#I think there isn't an argument that would persuade me it's not depressing

[blue-b-bro]

Actually, I'm still pissed

[cat-scarr]

Hello! I love your takes on Ben! He's also one of my favorite characters and has been since I was little. Unfortunately my parents thought the shows were too scary for me at the time, (I was probably like 5-10 and I had anxiety issues and other problems) so they tried to discourage me from watching but I would watch the show. I would often watch it in secret.

However, I got a bit of a mystery on my hands and I was wondering if you knew of any episode in Alien Force or Ultimate Alien that may have caused this.

In the middle of watching Alien Force and/or Ultimate Alien something I suddenly grew a very huge disliking for Ben 10 and I came out of it specifically hating Kevin. And heavily disliking Ben and Gwen.

Now I do remember very much loving Ben as a character so I thought this was odd. The adversion was so bad that I refused to participate in anything Ben 10 related even when Omniverse came out and my sister had to practically beg me to watch it.

I have been slowly getting through Alien Force now and haven't quite got to Ultimate Alien yet. I am much less picky than when I was 10 and younger so while I much prefer OG and Omniverse, I still do enjoy Alien Force Ben, even if the first episode of season 3 or so really tried to make me hate his guts. Issue is I still can't figure out what caused me to hate Ben 10 so much when I was younger.

Grant it, I recognize that the discouragement of my parents may have had something to do with it but I don't think it was entirely that. And since I really liked Ben I was wondering if there were any episodes where Ben is written not as well as usual and Kevin just kind of sucks that would appear really bad to a 10 year old or younger? Because so far I'm getting nothing and it's nagging at me but I think that's just because I'm older now and not so easily swayed by little problematic things characters may do sometimes.

I love these characters now and will still love them even if AF isn't quite my favorite version of Ben 10 and it's been quite a fun watch so I'm very sad I didn't get to enjoy this when I was younger.

Sorry if this is odd I'm just really trying to figure out what happened and I figured a fellow Ben lover might be able to give some insight.

wow, proof that Ben 10 is hated for no reason? what did I tell u fandom

No seriously, I thought about this for a while, but the fact that it bothers you to feel that way is a good sign, actually, because you realize there’s something not right about that. You love these characters. That doesn’t have to mean that you agree with them all the time or have to unapologetically forgive everything they do because they’re special to you like I do. But despite their flaws, you love these characters. You don’t want to believe there’s any good reason to hate them. 

Before I continue, I have to put this out there. I hold myself back from being a huge bitch about it, but this kind of thing has been happening in the fanbase for years. Not just because of one popular user or creator, but because the way that being popular in itself is enough to persuade the majority to believe what is being said is correct, accept that it is undeniably correct, and worth going around repeating. Victims of the fandom repeating the same take over and over until it gets ingrained in everyone’s brain syndrome. And then majority rules, even if it shouldn’t. 

Which is depressing, because a lot of the fanbase who does repeat these takes are clearly impressionable. Which means they’re often younger. If you’re active in internet fandoms, this is practically inescapable. 

The Ben being a bad boyfriend argument is a great example that I’ve beaten to death at this point. Do you know how many times I’ve come across people who liked him as a character, even had a crush on him, and still believed this was true? Didn’t question it? Didn’t take a look at the circumstances which painted him in a negative light undeservingly? Didn’t recognize that the series literally had him try to resolve those conflicts and make things right, which would ultimately point to meaning he isn’t nearly as bad as they say? 

To answer your specific question at the end there, I wouldn’t say Ben has ever done anything so horrible it was beyond understanding or logical explanation. This is because, in Ben 10 especially, conflicts are presented in order to be resolved. Not for chaos's sake, but in order to learn from them. Or, in order to cement the same lesson time and time again as a running theme of the show. In order to have several instances as proof of that lesson, not to make it seem as though the titular character is so stupid he forgets what he’s learned. It is much stronger proof, I think, to have several instances of a recurring behaviour pattern than only one lesson learned one time. This actually establishes consistency in characters. Whether they’re consistently problem solvers, consistently confused by customs foreign to their own, or even consistently abusive and toxic, just to name a few. 

