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transmutationisms · 9 months

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how do i know what’s right?

i feel like i have zero critical thinking skills ;-;

a lot of the time when someone poses an idea or a theory they think they’re right, and so they use language that enforces that. but then someone refutes it, and uses language affirming what they believe and i see the point in their argument. and then it gets refuted again and again and again and im just confused.

hi great question. i would love it if there were a single easy litmus test to figure out who's 'right' and whose info i should trust! unfortunately things are rarely this easy, and it's actually completely normal to be overwhelmed by the amount of information being produced and shared, especially when it comes to topics you haven't researched/lived/etc. for most of us, this will be most topics!

i'd preface this by saying that i think your overall attitude here is actually a good one. you're framing it in a pretty self-deprecating way—but actually, imo this type of openness to discussion and disagreement is a really good place to start, esp when dealing with topics that are new to you. nobody enters a contentious debate with a fully fledged, defensible viewpoint. you might feel like you're just treading water here, making no progress toward being able to evaluate arguments for yourself, but i highly doubt that's true.

all of that said: while i again cannot give you a single litmus test for figuring out what's 'right', there are four pretty basic sets of questions that i automatically run through when encountering a new idea, source, topic, or argument: we can call these origin, purpose, value, and limitations.

origin: who's the author? do they have any institutional affiliations? who pays their salary? is this argument or paper funded in any way? is the argument dependent upon the author's social position or status (race, class, etc) and if so, are those factors being discussed clearly? does the author have ties to a particular nation-state or stakes in defending such a nation-state? what's the class character of the author and the argument? what's the social, economic, and intellectual context that gave rise to this argument or source?

purpose: why is this source or person disseminating this information or making this argument? are they trying to sell you anything? are their funders? are they trying to persuade you of a particular political viewpoint? keeping in mind the answers to the 'origin' questions, are there particular ideological positions you would expect to find in this source or argument, and are they present? what are the stakes for the author or source? what about for those who cite the source or further disseminate or publish it?

value: what does this source or argument accomplish well? what aspects of the argument are new to you and strike you as insightful? are there linkages being made that you haven't encountered elsewhere, and that you think are effectively and sufficiently defended? are there statistics or empirical data that might be useful to you in forming your own argument, even if you disagree with how this source or author is interpreting them? what does this argument or source tell you about the types of debates being had, and the rules of those debates?

limitations: where does this argument or source fail you or fall apart? are there obvious rhetorical fallacies you can identify? is the author forgetting or overlooking some piece of information that you know of from elsewhere? which viewpoints may be omitted? keeping in mind the answers to the 'purpose' questions, if this source is defending a particular ideology or political position, is that one you agree with? is it only defensible so long as the author omits or distorts certain pieces of information? are there points where the argument jumps from evidence to a conclusion that the evidence can't fully support? are there alternative explanations for the evidence?

over time you will often find that it becomes more and more automatic to ask yourself these questions. you will also find that the more you read/hear about a particular topic, the faster you can determine whether someone is presenting all of the evidence, presenting it fairly, and using it to fully defend the argument they ultimately want to make. and you will probably also find that at some point, you're able to synthesise your own argument by pulling the strong parts from multiple other people's viewpoints, combining them with your own thinking, and fitting them together in a way that adequately explains and materially analyses the issue at hand.

#sry if this feels kind of abstract lol fight between specificity and applicability #lit and literacy

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wileycap · 2 months

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Hi! I really want to hear your opinion about Agni Kai in Atla LA and why it's bad thematically. Thank you!

Hi! I've never been asked anything before!

Alright, so - spoilers. Also, sorry that this is so long.

In the original, Zuko does not fight back, and that's so important. It's clear that the Fire Nation has great respect for hierarchy, whether it be elders, leaders or superior officers. Ozai is the ultimate hierarchical superior to Zuko: his father, his superior as a royal, and - of course - the leader of the entire nation.

In the Agni Kai, Ozai repeatedly orders Zuko to fight for his honor, and Zuko refuses. He remains prostrate, and reaffirms his respect for his father. In the context of this hierarchical culture, he is doing everything right in the face of an order that, to him, is the ultimate paradox. And that's what earns him his scar. A disfiguring, dishonoring brand.

He gets burned because he wants so badly to do everything right. He gets burned because he wants to show respect. He gets burned because, in a cultural context, he is behaving as he should. Because his father is cruel.

But it's not just that: it also serves as a shorthand to the audience that the Fire Nation under Ozai and his forefathers is wrong, to the point that Zuko, the dutiful son, literally cannot do right under that system. And you don't need to do a deep dive into what the culture is presented as to get that - it immediately strikes the audience with a profound sense of unfairness. It efficiently communicates that the Fire Nation is rotten, that the system itself has become corrupted and distorted.

And this sets up Zuko's entire arc. He did right, and he got punished. At the end of S2, he does wrong, and he gets rewarded, but the reward isn't fulfilling to him, because everything he could ever earn under that system is tainted and his experiences outside the system have shown him that, even if he can't accept it at first. And it's so narratively satisfying to watch him then defy his father, who tries to punish him again with lightning, only for him to now be able to literally turn it back (with Iroh's technique, Iroh being one of the few sources of unconditional love in his life!). He then redefines his relationship with Firebending itself, going back to the original source of it. He literally rids himself of the corruption of his nation.

It forms such a tight narrative arc, and it sets up so much about the Fire Nation with no need for explanation. Even his interactions with Iroh also tske on a new light: he's intentionally disrespecting his uncle - another elder and superior, as well as a father figure - and Iroh never punishes him for it. Ultimately, that unconditional love and support leads him to reform his nation.

In the Live Action, Ozai orders him to fight back, and he does. He even has a chance to strike Ozai, but doesn't, prompting Ozai to remark that "compassion is a weakness" before he burns Zuko. Which was never the point of Zuko's arc. It waters down his entire primary character conflict, because if his takeaway is that he lost a fight because he was too kind, then the only thing that needs to happen is for him to get some kind of narrative payoff by being kind. Wow, arc over. It becomes this surface level morality tale about how compassion isn't weakness.

In the LA, he also gets multiple chances to speak out at the war meeting. He questions the plan, the general and Ozai lay out actual, sensible reasons for why the plan has to proceed as it is, and then Zuko says that it's a terrible plan anyways. In the original, he speaks out once, and his words even make it clear that he's speaking out because the soldiers "love and defend our nation." His objection is the mildest possible form of objection: he isn't questioning the system, in fact, he's reinforcing it by appealing to the virtue of these soldiers. And he still gets punished.

With all that and Iroh explicitly calling out Ozai multiple times in the LA, we don't get the sense that the Fire Nation culture itself has been warped by imperialism. We just get the sense that the leader is a bad dude. And that's a far less powerful setup, and it will lead to a far less satisfying resolution.

It's an incredibly watered down version of the original, and lacks so much thematic weight.

#avatar the last airbender #atla #netflix atla #atla netflix #atla live action #atla spoilers #zuko #zuko's scar #prince zuko #fire nation #ozai #iroh #ask

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matan4il · 2 months

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I have a query and I'm sorry that this question is going to upset you in advance. I see a post circling on here about Holocaust survivors apparently saying that Palestinians are exactly like them during attacks on Gaza. I just scroll past it because I have poor attention span that cannot stay focused more than one sentence but I wanted to know your opinion on this post or if you have seen it. Again, deep apologies that this ask is upsetting. Thank you for still being here and sharing with us.

Hi Nonnie!

Thank you for the kind way you approached this.

I have seen a post that might be the one you're referring to... It's a screenshot of a tweet:

The original tweet shows an interview with one Holocaust survivor. The response falsely expands this to survivors, in the plural, as if this one tweet shows a whole movement of Holocaust survivors, that people simply refuse to listen to.

The original tweet comes from an account that calls itself a "media company," but has no website (something I would expect from an actual media company), and is at least 80% tweets that are anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. I'll give you an example. We all know Elon Musk has allowed antisemitism to thrive on Twitter, all kinds of it, including the white supremacist type, and others that have nothing to do with Israel. In an attempt to educate him, he was invited to a tour of Auschwitz. But apparently, according to this "media company," that was just meant to stop anti-genocide speech on his social media platform:

Of the up to 20% of tweets this "media company" posts or shares, many are anti-democratic or in support of dictatorial regimes.

This account also amplified the words of Julius Malema, leader of the South African EFF party, as he justified the Oct 7 massacre, and demanded support for the (genocidal) Hamas and its "resistance."

Malema himself has repeatedly sang, "Kill the Boer," a song which many understand as a genocidal chant against the Boers, the South Africans of Dutch descent. This guy is a controversial figure at best, doesn't seem to have an issue with an actual genocide, and this "media company" upholds his words as if he is a role model.

But if this account tweets Israel hate, then I guess the Tumblr user who passed the tweet along has no issue with how questionable of a source this is.

I recognized the face of the survivor. This is what it looks like in the cut off screenshot in the Tumblr post I saw:

So how did I recognize him? Because the number of anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors is SO small (around 5), and I have seen every single one of them repeatedly tokenized by antisemites so much, that I'm familiar with the name and face of each. The man in this vid is Hajo Meyer, who died in 2014. He couldn't possibly make any comments about Hamas' massacre on Oct 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza since, unless this "media company" has managed to somehow contact the afterlife. Here's a screenshot from Google, showing a recent re-upload of this vid to IG:

And here's a very brief bio, mentioning his date of death:

I'm guessing that "media company" didn't name him, or specify the date out of the vid, because it didn't want people to know the guy was dead, and the views he expressed were pre-Hamas' massacre.

Hajo Meyer was, without a doubt, an anti-Zionist. But would he still be using this rhetoric after Oct 7, after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, after better understanding the kind of threat that Israel and Jews worldwide (since Hamas has tried to target Jews in European countries as well, including in the Netherlands, where Meyer lived) are facing from this genocidal terrorist organization ruling Gaza? IDK. I'd like to think he would be better than to continue distorting the Holocaust through this false comparison, but I can't say for sure, and I'm not about to claim that I do, putting words in his mouth just to exploit a dead Holocaust survivor. The fact that the anti-Israel crowd would continue to tokenize (meaning, exploit) a dead survivor like that, as if anyone could know for sure that Meyer would continue to toe the same line, just shows there really is no moral low they can't stoop to.

