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#long before there was a mainstream conversation about it

veganineden · 9 months

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On the Evolution of “Happily Ever After” and Why “Nothing Lasts Forever”

A reflection inspired by Good Omens 2

One of my favorite Tumblr posts on the second season of Good Omens 2 was actually not about the series at all, but our reaction to it, primarily the ending. @zehwulf wrote, “I think a lot of us—myself included—got a little too comfortable with assuming [Aziraphale and Crowley would] work on their issues right away post-Armageddon.” We did the work for them through meta, fanfiction, fanart, and building a plethora of headcanons. Who among us AO3-surfing fans didn’t read and love Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach by Nnm?

In the 4 long years since season one was released, we did more than seek to understand and repair rifts between two fictional beings: we were forced to reckon with ourselves too. We faced a global pandemic, suffered traumatizing losses and isolation, and were forced to really and truly look into the face of our atrocities-ridden and capitalistic world. The mainstream rise of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice work, and our participation in this work, showed us that the systems in place were built to oppress and harm most of us, and they are.

So, what does this have to do with the evolution of “happily ever after”?

My friend put it best in a conversation we had following the season finale, when she pointed out a shift in media focus. The “happy end” in old stories about wars and kingdoms used to be “we killed the evil old king and put a noble young king in his place and now citizens can live in peace” and we’re transitioning into a period of “we tore down the whole fucking monarchy.”

If we look at season one, written to follow the beats of a love story, it comforted us by offering a pretty traditional happy ending pattern: you get your fancy dinner with your special someone, the romantic music plays, and you have a place to call your own. Season one’s finale provided a temporary freedom for Aziraphale and Crowley, the “breathing room,” but it didn't solve the problem that was Heaven and Hell, or the agendas belonging to those systems of oppression.

Is it good enough to keep our heads down, pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening, and live our own personal happy endings until we die? Moral quandaries aside, if you don't die (or if you care about the generations after you), then, like Aziraphale said, it “can’t last forever.” There’s a clear unpleasant end to the “happily ever after” that’s based on ignoring our problems– it’s the destruction of our relationships, and humanity.

Ineffable Bureaucracy can go off into the stars because they do not care about humanity.

You know who does?

Aziraphale.

And Aziraphale knows that Crowley cares about humanity too. (He knows because Crowley was the one who proposed sabotaging Armageddon in the first place, who only invited him to the stars when he thought all was lost, because Crowley would save humanity if he thought it was possible, and Aziraphale knows Crowley has survived losing Everything before, and he will do all in his power so that Crowley does not need to experience that again.)

In season one and two, we see how much they care about humanity, beyond their orders, to the point The Systems begin to frown at them. Aziraphale hears Crowley’s offer to run away together in the final episode of season two, to leave Earth behind, and just like the first time that offer was made in season one, he declines. He knows choosing only “us” is not a choice either of them can live with for the rest of eternity.

I believe season 3 will provide an opportunity to “dismantle the system,” but I don’t know how it will play out. I worry that Aziraphale has put himself in the now-dead trope of the “young noble king.” (I wish Crowley had told him why Gabriel was dismissed from his duties.) I worry that he would martyr himself as a sole agent for change. I worry that he doesn’t actually know how to dismantle anything by himself: because you can’t. He needs Crowley. He DOES. He needs Crowley, and Muriel, and other angels and demons and humans without fixed mindsets to help him. Only by learning to listen and making room at the table for all can they (and we) move past personal satisfaction to collective liberation.

Crowley was right when he said that Aziraphale had discovered his “civic obligations.”

So, I think we will get our modern-day happy ending– and it’s going to involve a lot of pain and discomfort, communication, healing and teamwork– and in the end, it’ll all be okay. There will be a time for rest and a time for “us.”

And most likely a cottage.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

- Maya Angelou

Support the SAG-AFTRA strike and other unions. Trust @neil-gaiman. Register to vote if you haven’t yet. Hold yourself and others accountable with compassion. Read books. Keep doing the work. Rest. Then watch Good Omens 2 again.

#good omens 2 #good omens #crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #good omens meta #good omens 2 meta #ineffable advocacy #ineffable partners #neil gaiman #terry pratchett #gos2 spoilers #good omens 2 spoilers #nothing lasts forever #liked by Neil Gaiman

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fob4ever · 5 months

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i was at a bookstore yesterday that had a copy of the kerrang: living loud book that featured the FOB watergun fight article i've never seen transcribed anywhere so i made a transcript of it for archival purposes. enjoy! from kerrang, may 2005.

For a man staring down the barrel of a loaded gun while wearing just underpants, Fall Out Boy bassist Peter Wentz looks remarkably chipper. Especially when you consider the person about to unload in his face is guitarist and vocalist Patrick Stump, grinning madly despite the fact that fellow six-stringer Joe Trohman has a pistol to his temple. He in turn is firmly in the firing line of drummer Andy Hurley, cackling loudly with his finger hovering over the trigger.

Passers-by stop and stare, waiting for the inevitable, messy climax of this "Reservoir Dogs" scenario. The tension mounts, onlookers brace themselves, the band get ready to open fire. Suddenly it happens.

"Argh!" screams Wentz as several litres of icy water soak him. "That's fucking cold!"

No, Fall Out Boy aren't about to blow each other away, They're having a water fight for K!'s benefit in a car park at the Chicago stop on travelling punk circus Warped Tour, where they're knocking out their "softcore" wares ("We're basically a hardcore band that couldn't cut it as a hardcore band," laughs Wentz) on the main stage alongside big hitters like The Offspring, Avenged Sevenfold and My Chemical Romance. The Windy City is more than just another stop for them; Chicago is Fall Out Boy's hometown, the place where they formed out of the ashes of their old hardcore bands, and where they still live with their parents- who are here for today's show - during the few weeks of the year they're not on tour.

It all started for Fall Out Boy here in 2001 when the members wanted a break from playing in their various bands. Long time friends Wentz and Hurley got together with hardcore associate Joe Trohman to do something a bit less heavy. Following a conversation about avant-metallers Neurosis in a bookstore, Trohman introduced Stump to the rest of the band. When their other bands folded, they took on Fall Out Boy full time.

"We wanted to do things before we were ready," chuckles Peter Wentz fondly of the early days of DIY tours for the benefit of the one or two people who would show up. "We'd plan two-week tours, just to see the world. Nobody would book us, so we had to do it all on our own."

"A lot of bands have scenes to go into and surround themselves with those people," says Stump. "We had no scene, so we would just play anywhere, with whoever."

FOB have come a long way from their humble roots. Right now they're America's fastest rising band. Radio smash 'Sugar, We're Goin' Down' has placed them squarely in the mainstream, having spent three weeks as the Number One song on MTV's 'TRL', a prime-time show usually devoted to pop acts like Maroon 5 and Ashlee Simpson. So dizzying their Stateside assent has been, they had to cancel their recent European tour in order to play the MTV Music Video Awards, where they are also nominated for 'Sugar...'. Thankfully, FOB haven't let the screaming adoration turn them into big-headed twats.

"A piece of shit with legs on it could walk onto 'TRL' and people would still go crazy," laughs Wentz. "That stuff just goes straight by me. With the fast turnover in the music industry, how can anyone have an ego"

Andy Hurley chips in. "You can be today's main stage and tomorrow's trash."

That's to find out tomorrow, though. Today among the madness of trying to plan anything on the Warped Tour - stage times are decided daily by lottery - Fall Out Boy have to try and find time for hanging out with family and friends.

"Three weeks on Warped is like three months on a normal tour," says Peter Wentz.

"Home becomes like Atlantis on tour, you wonder if it actually exists after a while," adds Patrick Stump.

Now FOB are big stars, a lot of old 'friends' have been coming out of the woodwork. Joe Trohman and Peter Wentz have polarised views on those who didn't give a toss back in the day suddenly becoming your pal once you've made it.

"The way I look at it is if someone's a dick to you and you don't know them, so what?" says Trohman. "Just care about who did support you, keep those important people close, not the people who five years ago called you a loser."

"I work the opposite way!" Wentz counters, before adding darkly, "The people I think about most are enemies. My brain works on revenge!"

Though a tight knit group of close friends, Peter Wentz is clearly Fall Out Boy's spokesman. He does most of the talking during the interview and writes the lyrics, and seems like the most driven one of the lot. As well as doing Fall Out Boy, Wentz has also written a book with tattoo artist Joe Tesaure, 'The Boy With The Thorn In His Side'. It's a dark, twisted tale that could have come straight from the brain of Tim Burton.

"I've always been into Roahl Dahl and people like that, and I was friends with a tattoo artist at the time and we came up with this idea to do a book together," he explains. "It wasn't something I felt fitted in with what Fall Out Boy is, I hate when bands do something that's not 'them'. The book is what it is, and Fall Out Boy is what we are."

Despite all thise talk of nightmares and revenge, FOB are upbeat individuals, enjoying their newfound success, while refusing to allow success to go to their heads. They'll tell you they don't like the shallowness of groupies or industry parties, and that the trappings of rock stardom hold no appeal.

"I don't feel like I deserve it," says Wentz in closing. "It's not like, 'this amount of time and this amount of shows = this kind of bus'. I appreciate what we've got. We've toured in a tiny van and it was cool, but now we're having new adventures living like this. I don't feel we deserve it more than any other bands do."

He surveys the sumptuosly appointed tour bus for a moment before chuckling heartily.

"Actually, that's a lie, we totally deserve it more than anyone else! Ha ha!"

#yayyyyyy #article

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rogueddie · 10 months

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On and On / Figure You Out

Corroded Coffin are at the peak of their popularity. They're not mainstream, or in any way big, but they're known enough that they're kept busy. Touring as an opening act, special appearences in little underground places...

Eddie hasn't been home for months. He'd known that he'd most likely be kept away when their manager started talking to them excitedly about all the opportunities.

He hadn't expected it to take such a toll on his and Steves relationship.

It had taken him a while to notice the problems too. He's always so tired after gigs... it takes him two weeks to notice how tired Steve sounds.

"Are you ok?" He blurts, as soon as he notices.

"I'm fine," Steve says.

Eddie can hear the lie.

"Are you tired?" He pushes. "Long day?"

"No. You don't need to worry about me. What were you saying about Jeff? Something about a solo, right?"

No, Eddie wants to scream. I was talking about us!

He doesn't say that though. He rattles off the things that happened in their last show- the things that are interesting, anyway. He doesn't mention how hard it had hit him, after the show, how lonely he is.

It's the same sort of conversation they always have. There isn't really anything different.

It feels different.

