#generational differences in perception

[contemplatingoutlander]

Young Americans are more pro-Palestinian than their elders. Why?

Originally posted 12/23/23; updated 12/24/23

This is a thought provoking article about how different U.S. generations perceive the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. To encourage people to read the entire article, this is a gift 🎁link so that anyone can read the article, even if they do not subscribe to The Washington Post.

Although I am from an older U.S. generation, I condemn the Netanyahu administration's decision to pursue Hamas at the unconscionable expense of tens of thousands Palestinian civilians, including many children.

However, reading this article helped me to also understand why, being born in the decade after the Holocaust, I don't absolve Hamas of their terrifying behavior on Oct. 7th--unlike many younger people seem to have done. Although I strongly oppose the apartheid Israel has imposed on the Palestinians (and I do believe that Palestine should have been a free separate state long ago), I still don't think there is any justification for such a terrorist act against Israeli civilians.

I encourage you to read the entire article, but here are a few excerpts:

Across more than two months of war between Israel and Hamas, public opinion on the conflict has continuously shifted. But there has been a constant: a divide between the views of older and younger Americans that has shown up both during the war and in the years leading up to it. [...] Each age group has a different “generational memory” of Israel, Dov Waxman,director of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said. Beliefs about the world tend to form in our late teens and early 20s and often don’t change, he said. Older generations, with a more visceral sense of the Holocaust, tend to see Israel as a vital refuge for the Jews, he said, and see its story as one of a people returning to safety in their homeland after living for 2,000 years as a scattered diaspora facing persistent persecution. In the decades after its founding, Israel was a relatively lower-income and vulnerable country. [...] But by the time millennials began forming their understanding of global events, the violence of the second Intifada had concluded in the mid-2000s with enhanced walls and barriers constructed between Israel and the West Bank, and then Gaza. This generation formed its idea of Israel from reports of Palestinians denied access to water, freedom of movement and fair trials, under the military control of what was by then a relatively rich, nuclear-armed power. “When I was in college it was the Oslo peace process, and I still remember that Israel — pursuing peace with the Palestinians and the hopes that came along with that,” Waxman said, of the ’90s. “Younger Americans have no memory of that.”

[See more excerpts from the article under the cut. Those excerpts are worth reading because they are quite thought provoking.]

A racial justice lens Joey Ayoub, a Palestinian-Lebanese writer, podcaster and academic, says young Americans are more likely to conceptualize the Palestinian cause as a sister issue to U.S. efforts for racial justice. There is a “visual parallel,” he said: of an armed soldier or police officer dominating a space inhabited by a populace with limited power, whether in a town in the occupied West Bank or a majority-Black neighborhood in the United States. [...] Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, said conflict between Israel and Palestinians seems to be seen by the young left, especially on college campuses, as “a people of color — that is, the Palestinians — rising up against a white oppressor,” though a significant portion of Israel’s Jewish population is of a non-European background. (Some are the descendants of about 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries and Iran after Israel was founded.) “It’s a bit of a curiosity,” he said. “One could tell an oppressor-oppressed story where the Jews, and Israel, is a story of the oppressed: kicked out of all these countries, going back to their homeland, surrounded by a broad set of dominant countries in the region that wants to destroy it.” Shifting demographics One explanation for the generational divide, experts said, was that fewer Gen Zers and millennials identify as conservative or Christian — demographics more likely to sympathize with Israel — than older groups. [...] Another “major factor” in older generations’ feelings toward Israel is their greater religiosity, according to Waxman. More than three-quarters of Americans 60-64 are Christian — with increasingly higher numbers for older brackets — compared with about half of adults under 30. “It’s, I think, for many religious Christians, somehow a kind of atonement in supporting Israel and Zionism,” Waxman added. “Genuinely, a feeling of Israel as a consequence of this long history of Jewish persecution” by Christians. Some Christians, particularly among evangelicals who are especially likely to sympathize with Israel, believe that Israel was promised to the Jews by God, and that the return of the Jews to Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy of the events that will precede the second coming of Jesus Christ. But even outside of this belief, the idea of Israel as a sacred land for Judeo-Christians has an emotional resonance that is simply not present for the increasing number of secular young Americans. [...] Social vs traditional media Dana El Kurd, a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute, said different types of media consumption have probably played a role in how people have formed their views on the Middle East. Americans 45 and older are most likely to get their news from TV networks and their websites, and Americans younger than 45 are most likely to get their news through social media, according to 2022 YouGov polling. The regular use of TikTok in particular is correlated with criticism of Israel, a New York Times/Siena poll found this week. Ayoub, whose interview podcast “The Fire These Times” with Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Jewish, and Armenian perspectives has mostly Gen Z and millennial listeners, said that new forms of media facilitated access between content creators and consumers without “having a gatekeeper.” This has downsides, including “a huge uptick in misinformation” online, he said, but also positives, including allowing traditionally underrepresented groups to reach an audience. [...] “I’ll give an anecdote,” El Kurd said. “My students, when the war broke out, said that they had gone onto TikTok and toggled between the different locations,” to see what kind of videos were popular in Israel compared with Gaza, the West Bank and other places. “It had never occurred to me before to do that.”

