#i acknowledge and understand that certain depictions of problematic themes in art can be actually harmful | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

meggannn · 4 years

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thank god im not the only other asian girl who came to realize how weirdly orientalist atla/lok is.

i hope you don’t mind me using this ask as a springboard to get some of my thoughts down (i edited this once and that fucked up the read more, so i tried several times to put this behind a cut again but tumblr hates me so i guess now everyone has to read my beef ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

my friend said last night that ATLA is like the new harry potter with the way people talk about it and..... yknow she’s not entirely wrong.....

like, not to keep pulling this card, but ~as a half-asian~, i have been struggling with this show a lot over the past few months; before even the show came to netflix, i was seeing a resurgence of ATLA stan culture. the hype of the live-action series and the release of the kyoshi novels have also amplified this. i reblog posts because i do still enjoy it, but i have been abstaining from reblogging commentary that so obviously glorifies it.

part of this burst-bubble effect is my problem, because i strongly dislike how people talk about certain characters and ships (and i admit that frustration is seeping through what ATLA did right) and observing fandom favorites makes me think that a lot of points were missed: people love toph, but hate korra (even people who think they love korra only because she’s one half of korrasami, actually do hate korra lmfao); people love zuko but completely ignore aang; don’t get me started on the fandom’s embracing of korrasami/subsequent forgiving of the patronizing, disrespectful, borderline racist way bryke did it. that is fan behavior, and it all bothers me and is no doubt coloring my judgment of the actual show, but beyond that, i also do want people to realize and accept “wait a minute, plenty of the things we criticize other media for also exist in ATLA, and it shouldn’t be different just because this show is full of asians.”

part of me wants to — and does — celebrate that a pan-asian show, in which NO white characters and NO trace of western culture exists, was a critical and commercial success in 2005! and had full network support and resonated with kids of different backgrounds. i can appreciate and be happy of that. but “no western culture” doesn’t mean “no western influence”: it’s an asian fantasy world created by non-asians, so the staff still ultimately wrote a pretty western story. the treatment of the fire lord imperialist dynasty is the big one (iroh was a war criminal who only left the warfront because his actions affected him/his family but now he’s a old friendly Good Guy and never acknowledges the lives he’s ruined! everything is ok now that zuko is fire lord! not like his new friends will have any direct trauma or conflicting feelings with how he is now heading a nation that burned two out of three of their homelands to the ground and tried to burn the third too! now here are all our headcanons about katara/sokka being fire lord/lady, toph being a fire lord advisor, and aang being an air nation rep to the fire nation! perfect ending!!), but also the themes of a pretty straightforward good kids v evil conqueror story, watered-down concepts of buddhism/taoism/others for child consumption — some of these are not strictly bad things, but they don’t make it the best story in the world. they are not worth saying “stop watching x problematic cartoon, watch ATLA, the BEST cartoon with the BEST diversity!!!!”

side note, my friend looked it up last night and there was a total of one asian writer on the staff, May Chan, who according to wiki, just wrote the Boiling Rock episodes. (at this juncture i want to keep in mind that someone in the writer’s or developer’s room might be in my situation, possibly mixed race but white-passing in both face and name... it’d be hypocritical of me to not consider that possibility, but as far as i know that’s not the case, and in any respect i think it’s important to have visible diversity, not because i think mixed people don’t have anything to say or shouldn’t be counted, but in the sense that poc who don’t get the luxury of being white-passing should be allowed control of depicting people who look like them. but that’s another discussion.)

honestly, i can look over some aspects of this show because i still do enjoy it. i like the use of martial arts as a fantastical magic device because it was used consistently and clearly they did their research, even if it does kind represent this idea of Asia, the Land of Magic Powers; i don’t mind because not everyone has the magic powers, the magic powers are deconstructed, people without the magic powers are still treated respectfully, the magic powers are diverse, and they are treated both practically and spiritually (so not everyone, like sokka, has the same awe-inspiring respect of them, which is realistic characterization to this world, and though he’s sometimes portrayed as incorrect in his disbelief of the spiritual, he’s never portrayed as wrong for being practical and realistic). honestly, i don’t mind the oohs and aahs of these magic powers because i still think the magic powers are pretty fuckin cool; it’s likely we’ve all pretended to be a bender at some point lol. and as a kid, i didn’t mind that ATLA nations blended cultures; i thought it was fun to look up later and see which sorts of things were made up and which were influenced by real things (i liked that not a lot if it was made up). i don’t mind that Lake Laogai was named after a real, horrifying place, though i understand and completely respect that plenty of others find the name disturbing and tasteless.

