#tfw you come from wealth and so you are the only person in the narrative capable of leaving the realities of life behind

[even-disco-baby]

DOLORES DEI — “I don’t *understand* you, Harry. You aren’t dying, you’re just sad. Why is everything an apocalypse to you? People don’t die of sadness! I’m… I’m not trying to kill you, Harry…” Her holy gaze falls to her feet. “I never wanted to hurt you at all.”

DRAMA — She speaks the truth, sire. All she ever did was love you.

RHETORIC — No. Don’t let her control the narrative. She’s *wrong.* People die of sadness every day. Sadness the likes of which she has never and will never know. Tell her about the body on the boardwalk, his mouth full of chewing gum to mask the smell of disappointment. Tell her about René’s angry little heart full of barbs and spines that repelled all but one man. Tell her about Cuno’s father, wasting away and leaving nothing but a specter that will dog his son’s footsteps forever. Tell her about Ruby. Tell her about the Bad Day.

“I never wanted to hurt you, either. I just wanted you to understand *my* hurt.”

“Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.”

DOLORES DEI — “But that’s not true, is it?” Her beautiful eyes are full of pain. “You *did* want to hurt me. You wanted me to be sad, too. And then you wanted me to leave you and prove that you were right about everything. About me, about life…”

She sighs, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “Well, you got what you wanted. I’m gone and I’m never coming back. Are you happy? Does it feel *good* to be right?”

INLAND EMPIRE — Nothing will ever feel good or right again. You have made certain of that.

RHETORIC — It feels better than the constant dread of being abandoned. It feels like vindication.

“I never wanted to hurt you, either. I just wanted you to understand *my* hurt.”

“Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.”

DOLORES DEI — “This again!” She pinches the bridge of her nose, and the gesture makes her look strangely more human. “What do you want me to say? ‘I’m sorry for not being born poor?’ ‘I’m sorry for not being an alcoholic?’ ‘I’m sorry I don’t want to die?’ I’m not going to ruin my life just to understand where you’re coming from, Harry!”

And then, her expression softens. Like light passing through stained glass. “You’re not well, Harry. You don’t need to die. You just need help.”

EMPATHY — She genuinely wants you to be better. And she believes that you can be.

RHETORIC — But she fails to understand the difference between you two. Poverty, addiction, the pain wracking your bodymind… She can leave these realities behind. Go back home to her parents, start a new life on another isola and be a new person. And so she did, and so she is. But you? It’s too late for you. It was too late from the moment you were born, in the death throes of the revolution. It was her people that killed it.

VOLITION — Is any of that her fault? Is it wrong for her to save herself from you, just because you can’t? You can be sad and angry at this wedge the world drove between you, but why did you have to misplace that anger? You took it out on her just because you could. You made it impossible for her to stand by you without getting stabbed in the back. You even became a cop so you could take it out on other people, too. Stop this, Harry. No more cruelty.

“There is no helping me. The world isn’t built to help people like me. I realized that in Martinaise. None of us can just *leave.*”

“Fuck you. You don’t know what I need.”

“I want to get better. Would you love me again if I got better?”

DOLORES DEI — She smiles, and it’s tinged with pity. “Oh, Harry… You are what you are. I’ve already forgiven you for that. And you may not forgive me, but I am what I am.” She closes her eyes, head bowing just slightly, almost like a prayer. “But we cannot *be* together anymore. Don’t you see that? There is nothing good left that can come of it. It would just be… more of this.”

Her Innocence Dolores Dei opens her eyes and looks around her— at this strange set you have constructed to act out a million different conversations that all end the same way. “I can’t live in your nightmares, Harry. And neither can you.”

VOLITION — You don’t have to anymore. Let her go, Harry.

“See you tomorrow.”

“Goodbye, Dora.”

DOLORES DEI — She smiles that pitying smile again. It’s not going to be that simple. “See you around, Harry.”

INLAND EMPIRE — You can try to rid yourself of this place, this feeling… But it will come back to you eventually. What you build at low tide will be swallowed up again someday.

