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An Essay About Slash Review of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, A Video Game Which is Very Good

(and also: has prompted many quite wrong rather bad takes)

An essay by Audrey of the joystick system

The very bad discourse and drama around The Coffin of Andy and Leyley has served to obscure the simple fact that it is quite a very good video game and this video essay is here to tell you about that.

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Transcript:

Hi everyone. So. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is really, really fucking good.

If you’ve heard of this game, you’ve probably heard of it in the context of memes, screenshots divorced from context, and/or capricious moral outrage. If you’ve not heard of this game, well, you’re hearing of it now! And good thing, too, because much of the coverage and discussion around this game that already exists has… been, let’s just say, not particularly earnest. I hope to remedy that at least somewhat with this video.

If you’ve heard about this game because of discourse, and come here expecting drama and hot takes, then, this may not be your video. Or your YouTube channel, even. Or maybe it is, if you’d like the delicious comments section. If you’re that sort of clicker, though— welcome! I’m Audrey of the joystick system, and this is the place where I (and my headmates) talk honestly about things we care about, and I hope you’ll hear me out a little and maybe consider staying and improving our viewer retention. Thanks, if you do.

So, to writ: My purpose today is to gush. I will be gushing here. For most of it. And as for what I will be gushing about, some of it will be gushing BLOOD, GUTS, AND DELICIOUS DEATH. I am entirely serious. The subject of today’s presentation contains mature content, including copious foul language and themes slash depictions of death, cannibalism, cultism, demon summoning rituals, parricide, dystopian social decay, and heterosexuality. Oh, and also a little bit of incest as a treat, I guess, but the incest is heterosexual, and that’s worse.

[long pause]

Excellent. You’re still here. So. This morbidly beautiful video game may not be for everyone, but that’s good, because it is instead for exactly me! A short plot synopsis of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley might go as follows:

if you're not watching the video listen to this for extra effect

Siblings Andrew and Ashley Graves are forcibly quarantined inside their apartment by the local authorities, with no food and even less hope for rescue. Their parents have abandoned them. Absolutely no one is coming to save them. In order to survive and escape this awful situation, they butcher and consume the fresh flesh of some guy who got himself soul vored by a demon that he summoned without a plan.

This conspicuously carnivorous crime, and their effort to cover their tracks, puts them in a fair bit of a deeper shithole than they are already in. So naturally they keep digging themselves deeper by committing even more crimes, AND in the process, also dig themselves deeper into their toxic codependent sibling relationship, which is going just great, thank you. Sure, Andrew almost killed his sister, but he didn’t, and that’s what matters! And she still loves him, so it’s all good!

This is of course a joke.

First thing I absolutely love about this game is the writing. It’s witty, intelligent, uncompromising, and just generally delicious. It holds nothing back in depicting the toxicity of the two leads and their relationship, resulting in two compelling characters whose flaws and few virtues perfectly complement slash exacerbate one another, resulting in a beautiful train wreck of a relationship dynamic that proves equal parts disturbing, mesmerizing, and hilarious.

The charming darkly comedic bite of the writing style also lends a lot of great character to the setting. This sardonically presented dystopian world is both richly detailed and fleetingly elaborated on, a commendable balance to have achieved, in my opinion. The first chapter of this game is hilarious not just because of the banter between Ashley and Andrew (which is terrific), but because it presents such a sharp satire of current year bullshit.

As just an example, I give you, one of my favorite jokes in the game:

I probably don’t need to explain the thing this is making fun of to you, but I will anyway.

The situation presented in The Coffin of Andy and Leyley’s first episode is very easily readable as an allegory for how disasters that are a direct result of ongoing 2020s late capitalist decay continuously fuck people over. In particular, this scenario feels like a direct commentary on both the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the Flint, Michigan water crisis. The former obviously has affected way more people but what both have in common is that they are crises created and exacerbated by malfeasance and/or negligence committed in the name of for-profit interests, and that the “response,” to them, such as there was one, has amounted to dehumanizing and marginalizing the victims while minimizing the issue, forcing the victims out of society’s wider view, and being reticent to punish the individuals responsible.

Just as the authorities responded to the water crisis and the worst excesses of the pandemic in real life, the authorities in The Coffin of Andy and Leyley impose half-measures designed to further restrict the freedom of the dirty undesirables who bear the worst damages, while merely shielding the upper echelons of society from the disaster rather than actually addressing or attempting to solve the issue. Most of you who lived through 2020 in the United States probably have experienced the frustration of being on the receiving end of this kind of policy.

During the pandemic, the quarantine was supposed to protect us, but for a lot of people it ended up doing quite the opposite. A lot of folks didn’t have any savings, and couldn’t get any since the employment market wasn’t exactly on fire, and our representatives had to be bothered way too much just to put out a pithy economic stimulus just to save face. Not to say that this all has stopped, exactly, as all that’s changed now is that we’re just, living with this situation, but.

It wasn’t literally a cop outside everyone’s door preventing them from going outside to not die, but for a lot of people, it might as well have been that! Never mind those who, y’know, had no inside to retreat to. Or were imprisoned during the pandemic and left even more unprotected! Or thrown out by their landlords! And so on. And, y’know, the big chain grocery stores keep throwing out all the perfectly good unsold food, so they’re already sending this message in all but, well… these exact words.

So, that’s why I think this joke lands. It’s exaggerated, but familiarly rooted, and that’s just good satire! It’s a joke which feels lifted right out of Invader Zim, which, I would put The Coffin of Andy and Leyley right about on the level of as far as both the tone it’s going for and the quality of its execution. Which of course, brings us to the extremes that these circumstances push its characters, and its plot, to.

Okay, so, also like Invader Zim, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is hardly a polemic, nor is it a morality tale. Sure, there’s social commentary in it, but that’s just a nice side thing. It’s not a story about the otherwise innocent victims of an unjust society who are pushed to do terrible things by circumstances outside their control— it is, rather a story of terrible people, who, both because of their character failings, and the desperate situations they find themselves in, find themselves doing even worse things.

Andrew and Ashley commit the cannibalism the first time in large part because they kind of have to do it. No food! Cop outside their door actively deterring them from getting food! Out of options! So they do it. They could probably be excused, if only they were given a fair trial. Which they realize they’re not going to get. So yeah. It’s understandable that they do it. And that they kill this one cop, who very much has it coming.

But they do not have to keep doing it! And gosh grief, do they keep fucking doing it— so many its. They really do not stop digging that hole that they are in. Even the first time that they do the cannibalism, when they kind of really have to do the cannibalism, Ashley is just a little bit more excited about doing the cannibalism than she probably should be.

I love this kind of delicious edgy dark humor. I love stories that go for it, imagine the worst possible people they can, and also try to make that funny. I love this about Invader Zim, that it presents a character who is unquestionably a monster, but also has relatable human desires like wanting to fit in and being concerned about looking weird or abnormal, but has those feelings for very different reasons and acts on them by committing some very despicable crimes. It really gets at a deep-seated darkness that I and a lot of other fucked up traumatized queer people who were little kids when this show aired have, the catharsis of visualizing some of our worst intrusive thoughts while evoking the emotions that pushed us to imagine this kind of fucked up shit.

I’ve loved this kind of thing since we saw Heathers when we were 14. Heathers is an absolutely incredible film that you should check out, by the way, and about which we failed to properly or interestingly articulate our thoughts a few years back. Its lead protagonists, Jason “J.D.” Dean and Veronica Sawyer, are similarly relatable characters who have familiar feeling flaws and emotionally resonant trauma hangups, and also function as very toxic enablers of each other’s worst traits, leading them to work through those feelings by, y’know, murdering their classmates!

Heathers made us realize just how exactly mentally ill of a 14 year old we really were when we were 14, and I love it for that. So. So fucking much.

That was ten years and change ago.

We are still a mentally ill 24 year old.

And Andrew and Ashley Graves, if I had to sum them up, are basically J.D. and Veronica, if they were in their twenties, siblings, and also way, way, way worse.

And I love them.

So, obviously. Ashley and Andrew are hilarious. At least, I find them to be such. They’re terrible, and awful, and amazing, and Ashley is such a girlboss. She is one of the most God Forbid Women Do Anything characters ever.

Anyway! I’ve talked about the cannibalism, and the dystopia, and the characters, and why all of that’s good. I’ve also forgotten to talk about the part where they evade an assassin, and, also a host of other things.

I love that this game has so many fun little optional interactions with NPCs, objects, and items, that you can totally miss. I love how the narration hints at the solutions to puzzles by snarkily referring to things you can interact with as what their purpose is to the characters rather than what they are, this quip about the mop that you clean up a murder scene with, the interactions that Andrew has with these cultists who suck at demon summoning, the excellent in-game art and the brilliant visual duality of Andrew and Ashley’s character designs, this line where Andrew is upset that life is so hard for them as fugitives from the law because they can only find this one shitty motel that takes cash and doesn’t ask them for their ID, and also the music, which is royalty free music made by people unassociated with the developer but is nonetheless perfectly suited for the game.

So much about this game is stuff I find so completely brilliant, and I have so little to criticize, that I think we’d probably be here all day if I kept going. So.

Let’s spend a thousand ish more words talking about the parents.

When The Coffin of Andy and Leyley begins, the protagonists’ parents are absent. You can optionally find two early references to them early on— one, if you interact with the bed in their bedroom, and encounter the shocking revelation that “Your parents have FUCKED on this bed.”

The second, is if you interact with the phone, the game dutifully informs you that,

You’re probably less than five minutes into the game at this point, barely begun solving the first puzzle, which prompted you to “find nutrients to not die.” And of course, this says about all you need to know. These children have been abandoned. But if it needed to be any clearer, the game later delivers unto you a flashback to prior in the story, when Ashley desperately calls Mrs. Graves for help after they leave and go move to a hotel, and later a new house, to which the kids are of course not invited. And this specific scene, specific line, here, fucking hit me:

“And I don’t want to hear these lies about starving anymore.”

Emphasis mine.

Even as Ashley and Andrew escalate the severity of their crimes which gradually come to have less and less to do with their need to survive as the story goes on, I find it very hard to not be on their side at least a little bit, and this is easily the biggest reason why.

I have had this phone call.

Not this exact specific phone call, of course. Obviously, I’ve never been locked up in an apartment with an armed patrol outside my door whose job it was to gaslight me while ensuring that I starved to death. Obviously, my mom has never said those exact words.

But gosh grief and fuck me if it’s never felt like she has. She may as well have fucking told me that, with all the things she told me I was lying about. And who fucking knows, maybe she did say those exact words to us, and we repressed them. I don’t know. I am very not done working through all the bullshit that she gaslit us over.

*sighs, preparing to vent*

I have called our mother and had to beg her to pay for food. I have called her and had to beg to pay for our rent, while our parents were supposed to be supporting us studying abroad. I have called her and begged her to forgive me for daring to use just a few of the thirty dollars our parents used to send us to live with every month back then, to buy a drink or a movie ticket or something. I have had to concede to our parents financially holding us hostage, had to go the last week of the month on a shoestring diet while waiting for them to graciously deposit another thirty dollars into our bank account... so that we could continue eating. I used to relish February, the shortest month, for being the one part of the year in which I had to stretch out that thirty dollars the least. And once, I pleaded with our mother to pay for us to move to another apartment when the landlord suddenly kicked us out of the current one, abruptly and obligatorily switching gears from arguing with her to kissing her ass through our gritted teeth, under threat of our parents cutting off their financial support of us completely, abandoning us in a foreign country where we had no money, no job, and barely spoke the language.

And one day, after I stopped dancing to their tune, they just stopped listening, stopped even pretending to want to help. After nineteen years of escalating emotional and physical abuse and neglect, they abandoned us. And one day, after I spent months working 10 hour days every week Ubering food around for tips, sending my resume, filling applications, making calls, stopping into places to ask for work, all to no avail, for months, and desperately plugging the Patreon page of this very YouTube channel praying that some generous soul with money to burn would solve all our problems. All of this still wasn’t enough, and wasn’t going anywhere, and I’d run out of money and was short on rent on the one sublet room we could get that cost exactly three hundred dollars…

And I called her, and I asked her for help. I really didn’t want to. I wanted to hear nothing of her again. And she said to stop lying. To stop bullshitting her that I couldn’t get enough money, or find a job.

Not too long after, I swore off all contact with her, and eventually also with our father. And every time I have spoken to either of them since, I have made no secret of how I feel. Because if I get nothing out of kissing their ass, why fucking pretend.

My family is not poor. They own their house. They own, and leased out, a second house. Their house is full of fancy IKEA furniture and various other niceties, they’ve renovated the place at least twice, they live in a nice, safe neighborhood, they have an attic and a basement, they at one point paid for multiple plane tickets for us per year while still refusing to let us eat on any more than thirty five dollars, an extra five dollars we also had to beg them for. Our dad has a lucrative tech job. All of this, and they insisted, while refusing to answer questions about their finances in any detail, that they couldn’t afford to help us go to where we wanted to go for college, that they had no place for us in their house, that they couldn’t afford three hundred dollars of rent to help us have a roof over our head for one more month.

