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cinearia · 3 years

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The "Morally Grey" in ACOTAR

I decided to write something I have been thinking about since I saw some people saying this when pointing out the wrong attitude of some characters in ACOTAR (aka Rhysand and company), but I think this can apply in general. In another specific story, but I will focus on ACOTAR.

And please, if you disagree, that's fine. This is an opinion of mine that I decided to write and post, because I find it an interesting subject that does not necessarily apply only in ACOTAR, but that is in the saga and I have seen people commenting on it. I don't want to fight with anyone, okay? I put in the tags that fit in.

So...

I love morally gray characters, but just to make it clear right now, I don't think that EVERY story has to have ambiguous characters. It's okay if the story is to follow a line more heroes versus villains line. But one of the things I saw here on tumblr and twitter about the attitudes of IC, Rhysand and Feyre was using that same argument, that they are not perfect, that they have their flaws. I definitely agree with that.

But history itself does not recognize this (and some fans too). Because nobody seems to call their shit out.

Starting from a general view that can include all of the IC. Like, how not to worry about your image while protecting your city? Okay, i get it, we had to be the tHe BaD gUyS, but y'all will suffering the consequences for this, especially if its to protect your own city. Some other people are protecting their citys too. Doesn't mean that you are wrong, but everything has consequences.

Or, how they constantly abuse their power; how Rhysand threatening and using his powers even at a political meeting sound good? How Feyre ended up hurting someone during that same meeting, even if unintentionally, was just fine? No one will call their shit about using their powers? Do you really seek to make allies and friends in the middle of a war by showing abuse of power and threatening others (and not just feysand doing this)? Or saying that they should step over the others so that there is only one king and queen in Prythian (that was right for you, Amren).

And that is partly the fault of writing. Now, more specific:

They lie and steals a valuable artifact from a possible ally and political leader of an entire court? Ah, but it is for a greater good. It will not jeopardize the confidence of a HIGH LORD OF A COURT who was supposed to be his ally in the midst of a war.

Did Feyre decimate an court? Ah, but the leader was abusive to her, she felt trapped in the place that was rebuilding because of a curse of hundreds of years, even though there are innocent people. And, of course, you will have the consequences for this.

(this one more personal and less political) Elain, perhaps the least worst of all, neglected Feyre as much as Nesta did, and also do nothing when she went hunting? Ah, but Elain is Elain.

Did Rhysand hide information from Feyre's pregnancy that she and the baby could die in childbirth? Ah, but he didn't want to worry her, he was scared to lose her and her son. And the whole IC agreed not to tell her anything? Ah, they also care about her, the High Lady.

(And this is the worst and yes, I’ve seen someone say that) Rhysand did it all with Feyre UTM, drugged her, put her in a dress that didn’t cover anything, made her dance all night on his lap? But because he wanted to protect her, we need to hear both sides of the story.

And that's fine because they are the good guys in the story. But it is nothing more than pure hypocrisy, and no consequence falls on them. If it happens, it will be unfair, is just to move the plot.

Do you want us to believe in the heroes of history, do you want us to side with them? Great, we can do that. We could have liked Feyre and Rhysand and the whole IC more, as a group that doesn't always do the right things, except that would have to change literally EVERYTHING (a little bit of charisma would be good).

Instead, for me, it became an egocentric boring FoUnD FaMiLy group that only cares about their own city - and it's not necessarily wrong to be concerned only with Velaris, it's part of their history. But forcing an image on them that doesn't match their actions makes me believe the opposite, especially cause started in ACOSF, again from AMREN, about a King and Queen in Prythian.

So, I came to believe that it was a POV issue. For IC, they are the heroes of history, and think they are better than the rest.

It would be curious, in fact, if the whole point was that Feyre's POV would incapacitate us from seeing the flaws that she doesn't see. And totally proposital. That is why we have to see her as a saint, but at the same time so badass. Wow, no one, i repeat, NO ONE, suspect of me while i pretend to be innocent.

Or how we see her mate so perfect, to the point that history doesn't allow us to stop and think 'wait, this is kind of ...weird'. Or that, as much as there is an error there, but not leat the reader question the characters themselves. Rhysand, for Feyre, is perfect.

We have to see Rhysand as that altruistic, laid-back person who does everything for others, mostly because he did it for Feyre, and that can't be denied. He saved her, took her to her city, her family. What made me stop to think is how Feyre may be reproducing their behavior. How he seems to want her to be part of it so badly. I don't know how to put it into words, but that's more or less what I wrote in another rant I did.

Everything she does is justified by the other characters. At the same time that she, Rhysand and everyone in the IC have hypocritical and very wrong attitudes that history itself does not recognize. And, worst of that, the story seems glorify her POV.

Seriously, when she disobeys the instructions given to her (what she does the most) she has no one to say 'girl, please stop. Just STOP)

And with this said, i add:

We don't have to agree with everything that the characters and the protagonist do. We can love them and still disagree with them, because they are people, or fae, like any other, and there will always be something in them that we will disagree with. It makes them real. They can be heroes and still have their dark side.

The reasons may be as noble as possible, but that will not exclude the consequences, it will not exclude them from being wrong. They do not necessarily need to take a spur or a lesson in morals, but just do not miss out on what every action can bring, especially political leaders in the midst of a war.

Whenever the IC does something, it is for a "bigger" reason, but without giving us the chance to even question it. We don't see them paying for their words, without necessarily moving the plot of the story, in a story that focuses so much on the development of the characters themselves and putting the war in the background (or how should been). Without us being able to question the motivations of the good guys and always doubt the villains.

And this is where I’m going to focus on a more specific point; funny like any character who is "MoRaLlY GrAy" and who "have YOUR rEaSoNs" are men or with history of abuser. Thats funny, right? The new one now is Eris, who was part of Mor's trauma and one of Lucien's nasty brothers, that one who already attacked Lucien, the one who was going to kill Feyre. Who did all that to Mor.

But having Eris saying that she, the victim, didn't tell the whole truth, and the history is now showing that we will see his side...

It just makes me ask, how, in ALL the process of creating and writing these books, passing for her editors, in the books that she wants to pass the message of feminism so much, SJM didn't stop to think, or didn't have a friend to put their hand on your conscience, how wrong does it sound for the abuser to say that the victim is lying?

Why are the men in this saga constantly gaining the gift of doubt?

I can no longer see Rhysand as being morally gray precisely because of what SJM wants us to believe as he is and justifies his actions. What could have been in ACOTAR stopped being completely from ACOMAF, probably because SJM wanted that in her story, the girl would stay with the """villain"""

For from then on, every action of Rhysand is justified and without future consequences, since we are supposed to root for him. Now he is the protagonist's new love interest. So we don't blame him for what he does. So, everything is fine. He's not the bad guy.

And meanwhile, Tamlin comes down to being the bad, abusive guy and... That's it. And no, I don't think he's a good person, he doesn't have to have an arc of redemption, what he did with Feyre is still wrong. The difference now is that Tamlin is just that, those are his only attributes now, while Rhysand has attitudes as bad as, perhaps more, than he had. One is being extremely vilanized while the other is the hero of history, when they are only two sides of the same coin.

I can share this hatred as ALL characters feel for Tamlin, if I didn't see how everyone else did such bad things. Let's remember too, one has the job of torturing people, another has decimated an entire village. They really do what they want and... It's okay.

Doesn't work say that the story has a morally grey area with the characters if the consequences balance it does not lean towards the protagonists.

It costs me less to believe that they are what they are every time SJM reinforces in Feyre's POV how selfless Rhysand is and how much Feyre talks about how badass she is and the two of them such a powerful couple. Literally, I start to think the opposite.

(I did a second part of this rant, but I think it can get a little more personal cause focus in Nesta and Feyre that I decided to split it in two)

#sjm talk so much that rhys is the most beatiful male all the time #that i start to see him with a normal appearence #thats sound so wrong #i swear i cant stand eris #if sjm continue with this redemption arc #rhysand is already wrong #cassian too #azril is more acceptable but still no #anti inner circle #anti rhysand #anti feyre #anti acotar #anti acosf #anti ic #anti amren #morally grey

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clinioelerrante · 3 years

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The house elf

Lovingly dedicated to the director @divagonzo and participants of romioneficfest 2021 ( @romioneficfest ) posted on Tumblr.

Finally, in English.

All my appreciation to @headcanonsandmore, without whose help the realization of this translation would have been impossible.

He did an OUTSTANDING job revising the original, something I can never thank him enough for. Any errors or inaccuracies in the text will be my fault, not his.

Even after reading @headcanonsandmore's annotation and, because the text is basically the interaction between a male character and an elf, I will using using he/his/him would perhaps have given the text a lack of freshness, as it was continually making 'notations' to clarify which of them is speaking. I hoped this would make it easier for the reader. I apologise if this may offend anyone in any way.

The home elf

When the first rays of sunlight broke through the windows of Grimmauld Place, the sapphire eyes of Ronald Weasley greeted them open.

He hadn’t slept much that night and there was a good reason for that. In a few hours Hermione, Harry and himself would infiltrate the Ministry to try to obtain Slytherin’s locked.

The first of the Horcruxes they must locate and detsroy brought with it the real meaning of what they were getting into and the terrible dance that they would be facing from them on.

Not that he had been unaware of it before, but he had always felt protected under Dumbeldore’s magic and presence. It was the attack on his own home that reminder him what that protection was over.

Just once, he had felt like this. So exposed, so vulnerable, so insignificant, so useless and scared. It was when Hermione had been injured in the Department of Mysteries. If it were up to him, he would have hidden Hermione with her parents on the other side of the world. This was a nice dream to find solace in but he was aware that without her, the mission would be doomed to failure.

The night when the first lights of dawn were coming to an end had been a constant succession of lucid nightmares in which he had envisioned the thousand and one dreadful fates they might face once they passed through the Ministry’s atrium, and all but two of these nightmares had as their protagonist a witch with thick bushy hair and chocolate-coloured eyes.

For a moment, resentment against Harry nested in Ronald Weasley’s heart. He had no problem sharing the fate of his best friend. If Harry asked him, Ron would be able to go down to hell with one hand tied behind his back, which in fact was exactly what he was about to do! Ron wasn’t stupid. The experience of previous years had given him a realistic perspective of the war. The price that was paid day by day and the price that was still to be paid, but that price should not include a stubborn witch who was wise, crazy and with a mouth he wanted to kiss. Harry should have insisted and forbid her to endanger herself by traveling with them.

As if you or he could have stopped her! A voice whispered in the back of his head causing a hint of a smile to play on the redhead’s lips as images of a platinum blonde ferret getting a superb punch to the nose replayed in his mind.

Besides, you know that if it weren’t for her, you’d both be perfectly dead and He-who-not-to-be-named would be walking the land of Merlin long before.

A brief growl escaped Ron’s smile at the thought that the little voice seemed to have the echo of a too familiar ‘I told you so’.

Even so, he could not refute that claim. Had it not been for Hermione and her prodigious beaded bag, their situation at this very moment might have been very different. They would not have had the supplies to survive until they had reached the Sirius’s residence and had been able to carry out all the surveillance of the ministry...

A thunderous grumble from his stomach put an end to all that introspection.

"I wonder how she’s arranged the food thing? She’s been reminding me of Gamp’s laws for six bloody years," he muttered as he sat up.

Knowing that he was unable to stay in bed for even minute longer, and hoping to calm his nerves and nightmares with a good cup of tea, he started towards the kitchen when he found the light leaking under the door of the room in which he had left Hermione the night before.

This had not ended in one of their famous arguments because he had preferred to bite his tongue rather than go to bed with both of them angry at each other, but he had been very close to grabbing her by the hip, throwing her over his shoulder, and throwing her over the nearest bed to force her to sleep, when she insisted on staying awake, going going over the details of infiltrating a Ministry dominated by Voldemort to the point of exhaustion. The rage he had barely managed to control returned with full force when he realised that she had to keep working on it.

With typical Weasley outburst, he burst into the room ready to end this madness and force her to rest for the few hours that remained, when he froze in the doorway while all the anger that had once made his blood boil evaporated as if it had never been.

Under the flickering candlelight, a sound-asleep Hermione, rested her head on a book on the theory of magic and a countless number of scrolls scribbled with diagrams and plans of the Ministry.

Ron needs to lean against the doorjamb when he feels his legs turn to jelly as he watches the flickering candlelight catch infinite shades of copper from the petite witch’s hair, how, despite the small trickle of drool that escapes from between... Oh, merlin; her lips! They look softly pink and absolutely adorable. The long lashes, blessing eyes that would be able to get anything from him just by looking lovingly at him, and the seven little freckles she has on her nose. He never told her, but he learned the configuration of the constellation Orion when he saw it perfectly represented on that little nose. But above all that, what touches his heart is to see the look on her face completely relaxed, as if for a moment, sleep has blessed her with a few hours of peace, oblivious to all the madness that has been raging around her.

For a moment he tempted to take her in his arms and take her to a bed where she rest properly. H is arms tingle at the mere thought of touching her, but he knows that if she wakes up, she will insist on continuing her crazy review, losing the little rest she so desperately needs, something he will not deny her. Although a part of his heart cries out for the set image of indulging in what has so far been only one of his craziest dreams like taking her to a marriage bed like a bride, the rest of her whole being makes him close the door slowly while casting a soundproofing spell her to prevent any noise from disturbing her sleep.

Only then, as he resumed his journey to the kitchen, does he allow himself to wonder. When she became so important to him? What at point did she become his whole world?

Surprisingly he couldn’t find a specific moment. Somehow, Hermione had been infiltrating his heart without him being fully aware of the stealthy invasion. Evidently, he had realized that what he experienced in the fourth year was a storm of jealousy, so big! That seemed to have turned his brain into jelly and incapable of thinking. But only when he faced the possibility of losing her at the end of fifth year did, he realized the “the sheer extent” of emptiness his had inside if she wasn’t in his life.

And while his mind is lost in the memories of a bossy little girl who scoldes him for having a dirty nose, with a young girl who looks amazing meanwhile she glides majestically through the great dining room with the hand of a pumpkin-headed arse with a ridiculous goatee; Ron finds himself in the kitchen just as he sees the old Sirius’ home elf, stirring between pots and pans, probably anticipating the housework of the day that begins with breakfast for the three tenants of the old Black House, while the Regulus’ locket hangs around it neck.

Well. Not ‘Sirius’’. It’s Harry’s elf now, he rectifies in his mind as he remembers that Harry’s godfather had been the biggest victim of that fateful night...

“Good morning, master”, the broken voice of the old servant interrupts the thoughts that again caused a shudder in his spine. “Perhaps Master Weasley woke up too early? Can Kreacher help his lordship with a cup of tea? ”

“Yes, Kreacher. Please.” He thinks he’ll never get used to the elf’s sensitive ears. Somehow, the little servant always seems to sense what is happening around him, even if it was turning its back on him at the time. Ron’s heart still comes out of his chest when he remembers the time he sneaked into the kitchen looking for something to eat at midnight, and when he closed the cupboard door, he found a pair of bulging eyes within an inch of his face staring suspiciously at him.

“Master would like something more substantial to go with his tea?”

Ron has not gone unnoticed by the change that had taken place in the Elf’s attitude since Harry had given it the Regulus’ locket. Its previous hostility towards Harry had turned into a quasi-devotion after that small act of kindness. He wondered, what would have happened to Kreacher, if all of Hermione’s ideas about S.P.E.W. and dealing elves with dignity and kindness had been applied by Sirius? Perhaps the tormented elf wouldn’t have found the flaw that allowed it to alert the Deatheater. In a twisted way, the last of the Black had forged his fate by treating his servant miserably.

Then, perhaps, he thought, Sirius could have stayed alive and Harry could have had a real family, where he could have felt the love and warmth of a real home.

“Master?”

“No Kreacher, thank you very much”, he replies kindly and with a smile when he returned to the present. Here is another one of Hermione’s crazy ideas for the magical world and which, however, she is right; he thought. “Tea will be enough.”

"As Master Weasley wishes. Should I to prepare breakfast for the other guests, perhaps?" A furry eyebrow rose with doubt.

“I don’t know. Have either of them woken up?” Ron wasn’t about to let either of them lose moments of sleep, so he considered finding out what his friends’ current situation was first before the elf mistakenly interpreted that it was time to wake them both up.

“Master Potter is still asleep, though he hasn’t stopped hanging around in bed and grumbling all night,” Kreacher seemed to know where Ron’s thoughts were headed, “as for the mudblood...”

“DON’T EVER! NEVER! YOU WILL NEVER CALL HER THAT AGAIN, KREACHER. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? DON’T EVER!”

Ron was not even aware of his reaction, until he saw the terrified eyes of the elderly elf as he lifted his arms in an attempt at self-protection.

He was unaware that the chair on which he was sitting slammed against the wall when he stepped abruptly, nor of his agitated breathing, nor how his fist looked white like snow leaning on the table, nor of how he had projected his body towards the elf like the wolf that stalks its prey.

Ron had not been aware of any of it, until he saw an elderly house elf, trembling with terror and with the certainty of supreme punishment in his eyes. That’s when a cascade of revelations is triggered in his mind, like if they had always been there, only now they seem to fit perfectly together.

To see how a being, with a magic infinitely more complex and more powerful that human wizards is so shackled by his social conditioning and fear, to the point to be unable to react even only to save its own life or the lives of its own, to become less than vermin in the eyes of it oppressors. And as he gazes into the terrified eyes of the elf, before her mind’s eye is the image of other eyes. The sweet chocolate eyes full of love and compassion for any living thing of a girl with big front teeth, who wears a hideous S.P.E.W. badge on her chest and that makes him feel so vile, unworthy and miserable that he feels nauseous of himself.

“Kreacher,” his voice sounded harsher than he intended with the try to control the gags that haunt him, causing the elderly shudder before him.

“Kreacher,” he repeated, this time with much more warmth. “Please, have a seat.”

The elf is so scared that it went like the victim of the ‘Imperius’ curse, to the nearest chair to sit, ignoring all the social conditioning that prevents it to sitting under the presence of a wizard.

“Kreacher,” Ron took a deep breath, as if he wanted to draw from the air the inspiration he needed to face the task before him. “I’m sorry; please forgive me. I shouldn’t have yelled at you, or frightened you.”

If previously the elf’s expression was one of absolute terror, it was replaced by one of utter shock.

“Is… Is Master apologizing to Kreacher?” Its voice sounded like a frog’s and his eyes seemed to pop out of their sockets as the thought finally pierced its skull.

“Yeah. You see,” the redhead graded his hair trying to focus. He had a difficult problem before him. On the one hand, he couldn’t put into crisis all the old servant’s beliefs at the stroke of a pen. That would only cause the elf to close itself to listen to him, but on the other hand, he had to make it see or at least consider, the abomination of belittling the mere existence of a sorcerer for the simple fact of his magical origin. “I didn’t mean to hurt or frighten you. Just don’t use that word again when you mean Miss Granger. She really doesn’t deserve it. ”

The elf’s stupor had not disappeared, but a glimmer of curiosity appeared in its gaze.