I encourage people to read the entire article.

I am strongly opposed to the apartheid that Israel imposed on the Palestinian population. But being from an older generation, I am also less likely to wholly embrace some of the (in my opinion) more simplistic generalizations that younger generations claim regarding Israel.

For instance, many younger people assume most Israelis are predominantly of white European ancestry, but there is evidence that about half the Israeli population is not of white European descent, including those who always lived in the region, those from Ethiopia and Northern Africa, and the descendants of the 20th century expulsion of 850,000 Jews from other nations in the Middle East.

There are also some estimates that only 20% of the general gene pool in Israel is white European. This in turn leads to questions about the assumption of many younger people that white European Jews engaged in a "settler colonialism" of Israel. Still, some form of colonization DID happen, even if it might not fit a strict definition of "settler colonialism."

But it is important to remember that most of the Jewish colonizers around the time of Israel's founding were refugees who had survived the Holocaust, or were running from Eastern European pogroms/oppression, or who were expelled from Iran and Arab nations. What is tragic is that many of these Jewish victims of persecution and oppression and/or their descendants ended up implementing or supporting oppressive practices towards the Palestinians in their attempts to create a Jewish state where they could finally feel safe.

In many ways, all the nations of the world who oppressed and persecuted Jews for centuries have some responsibility for this mess. But that does not absolve the Israeli leaders from their oppressive choices towards Palestinians (especially their current choices that have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians)--just as Israeli oppressive behavior does not absolve Hamas leaders for their decisions to employ terrorist tactics against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th.

Although I still support a two-state solution, I believe there are no easy fixes to this situation. The conflict, for both Israelis and Palestinians is an emotional powder keg fueled by thousands of years of transgenerational trauma (both within the region, and outside it in the case of the Jewish diaspora). This in turn affects the perceptions and responses of both Israelis and Palestinians. Sadly the current conflict has only added a new layer to the transgenerational trauma of both groups.

Anyway, after reading the above article, I realize that coming from an older generation, my perspective on the Israeli-Hamas conflict is different than the perspectives of some younger people. However, I still think there should be an immediate cease fire, and that the Biden administration should STOP supporting Israel, unless Israelis agree to end the fighting, fully support a rapid international humanitarian aid effort for the Palestinians in Gaza, come to the table to negotiate peace, and finally allow the creation of a free Palestinian state.

Originally posted 12/23/23; updated 12/24/23

[dailygihun]

day 6 || this era lasted like 2 minutes but i love it anyway

[secretly-a-catamount]

tim drake would rather die than kill innocent people and tim drake killed hundreds of supervillain henchpeople with long-range detonation explosives that one time are two separate headcanons that, contrary to what the fandom discourse would have you believe, can actually coexist at the same time.

there’s even a psychologist term for it.

it’s called compartmentalization!