So when I read this delightful jaunt of a chapter of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, where Andrew and Ashley break into their parents’ new huge house to steal all their shit, and Ashley says “This is some rich people stuff!” about their fireplace,

And when their mom says, “there’s no room to keep housing you here indefinitely,” and the internal monologue says, “even though it’s way bigger than the old house.” It’s both an entertaining mockery of the attitude of the typical American family, how first you’re your parents’ property for eighteen years and then you’re turned out on your own to face the world without their support, and how the fuck are you supposed to live like that, to figure out how to live your life in the face of that, to meaningfully be a fulfilled person in that situation, especially in a time, when, no, mom, I can’t pay a college tuition on a waitress salary like you did back in the fucking nineties, you c--t,

Even though they have an extra bed in their basement and a perfectly good couch and plenty of space for another bed besides, and a vegetable garden, and a kitchen, and all these other middle-class petty bougie niceties, the Graves mom says, “sorry, we can’t keep helping you,” and. And. I read all this, and I think,

“I understand why Ashley wants to fucking flay these people. I understand why she wants to K1!L them.”

I cannot tell you how much catharsis the ending of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley episode 2 gave me. I cannot convey the weight of my gratitude that someone out there validated my anger and my specific fucked up power fantasy with their art. I didn’t even ask them to. I probably would’ve eventually done it on my own. But I’m so glad that someone did it for me.

If I ever hypothetically meet Nemlei, somehow, and have some cash, I will happily buy them a drink. Hopefully, by paying this excellent game’s ten dollar cover price, I already have!

I know you’re not watching this, but on the off chance this reaches your ears, I just wanna say thanks. For giving me a safe, legal, regret-free, socially acceptable, non-violent outlet for the rage I feel towards my parents.

Well.

Mostly socially acceptable.

Meow.

This game is not finished, as you may have noticed if you’ve gone to check it out on Steam. It ends on an ambiguous and open note, but in my opinion, a perfectly satisfying one. Nemlei could disappear absolutely, never release the proper ending of this game, and never make another game again, and I would not be mad. I've already got more than my money’s worth and then some. So. Yeah. I’m happy. Count me as happy!

I kinda wanna start talking a bit more about the branches of the second episode. I wanna say how it’s a brilliant idea to have two separate story arcs for the two variations of this episode’s ending, and how I hope that that’s executed on as beautifully as the rest of the game already is. I wanna talk about the ways in which Andrew and Ashley’s mom is ambiguously humanized despite being so obviously terrible. I wanna talk about the dialogue Andrew does when his parents offer him a chance to make amends, and he has doubts, if you choose to let him have them, and how I would probably also have doubts in his position, and not be able to follow through without my lovely evil cannibal sister pushing me towards… the thing. I wanna talk about this line, where Ashley talks about why she likes eating people, and how it’s so equal parts poetic and macabre and edgy bullshit and that that’s such a beautifully balanced cocktail of emotion to nail and Nemlei totally fucking nails it

I WANT TO GUSH FOREVER. ABOUT THIS GAME. AND I WANT NO ONE TO STOP ME.

Alas, I will stop myself.

And move on to the elephant in the room!

THE FUCKING.

Mom: “But that-.... That doesn’t make any sense.” Mom: “Why would you not-......” Mom: “Ah, I get it.” Andrew: “..........??” Mom: “You fuck her.” Andrew: “Wha— HUUUUH?!?!!?” Mom: “Oh that is disgusting! Andrew, she’s your sister for god’s sake!” Andrew: “I haven’t done anything!? What the hell, mom!?” Mom: “Then what does she give you that makes it worth all this?” Andrew: “W-well that’s none of your business, is it??” Mom: “I knew something was off… How did I fuck up so bad? I’m the worst mother ever..!” Andrew: “No! I mean yes you are, but I have never—!” Ashley: “I’m baaaa-ack!!!” Andrew: “Now of all times!?” Ashley: “I got the money! Did you miss me, handsome?? Did you? Did you??” Mom: “...........................” Andrew: “(I WANT TO DIE!!!!!!)”

Okay. So. I said I didn’t want to talk about this. But I’m talking about this game. I can’t not talk about it.

Yep, it’s hot takes and drama time!

So, not too long ago, Nemlei deleted their Twitter, their Itch.io, their everything, their entire online presence. The Steam page for The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, which used to list Nemlei as the developer and publisher, now lists “Kit9 Studio.” It is the only game to their name on the platform. A community forum post from said entity known as Kit9 announces that “the developer” (no name given) “has decided to permanently and completely terminate their activities online from here on.”

I don’t know exactly what happened, or why they did this. There’s a lot of people around who sure think they know. But in brief, as neutrally as possible: Nemlei, or someone close to them, was doxxed, or at least sought out as a doxxing target, by one or multiple users of an online forum. Their supposed crime? Making a video game “for degenerates.”

I don’t know who did the doxxing. I don’t know what their motive was, and for my own sanity, I am not going to look. I am choosing not to care. The most important and most obvious fact at hand here is that Nemlei’s creation has been met with controversy amongst social media users, and about one or two hack video game outrage journalists, who seem to have nothing better to do or say. And it seems clear that the doxxing wouldn’t have happened had they not been met with this negative attention. And all because of this.

Not the cannibalism, not the parricide, not the demon sacrifices. No, um, the one implied sex scene.

And it doesn’t even actually happen! It’s just a premonition of a possible future event that Ashley and Andrew supernaturally receive. It’s not particularly graphic, it doesn’t yet go anywhere, and it’s a short scene on an optional route that the game actively forewarns you about. You have to be trying to see it on purpose.

Well, that’s all true. It is indeed a minor and avoidable scene, and the discourse about it has absolutely poisoned the well when it comes to the conversation about the game. But also, “uhh, it’s optional and not a big thing,” is inadequate as a defense. This is still content in the game that Nemlei actively chose to put in the game, and even discounting this, the themes of incest are all over the game. Ashley speaks flirtatiously to Andrew at basically every turn. Even if you avoid this specific scene, the incest themes are not something you’re going to just not notice, if you’re paying attention to the text.

All that being said, it’s not like this content comes as a surprise. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley’s Steam store page accurately represents the product! A brother and sister. Codependency and cannibalism. It’s not as if you don’t know what you’re paying for and choosing to play. You came here for this! Most of the people playing this are here for this! You have to figure that if they are fine with killing and eating people, they’re probably fine with fucking each other, or, eventually possibly eventually going to be, at least.

So you’d think, except that many people seem to unironically believe that the cannibalism is more moral than the incest.

Oh, god, I’m doing this right now, aren’t I.

So, I get it. While I’m pretty skeptical of the notion that cannibalism is not as bad as incest, I do realize that incest is, at the very least, the more taboo of these things, and that a lot of people are more uncomfortable with it than they are with the cannibalism and the murder. To quote the one positive and in-depth review available in any media outlet at the time of this writing, from Destructoid:

“This aspect is undoubtedly the most controversial element about The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, and I understand why. While cannibalism is a taboo subject, it’s present in mainstream games like Fallout as an option for players. Having incestuous themes crosses over into Drakengard territory, and even then, no option allows Caim to reciprocate Furiae’s feelings for him.”

"The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is horrifying and I can’t get enough of it" Andrea Gonzalez, Destructoid, November 12 2023

So, yeah, I. y’know. Get it. I know why. However.

I can point to a lot of things that Andrew and Ashley do wrong in this game. They are, as per the game’s premise, very not okay, not as individuals, and not together. Andrew is way too attached to Ashley, and Ashley is generally an awful person who is way too attached herself, and also, all too quick on the draw to take advantage of Andrew’s attachment to her to make him do what she wants. This is not a healthy relationship. And we’re here for it! It’s compelling!

But, I think it’s worth asking why it’s such a toxic dynamic. Is it because they’re siblings? Well, not really. It’s a dynamic that’s specifically possible with them being siblings, but it’s not because of their sibling connection.

The actual reason why Andrew and Ashley’s relationship turns abusive isn’t because their relationship is abusive by necessity or nature, but because Ashley abuses their relationship. And she is doing this for basically the whole game. Like, it is abusive the whole time. It doesn’t become abusive when their relationship takes its romantic turn. Does it become more abusive? I mean. Maybe. Maybe the romance exacerbates the abuse. I dunno, we’ll have to wait and see what the next episode says.

So, then, why is the notion of them possibly in the future having sex the elephant in the room here, when before that, they do so many objectively worse things that cause much more harm both to themselves and others? Is that really so much more of a bigger deal than the murder and the people eating?

Or. To phrase it Ashley’s way. You played a game about mutilating and eating your parents’ corpses, and getting laid is what you’re freaking out about?

Is the incest really that much more extreme, or are you just more disgusted with it?

And even if you are more disgusted with it. Even if we grant that it is, actually, somehow, more harmful for siblings to have sex with each other, than to do murder and cannibalism. Is this the hill you’re dying on? What you’ve decided is of such utmost importance and injustice that you decide to go harass some random indie dev who just wants to make a silly video game about a couple of siblings eating people?

Does it truly make sense to let your kneejerk moral disgust guide you to the conclusion that the creator of this game deserves to be persecuted for merely writing about and drawing a thing you don’t like?

Well, to answer that, we have to get into the question of whether or not “immoral fiction” is harmful, or “normalizing” things that are wrong. Does fictionally depicting an immoral action actually cause harm?

I could dance around in circles for a little while about the edge cases, and certain writers who are publishing bad or hateful material in bad faith, or fascist propaganda, which is of course always bad, or whatever other example I could use to qualify my point or list out an exception to appease the people who disagree with me, but, I’ll just cut right to the chase, and tell you the answer

No!

The answer is NO!

The thing about taboos is that they don’t make us more safe. They don’t protect us from bad things. All they do is protect people’s comfort by silencing people they don’t want to understand, and enable bad actors by keeping their victims in the dark, and denying them the ability to talk about it.

The only thing we end up doing by censoring stories about these uncomfortable topics, and making it socially unacceptable to talk about them, is make it harder to know. We deny ourselves knowledge. We deny ourselves a conversation about these subjects, we deny ourselves the ability to meaningfully understand them. We deny ourselves power, what little we have, as readers, to understand, and to critique, to reason.

There’s a tumblr post I really like. Well, a number of them, I really like, on this topic, but I’m picking this one, because it’s got a quote I really like. It talks about Lolita. That Lolita. And, now, I’ve never read Lolita, at least not yet. Lolita is a novel about child sexual abuse, told from the perspective of an abuser. It’s an uncomfortable book with an uncomfortable topic, and it’s not wrong to be uncomfortable with it. The author of this post acknowledges that.

But they talk about it. They talk about how it shines a light on its subject matter. The why and the how of abusers and their actions. The ways in which their victims suffer. How it shows all of this in a way that it only could from the perspective it takes. And, I’m just going to quote them. I can’t do anything else. They said it better than I could, right now.

“Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.” - tumblr user legsdemandias

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley has been ridiculed, joked about, hot taked on, made a target, drama-ed over, and so on, but it’s hardly been criticized. No one I’ve seen admitting to not liking it talks critically about why it’s disgusting to them, or tries to understand why it exists, or what it’s for. And this is most people’s reaction to most media that deals seriously with anything taboo. “I don’t get it. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t exist. Get it away from me.”

I’m annoyed that the medium, the art form, of video games, is valued so little by so many that this is the wide reaction when something like this gets popular. That the mainstream games journalism media ridicules it, and the creator gets threatened by an internet mob, and it falls on the weirdos and the freaks and the no-name YouTube uwu girls, to give it the serious consideration and recognition it deserves.

To summarize, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is, in my opinion, a very good video game, and on its behalf, I am mad at video games.

Now, go on. You made it through this video. I told you the plot! You can probably stomach the plot! So go, go. Shoo. Go buy Nemlei a drink. If you want to.

Or, buy us, the joystick system, a drink! You can do that at patreon dot com slash joycestick, or, ko-fi dot com slash joycestick. You can buy us drinks in both of those places.

I’ve been Audrey. Thank you for listening.

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that-ari-blogger · 2 months

Text

Galinda's True Colours

One key theme in Wicked is superficiality. The world of Oz is a place where honest conversation is difficult to come by. Almost everyone is pretending to be something, or believe something, or have something, all to get what they want.

Popular approaches this theme with the subtlety of a hyperactive wrecking ball and gives a musical monologue about how this world works, and why.

Because Galinda has been portrayed as ditsy up to this point, with a bit of the self-serving schemer archetype thrown in for flavour. But here, we see just how intelligent she is. Galinda has caught on to how the world works, and understands what buttons to push.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD (Wicked)

The first element to be brought under examination is Wicked's love for subverting expectations. By this, I mean that certain mindsets in the world have stereotypes associated with them, take idealism and cynicism for example.

From what I have observed, when a writer wants to use one of these archetypes, they will probably draw on a few common ideas. The former is usually portrayed as stary-eyed and naive, or unflinchingly positive. Cynicism meanwhile has a certain sarcasm to it. A cynic might feature a permanent scowl and a dry remark as a kneejerk reaction to anything.

In short, Cynics are usually written to be villains who are overcome by hopeful heroes, or to be heroes who are proven right by a world where hope is meaningless. Idealists on the other hand are either heroes who make the world a better place by sheer force of goodness, or naive fools who the world breaks down.

Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule, but those exceptions are mostly more developed characters in their own right, so the label of "a cynic" doesn't really fit them. Batman is an idealist (when he's written properly).

