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into-the-afterlife · 3 years

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Why I Ship Johnny/Female V Part 3: V, and You, and Me

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

I’ve spent a lot of time in this essay series so far focusing on one half of the pairing. Johnny is fascinating, but he’s only one half of the dynamic. So what about V is interesting? Why does she stand out as a character, in the context of this pairing?

Across different ships, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern. There tends to be one character that the fandom focuses in on to thirst over and one that the fandom imagines themselves being. In this ship, the thirst-character tends to be Johnny, while the self-insert character tends to be V. And that’s not surprising, considering that V is essentially our self-insert into the world of Cyberpunk 2077. It’s also worth noting that people who engage in shipping and transformative fandom tend to be predominantly AFAB, myself included, and it makes sense that when writing sexual stories we’d want a self-insert who has our anatomy.

But fans being AFAB doesn’t usually impact what ships are popular. Shipping is infamously dominated by M/M couples who are, ninety percent of the time, cis. Usually, that impulse to self-insert results in an exaggeration of top-bottom dynamics rather than genderswaps or increased focus on M/F couples.

And the thing about V is, she isn’t just a self-insert. In fandoms focused on open-world RPGs, there tends to be some focus on the player character. However, that focus tends to be limited to the Tumblr-ish, transformative end of fandom. One of my other favourite video game fandoms is The Elder Scrolls. There, people avidly draw and discuss their versions of the protagonists on Tumblr and AO3. But on Reddit and Facebook meme pages, the focus is much more on the other characters, the lore, the worldbuilding.

In this fandom, though? I’ve seen more Vs on Reddit than I have on Tumblr. On Reddit, you’re bombarded with beautiful screenshots of V after V. On Tumblr, there’s tons of new names for V, lovingly thought out backstories and more. And when I see V being shipped with Johnny, V is almost always depicted as female, despite there being an option for a male V and despite the norms of shipping favouring a male V.

So it’s clear that female V inspires more affection than most RPG protagonists. Part of that is to do with Cherami Leigh’s voice acting that I covered in Part 1. But I also think there’s a lot in V’s writing that influences things this way.

CD Projekt Red’s writers are known for focusing on character and plot over worldbuilding in their writing. There’s no, ‘I used to be an adventurer like you...’ in their games, no blank-slate hero or awkward, generic background dialogue. Instead, their other protagonist, Geralt, reacts to chasing after goats and weird children and ancient beings as his own person. The world he inhabits is similarly richly drawn, with even the most bland of background guards discussing gimps and birthdays.

There’s also no black-and-white morality. Even in The Witcher games, their fantasy series, the morality leans much closer to Game of Thrones than The Lord of the Rings. This means that their characters are always three-dimensional. Their first true RPG is actually Cyberpunk 2077. Oh, sure, they’ve done games with rich worlds and lots of sidequests, with skill-trees and moral options, but they’ve always had an authored character, with his own slants and biases. Even when Geralt picks the moral option, he’s likely to be cynical about it, and he always leans towards being a grizzled libertarian who’s Done With This Shit at heart.

Despite their provision of a relatively blank-slate character in this game, this influence lingers on in Cyberpunk 2077. One of the big critiques of the game at launch was that the much-hyped lifepath system felt clunky and didn’t have much of an influence on later gameplay. It’s true that the backstory sacrifices some smoothness of plot and introduction to the world.

But what it gets rid of in those aspects, it makes up for in characterisation. No matter what path you choose, V is never an anonymous prisoner, a mysterious courier or a long-forgotten colonist. She has a clearly defined context, and real roots in the world around her. Even after you move past the prologue, V has the network of people around her you’d expect for someone already embedded in the world. After you’re shot, you don’t just go to some random ripperdoc; you go to Vik, her regular ripperdoc and friend. You don’t get the tarot sidequest from reading an anonymous shard; you get it from Misty. Jackie dating Misty suggests that he introduced V to Misty and Vik. V getting to know them through Jackie feels natural, and just like the kinds of close communal networks that spring up in large cities. Meanwhile, the unique dialogue options for each lifepath keep reminding you that V had a life before you met her.

And that’s true even for the other dialogue options. Here’s a minor, early-game set of dialogue choices from Cyberpunk 2077:

And here’s a similarly minor, early-game set of dialogue choices from a recent RPG that shares a lot of tonal and thematic similarities with Cyberpunk – The Outer Worlds:

Notice the difference in attitudes allowed by each set of dialogue options. The player character of The Outer Worlds has the opportunity to respond compassionately, snarkily or lie for their own advantage. Deception is specifically highlighted and controlled by a skill tree, and each dialogue choice has its own tone and flavour. Meanwhile, all of V’s dialogue choices can be interpreted as some kind of attempt at deception. They’re also all written in the same voice. While The Outer Worlds offers matter-of-fact kindness, brevity and colourful imagery, V’s dialogue choices all share sentence fragments, spunkiness, bluntness and emotional volatility. No matter what choices you make, V’s attitude and voice always stays the same.

The way dialogue choices are controlled is also worth examining. There seem to be more choices on the surface in Cyberpunk, but a full half of them are controlled by skill trees. Level V up differently to this YouTuber, and they may not even be available. The skills themselves also betray a lack of choice here. While speech is split into five different skills in The Outer Worlds, and the skill used here is directly named ‘Lie’, in Cyberpunk 2077 the skills are simply named ‘Reflexes’ and ‘Cool’. That’s partially due to differences in RPG mechanics, which is beyond the scope of this essay. But look at the names themselves. While The Outer Worlds singles out deception, and bluntly names it for what it is, Cyberpunk 2077 frames quick thinking and bluffing as simply part of the reactions and social attitudes required to survive in Night City. Even the very names of the game mechanics are coloured by V’s attitudes.

While V’s status as an independent character is coloured by CD Projekt Red’s previous experience, it’s definitely not an accident. They had an entire trailer dedicated to answering the question of who V is. For the question of whether V keeps her own personality to be compelling, V has to have a personality in the first place. And in the Temperance ending, the emotional impact of seeing V as an NPC in cyberspace, as well as the final, long shot of V’s face on the bus, depends on you having built up a relationship with her as a separate character. She’s a fascinating mix of self-insert and defined character, and purely from a writing perspective, breaks a lot of new ground for RPG protagonists.

But back to the subject at hand: shipping. She’s just self-insert enough for you to imagine yourself as part of a heightened reality, as someone blisteringly witty, quick-thinking and intelligent. And feeling competent and confident, whether in the real world or in-game, brings you back into your body and makes you feel confident enough to pursue what brings you pleasure. But V’s also just enough of her own person that you can care for her and want her to be happy. That combination of affection and wish fulfilment is what the best ships are made of.

Another huge part of V’s popularity in the Cyberpunk fandom comes from the way gender, or the lack of it, interacts with her characterisation. Of course, you can make her look and dress however you want; that’s one of the beautiful things about RPG protagonists. But her lines and interactions with other characters, thanks to them having to be voiced by male V as well, are refreshingly gender-neutral. To understand this further, let’s take a look at some concrete examples.

Cyberpunk 2077, particularly during the prologue and Act 1, takes a lot of inspiration from Grand Theft Auto. Fast cars, exciting crimes, the obligatory strippers and prostitutes; they’re all there.

These kinds of gritty, sexualised game worlds have attracted criticism from feminist media analysts for normalising violence against women and normalising extreme violence as the default and desirable way of responding to the world. What I think about these takes would take its own essay to get into. But the part of these critiques I do agree with is this. By having protagonists in these worlds always be hypermasculine cis male protagonists, and by having victims of crimes and sexualised characters always be cis women, these worlds repeatedly and unnecessarily sideline anyone who’s not a cis man from imagining themselves having power and agency.

However, where Cyberpunk 2077 differentiates itself from other examples of these game worlds is its lack of gendered differentiation for its protagonist. Ninety-nine percent of the time throughout the game, male and female V voice exactly the same lines. This means that if you choose to play as female V, female V is characterised exactly the same way as male V.

Let’s take a look at some concrete examples of this. The biggest is V’s relationship with Jackie. It’s rarely that you see a male-female friendship that stays as platonic as this one does in media, and I welcome it. The quest called ‘The Ripperdoc’ demonstrates this, in the conversation when Jackie and V drive to see Vik:

Jackie [with relish]: ...I got a date - me and Misty.

V: You don’t say...

Jackie [confidentially]: She’s soooo sweet. Really gets me, y’know?

Jackie describes his relationship with Misty in respectful terms, and isn’t afraid to detail the emotional aspects of his and Misty’s connection. But he doesn’t hold back on the macho bragging either. In these lines, and especially in the pleased, suggestive tone of the first line, it’s clear he’s proud to be the kind of guy who could date someone like Misty. The presence of both of these attitudes together shows that Jackie both trusts V and considers V a part of his traditional-masculinity-valuing world. It’s less ‘not like other girls’ and more ‘not like other mercs’.

Similarly, while V’s first interactions with Johnny do draw from highly gendered relationship dynamics, the actual content of V’s responses undercut any feminising this would give her. Here’s one exchange from ‘Playing For Time’:

Johnny: The fuck kinda joytoy are you supposed to be?

V: Fuckin’ ghost off!

Johnny calls V a whore. Before and after, he physically hurts her in ways that, in my opinion, have a highly sexual undertone. But the crucial bit is how V responds here. She neither responds in a helpless, damsel-in-distress sort of way, nor in a defiant, sassy heroine way, where she might take the gendered insults and own them or prove them wrong via physical prowess. In fact, she doesn’t react to the gendered aspect of Johnny’s comment at all. Where a game with a Strong Female Character (TM) would use gendered jabs to refocus attention on said character, Cyberpunk blows them off to focus on the reality of this particular character’s situation.