“Look, I know how all that purity of blood crap goes, but I’m asking you to disregard it for once, okay?” Kreacher’s face implied without a shadow of a doubt/beyond a shadow of a doubt that it wasn’t understanding a word Ron was trying to explain.

“Kreacher. Imagine for a moment that you didn’t know Miss Granger’s origin. That you didn’t know her at all, and that the first time she had set foot in this house, instead of appearing in Muggle clothes and accompanying a handful of outlaws and bloog-traitors, she would have come at the hand of Master Regulus, dressed with fop’s elegant tunics and looking absolutely beautiful and relaxed, as if this had been her social environment all her life.”

“Master Weasley,” the elf looks absolutely desolate, “Kreacher can’t do that. Kreacher can sense the magic of the wizards. Its origin, its intensity. It is impossible that Kreacher would not have realized that she had been a charlaton.”

Ron felt his jaw clench and his back tended to stiffen with pure stiffness as he heard it refer to Hermione as a fake. Getting his point across seemed like an impossible mission. The elf’s behaviour seemed to be conditioned by the first impression of perceiving the origins of a wizard’s magic in conjunction with all its training. Once the conditioning of a lifetime, nay, a whole dynasty, intervened! There was no room to look at anything else....

“… Anything else…” he whispered, “Anything else. There is no second chance.” Ron’s eyes opened like plates.

“Is Master right?“ Kreacher had left the chair and cautiously approached the wizard who seemed unconcerned.

“There is no second chance,” he whispered again, and on his face appeared the smile and glow in her eyes that her opponents in chess they knew so well. “KREACHER! ”

The unsuspecting elf jumped backwards so much that stumbled upon the chair it had previously occupied and began to stumble with its own feet until the fall proved imminent, only to be taken in scooped up and gently placed on its original chair by freckled and plenty scarred arms.

“Are you okay, Kreacher? Ron’s voice had genuine concern. It was not only because of the continual jolts to which he was subjecting the old heart of the weak elf and the fear of destroying any bridge of understanding that might have been created between the two, but that he might have really suffered some injury.

“What did the master just do?” The elderly’s eyes were locked on Ron’s.

“I... I, I’m sorry Kreacher. I’m not good at mastering my impulses. I didn’t mean to scare you again.” Ron’s eyes turned to the ground as shame flooded him again. It was the second time he had frightened the elf. It was only logical that it would never trust him again. Any chance to make it understand the human greatness of the curly-haired witch had gone out the window thanks to his blatant and never well-measured combination of stupidity and impulsivity... “Shit!“ He moaned.

“Did Master help Kreacher?” its eyes widened like saucers. “Master protected Kreacher!”

“Errr...? “ Ron’s face was the manifestation of absolute astonishment.

“Master protected Kreacher! He didn’t forbid Kreacher to punish itself, no. He protected it.” Ron’s face clearly showed that he still did not understand what the servant was telling him. “Only Master Regulus did something similar once.”

“Hermione does it all the time” Oh Merlin! If that’s not a good opening, I don’t play chess.

“What?” Poor Kreacher looked as if it was being carried away by a stream of revelations that prevented it from being able to structure its thinking properly. It had been days since a half-blood Master who it hated had given it the treasure that had belonged to the best Master a house elf could wish for, at the same time forbidding it to punish itself even when it had betrayed him and alerted his enemies. Kreacher knew that it was a mere technicality that it could justify its actions on the basis of Master Harry’s vague instructions. Kreacher was aware that any action taken by a house elf that could directly or indirectly harm his master, could be severely punished, even with life and, in any case, a master did not need much justification to punish his servant if he chose to do so. Now a pureblood had used his own body to protect it, he had apologised for his action and was now letting it know that a mudblood was in the habit of protecting other house elves all the time. Its brain could not quite take it in and the question had slipped from his lips unconsciously.

“Ms. Hermione does it all the time. She loves every magical creature. She’s not worried about its origin. She always says it’s the actions that give greatness, not the origin. Kreacher, is it true that you can sense magic?“ He asked hopeful.

“Kreacher can, master.”

“And is it true that you can feel the intensity of a wizard’s magic, Kreacher?”

The elf nods.

“Then: How do you perceive the power of Miss Hermione’s magic?

The elf blinked, as if had never stopped to properly evaluate that point.

“Magic is very strong with her. Kreacher can remember only one witch with such intense magic, though the muggleborn witch’s might be stronger.”

“Who was the witch, Kreacher?”

“IS. Lady Lestrange, Bellatrix.”

An icy finger runs down the Weasley’s youngest son’s back cutting off his breath.

“She’s nothing like Bellatrix, Kreacher,” Ron can feel, almost physically, as if his heart is being squeezed out of his life. “Hermione has sweet eyes, full of curiosity and affection. They don’t exude hatred and madness like that motherfucker,” there is a dull anger growing in Ron. A roaring fire of anger, fear and hatred.

“It was she, the one who tortured Neville’s parents to madness. Two purebloods whose only sins were to defend innocents people who had never harmed anyone or anything from her madness and hatred. It is people like her who are responsible for Neville and Harry not having parents. It is people like her who drag sensitive people like Regulus down a path from which there is no return Kreacher. It’s people like her who bring pain and suffering into the world just because they think they are superior to everyone else,” he says as he tries to pull himself together.

“The point, Kreacher, is: Hermione...” there is genuine passion, there is a palpable devotion in every word that comes out of his mouth... “not only she is the most brilliant, studious and beautiful witch of this generation, but she is the best person you can imagine. That she’s a witch is a fucking blessing because, instead of the Muggles being the ones who have the opportunity to benefit from her privileged intelligence, her bravery, her desire for justice and her infinite love for any creature, it’s the magical world that has that opportunity because of “He-who-must-not-be-named” and People like Bellatrix, we’re being assholes refusing to accept that gift and all that magic that far surpasses the rest of the three of us and...”

“That’s wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“Her magic is not the most powerful of the three of you.” The elf’s narrow eyes remain nailed into the ocean of the youngest of Weasley’s men, like if they were contemplating something only they can see.

“Right. Obviously Harry has to be a hell of a wizard if he has to face the Dark Lord”, he says, looking away from the elf as he feels a pinch of envy in his heart for not being good enough and losing missing the surprised look Kreacher gives him, “but I’m sure her magical power must be very much like Harry...”

It is then when the emotional teaspoon that is Ronald Weasley is aware of how this crucial game of chess is unfolding.

Kreacher himself has just breached its own defence when the idea of a muggleborn can be as powerful as the most abominable Deatheater in the host of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. But that is not enough. That may have shocked its brain, but to win the game, to truly win it, Hermione must win the heart of the tormented being.

“She’s the smartest witch I’ve ever met, to the point where not even that smug git Snape, someone who enjoys making everyone look like fool , has been unable to keep her from scoring less than Outstanding on all his tests.” He proudly recalls all the times Hermione managed to get a pure curl of irritation out of the pitiful professor. One for every time she gave him the right answer even when that wasn’t the lesson of the day. "Continuously defeats any pureblood by doing a magic they aren’t even capable of dreaming of. By sheer intelligence she solved a lethal riddle in her first year and in her second she brewed an NEWT level potion that only master alchemists are capable of performing, discovered a fucking basilisk crawling through the castle’s pipes and survived an encounter with the damn thing using a simple hand mirror."

Ron can’t help the shiver that runs down his spine when he remembers the image of a little girl in a bed too big for her, stiff, limp and cold as snow. It was then that he realized there was something different about Hermione. He didn’t know what it was, but something was bloody wrong with him if she got hurt.

“You should see her when she’s studying, Kreacher. She’s quite a sight to behold. When she’s studying a particularly difficult subject she frowns adorably, her eyes sparkle with determination and she leans over whatever she’s reading so hard she looks like she wants to get inside the book and when she’s about to master all that new knowledge, she bites her bottom lip so hard I sometimes fear she’s going to hurt herself, but there’s an immense joy in her gaze. Just like when she is reading something she particularly likes. Then, she starts playing with one of her crazy curls by twisting it around her finger. I think she must be the only person in the world who flirts with a book while reading it,” there have been so many times watching her study in the library that Ron doesn’t even need to concentrate to conjure up such images. They are so deep in Ron’s heart that they are already a part of him, and the memory of them brings a smile to his freckled face.

“She is also courageous, determined, and just, like the day she shook a superb punch at the ferret’s nose in her third year...”

“Did she hit a ferret?” The elf’s jaw dropped as listened to the redhead.

"What do you mean...?" Ron’s initial surprise is quickly replaced by wide eyes as comprehension washes over him, given way to a thunderous laugh. "Not at a ferret, Kreacher. ‘The Ferret one.’ She gave a fucktastic punch to the only and genuine heir to Malfoy’s House," he completes with a chuckle meanwhile he watches the poor elf’s eyes pop out of their sockets as it imagines how she attacked a renowned pureblood with something as mundane as a punch to the nose. "Oh come on, Kreacher! That was great and she looked awesome. Besides...” his face suddenly turns serious as he looks at the elderly servant who still doesn’t seem to have come out of its stupefaction. “She was only defending an innocent creature from a spoiled child willing to gloat over its death just because it hurt his self-centred pride. She spent sleepless nights searching through old treatises of magical law for some way to save the life of a creature that wasn’t even human. Only because it was the right thing to do. Only because it was innocent.” A weight settles on Ron’s soul when he remembers that she was alone all those nights and he wasn’t there to help her.

“I’ve seen her support for her best friend and almost lose her life for it even knowing that he was wrong,” the lump in his throat threatens to keep him from talking. “I have seen her risk losing that same friendship just to protect him, and I have seen her be taken for eccentric or crazy just to defend that creatures like you, should be treated with dignity, regardless of race and origin.”

In his troubled speech, Ron feels the moisture flood his eyes and he wipes it away by running his sleeve over his face, unaware of how the elf has cocked its head slightly to one side and is watching him intently.

“She is also kind, sweet and loving.” The weight of his heart disappears when a warmth envelops him. “At eleven years old and not knowing him at all, she helped the shyest, most insecure guy look for his lost pet. Even if she wasn’t a prefect, she was always willing to take first-year tadpoles under her wing, to look after them and guide them when they were stunned by how great Hogwarts is. She helps them find their way around the castle, helps them complete their homework, hugs them when they miss their parents and tells them incredible stories that only she knows from the thousand and one books she has read,” she says as her eyes sparkle with pride in her best friend, “and she will do it with each and every one of them. To all of them she will give her incredible intelligence and her boundless love regardless of any other condition”.

That’s when he realizes that Kreacher is staring at him with its eyes and mouth wide open, like if it can’t believe what it’s seeing.

“Errr... ahem... This... This doesn’t mean she doesn’t have flaws, she does. She has a temper worthy of an explosive potion,” he says as he rubs his tingling arms, “So many times she’s so convinced she’s right, she forgets that the people concerned also have a say for themselves. Like that time when as prefect she sent extra homework to the OWLs students because she thought they weren’t preparing them,” a smile creeps onto his face. “Kreacher, you should have seen when McGonagall found out. She asked her if she wanted her position as head of Gryffindor house and Hermione turned so red she looked like a real Weasley.”

He doesn’t know why he said it, but as soon as he finishes saying it, the image of the most beautiful Hermione, dressed in a flowing white satin robe at the beginning of a hallway and holding a small bouquet in her hands, suffices that her heart seems to have lost the ability to beat properly.

“Kreacher”, he says softly looking at the elf with the intensity of one who is trying to convey the most important message of his life and fears that his words will fail him, “It’s not that she wants to offend you. Not you or the rest of the house elves when she wants to give you freedom. Freedom is a divine gift, yes, but it’s like a good roast rib. It may be tasty and crunchy, a fucking delight to the palate, but you can’t force it through a baby’s gullet. That way all you can do is to kill him with almost complete certainty.”

“It is simply that she loves you too much. She loves you so much, she loves every creature in Merlin’s green fields so much that, she cannot wait to give you what you all deserve. That is why she is wrong. She does not yet see that you are not ready for freedom, “he says to the servant’s curious gaze.“ No... I don’t mean to belittle you, the house elves, I mean, “he completes in a stammer, raising his hands in peace. But it is true nonetheless. Freedom frightens you, it breaks the scheme of things and the rules of your world. She cannot see it yet, Kreacher, but in time she will, and you will have no better ally and no better friend than she.”

“Is that her greatest flaw, Master?" It seems impossible, but Ron would be willing to swear to Merlin that the elf is leaning towards him as he looks deep into his blue eyes, as if it wants to discover something hidden deep within the troubled red-head.

“Well, not really," a sad smile creeps across his freckled face. “She has a pitiful interest in pumpkin-headed wizards with horrible accents and pompous nasties too full of themselves, as long as they’re great quidditch players."

“Still, Master is very impressed by Lady Granger.” The elf’s eyes are practically flashing before him and yet Ron can’t find a shred of contempt, mockery or hostility in his voice, if anything... recognition? And then something breaks in Ron when he realizes that the little bastard has just called her ‘Lady’ for the first time.

“So much that I would gladly give my own life so that she would have a full and happy magical life. Away from all the horror and war, away from the absence of her parents and the fear of being killed at any moment just because they are Muggles. Even if she was married…” his voice breaks,” she was married to either of those two bloody gits and their kids were...

Maybe it’s from years of involuntary training trying to save his life or their other two very best friends, maybe it’s from the keen senses of a quidditch keeper or maybe it’s just instinct, but Ron feels a tingling on his back on his neck, a feeling of a presence behind him just before he hears the crackling of the wood of the floor behind him and Ron can see how, for a moment, Kreacher’s eyes abandon his own eyes and turn to the space behind the redhead to open like plates when they focusing one specific point behind him. It may be again for all those years lurking around death, for all the trainings that have sharpened your reflexes or just warrior instinct, but without waiting to the command of his brain, he right hand goes to his wand, his body shrink to minimize as target and he moves around looking for a twist to shield midway between the servant and the place where the sound came from and, when he does, he does it in such a natural way, so instinctive, that seems that protecting a little body was often his only goal in life. And it’s when his head is close to complete the turn that will lead him to face the threat, when he feels a rough hand holding his wrist tightly enough to unbalance it and stop the rotation of his body. Even so, the arm with his wand continues its trajectory to point to the space that a few moments ago was behind him and one nonverbal ‘Protego’ unfolds from it while her eyes search for the owner of the hand that has stopped his movement to meet, face to face, with other eyes. Bulging, wrinkled eyes, gazing intently at him and glowing with the light of understanding.

“Master loves her.”

“With all that I am and with all that I will be, Kreacher. With so much intensity, it hurts. It hurts as much as hell itself.”

It is not a question. It is a truth revealed and as such it can no longer be shrouded in the shadows nor can it be denied, but needs to be proclaimed because it can no longer be contained.

And the elf nods. Once again, her eyes turn to the space behind Ron as he feels that the prey that the little character exerted on his arm gives way, allowing him to regain full mobility. That’s when Ron turns his head to face whatever is behind him just for his eyes can see an empty door.

“This damned house and its creepy noises are going to drive me bloody mad”, he says as his shoulders sink as all the tension he has been building up escapes from him.

“She didn’t know”, he murmurs. “Master hasn’t told Lady Granger.” Kreacher ignores the insult to Black’s ancestral meanwhile its inquisitive eyes turn to the tormented redhead.

“No, Kreacher. Not yet, and I can’t do it now. What’s at stake is too important and much bigger than us”, he says, shaking his head, as if he was trying to get some thoughts out of his brain and clear his own ideas. “When I confess to her and she tells me she doesn’t share my feelings, I’d have nothing left to fight for except to keep them both safe and sound, and leave if we win them. And if by some miracle she shared them, I couldn’t fulfill that mission. I could endanger Harry because when it came to protecting them, she would always be my priority.”

It is when the rays of sunshine flood the old kitchen that Ron realizes how far the morning has gone and the dreaded moment has come. It’s time to complete the final preparations to infiltrate the Ministry. With a snort of resignation, he heads for the door to wake up her friends when he feels the elf’s hand again on his arm, only in this case it is a gentle grip. Very similar to the touch of a friend who’s just trying to get your attention.

“No”, he says in a calm but determined tone. “Kreacher will take care of waking up the rest of the wizards.”

“No. Kreacher must to insist. Master Harry and fellows have a long day ahead.” The little servant surrounds the tall figure of Gryffindor’s old guardian while gently pushing him towards a chair in front of the large kitchen table. “Master Weasley will finish his tea and then Kreacher will return so that all of them can have a proper breakfast.”

Resigned to the now familiar elderly elf’s stubbornness, Ron nods and takes a seat in the chair as he lifts his cup of tea to his lips and watches it leaves the kitchen.

As soon as it has crossed the threshold of the door, the last servant of the ancient and honourable Black House turns towards the bedrooms, passing by the figure who leans against the wall, tries to keep herself hidden into the shadows while holding her hands over her face, trying to silence the desperate sobs that make her small body shake all over.

“Now Lady Granger knows”, it whispered as it turned to face the young woman.

Between sobs and shudders, a slight nod of her head is her only response.

“Perhaps it is time Master Weasley knew too."

The elf’s voice sounds firm, but there is a decided edge of pleading in it.

A head full of curls sharply denies, sending the wild locks flying in all directions, while the hands covering the face wipe away the tears that run down it.

“It is not possible, Kreacher. Like Ron said, the stakes are too high. Much higher than the two of us, and I can’t let Harry stop being Ron’s priority. Without Harry, there’s no future for anyone. Without Harry there’s no future for both of us.”

“Master Harry is not the most powerful magician under the roof of this house”, says the elf as if it had not heard the prodigious witch’s answer as its eyes turn to the kitchen door.

“I know,” she says in a sob as a sad smile insinuates over a face that is once again, streaked with tears and whose eyes focus on the same point the elf is looking at as if she expects to be able to see the redhaired man on the other side of it at any moment.

“However”, Kreacher’s eyes now turn fixedly to Hermione’s eyes, “he is not the most self-confident wizard either.”

“I know that too, and I curse myself every day for what I have contributed to his self-loathing.” The girl’s eyes briefly meet the elf’s and then search the threshold of the kitchen again, like has unwittingly become the border between the will and the duty." But we’ll both have to wait Kreacher," and her eyes, now full of fire, meet the elf’s again. "Though right now, my whole being is crying out for the desire to walk through that door and on the kitchen table, make him my own like only a woman can make a man her own to seal the deal. Because I’ve been his, forever.”

“That’s not fair to him.”

“Nothing in this war is fair, Kreacher.”

It nods in understanding and just when it seems that he is going to resume its path in search of its rightful master, it stops and looking carefully at the muggleborn, makes its fingers snap making Hermione feel a rejuvenating freshness running through her red eyes and her eyelids swollen by tears.

“Master Weasley doesn’t need any more worries at this time.”

“Thank you, Kreacher”, she smiles, “and thank you for not giving me up earlier”, she says, pointing to the treacherous loose piece of wood on the floor, just outside the kitchen door.

And for the first time in its long life Kreacher, the last proud servant of the ancestral, noble and elitetist pureblood House Blacks, gives a genuine smile to a muggleborn witch.

