#is that a huge oversimplification of the plot? probably | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

shihalyfie · 4 years ago

Text

About the Adventure: reboot, the likely reason why it exists, the question of target demographic, and whether I would recommend it or not

I think this reboot has been kind of a strange outlier in terms of Digimon anime in general, in terms of...well, just about everything. I also feel like everything surrounding it has kind of been giving us mixed signals as to what the intent and purpose behind the anime is -- well, besides “cashing in on the Adventure brand”, but looking at it more closely, that might be a bit of an oversimplification.

I’m writing this post because, having seen the entire series to the end for myself and thinking very hard about it and what it was trying to do, I decided to put down my thoughts. This is not meant to be a review of what I think was good and bad, but rather, something that I hope will be helpful to those who might be on the fence about whether they want to watch it or not, or those who don’t want to watch/finish it but are curious about what happened, or those who are curious as to why this reboot even exists in the first place, or even maybe just those who did watch it but are interested in others’ thoughts about it. I'm personally convinced that -- especially in an ever-changing franchise like Digimon -- how much you like a given work is dependent on what your personal tastes are to the very end, and thus it’s helpful to understand what kind of expectations you should go in with if you want to watch something.

With all of this said and done, if you want to go in and best enjoy this series, I think it is best to consider this anime as a distinct Digimon series of its own. The relationship to Adventure is only surface-level, and by that I mean it’s very obvious it’s doing things its own thing deliberately without worrying too much about what prior series did. Of course, I think everyone will have varying feelings about using the Adventure branding for something that really isn't Adventure at all, but we are really talking about an in-name-only affair, and something that’s unabashedly doing whatever it wants. So in other words, if you’re going in expecting Adventure, or anything that really resembles Adventure, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. But if you’re able to approach it like yet another distinct Digimon series, and the other aspects of it fit your fancy, you’ll probably be able to enjoy it much better. And, conversely, I think it’s also important to remember that this series seems to have a writing philosophy with a fundamentally different goal from most Digimon series, and since it’s understandable for most long-time Digimon fans to have their tastes built on those prior series, it’s fine and completely understandable that this reboot may not be your cup of tea, for reasons that probably don’t actually have much to do with whether it’s an Adventure reboot or not.

There are no spoilers in the following post. (Although I use some emphatic language for the duration for it, these are mostly just my personal thoughts and how I see the series and the overall situation.)

On what exact relationship to Adventure this series has, and why it’s an “Adventure reboot”

If you ask why they did an Adventure reboot, the easiest answer to come up with is “Adventure milking, because it’s profitable”, but that’s kind of an oversimplification of what the issue is. This is especially when you take into account a key fact that official has been very well aware of since as early as 2006: most kids are too young to have seen Adventure, and therefore have no reason to care about it.

That’s the thing: Adventure milking only works so well on today’s children, and Toei and Bandai know this. This is also the reason that the franchise started going through a bit of a “split” starting in around 2012 (after Xros Wars finished airing), when the video game branch started making more active attempts to appeal to the adults’ fanbase with Re:Digitize and Adventure PSP. (Although they were technically still “kids’ games”, they were very obviously aimed at the adults’ audience as a primary “target”.) The generation that grew up with Adventure and other classic Digimon anime was getting older and older, and targeting that audience would require tailoring products more specifically to them -- ultimately culminating in 2015 and the solidification of “very obviously primarily for adults” media in the form of both games (Cyber Sleuth and Next Order) and anime (tri.). Note that Appmon ended up getting its own 3DS game, but since it was targeted at kids, it seems to have been developed by a completely different pipeline/branch from the aforementioned adults’ games, so even that had a split.

So if we want to talk about full-on nostalgia pandering, that’s already being done in the adults’ branch. In fact, Appmon development specifically said that they felt free to not really care about the adults’ audience because that was tri.’s job. Of course, the hardcore Digimon adults’ fanbase is still keeping an eye on the kids’ shows, and it’s good to not upset them -- and, besides, even if we’re all suffering under the hell of capitalism, people who work in kids’ shows still tend to be very passionate about the content and messages they’re showing the kids, so they still put an effort into making good content that adults can enjoy too. But, nevertheless, adults are still the “periphery demographic”, and a kids’ show is not a success if the kids (who have not seen and do not care about Adventure) are not watching it or buying the toys. Appmon ended up being extremely well-received by the adults’ fanbase, but that all meant nothing since the kids didn’t get into it.

Most kids are not super incredibly discerning about so-called writing quality (it’s not like they don’t at least unconsciously know when something is good, but they’re much less likely to be bothered by little things adults are often bothered by), so there’s a certain degree you have to get their attention if you want things to catch on with them. Critical reception does matter a lot more when we talk about the adults’ audience, but for the kids, the more important part is how much you’ve managed to engage them and how much fun they’re having (especially in regards to the toyline). Moreover, there’s the problem of “momentum”; Digimon’s sister shows of PreCure, Kamen Rider, and Super Sentai have sometimes had really poorly performing shows (critically or financially), but have managed to recover it in successive years to avoid getting cancelled. Digimon never managed to get to that point, with sales nearly dropping to half with Tamers and again with Frontier. So in essence, Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon were all attempts at figuring out what was needed to just get that “kickstart” again -- but things just never lined up for it to work.

So if kids don’t really care about Adventure, why would they do Adventure nostalgia pandering? The answer is one that official has actually openly stated multiple times: they want to have parents watch it together with their children. Both Seki and Kinoshita said this in regards to watching the reaction to Kizuna, and it was also stated outright as a goal for the reboot, but, believe it or not, there’s reports of this having been stated back as early as Savers (followed by an admission that maybe 2006 was a little too early for people who grew up with Adventure to be old enough to have their own kids). So the little nostalgia references in Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon aren't really meant to magically turn the series into Adventure as much as they’re supposed to be flags waved at the parents to get them to pay attention, so that they can introduce their kids to Digimon and watch it together with them, until the kids eventually take an interest on their own and they don’t need to rely on that kind of standby as much. (I say “as much” because of course PreCure, Rider, and Sentai all are still very indulgent in their anniversary references, but they’re not nearly as reliant on it to the point of life-and-death.)

This is also why Kizuna’s existence and release date two months prior to the reboot is a huge factor in this. The reason tri. wouldn’t have done it is that it never actually reached a properly “mainstream” audience. It’s a huge reason I keep emphasizing the fact that tri. and Kizuna are two separate things with completely different production and release formats, because tri. being a limited OVA screening released in six parts over three years means that, although it was a moderate financial success that did better than the franchise’s other niche products, in the end, it didn’t actually reach the “extremely casual” audience very well. We, as the “hardcore Internet fanbase”, all know people who watched all six parts, and the difference between tri. and Kizuna’s release formats doesn’t hit us as hard because of international distribution circumstances, but even on our end, if you talk to your casual friends who barely remember anything about Digimon except what they saw on TV twenty years ago, you will almost never find anyone who got past Part 1, maybe 2 at most. (That’s before we even get into the part where a good chunk of them got turned off at the character design stage for being too different.) Sticking with a full six-part series over three years is a commitment, and if you’re not someone with a certain level of loyalty to the franchise, you aren’t as likely to put aside the time for it!

Kizuna, on the other hand, was a full-on theatrical movie with full marketing campaign that was aimed at that extremely casual mainstream audience, including a lot of people who hadn’t even heard of tri. (due to it being too niche) or hadn’t bothered to commit to watching something so long, and thus managed to “hype up” a lot of adults and get them in a Digimon mood. (Critical reception issues aside, this is also presumably a huge reason Kizuna isn’t all that reliant on tri.’s plot; Adventure and 02 both averaged at around 11% of the country watching it when it first aired, but the number of people who even saw tri. much less know what happened in it is significantly lower, so while you can appeal to a lot of people if you’re just targeting the 11%, you'll lock them out if you’re overly reliant on stuff a lot of them will have never seen in the first place.) We’re talking the kind of super-casual who sees a poster for Kizuna, goes “oh I remember Digimon!”, casually buys a ticket for the movie, likes it because it has characters they remember and the story is feelsy, and then two months later an anime that looks like the Digimon they recognize is on Fuji TV, resulting in them convincing their kid to watch it together with them because they’re in a Digimon mood now, even though the actual contents of the anime are substantially different from the original.

So, looking back at the reboot:

There’s a huge, huge, huge implication that the choice to use Adventure branding was at least partially to get Fuji TV to let them have their old timeslot back. Neither Xros Wars nor Appmon were able to be on that old timeslot, presumably because Fuji TV had serious doubts about their profitability (perhaps after seeing Savers not do very well). This isn’t something that hits as hard for us outside Japan who don’t have to feel the impact of this anyway, but it’s kind of a problem if kids don’t even get the opportunity to watch the show in the first place. While there’s been a general trend of moving to video-on-demand to the point TV ratings don’t really have as much impact as they used to, I mean...it sure beats 6:30 in the morning, goodness. (Note that a big reason PreCure, Rider, and Sentai are able to enjoy the comfortable positions they’re in is that they have a very luxurious 8:30-10 AM Sunday block on TV Asahi dedicated to them.)

Since we’re talking about “the casual mainstream”, this means that this kind of ploy only works with something where a casual person passing by can see names and faces and take an interest. This is why it has to be Adventure, not 02 or Tamers or whatnot; 02 may have had roughly similar TV ratings to Adventure and fairly close sales figures back in 2000, but the actual pop culture notability disparity in this day and age is humongous (think about the difference in pop culture awareness between Butter-Fly and Target). 02, Tamers, and all can do enough to carry “adults’ fandom” products and merch sales at DigiFes, and the adults’ branch of the franchise in general, but appealing to the average adult buying toys for the kids is a huge difference, and a big reason that, even if they’re clearly starting to acknowledge more of the non-Adventure series these days, it’s still hard to believe they’re going to go as far as rebooting anything past Adventure -- or, more accurately, hard to believe they’ll be able to get the same impact using names and faces alone.

This advertising with the Adventure brand goes beyond just the anime -- we’re talking about the toyline that has the involved character faces plastered on them, plus all of the ventures surrounding them that Bandai pretty obviously carefully timed to coincide with this. One particularly big factor is the card game, which is doing really, really well right now, to the point it’s even started gaining an audience among people who weren’t originally Digimon fans. Part of it is because the game’s design is actually very good and newcomer-friendly, but also...nearly every set since the beginning came with reboot-themed Tamer Cards, which means that, yes, those cards with the Adventure names and faces were helping lure people into taking an interest in the game. Right now, the game is doing so well and has gained such a good reputation that it probably doesn’t need that crutch anymore to keep going as long as the game remains well-maintained, but I have no doubt the initial “Adventure” branding was what helped it take off, and its success is most likely a huge pillar sustaining the franchise at the current moment.

Speaking of merch and toys, if you look closely, you might notice that Bandai decided to go much, much more aggressively into the toy market with this venture than they ever did with Savers, Xros Wars, or Appmon (Appmon was probably the most aggressive attempt out of said three). They put out a lot more merch and did a lot more collaborative events to engage the parents and children, and, presumably, the reason they were able to do this was because they were able to push into those outlets with the confidence the Adventure brand would let them be accepted (much like with Fuji TV). Like with the card game, the important part was getting their “foot in the door” so that even if it stopped being Adventure after a fashion, they’d still have all of those merchandising outlets -- after all, one of the first hints we ever got of Ghost Game’s existence was a July product listing for its products replacing the reboot’s in a gachapon set, so we actually have evidence of certain product pipelines being opened by the reboot’s precedent. (The word 後番組 literally means “the TV program that comes after”, so it’s pretty obvious this was intended for Ghost Game; in other words, the reboot’s existence helped ensure there be a “reservation” for this kind of product to be made.)

I think one important thing to keep in mind is that Toei and Bandai have as much of a stake in avoiding rehashing for their kids’ franchises as we do. Even if you look at this from a purely capitalistic perspective, because of how fast the “turnover” is for the kids’ audience, sustaining a franchise for a long time off rehashing the same thing over and over is hard, and even moreso when it involves a twenty-year-old anime that said kids don’t even know or remember. Ask around about popular long-running Japanese kids’ franchises and you’ll notice they practically rely on being able to comfortably change things up every so often, like PreCure/Rider/Sentai shuffling every year, or Yu-Gi-Oh! having a rotation of different series and concepts, or the struggles that franchises that don’t do this have to deal with. And, after all, for all people are cynical about Toei continuing to milk Adventure or any of the other older series at every opportunity, as far as the kids’ branch of the franchise goes, this is only capable of lasting to a certain extent; if they tried keeping this up too long, even the adults and kids would get bored, and there is some point it’ll be easier to try and make products directly targeted at the kids’ audience instead of having to rely on the parents to ease them into it.

So it’s completely understandable that the moment they secured a proper audience with the reboot and finished up their first series with this, they decided to take the risk with Ghost Game right after. And considering all that’s happened, this is still a risk -- they’re changing up a lot (even if not as much as Appmon), and there’s a chance that the audience they’ve gathered is going to shoot down again because they’ve changed so much and they no longer have the Adventure branding as a “crutch” to use -- but they’re taking it anyway instead of going for something at least slightly more conventional.

Which means that, yes, there’s a possibility this will all explode in their face, because the Adventure branding is that huge of a card they’re about to lose. But at the very, very least, Ghost Game is coming in with the “momentum” and advantage that Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon all didn’t have: a brand currently in the stage of recovery, all of the merchandising and collaborative pipelines the reboot and Kizuna opened up, a fairly good timeslot, and a premise somewhat more conventional than Xros Wars and Appmon (I’m saying this as someone who likes both: their marketing definitely did not do them many favors). There are still a lot of risks it’s playing here, and it’s possible it won’t be the end of more Adventure or reboot brand usage to try to keep that momentum up even as we go into Ghost Game, but it’s the first time in a long while we’ve had something to stand on.

Okay, so that’s out of the way. But the end result is that we now have 67 episodes of an Adventure “reboot” that actually doesn’t even resemble Adventure that much at all, which seems to have achieved its goal of flagging down attention so it can finally going back to trying new things. This series exists, we can’t do anything about the fact it exists, the period where its own financial performance actually mattered is coming to an end anyway, and we, as a fanbase of adults hanging out on the Internet keeping up with the franchise as a whole, have to figure out how each of us feels about this. So what of it?

About the contents of the reboot itself

One thing I feel hasn’t been brought up as a potential topic very much (or, at least, not as much as I feel like it probably should be) is that the reboot seems to be actively aimed at a younger target audience than the original Adventure. It hasn’t been stated outright, but we actually have quite a bit of evidence pointing towards this.