And here I wanna emphasize how wrong this antisemitic practice is, tokenizing Jews. Because no marginalized group is immune to the hatred spread against it, there will ALWAYS be some of its members, who will internalize and embrace poison aimed at it. There were gay Nazis (the notorious Ernest Roehm was the highest ranking one) and we also have contemporary gay neo-Nazis. So, should we use them in order to pretend that Nazi ideology is not homophobic? That it didn't harm hundreds of thousands of gay people? No, we know that the overwhelming majority of gay people suffered due to it, and would insist that Nazism IS homophobic. So, using those few exceptions to ignore (and embolden) the homophbia of this ideology, ends up being homophobic in itself. Embracing the unrepresentative few over the representative, mainstream majority of a marginalized group in "exonerating" what the group says is hateful and harmful towards it, ends up being hateful and harmful in itself.

And that's what people who only listen to the few anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors are doing. They're basically saying, "Listen to Holocaust survivors!" but they mean only the few who say what the anti-Israel movement does. All the other survivors they ignore, dismiss, silence or even erase.

They're ignoring the voices of the overwhelming majority of Holocaust survivors who WERE (and are) Zionist. Who do not agree with this distorted narrative. Yad Vashem estimates that two thirds of Holocaust survivors came to Israel at the end of WWII, and many more supported Israel even when they chose to settle elsewhere. Just recently, we had a group of 870 American survivors (along with their descendants, altogether 2,500 Jews) thank Biden for standing with Israel after the Hamas massacre. These anti-Israel haters are also erasing the survivors who were themselves targeted on Oct 7, whether threatened, kidnapped, injured or murdered (I've talked about several in my posts on this blog). This anti-Israel mob is exploiting Hajo Meyer even in ignoring that if he had been alive and present in Israel, even just to visit a friend or family member, he would have been targeted, too. These haters are ignoring survivors who said that what Hamas has done is similar to what the Nazis did (I've talked about several of them in my posts on this blog, too. All can be found in my Israel tag).

It is unconscionable, to treat most Holocaust survivors like they don't count, and only see a (literal) handful of anti-Zionist ones as if they do. And it certainly does NOT show the respect the anti-Israel haters imply survivors are owed, through the demand that we all defer to the opinion of the survivors, but ONLY the few anti-Zionist ones.

All that said, off the top of my head, here's a small number of HUGE differences between the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, and anyone ignoring them IS guilty of distorting the Holocaust.

-> The Holocaust did NOT start due to Jews repeatedly murdering Germans on German soil, in an attempt to keep Germans down and prevent them from establishing self rule in the German ancestral land. The Holocaust was completely unprovoked, unjustified and one-sided. Every oppressive measure taken by the Nazis against the Jews, was motivated by antisemitism, and was NOT a reaction to Jewish anti-German terrorism, that the Nazis had to protect their German citizens from. Speaking of unprovoked, unjustified and for a very long time one-sided, that describes the Arab anti-Jewish violence that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel by almost 100 years. But Jewish self-defense in this conflict, which only started about 50 years after said violence began, was provoked, was justified, was a response to what was done to the Jews first.

-> The Holocaust did NOT consist of Jews on German soil collaborating militarily with several Jewish countries surrounding Germany, with the goal of these combined Jewish armies invading and wiping it off the map, in order to prevent German self rule. Guess what the Arabs did to the Jews...

-> The Holocaust did NOT entail repeated German efforts to find a solution for how Jews and Germans could live together on the same land. In pre-state Israel, Jews did try repeatedly to reach an understanding that would allow Jews and Arabs to peacefully share (and co-exist in) the Jewish ancestral land.

-> When Jews finally started rebelling against the Nazis, they did NOT try to get as many Jewish civilians as possible killed. On the contrary, the outbreak of the most famous Jewish revolt, the one in the Warsaw Ghetto, was postponed until the Nazis entered, and the Jewish fighters believed this to be the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto (meaning, the deportation and extermination of the roughly 60,000 Jews still alive there). Only then did they fight back, because (in their own words), they did not want their decision to rebel to cost another Jew "even one hour of life." Compare that to how Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Or even to the Arab leadership back in 1948, which did not hesitate in risking or displacing the entire Arab population in the Land of Israel, in favor of fighting what they called "an extermination war" against the Jews.

-> The Holocaust did NOT see a single day where Germans worked en masse to try and alleviate the suffering of Jews, whether by providing them with humanitarian aid, or by moving them to areas where they would be safe from death. That's in direct contrast to Israel's efforts to make Palestinians' lives better, whether through humanitarian aid, work permits in Israel that guarantee a higher salary and better social rights, medical treatments, warnings when a terrorist target is about to be struck, etc.

-> The Holocaust was NOT supposed to end with even one Jew alive at the end of it. The Germans were going for total extermination of the Jewish people. All Jews who had German citizens were stripped of it in 1935, even before the most murderous parts of this genocide commenced. In contrast, Israel did NOT seek to kill all Arabs, there were many calls for Arabs not to flee Israel and the war which the Arab leadership had started, at the end of the war Israel gave citizenship to 150,000 Arabs who did not leave and did not take arms against Jews, and there was even an offer for tens of thousands of Arabs to return (Weitzmann presented it to the UN), if they do so peacefully. Just a few thousands accepted that offer, but those who did, got citizenship and land.

-> The Nazis were so eager to kill every Jew, that they came to the conclusion they HAD to industrialize their genocide of the Jewish people. That's why they built extermination camps with gas chambers at their core. Auschwitz alone could, on certain days, kill about 20,000 people. No Jew was meant to leave those camps alive. The crematoria were mass murder factories. ANY crime that you want to compare to the Holocaust specifically, you have to show that it includes this industrialization element. Currently, NO GENOCIDE, no matter how horrific, has. And God help us all, I hope it stays that way (this is one of the reasons why the Holocaust mustn't be distorted or minimized. We can't prevent something from happening, if we don't understand what HAS happened, and that we're trying to stop from being repeated). There is not a SINGLE thing in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict that comes CLOSE to being an industrialized form of massacre. Even the brutality of Hamas on Oct 7, the single bloodiest day in the history of this conflict for either side, doesn't come close.

-> While there are still Jews around, meaning the Holocaust as conceptualized by the Nazis failed, it was so deadly, that it DID lead to the murder of around 70-80% of the Jews living under the Nazi occupation over a short number of years. Even more than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, Jews have not recovered demographically. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population has increased by about 10 times since Israel's Independence War. But let's say people wanna claim that just this current war is comparable to the Holocaust. There are presently around 7 million Arabs in the territories of the Jewish ancestral land, of which about 2 million are Israeli citizens. I'm gonna go with the anti-Israel narrative for a second, which claims ALL of them are occupied and oppressed by Israel (even though they're not). In order for the ruin of Palestinians to be indeed on the same level, that would mean 70-80% of them would have to be murdered by Israel during the war. Let's go with the lower percent, so it's easier for the anti-Israel crowd to reach the number of deaths that would support their claim. To have killed 70% of 7 million, that would mean Israel would have to kill 4.9 million Arabs in this so-called "genocide." Even if we exclude Israeli Arabs, and only focus on the 5 million Palestinians living in areas where the Israeli army currently operates (imagine the German Nazis allowing Jews safety inside Germany, and only killing them outside it *eyeroll*), that would mean at least 3.5 million Palestinians killed. But after almost 5 months of this war, the number of Palestinian fatalities, as claimed by Hamas, is around 30,000 people (I'm putting aside the fact that at least 12,000 are Hamas terrorists). The gap between what is happening, and what people who make this false comparison are implying is happening, is incomprehensible.

Sorry for the length, but I hope this is helpful!

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

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bumblebeeenby · 1 year

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I guess I’m calling this the Lightningbot AU now???

Basics:

- Ed and Edna wanted a child, and having access to all the scrap in the junkyard, made one of their own! They never told him what he was, because they didn’t want him to feel different.

- Jay booted up for the first time without a power source being added at all. His element powers him on its own. This baffled his parents at first, but they just went with it.

- Contact with vengestone causes Jay to shut down if he touches it, which the ninja chalk up to him passing out. The second vengestone is no longer in contact with his body, he reboots. Before he knows he’s a robot, he refers to this as a “freak vengestone allergy”.

- Jay finds out that he’s an android during Hunted, where a rough landing from the portal severely damages his body. The group struggles to repair him with their limited resources. A scrap of foil isn’t gonna fix your face, sorry Jay.

- Over the course of Hunted, he acts largely the same as he does in the original, and treats his robot body’s reveal as something funny and insists everyone just “go with the flow” and not worry about it. Meanwhile the others are OBVIOUSLY concerned, and wonder if the crash is making him malfunction. At some point he snaps out of it and it hits him all at once and he freaks out for real.

- Pixal knew the whole time, literally since S3, and never mentioned it because she assumed they all knew already. Queue Jay having flashbacks to all the little hints she dropped in previous seasons (ie: implying he may need “repairs” or a “tune-up” after a fight, which Jay would shrug off as her simply wording her concern awkwardly).

- When they make it back home, they cannot figure out how to recreate the artificial flesh on his body, and he goes home to the junkyard for repairs and confronts Ed and Edna.

- The “junkyard boy” insult hits him much harder after he finds out, and is extremely self-conscious about the fact he was literally built out of trash.

- He returns to the lighthouse out of guilt and brings Echo back home with him. They bond over being made out of actual garbage.

- His head is a plasma globe filled with a mess of electrical impulses that make up his brain. When people touch it, it acts like a plasma globe, and makes Jay feel odd things (tickling sensations, lavender smell, the taste of kale).

- Once he’s aware he’s an android, he can learn to “possess” other electronics with his element/soul. His mastery over electricity gives him an instinctual understanding of electronics and how they function, which has unknowingly contributed to his love of inventing.

- Much to everyone’s dismay, being a robot opens up a whole new world of puns and terrible jokes for Jay to abuse.

#Lightningbot AU #Jay Walker #robot Jay #ninjago au #lego ninjago #robot gore #robot body horror #ninjago #eye horror

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scalesandwings · 24 days

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I don’t think I’ve ever seen ship policing in any fandom as hostile as the policing in the Hazbin fandom. Since when did canon matter when it came to ships? Since when did the OG source material and what the creator says affect anyone’s ships? Did people forget that ships have no affect on the canon material and therefore remain harmless and insignificant? Did people forget that shipping is only fantasy and cannot actually harm anyone?

“bUt ThEyRe EnEmIeS!!1!1!” So? Shipping enemies isn’t new nor does it “erase” the original dynamic in the source material. It’s one of the most popular ship dynamics!

