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kaimuki · 2 years

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Actually something very pleasant happened this morning.

Sorry this really isn’t well written and I talk about some stuff that was traumatic to me like bullying, self-esteem issues, and being misunderstood or not known at all.

For the past few days, I’ve been getting these tiktoks that talk about how emotional trauma manifests as unbalances in hip muscles, and probably other stabilizers in general. So it’s kind of been on my mind to stretch and just hope that passively this will unlock some kind of healing pathway for my brain, is worth a shot.

I’m not entirely sure if it worked on it’s own, but definitely some free progress was made today. Yesterday was a friend’s birthday, but I felt some huge anxiety about it -which I acknowledge doesn’t make any sense -so I think that contributed as well.

Anyway, I had this extended dream where there were people from both college and high school in it, and the friends that I made in college were really a source of comfort for me. I think I’ve had the privilege of meeting some really nice and awesome people, which I can credit being the literal thing that saved me in this instance.

High school has always been a mixed topic for me. There were moments of joy, peace, pleasantries, but also moments that were deeply confusing, disturbing, and chaotic even. I can imagine that this isn’t the case for everyone, and I can also imagine it being extremely common; but, I was not very bright, and I lived my life at its most surface level. I tried my best to understand what was going on, but I was ultimately deeply confused.

The stand out moment for me which was only important because it came at the absolutely worst time was this girl spreading rumors and talking shit about me. Simultaneously, I had just torn apart my leg playing sports, was having surgery, getting a severe, rare infection, having the classic sexuality/god hates gays problem, struggling with school, parents, and all the classic growing up problems.

So, at the time, I was playing basketball with the high school team. One of the upperclassmen were in the computer lab overhearing a conversation with a girl and my boyfriend at the time, and the girl was saying some wild stuff about me. I barely knew this girl, and my upperclassmen said she was calling me a monster, and then going into specific detail about why I was a monster.

Here’s the issue though. It’s obviously loud enough for other people to hear, and she’s using my name enough so that people can tell she’s talking about me. So yeah, this isn’t really casual.

The interesting thing is that I never really doubted my upperclassmen teammates. I don’t think they believed these rumors or shit talk at all. I always felt like they had my back, and that they knew me enough to not believe them. That was always a source of comfort. I’m always thankful that they knew better.

But the mutual friends I had with shit-talker, I didn’t trust. I tried so desperately to explain things to them, but I still felt them changing the way they treated me. Eventually I gave up. I thought that this feeling of being so deeply misunderstood was mine to carry and I never talked about it with them, just robotically said yes to things and showed up. I was constantly angry.

I thought that maybe there was just something wrong with me. I didn’t really think bad of anyone else. I thought if I knew how to express myself properly I could just tell them the truth, and it would be convincing, because how could any lie be more convincing than the truth? The truth happened. I know now that maybe I was really stupid and naive for believing things like that, but it is kind of endearing isn’t it? Like, what a sweet kid.

I realized that they never really had the pleasure of knowing me. They did have the pleasure of me reaching out to them, wanting them to understand me, but I think they took it for granted. They didn’t know who I was back then. I was someone who tried hard, cared a lot, and did my best despite being stupid and dense.

My best moments were with the team. I’m not sure if it was coach who tied us all together, but I felt like I genuinely liked my teammates outside of basketball. People shit on sports a lot, but I think I learned how to be a good friend, being on a team.

You needed someone to be at the gym with you? I’m there. You got in trouble and were running laps? I’m running with you. This kind of support I learned to give carried over outside of sports. There were places I knew I had to be to give support I knew I had to give, and I did it with my full heart in it. See, sweet kid.

Looking back now and being so separated from it, I could never think I was a monster. Insecure, probably. Stupid, yes. Never mean spirited. Never cold hearted. Alive and wanting to express myself, wanting to be understood, wanting to be connected to other people. Wanting to be helpful and aspiring to be kind. Failing at times, but always trying. Legitimate qualities. Maybe shit talker was the same, but she hasn’t earned my love the way that I have.

People have tried to communicate this idea to me before. Someone not knowing who I am, not paying attention to me isn’t my problem. So that feeling of being misunderstood or no one knowing me that I’ve been carrying around, it isn’t mine to bear.

Whether or not people think they know me, they’re not in my life to enjoy the love I have to give to them. So if I could just keep this idea in mind and not let the anxiety of thinking that I deserved all of that or that I’m a shit human that no one wants anything to do with, I can maybe be a better person and reach out more to people who might actually like me enough to be happy with that.

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c-is-for-circinate · 3 years

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I'd love to hear more of your thoughts about why P5R didn't quite land for you. I had the same reaction to it, but I've never quite been able to properly articulate why the last section fell so flat.

God okay so I've tried several times to answer this, and it seems like the answer is 'I still have way too many feelings, personally, to say this in anything less than thirty pages and fifteen hours of work', because Persona 5 the original is a game I loved a lot and care about a great deal. And most of the reasons I disliked Royal feel, in my head, like a list of ways it broke some of the things I liked best about P5--which means explaining them feels like I need to explain everything I loved about the original game, which is a book in itself, complete with referents to P3, P4, Jungian psychology, the Joseph Campbell mytharc, and fuck all even knows what. And that is too much.

But today I realized that I could instead describe it from an angle of, Persona 5 Strikers succeeds really well at doing the thing I think Royal was trying to do but failed at. And that I think I can talk about in a reasonable amount of wordspace, hopefully, behind this cut because I have at least one friend who hasn't played Royal yet.

Note for reblogs/comments: I HAVE NOT FINISHED STRIKERS YET. I got through the jail that pretended to be the final jail and have not yet gone into the obviously inevitable 'ohshit wait, you mean there's something more than simple human machinations behind all of this?' dungeon. (I got stuck on a really frustrating side quest, put the game down, and then dived into Hades to avoid throwing the Switch across the room for a while--and anyone around this blog lately knows how THAT'S been going.) Please no spoilers past Okinawa!

So, one of the many, many things I really appreciated about Persona 5 was its straightforward and unashamed attitude towards abusers and their acts of violence. Because, while yes P5 is a story about the use of power and control to make others suffer, it fundamentally isn't about those abusers themselves. It's about their victims, those that survive their crimes. And this shows up repeatedly over the course of the game.

We do not give a shit why Kamoshida wanted to beat and rape his students. We really don't. Kamoshida does not deserve our attention one moment longer than it takes to make him stop. Because, ultimately, that's the goal of P5, start to end. We don't know for sure if what we're doing is fair, if it's justice, if it's questionable. What we know is that people are being hurt, badly, actively, right now this second. What we know is that victims are suffering. What we know is that we, personally, us-the-protag and us the Phantom Thieves at large, are in danger. And in those circumstances, we don't care about the abuser's side any more. We don't. We don't have the space or time or capacity to care, because that is not the point.

The point is to help the weak. To save the people who need saving, right here and now. To give others the courage to stand up on their own behalf. We're not even out to change society, not really--that's a byproduct. We are reactions. We are triage. We are important.

There's something so empowering and validating about that as a theme, y'know? In a media landscape so full of "sympathetic villains", the idea that, you know, maybe sometimes you don't have to break yourself to show compassion that might possibly heal the bad guy--that sometimes you can just make the bad guy stop hurting people--feels both refreshing and satisfying. I really appreciate it as a message! I liked it a lot!

And yes, there's nuance to that theme, and the game is not without compassion. We save Futaba, because 'make the bad guy stop hurting people', in that case, means 'make this person stop hurting herself'. We give Sae a path forwards, help her fix her own heart. Yet it's worth pointing out that in both of those cases, while we were very glad to do those things, to save those people, we also went into both of those palaces for extremely practical reasons to begin with. We needed Futaba's help. We needed Sae's help. The fact that we chose to talk Sae into a change of heart rather than simply stealing her treasure, while ultimately a very good thing for her, was absolutely a practical choice predicated on the need for her palace to still exist to save our life. And yes, we wanted to save her, for Makoto's sake--yes, we wanted desperately to save Futaba. But Sae and Futaba let themselves be helped, too, and that doesn't change the overarching themes of the story itself.

Akechi (and to some extent Okumura) would not let himself be helped. Akechi's another interesting nuance to this theme, because of all our villains, we do learn the most about what drove him to the cruelties and crimes he's committed. He's at that intersection of victim and villain, and we want to help him, as a victim--but we also know that stopping him as a villain is more important. We'd like to save him from himself if we could, because we save people from their sources of trauma, it's what we do. We regret being unable to do so. But in the end, what matters to the story is not that Akechi refused to be saved--it's that Shido and Yaldabaoth need to be stopped, for the sakes of everyone else they're hurting now and may continue to hurt in the future.

The thing is, there's space and maybe even a need for a corollary discussion of those places where victim and villain intersect. It's an interesting, pertinent, and related topic. Strikers made an entire video game about it, a really good video game. It's centered in the idea that, yes, these people need to be stopped, and we will make stopping them our priority--but they're not going after us, and that gives us some space to sympathize. Even for Konoe, who specifically targets the Phantom Thieves--compare him to Shido, who actively destroyed the lives of both Joker and Futaba, who ordered Haru's father's death, who's the entire reason the team is still dealing with the trauma of Akechi's everything. Of course the game can be sympathetic to Konoe where it can't with Shido. There's enough distance to do that.

But right--Strikers is a separate game. It's a separate conversation. It's, "last time, we talked about that, so now let's take it one step further." And that's good writing. (It's something Persona has done before, too, also really well! Persona 3 is about terrible, occasionally-suicidal depression and grief. P4 is about how you can still be hurting and need some help and therapy even if things seem ok. Related ideas, but separate conversations that need to be separate in order to be respectful and do justice to either one. P5, as a follow-up to P4, is a conversation about how, ok, changing yourself is great and all, but sometimes the problem is other people so how do you deal with that? Again, still related! Still pertinent! Still alluded to in P4, with Adachi's whole thing--but it wasn't the time or place to base a quarter of the game around it.)

So one of Royal's biggest issues, to me, is that it tries to tack on this whole new angle for discussion onto a game that was originally about something else.

Adding Maruki's palace--adding it at the end, which by narrative laws suggests that it's the true point that everything else should be building up to--suddenly adds in about a hundred new dimensions at once. It wants us to engage with "what in this abuser/manipulator's life led him to act this way?" for basically the first time all game (we'll get to Akechi later). It wants us to engage with, "if the manipulator has a really good reason or good intentions, does that mean we should forgive them?" It requires us to reflect on, "what is the difference between control and cruelty?" It asks, "okay, but if people could be controlled into being happy, would that be okay?" (Which, based on the game so far, is actually a wild out-there hypothetical! Literally not a single thing we've seen in the game suggests that could ever happen. Even the people who think being controlled is safer and easier are miserable under it. Control that's able to lead to actual happiness is completely out of left field in the context of everything we've encountered all game so far.)

That's too much! We don't have time to unpack all that! We only have an eighth of the game left! Not to mention we are also being asked to bring back questions we put to bed much earlier in the game about the morality of our own actions, in a wholely unsatisfying way. Maruki attempts to justify his mass brainwashing because "it's the same as what you're doing", and we know it isn't, but the game didn't need Maruki calling it out in order for us to get that. We already faced that question when we started changing hearts, and again several times throughout the game, and again when we found our targets in Yaldabaoth's cells. The fact that we change hearts does not mean we think "changing hearts is fine and kind and should be done to everyone, actually." Changing hearts has been firmly established in this game as an act of violence, acceptable only because it prevents further systemic violence against innocents that we must prevent. The moral question has never once been about whether it's ok to change the hearts of the innocent, only about how far it's ethical to go against individuals who are actively hurting other people. Saying "you punched that guy to keep him from shooting a child, so punching people is good and I will save the world by punching everyone!" is confusing! and weird! and not actually at all helpful to the question of, how much violence is it acceptable to use to protect others! So presenting the question that way just falls really flat.

(And right, I love Strikers, because Strikers has time to unpack all that. Strikers can give us a main bad guy who wants to control the whole world for everybody's own good, because Strikers has earned that thematic climax. It has given us sympathetic bad guys who started out wanting to control the world to protect themselves and ended up going too far. It's given us Mariko Hyodo, who wanted to control the world to protect other people and went too far. It's given us a long-running thread about police, the desire to serve, and the abuse of power that can lead to. And since we are actively trying to care for the people whose hearts we're changing in Strikers, we can open the door to questions about using changes-of-heart and that level of control to make other people happy. We can even get a satisfying conclusion out of that discussion, because we have space to characterize the difference--Konoe thinks that changing peoples' hearts means confining them, but the Phantom Thieves think it means setting them free. We have seen enough sympathetic villains that we as an audience have had the space to figure out how we feel about that, and to understand the game's perspective of "stop them AND save them, if we can possibly do both." And that message STILL rests firmly on Persona 5's message of "it is Good to do what you have to do to stop an abuser so long as you don't catch innocent people in your crossfire.")

It's worth noting that the general problem of 'asking way too many new questions and then not answering them' also applies to how Royal treats its characters, too. P5 did have unanswered questions left at the end! The biggest one, and we all knew this, was Akechi, and what actually happened to him, and how we should feel about him, and how he felt about us. That was ripe for exploring in our bonus semester, and to Royal's credit they did in fact try to bring it up, but by god did they fuck up doing it.

Akechi's probable death in the boiler room was absolutely the biggest dangling mystery of the game. It was an off-screen apparent death of a key antagonist, so all of the narrative rules we know suggested that he might still be alive and would probably come back if the story went on for long enough. So when Royal brings him back on Christmas Eve, hey, great! Question answered. Except that the situation is immediately too good to be true, and immediately leads to another mystery, which leads to a flat suspicion that something must be wrong. We spend several hours of gameplay getting sly hints that, oooh, maybe he's not really alive after all, before it's finally confirmed by Maruki: yup, he really died, if we end the illusion we'll kill him too. Okay, at least we know now. Akechi is alive right now and he's going to be dead if we do this, and that doesn't make a ton of sense because every other undead person disappeared when the person who wished for them realized they were fake but at this point we'll take it. So we take down Maruki, and okay, Akechi really is dead! Probably! We're fairly sure! Aside from our lingering doubts!

And then we catch a glimpse of maybe-probably-could be him through the train window, and I just want to throw something, because come on.

Look, it is just a fact of storytelling: the more times you make an audience ask 'wait, is this character dead or aren't they?', the less they will care, until three or four reversals later you will be hard pressed to find anybody who gives a shit. Royal does this like four different times, and every iteration comes with even less certainty than the last. By the end, we somehow know even less than we did when we started! Did Akechi survive the boiler room to begin with and Maruki just didn't know? Or was Maruki lying to try and manipulate us further? Or was he actually dead and then his strength of will when Maruki's reality dissolved was enough to let him survive after all? Is that even actually him out the train window?

Where is he going! What is he doing! How did any of this happen! What is going on! We all had these questions about Akechi at the end of the original P5, and the kicker is that Royal pretends like it's going to answer them only to go LOL JK NO. It's frustrating and it's dissatisfying and it annoys me.

The one Akechi question that Royal doesn't even bother to ask, though, let alone leave ambiguous, is how does the protagonist feel about him? The entire emotional weight of the third semester rests on the protagonist caring about Akechi, Sumire, and Maruki. Maruki's the person we're supposed to sympathize with even as we try to stop him. Sumire's the person we're trying to save from herself. And Akechi is our bait--is, we are told, the one thing our protagonist wished for enough to actualize it in this world himself. Akechi's the final lure to accept Maruki's deal. Akechi's survival is meant to be tempting.

For firm Akechi fans, this probably worked out fine--the game wanted to insist that the protagonist cared for Akechi the same way the player did. For those of us who're a little more ambivalent, though (or for the many and valid people who hated him), this is a super sour note. Look, one of the Persona series' strengths is the way it lets players choose to put their time and emotional investment into an array of different characters, so the main story still has weight even if there's a couple you don't care about that much. It has always done this. The one exception, from P3 all the way through P4 to here and now, is Nanako Dojima, and by god she earned that distinction. I have never met a person who played Persona 4 who didn't love Nanako. Nanako is a neglected six-year-old child who is brave and strong enough to take care of herself and all of the housework but who still tries not to cry when her dad abandons her again and lights up like the sun when we spare her even the tiniest bit of time and attention. It is impossible not to care for Nanako. Goro Akechi is not Nanako.

