#writing a proof and beginning with a vision and seeing where the logic leads is very similar to starting a project- be it building something

[geometricalien]

15 people, 15 questions

Tagged by @ultfreakme thank you!! 💕💕

1.) Are you named after anyone?

My first name is biblical and since my parents are Christian and my sibling also has a biblical name, I always presumed it was bc of that. My middle name though is actually a last name from my lineage

2.) When was the last time you cried?

Yesterday! It was day 2 of being home alone since my roommate left for the week and I was feeling particularly lonely since another friend wasn't able to hang out with me the last couple of days in addition to feeling isolated from family during the holiday season Plus being on my period --- yeahhh

3.) Do you have kids?

No. Nope. Nuh uh. Ask me again in 10 years

4.) What sports do you play/have played?

I did volleyball and basketball a lot in my youth, did soccer in elementary school

5.) Do you use sarcasm?

Sometimes. Mostly only with friends when we know we are being sarcastic and are playing it up? Otherwise, I'm just such a literal person I hardly use it elsewhere (even when my friends and I are joking/using sarcasm we often say "just kidding" afterwards)

6.) What’s the first thing you notice about people?

Honestly height and hair. I have such bad face blindness, and I've had it forever. But I'll remember if someone was taller/shorter than me and their hair color

7.) What’s your eye colour?

Grayish blue. They were described like ice before if that helps

8.) Scary movies or happy endings?

Depends on my mood. I like horror movies and there are just so many different kinds- I haven't found a movie that genuinely scares me in a long time though... The last one I remember was Nope. I walked out of the theater and was just watching all the clouds in the sky fkdlsajf

9.) Any talents?

Nothing is really coming to mind... I guess I'm crafty? And it shows itself in different ways. I enjoy the process of creating. Be it in writing or drawing or baking and decorating or following steps- I enjoy having a vision and creating it

10.) Where were you born?

Usa

11.) What are your hobbies?

I read books and fanfiction, I write fanfiction, watch anime and shows, cook, bake, play genshin impact. I've been playing wordle every day for almost a year now. I like tactical stuff with instructions- like legos or putting together furniture- I got this DIY book nook last week and spent like 8 hours putting it together. In school as part of the STEM program we learned how to draft both by hand and on the computer through CAD and Solidworks- those were fun. I miss that. Again it uses that same part of the brain as legos. I also like playing with cards. I have solitaire and pinocle on my phone. I was also learning how to play chess (like the strategy part)

12.) Do you have any pets?

My family home has the cat I got my 8th birthday (barn cat, brown tabby with four white socks on his paws). In the apartment though there is my roommate's black lab, half ragdoll half Siamese cat, and who knows how many fish that keep having babies

13.) How tall are you?

5'10'' (on a good day sshhh)

14.) Favourite subject in school?

MATH HELLO! (......... but also the drafting classes damn i miss those)

15.) Dream job?

Can there be such a thing as having extreme trivia knowledge on my fandoms? I'd like that alot but otherwise.... I'd like to work at one of those cat [Blank] things. Be it a café or a bar or a bookstore (that'd be awesome!!) I think that would be fun

Tagging @alienjack @szivtalan @glitt-erm @amnestyaubrey @farklelucas @brazilian-whalien52 @bloodyspade0000 @traditionalartist @illbebuyingallofthoseflowers and anyone else who sees this and wants to hop in ☺️

#ask game #tags #personal questions? #the talent and hobby one were hard #bc yeah i can do things! paint draw write sing! but i wouldnt necessarily say im Talented at them. i can pluck at a piano. dont give me a #song and expect me to play good/well in a week though. #the one thing i thought i could say i excel in was math and thats... #dont ask me to do simple math like add two numbers. i suck at quick math like that that relies on memory. bc yeah i know what 6×7 is! or #18+5! but it takes my brain a moment to find the answer or remember and process the way to solve something. #but i say i majored in math and people oooo and ahhhh and say you must be good at math!! #i hate math!! #and like- yes and i get it. sometimes i do to. #to want to major in math means you must have had some success and fallen in love with it. and yeah that success can come through innate ski #ll or trial or both. #i found that my love for math deepens when i struggle bc that makes the success that much sweeter. #i feel like there is a connection in this struggle and solving with the bringing about a vision from crafting... #maybe they just have a similar feeling of success. maybe thats all... #but its not i feel in my gut that its not. #writing a proof and beginning with a vision and seeing where the logic leads is very similar to starting a project- be it building something #or writing a novel or starting a painting. you follow the flow and see where it leads you. access if its met its goal or expectations. #and fix the mistakes and if necessary start all over with a new approach. #it is creation. #sorry for the ramblings

[filipinoizukuu]

I saw your post about the FA's translations, and I totally agree. Sometimes, when they do not translate accurately, is to make it sound better or cooler in English, but it just ends up taking away a lot from the context and characters. We know how one of the most affected character interpretations is Katsuki's, a main character, no less. And Izuku and Katsuki's relationship too, which is something super super wrong, considering is deeply intertwined with the main plot of the series, thus if someone misinterpreted their dynamic, this person would miss a bigass chunk of the message the story has.

Here is the panel you mentioned before btw

I remember when I read this, only 10 or 11 chapters into the manga (?), and I was like "...I'm...pretty sure this guy didn't say that" khshsjdhs

OK FIRST OF ALL LMAO HELLO MANG!! THANK YOU SO MUCH AND DW ABOUT IT I TOTALLY GET WHAT YOU MEAN !!

(this is your warning for a long post ahead!)

In any case, I still think you're very correct on this! Not to ramble a bit, but Horikoshi's particular talent in developing the plot of MHA is actually very very brilliant and there are a lot of blink-and-you'll-miss-it details that together, assemble the big picture of what MHA is.

Translations are such an integral part of being able to understand foreign media. MHA or otherwise. The simplest of details say a lot about a character and often times make or break a series because everyone knows that strong character dynamics are what carry even the shittiest of plots.

First and foremost, I want to clarify that because of the nature of fan translations and the fact that most of it is volunteer work/ written out of pure enjoyment of the manga--we shouldn't judge these fan translators too harshly (if at all) for interpreting it the way they want to. FA, as far as I can tell, is a fan-based group that works out of donations.

The first thing I wanna bring up is that when it comes to fandom and its works, there are two types: Curatorial and Transformative. Now, the transformative part is something that must be very familiar to a lot of you. Fanfiction, fanart, and most headcanons fall under Transformative Works (i.e. AO3) because they are all about transforming the canon world to fit each individual's personal preferences. Meta-analysis posts and Character Breakdowns are also classified under this.

Curatorial on the other hand are fandom interactions made with the explicit purpose of being as close to canon material as possible. This is working out the logic of quirks, for example, or memorizing as much canon content about your favorite villain as possible. These are more cold, hard undeniable facts that lend themselves to the DIRECT VISION the creator/author had while making this media. If you were to ask me my opinion on this, this would be the moment where I tell you that the Curatorial side of fandom is where fan translations should (for the most part) fall under.

What people need to know though is that oftentimes, fan translations do not.

Translating isn't and has never been a one-is-to-one process. There are hundreds of thousands of aspects in a language that make it so that it isn't perfectly translatable. Colloquialisms to sayings to dialects, to just plain-out words that don't have a proper English translation to them! Manga is made by and for a Japanese audience, so obviously in a lot of instances, there will be cultural nuances that will not be understood by anyone who hasn't immersed themselves in Japanese culture/language.

So what does this mean then for fan scanlations?

It means that a vast majority of translators teach themselves to only get the essence of the message. They take the dialogue as they understand it and translate it to something of their interpretation. When language and cultural barriers exist, translators do what they can in order to make it understandable to the general populace. This means making their own executive decisions on how they see a character speaking. In example, if they see Todoroki using very direct and impersonal Japanese--one translator might interpret it to mean that Shouto is stiff and overly formal, while another may see it as him being rude and aloof.

The problem is, translators are fans just like us.

Like with the image Mang posted above, the translator based the usage of curse words off of their understanding of Bakugou's character. The lack of foul language in the original Japanese might have made the translator think "Oh. There just aren't enough Japanese cusses for his character." And took that as an initiative to make Bakugou's lines more colorful and violent because this was working off of the image Bakugou had had at this point in canon.

But Codi! You may cry. Wasn't it proven multiple times that Bakugou prefers concise and short lines? They should've known better!

Yes. Maybe they should've known better. But tell me honestly in your first watch-through of MHA, did you perfectly understand Bakugou's character either? Did you catch the whole 'direct and no flowery language' aspect of his language when you first saw Season 2?

Most people don't. I only really understood this fact after I'd read multiple discussions of it and even double-checked the manga myself. These are the kinds of things that only become noticeable with a sharp eye and some time to scrutiny. But the fact of the matter is that when it comes to fan translations, the clout and recognition are always going to go to who can post the quickest.

Am I excusing erroneous translations? A bit, I guess. It's hard for us to go in and expect translators to catch all these errors before release when we ourselves only catch these errors like 4 months in with a hundred times more canon context than these scanlation groups did at the time of its release.

Still, there are plenty of harms that come with faulty translations.

When a translation is more divorced from the original's meaning than usual, it creates a dissonance between what is actually happening versus what the audience sees is happening. This looks like decently-written character arcs being overruled and rejected by most of the readers because of how 'jarring' and 'clumsy' it seems. By the time translators had caught on to the fact that Bakugou was more than just a ticking time bomb, we were already several steps into showing how significantly he cares for Deku.

The characters affected most by these translation errors are often those with the most subtle and well-written character arcs. A single mistake in how the source material is translated can make or break the international reception of a certain character to everyone who isn't invested enough in them to look deeper into the canon source.

It creates hiccups in plots. Things that seem out of character but really aren't. Going back to MHA in specific, the way that inaccurate translations hurt both the 'curatorial' and 'transformative' parts of the fandom is that people have begun to cite them as proof of the main cast's characterization.

Bakugou and Todoroki are undeniably some of the biggest examples of mistranslation injustices.

Katsuki, in a lot of people's minds, has yet to break out of the 'overly-aggressive rival' archetype box that people had been placing him in since Season 1. One of the most amazing aspects and biggest downfalls of Hori's writing was that at first, nearly every character fit into a very neat stereotype for Shonen Animes (Deku being the talking-no-jutsu sunshine MC, Uraraka being the overly bubbly main girl, Todoroki being the aloof and formal rival). He made the audience make assumptions about everyone's characters and then pulled the rug beneath our feet when he revealed deeper sides of them to play around within canon.

What made this part about Horikoshi's set-up so good though were the many clues we were given from the very beginning that these characters were more than what they acted like. Even from the very first chapters, for example, we learn that Katsuki (as much as he acts like a delinquent) dislikes smoking because it could get him in trouble.

That is just a single instance of MHA's use of dialogue to subtly divert our expectations of a character.

Another example is when they replaced 318's dialogue of the Second User saying that Katsuki "completes" Deku with him saying that Katsuki merely "bolsters" him. This presents a different situation, as that line was meant to reinforce the importance of those two's relationship as well as complete the character foils that MHA is partially centered around. By downplaying their developed connection, it becomes harder for the MHA manga scanlations to justify any future significance these two's words have on each other without mottling the pacing of the story.

AKA, it butchers the plot.

With every new volume, there are dozens and dozens more of these hints and bits scattered around! So many cues and subtle foreshadowing at the trajectory of everyone's character arcs--yet mistranslations or inaccurate scans make it so that we don't notice them. This is what I mean when I said that some character arcs are being done great injustices.

Until now, many people can't accept that Katsuki Bakugou cares for anyone other than himself (much less his rival and MC, Izuku Midoriya), nor can they accept that Todoroki would ever willingly work by Endeavor's side. The bottom-line then becomes that because of people missing heavy bits of characterization that become very plot-significant in the future.

When it comes to the point where people can no longer accept or fit their interpretation of the earlier manga events to what is happening in canon, the point of a translation fails completely because it has lead people to follow an entirely different story.

TL;DR - Fan scans are hard. Translating is hard. Don't get too mad at fan translations, but also maybe don't treat them as the catch-all for how characters truly operate. Thanks.

Side note: DO NOT harass FA for any of these things. FA is actually a pretty legit and okay source for scans (they've been operating since like 2014 ffs), but regardless of that they still don't deserve to get flack for their work. You can have any opinion or perspective of canon that you want, I don't care. These are just my two (more like two million tbh) cents on translations. I suggest reading takes from actual Japanese audiences tbh if you wanna know more about the source material of MHA. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#IM SO SORRY MANG I RLLY WENT ON A RAMBLE FOR THIS #asks #mang #bnha #mha #my hero academia #boku no hero academia

[lany-d-flow]

Whisper Talk: Going Against Alternate Timeline Theories with a Theory, and Answering Questions Saying Otherwise.

Those who look with clouded eyes see nothing but shadows. -Sephiroth, Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

SPOILER WARNING

Pressing “Keep Reading” will bring you into spoiler territory for, well... Final Fantasy 7 Compilation and Remake, so this is your warning, all right buddy?

Also, this is one person’s interpretation of another work. What I predict may very well turn out to be untrue, and if you disagree with my prediction then that’s totally fine! (If you’d like, we could chat about it).

But honestly, I have spent the last few months thinking about this game in an unhealthy manner. I think having all of these whispers inside of my head with my frustration getting bigger is not going to move anything forward. So it’s time to wake up, get up, get out there and write thoughts about what is actually going on with Final Fantasy 7 Remake, while trying to clear up misconceptions that may be leading people astray. Perhaps the latter is the intention of the developers. If it is? Well, let’s move past the clouds and find the sunlight. 

All right, let’s mosey into this nonsense.

It’s been months since the release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. After a long five-year wait for many fans, we got a piece of the story on the Playstation 4 in March and April 2020. It was exciting to see the capital of Final Fantasy 7, Midgar, be brought to life with state-of-the-art graphics. Treading through mako reactors, Sector 7 and Sector 5, the nasty Wall Market, Shinra HQ, hearing conversations of lively NPCs, exploring the subtle easter eggs and symbolism through visual storytelling... Goodness, so much of what this game had to offer was a delight! The developers put their heart and soul into fleshing out a section of Final Fantasy 7 that was, at most, 6 hours long. This level of detail cannot go unnoticed, and I’m sure it’s made everyone excited to see the reimagining of Gaia when we receive future installments!!!!

Oh, but wait... the developers introduced a new monster called Whispers, otherwise known as Arbiters of Fate, and... What purpose do they serve?! Why are these things in Final Fantasy 7 when they never had a role in the original game? Based on everything we saw in the story, they seem to be making sure the story of Final Fantasy 7 runs exactly as it’s supposed to. Without these ghosts, the story will not be 1:1. To make things worse, we have Sephiroth who’s from the future?! No wonder these Whispers are here, Sephiroth’s trying to rewrite history because everything he has tried before failed him!

