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helpinghanikan · 3 years

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Hot Date

Pietro Maximoff x Reader

Sum: It shouldn't have to be said that SHIELD researchers aren't allowed to date their wards. But that doesn't stop the romantic tension from forming between you. The real question is, whose feelings will be most affected when the tension finally boils over?

Anomalous weapons supervisor was typed out on your paychecks, but babysitter would be a better description. Diplomas, experience and more resulted in your butt on bleachers. Watching the important people play around with powers few in this world understood.

Whoever designed this area probably didn’t know who exactly would be using it. It had the basics; a track for running, mats for sparring and weights for lifting. With more off the wall items thrown in that might be useful to the superpowered individuals using it. Like the massive metal balls being lifted and lowered by the red magic of your charge. Or one of your charges at least.

‘Wanda seems to have complete control of her powers. Whether these powers are coming from her mind or some sort of muscle in her hands has yet to be known.’ You type out just intime to get a guest sitting to your right.

“Can I get an autograph when your book is finished?” Pietro has been working on his accent, so had Wanda. As much pride as the two had they were still looking to adapt. But there were still hints of it on certain words. Especially when he’s this close not really trying.

“Only if I get to sign those tits.” Obviously, a joke, but you still had to take a quick glance to the camera. Just in case you get dragged into a meeting and this comes back up about your unprofessional comments. Not that it would stop your work.

“I can live without the signature,” Wanda’s voice, although distant, echoed in the wide space. “You’ve spelt many things wrong anyhow.”

Few people could say they were as close to the Maximoff twins as yourself. Even after the discovery of an alien/god, of the defrosting of a super-solider and the destruction from a billionaire people were wary of the twins.

It was through simple respect that Wanda had warmed up to you. You hadn’t talked to her with artificial kindness, didn’t look to the guards when her voiced raised even the slightest. No, you had asked how she was (the room was too hot for her), if she needed anything (just wanted to know how much longer she was going to be questioned), if she liked coffee or tea (tea is preferred), and how she was doing, really doing (she was tired, you all were).

It was another story for Pietro. Only trusting you after Wanda obviously saw you as a friend. Taking his own time to warm up after getting the same genuine experience you offered rather the blunt questions and stupid statements. It was the dinner you invited them to that sealed the deal. Nothing brings people together more than a lot of meat, the warm feeling of alcohol and a quiet afternoon with a food coma.

“What have you written?” Pietro asks, your laptop now in his hands.

There’s no point in trying to stop him when he snatches things. A child who had to move fast for food and safety makes petty theft a hard habit to beat. Not to mention Wanda already knew everything that went into your daily reports with a blink of her eye, it was seemingly only fair that Pietro got to know to.

“Same stuff I was doing yesterday, and the day before and the day before that and the-.”

“Yes, yes, thank you!” Pietro says, used to the child like taunts and knowing to stop you early.

With nothing of interest on said laptop he turned it back over to you. Taking his place leaning against your shoulder as you begin to work once more. Only speaking up to ensure you add in the correct description of his improvement.

These reports were supposed to be done without the twins knowledge. You were supposed to be a spy on the side of the government. Although it was blamed on Wanda’s mindreading in reality you had never tried to hide them. These friendships were genuine, resulting with the man practically putting himself in your lap to try and keep your attention.

"How much longer do we have to do this ‘training’?” Although a grown man Pietro could act like a little boy sometimes. When he’s done, he’s done. Taking whatever actions needed to get through his current situation and move on.

“For as long as the door is closed, Pietro.” Wanda has set the metal down. Taking slow steps to reach her brother and friend. “She would likely go faster without you hanging on her.”

There is no smooth way to say this; Pietro is a big spoon. Any chance he gets a hug or to hold someone results in being overwhelmed in lean muscle. Pietro was the only warmth during those impossible cold nights as newly orphaned children. His legs and arms creating a shelter that protected his chosen from any harm from ever happening. You were one of chosen now, which explained the face made at having to get up.

“Alright kids, let’s head home.” You say, slapping the laptop closed for effect.

You were one of several who kept an eye on the twins throughout the day. Wanda and Pietro pretended not to notice how certain employees just happened to always be in the hallway when walking through. Or the little cameras that were hidden in plain sight among the decorations in their quarters. And that’s not including all the mom aged agents “just checking in” at random times, complete with the sing song voice and overuse of the word “sweetie”.

On any other day you would have followed them into their quarters. Give them a recommendation for the TV and even stay awhile to watch it with them. A chime from your phone changing the day’s proceedings. It’s only a second-long hesitation that announces this change to the twins.

Pietro says your name in a tone different than the one earlier. It’s a tone of concern that snaps your head up at him. Wanda hanging around the quarter’s entryway, staying close enough to be apart of the conversation.

“Is everything okay?” he asks, now with your attention.

“What? Yeah, yes, I just got a…you know, a hot date.” You turn your phone to face him. Not long enough for him to read the entire message but enough to know that you weren’t completely hiding anything “I’ll see you guys later. Brush your teeth before going to bed, I’ll know if you don’t.”

Before Pietro or Wanda could give a retort the door slid shut.

“Who were they talking to?” Pietro asked the only other person in the room.

Wanda didn’t answer. Rather tilting her head towards her brother. Rolling her eyes when he asked “what? Wanda, what?”

Although officially a desk agent there were times the field required someone of your talents. When this happened, all other duties had to be dropped in exchange for an outfit change and a fancy car shared with your accompanying field agent. Natasha has been your designated agent since the first field mission and could now be considered a friend.

It would seem the babysitter had become the baby. Including having your clothes laid and being helped into them before reaching the car.

“You’re an heiress looking for some expensive decorations and I am your lovely assistant and translator for the evening.” Natasha says, holding the under-suit’s legs open for you to slip into. “We’ll show up fashionably late. You are incredibly rich and important and better than all of them. So, don’t make eye contact with anyone, and try not to say anything, they’re below you.”

Unlike fulltime field agents you weren’t trained enough to go without serious protection. Not just in the form of an accompanying agent but also in a (jokingly called) bullet proof onesie. So, fitting it was essentially a bullet-proof wetsuit that stopped at the knees and elbows. Making the clothes to wear over it something with long sleeves, past the ankles and covers the neck. Sunday school appropriate for this event.

“Can I fake an accent? Like, German?” It was a dumb question for you to ask, but the ride to the gallery was already taking longer than it should.

“Hmm, Let’s hear it.” Natasha doesn’t look up from her phone but still sounded interested.

“Vell-,”

“Stop.”

Very special pieces were being auctioned off tonight. Invite only without any advertisements to say what’s up for grabs to outsiders. Although the windows were blacked out and authorities were paid off (but obviously not enough) supposedly nothing for sale was illegal. But if that were true you wouldn’t have found a seat in the front row.

The language of the night was deeply European. One or two words you could maybe guess what they meant but there was no way you could name it. Nat knew it though; it kept her ears perked to the room and her mouth right next to your ear for most of the night.

First items up were the typical rich people arty stuff; vases and paintings that probably represented something to someone if you squinted. Those went for a year’s paycheck in minutes. It was after the third portrait of some lady now long dead that Nat placed a hand on your back, just below the neck.

“Next up is ours,” she whispered. “you’re doing good and you’re doing great.”

The entire night was spent with better manners than an office setting could ever be. Back straight, eyes forward, and no one is allowed to make eye-contact. It’s only when the target was wheeled in that your mask was starting to slide.

Genuine HYDRA blueprints for a titanium prosthetic. White ink on blue paper with decades old coffee stains and tiny tears, spread up and out under protective glass like a butterfly. Although Mr. Barnes had a serious upgrade with the Vibranium he now used. But these blueprints showed just how advance the original was for the time.

Sitting forward as it’s wheeled by wasn’t enough to authenticate the prints. Something you easily communicated to Agent Romanoff with just a look.

It was a bad idea, it called why too much attention, but Agent Romanoff whipped her head towards one of the several employees of the auction. Curling her finger at them to get them over and in her speaking line.

She speaks quickly, and with an edge to her voice, to the employee. With only a few words back that same employee returned to his post and spoke to the next man in charge.

“They going to invite a few of us up to inspect the piece,” Agent Romanoff whispers, “You’re going to have to be fast, we’re going on stage.”

Others in the audience made their way onto the stage when invited. Agent Romanoff ensures that you are somewhere in the middle of it. Heels and heavy shoes making creating white noise for your work to be done.

In all HYDRA’s documents, blue-prints and almost everything else their symbol was hidden throughout it. A little game of where’s the octopus in two places. A large, but translucent, icon covering the center. And a smaller one in the bottom right-hand corner, hidden behind the creator’s signature. Reproductions never had the smaller symbol, but the stains and fingerprints ensured you were right.

Later, during the debrief, you would be lectured about the importance of subtlety and espionage. But how was the look you gave Agent Romanoff any different than how others were looking at their people?

After that (completely natural and not at all suspicious) nod Natasha’s arm was around your back. This was part you were suddenly feeling ill. This was the part your assistant/translator/arm-candy would escort you out with just enough urgency and demands for the bathroom that you’d be gone before everyone was in their seats. Apparently this was also the part a sudden security guard fires twice into your chest.

“Watch your head.” Although not yelling Agent Romanoff’s voice was firm.

It's hard to say which was scarier; the bullets aiming firing for your death or how calm and professional Agent Romanoff was about it all. Although, few rounds were actually fired inside the auction hall.

Agent Romanoff shot an arm out to the first security. Pushing his gun up and inward quick enough to catch his jaw and take him out of the game. Agent Romanoff keeping the downed man’s sidearm for herself.

That was really the only bit of action you clearly saw that night. When things go wrong in the field it’s the agents job to remove their ward from the situation with minimal injuries. As the researcher your job was much simpler; don’t die. “Keep your head down, use your arms to protect yourself and trust your agent.” Was hammered in during field training. With this mantra running over and over you weren’t in the position to watch the mess happening all around.

“Someone, call the police!” It takes a second to realize it’s Agent Romanoff yelling this. In a panicked, almost shrill, voice that practically screamed ‘we’re being victimized!’

With all the guests now properly riled up it was easier to exit the building. Allowing the oncoming mod to carry the two of you out of the building without much more fuss from security. Trying to kill an agent was one thing but killing a rich connected person (or worse their spouses) would be on an entirely new issue.

Someone stepped on your foot. Another put an elbow in your rib harder than the bullets. And a third open hand pushed you, and your agent, right out the door and onto the street. It was only through the strength of Agent Romanoff, and your handling of flats, that this mission could be considered successful.

The blueprints were already being tracked and followed by the time you’re stripped down to underwear. The pretty clothes had to be taken removed, the makeup wiped off, hair undone, and the bullet proof onesie had to be taken away. Simple tank-tops, shorts and a coat were worn on the journey home. By the time it’s all off, and you’re finally walking into the apartment, it shouldn’t be surprising how you looked to others.

“Have a good time?” It takes a second to realize it’s just the roommate asking the question.

It’s expected that any roommate a SHIELD employee takes on would also be with SHIELD. The two of you weren’t in the same division or even security level part of why living together worked out so well. She was in the know enough to hear you complain but enough in the dark to keep any secrets from getting out.

“Yep, had a real banger of a night.” Although a friend and technical coworker you couldn’t disclose too much about the missions. At least not until the green light is given by the higher ups. Instead, you can only give the people something to speculate about. “Can’t wait to see what the bruises are going to look like tomorrow.”

Spoiler alert: the bruises looked like hickeys. Something noticed by Roommate but keeping quiet about it in exchange to heading out early. Ready with the latest thing to share with the office mates.

Just like any working environment gossip is always somewhere underfoot. After being dragged in by someone who couldn’t leave it at home it’s then latching onto everyone who came close enough to hear it. Most ignore it, others listen then forget and others drag carry it further into the workplace. Until researchers leaning against the wall talk too loudly and Pietro catches a few too many words.

“Who were they talking to?” Pietro asks once the housing area’s door shut. Quickly clearing things up with the use of your name.

“I’ve haven’t seen them yet.” Wanda doesn’t care enough to close her book but does enough to look up.

“No, yesterday. Before they left, someone messaged them. Who was it?”

Wanda shrugs and returns to her book, but there’s a smile there.

“You know who it is,” He says, now on beside her. “Tell me.”

“I can’t say for sure,” She’s smiling again. Only a slight glance at Pietro. “but I think he may be very handsome.”

The siblings argued as siblings do. With Wanda teasing as sisters do. All of this could be heard before you even made it to the door. Standing at its threshold to listen as the two go at it.

“Natasha will tell you the same, Pietro.” Wanda says, probably aware that you were in hearing distance. “And she says he can do more than simply be handsome.”

Although you say nothing Wanda grins at you.

The gossip overheard is just words without evidence. Just enough to get Pietro thinking but not enough to create any serious emotions. But the “evidence” to create those emotions was now standing in the room. Small marks darker than your natural skin was peaking out from the lower neckline.

To you, they were simple bruises, nothing worth trying to hide, even something to brag about to the other desk workers. To Pietro it was marks of another person, something that pursed his lips and marched away from. Doing so slowly, to be sure that both you and Wanda were aware of how upset he was.

“I missed something.” You say, setting everything down on the counter.

Wanda has a habit of sneaking into other people’s minds. The mission, the shots and the everything was slowly being filed through in the back of your head. A pressure at the base of your neck screaming that there was an intruder.

“Stop it.” You snapped, but Wanda only smiles back.

“How was your ‘hot date’?” She finally asks.

“Is that what he’s…sonofabitch. Pietro!” There are only three rooms in this section of the compound. One being Wanda’s, another Vision’s and the third Pietro. Making it easy enough to find the pouting grown man.

“What?” He asks upon your entering.

There isn’t a response on your part for moment or two. Spending that time going to the room’s corner. Standing on tiptoes to find that switch that definitely doesn’t exist on the camera. Shutting it down for the time being before turning to start your explanation.

“You can turn that back on.” He says from his place on the bed. “There’s nothing bad we need to talk about.”

“So, you don’t wanna hear about how I was shot in the tit?”

Manners were out the window at this point. Pietro openly looking towards your chest. Back up to your face, and back down to your chest. “You were shot? They look more like…”

“They’re not hickeys, I was shot a few time through a suit.” Frustration was starting to build up. It was overflowing when you finished with “You really should know about being shot.”

The hurt on his face screamed. He didn’t look away but stayed staring forward right at you. “Pietro, I’m so…I didn’t mean to say it like that.”

“It hurts,” He says. “Being shot, it really hurts.”

“I’m sorry.” Even as you walk around to sit beside him Pietro stares at where you were. Listening to your apology but not saying much else. Until he dares to lean against you. Something more than cuddling with a friend this time around. “I get it, I get you’re scared and all that. And I really like you, Pietro, I like you more than I am allowed to.”

It’s hard to say who started the kiss, but it doesn’t really matter. It was happening, and it was so much more than a something between friends.

“When that camera comes back on this didn’t happen.” You say in a moment of separation for air.

“What happens when the camera goes off again?” He asks, thumb rubbing over the bruise.

#reader insert #pietro maximoff #pietro maximoff x reader #quicksilver x reader #Pietros' alive au #One shot #Fluff kinda #Angst kinda #This is based on that window between 2012-2016 when everything was happy for the Avengers #Requested on my AOW #Not used to writing these kind of stories

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grandhotelabyss · 2 years

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My Year in Books, 2021

1. Best of the Year

The best novel I read this year was Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea. Please read my essay on it here. An excerpt:

Yet, as neatly as we can phrase her seeming judgments, Murdoch has a problem of her own—a problem faced, incidentally, by other major novelists who favor religion and morality over magic and art, such as Cynthia Ozick, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, and the mother of them all, Jane Austen. Novels, with their patient accretion of detail and ability to represent complex human entanglements, may be truer than the showy simplifications of the theater, but a novelist is a kind of magician too.

The best poem I read this year was Homer’s Iliad. Please read my essay on it here. An excerpt:

The genius of the poem is to tell this founding Greek war story so substantially from the other side’s point of view. The supposedly troglodytic Homer, this voice from the Bronze Age whirlwind, is ethically in advance of most of our own pop culture and political discourse, which usually represents “the other side” as some hive of vermin to be brainwashed or exterminated, whereas Homer mostly allows that the Trojans are the superior civilization and a memento mori for all social orders—universally.

The best work of nonfiction I read this year was Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Please read my essay on it here. An excerpt:

To Hobbes, Arendt adds Darwin and Marx to her anti-pantheon of totalitarian philosophers, since all three replace human exceptionalism and intellectual freedom with a naturalism and historicism that shrivels us to the enthralled condition of Pavlov’s dog. Totalitarianism is inherently progressive, government by those who know the laws of history and apply them directly, in all their instability, to the masses they oversee.

2. New Releases

I only read four books in 2021 that were actually published in 2021. The first was Kazuo Ishiguro’s poignant and inventive new novel Klara and the Sun, which inspired me to a reflection on humanity and non-humanity in popular science fiction:

Superficially, Ishiguro’s moral would appear to be the one pronounced by Kirk over Spock’s photon-torpedo casket in The Wrath of Khan, speaking for those science-fiction characters and readers who have found nonhuman entities (robots, aliens) more lovable than their own kind: “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most—human.” To learn that this is not a compliment—that it’s allegorically akin to Blake seeming to praise the eponymous “Little Black Boy” for being white on the inside—we have to read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), a novel that shows how measuring humanity via “humane” emotional proxies like empathy can be the alibi of oppression. (The film based on Dick’s novel, Blade Runner, beaten at the box office by the grieving Kirk and the deceased Spock in 1982—also the year of Ishiguro’s first novel—contains a line that sums up the ethos of both Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun: a character laments of the film’s replicant heroine and her truncated lifespan, “It’s a shame she won’t live. But then again, who does?”) Yet Spock does not merit Kirk’s anthropocentric praise due to some Hamlet- or Quixote- or Ahab-like vagary—an Ahab figure is rather the film’s villain—but because he sacrifices the individual to the collective on the avowed principle, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” To be human is to refuse animal selfishness—which is to be, in Ishiguro’s novel, a robot. Sam Sacks, of all the reviewers I’ve read, grasps this aspect of Klara when he writes, “She is, in an eerie way, the apotheosis of Ishiguran humanity.” She will never let us go.

The second was Cynthia Ozick’s worthy new novella Antiquities, which sent me to her stunning second novel, The Cannibal Galaxy, and to her work as a whole:

Though she commits herself to the prohibition on idols, with their misdirection of reason and sympathy toward merest matter, Ozick loves Forster, not to mention James; and she loves nature and the body, as her sensuous, impastoed prose mimesis—the equal of her also beloved Bellow’s—amply proves; and she loves the monastic life of the pagan poet with his inherently idolatrous ambition to make the flesh word, in defiance of Judaism’s discarnate deity and His bodiless ethic.