And yet third semester Royal doesn't make sense if your protagonist doesn't feel linked to Akechi. The one question, out of all the brand new questions Royal throws out there, that it decides to answer all by itself--and it's how you as a player and your protagonist ought to feel about an extremely complex and controversial character. What the fuck, Royal. What the fuck.

In conclusion, I'll leave you with this. I played the original Persona 5 in March and April of 2017, as an American, a few months after the 2016 election and into the term of our then president. It felt painfully timely. A quick calendar google early on indicated that the game's 20XX was almost certainly 2016, and the closer our plot got to the in-game November leadup to an election destined to be dominated by a foul and charming man full of corruption and buoyed up by his own cult of personality, the more I wanted to laugh/cry. It felt timely. It felt important. It felt right.

I went through Royal (in LP form on youtube, not having a platform to play it on) in summer of 2020, with a hook full of face masks by my front door and protests about racial tension and local policing that occasionally turned into not-quite-riots close enough to hear at night if I opened the windows of my apartment. The parts of the game that I remembered felt as prescient and meaningful as ever, if not even more so. The new parts felt baffling. Every single evil in the game felt utterly, painfully real, from the opening moments of police brutality to the idea of a country led by a guy who probably would use his secret illegitimate teenage son as a magical assassin if the opportunity presented itself and he thought he could get away with it. Yaldabaoth as the cumulative despair of an entire population who just wanted somebody to take over and make things be okay--yes, yes, god, in summer of 2020? With streets full of people refusing to wear masks and streets full of people desperate for change? Of course. Of course that holy grail of safety should be enticing. Of course it should be terrifying.

And then Maruki. Maruki, who was just so far outside the scope of anything I could relate to the rest of the game or my own life. Because every single other villain in the rest of Persona is real. From the petty pandering principal to the human-trafficking mob boss. The corrupt politicians and the manmade god of cultural desire for stability. And this game was trying to tell me that the very biggest threat of all of them, the thing that was worse than the collective force of all society agreeing to let this happen because succumbing was easier than fighting back--that the very biggest threat of all was that the world could be taken over by some random nobody's misguided attempts to help?

No. Fuck no. I don't buy it. Because god, yes, I have seen the pain and damage done on a tiny and personal and very real level by the tight-fisted control of someone trying to help, it never looked like this. Not some ascended god of a bad therapist. All the threats to the world, and that's the one I'm supposed to take seriously? This one man is more of a threat than the fundamental human willingness to be controlled?

Sorry, but no. Not for me. Not in this game. Not in this real-life cyberpunk dystopian apocalypse.

#c plays persona #driveby meta attack #p5 royal spoilers #p5 strikers spoilers #holy crap I did it #I actually wrote a semicoherent essay of a length I'm willing to put on Tumblr #about my problems with this game #I have been trying on and off for MONTHS #I wanted to like Royal SO BADLY #it makes me SO UPSET #anyway #now back to your regularly scheduled Hades blogging #asked and answered #Anonymous

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angels-heap · 4 years

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Okay hello I feel like you are Wise and Know things... it’s kind of hard to explain but is it wrong to just... Enjoy Things? With all the HL pisscourse going around it’s making me nervous about liking things like TF2 and missing something critical and huge in the media I consume and being labelled as a bad person for doing that. ESPECIALLY for liking characters like GLaDOS or Wheatley from Portal. I want to just Enjoy Things but there’s guilt tied to not being critical about every single detail

Thanks for reaching out, friend, and I’m so sorry to hear the current nonsense has you feeling this way. I have a hunch you’re not alone, and although I don’t claim to have all the answers here, I hope hearing my thoughts on this helps alleviate some of that guilt. This got long and I’m not putting it under a cut because it’s important.

The short answer to your question is no; it is not wrong to just enjoy things. You don’t have to constantly examine all your favorite media under a microscope and incessantly highlight or dwell on its faults to be a good person or a good consumer of media, and here are a few reasons why:

(CW for brief mentions of all the squicky/potentially triggering things that tend to come up in ship discourse conversations.)

1. It is virtually impossible to find a truly unproblematic piece of media.

And that’s okay! Media is both created and consumed by people, and people are notoriously imperfect and complex. Sometimes creators choose to explore dark or taboo themes that are always going to squick some people out, no matter how well (or poorly) they’re handled. Sometimes content creators are actually terrible people who deliberately try to perpetuate their messed-up ideas through media. Sometimes creators’ deeply internalized prejudices seep into a work in a way they may not even consciously realize. Sometimes consumers’ experiences or prejudices color the way they perceive a piece of media and may lead them to a very different interpretation than what the creators intended.

Point is, there are a lot of shades of gray here. We should always strive to do better as creators and consumers, but the goalposts for “perfection” are always moving.

There’s almost always going to be something about your favorite media—no matter how benign it is—that rubs some people the wrong way, or (perhaps unintentionally) perpetuates harmful stereotypes, or starts out okay but doesn’t age well down the line. Period. That’s an uncomfortable truth that we all have to sit with. But don’t despair, because…

2. It is still okay to engage with and enjoy media that you know is problematic. Even if it’s really problematic. For real. I promise. The media you consume does not determine your worth as a person.

Since you specifically mentioned Valve games, I’ll start out by clarifying that (as of July 2020), Valve games and their fandoms are pretty benign overall. Perhaps in the future, more of the humor will start to age poorly, or Valve will make some extremely questionable design choices with their next game, or Gabe Newell will be outed as a prolific serial killer, or whatever, but for now, there’s really nothing about Valve games that should make the average person go, “holy shit, you’re into that?!” when you bring them up in polite company. (And anyone who insinuates otherwise re: Half Life shipping discourse is either very confused about the definition of certain words or is maliciously trying to stir up controversy.)

That said, everyone has a different threshold for what they do and don’t want to see in media, and those boundaries are totally valid! But it is absolutely possible to enjoy even notably problematic media (e.g., Game of Thrones, the new Star Wars sequels, old movies where the directors were huge assholes to the female cast members, etc.) without being a bad person or a bad social justice activist. Instead of rambling about that at length, I’m going to link you to this excellent blog post on the subject.

The big takeaway here is that you can love a piece of media while also acknowledging its faults. In fact, I’d argue that a key part of loving something is being able to think critically about it and trying to hold its creators to a higher standard whenever possible. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be constantly analyzing it or prefacing every single public acknowledgment of your love for it with an “I know this is problematic and I swear, I just like it for XYZ” disclaimer, because…

3. Tumblr’s black-and-white thinking about media consumption is not healthy, “normal,” or (usually) present to the same degree in other virtual or real-world spaces.

I think most of the people on Tumblr who seem to be on a constant (and ultimately futile; see point 1) quest to find the One True Unproblematic Media have good intentions. I really do. And I applaud them for actively trying to understand and un-learn their own biases while becoming critical consumers of media.

Unfortunately, for a bunch of complicated reasons I still don’t totally understand and won’t get into here, some online communities tend to take these things to such an extreme that, in their quest to create a safe and/or inclusive environment, they actually end up creating an even more hostile one. To reference the recent drama again, nowhere is that more apparent than with “pro-ship” vs. “anti-ship” discourse.

Basically, “pro-shippers” believe that fiction is entirely separate from reality and therefore, “problematic” content (up to and including p*dophilia, inc*st, noncon, etc.) has just as much of a right to exist as any other content; this makes some sense on a purely intellectual level, but in the real world, obviously things are much more complicated than that. “Anti-shippers,” on the other hand, claim to be specifically against the aforementioned Big Three Bad Things in theory, but in practice, they’re basically the fandom purity police; they strive to criticize and shut down any media or fandom activity that could be even remotely construed as problematic, because they seem to have a (perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately misguided) perception that discussing anything “bad” in fiction will glorify/condone/promote it in real life and that all creators of “bad” fiction are inherently malicious. Often, they’re willing to twist definitions and jump through some very strange hoops to justify why something is “bad.”

The truth lies somewhere between those two extremes; fiction absolutely can (and does) impact reality, but not in such a clear-cut cause-and-effect way. People can see or read about dark/complicated/problematic things without condoning or enjoying them in real life, and conversely, people can dislike even relatively benign things without having to have an extreme, profound reason for feeling that way. People can also enjoy “bad” media while being fully conscious of what’s wrong with it and taking steps to ensure that it doesn’t negatively influence them, or they may lack the knowledge/context to understand why something is “bad” at first and change how they engage (or don’t engage) as they learn. There’s a lot more nuance to this issue than Tumblr is willing to acknowledge, and as a result, a lot of innocent people who just want to enjoy things in peace get sucked into some truly absurd drama that can be really hard to deal with. And that sucks. A lot.

So, TL;DR: Almost all media is at least a little problematic, but that’s okay, because the media you like does not determine whether or not you’re a good person. (And especially if your primary interests are Valve games... you’re good, mate. Seriously.)

The fact that you’re even asking me this question shows me that you’re being a thoughtful, responsible consumer of media, and that’s all anyone can reasonably ask of you without being a gigantic hypocrite—because whether they’ll admit it or not, everybody who’s perpetuating this discourse both on and offline likes something “problematic.” It’s impossible not to, unless you live under a rock and consume exactly zero media. Take care, and try not to let the discourse get to you! Go forth and enjoy things! (As always, my inbox is open for follow-up questions.)

ETA: Here’s another excellent tumblr post on this topic! And another one!

#asks #anon #fandom #ship discourse #sorry it took me so long to respond to this #I'm sure I left things out but here are some thoughts to get you started #long post

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nosunsetsjustsilence · 4 years

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The Manics and Gender Identity, Part 1

There is a lot to unpack in Nicky and Richey’s early lyrics pertaining to gender, particularly in terms of identifying with women. Richey approaches the subject — as he is wont to do — with regard to the exploitation and degradation of the female image, while Nicky’s attitude is more inquisitive and casual. Both use lyrics to express their own personal “What if?”

Make no mistake: I’m not claiming that either Nicky or Richey is/was non-cis or trans or anything other than curious. But it’s clear from their personal lyric struggles and hard-won lifestyle choices that this was a different time they were living in. In the 1990s, gender identity was not a topic with any kind of mainstream recognition, at least beyond those who wanted a “sex change” or girls who were considered “one of the boys”. I think it’s fascinating, at least from my perspective, to go back and examine the themes of gender dysphoria, identity, and frustration in lyrics written before any of it was part of popular conversation, and in a way that emphasized the then absolute cultural disconnect between desire and society.

Also, it’s important to note that both Nicky and Richey have presented gender in ways that don’t have anything to do with lyrics. Nicky is comfortable in traditionally female clothing and wears dresses on and off stage; both band members wore makeup and feathers on a regular basis. I’ve tried to write about gender in terms of lyrics only, but at times I do take examples from visual media.

Finally, keep in mind that yours truly is non-binary, and the discussion will hopefully not reek of a cis person watching queer men from behind bars in a zoo.

Special thanks to @sinisterrouge for vetting this before I posted <3

Little Baby Nothing

Although Richey seemed to find comfort in claiming that his lyrics were about the larger world — in the case of Little Baby Nothing, feminism and the way women are perceived in media — a closer look usually reveals a personal stake. When I discussed the meaning of this song previously, I emphasized that the “Little baby nothing” in question is clearly Richey himself, writing in the first person and deconstructing his own image to align with a kind of mindless female groupie used for sex.

My mind is dead, everybody loves me Wants a slice of me Hopelessly passive and compatible Need to belong, oh the roads are scary Hold me in your arms I wanna be your only possession

Richey often refers to himself as a “slut” and a “prostitute” and uses self-referential porn star imagery in his lyrics (So Dead: “You need a fix I’m your prostitute”, Yes: “there’s no lust in this coma even for a fifty”), aligning the industries of pornography and music performance in very vivid ways most often pertaining to exploitation. Appropriately, singing pivotal stanzas on this track is none other than Traci Lords, arguably most famous (especially in the early 90s) for an underage porn scandal.

What’s more, in the lyrics booklet for Generation Terrorists, there is a quotation or excerpt included for each song. The following corresponds to Little Baby Nothing:

“The male chromosome is an incomplete female chromosome. In other words the male is a walking abortion; aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.” -Valerie Solanos.

Ninety percent of what the Manics said and did in their early years was intended to be shocking and/or ironic. Of course they were trying to incite anger and riots, the questioning of institutions, and a teardown of normalcy. But the fact that Richey later used part of this radical statement as the title to one of his songs (“Of Walking Abortion”, natch) proves that he took it somewhat seriously, even if only in the most simple sense — that part of him resented his own maleness.

Life Becoming a Landslide

This is another song I’ve previously discussed, mostly in the arena of Nicky and Richey individualizing their distinctive voices into lines that can clearly be attributed to one or the other. In a song about nature vs nurture and the plastic confines of greater humanity cracking down on who or what someone is really supposed to be, we have:

Life becoming a landslide Ice freezing nature dead Life becoming a landslide I don’t wanna be a man

As far as writing style goes, Nicky was always fairly straightforward. Richey loves to convolute his message with proper nouns and alternating verb cases and a lack of a subject just to throw people off, but here’s Nicky, my boy, just saying, “Dude. Being a man sucks. I don’t like this.”

He could mean that being human in general sucks. But, since his attitude towards women leads me to believe he would not abbreviate humanity in this way, and given his and Richey’s track record with gender and Nicky’s well-documented gender presentation, I think it’s clear the lyric means that he doesn’t want to be male. Because he feels it doesn’t suit him, for whatever reason. And that nature failed by making him a man instead of a woman.

Yes

‘Yes’ is an incredible song. Its major-chord melody juxtaposed against Richey’s raw portrait of degradation is truly a thing to behold. The theme? Being used, prostitution both literal and metaphorical (“For sale? dumb cunt’s same dumb questions”), exploitation in the name of capitalism (“In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything”), and reaching the lowest possible point of existence (“Purgatory’s circle, drowning here, someone will always say yes”). But the chorus — the chorus boasts one of the rawest images of sexual violence the band has ever used:

He’s a boy, you want a girl so tear off his cock Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want

Wow. Okay. Where to begin? The implication here is that gender, along with everything else, is mutable if you have enough money and power to abuse people. However, it appears the change would be made not to entertain others, but to appeal to a specific person, sexually (“fuck him”). The “you” in question is clearly attracted to women, so the narrator offering to mutilate himself to please them can be seen as a last-ditch act of desperation. (“It feels like this massive defeat,” said a friend. “You can make him a woman to pleasure someone, but what’s left to change after that?”)

Richey wrote most of the song; “Rita”, obviously, is the name used for an alternative female identity. But who would Rita be? Richey seems to be wondering. Would she still be me? And would the change even be worth the affections of whomever he’s speaking to? If the means are so drastic (and difficult to picture without experiencing secondhand pain), that answer would usually be “no”. But the song is called “Yes”. I would say yes to anything at this point, Richey is saying, even the most extreme sexual violence imaginable, if that’s what you wanted.

4st 7lb

This is an extreme example of Richey using world issues to examine his own nature. Although anorexic himself, Richey writes “4st 7lb” from the point of view of an obsessive young girl admiring thin models. There could be multiple reasons for this, not the least of which is that when a person fails to fit the “classic” case of an eating disorder, they are often ignored. So, Richey says, you need me to be a teenage girl? I can do that.

(Note that in 1994, when this song was written, any eating disorder demographic outside the “white girl who loves fashion too much” model did not exist by medical standards and was usually subject to ridicule.)

Karen says I’ve reached my target weight Kate and Emma and Kristin know it’s fake Problem is diet’s not a big enough word I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view

Embodying the anorexic female stereotype allows Richey to criticize both the world and himself; by creating a parody of a young girl with an eating disorder, he creates commentary on how ridiculous and counter-intuitive her thought process actually is. The song is brutal and often focuses on nudity and sexual imagery, as it has been suggested in studies that eating disorders occur in those who are trying to annihilate their own puberty. Though Richey was well into his 20s when he wrote this, he often expressed a loathing of aging and the entire concept of adulthood.

