#a little too textually rich for even Me

[juniperhillpatient]

I know I'm terminally coffin-brained lately but hear me out it really bothers me that the perception of the Coffin of Andy & Leyley is ONLY "hehe incest cannibalism game" which is....not EXACTLY inaccurate but it certainly simplifies it ya know??? like I call it the incest cannibalism game too as a joke but I'm realizing there are a lot of people who think of it as like...a porn game? & btw I'm not AGAINST porny games or whatever I just think it's reductive & inaccurate to call Andy & Leyley that when in reality there is not even (so far) any textual sexual content beyond a demonic vision of a possible future. yes very obviously their relationship does have a sexual & romantic undertone, but it's compelling specifically because it's a complex story about siblings who have been genuinely fucked over by their parents & the world & they have developed a topically obsessive codependent relationship as a result.

like the initial conversation that the game's title is based on is Andrew casually half-jokingly talking about killing himself & it's just so..... narratively delicious. Ashley is not some horny one-dimensional slut who just wants to fuck her brother? Her reaction to Andrew talking about suicide is to joke that she'll race him to the balcony & he says back - semi sarcastically but we KNOW there's truth in his words, that he's clearly thought about this - that it would be too romantic, that they would be smashed together on the pavement, buried in the same coffin & like...the game proceeds from there with these two living in this intertwined fate, tangled together in ways neither of them can ever escape. it's romantic but it's also tragic & awful.

Andrew's love for Ashley will always be bitter & tinted with resentment because he was thrust with the responsibility of raising his little sister when he was only a child himself. he was made responsible for caring for Ashley with absolutely NO example of what caring for someone looked like & he was barely old enough to care for himself. Ashley never had anyone care for her in her entire life except Andrew & so she absolutely adores him to a dangerous & unhealthy degree.

like I hate it when people think Ashley is oh so abusive & manipulative or Andrew is so awful & selfish (she is manipulative & he is occasionally selfish) but like - as if there are not layers upon layers of WHY she treats Andrew the way she does & WHY he's so resentful. (as a side note I think debating who abuses who (aside from obviously the fact that they were both abused in different ways by their mother) or who's "worse" just...misses the whole ass point.)

and the cannibalism is initially about survival & the stakes are very apparent & built super well given the opening of the game spends a lot of time just demonstrating that they are literally starving to death to the point where Ashley is fainting & they're sharing a can of tomatoes out of the garbage joking that it's the best meal they've ever had. it is highly worth noting the way their actions escalate & get worse & worse with time as the game proceeds & you can see the way they're both getting more & more comfortable with violence & taboo. this game just would not compel me if it were just randomly "lol let's eat people!" get real

idk I just feel like people who don't know the game get the wrong idea about it when it's actually SO narratively rich okay bye

(this is not an anti Gravecest post either just to be clear, I fucking love the ship I just feel like it gets oversimplified often & also that Ashley especially is highly mischaracterized a lot, even in the game's marketing sometimes. at the core of the game are two deeply broken people who were fucked over bad & who are tied together in a way that neither of them can ever escape. it's love as horror & I loooove that about it)

[pissplasmicpantom]

for the last couple of months now ive been workin on reinventin my cyberpunk ttrpg NEON SPIRITS to be more evocative, more explicitly southeast asian, more in-line with my current politics and worldview and also just, more actual textual conveyance of the themes i originally wanted to impart. and part of that was a move away from the traditional 70s to 80s retrofuturist aesthetics that to late 90s to y2k retrofuturism

im far from the first to do it (ttrpgheads, go look up cybermetal 2012) but i realized another reason why i was drawn to the change, besides just the novelty. my primary aesthetic inspiration for NEON SPIRITS' setting is the congested concrete heart i grew up in, the filipino capital of manila, specifically my neighborhood in tondo. living here, u can sense a distinct *old-ness* in its tech culture that u only ever rly see in other parts of the philippines, & the global south more broadly

like some examples:

theres a piso-net near my house (if u dont know what that is, google it), and just a day or two ago, i saw a little kid there playing on one of the pcs; the graphic quality of the game told me it was absolutely made between the late 90s to early 00s. i remember watching on an old box tv and using a landline phone waaay into the 2010s until eventually we switched to a flatscreen and people stopped ringing up the landline. our living room cd-stereo is just collecting dust upstairs now, but we put that shit on play late into noynoys presidency. facebook, THE social media platform that ppl in the west see as for old people, continues to be the hotspot for social media activity in the ph; young ppl have started gravitating to twitter in the last decade or so, but fb is still where we message and post and keep up on online announcements

advanced technology as a class barrier is extremely charted territory for the cyberpunk genre. but in ttrpg worlds, it tends to come in the form of "high tech is commonplace, but the even higher/cooler tech is only affordable to the wealthy"; very "everyones got a phone but only rich people have the iphone 15" kind of energy. it sorta has basis in reality, but its also a perspective that comes from a privileged position, primarily from countries at the core of the geopolitical economy

for countries that live out in the periphery of this economy, we r always the last to get new commercialized technology—even when a household has the kind of wealth to be in proximity to the core. were almost always the source for this tech—whether its the manufacturing materials stolen from our soil or the manufacturers themselves—but its always too expensive to proliferate here at the same time it does for the us or uk or spain or elsewhere in the global north

we hafta wait till it hits the bargain bin for us to actually use it; and by the time we do, its already out of date by a couple years (this is also why piracy is so frequent a practice here even among bougie families like mine)

[ludcake]

🔥 On hotd shipping scene

It's awful. Genuinely so bad. If we're talking about like, the shipping scene as the whole, the fact that Lukemond is even a thing says enough about it - there's so much sexual tension among Viserys and Daemon and Otto and Lyonel Strong and you go for the anime boy and the zero personality kid.

There's a lot of potential but half of the fics refuse to even actually address or make a plot point of the fact that all these characters are in incestuous relationships. It's so... Sheltered, I guess?

I mean, of course it is, because of the general demographic of the people who do shipping. Of course the traditional yaoi pairing gets attention. Rhaenicent is fun! I think that Daemyra could be interesting, but it's entirely whitewashed for the sake of it being like one of those "yandere bf asmr" videos. It's just... Bleak, I guess? Because to me there's a textual richness that you can claw your way through if you just read a bit deeper, and it feels like everyone's looking elsewhere, if that makes sense.

And the shipping wars frustrate me, particularly with how they're articulated. I dunno, it just disappoints me, because I don't think that HotD has the richness that, say, Riverdale had for shipping wars, its focus is elsewhere entirely, there's very little will they-won't they tension, but it's ultimately wasted because the tension that is there is too ugly to really be fanfic material in the way people want it to be.

[crackers4jenn]

Some Ted Lasso finale thoughts

I feel like I always have to preface my Ted Lasso opinions with the reminder that I haven't seen the series in full, but! I have watched all of s3, parts of s2, and the first few eps of s1. I realize I'm working with limited context though.

I think my fave character overall was Trent. His physical comedy was outstanding, plus I just love that his role this season was basically: fly on the wall/reaction shot. I feel pretty cheated we didn't get some meaningful voiceover from him, though. You know, a bit of narration of his book. Feels like something like that would've tied in nicely within the montage.

I feel bad for the shippers (those first few minutes were especially cruel to the Ted/Rebecca shippers) but I also feel like a lot of the reactions I've seen in the tags would be way less critical if the shipper goggles weren't fastened so tightly. There's something to be said about online fandom and getting caught up in the echo chamber of it, and how that sorta amplifies your confirmation bias. You look for the things you want to find, even when they're not textually there. Before the finale aired, I kept seeing people be SO SURE that Rebecca would go to Kansas with Ted and for the life of me I couldn't understand WHY. Those two characters, in the context of tumblr? You see enough "invisible string" gifsets paralleling some of their scenes, sure. Maybe those two versions of Ted and Rebecca end up together, but the actual characters on the show? Who barely spent time together outside of work? Who thought of each other so, so platonically? I don't get it. If I have to like, deep dive into symbolism and read into stares and decode their supposed body language and break out the tack board to connect the dots because of some color scheme of the clothes they wear, with nothing actually happening onscreen telling me these people care even a little bit romantically about each other? Surely that says something about canon. If I, a casual viewer who isn't mainlining gaze-count compilations or whatever, aren't seeing what the hyperfocused fanbase is seeing onscreen with my own eyeballs, doesn't that imply some of the interpretation is fanon and not canon? Just a little? Obviously that is just the universal shipping experience, I'm not trying to be condescending or judgmental, I'm just saying: be for real. BE FOR REAL, Y'ALL.

I liked seeing Rebecca's emotions for Ted spill over in all of their scenes together (semi-related: I feel like when Rebecca was grieving Ted so hard and he was... not giving the same energy back it's because their headspaces were so different in those moments: for Rebecca, it was about saying goodbye. For Ted, it was about saying hello... to his family. Rebecca was feeling loss, and Ted was too, but he was also gaining back something big. But anyway!!) I do wish they hadn't pulled the "you go, I go" trope. For so long, so much of Rebecca's arc was about her getting back her independence from Rupert. Why, at the last moment, try and anchor her to another man? Especially after that episode where she stood up against all those old rich dudes and reminded them why they love the game, why the fans love the game, why SHE loves the game? It felt weird. If it was a panicked reaction because she was losing a really good friend, then I wish the show would've had Ted, ya know, COMMUNICATE with her instead of staying so mute, to remind her that she loves what she does, that she's earned her place, and that she can do it alone. But she wouldn't even be alone! She has literally everyone else she's always had in her corner still in her corner.

If I had been super into either Roy/Keeley or Jamie/Keeley I would be SO BUMMED that the show pulled the last second third wheel card, just to give them an ambiguous "Keeley chooses neither" ending. But I can also appreciate that the show just threw its metaphorical hands in the air and refused to make a choice. I, too, see the appeal of all sides of the triangle and don't even know what my preference would be. Besides throuple, obviously, which I also think the open-ending left a little crumb trail to set up. I will say, overall, Roy was so reactive this season in his feelings for Keeley. He broke up with her, then really only started gravitating back to her when she was with Jack, or when he was jealous about the leaked video, or jealous about Jamie. That wasn't my favorite, but he also just pines really nicely so I get the otp of it all.

