#but it's mostly to highlight a bigger issue that exists

[11-eyed-rook]

Accessible doesn't mean "for lazy people".

I can't express how frustrating it is that, so many times on so many platforms I've seen various posts, especially videos, which showcase an item that makes a random task easier (or possible at all) to do (such as onion/garlic dicers of all sorts, or items that can be used with one hand, or even the tools that make it easier to put socks on), and every time the comments section is filled with angry boomers (mostly boomers), who don't see past the concept of "if only people stopped being lazy" or "this is useless, we already have [less accessible tool/item], who needs this?!".

Just because something isn't needed/useful to you, doesn't mean somebody else doesn't benefit from the accessibility (or even just the convenience itself).

To give a few examples of what I mean:

The sock tools can help a lot of people with mobility limitations, and that can also include anybody going through pregnancy as well, to put on socks AT ALL. You don't even "need to be disabled" to benefit from stuff like this, ffs.

Onion/garlic dicers make it possible to quickly cut up food items that otherwise may be difficult (or even impossible) for people with certain disabilities or other difficulties (I've always found it a bit hard to dice/cut certain food items (ESPECIALLY smaller ones), so tools like this are very helpful and achieve a consistent result).

Noise-cancelling headphones help me, by blocking out the noise of traffic, which is very overwhelming to me, not just because I experience sensory overloads, but because I have tinnitus and extremely loud noises are very overwhelming to me. Regular headphones don't accomplish the same thing for me, not to the level my noise-cancelling ones do anyway, and I can still listen to music along the way (my headphones also have a mode that allow for me to still hear peoples' voices relatively well, whilst muffling traffic, engine noises, etc.).

I wear a backpack instead of using a pretty shoulder bag for carrying heavier items, because one of my shoulders is slightly deformed since birth, and because both my shoulders get some of the worst of my joint pain (whenever it does happen, which is often enough), whereas the backpack I have, is nicely padded and easy to organize too. I've seen people online mock adults using backpacks, I still don't understand why though??? I didn't even know people made fun of adults who use backpacks. I still want to hope those weren't meant to be real takes...

I may not look like I "need one", but I do sometimes use a cane to help myself move up/down stairs especially, since I have issues with joint pain, and especially since my foot injury from earlier this year (the pain of which still pops up now and then, and it's not great). People look at me weird when I randomly take out my foldable cane and then put it away after a while. My joint pain comes and goes, and when I don't need my cane, I don't use it. My own father keeps commenting on how I'm "too young to be using a cane". I'm 28, I've been using it for a handful of years now, disability doesn't know age.

Let me repeat myself. DISABILITY DOES NOT KNOW AGE.

Just because you might not use a wheelchair-accessible ramp, doesn't mean it's not needed/useful for anybody without a wheelchair. Even people with bicycles/scooters/baby strollers etc. can benefit from them, and for me, it's easier to walk up the ramps rather than using stairs, as using stairs tends to put additional stress on my already-injured foot, whereas a ramp doesn't require me to put that stress on my foot, so walking is easier for me, even if it is just those 'few handfuls of steps" or whatever.

In a separate post, I touched upon the kind of ableism I've witnessed in certain crafting communities, and how gatekeeping can very quickly become synonymous with ableism, and how that can affect something like a hobby. Everything I said there, applies to this post, too. If you're interested, feel free to read. If not - it's much of what I said here, but specifically regarding crafting communities and how ignorant/ableist people can be at times, and how that can affect people.

So many tools exist to help with certain tasks, to make some stuff doable at all, to add accessibility to an otherwise difficult task for any particular person, and so much of it is just seen as "useless" or "for the lazy people", or there's some aspect of aggressive gatekeeping fueled with "if you don't do it THIS way only, then you're not doing it at all/it's not valid enough" attitudes. If anything, people with disabilities often have to put in EXTRA effort to do what able-bodied people can do effortlessly, even WITH the extra accessibility whenever it IS available (and by available I also mean affordable, because not everything IS, and not all options are available for everybody; price/cost accessibility is something many people don't even consider in some cases!!!). Not all of it is because of difficulty, necessarily, but it's a fact of reality.

Accessibility isn't laziness. For the able-bodied, it can be convenience. For the disabled, it's a matter of getting that extra helpful boost, or the ability to do a task at all, without having to find somebody to do it for you (if that's even an option to begin with).

I know I really can't speak for most groups directly, nor can I relay the experience of every kind of disability besides my own experiences over the years, but I'm genuinely troubled by the "trend" of people STILL (even increasingly) dismissing accessibility tools, disabled people themselves, and anything that makes it easier to do something, to function, especially since there's absolutely nothing that could ever excuse such awful behavior towards people who deal with enough shit as is.

I don't just think of myself when I bring up accessibility and its benefits.

Because the fact of the matter is - even those who have no disabilities could benefit from the accessibility options for those that do, even if it is simply a convenience for most. It takes effort to make something inaccessible, and it would take so little to make a big difference even for some.

And on that note.

It's not laziness. It never was.

[zahri-melitor]

If you were to break the period since Flashpoint up into 3-4 eras, specifically based on how they handle Batfamily relationships with each other and the broader DC, how would you do it? (If such a question interests you.) Also, what dynamics would you highlight as shorthand for that era?

I've had a play around with it, and while I can break things down into more micro trends, there's really no reason not to use the New 52-Rebirth-Infinite Frontier breakdown for the post Flashpoint relationship differences.

If I were being picky, I'd probably start the current era at Joker War in 2020 rather than at Infinite Frontier proper as a better Batfamily marker in and of itself, but we're only talking a couple of months difference either way.

New 52 (2011-2016):

Basically, this is the 'characters don't feel like themselves' era, because the dynamics have so wildly shifted for almost everyone (Damian and Kate excepted). It's a period that feels extremely focused on everyone's relationships to Bruce in particular, with only one or maybe two other major interpersonal relationships shown outside of that.

So you see everyone generally grouped into pairs even during events. Jason mostly appears with Tim. Dick spends time with Damian or with Barbara. And so on. They don't get jumbled up together in different combinations much, or have opportunities where a bigger group are working together.

There is a pivot around mid 2014 in this era (around issues #30-34) that moves various Bat characters back to feeling like they have interpersonal relationships, rather than largely being satellites around Bruce: Robin Rises, the two Eternals, and Robin War in particular are the best examples of this. And a lot of that has to do with the fact Bruce from Zero Year onwards sort of stops being an active character in the broader books, as we transition into particularly Superheavy onwards.

But generally, a lot of this whole era feels really empty in terms of Batfamily relationships that are not with Bruce, and part of that is because it's so uncertain which ones we're expected to be assuming from Flashpoint still exist (and then with those assumptions often destroyed by writers contradicting each other), and part of it is that they don't really have proper crossovers until Batman Eternal. Sure, The Court of Owls and Death of the Family happen before them, but both are heavily focused on Bruce and simultaneously keep everyone from interacting with each other much.

In terms of how the Batfamily reads: it feels VERY pared down. Only Bruce, Dick, Jason, Tim, Damian and Babs are relevant, and Tim's only barely so. Other characters might move in and out of storylines but they don't really have any attachments to the rest.

Rebirth to Joker War (2016-2020):

I think the most noticeable thing about this period in terms of Batfamily relationships is the tension it has from trying to re-expand the timeline back out.

Some characters (like Jason and Damian and Kate) have personalities and relationships that are essentially identical to their n52 ones, or only with a minor "we added back in all the most relevant preboot stories" change. Some characters (like Tim) got rebuilt into their preboot form, but with everything that happened earlier being hazy. A lot of the others (like Dick and Barbara and Bruce) were uneasy grafts: Dick had his childhood with Bruce back but he and Babs were still only about 22, not the age they actually were at the end of preboot. The age gap between Jason and Tim remained out to about 4 years, while Tim to Damian tightened to about 3 years.

There was a lot that was sort of in a hazy 'we are taking vibes from this but there's no certainty' for characters, because there were only a few hard reboots and mostly everyone was just repointing characters in the direction of their preboot personalities and relationships, rather than explicitly kicking n52 out of continuity.

So it felt like a lot of interpersonal relationships were once again a go, but they got reruns to re-establish them for audiences. We literally see plots like Tim Seeley redoing the Dick and Helena romance so that they could once again be exes, we see Barbara and Jason Bard retreading and recreating their pre-COIE relationship status, we see Cass needing to establish relationships with everyone, we see Tim have to explicitly have Zatanna remove a block so he can remember Young Justice, etc.

There is also very much a focus on a nuclear family read of found family. It's Bruce And His Kids, and the most obvious encapsulation of this is everything around Tom King's Batman run and its focus on the BatCat wedding. The more complicated relationships between characters who mentored each other or had relationships that weren't referenced off Bruce still hadn't really returned. You get the impression that Dick and Tim are brothers as Bruce is both of their father and they were both Robins, rather than because they have a whole personal relationship that doesn't require Bruce at all, and so on.

There was also a lot of book siloing going on, honestly. The start of Rebirth assigned every Bat character Their Title (or maybe at most 2) and that character largely did not appear outside of their assigned title, and when they did it was mostly only cameos. So we got to see various Bats mixing when assigned to the same title, but they didn't cross over much.

There's also the difficulty with the period that both Tim and Dick cumulatively spend a lot of time off page and out of the rest of the Bat books between Mr Oz and Ric Grayson, and Damian was in the process of disappearing off right when 5G got canned. So there's not really many solid points during the whole 5 years when everyone is actually around at the same time, which also consistently leaves a gap in various dynamics.

Infinite Frontier Onwards (2021-now)

If I'm frank, the era since Joker War ended and DiDio's firing has been characterised by a lot of writers spending a lot of time re-establishing the primacy of pre-Flashpoint for character backstories, personalities and relationships (not you, Jason).

If Rebirth was DC trying to work out how to attach the fandom's favourite character traits, personalities and storylines, back onto characters who had been stripped down, IF onwards has been a lot of outright "we've stopped trying to make things line up and have soft rebooted everything. For preboot characters you SHOULD be able to jump on to their current stories if the last thing you read was before Flashpoint".

So, via the 'all possible backstories are accessible to choose from' we have seen a lot of straight out restoration of old dynamics. Not everyone got restored immediately; Dick got his everything back in 2020 while Cass had to wait until 2023, for example. But characters now actually have relationships with each other again that don't require them to think about Bruce! Tim and Babs can be thick as thieves in Nightwing in a story because they have lots of history together! Barbara and Cass have a proper big/little sister relationship again! People call Barbara for help and information! Dick can hate Jean-Paul and know why he feels that way!

The Future:

The final question to ask is "so when does the Infinite Frontier era end?" in terms of Batfamily, and I think the answer is that we're currently at a transition point that will become more clear in a year or so as to whether we're shifting out of it right now.

In particular, the vibes of what is happening around Batman as a title right now feels like we're about to hit a shakeup.

Characters have pretty much all now integrated where they were as of Flashpoint into their modern characterisation and are starting to move forward in stories again, rather than spending lots of time re-establishing things.

[bad-traffic-smp-ideas]

Welcome to Bad Traffic SMP Ideas, an experimental gimmick blog with a twist!

Hello! Instead of showcasing the many good ideas this community has come up with, this blog highlights all the "bad" ideas created with our beloved smps in mind.

I, the Head Watcher, will be your guide on this journey through the wonderfully horrific concepts I've collected for future traffic series smps. Enjoy your trip! ^^

[QnA + tag system + more below the cut!]

What is a "bad idea?"

It's whatever you want it to be! The "[blank] Life, but _" format works really well for series concepts as a whole, but "bad headcanons" are welcome too! Go wild, friends <3

"Someone already sent in my same idea! Can I submit it again?"

Sure!! Most of the time, I won't even realize it's been said before. This blog has been going for so long now and I have bigger priorities, I won't penalize you for sending in a "repeat" ask :)

(There is also the #additions tag for adding onto specific ideas, although it isn't used very consistently. If you would like your ask to be added to a previous post instead, just ask!)

"What does the queue look like for this blog?"

Currently, it posts 3 times per day, and there's about ~250 posts in the backlog waiting to be posted (as of late January.)

For complicated personal reasons (but mostly me being a busy uni student), that most likely won't be drastically changing anytime soon. I don't get around to stocking this blog very often and I would rather have it be slow and consistent than have random bursts of activity then silence. I know this is frustrating for people, but this is my personal passion project, and I don't want to needlessly stress myself out over something I started for fun :)

"I sent in my idea two months ago! Where is it?!"

Probably still in the askbox! Very rarely do I actually delete asks, I promise I don't cherrypick the ideas I like and discard the rest. But since I know the wait is frustrating, this is my policy to deal with it:

If you've sent in an idea and it hasn't posted yet, you can send me an ask describing your idea and ask to have it moved up in the queue. You can also send in a separate ask when submitting an idea if you want to have it posted sooner rather than later.

(If your idea is connected to recent events in smps, etc it will most likely be moved up anyway so it posts while still "relevant," although this is somewhat limited to my familiarity with the event. It never hurts to ask!)

"Wait, this blog has a TV Tropes page?!"

APPARENTLY. I didn't make it, but I'm a HUGE fan of it, and it's probably more organized than my actual blog. Go check it out, I'm famous guys <3

Housekeeping + Rules:

Mostly common sense things + be a decent person, etc. This isn't a place for discourse, so please leave that elsewhere. There haven't been any serious issues, but if there ever are I'll create a more cohesive list of rules.

Admin Info:

You can call me Pho! I saw the @/badmccideas blog and got inspired to make this around the end of Last Life in November 2021. My main is @phosphorus-noodles :)

Currently, I'm the sole mod running this blog. This may change in the future, but please don't ask to join the team unless I ask for more help! This project is my baby, and I'm very protective over it ^^'

Tagging System:

#bad traffic idea - catch-all tag for bad ideas

#headcanon - specifically for headcanons, not concepts (not consistently used, so if you can't find a headcanon tagged with this it's probably under the previous tag)

#not a bad idea - anything that's not a bad idea (announcements, admin notes, reblogs, etc.)

#good idea - personal favorite submissions <3

#admin - posts from yours truly :)

#ask - ideas sent in via ask

#submission - ideas submitted

#reblog - anything reblogged

#additions - inconsistently used, but meant for building upon existing specific ideas

#life series predictions - used whenever there's a new season on the horizon to try to predict where apollo's dodgeball will fall

#blog lore - mostly for fun, not that serious or consistent lol, feel free to filter this tag or join in with the fun! :)

If you've made it to the end of this post, congrats! I love you <3

[markrosewater]

Happy Saturday Mark,

I really enjoyed listening to your Drive to Work podcast on stickiness. It was one of my favorites in months! It was an interesting look behind the curtain design wise and the factors you consider when designing mechanics.

I definitely prefer mechanics that are sticky.

You mentioned that you still think it's worthwhile to design mechanics that aren't sticky but I don't think you really explained why the benefits of this outweigh the counterintuitive nature and memory issues that complex mechanics that aren't sticky create.

You mentioned that Magic is a complex game and that's part of its charm and intrigue. I think that's true, I also think it's true that everything can't be done by memory but I don't think going out of the way to create mechanics that are overly wordy and aren't sticky in a game that is inherently very complicated is helpful to the player. I think there's a fine line between tic-tac-toe and overly complex where it strongly goes against player intuition and memory bandwidth.

I also think you've proven that for 30+ years, Magic can make designs with new mechanics (and reuse existing ones) that appeal to players without going out of the way to make excessively wordy, complex and unsticky mechanics.

By the way, this doesn't mean there isn't merit or value in designing individual cards at higher rarities that are less sticky. Most planeswalker designs aren't sticky and they are often dynamic and interesting cards, although they almost always appear at high rarity and are only a small handful in a single set rather than them being full fledged mechanics that appear at common.

For example, Gemstone Caverns is a fun and dynamic card design that isn't particularly sticky and is fairly complex. That's okay but that doesn't mean it would be a good idea to keyword the mechanic, right?

I feel nearly every time there's a keyworded mechanic that isn't sticky and has memory issues, these mechanics are controversial or divisive. They seem to never be overwhelming popular (i.e. Mutate, Tempted by the Ring, Attractions, The Initiative, Day and Night) and they create so much more baggage and mental load issues compared to sticky mechanics.

I also find it counterintuitive that you acknowledge and understand that more people are playing Magic in eternal formats that are backwards compatible (i.e. Commander) but you seem to highly value creating mechanics that are highly words, complex and not sticky. In my experience, those types of mechanics overwhelm players more in those types of formats compared to less popular (but still very fun) formats like Limited Sealed.

