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mariacallous · 9 months

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‘I admired the force of his writing, even when I often didn’t support what he wrote, and he was always warm when we met.’ So wrote John Simpson, the veteran BBC foreign affairs correspondent, on news of the death of the campaigning journalist John Pilger on 30 December at the age of 84.

Those who know of Pilger’s work only in recent years and from the obscure far-left websites that published it may struggle to imagine that he was once a big figure in print and broadcast media, when newspapers sold in the millions and there was only terrestrial television with three channels. But he was, and generous sentiments like Simpson’s have abounded in the past few days. Pundits, politicians and others have typically praised Pilger for his journalistic integrity while making clear that they did not necessarily share his politics.

There’s a more sceptical variant of the same message, which I’ve noted especially among people of my generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s, who were impressed by Pilger’s reports when we were young and he was at the height of his fame. It runs like this: though Pilger descended in later years into apologetics for repressive regimes, he was once a principled and vital foe of oppression and human rights abuses, and it is this side of his work that deserves to be remembered.

The dichotomy is unfortunately not raised at all in an obsequious and evasive Guardian obituary by Anthony Hayward, from which you will learn little, but more thoughtful admirers of Pilger are exercised by this question and do pose it. What made Pilger, the famed voice of radical conscience, go from his celebrated series of films on the plight of Cambodia to his defence of Slobodan Milosevic, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin and his furious denial of their amply documented war crimes?

I immodestly claim to have the answer to this conundrum. There is an essential continuity in Pilger’s work. It’s not, as many believe, that his judgment dramatically deteriorated as he got older: he was always that way, and his reputation has progressively adjusted downwards to match reality. Pilger was not really an investigative journalist at all, for he never did investigations. As a reporter who once worked closely with him explained it to me, Pilger was a polemicist who went out looking for what he wanted to find.

Therein lies the essential transience of Pilger’s life’s work, for while there is much suffering and evil in the international order, a journalist’s first duty, allowing for personal biases and partial information, is to describe the world as it is and not as they might wish it to be. Pilger, by contrast, fabricated his conclusions in order to accord with his premises. This was always his method and I will give examples of this malpractice from his output on two particular issues. The first is his celebrated reporting from Cambodia and the second concerns the wars in the former Yugoslavia, a region he neither knew nor understood.

There is no diplomatic way of saying it but, in his journalism, Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster. And I use those terms in the strict sense that he said things he knew to be untrue, and withheld things he knew to be true and material, and did it for decades, for ideological reasons. If you know where to look, you’ll uncover his inspiration.

In 1983, the newly established Channel 4 broadcast a series of interviews by Pilger with people who, in his words, ‘have challenged orthodox ideas that lead us in the same direction’; additionally, ‘he or she must have demonstrated the courage of his or her convictions’.

The series was titled The Outsiders. Some of the interviewees were genuinely courageous or at least of real historical weight and importance. They included Salman Rushdie, Jessica Mitford and the redoubtable anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman. And there was also an interviewee called Wilfred Burchett.

Few people now have heard of Burchett but he was not like these others. He was, by his own lights, a pioneering radical Australian journalist, though he travelled on a British passport. In Pilger’s words, Burchett was ‘the only Western journalist to consistently report events from the other side in the Korean War and the Cold War, and from China, the Soviet Union and Vietnam’.

That’s quite some euphemism. Burchett didn’t merely report from the other side: he literally repeated their propaganda and pretended it was news. He notoriously claimed the US was conducting biological warfare in the Korean War. He never presented a shred of evidence for this incendiary allegation, because it wasn’t true. For these efforts he was secretly awarded the (North) Korean Order of the National Flag. Not even the radical American journalist I.F. Stone, later exposed as having been a Soviet spy from 1936 to 1938, believed the germ warfare allegations and he publicly rejected them. It was later proved, from documents uncovered in Moscow in 1998, that the whole story had been a propaganda ruse concocted by the Chinese Communists.

I am not, of course, suggesting Pilger was ever an agent of a foreign power. I’m pointing to the model of his journalistic mentor, who lied to his dying day in order to serve what he believed to be the greater cause. And that is what, as I shall discuss presently, I charge Pilger with having done too.

If I’m right (and I am) that Pilger operated with a combination of evasion, misdirection and fakery for decades, it is explicable though inexcusable. This was, after all, easier than the arduous and unglamorous tasks of fact-finding and fact-checking, for which Pilger was temperamentally unsuited. His obituary (unsigned, as is the custom) in The Times, a more balanced and reliable treatment than the Guardian’s, offers pointers.

Pilger was a man of such natural credulousness that he never thought to check his own story when, investigating child slavery in Thailand in 1982, he ‘bought’ a girl and returned her to her family. It was a hoax. The girl had been prevailed upon to act the part by a Thai fixer who knew Pilger wanted to ‘buy’ a slave. When the Far Eastern Economic Review pointed out Pilger’s error, he responded characteristically with wild and irrelevant invective, accusing the journalist concerned of having CIA connections. Auberon Waugh then additionally pointed out in the Spectator the sheer improbability of this account, whereupon Pilger responded with bluster and libel writs. The case was settled out of court, with no payment made by the magazine.

The fiasco was due in part to Pilger’s vanity, which took the form, among other things, of extreme sensitivity to any perceived slight, consistent rudeness to those he counted as ‘the little people’, and a hair-trigger litigiousness. He was the only journalist I’ve come across who habitually wrote angry letters for publication in response to criticism of his articles by readers. This is in my view an improper practice even supposing the writer has a genuine point, which Pilger rarely did. The letters page of a periodical should be for readers, as writers already have all the other pages.

Pilger’s vulnerability was compounded by the weakness of his technical grasp of almost any given subject. Sooner or later in public debate, and it was generally sooner, he’d flounder. Fortunately for him it was rare that any top-notch scholar considered his work but this was a danger he continually ran.

In his book The Price of Peace: Living with the Nuclear Dilemma (1986), Lawrence Freedman, one such academic heavyweight, noted ‘a tendentious television documentary which had sought to demonstrate how mendacious governments were in handling nuclear issues but which was in fact riddled with errors of its own’. Freedman was too tactful to name this documentary, but it was Pilger’s film The Truth Game (1983).

The gravamen of the film is as Freedman states it. Pilger purports to offer a critique of ‘nuclear propaganda’ but his errors of fact are legion. Freedman, with William Shawcross, itemised numerous of these fallacious claims for the magazine New Society (since subsumed in the New Statesman), to which Pilger replied, and it’s worth digging out the exchange. It’s not online but it should be available in a good university library (you can find it at Senate House in London). Pilger plaintively thanks the many people who, on reading Freedman and Shawcross’s critique, sent him sources and information with which to counter it. The notion that he might have investigated sources and checked his claims before making the film rather than after had apparently not occurred to him.

The general thesis of the film is extremely weak. Pilger argues that ‘by using reassuring, even soothing, language – language which allowed the politicians and us to distance ourselves from the horror of nuclear war – this new type of propaganda created acceptable images of war and the illusion that we could live securely with nuclear weapons.’ His sources include Wilfred Burchett, whose very trade was deceit and treachery on behalf of the Communist bloc. And the evidence is overwhelming that, so far from seeking to diminish the threat of nuclear war, western policymakers were anxious to stress that the bomb had changed everything.

In the much-quoted words of the American military strategist Bernard Brodie in The Absolute Weapon (1946), ‘thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.’ And in an extraordinarily prescient memorandum titled ‘The Atomic Bomb’ in August 1945, shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the new prime minister Clement Attlee wrote: ‘While steps must be taken to prevent the development of this weapon in any country, this will be futile unless the whole conception of war is banished from people’s minds and from the calculations of governments.’

The theme of official deceit was an abiding theme of Pilger’s work and he fancied himself a penetrating debunker of evasive language. Hence in the New Statesman on 9 May 2013 he congratulated himself on the thoroughness of his early journalistic training: ‘A style developed by a highly literate editor, Brian Penton, who had published poetry in the Telegraph, instilled a respect for English grammar and the value of informed simplicity. Words like ‘during’ were banned; ‘in’ was quite enough. The passive voice was considered lazy and banned, along with most clichés and adjectives…’

As you will surely already have perceived, Pilger in this brief passage roundly condemns the passive voice while using three passive clauses himself. Indeed, ‘the passive voice was considered lazy and banned’ is itself an agentless passive of the type almost universally (though in my view misguidedly) condemned by style guides. Were it not for the fact, noted by the Times obituarist, that Pilger was famously humourless, you’d have to wonder if he was being ironic here. The more plausible explanation is that, while he talked a lot about the power of language, he didn’t know much about it, and he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

That sort of arrogance has its inadvertently comic side, but it could also be ugly. Pilger prided himself on his courage in rejecting what he derided as ‘identity politics’ but in truth he lacked even an elementary sensitivity to issues of ethnicity and gender. Employing a startlingly demeaning racial epithet, he lambasted Barack Obama in 2008 as ‘a glossy Uncle Tom’, and in 2013 lamented that ‘the problem with media-run “conversations” on gender is not merely [sic!] the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class’. He considered Hillary Clinton a more dangerous presidential prospect in 2016 than Donald Trump.

Pilger’s politics can fairly be described as anti-American, in that he reflexively saw the United States as a malevolent actor in any conceivable situation. That idée fixe in turn drove him to the conviction that any regime opposed by the US was automatically innocent or even benign. Interviewed on the state-propaganda outlet Russia Today in 2018, he declared the Putin regime’s attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury a ‘carefully constructed drama in which the media plays a role’. He said in December 2021, as if Ukrainians lacked any capacity to speak and act for themselves and were merely puppets of Washington: ‘It was the US that overthrew the elected govt in Ukraine in 2014 allowing Nato to march right up to Russia’s western border.’

The apotheosis of this approach was an article in 2016 in which Pilger claimed: ‘The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.’

There was, I need hardly say, no truth whatever in this preposterous fabrication. With all too familiar legerdemain and gullibility, Pilger had alighted on an article on the Russia Today website and, without stating this was his source, plagiarised it. In my view this episode marks, in its combination of idleness and indecency, the nadir of Pilger’s career, and it was a very low and shady point indeed.

This is not the place to set out the chronology of the Bosnian war but what the mainstream media (including The Guardian, through the exemplary reporting of Ed Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane) said about it at the time was simply the truth. The war was not a cover for American power: it was a campaign of genocidal aggression conducted by Bosnian Serb forces covertly orchestrated from Belgrade, and in which Nato intervened against their positions far too late. It was also, as I have described here, a terrible augury of the barbarous assault that another European autocrat, Vladimir Putin, would direct against Ukraine 30 years afterwards.

What, then, of the earlier body of Pilger’s work, before his alleged journalistic and ethical deterioration? In the nature of things, it was not always wrong, but it was always reductive. His condemnation of Australian recognition of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, in print and in his 1994 film Death of a Nation, was entirely correct. But to be right on a discrete issue was never enough for him. He would have to construct some overarching explanation (or, less politely, a conspiracy theory) in which to embed it. He hence charged that Australia was administering a ‘hidden empire’ that ‘stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to the South Pacific’. You’d be hard put to find any such coherence in Australian foreign policy, which has often been made on the hoof and at the mercy of events.

When East Timor eventually achieved its independence, it did so to the fury of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. It was, in their eyes, an affront, for East Timor (whose population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic) was properly a ‘part of the Islamic world’ and belonged to Indonesia. This complaint was explicitly cited by bin Laden in justifying al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Indonesian tourist resort of Bali in October 2002, which killed 202 people including 88 Australians.

Pilger was usually quick to blame western foreign policy for provoking terrorism – he referred to the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005 as ‘Blair’s bombs’ – yet here was a case where western nations incurred the wrath of al-Qaeda for unequivocally (if belatedly) doing the right thing. The geopolitical situation was more complex than he had supposed, and than you would imagine from reading his output. He dealt with the disjunction of theory and fact in time-honoured fashion, by never mentioning it.

And then there is the case of Cambodia, the single best-known body of work Pilger did. His first film on the subject, Cambodia: Year Zero (1979) elicited a huge public reaction. (It made a big impression on me as a teenager.) It had two undeniable benefits, though one was more alloyed than the other. First, it raised a lot of money from the public to alleviate the desperate plight of Cambodians after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Second, it dramatically raised public awareness of the issue.

The problem was that public awareness was not necessarily equivalent to public understanding, and Pilger’s work didn’t serve the latter. Pilger’s message in this first film and still more so in its several successors was essentially propaganda on behalf of the Vietnamese puppet regime that had supplanted the Khmer Rouge and that was itself guilty of extensive human rights abuses. It was misleading and dishonest, and it involved defaming decent people trying to do their best for a ravaged nation.

Let me first give a bit of background. Pilger is often thought (and he did nothing to dissuade people from believing it) to have been responsible for exposing the sufferings of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. He wasn’t. Journalists who broke this story, whose horrors were almost impossible to conceive of, as early as the summer of 1975 included Tony Paul of Reader’s Digest, Bruce Palling and Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post, and Henry Kamm (no relation to this author) of the New York Times. They were the first writers to publicise refugee accounts, yet – for their pains – their reports were rubbished by some on the radical left as media distortions.

Noam Chomsky, the famed theoretical linguist, and his coauthor Edward Herman, a grotesque fabulist who went on to deny the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, wrote an infamous article in 1977 in which they complained that American newspapers were presenting a ‘seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered’.

But the refugee accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities, under which about 1.7 million out of a total Cambodian population of 8 million perished, were in all essentials accurate. Western journalists, in impossibly difficult conditions, had alerted the world to depravities that almost defied the imagination. Pilger was late to the story. This was due not to oversight on his part but to politics. He was a cheerleader for Vietnam, which had only just turned against the Khmer Rouge and invaded Cambodia.