“It will be our secret Lady Granger”, it says as it completes a graceful bow and leaves the place to look for its rightful master, even though it feels that something inside its has changed forever.

Months later:

“Hang on a moment!” said Ron sharply. “We’ve forgotten someone!”

“Who?” asked Hermione.

“The house-elves, they’ll all be down in the kitchen, won’t they?”

“You mean we ought to get them fighting?” asked Harry.

“No,” said Ron seriously, “I mean we should tell them to get out. We don’t want any more Dobbies, do we? We can’t order them to die for us —”

It only takes a moment, but for Hermione Granger it’s as if she’s been hit by the ‘Arresto Momentum’ spell. A lifetime of feelings and images flashes through her privileged mind so real, so sharp and clear, it’s as if she were reliving her own memories in a pesieve...

Terderness

A beautiful boy with a stain of dirt on his nose...

Loyalty

A rough stick falling over the head of a mountain troll...

Nobleness

Slugs vomited in a bucket...

Courage

Badly wounded, covered in dirt, sweat and blood, standing, with a broken leg, like a bulwark between two teenagers and a serial killer…

Jealousy

The broken arm of an action figure at the foot of a bed...

Devotion

A male figure with horribly scarred arms, who watches over her when she wakes up with a terrible wound in her chest...

Excitement

The smell of parchment, freshly cut grass and a soap with scents of wood and clove when hug that glorious body...

Hope

A broom that materializes in front of the burrow driven by a metamorpagus witch...

Confort

Hands joined, just before sleeping at Grimmaud Place...

Love

Blue eyes that watch over her when she wakes up at Shell Cottage...

Fear

A small boy, with a large head wound on a chequered floor...

Panic

A freckly face, as white as a sheet, on a bed surrounded by a bunch of redheads who look scared...

Terror

A mangled arm that bleeds so much that it is impossible to believe that a human being can contain so much blood...

Desperation

A soaked figure, with his face crazed with pain and anger, just before disappearing in the pouring rain on an autumn night...

Everything is a stormy maelstrom that consumes her, takes her breath away and threatens to blow her head up incapable of bringing together so many emotions at once, and that’s when a picture emerges above all that emotional explosion. A scene watched sneakily from the half-light, under the threshold of a door in an old manor house.

The image of a humble old house elf listening Ronald Weasley’s confession of love for her.

And the feeling that neither can, nor wants to be hidden any longer, breaks through. The imperative need, greater than breathing, to take what is rightfully hers and which she has been denying herself for far too long.

She is barely aware of what is going on around her, drunk as she is, of the emotion that envelops her. She does not hear the sound of fangs striking the ground, nor does she see a lightning-shaped scar warp as the eyebrows above green eyes rise as they widen, nor the movement of her own legs, nor the surprise reflected in a freckled face. Her heart is all she feels, the love overflowing from it and then the trembling of her own body and the feeling of to be at home when she jumps up and embraces the impressive hunk before her. The tremor in the core of her belly as she attacks lips that seem to have been made just for her. The vertigo she feels when Ronald Weasley, "Ron", her first, one and only true love, makes her flutter like a schoolgirl in the embrace that envelops her as he kisses her back with such intensity that she feels her toes curl and the shudder of her centre becomes so intense it burns. It burns like the very fires of hell within her.

He loves her.

She loves him.

And both will fight like hell, against any power in heaven or on earth that tries to separate them again.

The End.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/33865393

#Ron Weasley #Hermione Granger #Ron/Hermione #ROMIONE #Kreacher

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subjectivelycorrectcritics · 3 years

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Heartland ~ Breakfast Rants

Remembering this show, having rewatched it, and seeing why I stopped watching in the first place, I just really have to rant. My insane ramblings are under the cut.

Amy has to be the least likable protagonist I've ever seen. At first, I could pass off her bratty behavior because her mom had just passed and she was heavily grieving. Yet, as the show goes on, she continues to have this snobby attitude, treating even her own sister that is trying to help her horribly. She is treated as the mature, talented one that knows better than everyone else, even when she clearly doesn't, and throws hissy fits like a child. She's so sweet and kind, except to anyone that is remotely close to her. Amy is one of those people who can be great to work with or serves as the cool sisterly figure, only for you to get to know her better and realize that the status has really gone to her head and she'll only treat you well if you keep feeding into it. Amy never takes any criticism and, therefore, her character never improves. At some point, Ashley is a million times more likable than her, which is extremely ironic considering that, at first, she serves as her bully and rival. I find it hilarious that, even when the two calm down and become friends, Ashley rightfully never acts like she likes Amy for very good reason. Ashley grew as a person, became very kind and caring, while Amy did not at all. Rewatching the show I kept thinking, "oh, her character will get better, I remember the show just has a rough start", only to be proven so, so very wrong.

That's not even mentioning how Amy, and collectively the show, treats Ty. Every struggle in their relationship is his fault, even when Amy literally does the same things. When Ty tries to use what happened with Chase to prove that hey, a kiss you didn't ask for from someone that isn't your partner isn't your fault, she says it's "unfair". Amy gets away with literally everything for no reason and just treats him absolutely terrible. She's the one that gets all the support and anytime Ty asks her to be understanding of his shortcomings or tries to actually give context to situations she's mad at him for, he is basically told to shut up. Meanwhile, if Amy tries to explain it to Ty and he refuses to listen, he's being "unreasonable". Ty has had such a hard life yet is never given relief from anyone, except maybe Jack (and only sometimes). The double standard is painfully obvious and follows Amy in all her relationships. Everyone almost always has to apologize to her because Amy is so smart and kind, who could ever be mean to her? Except sometimes people aren't even being mean, they are either trying to be supportive and she takes it completely the wrong way and yells at them or rightfully calling her out. This would be fine if the show admitted she was a heavily insecure character that needed to realize this and improve, but no, she is constantly treated as the golden girl and never truly changes, instead, other characters are expected to change for her.

One of the few times she admitted she was wrong and being completely insecure, apologizing to Ty's female friend, she is proven right almost moments later because, just kidding, despite how nice this girl is, we're going to make her act completely out of character and get Ty to cheat against Amy. Against Amy, who she wanted to be friends with. Right. Females, don't ever let your man have female friends because, no matter how they act or who they are as people, they're all definitely convincing your man to cheat. Just ignore all the male friends Amy is allowed to have because?

Amy's golden girl status, no, the Fleming golden status, especially bothers me with the treatment of Mallory. Mallory is literally kicked around by the whole cast and the writing plays it off as if she consistently isn't. Whenever Mallory calls anyone like Amy out on her bratty behavior, she gets dismissed or told off. The show and characters constantly insist she is part of the family, but never bother to include Mallory in anything or treat her with respect. I understand she is sort of supposed to be the little sister, but Amy and Lou treating her as an annoyance only works when she was a bratty little kid that always got in the way and wasn't understanding of both the sister's issues. However, as the show progresses and Mallory matures into a, yes rather talkative, but sweet and understand individual, it just makes Amy and Lou look god-awful. I will never forget how much I hated Lou when Mallory rightfully didn't want to be her babysitter anymore and Lou was way more upset at losing an employee than losing a friend. Yikes. There is one time where Lou apologizes for being horrible to Mallory, but Mallory is so soon to shift the blame on herself (calling the Christmas tree she decorated horrible, something Lou previously did) it doesn't even matter.

But it isn't just them, Tim and Jack basically blame her for letting out criminals, despite it being a horrifying situation where she was threatened and one that wouldn't have happened if they took her along in the first place. Then there's Amy and Ty basically blaming her for the burning of the barn...yeah. Mallory is basically everyone's scapegoat and character to force their frustrations onto, which could work if she actually was an awful or sneaky individual who the casts are reasonably suspicious of and mad at having around, but that isn't her at all. If the show thought they needed this, they should have kept Chase around for this and given Mallory the treatment she deserved. I can't feel all warm and mushy during family moments when Mallory is constantly treated as the outsider that the amazing Flemings have to put into place. Yes, the Flemings with such highly skewered dynamics that Tim and Jack can't even stand to be in the same room at first and are constantly getting into fights. The Flemings who have gotten into gunfights. The Flemings whose daughter marries the oil guy that almost ruined their land. The Flemings whose birth dad has a secret son and treats his mother pretty terribly. I'm just saying, they are far from perfect, so why are they shown as these cool heroes that are totally entitled to judge everyone else on the outside? If I were Mallory, I would have left them a long time ago.

This issue is only made worse when Georgie shows up. I literally can not describe how much I hate Georgie. On my first viewing of the show, she was one of my favorites. I have no idea why. She is a complete brat that is, for some reason, treated as a perfect angel. I feel bad for her situation, yet I also felt bad for Amy's, and neither can be likable characters unless they recognize and improve on their flaws. Georgie is a mini Amy. She is talented and lets this completely go to her head, Amy basically encourages this. When Mallory is rightfully upset that this random kid that showed up is treated a million times better than her and immediately accepted into the family, when she has been trying for years, what excuse does Amy have for her family? None, she just told Mallory to "grow up". Again, let me circle back to how immature Amy acts. She attacks everyone due to her own insecurities, blames everyone but refuses to take accountability for herself, and throws tantrums when things don't go her way. She of all people said this to the rational Mallory, the one who always notices things she doesn't and always has to push the cast. She is such a positive force for the Flemings (that they obviously don't want or need because aren't they just so perfect...ugh) and, when she finally asks for some proper treatment for it, she gets told to just deal with it. Yeah, it was at this point, with the toxic treatment from the Flemings finally being recognized, but by getting worse with no accountability, and Georgie becoming an increasingly annoying character that I finally stopped watching.

It's too bad they completely screwed up the relationship between Lou and Peter and, after a point, didn't have much of the father and son relationship between Jack and Ty, because those were the only relationships that I was invested in and didn't make me want to pull my hair out. I also would have loved to see more of Ashley. While she starts off as a jerk, I ended up really loving her character a lot.

Anyways, that was my Heartland rant. I can see why some people enjoy the show but after a point, I just could not stand the lack of progression in the characters and, in my opinion, its flaws only became worse. So yeah, never rewatching or watching that show again lol.

~ SuddenCoffeeMug ☕

#TV show #show rant #heartland #heartland rant #netflix show #breakfastrants #let this be a reminder to myself to never watch this show again #it is so not worth it #just my opinion #suddencoffeemug

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magnumdays · 4 years

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Juliet Higgins is the Main Character of Magnum PI - An Argument

Now you’re all going; Huh? Did you miss the fact that the show is named “Magnum PI”? It’s obvious who the main character is; Thomas Magnum.

An yes, there is no question that Magnum is the protagonist; he drives the story, moving plot forward towards the conclusion of each episode.

But the question is, is he the main character in the sense that; is he the character who has changed the most because of the experiences he’s gone through in the series (so far)?

I’d argue he’s not and that this role actually belongs to Juliet Higgins. And that Magnum & Higgins, together (both as just business partners or something more), makes for a much more compelling story.

Don’t believe me? Let’s to a quick run down to where the characters start compared to where they are now.

Magnum: (pilot) Has 3 friends he trusts with his life, works as a PI, lives in Robin Master’s guest house and drives his Ferrari, recently had his heartbroken but still believes in love. Has a frenemy-ish relationship with Juliet Higgins.

Magnum: (2x14) Has 3+ friends he trusts with his life (Juliet takes Nuzo’s place here and maybe Gordon counts now), works as a PI, lives in Robin Master’s guest house and drives his Ferrari, recently had his heartbroken but still believes in love. Has a frenemy-ish relationship (Work) partner with Juliet Higgins.

Higgins: (Pilot) has about one friend on the island (the British dude that dies), works as Robin’s majordomo, disavowed by MI6, wants vengeance on the man who killed her fiance, emotionally disconnected from pretty much everyone.

Higgins: (2x14) has 3-4 close friends who she trusts (counting Kumu), found her fiance’s killer and chose to arrest him rather than kill him, chose to walk away from MI6 to work with Magnum as his partner to help people. Starting to open up to both Magnum & Kumu emotionally.

Basically, the only thing that has changed in Magnum’s life is that he now works with Higgins and takes her feelings more into account. And the girl he’s kind of heartbroken about is Abby instead of Hannah. But Magnum was never painted as totally closed off even as he was mourning/getting over Hannah and her betrayal. He’s grieving Nuzo, but this seems to have limited effect on his life (perhaps because we, the viewers, did not see Magnum’s life with Nuzo in it for long enough to notice the change.)

So compared to Higgins whose had much more emotional as well as actual stuff change (catching Viper + turning down MI6 + working with Magnum), Magnum has remained very similar.

This is, of course, partly a product of the medium; TV, especially episodic, needs a familiar hero and structure.

Still, it clear to see that Higgins has changed and Magnum has not.

It’s also interesting to point out that in season 1, Higgins is antagonistic towards him but he is not antagonistic towards her. I mean he gives as good as it gets, but it is largely Higgins who seems to be “attacking” him; changing gate codes, showing up at his house early with a bunch of kids to annoy him, setting the dogs after him and having his Ferrari towed.

Her version of this / explanation to this is stated well it in the “Blood in the Water” episode “It is as if your sole purpose in life is to needle me.” Starting out, she feels he’s coming into her life and changing it. And she initially resists the change by lashing out at him but this becomes harder to do as she at the same time is growing to like him.

Most of this early behavior is also filmed in a way, where while she’s not an “evil” bad guy, it’s a behavior that is wrong and should be “corrected” and as of lately it has been changing.

Compare setting the dogs on him for “stealing” wine in 2x01 to just 2x09 where she uncorks a bottle for them both to share. To the pilot when she barely will let him borrow the Ferrari to go find Nuzo’s killers to 2x11 when she flies to South America to save him and there is no question in her doing that what so ever. Actually got up on stage and singing karaoke in a bar at the end of 2x14 (I don’t see pilot Higgins ever doing that.) Telling Magnum in 2x03 that she’ll be his partner and “she’s found something she doesn't want to lose in Hawaii” and in 2x13 telling him she wants to be honest with him, compared to her nonexistent “emotional openness” in early season 1.

Juliet Higgins has changed a lot, mostly thanks to Magnum and always for the better (or so it is famed). Other characters (both the series regulars as well as clients and characters like Jin) influence her thoughts and views more than they do Magnum and thanks to this she’s becoming a fully realized character, dealing with her issues and letting herself care about people. And Magnum is the catalyst, the herald and sidekick (and even antagonist) all rolled into one, of her journey. He is impacting and changing her life but he himself is remaining very similar to how we see him in the pilot.

Meanwhile, Magnum’s tendency to ask for way too extreme favors from his friends all the time and being kind of reckless when on a case (and also never having any money/borrowing money from his friends) is poked at but is not (IMHO) framed as truly problematic, something that he needs to change or is even really that bad. There are no consequences for him always asking TC and Rick to help. Even if he temporarily loses Gordon’s friendship after lying about Hannah, that is eventually forgiven when he apologizes. Magnum has not changed nor is he portrayed as needing to change; internally, emotionally or externally.

Perhaps his progressing relationship with Higgins could be seen as change. He’s learned to work with someone (even if it was not established he had problems doing so from the start.) If the Miggy ship sails, they’ll both have had a satisfying relationship/ romance arch, starting off as kinda enemies, becoming frienemies, then friends and then partners and eventually being romantically involved.

Being alone in the pilot and ending up in a relationship by the end of the series (something we viewers love to see in movies and shows) is a good emotional arch. So I guess I could give that to Magnum. If it happens.

Only Magnum has not been shown to struggle with making emotional connections with people. He did have some random girls in season 1, but when meeting Abby he seems open to a committed relationship. Him entering into a romantic relationship with Higgins wouldn’t be as big of a deal to him, because it already been established he’s open to it, unlike Higgins.

Perhaps they will backtrack on this, having Magnum mention that maybe he wasn’t ready to move on and that might have been why Abby didn’t want to stay and fight for him (even if it was in-show heavily implied Abby ended things with him because she felt he had a stronger connection with Higgins than her.)

Change is part of why we like to ship couples, the positive differences in one's life that come from being with someone who truly completes us.

Something many (if not most) people want to find; be it a romantic soulmate or a best friend kind of soulmate. So Magnum getting with “the right girl” would be satisfying in a sense for his character.

BUT the one with the emotional baggage here is Juliet. Her hang-ups are bigger than his. She will have to change and develop more than him before she’s ready more of a serious relationship. Not only is there the Richard part, the I’m an emotionally suppressed Brit part but we got even more recent demonstration that she has trouble trusting and sharing the parts of herself she’s insecure about. I mean she wouldn’t even tell with Magnum that she’d dated the married guy, instead lying about it and faking an injury, because she was judging herself and fearing he would judge her too in 2x13. That’s some serious hang-ups.

Worth noting; main characters don’t have to change (especially not in action/crime TV shows). So even if Magnum never changes much he will always be the protagonist, whose eyes we view the story through. It’s his name on the door, after all, even if he changes it in-show to Magnum & Higgins Private Investigators, they won’t do that to the show in the real world. It’s through Magnum’s eyes the cases are framed. He is our point of view character.

But Juliet Higgins is the character that changes and her “flaws” at the start and their eventual realization and attempt to change, is what makes the story interesting. Characters changing, letting people in, doing the right thing, becoming part of something makes us, the viewer, want to change too, be part of something. Be better.

Because if they can do it, we can too.

And in Magnum PI, Juliet Higgins is the character who’s changed the most. The character with the emotional as well as external arch. The character who’s been shown needs to change and actually has. The outsider who has become part of something. Something I’d say makes her more of a main character than anyone else in this series.

This makes the relationship between Magnum and Higgins, the relationship between protagonist and main character the most crucial part of the show. Their relationship, as frenemies, friends and now partners, is crucial because of how these two factors work together. In the duality of this, things become much more interesting and gives us two-character with equal importance to the overall series and its emotional impact on the audience.

So, in conclusion, Magnum is the protagonist. He leads the story, frames it, narrates it at times. Higgins is the main character, she changes because of the other characters and the story.

#juliet higgins #character analysis #magnum pi #thomas magnum #miggy #it's just a bit of fun #think about it #character arch #magnum pi meta

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beneaththetangles · 5 years

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BtT Light Novel Club Chapter 14: Ascendance of a Bookworm, Part 1 Vol. 1

And here we are with our discussion of the first volume of Ascendance of a Bookworm! With the anime having just started, now is the perfect time to dive into this “bibliophile fantasy” and see what lies in store. @jeskaiangel will be joining me this time as we look at what makes this isekai story special.

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1. What are your overall impressions of the novel?

Jeskai Angel: The book is an offbeat but solid reincarnation isekai. WHAT happens isn’t anything special (a small child plays with mud and does math!), but the way it’s told makes for an enjoyable tale.

stardf29: The first thing that sticks out to me is how it goes against the usual tropes of isekai web/light novels. The protagonist doesn’t have any special cheat powers; in fact, she’s born into a sick body that has trouble doing anything. On top of that, she’s born into a poor family, and we get to see how hard life is for such a family in general. And there’s no sign of a harem, of course. That said, Myne does still have her knowledge of modern life and still uses it to introduce stuff to this world, so there’s still a bit of isekai familiarity in there. Overall, it feels like an isekai story without the otaku filters, which is definitely nice to see.

