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ilikelookingatthings · 4 years

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Barbie’s Duality and Untapped Role Model Potential

this particular essay by Clarisa Calderon-Figueroa

When I say Barbie, what pops into your head? A plastic doll with blond locks? The color Pink? Princesses? Glitter? Gender segregated toy sections at Target? Ripped off limbs? Maybe personal memories of playing with Barbie yourself scroll across the back of your eyelids. Or a sense of shallow distaste as you think of plastic surgery, removed ribs, and righteous complaints about body image. Barbie is a household name that has been steadily embedding itself in the world's collective consciousness since “1959, with her vast array of careers that stem from CEO to astronaut, but who simultaneously is more associated with the lyrics "I'm a blond bimbo girl" by the band "Aqua" ( Dockterman "A Barbie for Every Body") than the female empowerment message she goes out of her way to promote. The collective consciousness pulls "that age-old move" of "'demeaning' a powerful woman" and undercutting Barbie’s influence and the values she actually promotes by "'reducing' her to her appearance." ( Dockterman "Wonder Woman Breaks Through"). She is unfairly accused of selling a sexist, objectifying message under the veneer of empowering girls, stifling the untapped potential this icon has to teach children and adults the value of feminine traits.

Barbie has been accused of being inappropriate because of her body shape; on the surface these concerns are valid. According to a journal Barbie's design had been closely based on the "Lilli dolls, designed by O & M Hausser created in 1955…" which were "... racy..." dolls meant to be "… suggestive…" "… gag gifts..." that "… were not intended for children"(Hunter et al 138). She supposedly had the male gaze built into her and was repackaged for young girls. A 2006 study found that"girls exposed to Barbie at a young age were more likely to worry about their weight" (Dockterman "A Barbie for Every Body"). However, the study fails to consider that Barbie is not the only doll children would be playing with in real life. Some of those dolls have even more severe proportions than Barbie with a less wholesome image. Match up a Veterinarian Barbie with her "5-inch waist", "11.5-inches of height" and a "bust of 5-inches" against a Bratz doll with their "pouty lips", "bare midriff-baring tops", and half the waist with 7/10th the bust size(Hess). The disproportionate proportions winner is the Bratz doll. The study also proclaims that Barbie wouldn't be realistic if she was scaled up to actual human size, but Barbie is not meant to be scaled up and has never claimed to be realistic.

Barbie has tried to address the criticisms about her proportions by creating the "petite, tall" and "curvy"( Dockterman "A Barbie for Every Body") barbie body molds and with her worldwide reach, she can soon normalize the doll shapes from a young age since as of yet little girls still "snicker" at curvy barbie" which was noted by Tania Missad who had watched the test marketing of these new body types. If Barbie was the source of these body image issues kids would not snicker at different barbies but while she is not responsible she does have the ability to influence kids, especially with live examples of powerful female role models "Beyonce, Christina Hendricks" and "feminist leaders like Lena Dunham" with their "un-Barbie-like figures onscreen, fueling a movement that promotes body acceptance"(Dockterman 46). Barbie has the unique enduring appeal that has been picked up by generations of children; soon her different body types will recalibrate at the new normal.

Instead of blaming the society and the media that girls are exposed to daily, the blame is thrust on to Barbie even though "she's just a body" that "society can project on"(Dockterman "A Barbie for Every Body") and no one tries to blame boy toys like G.I. Joe of being a bad influence on young lads despite being the hyper-masculine ideal. Barbie is not even the only female icon that has her appearance dragged out to ridicule and used to distract from their actual accomplishments. The superhero Wonder Woman was sculpted from the mind of a "feminist, psychologist and… inventor of the lie-detector test..." "William Moulton Marston" in "1941" as "icon for little girls". Wonder woman's message of empowerment became so iconic the "U.N." dubbed her the "Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls..". Unfortunately, her position was rescinded due to a "petition objecting to "a large-breasted white woman of impossible proportions..."; dismissing her as a "... epitome of a 'pinup'" (Dockterman "wonder woman breaks through"). Wonder Woman has been around since Batman and Superman and yet she has had only "one" film compared to the "'Batman's' nine" and "'Superman's seven". People even criticized Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, not for her acting talent but for the size of her breasts, according to an interview mentioned in the Wonder Woman Breaks Through article. Evidence that the phenomenon of society judging the looks of females and using them as excuses to undercut the messages those ladies represent live people and imaginary characters.

