#one with nuance and deph

[lyxchen]

If that Iphone rule applies to Squid Game (which it probably does) then both Jun-hee and Myung-gi are not villains. Jun-hee was pretty obvious, but Myung-gi kinda surprised me, cause while I didn't think he'd become an actual villain next season, I did assume that they'd give him a storyline where he is more extreme with his actions and much more willing to kill other players. But idk when exactly Apple views a character as a villain. In-ho surely isn't allowed to hold an Iphone in the show. But does this also apply to very morally gray characters like Sang-woo where they do things that are certainly more evil than good but overall they have understandable motivations and do feel guilty for doing those bad things? Or does this rule only apply to like very obvious villains, the big bad guys like In-ho? Would it apply to Deok-su who is still a player with his own issues and motivations, but who we're also supposed to dislike a lot more than other players who have done bad things, simply because Deok-su on top of that is also an asshole? Like idk I'm just thinking what counts as a villain for Apple. Myung-gi certainly isn't one cause otherwise he'd be using a different phone. Which I'm kinda glad to see that cause I don't want him to go full shitty guy who only goes after his own goals without thinking about anyone else (except Jun-hee)

[qqueenofhades]

Now that you finished s2, do you want to share your thoughts about sweet pathetic Aleks and sweet pathetic Alina? In s1 I didn't care much about her, honestly, she didn't have the dephs I normally like in protagonist (for me to like) and I was genuilly worried about this season, but well. You saw, Hilary. I love it, what they did with her (and Aleks, and, for that matter, Alina and her relastionship with Mal)

Honestly, I am a huge fan of what they did with Darklina this season, and all the complaints about it deeply, deeply baffle me. Like... y'all realize that in the books, she kills the Darkling, gives up her power, and goes to live with Mal on a farm in obscurity, right? We all bitched about it, and we were all dreading s2 because of that whole mess and it not being what anyone wanted. I was obviously very skeptical about how the season overall and especially the Alina/Mal/Aleksander part was going to be handled. Because in the books, Alina is not very interesting, Malina is not very interesting but still automatically promoted to endgame, and none of that is really challenged or deconstructed at all. I wasn't sure how bold the writers were going to be about changing it up, whether they were going to play the book arcs fairly straight, or what. And they did NONE of that. Yes, she still killed him, but after we literally had a flashback of them kissing the first time and him stating that was when he truly felt peace! He dies gazing at her adoringly and calling her "my little saint!" Like! This was not them "minimizing Darklina" or whatever!

I know that fandom is gonna fandom, and also that fandom tends to insist that they like complicated female characters in theory and then turn on them the instant they're actually complicated, but Alina is SO much more interesting and nuanced in the show that she is in the book, Jessie Mei Li does a great job with her, and the chemistry with Ben Barnes, even and especially when they want to kill each other, is hnnnnngh. Like, again! The writers went "hey twisted soulmate bullshit!" at us at every opportunity! They broke up Malina and sent Mal off to develop an actual personality and plot purpose, and the show acknowledged multiple times in-text that the relationship is weird and codependent and possibly influenced by him literally being her magical footstool! They didn't just go "well they should get married now and Alina will give up her power and live Happily Ever After in obscurity!" Instead, they made it all much more complicated, they made Mal likeable instead of a jealous dickhead but still admitting he's outclassed, they had Alina choose Nikolai and power, they set up an arc of Alina trying to be the "good Grisha" and the "good queen" and discovering that it's SO much harder than just being able to summon light, and crucially, repeating every one of Aleksander's mistakes/being drawn into his character arc exactly as he predicted. So what happens next? We don't know, but we can bet there will be more Parallels.

Basically, the writing this season for Darklina was a lot smarter and a lot more challenging/subversive of the source material than I ever expected it to be, and I eat it up. AND THEY ENDED IT WITH ALINA LITERALLY USING THE SHADOW CUT, Y'ALL!! LIKE. LIKE!!!! SHE CLEARLY ENJOYED DOING IT BECAUSE YET AGAIN, TWISTED SOULMATE BULLSHIT!!! I AM STILL VERY MUCH INTERNALLY SCREAMING ABOUT THIS!