[not-so-superheroine]

Jesus is my older brother, not my dad.

other christians don't seem to feel the same?

am i missing something where he insists on such a thing except perhaps with actual little children?

[aroaceleovaldez]

Hiii! I hope this ask doesn’t come off as rude or pushy but I just have some questions about your opinion on Rick Riordan since I’m new the space of author critiquing.

I guess I’ll add I’m pretty young and a bit sensitive when it comes to things I like, so I automatically assumed since you post so much PJO content you liked his writing. But based on some of your posts, was I wrong? Again, I don’t want to sound pushy, I’m just new to being critical and honest when it comes to authors I like and would like to know your opinion on Rick Riordan specifically. Is he a bad writer? I just got wrath of the triple goddess and I’m not sure if I want to read it based on some of your posts.

Entirely focusing on writing itself and not the content within: I like Rick's old writing. His style when writing first series is dramatically different from his newer material, which I feel has significantly dropped in quality. A lot of the newer stuff feels very unpolished and gratuitous (towards the audience for marketing purposes, not his own interests) and he has a serious bathos problem that stunts the majority of the humor and sincerity that once existed in the franchise - and often severely gets in the way of a lot of attempts at inclusion and representation, to its detriment. Not to mention how condescending it feels towards the reader/presumed audience. It's also very clear he's trying to riff off of his previous success, including directly lifting previous sections and minorly rewriting them to try and achieve the same effect (not in a call-back manner, but just copying his own work).

I won't say his old writing is like, my 100% favorite or the end-all-be-all of literature. I have plenty of authors whose writing is more something that I think is structurally admirable. But Rick's original series writing is good! It became a pop culture staple for a reason! But the quality has dipped so severely as the series progress that it's hard to ignore and it's becoming increasingly difficult to enjoy the books for me because of this. Particularly very recent books like TSATS to me are so excessively full of simple structural errors and similar that it's baffling to me how it even got published or how we got here.

I think out of his post-first series writing, his works I've enjoyed the most are MCGA and Demigods of Olympus - particularly leaning towards the latter. It's simple but very enjoyable to me. TKC to me is mostly fine and enjoyable, and HoO is Just Okay. TOA is tolerable. TSATS and the marketing trilogy though are kind of unbearable for me.

I do love the franchise as a whole and it means a lot to me, which is exactly why I feel so strongly about the drop-off in quality recently. It feels like an insult to something I love and know can be better and has been better in the past - not from a personal perspective, but from as much of an unbiased perspective I can give as someone who has studied writing. So if he's a "bad writer" in general is kind of up to discretion i suppose.

[halfbaked00q]

okay as an admitted did-not-watch-NTTD'er who got, like, all of their info from uhh recappers, the wiki synopsis, the specific clips with Q I watched, and whatever I osmosis'ed from fics.

I finally watched the beginning of NTTD at @prismatic-bell's nudging. And I was like. Okay wait. wait wait wait. This is... well-written? And shot and directed & acted?? In a hollywood movie lmao?? Like. The way it's set up w Madeleine's backstory, and then the Bond & Madeleine stuff that does a much better job of establishing their relationship, the goooorgeous wide shots.

I admittedly was rather "I close my eyes I do not see" to a lot of canon - coming from partially a comics fandom background I'm very aware, well-versed, and well-practiced in the 'canon is your pick-and-choose buffet no need to feel like you have to 'respect' the 'sanctity' of 'canon' esp when it's Bad (like it contradicts other canon or you can just Tell this character was Not Written Well and it's like, here's what it could be that is better)' - and from opinions I saw on NTTD I was expecting to be very pick & choose about it.

But okay, wait. wait wait wait. It works. The beginning at least which I watched. Works. Like, it establishes a key character moment for Madeleine that Explains Everything about her behavior, actually - like she just like Bond is actually also very traumatized & has been locking it down/deflecting it vs processing it, and the whole like Vesper thing is (to me) very obviously her misdirecting Bond away from her own Goin Thru It. I can see how it can read as very suspicious to Bond esp with everything else but it, like, is a Narrative and Makes Sense for her character and Works. wild.