After saying their goodbyes, hanging up, Eddie hovers by the phone for a few minutes. Long enough for the others, who had been waiting nearby, to worry.

"Eddie?" Jeff is the one to walk over, putting a hand on his shoulder. "You ok, man?"

"Yeah," Eddie replies, automatically. But, frowning, he starts shaking his head. "No. I don't know. It's..."

"Hey, stay calm, it's ok. Did something happen? Is Steve ok?"

"Yeah, it... no. No. Nothing happened, but... I just have this feeling, man, like something really bad is happened and I'm seeing it too late and now-"

"Hey, hey, Eddie, breathe. Whatever it is, we'll help you out, ok? We can fix this, right?"

"Right," Eddie says. He looks to Gareth and Grant, then back to Jeff. "I need to go home. I need..."

"It's that big? Are you sure you're not overreacitng?"

"I don't know. I don't want to risk it. Like, it feels like something is about to break. I can't fix it from here- if I wait, it'll be too late, and-"

"Ok," Jeff cuts in, turning to gesture the other two over. "You go home, we'll find someone to cover for a few dates."

"I know someone who could cover for Chicago," Gareth offers.

"Thank you," Eddie manages to choke out. He knows it's not enough but, by their expressions, they at least understand some of what he can't bring himself to say.

"Go get your man," Grant encourages. "We'll be fine."

"Thank you," Eddie repeats. "So much, it-"

"Jesus, man!" Gareth cuts in, nudging him. "We know. We love you too. Now, go!"

"Go," Jeff says, nodding, when Eddie looks to him. "He won't wait forever, right?"

It takes too long to get a flight back to Indiana, and even longer to find a taxi willing to take him all the way to Hawkins. It ends up taking him 36 hours to get home, to get to Steve, after the phone call.

Steve is sleeping on the couch when he gets in, curled up in one of Eddies old sweaters.

"Sweetheart," Eddie whispers, brushing his hair back, gentle and soft.

Steve mumbles, nose scrunching in annoyance as he wakes up. He blinks at Eddie a few times, confused. "Eds? What- how are you here?"

"I missed you." Eddie isn't sure why he's whispering. The moment feels so fragile. "I needed to see you."

"But your tour-"

"Can wait. You're more important."

"What about that, uh... upward swing?" Steve pulls his hand off his hair, holding in both his own. "Once in a lifetime opportunity, right?"

"I don't care about that. On the phone, you... I had to come home, Stevie. You sounded so... I don't know. Tired?"

Steve is quiet for a moment, before admitting; "I missed you. Doesn't feel like home when you're gone."

"Good job I'm back then, huh?"

"For how long? One night and then you're gone again?"

"Forever, if you want. Or I can drag you out with us. Whatever it takes. Whatever you need."

"Just... don't leave me for so long."

"I won't. I promise."

"Ok," Steve finally smiles. It's a small, frail thing, but it's a smile. "Thank you, Eds. For coming here."

"Anytime." Eddie kisses the back of his hand. "Seriously, anytime. Call me and I'll come running. Whenever and whatever. I love you, so much. You know that, right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I know. I love you, too."

#stranger things #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie #steddie fic #ficlet #decideweekprompt

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hadesoftheladies · 9 months

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actually, it’s good for radblr to start talking about the wins of feminism. I know there’s still a long way to go, but there’s actually a lot of progress that feminism has made and I mean A LOT in terms of global society. not only has feminism been one of the best and most powerful social movements ever, but it’s done that nonviolently. female separatism, women resisting and choosing solidarity with each other, women demanding rights, HAS WORKED and it is a spit in the face of these women to say “we’re never going to make it out” simply because it’s still bad in many places. if we keep dismissing feminism as futile, men win. and we shouldn’t because it’s not true! we CAN have separatist societies, and non-separatist societies CAN improve because they have before.

some recent wins are:

-This FIFA World Cup has become the most watched women’s World Cup in history, with 1.5 million tickets sold. Many people are taking women’s football more seriously. I have been seeing videos of men and women packed in pubs to cheer on athletes. Kids are no longer referring to only male athletes as footballer heroes! Men are sharing highlights and admiring the skills of these athletes from a genuine love of the game!

-Barbie topped Oppenheimer at the box office. This movie has sparked so much self-awareness and reflection all over the internet and the world. It is not radical, but it is still culturally impactful. Greta Gerwig is now one of the most respected directors in Hollywood rn.

-Period products are now free in Scotland!

-Latin America is incredibly pro-choice, and different kinds of abortion bans have been lifted.

-FGM in Africa has GREATLY reduced and continues to reduce!

-World Athletics ruled in favor of keeping women’s sports female! This is a huge win for female athletes!

There’s so much more, and we should talk about it. Attitudes can change. These conversations are becoming more mainstream. And feminist activism DOES PRODUCE RESULTS, whether that’s separatism, art, demonstrations, etc. Respect that history!

There are women and (and male allies) right now who are working their asses off to kill the prostitution, human trafficking and porn industries, there are feminist movements within major religions happening, there are girls excelling in academia and getting into male dominated spaces, there are women fighting to make the internet safer and better, there are women working to make period products free and available…pay attention to these things and join whichever fight you can! you will not find yourself alone in your efforts!

we do not wait to see if there is any hope in the world. we create a hopeful world. there IS hope for women, so long as we have it

#feminism #radblr #radfem

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cerise-on-top · 2 months

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hi<3 if you can, can you do valeria and laswell with a gothic s/o? like someone who likes darker/morbid things and things like that! love your blog by the way! it’s definitely my favorite blog to come look at after a long ass day <333

Hey there! Sorry, but I couldn't really find too much on what counts as dark and morbid in the goth scene, so I wrote more general HCs, I hope that's alright still ^^;

Valeria and Laswell with a Gothic!S/O

Valeria: She’d most definitely be intrigued, but not too much. In all honesty, she doesn’t know too much about the subculture, she’s never really met a goth who was clearly one. However, if it makes you happy, that’s all that matters to her. While she won’t really know too many bands, or any at all, she’d be more than happy to listen to a few if you want her to. Yes, she won’t always have the time, but when she isn’t too busy she could put on some songs by Joy Division or The Cure, she really doesn’t mind. She can vibe to that sort of music, even if it isn’t her favorite. You’re more than welcome to discuss the literature with her, though. She’s probably never read a single gothic literature book, but she can buy you some. Anything from poetry to a regular novel, it’s quite alright. While she won’t be the best person to go to when it comes to discussing those, she’ll support you either way. However, something she could definitely enjoy would be going clothes shopping with you. The fashion is kind of nice, she has to admit, so she’d be more than happy to buy you whatever garments you desire. Will go out of her way to find something you might like as well. I can’t see her being too much into the history of goth culture, though. It’s nice that you are a goth, if you want to tell her about it, then you can and she’ll listen to you, but she likely doesn’t have the time to research everything by herself. Tell her about its roots and she can definitely appreciate you going against what’s mainstream and how it all came to be. She’s a very defiant and rebellious woman herself, so she definitely gets it.

Laswell: She knows so many people, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has worked with goths before. And even if she hasn’t directly, she’s likely seen quite a few walking around the city. She usually grows worried for them in summer since their attire is black, which makes it quite hot. However, she’d be very intrigued by you and your subculture. It’s something very near and dear to you, so she would put in the effort to learn about your history. Will give some classic bands a listen as well. She just really wants to have something to talk about with you. Besides, she gets to learn more about you. While she may not be the biggest fan of your interest in death, considering she’s surrounded by it more often than not, she’d be more than happy to indulge anything else it has to offer. Laswell spent a good chunk of life left alone with her thoughts, so she definitely knows a thing or two about melancholy, the state of the world and introspection. Maybe not in the same way you do, but she can definitely keep up in a conversation. She’s likely also unintentionally read some of the more popular gothic novels out there and liked them, so she’d make for a good discussion partner as well. While she doesn’t particularly understand the need to make your face completely white, she doesn’t mind. In fact, she thinks it looks quite cool, even if it’s not for her. However, the fashion in and of itself looks really good to her. Again, she wouldn’t want to wear it, but something about Victorian and Edwardian fashion has a certain something to it that she can’t quite place. Like Valeria, she’ll definitely buy you things she thinks you might like. Anything from a suit or a corset to a book about poetry. Beware, though, she will read the books before you can.

#cod #cod x reader #valeria garza #valeria garza x reader #kate laswell #kate laswell x reader #I am so incredibly tired so I'm sorry if this is bad #the day I'm writing this is Monday and I worked for nine hours today which wasn't very fun #I'll be working for nine hours tomorrow again and I'm not looking forward to that but I need that overtime #I've never met a goth before so I don't even know anyone I could ask about it #I know an emo or two but that's not the same #still I gave the music a listen and I gotta say it sounds pretty good #I can see Valeria indulging you in your morbid things though. if you collect animal bones she can definitely acquire some #whether it be through roadkill or ethically killed animals #Laswell wouldn't be too big of a fan of having bones at home but she won't stop you either #she'll just tell you to keep them somewhere she won't necessarily have to see them all the time #she's not squeamish but she prefers to not think about death too much outside of work. she gets enough of it on the daily #Laswell would be more media literate than Valeria though. she's definitely analyzed some poems for fun when she was younger #Valeria doesn't have the time to read too much into something. or read a book at all. a poem maybe but that's it she won't read into it

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zynart · 2 years

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“book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

kevin durant is talking about basketball fans but you’ll understand exactly what he means in a much broader sense if you’re on the basketball side of twitter and immediately recognize the mindset he’s describing — that it’s a sentiment that isn’t really about basketball fans at all, but about how we engage with all sorts of things especially in the social media era. but this tweet is just table-setting. the important thing here is that the rest of this post, about many writers and english teachers and book bloggers and overall people who describe themselves as book-lovers on the internet, can be summed up as a caption to this screenshot that just says “same energy”.

same energy. many writers and supposed booklovers on the internet actively dislike and disparage most literature. and actively dislike and disparage the entire literary tradition of the novel, and the novel as a form, and all the tools or frames of engaging with art, and many of the writers or novels known for beautiful writing, and the books that made up the history and development of the medium and inspired so many more of its writers and inspired stylistic shifts, so much fundamental context for any kind of novel… i’m losing my thread here but the point is, many people who describe themselves as book-lovers, many of them authors themselves or english teachers, will proudly and vocally announce their dislike and hatred of so many classic novels. often what seems like almost all of them.

and will not just proudly say so, but won’t shut up about it. and will bring it up constantly among themselves. it’s not a one-off thing either, this comes up con-fucking-stantly in what feels like almost any conversation about literature. often fully unprompted. and will somehow pretend it's an original insight and that they're being bold and brave and controversial and starting a conversation for saying it, when it's all been discourse every two months for as long as an online commons has existed, and when we all know they got that take from endless cycles of online discourse, and when the reason they say it is because they know people will agree with them, because we've seen how that plays out a million times already, b e c a u s e so many other people who like to imagine themselves as brave bold original thinkers for having picked up that opinion in a previous online cycle themselves will respond enthusiastically through some kind of collective pretense that it's a new conversation.

that's part of it too, everyone involved in that discussion collectively performs some kind of amnesia where this is a take they're hearing for the very first time, and speaking a truth they've always thought but never felt like it was socially acceptable to say. because that way, you get to feel like an original critical thinker without having to do any critical thinking, or to feel like you have a superior understanding of a piece of media without having any media literacy. and you get to feel some self-flattery about your superior insight for having the originality and courage to believe what is now a pretty mainstream view — maybe not mainstream among literati, but absolutely mainstream in the online commons, enough that you know many people agree with you already because you've seen the same agreement and mutual self-congratulation play out in a million online cycles already.

