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bsd-fan · 1 year

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Dazai osamu: Evolution

In a lot of ways this is where my Dazai analysis will really start, this is going to be insanely long so be prepared. It also has spoilers of the manga, anime, and most of the light novels.

I’ve talked about how is a mistake to measure Dazai’s character growth in terms of morality, because that has never been the main point of his characterization. Being a “good” or a “Bad” person is not as important as the fandom makes it to be. Dazai is unapologetically a morally grey character and he will always be. However, this doesn’t mean that Dazai hasn’t changed.

He has and it goes far beyond him changing into a boring trench coat and calling himself a detective. He has changed so fundamentally speaking that I’d go and say that right now is the most developed character in this area and the thing that make this even more surprising is that his character growth has not finished yet. He keeps evolving.

To understand this let’s start analyzing him chronologically:

Fifteen year old Dazai is probably the lowest we’ve ever seen Dazai. Starting fifteen, Dazai is showed to us as someone who genuinely wants to die, he is /not/ attempting suicide as a joke, is not a comedic relief. Fifteen year old Dazai wants to die with a desperation that borders on madness. He is so tired of living, so bored of life and the people that surround him, about how predictable they are, about how easy is to manipulate them, there’s not a thing in this world that can surprise him, he is living in this permanent state of numbness. He is completely lonely in a world that will never be able to understand him. And let me make a pause to talk about the fact that it has been /heavily/ implied that Dazai was living in this situation for a long time. People loves to blame Mori for Dazai’s personality but this is simply and canonically speaking not true.

Dazai has already formed most of his worse personality traits by the time Mori found him. Let me remind you that they met when Mori saved Dazai’s life /after/ he attempted suicide at fourteen. Fandom loves to act as Dazai was a perfectly healthy kid that Mori ruined when that’s not true. Mori made it worse, yes. But he wasn’t the cause of it.

“Miscalculation.

You misjudged the situation, he told himself. You failed to pick the optimal solution. You shouldn’t have chosen this child to help you. Dazai is unpredictable. He can be sharp but in a dark, twisted way. He’s observant. He’s cold and calculating with no equivalent even in the mafia, where the most evil reside”- Mori about Dazai, ligh novel fifteen.

I will talk about this more depth in another essay about Soukoku and the mafia but this is important to aknowledge. Dazai was like this even /before/ Mori’s influence, Mori was scared of him even when Dazai was just a child because he saw how deeply disconnected from his humanity he was. How cruel, cold and calculating he could be.

So going back to the main idea, at this point of the story, Dazai is already numb, manipulative, and machiavellian, he doesn’t trust in anyone and his only real connection is with Mori that looks at him like a convenient weapon to wield. But the most important trait of Dazai at this age? Is how deeply apathetic Dazai is to everything. At this stage of life Dazai lives in a pure nihilism, he doesn’t believe in /anything/, he conceives life as completely meaningless, he doesn’t see a point in existing when there’s no a reason for it. It’s so bad that it’s funny. Mori knows about the /raw/ potential in Dazai, about how valuable he can be as a tool but he can’t use him because Dazai is so unmotivated that he simply doesn’t give a damn about anything. He is a genius and he only uses his intellect to try to kill himself. He can’t be bothered with anything else, even breathing is an annoying task and a waste of effort and then…this happens:

I’m not pointing this out as a soukoku shipper because this is not even a soukoku analysis, this is all about Dazai. People will always talk about Fifteen importance for chuuya, but fifteen was also fundamental in Dazai’s arc.

Cold and apathetic Dazai was literally kicked in the face by his biggest narrative foil. Chuuya who is loud, and ridiculously emotional, who can’t for the life of him hide his expressions, who is a terrible liar, impulsive, pathologically loyal to the point of idiocy, and so fucking full of vitality, so hungry for life. And so /unbearable human/. And then Dazai gets annoyed, and surprised, and out of nowhere he is screaming at the top of his lungs, showing /emotion/, he is curious, he is intrigued. He went from saying that breathing is such a hassle to fucking throwing a party and singing happily while he, in person, decorates, he even got a cake for fuck’s sake.

He doesn’t understand chuuya, he is curious about the sheep dynamics and as the story progresses we realize that this is probably the first time that Dazai fucks up, he failed to predict a situation, he didn’t saw it coming.

He wasn’t able to realize that Chuuya was Arahabaki, he didn’t even thought about that possibility. Because since the first moment, he never thought that chuuya could be something else than human. He didn’t saw Rimbaud coming because the idea of a person going that far for someone else? Is ridiculous, it doesn’t make sense, is illogical. It’s not how people are supposed to act.

“-So it’s all for your partner-Dazai said listlessly- Betraying the mafia, spreading rumors about the old boss’s resurrection, this fight we’re in now…it’s kind of hard to believe, to be honest

-Maybe for a slimeball like you it is- Chuuya scoffed. He looked up at Randou- Throwing everything away for your friends is a perfectly respectable reason to risk your life if you ask me”- Dazai and chuuya, fifteen years old. (Pause to scream about how much I love chuuya, help)

So basically every thing that happened in fifteen leads to this:

And this guys, is one of the angular stones in Dazai’s development.

“The boy’s eyes were as clear as the sky on a sunny day; they lacked any shred of trepidation. This was not something earned, for only those determined to live could possess their heavenly blue sparkle”- about Dazai, fifteen.

This is the /only/ moment in the entirety of the series where Dazai not only doesn’t want to die, but that he /actively/ is looking towards life. The only moment in all bsd, Dazai is excited at the perspective of living. Fifteen is so important because this is the first time, Dazai’s view of life is challenged. Dazai was wrong. He made mistakes. People are not as predictable and boring as he thought. Dazai doesn’t suddenly start thinking that life has meaning, but he starts thinking that it /may/ exist, he just hasn’t found it yet.

This scene makes a radical switch in Dazai’s character because his primary goal changed from wanting to die to finding a reason to live.

In fifteen Dazai found hope, and everything that came after is possible because of this.

And it’s logical to an extent. He doesn’t understand life, but maybe if he understands death he can come closer to understand it. People always lie but when they are about to die? People become genuine, pretensions disappear, what do you cling to when you don’t have anything? When you’re dying, why do you keep fighting? If he can understand this, then maybe he can understand the sense in life. Maybe he can connect with his own desires and emotions. Maybe he can find his own reason to exist.

Unfortunately this doesn’t last.

By stormbringer, Dazai falls into despair once again, he goes back to looking for his death.

“Dazai glanced back at him, perhaps amused by this, then he muttered as if he was talking to himself. -I couldn’t find anything in the end’- Dazai osamu, stormbringer

“It seems true that he wants to die. It seems that all the value standards of living reflected in his eyes are just as worthless and ugly as scrap iron”- Oda about Dazai, The day I picked up Dazai osamu side A, translated by poppopretty

For a long time, I thought that was the culmination of Dazai’s development as a character. He went from wanting to die to trying to find a reason to live, he struggles but he is trying.

I was wrong.

Chuuya solves his main conflict in stormbringer, Dazai doesn’t. To understand this, we need to understand that one the main themes in Bungou stray dogs is existentialism.

In simple (extremely simple) words existentialism can be defined as: “ the philosophical belief we are each responsible for creating purpose or meaning in our own lives”. Which means that in a way existentialism also understands that life can be meaningless, that maybe there’s not a big purpose in existence BUT that doesn’t have to mean that it has to stay that way. Existentialism defends that people can find their own purpose and maybe is not something big, it may be not life changing for others, but is something people cling to and that’s enough to give sense to the world. I will be talking more in depth about this in chuuya’s analysis but right now the important thing is to understand that this is not enough for Dazai.

He /needs/ a bigger purpose, a better answer, something objective and logical, something that can’t be debated. Because if it’s not, then Dazai’s genius mind will pick on that and he will once again be drown in desperation. Dazai needs an absolute answer.

Enter oda, the catalyst of Dazai’s next biggest arc as a character. But first let’s understand sixteen year old Dazai’s perspective of live, shall we?

“- you said it is foolish to die, right? So here is my question. If dying is foolish, then why do we have to die?

(…)

-So, you mean life is not something to regret?

-No, it is worse than that. Even though we are all promised death, from the beginning, all human beings were born with a present desire called “I don’t want to die”. This is also one hundred percent true. That is why, that desire will never be fulfilled”- The day I picked up Dazai Osamu, transplanted by poppypretty

So, to summarize Dazai can’t understand what’s the point in living if by the end there’s no real point in it. There’s nothing there, there’s not a reason to suffer so much because that’s what he is doing. He is suffering. He is all alone, feeling like an alien in a world of humans, just using a mask and trying to hide how really inhuman and empty he is behind all of that and for what? The world is senseless. Worse than that, there are not a lot of things he cares about but when he finds something worth preserving, he loses it. Dazai is in a horrible situation because his intelligence alienates him and isolates him from other people but it’s not enough to win against the senseless of life. He lives at edge, trying to predict and control everything to protect himself and the things important to him, he purposefully goes along with the alienation and isolates himself more thus going farther from his humanity, and at the end is worthless. Because it doesn’t matter how intelligent he is, is still not enough, he will never be able to control everything, he will never be able to predict everything with 100% of accuracy because life doesn’t work in that way, is all about chaos. And Dazai can’t deal with that.

Time passes, by eighteen years old, Dazai in a lot of ways gets worse. He is the “Demon prodigy” destructive, cruel, a master in torture and his mental state continues to get worse and worse but funnily enough he is still standing and that’s thanks to two things:

1) the hope he found at fifteen and never let him. Yes, Dazai goes back to wanting to die because life sometimes becomes unbearable but his goal is still to find a reason to live. And that didn’t changed.

2) his friends. Odasaku, Ango and Lupin bar are important things for Dazai. He is still lonely but it’s a little better

Then everything goes to shit.

But I want you to understand this. After Oda decides to die, Dazai tries to stop him and this is what he says:

“-Find something to rely on. Expect good things to happen from here on out. There’s gotta be something…Hey Odasaku, do you know why I joined the mafia? (…) I joined the mafia because of an expectation I had. I thought if I was close to death and violence-close to people giving in to their urges and desires, then I would be able to see the inner nature of humankind up close. I thought if I did that…I would be able to find something-a reason to live”- Dazai Osamu, Dark era.

This is frankly tragic, because just as I said in previous analysis. Dazai’s worse trait, the real cause of all his suffering is his complete lack of self awareness. His main problem is not his lack of understanding of life, is the lack of understanding of himself. He thinks that understanding human at their most basic, desperate state will make him understand better humankind and that ultimately will make him closer to his humanity. But that’s not how it works. He can’t just watch from afar and expect that to be enough. Dazai needs to connect with himself, even the worse parts of himself, even the parts he doesn’t want to see instead of covering them up, he needs to let himself bond with other people, he needs to connect with his own emotions and desires. He needs to leave his overly complex ideas behind, to go down from the high horse he is in, to stop with the omniscient being act that aggravate his isolation and alienation, the things that ultimately make him perceive himself as something inhuman. He needs to accept that at the end of the day he is just human, just like the rest of the world and he is just as powerless as them.

Now let’s go to arguably Dazai’s most important scene as a character: Odasaku’s death

People love to make this scene about soukoku and it’s fucking ridiculous.

People will take this scene and put it as evidence for the “Chuuya’s always the second choice” theory that they came up with (even if the whole theory is fucking ) but specifically this? Dazai leaving the mafia? Has nothing to do with chuuya. It’s part of his /individual/ character development and exactly what it should be.

Let’s start analyzing it

Dazai arrives and Oda is dying, he is desperate to save him even when he know is too late and the Odasaku says something. And this, this guys is what ultimately leads to Dazai’s character growth.

“-you told me if you put yourself in a world of violence and bloodshed, you might be able to find a reason to live (…) you won’t find it-Odasaku said in an almost whisper. Dazai stared at him- You should know that. Whether you’re on the side that takes lives or the side that saves them, nothing beyond your own expectations will happen. Nothing in this world can fill the hole that is your loneliness. You will wander the darkness for eternity”

“ That was when Dazai first realized: Sakunosuke oda understood him much more than he’d ever imagined- right up to his very heart, almost to the center of his mind. Dazai didn’t realize until then that someone had known him so well. For the first time in his life, Dazai wanted from the bottom oh his heart to know something. He asked the man before him:

-Odasaku, What should I do-“- Odasaku and Dazai osamu, Dark era

This is the most important scene for Dazai. He has always been lonely, he has always lived with the knowledge that it doesn’t matter how much he tries, no one will ever able to understand him but then just minutes before oda’s death he realizes he was wrong. To say that he left the mafia for oda is as inexact as saying that he decided to live for chuuya. It’s simply not true. He was heavily influenced by both of them but at the end of the day it was for himself.