I guess my question is that for most of your podcast you highlighted why sticky designs are a great thing and that while every mechanic can't be as elegant and sticky as Flying, it's important to make mechanics as intuitive as possible to help players, if that's the case, why do you sometimes create mechanics that are very anti-sticky?

Keep up the awesome work and have a great day!

You're conflating "wordy" with "unsticky" and those are not synonyms. I'll use one of the mechanics you listed as an example - daybound/nightbound. The issue with the mechanic wasn't a lack of stickiness. The idea of there being day and then there being night, and things caring about it is pretty intuitive. Players got the gist of what the mechanic was up to.

Day/night's issues had to do with creating inconsistencies (mostly with Werewolves) and having tracking occurring when it didn't matter. So yes, there were play problems, but not because players couldn't wrap there brain around what it did.

Haunt, as a counter example, wasn't particularly wordy, but was very hard to remember.

I believe your question is really "why do we make complex mechanics?" And the answer is there's an audience that really adores the complex mechanics, and we're trying to find a good balance to allow every player to make Magic the kind of game they enjoy.

As to complex mechanics having a bigger burden on eternal games, I agree they do, but I believe that's what players sign up for when they play an eternal format. We're not going to simplify modern day Magic for all the other players that are enjoying the many other ways to play simply to keep eternal formats, which are already highly complex, slightly less complex.

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

PRELIMINARY ROUND - STAR TREK

PROPAGANDA

T'Pol

1.) dressed as a sex object. far more qualified & experienced than the (male) captain yet treated as less capable. had her agency removed when her past rape was revealed against her wishes & the episode treated it as a good thing. her taking command of the ship got humanity wiped out in an alternate timeline & she "redeemed herself" by becoming a housewife. there was a scene where the captain fell face first into her boobs. whatever they paid her actress, it should have been at least 3x more

2.) i think you can most clearly see the misogyny t'pol deals with in her costuming and makeup. she is given clear special treatment to make her look "more attractive": she wears catsuits throughout the show (despite neither institution she works for having any other similar uniforms, even for other women), sexy little silk pajamas, a cropped jumpsuit one time (even tho…it's a one piece?? and makes no sense to be cropped????), and SFX makeup that doesnt make her look as "alien" as other members of the literal alien species she's a part of. enterprise's main crime is sexualization, and while everyone (quite literally EVERY member of the cast) is hit with it at least once, t'pol pretty much never gets a break. there's a difference between sexy and overly sexualized, and ent is FAR into the over sexualized side of that spectrum. love you t'pol wish your canon was better xoxo

3.) The classic “Rick Berman Star Trek needs a woman who is strong and competent and part of the crew but gets skintight jumpsuits with low necklines instead of standard issue Starfleet uniforms to show cleavage and keep the male audience on board”.

Kes

1.) Poor Kes had it so bad. She's an Ocampan, which is a kind of alien with psychic powers and a 9-year long life-span. I was pretty interested in what they were going to do with her character when I started watching because in theory with the show having seven seasons, we could have seen her go through pretty much her whole life span over the course of the show. Unfortunately, most of her character is tied up in her terrible boyfriend Neelix, who is at a lower estimate in his mid 30s, and at an upper estimate his mid 50. He met her and started dating her while she was taken prisoner after being kidnapped. Neelix is mostly meant to be comic relief, he acts like an annoying, forcefully cheerful clown for the majority of his time on-screen (when he's not having war flashbacks) except for when he's interacting with Kes. With Kes he is possessive, controlling and manipulative. He's constantly accusing her of trying to cheat on him or leave him, throwing himself pity parties whenever she talks to another man and belittling her. And worst of all he's often framed as being in the right. She hardly gets any screen-time that isn't somehow actually about her boyfriend, the Doctor she's the assistant of or another male crew member who has a crush on her (also too old for her). When she does it's pretty much always focused on her psychic powers and not her as a person.

Some of the highlights of her time on the show include the time that Neelix's lungs were stolen, and after he spends the whole episode feeling sorry for himself and accusing her of being happy about it because he thinks she wants to leave him she donates him one of her lungs. Then there's the time some space anomaly makes her prematurely fertile so she has to decide if she ever wants kids right at that moment, and for some reason, almost the whole episode is focused on whether Neelix wants kids. She eventually breaks up with Neelix. Which is great! But she was possessed at the time. So she didn't even get to do that herself.

She was written off the show at the start of season 4 when another character was added and they needed to boot someone. She "ascends to a higher plane of existence". And then everyone on the crew proceeds to completely forget her about her straight afterwards. I'm not sure anyone was actually sad about her essentially dying. She comes back in a later episode called "Fury" which is about her trying to take revenge on the crew for her poor treatment. You'd think this would be good. But for some reason, she's mostly angry at the captain for allowing her to get on the ship in the first place, despite one of her few character traits being that she's adventurous and always wanting to learn things that no one else has. So the episode mostly focuses on trying to pick apart one of the only parts of her character that was well-defined and consistent. Her past self does tell her that she's forgotten what she truly wanted or something to talk her out of her revenge plan. I'm not really sure what they were going for. She tells the captain she was only an innocent child, so she shouldn't have been allowed to make the decision to get on the ship. She is never shown to be angry at Neelix. The man who started dating her when she was according to her future self a child. And a prisoner.

2.) She's kind of the sexy born yesterday character who's already taken. She's an alien whose race only lives nine years, so when i say that she got married at two that's a bit less alarming. She lived underground her "whole" life (about a year and a half) before she left her town, to find the surface, got kidnapped and then rescued by Neelix, a middle-aged scavenger/smuggler/chef who looks like a Cats character from a regular aging alien race. Neelix promises to show her new places and they apparently fall in love and get married and then Neelix takes her to the Voyager, and she leaves her home forever. At the age of 2. She lived in a cave her whole life, then found this gross little man, married him for some reason, and then was convinced to leave everything she had ever known, her entire family and life, to get on a star ship whose express mission was getting to the other side of the universe as fast as they were able.

Once on the ship she was able to find some independence and her own interests, and eventually left neelix, but god their entire relationship was really just loser old man and naive teenager and it was soooooooo uncomfortable

3.) I rewatched the Kes parts of Voyager. The "General Observations" section can be taken as a TL;DR (sorry for the essay). Here are a few not-so-fun facts about Kes:

General Observations:

Kes was kidnapped 4 times over the course of the show.

Kes often talks like a child especially early on in the show. She acts like a classic Disney Princess; sweet, but not quite understanding what's going on around her.

A lot of Kes's character revolves around the fact that she is very young, and a lot of the more uncomfortable aspects of her treatment revolve around this too. It's not like it's an impossible concept to pull off, in the same show the EMH is actually younger than Kes, and has several romantic relationships that don't feel super creepy in the same way most of Kes's do. This is because the writers don't make him act like a child and they actually give him agency in his relationships.

Kes's people, the Ocampa, live underground on a desert planet. Kes travelled to the surface when she was less than 1 year old, where she was captured by the people living there and tortured for information using "every method of persuasion" that they know. This is where she met and started dating Neelix. He explicitly says he thinks she is dating him because she owes him for getting her out of that situation, and yet it seems like the writers think this is a cute and heartwarming relationship.

Nearly all of her screen time is devoted to emotionally counseling the men around her, helping their character development, comforting and caring for them. She is hardly ever shown to have negative emotions ("Fury" aside), and then it's generally only when a man she cares about is in trouble. This includes when she is kidnapped. Even then she has to be calm, understanding and empathetic.

Kes's established character traits: curious, smart, psychic, caring, kind, young, innocent, naive. Pretty much all of these get tossed out the window in "Fury". She kills people she's known most of her life and tries to sell everyone out to organ harvesters because she gets "confused". She decides not to do this in the end because her younger self tells her she's acting out of character. This episode is one of the worst instances of character assassination I have ever seen.

In about 10 of her 70 total episodes on the show Kes makes a significant contribution to the plot that is not focused on a man. Most of those were more her acting as a psychic plot device rather than anything about her as an actual character. There was only one episode "Before and After", which I would count as truly being devoted to Kes as a character.

Practically every man Kes comes across is attracted to her. Often her attractiveness is mentioned in the same breath as the fact that she is literally a 1-3 year old.

Kes's love interests: Neelix, the EMH, Tom Paris, Tuvix, Ameron (while possessed), Nori (while possessed), Zahir. Aside from Zahir, she has pretty much no agency in any of these relationships.

Neelix calls Kes "sweetie", and talks to her like she's a child. When he's not shouting at her, anyway. Kes unconditionally loves and adores him for some reason.

Observations while watching:

When Neelix's lungs are stolen Kes refuses to leave his side and one of the first things she does is offer to donate one of her own, refuses to let the EMH perform any medical procedures until she's sure it's safe. Meanwhile, Neelix goes on a jealous rant at her because she called another man by his first name.

When Kes donates a lung Neelix refuses at first because the operation would be too dangerous, but Kes says "you've done so much for me, let me give you something once", implying that Kes owes him a lung for him helping free her from the people torturing her.

The episode "Elogium" was apparently meant to be a metaphor for teen pregnancy. With Kes as the teen and Neelix (whose actor says that he sees him as being in his 50s) as the father.

Ocampan puberty apparently happens between the ages of 4 and 5. Kes starts the series at less than 1 year old, and leaves at 3. She is apparently at an age where it would be dangerous to conceive a child in "Elogium". She is not sure she is finished growing. She has been dating Neelix for about a year (possibly more) at this point.

When the EMH hallucinates Kes as his wife, she makes him promise not to tell Neelix, because he tends to get "a little jealous"

In "Elogium", Neelix interrogates Kes over the fact that Tom Paris says "see you later" to her because he "Sees the way he looks at (her). (He) used to look at women that way (he) knows what it means." Neelix is later implied to be in the right here, Kes is being naive thinking Tom Paris could be her friend, apparently.

In "Twisted" Kes turns two years old. Tom Paris gives her a locket for her birthday. Neelix gets pissed off because he thinks he's trying to charm her. Neelix is, again framed as being in the right here.

Kes has a very good memory and is able to remember where everyone's rooms are. When she demonstrates this, Neelix implies she knows this because she's slept with every man on the ship. At the end of this episode, Kes decides to put his photo in her locket to always keep him close.

When Kes is upset that Neelix attacked Tom Paris over her, the EMH tells her she should consider herself lucky to have two men fighting over her.

Tom Paris admits to Neelix that he finds Kes attractive, but says that he won't try anything with her because he respects Neelix. He asks if Neelix would allow him to be her friend. Because who cares what Kes wants right? I guess if Neelix had said no he would have just stopped talking to her?

Tom says Kes is very devoted to Neelix, and Neelix admits he thinks she's only with him because he saved her life and she's grateful he freed her from captivity and she owes him. He is dating her despite this. This is never addressed.

Tanis, another Ocampan, calls her innocent and naive, so she seems quite young even by the standards of her own species.

Tuvix, having inherited Neelix's manipulative tendencies tries to manipulate Kes into begging the captain for his life.

Kes gets kidnapped by caveman aliens. When someone comes to rescue her, the cavemen try to trade another woman to them so they can keep Kes.

Kes goes into a coma and acts as the damsel in distress again in "Sacred Ground"

"This is typical of you Neelix… it bothers you that I'm making friends of my own, you always have to involve yourself somehow." "You can spend time with anyone you want" "As long as I spend most of it with you… I never realised a relationship could be any different. I've never been with anyone but you." Kes when she breaks up with Neelix. Except this isn't Kes because she's actually possessed at the time. She doesn't even get agency in her own breakup.

Kes is dressed in skintight leather trousers and high heels and tries to seduce everyone while possessed by a male warlord. He describes Kes as a "little girl".

In "Darkling" Kes starts wearing form fitting jumpsuits somewhat similar to the ones Seven of Nine wears (though not quite as tight). This is possibly because she's supposed to look more mature, and she starts having "young adult" storylines instead of teenager storylines.

"Everyone seems to be treating me like a child, I'm three years old now"

The EMH kidnaps Kes in "Darkling" when he turns temporarily evil. His treatment of her in this episode includes shoving her into a wall and putting his hand around her neck, repeatedly grabbing and shoving her, holding her at gunpoint and throwing her off a cliff.

The evil EMH kidnaps Kes because she wants to leave the ship to travel with her new boyfriend. This is framed as the good inside of him because he is trying to "protect" her. Kes decides to stay on the ship because of this. She never expresses any negative emotions about this incident.

In "Before and After" Kes goes through her entire life in reverse. In the future she sees, she has married Tom Paris and had a daughter with him, and her daughter has a child with Harry Kim, who was the best man at Kes and Tom's wedding. This is by far the best Kes episode, but she never really gets to react to anything that happens in it. Soon after this she ascends to a higher plane of existence in "The Gift".

In "Before and After" Kes sees threats in advance and warns the crew about them, preventing the Captain's death in the future. This isn't really acknowledged.

Half of "The Gift" is focused on Seven of Nine and the Borg. Not even Kes's send-off episode is really focused on her.

In "The Gift", Neelix and Kes have one final scene together. Neelix gets quite self-pitying again and says she broke up with him because he was holding her back. Kes says that wasn't it but doesn't say why it happened. This is the only time they directly talk about their breakup outside of when Kes was possessed.

When Kes decides to ascend, the captain begs her to reconsider. Kes insists she has not lost her judgement or come under an alien influence. Captain Janeway tells her she's family and tearfully embraces her. Tuvok puts out a candle in mourning (everyone forgets about her after this episode ends though).

In "Fury" Kes is back in physical form somehow, despite ascending into some higher plane of existence in the last episode she appeared. She is also much older in appearance.

In "Fury" Kes gets onto the ship, starts exploding everything she can with her psychic powers, kills everyone she comes across and goes back in time to the start of the show to kidnap herself.

Kes and Neelix have a scene in "Fury". It makes Neelix much nicer than he ever was in the early parts of the show (especially to Kes). He actually notices something is wrong and asks her how she is and prepares her favourite meal for her because she had a bad day. I'm not sure he ever even asked her how she was before. I guess at this point they must have wanted to pretend the relationship was a lot less creepy and unhealthy than it actually was. Especially since Kes is the villain of the episode.

Older Kes's plan in "Fury" is to travel back in time, sell out the people she spent the majority of her life with to organ harvesters so she can send her and her younger self back to her home world because the crew "abandoned her a long time ago". I think this manages to dismantle practically every established character trait she has.

Older Kes's explanation of her actions in "Fury": "You (Captain Janeway) took her (young Kes) from Ocampa. Her home. She's a prisoner on this ship. I was a child, you corrupted me. Your ideas. Exploration, discovery. I believed you. In three years I'm going to leave Voyager in search of higher things because you encouraged me to do it. You encouraged me to develop my mental abilities. What I found, I couldn't control it, it scared me… I trusted you!" Neelix was the one who took her from Ocampa. As noted before, Captain Janeway begged her not to ascend.

Old Kes is killed by the captain. They know something terrible happened to Kes when she ascended, but apparently all that they did was get Kes to record a video of herself saying that she shouldn't take revenge because it's not who she is. This worked for some reason, she says she killed everyone because she was confused.

Kes decides to go back to Ocampa. Due to the Ocampan lifespan, everyone she knew before she left is probably dead. To add insult to injury, Neelix is the last person she sees before she leaves for good.

[spaceyderg]

*climbs onto the driftwood with you* that hugging doodle is so cute???? My heart

Venom's hug looks so comfy??? He's so cute??? The hearts??? I really like the two-colour lines (did not realize the venom design was your own but holy that made it even more impressive???)

Miguel is such a loveable grumpy cat, and its so refreshing to see him be the smaller one in a ship.

Admittedly I mainly watch the movies and only a few comics, but Venom has a ranking system??? Eddie is the only one to get full stars???? Thats. Thats true love right there. Also whats this about Eddie being in charge of a whole venom-society?? Did not know about that (also hard to imagine) but feel free to talk about it. Imagine Miguel and Eddie bonding over being the de facto leader (leading the spiders must be a lot harder than leading the symbiote hivemind)

My Venom design is mostly inspired by the '94 Spiderman the animated series Venom, Ivan Fiorelli, Rian Gonzales, Gurihiru and overall orcas in general.

If I were to describe my design rules for Venom he'd have a big bulky body with stylized proportions, an orca styled face with a bigger lower jaw to fit more then 1 row of teeth, and his color is a solid black with bright colorful pencil textured highlights.

I have this headcanon Miguel might have discomfort in his current height, according to the wiki he's 5'10 but in ATSV he's 6'9 so I wonder if he ever misses being his old height. Like there's not that many ppl that exists that can fully envelop him a hug and make him feel comforted. Plus I can imagine how often he needs to remember to duck under a doorway or else he'll bonk his forehead, or when he's at a hotel and the showerhead is like at his chin level.