What is fascinating about Wicked is how the characters are presented. Elphaba is introduced as cynical, she fits the archetype to a tea. But after a musical number, her character swaps entirely. She keeps the sarcasm, but the hopefulness becomes a driving force that goes against the stereotype.

Galinda is... introduced as a bit of a ditz. She's got an ego, she gets what she wants all of the time, she has a well-known family. She's the generic rich kid, essentially. Fiyero gets the same treatment.

For the record, By Galinda, I mean young Glinda, and I am treating them as separate entities until they meet back up.

Anyway, when Galinda starts singing, her real worldview becomes clear. It's possible to argue that it wasn't particularly hidden to begin with, but in Popular, she bludgeons you over the head with it.

"Celebrated heads of state Or 'specially great communicators Did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh! They were popular! Please, it's all about popular! It's not about aptitude It's the way you're viewed"

As much as I despise it, Galinda is kinda right here.

In 1964, Henry Littlefield published an essay in the American Quarterly titled The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism in which he gave some opinions on a theoretical metaphor inherent in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book (if you don't want to read it, TedEd has a video discussing it and its legacy). He claimed that it was an inherently political book about the time Baum wrote it.

The sparkly new world looks even better if you put on tinted glasses, and only works if you understand that the wizard's power is empty, so Littlefield proposed.

Scholars since have praised, debated, and debunked Littlefield's essay. Pointing out the fact that this is pattern recognition with hindsight, in the same way that you can look to the stars and see a goat.

Essentially, there is an argument for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz being political, and there is an argument (most famously made by its Baum himself) that it is just a children's book.

Wicked is a satire, and not a children's book, so it gets away with some heavy insinuation, but to avoid landmines and a lack of knowledge on my own part, I am going to talk exclusively about how this affects the land of Oz itself, rather than its implications for the real world. Please don't argue in the replies.

So, Galinda's hypothesis here is that the leaders of Oz do not get to where they are because of any actual skill, but rather because they were well liked by either the people, or their superiors. She gets proven right about this throughout the musical. Madam Morrible moves up in the world by presenting Elphaba to the wizard, the Wizard gained power by giving Oz a common enemy, and Galinda and Fiyero themselves gain status seemingly out of nowhere.

In Oz, it doesn't matter what you know, but who you know, and who knows you.

In the show that I watched, Galinda was played by Courtney Monsma, who knocked this number out of the park. Galinda is an incredibly cynical character, but Monsma played her with what I can only describe as "manic pixie energy", which circles back to Wicked's idea of superficiality.

Because the ditzy pantomime of Galinda present in What is this Feeling and half of Dancing Through Life is nothing compared to the madness that is Popular. This is a character who knows exactly how to toss her hair to get what she wants, who knows how to make people think she is something she isn't.

Monsma played a character who was well aware that perception would get her further in life than intelligence, and was having fun with that confidence. But she is actually clever, Galinda has picked up on this fact that everyone else has just accepted subconciously, but now she can explain it.

This song feels like a hyper fixation rant. The frantic obsession was a mere outlet for the excitement of finally being able to speak to this worldview head on to someone who she respects and knows will actually understand her. This song feels like Galinda and Elphaba are on emotional and intellectual equal footing.

This song is also part of my case for Wicked as a queer musical that only works as a story because the romance doesn't. As in, this is a story about a romance that could have been, and that romance reads as queer to me. I will get more into it next week, but for now, I will say this:

This song doesn't matter, and that's exactly why it does matter.

This is the moment when Elphaba and Galinda connect, and share. This is Galinda trying to give back for the wand and make up for her previous behaviour to make Elphaba less of an outcast. But she has already done that.

The moment at the end of Dancing Through Life when Elphaba and Galinda share the spotlight, when Galinda makes herself look like a fool to match Elphaba, when she lets the outcast lead, and the rest of the room goes along with it. That moment is when the romance is kicked off, that is the moment when she starts making amends. That is the moment when she starts to make Elphaba less of a social pariah.

That dance renders Popular superfluous, or at least it does on paper. In reality, this song is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the foreshadowing department, even more so than What is this Feeling, in my most humble of opinions.

Popular happens because Galinda is right about so much in her world, but wrong about the most important thing. Brains and knowledge are irrelevant in Oz, perception is powerful, but empathy rules them all.

Galinda gives this big show of how amazing she is for helping people. Look at her, she's so good. But, Elphaba doesn't care about that, and Galinda does. The romance doesn't work in the end because Galinda realises too late that in the big scheme of things, superficiality is nowhere near as fulfilling as connection. That's why her romance with Fiyero breaks off, and its why her romance with Elphaba is doomed. She only realises this when both options are off the table.

The romance between Elphaba and Galinda breaks apart, but it can only do that because it was there to begin with. You can't tear down nothing.

You could read the relationship as entirely platonic, a friendship that breaks down. But art is subjective, and to me, the romance makes this story so much more compelling.

Final Thoughts

Popular is a popular song in the fanbase. It's an absolute bop, but it's also one of the simplest numbers in the entire production. The set is two beds, there is no fancy dancing, just one character sitting still and the other jumping around like she's on springs. The set doesn't change, there are no extra characters, nothing.

This song doesn't let anything distract from the character drama that is going on in centre stage, so that the audience can take in what is actually being said and done.

Next week, I am taking a look at I'm Not That Girl, and I will being going all in on the queer reading of this musical. Although, that is a heterosexual love song, right? How could that be queer? I have thoughts, so stick around if that interests you.

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(Images were sourced from this video)

#rants #literary analysis #literature analysis #character analysis #wicked is a queer story #wicked the musical #glinda upland #elphaba thropp #wicked musical #musical analysis #lgbtq #queer coding #lgbtqia #queer #gelphie

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mostlysignssomeportents · 19 days

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Async mugwump linkdump

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.

For 20+ years, I've processed all the information that came over my transom by blogging – mulling on why something I saw in the world caught my attention and trying to summarize it for strangers. This turns out to be a very powerful way to do a lot of different kinds of mental work:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

With Pluralistic, the solo blog I founded 4 years ago, I've moved into longer, more synthetic essays that try to connect the things that caught my attention today with all those things I've written about for the past two decades. That's also proven very fruitful:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

But this move to longer works has a downside: sometimes I'll arrive at the week's end and have a list of things that caught my attention without there being any obvious way to connect them, and when that happens, I devote a Saturday edition to a linkdump. There's been 15 of these so far:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Welcome, then, to the 16th Pluralistic linkdump, and a warning, this one starts with an obituary.

Ross Anderson was one of the heroes of the cryptographic revolution, a brilliant scientist and communicator, a fantastic activist, and a scorching curmudgeon. Ross died this week. He was 67, and had chronic heart issues as well as long covid:

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2024/03/29/rip-ross-anderson/

There's so much that's been written about Ross and his legacy already, and there's doubtless more to come, but I've picked out two pieces to point you to. The first is from Danny O'Brien, who was also the guy who talked me down off the ledge the first time Ross flamed me on a public mailing list, leaving me bleeding and furious:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868983

As Danny says, Ross was "the model of a politically and socially involved computer scientist," a man whose blazing intellect, fierce moral center and relentless curiosity inspired a generation of technologists to think about politics, and a generation of political activists to think about technology. Few of Ross's eulogizers (thus far) have mentioned how Ross's passion came out as fury, and – as someone who counted Ross as a friend and inspiration – I think this is a serious omission. It's hard to imagine Ross doing all that he did without understanding the anger that – along with his ethics – fueled his passion.

(Compare with @neil-gaiman's classic essay on the anger of Terry Pratchett:)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman

The other obit that I want to point you to comes from Bill Buchanan, one of Ross's closest collaborators. Buchanan's memorial for Ross does a superb job of rounding up Ross's technical contributions to the field of security engineering:

https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/ross-anderson-rip-59233c75fadf

Buchanan embeds videos for some of Ross's best speeches, links to his key papers (including the classic "Programming Satan's Computer," on "programming a computer which gives answers that are subtly and maliciously wrong at the most inconvenient moment possible), reminiscences of Great Moments In Ross Anderson, and terrific, lay-friendly breakdowns of some of Ross's key mathematical work.

As an unreasonable, angry person, I take great inspiration from people who channel their unreasonable anger to socially beneficial conduct – like whistleblowers. After Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge was totaled by the 95,000-ton cargo ship MV *Dali(, a vast cohort of instant experts in structural engineering, sea freight and shipbuilding has taken to the internet with a slurry of takes on the Meaning Of the Bridge.

Some of these are very stupid indeed, like the idea that somehow "DEI" caused the collision. But you don't have to be an expert in maritime issues or civil engineering to understand the importance of this report from The Lever about shipping giant Maersk's culture of retaliation against whistleblowers:

https://www.levernews.com/feds-recently-hit-cargo-giant-in-baltimore-disaster-for-silencing-whistleblowers/

Maersk is the company that chartered the MV Dali; Maersk is also a key player in the cartel that controls the world's shipping. Maersk was just sanctioned by the Labor Department for retaliating against a whistleblower who complained of unsafe conditions on the ships that Maersk chartered:

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OPA/news%20releases/Maersk-Sec%20Findings%20-FINAL%20071423_Redacted.pdf

Maersk's policy required employees to bring concerns to their supervisors before alerting the Coast Guard or others. This is not how that stuff is supposed to work. OSHA called this policy “repugnant” and a “reprehensible and an egregious violation of the rights of employees,” which “chills them from contacting the [Coast Guard] or other authorities without contacting the company first.”

The whistleblower – chief mate on the Safmarine Mafadi – complained of "unrepaired leaks, unpermitted alcohol consumption onboard, inoperable lifeboats, faulty emergency fire suppression equipment, and other issues." We don't know (yet) what happened on the Dali, but it's obvious that a company that retaliates against whistleblowers, rather than heeding their warnings, is prioritizing covering its ass, not operating safely.

Which brings me (inevitably) to Boeing, and to poor John "Swampy" Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who took his own life earlier this month. Barnett's suicide has stirred up similar low-yield online chatter focused on whether Boeing assassinated Barnett, a question that categorically cannot be answered through the method of arguing with internet strangers.

But there is a lot to say about Barnett: in particular, there's the substance of his whistleblowing, the specifics of his complaints about Boeing. For that, we can turn to the always-fantastic Maureen Tkacik, whose American Prospect piece "Suicide Mission" is definitive:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Tkacik does a great job of painting a picture of Swampy as a member of the tribe of unreasonable and angry people who refuse to sideline principle in order to get along. More importantly, Tkacik shows us what made Swampy so angry: a company that was hell-bent on lobotimizing itself by forcing out any technical expert who might point out inconvenient truths about the safety risks of high-profit strategies.

As Tkacik writes, Boeing once thought about "knowledge" in terms of expertise that could be brought to bear on the unimaginably complex task of making reliable, airworthy jets. But under the "value-engineering" financialized culture that arose after the McDonnell-Douglas merger, the company viewed knowledge as "intellectual property, trade secrets, and data." In other words, the point of knowledge was rent-extraction, not safety.

At the root of this transformation was the Jack Welch protege Jim "Prince Jim" McNerney, the former 3M CEO who took the helm at Boeing. McNerney was openly contemptuous of the company's senior engineers, branding them "phenomenally talented assholes" and rewarding managers who found ways to force them out of the company. It was McNerney who decided to produce the 787 "Dreamliner" in non-union shops, far from Seattle and its phenomenally talented assholes. Instead of these engineers, McNerney turned to Boeing suppliers to do the major engineering work on the 787 – despite the fact that many of these suppliers "lacked engineering departments."

The 787 was, infamously, a $80b-over-budget boondoggle, haunted by technical failures. Swampy was part of the "cleanup crew" that tried to salvage the 787, and witnessed first-hand how the company purged all the engineers who managed to ship the 787 despite McNerney and his "value engineers" and retaliated against workers who tried to unionize the South Carolina facility.

In particular, it was safety inspector who came in for the most savage punishment. When the FAA decided to let Boeing mark its own homework – hiring in-house safety inspectors to replace government inspectors – they pretended to believe that these Boeing-payrolled inspectors would be able to operate independently of Boeing's leadership. The inspectors tried to operate this way (not least because they were criminally liable for oversights that occurred on their watch) and McNerney's Boeing came down on them like a ton of aviation-grade aluminum.

To further neuter these inspectors, Boeing management ordered the inspectors to outsource their work to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising – that is, the FAA outsourced safety checks to Boeing inspectors, and the inspectors outsourced those checks to the mechanics themselves. Tkacik: "Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter."

Swampy kept careful records of every way in which this system produced unsafe aircraft and an unsafe workplace – including the day he discovered that someone had removed 400+ defective parts from the rejects box and installed them in aircraft in order to meet deadlines. Swampy's reports were key to establishing that the company's much-trumpeted "improvements" in safety reports were down to a culture of "bullying" – not any improvement in safety itself.

When Boeing went to war against Swampy, they barely bothered to pretend that they were playing by the rules. He was told one day that he was four-weeks into a 60-day "corrective action" that no one had told him about. The "corrective action" paperwork had a blank for Swampy's comments. He wrote, "Leadership wants nothing in email so they maintain plausible deniability. It is obvious leadership is just looking for items to criticize me on so I stop identifying issues. I will conform!"