Pilger’s consistent theme was that western governments and the United Nations were giving tacit support, including military aid, to the Khmer Rouge in order to undermine the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. And to muddy the truth that the Khmer Rouge had itself been supported by radical left-wing pundits in the west, and that its leaders were all former members of the French Communist Party, he slyly and repeatedly compared the movement to the Nazis.

In, especially, his second film in this series, Cambodia Year One (1980), and thereafter Pilger developed the theme that the west was denying development aid to Cambodia while providing assistance to the resurgent Khmer Rouge. These were shocking fabrications with direct and baneful humanitarian consequences. The truth was that Vietnam was deliberately preventing food aid from reaching the starving people of Cambodia: it was using international aid as a political tool, choosing who would be fed and who would not. UN agencies and NGOs told Pilger this, so he accused them of lying.

The aid agencies were correct and Pilger was the one telling untruths, which he never retracted. In fact the regime in Phnom Penh along with the occupying Vietnamese forces required every UN agency or NGO operating in Cambodia to pledge not to provide aid to starving Cambodians languishing at the border with Thailand. A real campaigning journalist would have exposed this scandal and inhumanity, but it was not Pilger’s cause. His documentary Cambodia: The Betrayal (1990), in which he alleged that SAS members had trained the Khmer Rouge, provoked a libel writ that Central Television settled at substantial cost.

Pilger went on to engage in reckless and extravagant fakery in the case of Kosovo, a province (and since 2008 an independent country) that he showed no sign of having visited. Nato forces engaged in a military campaign, beginning in March 1999, to stop the Milosevic regime in Belgrade from assaulting the Albanian population of Kosovo. It was a desperate last resort when diplomacy had failed. Though Pilger later depicted it as the forerunner of the Iraq war, the cases were nothing like each other.

The campaign against Milosevic was fought not for regime change or even for the independence of Kosovo but for the single and specific reason of protecting a Muslim population from genocide. It was the right thing to do. Milosevic’s forces had already expelled some 300,000 Kosovans from their homes, killed almost 2,000 and destroyed dozens of villages. And they threatened to do much worse. After 78 days, and nearly 40,000 combat sorties, Nato forced Milosevic to back down.

This limited, just and necessary campaign was described by Pilger in apocalyptic terms (‘the truth is that the US and Britain are engaged in a form of nuclear warfare in the Balkans,’ he wrote in The Guardian on 4 May 1999) that had absolutely no purchase on reality. But the reason I cite it in this context is that it elicited a series of demonstrable falsehoods by Pilger, all crafted to convey the message that western governments were lying about the threat to Kosovo and the numbers of Milosevic’s victims. He later wrote: ‘There was no genocide. The Nato attack was both a fraud and a war crime.’

In the wake of the war itself, Pilger wrote in the New Statesman in November 1999: ‘The numbers of dead so far confirmed suggest that the Nato bombing provoked a wave of random brutality, murders and expulsions, a far cry from systematic extermination: genocide.’ He was rubbishing the entirely accurate charge that Serb forces had engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing. And to make his point, he alleged that western politicians had wildly exaggerated the numbers of Serb victims. Hence, wrote Pilger: ‘Figures were supplied. The US defence secretary, William Cohen, said: “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing . . . They may have been murdered.”’

But Pilger deliberately elided the context from this remark. This was an interview that Cohen gave on CBS television, and he was not suggesting that the Serbs might have murdered 100,000 military-age men. As Michael Ignatieff correctly pointed out in The New York Times in November 1999: ‘In Mr. Cohen’s appearance on Face the Nation, his statements were actually much more complicated. While he said that 100,000 were missing, he also clearly stated that his reports showed that 4,600 Kosovars had been executed, a claim that has been confirmed by the forensic trail of evidence uncovered by war crimes investigators since June.’

Ever after, Pilger claimed that the Nato allies had deliberately and vastly exaggerated the number of victims in Kosovo at the hands of Milosevic’s forces. It was completely untrue. He amplified his fakery by claiming that, during the Kosovo campaign, ‘David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced that as many as ‘225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59’ may have been murdered’. Again, Pilger was lying. What Scheffer actually said, and Pilger trusted that his readers wouldn’t check, was that these men were unaccounted for – a very different thing.

Then and thereafter, Pilger always referred to a final body count of 2,788 victims of the Kosovo war, to reinforce his message that Nato had maligned the Serbs with false claims of mass violence. Again, he was lying by misdirection. The accepted number of those who were killed or went missing during the war is a little over 13,500. These included just under 1,800 Serb civilians, as well as more than 8,600 Kosovan Albanians.

Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, more would have perished under Milosevic’s orders had Nato not intervened. Pilger adopted the bizarrely literalistic view that someone could only be counted as dead if their body had physically been found. That is not the reality of war. In particular – as my family, friends and colleagues who reported Milosevic’s depravities observed directly – it was the aim of Serb forces to bury and hide their victims’ body parts far from any theatre of war, trusting these would never be found.

And here is the final weirdness of Pilger’s coverage of the Kosovo war. He not only lied about the statements of Nato governments and denied the atrocities of Milosevic’s regime, but also sought to spread flagrant disinformation about the war itself. Writing in The Guardian on 18 May 1999, some three weeks before Milosevic capitulated, Pilger dramatically claimed: ‘Nato is suffering significant losses. Reliable alternative sources in Washington have counted up to 38 aircraft crashed or shot down, and an undisclosed number of American and British special forces killed. This is suppressed, of course.’

Pilger gave no indication of who these ‘reliable sources’ were, but they were anything but reliable. The aircraft that Nato lost in the entire campaign amounted to exactly two, an F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft and an F-16 fighter jet, and there were no allied fatalities.

This was before the digital age, and I did not take up the trade of journalism myself till several years later, but I did try to identify where Pilger was getting this stuff from. I never managed to track it down. I’m familiar with the small circles of pro-Serb lobbyists but every inquiry came up a blank. I wrote to Pilger, via The Guardian, asking for his sources but I neither expected nor got any reply. It’s conceivable that someone, knowing Pilger’s record of swallowing tall stories and never checking them, fed him these whopping falsehoods in order to see if he’d put them in the public domain. But I have no direct evidence that any such third party existed.

The dispiriting but economical explanation is hence that Pilger himself invented the tale of extensive Nato losses which were being suppressed by the state and the news media, because he wished to stimulate popular opposition to government policy. He was spectacularly lying for the cause, which in this case was to assist a genocidal regime in its campaign of brutal repression.

I am sorry for Pilger’s family that he is now dead but sympathy does not necessitate sentimentality. Pilger’s career, at least till his more recent brutish outbursts, was replete with glamour and awards but it was in the service of deceit, and it exemplified indifference to human suffering and disregard for human rights.

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kimyoonmiauthor · 2 years

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Worldbuilding: Basics of Anthropology (and a tiny bit of Cultural Geography too)

I have, as I’ve said many-a-time, an anthropology degree. I also took classes related to world building, which included Cultural Geography. I got an A in both the Anthro 101 and Cultural Geography.

(I also took sociology, some psychology, and Ethnic studies... so those might feed this a little.)

As usual, cite your sources if you disagree. This will not substitute for you physically taking the classes, but it will help you with your world building and research into these topics.

What is Anthropology?

This is a thing I see people get wrong a lot.

Anthropology is the study of human beings. This is a huge, huge topic, which, contrary to popular belief covers the following subjects: Sociology, psychology, architecture, biology (particularly human biology, including genetics), population distribution, cultural belief systems, art, archaeology, linguistics, history (a shout out scorn to my fellow anthropologists that say that HUMAN history has “nothing” to do with ANTHROpology)

Anything humans do/are, anything humans destroy, anything that humans create, and anything humans want to somehow have sex with, any human interaction, that is anthropology.

It’s not exactly taught this way in most “standard” programs, but yes, probably the widest of all subjects. Was there a human involved? Anthropology wants to inquire on it. (Works with sentient xenospecies too)

What is Culture?

The definition of culture itself is highly disputed. Many contemporary anthropologists also think it doesn’t really exist in the first place. And so I’m going to give you three postulates about culture for you to chew on which I think are more useful than a textbook definition.

- Culture tries to define the greys and chaos of life, but fails and always leaves people out.

- Culture is always changing.

- Culture does not exist.

Culture tries to define the greys and chaos of life, but fails and always leaves people out.

So, for example, the Bible presents a dichotomy, which isn’t always how all cultures work. But let’s use the Bible since it has the widest reach.

So Bible, as many of the religions in the area, for context, present things in gendered norms, one, and also into either/or.

Man/Woman (The Bible does get into the New Testament where people are neither, which can include intersex and trans... but let’s leave that behind.)

Light/dark

Day/night

nature/humanity

animals that fly/walk

But if you go with this strict hierarchy, you can see problems already.

There are animals that fly and walk. There are animals that have wings, but walk. (Emu, ostriches)

And what do you do with our great ape cousins? Are they humanity, or are they “Nature”.

And evening and twilight and dawn...

How about foggy?

Humans are said to be hardwired to find patterns:

https://psychcentral.com/lib/patterns-the-need-for-order#:~:text=This%20inclination%20to%20find%20patterns,predicting%20outcomes%20in%20everyday%20life.

Like seeing shapes in clouds, Jesus in toast, etc.

So telling a human being there is no pattern and meaning, is really hard for a human to swallow.

This also leads humans to make hardwired rules about the world that are flat out not true. And in times of upheaval, humans are more likely to try to find comfort in these “rules.” because change is hard.

Recognition of patterns helps humans cope with language, and organize life, but in doing so, there is always something in our periphery that we don’t know about.

So think about your own culture and who gets left out of the cultural definitions? Who is exulted for it? Who is vilified for it? Who is ignored for it?

Culture is always changing (and lying to you about it.)

One of my professors liked to say constantly, “Culture LIES to you. It’s always changing. It’s always acting like it’s NOT changing, and then it changes.”

He’d drill this in.

Another professor liked to say, “Traditional? FROM WHEN? When was it traditional?” And you can see the reflection of these two things in the huge Worldwide Story Structure post. I’m constantly picking out flaws in my own work as I’m doing it, and subverting expectations that these things have not and will not change.

I often like to say,

Ah, Culture, you are my best friend, you give me comfort that nothing will change and what is always was and always will be.

Culture says: “Hey boss, I changed!!!”

Me: You betrayed me, I thought we were friends.

Culture: Hey, I changed again, but I swear I won’t change. And really this time I never ever, change.

Humans, I have to say suck, suck at change. We HATE it. We hate change. This is why a lot of older people get so paranoid about the future. And hate groups insist the “new” group out there is really new, and that their belief system is “older”, even if you show it is not historical fact. Humans are really bad at handling change.

For example, I ran into an anti-trans person who was somehow convinced that “Men have always worn pants.”

(Ignore sarongs, kilts, etc)

But this has a time and a place, even the first sewing--someone needs to invent a needle to make pants. And even the Bible doesn’t give Adam auto-pants.

So when you’re making things up, be sure to give it a time stamp, and then a false time stamp.

lol With Story structures...

The Fiction: Of course conflict narrative is from time immemorial, from the time of Neanderthal... the time that humans first were telling stories. How else were they supposed to make it “Interesting”

The fact: Percy Lubbock, who wrote in 1921. It’s barely 100 years old. And then was erased later in favor of Lajos Egri (because somehow Jews are better than gays? *pulls face*), and then Rowe? (He plagiarized) then Bertholt Brecht. But Brecht was too Jewish, so, you know, erase them all for Aristotle (who said nothing of the sort.)

So if you approach world building like that, it ll help you. Often stories, like rumors get exaggerated over time.

Of course for world building purposes, having an alien really, really good at handling change AND remember what the change was with exact precision (You have no idea how much this would annoy humans to no end. Fights have happened for less.) might be refreshing. But this is not humans, even though the so-called human strength is the ability to adapt.

Culture does not exist

This took me forever and a day to understand why this worked, but let’s put it this way: Culture is an ideal, it does not reflect the reality of human beings. It might give an impressionist mode of what another population thinks that other population is.

So from say, US PoV, people who wear very little clothes are called “Naked”

Those self-same people might see you wearing pants and say, “You like to smell your own farts.”

Think of the 1950′s America so-called ideal. If you are thinking White woman married to white man, with 2.5 children (cat doesn’t count), but was that the reality? Was everyone really that way?

And what do you do with the American that was recently immigrated from say, Ethiopia, is a woman and a lesbian. Are they not really American? Some people seem to think so, even if she is part of the story of America and American culture.

I heard a racist man wax on about the 1950′s, roughly this way (on the bus) while looking at me, and then assuming I couldn’t speak English:

You know, in the 1950′s, it was a great time because there were NO Chinese, and there were GREAT industry jobs.

Except there were Chinese in the 1950′s because Chinese first arrived in 1785. https://libguides.southernct.edu/Chinese-Americans#:~:text=The%20first%20three%20Chinese%20immigrants,immigration%20to%20the%20United%20States.. And the truth was that men back then were dealing with PTSD a lot of the time and being denied this was the case. There was hatred against PoCs, particularly black people--name your minority group, yep the 1950′s hated that.

As for the waxing about industry jobs, etc. There were problems with unions, and people often talked about how tough those jobs were.

True in the UK too: https://libcom.org/library/chapter-07-workers-1950s

But you can see the effect of all three here.

Outside of these three, I think it’s also important to remember the following:

You should ALWAYS look and judge if the thing you think is strange is in you, and yours first but in a slightly different way.

It doesn’t mean it works the exact same way, but it’s a way to freeze your superiority complex.

It’s really seductive to think one is superior in culture, but often people say that culture is a different way to cope with the same shit we all try to cope with. It’s much easier to make moral judgments when you don’t know the HOW and the WHY and the WHEN.

It’s much easier to judge the WHO and the WHAT. Without understanding the basis for the belief system.

And often people make shortcuts when they are dealing with other cultures to make the culture “Evil” without really getting into if and when THEY and theirs did it too. And under what circumstances, and if those might fit with when this other culture did it too.

So form an outsider’s perspective, people like to say things like “Aztecs are evil because they sacrificed people.”