Even the Bond stuff makes a ton of sense. Like, when I hadn't watched it and was going off second & third hand information, one of the things I was hrrrm ?? about was the. How do you get from the guy who says "I miss you" at Vesper's grave, to the guy who put Madeleine on the train. The man who, even after finding out Vesper betrayed him, still wanted to save her? Would... send Madeleine away? In what, a fit of pique? Surely he's more of a "run to me and I will handle it" if it turns out not to be true or a "if it is, I'll handle it" kind of guy.

BUT YOU KNOW WHAT IT WAS. YOU KNOW WHAT IT FUCKING WAS LMAO. I WAS MISLED BY THE FUCKIN. BILLIE EILISH SONG LMAO. The lyrics of it make it SOUND like it's a like "you betrayed/cheated on me how could I have ever trusted you" break-up song kind of situation. BUT IT ABSOLUTELY FCKN WASN'T LMAO.

It's like. two traumatized individuals who trauma-bonded and honestly maybe should have spent time apart healing/learning themselves again before re-evaluating if they think a relationship could work, but like. they both were Goin Thru It and let themselves get carried away with it ig. And then right when Madeleine was like. hm I've been Not Dealing with this a Lot (tbh her being a psychologist probably made it worse cuz I think it made her more effective at Not Dealing With It and deflecting/misdirecting, but like. I don't think she was doing it intentionally, I think it was just a "combination of circumstances" thing. But this also works cuz I think before the like why did Madeleine push him towards Vesper again even though he said she was in his past. And it's like. She was delaying dealing with HER shit and probably unconsciously deflected his attention by poking at waht she thinks is still HIS equivalent to her baggage) where was I. Oh yeah, Madeleine is like. hm. yeah. the whole letting go of secrets thing. I. need to come clean to him...

but then all of the Spectre stuff happens.

Even the him sitting in the car thing is soooo so so. Cuz Craig absolutely put his whole pussy in the acting for this scene. he's got that like. wrong side of overstimulated so you shoot past being in the zone and instead are zoning out lowkey thing going on, mixed with the like. agent faced with a hopeless situation Observing Everything still but like vaguely morbidly amused about it, probably what's running through the brain rn is "lmao, wonder which bullet will be The One" kind of deal. And cross-cutting the shooting & wide shots with the bells was *chefs kiss* genius.

Even Madeleine not managing to tell him was well written/paced. Cuz it was very believable that she (not trained for this) was scared/shocked & couldn't get a word out. Until the "JAMES. I'd rather die than have you think I--" and then the fucking. tragedy of the bad timing. god. And then even her not just saying it later is like, it all makes sense with the way it was paced, shot, & edited. It was beaaautiful oh man. This also where I was like. damn lmao. miscommunication in a movie where it. feels like it makes sense and isn't just a stupid macguffin lol??? In a hollywood movie?? wild

but yeah this is also where it was like. hey wait. the man who, in the face of sort of a morbid (passively?) suicidal emotional blowout due to the Everything, but was able to break through it when she got through to him enough for him to look at her, and her to cry & shake her head like no, it's not true/no don't do this/please/(w.e). and go, "Okay." and take action. How does he put her on the train??

BUT. BUT FUCKING. BUT THEN. MY GOD. *Actually* watching the fucking scene I was like. Ooooh. ough ough oh god. This isn't him vindicatively cutting her out of his life "the bitch is dead" style. This is his Vesper in the elevator cage moment. He's fucking drowning in the cage but he doesn't want to take her with him. He's locking her out of the cage. god.

And the fucking. devastation on his face while he's on the platform. THAT'S HIS FUCKIN. VESPER HOLDING HIM ONE LAST TIME AND SHOVING HERSELF TO TH EBACK OF THE CAGE AAARGGGGHH BARK BARK BARK

Which, a-fucking-gain. THEN MAKES THE NO TIME TO DIE SONG. ALL THE FUCKING MORE EGREGIOUS LMAO. "was I stupid to love you was I foolish to trust was it obvious to everybody else" WHAT ARE YOU ON. THIS IS A SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY THIS ISN'T FUCKIN. 'THE BITCH IS DEAD.'