Oh that makes me happy to hear, my first intro to Venom was the infamous '07 Spiderman 3 movie, so I'm glad to hear new fans get this fun intro to this character via the 2018 Venom movie. While I've been a lowkey fan of Venom I didn't do a full deep dive into his comics until 2021 with the comic Venom Verse as the first one. I've read a ton but I haven't read any of the early issues since those comics are v outdated by now and some of the info might have been retconned/rewritten. I'd recommend finding a reading list if you'd like to read more self contained stories or a full saga line of connected stories. Feel free to pick/choose what comics you consider as canon or not, cause not all comics are great and sometimes one doesn't like a specific writer for a run 🤷‍♀️

The ranking system is a compatibility rank it's seen in Venom: The End (A warning there is body horror/ imagery of Eddie withering away which made me uncomfy so I'm letting you know) I didn't much care for the plot of that comic but I do enjoy this ranking system as it shows Venom's preference when it comes to hosts. He sees most hosts as pretty good but Eddie is the perfect host according to him u wu 💕

As for Eddie being the head of the symbiote hivemind it's seen in the aftermath of the MASSIVE King in Black saga. After defeating the old head/creator of symbiotes Knull ,Eddie takes his role as the head. It's moreso a hivemind where he can control of any symbiote with consent and can communicate across all of them no matter where they are. However this does strain his physical body and he ages quickly and he dies via explosion. Venom is currently with his son Dylan atm while Eddie is in some sort of space/time limbo. I did fall off a bit on my reading towards the newer comics so here's where my knowledge on this run ends. I'd find pics but I'm feeling lazy rn

Miguel def has a tough job as he has to manage all these different versions of Spiderman and maintain the multiverse on top of making sure none glitch out of existence if those bands get messed up. He can't just up and leave he feels personally responsible due to his past actions. Eddie at this point is like in charge of running the universe but he's stuck in that position he can't quit or else the cosmos ends and he'll be replaced by another King in Black. They explain no matter what Eddie will always end up here someway or another.

Miguel is bound by his sense of duty, his responsibility to ensure the another universe will not end in the same way like his daughter's did. Eddie is bound by The Eventuality, he will always end up as the next King in Black even though he knows he can not handle it. To me it sounds like a lonely and stressful existence to be such a position of power yet they don't have the power to just go home and live a peaceful life with their loved ones like everyone else.

[livematchesnews]

IPL 2025 Suspended Due to India-Pakistan Tensions

The IPL 2025 suspended announcement has sent shockwaves through the global cricketing community. In an event that has upset fans and left franchises in limbo, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has confirmed that the upcoming season of the Indian Premier League will not commence as scheduled. This interdiction, stemming in the wake of worsening political relations between India and Pakistan, highlights the complicated interplay between sports and geopolitics.

A Sudden Jolt to the Cricketing Calendar

The Indian Premier League has long been considered more than just a domestic T20 tournament. The glitz, glamor, and international stars have made the IPL a worldwide cricket festival. Therefore, the news of IPL 2025 suspended has caused great disappointment across the world.

According to the BCCI statement on IPL 2025, the Board is taking this step "in light of the recent developments on the India-Pakistan geopolitical front that have created a tense environment not conducive for conducting a large-scale sporting event." BCCI further emphasized that safety of players, staff, and fans is their top priority.

IPL Suspension News Grabs Headlines

From the moment of the announcement, IPL suspension news took over all media headlines throughout the country and intercontinentally. Sports news portals and social media were flooded with reactions coming from players, franchise owners, and the bigger lot of cricket fans. The feelings were mostly of disbelief, coupled with an understanding of the fact that the politics surrounding the matter were serious.

Several interested parties, including franchise owners and broadcasters, have expressed their disappointment while commending the decision. "While it's heartbreaking for the cricketing community, we understand that national security comes first," said one prominent franchise owner.

Political Tensions Affect IPL

The political tensions affect IPL in a way we haven’t seen before. In previous iterations of the league, we have seen minor schedule changes due to elections and logistical issues, but never a full suspension because of international diplomacy challenges. In the past few months, relations between India and Pakistan have been more strained than normal.

Growing tensions because of incidents that occurred along the border, coupled with fiery exchanges between political leaders, have made it impossible to host a large international event (such as the IPL).

Analysts and sports experts suggest that it is very difficult for the IPL to exist during ideologically-charged political events and relations. With multiple nationalities, and incalculable logistical hurdles, creating seamless and secure circumstances is difficult.

IPL Postponed 2025: What’s Next?

While the official statement from IPL postponing 2025 is confirmed, there is a glimmer of hope. BCCI sources say the suspension is different from being cancelled. “We are keeping the situation under constant review and will be open to a needs-based investigation of possible windows later in the year if the geopolitical situation improves,” the BCCI said.

The report said the board continues to talk with stakeholders to look for alternate dates and venues to hold the tournament and some have suggested the idea of holding it in a neutral country, like when the tournament was held in South Africa in 2009 due to general elections in India.

Franchises have announced they must halt their pre-season training camps although contracts are valid but all before mentioned contracts are on hold waiting for next instructions. The board assures all stakeholders they will continue to provide updates based on information.

Economic and Emotional Impact

The suspension of IPL 2025 has major financial ramifications on many levels; from broadcasters and advertisers to franchise employees and local suppliers, the domino effect is enormous. The IPL injects billions every year into the Indian economy, and its suspension will undoubtedly adversely affect a plethora of sectors.

Fans are finding it hard to believe the news emotionally. For them, IPL is not simply a sporting event - it is a tradition, a summer fixture, as well as a source of happiness & entertainment. Fans have taken to social media, as you can imagine, and posts are numerous regarding the suspension; I have seen trending phrases like #IPL2025Suspended and #BringBackIPL on various platforms.

International Reactions

International players and cricketing bodies across the globe have also issued statements regarding the IPL suspension news. While the majority demonstrated solidarity concerning the decision, there were a number who emphasized a need to keep sports insulated from political issues altogether. Most agree that the safety of players and regional stability should be top priority.

The England and Wales Cricket Board's (ECB) statement said, “We stand with BCCI in their decision. Player safety and global harmony must always come first." Both the Australian and South African boards expressed similar views.

Fans Left in Limbo

For countless cricket fans eagerly anticipating the IPL season each year, the IPL 2025 suspended update is a bitter pill to take. The fantasy leagues, merchandise launches, ticket sales, and fan events have also come to a standstill. Websites like LiveMatches.in, which rely on live updates, match previews, and live scores, have felt the ripples of the IPL suspension as well.

LiveMatches.in, which regularly garners almost all IPL-related clicks as a gateway platform for its IPL content, experienced a spike in traffic immediately following the IPL announcement as fans were trying to find answers, clarity, and updates on the situation. The team at LiveMatches.in has kept providing current information and also alternative cricketing content to keep capturing the attention of fans who want to stay engaged during this chaotic chapter of cricket history.

BCCI’s Next Steps

As per the BCCI statement on IPL 2025, the board will re-evaluate the "status" continuously. The board has established a committee to work towards investigating alternative scheduling windows and liaising with the other international cricketing governing bodies to avoid clashes with other competitions and tournaments.

Even though the board hasn't clarified any refunds yet, insiders have advised that ticket holders/partners will have options for future games or be completely refunded depending on the final outcome of IPL 2025.

Looking Ahead: Hope Amid Uncertainty

The IPL postponed 2025 status is disappointing but it is not going to end. Cricket has always proven to be resilient. After the global crisis with COVID-19 cricket returned with more strength and enthusiasm. Fans will be upset, but they will hold on to the belief that the situation will return to normal and the world's most popular T20 league will return bigger and stronger.

Until then, cricket boards, players, and fans will now have to redirect their focus to other domestic and international series. Platforms like LiveMatches.in will continue to be a vital and valuable resource for updates, match previews, and match analysis.

Conclusion

The IPL 2025 suspended highlights the reality that, despite its worldwide audience appeal, sports are still affected by global political realities. As the world of cricket comes to terms with what is an unprecedented outcome, the hope is for peace and stability to return, and that IPL can begin again to entertain fans.

For the time being, cricket fans will read reliable sources such as LiveMatches.in to stay updated on the IPL suspension news, waiting with baited breath for the return of action back to the pitch.

[poof346]

Rodrick Rules: Disney + Disappoints

So uh, did you know this even came out? It got basically no marketing and I found out it released today by getting a community post on YouTube, which is hardly a good omen. Make a mental note of this, I'll bring it up again later. That aside, lemme talk a bit about Diary of a Wimpy Kid, since I doubt I'll get an opportunity for it again.

I was a pretty big fan of the books when I was growing up, being in just the right age range to laugh at the relatable scenarios. Watched the live action movies too, and honestly thought the trilogy (before The Long Haul) faithfully adapted the books while adding more layers to the characters. I fell off the series eventually though, and when I moved out of my house in Florida, I donated my whole set. Mostly because they took up space, but also because I felt they were losing something.

Not meaning to doubt Jeff Kinney's talent as an author, I do think those earlier books hold up from what I remember. But once you reach a certain point in an ongoing series, you begin to exhaust your ideas, highlighted even by the covers for these books reusing colors. So I suppose it wasn't too surprising that when Disney got the film distribution rights for the series, they would retread the books that already had movies to give Disney + more content. That said, when the idea was first teased, I was actually alright with it, since the first book was being adapted into an animated movie, and the test animation looked stylized enough that it could stand on its own.

However, I suppose the scope of the project was scaled back considerably after the test animation, because the final product ended up looking very cheap, and to put it bluntly...amateurish. This applies to the sequel too, which is what this review is really about, haha. Lumping these two together for context made more sense in my head, since I feel both movies have the same issues plaguing them. Anyway, the visuals, the big elephant in the room. They look REALLY bad.

The framerate is really jittery and like they forgot to include tween frames, the lighting is basic and gives everything an unappealing black shadow. The environments look empty and like they only modeled the bare minimum needed (I noticed the Heffley house has only one tree behind it in the opening scene). I could go on, but just in general, the team working on this clearly didn't have enough money or time to create something better.

And I don't think it takes a genius to understand why: the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies were only greenlit to fill space on Disney + since the service still doesn't appeal to people without an existing attachment to their IPs. The actual quality of the productions didn't matter to the higherups, they just needed to release so it looked like there was more value to the service. So, they likely delegated a shoestring budget, leaving them with barely anything left for marketing. That way the movies could be made for cheap, advertised for cheap (not at all), and it wouldn't burn a hole in their pockets since the films were hardly a consideration.

As such, my summary of Rodrick Rules will have as much care as Disney themselves had. It's the book but bad. Rodrick throws a party, Greg learns his tricks to skating through life in exchange for keeping quiet, their parents find out anyway, the brothers make up after some tension. The broad strokes are there but the specifics are off, like it was their first draft of the script being submitted. Mainly, due to the short runtime, this all happens really fast and none of the attempted emotional moments hit.

Does it matter though? Eh, probably not, I'm sure there's already an adaptation of similar quality for the third book being worked on for a release next year. Disney is a corporation with money on their minds first, so I doubt they would give more respect to the books of my childhood unless a much bigger audience shows up, and by design, these movies are being forgotten about after they release. Posting my thoughts here isn't gonna change anything, but I still wanted to voice them because it's better than letting them go unsaid.

[aboutanancientenquiry]

The Persians in the ancient Greek sources

“Babbling Greeks? Mistranslations & misinterpretations of Persian customs

James Hua

Template from https://www.vox.com/2018/5/15/17351806/is-this-a-pigeon-anime-butterfly-meme-explained

Yep, lockdown has helped me reach a new low. Couldn’t write that exam essay that you were really hoping would come up? Not to worry — Ostraka is your chance! This Ostrakon is based on an essay plan that I had prepared for my Greeks & Persians exam. Sad that I could not write about it, and a bit too eager not to, I’ve decided to experiment and write a brief piece on it.

I find exams to be great opportunities to extrapolate the bigger picture from the course content. They are a chance to link different pieces together and arrange them in ways that can challenge existing interpretations or glean out nuances. An optimal area to execute this is in methodology, i.e. what’s behind what we know, the source material, their limitations, their biases. To these ends, I made an essay plan that tackled scholarly views on Greek sources and how much we really know about their aims and biases in the first place.

When discussing the Greeks’ representations of “Others”, we often talk about the inherent biases and usually, to put it mildly, trash their historicity. Two issues are often raised. First, to some degree or other, the Greek sources almost always exclude foreigners (barbaroi) from their Greek civilisation and self-perceived perfection, thereby distorting them in negative ways. This is clear in the very definition of these “others” and their act of speech: barbarian, barbaroi, literally derives from the babbling sound Greeks thought foreigners made when speaking their own languages or trying to speak Greek. Second, partly due to this bias, these Greek sources often overshadow the extant emic evidence and our interpretation of it. So can we truly reconstruct some degree of historicity, or “truth”, from these Greek sources? Some have suggested simply steering clear from them, others treating them with due scepticism — in most cases, we label these Greeks as the real “babblers”, who project qualities onto the foreigners that reflect the inverse of their own Hellenism more than any truth. But let us pause. Beyond the dangers of massing the diverse corpus of Greek sources together, the Greek sources are often the only sources we have for Persian customs. Without them, we are a lot poorer in our knowledge of the Persians. So should we reconsider this view a bit? Just how full of othering, or in what ways, were the Greek sources? Most importantly, do we risk losing valuable information about the Persians in our attempts to patronise the Greek sources and highlight their inherent unreliability? The question I want to tackle is: Are the Greek sources on Persian customs a lost cause in reconstructing the “historical reality”?

As a side note, I should say that I realise this approach of revaluing often racist and stereotyped sources might ring inappropriately in the current context of Black Lives Matter and the removal of public statues of figures involved in racist policies and the slave trade. I am neither endorsing these attitudes nor trying to erase the unacceptable views of these mostly white, male, and old Greek authors, and I actively oppose these views and misappropriations. Here, I merely try to suggest different ways of approaching the evidence and searching for new interpretations. By doing so, as we’ll see, my analysis revalues local perspectives beyond the imperialistic dictum of Persia. So, in the spirit of Durham’s new online exams, I write this essay plan, albeit in a more blog-esque style with images and more accessible explanations (therefore slightly longer than the 1,700 words)— not least to start thinking about other ideas, and keep the learning going: the party never ends, as Socrates would say.

Are the Greek sources on Persian customs a lost cause in reconstructing the “historical reality”?

Steered by Saïd’s groundbreaking Orientalism, scholars have increasingly noted the ways in which the Greeks’ depictions of other cultures are driven by more self-centred aims than historical accuracy. Most prominently, the process of “Othering” by Greek sources, conscious or not, distorts the historical reality of Persian customs by projecting values that are binary opposite to Greek ones, exaggerating certain features and glossing out others, and inverting Greek normality. The result is an artificial caricature crafted more by Greek anxieties and self-definition. Given the pervasive extent of this process, scholars like Fehling famously for Herodotus have espoused the view that approaching the Greek sources for historical reality is a lost cause. Instead, these Greek sources should be discarded to avoid confusing the scant extant emic evidence.

A healthy degree of scepticism is undeniably required when analysing these Greek sources. However, more recent discoveries and reinterpretations (famously the Himalayan marmots and Herodotus’ gold-dust ants) have challenged just how far the Greek sources are a lost cause, and suggested that in some cases they are closer to the historical reality than we might at first think. This raises the counter-concern of whether we risk losing valuable historical information, with some tweaking, in our attempts to discard the Greek sources. In this light, I will analyse some examples of Greek authors describing Persian customs to demonstrate that what lies at the core of these misunderstandings are mistranslations and misinterpretations, beyond simple and deliberate Othering. With this background, I will analyse more ambiguous Greek anecdotes that hint at elements of truth, before finally exploring cases that depict Persian customs more closely than we originally thought. By doing so, I argue that while Greeks certainly did operate with deliberate “othering”, some biases result from mistranslations and can at times shed light on other local perspectives not often visible in the emic Persian evidence. Dividing my examples into historical and ideological topics, I take a more inclusive, redemptive approach building on the scholarship of Miller and Mitchell to discuss other voices that would otherwise be lost.