But if you draw a parallel timeline around the same time... umm... so were European Druids/Athens, Greece, etc, Indians (subcontinent), Much of West Asia, and parts of East Asia (Ghost Brides, and burying people with their masters). So the liklihood some of your ancestors at the same time were doing it too, is really high.

But I think the question is more importantly the “Why” rather than the how. What advantages did it give the people at the time to do this? And that is a huge, huge topic of debate and study.

(Also, while I love Mercedes Lackey, this is a weakness of her own world building with Valdemar. She short handed “evil” too much in a judgmental way, even when dealing with someone from that culture.)

The idea that one is “more civilized” without thinking about the symbolic ways we still sacrifice people in society and give them shorter lifespans, and turning it all out on one group is unfair. I guarantee, if you go looking, you might find groups we still sacrifice quietly. Say Homeless, which is why we should turn that judgement on the culture that think it is superior. (I swear this would have made Lackey’s Valdemar series richer--this is about the only major nitpick I have over her worldbuilding besides Calderas).

Worldbuilders’ Traps (People and things to avoid)

So seductive to use, but probably will get you academic ire and so you probably should leave these off unless you know more.

Jared Diamond Guns Germs and Steel.

His postulate are popular, but if you look closely at his evidence, it starts to fall apart. So I’d at least mark this one with caution.

If you want to use him as part of your world building (He’s kinda a structuralist, honestly), The mountain v. valley postulate pretty much checks out. Humans do prefer valleys (This might not be true for your aliens though)

Most of the archaeology, you’ll have to dig a lot deeper (pun half intentional?) Much of his conjectures are basic on reading half the study.

The development of metal and weapons in Europe... I found a better explanation for it, so I wouldn’t use his. (Came out after him.)

And some of his lines of evidence are straight up Fictitious. Not that he made them up, but he didn’t check the sources and it turns out to be things like “urban legends”. So be careful with him.

Steven Pinker

I’d be super careful on his postulates about culture. He’s not an Anthropologist and some of his assertions are made for his convenience. I ended up irked.

A bit cautious with his language book about Language Instinct. But not as bad.

Structuralism

The structuralist paradigm in anthropology suggests that the structure of human thought processes is the same in all cultures, and that these mental processes exist in the form of binary oppositions (Winthrop 1991). Some of these oppositions include hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, and raw-cooked.

https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/structuralism/#:~:text=The%20structuralist%20paradigm%20in%20anthropology,nature%2C%20and%20raw%2Dcooked.

Mostly French. It’s really seductive. Because it brings order and rules to everything. But the problem is that in the rules dictated, often there are Eurocentric problems with it.

So let’s take Claude Levi-Strauss, probably the least asshole of all of them, but still an asshole since he likes to call anyone not French “primitive”. (Putting a warning because I know PoCs read and check the works and some of it is infuriating to put up with and I’d have liked the warning).

Claude Levi-Strauss said in the Raw and the Cooked, the “cooked” is culture. And raw is “nature” according to a culture. Anything outside of these things is therefore, “Taboo” which then splits into Taboo “good” or Taboo “bad.”

You can see where this is super seductive. You suddenly have a rule for taboo. All those Shamans that are third gender, suddenly, you have a super rule to apply to it...

But hit pause here.

This irkingly sounds Biblical. And the rules for other cultures don’t always have dicotomies applied to them. They don’t always think of things as “Nature v. “Humanity” So maybe this rule for why they think their thing is taboo does not apply well for their instance.

But it’s really, really hard as someone who wants to shortcut and humanity who loves patterns to get away from structuralism. It’s super seductive. You want that shortcut. But it can also do you in (such as with the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode about how agriculture is superior to foraging, for reptiles, but then you have to inquire about reptiles, and then it falls apart.)

Hardlined rules kinda exist, but the world and universe is chaotic, and often humans spend a lifetime trying to undo misconceptions (Such as Alpha Males in Wolves). So tread carefully with this and think harder if it applies universally, locally, worldwide, etc. This is where having Cultural Geography helps quite a bit and sociology. Find and look for exceptions.

Functionalism

The even more seductive younger brother of Structuralism, but more imperialistic.

Definition: A theory that views society as a complex but orderly and stable system with interconnected structures and functions or social patterns that operate to meet the needs of individuals in a society.

https://sociologydictionary.org/functionalism/

If structuralism makes hardlined rules that don’t universally apply, then Functionalism is its younger brother with a harder edge.

Generally today’s social scientists are anti-Functionalism. Except for those who want to fuck Foucault. (I’m still upset).

Michel Foucault who raped Tunisian boys, BTW. which is a judgment on the rape, not the gay part. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-foucaults-sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-tunisia

The problem is most of these scholars never leave Europe and are as Franz Boas, the father of Anthropology would say, “Armchair Anthropologists”

Armchair scholars aren’t worth much. You should also keep in mind that many of these people terrorized a generation of boys.

Functionalists will occasionally pop up, particularly in the 1970′s-1980′s scholarship. And usually, but not always are French. A lot of them also believe in what is called “evolutionary cultural Anthropology” which is the disgusting belief that we move from “Primitive” to “advanced” and most Contemporary Cultural Anthropologists will call that “extremism” and the stuff that hate groups use. We should be long past that, especially since some of Anthropology is responsible for Nazism, which is well, well covered by a lot of programs on the cautionary tale of doing things wrong.

But as I’m going to drill into you over and over, there is no such thing as “Primitive” once we get to Modern humans (Homo Sapiens sapiens). You only have different ways to solve the same problems.

But let me tell you, early in studying Cultural Anthropology, both functionalism and structuralism are super seductive.

“But that culture is primitive for __ practice.”

The word primitive will get people up in arms with you. Don’t use it unless to thoroughly mock the character using it and turn them into dust.

At the point you try to feel superior, you’ve failed.

Noble savage will also get people after you.

Just don’t do it on a story level.

Keto, etc I’ll cover later.

So for specific ones, I’ll cover in the section it actually pertains to.

I should note there is debate over if species on Earth other than humans can do “culture”. But yeah, we don’t need that debate since it’s fiction anyway.

Cultural Geography

So, generally, I think the most important thing I learned from this course is that geography has *some* but not absolute influence on culture. Also, generally, it’s beneficial to a population to try to keep their population around 2.0 Meaning 2 kids for every pair of adults. (The US achieves this ironically through immigration, which is kinda weird considering how much the US hates immigrants over history once the white population established itself.)

Too much growth in the population results in less resources. Too few and schools, and other services may be forced to shut down.

But I also kinda think the problem is a lot of the programs to try to make women have or not have children are male-centric historically. It’s about forcing them, instead of giving them rights and making it easier.

Governments are generally incompetent at population control

For example, when a country wants to encourage children, they try to do it through tax breaks. But is that targeting the women? Not really. But do they think about spending the money towards expanding help with day care programs which are often overrun? Of course not. That doesn’t target the men, who usually in that system aren’t the primary caregivers of the children nor the family planners. Do they help with things like hospitals, and schools for children? No.

Also the reverse: Too many children. Do they think about giving women opportunities to have a college education? No. They don’t. They think about forced abortions, jail time and punitive measures to punish and shame these women.

But you can see often government policies don’t always think that hard about way to incentivize their citizens to do what they want.

I also learned a lot about charity work. It’s a lot more sticky than you think it is... but I don’t think this really applies for our purposes.

I should also note that certain subsistence systems result in different amounts of children, but I’ll cover that later.

Generally, but not always, humans like to settle near water/waterways (except in cases of empire, then it’s a rich natural resource, say flint.).

Because people need water for waste, but then the Thames and being able to walk on it. We’ll get there.

Writing Cultures that are not your own for Other Worlds: Basic things to keep in mind.

This is not for everyone. That’s OK. But in making it, “Not your thing” Don’t be an ass about it and admit that you have this weakness up front. Don’t do the whole, ‘Well, then if you are that ethnicity, you should write it, stop bothering me.” Instead saying something like, “I really appreciate X and X writers who write those ethnicities well, but unfortunately I find I am deficient in writing those things and wish to have time to work on myself to do better.”

1. Real People > Fiction. ALWAYS.

So, I’ve encountered people who say to me, but I want to write an Asian that is short, with slanted eyes, straight jet black hair and has an accent, don’t those people exist...?

But the question is here... what is the real world impact of your stereotypical depiction? Real people have to live with the fall out of what you did. It’s not fiction to them. They have to cope if your book becomes somehow popular with the perpetuated stereotype.

And I also have to ask, what happened to the rest of Asia?

It’s a pretty big probability that you hold a diversity. Is it disability? ND? LGBTQIA? Gender? or you know someone who struggles with that?

How would you or that person feel if someone said it’s absolutely true that ALL people about this stereotype feel this way? And then it got popular, and then people believed it to be true.

And the author’s defense is, “But it’s fiction, so I can write what I want.”

Ah, you’re one of the people who thinks it never happens. I present to you Madame Butterfly. The novel that became an opera and a musical. This single book managed to press in and hurt Asian women everywhere for generations. You want the origins of submissive Asian women with accents? It’s here. Dragon Asian Lady? In film. Why not be a part of the people who want to challenge it?

Will it be true for every book? No. But on the off chance it is yours, do you want to go down in history as an asshole after spending all this labor trying to get it right? Put the people you are representing first before the story. If a large number tell you to kill your storyline, do it.

2. Free Speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

You write a book that promulgates killing of all Polish people (Gustav Freytag, who is buried in Poland, BTW, Haha. Joke is on him. I hope someone pisses on your grave regularly.)

Does that mean that they have no right to criticize you? (Especially when you’re writing “romance” between Jews and Nazi Soldiers and “romance” between black slaves and their masters? Sally Hemmings was not even old enough to consent, Jefferson, you scum.)

3. Fuck you if you’re asking permission to write a culture from the people who live it.

Stop asking for permission. Please. It’s not going to free you from the consequences above. You fuck up. You take responsibility for it. Got it? You know what happens when people fuck up and truly catch it before others do? They get forgiven when they truly don’t do it again. And people forget about it.

I get it, you feel incredibly nervous. You’re supposed to if you’re putting the first rule in place. You’re supposed to constantly feel like you’re fucking everything up. But that should strive you do do better. The people from that culture are not your scapegoats. If they are closed off to outsiders, then you have, to, have to respect that and MOVE ON. (Again, first rule, people are greater than fiction. Fiction has killed and maimed people but you won’t die if you never write your book.)

To the people out there who are “giving permission” Please stop. No, really, please stop. Because you’re stopping them from trying to represent you better by you saying no.

“Can I write a really stereotypical version of your group?”

Get into the practice of saying “No. You can’t.” And FORCE them to actually do the work and research. If they fail the research, I’m going to tell you, as the non-writer of the story, it is not your fault. It’s theirs for fucking around and not doing the research.

If you’re trying to get comfort in any fashion for a fuck up you did, grow up, and learn how to apologize and own it. Your ego is not worth more than the group of people you hurt. (I have to often take a deep breath and think about this too But yeah, it requires swearing at myself to get over myself sometimes...).

4. Put in 99% of the work before you ask for the 1%. Other people’s time is as precious as yours.

Asking something like, “So tell me everything about Kenya.” Fuck you. You do the work and drill it down.

Instead, you should be spending time drilling down to specific hard-to-research questions.

Say, What are the titles in the bon’gwan register such as X and X to a Korean. I spent several days trying to find them through X resources and couldn’t find them in these ways.

Niche questions are fine. Because those questions aren’t easily searchable.

TT I’ve had Librarians mock me for really niche questions or requests. But I rather be there than asking a really loose question.

Oh and if people answer, and you get published, have the courtesy to ask if they want credit and to thank them. If they don’t want credit, you can still apply loose credit. (I’ll cover that later)

5. The more cultural area/groups you cover, the MORE not less research you have to do.

Say you want to cover East Asia. TT This gets poised to me a lot.

You have about 7,000? years to cover (remember, culture always changes), over 60 ethnic groups, their history, and then all of the cultural pitstops, literature, etc. And you have to make it cohesive.

It’s much easier to do a specific location, time and place. You can build cultures “from scratch” effectively (and do it better than George Lucas), BUT you need to know a lot to do a single thing and erase the serial numbers correctly.

For example, Ken Liu wrote Grace of Kings, which is lauded by the East Asian community for being really good at erasing the serial numbers. However, if you know his history before that...

He clearly knows about China, Korea, Japan, the relationship between them, all over time, and then knows the impact of all the parts. So, the reason he did it WELL, was because he knew A LOT and therefore could do it well.

This is also the approach of other authors such as Guy Gavriel Kay, who takes specific points in historical time/place and then builds fictional worlds. Because you need to know a lot to do a little. And it’s easier to control the amount of information you need to make it less offensive than it is to deal with a whole library of things to create it.

6. You will live in anxiety for the rest of your days about the story, and if this is true, then you are doing a good job, likely trying to get things right.

Basically this. If you feel nervous such that you’re triple checking facts and checking your source’s sources, and the dates, you’re probably doing better than if you’re 100% sure you got it correct. And you might get corrected even after that.

7. Always look for the diversity within the group. (And the diversity in the diversity of that group)

Not all East Asians are short. You have Yao Ming. You are obligated to check your stereotypes at the door once you want to represent the group. You have to look for the cultural standards according to that group, and then face and challenge them.

So for example, I said I am not short, which is true--I’m about average. I have curly-wavy hair. I don’t have black eyes. And I have freckles. But I’m still Asian.

8. Just because you “can” doesn’t mean you “should” and because you “can” doesn’t mean you are doing it “well”.

Just because you can write a buck-toothed sleazy, but submissive Asian, who speaks nasally in an accent, doesn’t mean you should do it.

And just because you can write that doesn’t mean you’re representing the group well.

Process of writing other cultures:

1. Sensitivity readers should be last.

Back to the 99% your effort. Their time is precious and you are asking a favor. It’s fine if it’s not for you.