So based on what we saw in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the developers decided to create a metaphor for the fanbase, and since we defeated ‘destiny,’ we’ve defeated the fanbase’s say in where the story goes, thereby giving the developers permission to change the story the way they want it. Wow, this is pathetic on Square Enix’s part. Final Fantasy 7 is an amazing story with layers and layers of complex themes, why would they try to form it into something else? Now we’re going to have time travel and alternate timelines in the plot and Sephiroth seems unstoppable now. Heck, the developers are probably going to make sure impactful moments in Final Fantasy 7 do not happen, so Zack and Aerith are probably going to survive. And they’re also ditching the Compilation? Can these people be trusted? 

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is ruined!!!

Still with me? Well, this is just some of the talk that I’ve heard based on the execution of Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s plot. I won’t try to list every possible thing people are talking about, but I think we get the idea of the impression that our game’s ending put on a lot of players. So I wanted to give my input on what I believe is actually going on with the story, as well as answer many questions popping up about the circumstances of our game’s characters.

So, do I think the developers are changing the story?

Short Answer: No, at least not in the way that many people think. They’re “changing” the story by putting in new elements, moments that tie with the rest of the Compilation, but the main plot points (Overarching plot, the main crisis, the internal plot, the emotional climax, etc.) still need to happen. This series is more than 2 decades old, and with time it has received: a movie, 2 books, a sequel, 2 prequels, and now a remake with existing materials to tie into the game. 

Long Answer: All right, if you’re still with me, thank you. I will do my best to explain all of what’s going on. I’ll give my input via understanding how the FF7 Universe works; in other words, what the Whispers are, how the Whispers work, how they’ve actually always been apart of FF7 and are now receiving an expanded role, and how Sephiroth and Aerith showing meta behavior makes sense due to the power that the Planet has given to the Arbiters of Fate (exposure = visions out of context). I will also be answering questions that one may bring up as proof of an alternate timeline/story change and argue what their purpose may actually be.

So, let's Talk about A Whisper

Wait a minute...

So, let's talk about the Whispers.

Let’s start by explaining what the Whispers are, what function they serve to the Planet, and how the Planet creates them in the first place:

Whispers are souls that act as arbiters of fate and have been a part of the Planet for as long as the Planet has existed. They know the fate of the Planet from beginning to end, and their function is to make sure that a specific destiny runs its course. They all unite under the will of the Planet, just like the Sephiroth Clones all act under the will of Sephiroth, which is probably the reason why they were given a cloaky look: the Whispers' function parallels the Sephiroth Clones' function and both act under the authority of something else. They cannot be seen by everyone, and to actually see their physical manifestation, you need to either be 1) deeply connected with the Planet, or 2) receive some form of physical contact from someone who has a strong connection to the Planet. This is established early in Chapter 2 of Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Cloud meets Aerith for the first time, and at first glance she seems to be blown away by the wind. After Cloud and Aerith have an exchange and Aerith gives Cloud a flower, immediately after this we are greeted with an illusion of Sephiroth tormenting Cloud and more importantly, Aerith touching Cloud, allowing him to see the Whispers floating around the street. This follows the logic of my two points, as Aerith is a half-Cetra who’s been receiving visions of the past and future for years (her mural of symbolism in her Shinra HQ room was drawn when she received a vision as a child, though she does not understand the full context of what it means), and of course she ended up giving permission for Cloud to see the Planet’s protectors in action.

So how do the Whispers make sure destiny happens as intended?

Well, they do so by constantly observing the actions of the Planet’s people, sometimes in sight, sometimes not. If something happened that is off course, the Whispers immediately act to correct the course of said issue. We see this multiple times in the story. Some examples include: Aerith trying to leave the street where she meets Cloud, then proceeding to leave the street after meeting Cloud, following the Whispers’ intentions; Jessie getting injured in Sector 7 because destiny needs to make sure Cloud goes on the next AVALANCHE mission. If this didn’t happen, then Aerith and Cloud probably wouldn’t have met again; Surrounding the debris on top of Jessie to ensure her death takes place on top of the Sector 7 Tower (I’ll cover the speculation on her “survival” later); stopping Cloud from remembering everything about the Shinra Research Lab; stopping Hojo from revealing the truth of Cloud’s past (no way in Hell are they going to let the internal conflict unfold this early); reviving Barret from the stab wound that the Sephiroth remnant gave him; lastly, pushing Wedge down the Shinra HQ tower to ensure his death happens. Destined events either eventually happened, or they got delayed. This implies that the Whispers are nigh-omnipresent beings, especially given how many they are and how they were able to surround Midgar entirely, and their part of correcting destiny follows the flow of a river. As Red XIII puts it, “The flow of the great river that is the Planet, from inception to oblivion… For it is the will of the Planet itself”.

Cool. So how are the Whispers born? Where do they come from?

It’s actually a pretty straightforward explanation, and Aerith tells us in Chapter 18: Destiny’s Crossroads. Before the Whispers became Whispers, they were “Those born into this world. Who lived and who died. Who returned. They’re howling in pain.” This adds on to what Sephiroth said a moment ago: “All born are bound to her.” All Whispers were once living people, animals, etc. And all that are given life on the Planet are bound by something like a contract: You get made into an image and are given a physical life. In exchange, once that time’s up, you must return to the Lifestream and become a part of the Planet, being one of many who follow her will. You’re born, you live, you die, and you serve another purpose in a collective of spirits who are now tasked with making sure the flow of destiny is as it should be. By following all of this, we can conclude that 1) Everyone who lives on Gaia could eventually become a Whisper, and 2) since Whispers are a part of the Planet, they are formed from the Lifestream, the Planet’s lifeblood. This leads us into the next question...

How do the Whispers know the course of Destiny from start to finish?

Great question! The logical explanation to how they know is quite simple: the properties of the Lifestream. The Whispers are made out of Lifestream, and that gives them knowledge of the Planet’s destiny. I argue it is not farfetched to make this claim, as the Lifestream has shown time and again what it is capable of. Infact, let’s make an analogy of Lifestream manifestations via state of matter.

Lifestream: Its Three States of Matter and their Benefits and Side Effects

Mako is the liquid form of the Lifestream, Materia is a solid form of the Lifestream, while the regular Lifestream itself can be most equivalent to something of a gas/plasma, at least one that can be seen. Throughout Final Fantasy 7 we’ve seen what all of these forms can do. Mako is an extremely powerful energy source that powers all of Midgar through reactors, and is also what SOLDIERs are bathed in to possibly receive superhuman strength; Materia are jewels capable of all kinds of powerful magic; summoning fire, lightning, ice, creating shields, copying abilities of other living beings, healing, elevating other materia abilities, and most notably summon manifestations of powerful beings (Bahamut, Shiva, Ifrit, Odin, Knights of the Round). While the Lifestream itself? That’s all the souls of the planet with a consciousness that follows the Planet’s will. Some can appear as a physical manifestation, but they’re not quite solid, which is how Cloud’s buster sword moves through the Whispers as if he didn’t cut through anything. Use of the Lifestream can also create projections (think Aerith’s Chapter 14 resolution), allow access into someone’s subconscious under certain circumstances, and of course, give people visions of the past and future without any context as to how those events happen(ed).

All three forms of the Lifestream have side effects, too.

Materia can degrade the vitality and strength of the user. Think of it as a trade-off for borrowing the Planet’s lifeblood in the form of a jewel.

Mako can cause extremely intense mental breakdowns and break the psyche of those without strong mental resilience, which is why Cloud was unable to make it into SOLDIER. But he eventually received Mako exposure anyway. What happened? Oh yeah, he went into a comatose state not once, not twice, but THREE times. First during experimentation, second when he arrived at Midgar before Tifa bumped into him, and when he fell into a pool of Mako and washed up on the shore of Mideel.

Meanwhile, Lifestream side effects are non-contextual visions, loss of sanity similar to Mako (think Tifa before she entered Cloud’s subconscious), and if the Lifestream has something in it, infection! That’s how Geostigma came to be: Jenova cells from Sephiroth, Jenova, and the remnants were floating in the Lifestream, and when the latter destroyed Meteor, it also exposed humans to Jenova cells, turning into a severe disease that is deadliest toward hosts with emotional fragility. This is why Cloud has a “Geostigma episode” in Advent Children when he runs into an injured Tifa.

Even with all these side effects, the benefits are far too great to ignore. All this power from the Lifestream is why Sephiroth and Jenova wanted to siphon it for themselves in the first place. By siphoning the Lifestream resisting side effects, one can receive unparalleled powers. Sephiroth himself said it in the original game: 

“By merging with all the energy of the Planet, I will become a new life form, a new existence. Melding with the Planet… I will cease to exist as I am now. Only to be reborn as a god to rule over every soul.”

Notice how the last quote aligns with what Sephiroth said in the Edge of Creation about the Nebula? 

“Our world will become a part of it… one day.” 

We’ll come back to that statement, I promise. But for now, based on everything I’ve told you, here’s what I think is going on in Final Fantasy 7 Remake:

Sephiroth is not from the future. His exposure to the Lifestream for the last 5 years gave him the side effect of non-contextual visions. Among these visions, he probably saw his master plan fail. Eventually he realizes that the reason he has these visions is because of the Whispers and more specifically, the Planet’s Weapon Arbiter. The Whispers are fighting against Sephiroth as he’s gained both a rough understanding of the future and the Lifestream’s powers by siphoning it up. So, his new master plan? Defeat the Arbiters of Fate and THEN continue with his original plan. Sephiroth being omnipresent makes sense given his control over Jenova and her shapeshifting, S cells that allow him to puppetize clones and Cloud, and being in the Lifestream basically giving him more power with one form of that being omnipresence. What’s going to lead to his downfall is ultimately his arrogance: he probably thinks that just stopping the Whispers is enough for him to win. So while the physical manifestation of fate is gone, Sephiroth still needs to meet the same criteria to win: get the Black Materia to summon Meteor, his ticket to siphon up all the Planet’s Lifestream, which means he also needs Cloud to give him the Black Materia, which then means that eventually Aerith will have to summon Holy and eventually become one with the Lifestream to beat Meteor.

See how all of this comes together without time travel theories that go off on insane tangents? It’s established that the Whispers know the course of destiny from past, present and future. But WHERE did it say that they can travel through time? WHERE did it say that Sephiroth can travel through time with the Lifestream? That kind of power would be an enormous retcon to the story and the functions of Gaia, and it would also lead to a really convoluted plot that can deviate from the main themes of the story (trust me, some theories out there are wild). We do know that Whispers are in a singularity and it moves like a river, which as @silver-wield cleverly put in a post about the story of FF7R, translates to:

The arbiters of fate issued a correction to Wedge and made him fall out of the window in the Shinra building. Which means fate cannot be altered, merely delayed, which then leads to a more painful end for not accepting that fate.

...Or perhaps shuffled up with ultimately the same necessary outcome, because the river of destiny was put on a different course but is still heading to the same destination. There are multiple works in the compilation that the writers and developers would like to tie together to the main story. What’s a way for them to execute this? By making a metaphor for the OG storyline and by beating it giving them permission to add new things? From a certain point of view, sure, but the developers never needed permission to do this in the first place. But the side effect of beating the physical manifestation of destiny was likely shuffling parts of the story of Final Fantasy 7, prequels all the way to the chronological sequels. One can make a case for this based on the explosion felt at Midgar when the Arbiter and Sephiroth were defeated in the Singularity. The glitters of light could also reflect this change. From all this I argue freedom came to be, and characters from the Compilation might make an appearance during the main story such as Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo. However, no matter what changes are present, the outcome will be the same. Cloud is not properly himself yet; he still thinks he made it into SOLDIER, he gets slight interferences from Jenova throughout the story (example: Cloud’s hand twitching when against Sephiroth at the Edge of Creation), he has the Buster Sword but still doesn’t remember who its original owner was, so his unreliable narration, downfall and emotional climax still need to happen. Aerith is the only character who can summon Holy and the only character who can call forth the Lifestream, and the only way she can call forth the Lifestream is by becoming one with it. How can she do this? There’s only one way: Death. Sorry guys, but if both Sephiroth and Aerith have prophetic visions of the future, there’s a chance that both know what must be done for themselves to get the upper hand. Sephiroth still wants to siphon up the Lifestream and become an omnipotent God, and the best way for him to do this? Summon Meteor. What does he need for this? The Black Materia. Who does he manipulate into giving him the Black Materia at the Northern Crater? Cloud.

My point from all this is that there are specific beats that need to happen to move the plot forward, no matter what new things they add from the Compilation. Using a different crisis for the overarching plot that isn’t Meteor is a retcon to the story, and why advertise Meteor and have it as the centerpiece of artworks and the title screen if you’re not going to use it in the first place? That’s just… really strange. We can add things in the middle of the plot to flesh out the main themes of a story while staying faithful to the outcomes. Adding something entirely different as a crisis like time travel in a game that has never been about time travel is out of place, unnecessary, and people are placing way too much faith in this being true while not looking at the bigger picture and function of Final Fantasy 7’s power tools. I believe the developers want you to think that the story is changing, that a happier outcome is in store for everyone. This all works with what Final Fantasy 7 did for many players in the first place: subvert expectations by placing us in an illusion with an unreliable narrative. We assumed Cloud made it into SOLDIER until we found out he never made it into SOLDIER and created a facade to conceal the truth that he was afraid to face. We thought Aerith was the love interest when the game kept making us appreciate her perky attitude until she ended up dying and then we discover in the Lifestream Sequence that Cloud’s romantic feelings, his whole reason for fighting, was for Tifa. We thought Shinra was the main antagonist of the game until shortly after going through Midgar, the main antagonist is Sephiroth. We thought we were fighting Sephiroth throughout the game until we find out that the real Sephiroth was encased in a crystal sucking up the Lifestream. We don’t actually fight him until the very end when he merges with Jenova and the Lifestream into Bizarro Sephiroth and Safer Sephiroth.

See where I’m going with all of this? The developers want to continue using red herrings and playing the theme of illusion by using different methods. The old methods will not work anymore, so they have to find a new way to subvert expectations in a way that gets us confused, excited, and uncertain what will happen until we actually play through the next installments. When that time comes, be prepared to get your heartstrings pulled, because reality hits our characters hard, just like it hits us hard. Think Biggs, Zack, Aerith are going to survive, and that Sephiroth is travelling through time to accomplish his devious tasks? Well, think again.

Now that we’ve gotten this far into this Whisper Talk, there are a load of questions I will need to address. So without further ado, Let’s mosey!!!

How is Sephiroth not from the future? His one-winged form from Advent Children Complete was shown in the final boss fight, the boss map looks eerily similar to Edge, and we saw multiple Sephiroths throughout the story. The game is heavily implying that Sephiroth is from the future and he wants to try to achieve victory a second time.

Well, for starters, First Class SOLDIERs having wings has been a thing for a while. Sephiroth was not the only SOLDIER to have a wing. As Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core showed us, Sephiroth’s comrades, Angeal and Genesis, were able to grow wings at will. They had different cells (G cells) which gave them a different ability, make copies of themselves, rather than control others who share their cells, sure, but that is NOT stopping any of them from growing wings at will. It’s something used across the board for all three of these really powerful SOLDIERs and it’s no surprise that this time around, they want to show Sephiroth using more of his abilities throughout the game.

Also, Sephiroth having one wing is nothing new. It’s part of his Safer form and is named on his track, One-Winged Angel. So, as an homage, they wanted the villain of the game to use a wing during his fight in Advent Children.