The third was Tao Lin’s new countercultural autofiction Leave Society, the cult around which made me wonder if the literary novel is truly as dead as some say:

Leave Society, whose widely discussed imminence inspired me to revisit Tao Lin earlier this summer, has had an unusually generous reception for an experimental literary novel: a respectful landing in mainstream media, a cult following among an emergent subculture, and even admiring reviews in the right-wing press. With this broad appeal, it is—even though it really isn’t, if you read it—the kind of American novel that used to be more common, a book of our time, a book every literate American read and wanted to discuss because it seemed somehow to explain ourselves to ourselves. Maybe something wasn’t permanently lost to our literary culture, besides of course their irreplaceable individual talents, with the deaths of past masters like Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. Except that Leave Society is not much like Morrison nor even the often autobiographical Roth, because they wrote novels immersed in American history and public life, in the headlines—in short, novels about society, not the leaving of it.

And the fourth, perhaps the most important book I read this year, was Benjamin Bratton’s manifesto, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, a spirited brief for technocratic totalitarianism and against humanism, individualism, spirituality, and democratic governance. From Bratton we learn that “Surveillance Is Not the Right Word” and that “The Problem Is Individuation Itself,” that popular sovereignty belongs to yesteryear and that ethics are a merely sentimental fetish, and we learn above all what “trust the science” and “believe experts” really mean, whether in the context of the pandemic or climate change: that you and I are obsolete, the wholly disposable organic substrate of the coming machine empire. Read alongside Arendt, who foresaw it all, this book told me that the elite racism of the 21st century will not be against this or that “race,” but against the human race.

3. My New Release

I released my novel The Class of 2000 in 2021. I started writing it in 2015, so its implicit argument that the end-of-history techno-utopianism of the late 1990s portended surveillance, moral crusades, and finally social violence, in ways we only discovered for sure in the last half decade, may count as prescience. But it’s not a didactic roman à thèse; it’s really my variation, kaleidoscopic in style, on the classic American literary novel: illicit sex and scandal in the suburbs. An excerpt, one of my erotic anti-heroines’ opinion of an infamous precursor that will remain nameless here:

I picked up Mrs. Lydon’s paper-covered book and detached the sleeve to look at the front cover. A young girl peered up at me with a seductive challenge over heart-shaped, red-rimmed sunglasses.

“I was enjoying it at first,” Mrs. Lydon said. “He’s really funny, though when I read it at home I have to keep the dictionary next to me. Or that’s what Kenny told me to do, anyway. Back in my acting days, I realized you don’t have to know what every word means, you just have to let the feeling carry you along. Kenny could never be an actor—too many plans, too much of a control freak. He’s afraid if he lets go of anything, he’ll lose everything. Anyway, like I said, I loved it at first, but now I wonder why I’m bothering. Don’t tell anyone, but I appreciated it more when I just thought it was a dirty, evil book—vile smut. Now I’m wondering if the message isn’t just, ‘Don’t rape little girls,’ which I already knew not to do. I did find it funny in a horrible way when he first gets her in bed and she says something like, ‘You think this is the first time I’ve ever done this?’ Mind you, if some man did that to my daughter—not that I have a daughter, or want one—I wouldn’t care if he’d memorized the dictionary and the thesaurus, I’d get Kenny and his cop buddies to hang him by his balls from the tree in the front yard—the front yard, you understand, as a warning to others. But when I’m reading a book, like when I used to study for a part, I forget I’m a wife or a mother or a citizen. I become a kid again. I just want something exciting to happen—exciting and, I don’t know, real.”

4. My Multimedia Empire

2021 was the year I took education to YouTube, uploading 60 lectures in modern and contemporary American literature from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace. These are official class lectures from a university position I no longer hold—from which I was, in fact, very rudely dismissed in one of the last year’s lower moments—but I plan far more audiovisual content in 2022. In the meantime, please follow my channel.

Happy New Year!

#literature #fiction #philosophy #poetry #literary criticism #political philosophy #creative writing #youtube

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redsector-a · 3 years

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AO3 Ask Game

I was tagged by @themarshalstale which, thank you so much! I feel like I always get missed on these (I know why, it’s been 84 years since I published anything but still). 1. How many works do you have on ao3?

46 it seems. Which...look I’m slow man so that’s not surprising. lol Also crippling depression does not make for much production, at least for me.

2. What’s your current AO3 wordcount?

309662 according to the stats.

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

So do I could only AO3 or in like life? lol I suppose it should only be on AO3 since this is an AO3 ask game. Hrm. Basically AO3 can be summed up as: Marvel (in several iterations - all Avengers related) Torchwood Highlander But isn’t it more fun to consider my entire fandom life, which, I’m sorry, I’m old so...yeah. Not all of this is was published and beyond that a lot is not available anymore...which is likely for the best. Highlander Star Wars Babylon 5 Ronin Warriors/Samurai Troopers Marvel (again, several iterations also of note Avengers and X-Men both count) Torchwood Star Trek LOTR Stargate (SG-1, SGA) Mortal Kombat I dabbled with the idea of Potter fic but never got past the ideas stage.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1: You rearrange me till I’m sane Clint finds himself spiraling into a deep depression after the Battle of New York...until the Winter Soldier ends up saving him and inadvertently giving him a new purpose – to save the man that the Soldier had once been – Bucky Barnes. Not one to be outdone, the Soldier decides that his new mission is to ensure that Clint remains alive himself. Protecting a blonde man with a self-destructive streak is somehow very familiar to him. Through the back and forth of who is saving whom they cross the country and learn more about themselves and each other – and perhaps find a reason for living. 2: Five Dates Bucky Didn’t Realize He Was on And the One He Planned Himself To say that Bucky was surprised when Clint kissed him was an understatement. But it was nothing compared to the shock he felt when he learned they'd been dating for months without him realizing it.Clint gets whisked away for a mission before they have time to talk and Bucky is left to figure things out on his own - hindsight being 20/20 he can't help but wonder how he missed things the first go around.

3: Puck Luck Bucky Barnes is used to the ups and downs of an NHL season. He's used to the unpredictability of the game, knows that bounces don't always go your way, but that doesn't make a broken hand in the final third of the season any easier to deal with. Especially not when he ends up with an impromptu roommate/personal assistant in the form of one Clint Barton - his agent, Natalia Romanova's (rather attractive) friend he hadn't known existed before his injury.

It's just for six to eight weeks - what could possibly happen in that span of time?

4: Loose Lips Launch Ships

Based on the following prompt: “We go to school together and I think you’re cute and apparently you’re also the pizza delivery guy and my little sibling opened the door screaming hey sibling! you know that kid you’re in love with? you really weren’t kidding when you said his jawline could cut steel holy shit-” Bucky is the pizza delivery guy. Clint's younger (foster) brother has a big mouth.

5: Indelible Bucky Barnes has a pretty decent life – a good job, good friends, a cat that adores him - but something is missing. He’s always found body art to be beautiful and inspiring, and on a whim (and with the hope that maybe he can find what he’s missing) he decides to take the plunge and get a tattoo. That's how he meets Clint Barton. Clint's talented and compassionate and there is an instant spark between the two of them. It's not long before Bucky finds himself wondering and wanting more from the relationship despite the ghosts of the past that crop back up. Because Clint makes him feel normal in a way he truly hasn't for years...

(this was pre-Alpine so I was totally chuffed when canon confirmed Bucky’s status as a crazy cat lady (affectionate).

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not.

I really really really want to do it but I often times don’t end up doing it. There are a few reasons. First, I am akwward AF and bad at interaction adn I feel like just saying thank you would be...not enough? Second - I often times tend to like...turtle (aka retreat into myself) when life gets Too Hard/Busy which happens a lot to me (sigh) and then I miss the vague window in my mind in which it would be okay to respond and then it’s even more weird. I do love and cherish all of them. Like there was one months ago that made me go “hmm...I didn’t think I was going to do a sequel to that fic (You rearrange me till I’m sane), timestamp glimpses sure but a sequel hadn’t come to mind” but then the comment made me think! So...who knows? lol Anyway, I literally have been rereading some in an effort to try and get myself going again. Know that if you have commented, I love you.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

At the moment? Probably: Look at you look at me Bucky's in love with Clint - problem is he's really not supposed to be. For Winterhawk Week 2019 - Forbidden Love (I really don’t want to give away the spin in the fic but...if you’re familiar with the Secret Avengers Vol 2 run circa 2013ish (aka when SHIELD initially ‘took control of the team’) that’s a bit of a hint as to the spin). Were it done, Torch Song would be up there. ;) Torch Song Clint is sent back in time, via an alien device, to 1938. While he tries to figure out how to get back home, he takes up singing and entertaining to make ends meet and does his best to not disrupt the timeline.Then he meets a 21 year old Bucky Barnes. --- A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, either where one party is oblivious to the existence of the other, where one party has moved on, or where a romantic affair has affected the relationship.

7. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve ever written?

Does *wanting* to write crossovers count? lol I want, so badly, to do more crossovers and fusions (which...are kinda deeper versions of crossovers in a way). The only one I do have posted is a crossover between Highlander and Torchwood -

The Immortal Mr. Jones A series of vignettes (some long, some short) in the life of the newly immortal Ianto Jones. My most ambitions project that I have been working on since late 2011/early 2012 is a fusion of the Avengers with Stephen King’s the Stand. I will get that done at some point *shakes fist* The Stand, for those who don’t know it, is an epic 1000+ page novel about a flu epidemic (I know) that wipes out over 99% of the population and then two figures representing Good and Evil pull the survivors in two directions for a showdown. So basically it’s a non-powered modern AU set in that universe. It’s a passion and comfort project. lol

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yes. Well, minor bitching back when I was in a prior fandom because I tagged a pairing in a fic but it was pre-slash and not labeled as pre-slash. I got hate on...I think it was Torch Song? And I’ve gotten hate on tumblr re me and my fic in general as well. Fandom! *jazz hands* Oh! And I’ve also been hit by those reviewers within Winterhawk (among general Clint pairings actually) who like rate you on either number scales or the “meh” scale. Which isn’t hate exactly but...it’s passive aggressive bullshit because I can’t believe none of them realize at this point that the authors can see their bookmarks - you know?

9. Do you write smut?

Yes. Do I write it well? I have no idea. lol

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I am aware of. Well...there was, I think, one of those reposting sites that had a few fics on it but I don’t think it was being passed off as someone else’s? I can’t quite recall. It’s why I have a note on AO3 about reposting my work anyway.

11. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not entirely, but sort of. Let me explain - I am part of a PBEM game; which for those unfamiliar since it’s a term that was most heavily in use 15-20 years ago, in which you basically do a round robin type writing thing but rather than everyone writing the same characters you write your own characters and you play off what other people have done. Another way of looking at it is it’s basically DnD without dice and written down rather than done out loud. You also don’t have to all be around at the same time. It’s a lot of fun and yes I have been in it for 20 years even though there aren’t many of us left but they are some of my dearest friends and fabulous writers. Wins all around. One of the other writers and I have actually toyed with the idea of doing a co-written fic actually, mostly because we work super well together and keep getting ideas for things but can’t really do them as rpgs since the pbem style isn’t used much anymore.

12. What’s your all time favorite ship?

Winterhawk probably. Though, let’s be real - Han & Leia are epic and amazing as are John & Delenn (from Babylon 5).

13. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Does wanting to expand The Black Stallion books as a wee child count? lol Not much of that was written save for world building ideas but there was a great oral tradition of telling stories to my friends. Otherwise...maybe a tie between Star Wars and Highlander. Star Wars was a love since I was super young but the writing bug didn’t hit me until around the same time Highlander was a thing as well.

14. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written? You rearrange me till I’m sane for sure. Though Torch Song, if it were finished, would be tied I imagine (I suck at picking favorites). Honorable mention to Puck Luck and Indelible. Tagging: I have seen this like a million times (okay 5) so I feel like everyone has been tagged already that I know. But...I guess... @vexbatch @crazycatt71 @heartonfirewrites and @disruptedvice sorry if anyone has been tagged before.

#icyredfics #writing #winterhawk #long post

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kaypeace21 · 3 years

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do you think it’s possible sarah (hoppers daughter) was an early-formed alter that went dormant before the events of season one? it’d make a lot of sense with how much of hoppers arc in season one was him mourning her and channeling that grief into protecting will (which would make sense since he seems like a protecter to both will and el). love your posts!☺️

Yep . :D

I already discussed all of this in the original did post - how sarah was a “little” (kid ) alter. And how hopper was a protector /introject alter. I also discussed her going dormant as a major possibility in my did theory. My assumption is she either (a) “became dormant” like some alters do- aka they are “gone” sometimes for many years but can return . And this can happen in a myriad of ways - sometimes alters go dormant after they had a simulated death in the inner world . theoretically sarah had such a Death. And so did El. Death isn’t really a permanent thing for alters ...they usually will come back or stay dormant - unless the body of the host dies (or they integrate) . They can’t really die . I think it’s very possible she comes back and Hopper while exploring the various innerworlds of Will’s minds (like the Russian one, the memory scapes , etc ) reunites/ finds her . look at the st s4 movie inspirations. In ‘what dreams may come” a guy with the guidance of his dead kid explore a heaven like world influenced by a painter’s emotions.We also have the movie ‘inside out’ -which involves “memory islands” (distinct worlds based on a child’s memories) which are influenced negatively by the kid being depressed she moved to California. The characters traveling to these memory islands are constructs of kid’s mind -and 1 of them also has a guide helping them explore the ‘memory islands’. in Inception a guy says he’s a construct of a guy’s mind and needs to help him escape the many different Ievels of the dream worlds.The in inception who made the worlds- had dad issues. 'the cell’also had alternate dimensions of a man's mind that a cop explored ( the dimensions were created by a man who was ab*sed by his dad). Movies like inception, matrix, Truman show, total recall, the cell, enter the void, wizard of oz, Peter Pan, hellraiser 2, dream warriors, bill & ted’s bogus journey, and welcome to marwen also allude to this: because they involve entering simulated abstract worlds usually created/based on happy& traumatic memories/fears.Cough s4 using the movie wizard of oz quote “we’re not in Hawkins (kansas) anymore.While truman show/matrix are more about realizing your reality isn’t real.in bladerunner 2044/total recall it has the theme of false implanted memories… probably relating to hopper realizing he’s an alter and not in “actual Russia.” Before seeing the other segments of the innerworlds with sarah. Like in total recall- the bad ass spy is told all his memories: his wife/ years of marriage, , his name, are just implanted memories. And she says “you’re life is a dream.”

In s2 Nancy asks Steve how his “grandpa’s time in the war is a metaphor for your life?” And steve compares the mf to the germans in the war. Dr owens mentions Will has ptsd like “ (vietnam) soldiers’, Hopper saying he had buddies like Will . “In the 70s there was a study that compared the post-traumatic stress symptoms in Vietnam veterans and adult survivors of childhood s**ual ab*se. The study revealed that childhood s**ual ab*se is traumatizing and can result in symptoms comparable to symptoms from war-related trauma.” Hopper isn’t actually in Russia -but in one of the innerworlds (after he jumped through the rift of the machine- into Will’s mind). We’ll see flashbacks but also present circumstances of his imprisonment echo Will’s past with Lonnie (if the movies indicate anything)- being starved, guards getting payed in order to let other prisoners r*pe a gay prisoner (than claim incorrectly because of his sexuality he wanted it) , as well as a gang of sadist men who r**e others and a warden using that as a threat to be compliant , being thrown in a dark room of solitary confinement and starved when they didn’t obey the warden, the warden being religious, etc. And the Anerican soldiers (in Vietnam) in the movies aren’t much better and do similarly horrific acts to civilians like r**e and bragging/ happily k*lling women, children, and the elderly. The drill sergant in vietnam calling them homophobic slurs & women, and chocking one of the soldiers with one hand, slapping one for not believing in christianity. Tying up a soldier in a bed , gagging him, beating him and saying “remember it’s just a dream.” Only praising them when good in fire arms.(movies : fullmetal jacket, papillon, shawshank redemption, platoon, welcome to marwen, etc ) . My assumption is flashbacks of his life- will hint he’s an alter of Will’s-the boxes in the basement are “vietnam” ,“dad”, and “ny” (and these are the memories of his we’ll see). And some of the bad characters in said stories will also parallel Lonnie . For instance in s2, Jonathan mentions Indiana writer Vonnegut- In his book ‘slaughterhouse 5′- Vonnegut begins the story of Billy Pilgrim, a man who has “come unstuck in time”. It accounts of Billy Pilgrim's capture and incarceration by the Germans during the last years of World War II, and scattered throughout the narrative are episodes from Billy's life with his dad, and his own wife and kids.Billy is forced to be part of the war and similar things against his free will. The moments start from his childhood when his father throws him in the water to teach him how to swim. He was unwillingly drafted into the war. Later, he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians (aliens that are implied to be caused by his mental health issues/trauma) against his will. Therefore, he realizes that this concept is just an illusion.

And some of the bad characters in said stories will also parallel Lonnie . Like how in ‘peterpan’- the young girl Wendy imagines netherland and the villain -captain hook- is based off her father ( in the movie they have the same voice actors/while in all stage productions the 2 characters are always played by the same actor). Similar to the other s4 film- ‘wizard of oz’ where the wicked witch of th west from the mythical land of Oz (is played by Dorothy’s real life mean neighbor in the real world/kansas). Or ‘in the cell’- every villain from the alternate-mind- dimensions is played by same actor in diff makeup. Not sure if they’d use Ross Patridge (actor of Lonnie) in this way . But it would be very interesting if (In makeup) Ross played many negative people in Hopper’s life/past -as a way to show Will’s past tr*uma.

Like also-look at Sarah’s tiger plushie! In chinese mythology/culture: “The tiger is personified by the constellation Orion (interesting given Sara’s interest in space/blackholes). The tiger represents protection over human life (hmm?). Tiger charms were used to keep away evil and disease (that’s awful ironic if she died in the manner she did). In Buddhism, wearing tiger skins during meditations was believed to bring protection from spiritual interference and potential harm while exploring astral dimensions.” HMMMMMMMMM XD

Kali in the stranger things novel ‘Suspicious Minds’ says…

“I was named after a goddess. She wore a tiger skin and was fierce in battle.”

Then Kali says to Alice (a women who can see future visions): “I love you, Alice. We can be tigers together.”This parallel (in relation to Alice) is fascinating because Kali actually uses her powers to fake Alice’s death- and to trick Dr. Brenner, and allow Alice to escape. The allusion was so realistic, that Terry could even touch the ‘dead’ Alice.

So the tiger symbolism could be a HUGE hint- that Sarah’s death was simulated and she’ll come back and travel the innerworlds/alternate dimensions of Will’s mind (as Hopper’s guide). Hopper about sarah “galaxies the universe-she always understood that stuff.”

Another possibility (theory b) is she integrated with another alter or with Will (which means she can’t return) .Hopper saying about Sarah “the black hole it got her.” Could imply she integrated with the mf/shadow monster? And ,or maybe she will later ?

But... I lean heavily to theory (a) the most , though.

Obviously sarah has a lot of the connections to Will. will and Sarah both being into science, Sarah winning a spelling bee, Will winning the science fair, both being connected to tigers. Both hallucinating something no one else can see and people trying to snap the 2 out of what they’re viewing. Joyce saying as a witch she’ll eat Will. Parallels Hopper saying as an ogre he’ll eat sarah. Hopper, in s1, when seeing Will (with a vine in his mouth) has a flashback of Sarah on a mouth respirator. And he also has a flashback of Sarah when seeing Will’s lion plushie which resembled Sarah’s tiger plushie. And el also had a lion plushie-like Will’s in s1. Hopper monitored both Will and Sarah at the hospital when they were “dying”. Will has a fear of clowns- and Sarah’s hospital gown had clowns on them. All 3 kids draw.

