects, even put together recipes for proper holiday cocktails … everything is fun and games all the time, right?

Of course not. Things go wrong and how you handle yourself in those moments is important, especially if you are in a service industry like architecture. This is not particularly enlightening for some, but every year at the holidays I am reminded that so few people actually connect the dots and realize that between the delivery failures and snotty retorts, they are the face of the company for which they work and the lasting impression they leave can have far-reaching consequences.

I don’t care for shopping in general but it becomes intolerable at this time of the year. I doubt you could find a happier individual than myself when online shopping became a reality and I could avoid the congestion of people fighting for parking spots at the local shopping mall. In addition to holiday shopping, we also tend to purchase items for the office (computers, 3D printers, etc.) right before the end of the year so we can avoid paying the taxes on money we leave in our corporate bank account. I would like to present two scenarios, both started off the same way but my opinions of the two companies represented at the end could not be more different.

Company #1 – FedEx

As part of our end-of-the-year equipment haul, we purchased an HTC Vive Pro virtual reality headset with all the trimmings. We excitedly waited for our packages to be delivered, knowing that in fairly short order, FedEx would have them delivered to the office. Yesterday, two of the three packages showed up … the missing package contained the actual VR headset. I go online to check the status where I am informed that the package was already delivered hours before.

What? No, it wasn’t, at least not to me and my office is so large that I am not aware of every delivery made when I am sitting at my desk.

For the next few hours, I spent time on the phone with various customer service agents from FedEx trying to determine the location of this missing box only to be told: “I don’t know what to tell you, you’ll have to follow up with the shipper and have them take care of it.” Wait a minute, this is a problem completely of your own making yet the solution involves everyone except you? I asked for the name of the person who signed for it as the delivery required a direct signature … the person who signed for it was “Receiving” and the delivery address was “Dallas, Texas.”

Ugh. Not helpful.

As I pressed on, the obvious next question (to me) was how do I prove to HTC that I didn’t actually receive my package? Again, I received the response “I don’t know what to tell you, it’s never been an issue before.” Using the word “before” as part of their response suggests that this is something that happens with regularity but they haven’t internalized this well enough to come up with an actual answer. At my request, my call was escalated to a supervisor, who proceeded to tell me that FedEx and their drivers are 1) really busy, 2) they are behind schedule, and 3) in their efforts to keep up, mistakes happen … as if any of those “reasons” should be of some comfort to me. I don’t think they realize that this is a terrible answer – everyone I spoke with was quick to point out all the reasons why they felt justified that losing my package wasn’t really that big of a deal. A much better way to handle this would have been easy,  they could have spoken about how they were addressing the problem, what steps were being taken to remedy the current situation, and what happens next if the package isn’t located. All of these things would have placated me rather than dismiss my concerns outright as if I had something to do with the missteps that had taken place, instead I hung up the phone with a bad taste in my mouth.

On the exact same day as I was dealing with FedEx, I was dealing with another delivery issue.

Company #2 – Amazon

I buy a lot of stuff through Amazon – a shameful amount probably. About 90% of my holiday shopping is done using Amazon and this year has been no different. There was one last item I wanted to get my family and rather than drive across town and go to the local big box retailer (the very idea of which still makes my face hurt), I just ordered it through Amazon. Since I have a Prime membership, I was given the option that “if you buy this item within the next 3 hours and 11 minutes, you can have this item delivered today at no additional cost …”

Amazing! So, at 6:34 am, that’s exactly what I did.

Fast forward to 3:30 pm, and I still don’t have my item. That’s cool, although I am a bit anxious because I am having it delivered to the office and I don’t want them to try and deliver it after the office has closed for the day. I’ll just go online and check the status …

Your Item is expected to be delivered on Wednesday, December 19th.

Wait a minute, that’s not the same day, that’s two days from now. WTH?

So I go online and I start chatting with an account representative from Amazon and I ask why my same day delivery not being delivered on the same day? His response was direct – that product had to come from a different distribution center than originally thought and as a result, they were not able to deliver it on the same day. My next line of questions centered around 1) this felt a little like bait and switch since I could have simply run down the street and picked it up today, and 2) why was I not alerted and given the chance to cancel my order?

The Amazon representative apologized for the poor communication and told me that he would move it to priority delivery which meant I would get it the next morning, which was essentially 1-day delivery and that it would be delivered before noon. Not bad, but still not what I had expected when I originally placed the order. As I was preparing to end the chat session, the Amazon representative apologized further and said that they would credit my account some $$ and that they sincerely hoped that this negative experience would not linger, that they valued our relationship.

This is a great way to handle a problem, right? Identify the issue, acknowledge responsibility, and present a solution, all the while avoiding language that makes me feel like this is somehow my fault or that I am being unreasonable for being disappointed. Amazon went above and beyond my expectations.

The main difference between the FedEx and Amazon exchanges are readily apparent. Amazon took responsibility for the situation and told me what they were doing to remedy the problems. FedEx essentially told me that mistakes happen, they’re really busy, and I should get over it.

Architecture is a service industry – we work against expected deliverables and typically have expectations set by our clients as to what should happen and when it is supposed to happen. These recent exchanges with FedEx and Amazon have cemented what my experience has already taught me – taking accountability for your actions (or inactions as it were) has more to do with allowing others to deal with the effects or ramifications of you not doing your part then the misstep that took place.

It has been my experience that the people I work with realize that I have their best interests at heart and that in addition to the work I am responsible for creating, I am at the mercy of others following through on their promises as well. I explain that as soon as you realize that you can’t make good on delivering your promise, let the other party know so that they have time to deal with whatever problem you have just created for them.

Take a moment and let that sink in, it’s important. The problem that you just created for them.

If I can limit the damage of not making a schedule or a delivery, the other person has some time to react accordingly. Sure there is going to be some disappointment in the results but you can recover from that if this is not a pattern of behavior – it’s their disappointment in you that is hard to recover from. If you are creating problems that other people have to deal with – what good are you as a service professional? Why would you expect someone to keep you around?

Happy Holidays, and Bah Humbug.