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scribeofmorpheus · 2 months ago

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Firstly, I want to say this is one of the most thoroughly researched and resourced critical analysis review essays I've read in a while! I adore your brain @sandetigerrr, and love how your passion for history and the etymology and thereby, specific parameter use of nomenclature is so evident here.

This also scratched a specific itch I've taken issue with in a lot of media lately that uses terms like "Woke" "Nazi" and "Facism" in broader, more generalised, homogenised terms. Whether as buzz-words for engagement or as rhetoric meant to reductivise (is this even a term?), these words are often used as simplified placeholders or doorstoppers around discourse, used instead to 'identify' but not further describe the commonalities in attributes that spurred the use of those words in the first place. And I love, love, love that you actually challenged and pointed out the difficulty in defining "Fascit"/"Facism" with a historiographical lens.

Nazi or Fascist is usually used to blanket cover characteristics commonly shown in fictional theonomic structures--like the Sith or Empire in Star Wars (never mind the fact that the Empire was actually constructed to be critical of [the then more capitalist-liberal] America's war on Vietnam, with the Rebellion being the representation of the 'Viet Cong'--as is evident most especially in "Return of the Jedi" when majority of the rebels used guerilla tactics on Yavin IV), the state of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, etc.. Essentially, an argument can be made for any "big bad" of a franchise to fall easy prey to the "Nazi"/"Fascist" tag, like the article that inspired this deepdive: "Veilguard Kills Fascists".

Whenever there's an established hierarchy that discriminates against gender, race, ability or 'force perception'; whenever there's an unjust system of law and governance that targets people for their ideological or religious differences; whenever there's loss of autonomy and free speech, or a predominant usage of propaganda to create educational institutions designed to indoctrinate; and, of course, whenever there is a subjugating power of a select few over the many, the go-to term to herd such characteristics under is, like was stated earlier, Fascism.

From what I can gather, the term is applied whenever there is any portrayal of political and ideological extremism which is oppositional to 'leftist' or 'centrist' scaling, as well as the general notion of a reluctance towards inclusivity or diversity--the anti-woke crowds.

Anyway, I won't try and bore you by defining more, but I needed to pick out the specific traits that pop up in media which earns any fictional creed or government the honour of such a term.

As someone who is a fan of Solas and his complexity, it wasn't uncommon for a lot of discourse around said moral grey characterisation of his character to be doorstopped by phrases like "he's basically a fascist" or "he committed genocide" or "he's racist". I don't want to step into this hornet's nest by trying to stir up old fandom drama, but I do want to say that whenever "real-world" terminology (that is specific to real world historical significance) is used, it throws me off kilter and submerges the "suspended plane of disbelief" I carve out between real/irreal and fiction/function.

To give an example of a term that fits within the predicated bounds of the fictional world established (which doesn't submerge my suspension of disbelief) is the use of "xenophobia" in a game like Mass Effect. The fictional world has established there's a level of intolerance and discrimination between human and xeno relations, as well as xeno and xeno relations, though the latter, having not existed in real-life politics yet, has no coined word to describe such a phenomenon.

Another example I can give to portray how the predicated bounds of a fictional world do not support the existence or use of a terminology is the recent use of "rape" in the Star Wars universe--specifially Andor s2.

The Hollywood Reporter opens the scene for understanding the gravity of such a term or act being depicted in the franchise by stating: "Star Wars is a franchise that has never — in film form — shown even consensual sex."

Through over 40-plus years of popcultural significance and a ton of extended universe auxiliary media, Star Wars is a behemoth of content, but never once does the fictional world acknowledge that gender-based sexual violence exists within its milieu. Maybe the extended universe, non-canonical books that feature Jacen Solo or Luke Skywalker's wife, Mara, broach the topic, but from what I remember, there's never a case where sexual violence is perpetrated against a "woman", "man", or "alien". Andor approaching such a topic could be indicative of applying real-world politics as they affect and are critiqued by art into a timely piece of commentary, but the issue is, for over 40 years, within canon, women in the Star Wars universe didn't have to contend with sexual assault. Leia in Jabba the Hutt's chains is as close as one gets, but the Hutt has no phallic organs, and, as far as we can tell, his enjoyment of shackling Leia wasn't inherently from a sexual pleasure 'kink' or perspective, but more from a power play perspective (she's a princess of political significance to a movement oppositional to the Hutts and Cartels, chaining her means taking away her power as a symbol of power).

According to the Hollywood Reporter article, the sentiment around how jarring the inclusion of rape is to the mythos of the franchise was polarising:

"Fan reactions have been divided. One major Star Wars fan account wrote, “I don’t want to see rape in Star Wars … You can portray power dynamics and making the audience hate the empire in other ways without taking it to such a disgusting place. Vader wouldn’t tolerate that shit nor does the Empire condone it. It has no place in Star Wars. Period.” Another pop culture fan account wrote, “I don’t mind having mature Star Wars but I’m not ok with it going so far as depicting an attempted rape. Or saying the word ‘rape.’ I’m actually quite disgusted with the Andor series right now."

I suppose it can be argued that misuse of the Force could denote metaphoric representations of sexual assault as they pertain to being "dominated" or "forced" to act against one's will. Even so, such a read remains within the interpretive space of a metaphor or analogy that can be perceived to represent such a phenomenon as it pertains to the viewer's perspective (and the subject matter's perception framing) when contrasted to the real-world.

Not saying sexual assault couldn't happen in the fictional world of Star Wars, only that the fantasy of such violence (as it disproportionately affects women in the real world, fiction and beyond) not occurring within the fictional bounds of that world was liberating, for a time, personally.