Plus, we all know the parallels of Will to El (Hopper’s new daughter).

I discussed in my did theory that Hopper (as an adult alter) is a form of protector to all the kid alters - el, Sarah, and Will (host/core). And Hopper as an introject-alter (who are alters based on a person the child knows ) are usually put in the system cause the kid assumes that person could protect them . And since original-Hopper was a police man (a little kid could easily assume that). Although, because he’s a “father figure” for the system he has some of Lonnie’s traits- which are reflected in other perpetrator alters/ bad npcs in the system- Brenner, Neil, Billy, the evil’s Russians,etc . So sometimes he acts similar to a Perpetrator alter too . And I listed those examples/bad parallels extensively in the original did post (linked in the beginning).

And I used these quotes from psych papers in my original did post to pretty much sum up Hopper’s use in Will’s system .

“Introjects can also be based off of figures that the dissociative child found strong, courageous, heroic, or otherwise worthy of being emulated and internalized and could theoretically protect them.”

“Older adult alters are created to serve a nurturing or parenting role, thus serving as a protector. (*protecting Will/el) . However, sometimes their older age is related to taking on the identification of the ab*ser and can therefore take on any of the other more hostile roles too ... Introjects which are mimicking ab*sers are trying to "keep you inline" in order to protect you from external ab*sers. They are copying behaviors shown to them by bad people, not harboring the intent, s*dism or imm*rality of the actual perpetrators.”

I think it pretty much sums up the nuances and motivations of Hopper’s character.

Thanks for the ask, anon :)

#jim hopper #stranger things #sarah hopper #will byers #kali prasad #el hopper #stranger things theory #did theory #s4 theory #st movies

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fr0gi-b0y · 3 years

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Happy Feet Lore

just made my friend watch happy feet and he was asking me why the penguins were being racist to dancing, which spurred me to come up with an entire history of the penguin population Mumble is from, and then that spiraled into a deep subplot linking all of the characters, and i needed to put it somewhere where others can be enlightened.

so first off, the reason why the penguins don’t like dancing but are fine with rapping like Seymour did, it’s because of an event known as The Great Ice Break. in the past, the penguins DID sing and dance in harmony, but all of the funky steps caused micro cracks in the ice. one year, during a particularly strong blizzard, the penguins were dancing in their huddle to keep their body temperatures up, and all of the vibrations from their steps caused the ice to break into parts, separating the colony and countless families the vibrations going through the water also alerted a herd of killer whales to their whereabouts. it was a slaughter. the elder penguin, who was the most staunchly against dancing in the movie, was there during that event, and he was able to see how the singing penguins were able to call out to one another through harmonizing and find their way back. since that time he vowed to rid the colony of the dangers of dancing.

now to the events of the movie. the archetype that mumble represents (outsider, misunderstood, hidden talent) is one that is very common in underdog films, but it is also present among neurodivergent people. Mumble taps his feet even while he walks and in the graduation scene he waves his arms and vocalizes in an excited manner, similar to the way an autistic person might stim. because of how he manifests his emotions and energy and how it goes against the “norm” of singing, he is ostracized and while his parents do try to stick up for him, they are pressured by the rest of the population and try to get him to conform to their traditional way of life(there are some heavy religious undertones which will be discussed more later).

again touching on how Mumble goes against the “norm” and must conform, this is also a common sentiment among the LGBT community. this, pairing with the religious tones of the elder penguins and how Mumble’s juvenile feathers don’t molt at the same time as his peers, implies that he is a “late bloomer” of some sort, or perhaps he is hiding a part of himself that is a part of growing up: sexuality.

on to Mumble’s journey and eventual meeting of the group of Adelie penguins. these shorter penguins, who refer to themselves as “The Amigos,” are meant to represent Mumble’s breaking free of his oppressive uprbingings and exploring other cultures . The Amigos immediately welcome Mumble into their group and celebrate his dancing, and bring him back to their colony where pebbles are used in place of singing to attract mates and show status. upon Mumble’s asking, The Amigos explain that they’ve never tried to give a pebble to a female penguin or build their own nests, and while they are shown to make some flirtatious gestures towards a group of females, it is in a joking manner and they move on quickly. this, along with their lack of discrepancy when it comes to physical contact (as is seen in the scene where Lovelace tells all of the penguins to hug and they are the only ones to do it), would imply that they are actually all in an open polyamourous relationship and have accepted Mumble in his journey of self exploration and actualization. However, he still has very real feelings for Gloria, which leads on the the conclusion that Mumble is bisexual.

having made this discovery about himself with the help of The Amigos, Mumble returns briefly to the colony and reunites with Gloria. he still feels the need to put on the impression of fitting in with everybody else in order to win her heart, however his scheme of lip synching is quickly found out and Gloria is disappointed in him and begins to leave. however, Mumble reveals his true self to her, and is able to achieve harmony with his dancing and her singing(i must comment that during this scene where Mumble and Gloria were dancing together and she was singing he SLAPPED HER ASS with his penguin hands.) their compatibility encourages those around them to embrace the dancing as well, spurring an episode of self exploration and deviating from tradition for his peers. however this is quickly put to rest when the elder penguin hears of it, and he berates Gloria and the rest for succumbing to temptation. Mumble’s parents try to defend him but ultimately he is banished after trying to convince the colony that the aliens he was told about by a predatory bird are the reason that the fish is disappearing, not his dancing as the elder penguin implies. he vows to find proof and leaves with The Amigos, once again shunned by his home for his differences.

when Gloria is revealed to have been following Mumble, at first he is overjoyed, but quickly realizes how dangerous the journey will be for her. he tries to get her to go away by mocking her singing, and she retorts by mocking his singing and how he thinks he’s special just because he can’t sing. this scene can be understood as Mumble trying to abandon his colony, and in turn his heterosexuality, in order to protect Gloria from a life of being shunned if she chooses him, as well as his own fears that he won’t be able to protect her on his journey. he still has something he needs to discover for himself, which brings us to our next major character.

now for Lovelace. while it seems that he has everything he could ever want when we first meet him - eager mates, the adoration of the colony, anything he wants - he holds anxieties deep within him and perhaps a sense of imposter syndrome, represented by the plastic around his neck. he gives generally negative answers to questions that are asked of him, such as an unnamed penguins mate being happier without him, or another never hoping to achieve his level of success, but these are more likely him vocalizing his own self doubts. at first he tries to ignore these feelings and acts boisterously to try and convince everyone around him and also himself that the “voices” that give him answers to the colony’s questions are legitimate, but they start to choke him, quite literally in the sense of the plastic around his neck. it is only when he separates himself from this pedestal he has been placed on and joins Mumble and The Amigos is he freed from this burden, the situation coming to a climax in the scene with the killer whales. There are 2, one representing his overcompensation and vanity and the other representing his crippling self doubt, and after a tense scene where the whales push him and Mumble around and nearly devour them, he plastic comes free from his neck and they escape the water. free from his own expectations and self doubts, Lovelace confidently commands the killer whales to leave his presence, and soon after finds new purpose in vowing to tell Mumble’s story of bravery and compassion.

the part where Mumble is put in a zoo can be summed up as he lost himself and missed his family, and became isolated and depressed. the little girl tapping on the glass is representative of his inner child getting him back in touch with his passions, and the antenna is indicative of his new, clearer mindset and his goal of changing the mind of his colony once and for all.

and here is the climax of the movie, when Mumble returns to his colony once and for all. with his journey of sexual and spiritual exploration complete thanks to Lovelace and The Amigos, he is a confident and self assured penguin who is dead set on changing the old ways. the first person he sees upon his arrival is Gloria, who he mocked and turned his back on at their last meeting. she is the first of the past regrets and inner demons that he has to come to terms with. he begins dancing and instructing others how to do the same, claiming that it will save them and send a message to the aliens that are stealing their fish. the elder penguin berates those who join in the dancing, and the rest of the elders begin vocalizing in a way that is very similar to a church choir, beginning the butting of heads between tradition and modernity. more penguins quickly join in, and the commotion brings forth The Amigos his mother, who now fully accepts him and wants him to stay because of how much she missed him. when Mumble asked about his father, his mother directs him to a solitary ice cave. there his father is consumed by depression over abandoning his own son, the second demon Mumble must conquer. his father tells him that he lost his heart song in his sadness, and Mumble is able to help him by getting him to see his perspective as someone who never had a “song” to begin with. father and son dance together and finally reach an understanding, going out to join the rest of the penguins dancing.

at this point the “aliens” arrive in a helicopter, and all of the penguins are given pause. the elder penguin spent so long telling the colony that they werent real, and now they were standing right in front of them. Mumble’s father encourages his son to start dancing, finally showing his full support and trust. Mumble begins to move and the rest of the colony follows suit, with even the elder penguin being converted after having his beliefs disproven before his very eyes. the humans record the penguins dancing and their message is received around the world, with arctic fishing being reeled back and the fish shortage ending.

the last scene shows everyone dancing in harmony together, a fully fluid community broken free of the oppressive traditions. the elder penguin is seen dancing with Lovelace, which could imply his own exploration of sexuality and the two being in a relationship. everyone is in harmony.

in conclusion: Mumble is a queer coded, neurodivergent revolutionary who broke free of the oppressive bonds of tradition and freed his entire colony from its grasp with the help of a group of polyamorous poc (penguins of color) and a body positive spiritualist.

#this is my ticket to hell #happy feet

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lilmissbacon · 3 years

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Adding Characters to the Big Four (RotBTD)

I've already made a post about just "How the Big Four Work so well (discussion)" which talks about their personalities are and what their stories have in common, as well as what criteria they follow.

So if you want to understand exactly what I'm talking about I'd recommend you read this first:

Now I'm gonna go into what characters would fit and why. So if you want to add other movies to this world, I would recommend Moana, Epic, The Croods or maybe even Hotel Transylvania and here's why:

Moana – Begins with narration but ends with a song. Although it's a song that sums up what Moana had learned and what her people have now become. So it is, its own form of narration. She also goes through the journey of finding herself by becoming a wayfinder like her ancestors.

Moana definitely adds to the groups resources with being friends with the ocean, knowing about the realm of monsters and being friends with Maui & Te Fiti. She would definitely get along great with the big four friend dynamic in many ways.

Hiccup: through their ability to lead and quick thinking. They also both understand what it's like to grow up on an island with their fathers being the leader who expects certain things from them.

Rapunzel: because they understand going against a parent's wishes and working to make their dreams/wishes come true. They also have the same type of bubbly personality and would converse well.

Jack: they both understand what if feels like to be chosen for something they feel they're not ready for and what it feels like to be an outsider from the people around them.

Merida: their tough and somewhat playful nature as well as their diplomacy skills match each other so well. They'd definitely be the closest of the group because of their strong personalities.

Out of a friend group consisting of: the girly-girl, a troublemaker a nerd and a tomboy, she fits into the literary dynamic through being the 'athlete.' In battle, consisting of: a leader/strategist, a healer, a sniper(bow and arrow) and a speed fighter, Moana fits in as the 'close combatant' in battle.

The magic also can still follow the guidelines of rotg. They speak about Gods but what if there really aren't any? The only 'God' we see is Te Fiti, who is the bringer of life. Or in other words; Mother Nature. The God that had raised Maui could've actually been the man in the moon and that would be how Maui was given magic and doesn't age. He goes around, calling himself a demigod but in reality, he's a spirit. And of course he's able to be seen since everyone on Motunui believes in the demi/gods.

Seasonally, Moana would most obviously be put in summer. But there are a lot of people who feel that adding more characters to the big four kind of breaks the seasonal aspect and that's fine.

But here me out.

The seasons effect the land on earth but if Moana is a spirit of the ocean, then she's effecting the rest of the earth's surface. The ocean doesn't necessarily have seasons so you don't need to apply one to her in order for her to add to the group. BOOM! Loophole!

I believe she's the BEST additional choice out of them all. Plus she'd definitely be chosen to become a guardian because *cough cough* SHE SAVED THE WORLD FROM DECAY.

Eep – A lot of applications for Moana fit for Eep too. She has narration at the beginning and end of her film. She'd fit in literarily as the 'athlete' and battle-wise as 'close constant/brawler.'

She also kind of has an arc of finding herself by leaving her cave days behind and following the light with her family. And being that she's from the caveman days –a time even before Moana– she could definitely add to the group with her survival skills.

Eep's dynamic with the others would be:

Hiccup: he understands overly strong women and would be able to keep up with her. She also has an innocent side to her and would be enthralled with his inventions. She'd just sit there and watch him work 😆

Rapunzel: being that Eep is getting a new friend in Dawn (who reminds me of Rapunzel) in "The Croods 2," I would imagine Rapunzel would also be intrigued with Eep's scars/adventures and Eep would be more than happy to boast.

Merida: their roughness and competitive nature would make them the best frienemies. They'd be closer than ever but do nothing but wrestle and compete.

Jack: like how Eep would boast with Rapunzel, Jack would boast with Eep. She would be in love with Jack's magic and he'd be more than happy to show off.

There really isn't a magical aspect to compare with rotg so the world can still fit into the dynamic here.

Eep is witty, optimistic, energetic, speaks without thinking and fails to plan ahead a lot. Therefore, as a seasonal spirit, Eep would bring spring.

MK – Begins with narration but doesn't really have any at the end. She can add to the groups resources by knowing about the leafmen and the whole mini society, of course.

The magic also stays in line with rotg and it probably helps that the creator of Epic was also the author of the Guardians of Childhood books that inspired rotg. The moon is what blooms the pod, so it's possibly the man in the moon passing his magic into the pod so it gives the next queen her powers.

In the literary dynamic, MK would be the 'city girl' friend-wise and the 'reanforcement' fight-wise. Getting along with the rest would be:

Hiccup: she would be a sense of familiarity with MK's dad being a scientist and Nod's sarcastic nature. Hiccup would also be very intrigued to learn more about the Moonhaven kingdom.

Merida: their stubbornness and being able to understand having a parent that doesn't listen.

Rapunzel: their (new) love for nature and exploring. As well as being able to understand the pain of losing a loved one.

Jack: understanding the feeling of being invisible to the people around you. MK definitely felt this way after her mom died and when her dad wasn't listening. She mentioned how she felt alone to Ronan when he brought up the "many leaves, one tree," line.

I believe she could've been chosen to become a guardian because she did save an entire society and forest. Seasonally, I believe MK would be made into a fall spirit. There are certain places that relate to or even represent the seasons. When you think of Fall, you think of trees. Spring relates to a field/garden, summer relates to a beach and winter relates to just about everything being in snow, but usually frozen bodies of water. She's also very dependable, willing to work, disagreeable and easily irritated. All traits that relate to Autumn.

Mavis – Probably the least workable candidate. There really isn't any narration in this movie and she also doesn't really "find herself" either so her movie criteria don't really work here.

But her character criteria still does. The magic still fits because we know that spirits are created by the man in the moon. If we go by the GoC books, the mim is alien magic. But who's to say that earth didn't have its own magic in the form of monsters (which can also fit for the realm of monsters from Moana.) So the magical dynamic still works.

She could also add to the group by knowing about monsters as well as being a vampire herself. She could turn into a bat or travel as smoke to sneak around places to find information if need be.

She'd fit in literarily as the 'gothic (not so much as personality but by style)' friend-wise and the 'sneak attacker' fight-wise. Getting along with the rest would be:

Jack: there are many takes on the Jack Frost myth and in a few of those takes, he's a monster. The reason for this could be because Jack has come across Hotel Transylvania and the monsters could see him (not being human and all) and he befriended Mavis, knowing she was lonely. They have the same type of fun personality and are both great with balancing tricks. I can imagine Jack getting Mavis into trouble through pranking the hotel guests.

Rapunzel: they'd both be able to understand being locked up in some way by a parent and wanting to travel the world. They both also have naiveties about the real world and would be learning things for the first time together.

Merida: through their daily activities and love for food. I could imagine them trying each other's scream-cheese and haggis😂 I'd also imagine Merida being the one to help Mavis socially catch up.

Hiccup: much like Eep, she'd be incredibly intrigued by Hiccups inventions. I think she'd even try anything to assist him while he's testing certain things. I can imagine him also being the one to help Mavis socially catch up as well.

She's very curious, friendly, energetic and tender-hearted as well as undecided and talkative. So seasonally, she too, would go to spring. She unfortunately can't go into sunlight but there are plants that actually do better in darkness. That would be where she specializes.

I hope you all like this. I hope you find this whole thing very interesting and informational. If you have any other characters you think could add to the big four, I'd love to hear it.

#the big 4 #the big four #rise of the guardians #rise of the brave tangled dragons #rotbtd #how to train your dragon #httyd #tangled #brave #hotel transylvania #the croods #epic #moana

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kuroopaisen · 3 years

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hi! i saw your post about the fascism in aot and i’m jewish and although i don’t watch or read it, i will say that i’ve heard it is extremely antisemitic, and i don’t know all the details (i definitely dont watch it specifically because of it being antisemitic but i know people who are jewish who do watch the show) but what information i’ve got about the antisemitic aspects is that,, the titans (?) are supposed to represent jews who can only... regain their humanity by ... eating people (? correct me if i’m wrong on that premise) but that’s... really really antisemitic, thinking of jews as anything but just another person (reptilian, alien, or in this case, titian) is a super antisemitic trope that’s ... really popular in several forms of media also the germanic/nazi imagery also tends to be antisemitic, again i’m not entirely sure about the details just bcs i refuse to watch a show that paints jews as monsters, but yeah i just... wanted to let you know (also here’s a twitter thread about it!)

first things first, as a gentile i don’t feel like i’m in any place to say something is or isn’t antisemetic! but hhh a good way to sum up my ‘ideological’ assessment of aot is “is isayama a nazi? probably not. is isayama an anti-pacifistic nationalist? not unlikely!” and that’s the reason i said in my earlier post that it’s impossible to say he is or is not the latter until the ending, if that makes sense? also, it’s highly concerning if he is a pro-war nationalist, given the horrific crimes against humanity committed by the imperial japanese army.

saying he’s not a nazi doesn’t mean he’s not antisemetic; even if the antisemetic aspects aren’t intentional propaganda, they’re still harmful (and a common issue with deconstruction is that... well, sometimes it’s so faithful to what it’s deconstructing that the people being criticized end up adopting it -- such as american history x). also, apparently that germanic aesthetic is really popular in japan? sort of like how some people in america identify as francophiles. which... is concerning?

i think a big issue with aot is that the eldians are sort of... a combination of jews and japanese people? isayama obviously draws heavily from holocaust imagery, but a lot of the... themes and the text itself seems more in line with japan? and by that, i mean specifically the war-mongering past (when grisha’s father explains eldian history to him which is very much centred on conquest and empire, and grisha retort “but me and my sister didn’t do any of that!” which echoes certain nationalistic sentiments in japan) holocaust imagery is more ‘window dressing’; an aesthetic i don’t think he had any right to co-opt, given that he isn’t jewish himself. also, conflating the discrimination against the jews in twentieth century europe with the reparations demanded of japan once the empire fell is... not just tactless, but definitely damaging?

ooo okay so with the ‘regaining humanity’ thing... the short form is that there are nine ‘special titans’ who can change between human form and titan form. if a ‘pure titan’ eats someone who currently ‘has’ one of those nine titans, then they technically gain that ability to change back and forth. otherwise, eldians can’t turn into titans at will; it’s something forced upon them by injections given by either the rulers of the previous eldian empire or the marleyans.

oh also death of the author means i may be interpreting aot all wrong. not that ‘word of god’ would give isayama reprieve for the pernicious aspects of his work, but that’s an important point to remember. furthermore, i completely understand and respect people who avoid it because of how he uses a jewish allegory -- and nobody should admonish them for taking that stand.