2. Spend a year with the following: Self media representations, folktales from different time periods, books from that group. Immerse yourself in their point of view. Go after classics and recent works.

You need to absorb the culture’s POV ad try to get past your own prejudices. Is a year enough? Probably not. But it’ll get you a good idea of how close you are getting to the core concepts (especially after I give you the things to hit and think about)

3. Anything you CAN’T find after searching really hard through all the catalogs you know of, then you ask own voices specific questions, but always ask if it’s OK if they would like to answer.

Again, asking so what are Kenyans like is a big fat no. What are Koreans like? Also find out if your questions are offensive in the first place before you ask them.

Asking a Korea, for example, How is Kimchi of Japanese origin?

is super offensive.

So make sure you research to make sure your question is appropriate and stay the fuck humble. They don’t owe you time, you aren’t paying them, they don’t owe you anything. So don’t get uppity.

4. Research basics of Anthropology (which I will cover) in order and quickly as possible.

I’ll give you the guide for this. But try to hit the basics. And then RESEARCH.

5. Research specific areas your story will cover.

Yeah, there is nothing that pulls people out of stories faster than especially a non-own voices person gets facts fundamentally wrong. You deserve to be mocked if you’re writing a doctor and you think the mandible is in the chest.

But you also deserve to be equally mocked if you think that Kimono are Korean and have no idea how kimono are constructed when your character is supposed to be an expert in it. Just because it’s another culture doesn’t mean there won’t be a geek out there to point out your flaws. And since culture/ethnicity is more personal, and you are an outsider, they are going to be twenty times more offended you got published with your bad info over own voices. Especially if your entire book revolves around the subject.

6. Your subconscious is wrong. Avoid/Play with the stereotypes THOUGHTFULLY.

I know there are a bunch of improvisers out there. But usually when it comes to writing other cultures, your subconscious is wrong. You need to curb it.

This means you need to spend time on internal and external stereotypes. Find them, and then if they pop up in your work and are super offensive, destroy them. I know it’s not how you work. But your subconscious is often absorbing asshole ideas 24-7 pummeled by media. You need to punch it and make conscious choices and correct it. So you aren’t writing your first impulse.

(Believe me, I was there and horrified when I did it, so, no, don’t let it slide. Give yourself the time to do the research and don’t leave it to betas worried about a fragile author to correct. ^^;; Also done that and yes, I still feel deep guilt over it.)

7. Try to avoid “Outsider learns this culture’s ways and becomes a better human being.”

No saviors, !@#$ Please?

Also none of the, I became a better person because I, white person, went all the way to PoC country after having prejudiced PoV.

Also, don’t use biracial people this way. They hate it. I’ve heard it over and over they hate it with a huge passion. And it is a whole other identity in the first place, so don’t be an ass and think Biracial/biethnicity, is somehow like a gateway.

If you’re nervous on this account and want to “slide” on the representation, you either need to work on finding own voices better and understanding their PoV, or work on your research. If you can’t achieve that, consider dropping it if you’re not going to do better by the real living people. You need to find the correct PoV, which is true of any character. So if you’re trying to use real human being identities in order to try to make up for your failings, you’re not that great of a human being are you? Try harder to become a better human being.

Lastly: Don’t be an ass towards your sensitivity readers/people whom you asked questions. Keep track of them and ask if they would like credit. How they would like credit. And find way to pay them for their time and labor.

If they read all your manuscript, then either pay them back in kind, with a manuscript read, or pay them monetarily--me I pay my betas with hand knit socks. Harbor good will so they remember you fondly. Because the opposite of that is Arthur Golden. And everyone remembers Arthur Golden for being an ass to Mineko Iwasaki. And you don’t want to be that person.

If by chance you’ve lost contact with that person, mention the thing they did, drop their last name, mention their first name (if not uncommon) and then say thank you.

If you are 100% sure the person wants to not have name credit, the next thing is to mention them by the things they did for the book, but not mention their name.

Such as (which Arthur Golden should have done)

Thank you to my Geisha informer who especially helped me on the Geisha life for daily life tasks.

And then you should absolutely disclaim that any people you’ve mentioned helped you, are not responsible for the mistakes in the book and all mistakes are your own. Because it is your responsibility. You wrote the words. No matter how they gave your permission, it was your job to check and recheck all information YOU put into the book. It’s 100% on YOU. Because what? Real people are always greater than fiction. You can write what you want, but that does not free you from the consequences of getting it wrong.

And if you get it wrong, OWN it.

Conclusion

I do think being able to deep dive into cultures other than your own make you a better human being, if you do it with respect and a mind towards learning. And I’ll tell you, I think your readers absolutely can feel when you do this. Respect deepens when you don’t paint it all one way. When you can present both sides. When you respect your sources. When you put the time and effort in to research deeply.

Takeuchi Naoko wrote and drew Sailor Moon. And years after my initial consumption of it, I find myself being amazed and thinking about it because I thought initially it was a shallow and entertaining cartoon. But as I saw the things she researched and found out more, I think about the series over and over and I’m deeply amazed that she spent an hour a day doing research. (Also I have a lot more respect for Season R/Black Moon than before which never really gets that much love in the fan community.).

This is also true of “King of Dramas”. At the time, I thought it was an “OK” drama. Maybe 8/10. and I would forget it. But the amount of knowledge and research poured into it, and the jokes punched correctly make me return to it over and over again. It was the research that got me there.

If you’re going to write a culture other than your own, people will remember when you do it well. Do not skimp on research, especially when it deals with people unlike you. It’s their necks on the line, not yours.

#worldbuilding #anthropology #science

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castlebyersafterdark · 3 months

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what do you think of mike and will (or either one) being a side in terms of sexual position preference? its possible neither of them would be into penetrative sex / top and bottoming at least at first! i think being a side usually focuses on the emotional parts of sex rather than raw animalism, but of course it's still possible for anal sex to be emotional and for outercourse to be physical and rough too.

i just like the idea of them both being open or vers-ready, but not actually knowing enough to proceed with confidence for a good long while. i mean, many young gay men learned from mentors before the internet age, but mike and will are both inexperienced. are they really going to be stealing mags from the newsagent or the library? i would love it if they did, but im not sure how much info there actually was back then. robin working at family video is hella convenient for access to x-rated stuff, but would a hawkins store even carry more than 1 gay tape? if at all? and would they ever feel that confident with robin? will family video even still exist after s5? if so i doubt robin will be working there.

i think instinct would tell mike and will what they want to do to each other, so im not saying they remain clueless forever - although knowledge for the best and safest way to go about doing all they want to do, i think, will elude them for a while until they reach a big city culture. i like the idea that they just frot or experiment with oral and other stuff for a long while, and don't see anal sex as the be all and end all of how to be together. perhaps they both thrive on not needing penetration. idk. maybe it's not seen as a hot enough headcanon by most spicy fans, but i live for the romance of them being like 'you know what, we tried it, it's not going to be our go-to'. will's ass most certainly would not be going to waste cos you KNOW mike's face is in there every chance he gets, not to mention just lots of doggy style friction and thighjobs. i love love love top mike/bottom will, but sides as a concept just makes my heart swell, and i think emotionally, they match with this dynamic: prioritising the emotional side of sex, and both seeming like a natural top or bottom.

YES! This is such a valid option and not one as often mentioned or explored. I think it's so common to just fall into the top/bottom debate, especially because there really is this focus on penetrative sex, for all gender match-ups, being this be-all end-all to sexual relationships. But, sexuality and sex itself are both spectrums.

While I personally view Mike and Will a certain way, my main characterization in realistic analysis and portrayal of their relationship does typically go with them waiting to actually go all the way. I really like everything you said above! So, while I don't tend to view or portray them as sides, that's definitely a valid read for them if that's a direction wanting to be explored. Because there are not true 100 percent universal experiences. There's no one way to be gay, or any other sexuality. I also, while leaning towards bottom Will / top Mike, really don't even like using that strict dichotomy for them, because I just like to explore 'preference along with versatility', for sure. I see them as super super exploratory, with a natural curiosity when it comes to sex.

I've said before, with exploring characters - if you can make your argument and present them in the way you want and analyze etc etc, then go for it within your preferred dynamic. Because there's no rule book on who can want to top, who can bottom, who can choose to engage in all other forms of sex but have no or limited interest in full penetration. It's all interesting and valid and that's the joy of fandom. And there's no need to argue or get aggressive about it, space for everyone!

I do think that anal is the go to for the spicy side, as the ultimate goal, but hey, that kind of reflects society? And that's ok, listen, I like writing it and talking about it, too. And even in some of my ideas and stories I'm writing, it's just a fic scenario and doesn't even follow my personal "canon" idea of their sexual relationship trajectory. But that's what's fun about fic and fandom - the exploration. I'm also interested in a lot of other dynamics for them, will be exploring a lot of ideas and perspectives.

**Personal considerations under the cut because I still feel odd talking about my actual life sometimes but also why am I kidding myself:

Gay culture is so vast and it's always interesting to dive into things because like I said, no experience is completely universal. A lot of the "culture" that seems to be common knowledge or assumed is just not applicable to everyone, and that's ok! Spectrum! People are just people. Humanity is not a monolith and neither are gay people. We're all just living. Fandom is interesting, too. I think there's space for everyone and all sorts of different ideas - be open to many perspectives! It's great!

To speak frankly, this ask was super cool because being primarily a side was most of my dating/sexual experience out of personal choice for the most part, with selective divergences. I mean, never strictly labeled or anything but words are useful in talking about stuff. So it's interesting seeing this dynamic brought up because it's definitely realistic! Welllllll, that all did very much change for me as time went on 🤭😉 but the journey is the thing of it all, yeah? But anyway, this ask was super cool, thank you for the conversation!!

#asks #❤️❤️❤️

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j-graysonlibrary · 11 months

Text

The Xiang Chronicles: Book Two Chapter 19

Title: The Xiang Chronicles: Book Two

Author: Jay Grayson

Word Count: 98k

Genres: Fantasy, adventure, drama, LGBT+

Available on: my website

Synopsis: With another Xiang in the mix, for the first time in history, Pangu decides to reevaluate his methods and his place in the world. Along with taking his little sister Heidi as his last disciple, he also chooses to take the more political path in his efforts to end the discord throughout the land—particularly within Terra. (And gaining favor from the handsome Lord of Ultimos does not hurt.)

Heidi butts heads with everyone in the group, save Raine, and tensions are higher than ever. There are failed love confessions, in-group fighting, and demons from Kira’s past but that all comes to a head when they meet a servant of Shakti who is more than what she seems.

Could it be that the Mistresses of Shadow are more nuanced than previously believed? Or that the strict dichotomy between light and dark are, perhaps, a touch exaggerated? That and more begin to plague Pangu’s mind and his faith wavers…

Full chapter 19 under the cut

Chapter XIX:

The grips of the hangover lasted until after midday. There was little talking but that had less to do with the pounding headaches and tumultuous stomachs but rather the imposed time limit that they had placed on themselves. They hoped to be at least halfway there by nightfall but it would be a taxing trial—their destination was on the other side of Kyrie.

As they passed through woods, plains, over creeks, and across rivers, Kira started to notice something. He waited until they slowed their convoy, giving the horses as much of a rest as they could afford.

“I have been thinking,” he began as he moved in, side by side with Pangu. Though, as he slowed, he had another thought pop into his head that he could not hold back now that he was looking at the Xiang. “You have gotten very skilled at riding.”

“Oh?” Pangu gave a smile. “It is due to you and Raine’s teaching.”

“Even if our teaching is great,” Raine joined the conversation, bringing his horse to a trot on Pangu’s other side, “We have been riding almost nonstop since we left Ultimos. It has been rather strenuous.”

“I cannot afford to slow us down.”

They passed from woods into a field where a distant farm dotted the horizon. The shape of the barn was, especially, prominent and seeing that made Kira remember his initial concern.

“Oh, right,” he chuckled a little at his lapse in thought before saying, “We have passed by a few small towns and farms already. Why did that villager run all the way to Castelle with his injuries? Would he not have collapsed before?”

Both Pangu and Raine looked over at him. “Maybe he did?” Raine suggested. “He could have been given some first aid but then insisted on continuing on to see the King.”

“Or he did not take a straight path there?” Pangu added another possibility.

Kira hummed and considered both—neither sat right with him. There was no reason to doubt the King’s story, not especially anyway, so he dropped the line of questioning.

A few paces behind them, Heidi came up on Baiya’s side and leaned forward to stare at the trio in front. “What do you think they are talking about?”

Baiya did not even realize she was speaking to him at first so he did not look over. It was not until she let out a few, raspy, ‘hey’s did he turn his head. “What?” he asked.

Heidi immediately rolled her eyes. “You were not even listening? Where is your head?”

“No concern of yours…” he muttered and fixed his eyes back on the group in front. The pace of their horses had started to pick up again, signaling the end of their break.

He was probably still hung over, Heidi concluded. She was a bit too but at least the sunlight was no longer so loud and aggressive. The only thing that stuck with her was the memories of the night before where she talked far more than she was used to and to strangers no less. It would have been embarrassing if she had been the only one affected in such a way but, luckily, her brother became very chatty when he was drunk as well.

She had not even been aware, before last night, that the Xiang was allowed to drink. Or, perhaps, he was not. Maybe that was why Baiya was staring at him.

***

Night fell and they could no longer push their horses in good conscience. Pangu walked his steed up in front of everyone with a degree of confidence that suggested he knew exactly where he was. After passing through another spot of trees, they came unto a clearing with a rather large building in the center.

“It is an inn,” Pangu explained before anyone could ask. “We can rest here tonight and hopefully we will reach the village by this time tomorrow.”

“You have been here before?” Kira guessed.

He nodded. “I came here with my old mentors on my first trip to Castelle.”

“Ah, so there is definitely room for all five of us,” Raine realized aloud with a smile.

“…Yeah.” Pangu returned his smile but it was short lived. “I will get us a room while you hitch the horses.”