“People live to save themselves”

I’ve say it before but this sentence is the core of bsd. If you want to analyze a character in this series, not matter who, you need to start by this quote. Dazai is not the exception to it.

He joined the mafia trying to find his own salvation, to get closer to his humanity, to find his reason for living, to find answers and he left because he realized it was useless. He always knew in a way, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave because this was his only chance, the mafia was his only hope, was the only thing he was clinging to. Even in his worst moments, Dazai still clung to the idea that he would find what he was looking for. But then, while dying oda talks to him and he realizes that there was someone who understood. Someone who knew about his pain, someone who understood his desperation, someone who looked through the mask and realized how utterly broken he was. And thing is, he failed, he tried the logical option and he found nothing but then maybe oda, oda who knows him best, oda who probably understands him better that he understand himself can tell him what to do. That’s why Dazai is so desperate in this scene, asking what to do. Because this is a new chance, there’s new hope. What Oda said might sound horrible but it was exactly what Dazai needed to hear and is the reason I was wrong.

Dazai doesn’t read as a character who went from wanting to die to wanting to find a reason to live.

Because to begin with, what Dazai was looking for was completely unreachable because it doesn’t exist. He can be looking for a reason to live all his life and he won’t find it because there’s not an absolute answer. There is not a bigger motive. The world really is senseless, that’s how it is. And Dazai needed to understand that. That’s why oda tells him to forget all about that silly hope. Because is useless.

“Be on the side that saves people. If both sides are the same, then choose to become a good person. Save the weak, protect the orphaned. You might not see a great difference between right and wrong, but…saving others is something just a bit more wonderful”- Oda Sakunosuke, dark era.

But that doesn’t mean than living is worthless

And this is how we come to Dazai’s real change as character. Dazai goes from nihilism, to a failed attempt of existentialism to absurdism.

Absurdism is the philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd, meaning that the world lacks meaning or a higher purpose. It also refers to the discrepancy between two things such as: the conflict as a colission between a rational man in an irrational world. In simple words, absurdism refers to the struggle of the man to find sense in a senseless world and we can see the mental impact of this struggle in the form of existential crises (yes, just like Dazai) Okay so I swear this made perfect sense in my own language, I’m gonna try as best as I can to explain it in English. Absurdism is different from existentialism because it doesn’t think that you can find a sense in the world, it really defends that not matter what you do, you will never find anything, that it doesn’t matter what you cling to in the great scheme of things it still means nothing, and in a way this need to find a sense in life will lead to more chaos BUT it also defends that you have to keep living despite that, maybe out of pure spite of it. Things doesn’t need to make sense to be worthy.

Absurdism says that there are three options to deal with this problem

Suicide: the pure desperation of trying to reach something that doesn’t exist will lead to the rejection of life. But this is not the correct answer (Cough, young Dazai, cough)

Religion: trying to cope, clinging to the idea that there’s a higher purpose. (Cough, Fyodor, Cough)

Rebellion against the absurd: which is the right answer, the individual needs to learn to accept the absurdity of the world and of his own existence but keep opposing to it. Which means, that the individual keeps living clinging to little things that may not have sense, but that are still worthy and valuable. In even simpler terms, absurdism says “do what you have to do to stop from killing yourself, not matter how stupid that thing is”

Cadmus explained it even better using this example:

You all know about Sisyphus, right? If not is basically this man that was punished by the gods. The punishment consisted of rolling a massive rock up a hill, but it doesn’t matter how hard he tried, at the end of the day, once the rock reached the top it would roll down again. So it was a completely senseless punishment. Not matter how Sisyphus tried he could never win against the absurdity of it. And this also happens with human lives, we do meaningless things all the time, knowing that at the end we will die. Not matter what we do, if we end up as vagabonds or if we find the cure against cancer, the result is still the same, we will all die, so everything we do in life is pointless. BUT Cadmus said that you still can’t give up. Because at the end, sisyphus needs to stop caring about something that he can’t change, the result will always be the same but the important thing is the instant of happiness when he comes close to finishing his job. The moment when the rock reaches the top? seconds before it rolls down, that satisfaction? Is what life is really about. And that’s exactly what Dazai is trying to do right now.

He won’t find sense in life, but being in the ADA is a little more beautiful and that alone is reason enough to be there. Maybe he is not a good person, maybe he doesn’t understand morals but he is with people he has come to appreciate in a better environment doing something that he enjoys more and that’s enough.

There’s this omake in bsd that shows a conversation between Atsushi and Dazai. And Atsushi asks Dazai, why he is in the ADA because someone as intelligent as Dazai can surely find a job with better pay, and Dazai looks at him and tell him that it’s true, but he is fine where he is because he likes to use his brain to help people. That guys, is absurdism right there, Dazai acknowledges that it may not makes sense but he likes what he does and that’s enough.

This change has been gradual and Dazai still struggles with it. He still has problems with the idea of letting things go, he still is a manipulative bastard and that will never change, because at this point is just a part of his personality, he still is trying to control everything but at the same time he also is ready to accept that sometime you just don’t have the answers and that’s part of humanity. This is one of my favorite panels on earth:

Dazai is trying to convince kyouka of living, to choose to do something different from the things she’s good at, if that what makes her happy. This is one of the few scenes Dazai accepts that he is not omniscient, that there are no answers for all the questions, and that we are all a little lost because of it. This is also the first time Dazai is not in desperation while saying it. His growth is not about becoming a good person, he still does horrible things, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t changed. To accept that life is senseless but it still is worthy, to accept that he can’t control everything but the possibilities of it are not necessarily something to be afraid but opportunities? /That’s/ his character growth

This whole arc is a masterpiece because it highlights Dazai’s growth. He is against Fyodor, who in a lot of ways is just like him but at their core they are completely different.

This hands down is my favorite Dazai’s panel because is all about his growth. Because he can see what Fyodor doesn’t. Fyodor see himself as a god, Dazai doesn’t because he knows that it doesn’t matter if they are pulling the strings, they are still isolated and alienated from everything, the people that really is moving the world is the one out there, the people that jumps even when they don’t know if they will be caught. The people that don’t know half of what they know but still are able to move in the middle of the uncertainty. And that’s something that neither Fyodor nor Dazai are able to do. But Dazai is no longer in pain because of that, he now understands the problem and is trying his best to overcome it. Dazai stopped resenting the world for being senseless and illogical and is learning to accept it and just adapt as best as he can to it. To give everything for the people he cares about even when there’s no guarantee that it will end well, but Dazai is trying and that’s what matters.

I really wish I had the time to make a better analysis but I don’t. Even then, I wanted to share my pure love and admiration to this character. Dazai is so beautifully written and by far the most complex character in this whole story, all of his development as a character is simply fascinating and the way Asagiri is writing him right now has me screaming and running in circles.

#bsd #bungou stray dogs #dazai bsd #dazai osamu #soukoku #skk #dazai analysis #bsd spoilers #this is annoyingly long

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ilynpilled · 8 months

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im sorry for complaining about this again and im gonna remain frustratingly vague as usual but to me it feels like there are some fundamental misunderstandings when it comes to jaime and some of the things that are being explored in depth in his arc and how, and a lot of that misunderstanding is deflected with the “redemption vs no redemption” discourse where that very concept isnt even meaningfully defined, especially in the context of his story. his character is very often simplified down to an extreme (and also confused) dichotomy that does nothing but force all discussion of complicated characterization, themes, and actual difficult choices being made (and why, and how those choices are restricted by external or internal factors, and what desires of his are selfish or commendable) to a halt by virtue of being frustratingly reductive. like a lot of ppl just dont engage with this character properly because of the “complex asoiaf characters being locked inside of fandom created boxes they dont fit” phenomenon. one of the greyest characters in asoiaf is just not allowed to be grey because of the redemption dichotomy. he either has to be a golden retriever with no agency of his own when it comes to the evil he does or enables who is only making selfless choices since jumping into the pit (as if this kind of simple linear trajectory is a requirement for an arc to be one thats exploring reformation and the struggle with atonement & redemption, among other things) or a morally black villain with all of his redeemable and heroic aspects diminished, whose difficult position of being in the middle of a lot of conflicting oaths that is full of moral grey area (so many vows speech) and cannot be made to compromise — as well as his house (including his 8 year old son) being under existential risk — is just outright ignored, his internal conflicts, guilt/shame, and self reflection misconstrued, his development denied, and everything he decides to do being read in bad faith to neatly fit a specific narrative that actively rejects the questions proposed through his character arc (that the author himself openly talks about in interviews, if you still refuse to believe it is the intention). and please stop acting like george is even trying to give you a straightforward easily digestible and resounding yes/no answer to these questions. like theres an actual allergy to complexity here, and i cant even act shocked when i see some of the most basic aspects of his character being missed. and for me it is especially easy to recognize when certain talking points are being regurgitated rather than actually thought about meaningfully or independently bc ive seen every opinion on him under the sun, and it is really not that hard to spot

#like i really would love if he could be engaged with as a grey character #instead of whatever u ppl keep doing #jaime lannister

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that-ari-blogger · 2 months

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Witch Side Are They On? (Young Blood, Old Souls)

Hero and villain are nebulous terms, the definitions of which can be taken to mean literally any character. Although, almost everyone knows one when they see one. It's a vibes based classification. Nobody is trying to argue that The Joker is a paragon hero (except some people), for example.

Certain characters break from the mould, with some protagonists displaying more morally challenged motivations or methods, some villains being redeemed, and some "morally grey" heroes ending up being written as power fantasies and you can usually tell when that happens.

I find the classification of characters rather redundant, as people have a habit of being complex. Sure, I have met people who fit stereotypes to a tea, but they are the exception not the rule, and the more you get to know someone, the less tropey they seem to you.

So, instead, I would like to examine the actions that The Owl House frames as evil, as well as the point at which the series decides a character is no longer redeemable.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD: (The Owl House)

Because good and bad are subjective, and this is the internet, I am going to define heroic and villainous actions in this context as "behaviours that The Owl House presents as desirable and undesirable" respectively. Knowledge, expression and kindness are heroic in this context, and willful ignorance, cruelty, and repression are villainous. Ok?

These themes are really well emphasised by the light and dark motif going on. Luz's name literally means light, and she is very much associated with that concept through her magic.

Compare that to Belos, who has managed to spend the entirety of the series up to this point either in literal shadows or figurative ones. We haven't seen him outside in the daylight; we haven't even seen what he looks like yet. The man exists in darkness.

What I mean by this, is light reveals, shadows conceal. A light can bring hope, show you the way out, or let you glimpse the beauty of an artwork, if someone keeps you in darkness, your eyes will adjust eventually, but you won't be seeing the full thing.

Now, here's a question: what exactly is Lilith's motivation? The flashback gives her a history, and shows her actions and sacrifices, but it doesn't redeem her by any stretch of the imagination.

Lilith made a sacrifice for power. She has been chasing Eda because of Belos, and we will get to that. But the curse was her own misdeed, and I think its fascinating how the concept of willful ignorance plays into that.

"I thought it would just be for a day."

Now, I don't know what was on that scroll. Maybe it came with a sticky note that says, "guaranteed 24-hour magic removal or your money back". But, it takes some serious mental gymnastics to decide that the thing you wanted to do because you wanted to do it with someone was worth sacrificing that someone to achieve.

And when the curse turned Eda into the beast, it never occurred to Lilith to tell anyone. I think providing evidence of the magic that caused it might have helped to fix it, but Lilith kept it a secret.

Also, if you see a system that outcasts your closest family member and TURNS PEOPLE IT DOESN'T LIKE TO STONE, and you devote yourself to upholding that system "because of all the good it does", you are deliberately ignoring some major factors.

So, Lilith engages with the theme on two fronts, she keeps the world in the dark about her own actions, and she actively ignores things about the world she is in, and that is the key here. Lilith is presented as highly intelligent and rational, but someone the clever should surely notice some things that she very much doesn't. Which leads me to believe that she is either unintelligent and rational, or intelligent and irrational.

I don't think Lilith is a villain in the series, entirely. I think she is an antagonist, and thematically opposed to the heroes. But the motivation for the specific acts of antagonism are, fundamentally, altruistic. She wants to heal her sister. The problem is that being motivated by guilt and compassion doesn't square with the actions she has taken to get to this position. So naturally, she ignores the incongruities until she runs face first into them, and her redemption comes later through her actions and decisions to seek out and understand.