All of the "Ted is leaving all his friends behind! He's got nothing to live for in Kansas except his son!" online takes are SO BAFFLING. Y'all realize this character didn't apparate from the ether into Richmond as a fully grown, fully mustached man, right? He came from a place where he ALSO had friends and family he was leaving behind, with relationships that were likely just as important to him. And he will make friends after. Like????? You'd think Ted was returning to the gallows on a death sentence or something, just to wither away after Henry grows up.

I think I'll try and watch the show from the start and see if my opinions on anything change. I've heard that all of the prime Ted/Rebecca stuff happens early on in s1, and maybe seeing them in a classic enemies-to-friends situation might reveal to me what the shippers see. And maybe I'll care more about Nate's arc and Jamie's growth.

ps; dollsome, if you're reading this and you've made it this far, look away!!! Because, I'm sorry, I love that the Dutch boat guy came back. His and Rebecca's chemistry was just off-the-chart bananas. I think the psychic stuff was set up to red herring the crap out of the fandom from all sides, I don't think Rebecca and boat guy are like, psychically fated and meant to be, but! They were lovely, so I'm glad their montaged future had them together. And with a pilot in her life, hey. Rebecca can fly out to Kansas and visit her old bud, Ted, anytime, right?

[blandbutfunny]

And What Transpired?

The shallow ambience was all-consuming, swallowing them whole and spitting them out for an audience of inattentive spectaculars.

Practice became purpose far more often than preparation did, as uniform social anxieties penetrated paper with keen precision. It was a skill to be this scared so consistently, to engage fight or flight so often that the switch stuck on.

And for What?

Nothing new grasped them, no creative beacon shot skyward. They had exhausted the usual meta-textual pattern of rumination and reflection on thought and plucked each petal from the assorted bouquet of existentialism that smelt oh so ripe in this current climate. Once again, it was a brain, body, boredom and a pen.

They assumed no one would find these musings quite as delightful as they did themself. Assumption felt too unsure a term.

He/She/They considered adopting an era's tour etiquette writing dribble for people who knew as little as they did but concluded that for that much labour, one would be happier with a small farm than a factory.

Currently, Zionist agitators live up to their opportunistic, scabbing reputation as they assault a group of peaceful Palestinian protestors at UAC. They hoped that if fate permitted they would have joined them, but recognised the lack of strength held compared to even a single of those students.

I'm not trying to make this about me - commentators are not placed on the field of play. I don't play NRL, but I do play basketball and because of that, I also share a passion for player safety.

And on the other side of that mirror...

Bile spews at the centrifuge of hell-hot gears; crushing machines whose input is viscera and output turmoil and all could have been left abandoned had inquisitive nature been resisted.

References, references, references echo echo over airways, walk and talk and shush and fight and here is a mirror to your manner in language, in artistic manifest in the breath you left in the casket at your mothers funeral, at the first tear of joy and the last tear of despair you are all collections of references, assemblages moderated and codified by the cliff your predisposition kicked you off and you don't stop referencing, even when it all seems for naught and when it all becomes redundant you keep referencing, being referenced as you morph into other's process of referencing and referencing becomes thanksgiving in all its virtue and vitriol referencing itself becomes the function and definition and we all lie naked covered in fecal decay referencing until the skin off our backs grafts itself to the walls and floors and we reference the cells of bacteria that eat away at our precious minutes and I ask myself

Do I love this city, despite the burden of referencing?

Comets Have I been here before?

Spilt water and the page is made translucent, the words obfuscated.

Have I destroyed meaning or created it and is it one or the other?

I cope with the question by constructing my own cannon and co-linking chapters with cheap thematics in the hope that forgotten tongues are rich enough to fill the blanks.

What are we to do but reference?

What quantity or maybe quality of references can paint me a beautiful sunset that blazes with pre-processed gems and glitter?

How do I spell my name in references?

[kabutoraiger]

finished ishiko to haneo! started it back when it was getting fansubbed & fell off for whatever reason but now that it's on netflix i picked it up again

really pleasant little show overall. (the copyright protection ep was a bit cringe & built on a logical fallacy imo but otherwise) if more lawyer shows were comfy & lowkey like this i'd probably watch more of them. i like how the rich guy final boss does use his money to escape jail time (realistic) and the heroes' W is just in getting people to call him lame on the internet. it really is the small victories that are the sweetest sometimes

this whole time i had it in my mind that this was yet another akaso eiji polyamory show and i was surprised by how totally platonic it all was. even the ostensible textual romantic side is like. no way is this couple lasting, right? but i think they'll still be friends after. if you like charming coworker friendships you'll probably really enjoy this

my only other complaint is that i wanted haneo to be more traumatized lmaoo... that sounds bad to say but i mean. when he had his first anxiety attack when an imposing older man was being physically aggressive i was like Oh I See (intrigued)... but then his dad is just this basic annoying well off guy who treats his kids like accolades? i dunno. maybe dad was originally planned to be worse but they decided it'd be too much of a downer. haneo is a Jdrama Guy Of All Time to me regardless

[blujayonthewing]

the tricky thing about pirates is that when you get down to it it’s really hard to get around the fact that they are, like, actual bad guys

[wordsnstuff]

How do you find a balance between “show, don’t tell” and “readers might not catch/understand this subtle concept or showing it would be too convoluted or more open to interpretation than it needs to be”? It doesn’t help that everyone encourages more showing even if it swallowing little details that are supposed to stand out. Basically, I feel like I overthink my showing as being too tell-y even when it already has several layers of meaning and is already too dense for average readers.

“Show don’t tell” resources & advice...

I think people often mistake the advice of “show don’t tell” as being in the interest of making one’s writing more literary; more “high art” than candid prose typically is. The advice is intended to help one recognize when their prose is becoming dull or unengaging to the reader. Showing is supposed to promote an organically flowing reading experience, rather than turn the writing into a flowery, pretentious, and unintelligible mess. Finding a satisfying way to deliver information in the text that isn’t “I felt” or “I thought” is important. It should never dilute the information. Clarity comes first, and then one can configure the sentence to add as much richness to the reader’s ability to immerse themselves as possible. 

If the desire is to show that the character is sad, writing that “she looked down at the floor and wrapped her arms around her own waist” is not going to be any less indicative of that information than “she felt sad”. That is the point of this advice. It is not a way for one to convert information into a code that the reader must analyze in order to comprehend the basic idea of what the scenes are about. This isn’t 1597, and nobody is asking anyone to be Shakespeare. 

Density of a piece of writing does not give it inherent worth. Ease of comprehension doesn’t always have to be the number one priority, but it should be a considerable factor when one accounts for their audience and their subject matter. If one is writing a young adult fantasy trilogy, the density of the writing should be adherent to the demographic’s ability to comprehend certain writing styles. “Show, don’t tell” applies to all writing, but different writers interpret it differently, often based on who they’re writing for. If the concept you’re trying to convey to the reader in a subtle manner is not coming across without blurting it out in the text, perhaps the problem isn’t the way you’re describing it, but the concept is weak in its current state. 

Easily misinterpreted meanings or concepts are often not the victim of descriptive style, but being underdeveloped sub textually. No important concept can be described once within a dense text and expected to translate as intended into the reader’s understanding. If it’s important enough to the bones of your story and meaning, it shouldn’t rely on the manner of description to shine through. Sometimes the density of a text is a product of too much intentional symbolism or motif. It’s okay to allow some things to be meaningful purely in interpretation. It’s okay to acknowledge that you allowed something that obviously implies meaning to be prescribed its implications by the readers. 

Here are some of my other resources on the topic that you may find helpful:

Resources For Describing Characters

Resources For Describing Emotion

Conveying Emotions

All About Colors

A Writer’s Thesaurus

Showing VS Telling in First Person POV

Using Vocabulary

Balancing Detail & Development

+ When To Use “Felt”

Showing Vs Telling

How To Better Your Vocabulary & Description

Describing emotion through action

Improving Flow In Writing

How To “Show Don’t Tell” More

–

Masterlist | WIP Blog

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[buttercuparry]

Day 3: Jon Snow ( his love for Arya)

I don't think that I can add to this particular topic any more than what my fellow bloggers already have.

Textually Jon and Arya's relationship is something that is so rich that it has become a point of a massive confluence of a great many rhetoric.

For example we have Jon, the "bastard" of Winterfell. The young boy who has always felt unwanted, out of place and like a black blot in Catelyn Stark's family. Hence he yearns to know the person who had birthed him. 'The mother'. The woman who has been a tight lipped secret and a point of speculation among many.

Not my mother, Jon thought stubbornly. He knew nothing of his mother; Eddard Stark would not talk of her. Yet he dreamed of her at times, so often that he could almost see her face. In his dreams, she was beautiful, and highborn, and her eyes were kind.

Your half brothers, a voice inside reminded him. And Lady Stark, who will not welcome you. There was no place for him in Winterfell, no place in King's Landing either. Even his own mother had not had a place for him. The thought of her made him sad. He wondered who she had been, what she had looked like, why his father had left her. Because she was a whore or an adulteress, fool. Something dark and dishonorable, or else why was Lord Eddard too ashamed to speak of her?

And yet ironically, this boy would be the one person (in the current generation) to best know exactly what kind of woman his mother had been. He would know her eyes, her temperament and even to some extent her principles too. For his mother, Lyanna Stark, has found her doppelganger in her niece Arya- both in appearance and in spirit.

And of course Jon has Arya's love ( I mean it here in a platonic sense). And what a love it is! It is almost a boon given to him to make up for what has been so unceremoniously taken away. And this love that is shared between them goes with him beyond the walls of winterfell and bleeds into his future relationships.

His first encounter with Ygritte goes like this:

Jon could see fear and fire in her eyes. Blood ran down her white throat from where the point of his dirk had pricked her. One thrust and it's done, he told himself. He was so close he could smell onion on her breath. She is no older than I am. Something about her made him think of Arya, though they looked nothing at all alike. "Will you yield?" he asked, giving the dirk a half turn.