And now back to "Nazi". See, I'm going to bring back The Handmaid's Tale here because I have been writing a lot about it in my spare time, but in the sixth season, June's mother Holly uses the word "Nazi" to describe Nick Blaine (and pushing aside my dislike for his characterisation in the final season), even in a show like The Handmaid's Tale, the use of "Nazi" felt cheap and reductive. Mainly because Atwood specifically didn't use such words within her writing, within the fictional bounds of the book's universe. And I understand why that is important to writing. Showing, not telling, applies to written text, too. If you wave a finger and point at a character and have the narrator say "This here is a Nazi" in a world where such a term has never been uttered or used before, it breaks continuity, and moreover, it deals an absolute to the reader.

Sometimes you need to state things overtly, a bonk on the head so viewers know, without a doubt, what you are putting out there. The issue I have is, if the [fictional] world tried so hard to never use the easy out of a "doorstopper" or "placeholder" for something that could have been otherwise more profound and cathartic had the reader come to such a conclusion by themselves, without a 'gotcha' moment, why bother being ambiguous about it from the beginning?

I don't know if I'm making much sense, but the way sandetigerr's rebuttal broke down, examined, eplained and then built back up the scaffolding of what the implication and use of a paradigmatic term--without having defined it within the source text to begin with--muddles intention and argument if used flagrantly or in a reactionary fashion really resonated with me!

As BoJack Horseman's creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg said in an interview with HuffPost:

"...we have a responsibility in this industry and as creators of pop culture to really think about the messages and stories we’re putting out there, and I don’t believe most people take that responsibility seriously enough. I’m not for censorship, but I am for being accountable and really being considerate of what the stories are doing and the effects that they have." [x]

Similarly, I think Veilguard, as a message board, a medium for conveying sharp, intricate, smart and complex messaging in a series that once stood as some of the best writing I had ever come across in the video-game industry, ultimately fails to consider the mytheopic elements of the world constructed and its very ethos established in the three games prior. It has no radical messaging, it isn't about anything beyond the pop-colour politics of "LGBTQ+" representation 'wokeness' (as it self-brands) and "blood mages" evil guys because... gross?

Sidenote: As a person of colour, seeing how non-persons of colour co-opted, reduced and arbitrarily repackaged the term woke into what it is today is SICKENING. It's the new SJW tag. I highly recommend you read "A history of “wokeness--Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war" by Aja Romano on Vox.

But to just grab a pullquote from Wikipedia:

"Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. Over time, woke came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States... By 2019, the term was being used sarcastically as a pejorative among many on the political right and some centrists to disparage leftist and progressive movements as superficial..."

TL:DR: Basically, all I mean to say is words hold power, their etymology holds significance, and how they represent and interact with irreality/reality matters. Once we start trivialising and overusing them, they begin to wash out, much like how psychology-speak has made the once simple trait of being observant into being a performance that forces many to be exhaustively categorial of interactions and behaviours, and that is a dangerous precedent.

I want to talk about that article that wrote about Dragon Age: The Veilguard and used the title, "This Game Kills Facists." If you've seen it, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't. Well.

I think before I dig into this, I want to put forth a few caveats. This won't be a formal essay, but I'll do my best to cite my sources and previous argumentation. I also don't have any real animosity toward the author of this article, I'd never actually even heard of her until someone directed me to this article, and I don't think the problems with this article are unique to the author. But. As I said in a different post late last night, I think the article itself such a textbook example of this kind of left-liberal politics that doesn't actually understand the terms they're mobilizing about, stakes their identity on their consumerism habits, and seems to think that vibes-based opinions are in any way, shape, or form equivalent to critical analysis that interrogates the text and the meta of the media they're engaging with.

The analysis in this article is bad, I'm sorry to say. Just from a structural standpoint, it fails to understand how the structure of rhetorical argumentation functions, and doesn't bother to provide any concrete support for its claims. It highlights an inability to formulate an argument that I think is rampant among fandom discourse and I would perhaps argue is a common issue with liberal political argumentation in general, although that's another essay and isn't central to what I want to dig at today. I also fundamentally do not think this author understands what fascism is, which is frustrating at best, and I find it irresponsible although I don't think the intent is malicious. I'm also not convinced that the author really has a good grasp of media analysis or how to interrogate the thema of the stories she's talking about, but I'll leave that for you to determine.

So. What is the thesis of this article, which purports that this game "kills fascists"? I had to chew on it for a hot minute while reading, and as best as I can tell, the thesis is "Wokeness is the point of Dragon Age."

It takes the author three paragraphs to read this point:

"But I do want to call out the choo-choo hate train triggered by Veilguard’s [weary sigh] “wokeness,” because, of course, the wokeness is the point of Dragon Age. It always has been."

"And yes, Veilguard is the wokest, queerest Dragon Age yet."

And it is reiterated again in the concluding paragraph:

"So we’re back to the wokeness. I told you it was the point. Empathy and community building, kids. It’s not only the point of Veilguard, but the prevailing lesson of the Dragon Age series, where, again, stunning, ideologically-driven betrayals drive each narrative and make the unintended and the least of us suffer, only for a hero to pick themselves up and start figuring out how to go on and who can help."

"This game kills fascists. Literally, in the course of the game, yes–I will leave it up to you and your ending what that means for Solas****–but more importantly, its soul is pure fascist bane, centering empathy, intimacy, heroism, community. Multiple overarching storylines intersect to highlight the ways history and faith can be twisted to alienate and control people, as well as how the best way to fight fascism is always with each other."

Okay, great, that's at least a decent starting point.

Except we have a real problem. If we are making an argument that a game like, say, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is woke, and therefore its very character of wokeness is "fascist bane," base bare minimum, we have to define what makes something 'woke' and what makes something 'fascist.' Words mean things, and especially words like these, which have specific political definitions that are frequently pulled out of the hat and used colloquially as short-hand for... whatever it is that someone wants it to mean, and for what it is meant to mean within a community.