Darius’ Apadana Relief showing a potential scene of proskynesis, Persepolis: https://www.livius.org/articles/place/persepolis/persepolis-photos/persepolis-apadana-north-stairs-central-relief/

On the one hand, however, the majority of Greek sources engage, to some degree, in “othering”. While it is prevalent, however, it is not always deliberate; in certain cases, these misinterpretations can be traced to more incidental mistranslations of Old Persian terms and different cultural contexts between the Greeks and Persians. In the ideological sphere, this is perhaps best exemplified by the Greeks’ misconception of the Persian King’s divinity. Sources like Herodotus’ episode of the Spartan messengers Sperthias’ and Boulis’ refusal to bow and perform proskynesis before King Xerxes, citing that they would not honour a mortal as a god through proskynesis (7.36), highlight that (some) Greeks believed that the Persians treated their king as a god. This is corroborated more explicitly by the eunuch’s claim in Plutarch’s Themistokles that the best law in Persia was that of prostrating before the King as if to the “image of a god”, and diachronically in Plutarch’s anecdote of the Theban Ismenias’ embarrassed covering up of his proskynesis to Artaxerxes by pretending to “accidentally” drop his ring and bow down to collect it. This association of kingship and divinity appears to stem from the act of proskynesis, and it is the differing Greek and Persian interpretations of this proskynesis that suggest this Greek misinterpretation may not have been wholly intentional. While Bowden has demonstrated that proskynesis in 5th century Greece often symbolised a sign of respect to a god (e.g. Xen. Anabasis where proskynesis is performed after a sneeze, believed to be divinely-sent), in Persian custom it appears to be simply reserved for the king. Second, given the lack of extant Persian evidence asserting their Kings’ divinity, the Greeks may have skewed the reciprocal relationship that the Persian Kings did have with their god Ahuramazda into a more identical one, even though royal Persian iconography (cf. Bisitun, DNb) detailed that the King reciprocally worshipped Ahuramazda in return for the protection and legitimacy Ahuramazda’s power provided. Thereby, it appears that this “othering” stemmed from different cultural interpretations of similar rituals and the Greeks natural inclination to their own meaning, alongside a degree of deliberate vilification. Consequently, this misconception was assimilated to and amplified by broader Greek perceptions of the ultra-human status of the King, as exemplified by Heracleides of Cyme’s claim that the Persian King did not physically touch the mortal earth (perhaps stemming from the King’s feet resting on the cushion in the Apadana relief).

This misunderstanding, alongside intended othering, in the ideological sphere also extends closer to historical facts and across time, exemplified through the Persian custom of the “substitute king” with Alexander and Darius III. Many Greek historians, such as Arrian 3.12, characterise Darius III’s final years as miserable and dishonourable: pursued by Alexander, Darius’ own courtiers rebelled and arrested him; all agree that Darius was held captive by his courtiers. Arguably, this is part of a broader historiographical trend: this humiliation culminates Darius’ especially inept reign that ended Persia, building on his illegitimacy to the throne and revolts early in his reign (Diodorus Siculus). By contrast, this helps to elevate Alexander as the especially great Greek conqueror. Hence the othering. However, approaching this detail of Darius’ “capture” through other Persian evidence suggests that the Greeks were misinterpreting a legitimate Persian custom that implies that the Persians were still fighting hard. As Nylander has argued, evidence like Xerxes’ placement of Artabanus on his throne to receive his dream at the Hellespont (Hdt. 7.12), or more emically LABS 351 involving priests, attest to the custom of installing a “puppet king” on the throne when the real King was threatened, so that the evil might befall that substitute king and the King proper be reinstalled safely. The “captivity” of Darius and usurpation of Bessus, therefore, rather than being traitorous and culminating Darius’ weaknesses, likely highlight Darius’ resilience and attempts to stay in power. In ideology, therefore, alongside simple othering, Greek sources seem to involuntarily overlook these Persian meanings, whether consciously or not, and interpret actions through their own cultural expectations; this problematises the narrative of Alexander’s sweeping conquest over the Persians. This misunderstanding highlights therefore that these Greek misrepresentations were not fully products of deliberate “othering”, but involved more complex cultural expectations and their misinterpretations.

The Gadatas Letter, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Letter_Darius_Gadatas_Louvre_Ma2934.jpg

Moving more directly to historical examples of failed Greco-Persian diplomacy not only amplifies these underlying cultural misinterpretations, but also reveal more minute verbal mistranslations, beyond deliberate othering. With this, we can better map the causes for these misinterpretations and begin to see vestiges of, or attempts to preserve, the truth. Right from arguably the cause of the Persian Wars, cultural misinterpretations are at the basis. The Athenian messengers’ mistake of offering earth and water to Darius in 508/7, and the Athenians’ harsh rebuke of this (Hdt. 5.73), is arguably explained by the different significance each culture attached to the tribute of earth and water: Rung argues that while the Persians viewed this offering as a sign of total subservience and their imperial extent (e.g. the jars of water from around the empire kept in Persepolis’ Treasury, Plut. Vita Alex. 36, Strabo), the Greeks viewed it as ratifying a neutral non-aggression pact and mutual alliance (συμμαχία in Hdt.) and thereby helping them against the Spartans in their immediate politics. Similarly in such diplomatic missions, the Greeks also often misinterpreted the Persian custom of gift-giving, whereby the Persian King was meant to always give the greater gift, through their conception of equal xenia, as Miller has argued. In other cases, however, this misunderstanding extends closer to semantic details and mistranslation of words. In the Gadatas letter, likely an original Achaemenid letter recopied into Greek and erected near Magnesia on the Menander, the term used to define the satrap Gadatas’ relationship to King Darius is δοῦλος, “slave”. That this term plays into broader Greek stereotypes highlighting the servitude of all subjects and even satraps to the King (cf. Herodotus’ reference to Aristagoras as Darius’ “slave”, Andocides’ to Amorges as the King’s, and Agesilaos’ to Pharnabazus in Xen. Hell.), rings warning bells regarding historicity. The Persian terminology for satraps on inscriptions like at Bisitun, however, reveals that the Old Persian term used was likely bandaka, meaning the more neutral “underling” without connotations of slavery. The Greek carvers’ misinterpretation of one seemingly innocuous word “satrap” when translating the Old Persian letter, therefore, imposes a whole other cultural baggage, influences our interpretation, and contributes to Greek “othering”.

Other historical cases of such mistranslation, to highlight their complexity in Greek depictions of Persian customs, span both Old Persian and Greek terms. This is best exemplified by the Greeks’ views on eunuchs at Persian court. Leaving aside the contentious historical debate about their identity and the Greek tendency to glamorise and effeminise them (cf. Briant vs Llewelyn-Jones), I will approach the question of why the Greeks often portrayed them in power through the mistranslation of Persian and Greek words, and subsequent reference to different groups of people. From the Greek perspective, as Briant has noted, the phonetic similarity of the Greek description of eunuchs, εὐνοχοοι (“someone who protects the bed-chamber”), to οἰνοχοοι (“wine-pourers”, cf. Nehemiah with Artaxerxes), has led some Greek sources to often use them interchangeably, and thereby attribute the powerful position of cup-bearers to these castrated eunuchs. The Persian evidence, however, links to this Greek slippage and clarifies it. The confusion between a court official “pouring wine”, who was not necessarily castrated, and a physically castrated eunuch is also seen in the Septuagint of Esther, where the term eunuch is glossed as se sari, the Old Persian word meaning “of the head”. This gloss, compared to other emic Persian definitions of se sari in the Wadi Hammurat inscription, suggest that this “wine-pourer” was simply an official in a high position, a “minister”. The distinction also nicely captures the divide in our Greek sources: while these “ministers” did not necessarily have to be physically castrated eunuchs, given the large number of these ministers mentioned, Llewelyn-Jones has pointed to the historically large numbers of castrated eunuchs in sources like Herodotus. Thereby, these semantic distortions suggest that, through the mistranslation of an Old Persian title, Greek authors attributed great power to these castrated men. While this misidentification certainly plays into preexisting Greek stereotypes around effeminisation, it suggests the Greeks were in some ways engaging with the original language in complex ways.

The “apple” that the soldier “bears”, inspired by the spherical golden metal counterweight; https://www.livius.org/articles/concept/immortals/

This Greek engagement with Persian sources is most explicitly visible in another area of Persian life, the military, as it involves visual and first-hand interaction. When numbering Xerxes’ troops before Thermopylae, Herodotus names the elite corps of the best 10,000 Persian warriors the “Immortals”. Prima facie, this unusual name appears to be a symptom of othering, as an extension of the association of the Persian King as divine. However, a closer look at the Persian word for a similar and more general office suggests that Herodotus’ term is more a result of a mistranslation of a different group, rather than intentional othering: the Old Persian for the King’s “companions” at court, anûšiya, differs by only two vowels to the Old Persian word for Immortals, anauša. Rather than being deliberate, therefore, it appears that somewhere the meaning was lost in translation. What this mistranslation attests to, importantly, as Herodotus himself reports elsewhere, is the direct discussions that Herodotus had with Persian and native translators and interpreters, arguably with an aim to capture the historical reality and ideology of the Persians. Indeed, one should be cautious before dismissing Herodotus’ thinking and attempts to reconstruct the truth here, since the reason he gives for this title “Immortals”, that they were constantly replaced to the number of 10,000 (i.e. they were eternally 10,000, not in life), seems equally logical and plausible. Supporting this even further, this direct interaction with Persians extends to the visual sphere: later Alexander historians also distinguish among these Immortals the supreme Μηλοφόροι, “Apple-bearers”. This reference has confused scholars, but a comparison to emic Persian evidence might explain it. The unusual spherical object, i.e. the metal counterweight, at the spears’ ends of the depictions of such warriors on the glazed bricks at Susa may actually be the attribute which gives them this title. Therefore, beyond simple othering, these martial examples demonstrate that Greeks like Herodotus were actively thinking of ways to interpret this new Persian culture as it was, in their Greek terms. Even though they may have distorted reality and slipped into othering, these examples attest to some Greeks’ engagement with Persian customs through translators and visually to ascertain their truth, and challenges the degree of malevolent stereotyping.

Cambyses’ stele for the Apis Bull; https://www.livius.org/pictures/egypt/saqqara/saqqara-serapeum/apis-stela

Finally, this direct engagement with the Persian customs and attempts to depict them faithfully opens the possibility that in some cases these Greek sources did capture some vestiges of historical truth and should not be fully discarded. Now, I analyse an ideological and historical case to demonstrate that the Greek (mis)interpretations of Persian customs can sometimes provide insights into valuable local perspectives of Persia’s subjects not visible in the emic royal evidence. In history, beyond the vindicated historicity of isolated cases of Herodotus’ “gold-digging ants” and “flying snakes”, is the case of Herodotus’ pessimistic portrayal of Cambyses’ actions in Egypt. Characterised by Cambyses’ cultural insensitivity in flogging priests, burning mummies, and killing the Apis bull, Herodotus’ account clearly plays into the “othering” of Persia in its foreign affairs (as opposed to Greek respect for others’ laws) while also being crafted to fit into his overarching pattern of Persian Kings (each is progressively and cumulatively worse, or each has his own flaw [Cambyses’ cultural insensitivity]). More recently, however, scholars have debunked the historicity of Herodotus’ negative account by foregrounding the remarkably positive cooperation and pharaonic respect Cambyses showed to Apis and other cults in local Egyptian evidence such as the Apis Bull Stele, Cambyses’ cenotaph for Apis, and the Udjahorresnet stele. This is valid, yet not wholly unproblematic: it assumes there was one single sentiment towards Cambyses’ actions, and elides together other contested versions and genres of Egyptian history. One such literary genre which fits Herodotus’ quasi-apocalyptic account remarkably well is the Egyptian tradition of Chaosbeschreibung, or ex-eventu prophecy, where a figure prophecises the present apocalyptic destruction of Egypt before native rule is restored. Reiterated in a recent Herodotus Helpling seminar, John Dillery has argued that Herodotus’ details closely follow the tropes in the Potter’s Oracle and Leper Fragment of Manetho: a foreign invader ravages Egypt, kills the sacred animals, mutilates the priests, before being self-punished and expelled. Fascinatingly, therefore, and given Herodotus’ interaction with Egyptian priests, Herodotus’ Greek and seemingly exaggerated account may very well draw from direct interaction with this particular priestly, local, Egyptian historical version that interpreted Cambyses actions in Egypt pessimistically, rather than the Egyptian elite propaganda closer to Cambyses; Dillery posits this tradition stemmed from the contemporaneous Cambyses Romance. This historical case, therefore, demonstrates that the Greek sources, prima facie stereotyping, can shed valuable light on variant local perspectives on the effects of Persian imperialism, otherwise invisible.

Bisitun Inscription; http://persiababylonia.org/archives/background/the-historical-importance-of-the-bisitun-inscription/

Finally, this Greek palimpsest of local versions extends to the ideological sphere and directly to royal Persian ideology, especially with Persian ideology of watery boundaries and Herodotus’ accounts of Darius’ and Xerxes’ routes to Greece. Famously, Xerxes’ whipping of the sea at the Hellespont has been seen both as a historical exaggeration and as culminating Herodotus’ theme of Xerxes’ hubris and transgression on nature. However, reappraising it through royal Persian evidence on the sea might instead suggest its historicity and the value it provided to these Kings, rather than highlighting their megalomania. First, as the Babylonian world map and Persian royal titlature demonstrate, the sea was represented, in Persia, as the boundary of the known world (landmass of Asia) and called “bitter”; beyond it were the nagû, the unknown lands. Traversing the sea and conquering these nagû enabled later Persian Kings to assert their superiority over their predecessors, since they would surpass the latter’s world conquests up to this “bitter” sea: this is evident in both Darius and Xerxes’ use of the phrase “beyond the sea” to describe the Ionians and Greeks whom they conquered (DPg, DNb, Daiva Inscription). Thereby, as Haubold has argued, this imagery of the sea and surpassing it was crafted emically by Persians and provided valuable ideological capital for Kings to legitimise their power. Returning to Herodotus, the fact that Xerxes’ action occurs at the Hellespont, the symbolic stretch of sea between the known world of Asia and the nagû i.e. Greece, may suggest that Xerxes’ performative mission did happen and served to legitimise his rule by surpassing the sea. Indeed, Xerxes’ words in Herodotus come astonishingly close to this royal Persian ideology: Xerxes calls the sea “bitter, brackish” (πικρὸν ὕδωρ, 7.35), just as in his Persian inscriptions. Most interestingly, other details in Herodotus support and may be nodding to this Persian ideology. Herodotus’ emphasis on Darius’ trip and performative gaze over the Hellespont when going to Scythia may have been part of a real legitimising royal ritual; more clearly, Xerxes’ detour to the Peneus’ mouth before marching across land to Greece symbolically enacts his arrival and conquering of the nagû as stated in his emic royal ideology. Finally, this close resonance between Greek and Persian royal ideology is captured at the broadest scale through both cultures’ use of fish imagery. Aeschylus’ Persai famously compares the Persians as fish drowning in the sea after Salamis; respectively, alongside the Persian custom of “netting” islanders like fish to capture them, Cyrus’ story to the Ionians during his conquest of them in Herodotus richly exploits the comparison of the Ionians as fish, now doomed on land. Therefore, given the sea geographically separated these two cultures, both Greeks and Persians logically refer to each other as the fish-people, as perhaps the Greek sources realised, alongside recognising the Persian Kings’ use of sea imagery. Therefore, digging into the initial stereotypes reveals details both of local traditions and royal Persian ideology; discarding these Greek examples, rather than analysing them critically, would lose these perspectives.

In conclusion, therefore, while many Greek accounts of Persian ideology and history certainly are driven by “othering” to varying degrees, they are not always intentional, but sometimes bi-products in the Greeks’ attempts to understand and record these cultures. In some cases, most interestingly, these attempts to capture the truth in forms understandable to Greek audiences pay off, and capture authentic local versions and responses to Persian imperialism, as well as the prized emic royal Persian ideology itself. Therefore, reappraising the Greek accounts through local and emic evidence, albeit cautiously, can extrapolate valuable new emic evidence. This demonstrates that Greek sources like Herodotus, in their attempts to engage with this fascinating culture and at times compare it more favourably to Greek customs, are not entirely, and perhaps were not intended to be, lost causes.”

Text and pictures from https://medium.com/ostraka-a-durham-university-classics-society-blog/babbling-greeks-mistranslations-misinterpretations-of-persian-customs-4814ab120592

James Hua. MPhil in Greek History (Oxford); past Undergraduate at Durham Classics and once Ostraka editor. Greekophile. Contact: james.hua@merton.ox.ac.uk

[fastaprola]

A Closer Look at: Momoe Sawaki’s character arc; by a nonbinary (trans) viewer.

CW: Major spoilers for Wonder Egg Priority + mentions and discussion of sexual assault, transphobia, lesbophobia, self-harm; please proceed with caution.

Wonder Egg Priority came as a relatively pleasant surprise for me; I heard about it some time after the first few episodes aired, but I never actively went out of my way to ever try to watch it myself until, that is, a few days ago. I must say, I’m glad to have taken the initiative to experience such anime on my own.