2. What is your opinion of Myne as a character and as the protagonist?

Jeskai Angel: Myne works really well as a protagonist. Because she’s been quite literally sheltered, as in bedridden, much of her short life, she knows little about her world, and this makes it possible for us to learn about the world right alongside her. Like with Mile in Abilities Average, her character also seems to combine elements from both her past life and her new one. She has esoteric knowledge no child her age would have, yet she’s also capable of being quite immature in her responses to situations.

stardf29: Myne is definitely an interesting protagonist, in part for the reasons you mentioned. To add to that, it helps that she has a definite goal in this world, so she’s not drifting around aimlessly. The other thing, though, is that she can be quite selfish, since for the most part she only cares about getting books and doesn’t think too much about how she’s making trouble for others. While I’ve seen some complaints about this, I think it provides a nice opportunity for some character development, which does start to show up later in the book.

3. What do you think about the other characters in the story?

Jeskai Angel: In a way, it’s all the other characters that really sold me on the story. Myne’s relationships with her parents, sister, friends, even Mr. Otto, etc., are just incredibly heartwarming. You really get the sense that all these people love Myne. The depth of the relationships takes a story of a little girl failing to make books and lets it be something special.

stardf29: Yeah, I really like how the other characters play into the story. It’s one of the things that I mentioned helps make this feel not as otaku-fied, by having supporting characters that naturally fit in the story and in Myne’s life, instead of filling out a checklist of character tropes.

4. How did the lack of common isekai fantasy elements affect your experience with this story?

Jeskai Angel: I found it interesting how basically nonexistent common fantasy tropes were. Unlike most isekai stories that take place in an openly magical world, this book has almost nothing that is explicitly supernatural. We, along with Myne, do hear about some unusual plants that don’t exist on earth, but it’s not really clear if they are magical or just weird. I felt the apparent lack of magic really gave the setting a different feel compared to other isekai stories. Of course, the very end of this volume does betray a hint that magic will be involved in Myne’s future, but that doesn’t negate the strikingly mundane tone of our introduction to Myne’s world. Her struggles are more relatable, I think, because she’s not (at least as of vol. 1) living in a high fantasy setting.

stardf29: The immediate benefit of the relative lack of magic is that Myne cannot rely on any magic “cheats” to get her books. She has to do it the historical way, which allows the book to be a bit educational on how writing methods used to be made.

That said, as you mentioned, the end does hint that this world does have magic. Moreover, it’s something that seems to be exclusive to nobles, meaning it’s likely largely behind the social stratification of this world. So the relative lack of magic also highlights just how low-class Myne’s current circumstances are. And then, of course, there’s the matter of the “devouring”…

5. We touched on this a bit earlier: how do you think Bookworm‘s portrayal of “older girl in a young girl’s body” compares to how Abilities Average did it?

Jeskai Angel: It was fine, though I think I’d say Abilities Average handled the issue slightly better. I suspect that’s because Mile is a bit older than Myne, meaning there’s less of a gap between her physical age and the age of her past-life-memories. With the larger age gap between Myne and Urano, the blending of the two identities isn’t quite as smooth. But the story actually makes good use of the incongruities — they provide a basis for various other characters to recognize that Myne is strange, behaving oddly for a child her age or knowing things they wouldn’t have expected.

It occurs to me that Mile never really seems conflicted about her identity, easily accepting her reincarnated nature upon regaining her memories. On the other hand, Myne seems noticeably conflicted at times about whether she’s Myne or Urano. I think her behavior ultimately shows that she is truly BOTH, perhaps even more than she wants to admit. As a tangent, it’s interesting to compare these two series with Seirei Gensouki, which has yet another take on the child-awakens-memories-of-past-life plot device.

stardf29: I think the difference is that Mile wanted to leave her previous life’s identity behind, so she embraces her new identity as much as possible. On the other hand, Myne wants to basically continue living her Urano life in the new world, at least as far as reading books goes. So that factors into that greater incongruency between her two identities.

A more amusing difference I noticed was with their interest in boys. Mile had zero interest in any of the boys her age, because her higher mental age made her see them as too young. Myne, on the other hand, did seem to at least be a bit charmed by Lutz early in the book, so in her case her new body is influencing her more? This is definitely something I think about as someone with an interest in psychology, in just how much the body affects the mind, especially with these reincarnation stories.

Jeskai Angel: Myne sometimes talks as if her “original” Myne identity is something separate and gone, overwritten by the memories of her Urano days. But things like the affection she shows her family or her childish meltdowns when something goes wrong both suggest that she is truly both Myne and Urano, even though it seems like Myne herself doesn’t care to admit it.

6. One of the most notable moments in this first volume is when Myne, having experienced one too many setbacks in her book-making, almost loses the will to live, and then the “devouring” nearly actually kills her. What do you make of this moment that is practically a depiction of barely-averted suicide?

Jeskai Angel: The big thing I took away from the incident actually ties into the last question: having a total meltdown when something goes wrong seemed rather immature, childish even. It was one of the developments that helped me see that for all her Urano memories, Myne really is Myne the little girl, not just adult Urano. Another takeaway I got from this event was the degree of Myne’s devotion to books. We’ve already seen her depicted as an extreme bibliophile, but seeing her almost give up on life itself over books drives home that her love of books is actually a bit of a weakness in her character, a trait taken to such an extreme as to become a flaw. I can’t help but think Myne would do well to consider Ecclesiastes 12.12, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” It will be interesting to watch in future volumes to see if she matures in this area and finds more reasons to live. Finally, it’s ironic that Urano died from too many books, while Myne nearly dies from the lack of books.

stardf29: I remember finding that part to be rather jarring upon first reading it, like “I know Urano/Myne really likes books but is she really the sort of person who would basically kill herself if she didn’t have books?” Of course, after reading the side story about her life back on Earth, maybe she is… But as you said, this seems to be a case where Myne’s younger body/brain is influencing her. Of course, she does get over it in the end, thanks to remembering a promise she made with Lutz. Which leads into…

7. What do you make out of the relationship between Myne and Lutz so far?

Jeskai Angel: It’s a great aspect of the book (as are Myne’s other relationships). Lutz really seems to “get” Myne in a way that few others in the story do, and he’s remarkably selfless in the way he helps her. One also suspects there’s a childhood friend romance brewing, but they for now they are still young children and any overt romance seems to be well off into the future.

stardf29: Lutz interests me a lot because, while on first impression he’s the romantic interest, there’s a lot more going on with him than just being “interested” in Myne. We get to see what he wants to do, even if it is not the most practical thing to do. It gave me the feeling that Lutz is being inspired by Myne’s pursuit of her “books” despite her condition.

Meanwhile, on Myne’s side, given that he was the reason she overcame her devouring, even if only to fulfill a promise she made to him, it seems like Lutz is the start of her growing out of her selfishness and really learning to care about others. So I’m definitely interested in seeing how their relationship develops from here on out.

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And that… almost wraps up our discussion of the first volume of Ascendance of a Bookworm. We do have one last thing to discuss, though: our impressions of the first episode of the anime adaptation! That will be posted separately later on, so look forward to that.

As for what the Light Novel Club plans to do next: you’ll have to stay tuned next week for that announcement. It’ll be something a bit different from normal, though, so look forward to that!

In the meantime, if you read along with us this time around, go ahead and post your own answers to the above questions, or anything else about the book, in the comments!

#Light Novels #Ascendance of a Bookworm #Honzuki no Gekokujou #Honzuki no Gekokujou ~Shisho ni Naru Tame niwa Shudan o Erandeiramasen~#BtT Light Novel Club #Articles #Author: stardf29 #Author: JeskaiAngel

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tshepiso-reads-books · 5 years

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I Give Up | The Fate of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

Started: 21/09/18

Finished: 13/09/18

This is a heartbreaking review to write for me. I was hoping, despite the lackluster turn of the Invasion of the Tearling, that Johansen would end the series with a bang, but The Fate of the Tearling ultimately, ended up dying with a whimper.

Summary

The Fate of the Tearling follows directly after the events of the second book. In this we see Tearling still under threat as the Avarath and Holy Father make a grab for the throne. Meanwhile, Mortmense begins to crumble after the failure of its invasion of Tearling. the Red Queen is steadily losing control of her country (and mind) and the mysterious Row Finn is out of the Fairwitch and causing trouble.

Review

As I collate my... complicated thoughts about this book I would like to emphasize that I think Johansen is a good writer. She has a skill in creating interesting characters and has obvious knowledge in creating tension, suspense, and anticipation; the only way an author can disappoint you is by not living up to expectations they've already created.

This book had scattered moments of brilliance. Individual characters, Mace and Aisa especially, had strong character moments within the book. Seeing all our favorite characters grow into the best versions of themselves and fight for good was lovely to read. I especially liked the conclusion to the Red Queen’s story arc and appreciated how the romantic loose ends were tied in the story.

There was something off in the pacing of this book. Despite being the final book in a series it never really felt as if we were building towards anything significant. Kelsea continued to play a very passive roll in the story despite being the protagonist. The majority of her action in this book was reaction, this did lead to great internal moments of growth at times, but for the most part, left me in want of the Kelsea of the first book who drove the plot forward instead of letting it drag her from place to place.

Honestly, I was ready to give this book four stars. While I wasn’t in love with this book like I was the first, Johansen served up some good writing. The paths she lead Kelsea down emotionally were interesting despite her lack of action in the story, her subplots were tightly paced and interesting and the arc of the narrative was good. The ball was on the tee, the batter perfectly positioned to strike aaaaaannnnnnnnd *swooosh*.

That, ladies and gentlemen was the sound of the biggest L of a final chapter I have ever read. As I read the final chapter of the Fate of the Tearling, I felt more emotions than one wants to feel. This ending was contrived, dumb, nonsensical, out of place, and took the story to the worst place possible. I can’t discuss this dismal writing choice without major spoilers so…

HERE BE THE SPOILERS (Warning: it may be nonsensical to people who haven't read the book)

So, Johansen did a time travel retcon and here’s why it sucks:

It implies every single problem in Tear’s Town was directly to do with Row Finn, therefore killing him saves human society. Forever.

It suggest that all of humanities’ faults could be course corrected and erased by like 7 people in 1-2 lifetimes.

It implies that one can drastically change every aspect of a country over 200 years but all our characters from the last book somehow still exist

I’m gonna harp on this point for a little longer. Johansen implies that despite the ENTIRE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPE of a goddamn continent changing fundamentally everyone, down to the great-great-great-great grandparent fucked the exact same people at the same time to produce the same people.

Finally, and most importantly: it betrays the ENTIRE POINT OF THE BOOK! Tearling was set up flawed from its origins; an evil totalitarian dictator didn’t come in and make it shitty, regular people with fears, selfishness, and good intentions gone wrong, did. The Better World is something we’re supposed to fight for every day and making Finn the root cause of every problem erases that idea completely.

Addendum: I will admit I did like the very, very final scene in the book because I’m still a sucker for a bittersweet ending.

SPOILER OVER

Stars

🌟🌟½

When I read The Queen of the Tearling I fell in love with a complex political fantasy about a girl in shoes too big to fill, trying her best to do what was right despite everything being stacked against her. I don’t think Johansen fully realized the potential this story had and I’m so sad about that because it could have been beautiful.

#YA #Fantasy #YA Fantasy #Queen of the Tearling #Books #Review #Book Review

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solitaire-dreams · 5 years

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Pokespe Gold, Silver and Bronze? An Arc Progression Analysis

Hey readers! I'm back and ready to attack a long post that had a long time coming. It is time for the part 2 of my prediction for the Gen 8 Pokespe dexholders/dexholder analysis. I would recommend reading my previous “What Type are you?” but there is a recap below for need-to-know info. Skip to the asterisks if you've already read (thanks).

Grass type dexholder = character who has self-intrinsic motivation despite life pushing them down and the path to their goal doesn't hurt many people.

Fire type dexholder = character who tramples over anything or anyone in the way of their goal.

Water type dexholder = character who hides important information from other characters and is secretive.

Gen 8 Male Character Counterpart = water type

Gen 8 Female Character Counterpart = fire type

Relationship (platonic) between the two = more emotionally charged and dramatic than other pairs.

***Today in our analysis, part 2 looks at exploring the progression of Pokespe against the evolution of...comic books of all things...and how the sets of holders mirror the ages of comic books.

DISCLAIMER: I am personally not a fan of comic books, despite my love for the superhero shonen of BNHA, and all this information is extrapolated from online research. Also this post was inspired by a post on the dexholders opinions of the pokedex which I can't refind for the life of me because I DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE THIS FREAKING SEARCH BAR CORRECTLY. Credits to them for inspiration. Somewhere out there.

SPOILERS BEWARE.

So, let's start at the beginning with the main arcs for our first three dexholder trios (RGB, GSC, and RS; with Yellow and Emerald to a lesser extent). These arcs represent the Golden Age equivalent in Pokespe.

The Golden Age (from the late 1930's to the middle of the 1950's) is described as the introduction of archetypes for the genre, and heroes and villains were depicted as very white and black in order to provide moral for a society in wartime.

While the original arcs of the manga were marketed towards 10 year olds in the 1990s-2000s instead of 10 year olds in the time of WW2, there is many of the same patterns in how they present the stories.

The RGB arc is the most shonen-esque out of all of them, where Red simply plays the role of the standard protagonist you've seen countless times and an episodic formula for chapters. The rival of Blue also feels standard by this definition and the conflict with Team Rocket is pretty black and white. Giovanni is a mafia boss who kidnapped an entire town, genetically engineered multiple Pokemon through harsh experiments, was willing to murder kids; and all for “The Glory of Team Rocket.”

GSC gives you the exact kind of story you expect with a shonen target market and a hot-headed + headstrong main protagonist (a f*ckboy). The main villain of the Masked Man who kidnapped children also keeps him firmly on the evil side and our protagonists who oppose him firmly on the good one.

Then while RS may have been unexpected for most readers, considering a secretive male protagonist clashing with a headstrong female protagonist, a stronger character focus and development was to be expected. Plus, despite Ruby initially ignoring the fight against the region and Norman (who I still maintain is a sh*tty parent and should not have been forgiven for his treatment of Ruby that easily) both are still painted on the side of good. Ruby does the closest in giving a complex protagonist, but by the time he locks Sapphire in the aircar and teams up with Courtney, the reader can understand he's still on the side of good.

Mainly, the reason they never seem too morally grey in the first arc is that the in universe characters do not address their flaws as in depth as they should. Plus, the villains of Maxie and Archie are both shown be extremely corrupt and willing to endanger their own for the end means; providing a level of villainy to overshadow the grey tones of Norman and Ruby.

The arcs are all often grouped together when talking about Pokespe as well because the first three regions of dexholders are the only ones that have actually interacted with one another. And the post which I CAN'T find classified their stance on the Pokedex as they take their roles as protectors of the region seriously and accept the responsibility.

This translates well into the Golden Age characterization as this view of all the dexholders makes them appear more noble than most; magnifying the heroic traits of dexholders and heightening the contrast with the villainous teams.

Next up in the timeline was the Silver Age. The notable features of the Silver Age (mid 1950's to 1970) are hard to peg down, but they conclude important aspects are: targeting a wider audience including girls and adults, science fiction overcoming gods and magic in use in stories, and the pop art style started in this time period.

The Silver Age honestly doesn't have much to apply to Pokespe, but the Silver Age is a transitional era for comic books, as its boxed in by the much more influential ages of the Golden and Bronze ages. For Pokespe, its version of the Silver Age does seem to adjust its target audience to a wider audience of kid Pokemon fans (as there isn't too much “mature” content in Sinnoh or Unova arcs). However, its new hook lies in “the power of friendship”; also noted in that elusive post.

The DPP arcs centres around a trio that all become very close friends, with the Pokedexs canonically serving a role to demonstrate the bond all three of the characters have developed. Plus, Dia is a protagonist who completes believes in friendship for all as he listens to Cyrus is the Platinium arc, possibly giving him the chance to amend his wrongs.

BW may not have a trio of great dexholder friends, but the connection that develops between Black and White have a strong focus, and Black's friends of Cheren and Bianca also have a strong present in the story and exhibit the friendship that exist all between them. Meanwhile, the power of friendship cannot really apply to Team Plasma, but they definitely manifest the transition from “evil for the sake evil” to “complex motives that may not make them evil”. Despite N being the near definition of “morally grey” in Pokemon, the manga keeps him in a dark enough light that the reader can't fully think of him outside of evil—unlike the game.

Following up the Unova adventures in B2W2, this arc does a better job of emphasizing friendship. While Lack-two/Blake claims to lack any emotions, I'm not sure if it would hold up to a power of friendship punch in his emotionless face. Whi-two/Whitley also learns a lot about becoming friends as she gets closer and opens up to Blake—despite it being a ploy for information—still pushes the friendship theme. The evil is team is dealt with better as well, because Whitley has sympathy for N and the old values of Team Plasma, being a former member herself; and we see one of the older members aid Hugh in his search for Purloin. By having the new terrorist branch of Team Plasma cover the evil, it allows the members who follow the previous values to be painted in a redeemable light.

Finally, we arrive at the two most recent arcs of XY and SM/USUM. Or the Bronze Age equivalent of Pokespe.

The Bronze Age (1970-1985) of comics is the one people who are fans may know fairly well. Darker plots returned in full forces, tackling more serious topics such as poverty, pollution, and dangerous substances. Heroes were also more flawed and complex than they had ever been; and villains were dipped deeper into grey.

And if you've read the XY arc, these traits are probably ringing some alarm bells. The arc was extremely dark, expanding on the games in a way they never managed to achieve. The main theme of the arc is the apathy of society and how its flawed, self-serving natures screws over anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in its wake. This stance that Team Flare took against society had radical actions (tons of it), but the sucky behaviors demonstrated by Kalos citizens in the manga prove society is far from perfect. The story of Emma/Essentia is also compelling as you understand she is on the wrong side, but with some right reasons.

X is additionally one of the most flawed male player character protags by far; the best way to describe him being all the negative mental problems shoved into one 12-year old boy (which I mean in the most loving way possible). Y also has her repressed problems, and a standoff-ish/headstrong nature that puts her at odds with others; most notably with the huge fight with her mom.

Then, in the SM arc, despite the more lighthearted vibes that come from Alola; that does not undermine the Bronze age themes present throughout the arc. The manga does not shy away from manifesting the trauma Gladion and Lille have sustained from Lusamine going insane, Guzma smashes his head into a wall after losing a fight, and Lusamine's fusion with Nihelego horrifies our protagonists; as it probably should if you saw that for the first time. The manga seems to be going in the direction that Lusamine has lost all her marbles and can't be fully held responsible for her crazy actions. Plus, Sun's flaw of hyper-focusing on gaining all the yen he needs to buy back the island/hatred for the Aether Foundation; and Moon's flaw of a hero complex that causes her to help one problem, but abandon it for a new one when it comes up (on top of her cold attitude to people initially).