“I will come with you,” Heidi said and jumped off of her horse after him.

Her brother did not refute her and just silently walked into the building. He barely looked around in wonder despite the incredible scenery but, she supposed, he had been there before so he had seen it already. That did not stop her from craning her head back and marveling at the glowing glass ceiling that shined like torchlight but without the overbearing heat.

“Alright.” Pangu handed her a key while her head was still turned skyward. Once she had grabbed it, he said, “Tell the others to take their things upstairs to the room. I am going to check something out.”

“Mmmkay.” Heidi did not look away from the ceiling, even when she exited the building. On the outside, it was a slightly duller yellow but it still illuminated the colorful leaves on the trees surrounding it. She had seen a strange glow as they approached but she would have never expected something like this. Once she joined the other disciples, she finally snapped her head back to look forward.

She grabbed her things along with everyone else and then led them to the room number that was engraved on the key. It was at the top of the stairs and, inside, there were six beds, each spaced apart quite impressively as if designed for a party of adventurers. In the back, a fire crackled and warmed the room a little too much.

Baiya sucked the flame into his hand and shook his wrist. Without a word between them, they all silently agreed that was the correct move.

Then Kira spoke up. “Where is Pangu? Is he still downstairs?”

Raine and Baiya began to turn about as if they might find the Xiang suddenly behind them. Heidi, however, shrugged. “He said he was going to take a look around or something. I don’t know, I was only half-listening.”

“Some help you are,” Kira grumbled, already heading toward the door.

Baiya caught up to him, grabbing his arm and pulling back. “I will go look for him.”

Kira was ready to fight him but when he caught sight of his eyes, burning with an intense purpose, he faltered. His eyebrows lifted and he almost wanted to ask the man if he was sure about his plans but he could not get the words out before he was gone.

“What was that about?” Heidi asked, starting to get the feeling she was wrong, again, about her assumptions on the road.

“What was what about?” Raine questioned before disregarding the subject altogether by saying, “We need to get ready for bed. They will be back in a moment, I am sure.”

But Heidi and Kira looked at each other. Heidi began to smirk. “Should we follow?”

“No,” Kira scolded even if, normally, he would not be opposed to spying, he did not want to do so with her.

“What? Why not? You two had no problem following me.”

“What are you talking about?” Raine walked closer, half out of his armor already.

Heidi huffed, deciding her embarrassment was an alright price to pay for throwing Kira and Baiya to the wolves. “The other night when I talked to you at the orphanage, they were both listening.”

Raine’s eyes flickered to Kira immediately. “You were…?”

“By accident,” Kira explained, “I was looking for you and then overheard. Baiya was the one creeping.”

“Yeah, so let’s go creep on him,” Heidi returned to her original point.

“Why do you assume that would be a proper revenge?” Raine asked, reminding the other two just how out of the loop he was.

“Because he could be having the same kind of talk with Pangu,” Heidi said without pause while Kira slapped a hand to his forehead.

Raine blinked a few times and the pieces that had been trying to fit together for a while now finally clicked. “Oh.”

“Oh?” Kira repeated.

“Oh, I mean…” Raine frowned. “A lot makes sense now, I guess.”

“Yes, and we should go see how it turns out,” Heidi was not letting it go.

Kira would not be swayed, however. If what they believed was happening and what Baiya’s expression told Kira were both true then he could afford them some privacy. Not for Baiya but for Pangu’s sake. So he picked up the closest pillow and threw it at Heidi.

She caught it with ease but was confused by his actions. Before she could ask what he was doing, Kira picked up another pillow and held it up.

“If you want to go down there, you will have to get through me. No elemental assistance either—you blow me down and I use the wood in this room to skewer you.”

“Deal.” Heidi fluffed her pillow before shouting and lunging at the Terran disciple, ready to beat the stuffing out of him and his “weapon”.

The commotion could not be heard outside the door and certainly not outside the building. No, outside was only home to the sound of crickets chirping and distant birds, still struggling to get to sleep. Every so often, there was the crunch of leaves from a small animal in the woods but, other than that, there was silence.

Around the side of the building, Baiya found Pangu standing and looking up at the stars. He had been acting off for a while now and, while the previous night of drinking and partying had been a sweet reprieve, it seemed he was back to feeling weighed down.

Pangu did not need to turn around to know that someone was walking up behind him or who it was. He continued to stare at the sky as he said, “This was where my teachers left me. As I stood here, about a year ago, I watched them turn into a cloud of fireflies and float off into the sky. I assumed I would never see them again…not until I was dead, at least.”

Baiya walked a few paces closer but still kept more than arm’s reach between them. “Are you glad to have been wrong?”

Finally, Pangu lowered his head and turned around. He gave a hefty sigh. “Yes and no. Of course, I was happy to be able to see them again but…the circumstances are not great.”

“They still need you as the Xiang,” he attempted to cheer him up and added, “And even if they did not, we would all still stay with you.”

Pangu gave a lopsided smile. “Yeah?” When Baiya nodded, he shifted his focus to the ground. “Well, that is a nice thought I suppose but I do wonder how my Xiang journey will end up now.”

There was much that would not change, he knew, but the parts that did were the most concerning. Pangu had been swaying back and forth on how he felt, still, and could not make up his mind. The breadcrumbs from the old world and religions wracked his thoughts as well and he felt stuck between two minds. To be a better Xiang for his mentors and Tiandi or to explore the world and truth as Pangu.

And the fact he felt the second option would betray his initial cause deeply worried him. Even as he stood there with Baiya, otherwise alone by the woods, he felt eyes on him, coming from all angles. Whether his paranoia was exacerbating the sensation or not, he still knew the spirits were watching him at all times.

Baiya’s brow furrowed when Pangu spoke of the end and he asked, both curious and worried, “What did the end look like before? Did you know?”

“Well, I assumed it would be much the same as Xiangs before me.” Pangu loosely shrugged. “I would collect miasma and then fight the Chaaya to the death. Obviously those things changed with Kira in the picture but I still assumed we would be fighting another Chaaya in the end and I would need to do whatever it took to defeat them.”

“Even dying?”

“Yes. That is how most Xiangs end.”

Baiya clicked his tongue in irritation. He was not angry with Pangu, however, his frustration came from all of those who taught him to think this way. The men who raised him—who told him that his death would come early and in service of them and their god. It was not right. Just because Pangu was a religious figure, he also had to be their tool? Why could he not have a long and fruitful life?

“…What is the matter?” Pangu asked when he noticed the wooden expression on his disciple’s face.

“I don’t want you to die, Pangu.”

The Xiang laughed. Not because what he said was particularly funny but because he had no other physical response and that was just what came out. “I have to die eventually…”

“I know that,” Baiya snapped. His hands balled into fists and he hung his head as he repeated, softer, “I know that. But I wish it did not have to be during your mission or right after it. I would see you live long and happy…doing whatever you want after your purpose is fulfilled.”

“And that is why you make a good disciple. You and the others will protect me until the end and I do not doubt that for a second—”

“I do not want to simply protect you until you are ready to martyr yourself!” Baiya stepped closer. This was not, at all, how he had planned to approach the subject but he had left the inn with confidence and determination. He would do what he set out to; he would say what he planned. “I want to stay with you forever, Pangu.”

“Forever?” The Xiang blinked. “You do not plan on dying with me…do you?”

“No, Pangu, what I mean is…” Baiya bit down on his lip until he found the right words in his mind. Being direct was best, he knew, but it was also hardest to say. He took a sharp inhale and then took the plunge, “I care for you. As a person you are determined, inspiring, and remarkably giving. As my friend, you are kind, understanding, and fun.” His words nearly faltered as he hit the last stretch and, with a squeeze of his fists, he grounded himself and said, “and…I also care for you in ways I know I am not supposed to. I have felt it, in many regards, since we first met—superficially at first but after knowing you and spending these months with you, I know this is deeper than I can say.”

A pointed tickle hit Pangu’s throat and he was compelled to gulp, hard. He was not sure he heard correctly but his body was certainly reacting to what he thought was being said. “Baiya…I...what do you mean?”

“Is it not obvious?” With a pained smile, Baiya laid it out in a plain, unmistakable proclamation, “Your role as Xiang completely aside, if the rules of this world allowed it, I would ask you to marry me. That is to say, unquestionably, I love you, Pangu.”

The air was stolen from Pangu’s body and he could have fallen to the ground. Out of all the things he could have guessed might come out of Baiya’s mouth, he had least expected that. He almost started to wonder if he was in a dream but that euphoric, shocked sensation was quickly shoved aside by a cold chill and the feel of a million spirit eyes piercing his skin.

They came from all directions, each more vicious than the last and he knew, in his gut, that if he responded how he wanted, that Tiandi really would disavow him. Even if he wanted to tell Baiya he felt the same and jump into his arms, he could only stand there and stare.

“Baiya…” Just saying his name was painful. “I…I cannot…”

“I know it is against your rules. I just wanted to be honest with you.” Baiya gulped. “But, perhaps, after your mission is complete and we have all kept you alive…those rules may not be so strict?”

His optimism was not unlike Pangu’s when he spoke about such a prospect with Viren. But, instead of Viren’s harsh reminder of reality, Pangu had the death glares from beyond their realm. He had a feeling that using the loophole of ‘maybe in another life’ would not work this time.

“No, I am sorry.” Pangu closed his eyes, a poor attempt at calming himself. When he opened them again, Baiya was still there and so was the guilt. “I do not feel the same. I care about you, Baiya—I care about all of my disciples—but I do not love you.”

There was no more he could say and no more he could bear so he hurried back to the inn, leaving Baiya behind with one more, soft, “I am sorry,” spoken from over his shoulder.

Pangu’s chest burned all the way to the room and only dissipated, slightly, when he walked into a pillow fight between Kira and Heidi with Raine intervening to keep it clean. All of them looked up at the sound of the door opening and froze in place.

“Hey, where is Baiya?” Kira asked.

“Outside. He will be in shortly,” Pangu kept his voice impressively steady. He started to extinguish candles as he walked to the bed on the far end. “We need to sleep.”

“…Did something happen?” Raine’s concern laced voice nearly broke through his defenses.

“I was just reminiscing about my mentors. They left me here.” He slipped into the bed and faced his back to them. “Now I would like to get some sleep.”

The three disciples looked at one another, none of them convinced of what the Xiang just said. While it might have been true that his mentors left the last time he was here, there was definitely more going on. Yet, they did not want to push it. Even Heidi’s curiosity had some limits and she picked out her bed to lie in, forfeiting both the line of questioning and the pillow fight. For now.

Most of the other candles, save a few closest to the door, were blown out and everyone settled while Pangu curled into himself. His pillow became damp with tears in seconds and his breathing was slow and controlled so he would not make a sound. He clenched his teeth and forced his eyes closed but the crying did not stop for hours. Not until he passed out from exhaustion with a wet face and pillow.

#the xiang chronicles #my novel #my writing

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writingwithcolor · 3 years

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Queer Romance & Multiple Asian Family Relationships, Chinese & Indian

Part of a story I’m writing features a romance between a teenage protagonist (queer Chinese American character) and a queer Indian American teenager. (I’m queer and Chinese American myself.) Neither of the families feature stereotypical “tiger parents” and nobody is abusive. However, I initially wrote the protagonist’s family (single mother) as having somewhat high academic expectations, but also being fairly hands-off, and being quite progressive when it comes to sexuality. I wrote the Indian character’s family (his father and stepmom) as being much stricter when it comes to academic/job expectations and less outwardly progressive, though it is made clear that the family still loves and supports each other. (They aren’t openly bigoted in the story, but the character isn’t out to them yet – when speaking to Indian and Indian American friends about this, I was told this would be a realistic scenario.)

I was originally hoping to show supportive Asian parents in addition to stricter ones. However, I’m wondering whether I’m inadvertently painting Indian families as less supportive/more overbearing/more traditional than Chinese families. Are there things I should be doing or keeping in mind to make sure that I’m not doing this, or contributing to harmful stereotypes about Asians generally? Or would it be better for me to just make the Indian family also supportive and progressive?

(These are the two prominent families who appear in the story. There is another Indian parent (the love interest’s mother) who is very progressive and supportive, and there’s another Chinese family that’s portrayed as having high academic/job expectations (but also being loving and supportive). Both families are plot-relevant but neither are major characters as of now. There’s also one shitty white parent who’s quite minor.)

The important thing to consider here is:

Does the South Asian parents’ slightly more conservative approach form the main conflict of the story?

Are they being painted as the singular, most major obstacle to the two MCs?

If not, I don’t think there should be a problem, mainly because you emphasised that while the Indian parents are very strict, they are also coming from a place of genuine affection and well intention, as opposed to a caricature of bigotry. In addition, you have also mentioned that there are cases in your story where an Indian parent is shown to be progressive and supportive (be careful while navigating the strict stepmother/loving mother dichotomy though!), alongside another, stricter Chinese family; this shows that neither community has been depicted as a monolith.

Also as a bisexual Indian, I find it believable and acceptable that the love interest isn’t out to their family. As a good reference, you can look up The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar, which also depicts a queer interracial relationship between two POC, the MC being South Asian. Jaigirdar portrayed a Bengali family who initially didn’t accept their daughter as a lesbian, but the fact that they were loving parents doing their best and not just regressive/“backward” people was very clear narratively. South Asian parents being strict doesn’t necessarily have an overt negative connotation unless they are used as the sole example in a plot full of characters of other ethnicities, who are all depicted as comparatively more open-minded.

- Mimi

Chinese perspective here! Dropping in to add onto what Mod Mimi said- I don’t find any problem with Chinese families being portrayed in this manner. Generally, problems with the “Asian tiger parent” arise when these characters are written to be reflective of all Asian parents… In reality most parents have complex motivations and understandings of the importance of education that aren’t acknowledged (i.e. with diaspora, our older generations have sacrificed so much in order to immigrate somewhere with better opportunities, and attain better lives for us).