Shortly thereafter, he was forced out altogether. Managers who tried to bring him on their teams were told that no one was allowed to hire John Barnett. His name appeared on a secret internal memo entitled "Quality Managers to Fire." Meanwhile, the value of Boeing shares had tripled.

After Boeing's 737 Maxes started falling out of the sky, Swampy's painstaking documentation of the flaws in the 787's production took on a new urgency. A program of random inspections of 787s found major defects in all of them ("Boeing Looked for Flaws in Its Dreamliner and Couldn’t Stop Finding Them" –WSJ). An Aviation Week diagram of problem spots with the 787 marked red arrows over "every single section, from the tip of the nose to the horizontal stabilizers":

https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/new-boeing-787-fix-details-reveal-extent-gap-check-challenge

Boeing's war on "brilliance" did its work: after everyone who understood how to make a safe aircraft was forced out of the company, financialized CEOs were able to cut corners on safety, triple the share-price, scoop up billions in government subsidies and bailouts, all without those pesky "phenomenally talented assholes" pointing out that they were going get (lots of) people killed.

Tkacik closes by saying that Swampy's former work colleagues refuse to believe he killed himself. A former executive told her "I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys…It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere." I confess that I don't know what to make of that, but I'll say this: if Boeing killed Swampy, that's just one of hundreds of murders they committed. Whether or not Swampy's death was their fault, the deaths of everyone who went down on the 737 Maxes that crashed is on their hands.

That's what "profits before people" means, after all: sacrificing human lives to make yourself richer. It's the foundational tenet of the conservative movement, though that impulse is often checked by other factors, like human decency. It's only when sociopaths get a sustained run at leadership that you see what they really want.

Which brings me to the UK, which has been governed by the Conservative Party for 14 years. The Tories are tipped to get destroyed in the next election, and a long article in the New Yorker by Sam Knight catalogs the many ways in which Tory rule has devastated the UK:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/what-have-fourteen-years-of-conservative-rule-done-to-britain

The thing is, after 14 years, it's impossible for the Tories to blame anyone else for the state of the UK. With strong Parliamentary majorities, Conservatives were able to govern as they pleased – the only compromises they made were between their own internal factions. The ideological commitment to making the rich richer, privatizing everything, subordinating governance to market forces – that's all them.

It's all them: the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars, on them. The catastrophic traffic, housing, jobs market, and precarity, on them. Plummeting health, on them. The austerity, on them. The withering of the country's courts and prisons and police, its wilderness, its programs for young people and pensioners, its public health, its diplomatic corps, its road maintenance – on them.

A country where the police can't afford to prosecute burglaries – on them (4% of burglaries are prosecuted). The 2.5 year delay between a rape arrest and its trial? On them. Mass closures of schools that are literally crumbling? On them.

43% of the countries courts have closed. On them. Cuts to prison funding, coupled with longer sentences? On them.

And of course, Brexit – on them. Every part of it. The referendum. The referendum question. The failure to negotiate a deal with the EU. All on them. The collapse in British living standards, all on them. The fact that the 20% richest households in the UK have been untouched by all this? Also on them. But you might not notice it in London, where people earn an average of 400% more than people in Nottingham.

The only growth sector outside of London are the Citizens Advice Bureaux, whose client rosters are growing even as their funding is cut. Where the CAB once primarily catered to people who couldn't make ends meet due to disability, unemployment and other reliable predictors of economic distress, today, CAB advisors are seeing homeowners, people working two jobs. Desperation is "like a black hole, dragging more and more people in,"

More Conservative growth: Tories presided over a doubling in the rate of NHS antidepressant prescriptions, and a 20% rise in long-term health conditions. No wonder Tory Britain had the world's worst pandemic outcomes for a wealthy nation – that's on them, too.

Knight's article closes with a Tory MP who believes that "the key thing for the Conservatives now is to be more conservative…Toryism must have its day again."

We can't count on oligarchs to rescue us from oligarchy – not even when oligarchy's failures push society to the breaking point. There's always a rationalization explaining why we just had to lean harder into oligarchy.

You hear echoes of this in the pro-monopoly choir, whose squeals of outrage at the rise of a new anti-monopoly movement grow louder even as monopolism's failures grow clearer. One of the more tangible expressions of monopoly's failures is the Ticketmaster/Livenation octopus, which controls the entire live music industry – key venues, promotions, and ticketing. Ticketmaster fucks over music fans, but it also cheats famous musicians, the kinds of people with big microphones, so we know a lot about how bad it is:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

Of course, the fact that Swifties hate Ticketmaster lets the pro-monopolists dismiss critics as foolish young girls, not Very Serious People Who Understand Economics and thus can see that Ticketmaster's monopoly is Good, Actually.

Last week, Congressman Bill Pascrell dumped a ton of litigation documents related to Ticketmaster's sleaze, and Matt Stoller broke them down:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed

The docs reveal how Ticketmaster's system of (formerly) secret kickbacks let it choke out any competitor, so that it could charge fans more and pay artists less. The mechanics of the scam are beautifully laid out in Stoller's post – as is the many ways in which it violated both the law and Ticketmaster's numerous consent decrees arising from its previous lawbreaking.

This kind of scam breakdown is essential. It's easy to think that we, as mere normies, can't hope to understand the machinations of the corporations that prey on us. But once you pierce the veil of performative complexity, what's left behind is a set of crude tricks and transparent ruses.

Here's one of those transparent ruses: Discord's terms of service require Discord users to actively opt out of its "binding arbitration" system. Binding arbitration is when you sign a contract saying you can't sue the company no matter how much it harms you – instead, you promise to have your disputes heard by an "arbitrator" (a fake judge paid by the company that screwed you). Unsurprisingly, these fake judges are awfully tolerant of their employers' crimes.

Discord says that once you click through its garbage legalese novella, you have just a few days to opt out of this binding arbitration clause – if you happen to miss that fine print, you have "consented" to giving up your legal rights.

But every time Discord changes its ToS, the clock for opting out starts ticking again, and Discord has just changed (that is, worsened) its ToS again:

https://discord.com/terms

That means that if you send an email right now to [email protected] with "I am confirming that as of the date of this email, I am choosing to opt out of binding arbitration to settle disputes with Discord" in the body, you can escape this consent theater:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112175832989845038

Consent theater is a particularly galling corporate ruse – the idea that we chose to allow them to abuse us. Consent theater gets more outrageous by the day. Take Soofa, who operate streetside digital kiosks that identify you by grabbing your phone's unique wifi and Bluetooth identifiers:

https://gizmodo.com/digital-kiosks-snatch-your-phones-data-when-you-walk-by-1851368948

Soofa sells this data to advertisers – claiming that by walking down a public street, you "consented" to being tracked and sold.

The only reason this flies is that the US hasn't passed a federal consumer privacy law since 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from telling people which VHS cassettes you took home. Congress keeps on failing to pass a privacy law, despite garbage companies like Soofa.

But that hasn't stopped the administrative agencies from acting to defend your privacy! The FTC just dropped its latest Privacy and Data Security Update, a greatest hits list of the actions the Commission took while Congress failed:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2024.03.21-PrivacyandDataSecurityUpdate-508.pdf

One of the best things about the current administration is the number of extremely competent regulators who know exactly how much power they have and aren't afraid to use it to help the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

The new FTC report, which details how the Commission's existing powers let it go after the commercial surveillance industry from smart doorbells to review fraud, from kids' programming to medical data, from lax security to data-breaches, is a bright spot in an otherwise grim week.

One more bright spot, then, before I wind up this linkdump. All week, I've been humming a half-remembered lyric, "come on baby/you're a link in this chain/put your hands together/and get free of the pain." For the life of me, I couldn't place it.

Last night, I searched for it (using Kagi, the post-Google search engine I've been paying for for the past month, and which I'm loving) and discovered that I had somehow completely forgotten a whole-ass band that I once loved: Toronto's Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, whom I saw live on many occasions.

The mystery lyric came from "Death is the Great Awakener," a fucking banger of a post-gospel track that I've been listening to on nonstop repeat as I wrote this. It's a hell of a tune and I'm intensely grateful to have it back in my life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6RUb63Tx3w

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/30/dewey-502/#rip-ross-anderson

Image: Waffleboy https://www.flickr.com/photos/waffleboy/28198395465/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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emerald-star-productions · 5 months

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My Thoughts on James Somerton [RANT]

Before I begin this post, I highly recommend watching Hbomberguy's new video about Plagiarism. It's the main reason I'm discussing James right now & it provides a more detailed breakdown of what he did.

youtube

So for those of you unaware, Queer YouTuber James Somerton has recently been revealed to be a full on plagiarist, having done so for SEVERAL of his videos and isn't exactly the nicest to other queer creatives in the same video essay field as him. Got it? Good. Again, watch the vid.

Upon watching the video and learning about what James did, I was in such shock. My eyes widened. I had begun to see other essayists I follow "feel vindicated" about him being called out. Unbeknownst to me, it's the second part of the video where he's called out.

Having finished the video, I'm not angry. No, I'm PISSED. When one of my best/trusted friends recommended James' videos to me back in 2021, I was immediately hooked. I was inspired by him to further my own craft as a queer video essayist at the time.

To now learn that James is nothing more than a plagiarist who steals other people's content and doesn't even have an original thought to begin with? I'm hurt by this. In my rant video about queer rep, I referenced & linked one of his videos.

youtube

I can't even look at this video anymore. I don't even make essays anymore but I can't even look at one of my favorite essays in good faith anymore cuz the man I referenced may have plagiarized in said video I referenced. Do you have any idea how angry I am about this??

In a time where it's getting harder to be openly queer and to not feel scared by literally everything around me, James was that light in darkness that gave me hope. A queer creator who seem to be well-spoken and knew his shit. Come to find out that was never the case. I feel betrayed. He was the sole reason I kept making video essays in 2022. I almost stopped after The Glass Scientist vid but kept going cuz his vids inspired me to keep pushing to be a better creator. I donated money to his fucking production company. I was even one of his patrons for a short period of time. I left the patreon after he got into two different conflicts that pushed me away for the second half of 2022. He made some...not so great comments about Beyonce and her place as a queer icon.

And then he made a whole stink about not being a creator on Nebula. These two reasons, among other minor things, are what pushed me away from James for a good 6-8 months. I only returned to his content literally last month. Last. Fucking. Month. I thought maybe, just maybe, I could give him one more chance. His video on Red, White & Royal Blue was great...and then we get to Hbomber's vid...where apparently he plagiarized in that one too. I was suffering from second-hand embarrassment as Hbomber clocked everything James plagiarized and all of them happen to be videos I watched or took a look at. I felt cheated, betrayed and hurt. Cuz I thought James, at the very least, came up with his own shit. And as someone who works very fucking hard to write/rewrite their own works to near perfection & and takes writing very seriously, I was pissed off. I'm still pissed off now. I got sleep but struggled to stay awake cuz this was weighing on my brain. To now know that James is nothing more than thief who can't write his own shit, I'm disappointed. I pointed to him as one of my inspirations to push for more queer rep. No, he's not the reason I made Roomies...thank fuck for that. He didn't taint my one good thing. On the topic of Roomies, which has a lot of queer POC, I now question if he actually gave a fuck about other queer poc that didn't benefit him for a video. Cuz if we're gonna keep it a buck, most of his queer analysis has been mostly about yt folks. And let's not forget how this man regularly shat on women, both queer & straight. I know there's a discussion to be had about gay men being fetishized, but looking at it now, his views on women in general seem to be very...narrow-minded.

To wrap this up, I no longer support nor stand by James Somerton. Easy thing to do since I barely got back into his shit last month. To say I'm disappointed in you is a fucking understatement. No amount of apologizing is gonna fix this shit.

Good riddance.

#james somerton #hbomberguy #need to vent #queer #bi artist #queer artist #Youtube

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erriga · 7 months

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Pathologic and Edward Gordon Craig

In this episode, one very tired theatrology student will try to explain how Craig's ideas about actors and theatre in general might have factored into the way theatre is used in pathologic, especially when it comes to minor changes made between patho classic and 2. We'll talk about puppets vs actors, the role of directors and how it all relates to death. Yay!

SPOILERS FOR BOTH GAMES AHEAD

THEATRE IN PATHOLOGIC

So, anyone who's seen Codex Entry's video essays might be aware that Pathologic very visibly uses and plays with various theatrical ideas and concepts, especially when it comes to XXth century avantgarde movements. So far, Ruby has discussed the influences of Artaud (my boi), Brecht and Beckett, but today we're going to take a little step back and focus on one thinker who might have just been on of the most important theatre theorists ever and whose ideas definitely influenced all those that came after him. We're talking about our favorite theatre malcontent- Edward Gordon Craig

Soo, Craig was a theatre theoretician, actor, director, and founder of the magazine "The mask" back in the 1910s. In it, Craig would talk about his thoughts on theatre, which were largely counter-cultural, at least in comparison to the standard established back in the mid XIXth century. His works are often cited as fundamental to the Great Reform movement, which included among others, Stanislavsky, Reinhardt, and Appia. Their works paved the way towards avant garde theatre and a completely new understanding to it.