Their Pokedex stance was summed up in the post by: “WTF is this thing? I don't want it.” which fits pretty well with their overall stance on the region crisis. None of these four protagonists ever truly consented to saving the region. In Kalos, the reasons the protagonists fight back is that their town is destroyed and they are being assaulted by the evil team. And as for Alola, both Sun and Moon get sucked in slowly with smaller events until it's like: “Hey, you've bonded with the incarnations of the Sun and Moon. Guess you’re the last line of defence for Alola now!”

Thus, if the Ages have each of the three rotations sets in it, Gen 8 in the Galar region will also stick with the Bronze Age vibes. Though, that's to be elaborated on in a later post (so sorry).

Tl;dr The progression of arcs in Pokespe follow the same progression of comic books throughout the different ages. RGB-RS (also Emerald) are in the Golden Age, with standard archetypes and black and white divides between heroes and villains. The Silver Age doesn't tie in much to DDP-B2W2, but they are both transitional periods for villain characterization (evil, but with a chance for redemption) and have a new hook; this time in the form of friendship boosts. Last lies the Bronze Age for XY and SM arcs, known for darker plots, and complex and morally grey villains paired with complex and flawed protagonists.

#pokemon #pokespe #original #analysis

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gch1995 · 6 years

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I went on to TV Tropes, and found a list of bad writing tropes. Sadly, most of them apply to every character on OUAT.

Aesop Amnesia: The more times a character is taught a lesson without learning it, the lower the viewer's opinion of him/her and you.

(Rumple, Belle, Emma, Snow, David, Hook, and Regina from S4-S6. I don’t think anyone on this show who lasted past season three ever really learned anything new after the first two-and-a-half seasons from past experiences. They just went back-and-forth until they came back full circle to the same points they were at before in the end of the Neverland arc at the end of S6-S7. The writers could not stick to positive character development, or write realistic regressions at all. I didn’t really hate the characters for it, just the writers behind them)

Angst? What Angst?: Make your characters react realistically to setbacks or tragic events. Too little angst makes them appear callous or ditzy.

(Literally, everyone on this show. There were no realistic human reactions anymore after the first two-and-a-half seasons)

Character Derailment: Characters can grow, but don't suddenly mutate them into something else.

(Let’s see, Rumple, Belle, Emma, and Hook seemed to be the biggest sufferers of this trope on OUAT)

Character Shilling: Having characters suddenly talk up another character for no real reason doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

(A lot of the Rumbelle drama from S4-S6)

Chickification: Be careful when you decide to make an Action Girl less action-oriented; if not done properly, it will annoy your audience.

(Emma Swan after she got together with Hook)

Compressed Vice: Don't have a character develop a bad habit or flaw out of nowhere solely for the sake of setting up An Aesop (doubly so if it contradicts previous facts about the character), and especially don't show its consequences in a hamfisted, unrealistic manner.

(Rumple and Belle from S4-S6, tbh)

Conflict Ball: Don't have a character cause conflict just because the plot says so.

(S1 Regina, 3B-6A Rumple and particularly Belle, Hook, and especially Zelena)

Creator's Pet: Treating a certain character with tons of love when they really don't deserve it is never a good idea.

(Hook, Regina, and Zelena)

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Making the story excessively bleak and giving absolutely no hope will only tire out the audience until they lose interest in the story.

(3B-S7 of the entire series)

Demonization: Some of your potential audience may actually see where this position is coming from, if not actually agree. You'll turn them off by your exaggerated portrayal. It also makes it seem like the position you hold isn't nearly as solid as you think, since it can only stand up to strawmen.

(Rumple from S4-S6, and not in a good way)

Designated Hero: Having your hero Kick the Dog and still expecting your audience to see them as a paragon of virtue because you say so doesn't usually work; rather, it makes your hero unlikable.

(H00k, Snowing, Emma, Belle, and even Henry at one point or another. Pretty much every once truly heroic character on this show after S3 at one point or another)

Designated Love Interest: If you say that two characters are in love, don't make them hate or be apathetic to each other, actually go out of your way to make them love each other. Otherwise, it just feels contrived

(6A Rumbelle on both sides, and Belle’s characterization after the town line scene with Rumple, but that was just OOC. 5A CS on Hook’s side, and the main reason why I hate CS so much is because Jmo and Colin have no chemistry. It was forced)

Designated Villain: Having your villain come across as harmless or even too benign and still expecting your audience to see them as a monster because you say so doesn't usually work; rather, it makes your villain petty and perhaps far too sympathetic.

(Rumplestiltskin in 5B)

Die for Our Ship: Attacking a rival of your pairing of choice doesn't necessarily make that character a bad person and makes you look petty.

(What they did to Rumple, Belle, and Rumbelle to prop up Hook/CS, and Nealfire’s death).

Distress Ball: Don't have a character get kidnapped for no good reason.

(I actually haven’t thought of too many instances in the series, but Gideon in 6B. There was no point for him to rip apart Rumple and Belle with character destroying Drama™️ in 6B, so that Gideon could be kidnapped by the Black Fairy and become the “big bad” because there were no lasting or serious consequences for it in the end, anyway. Gideon had his memories erased of his upbringing under the control of the Black Fairy for 28 years and his time as a villain by deaging him back to an infant with a blank slate mind, so what was even the point of committing all that character assassination of his parents, getting him kidnapped, and making him the big bad decoy villain of 6B? It was just for Drama™️, which is bad writing.)

Draco in Leather Pants: Have an acceptable reason for making a truly evil character suddenly be nice. "He or she is hot!" will not do.

(Hook, Regina, Zelena, and even Rumple on a few occasions.)

Dull Surprise: Have your characters emote during events that would make a real person do so.

(Belle’s complete lack of trauma after being locked up for 28 years, but there are more instances of this on this trash show, sadly.)

Failure Hero: While having the hero lose from time to time adds some realism to the hero and drama to the story, if they lose every single fight or mission, not only will it destroy any and all tension, but the reader will feel bad for relating with the hero.

(BELLE from S4-S6)

Faux Action Girl: If you say that a girl is strong, then make her strong. If said Action Girl comes off as too weak, the audience will begin to hate her.

(Sometimes Belle and Emma, I guess)

Hero Ball: Heroes are expected to make bad decisions every now and then, but when they do this against all common sense it becomes annoying.

(Emma, Snow, David, Henry, and particularly BELLE)

Idiot Ball: When the character is suddenly acting like an idiot.

(Rumple and especially Belle from S4-S7)

Informed Wrongness: If a character is actually in the wrong, prove it.

(Rumple wanting to use the shears on the Rumfetus in 6A. Still don’t understand how or why it was ever proven it would have been so awful when they would have prevented Gideon from living a fate that was far worse, and Aladdin was fine. Also, Rumple has said himself that magic couldn’t be used to make someone love you on numerous occasions, soo...But whatevs..I also don’t get how Rumple taking back the curse “ruined” Killy’s sacrifice).

Jerk Sue: Having a character be a complete Jerkass who gets away with it just because the author designates them as such and says you should support them does not make for a strong character, and is more likely going to turn out be a case of Creator's Pet, and often The Scrappy. Also, it tends to look like a half-assed effort when the author just throws in some secondary throw-away detail in an attempt to make you feel sorry for the character and expect you to not get upset when they behave like a jerk for no other reason than they feel like it at the time.

(ZELENA!)

Moral Dissonance: Don't have the hero behave contrary to their usual morality and be completely oblivious to it.

(BELLE, EMMA, SNOWING, EVERY “HERO” ON THIS SHOW after 3A!)

Most Writers Are Male: Don't write women from ignorance, stereotypes, and/or in unsympathetic ways (either in the form of misogyny or over-sexualization).

(The writing for Emma and Belle in seasons post s3 ish in their relationships with Rumple and Belle, but for different reasons. Belle got dumbed down and turned into a harpy and a hypocrite with Rumple to vilify him, while getting declared “strong” for emotionally abusing him, leading him on, or doing shit like banishing him with nothing. Meanwhile, Emma turned into a codependent and violent stepford wife with no personal values, or life outside of Hook.

Also, the whole “evil is sexy” trope in female villains was offensive).

Out of Character: Moments when the character does something that he wouldn't normally do without any justification.

(Every character on this show at one point or another 98% of the time post season three ish. Yeah, the sad thing was that it wasn’t just moments of OOC ness, but overall characterizations in general)

Protagonist-Centered Morality: A character's moral standing should be based on their actions as a whole, not solely on their actions toward the main character. A sure sign of a Mary Sue or a Designated Hero.

(Hook, Emma, Belle, Snow, Henry, Regina, )

Race Tropes: Tread carefully with these. Having a minority character act like a walking stereotype screams lazy writing and will upset people

(OUAT did this a lot)

Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: Bashing a female character for liking/doing traditionally-feminine things is another form of misogyny, and can piss off the audience.

(I think they’ve done this sometimes)

Romanticized Abuse: Make sure that your romance is actually a reasonably healthy relationship. If abuse, either physical or emotional, is presented as sexy or sweet, the characters could become Unintentionally Unsympathetic, and viewers may get the wrong idea of what an acceptable real-life relationship requires

(Captain Swan, Rumbelle at times, and even Snowing at times)

Ron the Death Eater: Have an acceptable reason for making a truly good character suddenly be mean. "I hate him or her!" will not do.

(BELLE at the beginning of S6 with Rumple before he started screwing up, and in 5x18 in the UW with him)

Satellite Love Interest: Define your characters by something other than being the lover or crush for The Protagonist, or the archetypal "perfect" boyfriend/girlfriend.

(Belle for Rumple, but they didn’t always portray her as the archetypal perfect love interest for him either)

Strangled by the Red String: People going directly from being strangers to being genuinely in love is not very realistic or satisfying to watch. If you're going to make two characters fall in love with each other, try to take it slow.

(Emma and Hook)

Strong as They Need to Be: Don't have characters suddenly gain or lose power without any explanation.

(The whole loss of Rumple’s seer ability after he was resurrected. Was it ever explained? The only thing I can think of is that he wouldn’t have done a lot of the OOC stupid shit that he did if he could have seen the future)

Stupid Sacrifice: Characters shouldn't give up their lives for nothing (if the character is not a Martyr Without a Cause).

(Rumple and Belle in S7)

Villain Ball: See Hero Ball, only swap "heroes" and "villains".

(Rumple on-and-off-again from S4-S6)

Villain Decay: Don't have your antagonist lose their power and competence without a good reason

(RUMPLE from S4-S6. Seriously, he was honestly the worst possible main antagonist they could have chosen, and the least competent! )

Wangst: Make your characters react realistically to setbacks or tragic events. Too much angst makes them unrealistic and annoying.

(Every main character on the show, tbh, but especially Belle )

What an Idiot!: Characters should not make unrealistically bad decisions to drive the plot.

(Every main character on the show at one point or another from S4-S7)

Wimpification: Stripping the action, common sense, and strength from characters to add Wangst is a good way to piss off the audience.

(Rumple, EQ, Belle, Emma, Snowing, Hook, and every main character on this show)

@0ceanofdarkness

@ishtarelisheba

@done-with-ouat

@jxhniarty

@rufeepeach

@rumplestiltskin

@toewsgirl42

@forzaouat

@foreveradearie

#once upon a wasted potential #anti ouat #anti ouat writers #anti kitsowitz

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strawberry--souda · 6 years

Text

Kaede Akamatsu Character Analysis (Spoilers!)

So, I know this isn’t the kind of thing I normally put on my blog, especially since I don’t exactly make content anyway. But inspiration struck me to do an analysis on one of my favorite characters of all time: Kaede Akamatsu from Danganronpa V3. I hear a lot of people say that Kaede is just Makoto and/or Chiaki 2.0, and I feel that this could not be further from the truth. So I’m hoping that this analysis gives somebody a new perspective on my favorite DR character. Needless to say, Danganronpa V3 spoilers abound.

Obtained Truth Bullet: The Protagonist of DRV3

So, let’s get the big one out of the way first, shall we? Kaede was heavily advertised as the protagonist of V3, and many people (myself included) were very excited about this. As opposed to the generally weak/easily pushed-around Makoto and Hajime, Kaede is a go-getter. She was considered new and refreshing, and even now there are still many people who would consider her more interesting or a better protagonist than Saihara.

The protagonist swap was (and still is) highly controversial, and the wrong opinion around the wrong people can cause quite a debate. The general consensus, however, is that it was an extremely well-executed twist, no matter who you favor as the protag. It was a true gut-punch even to people who may not have been that enthusiastic about either protagonist up until that point, and is typically considered one of the saddest moments in the series. The revelation that Kaede died for no reason really twisted the knife further, at a point in the game when many may have moved on and fully accepted Saihara as protagonist.

The twist was controversial for the aforementioned reason of Kaede being vastly different from the other protags personality-wise. Kaede is a natural leader. Friendly and cheerful, but fully capable of being assertive. Saihara, meanwhile, is shy, somewhat of a downer, and can have a hard time expressing himself. Both characters have their strengths as the protagonist, but after V3 people started getting tired of the standard Danganronpa formula, and Kaede continued to be viewed as new and refreshing. This is one of the strongest and most common arguments for why she should have been the protagonist. While I do recognize Saihara’s strengths, and I like him quite a bit as well, I ultimately agree with this point, and I think Kaede as the protagonist would have been very interesting.

Obtained Truth Bullet: The Murder of Rantaro Amami

This is, of course, the other big one. It’s impossible to discuss Kaede as a character without bringing up her actions. As we know, in Chapter One, Kaede and Saihara set up a scene in the library made to discover the mastermind and end the game before any murders took place. However, Kaede altered this trap, fearing that catching the mastermind before the time limit would not be enough. To assuage her paranoia, and at great risk to herself, she set up a trap of her own. Something of a Rube Goldberg machine that was designed to kill the mastermind rather than trap them. This trap was set up at the same time as Saihara’s original plan. For those who may not remember, the trap involved rolling a shot-put ball along a carefully-aligned staircase of books, until it came down on the mastermind’s head.

Unfortunately, as we know, this trap failed, killing someone other than the intended target. Rantaro Amami, the Ultimate Survivor (initially known as the Ultimate ???) was killed in the midst of his own investigation, having known about the mastermind’s secret lair (and its entrance in the library) as well. And yet, the truth was that the shot missed. Rantaro survived, only to be killed by the mastermind right after. Nonetheless, Kaede, Saihara, and the others were thrown into a class trial to find out who killed the amnesiac Rantaro. Kaede initially used this as a chance to find out who the mastermind was, reasoning that the mastermind must have killed Rantaro. Ultimately, however, the case closed in on her, primarily due to the machinations of Ouma. Ouma was as unaware of the truth as everybody else, but called Kaede out on a lie she made. After trying to prove her lie, she ultimately had no choice but to admit to her crime, lest Saihara be convicted in her place. This is when the protagonist switch takes place.

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And eventually, Kaede gets executed for her crime like every other blackened in the series, unaware of her innocence. So ends the story of Kaede Akamatsu, and begins the story of Shuichi Saihara.

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Obtained Truth Bullet: Ultimate Pianist

As anyone reading this probably knows, Kaede is the Ultimate Pianist. In other words, one of the greatest piano-players in the world. This has a large impact on who Kaede is, as any such major talent would define a person. Kaede is protective of her hands/fingers as a result, preferring to avoid cooking and sports for fear that they might damage her ability to play piano. During her trial she says her hands are only strong enough to play piano as a defense when she is accused of murder. Her talent is a part of how she dresses (skirt and hairpins), her habits (avoiding certain activities), and her conversational habits (casually mentioning piano songs and concepts in conversations). It is a substantial enough part of her that at the end of chapter one, what is heavily implied to be her ghost appears to play piano for Saihara in her Ultimate Lab.

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Obtained Truth Bullet: Kaede’s Personality in the Game

As demonstrated during the events of the game, Kaede is a cheerful person. She is bright, friendly, and pleasant to be around. Overall a helpful person, and considered likable by all but her most troublesome classmates. However, she does tend to get too helpful at times. She can be quite pushy about her ideas, to the point of stubbornness. For example, in one conversation with Miu Iruma, Iruma discusses doing drugs. While Iruma is easily-distraught, Kaede pushes the idea that she shouldn’t do such things to the point of upsetting the inventor. In a more serious context, she refuses to doubt her plan to kill the mastermind until it actually fails, believing that it is the right thing to do beyond any doubt. This is one of Kaede’s greatest flaws; when she gets an idea, she convinces herself that she is correct, and can become very pushy and stubborn as a result.

Kaede is also shown to be a pragmatic and goal-oriented person when necessary, in accordance with her stubbornness. She loathed the idea of killing anyone, and hated herself for the time she had left after killing Rantaro, angrily declaring that she would never forgive his killer. Nonetheless, she still planned to kill the mastermind, despite the heavy toll that committing murder would take on her. Additionally, despite being uncomfortable with it, she lied in the class trial to protect Saihara and stall for time, making a claim that would make herself look suspicious. So despite her kind personality, Kaede will do what she feels she has to, even if she knows it is wrong.

On a lighter note, Kaede is shown to be silly and even perverted at times. She makes remarks a number of times about how ‘cute’ or ‘sexy’ other girls are, such as when she first meets Tsumugi and says she has a sexy aura. Saihara even comments at one point that she sounds like a creepy old man sometimes. She also does things such as poking Tsumugi’s cheek or touching Kiibo’s emergency button, showing that perhaps she is not the best with physical boundaries. Despite this, she tends to be fairly oblivious; during her Free Time Events with Tenko and Himiko, she doesn’t seem to realize what they mean by ‘playing for the other team’, nor does she really seem to comprehend the idea of homosexuality. Additionally, as shown in just about every interaction she has with Iruma, she is sensitive to and dislikes large amounts of vulgarity.

Interestingly, despite being an overall friendly person, Kaede has somewhat of a temper, and can get easily riled-up. Shortly after meeting Saihara, she told him to shut up in order to stop him from panicking, and later on even slapped him when he wasn’t responding to anyone. Additionally, she tells Himiko to shut up after the latter keeps talking about magic during the investigation of Rantaro’s murder. She tries to be patient with the more troublesome/hard to get along with classmates, such as Iruma and Ouma, but does lose her patience with them sometimes. She frequently calls Ouma out for being delusional, and after a particularly vulgar insult by Iruma, snaps back with an insult of her own. So while pleasant to be around, Kaede does have a short fuse at times, and can be easily agitated.

Obtained Truth Bullet: Kaede’s Personality Before the Game

Kaede’s personality before the game is shown to be more or less the total opposite of who she is now. She is shown to be a pessimistic person with a bleak outlook on life, and a hard time trusting/believing in others. She says she’s perfect for a killing game. Interestingly enough, some of the above-stated traits can be seen in the Kaede from the game to some extent. Kaede is paranoid enough about the time limit to doubt Saihara’s plan, enough that she would alter the scene to kill rather than expose the mastermind. And she is considered perfect for the killing game in-universe, with her leadership and forward personality having been intended to keep the game going. However, it is incredibly debatable how much of this is true, since the information about pre-game Kaede is revealed by the mastermind, a known employee of the greater-scope villains of the game, and therefore somebody with reason to lie and/or forge evidence if needed. This part is ultimately up to interpretation, but I personally believe that the mastermind was lying, albeit with some sprinkles of truth.