Let’s take a moment and discuss what it even means to have a different target audience. When you’re a kid, even one or two years’ difference is a big deal, and while things vary from kid to kid, generally speaking, it helps to have an idea of what your “overall goal” is when targeting a certain age group, since at some point you have to approximate the interests of some thousands of children. Traditionally, Digimon has been aimed at preteens (10-11 year olds); of course, many will testify to having seen the series at a younger age than that, but the "main” intended target demographic was in this arena. (Also, keep in mind that this is an average; a show aimed at 10-11 year olds could be said to be more broadly aimed at 7-13 year olds, whereas one aimed at 7-8 year olds would be more broadly aimed at something like 5-10 year olds.) Let’s talk a bit about what distinguishes children’s shows (especially Japanese kids’ shows) between this “preteen demographic” and things aimed at a much younger audience (which I’ll call “young child demographic”, something like the 7-8 year old arena):

With children who are sufficiently young, it’s much, much more difficult to ensure that a child of that age will be able to consistently watch TV at the same hour every week instead of being subject to more variable schedules, often set by their parents, meaning that it becomes much more difficult to have a series that relies on you having seen almost every episode to know what’s going on. For somewhat older kids, they’re more likely to be able to pick and pursue their own preferences (the usual “got up early every week for this show”). This means that shows targeted at a young child demographic will be more likely to be episodic, or at least not have a complex dramatic narrative that requires following the full story, whereas shows targeted at a preteen audience are more willing to have a dramatic narrative with higher complexity. This does not mean by any shake of the imagination that a narrative is incapable of having any kind of depth or nuance -- the reboot’s timeslot predecessor GeGeGe no Kitaro got glowing reviews all over the board for being an episodic story with tons of depth -- nor that characters can’t slowly develop over the course of the show. But it does raise the bar significantly, especially because it prevents you from making episodes that require you to know what happened in previous ones.

The thing is, the original Adventure and the older Digimon series in general didn’t have to worry about this, and, beyond the fact that their narratives very obviously were not episodic, we actually have concrete evidence of the disparity: Digimon has often been said to be a franchise for “the kids who graduated from (outgrew) a certain other monster series”. Obviously, they’re referring to Pokémon -- which does have the much younger target demographic. That’s why its anime is significantly more episodic and less overall plot-oriented, and Digimon wasn’t entirely meant to be a direct competitor to it; rather, it was hoping to pick up the preteens who’d enjoyed Pokémon at a younger age but were now looking for something more catered to them. This is also why, when Yo-kai Watch came into the game in 2014, that was considered such a huge direct competitor to Pokémon, because it was aiming for that exact same demographic, complete with episodic anime. When Yo-kai Watch moved to its Shadowside branch in 2017, it was specifically because they had concerns about losing audience and wanted to appeal to the kids who had been watching the original series, but since they were preteens now, they adopted a more dramatic and emotionally complex narrative that would appeal to that audience instead. So you can actually see the shift in attempted target demographic in real time.

Adventure through Frontier were aimed at 10-11 year olds, and here’s the interesting part: those series had the protagonists hover around the age of said target audience. We actually have it on record that Frontier had a direct attempt to keep most of the kids as fifth-graders for the sake of appealing to the audience, and so that it would be relatable to them. You can also see this policy of “matching the target audience’s age” in other series at the time; Digimon’s sister series Ojamajo Doremi (also produced by Seki) centered around eight-year-olds. Nor was Seki the only one to do this; stepping outside Toei for a bit, Medabots/Medarot had its protagonist Ikki be ten years old, much like Digimon protagonists, and the narrative was similarly dramatic. The thing is, that’s not how it usually works, and that’s especially not really been how it’s worked for the majority of kids’ series since the mid-2000s. In general, and especially now, it’s usually common to have the protagonists of children’s media be slightly older than the target age group. This has a lot of reasons behind it -- partially because kids are looking to have slightly older characters as a model for what to follow in their immediate future, and partially because “the things you want to teach the kids” are often more realistically reflected if the kids on screen have the right level of independence and capacity for emotional contemplation. Case in point: while everyone agrees the Adventure through Frontier characters are quite relatable, it’s a common criticism that the level of emotional insight sometimes pushes the boundary of what’s actually believable for 10-11 year olds...

...which is presumably why, with the exception of this reboot, every Digimon TV series since, as of this writing, started shifting to middle school students. That doesn’t mean they’re aiming the series at middle school kids now, especially because real-life 13-15 year olds are usually at the stage where they pretend they’ve outgrown kids’ shows (after all, that’s why there’s a whole term for “middle school second year syndrome”), but more that the narrative that they want to tell is best reflected by kids of that age, especially when we’re talking characters meant to represent children from the real world and not near-immortal youkai like Kitaro. In fact, the Appmon staff outright said that Haru was placed in middle school because the story needed that level of independence and emotional sensitivity, which is interesting to consider in light of the fact that Appmon’s emotional drama is basically on par with that of Adventure through Frontier’s. So in other words, the kind of high-level drama endemic to Adventure through Frontier is would actually normally be more on par with what you’d expect for kids of Haru’s age.

But at this point, the franchise is at a point of desperation, and you can see that, as I said earlier, Appmon was blatantly trying to be one of those “have its cake and eat it too” series by having possibly one of the franchise’s most dramatic storylines while also having some of the most unsubtle catchphrases and bright colors it has to offer. Moreover, one thing you might notice if you look closely at Appmon: most of its episodes are self-contained. Only a very small handful of episodes are actively dependent on understanding what happened in prior episodes to understand the conflict going on in the current one -- it’s just very cleverly structured in a way you don’t really notice this as easily. So as you can see, the more desperate the franchise has gotten to get its kids’ audience back, the more it has to be able to grab the younger demographic and not lock them out as much as possible -- which means that it has to do things that the original series didn’t have to worry about at all.

Having seen the reboot myself, I can say that it checks off a lot of what you might expect if you tried to repurpose something based on Adventure (and only vaguely based on it, really) into a more episodic story that doesn’t require you to follow the whole thing, and that it has to break down its story into easy-to-follow bits. In fact, there were times where I actually felt like it gave me the vibes of an educational show that would usually be expected for this demographic, such as repeated use of slogans or fun catchphrases for young kids to join in on. That alone means that even if the “base premise” is similar to the original Adventure, this already necessitates a lot of things that have to be very different, because Adventure really cannot be called episodic no matter how you slice it.

Not only that, even though the target audience consideration has yet to be outright stated, we also have interviews on hand that made it very clear, from the very beginning, what their goals with the reboot were: they wanted the kids to be able to enjoy a story of otherworldly exploration during the pandemic, they wanted cool action sequences, and they wanted to get the adults curious about what might be different from the original. Note that last part: they actively wanted this series to be different from the original, because the differences would engage parents in spotting the differences, and the third episode practically even goes out of its way to lay that message down by taking the kids to a familiar summer camp, only to have it pass without incident and go “ha, you thought, but nope!” Moreover -- this is the key part -- “surprising” people who were coming from the original series was a deliberate goal they had from the very beginning. They’ve stated this outright -- they knew older fans were watching this! They were not remotely shy about stating that they wanted to surprise returning viewers with unexpected things! They even implied that they wanted it to be a fun experience for older watchers to see what was different and what wasn’t -- basically, it’s a new show for their kids who never saw the original Adventure, while the parents are entertained by a very different take on something that seems ostensibly familiar.

On top of that, the head writer directly cited V-Tamer as an influence -- and if you know anything about V-Tamer, it’s really not that much of a character narrative compared to what we usually know of Digimon anime, and is mostly known for its battle tactics and action sequences (but in manga form). In other words, we have a Digimon anime series that, from day one, was deliberately made to have a writing philosophy and goal that was absolutely not intended to be like Adventure -- or any Digimon TV anime up to this point -- in any way. And that’s a huge shock for us as veterans, who have developed our tastes and expectations based on up to seven series of Digimon that were absolutely not like this at all. But for all it's worth, the circumstances surrounding its production and intent don't seem to quite line up with what the most common accusations against it are:

That it’s a rehash of Adventure: It really isn’t. It’s also blatantly apparent it has no intention of being so. The points that are in common: the character names and rough character designs, some very minimal profile details for said characters, Devimon having any particular foil position to Angemon, the use of Crests to represent personal growth, the premise of being in the Digital World and...that’s it! Once those points are aside, it’s really hard to say that the series resembles Adventure any more than Frontier or Xros Wars resembles Adventure (which are also “trapped in another world” narratives) -- actually, there are times the series resembles those two more than the original Adventure, which many have been quick to point out. The majority of things you can make any kind of comparison to basically drop off by the end of the first quarter or so, and trying to force a correlation is basically just that: you’d have to try forcing the comparison. The plot, writing style, and even the lineup of enemies shown just go in a completely different direction after that. So in the end, the base similarities can be said to be a marketing thing; if I want to criticize this series, I don’t think “lack of creativity” would actually be something I would criticize it for. (Of course, you’re still welcome to not be a huge fan of how they’re still guilty of using Adventure’s name value to market something that is not actually Adventure. We’re all gonna have mixed feelings on that one.)

That they don’t understand or remember Adventure’s appeal: Unlikely. All of the main staff has worked on character-based narratives before, which have been very well-praised while we’re at it. The producer, Sakurada Hiroyuki, was an assistant producer on the original series, and I would like to believe he probably remembers at least a thing or two about what they were doing with the original series...but, also, he’s the producer of Xros Wars, which definitely had its own individuality and style, and, moreover, was more of a character narrative that people generally tend to expect from Digimon anime. (Still a bit unconventional, and it has its own questions of personal taste, but a lot of people have also pointed out that this reboot has a lot in common with Xros Wars in terms of its writing tone and its emphasis on developing Digital World resident Digimon moreso than the human characters.) All signs point to the idea they could make a character narrative like Adventure if they really wanted to. It’s just, they don’t want to do that with this reboot, so they didn’t.

That they misinterpreted or misremembered the Adventure characters: There’s been accusations of said characters being written in a way that implies misinterpretation or lack of understanding of the original characters, but the thing is, while I definitely agree they have nowhere near the depth of the original ones, there are points that seem to be deliberate changes. (At some points, they’re actually opposites of the original, and certain things that operate as some very obscure references -- for instance, Sora complaining about having to sit in seiza -- seem to also be deliberate statements of going in a different direction.) The lack of human character depth or backstory doesn’t seem to be out of negligence, but rather that this story doesn’t want to be a character narrative to begin with -- after all, we’re used to seven series of Digimon that are, but there are many, many kids’ anime, or even stories in general, where the story is more about plot or action than it is completely unpacking all of its characters’ heads. In this case, this reboot does seem to have characters that are taking cues from or are “inspired by” the original, but, after all, it’s an alternate universe and has no obligation to adhere to the original characters’ backgrounds, so it stands to reason that it’d take liberties whenever it wanted. (Again, the head writer outright stated that he based the reboot’s Taichi more on V-Tamer Taichi than the original Adventure anime Taichi. He knows there’s a difference!) Even more intriguingly, the series actually avoids certain things that are common misconceptions or pigeonholes that would normally be done by the mainstream -- for instance, the Crest of Light (infamously one of the more abstract ones in the narrative) is fully consistent with Adventure’s definition of it as “the power of life”, and, if I dare say so myself, Koushirou’s characterization (emphasizing his relationship with “knowledge” and his natural shyness) arguably resembles the original far more than most common fan reductions of his character that overemphasize his computer skills over his personal aptitude. In other words, I think the staff does know what happened in the original Adventure -- they just actively don’t want to do what Adventure did, even if it’s ostensibly a reboot.

That it’s soulless or that there’s no passion in its creation: Well, this is subjective, and in the end I’m not a member of the staff to tell you anything for sure, but there are definitely a lot of things in this anime that don’t seem like they’d be the byproduct of uninspired creation or lack of passion. It’s just that those things are all not the kinds of things that we, as Digimon veterans, have come to develop a taste for and appreciate in Digimon anime. That is to say, there is an incredible amount of thought and detail put into representing Digimon null canon (i.e. representing special attacks and mechanics), the action sequences are shockingly well-animated in ways that put most prior Digimon anime to shame, and the series has practically been making an obvious attempt to show off as many Digimon (creatures) that haven’t traditionally gotten good franchise representation as they can. Or sometimes really obscure “meta fanservice” references that only make sense to the really, really, really, really hardcore longtime Digimon fan (for instance, having an episode centered around Takeru and Opossummon, because Takeru’s voice actress Han Megumi voiced Airu in Xros Wars). If you follow any of the animators on Twitter, they seem to be really actively proud of their work on it, and franchise creators Volcano Ota and Watanabe Kenji seem to be enjoying themselves every week...so basically, we definitely have creators passionate about having fun with this, it’s just that all of it is being channeled here, not the character writing.

So in the end, you can basically see that this series is basically the epitome of desperately pulling out all of the stops to make sure this series lands with the actual target demographic of children, dammit, and gets them into appreciating how cool these fighting monsters are and how cool it would be if they stuck with them even into a series that’s not Adventure. The Adventure branding and names to lure in the parents, the straightforward and easy-to-understand action-oriented narrative so that kids will think everything is awesome and that they’ll like it even when the story changes, and the merchandise and collab events booked everywhere so that they can all be reused for the next series too...because, remember, they failed with that during Savers, Xros Wars, and Appmon (I mean, goodness, you kind of have to admire their persistence, because a ton of other kids’ franchises failing this many times would have given up by now), so it’s a bit unsurprising that they went all the way to get the kids’ attention at the expense of a lot of things that would attract veterans, especially since the veterans already have a well-developed adults’ pipeline to cater to them. This does also mean that this series is more likely to come off as a 67-episode toy commercial than any previous Digimon series, but it’s not even really the toys as much as they’re trying to sell the entire franchise and the actual monsters in the hopes that they’ll stick with it even when the narrative changes.

Nevertheless, here we are. The series is over. Ghost Game -- which, as of this writing, is looking to be much more of a conventional Digimon narrative, complete with older cast, obviously more dramatic atmosphere, and pretty much everything surrounding its PR -- is on its way, presumably thanks to the success of this endeavor. It’s hard to gauge it; we have it on record that they also intend it to be episodic, but remember that this doesn’t necessarily prevent it from having an overall dramatic plot or nuanced drama (especially since the abovementioned Appmon and Kitaro were perfectly capable of pulling off this balance). Nevertheless, it seems to be a lot more of the conventional kind of Digimon narrative we usually expect, so, as for us, adult long-time fans of the Digimon franchise (many of whom don’t have kids anyway), what exactly should we make of this? Well, as far as “supporting the franchise” goes, you’ll get much more progress supporting Ghost Game than the reboot; I highly doubt view counts and merch sales relative to an already-finished series will do nearly as much for the franchise’s health as much as the currently airing series, and, besides, it’d probably do us all a favor to support the endeavor that’s actually new and fresh. So when it comes to a “past” series like this, it’s all just going to come down to a question of personal preference and taste: is this a series you, personally, want to watch, and would you find it entertaining?

For some of you, it’s possible that it just won’t be your cup of tea at all -- and since, like I said, the majority of us here have based our expectations and preferences on up to seven series of Digimon that were not like this, that’s also perfectly fine, and in that case I don’t actually recommend you watch this. Of course, I’ve never thought that it was ever fair to expect a Digimon fan to have seen all of the series released to date; the more series we get, the more inhumane of a demand that’ll become, and I think this franchise becoming successful enough to have so many series that most people won’t have seen it all is a good thing. (It’s actually kind of alarming that the percentage of people who have seen it all is so high, because it means the franchise has failed to get much of an audience beyond comparatively hardcore people who committed to it all the way.) But I think, especially in this case, with a series for which adult fans like us were probably lowest on the priority list due to the sheer amount of desperation going on here, it’s fine to skip it, and if you’re someone who lives by a need for character depth or emotionally riveting narrative, the fact this series is (very unabashedly and unashamedly) mostly comprised of episodic stories and action sequences means you won’t have missed much and probably won’t feel too left out of any conversations going forward. That’s before we even get into the part where it’s still completely understandable to potentially have mixed feelings or resentment about the overuse of the Adventure brand for something like this, especially if Adventure is a particularly important series to you.