(it feels very disingenuous. maybe it's not consciously and intentionally disingenuous, maybe it's just a lack of self-awareness, but it's like.. you know how we could say a great joke at a family function that we once read on the internet, and they wouldn't know and would just think you're just that witty for coming up wiht it? like that, except we're all on the same internet and we'd all read the same joke already but we all have to pretend we'd never heard it before so we don't break kayfabe, because that way you can convince yourself that nobody else had seen it before and they all thought you were witty. everyone just performs the exact same roles every time discourse about any given book happens every 2-6 months on the internet. next time, can we all at least not pretend like this isn't the 26th time we've seen this conversation and spare all the "FINALLY someone said it!" "someone needed to start this conversation!" schtick? is that too harsh?)

but anyway. the thing is, alright. if you think jane austen is boring. and that the great gatsby is overrated. and also that the bronte sisters' books were super problematic (bc heathcliff and rochester with mad wife in the attic are both kinda misogynistic). and also that hemingway is boring posturing. and catcher in the rye is overrated (because the abused kid processing his brother's death is "annoying"). and that shakespeare is too old english style to be worth reading.

and that only pretentious wannabes read tolstoy or dostoevsky. and as for ursula k le guin or isaac asimov or philip k dick, sci-fi is a boring genre. and that nabokov is weird and kinda suss, and kundera seems like he has an ego and philosophizes too much (will claim to have liked one hundred years of solitude tho bc that’s still seen as fashionable). and only pretentious hipsters read david foster wallace or pynchon or franzen. none of them seem to remember that edith wharton exists. some quote george eliot as another white man, or just don’t mention her at all.

and never even mention chinua achebe or toni morrison or james baldwin or arundhati roy. and — this is something i actually saw being said on twitter in conversations between english teachers, authors, and people who call themselves book bloggers — say "kazuo ishiguro is only read by white people who want to feel smart but is actually full of weird stuff" while including a screenshot from a haruki murakami novel. even though ishiguro and murakami write very different books in very different styles, one has lived in the uk his whole life and his best known books are all set in the uk while the other is a japanese pop writer, and they have very little in common aside from a kinda sparse prose style and being ethnically asian…

at that point, do you even like literature?

having a few or couple of those opinions is one thing, people’s tastes vary and i don’t expect everyone to love every supposed literary classic, i’ll admit to not enjoying ‘a separate peace’ at all — but so many writers online proudly announce pretty much all of this. and it’s usually not even with specific justification about the specific author or book, just broad strokes commentary. a lot of it seems to be half-remembered from bored high school years, books where they barely remember what even happened during them but retained their opinions on them with full unwavering confidence, a lot of the comments that sound like someone who’s only vaguely heard of the book and not even to the level of reading the wikipedia page to check, who misunderstood the main themes and seems to not have tried to critically engage with it at all.

honestly, i know most people online's clever opinions about books are just regurgitated from the internet. i’m pretty convinced this applies to 80% of all mentions of the catcher in the rye online, for example. fuck it, here’s the screenshot of the ishiguro/murakami incident i mentioned a couple paragraphs back:

how is this not, really, just the hardcore marvel-only fan types of the book world? people who aren’t happy with their movies basically being so dominant they’ve outcompeted every other kind of movie in cinemas and make a trillion dollars, but also demand they get the critical appraisal of the godfather, and that martin scorsese praises them without reservation as high art, and also that they should get the same kind of respect and cachet among film artsy types as people who love all the classics of cinema or whatever. it’s the exact same mindset.

in a way, i feel like a lot of how gen x-millennial-zoomers are about art is like a relatively harmless version of how maga boomers are about society, in the sense of.. having the smallest expectation made of you or the smallest amount of effort/inconvenience asked or anything that isn’t super familiar exactly the way things were unchallenging or anyone not praising you for all of it is some kind of horrific thing that shouldn’t be allowed. i think this is a pretty terrible cultural development, as those go. its some kind of social collective self-infantilizing, all propped up by a whole circle of mutual reflexive defensiveness at any criticism of this way of being. and it’s a bit stressful saying all this knowing that there’s a pretty good chance that if the shoe fits, the response is likely not going to be a careful consideration — i mean, why would this somewhat incoherent and sloppily edited rant by some random on the internet warrant a level of careful consideration that people are proud of denying f scott fitzgerald or toni morrison?

its normal to have to put in a little tiny bit of effort and accommodation to access great things, like good art or a functional society. it’s good, even. it’s part of what makes life beautiful. there’s so much beauty to be found in art that you have to sit with and dwell on and read criticism of and analyze to find more and more layers of beauty, to find complexity, to develop a personal relationship between yourself and the art that’s so much deeper than just superficial infatuation because it’s something you built. you cant be mad about that expectation and demand praise for not following it. it’s fine to enjoy art on a simple and escapist level, but that’s not all that art is meant to be. insisting that it’s all that art has to be, or that expecting art to also be more is somehow morally wrong or elitist, is just philistinism and i’m only being a little bit hyperbolic when i say the normalization of that understanding of art is detrimental to society.

art is also meant to be something where you understand and respect the amount of craft and learning and attention to detail and thought and transcendent talent goes into making beautiful things, and you want to engage with it to the level that it deserves, to peel through the layers. to see how you interpret and find meaning and emotion in it based on the person you are at that moment in time, the most salient experiences and thoughts as you encountered that piece of art, the setting, the memories, an understanding that you can look back on and see change as you yourself change. to create an emotional correspondence with a mind you’ve never met, one that might have died decades ago and that lived in a world unimaginably different from your own but shared so many familiar thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears.

that carried the torch of a beautiful tradition of the form — the novel from miguel de cervantes through flaubert and tolstoy into the novels of the lost generation, the development of internal life as an art form in a way that’s unique to the medium and that can’t be shown in a play or film, the transition from novels as storytelling similar to a play in its earliest days to novels coming into its own as a unique art form that allows the reader to truly inhabit someone else’s mind, to think their thoughts and feel their feelings, in a way you can’t get from anything else. not from visual mediums, where you can see the action but can’t inhabit the inner minds of characters, only infer it. not from short stories, which even at their most introspective and internally oriented still don’t give you enough time.

i'll quote milan kundera from the art of the novel here, about what i mean when i talk about the development and tradition of the novel, and what only the novel can do: "Since its very beginnings, the novel has always tried to escape the unilinear, to open rifts in the continuous narration of a story ... Through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine "what happens inside," to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers man's rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera ..."

[my note: interrupting kundera here to note that all that's just up to pre-war early 20th century. there's still novels by the lost generation shaped by world wars and the great depression attending gertrude stein's salons in paris, the influence of fitzgerald and hemingway as branches of prose style, william faulkner and southern gothic, stream-of-consciousness and feminism with virginia woolf, chinua achebe and jean rhys with postcolonial inversions of older classics, magical realism with gabriel garcia marquez and salman rushdie and the like, big self-referential playful intertextual postmodern novels like david foster wallace through the weirdness of the 1990s, to this day there's still evolutions in form like jennifer egan with 'a visit from the goon squad', which such a great book by the way but i digress.. all that came after what kundera described here! and so much more that i'm likely forgetting right now]

but anyway, continuing kundera: "The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become ... The novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry nor philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing anything of its identity ... it can blend philosophy, narrative, and dream into one music ... it has [the ability to] marshall all intellectual means and all poetic forms to illuminate “what the novel alone can discover”: man’s being. ... I’ll never tire of repeating: The novel’s sole raison d’être is to say what only the novel can say."

i think that's very cool. i love thinking about what the novel can do and all the possibilities offered to me by its presence and what only the novel can do. when you’re reading a novel, the same little voice in your head that speaks out your own thoughts are speaking out someone else’s thoughts; the same body where you feel sadness or tension or excitement at events in your life, through the power of imagination, replicates those same feelings in you as you read someone else experience them. you get to understand situations and develop insights that you never could’ve if you’d only had your own experiences to rely on, because you could briefly borrow the direct experiences and emotional responses and realizations of others. having that lightbulb moment as you piece together some insight that the writer had laid out the breadcrumbs and guided you to discover. where things that wouldn’t have gotten through if you’d just been told it in bullet points become things you understand intimately because on some mini scale, in that brain-in-a-vat that’s your mind inside your skull inside your body, a book gave you the same experiential stimuli as being someone else and living a different life. that shit is fucking magical. learning about the journey, tracing that development, witnessing writers over the year gradually understand the full power and capabilities of the novel as a medium and experiment in finding ways to use the medium, is just fascinating to me.

reading classic novels to me is discovering a whole parallel history. not just events, not just ideas, but the way we think about stories. aren’t you interested in that? if you’re an english teacher, don’t your students deserve to experience that with your guidance? if you’re a writer, doesn’t taking your work seriously call for a more intimate knowledge of the clay you’re molding?

i think people give a lot of excuses for their reading choices where they can’t just admit it’s a simple choice with trade-offs, or a preference where what you value in the moment is just different. that’s fine. there’s no need to be ashamed of that and to try to make it out to be anything deeper than that. nobody has to act like a certain type of book is the only kind that’s sufficiently accessible or that has characters of a relevant age or certain background. i mean, there's just straight up books. all kinds of books, a whole wide world of them. i understand being unable to read out of attention span or language level or whatever, but if you can read and its just about needing the book to be unchallenging, there's many many books. relatively short books, readable books, even books with characters in their 20s.

and i would argue that even if there aren’t, its still valuable to read about people with different lives and experiences. marshall mcluhan has a point about how what we call narcissism is a misunderstanding of the actual myth of narcissus from which we get the word. i'll include the quote here first: "The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves... the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was [literally] himself. It is indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus."