#nazi mention #nazi tw #holocaust tw #attack on titan spoilers #anon #rowan replies

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sparrowsabre7 · 3 years

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Ok this was in my drafts from ages ago and I forgot to post so it’s here now:

So with Arkham Knight completed I wanted to discuss the story and some of the things I liked about the plot.

For my money Arkham City is the most entertaining of the series plot-wise. It is wide in scope, incorporating a large group of Batman’s rogues, with a lead villain who has a commanding presence. It is the quintessential Batman plot, full of twists, focusing on his dynamic with the Joker and is a big ‘ol actionfest.

Arkham Knight’s plot on the other hand is quite pedestrian by comparison looking at the villain plot: Scarecrow wants to take down Batman and cause chaos in Gotham and a mysterious new villain appears to help. From this standpoint, Arkham Knight is nothing special. However, as a character study of Batman, it goes much deeper than any of the previous games, and deeper even than any of the films. Most of those dealt with “Why does Bruce Wayne become Batman?” whereas Knight asks the question “What does it mean to BE Batman?”

In this respect “Be the Batman” is more than just a marketing tagline. We really delve into what makes Batman and Bruce Wayne tick and their relationships with the world, their allies, and enemies.

We’re going to delve into big spoiler territory now so be ye warned.

Batman in this game is in an interesting place. Crime is supposedly lower than ever when Scarecrow’s plan starts falling into place, yet he’s hitting criminals harder than ever, working tirelessly in his war on crime. His modifications to the Batmobile make this immediately apparent, adding numerous heavy weapons and armour. One of the unlockable Arkham stories indicates that adding more weaponry has been something Batman has fought for years, according to Lucius, but he had a change of heart some point between City and Knight. We learn soon enough that Batman is on borrowed time. His blood is still infected with Joker’s own and is actually beginning to turn him. This is his last assault on crime, one final push if a cure cannot be found. As a result, he is pushing his allies further away than ever. This alienation was seen in a small way in the epilogue DLC “Harley Quinn’s Revenge”, keeping Robin at arm’s length and mostly avoiding contact with his allies entirely.

This is one of the key themes of the whole game and, personally, if I were to choose one word to sum up Arkham Knight it would be “family”. “Asylum”, “City”, and “Origins” were all solo efforts on Batman’s part, with some input in his ear from Oracle and Alfred, and a brief appearance by Robin. This is the first game to really have the Bat-family on board proper and this really informs a lot of the game and Batman’s motivations.

He pushes them away because he knows he’s dying. He pushes them away because he wants them to get used to the idea of him being gone. Most importantly, he pushes them away because he believes this will keep them safe. This is underlined when Scarecrow’s fear toxin kicks in. Thanks to the hallucinations provided by it, we are shown two of Batman’s greatest failures in his eyes, along with his raison d’etre: the crippling of Barbara Gordon, the torture and murder of Jason Todd, and the death of his parents. The former two are clearly never far from the dark knight’s thoughts and show why he genuinely does fear for his allies safety. This ends up, in the obvious ironic twist, putting them in greater danger. By keeping them at arm’s length and withholding his plans, the Batman is a less effective force. He doesn’t consider that they are safest together, working as a team. His allies come to his rescue a couple of times during the course of the game, Nightwing saving him from Penguin’s thugs, Catwoman saving him from an unwinnable fight against The Riddler, Oracle aiding him during the defence of the GCPD and Robin not saving him per se, but defusing some of the Johnny Charisma’s bombs while Batman is unable to move.

Another key subplot is Batman vs Joker. Even after his death, through his blood and the fear toxin, Joker is resurrected as a hallucination, a dark Jiminy Cricket pestering and needling the caped crusader at every turn. This is the ultimate Joker, no less potent for not being “real”. He represents everything Batman hates and fears, because he is not only The Joker, but the darkest parts of Batman’s mind, all the what ifs, the maybe should’ves, all of this tumbles out of Joker’s mouth, taunting the dark knight with his own insecurities. It shows Batman’s human side a lot more than any previous game, shows he can be afraid, he does have doubts, can fail, can falter. This is something which clearly plays across his mind throughout the game and leads him to the ultimate conclusion of the game which I will touch on in a bit.

The Joker has always been key to the Batman mythos. He was that in Batman #1 so nearly as long as the Batman has been in existence. Having him manifest as a facet of Batman’s subconscious is both a neat narrative trick (and way to skirt the “Joker is dead” thing without cheapening the end of “City”) and a useful dynamic in explaining who Batman is. Much of his existence has been spent battling The Joker and it’s clear that there is a side of Batman in “Knight” that almost misses him in a sense. His presence also plays up the yin-yang of their relationship and eventually culminates quite literally in a battle in Batman’s psyche.

Near the game’s ending Scarecrow unmasks Batman and injects him with a heavy dose of fear toxin. This causes Joker’s personality to be brought to the fore but at the same time empowers Batman’s own power of fear, showing the clown prince of crime his own greatest nightmare: being forgotten. This is ultimately delivered personally by Batman, bursting from the shadows of his own mind and subduing the Joker side, locking him away forever, enforcing this with the time tested phrase “I am vengeance, I am the night, I am Batman.” This is said, as another blogger pointed out, as much to himself as to The Joker. This is a declaration that he is Batman, he is no longer Bruce Wayne. To paraphrase “Batman Begins”, as Bruce Wayne he can fail, be killed, and simply die, which is when we come to the ending.

Upon the final villains being rounded up he initiates the Knightfall protocol and removes his mask. This is a clear symbolic gesture as he is leaving Batman behind on the rooftop with the Batsignal and reverting to Bruce Wayne. He flies back to Wayne Manor and it explodes, destroying the whole building. It’s not made explicit but it’s fairly evident that Bruce has faked his death, very publicly killing Bruce Wayne, now that he has been revealed as the alter ego of Batman. Gordon’s narration states that “this is how the Batman died” but it’s really how Bruce Wayne died.

The final scene shows Thomas, Martha and young Bruce Wayne stand-ins walking down an alley past a theatre, visually recreating Batman’s origin. There’s a gunman, there are broken pearls, this is the birth of Batman as we remember. This time however, Batman already exists. A shadow appears on the rooftop behind the criminals, towering high before spreading shadowy wings and fiery demon eyes alighting as it swoops towards them and cuts to black. It’s clear this is more than a symbolic statement as the criminals react to this “Knightmare” and are clearly terrified. Ultimately it’s up to interpretation, but I think, either it is The Batman in his purest form, shed of the Bruce Wayne identity, free to be more than human (with the use of Scarecrow’s fear toxin apparently), or it simply a psychological manifestation. After Scarecrow’s gas flooded Gotham’s streets, perhaps the residual effects left a lingering memory of Batman that was burned into their consciousness.

Either way it’s a true and final realisation of Bruce Wayne’s goal for the Batman. To become something eternal, supernatural even, that will watch over an protect

#batman #arkham knight #games #arkham trilogy

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geopolicraticus · 4 years

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When Futurism Gets Stuck in the Past

Overcoming the Idée Fixe of World Government

Ever since I first became interested in futurism in the 1970s, and I began to read everything I could find on futurism, I noticed the almost exclusive interest in world government as the political paradigm of futurism, and even at the time I thought it was odd. I still find it odd today, and so I have gone looking for explanations for the political monoculture of futurism. Let me begin with a speculation—nothing that I consider to be definitive, but only one possible explanation among many—and after my speculation I will move on to a more analytical understanding of the world government paradigm in futurism.

Historical thought in western civilization is haunted by the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Romans expanded their political control over the entirety of the Mediterranean Basin and maintained this universal empire for hundreds of years. If we take Rome from its foundation to its last effective presence at Byzantium, its history can be measured in millennia, like Ancient Egyptian civilization. Western historians always have, in their back of their minds, the cautionary tale of Rome: a single, universal civilization effectively dominating the known world, utterly failing and leaving in its wake confusion, social collapse, conflict, and Balkanization. This cautionary tale is often understood as a moral lesson for our time (cf. Manifest Destiny: Roman and American).

No historical narrative that summarizes thousands of years of history into some neat schema could ever be quite true; it is an oversimplification in order to give us a “big picture” view of the trajectory of western civilization, but oversimplifications have their place, side-by-side with soporific detail. Either approach risks alienating some part of the audience, which audience is us, today, inheriting these historical traditions at the same time as we look forward into the future.

It is possible that this oversimplified narrative of Roman expansion, overextension, decline, and failure is the source of the idée fixe of world government in futurism. World government is what was effectively lost when the western Roman Empire failed, and western civilization ever since that time can be understood as the conscious or unconscious attempt to recover that lost world government of the Roman imperium. Dante was quite explicit about this in his pamphlet De Monarchia (often translated into English as On World Government).

Whether or not the explanation of the world government idée fixe ultimately is to be derived from the western historical imagination being haunted by the specter of Roman collapse, or is due to some other cause, is not ultimately decisive; it may bear upon the question and its eventual resolution, but I do not think it will be decisive. So let us widen our scope and consider three other sources of the intellectual fixation on world government; specifically, let us consider three ideas that loom large in the idea of world government, even if these ideas are not often made explicit:

The Political Idea

The Planetary Idea

The Universalist Idea

We will take up each of these in turn.

The Political Idea

If we understand civilization to be a form of social organization, and we understand social organization to be intrinsically and essentially political, then it follows that civilization is intrinsically and essentially political. In brief, civilization is a political phenomenon. And one can further conclude that, when the scattered and diverse civilizations of our homeworld began to grow together in a planetary concrescence, because the world entire is settled and populated, then the emergent planetary civilization, being intrinsically and essentially political, should also be converging on a common planetary political framework. The scattered and diverse political structures of the once numerous civilization of our world would, it seems, also grow together into a planetary concrescence of political institutions.

If, on the other hand, one denies that civilization is intrinsically and essentially political, then the growing together of civilizations originally separate does not necessarily entail the growing together of political regimes originally separate. Civililzation may become planetary (arguably, it is already planetary at this time), but since civilization is not intrinsically or essentially political, the planetary scale of civilization does not entail planetary scale political institutions.

The relationship of civilization to political order is a complex one, so that one might argue either side of the question and be able to produce historical examples of either the coincidence of civilization and political order, or the divergence of civilization and political order. Clearly, one of the emergent properties of civilization has been the emergence of sophisticated political institutions. This has been necessary because civilizations join together a far larger number of individuals than can be found in a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers, a tribe, or a clan, which usually increase to the number of individuals with whom stable social relationships are possible (known as Dunbar’s number), and fission thereafter. The institutions of civilization are a “work around” for the limitations imposed by Dunbar’s number.

However, emergent political institutions of civilization do not necessarily entail top-down unification of peoples in relation to some central authority (and the idea that the unified peoples inhabit a particular geographical territory is a later artifact of the territorial principle in law, which more or less corresponds with the origins of the nation-state). One of the most familiar forms that civilization takes is that of a network of cities bound in relationships of cooperation, competition, and conflict with one another (I call this my pragmatic definition of civilization), all cities of which network share in a common civilization, but not a common government. We find this pattern among the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, swept now into one empire, and then later into another, and we find the same pattern among the Mayan cities of ancient Mesoamerica, as well as among the many cities of the Indus Valley civilization, and so on. We understand that when Siyaj Kʼakʼ installed Yax Nuun Ahiin I as king of Tikal in 379 AD that this was a political struggle internal to Mayan civilization and that it does not represent the conquest of one civilization by another.

I argue that the identification of civilization with a (single) political regime is reductionist, since civilization is a much more comprehensive conception than that of political order, as seen from rival political orders contending for power within one and the same civilization. That some civilizations have been unified on an imperial basis (e.g., ancient Egypt after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt about 3100 BC, and China throughout much of its history since Ying Zheng founded the Qin Dynasty after the Warring States period) demonstrates only that imperial unification of one civilization into a single political order is one possibility among many possible political orders that might hold within a given civilization.

The Planetary Idea

In the distant past, when there were far fewer human beings, the size of Earth was sufficient to be effectively indefinite in extent. Small bands of hunter-gatherers could wander for generations, crossing paths with other bands, but with any band able to seek its own uncontested territory if only that band were willing to migrate further than its neighbors. As noted in the above section, nomadic bands fell well within the limits of Dunbar’s number, and as this number was approached by a growing band, that band could fission and the resulting two or more bands would then be free to go their separate ways, maintaining the effective social order.

Later, when civilizations began to appear—and even before that when nomadic bands began to settle down into patterns of village agriculture—still Earth was large enough that civilizations could expand to the extent of their ability, sometimes impinging upon other civilizations, but also often without opposition. The remaining nomadic bands would recede further from arable land as the settled agricultural peoples expanded, with the last of the nomadic bands either retreating into the mountains and becoming mountain peoples with a distinctive way of life dictated by this distinctive geography, or becoming pastoralists and eventually horse nomads who learned to raid and to conquer the settled peoples through their mastery of mobile fire.

Now the entirety of Earth’s surface has been mapped and claimed and there are no frontiers; all territories are claimed by nation-states, or their administration is agreed upon by nation-states (as with the “Empty Quarter” in the Arabian Peninsula or Antarctica). Territorial expansion is now a zero sum game: one nation-state can expand only at the expense of another nation-state. With Earth being entirely divided up among nation-states, civilization is to be found on every inhabited continent, and many of the institutions of civilization are planetary in scale. The Earth itself is the limit, the natural teleology, of civilization. Or, at least, Earth is the natural teleology of planetary civilization.

Having converged upon planetary civilization, the planetary idea presents iself: the natural telos of civilization is understood also to be the natural telos of humanity, of political order, of history, of society, of culture, and of civilization. Earth is entirely a civilized planet; the natural order of things is that the planet entire will slowly converge upon a consolidation of all institutions of planetary scale, including political institutions.

Needless to say, this unification of natural teleologies into an overarching planetary teleology is strictly speaking a non sequitur; we have no a priori assurance that the events and activities on Earth are “naturally” limited to Earth and find their fulfillment on Earth. Arguably, we have already imagined elaborate futures for civilization beyond Earth, so that even if human civilization fails to make a spacefaring breakout (or, alternatively, to achieve such an inflection point), we can still conceptualize spacefaring civilization, and if spacefaring civilization is not realized in actuality, it becomes an unfulfilled potential—meaning that the fulfillment represented by planetary civilization does not exhaust the meaning of civilization as it has developed to date.

The Universalist Idea

Since the Enlightenment, the idea that there should be universally applicable ideas and institutions, equally valid for all peoples at all times and in all places, has gained the upper hand over a de facto particularism, to the point that one must draw attention to this Enlightenment universalism simply to be aware of its presence as a pervasive influence on our conceptions of political order. Universalism has become like the air we breathe, or the water through which fish swim: it is the unquestioned medium that supports and surrounds everything else that we do.

Universalism as applied to political thought holds that there is a uniquely optimal political structure through which human beings can best govern themselves. When Francis Fukuyama asserted in his “The End of History?” essay (1989) that this universal political order was none other than liberal democracy, which had won the Cold War contest and proved itself to be the “last man standing” after a global ideological war, this was, in a sense, the culmination of the Enlightenment trajectory toward a new political system that would replace the feudal hierarchies of the past.

It could be argued that the Roman idea of a cosmopolitan order was a pre-Enlightenment conception of political universalism; this may well be true, and, while I do not gainsay this interpretation, I see it in the context of larger developments. The backward-looking character of renaissance humanism, that raised the norms and ideals of classical antiquity as a superior model to that of the otherworldly ideals of the Middle Ages, institutionalized the Roman imperium in the western historical imagination, and it could be argued that the Enlightenment seamlessly took up this idealization of classical antiquity and ran with it in order to create its own norm and ideal of Enlightenment universalism. Enlightenment universalism, then, could be understood as the culmination of a long development in western history evolving from a cosmopolitan Hellenism of late antiquity to the explicit statement and political formulation of an idealized universal form of civilization.

A Retrograde Ideal

The idea of world government is backward-looking if we understand it as the attempt to recover the Roman achievement, it is backward-looking if we understand it as a tradition of futurist thought (there are comprehensive articles on world government on Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, both of which discuss the long intellectual pedigree of the idea), and it is backward looking if world government is simply taken as the default position of futurism, the unquestioned political paradigm of futurism, because futurism has always advocated for world government.

It would not be at all difficult for anyone who cared to do so, to investigate the possible permutations of political forms that future civilization might take, with an emphasis upon exploring possibilities that have been neglected in the light of the intellectual fixation on world government. That this has not happened in any kind of systematic way is a glaring weakness in futurist thought. The impoverishment of our political futurism is a reflection of an inability or unwillingness to think critically about political institutions, and especially to think critically about the big picture of political institutions in space and time. One must maintain a cultivated blindness to the complex reality of political institutions, and how they have functioned through history, to maintain unquestioned the idea of world government either as a practical outcome of planetary-scale civilization or as an ideal state of human affairs.

This is especially true in relationship to the idea of law. Without studying law one tends to view the institution of law as monolithic, but, in fact, law is anything but monolithic. There are many systems of law employed by many different political entities of overlapping jurisdictions. For one small example, a distinction is made between private international law and public international law, with private international law governing interaction of private individuals from different nation-states, and public international law being a agreed-upon framework within which independent nation-states resolve differences. As war takes place within the framework of public international law, nation-states may choose to resolve their differences through armed conflict and still abide by the provisions of public international law.

If one conceptualizes world government as a single system of law for everyone, this idea is so out of touch with the reality of law—its tradition, it formulation, its promulgation, its policing, and its enforcement, all of which involve distinct institutions (the legislature, the executive, police, and courts)—it would be difficult to know where to start in pointing out the flaws in this idea.

The Code Napoléon represented an attempt to formulate an Enlightenment universal civil code that prevailed throughout much of the Francophone world, but, significantly, the civil code was not truly universal in so far as it did not also serve as a military code, a criminal code, or a commercial code, each of which sectors had codes distinctive to each aspect of life. A comprehensive code can be cobbled together by joining the codes for distinct sectors of society and the economy, but when a legal code is assembled in this way ex post facto, it will inevitably involve conflicts that need to be rationalized. This was the situation with Roman law when Justinian commissioned the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which was a compendium and synthesis of Roman law that aimed to rationalize hundreds of years of Roman law into a single system of law.