Stomach collapsed at five Lift up my skirt my sex is gone Naked and lovely and 5 stone 2 May I bud and never flower My vision’s getting blurred But I can see my ribs and I feel fine My hands are trembling stalks And I can feel my breasts are sinking

Ultimately, “4st 7lb” hits hard as both an experiment in identity and a vicious satire of the rich white girl eating disorder cliché. Although the lyrics do not express a desire to become female, they do indicate that Richey feels everything might be easier and fit more neatly into a box if he were a girl.

[Coming in Part 2: The Girl Who Wanted to be God, Tsunami, Born a Girl, and Pretention/Repulsion.]

#gender identity #gender fuckery #manic street preachers #manics #nicky wire #richey james #richey edwards #lyrics #yes #little baby nothing #generation terroris #the holy bible #life becoming a landslide #4st 7lb #eating disorders #gender

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dark-strangeson-virgil · 4 years

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Title: He Shines (Bright Like a Diamond)

Pairings: Moceit (Pre-Relationship), Backround Prinxiety (Pre-Relationship), Backround Intrulogical (Pre-Relationship), Backround Remile (Established)

Words: 4.4k

Janus totally wasn’t nervous. Not at all.

Okay, so maybe he was slightly nervous. It’s really not that big of a deal. It’s a simple school winter formal, and it’s only his sophomore year. Maybe dances will seem more important in his senior year, but for now they seem like nothing more than a few hours of fun, not to be taken too seriously. At least according to Janus.

So why could he feel his chest tightening?

He was going with his friends, so he didn’t have any date he needed to worry about impressing. He was a pretty good dancer, and high school dances barely involve any actual dancing anyways.

If he were being 100% honest, he was probably slightly nervous about his outfit choice. With Roman’s help (the two had spent a solid hour and a half on video call the night before choosing out outfits together, since they were easily the most extravagant of the group), he had chosen a yellow dress shirt, a black tie, black dress pants, and a glittery black vest. He knew it would draw attention to him, and he could see clear as day in his mirror that he looked absolutely fabulous in it. A year ago he would’ve had no doubts at all, sauntering into the dance with his friends confidently. However, a year ago he had not yet realized his absolute infatuation for one Patton Myron.

Rationally, Janus knew Patton would never judge him. Patton was an incredibly loving and accepting individual who loved to experiment with his own style, but this thought still couldn’t help Janus shake his nerves. Even Roman had tried to settle his mind while on their video call. He hadn’t truly known why Janus was as worried as he was but his attempts were at least a welcome distraction. He had elected to simply ignore the worried part of his brain, opting to channel his natural confidence and use it for all it was worth. He adjusted his hair one last time and swiped his keys off of his desk, running down to his car and clearing off his back seats.

They had decided on carpooling in smaller groups to the dance rather than all together, knowing that all of them packed into a small car would likely be too chaotic for the driver to handle. Janus was taking Roman, Remus and Virgil, while Logan had been tasked with transporting Emile, Patton and Remy. Sighing, Janus jammed his key into the ignition and began the short drive to the twins’ house.

He quickly turned on “The Playlist”, knowing it was the only way to prevent a fight over the music once everyone was in the car. While humming along to Fall Out Boy’s “Immortals” he allowed his mind to wander (while still watching the road of course), yet still carefully avoiding the topic of Patton. He could already imagine the stares he would receive once he arrives at the dance. People tend to stare at him often anyways, seing as the freckle concentration on the left side of his face tends to intrigue his peers. However, tonight his vest would hopefully grab attention in a positive way, and Janus truly did love attention.

He had never been to a school dance before so he honestly didn’t know what to expect. He had opted out of freshman year homecoming and winter formal, claiming to find dances “meaningless”, and prom was only for juniors and seniors at his school. His friends had begged him to go this year though, and their descriptions made the idea sound interesting enough for him to agree. If nothing else, he would have an enjoyable night with his friends.

As he pulled up to the twins’ house he messaged both of them, telling them oh-so-elegantly to “Hurry the hell up, we still have to grab Virgil.” As the minutes ticked by he began to get more irritated. Just as he was considering leaving them to find another ride he saw Roman emerge from the front door, Remus quickly following behind his brother. He glared at the two as they entered his car, Remus sitting in the passenger's seat and Roman opting for the back seat.

“And why, pray tell, did you take over twelve minutes to get out of your house after I explicitly told you to hurry?” Janus honestly wasn’t mad. If anything he was slightly annoyed, but he enjoyed messing with Remus and Roman just a bit.

“I was trying to drag Roman out the door, but he kept insisting he needed, ‘Just another minute to fix my hair!’” Remus offered, mocking his twin. Roman grumbled in the backseat, but made no move to argue.

“It’s probably for our resident emo. We all know Roman has a huge crush on him!” Remus practically shrieked, earning a chuckle from Janus.

“Shut up!” Roman shouted, voice slightly cracking as he reached to punch his brother in the shoulder.

“Oh, you’re absolutely right Remus. That’s obviously why he chose the backseat as well. More time to spend talking to his “Dark Prince” as he says.” Janus continued to tease the poor boy, leaving his face a lovely shade of crimson. Roman elected to stay quiet after that, instead going to text Virgil and let him know that they were on their way to pick him up.

The three settled into easy conversation during the drive to Virgil’s house, discussing their plans for the upcoming holiday break. With only one week of school left everyone had begun making plans for the holiday season and they were all eager to plan gatherings so they could stay in touch over the break.

Soon enough the group had arrived at Virgil’s house, Janus shooting him a quick text to let him know they were outside waiting. Unlike the twins, Virgil was walking out the door within 30 seconds or receiving Janus’s text. His anxiety always forced him to get ready for things extremely early, as he didn’t want to inconvenience his friends by being late. He swiftly opened the backseat door and planted himself in the seat across from Roman, muttering a simple “Hey.” as he did so. Roman almost immediately began talking the boy’s ear off, his eagerness for the dance becoming very clear. As Roman talked Remus noticed a small, fond smile work it’s way across Virgil’s face, watching Roman intently. He shot Janus a “How are they so oblivious?” look, which the driver returned as he shifted the car into drive and began the trip to the school.

The conversation eventually shifted to include all 4 boys, discussing the dance as “Doubt” by Twenty-One Pilots played softly in the background.

“I just hope they play some actual fun music this time! Most of the music they played at homecoming was so boring.” Remus whined.

“Your idea of ‘fun’ is just music you can twerk to, Remus.” Virgil retorted, earning a chuckle from Roman that caused a faint blush to tinge his face.

“Exactly! We’re high schoolers, what else does the principal expect?” Remus made a fair point.

“I suppose you’re right.” Janus allowed his mind to float once again, this time choosing to focus on how little he actually knew about dances. ‘Do they serve food, or are we going to have to stop somewhere on the way home? Is the music going to be a bunch of overplayed Christmas songs, since it was the winter formal? How many slow songs were they going to play?’ That last thought caused Janus to halt his train of thought. He hoped they didn’t play many slow songs. Emile and Remy were the only ones in their group who were in an actual relationships (despite gay pining being blatantly obvious from multiple members of their group). Slow songs would likely just leave the rest of them to sit on the bleachers, sulking about their loneliness.

No, he decided with finality. This night is about spending time with friends, and it will not be ruined due to a few sappy love songs. If slow songs are played they could use that time to take a break outside the dance, not mope. He was determined to make this a fun night out with his closest companions.

He took a deliberate, calming deep breath as he pulled into a spot in the free student parking lot. Sure, they would have a slight walk to get up to the school, but it was better than paying $5 to park in the other lot for a mere few hours. He turned the car ignition off, turning to face his friends in the back seat.

“Are we ready boys?” He asked, his signature smirk taking it’s reserved place across his face. Roman quickly hopped out of the car, bouncing on his feet giddily as he waited for the others to join him. Virgil stepped out next, followed quickly by Remus. Janus took one last look at himself in the rear-view mirror, nodding to himself reassuringly before stepping outside the car to join his friends.

Roman immediately shrieked upon seeing his outfit in its entirety. “Oh my god! I told you it would look absolutely fabulous! Doesn’t he look amazing?” Remus and Virgil nodded approvingly, and Janus felt his face heat up just the slightest bit. It felt good to know that his friends approved of the outfit. He took this opportunity to examine both Remus and Roman’s outfits. They were wearing simple, matching suits, with contrasting color schemes. Remus’s was a deep black with a pale green undershirt and a simple black tie, while Roman’s was white (Roman had to be one of the only people who could manage to pull off a white suit and not look absolutely ridiculous), paired with a rich red undershirt that had flecks of gold sprinkled on it. Their outfits matched them well, Janus decided.

Virgil had gone for a less extravagant look, sporting a lilac dress shirt with black dress pants and an obsidian tie. His shoulder-length hair paired quite well with the outfit, the pink at the ends helping to break apart the black and purple from higher up in his hair and in his outfit. Roman seemed to think the simple look suited Virgil, sneaking glances at him when he though nobody would notice.

The four quickly walked up to the front doors of the school, where they presented their pre-bought tickets to the students running the ticket stand. (Roman had insisted on buying their tickets in advance, worrying that if they waited until the night of tickets might have sold out.) As they entered the school Janus could feel his nerves return, no longer able to ignore the thought of how Patton would judge his outfit. Virgil could sense the worry from the other boy and nudged him gently by the shoulder, offering a soft and genuine smile as a source of comfort.

Janus smiled back, glad that his friend wasn’t drawing attention to his nerves. He took one last grounding breath and stepped into the gym, immediately being blasted by Lady Gaga’s voice bursting through the speakers up by the booth at the front of the gym. The dimmed lights coated all of the boys in a slight blue hue as they made their way through clusters of teenagers already dancing, attempting to find their other friends.

Roman spotted Remy first, his sleek all-black suit making him stand out amongst the crowd. Knowing Logan, Emile and Patton would be close by, he led his small group over. Janus opted to stand behind Virgil, still able to be seen but being mostly concealed.

“Salutations, I am glad we have finally managed to locate you four. Emile and Patton were beginning to worry that you had gotten lost on the way here.” Logan’s rather formal greeting was contrasted by his genuine smile, always glad to be in the presence of his friends. Remus immediately began eyeing him up and down, observing his black vest and matching dress pants with a royal blue dress shirt. Suddenly Patton popped out from behind Logan, his positive energy immediately brightening the atmosphere.

“Oh goodness, you all look so wonderful! Vee, you look beautiful with that makeup!” Virgil beamed at the compliment as Janus peeked over Virgil’s shoulder, seeing Patton in a grey suit and baby-blue button down and his classic circular glasses, looking like an absolutely radiant burst of sunshine in Janus’s opinion. Emile came into view, with his coral-pink dress shirt and light grey dress pants. As Emile and Remy began to join in on the conversation Janus stepped out from behind Virgil to contribute, not noticing as Patton’s jaw practically fell to the floor.

Oh god, Patton was going to faint. That was all he could think about as he got the chance to observe Janus’s outfit. His slacks and suit were perfectly tailored and fitted to Janus’s body, showing how marching band had helped increase his athleticism. The tie was also a lovely touch, but what Patton was truly fixated on was the vest.

The glitter reflected beautifully off the lights in the school gymnasium, drawing attention to Janus from anyone who looked. In Patton’s opinion he absolutely shined, and this caused Patton to go into a temporary state of gay panic. He checked to make sure Janus wasn’t watching his reaction, then briskly walked over to stand by Logan. He could tell his face closely resembled a firetruck, he couldn’t shake the lovestruck smile off his face and he found himself babbling incoherently, the only understandable words being “pretty,” and “wow”. If only poor Patton had seen Logan recording his moment of panic from his phone, but luckily Logan would never show anybody with the video. He would just tease Patton with it. Relentlessly. But that was a matter for another time.

After a moment Patton managed to compose himself, and walked back over to properly greet Janus. Smiling his usual bright smile (if not a little wider than usual), he tapped the dark-haired boy on the shoulder.

Janus felt a gentle tap on his shoulder and turned around, only to be met with Patton’s twinkling face, feeling his heart skip several beats as a soft smile formed across his own face.

“Hey Jan! I’m so glad you decided to come tonight! And that’s a super neato vest!” Patton’s tone was as cheery as ever, but Janus couldn’t quite tell what Patton’s intentions were with the vest comment. His insecurities immediately took over, offering a reply in what he hoped was a perfectly casual tone.

“Roman insisted I wear it, but I wondered if it would be too much.” He avoided Patton’s gaze and instead let his eyes fall to the space past the curly-haired boy’s shoulders.

“Oh nonono! That’s not what I meant!” Patton replied a little too enthusiastically, causing Janus to jump slightly in surprise. “Sorry. But I meant it looks really good, er, nice on you! It was a good choice!” He added, this time more calmly. Janus felt the small knot in his stomach come undone at those words, being immediately replaced with a swarm of butterflies. ‘Patton thinks I look good!’

“Oh, well in that case thank you. You look quite nice as well.” Janus was able to look in Patton’s eyes this time as he spoke.

“Thanks! Oh, before we start dancing we should go take pictures at the photo stand!” He suggested to the group, everybody quickly agreeing and exiting the gym to claim a place in line for the photos.

Luckily the line wasn’t very long since the dance had essentially just begun. After around 5 minutes of waiting the eight friends found themselves at the front of the line. They decided to give the teacher running the photo area (their choir teacher, a very sweet man who many of them were familiar with) Remy and Emile’s phones, trusting the two eldest of the group to send the photos to everyone else via group chat later in the evening. The teacher quickly told them that they were allowed to take two photos, one more genuine, well-behaved photo and then a more silly photo before moving to allow them to take their places in front of the snowy backdrop.

The boys lined themselves up with Remy and Emile holding hands in the center. Roman, Virgil and Remus were spread out to Remy’s right, and Patton, Logan and Janus matched them to Emile’s left. They each plastered a simple smile across their face as the first photo was taken, looking poised and elegant. After the teacher gave them the go-ahead to get into position for the second photo Roman decided to make a bold snap-decision. He hastily wrapped his arms around Virgil and hoisted him up princess-style, Virgil letting out a surprised squeak and causing Roman to slightly bump into Remus. Remus nearly toppled over at this but was caught by someone, looking up to see Logan holding him up in a dip position. Not willing to sacrifice this opportunity, Remus simply said “Oh well,” and smiled brighter than he had all night into the camera, with Logan following suit. Emile opted to hop onto Remy’s back, Remy easily supporting the added weight.

Noticing everybody else pairing up, Patton turned to Janus. “Looks like everybody else is posing! Wouldn’t want to be left out!” He swung his arm around Janus’s shoulder, pulling them into a side-hug and leaning in so their heads were bumping each other. As their heads touched he let out a giggle so adorable Janus thought he might just die. Both of them smiling genuinely at the camera allowed the choir teacher to snap the second photo, finding it sweet how close this group was. He handed Emile and Remy their phones as everyone began to untangle themselves. Virgil could be heard grumbling a “Warn a dude next time, Princey.” But judging by the way he was glowing he wasn’t upset in the slightest. Roman began ushering them all back into the gym, eager to get onto the dance floor.

Janus’ head was spinning as they began looking for an open spot on the dance floor, the butterflies in his stomach increasing tenfold. They finally found an area decently close to the center just as Taylor Swift’s “22” began streaming through the speakers. Roman, Remus and Remy were almost immediately able to get into “the groove” as they called it, with Roman being very thankful he was only surrounded by his closest friends. Everybody else felt slightly awkward at first and it took a moment to warm up to dancing among so many people, but eventually they realized everybody else at the dance was focused on their own friend groups. This realization slowly helped each of the boys loosen up, and by the end of the song they were all dancing their hearts out in the small circle they had created.

The next song to play was ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” to which Roman squealed. As they reached the line “Dancing queen, young and sweet, only 17!” Patton, Emile and the twins were thrust into the center of the circle, being the 17 year olds among the group. Feeling the energy among his friends was exhilarating, and Janus was left wondering why he had opted out of dances in the past. This felt so freeing, and he was so genuinely happy. Looking around at all of his frieds’ smiling faces, he knew he wouldn’t need to be convinced to come to another dance from now on.