Belos plays an interesting role in this as well. I mentioned in my previous post that Belos manipulates her agency out from underneath her, and I stand by that here for two reasons. 1) Belos is the system she has bought into. He has directly and intentionally, through propaganda, convinced a world that wild magic is bad and that sacrifices must be made. 2) He found a woman who was conflicted about her actions and saw a way to get rid of the most powerful witch in the boiling isles.

So, Belos too features the theme of wilful ignorance, imposing it on the boiling isles, and making use of Lilith's blind spot to further his own goals.

I've mentioned Belos' restriction of expression in the past multiple times, but there is one more of the core themes that the emperor engages with, and I think the way in which he does that is rather funny. Belos is cruel, and it is constantly tripping him up.

So, what spur's Lilith's redemption? She gets shown her actions are wrong immediately after performing them, so it can't be realisation. So, what is it that prompts her to reconsider her life choices? What causes the leader of the coven heads to bail? Lilith backs out of the coven system because Belos is a jerk.

Belos could have kept the manipulation going. He could have said that he tried and failed to heal Eda's curse. He could have said that Eda attacked him and left him no choice. But instead, he decided to gloat.

"Ah, taking her to the healing ceremony?" "I will not be healing her." "But, you, promised me." "Don't be so naïve, Lilith."

This isn't even the only time the man's desire to gloat self-sabotages him in this episode. So, let's get to that fight scene.

"Okay, I'll play."

I feel the need to point out that Belos wins the fight part of this scene hands down. I recommend UnholyBasil's excellent video on this scene, but suffice to say, anyone with the power to instantly quadruple the animation budget for a moment is a terrifying threat, and Belos is definitely that.

Up until now, the emperor was just an ideological roadblock. The antagonist has been the coven system and the Emperor's Coven that want to restrict magic. Belos has simply been the guy at the head, the one Luz must symbolically defeat.

But now, Belos barely has to lift a finger, and Luz is on the back foot. She can't even touch him. And that is the key to why the ending of the fight is so cool. Belos is untouchable, emotionally and physically, so Luz does both. She puts a crack in his armour, not enough to defeat him, but enough to break the facade he has put up and make him look like an Undertale character.

Remember what I said about self-sabotage? Well, it happens again here. Here is someone who is trying to kill Belos, someone with magic that he has seen. And he decides to waltz up to her and present his face as a target, just because he wants to needle at her mind, the man would have succeeded had he been intelligent.

That is my takeaway from Belos. He is an eejit with delusions of grandeur. Don't get me wrong, the man is a decent manipulator, but his inability to look past himself and his need to be cruel repeatedly puts a dampener on his whole mastermind shtick.

Also, he didn't think to check for the obvious glyphs on the side of the suitcase he was given, he just assumed he had won and didn't feel the need to make sure. Are we sure this guy is clever and not just charismatic?

Now, I haven't talked about Luz or Eda much, and I think it's time to rectify that.

Lilith's character design is a mirror of her sister's. She is restricted in her dress, and perfectly symmetrical. Eda meanwhile is unkempt and wild, with the torn outfit making her look unbalanced and volatile.

The Clawthorn sisters also have a Red Oni, Blue Oni motif going on between them, a trope about characters with a duality to them that has shades of colour symbolism and mythology thrown in for spice.

According to TV Tropes:

"The Red Oni is associated with passion, wildness, and defiance. The red oni character is often more brawny than brainy, extroverted, enthusiastic, determined, and filled with a zest for life. They are also much more likely to break conventions and rules than their counterpart."

Meanwhile:

"The Blue Oni is associated with serenity, control, and observing authority. A Blue Oni is more intellectual, proud, traditional, introverted, and cultured."

I those two don't sum up Eda and Lilith respectively, I don't know what does. And if you have been paying attention, the colour symbolism there appears in the designs of the two. Lilith bears more cool colours, with the blueish hair, eyes, and gem, while Eda scraps all subtlety and just wears red and orange.

So, Eda and Lilith represent two ends of the spectrum, chaotic and lawful. But its notable that when Lilith gets redeemed, she doesn't lose the logical, heavily rationalised mindset, she loses the restrictions. She ends up being free to be whomever she wants, and that person doesn't have to be as overtly wild as her sister.

Luz and Belos, however, are extremely similar characters, with one Luz and Belos, however, are extremely similar characters, with one main difference. One is kind, one is cruel. In terms of character mechanics (how they approach problems), that is the main difference. The rest of their actions come as a result of this dichotomy. Both have a form of main character syndrome, for example, but where Luz wants an adventure and to save the world, Belos wants to remake the world in his own image.

I'm not saying they are identical, or that they are the same character, I am saying that they are similar except for the most fundamental of points, derived from this difference of kindness vs cruelty. All of the lessons that Luz learns but Belos ignores, come from selflessness, all the differences come from expanding out this over and over again until you get a hero and a megalomaniac.

They are both charisma-based artificers, but they have different alignments, and that has led to them making different choices, and leading different stories that have clashed with each other. They started in a similar place, but because of the one difference, their paths diverged wildly.

Final Thoughts

Belos is a villain who would be right at home with Wiley Coyote if he wasn't so terrifying and megalomaniacal, because he cannot stop bringing about his own downfall in spectacular fashion.

I wanted to find the Tolkien quote about evil destroying itself for this post, but instead I found something that sums up The Owl House really well.

"You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil."

Tolkien was a man who fought in both the first and second World Wars, including the battle of the Somme, and yet he was a profoundly optimistic man, as well as being a realist. His most famous work is about someone small accomplishing a great thing against all the odds because evil cannot comprehend the simple acts of kindness.

That, transformed by generations of nerds, has resulted in The Owl House, where a villain, by dint of being clad in gold, can only shine by reflecting the light of the protagonist. And he cannot comprehend the simple kindness of community, and harmony.

Light, do not faulter.

Next week, I am diving straight into the next season, with Separate Tides, and the introduction of the woobie, so stick around if that interests you.

Previous - Next

#rants #literary analysis #literature analysis #character analysis #what's so special about...?#the owl house #toh #toh belos #the owl house belos #emperor belos #the owl house lilith #lilith clawthorne #toh lilith #young blood old souls

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wishesofeternity · 1 year

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Daemon Targaryen rant, incoming

(Warning: it’s really long)

To begin, this is how Daemon Targaryen is introduced in the story:

“Over the centuries, House Targaryen has produced both great men and monsters. Prince Daemon was both. In his day there was not a man so admired, so beloved, and so reviled in all Westeros. He was made of light and darkness in equal parts. To some he was a hero, to others the blackest of villains.”

The problem with this sort of narrative is that is conflates morality with fundamental human nature. The latter is the capacity for good and evil, and the ability to choose, that exists in every human being. However, it means absolutely nothing without morality, which is defined as a system of values or principles of conduct, and is used to understand the extent to which an action is right or wrong. Grey morality is the blurring of those lines, where motives and contexts are so complex that you cannot pin down whether an action or a person is purely good or purely bad.

Daemon Targaryen, like every other character, possesses the capacity for good and evil and the ability to choose. But morally? Daemon was a child groomer and a pedophile who had physical relations with his teenage niece and a 17-year old girl (he was 50 at the time), and enjoyed sampling young virgins at brothels. He was a warmonger and war criminal who began a conquest of the Stepstones, taking all but two islands, ensuring that the people there "learned to fear" his dragon, before abandoning the entire thing because he got bored. He was a child murderer responsible for the brutal murder of a 6-year old boy and the threat of rape to a 6-year old girl. He encouraged the continuation of the Dance and vengeance against his enemies, dismissing his Hand's proposal for peace. He had the selfishness of Aegon IV, the brutality of Maegor, and the tyranny of Aerys II. And that’s just scratching the surface of the things he did, both before and during the Dance. This man was not morally grey. He was not “light and darkness in equal parts”, because that implies a moral balance or moral complexity which does not exist. He had the innate capability to do both good and evil, yes. No one is denying that he could potentially be a decent person, or potentially make better choices. That is true of every human being. But the fact remains that Daemon was repeatedly and consistently awful throughout the overwhelming majority of his life, to the detriment of the people close to him and Westeros as a whole. Nor does he have a Tragic Backstory(tm) to contextualize his actions: he was a prince born to the most powerful family in the continent with an immense amount of privilege that allowed him to get away with virtually everything. Daemon isn't "morally grey", he's just an entitled asshole who does what he wants and suffers absolutely no consequences for it. There's nothing particularly complex or compelling about that.

I think there is also a conflation of grey morality with unpredictability. Daemon was unpredictable, with his sudden elopements and kickstarting of wars and general mercuriality. The moral complexity of this, however, depends on his motives, and none of his are particularly complicated or difficult to morally pin down: he is primarily and consistently motivated by self-interest. If they happen to benefit others, it’s purely coincidental, and always secondary. Unpredictability does not automatically make someone morally grey, and it certainly doesn’t with Daemon.

(And since lots of people have brought this up, I would also like to point out that love is not inherently virtuous. Kevan Lannister loved his family, does that balance out the cause he served and make him morally grey? The Greens also loved each other and fought for each other till the bitter end, does that mean they should be excused in a similar manner? And contrary to what people believe, Daemon has not been explicitly or singularly loving to any family member in canon except for Laena Velaryon, which was more convenient than purposeful. Was he a good father? Maybe, but nothing in the text emphasizes or denies anything. I would also like to point out that his last act in life was literally to abandon Rhaenyra and his children to settle a personal score, directly leading to her downfall and two of his children’s imprisonment. I don’t understand how people bring up his “love” for his family as his redeeming factor at all).

If the narrative had leaned into his awfulness, he could have potentially been a fun villain. But ultimately, the problem lies in the fact that while Daemon is constantly shown to be an all-around terrible person, the narrative repeatedly paints him as someone who is both a monster and a great man, and who is made up of both light and darkness "in equal parts". Thus, all his atrocities are absorbed into a narrative mythos of glorified grey morality rather than outright condemned. In order for him to be a truly morally complex character, a balance needed to be maintained, and in this case, it was simultaneously one-sided and non-existent.

Basically, GRRM’s version of grey morality is deeply flawed. This one in particular was a classic example of telling rather than showing, and a classic example of an author having a particular characterization in mind but executing it very differently in the text, because Daemon is nowhere near as complex or as compelling as GRRM or his stans seem to believe he is.

It is also necessary to remember that Daemon is one of GRRM’s all-time favourite Targaryens, which explains quite a bit of my frustration regarding the way he’s written. Namely, it explains why the narrative of the Dance was single-handedly ruined by the prioritization of Daemon and Daemon's storyline at the expense of virtually every other character.

His wives are all overshadowed by him and primarily defined by their relationship with him. Rhea Royce is an unfeatured non-entity who exists solely for him to hate, and conveniently dies in time for him to remarry. Laena is a beautiful, fiery, perfect companion who dies tragically young and in a conveniently gendered manner, once again in time for him to remarry. Rhaenyra is sidelined and eclipsed in her own war and her own story in favor of him. Nor should we forget his lovers: more time is spent describing Nettles and Mysaria’s relationships with Daemon than actually telling us more about them as individuals. Once he’s out of the picture for good, the former completely retreats from civilization, and the latter is gruesomely murdered by his enemies. Once again, all I can say is: Convenient.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of this blatant favoritism is how Daemon is turned into the essential protagonist of the Dance of the Dragons. He is the “wonder and terror of his age”, with a legendary sword and a famous, fearsome dragon. He is the one driving the events that lead to the Dance and the events of the Dance itself; thus, he completely usurps Rhaenyra, the actual claimant of the throne. While she is being dismissed by their enemies, he is singled out as the most dangerous threat. While she is being berated for refusing to risk herself or her sons in battle and thus costing her allies their lives, he secures a spectacular and bloodless victory by taking over Harrenhal. While she collapses after hearing of the death of her son, he promises vengeance and enacts Blood and Cheese, kickstarting the war for good. While she is unable to maintain control of the city, driving her reign to the ground and dying an ultimately defeated and gruesome death, he achieves a final triumph by killing his enemy and leaves the singers wondering if he ever died at all, while his abandonment of her and role in her downfall is not emphasized in the slightest. Nor is Rhaenyra allowed a single moment of singular glory: her takeover of King’s Landing is explicitly with him by her side, and culminates in his crowning of her. And I really cannot say this enough: none of this is propaganda or based solely on in-universe sexism. It is simply GRRM’S clear narrative bias that favors Daemon at Rhaenyra’s expense. The misogyny of it all is embarrassing.