The Corpus Iuris Civilis was formulated in Byzantium when Roman civilization had already largely failed in western civilization, so that as European civilization took shape in the aftermath of Roman collapse, it eventually came to draw upon the Corpus Iuris Civilis (which haunted the western historical imagination in law as in other areas of life), but it also drew from the traditions of law among the German tribes (the “barbarians”), as well as eventually from the English common law tradition, which represents the other focal point of legal thought in the western tradition, which is bookended by Roman statutory law and English common law, which latter is a body of case law.

This brief sketch of the prolixity of legal traditions within the context of a single civilization could easily be multiplied. Most civilizations have a multiplicity of legal traditions superimposed upon each other over a long history, so that there are many legal codes that can claim to be traditional, and none that can claim to be universal. This is true for all the institutions of civilization, in each and every tradition of civilization; pluralism is the reality that cannot be wished away. Rather than engage in shadowboxing between the reality of a plurality of legal traditions and the monolithic shade of a pretense to universal legal traditions, we should embrace the reality of pluralism and learn to live with it, both at the level of local institutions and at the level of planetary institutions.

Taking Politics Seriously in a Planetary Context

I have earlier pointed out that one of the great disconnects in western thought is that between philosophy of law and political philosophy. One would suppose that law is the implementation of politics, and politics the sum total of law, so that these bodies of thought would be related as idea to execution, but in fact we find problems in the philosophy of law being discussed in a conceptual framework that only partially overlaps with political philosophy, and vice versa, so that there is no systematic approach to identifying problems common to both, much less resolving these problems. The philosophy of law in Anglo-American analytical philosophy has become tightly focused on legal positivism, while political philosophy remains mired in the presuppositions implied above that follow from unquestioned Enlightenment universalism.

We need to move beyond both the retrograde ideal of planetary governance and the disconnection between legal and political institutions. Taking politics seriously in a planetary context would mean a planetary revaluation of all values (what Nietzsche called Umwertung aller Werte), which in turn would mean a planetary revaluation of law and legal institutions, of politics and political institutions, and overcoming the disconnect between the two. Those who look toward planetary governance as an ideal for humanity have an intellectual responsibility not merely to invoke an empty concept of world governance, but to conduct just such a thorough-going revaluation of legal, political, and civilizational institutions, so that they can offer concrete proposals that transcend the past rather than recreating past follies on a larger scale.

This is not something that could be accomplished by one comprehensive book, or by a few books. This would require a multi-generational research project that would benefit from the contribution of the best minds of all the world’s civilizations, spontaneously and willingly cooperating in the enterprise because the idea of planetary ideals and values becomes so compelling that one cannot but dedicate oneself to it. Until such time as such a multi-generational research project comes into being and begins to bear fruit, one should not make the mistake of taking the idea of world governance seriously, as in its current state it is merely the province of dilettantes, who have little of substance on offer. Until then, we are better off investing our time in studying permutations of the nation-state and how it is expressed in the anarchic international state system, since there is at least an extant body of scholarship undergirding this context for planetary affairs.

Konstantin Yuon, “New Planet” (1921)

#futurism #government #world government #universalism #Enlightenment #political science

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fancyemowolfbat · 4 years

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Thoughts on Castlevania S3: Taka and Sumi’s abuse of Adrian

Season three spoilers below: and yes, this is plot heavy. So if you haven’t seen yet, read at your own risk.

But the TL;DR: I love Castlevania and this scene only made me love it more.

To start: This is entirely an opinion post. I don’t have enough energy to make it into a full analysis with resources and other things. So don’t take this as an essay with some deep meaning. This is entirely just an impressions post.

I love this scene. I love the writing and the visuals. And I love that it was handled in a very real manner. And I love that it represented abuse correctly, because make no mistake-- this scene was abuse--at the very least, and rape at worst. But I’m not saying that for the reasons others have given. But I’m going to get back to that in a moment.

I’m going to leave out the controversy that’s been spat about this scene, because honestly, I don’t feel like talking about it. Like I said, I’m tired. And I’m not gonna harass someone else over their opinions just because they’re different than mine. If you didn’t like this, that’s totally fine. Please don’t ask me to debate, I’m not interested in . I’m simply enjoying this show in my own little corner, and am sharing my own opinions and observations for those who might be curious.

1.) Adrian is confirmed canonically (as far as the Netflix series goes) Bisexual.

While the events that follow the scene absolutely make this scene abuse and manipulation, at the start, Adrian does consent to the sex initially (INITIALLY, I’m not forgetting what happens after). He willingly makes out with both Sumi and Taka, and he’s very obviously anally penetrated when Taka puts Adrian’s legs over his shoulders. It’s not subtle. This is probably the smallest thing to mention given what happens, but this did make me happy. Adrian is only the second character in my favorites list to be confirmed LGBTQIA+ (the other being Damien Bloodmarch from Dream Daddy: a Dad Dating Simulator). And I won’t lie, I cried for both instances.

This is a popular show, and Adrian is one of the main characters. This season had so many good examples of LGBT+ relationships-- including a very healthy partnership between two of the female villains which was openly discussed by them on screen. It’s treated as normal but not made the focus of the story, though it’s very obvious and not hidden. This was very impressive and respectful, showing a range of different orientations, and showing both healthy and unhealthy relationships.

I won’t address the games, because I haven’t finished playing them. I’ve heard some saying he’s always been bi, some saying it was never confirmed, and some saying he was confirmed straight. So I don’t know. I am of the opinion that a character’s sexuality does not affect the overall lore any more than their skin color or religion does. BUT, that is all I can say. I don’t know the games. And this scene certainly does include lore, as I will touch on in a bit...

2.) This scene was abuse, and the writing vilifies it as such.

As I said above, Adrian does seem to initially consent to the sex. He returns their kisses, he grips onto Sumi’s ass, and holds Taka’s shoulder as they make out. These are actions that imply he was enjoying this at the beginning. Although, it is possible he may have felt somewhat pressured to go further, as when they initially push him down, he does seem taken back, although that may have been mostly surprise.

However, as the scene goes on, it becomes clear that these two are attempting to make Adrian vulnerable. They continue with him until he is exhausted-- there are two of them and one of him. And given Adrian’s reactions, it’s very possible this may have been his first time. And I’m also not going to gloss over the fact that Adrian himself has said that he aged quickly. It is entirely possible that Adrian may still mentally be a child, in which case, this is also two young adults taking advantage of a younger teenager.

However, when this clearly becomes abuse and possibly rape is why they were having sex with him in the first place-- they wanted to make him vulnerable enough to kill him. They grew impatient with Adrian, wanting him to do things he could not do and teach them things he had not yet had the chance to. He gave them all he could, but their urge to return to Japan and free their people grew into a desire to kick out and replace the authority that abused them, to “make their own empire.” I also like that this makes this very real and tangible-- the abusers are not cartoonishly evil. They are real people with real motives who experienced abuse themselves. This hits a really sensitive topic many people aren’t willing to address-- that anyone is capable of abuse, villains aren’t alien, and people who may be otherwise trustworthy may commit grievous acts which can deeply hurt people.

What solidifies the idea in my mind is Adrian’s reaction after he kills them both and frees himself. We see him, having dragged himself to his childhood bedroom, laying on the floor in the spot where he killed his father, shaking and crying. He was violated. He was betrayed. The first time he’d been living a somewhat normal life in over a year, and the only two friends he had after Sypha and Trevor left stabbed him in the back. These humans, whom he killed his father to protect, took advantage of him and almost killed him, forcing him to kill them first.

I’m going to link to this post by @fandomwanderer and this post by @mega-ringsandthings-world, because the sum up the idea better than I ever could. But this sets up Adrian’s character superbly. I will say, my wish for the next season is a bit different.

I hope that, eventually, Sypha and Trevor do come back, expecting Adrian to be waiting for them with open arms. And instead they find a very cold, very detached Adrian who is not acting like himself. I want tension between these three characters who used to be friends, until it builds up and eventually leads to a clash, possibly in the form of a physical fight. I want it to escalate until something happens and causes pause enough for Sypha and Trevor to talk Adrian down, at which point we finally see him start to crack, and eventually break down in his friends arms. I want them to ask about the scars, and prod and push until he snaps and attacks them, only to lead to him revealing everything that happened and clinging to them for comfort, while they wish they could’ve been the ones to kill the bastards. I truly do hope this happens. It’s been Three Seasons. Two of them have ended with Adrian sobbing. I want him to finally get some relief. But, even with this, I’m sure whatever the writers decide to do, it will be amazing. They’re in a very precarious place right now, but I’m excited to see where they go with it.

3.) Adrian’s reaction is perfectly justified.

This may just be an extension of point two, but Sumi and Taka’s abuse is not excused by the writing. All too often in fiction, rape and abuse are written off as not being that bad or even being desirable. What happens to Adrian is not painted as positive. It affects him extremely negatively, and it is not treated as his fault in any way. Even though he initially consented, these two betrayed his trust and hurt him. That is never treated as something he should be responsible for. Granted, with this being at the end of the series, there wasn’t much time for this to digest. I expect to see some characters see how he reacted by killing and spitting them, and initially assume that he did so because “he’s Dracula's son and of course.” But these characters will likely be doing so without context. The abuse also isn’t blamed on Adrian’s apparent orientation. Hector is abused in the same way by Lenore, in a heterosexual female-on-male abuse scene. And as stated above, there are healthy LGBT+ relationships in the show, as well.

Also, as the above linked post states, this also leads to us seeing Adrian slip slowly into the mindset his father once held-- perhaps not completely, but it is beginning. And all I’m left to think is, how much must this hurt? How much must Adrian hate seeing himself this way after everything he did for humans? But he’s so hurt by this betrayal that he can’t see things any other way right now. He is in pain, and he has had no real rest from that pain since his mother was killed.

“I gave you everything.” Adrian opened his home to Sumi and Taka, and he opened his heart to them, as well. He gave them his home, his weapons, his knowledge, his body. He is very young and very trusting, despite everything he’s been through. And that trust was taken and shoved right back in his face with insult and humiliation. He gave his all, not just for Sumi and Taka, but for humanity as a whole. He killed people, he killed his own kind, and he killed his own father-- his only remaining parent-- after his own mother was killed by the very people he was trying to protect. He gave everything, and humanity took it all and then shat on him in return. Adrian has every. right to feel betrayed. I don’t think he’ll be the new villain solely because I believe they will stick a bit closer to game lore, and may rather have him simply put himself to rest until the next major disaster hits humanity. But I do think this event caused his view of humanity to be less rose-tinted. He was forced to grow up fast, and much more painfully than he should’ve.

I truly hope, more than anything else, in future seasons Adrian does get some form of relief. Though, I doubt the world is done kinking him while he’s down. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, something truly good and unbastardized will come his way. Until then, I’ll be waiting with baited breath. I couldn’t be happier that this series is continuing.

P.S.: Please let me hug Adrian.

#Castlevania #castlevania season 3 #castlevania spoilers #castlevania season 3 spoilers #castlevania s3 #casltevania s3 spoilers #abuse tw #rape tw #analysis #opinion #review #Self 🔅 Adrian

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bouwrites · 4 years

Text

Even Heroes Have the Right to Dream: Chapter 7

I try to reach out to the light through the glass as it shatters.

First, Previous, Next. Ao3.

Story under read-more.

Marinette is nervous to see Jon again. She probably shouldn’t be. They don’t part on a bad note, and as they promise, they text each other throughout the break, so she knows they’re good, she just… is nervous.

The summer is a good time to distract herself and process everything that happened. Process knowing that Jon is Superboy. Or, was. He’s not anymore. Marinette still has to remind herself of that, despite it all. And the reason she has to remind herself is because it just makes too much sense.

Jon is a man who takes what he’s doing seriously. Even when he laughs and jokes around, he practices a kind of restraint that Marinette doesn’t see in many people. A sort of temperance that implies he’s always aware of exactly what he’s doing. The way he makes moves around her so that he never crowds her even in the tightest of quarters, how careful he is with the most simple of actions, like holding a pencil, the way he always seems to be there when she has a problem, but never forces the issue. Moments like the day she returned from break and he cheered her up after her breakup with Adrien. He’s almost hyperaware of boundaries and stays as far as he can from breaking anything while still doing everything possible to help.

Marinette thought he was just like that, but now that she knows he was Superboy, she thinks that’s probably something that is trained into him. That doesn’t make him any less sweet and thoughtful, of course, but if she’s totally honest his powers unnerve her. Even in her time as Ladybug, Marinette never had the pleasure of meeting any of the Kryptonian heroes, but she knows of them. Alya adores them. Marinette doesn’t know what to think of them.

Some people – most people – uphold Superman as an ideal. He’s a model of the idea that power doesn’t have to corrupt. He is someone with the power to do almost anything he wants, a veritable god on Earth, yet he doesn’t. He restrains himself, constantly and consistently puts the needs of others above his own, and is relentlessly mindful of the repercussions of his actions. He’s a reminder to do good, but also that one must remain vigilant in doing so.

To a certain degree, Marinette also tries to uphold this ideal. When she accepted her role as a hero back then, she did everything she could to make Ladybug stand for the same thing.

In a word, Superman as a hero can be described as careful. All of the Super family can. Jon is no exception, even in his daily life. So, in that sense, it doesn’t surprise her.

That said, truth be told, that kind of power makes Marinette uncomfortable. She doesn’t have great experience with adults in positions of authority restraining themselves and consistently doing the right thing, to say the least. She doesn’t trust that kind of power, because she believes that power does corrupt.

Power turns little girls into bullies. Power is what desperate people lie and cheat and kill for. Power is what turns a heartbroken widower into a deranged psychopath, or a devoted love into heartless manipulation. It’s a hero’s job to wield power for good, but how many terrible things have been done by heroes? Perhaps it’s cynical of her, but while she believes in people’s inherent goodness, she does not believe in the goodness of power. The hero’s job is so difficult precisely because they’re using their power against its own nature.

And thus, she’s ideologically at odds with Superman. Maybe he can do it. Maybe he can refuse temptation. Maybe he’s really just that good that his restraint and integrity can survive the absolutely absurd amount of power he possesses. Maybe Supergirl is the same way, too. But someday, if they keep having kids, if Jon’s kids inherit the powers, and their kids inherit it, and on, and on, Marinette doesn’t think it’ll be long before one of them does mess up.

And yet… now that she knows Jon, now that she knows what kind of person he is, she’s not so worried. Because Jon isn’t a person who practices restraint. He’s not a person who is always keeping an eye on himself, checking himself because no one around him is strong enough to do it for him. Jon is just a guy who has so much of that inherent goodness Marinette believes in that he doesn’t need that kind of restraint. Marinette is surprised that she trusts him. And that makes her doubt his family a little less, too. They raised him, after all, so they can’t be that bad.

“What’s that?” Marinette asks. Jon is finally at the apartment and is unpacking when she spies a colorful bolt of cloth in an open one.

Jon looks over and chuckles awkwardly. “That’s, uh… that’s the… flag. Of Krypton.”

“Huh. I didn’t know you had a flag.”

Jon takes it out of the box to spread out on the coffee table so she can see it. It’s a little dull and faded. Marinette imagines it’s old. When she pictures the flag in its proper form, she thinks it’s bright and vibrant. The planet in the middle with seemingly random-colored rays bursting out from it. “Yeah, it’s the, like, Planetary Federation of Krypton’s flag. There were other people on Krypton, but this is, you know, my folks’ flag.”

“…Neat.”

Marinette spies Jon frowning at her. “You’re not… upset?”

She blinks. “Upset for what?”

“Because it’s… weird alien stuff?”

“Pfft, oh, no, Jon.” She sighs. “I don’t want anything to do with heroes, but your heritage is not a hero thing. I don’t mind you bringing Kryptonian things in here. I mean, I make you take off your shoes. That’s not an American thing.”

Jon lets out a tense breath. “Oh, good. Hah. I was kind of nervous about that.”

Marinette laughs. She can see why he is, honestly, especially after last semester. “So, why do you have this? Did you just not take it last year because I didn’t know yet or what? And, uh…” She takes another long, cautious look at the flag, “what do you plan on doing with it?”

Jon eyes the flag with her. “Nah, I got it this summer. My Aunt Kara gave it to me. She was actually on Krypton before it blew up, so she’s the only one who actually remembers what it was like there.” He looks over at her and smirks. “And don’t worry, I’m not hanging it up. That would be hard to explain to visitors. Besides, it’s kind of ugly, isn’t it?”

“Oh, thank god!” Marinette sighs dramatically. “I didn’t want to be rude, so I didn’t want to say anything, but you said it first! It’s pretty ugly.”

Jon laughs. “I know. But it’s symbolic.”

“They couldn’t have picked a prettier symbol? This is like a Teletubby vomited on fabric.”

“Pfft hahaha! Marinette! Wow!”

Marinette blushes. “I’m sorry, was that too far? I just-”

Jon continues cackling as he valiantly tries to force comprehensible words out. “Don’t worry about it! It is ugly.”

Marinette shifts uncomfortably. True as her statement is, and even though she is only emboldened enough to say it because Jon clearly takes no offense, she still feels guilty throwing shade at the flag of a near-extinct culture. That seems disrespectful. “So… what does it mean?”

Jon calms down his giggling to explain. “Right, so I’m not really an expert on Krypton, so I’m probably not the best person to ask, but each part of the flag represents one of the eleven virtues. They’re usually referred to altogether as the Girod.”

“Girod.” Marinette tests the alien word on her tongue. It’s a little strange to her, not because of pronunciation or the word itself, but because of the knowledge that the word she’s saying quite literally comes from an alien race.

“The Girod is basically the foundation of Kryptonian society. When Aunt Kara gave me this, she told me this,” he gestures to the flag, “is what it means to be Kryptonian. She and dad try their best to live up to the Girod, and I…” He sighs, melancholier than Marinette expects. “I’m not sure yet. I mean, in theory, I’ve been raised with the same principles. We just didn’t call it the Girod or acknowledge it as, you know, the foundation of Kryptonian society. But… I’m not really sure I believe it’s even possible.”

Marinette purses her lips, examining Jon carefully. He’s pensive, all furrowed brow and distant eyes lost in the oceans of the planet on the flag. “What are the virtues? You said there’s eleven of them?”

Jon shakes himself out of his thoughts to answer. “Right, uh… The center, that’s Krypton, represents Unity. Then there’s… Truth, Industriousness, and Justice. Those are the core virtues, and are the three green lines here. Then there’s… Peace, Purity, Restraint… how many was that? Hold on.” He frowns, grumbling as he counts on his fingers. “Unity, three core ones – that’s four. Peace, Purity, Restraint… seven. What else? Imagination, that’s one. Can’t forget Hope – you know, my family’s crest also stands for Hope? Apparently the ‘S’ for Superman is just convenient.”

Marinette giggles. “I think Alya might have mentioned that.”

Jon nods. “Anyway, that’s… where were we? Augh, sorry, just a second.” He picks his phone up off the table and navigates through it.

“It’s fine if you don’t remember, Jon.”

“No, no, I need to remember this. I’m trying to learn it. Okay, here it is. I got the first few right. Unity, Truth, Industriousness, Justice. Then, oh! That’s what I was forgetting. Synergy.”