Now, why is Craig so important? Basically, he complained a lot and had very cool, albeit sometimes impossible ideas which were later inspired other in creative ways. His main ideas were:

Theatre is not a synthesis of other arts but rather something autonomical, unlike SOME OTHER PEOPLE THOUGHT (im loking at you wagner)

The director>>>>>>>> some dumb smelly actors

The actor shall one day be replaced by the Uber marrionette (tm)

Today we'll focus on those last two, since they are interconnected and most relevant in Pathologic.

The second point is pretty self-explanatory. Craig proposed that the director and their vision is the most important part of any given theatre show. The director should have a holistic vision, knowledge about all the arts participating in theatre and abilities to make their ideas reality. Before that, directors were more like the caretakers of shows, while the main focus was on the star actors. And this way of thinking leads us directly toooo:

THE UBER MARRIONETTE

(project by Oscar Schlemmer)

So, what is the uber marrionette? Basically it's a slightly esoteric idea that somewhere between puppets and living actors exists a form which would be perfectly responsive to the director's artistic vision. Human actors were ego-driven, restricted by their bodies and minds which generally not malleable enough to be a good material, even going so far as to suggest that acting is not an artform at all, since it is driven by chance and not specific intentions.

In contrast to that, Craig explained the nature of puppets- perfectly controlled, humble, objects of worship. And also symbols of death. Which he thought of as perfection. So, in some way, a perfect actor is a ...dead actor. Or, not literally dead, but posseing the perfect stasis of death, one usually assosciated with inanimate objects.

OK, WTF?

As I mentioned those ideas are very cool theories but are rather hard to actualize in the real world, especially since Craig was sometimes vague about what he ACTUALLY wanted to see. He would complain about people misinterpreting his works and declaring that he wants to replace actors with literal machines, while also never specifying what he actually meant. So different artists tried to bring his ideas to life, mostly by "mechanising" living actors, or using some blend of life and artificiality. In practice it was mostly shit like putting actors in giant metal pots and making them communicate in mono syllables to restrict their natural expressions od self as much as possible

OK, BUT HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO PATHOLOGIC?

So my theory is, that by portraying the player character(s) as puppets in classic, and as actors and tying all of this to the idea of death, the makers of PAthologic are playing (pun intended) with the concept of the uber marionnette and maybe even proposing a solution to this impossible problem.

Let's start with classic, because it's pretty straight forward. The characters are dolls/puppets (I'll be using those words interchangibly because fundamentally they serve the same purpose). The theatre itself is specifically said to host puppet shows (which is in itself a nod to the long standing tradition of folk puppetry in Russia and other eastern european countries)

Which in hindsight, are a direct reference to the fact that the very story you are playing is nothing more than a game/puppet performance hosted by in-world The Powers That Be and at the very top by the makers of Pathologic. In that way it is a very straight forward (but ultimately incorrect) use of the uber marionette- the player character is a humble vessel through which an idea is manifested. It's a puppet made out of polygons and lines of code instead of wood or felt. Your role as a player in this performance is two fold- you are both the puppeteer (the one who moves the dolls) and the spectator (because you are being told the story, not the other way around). What you are not is the Director- that role, personified by Mark Immortel and later by the Executor and Tragedian is out of reach for you. So, as you can see it's definitely using puppets, but not necessarily uber marrionetes.

AND THEN WE HAVE PATHO 2

So, the theatre inspirations in Patho 2 are a lot less...subtle than in classic, one of them being literally namedropping my boi Artaud's concept of the Theatre of Cruelty.

But what I want to focus on in this case is the seeming dissapearence of the puppet metaphor from the first game. You are no longer compared to a puppeteer moving a vessel, but to an actor inhabiting a role. A role which is in a way highly restrictive, since there are only four endings, and only two choices that actually impact what happens in the end (what you do with the documents, and whether you take the fellow travellers deal or not) You are faced with the idea that you are replacable, so your personal ego is not valuable to the director in universe and the game creators out of the universe. And finally, to make it even more interesting, you are in-universe faces with the neverending cycle of life and death, through the system of deaths having consequences/being part of the game's continuous timeline instead of just out of universe reloading. I think you might already see where i am going with this.

I THINK THAT THOSE TRAITS MAKE ARTEMY'S PORTRAYAL SIMILAR TO THE CONCEPT OF THE UBER MARRIONETTE

So not the concept itself, but something that heavily resembles the ideal version of what it could have been. Now, does it theory make perfect sense? No, but I thought it was a cool though experiment to do nontheless. The idea of an uber marionnette is onfusing theatrologists to this day, and many people have claimed to having founf a way to realize it, but since Craig himself was unclear about it, we will never know how relevan those tries were. But I still think that the topic of video games and theatre concepts is a fascinating one (that will probably be the topic of my bachelor's thesis lol), and pathologic is a perfect examples of those two ideas working together. If you have any other ideas about it, please let me know, and if you're interested i can make more posts about the theatrological angle of patho!!

#pathologic #pathologic classic hd #pathologic 2 #pathologic meta #pathologic spoilers

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corvidinthewoods · 4 months

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going to ramble a bit about hbomberguy, not the latest video directly more about some of the reaction to it. full disclosure i am a patron of his, have been for a few years, and became a fan of his channel years before that. i think maybe six years ago? give or take.

im maybe experiencing cognitive dissonance bc its nice that something ive enjoyed for a long time is gaining new audience, and of course new criticism. my initial reaction has been one of resistance that i need to check.

but after reading a bit more of the criticism im like. i kinda of agree? only kind of. i feel like the criticism is maybe not directed at me (or types of fans like me) but at folks for whom this is their first encounter with hbomberguy and are hailing him as a career-ruiner and gleefully enjoying the takedowns. dont get me wrong, takedowns are fun and they’ve always been core to his channel. his oldest stuff was debunking and clowning on right wing youtubers. but thats not all he is? and i dont like the idea of him as this Great Takedown Guy because personally the stuff i like best is his media criticism.

and thats not in the way some folks are like “oh yeah i enjoy hbomberguys media analysis but not his political stuff” i like both. but i think if folks are disregarding that side of his channel then theyre not like. idk how to word this im not the best writer. theyre missing out? or missing the point?

my personal favorite hbomberguy video is Halcyon Dreams. I also really enjoy Scanline (which is both him and shannon strucci), the CAD SLA, and the whole And Here’s Why series (especially speedrunning and pathologic). in much of hbomberguy’s other work, he will disagree with creators or producers in ways that aren’t career endings. and i don’t imagine he’s trying to become a person who does that all the time? i see behavior of his that indicates this to me, such as not naming who took his joke in the uber, explicitly saying “if you go harass Somerton you are worse than him”, and how most of And Here’s Why is neutral to positive, even tho the Garbage ones may get more views. the Sherlock has the highest

uhh where am i going with this. i always got points off for my transition sentences in essays

i guess im saying like. i don’t think it’s fair to just view the hbomberguy channel as waiting for the skeletons to come out of the closet. but i also dont think fans (especially y new fans) should put him up on this pedestal, particularly as Guy Who Destroys Careers. its not a good idea to idolize ppl in general, and its not great to live in a mindset of waiting for the next target for you to justify harassing.

#crow.txt #glad i went and read a bit more of the posts by the oerson who got me thinking about this #bc there were good points especially about some folks behavior #even if obviously i dont agree with the main thesis #hbomberguy

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the-reincarnated-princess · 9 months

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That might be an unpopular opinion (idk) because of the narrative framing but frankly in UnOrdinary, the school hierarchy actually makes a lot of sense.

You're in a world where, at the minimum, 99% of the people have a power of some sort. While most of them have mundane powers (see Evie's flashlight, Isen's tracking ability, or what's-her-name from the beginning who could grow her hair at will and make it take shapes) or powers that are not too dangerous for their peers (Arlo's barrier, that girl who could see a few seconds into the future, Darren's "shadow" or the security guard who could sense people walking into his area), there are also extremely destructive powers.

There are kids who can become invisible (with all the abuse it can generate), there are kids who can shoot energy beams that can break walls, there are kids who can generate enough electricity to kill someone, there are kids who can freeze time and do whatever they want... there are also kids who are just stronger than everyone else or faster (Heinz, Zeke...) and there's a lot of potential for bullies to misuse their powers.

Heck, even for non bullies, a kid who has anger issues and the "right" powers could easily destroy a room or injure other kids. Sure, the answer to anger issues isn't to beat the guy into compliance to the rules.

But the hierarchy's goal, at the beginning, isn't to beat the weaker people. The hierarchy (the school one, with it's King Queen Jack system)'s goal is to have three kids, the most powerful of the school, make sure that the weaker (but still powerful) kids will stay in line and reduce bullying.

I wrote another essay about it for a video game which wasn't the point but basically in a school were the pupils might be more powerful than the teachers, be it because it's an "elite" school with middle class teachers for royalty and billionaire kids, or a "magic" school in which the teachers' magical level might be inferior to that of the kids (as in, not a school where you learn magic, but one where magical beings go) it makes sense that the kids would be supposed to regulate themselves without needing an adult to step in, since adults wouldn't be able to do much, particularly in case of fight.

So put kids in charge of it. Why?

Because telling the three most powerful kids "if you keep the rest in check, you'll get an extra credit" (or something) means also neutralizing said three kids, with promises and threats, so they are not going to be the ones wrecking havoc.

Because it teaches responsabilities to the most powerful kids. They're the ones most likely to get in trouble later for their powers, or to have great responsabilities, for example in politics, the army, or jobs where their powers might be the reason they stay alive. If they learn as soon as middle school to be the voice of reason, it might create a better society, with elite kids being taught to be aware of bullying and avoid it, future soldiers and cops taught not to abuse their power, etc

Because telling the middle level kids "hey, the faculty won't do anything for you if the higher levels decide to beat you up as punishment for bullying weaker kids" might actually work (in a fucked up way) in making them stay in line and not bully the weakest.

Basically, if the hierarchy worked the way it was supposed to be (aka not the way Arlo made it work because he tried to over-correct what Rei had messed up when he had been king) it would be the most efficient way to teach kids responsabilities, to keep the would-be bullies in line, and to protect the teachers since physical fights would be left to break to powerful kids instead of weak teachers.

The only reason it doesn't work is because UnOrdinary's society is decadent and slowly crumbling down, the hierarchy is seen as a tool of oppression even by the people who participate in it (although they see that as "yes! we can oppress people!") instead of regulation, and the government is corrupt, as well as basically every authority figure.

#unordinary

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liauditore · 7 months

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For the ship bingo, perhaps ethubs or boatboys?

sorry it took so long to get to this i got so excited someone asked me to talk abt ethubs i went into a coma 😭😭

Ethubs

um uhh umerm ethubs yeah etho and bdubs and last life and mindcrack UHCs and eyah yknow um yeah

you know that one post that's like "inside my head is a five page essay with footnotes and when i speak it's just ouhghh blorbo he is so shaped". that's me with ethubs. not even kidding ethubs is the ship that made me finally "get" shipping in general, mcyt or not. i. words. i care them.

and uh there's. not rlly anything i can say i think that my ethubs moots haven't already said? They've been friends forever, they play off eachother super well, "he loves me", they're both so obsessed and in need of eachother but at the same time would rather eat raw, unpicked cactus than admit that, etc etc they're so unwell

im just gonna skip on over to the song lyrics bit cus i. they make my brain short circuit i cant even sentences.

The scarlet summer is gone and peaceful gray is draping the city Alone, I reach out for you to hold me tight, shivering Always the days spent with you warmed my heart and kept me from freezing Although I knew they were gone forever But in my pain, to me you came like the warmest breeze "On nights so cold I know you need some company."

Though only in lonely and freezing times, we held each other close to keep from feeling hopeless nothings And now again I can see summer fast approaching like a storm that there's no stopping Repeating in a cycle Like our mistakes

My love for you is endless, just like the deepest sea And like the ocean blue your complications speak to me I've come to understand you, your parts and inner workings My sun only in winter Only when I need you or else you won't need me

Leave you in Summer, Yet You're In My Fluffthoughts (Ashe translyrics) (sidenote this might be one of my favourite music videos of all time)

Falling so deeply while clinging to love But even so, I feel my heart and it’s floating up above Your true face, such a passionate one, shows your beauty, coming in a flood True, all of our short-lived youth will someday come to end Ah, even so, in my view, it starts right now, yet again

And every day, I found I prayed for you to be always full of happiness that remains Ah, just like this, please wait right by my side, please stay

Tablet (Will Stetson / sayriris translyrics) (after watching LL the first thing i did was make a MV to this song with LL Bdubs and it was still the most insane thing ive ever done fuelled by pure gargoyle inspiration juice)

I wouldn't say they're ~~Divorced~~ quite yet cus Idk if they were ever really married as much as just plain endlessly obsessed with eachother, which they still are. But they definitely broke up lmao

but yeah uh their chemistry is great. bdubs said it best. they've been thru the trenches together.

Boat Boys

Thankfully much less thoughts about these two or else this post would get way too long lmao. I like them but I'm not too insane about them I guess? Etho's very awkward near people he isn't used to which was fun to watch but made their interactions kind of limited for a lot of DL I feel.

Joel's obsession with Etho is hilarious and seeing Bdubs get jealous of his #1 ethogirl status getting challenged is great fun. He's definitely gone through a bit of an arc from "I KILLED ETHO! I KILLED ETHO!!" in Last Life to "Eefo D:< You're making me nervous, eefo D:<" in Double Life to whatever the cow divorce situation was in Limlife. It seems like Etho's otherworldly status has been nerfed in his head and he's much less intimidated by him, while still admiring him in that 'childhood hero' sorta way.