“iTs QuEeR eRaSuRe!!1!1!” No ship is as strong enough to overtake OG source material to erase anyone’s canon sexuality. Also, regarding Alastor, Aro-Ace is a spectrum. His canon sexuality shouldn’t affect anyone’s fantasy (because shipping is, again, just fantasy).

Never has any character’s canon sexuality stopped someone from creating fan material of their own ship and I don’t see why this “ship policing” is enforced in this fandom. Let us not forget, none of these characters are REAL! Queer representation doesn’t hang in the balance of how Hazbin characters are “properly shipped” amongst fans. If anyone’s ship bothers you, you don’t have to engage in it or support it. If you feel strongly enough to have to bully someone or call their art ugly because you don’t like it, go outside and start talking to real people. Please.

And my last note, coming from someone who is ace, who’s had a rough journey trying to figure out their own sexuality and struggled so long with labeling (because everyone’s obsessed with labels), STOP SPEAKING FOR US! Alastor’s canon Aro-Ace being tampered with among shippers doesn’t need to be your hill to die on!

#hazbin hotel #hazbin alastor #hazbin art #hazbin lucifer #hazbin angel dust #hazbin charlie #hazbin vox #hazbin husk #hazbin vaggie #hazbin adam #radioapple #radiostatic #alastor the radio demon #radiobelle #alastor x lucifer

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prying-pandora666 · 5 months

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On Alucard and Maria

Are there actually fans advocating for Alucard to be written as Maria’s father figure in the new season of Nocturne? Like that would be a good thing and not infinitely creepier? I don’t think they’ve thought this through.

Alucard is the single most popular character in the franchise. He’s also probably the most shipped character. And yet he has only had one canon love interest in the decades since he’s existed. It’s Maria. And you’re telling me that you think that because he’s 300+ and she’s 17-18 when they started living together in the games, that it would be grooming. However, somehow him inserting himself into her life at age 16 when she’s just lost both her parents wouldn’t come off like grooming!?

Does this man look like he should be picking up random children!? He’s literally terrified of his own cursed blood. Maybe LISTEN TO HIM.

I’m convinced fandoms have forgotten what that word means. Grooming has specific features. It doesn’t just mean “older guy and younger girl.” A relationship with an age gap or an uneven power dynamic can be exploitative or abusive without being a case of grooming. Grooming specifically refers to the process of forming a relationship with a child with the intention of leveraging that relationship and trust to train and prepare (aka brainwash) your victim for the harmful activities the groomer wants to normalize. The relationship Alucard and Maria have in the games is in no way grooming. You know what would be grooming though?

Coming into a 16 year old’s life when she’s vulnerable, traumatized, and recently orphaned only to insinuate yourself as a new father figure. This is so highly inappropriate and a huge red flag. Consider what you’re actually asking for here. These characters do not exist in a a vacuum. They have a long history together as each other’s only canon love interests. You cannot fully extract them from the games, art, interviews, audio dramas, animations, and more where they’re depicted as a couple. There are decades of this precedent and you are asking Netflix to knowingly take the characters with an established romantic dynamic that the audience is already primed to see as romantic and instead portray their meeting as him trying to be her new daddy?

“Oh look! Alucard and his… daughter? Yikes.” This is an official advertisement btw.

THAT is grooming! Think about the optics of this! It would be abysmal! No it would NOT fix the problem of their age gap to make him act like a groomer and get in good with her as a dad. You just cannot completely extract them from the legacy of their relationship in the source materials. It will be incredibly creepy and textbook grooming if you get your way.

Is this really what you want to associate with an “adoptive father Alucard”? Because the art we create doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All the old content—official and fanmade—is still going to exist.

What is so objectionable about the original dynamic anyway? It’s a pretty fun subversion of the tired and problematic vampire trope of “vampire man stalks teen girl and coerces her into being his”. Instead in their original relationship, Maria is the one who pursues Alucard! It’s the young woman who takes initiative and is given the agency to go after what she wants. She courts and woos him. That’s part of the fun!

Yes, Alucard is 300+. He’s also a fictional creature that doesn’t actually exist IRL and stays eternally young. There are no actual people who will ever have his problem of staying 20 forever so it’s rather silly to say he can’t date any humans because of course he will have an age gap with any of them.

The only real problem I have seen people bring up is Maria’s age, but from what I can tell, the show’s already fixed this. Check it out.

In The Games

Rondo of Blood: Maria is 12. She and Alucard do not meet. Richter is a brother-figure and not romantic.

There is then a 5 year time skip.

Symphony of the Night: Maria is 17. She and Alucard meet to save Richter. At the end, Alucard says his goodbyes and intends to return to a life of solitude. Maria goes after him because she has developed feelings for him and doesn’t want him to suffer a life alone.

Maria is given agency to pursue what she wants and prove herself even against Alucard’s resistance and hesitance to let another person into his life.

They spend a year together before we get the audio drama.

Nocturne of Remembrance: Maria continues to try to get close to Alucard. They end up saving each other’s lives and in the end he finally confesses his romantic feelings for her. She is an adult and perfectly able to make her own choices. She chose him. He admits he returns her feelings.

How fandom can look at a story about a young woman subverting the trope and chasing the vampire to get what she wants—basically an anti-Bella Swan—and still find a way to disempower her just so they can pearl clutch? I couldn’t tell you.

So now let’s look at what the show did.

In The Show

Nocturne S1: Maria is 16. She’s been aged up from 12, probably to give her a more active and believable role. But this also means she’s within a normal age to start feeling attraction and expressing her wants. Within her society, she’s even considered of marriageable age. However we are spared the discomfort of our modern values clashing with her contemporaneous ones because Maria in this season isn’t interested in romance. She’s interested in revolution, equality, justice. They’ve portrayed her with so much love and strength. There is no indication they’d betray her by writing her as the child victim of a male suitor. In fact she only meets Alucard in the final few seconds of the season and the two do not even speak a single word to one another.

Now let’s remember the games had a five year time skip. The show only needs two years to get Maria to the adult age of 18, but assuming the follow through with the timeline and go for the full five?

Maria will be 21.

21.

Fan concept for adult Maria. Credit:@esp-art

Are you telling me a 21 year old woman is not old or mature enough to make her own decisions? How is this not a total infantilization of women? Do you think a 21 year old badass vampire hunter needs protection from the ace depressed dhampir boy who just wants to sleep and has in no way tried to pursue her until after she expressed consistent and persistent interest in him?

It is not “grooming” to meet someone when they were younger and then meet them again years later as an adult. That’s a thing that happens! In real life! Adults can still make decisions for themselves! It is only grooming if Alucard behaved in a way that would manipulate teen Maria and put her under his control and authority before she can consent. There is no indication that Alucard in the show is going to do this. And yet the fandom is basically demanding it by saying he should make her “his baby girl”?

And what of Maria’s feelings in all this? She just lost her mother and was betrayed by her father shortly after discovering he even existed. She has lived her whole life without a father. She is in no desperate need of a new one. And if she does need a family member, she already has one! Richter is 19 and is her trusted adoptive brother. Why wouldn’t she go to him over a total stranger she just met and who is half vampire - literally a predator creature that feeds on humans!?

Yeah, hi, Richter Belmont still exists. He and Maria consider each other family. Why would you want her relying on a strange man she just met as a “father figure” rather than her trusted and loving brother?

Have none of you even considered how Maria would feel if Alucard even tried to fill the paternal role? He’d have to force it on her through manipulation and coercion. No way she would want to view him that way. Especially considering she is 16 and likely to be as attracted to the sparkly 20 year old looking sculpted marble beauty as anyone else!

Don’t mind the beautiful eternally young man who looks made of pure porcelain and light. No teen girl has ever been attracted to this, right? No way it could be exploitative and creepy for him to present himself as her new daddy, giving himself authority and influence over her as his child to mold as he wishes, right? Oh yeah, this is MUCH better than Maria pursuing him of her own volition once she becomes an adult, right guys?

We are truly in the stupidest dark timeline.

Frankly, I don’t care if Netflix has them get together or not. They would work just fine as friends too. I just sure as hell hope they’ll ignore the fans clamoring for a creepy daddy/daughter dynamic. Dressing it up as “concern” won’t hide that for some it’s a fetish, and for others they’re just useful idiots who haven’t thought it through.

I implore you to think it through.

#castlevania #castlevania netflix #castlevania nocturne #alucard #maria renard

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momentomori24 · 3 months

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Shadow, despite hating Nine with a passion, is the only person in this entire show that actually sees and understands him in any meaningful way. Sonic's attachment to Nine is based off his friendship with Tails and his inability to cope with the fact that his best friend is gone. In his eyes, Nine is just a gloomy, edgy version of Tails, not his own person with his own motives and desires. He's so used to him and Tails being on the same page, always having each other's back, that he didn't even bother to consider the fact that Nine and him would be any different, and his lapse in judgement is what lead to Ghost Hill being destroyed in the aftermath of Nine's betrayal.

Shadow repeats the sentiment ''they're not your real friends'' over and over in the show. Not only does he offer Sonic a mental out, a way to compartmentalize and stick to their priorities without any regrets weighing him down, it also rings very true to every character Sonic has met thus far. Rebel isn't Rouge, Renegade isn't Knuckles, Thorn isn't Amy and Nine isn't Tails. They're only pieces of their original's personality formed and twisted into their own people with their own lives and their own names. They're similar, but distinctly different, complete strangers in all but appearance. Sonic undoubtably cares about Nine and the others, but that care is built on an illusion, and Shadow recognized that immediately. And for me that's the most ironic and sensible part of it all. That it's Shadow of all people recognizing that so quickly. Shadow, the guy with a history of identity issues plagueing his legacy. Shadow, the guy who cares the least about these other people and made Sonic eat dirt for an entire episode just to sacrifice them one season ago.

And it makes sense. Because he knows first hand how difficult it is to seperate the past from the present, walking the line between being a protector and being a destroyer, his own person or just a weapon and existing as an entity for others to project on until he finally figured himself out on his own, he's able to sniff out Nine's confusion and resentment of Tails from his line ''This is the friend Sonic thought was like me? We're nothing alike'' when they encountered his ghost form before Sonic ever did. And because he doesn't care for him, he never associates him with Tails, giving him the ability to see Nine for who he really is. And Nine's troubled, selfish and volatile, and not to be trusted because his goals never aligned with theirs. He's everything Tails isn't, and that's why Sonic never acknowledged those traits. But Shadow sees Nine, and that's why he was so quick to distrust him.