I don’t analyze them often, but Gwen and Kevin were kind of inconsistent during those arcs, too. It’s not just Ben to some extreme degree. I can make less sense of Gwen and Kevin trashing Ben's boyfriend skills than I can of Ben’s “overconfident” attitude or him getting so serious about his responsibilities that he considers taking down threats permanently. I guess watching characters who should otherwise be able to understand being forced to villainize another character even when it doesn't make sense can cause them to come off unlikable.

There was a tonal shift during Alien Force’s season three and Ultimate Alien. I won’t deny that. That did have an impact on the characters. But that being said, I wouldn’t say it ruined the characters. 

If there is any reason for what you might have felt, besides real life factors, perhaps it was a mix of the slight changes in creative direction behind the scenes and negative fan feedback that affected your viewpoint subconsciously. Being younger and more impressionable can have that effect, even if you don’t realize it.

I hope I offered some new perspectives. Thanks for reading my blog <3

[abigail-pent]

So I saw She Said last night; and I have some thoughts.

#1: Great film; well done; fairly white, though, but I think that reflects the reality of this particular story. The cast was amazing though, and there are a lot of great cinematography choices made.

#2: It was weird about The Jews. This is why I come to tumblr today.

So basically, there is an undercurrent running through the story that Jodi Kantor's Jewishness is important to getting this story done the way it was done. There are four specific parts of the movie where this is highlighted.

Part 1: Kantor is depicted celebrating Shabbat with her family. This scene is provided apparently solely for the purpose of highlighting her ethnoreligious background/identity. No other main character gets a similar treatment; Twohey gets a little bit of background in the sense that they show that she's just given birth and is struggling with postpartum depression. That's the parallel the film draws between the two of them: the thing propelling Twohey to do this work is that she thinks work will help ease her postpartum depression, and the thing propelling Kantor to do this work is that she's... Jewish. So, immediately, a bit odd, a bit unbalanced. An argument can certainly be made that the relevance of her Jewishness to the parallel is that she maybe has a strong sense of justice and is pursuing it. But this is extracurricular work that the viewer has to do, and which the viewer can only do if they have the background to know about why someone from modern, mainstream New York Jewish culture would feel strongly about a story like this.

Part 2: "Jew-to-Jew". There's a line in the film where Kantor says to Twohey that Lisa Bloom, who was acting as Weinstein's lawyer, approached Kantor and tried to connect with her "Jew-to-Jew" to try to persuade her not to write the story. This is the quote: "Jew-to-Jew". This is mentioned in kind of an offhand way, but it sat weird with me, because who talks like that? Specifically, who would say that phrase to their goyische coworker, and expect that their goyische coworker would immediately understand what that means? And what impression does that give the audience of us? To me, it was an immediate red flag, because the implication to an audience not familiar with Jews is likely to be something along the lines of: "They all know each other, they all expect one another to be loyal to the group, and this is well known by people who live and work in New York and who write about these powerful people." When you phrase it like that, it is likely to reinforce antisemitic beliefs about how members of our ethnoreligion interact with one another.

Now, according to this Jerusalem Post interview that Kantor gave, it seems like an interaction like this did happen in real life. She says:

“Weinstein put [Jewishness] on the table and seemed to expect that I was going to have some sort of tribal loyalty to him. . . . And that was just not going to be the case.”

So this is a real interaction, but the phrase "Jew-to-Jew" seems to be an invention of the screenwriter, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who also wrote Ida and Disobedience. She certainly writes a lot of films which are Jewish or have significant Jewish content; and per her Wikipedia page, her stepfather is Jewish, and there's one article in the Advocate which identifies her as Jewish too; so while I hope that's accurate, this bit just really hit a wrong note with me. Also, important to note, these words are put in the mouth of a non-Jewish actress (Zoe Kazan), who plays Kantor. So we're looking at yet another movie where someone who isn't Jewish but does have a schnoz is cast as a Jew. Now, Kazan does a great job, but it still rankles a bit.