Outside of V’s closest relationships, this gender neutrality can also be seen in the wider world of Night City. Dexter DeShawn is one of the most tropey, Grand Theft Auto-esque characters you meet in the game. As such, he’s one of the best barometers for how gender interacts with the ‘usual’ state of the world. And how does he react to a female V?

The answer is, not at all. He addresses her as ‘Ms V’, but that comes across as less about her and more about him being high up enough in the world that he can afford affectations. Her gender simply isn’t relevant. While this is increasingly common in pop culture, it’s still rare in worldbuilding like this, where gender is all too frequently used as a lens through which to explore violent, chaotic worlds. In a type of world and tone where gender roles are traditionally emphasised , V slips past those roles and is allowed to exist beyond them.

But why does gender neutrality make V more appealing to ship? To answer that fully, it needs to be combined with my next point.

V is also compelling to ship because her characterisation gives a safe platform from which to imagine her being vulnerable. What I mean by that is this. The main aspect of V’s characterisation in canon is her status as a merc. How you experience her life, through gameplay and through the situations she gets into, is through her skills at hacking, sneaking and killing. You don’t just witness her competence, daring and toughness; you share in it.

When writing fiction that focuses on romantic relationships, one of the toughest balances to get right is that of competency and vulnerability. Any good romantic arc involves watching a character’s barriers come down, seeing how they react to the other person when they lay aside their protective pretences. But this can’t happen too soon, or too much, for either the protagonist or the love interest. Competency and assuredness are huge parts of what makes someone attractive, and they’re also huge parts of feeling like you can come out and play, sexually speaking. Even for the biggest submissive on the planet, the submission has to be a deliberate choice to be hot.

Taken together, V’s canonical characterisation and the possibilities and conventions of fandom provide the perfect balance of those two qualities. Canon makes it clear that V is capable and strong. When you or I imagine our Vs with Johnny, that buildup of ‘competence capital’ makes it feel safe enough to imagine V vulnerable.

And that safety is vital when shipping any character with a character like Johnny. This is where the gender neutrality I talked about earlier comes into play. Imagining V vulnerable feels safe. So does imagining V in a dynamic with a guy who’s a tropey bad boy. Because V is written in such a gender-neutral way, it lets the player enjoy all the deliciously dangerous aspects of her relationship with Johnny without the distractions that may come from feeling disempowered. It also refreshes all the clichés of Dangerous Guys, making their impact feel fresh and new again. Her ability to walk the line between wish fulfilment and independent characterisation inspires simultaneous identification with her, affection for her and boosts in confidence for the player.

This is why she’s compelling to ship. Johnny brings in the familiar emotional arcs of classic tropes, while V makes them new. So what happens when you put these two characters together? Just what about the way they bounce off each other has inspired the majority of fic and art in this fandom?

That’s what I’ll talk about next time.

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

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notbang · 4 years

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the pursuit of happiness

or, an examination of happiness and the chase as recurring motifs in the character development of Rebecca Bunch and Nathaniel Plimpton

rethaniel appreciation week day 2 → pursuit

I could write a small novel cataloguing the endless parallels between these two—I have, in fact, thought about attempting it many times—but honestly the list is so long and varied and sprouts off in so many different directions that I’ve yet to think of a logical way to go about it. Which is why for the time being, I’m choosing to focus instead—in some degree of detail—on this particular mirrored thread between them.

As our protagonist, Rebecca functions as a major catalyst for change in West Covina, and just as surely as she stumbles along in her journey we see the (for the most part) positive effects of her friendship on those around her. With perhaps the sole exception of White Josh, all of the characters end the show as happier and healthier iterations of themselves, with many of the major aspects of their growth traceable to their involvement with Rebecca in some way. Nathaniel is no exception to this rule; arguably, his development, more so than any other character’s, is directly tied to Rebecca’s influence on his life. The main difference here lies in the fact that he moves to town good a season and half after her—putting him that much further behind in his inevitable development.

One of the major, ongoing setbacks Rebecca faces over the course of the show is her tendency to conflate happiness, or personal fulfilment, with romantic love, and more specifically, for the first half of the series at least, conflating it with a single person. Nathaniel, by comparison, at the time of our introduction to him, has little interest in the concept at all, something Rebecca is quick to sympathise with in 2x09—‘You know Nathaniel, I used to be a lot like you. Ruthless. But then one day I was crying a lot, and I decided to flip things around. Decided to put happiness before success. And when I did that, the world rewarded me with true happiness.’ Nathaniel doesn’t verbally dismiss the sentiment, but the wealth of facial expressions he supplies in response suggest what he thinks of that: happiness is frivolous, and he doesn’t have space for it in his busy schedule.

Nathaniel, probably: Sounds fake but okay.

In the season two theme Rebecca declares that as a girl in love, she can’t be held responsible for her actions, and the sweeping duet Nothing Is Ever Anyone’s Fault follows a similar thread of eschewing culpability. While this certainly works to help dismiss a season’s worth of questionable behaviour from the two of them—including, but not limited to, infidelity and conspiracy to murder—I’m not convinced the touted concept behind the song—that Nathaniel has learned the wrong lesson from being in love with her, as explained in post-finale interviews at the time—flies in the face of our understanding of Nathaniel’s character thus far. As a rich, straight, white, cis male whose privilege the show has only made clumsy attempts at dismantling, a disregard of consequence seems a lot less like something he needed to be taught by anybody and a little more like something that was probably ingrained in him at birth.

If we want to talk about misguided takeaways within their relationship, though, their relationship to happiness is the perfect place to start. Nathaniel begins the show with no concept of the pursuit of happiness, so it makes sense that when he does adopt an interest in it, he takes a page right out of the book of the person that introduced him and pins it all in the one place. Unlike Rebecca, though, Nathaniel’s preoccupation seems to be less wilful delusion and more of a case of ignorance being bliss—being with her feels good, so why change anything or interrogate the situation any further? For all his earlier talk, he is quick to give up the thrill of the chase under the hedonistic guise of contentment. Unfortunately, what he lacks is the emotional intelligence to navigate the implications of Rebecca’s disorder, highlighted by his belief that the mere fact that he and Josh are two vastly different people is reason enough for him to be able to dismiss her obsessive behaviour as ‘cute’ and ‘flattering’. Rebecca’s recent breakdown and consequential suicide attempt can’t exist as warning signs in their (what he perceives as superior) relationship because he isn’t planning on leaving Rebecca at the altar; he isn’t privy to the realisation that it ‘wasn’t about Josh, and maybe it never was’.

Nathaniel: I don’t want to get in the way of your therapy thing, but isn’t the point of all this to be happy? We’re happy. That’s what matters.

It’s a shame because despite there being so much more going on with Rebecca than Nathaniel is capable of comprehending at this point in time, he actually, perhaps entirely by accident, manages to get a few things right—he checks in with her about her therapy when her appearing on his doorstep contradicts the information she’d given him earlier (even if he is, at this point, all too easy to convince), counters her suggestion that they play hooky at Raging Waters with the compromise of a more sensibly scheduled dinner they’ll both enjoy, and, when they do come in to conflict over her obsessive behaviours, takes some time for himself before having a serious conversation with her. Though it’s certainly naive of him to think it’s a problem as easily solved as getting Rebecca to promise she’ll never do anything like this again, it suggests the capacity exists (given, with great guidance) for him to approach Rebecca’s mental illness within their relationship in a thoughtful way.

(This of course completely ignores the inherent issues in their boss/employee relationship, which come to a questionable forefront when Rebecca makes the decision to return to work after having broken things off, but we’re starting to get a little off-track from the intended scope of this discussion.)

The idea of romantic love as a chase—if not already sold to us by Rebecca literally moving across the country in pursuit of Josh—is hammered home most effectively in episode 2x11, but Nathaniel actually brings it up in the episode prior; before Rebecca and Josh leave for New York, at the same time as setting up the whole ‘man of my dreams’ idea that also carries on into the next episode, a sweaty Nathaniel beseeches Rebecca to imitate a land-based predator so he can amp up his workout under the threat of chase. Within this alignment, Josh, who ends up proposing to Rebecca at the end of 2x10, becomes even more clearly representative of an end goal—love, marriage, and, as an expected by-product, ultimate happiness. Nathaniel, by contrast for the time being, is all about the chase that comes before. After his speech at the beginning of 2x11 boasting of his dogged approach when securing clients, his passionate buzz words begin to permeate Rebecca’s subconscious, with ‘pursuit’ in particular going so far as to in an echo in a similar way that ‘happy’ does in the pilot. Such is the effect of his words on her that she parrots them back to Josh when she tells him she’s moved up their wedding—‘Finally, it’s coming to an end. The pursuit is over and I just want to celebrate that’. The title of the episode title may pose the question Josh is the man of my dreams, right? but in the most literal sense, the star of her dreams becomes Nathaniel, along with his personal brand of terminology.

Where Nathaniel thinks life is all about playing the hunter, Rebecca insists she doesn’t care for the chase, which makes sense—she doesn’t want to be chasing Josh, and furthermore, admitting that she’s chasing him would only be contradictory to her belief that they belong together. She wants her happy ending. She wants to arrive at her final destination—her destiny—because thus far all her journeys (which have in actuality been more of a kind of stagnation) have been left her unfulfilled. However obsessing over an idealised future only postpones her happiness with her inability to focus on the present. Ironically, the point at which she makes an active choice to begin shifting that focus—in 3x07, when Dr Shin encourages her to live in the messy in-between—is right around the time Nathaniel starts buying into her idealisation himself.