It's also why he could easily deduce what the motive behind his actions were. Power. It's a motive he can certainly relate to. Something he can understand, but Sonic cannot (bless his heart). It was his driving force for the entirety of SA2. What he was after was the power of the Chaos Emeralds to inact Professor Gerald's revenge on the planet and was he believed to be Maria's dying wish, just like how Nine searches for power to create a paradise where he can live the life he always wanted surrounded by ''friends'' he never had. Both of them didn't think about the damage they caused or those they betrayed in that pursuit because they never factored into the equation in the first place. It's about power to achieve self-fulfilment, and what a broken, lonely, destructive and misguided guy seen by nobody and isolated by everybody will do to see it all through to the end.

Nine and Shadow can relate to each other. They can understand each other. They're can be on the same page when it comes to figuring out what the other person is plotting from eye contact alone (like Shadow immediately realising that Nine was going to use Sonic as his energy source). What Shadow wants from Sonic is to be heard, and what Nine wanted from Sonic was to be seen, and what they can't recieve from him they can give to each other. They're similar, they're compatible, they're both attached to Sonic despite acting otherwise and their mindsets are identical-- and that's exactly why they will never be friends.

#sonic prime #sonic prime spoilers #i find shadow and nine's rivalry really neat if that wasn't obvious already #i'm a sucker for characters so similar they're fated to clash and they fit the bill so well it's nuts #shadow acknowledges nine as his own person which is what nine always wanted out of sonic #but because he does unlike sonic he doesn't trust nine further than he can throw him. so nine is stuck regardless #idk i just wanted to rant about these guys real quick hope this post makes sense #nine sonic prime #shadow the hedgehog #sorry for any grammar mistakes!

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alatismeni-theitsa · 2 months

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https://www.tumblr.com/cardassiangoodreads/722229585723424768/im-just-going-to-say-right-now-that-i-dont-think?source=share

Just curious about your thoughts

The post and the tags because this person has blocked me preemptively - and they're lucky cause I wouldn't shat all over them. This person is a USAmerican very removed from Italian culture.

My Answer:

Ooooo coloniser rhetoric in the 21st century! That's a sight for sore eyes! (Which became sore cause they see such takes all the time).

Funny how this person talks about how objects belonging to Greece right after saying that our heritage figures (like our gods and heroes) don't belong to us. If Greek culture is a global culture why can't foreigners keep the objects? Hmmm I wonder…. They still put the "Greek" or "Roman" to characterise the stories but the moment Greeks and Italians speak up, then all of a sudden "the stories akksuually have no culture, they belong to all of us!" 😂😂😂

I wonder if this person understands what the term "heritage" means, because gods and heroes are definitely part of one's heritage and we never stopped preserving the texts that spoke about them, and they are still part of our living culture.

I'm all for listening to the members of the diaspora but when we are at the point when one of them is regurgitating imperialist points, not only there's a big divide with current opinions in Italy, but I also cannot leave such points unanswered. Also, many Italians, like Greeks, are sick of how their myths are treated but this person didn't even check, they just spoke over them. Because they didn't bother to ask people, obviously.

Ancient Greek heroes and gods still mean a lot to us. They always meant. They were born from visions, dreams, and other sacred methods, or oral traditions from our ancestors, reflecting specifically the ancient Greek culture. It's good that foreigners can access them and relate to a degree but divorcing any folk story from its origin is always negative. Especially when this culture is still ongoing.

Our Christianity is revamped ancient Greek religion, I wonder, does this person know that? Our temples have the same parts. We still have home altars, and divinities presiding over domains. Our hagiography is how we used to paint our gods and creatures. We still have almost the same nature creatures. The customs have remained and have persisted, and I won't have someone who clearly ignores this say "They gave the religion up". Ftou.

Also when it comes to our gods and their symbols (and yes btw we call them "our" gods lots of times), we can deduce things from our local tradition and environment, whereas an Anglophone who worships the gods or is interested in them but doesn't know stuff about the country of origin of those gods has no idea about our history, methods and environment. Example: Foreigner refuses to accept that there's a pine cone on Dionysos' thyrsos (although it looks like a pinecone) because "it doesn't make sense" and very excitedly suggests another plant instead. Greek lets them know that it is actually a pine cone not only because it looks like a pinecone but because the pinecone has been used in our winemaking process forever, and Dionysos also presided over this process. Guess Greece and its environment and it's people are still relevant to the religion, and it also turns out that the symbols of the gods derived from the Greek reality. Who knew!

Now onto another point. Op says that the Greek stories became "global culture" because they got shared everywhere. Them being shared is not a bad thing! However just studying them and be taught about them is not culture. By this logic, and since Egyptians "gave their old religion up", ancient Egyptian gods are now MY ancient gods because I can find books about ancient Egypt at my local bookstore. woww 😂 What about this? Almost every Greek knows 100 and 1 nights. We have made it into a play also. SOO... these are our cultural stories now, right? West Asians and Arabs in general shouldn't speak if they ever see us and other nations being ridiculous about the stories, and stereotypes and changing the characters a lot but still claim we are doing great, right? Got it.

The way this post is written it's like Germans and Brits kept the ancient Greek myths alive since ancient years or something. Greeks themselves never stopped preserving their own ancient texts, and they escaped with them in Europe after the fall of Constantinople, so NW Europeans REDISCOVERED them 1500 years later. They had lost interest by then.

Funny they mention different nations that were Hellenized or became Roman territories because people living in these nations are exactly those who don't speak about Greek and Roman culture as "a global culture". It's always North Westerners who start these discussions, I wonder why…..

People from the aforementioned nations already interact healthily with their ancient heritage - which is not Greek or Roman culture but always a local version with Greek or Roman elements, and that's great too. I haven't heard a Pakistani say "Theseus is our hero too!" or a Tunisian say "Zeus is our local ancient father of the gods!" Because they know exactly how the mix happened and what their national identity is. And I'm getting more and more tired of seeing Westerners erase these experiences too, and just make assumptions for other nations.

I swear I mostly see USians getting butthurt about other people getting conquered 2.000 years ago. The nations themselves don't give a shiiit. Guys, I know our antiquities are the only interesting thing about us in your eyes but Please Make An Effort to understand people from ancient cultures and how we don't give a shit about these conquests cause they happened Two Thousand Years Ago, and we had other tragic stuff in the meantime. Thanks

Also, as I said, these conquests are not why Greek myths are popular today. The conquests were so incredibly old that the average person in these countries (Balkans, the Mediterranean, West Asia) - and Greece - had no idea who built the ancient ruins they saw around! Does this person think Greek myths were handed down from Moroccan grandma to Moroccan grandchild from 300 BCE to 2024 continuously or something?

Greek myths are very popular in most parts of the world today because the West (meaning not Greece, especially at the time when we were "cattle") popularized them non-stop the last few centuries. And they did a shitty job, at that. In fact, Greeks abroad have been cringing about this treatment of our myths since the 15th century but, as usual, we were not being heard.

And what does "global culture" even mean?? As if you see any culture to how the US (because OP focuses on the US and the retellings there, from the looks of it) interacts with our stories. As if they care about the meaning of the story. (There are a few notable exceptions ofc but they remain FEW) People with such arguments just want to feel guilt-free when using our myths out of context. That's why Western academic cycles often run in circles about "what the myths mean" while Greeks have told you exactly what they mean.

The US audience is still not free of the coloniser WASP approach. They see our myths STILL as a product of modern White Supremacy instead of an ancient Greek product, and they often condemn the myths and "better" them by completely pushing them into USian lens to the point they don't look or feel like the original myths anymore. (All the above you don't dare to do with cultural stories and figures from nations you want to respect, by the way.) Is this the cultural "exchange" they're talking about?

I'm done hearing in the international spaces that my culture is "boring" because USians have seen horrible adaptation after horrible adaptation. I'm tired of USians making wild assumptions about how "horrible" our gods are because whoever told them the myths didn't give a simple explanation about our ancient societies. (Don't start crap about accessibility, there are very accessible ways to talk to kids, teens, and adults about other cultures and teach them age-appropriate tales) I'm tired of my heritage being commercialized to that degree. All Greeks roll their eyes in USAmerican movies about our culture and we call them Amerikaniés. And don't worry, I'm getting to the real stuff.

How our ancient culture is treated and how we are sidelined has real consequences on our lives abroad AND inside our culture, on how we are perceived, on how our surnames are perceived, on how we "don't look like Greeks", on how our Greek myth retellings don't get published abroad! They speak in front of us about our own words as if they are magical and mythical and strange! The opinions and perspectives of Greeks are not sought abroad, and you are a masterclass on why this happens. We make y'all uncomfortable. You feel better if you forget about us.

Another exhibit: All the hurtful comments of foreigners who centered the HUGE milestone of same-sex marriage in Greece because all they could imagine - while queer Greeks suffered a lot these last few months - was their wedding in Gay Mykonos and Lesbian Lesbos. This was their first reaction. They didn't possibly think that Greeks were seeing that because we are far away and irrelevant, right?

Obviously culture-mixing is not bad but the West didn't mix our culture with theirs. They just took it for entertainment and their popular culture never saw the depth or the meaning of it. OP speaks about how our stories were spread while actively avoiding speaking in depth about the problematic elements of that spread. They recognize to a small degree how Greeks feel about the matter but they dismiss most of our concerns in such a nonchalant way that all that comes to my mind is "privilege".

And speaking of power… Greeks have less systemic power than the countries of the West. We are the US' puppet, are you kidding me?? Our armies get deployed wherever the US wants. Our politicians don't even fart without a telephone from the US. We are the whores of the German, Belgian and French governments. Greeks abroad still face discrimination for their customs and how they look, and how their food smells, and how our religion is and how our hymns sound, and other ridiculous stuff. Our infrastructure is slowly being bought out by Germans and USians to various degrees. There are different scales to exploitation and bigotry, I agree, but that doesn't mean that only the roughest bigotry cases are worth discussing.

"We could also talk about the additional level of exploitation in how imperial powers used Greek mythology as an argument for the "superiority of the West," while at the same time plundering Greece's resources and treating it like it exists only as a tourist site" They are SO close to getting it, and yet their post says otherwise.

Fetishism of a culture makes the members of the actual culture feel alienated and hurt. As a person of Italian ancestry you should know how this specific "global culture" argument has been used to strip Greeks and Italians of any claims, so the "dirty Greeks" can be separated from the "pure WASP" USian upper class of the time who deemed themselves more suitable to engage with the material.

"Greeks spreading their culture through military force all over (eventually) most of Europe" what the hell?? Sorry, guys, (side-eyes the other Greeks) we conquered Romania??? wow!