There’s also another way we can explain this. Sephiroth formed a body of his image in Advent Children thanks to Kadaj. And what purpose does Kadaj serve? He’s a strengthened remnant embodying Sephiroth’s cruelty. In other words, he’s another puppet Sephiroth can manipulate. And he uses Kadaj’s body + Jenova’s head to form his image. A clone and Jenova cells, or just straight up Jenova, allow him to shapeshift as that’s one of Jenova’s trademark abilities. So using this as an implication of time travel doesn’t add up.

When it comes to Sephiroth’s 70 alternative accounts, each of them have a straightforward explanation, including the one that confuses most people. Here we go, according to the FF7R Ultimania:

An illusion only Cloud can see:

Cloud has S cells injected into him. The same S cells are also Jenova cells. Jenova cells allow hosts to read the memories of those nearby, inherit the memories of other hosts, and give Sephiroth shapeshifting and puppeting abilities on those who have S cells. This is how Cloud created his SOLDIER facade thanks to Zack’s injection, similar memories and instinct to hide from the truth. What’s likely going on here is Sephiroth is able to make Cloud hallucinate thanks to said S cells, hence why it’s an illusion ONLY Cloud can see. We saw this during the Nibelheim flashback, meeting Aerith for the first time, after the Sector 7 Plate collapse when he was behind Tifa. This is another way of showing Sephiroth’s omnipresent power.

Also, if we're going to get really specific about the properties of Jenova cells, we can look at a source like FF7 Ultimania Omega:

Jenova's mimic ability Jenova has a mimic ability which allows it to read the memories and feelings of others, then adjust its appearance, speech and behaviour accordingly to imitate what it has seen. Jenova once used this ability to get close to the Ancients and infect them with its virus, which killed many of them.

This ability is not limited solely to Jenova itself, for those who have its cells within them passes it as well, though in an incomplete form. Immediately prior to the start of the game, when Cloud's mind was shattered, he ran into Tifa and seemed to immediately return to "normal"; this was because of the mimic abilities of the Jenova cells inside Cloud read her mind, seeing her memories of him, which were then combined with his own ideal vision of himself, fashioning a new personality for himself.

And there you go. Jenova's signature abilities are shapeshifting and illusion. It's mentioned in her backstory, It's shown in her boss battles, it's shown in Jenova-infected hosts, and it's even shown in her OST! The illusion aspect being something only Cloud can see makes sense, thanks to his Jenova S cells, so the developers are expanding this ability.

Black Robed Man:

Simple. These are Sephiroth Clones, also known as Remnants. Each of these puppets have S Jenova cells injected into them, which is what allows Sephiroth to create illusionary projections of himself via their bodies. They can also create an illusion of Jenova’s Lovecraftian forms. If predictions are correct, there’s a chance that a couple of them could end up becoming the Advent Children (more on that later).

Flashback:

Also simple. This connects to what was mentioned in Cloud’s illusion. Cloud knows events he should not thanks to his Jenova S cells, and flashbacks like, “Within my veins flows the blood of Ancients. This Planet is my birthright!” are events that will be featured later in the game in moments like the Kalm flashback. Moving on!

Unknown:

This is where people get confused. But believe me, the answer is MUCH simpler than most people realize. The Unknown Sephiroth is the last form of Sephiroth that we fought in Final Fantasy 7. Yes, the shirtless one. From here forward I'll call him SOLDIER Sephiroth. For reasons I do not know, they decided not to make him shirtless this time around (too sexy by far?) but believe me when I say that that Sephiroth is the same one we saw at the Edge of Creation. How am I so sure of this? Look back at how Cloud met that Sephiroth in Remake and compare it to what happened in the Crater. They have the same tunnel of light and Cloud’s visiting a persona of Sephiroth that exists in a dimension unaffected by time and space. The Lifestream gives Sephiroth the opportunity to pull Cloud's conscious mind into this dimension. Cloud being in the Singularity during the final battle of FF7R Part 1, and the Singularity containing Lifestream = ability to take Cloud to meet SOLDIER Sephiroth in a pocket dimension, the Edge of Creation. In OG, being exposed/near the Lifestream in the Crater allowed Cloud to visit Shirtless SOLDIER Sephiroth in another dimension and finish him off, with Aerith helping Cloud return his consciousness to the real world.

See?! It actually makes a lot of sense, only this time Sephiroth hasn’t been stripped of his God powers and is currently siphoning the Lifestream. So this time around, Cloud couldn’t beat down Sephiroth. The reason the FF7 Remake Ultimania labels this Sephiroth as unknown is because it’s following a narrative where it assumes you do not know everything yet. Final Fantasy 7 Remake has only covered Midgar, and there’s still many places and moments we have yet to explore. But the Ultimania is not going to cover them until they are published in the next installments, and why would it tell us unrevealed "secrets" of the story? So for now, it has to act as if this is a mystery. This is the same case with Zack being labeled as “Missing in Action” rather than dead in the Ultimania, because we have not reached that moment in the plot yet. But I’ll cover that a bit more on one of the next questions.

As for Sephiroth being prophetic in the Edge of Creation, it’s simply foreshadowing what we’ll eventually have to face. “That which lies ahead… does not yet exist” is telling us that the final battle still has years before it’s ready to be unleashed. As for the Nebula, “Our world will become a part of it… one day,” this is a more vague statement of what I quoted earlier:

“By merging with all the energy of the Planet, I will become a new life form, a new existence. Melding with the Planet… I will cease to exist as I am now. Only to be reborn as a god to rule over every soul.” The Nebula that Sephiroth is staring at is stated in the FF7R Ultimania to represent Sephiroth’s wing(s). This same Nebula also has a similar shape to the original sketch of Safer Sephiroth. So, based on what SOLDIER Sephiroth told Cloud, we can conclude that Safer Sephiroth will one day be born and be the last fight for our team, maybe even taking place in the Edge of Creation. BUT it’s not quite time for that to happen yet, as Safer Sephiroth's physical body is still resting in a crystal at the Northern Crater. So there you have it!

Lastly, conceding the battlefield against Sephiroth, it is an homage to Advent Children and Edge, yes. That does not automatically mean that Sephiroth is from the future. We just fought arbiters of destiny who turned themselves into depictions of the three Advent Children. This is ultimately the developers' way of ending the game with an exciting boss battle and a somewhat familiar scene. It's just a manifestation of one of Gaia's locations while in the Singularity. Also, this whole boss battle was ultimately a fanservice-esque decision by the developers, particularly Co-Director Naoki Yamaguchi. They originally did not plan to have this boss battle in the first place, but they wanted to end this game on some kind of high note with the main antagonist. They could've ended the game with the Arbiter boss battle, and I think doing so would have confused less people, but the reason behind the Sephiroth boss battle has been spoken. We can conclude this: it was a Jenova/Remnant copy of Sephiroth using expanded abilities like his wing and absorbed some of the Whispers' power before this Sephiroth was defeated by the team and the Whispers were released from his grasp. There is no need to overthink this decision (but yes, I don't think it was entirely necessary).

But what about the Arbiters manifesting into images of Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo? Whisper Rubrum, Viridi, Croceo, and Bahamut SHIN are all representations of Advent Children’s antagonists and their bio says they are from a “future timeline.” Isn’t this proof that there’s time travel and alternate timelines going on?

Well, you are right about the enemy intel bio in Final Fantasy 7 Remake stating that these guys are manifestations of figures from a future timeline. BUT that does not imply that multiple timelines are forming. Technically speaking, we all live in one timeline that follows through a singularity. This is the same case for Final Fantasy 7, and the very place we are fighting these Whispers is called the Singularity. The reason the Whispers are forming into these creatures is because of their future knowledge. This is their way of shapeshifting into powerful foes that can defend themselves against the team. They are turning into foes that destiny will one day birth, but in the form of something akin to a Weapon just like the main Arbiter itself, and this is also the developers way of adding a homage and possibly a hint of the foes that will appear in the future. They are NOT the Advent Children themselves, otherwise there would probably show more personality, and they would also… look more like them. So what happened with “time” after defeating these Advent Whispers and the Arbiter Weapon? Well, it sharpened the curves of the river and put destiny on a new course, but to the same destination, hence the “set beginning and end” that the developers mentioned before. In the river’s new course, we’ll get new events that while still having original events that will all be more fleshed out. In part of this new course of destiny maybe there’s a chance that we will see the Advent Children themselves. How can I be sure of this? After speaking to a friend about it, the remnants we encountered give us a hint. Marco, #49, resides in Sector 7. Who was a teenager that resided in Sector 7 before becoming a remnant and then Advent Child? Kadaj, also known as the manifestation of Sephiroth's cruelty. Meanwhile, we have #2 in Sector 5, who shows strong features fitting for someone in SOLDIER. Who fits this category? Loz, also known as the manifestation of Sephiroth's strength. People have theorized that #2 is Zack, but I do not agree and will address that later. The only remnant candidate we have left is Yazoo, the manifestation of Sephiroth's allure. This makes sense as he’s the most silent of the trio, so the developers will keep his remnant in mystery for now. But there you have it. By Nomura stating, "Come back to me a few years later and ask me what remake means," what I believe he means by "remake" is write the original story of Final Fantasy 7 with characters in other parts of the compilation included. Hence, a shuffled story with the same necessary outcomes.

Okay, but didn’t the developers say that Final Fantasy 7 Remake is not canon to the Compilation, thereby making it a different story from the Compilation and proving the developers are ditching the original story in the process?

Let me tell you right now: if those lines were what they actually said in full context, then they were lying. How am I sure? Because throughout FF7R, parts of what happened in the Compilation are included in the story. Zack’s Last Stand was featured in a flashback; Hollow’s lyrics greatly parallel the lyrical version of Price of Freedom; one of Cloud’s old Shinra Military comrades was featured and mentioned Kunsel, from Crisis Core; and of course the big Arbiters being manifestations of the Advent Children.

For saying the Compilation is being ditched and is the bad ending, why include characters and homages specifically from the Compilation? If they really were, they wouldn’t put pieces of it into the story like this. All that was stated by Director Tetsuya Nomura was that FF7 Remake is not canon to the Compilation YET. Keyword YET. The story is incomplete and the developers need to see Remake through from start to finish before they can say it’s truly canon to the Compilation. And what have Scenario Writer Kazushige Nojima and Producer Yoshinori Kitase said about the story?

Does this sound like they’re ditching the Compilation to you? I think this should sum up how they are tying the series of Final Fantasy 7 into one big package, but there are some people saying that the team seeing Advent Children and the Planet 500 years later, followed by Red XIII saying it’s “a glimpse of tomorrow if we fail here today” as proof that what happens in the future is a bad ending. This is not entirely true. It makes sense for humanity to be gone 500 years later with the Planet living on because that was the life that the team was trying to save in the first place. What Red XIII told us was simple: that if Destiny wins, then the river of Destiny will run the same course, and that includes the events of On The Way To a Smile, Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, and of course humanity being gone 500 years later. This is another case of the team receiving future visions without context, as I addressed before. They saw an event where they maybe saw people they knew, but do they know what leads to it? No. So what they assume about the outcome of the future and what’s good and bad may not necessarily be correct. They will find that out as the next parts of Final Fantasy 7 Remake are released.

Okay, but aren’t the characters free to do whatever they want now that they have beaten Destiny? As Aerith said, they have boundless, terrifying freedom.

They have freedom from the Whispers, and like Zack once said, “The price of freedom is steep.” They can begin their journey without the worry of the Whispers acting up if they do something that strays far away from what’s necessary. That doesn’t mean that they are not going to head to all the destinations we needed to reach in the original game. We will still probably have the flashback at Kalm since it’s the nearest town away from Midgar. We still need to pass through the Mythril Mines to get to other destinations. We still need to pass through Corel, Barret’s hometown, to get to the Gold Saucer where we will meet Cait Sith and reach Barret’s character climax. We still need to reach Gongaga and this will likely be a required place to visit because of how much more importance Zack is given in Remake. There’s also no working reactor in Gongaga so there’s a chance that yellow reunion flowers will grow as foliage. We still need to head to Cosmo Canyon, where Bugenhagen will teach us more about the Lifestream and where Red XIII will learn the truth about what happened to his father Seto. We still need to head to Nibelheim where a lot of confusion is going to rise within our team--specifically Cloud and Tifa--and also where we need to release Vincent from the Shinra Mansion. We still need to cross Mt. Nibel (we might get a flashback from Cloud) and head to Rocket Town to meet Cid and drink some goddamn tea. We still need to head to the Temple of the Ancients for the team to find out what needs to be done to save the Planet, and also the place where Sephiroth will manipulate Cloud and the team into giving him the Black Materia. We still need Aerith to head to the Forgotten City as it’s the only place she can use her prayer to activate the White Materia and summon Holy. We still need to head to the Northern Crater as that’s where Cloud will likely have his downfall and submit to Sephiroth….

We could keep going on with this, but I’m sure you see my point. New things will happen but there are important locations that the team needs to reach in order to come closer to their goal of stopping Sephiroth. The simple thing is that, from here on out, the Whispers will not intervene, giving us the illusion that things will change, but we most likely will learn the hard way that the necessary outcomes will still happen. So once again, the river is on a new course to the same destination.

Okay. You’ve talked about Sephiroth not being from the future, but what about Aerith? Her prayer stance in the opening cinematic looks eerily similar to her stance in the ending of Final Fantasy 7. Based on this, is she from the future/did she see the outcome of the Meteor-Lifestream-Holy Conflict?

No. What probably happened was the developers paid homage to that ending screen. What follows immediately after that is Aerith picking up a crushed reunion flower, symbolizing the non-reunion that Aerith and Zack could not receive in life, but eventually receive in the Lifestream. And once again: Aerith has received visions of the future, but without context as to why and how they happened. In a novella it’s mentioned that Aerith received a vision as a child and drew her mural of symbolism in her room as a result. We know she’s been receiving non-contextual visions for awhile, but being forced into a big responsibility by the Planet is something she needs to learn to accept, and that’s part of her character arc we will receive in the next parts of FInal Fantasy 7 Remake. There is no evidence she can time travel, and she doesn’t always know the Whispers’ intentions. When the team asked her what they were doing while surrounding the Shinra HQ Tower, she simply replied, “Who knows?”. She’s not omniscient. She has some meta knowledge and a big responsibility, but does not know how to handle this role yet. And that's where character development comes in for our Maiden of the Planet.

Cool, but why are people like Rufus and Hojo able to see the Whispers in the first place? And maybe Zack, too?

Actually, there’s a pretty straightforward explanation for this. As we know, to be able to see the Whispers, once again you have to either be heavily connected to the Planet or touched by a special person. Aerith spent a portion of her childhood in the Shinra HQ Tower. Who else was there with her? Her biological mother Ifalna. These two are both Cetra, one half and one full-blooded. Hojo likely spent hours upon hours with both of them, especially Ifalna, so receiving contact from them is not farfetched. Also, that gross f***** of a scientist does unfortunately play an important role in the plot and keeping the flow of destiny on course. As for Rufus? This man was a teenager when Aerith and Ifalna were living in Shinra HQ. It’s very possible that he ran into one of the two cetra and maybe received contact from them. If he didn’t? Don’t forget, this man is the president of Shinra throughout almost all of FF7. Even if the team opposes him, they still need him. He is very necessary to destroy the barrier that blocks the team from getting into the Northern Crater. Without his actions, the team cannot make it to Sephiroth. It’s that simple. And even though he can see the Whispers, how much does it matter? It’s only going to matter if the Whispers make a resurgence sometime in the plot. There you have it.