and i think this was really prescient about the state of a lot of modern online criticism and discussion of art. the organizing principle of how some "book lover" communities, whether on YA twitter or fandom tumblr or at your local library reading group, judge the value of media: by their "relatability", whether you can see yourself within the book and setting and characters being the ultimate arbiter of whether a piece of fiction is good or bad. i don't want to call it narcissistic per se, but it does mirror (pun intended...) the myth of narcissus, in that falling in love with a piece of fiction is about whether it's relatable, whether you can see yourself in it.

i'm going to head off a likely response here by emphasizing that this is different from the broader phrase of "feeling seen", which conflates "relatability" and "representation". i'm not here to quell the power of feeling seen, especially for people who have traditionally been surrounded by media where they haven't felt seen, but i think it'd be disingenuous to claim what mcluhan says here is referring to representation. representation is about seeing people *like* you, finding a sense of community in seeing someone who experiences the world in similar ways and would understand how you experience the world as a result. where the myth of narcissus would be applicable is about falling in love with media, even judging the objective value of media and whether it's good or bad as a work of art, based on how much you see yourself in it.

which i think kind of defeats the point of books, the reason why books and reading got this semi-mystical reputation in the first place. the concept of the empathy machine was coined, to my knowledge, by roger ebert referring to movies. art forms in general have the power to be empathy machines, compassion machines, tenderness machines, sympathy machines. empathy as feeling what it's actually like to be someone else, compassion as understanding that someone else also feels things you feel, tenderness as feeling seen and empathised with, sympathy as sorrow and commiseration because you see someone else, maybe the exact way you'd define them might be different but let's phrase them clumsily like this. the machine doesn't operate by itself, it needs you to plug directly into it, and the machine works differently based on your own nature and what you put into it and how you engage with it. most art has the capability to be empathy machines for someone empathetic willing to engage enough, but the barrier of entry is different

the magic of books is that they are a special kind of empathy machine that puts you directly inside the mind of another human being, almost like an other-selves simulator. other-interiority simulator, other-inner-self simulator, whatever you'd like to call it. which makes them uniquely powerful as an empathy machine, even compared to other types of art. how it feels to be someone else is the most unbreakable, most fundamental barrier in existence. it's the AT fields from evangelion and the argument for the human instrumentality project, the impenetrability of that barrier is the reason for wallfacers in the three-body problem, its how sufis and ascetics fall in love with god when nobody else but the omniscient can ever ever truly know what it's like to be you and feel what you feel

this can't be conveyed in the same way in mediums like movies or plays where the medium itself is from an external point of view and is viewed through this barrier of the mind, and is harder to convey in structured forms like poetry which may not be able to capture the endless variety of form and expression within our thoughts and feelings and experiences (or, going back to kundera, the freedom of form within the novel as enabling polyphony). i think the closest art forms in that sense may be music, which also has a relative freedom of form and the ability to express depths of feeling both individually and through the interaction of music with words and even the sequencing of tracks across an album, and video games, which may not directly put you in the mind of someone else the way books do and which may at first glance seem like they belong alongside movies in being seen through the AT field but where the difference is that in a video game your character makes *choices* and you feel how it feels to make those choices as an agent — even if you're not inhabiting someone else's thoughts, you're feeling how it feels to be someone who experienced and did certain things and made certain choices. but i think there's still plenty about books that is unique. the empathy machine has to be collaborative, your imagination is a necessary creative or generative aspect for it to be a novel and not just a report of events

"book lovers" often act like books have some kind of sacred and mystical power but don't seem to be able to justify this idea in how they engage with books as a whole, beyond this sense of books as an identity signifier or aesthetic or accessory. but books do have a certain sacred and mystical power — that they are invitations, almost portals, you could call them pensieves even, where someone gives you a window into another mind. (not necessarily their own mind — the mirror of books as an empathy machine is how even writing itself is an empathy machine of an activity that asks the writer to empathize up a creation — which is also partly why i think that to be a good writer you should also be a good reader).

in much of online, the idea that any book or piece of media that isn't personally relatable would naturally be boring and impossible to connect with is so widely accepted that it's never even really a point of dispute. i want to say it should be, and that we should start disputing it. because i think the magic of books and fiction in general is that it's a way for you to exercise your empathy muscles. the characters or settings don't have to be "relatable" for you to be able to relate to it: it's just about stretching your capacity for empathy a little bit, inhabiting someone different from you with a life different from yours, seeing the world through their eyes, and ultimately learning something about yourself, the world, and humanity as a result. i think it's important to make this argument forcefully and not let this narcotic view of art — that it's natural and expected for us to only be able to enjoy art that is relatable, that relatability is a merit and unrelatability is a flaw in itself — not become even more hegemonic.

but ultimately, prioritizing enjoyment or relatability is fine. there's no harm to the preference. life is short and exhausting, free time is limited, and what we do for leisure can just be about having a fun time, or about getting a guaranteed emotional hit from a genre or medium that you know will fill whatever you need emotionally from reading right now. it's fine to read romance because it's fun or sexy, or fanfic because it'll make you cry. even "narcotic" isn't an inherently bad thing to be: even in a very literal sense, we all accept that it's perfectly normal to unwind with a glass of wine or a joint. it’s fine to prioritize other things. but for people who make their whole brand being about books specifically, i think it deserves far more harsh criticism that so many are so wilfully against engaging with the majority of books. a lot of it is an echo chamber where everyone else in the same circles feels the same way, i guess, but society in general has given this obviously ridiculous state of affairs a free pass for so long.

maybe the internet just isn’t real life and i’m seeing an unrepresentative subset of people. but at least going from “book lover” twitter, which is a loose amalgam of authors and english teachers and people who run wordpress blogs with book reviews, it feels like a lot of it is a whole generation of people who got into writing through fanfic and exclusively read YA or fanfic and felt embarrassed about it being seen as dorky, so they made their whole identity and personality and mission to be about validating kids like their imagined younger selves, without ever really growing up in that aspect of their personalities, and without doing any further developing/exploration of their tastes.

you know what i really don’t understand coming from an author, or even an amateur writer? having zero interest in reading the classics, even just to see if there's anything worth learning from great prose stylists to improve your own craft. i mean, if you think there's nothing in classic novels worth learning from, not even like 5% of it to try find what details or specifics you might find from widely respected prose stylists or lauded writing, like that its not worth reading it even to find just a few points you can use to develop your own writing — let alone that whole thing about all that art has to teach us about the human experience, which is so much more than the ground covered by contemporary YA and fanfiction, and what value that could add to the actual lives of yourself or your students —

if you're blinkered enough to think that your subset of writing is all there is to take value from, and you're basically just doing the reverse of all your "people who respect the classics don’t bother to see that there is insight and value and quality to be found and learnt from within pop fiction like YA and fanfic!", and arrogant enough to believe that you don’t need any more than that —

clearly you don’t actually love writing, or language, in that case. and that’s the truth. none of it was ever about a love for literature or writing or language as much as it was about validating the child version of themselves by coddling it and saying it’s actually fine to feel superior about it. what’s missing is any process of validating what does bring them out further, for getting into writing/reading in the first place being a starting point for growing and branching out and discovering how much more there is to art, rather than using it as a reason to just double down and shut out anything else.

i may not be able to do some critical meta-analysis of all new literature but look, a generation of writers filling a whole genre not actually wanting to learn from all the lauded writers before them to improve their prose style or get ideas or insights isn’t going to be doing the best job they can. it’s a mindset that is actively damaging to the genres you claim to love, one that’s going to lead to stagnancy and decay, and one that disrespects an audience of voracious readers who want to get the best art they can. i don’t think this should be all that controversial. people might try to argue with me about whether old books are better than new books or whatever, but that’s not a point i’m interested in arguing — survival bias does mean that often only the very best from the past is what makes it through the decades to still be widely known to us, and i’m not qualified to compare the absolute very best of modern literature to that of the past and i’m not even sure that’s possible — but that’s not a point i’m interested in arguing.

thing is, it doesn’t matter which were better, what matters is that there’s definitely unquestionably indisputably a lot to be learned from books that have connected with millions across generations, and inspired movements and moved critics, and led literature lovers to their spark of love, and that passing up all of that is a cynical, nihilistically arrogant, aggressively anti-intellectual approach to art. if i tried to build a plane engine without ever really studying, i might wing something that gets you off the ground by watching some youtube videos, but it's likely not going to run a plane as well as something built by engineers who've spent years learning from the lessons of masters and geniuses before them honed through the mistakes of thousands before them.

and if i respected the craft, i’d bother learning. and when i pick up those textbooks, they’re going to be boring or hard if i never bother doing much study, or doing any complementary readings, or doing the exercises or discussions of the material, or even doing any close reading at all. i can’t slack on all of that and then say the textbooks or lectures are just impenetrable and too hard to bother with. that would be an asinine way to approach any other craft or skill. and i think authors and english teachers and people who love books should respect the art enough to take it seriously, and not just blow it off as “who needs to study or learn or read up on it? anyone can write, it’s just putting some words down!”. we shouldn’t be saying that. that’s for my parents to say

work with me here. at least try put aside your prejudices about some of those classics, or what you vaguely remember as your first impressions, and actually engage with them in good faith. reading commentary or discussions and critics' views on them, paying attention to spot the metaphors and turns of phrase and motifs and how the sentences are structured to make something sound beautiful or how something is set up to come together later. you don’t have to love it, but you can at least engage with it in good faith first, with an approach of respect and seriousness. it’s a fun way of socializing with like-minded people when you can make it an identity signifier thing, where you have an imagined view of classic novel lovers as aloof opponents making fun of you in class and you stake out an identity as being anti-that and pro-ya or fanfic, like a fanfic or YA protagonist who learns to embrace their differences and acknowledge their specialness against the world or whatever.

where it genuinely depresses me is to see it coming from english teachers. from anyone who influences what young people get to read, really, but especially coming from english teachers who take pride in denying their students the opportunity to learn many of the great novels that they could be learning, and that they could be finding beauty in and enjoying if you could bring that same passion and approach to teaching them instead of letting your dislike show. i understand that the way those english teachers may have initially been introduced to the classics in their high school years was probably not pedagogically ideal, but it's really not an excuse for an adult making a career out of it. at that point you have a responsibility to your students and sometimes that responsibility requires you to get over yourself and do right by your students. no copouts here. no avoiding responsibility. it's an understandable excuse for why any random adult might not be a fan of the classics. if that same random adult claims to be a book lover literature fan i may find them a bit of a fraud for it, but they aren't doing wrong by anyone. an author who does it should think their readers deserve better. an english teacher doing it is self-centered and malpractice.