But for some of you out there, it might still be something you can enjoy on its own merits. I’ve seen people who were disappointed by the limited degree of Digimon action sequences in the past or the fact that the series has gotten overly fixated on humans, and had an absolute ball with the reboot because it finally got to represent parts of the franchise they felt hadn’t been shown off as well. “Fun” is a perfectly valid reason to enjoy something. It’s also perfectly possible to be someone who can enjoy character narratives like the prior Digimon series but also enjoy something that’s more for being outlandish and fun and has cool Digital World concepts and visuals -- and, like I said, it does not let up on that latter aspect at all, so there’s actually potential for a huge feast in that regard. I think as long as you don’t expect it to be a character narrative like Adventure -- which will only set you up for disappointment, because it’s not (and made very clear since even the earliest episodes and interviews that it had no intention of being one) -- it’s very possible to enjoy it for what it is, and for what it does uniquely.

#digimon #digimon adventure:#digimon adventure reboot #digimon adventure 2020 #digimon adventure psi #shihameta

108 notes · View notes

goldenkamuyhunting · 4 years ago

Note

This question may be interpreted in the wrong way, so before I get lapidated for this ask, GK is my favorite ongoing manga and I read it bc of plot&characters arcs, not bc of ships.

Noda has proved to be okay with having canon and outwardly lgbt characters (Ienaga, Princess&Boss), do you think some of the characters still alive, if revealed to be lgbt, could get together without having to die?

There are many men in the cast who have shown no interest in women so far, whereas they have strong&close relationships with other men. Noda’s style is also pretty homoerotic, and there are hits that some MCs may be bi/gay or demisexuals. Since GK is a seinen and its fandom is familiar with Noda’s style, it could get away with having a canon lgbt pairing sans backlash, but it would be pretty risky bc of Japan’s censorship (talking about the anime aired on national tv, idk where GK airs in Japan). Maybe I’m just projecting my wishes too much into it. Noda’s homoerotism and bromance are awesome, and he has already inserted some lgbt characters, but it would be refreshing having a canon lgbt relationship without using the “bury your gays” trope.

Don’t worry, I don’t think you’re asking something wrong!

Honestly though... I’ve no idea.

I’ve no idea which is the position of Japan censorship and if they would care so I can’t even speak in this regard.

Also... I don’t really know how many will survive this mad chase.

Among those I expect to survive there are Sugimoto, Asirpa, Ogata and Ushiyama because they were on the right side of the road of survival, Shiraishi, because he escaped from the wrong side of the road of survival and Tanigaki, Koito and Tsukishima because the tiger’s curse condemn them to a live of missfortune.

So about them:

- Asirpa: she has a crush on Sugimoto which, I hope, she will grow out of it. No idea if then the story will want to show us what will be of her when she’ll grow up and if she’ll have a love interest by then.

- Sugimoto: I expect him to go back to Umeko. She can dump him if she wants to, but, unless the plan is to pair Sugimoto together with Asirpa afterward, I don’t expect the story to show him starting a love story with anyone else, not because he’ll forever live a single life but simply because it would go beyond his character arc. The story started with him deciding to bring the money to Umeko, so she’s part of it, and it focused a lot with his relationship with Asirpa so this can sadly mean something but to insert a third love relation is something I feel unlikely regardless from the partner being male or female.

- Ogata: honestly, unless the story will skip far forward in the future, I don’t expect Ogata to ever end up in a relationship until he manages to solve his issues first, learn to accept himself and the fact that love exist and he can receive and give it and that he doesn’t have to stay a solitary wildcat forever. So in the remote case the story will have him solve his issues the fact he were to get someone could conclude his arc but in this case it would make thematically sense if it were more to drive to the point he became for his kid the father his father wasn’t to him, than to pair him with someone. A way to close his father’s issues, in short, not really to give him romance. And, as said before, he first would have to solve most of his issues so I’ve no idea if we’ll ever get to this point.

- Ushiyama: I can’t see him as having a stable relation. Ushiyama is above 40 so old enough he was alive when in Japan it was assumed that the norm was being bisexual (sorta, this is actually a huge oversimplification because the whole thing is a lot more complex but you get the gist), and he might even have the right background to still be all right with it. However he very clearly has a favourite type so unless he meets someone else like Ienaga he’ll probably continue hanging around brothels.

- Shiraishi: Probably many didn’t know about it but I was hoping Boutarou would take Shiraishi as his lover because I loved them together and I thought they had the right chemistry. ;_; With Boutarou’s death and the promise Shiraishi will have to get married and make kids to whom he’ll pass Boutarou’s legend on, I’ll expect Shiraishi to do just that.

- Tanigaki, Tsukishima and Koito: as I said, I’ll expect the tiger’s curse to eventually find them and force them to live a life of missfortune so their fate doesn’t fit with your hopes. Of the three Koito, despite his young age, is in a social class in which his parents would, for sure, get him a wife but that might also find normal for him to have a male lover under certain conditions (so yeah, I think Koito was genuinely crushing on Tsurumi and saw nothing wrong in this because he’s from a social class that historically found it normal to be interested in both males and females). But again, misfortune hits them so I guess that’s not what you were hoping for.

The rest can very well end up being wiped out or jailed so I doubt they can give you a pairing that doesn’t end up getting buried or getting parted.

For example I’m pretty confident Hijikata and Nagakura, being on the wrong side of the road of survival will die but I also like to think they had a platonic love relation because it fits with the time period they came from, but again, they’ll likely get buried so I don’t think it’ll satisfy you if this were to turn out to be true.

So... I don’t know.

It’s not impossible Noda will... let’s say, decide to keep Kantarou alive and give him a male love interest but well, it’s something I can’t predict because it isn’t really tied in the themes of the story, it’s just a nice extra.

We’ll see. Sorry for not having been particularly helpful...

#Hijikata Toshizou #Nagakura Shinpachi #Ushiyama Tatsuuma #Okuyama Kantarou #Oosawa Fusatarou #Shiraishi Yoshitake #Sugimoto Saichi #Asirpa #Ogata Hyakunosuke #Tanigaki Genjirou #Tsukishima Hajime #Koito Otonoshin #Tsurumi Tokushirou #Ask

27 notes · View notes

strangertheory · 5 years ago

Text

"anti-Mileven"

I know you submitted this as a message and not an Ask, but I hope you don't mind if I answer your question with a longer post because this is a topic that is important to me but is complicated. I've meant to do a post about this, but kept putting it off because it is a very layered topic for me and my thoughts about Mileven are probably not what a lot of fans want to hear.

I respect that everyone develops an attachment to their preferred couples in stories for personal reasons, and as such any criticism of the dynamic between two characters that are dating can feel like a very personal criticism. I respect everyone's head-canons and favorite ships as sacred ground: I don't want to tell anyone how they should or should not relate to a story. That's unique to each of us as fans, and we will all enjoy Stranger Things for different reasons.

However: I do have some thoughts regarding the way that the narrative has established the dynamic between Mike and El. And I personally do not find their dynamic *as it currently is* to be one that is ideal for either of them yet.

I really care about Eleven and I really care about Mike. They are two of my favorite characters in the story.

To say that I'm "anti-Mileven" is a huge oversimplification of how I feel about Mike and El's dynamic.

I am very much anti:

overlooking the fact El has been treated as a lab rat and abused and isolated from society for the majority of her existence and her ignorance of her own identity and her own desires is repeatedly reinforced canonically. ("How do I know what I like?") El has spent only a few months out in the world beyond her cell at the lab and beyond Hopper's cabin, she knows very little about the world yet, and she is being taught much of what she now knows by her boyfriend who also happens to be one of the few people she interacts with in her daily life. The power difference and social difference between them is huge currently regardless of whether Mike is a nice kid with good intentions or not, and they are both fourteen years olds.

overlooking that it is superficial and not representative of a "deep" relationship to only kiss and make out with a significant other and not do other meaningful activities that establish a real day-to-day relationship (like hanging out with friends and other loved ones as a couple.) There's a popular misconception that the act of two people kissing is inherently romantic and a sign of emotional closeness. But kissing becomes romantic psychologically when two people share a deep affection for one another that is based on shared experiences and emotional and psychological connectedness. If two characters can be shown to care about one another without ever physically touching, they have the potential for a deep connection that is based on more than the thrill of physical affection. Give me a well-developed relationship first, and then kissing will seem romantic to me. Without an established psychological and emotional connection between characters, kissing is merely a superficial representation of the idea of intimacy between characters without any actual substance underneath. Sure that's what kids do when they're figuring out how dating and feelings and physical intimacy work and it's not harmful in itself provided that they are both comfortable with it, but keep this in mind within the context of the other concerns I list here.

trivializing Mike's dishonesty and blaming Hopper for Mike's lying when the truth is Mike could have easily explained to El that Hopper didn't want them spending as much time together and having some space would be better. El is well aware of Hopper's dislike for their time spent together. This should have been a very easy conversation. As Lucas rightfully asks as Mike is ranting about the situation he got himself into: "Why lie?" Good question, Lucas. Good question. El asks Mike this again later at the mall. "Why do you lie?" Mike stares back at her with an awkward expression, and does NOT answer her. Why is this answer not an easy one? Why has Mike still not addressed things with El? I think there is more going on here than just Hopper's threats.

I am very in favor of:

El learning more about who she is and what she wants to do with her life outside of the desires and expectations of other people.

Mike figuring out how to effectively express his thoughts and feelings honestly. He is clearly struggling to do this throughout season 3, and it is uncharacteristic of the kid who defiantly said and did what he wanted frequently in seasons 1 and 2. Clearly Mike is not comfortable and is nervous, which is understandable for someone exploring new emotionally vulnerable territory like dating for the first time, but he needs to learn to be honest and tell people how he is thinking and feeling or else he is also putting himself and his feelings and needs at risk and potentially establishing an unhealthy relationship that will hurt him and hurt others even if he doesn't mean to. Mike's nervousness is STILL present in the final goodbye scene in which Mike and El talk, and El tells him she loves him and kisses him. He is still stumbling over his words and anxious, and he seems notably confused after El kisses him. These small details are not trivial, they are clearly intentional.

Recognizing that Mike is the first person her age that was kind to El when she escaped the lab, and given that she has only known pain and abuse her entire life and has never known friendship let alone romance that her psychological readiness for understanding a romantic relationship is NOT the same as an ordinary 14 year old's and this cannot be stated enough.

Recognizing that societal pressures and personal insecurities might be a huge factor in how Mike clings to El's attention and affection for him, and that there is evidence in the story that supports this interpretation. We know that Mike is bullied frequently, and that there is a layer of homophobia often involved. (Even if James and Troy were speaking rudely about Will, they were still directly confronting Mike. The implication is there.) We know that Lucas yelled at Mike "No Mike. You're blind. Blind because you like that a girl's not grossed out by you!" This reveals that Lucas knows that Mike is insecure and wants validation. Just because Mike has a desperate desire to be loved and liked by a girl does not mean that his appreciation of El's attention is based on his genuine romantic affection for her. Mike might be dating El because he enjoys the attention, he likes being liked, and he likes how having a girlfriend makes him feel more accepted and normal.

Recognizing that every moment that Mike has tried to share something that he is passionate about with El (the Yoda figurine, the dinosaurs) she has been completely disinterested. Since El has no cultural connection to the pop culture stories Mike loves and she lived in the Lab her entire life, it makes perfect sense that she will have no interest in these toys. Her lack of interest in what Mike is passionate about, however, is worth noting: not because it's a bad thing, but because it's just one of many reasons they are "not even from the same planet" and cannot bond and connect easily. El has lived an incredibly different life from Mike, has suffered through so much, and is still learning about the outside world and about herself. She is severely behind in social and personal development. She needs time to learn and to grow and to heal so she can live her best life and recover from what she has been through. (She doesn't really care about your Star Wars toys, Michael, because she just learned what a phone is and is processing a lot of other things right now.)

*I want to credit @kaypeace21 for pointing out many of these particular observations listed above: you can read her very detailed and extensive analysis in her post here: El is Not in Love with Mike.

These are just a few of many thoughts I have regarding Mike and El's dynamic together, and why I find the romanticization and idealization of their dating relationship to be more suited to fan-canon and fanfiction. For El to have a relationship with Mike that I would personally enjoy and appreciate, the story would need to convincingly allow her to establish a notably better understanding of who she is and what she wants, and have time to heal from her trauma and learn a lot more about the outside world. While I suspect that the Byers moving away will be very difficult for Will, in many ways I think it will benefit El tremendously and I hope that she is given more opportunities to learn and to grow.

I also agree with @hawkinsschoolcounselor 's hypothesis that Mike is projecting his feelings for Will onto El. It's impossible for me to see Mike's dynamic with El as entirely separate from Mike's relationship with Will because El was found in the woods when they were looking for Will in season 1, El helped everyone find Will in the Upside Down and saved his life, and El reappears at the end if season 2 and saves Will from the Mindflayer. Until season 3, El's appearance in Mike's life has been directly tied to Will's survival and safety. I do not think this is a trivial aspect of El's narrative. El's importance within the larger story being told is repeatedly tied back to what Will is dealing with. The reason that El and Will's narratives are so deeply intertwined has not been revealed in the story yet, but I suspect that there are some important aspects of El and Will's stories that haven't been fully revealed yet that will bring all of these seemingly isolated plot threads together. The creators of Stranger Things repeatedly tie El and Will together visually and narratively (re: @kaypeace21), and I believe there is a very specific reason for this.

I look forward to seeing what happens in season 4. Whether my interpretation of El and Mike's dynamic is fair or not, I trust the writers have a compelling next chapter in their story for us all to enjoy.