The songs continued to change, ranging from Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” to the classic Lady Gaga “Just Dance”. At one point “Timber” by Ke$ha and Pitbull was played, giving Remus the exact type of “fun” song he had been looking for. He jumped around wildly, pulling Logan in with him a few times throughout the song “jokingly flirting” and having the time of his life. Everybody else danced along to the song as well, but none of them came even close to matching Remus’ enthusiasm.

Once that song ended a slow song began to play, one Janus couldn’t recognize but Roman immediately announced was Ed Sheeran’s “perfect”. Remy and Emile took to the dance floor, while the six remaining boys opted to step outside for a breath of fresh air.

The group collectively decided to use this as time to take a breather. Standing in a line against the wall, they sat on the concrete, leaning on the wall behind them for support. It was nice for Janus to take a breather, not realizing just how crowded the dance floor had been. The air had started to feel stuffy and hot, though the environment was just too electric to ignore in the heart of the dance floor. He could hear his friend around him breathing deeply, taking in as much of the cool night air as possible. He decided to follow in their footsteps. After around five minutes Roman suggested they should head back inside, always eager to be in the thick of the dancing.

They felt more collected as the bunch re-entered the gym for the third time that night, working their way back into the crowd where Remy and Emile had secured their spot. Everybody quickly fell back into the dancing, no longer feeling any of the awkwardness from earlier in the evening. The song that had been playing eventually faded out into Rihanna’s “Diamonds”, a tune everybody quickly recognized. Janus was so caught up in his own dancing that he didn’t notice Patton slowly working his way through their friends and directly over to him. It was only when he felt a hand brush his that he turned, looking over at the precious boy next to him.

As the song neared it’s chorus Patton linked their hands together, continuing to bounce along to the song. He sang along with Rihanna as she sang through the chorus, looking directly at Janus as he did. He gently swayed and bounced their arms between them, trying to keep the mood light and fun. Once the chorus ended and the song switched back into the second verse Janus quietly asked, “What was that about?”

“Well, your vest is so sparkly and it makes you shine bright like a diamond, so I igured it would be appropriate if I danced with you for this song!” Patton had to be the sweetest human alive. There was no other explanation for the way his words made Janus feel absolutely weak in the knees, opting to no longer hide the goofy grin on his face. Janus felt no need to reply to the statement, letting his smile be enough of a response and moving to continue their lighthearted bouncing. The two continued to dance happily together throughout the song and settled easily back into casual dancing on their own once it ended.

As the event began to near it’s end, Janus could feel the fatigue begin to set in. He had been dancing for a good amount of time, with only three slow songs playing throughout the entire evening. He was sweaty and beginning to feel tired, but the bubbly feeling in his chest remained, his joy still being present within him. He looked around and could see his friends in a similar state. The DJ announced that the last song of the night was about to play, and the students’ ears were suddenly flooded with the voice of Katy Perry with her song “Firework”.

The teens gave their all to this last song, happily jumping along with their classmates and singing their hearts out at the chorus. ‘What a positive note to end the evening on’, Janus thought as the final chorus of the song rang through the school. At this point a good amount of people had left, but every student that was still at the school was singing along to the song’s final notes, letting out a collective breath once it ended.

The boys took a moment to catch their breath before walking over to collect the jackets, cell phones and other personal items that they had set down throughout the evening. Once everything was collected they slowly made their way back to the free parking lot, the cool nighttime air feeling like heaven against their skin.

“So, did you have fun?” Patton stood in front of Janus once again, looking at him hopefully. If Janus weren’t practically buzzing with energy he’s sure he would have melted into the floor at Patton’s tender tone.

“I… yes, I had an amazing time, Patton.” This only resulted in Patton grinning wider, jumping up and wrapping Janus in one last hug for the night. Janus held him there for a moment, squeezing him back tightly before letting go and waving goodbye to Patton, Logan, Remy and Emile for the evening. The group he had arrived with all climbed into his car after saying their goodbyes, beginning to feel the effects of their exhaustion.

The drive home was practically silent compared to the ones earlier on in the evening, allowing Janus to reflect on his amazing evening and feeling very lucky that he was a good driver even in the darkness. He could feel everyone’s fatigue, deciding they were too tired to stop for food. As he pulled up to Virgil’s house he found the emo boy asleep on Roman’s shoulder in the backseat, with Roman being equally passed out and Remus clearly dozing. He gently shook Virgil awake, saying a quick goodbye and letting the boy head inside to get some well-deserved rest. He arrived at the twins’ houses shortly after, nudging each of them awake. Roman didn’t seem to want to fully wake up, leaning on his brother for support as they walked into their own home.

As soon as Janus was parked in his own driveway we worked his way into his home and up to his bedroom, his feet feeling like lead due to his exhaustion at this point. As he opened the door to his room he felt his phone vibrate within his pocket, with the pictures from earlier being sent from Emile. Without looking he immediately knew what the text would be, smirking to himself as he changed into some basketball shorts and a t-shirt. The sleepy boy crawled into bed, plugging his phone in and falling asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. He knew he would remember this night forever, the pure unfiltered glee he felt being hard to forget.

The next day the silly picture was printed out and hung in a spare frame above Janus’ computer, right where it belonged. ‘Yeah, I could get used to this.’

(A/N: Once again, thanks so much for reading! I’m so thankful that I finally got this done. I worked really hard on it the past couple days and it’s my first fully completed fic! I am new to this, so comments and constructive criticism is much appreciated! Have an amazing day! I love you!)

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hillbillyoracle · 5 years

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Healing Your Relationship with Christianity is Foundational Shadow Work for Witches

Many folks come to paganism and witchcraft after a falling out or even just falling away from Christianity. Not all, but a good many. And a lot people rush into this new spirituality with unpacking what didn’t work with the old one which means there’s a lot of baggage around Christianity in the community. I say baggage but a better word would probably hurt or pain because that’s how it often manifests.

And while I definitely do not blame what people experienced with Christianity on them, especially because so many of us were raised in it and didn’t have a choice, I do think people need to heal their relationships with Christianity. What some people won’t deal with is hurting all of us.

The Boundary Problem

One way it’s impacting all of us is because the amount of people saying they left Christianity because they hate “being told what to do” is high and a lot of those people take other people enforcing common sense personal boundaries is “being told what to do”.

I’m still not sure where all this comes from but I do think it’s in part because of hypersensitivity around social norms in religious and spiritual settings. Christian social settings can be extremely invasive and demanding, especially for queer and trans folks. So, I get feeling on edge socially when you’re participating in spiritual communities online or in person.

But not all restrictions are bad restrictions. It’s important to sort through that. People are absolutely allowed to place restrictions on their time, energy, and ways they prefer to be interacted with. And if you don’t respect those boundaries, you’re not rebellious, you’re just replicating what you’re running from.

We Need More Scholars

It’s also negatively impacting our community because people are rejecting reading source texts or “being told what to do” by people who’ve researched more. The latter part is the one I find especially toxic. The amount of times I’ve seen people state basic historical fact or present a primary source and see someone respond with some version of “well you don’t get to determine what’s true!” is wild to me. We can talk about perspective and lenses all day long but there are just some things we have evidence of and some we do not. There are places where we have written records or well-maintained oral histories and some where we don’t.

But too many people lash out at folks who are more knowledgeable in part because they’ve never unpacked their feelings around someone pointing to a text to back up their position in a spiritual setting. And it is absolutely necessary. Just because something is spiritual doesn’t mean it’s not rooted in the material reality of our histories. Those histories are absolutely worth learning.

But too many people want to form beliefs before they’ve ever investigated anything and they don’t want those beliefs challenged. If you make a spiritual assertion, I’m not likely to touch that personally. We all have some beliefs that just are what they are. But if you make a spiritual assertion with historical claims to try to validate them – don’t be surprised when folks ask for sources or you run across information that calls it into question.

Do not mistake this as me saying folks need to know everything before they speak – its not being open to new or better information that I think holds us all up. And to do that folks absolutely need to unpack their baggage with spiritual texts.

Ghosts of Fragile Christianity Past

Fragility is too huge a topic to unpack here but I wanted to talk about it around recovering from Christianity in particular. A lot of us grew up in churches with a tight hold on behavior, dress, and norms. And it’s a mistake to see that tight hold as power. What I’ve come to realize is that hold is actually fragility. It’s purpose is to prevent contact with challenges because someone or some group can’t withstand that.

Please note I’m talking about individual churches here, not Christianity as a whole. Because obviously it’s persisted in multiple different forms just fine. But churches know internal strife spreads much more rapidly in small groups. I have flat out had minister talk about this with me.

The thing is, even if you were on the outside edge of that, you take that with you when you leave. And if you don’t unpack it, you’re going to be constantly on guard for what may challenge you. I’ve talked about information and boundaries but it’s so much more than that.

People are going to share their experiences and it’ll seem like an attack. People will express a different preference and you’ll lash out. People won’t just go along with something you’re saying and you’ll get defensive.

You are going to wind up attacking anyone who is different than you and how different is that from what you left really?

I see it all the time.

How to Heal

This honestly could be a whole separate post but I’ll take a sec to touch on some points that have been helpful to me. Taking a leaf out of trauma-informed care’s approach, my goal for myself was to make Christianity just another religion. To not overgeneralize my experiences to all spirituality or all of Christianity even. I sought out conversations with Christians who were better with being respectful and thoughtful that helped me heal my impressions of what Christianity was. It helped me be less hypervigilant in spiritual settings and I really recommend it.

From the CPTSD approach, I try to watch for when I might be triggered into an emotional flashback. Damaging experiences with Christianity, when you grew up in it, can be so many and so massive that often times you’re not going to flashback to a specific instance when confronted with something in the present. Often times the only thing you have to go off of is feeling the same way you did then.

I also evaluate and support the spiritual needs that went unmet during my time as a Christian. I was not supported at all in my intellectual exploration of spirituality when I was younger. I was told to accept what I was told and actively kept away from information that would challenge it. So one way I meet my needs is by reading spiritual and historical texts so I feel like I have better access to information that supports my spiritual growth. I also seek out spiritual community with folks who accept who I am and have good boundaries as I wasn’t able to have that back when I was Christian.

A lot of healing is meeting our own needs, giving us what folks neglected to give us. We can’t control what people did but we can control what we do now.

Conclusion

It’s absolutely necessary that healing from Christianity gets included in our shadow work.

It’s a constant process, not a thing we achieve. You can’t undo a lifetime of conditioning with a few journaling sessions. I know we’re all at different places with it but I wanted to take some time to nudge people to start pursuing it intentionally.

We absolutely need to do better for our community than what we received from our communities we grew up in.

We need to and we can.

Journal Prompt

What do I associate with Christianity?

When interactions in the witchcraft community remind me of Christianity, what am I afraid of?

What role do boundaries play in my relationship with Christianity?

#shadow work #witch #witchblr

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mirrormirrormag · 4 years

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muslim women's day: autonomy

Happy belated Muslim Women’s Day! This day has become so important for me because it came at a confusing point in my life where I was really unsure of my identity as a Muslim woman. Seeing the accomplishments of Muslim women celebrated in the mainstream was so affirming for me in my journey towards finding what I wanted to do in my life. This year’s theme was all about autonomy which is something that is very sacred to me because no matter where you are in the world, women’s rights to her body and identity are constantly being threatened. And I know I’m obviously late to the conversation regarding autonomy and how it applies to Muslim women, but thinking about this sentiment over the weekend has given me a new perspective.

One of the biggest reasons why I wear a hijab, which makes me visibly uslim, is because it gives me control—and autonomy—over the way my body is viewed and treated in society. It’s not so much so that guys don’t stare at my ass, but more so that my looks don’t play a role in how I’m perceived or treated. In our historically misogynistic society, a woman’s appearance plays a heavy stake in her value and worth in progressing the ideals and agendas that men want to assert; though the dynamics are changing, for the longest time, women were used as a tool rather than an asset on a heavily male team to instill values that contradicted those of women’s that preached empowerment and independence.

Regardless of how outdated Western people perceive my hijab to be, I wear it to free myself of any assumptions or labels a man or woman can use to limit my existence.

The paradoxical irony here is that as a hijabi in America, I already am boxed into an oppressive label that undoes all my efforts to regain autonomy over my existence. Stereotypes about my liberation or my timidness, regardless of how false, are one of the first things assumed about me and other hijabis in the country which takes away our autonomy. Because on top of controlling the way people use my body as a tool, I also have to control the way people view my lifestyle by constantly proving to people that I’m just as worthy as my less-confusing counterpart.

There is always a piece of Muslim women, and women in general, that keeps us tied down to the perceptions of others because no matter how “diverse” an industry insists it’s becoming, it’s still diversifying itself under the male gaze rather than the influence of minorities whose worldview is more authentic than the damaging and perverse perspective of the majority of men.

And on the hot-button topic of diversity and representation, the version of diversity that the rest have chosen to display (using minorities without their voice) is more damaging than helpful to the careers of hijabis who are in the public eye. We have seen a surge in hijabi models, entrepreneurs, and influencers that have changed the western world’s stagnant view of Muslim women for the better. Yet as companies make the effort to hire these women as the faces of their campaigns, it’s harder and harder to discern whether the intentions of said company is exploitative or supportive. There is no denying that in the corporate world, diversity has always been and is still a tool and object molded to their desire.

Just because the topic of diversity has been brought up a lot more than it was ten years ago, the same intentions and efforts are at work to keep minority voices out of the conversation and minority faces in their marketing; the fact that people don’t think that Muslim women are oppressed doesn’t and shouldn’t take away from the fact that our humanity has not been restored and instead more people are taking advantage of us instead. Rather than shifting the culture through these women’s own organic efforts, the exact companies who have been the reason for our dehumanization and degradation are using us in the same exact way, but now it’s not in obvious ways like it was before (excluding Muslim women from conversations).

"The paradoxical irony here is that as a hijabi in America, I already am boxed into an oppressive label that undoes all my efforts to regain autonomy over my existence."

Now, we are losing our autonomy when we abide by the terms and conditions set by men (still) whose interests aren’t aligned with our visions for empowerment, and instead interested in the profit that they can attain from our community. The same systems are still at play even though the means for it have changed. Instead of primarily exploiting women’s bodies as a means for profit—although this is still an extremely pervasive issue in our culture—our society is focusing its efforts on exploiting the diversity and vulnerability of minorities. These large companies, whose products and campaigns heavily influence our culture, know that without their guidance or support, Muslim women will be generally disregarded in the mainstream. It’s sad that in order to gain support, one has to commercialize themselves and make themselves palatable to the superficial needs of Western society, yet we keep giving it power and enable this system’s methods to maintain a monolithic world.

We have seen the influence Muslim women have just through the spaces they have carved for themselves without the “help” of large companies, and we can’t afford to lose the authenticity that has made their brand attractive because we won’t ever be able to branch out from under the wings of the misogynistic media we still enable today.

Obviously this is not to say that Muslim women are sell-outs, in fact all of the incredible work that I have seen in just the past few months will have an insurmountable influence on the generation of girls to come, but we still have to be wary of the selfishness that is still prevalent in society. I know that our community is more than capable of being influential without being the face of the company that has been the most degrading of our people just to prove a point that this thing can be done, and the message that it would send to our culture that our values and humanity won’t be compromised will dismantle the destructive loopholes that have kept ignorant people in power.

I hate that this all sounded more negative than optimistic, haha, so I’m going to share some of my favorite Muslim women who have inspired my voice a lot recently.