God this is like when ppl are convinced QoS was Bond going on a revenge rampage when he was (1) not even rampaging (2) not on a revenge quest/storyline - that was Camille's story!!!* caveat I did not watch QoS either lol, but I did watch a video essay breaking it down which I found Very Compelling and have since incorporated it into my worldview lmao. Like, in light of me actually watching the beginning of NTTD, and then it launching into the title sequence and the song. IT ACTIVELY. REWRITES HISTORY YOU JUST WATCHED ON THE SCREEN AAAGGGHHH BITE CHOMP KILL. IT UNDERMINES THE WHOLE. ALL OF THE WORK THE FILMMAKERS DID UP TO THAT POINT IN PLOTTING OUT ACTING OUT & ESTABLISHING THE STORY TO THIS POINT.

Like. The problem of the song isn't even oh it's a limited POV thing. IT'S NOT EVEN WAHT BOND'S POV WOULD HAVE BEEN/SHOULD HAVE BEEN BY THAT POINT. Again, this is the "the bitch is dead" edit of the scene, BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT HAPPENED. THIS IS BOND LOWKEY SPIRALING AND LIKE. OVERSTIMULATED-EXTREME-EMOTIONAL-AMBUSH-IN-A-VERY-SHORT-TIME LOWKEY EMOTIONALLY SPINNING OUT. BUT THEN BREAKING THRU IT ENOUGH WHEN MADELEINE CALLED FOR HIM. TO LOCK HER OUT OF HIS SINKING CAGE. BRUH. BE SO FORREAL RN.

also lmao she clutches her torso WAY too high up, bruh that's her sternum not her belly... but ig the idea translates across still.

but yeah. god. And here I thought No Time to Die the song was just. boring & musically uninspiring. but no. it's so much worse lmao. god.

[taraxippos]

There's a LOT of things people do wrong when constructing fantasy beliefs in pantheons of gods, but one of the more specific is having only one god related to fertility and it kind of being just a horny sex thing.

Like you'll have one in the entire bunch whose sphere is listed as fertility and it's basically like Yeah this is the sex one. She's always depicted naked (but not TOO naked because censorship and/or the writer's own skittishness). She's going to have the exact body type epitomized in contemporary western beauty standards and there's usually no chance in hell that she's gonna be fat (unless MAYBE they're referencing 'venus' figurines). Her thing is fertility, which means having sex and making babies. Might be a goddess of beauty or love or marriage too, because these are kinda sex things, but that's probably it. And yeah that sort of thing is virtually nonexistent in real life.

Like the concept of fertility is so fundamentally important to the function of most societies in human history in ways that it is just Not in industrialized imperial core countries. Most people are getting food from stores, and not having to worry about harvesting crops or breeding livestock or foraging for food or having enough animals to hunt, so fertility only really comes up as a concern if you're trying to have kids (and there is certainly societal pressure to have children, but your wellbeing and survival is rarely going to Depend on it). And I think writing only from that perspective and not even trying to learn about WHY fertility is so conceptually important is why you see this trend.

There's no absolute universal statement about how people believe in gods but it's broadly accurate that systems with many deities will Usually have more than one deity associated with fertility, and these associations will certainly include human reproduction but also the fertility of livestock/hunted animals, plants, the land itself.

Some fertility deities may also be heavily associated with seasonal changes or environmental factors that agriculture or foraging is dependent on (spring/summer/fall, seasonal rains, seasonal flooding, rain itself, sunlight, good soil, rivers, wetlands, etc). Some certainly might be related to love, marriage, sex, and beauty, but that's VERY RARELY going to be the sole way the concept of fertility is embodied. And they'll often will have other associations not directly about fertility, or related to fertility in culturally specific ways.