I think because of that I've always seen them a little bit as more of a mentor/prodigy relationship than anything else? Specifically one that Etho is not even aware he's in. Eitherway, I don't really ship them in the romantic sense 🤷‍♂️ etho's just way too aloof and joel's got too much fangirl energy for it to be anything intimate lol

#asks #ask games #trafficshipping #ethubs #smalletho #i love joel smallishbeans have i mentioned i love joel smallishbeans #but yeah i would have so much more ethubs art if i wasn't such a perfectionist abt them </3 #they drive me insane

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fatheriimaginedyoutaller · 4 months

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(SCRIPT PREVIEW)

Hey ya'll. Hope you're all having a great afternoon! I'm here to bring you a little update about this post.

After watching some video essays for inspiration, I began developing a draft for a script about Robin: Son of Batman (2015). Analyzing the story implications, themes and motifs! :)

And because ya'll been so supportive of my nerdy endeavours, you guys are getting a special preview of the aforementioned draft! (criticisms accepted of course!)

Part of the script avaliable under cut

tagging in: @fancyfade @fluffykitty149 @cleoeatsit

The first issue of the comic run starts with Damiam returning some sort of cultural artifacts to their rightful owners; an order of monks in mainland China. So, immediately, we got this Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones kind of plot point.

(Man I sure hope it doesn’t get abandoned halfway through and pivots to portraying the replacement of an autocracy with another autocracy where the head of state its not even from the country as a good thing)

ahem…

He gets interrupted by League of Assassins members which he fights off with the help of his pet, Goliath the Bat-dragon. He wins said fight and is lavished for returning the sacred object by the locals

All while a masked figure is observing the scene while saying:

“(...) there cannot be redemption for the year of the blood”

This introduction to the comic is interesting because it highlights the main narrative theme and framing device of the whole story: The Quest for Redemption.

Before we even know exactly what Damian is doing and why he's doing it. We know he's looking to mend a rift. To make a past wrongdoing right. And then we find out someone wants to stop him…

This forms an interesting parallel with real life survivors of schoolyard abuse aka bullying.

Now, hear me out…

Many kids (especially those with conditions such as autism) are manipulated by their bullies into doing bad things to other children. They generally do this by preying on their loneliness and desire to be accepted by their peers. And so said kids carry out acts of hazing to other children, perpetuating a cycle of harm.

A cycle which is hard to escape from. Because if you hurt someone, regardless of if you were manipulated or not, that person will probably not trust you after the fact. And if you add into account the environment of a school, where rumors spread like wildfires, there's a high chance you develop a bad reputation. Cause other people have no way of knowing you did it while being threatened into being a social pariah. It's a no win situation.

Damian's story is simile to this. Sure, the acts he carried out were far more extreme and he was not manipulated by an outsider but by his own grandfather, Ra’s Al Ghul. But the effects of his psyche, development and public perception are all the same.

Think about it: His claims to being either the Blood Son or the Grandson of the Demon are basically him trying to justify his existence to a family that, for all he knows, could abuse him again. Which leads him to having a thought process where he has to be the best of the best in the room, cause the only other alternative is death. and for that he’s punished. Even though no one ever bothered to teach him the normal social protocols for a boy his age.

So when you make that reading of Damian, and put into the context of a story where he, by his own volition, decides he’s gonna try and reverse all the harm he caused while being essentially groomed. You get something really powerful.

Well…kind of…

There’s a few things that stuck out with the framing of this arc. The most glaring one being: this arc takes place after he comes back from the dead. After being trapped in hell for the better part of a year after being killed by his own clone.

By making Damian’s journey for redemption take place after he’s been through literal Hell, there’s the subtle implication that he’s not doing it out of his own free will, but to avoid some sort of celestial punishment.

And that’s not a bad idea per se, if the comic acknowledged that implication. Because it does put an interesting question into the table. “Does it matter why we do good things? As long as we do them?” Does it matter if Damian doesn’t kill anymore because of “selfish” reasons. After all, why would an orphan he saves from a fire care if he used to be bad or not? Should that matter to anyone?

That last part is a testament, I think, to how much better executed some ideas that writers at DC have would be if they played them straight. If they acknowledged the implications of their writing instead of just doing something because they thought it would be cool or dramatic.

#my post #batman #damian wayne #dc comics #batfamily #robin #batfam #bruce wayne #talia al ghul #rsob #robin: son of batman #dc meta #character analysis #media analysis #literary analysis #meta

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lumentears · 2 years

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Garreg Mach students ranked by how popular their tumblr blog would be, from least to most

Popularity is measured not only by follower count, but also their general notoriaty in the tumblr dot hell ecosystem.

Ashen wolves sadly excluded because this list is long enough and I wish to see the sun again sometime today.

24. Leonie

I say this with a mind free of judgement and a heart full of love, but Leonie is a Facebook user. She doesn't really get tumblr, since for her social media is mainly to keep up with her people back in Sauin village, and you can not tell me that a community of mainly hunters uses anything other than Facebook to show off their latest game.

Most popular post: Her introduction post. Liked by Byleth and Byleth only.

23. Dimitri

He uses his tumblr as a personal vent blog whenever he is having a Mental Health Moment™ and deletes everything he posted the day later. He sits on an ask box full of concerned anons he can't bring himself to either acknowledge or delete.

Most popular post: His posts get liked in the """"traumacore"""" space but since he immediately deletes them it's hard to gaige exact metrics.

22. Hubert

You fool! He has 70 alternative accounts! And he uses all of them to send anon hate to his enemies and publish callout posts on those who seek to oppose Lady Edelgard.

Most popular post: "Lord Varley is a terrible person that deserves to be deplatformed and beheaded and here's why"

21. Ashe

His tumblr is for things he personally enjoys, he doesn't really post much original content. He reblogs from Bernadetta and Ferdinand and every single credible gofundme he can get his fingers on.

Most popular post: That time Felix baited him into a lengthy argument over the ethics of shoplifting.

20. Raphael

Reblogs warriormale like it's his god damn job. Occaisonally posts workout videos too, but for some reason Ignatz is REALLY bad at getting the camera to focus whenever Raphael is on screen.

Most popular post: Raphael was very enthusiastic about warriormale's drop that towel!!! post, much to the amusement of many immature people online.

19. Petra

Petra has a travel blog, mostly to document her experiences in Fódlan and get her into the habit of writing in her second language. It's mostly for her own sake, so she isn't fussed about getting followers.

Most popular post: A video titled "Me and my best girl friend at the beach". Every single one of the notes are a variation of "girl is that Dorothea Arnault 👀👀👀". She never confirms or denies this and her next update is about her catching the cold for the fifth time this year.

18. Linhardt

No queue, no tags, no system, Linhardt posts whatever holds his interest. An absolute nightmare for the novice to follow, but students with a little bit of patience can unearth many a pirated textbook.

Most popular post: A masterlist of crestology textbooks. Reblog to save a student's life!

17. Ingrid

Mostly vaguely feminist theory and book recs. Sometimes extremely personal ventposting. People who know her irl pretend not to know it is her as to not make her uncomfortable.

Most popular post: That one time she got kungpowpenised on one of her more...problematiqué opinion pieces.

16. Lysithea

Okay folks hear me out - she totally has a super secret fandom blog. She pretends that it is for the sole purpose of pointing and laughing at fandom drama as she herself is above that fandom-brained nonsense, but Goddess have mercy on your sinful soul if you provoke her into sharing her hot takes.

Most popular post: A 14k word essay on disability in the warrior cats book series.

15. Annette

Annette also has a fandom blog, but shame? Not on her good christian site. She takes great pains to keep her blog a space of positivity and unabashed joy in being cringe. In all honesty, it feels a bit like falling through a time portal into pre-dashcon tumblr, and I say this with equal parts nostalgia and condemnation.

Most popular post: In this universe, she is the person that birthed the "my homophobic dad became an ally by watching Sherlock" fake tumblr story. It was a bit of wish fulfillment when she was younger, and it haunts her to this day.

14. Ferdinand

Writes mediocre poetry and reblogs scenery panoramas and history posts. Regularly has to fight accusations of being a tradcath blogger, and he fights them to the death.

Most popular post: A picture of him on horseback went semi-viral once, akin to the ridicoulusly handsome marathon runner.

13. Lorenz

Writes mediocre poetry and reblogs scenery panoramas and history posts. Is actually a tradcath. Alas, people live for the drama and Lorenz gives them no shortage of it.

Most popular post: That time Lorenz went defcon as he was accused of sneaking into women's dms to ask for feet pics. He vehemently, desperately denied being into feet.

12. Felix

Felix has been banned from every other platform but tumblr, and he uses it for PVP only. He's become infamous sitewite for always starting shit and getting into arguments, almost in the same vein as human pet guy, just a bit less horribly morally bankrupt.

Most popular post: A legendary colour-of-the-sky length feud with Sylvain that ends in Felix posting a screed that has become the next "what the fuck did you just fucking say about me" copypasta.

11. Marianne

Has one of these "is the animal media cute" blogs. She tries to stay nonjudgemental and positive, but something in these blogs just seems to make people go sicko mode - she has to block at least a dozen people every single day. Secret star of the blog is Dorte the horse.

Most popular post: A video of her singing happy birthday to Dorte. It wold probably have gone unnoticed if Hilda hadn't reblogged it to her ravenous audience who can't get enough of pretty girls.

10. Dedue

Is most active on youtube, but he still has a woodworking, cooking and gardening blog that attracts the most wholesome audience of old people. You know, the „great work, Dedue, it’s nice to see the younger generation still picking up these kinds of hobbies“ kind.

Most popular post: I feel like he’d dabble in the kind of „cooking hack debunking“ videos Ann Reardon does in our universe, because he respects the craft and doesn’t want young people getting hurt trying dangerous viral hacks.

9: Ignatz

If you’ve ever been on the internet at all, you’ve probably seen one of his artworks. Sadly, those artworks are probably reposts of reposts of reposts, and Ignatz is still struggling to make comissions – he is still to shy to just become a furry artist but give it a few months and he might not have a choice anymore.

Most popular post: A post begging tumblr users to reblog his art.

8. Dorothea Arnault

She absolutely could be in the top 3 of this list if she wanted to. She just ABSOLUTELY doesn't want to. She's incognito on this blog and, once you've dug your way through reblogged gofundme's of folks in need, you'd find that her content is mainly her singing in places you wouldn't expect great audio in - stairwells and basements, mostly. Sometimes, people will ask her "has anyone ever told you you sound like Dorothea Arnault?" and she'll answer "I don't know who that is, sounds like a bitch though".

Most popular post: Her blog really took off during the sea shanty stage of quarantine - in fact, her sapphic shanties might have kickstarted the era.

7. Sylvain

Hornyposts all day every day and still finds a way to get all up in everyone's business. Was determined to outlast the titty ban and by now, the algorithm as pretty much thrown up its hands and given up on him. Totally the kind of guy who reblogs nsfw pics or videos from other blogs with unwarranted commentary.

Most popular post: His legendary tiff with Felix, in which he pulled off smooth shark levels of playing dumb to piss off his opponent. The resulting mythic copypasta is now his bio.

6. Mercedes

Mercedes posts daily on her affirmations and positivity blog. Reminders to relax x muscle, unclench y joint, and afford yourself the same grace you afford others. She also gives advice to troubled anons, and it's not neccessarily good advice but it's nice to see someone sincerely cares. People somewhat parasocially call her the "tumblr mom".

Most popular post: Her coming out post where she announced she is bisexual.

5. Caspar

Okay this might be a hot take but i feel like Caspar is a tiktoker – detractors call him a thirst trap but honestly he doesn’t show off his abs to make money off of horny viewers, he shows them off cause he's proud and wants everyone to know about them. He reblogs all his stuff to tumblr because he knows Linhardt is most active (most being a relative term) there and Linhardt liking his new post is a highlight of his day.

Most popular post: He’s gone viral a few times with a genre of tiktoks tumblr would describe as this is what boys will be boys should mean. In this universe, he ist he originator oft he vine of a guy pushing his friend, who’s fallen asleep on an air matress, out into a lake.

4. Bernadetta

Has a gajillion sideblogs she can’t bring herself to part with – she lives in constant fear someone will discover her abandoned onceler sideblog. Her most popular blog is for writing reader insert fanfiction. Whenever her blog gains enough followers to make her feel nervous about posting, she drops off the face of the earth for a few months until her follower count has shrunken to a managable size.

Most popular post: shamefully, an 18+ onceler rp from the olden days.

3. Edelgard

Your one-stop shop for protest tactics, world news, guilt-trippy posts about today's calamity and what you can and MUST do about it, and organisation to donate time and money to.

Most popular post: So she let her guard down once, ONCE, and reblog a slew of topless buff woman gifs to main on accident, and tumblr still clowns on her for it.

2. Hilda

She may be an insta gal, but she took to tumblr like a duck to water. Yes, tumblr as a whole hates the idea of being sold things, but sometmies they are willing to make an exception if the girl selling things is a delightfully lazy and aggravatingly cute #girlboss.