Another thing I’d like to mention, is that I absolutely love how you’re going to be representing a relationship that’s both queer and (POC + POC) interethnic! A lot of (mostly white) authors default to white+white/POC+white as their representation of queer relationships, or cishet+cishet as their representation of POC+POC relationships. I just think that it’s so great that people are writing QPOC loving other QPOC. :)

~ Mod Emme

I think perhaps what piques my interest more about this scenario is not that you have two queer Asian characters with parents who are supportive in culturally consistent ways but rather that there seem to be no issues from each set of parents with respect to the ethnicity/ nationality of their respective child’s partner!

I certainly know many Indian and Chinese individuals who have cordial relationships with each other, but, in my experience, a much smaller number of them would be ok with their child being romantically involved with someone of Chinese/ Indian descent. Certainly in the US, you will hear many South Asians report experiences of intra-Asian racism from East Asians, and I have heard multiple Indians (both diaspora and at home) express extreme resentment towards mainland Chinese people over Chinese foreign policy and interference in the subcontinent. Mind, this is not universal. There is a sizable Chinese diaspora in India and, similarly, there are many Indians living alongside ethnic Chinese populations in Singapore and other parts of South-East Asia. Thus, the backgrounds of the families for both your characters strikes me as relevant.

Now, if you just want to write a fun, fluffy romance about two queer AsAm teens trying to figure themselves out, I don’t want you to feel as though you have to bring all of this baggage into your story. However, family is so central to many cultures in both India and China that I have difficulty believing the perspectives of the parents will not affect the children. Furthermore, to many Asian parents, “My child is dating” and “My child is likely going to marry this person” can feel very similar, so if by chance all parents are supportive, they will likely try to get to know each other very quickly.

Thus, if you think it will help add depth and lend insight into your characters’ relationships with each other and their families, consider going back to your desi friends (And your own family, if that feels safe) and getting a sense of how people in your social circle feel about interactions between different cultures and romance.

What are potential stereotypes and sources of contention that could serve as obstacles and communication barriers?

What are areas of commonality your characters can bond over?

There is such a deficit of portrayals of interracial relationships involving two non-white, queer characters that I think you could take this to interesting places while showcasing the complexity of the “Asian-American” experience.

- Marika

#South Asian #Indian #Chinese #China #lgbtqia #lgbt #stereotypes #Asian stereotypes #relationships #tiger mom #tiger parents #strict Asian parents #Asian families #asks #interracial romance #interracial relationships

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wingsyliveblogs · 2 years

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They interesting thing about Something Ventured, Someone Framed, that Gus has real human stuff, he just gets what they are wrong. Matt on the other hand has fake things but are clearly modeled on real human items. Interesting dichotomy

Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting, too! From Gus's perspective, and thus ours, his artifacts are the superior ones since they're real, but Matty makes up for his lack of legitimate items by having a better understanding of what the artifacts are actually supposed to be. I feel as if neither of them is significantly better or worse than the other regarding their approach to human artifacts - they're just two sides of the same coin.

And as much as Matty was an antagonistic force in this episode, he wasn't... entirely... wrong? The other three members of the club weren't having a lot of fun with Gus's strict rules, and seemed much happier to go along with Matty at first. Gus's goal as president of the Human Appreciation Society was to help and look out for his fellow members, but he got caught up in his desire to keep his position and lost sight of what was best for other people - both Luz and the other kids.

His punishment at the end of the episode might actually be for the best, giving him a chance to step back and reassess the situation without being caught in the middle of a continuous conflict with someone else, which could easily have pushed him to make similar mistakes in the future.

#wingsy liveblogs #ask #wingsy watches owl house #owls ep 9 #the best solution here would've been for Gus and Matty to combine forces #one of them has real human artifacts and the other understands what the artifacts are...#together they'd be able to make a lot more sense of human-related stuff than either of them could individually #but sadly they were too busy fighting over the presidency to realise this #thanks for the ask!

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atlas-of-galaxies · 3 years

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i haven’t written fic in Literal Years but i am So Intrigued by the idea of a fic that swaps perspectives between jonmartin in a seemingly normal but utterly doomed universe and the archives crew in a broken, tired, yet hopeful and entity-free one. they’re both back to life as it normally was, in a way, but the circumstances are massively different.

how would jon even begin to manage the guilt of sicking the fears upon yet another reality? how much of the Pupil’s influence still lingers over him, and how does he deal with the whiplash of going from being the Ever-powerful Archivist to just Some Guy in a universe he doesn’t even belong in? and, if these other realities are really as parallel as some may suggest, how would the two react to seeing people they know who died in their own reality?

and in the tmaverse, how would georgie, melanie, and basira navigate the world when the strict dichotomy of Watcher vs Watched is still so fresh in everyone’s minds? would people recognize them as those who were Outside the domains, neither Watcher nor Watched? how does society piece itself back together when you now know Exactly how many people on your subway ride to work were willing to sacrifice others to save their own skin? to sacrifice you?

how long did the apocalypse even last? fearscapes could manipulate time and space to their liking, we know that; but we have no time frame for the apocalypse as a whole. several years? one year? a matter of months? a second?

october 18th, 2018 could have been both the day that the world ended and the day that it came back, forever regarded as The Worst Collective Day of Everyone’s Lives.

and jon and martin, accompanied by the fears, could have popped into a new reality on that same day, starting the clock on the potential ticking timebomb of another apocalypse.

and of course, neither party will ever know any of these answers about the other. they’ll truly die as mysteries.

i don’t know how to end this i’m just thinking so very much

#i am having so many thoughts #i haven't written fic in so long but ... man... tma might do it for me #tma #the magnus archives #tma meta #atlas talks #tma finale

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hamliet · 4 years

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Am I My Brother’s Keeper?: Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng

Or, how the two most virulent Wen-haters in the story tragically mirror each other in far more ways than just their issues with the Wens.

I’ve written about MDZS’s use of character trios as a narrative structure before (here and here). In this meta I’m going to talk about the main three and the Venerated Triad. I’ve also written before about how Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao’s relationship (however you interpret it) parallels Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian’s, with Lan Xichen as a strong Lan Wangji foil (fitting, as they are the “Twin Jades”), and Jin Guangyao as a strong Wei Wuxian foil (as Wei Wuxian himself acknowledges in the story’s final chapter). So let’s talk about the third member of these trios: Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng, who also closely foil each other... in particular, through their respective relationships with Jin Guangyao and Wei Wuxian.

But wait, you say. Jin Guangyao killed Nie Mingjue, which parallels Jiang Cheng killing Wei Wuxian!

True. There are some parallels between Jiang Cheng and Jin Guangyao (such as JC killing WWX to avenge JYL, even though she wouldn’t have wanted that, and JGY doing it when NMJ hurts NHS, even though NHS adored NMJ), as well as between Chengxian and Xiyao, but this is not a meta about those specifically.

Nie Mingjue tried to kill Jin Guangyao in life (twice), and actually does do so in the end, and Jiang Cheng helped kill Wei Wuxian even if he did not do it directly. The reason both Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng were able to treat their brothers like this was because of their immense privilege, the privilege neither acknowledge until it is time to weaponize it. In those moments, both chose not to empathize but to see their brothers as an “other” instead of as someone they loved (and I do think both Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng loved Jin Guangyao and Wei Wuxian in a realistic, flawed way). In the otherizing of their brothers, both Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng put on robes displaying society’s flaws as blatantly as Sect Leader Yao does, but with a lot more humanity than the flat, static Sect Leader Yao. Thus, MXTX tells us we cannot even “other” society as a whole.

If this sounds like I’m hating on either character, I’m really not intending to. They’re great characters and I enjoy both of them (Jiang Cheng’s one of my very favorites), but they’re flawed, and in fact that’s the whole reason I like them. But I do admit this essay will be scathing to an extent; just know it doesn’t touch on my whole opinion of their characters, and isn’t meant to excuse Wei Wuxian (who had a savior complex) and Jin Guangyao (who sought society’s approval to his own doom); I’ve just previously excoriated those two.

I. Defining Justice as Trauma

Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng both lost their fathers to Wen Ruohan (as did the Lan brothers), and both vowed to wipe out the Wens as a result. However, both of them fail to think about the Wens as people, and wind up, well, becoming eerily similar to the worst Wens.

Jiang Cheng has lived through the pain of losing everything (status, family, home) and he not only refuses compassion for the two Wens who saved him so that he could fight to get those things back, but inflicts the same traumas on them. In fact, Jiang Cheng’s reaction to Wen Qing’s predicament post-Sunshot campaign is paralleled explicitly with Nie Mingjue’s:

Jiang Cheng’s brows were knitted. He rubbed the vein that throbbed at his temple and soundlessly took in a deep breath, “… I apologize to all of the Sect Leaders. Everyone, I’m afraid you don’t know that the Wen cultivator whom Wei WuXian wanted to save was called Wen Ning. We owe him and his sister Wen Qing gratitude for what happened during the Sunshot Campaign.”

Nie MingJue, “You owe them gratitude? Isn’t the QishanWen Sect the ones who caused the YunmengJiang Sect’s annihilation?”

...

Lan XiChen responded a moment later, “I have heard of Wen Qing’s name a few of times. I do not remember her having participated in any of the Sunshot Campaign’s crimes.”

Nie MingJue, “But she’s never stopped them either.”

Lan XiChen, “Wen Qing was one of Wen RuoHan’s most trusted people. How could she have stopped them?”

Nie MingJue spoke coldly, “If she responded with only silence and not opposition when the Wen Sect was causing mayhem, it’s the same as indifference. She shouldn’t have been so disillusioned as to hope that she could be treated with respect when the Wen Sect was doing evil and be unwilling to suffer the consequences and pay the price when the Wen Sect was wiped out.”

Lan XiChen knew that because of what happened to his father, Nie MingJue abhorred Wen-dogs more than anything, especially with how intolerable he was toward evil. Lan XiChen didn’t say anything else.

There’s a lot of irony in this. Wen Qing didn’t speak up because she wanted to protect her little brother--something Nie Mingjue should have been able to relate to, considering he sent Huaisang to safety in the Cloud Recesses during the war. Also, I mean, Nie Mingjue, you didn’t exactly rise up against Wen Ruohan until you knew you had the forces to win. He likely spent several years in begrudging deference to him, even sending Nie Huaisang along as tribute when Wen Chao demanded it. Jiang Cheng starts to do the right thing in this scene by speaking honestly about Wen Qing, but then Nie Mingjue reminds him of society and propriety, and Jiang Cheng backs down, crushed under society again. Both of them commit sins of omission, in that they stand back and allow society to belittle and vilify people.

The “sins of omission” is a motif that continues in both Nie Mingjue’s and Jiang Cheng’s arcs. For example, Jiang Cheng stood by to let Mianmian be brutally killed in the cave of the Xuanwu of Slaughter, and even stood by to let Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan die too as they protected her. He goes on to blame Wei Wuxian for the deaths of his family because of Wei Wuxian saving them. Nie Mingjue keeps the truth about the saber spirit from Nie Huaisang, and additionally, the very same conversation about Wen Qing referenced above, Nie Mingjue is directly stated to know Jin Guangyao is lying to help his father, and he says nothing at all even though Wei Wuxian’s life hung in the balance. (It then karmically backfires on Jin Guangyao).

Jin GuangYao came to save the day, exclaiming, “Really? That day, Young Master Wei busted into Koi Tower with such force. He said too many things, one more shocking than the next. Perhaps he said a few things that were along those lines. I can’t remember them either.”

... As soon as he heard it, Nie MingJue knew that he was fibbing on purpose, frowning slightly.

...

One of the sect leaders added, “...Excuse my bluntness, but he’s the son of a servant. How could the son of a servant be so arrogant?”

With him having brought up the ‘son of a servant’, naturally there’d be some who connected it to the ‘son of a prostitute’ standing in the hall. Jin GuangYao clearly noticed the unkind stares.

While Nie Mingjue is quick to accuse Wen Qing for her inaction but languid with his own, this isn’t exactly unique. He also is quick to accuse Jin Guangyao of standing by as Jin Guangshan manipulates to acquit Xue Yang for his crimes against the Chang Clan. (I’m not defending Jin Guangshan or Jin Guangyao in this.) How dare they stand there and not argue for justice?

In spite of Nie MingJue being a junior to Jin GuangShan, he conducted himself in a strict manner and refused to tolerate Xue Yang no matter what. With an angry lecture, Jin GuangShan was left with no words and a great deal of embarrassment. Nie MingJue, as the irritable person he was, unsheathed his saber on the spot with the intention of killing Xue Yang. Even when his sworn younger brother LianFang-Zun, Jin GuangYao, attempted to ease the situation, he ordered him to leave. After a harsh scolding, Jin GuangYao hid behind Lan XiChen, not daring to say anything else. In the end, the LanlingJin Sect could only give in.

But, Nie Mingjue never offers a critique of Jin Guangshan when Jin Guangshan lied to Nie Mingjue’s face about Meng Yao. He discovered that Jin Guangyao’s stepmother is routinely beating him, and Nie Mingjue does nothing. Even if his hands were tied, if he really cared about doing the right thing, why didn’t he intervene somehow, some way, for his brother? If he really cared about holding people responsible for their actions, about making sure justice was served above everything else, why is it that the only person he consistently holds accountable is Jin Guangyao?

Could it be that, much like society, what Nie Mingjue was angry about was not injustice, but actually his hurting self? His hurt pride, his hurt child self still reeling from the cruel way Wen Ruohan betrayed his father and left him to die an agonizing death?