[solanj]

sometimes in the fandom you see some art that is SO beautifully made but goes SO against the grain of how you perceive the drawn character(s) like I want to reblog it so much because it's so visually gorgeous and the artist is amazing and deserves to know this but I'll fucking die before letting that particular interpretation of the character(s) anywhere near my blog

[laufire]

while many times this goes unspecified, as many authors think it goes without saying, it's an inescapable truth that a non-insignificant amount of characters in the western canon come across as profoundly white, cisheterosexual and christian in their demeanor and in their values. speculating about how a character might change if you altered any of those groups invites a deeper exploration of these aspects than you're likely to encounter in most corners of fandom.

not to mention, how much more inviting these arguable blank canvases seem to be when it comes to fandom engagement, vis a vis explicitly non-white, non-cishet, non-christian characters.

[worldofgoo]

ok so mostly i am confused about the lack of mcguirk transgenderisms in the tag, i feel like ive seen every other headcanon under the sun but this one is noticeably absent despite feeling most apparent to me in the show itself?

im going to guess that its the fact that its difficult to tell how much is meant to be a joke and how much is sincere, but you can say exactly the same about brendon and ive seen people talk about that? maybe i just interpreted things more sincerely than i was really meant to but having repressed gender alongside the repressed sexuality deal feels very easy to integrate into what we see of the character

[theygender]

Thinking about my scifi story idea again and specifically about the alien love interest. And I'm wondering how far I can go in either direction on the non-human spectrum before it stops being a scifi book and becomes a furry/monsterfucker book

[quatregats]

Had a conversation about being perceived as South Asian with my cousin and her kids and I'm still rotating it around in my head because like. Did everyone suddenly forget that I am also half white. Like did you forget that I do not have two South Asian parents

[wonder-worker]

"Alice Perrers was perceived by her contemporaries to be an uncrowned queen and through an analysis of her activities it is clear she was able to utilise the practical benefits of queenship for her own ends. However, by taking on the mantle of queenship Alice fundamentally corrupted the sovereignty and kingship of Edward III. First, by her aggressively political behaviour she became the threat at the heart of the power structure that the gendered constructions of queenship were supposed to remove from a consort. Second, by taking on the practical aspects of queenship she inherently undermined the ideological role of queenship, both by the simple fact that she was a mistress and not a queen, and even more so because of her behaviour. The problems Alice caused and how she was perceived were amplified in contrast to the [...] demeanour of Philippa, who was widely respected and much loved by the people. Just as queens in their exalted position were ‘lightning rods’ for ideas about women and female power, so was Alice because of her proximity to the king."

— Laura Tompkins, The uncrowned queen: Alice Perrers, Edward III and political crisis in fourteenth-century England, 1360-1377 (PhD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013)

"Alice's expansion of her power through the office of queenship was problematic for a number of reasons. First, while the queen’s power was legitimised by her marriage to the king and her coronation, Alice’s power was not formalised in this way and consequently would have been regarded as illegitimate. Second, she was not the right type of woman to share in the king’s dignity. She was not noble, she was not chaste and she was not virtuous. Instead, she was a low-born London widow and a businesswoman. Consequently, we find Alice being discussed in the language and stereotypes of queenship, but in a rather negative light. For example, while queens are routinely described as noble, beautiful and virtuous regardless of what they actually looked like, Walsingham is quick to emphasise that Alice was of low birth, and that, almost implied as a consequence, she ‘was not attractive or beautiful’. While we do not know what Alice looked like it seems unlikely that Edward III would have taken and kept her as a mistress for so long if she had been physically repellent. Third, and most significantly, not only was Alice an inappropriate mistress exercising illegitimate power, but she also broke all of the gendered rules that queenship was constructed around, inverting the ideal form of queenship to her advantage."

[skitskatdacat63]

Mattmac's acting in TD will never not be insane to me, bcs its probably the only acting that genuinely fully made me think, yeah he completely escaped into the role. It's not that there's not any other actors out there that I think are amazing, but it's still often hard for me for the most part to separate the actor and their roles, especially if I've seen a lot of their work. Meanwhile, even just looking at a still of Rust, it's so hard for me to perceive, oh wait that's not a real guy?? Rust isn't out there???