Then again:

"I never meant to steal you," he said. "I never knew you were a girl until my knife was at your throat."

"If you kill a man, and never mean t', he's just as dead," Ygritte said stubbornly. Jon had never met anyone so stubborn, except maybe for his little sister Arya. 

Later he has this to say about Val:

Val looked the part and rode as if she had been born on horseback. A warrior princess, he decided, not some willowy creature who sits up in a tower, brushing her hair and waiting for some knight to rescue her. 

And again:

Lonely and lovely and lethal, Jon Snow reflected, and I might have had her.

It is clear to see who has influenced Jon's taste in his love interests. And it goes both ways. In Arya's POV we have this interaction:

Dusk was settling as they stopped to rest... "I'm cold and wet," Hot Pie complained. "... We could have us a fire—"

"NO!" Arya and Gendry both said, at the exact same instant. Hot Pie quailed a little. Arya gave Gendry a sideways look. He said it with me, like Jon used to do, back in Winterfell. She missed Jon Snow the most of all her brothers.

While Arya has had positive interactions with almost all the male members of her family, it is Jon with whom she had the strongest bond (they could finish each other's sentence). And this thus becomes relevant as canonically Grrm has written a love song for the gendrya pairing.

Beyond these matters of the heart or perhaps as an extension of it: both Jon and Arya consider 'home' to be situated in a person. Throughout the series Arya has tried to return to Winterfell in hopes of reuniting with her family. But another wish that she has had, is to go north to the Wall, to reunite with Jon.

When at last she slept, she dreamed of home. The kingsroad wound its way past Winterfell on its way to the Wall, and Yoren had promised he'd leave her there with no one any wiser about who she'd been. She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and Bran and Rickon . . . but it was Jon Snow she thought of most. She wished somehow they could come to the Wall before Winterfell, so Jon might muss up her hair and call her "little sister."

Her strongest belief is that even if the whole world rejects her for being unsatisfactory, she would always, always have Jon and indeed in ADWD we see the Lord Commander of Night's Watch proclaim that Arya's home is with him.

Bring her home, Mance. I saved your son from Melisandre, and now I am about to save four thousand of your free folk. You owe me this one little girl.

This then brings into question the intensity of Jon's love for Arya. In AGoT Jon tries to desert in favour of joining Robb's quest for vengeance but ultimately he turns back and decides that the time has passed and he can longer interfere in the matters of the realm.

And yet in Adwd we see him risking his position as the lord commander (something that is highly coveted by individuals who have no hope to rise high in life within the constraints of the westerosi world order) of an 800 year old institution to save his 'sister' from the cruel clutches of Ramsay Bolton.

However Jon's decision to violate the neutrality of the NW has not been an easy one. There is a dilemma presented in the series across numerous povs: the constant push and pull of the two opposite facets in life, the facets of duty/honour vs love/desire of the heart. It has played a part in Arianne Martell and Arys Oakheart's relationship. It is present in Jaime arc: Cersei vs his duty as the commander of Kingsguard and I don't know if it can be said, but perhaps it was present in Rhaegar and Lyanna's storyline as well...so it is only fair that it should play a part in their son's life too.

Jon struggles throughout ADwD, going back and forth debating the worth of his honour and the depth of his love for his little sister:

"I have no sister." The words were knives. What do you know of my heart, priestess? What do you know of my sister?

I don't think anything else can summarize Jon's internal conflict more than these lines. But ultimately, with the threat of Bolton wanting his bride back, what triumphs over everything else is Jon's heart. He thus manipulates Stannis into form an alliance with the mountain clans, with the northern lords so that the Baratheon may participate in his quest to rescue Arya.

And of course! the sheer magnitude of this act is felt by his Black Brothers. The fact that a lord commander can neutralize the Watch's position as an nonaligned institute is unthinkable! And so Jon dies. He dies with his brothers betraying him. With the thought of Arya.

[pumpkinpaix]

Pleeeeeeease get into the class one at some point because I very much want to understand the class dynamics happening in the story but I have yet to find a meta that dives into it

god anon you want me dead don’t you alsjdfljks

referring to this post

okay, so -- my specific salt about class interpretations in mdzs are very targeted. I can’t pretend to have a deep understanding of how class works in mdzs generally because uhhhhh yeah i don’t think i have that. i’m just not familiar enough with the genre and/or the particulars of chinese class systems. but! i can talk in general terms as to why I feel a certain way about the class dynamics that I do think I understand and how I think they relate to the themes of the novel! i’m gonna talk about wei wuxian, the daozhangs, xue yang, and 3zun with, I’m sure, a bunch of digressions along the way.

the usual disclaimers: i do not think you are a bad person if you hold opinions contrary to my own. i may disagree with you very strongly, but like. this isn’t a moral judgment, fandom is transformative and interpretive etc. etc. and i may change my mind. who knows what the future will bring!

OKAY so let’s begin!

here’s the thing about wei wuxian: he’s not poor. I think because characters use “son of a servant” kind of often when they’re trying to insult him, a lot of people latch onto that and think that it’s a much stronger indication of his societal status than it actually is. iirc, most of the insults that fall along the “son of a servant” line come after wei wuxian starts breaking severely from tradition. it’s a convenient thing to attack him for, but doesn’t actually indicate anything about his wealth. (exception: yu ziyuan, but that’s a personal familial issue) this is in direct contrast to jin guangyao who is constantly mocked for his family line, publicly and privately, no matter what he does.

so this, coupled with all the jokes about wwx never having any money (wei wuqian, sizhui’s “i’ve long since known you had no money” etc.), plus his like, rough years on the street as a child ends up producing this interpretation of wei wuxian, especially in modern aus, as someone who is very class conscious and “eat the rich”. but the fact of the matter is, wei wuxian IS rich. aside from the years in his childhood and the last two years of his life in yiling, like -- wei wuxian had money and status. he is gentry. he is respected as gentry. he is treated as a son by the sect leader of yunmeng jiang -- he does not have the jiang name, but it is so very clear that jiang fengmian favors him. wei wuxian is ranked fourth of all the eligible young masters in the cultivation world -- that is not a ranking he could have attained without being accepted into the upper class.

wei wuxian’s poverty does not affect him in the way that it affects jin guangyao or xue yang. he is of low-ish birth (still the son of jiang fengmian’s right hand man though! ok sure, “son of a servant” but like. >_> whatever anyways), but for most of his life he had money. he, jiang cheng, and their sect brothers go into town and steal lotus pods with the understanding that “jiang-shushu will pay for it”. this is a regular thing! that’s fucking rich kid behavior!!! wei wuxian is careless with money because he doesn’t have to worry about it. he still has almost all the benefits of being upper class: education, food security, respect, recognition etc. I think there may also be a misconception that wei wuxian was always on the verge of being kicked out by yu ziyuan, or that he was constantly walking on eggshells around her for fear of being disowned, but that is just textually untrue. i could provide receipts, but I admittedly don’t really feel like digging them up just now ;;

even in his last years in yiling, he was not the one who was dealing with the acute knowledge of poverty: wen qing is the one managing the money, and as far as we know, wei wuxian did little to no management of daily life during the burial mounds days -- mostly, he’s described as hiding in his cave for days on end, working on his inventions, running around like a force of chaos, frivolously making a mess of things -- it’s very very cute that he buries a’yuan in the dirt, but in classic wei wuxian fashion, he did Not think about the practical consequences of it -- that A’Yuan has no other clean clothes, and now he’s gotten this set dirty and has no intention of washing them. is this a personality thing? yeah, but I think it’s also indicative of his lack of concern over the logistics of everyday survival, re: wealth.

furthermore, i think it is important to remember that wei wuxian, when he is protecting the wen remnants, is not protecting common folk: he is still protecting gentry. fallen gentry, yes! but gentry nonetheless. wen qing was favored by wen ruohan, and wen ning himself says that he has a retinue of people under his command (the remnants, essentially). their branch of the family do not have the experience of living and growing in poverty -- they are impoverished and persecuted in their last years, but that’s a very different thing from being impoverished your whole life. (sidenote: I do not believe wei wuxian’s primary motivation for defending the wen remnants was justice -- i believe he did it because he felt he owed wen ning and wen qing a life debt, and once he was there, he wasn’t going to stand around and let the work camps go on. yes, he is concerned about justice and doing the right thing, but that’s not why he went in the first place. anyways, that’s another meta)

after wei wuxian returns, he then marries back into gentry, and very wealthy gentry at that. lwj provides him all the money he could ever want, he is never worried about going homeless, starving, being denied opportunities based on his class and accompanying disadvantages. who would dare? and neither wei wuxian nor lan wangji seem to have much interest in shaking up the order of things, except in little things like the way they teach the juniors. they live in gusu, under the auspices of the lan, and they live a happy, domestic life.

were his years on the street traumatizing? yes, of course they were, there’s so much delicious character exploration to be done re: wei wuxian’s relationship to food, his relationship to his own needs, and his relationship to the people he loves. it’s all important and good! but I feel very strongly that that experience, while it was formative for him, did not impart any true understanding of poverty and the common person’s everyday struggles, nor do I think he ever really gains that understanding. he is observant and canny and aware of class and blood, certainly, but not in a way that makes it his primary hill to die on (badum-tss).

this is in very stark contrast to characters like jin guangyao and xue yang, and to some extent, xiao xingchen and song lan. I’ll start with the daozhangs, because I think they’re the simplest (??).