She kind, sort of, gives us an idea of what she means when she says the game, and indeed the storyworld of the Dragon Age series, is woke. Wokeness, which she equivocates as anti-fascism, carries the character of being compassionate. Wokeness is when you center collaboration. If we are are woke, if we are combating fascism, we are empathetic and vulnerable and intimate and we interested in building communities and we are trying to help each other. Apparently, being anti-fascist is when your story is queer, or at the very least, allowing space for queer identities. And apparently, being "a hero" requires that you be woke / anti-fascist

There are two problems with this:

The first is that, unfortunately, examples aren't definitions. Examples are meant to exist as part of the supporting body of your arguments; they're the rhetorical illustration in the encyclopedia on the page next to the definition.

The second is that while we're receiving an attempt to qualify what fascism is indirectly by qualifying what stands in opposition to it - in this case, 'wokeness,' which is itself never clearly defined and instead relies on a definition of woke that literally just relies on the negation of whatever being not-woke, or 'anti-woke', means.

This is bad logic, regardless of your opinions of the writing of The Veilguard. If you cannot tell me what fascism is, then you cannot tell me what it is not, and you certainly cannot tell me how something like being 'woke' is in opposition to fascism. The fact that the author fails to do this, that they assume you will understand exactly what they mean because it is somehow inherently self-evident, brings into question what exactly they mean.

I've tried to interrogate what she means by fascism, and the closest we really get is:

"And again, these stories are no fantasies and there are still no easy questions, no right answers. Except fighting the fascists. This game kills fascists. That one is a gimme."

"...accidentally releasing the two other remaining elven gods onto the world. Unlike Solas, who rationalizes a greater good, these gods are purely malevolent enslavers. They, too, want to turn the clock back, but to the days of their unlimited rule before Solas overthrew them. Not much ambiguity there, but good contrast. Solas is sidelined by events, relegated to advising Rook as they seek to defeat two sadistic gods and their Super PAC of bad guys rising across the nations of northern Thedas. But you’re not only fighting the gods and their allies, all of whom are explicitly fascist."

"You can also see how those thorny Dragon Age companion relationships are the They Live glasses all of us need at one time or another, teaching us how to empathize with someone you never even wanted to know, or maybe to forgive someone you thought beyond redemption. Or how beliefs are often flawed, but no one’s rights are negotiable. Or how no one is free until everyone is free. This game kills fascists. Literally, in the course of the game, yes–I will leave it up to you and your ending what that means for Solas****–but more importantly, its soul is pure fascist bane, centering empathy, intimacy, heroism, community. Multiple overarching storylines intersect to highlight the ways history and faith can be twisted to alienate and control people, as well as how the best way to fight fascism is always with each other."

Fascists are when you are sadistic. When you are malevolent. When you are enslavers. When you seek to regress society. When you lack empathy, when you destroy communities, when you hold things against people, when you believe [human] rights are negotiable (depending on who you cosnider [human], perhaps?) when you weaponize history and faith "to alienate and control people." Fascists do genocides.

These are, again, examples. Not definitions. And I think beneath that the author is using what they believe is a "true" or "commonly accepted" meaning of fascism that falls under what we might consider a persuasive definition logical fallacy; except the definitions are not even definitions, but vibes, and they aren't even vibes that correspond with any of the most commonly accepted frameworks of how to identify fascism.

To some extent, I might be willing to cut the author some slack because fascism is pretty infamously a loaded term that gets thrown around with a colloquial usage that absolutely does not adhere to the generally accepted parameters of fascism - and even within academic discussion circles, there's debate on what exactly does and does not constitute a definition of fascism, made in part difficult because one of the key characters of fascists seems to be their mutability, their willingness to adapt to populist beliefs and weaponize said populist sentiment toward their own goals, as a way to muddy the water on who they actually are and what they actually stand for.

In this vein, I think I'll recommend a couple of books here.

THE ANATOMY OF FASCISM by Robert Paxton is always a good starting point. [link to online Internet Archive copy].

Stanley Payne's A HISTORY OF FASCISM 1914-1945 is also a good baseline. [link to online Internet Archive copy].

SPAIN AT WAR: THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN CONTEXT 1931-1939 by Shubert and Esenwein [link to online Internet Archive copy].

EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS: A POLITICAL HISTORY by Martin Kitchner [link to online Internet Archive copy].

FASCISM by Roger Griffin.

Umberto Eco and UR-FASCISM.

I actually very specifically think the issue we all tend run into is that fascism is less a coherent ideology than it is extremely opportunistic and has a myriad of commonalities but very few exclusive traits, which is exacerbated by the inherent limitations and rigid nature of definitions. I tend to stick with a blend of Griffin and Paxton's definitions that I added a few things to but always have to put up a disclaimer that it's a bare bones definition that doesn't encompass the ideology but rather points out the few core ideals and its general manifestation, and even then, I think fascism pre- and post- neoliberalism are also incredibly distinct even if you put all fascism under one umbrella and separate them just by those two eras. Griffin I think is mostly useful for a layman's overview of fascism, and I also think that Alexander Reid Ross has a fairly functional definition, although I don't wholly agree with it, either:

"Fascism relies on the perception of a constituency producing, and produced by, an inherently natural process of hierarchy manifested by warrior elites embedded in the spiritual myths of the nation. In short, fascism is a syncretic form of ultranationalist ideology developed through patriarchal mythopoesis, which seeks the destruction of the modern world and the spiritual palingenesis ("rebirth") of an organic community led by natural elites through the fusion of technological advancement and natural tradition."

These are all good starting points, but I think the major takeaway is that fascism is not ideologically coherent. It is somewhat of a non-ideology, and furthermore I think any decent fascist scholar will point out its opportunism and lack of actual ideological foundation, which is why it's so difficult to really define it coherently beyond "here's some general traits, here's how they manifest in this situation." To this point, I would probably direct you to Eco's 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", where he lists fourteen general properties of fascist ideology and further argues that it is not possible to organize these into a coherent system, but that "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it". But with the caveat that it's easy to fall into the trap of "commonalities" while still serving as a useful checklist for identifying red flags.