Amina Hassan - influencer and my fashion inspo

IG: @blackish.gold

Hoda Katebi - blogger of my favorite website (joojooazad), activist, and sustainable fashion advocate

IG: @hodakatebi

Shahd Batal - youtuber, influencer, my queen

IG: @shahdbatal

Linda Sarsour - activist, speaker, she founded the women’s march and then left them in shambles for bigger and better things

IG: @lsarsour

Marwa Atik - fashion designer and entrepreneur

IG: @marwaatik

#society #identity #hijab #autonomy #hijabi #muslim women's day #muslim women #diversity #representation

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manuscripts-dontburn · 4 years

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Living with Ghosts: Eleven Extraordinary Tales

Author: Prince Michael of Greece

First published: 1996

Pages: 192

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

How long did it take: 1 day

I was hoping for a cozy-creepy reading for an autumn day, unfortunatelly, Prince Micheal failed me yet again. The man is, at best, and average writer, and this book more than any other shows how self-obsessed and special he (thinks) he is. Because this Prince can see ghosts. Literally any place he steps in he can see them and they narrate their stories to him. The worst parts of the book were him trying to "sound" like the female ghosts he chose to present, because they all sound like a machine. And a male one at that. His stories, so completely and obviously made up by him (whereas I had hoped he was simply rewriting an original lore) were uninspired and for most part bland. Finally, the dude cannot even get his own family history accurately right, so how am I supposed to believe even the parts which are supposed to be a real depiction of history? Greatly disappointed.

House of Glass

Author: Susan Fletcher

First published: 2018

Pages: 368

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 7 days

This book is like a strong summer heat, the kind which flows through your bones and closes your eyes and everything feels lazy and languishing, the pleasant type of exhaustion. There are so many aspects to it, and so many things I love, that I do not feel the need to explain and describe it. I just want to bask in its feeling for a little while more.

The Romanov Royal Martyrs: What Silence Could Not Conceals

Author: Mesa Potamos Monastery

First published: 2019

Pages: 512

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 7 days

This book offers yet another view of the Romanovs, their personalities, decisions and influence on the Russian history (as well as guilt/innocence). Naturally one needs to take into account that this ais a book by deeply religious Orthodox Christians about other deeply religious Orthodox Christians and the faith and its importance for the last Imperial family is the underlying theme for this whole book. The writing flows very naturally, and even though at times I thought the book was way too apologetic in regards to Nicholas and his share of blame on the minefield of events between 1894-1917, it does make one consider those events from a perspective rarely explored by historians (who in general tend to be snarky and smart-ass, if not outright damning). Finally, one has to admit this publication is simply beautiful. Richly illustrated with black and white photos and a bunch of coloured ones near the very end as well.

Maria and Anastasia: The Youngest Romanov Grand Duchesses In Their Own Words

Author: Helen Azar (editor)

First published: 2015

Pages: 191

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 5 days

Excellent resource focused on two msot overlooked girls in the family. The letters written by Maria Nikolaevna especially give the Grand Duchess her own distinctive voice.

Man's Search for Meaning

Author: Viktor E. Frankl

First published: 1946

Pages: 165

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 6 days

What makes this recollection of Holocaust different from all other books on the same topic is the chosen point of view. The horrible situation of the prosoners, the torture, the humiliation, all of it is there, but instead the focus is on looking for a viable reason for living. Extremely interesting, uplifting and definitely offering food for thought and self-reflection. The only problem I had was the audiobook, where the narrator, for whatever ungodly reason, decided to speak with a ridiculous German accents every time a fellow prisoner or a guard was quoted.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

Author: Eric Larson

First published: 2003

Pages: 496

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 7 days

What an excellent book! (at least as far as the enjoyment goes)I was honestly surprised at how much it grabbed me and did not let go. The juxtapositioning of the achievement of the human effort and inspiration (and pigheadedness) to the lowest brutality which forms the other part of the human nature was well balanced. Whenever the parts about the World exhibition started to be a bit too tiring, one was thrust into the cold and horrifying world of a serial killer. And when those became too overwhelming, returning to the lights of the White city felt like a welcome reprieve. Definitely a non-fiction worth your while.

Anna Pavlova: Twentieth Century Ballerina

Author: Jane Pritchard

First published: 2013

Pages: 208

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 2 days

This is a beautiful tribute to Anna Pavlova the Dancer and her enormous legacy. It is richly illustrated with high-quality photographs and makes for a perfect cofee table book. Sadly, I still know next to nothing about Anna Pavlovna the Person.

Children of Blood and Bone

Author: Tomi Adeyemi

First published: 2018

Pages: 531

Rating: ★★★☆☆

How long did it take: 15 days

Sooooooo..... this is one of those books I probably would have loved had it been around when I was 14, but at 32 and some pretty decent reading behind me I feel rather indifferent to it. I appreciate the underlying thought as well as the African-inspired setting, but other than that the book felt extremely awkward in pacing (the first half is literally just action with hardly any world-building, other times the story seems to simply stop.... and not do anything). The author holds a promise, but as of this book it is far from genius (the random modernized language thrown into the conversation rubbed me the wrong way) and all three main protagonists were extremely interchangable when it came to their "voices". I prefer some mystery to my stories too, so the very much linear and served-all-at-once kind of storytelling here did not suit me. Add to it the book is full of YA chlichés, and what you get is a competent book that can take your mind off of your own daily worries for a bit, but that could also have been so much more.

Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

Author: Svetlana Alexievich

First published: 1997

Pages: 294

Rating: ★★★★★

How long did it take: 5 days

I have read books about torture and plagues, about wars and pandemics, about murders and slavery, but few of those raised such horror in me, made me so utterly exhausted and left me both angry and just numb. I am one of the children who were born in the central Europe shortly after the Chernobyl disaster and as such I have heard the name and have always had some knowledge of the event. But this book finally put it into perspective, made me aware of the acute danger, criminal decisions and human despair the name of Chernobyl truly stands for. It is as important as it is horrifying.

A Dog's Heart

Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

First published: 1925

Pages: 125

Rating: ★★★☆☆

How long did it take: 5 days

I love Bulgakov with all his feverish energy, poetic descriptions of the ordinary and racing imagination, but though I liked this book, it was, in parts, way too jumpy and sketchy to be truly enjoyed. Would probably work better as a theatrical play.

Marina

Author: Carlos Riuz Zafón

First published: 1999

Pages: 196

Rating: ★★★★☆

How long did it take: 3 days

In spite of some issues I had with the pacing and revelations of vital information..... I enjoyed this book and read it very quickly. It holds the same love of old Barcelona as the author´s more famous The Shadow of the Wind, it has the same issues of feeling abandoned, experiencing first love and raking through a mysterious past to reveal something extraordinary. Unlike The Shadow of the wind it holds some supernatural elements and would make a good read even for younger readers. Me myself just needed a bit more flesh on the solid bones of the story for the book to be simply excellent.

#booklr #wrap up #November 2019

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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The Vindicator

We’re heading back to Canada, the True North Strong and Free that brought us The Final Sacrifice. Our indie movie scene up here is pretty weird and very cheap, and this is a prime example of the latter. It’s a dimly-lit, badly-directed ripoff with shitty effects and a has-been headliner. The perfect thing for Pearl to throw Mike’s way in between her other cruel experiments.

A research guy named Carl is killed in a Science Accident at EvilCo, so his bosses save his brain to make into an indestructible cyborg I hereby dub RoboCrap. Boy, that’s a great idea. Not like he’ll escape and go on a rampage. EvilCo’s boss decides that the only way to get him back is to hire Hunter, a ninja lady played by the closest thing this movie has to a star, Pam Grier. By using RoboCrap’s wife Lauren as bait, they lure him back to EvilCo for a final confrontation. Somehow this all results in people being able to land on Mars. I don’t know. I don’t care.

So despite a title that’s supposed to invoke The Terminator, this is in fact a ripoff of Robocop, and it’s very, very bad. Almost Future War bad, where they really shouldn’t have tried to make this movie on this budget. I can say in its favour that it did understand what was interesting about Robocop and tried to ape that rather than just showing us a cyborg killing people, but it still gets it all wrong.

Let us start with RoboCrap himself – I know his name is Carl because people keep yelling it at him. He’s obviously the Alex Murphy of this story, the guy whose death is co-opted to create a killing machine, and who eventually turns this weapon against his creators while reclaiming his humanity. They do this wrong at every stage. RoboCop made sure we got to know Murphy just well enough to feel for his death and be interested in him rediscovering himself. When we meet Carl we see that he’s at odds with his boss over funding, but this isn’t particularly compelling, and the only thing we know about him on a personal level is that his wife is pregnant. It’s kind of like Hawkeye in Age of Ultron, where the existence of a family is treated as a substitute for characterization.

Having failed to humanize Carl, the movie then fails to dehumanize him. RoboCop presented the title character to us very much as a machine, with very little idea, at first, how much of Murphy was left in him. Carl still knows who he is and soon finds out what he is, and there’s never any doubt even among the bad guys that there’s still a human being under all that machinery. This is illustrated best by the movie’s own visuals – one of the way’s RoboCop hid Murphy’s humanity was to cover his eyes. The Vindicator covers everything but Carl’s eyes.

While I’m on that topic, the suit design is terrible. Robocop had an easily recognizable silhouette that looked convincingly mechanical while not being distractingly complex. RoboCrap here looks like he’s made of garbage. There are far too many little parts and the lighting is so bad you often can’t see anything but a mass of vaguely metallic stuff. Even in daytime shots, you never really get an impression of what this being looks like or what any of this junk does. The fact that you can see the actor’s eyes mostly just emphasizes that this is a stupid costume with a guy stumbling around inside of it.

Look at that. This shot would be forty times better if he were standing in front of the yellow van, where he’d stand out, instead of in front of the scrap metal he blends right into. Morons.

I guess the wardrobe department’s reasoning for leaving the eyes uncovered was that it would allow the actor to emote. It’s too bad they hired a crappy actor. He’s bad as RoboCrap, and worse in the early scenes where he’s just supposed to be Carl. The worst thing he does is shout NOOOOOOO during the science accident, which is so awful it’s hilarious. Then not only do they show it to us again in flashbacks, they also have him go off on another NOOOOOOO when he realizes he’s killed a bunch of people in a sewer. You can’t watch this and take it seriously.

A poorly-handled main character will kill a movie very effectively, but The Vindicator does just about everything else wrong, too. The EvilCo boss’ reasoning for creating this cyborg never makes any sense – in fact, it makes so little sense that other characters keep pointing out how dumb it is! When you know something in your movie is stupid, the last thing you want to do is draw attention to the fact! Nor do we ever really know what it is Carl’s trying to achieve. He hangs around in the sewer, leaves cryptic messages for his wife, and defends himself from a biker gang and from Hunter’s mercenaries. Eventually he reprograms himself to remove the insta-kill mode they inexplicably installed in him, but that happens offscreen and is rather anti-climactic. The insta-kill is established for us in a scene with a lab chimp, where the CEO of EvilCo literally pokes the animal with a stick until it gets so pissed off at him it dies of a heart attack. This is established like it should be a plot point, but we never even see anyone concerned that Carl will Rage To Death. The movie has totally forgotten about it by the time we get that far.

Similarly, we never find out what Carl was threatening to ‘blow the whistle on’ when he argues with his boss. EvilCo is up to some shifty stuff to be sure, but as far as I can tell from the movie we see, it’s all disguised. The development of the robotic limbs was undercover as advanced prosthetics, the indestructible shell was a spacesuit, the mind control was only for use on animals, etc etc etc. Even the people developing this stuff were surprised when the CEO had them bring it all together to create RoboCrap. What did Carl know? We never find out, because the movie never mentions it again. I figured he would try to use secrets as leverage but nope.

Another really weird plot point has to do with the synthesizer in Carl’s house, which apparently has a short circuit or something that picks up radio broadcasts. RoboCarp uses this to communicate with Lauren, but it’s never clear why this is necessary. He’s perfectly able to speak, and there’s no reason why he couldn’t just phone her. Using the synthesizer doesn’t even accomplish anything in the plot – EvilCo has the house bugged, so they’re listening in on the conversations anyway!

The list of crap goes on. There’s an annoying little kid playing in a junkyard who sees RoboCrap and asks him if he’s from outer space. Like the ape raging itself to death in the opening scene, this kid is introduced as if he ought to be important to the plot, but he isn’t – he just stands around going ‘ooooh’ as RoboCrap lifts cars, and then he’s gone. I guess we should be glad of that, because it means we’re not obliged to put up with his ‘cute’ antics for more than a couple of minutes. At the same time, he’s still annoying, and since he doesn’t do anything important, he’s also pointless.

One of the biggest ruined opportunities in the movie was the character of Carl’s co-worker Bert. When they’re introduced they seem to be good friends and Carl asks Lauren to contact Bert for him so that he can ask for help. Bert meets Carl, but it turns out to be a trap by EvilCo, who have rewarded Bert for his help with a promotion. This makes Bert, and the conflict between his loyalty to his friend and his loyalty to his job, potentially quite interesting… but then it turns out he’s just an asshole, who only hung out with Carl at all because he was in love with Lauren. When Lauren rejects him, he tries to kill her.

This means we don’t have to feel bad about it when RoboCrap kills Bert a few minutes later, and neither does RoboCrap himself. But honestly, it would have been a way better movie if we did. Carl and Bert’s friendship was one of the only relationships in the movie that was properly established, and having Bert actually blackmailed into betraying him, and Carl actually forced by his programming to murder his friend, would have had far more emotional impact. Carl is horrified by his own killing but we don’t really feel that when his victims are criminals and his evil bosses.

Is there anything good in this movie? There’s a few things here and there. The lab animals that escape from their cages to kill the scientist who’d been torturing them did richly deserve that revenge. There’s a scene in which some extremely creepy dolls are used to emphasize that Carl has become an uncanny effigy of humanity or something, and it goes on way after we’ve got the idea but it’s all right. It’s also established that RoboCrap will only kill in self-defense, when a perceived threat activates the insta-kill. He states that he doesn’t want to kill people but cannot control this programming – so the bad guys repeatedly bring violence upon themselves when they attempt to attack him. This is clearly intended to be ironic and kind of works. Hunter’s suicide, when it’s very unlikely RoboCrap was actually going to kill her, functions on a similar level.

Man, this movie is bad, and it’s not even bad in a fun way – it’s just bad. It ‘got’ what made RoboCop worth watching but it still couldn’t do anything with that, and everything it could have done with what it had, it fucked up. The result reminds me of that Fix Auto commercial where the kid flails around and ends up whacking his mom’s car instead of the pinata. They could have had something tasty, but instead they just made an expensive mess.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the vindicator #tw: rape #tw: suicide #80s

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bethkerring · 5 years

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10 Tips for Writing Characters with Depression

Depression isn’t exactly the easiest topic to write about, in fiction or otherwise.

I’ve struggled with writing about it personally, and I’ve experienced it, so I know it must be a hundred times harder for people who have never been through it. I’ve seen depression, as well as other forms of mental illness, pop up more and more in books, movies, TV shows, and other forms of popular media, and the quality of that representation is … extremely varied. Sometimes it’s done so beautifully it affects the way I view my own experiences, and sometimes it’s so bad that I worry for how many people it harmed.

I’ve also heard writers talk about how scared they are to write about depression, because they want to do the topic justice and aren’t sure how to present it accurately if they don’t have personal experience. I’m not an expert by any means, but frankly, I don’t think anyone is. Everyone’s experience with depression is different, but I hope that sharing some of the things I’ve learned from my experience and others’ can help writers create characters with realistic and properly represented mental illness.

That said, a quick disclaimer: these tips are, again, based on my personal experience and those of people I know. They are not universal, and not everyone agrees on everything. If you’re writing a story that features one or more characters with depression, please do your own research and listen to as many different experiences as you can.

Also, trigger warnings for, obviously, discussion of depression, as well as brief discussion of suicide.

Good? Good. Let’s go.

1. Depression is an illness, but that doesn’t mean it’s just like having the flu. I’ve heard people compare mental illness to physical illness to make the point that we don’t take mental illness seriously, treatment is harder to get, we blame people for mental illness where we don’t with physical illness, etc. And these are all perfectly valid points. But it’s also important to recognize that the metaphor does, at some point, break down. Mental illness is, indeed, an illness, but the way people experience it and the way it affects their lives is often very different from, say, catching a cold. It’s often a long-term condition, for one, and we know a lot less about the mind than the body. There are some similarities, and mental illness should be taken just as seriously as physical, but mental illness also comes with some unique factors that often make it more difficult to treat.