Another complaint lobbied about the Barbie brand’s narrow view of positive, cheerful girl power. It's true, Mattel could be promoting one type of image of what being a girl is like, but the fact that Barbie from her inception has "inspired resistance" to even her own "script" (Weida el al [103]17-31) and has inspired conversations about what it means to be a lady. Even when Barbie seems one note she can be used to articulate a change. Barbie, as mentioned before with the body molds, has adapted to these arguments; just as feminism has grown and changed over time. Barbie has even purposefully used start a ripple of change for young girls to become interested “in the field of computers and information technology” by filling the gap caused by the “lack of well-known female role models” with the Barbie computer science "coding program"(Martincic et al 7).

The classic Barbie doll is often accused of promoting a shallow, stereotypical view of the female gender. Its true Barbie is blonde, pretty, fashion-obsessed, loves glitter, and associated with the term princess, however, seeing these as a negative from the get go is sexist in and of itself. If someone is blonde they shouldn’t be taken less seriously than a brunette. If their preferred color is pink it doesn't mean they should be judged more than if their favorite is blue. Enjoying clothes isn’t inherent shallow as it is a method expressing yourself; and glitter is gender-neutral. By associating these feminine aspects with negative light it can lead to dismissing other traits deemed as feminine, such as kindness or compassion, as weak. If girls don't respect those aspects how will they get boys to respect those aspects? Barbie takes those stereotypical girly aspects people have been conditioned over time to avoid and proclaims there is nothing to be ashamed of.

Even the idea of princesses has become synonymous with being a damsel in distress; a passive prize to be won. In reality, princesses are leaders and have " 'spanned' nearly all cultures and time periods…" and have a "myriad representations"(Weida el al 17-31) of what princesses can be like. The damsel image can immediately be changed when you change the princess to an active main character who drives the story. Barbie has a large association with princesses due to her movie franchise that almost slaps the term princess or mention of a royal in a majority of her films that I am a big fan of because Barbie is always the main character and the goals of the movies don't revolve around romance. Barbie's overly pink girly image is associated with the damsel stereotype which also means when Barbie breaks that stereotype over and over again it will stick. Barbie draws in little girls with her pretty dresses and sparkly animation and can inspire and teach little girls' leadership by normalizing the idea that guys can "… play subordinate roles in comparison with the female characters" (Änggård) since Barbie is the active problem solver.

Barbie as a female-focused brand explores scenarios where girls are the central focus without the expectations that they'll be brushed aside in favor of boy characters which can happen in more neutral, family-oriented. Slipping in an accidentally positive preference bias toward guys. Eva Änggård had noted that while the girls had included boys in their stories, none of the boys included girls in their own stories. The boys seemed to associate "The presence of female figures…to romance" which caused "teasing" from other boys. It had gotten to the point at least "two girls" had become "angry because they were not allowed to play in the boys' stories" so they "wrote their own stories" (Änggård) that used the themes the boys had favored. Kids reflect the society around them so the fact that the boys dismissed the girls entirely from the story is a micro-example of what happens on a large scale around the world. Barbie can fight those expectations due to her wide media presence. If the media would stop focusing on the flaws Barbie is ironing out and talk about how entertaining her shows or toys are, or the lessons she actually endorses, Barbie might teach the guys who aren't just forced to watch with their sisters the leadership qualities and friendship lessons.