In a similar way to Rebecca, regardless of his purported love of the pursuit, Nathaniel’s infatuation is seemingly tied to the concept of a destination—several times quite literally. In 3x04 he’s ready to whisk her away to Rome to evade any obstacles to their being together, and in 4x01 proposes a similar escape to Hawaii, causing him to lash out when Rebecca turns him down—‘I want us to just be happy and be together. That’s what I want. You just said you love me, right? So can you just do that for me? Can you just stop overthinking everything? …seems like every time we’re happy, you try to ruin it.’ He sees their shared happiness as a nirvana state he’s caught a glimpse of that Rebecca is now determined to deny him access to, to the point that he seeks to make their version of a love bubble a physical one, where no outside interference (or, more accurately, internal reflection from Rebecca) can keep them apart. Still degrees behind Rebecca in the parallel arcs of their development, he’s stuck in the mindset that them being happy and in love is the only thing that matters. His behaviour is far from flattering, but with a quick review of his history of being on the continual receiving end of her rejection, it’s not entirely difficult to see where he’s coming from.

(As an aside, Rebecca’s relationship with the destination versus the journey as it pertains to the mural on her wall is something I’ve already discussed in a previous meta.)

When she breaks up with him at the beginning of 3x09, Rebecca responds to Nathaniel’s protest of ‘but we’re happy!’ with the qualifier that she’s ‘happy, but it isn’t real’, which probably isn’t the most pleasant thing to be told, even before you factor in Nathaniel’s implied inexperience with serious relationships. While her behaviour prior to this definitely calls for some self reflection, it’s an interesting backflip from extreme infatuation to sudden dismissal, and while it does align with the black and white thinking associated with BPD, it’s easy to see why Nathaniel feels blindsided and, consequently, spurned. She begged him not to break up with her not only to then turn around do exactly that, but to also (presumably unintentionally) throw in the humiliating implication he cared more than she did.

Dr Akopian: Maybe now you can see that your father’s behaviour in the past has set a pattern for you, seeking the love of men who don’t fully love you back. Who you have to pursue. Men who are taken or emotionally unavailable. Like your father. Like Josh. Like Greg. Like other men, I’m sure.

Nathaniel is an outlier amongst the three main love interests in that, for all his grandstanding about humans being hunters by nature, he’s the one constantly falling over himself to win Rebecca’s affection rather than the other way around; it’s ironic that the love interest that asserts himself as being all about the chase is the one that ends up later having to assign himself the title of ‘king of declarations’ based on his ongoing habit of blurting out to Rebecca how he feels, never achieving the level of emotional standoffishness he hopes to exude. Nathaniel’s unavailability—and subsequent cementing as one of the types of men Dr Akopian calls Rebecca out on being predisposed to pursuing—comes only when he enters into a relationship with Mona, and Rebecca, who supposedly ‘never cared for the chase’, with interest reignited finds a skewed sense of security afforded by the romantic roadblock, something Nathaniel seems to understand on some unspoken level, as hinted at by his eagerness to maintain the fragile status quo of their morally questionable arrangement.

As a result of this subversion of power dynamics within Rebecca and Nathaniel’s relationship, in amongst the many other parallels between them that only serve to support this, it starts to become apparent that, narratively speaking, Nathaniel is to Rebecca as Rebecca is to Josh, something that is visually co-signed by the show during 4x03, when we see the same golden glow of romantic epiphany crest behind Rebecca in the church during her speech at Heather and Hector’s wedding that suffuses across Josh when Rebecca encounters him in the streets of New York.

Nathaniel’s takeaway from Rebecca’s speech is that because he loves her, he should do everything within his power to get her back, which of course leads to his (frankly embarrassing) attempts to manipulate her and win her over in 4x04. (Fittingly enough to this discussion, the opening line of the Slumbered quote he plagiarises is ‘you are the only thing that makes me happy’. The irony of his failed use of her teenage diary to win her over is that I honestly do believe the speech is an accurate summation of how he sees Rebecca, and had he only chosen to put it in his own words, that final scene between them might have played out a little differently.) The part he probably should have focused on, though, is the part Rebecca is currently pouring all her professional energy into (and not so coincidentally, it’s right there in the episode title)—love (and therefore happiness) being about finding your own path.

Rebecca: I don’t believe in destiny anymore. I just believe in taking responsibility for your own happiness.

This is not the first time Nathaniel makes the decision to actively pursue Rebecca while her attention lies firmly fixed elsewhere. In 3x03 and 3x04, he is forced to grapple with his feelings alone when a distracted Rebecca eventually goes where he cannot follow, putting an abrupt end to any potential for chase when she flees back to New York in 3x05. Consequently, Nathaniel embarks on a mini-arc of struggling to accept the idea that Rebecca may never come back—initially incomprehensible to him, owing to the fact that she bears importance to him, personally—to conceding that his (thus far relatively unexamined) need for her to be in his life is secondary to her own wellbeing, something that acts as a precursor to a major thread in Nathaniel’s (often one step forward, two clumsily-written steps back) character development in the back end of the series.

Nathaniel: I just hope wherever she is, she’s happy.

In 4x11, Nathaniel’s dream world amalgamation of Maya and Rebecca begs him to let her be happy, and as the former fades into the latter we get another callback to the pilot—an echo of 'happy, happy, happy…’ reminiscent of the empty shell of New York Rebecca latching onto Josh’s description of laid-back West Covina. Unlike its instance in the 1x01, however, this is a wake up call of an entirely different kind—it is not the blossoming of a brand new delusion but the sobering dissolution of one. And unlike the speech a radiant Rebecca gave at Heather’s wedding about finding the one you love and holding on tight, this particular iteration is here to impart the contradictory wisdom ‘if you really love me, you have to let me go’.

Nathaniel: I want you to be happy, I do.

This moment is arguably the true beginning of Nathaniel’s lesson that his happiness isn’t necessarily (or in this case, due to the current circumstances, can no longer be) inextricably linked to Rebecca—she has the opportunity to find happiness independently of him and that in itself is something that should make him happy, as someone that loves and cares for her. His assertion to dream Rebecca that he wants her to be happy manifests in his concession to Rebecca in the real world—‘I’m glad you’re happy. I really am. And it makes me happy too’—an exchange that echoes two similar moments between them back in season three, during which Rebecca expresses the same sentiment regarding his relationship with Mona, first following the cool down from their 3x10 conflict, and again in the aftermath of their ended affair in 3x13:

Rebecca: I’m happy that you found someone else. Mona seems lovely.

Rebecca: I’m happy for you… I want you to be happy.

The more interesting callback here though, of course, is to Rebecca’s conversation with Greg at the duck pond way back in 2x02. After finally tracking down an AWOL Greg with the intention of breaking the news of her involvement with Josh, Greg makes peace with the situation by way of reassuring them both that everything worked out fine as long as Rebecca is happy. ‘You and Josh—you should be happy together. You’re happy, right? And he treats you well?’ Rebecca responds to this in the affirmative, though her expression—and the context of the episode—belies her answer. In contrast, her exchange with Nathaniel goes a little differently:

Nathaniel: Because you’re happy, right? You’re happy with Greg. Rebecca: I mean, I don’t know. I’m not there yet. But I could possibly be, yeah.

The evolution of Rebecca’s response is of course evidence of her development as a character and her own understanding of her relationship to happiness, but what I find most noteworthy is not that she lies in 2x02, but that in 4x11 she chooses to tell an unusual truth. She could just have easily have said yes the second time around and it would have functioned as a clear enough juxtaposition of what she considers close enough to happiness; after all, at the time of 4x11 she and Greg believe they are approaching their relationship in a mature and thoughtful fashion, they are warm and affectionate towards one another and, unlike in 2x02, she is not having to compete for her partner’s attention. She would, by all accounts, be completely justified in giving what could be considered the normal response to being posed such a question—that yes, she is happy with Greg. So even though it’s encouraging to hear Rebecca verbalising her newfound knowledge that happiness is so much more than such a simple dichotomy of yes and no, it feels significant that Nathaniel, as a person currently knee-deep in untangling his own complicated relationship with happiness, is the one that gets to be privy to this particular brand of truth.

And while it can be argued that all the strides Nathaniel makes in 4x11 are undone over the course of the following episodes, setting aside the very real fact that human emotions are fickle, and we can’t always stick as completely to our guns as we’d like, his blessing here still comes with a telling caveat: ‘I’ve got to let you go… because you’re happy’. And who shows up on Nathaniel’s doorstep during 4x12 to poke holes in that perceived state of happiness between her and Greg? None other than Rebecca herself.

Rebecca: You just want me to be happy, which is what I want too, and god, Greg… Greg doesn’t know what happiness is.

Such is the shared significance of this concept of happiness between them that the second Rebecca alludes to their conversation in the foyer, Nathaniel’s previously good-natured, albeit slightly confused, response to her drunken presence in his apartment quickly and very clearly dissolves into alarm bells and he eventually sends her on her way. Though he could easily have wielded Rebecca’s visit as a weapon to create dissonance between her and Greg in 4x13, he merely probes for clues by way of a convoluted metaphor, resigning himself to the fact that the issue has been resolved, while Greg, in actuality, is at this point none the wiser. It’s only once Greg himself tells Nathaniel that it is over between him and Rebecca that Nathaniel returns to entertaining his feelings for her.

Though we the viewers are all too aware (and at this point, probably screaming at the TV!) that Rebecca’s happiness is not, contrary to recurring belief, a vacant role that she needs someone to fill; unlike us, the characters have not had the good fortune of being able to watch the show Crazy Ex Girlfriend on the CW network. Nathaniel is still a fledgling in terms of self enlightenment, and it makes total sense for him to be nudged towards into pursuing her again once the clearest obstacle to her affections—her relationship with Greg—is no longer an issue.

When she breaks the news of her decision to Nathaniel in the finale, Rebecca is quick to assure Nathaniel that ‘the times that [they’ve] spent together have been some of the best of [her] life’, which is an interestingly bold statement all on its own, but it feels somewhat satisfyingly like finally giving Nathaniel a real-life answer to the ‘we’ve had such happy moments, you and I, haven’t we?’ that he throws at his Maya-shaped projection of Rebecca in 4x11; affirmation that contrary to what she says in 3x08, something in there between them was real.