Likewise, Jiang Cheng knows, when he leads the siege at the Burial Mounds against the Wens, that no Wen there is dangerous. They are all elderly or children, not soldiers. He knows even that his sister died saving Wei Wuxian’s life, but chooses to ignore her wishes to satiate his own anger and the inner child inside of him still crying in loneliness. No one had ever chosen Jiang Cheng: his mother viewed him as a disappointment, and his father preferred Wei Wuxian, but Wei Wuxian promised to stick by Jiang Cheng no matter what. When Wei Wuxian breaks this promise, Jiang Cheng never gets over this, and carries out revenge on him for choosing actual justice over staying close to Jiang Cheng (looking back, this adds a symbolic irony to Jiang Cheng refusing to intervene and save Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan in the cave: they are both the people who will be his siblings’ spouses).

But the sad reality is, it’s a false dichotomy. Wei Wuxian did not choose the Wens over Jiang Cheng. Jiang Cheng, like society, chose society and conformity over Wei Wuxian.

I’ve said it before, but while Jin Guangyao isn’t correct that the siege on the Burial Mounds is “all” Jiang Cheng’s fault, he’s not wrong when he makes this point:

“But what you have to understand is that, for what happened to Young Master Wei in the end, you are responsible too and in fact, you are very much so. Why did so many people crusade against the YiLing Patriarch? Why did they shout their support, no matter if they were involved or not? Why was he one-sidedly condemned by so many? Was it really their sense of justice? Of course not. A part of the reason is you.”

...

“… Back then, the LanlingJin Sect, the QingheNie Sect, and the GusuLan Sect had already finished fighting over the biggest share. The rest could only get some small shrimps. You, on the other hand, had just rebuilt Lotus Pier and behind you was the YiLing Patriarch, Wei WuXian, the danger of whom was immeasurable. Do you think the other sects would like to see a young sect leader who was so advantaged? Luckily, you didn’t seem to be on good terms with your shixiong, and since everyone thought there was an opportunity, of course they’d add fuels to your fire if they could. No matter what, to weaken the YunmengJiang Sect was to strengthen themselves. Sect Leader Jiang, if only your attitude towards your shixiong was just a bit better, showing everyone that your bond was too strong to be broken for them to have a chance, or if you exhibited just a bit more tolerance after what happened, things wouldn’t have become what they were. Oh, speaking of it, you were also a main force of the siege at Burial Mound…”

II. Privilege

The main villain of all of MXTX’s novels is privilege (I’ve touched on this here and here and here). Unfortunately, both Jiang Cheng and Nie Mingjue are heavily infected with it, and it’s partially why they treat others as they do.

Jiang Cheng speaks negatively of Mianmian in chapter 56, noting that she’s probably just the daughter of a servant. When Wei Wuxian challenges this by pointing out he is also the son of a servant, Jiang Cheng expresses that Wei Wuxian is somehow different (and to be fair, he is indeed treated with more respect because of Jiang Fengmian’s background with Wei Wuxian’s mother), but the implication is also classist. Ironically, again, when Jiang Cheng will not speak up for Wei Wuxian or Wen Qing during that same conversation referenced earlier, Mianmian does; though Nie Mingjue expresses admiration of her for doing so, he does not do the same.

Additionally, Jiang Cheng says the following about Jin Guangyao:

Wei WuXian, “Isn’t Jin GuangYao here now? Jin GuangYao seems so much better than him.”

Jiang Cheng... “So what, if he’s better? No matter how much better he is, no matter how clever, he could only be a servant who greets the guests. That’s all there is to his life. He can’t compare with Jin ZiXuan.”

This pretty much sums up how society treats Jin Guangyao, and Jiang Cheng doesn’t think to question it. Wei Wuxian, on the other hand, points to Jin Guangyao’s character, which at that point looked decent (even if... later... sigh). Additionally, it’s hard not to see this as a commentary on how people think Wei Wuxian should be acting. Even though Jiang Cheng is, er, wrong about how far Jin Guangyao can rise, he contrasts with Jin Guangyao in how Jin Guangyao builds the lookout towers to provide justice for the common people, while Jiang Cheng encourages Jin Ling’s initially snobbish behavior (leaving common people in traps).

Not only that, but Jiang Cheng routinely commits atrocities under his protection as a sect leader. He’s described as having whipped the flesh off the backs of people accused of demonic cultivation, and supposedly no one arrested for that survived his tortures (ironically, Wen Ruohan is also known for torture). As someone pointed out once, the people who would turn to demonic cultivation are likely those unable to form golden cores (Wei Wuxian), or those taken in as disciples too late/too untalented to do so (Mo Xuanyu); Xue Yang was also taken in late as a disciple, but is noted to be unusually talented. The interesting thing is that all three of these people are from impoverished, humble origins. Thus it’s very likely the people Jiang Cheng was arresting and torturing to death were not wealthy cultivators (not to mention other sects would complain if so), but common folk.

As for Nie Mingjue, Jin Guangyao goes further than Wei Wuxian and directly attempts to challenge Nie Mingjue to acknowledge his privilege with brutal honesty on his own part, only for it to go... poorly.

Nie MingJue, “There’s no need for explanations. Come back to me with Xue Yang’s head in your hand.”

Jin GuangYao still wanted to speak, but Nie MingJue had already lost all patience, “Meng Yao, don’t speak such pretentious words in front of me. Your whole thing stopped working on me since a long time ago!”

Within a second, a few degrees of unease flashed over Jin GuangYao’s face, as though someone with an unmentionable illness was suddenly exposed in the public. There was nowhere for him to hide.

He spoke, “My whole thing? Which whole thing? Brother, you’ve always yelled at me for calculating people and being too dishonorable. You say that you’re a proud, righteous person, that you aren’t afraid of anything, that propen men shouldn’t need to play with schemes. That’s fine. Your background is noble and your cultivation is high. But what about me? Am I the same as you? First, my cultivation isn’t as firm as yours. Ever since I was born, has anyone taught me? And second, I have no prominent background. Do you think that I’m in a steady position, here at the LanlingJin Sect? Do you think that I can rise into power the moment Jin ZiXuan dies? Jin GuangShan would rather bring another illegitimate child back than want me to succeed him! You think that I should be afraid of nothing? Well I’m afraid of everything, even other people! He whose stomach is full believes not him who is starving.”

Nie MingJue replied coldly, “In the end, all you mean is that you don’t want to kill Xue Yang, that you don’t want your position at the LanlingJin Sect to waver.”

Jin GuangYao, “Of course I don’t!”

He looked up, unknown fires dancing within his eyes, “But, Brother, I have always wanted to ask you something—the lives under your hands are in any regard more than those under mine, so why is it that I only killed a few cultivators out of desperation and you keep on bringing it up, even until now?”

Nie MingJue was so enraged that he began to laugh, “Good! I’ll give you my answer. Countless souls who have fallen under my saber, but I’ve never killed out of my own desires, much less to climb up the ladder!”

Jin GuangYao, “Brother, I understand what you mean. Are you saying that all of the people you killed deserved their deaths?”

With courage gathered from nowhere, he laughed and walked a few steps closer to Nie MingJue. His voice raised as well, asking in an almost aggressive manner, “Then, may I ask, just how do you decide if someone deserves death? Are your standards absolutely correct? If I kill one but save hundreds, would the good outweigh the bad, or would I still deserve death? To do great things, sacrifices must happen.”

Nie MingJue, “Then why don’t you sacrifice yourself? Are you any nobler than them? Are you any different from them?”

Jin GuangYao stared at him. A moment later, as though he had finally either decided on something or given up on something, he replied calmly, “Yes.”

He looked up. In his expression were some of pride, some of calmness, and some of a faint insanity, “I and they, of course we are different!”

Nie MingJue was infuriated by his words and his expression.

He raised his foot. Yet, Jin GuangYao neither avoided nor took defense. The kick landed right on him, and again he rolled like a pebble down Carp Tower.

Nie Mingjue, here, is being compared to two other people: the man who kicked Meng Yao down the stairs at a brothel as the man dragged Meng Shi outside naked to humiliate her, and with Jin Guangshan--the very person Nie Mingjue’s enraged with--by doing the same thing: kicking someone he views as lower than himself down the stairs. Instead of addressing the actual problem (Jin Guangshan), he finds a scapegoat. It’s not a good look. All three of these instances are linked with society standing by and allowing it to happen, with a few exceptions: Sisi intervenes with Meng Shi, and Lan Xichen intervenes to stop Nie Mingjue from killing Jin Guangyao.

Nie Mingjue never had to kill to climb the ladder within his sect. He did have to kill to climb the ladder in the cultivational world--and he actually did so, through killing the Wens. Yes, I know Nie Mingjue killed the Wens because he wanted revenge for his father and protection for himself and his brother, but the problem is... that’s exactly what motivated Jin Guangyao: protection. Jin Guangyao just had more to fear than Nie Mingjue.

The irony of the above scene that Jin Guangyao knows killing is wrong, but it’s how to survive in this world, so he does it anyways. Nie Mingjue thinks the problem of someone thinking they are entitled to kill can be solved by killing the one who says such a thing, because he’s entitled to kill someone who thinks they’re entitled to kill-- You get the point.

That sad thing is that being shoved down the stairs doesn’t even end that scene. Nie Mingjue directly attempts to murder Jin Guangyao:

Just as Nie MingJue unsheathed his saber, Lan XiChen happened to leave the palace to see what was going on, concerned after having waited for long. Seeing the situation before him, he unsheathed Shuoyue as well, “What happened, this time?”

...

Nie MingJue, “... I know what I’m doing. He’s beyond hope. If these keeps on going, he’ll do the world harm for sure. The earlier he’s killed, the earlier we can relax!”

This does not at all justifying Jin Guangyao’s subsequent murder of him, but again, Jin Guangyao kills to protect himself, and he’s not without cause for fear of his life (this does not justify, because neither is Nie Mingjue entirely without cause, but people have gotta acknowledge that reality).

III. Reasons to Kill

I often see Nie Mingjue held up as someone who judged people based on their actions and was countercultural in that he was willing to stand up to Jin Guangshan when Jin Guangshan wanted to acquit Xue Yang of slaughtering the Chang Clan. However, this is decidedly not the case. Nie Mingjue is very much acting within society’s principals here (calling someone else out is hardly unique or noble: see, Su She, Jin Zixun, etc.) Nie Mingjue stood up to Jin Guangshan then because the crime was so severe he knew he might actually be able to win; otherwise, he let Jin Guangshan do as he wished.

To illustrate this, I’ll share the piping hot tea a commentator spilled on one of my fics recently, because she says it perfectly:

She isn’t wrong. You can hold Xue Yang--and Jin Guangyao and Wei Wuxian, for that matter--responsible for their actions and also point out the hypocrisy of a society that holds to ideals of how people behave, yet is constantly making exceptions for themselves. Nie Mingjue does just this by demanding Xue Yang’s head as a price for not killing his own sworn brother. Jiang Cheng does just this by murdering the older, helpless Wens at the Burial Mounds, and turning his back on the Wens who saved Jiang Cheng’s own life.

Why do these characters kill?

Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng killed out of revenge to honor their families and save themselves.

Jin Guangyao killed to get his father to acknowledge him as his son, and then in revenge when he realized he never would, and to save himself.

Wei Wuxian killed out of revenge and then out of despair--really, revenge against the whole cultivational world that had set him up for failure no matter what he did.

Xue Yang killed out of revenge for his little finger.

What do all of these have in common? They reveal what each person prized.

Jiang Cheng and Nie Mingjue prized the honor of their culture and of society.

Wei Wuxian prized his loved ones.

Jin Guangyao prized himself as his father’s son, a sort of combination of JC/NMJ’s status love and WWX’s wanting to be loved.

Xue Yang prized his body.

Xue Yang seems condemnable on paper, but let’s look at this a little deeper: what else did Xue Yang have? Nie Mingjue inherited a sect and had his beloved little brother, men who would die for him, people who admired him. Wei Wuxian had his loved ones, and then they were gone. Jin Guangyao had his dead mother’s wish for him to be approved for by society, and a famous father. What exactly did Xue Yang have besides his own body? He didn’t have parents, as far as we know. What else was he to value? Why is Nie Mingjue venerated, and Xue Yang condemned? Why is Jiang Cheng allowed to torture the poor under him for so many years, just because they reminded him of his brother, and Xue Yang hunted down?

The only answer is privilege. It’s privilege that allows Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng to decide when and how they want to enforce justice, and if they do at all. It’s privilege that they had families to avenge. It’s privilege that enables them to commit atrocities and get second, third, fourth chances. It’s privilege of his birthright than enables Jiang Cheng to never once die in the novel (Nie Mingjue not so much). But when Nie Mingjue dies, he seeks revenge on his murderer, not justice. He kills countless others in his quest to kill Jin Guangyao, people who had nothing to do with his death, and he could have killed his own brother. Even when he succeeds he ends up battling Jin Guangyao in a coffin sealed for a hundred years--hardly a victory.

So since we’ve brought him up, let’s talk Xue Yang and the Yi City trio now. The “judgy” member of the Yi City Trio is decidedly not privileged (A-Qing, as @thisworldgodonlyknows wrote about her, foils Nie Huaisang, but also she foils Nie Mingjue), and her character reveals these precise flaws in Nie Mingjue and Jiang Cheng. She is a beggar girl and a thief, but she seeks justice for Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan out of nothing more than love. She herself does not kill, and frankly I’d say she is the moral backbone of the series more than any other character (along with perhaps Mianmian). She was never a part of society, after all.

A-Qing dies young, alone by a river, mutilated. She has no privilege, but her spirit survives as a ghost solely because of her desire to ensure justice for Xiao Xingchen and for Song Lan. Her condemnation of Xue Yang is at first admittedly selfish--she was jealous--but then honestly understandable and easier to swallow, since she came from a similar background. But because of this, and because A-Qing is willing to empathize, she ends up understood and her wishes fulfilled. In the end, Song Lan leaves with the remains of her soul, determined to heal both her and Xiao Xingchen.

As I wrote here, A-Qing is also faced with a dark version of herself in Xue Yang. Similarly, Jiang Cheng is faced with a dark version of himself in both Su She (jealous of Lan Wangji, jealous of Wei Wuxian; he calls out their arrogance) and in Jin Guangyao in the temple, and only then is he able to move forward and grow. Nie Mingjue, unfortunately, did not recognize the dark version of himself in Jin Guangyao, and ends up trapped with him.