2. There are countless treatment options, and there is no one universal “cure.” If someone discovers that they have depression, the solution isn’t as simple as “get therapy” or “get medication.” Those are two possible treatment options, but the treatment will depend on the severity of the depression, how long it’s lasted, the individual’s life situation, and, most importantly, what the individual prefers. Some people don’t want to go on medication but like the idea of therapy. Some people can’t find/afford therapy and want to try medication instead. Some people do both. Some people seek other treatment options or decide to give it time before deciding, especially if the depression is clearly related to a life situation. Everyone is different, and treatment options are exactly that: treatment, not cures. What works for one person will not necessarily work for another, and even if a treatment “works,” that doesn’t mean the depression goes away forever.

3. Therapy can be expensive and hard to get - and finding the right therapist is even harder. I’ve only had one experience of searching for a therapist as an adult, and let me tell you, the process itself ended up actually contributing to my depression. Though every country is different in terms of access to good therapy (counseling, especially), my country—America—has a long way to go. First you have to find a good counselor in your area, then you have to see if your insurance (if you have insurance) will cover treatment with that particular counselor, then you have to see if you can afford what the out-of-pocket cost will be, then you have to make an appointment that works with their hours and your schedule (some therapists don’t work weekends or evenings), then you actually go to the therapist and hope that they are a good match. If you’re very lucky, this is the end of the process.

If you’re like many, though, you realize the counselor isn’t a good fit, and the process begins all over again. All while you’re suffering through the mental illness you need treatment for.

It should also be recognized that therapists aren’t perfect: they’re human beings with differing personalities and approaches to treatment, and finding the right therapist is just as important as actually, well, finding a therapist. Because of the position they’re in and how much influence they have on someone’s life, the wrong therapist can potentially make someone’s mental illness worse, or create problems that weren’t there already. Even if a person finds the right therapist, the benefits of that therapy often don’t show themselves immediately, and that good therapist can still make mistakes (saying the wrong thing, making false assumptions, bringing in their personal biases, etc.). Basically, don’t have your character enter therapy and magically end up cured. Therapy can be fantastically helpful and important for someone with depression, but it’s not quick, it’s not always easy, and it’s not perfect.

4. Medication is not a miracle cure. I hope that most people reading already know this, but just in case, it’s worth repeating. Many people with depression have found medication helpful, but there is no “magic pill” to “cure” depression that works for everyone. There are many, many different types of medication, which work in a variety of different ways. Many of them can take weeks to have a noticeable affect, and an individual might need to try several medications—and dosages—before they find what works for them.

Side effects are also very common and can sometimes outweigh the benefits. Even if the side effects aren’t bad enough to stop the medication, they might still be annoying, so be sure to look up the side effects of any medication your character might be taking. Finally, not everyone benefits from or wants to take medication: unmedicated depression is not necessarily untreated depression.

5. Lifestyle changes are also not a miracle cure - but that doesn’t mean they don’t help. I want to be very clear here: telling someone with depression to “just go for a walk” is, frankly, disrespectful toward their suffering. But so is suggesting that they should “just get therapy” or “just get medication.” Treating depression is never simple, and though going for a walk isn’t going to cure longtime depression, exercise and sunlight, among other lifestyle changes, can make a difference to someone suffering from it. Depending on the reason for and the type of depression, someone might find it very helpful to get more sunlight, to take up exercise, to eat healthier, or to spend more time socializing. Conversely, if someone spends all day secluded in their room with blackout curtains and junk food, their depression is unlikely to get better, and may, in fact, get worse. Depression and lifestyle can even become a vicious cycle, where someone feels unsociable because they’re depressed, so they don’t go out, which makes them more depressed. The same goes with not feeling up to exercising because of depression, so lack of exercise ends up contributing to the depression, and eating junk food for comfort, and that junk food making the depression worse. Again, lifestyle may not be a miracle cure (or the sole cause), but consider how your character’s lifestyle may interact with, contribute to, or help their depression.

6. Depression can be caused by a wide range of things, and often more than one. I often hear depression described, almost exclusively, as a “chemical imbalance.” And it’s true that a chemical imbalance can cause depression and, technically speaking, any form of emotion is caused by chemicals in the brain and body. But I don’t believe it’s that simple. Many studies have linked depression to experiences and trauma in both childhood and adulthood. This doesn’t mean that chemicals don’t play a part, or that these experiences don’t affect brain chemistry (they absolutely do), but there is no single cause for depression, and often it is result of a combination of genes, environment, and other factors. Keep that in mind when creating your characters and their backstories. Does your character have a family history of depression? Does this make their family more or less supportive? Has your character dealt with life experiences that contributed to their depression? Is your character dealing with a difficult situation during the story that causes a depressive episode or makes it worse? You don’t have to know the exact balance of nature and nurture—no one does in real life—but consider these factors and remember that depression and its causes are much more complex than you might think.

7. Depression is more than a single episode. That’s not to say someone can’t have just one long (or short) depressive episode, which is then treated and disappears forever, or goes away on its own. That’s certainly possible, but it’s not the norm. Many people with depression experience it as “episodes,” which can be short or long. Those episodes might come about due to a specific event or apparently randomly, and they might end due to treatment or just disappear without a clear cause.

That’s not to say that treatment can’t help prevent future episodes, or make them less severe. But many people with depression don’t expect that their depression will ever completely go away. It might, but for many people, depression is something to treat and to cope with. It may go away for years and then suddenly come back. It may just hit occasionally and, hopefully, less severely as better treatment or coping resources are available. But in my experience, it’s rare that your depression is “cured” just because you feel better. That particular episode has ended, but someone who has proven to be “prone” to depressive episodes is likely to have them again in the future.

8. Stigma toward depression is still alive and well. I’ve referenced this already, but it’s worth repeating: though stigma toward depression (and other mental illness) is getting better, it definitely still exists. People are still accused of “faking it” or “being dramatic” if they claim to have a mental illness, and mental illness is still often brushed aside as not necessarily serious. Plus, the simple fact is that society is much more accommodating and understanding toward physical illness than mental illness: it’s considered more acceptable to ask for a day off of work for a stomach bug than a bad depressive episode, even if they might be similarly debilitating. This differs significantly depending on where your story is taking place, of course, but assuming you’re writing about a real, modern society, many don’t take mental illness as seriously as they should. But this is not universal, and if you’re writing about a society you don’t belong to, please do your research regarding how people in that society react to someone suffering from depression—and remember that your character's family and friends might have personal prejudices that their society doesn’t share.

9. Suicide is a real and important issue - but please be careful writing it. It’s very important to have good representation for people who suffer suicidal feelings. This is a serious phenomenon and people dealing with it should have characters they can empathize with. However, this should not be done lightly, and if you’re going to deal with it in your story, please do your research ahead of time, because bad representation can do a lot more harm than none at all. There are dozens of ways suicide can be written badly, but I especially want to warn against romanticizing suicide and its effects on survivors. Many people who deal with suicidal feelings think that, if they kill themselves, the people who hurt them will finally see the pain they caused and either get their “just desserts” or become better people. Though this feeling is common, this is very dangerous to present as a reality—not only because it (unintentionally) might help convince someone suffering from suicidal feelings that suicide will accomplish their goal, but also because it’s almost always false. Suicide rarely leads survivors to suddenly regret all any harmful actions—even if it does, it often doesn’t happen to the people who caused genuine harm. Usually, the people who wallow in guilt are the people who genuinely cared for the person and did their best to help them, and they will be stuck with that guilt for the rest of their lives—sometimes leading that survivor of suicide to attempt suicide themself. Most often, suicide leaves the survivors confused, angry, grieving, and understanding even less than they did when the person was alive—and in the rare case that they do understand the harm they caused, and regret it, there is still nothing to be done. The person is dead and the survivors live on in guilt. Nothing is solved. Nothing is fixed. There is just more pain. So please, be careful when writing suicidal feelings, attempted or completed suicides, or the reactions and survivors—do your research, read real people’s stories, and consider the effect your writing will have on those reading it.

10. Yes, you can live a full and happy life and still deal with depression. This might sound like some cheesy motivational post, but it’s completely true and very important, both for people suffering from depression and people who write characters who suffer from depression. Just because your character has depression does not mean that they will live a life of constant misery—and your character’s depression does not have to be cured for them to have a happy ending. A “happy ending” for someone with depression might be finding a form of treatment that helps, or coming to understand that things will get better, or learning to ask for help from those that love them. Even learning that they aren’t broken because of their depression can be a valuable and life-changing lesson. Be realistic when thinking about where your character ends up, but also keep in mind that many, many people live with depression and, with time and support, can find a treatment plan and coping resources that allow them to enjoy life and be happy.

Original post on my website.

#writing #writing tip #writing mental illness #depression #writerblr

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beesandwasps · 5 years

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Everything You Will Ever Need To Know About Unicode (And Many Things You Will Not Need To Know As Well)

(This post is specifically being written so I have a single URL which covers all the points involved, and therefore does not necessarily cover all technical/historical points thoroughly even though it is extremely long. For your convenience in skipping it, the whole thing is below the fold.)

A Little History

Once upon a time, computers with keyboards instead of punch cards and switches were new and magical things. Since computers deal with complex data by converting it into numbers, a system was needed to map text to numbers. This kind of system — where numbers in some range, usually beginning with 0 and ending with some binary-significant value — are mapped to printing characters is called a character mapping.

After a certain number of false starts, American computer companies and their English-speaking foreign counterparts settled on ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Most people, even now, know a little bit about ASCII — the main points are:

Uses values from 0 to 127 (that is, values which can be represented in seven-eighths of one byte)

Values from 0 to 31 and the lone value 127 are non-printing characters (including a “backspace” character) intended to transmit control instructions

Contains the digits from 0 to 9, the latin alphabet without accents in both upper- and lower-case, and 32 symbols; the digits are in sequence, as are the alphabet.

Does not contain “curly quotes”, accented characters like “é”, or currency symbols other than the dollar sign “$”

Does not specify which non-printing character signifies a line break/paragraph ending

The line break issue is of some importance, so it’s worth explaining: ASCII as originally formulated treats text more or less as a stream of characters passing through the print head (the “carriage”) of an electric typewriter or old-fashioned line printer. As such, it has two characters which deal with moving the carriage to a new paragraph: “line feed” (LF), which moves the head down one line, and “carriage return” (CR), which moves the head to the extreme left edge of the line. ASCII says that LF is 10 (hexadecimal 0x0A), and CR is 13 (hexadecimal 0x0D). On an electric typewriter or line printer, where there is a physical moving part, a new paragraph is a carriage return and a line feed, in either order, but a computer generally doesn’t need two characters. With typical contrariness, the major families of operating systems adopted three standards:

POSIX-y systems (Unix, and eventually Linux) decided that LF meant a new paragraph, and CR meant nothing.

DOS (and eventually Windows) decided to follow the electric typewriter model, and used a carriage return followed by a line feed, CRLF. Either character by itself meant nothing, and LFCR meant nothing.

“Classic” Mac OS decided that CR meant a new paragraph, and LF meant nothing. (Mac OS X — which is actually a reworking of an older OS originally known as NextStep — is actually a Unix variant; any GUI program using the built-in text APIs will auto-translate all three options when reading a text file, and write LF.)

Obviously, although ASCII is good enough for programming in most computer languages, which tend to be English-y and designed for a certain amount of backwards-compatibility, ASCII was not good enough for other forms of text, which demand better punctuation and support for languages other than English.

There was a longish period during which a number of other character mappings were used in different contexts. Many of them were “extended ASCII” character sets, which used one byte per character, and filled the extra 128 values left by ASCII with extended punctuation and accented characters as support for other languages. By and large, these were encoded into a family of standards by the International Standards Organization (ISO), known collectively as ISO 8859. The most common of these is ISO 8859-1, “ISO Latin-1”, but there are others as well. (Most versions of Windows use a modified version of ISO Latin-1 known as Windows-1252, and the “Classic” Mac OS had an equivalent mostly-overlapping character mapping for European languages, Mac Roman.)

(As a purely historical note: IBM had its own family of character mappings entirely distinct from ASCII, known collectively as EBCDIC: Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. For many reasons, EBCDIC did not catch on — among other things, the latin alphabet was never encoded as a single set of consecutive values — and it is included here primarily so that you can win trivia contests.)

Other languages, however, could not base their character mappings on ASCII. Real support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean requires at least some large subset of the multi-thousand-character system called “漢字” (Pronounced “Hanzi” in Chinese, “Kanji” in Japanese, and “Hanja” in Korean), among other non-ASCII things. For this reason, there were also many pre-Unicode character mappings which used more than one byte per character, and even a few which used a variable number of bytes per character. All of these systems tended to include all the characters of ASCII, but were obviously not directly mappable to any ASCII-based single-byte character mapping.

This was the situation in the late 1980s, when Xerox and Apple began working on what would eventually become Unicode. The first published version of Unicode — which was a fixed-size two-byte encoding intended purely for modern languages in active use — was published in 1991, and an expanded version (essentially the current system from a technical standpoint) was published in 1996.

What Unicode Is, And What It Isn’t

Unicode is a character mapping (and a few other things as well which we won’t go into). It attempts to fulfill (sometimes with more success than others) certain specific goals:

Every character set used in “real” human communication should be representable. (There is a certain amount of fussiness over what “real” means — Klingon is not included, for instance, because it was deliberately invented to be “alien”, but Shavian phonetic script is included.)

For every character set included in Unicode, the order of the characters should ideally follow some popular pre-existing character mapping, if there is one, or at least have some technical justification even if it is only “this is the order of the alphabet in this language”.

Every included character has a numeric value — its “code point” — and a unique name in English, usually represented in all capitals. A code point is properly given as “U+” followed by the value in hexadecimal, padded to at least 4 digits. (That is, “U+0043”, not “U+43”.)

Characters which modify other characters, such as accent marks, should be included. If a modified character is common enough, it should appear as its own character. (For example, a capital “A” with a grave accent, “À” can be represented by U+0041, “LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A”, followed by U+0300, “COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT” — but it can also be represented as U+00C0, “LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE”.) Algorithms are provided to “compose” these combinations into single characters where appropriate, and to compare strings properly with consideration for composition.

The Unicode standard, which is at version 12 as of this writing, is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, which is an international organization not under the control of any company, but including representatives from some companies as well as academics specializing in language. Note that Unicode is not a piece of software, nor is it a font. It is a character mapping, which must be implemented by software companies and font designers who want to display text. Although the application to include new characters in Unicode (or to modify existing ones) is not particularly complex, the process involves deliberation and tends to move very slowly.

It is important to remember that a Unicode code point is distinct from the bytes which will be recorded in a file. Unicode by itself does not specify how a code point should be recorded in bytes, merely which number values correspond to which characters (and how they interact). Unicode code points range between 0 and 0x10FFFF, which means that it would be theoretically possible to encode Unicode directly to disk as a fixed-size 3-byte encoding. In practice, this does not happen; more about this topic below. Certain specific code points are deliberately unused, most notably the 2048-code-point range from U+D800 to U+DFFF and the specific value U+FFFE.

The code points are usually (with a few exceptions) arranged into groups of related characters by language or purpose. These sections are known as “code tables”, and always contain a multiple of 16 characters, some of which may be unused, so that any two code points whose hexadecimal value differ only in the last digit are always in the same code table. (For instance, Mongolian is U+1800 through U+18AF.)

Some general notes on the basic structure of Unicode:

The values from 0 to 255 are identical to those in ISO 8859-1, so that ASCII and the most common “European” encoding have a direct conversion of values.

Most (though not all) character sets which would have a single-byte encoding by themselves, but are not based on the latin alphabet, appear fairly early in the list. (Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Cherokee, and so on.)

The majority (though again not all) of characters used commonly in modern languages appear in the Basic Multilingual Plane, or BMP, which is the range of values from U+0000 to U+FFFF. (In fact, Unicode 1.0 was the BMP.) There are other “planes” as well, and certain ranges of values are designated as “Private Use Areas”, so that programmers can use characters which are explicitly not part of ordinary text without having to switch between Unicode and other systems. (Apple, for example, stores their logo in the system fonts which come with Mac OS X as U+F8FF, so that it can be used in the menu bar and in text.)