if what you’re modeling for your students is that they should also feel comfortable or even empowered flippantly dismissing the books they’ve been told make up part of a great education, you’re not all that far removed from the people in school telling kids that books are lame and for nerds and that they should just watch a movie. it’s only different in degree, but it still communicates the exact same concept to students. what an english teacher is meant to do is to at least try inculcate a love of books in students, a sense of awe and respect for the power of the written word. that books are amazing and that there’s so many kinds of books out there that they should give a real chance to and that they’ll find some book they love and that it’ll open up whole new worlds. don’t you think that out of all your students, the book which makes some of your students fall in love with reading might be one of those great novels of history?

i’m not saying that assigning books that kids will find easier to read and engage with isn’t a perfectly fine approach to involving students, especially if other approaches aren’t getting them as involved. but anyone reading this essay in good faith already knows that thinking that’s what i’m criticizing is defensively propping up a strawman, because i’m not talking about the english teacher who clearly loves novels and goes with a book at the class’s overall level while still encouraging students to go seek out more and pointing them toward the wide world of great novels out there that they can try read and engage with in their own time if they want. i’m talking about this very common attitude and phenomenon of people disparaging most novels, this often being english teachers who discuss this mindset informing how they teach their students. who proudly tweet about how they shut down some kid’s curious question about the catcher in the rye or the great gatsby or the grapes of wrath with some soundbite from the internet detritus that’d do great for clout, telling their students something like “ugh, those books are so boring”. which i think is something that an english teacher should feel embarrassed to admit.

at that point, it’s not really about those kids’ education at all, its about the teacher themselves. or it’s not about their young readers, it’s about the author’s need for personal validation in their tastes and choices, and seeking that validation from people who are influenced by and take cues from them in the first place because that’s a way to receive uncritical validation without much pushback. it's just a kind of self-laudatory narcissism that claims to be supporting kids, when it’s really just about those teachers or authors themselves in some ways never having moved on from childhood. not saying they're immature or childish as a whole in their lives but in this specific aspect, it is absolutely an immature and childish approach that casts themselves and their students/readers as characters in a high school setting fanfiction or YA story. just people congratulating themselves for teaching their students that a lot of reading is lame and uncool and boring and elitist beyond an entertaining subset of it. which, to clarify, is something which i think should be considered malpractice for an english teacher.

that’s just doing the kids they're teaching (or writing for) a disservice. it’s basically making them just a prop in your exercise of validating your aggrieved younger self, while dismissing the possibility of actual real kids' intelligence or interest in expanding their tastes or intellectual curiosity — a perspective where you can look down on everyone else, including those other kids who want more from class, as somehow being snobby villains in your life story or in the life story of an imagined self-insert high school version of yourself that you're projecting on some poor kids you identify with in class. i think this is something people who do this to their students need to sit with and be introspective about, because personal psychodrama shouldn’t be taken out on students.

you can’t dismiss the classic novel or literary canon like that. that dismissal is either a bad-faith argument or an unserious and ignorant one. there is so much literature that has so much to say about actual cultural evolution from gender repression in victorian times (jane austen, bronte sisters) or the force of tradition in 19th century russia (tolstoy) to the world wars (elie wiesel, erich maria remarque) to the despair of the lost generation after the world wars (fitzgerald, hemingway) to 60s counterculture (hunter thompson, kerouac, ginsberg) to life through postcolonial revolutions (achebe, rushdie, camus) to socialist republics and revolutions (kundera) and latin american corporatist coups (gabriel garcia marquez) and indian caste conflict (arundhati roy) and postmodern disillusionment and absurdism (david foster wallace, delillo, pynchon, etc) and warnings of futures like theocratic conservatism or authoritarianism or classifications (atwood, orwell, huxley, ishiguro, philip k dick)…

and i do think calling the overall literary canon of classic novels "straight white male" (notably, a claim often made by straight white people) is often just a crutch to moralize their own personal dislike of something for aesthetic reasons. and i often find that just fundamentally dishonest, because its not like they're replacing hemingway with chinua achebe or james baldwin or allen ginsberg or ralph ellison or toni morrison or edith wharton or arundhati roy or gabriel garcia marquez or salman rushdie or kazuo ishiguro or ursula k le guin or margaret atwood, all of whom are either people of color or gay or women or some combination of the three. they're dumping all of those out too as distaste of classic novels and replacing it with diverse YA novels.

the real truth is that it’s not about straight white maleness at all. there’s plenty of novels universally considered ‘great novels’, ranked in lists of the great novels, available for teaching in schools, subject of plenty of critical praise, with huge legacies in the development of the medium and of culture as a whole. it’s not about that. its about genre and about the idea that literature should just be a rollicking read that is nice for the imagination and feels fun, and this continued idea that any art being challenging is bad.

and thing is, ironically enough, this is actually erasing the contributions of those famous and respected and influential non-white/straight/male literary figures, and the art that they created engaging with and in reaction to their circumstances, while doing so. because discarding the classic novel or literary fiction or whatever you want to call it, swapping out influential classic novels for ya, is just throwing out all of their work and their legacies. you can’t pretend that that recognizing diversity is your actual justification when you're throwing out the study of classic novels alongside their historical and cultural context, which includes a ton of the contributions of non-white/straight/male people.

and the charitable interpretation of that for me is that it’s just a bullshit excuse and lying to themselves. that a lot of it is just people working out their own personal insecurities about not being taken seriously, by digging in the trenches real pre-emptively and casting themselves in the role of righteous rebels overturning an establishment that propped up bad things while suppressing the good things they liked. none of this is to be dismissive of either the young adult genre or fanfiction, which i’m fully sympathetic to as genres that have put out a lot of great art that shouldn’t be summarily dismissed but often have been. but at this point, all of it begins to feels like a whole psychological mess that's making childhood resentments and aggrieved persecution complex about not having your tastes be universally praised no matter how mainstream or popular or successful they become.

i compared it to maga boomers or marvel fans before. to paraphrase dril, i’m not going to “hand it to” maga boomers and have no reason to. but at least marvel fans who act like that have much less weird psychodrama going on, because most of them don’t go on to become filmmakers or film studies teachers themselves and aren’t producing art where they imagine themselves in the position of the superhero. they're just occasionally annoying fans, who don’t really have much negative impact beyond their dollars dictating what gets made. which i don’t really blame ppl for because its individual tastes driving their individual ticket purchases that adds up to a lot of money and makes it profitable. but your average marvel fan doesn’t themselves either teach or create content where they can perpetuate it within culture. and at least marvel fans just call themselves marvel fans, they don’t insist they're the true actual film fans while shitting on the godfather and proudly announcing how they won’t watch anything from before 2008. many “book lovers” and “literature fans” who actually hate pretty much most literature and great novels could do with that level of specificity, without trying to take on the mantle of being so in love with books and the english language and the written word. it’s not true. it’s denial. it’s a cope.

and that’s the charitable interpretation. because the alternative is just being too ignorant of the presence of all those writers and their contributions within the canon in the first place. in which case, why do people talk so confidently disparaging classic novels if they don’t actually know anything about them beyond recognizing maybe the great gatsby and moby dick, and don’t actually know enough to even know about all these non-straight/white/male writers of classic novels and their role in the evolution of the novel as a medium? it’s just a fully unjustified level of confidence in that situation. and neither one of ignorance about their subject or uninformed confidence, let alone both, paints a great picture of people who've supposedly made a career out of writing or literature or the english language.

i don’t love getting into neat little psychological explanations for things but then again, fuck it. all the “essays” on here are just ruminations on culture and whatever psychology it feels like is driving that culture, after all. it’s not like that’s out of the overall scope of what’s going on here so why not. the reason i hesitate here is because there’s a lot of reflexive thin-skinned defensiveness that seems to be part and parcel with this attitude, given that i think a lot of it is birthed in a sort of understandable insecurity anyway — and i don’t say insecurity as an insult, i think insecurity is a very understandable and pretty universal aspect of being human — but the rest of this is going to be pretty harsh. and maybe that harshness isn’t the right approach to persuade people who i’d hope would be persuaded, but i don’t know, honestly i think we’re long overdue to start being harsh about it and i’m going to give that a little nudge. at this point, my visceral reaction to seeing this is just thinking “grow up”, and that they've been indulged and welcomed and catered to enough already now.

that’s my screed. me to classic novels, the most dickish love letter in the world

update, now that people have discovered this post and are actually reading it: i don't mind any of this being shared or reprinted anywhere if it's with attribution. whatever gets people to read it to change the conversation works for me. i hope it reaches enough of an audience to make the right people mad, to be honest.

if you liked this, feel free to check out my other 'essays' on internet/pop culture stuff on my homepage. here's a selection:

· humanity is worth loving, humans are worth saving

· there are things we owe to each other

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don't know either!

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

#literature #books #novels #english #teaching #fiction #literary fiction #writing #lit #booktok #booktwt #god every time there's discourse about #the catcher in the rye #catcher in the rye #holden caulfield #its always the same lazy as fuck take thats been brought up every week for the past 12 years #that people pretend is a bold brave thing to say when they got it from the internet and already know the internet will agree

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inbarfink · 3 months

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Okay, here’s a Thought I had just recently…

So, Iggins. Everyone hates Iggins. He’s designed to be one of the most instantly hateable characters ever featured on a show that’s already famously misanthropic. And this is done by just… making him just an intensely concentrated version of every Obnoxious Gamer Stereotype (and way before they were widespread in mainstream media. ‘Invader Zim’ truly WAS ahead of its time). Simple enough, right?

But there’s actually another dimension to the whole thing.

Because what is it exactly about Iggins that Gaz finds so annoying and loathsome?

Well, it is the fact that he starts long rambling ‘conversations’ despite her obvious lack of interest which are just him talking at her

Is incredibly self-aggrandizing and self-centered

He LITERALLY went 'and then everyone clapped!', this show was a head of it's time, I tell you!

And his delusion of grandeur is his justification for overriding Gaz's desires and taking what is rightfully hers.

And, like.... leaving outside the literal taking of the physical Game Slave.... these are also the primary reasons why she gets angry at Dib.

Iggins is just a more annoying Gamer Dib. He has all of Dib’s negative traits and especially the ones that tend to affect Gaz; the inattentiveness, the self-centeredness, the self-aggrandizing, the assumption that his needs' triumph everybody else. But with Iggins they farther exaggerated, and instead of the Paranormal, Iggins is obsessed with Gaz’s Special Interest.