Narratively, the Greens suffer the most from this. All of them are caricatures meant to oppose the Blacks rather than individual characters in their own right. While this is evident with every single one of them (particularly Aegon II, the other claimant of the throne, and Alicent, the most important woman on her side), nowhere is the bias more evident than the manner in which the narrative depicts Daemon compared to his nephew, Aemond Targaryen. Both of them are clearly meant to be narrative parallels: second sons, dangerous swordsmen, the heavy-hitting wildcards of the war, one of them claiming Visenya’s dragon and the other one possessing Visenya’s sword. Both of them committed heinous atrocities on equal proportion, the only difference being that Daemon lived longer and thus had the time to commit more. Yet the way they are portrayed could not be more different: Aemond is rightfully depicted as war criminal and a murderer, and is both one-dimensional and over-the-top in his awfulness; Daemon, on the other hand, has far more pagetime, is explored in far more detail, and has all his crimes contextualized as part of his glorified and non-existent “grey morality”. (And while this is not a direct criticism, it’s also a little weird that while Aemond is justifiably called Kinslayer, Daemon is not, despite the fact that he was responsible the death of his young grand-nephew, a suspect for the death of his good-brother, and the eventual killer of Aemond himself.) The narrative rightfully condemns one while painting the other as someone who was “made of light and darkness in equal parts”. The bias is very, very evident.

This culminates in Daemon’s final scene: The Battle above the God’s Eye. I get the symbolism: he killed a younger allegory of himself, Satan slayed his son, the vicious circle has ended, etc, etc. It makes symbolic sense. But the fact remains that this gives Daemon a final triumph and narrative glorification that he of all people did not deserve, that no other player of the Dance received. This is emphasized by the way the duel was described: two important people fought, two important people died, and yet it was called “Prince Daemon’s last battle”, which really tells you all you need to know. The duel was meant for Daemon; Aemond existed solely to be his mirror and his final opponent.

(I’d also like to point out that a 50-year old man challenging his barely 20-year old nephew and winning against him is nowhere near as glorious or awe-inspiring as the book or its fans make it out to seem, but is in fact one of the most pathetically embarrassing things I've ever read about. I also don’t think it was realistic at all, and would have made more symbolic and literal sense for both of them to mutually kill the other. But that would result in GRRM’s favourite character getting the equal end of the stick for once, which is probably why it didn't happen)

Basically - Daemon Targaryen was the Gary Stu of his age, and I despise everything about him

#asoiaf #hotd #fire and blood #anti daemon #anti daemon targaryen #anti daemon stans #kinda #fire and blood critical #queue #aemond targaryen #it's so frustrating because i really enjoy morally grey unpredictable characters (especially when they're charismatic)#but daemon is not one of them lmao #mine

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esther-dot · 5 months

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What do you think about Jaime's fate? Is he doomed by a narrative? Is he doomed because of the show? Or does he stand a chance?

Personally I'd like to believe that he would live. As far as I can remember (I could totally be wrong though) the most evil thing he does in the series is the Bran thing. And westerosi karma already held him responsible - he loses his ability to do that one thing that he loves the most and becomes disabled just like Bran. He's not the kindest, bravest, most noble etc person in the westeros but he's far from being evil like ramsey or tywin or cersei. Imho he's way better than fan favourite boy tyrion and not so favourite boy stannis - for a bunch of reasons. I just don't want him to die although chances are, well, questionable.

So how do you see his chances to survive?

Hope you're having a nice - or at least decent - day!

It's lovely weather, and I took a long walk first thing which means, it's a great day in my book. Thank you!

I can't remember what specifically convinced me, but somewhere along the line I accepted that Jaime and Cersei would die together, so I believe D&D got that from Martin. I wrote at the time that Jaime is a better man for returning to his sister/lover/mother of his children than leaving her to die alone, so I didn't share the opinion of the rest of the fandom there. It's really easy to project our feelings about a character onto a different character, and I think that happens a lot with those two.

Anyway, since then, @istumpysk has collected all the book foreshadowing for them to die together (here, a long google doc about it, more here), so I give him no chance of survival.

Ramsay is cartoonishly evil, so I don't think he's particularly interesting. Tyrion is Martin's fav and will likely benefit from that, Stannis is doomed, but Jaime really is an interesting character. My controversial take is that I don't think he's more deserving of a happy ending than Cersei who all the fandom recognizes will die. Yes, this a) reads like foreshadowing for King Bran, and b) also reads like karma:

"Does the sight of my stump distress you so?" Jaime asked. "You ought to be pleased. I've lost the hand I killed the king with. The hand that flung the Stark boy from that tower. The hand I'd slide between my sister's thighs to make her wet." He thrust his stump at her face. "No wonder Renly died, with you guarding him." (ASOS, Jaime V)

but I didn't think Jaime fundamentally changed as a person as far as values go? That's a severe punishment for him, I'm not gonna minimize what it means to him, but I did laugh in the show when he's facing Bran and unapologetic because to me, that's Jaime. Martin writes kid killing as a big no-no. Jaime is pretty cavalier about it:

Jaime got to his feet. "Your wife may whelp before that. You'll want your child, I expect. I'll send him to you when he's born. With a trebuchet." (AFFC, Jaime VI) Ask Edmure how chivalrous I am, thought Jaime. Ask him about the trebuchet. Somehow he did not think the maesters were like to confuse him with Prince Aemon the Dragonknight when they wrote their histories. Still, he felt curiously content. (AFFC, Jaime VII)

Now, I don't think dying with Cersei is necessarily meant to be read as karma for Bran, but I included the above for two reasons.

1.Jaime is a foil to Jon, I believe we're meant to contrast Jon's, morally grey perhaps, attempt to save a child with Jaime's disregard for one, and overall compare what their upbringing, the morals or lack thereof instilled, have formed of these two who had similar dreams, experienced disillusionment, shared the same hero:

They were not little boys when they fought, but knights and mighty heroes. "I'm Prince Aemon the Dragonknight," Jon would call out... (ASOS, Jon XII)

2. Jaime and Cersei are a variation on the Aemon and Naerys idea, and the parallels between Jaime and Jon, Sansa and Cersei, point to Jonsa being the positive variation of the old tale. So that expectation, in which Jon will successfully save Sansa from a marriage she doesn't want (hello girl in grey prophecy) and they'll fulfill the maiden/warrior vision that Jaime once had of himself and Cersei, the underlying, uh, preoccupation with and loyalty to their sisters (that Jaime has and Jon will have post reunion) means I'm ok with Jaime deciding his fate is to be with Cersei, in birth, in life, even in death. As I thought it worked in the show, returning to Cersei in the books will likewise mean he is able to have some self-respect. I don't think you can read his, I mean, I would say Cersei obsession and believe he'd ever have any peace of mind if she died alone while he had to go on living. We will get a healthier, happier version of the “brother/sister” (in the Targaryen sense) relationship with Jon/Sansa to complete the convo which is important to keep in mind when bemoaning the fate of certain characters--their endgames are part of a much bigger picture.

I thought this was a great write-up of his character which you might enjoy reading:

But what’s so vital about Jaime is that this is who he is - a bad person, a person willing to kill children to achieve his aims - but it isn’t all he is. And the point of introducing him as a POV is to force us to confront this fact, the fact that this would-be childkiller is also a three-dimensional, even sympathetic man with his own heartaches and struggles, with a sense of humor and a sense of honor and the saved lives of half a million people to his name. The good deeds don’t cancel out the bad, but neither do the bad cancel out the good. And instead of allowing us to take the easy path and categorizing him as either ‘purely evil’ or ‘wholly redeemed,’ the story simply pushes us to dwell within the psyche of this complex, broken man who is neither fully one nor the other. (link)

#dot chat

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listen-to-the-inner-walrus · 5 months

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okay so as suggested by @fromkenari (big thank btw), ive decided to make a post about one of my idols who happens to be a part of queer history i dont hear people talk about much.

and said icon is james whale.

he was an english director working in early hollywood, as well directing theatre and acting. his most well known films are probably the invisible man (1933), frankenstein (1931) and bride of frankenstein (1935).

(you might also know him from the road back (1937) if films about ww1 are your thing)

and while part of why i idolise him is those films and making horror art, i bring up the dates specifically because james whale was openly queer throughout his entire hollywood career.

said career began in the 1920s and continued up to 1950. he was pressured to step into the closet but he never did, and its likely a big factor as to why his career ended.

a lot of his films are packed with queer subtext, particularly bride of frankenstein. that film has so much camp packed into it and pretorius is so damn queer coded. theres a lot of queer readings of it you can explore, its fucking incredible.

and mind you, the hays code went into effect in 1934.

the hays code also happened to massively effect frankenstein in retrospect due to scene-cuts in re-releases, and bear with me on this one:

see the original cut had a scene where the monster meets a young girl named maria who asks him to play a game with her. in the game, they sit together and throw flowers onto a lake where they float. when the monster runs out of flowers, he throws his new friend, maria, in, assuming that she would float like the flowers. she doesnt; rather she drowns.

and this scene was specifically created by james whale in reaction to a then moral panic in america basically about the creepy man in the shadows who lures your child away and molests them. this deviant shadowy figure was essentially synonymised with gay men, who were falsely arrested on sodomy charges or died at the hands of mob "justice".

the flower scene challenges that idea because the monster isnt, well, a monster. in 1931, the monster was almost unilaterally perceived as this perverted evil thing that would steal your children; he was practically the same as these "predatory gay men", and then the monster wasnt a monster.

he was misjudged, he wasnt inherently evil, and he was unjustly punished. and if that applies to the monster, surely it applies to whale and all the other openly queer men.

as a scene in 1930s hollywood , it was so divisive because it portrayed the "villain" in a more morally grey area, and essentially said "hey, maybe this queer witch hunt is misguided"

unsurprisingly, producers at universal wanted to end the scene before the drowning. ending the scene there would leave it to the imagination as to what the monster did to maria, and given the sex offender moral panic sweeping the nation, the implication would be that he raped her.

but james whale fought for the scene to be kept and he won. specific states still forced the studios to censor parts of the film, but his film was intact.

BUT when this film was re-released in 1938, they entirely cut out this scene. and this fundamentally changed the character of the monster and the film itself.

by some fucking miracle, the scene was found in the british national film atchive in the 1980s, and modern cuts of the film now include. unfortunately, whale himself would not live to see that as he committed suicide in 1957.

what james whale did with frankenstein in 1931 was revolutionary in the same way that tod brownings freaks (1932) was. both men created films that portrayed the people society called monsters as real, complex beings who are not pure evil, and both faced censorship hell for it.

(go watch freaks btw, its so good)

and, you know, i get emotional talking about james whale. both because i have so much admiration for him as a queer person who refused to lock his queerness away, and because his name is never one i hear in discussions of queer history, and also because hes from the same area as me.

(im yet to find any clips of him speaking so i dont know if he has our accent or not. i like to think he did. he was the sixth out of a seven child working class family and first worked as a cobbler so its as likely as it could be.)

i would like for more queer folks to know about him because i think he deserves more of a legacy.

ian mckellen plays him in gods and monster (1998), and if youre ever in england with spare time, he does have a memorial sculpture. its in dudley which is where he was born, and if you know it, its right at castlegate.

but yeah no, this is my ramble post about a lesser known queer icon. originally i wrote an abridged version in the tags of a different post but @fromkenari was right, it deserves its own post.

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cacodaemonia · 1 year

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I think I figured out why parts of the Dooku eps of Tales of the Jedi rubbed me the wrong way.

I had this written up already when I saw @sailorsol's reblog of this post. I considered just adding my rambling to a reblog of that, but my point kind of diverges and I didn't want to hijack the op.

Tbh, I agree with a lot of the things both sailorsol and @cosmic-herbal-tea said, and I think a lot of the episodes' interpretation is up to the viewer.

Anyway, that said, here are my completely unimportant thoughts:

The narrative in TotJ largely treats "the Jedi Council isn't perfect and has to work within the crappy governmental structure within which it's trapped" and "it's okay to commit genocide and start a totalitarian dictatorship because that will 'bring order to the Galaxy,'" in the same way that most US news media 'presents both sides of an issue.'

For example, a news channel might interview the two scientists on the planet who don't think climate change is caused by humans alongside two of the millions of scientists who know it is, and treat all four of them as if their opinions are equally valid.

Now obviously, as I and many others have said over and over, stories don't have to point at a Bad Thing and say, "This is a Bad Thing." However, I think the narrative of those TotJ eps really does try to treat Dooku's choices as reasonable when he is in fact doing objectively awful things and becoming a puppet of literally the most evil person in the Galaxy.