“Synergy?” Marinette makes a face. “Isn’t that the same as Unity?”

“Eh… sort of. Unity is more like… belonging. It’s… family, sort of. Like, we’re all part of the same group. Synergy is working together; more of a ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ kind of thing.”

“Oh, okay, that makes sense.”

“And the rest of the virtues are Imagination, Purity, Restraint, Hope, and Altruism… wait, was that eleven? Oh! Peace. I said that the first time but skipped when I was reading the notes.”

“Calm down, Jon. You won’t remember it right away.” She pats his back gently. “I think it’s really cool that you’re trying, though.

Jon ducks his head. “Thanks. I- I’m not really… I don’t really know what I’m doing.” He gets that far-off look as he examines the flag once more. “Krypton is just as alien to me as it is to you, but… somehow it’s my heritage. Honestly, it’s kind of weird. And the Girod… Do you see what I mean? When I say I’m not sure I really believe it’s possible to live up to that?”

Marinette sighs. The way Jon hold himself, how unsure he is, how frightened he is, it’s unsettling to her. For a lot of reasons. “You know, to me, it sounds like you do a pretty good job already.”

“You think?” Jon doesn’t smile. That draws Marinette’s lips downwards, too.

“Yeah.” She says. “Can I see the list?” He hands over his phone so she can read off it. On the note is just a simple list of the virtues with a color next to them – the color on the flag that symbolizes that virtue. “Restraint. I think your whole family has that in spades just to live normally.”

Jon chuckles uncomfortably. “Something tells me that’s not what that originally meant.”

Marinette shrugs. “Altruism. You’re one of the most selfless people I know. Remember when I was really frazzled last year just before our first tests?”

That does manage to pull a smile out of him. “I had to take you out fabric shopping just so you’d obsess over something else. Then I ended up being your pack horse.”

“And that whole time, you had tests to study for, too.” Marinette points out. “That’s just one of a hundred different things you’ve done for me in just a semester, not even counting everyone else you help all the time. Then there’s peace. I think you do that better than your dad.”

Jon jumps a little. “You do?”

“Duh. Even in the name of peace, violence is still violence. I don’t think any of those types of heroes can truly say they stand for peace.”

“Even if it’s to protect people who can’t protect themselves?”

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t fighting. Even if it’s a good fight, even if it’s the only choice, it’s still not peace. Don’t you think?”

Jon is quiet for a long time. “…Yeah, I think I agree.”

Marinette smiles and hands him his phone back. “But, hey, I’m human. Maybe my interpretation of these virtues isn’t even close to how Kryptonians saw them.”

Jon frowns for a little longer, and then asks, “Does it matter? Maybe humans have some pretty good insight. I think you do, at least.”

“Aw, that’s sweet. I try my best.”

Jon giggles. “You know, I’ve talked to Aunt Kara about what each of the virtues mean, but… now I’m thinking I want your perspective, too. I’m not, like, devoting my life to the Girod or anything, but… I think it’s a beautiful ideal. Don’t you? It might be worth thinking about, as I figure out what kind of person I want to be now that I’m not a hero.”

“Sure.” Marinette says. “I’m always happy to help. And, now that I’m thinking about it, if you want sage advice on virtues, you might find talking to Tikki interesting.”

Jon raises his brow at her. “Tikki?”

“She’s a kwami. I never told you how I became Ladybug, did I?” Jon shakes his head. Marinette chuckles. “Well, I’ll start at the beginning.”

Marinette doesn’t introduce Jon to Tikki right away. They both still have unpacking to do and a semester to prepare for, after all, but they do eventually find time for Marinette to dig out the earrings and summon her.

Tikki’s big, sad eyes cut deep into Marinette. She knows Tikki doesn’t like that Marinette doesn’t wear the earrings regularly, or that Marinette is leaving the Miracle Box in Paris. She begrudgingly gives her blessing, but she’s definitely not happy about it.

Marinette often misses Tikki, but the earrings feel so heavy in her ears. It’s hard to bring herself to wear them. It’s been over a year now since she stopped doing so regularly. Despite everything else, Marinette likes being just a normal girl. The leaden studs in her ears and Tikki’s constant presence is only a reminder that she isn’t and never will be. A painful one.

“Tikki, meet Jon.”

“Hi, Jon!” Tikki chirps, appearing happy. “It’s nice to finally meet you!”

Jon hesitates a little when he sees her, and Marinette can tell his smile is a tad strained. “You too, Tikki.”

“Marinette told me about you.” Tikki says. “Thank you for being here for her. I know times are hard for the both of you, but I know you can get through it together if you stick by each other.”

Again, Jon hesitates. There’s an odd look in his eyes as he says, “Yeah. I’m lucky to have her.” The look is almost… wary.

The conversation continues for a while, and Jon eventually explains the Girod and asks for Tikki’s opinion on it and as Tikki talks, Jon starts shifting around and staring at his own lap and worrying his lip. “I’m curious about the Kryptonian stance on when those virtues come into conflict.” Tikki says. “If, for instance, you must sacrifice Peace for the sake of Justice, what should you do?”

“Don’t.” Jon says. “If you sacrifice peace for justice, it’s not justice to start with. It’s revenge, or pettiness, or… something like that.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I’d like to think so, anyway. Honestly… I don’t know enough about Krypton to say what they thought.”

Tikki hums thoughtfully. “But if there is a villain that is hurting people, there may be no way to bring him to justice except to fight.”

Jon slouches further, shrinking in his chair. “Is it worth it? To sacrifice peace?”

“If it saves the lives of innocents.”

“If it makes you guilty?”

“It’s for a good cause. You’re not guilty.”

“I think you are.” Jon says. “I don’t think there’s any good reason to sacrifice peace.” He sighs. “That’s… one of the virtues I’ve been considering the most. In human history, who are the most renowned champions for change? Who do we consider to have made the most difference for the better?”

Tikki’s eyes flash with something akin to recognition. “I think of Jeanne d’Arc. Joan of Arc, I think you call her.”

“I think of Martin Luther King Jr. Ghandi.” Jon says. “Those people changed the world with a principle of nonviolence. That proves it can be done.”

“In some situations. Most situations, I agree. But there are times when there’s no choice but to fight.”

Marinette shifts under Tikki’s gaze, as does Jon, but Jon, for now, at least, doesn’t back down. No matter how doubtful the expression on his face appears. “And we can drop our principles just like that? What value do principles have if we can ignore them whenever they don’t help us?”

“They still guide you. They give you something to fight for. They’re what you win for.”

Jon takes a deep breath. “I can’t accept that. Fighting in the name of peace is stupid. And it makes you a hypocrite. Fighting is fighting. Simple as that.”

“So in the name of peace, you would stand by and let a tyrant harm innocents?” Tikki frowns, and looks between Jon and Marinette for a moment. “I know you both have decided to give up on being heroes. But heroes are still important. Everyone has a responsibility to do what they can for the people around them. That includes fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves. And if the villain doesn’t give you any other choice, it may even include going to battle for them. I don’t think peace means nonviolence. I think it means balance. And the ever-shifting balance is a constant battle to maintain.”

“You expect us to sacrifice ourselves and our ideals for people who don’t even see us as people?” Jon mutters. “Just because we can?”

“The virtue of altruism.” Tikki says.

Jon takes another deep breath. “You expect too much of us.”

“I don’t think so. I think you’re more than capable. You’re both wonderful heroes. And it’s true that it’s hard. Sometimes, you need to take a break, and that’s okay. You have to take care of yourselves, too, or you won’t be able to save anyone. But people do rely on you. Just think about it.”

Jon huffs quietly. “Like I ever stop.” Marinette flinches at his words because she can relate. Even a year out, it’s hard to ignore how many people she might be helping. The more time passes, the more people go unaided because she made the choice to abandon her duties. And she feels guilty.

She doesn’t regret leaving, though. Yet that only makes her feel guiltier.

Marinette takes the earrings off eventually, tucking them back into a hidden corner, and she and Jon are in silence for a while. “I don’t think I really like Tikki that much.” Jon says.

Marinette grimaces. “No?”

“She kind of reminds me of Dad when he gets on my case about superhero responsibilities. He doesn’t do that anymore, since he’s accepted that I’m retired, but… I don’t really appreciate the lecture. No offense.”

“I understand.” Marinette says honestly. “Frankly, that’s part of the reason why I don’t have her out much. Part of it is just that wearing the earrings, having her around all the time, it reminds me of… everything. But another part is that she…” Marinette sighs. “I’m the guardian of the Miracle Box. It’s my duty to take care of all the kwami, not just her. And I’ve left the box with Chat Noir. I… don’t really want it back.”

Jon makes a face. “Yeah. Understandable.”

“To you.” Marinette laughs bitterly. “I think you’re the only one who actually understands. Everyone else is either waiting for me to come back or is supporting me despite not understanding.”

Jon chuckles as well, mirroring her. “I know that feeling. At least they are being supportive, right?”

“Yeah. They’re good friends.”

“The best.” Jon bites his lip and smiles. “Do you think you can just make Chat Noir the guardian?”

“I’ve thought about it.” Marinette sighs. “I told you what happened to the old guardian.”

Jon recoils. “Right. I remember now. You’d forget.”

“I’m tempted to do it.” Marinette says. “I can. Anytime I want. I just have to do it. Sometimes I think forgetting will be a good thing. If I do, I can finally just live a normal life and none of these responsibilities will be mine to worry about. I won’t even know they exist.”

Jon’s face is still contorted into a hurt, concerned grimace. “If you did… would you forget me? This?”

Marinette sighs. “I’m not sure. If we were just two university students rooming together, I’d say maybe not, but… I know you were Superboy, and you know about Ladybug, so… maybe it’s too intertwined with the Miraculous. It’s hard to tell. I’d for sure forget a lot of my friends back home. Honestly, it kind of scares me how tempting the offer of forgetting is despite all that. That’s part of what made me realize I needed to quit being Ladybug in the first place.” She chuckles. “It’s a bit of a red flag, isn’t it?”

“Hah, wow, yeah. I’d say so.”

Marinette breathes slowly. “Anyway. I know Tikki lectured us both a bit, but did you at least get anything out of it? For the… Girod?”

Jon smiles. “Yeah. I think I did. It was… interesting. Thanks for letting me talk to her.”

“No problem.” Marinette says. “I really should let her out more often, anyway.”

The first semester of their second year isn’t anything special, really. Marinette likes most of her classes, though there is, of course, the one that’s just a chore to get through. Jon is stressing over what his major is going to be, so she brainstorms with him sometimes, or just distracts him if he gets too deep into his own head.

By and large, they’re back to how they were before. Things are still a little tense sometimes, and in rare moments Superboy is all Marinette can see when she looks at him and her chest hurts a little, but she makes an effort, as does he, to spend time together. When they eat together at least once almost every day, study together (even if it’s just silently in the same room because of their different subjects), go out together in their free time, and just exist in such close proximity every day, it’s hard not to get used to each other.

And they’re friends. They’re close friends. Marinette is still small, cold, and trembling. The memory of hurt still frays her. But she’s slowly rising up. Things feel okay again, and Marinette thinks that if they can just keep this up, they’ll figure the rest out and they’ll be just fine.

And of course, she has to jinx it.

The phone call comes in at a surprisingly reasonable hour. Marinette is just sitting at her desk, scribbling away at an assignment when her phone starts buzzing. Marinette picks it up and feels her heart jump to her throat when she sees the name on the screen. Adrien.

It’s not that they don’t talk. They do. They’re still friends, and Adrien is still essentially acting as guardian in her stead, so they have to communicate to some degree. Even so, every time he calls and Marinette sees his name she gets dunked into an icy wave of guilt and regrets.

It’s not long until they’ve been single for a year now. And they’re both still trying to be strong. The worst of the pain has passed, but confronting him directly, even about unrelated topics, brings it back.

“Hello? What’s up?”

“Mari! Mari, I’m so sorry! I’m so, so, so, so, sorry! I don’t know how they got in! I swear, I keep it under lock and key; there’s no way they should have know-”

“Adrien, slow down.” Marinette says sharply. In person, and when they were together, this tone would always cut through his panic. Ground him, so that he can focus better. “What happened?”

“I went on patrol like I do every night.” He says. “But when I got back, the Miracle Box was gone. I don’t… I don’t even know who might have taken it! No one knows my identity; it wasn’t just a burglar – they left everything else. My lady, I don’t- I don’t know what to do here.”

Someone’s stolen the Miracle Box? Marinette feels a familiar cold weight inside of her. “What do you have to work with?”

“Myself, Queenie, and Viperion.” Adrien murmurs. “That’s it. And… and you.”

Marinette lets out a soft breath. This is… horrible news, but there is a bright side. “At least you have Viperion. That’s the most dangerous.” Marinette’s stomach turns. She wants to vomit, but instead she just curls forward over her desk and closes her eyes.

Part of her wants to ask why Chloé and Luka have Miraculous, but Adrien is the acting guardian, and she trusts his judgement. Whatever reason he has to give them the Miraculous again is none of her business. “Yeah, but…” Adrien says. “I’m scared. I let you down, and now who knows where the Miraculous are? What if we get another Hawk Moth?”

“Then you’ll stop them.” Marinette says. She tries her best to sound confident. “And you won’t have to wonder who broke in.”

“Who could it be?” Adrien’s voice is tight and desperate. “They had to know who I am and that I’d be out!”

“You have a regular schedule, Adrien, it’s not hard to predict when you’re patrolling.” Marinette says. “But you’re right, they probably know your identity. That narrows down the options.”

“But no one who knows would do this. I won’t believe one of our friends took the box.”

“You’re forgetting someone.” Marinette says. “She found out your identity the same time your father did.”

“…Nathalie.” Adrien’s voice flattens out and turns dark. “Why now?”

“Because you weren’t expecting it. She never would have pulled it off right after Gabriel was arrested.”

Adrien takes a long breath. “At least we have an idea of what we’re dealing with. Thank you, my lady. I’m sorry I let you down.”

Marinette still feels sick, but she has the advantage of being an ocean away. Adrien might still be able to tell how she truly feels, but she thinks she controls her voice pretty well. “You haven’t. No one could have predicted she’d strike now.”

He hums softly. “I’m going to find her. I’ll find her and get the Miraculous back. I promise.”

“Adrien…” Marinette sighs. “I’m not the one you need to make that promise to. That’s not my life anymore.”

“Right.” He sounds a little choked, but he recovers quickly. “I need to call the team. I’ll keep you updated. See you soon, Marinette.”

He hangs up, and Marinette bitterly hopes he doesn’t keep her updated. Calming down Adrien and thinking about who might have stolen the Miracle Box all makes Marinette feel like Ladybug again. It’s… nauseating. She feels guilty in equal parts for acting like she’s still a part of Adrien’s team and for feeling so awful about it.

I wonder if I should tell Jon about this. That idea, too, makes her feel guilty. Because she feels like a hero again when she’s on the phone with Adrien, and no matter how much she hates that feeling, the real guilt is in her hypocrisy. Will Jon agree that she didn’t really do anything? Or is it still too much. He wants to put the hero life behind him, too, and Marinette won’t allow her problems to drag him even tangentially back into it. That’s unfair to everyone.

Marinette won’t bother him with this. She can’t.

The days crawl by. Adrien texts her updates on the situation every now and then, but there’s not much to speak of. A week passes, then another, and then the thing Marinette fears most happens.

Mayura attacks. Marinette is an ocean away, living a different life, but suddenly she’s a fourteen-year-old girl again fighting battles much too big for her. She watches on her phone as Chat Noir and his team defeat the sentimonster, but their victory only hurts. The weight of it all crushes Marinette beneath it like she’s nothing more than an insect. It’s too familiar, too much the same as it was back then. Like she’s accomplished nothing. She did nothing as Ladybug, and she’s doing nothing now. Everything she’s ever done has resulted in failure.

So how can she hope for any different on her search for a normal life? Every time she thinks it’s within reach it’s violently pulled away from her like a rug under her feet. First, she finds out that the person she associates with her normal was a hero, then just as she’s recovering from that, all her accomplishments as a hero are essentially erased.

All because she abandoned her duty. The only reason Nathalie is able to steal the Miracle Box is because it is left in Paris with Adrien. If Marinette hadn’t abandoned her duties, hadn’t turned her back on her role as guardian, then they wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s her fault, and now she’s an ocean away while the people she loves fight to fix it.

Marinette doesn’t want to be a hero again. She hates Ladybug. She hates being the only thing between the world and destruction. The only thing between a villain and tragedy. She’s not Superman, or even Chat Noir. She doesn’t have that kind of strength.

She’s too selfish, and too weak.

But Adrien asks her to.

It’s during the break, not long after she gets back to Paris. Adrien begs her to fight with him again. “I can’t do this without you, my lady.” He pleads. “I need you.”

“I’m not a hero anymore, Adrien.” Marinette says. “I brought the earrings. You can find another Ladybug. That’ll minimize the damage. You can do it.”

“I can’t. We’re fighting Nathalie. You were always my rock, Marinette. You’re the only reason I could fight my father. I need you. Not any Ladybug, you.”

Marinette grits her teeth. “I’ve been trying for over a year now to live a normal life.” Marinette says quietly. “You’re asking me to give that up.”

“I know.” He covers his face. He doesn’t want her to see that he’s crying, but he can’t hide it from her. He can’t hide anything from her. “I’m sorry. But I don’t have any other choice.”

“You’re the hero, Adrien. Not me. This? Right here? This is exactly why I quit. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

And she means it. She means it with every fiber of her being. But when Mayura gets the upper hand, when Viperion is taken out in almost the first strike, when Queen Bee is battered and unmoving a mile away, Tikki is pleading, and Chat Noir has that look in his eyes that Marinette is too familiar with, there’s no other choice.

She throws a blanket over her mirror, ducks beneath her shame, and shakily says, “Tikki, transform me.”

——-=——-

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#miraculous ladybug fanfiction #ml fanfiction #ml x dc #maribat #marijon #ehhtrtd

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hand-in-my-pocket · 3 years

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“Hand in My Pocket” Lyrics Analysis

“Hand in My Pocket” is amazing for its ability to tell the story of any person’s life within it. If you listen to this song close enough, you can hear every detail of your life coursing through its verses. You see your most painful defeats and your most feverish exaltations somehow perfectly captured by the song. You hear your failures, your addictions, your temptations, your attempts to be a better person, your maturation, and your love for life. Alanis Morissette captured the true essence of life in this song.

Life is so sad and yet so happy. Life is an unimaginable mass of misery: it’s all the war, starvation, loss, alienation, depression, the sum of all of it, over 7 billion people. How can anyone be hopeful in the face of these miseries, especially when everyone knows they have contributed to them? We all make mistakes and we have all made someone else’s life worse, whether intentionally or not. We all make bad decisions, but we all try as best as we can not to. And yet we still find ways to enjoy life and be happy and say “everything is just fine.” Every one of those unimaginable sadnesses has a counterpart in happiness, and there is so much that is equally happy and beautiful that it is simultaneously difficult to imagine how one could not love life.

What jumps out about the verses most prominently is the constant contrast and duality. We will explore each of these in detail, but first let’s look at the chorus, which is where this duality is most fully realized.