#anti mileven #antimileven #anti-mileven #stranger things #stranger things theory #but not actually anti mileven I am tagging it that way because I am critical #so fans can choose to not read my thoughts

171 notes · View notes

proiida · 7 years ago

Text

the misperception of iida tenya

honestly, i’m kind of in awe at how well-written iida’s character is. he probably has one of the most clear paths of genuine character development in bnha. for one, he actually gets scenes dedicated to developing his character, which is a lot more than most bnha characters have going for them. on top of that, out of the characters that actually do get development, his development excels. this isn’t even me speaking as an iida stan. horikoshi tends to write characters in a way that can make their development unclear. other characters might develop in conflicting ways, have their development stated rather than shown, or just straight up have no genuine development. but iida? he has some of the clearest moments of development, filled to the brim with insight on what he values, why he takes the actions he does, and how he improves on past mistakes.

and yet, despite just how well-written his character is, there are few who are willing to invest the time and effort to actually see the amount of substance his character has. it’s strange in a way, because it is very easy for a member of the audience to see him as another depthless character. there are a variety of reasons that iida’s character is often misperceived. of course, a lot of iida fans speak of how ableism affects the way that his character is viewed. while this is true, it’s not what i am going to focus on in this piece. rather, i want to focus on how the narrative places him at a disadvantage in terms of audience perception.

when we first see iida, we don’t think very positively of him. there are various points in the yuuei entrance exam where iida seems more like an asshole than anything else. when the practical exam is being explained, iida admonishes izuku for izuku-ing, and points out what he assumes to be a oversight in the entrance exam. then, we get iida reprimanding izuku yet again, for trying to speak to uraraka. the initial impression here? “ah, that pretentious asshole who’s probably going to end up being in the same class as the main character.” i wince every time i see the entrance exam scenes, because they make him seem so bad. “pretentious asshole” is worse than than seeing him simply as “the class representative who’s a stickler for rules”, which, while an oversimplification of his character, isn’t completely off the mark. sure, someone who was familiar with his character would see that these scenes demonstrate his tendency to jump to conclusions, and understand that he genuinely wants to be on equal ground with his fellow test-takers. what someone who is unfamiliar with his character sees, though, is someone who assumes the worst of others and disguises bad intentions with well-meaning words. it doesn’t help that his words question the protagonist, either. as the audience, we typically feel that the protagonist is in the right because we are working from the perspective of the protagonist. it’s part of what makes us feel indignant at shinsou’s statement that izuku wouldn’t understand what it’s like to not be blessed with an amazing quirk, even though shinsou has no way of knowing izuku used to be quirkless. similarly, iida has no way of knowing that encouragement would have helped uraraka, or that that’s even what izuku is trying to do. so he acts on the assumption that izuku’s actions will end up distracting uraraka. it’s hard to see the situation from iida’s perspective though, so the audience assumes the worst of him. it’s less an issue on the part of the audience, and more of an issue on the part of the narrative.

if you watch the anime, there’s another scene during the entrance exam that likely contributes to this negative perception of iida, whether intentional or not. when the zero point robot comes out, both the manga and anime show iida running away. in the manga, he is merely in the background of a panel focused on izuku, with a text bubble saying “people show their true colors when they face that thing”. however, in the anime, “a person’s true character is revealed when they’re faced with danger” is said, and it shows a slow-motion view of iida looking at izuku on the floor as he runs away, and then looking away and continuing to run. it almost seems to suggest that iida’s motives as a hero are impure, to some extent greater than any of the other people running away. is this the intentional effect? probably not. however, what a piece of media intends to portray is often different from what the audience actually perceives.

then, as we progress into season one, the audience’s perception of iida changes. we realize that, no, he is not quite the pretentious asshole we thought he was. rather, he is the class representative trope! mr. stickler for rules! i’m not sure why, but the fact that iida happens to fit the class representative trope often makes people write his character off entirely. perhaps it is because the word trope is often viewed as something negative, to define an “overused cliché” in media. i have to disagree with this idea though, because tropes are merely recurring themes in literature, and the fact that some tropes lend themselves more easily to boring, repetitive characters doesn’t necessarily mean that every character who fits a certain trope is going to be boring. i mean, quite frankly, every character fits their own set of tropes, whether subtle or obvious. that’s just how literature works. alas, people are typically inclined to stick to the view that popular character tropes are overused and cliché, and thus they see iida as overused and cliché! and here is where the audience begins to label iida as a terrible thing for a character like him to be labeled, because quite frankly, he is anything but. the audience sees him as a stagnant character, before even giving him the chance to get his own development. from this point on, any change he does make is likely to be glossed over because of this assumption that he won’t change. this perceived stagnancy plays a huge role in how iida is seen by people. in season one, it isn’t much of an issue, because he doesn’t get much development, but later on in bnha, it becomes much more significant as he gets proper development. notably, the stain arc, which is the most obvious example of iida’s development in the series.

there are two ways to view the stain arc in terms of iida’s character. you can either see the arc as an example of his development, or you can see it as a reason to not like him. iida’s decision to seek vengeance for his brother by trying to locate and murder stain on his own is very clearly a mistake. we see some of his negative traits within this arc, such as the way that he prioritizes his own emotions over the safety of others, which stain points out as unheroic. at the end of the arc, iida takes stain’s words into consideration, and decides to leave his left hand injured as a reminder that he needs to work to be more heroic. it’s one of the most standard development arcs that a character could have. character makes mistake, events happen, mistake causes consequences, character learns from mistake. and yet, what do people choose to fixate on? they choose to fixate on the mistake, not the development that arises because of it. quite frankly, it’s unfair to iida. part of what makes iida’s character so strong to me is that he represents the learning hero. he’s a kid trying to live up to the legacy of a (former) hero, and in the process of doing so, he struggles to find the balance between duty, honor, the law, and caring for those important to him. if i may once again emphasize, he is a kid. he is fifteen during this arc. he is still learning, and isn’t going to be the perfect hero.

people don’t give him a chance by accepting his learning process, though. instead, they almost ignore it. but why? admittedly, iida makes an enormous mistake, but he’s not the only one. bakugou nearly kills izuku in the battle trial arc, but it’s nothing i’ve ever seen anyone hold against him. you might argue that those are different situations, but trying to be a vigilante murderer and launching an attack that you know could kill your classmate are both very serious actions. what makes bakugou different than iida, though, is that unlike iida, people know that he’s going to change. bakugou wouldn’t have such a prominent role in bnha if the end goal was not to have him be a better person than he is as the start. the audience doesn’t give iida the same chance for development that they give to bakugou, though, because they aren’t receptive to iida’s development. again, it comes back to this perceived stagnancy in his character. once you’ve written off iida as a stagnant character, it’s hard to let yourself see the ways that he develops. some people genuinely do not see how pivotal the stain arc is to iida’s character. they’d rather see the stain arc as nothing more than a way to further the plot of bnha, even though it’s also a chance for his character to develop. instead of seeing a negative trait of iida’s presented to us and then improved on, people merely see a negative trait of iida’s that never changes.

another case of people ignoring iida’s development in favor of fixating on the negative aspects of iida is much more subtle, but it’s probably what inspired this meta. it’s the scene during the hideout raid arc, where iida punches midoriya after explaining why he doesn’t want his classmates to rescue bakugou. the reason that this scene is a less noticeable case of people ignoring iida’s development is that not very many people actually see it as development on iida’s part. and yet, it’s one of my favorite scenes showcasing his development. there are some things that the narrative does that make it hard to see how iida develops, of course. iida is pit against the wishes of the protagonist, which makes the audience inclined to perceive him as being in the wrong. additionally, the fact that the plan is executed without anyone getting harmed makes it seem like iida was worrying over nothing. while the setup of this scene doesn’t really make it easy to see why this scene is so important for him, it isn’t entirely to blame.

i was initially going to take the position that any negative impact this scene has on the audience’s perception of iida is mostly a consequence of the narrative, but honestly, looking back at the scene...it’s so hard to not see where iida is coming from. we get an entire three pages dedicated to the reasons why iida tries to stop his classmates. 1.) he is worried that his classmates will make the same mistake he did, 2.) he is angry because he believes that todoroki and izuku are ignoring the lesson he learned from the stain arc, 3.) he doesn’t want yuuei to take the fall for their actions, and 4.) he is worried that his classmates will get gravely injured the same way that his brother did. i’d say that that’s a pretty solid case he has. sure, he might have been overestimating the gravity of the actions his classmates were going to take, but his concerns are still entirely valid. what the kids are planning to do isn’t the safest thing to do. this is him showing that he has genuinely reflected on the events of the stain arc, and that he meant it when he said he was going to be a better hero in the stain arc. only thing is, people yet again ignore this sign of change, to focus on the fact that he punched izuku. the punch is often misunderstood as iida being a shitty friend, even though it mostly exists to emphasize how intense his emotions are in that moment. izuku believes that iida doesn’t want them to go because they’d be breaking the law. following this statement, iida punches izuku, who fails to understand why iida is so concerned. iida doesn’t want them to go because he values the safety of his friends over the law.

it’s interesting that the first thing that comes to mind when people think of iida is his focus on rules and laws. when i think of iida, the first thing that comes to mind is how he prioritizes those he loves over anything else. you know what iida does in the hideout raid arc, in spite of every reason he’s expressed against rescuing bakugou on their own? he decides to go along with them. because at the end of the day, he prioritizes the safety of his friends above all. maybe others see the fact that he goes along with the plan in spite of all his complaints as a random, plot-convenient action, but i think it’s one of the most in character things for him to do. him going along with the plan to rescue bakugou isn’t him saying that the points he previously made were meaningless, it’s him showing just how worried he is for his classmates. this scene is probably one of my favorite moments of his, because you can really see his thought process, how he’s changed, and what he values. it’s a very concise moment where his character shines. but it’s one of the moment he’s most hated for. and y’know what, i don’t mind if people want to hate him for it. punching your friend in the face isn’t exactly the nicest thing to do, after all. what i do mind, though, is when people fail to even try to understand where exactly he’s coming from.

iida’s development as a character is a strong one, and it’s an interesting one. even if you don’t like him as a person, there’s a lot to like about his character. the problem is that people refuse to see the depth of his character, whether they realize it or not. if people didn’t dismiss the potential of his character from the get go, we would be seeing a very different reception of iida. i think a lot more people would appreciate his character if they just gave him a chance, by understanding that he’s a developing character and developing hero. it’s very easy to see him in a negative light, but with a bit of effort, it’s also possible to see him as one of the most interesting characters bnha has to offer.

#meta #bnha meta #iida tenya #iida #iida tag #stan iida #that's the moral of the story #mine #i'm smart

631 notes · View notes

theyearoftheking · 5 years ago

Text

Book 5: The Stand

Bloggers note: if you’re looking for a complete plot summary and a list of all the characters in this epic tome, this is not the blog post for you. Proceed with caution.

Once upon a time, there was a precocious ten year-old, with divorced parents. One parent embraced her weirdness and didn’t pay attention to what books she was bringing home from the library; and the other parent was my dad... who constantly wondered (aloud) why I wasn’t like normal kids.

Being of slightly above-average intelligence, I saw this as an affront, and did subtle things just to piss him off. Subtle things “normal” children probs wouldn’t do. The summer I was ten, my dad had picked up a paperback copy of The Stand, and was raving to me about how good it was. I remember he was fixated on people falling dead in their bowls of Chunky soup.

“Sounds like a cool book, maybe I’ll read it,” I commented.

“This isn’t a book for children. You still haven’t read that copy of The Hobbit I gave you.”

Hold my beer, motherfucker. I’m here for it. And The Hobbit was boring af. I never got past all the singing.

Just to piss him off, I read the book cover to cover, faster than he did. You know, like normal vindictive ten year-old girls do. I don’t have a lot of memories of my dad growing up, but I hold onto this one fast and tight, because I got mine in the end. I was like the Trashcan Man of the fifth grade set. Just with a worse haircut. See below.

Needless to say, my comprehension of The Stand almost thirty years later is a little bigger, wider, and deeper. It’s also colored by other epic “Good vs. Evil” reads (sigh, yes... even Tolkien); and King’s other works (mostly The Dark Tower). While at times this was not an easy book to read, I’m glad I powered through it. Ultimately, I feel rewarded I didn’t give up on page 872 like I had initially wanted to. I’m also glad I didn’t go with my gut instinct of reading the original released in in 1978, and then later on the uncut edition that was released in 1990. One reading of The Stand per year is more than enough, thank you. And besides, there’s fun pictures along the way! I mean, if I’m being honest, the book is mostly pictures with just a few words here and there to break it up. I’m absolutely kidding.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

First of all, I picked the worst fucking time to read this book. Coronavirus is probably going to kill the whole world, and I refuse to be one of the survivors like in The Stand. There’s not enough bourbon in Kentucky for me to survive that shit show. Additionally, my family is huge into board games, and we thought Pandemic might be a fun cooperative game to try. Spoiler: it’s awesome, we’re all hooked on it. I highly recommend it for your next game night. Maybe an End of the World/Pandemic theme?? You can all wear gloves and masks, eat shelf stable foods and bottled water, and play REM on repeat. Sounds... awesome.

But I digress. The Stand is your ultimate post-apocalyptic good versus evil showdown. A government employee with Captain Trips (the world ending virus) goes AWOL from his base, and takes a frantic road trip across the country with his family, where he manages to contaminate everyone he comes in contact with.

What is Captain Trips? Well, I’m so glad you asked! To hear a doctor explain it, “We’ve got a disease with several well-defined stages... but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom though all four as if they were on a rocket-sled...”

The virus spreads (like viruses do), until there’s less than 15,000 people left in the country (rough estimate). The people still alive start having two types of dreams; either scary nightmares about The Walking Man, or peaceful dreams about Mother Abigail. Again... good versus evil. Guess who is who. If you need clarification, let me give you this one little quote about Randall Flagg, courtesy of Mother Abigail, “He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is a little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones... the lonely ones... and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”

And his followers?

“They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.”

Yeah. I’m just going to leave that there for you to read and digest.

So, the remaining people from all over the country either ended up in Vegas with Flagg, or Boulder with Mother Abigail and The Free Zone; which is basically Bernie Sander’s Utopian dream.

God damn it! I swore I wasn’t going to get political and compare Donald Trump to Randall Fla-

Ok, so The Free Zone. Most of the people who come to Boulder, want to meet Mother Abigail Freemantle, the one hundred and eight year old black woman they’ve been dreaming about. She’s got a self-described case of the shine, and speaks stupid relevant truth to her followers, “I have harbored hate of the Lord in my heart. Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy. I do His will, but the human part o me has cursed Him in my heart.”

I’m not religious, but that hit hard. And it shows you the clear difference between Randall Flagg, and Mother Abigail.

Later on, Mother Abigail also hits us over the head, and explains to us why this book is titled, The Stand: “But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand. You will go, and you will not falter, because you have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand.”

Spoiler: it doesn’t quite go according to her plan. Very few are left standing at the end.

So, The Free Zone. People come together, dispose of dead bodies, get electricity turned back on again, clear the roads of abandoned cars, and form a de-facto government. While lots of characters come and go (die. They die.) throughout the book, there are a few mainstays in The Free Zone: Franny, Harold, Stu, Larry, Nick, Tom, Nadine, and Lucy. But again... good versus evil. While most of the residents of The Free Zone are good, Flagg is able to whisper in the ears of some members, mostly Harold and Nadine, who end up defecting and making the trip to Vegas.

While socialist utopia is succeeding in Boulder, Flagg is ruling with fear of crucifixion in Vegas. His henchmen include Lloyd, and The Trashcan Man. Oh, Trashy... maybe one of King’s most iconic characters. He’s a bit of a firebug (understatement of the century), and really goes out in a blaze of glory (ha. Pun intended).

In fact, the two heroes of this book are Trashcan Man, thanks to his epic nuclear disaster; and simple-minded Tom Cullen, who is able to infiltrate Flagg’s inner circle, and successfully make it out, rescuing Stu Redman, who is dying in the desert with a broken leg and a horrible infection along the way. Tom Cullen is the character you root for. But Trashy is the character you’re always curious about. He’s like that rebel guy you dated in high school for ten minutes, and now stalk on Facebook, because you want to see what shady shit he’s up to twenty years later.