I think it's also important to keep in mind that part of the reason that fascism is not a coherent ideology is because fascism has historically and continues to contemporaneously adopt a lot different types of tactics to gain popular support. They frequently employ socialist rhetoric, engage in aesthetic appeal, turn minor things regarding a specific group into major ploys against the dominant structure, etc. They're so successful that to this day I am arguing with people who say "socialism is bad because the Nazis were Socialists because they were called National Socialists" which is just. A stunningly bad grasp of the politics of fascism and socialism and the history of the Nazi party while also being an incredibly pervasive issue in the discourse of this subject. Fascist rhetoric lies on appealing to nationalism that most people will have ingrained throughout their childhood (regardless of political system) and claiming the woes and struggles people face are due to a cultural backsliding brought about by some group or groups, and they use a variety of tactics to make that more digestible and appealing until it becomes more mainstream and they can actually say what they mean -- to become mask off once. We're watching it happen in real time in the United States. The shit being said about LGBTQ+ people rightly could not be openly said even 5 years ago, let alone 10 years ago. They had to lace it in all sorts of rhetoric and dog whistles whereas now they can be blatant about it, and now we're watching the United States erode into a fascist state.

There exists another problem with defining fascism -- which I think is an issue even with the identifying frameworks I like to work with -- and that is that the framing of specifically the role of capitalism tends to be either overemphasized or not emphasized enough (or at all). This is problematic because fascism is specifically a capitalist development, but the commonalities trap of Eco leads to, for example, Marxist arguments that "fascism is the immune system of capitalism" or is a "last ditch effort by the bourgeoise" -- arguments that are both ahistoric to the early 20th century era of fascism (as a glittering generality, the main rich conservative element that disliked the Nazis were the prussian nationalists, conservatives and military leaders, who ended up trying to appropriate the Nazis. And well, we know how that turned out) as well as the era of neoliberalism, wherein the latter there are still 'roots' present but the fascistic relationship with capitalism is foundationally different than it was in the early 20th century. And this is how we end up with analyses that attempt to position concepts like racism and transphobia to capitalism rather than understanding how they are adopted by and employed by capitalism, and therefore failing to contextualize their roles within fascism.

People often equate concepts/phenomena like genocide, authoritarianism, militarism, fetishism of aesthetics, etc. exclusively with fascism but the reality is that liberals and state socialists routinely have committed (for example) genocide and they're not fascists. They are liberals. And it is also true that fascism is a descendant of that liberal genocidal violence. United States and European white supremacy, for instance, were not developed under a fascist regime and in fact existed long before fascism reared its ugly head. A preoccupation with population control will likely be present in any regime, and historically concepts like population reduction or eugenicist spins on natalism are a common appearance in the nation myths they nations make for themselves. I would argue that population control specifically predates not only fascism but also capitalism and has been the backbone of liberal democracies, but that's another thing altogether for a different essay. The point is, an ideology does not need to be fascist to do heinous things, and further, fascism isn't definable as "any evil act." Using fascism as a shorthand for evil is both incorrect and also helps obscure how other forms of evil work.

The problem I have, therefore, with the author of this essay "This Game Kills Fascists" is that she doesn't even seek to employ a working framework of fascism. The enemies are "explicitly fascist" but she doesn't really tell us how, she just provides examples that might conceivably fit into a framework, were she to utilize one.

Sadism is not inherent to fascism. Slavery is not inherent to fascism. Social regression is not inherent to fascism. Social regression, or a return to tradition, certainly can be a red flag to watch for, but isn't exclusive to fascism and isn't enough to stand on its own. The author argues that community and disparate peoples coming together is a feature of the game and the series, and this is ultimately antithetical to fascist movements, so I could certainly grant her this.

On the other hand, the linkage of heroism as anti-fascist is an interesting choice because, if we refer to Eco's 14 Points:

"In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

We would of course never argue that Rook is intended to be fascistic as a hero. Nor would we argue this for our companion Davrin, who as a Grey Warden is essentially in a death cult and who does manifest through the game a desire to die heroically because that is what he is supposed to do (Grey Wardens are meant to die slaying the archdemon and stopping the blight!) But: this is an adequate illustration of the type of commonalities that we must watch for.

Or if we borrow tumblr user Mythalism's point about the types of literature that were permitted by the Nazi state under its fascist regime, it's generally understood that there were four categories of topics in literature (we'll apply this more broadly to media) that met the Nazi criterion.

The first was ‘Front Experience’. This was to promote the camaraderie and good times that would be found in time of war on the front line. The most famous author in this category was Werner Bumelburg. The second category was ‘World View’. Books on this promoted the views of Hitler and Rosenberg. Hans Grimm wrote ‘People Without Space’ in 1926 and it was heavily publicised once the Nazis gained power. The book gave the Nazis one of their most famous slogans: “The Germans: the cleanest, most honest people, most efficient and most industrious.” The third category was ‘Regional Novels’. These books emphasised the excellence of the various regions of Germany. The most famous authors in this category were Agnes Miegel, Rudolf Binding and Börries von Münchhausen. The final category was ‘Racial Doctrine’. Books in this category emphasised the greatness of the Aryan race when compared to Jews, Slavs and anyone labelled ‘untermenschen’. The most famous author in this category was Gottfried Benn who based his work on the “ancestral vitality” of the German people.

Literally nobody who is reasonable is going to argue that The Veilguard is a fascistic piece of media, but if you were to stretch the framework to make an argument for something like that, Mythalism points out that it wouldn't be too difficult to find commonalities between elements of the game and the criterion outlined immediately above:

camaraderie and good times found in war

simplistic world view with good vs. bad people

emphasized excellence of the countries represented and erasure of their flaws

we could probably swing the last one with how it frames elves as the source of literally all evil in the world

Voila, fascist game! (This is not serious.)