Plus, this person doesn't know the difference between the Greek colonisation of Italy and Sicily and the recent European colonisation, and - to say it very politely - they should open a book.

By The Way

You can still interact with the Greek culture without having a colonial attitude! Nobody is barring you! I want to make this abundantly clear!

Most importantly, you don't have to make arguments for "global culture" when it's simple to place the myths inside their original context while interacting with them! You just have to read a bit more books that are on the internet and your library for free! Recognising that a foreign culture is not yours, and that you engage with it because it's just popular, doesn't stop anyone from interacting with it. You simply refuse to interact with them at the proper, deeper level, because you always want to center them around yourself. You want to interact with foreign stories just how the colonisers did it. Congrats.

I'm talking about the majority of cases. Of course people in the US can take all sorts of inspiration from foreign myths and adapt them to their reality. And it's a good result when they're being respectful and have studied the stories beforehand.

All we ask is to engage with the material in context so you can understand what our ancestors wanted to express. If your only view of Greek myths has come from other Americans and NW Europeans then you see them through coloniser lens. That's non-negotiable. I had people from other countries recite to me USAmerican viewpoints about the Greek gods, as if they were fact. Cause it's the only exposure that's happening worldwide right now.

You can interact with Greco-Roman myths whether Greece and Rome touched your country or not, we don't care. But please don't get your source from the pop US culture. These people think that it makes sense for nymphs to look like trees (that's an Anglo-Saxon and Celtic nature creature depiction. Ancient Greece was very anthropomorphic). It's not a crime if you change some stuff in a retelling but why willingly ignore the original depictions and what they have to show you for the ancient people who created them?

Pfff... Thank you anon for bringing this trash to me. I needed to - metaphorically - throw something in the trash. It took me a few hours to answer this but well... I do write a lot and this post was full of shit I had to shovel.

#answered #xenoi doing bs #uscentrism #representation #appropriation #greek myth #greek mythology

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silvermoon424 · 10 months

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Twisted Tropes: An Examination of How Magical Girl Tropes are Subverted in Puella Magi Madoka Magica

(this is a long one, clocking in at over 1600 words. Enjoy!)

Madoka Magica has often been called a “deconstruction” of the magical girl genre, and while many fans refute that claim, it’s clear that it at least offers a darker twist on many of the tropes beloved and well-known in the genre. These tropes include the transformation trinket, the cuddly mascot, the monster of the week, magical girls having a secret double life, magical girls themselves being child heroines, and even the concept of why magical girls fight in the first place.

One of the biggest examples of these tropes being twisted is the magical girl transformation trinket, which in this series are Soul Gems. In more conventional magical girl series, transformation items are pretty, flashy items that enable the girl to transform from her civilian form to her magical girl form- and to be frank, serve the double purpose of selling toys and merchandise in the real world.

In PMMM, Soul Gems are beautiful Faberge egg-like items that serve the same purpose. It turns out though, that their name is very literal; they are gems that serve as containers for the magical girl’s soul (or may even be her crystallized soul, it’s not really made clear). Soul Gems are formed when magical girls make a contract with Kyubey and are the source of their powers. Moreover, because her soul has been ripped out of a magical girl’s body, her body cannot function unless her Soul Gem is within a few hundred feet of what is now her soulless husk.

In more traditional magical girl shows, transformation trinkets sometimes get stolen, misplaced, etc with no ill effect for their users except for an inability to transform. In PMMM, this is a literal death sentence unless the Soul Gem can be recovered (as displayed in episode 6, when Madoka tosses away Sayaka’s Soul Gem in an attempt to prevent her and Kyoko from fighting). The consequences of this are actually explored in one of the routes of the Madoka Magica PSP game; Sayaka is separated from her Soul Gem in a Witch’s barrier, and it takes Kyoko days to find it. In that amount of time, her body began to literally rot.

The next concept I want to explore is that of the cuddly mascot. Magical girl mascots are a common feature in many shows, from the Moon Cats in Sailor Moon to Cerberus in Cardcaptor Sakura to the many, many mascots in the Precure franchise. In all of these series, the mascots act as friends and often mentors to their magical girl companions; in most series, they are also responsible for empowering/awakening their magical girls.

In PMMM, Kyubey initially seems to be much the same. He is a cute, cuddly creature who is responsible for creating and guiding magical girls. Pretty soon however, it becomes clear that Kyubey is a sinister figure. His contracts don’t seem very benevolent; they seem exploitative, taking advantage of girls when they’re at their lowest point. And unlike the Senshi in Sailor Moon or the Cures in Precure, it quickly becomes apparent that the magical girls in PMMM are dealing with much higher stakes- at least, when it comes to their own wellbeing.

PMMM almost seems to ask the question: what kind of creature would give superpowers to children and send them to fight monsters that could very easily kill them? Even Kyubey’s appearance is highly implied to be a carefully calculated façade meant to lure teenage girls into a false sense of security and make them feel drawn to him. For example, Kyubey uses this to his advantage when he plays up his helplessness to Madoka in episode 1 when he’s being hunted down by Homura. In reality, the Incubator’s true appearance- as seen in Rebellion- are implied to be mechanical structures with giant eyes in the middle; a very alien appearance suiting their alien origins and psychology.

Speaking of child heroines, PMMM also addresses the magical girl tropes of the child heroine and the double life. In most magical girl shows, being a teenaged (or even child/preteen) magical girl is portrayed as an exciting, glamorous, heroic position. The role of magical girl is often contrasted against the mundane, yet still charming and school and civilian life. Magical girls often work hard to maintain the secret of their alter egos from their (non-magical girl) friends and family, although in some series the secret does come to light. However, the girls are usually able to enjoy a healthy balance between their personas.

In PMMM, magical girls seem more like child soldiers than glamorous heroines. Being young girls and not hardened adults, many magical girls face severe psychological trauma from the life they’re thrust into- much life real-life child soldiers. Most magical girls made their contracts without truly getting to think about their wish or the consequences of being a magical girl for the rest of their lives. And because getting enough Grief Seeds is literally life-or-death, they must spend most of their free time patrolling for Witches.

We get a good look at the toll being a magical girl takes on one’s social life through Mami’s character; supplementary materials reveal that she was once a popular girl who had a lot of friends, but after she was forced to contract in the same accident that killed her parents, she slowly lost all her friends because she had no time to do anything else but train, hunt Witches, fight Witches, etc in her free time. In episode 3, when Madoka talks about how she wants to be a magical girl, Mami outright tells her that the life of a magical girl is a lonely one and Madoka will no longer have time for things like boys or hanging out with her friends after school. Even in Magia Record- an alternate timeline that offers a much more positive look at the PMMM-verse- most magical girls are only friends with each other.

Another major example of a trope being twisted is that of the “monster of the week.” Most magical girl series have the girls fight monsters, and in many of those series the monsters are created from human beings. Sailor Moon and the Precure franchise are two standout examples of this. For example, in the fifth season of the 90s anime adaptation of Sailor Moon, people who don’t have “true” Star Seeds will turn into monsters called Phages if their Star Seeds (ie, souls) are ripped out. A similar phenomenon happens in Heartcatch Precure, with the added bonus of the victim’s consciousness eternally reliving the same state of despair that made them vulnerable in the first place. In all of these series, however, the magical girls are able to heal the victims and restore them to their former selves. Sometimes, if the monster/victim is a loved one or someone else known to them, they can even do a “I know you’re in there somewhere” plea to help them to break free.

PMMM takes the true horror of this concept up to eleven. Moreover, the victims aren’t regular people- they’re the magical girls themselves, and this fate is inevitable. Every magical girl, if she doesn’t die in battle against a Witch, will become a Witch herself who spreads despair and kills innocent people until the day she is put out of her misery by another magical girl. And she will be in misery; the Rebellion movie shows that Witches relive the worst moments of their lives over and over again and are psychologically tortured. A lot of Witches also seem to be in ironic hells. For example, Charlotte can create any dessert she wants except for cheese or cheesecakes, which is her favorite food. Roberta is surrounded by lascivious men (her familiars) who annoy her. And of course, every Witch was once a magical girl who once spread hope and saved people and now does the opposite.

It’s also made abundantly clear that once the Witch transformation happens, it’s over. There’s no saving someone. The only person in canon who is able to actually get results is Madoka- aka an actual goddess with huge karmic potential- and it comes with caveats (in one, later timeline she brings Sayaka back from the dead after she became Oktavia, and in Rebellion she is able to reverse Homura’s transformation into Homulilly- although afterwards Homura still needs to be brought into the Law of Cycles like any other magical girl about to become a Witch). In episode 9, when Kyoko and Madoka try to reach out to Sayaka’s inner self when Kyoko fights Oktavia, it ends in Kyoko’s death because nothing of Sayaka remains.

In most magical girl shows, the monsters of the week are just ineffectual mooks who are fodder for the evil organization opposing the magical girls. But in PMMM, they are mirrors of the magical girls themselves, agents of chaos and despair who present a very real threat to the magical girl’s lives- not to mention the lives of any unfortunate people who stumble across them.

Finally, I want to examine the topic of why magical girls fight in the first place. In most series, there is a group of villains who pose a threat to humanity/the Earth/etc and magical girls must oppose them. There is a very real external threat being faced.

In PMMM however, the beings that empower/perpetuate magical girls and are ultimately the threat are one and the same. Because the tragedy of PMMM is that magical girls are fighting against a self-perpetuating cycle; magical girls form contracts, magical girls become Witches, more magical girls form contracts and fight the Witches, and on and on it goes. Magical girls are their own enemy, in a sense.

I’m sure there are lots of tropes I��m forgetting, but this essay is already over 1,600 words long, lol. I might make a part 2 at some point, so give me your ideas!

#I wrote this while I was stuck at the office this week lmao #it helped keep me sane #pmmm #puella magi madoka magica #madoka magica #analysis #my analysis #my writing #anime analysis #tropes #writing tropes #magical girl #magical girls

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sporesgalaxy · 1 year

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Gee. You know. Looking at this? I am not eved making a comic this long. I've just kept slowly adding to this thing and it's too big to do anything with now. So. Uh.

3 part final version of my TOHsona dream sequences I guess? cw for violence and unreality

Part 1: (the pitchfork dream I posted a draft of a while back)

There is an old myth on the Boiling Isles that Humans, because they cannot cast spells, lack a heart.

This myth predates the discovery of the bile sac. In ancient times, it was understood only that the heart was the source of a witch’s magic.

This is the origin of the modern superstition that witches with round ears are heartless in the metaphorical sense.