This is the biggest oversimplification I think I’ve ever written. The onus is on you to just pick up the damn book and read it yourself. Do it soon, because you might not have a lot of time left, what with Coronavirus breathing it’s death fumes down our necks.

For those still keeping track, we have TWO Wisconsin references in The Stand. The first was on page five, set in a gas station in East Texas, “...had covered himself with glory as a quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone on to Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers...”

I can’t help but feel Steve is a closeted Packers fan. He lives in Maine, so I know he’s contractually obligated to be a Patriots fan (gag), but come on... homeboy loves him some green and yellow.

The second reference comes from our friend Trashcan Man, while trying to find a walking route of possible destruction. “He had planned to get over to the west side of Gary, near the confusion of interchanges leading various roads towards Chicago or Milwaukee...”

Question... does Gary, Indiana still smell in a post-apocalyptic world? Asking for a friend.

We also start getting the Dark Tower references fast and heavy. I didn’t make note every time Steve referenced wolves, crows, or wheels; because we’d be up over a million references now. And Randall Flagg himself is straight out of The Tower. So that’s fun. And we have our first “ka” reference: “And it came to him with a dreamy, testicle-shriveling certainty that this was the dark man, his soul, his ka somehow projected into this rain-drenched, grinning crow that was looking at him...”

‘Tis ka, bitches.

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 8

Dark Tower References: 4

Book Grade: A-

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

The Shining

The Stand

‘Salem’s Lot

Carrie

Night Shift

Next up is The Dead Zone, which I must have watched a million times as a kid, because my mom was obsessed with it, but I’ve never actually read the book. So this should be fun! I mean... who doesn’t love reading a book and imagining Christopher Walken without his cowbell as the main character?

Long Days and Pleasant Nights, Rebecca

1 note · View note

scarlettlawyer · 6 years ago

Text

Part 13 of my reaction/commentary to the Phantoms & Mirages Saga, the fanfic series by @renegadewangs

(Chasing Phantoms): Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

(Haunted Specters): Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

(Vanquishing Mirages): Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9

Vanquishing Mirages / Lifting Spirits: Part 10

Lifting Spirits: Part 11 Part 12

OH BOY we actually made it. Are we actually here? At the Lifting Spirits ending?! :O

It only took thirteen posts and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of words and a couple of AUs and fun off-topic detours but WE DID IT. But it was the journey that counts, not necessarily the destination, no? XD

It was only the three of them- Simon, Athena and Bobby himself who were visiting Lex. There were very few other people who would bother to pay their respects, Bobby supposed.

[…]

The ambassador was probably the only other person who’d visit the grave with honest intent.

I don’t… necessarily think that’s true, to be honest.

I have some thoughts about this that I won’t go into, but, there were many people deeply upset by the fake verdict in-universe.

Lifting Spirits, Chapter 18

ascending.

I can’t it’s so much, the sweetness the…

”His identity was mine up until two months ago and it’ll continue to be mine whenever my uncle deems it time to take me out for some exercise.”

PALAENO OUT HERE GONNA TAKE LEX FOR WALKS LIKE A HECKIN’ DOG LOL? I love it.

While this was a suitable alternative to execution, in a way it felt like they were cheating.

Okay I really liked this line on first read honestly because. Yes.

Like, this ties in a huge amount to what I said in the last post. It… DID kind of feel like cheating to me back then? In the sense that this is such a wonderful, happy ending for everyone to the extent that it almost felt like it shouldn’t be possible given the past and the characters involved. It felt like a bit of a meta line? And I really don’t know if it was intended as such, that’s just how I interpreted/read it!

And these are the EXACT lines wherein, tied with the open acknowledgement of the inability to please everyone discussed in the last post, seriously made me embrace and adore this ending one thousand percent.

The “cheating” comment seriously resonated with me and just, by alluding to it feeling like cheating… to just embrace it… The open acknowledgement goes such a huge way. There doesn’t need to be any internal sense of dissonance whatsoever if the story is right there with you in terms of self-awareness.

By saying “not everyone can be satisfied with the ending” in and of itself allows me to be fully satisfied, and to no longer have to worry about the fact that it can’t please everyone, since the story is already aware of this and having pointed out that pleasing everyone isn’t possible anyway.

Mind you, my perspective now is somewhat more akin to hissing “no it’s not cheating back off this beautiful ending is 100% earned and righteous shhhhh”.

I… am really rendered speechless with some of the wonderfulness of this ending… And I’d actually... forgotten a lot of wonderful details too? Because I’d only read it through once before, and the fact that rereading the series to do these reviews has taken some time means the largest gap of time had passed between the first and second reading when it came to these last few chapters (making my memory of them the least fresh before reading through a second time). So the entire time prior to actually reading them once again, I’d been entirely going off memory of my first reading from like… a few months ago now, when discussing things with my friend(s) and thinking up scenarios. So, some things were like reading afresh and they just kinda outright killed me (in a good way) as if it was better than I had even remembered it being. Two examples of this are, 1. I could not recall with certainty an instance of Lex referring to Palaeno as “uncle”, and while reading through Lifting Spirits, noticed that even after the surgery he was still just referring to him as “ambassador”. Which, made me wonder if he had… So, suffice it to say… Reading this ending and seeing how he continuously refers to him as “uncle” & “my uncle” SO many times in such a short timespan, blows me away, and WOW!! WARMTH & LOVELY EMOTIONS ABOUND. 2. THIS IS KIND OF SKIPPING AHEAD TO THE LAST CHAPTER I GUESS BUT SIMON OUTRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGES THEM AS FRIENDS!!!!!!!! PLEASE I DIE OF WARMTH. I did NOT remember that, it is so… casually acknowledged!!! Like yes, yes, it is clear as DAY that, by the end, there is friendship among the trio, but it is casually verbalised by Simon like that and oh my goodness.

Lifting Spirits, Chapter 19

I will have to say that for the Lifting Spirits ending, I was way, way more invested in the themes of family and family dynamics instead of the shipping side of things. But SHIPPERS GOTTA SHIP and I respect that XD

Things spiraled out of control further and further.

Alexander… Luster Jr

Not with someone else, only Benny. …For now, anyway.

…AND HOW MANY NEW PEOPLE IS HE PLANNING ON MEETING WHEN ON HOUSE ARREST, EXACTLY?!

Lifting Spirits, Chapter 20

Really love the parallels vs differences between Benny and Lex illustrated so clearly in this chapter.

He didn’t want her to die. It seemed unfair of her to have to die while he got a second chance at living.

OH MY GOD? I Had TOTALLY FORGOTTEN THAT THIS GETS ADDRESSED/MENTIONED IN THE ENDING WHEN I’VE SPENT THE LAST FEW WEEKS/MONTHS ECHOING THIS EXACT SAME SENTIMENT!!!!

WILD that I had forgotten about this being brought up directly in the text considering how much I’ve been “”complaining”” about this EXACT “double standard”.

My memory must be SO bad I genuinely thought that Mirage didn’t even get any mention anywhere in the ending, and that after Lex’s meeting with her in the prison she promptly Disappears never to be mentioned again in Lifting Spirits, which felt INCREDIBLY unjust and to do her character a severe disservice. Once again I am a FOOL. A FOOL. That’s my entire Phantoms and Mirages reading experience let’s just be clear: me just, fumbling around blindly and making a fool of myself xDD

I actually think this being brought up directly in the text is the precise thing which planted this thought in my head in the first place too, and then I just, forgot that it was brought up in-story and started going around thinking it was my Own Original Sentiment, pffffff. THAT’S UH. A BIT OF A RUNNING THEME ABOUT THINGS FROM THE ENDING ACTUALLY. This is what I get for reading the ending Once and then needing to go off of memory alone for the next few months: suddenly it starts seeming like my ideas are Totally Original, Not Drawn From Direct Textual Hints/Discussion Or Anything. LOL.

Lifting Spirits, Chapter 21

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

I have no clue if this was intentionally meant to echo one of the Phantom’s statements in Chasing Phantoms, but I found myself noticing it, at least on second readthrough, nonetheless!

“It would be best if you wipe that smirk off your face and hold your tongue, Bobby, as I’m quite certain your assumptions won’t sit well with me.”

Benny is right there? He’s right th

Hhhhhh I guess Benny is ok with the lack of openness then? dfhjbdfjfdkjb but Bobby’s RIGHT and Lex is a LIAR~

“I feel it is our duty as your friends to rub it in. Thirty eight years old, wasn’t it?”

“as your friends” once again, I’m ascending

Simon decided to tune out the remainder of the argument. Much as he believed Bobby had a point- the Jammin’ Ninja really was worthless against an opponent as grand as the Steel Samurai- he had no interest in partaking in the discussion.

SDKJNFDNJLFSDKJ

The former spy dropped himself back in his chair to return his attention to the watch he was constructing.

The

Former

Spy

: D (I misremembered the “former” part being way earlier in the narrative… and was kinda “huh!” whenever the narrative would still refer to him as “spy” long after the surgery on this readthrough… This is an example of my oversimplification of the distinctions the text makes between Lex and the phantom; in reality, there was still a transition involved, and things/characterisation wasn’t as clear-cut as I’d remembered it being in a “before vs after the surgery” sense. The subtle changes are… super great).

Okay, so for this ending (and the plot of Lifting Spirits), there was ONE thing that slightly nagged at me. Ultimately, I couldn’t be happier with how things turned out. But one thing that did strike me is that the Phantoms and Mirages narrative very clearly frames the phantom’s lack of emotions – their impairment as a result of the bone sliver – as a disability. Through the removal of the bone sliver, this disability is ultimately “cured”, and Lex is given the opportunity to become a “real” and good person.

In real life, in the vast majority of cases, there is no ready cure for disabilities, and a person’s disability cannot be readily separated meaningfully from who they are. It is something with them their whole life. It could be said that the disability itself is being kicked aside in this narrative instead of being accepted. (But, of course, given the context, it’s pretty understandable). There’s the slight potential for things to go awry if you warp some kind of message out of the narrative somehow such as “oh, it’s okay, if you’re disabled you can still have a happy ending… You just need to “cure” your disability first!” but that is obviously an extremely unfair and uncharitable reading.

I think it’s important to clarify that the Phantom’s lack of emotions – his disability in and of itself is not what made him a bad person (obviously), it was his actions. And I think that the narrative does make that pretty clear.

But the thing is,

It’s NOT actually the case that Lex gets suddenly magically “cured” of everything. That’s not the case at all! He must continue to struggle and to strive – he may not be emotionless anymore, but now he has to deal with the opposite, which is a sort of handicap all on its own. There are lasting repercussions from the bone sliver in the sense that now he must learn to deal with the intensity of what he is feeling. With that in mind, to frame it in terms of a “disability being kicked aside” is a pretty incorrect reading.

I said this in a previous post when I kind of touched on this kind of thing:

It’s just, the notion of a character actively striving to be good and overcoming themselves vs a sudden fix that gets externally applied

But another thing is… In my mind, I had exaggerated somewhat just how much of an effect this “sudden fix that gets externally applied” has as well. Lex must not only strive to overcome the extremity of the emotions he feels now, but there continues to be development throughout Lifting Spirits regarding how he interacts with the characters around him. It’s not like he gets the surgery and his characterisation/bonds with the others suddenly and abruptly jumps to where it was at the end and remains consistent through the whole fic; not at all. There CONTINUES to be development as he makes progress towards the point he’s at in the ending, even after the surgery.

Another thing about this ending is that it is so nice.

I think that Lifting Spirits, at its core, is a really beautiful story and concept. It really is. And part of why I had, perhaps, fought against or figured I wouldn’t find a good ending convincing is because I had convinced myself that it just wasn’t possible for the phantom as a character in general to ever achieve any kind of happy ending no matter what, EVEN IF I might like such a thing. I must make some clarification here, because other stories do offer a good kind of happy ending for them, but not in the same manner in which Lifting Spirits does, Lifting Spirits definitely feels like a different “kind” of good ending and a more “direct” good ending at that. I hope that makes some sense, because articulating the difference does seem kinda difficult.

Usually with favourite characters you want them to be happy, but with the phantom it had never been like that… I only ever wanted, or expected, angst or whatnot because… I simply did not think anything else was possible. And I was pretty content with that. But you… You…!

Anyway, there is another big aspect of the ending’s greatness that I want to talk about too. It’s kind of open-ended in the best possible way…

So many things happen that well and truly make it seem like the story is drawing to a close, and YET, simultaneously, there is very much this sense of new beginnings as well, and this ending works equally well regardless of whether there’s another instalment or not.

Something little like Simon getting his hair cut, or Bobby and Simon officially moving in with each other, are awesome things that feel very significant, that make you go “wow, we really are at the wholesome, satisfying, grand conclusion to it all huh? We’ve spent so much time with these characters, but now it’s finally time for them to go on their merry way, and continue to go on with their lives beyond the text written on the page.” They are CHANGES, changes to the “status quo”. You certainly get the impression that even if the story might be “over” for the reader, it certainly isn’t over for the characters – and that is the impression we would still get if there was absolutely nothing else written beyond Lifting Spirits – that their story would continue on regardless, and there would still be… adventure.

Because that’s another thing about the ending to Lifting Spirits. It closes off, and wraps everything up so very nicely. But at the same time, it remains poised, there is just this huge atmosphere of “stuff can still go DOWN” building. It’s the perfect ending where everything gets wrapped up but it is also the perfect set-up for anything to happen beyond the conclusion.

I sense this VERY STRONGLY in the segments where, for example, Benny considers how maybe he might need all the weapons and skills he has. Feels very “calm before the storm”.

Part of what’s so great about something like Simon getting a motorcycle is that the “the subway sucks” and “Simon trying to learn how to drive” subplot(s) have been present in the series from the very beginning. And finally, finally, after trying and failing at learning to drive regular cars, Simon has successfully escaped the subway at the very end.

We are given such hints on what could lie beyond, but also, from the way things are? There are a million different ways things COULD pan out in future, and the audience is only left to wonder.

We are given this strong hint that MAYBE… just maybe, this situation isn’t quite sustainable indefinitely. That perhaps, something’s gotta give at some point.

And that no matter what, the characters probably have some wild times ahead of them. Like that’s the thing: Even if Tracking Ghosts didn’t exist, I’d be left with the lasting impression that events of “Tracking Ghosts” length may still await the characters in the future.

But it’s all left so perfectly VAGUE. All left only in the realm of possibility.

I was satisfied to the extreme with the ending, I had to just take it and run at the time (of course I always planned on reading on), although back then to an extent I was outright BAFFLED at there still being this huge instalment to go. In the words of my friend, back then when I told her that Actually, there’s STILL even MORE to read:

Like, it truly felt like EVERYTHING had already been said and done. So how…?!

And since then, of course, I have not continued reading on as of yet, which has given me plenty of time to think.

And I have since realised that, as well and as thoroughly as Lifting Spirits DOES wrap everything up, there are still tiny, potentially loose threads. Tiny threads that could be unravelled until they could give way to all manner of things, scenarios, plots.

And that aside, there’s so much else that COULD happen as well. The Lifting Spirits ending is rife with potential. It is absolutely brimming with it.

And I also found myself realising that hey, there actually are things that haven’t been said and done yet. That there ARE little tiny things left nagging at me.