Obtained Truth Bullet: Kaede’s Interests

Kaede’s chief interest, as we know, is the piano. She cares deeply about music, and has been playing piano from a young age, even to the point of winning competitions. However, she does enjoy other things. For example, in Love Across the Universe, she expresses an enjoyment of manga, particularly when the plot involves music. She also enjoys drinking tea, and likes to relax in the sun, despite her hardworking and driven nature. In regards to her dislikes, she doesn’t have many shown or stated, but she seems to dislike bicycles. This is never actually elaborated on, but it is a strong enough dislike to be stated in her bio.

And that’s about all I have to say about the Ultimate Pianist, Kaede Akamatsu. My favorite character in Danganronpa, and one of my favorite characters of all time. I hope this gives anybody who didn’t like her much a new opinion, and that people who do like her enjoyed my analysis as well. I sadly don’t see myself doing another analysis like this, but this was a lot of fun to do. If you’ve read this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you had fun!

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #kaede akamatsu #akamatsu kaede #character analysis #shuichi saihara #rantaro amami #this was so much fun #hard work though #don't even ask me why I did this #the motivation hit me out of nowhere #but yeah #this was a labor of love for one of my favorite characters

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poorquentyn · 7 years

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I'm re reading IT right now (slowly, as adult life is getting in the way) and was wondering what other bad storytelling choices you thought king made besides the. Uh. Sewer scene? Its been years since ive read it and nothing else really stood out to me as poor storytelling that i can remember. I'll read it for myself eventually but was curious of your thoughts. Love your blog!

Thanks! Stephen King often veers into caricature with his supporting characters, and It is no exception. The way he describes Eddie’s mom and wife physically goes well beyond the narratively useful purpose of establishing how their weight disorders have intertwined with Eddie’s hypochondria and into “ugh fat people are gross” territory. I don’t think King has conscious malignance in this area, because he finds a proper balance with Ben: the latter describes in realistic detail how he lost weight over time, his mom is upset that he’s eating less but is presented humanely (as someone who associates her son eating a lot with her doing well as a single mother), and King manages to avoid shaming Ben for his weight while also acknowledging that Ben personally feels a lot better about himself after having shed it–or rather, because of the confidence he gained in himself by taking charge of the situation. The idea here is not “Ben needs to lose weight because gross” but rather “Ben needs to be in control of his body.”

The good doesn’t wipe out the bad, nor vice versa; gotta consider them both in context. Main characters are naturally going to get more nuance than supporting characters, but necessary shorthand can easily turn into harmful caricature. And of course, a storytelling choice that seems solid in isolation can become a problem within the work as a whole. Beverly is sexualized throughout It in a way that’s often very unpleasant to read, associated throughout with violence and misogyny. Sometimes this works, as a way of peeling back the layers of petty ego driving a man’s man like her husband Tom; he explodes at her in their introductory scene because her paying attention to Mike’s call instead of him makes him feel like he’s literally not there. Other times it doesn’t, like when King lingers on the “smell” that Bev and her father “make together” now that she’s reaching puberty. We don’t need that to get the point that Bev’s father has inappropriate feelings for her–we got that from Bev’s mom asking if he ever touches her. When you put both sides of the coin together with the infamous sex scene in the sewers and the amount of time spent on whether Bev will choose Ben or Bill, it starts to look less like King was taking a stand against objectification by showing its omnipresence than that he simply didn’t know what to do with Bev as a character without constantly making reference to sex, rape, assault, and molestation. While she does get some right to response on these matters, I don’t think it’s nearly enough. It pushes back against a mindset that casually treats women like objects, but fails to establish a counter-narrative rooted in the female characters as individuals, fleshed out beyond their relationships to the men around them. It’s less a question of Does Stephen King Hate Women than one of imagination and empathy.

Of course, some flaws are lessened by context, rather than enhanced by it. Take, for example, our protagonist William Denbrough, a blatant author insert. Bill is a popular horror author (check) whose books are increasingly being adapted for TV and film (check) and who has a rather tense relationship with critics and academics (double check). The latter is spelled out in an extended flashback to Bill’s college days, in which he takes a stand that ought to be very familiar to anyone steeped in modern media discourse:

Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There’s one guy who wants to be Updike. There’s another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner-only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There’s a girl who admires Joyce Carol Gates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is “radioactive in a literary sense.” Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There’s the short fat grad student who can’t or won’t speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there are nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with “War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.” This fellow’s play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master’s thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer’s play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.

Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson-in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.

One of the sf tales earns him a B.

“This is better,” the instructor writes on the title page. “In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the “needle-nosed” spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.”

All the others do no better than a C.

Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman’s vignette about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class-and the instructor-agree, but still the discussion drones on.

When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tail, and has a certain presence.

Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics… culture… history… aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean… ” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean… can’t you guys just let a story be a story?”

No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.

Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “do you believe William Faulkner was ‘just telling stories’? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.”

“I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

“I suggest,” the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, “that you have a great deal to learn.”

The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.

Bill leaves… but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he has written a story called “The Dark,” a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a land of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut-off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. “Going to knock the shit out of it,” he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little-a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that-after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn’t careful, it will knock him down.

He rushes inside and finishes “The Dark” at white heat, writing until four o'clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring-binder. If someone had suggested to him that he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years-or so he honestly believes.

The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the tide page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.

Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the wood-stove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it!

“Let them fucking trees fall!” Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.

He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor’s judgment on it, and sends it off to a men’s magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users). Yet his battered Writer’s Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls and the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.

He sends “The Dark” off with no real hopes-he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips-and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it “the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury’s "The Jar.” He adds, “Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it,” but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!

He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to the assistant fiction editor’s congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor’s door. In the corner of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I’m going to kill myself, because I won’t know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn.

You can easily imagine this argument–a timeless appeal is being ruined by lefty college kids and their postmodern analyses–being made today by an alt-right YouTuber out to cleanse the game industry of SJWs. Throughout It, King keeps cutting back to an image of a librarian reading “The Billy Goats Gruff” to a group of kids, the latter enthralled (King tells us) by the primal purity of the kind of monster stories upon which both King and Denbrough have built their careers. “Will the monster be bested…or will It feed?” That’s King declaring that Bill’s his professors were wrong to wave aside his short horror stories. See? See?! I made it, and you pretentious eggheads were wrong to ever doubt me! This aspect of It is frankly embarrassing, especially as time marches on and we see how this mindset has taken root in the next generation.

But! While King very clearly believes this stuff, he’s also self-aware enough to include auto-critiques in his writing. Stan’s wife Patty picks up one of Bill’s novels and dismisses it as practically pornographic in its horror imagery. King goes too far in casting Patty’s dislike of Bill’s work as reflecting a lack of imagination on her part, but he then goes on to sympathetically explore how the grounded relatable struggles Patty has faced (anti-Semitism, her father mocking and dismissing Stan, their inability to have children) have led her to consider “horrorbooks” as shallow escapism. The real world, It admits, has horrors beyond anything the Kings and Denbroughs can come up with. “Werewolves, shit. What did a man like that know about werewolves?”

Later on, when Ben is telling his triumphant story about calling out a high school coach who taunted him for his weight, Bill gently notes that as an author, he has trouble believing any kid really talked like that. That’s King using his self-insert to wryly poke fun at his own oft-overheated dialogue. Self-awareness and self-deprecation are absolutely vital to making a book as thematically and structurally ambitious as this one work.

And while some of It’s politics make me cringe, other aspects make me perk up and take notice. King wrote It over the course of four years in which HIV and AIDS became a national crisis that was being largely ignored by said nation’s government. There was a growing conventional wisdom that the afflicted deserved their punishment and should be more or less left to rot. This was all part and parcel with the ascension of the religious right in American politics, especially within the Reagan White House. A huge part of the Reagan narrative (as we see in the “Morning in America” ad, also released while King was writing It) was a portrait of lily-white small-town America as a social ideal being beset by all sorts of ills that the left was either letting happen or actively supporting, and The Gays were most certainly among them.

It opens with a scene that seems to dovetail with that narrative: an idealized ‘50s small town in which an adorable innocent white boy from a good Christian family is horribly murdered by (what seems to be) a nightmarish external force that takes advantage of that innocence. Already, you can see a potential Reaganite spin–It as the Other, the “bear in the woods” threatening the ideal of Derry.

But that’s not what It is about. The second chapter jumps forward a generation, into the mid-1980s in which King was writing, and onto a scene of violence that cannot be wrapped into the meta-narrative of the religious right. Three men attack a gay man on a bridge, their delicate sensibilities offended by his flamboyance. They beat him within an inch of his life and toss him over the side…where he finds It waiting for him with a gleaming sharp-toothed smile. Both the victim’s boyfriend and one of the assailants tell the cops and lawyers involved about the demon clown who finished the victim off, but the powers that be cover it up for the sake of a successful prosecution.

The idea being that they’re dealing with the symptoms, not the disease–the violence, but not the hand-me-down hate driving it. The bereft boyfriend tells the cops that he tried to warn his new-to-town lover that despite its cheery appearance, Derry is a “bad place,” one positively crawling with “AIDS is God’s punishment” homophobia. Moreover, he whispers through his tears, he realized while staring into Its silver eyes as It ate his true love that “It was Derry…It was this town.”

So while the first chapter seemingly wrapped the era’s conservative politics in a cozy semiotic blanket, it was only baiting the hook so that the second can rip that blanket off like a Band-Aid. As Reagan strolled to re-election with 49 states at his back, as the Democrats’ convictions wavered and they began to drift rightward, as thousands of Americans wasted away while their government and so many of their fellow citizens watched pitilessly, here comes Stevie King to stick his middle finger in the Moral Majority’s face and say: gays aren’t the monsters, you are the monsters, you are the ones eating your children. He built a thousand-page Lovecraftian epic around that idea, and made it a bestseller. How fucking awesome is that?

Again, it’s all always going to be complicated. The good not only coexists with the bad–they’re often inextricable. The author who slipped a rant against leftist academics ruinin’ his storybooks into It is also the guy who now declares his support for BLM and his disgust for Trump, and It is both a deeply flawed work and one of my very favorite novels.

#it #stephen king

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wendynerdwrites · 7 years

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Meta Repost Project: Fandom Studies and the Personal Favorite White Boy

(note, this is an article I originally posted on therainbowhub and fandomfollowing two years ago but has been lost to caches and bad decisions on my art. Here it is again, non-caches and in full. This article has some errors and is out of date, but I wanted to preserve the original even if it is flawed. It works well as a reference and I may add/alter it again, but I wanted to post is and have it here, untouched, first)

This one’s gonna hurt…

Personal Favorite White Boy (n.): A (usually white) male character who can commit acts ranging from “pretty damn douchey” to “outright atrocities”, but is constantly defended by or stanned for by a furious fan base who will go to any lengths to excuse their actions and vilify critics. A male fave who is portrayed as a precious cinnamon roll who are only ever victims and heroes, and anyone who says differently is evil or illiterate. Who will have their fangirls who “understand” them furiously warp their characters, outright ignore their flaws, and attack anyone who points out anything remotely negative about their faves. Any woman who rejects them is an evil bitch, as is anyone who dares to hold them accountable for their actions. Everything they do is justifiable due to past abuse, “true love”, or a protective instinct. The figure from which Draco in Leather Pants, along with other modern fandom tropes, has spawned.

Fifty Shades of Grey fans will dox you online for saying Christian Grey is an abusive stalker despite the fact that he tracks a woman through her cellphone and uses faux-BDSM to hurt his wife for the crime of going out for drinks with a friend.

Twilight fans will lose their shit if you point out how not-okay it is that Edward Cullen took a piece of Bella Swan’s car engine out to keep her from going to see Jacob. Or if you make the point that Jacob forcing a kiss on Bella is, in fact, sexual assault.

You’re a total simpleton if you think that Thomas Raith from the Dresden Files is rapist. Sure, he uses magic to compel humans into having sex with him, but he acknowledges he’s a monster and also consent doesn’t matter to vampires! He’s a hero because he feels bad about it. Can’t you just understand context?!

If you dare to mention that you’re not supposed to stand with Ward (or you get shot in the head because he’s a traitorous neo-Nazi rapist), some Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fans will want your blood.

Finn Collins from The 100 has great hair and calls the lead female character Clarke “Princess”, but he also killed nearly twenty unarmed men, women, and children. That makes him a war criminal and the Grounders wanting him dead as an offering to insure their peace treaty (the one that will likely insure the safety and health of hundred, if not thousands of innocents) is pretty reasonable. As is how the lead character, Clarke, stabbed Finn to spare him a torturous death. But some fans of The 100 insist that Clarke is “a bitch” for doing this and not killing Grounder leader Lexa— even though that would surely result in the deaths of everyone she’s ever loved.

…I know, right? It’s maddening. How much media utterly idolizes men even if they’re shits? Or at the very least problematic?

These men— the Grant Wards, the Spikes, the Finn Collinses, the Tyrion Lannisters, the Edward Cullens—- are the Personal Favorite White Boys, and they get psychotic fandom defenses more passionate than anything. These PFWBs will be absolved of anything— be it rape, abuse, massacres, mistakes that lead to the violent deaths and starvation of thousands— by certain fans with defenses going from “He was abused as a child” to “He cried once.”

Which brings us to the first prong of my theory regarding the rabid Personal Favorite White Boy Defense phenomenon: male characters in media, agency, and our changing views of what we view as acceptable and unacceptable.

First, there are the roles of female characters in stories, and how the primary actors or aggressors in most stories are men.

Men were almost always the active players. Even in stories that feature main female protagonists, such as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, those main female characters are so passive to the point of unconsciousness— and need to be saved by men in the form of what is considered modern day sexual assault.

But men were the primary agents, the true heroes, and so they had actions that could be judged for good or ill– choices they actually made. Whereas even the females’ characters choices were usually framed as a thing they did because “they couldn’t help it.” Still utterly passive, with no agency. So there is no instinct to defend female romantic leads in text much because there was never a real need. Even when they were objectively messed up people, they were always framed as a prize and their flaws had more to do with them being weak and dependent than letting us see their own choices and real motivations— think Daisy Buchanan (who was awful, but very much built up simply as an object rather than a person). So there simply has never been much encouragement for men to feel like they need to justify their fictional crushes. Once a woman did something bad, it was done. She was just bad. But she was always, always passive and always an object. There are some exceptions, of course, but often even those stories are altered or ignored. Compare and contrast how the stories of Joseph and his coat of many colors or David defeating Goliath are well known and publicized. Meanwhile few people could tell you much of Judith, who saved the Hebrew people by slaying the Assyrian general Holofernes.

In modern media, we’ve improved by increasing the actions of female protagonists, but in a world where the ratio of male to female characters in mainstream film is 2:1 and The Bechdel Test actually has to be a thing, we’re still used to having women as non-entities.

And that’s the narrative tradition we have. So while we can up female agency, men are pretty much NEVER without agency, even in woman-centric media unless it’s aimed at little girls. Men are still very often the heroes, the aggressors, the people who take active part in everything and have real choices to examine. And since we’re encouraging more progressive views, it means that arguing of the morality regarding men becomes far more complicated and nuanced.

Look at the changing views of characters like John Harker or Heathcliff, or any Byronic hero. Once they were an ideal, but now that our lens has changed, particularly when it comes to romantic/sexual matters, heroes get challenged in a new way, and are challenged to their potential romantic audience— primarily women. So the pressure is on the women to justify their fictional romances.

As said before, we’re used to, and comfortable with, judging women both fictional and factual. Women are encouraged to defend men, and expected to do it now with the rapidly changing social views that we have. And unfortunately, while the complex issues of things like personal autonomy, consent, and justice have been progressing, there are many people who are still woefully uneducated about certain issues. For instance, when I wrote in a blog post how in the A Song of Ice and Firebooks, the character of Tyrion Lannister molests his crying, terrified, twelve-year-old POW of a bride, I had a very sweet teenage reader go, “Wait, Tyrion rapes Sansa WTF???” When I replied that no, I said he molests her, the young woman asked, “Wait, are molestation and rape not the same thing?” She seemed pretty happy to learn this, even though she, like all other young people out there, deserve to have learned this at a much younger age.

We still have a ton of women these days who don’t know that sexual assault encompasses more than rape, that consent can be revoked, and are still heavily influenced by rape culture and sexist ideals. People who still think it’s not abuse unless the boyfriend gives his girlfriend a black eye. Who don’t understand that S&M is meant to be built upon clear, informed consent and communication.

So as a result, when you point out to someone that taking apart Bella Swan’s car engine totally qualifies as abuse, you have many fangirls who are shocked and furious. To them, domestic abusers are drunken stepfathers in wife beaters breaking bones, not well-dressed, sophisticated, “protective” Edward Cullen.

When you say that Christian Grey is an abuser since he manipulates ridiculously-innocent and ignorant Anastasia Steele into a “BDSM” relationship and continues it even after it’s confirmed that she doesn’t understand concepts like butt plugs and orgasm denials, then shames her for using the safe word (which is, like, a totally normal thing to use), they become enraged.

When you mention Damon Salvatore raped someone, the response is often, “But she expressed interest in sleeping with him! They flirted!”

Now, everyone is happy to judge women, but rarely to ever examine their choices. Those judgments have always been simple: Virgin/Whore.

There’s never been any sort of need for men to try and justify their romantic choices, partly because heroines were so bland so often, portrayed as objects not people, and you can’t really examine the morality of an object that doesn’t make real decisions. Whereas male characters have historically always had agency.

But men aren’t objects. They are the people who, historically, have controlled the world in really messed up ways and we’re coming to realize that. So women will have put emotional stock in a character, and now are pressured to examine a male character’s choices in a way that men haven’t really had to, especially not through a lens of characters they find attractive.

For instance, guys will talk your ear off about how much Bella Swan from Twilight sucks, but were they ever in a position to get emotionally attached or attracted to her? No. Female characters are either identifiable with women or just titillation or prizes for men. Bella Swan was never meant to be lusted after or won by a male audience. Whereas women throughout history have been actively encouraged to think of Heathcliff or whomever as a romantic interest, and now that sort of thing is being challenged. Women are encouraged to be on the defensive about their romantic/sexual feelings, and that is their default setting.

Let’s face it: throughout history, those things that have been viewed as appealing to women, especially young women, are often denigrated and seen as “lesser” pieces of art than those marketed or made by men.

Sure, the word “fan” originally comes from the word “fanatic”, but that seems to only get recognized when women are involved. Male fans are just that— fans. Female fans are half-fan, half “lun-ATIC.” And no amount of football riots, soccer riots,hockey riots, or actual history will do much to dissuade people of this idea.

When Elvis Presley and The Beatles took over the popular consciousness, much was made of their legions of screaming fans— most of them young women. These “Beatlemaniacs” were a joke, a joke which ended up extending to the band itself.