[12 YEARS BEFORE THE DAY OF UNITY]

Philip watches as Caleb walks away from him, towards the figure of a witch silouhetted against an obscuring light, her hand outstretched.

Philip cannot move a muscle. He grips the rock he's crouching behind and his wooden mask so tightly that his knuckes are white.

Caleb reaches the witch, and discards his pitchfork. The loud clatter makes Philip twitch, but he remains frozen. He wills himself to stand, to shout, to do something, anything, but it's useless. His body simply refuses to listen.

The witch puts an arm around Caleb so gently that Philip wants to be sick. They enter the light slowly, agonizingly. Philip watches as their forms blur around the edges more and more, until at last the final hint of their shadow vanishes, and the door slams behind them.

Philip leaps to his feet, knowing he is too late. He jumps over the rock anyways, running full speed towards the door.

P: CALEB--!

Abruptly the door swings open again, and a new figure rushes out of the light, toward Philip, causing him to stop short and almost fall over from momentum. She leans back through the doorway to say one last thing--

S: --no thank you! Sorry!

-- then closes the door hurriedly and backs away from it nervously. Philip finds himself at a complete loss for how to react. This girl is not the witch who took Caleb, she's too short-- closer to Philip's height-- and her hair is too long. She shows no trace of the demonic pointed ears, either, but one can never be too cautious.

From behind the door, Philip hears the muffled voices of a few more young girls:

?: What's her problem?

?: You're missing out, scardey cat~!

?: She wouldn't've been much help, but it would've been fun...

?: C'mon guys, lets pick a doll!

[giggling]

The girl sighs, staring forlornly at the door as the voices fade away.

P: [now weilding Caleb's pitchfork] Who are you?!

S: [jumps violently] Agh! Uh--!

She rubs her face and sniffles. Her cheek seems shinier, but it's not quite how tear streaks should look--

S: I'm Signey-- Sorry! I thought this was...my room...?

She looks around, only now registering that she is in a cave.

P: Well, you don't belong here! Begone!

P: A-and bring my brother back! Or...or else!

He thrusts the pitchfork toward her threateningly, with much more confidence than he feels. She lifts her open palms in front of her to mime surrender, and leans away from him for good measure, back pressed against the door.

S: I didn't see any boys on my way here! I just came down the hall!

She points unhelpfully at the door.

P: I don't care!! Get out!!!

She reaches for the doorknob as if to heed him, but then pauses and stares nervously at it, chewing her lip.

S: Uh...can I stay here for just a minute, actually...?

Shw turns toward him a little, but doesn't make eye contact. She is wringing her hands.

S: I just...don't want to be in there during the conjuring spell...

P: Spell?! [gasps] Caleb!

Frantic, Philip runs toward the door, and fhe stranger has the good sense to swiftly step out of his way. His hand hesitates over the doorknob for just a moment. He takes a deep breath, barely manages to steel his resolve, and throws open the door.

On the other side is a hallway, apparently inside of a house. He hears girls giggling around the corner and runs toward the sound

He's met by a circle of witches that look a little bit older and are dressed even more strangely than the girl he just spoke to. Candles are arranged throughout the room, and tbeir wicks burn an unnatural green color, casting everything in an eerie, flickering light.

P: [wielding pitchfork at them again] Where is Caleb?!

The witches look at him with confusion, disdain, and annoyance.

??: Uh.

??: What the hell?

?: Get out of here! No one invited you!

??: Cool witches only.

P: [voice shaking] Just-- just tell me where my brother is and I won't hurt you!!!

??: Oh my Titan.

??: We don't know who you're talking about, weirdo!

??: Seriously!

Signey shuffles timidly around the corner behind Philip.

S: Uh...Sorry. He's confused, I think...Sorry...

?: Whatever. Just get him away from us.

Signey walks toward Philip, lifting a hand as if to touch his arm, but stopping short.

S: Hey, come on--

He stumbles backwards a couple of steps, twisting to face her.

P: Get away from me!! I can't allow these witches commune with the Devil, or-- or whatever it is they're doing!

S: [raising her voice to match his] Can't you just leave them alone?

S: You're ruining the conjuring! [she steps toward him]

[Philips shakey grip on the pitchfork tightens]

P: What is wrong with you?! That's clearly dark sorcery!!

??: Ugh, shut UP.

?: It's not a big deal. It doesn't even count as Wild Magic. Everyone knows that.

S: Yeah! It...it doesn't count. Just let them do whatever they want!

??: Yeah!

P: But...You don't really think that!!

S: !

P: Just a minute ago, I saw how scared you were! You must be able to tell this is evil!

S: No! I-I just...I'm nervous, 'cause...!

[The other witches are all staring at her silently. Signey cannot meet their eyes]

S: I just am! I'm a baby, okay?! It's me, not them!

P: How can you defend them?! They took Caleb! They're evil!

S: SHUT UP!!!!

[Philip is shocked into silence]

S: NO ONE CARES!!!!

S: No one cares about your stupid brother!!!! He's not even here!!!

S: No one wants YOU here, either!!!

S: So GET OUT!!!!

As the witches shout in agreement, Signey suddenly lunges for his arm-- he elbows her away. She reaches for the pitchfork instead, managing to grab the handle. She tugs on it hard, and nearly wrenches it out of his hands. He needs to act fast, or he's going to be defenseless. In a moment of desperation, Philip twists the pitchfork out of her grip and swings the sharp end towards Signey, succumbing to the childish impulse to squeeze his eyes shut. He feels the pitchfork catch.

The room falls dead silent. The light seems to change. Signey, who had flinched reflexively, looks down to see the prongs of the pitchfork sticking into her chest.

Philip stares, frozen with shock. The direction he'd swung in and the place she was standing should have made this impossible.

Signey is not moving, barely even breathing. The two children stay stone still for a moment that seems to stretch on for ages.

Then, the witches behind them start laughing.

Philip whips his head around to look at them. They are shrouded in shadow, their facial features becoming unclear and their grins seeming to stretch to uncanny extremes in the dim light. They take turns jeering between fits of giggles.

??: Wowww!

??: Seriously?

??: Don't just stand there!

?: Suck it up!

??: Use a spell!

Philip's skin crawls.

P: Stop laughing!! This isn't a joke!

Laughter roars again.

?: Yeah it is!

Pointing a shadowy finger toward the pitchfork’s prongs, a witch with long, dark hair continues, barely stifling her own laughter,

?: Look! There’s nothing in there!

When Philip looks again, he realizes it’s true. It’s as though he’s poked through the shirt of a scarecrow. The fabric puckers inward, but there’s no indication of flesh or blood underneath.

Despite everything, the unnatural sight gives Philip a rush of vindictive courage.

P: She’s a witch, like all of you! It’s sorcery!

His comment renews their laughter a bit too well. The lead witch says, as though it is the most obvious thing in the world,

?: Yeah right! She can’t even handle a moonlight conjuring!

Signey is trying desperately to speak, but her jaw will not move far enough, and her vocal chords refuse to cooperate. She can't even will herself to look up. She is helpless. Still, Signey hears the wide smile in her sister’s voice as she continues:

?: Don't you get it?

?: You’re both human!

Philip's blood runs cold.

?: And he still hates your guts.

The witch erupts into hysterical giggles. Philip’s eyes reflexively snap to Signey, and he regrets it. Her wide-eyed, desperate terror reflects his own too closely.

Philip steps backwards in a futile attempt to separate himself from what he’s done. The fire encircling them, dancing with derisive glee, prevents him from getting very far. When did the flames get so tall? Philip feels the bloodied knife slip out of his weak grip.

Signey's skin prickles. It's forming scales that dry out and catch on her hair. She presses a forearm against her stab wound, which is feeling strangely cold. Her breaths are shallow.

With no one around to impress, the things Signey said come crashing down on her. Of course he hates her.

She wants to let herself collapse. She wants to cry. She wants to apologize. She can't form the words. She wonders how it feels to burn to death. She wonders if his poor brother will be okay.

Philip's blood feels like ice. He can’t doubt himself now, not after he’s come this far. Not when there is still so much to do. His opponent is only a silouhette against the flames, curling in on itself pathetically. He can't indulge the pity or the grief. It's too late for that, now. “You’re not human,” he mutters desperately instead, shaking his head, “Not anymore.” The figure staggers, struggling to hold itself upright. His dread and panic, allowed a tiny foothold, now refuse to release him; Philip feels himself teetering on the edge of sickening, unbearable uncertainty.

Eager to drag him deeper into terror are the hundreds of grating, childlike voices that swiftly flood his mind. They bury all coherent thought under a shrill cacaphony of accusation and animal distress. Philip feels his muscles slithering painfully beneath his skin, spasming more violently when he reflexively tenses them, only ceasing after they’re stretched taut by aching, malformed bones. He shifts his weight, fighting the burden of his own greusome anatomy.

A round, golden mask snaps loudly beneath his heel, and he lurches backward, into an unseen abyss.

Too shocked to control the transformation, with nothing to support his weight, Philip falls backward--

In two very different places on the Boiling Isles, Signey Shale and Emperor Belos jolt awake from a nightmare.

#tohsona #toh

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mdzs-fanon-exposed · 3 months

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MDZS Fanon VS Canon: 2/?

Wen Ning fits Jiang Cheng's list of requirements for a wife

Rating: FANON – NEUTRAL

A lot of ships involving Jiang Cheng will use a list detailing the characteristics of his ideal woman as evidence for one pairing for another, and the character brought to me to evaluate as a suitable match was Wen Ning. Unfortunately, I have to rate this as fanon because Jiang Cheng's wife requirements... aren't canon to the novels.

In terms of the official adaptations, Jiang Cheng's requirements for his perfect wife seem to be Untamed-only canon, as part of the Jiang Cheng/Wen Qing subplot the drama invented. However, the MDZS Fandom Wiki (which, side note, is a horrible source for anything) credits the following list of requirements to a since-deleted Tumblr post:

Naturally beautiful, graceful and obedient, hard-working and thrifty, coming from a respected family, cultivation level not too high, personality not too strong, not too talkative, voice not too loud and must treat Jin Ling nicely. (source)

Using the Wayback Machine, I managed to find the original Tumblr post in question (seen here). According to the user who posted it, this is a translated excerpt from a Weibo post written by MXTX herself, listing 10 supplemental facts about the books – supposedly posted a year before The Untamed was first announced.