It seems as if there are some segments of the fandom who only like Alina in theory, as long as she doesn't do anything to "challenge" or push back against Aleksander, and like. Guys. That's their whole arc. That is the whole dynamic in a nutshell, and that's what makes it interesting. Enemies-lovers-enemies-lovers, inextricably bound up even as they hurt each other and deny each other and try to push each other away. They always end up coming back to each other, because as the show and the characters themselves keep telling us, they are each other's only equal in the world! Not mention, the show has cleared WAY more space for that to be explored in an actually meaningful way than the books ever did, and I for one am very here for it. It's My Jam to a truly embarrassing degree.

[thekatebridgerton]

I don't understand the people who say Show Anthony and Kate are better versions than their book counterparts, I saw no character development in any of them in the show

Because some people prefer their problematic faves to not have character development.

I know, it's weird, but that's the gist of it. It's why people love sitcoms so much. Because characters never change or improve or learn anything. It's predictable and familiar.

Aka: What you and I would call boring characterizations.

In sitcoms characters are never the cause of their plotline, they never push the plot forward on their own will, because that would mean they're looking for character development. In sitcoms things HAPPEN to characters for the story to move along not the other way around

If Bridgerton were marketed as a regency sitcom, people would understand more the lack of things making sense.

In books, if a character doesn't learn anything or change in some way during the course of their story the book is considered a bad one. This is not true for tv. In tv the less a character changes the more comfortable the audience feels with them. And should they indeed need to change it must happen in the course of 5 seasons, not 8 episodes. Because in tv the opportunity to understand deph and nuance is more scarce than in books.

And some people would rather not analyze character motivations when they're just looking for a drama show to binge on

Sad but statistically significant. And that's the tea

[jonathankatwhatever]

It amazes me how quickly things come together now. I just connected the triangle conception to another level. Example: if you look at concepts that displace, those are creating a visible triangle that replicates through zK into them. So, interracial is a way of reflecting the woman over a different man, one who distinguishes the woman by being different from the watcher. That’s a literal distancing in the image in which there’s a layering of man and different enough man. That also literalizes in ‘watcher’ or sharing or cuckold videos; the image contains an actual observer or the camera as that observer, so you watching move into the action just like Cats should have been, as a penetration of the 4th wall. (I have such a dirty mind.) These physically observable differences allow substitution in zK, meaning you get into the scene, into the fantasy, behind the visible. Underlying what becomes in some a fetish is a simple triangular model in grid squares: it is easier to imagine sex with that woman or being in that scene if you play another part because the indirect connection, which runs around the outside of the square is ‘faster’ than the direct connection in which you must picture you. That is, the count is 1 not root2, so you can see yourself as him. This is true because the other route is also true; men like seeing men they can identify with, the other direction 1 count around the outside of the square. So, type similiar, type not similar. Both displace because both are fantasy for you, real for them in the physical sense of those acts. There is depth in similarity and deph in non-similarity.

Another approach is real fantasy versus not real fantasy, meaning there’s depth in the fantasy that becomes real and there’s depth that resists real. A fetish tends to develop as a pathway into that which becomes real. I think a better wording might be that there’s rational depth and irrational depth, that a relationship can reduce to a ratio which repeats like ⅓ or it can be irrational and thus infinite in a different way than constant. The greater the depth, the more real the path can become. And this develops or sucks you in, like how you absorbed me. In gs, an atraction to a simple ratio combines attributes to generate ‘great pair’, which I pick for the their ephemerality. You judge that. You repeat this. The actual joy is often realizing ‘great pair’ not recognizing ‘great pair’, meaning an attraction to the newness of the label. Let’s say you see those regularly: you repeat the judgement and see if it matches, which tends to be done each time along a somewhat different pathway. This means achieving the same place or degree of fantasy realization tends to require more nuance or invention, if only to overcome the shrinking of the space by it becoming modular. That is, you count modules fast, like when I improvise using hand shapes.