Tracking Ghosts contains a whole new threat, elaboration on Lex's emotional instability, road trips through Borginia, lots more 'Mirage' and Domestique LaSoote's backstory (oooh~). Also, the mother of all epilogues and a few more bonus chapters that take place afterwards.

Okay it is actually hilarious how little I remembered of all of this by the end. And that is to say: pretty much none of it. I straight-up forgot ALL of this being even mentioned in the Author’s Note at the end, and therefore have incorporated stuff like “road trips through Borginia” and “Mirage backstory” very VERY little in how I’ve thought about what to expect from Tracking Ghosts, at least in recent times, ahahahaha. Well I’ve got… quite a lot ahead of me, I’m sure.

I am certain that there’s so much more I could probably say about this series, I could continue to go on and on, but for now, there you have it, I think. I have not done this ending justice at all – it’s just so good it defies being done justice, and I don’t think I can fully articulate what I want to. But I’m content. Across so many posts, in thousands and thousands of words, I have already said quite a bit. XD

So now, all that’s left is to take that plunge and finally start to read Tracking Ghosts as I planned on doing once this series of posts was finished, huh? XD

I start my work week tomorrow, so it’s currently looking like… I will start reading it next weekend! It will have to be a weekend, sadly, as I can’t imagine starting and diving into something so huge when I have to try and focus on work/get sufficient sleep, lol.

OH I DON’T KNOW HOW TO END THIS POST-

Thank you, so much, for everything, and uh, apologies in advance for however much I might blow up your inbox/DMs/what have you when reading Tracking Ghosts. GENUINELY DON’T KNOW how much I will liveblog to you, if only a couple of things will slip through or if I’m just outright gonna go completely wild with it XD. IT WILL DEPEND ON THE STORY ITSELF AND HOW I’M FEELING I GUESS/my reactions.

These review posts have been… they’ve been really fun, I’ve enjoyed doing them a lot. They’ve been time consuming, but it was all 100% worth it and I’m very glad I set out to do them. I couldn’t not do them, really. I found myself realising that I just needed to tell you about the incredible journey/ride this series took me on one way or another – and, of course, I just have so many thoughts and so very many opinions about it. It lends itself so readily to analysis for me. But more than that, it feels like it SHOULD be analysed and subjected to analysis.

Talking with you is really great, and I hope to talk with you heaps more in future! Not just about your stories, just in general!

Thanks again, and I hope you have a great week! And then it will be TRACKING GHOSTS TIME.

#long post

4 notes · View notes

clockworkkatana · 8 years ago

Note

why did rome fall (I already asked your girlfriend but wanted to compare notes - no cheating guys)??

constantinople

i mean, okaythere isnt one specific reason by any means - rome wasnt built in a day and neither did it fall in one - but rather a whole host of them, all incredibly complex and nuanced and im going to be here for fucking hours arent i but mostly its constantinople and the audacity of naming a city after yourself and instantly moving there and declaring it the new capital of your empire and when i say that i mean actually just splitting your empire in two because you wanted a change of locale

also full disclaimer i prefer classical antiquity to the constant teenage deathdrama of late antiquity if your teen angst bullshit included political intrigue, murder plots, assassination by stabbing, assassination by poisoning, assassination by strangling, assassination by decapitation, assassination by the praetorian guard, forced abdication, forced abdication and execution, forced abdication and mutilation, forced abdication and blinding, torture, exile, and im literally still just listing ways emperors were deposed do you potentially see a possible trend and/or theme that could possibly be indicative of a federal fucking issue with regards to the roman political theater: a circus, or rather, the panem et circenses of every history major who ever thought it was maybe a little telling that “murdered roman emperor” is its own fucking category on wikipedia with subcategories to spare

also second full disclaimer im qualifying ‘fall of the roman empire’ as ‘fall of the western roman empire’ because byzantine is its own thing and im not particularly interested either in that portion of it or typing up a whole new dialogue just on the eastern roman/byzantine/ottoman empires because its too far removed from the prelapsarian concept of rome and the aesthetic ideal of the roman empire to count in my opinion

anyway

we begin, as a great deal of roman history lessons begin, with a murder(there are diatribes i could go on about how really when you think of it all of roman history begins with a murder - romulus to remus - so is it any wonder her demise begins the same way but im not even started yet so thats a bad idea just on general principle)march 19, 235. mogontiacum, the citadel that would become the city of mainz in germany. a tent flap is thrown open, and forth strides a young man in a fury like one possessedhe is severus alexander, 26, emperor of rome, and hes fucking pissedwhy so upset? enter a man named maximinus thrax, a barbarian from thrace and a goliath of a manmostly illiterate, but then soldiers never cared for literature, and it was soldiers who rallied around maximinus, soldiers who murdered severus and his mother for choosing diplomacy over open war, soldiers who proclaimed a barbarian from the black sea the new emperor of rome, and soldiers who legitimized that claim in the senate

thus begins the crisis of the third century, a fifty-year period that sees no less than 26 claimants to the imperial throne (the empires youngest emperor reigns during this time, gordian iii, who took the throne at 13 and ruled for six years before his death and was, by my account anyway, a nice kid), the fracture of the empire into the competing factions of roman, gallic, and palmyrene, a great deal of plague, a slew of invasions from the north, and some good old-fashioned economic depressionso basically a tuesday

i wont get too into the brunt of everything because im gonna be here all night as it is but while, yes, the crisis was indeed averted and the empire restored by diocletian in the early 284, the crisis of the third century marked a huge shift in the history of the empire as a whole (from augustus to severus alexander was 26 names and 262 years, from maximinus to diocletian was 23 names and 49 years) and is actually the turning point from classical antiquity to late antiquity, which i mean is telling in and of itself but frankly its only due to diocletians reforms that rome managed to survive the next 150 years as it did but im getting ahead of myself

diocletian was, by all accounts, a good ruler: he came up from nothing, the son of a peasant farmer who rose up through the legion ranks before being declared emperor after the deaths of carus and numerian he only reigned a single year as the sole emperor - he appointed his friend and fellow soldier maximian as augustus of the west, and from there he delegated further, appointing junior co-emperors called caesars (romans had a thing for titles based on previous rulers - part of the imperial cult, in a sense) to create a tetrarchy, a rule of four which actually worked out for him? with maximian and constantius dealing with germanic tribes in a scorched earth campaign along the rhine and galerius fighting the sassanids to the south, diocletian was able to secure the border (didnt even have to build a wall, fancy that) and focus on much-needed imperial reform, though perhaps his greatest achievement is that he was the first in the history of the empire to abdicate and retire peacefully and voluntarily, living out the rest of his days in the small town of spalatum (now split in croatia)

without diocletian, things, as they tend to, go to shityet another roman civil war burns itself out for the next 8 years or so before we get constantine the great, who takes a bunch of diocletians work and either rolls with it or upends it based on whether or not it suited him at the time, and its with constantine where the empire really starts hemorrhaging

personally i think constantine gets too much credit there are like maybe three people in history who deserve the title of ‘the great’ and just because you got venerated by the dominant religion in all of western civilization doesnt mean youre great it just means youre not a fan of persecution and i mean thats cool but im not a fan of persecution and im certainly not so titled, no i just get dubbed ‘the pure’ because i dont hit on every maiden from here to camelot listen lance buddy gwen was better off with arthur and you just need to get the fuck over yourself alreadythis turned into a roast track for lancelot all of a suddenanyway constantinea lot of it is because of the whole religion thing which ill go over briefly but likeyes he pulled off a lot of reform that did a lot of economic and social good and he stopped the persecution of christians which i mean yes is a good thing and yadda yadda yawn listen he fucked up big time with constantinople alright you could narrow down a lot of this answer to just the word ‘constantinople’ and frankly youd be the better for not reading and having forced me to write what has to be like at least a thousand words by now but all in all constantinople in my mind marks the period where shit really starts tanking because up until then - with the crisis and the tetrarchy, etc - the empire had been divided but never so explicitly and finally separated. this is a major turning point for the empire as it actively splits the whole of rome pretty much down the middle - diocletians tetrarchy had done this before, yes, but not nearly as callously nor as resolutely: once every great while a strong emperor would reunite the west and east under one ruler but eventually hed die and it would be civil wars all over again until we came back to east and west

from constantine it was a slow march towards the grave for rome - the crossing of the rhine, a constant plague of invasions and failed wars that slowly chip away at her lands and resources and put considerable strain on her already absolute shite economy (turns out an economy dominated by slavelabor and conquest isnt feasible when you lose all your wars and your empire is splintering before your eyes)

the last “true” emperor of what i, anyway, consider rome - and even that is up for debate - is romulus augustulusonly 14, and his claim disputed everywhere beyond italy, but it seems fitting, to me: named for romes founder, called ‘little augustus’ after her first emperorhe is deposed - but not killed, exiled to a seaside castle where he disappears from historical record - by odoacer, who becomes the first king of italy, as there was no more empire to rule, and with the death of the office of emperor so dies the state of the empire

this is a vast oversimplification of a lot of things and you should also read radias answer which is probably better than this one - i summarize a lot in my theses and probably need to work on thatbut yeah pretty much there you have itblame constantinople

#historia stercore tremendum #long /#im so tired but also bless you for this #Anonymous

7 notes · View notes

maidenoftheforestlight-blog · 8 years ago

Note

Hi again! I'm show!Dany anon. Your answer it's very interesting, so far I actually hadn't thought about the infamous villain smirk. The parallelism you highlight about the male characters who have done it is magnificent. A really interesting thing to think about it. it's really a pleasure to read you! Thank your for sharing your opinion, I'm actually interested too about your thoughts abour Dany's behaviour and development in the books if you like to share as well. (1)

(2) She’s a character who I began to dislike since ACoK, but I actually have never been able to reflect about a concrete reason to that feeling. Anyway, thank you and sorry if this bother you :) (and sorry too if my english is very bad, it’s not my native language! )

Firstly your English is great!

Now onto the question… So I’m not the biggest fan of book Dany either, but that has little to do with the character herself, who I find compelling, and a lot to do with the story going on around her. What I mean by that is, it’s just a little uncomfortable for me to read about a literal “white saviour” going around trying to save and educate eastern “barbarians”, all the while conquering their lands.

Now, some big book Dany fans would mostly call this a huge oversimplification of her story and even I’d agree that it probably is… but that’s what struck me from the first when reading her POV. I just can’t get past the fact that there’s this exceptional, gorgeous, noble blooded, western, white girl travelling around with people of different ethnic groups, being their leader, showing them the light, trying to save them all from the evil, barbaric elements of their cultures… It’s just not something that sits well with me at all.

This isn’t Dany’s fault as a character. I actually quite like her, I think she is well written, interesting, nuanced and that her heart has always been in the right place… This is actually a problem in GRRM’s framing of her narrative (and yes, I will also criticise GRRM where I feel he could have done better). I just think that I’d enjoy book Dany a lot more if the racially diverse characters surrounding her (who are mostly very tertiary and all non-POV) were actually given just as much complexity and interiority as many secondary and tertiary characters are given over in Westeros. Actually, even more than that, I think in order for me to have liked Dany’s plot over in Essos, I needed POV characters from the various cultures she interacts with. I want to know what a Dothraki woman who has lived in that culture her whole life thinks, and feels, and desires. I don’t just want to see them through Dany’s or any other outsiders eyes.

So yeah, my main issues with book Dany are not so much with the actual character and are more to do with my discomfort with the way her story is being told because it seriously highlights GRRM’s lack of POC main characters. Of course, the show makes this 100 times worse because that’s what they do. Any weakness or flaw in GRRM is hugely magnified and somehow twisted so that it becomes more offensive than it is in source material. Show Dany’s story is a major victim of this and that’s why her plot is one of the first that critics ever seriously called the show out for.

#ask #daenerys targaryen #ASOIAF #books vs show #kinda #except not really #more in a sort of why the adaptation is so very bad kinda way

5 notes · View notes

teagrl · 8 years ago

Text

Traitor, part 1: Losing the Force as a Coming of Age

Traitor is a lot more difficult to write about than the RotS adaptation or Mindor. Part of it is the complexity of the ideas it’s dealing with (Jacen Solo’s coming of age as a Jedi, the nature of pain, the nature of the Force, Jedi philosophy) and the context which draws upon the sprawling NJO series.

I’m going to divide my thoughts over a series of posts.

The central issue, as I see it, of the novel is Jacen Solo’s conflict about the Force. @jedihafren can probably speak to this with more depth and scope than I can, since I admit to not really focusing on beyond this novel more than Balance Point and Traitor. The gist, it seems to me, is Jacen turning away from the Force for fear of using it aggressively and falling to the dark side. In Balance Point, he does eventually use it to protect his mom, but before that he had resolved to not use it entirely.

In any case, the general plot of Traitor has Jacen having fallen into the Yuuzhan Vong’s hands. The YV are a race that aren’t able to be perceived in the Force and that leads to a lot of discussions of what the nature of the Force is, if some beings seem to exist outside of it.

That’s outside the bounds of this discussion, so that’s all I’m going to drop there.

The YV are cultural oddities in that they worship pain as well, and so pain is another thematic center of the novel. Jacen being captured by the YV means that he’s subjected to torture and his overseer is this ambivalent character, Vergere, later revealed to have been a former Jedi. Where she falls on the light/dark spectrum is never fully resolved, even though LotF would have us believe she was Sith -- I tend to agree that this is an oversimplification of a lot of the philosophy she shoots at Jacen. Fundamentally Vergere to my mind is trying to use pain to jolt Jacen away from dogma (what is a Jedi) and his own history (what is a Solo-Skywalker) so that he can truly decide for himself his path. Jacen is so far consumed by these two things, 1)the Foce according to Jedi and 2)his own heavy history, that he’s a bit paralyzed.

That’s not to say grabbing someone and torturing them is the right way to go, which is why Vergere is far from a light side entity. I’m going to also bracket Vergere and focus on what she says re Jacen and the Force.

[See why this novel is so hard to talk about?]

I. Losing the Force as a Coming of Age

So let’s begin with where this all starts. While Jacen has been tortured for a while, his true anguish begins when Vergere disconnects him, so to speak, from the Force. It’s not just about losing his gift and his means to fight or keep himself centered. Remember that Jacen has been captured-- for him to disappear from the Force means that he will be taken as dead by the people who would otherwise come rescue him.

The Force is at base connection between the living, so losing it is incredibly traumatic for Jacen, especially coming on the heels of the disastrous Myrkr mission where his brother dies. Jacen is in a lot a lot of pain.

But this is what Vergere says when she takes the Force awat from him:

“You are forever lost to the worlds you knew,” she went on with a liquidly alien gesture that might have been a shrug. “Your friends mourn, your father rages, your mother weeps. Your life has been terminated: a line of division has been drawn between you and everything you have ever known. You have seen the terminator that sweeps across the face of a planet, the twilit division between day and night? You have crossed that line, Jacen Solo. The bright fields of day are forever past.”

But not everything he knew was gone, not while he lived. He was a Jedi. He reached out with his feelings—

“Oh, the Force,” Vergere chirped dismissively. “The Force is life; what has life to do with you?”

[...]