That kinda makes him the perfect antagonist for Gaz. And also maybe demonstrate that Gaz’s problems with her brother, unlike the Rest of the World, don’t always stem from just him having Weird Interests. If Dib had more normative interests (or at least as normative as Gaz's) but he was still just as much of a self-centered blowhard at her as he usually is - she would still be just as pissed-off at him as usual.

#invader zim #iz #zim #gaz membrane #iz gaz #iz gaz membrane #invader zim gaz #gaz iz #gaz invader zim #dib membrane #invader zim dib #iz dib #dib iz #iz dib membrane #iggins

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workersolidarity · 10 days

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🇺🇸 🚨

UNITED STATES CONGRESS PASSES SERIES OF ANTI-DEMOCRATIC AND PRO-WAR BILLS DESPITE PUBLIC OPPOSITION

The United States Congress and Senate passed a series of bills, including three controversial anti-democratic and pro-war bills, two of which were tied together, on Saturday, bypassing public opinion and popular opposition to the profligate, pro-war, globalist, Neolib/Neocon agenda currently driving United States domestic and foreign policy.

Included in the bills passed was a bill to force TikTok to divest from its connections with China at risk of being banned immediately, which naturally was tied to a Foreign aid bill.

However, as even Republican Senator Rand Paul mentioned in an opinion piece in Reason Magazine, the Bill is almost certain to lead to more power for American political elites and their administrations to pressure companies like Apple and Google to further ban apps and sites that offer contradictory opinions to that of the invented narratives of the American Political class.

Before long, Americans, many of whom are already poorly informed, and heavily misinformed by their mainstream media, could lose access to critical information that contradicts the narratives of the United States government and corporate elites.

Horrifically, this only the start. The US Congress also extended the newly revised FISA spy laws, which gives the United States government the power to spy on the electronic communications of foreigners, while also conveniently sweeping up the conversations of millions of Americans, as we learned years ago thanks to the sacrifices of whistle blowers and journalists like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.

The new FISA Law goes further than this, however, granting US Intelligence agencies the power to spy on the wireless communications of Americans in completely new ways.

A recent Jacobin article describes these new powers as a, "radical expansion of government surveillance that would be ripe for abuse by a future authoritarian leader", or it could just be used by the authoritarian leadership we have right now, and have had for decades.

In fact, when one commentator described the new powers as "Stasi-like," Edward Snowden himself replied with a long post in which he remarked, "invocation of "Stasi-like" is not only a fair characterization of Himes' amendment, it's probably generous. The Stasi dared not even dream of what the Himes amendment provides."

The amendment in question just "tweaks" the current law's definition of an "electronic communication provider," which is being changed to "any service provider," something extremely likely to be abused by the government to force anyone with a business, a modem and people using their broadband to collect the electronic communications of those people, while also forcing their victims into silence.

The government could essentially force Americans to spy on other people and remain silent about it. Cafe's, restaurants, hotels, business landlords, shared workspaces all could get swept up into the investigations of the Intelligence agencies.

Worse still, because picking out the communications of a single user would be next to impossible, all of their victim's data would end up being surrendered to the authorities.

Sadly, the assault on Americans by their own political elites didn't end there, to top this historic day in Congress, at time when the United States public debt is growing at an astounding rate of $1 trillion every 100 days, US lawmakers also passed a series of pro-war aid packages to American allies (vassals) totalling some $95 billion.

Included in the foreign aid bill are aid packages totalling $61 billion for the Ukraine scam, $26 billion for Israel's special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, and $8 billion to the Indo-Pacific to provoke WWIII with China, at the same time we're also provoking a nuclear holocaust with the Russian Federation.

Also buried in these aid packages is the authorization for the United States government to outright steal the oversees investments of the Russian Federation, and thereby the Russian taxpayers.

Astonishingly, and in direct opposition to the wishes of their own voters, Republican support was won without the possibility of conditioning the aid to any kind of border security, this despite the issue being among the top biggest concerns of Republican voters.

Although much of the money is to be used replenishing the heavily depleted stocks of America's weapons and munitions, it remains unclear where the munitions are expected to come from, as US defense production has remained sluggish and slow to expand despite heavy investments and demand in recent years, despite the rapid urgency with which the policy elite describe the situation.

It bodes poorly for working Americans that only a relatively small handful of lawmakers opposed the bills, producing unlikely bedfellows like Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Mike Lee in the Senate, opposing the FISA bill.

While in the House, the loudest opposition to the foreign aid bill mostly came from populist Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie and Paul Goser. Only 58 Congresmembers voted against the Foreign Aid Bill in which the TikTok ban was tucked.

Not one word from American politicians about the need to raise the minimum wage, which hasn't been increased since 2009 despite considerable inflation, nor a word about America's endlessly growing homelessness crises, property crime increases, or the 40-year stagnation of American wages, the deterioration of infrastructure, and precious little was said besides complaints about border security over the immigration crises sparked by American Imperialist adventures and US sanctions.

What we've learned today is that we are highly unlikely to see any changes to the insane behavior of the US and its allies any time soon, neither with regards to the absolutely bonkers Neocon foreign policy leading us to the edge of abyss, nor the spending-for-the-rich/austerity-for-the-poor Neoliberal domestic policy of the last 45 years.

#source1

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@WorkerSolidarityNews

Blue: titles are opinion pieces or analysis, and may or may not contain sources.

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aphrogeneias · 8 months

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𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐧𝐨 𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰 — 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞

summary: it's getting harder and harder for eddie to hide his feelings for you, and an unexpected visit from his bandmates may accidentally change everything.

pairing: eddie munson x fem!reader

warnings: eddie's pov, some playful jealousy. "you give love a bad name" only came out late 1986 (october, i think?) but i could not resist mentioning it here.

author's note: changes were made here as well, some major editing was done.

series masterlist

“You just like them because you think they’re cute.”

This wasn't the first time he'd had this conversation with you. Beside your daily debates where you seemed to always be on opposite sides of, Eddie liked teasing you about liking mainstream artists for their looks — it wasn't because he secretly liked fantasizing about himself being the rockstar who was the object of your desires.

Not at all.

“Is that jealousy I hear?”

From where he stood, following you around the store as you went through the rows of records, carefully re-organizing the mess left behind by a full day of customers, Eddie felt his face redden, heat rising from his cheeks as you playfully mocked him. “That’s not what I meant…”

“Don’t worry,” your eyes caught his, and instead of hiding, he just melted under your gaze, “I’m sure Jon Bon Jovi isn’t gonna come sweep me off my feet any time soon."

Pretending that the image of a man — any other man but him — sweeping you off your feet didn’t phase him, because it shouldn’t phase him at all, he just mumbled a “Who says I’m worried?”, under his breath.

“Besides, you were humming to You Give Love a Bad Name just the other day when it came up on the radio, don’t think I didn’t hear you.”

“What can I say? That shit is catchy.”

Eddie’s flustered state, grumbling and fidgeting with his rings while you seemed unaware of his predicament, didn’t just come from being caught red handed, letting himself get jealous over a band you liked. He was scared, scared that you’d find out he’d caught feelings for you. Somewhere along the way, he stopped seeing you as the girl who kept him company on his lonely days, someone who he liked talking to, and started seeking comfort in your presence, longing to be near when he was away, dreading the times where he had to leave.

It was too late to tell himself not to get attached, he was already past that point.

He wondered if you knew. It wasn’t like he was such a great actor, you’d caught him staring at you more times than he could count - all the times you’d made him a question and he didn’t answer because he was too busy looking at the way the light hit your eyes, or at how delicate your hands were compared to his, and thinking about how it would feel if you were to touch him, or what it would be like to touch you under those annoyingly tight band tees you were always wearing. You had to at least suspect that he wasn’t coming all the way here just to annoy you with his incessant shenanigans.

Before he could gather his thoughts and change subjects, the bell above the door chimed, announcing the arrival of two people. It startled Eddie to watch Gareth and Jeff walking in, shoulder to shoulder, matching shit eating grins on their faces.

He felt his heart racing as he mouthed at them from where he stood beside you, “What are you doing here?”

When they got to the aisle where you were in, while you were still blissfully unaware of the company of his bandmates, Eddie tried, and failed, to act as casually as possible.

“Hey, man. Aren’t you gonna introduce us to your girlfriend? It’s about time.” He knew Gareth must have practiced this, intended on making a fool out of him, and it was working, because Eddie was speechless.

“She’s not my girlfriend, dickhead.” He deadpanned. While he was struggling to keep it together, you looked amused, looking back and forth between the friends. He composed himself enough to introduce you to his friends, finally telling them your name.

“So, this is the infamous Corroded Coffin.” You recognized, greeting them with a bright smile, making Eddie feel that surge of irrational jealousy all over again. “I heard a lot about you.”

“What a coincidence, we heard a lot about you too.”

This wasn't supposed to be happening — but Eddie should have seen it coming.

They weren't exactly lying when they said they'd heard a lot about you. The first time he had ever mentioned you to his friends was when he was late for rehearsal one afternoon, after losing track of time while he spent time with you. Since then, they’d been relentless, teasing and accusing him of hiding you from them, talking about you during Hellfire meetings, which made Dustin and Mike get on his ass about you as well, questioning him about who’s the girl that had finally gotten past his façade.

Maybe they were onto something when they said he was hiding you from them. He wasn’t doing it on purpose, but the moments he had with you were special, they were his, and he didn’t want to share it with anyone else. The days he spent with you, in your own bubble inside the record store’s walls, pretending as if the outside world didn’t exist and his only focus was you - watching you work, sharing more than just music with you, making you laugh - were his, and he didn’t want to risk losing that.

Losing you, though he never really had you in the first place.

“What have you been telling people about me, Munson?” He could tell you were having fun by the way face lit up, shouldering him as he stood by your side. “Only good things, I hope.”

“Oh, no, only the best.” Jeff commented. “Honestly, he’s head over…”

“You know what? I know why you’re here!” Eddie pushed forward, interrupting his friend before he could make everything worse than it already was. He kept his act, now standing between the two boys, passing his arms over their shoulders, “I’m late, aren’t I? I’m late again, and we have to leave!”

“C’mon, Eddie, they just got here!”

“Yeah, Eddie, we just got here.” Gareth echoed your protests with sarcasm. “What if we just wanna buy some records, huh?”

“All you want is to be a pain in my ass, that’s what you want.” He gritted through his teeth, turning to Gareth, and already pulling the boys by the collar of their shirts and away from you. “I’m sorry about these miscreants, sweetheart, we’ll be taking our leave now.”