Okay, but why is Zack alive after his Last Stand? And why were the Whispers present during this? Also, what about the Stamp bag? Isn’t this proof of time travel and alternate timelines?

And here’s where the red herring comes in! He did beat the Shinra Army. And yes, the Whispers were present. BUT why were they present? Remember what was mentioned earlier? The Whispers are dead souls returning to the Planet, and if that’s the case they have been part of the Planet for a LONG time. This means that they were ALWAYS present through the course of events in the Planet. The reason we see them during Zack’s Last Stand is likely to throw one off at first, until they connect the dots with how old the Whispers actually are. And they are showing themselves in the Last Stand because this is an extremely important event that has to happen for Cloud’s next journey to begin. We didn’t quite get to see how the Whispers changed up the event, but they likely did form it in a way where the developers wanted to trick us. It's also left ambiguous if he can see the Whispers or not, although they do not seem to alarm him IF he can see them.

Now, about the Last Stand, If you compare Remake’s Last Stand to Crisis Core and Final Fantasy 7 OG, you’ll notice that Remake’s moment has similarities to the OG scene.

Zack walks, drops Cloud in a safe place, and defends himself against the soldiers in all three. So here's where the cutscenes get different:

FF7 OG: Zack fights against Shinra infantrymen. We don't see the troops, but Zack thinks he defeated them. Afterwards he heads to Cloud but immediately gets shot by a group of Shinra troops, and I mean shot. Afterwards, there is no dialogue between Zack and Cloud, Cloud grabs the Buster Sword and starts breaking down in the rain. Thus, his journey--nearly--begins.

FF7 Crisis Core: Zack confronts the Shinra army. He begins his monologue:

Boy oh boy... The price of freedom is steep. Embrace your dreams, and whatever happens... Protect your honor, as a SOLDIER!

We then proceed to battle the Shinra army. Eventually, the screen fades to black and we see Zack mortally wounded. The same group of Shinra troops from OG come over and bullet Zack to death. Eventually, Cloud wakes up in shock, and Zack parts Cloud his sword and last words:

For the both of us... You're gonna... Live. You'll be... My living legacy. My honor, my dreams... They're yours now.

Cloud then proceeds with a breakdown, and afterwards begins his journey, where he'll bump into a certain someone while in Mako comatose. Sheesh I hate watching that scene due to its deadly side effect.

Where does Remake stop?

Right in the area where Zack’s grave is, a cliff with a steep descent to flat land. It’s the same spot where Zack got shot by a Shinra infantryman who pursued Zack throughout his running away from Shinra Mansion; it's the same spot where Cloud placed the Buster Sword to honor his close friend’s wish; and the same spot where Zack declared, “For the both of us… you’re going to live. You’ll be… my living legacy.” The developers intentionally stopped us from seeing the outcome of that moment because it’ll either be the same place where Zack will die, or we’ll see his fate get delayed and placed somewhere else. 

I have also seen people argue that #2 is Zack, or if not Zack, then Zack’s corpse.

This is false.

Remember why Zack was placed in a cryosleep tube in the first place? Because, like Cloud, he was considered a failed experiment by Hojo because the S cells could not turn him into a Sephiroth clone. Zack becoming a Sephiroth clone would be a major retcon to the story and how he was able to escape with Cloud in the first place. Zack becoming a clone would mean that he was never a failed experiment. And what would happen if he wasn’t a failed experiment? Cloud wouldn’t be able to escape and FF7 wouldn’t have happened. Could Hojo have picked up Zack’s dead body after his death? Maybe, but is there evidence that his corpse would still become a clone? That’s extremely unlikely in my personal opinion. We would have to assume that Hojo did another clone experiment this time around and the Shinra troops decided to take his body with them when they had no good motive or order to do so anyway. Their orders were likely  “shoot to kill” and that’s it. We don’t need Zack’s corpse to be remade into a clone, and we certainly don’t need him to be a clone if Sephiroth wants to do something like create an illusionary projection of Zack. Remember what happened in the Northern Crater? Sephiroth used Jenova to create an illusion of Tifa in order to trick the Black Materia holder into “helping” the team.

Lastly, that bag of Stamp's Champs, Original Flavor.

It’s interesting, isn't it? And Nomura told us to pay close attention to both stamps. This is probably the biggest case of an alternate timeline being real, but after thinking about it for a while, I argue that it's not proving an alternate timeline exists, but rather it's being shown to give focus to two different heroes. And how does this work in the FF7 world? Well, Shinra probably has simple rebranding of Stamp on a Shinra product. It’s not uncommon for corporations to rebrand their products into a different name (just look up Lay’s Potato Chips and you’ll come across Walkers, as shown in my poorly collaged photo). BUT there's another example to talk about, as a friend mentioned. Stamp's Champs are the "original" flavor. This original flavor and Terrier is being used to represent Zack in FF7, as he was once called a "puppy" by his mentors in FF7 Crisis Core. Now, that bag is calling to the original hero, who was Zack (could also be an homage to how Zack's design was originally assigned a "different" role in FF7 OG) up until he passed his dreams on to Cloud. So what this means is both Stamps are used for wither a different flavor or got rebranded after a certain amount of time passed, or the Stamp brand has the same flavor is different depending on the location in Gaia. Now for the second functionality for Stamp: It's being used as a red herring to mislead the players deeper in to the mouse trap. Remember Stamp’s original function in the context of Shinra? It served as a propaganda device for Shinral to promote its use of warfare for wealth to mislead the public into thinking Shinra’s deeds were for progress and beneficial for the Planet. It’s very possible that the developers are using Terrier Stamp as a propaganda device to trick the face-value players into thinking everything’s going to be different for the story until we're shown otherwise. And if it actually is an alternate timeline? It will not affect our team. As established previously, there is no time travel that our team is capable of, and the Whispers act on a fixed flow under the Will of the Planet and are almost omnipresent, so they must correct the course of destiny in the present and as quickly as possible. That alternate timeline would probably just be used to show us that no matter what we do, what’s set in stone needs to be kept in stone. So, don’t get your hopes up that Zack is going to survive, especially since he already passed on the Buster Sword to Cloud in the present "timeline" that we're playing.

But why is there a different Seventh Heaven sign shown during the ending sequence? Isn’t this proof of an alternate timeline?

Careful now. There’s a big possibility that what was shown during that shuffled sequence of events was the original Seventh Heaven bar. That’s right, there was a Seventh Heaven before Tifa’s in Sector 7. How do I know this? It’s a sidequest in Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core. Zack met an unnamed carpenter in the Sector 7 slums and helped name the bar. The canon answer in the narrative is to choose the name Seventh Heaven. So what’s likely happening here is 1) we saw a past event of the first Seventh Heaven bar being worked on, as the folks of the slums are building their homes together; 2) we are seeing the folks rebuild the Sector 7 slums, and perhaps to honor what was once there, the folks are building another bar and making sure to keep the original name Seventh Heaven, or 3) pretty much what I said before and it’s happening in an alternate timeline. Regardless, there’s a good chance that Crisis Core is being referenced here. And if it isn’t and it’s different events happening in an alternate timeline? Once again, our friends can’t go to that alternate timeline because time travel is not a power they have. So, it doesn’t really affect the main beats of our journey. What may happen, though, is our team will visit the Sector 7 slums later down the line, and they’ll have a reunion with a rebuilt home before settling the score with Shinra and Sephiroth. Until we see it, though, that’s just headcanon.

But why is Biggs alive? Aren’t Wedge and Jessie alive, too?

Biggs is shown to be alive, yes, but at what point of time and for how long? Also, even though he is shown to be alive, how is that going to drastically alter the story for our friends? He may stick around and have a minor role later, but he could very well die again depending on where the Destiny River is heading, and there’s likely very little he can do to somehow drastically change the story. Is he going to suddenly appear and sacrifice himself to make sure Aerith survives? Highly doubt it. See what I mean? Even if someone like him is left alive, he’ll either receive the same fate in a different way or just get a role that won’t change much of the main story. So, are Wedge and Jessie alive? Wedge, absolutely not. He was pushed down Shinra HQ Tower and there is no way he was able to survive a fall that high. There is no evidence that he “survived” after that fall as well. As for Jessie, we saw her gloves and headband on a dresser next to Biggs, but that’s it. Why would they place those next to him and not next to Jessie if she’s still alive and being taken care of? She was high atop the Sector 7 tower and it’s very unlikely anyone besides our team was able to run up and grab her on time. She was also in a worse state than Biggs and probably got crushed by the tower collapsing. In other words, she got crushed twice. Once when she set off her bomb and Cloud and Tifa bump into her; the second, when the plate dropped. What the glove and headband are, are likely nothing more than the remains of a friend who couldn’t make it. There may have been time for someone to pick up Biggs and that’s how he ended up in a bed, covered in bandages. As for more proof he’s the only one who survived? Wedge had 3 cats he held. Out of the three, only one named Biggums survived. The other 2 missing, I believe, are symbolism for the fate of the AVALANCHE trio. There you have it, three charming but minor characters who had written character arcs that got fleshed out in Remake, but don’t serve an extremely important purpose to the main plot points of the game (no offense to the trio, I do like Mr. Not-Charlie-Sheen and I wonder what they will do when the inevitable happens).

This is cool and all, but what about Sephiroth's line? "Seven Seconds till the end. Time enough for you, perhaps. But what will you do with it? Let's see." Also, this Sephiroth used more informal phrasing in the Japanese acript, such as "ore." He seems to be aware of what the future holds, too. So what do you make of this?

Ah yes, this moment, also one of the first pieces of script the writers thought of:

Well friend, I actually covered this topic before:

Seven Seconds Before the End: Theory vs. Context

While that post was made to debunk a theory, I believe what I wrote in it can easily be taken into the context of this post. That's one thing people constantly overlook about this line: it already has a given context. What do I mean by that? Check out the story log here:

In the world beyond, Sephiroth shows Cloud a vision of the planet seven seconds before its demise. Having strayed from the course destiny set for them, they strike out on a path toward an unknown future.

This is what Sephiroth was referring to: the end of the Planet. Unfortunately people are taking this line WAY out of context and using it to write theories that stray far away from the line's meaning in the first place. It's part of what Sephiroth is after, and it's part of what Cloud is fighting against. The team fought against the Arbiters of Fate because they believe what they saw was the end of everything for them without seeing the long-term outcome, while Sephiroth lured the team to fight against the Arbiters of Fate because he may have seen his failure, and believes that with the physical manifestation of the Whispers gone, he can continue his plan without any chance of failure. A part of the future, no matter what seems to happen, will involve making a decision seven seconds before the Planet's demise. What will cause the Planet's demise? Meteor. That is the main calamity we are trying to stop after defeating Sephiroth, and we need to defeat Safer Sephiroth and SOLDIER Sephiroth to make sure his will cannot block Holy from being summoned, as well as prevent Aerith from calling forth the Lifestream. So once again, this is from Sephiroth's rough understanding of the future, and it's a meta message for the players of what the ending of Remake might entail. It is NOT Sephiroth from the future suddenly sending his body/consciousness into the past in a really odd moment to give Cloud a warning.

Even with all this, the ending of Final Fantasy 7 Remake stated, "The Unknown Journey will continue." What do you have to say about this?

Yes, there is an unknown journey. This is a journey with new content to tie the rest of the Compilation together, like a possible story shuffle mentioned earlier. There's bound to be new and revised scenes in between the set beginning and end, hence "the unknown journey." I talked about this before, but for the developers to put something like "The same journeys from 2 decades ago will continue" is counter-intuitive to what they just showed us in the ending and would mess with all the anticipation for what's to come next. We have to think about this in a different perspective, and not the perspective of "oh, nothing is going to change." The developers need to keep people excited, and part of keeping that excitement is marketing a tease. It's pretty much how marketing works, too. A marketing scheme that only tells the literal facts without trying to juggle the consumer's emotions isn't going to interest the consumer that much compared to the marketing scheme that teases at the possibilities. As for the reason Yoshinori Kitase will then say that the team is continuing FF7R as FF7 has? He's in a different mindset during interviews like that. The game Final Fantasy 7 Remake is telling us things like a book, ending the events with a To Be Continued cliffhanger. Meanwhile, Kitase can state that FF7R will continue as FF7 because that's technically a vague statement. We know we'll get key locations and scenes, but we don't know how they'll get fleshed out. And we sure as heck don't know about any new scenes and how those are going to be executed in the next installments. In other words, think of a classic sandwich with a hipster rendition. The set beginning and end are the top and bottom buns, the protein is almost the same, maybe a couple spices added in there; and the unknown is all the new toppings added in your hipster-style classic sandwich. I know this is a strange analogy, but hopefully it gets the point across. So don't worry too much; Nojima, Nomura, and Kitase haven't shown us the new condiments yet!

Conclusion

If you're still here after reading through my wall of jargon, thank you! After all that I've written, I hope I was able to accomplish my goal: to ease your worries about the developers' plans with the story. And I hoped to do this by giving an in-universe explanation as to why certain things are happening. There is context to the Whispers' powers, and with the Whisper following a continuous flow of destiny, pieces of the future and past are scattered in that river. Sephiroth's been basking in this river for years now, so he got similar exposure as Aerith did and now has rough knowledge of what's to come. I think people who are clinging to time travel theories are taking the Whispers' powers out of context. We saw vague bits of the future; Aerith did, Sephiroth did, we did, and do you know who else? Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and Red XIII. Heavy exposure to the Whispers gives visions as a side effect. They're not travelling through time from the future to fix things when they've always existed as dead souls who returned to the Planet; they're continuously moving around Gaia and watching folks--especially key players in saving the Planet. The flow of a river doesn't stop, it keeps moving through its closed course. Maybe it can change its course in a slightly different direction, or get shafted into sharper curves to delay the flow, but it will still head to its final destination no matter what. While we are in the current of this new course, we'll stumble upon some untouched terrain before we get to the set ending.

However, even if we know about the inevitable, that isn't going to stop us from feeling intense pain for our heroes.

Thus the journey continues.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go sit my ass down and drink some god-damn tea.

Special Thanks

@otp-oasis-heavenxearth (Also known as @magicalchemist)

For taking the time to read my rough draft and pointing out the goofs, bringing in your theory ideas, as well as helping me solidify my confidence in Final Fantasy 7 Remake's future. Seriously, if you haven't, check out her blog. She's incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to FF7 and looks through every different perspective while sticking to the facts. In other words, straight up awesome!

@silver-wield

For allowing me to cite your post, as well as being the first person that made me faithful the developers are staying true to their word with their direction of FF7R. Seriously, thanks! If you haven't, check out her blog. Her attention to detail is incredible!

