#and everyone has access to canon evidence they don't need a degree

[avaisnerdytoo]

5YL Ep7 Motion Comic:

Some quick thoughts from the episode in which I found tons of affinity on. (Link to watch at the bottom of this thingy).

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This episode presents a dilemma which I personally have a bit of personal fascination on. If you have a character that is all powerful, should they, or should they not ascend to godhood?

There are 3 characters I love in this world, Flash, Iron-Man (with less direct comparison in this instance), and Ben, all 3 possess the means to shape the world as they like, to exert some kind of weight onto everything else which only they can lift.

Granted Ben, through Alien X far exceeds my other two examples, but the question remains similarly.

If all 3 of these characters are heroes, shouldn't they take the reigns of the world?

Surely their judgment would spare us all, they have their hearts on the right place!

I hadn't typed this out publicly before, but dorky me actually likes to imagine many stories, including ones were my OC has some kind of access to significant power, as a fun wild card in my own stories.

Part of the fun of stories however, are challenges, and in my own, I try to maintain a sense of realism, although in such cases, I do often think to myself...

If I were in that situation, it would be seriously tempting to pull that kind of card, even if for something simple...

"Oh, character is stuck in the past with no way home except a tedious process of gathering all the resources to make a time machine to head back? Why not skip it and pull the Alien X card - or whatever OP thing for whatever example - and literally just go back home?

You were going to do it anyway... In this example the character has the knowledge to fix the problem, they simply made it easy on themselves, the faster they get back home the faster they get back to helping right? They don't have to use Alien X/OP Thing to solve the problem back home, they simply used him to return.

And as small excuses begin becoming bigger, slowly there are less reasons not to use him for everything."

I like Ben calling out "Life" as a good reason not to go through with using Alien X. That level of responsibility exceeds anything anyone should ever carry, as humans I mean. Not to mention the complete loss of reality to everyone else, would things even be "happening" at that point?

Kuro once said that he likes Ben not using him even without any deadlocks as it shows a massive sign of mental fortitude, every time he uses another transformation, he is choosing to be better.

And as contextualized in the comic, as a sign of respect for the symbol of the watch.

One head canon I like to play with is the idea that, "if Ben has full control of Alien X, perhaps as time went on he also acquires all the omnipresence that comes with it, as Belicus and Serena practically aren't involved at all, he could, like Dr. Manhattan, see it all, the whole universe as a static picture, only he doesn't retain the knowledge because it would be too much to handle".

To be honest, I always wondered how other characters would react to Ben having to full control of Alien X, true free control. Previously, they all understood the hassle that would be the arguments needed to make him work, but now?

The Hero of Heroes has always shown excellent judgment, he clearly can be trusted, why not get ahead?

Rook logically supporting the suggestion, or Kevin not understanding why freeing others of pain wouldn't be the instant choice feels right in character for me. And if I were not Ben, but alongside him, I would also feel some degree of pressure to wanting him to spare us all of anything further.

It should be evident by now that I haven't read the rest of the comic, I was actually doing so, and then I kinda dropped it haha, not out of distaste though, far from it hahaha.

I'll definitely get back into reading though, this is absolutely amazing.

Watch 5YL EP7 : The Ink Tank on YouTube

Read 5YL : The Ink Tank Website with multiple reading options.

[sometimesrosy]

U have advantage that ur a writer and also have a degree. But there r other people in the fandom who r writers with a degree. That girl erin from met station. I think she also lost hope

I have an advantage because I have degrees and decades of experience and an understanding of the discipline, so i can sometimes go deeper than others, or pull on extra-narrative knowledge, but understanding a story is not some esoteric, elite skill that only people with degrees can do.

A story, whether book or movie or tv show, is laid out for you. All right there on the page or screen. We all have access to the same canon facts. And as it’s a tv show, not some academic, high-literature experiment with post modernism or something, most of the interpretation of The 100 is pretty basic. I found season 3 to be the most ambitious and complex, but they pulled back after that. 

I don’t believe you need a degree or to be a writer or an english major or a teacher or in hollywood to understand what’s going on in the show. All you have to do is make sure that your own personal opinions, desires and fears aren’t taking over your interpretation and confusing what’s happening in canon.

And I don’t believe HAVING a degree makes you more able to do that. Unfortunately, erin, while a professor, has a hard time separating what she WANTS to happen from what IS happening on the screen. She has a tendency to decide what the meaning is (for whatever reason) and not allow any question about it into the equation. Whether she decides her interpretation through analysis, shipping, or the “correct” pc position, is irrelevant. She won’t allow anyone to question it, or have an alternate interpretation. She told me, personally, that I wasn’t allowed to have my own interpretation of Polis, or understand authorial intent, because SHE understood authorial intent, and I was wrong. I was also immoral for my interpretation. 

And as a lowly public high school teacher, I can tell you, EVERYONE has a right to their interpretation, especially if they show you where they got it from in the text. In fact, that’s what I taught. Come up with a hypothesis, defend it with evidence from the text, come to a conclusion of what it means. This is SIMPLE analysis, and anyone who pays attention to the canon can do this. If ANYONE tells you that you have no right to your analysis, they are untrustworthy, because they are trying to dominate the conversation, silence you, and keep you from thinking on your own. That a TEACHER would tell someone that they were NOT ALLOWED to interpret a work of fiction differently from their interpretation offends me as a pedagogue. It’s our job to teach students how to understand, analyze and think. It is not our job to teach students our dogma and to follow only our interpretations.