What we seem to have here is a simplistic view of "fascists = bad" and therefore the elements that are woke (aka good) are inherently the opposite of facist, therefore, anti-fascist. Here we must return to the fact that woke / wokeness were never clearly defined, and to the history of woke as a concept in Black communities in the United States. While I am not a scholar of the phenomona of how woke as a concept got mainstreamed into US politics, I'm generally given to understand that it came about in the Black Lives Matter movement and specifically with the sensationalization of the slaying of Michael Brown, which has since been appropriated into the Culture War as a shorthand for supposed political progressiveness by the left and as a denigration of so-called leftist culture by the right. (If this needs to be corrected or clarified, please feel free to let me know, but it appears to be the general gist of it as applies to how the author of the inciting article mobilizes the term.)

At the end of the day, you can't say 'this game kills fascists' and then not only fail to define what fascism is or what makes someone fascist but then also fail to illustrate why this game is anti-fascist and directly combats fascism. The definition of woke in this article simply hinges on just negating what being anti-woke means, and it's a manifestation of how the right co-opted woke to mean "anything that deviates in any way, perceived or actual, from established hierarchies" and then liberals and left-liberals responded to this with "let's go with that definition and be anti-anti-woke!" It's not a coherent interrogation of the politics of these terms, nor is the article able to coherently grapple with its core thesis.

I'm going to post a screenshot of (and also link to) an anonymous ask sent to @/Mythalism that I think really complemented what I was writing here:

I will write more about this at a later date and return more to some of the specifics of what the author says about queerness, heroism, hope, and the framing of the story (which is... inconsistent at best and deliberately disingenuous at worst), particularly because the essay is, in my opinion, extremely liberal in its construction, and in response to a game that was developed within a white, centrist, neoliberal political framework. The essay is attempting to moralize the game with pot shots in the dark and political buzzwords that ultimately mean nothing because she does not put in the introspection or effort to ensure that they mean something. And I think we need to move beyond the simplistic "i only like things that are not problematic and therefore if i like this thing it is not problematic and therefore if you are criticizing this thing you are problematic and also making a personal attack against me." I also think we need to return to the very basic rhetorical construction of "claim -> supporting evidence -> conclusion" until people learn how to actually structure an argument.

#I absolutely devoured the sandetigerrr's essay #media criticism #dragon age the veilguard #da: veilguard #dragon age [messaging] critical #critical analysis #i added my own thoughts because you have once again summed up so many floating thoughts I had so articulately #the handmaid's tale #andor spoilers #andor season 2 #star wars #media critique #bojack horseman

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scribeofmorpheus · 2 months ago

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These Designs, I Declare of Kings

In response to the days which seem to demand of me a scream, yet I feel as though I have no right to use my mouth, for much of what is said is often too soft to be heard over every other scream at the assembly plant where further woes are welded unto man.

N.B: Long Essay, existentialism and just an exorcism on the frustrations of current political, media and social climates--I had so much to say but didn't know where to put it or why it was all centred around my disappointment and non-surprise surrounding news of Sandman's alleged plagiarism, hand-in-hand with the release of the Vulture article by Lila Shapiro on Gaiman, so I have placed this text here.

With everything that has happened in the world over since I wrote the first chapter of this story (a story I very much used as an exorcism of old pains and festering wounds), I never expected to wake up to a morning where this reality we now live in is not only real but lived-in.

It is 2025, a new year, and it does not hold a chalice full of promise as we toast. As I sit and read over what I had once been inspired to write, I am lost in the lines of the passages below. A triquetra. A triptych. These three paragraphs, which feel grossly too prescient, almost mockingly so, haunt me:

“Strife justified the need for order. Order bestowed righteous power. And prosperity would always call that power into question. For one could always desire more once they had the privilege of sitting still for long enough. That desire would increase tenfold if the seat was a throne. If people prospered, it never simply meant prosperity. To a king, it meant benevolence, a right to rule. For military generals, it meant a restless army. For young children, it meant a coming war for conquest, lest they be spoiled in the eyes of their parents. And for the scions of the end of peace, it either meant a turn to totalitarianism or a fall of an empire. Morpheus was no exception to this, as his past would prove. He, too, was a product of the design of kings.” – of human thought, Chapter 10.

Sandman was a life-line for me when I could not find any rhyme or reason to the depths of my despair, for the trials that seemed unending and further crueller no matter how many sunrises I missed or how many full moons I was shied from behind heavy curtains and a tired body.

I have since learned to fit inside my body again. I have learned to wake before the sun so I might know of beauty while it is rare upon the sky, and I look to stars at night because I work late hours, often returning home in the silent cold of midnight. The cruelty of fate has subsided somewhat, and I no longer feel as though each occurrence in my life is a trial waiting to break me. But I unfortunately do feel like a scion of the end of peace.

Am I to inherit nought but conflict?

Palestine. Congo. Sudan. Ukraine. The women of Iran. The women of Korea. The women of the States. The ecological warfare our industrial complex is waging over Antarctica, the Amazon, the oceans.

From the seats of those sat in power, the winds blow in dangerous directions, and history threatens to remain a cautionary tale no longer, rather it deigns to return as a gale from the cold north wind, as if Boreas—violent in his temper as he kicks down doors and shatters homes.

In the midst of all this turmoil, someone falls. It is truly sad that many built a home in the illusions of the houses he constructed from paper and fiction. Once, one of them was a warm place from which to weather a terrible, ongoing storm. Now, I am left woefully unsurprised (as is the way of the current climate, it seems), but worse yet, I harbour disappointment.

It is wearisome, being accustomed to disappointment.

The foul taste that remains after reading the Gaiman article refuses to relent. I should be outraged, but outrage was one of the first emotions to burn during the last year of inconsolable loss and continuous protest for so many causes dear to me. I am disturbed by the news and I am also left in a weird trance—it’s as if I lay on my back as the ocean currents carry me out into the depthless sea; I know I should kick my feet and try to swim to shore, but that requires I risk drowning from the effort, so instead I wait… I wait for a bell to ring in my head or a siren to summon me with her call.