Most popular post: Technically, it's a selfie with her tiddies almost out. What draws people to the post is Marianne in the background, clearly hypnotised, pouring a herself a nice cup of tea...into her lap.

1.Claude

You think he's a tumblr funnyman? Wrong. He's ALL the tumblr funnymen. He is gaud, he is pukicho, he is all the other's who's names I can't be arsed to look up. It began as him sockpuppeting on another account to set up a punchline to a shitpost, it snowballed from there and now he is roleplaying several different tumblr blogs with an incredible amount of dedication. Right now he is planning for two of his personas to stream a game simultaneously.

Most popular post: If you ask him, his most popular post has not been made yet, but it sits in his draft, just waiting for the day they pull the plug on tumblr, so he can end the charade and dramatically unmask himself at the last possible moment.

Bonus: Byleth

Reblogs every single post her students make. Regardless of theme. Regardless of content. Always reacting with a couple of emojis. Nobody is sure whether her blog is a bot or a real person, and scrolling through it the closest one could come to browsing r/all on tumblr.

She is, of course, not a bot, this is just the way she makes her unconditional support of her students known. Even if that means reblogging hardcore porn, an essay on the canonical treatment of Brightheart in The Prophecies Begin, more hardcore porn and a deeply personal account of trauma within seconds of each other.

#fire emblem #fire emblem 3 houses #listen if i was mean to your fave on here there is a good chance i actually love them #i am just shitposting #black eagles #blue lions #golden deer #fuck im not tagging every student in this if this is a 2 note post then so be it #fe3h

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melonteee · 4 months

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Just saw your video on women, i really loved it, its great. i do love me some hour long video essays. Pls keep doing more

I wanted to know your opinion on this because you didnt mention it in the video (which is fair, its already long), do you think Oda is trying to fix some of the more misogynistic things he wrote at the start without thinking to much about it?

Maybe things like Zoro being called out, having the more recent female characters have a bit more diversity in body types or Sanji having a more genuine love story where he doesnt get to perv that much are possible examples of this.

Honestly I can indeed see an evolution in Oda's writing, he certainly feels he's trying to become more open minded and include more...well, MORE! For everyone! Egghead especially has felt so...tame I guess? In general, anyways. Honestly I can forgive the women getting little booty short outfits because...listen I'm gay as hell I'm no better than a man jgjjgjh

But at the same time, we gotta remember it's not just Oda. He has a whole editing team who'd push him to put specific things in from time to time, which is funny because he's gotten a new editor for Egghead who is apparently quite young, and it feels very obvious! I'm really enjoying the way Egghead is heading and what One Piece is shaping into.

I don't know what's in Oda's head and what he's thinking ofc, but in my opinion, I can at least see efforts being made. He thankfully has not done that boomer thing where he like, hits 50 and becomes insanely conservative or something LMAO at least from what I can tell

#ask #melonask

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onecornerface · 4 months

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YouTuber Tom Nicholas misrepresented Steven Pinker's statements on academic writing

Tom Nicholas’s YouTube video “Why is Academic Writing so Boring?” is wildly wrong and misleading in how it portrays Steven Pinker. Nicholas falsely accuses Pinker of making arguments that he very clearly does not make, and ignores almost everything Pinker actually says.

Several years ago, I read Pinker’s book The Sense of Style—a pretty great book about how to improve writing, especially academic writing. When I saw Nicholas’s video, which only focuses on Pinker’s much shorter essay “Why Academics Stink at Writing,” I noticed the view he attributes to Pinker bears little resemblance to the view Pinker develops in the book. But I wondered if maybe Pinker’s essay was indeed a lot dumber than the book, since authors often do a very bad job of compressing their ideas into short formats. So I read the essay—and found Nicholas’s portrayal was not a remotely reasonable interpretation.

For one thing, Nicholas speaks as if Pinker is opposed to academic jargon, which is not true. Pinker thinks some jargon is essential and useful, and that some jargon is gratuitous. Some version of this position is blatantly correct. Nicholas spends a LOT of his video defending the very idea of academic jargon—a view Pinker already agrees with! Nicholas and Pinker may well turn out to disagree on the specifics of what kinds of jargon are justified, but Nicholas can’t explore this idea since he’s misrepresenting Pinker as being opposed to all jargon.

In fact, Pinker mostly focuses on issues other than jargon—and Nicholas completely ignores all of this, despite its obvious relevance to the video topic.

On two occasions in the video, Nicholas presents a quote from Pinker (from page 1) out of context—making it sound as if Pinker is saying academics in the “softer sciences” generally write badly on purpose, “to hide the fact that they have nothing to say.” But the truth is, Pinker doesn’t express this theory himself. He says it is the most popular theory among non-academics! Then in the very next paragraph, he says: “Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.” This is never mentioned in the video.

Nicholas very briefly mentions that Pinker gives several reasons why most academic writing is bad, but he gives the impression that the bamboozlement theory is an argument Pinker himself is putting forward. Nicholas completely omits the fact that Pinker says the theory “does not ring true.” And Nicholas completely leaves out any mention of the reasons that Pinker spends the entire rest of the essay discussing. Pinker rejects the notion that most bad academic writing is intentionally obscure. Instead, he gives a nuanced and charitable analysis appealing to several factors, many of them fairly innocent. A large portion of his analysis is the “curse of knowledge”—roughly, the tendency for an expert on X to fail to grasp what it’s like to not know much about X, and thus to fail to write in a manner that is comprehensible to someone who doesn’t already know the same stuff.

There is a popular notion that academic writing is generally bad on purpose, and that it is generally bad due to jargon. Some parts of Nicholas’s video are a half-decent rebuttal to this view. But he depicts Steven Pinker as the avatar of this view—a view Pinker explicitly rejects.

Nicholas occasionally mentions that he agrees a lot of academic writing is bad, but he never clarifies how. Meanwhile, Pinker has actually written a lot on diagnosing the problems and giving advice on how to improve it.

Nicholas speaks as if Pinker singles out the “soft” sciences (twice misrepresenting Pinker’s quote, as I mentioned). Pinker does later claim that the humanities have some distinctive writing problems (which may or may not be true, and may be worth exploring at length-- but Nicholas doesn’t even cite this part), but in the essay under discussion he simply does not dwell long on this. Pinker criticizes the writing style of “hard” science research studies numerous times. He also says some writing problems are especially severe in linguistics, his own field.

Finally, Nicholas essentially accuses Pinker of opposing jargon out of a desire to defend status quo capitalism and make it harder to engage in high-level critique of status quo capitalism. Pinker is a capitalist, and some of his political views are probably bad. The only Pinker book I’ve read is The Sense of Style, which barely discusses politics (except in the section where Pinker defends the singular ‘they’), so I can’t comment on that. All I know is that Nicholas blatantly and severely misrepresents the Pinker essay in the video, and none of Pinker’s political positions will change this fact or make it okay.

#steven pinker #academic writing #tom nicholas #youtube

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lonelywretchjervistetch · 8 months

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My DCCU: Character Essay - Mr. Mxyzptlk

So...did you see the last episode of MAWS?

I just wrote an essay discussing this series, and without making you read that (although here it is if you wanna), let's just say I love almost everything about it, but the villains have me...nervous. Which, yeah, not exactly a unique take on the series, critically speaking. It is, in fact, the most common refrain about the series amongst Superman fans.

Now, since then, to be fair, we've gotten some very promising characters make their debut, or becoming more prominent. Task Force X - which includes Amanda Waller, the General (who's gotta be Sam Lane, but may also take some inspiration from Wade Eiling; time'll tell on that one, though), and a very cool super-armored version of Deathstroke - are our main antagonists, and I'm excited to see what comes out of them. Their former associates, power couple Brain and Monseiur Mallah (who are also gay in the comics, if you didn't know) are a more sympathetic turn on the characters, but quite satisfying in this form.

But no, there's only one real reason I'm making this post. And that is of course, the villain featured in the most recent episode, as of me writing this post. He's already up above, so let's just get into it.

Fun fact about me: I love a lot of Superman villains, but of all of them, my absolute favorite is Mr. Mxyzptlk. He's a mischief-making, chaos-loving, harmless and harmful menace from the 5th dimension, who obeys no laws of the dimensions below. The origin of legends, past and present, of genies, leprechauns, fey, and imps that tease men with ill-fated wishes. An all-powerful being disguised as a man dressed in a funny little hat.

Mr. Mxyzptlk is the Robin Goodfellow of Superman's world. He appears to amuse himself, no matter the cost to the Man of Steel's day. Usually, you can send him back via making him say his own name backwards, but that's just one of the rules to Mxy's games. And make no mistake, that's what they are: games. Mr. Mxyzptlk has played on the side of angels and devils, and he really only cares about his own amusement. And his relationship with Superman, varied as it can be, helps to fuel his morality.

I could bring up the character's live-action appearances (which are notable in their own right), but those are mostly afraid to really go for it. The closest to the original character would be Michael J. Pollard's version in Superboy, a mostly forgotten series from the late'80s, and a version that actually wears the comic book outfit. There's also the Supergirl version, which was notable, and played by Peter Gadiot and Thomas Lemmon; and there's the version played by Howie Mandel (yes, really) in Lois and Clark: The Adventures of Superman in the '90s, which is a more evil but passable version of the character. Oh, and the Smallville version? Yeah, absolutely doesn't count. If you want a true adaptation for Mxy, you gotta go animated.

The most iconic adaptation of this character was portrayed by the late, great Gilbert Gottfried in Superman: The Animated Series. Now, I say the most iconic, but that's probably a bit biased on my part. In my opinion, this is the most fun and accurate version we've seen of the character, taking from his original design for inspiration. An annoying imp that appears every three months, his debut episode in the series, Mxyzpixillated, is one of my favorite episodes of the series, and goes balls-to-the-wall wacky, as you should with Mxyzptlk.

The character had only a few more appearances in the series after his first, but Gottfried's performance was so memorable, he was brought back for multiple incarnations, including the video game DC Universe Online, and the more recent animated series Justice League Action, which would be one of Gottfried's last performances, and therefore his last appearance as the character. He'll be sorely missed for a number of reasons, but the voice he gave to the imp is never going to leave me.

Which brings me to the version of the character we see in MAWS. And yeah, this is obviously a VERY different version of the character, appearance-wise. Outside of the orange and purple color scheme and one other exception, this version has no design similarities with any version of Mxyzptlk, and is obviously very anime-inspired, as is the entire series. I mean, for Chrissakes, the title of the episode is a reference to Ouran High School Host Club. They knew what they were doing.

We meet Mxyzptlk in the middle of a heist, and he already shows his power and prowess by tricking Clark immediately. Amongst a bunch of fantastic DCU references, and a lot of multiverse talk, we eventually stumble upon his actual goal: the reclamation of an ancient artifact stolen from him by the League of Lois Lanes. And that artifact is...his hat. THE hat. And lemme tell ya, I was overjoyed to see that stupid little bowler.

Once he gets it, we get a glimpse of true Mxyzptlk power, as he goes full chaos lord on us. He's eventually defeated through trickery with portals, and NOT through the backwards name gambit. And even then, he's not actually defeated, and returns in the end to annoy his new target: Lois Lane. Yeah. He's haunting LOIS, not Clark. And honestly, I'm...very intrigued.

This Mxyzptlk is, honestly, a faithful version of the character, straight-up. Sure, there are elements missing, and the outfit is completely different, but he also sort of looks like you'd expect an imp or genie to look. Like Alan Moore said in Whatever Happened to the Man of Steel?, why should an extradimensional imp look like a little man in a suit and funny little bowler? I think this works, honestly.

I'm also excited to see him in the future of the series, and see what they do with the character as a result. Mxyzptlk is, as I said earlier, one of my favorites, whether he helps or hurts the Man of Tomorrow. And if I had one complaint, it's that I want him to go wackier. Like, CRAZY. Watch his appearances in Superman: The Animated Series if you haven't, and you'll see what I mean. The potential is quite literally unlimited when it comes to the fifth dimension imp.

But if that's the case...what would I do with Mxyzptlk in my DCCU?

Mr. Mxyzptlk in My DCCU

I would do...not much more than Easter eggs at first. Look, I love Mxyzptlk, but having him as a character in a film or film series is extremely tricky. But instead, Mxyzptlk is both a seen and unseen force in my DCCU, hovering around Superman's world without actually interfering in it directly. Not exactly his bag, I know, but it's a good way to get him to work in a film series. Essentially, I'm turning him into a background character in the first and second films, to be noticed by only the most observant. Disguised as other characters, maybe making odd gestures every now and then as if to manipulate things around him. The ultimate Easter egg character, basically. Until, possibly the very end of the second, or even the third film in the franchise.

Fast forward to the second film's post-credit scene.

A poker game is being played, but we're table level. All we see are the hands and the cards, which get increasingly stranger as the game goes on. Three voices are speaking, and we get the immediate idea that these people are watching our heroes. Eventually, a fourth voice juts in, and we also find out that a fifth one of them has been invited, but chose not to attend. Finally, we pan up, and we see...some dude.

This guy, whoever they are, should've been a face we've seen in the first and second films, usually hanging around the Daily Planet, but also around Metropolis. In fact, they should be visible in every conflict or battle seen in the films thus far. As we look at the others, we should see similar figures that've appeared in Batman, Wonder Woman, and Flash films that've come put by this point. All extras, and all watching our heroes. In fact, it'd be great if the Flash-focused person hasn't appeared yet, because the Flash's film releases after this one.