‘You only get one life,’ he tells her in return. ‘And you’ve got to live that the way you want.’

Neither of them uses the word ‘happy’ in this exchange, but as we fast forward in time, we get:

Nathaniel: Happy to be here.

Rebecca: For the first time in my life, I am truly happy.

Nathaniel (who in an amusing reflection in 2x09, reveals that he, in a roundabout way, moved to West Covina because of Rebecca—‘it’s kind of your fault that I’m here’) has finally made the actual change that Rebecca taunted him with on their first meeting. And unlike Rebecca, he’s had a chance to interrogate what happiness for himself, removed from another person, might look like before he does so. Rather than starting with a life-altering change, he gets to make incremental changes along the way—which very much are tied to his entanglement to Rebecca—in order to make a more meaningful and deliberate life change for himself later on.

“When you find someone that melts the iceberg that is your heart…” - 3x03

“Provoking me, and zinging me, and challenging my world view. And warming my heart.” - 3x04

“You make me feel like I can be a different kind of person.” - 3x08

“You’ve awakened my heart and unlocked my soul.” - 4x04

“You’ve changed my whole life. Who I am, who I can be.” - 4x11

Rebecca describes her moving to West Covina in Nathaniel’s first episode as ‘[deciding] to flip things around. [Deciding] to put happiness before success. And when I did that, the world rewarded me with true happiness.’ In the finale, she tells the audience how he, by comparison, ‘upended [his] life’—‘You changed everything. But unlike me, you did it for the right reasons. And I am in awe of you.’ Alongside the nice progression from her proclamation in 2x09 that she ‘came to West Covina to search for happiness’ to her more self-aware announcement at the open mic that ‘for the first time in my life, [she is] truly happy’, (which feels like a subversive callback to a certain infamous butter commercial) we also get a reiteration of the sentiment— ‘I came to this town to find love. And I did. I love every person in this room’—that conflates happiness with love in what is now a healthy and satisfying way. It’s the perfect twist that she’s rewarded with the thing she was searching for all along just as soon as she realises she was looking in all the wrong places, and that the place itself still gets to play such a large part in that. And she is able to see Nathaniel’s journey as all the more meaningful in light of her own missteps along the way.

While I have my reservations on the bow they tied Nathaniel’s arc in for the finale (because despite Rebecca’s realisation that there is no such thing as ‘ending up’, there is in the sense of the scope of this series) being a well thought out resolution as opposed to leaning on a previous gag without laying any actual groundwork, the truth is it’s unclear what the true nature of Nathaniel’s sabbatical is/was/will be—mere extended vacation, permanent new career path, or just the initial spark of inspiration in some extended self discovery. That being said, much like Rebecca evolving towards a point where she can appreciate the interconnectedness of love and happiness in a less troublesome way, it is neat that Nathaniel’s resolution follows on from his tendency to want to escape to far-off destinations in an attempt to control his desired status quo. Though his fleeing town is still inextricably linked to having his heart broken by Rebecca, Guatemala, for once, isn’t about transposing his current circumstance to another place in order to cling to something, but rather a carefully selected, specific site for welcomed change.

Independent of any potential that may or may not exist between them as the show closes out—romantic or otherwise—it’s undeniable that these two characters have left indelible marks on each other, and without their respective involvement in each other’s lives, their journeys—and resulting transformations—would not have been the same.

#crazy ex girlfriend #rebecca x nathaniel #rethanielaw #rethaniel #rebecca bunch #nathaniel plimpton #crazy ex meta #stop! meta time

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faejilly · 3 years

Text

I was tagged by @la-muerta & @facialteeth & @thedivinemissema for the WIP/Title Game

rules: post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. send me an ask with the title that most intrigues you and interests you and i’ll post a little snippet of it or tell you something about it!

AND THEN by @shadoedseptmbr @msviolacea & @ravenclawnerd for the “stories you want to write... but for some reason haven’t yet”

so this will be a mish-mash of both? The WIPs will mostly have blurbs in this case (to fit the second meme) but you are still welcome to ask follow-up questions, if you’d like ;) Assuming you make it through the list, it is uh. Not Short.

Anyone who would like to play with their WIPs, please consider yourself tagged in either or both of these. :D

Misc Fic Folder:

“untitled document” - where I’m working on fictober fills so I have word-counts for my GYWO tracker. I am not working on these because Brains Are Dumb and also Going Back To Work Is Exhausting

I made a file called “YULETIDE!” which has nothing in it but I’m determined to finish this year so that is definitely technically a thing in the Unending WIP List of Doom worth mentioning. (Tho obviously that’s all I could say even if I had started, because anonymous.)

“coda-fics, rewatch!” -yes, that exclamation mark is important! it’s to keep me motivated! (it didn’t work). Much like untitled, this is for putting stuff so I can do word count tracking even if I don’t know what I’m doing. Currently I think it just says “MARYSE” because I was working on my SH 1x6 coda-fic and then got distracted and haven’t typed anything up yet. (Yay notebooks? Boo notebooks? Not even sure at this point.)

WNIP (works not in progress) Folder:

“TOG” - I had one vivid mental image of how Nicky & Joe met (blood-stained evil smiles?) but then no idea for a follow-up story and also the fandom is insane and I’m not sure I want to deal with all of *gestures vaguely* all that

“Shan Xia Notes” -for a TTRPG that never quite got off the ground; she was a semi-tragic selkie who was still in love with the evil queen/lady who stole her skin and I got to play her for like one session and she was surprisingly chaotic neutral, which wasn’t at all what I’d been expecting. But the game never really got off the ground, so I never had enough info to really delve into writing backstory fic

“post-Kruschev” -Kruschev’s List was the last episode of Scarecrow & Mrs King, and I was debating writing an epilogue in place of the s5 we never got, to try and tie up some loose ends, but the fandom’s three old-ladies in trench coats and I never quite worked up the gumption to get it anywhere

“Code Realize warm as silk sequel” -there is literally nothing in this file except “SEX! Only a little angst” because I wanted to write some “we can’t actually touch each other” smut but never actually did. 🤷‍♀️

BioWare (also all Not-In-Progress Anymore)

“seb/adelaide”, “Theia” & “DAI Erana” -these WIP folders were cannibalized for ficlets for the last few times I did fictober, and while originally I had ideas for longer epilogues for all three of them, at this point I don’t think any of the remaining bits could support a story any longer.

”whispers in the dark” -Maia Ryder never really got much fic at all; the cancellation of any further Andromeda stuff was really disheartening, and at this point I’d have to play the game again, and I don’t think I’m gonna manage that any time soon

”TSP” -a Mass Effect 3 Shepard AU collab project that kind of went off the rails, and our mutual brains/lives never quite seem to line up so we can try and rebuild it ”Ngaio & Tane” -my one truly ruthless Shepard (Alliance background, who romanced Traynor) whose father Tane Shepard was, I think, in PsyOps, and I wanted to figure out their complicated relationship but never really did know where I was going with it

”JE Zu & Yaling” -so I’ve rambled about my Tragic Sagacious Zu Romance Thoughts regarding Jade Empire more than once (#Icy Yaling should have most of it) but apparently I want to yell about it more than I want to actually write it? Whoops.

”CI sequel: 5 times fic?” -Cruel Intentions is a kinkmeme fill that I started and then it sat for like five years before I actually finished it, and I liked the ending, but it does leave a giant fucking question mark in terms of how those people got from there to where they are after the game, and I kind of wanted to write a proper h/c fic rather than just... leaving them wallowing in all that trauma?

But I didn’t. I don’t even remember for sure how I wanted to frame the 5/1 of it all, besides it being something sad about allowing people to see you or touch you in some way. (Prayers maybe, since I think there was definitely some Sebastian & Fenris & faith stuff going on in there.)

“candles” -Merribela prompt fill that I never was happy with? Not sure what I might do with it at this point, so it’s just sitting there all sad and lonely and neglected-like.

Shadowhunters

pt1: WIP LIST ONLY

“Persuasion” -so I keep trying to write Persuasion AUs in many fandoms because it’s my favorite Austen, but I think I like it too much, I have no real solid concept of how I’d transform it, and if I don’t have anything else to say about different characters within that framework, I have no push to actually write anything? Also this SH version of it suffered from MASSIVE scope creep when I started outlining and it got too big for me to handle so I like, killed it twice? Whoops. This one is really probably never gonna happen.

“oosdt sequel” -I wanted to write more about the Forest That Eats People and Magnus & Alec as Guardians Between Worlds, and also some background Magnus’ Found Family & Lightwood Family Feels (maybe some clizzy?) and I left a Madzie plot-thread dangling from the first one on purpose even but I think this one had too many ideas and not enough focus so it’s sort of sprawling all over a doc with a lot of “???” in it

“procedural-ish” -this was originally going to be a sex-farce. and then it turned more serious. and then maybe kind of copaganda which was uncomfortable in terms of the Everything That Is The News in 2020, and then maybe it was more a Mafia AU and at that point I had self-inflicted tone whiplash and I wished the voices in my head were a little more forthcoming about their plans so I stopped before I brained myself on my computer monitor in frustration.

“I had rather a rose than live forever” -I started a reverse!verse Malec (Shadowhunter!Magnus, High Warlock!Alec) for bingo last year, and I couldn’t quite get it together in time, so I made a moodboard inspired by the bits I’d started instead. I may see if one of my prompts from Bingo this year help me finish it?