#final fantasy 7 #ff7 #ffvii #final fantasy vii #ff7r #ff7 remake #ffviir #ffvii remake #final fantasy 7 Remake #final fantasy vii remake #theory #fan theory #lany-d-flow #my thoughts #red herring #whisper talk #i spent way too much time on this #final fantasy #ff #final fantasy 7 remake #theory nonsense #nonsense #timey wimey #there ain't no time travel nonsense

[iabsolutelyresentthiswebsite]

Rey’s Parentage Reveal In The Last Jedi is OBJECTIVELY Inaccurate

So buckle up, my folks. We’re about to take a trip down Logic Lane with a few stops along the way at The Force Awakens Way, Force Vision Terrace, and Skywalker-Solo Circle.

Where to begin?

Ah, I have it.

So, since The Last Jedi allegedly gave us an answer as to who sired young Rey and (spoilers) they’re supposed to be junk traders who sold their daughter for drinking money and then died in the sands of Jakku, a good portion of the fanbase has been up in arms, some simply dissatisfied, but some to the point of a vehement rebuke of the information, for various, very justified reasons. 

However, there is the minority of the fanbase that is satisfied with the information and moves on from it, pretending like everything is okay...which it isn’t.

Because who was said to be her parents is objectively inaccurate based on The Force Awakens, cinematic tells, and logical deductions from the current two movies in the Sequel Trilogy.

I’m not going to lie so I’m going to come right out and say it, I am emphatically Anti-The Last Jedi because of several things that are wrong, unexplained, or simply bad about the movie. Like, if I could personally strike it from canon, I would. However, I have another whole series (#the last jedi sins) you can read, if you’re interested. I am here to talk solely about how Rian’s vision for Rey’s parentage is inherently incorrect.

As has been discussed dozens of times, it was originally intended for Rey to be the daughter of of Leia and Han, in early concepts for The Force Awakens. However, so much has changed anyway, so I will not be staking anything on that debatable evidence. Instead, I will go for the more tangible evidence that we can all see.

Aside from the fact that The Force Awakens did, in fact, emphasize many, many, many parallels between Rey and Luke’s emergence in the saga, causing most fans to speculate who her father was, there is even more to talk about. You can read my extensive dissertation on that here, or just go to my blog and /tagged/rey-skywalker and see everything I have on it.

In TFA, Rey had a Force Vision of her, being held by the hand, calling out to whom we’re lead to believe are her parents, yelling at them to “Come back!” as they fly off of Jakku in a spaceship. 

Drunk junk...traders have their own, high-class spaceship? That’s fucking news to me. Like Rey, for all intents and purposes, lead a similar work life to her parents, and she had nothing...how did drunk junk traders have a spaceship? 

Apparently, they had sold their daughter for drinking money, also. 

W-why d-didn’t they sell their spaceship first? 

Now I get it, some people are turds, but...really? You sell your own daughter before you sell your ship? Your flesh and fuckin blood? 

Moreover, she was allegedly sold to Unkar Platt/Plutt for drinking money. 

But...nowhere in The Force Awakens did I ever get the impression she was a slave, which is what is implied from being “sold” to someone in exchange for money. It makes that person a slave.

Slaves, typically, aren’t allowed to go wherever they please, when they please, live wherever they want, and give what they choose to their master. The fruits of a slave’s labor are typically considered the property of the slaveowner. 

Also, slaves don’t usually sell things to their slaveowner. That’s not usually how slavery works. I mean, yeah, she’s selling it for food and supplies, but...it’s still not usually how slavery works.

For me, Rey was someone who was simply trying to survive after being abandoned. In this little settlement, she works/scavenges for food and supplies.

Also...thinking about it...if she’s a slave...doesn’t that make all the people selling stuff to Unkar Platt/Plutt slaves too? Because she was exactly like them. 

Furthermore, she could not have been a slave because when Unkar took interest in BB-8, she chose to not sell BB to him. Slaves- objectively- cannot do that. The slaveowner will take whatever their slave has, whether they like it or not. 

Unkar sent someone after her to get the droid, but that establishes Unkar has henchmen, not that she is a slave. Because she would have been obligated to agree to BB-8′s sale as soon as he was interested, if she was a slave. 

So she’s not a slave, therefore she could not have been sold for drinking money. She must have been abandoned or left there by someone.

Someone who cared about her, probably because in the Force Vision, she was wearing pauper’s clothing, but it wasn’t dirty or damaged. It was just clothing, basic clothing. Her face and hair looked clean. I’m actually watching this on repeat while writing this because I’m making sure my memory is clear and yeah, she looks in good health and hygiene. So her parents obviously did care about her. Certainly more than to sell their daughter before selling their ship for drinking money. 

Also, going back to the very beginning, her parents were allegedly junk traders. But drunks. If they were able to own and pay for the upkeep of a ship that size, they had to have been pretty well-off or at least comfortable. They would have had 

1. no need to sell their daughter to get drunk

2. been successful enough to actually have the money to do those things.

So, something is definitely amiss there. All of it is amiss from a logic and storytelling perspective. 

Additionally, it is canon that Kylo Ren does recognize her in The Force Awakens. In the novelization, there is a mention of Kylo Ren saying or thinking ‘it’s you’ when he interacts with Rey. That is completely unjustifiable if she is some nobody from Jakku. Kylo knows her. That is proof enough that Rian’s interpretation of her parentage is objectively incorrect. It directly contradicts text canon. 

Since we’re talking about Kylo anyway, let’s delve into the reveal again. I talked about it at length here, if you’re interested for a more in-depth analysis.  

When Kylo was trying to get Rey to know the “truth” about what turned him, although it makes no sense and is inconsistent with characterization and plot elements, he removed his glove, in a gesture of vulnerability and honesty when they touched hands. However, when he “validated” that her parents were nobodies, he kept his glove on and immediately pressed for her to make a decision to join him, through coercion, saying that she was nobody and has no place in this. It was clearly dishonest and manipulative, seeing as she wanted someone to “show her her place in all this”.  Also, look at the look in his eyes! There’s something else he’s not saying. (This is why Adam Driver is such an amazing actor!) He either never saw her parents or was manipulated just like Snoke manipulated Rey to believe he could be turned. 

And Leia sent Rey to acquire Luke from Ahch-To, even though she had been looking for him for fifteen years. Why her? Yeah, she’s Force-Sensitive, but so is she...but that hug in TFA? That’s more than an “I just met you, but I feel you” kind of hug. Leia buries her head in the notch of Rey’s neck, that’s a clear sign of familiarity. Most people only do that with people that they deeply, intimately know. Rey, on the other hand, keeps her chin on Leia’s shoulder, but as the hug goes longer, she moves her chin into the nook of Leia’s neck...there’s a familiarity growing inside Rey too. Leia knew, but Rey’s coming to know. This is body language and basic psychology, my guys. I’m not even reaching here. On Ahch-To, when Luke turns around, the look in Luke’s eyes is soft and haunted when he sees this girl standing before him. He already knew. 

With all of this in mind, she can’t be a nobody. Kylo wants her on his side..there must be some reason for that...especially because it is canon he recognizes her. She was never a slave and her parents couldn’t have been drunk junk traders because it fails the logic tests. And all the parallels made between her and Luke...can’t be a red herring. Why would they be there, if there was no point? It’s bad storytelling. 

In conclusion, Rian Johnson did not watch The Force Awakens, nor does he understand basic storytelling practices or logic. There is no logical precedent for her to be Rey Nobody, so she must be Rey Somebody. Even Rian admitted that they may undo what he did in VIII in IX, probably because he might have realized how much he fucked up with not making her Rey Skywalker/Solo/Kenobi. Rey’s parentage in The Last Jedi is objectively inaccurate.

#rey skywalker #rey's parentage #rey of jakku #star wars #virginia speaks #the last jedi sins #yeah ill tag it there #rey solo

[padawanlost]

You know what really gets me about Yoda? When Ahsoka goes to him about her vision of Padmé dying, he's like 'choose, you must, how to proceed, but be careful because the future has many paths.' When Luke has a vision about Han and Leia, he went 'You must choose, but I'm dropping major hints that you shouldn't go.' When Anakin goes to him with his visions of Padmé? 'Rejoice for those who join the Force.' What kind of hypocritical nonsense advice is that, Yoda??

BINGO! Yodais a hypocrite, that’s a fact. What astonishes me is this notion that Yodagives good advice. He has a terrible track record with counselling people. Infact, thing only work out well (or less tragically) when people ignore whateverhe’s told them. Yoda speech pattern might make him sound wiser but when youconsider all the things he has said and how it affected everything it becomes obvioushe causes harm. Yoda, when not being a complete hypocrite, is busy preaching unhealthycoping mechanisms and manipulating the truth.

Yoda’sadvices are some of the most quotable Star Wars moments and yet when I thinkabout them I see nothing but empty wisdom.

However,before I get more into it I would like to make a few things clear: this dealswith grief and coping mechanism so if this may trigger you, please do not readany further. Also, this is not an attack on people who find this particularadvice useful or comforting. If Yoda helps you deal with whatever is going onin your life, good. I have no problem with that. I just wanted to write about my own feelings on this matter and whyI believe this particular advice didn’t work for Anakin or for me.

This isquite long, personal (kind of, but not really) and it might be triggering soit’s under a “read more”.

It’s allvery pretty and helpful at first glance but once you begin to think about whatit all means or how to put it into practice you realized most of Yoda’s advicesare not helpful at all. One of his most famous quote is “Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you whotransform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leadsto jealousy. The shadow of greed that is. Train yourself to let go… ofeverything you fear to lose.” from ROTS and it’s also the one that bothersme most.

When Ifirst heard it I thought “oh! This isgood advice”. I was a sweet summer child. TBH, part of it could be consideredgood advice, especially the first part. But when you consider context and applicability it all falls apart. Ibroke it down into parts, trying to figure exactly why it doesn’t seat quitewell with me and here’s what I got:

“The fear of loss is apath to the dark side.”

Terribleadvice #1. When someone troubled comes to you with their fears, telling themfear is wrong and evil is never a good idea. You’re only reinforcing theinitial fear. Now the person is also afraid of their own fear as well. Imaginesomeone coming up to you and saying “I’m afraid my mom will die”, now imagineyourself saying “Fear is wrong. Let it go”. Does it really sound like good,healthy advice?

“Fear is a vital response to physical andemotional danger—if we didn’t feel it, we couldn’t protect ourselves fromlegitimate threats. But often we fear situations that are far fromlife-or-death, and thus hang back for no good reason. Traumas or bad experiencescan trigger a fear response within us that is hard to quell. Yet exposingourselves to our personal demons is the best way to move past them.”[x]

Yes, toomuch fear is a problem (in fact, that’s Anakin’s problem) but what’s  wrong here is that the fear is neverrecognized or validated. Being afraid is wrong and it leads to evil. That’s it.There’s not even a hint as how to deal with fear. There’s no “you need to faceyour fears”, or “you need to learn to control your fear”. Nope, all we get hereis: fear is wrong and you shouldn’t feel it.

It’s just awarning (not at all what Anakin was looking for) and an unhelpful advice.

“Death is a naturalpart of life.”

Fairenough. Can’t argue with that. However, I wonder if death affects Yoda (themost detached being in the Galaxy) the same way it affects Anakin and everyoneelse. Yoda is talking about grief, but grief is tied to one’s ability to feellove and empathy. Death is heartbreaking because of the loss attached to it.When you’re not connected to anyone and you’re incapable of deeply empathizingwith people, seeing death as fact of life is much easier. But here Yoda istalking to someone who:

Has a history of fear, emotional     instability, and deep attachments.

Just admitted is talking to some close to him:

Anakin: They are of pain, suffering. Death. Yoda: Yourself you speak of,or someone you know? Anakin: Someone. Yoda: Close to you? Anakin: Yes.

Ourattachments are what makes loss so devastating and personal. When we aretalking about Death as a concept, sure, there’s nothing wrong with reminding usthat Death is natural and unavoidable. But in a more immediate situation, wherethe threat is real (Anakin believes it’s real) it’s a rather cold thing to say.It’s the equivalent of saying “people die” to someone in a life-or-deathsituation. It’s not a lie, but it’s hardly helpfuladvice.  Anakin was not afraid of“conceptual death”. He was a soldier and a former slave. He was aware of deathas a fact of life. He was seeking advice on personal loss. Yoda, being the detached Jedi he was, was incapableof understanding the difference because to him there was no difference. ToYoda, every death is a fact of life, not a personalloss.

Althoughthere’s nothing fundamentally wrong with what Yoda said, his lack of empathymakes him lose some points in my book.

“Rejoice for thosearound you who transform into the Force.”

I’ve seenpeople interpreting this as “be happy this person lived” but imo, that’s notwhat he said at all. Yoda advice here is “be happy the person has gone somewhereelse”.

It’s not abad thing to say if we see “transforming into the Force” as the equivalent of anafterlife. Again, the problem here is not what he is saying but when he issaying it. Yoda is talking to someone who is afraid to lose someone they love,not to someone who has lost someone they love. He’s not talking about someonewho’s dead or dying.

Yoda: Premonitions, premonitions. These visions youhave… Anakin: They are of pain,suffering. Death.

They aretalking the possibility of loss and Yoda is already telling him to let go. Itfits the Jedi mindset but when we consider Anakin’s emotional state or a reallife situation it’s not helpful at all:

Person 1: someone I love might be ill.Person 2: be happy they’ll go to [insert any equivalent to the Force/afterlife here].

Once more,it’s matter of tact and compassion. The problem it’s not what Yoda is saying.It’s when, how and to whom he is saying it. That same sentence “Rejoice forthose around you who transform into the Force” would probably have givenObi-wan great comfort after the loss of Qui-Gon. But here, it doesn’t helpAnakin because Anakin is not ready to let go of his pregnant, healthy and ALIVEwife.

“Mourn them do not.”

This iswhat I was talking about. On paper, great. One practice, terrible. Mourning isa natural process. Dealing with our grief, learning to cope and moving on ishealthy. Pretending you’re unaffected by loss, is not. This a perfect exampleof toxic Jedi behavior. Conceal, don’t feel.

“Miss them do not.”

Seriously?!You can’t even miss them? Does this mean Yoda doesn’t miss all the Jedi Anakinkilled? Is this another example of Yoda’s hypocrisy or he truly doesn’t care?I’m torn on this one.

“Attachment leads to jealousy.”

True. Butthis is quite a big leap. He was talking about death and mourning, and his mindwent straight to jealousy. How does that help Anakin, or anyone else? this is basically,“don’t love anything or anyone, or else you’ll get jealous”. Seriously? Is thisreally good advice to give someone who is afraid of loss. Like I say earlier,this sort of “advice” only adds to the strain the person was already feeling.Not only no real help is being offered, their feelings are being criticized. InAnakin’s case, he’s being told he can’t help his loved one, he’s also beingtold that having a loved one is wrong and that even love itself leads to evil.

“The shadow of greed that is.”

*_____*

“Train yourself to let go of everything youfear to lose.”