I do not have Weibo and cannot verify this claim, but regardless, I do not consider "word of God" to be canon for the purposes of this blog. Whatever MXTX's intentions were when writing this list, Jiang Cheng's requirements are not mentioned anywhere in the actual text, and so I cannot rate this suggestion as anything but fanon. You, the reader, are free to choose whether you think MXTX's supplemental material is canon-accurate.

As for Wen Ning himself: Canonically, Jiang Cheng "could never tolerate" him (Seven Seas Ch. 19, p. 251), and so unfortunately this ship cannot officially sail. Even if Wen Ning does fit every entry on this list, Jiang Cheng would not consider him a prospective match. I do not consider the list canon, and so any attempts to figure out if Wen Ning fits the letter of the list (if not the spirit) can not be anything but subjective.

But, well, this post is about the list itself, not Jiang Cheng's feelings about it. So while I'm here, I might as well have some fun with it.... Feel free to use the notes to debate whether or not you think Wen Ning is secretly right for Jiang Cheng's dubiously-canon standards.

Naturally beautiful: Wen Ning is ADORABLE and I LOVE HIM. You can't look at him and NOT call him cute; even Wei Wuxian thinks his "side profile [is] delicate and refined" (Seven Seas Ch. 12, p. 141). Would Jiang Cheng think this? Um,

Graceful and obedient: He's pretty meek and he's described as a yes-man (Seven Seas Ch. 16, p. 22), and he does what Wei Wuxian says a lot (under magical flute coercion or otherwise), but he can be pretty stubborn when he wants to be. I wouldn't call him falling off a roof "graceful," but I suppose that was after he was zombified.

Hard-working and thrifty: Yes – I can't imagine he got all those Wen subordinates by being completely lazy. And if anything he's kind of the pack horse for the Burial Mounds crew lol.

Coming from a respected family: Technically? Yes. The Wens have historically been a powerful and influential family, and Wen Ning is the younger brother of someone of "a rank on par with Wen Chao" (Seven Seas Ch. 12, p. 148). Functionally? Uhhhh

Cultivation level not too high: This one is debatable, but probably a yes. We don't receive much information about Wen Ning's cultivation level, since his fighting prowess isn't really plot-relevant until he dies, but he is described as "unremarkable" in comparison to Wen Qing. Just like, in general, I guess. (Seven Seas Ch. 12, p. 149)

Personality not too strong: See #2. I would say yes with some caveats. Especially (and ironically) when Jiang Cheng is involved.

Not too talkative/voice not too loud: Also a match! Wen Ning stutters a lot and doesn't really raise his voice unless he's angry, so he's pretty quiet. Remember that time he and wangxian were on that boat and Wei Wuxian straight up didn't notice him for like five minutes? Poor guy. Can you believe this happened to him twice.

Must treat Jin Ling nicely: Do we count murdering his dad? Because if we don't, then Wen Ning treats Jin Ling very nicely. He even saves his life multiple times!

In conclusion: ?????????

#fanon vs canon #mdzs #jiang cheng #wen ning #rating: neutral #i am not going to provide sources for every part of my breakdown of the list bc it is so much just me fucking around with it #but yall are welcome to take this and run with it. tell me all the reasons u think ur fav character is actually jc's perfect match #*wen ning voice* if i had a nickel for every time i was on a boat with lwj and wwx (give or take assorted juniors)#and i wasn't noticed for a weirdly long amount of time #i'd have two nickels. which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice

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ikindamaybewanthertositonmyface · 2 years

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Hi, my name is Dahlia, that's not me up in the header image of course, that's my kitty Stormi, I'm not all that comfortable with my appearance so I figured I'd share her cuteness instead.

So I feel kinda uncomfortable doing this, but recently I wound up 3,000 dollars in debt, and I'm required to pay off 300 dollars of it each month. But I really cannot afford to do so all on my own. I barely have any money in the bank to speak of, and my only source of income is 700 dollars a month that I receive from Social Security Disability, which I've been on since I was 18. Normally this 700 is actually just enough for me to get by each month, but now with 300 dollars of it going towards paying off this debt, it's left me in a pretty bad place.

I of course have bills to pay for, including for rent, among other things. And then I also have about a dozen or so medications to pay for, medications that I need for my Depression, Anxiety, and OCD. Along with the ones for my Hormone Replacement Therapy, which I've been on for almost 4 years now.

And so the 400 I'm left with after paying off the debt each month is just not enough for me to get by.

It's lead to me having to borrow from the few friends I have just to get by, and they are all having hard enough times getting by as well, and I don't want to keep putting the burden on them. Especially when they can't afford it either.

So all in all the situation I'm in just has me having daily panic attacks, as I'm just so scared and worried about what I'm going to do, and even with all the medications I'm on, my depression and anxiety has just been out of control lately.

So last night I was talking to a friend about all this, and they suggested I try making a Go Fund Me page. Originally I wasn't sure about that, I mean it's not like I'm in a medical emergency or anything like that. And I felt, and still do feel kinda bad at the idea of asking those I don't even know for help when there are probably people out there who deserve it more then I do. But my friend assured me that things like this, the situation I'm in, is exactly what Go Fund Me is for. So here we are.

I honestly don't know if anyone will even help me out here, I can be pretty pessimistic at times, and since all this got started it's just been so much worse. Plus I know that times are hard for everyone right now. But anything you could spare would help me out a whole lot. Or if you can't help out by donating, please consider sharing this link on any social media sites you use to spread the word. Thank you.

Also, if anyone likes the pic of my kitty, I'll gladly share more pictures of her in updates, I have tons of them. :D

#Go Fund Me #GOFUNDME #Donation Post #Donation Request #Please Help #Financial Aid #Donations Needed

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fuck-customers · 2 months

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https://www.tumblr.com/fuck-customers/740474153557164032/this-is-totally-a-dick-move-but-im-doing-it?source=share

I wanted to address a reply I saw on this post that I submitted. (I prefer to stay anonymous on the off-chance that someone could figure out who I am from my blog. The chance is EXTREMELY small, but if you read the original ask, you'll understand my concern)

Someone responded, saying that (I'm paraphrasing) by leaving negative reviews, I'm causing corporate to cut hours to my location even more and this is hurting me and I should instead leave fake positive reviews.

Ok I GET where you're coming from, I do, and I'm sure others have had that same thought. HOWEVER, as I said in my original post, I. WANT. THAT. STORE. TO BURN. I said in my original post that I've worked there several years (actually 4+ years more than any other employee at my particular location) and I've gotten shit on left and right. By the company, by management, and by customers and while I am looking for another job, it would make me SO happy to watch that shithole burn.

In the time I've worked there:

-My hours are always the first to be cut whenever "budget cuts" come around

-I regularly get scheduled closing shift when the other shifts CLEARLY have not done their tasks (as in I clocked in less than a minute ago and my manager can clearly see that the amount of work left could not physically be made in 1 minute) yet the manager is on my ass every few seconds to clean up after all of them and if my shift ends and I cannot finish, I get a talking to.

-I have been physically shoved by a manager and berated in front of coworkers and customers and that + the already stressful day I was having made me hide in the bathroom and cry. Then a few days later, another manager who wasn't even there that day heard about the incident (not the crying part-I hid) and made fun of me for a small mistake and said that I deserved the other manager yelling at me

-I spent my first year covering every single shift whenever asked and cross-trained myself so I could work in all departments and get more hours that way (🤡) only to be repaid by never getting promotions or raises (I did stop covering shifts after it was blatantly obvious that I would not get a raise/promotion/anything but taken advantage of)

-I worked the entire pandemic every day, almost to full-time, yet they refused to actually make me full-time, scheduling me just under (30-35 hours) so I was essentially working full-time hours without being able to get full-time benefits.

-An SM that worked there for a year apparently was threatened by me (though in no way was I after her job, I even repeatedly expressed that I had no interest in becoming management) and proceeded to fabricate an entire false story and reported it to HR as an EEOC issue in an attempt to get me fired

-Plus the multiple leads that have come and go that either treat all employees like dogshit and/or me, specifically. Talking down to me/us and snapping at me/us.

-Not to mention the disrespectful customers who see that I appear young and automatically assume I am stupid and/or incompetent, the most memorable experience being the old man who straight up asked me if I had brain damage and the (separate) old woman who straight up asked me if I was stupid and then immediately flat-out called me stupid to my face 10 seconds later.

PLUS: the store has been extremely noticeably not managed. We don't get enough hours to actually clean the store up and when I personally tried to start some cleanup projects on my own, I was actively discouraged and scolded by management. The place is a mess and actual customers have complained to me personally and other employees that I've witnessed about how shitty the store looks and how shitty the shopping experience is, so odds are, real customers are making the same reviews. I'm just filling in for those who lost their receipts.

ALSO: In the years I've worked there, I have seen several positive reviews from real customers, in fact the store used to have almost exclusively positive reviews, yet I never once saw any rewards from that. I even had customers personally go up to my manager and tell him how helpful and nice I was, blah, blah, blah and he came back and told me what the customers said and never once rewarded me and instead cut my hours when budget cuts came around.

Posted by admin Rodney.

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cleolinda · 1 year

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Varney the Vampire: A Preface

I want you to think back to what it’s like to reread your old work from years ago—your old stories or poetry, your old school papers, or even your old tumblr posts. Sometimes you’re actually kind of pleased, sure, but I want you to really go back and locate yourself in the heady cringe of that feeling.

In related news, I'm going to pick back up with the Varney the Vampire recaps I started in late 2010 CE. I got about nine chapters in, and then something, who knows what, derailed my life, as things tend to. Like, I'm used to this, it happens with the regularity of a lunar cycle. But I like writing about vampires (clearly), and since I feel like Dracula has been tread pretty thoroughly in recent times, I figured I might go back to something different; we had some lively discussions about Varney back then.

But 2010 was a time before A Lot of Things happened. I was in my early 30s at that point, so I won't say, "Oh, I was so young," but I had a very different energy as a blogger 12-13 years ago. So I've decided to rewrite the recaps a little—some more than others, some not much at all. I just feel like I have a really different perspective on the first chapter in particular, in 2023.

As before, I'm using the full, unabridged text. It is hideously long, something like 230+ chapters, but go big or go home, I figure. The thing is, I was using the files hosted at the University of Virginia, and now you can only get those through the Wayback Machine, but they are still usable for now. I have various backups saved, but I do want you to be able to see that I am, as ever, Not Making It Up.