“fall fright fest (practical magic au)” -exactly what it says on the tin! almost exactly a year old & neglected! IDEK ANYMORE (I talked about this one with the WIP meme last time tho: here)

“priest!kink theology?” -I thought it was gonna be smut? I like priest!kink. I have made other people like it and yell at me even! But then I kept diverging into demon!Magnus thinking about Priest!Alec’s faith and as usual, IDEK ANYMORE *laughs*

(If they’re remotely canon-adjacent or divergent, a bunch of these are in here because I need to rewatch the show to get the pacing/timing/tone right and I haven’t, and I don’t know why, because I enjoy the show, but BRAINS! Are Dumb! So I guess that’s it?)

“I do” -I have tried to write this damnable Malec arranged marriage fic like six different times. I have signed up for fic exchanges and bangs with it, I have rewritten massive sections, trying to change tone or structure or POV or whatever, and it basically comes down to they like each other too fast and I keep not gutting it enough to get back to a useful pace, but by the time I realized that I was on take six and kind of sick of it. I may get back to it eventually

“wing!fic” -canon divergent in early s1, trying to deal with the consequences of Simon’s kidnapping as the Truly Serious Event that it should have been. It uh. Got heavier than I expected with those consequences (considering it was originally just supposed to be Alec’s wings flirting with Magnus) and also see above re: rewatching for pacing.

“2x20 aftermath/date night/pandemonium porn“ -yes that is the actual wip title. It used to be “spite fic” because I was originally inspired by fighting against a lot of fic!Alec characterization that was clearly based more on the books and ATG syndrome than the Alec in the show, which is the Alec I know and like and want to read about. BUT, pacing and etc. again, I think. Also I have somehow entirely lost my knack for writing porn, which makes it difficult to finish something originally intended to be smut!fic. Or even teasing almost!smut.

“rubbish heap” -so this is about three different fics that I realized complemented each other really well so they’re now all in the same file as I try to turn them into the sequel of “with an if in its soul”. It includes amnesia, parabatai lore shenanigans, a s3 rewrite, and some truly awful Owl adjustments that make me wince in horrified authorly delight and pain. BUT, as with the other ones in this file, the scope is large and I normally write short-fic and I kind of just threw up my hands in exasperation. I may have to break it back up into the three different fics instead, if I ever actually want to write it. Them? But also I need to take better notes on s3 to make sure I have what I need in here.

SH Pt 2: Started posting or not yet in hiatus because it’s actually almost ready to be a thing in the real world! maybe!?

“kisses (firsts)” -I actually started publishing this one, a “series of firsts” that was supposed to be kind of relationship milestones and kind of an excuse for smut, and then there wasn’t that much smut and I lost momentum and also dear lords & ladies the timeline is stupid, wtf. I may not ever add to this one, tbqh. It doesn’t stop in a terrible place, and they’re all ficlets so they stand alone all right.

“clizzy epilogue” -this is blank atm, it’s more a reminder for me to keep poking away at my “girls who can’t breathe air, only fire” collection BECAUSE I WOULD LIKE TO ACTUALLY GET TO THE CLIZZY AT SOME POINT

"mer!alec" -pts 2-4 of a series, but apparently having an actual plan gets in the way of me *writing* the thing, and I haven't managed to throw the half an outline far enough away from my brain to be able to write again. Or something like that.

"ibhww" -if broken hearts were whole is a soulmate fic I started a million years ago, and purposefully set aside to finish some other WIPs because I thought they'd be quick, and now it's just buried under two and a half years of regret and shame so it's hard to get back to it

"iafy" -i am for you is a delightful & frothy semi-epistolary fluff piece that also just lost momentum because Life & 2020 & etc. It's far and away the most popular thing I've ever posted on AO3, which also makes me feel weird sometimes, and I feel like the fact that there's no grand conclusion planned, just a bit more fluff and settling in, might end up being disappointing? Basically, it's the first time I think I've psyched myself out about reader expectations, and until I get over that I'm going to have trouble finishing the last couple chapters. (There really are probably only two more chapters though. IT’S SO CLOSE, I wish I could just... write it. And yet?)

“fake-hating” -I do not like fake dating as a trope that much, I just do not get it, but I love outside POVs and arranged marriages and there’s this delighful tumblr post about how they wished there was more fic about people who were together but had to pretend they werent’, and uh. This may be that? Eventually? I’m not exhausted by my failure to finish it yet, so it’s still in the regular folder rather than the hiatus folder, even though nothing’s been posted for it.

AND I THINK THAT’S IT?

Not as terrible as it could be, but still. MANY WORDS THAT MAY NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY. Posting the equivalent of one’s old ratty sketchbook is always a weird feeling. :D

#on writing #writing memery #unending WIP List Of Doom

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vaspider · 6 years

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What do you think about the reclamation of the pink triangle (and the black triangle which isn't even fully or mainly ours) and the way it's handled. Because I honestly kind of hate it. I'm German. Those were the deaths of people who may have lived in my house before me. But Americans decided they could "reclaim" (as if it had ever been ours/theirs) it as a fun pop symbol. And instead of respecting the dead (like it is done with aids) it's for celebration. And I feel that's wrong.

You are always entitled to your feelings, however, I think that you’re missing some pieces of the puzzle and attributing some meaning to it (”fun pop symbol”) that it simply doesn’t have in the United States – at least, not any part of the communities I’ve been a part of.

Let’s walk through some of the pieces that I think you’re missing, and how those things expressly make it clear that it is not a ‘fun pop symbol’, and never has been, not to us.

I’m going to put this all behind a cut, because this is going to delve into some painful history. Content warnings have been tagged.

The reclaiming of the pink triangle began as a direct response to the first widely-published accounts of gay men during the Holocaust, not long after Stonewall. The intersection of the LGBTQ movement - and specifically gay men - being able to come out into the light of the public eye in the US, and the 1972 publication of The Men with the Pink Triangle, a book written from a series of interviews with a man named Josef Kohout, led to a desire for people to grapple with history that, for them, was still extremely recent.

Since you’re German, you’ll be aware already that many gay men were simply returned to imprisonment after WWII and some of them were imprisoned for 20 years after the end of the war. So we’re looking at a community just being able to truly come out into public discourse, and grappling with both current events and also the knowledge that people who had been imprisoned for simply being like them had only been released seven years earlier. This wasn’t a ‘fun pop symbol,’ this was a very intense symbol. The reasons why it bothers you are exactly the same reasons why the symbol was important to the community.

Here’s a great example of the manner in which the pink triangle was treated by the community in the 1970s – please note these quotes are from a first-hand account written by a person present for the events, and all terms are his:

On this date in 1976, speakers at a public program in Hartford, Conn., told the history and paid homage to the homosexuals exterminated in the Nazi concentration and labor camps.

A West Hartford resident in the 1970s, I noticed that local Jewish and human rights activists were planning to build a Holocaust memorial, a “Mandala,” in the city. As an activist, I saw an opportunity for inclusion of the homosexuals, about whom testimony and scholarship had begun to emerge.

… We were outsiders to history…

My partner at the time, Michael Jospe, designed the poster for our program, which depicted a swastika emitting flames that were consuming a pink triangle. Michael was a Jewish South African whose parents had fled from Germany in the 1930s, as Michael himself had left his own native country in the 1960s out of disgust with apartheid.

That day remains one of my proudest: This was the first public recognition anywhere in the world of the experience of homosexual repression and extermination in the Holocaust.

Nowhere in there do I see a ‘fun pop symbol.’ I see an intersectional group, including a Jewish gay man whose family had fled Germany in the 1930s, attempting to grapple with community history, and the symbols which are deeply intertwined with that history.

Remember that date: 1976.

You see, if you go in to donate blood in the United States, you will be asked whether you have ever had sex with a man who has ever had sex with a man – even once – since 1977. Even now, in the United States, a man who has ever had sex with men cannot have had sex with a man within the last year and donate blood. Yes, even if that man has been in a monogamous relationship with the same man since, say, the 1960s. Yes, even if both of the men in question have only ever had sexual contact with each other, and both are HIV-negative.

Many blood-donation and plasma-donation places still maintain much stricter standards than Federal standards require, so someone like me – AFAB non-binary, partnered with a cis man who has had male partners since 1977 since, you know, we’re both in our early 40s – still can’t donate plasma or blood if those institutions choose to keep to the older standards.

Why does this matter? Because the pink triangle, so fresh in everyone’s mind as the community grappled with these revelations, became an important part of the imagery around the AIDS crisis, and because that crisis is still ongoing. Serophobia is still not only very active in the LGBTQ community, but literally institutionalized in the United States, far beyond what any medical or practical necessity would dictate.

While it is estimated that 10,000 pink triangle men were killed in concentration camps, approximately six thousand people died in 2016 – the last year for which we have numbers right now – in the United States from AIDS. Now. When we’ve actually got treatments and therapy – at least theoretically, the accessibility of medicine in the US is an entire other essay – we still see that many people (again, mostly gay and bisexual men) die every two years. In the first year for which we have reliable numbers, 1987, 13K people died. In 1995, that was 41K.

Approximately 675,000 Americans have died from AIDS since the beginning of the crisis. Just to put some numbers on the table, so we understand the scale and the scope of what the community was immediately dealing with.

So as a community, we went from ‘dealing with something that had happened twenty years earlier but to which we just now had access, information-wise, and around which we were just starting to put our arms and understand what that meant,’ to a criminal and fucking genocidal lack of attention, research, and belief. Rather than help, we got William F Buckley suggesting that men infected with HIV should be tattooed on the arm… and on the ass, so as to warn other men. Rather than help, we got fucking silence. Rather than help, we died.

You say those could have been the people who lived in your house before you? I can go to streets in my city and point to buildings and say, ‘here, and here, and here. Here is where they died, and no one would even fucking bury them.’ Never mind that we have an ongoing crisis, particularly in the black and Latino mlm communities in cities like mine, never mind that 10K black mlm are infected in the US every year even now.