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sneakydraws · 4 years

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Okay, I’d like to go through this point by point because there’s a lot going on.

“You’re leaving out Akio and his intentions” - If this is about the original essay then, well. To be blunt, I left Akio out of it because it is not about him at all. If I had had the freedom to write however much I wanted, maybe I would have included him in my discussion about Anthy’s characterisation more, but with the strict word limit - which I’ve mentioned repeatedly - I had to stick to the topic on hand very narrowly.

If this is not about the essay, but rather about my reply to your initial comment, then yeah, I didn’t mention Akio’s agenda because, again, that just wasn’t the topic of discussion. You specifically took issue with my idea that Anthy took some amount of pleasure in making herself seem antagonistic to Utena, so I explained why I thought that was the case. If the topic at hand was the ways in which her relationship with Akio influences Anthy’s behaviour, I would have talked about that.

“Personally, it kind of stings to hear people act like Anthy is just ~loving~ showing off how she’s sexually involved with her brother. I personally see Anthy’s witch status as very related to the stigma and trauma of incest, but that entire angle goes unmentioned in your analysis, where witch just means “evil sexy manipulative woman.””

The angle of witch as tied to incest goes unmentioned in my analysis because I have not read enough sources that connect the two together to be able to confidently say there’s a connection. Of course, in RGU incest is a major theme and it influences Anthy’s “witch” status, and in the “I’m your little sister; you could not make me a princess” stage play the two are tied together, but in my essay I talked more about the preconceived notion of “witch” that the audience would bring with them to the show and then connect to Anthy, and less about the notion of “witch” created by the show itself. If the essay was more generally about the roles of Princess and Witch as portrayed in RGU, then I probably would have contrasted the Witch in RGU - where it is explicitly related to incest - with the Witch as seen in (pop)culture more widely. Again, this is a case where I don’t mention something not because I don’t think it exists, but simply because I did not talk about every single angle the topic could be discussed from.

“I think Anthy’s possessiveness over Akio is massively overstated and the idea that she’s “showing off” her relationship with him to Utena makes me sick to my stomach. when I was first watching the show, I definitely thought they were meaning to paint Anthy as possessive over him, but if you pay attention, who actually acts out possessively over their sibling? isn’t it Akio? that’s not to say that Anthy doesn’t have any possessiveness (I have an essay I’ve been working on about that), but I think that even the framing of Anthy as the ultra possessive one is another example of scapegoating--she takes the blame for all the faults of the prince.”

Maybe you’re talking about a general attitude you’ve seen in the fandom, but given that it’s a reply to my analysis specifically, I really don’t appreciate how you seem to be putting words in my mouth. “The framing of Anthy as the ultra possessive one”? When I bring up Anthy’s possessiveness, I immediately downplay it, specifically because I did not want anyone to think I was overemphasising that part of her. You yourself imply that you think Anthy has “some possessiveness”, so I don’t understand why you take my very restrained mention of it as “massively overstating” the case.

I also resent the wording of “the ultra possessive one”, as if my mentioning her possessiveness carries with it the implication that Akio’s less guilty in this regard. Again, just because I didn’t talk about it doesn’t mean I don’t think it exists.

“As Anthy stares across at Utena, she is in pain. she’s telling her, here I am, I’m a witch, this is the real me--but I don’t see it as Anthy “reveling in portraying herself as a villain.” Anthy according to Enokido and Ikuhara is a “symbol of reality.” so she is showing Utena the reality of Akio, Akio’s relationship to herself, and Akio’s relationship to Utena.”

Yes, Anthy reveals to Utena the reality of her relationship with Akio, with all that implies. There is nothing actually evil about being sexually abused by one’s brother, but within the confines of the unfair princess/witch or madonna/whore dichotomy, it does bring her into the villainous witch/whore role. You know, because those roles are unfair, and condemn actions that aren’t actually wrong. I thought that was a given before, but maybe I should state it clearly.

Also, when I talked about Anthy “almost reveling” in portraying herself as the villain, I wasn’t actually referring to the reveal in ep36 itself, but rather to her behaviour afterwards (the next ep preview, breakfast, post-date scene, etc)

“What about Utena’s role in all of this? in that preview clip where Anthy says she’s always hated Utena, Utena says “I just can’t forgive what you’ve done.” well, is that what happens in episode 37?”

I don’t really see your point here? Yes, Utena’s words were untrue?

“Is Utena painting herself as a villain by saying she can’t forgive Anthy?”

No, in fact I think she’s painting herself as the victim. I guess this is a matter of subtle differences in interpretation, but I see the phrases “I can’t forgive what you’ve done” and “I’ve always hated you” as carrying very different emotional implications. The first is technically a neutral statement of one’s feelings, but the tone is accusatory, and I hear in it an implied “what you’ve done to me”. The latter would come across as antagonistic even on its own, but with the added context I do perceive it as Anthy painting herself as the villain. The fact that she’s acted friendly towards Utena until this point comes together with this statement to imply that she’s been lying to Utena, which has obvious connotation to the literary/cultural role of “villain”.

Again, it sounds to me like you misinterpret my words. I don’t think Anthy is “THE villain” in her relationship with Akio, and I don’t think I ever implied that. In fact, neither the original essay nor my initial response were actually about her relationship with Akio, and they didn’t aim to comment on who was the more possessive one, or the abusive one, or the villainous one. If they were about Anthy’s relationship to anyone, it was to Utena. Though really, that wasn’t the main topic either - the topic was the ways Anthy is characterised to the viewer through referencing fictional tropes/archetypes, and the ways in which she behaves towards Utena were part of that because Utena is the audience surrogate for a good chunk of the show.

You say that you feel as if my reply “flattens” and “waters down” the complexities of Utena and Anthy’s relationship, but it was not meant as an exploration of every single aspect of that relationship, just a very narrow and specific part of it.

Lastly, I hope this post wasn’t actually about me - since, like I said, I never characterised Anthy as “dominant and somehow the abuser” in her and Akio’s relationship. I didn’t write anything like that in either my essay from last year or my response to the first comment. Maybe the post is just about a general experience with the western fandom, the timing of it just makes me a bit suspicious.

#revolutionary girl utena #anthy himemiya #also like. idk maybe make up your mind on whether you want me to see those posts or not

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the-messenger-hawk · 4 years

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Confession Time:

I have a strong distaste for the Raava/Vaatu, dark vs. light, good and evil dichotomy that was introduced in Legend of Korra. The introduction of the “light and dark” spirits immediately rendered the narrative simplistic and childish, reducing the being of the Avatar down to something much less nuanced. The fact that they took it once step further to make a “Dark Avatar” out of Unalaq to combat Korra’s “Light Avatar” just had me groaning in annoyance.

It wasn’t about balance anymore, but ‘bad spirit evil,’ and I didn’t care. I missed the ambiguous blue-and-orange morality of spirits like Koh, who was capable of appalling things that he did merely as a nature of his being, but could be perfectly helpful if very specific rules were followed when interacting with him.

Whereas Raava and Vaatu just seem to exist for the sole purpose of being good and evil. I think the show shouldn’t have had that element at all. There’s a reason I skip Book 2 on every rewatch now (Besides the stupid love triangle).

Now, to be fair, I think there’s probably a way that you could rework these spirits in a way that would make them actually interesting.

Here’s what I’m thinking, as an example: Let’s say that both Raava and Vaatu (or whatever you want to call them) both exist together in the same space in the Avatar Spirit, and have been that way since the Avatar first manifested. And also, they’re not “light and darkness,” they instead embody the essences of order and chaos. Neither one of them are inherently evil, and both can be used to both positive and negative ends. But the spirits are constantly fighting a subtle war over the the Avatar Spirit over the course of many centuries. The Avatar must balance these opposing forces within themselves to avoid dipping too much into either cold, jackbooted order, or the uncontrollable madness of chaos, lest either consume them.

This could then be tied back to the finale of ATLA, of how the act of spiritbending someone’s bending away is a intense manifestation of the Spirit of Order, and the Avatar has to maintain strict focus and personal grace to avoid being corrupted by it. Aang, who was devoted to his teachings and deeply-held beliefs, withstood that corruption and retained his balance.

#atla #legend of korra #atla analysis #headcanon #negative

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spiritualdirections · 5 years

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Interpretive Charity and the two paradigms of the pandemic

In the Gospel today, the woman at the well and Jesus begin by talking past each other. The woman thinks Jesus is interested in water, or perhaps she thinks he’s interested in being her next husband. Jesus is interested in her conversion. She doesn’t get what he’s saying, at all. She lacks the imagination to consider this conversation the way that Jesus does.

A lot of us are talking past each other: At MIT this week, the administration managed a giant operation to shut down the university within a few days. Every so often, there would be a conference call where exhausted members of the administration would explain what they were doing and why, receive feedback in the form of “have you thought of this?”, and then give an answer (which, as often as not, would be changed within a few hours). Their work and efforts were really quite intelligent, and earned praise from MIT’s president. Also at MIT this week, students protested the various decisions of the Institute, often in vulgar language, which really hurt the feelings of the men and women who were working long hours to evacuate (sorry, “de-densify”) the campus. But, of course, the decisions of the Institute hurt many students in obviously real ways. Both sides had a point, and yet neither was really able to get inside the mind of the other and interpret the other’s actions charitably.

A poll just came out which shows that Republicans and Democrats view the facts and dangers of the pandemic in extremely different ways. There’s a popular saying, that you're entitled to your opinions, but not to your own facts. But, the fact/opinion dichotomy is not sustainable, as anyone who ever studied the great MIT philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions knows.

What we seem to have here are (at least) two different paradigms for looking at the pandemic:

One paradigm, expressed really effectively in this article, is that the pandemic is really big, really scary, and that the more governments act in a dictatorial fashion, the better we’ll all be.

The other paradigm is that over 80% of those who catch the virus get the sniffles and can be treated with DayQuil, that of those with the virus in South Korea (where they have the best testing and thus best data) only .06% die from this, and that it’s harder to catch than the average flu because you can’t infect anyone else unless you’re coughing and sneezing. People under 50 have little to worry about unless they have a preexisting respiratory, heart, or immune condition, and young people under 20 don’t have anything to worry about at all.

I’ll call those who subscribe to the first paradigm Team Pandemic (slogan: “Act now to avert the catastrophe!”), the second group I’ll call Team Don’t Panic (slogan: “You can’t spell ‘pandemic’ without ‘panic’!”).

Each paradigm looks at the information available to us and evaluates things differently. Each has important “facts” to build their theory upon: Team Pandemic can point to the limited number of respirators and hospital beds and point out that there’s an absolute number of severe cases that our healthcare system can handle before being overwhelmed, even if the percentage of cases that are severe is low. Team Don’t Panic can point out that we don’t need to isolate everyone, just those who are likely to develop severe cases because of age and pre-existing conditions, and those who are symptomatic. Team Pandemic worries that you can transmit the virus without being symptomatic; Team Don’t Panic points out that no evidence supports this. Team Pandemic points out that the regions that instituted strict policies quickly have the virus spread under control; Team Don’t Panic responds that we should adopt China’s approach of having huge numbers of “contact tracing” teams tracking down the network of those exposed to the already infected, which is a scalable response (interviewers can be trained and deployed quickly). Team Pandemic points out how one woman, Patient 31 in South Korea, who ignored social isolation policies infected thousands of people. Team Don’t Panic points out that she was symptomatic (including feverish) for over a week and didn’t self-isolate--that hardly justifies asymptomatic people being forced into isolation. Don’t Panic points out that isolating policies are likely to have devastating effects on the local and global economies. Team Pandemic points out that a global health crisis might be even worse.

I’m not the guy to adjudicate the debate. Actually, it’s not just a debate, but a deliberation about how we should live together right now. Academics can analyze and debate things for years. But we have to make decisions about how to behave right now based upon very incomplete information. We also can’t just adopt a “live and let live” attitude, since my neighbor’s mistaken decisions might affect me. So we need to deliberate together. Unfortunately, as the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre has shown, our society’s capacity for moral argument across competing paradigms is quite low.

I do think that in the days and weeks to come, we should work to try to understand the other side’s paradigm. This past week, I’ve seen both sides be extremely focused on solving problems within their own paradigms, while being completely unsympathetic to the viewpoint of the other team. Because the authorities have largely joined Team Pandemic, most people on Team Don’t Panic are actually quite aware of the arguments on the other side; they just see things differently. I think most people on Team Pandemic are oblivious to the critique of their own position. That sort of imbalance in listening is a recipe for social unrest, civil disobedience, and riots. If the authorities on Team Pandemic continue to order people around without listening and responding to the arguments from Team Don’t Panic, they might lose their ability to lead. If Team Pandemic happens to be right about the necessity of social isolation, and yet people start disobeying them because of their own unwillingness to listen, they might bring about their own worst nightmare.

But I’m a priest, and chaplain of hundreds of college students, and so my more direct concern is that people make the effort to be charitable to one another. If you are squarely on one team, don’t yell and scream at people on the other team. Try to see the world from their perspective. Try to focus on the “facts” that are most weighty in their opinion, and see if there’s some sort of compromise you can make about your own views. Investigate the facts that are under dispute, analytically, with an openness to new evidence. Check your blind spots, by broadening your vision to think about other aspects of the situation than those you usually do. Love the people on the other team, not in a condescending way, but as people who also are seeking the truth about how to live under these circumstances. If you continue to disagree, don’t be disagreeable. Bear with the faults of others, and apologize if you realize that you lost your temper or argued disrespectfully.

And, if, like me, you’ve been forced into working from home--don’t be resentful about it. Assume God has a plan!

#pandemic #coronavirus #sars 2 #ars technica #3rd Sunday of Lent 2020 #charity #alasdair macintyre #thomas kuhn #scientific revolution #paradigm #samaritan woman

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