As it turned out, erin was wrong in her interpretation. And not only did the narrative prove me right, but so did the writers, as my interpretation was confirmed and hers was debunked, no matter how she said only she was allowed to interpret the story. But it’s not really ABOUT the interpretation. It’s about a refusal to question her own interpretations, because she’s the authority and believes she’s right and anyone who disagrees with her is felt to attack her identity. 

Erin lost faith because the story did not turn out like she thought it would, and the only explanation she can come up with for that is that the story is wrong and JR is a bad writer, and he hates Bellarke, and she’s been betrayed. So, at this point, you can see that not only does she think other people are not allowed to have different interpretations from hers, she also doesn’t think the WRITERS are allowed to have a different story than the one she has declared is happening. 

Instead of going back and seeing how she got it wrong when canon didn’t do what she thought it should, where her interpretation was off, and how she could better understand the body of work that he was analyzing, she declared the body of work wrong, bad and inferior. So that her interpretation could remain. She demanded the story follow HER story, not the creators’. This is actually a pretty common thing in fandom and you can see it all over, like when fanboys decide that star trek has gotten too political, despite the fact that star trek was EXPLICITLY political all the way back in the pilot episode. THEY don’t want to see it as political, so they erase the story being told, and say canon now is WRONG, because it doesn’t match their experience and interpretation and what they valued from the canon in the first place. 

IMO, as a teacher or as an academic or as a writer or whatever, we should always double check our own ideas about the facts/canon. Make sure we are staying true to the facts/canon, make sure our own biases aren’t coloring our interpretations to the point of ignoring canon. We all have biases. There’s no way to avoid them, but there is a way to get past them, and that’s double checking your opinions and how you came to them. Asking yourself, “if i see it a different way, do I come up with a different interpretation, and if I do, is that interpretation more valid than my original interpretation?” Look at your canon with different perspectives. “If lxa is a hero, what is happening here?” “what would this story look like if Clarke were the hero vs if Lxa were The Hero and which seems to be the story?” “if clarke is in a dark pscyhological story, how would it change the meaning?” “Does the story make more sense if Bellamy is the villain or Bellamy is struggling with his own darkness to do the right thing and become the hero?” “If I was wrong about Lxa being the hero and Bellamy being the villain, then what did I miss, and if I take that into consideration now, how will my interpretation change?” Please note, i’m only talking about interpretations from s3 right here. Erin never did this. She simply went, “Well JR is a bad writer who told the story wrong, nobody understood it.” And I would like to say, no they didn’t tell the story wrong, they didn’t tell HER story. 

And this attitude continued into season 5 where she believed that Bellarke was not romantic, and ignored all the canon evidence for a romantic story of Clarke and Bellamy having romantic feelings for each other including the word “love” and canonical on screen jealousy, being called his girlfriend, comparisons to canon love relationships, and a narrative focus on Clarke and Bellamy, their relationship, their feelings for each other, and their reunion, rather than the “canon” relationship of B/E. She believed Bellarke wasn’t happening so she ignored all evidence to the contrary, because it contradicted her theory.

SO. When she got “inside information” from someone who said that the writer’s room used to argue all the time about whether or not to do romantic Bellarke and they didn’t argue anymore, she interpreted that to fit with her theory that Bellarke was NOT happening at all. She suffers from confirmation bias. When she hears evidence, she only hears the evidence that confirms her bias, she ignores totally anything that challenges her interpretation.

Because she didn’t see Bellarke in season 5, despite all the canon romantic bellarke and canon love triangle of C/B/E which makes Bellarke a romantic story. When someone said the writers didn’t fight about doing romantic bellarke, she decided it meant they’d chosen not to do bellarke at all and it was platonic. It confirmed her belief that Bellarke was dead.

I hear the same evidence, and because I saw a classic dead-wife-back-from-the-dead love triangle romantic trope, and that means THEY ACTIVELY PURSUED ROMANTIC BELLARKE IN THE WRITERS ROOM, I hear that they’re not arguing anymore, because they’ve already started the romantic bellarke story. There’s no should we or shouldn’t we, because it’s already happening. Bellarke is coming.

HOWEVER. That’s not what happened with Erin. Erin took something told to her in confidence and spread the rumor that Bellarke was dead, and it was confirmed dead, and JR was never doing Bellarke because it was confirmed. Because she said so. Despite, as a professor, knowing that nothing is canon until it is canon. Or I guess she doesn’t know that. I guess she thinks interpretations and rumors are canon. 

I will be honest, I have refrained from talking about her, even though my conflict with her was years ago. I do not believe she understands the story at all. She keeps ending up wrong. And she doesn’t admit it. Instead, she blames JR for doing it wrong, fandom for interpreting it wrong, or me personally for having an interpretation she personally didn’t like so didn’t listen to. :)

But to actively harm fandom by spreading unconfirmed gossip and rumors and saying they meant bellarke was CONFIRMED dead, and using her position and authority as someone who is in the know to destroy people’s enjoyment of a tv show, means that I find her HIGHLY unethical and I blame her, personally, for a lot of the anguish in the fandom.

She’s a professional. She should behave professionally. And she’s not. She’s using her position as a professional to give her interpretations more clout, rather than using the CANON to defend and support her interpretations. 

So if you try to challenge my interpretations, and say “yeah sure you have degrees, but erin has degrees and she thinks bellarke is dead, so your degrees don’t mean anything,” I’m gonna have to tell you. You bet our degrees don’t mean anything. Not mine, or hers.

The only thing that means anything is canon. Stick to the text. Never think that someone’s degree means their interpretation is better than yours. Because degrees don’t support an argument. EVIDENCE DOES.