With a stunning animation to accompany the heavy subjects this work touches on, I quickly fell in love with it; all the characters feel very grounded in reality, with their struggles (even someone like Neiru’s, who is a literal genius and CEO of her own company) feeling relatable in one way or another. Episode 7 became my favorite due to this very thing, Rika’s problems were things that not only have I seen in other works before, but that I know exist because of the stories told in the news every so often. It only helped, in my opinion, that they gave a character with her background such a hopeful ending.

That being said, Wonder Egg is not a perfect anime, and though I didn’t expect it to be in the first place, I do think talking about why some of the ways it handles a specific character of the main cast are problematic are worth the time. When I mentioned that “all the characters feel very grounded in reality”, I actually only meant three of them, a.k.a.: Ai, Rika and Neiru. The reason Momoe is not included in this group is what I will be discussing in the next paragraphs.

This anime lets you know, right off the bat, that it will not stray away from heavy subjects throughout the duration of its runtime; the show deals with suicidal idealization (and actual suicide as well as its aftermath; in fact, “female suicide” is at the very core of the show and is what essentially moves it forward), self-harm, sexual assault, same-sex relationships, transphobia, and being a gender noncomforming person in a society that punishes you for not adhering to the roles it has imposed on you since childhood. The last points are the ones I took issue with, however, and though they are mostly the show’s fault, they also took it upon themselves to make Momoe be at the center of all three.

See, when we are first introduced to Momoe, we can guess by context that she is a girl, however, the other characters aren’t aware of this fact yet, and so they seemingly go out of their way to call her a boy, which makes her deeply uncomfortable, and this (ie. her reaction to be treated or perceived as a boy) is a running theme throughout her arc. This, in itself, isn’t really the worst creative direction to take with a character, it’s a story that has been told time and time again, but there is a problem with the way Wonder Egg Priority specifically deals with it: Momoe is cisgender, and so far, there hasn’t been a sign of this changing whatsoever, so she will most likely remain cis until the show ends. Normally, a story about a gender noncomforming cis person wouldn’t be seen as anything out of the extraordinary, as I’ve mentioned before, but it seems that they wanted to… “innovate”, so to say, with her character. And it’s this innovation, in my opinion, that which makes Momoe’s struggles miss the mark for me.

Momoe is perceived, almost ridiculously so, as a boy by whoever even so much as stumbles upon her; her followers on Instagram most likely worship her because they’re under the impression that she’s a bishounen, and yet the show goes out of its way to deal with just how uncomfortable this makes her. This is the issue I take with her and her arc: the show has a keen awareness of AFAB people’s issues, and treats them with the respect they deserve (which is not to say some jokes at their expense aren’t made, but in general this tone is kept throughout the duration of the story), and yet the tone-deaf manner in which they deal with her issues feels… disappointing, to say the least.

Momoe’s struggles, though they are valid on their own, are not a societal issue, no matter how one may look at them; if she were a trans person (either a trans girl, boy, or nonbinary), the strong emphasis on her discomfort at being misgendered would have made so much more sense. The reason why ‘switching around’ the stereotype of a tomboy falls flat on its face is that there is no real pressure from society to present feminine, it’s what they want you to, or more accurately, force you to do if you’re perceived as being assigned female at birth; however, this is not where my issues with Momoe’s arc and character end.

At first, I imagined a variety of (albeit vague, still reasonable) reasons as to why this show couldn’t have just made Momoe be trans, and semi-understanding of this decision; that was, of course, until I watched the actual episode mostly focused on her struggles, and that’s when I got slightly mad. Being honest, I still think it was a good episode, and it definitely made Momoe seem way more sympathetic than any of her past appearances, but it also perfectly highlighted my problem with her, and subsequently, the show itself: using queer people’s actual, realistic, problems in order to push her, a cisgender character, forward.

The thing with Wonder Egg Priority is that I love how, despite all these girls literally risking their lives to save a specific person, they still seem to have conflicting feelings about them (ie. Rika’s mocking of Chiemi, Ai’s frustration towards Koito, etc.) but I also take issue with this when it comes to Momoe specifically; Haruka is very much intended to be seen as gay, yet when push comes to shove, we are supposed to be taking Momoe’s side in this conflict. We, the audience, see these events from her point of view, and are therefore made to feel, in one way or another, uncomfortable with Haruka’s attraction for her. Yes, Momoe has worked hard to bring her back to life, but the fact that she’s cis and heterosexual stands; this isn’t just exclusive to Haruka, however, but every egg she’s had to save in order to get her friend back. All of them express a clear attraction for Momoe, “despite her being a girl”, and it’s just very easy to read these attitudes as wlw-phobic, extremely so.

My biggest issue though lies within the very existence of Kaoru’s character, the trans boy she has to protect in the episode mainly focused on her; while he is an endearing and sympathetic character, and I like that despite him presenting ‘majorly female’, Momoe never misgenders him. The thing is: he’s made out to be almost a “parallel” of her own gender-related issues, and this is just a very tone-deaf statement to make; trans people fighting not to be misgendered, fighting to be called their chosen name (something Momoe, while being cis, can just freely enjoy) - trans people’s pain is very much real, which the show is aware of, but Momoe’s is very much an individual’s problem rather than the way society actually works, which Wonder Egg is seemingly unaware of, for whatever reason.

Before I arrive at my last point on why this comparison doesn’t work, I would like to quickly point out the fact that most, if not all, the eggs the girls have had to save until this point were specifically meant to be girls, in one way or another. Therefore, taking this into account, Kaoru makes me feel… a lot of things, the more time I spend thinking about it; the show acknowledges he’s a boy, though not cis of course, but still very much a boy, yet also places him in this very much ‘female’ space; no matter how I looked at it, I could find explanations both for an opinion in favor of this decision (the way a lot of trans men’s problems are defined by our patriarchal society seeing them as women) as well as some for an opinion against this decision (the fact that it could be read as the show ultimately deciding he’s ‘female-aligned’, etc.) and though I won’t be discussing this decision in-depth, I still possess that it’s an event worth examining from different lenses.

Now, onto the actual element that got me heated about Kaoru serving as a parallel to Momoe’s struggles: Kaoru was not only sexually assaulted by a man who’s always thought of him as a ‘pretty, delicate girl’, his death directly relates to the fact that he was abused and then impregnated by this man for not living up to his gross ideal of what a man and a woman are; contrast this to Momoe, who pretty much gets the treatment Kaoru would love to have: she’s pretty much right off the bat seen as a guy, she’s fawned over by women because of this fact as well, they literally call her ‘Momotaro’, etc. Taking all of this into account, it’s simply impossible for me to be okay with a comparison that ultimately decides a cisgender person’s discomfort is, in any sort of way, on equal grounds as a (might I remind you, dead) trans person’s basic human rights.

All in all, though her episode made me take a bigger liking to her character, it also served to almost perfectly highlight the very problem of her existence, as well as the “struggles” she’s intended to represent; I don’t hate Momoe in any sort of way, and though I know there must be someone somewhere who relates to her, I also think that they could’ve done something way more meaningful with her had they just made some changes that made her more realistic (as in, make her at least be LGBT rather than just cis and heterosexual); I will be patiently waiting for the finale, and who knows? Maybe something does change about her in the end, that would be even more of a pleasant surprise.

[davidmann95]

Thoughts (if any) on DC's April 2021 solicitations?

Let’s take ‘em in order! I should be able to muster up a comment on just about everything one way or another.

Green Lantern #1: Oh this is gonna be bad. Heard only the worst about Thorne’s Future State: Green Lantern, and I assume Jo Mullein’s DCU debut will be wasted here to either function as some kind of ridiculous ‘popularity contest’ with Teen Lantern for who gets the bigger push, or as a way to put TL over with a few “good work kid, you got a future” comments. Also, and granted I don’t know how Morrison will end or this will begin, is the New Guardians angle being immediately dropped?

Robin #1: Dope suit, art, and premise, but it’s Williamson so I don’t care.

Batman: The Dark Knight #1: I’ll read this and I expect to like it, but between this being Kubert’s first big Batman project since Master Race, the ‘old but not quite retirement age yet’ angle, and the title, I’m concerned the shock ending here is that it’s actually a stealth DKR prequel.

The Next Batman: Second Son #1: So they really are committing here, though weird that this kinda makes Ridley’s Future State book basically a longform teaser for this. And I’ll get it as it comes out since it turns out this won’t be in that John Ridley’s Batman collection after all - sorry Dustin Nguyen, I love your stuff but I won’t buy an entire trade of material I otherwise already own just for one new story by you.

The Batman & Scooby Doo Mysteries #1: I got that whole great-looking Scooby Doo Team-Up run by Fisch for free on Comixology, I should read that sometime and see if this’ll be worth getting too as well, because it sounds like a hoot.

Challenge of the Super Sons #1: Glad people who want it are getting it, I do not care.

RWBY/Justice League #1: WILL BE GETTING A POST ALL ITS OWN

Action Comics #1030: His powers waning definitely won’t help the standard pre-run fuming by a lot of Superman fandom, but it’s an interesting pairing with PKJ apparently doing mainly cosmic Superman adventures so I’m curious where he’ll go with it. That it’s particularly cited as being tied to Death Metal might validate my suspicion that the new ‘everyone remembers their entire mainstream publishing histories’ thing will play into Johnson’s description of Clark really feeling his age at the start of the run. And Janin on covers even before he gets in on the book proper! And that Midnighter description!

Superman #30: This sounds like where Johnson’s gonna start with that worldbuilding he touted, and I’m curious; definitely reads in this instance like him shoving Clark and Jon into some swords-and-sorcery-esque territory he’s familiar with.

American Vampire 1976 #7: Not reading, don’t care.

Batman #107: I assume ‘the events at Arkham Asylum’ are the ‘A-Day’ ominously brought up in Future State solicits. Tynion Batman, Jimenez as the regular artist now, whatever the Unsanity Collective is, all entirely my shit. More importantly than any of that though, GHOSTMAKER BACKUPS. And drawn by Ricardo Lopez Ortiz, artist on Steve Orlando’s excellent The Pull! Dope!

Batman: Black & White #5: Any other issue and ‘Jamal Campbell doing a life story of Nightwing’ would probably be the highlight, but in case you somehow hadn’t heard Gillen/McKelvie are making their DC debut on a Batman vs. Riddler story here, absolutely wild.

Batman: Urban Legends #2: Even more excited for this now that I’m onboard for the Grifter and Outsiders stuff given how much those features pleasantly surprised me in Future State.

Batman/Superman #17: Injecting it isn’t enough anymore, I need to be on some kind of constant IV drip with this book. I was wondering whether it’d take the premise to further generational riffs or follow a history of mass-media Supermen and Batmen, but instead it’s veering off in a direction I never could have guessed and I couldn’t be more excited.

Batman vs. Ra’s Al Ghul #6: NOTHING CAN STOP THE ADAMSVERSE. NONE MAY DARE TRY.

Batman/Catwoman #5: Wondering how this Harley involvement plays in - I don’t imagine it’s quite what it seems given how King’s written her before. And love that Joker by Mann on the cover, major Clown at Midnight vibes.

Catwoman #30: No reason to assume this run won’t continue to rule.

Crime Syndicate #2: Dammit, I don’t think this book is going to be good, but I’m kinda tempted.

Detective Comics #1035: Wouldn’t be psyched, but Dark Detective was another pleasant surprise so I’ll give this a chance.

The Dreaming: Waking Hours #9: Again, not reading.

Far Sector #11: Sucks a little knowing we’ll never see that little ‘Young Animal’ label in the corner again after this wraps. At least it’s going out on its highest note.

The Flash #769: In a vacuum this would sound dope but I have less than no faith in this, and goddamn that’s a terrible cover.

Harley Quinn #2: I’m sure it’ll be fine, no interest.

The Joker #2: I wanna believe Tynion will be able to make this work, he keeps talking like he has more freedom on this than he has some other books, but everything about this reads like the price he has to pay for relative post-Joker War freedom on Batman.

Justice League #60: It’s Bendis/Marquez on Justice League, lots of people will complain but I’ll mostly dig it. More interested in Ram V briefly getting to write the main crew in the JLD backup.

Man-Bat #3: I’d ask why this exists - and as a matter of fact I still do - but checking out some of DC’s digital-first output recently I see Dave Wielgosz has something on the ball, so maybe he’ll be able to make this work? Perhaps I’ll check it out in trade someday if worth-of-mouth is on its side.

Nightwing #79: I maintain, this is gonna be huge. And clever move to make for how to justify Nightwing keeping up his standard way of business after Bruce loses most of his money.

Rorschach #7: A comic I will purchase and let’s continue leaving it at that.

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? #109: DC’s highest-numbered comic (that hasn’t gone through an interim renumbering), astonishing. Not getting it myself, but respect.

Sensational Wonder Woman #2: Can’t say this sounds like my thing.

Suicide Squad #2: I’ve been swayed into checking out the Future State debut, but that’d have to really blow me away for me to follow into the main book.

Superman: Red & Blue #2: Sadly if unsurprisingly DC’s clearly not stacking this with AAA attention-grabbing names in the same way as this latest version of Batman: Black & White, but there do seem to be some interesting names from outside the usual big two roster here. And the main and Bolland cover may disappoint but holy cow that David Choe variant.

The Swamp Thing #2: I have no doubt it’ll be incredible but time and again I learn I simply don’t have it in me to care about Swamp Thing regardless of the objective quality of the effort put into him.

Sweet Tooth: The Return #6: Another one I’m not interested in.

Titans Academy #2: Oh lord so this is where they stuck Billy Batson.

Truth & Justice #3: I continue to have no idea what if anything the unifying idea of this anthology is supposed to be.

Wonder Woman #771: Wonder Woman as troubleshooter for mythological mishaps isn’t a permanently sustainable or desirable status quo but I’m down for it for as long as it lasts if it’s any good (though that Immortal Wonder Woman preview...concerned me, in spite of Jen Bartel’s jaw-dropping art).

So that’s 19-23 out of 37 I’ll be getting - if DC’s standard for success with Infinite Frontier is the proportion of their line people will be checking out, I guess it’s winning with me.

[architectuul]

Mapping the Margins

Christina Serifi is an architect, researcher and urbanist. She is a co-founder of TiriLab, an initiative which explores multi cultural heritage related to techniques, technologies and culture specifics from communities in northern Greece. Christina is associate researcher in Terreform, where she has coordinated various publications regrading indigenous knowledge, alternative educational models and self sufficiency. 

Photo © Norman Posselt

Her work investigates forms, collective memories, typologies and local practices, focusing on urban fragments, in-between spaces, as well as osculation of architectural and social space, Christina has been awarded with the Fulbright fellowship and Urban Design Award ’14 from CCNY, she is also a Future Architecture Platform Fellow and Digital Research Fellow of Architectuul. 

Mapping the Margins is a series of maps and documentations, identifying, for the first time, all the women associations, local agriculture cooperatives as well as abandoned buildings in Thesprotia province, in order to create an active platform where many cooperatives can find a space to grow. Through these rural commons, we aim to merge formal, non-formal and informal learning models and create encounters with artists, local institutions and inhabitants from and for the region.

Berlin, New York, Athens, where is your basis?

CS: The truth is that I develop my professional practice through constant collaborations with local initiatives, professionals and different institutions. I am a Digital nomad I would say. If you ask about my physical basis is in Berlin, where I spend three or four months. The rest of the year I travel a lot, try to be as close as possible with communities that I work with.

Christina, please talk about  your work in Terreform with Michael Sorkin. He has been a very important mentor and friend who has influenced your work a lot?

CS: Yes, this is true and I am happy that you are taking me some years back. This is a very sensitive matter for me because as you know we lost Michael a year ago because of COVID and since then all Terreform members are mourning for this loss. 

I joined Terreform team after my Masters studies in New York, when we started to work in Yachay in the North of Ecuador, which was a new Technopole that the government was planning to build from scratch in one of the most fertile lands in the country. We started to investigate during my Masters this topic and Michael suggested me to join Terreform team, which was for me an amazing experience. Not only we manage to focus deeper on Technopoles, but we also travelled to Ecuador, we developed a lot of alternative plans, we talked with the local municipality how to support the local communities and protect this territory. We developed alternative plans, on how many new educational functions can be re-located in the existing near town called Ibarra. We also investigated a lot the integration between formal and informal knowledge. I don’t like to use words scientific or non-scientific, because I believe that this distinction has to do more with power and less with the production of knowledge. We were trying to highlight the local knowledge. This was one of the most interesting project that I was working while I was in Terreform.