VOLITION — And then you’ll build it again. As long as you live. You can do it.

#disco elysium #harry du bois #dora ingerlund #dolores dei #suicide tw #dora is. so juicy to me. #tfw you come from wealth and so you are the only person in the narrative capable of leaving the realities of life behind #but the leaving is exactly what deprives you of a voice in this story #except from the pov of your shitty unreliable narrator ex #who can only remember you as a vague concept to project both his own self loathing and his directionless anger onto #but there’s also kernels of truth to certain things he remembers about you #which is that class drove a wedge between you that prevented you from being able to even imagine what was going on w him internally and why #but he only drove that wedge farther and made it impossible for you to bridge that gap #are you the villain in this story? are you a martyr? #you’re neither. you’re just a human with no power over the circumstances of her birth #but more power over what course your life takes than other characters in this story #and so you get to live in one new world at the cost of another

[babygirl06301]

A Letter to Certain SPN Fans Post-Series Finale:

Y’all may wanna sit here and act like we only say the finale sucks because we didn’t get Destiel, that we ignore Sam, that we would’ve been fine if it was gay.

Well, check your facts, kid, because I’m pissed for so many reasons.

Castiel/Misha not getting the respect he deserved after 12 years of being a part of this show and, quite frankly, saving it a lot of times.

Sam not getting to enjoy a life of freedom with his brother he fought so hard with for years.

Sam not getting marry the woman he was so, so happy to have and so, so scared to lose (and even if you say his wife could’ve been Eileen, it doesn’t fucking count it the writers couldn’t even say so).

Dean having 15 years of development totally undone by one stupid decision to kill him off right after he became comfortable with himself and gained the freedom he’s never had.

Bobby being the only fan favorite in the finale even though the finale was supposed to be about the family the boys have built around them.

The complete lack of acknowledgement or grieving for the loss of Cas from either Sam or Dean, which narratively, makes no fucking sense after the impact Cas’s exit scene had.

Barely a fucking smile from Dean when he heard that the second most important person in his life--the one he wept over while ignoring his own brother during a highly critical time--was alive and kicking around in heaven with him.

Castiel’s confession being completely ignored and not brought up again (which you can sit here and bitch and say is a Destiel thing, but fact of the matter is, in not bringing it back up, they essentially made that scene pointless for how impactful it was; narratively, once again, that makes zero sense). 

Then comes Destiel. Destiel is such a small portion of it, and most of us would’ve been happy with some nod to the fact that Cas and Dean interacted at some point in the finale and were going to spend eternity together alongside Sam. And really, if you stop lying to yourselves about what it is we’ve seen from the this show since Dabb took over--and I’m not even asking you to look at the whole show here--it has been a definite and clear shift to Dean caring about and loving Castiel in a new and profound way. Cas’s confession was the bookend to that, an opportunity for Dean to let himself love freely like he could now live freely after Chuck--and the writers just ignored it so they wouldn’t have to deal with it.

I’m not pissed because we didn’t get gay sex, I’m not pissed because the entire episode wasn’t about Castiel, I’m not pissed because I think the show revolves around Dean and Cas instead of Sam and Dean.

I’m pissed because all three of the leads got done so fucking dirty in this finale, and Team Free Will as a whole got done dirty, too. 

Even if you want to ignore the development between Dean and Cas for the past few years, their relationship still deserved to be acknowledged in the finale of the entire series because it has reshaped this show in such a profound way and given so much meaning to it. To ignore it is to ignore an entire portion of both characters’ development.

Even if you are satisfied with Sam’s ending because he got to have a family, he should’ve at least gotten the confirmation that the woman he loved so dearly and who loved him back was the one he got to start a family with. He should’ve been able to share that family with his brother, even if only for a while.

Even if you think Castiel’s confession being acknowledged had no place in the finale, Castiel himself still deserved a better ending than being killed off two episodes before the finale and then barely being mentioned in the actual finale. If the finale was meant to be about family, then the lack of Cas is absolutely unacceptable for the amount of love and quality and meaning his character put into the show.