Part 3: In that same Jerusalem Post interview, Kantor says that part of Weinstein's manipulation of her was that he hired Black Cube to try to derail her specifically, and that a Black Cube (so, Israeli) agent tried to get her to speak at some women's conference for a large sum of money. This is mentioned in a very off-the-cuff way in the film, and it's not ever expanded upon or connected back to Weinstein. It feels really out of place, like a line that could have been cut. And since Kantor herself identifies it as part of the way Weinstein tried to use her Jewishness to neutralize the story, it feels extremely weird that the way this incident shows up in the movie is for her to check her phone and ask Twohey and Rebecca Corbett if they know the name of the person who called her, because they're trying to get her to speak at some conference. That's it. No further context is given. So at this point, from the Jerusalem Post article, it's clear that there is a big backstory in which Weinstein is trying to use Kantor's Jewishness to stop her writing; but from the audience's perspective, all we see is that there's a well-known understanding among Jews that we'll all have each other's backs. In reality, Weinstein is trying to use shared heritage in a nefarious way that Kantor is not okay with; in fact, he's using it to target her in a very malevolent way, meaning that she's actually experiencing harassment from Weinstein specifically because she is writing this story while Jewish; but we don't get nearly enough context in the movie to know that. Instead, we see vague references to an antisemitic conspiracy which the character version of Kantor just sort of accepts matter-of-factly. And this other extremely important aspect of her interaction with Weinstein is not connected back to Weinstein at all, or in fact back to... anything.

Part 4: There is a long scene in which Kantor appeals to shared heritage with Weinstein's accountant, Irwin Reiter, to try to get him to trust her. There is a lot of screentime given to the fact that they both grew up going to the Catskills every summer, and that they're both descendants of Holocaust survivors. There are several minutes devoted to this onscreen, with very sort of ... almost titillating? ... references to the numbers tattooed onto Kantor's grandmother's arms. It's a lot of screentime. And at the end, Reiter trusts her and develops a relationship with her and ends up giving her a bunch of evidence that was important to the story. So the implication is that the trust happened in large part because of their shared heritage. Which would seem to reinforce the idea of the antisemitic conspiracy theory; it kind of looks like Kantor is telling Reiter a password and this password unlocks more access than she otherwise would have gotten. When, in reality, this is New York in the 2010s, and it's very common to be Jewish; so just being Jewish and the descendant of survivors doesn't really get you anywhere on its own. So this also sounded a false note for me. Kantor talks about this in the Jerusalem Post interview, and her description of how this interaction went sounded extremely different from how it was portrayed:

"I quickly figured out that Irwin and I were from the same small world. He was the child of survivors and had also spent his summers at bungalow colonies in the Catskills just down the road from mine. I don’t bring up the Holocaust a lot. It’s a sacred matter for me, and I didn’t do it lightly. But once I discovered that we did have this really powerful connection in our backgrounds, I did gently sound it with him – I felt that was sincere and real. Because he was making such a critical decision: Weinstein’s accountant of 30 years is still working for the guy by day and he’s meeting with me at night. And I felt like I did need to go to that place with him, saying, 'Okay, Irwin, we both know that there are people who talk and there are people who don’t. And we both grew up around that mix of people and what do we think is the difference? And also if you know if you have the chance to act and intervene in a bad situation, are you going to take it?' We didn’t talk a lot about it, because I raised it and he didn’t want to fully engage. But I always felt like that was under the surface of our conversations, and he made a very brave decision to help us."

The depiction in the film is not emphasized as though it's a gentle, light-touch, short interaction. They do talk about it a lot. And that seems weird to me, that so much is made of it in such an overt way, when that really isn't how Kantor describes the tone of it at all. She did float their similarities to him in conversation, but this wasn't enough to unlock his trust. Because of course it wasn't!

So in summary... the ways in which Kantor's Jewishness shows up in the film She Said are a real fun-house mirror of the way they showed up in real life. Nothing seems fabricated, but there are ways in which Weinstein tried to use their common heritage against her which were really underemphasized, and ways in which Kantor appealed to common heritage with Reiter which were really overemphasized, and the overall effect makes it look like both types of appeals held the same moral value. Like it was equally reasonable and normal for Lisa Bloom to talk "Jew-to-Jew" with Kantor on Weinstein's behalf, and for Kantor to talk "Jew-to-Jew" with Reiter. The entire idea that there is such a thing as "talking Jew-to-Jew" with someone as part of a bid to influence the outcome of some professional endeavor is actually put forth by the film as a thesis. It's presented as though this is an activity Jews engage in with one another (specifically, in the fields of film, media, and accounting) with the expectation that they will be successful in getting a fellow Jew to do what they want. That is a pretty sneaky way of introducing and reaffirming an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and totally ironing out the background context there, as well as the vast differences in tone between the two interactions.