Terreform Why Yachay. | Photo © Christina Serifi

We worked in Gowntown, where we interrogated the expansion of the Columbia University in Upper West Manhattan. I also worked in this amazing project that Michael initiated ten years ago called New York City Steady State where we investigated how New York can be self sustainable and self -sufficient in its own boundaries. For me the most important lesson that I’ve learned in Terreform was regarding the work ethics and this amazing environment that we built together. Michael was a very generous and open person. He managed to bring together people from different places around the world and involved them on projects that were really interesting. He was very generous in this sense, offering his knowledge, his guidance, giving the space to every person who wanted to investigate, publishing books from independent authors or people that they couldn’t find publishers. In this sense he was a true mentor and a real light.  Although, I left New York four years ago I really miss his light.

Another part of your professional life is TiriLab?

CS: TiriLab is something I was dreaming many years and have imagined since I left Greece and moved to New York. I had this dream of how to return to my hometown, in Morfi, a smaller village where I was born, be closer to nature, work with the community there and different women initiatives. In TiriLab, we work mostly with women through our recent projects. These projects challenge traditional gender norms in rural areas, rediscovering narratives of women from different ethnic groups. Everything started, when I invited 35 amazing friends from all over Europe to come and spend some days in the village. They stayed with local families and we managed to create food encounters, where we were cooking together and meeting different women initiatives from the area. We called it Summer of Nothing. The idea was not to propose solutions as professionals but to go to rural area, stay, listen and understand the life that unfolds in such areas. This was the beginning of TiriLab.

Mapping the margins in Thesprotia by Tirilab. | Picture © Christina Serifi

A lot of local initiatives were organised by women, these small informal or formal groups managed to keep these villages alive during the economic crisis and they are also responsible of the cultural life of these villages. We wanted to empower these women initiatives, give them visibility and foster their multi-layered identity.  A big step was last year when Tirilab got selected to be part of Future Architecture Platform encounter in Ljubljana, where I met different other groups and exchanged experiences. After that TiriLab expanded. 

Mapping the margins in Thesprotia by Tirilab. | Picture © Christina Serifi

Oikeiology, Satellite Kitchens, Epirotopia - could you explain me these projects briefly?

CS: They are ongoing projects that started last year after I returned from Ljubljana. Oikeiology started as a pedagogical experiment, we wanted to bring to the forefront all the livelihood relationships between communities and natural bodies. It came to our minds in May, when the Greek government passed a law of abolishing the protection of NATURA 2000 areas in the whole country. Specifically in Thesprotia, in the region where we work in Tirilab, more that 45% of the natural areas are protected. The new law will leave these areas without any legal legislation for protection. We wanted to bring to the attention of local municipalities and also neighbourhood communities how to keep these ecosystems alive, how to involve the idea of eco-pedagogy into the schools and learning programs because the relationship of the communities with the natural environment there is really strong. Their food culture, their economic activities are related to the natural landscape. These pastoral communities use the natural resources in a regenerative way and they strongly support their protection. This dialogue is very important.  In a bigger scale, with Oikeiology we wanted to examine the connection between urban and rural environments through shared experiences, knowledge, skills, ideas and resources of solidarity. 

Satellite Kitchens, Paraskevi Demetriou | Photo © Angel Ballesteros, Muzungu

Satellite Kitchens, Dora Tzani | Photo © Angel Ballesteros, Muzungu coop

With the support of 5th Istanbul Design Biennial we created the project Satellite Kitchens. Through this project we had an amazing chance to collaborate with Muzungu, a group of video producers and journalists based in Madrid and Athens. We spent a month of documentation and researching on exterior kitchens. In this area a lot of women have built their kitchens, where whole communities were created around them. These communities were more pastoral and nomadic. After the 1960s they become more stable and you can see that many houses were developed around the exterior kitchens.  We started documenting, drawing and understanding how these kitchens were evolved as spaces and also as places of storytelling, sharing different experiences and stories of women that have inhabited them so long. We saw a kitchen not only as a laboratory but also as an assembly space, as a common space and also as a space of resistance. They are more that 40 communities in the area and we managed to document 15 of them. For me, personally, it was an amazing opportunity to understand and come closer to a lot of these women that I knew since my childhood.

TiriLab’s Summer of Nothing. | Photo © Emanuel Dominguez, Zuloark

Epirotopia started when Zuloark, invited us to create the first parliament talking about the rights of the people in the area. We managed to bring together people from the municipality, local initiatives, inhabitants of different villages and young groups that create interesting projects. We invited them in a first digital encounter last December to envision together different socio-political imaginaries for the area. It was challenging moderate this huge parliamentary session but very rewarding! We are planing to create a physical meeting in August and discuss some of the local issues in depth. We also plan to make it regularly every year. The idea is that each inhabitant could reply to each of the 3 questions: what to protect, what to eliminate and what to bring new in the area.

What about the Future Architecture Platform and the Digital Research Fellow as a part of Architectuul’s joint venue?

I am super grateful having in my professional and personal life both platforms. Through Future Architecture Platform I meet Architectuul, where we started developing an amazing professional and personal relationship. It was a unique opportunity that through FAP we managed not only to bring TiriLab into life but also to create further exciting collaborations. 

Christina presenting TiriLab at the Future Architecture CEx2020 Matchmaking Conference, 12. februar 2020, MAO | Photo: Iztok Dimc

I was also very happy to be nominated together with 45 degrees as a Digital Research Fellow and work with Architectuul. We continue with mapping all the best practices that we started in Greece and bring it in another scale, to start highlighting a network around Europe. I was imagining Architectuul as an active knowledge platform where practitioners, activists, researchers, local initiatives and practices can interconnect and create synergies. 

Your theoretical work and research is very much integrated into the core of different communities, you use new digital methodologies and technologies to enable forgotten communities?

CS: This is a hard question! My work is balancing between theory and practice. When I work close to local initiatives I am trying to understand their ways of living and producing and how to deliver this message to reach wider institutions and more specifically educational institutions.  When I was working in Terreform, we started using multiple digital mapping techniques, integrating GIS in our research, collecting not only quantitative but most importantly qualitative data. Since then, I had this obsession on creating active digital maps that can operate as an open encyclopaedia or platform of practices, methodologies, local techniques and knowledges. I am really grateful of having the opportunity to be part of a new research project between TU Braunschweig and Central Saint Martins “Architecture after Architecture: Spatial Practice in the Face of the Climate Emergency” where I can explore these mapping methodologies together with an inspiring group of educators and researchers.

But you are still not finished, I heard about some UAU?

CS: UAU! is an amazing collaboration that we started recently and stands for Urban Activation Unit. It’s a joint venture between collectives, professionals, practitioners and educators. The three of us whom initiated UAU! don’t see it as a project that belongs to us. We see it as a bigger platform that can embrace alternative pedagogical experiments and qualities of third landscapes as ecosystems. 

With UAU! we want to challenge the established way of transferring knowledge and we see it as a moving open pedagogic parliament. It starts its route within the Balkans because the three of us come from the Balkans. Our idea is to bring together people from urban and rural geographies, local residents with students, each time on a different program addressing issues that have to do with water recuperation, food production and local educational practices.

Its launch will be at the summer school Informal City: Temporal-Autonomous Utopias in Koper, Slovenia from 1-10 September. During this event we will co-build the Table on the Future, where participants will share food, exchange ideas and open new cultural dialogues regarding lively practices. This table will become an infrastructure where the production and distribution of food will be celebrated to address how can we establish ecological conscious communities. More news will follow from UAU! so stay Tuned! 

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael in the Mainstream: The Dark Knight Trilogy & Its Negative Impact on the Superhero Genre

Superhero movies have come a very long way in the past couple of decades, cementing themselves as a genre unto themselves rather than the odd action movie here or there. Almost every year a few new ones of varying quality pop up that incite equal parts excitement and derision. It’s definitely a genre people feel very strongly about, but even people who tend to not love superhero films will admit that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is fantastic.

From 2005 until 2012, Nolan reinvisioned Batman in a way that grounded the character in reality. There’s no fantastical elements, there’s no insane science, there’s no superpowers… Everything in these films could happen in the real world. In a post-Batman & Robin world, this was seen as a breath of fresh air, and the critics loved it. In particular, The Dark Knight helped to usher in the modern age of superhero films, releasing the same year the MCU kicked off and widely being hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. That’s right, not even superhero films, films period. These films were impressive, groundbreaking, and… they fundamentally ruined superhero movies for quite a while.

Look, I don’t particularly hate these films. I think all of them are pretty good, in their own ways. But they have a lot of glaring issues that really hamper them a fair bit and yet, somehow, they became the blueprint that studios decided to look at for what they thought a successful superhero movie should be. Nolan’s films are serious, brooding, dark, and lack the whimsy and creative insanity that makes comics such a fun and engaging medium, and I think this right here is what has hurt comic book movies the most over the past decade. These are films that feel absolutely ashamed to be comic book movies, and they desperately want to seem like they’re “mature” and for “adults.” And, unfortunately for the rest of us, this shame translated over into a lot of other films, something we’re only just now recovering from.

Looking at the greatest strength of the trilogy shows this issue pretty well, that being the villains. Nolan’s films gave us truly iconic portrayals of characters like Bane, Joker, and Scarecrow, and you’re not gonna hear me say much bad about them. Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Aaron Eckhart, and Heath Ledger all do fantastic jobs as the insidious rogues of Batman. But the issue I have is that by grounding these characters in a realistic setting like this, it kind of misses the point. Joker isn’t using exploding cakes and laughing gas, Ra’s al Ghul isn’t an immortal warrior, Bane isn’t a drugged-up super soldier… They’re all just Guys. They’re Guys With Gimmicks, yes, but at the end of the day they aren’t what should be looked at as the be-all, end-all of the character’s portrayals.

And yet everyone acts like no one should ever play Joker again, because Heath Ledger’s Joker was just so good, guys! And he was good, but I don’t think Ledger’s Joker should be the absolute final Joker ever. Quite frankly, I prefer Phoenix’s Joker, because even if that version is also in a rather grounded film missing the overt weirdness of comics for the most part, he still dresses in a colorful costume, acts weird, tells jokes, and is in general more Jokery. Out of all of these villains, I think Bane and Scarecrow at least come within the ballpark of being close to how they should be, but Scarecrow is horribly underutilized and Bane is given a rather undignified sendoff.

Then there are the bigger issues. Batman himself is really downplayed throughout the trilogy, getting fairly little screentime compared to villains and side characters. This was a huge point of contention when The Dark Knight Rises came out, with most of the film featuring Bruce Wayne, and in hindsight it highlights how unwilling Nolan was to engage with the comic book trappings of what he was adapting. I like Christian Bale a lot, he’s a great actor, but I don’t think he really carries any of the films; in fact, it’s usually the villains carrying the movies. Bale is certainly not as bad as Val Kilmer in the role of Wayne/Batman, but he’s no Keaton, he’s no Clooney, he’s not even an Affleck. A lot of the time, he also just feels like… a Guy. And Batman should not ever, ever just be a Guy.

But perhaps the most egregious fault of the films is what it did to Gotham City itself. In Burton’s films, you really get a feel for the Gothic atmosphere of the city with how it’s designed, and this goes for Batman: The Animated Series too. And even the more cartoonish, colorful Gotham of Schumacher’s films pops and leaves an impact. But Nolan’s Gotham? It’s very much just a City. There is nothing distinct about Nolan’s Gotham, it’s literally just a generic city, and if you even have the faintest knowledge of Batman you will know that Gotham is not just a city. Gotham is pretty much a character itself, a dark, imposing landscape in which Batman does battle with his costumed foes. Every other adaptation I can think of knows to make Gotham feel unique and distinct, but this one just absolutely drops the ball. You might as well just have the city be New York if you’re going to put no effort into giving it personality.

And that all brings me to this: every reviled superhero movie of the past decade, from F4ntastic to The Amazing Spider-Man to Dawn of Justice, all have their genesis in Nolan’s trilogy. He laid the groundwork for these films to exist, and a large majority of the blame needs to be put on Nolan for sapping the fun out of comic book movies. Now, to be totally fair to Nolan, he’s not entirely responsible for what happened to the comic book film landscape; prior to him, the X-Men film series was giving all of the heroes dark costumes and being a bit more serious. But despite those films playing a bit of a part, there’s one major reason I don’t fault them nearly as much: The X-Men films never once felt ashamed to be comic book movies.

You have to understand, people loved grit and edginess in the 90s and had just violently rejected Batman & Robin a few years prior to the original X-Men film, so it’s hard to really fault it for wanting to avoid being too campy. But much like Blade, the films never tried to act like they weren’t still crazy comic book films. Scott still has eye lasers, Mystique is still blue, Nightcrawler looks like a demon, there are Sentinels and Apocalypse and even Dazzler shows up at one point! The X-Men franchise wasn’t always good, but it managed to balance between being silly and taking itself seriously pretty well for the most part. Magneto is still a Holocaust survivor, his relationship with Xavier still has impact, there are still emotional moments here and there, but then you also have Deadpool movies and the multiple comic book style retcons to the timeline that leave the continuity a mess, and something about that just feels right. And all that makes Logan less egregious despite being the sort of brooding, angsty superhero drama Nolan would make, because even if it is those things, it still centers around a dude with metal claws coming out of his hands trying to stop his best friend from wiping out everyone with psychic seizures. Nolan could never make this superhero film.

Nolan’s films, on the other hand, did. These films did not feel like they wanted to be comic book movies, they felt like they wanted to be serious crime films but Nolan was stuck with Batman so he just mashed the two together. And honestly, I’d probably be more forgiving if it weren’t for the hugely negative impact these films and their critical success had on the superhero genre even until this day. The first decade of superhero films as a major contender in cinema were colored by these films. People outright balked at silliness in superhero movies for quite some time, with a lot of criticism levied at the early phases of the MCU for being too goofy; in fact, at times it seemed as if the MCU was going a bit too far in the goofy direction without striking the proper balance, with films like Age of Ultron having most of its tension defused by constant wisecracks. And on the DC side, Nolan’s grounded approach lead to Zack Snyder’s flaccid filmmaking with dark coloration, moody atmosphere, and not a shred of joy to be found. Nolan is essentially the peak of dark, grounded superhero films, and Snyder is the nadir, but Snyder’s awful DC films wouldn’t exist if not for Nolan.

It was a slow crawl getting to what superhero movies should be. Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man were films tossed out only when Marvel was certain they could take risks, because absurd concepts like those would just not have been able to survive if not for years of good will beforehand. That’s not even getting into some of the more bonkers elements of later films, such as Ego the Living Planet and basically everything about Doctor Strange. In fact, Doctor Strange, for all its issues, is still a massive step forward for a genre that outright rejected magic for a long time, instead for a time turning Thor and his costars into a cast of hyper-advanced aliens, with later films having to clarify that there is magic and zombies and so on. The recent WandaVision was able to further clarify this by making Wanda unambiguously magic and not an evil Nazi science experiment.

Superhero animation didn’t suffer quite so much, but that’s mostly because, much like comics, animation is still seen as “kid’s stuff” by way too many people. And even then, they didn’t escape the shadow of Nolan totally unscathed; one need only look into the infamous Bat Embargo, which limited Batman villains so there could only be one given incarnation of said character in media. For instance, the Scarecrow being in Batman Begins meant he could not appear in the animated series The Batman. This lead to such things as no Batman characters appearing in Justice League Unlimited. It was truly a stupidly frustrating time to be a Batman fan when some of his most iconic foes were relegated to only certain appearances because it “might confuse kids.”

Let me again clarify this: I mostly like the Nolan films. I usually like Nolan, though he has become unbearably, obnoxiously pretentious these days. I think a lot of elements of them are great, I feel like they mostly have strong villains, and I don’t disagree that The Dark Knight is a fantastic film. But the thing is these are only good as AU stories, as their own thing; they should not be the template every superhero movie should follow, or any superhero movie for that matter, because they lack the ability to engage with the things that make people love comics in the first place. People love wacky, off-the-wall concepts, superpowered aliens, magic, talking animals, evil living planets, alcoholic ducks, and all that fun stuff.

People desperately want the fun, camp, and wacky stuff back in comic book films, as the success of the goofier DC films like Aquaman, Shazam, and Birds of Prey as well as the success of shows like Doom Patrol in comparison to the critical and audience revulsion of Snyder’s films, with Shazam in particular giving us such bonkers concepts as an entire family of superpowered children and Mr. Mind, the evil alien caterpillar. Thor: Ragnarok and the Guardians of the Galaxy films have become some of the most beloved MCU movies despite being weird, wacky, and wholly embracing the joy of comics to the point the latter films feature Howard the Duck and the aforementioned Ego alongside bizarre characters like Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and Taserface. And the thing with all of these films is that they’re able to balance the weirdness and wackiness of comics without losing sight of human emotion, moving storytelling, and drama. They’re both fun and deep, goofy and yet meaningful. This is what comics are, and what they should be, and anyone who thinks comics should be grim and gritty really needs to think about why they think an entire genre needs to be colored in with only the dullest colors.