My aimlessness is contextually tied to the crossroads ahead; I struggle with the ethics of supporting the new season (which has now been re-tweaked to appear as a dénouement to the oeuvre that is Dream’s endless story). People unaffiliated with Gaiman, good people, creative people who must face the reality of working in a time where the human element is so easily dismissed or replaced by the machine remnant—a time where the craft of costume design is never appreciated for the countless stitches used, the fabrics sourced, the buttons sewn; a time where the make-up departments are rarely praised for their hours spent bending over a face to make it ready for the role it is meant to play; a time where everything is left to the overworked offices of ‘post-production’—must now let go of something that was most likely adapted, acted, costumed and composed from a place of passion, creativity and admiration. To not support it is to prove to media corporations that the people do not yearn for such craftmanship and niche stylistic choices, that they do not appreciate such risks in art—a horrendous take-away that doomed Dead Boy Detectives.

Yet to support its release would be to support, in some monetary fashion or another, a man who has abused the power given unto him by fame and celebrity, power diluted to the public eye by the kinder façade he projected for so many years. I mourn for what Terry Pratchett would have thought had he lived to see this reality unfold. It used to be, that the most one had to fear was the proving of the axiom “Never meet your heroes”—for they are seldom as they appear in your mind’s eye. Now, we are left on a junction that seems to lead down two avenues: “Never admire another person” or “Burn to the end of your wick, till there is little fight left in you to care for even the smallest things that could marvel and awe.” Perhaps reductionist, but everything feels like the better of two bad choices lately.

Right this moment, I am left to think about domino effects and the structure of experience. Everything is connected, a chain of catalytic reactions in the energy cycle affects the grass and then transfers to the very foods we eat. Our carbon returns to the soil and feeds the growths of spring. One act can affect someone you will never meet. The fall of a supposed hero figure at every turn sours the ideology of there ever being one in the first place.

It feels almost as though I have lived two lives in one instance of time. I have lived long enough to see that choosing to appoint someone much better-off than ourselves as a hero is a future grievance in the making. Whether it is the fact you will turn aspiration to hounding self-disappointment when you do not make the same strides as your hero’s or whether those you held up as personal heroes turn to bad apple seeds in the pit of your stomach, burning like acid with each strenuous swallow as you come to terms with disappointment, yet again, it is practically fool-proofed that the inevitable resolution of hero-worship is the chipping away of you. Yet the need for heroes is older than the written word. We crave a better story than our own, in the hopes that we might achieve that better ending we so desire.

If we cannot turn to people, who do we turn to? The answer was traditionally: fiction. Yet people have lost the nuance of appreciating a character written within the narrative bounds of their respective genres—equating them for literal representations of real-world problems rather than as fictional allusions or mediums of metaphor, exaggeration, hyperbole or criticism. So, then, if the fictional is still not a safe space to cultivate heroes, what then? And even worse, what happens when the fictional hero is virtuous but the creator is not? How does one enjoy fruit from a spoiled tree?

Structuralist and post-structuralist media critic Roland Barthes championed an area of thought known as The Death of the Author. Wherein, he postulated that the intention of a piece of media need not solely rely on the context of the author’s life and experiences, but that there was equal power to be found in the reader making that piece of media their own (sans authorial intent). Though the “explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us,” it is also plausible to state that “a text is made of multiple writings [for which the Author is merely the mixer of unoriginal text into their own envisioned final product], drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” (Barthes, 1968).

There is a thin line to balance whereabouts the fictional hero can remain untainted by the spoiled tree from which it fruited (especially when called to question when said tree began to spoil—was this thing you love made before, after or during the spoling stages? Is the rot imbued or still mycelial in its size?), but this school of thinking must not be consumed to ignorance either.

Anything in excess is rarely constructive for the soul.

I personally prefer Foucault’s ruminations on authorship, in which he seems to “call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure.” But I dare not bore you further with another French philosopher’s essays. I will, however, point to a great notion he poses to culture, which is to hold in the back of your mind an awareness for the point at which “we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes.” (What is an Author?, Foucault, 1969).

There are so many layers to being human. Always has been. But I keep coming back to ‘Power’ when drafting this text: Power has never been more corrupting than it is right now. Power is at the root of all injustices. Power monopolised or hoarded under corporatised capitalist consumerism is as close to the notion of “king-making” as our generation will get.

Western media is so enveloped in the inevitable mythic portent of “absolute power corrupting”, one must question if this notion should be adopted universally given the uneven distribution of power historically (it has categorically belonged westward). Though it is not lost on me that our structures of power are the result of the society we’ve built, the history we’ve endured and the rulership we’ve been subjected to since the first scramble for dominion, this doesn’t mean that things are always doomed to churn for the worse, it simply means there is are unaddressed flaws lingering in the small works of this large frieze that depicts our earthly experiences.

King-making used to be of the Epics and the Classics in literature; slay a dragon and best a trial, you who are pure of heart or strong of might can so too be a ruler of lands wide. Then it was of the Romance; of French-Anglo royal courts and their commissioned stories to paint the champions of these adventures as kings anointed by purest blood and guided by the Hand of God, i.e. destiny. Then it was Regency-specific; lands and title deeds and wealth from the colonial conquest; naval power, and inter-marriage and the sanctity of the church’s approval.

Currently, what kings by blood that remain are but showpieces of the distant past.

However, those who believe themselves powerful enough to have been of kings had they lived in the past, are the ones I refer to in the vein of recipients of the pageantry of king-making culture in a society without need for kings. The issue of continuous, systematic, blatant abuse of power arises when there are far too many people with enough power of a kind to govern a country if they so wished—enough wealth and draw to be callous, endangering; or else enough social credibility to be ‘unstained’ in the eyes of the public—but not enough personal tribulations or grounding moral constraints to keep them from succumbing to the cruelty of boredom. If you are left wanting for nothing, it is likely you will begin to push the envelope a little further each time until you lose track of the grounding line.