I think both xiao xingchen and song lan have class consciousness, but in a very simplified, broad-strokes kind of way (at least, given the information we know about them). we know that the two of them share similar values and want to one day form their own sect that gives no weight to the nobility of your lineage and has no concern with your wealth. we also know that they both disdain intersect politics and are more concerned with ideals and principles rather than status. but, I think because of that, this actually somewhat limits their perception and understanding of how status is used to oppress. as far as we know, neither of them participated on any side in sunshot and they demonstrate much more interest in relating to the commoners. honestly, i hc that they were flitting around trying to help decimated towns, protecting defenseless villages etc. I ALSO think this has a lot of interesting potential in terms of xiao xingchen and wei wuxian’s relationship, if xiao xingchen is ever revived. regardless of whether you’re in CQL or novel verse, xiao xingchen really doesn’t know wei wuxian at all, other than knowing that he’s his shijie’s son. he knows that cangse-sanren met with a tragic end, like yanling-daoren before her, and that he wants to be different. but here is cangse-sanren’s son, laying waste to entire cities, desecrating the dead. I would very much like to get into xiao xingchen’s head during that period of time (and i think, if i do it right, i can write some of it into the songxiao fixit), but that’s neither here nor there, because i’ve wandered off from my point again.

i would posit that song lan is used to an ascetic lifestyle, and xiao xingchen probably is too -- but that’s different from poverty because there’s an element of choice to it. I also think that neither of them is particularly worldly, xiao xingchen especially. he lived on an isolated mountain until he was like, seventeen, and he came down full of ideals and naivete about how the world worked. I think that both of them see inequality, that they are angered by it, and that they want to do something about it -- but their solution is neither to topple the sects, nor is it to reform the system. rather, it seems to be more about withdrawing and creating their own removed world. I think that the daozhangs embody a kind of utopianism that isn’t present in the minds of any of the other characters, not even wangxian. honestly, baoshan-sanren’s mountain is a utopian ideal, but one that is not described. it exists outside of and beyond the world. i have a lot of jumbled, vague thoughts about utopianism generally, mostly informed by china miéville and ursula k. le guin, and I don’t think i have the ability to articulate them here, but i wanted to. hm. say something? there is something about the inherent dystopianism contained within every utopia, that utopias are necessary, but also reflections of the existence of terrible things in their conception. idk. there’s something in there, I know it!! but i suppose what I want to say is -- i do not think the daozhangs understand class and social hierarchy very deeply because they don’t see a need to examine it deeply. for their goals, the details aren’t the point. they’re not looking to reform within the system, they’re looking to build something outside of it. I think they spend a lot of time concerned with alleviating the symptoms of social oppression, and their values reflect the injustices they witness there.

regardless, even if their story ends in tragedy and there is a certain amount of critique re: the utopian approach, i think the text still emphasizes that xiao xingchen left a utopia and that he thought that people mattered enough for him to try, and that was an incredibly honorable, kind, and human thing to do.

YEAH SURE THE DAOZHANGS ARE THE SIMPLEST ok ok RETURNING to class and moving forward: xue yang.

i also don’t think xue yang has class consciousness lol, or not in any way that really matters, but I do think poverty impacted him in a much stronger way than it impacted wei wuxian. wei wuxian spent some years on the street as a child. xue yang grew up on the streets. chang ci’an’s horrific treatment of him was directly due to his class and social standing: chang ci’an is a nobleman and xue yang is not even worth the dirt beneath the wheels of his cart. what I think is the seminal point though, is that this does not make xue yang think particularly deeply about systemic injustice, because xue yang is so self-centered, self-driven, and individualistic. he is not even slightly concerned about how poverty and class might affect other people -- they’re other people. what he takes away from his experience is not an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a system, but an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a specific man.

xue yang is not particularly concerned with the politics of the aristocracy -- he has no obvious ambitions other than, “i want to eat sweets whenever i please”, “i want to hurt anyone who wrongs me”, and “i want to be so strong that no one can hurt me”. like, he just doesn’t care -- it’s not the kind of power he wants. he sneers at people for like, personal reasons, not class reasons -- “you think you’re better than me” re: xiao xingchen and song lan. to him, all people -- poor, wealthy, noble, common -- are essentially equal, and they are all beneath him. after all, what does he care what family someone comes from, how much money they have? everyone bleeds when you cut them. some of them might be harder to get to than others, but xue yang does not fear that sort of thing. it’s just another obstacle he needs to vault on his way to getting revenge and/or a pastry.

ANYWAYS onto jin guangyao (wow this is hm. getting rather long ahaha oh dear): I would argue that the two characters with the most acute understanding of class/societal politics and the injustice of them are jin guangyao and lan xichen. i’ll start with jin guangyao for obvious reasons.

where xue yang took the damaging effects of poverty as personal slights, I think jin guangyao is painfully aware that there is nothing personal about them, which is, in some ways, much worse. why are two sons, born on the same day to the same father, treated so differently? just because.

he watched his mother struggle and starve and work herself to the bone in a profession where she was constantly disrespected and abused for almost nothing in return, while his father could have lifted her out of poverty with the wave of a finger. why didn’t he? because he didn’t like her? no -- because he didn’t care, and the structures of the society they live in protect that kind of blase treatment of the lower class.

“so my mother couldn’t choose her own fate, is that her fault?” jin guangyao demands. he knows that he is unbelievably talented, that he has ambition, that he has potential, and that all of it is beyond his grasp just because his father didn’t want to bother with it. his mother’s life was destroyed, and his own opportunities were crippled with that negligence. it isn’t personal. that’s just the way things are. your individual identity is meaningless, your humanity does not exist. when he’s kicked down the steps of jinlin tai, it’s just more confirmation that no matter how talented or hardworking he is, no one will give him the time of day unless he finds a way to take it himself and become someone who “matters”.

jin guangyao’s cultivation is weak because he had a poor foundation, and he had a poor foundation because he was denied access to a good one. he copies others because that’s all he can do at this point, and he copies so well that he can hold his own against some of the strongest cultivators of his generation. he’s disparaged for copying and “stealing” techniques, but -- he never would have had to if only he had been born/accepted into the upper class. the fact is that i really do think jin guangyao was the most promising cultivator of his generation that we meet, including the twin jades and wei wuxian: he had natural talent, ambition, creativity, determination and cunning in spades. in some ways, I think that’s one of the overlooked tragedies of jin guangyao: the loss of not just the good man he could have been, but the powerful one too. imagine what he could have done.

jin guangyao spends his entire time in the world of the aristocracy feeling unsteady and terrified because he knows exactly how precarious his position is. he knows how easy it is to lose power, especially for someone like him. he’s working against so many disadvantages, and every scrap of honor he gets is a vicious battle. jin guangyao fears, and I think that’s something that’s lacking in xue yang, wei wuxian and the daozhangs’ experiences/understandings of poverty. i think it’s precisely that fear that emphasizes jin guangyao’s understanding of class and blood. jin guangyao exhibits an anxiety that neither wei wuxian nor xue yang do, and it’s because he truly knows how little he is worth in the eyes of society and how little there is he can do to change that. to me, it very much feels related to the anxiety of not knowing if tomorrow you’ll have something to eat, if tomorrow you’ll still have a home, if tomorrow someone will destroy you and never have to answer for it. it’s the anxiety of knowing helplessness intimately.

moreover, jin guangyao is the only person shown to use the wealth and power at his disposal to take concrete steps to actually help the common people typically ignored by the powerful -- the watchtowers. they’re described in chapter 42. it’s a system that is designed to cover remote areas that most cultivators are reluctant to go due to their inconvenience and the lack of means of the people who live there. the watchtowers assign cultivators to different posts, give aid to those previously forgotten, and if the people are too poor to pay what the cultivators demand, the lanling jin sect pays for it. jin guangyao worked on this for five years and burned a lot of bridges over it. people were strongly opposed to it, thinking that it was some kind of ploy for lanling jin’s personal benefit. but the thing is -- it worked. they were effective. people were helped.

i believe CQL frames the watchtowers as an allegory for a surveillance state/centralized control (i think?? it’s been a minute -- that’s the hazy impression i remember, something like a parallel to the wen supervisory offices?), but I personally don’t think that was the intent in the novel. the watchtowers are a public good. lanling jin doesn’t staff them with their own sect members -- they get nearby sects to staff them. it’s a warning network that they fund that’s supposed to benefit everyone, even those that everyone had considered expendable.

(did jin guangyao do terrible things to achieve this goal? yeah lol. it’s not confirmed, but his son sure did die... suspiciously...... at the hands of an outspoken critic of the watchtowers........ whom he then executed....... so like, maybe just a convenient coincidence for jin guangyao, two birds one stone, but. it seems. Unlikely.)

lan xichen is the only member of the gentry that ever shows serious compassion for and nuanced understanding of jin guangyao’s circumstances. lan xichen treats him as his equal regardless of jin guangyao’s current status -- even when he was meng yao, lan xichen treated him as a human being worthy of respect, as someone with great merits, as someone he would choose as a friend, but he did so knowing full well the delicate position meng yao occupied. this is in direct contrast to nie mingjue, who also believed that meng yao was worthy of respect as a human being, but was completely unable to comprehend the complexities of his circumstances and unwilling to grant him any grace. you know, the difference between “i acknowledge that your birth and status have had effects upon you, but I don’t think less of you for it” and “i don’t consider your birth and status at all when i interact with you because i think it is irrelevant” (“i don’t see color” anyone?)

to illustrate, from chapter 48:

大抵是觉得娼妓之子身上说不定也带着什么不干净的东西，这几名修士接过他双手奉上来的茶盏后，并不饮下，而是放到一边，还取出雪白的手巾，很难受似的，有意无意反复擦拭刚才碰过茶盏的手指。聂明玦并非细致之人，未曾注意到这种细节，魏无羡却用眼角余光扫到了这些。孟瑶视若未见，笑容不坠半分，继续奉茶。蓝曦臣接过茶盏之时，抬眸看他一眼，微笑道：“多谢。”

旋即低头饮了一口，这才继续与聂明玦交谈。旁的修士见了，有些不自在起来。

rough tl:

Probably because they believed that the son of a prostitute might also carry some unclean things upon his person, after these few cultivators took the teacups offered from [Meng Yao’s] two hands, they did not drink, but instead put them to one side, and furthermore brought out snow white handkerchiefs. Quite uncomfortably, and whether they were aware of it or not, they repeatedly wiped the fingers they had just used to touch the teacups. Nie Mingjue was not a detail-oriented person and never took note of such particulars, but Wei Wuxian caught these in the corner of his eye. Meng Yao appeared as if he had not seen, his smile unwavering in the slightest, and continued to serve tea. When Lan Xichen took the teacup, he glanced up at him and, smiling, said, “Thank you.”