And what it all comes down to Is that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine 'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket And the other one is givin' a high five

Reserved but resolved. Afraid but brave. Having one hand in your pocket but giving a high five. Keeping one hand in your pocket is a metaphor for many things: reservation, fear, uncertainty, keeping close to yourself, individuality. To live is to know pain, and none of us chose to be born. Everyone is brave simply for living. How can you blame anyone for keeping one hand in their pocket? No one is fully sure of themselves, and everything they do is still with one hand in the pocket. There is no true confidence. Confidence is an act for the outside world to observe, but every mind is muddled with doubts. Our minds stop developing at around the age of 25, but our bodies age continually. Trapped in this arrested development, everyone essentially is living with the mind of a child but the body of an adult. There is a huge disconnect between your outward appearance or image to others and who you know to be to yourself. Everyone is putting on a bit of a show by “giving a high five” to their friends, while still remaining with a “hand in their pocket” to themselves. This high five belies the trepidation and uncertainty we all feel. We are in denial living a life trying to be happy, knowing we are inching closer to death and scared because of it.

So why is “everything gonna be fine”? Well, the hand in the pocket is to be expected, but it is amazing that we still do give high fives. Even though we can view living life as a denial of death, we can alternatively view giving a high five as a leap of faith and an act of love. We cannot live solely as individuals, and there would be no life without community. We can’t live if we have both hands in the pocket, and no one can truly take both hands out of the pocket, so the best we can do is to take one out. To have both hands in your pocket is to die and disintegrate and be absorbed by the Earth. To have both hands out of your pocket is to leave your body and transcend to the heavens. That’s why to be a human is to have one hand in your pocket and the other outside of it. If this doesn’t make sense yet, it will as we go through many examples during the analysis.

Throughout this entire song, Morissette’s hand is in her pocket, and other hand is always doing other things. Fear and sadness and stability are a constant throughout life; it’s always something that’s there and can’t change. However, because of time’s unstoppable move forward, you are forced to live life, so even though you always have a hand in the pocket, you always have another hand doing different things at different stages in life. And it is inspiring that even though life is sad, we all still somehow push through and live through it and find happiness.

And what it all comes down to Is that everything's gonna be quite alright 'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket And the other one is flickin' a cigarette

This is similar to the first chorus, but something changed. In the first chorus, “fine” and “five” rhymed (although imperfectly) while in this chorus “alright” and “cigarette” do not rhyme. This is the first sign that something is amiss. Although you might not have noticed, this song actually has a chronological progression. The song tracks the stages of a person’s life from innocence to disappointment to acceptance. In the first chorus, Morissette is still as excited and forward-looking as you would expect any child to be. Although the central message of the song is built into the chorus, Morissette is still confident that everything will be fine. Although Morissette is still maintaining that things will be alright, there is some doubt communicated by the lack of a rhyme with cigarette.

And what it all comes down to Is that I haven't got it all figured out just yet 'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket And the other one is givin' a peace sign

Now Morissette has changed the message. Instead of saying everything is gonna be fine, she says that she doesn’t have it all figured out yet. Why is this confidence supplanted by doubt? We again see that the chorus doesn’t rhyme. In fact, in a fittingly cruel irony, if Morissette did not change her mind and continued saying that things were gonna be fine, the chorus would have actually rhymed (and perfectly too). Interestingly enough, “yet” actually does rhyme with something we heard before: “cigarette.” In the previous chorus, Morissette was still innocent and excited but began having her doubts when she saw that not everything fit perfectly, and in her attempt to try to rectify the mismatch between “fine” and “cigarette” she changed her worldview from “everything is gonna be fine” to “I haven’t got it all figured out just yet” hoping that now her philosophy would be consistent with her experience. Furthermore, her new worldview that “I haven’t got it all figured out just yet” reflects the fact that the previous lack of rhyme was a signal that she actually doesn’t understand everything yet. Of course, this is all a metaphor for living life, being enthusiastic and having big dreams as a child, thinking that once you become an adult, you will have everything figured out, then growing up and being that adult and seeing you don’t have everything figured out and being afraid that maybe something is wrong with you. Of course, we all later realize that every adult is like this and really no one has it figured out, but that is what the next chorus directly address. This stage of life is the scariest and most difficult though. Your dreams have not been realized and you are not as carefree as you were as a child, and most of all, you are confused because life doesn’t make any sense. And the fact that you are confused is scary because this is your life, your one and only life, the life that you looked forward to as a kid and had so many dreams about, and now it’s yours, it’s in your hands, and you have no idea what to do with it. You are looking for that perfect answer, but you never find it, even though sometimes it feels like it’s barely eluding you (just like Morissette barely missed what would have been the only perfect rhyme in the song: “fine” and “sign”).

It’s also worth noting that “giving a peace sign” is different from giving a high five or flicking a cigarette. It is not just a mundane daily action, but a message of the most naïve optimism. Although this chorus represents what may be the lowest stage in a person’s life, Morissette’s action with her free hand is the most optimistic in the song. Perhaps this is denial, an act of strong outward positivity meant to counteract the inward fear. Or perhaps it is really an optimistic message in and of itself: even at our lowest lows we still hope for progress and we still care for others. It again conjures the central beauty of life: that in the face of so much sadness and disappointment, we can still find ways to love, forgive, and be happy.

And what it all boils down to Is that no one's really got it figured out just yet Well, I've got one hand in my pocket And the other one is playin' a piano

After the nadir, we now have the first sign of maturation. Morissette realizes that she is not the only lost soul populating Earth. Just like her, everyone doesn’t have it “figured out.” This realization is simultaneously alarming and relieving. It’s sad that life is just a bunch of people walking around pretending to be important when really everyone is lost and confused and humanity is a befuddled mess. But isn’t it nice to know you’re not alone? We are all in this together, and we can all comfort each other as we confront this truth of our nature. This realization is where the healing process can begin. Life is not what we thought it would be. It’s a mess, but armed with this new understanding that everyone is confused and that life is unfair, we can redefine what we understand about life and we can create new values and outlooks that are healthy and can actually lead us to happiness. This is what Morissette does in the next chorus.

It is also worth noting that the other hand in this chorus is playing a piano. We can assume she also had one hand in the pocket while composing this very song. This is a self-aware nod that Morissette cannot even claim full confidence over this song or any of her artistic work. Even as she spreads her life-affirming message of humility, there is a recognition that this song is no conclusive answer as such a thing can never exist.

And what it all comes down to my friends, yeah Is that everything is just fine, fine, fine 'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket And the other one is hailin' a taxi cab

To close the song, Morissette settles on “everything is just fine.” This is markedly different from “everything is gonna be just fine.” This outlook is an acceptance that things the way they are right now are good enough, and you don’t need to look towards the future to wait for when things will be fine. As kids, we all make the mistake of pinning our happiness to some conception of the future, and the eventual mismatch of expectation and reality makes us sad. Now after going through the development of hope followed by disappointment, Morissette has learned to accept what she has now because there is always so much to be happy about, even small things, like high fives.

It is worth noting that the last two verses do not rhyme at all. Attempts at rhyming are completely abandoned after Morissette was burned by trying to find some solution to life and failing. But the song is just as beautiful even without the rhymes. This is just like life, still beautiful despite its flaws.

“Hailing a taxi cab” at the end of the song could be interpreted as a metaphor for death, with the taxi cab taking you away from life. The last line before this chorus mentions that she is sick, perhaps meaning the narrator is close to death in the arc of the song.

Now let’s explore the lines of the verses. We have touched on a lot of themes in this opening analysis of the chorus, and all of these will be greatly elaborated upon in the analysis of the verses.

I’m broke, but I’m happy

How can someone be happy even though they are broke? Could it be because your material possessions are somewhat independent from your happiness? That is exactly true, and this song is certainly a rebuke of materialism. Material success (e.g. wealth, fame) is something only the minority of people know. This is by definition as material success is measured relative to others. For example, to be rich is to have more money than most people, meaning most people are not rich. But it’s not true that most people are unhappy. Happiness is not measured relative to others. It is also a well-studied fact of psychology that increasing your wealth past a certain point has no positive long-term effects on happiness. Furthermore, pursuing extrinsic goals (goals that are pursued for their material outcome) are much less likely to make you happy than pursuing an intrinsic goal (a goal that is pursued for the sake of the pursuit, e.g. developing a skill, raising a kid).

I’m poor, but I’m kind

The ability of humans to be kind to each other is one of humanity’s most important and beautiful qualities. Morissette might be poor, and others might be alone, disabled, sick, or anything else, but despite their neediness they can miraculously subvert their Darwinian individualistic instinct by being kind even though they may stand to gain something from being selfish. Why are there people like this? Why is the poor but kind person a stereotype? Why is there the dual stereotype of the rich but coldhearted person? Obviously there are exceptions to both of these stereotypes; they are merely stereotypes after all. There are plenty of great, kind, loving rich people and bad, selfish poor people. However, we know there is on average a difference between the two and this indicates some sort of pressure acting disproportionately on these two groups. One way this discrepancy arises is from the fact that people who are selfish and individualistic are more likely to become rich because they have more ways to become rich since being willing to do something at the expense of someone else gives more opportunities and paths to success for selfish people. It’s not their fault though. We should not be upset at selfish or coldhearted people. We must forgive them. Forgiveness is the central message of this song. Many of these dualities are forgivenesses: “I’m poor, but [I forgive that fact because] I’m kind.” Happiness itself is a forgiveness. To be happy even though life is sad, is to forgive life and to forgive humanity for its faults and still appreciate it for the good it has. The arc of the song even reads like a forgiveness: Life gave me hopes, it thwarted those hopes, but I learned to forgive it and be happy anyway. Selfish people are selfish because they’ve been led that way by life. Selfishness is baked into human DNA. Our brains make us think that success will make us happy. People who are selfish are lost in their own way, and in the fourth chorus, we realize that everyone is lost. Everyone has something wrong with them, and everyone is guilty, but it’s easy to sympathize with them because they were just trying to be happy. Therefore, everyone should ask for forgiveness from everyone, and everyone should forgive everyone.

I’m short, but I’m healthy, yeah

This is still the first verse of the song, or the childhood phase, and being short and healthy is characteristic of children as opposed to being sick, like in the final verse.

The first two lines dealt with one kind of materialism, money, but this line deals with another, appearance. Striving for a good appearance is another way life tricks us by infecting us with expectations that will likely disappoint us in the future. Our biology and society tell us to strive for a good appearance, but this is absurd because no one can actually control their own appearance. Many factors of your appearance are decided by DNA and impossible to change. Obviously there are many things you can do to improve your own appearance like grooming and exercise, but many of the most important factors really do come down to DNA. To use Morissette’s example, you can never change your own height, but this could immediately disqualify you from being a certain level of attractive. It is such a shame then that so many people end up staking happiness on appearance. We must all eventually learn to live with this as Morissette does in the fifth chorus. We must learn to forgive appearance and love life despite it. Ultimately, it’s material and extrinsic, and it’s not what truly makes one happy.

There is something that is closely tied to appearance but actually is a good idea to pursue: health (the subject of the second half of this lyric). Even though living healthy and getting exercise improves your appearance, it has some major differences from appearance. First of all, your health is in your control. There are things about your appearance you can never change, but almost everyone has the capability to drastically influence their health. (Of course, there are exceptions: for example, people with uncontrollable disorders or people who lack access to nutritious food.) The other important difference is that pursuing good health actually has a tangible positive physical effect. Unlike appearance, whose effects on you are ethereal and abstract, good health physically changes your brain chemistry to make you happier. Pursuing health is usually a good intrinsic goal. There’s a lot of parts of our biology that work against us to makes us sad in the long-term, so it only makes sense to leverage the parts of our biology that can make us happy.

It is interesting that there is this fine line between pursuing appearance and health. There are many of these fine lines all over life. For example, most of the Seven Deadly Sins all have counterparts across a thin line like this, e.g. Love / Lust, Sloth / Rest. It’s because all the good is mixed with all of the bad. That’s why many of the lyrics are inseparable opposites. One must always have one hand in their pocket and another outside.

I’m high, but I’m grounded

This can be translated to the Platonistic “I’m celestial, but I’m earthly.”

We are all necessarily grounded on Earth because of its gravitational pull. No matter how high we ever get in life, the gravity of Earth will always pull us down. Earth and life are inherently flawed. We won’t ever find perfect happiness or harmony. Everyone eventually gets to a peak early in life after which they are pulled back down and need to readjust expectations. As discussed with the choruses, it is impossible to take both hands out of your pocket, and it is also impossible to not be grounded. However, the ability to forgive and still be high while grounded is the beauty in life. Even though everything we do may be imperfect and half-hearted with one hand in our pocket, the fact that we still do keep that second hand out of our pocket despite all of the adverse pressures not to is what this song celebrates.

I’m sane, but I’m overwhelmed

This is very similar to the previous line. No matter how sane you are, you still don’t have it figured out just yet, and hence you will be overwhelmed.

An interesting thing to note is that the first three lyrics took the form of “I’m [negative thing], but I’m [positive thing]”; however, the order is reversed in these two lyrics. It turns out that no matter which angle you view it from, you will always find good and bad. Looking at a situation in a positive light, you will always find something bad about it, and vice versa. The good and the bad are inseparable in life, and sometimes it is ambiguous which is which. Furthermore, no matter what worldview you have, there will always be doubts and counterarguments. There is no satisfying answer to life, and there is nothing you could declare without there being a “but” that can follow it. It is inevitable that things will not work out perfectly and there will always be bad with the good, and this song is about acceptance of that fact.

I’m lost, but I’m hopeful, baby

This idea has already been discussed at this point in the analysis. It is explicitly stating some of the subtext of the choruses. To not be lost would be to have both hands out of the pocket while to lose hope would be to have both hands inside the pocket.

I feel drunk, but I’m sober

There are plenty of ways to feel drunk while being sober. Sleep deprivation, for example, can produce many drug-like effects. You could feel drunk any time something is causing your brain to process information differently and change your perceptions. The way you perceive the outside world physically changes during the brain development of the first 25 years of your life, but the transition is gradual because you cannot feel it in the moment. However, if you could skip back to the brain of your adolescent self for a few hours, the effect would be much like that of taking a drug. We also enter a different mode of perception every night through dreaming. The lack of consistency in our perception is part of why empiricist philosophers are so skeptical of the veracity of our perceptions. Two people can view the same thing entirely differently. We even often view the same thing differently from ourselves at a different point in time. In fact, at two different points in time you are effectively two different people. Why do we sometimes dislike a movie, then watch it later and love it? Life events can change your perspective by giving you new experiences. Watching a movie about a family might be an entirely different experience before and after having a kid. Having a kid can completely change the way you see life; it can change your reality. Meanwhile, your having a kid has no effect on others’ realities. Everybody’s reality is constantly in flux, and these realities clash with each other. Part of forgiving others is recognizing that they just have a different reality.

It is harder to tell what is reality when you are drunk. Your memory is bad, your thoughts intermingle with your perceptions and cloud your judgment. But even when you are sober, this is all still true, just to a lesser extent. Humans are notorious for faulty memories, and their thinking can be influenced by the outside world. Priming studies have shown, for example, that levels of selfishness can change among individuals depending on things like which room of the house they are in or which words they have seen recently, for completely subconscious reasons. Your mode of thinking can change just by seeing the word “family” without consciously knowing it. We are all always feeling drunk in a way because in this confusing world with our faulty perceptions, it’s hard to really tell what reality even is.

I’m young, and I’m underpaid

To be underpaid is to be undervalued. Everyone is undervalued by others to some extent. People see flaws in other people and value them less for it. What would it even mean to not be undervalued? To be valued at exactly what you are worth? People don’t have concrete values so this is an absurd proposition. The idea of valuing a person is another human fallacy that causes unhappiness. The idea of giving people concrete values is attractive because it is convenient and easy to understand. Humans make abstractions to simplify our views of the world to make it more digestible. Science is a wonderful example that has made the world feel less like a confusing mess. Tying your own worth to some concrete value, although easy to understand, leaves you susceptible to unhappiness due to mismatched expectations. Wanting a salary above a certain dollar amount or a certain number of followers on social media are easy goals to measure, but not obtaining them will make you unhappy, so you are just giving yourself a way to concretely measure that you are a failure, even though a single number cannot possible capture your worth. Goals are great to set and pursue, but your happiness should be staked on personal development through the pursuit of the goal, not a material end result.

This is the first lyric that uses “and” as its conjunction rather than “but.” As discussed before, the good and the bad are inseparable, so using “and” is just a more direct way of saying what’s been said in the previous lyrics. At this point, there is not much of a distinction.

I'm tired, but I'm working, yeah

This lyric and the previous one paint the image of someone who is still young and optimistic, working hard to achieve their goals. As discussed in our analysis of the choruses, the outlook of this person will be revised as the song progresses.

Doing work makes you tired, and the more tired you are, the less work you can do. Resting makes you less tired, but the more you rest, the less work you do. Finding the right balance between work and rest is a big struggle for humanity. Rest and work are both good, but doing either too much or too little is bad. This is another case in which humans are forced to have one hand in the pocket (rest) and one outside of it (work); however, instead of human nature being the driver of this dynamic, the laws of physics themselves actually make this necessary. It is not only true that humans get tired as they work. This is true of everything in nature; doing work requires energy, and energy is not unlimited. Having one hand in a pocket is not just a feature of humanity but a feature of nature itself.

I care, but I’m restless

To care is to want better, but often anything you do that has a positive effect also has a negative one. You cannot separate the good from the bad, so if you care about the good, you will inevitably be driven restless by trying to shoo away the bad. Pursuing perfection is a game of Whac-A-Mole. Even if you could in theory achieve perfection at some point, this perfection would all be undone by the progress of time which eventually destroys everything. To achieve perfection is to stop time. There is no perfection; it’s a law of nature.

I’m here, but I’m really gone

Who you were when you were a kid is gone; who you were five years ago is gone; who you were a year ago is gone; who you were last month is gone; and who you were a second ago is gone. It’s all gone, lost to the ether. The first time we heard this song, the person who wrote it was already gone. Each life is a beautiful flicker of a firefly in time. As Mark Eitzel writes in “Firefly,” “You're so pretty baby / You're the prettiest thing I know / You're so pretty baby / Where did you go?” All we really ever have is the present moment. Like this moment right now, this moment in which you are reading the ramblings of someone blogging about an Alanis Morissette song. Isn’t there something strange and beautiful about this moment? There will never be another one like it. Time forces one hand out of the pocket. It moves forward whether we consent or not, and it forces us to continue living life. The forward movement of time causes us to be hungry again, to be lonely again, and we have to act to satisfy these desires. There is nothing we can do besides placid acceptance. “Everything is just fine, fine, fine.”