Toni Morrison surmised the phenomenon of Power’s transformative qualities better than I. Within the context of the settlers who voyaged to settled the New World, she explained their paradigm shift from powerless to the allowance of a new raiment of self, within power structures they could construct for themselves, as thus: “Power—control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste and cunning persecution. One could move from discipline and punishment to disciplining and punishing; from being socially ostracized to becoming an arbiter of social rank.” (The Source of Self-Regard, Morrison, pp.145)

To no surprise, I say “king-making” as an affront. It isn't in reference to the ideal of kings we carry over unto fiction imbued with nostalgia or romanticism, it is more in line with the failings of kings and the systems they were indebted to.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

Whenever there is a revolution, those in the finest silk will not tear from their garments a thread of weave to stop the bleeding of a child that lay quiet in the dark under-belly of their empires. Yet, more often than not, when condemned, these very silk-wearers will cry the greatest injustice has been done unto them even when it is not an injustice but the mere act of questioning their position in the ecology of the world.

We are always told that we are supposedly born equal under the sun, yet never are we guaranteed equity to not burn under its harsh onslaught.

We live in an age of misinformation and the dizzying simultaneity of unreality. The sterilisation of all that might cause thought found to be too discomforting is shrinking the oceans of thought we are allowed to enter. It is all dichotomous now. A bifurcated system—two-party governance, right and wrong, the marketable and unmarketable, rich and poor (for which the middle-class is shrinking considerably, while the bracket for rich is growing further unattainable unless you are like a King of the Grail: blessed by inheritance by blood in terms of destined wealth).

The need for the Righteous Rule of Kings is an antiquated one, yet “king-making” is the closest analogy I can string together right now. Too many people with power, fame, charisma and the fortunes of could-have-been-kings have overextended their reach, assaulted the notions of privacy and consent, pillaged the resources of all, distorted truths and orchestrated smear campaigns, bending the arc of the truth’s story to their favour. There is too much dissonance and noise, we are in a short-lived cycle of attention, we forget outrages that should be the cornerstone foundations of movements. But we are also louder than ever before, with a voice that can cry through algorithms, videos, and entire bandwidths of data.

Yet the kings still hold too much power.

Politicians that tell you what you can and cannot be within the very mechanisms of your body. Celebrities that garner eyes like moths to flame, speaking untruths like dogma and then beguiling or threatening those around them simply because they feel ‘untouchable’. Beyond reproach. Too well-respected to dare fear the small voices of names you would not recognise when credits roll or curtains draw. It is not only consent of the body that is tarnished, but that of the mind. Machines take and take from you to build their own scaffolding of bones, their sense of the world and how it is to be human are stolen from your epithets papered over the web. Machines never so much as asked for consent as they scraped every brush stroke of immense patience and dedication, trivialising every ache in the wrist or hungry night spent without sweetness, yet they benefit from making ‘authorless’ creations as a result. These regurgitations are not authorless because a machine made it, but are authorless because the many voices it took from have been superimposed and overlapped to the point that all discursive elements used by the machine to learn, “would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur.” (Foucault, 1969).

Even in this newly forming Machine Era, the kings (those who own these machines) profit still.

I miss the era of fore-kings which we bring to life with grandeur in the essence of a contemporary chivalric tale. Of those heroes in fiction who became kings out of service and not wealth in a time of disparity or might in a time of war.

“Just Kings” like Edmund Pevensie, a redeemed brother-betrayer by naïveté; a lamb-led-astray by rare kindness and even rarer sweetness found in the simplicity of Turkish Delight—a triviality we only now view as trivial because the story so oft is not remembered for its harsh reality: after extended time exposed to WWII food rationing, would you not take the sharing of sweetness to mean an act of kindness? Edmund was one of the first fictional characters in my youth who imbued me with hope—for even flawed and dejected by the lack of a caring figure, he was not self-centred so as to be blind to his mistakes, and he became a Just King when given the room to grow out of the shadow of his failings.

Similarly, purer of virtue yet not a stranger to self-doubt, there is the King of Isildur’s Heir: one who would rule benevolently, in kindness, and in direct opposition to the fear of what is possibly inherited—that the corruption which poisoned his forefathers would mark him as an unfit ruler, susceptible despite his strength in character.

Even Kings of the “Grail” have a veneer about them when viewed through hindsight, albeit one must be aware it is a story repurposed by church and court from smallfolk hero of Welsh legend to embody the Roman-obsessed figure of a golden-haired, lion-shielded king wrapped in the Judaic-Christian prophetic saviour’s purpose. A king used by the ruling class to emphasise the merit of power-by-blood as ordained by god—where the powerless people are given tales of champions of divine marking to assert the courtiers' positions in a more uncertain, war-torn map of Europe. This king’s appeal is not in Arthur himself, but in the Gawains, Yvains, Lancelots and the Ladies of the Lake that surround this legend. Knights who struggle with their very chivalric values, witches who overcome the evil sorceress's fate and grant the king with the object of benevolence he needs to secure his place in the story (the sword, a quest, a love). Few know this outright, but it is called the Vulgate Cycle in academia, more commonly: the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. For the importance lies not with Arthur alone. The story, in fact, ends not after the death of Arthur, but with the final moments in Lancelot and Guinevere’s stories. King though Arthur was, his legend is only made that of a king’s because of his knights and the famed, scandalous tale of non-chivalric love between Lancelot and Guinevere, never without.

Those kings stated above were granted their titles only after they proved themselves in the eyes of the people—or else in the eyes of those in close proximity to “relatability”.