I'm also not going to quibble anymore as to whether James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest wrote this behemoth. Per Wikipedia sources, scholars seem to agree that it was all or mostly Rymer. When it's mentioned that they figured this out based on his dialogue style, I went... yeah, that checks out. Because it sure is A Style, and I'll be honest, the repetitive filler dialogue in chapter 10 was such a speedbump for me that I just threw up my hands and said, "I don't know how to recap this. Something I can't remember now is going on in my life and I Cannot. I no longer Can."

Well, it's the 2020s and we're gonna. Like I can't tell you how much stress I do not have about this. I've had covid three times and also spinal surgery. Varney the Vampire can no longer hurt me.

To start, this ordeal has a preface—apparently written upon the occasion of collecting the serial into book form—wherein The Author expresses his gratitude for "unprecedented success of the romance of Varney the Vampyre." First off, Rymer uses "vampire" and "vampyre" interchangeably, because fuck me for caring about consistency, I guess. Second, as Wikipedia notes,

It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls." The author was paid by the typeset line [YEAH, I NOTICED], so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.

For comparison, all of Lord of the Rings plus The Hobbit is 576,459 words. I sure do blanch every time I see those numbers! It's fine. We're gonna be fine. Back to the preface:

The following romance is collected from seemingly the most authentic sources, and the Author must leave the question of credibility entirely to his readers, not even thinking that he is peculiarly called upon to express his own opinion upon the subject.

"Seemingly" is doing a lot of work here.

Nothing has been omitted [for real, nothing down to the tiniest fly-swat has been omitted] in the life of the unhappy Varney, which could tend to throw a light upon his most extraordinary career, and the fact of his death just as it is here related, made a great noise at the time through Europe, and is to be found in the public prints for the year 1713.

I've seen more than one Dracula multimedia art project where people recreated the letters and diaries and recordings in the book (have you heard my whole thing about how Dracula actually was a cutting-edge techno-thriller back in 1897?), but I've never heard of anyone creating ARG-style media for the Totally for Actual-Fact Real tale of Sir Francis Varney the Vampire, and I think it would be hilarious if someone did.

I won't belabor the entire preface, but what I do want to touch on is Rymer's mention of "unprecedented success." Varney is actually standing on the shoulders of a vampire giant, and it's not the one we would think of. Nowadays, our big touchstone—the influence so great that most works either evoke it or take the trouble to say "Our vampires are different"—is Dracula, obviously. Which was published exactly 50 years after Varney, in 1897. But Varney's touchstone is Polidori's short story "The Vampyre" (1819). And for most of the 1800s, this was everyone's touchstone. Per Wikipedia (which I'm going to lean on for how concise it is, but I concur with this from my own research as well):

An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard's novel Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own dramatic version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. This includes operatic adaptations by Heinrich Marschner (see Der Vampyr) and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner (see Der Vampyr), both published in the same year. Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas [note: I have the Ruthven play he wrote around here somewhere] and Aleksey Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre. Dumas makes explicit reference to Lord Ruthven in The Count of Monte Cristo, going so far as to state that his character "The Comtesse G..." had been personally acquainted with Lord Ruthven. [...]

In England, James Planché's play The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles was first performed in London in 1820 at the Lyceum Theatre based on Charles Nodier's Le Vampire, which in turn was based on Polidori. Such melodramas were satirised in Ruddigore, by Gilbert and Sullivan (1887); a character called Sir Ruthven must abduct a maiden, or he will die.

Back when no one gave a shit about copyright, Polidori's work was spun out into a cottage industry of knock-off stories and plays, an entire horror zeitgeist. Lord Ruthven was, for 78 years, who you copied, who you riffed on, who you parodied, what Count Dracula is to us now: the archetypal vampire. The Big Guy. And Varney is clearly cut from his cloth—the ostensible gentleman who worms his way into the lives of respectable, unwitting people. Unlike Dracula, there's no foreigner Othering, no "historical basis," no undercurrents of contagion and infection, no ambition to make the world his wine-press, none of that; Ruthven is a simpler figure, but the dominant one of this time no less. He is a stranger who shows up in the middle of London high society, icy and distant, his eyes “dead grey”—stern, yet somehow compelling when he cares to be. And when he cares to be, you're in trouble.

And this is the cultural consciousness when Francis Varney shows up.

[Chapter one will go up sometime this week, March 8-10 or so.]

#varney the vampire #vampires #vampire studies #honestly I am nervous about what I want to say about the first chapter #not sure it's gonna go over very well #long post #welcome to hell it's my blog #tv tropes warning. here is your rope to climb back out

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mdhwrites · 10 months

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Why Does The Owl House Feel Like Fanfiction?

So there’s a lot that could be used for this but a lot of it can also go back and forth on simply being bad writing. To genuinely feel like fanfiction, you have to make it clear that as an original writer, you’re still leaning on the biggest joy and sin of fanfiction.

You need to show that you still don’t want to do the setup work for your story. You just want the payoffs.

That is the big strength of fanfiction after all. You don’t need to make the characters, introduce the world, etc. like that. You can just get to the juicy stuff without bogging yourself down. Even AUs often don’t have to actually make new designs or establish what a character’s personality is unless it’s directly opposing the source material because the audience will assume they’re the same otherwise. If you doubt me on that, I will start linking you all the comments I’ve gotten of people having to remind themselves that Odalia isn’t pure evil in my own fanfics.

But that also presents a danger when going to original fiction. After all, if you don’t setup the world, characters, etc. like that and just do big payoffs, they’re going to feel increasingly more shallow as they make less and less sense or don’t feel like they’re happening when they should. The seams of your writing will show if you don’t put that effort in.

A perfect example of this is one of the most celebrated things in the show: The Enemies to Lovers arc. To really highlight this, let’s break it down to what it would look like in fanfiction, what it would look like commonly in original fiction and then how TOH did it.

Fanfiction: The enemy relationship is already made. You don’t have to do that unless you’re changing a LOT. So all you need to do is the inciting incident that makes the two see each other in a new light and the romance can spark from there, possibly without even becoming friends because the writer just wants to see the two kiss and that’s fine. I’ve done plenty of Luscha stuff like this.

Original Fiction: HAHAHAHA! Oh god, fuck this trope in original fiction. It takes SO. FUCKING. LONG. I’m not even just talking about my own stuff. Catradora took THREE SEASONS for a reason. My own works took literally dozens of chapters to even get the characters on SPEAKING terms, let alone as friends and even then, needing to figure out what just friendship looked like to them.

This is because Enemies to Lovers DEMANDS a character arc on multiple sides. It’s a very big change from the introductory dynamic... But you also have to explore that first dynamic. You need to set up that they’re genuine enemies, explore it and sell it to the audience. Then you need to start whittling away at the base of the problem between the two, start showing their other sides like you would a villain redemption arc, and THEN you can start moving towards romance after they’ve stopped trying to fight each other or oppose each other, etc. like that. It cannot be understated that this trope is so powerful because it requires just a fuck ton of effort and patience on the writer’s part and while you can make cheats for it, like I did in Eyes Beneath the Water by making two people ex-friends but neither wanted the friendship to end, you cannot half ass it.

The Owl House: Amity is, at best, an enemy of Luz’s for three episodes. Teenage Abomination, Covention and TECHNICALLY Hooty’s Moving Hassle, even if her social media post feels awkward post Covention because... Why she is still antagonizing Luz? It makes Lost in Language somewhat confusing because she sounds like she was just trying to dismiss Luz. Like, she couldn’t get her quite out of her head but she was ready to leave her alone.

But also... Lost in Language is Amity’s next episode. By the end of it, they’re friends. By the end of Adventure in the Elements, they’re DEFINITELY friends. Period. And by the sixth episode Amity has a major role, fifth if you don’t include Hooty’s Moving Hassle, she’s blushing at holding Luz’s hand because that’s Understanding Willow which leads directly into Grom where she wants to ask Luz out.

That is no time, especially since Adventure in the Elements has Luz and Amity in it but it’s not really about the two of them. It’s kind of an all over the place episode frankly where Amity is in it but could have been swapped with anyone else. In fact, it would have made Luz look less awful for stealing from a friend. But they are enemies, strictly enemies, for three episodes at most. They are friends for three episodes at most and for most those, they aren’t exploring their friendship or their relationship in general. The only time Amity’s enemy phase will be referenced will be once by King and Amity doesn’t even react to it. It’s literally everyone else except Luz and Amity who are talking about as a joke.

It’s them lampshading the fact that they, you know... Didn’t actually do the trope. That they speedran Lumity because they like the Enemies to Lovers trope, wanted the payoffs of smiling, blushing Amity and the two getting together like you get with that trope but didn’t put in the work. They minimally setup up Amity before ripping her character apart so as to do what they wanted. They never explored the different phases of the two together, barely really made any sort of real dynamic between them at any point before they’re just the love interest and hero because... That’s what they were actually interested in.

And this is isn’t just with Amity. The Boiling Isles has all of its world building repeatedly kicked in the dick for the sake of whatever the writers want to do. The magic is abused and contradicted all the time because actually working with it would get in the way of what the writer wanted to do. Eda’s criminal background and Hooty’s strength would have made them not able to send King and Luz off to show a big payoff to Momma Eda. Actually having to show the Owl Family get close to each other would have taken too much effort so immediately after the body swap episode, the first time they ever even try to understand each other, they’re already now best friends and King is acting like he already views Luz as his big sister come Really Small Problems, their second major episode together.

And that is fanficky. It setup such a bare bones world and the like just so it could do what it wanted. It tore apart characters and rushed arcs even back in S1 because those elements would have gotten in the way of actually doing the tropes they wanted. They wanted to just get to the good stuff which is probably why most characters, after their trope hits their highlight, become really boring and one note. The writers don’t care anymore because they no longer have a big moment to work towards.

Why do you think so many fanfics are so short? And... That is the really painful part for someone like me. TOH truly was blessed by the shortening because while this whole blog is about how TOH fucked up in its FIRST season as far as Lumity’s base trope goes, they will still tell me to just blame the shortening. To blame Disney meddling with the show. It’s not fanficky because writers are bad or the writing is bad, it’s fanficky because of things that let you just ignore the rest.

And that makes my stomach churn and my eyes water, both as an analyst, and as a writer who keeps getting scared about new ideas because to do them right, means doing them long and I don’t know if my brain will manage to see it to the end so I can get that payoff.

But I’m not willing to just cheat like TOH did, not with my original stuff, even though TOH’s cheats also made it the most popular of Disney’s recent animated shows. Maybe that just makes me a fucking idiot then.

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I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead, If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

And finally a Twitter you can follow too!

#TOH Critical #the owl house criticism #amity blight #lumity

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