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Hmm so a perspective I think I’ve seen crop up in meta before, but that I don’t really buy, concerns taking this line from Bedelia in 3.10:

You couldn’t save Hannibal. Do you think you can save this new one?

because I’ve seen people imply that Bedelia was correct in her assumptions about Will here, but I’ve honestly never gotten the impression that Will wanted to “save” Hannibal at all.

“This new one” can only refer to Dolarhyde (touched on only elliptically in this scene), and I think it’s fair to say that Will does have some investment in “saving” Dolarhyde, by some definition of that word - hence his attachment to the idea that Dolarhyde might be trying to stop killing. But I don’t think that he at any point wants to save Hannibal. He spends 3A trying to understand Hannibal better, but it doesn’t seem as though he wants to use that understanding to “redeem” Hannibal or save him from his worst impulses. In fact, he actively rejects the idea that Hannibal’s backstory can explain the person he is now (“Mischa doesn’t explain Hannibal… she doesn’t quantify what he does”), or that Hannibal is capable of being redeemed. My impression is that, consistently through seasons two and three, he thinks of Hannibal as an immutable force, one he can either resist or submit to. (And of course, he opts to resist at the close of the first half of season 3, and ends the show by submitting.)

So I think the investment Will may have in saving Dolarhyde stems from his identification with Dolarhyde, especially in the fact that Dolarhyde becomes another pupil of Hannibal (and Will uses their shared role vis a vis Hannibal to manipulate Dolarhyde in WOTL). His theory that Dolarhyde is trying to stop is perhaps wrapped up in his own desire to resist Hannibal, and by extension his own violent urges. And perhaps that sheds more meaning on “I don’t think I can save myself, but maybe that’s just fine.” But any desire to “save” Dolarhyde seems much more based in a desire to save himself than a desire to save Hannibal.

And this dialogue from Bedelia is in the same scene as the wounded bird exchange. Bedelia instructing Will to crush the wounded bird, instead of save it, makes the most sense when read as her trying to get Will to kill Hannibal (in the same way she tried to get Hannibal to kill Will in 3A). But there’s no indication to me that Will thinks of Hannibal specifically as a wounded bird. In fact, it’s easier to argue that Bedelia saw Hannibal that way - she and Will discuss her continuation of her role as Hannibal’s psychiatrist, and that’s contrasted with her “crushing” Neal Frank, and her acknowledgment of how unevenly distributed her compassion was towards her two patients. So when she tells Will, “the next time you have an instinct to help someone, you might consider crushing them instead”, she’s actively trying to redirect his impulses, but I think also alluding to the shift in her approach towards Hannibal from 3A to 3B.

All of that is to say - I think Bedelia’s assumption that Will was motivated to “save” Hannibal is perhaps a case of projection on her part.

And Bedelia’s perception of Will changes throughout this arc. Although in 3.10 she’s very convinced that Will isn’t a true killer, she gradually comes to realize just how actively allied with Hannibal’s interests he is, whether he realizes it or not. The turning point for her is, I believe, 3.12, in the aftermath of the Chilton affair, when she recognizes Will as Hannibal’s “agency in the world.” Although Will does end up crushing Dolarhyde, he opts to help Hannibal. But it’s not rehabilitative help, it’s collaborative. And I think Bedelia becomes steadily more aware of that throughout this arc.

[adulthumanproblem]

Honestly, I was kind of done with the online left when people claimed you're a real life bad person if you

*checks notes*

Play the video game The Tenants (and similar)

Because you play as a landlord, and landlords are evil, and because you play as one, you basically are one, and you're therefor evil

No really. That's a discussion I had.

I tried to teach them the difference between real life and video games, between fantasy and reality, but no dice

I got blocked the moment I said that I'm anti-gun irl but still play shooter games every so often

Anyway. Many of the "progressive moral online left" would totally blame video games for real life violence