that said, as an adult coming to ATLA for the first time, I would probably not go this hard for a show that blends a bunch of real ethnicities together in a hodgepodge of culture clashes, at least not one spearheaded by a white developer team. i would be less willing to ignore the northern air temple episode, where aang, victim of a genocide, forgives a bunch of strangers who disrespected and destroyed his home (including the guy who was NOW INVENTING WAR WEAPONS FOR THE VERY NATION THAT DESTROYED HIS PEOPLE). i can mostly look over these things because of nostalgia. but the way people outright stan the whole avatar series (including LOK but i won’t get into that right now) without acknowledging ATLA is, ultimately, still a story with a pretty western handling of its themes just with asian faces, is..... frustrating.

a new coworker of mine, also an asian woman who was too old to watch ATLA at the time it was airing, has said that the more she learns about ATLA as an adult the weirder she feels about it and less inclined she is to watch it, which makes me think that maybe i’m not crazy.

#avatar commentary #Anonymous #askbox #ok to reblog #megan talks about avatar

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lennyandkarlmarx · 4 years

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Harry Potter and the Misuse of Literary Concepts

JK Rowling is transphobic. This isn’t new information to anyone with any degree awareness of her social media habits over the last few years, but it is new to many. As such, a wide swath of her fans have found themselves mowed down by the sudden revelation and fallout. Unsure how else to grapple with the powerless innate to an already wealthy and successful person doing a late heel turn, the discourse as turned to death of the author to fly in and bailout any fraught emotions or angst regarding people who grew up loving the Harry Potter series, but don’t hate the trans community.

Death of the Author is a frequently misunderstood concept. It does not mean, as many seem to believe, that the work of a writer, once released, now belongs to its readers. It simply means that, if we consider the author’s identity when criticizing a text we’re severely limiting ourselves to a singular, specific explanation of the work. Instead, Roland Barthes, who is credited with coining the term, believed that it’s best to perceive the text in a wide variety of contexts, not just say, for example “HP Lovecraft was an extreme racist, so his stories are all written to impose his racist views on his readers.”

Speaking of Lovecraft, his work often can be interpreted in a specific way due to the audience’s awareness of his particularly vile and incendiary views on race. It is not in bad faith or bad criticism to look at certain Lovecraft stories and conclude that the other the author so often likes to depict as a source of fear or anxiety, was likely consciously or subconsciously the then growing population of color in the North East of the United States. Barthes would not tell one that this is a bad interoperation in all likelihood, but would say it’s incomplete, and that the stories often represent far more than just the author’s bigoted views. The subconscious forces that lead Lovecraft to include racialized themes in his work also likely worked to include his other fears and anxieties as well, all of which are worth understanding both in and out of the context of speculating about his personal views.

This is all an academic question though, and often what people are talking about, even while they use academic language, isn’t actually academic. The question many seem to actually be asking when they talk about Rowling and Death of the Author in the wake of her more outright transphobia, is can I still enjoy Harry Potter? It’s an attempt to seek validation for an already held view, one that they like formed years even decades prior to the recent revelations. There are many angles to approach this from, and unfortunately, most of the honest ones offer little satisfaction, as is often the case under capitalism.

The Death of the Author route, which seems to just blindly whisk away the putrid slurry of Rowling’s bigotry and try to make the best out of the final product leftover, is obviously an intellectually dishonest one. A brutal structuralist or formalist approach to criticizing Harry Potter as a book or film series is perfectly fine, but that alone can’t erase the material connection to the consumption of products from that franchise to their bigoted and influential author. Just as insincere, and arguably more insufferable, are the well I always hated it anyway crowd, who of course are revealing their desire to use political posturing as a self-righteous wedge to support their aesthetic opinions. The actual reveal here for these people is their stated willingness to complicate the question of what to do with a work when its author is bigoted if they actually like the work. They’ll use the trans community to justify disliking something they already disliked, but wouldn’t actually support the trans community, or are at least less likely to, if the bigotry in question surrounded a work they enjoyed.