In many cases, the Unicode Consortium later added additional characters for a specific language or character set, and so there are many small code tables containing “supplementary” or “extended” characters to previously-defined code tables. (The latin alphabet has 8 code tables so far, starting with “Basic Latin” for ASCII and “Latin-1 Supplement” for the rest of ISO Latin-1, but extending into extraordinarily rare characters up through “Latin Extended-E”, with a brief side trip to “Latin Extended Additional”.) Although the latin alphabet and the CJK character sets have more code tables than usual, there are “supplementary” and “extended” code tables for many others as well.

The 漢字 characters for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean appear only once, mostly in the massive code table “CJK Unified Ideographs”, which stretches from U+4E00 to U+9FFF. (The characters often have different appearances in the different languages, which means that there is a useful distinction between, say, the Korean version of a character and the Chinese version, which Unicode by itself does not preserve, making the single inclusion a contentious decision.) The characters generally appear in order of complexity, with the most common/simplest ones appearing at lower code points — but, as anybody who has perused a reference work involving 漢字 will tell you, “simpler” is not only a relative term but one on which different authorities disagree.

In addition to characters used in spoken languages, Unicode also contains a very wide range of shapes and symbols. Usually, these characters are added in response to their inclusion in some communications system outside of the Unicode Consortium’s control. (For example, emoji were originally taken from Japanese cell phone texting systems, which is why so many of the early emoji in Unicode are Japanese cultural items, like U+1F359 “🍡”, dango. That’s also why all the “face” emoji started off without alternate forms for skin color.) These non-language characters tend to appear in two places in the Unicode table: just before the 漢字 characters, and towards the end of the currently-defined characters.

Recording Unicode On Disk: Byte Sequences and UTF

In theory, you could record all Unicode characters using a 3-byte encoding; more commonly, people think of Unicode as having 4-byte values. While this is not technically incorrect, it is worth remembering that Unicode itself never uses values above 0x10FFFF. (On the other hand, there is a “larger” standard known as the Universal Character Set, UCS, which is currently defined as being identical to Unicode for all defined values, but explicitly says that characters can potentially have any four-byte value, and most software is written with an eye on UCS.)

A method of converting Unicode code points into values on disk is a Unicode Transformation Format (or, if you like, a UCS Transformation Format), abbreviated UTF. The obvious, simple, and almost unused method is to record text as a stream of 4-byte values. This is known as UTF-32, or UCS-4, and is extremely rare in practice.

There are 2 common encodings (one of which comes in two variants) which reduce the amount of wasted space (bytes of value 0) recorded to disk:

UTF-8

UTF-8 is by far the most common encoding found on the web, and also in text files used by programmers. The premise is simple: characters which appear in strict ASCII take up one byte with the high-order bit set to 0 (that is, with a value from 0 to 127), other characters use 2, 3, or 4 bytes with the high-order bit set to 1 (a value from 128 to 255). A valid strict ASCII text file is automatically a valid UTF-8 text file.

The Wikipedia article explains the algorithm in detail, but in short: multi-byte characters in UTF-8 are formatted so that the first byte indicates how many bytes will be used, and the remaining bytes cannot be mistaken for the first byte of a multi-byte character. That means UTF-8 is useful across unreliable transmission methods — if a single byte is lost, the character corresponding to that byte will be lost, but the rest of the text is not jumbled.

In addition, any system which was written with the assumption that all text was ASCII (which includes most command-line tools) will probably handle UTF-8 text without any problems, provided that they do not strip high-order bits or split up any adjacent multi-byte characters. (That is, they will be able to do things like search through the text or wrap it to a maximum line width for display without making it unreadable.) This makes it particularly convenient for programmers and system administrators, who frequently use tools which were written long ago and “think” in terms of pure ASCII text (or, at least, ASCII-based single-byte character mappings).

It is possibly important to remember that, contrary to popular belief, not every sequence of byte values is valid UTF-8 text. There are byte sequences which encode values which have no character mapping, byte sequences which encode values too large for the Unicode range, and byte sequences which encode ASCII characters — which would be readable but still invalid.

The algorithm for UTF-8 can actually handle the entire UCS character set, using up to 6 bytes per character for values outside the official Unicode mapping, and when the UTF-8 encoding was introduced, those additional values were part of the algorithm. By the official standard eventually set by the IETF RFC in 2003, UTF-8 is restricted to valid Unicode values, and therefore no more than 4 bytes per character.

UTF-16 (and UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE)

Much though “tl;dr” synopses are horrible, this section can be summarized as: “unless you are defining your own file type (so that only your program will ever need to read it) and will be storing a lot of text which does not use the latin character set, do not use UTF-16 because it is a mess and invites trouble”.

UTF-16 was — in Unicode 1.0 — the equivalent of UTF-32 in later versions, because all Unicode values used 2 bytes, meaning that recording two bytes per character was the simple, obvious thing to do. It was somewhat wasteful of space for most European languages, since it “wastes” a byte for any character in the ISO Latin-1 character mapping, but even in 1991 when Unicode 1.0 came out this was not an unreasonable strain on existing storage technology. The problems which eventually made UTF-16 unpopular were more subtle and varied.

First was the fact that there are two varieties of UTF-16. Some computers are “big-endian” (that is, the first byte in a multi-byte value is the byte which stores the larger portion of the value, the “big end”) and some are “little-endian”. (The terms are references to Gulliver’s Travels, and are traditional for describing this problem.) So by default, some computers “want” to write U+1234 as 0x1234, with the “big end” first (UTF-16BE) while others “want” to write it as 0x3412 with the “little end” first (UTF-16LE), and since U+3412 is just as valid a code point as U+1234, there is no automatic way to be sure whether a UTF-16 file from an unknown source was UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE.

In order to solve this problem, Unicode defined U+FEFF as a “Byte Order Mark” (BOM) which could be placed at the beginning of a UTF-16 text stream to show which one was in use. (Its character is defined as a “zero-width non-breaking space” — in other words, a character which is technically a space for the purposes of word-count or spell-checking, but takes up no space on the screen, and at which programs are not supposed to break up text for line-wrapping or layout purposes. Since this has no visible or analytical effect on the text at all, a correctly-interpreted BOM in a Unicode-supporting program does not alter the text and can even be safely included in UTF-8 text files where it is unnecessary.) Which solved the problem… except that the overwhelming majority of programs which used UTF-16 did not record a BOM in their files, regarding it as an unnecessary waste of space. As a result, most pure text editors which support UTF-16 have an option to force a file to open as either BE or LE.

When Unicode 2.0 increased the range of valid code points all the way to U+10FFFF, two bytes were no longer sufficient to cover all possible characters. UTF-16 was amended to use approximately the same trick as UTF-8 to extend its range. As it happened, no characters had yet been assigned to the range U+D800 to U+DFFF, and so this range was declared to be permanently unused; characters with code points above U+FFFF are recorded in UTF-16 as a pair of 2-byte values in this range. (More specifically, the first value will be in the range 0xD800 to 0xDBFF, and the second value will be in the range 0xDC00 to 0xDFFF; this gives 1024×1024 combinations, coincidentally the number of values from 0x010000 to 0x10FFFF.) As a result, “modern” UTF-16 is a variable-length encoding — most of the time, it uses two bytes per character, but sometimes uses four.

If a single byte is missed or deleted in transmission (or any odd number of bytes), the rest of the text is garbled, and unless an invalid combination like an unmatched U+D800 occurs, there is no way to detect this algorithmically. If multiple bytes are lost at random, the text will switch back and forth to and from gibberish.

Finally, and fatally in many cases, UTF-16 often chokes old programs which “think” in ASCII, which are often used by programmers. Unfortunately, a very large number of two-byte combinations which are valid UTF-16 are also valid ASCII, so programs which expect to be able to alter ASCII text for convenience can mangle UTF-16 text irreparably.

In particular, line break characters can be a problem with UTF-16 text. Tools such as Git often default to some sort of “auto-translation” mode when retrieving code files, but are not smart enough to catch on to multi-byte character encoding. A file which is converted to the Windows paragraph ending, CRLF, from (usually) the POSIX paragraph ending, LF, will cause the insertion of an extra byte, garbling all the characters in even-numbered paragraphs. Although it is possible to shut off a given tool’s auto-translation mode, it is much easier simply to avoid UTF-16 encoding in favor of UTF-8 from the start.

UTF-7

UTF-7 is primarily used in e-mail. You are unlikely to use it and it is listed here purely to head off questions. It records unaccented latin letters, numbers, and a few symbols directly as their ASCII equivalents, “+” as the sequence “+-”, and all other characters with a “+” followed by the base64-encoded UTF-16BE value of the character. This means that the entire text will consist of ASCII characters, thus conforming to MIME requirements. Since this is extremely wasteful of space without any particular benefit in terms of readability or formatting, it is generally unused as a file format.

#unicode

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threewaysdivided · 6 years

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Quality Should Not Be Binary

In my wanders through life in general - and the internet in particular - I’ve noticed a strange mindset regarding the quality of media and the people who produce it. It’s this weird idea that something is either 100% perfect, flawless and ‘how dare you claim to be a real fan while suggesting there’s anything wrong’, or that it’s completely awful, valueless and ‘you’re a terrible person for enjoying that or thinking it has anything to offer’ - sometimes flipping from one to the other as soon as a ‘flaw’ is revealed, or a ‘bad’ work does something suitably impressive.

This mindset has never really made sense to me. Maybe I’m a just habitual over-thinker who spends unhealthy amounts of time analysing things, but I can’t see how this sort of absolutist approach would do anything other than shut down discourse, limit the value to be had from a piece and maybe make people angry.

So in honour of that please enjoy some indulgently long navel-gazing about critical analysis and media quality.

Disclaimer: This post is going to summarise my personal philosophy. Everyone approaches life - and especially art - in their own way and far be it for me to say you’re wrong if you prefer a different approach. You do you.

Blindness Hurts Both Ways

To an extent I get the simple yes/no mindset. Analysis takes time and it would be exhausting to give an extensive, nuanced breakdown on your view at the start of every discussion. Plus the whole ‘dissecting the frog’ thing can definitely apply to enjoyment of media.

However, taking it to the point where you’re denying the positive side of things you dislike or refusing to acknowledge faults in works/people you enjoy has the potential to swing around and bite you in the butt.

Why deny yourself a useful experience? I think there’s an important distinction to make between being good and being useful. Subjective, technical or, ethical ‘badness’ is not the same as having no value. Similarly, being touching, entertaining or otherwise enjoyable doesn’t preclude something from having genuine problems.

Personally, I can find it difficult to work out exactly what’s going right in a generally positive piece. After all, ‘good’ doesn’t hinge on a single point - it’s usually the product of a lot of things working well together, and it can be hard to figure out cause and effect in a system like that. It’s much easier to look at a failed attempt and identify the specific elements that caused problems, where it had the potential to recover, and places where it might be succeeding in spite of those issues. Similarly, some works can be very strong except when it comes to ‘that one thing’, which in itself is a useful reference. Negative examples can be just as beneficial as positive ones, and turning a blind eye to a piece’s weaker aspects just denies you that tool.

On the other hand, sometimes a piece and/or creator can be ethically awful while being technically strong or succeeding at its intended purpose. In this case, while they’re not positive it can certainly be valuable to analyse the techniques they use, and even apply those tools when selecting and creating things for yourself.

It’s important to remember that acknowledging where something is strong isn’t the same as endorsing or supporting it, and that there’s a huge difference between pointing out a genuine weakness or failing and maliciously hating on a work or creator.

Why give something that much power? Starting with the gentler side, I think it’s important to remember that a work being ‘good’ on the whole shouldn’t be an excuse to gloss over possibly troubling elements or to give creators a free pass on their actions. Sure, even the best-intentioned artists make bad PR and creative decisions sometimes but it’s also valid to acknowledge and call out possible misbehaviour when it crops up, rather than blindly playing defence until it reaches critical mass and undermines the good of their work (or worse, actually hurts someone).

There can also be a danger to simply writing off and ignoring ‘bad works’, especially if you dislike them based on ethical grounds. If something ‘bad’ is becoming popular it’s usually a sign that it’s getting at least one thing right - whether that be plugging into an oft-ignored hot-button issue, or simple shock-value and shameless marketing. Attributing the success of such pieces to blind luck and ignoring any potential merits that got them there opens up the potential for other, similarly objectionable works to replicate that outcome.

Not to mention the issues that can come from letting these things spread unchecked. Think about how many crackpot theories and extreme notions have managed to gained traction, in part due to a lack of resistance from more moderate or neutral parties who at the time dismissed them as ‘too stupid’ or ‘too crazy to be real’. Unpleasant as it may be, I think there’s some value in dipping into the discourse around generally negative media. If nothing else, shining a spotlight on the misinformation or insidious subtext that a work might be propagating can help genuine supporters notice, sidestep or otherwise avoid the potential harms even as they keep enjoying it.

Why lock yourself into a stance like that? Maybe it’s just my desire to keep options open, but it seems like avoiding absolutist stances gives you a lot more room to move. Publicly championing or decrying a work and flatly rejecting any counterpoints runs the risk of trapping yourself in a corner that might be hard to escape from if your stance happens to change later. If nothing else, a bit of flexibility can help you back down without too much egg on your face, not to mention shrinking the target area for fans or dissenters who you might have clashed with in the past.

A little give and take can also help build stronger cases when you do want to speak out. Sometimes it’s better to just acknowledge the counterpoints you agree with and move on to the meat of the debate rather than wasting time tearing down their good points for the sake of ‘winning’. The ability to concede an argument is a powerful tool - you’d be surprised how agreeable people become when they feel like they’re being listened to.

Finally, from an enjoyment perspective, is it really worth avoiding or boycotting what could otherwise be a fun or thought-provoking experience just because you don’t 100% agree with it or have criticised it in the past? Sure, there are absolutely times when a boycott is justified but why deny yourself a good time just because it involves an element that’s been arbitrarily labelled ruinous. ‘With Caveats’ is a perfectly acceptable way to approach things.

Existence vs Presentation of Concepts

A rarer argument that occasionally pops up is the idea that certain works are inherently ‘inappropriate’, ‘distasteful’, or should otherwise be avoided purely based on their subject matter. Usually this revolves around the presence of a so-called ‘controversial’ topic; things like war, abuse or abusive relationships, sexual content, bigotry and minorities (LBGT+ relationships being a big one right now).

Personally I think this is a reductive and pretty silly way to choose your content. No topic should be off-limits for any kind of media. (With the possible exception of holding off until the target audience has enough life experience and critical thinking skills to handle it. There is some value in TV rating systems.) Yes, some concepts will be uncomfortable to confront, but they are part of life and trying to keep them out of mainstream art simply stifles the valuable real-world discussions and conversations they might spark.

What we should be looking for is how a work handles the concepts it chooses to use. There’s a world of difference between presenting or commenting on a controversial topic as part of a work, and misrepresenting or tacitly condoning inappropriate behaviour through sloppy (or worse, intentional) presentation choices. The accuracy of research and portrayals, use of sensitivity and tact, consideration for the audience and overall tone with which a topic is framed are much more worthy of consideration than simply being offended that the idea exists in media at all.

‘Bad’ Art, ‘Good’ People and Vice Versa

I think it’s important to remember that our content creators are, well, people. They’re going to have their own weird taste preferences, personal biases and odd worldviews that will sometimes show through in their output. They’re also going make mistakes - after all, to err is human. Unfortunately, in the creative pool you can also find some genuine bigots, egotists, agenda-pushers, abusers and exploitative profiteers who don’t care about the damage their work might be doing.

It can be discomfiting to notice potentially negative subtext in the work or actions of a creator you like, and upsetting to realise that a work you love is the product of a person who you can’t in good conscience support. Which of course leads to the discussion of art, artists, whether they can be separated and what to do when things go wrong.

Obviously I’m going to be talking primarily about the ethical/moral side of things, as I think most of us are willing to forgive the occasional technical flub, production nightmare or drop in outward quality from creators we otherwise enjoy.

It can also be a touchy subject so I’d like to reiterate that this is just an explanation of my personal philosophy. My approach isn’t the only way and I won’t say you’re wrong for taking a different stance or choosing to stay out of it entirely.