He immediately dipped his head to take a sip, and only then continued to converse with Nie Mingjue. Seeing this, the nearby cultivators began to feel somewhat uneasy.

all right, since we’re in full cyan-rampaging-through-the-weeds mode at this point, i’m going to talk about how this is one of my favorite 3zun moments in the entire novel for characterization purposes because it really highlights how they all relate to one another, and to what degree each of them is aware of their own position in relation to the others and society as a whole.

1. nie mingjue, who is a forthright and blunt person, sets meng yao to serving tea and is done with it. he notices nothing wrong or inappropriate about the reactions of the people in the room because it’s not the sort of thing he considers important.

2. meng yao, knowing that his only avenue is to take it lying down with a smile, masks perfectly.

3. lan xichen, noticing all this, uses his own reputation to achieve two things at once: pointedly shame the other cultivators in attendance, and show meng yao that regardless of others’ opinions, he considers him an equal and does not endorse such behavior--and he does it while taking care that no fallout will come down on meng yao’s head.

is this yet another installment of cyan’s endless lxc defense thesis? why yes it is! no one is surprised! but this is my whole point: both meng yao and lan xichen understand the respective hierarchy and power dynamics within the room, while nie mingjue very much does not. this is not because nie mingjue is a bad person or because nie mingjue is stupid--it’s a combination of personality and upbringing. nie mingjue is straightforward and has no patience for such games. but then again, he can afford not to play because he was born into such a high position: that’s a privilege.

to break it down: meng yao knows that he is the lowest-ranked person in the room, sees the way people are subtly disrespecting him in full view of his general who is doing nothing about it. in some ways, this is good -- nie mingjue’s style of dealing with conflict is very direct and not at all suited to delicate political maneuvering. after all, the way he promoted meng yao was actually quite dangerous to meng yao: he essentially guaranteed that his men would bear meng yao a grudge and that their disrespect for him would only be compounded by their bitterness at being punished on his behalf. (it’s like, why often getting parents or teachers to intervene ineffectively in bullying can just be an incitement to more bullying -- same concept) meng yao’s reaction during that scene shows that he’s pretty painfully aware of this and is trying to defuse the situation to no avail. nie mingjue gives him a bootstrap speech (rip nie mingjue i love u so much but. sir) and then promotes him, which is pretty much the only saving grace of that entire exchange, for meng yao at least.

lan xichen, on the other hand, understands both that meng yao is the lowest-ranked person in the room and that any direct attempt to chastise the other cultivators in the room will only serve to hurt meng yao in the long run. he knows that if this were brought to nie mingjue’s attention, he would be outraged and not shy about it -- also bad for meng yao. so he uses what he has: his immaculate reputation. by acting contrary to the other cultivators’ behavior, he demonstrates that he finds their actions unacceptable but with the plausible deniability that it wasn’t directed at them, that this is just zewu-jun being his usual generous self. this means that the other cultivators have no one to blame but themselves, nothing to do but question their own actions. there is nowhere to cast off their discomfort. meng yao didn’t do anything. lan xichen didn’t do anything -- he just thanked meng yao and drank his tea, isn’t that what it’s there for? he doesn’t disrupt the peace, he doesn’t attack anyone and put them on the defensive, but he does make his position very clear.

i know this is a really small thing and i’m probably beating it to death, but I really think this shows just how cognizant lan xichen is of politics and emotional cause and effect in such situations. certainly, out of context I think the scene reads kind of cliche, but within the greater narrative of the story and within the arc of these characters specifically, I think it was a really smart scene to include. it also showcases lan xichen’s style of action: that he moves around and with a problematic situation as opposed to moving straight through.

not to be salty on main again, but this is why it’s very frustrating to me when I see people call lan xichen passive when he is anything but. his actions just don’t look like traditional “actions”, especially to an american audience. it’s easy to understand lan wangji and wei wuxian’s style of problem-solving: taking a stand, moving through, staying strong. lan xichen is juggling an inconceivable number of factors in any given situation, weighing his responsibilities in one role against those in another, and then trying to find the path through the thicket that will cause the least harm, both to himself and the thicket. lan wangji and wei wuxian are not particularly good at considering the far-reaching consequences of their actions -- again, not because they are bad people, but because of a combination of personality and upbringing. they’d just hack through the thicket, not thinking about the creatures that live in it. that is not a terrible thing! it isn’t. it’s a different way of approaching a problem, and it has different priorities. that’s okay. there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides, and where you come down is going to depend on your personal values.

okay we’ve spiraled far and away from my original point, but let’s circle back: i was talking about class.

I think it’s undeniable that class, birthright, fate etc. are some of the driving forces of thematic conflict in mdzs, and the way each character interacts with those forces reveals a lot about themselves and also about the larger themes of fate, chance, and what it means to be righteous and good and how that is and isn’t rewarded. a lot of the tragedy of mdzs (the tragedy that isn’t caused by direct aggression on the part of one group or another) stems from the injustices and slights that people suffered due to their lot in life. it isn’t fair. none of it is fair! we sympathize with jin guangyao because we recognize that what he suffered was unconscionable, even if we don’t excuse him. i sympathize A Lot with xue yang as well for similar reasons, though I understand that’s a harder sell. this is a story focused on the mistakes of an entrenched, aging gentry and the effects that those mistakes had on their children, and a lot of it has to do with prejudice based in class and birth status. whether the prejudice was the true reason or whether it was just a convenient excuse, the fact remains that the systems in place rewarded and protected the people in power who used it to cling to that power. mdzs is also a story of how the circumstances of one’s life can offer you impossible choices that you cannot abstain from, and it asks us to be compassionate to the people who made terrible choices in terrible times. it’s about the inherent complexity in all things! that sometimes, there are no good choices, and i don’t know, i’d like to think that people would show me compassion if I had to make the choices some of these characters did. not just wei wuxian, mind you, every single one of them. except jin guangshan because I Do Hate Him sorry. and i guess wen ruohan. i think that’s it.

good. GOD this is clocking in at //checks notes -- just over 5k. 8′D *stuffs some weeds into my mouth like the clown i am*

(ko-fi? :’D *lies down*)

[be-gay-do-heists]

hello yall :) the holy month of elul started last night, which is typically a time for contemplation, so since it is impossible for me to stop thinking about leverage, i decided to write an essay. hope anyone interested in reading it enjoys, and that it makes at least a little sense!! spoilers for leverage redemption

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Leverage, Judaism, and “Doing the Work”: An Essay for Elul

When it comes to Elul and the approaching High Holidays, Leverage might seem like an odd topic to meditate on.

The TNT crime drama that ran from 2008-2012, and which released a new season this summer following its renewal, centers on a group of found-family thieves who help the victims of corporations and oligarchs (sometimes based on real-world examples), using wacky heists and cons to bring down the rich and powerful. In one episode, the team’s clients want to reclaim their father’s prized Glimt piece that had been stolen in the Shoah and never returned, but aside from this and the throwaway lines and jokes standard for most mainstream television, there’s not a ton textually Jewish about Leverage. However, despite this, I have found that the show has strong resonance among Jewish fans, and lots of potential for analysis along Jewish themes. This tends to focus on one character in particular: the group’s brilliant, pop culture-savvy, and personable hacker, Alec Hardison, played by the phenomenally talented Aldis Hodge.

I can’t remember when or where I first encountered a reading of Hardison as Jewish, but not only is this a somewhat popular interpretation, it doesn’t feel like that much of a leap. In the show itself, Hardison has a couple of the aforementioned throwaway lines that potentially point to him being Jewish, even if they’re only in service of that moment’s grift. It’s hard to point to what exactly makes reading Hardison as Jewish feel so natural. My first guess is the easy way Hardison fits into the traditional paradigms of Jewish masculinity explored by scholars such as Daniel Boyarin (2). Most of the time, the hacker is not portrayed as athletic or physical; he is usually the foil to the team’s more physically-adept characters like fighter Eliot, or thief Parker. Indeed, Hardison’s strength is mental, expressed not only through his computer wizardry but his passions for science, technology, music, popular media, as well as his studious research into whatever scenario the group might come up against. In spite of his self-identification as a “geek,” Hardison is nevertheless confident, emotionally sensitive, and secure in his masculinity. I would argue he is representative of the traditional Jewish masculine ideal, originating in the rabbinic period and solidified in medieval Europe, of the dedicated and thoughtful scholar (3). Another reason for popular readings of Hardison as Jewish may be the desire for more representation of Jews of color. Although mainstream American Jewish institutions are beginning to recognize the incredible diversity of Jews in the United States (4), and popular figures such as Tiffany Haddish are amplifying the experiences of non-white Jews, it is still difficult to find Jews of color represented in popular media. For those eager to see this kind of representation, then, interpreting Hardison, a black man who places himself tangential to Jewishness, in this way is a tempting avenue.

Regardless, all of the above remains fan interpretation, and there was little in the text of the show that seriously tied Judaism into Hardison’s identity. At least, until we got this beautiful speech from Hardison in the very first episode of the renewed show, directed at the character of Harry Wilson, a former corporate lawyer looking to atone for the injustice he was partner to throughout his career:

“In the Jewish faith, repentance, redemption, is a process. You can’t make restitution and then promise to change. You have to change first. Do the work, Harry. Then and only then can you begin to ask for forgiveness. [...] So this… this isn’t the win. It’s the start, Harry.”

I was floored to hear this speech, and thrilled that it explained the reboot’s title, Leverage: Redemption. Although not mentioned by its Hebrew name, teshuvah forms the whole basis for the new season. Teshuvah is the concept of repentance or atonement for the sins one has committed. Stemming from the root shuv/shuva, it carries the literal sense of “return.” In a spiritual context, this usually means a return to G-d, of finding one’s way back to holiness and by extension good favor in the eyes of the Divine. But equally important is restoring one’s relationships with fellow humans by repairing any hurt one has caused over the past year. This is of special significance in the holy month of Elul, leading into Rosh haShanah, the Yamim Noraim, and Yom Kippur, but one can undertake a journey of redemption at any point in time. That teshuvah is a journey is a vital message for Harry to hear; one job, one reparative act isn’t enough to overturn years of being on the wrong side of justice, to his chagrin. As the season progresses, we get to watch his path of teshuvah unfold, with all its frustrations and consequences. Harry grows into his role as a fixer, not only someone who can find jobs and marks for the team, but fixes what he has broken or harmed.