Today, The Beatles are seen as one of the most important, artistically capable, and revolutionary musical acts of all time. Whereas before, during the height of Beatlemania, critics were quick to make snide remarks about their lack of artistic merit. “Is this the King’s English?”, one snide reporter wrote. They were seen as nothing but mop-topped sex symbols…

…Right.

Indeed, fangirls have had to defend their media preferences for a very, very long time– just as much for modern media as classic works. Plenty of people these days will sneer at a “feminine” love for classic knightly tales of chivalric romance— “All that stupid fairy tale romantic BS. That’s not how it was in the real Middle Ages!”

Granted, it is true that the knight in shining armor trope isn’t exactly historically accurate. But what many people seem to forget was the context under which many of these fairy tales and stories of courtly love were written. These stories were not just written to make naive women soak their petticoats. In fact, many of the codes of romantic chivalry were established by and for men in order to instill a more sustainable and less chaotic way of life for men at arms— a way of giving knights a code in order to keep any guy with a sword from randomly slaughtering and raping everyone he encountered. Indeed, many fairytales and fantasies— from Snow White to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight— were written with the intent of positively influencing and representing the cultures that spawned them; they were not only entertaining and educating their contemporary audiences, but serving as significant historical and social texts for people to study today. “Fairy tales” and myths of knights and ladies have huge academic and intellectual significance to the modern day. And yet, many call it “Fairy tale bullshit.”

As a result of this cultural bias, women just naturally feel the need to automatically be on the defensive about things they like, regardless of the artistic merit of said media. This includes the need to justify almost any sexual/emotional/romantic feeling they have for a male character. Men? Not so much.

We’re just not used to questioning the agency of men. We’re supposed to accept men as heroes and accept what they do “for love.” We have to always make excuses because they’re men being men. Women should be prizes for these men. And we should stand by our men.

Unfortunately, there are changing standards for acceptable behavior. What does and doesn’t count as sexual assault. What does and doesn’t count as stalking. What does and doesn’t count for abuse. What can and can’t be excused on the basis of age or history of abuse. Edward Cullen was “protecting” Bella. Grant Ward was abused as a child. Finn Collins was traumatized and was desperate to find Clarke, who he was in love with. Christian Grey is just into S&M.

Any excuse must and should be found. Or certain actions should just be brushed aside as no big deal, especially if they did it “for love” (often the excuse with Finn Collins defenders).

Now, it’s true that certain Personal Favorite White Boys are in fact characters with complexity. But the strange thing is is how often those very complexities that are praised by fans are in fact erased via white-washing, all while female characters are vilified for infractions as horrible as “crying too much”, “not falling in love with the guy who wanted her”. Tyrion Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire is a great example (known more popularly by his show counterpart, who has most if not all of the character’s flaws erased… Yeah, the Personal Favorite White Boy can be extended to dudebros like David Benioff and D.B. Weiss making “adaptation” decisions as well). He’s a severely messed up person who has moments of great compassion and courage, but also sometimes does horrible things. This is not because he’s pure evil, but because the man is completely warped. But that does not make excuses, validate, or erase the horrible things he does. They do not make him a good person. Tyrion is still a character with agency, and oftentimes he uses that agency to do awful, awful things.

And if you bring that up, you’re an ableist douchebag who thinks people who have been abused should just “get over” things.How dare you call the man who willingly married a twelve year old POW selfish and sexist! His Dad was the one who offered him that marriage (along with another match as an alternative, with no threats of violence), and his dad has abused him, so therefore Tyrion did no wrong!

Just like Thomas Wraith can’t help hypnotizing people into sex, because he’s a vampire and vampires in the Dresden Files don’t care about consent.

It’s okay as long as he acknowledges that he’s a monster.

Even when a guy is a rapist, neo-nazi terrorist, the fact that his father beat him means #IStandWithWard.

That is not to say that all fans are like this. Nor is it to say that there is something necessarily wrong with having a problematic fave— as long as you acknowledge and don’t try to white-wash these things. There are tons of fanboys and fangirls who are perfectly ready and happy to admit the faults of their characters, gleefully call them “shitheads”, and examine the issues at play in the media they consume. But unfortunately, the Personal Favorite White Boy phenom is great enough that it sort of sets the stereotype for empty-headed female fandom (which, by the way, is bullshit).

This mentality comes from a strong social background. One in which we are expected to find reasons and explanations for the heinous acts committed by white men. Where the Aurora shooter was described as bullied and mentally ill, and will be nonviolently taken into custody for a life sentence after killing a dozen innocent people; where Jeffrey Dahmer is given due process and only restrained during arrest after killing and eating several people, but Walter Scott is shot point blank for running and 15-year-old Dejerria Becton is forced to the ground because of a noisy pool party. One where women are not expected to have agency. One where rape culture and bigoted social mores are institutionalized. Where women expected (and are expected) to be judged for everything. Where women in media are sex objects, so there is no urge for the heterosexual males who want her to feel the need to defend her actions or choices. Meanwhile, women are actively encouraged to feel persecuted or defend “their men” no matter what. Where they’re automatically defensive because female audiences are so automatically looked down upon, and where media is being constantly re-examined through a rapidly evolving social lens. Where the issues of sexual assault and consent are so poorly explored and communicated that there are tons of people who still don’t get that hypnotizing people into having sex with you is still rape.

As a result, we’ve produced the culture of #IStandWithWard.

And then there’s just how female fans in general are treated– but that’s a different article.

(This is the first in a series of articles exploring fandom and its idiosyncrasies. Tune in next time, when Wendy deconstructs all the reasons fangirls are so automatically defensive of everything in the first place!)

#personal favorite white boy #meta repost #byronic heroes #sexism #fandom meta

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heravenueexpert-blog · 7 years

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What similarities do you see in Adrien and Marinette?

I suppose this question comes from this post, in which, i said Adrien and Marinette are pretty similar when it comes down to it (that’s why they are the chosen pair in the first place xD). Although I just said that impulsively (because despite the two having contrasting traits I feel they have the same wavelength of some sort?). I guess it’s worth to elaborate a bit.

Well, first of all, they are both kids with great potential but hindered by their own insecurities.

Adrien, being a sheltered child was never able to make friends aside from Chloe. While he doesn’t really tolerate “bad” actions such as putting a bubblegum on someone’s chair, he is also a sweetheart that doesn’t want to sell a friend away. It’s to the point of getting his self into trouble. Of course, Nino told him it’s better to tell the truth and he did so afterwards but I think this is a highlight to Adrien’s “niceness” may have come from not wanting to incite dislike/discontent from other people and therefore, “lose” friends (or potential ones at least). This is something I also noticed in Volpina episode.

Adrien is angry for Lila’s sake, but changing his tone immediately to a much nicer and more passive one when confronting Ladybug. Of course, it may be due to the fact he’s talking to his crush but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

When Volpina said they are on a “romantic” date, he was quick to say it is not, but nervously changes to “but it could be” after receiving her glare. There’s also more subtle example which is also at the beginning of the episode where Lila was pulling him into the library and he looked like he isn’t too keen on the idea but not voicing it out.

Then there’s also the thing with Chloe when she asked Chat Noir to do her work. He was clearly displeased by it but still helped her.

Point is, Adrien is very timid when it comes to others which is quite similar to Marinette at the very beginning before she met Alya and became Ladybug.

Both Adrien and Marinette are the kind to just roll with things and not voice out their opinions even when they are uncomfortable (Marinette is becoming less of this since Origins) and will only do so if they see injustice or someone being wronged or pushed to the limits (like when Adrien tried to secretly go to school due to loneliness).

As for the others, I’ll just do a quick run down.

They are both at the best of their league when it comes to “video games”. Marinette may be way better than Adrien, but it doesn’t dispute the fact that he’s the best among the boys and would have been first place if not for her.

Their best friend are the first friend they made at the beginning of the school year. Interestingly, there’s a bit of parallel here. Marinette’s best friend is the “new” girl at school, Alya. Meanwhile, Adrien is the “new” boy at school and Nino’s bestfriend. Also, it seemed that they don’t really have friends (excluding Chloe?) who would talk/hang out with them at school before: Adrien, for obvious reasons, and Marinette, for being unlucky I guess?

They are both great (if not the best) at the things they do. Simply put, they are multi-talented as shown throughout the episodes. Adrien is understandable as he fits the trope of popular boy who’s good at everything, while Marinette is the protagonist who can do things if she resolves herself into it. It’s to the point where you can question the “intro” and ask yourself, “Which part of her is a ‘normal’ girl like any other that leads a ‘normal’ life again?” She is friends with the most popular guy in their school/city, became esteemed employee/designer of the most famous singer, and win all contests she got herself into.

They are both charismatic and have qualities of a leader. They are shown both capable to rally the students and make them do something in case of an emergency situation. Marinette showed her charisma when they were trapped and lead others to escape in “Darkblade”, while Adrien was able to lead the scared and transformed students to help Ladybug and attack in “Reflekta” episode.

They both still have insecurities and underestimates themselves despite how awesome they actually are. I know that it’s supposed to have the audience relate to them and make the viewers think “I’m much more awesome than I think I am”, but see this: Adrien is actually the top placer, but seeing Marinette’s skill with video games suddenly made him feel that he sucks at it (well, either Marinette is just that good or Adrien doesn’t really think much of his video game skill). Marinette still thinks that Adrien will be disappointed in her if he finds out she is “Ladybug” despite all the accomplishments she had done as “Marinette”. Of course, we supposed to have humble heroes with silly to normal insecurities to make them more vulnerable and easy to relate for the audience.

They are both sweet children, but they can act really petty when jealous. For me, this pettiness is more for audience amusement and ship tease, but it also showed more their “human” side and this little bit of flaws makes it more interesting. I don’t need to mention what they did in Copy Cat, The Bubbler and Volpina, right?

They are both raised well and cherished by their loving parents. Yes, Adrien too. Despite the conflict he is having with his father right now, take note that it’s implied that his father is not usually so cold and distracted. Adrien said that his dad “changed” when his mom disappeared. So I guess they were a loving and happy family until the disappearance of Mrs. Agreste and Mr. Agreste who is already over-protective (he prefers Adrien to be home schooled after all), became even more strict. I wouldn’t have add these since it’s normal to have parents that love you and is not a trait these two strictly shares (their parents’ way of expressing love are different too) but not everyone has a good family. Unfavorable parents are as normal as good ones so hey, that counts… right?

They’re both popular? Ugh, I don’t feel like adding this since it’s too cliche of an answer but it’s still one of their similarities. I don’t need to explain Adrien’s popularity or Marinette’s popularity as “Ladybug”, but Marinette can be considered pretty popular if she is voted for Student Representative. And considering the deeds she had done at school, it wouldn’t be surprising if students think good of her and has great reputation.

In conclusion, these two kids are great with lots of potential but both don’t really think that highly of themselves and thinks their hero counterparts are better. It’ll be great to see the two actually make each other realize how awesome they are and have them appreciate themselves better (like how Adrien/CN comforts Marinette/LB every time). I do hope there will be a reversal episode where Marinette/LB does the support this time for Adrien/CN.

Maybe there’s supposed to be more, but this post is pretty long now. If you think there’s more to add, feel free to reply and add it xD

#miraculous ladybug #ml #adrienette #ml analysis #marinette cheng #adrien agreste #character analysis #ml character analysis #ml character #analysis #reply

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goddamnwebcomics · 7 years

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Predicting Spinnerette Arcs 26-35

Everyone except very delusional people know that Spinnerette is going downhill. With it’s current asinine plots, the fact the whole comic seemed to lose it’s serious plot-related grasp after Colonel Class arc, and it’s stupid awful artstyle drawn by a guy who keeps altering the designs of characters - let’s call him P. C. Dimbleby - and actual script calls for chibi faces, things aren’t honestly looking good for the Asylum version of Empowered. But hey, Kraw’s printing money with merch involving scantily clad protagonists and porn comics that are canon so nothing’s gonna be a problem for him!

With that said, it’s pretty easy to call what he has in his mind next, and here i will predict the plot of every issue from 26 to 35. Let’s begin.

Issue 26: The Return Of Jara

It’s revealed that before Spinny, Mecha Maid dated a man who was abusive towards her and made her become a lesbian. The said man is now working in the same science lab place as Heather, and the man titled Jara - who looks like a Biff Tannen with classic P.C. Dimbleby hooknose, by pure accident runs into her. Jara grows fondness for Spinny, thinking she is single. After several irritating catcalls, Heather wants to bring Jara to comfort HER love. Heather forgets that secret identities are a thing that must be protected, and in her futile ALS form, she comes to see Jara again. Jara calls her buzzwords which are meant to make audience angry, allowing Heather to transform into Spinny and beat the crap out of him. Mecha likes it for some reason and they get away with it, because turns out Jara had been stealing scientific tools from the lab in order to make moonshine and the cops think Spinny was beating him up for that reason. Their relationship “develops” and Kraw wants to inform you he is not like most guys and he is single ladies.

Issue 27: Colonel Glass 2: Part 1

North Korea has done some nuclear tests, which pisses off America and it’s anti-superhero and anti-fun and anti-allthingsKrawlikes president Meanie D. T. Incompetent. He teams up with prime minister of Canada, who is a topical Rob Ford parody despite the fact dude died several years ago, in order to use the “superity” from the local superheroes to recreate Cherenkov-Kirby Reactor or something which could wipe N.K. off the map. However, the superheroes know MORE THAN THAT, Benjamin Franklin returns to reveal the nuclear tests are actually massive attacks performed by Colonel Glass 2. Turns out N.K. had a bodyclone of Colonel Glass in case he would die in his trip, which he did. Benjamin also tells the heroes to watch out for government who are trying to do something with “superity”, we get exposition that the first superhero that did CK reactor basically created superheroism by using his blood to create the reactor, which gave birth to “superity”, more “superity” they have, the stronger they are and so far CK Reactor is the only one that can infect being with “superity” but governments all around the world are looking for other ways to make it. Because governments are hypocrites, says Kraw as he pats himself in the back and thinks he’s about to create the next Brave New World. Superheroes get canadian superfucks to help them because of course they do.

We cut to Colonel Glass 2 doing shit, turns out he shares the memories of Colonel Glass 1, including the memories from before he died? and develops perverse fondness for Mecha Maid, he starts flying towards America as all glass around the world go haywire. Spinny, Mecha Maid, Tiger, London, Minerva, Katt O Nine Tails and Green Gable try to sneak with their supercar when Sergeant Generic notices them, he sends Noob Saibot after them. Meanie D.T. Incompetent finds out about the escapees and proceeds to BOMB THEM AND NOT CARE ABOUT CASUALTIES because that’s how politicians in real life work. Cliffhanger.

Issue 28: Colonel Glass 2: Part 2

Spinny and rest of superheroes survive the attacks and reach the Atlantic, where they bump into a weird group of rejects with really one sided personalities, one is a character meant to point out the flaws of Netflix series Daredevil which Kraw seriously thinks he could write better, other one is a friendly zombie girl and another is a quirky scene girl who licks things and a wacky running gag is that Mecha Maid finds her creepy. They reveal they are South Korean Superheroes who were almost killed by Original Colonel Glass and set up a base in the atlantic. They were before experimented with CK Reactor and therefore have more “superity” than any other superhero on the planet besides Colonel Glass 2. Meanwhile President Incompetent decides to start a war against the entire continent of Asia, considering them all “anime-watching rice eaters who did Pearl Harbour” because Kraw never puts stereotypes in his own characters. American War Fleet flies past the superfucks, and canadians and Tiger stay in the base while the SK heroes and Spinny and Mecha Maid go after them. They all get destroyed in one hit by Colonel Glass 2. Spinny, Mecha Maid and SK heroes somehow survive the blast but turns out it was INTENTIONAL as Colonel Glass 2 finds Mecha Maid to torture her. Spinny is mad. Cliffhanger.

Issue 29: Colonel Glass 2: Part 3

President Meanie D.T. Incompetent has HAD ENOUGH and demands Sergeant Generic to call some abnormal guy to help them set up the CK Reactor Weapon properly that can wipe out CG2. Because world is small, Generic calls Dr. Universe, who agrees to let past be past in face of common threat, but also wants to manipulate them into following their objectivist goals. Mecha Maid wakes up in a dark room, where she gets fed memories and other shit, that Kraw wants you to think resembles sexual harassment geddit Kraw knows your feelings Kraw understands Kraw is a friend. Bullshit happens as Spinny’s anger manifests inside him and transforms him into a giant golden spider creature, one of the SK Superfucks say “this is like Dragon Ball Z episode” and at that point you know where this is fucking going. Spinny tears inside Glass’s base conveniently and a long climactic fight ensues, ending with Glass 2 dying by thermite again. Spinny becomes normal again and wakes up in the SK fleet, where Mecha Maid is mad at her for once again murdering someone. Mecha then cries it was her own fault and crying crying crying. Dr. Universe fools Meanie D.T. Incompetent as he calls Super MILF and Greta Gravity to sex him out of working on the weapons! Ha ha! This is a serious comic!

Issue 30: Boring Prequel

This story is a prequel to the first ever case of “Superity”, which takes place in Wild West, in yet another stupid unimaginative alternate universe twist, Buffalo Bill was a superhero, and from there it’s shown how first CK Reactor was made, but the first superhero whose name i forgot is warned of “them”, who are “they”? You’ll find out soon enough.

Issue 31: Critical Analysis

Spinny has returned home with a bad feeling, and she’s got strange aches all over her body. Turns out the Friendly Zombie Girl is there to investigate upon Spinny as she reveals to her both of them are “Stanisian”, people who are full of “superity” which is just Stanisian blood, and are unable to toggle their powers off. Spinny somehow became stanisian by CK Reactor because before stanisians were only by birth only which intrigues the zombie girl. She reveals what happened in the last arc was her exposing her “Ultra Stanisian Power” which only comes into effect over strong stress. Heather also finds out Stanisians never die, as SK zombie girl was the first child of Genghis Khan. Stanisians have existed since humanity’s beginning, but only when CK Reactor was created, humans could get “superity” AKA Stanisian blood too. The reason most humans don’t know about them is because they’re the mortal enemy of “Enlightened”, perfect humans who have ability to manipulate people and are omnipotent but don’t have superpowers, Enlightened have controlled the world by their secret society - you guessed it - the Illuminati since the old times in order to wipe out Stanisians but they always fail.

First thing Spinny realizes after all of this is that, she can cure Mecha Maid by transforming her into Stanisian! Friendly Zombie Girl advices this is not a good idea because exposing a human to too much superity could kill them, and types like Heather are a rarity. Spinny can’t convince Mecha though, who just gets madder so Spinny asks help from Universe. Universe reveals he knew about Stanisians all along and he constructed CK Reactor so that he could in fact turn more people into them so that the Illuminati could be taken down. It’s revealed Ayn Rand was against the Illuminati and the infamy of the book is a pop culture propaganda. What. They begin working on it. Cliffhanger.

Issue 32: The Lesbian Torment

Adrastea and Sara NIcole meet on same jailcell, they fall in love because Sara Nicole hasn’t eaten her anti-gay bagels. Their relationship is meant to be “different” as in, “it’s same shit as Mecha’s and Spinny’s relationship, except they’re both more aggressive”. They fool the guards by making out and escape.