“You have no business with the Force, nor it with you. Let you have the Force? The idea! It must be some kind of human thing—you mammals are so impulsive, so reckless: infants teething on a blaster. No, no, no, little Solo. The Force is much too dangerous for children. A great deal more dangerous than those ridiculous lightsabers you all seem to like to wave about. So I took it away from you.”

Being disconnected from the Force is 1)equated to truly dying (”lost to the worlds you knew”) and 2) with a weapon that he, as a child/immature, shouldn’t wield at that point.

In taking the Force away from Jacen, we have a really interesting deconstruction of “hope”:

“That, at least, is very clear,” she sighed. “I give you a gift, Jacen Solo. I free you from hope of rescue. Can you not see how I am trying to help you?”

(Second set of italics are mine). I’ll get back to that.

But first the framing of Jacen as a child and this torture he’s being subjected to as a lesson is something that Vergere keeps mentioning. Inflicting pain more often than not is to gain information or to inflict terror -- a destructive activity. A lesson is fundamentally a productive endeavor. This is what Vergere argues.

[This leads me to point out that how torture stands in the GFFA is another topic worth thinking about. Jacen too mentions no one ever asking him anything so what is the point. This has echoes to Han in the OT, but this is as far as I’ll lest it take me on a tangent.]

Let’s look at Vergere’s claim to “help” while this hard lesson is going on.

Vergere offers an illustration of how this huge pain inflicted on Jacen (both physical and mental) can be productive (a needed lesson) through the analogy of shadowmoths, who need to struggle and suffer to come out of their cocoon. To “help” them by cutting them out of the cocoon would mean to cripple them. So we have Jacen positioned like the shadowmoth. How to help a shadowmoth from its pain?

In other words, how to help Jacen without taking away the struggle (lesson) he needs to resolve his indecision and grow into his own path? Jacen himself says:

“So I guess the best help you could offer would be to keep watch over the larva, to protect it from predators—and leave it alone to fight its own battle.”

“And, perhaps,” Vergere offered gently, “also to protect it from other well-intentioned folk—who might wish, in their ignorance, to ‘help’ it with their own utility cutters.”

[...]

“And also, perhaps,” Vergere went on, “you might stop by from time to time, to let the struggling, desperate, suffering creature know that it is not alone. That someone cares. That its pain is in the service of its destiny.”

Jacen could barely breathe, but somehow he forced out a whisper. “Yes …”

Vergere said gravely, “Then, Jacen Solo, our definitions of help are identical.”

So that’s what Vergere does in cutting Jacen off from the Force, watch over him, but leave him to struggle without others coming to get him out (which means having to cut him off from the Force), while still checking on him so he’s not completely alone...and reminding him that there’s a meaning to it all.

[For more on meaning, I just posted this on Mindor, it’s simpler]

Let’s close this part with Jacen’s realization:

She has freed him from his own trap: the trap of childhood. The trap of waiting for someone else. Waiting for Dad, or Mother, Uncle Luke, Jaina, Zekk or Lowie or Tenel Ka or any of the others whom he could always count on to fly to his rescue.

With that the pain that Jacen’s going through stops mattering all that much.

#traitor #jacen solo #vergere #the force #meta

19 notes · View notes

elizabethrobertajones · 8 years ago

Note

Hey 😊 What are your thoughts on not!Lucille being included in 12x15? I feel like I'm the only one (unpopular opinion coming) but I hated the way they did it? The fact that Dean ENJOYED using the bat (or at least seemed to), and was looking at it/handling it with REVERENCE creeped me out? It just drew parallels with Negan that I didn't want drawn? I mean I get that it's JDM, but Dean should never be paralleled with Negan 😭😭, it betrays who he is as a character just to get a cool reference in😭

Heya! Funnily enough I ended up in the same place, kind of. At least, being totally horrified by it, after I had a very good laugh on first impressions. I don’t think they shouldn’t have done it though because it was a great joke on first impression and then the fridge horror of it all actually works really well for me thematically with exactly what was going on in that scene ANYWAY so it was actually an incredibly clever and layered joke that I think happened to just fit in with something they were trying to tell anyway.

I actually talked out everything I had to say about it in my watching notes, so I hope you don’t mind me C&P-ing them to save time, after I already C&P’d a conversation with @mittensmorgul to save time on writing these, so really this is incredibly incredibly lazy :D Laziness squared.

Pfft some extras from the Walking Dead wander into the Bunker making obvious pop culture references. Do we even analyse that mention of Dad or do we just laugh hysterically and move on?

Wait so that time when they seemed to have it on set they weren’t just fucking around with the baseball bat because they felt like making one but it was actually going to be in an episode oh my god

I wonder if Mary has been watching The Walking Dead or if she hasn’t had time.

Being distracted by Mittens:

elizabethrobertajonesWait - Sam is clean… is this meta or are we still in the pop culture reference?

mittensmorgulThe things on Dean, “ghoul, wraith, siren.”

elizabethrobertajonesyeahThey fought a SIRENWHAT HAPPENI want to know everything

mittensmorgulI DON’T KNOW?!

elizabethrobertajonesI bet if it was “back to back to back” they didn’t have time for it to be complicated

mittensmorgulI mean, DEAN fought the siren, Sam is completely clean

elizabethrobertajonesWHY IS SAM CLEAN

mittensmorgulAnd Dean’s been wearing his underpants for four daysPeople are screaming OOC

elizabethrobertajonesoh god

mittensmorgulI have no idea

elizabethrobertajonesAhahahahah "Frodo"

mittensmorgulSort of reminded me of how he looked after he killed the stynes

elizabethrobertajonesIs that a thing

mittensmorgul:D

elizabethrobertajonesmaybe they intentionally USE those code namesmaybe Mary talked to Samwait if Mick is telling Sam where to gohas he given them “back to back to back”

mittensmorgulyes…

elizabethrobertajonesand Dean did all the killingand Sam was cleanOkay THERE’S the symbolism I was looking for :P

mittensmorguldo go on…:D

elizabethrobertajonesI am literally paused just at “Frodo” and his missing campers message so idk what happens nextbut yeah :PDean’s being used as the weapon here and Sam’s coordinatingAka trying to turn him into Ketchor Mark!DeanSam doesn’t have any blood on his hands for these huntsand they’re coming too fast for Dean to process them and work out shades of grey….

mittensmorgulYep

elizabethrobertajoneswhich means the Negan thing is probably a reference to how bloody it has all beenand not just a joke >.>

mittensmorgulnope

elizabethrobertajonesthey’re trying to turn him back into a bloody single minded hunter like Johnthis is awfulI LAUGHEDnow I feel horrible about it all :P

elizabethrobertajonesAlso Dean not being a germ freak about it all is probably a bad sign >.>

elizabethrobertajonesOh no Sam lyingepically

mittensmorgulyep

elizabethrobertajonesreminds me of 8x01 when he tells Dean how he found Kevinbut he actually did thatDean like Purgatory DeanWait fuck that baseball bat is his purgatory weapon*slides under the table* Go away NeganThis is worse than the Eliot Ness thing

To clarify that last reference, it’s when they get to the uni campus and Sam explains in great detail how he tracked Kevin via his IP address and router and stuff, while Dean sits there unimpressed eating his first burger back from Purgatory. Despite actually being shown as the better HACKER (thanks, “Strictly into Dick” moment) Sam’s got a broader computer knowledge while Dean seems to have just intuitively picked up the software Frank and Charlie taught him better than Sam, probably because Dean learns the tools of the trade while Sam is, really broadly, more aligned with lore and research (this is a gross oversimplification for both but all these moments play into it)

I think it was also that Dean forgot computers while he was in Purgatory and had to sort of re-learn being in the modern world and showing him not following computer babble was a good way to show how his mind was working right then… he re-learns it off-screen and within a few episodes was perfectly competent again. Dean making silly comments about computers only being good for monsters and porn also echoes that sentiment while he’s in a sort of over-hunted exhaustion because I think the point was to show him in a very particular state where all the Dean danger signs are flaring up, from not being precious about keeping his home tidy and initially rejecting the shower, to almost… tempting him with the high of killing monsters endlessly, and making him channel the darker part of himself that gets involved in killing. The attack dog imagery wasn’t spelled out for once, but Sam being completely clean showed the imbalance even before we see he’s getting all the cases…

Anyway Dean channelling Negan is awful and I haven’t even seen TWD but the meta links are brilliant even with a casual outside eye on what’s going on there, because the shadow of John is over everything all the time, and Negan is like… a worst case scenario or something, a way to really explore the idea of John as the boogeyman he is in the narrative because there’s a fresh reminder out there of Negan being like… a pop culture renowned worst villain ever contender because he’s really horrifying people and making big pop culture waves as far as I can tell sitting over here really not caring what JDM or TWD are up to and hearing all about it from multiple sources anyway :P I was wondering if they’d sneak a reference in but that was extremely blatant. It would be for someone who’s actually watched TWD to comment in-depth, but anyway linking John and Negan in the narrative is CLEARLY pulling pop culture strings to make a point, and one that works in the story…

Not to say John was that bad, but to remind us that he was a dark, ruthless hunter, for example in 2x03 he was compared to Gordon, and we’ve always known he was falling out with mainstream hunters, and clearly with a black and white revenge-y approach to monsters that would fit well with the BMoL’s goals. He instilled “saving people, hunting things” in Dean (who passed it onto Sam) but 1x01 and 1x02 are a lot about taking up the mantle of that job because John’s moved on, abandoning everything to do with working regular cases and saving people, to work on the revenge mission. It’s clear that Dean especially in season 1 and both of them in general are much more focused on saving people, and Sam in 1x22 has his huge moment at the end of picking family over revenge, after which in 2x02 he clearly gets onto the same path Dean was on in 1x02 of focusing on the job and saving people… Anyway that’s all in contrast of what we learn about John while he’s around, which is mostly that he’s running around doing plot stuff and throwing cases their way to deal with, and not behaving as a regular hunter who’d work those cases himself. He’s on a quest to get revenge where that darkness has consumed him, and we see all season through Sam, what that means with the danger it could consume him too, until Sam rejects it at the last moment. But in many cases revenge makes Sam reckless and impatient and he leaves or argues with Dean about why they’re following orders and working regular cases, so if you parallel them together, you see through Sam that John had no interest in “saving people hunting things” any more, and that it had probably only been something he did on the side to his revenge mission anyway, emotionally. Like, he starts the family business, but out of necessity, while his sons are raised in it and as a life, changing the way they relate to saving people…

Sorry, this is really rambly but I get the feeling no one ever reads my long rewatches where I write very long essays about this sort of thing, so I’m trying to summarise in a few paragraphs something I’ve written like maybe 100k words on at least after wandering through season 1 and 2 getting really invested in the early Winchester family drama :P

Anyway! tl;dr John is still haunting them, especially when Dean is in a bad way, ESPECIALLY when he’s being made to prioritise “hunting things” over “saving people” because there’s a REALLY fragile balance and Dean only functions well when he’s over on the “saving people” side, and if he’s not, angst follows :P Even just being made to hunt monsters non-stop immediately wears down on Dean’s humanity, and so you get a parallel like this, and to Purgatory, Mark!Dean, and generally showing all sorts of the good parts of Dean stripped away. >.> I think it’s a warning we should be WORRIED about Dean, NOT a direct comparison between Dean and Negan, especially as he makes the comparison himself between John and not!Lucile, and therefore the parallel is between John and Negan, and Dean’s just caught up in that as an incidental part of his characterisation, but probably isn’t going to go around braining people willy nilly.

#Asks #12x15 #if you're curious it's the 'weird rewatching' tag - sort if by chrono/page 2 and start from the start XD #Dean analysis

60 notes · View notes

aminalatif · 7 years ago

Text

blockchain technology: Why blockchain could be as revolutionary as smartphones

NEW DELHI: This is bonkers. A new so-called blockchain company is selling virtual real estate online with prices as high as $120,000 for a 10-meter by 10-meter piece of virtual land. You can buy a plot of virtual land in a virtual city, with certain neighbourhoods costing more than others, like in a real city. Except that it isn’t a real city. It is all virtual. Follow? Me neither.

Somehow the company, Decentraland, raised $26 million in 30 seconds from investors last year. That money isn’t “virtual” — it’s real.

Confused about blockchain? Here’s what you need to know

Most databases used to keep financial records are maintained by a central institution. Banks, for instance, are responsible for keeping track of the money in all of its customers’ accounts. With Bitcoin’s blockchain database, the ledger is kept and updated communally by all the computers that are hooked into the Bitcoin network.

Welcome to the world of blockchain, the latest technological revolution to those in the-know — and what seems like the latest get-rich-quick gibberish to the layperson.

You’ve probably heard the blockchain is a technology that is going to change the world — it is the backbone of Bitcoin, the now infamous cryptocurrency. You might even have heard someone trying to explain blockchain by describing it as a “trusted distributed ledger.”

If you’re like most people, that’s when you stopped understanding — or even trying to understand — what this whole blockchain thing is all about. (Stick with me for a moment and I promise you’ll understand it very soon.) It all feels a bit like 1999, circa the dot-com bubble. In Cannes, France, in June, at a gathering of advertisers, there was a “blockchain yacht” and a “blockchain villa.” In Davos, Switzerland, there was a “blockchain lounge.”

Meanwhile, Fortune 500 companies are investing billions in the blockchain. IBM has a whole division focused on blockchain, as do the consultancies Accenture and PwC. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, has dismissed Bitcoin, but says “the blockchain is real.”

Silicon Valley venture capitalists have already sunk more than $1.3 billion into blockchain technology just this year. And in June, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prominent technology firms founded, in part, by Marc Andreessen — who is credited with inventing the modern Web browser — announced a $300 million “crypto” fund to exclusively invest in blockchain technologies.

“For those of us who have been involved in software for a long time, it feels like the early days of the internet, web 2.0, or smartphones all over again,” Andreessen and his colleagues said when introducing the fund.

That explanation of where this new technology sits within history feels right: While prognosticators love to talk about crypto and blockchain as a bubble, it is likely just very early days. And while 1999 marked what seemed like a high point for the internet before a precipitous fall, it proved to only be the first stage of the its rise.

And what was arguably considered wild overspending in the 1990s on internet infrastructure and experimental companies, ultimately set the foundation for the modern era we live in today.

Think about blockchain like this: There will be huge failures and misspent money — and yes, scams (the US Securities and Exchange Commission can hardly keep up), but a decade from now, when you look back at 2018, it’s more likely than not that blockchain will be embedded in our day-to-day lives in ways that, today, we can’t even imagine.

“New models of computing have tended to emerge every 10 to 15 years: mainframes in the ’60s, PCs in the late ’70s, the internet in the early ’90s, and smartphones in the late 2000s,” Andreessen said. And now blockchain.

The easiest and most basic way to think about the underlying technology is to think about a technology that keeps a master list of everyone who has ever interacted with it. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but if you’ve ever used Google Docs and allowed others to share the document so they can make changes, the programs keep a list of all the changes that are made to the document and by whom. Blockchain does that but in an even more secure way so that every person who ever touches the document is trusted and everyone gets a copy of all the changes made so there is never a question about what happened along the way. There aren’t multiple copies of a document and different versions — there is only one trusted document and you can keep track of everything that’s ever happened to it.