A chorus of Sweetheart? and I thought you only called your guitar that left his friends’ mouths, which only made his face burn more as he guided them out of the store and into the street. Inside, all you did was laugh, an adorably befuddled adorned your features as you waved your goodbyes.

He would never be able to live this down.

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x y/n #eddie munson x fem!reader #eddie munson fanfic

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blazehedgehog · 3 months

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Do you agree with Gaming Journalists and what do you think of gaming journalism in general?

What does this even mean, dude.

"Do you agree with gaming journalists"? On what?

Do I agree with Shacknews that Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a 10/10, and with Digital Spy that it's also a 7/10? Do I agree with Let's Clear Up Those Halo Battle Royale Rumors?

Like, I've gotten some bait on this blog before, but this is 2/10 stuff, man. This is some hot 2014 garbage. Like no matter what I say, you're gonna go all

"Very interesting. Then do you care to explain why..." No thanks.

My real answer: Something I learned during my time at TSSZ and being around a few people who were deeper into "the biz" than I is that everybody needs journalism more than they realize. Corporations are pushing for consumers to become their personal cheerleaders more than ever before, which makes criticism and the journalistic exposing of information seem villainous.

After all: Xbox is my friend now, so how dare you attack the Xbox. Behavior that used to be reserved for the most dedicated fanboys is now the expected room temperature. I've talked about "The Cult of Naughty Dog" before, and that's the same thing. If a corporation can get you to be parasocial with them, then they have won, and being parasocial with a corporation means shunning real investigative journalism that would otherwise undo them. Journalists and critics used to be marketing tools, but by undoing the press pipeline and talking directly to fans, journalists and critics are painted as untrustworthy for being wildcards that don't always toe the company line.

And there has been more than a decade of people with a "I choose to be stupid and ignorant on purpose" outlook, which just makes that more frustrating. We've all seen screencaps where some brainless rando tries to explain something to a person who is an expert in that field. The rando thinks they're flexing their brain, but in some cases they are arguing with the person who literally wrote the book on their topic of conversation. Some people don't want to know anything but still pretend like they know everything, when there are real people out there doing real work to uncover real truths.

Misinformation is the real problem. It should not surprise anyone that there are people out there deliberately eroding the foundation of journalistic integrity, because the less people trust journalism, the easier it is to get away with lying. The easier it is to lie, the easier it is to control the mainstream, the easier it is to scam people out of their money, so on and so forth.

And misinformation is more than just "this one news article is fake." There are long running campaigns to install people into news organizations themselves to publish false information for all manner of different goals, but it's all the same: nobody trusts anyone and it's making everyone dumber.

That's when we get crypto currency. And NFTs. And now people claiming that generative AI will save humanity. Grift after grift after grift where the people at the top of the snake oil food chain make off with billions of dollars while the rest of the world is left scratching their heads.

The law isn't going to catch them. If they do, it'll take years. Look at how long it took for Sam Bankman-Fried to get caught -- he operated for almost half an entire decade. The amount of damage somebody can get away with in five years is significant.

We need journalism. Real journalism. Good journalism. Watchdogs that keep an eye on things and blow the whistle when it goes bad. Somebody to enforce accountability that isn't a cop.

Where do you find that? That's the hardest question. I'm lucky enough that I know people I trust because they are long time friends, or friends of friends, and thus they've been properly vetted in my circle as The Real Deal. But there are a lot of outlets out there who claim to champion "truth" and "intelligence" in a way to prey upon insecurity. I mean, c'mon, Trump's social media platform is called "Truth Social" and is basically the furthest thing from the truth you will ever get from anyone, ever.

The more obsessively they try to convince you they're telling the truth, the less likely it is they actually are. Which in itself could be an attack meant to undo the foundations of trust in people who actually know what they're talking about. By casting doubt on the very concept of truth itself, they can lie with increasingly greater efficiency.

Any advice I give feels like it is incredibly circumstantial. Which is the point, and is why we're in the state we're in.

Here's a good pdf by The News Literacy Project that's probably a good place to start. The general gist is "you'll have to do a lot of fact checking for yourself" but that's unfortunately where we're at these days.

But by and large I would say life is a lot harder for real journalists right now than I think some of their critics have ever thought about. There are people out there trying to do actual good work and being a bubble-brained moron about it just makes everything harder for everyone.

#questions #Anonymous #journalism #games journalism #gamergate

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joesalw · 5 months

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This conversation about Taylor's downfall in 2016 and what led up to it, plus this lie that most criticism of female celebrities is just misogyny is really interesting to me because it's something I talk to people about in real life. There's this idea that in mainstream media people love to build female celebrities up and then rip them apart when they get successful, which don't get me wrong is absolutely true, but in some cases it's a little more complicated than that. There are times when certain celebrities brand and present themselves as "the ideal dream woman" of whatever period they're in, and then when the societal image of what "the ideal dream woman" shifts but the celebrity's image doesn't, the facade cracks.

I think a good example of this is Jennifer Lawrence. I was a teenager when the hunger games movies were coming out and was obsessed so I used to watch a lot of the interviews with the cast. Jlaw presentes herself very much as a "cool girl", she was the youngest of 2 older brothers so she was a "tomboy" that loves sports and drinking beers and shots. She also made it a big deal about how she doesn't diet and is constantly eating yet still has a slim body and doesn't know about designer clothes and is so above all this fame thing. Whilst all this was happening the Gone Girl monologue was gaining traction particularly the part about cool girls and how women alter their personality for men's consumption. Eventually people caught on about all the fictional women and celebrities that fall into the trope and were over it, yet jlaw kept up with the persona. Couple that with her continually working with David o Russell, the insensitivity to other cultures, the overexposure and people realising her acting ain't really all that, you have the general public getting sick of her and her having to take a break. She's sort of made a comeback now and people are just chalking her downfall to "misogyny".

I wasn't really following what Taylor was up to in the lead up to her crash because I'd gotten sick of her long before that and avoided her stuff like the plague, but I did see someone on Reddit talk about how her winning album of the year over Kendrick Lemar and then using her speech to shit on another prominent black hip hop artist over something that was a lie wasn't a good luck for her. Add in the racist undertones in shake it off and wildest dreams videos for good measure.

This time around I do think her not adapting to the political and societal change is going to be a major factor if (I hope) she has another downfall. Before I get to the next part I do have to say I'm from England (you may have heard of it but it is a very foreign country/s) so if I'm wrong about the American political atmosphere someone feel free to correct me. After the election of trump there was a whole knew political awakening and conversations happening, one of them being about how Hillary lost due to misogyny (not completely true) so there were conversations about patriarchy, sexism, double standards and all that. This was the perfect climate for Taylor to be able to swoop in and use all these buzzwords she's learnt and blame anything bad that happened to her on misogyny and made all of her problems into "women problems". You had her giving quotes like how women are only allowed to react or some shit and released "the man" (side note but does anyone else find the bridge to the song kind of racist? Especially the way she's constantly compared to black artists?). She was of course celebrated for all this and had successfully rebranded to politically conscious Taylor Swift.

I don't think she expected the political climate to shift so quickly once again. In 2020 we had those viral videos of white women calling the cops on black people and the conversations about how white women use their privilege and tears to harm others and get away with it. During BLM there were talks about how certain white women will present themselves as allies and progressive but still have friends and date people who are bigots showing their politics is skin deep *cough cough*. COVID had us talking about the disconnect from celebrities about the real world and how capitalism is just another plague that is killing us normal people. You had certain companies and people becoming billionaires during this time and this truly began the crumbling of the pedestal the rich and famous were on.

Flashforward to now, where there are multiple genocides happening in front of our eyes. A time where you can't open any social media site without seeing innocents being slaughtered in ways that fills you with a rage and sorrow I can't even put into words. A time where our world leaders are doing Jake shit like some Arab leaders or actively funding it like the UK and US. A large number of Americans are saying they won't vote for Biden next year, others are screaming if you do that we'll get a repeat of 2016. But people are rightfully pointing out that Hilary is also a war criminal and the DNC were told people are not going to vote for her so pick a different candidate, they didn't and lo and behold those people stuck to their word. Women being in power does nothing if they uphold the same system which is exactly what women like Taylor do.

So the women Taylor rebranded herself to is the exact kind of woman whos shit people are sick of. Her face literally being used as the face of the western media ignoring the atrocities happening to brown and black people and upholding the status quo is just poetic justice. Add in the absolute shallowness of that interview and the whole capitalism is okay when you're girl bossing and you've got people wondering who the fuck does she thinks she is.

There's obviously a lot more to any potential crash Taylor may have and this is all my observations that may be wrong, but I do find all this shit fascinating and I wish people smarter than me would look into it to see if I've got a point.

You’ve got a great point

#anti taylor swift #anti swifties #swifties dni

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ericmicael · 7 months

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Elsa + Queen Disa VS Elsa + Honeymaren

A conversation about this before it turns into a discussion beyond what I'm seeing in my social circle.

The look of Queen Disa from the "Frozen Podcast" was recently revealed, and due to her interaction with Elsa in it, a new shipp is being born in the Frozen fandom: Elsa + Queen Disa.

I haven't watched the entire podcast yet, but I've seen some analyzes and in fact Elsa and Disa have a lot of interesting scenes: they start off having problems with each other because of their thoughts about magic and technology, they eventually end up helping each other (especially Disa helps Elsa), and in the end they really become friends, promising a new moment for them to meet. It's almost like "enemies to lovers".

And because Elsa + Honeymaren is the current shipp, it is obviously leading to a certain principle of rivalry. And a lot of people jumped on the theory that Elsa is a lesbian because of Elsa + Honeymaren, and now we have a new girl to steal some of the spotlight.

I went through this myself in "Frozen 2" with the appearance of Elsa + Honeymaren to the detriment of Elsa + Marisol. As I said before, I had certain problems with "Frozen 2" at the beginning: I hated the separation of the sisters and that Marisol was technically replaced by Honeymaren. It took me a while to understand "Frozen 2" and accept ElsaMaren, and especially to understand that Honeymaren is the mainstream version of Marisol, the version that Disney could take to the cinema.

And so today we have an absence of the Northuldra tribe in material that precisely addresses the Enchanted Forest, and in Honeymaren's place we have Queen Disa who is appearing on the "Frozen Podcast" alongside her sisters.

A few days ago I made a post talking about the possibility that in “Frozen 3” instead of having an approximation of Elsa with Honeymaren, there would be an approximation of Elsa with an original woman, a more mainstream character and free for Disney to use in merchandising. And therefore be different from a woman linked to a tribe that exists in real life and that perhaps has some control over her image, as is perhaps the case with Honeymaren. And now we have Queen Disa.