Film critic Lindsey Ellis tried to circle the square here by acknowledging that the author in this case is so deeply tied to her work in a material sense, that it becomes impossible to support the work without supporting her and thus her views, but that too is a flawed approach. Calling for a boycott, as Ellis openly does at the end of her recent videos, fundamentally misunderstands the human elements in play that she claims to be compensating for. As has been demonstrated time and time and time again, people do not change their consumption habits over basically anything other than an immediate material driving force to do so. Ellis’ position that consuming Harry Potter content is aiding transphobia falls short both in its tenuous tie to the actual material circumstances, which are now, given Rowling’s immense wealth and status prior to even the early reveals of these views, are completely static, and the actual consequences of that attitude. If the narrative becomes “liking Harry Potter makes you transphobic” that will leave too many with a choice between either rationalizing Rowling’s transphobic views, or discarding something already fundamental to their identity.

There is no true right answer here, other than to accept one’s own powerlessness when it comes to media consumption. Whether it’s The Call of Cthulhu, Ender’s Game, or Harry Potter, the liking of problematic media is an inevitable part of a reactionary culture. All art is problematic on a sliding scale just as all free market entities are inherently exploitative under capitalism.The only way forward is to learn to compartmentalize one’s consumption, whatever aids getting through the day both emotionally and physically, with one’s own personal views, and of course working as much as possible to try to gain more power in the hopes of radically improving the world, as beyond possible as a prospect as that might seem.

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listoriented · 5 years

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The Cat Lady

cw: suicide, mental illness

The Cat Lady is a sidescrolling horror-adventure game. It contains: long sections of dialogue, item-based puzzles, jump scares, slow-moving character animations. It was released in 2012. It was made by Harvester Games, an independent studio from Poland. Apparently a sequel, Lorelai, was released earlier this year. Curiously, three out of the last five games now have been made by different Polish studios.

The protagonist/Cat Lady in question is Susan Ashworth. Susan is a forty-year-old woman who lives in an apartment, more or less fully alone aside from the occasional company of stray neighbourhood cats. Susan is suffering from severe depression — the game begins with her attempting suicide. She ends up in a limbo realm where the French-accented ‘Queen of Maggots’ tells her to go back to the living realm and kill five psychopaths (“parasites”). So she does, kind of, but the subsequent quest to do this is very mixed in with Susan’s own path to recovery.

The Cat Lady is a perplexing, frustrating, interesting patchwork mess of a game. I don’t know what I think of it. I don’t know whether to celebrate its relatively (to most other games) thoughtful depiction of mental illness or discuss how this is still overly enmeshed in problematic depictions of violence. I don’t know whether to commend the game’s partial unwinding of the lonely cat lady trope or to reflect on how it reaffirms this idea of depression as something that makes someone act like an arsehole to everyone around them.

The whole game is kind of like this. It uses surrealism and unreliable narration to imply discursive thinking into the altered states of perception produced by mental illness, but then it seems to narratively validate these altered states because the plot of the game involves murdering, and getting murdered by, serial killers and psychopaths. It has lots of overbearing, superfluous dialogue, mixed in with some genuinely thoughtful and insightful moments – which it then undercuts, again, with ridiculous violence. For example! The first time The Cat Lady made me think, oh, maybe this game is actually going to take this subject seriously, was in the second chapter when Susan talks to a psychiatrist and it gave you these dialogue options of, like, talking seriously about your past, yay, the game is making the implicative link between trauma and illness, maybe there is hope! And then….. and then the psychiatrist MURDERS YOU because he is A SERIAL KILLER.

And it’s just like. What?