Attachment= emotional bond (love)

Attachment-> Jealousy -> greed => dark side (bad/evil)

By Yoda’s(Jedi) logic here, attachment is the cause of all evil. And the only way toprevent evil is to prevent love. To prevent love, you must let go of everythingyou fear to lose. Yoda concludes his advice by saying “you shouldn’t care aboutthis”. You should let go of whoever you love, because love leads to bad things.That’s not good advice, to Anakin or to us. Good, admirable advice, would recognizethe person’s feeling and actually help them to deal with them, or at leastcomfort them.

To be fair,all the unhealthy implications above are not only about Yoda. It’s a about theJedi Order as whole and how their rules and beliefs harmed their own members.Yoda, Obi-wan, Qui-Gon, Mace Windu, Anakin and all the others felt the samethings we do: love, anger, fear, etc. and even if they weren’t attached tosomeone they were attached to the Order and their own ways and ideals. The Jediand their story is the proof this kind of thinking doesn’t work in practice. Ican’t think of a single character (who had contact with Yoda and the Jedi wayof thinking) putting all the above into practice. Here’s one example:

“The fear of loss is apath to the dark side.”

They allfelt fear.

“Fear, anger, hate. Consumed by the dark sidethe Jedi were.” Yoda to Kanan [Rebels]Right before the Jedi Purge, the jedi were so afraid to losing their power andinfluence they were willing to compromise their beliefs, spy on the chancellorand plot against the Senate.

Mace Windu: I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi. The Dark Side of the Force surrounds the Chancellor.Ki-Adi-Mundi: If he does not give up his emergency powers after the destruction of Grievous, then he must be forcibly removed from office.Mace Windu: It will be tricky. The Jedi Council will have to take control of the Senate to ensure a peaceful transition to a new government and a new leadership for the Republic.Yoda: Hmm. To a dark place this line of thought will carry us. Great care we must take.

Yoda’s “words of wisdom” are just more proof of his hypocrisy and damaging mentality that lead to the destruction of the Jedi Order.

#ask #anon #anti-yoda #the yoda problem #sw meta #anakin skywalker #meta: yoda #jedi culture #txt #meta: anakin

[shingekiqts-blog]

Enlightening Cinema

bound McKennaEnlightening CinemaMetaphysical Articles | February 6, 2005... Cinema By depart ... me tell you why you're here. You're here for you experience ... What you know, you can't explain. But you mood it. You felt it your gross life. so that f movies re' Enlightening Cinema away Jed McKenna"Let me instruct you proof you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You twiddle it your entire life. That three r's something bad with the world. You don't recognize what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your thought driving you mad." -Morpheus, The Matrix This isn't a flick review table and it's not comprehensive. It's aloof some notes about a few movies I think are profitable for the purposes of awakening and why, or that ardent and cause not. along tools of understanding, dreadful is generally better then good. dominant themes represented on this list imply to be these: - Heresy - Captive/Captor - Teacher/Student - Nature of self/man. - Death/rebirth. Cataclysm/epiphany. - Untrustworthiness of mind/memories. The exclusive thing I might suggest with observance to picture and album is to raise the material raise to the level situation it becomes of profit to you. Orwell valor have been writing an anti-communist manifesto, but finetune Eighty-Four is much new interesting scrutinize as the struggle inserted man and his confinement. Apocalypse straightaway is about something other than Viet Nam, whereby to Get Ahead modern Advertising is about something more tan rampant commercialism, etc.::: african Beauty"I touch like dive been in a stupor for the past tweet years. And I'm equitable now alert up." dive included American Beauty principally for what's wrong with it. Lester's major death/rebirth transition fair promise, but what move he development to? Backward to teenage crap, not forward in any sense. A fear-based regression. ludicrous car, ludicrous drugs, irrelevant vanity, ludicrous skirt chasing. Not at all redeemed when lesser sees his own silliness near the end or by sappy/smarmy dead gentleman voice-over. breathtaking movie is slightly reclaimed by the presence of the quasi-mystical neighbor daughter and his video footage of a windblown bag:"That's the light I accomplished that there was this entire get-up-and-go behind things, and this incredibly humane force that wanted me to notice there was no logic to be afraid, ever."::: Apocalypse Now"In a fighting there are many point for mercy and delicate action. responsible are crowded moments for ruthless reaction what is often called ruthless what may in many outlook be apart clarity, noticing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it." You'd see that holocaust Now Redux, the director's cut, would be the version to watch, but all the stuff that was justly cut from the original has last wrongly replaced. (Raising the interesting point that administrator and authors often restriction understand the higher utilization of the stories they're telling.) cane with the original past both Redux and gonads Heart of Darkness.Apocalypse immediately is all about the Horror. ac journey of discovery, in the direction of through to the soul of darkness, arriving at this horror. What's the horror? whence do you get there? Why would anyone produce such a journey? enjoy you prepare such a journey? Why or proof not?Note the powerful epiphanies that run the film. The early assassin's character home, ("Sell the house, sell the car, close the kids..."), Dennis Hopper's youthful exuberance, Kurtz's jewel bullet, wizards "...I wasn't even in their squad any more." ::: subsistence There"Spring, summer, autumn, winter... then hop again."A engaging film wrecked by a foolish walking-on-water stunt zigzag on to the end. Without that nonsense the viewer would be handout to think, to decide, to wonder. Instead, the movie zips itself up tight with its adept little dumb-it-down twist. blow the conclusion button during Chauncey is straightening the sapling, before the catastrophic denouement, and it's a fun, splendid film.::: sword Runner"I've notice things you people wouldn't believe. raid ships on fire slight the carry of Orion. I've minded c-beams glitter in the dark adjacent the Tannhauser Gate. All those date will be lost in time like tears in rain. past to die." Were you born quintuple minutes ago? Of plan not, and you have the mind to show it. od'd know if they were artificial implants, because, uh...::: Cast Away"I couldn't square kill I personally the style I asked for to. I had power over nothing."If a guy screams on a vacant island and there's no one to hear him, does he make a sound? breathe it sufficient that he hears it himself? What if not? What's left when you take aside everything?Self deprived bare.This show raises many intriguing query about the substance of self, or lack thereof, and introduce a actual Zen eulogy.::: Dead author SocietyHeresy.::: caroled and Maude"Vice, virtue. It's best not to be too moral... Aim over morality."American Zen, master and disciple. ::: Harvey"For senescence I was smart... I recommend pleasant."Elwood P. Dowd, wisefool. ad sweet depiction of a higher regulation of being misinterpreted as a reduced order of being. exert we notice the remarkable Man during we repartee him? ::: How to Get along In Advertising"Everything I accomplish now makes perfect sense."A thwarted offer for freedom. A decline attempt to overthrow Maya. Enjoy the insanity of the epiphany.::: Joe facing the Volcano"Nobody knows anything, Joe. will take this leap, and we'll see. We'll jump, and wheel see. tatas life, right?"Death and Rebirth. Unlike American Beauty, this is all about moving forward, "away from the things of man."::: brother Facing Southeast (Hombre Mirando Al Sudeste)Watch especially for the ocular poem of a guy crumbling a human scholar into a sink in the time looking for the soul.::: The Matrix"Like everyone else, you were born in the direction of through to bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind." plutos Cave for the people. As allegorically lucid as Joe across Vocano, Pleasantville and leading Wars.::: mint Python's heart of Brian"No, no! attractiveness is a sign that, like Him, we requisite think not of the things of the body, but of the surface and head!"Sacred Cow-tipping at its best."Meaning of Life" also apply on this list.::: finetune Eighty-Four"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, fancy a oxford stamping on a individual faceforever."This show is particular in the sense that it's as good as the book, which is an excessively intimate picture of the captor/captive, Maya/man relationship. Compare this to Moby-Dick or One float Over the Cuckoo's refuge which are superb essay but inoperative movies.::: separate Flew Over the Cuckoo's NestAs with Moby-Dick, Hollywood castrated the book. They stripped it of mine archetypal measure and reduced it to a insignificant pissing race between McMurphy and therapist Ratched. huge entertainment, but for meaningful insight, scan the book.::: Pleasantville"There are some site where the road doesn't go in a circle. There are some point where it keeps on going."A effervescent tale of heresy in which no one is burned at the spike and the new paradigm is, eventually, embraced by all.::: climactic Razor's Edge"The dead look so desperately dead."The razor's edge is what manufacture it interesting; seeing harry shakily offset on the fine streak between what he was and what he's becoming. He is walking the edge between two lives. The check Murray interpretation is a bit unfocused... stick with Tyrone influence or see the book. Maugham probably used Ramana Maharshi as the model for the novel's pure man.::: celebrated Wars"The fury will be with you, always."The premier one, location Luke form the transition from meat to spirit. The hrs Journey.::: dramaturgic Thin glowing Line"Maybe all men receive one immense soul every bit a section of, all faces are the double man."A sublime inquiry toward the intangible nature of man. extra a sad/sweet song tan a historical film.::: climactic Thirteenth Floor"So what're you saying? You're saying that there's another world on top of this one?"Layer after layer. Turtles on top of turtles. ::: Vanilla Sky/Abre Los Ojos"Open your eyes."If you agnate Vanilla Sky, check out the original, the Continental film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). the above-mentioned two films may be the tough of the bunch for our purposes; the warm to an enlightenment allegory.Of course, the interesting material about sophistication is taking there, not being there, and teats what the above-mentioned films are about; provocation from a false reality, opening your eyes. They're not so much round what's authentic as wits not. It's the version of the journey one takes to get to the place where anything, even jumping off a tall building, would be better than continuing to live a lie, alike a beautiful, blissful lie.Note the existence of the true guru, explaining in clear stipulation why bound off the building is the tough thing to do, and waiting dispassionately for it to be done.::: stirring Life"They say that dreams are isolated real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same piece about life?"Wide-ranging philosophical inquiry. Provocative. Amusing. Potentially disruptive.::: Wings of Desire"When the child was a child, it was the second of the above-mentioned questions: Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? at did generation begin and where end space end?"A lovely, intelligent, thought-provoking film. Can the awakened life return to the dreamstate? Would he want to?::: OthersSome other films that reward thoughtful viewing are The diviner of Oz, About Schmidt, What thought May Come, Total Recall, All the Mornings about the universe (Tous lies Matins du Monde), and, of course, many more.-Jed McKenna ::: About the Author"Jed McKenna is an American original." -Lama sierra DasJed McKenna is the author of "Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing" and "Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment", published by Wisefool Press. Coming in 2005: "Spirituality X" and "Jed McKenna's Notebook". Visit WisefoolPress.com to pick up more.

[topmixtrends]

THE FIRST TIME Leslie Jamison goes to an AA meeting, in a church basement, in the dead of an Iowa winter, she imagines one thing she doesn’t need to worry about is the group circle, where each member sips on burnt coffee and takes a turn telling the story of their addiction. After all, she is a professional writer, with an MFA from the most prestigious writing program in the country and a published novel under her belt. She tells stories for a living. But in the middle of rehearsing her tale, one old-time circle member blurts out: “This is boring!” She is chastened, but the challenge implied in the insult — how do we tell the story of addiction and recovery? Is it possible, or even desirable, to tell it well? — becomes the seed around which she will, eventually, layer the pearl of her stunning new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath.

The Recovering recounts Jamison’s tangle with addiction, from the first warm tingle of champagne as an adolescent, through rite-of-passage college blackouts, through the textbook subterfuges of the practiced addict: putting her empties in the neighbor’s trash; brushing her teeth and gums bloody so she doesn’t smell like gin when her boyfriend comes home. But threaded throughout her personal story of recovery is a patient, luminous, encyclopedic exploration of a simple thesis: addiction is inseparable from storytelling — both the stories we get written into against our will, as well as the ones we freely choose. For Jamison, recovery hinges not only on reimagining the narratives she lives by but accepting the limits of narrative itself as a means of salvation.

¤

It is as a young MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that Jamison begins to hitch her nascent drinking habit to the myth of the artist-alcoholic-genius, all the “white scribes and their epic troubles” in whose hallowed footsteps she and her Iowa cohort follow: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Denis Johnson. These men drank themselves silly, bloody, bawling, cracked; drank until they seeped from all their orifices, until their livers bloated, visible beneath the skin of their tender bellies. And yet they prized their descent into darkness as the price to be paid for coming face-to-face with the abyss — awful, baleful, sacred — whose truths they carried back like treasures from the deep to their more timid, earth-bound fellows. They were “diplomat[s] from the bleakest reaches of their own wrecked lives,” bearing “glorious vision[s] of what it meant to be broken.” Steeped in such mythology, wellness could only savor of bourgeois anti-climax. “What role could sobriety possibly play in that glorious arc of blaze and rot?” Jamison wonders.

Nor was it only writers who were attracted by “the allure of the tortured artist spinning darkness into gold.” Literary critics, professors, editors demanded it, as well. Jamison recounts that in 1967, Life magazine ran a profile of Berryman entitled “Whiskey and Ink.” The article featured images of the grizzled poet dispensing wisdom from behind a frothy beer mug in Dublin pubs. “Whiskey and ink,” the text ran, “These are the fluids John Berryman needs […] to survive and describe the thing that sets him apart from other men and even from other poets: his uncommonly, almost maddeningly penetrating awareness of the fact of human mortality.” When Raymond Carver finally got sober in 1977, he started writing stories that included not only the wreckage of drink but, tentatively, gestures toward empathy, hope, second chances. But when he sent the stories to his editor Gordon Lish in 1980, Lish edited out fully half of the prose. It smacked of sentimentality, lacked the signature “bleakness” of Carver’s pre-sobriety oeuvre, he complained.

The truth of addiction, Jamison comes to know — and as every addict, in her more honest moments, knows — is that it is quite simply boring, frequently buffoonish. Addiction “grinds down […] to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.” Anyone who believes that orphic wisdom is somehow a by-product of the cycle, she notes dryly, clearly “hasn’t spent years telling the same lies to liquor-store clerks.” She cites as confirmation Carole Angier, Jean Rhys’s biographer. A historian practiced in the art of finding narrative arcs, even Angier eventually had to admit defeat in tracing the peripatetic, drunken course of her subject’s life. “Jean’s life […] really did seem to be the same few scenes re-enacted over and over,” she concedes.

Jamison learns to reject the sham logic of endlessly generative, creative addiction. Still, when she finally decides to get sober, everything about the AA meetings chafes against her artist’s sensibility; is reminiscent, in an odd way, of the monotony of addiction itself. AA has its own way of fetishizing the recycled with its attachment to cliché (“Take it one day at a time”; “We have to quit playing God”), the unadorned ordinariness and sameness of the stories. Both in its lived experience and as a foundation for art, sobriety is brittle and tedious. It substitutes a narrative flat-line for the breathless plot pivots of inebriation. As she struggles to stay dry, Jamison sets out on the trail of addict writers turned sober, rifling through archives to find in their life stories — as well as the stories they committed to paper — the narrative potential of recovery. A kind of displaced thirst.