This is only a problem (and I say 'problem' like, a storytelling problem, because this is a fictional story and doesn't actually matter) in my eyes because the main Star Wars movies/shows have traditionally had a fairly black and white narrative of good guys versus bad guys. Yes, individual characters might be morally grey, but the stories as a whole don't leave much wiggle room for what is Good and what is Bad. Lucas has explicitly stated, over and over, that the Jedi were good people caught in trap they didn't even know existed. But when Filoni muddies the waters like this, he's sort of changing the fundamental way that the canon SW universe works, which imo is not great storytelling.

To return to the climate change analogy: giving climate deniers and anyone with a brain equal consideration allows bad actors to point and say, "see, it's okay to pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we want." Similarly, though obviously much less important, I think these weird narrative choices are only giving more fuel to the people who seem to think that the Jedi deserved what they got (imagine that: thinking genocide, even in a fictional setting, is ever justified in-universe...🤔) and that the Sith are... good?

A lot of the rules of a story are dependent on the way the fictional universe works, like how plot armor in SW is very different from plot armor in the first few seasons of GoT, but they both work within their universes. When you suddenly change those rules, though, like with lots of main characters in later GoT seasons surviving utterly ridiculous situations, it tends to break the immersion and confuse the narrative, which is what I think these TotJ Dooku eps do.

#tales of the jedi #dooku #sith #jedi #jedi order #jedi council #star wars #storytelling #'fair and balanced'#sw meta #long post

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elcucurucho · 4 months

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finished o segredo na floresta! I have many thoughts!

HEAVY SPOILERS UNDER CUT

AAAAAAAAAAUAUAUAUAURUHRUAUUEUURUEUEUUAUAURUEUEUEUUEUEUEUEUUEUEUUUAAAAUAUAUUUEUURUAHUAUURUUAUUAUAUAUHDURUR

EVIL!! FUCKED UP AND EVIL!!!!!!!!!! JAIL FOR GAME MASTER FOR 1000000000 YEARS!!!!!!!

What I really can’t get over is there was no good end for santo berço or for anyone living there. They had no choice, they were victims, but they were doomed from the start. The good lives they lived were covering for the fundamental evil that made it possible, and trying to preserve that life and protect innocent people was enabling that evil to grow even more powerful under the surface!

Like the townspeople weren’t evil. The town was founded with evil intentions, and then it grew completely out of control, into something that consumed even the scientists that created it. And thanks to the time dilation, enough time passed that the only ones that even knew the secret of the forest, if you will, were the people responsible for maintaining the lives of the others. The blacksmith was truly convinced that the ordem had already failed, and the lives of the people were worth more than the price it would take to stop something unstoppable. Even without santo berço affecting his mind, that’s an understandable position.

The wellsprings themselves are already morally conflicting, it’s very omelas core, like sacrificing the lives of a few for the happiness of many. Was the blacksmith in the right for wanting to protect his town, full of unknowing innocents? Was the gatekeeper right for wanting to free his imprisoned brothers, also innocent? And all of it was ultimately futile, because they were always all going to die in the end.

And LIZ OH MY GOD LIZ. She was always willing to sacrifice her own humanity for the job. Absolutely incredible role playing on Bagi’s part for the last couple episodes especially, my god. Her getting talked down from killing the wellsprings was just heartbreaking. Because maybe they died in the end anyway, and maybe killing them would’ve helped in some minor way, but Liz killing them would’ve been a step away from her humanity in a way she couldn’t have come back from. Joui acting as the teams moral compass really got to me. Maybe sometimes you have to make morally grey choices, but what an awesome character choice to have someone who is willing to go “no, even for a good reason, this is wrong.”

And that final fight. Jesus fucking christ. The second cellbit talked about time stopping I went “uh oh” and then it uh. Got Worse. Losing 22 years of your life in an instant because you got unlucky is one of the most horrific concepts he could’ve come up with. And Thiago having to wait for decades for his friends to escape so he could blow himself up and end it? Absolutely brutal. Incredible ending to the fight though, I have literally no idea what would’ve happened otherwise. Could’ve easily imaged a TPK there.

The whole ending was brutal. One of the things I’m growing to LOVE about ordem is there are no easy victories. Everything has a cost, and that cost is often devastating. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean you’ll get rewarded for it. Usually, it actually makes your life harder. Sure, the team may have saved literally the entire world. But all they know for sure is what they gave to accomplish it. It’s so so compelling to me. What are you willing to sacrifice in the name of doing what’s right?

Genuinely have so much to say about every character, it’s crazy. I started watching this months ago so I know there’s so much progression I’m missing but my god. I’m going to think about this for the rest of my life.

#ordem paranormal

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thesherrinfordfacility · 7 months

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LWA: I'm going to be reactionary today (not to you), because I've now come across this persistent if small subset of viewers who are outraged that Aziraphale directly asks Crowley for things in S2. This despite S1's plot engine being driven predominantly by Crowley directly asking Aziraphale for things, one of them unjustifiable, and getting him to say yes to all of them. (S1 has Aziraphale indirectly asking for HAMLET, paint removal, and handcuff removal.) It's parallel structure that uses the dialogue shifts to open up new avenues for characterization...

Anyway, to avoid just grousing, I'd like to tie this into the question of greyness. Because despite our haste to endorse Crowley's position on living within grey areas, the script insists that he is not always correct or even good at it (any more than Aziraphale is always correct or good at it). Moreover, while I don't think the series has any profound or even accurate engagement with the concept of yin-yang, the fundamental point that the two characters embody necessary and complementary forces is crucial to the series' argument. (It's not an accident that a yin-yang symbol appears right behind them in the coffee shop during their ep1 conversation.) So, Crowley's asks:

The Arrangement: the Arrangement is a pragmatic exercise that enables them to engage in their favorite activity, namely, being lazy. The high comedy of this is that being lazy is the most moral thing they could possibly do in the GO universe. The full moral implications of the Arrangement are not visible to either character in both novel and series, although Novel!Aziraphale is much more aware of how it fractures the Good/Evil binary than TV!Aziraphale is. I know that the fandom likes to think of Crowley's work as being somehow noble, "giving humans choices" and all that, but the Nuremberg Defense he drops on his foot at the end of the novel calls this interpretation into question. Doing their jobs is "messing about" by the novel's moral standard, and the series is heading in that direction by the end of S2. Humans make choices just fine without Crowley intervening. In other words, the Arrangement is an apparently grey choice ("that would be /lying!/") that leads to a moral absolute in the novel and appears to be heading in that direction in the series--namely, that supernatural interference with human free will is wrong, full stop.

Averting Armageddon: AKA treason. Everything in the script obviously endorses Crowley's request and Aziraphale's agreement with it, although TV!Crowley has a potentially fatal moral lapse along the way (see #4). The plot structure of s1 is yin-yang in action, as Crowley loses most of his narrative drive after ep3 and Aziraphale correspondingly gains it.

Holy Water 1862/1967: for Aziraphale, the resolution to the Holy Water argument in 1967 is a true grey decision in which there is no good resolution from his POV, just a less bad one. It might have been less grey if 1862!Crowley had managed to restrain his immediate emotional response to Aziraphale's refusal and just denied that it was a suicide pill (cue the end of s2ep6 for Crowley deciding the emotional marriage proposal was a better option than relaying what he had discovered in Heaven). 1967 doesn't resolve the problem--yes, Crowley responds to Aziraphale's obvious pain, but is he responding in the way Aziraphale needs him to?--and the characters apparently never return to it. But the point is that Aziraphale can, in fact, negotiate grey areas successfully, if at great cost to himself.

Kill the Antichrist for me, as a treat: at some point you're going to ban me for discussing this! Here, both the novel and series are emphatic that /there is no grey area/. You cannot kill children, no excuse, doesn't matter if they're the Antichrist, still can't kill them. What's interesting is that TV!Crowley is 100% in the wrong here for committing a hit-and-run against Aziraphale with a trolley problem, but Aziraphale's initial response is /also/ wrong: it's "I've never killed anything before," not "killing children is wrong." Aziraphale falls victim to the trolley problem because he's /not/ in full right/wrong binary mode here! Crowley screws up by misclassifying a non-grey problem as a grey one, while Aziraphale also screws up by substituting a subjective objection for an absolute one. Ironically, that is, the problem in that subplot is not that Aziraphale is too different from Crowley, but that he's tiptoed too close to him. Meanwhile, Crowley shows himself unwittingly capable of risking Aziraphale's life--which is what he's doing here--for his own convenience. Like the Holy Water argument, the underlying problems in this conflict are never resolved.

And now Aziraphale in S2, where Aziraphale is learning how to ask for things:

Help with Gabriel: Aziraphale's decision to help Gabriel is an act of radical charity that brings him close to holy fool status, I think. It's possibly dangerous, there's no real reward, and Gabriel tried to murder him (erm, yes, that); then again, Gabriel-as-Jim is in full factory reset mode and is entirely helpless. Like a child, in fact, so see #4 above. I don't think "liking" or "not liking" Aziraphale's choice is relevant to the moral problems raised by the entire situation, which are extraordinarily difficult and stretch across multiple philosophical, theological, and political domains--what do you /do/ with a bad person in trouble?--and left for the viewer to chew on. My own reading is that the script endorses Aziraphale's decision to help despite the total lack of benefit to and potential danger to himself (he's still unsure how "awful" Gabriel/Jim is). Crowley, by contrast, does not ever appear to fully understand what Aziraphale is doing. His agreement is not an agreement, since it involves concealing the actual reason for his willingness to participate, and his initial response is to just abandon Gabriel/Jim. Of the two, it's Aziraphale who negotiates the extreme greyness of this particular grey area with more success. You can certainly argue that Aziraphale should have been more attuned to Crowley's anxieties, but then Crowley's decision to give away the whole darned body swap suggests that maybe Crowley should also have listened more to Crowley's anxieties.

Taking the Bentley: this exchange is Aziraphale reverse-Crowleying Crowley. In the Gabriel ask, Aziraphale is clear but doesn't do a good job arguing his case, and Crowley resorts to glowering silently. When he convinces Crowley to let him take the Bentley, though, he tries out the same kind of experimental button-pushing that Crowley does in s1ep1. No, he shouldn't have changed the Bentley when he drove it, but it's unclear how many of those changes are the Bentley's doing, and he had no way of knowing that Crowley could feel the alterations until Crowley yelled at him. A more significant problem is that it's not clear if Crowley fully /hears/ what Aziraphale is truly asking, which is for Crowley to acknowledge that they are sharing each other's lives. It would be easier for Crowley to hear that if Aziraphale would just come out with it, but...

Come to Heaven and be an angel again: now, /this/ request is definitely wrong, and Crowley correctly refuses. Crowley's refusal is in contrast to s1 Aziraphale, who sacrifices his own boundaries to Crowley in the Holy Water incident. (If you can see where I'm going here, between the Holy Water and the child killing, I think the problem is not Aziraphale refusing to give Crowley things and then giving in, but Aziraphale needing to learn that sometimes /Crowley/ should get an absolute no.) This is the bad side of Aziraphale's binary thought process on full display. The decision to go to Heaven on its own, though, strikes me as much more in tune with his decision to help Gabriel regardless of personal danger or potential reward, and the extraordinarily ambiguous closing shots are about as grey as you can get, right down to the lighting.

i can’t tell you how excited and trepidatious, in equal measure, i got at the words “going to be reactionary today”, LWA✨ - but it usually means some excellent Hot Tea is heading my way though, and this is no exception!!!

(i would never ban you for discussing your Favourite Bugbear, perish the thought!!! but i may well start cataloguing them in my favour for an apology dance, so proceed with caution)

at some really interesting points in the story, i think crowley betrays his own narrative, and the image that he holds of himself. i noted something - and this is quite tangential to your ask but humour me - from the coffee-shop scene, specifically in the part where bohemian rhapsody (BR) is playing at the time of him questioning aziraphale about what’s going on, and if he needs help.