Issue 33: Critical Analysis Part 2:

Dr. Universe takes a bit of blood from Friendly Zombie Girl as she has finished the POCKET SIZED CK REACTOR. Then government rushes in with Sergeant Generic on helm and Universe as well as Spinny get arrested. They’re taken in front of Illuminati, who are ready to literally wipe them out of existence because oh cool Kraw read 1984 just now. Friendly Zombie Girl wasn’t arrested and Greta takes her to bite Mecha Maid, curing her by all of her fucking problems and she becomes Ultra Stanisian, saving Spinny and Universe. Illuminati finds out THE INFESTATION IS SPREADING. At this point it’s also revealed N.K. Government is actually propaganda’d as shitty dictator state because they refused to join the New World Order and is the only state ran by Stanisians.

Issue 34: War Of Minds

A kickstarted exclusive story focusing on SK Superheroes, with Daredevil potshotter dating the other. Boring.

Issue 35: Revenge of Revenge

Life has become harder for Spinny to keep double identities when Sara Nicole and Adrastea butt in to cause chaos. Adrastea wants to nuke science facilities while Sara Nicole wants everyone to like her. They nag like an arguing couple, isn’t that funny. It ends with Mecha Maid dying as Spinny cries, when she wakes up to find out it has all been a drug-induced dream and she remembers when she went to comfort Mecha Maid after Colonel Glass Arc, she threw Heather off the bed and beat the ever-living shit out of her, before she got a massive heart attack and passed away, with her last words being “I wish i never met you.” Heather wants to go back into these dreams when she finds out she’s been carried to hospital, where Sahira states that she’s been diagnozed with a rare variation of ALS that is contagious. Haw haw.

#spinnerette #blogpost

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richmeganews · 5 years

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The Death of America’s Frontier Vision

Katherine Lam

Lost Children Archive opens as a family prepares for a transnational journey. The man is a sound artist; the woman’s a radio documentarian; the boy is 10; the girl, 5. The man has announced that he has to go to Arizona on a recording quest, and whether he intends to come home again is not clear. The woman is opposed but eventually agrees: They will all drive west until they find what the man is looking for, and decide later whether they’re returning home together.

If the broad details of the plot feel vaguely familiar, it’s because Valeria Luiselli, a Mexican novelist and essayist now living in the United States, has taken up the American pioneer myth: A family (here named, as is traditional, “Ma” and “Pa,” “the boy” and “the girl”) sets out from the relative safety of the East Coast in a wagon (here, a station wagon) in wary but hopeful search of a new home. Theirs is a pilgrimage to a kind of western Zion, fraught with peril, undertaken because it is the only solution to an existential threat. But the migration in Lost Children Archive is constructed as an inversion of the American frontier fable—its anti-myth, its interrogator.

Luiselli’s pioneer family departs from the Bronx. Unlike the old trope, in which the Anglo-Saxon family confronts a wilderness populated by “hostile” native tribes, this family is threatened by the “white supremacist something” playing over the speakers in a Virginia gas station. They clench their teeth through an encounter with a policeman who scolds them about getting the girl a booster seat. (Luiselli never directly states the family’s racial identity, but the woman’s fluent Spanish is a clue.)

Knopf

The threat forcing this migration is relational rather than physical—emotional estrangement, broken communication, divorce. It’s a blended family—the son is the man’s by birth, the daughter the woman’s—but one that has entirely bonded, until now. The woman, who narrates most of the book, senses that she and her husband will part ways at the end of this road trip and that the children, who have been siblings as long as they can remember, will be separated. “Inside the car, although we all sit at arm’s length from one another, we are four unconnected dots,” she thinks, “each in our seat, with our private thoughts, each dealing with our varying moods and unspoken fears.” In leaving home, they have lost the “small but luminous space where we had become a family,” and without a “center of gravity,” they seem unlikely to survive as the family they once were.

The man’s sound project, which inspired the road trip, is an “inventory of echoes,” an archive of the sounds of the Chiricahua Mountains, in southeastern Arizona, the heart of Chiricahua Apache country, where, he tells the children, “the last free peoples on the entire American continent lived before they had to surrender to the white-eyes.” (The Chiricahua, represented by Geronimo, were in fact the last of the free tribes to surrender to U.S. government troops, in 1886; many of the ambient events of this book are fact-checkably nonfictional.) He is out to record “the ghosts.”

The woman, meanwhile, is working on an audio documentary about migrant children arriving at the southern border from Central and South America and going missing—at the hands of smugglers (known as “coyotes”) or the U.S. government. A friend from New York calls to say that her two daughters, who were migrating alone under the supervision of a coyote and had made it into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have suddenly vanished. Hearing reports on the car radio of missing minors, the boy and the girl start to call them “the lost children,” so the man and the woman do too.

What they’re driving toward isn’t so much a Zion as an absent monument, not the pioneer’s “freedom” or “land of possibility” but the site of the final stroke of the genocide and enslavement those myths excused. At first it’s the man who wants to reach the place where Geronimo surrendered, but the children soon take an interest, imagining other outcomes. “They come up with possible endings and counterfactual histories,” Luiselli writes. “What if Geronimo had never surrendered to the white-eyes … The lost children would be the rulers of Apacheria!” The woman privately comes to think of their destination (which is, in the end, a real corner of Chiricahua National Monument called Echo Canyon) as the place where the family will discover which of its own possible trajectories will come to pass: stay together, or part.

I am to see to it that I do not lose you, promises the final line of a Walt Whitman poem that the man and the woman recited to each other at the beginning of their romance. This mandate haunts the book. What happens when a person is lost to loved ones, to herself, to history? Can such loss be prevented? Can we be retrieved?

Both mother and son—who also narrates part of the book—are curious about the documentary impulse, and anxious about whether documentation can shore up the world against loss. The boy received a Polaroid camera for his birthday just before they set out on their journey, and he spends the first part of the drive learning how to use it. His immediate questions aren’t so much technical as ontological, maybe prompted by his curiosity about what his parents do. “So what does it mean, Ma, to document stuff?” Before the woman replies, she reflects:

Perhaps I should say that documenting is when you add thing plus light, light minus thing, photograph after photograph; or when you add sound, plus silence, minus sound, minus silence. What you have, in the end, are all the moments that didn’t form part of the actual experience. A sequence of interruptions, holes, missing parts, cut out from the moment in which the experience took place … The strange thing is this: if, in the future one day, you add all those documents together again, what you have, all over again, is the experience. Or at least a version of the experience that replaces the lived experience, even if what you originally documented were the moments cut out from it.

What should I focus on? the boy insists.

This is a bit heady, but the book itself is attempting to solve a heady problem: how to account for the past and the present at once, how to hear the people who remain undocumented, how to rescue what is lost and also make sense of what and who are still here. By combining archivist protagonists interested in border politics and indigenous people’s history, Luiselli invites a closer look at the word undocumented. Being undocumented also means having no proof of self to carry forward into the future.

The woman seems dizzied by history, as if now is the time when all eras and their energies collide—when the past is the present and the future is impenetrable and uncertain. She’s struck, she says, by a change in the world.

Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises.

The boy’s question about where to point his camera, the woman concludes, suggests the real problem: “Our ways of documenting the world have fallen short.”

Lost Children Archive attempts its own new form as if in answer to that challenge. The family’s story is interspersed with archival lists cataloging the contents of each of the seven boxes they have brought along. Luiselli inserts photographs, migrant-mortality reports, maps, newspaper clippings, reading lists, and an annotated photocopy of a poem by Anne Carson, as well as sequences of notes on “stranger echoes,” “car echoes,” “insect echoes,” “leaves echoes.” There is even a second book within this one—the woman reads a novel about migrant children to the boy and the girl, and it appears chapter by chapter, as a counterpoint to their own journey. One of Lost Children Archive’s pleasures is its resemblance to the kind of collection that emerges when a dedicated mind is at work on the same problem over the course of years. Luiselli gives us the text and the metatext, and instead of being a contrived poststructuralist irritation, the approach feels elegant and generous. She has left us the paper trail.

Luiselli has created an extraordinary allegory of this country’s current crisis of self-concept: What do America’s borders mean now? Why are some migration (or pioneer) stories celebrated in the nation’s history, while others are framed as intrusions to be erased from the record? The same political and existential questions animate the historian Greg Grandin’s new book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. In his account, lust for the frontier has been the driving force in American history, starting with Christopher Columbus and sweeping westward to the Pacific, then imperially across the world, and now back home to the contested U.S.-Mexico border. Only now, he argues, are the fallacies of America’s self-mythology of “endless becoming and ceaseless unfurling” clearly revealed, along with their consequences.

Metropolitan

“This ideal of freedom as infinity,” Grandin points out, rested on domination—first of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans, and then of whatever countries U.S. forces decided to occupy. The society created through this expansionism was inevitably plagued by injustice: economic inequality, racism, nationalism, political sectarianism, and violence. But the ever-receding frontier provided a safety valve for the pressures it caused. “A constant fleeing forward allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems.”

The logical flaw is obvious: At some point the system is going to implode. “In a nation like the United States,” Grandin writes,

founded on a mythical belief in a kind of species immunity—less an American exceptionalism than exemptionism, an insistence that the nation was exempt from nature, society, history, even death—the realization that it can’t go on forever is bound to be traumatic.

He suggests that the moment of implosion has crystallized in Trumpism’s rhetoric of division and isolationism. “Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy the interests, reconcile the contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger.”

“Something changed in the world,” Luiselli’s woman says. “Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it … somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits.” Americans no longer enjoy the illusion of a limitless world. Now we are nose to nose with a wall. Grandin, like Luiselli, is a fan of Anne Carson, whom he also cites: “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” If we have lived past ours, what (or whose) mythos will take its place?

Both Grandin and Luiselli decline to imagine forward into the beckoning horizon of a new national story. Instead, they reach back to retrieve the narratives of those who were dominated or eclipsed in history. Grandin’s book pays careful attention to the various peoples who were subjugated, enslaved, or exterminated in the name of the American project. If Luiselli’s narrator asks whether the undocumented can be retrieved, Grandin’s answer is yes, partly—at least for the historical record.

Luiselli’s focus is narrower: the thousands of children who have vanished trying to cross into the United States (the littlest, most vulnerable pioneers). Their saga has captured the American imagination as much as frontiersman stories did two centuries ago, and yet their stories explicitly frame the United States as a site of terrifying erasure rather than self-authorship. In adopting the novel as her format, she suggests that their voices in particular are reachable only with the help of imagination. Some children, she admits, are simply lost. Their absence, their horrible silence, is what’s left to record.

This silence is accented by the two tender, rowdy children journeying in the narrator’s back seat. With an ethnographer’s curiosity, she records their moods, their games, their funny and poignant judgments on the country out the window, their various assertions of selfhood. The boy and the girl are the bright, almost painful joy of the book—and the starkest indictment of a country at whose hands children can be erased. Near the end of their journey, the boy and the girl stand alone at the edge of a canyon in Apacheria, surveying the landscape. They begin to play a hide-and-seek game of their own invention—hollering “Geronimo” when they spot each other—and the girl shouts so forcefully that the name comes back to them: “eronimo, onimo, onimo.” They have arrived at Echo Canyon. Excited, they shout Geronimo’s name again, and then their own names, and eventually their names mix with the lost name, until the boy is “full of thunder-feelings, my stomach, and full of lightning, my head.” He calls into the void and his voice rings forward and backward, all around him, like an arrival of ghosts.

This article appears in the May 2019 print edition with the headline “The Death of the Pioneer Myth.”

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trendingnewsb · 7 years

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30 Books That Everyone Should Read At Least Once In Their Lives

The greatest books are defined as classics for a reason. Written by the greatest literary minds of their time, they have universal themes, characters, experiences, emotions, and perspectives that are still relevant today. Some of them are the very inspiration from which entire modern genres of literary fiction have sprung up from.

If you love reading, here are 30 books that that we feel are defining milestones in our literary tradition. Some are well known classics, others are modern giants. All are well worth reading at least once in your life!

To Kill a Mockingbird

by Harper Lee

Published in 1960, this timeless classic explores human behaviour and the collective conscience of The Deep South in the early 20th century. Humour entwines the delicate strands of prejudice, hatred, hypocrisy, love and innocence to create one of the best novels ever written.

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1984

by George Orwell

Although 1984 has passed us by, George Orwell’s dystopian, totalitarian world of control, fear and lies has never been more relevant. Delve into the life of Winston Smith as he struggles with his developing human nature in a world where individuality, freewill and love are forbidden.

Print | eBook | Audiobook

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

by J.K. Rowling

I’m willing to bet you’ve heard of Harry Potter, but have you read the books? Join Harry Potter as he begins his journey into the world of magic, where he is the celebrated Boy Who Lived. Visit Hogwarts, meet your favourite characters and watch Harry grow into the one of the most famous literary characters in the world.

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The Lord of the Rings

by J.R.R. Tolkien

Middle Earth is a wonderful, expansive fantasy world filled with turmoil, heroes, evil and innocence. Although our protagonist Frodo Baggins’ quest seems impossible to complete, this trilogy is a tale of triumph in the most impossible circumstances.

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he Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Published in 1925, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explores the decadence of the Jazz Age, and one man’s introduction into a world where even those with the most indulgent lives cannot earn love.

Print | eBook | Audiobook

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

One of the most famous novels of all time, Pride And Prejudice details the courtship of two opposed characters in a world where manners and courtesy are of the utmost importance.

Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Diary Of A Young Girl

by Anne Frank

Unforgettable and deeply influential, Anne Frank’s diary is a raw account of a young girl’s life as she hides from the Nazis. Despite her circumstances, Anne believes that people are still good at heart and that the world is full of beauty: she will change your life.

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The Book Thief

by Markus Zusak

Set in Germany during 1939, The Book Thief follows Liesel as she rescues books from the tyranny of Nazi rule. Meanwhile, her family has hidden a Jewish fighter in their basement and death looks down on the family, narrating our tale. Experience bravery that is rarely found in the world, and friendship that is formed in the most unlikely of situations.

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The Hobbit

by J.R.R. Tolkien

Although the movies are inexplicably long, The Hobbit was originally written as a short children’s book. Meet your favourite characters for the first time as the unforgettable Bilbo Baggins traverses the harsh landscapes of Middle Earth to challenge a dragon.

Print | eBook | Audiobook

Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

Join four sisters, each with their own prominent personality, as they come of age in charming 19th Century New England. Experience their struggles and revel in their flaws, as these girls become strong women.

Print | eBook | Audiobook

Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury

Books are forbidden, and it is our main character Guy Montag’s job to burn any books he comes across. Often compared to George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian world is an unsettling commentary on Western societies’ addiction and dependence on the media and conformity.

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Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Bronte

Arguably one of the most influential fictional heroines of all time, Jane Eyre is a strong, unbroken women despite her troubled childhood and repressed Victorian society. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Animal Farm

by George Orwell

This famous 1945 satire, examines the realistic risks of revolution and the dynamics animals will inevitably give in to.

Print | eBook | Audiobook

Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

Set in The South during The Civil War, chances are if you love the movie you’ll love the book. Although the main character and the world she lives in is loathsome, readers’ opinions are twisted as this novel dishes out a fated justice when both Scarlett and The South lose their wars. Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Catcher in the Rye

by J.D. Salinger

Starring the original cynical adolescent, The Catcher In The Rye explores the challenges and isolation of adolescence. Decipher your own message as you follow sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, in this novel that has split audiences for decades. Print | Audiobook

Charlotte’s Web

by E.B. White

Team up with Charlotte, a loving and generous spider, and Fern, a farmers daughter as they try to save Wilbur the piglet from becoming breakfast. Charlotte’s Web is a compelling reminder to bask in the simplistic wonders of everyday life, and to be kind to all living creatures. Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

by C.S. Lewis

Another renowned fantasy world, Narnia is the home of hundreds of magnificent creatures each with their own origins, morals and ideals. Let you imagination run wild as you enter the wardrobe and meet some of the most famous literary characters in history. Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

Published in 1939, this novel set during The Great Depression follows one Oklahoma family as they are forced to travel to California. Experience America in a tale where it’s people are divided into the haves and have-nots, the powerful and the powerless. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Lord of the Flies

by William Golding

This classic novel follows the lives of boys marooned on an island as they regress into savages; and their beautiful, enjoyable island existence collapses into a primitive and cruel nightmare. Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

A story of true friendship, The Kite Runner follows Amir as he tries to find the only true friend he’s ever had – despite abandoning him due to ethnic and religious differences that were prominent in Kabul, Afghanistan. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Of Mice and Men

by John Steinbeck

Of Mice And Men is a complex story of a friendship between two migrant workers: George Milton and Lennie Small, in California. Watch their friendship develop as the pair work towards their modest dreams of owning their own land and pets. Print | eBook | Audiobook

A Tale of Two Cities

by Charles Dickens

Following eighteen years as a political prisoner, Dr Manette is released and returns to England with his daughter Lucie. There, two very different men fall in love with Lucie and become entwined in a tale of love and sacrifice. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Romeo and Juliet

by Charles Dickens

Perhaps the most famous love story ever written, Romeo and Juliet is an epic tragedy that explores the euphoria of desire and the tragedy of revenge. Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

by Douglas Adams

Grab a towel and accompany human Arthur Dent on a fantastic adventure across the galaxy. Learn not to take the universe so seriously and forget any meaning you’ve applied to anything in your life, because we all know the real meaning of life is 42. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Bronte

Published in 1847, this passionate and harrowing story of love, rivalry and revenge follows Catherine Earnshaw and her father’s adopted foundling Heathcliff as they grow into very different adults. Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Color Purple

by Alice Walker

Winner of multiple awards, The Color Purple is a devastating tale that tackles the lives of colored women in 1930s USA. Censored and challenged, the harsh reality displayed in The Color Purple will leave you shaken. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Alice in Wonderland

by Lewis Carroll

Bizarre and curious, Alice In Wonderland explores the potential of imagination and the reality of fiction. If you’re a fan of escaping the real world, this is definitely the book for you. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Frankenstein

by Mary Shelley

A combination of gothic thriller, cautionary tale and romance novel, Frankenstein is a story like no other. Written by Mary Shelley when she was just eighteen, Frankenstein prompts readers to ask themselves some truly shattering questions: what makes us human? What do we owe to one another as living creatures? How far can science push the boundaries of nature? Print | eBook | Audiobook

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

by Mark Twain

Often titled The Great American Novel, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn is a deep and complex tale of friendship, adolescence and shifting societal norms. Print | eBook | Audiobook

Slaughterhouse-Five

by Kurt Vonnegut

Although Vonnegut himself admits there are few characters or confrontations in this book, the impact of his novel is undeniable. We travel through life with our protagonist Billy Pilgrim as he experiences World War II from a rather unique perspective – that is, he’s been abducted from his home planet of Tralfamadore. Rich and deeply funny, this tale aims to discourage us from war and murder that the authorities force the public into.

Print | eBook | Audiobook

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