And so the pink triangle became the symbol for the silence of our government and the medical establishment and the horrifying, seemingly-never-stoppable, painful death that followed, and most importantly, our defiance and our anger and our voices in the face of that massive bureaucratic shrug. Keith Haring used the pink triangle in his art about the crisis – at least, until he died from complications of AIDS in 1990. ACT UP used it starting in 1987 – remember, it took ten years for the government, especially under Regan, to even start recording the numbers of our dead reliably. While TIME Magazine was blaming bisexual men for infecting ‘innocent heterosexuals,’ while people we knew and loved were dying and we felt so fucking helpless, we could, at least, not be silent.

We could take that mark that had meant death, and we could use it to scream in the face of an uncaring system and a virus that kept stealing and stealing from us.

And it keeps stealing from us.

I don’t know where you got this ‘fun pop symbol’ nonsense from, and you’re certainly entitled to your feelings, but in the United States that I grew up in, the pink triangle has never been cute, it’s never been fun, it’s never been a ‘pop symbol.’ It’s been the screaming defiance of a community getting murdered by neglect by its own government, it’s been our solemn remembrance of what was done in Europe, it’s been a symbol of our continuity and our strength as we reclaimed it and used it to say stop fucking killing us.

So, like, I dunno, I guess I just have a different opinion about what it means.

#serophobia #aids #medical neglect #holocaust #nazis #medical abuse #pink triangle #HIV #institutional neglect #seriously fuck Regan though #and like really the people responsible for pushing for reclaiming the pink triangle were jewish??? many of them??? so like #enough already #i'm so tired of having to explain this over and over #why does this come up every year like fucking clockwork?#eisart

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markjsaterfiel66 · 6 years

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Fan-Out Capability of the APA102C

Our victims for the day

While playing with APA102C addressable LEDs, I found myself thinking about the various hypothetical lengths of various hypothetical strings of them and how DC has to be carried down to the end of the string, and how you’ve got some amount of propagation delay for the logic that runs through every LED…. And I started wondering about the viability of running the parts in parallel with regard to the logic.

“But Pete, why would you do that? The whole point behind them is to have control of every pixel with a minimum of wiring.” Well, this would be applicable in only certain sorts of installations, I’ll grant you that. I mean, the DC benefits are clear: what would have been a longer, daisy-chained string would be split up into something closer to a star configuration of smaller strings, reducing the number of LEDs that need to be fed per string and giving that last LED in each chain just a little more juice. Propagation delay is also reduced to the end of any given string. But because each parallel string gets the same data, all of the parallel strings display the same patterns. So this trick would lend itself best to installations with repeating, or maybe radial patterns.

How many inputs can you attach to a single output before it goes wonky? To put a label on it, it’s called fan-out, and it’s a spec you just might come across in a datasheet for a digital part. Does the APA102C datasheet tell us anything? Eh… not so much. No spec for output drive capability for CO or DO, no input impedance for CI or DI, and no mention of the term “fan-out”. This isn’t particularly surprising, as they’re only meant to work in a single string and you shouldn’t need to know those specs, right? But one thing the datasheet does say is that it’s a CMOS part, so the input Z for the clock and data lines should be really high (like many megs worth), and the outputs probably can’t source that much current.

Let’s dig a little deeper. I’ve got a bunch of Lumenati boards left over from the prototyping phases of those boards, but I’ve plugged them together into a light fixture for my work bench so I’ll have to separate them all to use them for this test. Tools: scope, meter, brain. I give myself just slightly better than average chance of learning something.

After busting them apart, I put 4-pin headers on all of them and plugged them into a breadboard, shown in the pic at the top of this post. The idea is to get a baseline of performance of the clock and data lines at the output of one board using my Analog Discover 2, then adding boards onto the first board’s output and watching the change in performance, ultimately to the point of failure. Small caveat: I’m not using the scope probe adapter for the AD2. So between the jumper-wire probes and the breadboard everything’s plugged into, I’m probably adding a fair amount of stray capacitance and my measurements won’t be accurate. But that’s fine, as I’m doing more of a comparison and not an absolute measurement.

10k view of the start of the data transmission

The first read of the scope is what you’re seeing above. The blue trace is clock, the yellow is data, the vertical scale is 1V/div and there is no load. What we’re looking at is the start of the data transmission from my ProMini. Each of those blue chunks (that are about 3uS) is 8 bits, so from the left you see the 4 start bytes, followed by 4 bytes for each LED on the 8-Stick that’s going to be feeding the other boards. After those first 8 LEDs get their respective marching orders, the data line goes active with the clock. Both signals are going 0-4.5V-ish. FWIW, my code is sending data for a long string of LEDs because I had them all attached in series originally, so it should easily be sending enough data to light up all of the parallel boards.

Close-up of the data

Getting a little closer in, we see a couple of arbitrarily chosen bytes about 397uS from the trigger point. We learn a couple of things from this capture. First, those leading edges are not sharp, most likely from my jumper-wire probing that’s adding capacitance to the circuit. It also looks like there may be some interaction between the clock and data drivers, given the peaky-ness of the data line during clocks… or that might also be an artifact of my janky probe. Last, the data line stays high between those 2 bytes. That’s my sloppy code at work. Bad dog.

In the heat of the test. It’s much worse to look at than this lets on.

I’ll spare you some of the more boring details of this test. Suffice it to say that I added progressively more boards (14 of them) and the signals got worse, but it never quit. Check out the scope below.

14 boards attached and all’s mostly well

From the above capture, it looks like some more capacitance has been added to the line (which we expect) and the signals are achieving a lower top value (around 4.2V). Again, that charge time is certainly augmented by my jumper-wire probes and the breadboard, but it looks to be increasing. Still, this functions with 14 boards in parallel. But where does it fail?

I don’t have any more boards I can attach, and clearly it’s going to take a bunch more. So… we cheat. I put a 100k pot on the data line and dialed down the value until the parallel board section started reading weird values (as indicated by colors other than white, or LEDs being entirely off).

Failure achieved

The condition that produced the above plot is an additional 180 ohm load on the data line. The data line rises to about 2.3V, making the current sourcing capacity of the output driver about 12.8mA. But check out the clock line when the data line goes high. We’re clearly loading the driver supply, as well as the driver itself, in the APA102C as indicated by the reduced peak voltage of the clock line when both lines are high. Further testing (a second pot on the clock line) showed that the combined output currents of the clock and data lines is limited to that 12.8mA, they can’t both drive that much independently. So each line can’t be loaded with more than about 360 ohms, assuming the loads will be equal from x-number of boards attached to the output, making its max drive current 6.4mA.

OK, so… how many boards can we feed from a single APA102C output? Can I measure the input current on either the data or clock line and divide that into 6.4mA? Turns out… nope. Those inputs are definitely CMOS, which means no DC current path. Oh sure, there’s got to be some leakage current there, but not enough to keep those inputs from floating around 4.5V when not attached to an output that’s actively driving it to some value. I even read the floating value with all 14 boards in parallel, thinking at least one of the inputs would have to be out of spec and pull it down, but no dice.

That makes our answer ALL THE BOARDS! No, not really. But lots, certainly. If you can keep the lengths between boards sufficiently short to reduce capacitance, reflections and such, I’m sure the number is quite high. At some point you would need to start thinking of this spaghetti monster as a really bad transmission line, but small-scale operation looks promising. Admittedly, I didn’t have to run all of the boards off of a single APA102C output. I could have used the ProMini directly, or an op amp as a buffer/driver. But part of my interest is in radiating and repeating light installations using Lumenati boards, so this was the data I needed to verify that operation.

As I mentioned at some point, the desk-lighting setup I had these previously involved with was a series string like you would normally expect. But adding lights in this setup becomes a pain because you have to change the code to accommodate more LEDs. After a year or two, I may not be able to find the code that runs my workbench light. When I put them back together this time, they’ll be in parallel.

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kayawagner · 6 years

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Black Lightning Strikes Truth — Running Great Superhero Games

*Black Lightning: My Man!

Today’s guest article is by Chris Spivey, talking about how the TV show Black Lightning makes fertile ground for a great superhero game and how to run one. Chris is the award winning author of Harlem Unbound and is currently working on an un-named superhero game for Chaosium. – Head gnome John

Considering the second season is airing any day now, I am coming to this retrospective and exploration later than most. The show spoke to me in a similar intensity, if not manner, as Black Panther did. That feeling made me consider staying in a quiet(ish) mood, keeping my overall thoughts and perceived implications of the show to myself rather than with the world. But my mind kept coming back to this show—its vision of superheroes, world building, relationship dynamics— and how it lined up with so many of my thoughts related to superhero gaming. A number of the beats have appeared in my superhero campaigns.

What changed my mind? Someone told me they don’t know why we need Black Lightning if we have Luke Cage. My first thought was, “What kind of logic is that?” If we all believed that, then we don’t need Arrow, The Flash, Daredevil, Punisher and especially not Ironfist. But each of those shows is telling a different story with a different lead, (mostly) addressing issues differently. If anything, we need more shows like Black Lightning, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Agent Carter (we miss you, Peggy). I am still rallying for Photon, Blue Marvel, and Ms. Marvel. Hearing that comment solidified my need to share my thoughts about the show and how gamers can add the essence of the show to their own supers game.

A Brief History of the Superhero Genre

We can’t talk about superhero comics-related media without touching on the comic ages. Anything I write about superheroes has to include their importance and impact on society, each age reflecting society at the time:

The Golden Age (1938–1950ish) ― Coming out of the Great Depression, America was looking for light entertainment and a diversion from reality and found it in Superman! The Kryptonian boy scout jump-started the age, surpassing his masked predecessors, and his success solidified the comic industry. The wave rode into World War II with heroes shifting to patriotic themes and providing moral support for troops and people back home. The superheroes frequently fought gangsters, supervillains, crooked politicians, and Fifth Columnists.