So why was Hardison the one to make this speech?

I do maintain that it does provide a stronger textual basis for reading Hardison as Jewish by implication (though the brief on-screen explanation for why he knows about teshuvah, that his foster-parent Nana raised a multi-faith household, is important in its own merit, and meshes well with his character traits of empathy and understanding for diverse experiences). However, beyond this, Hardison isn’t exactly an archetypical model for teshuvah. In the original series, he was the youngest character of the main ensemble, a hacking prodigy in the start of his adult career, with few mistakes or slights against others under his belt. In one flashback we see that his possibly first crime was stealing from the Bank of Iceland to pay off his Nana’s medical bills, and that his other early hacking exploits were in the service of fulfilling personal desires, with only those who could afford to pay the bill as targets. Indeed, in the middle of his speech, Hardison points to Eliot, the character with the most violent and gritty past who views his work with the Leverage team as atonement, for a prime example of ongoing teshuvah. So while no one is perfect and everyone has a reason for doing teshuvah, this question of why Hardison is the one to give this series-defining speech inspired me to look at his character choices and behavior, and see how they resonate with a different but interrelated Jewish principle, that of tikkun olam. 

Tikkun olam is literally translated as “repairing the world,” and can take many different forms, such as protecting the rights of vulnerable people in society, or giving tzedakah (5). In modern times, tikkun olam is often the rallying cry for Jewish social activists, particularly among environmentalists for whom literally restoring the health of the natural world is the key goal. Teshuvah and tikkun olam are intertwined (the former is the latter performed at an interpersonal level) and both hold a sense of fixing or repairing, but tikkun olam really revolves around a person feeling called to address an injustice that they may have not had a personal hand in creating. Hardison’s sense of a universal scale of justice which he has the power to help right on a global level and his newfound drive to do humanitarian work, picked up sometime after the end of the original series, make tikkun olam a central value for his character. This is why we get this nice bit of dialogue from Eliot to Hardison in the second episode of the reboot, when the latter’s outside efforts to organize international aid start distracting him from his work with the team: “Is [humanitarian work] a side gig? In our line of work, you’re one of the best. But in that line of work… you’re the only one, man.” The character who most exemplifies teshuvah reminds Hardison of his amazing ability to effect change for the better on a huge stage, to do some effective tikkun olam. It’s this acknowledgement of where Hardison can do the most good that prompts the character’s absence for the remainder of the episodes released thus far, turning his side gig into his main gig.

With this in mind, it will be interesting to see where Hardison’s arc for this season goes. Separated from the rest of the team, the hacker still has remarkable power to change the world, because it is, after all, the “age of the geek.” However, he is still one person. For all that both teshuvah and tikkun olam are individual responsibilities and require individual decision-making and effort, the latter especially relies on collective work to actually make things happen. Hardison leaving is better than trying to do humanitarian work and Leverage at the same time, but there’s only so long he can be the “only one” in the field before burning out. I’m reminded of one of the most famous (for good reason) maxims in Judaism:

It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it. (6)

Elul is traditionally a time for introspection and heeding the calls to repentance. After a year where it’s never been easier to feel powerless and drained by everything going on around us, I think it’s worth taking the time to examine what kind of work we are capable of in our own lives. Maybe it’s fixing the very recent and tangible hurts we’ve left behind, like Harry. Maybe it’s the little changes for the better that we make every day, motivated by our sense of responsibility, like Eliot. And maybe it’s the grueling challenge of major social change, like Hardison. And if any of this work gets too much, who can we fall back on for support and healing? Determining what needs repair, working on our own scale and where our efforts are most helpful, and thereby contributing to justice in realistic ways means that we can start the new year fresh, having contemplated in holiday fashion how we can be better agents in the world.

Shana tovah u’metukah and ketivah tovah to all (7), and may the work we do in the coming year be for good!

------

(1) Disclaimer: everybody’s fandom experiences are different, and this is just what I’ve picked up on in my short time watching and enjoying this show with others.

(2) See, for example, the introduction and first chapter of Boyarin’s book Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (I especially recommend at least this portion if you are interested in queer theory and Judaic studies). There he explores the development of Jewish masculinity in direct opposition to Christian masculine standards.

(3) I might even go so far as to place Hardison well within the Jewish masculine ideal of Edelkayt, gentle and studious nobility (although I would hesitate to call him timid, another trait associated with Edelkayt). Boyarin explains that this scholarly, non-athletic model of man did not carry negative associations in the historical Jewish mindset, but was rather the height of attractiveness (Boyarin, 2, 51).

(4) Jews of color make up 20% of American Jews, according to statistics from Be’chol Lashon, and this number is projected to increase as American demographics continue to change: https://globaljews.org/about/mission/. 

(5) Tzedakah is commonly known as righteous charity. According to traditional authority Maimonides, it should be given anonymously and without embarrassment to the person in need, generous, and designed to help the recipient become self-sufficient.

(6) Rabbi Tarfon, Pirkei Avot, 2:16

(7) “A good and sweet year” and “a good inscription [in the Book of Life]”

[tomatograter]

This may be a weird ask, but opinions on Jane? I'm curious, since being a Jake liker is very much your brand and she has (implied) assaulted him?

Its very much past (implied) at this point and frankly it was always a murky situation where jane showed she didn't care about jake's consent or genuine feelings at all, but here's the thing; I'm not a fan of defining narratives about fictional women purely by their attachment to romancing Some Guy either, and jane has always felt like she was made *less interesting* just for the sake of filling that beaten niche trope, even back in 2011.

I think the reason why a lot of people were taken by surprise with her fascist crockercorp turn in the Epilogues is that in HS jane is hinted to have internalized all of this privileged hyper-corporate poison, but it never goes far enough. In the grand scheme of things, it feels like it almost doesn't matter when compared to her romancey woes? That you're supposed to clap and cheer whenever she does blow up at jake, like thats her main problem, being a silly highschool girl with a crush, and NOT the fact that she wants to (and this is a vague quote) "Sink her gnarly claws into the public U.S. postal services once she inherits the empire," (source) or that she's a very spoiled rich kid whose main array of traits includes rebuffing every time her friends tell her The Empire Is Bad because they must be silly silly liars. That last one textually damages the friendship between roxy and jane, too, roxy confesses that she feels unheard and belittled by their bffsie (-which in on itself is interesting, considering how roxy ignores all of dirk's requests to stop sexually advancing on him, but roxy is generally taken as the Just and Heroic alpha kid).

Jane is an interesting character when it comes to questioning class privilege, societal conditioning & le epic girlbosses of capitalism. She'd also be interesting to explore in a situation where she has to come to terms with the fact that her legacy has directly harmed all of her friends and billions of other people. Besides, we never get into the meat of her ideological toxicity because the text enjoys saying "jane bad" just as much as it doesn't actually give a shit about the people jane's harming (insert epilogues jake a third time here) so the whole thing comes off as a flaccid waste of time.

TL;DR: I dont hate jane for the same reason that prevents me from hating roxy or epiloguesjade, where you get unfortunate edgy writing trying to point at something but mostly falling flat because the joke is either 'oh noooo women are sooooo hysterical lol' or 'lol the boys are acting like little girls over a kiss' and if you're above 13 years of age that's not gonna engage you for very long.

[dangerously-human]

25 and 32 for the writing asks.💜💜

Thanks, sweet friend! These were fun ones to think about for sure.

25. What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story?

So, here's the thing... I can't bear to not include all the little background details I come up with for characters, so they pretty much always make it into the story somehow. 😅 I have absolutely been known to write entire spinoff fanfics because I had a thought about a character that I couldn't squeeze into an ongoing story. And I haven't done much with OCs in a long time, so that's harder to answer... I guess my best response is that I have a pretty detailed timeline for the Those Binary Stars AU that outlines AT LEAST season and year for like every landmark event in Joan and Morse's relationship, and some are down to the day, even though they don't really come up in the story - because I didn't want to accidentally overlap stuff.

Wait, actually, now I am thinking of a better answer! At least 90% of why this timeline exists is because I know the youngest Morse daughter has ADHD like her dad (my headcanon but SO textually supported, fight me), and I was trying to get the timing right so she'd be born in an era where that was actually diagnosed, and then Joan looks at Morse and squints and goes, "Honey. Yeah, you too." But since Morse doesn't present with hyperactivity and I wanted their daughter to have a presentation that would actually get diagnosed and that her parents would recognize Morse in, that would have to be late 80s at the absolute earliest, which was tough to swing... Anyway. I have no idea if I'll ever write the ADHD diagnosis chronicles of Zoe Morse - probably won't - but still, I've got so many details of it worked out.

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

So this actually fits in quite well with the first Adrienne Rich quote I shared a little earlier! It's from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

This describes me to a T. I see beauty everywhere, in everything, in a way that is often painful and can feel more like grief than joy at times. I spent a lot of my life trying to be less intense, and sometimes I still fall into that trap, but I'm starting to appreciate my natural perspective a bit more and accept the intensity of my difficult emotions right along with the ones I like more.

[acey-wacey]

Lovestruck MC Headcanons

A/N: I've been playing lovestruck as a coping mechanism for covid but what really irks me is how the main characters are written. The player is allowed to choose their name, but not their appearance meaning the MC is not intended to be a self-insert. Even though it is established that the MC is a distinct character, they still never have any personality other than their love interest so I've decided to write my completely random headcanons for the MCs of the different books.

Love and Legends MC (with the protags)

-She loves cheesy rom-coms and says it's only to laugh at them but she really just loves the predictability.

-She is very defensive of her friends and has to be held back all the time.

-In high school, she knew she was attractive and lead boys on just to dump them (toxic much?).