I think what I’m trying to say here is this: Make a Detective Chimp movie, you cowards.

[honourablejester]

Worldbuilding with Deities

AKA some thoughts on how to make pantheons for your fantasy worlds.

Okay. So this is fairly heavily inspired by D&D specifically, because some of the published settings feel very lacklustre to me in the deity department (*cough*Eberron*cough*), but it also feels like a general problem in fantasy when your setting is not ‘medieval or heroic western fantasy’ where you can just file the serial numbers off the Greek, Norse or Christian mythologies and call it good. I also feel there’s a bit of an issue with either darker or more technological settings, where there’s a push to either have no gods, evil gods, or relatively powerless gods, to show that this is a more enlightened and/or cynical setting that doesn’t rely on silly things like faith. Which is perfectly fine if that’s what you’re actually going for! But. You can have a very wide variety of settings and still have cool and interesting deities in them.

With D&D specifically, I feel like part of the issue is that clerics, paladins and warlocks are playable classes, so there’s mechanical considerations to keep track of. So when you’re worldbuilding a setting, you feel some pressure to ‘tick all the boxes’ with things like cleric domains, and it feels less like building out your setting and more like making random stuff up to fill jobs, which sucks some of the joy out of it. If clerics and deities and mythologies are your jam, excitement will carry you through, but otherwise it might feel like a bit of a slog. Ticking boxes on your worldbuilding forms.

Of course, clerics and deities and mythologies are my jam. So I possibly don’t have much of a leg to stand on here. But. I’m also a pantser when it comes to worldbuilding, and nothing turns me off faster than lists of things to shoehorn in. So. I do have some thoughts here.

When I’m building a mythology, and not just making up a couple of gods for a quick story, I do have a bit of process. It’s mostly subconscious, granted, but there is a method there. Things I consider in a particular order to get where I need to go.

So. Thoughts for rough-and-ready mythology worldbuilding for pantsers who don’t like to overplan. A quick summary:

Mood/Genre

Important Concepts/Themes

Overarching Goals

Reverse-Engineered Cosmology

Further Details

Mood/Genre:

This is the one I think about first and foremost. For worldbuilding in general, really, not just building pantheons. Everything starts from the mood for me. The tone of what I want. What my world is going to feel like to people. Do I want something bleak and pale? Wild and whimsical? Meaty and heroic? Urbane and subtle? Is the world wild and empty and only partially discovered, or completely full to the brim? Is it starting out, fresh and wild and new, or fading away, weary and dangerous and despairing? What does it feel like?

Genre usually follows from tone. Am I looking for dark fantasy? Something post-apocalyptic? Urban low fantasy? Old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery? Celtic fantasy? A rough-and-rowdy beat-em-up?

You don’t have to be overly specific on the genre. I mean, you don’t have to plan that in advance. The tone is the overriding thing, genre will settle itself. But sometimes it’s easier to conceptualise or pitch a thing by its genre.

Once you have the tone nailed down. The mood of what you want. You move on to …

Important Concepts/Themes:

When you’ve gotten a tone, then you can start to think about the concepts that might be important in it. What concepts that would be culturally valued in a setting of this tone, and concepts that would be regarded with suspicion. The themes that divide it up. This is where your domains start to come in, and also where you start to line up what the ‘good’ gods vs the ‘evil’ gods look like.

A question that I find helps here is what do the stereotypical ‘heroes’ look like in this kind of world? Are they rogues up against the man (urban fantasy)? The faithful against the profane (heroic fantasy)? The simple warriors against the sorcerous villains (sword and sorcery)? The fragile monster hunters against the unrelenting darkness (gothic horror)? Etc. This’ll tell you where domains like knowledge, trickery, arcana, war and order will broadly line up on the morality scale.

This is how you get your darker/bleaker settings in as well. You just rearrange your value-sets somewhat. Think about what is still valued in this world. What might usually be valued in a less strained setting, but might be more questionable here. In a post-apocalyptic world, where survival is the name of the game, perhaps gods touting ‘peace’ and ‘acceptance’ are viewed as corrupters, trying to get people to resign themselves and lay down and die. Or they’re saviours, offering a peaceful afterlife away from the horrors of what the setting has become. Dealers choice.

The point here is to get a broad, overarching theme or set of themes to arrange your pantheons around. In a dark fantasy world, it might be light vs dark, faith vs corruption. In a strongly urban fantasy, a very built-up setting, it might be anarchy vs fascism, rich vs poor, honesty vs corruption. In a post-apocalyptic world, it might be hope vs despair, survival vs surrender, life vs death. In a bawdy heroic fantasy, it might be exploration vs safety, civilisation vs freedom, natural vs unnatural. You’re thinking about the driving forces in your setting, the big conflicts that shape it. What things have value, what things are frightening.

And remember, this comes back to the feel of the world. You’re not writing a moral screed here (or, well, you can, but it’s not my primary point), you’re picking the themes and conflicts that will most highlight the mood you want.

And then, once you know the conflict points your gods will be divided along, you can move on to:

Overarching Goals:

What are the deities in your setting working towards? What are their main goals, what are they trying to preserve or destroy or make or accomplish? This lets you divide them up into groups that are working with or against each other. It’s an easy mechanism to build pantheons around, and is based on your themes/values from the previous point.

So. In your urban fantasy setting, built around themes of anarchy vs fascism, honesty vs corruption, rich vs poor. You have your gods of civilisation and tradition, of honesty and respect, of building and preserving. And you have your gods of change and chaos, of trickery and freedom. You have your gods of greed and corruption. Your gods of ascetism and simplicity. You could have them all the one pantheon, forever gaming between themselves. Or divide them out, make two primary pantheons around that first divide, civilisation vs anarchy, with each of them viewing the other as evil, and then several other deities on the outskirts, trying to gain for themselves, or poke at the larger pantheons.

In your post-apocalyptic setting, dark and bleak, built around hope vs despair, survival vs surrender, life vs death. You’ll have your gods of life and protection, of bastions and defenses, of nurturing and rebuilding. Gods who want to protect what’s left and help it rebuild. Then maybe you’ll have gods of death and annihilation, gods of despair and madness, gods of acceptance and fading. Gods who want to help the world limp along to a final darkness. And possibly you’ll have gods of light and defiance, gods of hunting and exploring, gods of lost knowledge and future innovation. Gods who want to reignite the world, kick it back into high gear, and maybe destroy it in the process, but better that than a long slow slide into a hungry nothing!

In your heroic fantasy, big and bawdy and brave, built around exploration vs safety, risk vs reward, civilisation vs freedom, might vs might. You might have people-specific pantheons, in a big empty world where every race or culture is out for themselves. Gods who pick (or come from) specific peoples, and act to make space for them in this brave new world. Other gods, with bigger or smaller goals. Gods of chaos, thriving on the general anarchy of the world. Gods of civilisation, striving to unify it more. Gods of annihilation, who want to wipe the slate clean, and who are great for everyone else to rally against.

There’s a lot of archetypes to work with here. When you’ve got your mood and your theme, it’s easier to get a picture of the type of god that’s going to live there, to embody that. Then what types might stand a good counterpart or complication to it.

Divide your pantheons up broadly along your themes. Feel out which domains and concepts and ideologies belong with which camps, which might be shared between them. What the pantheons as a whole culturally value, what individual gods value, what that means for their allegiances and goals. What deities would be outliers, independent, what ones would work together, what ones hate everyone but are broadly aligned in goals with others.

From there, we’ve got two further considerations, which I tend to do in whichever order makes sense at the time. One of them:

Reverse-Engineer Your Cosmology:

By which I mean, the origins of your deities and the mechanisms by which gods and/or universes are created in your setting. Can gods be made or created later, or did they have to exist from the start of the world? If they can be created later, how can they be created? How willing are the gods to personally interact with the world and to what extent? Did the gods create the things they’re in charge of, or are they avatars of them, or did they just divvy up jobs the old fashioned way? Etc.

Now. I know a lot of people prefer to do this step first. Cosmology first and work down from there. That’s perfectly fine if that works for you! For me, though, it really doesn’t. It’s far, far easier for me to reverse-engineer it later, after I’ve sketched out what my setting feels like and what sort of gods I’d like to exist in it. It’s easier to have realisations like ‘this setting is way too bleak for ascension to be an option’ or ‘this setting values freedom and chaos too much for everything to have been set in stone from before the beginning’ or ‘this setting is too subtle and low-key for vast holy gestures to be feasible until endgame’ if I’ve already run through the rest first.

Also, it’s easier to come up with backstories if the setting is already sketched. If I decide gods can be made, I can look at things like the cataclysm that defined my post-apocalyptic world and go ‘that made or killed a whollle bunch of gods’. If it’s a gothic/dark fantasy story that relies very much on faith and hope vs monstrosity and darkness, then mortal-origin deities who were so hopeful or monstrous in life that they became avatars after death becomes an obvious option. Things like that. Cosmology is easier sketched in retrospect, I find. You’re not paralysed by fitting stuff into a pre-existing grand order of the universe. You can come up with stuff as it pleases you, and work back to justify it later. (I mentioned I’m a pantser, right?)

And the other consideration:

Further Details:

Once you have your broad-strokes themes and pantheons sketched in, you can flesh them out and start building stuff above, below, within and around them.

Above would be the reverse-engineered cosmology above.

Below would be: servants, celestials, lesser deities, demigods, mortal champions, mortal organisations, priesthoods, cults. What the gods have put into the world. Artefacts. Locations. Ideals. Religions. Powers and magics.

Around them would be other beings, devils, demons, eldritch abominations, etc, and where they fit in this setting. Anomalies to the grand order. Etc.

And within them would be: individual gods, backstories, personal histories, what gods are most powerful depending on theme, what gods are most independent, what gods have changed allegiances in their history, what gods does nobody know their allegiances. What do the gods themselves feel about their jobs and their goals and their means to enact them. Once you’re down off the broad strokes and into the details, remember that your deities are individual, thinking beings as well. Perhaps they can learn, change. Perhaps they have personal hangups from their histories that preclude their doing or joining a certain thing, despite the thematic sense it would make. Perhaps they identify more strongly with a particular aspect of their nature/domain that could put them over into an unexpected camp. There’s a lot of room to muck things around and complicate them once you’re into the nitty gritty.

If stuff crops up here that makes you reconsider any of the previous points above, follow it. Play with it. Maybe adjust some stuff because of it. It often happens to me that a small specific detail will catch my imagination so much that I’ll edit huge chunks of the world around it. Possibly this works out better for writing personal worlds than for live game worlds that have other people in them, but still. It’s a point to consider. Stuff likely will come up later. Mood or tone might shift a bit, entirely naturally. Don’t go too far down into fixed details. Leave enough things vague or sketched that you’ve wiggle room later for adjustments.

In Summary:

Voila! My bootleg process for worldbuilding in general and worldbuilding deities in specific: start with what you want out of it, the mood and tone, the feeling of the setting. The themes and conflicts you want people to explore in it. Then jury-rig the rest out of that. Move to your goals, your factions, your big forces. Then your smaller details, individual characters and personal details. Your origins and your processions, going back and going forward. Reverse-engineer what you’d need to have done to get the setting you want, set the stage for where you might want it to go later. And always remember to keep things loose enough that you’ve got room to play and adjust and be surprised later, often by your own flighty brain.

Also. Deities are just characters, when we’re talking about fantasy settings. You don’t have to make any specific real world points with them. You just have to make them fit with the mood you want within your setting. You build your universe to fit your story, because fantasy allows us to do that, unlike the real world where we’re stuck with whatever was premade earlier. Heh. So don’t get too bogged down with what you need to add in or leave out to make things ‘dark’ or ‘realistic’ or whatever. Anything can be made to be anything, if you build stuff around it the right way. So add in whatever you want, and jury-rig the rest until it fits. Get a strong enough, loose enough base, and you can add in a surprising amount without upsetting it too much. In my case, that’s the feel. Get the tone nailed down, get some good strong archetypes to build the show on, and you can play merry hell with it from there.

It’s a good general rule. At least for rough-and-ready, adjusted-as-required stuff. Start with what you want, set up a loose framework for it to fit in, then jury-rig the rest from there.

(Or make stuff up out of whole cloth in a blind panic and spend the entire rest of your time straining to keep one chapter ahead so no one figures it out, until you hit a surprise endgame that absolutely no one, least of all you, was prepared for. You know. One or the other. Heh)

So. Good luck inventing gods? Hope this works for more than just me? Eh. Hopefully there’s something worthwhile in it, and good luck!

[skaylanphear]

None of y’all are actually understanding The Puppeteer 2 (spoilers ahead)

Okay, so it’s been a LONG time since I’ve written any meta on this show. Mostly because a lot of episodes are now focused on things I don’t care so much about, BUT I was rather inspired by Puppeteer 2, especially since SO MANY PEOPLE seem to be missing the entire point of the episode.

Now, I’m not giving the writers of the show a ton of credit--they have their good and bad moments. But given the obvious budget of this episode as well as the sheer amount of dialogue, I think it’s pretty fair to assume at least some thought was put into this episode. 

So, first and foremost, there were a few points made during this episode.

Let’s start with the Wax Museum and why it’s so pertinent to this episode. The Wax Museum is made entirely up of celebrities. Though we have encountered Adrien and his status before, this is one of the most direct ways they could have drawn attention to it. There is a clear line in this episode--Adrien is a celebrity, his friends are not. Yes, the akumas had wax statues, but the victims and their akumas are not the same people, so to say.

So here we have an “honor” that is only ever granted to celebrities (wax figures) and we have Adrien coming in to work on his. But before that, we have a constant back and forth in the car as to why Marinette is even there--is she Adrien’s friend? His lover? Just a fan of wax statues? This is important because it is less a reflection of Adrien and Marinette’s characters as it is Marinette’s own, let’s say, psychological confusion over how she views Adrien. We’ve seen here make stupid, flustered claims about Adrien before, and these conversations are forcing her to face that head on, even if Adrien remains oblivious as always. 

During the conversation up to the top of the building, we are faced with more of this confusion. Namely, Adrien’s interpretation of his relationship with Marinette versus her own. Granted, Nino brings to light a lot of the problems, but he is less the cause so much as the vehicle with which Marinette’s own inability to be honest is being portrayed. Her behavior causes confusion, even if Adrien is unable to fully grasp that (which is all the more part of the problem). Alya, Nino, and Adrien are ALL responding to the issue of Marinette’s feelings in different ways, because THEY are confused as to what she actually wants and what they’re meant to be doing. Marinette says one thing and then backs out a moment later. As someone who recently went through something similar, my initial indecisiveness to admit my feelings to the person I liked caused a lot of back and forth confusion for the people I had told. Marinette’s situation has spiraled FAR beyond that, which is all the more reason we’re getting these vastly different interpretations as far as how her friends are meant to be reacting. The POINT is that her indecisiveness and timidity is confusing and this is becoming a problem. 

The other thing that I think is interesting in the following scene--which will lead me back around to my main point--is the fact that despite having come with Adrien to support him because the wax stuff is going to be long and boring, all his friends abandon him when he’s literally trapped in the vice of “celebrity.” Granted, Nino and Alya leaving is a bit of a device to move the plot forward, but Marinette also leaving kind of wraps the whole thing up in a neat bow. She’s supposed to confess and ultimately can’t. And instead of staying with Adrien as a good friend should despite her inability, she leaves as a flustered mess. 

Adrien is now alone, his hand clamped in a wax trap. In a lot of ways, this is extremely symbolic of his status as a celebrity and his friends not being a part of that. That Marinette left as a flustered mess only makes this worse, especially since she left him in a manner that is very similar to how a flustered fan might react if they become overwelmed. 

This is important because we’re now seeing a very clear implication that though she desires to know Adrien and has done many things to be a good friend to him, Marinette is still haunted by this “idea” of Adrien that she has that isn’t at all factual. And while I don’t think it’s celebrity worship, as some would argue, I do think that the metaphor of celebrity worship in this episode is a very good use of Adrien’s character. We are seeing that Marinette interprets Adrien in a light that is not entirely realistic, which doesn’t help anyone. 

This metaphor is only further expanded after her discussion with Tikki. While Tikki’s advice might seem helpful, what it really does is further support the notion that Marinette’s entire infatuation with Adrien is shadowed by false idealizations. She creates a persona to act as in order to communicate with him. She is literally creating a role for herself that she thinks will allow her to exist in Adrien’s, I guess, “proximity” so as to allow her to “get what she wants,” so to speak. She’s acting--as in, she’s lying. Just as much to herself, I think, as she is Adrien. 