BR is a swift but a fairly complete story that follows the relatively basic hero-narrative structure. rundown to help illustrate my point: hero has issue, hero decides to solve said issue, hero goes on adventure, hero has conflict of conviction, and hero prevails. well, i don't think it's particularly accidental (because - of course it probably isn't) that the dialogue from "listen, something big is going on in heaven", up until crowley downs his caffeine nightmare, is overlayed with the section of BR that seems to fit best with the adventure mark of said structure, and that the rest of the song is missing. i'll come back to this in a minute.

i like the note that crowley loses a lot of his narrative drive after ep3, but i'm wondering if it potentially happens earlier than that - specifically in ep1? his (as we know more solidly now from s2) tendency to insert himself as the hero? to my mind, his 'hero-narrative' in s1 is derailed quite quickly after inception, specifically in the main antichrist plot. he’s given the antichrist and delivers it (issue), wants to stop armageddon and enlists his counterpart to help (decision to resolve) and they decide to meddle in warlock’s childhood to ensure that the apocalypse never comes to fruition - so, by this point, we’re pretty much on par with the adventure mark in the structure.

but then we get to the bench scene, and crowley offers up the dilemma of the hellhound and… record scratch. aziraphale is obviously alarmed by this detail, one that has a direct bearing on how the rest of the narrative will go, and that crowley wouldn’t think/remember to share it at this point. crowley tries to claw it back, says that it won’t matter; if they’ve done their jobs right, because it will be sent away unnamed. he doesn’t consider that whilst they may have influenced the kid, the kid is ultimately going to do what it likes, and potentially unravel it all anyway.

aziraphale however does propose this eventuality (which by-the-by also serves to indicate perhaps how much aziraphale might understand humanity a bit more than crowley does - that a human child is of course going to name a stray dog and want to keep it), and crowley instead jumps straight into a solution that involves tempting aziraphale to kill a child. this is, loosely, crowley’s mark of having a conflict of conviction - that their plan will work - and he chooses a solution to that. whilst that solution would resolve it, it doesn’t take into account the world, and people, around him, nor indeed the consequences (harking back to our last chat).

what occurs thereafter is arguably aziraphale leading the overall story with his hero-narrative instead - from the point that he shakes off crowley’s suggestion, and proposes instead to stop the dog himself - and crowley’s grasp on his hero-narrative disintegrates (albeit the two re-converge in ep6). the precipitating events in s1 would not have occurred if aziraphale had not reached this proposed solution, or at least not in the way we ended up seeing them - as you said before, LWA, it’s highly doubtful that aziraphale would have survived, in any way, killing an innocent child.

(we see him distraught at the prospect of lying to god to save job's children, and bowing to the 'inevitable' of falling (despite him knowing that he likely did the right thing) - for him to actually kill the child antichrist would be bad enough, but to find out later that warlock wasn't the antichrist to begin with? aziraphale would surely have bypassed falling entirely and walked himself straight into hellfire)

the coffee-shop scene in s2, imo, suggests much the same; crowley learns of the “naked man” (issue), downs coffee (decision to resolve said issue), and abruptly leaves the table to go play hero (adventure). the rather aggressive overlay of BH, specifically the part of “will not let you go (let me go)” suggests to me that this is where we, and crowley, need to anticipate the upcoming conflict of conviction beat, and ask: what will crowley decide to do?

so we head into the bookshop, he discovers gabriel, and the So Did I argument ensues... and crowley resolves to storm out. he doesn’t explain to aziraphale why helping gabriel is a hard-no for him, and - again, as far as the narrative indicates - essentially abandons him. it isn’t until he learns of the book of life that he even resolves to go back to the bookshop, and fakes an apology to insert himself into the narrative that aziraphale is on… but what would have happened if he hadn’t learnt of the book?

that’s considerably unknowable, but regardless - the missing last verse and outro of BR arguably spells it out for us. by crowley walking out, abandoning aziraphale and betraying the narrative he set himself on, the result would have been the exact same as what we see at the end of s2. just like those lines in GOFLB later on in the episode, i think it’s rather telling that they were cut/left out.

so - in s1, crowley attempts to drag aziraphale along on his story where he gets to play hero, and immediately cocks it up with the antichrist ask, alienating aziraphale for the majority of the narrative up until aziraphale reconciles that heaven is not on the side of humanity like he and crowley are, and he immediately goes to bring crowley back into the fold. in s2, crowley drives himself back into the narrative a bit more successfully than his attempts in s1 (with calling aziraphale for check-ins, meeting up at the bandstand, etc) but arguably the damage has been done in s2, and aziraphale and he continue to be at odds for the rest of the show - not necessarily in ways that relate specifically to the gabriel/jim plot, but crowley abandoning aziraphale sets the tone for what's to come.

the thing is - and i may be skewered for this - i don’t think crowley operates in the grey as much as he likes to think he does. it’s all very well that he intellectually understands beyond a moral-dualistic concept, but he doesn’t always put his mouth where his money is:

it's fairly clear to the audience that he cares for aziraphale at the very least, and is concerned largely by his wellbeing and safety - and yet won’t tell him important information that would make aziraphale amenable to, or more receptive to, crowley playing hero and asserting his protectiveness. that, and the fact that he completely forgets to safeguard aziraphale when confronting jim in ep5.

he considers it wrong to hurt the innocent or cause them suffering, but drops graveyard guards down a huge shaft in a completely disproportionate response of self-defense, and only remarks that he might have “slightly overdone it” (oh, and attempts making his best friend kill a child - arguably still innocent regardless of their origin - so he doesn’t have the stain on his own conscience).

he is vocal of his vehemence of heaven/hell having any interference in his existence on earth - and that of aziraphale’s - but does not once stop to consider the moral implications of messing about with nina and maggie, or with warlock... or with any other humans as a supernatural entity, for that matter

as an example of the other way around - crowley obviously hates gabriel being in the bookshop, and the risk that it confers onto aziraphale's safety. and yet, in ep3, he is clearly showing some level of acceptance, patience, and camaraderie with him. this is probably subconsciously showing his recognition that jim is entirely innocent, but i dont think it's out of crowley suddenly understanding aziraphale's charitable, altruistic perspective in ep1 on protecting him; instead, it's perhaps because his level of thinking still slips into the binary: jim = good, gabriel = bad... something that i'm personally not convinced is completely fair in the first place (but that's a different post).

that’s not to say that aziraphale is any better - of course he’s not, and in some instances aziraphale is even worse in this regard - but the hypocrisy of crowley’s assertion that he exists beyond heaven and hell’s machinations is manifestly unsupported by his own actions and choices which, as he confirms in job, he has the free will to decide for himself.

i’m not quite sure how it’s possible to miss, in this respect, that regardless of interpreted historic trauma, that crowley (speaking specifically about tv!crowley here) is altogether not entirely a good person, grey or otherwise. he doesn’t really demonstrate a whole lot of that greyness - balance - with any great consistency. his decisions and attributes appear to be entirely based on his own agenda; saying in job that he’s on his “own side” is probably as close, for me, to true self-description as he gets as of the end of s2.

aziraphale on the other hand just doesn't seem to grasp what the greyness actually means. his intellectual analogue is very much on the dualistic, binary scale, and it's certainly not something he truly understands by the end of s2 either. whilst i do think he's able to separate heaven from god, and separate them both from angels, and then separate himself from all of it, he still holds to the belief that there is superiority in the absolute concept of good.

his comment on hell being "the bad guys" notwithstanding (which, given the events of ep5/ep6, is not a wholly incorrect assessment to be fair to him), it's his assertion that heaven remains the side "of truth, of light, of good" that gives pause. whilst he may acknowledge that it hasn't embodied this in some time, he at least believes that it was always meant to (which, to me, is odd, if you consider that 'heaven' was probably never meant to be good before the fall - because hell didn't exist to given heaven that level of definition - and was just meant to be). but aziraphale may have always considered god to be good. this is again not something supported in the narrative whatsoever; at 'best', god is completely amoral.

and even more interesting, as you said LWA, is that aziraphale is the one of the two of them that seems to land himself in predicaments that are grey, and is able to navigate it better in certain circumstances. those circumstances - the suggestion of killing the antichrist*, the giving of the holy water, the protecting of gabriel/jim, and returning to heaven to make a difference there - all pose a dilemma to aziraphale where it pulls into question what he fundamentally believes in morally. the fact that by proximity to crowley in s1 that he essentially betrays that (goes to shoot adam, gives crowley the holy water), but in s2, after some distance has been established between them, he sticks to his metaphorical guns (protects gabriel, goes to heaven), i think shows the true essence of where their dichotomy lies.

*i personally still consider this to be a grey decision, because i can see why crowley suggests it; the weighing up of one against the many. the issue i cannot reconcile is the tempting aziraphale into doing it instead of crowley... imo, don't suggest a grave, horrendous action if it's not one you're prepared to consider doing yourself, or at least communicate why you can't do it... but that's my personal take.

#the issue with LWA asks is they so neatly and beautifully sum up everything that i literally have nothing to add #but the effort they put in deserves a response so i end up going on tangents and discussing something arguably completely different #and look one day theyre probably going to run out of things to send to me so i have to make the most of them right :')#anyway yeah have a lukewarm take #good omens #ask

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joys-of-everyday · 10 months

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Wei Wuxian and the Difficulties of Morality

Wow so I did not realise how much discourse there was around Wei Wuxian and moral greyness. Let me erm… poke around a little because that’s a hobby of mine.

Btw, I usually write about SVSSS. This won’t change. This is a one-off thing (for now).

Firstly, an Anecdote

Fun story, I watched cql and the mdzs donghua with my mum. There were many memorable things that came out of this, but one of the relevant points is an offhanded comment from my mum. She said (translated into English): ‘Wei Wuxian has no face to show Jiang Cheng, because he broke his promise to stay by his side’ (1). For context, my mum grew up in a fairly traditional Asian household. They take their declarations of loyalty seriously (or at least, that is my impression).

I find this interesting, because when it comes to moral judgement, I (who grew up in the west, with a lot of western values) get far more hung up on the things WWX did, rather than some promise he made in his adolescence. Breaking a promise is not ideal, but in my books, doesn’t really count as a huge moral failing.

The point here is not to say anything about the ethics of promise breaking, but to illustrate a point. Different people have different values. Or one person can have conflicting values. There are many scenarios where it’s not possible to say with certainty what is right or wrong. This is moral ambiguity.

(Funnily enough, the issue that my dad took with WWX was the fact he was fiddling around with dead bodies, which was like… the least of my concerns, but then I realised that bodies have a lot of religious significance.)

What even is moral greyness?

There are two possible and equally valid definitions of moral greyness.

1. Characters who are not 100% evil or 100% good

2. Characters who do not fall into the categories of ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Note that definition 2 is a strictly stronger definition than definition 1. It is not that hard to argue that WWX does not fall under definition 2, in that he is somehow overall ‘good’. (I would also argue that MXTX encourages you to not think too hard about these dichotomies, particularly via SVSSS, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.) It is also not that hard to argue WWX does fall under definition 1. Mainly because it’s quite hard not to breathe without falling under definition 1.

The Two Kinds of Uncertainty

When it comes to ethical questions, there are two uncertainties you naturally run into. Firstly, uncertainty of the world, which comes from having imperfect information about the situation or consequences of any given action. Secondly, uncertainty around the underlying moral question. Is it okay to sacrifice few for the sake of many? Should we place more value on those close to us in comparison to a stranger?

Humanity has not figured out morality, and certainly not for a lack of trying. Standards change over time. We look at the behaviour of our ancestors just a few hundred years ago with no small amount of repugnance. Most likely, in a few hundred years’ time our descendants will do the same. This isn’t to pass judgement on anything or anybody, but to make an observation that there is nothing you can do in the world that doesn’t inherently come with moral ambiguity, because there is always uncertainty – both of the world and the morals you are applying. And wherever there is moral ambiguity, there is moral greyness (definition 1).

That being said, ‘everything is morally grey’ is not really a helpful statement. There are things that we (society today) generally agree on e.g. ‘killing someone for no reason is bad’ or ‘being nice to people is good’. So the argument I want to posit today is that WWX’s moral greyness goes beyond this in a substantial way.

The Uncertain Character of WWX

The Fundamental Principle of MXTX is that all narrators are unreliable. At the bloodbath of the Nightless City, did WWX kill 5000? 3000? Far fewer? Had WWX acted in a different way, could JYL’s death have been avoided? We’ll never know.

To add to this complexity is subtle shifts in canon depending on the adaptation. WWX tortures Wen Chao pretty brutally in the novel (and even if you hate him, it’s a bit ick). In cql, it ‘fades to black’. In the donghua it’s a nice quick stab. Then there’s all of the fiddling around they did with JGY depending on the adaptations, giving him more or less blame for the events. I’m not sure if ‘novel is the only canon’ is the correct way to go, mainly because adaptation!WWX is interesting to analyse in itself. I won’t explore this too deeply here, but something to keep in mind.

Anyway, I want to argue that WWX is morally grey, through commentary on a few elements of his character.