Finally, as we pan back around to the Superman-focused character, who is smoking a cigar, the conversation turns to what's coming. Mxyzptlk is aware of what's coming for Superman, but the rest refer to "the first Crisis". Mxyzptlk sort of brushes it off, even as they're saying things that hint at the first big even film to come in the DCCU. And these should be vague yet intriguing clues to this event. But Mxyzptlk insists that his guy'll be prepared, and that he has a lot of money riding on that outcome. With that, the mysterious figure looks directly at the camera.

Yeah, realizing that we're peering in on the game, he probably berates the nerds in the audience for knowing who he is without it being said (possibly by turning into a more comic-accurate version of himself) , then confirms that he'll be back in the next one, but not as the big threat. Maybe he'll be there to help, maybe not; depends on his mood that day. After a few more snarky remarks, he gives us a look and tells us to buzz off. We may even get a glimpse at the other imps in the room, those being Bat-Mite, Wondermite, and Mopee. And with that, he snaps his fingers, and the film ends officially.

Yeah, I basically pulled an Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to bring in Mxyzptlk. And, since that scene is one of the best of the film, I don't think that's a problem! In the next film, we know what Mxyzptlk's identity looks like, and he may even give us a wave from the background in his first appearance in the next film. He won't interfere directly, but in the last post-credits scene of this trilogy, he'll finally get caught by Superman. Over time, Superman's had some experience with magic users, probably via Wonder Woman. And magic, in my universe, has a distinctive smell of some kind.

Knowing that Mxyzptlk's been watching him throughout the films, Clark finally confronts him on it, and asks what he wants. And Mxyzptlk actually replies and shows himself, explaining that the battles to come are pretty intense. He won't help or harm, but he just wanted to give a heads-up, mostly because it's fun. With that and a bit more conversation, Mxyzptlk leaves having given this ominous warning.

Does he return? Maybe during a Crisis on Infinite Earths movie, maybe in the Darkseid-based Justice League film to come, who knows? This version of the character is basically a Watcher, maybe throwing in some fun chaos here and there. It's sort of hard to add Mxyzptlk into a film series, because he's not a plotter. He's an all-powerful one-off character who, were he to be introduced as a genuine threat to the films, could just kill Superman immediately. It wouldn't make sense. So, make him neutrally bent, and keep him as a fun Easter egg character.

That take may be disappointing to some, but...like, c'mon, guys, he's a pretty big gun. Having him as the ultimate threat of a film also wouldn't make it very fun, because we don't want to see him get killed, but he also can't really win. It'd just be unsatisfying. I like the idea of making him this greater, scarier presence, while also making all of the imps these all-powerful observant beings that watch over our plane with fascination and/or reverence. And maybe, just maybe, we can squeeze some mischief in there somewhere.

Any other ideas on how you would introduce Mr. Mxyzptlk to a cinematic universe (if you should at all)? Reblog! Comment! I'm extremely curious, frankly. This was one of, like, three ideas I had, but the one I thought worked best.

And if you liked this, check out my other Superman essays here!

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gregrulzok · 10 days

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Modern!AU Zeke Jager brainworms, courtesy of the really long and complex AU I made with my friends fucking, what, two years ago?

We're only talking about Zeke but suffice it to say there's a lot of other backstory I'm leaving out

• Full name is Ezekiel Jager. He will absolutely never use this name and fully pretends it doesn't exist

• Was abandoned by Grisha when he was 7 after Dina died. Grisha left him with his grandparents and disappeared 'to grieve', returning 3 years later with a new wife and son to take him back

• Zeke really resented both him and Eren for a while, but after realising what a shitty father Grisha was to both of them, he took over taking care of Eren as much as possible - doubly so after Carla died too

• While Grisha was absent, Zeke developed a close paternal bond with his teacher/baseball coach Mr. Ksaver. Ksaver passed away when Zeke was 16, and Zeke was too grief-stricken and ended up abandoning baseball, comitting instead to becoming a doctor like Grisha

• When the Jagers started fostering Mikasa, Zeke was the first to try and learn some Japanese to make sure she didn't forget the language

• This led to him studying medicine in Japan after he got his bachelor's degree. He has a very ... Interesting encounter with Levi Ackerman while staying there *cough cough* at a specific sort of club *cough cough*

• (They met at a gay club and hooked up multiple times over the years, forming a very strained and awkward sort of relationship. They definitely annoyed each-other more than they liked each-other, but they formed a sort of kinship largely through their complicated family lives)

• Eventually he returned to do his residency in his father's hospital. In truth he absolutely hates the stress and fuss of being a doctor and thinks he isn't cut out for it - but he can't bring himself to quit.

• Staunchly anti-natalist - doesn't ever want to have kids and thinks he'd make a terrible father. On top of that, doesn't want to get married - he considers it an outdated institution

• Dated Pieck briefly. They had a stable relationship, but a fairly explosive break-up - Pieck brought up moving in together, and Zeke interpreted it as a marriage proposal and shot the idea down very harshly, leading to a huge argument and eventual break-up

• Most of his joy in life comes from embarrassing and poking fun at Eren. He loves him more than anything and can't bring himself not to annoy him at every possible opportunity

• Has numerous houseplants and can't keep any of them alive for shit

• Owns and takes great pride in using a full-on beard care kit, complete with an ornately carved mahogany box to keep it in. Generally takes really good care of his appearance ... Whenever he goes out. If he doesn't go out for two days in a row he immediately transformed into an over-caffeinated anxiety-riddled sasquatch

• Despite appearances, his house is an absolute mess - every surface has coffee stains, papers are scattered everywhere, ashtrays overflowing, dishes that haven't felt the touch of a single drop of water in many a night ... He absolutely hates cleaning and will put it off by any means necessary

• Has a novelty breath-mint tin

• Too nervous and forgetful to own a pet - he's toyed around with the idea of getting some fish, but after researching the amount of care they actually need he gave up on it entirely

• Listens to a lot of podcasts about the most random topics. Additionally his entire YouTube recommended feed is full of 3+ hour video essays

• Has a lot of trouble sleeping. The temperature, light and sound levels need to be very specific. On top of that he needs to be holding something to his chest.

• Fantasy nerd. Has read lord of the rings, played DND in college (doesn't have time for that these days), still watches real play streams - WILL try to mansplain the complex topics in any given high fantasy work of fiction

• Owns a collection of weird shirts with random images and sentences on them. It started off as a gag gift from Eren that read "Women fear me, Fish want me" - now he has easily over 20+ weird shirts, which he wears around the house at any given opportunity

• Loves Monty Python

#zeke #zeke jaeger #attack on titan #aot #shingeki no kyojin #snk #zeke snk #zeke aot #zeke attack on titan #zeke shingeki no kyojin #headcanons #au

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discluded · 2 years

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https://youtu.be/fipafHfc650 have you watched this video? I think it's really interesting and the analysis is spot on especially when they talk about mileapo's chemistry (and the difference between kinnporsche and vegaspete scenes)

Anon, are you trying to get me in trouble with the VP fans?! 🤣🤣🤣

I have watched this. I will say in general it's good, and I recommend everyone give it a watch if you have the chance.

youtube

But if you don't, I'm going to highlight the key points from the essay in order to respond and also some minor points of contention I have.

Mile and Apo set a new standard for chemistry in BL, and fans are not going to be satisfied with the same dead fish kisses they've been seeing in a lot of BLs. (Agreed, this point has been iterated before by other bloggers on tumblr too)

Their kisses are exceptional acting. (The thesis of this post, and I'm guessing why you linked me to the video.) The essayist highlights three items as what makes a great kiss scene: the physical, the emotional, and the lexical.

VP's sex scene is a combination of multiple takes and B-roll likely because they couldn't get one shot that was cohesive enough to use. (this is a fact, I can't dispute it and other people in VP fandom too have noted it). This is in contrast to KP's NC scenes which are usually one take. The video essayist theorizes the BDSM element could have caused more elements for the actors to be uncomfortable and recommends that they work on their chemistry between seasons, provided there is an S2.

I'm gonna focus on chemistry as the subject of this ask.

First of all: What is chemistry?

Chemistry such a vague concept people talk about and never define that you can really only talk about it as "you know it when you see it." But it's so innately recognizable that it's something you can see on video and in still photos.

I would define it as a function of who the people (actors) are to each other. Let me highlight one (extreme) example with MileApo at the Dream Salon Farger event.

This is what I would consider reasonably neutral friendly body language. They're seated in two different chairs, but they are looking at each other and engaging.

Then Mile gets asked a question about confessing and they literally start leaning into each other even though Mile is supposedly talking to the audience.

Then he finishes answering the question with direct eye contact with Apo. Now he's answering the question only for Apo at this point. They're in their own little world, we're just witnessing it.

Also something that's haunted me the longest time... what the hell Apo, why are you shy about Mile answering a question about flirting in private. I mean we all know why but. GOd.

??? what the hell.

ANYWAY. The point is, the chemistry between them is so visible they're literally like magnets pulling towards each other. These are all stills from the video. Even though they started out from a fairly neutral position, their bodies and eyes are innately drawn into each other.

If you have an example this obvious you can tell it's happening even though not everyone might be able to verbalize why you can see the chemistry.

My opinion on actor chemistry is that you can't fake it and you can't really make it happen. It's also not a function of how good the actor is at acting.

Let me give you an example of that. I would consider one of the gold standards of cinematic chemistry to be Daniel Craig as James Bond meeting Eva Green's Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. And while I haven't watched Blue is the Warmest Color, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos's chemistry in the film is what has made it one of the great recent queer cult classics.

Yet Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux have absolutely no chemistry. I was kind of shocked when they got together because their lack of chemistry was so palpable I couldn't see it coming. Two actors who have previously displayed incredible chemistry with other costars and are great actors in my opinion just don't...click.

That's why you cast for chemistry.

So my criticism of the essayist's point they need to work on it is, I don't think they can... I will say, Daniel and Lea's chemistry in No Time to Die was slightly better, but it's not a function of familiarity. If it's not there, then it's not there.

I don't think Bible and Build "lack" chemistry to the same extent as Daniel and Lea above... I actually think it's not terrible, but it doesn't come off at the same explosive level as Mile and Apo's. I would say they operate on a good level we see in a lot of normal-level romantically cast pairings. As for why the NC scene came off as awkward, I do think it's familiarity with each other in the context of that kind of storytelling. Remember that Mile and Apo also spent a year making out with each other for practice too 🤪

What is chemistry in the context of storytelling?

For me, in good storytelling, actor chemistry is usually used in opposition to the events of the story. The chemistry is what glues the characters together while the events unfolding pull them apart. The visible chemistry is the "why" that keeps them coming back together and fighting for a relationship even though intellectually it doesn't make sense.

And by relationship I don't necessarily mean romantic, though sometimes actors get cast for romantic chemistry even when the relationship is meant to be read as platonic. An infamous example of that is Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy in the X-Men reboot.

Their chemistry isn't as intense as MA's (I mean, most people aren't unless if they're actively in a scene trying to bring that out), but if you watch a live video of them, they're magnets for each other too.

And the filmmakers used this kind of chemistry to build the story around why two people might have the type of friendship that crosses a turmulous multi-decade civil rights divide and explains why two people would continue to care about each deeply other despite all the history between them and how much space and time they spend apart.

So do BibleBuild cross that threshold for VegasPete? I would say... actually yeah. Despite all the fucked up things that happened between them, I personally could believe at the end that Pete would throw away all he knew to stand by a man who had kidnapped and tortured him and claimed he had nothing left to offer Pete.

I would actually say the problematic lack of chemistry is between Jeff and Barcode. I love Barcode as Chay, but the original cast Gameplay just had much more chemistry with Jeff. Actually it threw me off how much I felt when Kim found the photos Chay had left him because somehow Jeff created more KimChay chemistry with photos than when Barcode-as-Chay was in the room with him... 😥

It's Physics More Than Chemistry, Baby

Here's the thing, and what I think the essayist was trying to say. I don't think the problem with VegasPete's NC was BBB's lack of chemistry. I think it was the lack of familiarity and comfort. The BDSM elements might have thrown them off, but I do think it's a fundamental discomfort with the NC scenes for them. It comes off as inorganic.

I'm going to get so much shit for this but in for a penny, out for a pound I guess.

MaxTul is considered the king of BL chemistry, and watching manner of death, I would actually agree. They have great chemistry.

But this gifset I saw of them? 😬

This is not the body language of two people ready to get it on. There's so much intentional space between their bodies. There's no rhythm. They're deliberately trying to not have their groins touch. It's so inorganic. It's not a dance between two partners.

The "choreography" of this scene is a close match to Porsche seducing Kinn in episode 9, and yet the difference in authenticity between the two scenes is so vast.

A scene like this is not something you can't rely on just chemistry for, there needs to be comfort and coordination in what's happening between the two actors. That's why it's acting.

I think that's what the essayist and a lot of people see is lacking in VegasPete's NC scene. But this is fixable. It's not a chemistry problem, because that is not really fixable.

#chemistry #kinnporsche #kinnporsche meta #mileapo and acting #mileapo #and that's what we call acting #not tagging this as the other couples to respectfully keep my opinion out of their tags

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