The Silver Age (1956ish–1970) ― The Silver Age moved towards more science-based superheroes rather than magical ones of the previous age. The idea of superheroes on teams with constant bantering, bickering, and facing greater challenges sold in droves; such teams as the Justice League, the Fantastic Four, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and X-Men were hot items.

The Bronze Age (1970–1985) ― Comics became more complex, lost the frivolity of the Silver Age, and evolved into what they were meant to be: a mirror for society. Comics became a voice to those without a voice, a chance to inspire as they did in the Golden Age but with more modern values and diversity. There were too many issues plaguing the world to ignore: street riots, the Vietnam War, a corrupt law and order system, and drugs. This exponential increase minority superheroes with the likes of Luke Cage (the first black superhero to have his own comic book), Shang-Chi, and Storm.

The Modern Age (1985–Now) ― This could easily be broken down into two or three new ages; building on the concept of social issues and complexity led to a desire for grim and more adult-themed comics. Independent comic publishers were able to establish themselves as power players in the market, such as Image Comics, Milestone Comics, and Dark Horse Comics. These independent comics could do things that the larger companies couldn’t, as they did not need to hold a middle ground of ideas to keep their fanbase.

The Skinny Upfront

Black Lightning is one of the best DCTV superhero shows (heck, just any television series) airing, in my opinion, with Arrow as a distant second. There you go, I said and stand by it. Netflix/Marvel’s Luke Cage is excellent but a very different show with a different vision that is a different discussion. The characters are well developed, the story moves at a solid clip, and the cast is engaging. All of that makes it a great show and fertile ground for superhero roleplaying game ideas. It does not reinvent the superhero genre or even attempt to, and Black Lightning does something better…it elevates the bar.

One of the show’s primary focuses is on what superhero comics were meant to do ever since the first pages of Action Comics #1 in the Golden Age, and more solidly addressed in the Bronze age of comics: hold a mirror up to society exposing the ugly truths while holding us to a higher ideal through our superhero avatars. This has been done to varying degrees of success since its inception and when it is done, it is frequently whitewashed. The X-Men are a perfect example of this, being an analogy of the civil rights movements with some people casting Professor X as Martin Luther King and Magneto as Malcolm X, and the mutants representing African Americans. And yet they are primarily all white, even in today’s incarnation. The analog has continued to evolve with the times to include those in the LGBTQ community and more, but the characters are still principally cis, white, and usually male.

Black Lightning’s creation had the other DCTV shows attempt to address social issues with baby steps. For instance, Super Girl’s Jimmy Olsen’s, a black hero, needing to decide if he should come forward to show a black man can be a hero. In those shows, all of the people of color are sidekicks, their struggles barely acknowledged, and their stories are quickly wrapped up before the end of the episode. This show casts people of color as the primary protagonist and integrates the struggle into their daily lives making it a near-perfect superhero tale for television or the gaming table, balancing real life with the responsibility and repercussions of superheroics.

Relationship Diversity

The show focuses on community—on family and friends—by placing them all into the central plot of making their city a better place; they are pillars of the story.

The reason this show speaks to me so much: I am an educated black man of a certain age raising a daughter in our dangerous world. I endure racism, being targeted by the police, and the crushing weight of depression from the current administration politics. To see a strong realistic African American family battling the same issues I do daily is uplifting and inspiring. At its core, that is what superheroes are supposed to do. They inspire us, make us want to be better, and are a reflection of our lives.

That spark of inspiration is something that can be reflected in a game. It may seem small but it establishes the player characters in the world and reinforces that their actions have positive consequences. So many games focus on the damage the superhero battle inflicts on the city, which should also be considered, but they don’t highlight the “civilians” cheering them on. For Black Lightning, they can be found in the random doorman that opens the door for him and praises his work before a battle. Those moments tie the supers more strongly into the world. They can even translate into a minor mechanical bonus to hit or dodge, or a Sanity bump.

Bringing it to the Gaming Table — A Template for Assessing your Superhero Game

How does any of this help you run a superhero game? How do you apply it? Here are a few questions to ask and things to consider as you prep for a great superhero game.

What Comic Age Do You Set It In? Decide on what age the campaign will fall into. It doesn’t need to be a direct correlation but rather a general tone or vibe and it should set the values of the universe. Whatever the age, it can be modernized and interwoven into the game. This is something the players should know before making characters as it also lets them have a better sense of the type of game they are playing in. The Punisher blasting his way through a group of criminals doesn’t generally work in a more simple Golden Age Style game.

Know Your Vision: You need to know the scope of the “world” for the first “season” of the game. The scope may change after contact or after a few sessions with the players and that’s fine. The initial setting may be focused on a single city block, neighborhood, or the entire city. By establishing that baseline it enables the game to expand naturally.

Player Characters vs NPCs: The players should know both the Comic Age and your Vision before creating characters. This lets them build a character that fits into the campaign mechanically. If a player knows that the game has a Silver Age vibe and deals with keeping the city safe, they may decide to build a mechanical engineer working for a private company knowing they are more likely to encounter alien technology rather than magical power rings.

Backstory. Backstory. Backstory: Backstories are more vital in superhero games than in almost any other genre. The character is living dual existences. This conflict is fertile ground for drama, roleplaying, and enhancing player buy-in. This is the element that makes superhero games more than just punching a bad guy in the face.

What Are The Key Relationships? With the world and superhero backstories established, relationships are going to need fleshed out. These relationships should feel natural by creating complications and moments of joy. My personal balance for this would account for this being 25-30% of the campaign’s focus. These relationships can be both as a superhero and within their secret identity.

What System and Why? Picking a system is always tough. The game needs to feel super-heroic, allowing incredible feats, but not be too crunchy. There are many systems out there that tackle superheroics in different ways — choose the one that fits your play style best.

Lightning Strikes! Running Black Lightning With The Template

Let’s break down a few of the key elements of Black Lightning into the steps above so you can be ready to run a Black Lightning themed game.

Comic Age: Modern Age

Know Your Vision: Protect Freeland. Much of a Black Lightning game revolves around keeping the city safe and stable.

Player Characters vs Key NPCs: Players: Jefferson, Jennifer, Anissa, Lynn, and Gambi Key NPCs: Tobias, Henderson, Lala, Syonide, and Kara

Backstory. Backstory. Backstory: I won’t delve in too deeply so there aren’t spoilers, but the backstories in Black Lightning are often about uncovering the past and finding out how those things hidden in history affect the future where the current story is being told.

Relationships: There are many relationships that interweave between the main characters, and some of the Key NPCs change throughout the show and in relation to the characters. I don’t want to spoil much, but in a Black Lightning game, relationships will change based on the choices the characters make — where they put their efforts and what they leave behind to protect Freeland.

What System and Why: My first thought would be Wild Talents. Wild Talents has the ability to create various powers; the Will mechanic dovetails with the character’s moral drive, and the ease of research. Black Lightning could also easily be run in my upcoming superheroes campaign for Chaosium. That allows for a number of powers, occupations, and sanity effects. An interesting take would be to run the game as a One-2-One. The player would choose one of the main cast, while having the other main cast members be sources, and tackling the series’ story.

Black Lightning as a show is great, and Black Lightning as a game played among friends brings the story to the people at your table. It takes the narrative and makes it a living thing. When you’re jonesing for a new superhero game, look to Black Lightning as something that might give your group a good narrative framework. Where’s the future? Right here.

Black Lightning Strikes Truth — Running Great Superhero Games published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

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qwertsypage · 6 years

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Code refactoring techniques

Code refactoring is one of the key terms in software development and today I would like to talk about code refactoring techniques that might increase your efficiency!

But first, let’s agree on what is code refactoring! Basically, code refactoring is the process of changing a program’s source code without modifying its external functional behavior, in order to improve some of the nonfunctional attributes of the software. In other words, code refactoring is the process of clarifying and simplifying the design of existing code, without changing its behavior. Nowadays, agile software development is literally a must and agile teams are maintaining and extending their code a lot from iteration to iteration, and without continuous refactoring, this is hard to do. This is because un-refactored code tends to rot: unhealthy dependencies between classes or packages, bad allocation of class responsibilities, way too many responsibilities per method or class, duplicated code, and many other varieties of confusion and clutter. So, the advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity; these can improve source-code maintainability and create a more expressive internal architecture.

Two of the most influential people in software development of recent times, Martin Fowler and Kent Beck wrote the book on the subject of refactoring called “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code”. I highly recommend you to read it, it is definitely worth it! This book describes the process of refactoring and spends most of its time explaining how to do the various refactorings – the behavior preserving transformations. In this book you will find simple example that describes the whole process. There are also broader issues around refactoring, the “code smells” that suggest refactoring, and the role of testing, which you will find in this book as well. What I like the most about this book is that seventy refactorings and code refactoring techniques are described in detail: the motivation for doing them, mechanics of how to do them safely and a simple example. A common question is whether the book is still relevant and this is a good question since technology has made many advances, but according to our experience in Apiumhub and listening to other software developers, the book is still very useful. For example, the code refactoring techniques described in this book have not changed, since they are part of the fundamental use of programming languages. Another reason why you should read it is that it is written by legends of our time, by people who actually tried it first and developed the concept! There are other interesting books about this topic and you can find them here, but this one is a high priority one.

Some tips for doing code refactoring techniques right

Code refactoring should be done as a series of small changes, each of which makes the existing code slightly better while still leaving the program in working order. Don’t mix a whole bunch of refactorings into one big change.

When you do refactoring, you should definitely do it using TDD and CI. Without being able to run those tests after each little step in a refactoring, you create a risk of introducing bugs.

The code should become cleaner.

New functionality should not be created during refactoring. Do not mix refactoring and direct development of new features. Try to separate these processes at least within the confines of individual commits.