Even if Dean dying in a hunt was fine for you, he shouldn’t have died so soon. He shouldn’t have died without getting to be happy like Sam got to be happy. He shouldn’t have just been sent to heaven to drive around for ten minutes before the end.

Even if knowing that Team Free Will ended up together in heaven is satisfying enough to you, the bullshit of not seeing all three (or four, if we count Jack in TFW 2.0) of them together one last time is a slap in the face to the fans who were expecting a goodbye and some type of closure for this show that we’ve all loved for so long.

You can love the finale if you want to. Some parts of it would’ve been perfect had they been done well. But for those of us who wanted writing that honored the wonderful stories and characters that’ve been built up over the last decade and a half, it just didn’t cut it.

So, please, try not to boil down our discontentment to “it should’ve had Destiel” or “Castiel is more important than Sam and Dean.” For some of us, those are factors, but I promise you there is a wealth of reasoning behind every Castiel post or every Destiel post that explains why the finale sucked for each person. Hell, you don’t even have to be a Destiel fan to understand why the points I’ve made make sense and why that means the finale was subpar.

Am I Destiel fan? Yes. Does the finale still do an injustice to the fans regardless of the ships they ship or the characters they love? Yes. We hoped for more, but in the end, it was still Supernatural.

#supernatural #spn s15 #spn series finale #spn 15x20 #castiel #destiel #dean winchester #sam winchester #eileen leahy #saileen #bobby singer #i'm expecting shit for this post #and i welcome it #2020 man

[speedofcattle]

Deconstructing RBC’s InvestEase Advertising Campaign

A quick glance at any number of ads these days can be a relatively simple way to gauge how much more dystopian things are getting. This morning, I looked up at the ads on the subway to notice that Marvel had decided to flaunt their wealth and power in the entertainment industry by buying out every single ad-space on the train to advertise Captain Marvel. Shortly after, I checked my email and saw one from Linkedin reminding me that though it might seem as if there are no jobs, there actually are, they’re just not located conveniently, geographically speaking; for example, there are many jobs in Amazon warehouses just outside of cities - well, why didn’t they say so in the first place? I’m sure those are jobs everyone wants right now!

Anyone who knows me knows I think a lot about advertising, and recently most of my writing about it has been concerned with how it happens online. However, I’ve also recently taken a strong interest in ads that appear in physical space since moving to a city whose transit system is plastered with such ads. One group of them in particular has stuck out to me as of late, and I figure it’s insidious enough that it’s worth deconstructing: This is the group of ads focused on promoting RBC’s “InvestEase”.

The ads in question are a series of images that all follow the same basic formula. They are almost always grouped together in a series on subway platform boards and appear at strategically-chosen locations of high traffic (as well as, conspicuously, high student traffic; I’ll get to that in a minute). What interests me so much about them is how blatant they are in their tactics and how consequently easy they become to deconstruct.

Let’s start with some basics on the ad series as a whole before moving on to look at the individual instances. The ads, as previously stated, are advertising RBC’s “InvestEase” service, which, if the ads are to be believed, make the process of investing “easy”. They appear to be targeted towards “young” people. Just what this vague category entails is not always so easy to define; the ads depict a series of people who look to range from their late 20s to late 30s, but given the ads’ recurring theme of “looking towards the future”, they may also be targeting those slightly out of that age range (eg. early 20s).

The target age range is likely what it is due to corporate anxiety over whether or not younger consumers will invest at the same rates as previous generations. Since banks rely on this for their profits, it is no surprise this anxiety would arise. I can still remember a couple years ago when a small social media campaign began against RBC attacking them for investing customers’ money in anti-Indigenous pipeline-related activities*. It seems that the strategy of these ads is thus to project their anxiety back onto the generation in question in an attempt to make investment a point of serious concern in their everyday lives.