-Her favorite food is pizza and she cries inside every time Solaire says she doesn't know what that is.

-She is constantly humming BTS songs and it confuses everyone else.

-She regularly sneaks out of the palace, with her chosen love interest, to find bits of the fantasy world that look just like movies she's seen.

-She makes dirty jokes way too often and only Iseul thinks they're funny.

When Reiner let her out of the palace for the first time, she went crazy with shopping and bought way too many Renaissance dresses.

-After her chosen love interest confessed to her, she had a mental breakdown about how all of this is a coma dream and no real person could love her.

-She is very cuddly and all the horses love her.

Starship Promise MC (aboard the Promise)

-She listens to heavy metal whenever she's working.

-Atlas told her it was annoying so she soundproofed the entire lab in a single night.

-She can actually use a blaster very well but if the chosen love interest offers to teach her, she's suddenly blind.

-She hates pickles and always throws them to Comet even though he doesn't like them either but he'll eat them for her.

-She watches old earth horror movies and laughs when the protagonist does stupid stuff.

-She has astronomy books from all the planets her parents visited and can name most of the stars in the sky from any given planet.

-She always has to be the bait for recon missions because she's a pretty blonde woman but unless it's genuinely important, she'll blow her cover on purpose just to make a point.

-She has a sixth sense for when someone is down and is completely ready to listen to them or knock some sense into them depending on the situation.

-Whenever she gets into an argument with one of the crew members, she just stares at them until they get freaked out and leave.

Reigning Passions MC

-She doesn't flaunt her poker skills but is prepared to humble any cocky player at Sebastian's parties.

-She has a lovely singing voice when she's sober but only ever sings at her grandmother's grave.

-When palace life gets too overwhelming, she sneaks out to the village and works at the bar for an afternoon.

-She knows how to do a lot of card tricks and uses them to entertain children.

-Soon after she was crowned, she appointed Xenia to be her "royal confidante", meaning they can spill tea for an hour and a half every Tuesday and nobody thinks anything of it.

-She learns a little bit of magic from each season, not only to do cool tricks but to appear as the heart of the capital, with influence from all four seasons.

-Never once has she abused her power but when a drunk man grabbed her butt, she seriously considered executing him.

-She is the life of the party, not just because she can make drinks tray well, but because she knows exactly what makes everyone laugh.

-She memorizes small things about each person she meets in court so that she can either become friends with them or keep an eye on them.

-Sometimes she helps Gideon with his experiments even if it's in the middle of the night.

-She despises court parties and always tries to leave as soon as possible.

-She considers her hair a very sensitive part of her body and only lets her chosen love interest style it.

-She has an extensive wardrobe but she only ever wears two dresses because they're the most comfortable.

Astoria: Fate's Kiss

-She is the only person brave enough to ask Hades why he married his niece.

-K-pop stan to the max

-She used to want to own a bakery before she started working for H.E.R.A.

-She is the most indecisive person ever and get stressed out over choosing an ice cream flavor.

-Chosen love interest chooses her ice cream flavor for her and that's part of the reason why she loves them.

-She overworks herself to the point of passing out at her desk.

-She has a pink sparkly pom-pom pen that she calls the "Punish-pen-t" because anyone who swears in the office has to use the pen for paperwork for the next week.

-She likes sour candy better than sweet.

-She doesn't like physical affection and will only let her chosen love interest and May touch her.

-Her favorite flower is sunflowers.

-She has never left Manhattan for any reason other than work.

Castaway! Love's Adventure

-She's all about eating the rich.

-She swears a lot and it bothers everyone on the island.

-She also has immaculate comedic timing and TK hates that it makes him laugh.

-She has scars all over her legs from rocks and brush scratching her.

-She needs to be watched at all times to make sure she doesn't touch any snakes or something.

-After leaving the island, she has withdrawals from switching between wilderness and city so quickly.

-She makes a lot of references to old movies.

-She has a flip phone because she spends all her money on desk accessories.

-She has seen one episode of Naruto and calls herself an anime fan.

-When she gets mad, she has really well thought out argument and provides textual evidence because she's used to journaling.

-She's so used to scrutiny that she apologizes anytime anything happened even if it isn't her fault.

[cosmicjoke]

Okay, so here we go!  Chapter 1 of “No Regrets”!  

There’s a few things I want to point out about this chapter, because both visually and textually, we get a lot of information about the Underground and Levi, and his relationship with Isabel and Furlan.  So I’ll just go through it.

The first thing that really caught my attention for this chapter was the opening page, which is a retrospective shot of Levi after he’s joined the SC, thinking about how he can’t ever know what the results of his choices are going to be.  He says here “I trusted in my own strength... I trusted in the decisions of comrades who had earned my faith...”  And this quote from Levi is really important in later understanding why he makes the choice he does, at the end.  He says he trusted in the decisions of comrades who had earned his faith, and that tells us that Levi believes in Furlan and Isabel, that he believes in their strength and their capability, that he believes in them enough to let them choose for themselves and trust in their judgement.  We’ll obviously delve more into this as it becomes more relevant to the story.  But moving on...

The next thing to catch my attention is the panels of the Underground we see.  These are probably the best shots of this place we get in the whole series, as it really depicts a place that is totally run down and dilapidated, with buildings falling apart and crumbling in disrepair, filth ridden streets with literal sewage water coming out of drain pipes, and a actual cave cover overhead, complete with stalactites, blocking out all sunlight except for few and far between pockets which break through holes in the rock ceiling.  The most telling panels though are the ones which depict the violence and poverty of the place.  We see a panel of a homeless man passed out on the street, painfully thin looking, and under him, two men in a fight, one beating the other violently.  And the next panel shows us a little girl, sitting barefoot on the ground between two men who have just blown each other’s brains out with guns.  Truly, this is a violent, dark, poverty-stricken place that breeds crime and depravation.  The pages before this say that BECAUSE of the splendor of the Capital city above the Underground, this place exists, and that’s accurate.  Because of the excesses and decadence of the rich and well off above these people rejected by society, that means fewer resources for the less fortunate.  It’s truly tragic.  

Alright, now I just want to move on to some small, but telling moments here while Levi and the others are being chased by Erwin and his crew.  

When Isabel is bragging about how the MP’s never learn, referring to how they’ll never be able to catch their gang, she asks Levi if what she said was cool.  Levi tells her “Don’t be stupid.”  This might seem like Levi just blowing her off, but the way I read it, it seems more to me like Levi is warning her not to be cocky, not to be over confident, because that’s the kind of thing that can get you killed, or caught.  Big Bro indeed!   We also see how mindful Levi is here as a leader, when he tells them they can’t afford to lead the soldiers following them straight to their hideout, and clearly they have a plan in place for just this sort of thing.

More importantly, Levi is fast to realize these aren’t ordinary soldiers after them, which shows his great instincts, but what’s really interesting is his internal thoughts here.  His logic is telling him regular MP’s wouldn’t work this hard to catch them, and that their skill with the ODM means they must be SC.  But Levi doesn’t really believe it which, given what we later find out about the deal with Lobov, and Lobov warning them of Erwin’s plans, tells us that Levi never really believed the SC would come after them.  He’s clearly surprised here.

Further, after informing Isabel and Furlan and confirming his suspicions, he tells Furlan that he’s got no intention of getting mixed up with “these guys”.  This tells us Levi never wanted to go through with Furlan’s plans, never wanted to join the SC, never wanted anything to do with any of it.  There’s further evidenced in this very chapter, which I’ll get to in a moment.  But it tells us a lot about the dubious feelings Levi had from the start, and how he probably would have simply been happiest to stay in the Underground with his friends, even though it was a hard life.  

Alright, so, this next part is a big deal, and it’s an overlooked detail which speaks volumes about the kind of person Levi is.  I didn’t even notice this the first time I read it, so I want to talk about it.  Levi separates from Isabel and Furlan, and takes Erwin and Mike on a wild chase through the back alley’s and narrow passages of the slums.  He really tries to give them the run around here, until he flips over a door, into another area.  What’s really important here is Levi’s dialog.  He says first “... Lost ‘em, huh?”  And then he says, “That got a little crazy...  I hope... none of them crashed.”  This is kind of amazing.  Levi is showing actual concern for the two soldiers who’d just attempted to catch him and his friends, who were doggedly pursuing them with obviously bad intentions of some kind.  And Levi, after having to resort to some serious ODM skills to shake them, says he hopes that none of them crashed.  He doesn’t want Erwin or Mike to get hurt, he just wants to get away from them.  Considering he doesn’t know either of them at this point, they’re just nameless, faceless military dogs trying to mess things up for him, that shows remarkable character.  

Of course, things go downhill from there, when Mike crashes through the door and tackles him.  All bets are off then, because Levi’s life is now in danger, and when that happens, he’ll resort to physical force.  Still, he only throws Mike off of him and once again attempts to get away, only for it to be Erwin who swoops down and cuts Levi’s cables.  This was actually really dangerous.  Given Levi’s momentum and position, he crashes hard into a nearby wall before falling to the ground.  So we already see some of that ruthlessness from Erwin here.  Of course, that spurs Levi into violence himself.  I have no doubt that when Levi lunges for Erwin and knocks his blade away, bringing his knife to his neck, he truly intended to kill him in that moment.  Levi’s compassion for these soldiers can only go so far, considering the desperation of his own circumstances.  If Mike hadn’t been there to stop it, I think Levi probably would have ripped Erwin’s jugular right out, and that would have been that, lol.  And then, it’s important to note too WHY Levi stops.  Not because Mike was able to physically restrain him, but because he tells Levi to look around himself, directing his attention to the fact that Furlan and Isabel have been caught.  That immediately stays Levi’s hand, and once again, we’re shown how Levi puts the wellbeing of his friends above himself.  He could have ditched Furlan and Isabel right then and there and escaped on his own.  Instead, he allows himself to be restrained and cuffed.  He refuses to abandon them.

Now the next scene is hugely important to a lot of stuff.

Erwin’s got Levi and his friends down on their knees, in the sewage, questioning them about their ODM skills, and the three of them stay silent, obviously defiant.  We really get a good look at Erwin’s abilities as a manipulator here.