The blockchain is, of course, being used to create all sorts of cryptocurrencies, led by Bitcoin and Ethereum. But more important, it is touching all different industries.

The advertising industry plans to use it to track ads on the internet; the music industry is planning to use it to track songs; banks and mortgage companies want to use it to track the deeds of homes and the complex process of tracking all the documentation; shipping companies are investing in blockchain technology to track bills of lading, the pharmaceutical industry wants to use the technology to verify the drug supply chain.

If it is successful, blockchain technology will bring a new level of enhanced trust to business and will also cut out the middlemen that have historically tracked — and profited — from the complexity of so many different systems trying to communicate with each other. That could lower prices for goods and services.

At the same time, for all the promise of blockchain, there are real questions about whether it may be applied to solve problems that don’t exist. Databases already exist and, in certain cases, a centralised database might actually be preferable to the blockchain.

Blockchain is about solving society’s ultimate challenge: trust. Or rather, lack of trust. It’s about using technology to create a shared sense of trust in a group of disparate participants.

The biggest question is whether the hundreds of projects like Decentraland, where individuals are using real money to buy virtual property, will end well or badly — and whether that experience will ultimately instill or undermine trust in this emerging technology.

The post blockchain technology: Why blockchain could be as revolutionary as smartphones appeared first on Watch Online Pakistani Dramas.

from Watch Online Pakistani Dramas https://ift.tt/2qQmCac via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Watch Online Pakistani Dramas

0 notes

newssplashy · 7 years ago

Text

Opinion: Demystifying the blockchain

(Dealbook)

This is bonkers. A new so-called blockchain company is selling virtual real estate online with prices as high as $120,000 for a 10-meter by 10-meter piece of virtual land.

You can buy a plot of virtual land in a virtual city, with certain neighborhoods costing more than others, like in a real city. Except that it isn’t a real city. It is all virtual. Follow? Me neither.

Somehow this company, Decentraland, managed to raise $26 million in 30 seconds from investors last year. That money isn’t “virtual” — it is real.

Welcome to the world of blockchain, the latest technological revolution to those in-the-know — and what seems like the latest get-rich-quick gibberish to the average person.

You’ve probably heard that the blockchain is a technology that is going to change the world — it is the backbone of bitcoin, the now infamous cryptocurrency. You might even have heard someone trying to explain blockchain by describing it as a “trusted distributed ledger.”

It all feels a bit like 1999, circa the dot-com bubble. In Cannes, France, just last week, at an annual gathering of advertisers, there was a “blockchain yacht” and a “blockchain villa.” In Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, there was a “blockchain lounge.”

Silicon Valley venture capitalists have already sunk more than $1.3 billion into blockchain technology just this year. And just this week, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prominent technology firms founded, in part, by Marc Andreessen — who is credited with inventing the modern Web browser — announced a $300 million “crypto” fund to exclusively invest in blockchain technologies.

And what was arguably considered wild overspending in the late 1990s on internet infrastructure and an assortment of experimental companies, ultimately set the foundation for the modern era we live in today.

Think about blockchain like this: There will be huge failures and misspent money — and yes, scams (the Securities and Exchange Commission can hardly keep up with the number of fraudulent players out there), but a decade from now, when you look back at 2018, it’s more likely than not that blockchain will be embedded in our day-to-day lives in ways that, today, we can’t even imagine.

“New models of computing have tended to emerge every 10 to 15 years: mainframes in the ‘60s, PCs in the late ‘70s, the internet in the early ‘90s, and smartphones in the late 2000s,” Andreessen said. And now blockchain.

The blockchain is, of course, being used to create all sorts of cryptocurrencies, led by bitcoin and Ethereum.

But more important, it is touching all different industries.

The advertising industry plans to use it to track its ads all over the internet; the music industry is planning to use it to track songs; banks and mortgage companies want to use it to track the deeds of homes and the complicated process of tracking all the documentation; shipping companies are investing in blockchain technology to track bills of lading, the pharmaceutical industry wants to use the technology to verify the drug supply chain.

At the same time, for all the promise of blockchain, there are real questions about whether it may be applied to solve problems that don’t exist. Databases already exist and, in certain cases, a centralized database might actually be preferable to the blockchain.

The blockchain is ultimately about solving society’s ultimate challenge: trust. Or rather, lack of trust. Blockchain is about using technology to create a shared sense of trust by a group of disparate participants.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/06/opinion-demystifying-blockchain.html

#News

0 notes

theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

Link

The most important scene in Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2 comes early on and offers a brilliant summation of everything the writer-director does so well.

The Parr family, having attracted the attention and irritation of the government with their superhero shenanigans, sits in a lonely motel room, munching on Chinese food. They’ve just saved the city of Municiberg from the Underminer, who set his giant drill on a path to destroy City Hall.

But officials don’t see all of the destruction that was averted — they only see the rubble that actually exists. Yes, nobody wants supervillains like the Underminer robbing banks, but there’s a process in place to ensure those banks and the money within them, and having superheroes leap in to save the day just complicates that process.

The scene is notable both for its small, detailed animation — pay attention to how Bob Parr (aka Mr. Incredible) can’t seem to grasp anything with his chopsticks and finally just stabs an eggroll through the middle — and for the way it tosses a bunch of questions the movie knows it can’t possibly answer up into the air. To change the law that has made superheroes illegal, the Parrs will have to break it, to show that superheroes can still be useful. Or, as G-man Rick Dicker wearily sighs in an earlier scene, “Politicians don’t trust anyone who does a good thing just because it’s right. It makes them nervous.”

The first time I saw Incredibles 2, all of these ideas jostling for space within the movie struck me as a movie frantically searching for a story to tell, one it eventually found but that didn’t quite cohere with everything else. The second time through, though, the movie made more sense to me as a meditation on the popularity of superhero stories and what it means to live in a world where what’s legal isn’t always what’s right. It doesn’t offer solutions, because it knows there aren’t any.

But the movie is also keyed in to something that’s always present in Bird’s work, something that’s caused some to accuse him of being an objectivist along the lines of Ayn Rand: an obsession with the rights of the exceptional and how they can be stacked up against everybody else.

Incredibles 2 strikes me both as Bird’s deepest exploration of this idea and his biggest refutation of it. Bird might be fascinated by the exceptional among us, but he’s also not interested in exceptionalism if it doesn’t benefit the larger community.

Brad Bird Photo by Juan Naharro Gimenez/Getty Images for Disney

The works of author Ayn Rand — including Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and others — have been hugely influential on the thinking of various political and economic theorists over the years. (Among current politicians, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan is a notable devotee.) To put Rand’s writings in modern terms, you could describe her objectivism as a kind of extra-strength libertarianism, in which the truly great among us should, as much as possible, not be shackled by the law or by conventions.

Atlas Shrugged is her magnum opus, a futuristic dystopia in which citizens who don’t contribute to society leech off the business classes, who create both wealth and useful material goods (mostly trains and railroads). The action of the book — if a book so heavy in long discussions of philosophy can be said to have “action” — mostly involves the various characters learning that society needs them more than they need society, that the world is only as strong as its strongest, who should be subject to as few rules and regulations as possible. Rand stops just short of saying, “Billionaires should be able to straight-up murder whomever they want,” but reading the book, you have to think the idea occurred to her at some point.

This is a vast oversimplification of a book I read once in high school for an essay contest, but Rand’s ideas that regulations are bad and wealth creators are good have trickled down into the modern Republican Party in ways that are hopefully obvious.

The question is if they’ve also trickled down to influence the films of Brad Bird, one of modern animation’s few auteurs, but also a writer-director who keeps returning to the idea that society places unnecessary constraints on exceptional individuals. You can see where the comparisons come from.

Bird has made just six films — 1999’s The Iron Giant, 2004’s The Incredibles, 2007’s Ratatouille, 2011’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, 2015’s Tomorrowland, and 2018’s Incredibles 2 — and four of those wrestle with the above idea at length. There’s a touch of that idea in Iron Giant (which we’ll get to), but it doesn’t dwell on it at length, while Ghost Protocol (one of the finest modern action movies) is mostly about how it would be totally rad to free climb the world’s tallest building. (Ghost Protocol and Tomorrowland are live-action; the other four films are animated.)

The “objectivist” tag was first applied to Bird extensively after the first Incredibles. And to be sure, the very premise of the film plays in this territory: superheroes have been outlawed due to safety concerns, and one character bellows, “With everyone super, no one will be!” This is particularly true of a concluding scene in which young Dash Parr, blessed with super-speed, intentionally throws a race at a track meet. The plot reason for this is that he can’t let anybody know he has superpowers (which are still illegal), but it plays as a weird critique of the idea of participation trophies and the attempt to make sure no child’s feelings are hurt.

The criticism followed Bird through Ratatouille — which is ostensibly about how anyone (even a rat) can cook but is also kind of about how if you don’t have talent, you should get out of the way of people who do — and especially Tomorrowland, in which a group of geniuses abscond to an alternate universe where they build the sci-fi future imagined in the ’50s and ’60s and mostly abandoned in our modern era of imagined dystopias.

A world where the exceptional cordon themselves off and refuse to save the rest of the world is literally Galt’s Gulch from Atlas Shrugged, where the book’s mysterious hero, John Galt, hides out to proclaim his superiority to everybody else. And now Incredibles 2 toys with many of these same themes, which makes sense as a continuation of the first film. (When I asked him about these themes, he mostly punted on answering the question, saying he didn’t think about it that much when writing his movies.)

I think it’s worth considering all of these ideas in the context of Bird’s career, which got a bit of a late start. After beginning as a young wunderkind animator at Disney in the early ’80s, Bird was fired after raising his concerns that the company was half-assing it, instead of trying to protect its rich legacy.

Bird spent much of the ’80s bouncing from project to project — he worked on, among other things, a Garfield TV special and the Amazing Stories episode “Family Dog” (his directorial debut) — until in the early ’90s, he landed a job as the animation supervisor on a new TV show named The Simpsons, a job that made his career and allowed him to direct Iron Giant. When that movie flopped, he was brought to Pixar thanks to a college friendship with John Lasseter (who has recently been pushed out of the company after accusations of sexual misconduct).

But his directorial debut still didn’t arrive until he was in his early 40s. And while that’s not exactly unprecedented, it is at least a little unusual in an industry where someone with the evident talent of Bird likely would have proceeded through the ranks of a major animation company and directed his first film somewhere in his 30s.

Bird’s self-admitted demanding nature likely make him difficult to work with — something that surely contributed to his difficulty getting a film made, despite numerous almost-realized projects, like an animated adaptation of the comic The Spirit. (Bird was also probably hurt by his certainty that “animated film” and “kids film” shouldn’t be synonymous, even though animated films aimed at adults have always been difficult sells in Hollywood.) It makes sense that Bird’s frequent musings on the shackling of genius might be a political, but it’s just as possible this is an artistic idea, based on the struggles he had getting his career to take off. (My friend David Sims has had similar thoughts at the Atlantic.)

So, yes, we could read Bird’s filmography as a celebration of Ayn Rand and of climbing very tall buildings. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t also read it in the context of the career of a director who felt stymied at every turn for almost 20 years, before he unexpectedly became one of the most successful directors of his generation almost out of nowhere.

Even then, we’d be missing something big.

The Iron Giant paints a very different picture of how those with great talents should behave. Warner Brothers

One of the things that makes that early motel-room scene in Incredibles 2 so potent is the fact that there’s no clear right answer to the issues that Bird raises via his characters. Nor is there a right answer in a later scene in which Helen Parr (Elastigirl) talks with a new friend about whether the ability to create something great or the ability to sell it to the mass public is more important to the world. Nor in the frequent arguments about whether breaking unjust laws is the right thing to do, even if society requires people to be law-abiding to function.

It’s impossible for any animated movie to truly be “timely” because they’re produced on such a long timeframe. But Incredibles 2 feels eerily tapped in to the political debates we’re having around the globe right now. If you have massive amounts of power and feel like the world is circling the tubes, is your primary duty to society or to the self? Or your family? Or all of the above? Brad Bird doesn’t know this answer, so the movie doesn’t either.

This is a common thread across his filmography. All of his movies grapple with objectivist themes, to be sure, but they also don’t conclude that doing what’s best for the self is what’s best for everybody. The closest thing to an answer Bird ever provides is “Do what’s right, and what’s right is what benefits the most people.”

In short, his movies always posit that the exceptional should be allowed to express their talents to the best of their abilities — but only insofar as they can benefit society at large.

What’s interesting is how often Bird’s most openly objectivist moments and story ideas are presented as bad things. That collection of geniuses making up Tomorrowland, for instance, invents a machine meant to bring doom to our world, while the famous line about being special or super from Incredibles is actually spoken twice — the first time by a child and the second time by the movie’s villain. Helen is the closest thing the Incredibles franchise has to a moral conscience, and she’s always the one on the side of the idea that “everyone is special.” We just have different talents.

Ratatouille might be the best developed expression of this idea among Bird’s films. His portrayal of a restaurant as a collection of people who do very specific jobs to the best of their abilities, all adding up to a kind of symphony, is very much like filmmaking, with the film’s hero, Remy the rat, standing in as a director. The movie’s villains are those who would stand in the way of Remy realizing his full talents — but you can also read that as being against prejudice, as a celebration of the idea that anyone can cook and great art can come from someone you’d never expect (like a young and hungry would-be animator from Montana, not exactly a hotbed of Hollywood talent).

It’s telling that Ratatouille’s great chef is a rodent and not the gangly human who discovers he’s the son of a great, dead chef. Talent isn’t always predictable, following along conduits you’d expect. But when you find it, it’s best to encourage it but also make sure it’s tempered with kindness, as it is in Ratatouille, a movie where even the restaurant’s waitstaff is briefly but memorably celebrated.

All of which brings us back to The Iron Giant, a movie rarely discussed in conversations about Bird’s interest in exceptionalism. If any Bird creation is exceptional, it’s a giant metal man who eats railroads and can become a literal death weapon, but the arc of the film is about the giant trending away from that which makes him exceptional and would harm others, and toward what about him is exceptional that could benefit others. It’s a movie about a really amazing walking gun who decides, instead, to become Superman.

Superman’s a fitting icon to consider as a way to understand Bird’s ultimate philosophies. Yeah, he could kill all of us with a flick of his fingernail, but he doesn’t. So could the superheroes of Incredibles 2, but they make the choice not to.

That’s why Incredibles 2 stands so beautifully as Bird’s most fully engaged wrestling with all of these ideas. It never offers easy answers because there aren’t any. The question of how we build a society that benefits everybody and gives them the same rights as everybody else, while still allowing people as much freedom as possible to exercise the talents and abilities unique to them, isn’t one that can be answered easily. It’s arguably the work of democracy itself, and it will never be finalized, as long as human beings strive for a better world. Thus, those of us who are exceptional, be they people or rodents or whole countries, are only as exceptional as they are good.

While it’s not always easy to determine the right course of action, determining what’s good almost never is. It’s what takes you away from celebrating the self and back toward figuring out how that self can fit into the community of others, how your own exceptionalism can become a part of the great symphony of life.

Original Source -> Why Incredibles director Brad Bird gets compared to Ayn Rand — and why he shouldn’t be

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

0 notes