But it can’t be too serious - young people don’t like that. So RBC has chosen to co-opt a specific format popular in young people’s internet humour: the ads take the form of memes. Not just any memes, mind you; specifically these ads fall into the genre of “reaction images”. This genre is typically comprised of two parts: a textual statement of a condition (most often beginning with “When…”, eg. “When you work three jobs but still can’t afford rent in your city”) and an accompanying image, usually of a person, meant to reflect what this condition “feels like”. This is the most recent form of memes in this genre that I’m aware of; the “ancestor” of the meme, so to speak, is likely the “tfw” meme from 4chan. Initializing “That Feel When” (eg. “tfw no gf” - “gf” being itself an initialism of “girlfriend”), memes of this type would take mostly the same format as more recent reaction images, albeit with the slightly amended text and a more limited range of accompanying images - typically one would see either “Pepe” or the “feels guy”**. My guess is that “tfw” memes gave way to the reaction image format partially because of the former’s limited range of accompanying images, partially because of its tendency towards cryptic initialisms that are not always easily understood by audiences of different ages/linguistic profiles and partially because of its association with 4chan in the first place, which has come to be seen in more recent times as a “toxic” site, one to avoid reference to in social settings.

There are three main things that interest me about RBC’s use of reaction images for this ad campaign. The first is that the actual images involved are not well-established stock photos or photos cultural icons, as most reaction images tend to be; they are instead uniquely-created content meant to better reflect the values RBC is trying to sell to encourage the use of InvestEase. The second thing that fascinates me is that these ads have managed to do something that many ads online have failed at time and again: they have successfully deployed a meme format without it coming across as overly “cringe-y” to young people. Now I can’t say that with 100% confidence, and obviously my deconstruction of these ads is probably only going to make them seem more that way - but on the other hand, I haven’t yet seen anyone post pictures of them online to mock them for trying to appeal too much to “the youth”, despite the fact that this is exactly what they’re doing. The third thing I wanted to note is somewhat related to that last point: the ads have also accomplished something (relatively) new by successfully bringing a digital advertising format (memes) into a physical format with almost no “glitches” or turbulence. This sets a precedent for other companies and I now wonder if we won’t see far more of these in subsequent years.

Beyond the youth target in terms of age, these ads have a couple other demographic qualities worth noting. While some of the ads depict people with worried expressions on their faces, most depict seemingly happy people. This is obviously an attempt to make investing (an inherently risky practice) less “scary” to younger demographics by showing that there’s “more good than bad” in it (“good” always being associated with cases in which the people depicted have “made the right choice” and invested with RBC). The gendered breakdown of humans depicted in these ads is not 50/50; each ad contains a picture of a single person, and while 5 of the ads depict men, only 3 depict women. While all of the women depicted would be considered “conventionally attractive” and relatively skinny, only a few of the men would be. Finally, while the pictures of men depict men of various races (including white, black and asian men), all of the women depicted are white. These demographics send messages: you can be a woman in a public place, as long as you’re pretty and white. Also, women are (inexplicably) supposedly less interested in investing than men. You can chalk up these messages to laziness or carelessness on the part of the advertising team, but I see a more likely explanation in the fact that women tend to make less money than men on average and women of colour make even less than that average; thus it’s actually more profitable to advertise to men and white women anyway, so why would RBC bother including a picture of a woman of colour?

Having concluded this initial analysis of the ads as a coherent series, let’s look at each one on an individual level and see what kinds of messages they deliver.

1 - This is a “happy” ad, as you can see by the woman’s smile. But it is not a happiness of immediate gratification; the text indicates that the subject won’t have to “live with roommates forever”. The happiness is based on the future projection that the woman’s decision to invest with RBC has paid off. The image depicts a scene of mess and disarray surrounding the woman, which acts as an abject “other” that can be contrasted with her “smart decision to invest in the future” (the implication being that it is the roommates, not her, who caused the mess). This scene is interesting as it involves a “transitional” state, one in which there is a suggested necessary “struggle” that the individual must live through in order to come out “richer” (quite literally) on the other side***. The abjection of the roommates as inherently sloppy creates a kind of essentialist narrative of life in which it is always more desirable not to live with roommates, an individualist paradigm that pits itself against more communal living. The spectre of “living with roommates forever” hangs heavy in this ad, effectively threatening a younger generation that is unwilling to invest with this prospect as a consequence of not complying with the ad’s suggestion.