No, the facets of power that aspire to be kings today are poisoned by the hedonistic ego of the “king-making” sickness: those who believe themselves worthy of walking in the footsteps of such characters, yet who coincidentally are never aware of their mishandling of power when used for the subjugation of others to their whims, or the trifling of others’ misfortunes when balanced against their fortunes, or when executing fear tactics against those unable to say “No!”. Lest us not forget the threats used against those who do have the courage to say “No!”. Disconcerting again, is that if they truly do believe themselves the rightful recipients to such power, then they fancy themselves above the throne of kings (which usually can be deposed by the people). It is thus that they now place themselves on a pedestal polished for gods instead. Untouchables. So irrefutably correct in their politics and notions of what is true that they would rather bend the world around them than allow the world to change their understandings of it.

Perhaps this was all one avoidable tangent and I could have simply not written this out, but I am in excess and must put my frustrations somewhere. I had hoped to revisit Sublime Sovereignty as Enter: the Sublime had originally been titled. I had hoped to revisit the Dreaming by rereading the comics and retreading Dream’s story. I still can, and could, but it seems disingenuous—like an act of attributing triviality to all that is circulating in the ethos of this piece of media. There are satellites strung in its orbit, and an egregious mishandling of power and breaking of trust has occurred for someone who was vulnerable and in close proximity to Gaiman. And it is not an isolated incident.

But even this grim reality does not dampen the idea that Morpheus stands for (as a concept, through mythology, through varying names and religions, to this very transformative fiction story based on another author's contemporary re-imaging of the God of Dreams, and I include Tanith Lee’s Azhrarn from TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH in this): Dreams are powerful.

Dreaming was how I escaped. I could lucid dream from as far back as I can remember. I could build kingdoms in my head. I could picture them so vibrantly. Then, to meet an Endless that was the personification of that limitlessness of creative power, and to see he was heartbroken, driven by the whims of self-importance at times, repentant, stubborn, strange… there was my anchor in the stars, I thought. And I had grown to love the beauty of the dark in doing so. Sandman was not safe literature. It provoked and it gave voice to what we assumed, before the current allegations of Gaiman’s misuse of power, to be feminist representation of the women wronged, an un-shied lens that cast light on so much injustice—like Calliope. Only now to learn there may be something more sinister in the framing, in the suffering, in the similarities. Calliope’s story is her own creature now, it was from the moment it was published and a woman somewhere read it and felt a form of denied catharsis given back to her the moment Dream curses Richard Madoc to incomprehensible insanity.

Whenever I see Caravaggio’s Medusa, in horror and decapitated, I always question why a gorgon (a victim of the callousness of gods) need be slain for being cursed outside of her own power? Then I think of the juxtaposition between Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and that of Artemisia Gentileschi’s rendition (to which the title is changed from the impersonal “Beheading” to the very emotive action of “Slaying”) in Caravaggio’s style.

Summary from Wikipedia: In the story, Judith, a beautiful widow, is able to enter the tent of Holofernes because of his desire for her. Holofernes was an Assyrian general who was about to destroy Judith's home, the city of Bethulia. Overcome with drink, he passes out and is decapitated by Judith; his head is taken away in a basket (often depicted as being carried by an elderly female servant).

Caravaggio's Judith is ‘fairer’, youthful, a mix of confused and afraid, almost unwilling but eyes too darkened to not be at least partially responsible (though perhaps under a geas of the ‘old crone’ architype behind her). Gentileschi's Judith is steely, filled with conviction, and full of dark rage—both Judith and her maid partake in the act, in solidarity.

I am enthralled each time by the sudden-returning re-realisation of these two paintings existing in the same time frame. So similar. One inspired by the other. One painter taught in the style of the other. One remembered far longer in the breadth of history, while the other remained in the demimonde fringes—understated unless you know to seek her out. Though sharing a common root, the paintings diverged in result due to authorial experience, and this enforces a feminist reading by default. One Judith is a vehicle of the story, moved along despite her reluctance. The other Judith is the story. She makes the choice. She carries out the act. She regains her agency.

Agency. I suppose that is the root of this text. Of how parts of your agency can be taken from you in ways you least expect them to.

Perhaps the Calliope of Sandman’s story is Caravaggio’s, there is yet room for a Calliope in Gentileschi’s style. There is room to retain agency, to brutishly reclaim it if need be. Not all action must be conformist and appeasing. Express anger and hurt.

Do not be gentled by this unrighteous age we are coming to terms with being our inheritance.

I am writing this, I suppose, as a way of not being complacent through simple disavowing, through dichotomous drawing of lines or the silent closing of doors. This essay, and final chapter closer on this series that I am still proud of, for it had been a labour of love and self-preservation through art, is a way of retaining my agency while also trying to contextualise the chaos that isn’t simply linked to this one thing, but is a result of many things piled-on high.

I suppose all this exhaustive matter written down here is merely the evidence from which to use as a temporal marker: to mark when the straw broke the camel’s back, for use of poor metaphor.

To be docile is to be easily governable. For the use of a horrendous analogy: to be docile is to let your agency to an agent outside of yourself, these agents (be they of chaos, trauma, misinformation, hopelessness, disappointment, fatigue, strain, depression, hyper-capitalism, loneliness) they can take from you whatever you are not vigilant at maintaining—and it is getting increasingly easier to keep your eye off every detaching part of yourself. Which is why you must keep as many parts of yourself resistant, kinetic, ungovernable when denied the assurances of a satisfactory milieu.

To be ungovernable is to be an anarchist. Anarchy is not about destruction or vandalism or style, but about resisting against being made amenable, docile, without the need to rage for autonomy to have the inheritance of things the world rightfully offers you without need for compensation.

Take everything contained here within these words as a form of anarchy: my truth and discontentment with the current age we are in—of my frustrations with the impermanence of everything except the damage we render unto the earth and the collective psyche of the generations here and to come, of so much unresolved injustice.

If you must take one thing away from this eclectic collection of thoughts, take this:

“Keep dreaming of the kind of future generations of people would have built cathedrals for, then realise that is you!”

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