¤

Often, she is disappointed. Sober writing can be bad writing — abstract, or didactic, or sentimental. During one of his many attempts at getting clean, John Berryman began sketching the outlines of a new novel tentatively entitled Recovery. In the margins of an AA pamphlet Jamison unearths in Berryman’s archive, next to the question, “What is the real importance of me among 500,000 AAs?” Berryman had scribbled: “1/500,000th.” The notes for Recovery, not surprisingly, follow its addict protagonist Dr. Severance in his quest to climb outside of his ego, to imagine himself, “as one tiny numerator, a blocked self, above the larger denominator of a community,” as Jamison glosses it. The result is saccharine. When Severance manages to convince a fellow addict to give up his self-loathing obsession with having disappointed his dead father, Berryman sketches the scene: “Cheers from everybody, general exultation, universal relief and joy. Severance felt triumphant.” In the end, Berryman was never able to finish the book. He relapsed, and finally, on January 7, 1972, jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge at the University of Minnesota.

Jamison eventually finds better models for her own experience of recovery, which is messier than Berryman’s fictional “cheers and exultation.” In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Jamison is relieved to find a story that finally makes her “thrill toward wellness,” rather than rooting for the hero to get drunk again. Don Gately’s sobriety in the novel wasn’t “stolid or pedantic; it was palpable and crackling and absurd.” Similarly, she finds that Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter “resists the burden of providing a seamless arc,” making room for stammering and relapse. In fact, Stringer relapsed while writing the book, proof if ever it were needed that “his story won’t be over, even after it gets told.” Part of getting ready for recovery, Jamison concludes, is “admitting that you can’t see the end of it.”

This ruthless, patient questioning of the narrative structures by which we make sense of the experience of suffering — where story arcs fall short, where they substitute false certainty for mystery, where they act as cover for more unpalatable or unspeakable truths — is ultimately the most important contribution of Jamison’s memoir, and deepens themes first explored in her earlier, celebrated book of essays, The Empathy Exams. One of the most searing pieces in that collection is “Devil’s Bait,” a reported essay about patients suffering from Morgellons disease. Morgellons is a mystery illness whose signature symptom is “formication,” or the sensation of crawling insects under the skin, and the periodic eruption of what sufferers describe as “fibers” from their sores. Yet mainstream medicine and the CDC have not found objective evidence of the disease. Morgellons patients (or “Morgies,” as they call themselves) suffer doubly as their symptoms are dismissed by the medical establishment as “nothing”: fabrication, mental illness, hypochondria.

Jamison attends the Morgellons Conference in Austin, Texas, where sufferers gather annually to swap medical tips and leads, and to simply share their stories. She finds its denizens pocked and scarred not so much by the disease they believe they have, as by their persistent efforts to try — but unsuccessfully — excavate the wriggling evidence of pain from their bodies. As one attendee tells Jamison, “Some of these things I’m trying to get out, it’s like they move away from me.”

Jamison can relate. While on a trip to Bolivia, she is bitten on the ankle by a botfly, which lays eggs in its host. The wriggling she feels under her skin is finally validated when, weeks later, a doctor pulls a worm — “the size of a fingernail clipping and the color of dirty snow, covered with tiny black teeth that looked like fuzz” out of her flesh. In the days afterward she continues to feel a phantom wriggling; spends hours poking and prodding her wound, scouring “its ragged edges and possible traces of parasitic life.” But where her affliction is stamped as real — she has the tweezed-out larva to prove it — “morgies” lack the objective evidence to support their claim to suffering.

“Devil’s Bait” thus offers a study-in-miniature of themes Jamison develops more fully in her memoir: that narratives (in this case, medical diagnoses) offer containment and closure, and that these narratives also routinely fail or betray the suffering that begs to be told. The Morgellons diagnosis, Jamison observes, “offers an explanation, a container, and a community,” granting “some shape or substance to a discontent that might otherwise feel endless.” And yet the disease lacks a cure, or even official medical recognition, which merely substitutes one open-endedness for another. Once you “know” what you “are,” where do you go from there? “The trouble,” Jamison concludes, “ends up feeling endless either way.”

Jamison circles back to the metaphor of the botfly in The Recovering, now repurposed to reflect on the pain of addiction. The psychiatric-medical drive to find the sources of addiction in brain chemistry, or childhood trauma, or genotype can constitute its own form of wishful storytelling, one that reduces the complexity of causality. It holds out hope for recovering something tangible to isolate under the microscope as a cause — when in fact what we are often stuck with are the rippling effects of an initial cause that may or may not actually be “there.” And even supposing one does dig back into the past — of one’s cells, of one’s childhood — to uncover the source of the malady, knowing doesn’t cure it. “I’d parsed my motivations in a thousand sincere conversations,” Jamison notes, “and all my self-understanding hadn’t granted me any release from compulsion.”

Respect for this unknown x is ultimately what Jamison comes to prize in recovery narratives, and she recognizes herself most clearly in those stories — whether literary or medical — that reject the “syllogisms of cause,” the pretension that one might “source the fabric of the poison coat.” There is no before/after, no “If I do x, I get y,” or “If I find x, then I know y.” In place of the closed-book satisfaction of what she calls “contract logic,” she finds instead the openness of an ongoing story: the endlessness, maddening, and yet ultimately grounding AA mantra one day at a time. In the back pages of Berryman’s notebook for Recovery, Jamison discovers a fairy tale he wrote with his daughter, entitled “The Hunter in the Forest.” A hunter gets lost in the woods; he is captured by two hungry bears and locked in a cage, where he falls asleep. Berryman and his daughter wrote three alternative endings for the story, each offering some form of narrative closure: the hunter breaks out and kills the bears; or he feels remorse for trying to kill them; or he befriends them. But the fourth ending, annotated in the child’s scrawl as “Real Ending,” is much more ambiguous: “The hunter awakened and said, ‘Well?’”

The open-endedness of narrative is one lesson Jamison takes away from recovery. Another is the way each story of personal pain is never truly private, but always inscribed into the wider sphere of public meaning: the gendered, classed, and racialized social narratives that determine in advance whose pain counts, and whose doesn’t. Part of the reason Jamison is able to tear herself away from the idea of art as the product of “beautiful wreckage” is that the protagonists in this age-old story are so relentlessly male. Where drunk male writers are scripted as stoic and selfless, “rogue silhouettes,” their drunk female peers are cast as messy, sad, failed mothers (generating words, a spurious substitute for children).

Jamison devotes a good portion of the book’s early chapters to excavating the intertwined medical and legal history of addiction in the United States, and the ambivalence with which it has been treated: addicts are alternatively ill or criminal, victims or perpetrators, sometimes both. Most often, the placement of an addiction on the spectrum from regrettable illness to criminal deviance is determined by skin color. “It took me years to understand that my interior had never been interior — that my relationship to my own pain, a relationship that felt essentially private, was not private at all,” she writes. “It owed its existence to narratives that made it very possible for a white girl to hurt,” casting her addiction as “benign, pitiable,” even “interesting.” She contrasts this narrative leisure with the constraints of the poor or the person of color, whose addiction has always been cast as nefarious, from the specter of “oriental” opium dens in the early part of the century, through the explicitly raced crack moms and baseheads of Reagan’s War on Drugs, through our modern epoch’s mass incarceration fueled by drug convictions. She cites a 1995 survey in which respondents were asked to close their eyes, “envision a drug user,” and then give a description; ninety-five percent pictured someone black. “This hypothetical drug user was the product of decades of effective storytelling,” Jamison notes.

The story of Billie Holiday floats through the pages of Jamison’s memoir like a recurring blue note, an emblem for the way the addict’s life — especially if she is poor and black — is scripted by forces outside her control. Holiday was lauded by New York’s literati for her astonishing ability to alchemize pain into beauty; New York Review of Books essayist Elizabeth Hardwick confessed herself enchanted by the singer’s “luminous self-destruction.” At the very same time, Holiday became a prime target for Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Narcotics Bureau in the 1940s, who saw her as a perfect black addict-villain for his anti-drug crusade. He had her tracked and arrested on several occasions, including a 1947 conviction that sent her to prison for one year. Billie Holliday’s story is a brutal reminder of the prison-house of narrative, quite literally. When she was checked into New York’s Metropolitan Hospital at the age of 44, dying from cirrhosis of the liver, Anslinger’s narcotics agents were still on her trail. “You watch, baby,” she confided to a friend. “They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.” And they did: they handcuffed her to the headboard where, six weeks later, she died.

¤

In the end, it is by articulating a collective “we” that, without reducing suffering to sameness, Jamison discovers an adequate narrative form for the story she has to tell, a tunnel out of “the claustrophobic crawl space of the self.” She had been looking for a very specific kind of beauty in the art of addiction and recovery, a beauty modeled on the modernist obsession with autonomy (“art for art’s sake”) and originality (“Make it new!”). But the narrative work done in AA meetings turns this model on its head: sameness, or what members call the “resonance” between stories, is precisely the point. In AA, she learns that “a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again. Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite of it.” AA stories are not necessarily beautiful, but that doesn’t mean they do not, in their own way, perform a function often attributed to art: to alchemize pain into healing. Jamison suggests that perhaps there can be beauty in chorus, in the mundane but also transcendence of repetition. That anonymity — that most antithetical of values in the modernist canon — can shine with its own species of beauty. What matters is less the particularities of each individual voice and more the polyphony of the voices combined to hold one another up, and to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

The irony is, of course, that Jamison’s 500-page narrative is nothing if not classically beautiful: implausibly so, almost ludicrously consistent in its fierce freshness and poetry from page to page to page. Her language manages somehow to be simultaneously lush and piercing. It is richly imaged, delighting the senses with its descriptive texture. Jamison describes her time in a Nicaraguan market, threading her way through “street vendors selling fried dough and dishwashers from tarp-covered stalls clustered in a system of old storm drains, hawking tubs of lizard-skinned custard apples and pale and salty cheese in sweating blocks the size of dollhouses.” But just as the enumerative descriptive bounty of her prose seems that it might flood the narrative, she pivots to an ongoing debate about Jean Rhys, about whether her “monstrous” life was worth the art she produced. Cutting through the rich street scene with the steely tip of a perfectly turned philosophical observation, hard and compact as an aphorism, Jamison writes, “Her life was. The work is. We can’t trade either back. There’s no objective metric for how much brilliance might be required to redeem a life of damage — and no ratio that justifies the conversion.”

There is some repetition and overlap in the weave of the narrative, its rowdy and eclectic cast of characters, from narc agents to jazz singers to psychiatrists to gin-blind poets, popping in and out at unexpected intervals. A story line is taken up, dropped, then revisited again just when the reader had begun to let it go. But if this ruminative, polyphonic mode may be cited by some as a weakness of the book, it is also necessarily its greatest strength. It embodies the aesthetic of resonance, of echo and call and response, that Jamison finds best fits the collective story of addiction. It mimics the rhythms of recovery itself: two steps forward, one step back; recovery and relapse; commitment and abandonment, then commitment (again?) again.

¤

Ellen Wayland-Smith is an author and associate professor of Writing at The University of Southern California. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Signature Reads, Catapult, The Millions, and Longreads.

The post (Again?) Again: Reading Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[mathloverandteacher-blog]

Curriculum Building 101?

As part of a new, innovative STEM high school adopting a new math curriculum (integrated approach versus traditional), I honestly didn’t know where to start when I was told that I was going to build the curriculum from scratch. On one hand, this was part of the reason I took the job. I know whatever math class I’m going to teach, I’m going to do everything I can to revamp it so that it doesn’t look like your typical lecture and I do-we do-you do. If I am going to go through the effort of changing everything I know of high school math and make it more relevant and more truthful (I will get to that later), I might as well be in a school that supports the idea of switching things up. I am in a unique position where the director of the school, principal, and district math supervisor trust and support me in whatever direction I chose to take. With great power comes great responsibility.

But on the other hand, what?? I only graduated from college with my undergraduate degree eight months ago! What were they thinking, hiring someone so new to the game to start something fresh? I know high school math like the back of my hand, but I honestly don’t know the standards and PARCC expectations of those standards that well. I student taught Algebra 1 and 2, but this integrated math thing - it’s so new. I don’t even know how it’s supposed to look like though I conceptually understand that it’s meant to INTEGRATE math.

Unfortunately, the only curriculum maps I have found for Integrated math doesn’t really integrate math. I love the idea of project based learning (PBL) but their curriculum isn’t integrated... it’s just expedited. Numbers, algebra, function, geometry, and statistics are literally chunked into units like they are separate entities living side by side. Vision Project has great activities that introduce topics (honestly, I think a kid could teach themselves math painlessly just by following the curriculum), but it’s also split by modules that separate the maths. Aside from those two resources, I have stalked other schools and their curriculum maps, but they’re all the same. Algebra is separated from geometry which is separated from statistics which is separated from number sense. How integrated is that?

Maybe it’s because I’m stubborn and I don't want people to criticize my lack of integration despite the course name of “integrated”, but I cannot do that. I cannot teach a curriculum that does not say what it claims to be! But mostly, I think it’s because I LOVE math. Why in the world would I make math seem like a hot mess of randomness when it is a beautiful discovery of human intellect?

So what do I do?

I literally find the standards addressed in each course (standards are law, in case you’re not familiar with how the education system works), and I literally mix it all up. I was going to use post it notes or index cards so I could shuffle all the standards around, but I found that stormboard does the function just fine.

Is there a method to the madness? It is 100% NOT backed up by research. Most of my math peers love the structure and organization of textbooks (I do too- I always believed that a good textbook was infinitely more necessary than a good professor when picking my courses in college), but this was deliberately ruining the simple order that these standards were placed in. Let stubbornness and zeal take hold, because I am building a new curriculum from scratch and I will make it beautiful!

For integrated math 1 (IM1), I am going to start off with statistical modeling and move into functions. For IM2, an algebra 1 review (because it’s necessary) and writing equations based on word problems, graphs, tables, etc.

I know that’s an extremely vague way to explain what’s going on but I think I will  post what happens as it happens. Those lessons are going to happen in two weeks after the initial beginning lessons (what I’m calling Unit 0.5) so I don’t want to talk about them too much right now.

So before I close for tonight, I just have to elaborate on what I mean by the lack of truth of math in our education.

For starters, people believe that math is all about numbers. That word problems are the only way to connect math to everyday life. That math in projects (if done right) will lead to using statistics or algebra in a way that pretty much spells out engineering.

Well, that couldn’t be more wrong. Math is so much larger than that. One of my favorite youtube videos, The Map of Maths, explains the different areas of math. To put it simply, I believe math is the DISCOVERY of truth, the JUSTIFICATION (in the form of proofs) of these truths, and the USE of this truth (application). 

How much do schools teach us about math? Some schools are moving into discovery/ exploration activities, but most classes don’t. Proofs? Do students even see a glimmer of truth outside of geometry? Students are told, it’s been found and it’s right --- just use it for this problem. God, no! How dare schools limit the use of math to minimal application?

How is it that students are not taught LOGIC in school? Even basic truth tables don’t show up. Why don’t students learn that Ancient Greek philosophers were often mathematicians because they were the ones THINKING? Seriously... if there’s one purpose for teaching math in school, it is for students to learn and practice how to logically think. Yet many classes avoid thinking and tell students exactly how to follow directions and replicate that. If you want to work in a factory, sure. If you’re a little more creative with product, maybe you’ll become an engineer. But that kind of thinking will never lead you to become a true lover of mathematics.