I’m wrong, and I’m sorry, baby

And now we come to what is arguably the most important line of the song. Following the pattern of stating a positive along with a negative, we have “I’m wrong” (a negative) followed by “I’m sorry” (a positive). Humanity can be summed up with this line. Being wrong is universal. Nobody is infallible. In fact, most people are flawed in very conspicuous ways. Can you name anyone who is truly perfect? And if everyone you know is imperfect, then surely you are not the only perfect one, right? No, being wrong and being flawed is nothing to be ashamed of. We are all in this together; everyone is a bad person in a lot of ways. But humanity’s saving grace is that we are trying to be good. Everybody really does try. This lyric can be translated to “I’m bad, and I’m trying to be good.” No individual can escape the gravity of being bad, and this understanding is essentially to maturation. Morissette bravely leads the way by admitting she is wrong to us and asking for forgiveness. The proper response is for us to forgive her, admit that we are wrong too, and ask for forgiveness back.

The flip side to the fact that everyone is wrong is that everyone has been wronged. Many people are wronged in ways that can never be rectified. How can you forgive someone who has irrevocably wronged you? Only with the recognition that they have been irrevocably wronged as well. And if you still cannot forgive someone, I can forgive you for not being able to. In fact, we are all irrevocably wronged by nature itself. Time dispassionately and irreversibly takes away all of our loved ones from us (if it doesn’t take us first). Yet to not forgive time is madness and denial. Being wronged is nature. To be happy is to be happy despite being wronged. To be happy is to accept and forgive.

Most of all, people are wronged by themselves. Everyone thwarts their own potential and wastes parts of their limited life to some extent due to succumbing to temptations, bad judgment, and selfish motivations. We often willingly and knowingly wrong ourselves on top of everything else. We beat ourselves up over it because it was completely in our control. However, if this is something that happens to everyone, then maybe it’s time to stop thinking we have so much control. Of course, everyone should try to be the best they can, but with the healthy recognition that our brains work against us by design (e.g. catalyzing selfish actions, rewarding addictive behavior). Ultimately, the most important reason that we should, along with Morissette, admit we are wrong is not for others to forgive us, but for us to forgive ourselves. We should try to be as good as we can but understand that we will always be flawed. Learning to forgive others goes hand-in-hand with learning to forgive yourself. Others are a reflection of yourself, and we are all a reflection of human nature, a complex, beautiful, monstrous beast that gives us everything and also takes everything away. Forgive nature, forgive yourself, then be happy.

I’m free, but I’m focused

With the knowledge that our own natures often work against us, it’s clear to see that freedom is a double-edged sword. To have total freedom is to have freedom to engage in behaviors that destroy us. We are free to become addicted to drugs, sex, video games, gambling; we are free to neglect diet, hygiene, and exercise; we are free to not be productive and instead spend our time watching the same TV show over and over; we are free to isolate ourselves from others; we are free to abandon our families. Freedom affords many great advantages but also greatly widens the window of opportunity for failure. Freedom on its own is meaningless without focus or responsibility. Freedom is a tool that must be properly directed.

I’m green, but I’m wise

A kid can be smart for their age. They’re not really smart, but relative to other kids, they are smart. When we say an adult is smart, there is an implied “for a human” at the end of the statement because, let’s be honest, no one is really actually smart. Morissette says this herself: “No one really has it figured out just yet.” It makes sense for a kid to say “I’m green, but I’m wise for a kid,” and it equally makes sense for an adult to say “I’m green, but I’m wise for a human.”

It is also worth discussing that many of the descriptors used in this song are relative terms. There is no pure Platonic form of wisdom that we actually have to measure our own wisdom against to know how wise we really are in an absolute sense. When we say someone is wise, of course what we really mean is that they are wiser than the average person. Our idea of wisdom is based on how wise humans are, and what it means to be wise would change if everyone were collectively wiser. This is partly why it is so easy to claim you are two opposite things as Morissette does throughout the track. Since the meanings of these words are relative, their truth is not absolute and depends on what we compare against. Any person can have different levels of intelligence and experience in different areas. You could say “I’m green when it comes to relationships but wise when it comes to self-care” for example. But there is an interesting and universal example. Everyone is wise when it comes to knowing themselves and green when it comes to knowing others. Everyone has the utmost experience with being themselves and no experience with being a different person. To really understand what it means to be human is to sum the experience of every person and abstract out what is universal among them. However, the only lived experience anyone ever has is their own. Therefore, no individual can ever really know human nature. Every living person holds a different piece of the puzzle, and interchange is not physically possible.

I’m hard, but I’m friendly, baby

We all would love to be as friendly and open as possible, and let as many people into our lives as we can, but as we’ve already discussed, everyone is a bad person in some ways, so if you let yourself be too open to allow anyone in, you risk getting burned by someone’s bad side. Hence, we all have to be hard in some ways. There is also another tradeoff: the more open you are, the more people you become friends with, and the more friends you have, the less time you have to spend with each individual friend, meaning your relationships will be less close on average. Each person falls somewhere on the spectrum between hard and friendly. Your position within this range can influence whether you develop a few close relationships or a lot of less close relationships. Even with each individual friend you have, there is a tradeoff with how close you want to be with them. If you are not very close, you might not know them as well and hence run a higher risk of being burned by them, but since you are not so close, being burned is a lesser breach of trust than with a closer friend. However, a close friend has a lower risk of burning you since you’ve gotten to trust them enough to let them in, but since they are closer, the impact of them burning you is much more destructive. Therefore, keeping a small circle of close friends gives a low risk of a high cost while a large circle of less close friends gives a high risk of a low cost. Because of this dangerous dynamic, each person must selectively be hard to reserve trust and friendly to give trust for each relationship they maintain. To be completely hard would be to close off all contact from humanity, to effectively kill yourself; and to be completely friendly would be to allow yourself to be taken advantage of by anyone, to effectively allow someone else to kill you. A fully friendly figure, a Jesus or a Prince Myshkin, cannot be realized in humanity, as one would need to transcend their nature.

Many things in life are a necessary evil. Any action we take inadvertently introduces some poison into our body. Most of the food we eat is necessary for health, yet introduces trace amounts of what will eventually kill us. Making friends is necessary for mental health, yet also opens us to small poisons that may later kill us. Any action we take may eventually be the reason we die, and ultimately life is the cause of death.

I'm sad, but I'm laughing

Why do sad things sometimes make us laugh? Even though laughing usually makes us feel good, is there any reason why sad things can’t be funny? In fact, no, there isn’t and it is perfectly natural for many sad things to be funny. One of the most common reasons we find something funny is that it is unexpected. There are exceptions to this rule, but usually humans find unexpected things funny. Now, let’s consider what makes us sad. Often, the things that make us sad are also unexpected. Often sadness is the product of a mismatch between expectations and reality, as previously discussed. On the other hand, you are usually happy when reality meets your expectations, which is why we find happy situations funny much less often than sad situations. There is nothing funny or surprising about wanting a job and then getting the job. However, really wanting a job and then not getting it can be surprising and hence funny depending on the situation. Among your sad ruminations, at some point there might appear the self-aware recognition of how sad you are, how absurdly bad this situation is, and how things just did not go at all how you foresaw, and the surprise of it all is a little funny, even if the surprise is a sad one.

The act of being sad but laughing is also a perfectly natural reaction to the world at large. Sometimes there are ways in which the world seems too bad to be true. Sometimes it’s hard to believe how it’s even possible for humanity to have gotten itself into some situations. For example, it’s absurd that we have created weapons with enough force to destroy the world and now they are in control of a few individuals, even though we know all humans are fallible. There’s no kidding it’s sad, but it’s also such a strange, unbelievable situation that it’s also funny.

I'm brave, but I'm chickenshit

In this context, chickenshit means cowardly. But how can someone be brave and the opposite of brave at the same time? Plato observed that people can hold conflicting desires. For example, someone can desire to eat a burger because they are hungry, but simultaneously desire not to eat it because it is unhealthy. It’s not news that our mind has conflicting impulses and identities that lead to indecision or decisions we regret. (Plato separates the soul into three parts; Freud separates the psyche into id, ego, super-ego.) Therefore, we often harbor contradictory desires that not only confuse others but also confuse ourselves. It’s hard to pin down even what your own identity is. We’ve talked a lot about how life is sad, but it is also just confusing. Our decision-making apparatus is convoluted, hard to understand and hard to control, and after we make a decision, the feedback we get from life is often also convoluted and unclear, which prevents us from evaluating whether the decisions we made had a negative or positive effect. Furthermore, since we often harbor contradictory desires, we often voluntarily do things we don’t actually want to do, which is another way our biology works against us.

I believe to live is to be brave. Life is a crucible of pain, and each individual has their own intractably difficult problems to deal with. And then of course to be chickenshit in the face of these intractable problems is only natural.

I'm sick, but I'm pretty, baby

Everything is sick but pretty. Because of time, everything is temporary and constantly progressing closer to its end. Any time we witness beauty, whether it’s a person, a piece of art, or a flower, we were lucky because we caught that beauty in a moment when it still existed, a moment that was immediately lost to the ether. Every beauty we know will perish. Each person, intricately and uniquely developed after decades of life, eventually disappears completely. Ultimately, we are all sick but pretty. This fact is sad but happy. We can choose to be sad that one day we will die, or we can accept this fact and be happy that each passing moment is beautiful.

#alanis morissette #hand in my pocket

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marysfoxmask · 3 years

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the secret garden (1949) - why it’s my favorite adaptation

hello @renee-mariposa! thank you so much for the ask! while i believe i have answered a question like this before, i don’t think i’ve elaborated as much as i’d like to. so allow me to wax poetic on my favorite adaptation, the secret garden (1949)!

intro

this adaptation really stands out, i think, because of the the era it was made in; i don’t think you could get an adaptation aimed towards kids that is such a sentimental, gothic-lite melodrama with these days, at least without aggressively telegraphing its more emotional moments a la pixar/disney; it’s amusingly blunt and straightforward in that regard, much like the children at its center. there’s not much syrupiness at all. the child actors (margaret o’brien as mary and dean stockwell as colin) are fast-talking as any actor of that era, but in my opinion, the film’s clearly scripted dialogue just makes all the kids seem amusingly precocious.

actors

margaret o’brien as mary is great. i love her stridency, her snobbishness. unlike other adaptations, which downplay mary’s contrariness to the point where her character arc comes across as too subtle by half, the movie upgrades it. not only is 1949 mary contrary, her sullenness has been replaced by a shrillness, snobbery, and the tendency to run to emotional extremes (not to mention a healthy helping of classism). she alienates herself from the other children on the ship to england purposefully, finding them inferior to herself, then attempts to physically fight another passenger when the child calls archibald a hunchback. while this characterization isn’t book-accurate (book mary is a mix of fiery and sullen that none of the films capture accurately imo), i prefer this characterization of her to the closed-off sullenness of the 1993 version or the palatably traumatized 2020 version. 1949 mary isn’t given an obvious freudian excuse for her issues; her parents are just as neglectful, but the film puts the onus on mary for being contrary, which is weirdly refreshing and more attuned to the novel’s perspective. (that isn’t to say that mary’s traumatic early childhood didn’t inform her character in any meaningful way, or that the adults around mary aren’t responsible for how she turned out--but imo the films tend to take an un-nuanced view of the situation in order to make her a more palatable, sympathetic character, which is vastly less interesting than a complicated, flawed one no matter if the character is a child or not). when mary’s character develops and she becomes sweeter, it’s much more impactful as a result of this earlier narrative choice.

brian roper, who was 20 at the time (crazy, right?), plays dickon, and he plays him with a sweet affability that’s hard not to enjoy. he’s a little mischievous, laughing at mary when she accidentally speaks yorkshire (i’ll talk about that in a bit), and has, in a nice touch that i’ve strangely only seen in in the 1994 straight-to-dvd animated film, just as much of a passionate interest in the secret garden as mary does. dickon isn’t treated as mystically as other adaptations, save for the tendency to disappear strangely quickly just when mary happens to turn around (which is a nice nod to his quasi-magical aspects without being distracting, and also adds to mary’s sense of displacement/confusion on the mysterious misselthwaite grounds). he also gets a surprising amount to do in this adaptation, which i love, as someone who strongly believes his character has been under-served in all the film adaptations thus far. in this film, he gets to even enter misselthwaite manor by climbing up ivy into colin’s room in the middle of a storm (albeit offscreen), which is just the kind of adventurous, dramatic touch i enjoy. he also gets probably more dialogue than any of the other dickons (whoo!), as he makes a couple minor declarations--nothing super ham-fisted and melodramatic, as i said the screenplay is rather straightforward and devoid of a lot of corniness you might expect from a children’s film made in the ‘40s, especially with this kind of source material--that are heartfelt without being cloying (one of the benefits of having an older actor playing this kind of role).

colin, played by dean stockwell, is a weaker element to me. he does a good job alternating between screaming (and this movie contains a lot of screaming) and being sweet when the movie calls for it, but i don’t think he was the best choice for colin. while i think it’s awful to criticize a teen actor (stockwell was 13 at the time) for being baby-faced, the fact that he looks significantly younger than o’brien (who was 12) means that his tantrums come off as less a result of arrested development than they should. while he speaks as stiltedly as 2020 colin (who i personally think was one of the best elements of that film), it’s unclear whether that’s the result of the ‘40s fashion of expressing dialogue or a characteristic choice (i’m guessing the former). he can’t help but pale compared to o’brien’s mary, though he is perfectly adequate. he just didn’t stand out for me.

i summed up my feelings of elsa lanchester as martha in my previous, brief review of the movie back in june: “the one major flaw, i think, is actually martha, played by elsa lanchester; her portrayal is odd, feels definitely tone-deaf. her constant shrieking laughter feels very forced and unconvincing. in her few scenes, she jars everything to a halt in terms of believability.” she was significantly older than brian roper, being in her ‘40s playing a character heavily implied to be in her mid-teens to early twenties, and as a result feels out of her depth. her establishing scene is probably the worst, although i’ve warmed to her other scenes as time’s gone by.

tone/atmosphere

in general, i think the ‘49 film does a wonderful job expressing the gothic implications of the original book, even emphasizing them by casting misselthwaite manor largely in shadow and having mary and mrs. medlock first arrive in a carriage pulled by black horses on a dark, stormy night. it makes the bright outdoor scenery seem that much more inviting in comparison. burnett’s robin is also replaced by a raven, who also takes on aspects of dickon’s crow soot, as he is friends with dickon and hops on his shoulder occasionally. while it divulges from burnett’s book, i think a raven makes a little more sense in this adaptation, which amps up the eeriness of the original story; it gives mary’s journey a little more of a fairytale aspect, i think, and is overall an understandable and palatable change.

plot

the big plot development that divulges from the novel is the presence of a subplot where, due to a misunderstanding of an axe and a tree in the titular garden, mary and dickon fall under the impression that archibald killed lilias. now, this is a pretty bizarre plot, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t take up much of the film; it’s charming in its strangeness, and fits well with the idea of innocent children struggling to understand the complicated adult world—which is itself a theme original to the story that i’m kind of a sucker for, in general. it also serves as a bonding point for dickon and mary, whose friendship largely feels passed over in film adaptations.

and, of course, there’s the big plot-breaking point near the end, where archibald goes to tell colin that he’s selling misselthwaite and going to move to europe with him. an obvious plot point that conflicts with this scene is that colin, in the book, has no relationship with his father. again, it’s an odd adaptational choice meant to amp up the stakes, but it doesn’t impede my enjoyment of the film as a whole. the presence of two doctors—one, a hapless neville craven figure named dr. griddlestone, and the other is obviously inspired from the book’s “doctor from london,” who insisted all colin needed was fresh air, food, and exercise—gives the film some psychological weight. despite the disappointing element of all of colin’s neuroses being blatantly the result of his father’s emotional ailments, which i think is a lazy way of reading the original novel’s portrayal of colin’s illness, i think the way this development was executed in the film was tolerable—and i’m a sucker for children’s films that don’t think anything of including long conversations between adults about psychological issues. like, you can’t help but respect a film like that!

the garden

something i also love about this adaptation is that the garden isn’t a huge part of it; it represents more of a place where mary and dickon and colin can foster ideas and grow rather than a place of orgasmic beauty. there’s not a surplus of lavish panning shots, really, like in the ‘93 film, and it lacks the magical realism of the 2020 film. the garden itself is more transparently a plot device, which i actually like—it gives more room for the children to center themselves.

individual scenes

and the pacing of the film is actually really nice, i think—probably the best out of all the films. i love the ‘93 film with all my heart, and it’s definitely gorgeous in its own right, but i think it gets a little sluggish; this film is paced beautifully. there’s no fat, really.

there’s a scene i really love that shows the passage of time from winter to spring in a super succinct, stupidly obvious way that nonetheless works because of the innocent sweetness of o’brien’s delivery. like, it’s very old-fashioned and sentimental, but gah, it gets me every time.

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it’s time to talk about the scream scene!

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this film stole my heart the minute mary screamed wholeheartedly at colin that she hopes he dies. there’s a dark comedy to this whole scene; these two maladjusted, spoiled children trying to out-scream one another while tearing down curtains and knocking down tables full of food higgledy-piggledy?? you just can’t get better than that!

if you’re adapting the secret garden, i strongly feel you can’t soften the children’s meanness, their sharpness and ugliness. their tantrums must be harsh and grating and horrible! they have to really let loose! the rawness of the children’s emotional dysfunction contrasted against the buttoned-up stiffness of edwardian england is one of the fascinating aspects of the novel i love to think about, and you just can’t get that contrast if you don’t have the children be genuine terrors! i think this scene puts that nicely, more nicely than any of the other films, which pussyfoot around colin’s intense tantrum too much to be nearly as effective. i get giddy whenever this scene comes on; it’s brilliant.

there are so many little details from the book that i love: that the children speak yorkshire to one another, mary singing her ayah’s song to colin,

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dickon’s “i will cum bak” note (here written as “i will kum back”), the mention of dickon’s mother sending them bread to eat to make them strong. it’s all so nicely implemented, and reminds me of the joy of reading the book for the first time.

but the scene i love most is one entirely made up for the film. in it, mary tells colin about the garden, but wraps it up in fiction wherein it’s a sort of child’s eden, only accessible for children like themselves. that gets to the heart of why i love the book moreso than any other adaptation i can think of. it’s a children’s paradise where the innocent, inherent goodness of children reigns. it makes me tear up almost every time, despite the scene’s brevity.

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miscellaneous

there are some little details that i love about this film: the fact that mrs. sowerby is spotted in one scene where we see dickon at his home, feeding a lamb (and the implication that mary was so darn excited about finding the key to the garden that she ran all the way to the sowerbys’ cottage, five miles away from misselthwaite, to show dickon), mary’s clearly false story to colin about being surrounded by tigers and elephants in india, mary threatening to tear people’s gizzards out, mary telling dickon she hates him because he (gasp) dared to know about colin so she couldn’t reveal his existence to him...there’s a lot to enjoy about this film. it definitely isn’t the most accurate to the book, but it’s one of those films that i could watch over and over again.

aside from some superfluous subplots, it’s a lean adaptation that still captures all the essential elements of the book to at least to a degree. i can easily imagine some very indignant little girls in 1949 insisting that no, the raven was a robin in the book, and there was no implications of murder, either, but i love it in all its simplicity. i think you need a little old-fashioned sentiment to make a film adaptation of the secret garden successful.

#the secret garden #frances hodgson burnett #the secret garden 1949 #mary lennox #dickon sowerby #colin craven #margaret o'brien #dean stockwell #brian roper #elsa lanchester

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