2 - This is an “anxious” ad, obvious through the woman’s distraught expression. The statement that “your kids are growing faster than your money” invokes the anxiety to match it. It is telling that the only ad that mentions children is one that features a woman, reinforcing the social conventions that women are “natural caregivers” to children and that taking care of children is thus justified as being primarily “women’s work”. The association of the money with the children here has a few interesting angles to it; the most obvious is that investment is being portrayed here as not only something you do “for yourself”, but also for your children; investment is now part of the “maternal care” - if you really care about your kids, you’ll invest so you don’t end up poor and unable to provide for them. As a result, this is possibly one of the most threatening of the InvestEase ads. A different angle, however, may be seen by returning to the comparison between the children and the money; children may too come to be seen as “investments” for the future, which is why it’s important for the mother to “invest her time” in them, invoking a three-part chain of investment - the woman invests her money with RBC, which eventually pays back so she can invest in her kids.

3 - This is a “happy” ad, though only cautiously so and perhaps the most subtle of these. The woman in the photo is depicted as doing some kind of meditative exercise (possibly yoga; for the sake of short-forms, I will refer to it as “yoga” from this point on while later problematizing this notion). She is, however, not completely absorbed in the meditation - she is instead peeking at her laptop screen with one eye. The caption states that she has realized that “her money is working hard even when she’s not”. This particular ad sends several interesting messages. The first is immediately apparent in the open eye distracting the woman from her yoga practice; whatever “mindfulness” activity she is doing for self-improvement is actually of secondary importance to her - she is actually more interested in whether or not her investment is paying off. The mere fact that she is doing yoga is itself important. The ad is clearly trying to cater to a recent craze for any type of “self-improvement” activity that can nevertheless be separated from work, such activities typically focusing on achieving some kind of “peace” or “spirituality” (presumably because one’s work is so physically-demanding, or stressful, or unbearable, or nihilistic, or meaningless, etc.). The ad makes a clear distinction with its caption that such activities are “not work”, in spite of the fact that in many cultures today and throughout history, spiritual practices have been considered as having at least as much significance and requiring at least as much effort as a full-time job. This suggestion that yoga is not work is even stranger when I consider the fact that I saw an ad on the subway on the same day I saw this one that suggested “turning your passion into your career”; the ad’s example of such a career was a woman who enjoyed yoga so much, she opened her own yoga studio. This contrast between “mindfulness activities” as a means of relaxation/non-work that is fully detached from the labour market and these same self-improvement activities as a means of personal monetary profit through “entrepreneurship” is one that should be examined more carefully.

And what is to be said for the other half of this statement? We know that the woman is apparently “hardly working”, but why is her money “working hard”? This is a cut-and-dry case of Marx’s commodity fetishism, though with an interesting twist. The money in investment is, in truth, incapable of working itself; thus the money is presumably going towards building the capital and workforce of all the corporations who are expected to grow economically and provide a profitable return for the investment. All of this involves a great deal of workers doing actual labour with material resources, which is conveniently excluded from the scene depicted here in favour of the suggestion that the “money is working hard”. The kicker here is that technically there is a reference to labour in that statement through its implication of “hard work” - but the labour is the imaginary labour of the money the woman invested having somehow “worked” to “improve itself” so that it can move from being the price to being the product. It is fascinating to see how well this imaginary labour’s “short circuit” parallels the woman’s own self-improvement activities.