He’s pulling the whole good cop/bad cop routine on Levi, when he tells him “I’d like to avoid any rough treatment if I can” before looking to Mike in a clear signal for Mike to pretty damn violently tear Levi’s head back by his hair before smashing his face into the sewage on the ground.  And this really IS sewage.  It’s not mud.  If you look at the panels, we see this brown muck coming out of drain pips attached to the surrounding buildings.  This water is probably, literally, dirty with feces, and Erwin has Mike put Levi’s face in this and hold it there.  Now let’s remember something important about Levi.  He’s a clean freak.  He obviously cares deeply about keeping both himself and his environment clean.  Erwin couldn’t know this about him at the time, but nobody of course would be happy about having their face shoved into literal shit.  But for Levi, I can only imagine this had to be tantamount to a kind of torture.  Erwin keeps questioning him, looking down at him without any kind of emotion, and Levi remains stubbornly silent, despite how awful this must truly be for him.  We get a close up of Levi’s eye in one of the panels, paralleled with Erwin’s own, and Levi’s expression really strikes me as one of awful humiliation.  He goes from looking up at Erwin in rage, to looking away, staring straight ahead, while Erwin keeps looking down at him.

Still, Levi says nothing, and it’s Isabel who finally cracks, telling Erwin that they didn’t learn to use ODM from anyone, with Furlan further explaining that they taught themselves as a means of survival.  He remarks that “anyone who doesn’t know what sewage tastes like couldn’t understand!”.  Clearly, both of them are really upset to see this being done to Levi, and I have to imagine it’s at least in part because they know how awful an experience this has to be for him, given that they know how much he desires to stay clean.  Their shocked expressions when Mike first pushes Levi’s face into the sewage says as much too.

But still, Levi remains silent as Erwin then demands to know Levi’s name.  What Mike does to Levi in the next panel is even worse.  He pushes his face into the sewage and holds him there until Levi literally starts to choke in it, for long enough that, when he finally does pull him up, Levi is gasping for breath.  I really don’t see people talk enough about this scene, but, well...

It’s a torture scene.  Erwin is ordering Mike to torture Levi here.  It may not be the most extreme form of torture, it isn’t the type of physical violence we typically think of when we think of torture, but that’s what it is.  It’s causing Levi both physical and mental degradation, as well as physical distress.  

Even with this though, Levi’s still silent and refuses to answer Erwin at all.  

It’s only when Erwin literally threatens the lives of Furlan and Isabel that he finally talks.  This is such an important detail.  Levi was willing to take what to him must have been truly horrific treatment, but as soon as Erwin gives the signal to the other two Scouts who have hold of his friends, we see Levi’s expression shift from defiant rage to wide eyed fear as they put their blades to Furlan’s and Isabel’s throats.  

Finally Levi talks, calling Erwin a “bastard”, to which Erwin simply asks him again what his name is, and after a slight hesitation, Levi finally gives it.  

I think this entire scene is vital in understanding WHY Levi was so violently pissed at Erwin, to the point of wanting to kill him.

I think it’s a combination of both the humiliation and torture he puts Levi through here, and, worse still, the fact that he threatens Isabel and Furlan’s lives.  Levi already feels looked down upon by Erwin here, he already feels humiliated and embarrassed and as though he’s being treated like he’s worthless, because Erwin IS treating him like that here.  All while Erwin stands there, expressionless, making statements like he doesn’t want to have to use any rough treatment, etc... while at the same time ordering Mike to do just that.  Already, Erwin is sending Levi the message that he’s a liar and a manipulator who thinks nothing of putting another human being’s face in shit.  And then, to top that off, he shows Levi that he’s willing to hurt, maybe even kill, his two friends to get what he wants.

Is it any wonder Levi hated Erwin as much as he did at the beginning?  After a lifetime in the Underground where, from the time of his birth, he had to deal with him and those he cares about being treated like worthless trash.  It would be a miracle if Levi DIDN’T want to kill Erwin at this point.  To have to then submit to him willingly, after all of that, must have been beyond humiliating for him.

Erwin continues to be manipulative here too, when after Levi gives his name, Erwin’s attitude suddenly shifts, and he smiles at Levi and gets down on one knee with him, in the filth, his entire demeanor seeming to shift into an abruptly friendly one as he offers his deal to Levi.  Again, that whole good cop/bad cop thing.  At the same time, he continues to threaten Levi by telling him if he refuses his offer, he’ll hand them all over to the MP’s and that, given their crimes, they shouldn’t expect to be treated with any kind of decency.  What’s kind of funny about this statement from Erwin is that up until now, Erwin and Mike have done anything but treat Levi decently. 

Okay, one more important point to make about this chapter, and it goes back to what I said earlier about Levi not wanting anything to do with the SC, and how that tells us Levi really didn’t want to go through with Furlan’s plans.

After Erwin makes his offer, we see Levi look over at Furlan, who’s giving him an intent look, and in the next panel, we see an almost surprised, or astonished look on Levi’s face, like he can’t believe Furlan is asking him to do this, before he grits his teeth in obvious frustration, and then accepts Erwin’s offer to join the SC.  What this tells us is that Levi only takes Erwin’s offer because Furlan wanted him to.  Because this was all part of Furlan’s plan, to go through with Lobov’s commission, to get caught by the SC, etc...  It’s clear Levi never wanted this, and he’s upset at having to do it.  But the fact he agrees after looking over at Furlan and seeing him implore Levi with his eyes tells us, once again, that Levi is willing to sacrifice his own desires for the desires of others.  That being his two friends.

For them, he’ll join the Survey Corps, even as every one of his instincts is probably screaming at him that this is a bad idea.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the first chapter of “No Regrets”.  There’s a lot more to unpack in this manga than I think people realize.  I hope whoever took the time to read my long ass post found it at least a little worth while.  I’ll be moving on to chapter two next!

[drivingsideways]

Mine Review

It will never cease to amaze me that 2021′s most feminist kdrama turned out to be a chaebol-makjang , a genre that I’ve never really paid attention to. I picked this one up purely for thirst reasons, aka Kim Seo-hyung, but stayed out of sheer amazement at what this flashy, over-the-top melodrama about a bunch of awful (and awfully) rich people was pulling off with such aplomb. 

At the start, this really seemed like a show that was primed to hate women, what with gold digging, scheming nannies, and cold step mothers and silly rich women with too much time on their hands, and too little going on in their brains. 

But! Writer-director duo Baek Mi-kyung and Lee Na-jung  almost straight away subvert those expectations and  the show continues to escalate in the opposite direction, until it ends with the finale, appropriately titled “ Glorious Women.” (I want to state here that there’s some classism and slut-shaming in the show that is quite disappointing in a show that gets a lot of other things right, but the bulk of the show actually works against those moments.)

A short list of things that I particularly enjoyed about the show:

1. Literally smashing the patriarchy by insisting that sons belong to and with their mothers. Yep, yep, yep. Much of the plot and back story is devoted to the question of legitimacy and heirs; as the plot progresses, what is initially set up as a cat-fight between two mothers, and on the surface,  a glorification of motherhood as the goal of womanhood,  ends up instead, being a damning indictment of unfit fathers. In the end, the women win by rescuing the next generation- their children of the heart as much as their body- from the personification of toxic masculinity in the form of a child’s biological father. (All three of the women do this- in Seo-hyun’s case, it’s fighting for her step son to follow his own path, and marry the “unsuitable” woman of his choice.)

2. The lesbian love story! This got a lot of press, deservedly, and ran into some controversy re: one of the actors, which I won’t get into here- at the end of the day, what we got was a textual wlw romance that was tender, romantic, and, in many ways, hopeful. The fact that Seo-hyun does not, even at the end, come out to the larger public despite all her privilege, is actually very well done, imo, because it’s framed as something she’s choosing on her own terms. There may be a day when she does, but more importantly to me, she’s  already freed in her own mind and to the people she loves the most and cares about the most, and their acceptance of her is wonderfully played out. (Side note: Absolutely loved that they had Sister Emma leave the order, which I am 100% convinced was just so that Seo-hyun could have that coming out speech to an (ex) Catholic nun and have her say that love is love)

There’s another, more subtle way, I think in which they made fun of male homophobia in particular, but in what seems to be, again, on the surface an extremely homophobic way! I refer to the constant “gay” jokes that are played between Han Jin-ho and Kim Seong-tae, and later with the young hunk who replaces Seong-tae. My initial reaction was, oh, they are playing both sides, to placate the bigots and undermine what they’re doing with the Seo-hyun story line, but y’know, at the end of the day, what the scenes did , in large part due to Park Hyuk-kwon’s stellar acting choices, were to leave you with a niggling doubt about whether the womanizing philanderer Han Jin-ho was really 100% straight. Well played, well played, show. 

3. Deconstructing masculinity! The show takes pains to show up the fragility and toxicity- and finally, the pathetic nature-of certain kinds of masculinity, whether overtly or subtly violent.  Not a single male character is spared of indictment; but more importantly I think, it shows how this is a learned behavior, passed down through generations, and not “inherent” to maleness. That is the hope for change that the show leaves us with, both in the younger and older male characters. But! It also clears up that the responsibility for the change lies with the men taking accountability for themselves and their actions. No women are around to baby sit and cajole them into becoming better people; instead the women are shown as busy getting on with their lives, sans men, in new configurations of “family”: Hi-soo and Ja-kyung with their son; Seo-hyun reaching out to Suzy Choi in a intimation of their future, and Seo-hyun and Hi-soo remaining as supportive friends despite no longer being “official family”.

4. The space it gives women! Of all stripes. They are allowed to be smart, angry, petty, greedy, silly, loving, sexy, strong, weak, naive, sweet, bitter- every single flavour. I was particularly thrilled by the star turns put in by Park Won-sook who played the bitter-ridiculous wife/mother/mother-in-law with flair and pathos; and Kim Hye-wa’s Han Jin-hee who’s written to be laughed at, but played so you can laugh with her. 

5. The women win. They just do. Straight out, no waffling, no compromises. It’s THRILLING.