And this whole thing is only made worse by Adrien’s “prank.” He symbolically becomes nothing more than a wax statue during the entire time that Marinette is playing her “role.” She even goes on a tangent about all the great characteristics he has as a statue, highlighting a lot of shallow aspects of why she’s attracted to him. Granted, I think there’s more to it than that (her feelings, I mean), but she’s so confused by the “more” that it’s hardly relevant if she can’t voice her feelings in the first place, beyond how “perfect” she thinks he is. 

Now, this is the “cringe” part of the episode that everyone is complaining about. But to be honest, I really didn’t think it was that bad. It clearly shows Marinette’s idealization of Adrien, as well as the “form” Adrien has within that idealization. That she said all the silly things she did (again, playing her role) and kissed him, while embarrassing, is wholly within her character. Given her tendency to fantasize on extreme levels, I think I’d be more surprised if she didn’t try to kiss Adrien’s wax statue. I get people are annoyed with Marinette constantly being the cause of bad things, or the butt of jokes, etc, but I don’t think that this situation is wholly unfounded given her personality. It was very in character for her to act that way, and I think it made a rather valid point about her feelings for Adrien. After all, she and Adrien may be “friends,” but they’re clearly not close enough for him to feel certain about what she really thinks of him, so she can’t be that close to him, which means there is a bit of shallowness on her side as far as her feelings, even is she would prefer it be different. 

Now, another complaint people have been voicing about the episode is “why can’t Marrinette have a tastefully handled confession like Chat?” And while a lot of you didn’t seem to realize this, the episode actually addresses that.

When Chat Noir flirts with Ladybug, she actually stops fighting to ask him how he so easily is able to express his feelings, because she has such a hard time doing the same thing. He responds with some line about how the people you care about should know how you feel, but the whole point of that episode was to illustrate the differences between Adrien and Marinette, and kind of explain why Marinette’s confession is so long in coming while Chat Noir has confessed, like, two or three times now.

For better or worse, Marinette’s inability to be honest about her feelings for Adrien is a huge conflict surrounding her character and has been from the beginning. Much bigger than Chat’s conflict over his feelings for Ladybug, which tend to be addressed in a more, let’s say, lighthearted manner than Marinette’s feelings for Adrien. Adrien is a very forthcoming person. He likes to think the best in people and is very honest about how he feels with almost anyone. And while I think he should probably re-evaluate the behavior he thinks is acceptable from other people, he mostly deals with any kind of conflict straight out. He doesn’t sit and stew like Marinette does, he doesn’t even waste time thinking about Chloe and Lila. Adrien would much rather think about the good than the bad. In fact, he would much rather ignore the bad (which is probably why he tried confessing so many times--likely hoping for a different outcome. Optimists, amiright?)

Marinette is NOTHING like this. She will sit and stew and plan and make herself anxious and scared and angry over things that would slide off Adrien’s back like water slides off ducks (thank you, Crowley). Marinette confessing is a much bigger roadblock because of this difference in their personalities. And it’s also why she gets all sweet on Chat for his reasoning behind why he can express his feelings so easily, because he makes it sound so simple, which is exactly what Marinette needs. Not overly complicated plans (Nino and Alya) or anything like that. She needs to be able to push back on her anxiety, walk up to Adrien, and just say it (much like how she kissed his cheek in the finale of the last season). No attempts made by her to confess will EVER succeed so long as there is any kind of convoluted plan surrounding it. 

The writers were literally giving the viewers a direct comparison between Adrien and Marinette as far as how they deal with their feelings and y’all missed it because you were too busy being mad. While Adrien overly simplifies situations--which can be both good and bad--Marinette is more likely to overly complicate things--which is also both good and bad. Where Adrien might fail to see how complex a situation is, Marinette will, whereas Adrien is able to make things simpler where Marinette cannot. You even see it in their fighting styles. Adrien ALWAYS goes for the obvious physical attack, while Marinette is the one to strategize. IT HAS BEEN A LITERAL PART OF THEIR PERSONALITIES FROM THE BEGINNING AND YOU ALL MISSED IT!     

The point of this episode was to illustrate Marinette’s issues with her feelings for Adrien, as well as draw comparisons between them so as to better understand why Marinette’s attempts to confess ALWAYS FAIL! 

Until Marinette can pull back enough to see Adrien less as a terrifying mountain to climb and more like a simple set of stairs, she will not be able to reach him. 

And that is the tea. 

[personalcoachingcenter]

Women in Leadership – How Can Coaching Support Female Leaders

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/women-in-leadership-how-can-coaching-support-female-leaders/

Women in Leadership – How Can Coaching Support Female Leaders

Lets talk about Women in Leadership

I would like to start by saying that I am very passionate about working as a coach with women, see how we think, dream, grow and change – celebrate our diversity.

We live in a very masculine world still and it has been my mission to investigate the ways we can support each other as women, get to know each other´s needs, and face all the difficulties that come with our gender when working as professionals. We need to talk about changing the way things are and dream big, to know that we can do anything we want in our lives truly free, liberated, intelligent, and confident.

  In this paper I will present the following topics:

The myths about female leaders

Difference between two genders

Female Leaders Coaching

Gender differences and Coaching

The Role of Coaching

Female Leaders Coaching Model – PASS

Survey

The Myths That Hold Women Back at the Workplace

Gender inequality exists in the workplace. As women we need to be diligent to keep the conversation about it going, talking about the diversity at work as well as how to build resilience. Inequality has been an issue for decades and concerns every woman that enters the professional career, therefore, tackling the issues has become especially difficult as we became desensitized, so it is essential to be bold and speak out about the common myths of gender inequalities as they appear.

The False Four (Common Myths About Female Professionals):

Women Choose to Devote the Time to the Family Instead of the Workplace

The assumption here is that women cannot handle the demanding family life and the dynamic work life. It is unfair to assume that a woman will not take the lead of the project because that would mean more hours or that the single woman has to take all the workload that nobody else wants to catch up on.

Having children is not an excuse to withhold a growth opportunity from a woman at work. Women are often pillars of our homes and our communities and children are not our excuses, they are our REASON.

Women are really good at multitasking. If you want something to be done, ask a woman!

Women Are Too Emotional to Lead

Women leaders are not too emotional, there is time and place that there is a space to show great empathy. A woman´s ability to show empathy uses thoughtfulness and her intuition is not a sign of weakness. It makes a very positive work culture and certainly does not lead to emotional decision-making.

Statistics on women’s leadership do not support this myth, Peterson Institute of International Economics of Business analyzed the data from 22.000 globally trading companies in 91 countries, showed that having at least 30% of women in leadership positions adds 6% to the net profit margin of a business.

Women Are Just Not Interested in Technology and Other Male-Dominated Industries

Women seek degrees in male-dominated industries at considerable rates but men are still preferred in the male domains more than women as well as receive bigger salaries than their female counterparts.

Younger Women Are More Valuable at Work Than Older Ones

This is not a competition. All women are valuable, and “when you are living and breathing you are not done”. Age and wisdom is an incredible asset.

Now, we need to remember that if you tell a lie often enough you really start to believe it, if we believe the myths and untruths about women in the workplace we will take them as factual representations of gender inequality.

The bottom line is that you do not have to accept the myths, the mold, the status quo, you can create your own reality.

Supporting other women is our mission!

Difference Between Two Genders

Men and women are guided by their own logic and perspective respectively. They think, act, and are educated differently. They look, observe, perceive, highlight and fulfill their needs in different ways. Some claim that the differences are due to socio-cultural, educational, psychological, and even biological questions. Therefore, one can start reflecting on the situation raising the question: Women and Men, two worlds or two viewpoints?

Social Viewpoint: Personal Relationships

Historically, there are different expectations towards men and women. Women are expected to provide support, be understanding and offer service, whereas men are expected to be successful professionally, provide for their household, be strong, decided, and in control.

Women´s satisfaction, in general, is related to their social interactions and their family bonds, so they choose to cooperate and accept that their contribution can serve a bigger purpose. Women need to find pleasure in their day-to-day activities, therefore, their professional life must allow for family time. The professional and family lives are integrated, they are one.

Psychological Viewpoint: Intuition and Creativity

Women use intuition as a tool when rational thinking is not enough in their workplace. Logic is indispensable to organize thoughts and emotions, however, it should not discard the intuitive intelligence, which for various reasons tends to be the female domain. Unfortunately, in the professional surrounding, intuition tends to be overlooked and its importance belittled.

Both intuition and creativity are mostly developed in the right hemisphere of the brain.

Emotional Viewpoint: Emotional Intelligence

Emotion – the definition says it is: ¨instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge.¨ Daniel Goleman defines Emotional Intelligence as a person’s ability to manage their feelings so that those feelings are expressed appropriately and effectively. According to Goleman, emotional intelligence is the largest single predictor of success in the workplace.

In the research conducted by Goleman, it is showed that on average women have more awareness of their emotions, show more empathy, and are more capable of creating interpersonal relationships.

Biological and Organic Viewpoint: Brain

According to scientists the differences between female and male brains can derive from genetic factors. Neuroscience states that each person develops based on their natural genetic identity. There is a biological platform that underlies the existence of two kinds of the brain: a masculine brain and the feminine one. The differences are observed in both: the development and reaching maturity of some parts of the brain, especially when it comes to children; girls´ brain seems to mature earlier than the boys´ one.

Not only do the female and male brains vary in their architecture but also in a way they establish the strategies to process information and emotions but also in a way of generating responses.

Furthermore, the magnetic resonance shows that man has more grey matter in the brain, which indicates more activity in the left hemisphere and predominant logical thinking and women demonstrate having more white matter, which in turn proves brain´s activity takes place in both hemispheres simultaneously, which reduces the division between logical and intuition activities in the female brain.

Female Leaders Coaching

Coaching strategies depend on the coachee, therefore I would like to describe the various coaching niches/gaps where coaching can support and help women. The following issues raised here aim at identifying a few contexts, in which a woman’s situation differs from the men’s one.

The gaps that still kept in several economic sectors, where a woman does not have equal opportunities to access certain positions and the energy and effort invested there is considerably bigger than the one required from their male counterparts.

The limiting beliefs engraved in women’s minds about the social roles and the way they ¨should¨ act, speak, look, be as professionals, mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, students, etc…

Self – limitations that a woman imposes on herself as a professional, which can cause a lack of self-esteem and confidence and finally incapability to peruse her goals.

A very short history of female leadership in the world requires paving the way for others without valid models or success stories to follow, that would help to learn and navigate in the man´s world.

Personal attributes and leadership qualities are demonstrated by a woman apart from her specifically feminine characteristics that she starts to express in the workplace and that is perceived as an added value to compete and develop.

The difficulties to reach a natural balance between the personal wellbeing and of others surrounding them that is projected in the work-life.

The above issues raise many existential topics for women, which question their values, personal and professional behaviors, the meaning of their realizations and satisfaction as well as future projections like:

Could my life be different?

Do I want it to be different?

Which aspect of my life do I want to be different?

How far do I want to get?

What is it that I really want, what does it mean to me to be successful?

Why do I desire something?

Am I aware of the internal resources I possess that I necessary to make the change in me and my surrounding?

Do I have a plan for life to achieve what I want?

How will I carry it out?

How can I include the people I care about in this plan?

How will I know that I have reached my goals?

What can I do to keep growing?

Coaching that can recognize personal circumstances and differences can be most effective in this internal dialogue carried out by the women.

Gender Differences and Coaching

Psychological Differences and Coaching

When it comes to coaching women it is important to remember that women are more motivated and interested in:

Self-development.

Achieving objectives for the whole team.

Team success.

Working in the atmosphere of cooperation rather than competition.

Tend to take responsibility for the mistakes rather than blaming others in general.

Taking the above factors into consideration can help the coach relate better, understand the problem properly and assist the coachee in coming up with solutions.

Communication Differences and Coaching

The main difference in communication between men and women is the reason why they decide to communicate and what they are talking about.

Jennifer Coates studied discussion groups of only men and only women and noticed that when women talk among themselves they reveal much more of their personal lives. They also tackle more personal issues, spend more time on them, and make sure that all of them participate in the conversation.

Men, on the other hand, do not tend to speak about their personal issues but choose to focus on topics like politics, religion, sports, news, art, history, etc. Jennifer also noticed that when the groups are mixed men tend to speak more, express their opinions with more confidence, irrespectively of their status or position in the company. In contrast, women strive to connect and generate intimacy while communicating.

The Role of Coaching

Coaching helps to make choices in the professional areas, assists the woman to find the passion and the meaning because it is essential to be successful, happy, and truly accountable. Self–awareness plays a vital role in this process as well as knowing what your strengths and desires are, who you are, what are your values, and being able to assess yourself every step of the way. It is important that the women can dream about what they really want to experience in their lives.

A coach can also help the coachee in building their self-confidence but getting to know themselves.

Another very important way, the coach can contribute to the growth of a woman coachee is to help her create a support network that consists of meaningful relationships, and establish the action strategies focused on achieving her goals. A coach can achieve that by:

Embrace and strengthen the way the woman sees herself (self–perception) at work and analyze the ways, the woman can emphasize their strengths when establishing new contacts, feeling authentic, true to herself.

Plan and prepare to generate new contacts proactively, defining where, how, and when.

Reinforce the existing contacts, focusing on deciding where to invest best.

Differentiate the professional contacts from the family, social, and others because each of them requires a different treatment and involves a different bonding style.

A coach can assist their female client to find the balance between professional and family life, develop themselves in all aspects of their lives to become complete human beings, and build resilience.

Resilience

Women and men that bear the positions of Leaders need to face lots of pressure, long working hours, and daily challenges. The difference between men and women is that women go to work, “change the hat” and start their “other” job, which is exhausting and may lead women to reconsider their careers. Some women flourish, some other diminish under such conditions.

Resilience is necessary to work and maintain your skills up high. Resilience is a process in which a person can think, act successfully under pressure, and recover quickly, adapt to new circumstances, and even become stronger.

Women are usually very demanding towards themselves when working and growing, however, to be sustainable in the process they need to overcome several problems and obstacles, they should also understand and reinforce their support system, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Therefore, the development of balanced resilience consists of:

Cognitive Resilience: Working on creating positive beliefs about themselves and the world by recognizing the negative beliefs, extending their ability to resolve the problems, and identifying their strengths.

Emotional Resilience: Recognize and develop their own emotions and other people´s emotions and the ability to manage their impulsiveness.

Attitude Resilience: build sustainable networks, take care of the physical aspects in the moments of crisis and reinforce the self-esteem by focusing on their strengths.

Female Leaders Coaching Model – Pass

I would like to present a PASS coaching model, which I will describe in detail in my coaching model paper. It consists of:

P – Personal – Here, a coach and a coachee create a relationship based on mutual trust and confidence. It is established by being present and accepting at all times.

This stage is very important for female coachees as in general they are all about bonding and creating relationships

A – Awareness – Here, a coach helps the coachee to gain self-awareness through several tools.

S – Structure – Here, a coach challenges the clients via powerful questions, helps them to identify their goals, and accompanies the coachee in finding the best-suited structure and action plan.

S – Support – Here, a coach supports the coachee in following through with their action plan and becomes the accountability partner, a team player, a kind and supportive mirror for the clients.

Survey

When I was writing this paper I conducted a mini-survey, I asked 35 women, professionals, from different countries and various walks of life about their present job satisfaction.

My main purpose was to measure their job satisfaction and to see what are the biggest motivators and obstacles for them.

The survey consisted of 10 multiple questions and according to the responses in questions number 9 women rely on the family members for support when tackling changes in the professional field. That would confirm the opinion I expressed earlier in this paper that women rely on the family members and the relationships they have built throughout the years.

In question 4, it is so clear to see that all women know their skills. I mentioned in previous points that women seem to be more directed inside rather than outside and they tend to know their strengths and weaknesses better.

In question 10, women mentioned that poor promotion and development opportunities seem to be the biggest challenge, but not only, creating relationships with co-workers is another big challenge, which also proves what has mentioned earlier that women are focused on creating relationships.

A Research Paper By Aleksandra Kowalska, Business Coach, in SPAIN

References

(203) The myths that hold back women at the workplace | Star Jones | TEDxVitosha – YouTube

Desarollo y Coaching de Mujeres Lideres, Fabiana Gadow, Granica

Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Women, men and language, Jennifer Coates, Pearson Longman, London

Original source: https://coachcampus.com/coach-portfolios/research-papers/women-in-leadership/