‘Bad’ art from an apparently ‘Good’ person In general, when it comes to apparent bad behaviour or negative subtext from otherwise decent creators, I favour the application of Hanlon’s Razor.

Hanlon’s Razor Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence - at least not the first time.

Art is a subjective medium, with multiple readings and interpretations being possible from the same piece. It’s definitely possible for an author to lack the awareness or experience needed to notice when unintended implications or alternate readings have crept into their work. Sensitive topics are tricky to handle at the best of times and seemingly harmless edits or innocuous creative choices can stack into subtly nastier tonal shifts. Similarly, being a good creator doesn’t automatically make them good at PR or talking to fans - it’s easy to get put on the spot or to not realise the connotations of their phrasing and how it may have come across. Of course this still means someone messed up, and it’s totally reasonable to call them out for ineptness, but I’d take an unfortunate accident over malicious intent any day.

Then there are times when the negative subtext is a lot less unintentional. In that case I think it’s important to make the distinction between creator sentiment and the sentiment of the work, character or their production team (if collaborating) before making a judgement on them as an individual. For example, the presence of casual bigotry might be justified in historical piece that’s attempting to accurately portray the culture of the time, and a creator/actor might write/portray a protagonist with biases and proclivities that they personally disagree with for the sake of a more compelling story. The presence of a worldview within a work doesn’t automatically translate to the opinion of it’s creator.

Similarly, when considering a problematic production or team it’s worth acknowledging which positions hold creative power, if every member is complicit and why a dissenting individual might stay silent; whether out of contractual obligation, a desire not to throw colleagues under the bus or just because they don’t have the financial security to risk rocking the boat or walking away from the role. It’s important to figure out who the buck stops with before we start pointing fingers.

Overall, I don’t think there’s much value in passing judgement on an artist for the troublesome content in a single work. You’ll get more mileage and a fairer assessment from looking holistically across their collection and personal/private channels for telling patterns of subtexts and behaviours. For the most part I prefer to offer the benefit of the doubt until there’s enough supporting evidence or they do something to definitively out themselves. Speculation fuelled witch-hunts are no fun for anybody.

‘Good’ art from ‘Bad’ people Exactly what defines a ‘bad’ creator will vary (there’s a reason I’ve been putting the terms in inverted commas). Whether it’s a disagreement with a key opinion/ creative philosophy/ method, that they’ve done something actually heinous/ illegal, or anywhere in between, enjoying a work while being in conflict with the creator can be a difficult situation to reconcile. Personally I think there's power to the Death of the Author argument in these cases:

Death of the Author An author's intentions and biographical facts (political views, religion, race etc.) should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing.

If you’ve found value or enjoyment in a work then you’re well within your rights to enjoy the work on those grounds, even if the message you’ve personally taken from it runs counter to the original author’s opinions or intentions.

It’s also important to remember that a creator’s personal and/or moral failings don’t retroactively invalidate their skill and achievements in their field. It’s possible for a person to continue offering valuable insights, observations and lessons on their chosen speciality in spite of their other behaviour or stances. Their work can have value in isolation, although it may be worth taking the information with a grain of salt when it comes to possible biases.

This becomes a little harder when the disagreeable sentiments bleed directly into their creations but, again, there’s no reason why you can’t decide that the strengths of a work are worth looking at even if they take some squinting past uncomfortable elements to appreciate.

The question should never be ‘can I still enjoy the art?’ because that answer is always yes - if you liked it before learning about the artist then you’re allowed to keep doing so afterwards. The new context may add caveats to the discussion but it doesn’t demerit the existing positive aspects.

However, Death of the Author runs into problems when the creator is still alive. If the artist is out of the picture then you can engage freely without any financial support or publicity going back to them. When they’re still around the question becomes ‘do I still feel comfortable supporting them?’ This is particularly relevant when it comes to online creators, as just interacting with their content can generate passive ad revenue, increase view counts and contribute to algorithm boosts.

I honestly don’t think there’s any one answer to this particular question. It all comes down to a personal case-by-case judgement; weighing the severity of the conflict against how much you value their work and, in the case of creative teams, whether you think their colleagues are worth supporting despite them. Even if you decide to pull back there are soft options before going for a full boycott; using ad-block to limit passive financial contributions, buying physical media second-hand or lending/borrowing hard copies to avoid generating any new purchases.

There are creators that I disagree with politically but continue to enjoy because their stance isn’t especially harmful or is relatively minor compared to the value of their work. There are creators who I no longer want to support but whose pieces I like enough that I don’t regret having purchased from them in the past. On the other hand, there’s a creative team whose content I adore in isolation but who I’ve had to drop entirely after their leader was outed as an emotionally manipulative office bully. Where someone else would draw that line comes down to their own personal standards, and it wouldn’t surprise me if another person took a completely different approach.

Don’t be a Jerk

I feel like this should go without saying. Rational discussion is great. Being able to have a critical discourse - even one that’s focused on the more negative sides of a work - is wonderful. Opinions are fun.

However, the thing with opinions is that a lot of them differ. We aren’t always going to sync up and there are times when you shouldn’t, and won’t be able to, force someone to agree. In that case, please don’t attack them over it. You don’t have to like or respect their views but some basic civility would be appreciated. You’re trying to have a conversation, not win a catfight. Condescension, derision, high-horsing, ad hominem and otherwise getting personal doesn’t tend to win many friends or endear them to your perspective. And to the rare few who go so far as to threaten or harass fans, creators and their families; that’s an awful, completely unnecessary, out of line thing to do. (Seriously, never do this, it won’t help and just makes you look crazy. Also, it can be considered criminal behaviour.)

It’s also important to know when to let things go. You’re not always going to be able to turn the tide and constantly chasing the argument, stirring the pot and fighting waves of push-back eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns. No matter how important the issue is there’ll be times when you’re just screaming into the void. The best you can do is make your peace, say your piece and take your leave. After all it’s not the school playground. And unlike the playground, we’re not obliged to stick around.

Value Judgements: It’s Good to Examine Your Tastes

At the end of the day I think you get more mileage from reaching an opinion based on a value judgement of a work’s positive and negative sides than you do from just bandwagoning into blind adoration or hate. ‘Perfect’ and ‘Unsanctionable’ aren’t binary boxes - they’re points on a scale, and figuring out where you stand on a piece can be a useful mental exercise. Even if your opinion ends up matching the general consensus, at least you know how you got there and can defend yourself if challenged.

If nothing else this kind of thing can help you figure out what elements you like, dislike and prioritise in media, and where your personal boundaries lie in regard to different issues.

Still, even after all this there are plenty more factors that determine whether or not you’ll enjoy something. I’ve dropped way more pieces for not being to my subjective liking than I have due to technical or ethical flaws. Your tastes are your own, and if needed you can stop the conversation at ‘it’s just not my thing’.

In the end there’s no ‘correct’ way to be a fan of something. We’re all just here to have fun. So try not to be an ass when you run across someone who does things differently.

#Scattered thoughts #thinking about media #examining your tastes #acknowledging flaws doesn't make you less of a fan #no work is perfect #your tastes are your own #and that's fine #critical thinking #long post #really long post

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logh-icebergs · 6 years

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Episode 30: Lost Things

March 18, 798/489. In the Empire, Reinhard’s fleet prepares to warp Geiersburg Fortress into the Iserlohn Corridor. On Iserlohn, Yang prepares to submit to a dubiously lawful inquiry by the hostile—but democratically elected!—Alliance government. Hilda convinces Mecklinger to pay a visit to her sick cousin, who teaches us all about the importance of having hobbies. And Geiersburg’s test warp, thanks to Kempf and Mueller’s adept leadership, goes off without a hitch. Meanwhile, Reinhard sinks deeper into depression, Julian blows off steam at the shooting range, and Reuental and Mittermeyer (you guessed it!) go on a date.

Reinhard Alone

Reinhard may be dead inside, but he still looks amazing. Episode 30, in particular, has some of my favorite animation in the series, so please enjoy all the ridiculously beautiful heartbreak as much as you possibly can through your tears.

We haven’t spent much time with Reinhard since the traumatic season 1 finale, so we’re long overdue for a check in with our fast-rising Empire-side hero. How’s he been doing?

Not great! (From episode 28.)

Once you're immersed in how LoGH tells stories, it’s tempting to say that Reinhard’s newly sour affect “should come as no surprise,” given what he’s been through. And though that is true on an in-universe level—nobody who suffered the tragic loss of a long-time romantic partner only months ago should be expected to have recovered already—it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that surprise at the way LoGH treats Reinhard’s grief is unwarranted.

In my episode 26 post, I talked about how my past experiences as a queer consumer of media had primed me for LoGH to handle Kircheis’s death poorly, and what a surprise it was when my expectations were subverted. In that light, Reinhard’s grief—the way it changes him, the way it has a tangible presence, the way other characters tiptoe around and discuss it—is a surprise. It’s a constant reminder not just of how important Kircheis was (and still is) to Reinhard, but also of how committed LoGH is to treating its queer characters and their relationships with respect.

LoGH can be a difficult show to watch. Not only does it have over a hundred incredibly dense episodes to get through—some of which are basically impossible to parse unless you watch them more than once—but it’s also deeply, sometimes overwhelmingly sad. Depending on the context, though, that can be good, or at least validating. And Reinhard’s grief, upsetting though it may be, is fundamentally important to a queer reading of LoGH.

Like I said during episode 26, Kircheis’s death is a turning point for the slow dissolution of LoGH’s heteronormative surface reading. And the unflinching portrayal of Reinhard’s grief from here on out is evidence of an ongoing decision on the part of LoGH’s creative team to allow what was formerly confined to subtext to remain above the surface.

The Locket

The way Reinhard’s voice softens when he talks to “Kircheis” via his locket is dramatic and says a lot more on its own than is possible to express in a mere text caption. If you missed it the first time, definitely go rewatch this scene in episode 28 (the timestamp is 3:45) to get the full effect.

The most obvious manifestation of Reinhard’s grief is, of course, his locket, in which he keeps a family photo and a lock of Kircheis’s hair. Some of Reinhard’s colleagues, as I’ll get to in a minute, worry about him because of how much he’s changed since Kircheis’s death. But I would argue that a lot of what’s so disturbing about Reinhard’s transition into Life Without Kircheis is the lack of change, at least in one respect: He still relies on Kircheis for emotional support, as is evident in the gifs above, and for strategic advice, which we see a bit of in episode 30 (below), and will see more of in the future.

Hilda is particularly attuned to Reinhard’s new habit of playing with his locket whenever—were Kircheis still alive—he might have looked to him for input, approval, pushback, or whatever.

There’s nothing inherently unusual about accessing one’s memories of a departed loved one for guidance, but Kircheis was Reinhard’s only intimate relationship before he died, and now that he’s gone, Reinhard still shows no interest whatsoever in diversifying his support network. As a result, his only intimate relationship is now with an inanimate object—or, to put it another way, he has nobody.

Of course, Reinhard’s isolation isn’t entirely self-imposed. Annerose was also a source of strength and comfort before she voluntarily withdrew from his life. If things had gone differently and Annerose had stayed, Reinhard might not feel so lonely—but would that have been healthier, for either of them? I’m not sure. My guess is: not significantly.

Other People

I’m not sure Reinhard realizes how obvious it is to everyone around him the extent to which he’s been utterly destroyed by Kircheis’s death. The fact that he wouldn’t care even if he did realize is, well, not unrelated.

From the relatively trivial to the life-altering, rumors and hearsay play a substantial role in our understanding of LoGH’s world and characters. Reuental and Mittermeyer, who have already spent a good deal of time gossiping about Reinhard and will continue to do so far into the future, are responsible for a good portion of the Empire-side gossip that we see—probably as a factor of their daily standing date. In episode 30, Reinhard’s two highest ranking admirals discuss the depths of his grief in vague terms:

It’s worth mentioning (as always) that Reuental and Mittermeyer’s bodies during this scene are beautifully aligned, without being symmetrical. The line of Mittermeyer’s torso is precisely parallel with Reuental’s left arm! Look at it! In case you hadn’t noticed, I am in awe of the animation team’s treatment of these two.

Reuental and Mittermeyer’s discussion of Reinhard and Kircheis is, of course, about more than just Reinhard and Kircheis—this is Reuental we’re talking about, after all, and he is pathologically incapable of saying one thing without also meaning at least five other things. For the time being, though, this scene mainly adds another, third-person dimension to Reinhard’s grief: We already know how it is affecting him personally; now we also know that it is affecting the people around him, that they’re aware of it, and that these are important enough facts to merit scenes of this length devoted to conveying them.

Hilda, on the other hand, is a lot less prone to gossip than Reuental and Mittermeyer—or maybe she just hasn’t found the right gossip partner?—so her feelings about Reinhard’s situation are communicated to us differently, mainly via looks (above) and internal monologue:

Worry not, dear reader: I’ll be spending tons more time on Hilda and her well-articulated emotional intelligence in the very near future. For now, feel free to repeat “Hilda knows everything” to yourself whenever you see her on your screen, because that basically sums it up.

I also love this little exchange, after Reinhard shuts himself away (again) in the room on Geiersburg where Kircheis died:

Kempf and Mueller’s quick look of mutual understanding here is so simple, but goes a long way towards expressing that the topic of Reinhard’s grief is never far from anyone’s lips among the admiralty.

These are all—even the lengthy conversation between Reuental and Mittermeyer—comparatively small moments in the overall landscape of LoGH. But taken together, they convey that Reinhard’s grief is not small; not for him, not for the people around him, and not for the galaxy.

Reinhard’s Oberstein Eyes

On a subtler character note, remember a few episodes back when Rebecca likened Reinhard’s eyes to Oberstein’s? Well, you may have thought she was being facetious, but she extremely was not. Allow me to demonstrate:

Here are Oberstein’s eyes as they appeared in episode 4. Their most noticeable trait is, obviously, the fact that they’re flashing red. But another distinctive characteristic of Oberstein’s eyes is that they don’t have any highlights or other details beyond the pupil and flat, uniformly blue iris.

In contrast, this eye-heavy moment from episode 28 is a good example of how eyes are typically animated throughout LoGH—with the remarkably consistent exception of Oberstein’s which are, of course, artificial. Mittermeyer and Reuental’s eyes here both have distinct highlights, and seem to move naturally.

Here’s an example, from episode 9, of how Reinhard’s eyes in particular have been depicted before now: Note the visible highlights that change and move with his expression. Reinhard’s eyes do a lot of characterization work for him, and obviously got a corresponding amount of attention from the animation team.

Compare that to Reinhard’s eyes here, in this moment from episode 27. Like Oberstein’s eyes, Reinhard’s irises are now flat and lifeless. They don’t move with the rest of his face and have none of the energy we’re used to seeing from him.

But unlike Oberstein’s, Reinhard’s eyes aren’t synthetic. So when he lets his guard down—which he can only do when he’s alone with his memories of Kircheis—we see unbridled pain and anguish flood back into them. Poor Reinhard.

Stray Tidbits

Can someone please explain to me exactly what is going on here? Why does Yang’s desk only go up to Schenkopp and Cazellnu’s knees? Why is Yang proportional to his weirdly tiny desk? Why is his entire head smaller than Schenkopp’s crotch? This single screenshot keeps me up at night with questions.

Maybe the furniture store that sold either Mittermeyer a tiny chair or Reuental a huge chair also has a location in the Alliance.

Try to imagine something more suspicious than not having a pet. How about liking books more than pets? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Time for some fun facts: Other than Da Vinci, the three historical figures that Hilda’s cousin mentions are Cao Cao, Lazare Carnot, and Tughril Beg. Biographical info on Cao Cao and Lazare Carnot makes it pretty clear they were both, like Mecklinger, Renaissance men who had a wide variety of cultural accomplishments in addition to their political/military careers; it’s harder to find information on Tughril Beg but my guess is that he falls into the same category.

#Legend of Galactic Heroes #Legend of the Galactic Heroes #author: Elizabeth #Empire #Reinhard #grief #queerness #eyes #Reinhard's locket #Geiersburg #gossip

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