I really don't believe that Queen Disa is in "Frozen 3", although a podcast released close to the franchise's anniversary is more mainstream than a book or a comic, I still don't think it's relevant enough to be the gateway to a character that it will be in a film... but I could be wrong, I never rule anything out.

But unlike my initial problem with Honeymaren, I don't intend to create any resistance to the possibility of a new woman for Elsa. As long as it's a woman I have no problem.

And one last text about Elsa + Queen Disa vs Elsa + Honeymaren. Queen Disa and Honeymaren are almost opposites:

Disa seems to be much more extroverted while Honeymaren has already demonstrated that she has some problems speaking in public (Disney Magic Kingdoms).

Disa is a book girl, Honeymaren is a warrior.

Disa is knowledgeable in technology while Honeymaren has some knowledge in magic.

Disa is the girl of the city and modernity while Honeymaren is the girl of the forest and traditions.

Whether it was a coincidence or not, I found this interesting, and it's really easy to see Elsa pairing up with the two women: friendship beginning until an eventual romance.

#frozen 2 #frozen 3 #frozen podcast #elsamaren #elsa lesbian #honeymaren #queen disa #give elsa a girlfriend #mariselsa

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kanansdume · 2 years

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Man, that scene between Luthen and Saw was SO INTERESTING.

Because we don't know a lot about Luthen, much like Saw, but we DO know more about Saw, just like Luthen seems to. The audience isn't aligned with one character or the other necessarily, we can go back and forth a little.

Luthen's lack of explained backstory, the fact that he's always putting up some kind of act, some kind of front, means that we as the audience don't really know him either. It's hard to know exactly what he stands for and what his plans are with Cassian. He's not affiliated with Saw, he isn't explicitly affiliated with Bail Organa yet, and he's not affiliated with any of the other known organizations we've been given in mainstream Star Wars before (the Separatist/Republic divide from TCW). All we know is that he SEEMS to be anti-Imperial. But one of the last people we were told was pretty firmly anti-Imperial turned out to just be out for himself.

And on the other hand, we DO know Saw. We know his origins on Onderon and the death of his sister. We know just how long he's been fighting oppression of his people. We know what he does and what he becomes in the future. We know that he's willing to do some pretty heinous things in the name of his cause, but also that he's one of the only people aware that the Death Star is something that needs to be figured out and is trying to track it down to keep it from becoming the problem it has the capacity to become. We know Saw. The good, the sympathetic, and the ugly.

So it's interesting to see this conversation with Luthen, Luthen who says "we need a little extra oppression in order to actually spark a real rebellion," which seems ruthless enough to fall in line with Saw's own tactics, except that Saw's not willing to risk his own people, his own cause, for someone else's mission. He's unwilling to help someone else if there isn't something about it that helps his personal agenda.

And we also see Luthen refuse to pick a side beyond bringing down the Empire, arguing that they can do more together than they can separately, and that their infighting can wait until the Empire's been taken down. Saw's choices to protect his own people for his own agenda go against all of his big talk about how everyone chooses a side but he's the only one really fighting for the galaxy. Saw's more inclined to let petty infighting keep him from helping other people in favor of just trying to do everything himself and assuming he can do it all himself. Which isn't unsympathetic when absolutely no one listens to him later about the Death Star, so in some ways he's not WRONG that if he wants something done he just needs to do it himself.

We don't know who Luthen is really, we don't know why he does what he does and makes the choices we see him make, which makes him inherently untrustworthy but also leaves the option open for him to surprise us with his alliances. We do know who Saw is and why he does what he does, which means even if we don't LIKE him, we can trust that we know what choices he'll make. We can trust that we know where he stands.

Saw stands at the front with his people, he's hiding out in cold caves with his people and making absolutely no bones about who he is and what he believes. He's got nothing to hide from anyone.

Luthen stands behind all of his recruits, letting them do the work while he stays on Coruscant in relative safety drumming up support from senators to fund his efforts and just passing information where it needs to go. He's hiding from everyone.

This scene was incredible because so much went unsaid and lives in just... the audience understanding who Saw is as a character and how that juxtaposes with the relative little of what we known of Luthen.

Which seems like such a wonderful way to use a legacy character, to take the fact that this character has been around for a while and that most audience members will know him and his story, to compare against a character who is completely new and unexplored. That dynamic that the audience has with the characters has been transposed into the dynamic the characters have with EACH OTHER and defines the place they currently hold in the narrative and its themes. It's masterful.

#andor #andor show #andor series #sw andor #star wars andor #luthen rael #saw gerrera #andor spoilers

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clavissionary-position · 2 months

Text

Gilbert vs. Azel

(crack but also contains some main story and sequel route spoilers)

Azel: (standing saint-like and unbothered at the end of Gilbert’s pointed cane)

Azel: And now that you’ve learned that little factoid, feel free to donate this—(skewers a receipt onto the cane)—exact amount to me. You know my contact information, right?

Azel: [email protected]. I’m telling you that free of charge, of course. It’s common knowledge, but it’s okay to be embarrassed if you didn’t know.

Gilbert: Hehe. As it happens, all of your other contact information is also common knowledge. (Retracts his cane to glance at the receipt) To me, anyway.

Azel: I’m happy for you. That means there’s no need to send any more rando princes to my country. It must be gratifying for a mortal to be so creepy, I mean knowledgeable.

Gilbert: Oh no! I’m not the one mystically window-watching into every bedroom ever, am I, Mister [email protected]?

Azel: May I ask why you seem so envious about that? Your current god complex isn’t lacking by any means.

Gilbert: Well, as you know, you can never know too much. Hehe.

Azel: You’d be surprised. By the way I also charge interest on any pledged donations that aren’t paid off in a timely manner. You will find my rates are completely reasonable.

Gilbert: For a prince.

Azel: For a man with eclectic means.

Gilbert: Ah. (smile deepens) While I’m not Silvio, it’s not a bad idea to attack me through my investments. But unfortunately for you, I don’t pay any bills I can’t read.

Azel: Tsk, tsk. It’s not a good look to lie to an omniscient character.

Gilbert: (pouts) I’m not lying. I mean, this handwriting is pen vomit. It looks like a tiny animal tried to imitate what it thinks a human being writes like.

Azel: (maintains his generous smile even though his eye is twitching) I wrote the receipt out in front of you not even ten seconds ago. Had I known you suffered from such catastrophic lapses in memory, I’d have gone to Prince Chevalier first.

Gilbert: Ahaha! Maybe you should have. He’d have ended this conversation much earlier. With much more blood.

Azel: (grimace) I’m happy we can agree on that much, at least. So in the interest of parting ways as soon as possible… (points at the receipt)

Gilbert: How shameless. So you think you get to order an Obsidianite prince around? I almost admire your foolhardy levels of courage. But I think there’s something that needs to be made clear.

Gilbert: Tigers, you see, are at the top of the food chain. They answer to no man. No god.

Gilbert: Sometimes to bunnies, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Azel: I don’t contest that. But unicorns, you see…

Azel: (appears to glow under the mid-day sun) …are not even on the food chain.

Azel: (eyes sparkling) They prance-fly in their own pastel dimension, unfettered by this world’s foolish ways and uncivilized biologies.

Gilbert: Hehe, that’s a creative way of saying you’ve noped out of reality.

Azel: (under his breath) Your face is a creative way of saying ‘punch me’.

Gilbert: Hm? What was that?

Azel: (saintly smile) Nothing, nothing. Just praying for you.

Azel: (scribbles an extra surcharge to the receipt) You’re learning so many new things today, Gil. I’m sure you’ll achieve a grown-up’s level of knowledge long before you reach a grown-up’s level of physical stature.

Gilbert: You know, you shouldn’t directly plagiarize insults from whatever is popular at the moment. If it’s too mainstream, it loses its bite.

Gilbert: (dramatic shrug) I really thought a living god would be much more inspired than that, but I guess I was wrong.

Azel: I have better things to do with my time than murder normies, stalk bunnies, and brainstorm funnies.

Gilbert: Are you sure about that? That second point, I mean. A little bunny told me about some very interesting dreams she’s been having as of late.

Azel: (serious expression) I’m glad you brought that up. Can you tell your pet to quit stalking me? I’m a very busy man and I have no interest in starting a harem.

Gilbert: (tilts his head with an evil smile) Tell her yourself.

Azel: …..?

That night in the rosy dream world…

Azel: Oh, goddammit, not this goddamn stupid dream again! (kicks one of the columns) Urgh, that hurts!

Emma: Um, A….zel? Oh hey, I remembered your name this time! Azel, are you here today?

Azel: Of course I’m here. If I’m here, you’re here. If you’re here, I’m here. If you have a cure, I’m all ears.

Emma: Aw, that’s a cute poem.

Azel: Shut-up.

Emma: Right, anyway, I’m sorry about this. (points a gun at him)

Azel: …

Azel: …….

Azel: (watches the crystalized rose on the table begin to rot)

Azel: (sighs)

Azel: Does he want a discount on the bill, is that what this is about?

Emma: (realizes what she’s pointing and scampers to put the gun away) Oh shi… I’m sorry!

Crystalized Rose: (goes back to being uwu)

Emma: I meant to hold out my hand in a truce!

Azel: Truce? I don’t remember being at war with you.

Emma: Apparently we are? Stuff gets twisted around in Gil’s head all the time. Although usually there’s at least a grain of truth to it. But basically I’ll stop stalking your dreams if you stop stalking mine. I don’t know how, but I figure this is a good start.

Emma: (looks up at the dreamy clouds) See, Gil? We’re talking it out. Stop strapping your gun to my thigh while I sleep, please? It tickles and it makes me want to pee!

Azel: This is our dream. He can’t hear you.

Emma: I know, but I heard that if you shout stuff in your dreams, it's more likely you'll remember it when you wake up.

Emma: AZEL IS DEFINITELY THE GUY WE'RE TRYING TO TAKE DOWN IN THE CURRENT STORY ARC!

Emma: I NEED TO STOP CASUALLY TELLING HIM NATIONAL SECRETS!

Azel: (covering his ears) You're the reason I wake up with seven hundred bags under my eyes.

Emma: So... truce?

Azel: Yeah, sure, truce, whatever. (goes to shake her hand)

Emma: (points gun at him again) I'm sorry, I can't let you actually physically touch my hand or Gil will literally kill you.

Azel: THIS IS A DREAM WORLD

Azel: I’m not even going to tell you that your love is cursed. Your entire man is cursed.

#ikemen prince #ikepri spoilers #ikepri gilbert spoilers #gilbert von obsidian #ikepri azel #incorrect quote folder

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