Benefits of code refactoring

1. See the whole picture If you have one main method that handles all of the functionality, it’s most likely way too long and incredibly complex. But if it’s broken down into parts, it’s easy to see what is really being done.

2. Make it readable for your team Make it easy to understand for your peers, don’t write it for yourself, think on the long-term.

3. Maintainability Integration of updates and upgrades is a continuous process that is unavoidable and should be welcomed. When the codebase is unorganized and built on weak foundation, developers are often hesitant to make changes. But with code refactoring, organized code, the product will be built on a clean foundation and will be ready for future updates.

4. Efficiency Code refactoring may be considered as investment, but it gets good results. You reduce the effort required for future changes to the code, either by you or other developers, thus improving efficiency.

5. Reduce complexity Make it easier for you and your team to work on the project.

List of main code refactoring techniques

There are many code refactoring techniques and I do not want to cover them all, as this post would end up becoming a book in itself. So, I decided to pick the ones we feel are the most common and useful.

Red-green refactoring Lets start by briefly talking about the very popular red-green code refactoring technique. Red Green Refactor is the Agile engineering pattern which underpins Test Driven Development. Characterized by a “test-first” approach to design and implementation. This lays the foundation for all forms of refactoring. You incorporate refactoring into the test driven development cycle by starting with a failing “red” test, writing the simplest code possible to get the test to pass “green” and finally work on improving and enhancing your code while keeping the test “green”. This approach is about how one can seamlessly integrate refactoring into your overall development process and work towards keeping code clean. There are two distinct parts to this: writing code that adds a new function to your system, and improving the code that does this function. The important thing is to remember to not do both at the same time during the workflow.

Preparatory refactoring As a developer, there are things you can do to your codebase to make the building of your next feature a little more painless. Martin Fowler calls this preparatory refactoring. This again can be executed using the red-green technique described above. Preparatory refactoring can also involve paying down technical debt that was accumulated during the earlier phases of feature development. Even though the end-users may not see eye to eye with the engineering team on such efforts, the developers almost always appreciate the value of a good refactoring exercise.

Branching by abstraction refactoring Abstraction has its own group of refactoring techniques, primarily associated with moving functionality along the class inheritance hierarchy, creating new classes and interfaces, and replacing inheritance with delegation and vice versa. For example: Pull up field, pull up method, pull up constructor body, push down field, push down method, extract subclass, extract superclass, extract interface, collapse hierarchy, form template method, replace inheritance with delegation, replace delegation with Inheritance, etc. There are two types of refactoring efforts that is classified based on scope and complexity. Branching by abstraction is a technique that some of the teams use to take on large scale refactoring. The basic idea is to build an abstraction layer that wraps the part of the system that is to be refactored and the counterpart that is eventually going to replace it. For example: encapsulate field – force code to access the field with getter and setter methods, generalize type – create more general types to allow for more code sharing, replace type-checking code with state, replace conditional with polymorphism, etc.

Composing methods refactoring Much of refactoring is devoted to correctly composing methods. In most cases, excessively long methods are the root of all evil. The vagaries of code inside these methods conceal the execution logic and make the method extremely hard to understand and even harder to change. The code refactoring techniques in this group streamline methods, remove code duplication. Examples can be: extract method, inline method, extract variable, inline Temp, replace Temp with Query, split temporary variable, remove assignments to parameters, etc.

Moving features between objects refactoring These code refactoring techniques show how to safely move functionality between classes, create new classes, and hide implementation details from public access. For example: move method, move field, extract class, inline class, hide delegate, remove middle man, introduce foreign method, introduce local extension, etc.

Simplifying conditional expressions refactoring Conditionals tend to get more and more complicated in their logic over time, and there are yet more techniques to combat this as well. For example: consolidate conditional expression, consolidate duplicate conditional fragments, decompose conditional, replace conditional with polymorphism, remove control flag, replace nested conditional with guard clauses,etc.

Simplifying method calls refactoring These techniques make method calls simpler and easier to understand. This simplifies the interfaces for interaction between classes. For example: add parameter, remove parameter, rename method, separate query from modifier, parameterize Method, introduce parameter object, preserve whole object, remove setting method, replace parameter with explicit methods, replace parameter with method call, etc.

Breaking code apart into more logical pieces refactoring Componentization breaks code down into reusable semantic units that present clear, well-defined, simple-to-use interfaces. For example: extract class moves part of the code from an existing class into a new class, extract method, to turn part of a larger method into a new method. By breaking down code in smaller pieces, it is more easily understandable. This is also applicable to functions.

User Interface Refactoring A simple change to the UI retains its semantics, for example: align entry field, apply common button size, apply font, indicate format, reword in active voice and increase color contrast, etc.

Here are some examples of code refactoring techniques; some of them may only be applied to certain languages or language types. A longer list can be found in Martin Fowler’s refactoring book, which we discussed above.

And if you are interested in best practices in software development, I highly recommend you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter to receive latest software development books, tips, and upcoming events.

If you liked this article about code refactoring techniques, you might like …

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stringsttothepast · 7 years

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My Response to Buzzfeed’s “I’m Gay, But I’m Not” + My Story

This video has shown up on my Facebook Feed under fire, heavily criticized for displaying insensitivity by perpetuating a heteronormative narrative. To many, the video is perceived as a sort of attack on queer tropes as these men are essentially telling the audience “I am not that type of gay,” implying that there may be something wrong with other gay men that do identify with these stereotypes.

I’m going to give my own two cents on the matter, but before I do let me say a bit about myself so this post won’t come off as an outsider looking in.

My Story

To start off, I am a cisgendered queer person of color. I am also an introvert. I came out to my friends and peers in my sophomore year of high school, I believe about 2006 or 2007. At that time, I only knew of of two other queer guys from my school, eventually meeting more through a neighbor from down the block. At this point, my queer contacts were more aligned with a more alternative rock, borderline emo clique.

My next encounter with any other queer folk didn’t happen till after my freshman year of college in 2010, when I’ve taken an involuntary break from school. I met with other queer folks through my ex’s ex. It was my first encounter with transpeople, and the group as whole had faced hardships. It was an oddball group of ravers, emos, punk-rockers, mixed with a little bit of Ke$ha and Otakus. A number of us faced homelessness, or the danger of homelessness. Some picked up serious drug addictions, and resorted to using their bodies to be able to sustain themselves. Our migration often went from Chinatown Arcade, to Central Park, to Union Square.

Eventually, I ended up leaving for reasons.

At this point, I was found by someone on facebook, and was brought to the local LGBT center in my city. It was my first time being around so many other LGBT folks, and there was a steep learning curve to learn the climate. I began to learn more about the differences between sex, gender, gender expression, and sexuality. I’ve attended young men’s group, though the contents I’m omitting for the sake of confidentiality,

There were events that occurred on occasion. I’ve seen people vogue, but that’s the closest I’ve gotten to the ballroom scene. If anything, I ended up drinking with smaller groups.

In more recent years I have been more engaged in community activism, mostly working with communities of color on addressing racial injustices within our education system and how my city does policing. And lately more vocal in terms of representation of Queer People of color and issues that Queer PoC face. Studying film and production, I became more aware of how all media content is politicized. I’ll revisit my disdain of Babadook being the 2017 queer icon in a later post.

My 2 Cents

With all that being said, here is my subjective take on the video.

For starters, it is important to understand that the video is part of a series in which it explores the diversity of personality within the LGBTQ community, so it comes to reason that the opening part can be taken out of context as something that lends itself to the idea of internalized homophobia. Like I mentioned before, “I am not like other gays” or any variation, carries a tone that projects shame towards the community, with an air of “superiority” of not conforming to what people believe is queer culture, while often adhering to heteronormative standards as a way of being. That is often what is perceived when a person places too much emphasis on how “different” they are.

But I can resonate to the sentiments shared. Not that I feel that I’m superior, but feeling something beyond the scope of how the community expresses queerness. Given my upbringing, I was not as exposed to what is often believed to be “need to know” info with regards to culture. Because I was more punk, alternative, and the like, I never felt as if I would fit in anyway within the community.

I see it as a narrative to deconstruct stereotypes on what people perceive queerness to be. While yes it’s something to be celebrated, not many LGBT celebrate it as the focal point of their identity as a person.

Part of the reason why this video is under scrutiny, aside from being taken out of context, is this sort of culture that looks down on femininity that exists within the community. There is a toxic sort of Masc4Masc Culture that exists that undervalues effeminate gays. This sort of mentality is reminiscent of old conservative LGB groups in the late 20th century that tried to appeal to the masses by rejecting those stereotypes and strictly adhering the social conventions of what defines masculinity and femininity.

That sort of thought process is toxic in which it goes against everything that the rainbow represents (of course, my thoughts on “inclusion” within the community is to be visited later on as well). It is seen as a form of constraint on expression, with cis-gendered gays eventually looked as the model for what the “socially acceptable” gay should be, in terms of adhering to heteronormative standards of being.

The Comparison

Now for the comparison to an earlier video, “I’m Bisexual, But I’m Not…” The video uses the same mode approach to debunking myths, though what is different between the two videos is that in the “I’m Bisexual, But I’m Not” video, it is more on myth debunking, as opposed to the “I’m Gay, But I’m Not…” which is an opposition to a generalization of what people believe gay men to be, while inconsequentially projecting negative feelings towards what may be seen as a truth to many gay men.

Could they have done something else to show diversity and the complexity of queer individuals? Of course! It is something that is more complicated to convey given the amount of social oppression of the different forms of expressions of queerness within the community, while mainstream media and culture only showcases these caricatures.

In Short

The video was intended to debunk generalizations about gay men.

Unfortunately, the first half when taken out of context, further perpetuates this anti-feminine vibe which is an existing issue within the community.

#I'm gay but i'm not #buzzfeed #video #critique #analysis #gay #internalized #homophobia #miscommunication #different #conforming

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