1. The Horrors of War

WWX does a lot of things that are somewhat eyebrow raising. You know, killing people and stuff. Now it has been pointed out plenty of times that his situation was unusual (it was war!). The moralities surrounding warfare are in itself complicated. A pacifist might argue that war is no excuse for violence, but even without going to such extremes, these days we appreciate that there are some actions that cannot be condoned, even during times of coflict – this is the notion of war crimes.

War crimes are a surprisingly modern thing (people started to care a lot after the atrocities of WWII). Medieval warfare was brutal. Anyway, these include things like ‘torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments’ and ‘wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages’. Note that while killing large numbers of enemy soldiers doesn’t fall under war crimes (although some methods of going about this do, like biological weapons), torture does, so that’s one strike against book!WWX. Now there is subtly in these things, because if you judged people by these standards for anything more than 200 years old, basically everyone is committing war crimes without thinking too hard about it. WWX did do a lot of arguably good things in the Sunshot Campaign (whatever good means in war) – he fought against the tyranny of the Wens and was one of the key things that shifted the tides towards victory. Without him, the world might have looked a lot darker. Whether these ‘goods’ weigh over the ‘bads’ is something to think about.

On a slightly softer note, weapons of mass destructions are another cause of serious discussion. Those involved in the Manhattan Project creating the first atomic bomb weren’t exactly all war criminals (moreover, many of them genuinely believed they were doing what was right and necessary) but the consequences of their actions are what they are. So while WWX made the Yin Tiger Talley as a method of deterrence and assurance, considering the consequences of its use and the potential for future misuse, here lies another moral ambiguity.

2. Intent vs Consequences

It’s fair to say that most of the time, WWX’s intentions were good. Whether it be to protect the weak, to stand up for justice, these are all things we can get behind. The consequences of his actions? Well, JYL is dead, as well as a bunch of other people, and most the Wens didn’t survive anyway. That’s a big oof.

Now most people don’t subscribe to the strongest version of consequentialism which judges whether something is right or wrong by its consequences only. As in, for one, it’s almost impossible to apply in practice because you can’t predict the consequences of your actions at the point at which you chose to do them. Case in point, most of the consequences of WWX’s actions weren’t wholly down to WWX and it’s difficult to say if there was anything at all that he could have done to lead to a better outcome. (Arguably, WWX should have tried harder to negotiate with the rest of the cultivation world instead of being a one-man army against them, but in that case, they might have just mowed down the Wens anyway.)

Then again, I think most people do subscribe to at least a weak form of consequentialism. No matter how good the intentions, no matter how righteous and commendable… if the outcome is bad, it’s hard to label those actions as ‘good’ (play pumps is an example if you want to look into how charities can do more harm than good).

I draw no conclusions here. It’s food for thought.

3. On Conflicting Values and Lose-Lose Scenarios

A lot of the above comes from applying modern ethics to a character in a world largely based on ‘Ancient China’ (the quotation marks from the fact Ancient China is several thousands years old and changes significantly over time). We do this all the time. Hell, people are still reimagining the Three Kingdoms and making commentary on the morality of Cao Cao (155-220). MDZS makes a lot of commentary on modern social issues (the ‘mob mentality’ of MDZS feels like Weibo/twitter lol), so viewing it through a modern lens makes sense.

But let’s put that aside for a second and return to my mum’s comment about WWX’s broken promise. By traditional values, family is important. In Confucianism, the Four Virtues are ‘loyalty’, ‘filial piety’, ‘continence’, and ‘righteousness’. To illustrate just how serious family was, in the conflict between Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, Xiang Yu at some point threatened to kill Liu Bang’s father. Then Liu Bang was like ‘we’re sworn brothers, so technically he’s your father too’, and Xiang Yu didn’t kill him, because it would be unfilial to do so. All this is to say, WWX turning his back on his sect and his family was a big deal. Equally, loyalty towards a superior was valued greatly, even towards eyebrow raising superiors.

But Confucianism also teaches the importance of things like ‘righteousness’ and ‘benevolence’. Throughout many dynasties, important people have cared a lot about the grievances of the masses. Bullying the weak and hoarding power unjustly is seen as one of the ultimate evils, a big reason for a leader to lose the Mandate of Heaven, thus becoming unfit to rule. Plenty of subordinates have stood up against the tyranny of their superiors. So WWX standing up to the evils of the Jin clan is highly commendable by these standards too.

Another thing is ‘paying back your benefactors’. In the west, although we do have concepts like ‘owing a life’, I don’t think it’s as strong??? This is also serious business. In the Three Kingdoms, Cao Cao spared his enemy general Guan Yu, and later Guan Yu briefly fought for Cao Cao even though he was an enemy, in order to repay this debt. Wen Ning and Wen Qing saved WWX’s life and helped him when he was in need – WWX has a moral obligation to help them in return.

Thus we see WWX between a rock and hard place. Turn away from the Jiangs and he turns away from his family, and from someone he promised his loyalty to. But turn a blind eye to the treatment of the Wens, and he is a not only allowing evil to go unchallenged, but also abandoning his benefactors. The game is rigged. There is no right move here. Morally ambiguity -> moral greyness.

(Note: A lot of the previous two points can also be viewed from a 'traditional' lens. Mohism has been arguing about pacifism and universal love since 400BC. Taoism has many things to say about intervening in world affairs. Life has always been complicated, and while our language/framework may shift, many of the underlying questions remain.)

(Second note: my knowledge of Chinese philosophy is all the stuff I learnt in Saturday school+a few books/youtube videos aka. not a lot. Please call me out if I'm sprouting nonsense.)

Let’s wrap up

Tl;dr WWX is a morally grey character.

And I haven’t even started on what went down at the Nightless City, or how interesting (read: morally sus) his methods of murder were, or his fantastic takes on risk assessment.

Maybe he’s good overall. Maybe he’s a hero. But heroes too can be morally grey. That’s just a part of life.

1. This is really hard to translate actually, and I think the way I’ve written it makes sense but comes across stronger than it was. More literally it was ‘can’t raise his head towards’. It was sort of explaining why JC was giving WWX a lot of shit later on and WWX wasn’t arguing back, more in a sympathetic way rather than a critical way.

As usual, thank you for reading! Comments and criticism appreciated, but I may be significantly slower getting back because my brain is in svsss mode rn :)

#mdzs #mdzs meta #wei wuxian #wei ying #i started writing this at midnight #its now 4am #why do i do this?

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scary-ivy · 10 months

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I honestly hate "Underfell" sooo much because in my opinion it fundamentally misses the whole point of Undertale.

"Oh what if these friendly monsters were all evil and edgy instead?" as if the monsters being befriendable instead of inherently evil wasn't the whole refreshing gimmick of the original game. And also missing the nuance that most of the characters in Undertale aren't just "friendly and good", most of them are morally grey and fully willing to kill a 5-year-old for the greater good. It's the fact that they're capable of doing awful things that makes winning their friendship in the good ending so rewarding.

"Oh well it's really just about having fun seeing what the characters would be like with evil villain aesthetics" THEY'RE ALREADY MONSTERS. Sans and Papyrus are fucking skeletons, Papyrus literally acts like a Saturday morning cartoon villain and Sans gets a lot of creepy moments. Undyne wears a spooky suit of armor and has snaggly fangs. Mettaton is literally playing the part of a killer robot. Asgore is supposed to be visually intimidating and takes design cues from the devil. Drenching these characters in a shitty black and red color scheme adds nothing. This whole AU just exists to give people an edgy dom Sans to draw rule 34 of, but like, Sans already had an edgy and dark side in canon. He's a depressed nihilist who only refrained from child murder because a milf told him not to kill kids. There was no good reason for this AU to exist.

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terrestrialnoob · 11 months

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Yeah, so, personally, I don't see Fast Forward or Back to the Sewers as a part of the original TMNT 2003 series. I see them as Sequel Series, kinda like how Avatar: The Legend of Korra is the sequel series to Avatar: The Last Aribender.

Not only do FF and BTTS have different titles, literally everything else was changed too. The writers, directors, primary and secondary animation companies were all changed at some point, with only the production company the same and most of the same voice actors, but that was it. That's less than what Legend of Korra had in common with the Last Airbender. And FF and BTTS were intended to be soft reboots to make the 03 series more profitable and palatable. They weren't making enough new marketable designs for toy sales and the dark tone was making the production company nervous (despite the success of the previous seasons).

(That's the important bit, there's only criticism of FF and BTTS after this.)

The FF and BTTS seasons were extremely fundamentally different: literally having different foundations in style, characterization, and storytelling. Though, the FF designs were really good for the adaptions to more computer animation, unfortunately the characters started their descent into "technically still in character", and there were parts that were actually pretty good, if it had been written by slightly more capable writers. BTTS was when everything really went to shit.

The main series was formatted so that there would be three to five episode arcs with zero-to-two standalone episodes in between. But FF started with two vague overarching story-lines that loosely held the season together with decent pacing towards the resolution of those overarching story-lines with one-off character stories breaking them up and giving us about 60/40 "Oh, that was actually a good character interaction" / "He would not fucking say that". It was really always on the edge of being good, but never actually getting to it. And I might actually put TMNT Fast Forward as a standalone series on par with the quality of the 2012 series.

FF had some pretty interesting ideas the writers just didn't do anything with or were forced to drop. Sho'kanabo was basically the Rise Kraang, just with the major weakness of sunlight disinfecting his victims. He was proper terrifying, infecting, taking over, and controlling his victims. He also made evil clones of the turtles who were like, amazing characters and had so much potential! They were so cool! And Zix was an interesting character concept, a smuggler with grey morality who helped just as much as he harmed? If only he was actually well written, and actually was grey and did just as much good as he did bad instead of just being a bad guy who said "sorry :(" sometimes.

Back To The Sewers on the other hand, was fully bad. Every part individually was bad, there is no evidence anyone working on BTTS had any passion for it whatsoever, which means management unequivocally failed at every turn. The designs were actually bad, the animation was stilted and unnatural, the plot was nonsense, most of the dialog was also nonsense to match, the writing was some of the laziest I've ever seen in the entire franchise, one (or more) character was out of character at least once in every episode, and the villains weren't serious threats (The Shredder got taken out by Mikey on his own. Speaking of... Mikey got a ton more screen time, but he also like, absorbed everyone else's character traits depending on what the plot needed? Like, I think they discovered that Mikey was the audience favorite and just made him the center of the episode no matter if it made sense or not). And on top of that, just like the 87 series, they just had to introduce a new toy or accessory design into every episode, which can be fine - unless there's nothing there to distract from it, no good writing, or animation, or characters draw your attention away from the commercial inside the show. It's so bad.

#tmnt #tmnt 2003 #tmnt fast forward #tmnt back to the sewers #analysis #critisism

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hazelnut-u-out · 2 years

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I also prefer to see Morty plots

Or at least plots where Rick has to get involved with Morty shit. That's kinda why evil Morty and the s5 finale worked so well. And why "Big Trouble In Little Sanchez" is one of my favorite episodes!! As much as I love the big sci Fi concepts... I need to see Rick getting involved with petty shit again. The fact that he got expelled from Morty's highschool is too hilarious

- WhovianB

obviously, a huge draw to "rick and morty" at its very foundation is the "hardened adult meets naive child" dynamic, and how that effects the characters as they navigate their respective arcs. i think that's something pretty central to the show. i LOVE seeing the smith family working as one large cohesive unit, but i think that this season just doesn't have a healthy mix of the two main characters and how this development is effecting them as individuals.

i love morty. not because i think he's perfect (because he is most definitely morally grey), but because he is so unique in the context of the show. while it could be argued that every other member of the smith family is the way they are because they are old enough to have chosen that for themselves, morty's situation and identity as a character is completely different.

he has no real idea who he is. he's a child that has been robbed of his naivety, who constantly gets punished for his empathy, that is consistently rejected inside and outside of his family dynamic for being "different" and gentle. on the other hand, the stuff he's been exposed to has fundamentally altered how he perceives the world and his understanding of right and wrong. he commits atrocities, he maims, he slaughters, he violates- just like every other member of his family. still, though, he is different. he does these things because he is a product of his environment- but he is the only one in his family who still consistently tries to do good. to be good.

he tries. he gets punished for it; he occasionally acts out because he represses that part of himself that resents the people in his life, the world, the universe that lets these horrible things steal away his innocent light; but overall, that little boy tries.

he is so compelling. so interesting. so deeply sincere.

i need more of him on screen. i need more substance loaned to his involvement in this season.

MORTY PLOTS FOREVER AND EVER, AMEN.