I think, in a vacuum, this sort of tonal rollercoaster would be fine, if this was one game among many that explored different depictions of different kinds of experiences of mental illness – sure, that would be totally valid. The Cat Lady has one of the more interesting explorations of mental illness I’ve seen in games. But this is both a medium that is very prone to violence, and one in which mental illness has largely been tied with the motivations of evil boss characters, in much the same way that we often look for it as the motivation for crimes without necessarily trying to understand the social underpinnings that go into it. Video games have been more likely to stigmatise mental illness rather than engender understanding. Working with this background, continuing to tie violence to mental illness poses an associative problem that, through its spectral depiction of surrealism, it never really shakes itself of – it doesn’t work hard enough against the pre-existing tropes, basically. But that isn’t to say it’s wrong, only that I don’t know if it can be categorically declared ‘a success’. Like, sure, I get that maybe it’s meant to be read as allegory, or maybe we’re meant to appreciate that not knowing what is real is indeed one of the game’s core points about depicting mental illness – but then, the logical leaps it makes are so large, it frequently undermines so much of the sensitivity in its world-building. It’s hard to find much to hold onto, or know where to orient ourselves to parse what these depictions of these themes are saying.

It’s all over the place in so many ways. It starts poorly – the first two chapters are the weakest – but I liked it better the more I played of it. Some of puzzles are a little infuriating, though I ended up enjoying how they played out more often than not, particularly once I’d picked up the rhythm of the game’s thinking. The voice-acting is extensive though not always convincing. The penultimate chapter has a neat sleuthing layout that really slinks into a cool, elaborate whodunnit puzzle. After the chaos of the first two chapters, I liked the way the game built up through the middle, reorienting around depictions of Susan’s apartment and the warmness of the little moments like having coffee and a cigarette on the balcony. I appreciated the morose, mostly monochrome pallet with sparing and smart interjections of colour. I liked the way the art feels cut together, lo-fi but intricate. Some of the jump scares are pretty good.

It’s…I don’t know. I feel like I’ve mostly read positive things about it, but I can’t get totally on board, nor do I really have the time/energy to more coherently unpack why I think it doesn’t always deal with its heavy subject matter that well. Maybe it’s an angle thing. If you’re asking “does it have a good depiction of depression for a schlocky horror game?” then yes. But remove the genre requirement, then no. Everything is relative.

update 9/10/2019** Some people have already discussed The Cat Lady with regards to representing mental illness with a bit more clarity and nuance than I have. Sarah Stang (2018) at First Person Scholar discusses The Cat Lady alongside Fran Bow and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, acknowledging that while these depictions have shortcomings, they represent a comparative step forward for games:

The particular strength of all three games discussed above is that they feature female protagonists with mental illnesses and emphasize healing rather than curing. In Fran Bow and The Cat Lady, the clear message is that people with mental illnesses can help others and themselves, can overcome adversity and live with trauma, and can form meaningful relationships.

Stang links to a couple of other articles that give a reasonable background on the problematic relationship games have with mental illness. Sarah Nixon in 2013 gave a concise rendering of how horror games particularly tend to use and stigmatise mental illness. Aaron Souppouris (2015) looks at particular mechanics more extensively in discussion with a clinical psychologist.

I also liked Eric Swain’s short and sweet take in 2015 (from ~5 minutes in), on a critical distance confab postcast in discussion with Austin Walker in 2015. Swain described the game as Freudian studies “through a 2000s nu-metal aesthetic”, noting how interesting the game looked and also the nice balcony scenes, but mentioning that it was hard to know what the game’s creator wanted to say about certain sensitive topics. **

Duration: Eight hours.

When/Why: A few years ago I was friends with a guy named John. We were in a book club with a bunch of other ex-classmates from uni. John also liked playing Dota, during the period of my life where I, too, was on that horse. I played Dota with John and his friend a few times, and was shocked at how angry and rude he was in game, this everyday fairly polite and thoughtful guy. Anyway, at some point John mentioned or recommended The Cat Lady in the context of a discussion at book club, which is, I think, how I came to buy it in a steam sale in early 2015. I played it for a bit but found the physical slowness of the game too patience-testing at the time, given that at the time I was, as mentioned, addicted to the dopamine gambit of Dota. When I later mentioned this – my inability to get through the first chapter of the game he’d recommended - to John, he agreed that it was “a bad game”, further confusing me as to why it was brought up in the first place, and indeed I’m not sure if John has actually played it, seeing as it doesn’t come up as something that exists in his steam library, or at least, on the steam account of his that I’m friends with. So, that’s the long story as to how this game came to be here. But why else do you read this blog?

up next is Cat Quest

#game78 #the cat lady #harvester games #games of poland #games of 2012 #horror #depression games #adventure games #sidescroller

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