4 - This is a “happy” ad, as is made clear by the man’s smile and the optimistic caption. The man has apparently realized that he “doesn’t need a degree in money to invest”. As with other aspects of these ads targeting young demographics, it seems that the purpose of such a statement would be to make investment less “scary” to young people. This is emphasized through the use of a simplified “degree in money” rather than “degree in finance”, or “degree in economics”. This serves a secondary function in erasing the labour that goes into managing investments, as many workers who do have “degrees in money” labour intensively both to manage everyday investments and to help develop tools that make investment more accessible, like InvestEase. In contrast to the woman in [3], we see this man actively engaged in his investing (if momentarily distracted by his epiphany) while also relaxing in a bath; his leisure time is not used for self-improvement, which may be related to the social expectations that women are expected to do more intensive labour and discipline themselves to appear more desirable (eg. through means such as physical activities, of which yoga is one), while men are not held to the same standard. Thus the man is allowed to sit back and relax in a bubble bath, having only to worry about the growth of his money as a means of self-improvement, as men are expected to be the holders of material wealth (rather than embodied wealth) in society.

5 - This is an “anxious” ad, as indicated by the man’s apparent “freezing” in the middle of a daily routine. The man has stopped brushing his teeth as he realizes in horror that “his little brother has started investing before him”. This adds a competitive element to the ad, suggesting that there should be a kind of “race to invest” before a rival-like figure (such as a brother) begins to do the same. It also marks investment as a kind of “rite of passage”, making the spectre of the younger brother’s investment significant in a different manner; the mood invoked is almost as if the younger brother was getting married before the man in the picture, or beginning his first full-time job, or any number of other “significant life activities”. By placing investment in this context, RBC has effectively “naturalized” it as an activity desirable mainly because it is “what one does” by a certain point. The combination of the “sibling rivalry” competition and the “missed rite of passage” anxiety serve to justify the notion that competition is all-important in capitalism not only by economic law, but also by cultural convention.

6 - This is an “anxious” ad, visible in the expression of concern and distractedness in the man who has presumably just bought (or is about to buy) new shoes. The caption suggests that he “invests more in his shoes than his future” and is only realizing this now. This caption indicates a changing of values in the man’s life; like [5] and [1], it is a “transitional” image marking a turning point for the subject. There is something almost religious about this particular ad; the man’s epiphany here is directly related to a turn away from his material possessions towards something less physically tangible. The intangible object is described in the caption as “his future”, but in truth, this “future” is (as mentioned in [3]) tied directly to material labour and processes necessary for his investment to grow in the first place. Interestingly, the shoes the man is depicted next to are framed by the caption in terms of investment rather than personal enjoyment, implying that the man is buying the shoes with an expectation of some kind of similar “return” on them to that he might expect from an investment. I hope I’m not stretching too far here when I ask: surely not all personal-level decisions are made in this way?

7 - This is a “happy” ad, and one of the most obviously-so due to the celebratory gestures of the man depicted in his chair. The man’s computer screen shows a graph rising higher and higher along its x axis, presumably indicating the projected future growth of his wealth. The caption implies that this is an estimation of “what you could be worth in 10 years”. One thing that is immediately important to note here is that the most optimistic outcome has been strategically depicted; while investment is at root a mere requirement for anyone’s money to keep up with inflation so it stays at the same value throughout their lifetime, its growth to the degree depicted on the computer screen here over a decade is uncommon. Further, it is practically a cliche at this historical moment to remind people that they are “worth more than just the sum of their bank account” - and yet this ad seems to have no problem refuting such a claim by equating “what you could be worth” (and by extension, what you “are currently worth”) with your money.

8 - This is a “happy” ad, and what could probably seen as the “closing” ad in this series. There are few signifiers to communicate important messages here other than the man’s broad smile and the caption marking “completeness” of the decision to invest with RBC: “When you realize you’re officially an investor”.

*Forgive me if this is slightly inaccurate, my memory’s a little foggy and I don’t have the time to dig up the exact details of this campaign at the moment

**Not worth describing in this discussion. Those interested can search and find more about this easily if you don’t already know what they are.

***See any of Foucault’s discussions on the “discipline of the self” for more on this.