And that’s why I say math is not represented truthfully in schools. It’s been limited to a little thing that is full of consequences if you’re not good at it. You might not even know why people make such a big deal about it. I mean, even the adults that say, “Math is every where!” can barely give you a good enough reason why to genuinely believe that because they are forcing their opinions on you instead of actually telling you the truth (probably because their education of math is also limited and they don’t know for themselves either).

Anyway. New curriculum. Integrated math. It’s going to happen. I’m going to make it happen. Hopefully it goes well

#math #mathematics #teaching #education #firstyear #curriculum #planning #truth #school #integratedmath #challenge #teacher #firstyearteacher #stem #stemschool #highschool

[elliottelderfmp]

SCRIPT REDRAFT

Who are you?

 What do you see in front of you right now?

 What do you hear?

 What did you do yesterday?

 What if I told you that technically, there’s really no way to know any of it’s true.

 TITLE CARD (SYNC W MUSIC)

 The process of Cartesian or hyperbolic doubt was created with the intention of finding out infallible knowledge. Hyperbolic doubt does not necessarily intend to prove anything but instead points out a lack of proof in concepts that we commonly accept as true.

 In a world of fake news and a post truths in our ultra-sensationalist media, I encourage us as thinkers to be more inquisitive and sceptical concerning information presented to us. The following chain of arguments attempt to dismantle the foundational truths that we as humans assume to be correct.

 In order to perform this philosophical process one must assume that he or she can only know things if they are guaranteed to be true and must break these truths down into smaller units. These smaller units must be proven to be correct first before we can acknowledge anything above to be valid.

 Creator of this approach, Mathematician and father of modern philosophy, Renee Descartes illustrated that at the very foundational level, our grounds for reasoning and gaining any knowledge are flimsy. For the purpose of this short venture we are to assume the definition of knowledge to be something which is a justified, true, belief, although this has been questioned and debated over

.

 Descartes recognised that one of the “smaller units” we must explore when questioning the validity of the knowledge we gain is that which is absorbed from the external world. Through our eyes, mouths, ears, noses and fingers we are believed to gain knowledge, see objects, hear music and feel textures. This form of knowledge is known as aposteriori knowledge, knowledge gained after experience – perception. In his writings in “meditiations” and Through hyperbolic doubt Descartes questioned this commonly accepted idea posing the idea that an evil demon could be tampering with our minds, deceiving us of what is infront of us.

 One may question the likeliness of this absurd suggestion, however this undermines the intention of Descartes’ Hyperbolic doubt. He isn’t posing the idea that this is necessarily happening, however he simply points out that there is no proof that this isn’t happening. We therefore must not take for granted that “we perceive the external world as it exists” to be a true belief.

 Among popular theories of realist perception stands two, both arguing that the external world exist but differ in the form of their explanation of how we perceive it.

 Direct realists state that we perceive the external world in a very straightforward way, aligning with common sense. Our eyes exist sort of like windows to our minds eye, showing us the external world as it exists.

 But it doesn’t.

 One can use examples Descartes provides to disprove this theory. The existence of illusions undermine the validity of this common sense view: How can our eyes exist as windows if there is a disconnect between what exists in the external world and what our mind’s eye perceives. This disconnect can be taken further though.

   Perceptual variation is the idea that between different humans we perceive, or have no proof that we don’t perceive the world differently from one another. This can be as simple as a tree being bigger from my perspective than you who stands far away to our vision of colour being completely non resembling in our minds when compared.

 A response to which would be to take up the other realist view in perception: Indirect realism. Similarly to direct realists, indirect realists argue that the external world does indeed exist, we just perceive a somewhat warped version of our world. Where direct realists believe the eyes are windows, indirect realists argue that the eyes exist more like a camera, providing sense data to our minds eye through an indirect feed. We in a sense view the world from inside our heads through a camera feed.

 This overcomes issues with the disconnect between perception and existence in the external world as all that is happening is that our cameras are showing a disturbed or distorted feed. This means that the sense data itself is although an incorrect representation of the world, we cannot deny that the representation exists, its infallible because we are all experiencing sense data, its just that sometimes some properties that are being represented are inaccurate, such as Descartes’ example of the oar bent in water.

 However now there is a disconnect between an external world and our perception of it, one can begin to question if there is a need or even a valid explanation for an external world at all.

 Taking the indirect realist approach takes us down a spiral into cluelessness

 The following chain of arguments, show that we in fact cannot know anything for certain:

  The past

“Yesterday I had toast”

According to Descartes waves of doubt we can’t be certain our minds are giving us correct information as we have no proof that an evil demon is not existing in our heads tampering with thoughts memories.

 Here’s a thought experiment:

How can you prove to yourself that have not just come into existence this exact second and every memory you have ever had up to this point is an illusion. Everything and everyone has suddenly snapped into existence and all prior events are fictional memories placed into everyone’s brain.

 You simply can’t.

Logic

“Two plus two = four”

 Philosopher Hume made the potent argument in Hume’s fork that logic is not a process of gaining information but instead recycling previous information (stemming from perception – which as discussed cannot be trusted .

The self

COUNTER TO WAVES OF DOUBT: COGITO

the fact I am able to question a demon in my head shows that I have a mind able to think and use logic surely?

No: Hume - Using the process of doubting only shows that “something is being thought” not necessarily that we as mind exist as a thinking thing able to perform logic and the past, we never can KNOW identity only thoughts (which may not even be true).

The future

“Tomorrow I shall have toast”

Hume argues that we cannot predict or use induction to guess anything due to our lack of perception of causation. 

If someone hits a billiard ball into another and the other ball moves.

We do not perceive ball one to CAUSE ball two to move but instead we only perceive ball one moving into ball two and the separate event of ball two moving. Now of course one could repeat it, hit ten thousand ball ones into ball twos and this would cause us to make the connection that one event (ball 1 moving) leads to another event (ball 2 moving) however we never perceive the cause and effect, we simply create that link in our minds. Thus we cannot KNOW the cause and effect as a necessary certain truth : therefore we cannot know or predict anything in the future as certain knowledge.

 The external world

“Toast exists infront of me in the external world”

There’s no proof the external world exists, Descartes waves of doubt, how do we know an evil demon isn’t tricking us and our perceptions, even if we perceive the world indirectly, so what if we have a camera feed to our minds, that doesn’t show that the camera isn’t simply showing us trick images that hold no representation of the external world.

This leads us to a theory known as idealism which argues that we simply exist as minds alone.

 The external world does not exist externally but instead in our minds.

Other people have minds

However this train of thought then leaves you with no proof that other humans have minds at all. If we cannot trust perceptions of the external world and must therefore ditch it, why must we believe that the humans in it too hold a mind as we do?

 This very lonely existence is known as the theory of solipsism.

So what do we know exactly?

All we can know for certain are our current sense impressions that our mind’s eye views, whether this correlates to an external world we simply don’t know.

 This doesn’t mean that everything we see is true, as we have shown memory isn’t something we know or trust.

 So the only thing we know for absolute certain is that we are currently perceiving mental images to the exact millisecond, not necessarily that these images correlate to an external existence, all we can know is that we as humans can “feel”.

Yet this doesn’t include past or future feelings  by the time you have finished hearing this very sentence, the validity of the sentence you just heard can’t be trusted.

All we can know for certain is “my mind is seeing this thing right now”. Nothing more, nothing less. We are alone in our heads seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling things, and we have no proof that there’s anything beyond that.

 HYPERBOLIC DOUBT.­­

 it gets progressively notier as we go, its too long and wordy, must cut down sections of less imact and interest that other sections don’t rely on.

#x

[stevejehovahbible]

Genesis 15

1 After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward. God gives Abram mad props for his pious display in front of the magic priest king man Melchizedek, and tells him not to worry about giving up all the plunder, because He totally has Abram’s back. It doesn’t explain why he would be worried in the first place, because he was a rich man at the BEGINNING of the story. Let’s just shrug off that obvious logical blunder and plod on. I sense the rest of this story is going to be a cornucopia of nonsense, so we’ll have a lot to get through.

2  And Abram said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? 3  And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir. He can't believe he’s going to have to leave all his vast wealth to a man from Damascus, instead of his own children. Because people that aren’t from this special bloodline are less than people. But that’s not disturbing at all because God God Jesus God Reasons Magic God ShutUpWithYourLogicYouHeretic!!! Notice that Abram isn’t happy with God’s repeated assertions that have no backing evidence. He is an old man, and God has promised to make him the father of a master race (which totally is different from that Hitler idea that is exactly the same in every way because God said it was ok), but he has no children. Abram wants more than empty words, which we’ll soon find out is a BAD thing? Asking for proof leads to trouble. Bible lessons 101. 4  And, behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir. 100% literal translation: “You won’t have to leave your money to that commoner, who is obviously beneath you and doesn’t deserve any of your wealth! You’re going to crap out a butt baby from your intestines.” It’s actually saying that it will be his own son that he loves, as the seat of emotions in those days was the bowels. It’s like saying “your ACTUAL son, that you love with all your heart, will be your heir.” But for strict biblical literalists... well... I guess they think God is going to bring one of Abram’s turds to life.  5  And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be. This song and dance again? Look at the stars Simba! The great master race of the future looks down on us from those stars. So whenever you feel alone, just remember that those kings will always be there to guide you, and so will I. Now go kill that guy for picking up a stick on Saturday. I have spoken. 6  And he believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness. Belief is not a moral action. This is yet ANOTHER example of the bible attempting to validate itself in an illogical way, to instill fear into those reading it. If belief is righteousness, than disbelief is wickedness. It attempts to make the simple act of doubting a “sin.” When this nonsense is taught to children, it subtly programs their brains to accept that trust in God is automatically good, and questioning God is automatically bad. Now where have I heard that before? *cough* mind pattern programing *cough* cult psycology *cough* it’s exactly the was dictators and despots keep their subjects in line *cough cough* never question the great leader *cough*... Sorry... scratchy throat. Now where HAVE I heard that before? Nevermind. So, there’s another issue I’d like to bring up here that is a MAJOR problem in religion. The recycling of bad arguments. The apostle Paul cites this verse multiple times (Romans 4, verses 3, 9, and 22, Galatians 3:6, James 2:23) as EVIDENCE of justification by faith. The assertion is made, unchallenged, and therefore accepted as viable evidence of reality. Simply because Moses wrote that God said “Faith = Awesome” does not make that a reality. Citing that as hard evidence to a further claim you’re attempting to make is automatically fallacious reasoning.

“Say, Bob, did you know that cats can fly?” “Really Jim? How? I’ve never seen a flying cat Jim.” “That’s really not important Bob. Just trust me. Cats can fly.” “Well, I guess I’ll just chose to believe you Jim.” “Excellent choice Bob. Because belief is clearly a choice.” *Months later, Jim throws a cat over a roof with a cat-apult (*snicker*) and tells Bob that his beliefs have been vindicated! Just look at the evidence! Decades later, a scientist uses Jim’s belief in flighted cats, and Bob’s support of that belief to write a law saying all cat owners must get their cat’s wings clipped, or they’ll be shot for international super-treason or something. Cats don’t have wings, so all cat owners are killed. Dogs everywhere high five and sip their tennis ball flavored martinis. In a surprise MNightShamalablahmanon twist ending, Jim was really a dog in an elaborate disguise all along!

7  And he said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it. In case you forgot, let me remind you again. Apparently people in bible times all had severe short term memory loss and needed to be told the same things over and over. “Hey, remember this land I gave you twice already...? Guess what? I brought you here to give it to you. Neat, huh?” Ownership of THIS land is super-duper important for some reason. You’d think God would tell Abram that owning land isn’t really something he should strive for, as it is ultimately materialistic and not a very high minded obsession to have. But He never does.  Instead, He continues to tell Abram that he’s God’s favorite, and that Abram’s kids will totally OWN this patch of earth just because God said so. Abram is the father of the Prosperity Gospel here, and God encourages him EVERY step of the way. Not a very godlike thing to do, but we should expect no less from this character. It fits with everything else He’s done so far.

8  And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? Again, Abram is a BAD believer, because he’s asking for confirmation. This is actually something believers should do a little more. Ask for confirmation. Make sure the things you believe are grounded in reality. It’s a radical idea, I know. Thousands of years later, it’s still kind of seen as a fringe idea within the religious community at large. I’m hoping it becomes more mainstream in the future. 9  And he said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon. “You want proof? Kill some animals for me. I don’t just give proof for free! I need to see something suffer and die first. Get with the program Abram!” 10  And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not. Abram kills a cow, a goat, and a sheep and splits them into pieces. Why? Well, because this is an ancient ritualistic custom. Here’s how it works: Two people make an agreement. They slice animals in half, and then walk between the separated halves to symbolically affirm that the same should happen to them if they break their end of the bargain. This ritual is also mentioned in Jeremiah 34. Sounds like the perfect thing for a timeless, eternal, all powerful being to endorse and participate in, right?  11  And when the fowls came down upon the carcases, Abram drove them away. 12  And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. In essence, Abram is unsure if he can trust the voices in his head about getting this land for his posterity, so he sets up a primitive version of a contract and waits - fully expecting God to physically appear and “sign” it by walking through the dead animals with him. But God doesn’t show, and he spends the day shooing away vultures from the rotting carcasses until he FALLS ASLEEP. That’s right. As with ALL proof offered by believers, the justification for it is 100% in his mind. Nothing happened to the dead animals. God didn’t physically appear. Abram asked for evidence and got NONE, so he made some up in his own head while he slept. For some reason, believers don’t balk at this. I’ll never understand why. There’s another minor thing to address here. I’ve seen it postulated by more than a few apologists that God put Abram to sleep BECAUSE there was no promise on Abram’s part, and he didn’t need to walk through the dead animals. As if that makes a lick of sense. The argument that real proof wasn't offered, just something in his sleeping mind, because of a technicality in the contract. God couldn’t show up physically and offer real proof, because Abram didn’t owe him anything. How does that make any sense at all?       13  And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; 14  And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. 15  And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. 16  But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. All written down after the fact, by someone who wasn’t there. The words of God in a dream are recorded IN QUOTES by someone writing in generations later, after the supposed promises and prophesy made by God have already come to pass. How very convenient. 17  And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. Ok, so there’s two options here. Verse 12 says, “And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram,” so he is asleep here. Did the smoking furnace and burning lamp pass through the dead animals in his dream? Because that’s REALLY stupid. Or, did this even happen physically with no one present to witness it except a sleeping old man - but it’s recorded as an actual event that happened anyway. Because thats somehow even MORE stupid than the first option. Much like the snake in the Garden of Eden, we’re supposed to extrapolate from the story that the furnace and the lamp are symbols of God, just like the Snake was a representation of the Devil. The text doesn’t actually explicitly say this, and there’s no reason to automatically jump to that conclusion, but the apologists are going to jump anyway. It’s their nature. 18  In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: 19  The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, 20  And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, 21  And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. God promises again, without any actual evidence - that he’s going to give the land to Abram’s descendants, AND further promises that they’ll overthrow all the various “Ites” that dwell there. Because Moses wants the people to believe that God said all this. And they do. Without any evidence. And in thousands of years, nothing there has changed. People still believe things, just because someone tells them God said it.  

#Steve Jehovah #newer testament #Bible #bible study #logic #God #Religion #atheism