#rick and morty #morty smiths #thank you for the ask :)#asks

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maxwell-grant · 2 years

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Jojo bingo: Father Pucci

And that brings us our second bingo

If Jonathan and Dio are my favorite characters sharing a kind of number one position together, Pucci is in a bloody contest with Jolyne and Jotaro for number two. I would even argue that he's the best JoJo villain. Even with his significantly more nuanced and calmer personality compared to them, he’s just as gloriously over-the-top and ridiculously funny at points as the other main JoJo baddies. He has two of my absolute favorite Stands in the series (Whitesnake alone deserves a separate post for how much it’s personality and powers add to Pucci, who is already complex and fascinating and horrifying even without a Stand that has an entirely separate personality), he’s pro-active and vicious as a main villain to an extent the series hadn't seen since Phantom Blood Dio, he grows in power and scope and personality over the part, he’s psychologically disturbing and fucked up to an extent I'd argue surpasses Kira (y’know, the fetish-based serial killer), he adds a ton to Dio's character and his story culminates in him growing into a bigger, badder and better villain than DIO and, just, Pucci is incredible. There couldn't be a better villain to wrap up the original JoJo saga. One of the greatest villains of all time ever.

I feel like out of all the main JoJo villains, Pucci is the only one who does pull off being morally grey (Valentine really isn’t, he’s a silver-tongued imperialist torturer and J.Geil-tier disgusting creep who’s just good enough at appropriating heroic imagery that he’s convinced himself and a good chunk of the readership (and the Eyes of Heaven writers apparently) that his deeply selfish and unfathomably monstrous plan is noble and selfless and patriotic. He’s a good and layered villain, but morally grey he isn’t). Having significantly lesser crimes compared to the others, more human reasons and more concrete goals, all of which doesn’t do that much to make him sympathetic, quite the opposite. Pucci is horrifying for a myriad of reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that we’re allowed to understand him and his backstory and his goals, and get in his headspace in a way that’s only really reserved for protagonists. Pucci is one of the best examples of how audience sympathy can be used to make villains more resonating and even more horrifying. Pucci is horrible, awful, even described as “the evil that doesn’t know that it’s evil, the worst evil there is”. And we walk through his journey every step of the way.

Sometimes this moral greyness gives way to people arguing Pucci wasn’t so bad or that he was the only JoJo villain not motivated by selfishness, which I kinda disagree with. Because while it’s true Pucci doesn’t think of himself as selfish and genuinely believes he’s doing everyone a favor, Pucci’s plan is monstrous, and to pull it off he commits the most unfathomably selfish deed in the entire series. He quite literally breaks the universe and rebuilds it again in order to strip agency from everyone, HIMSELF INCLUDED (even if he does have more power over it than everyone else), so that everyone will accept the fate that’s decided for them and never try to defy fate. This, he argues, is born of “resolution eradicating despair”, which further cements Pucci as a Joestar-gone-wrong, in that he quite literally turns the driving ethos of the series against itself, against the universe and the Joestars. And he wins.

No one has any agency, no one's decisions matter, no one’s at fault for anything. Pucci rewrote the universe so that he’d fundamentally never be responsible for his sister's death, by making it so that she not only never really existed to begin with (since the dead do not carry over with their souls and personalities intact), but even if she did, she would have just learned it’s inevitability ahead of schedule and accepted it and be happy for it, just like everyone else, nothing anyone (certainly not him) could have ever done about it. And this? I find this to be a level of ghastly selfishness somehow scarier than anything DIO did, because it’s so much more human, so much more tragic, and so much more fucked up existentially.

(People have argued a bit over whether or not this goal fits DIO’s character and there’s room to argue both ways, but even putting aside Eyes of Heaven (which is thankfully non-canon, but it’s take on Heaven DIO was designed with input from Araki himself, which counts for something), the plan outlined in DIO’s Diary was always meant to be fulfilled by a friend and not DIO himself)

And I think this is part of why I’m so strongly in that “Everyone is wrong about them” camp because, people consistently mischaracterize Pucci as only a couple of steps above the average DIO flunky, or someone motivated by a romantic love towards DIO (putting aside the age thing, DIO’s Diary quite literally states that Pucci would have been the wrong person if this was the case), or even non-canon spin-offs that depict Pucci as someone who’d immediately abandon Heaven if DIO was still around to boss him. I fundamentaly disagree with this because Pucci adheres to the same theme of legacy that defines Jolyne. And much like Jolyne, who has to battle for the sake of her lineage and the universe, needs to be better than Jotaro, needs to succeed where Jotaro failed (which she does through rescuing Emporio), Pucci has to be better than DIO. Stone Ocean is the glorious apocalyptic book-end to Phantom Blood, with Jolyne, at the end of the world, forcing herself into becoming the final Ultimate JoJo and wrangling along whatever reality-warping weirdos she can, as she desperately tries to catch up to the new Ultimate Evil who's running away with the plot so fast nobody can catch him until the end.

Pucci surpasses DIO, in terms of power (he attains a Stand that surpasses all other time-based Stands, including the one that defeated The World), scope and accomplishment (he single-handedly disabilitates DIO’s arch-enemy with relative ease and then kills him by turning his time stopping power against him, as well as the current JoJo and the entire supporting cast that accompanied her, and recreates the world into one where the Joestars cannot do anything against him, and only loses because he, like Dio, goes too far and targets an outsider ally to the Joestars). Pucci isn’t DIO’s 2nd in command or partner or flunky, or DIO-lite, Pucci is superior to DIO, he’s DIO’s ultimate accomplishment, the supreme power he attains over Destiny and the Joestars, within the text. When they do JoJo mega crossovers like Jorge Joestar and Eyes of Heaven, they downplay Pucci’s agency and beef up DIO’s powers to be some multiversal world-challenging menace, just so he won’t be lagging behind Pucci, who already is that in-canon.

Pucci is horrible because he makes use of every resource at his disposal, everything that the protagonists have, everything that the Joestar bloodline has used over the centuries, Pucci turns against them. Enrico Pucci’s endgame is to rewrite the history and ethos of JJBA itself so he may wrench defeat from the jaws of victory forever, and he succeeds, and I love that this is not at all an exaggeration of what he does.

Pucci is horrible because everything he does stem from his complete inability to analze himself and admit wrongdoing, to even recognize his cruelty and malice as such, he has such a gargantuan moral and personal blind spot that even his Stand, the rageful melting spectre he bosses around to corrupt and kill people and strip away their memories or give them dangerous powers, is shown to be more introspective and reflective and humorous than the human who wields it, who has to yell at it occasionally to get things done.

He compartmentalizes everything that comes his way and interprets everything so that he never has to have his worldview challenged, never has to question himself, never has to regret anything that ever happened to him or that he ever did. Everything was fated to be. Everything is a test that everyone, including him, must pass, ergo, he’s on even odds with everyone else. If he fails or fucks up, he’s being tested, ergo, he will eventually succeed. If others fail or fuck up, they’re to be disposed of, such is the order of things. If he succeeds or something goes his way, it was fated to be. If others get the upperhand, he’s being tested by fate, and since fate demands him to survive and complete his mission, he’s got permission to destroy and kill whoever’s holding him back.

If he does horrible things, well, what’s a few corpses, or a hundred thousand, for the good of the entire world? Would you make their sacrifices meaningless by stopping him? Everything is fated to be, and fate is on his side, not yours. He’s DIO’s God’s chosen. If The Lord wanted him to stop, he’d have chosen someone else, he’d have died by now, but he didn’t, so it falls on him to drag mankind kicking and screaming into the better tomorrow his friend showed him. He barrels through the story with this mindset and even dies screaming it, screaming at Emporio and the vengeful power of the brother he murdered that they just don’t understand anything.

His backstory is so fucked up because we see how he was wronged by fate and circumstance time and time again, how he was just confused and looking for answers, but for all intents and purposes he was a good kid trying to do what was best for everyone. He went to a seminary to find answers, to alleviate his guilt over his (at the time) dead twin brother, to learn about how to find happiness for himself and others. A horrid situation was thrust into his lap by no fault of his own, and he tried to handle it with the least amount of harm to all parties, and he fucked up catastrophically. And that moment, that awful moment, where he finds Pearla’s body and has a moment of self-realization, where he briefly understands he is to blame and, is on the cusp of kickstarting the path that should have lead him to becoming a better person, a morally responsible person, and then

fucking

DIO

who immediately provides Pucci with the escape hatch out of the Painful Moral Growth path, who fills his head with poison and stunts his growth by giving Pucci absolution on the terms that Pucci wanted, not the terms that Pucci needed. What started as seemingly the most benign thing DIO had ever done for anyone (healed a young priest’s malformed foot and left him some parting words) spiraled into the actual end of the universe as said priest, well, no longer needed God, once he figured that DIO could play the part for him, could provide him the answers the church wasn’t giving him, could alleviate his guilt and teach him what brings people together and alleviate his guilt and teach what makes someone happy and alleviate his guilt and alleviate his guilt and alleviate his guilt and alleviate his guilt and

As much as I stand by the idea that Pucci is DIO’s superior and his ultimate legacy, because this is DIO we’re talking about and all evil in-universe springs from him (Araki said as much in the post-scriptum for Vento Aureo that DIO embodies Destiny and Fate), Pucci is also, to an extent, a victim of DIO. This is also part why I fundamentally disagree with the idea that Stone Ocean softened DIO. I don’t agree with the idea that his pursuit of Heaven was out of character either (it was essentially what he’d always been looking for, trying to attain happiness by taking control over his destiny in increasing bids for power and self-transformation), and I don’t agree with the idea that this was out-of-character. I’d argue DIO’s much-vaunted manipulative charisma, while always present, had never once been depicted as horrifyingly thoroughly as it is here, when he truly lives up to the dark messiah image his followers in Part 3 described and when we see how thoroughly he was able to corrupt Pucci, even while doing seemingly nothing but being the priest’s friend at a time of need. Stone Ocean, I’d argue, makes DIO scarier and more godlike in a way no other part (and certainly not those crossovers that did push Dio into actual godhood) did.

I think Pucci is one of the few religious villains I’ve seen that I like because he’s much more interesting than just a condemnation of particular priests or the church as an institution, and he doesn’t go the obvious route of being an old white bigot (quite the opposite, since those types killed his family to begin with). Rather, he embodies so many kinds of thinking you see within religious circles or mindsets. “He works in mysterious ways”, “He saves all of us in the end”, “only His will matters”, “humans cannot possibly claim to understand His design”, “there is a point to the suffering”, “the suffering will be worth it if you trust Him”, “look out for His signs even if you don’t understand what they are for”, “your suffering on Earth will be nothing compared to how much better your life will be in Heaven”, “trust those that He sends your way to guide you”, “trust not those who fall into the path of evil, the path that is not His”, “your enemies deserve salvation as well even if they don’t know it”, there’s just, so much you could dissect here, in terms of how Pucci speaks to the experience of religious thinking, or even just believing in the existence of God even if you’re not specifically christian or religious (...see why I put up there why I’m a little scared to admit I relate to, or at least kind of get, Pucci? Sometimes I think of Pucci as almost a big Mr.Hyde to the collective experience of everyone who grew up religious and had that shape their worldview whether they wanted or not.).

Pucci, a man every bit driven by the same unsatiable black hole that DIO has (just replace “ambition” with “guilt”), takes all of these, and drives them to an unfathomably horrifying, yet entirely plausible, conclusion. Spearheaded by tangible proof that yes, Fate is real, Heaven is real, and he can make it happen, no, he’s the one assigned by higher powers to make it happen, so long as he just does this and that and gets rid of some vile enemies of his that would rather have all of mankind suffer before letting him win. But, no matter, the sinners always get their due, in the end.

I hate that Netflix’s release schedule killed the Stone Ocean hype but, no matter, nothing can take away from how great it is and how great Pucci is. Not quite my favorite but one I’d easily argue is the best villain in the series, the perfect apocalyptic pilgrim JoJo needed to bring the end of all things and the birth of countless new ones.

Also, I always read Stone Ocean and applied DIO’s OVA theme to Pucci’s scenes. I love his anime theme, but I will always think of this as Pucci’s theme first and foremost.

#replies tag #character opinion bingo #jjba #jjba part 6 #stone ocean #jojo's bizarre adventure #enrico pucci #dio brando #whitesnake #made in heaven #that scene where he finds the body is so fucked up man #he comes SO CLOSE to getting the epiphany he needed #he was just a lost and confused 15 year old #Dio ruins everything even when he doesn't really do anything #I love Pucci but he fucks me up

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