Barbie has a wide reach not just as a toy, but through her "39" ("List of All Barbie Movies Online") movies and TV shows including Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse. Barbie has computer games and clothing lines. Barbie appeals to nostalgic adults with their collector Barbies; using that connection to prompts those adults to introduce Barbie to their kids. Barbie has an online presence that includes a motion capture Barbie YouTube channel, the Facebook page, or her twitter account ("Barbie YouTube"). Her worldwide appeal is already strong so if the instinct to brush aside girl-oriented media and jump on every minor flaw Barbie has was curbed, she could influence young children when they are the most impressionable to accept many wonderful traits.

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Cite

Änggård, Eva. "Barbie Princesses and Dinosaur Dragons: Narration as a Way of Doing Gender." Gender & Education, vol. 17, no. 5, Dec. 2005, pp. 539–553. EBSCOhost, doi: 10.1080/09540250500192777.

"Barbie." YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/c/barbie/videos.

Dockterman, Eliana. "A Barbie for Every Body. (Cover Story)." TIME Magazine, vol. 187, no. 4, Feb. 2016, pp. 44–51. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=112553378&scope=site.

Dockterman, Eliana. "Wonder Woman Breaks Through." TIME Magazine, vol. 188, no. 27–28, Dec. 2016, pp. 98–105. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=120303854&scope=site.

Hess, Amanda. "Leave Barbie Alone! She's Not the Skinniest Doll on the Block." Slate Magazine, Slate, 5 Feb. 2014, slate.com/human-interest/2014/02/barbies-not-the-skinniest-doll-on-the-block-measuring-barbie-bratz-monster-high-and-american-girl-dolls.html. WEB

Hunter, Dan, and F. Gregory Lastowka. "BarbieTM." Tulane Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property, Vol. 18. Fall 2015, pp. 133-160. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct-true&db=a9h&AN=111415505&scope=site.

"List of All Barbie Movies (Online)." Princess Movies Online, Princess Movies Online Copyright © 2020. Disney Movies Online Kids Movies, 11 Aug. 2020, www.princessmovies.org/barbie-movies/list-all-barbie-movies-online/.

Martincic, Cynthia J., and Neelima Bhatnagar. "Will Computer Engineer Barbie Impact Young Woman's Career Choices?" Information Systems Education Journal, vol. 10, no. 6, Dec. 2012, pp. 4-14. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1136648&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Weida, Courtney Lee, et al. "Poetics of the Fairy Tale Princess: Products, Problems, & Possibilities." Canadian Review of Art Education: Research & Issues, vol. 46, no. 2, July 2019, pp. 17–32. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=138903133&scope=site.

#Barbie #Role model #curvy petite tall #wonder woman #feminism #bodytypes #ken #engineering #careers #boys #girls #engineer #unfair?#sexist #barbie movies

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otp-armada · 4 years

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I am not looking forward to these flashbacks.

To date, we’ve had four onscreen kisses shared between Bellamy and Echo with additional, smaller moments of other forms of intimacy. I’d rather the show refrain from adding more tally marks to the count.

If humans were gifted with the capacity for purging unwanted memories, then all this discomfort would be a moot point. I suppose there’s always alcohol as a fallback option, but not even the prospect of temporary amnesia is worth destroying my liver. Turning to alcohol to drown my B/E-related sorrows would probably qualify more as self-harm than self-help.

I’d much prefer to cut directly to an imminent breakup scene without the pomp and circumstance of an agonized Echo’s trip down memory lane.

If anything, supplying us with visual evidence on how happy they were together is an even sadder remark on the state of B/E’s fragility, knowing it took 0.001 seconds for the mere mention of Clarke’s name to bring it all to ruin. No collection of past happy moments shared on the Ring erases the fractures in their relationship that occur between them afterward, originating with the revelation of a still-living Clarke. I'd be an absolute fool to believe otherwise.

But if Jason deems a tour of their greatest hits as necessary to the story, I trust his judgment. Showing us B/E's origins as their romantic relationship begins to fall apart in real-time brings it full circle, and it lends gravitas to the story he's telling with Echo. With this particular arc, the bigger picture is still Echo's evolution. It's not about B/E.

Once season 7 started, there was a visible shift in how Jason utilized B/E. Whereas seasons 5 and 6 primarily used B/E as the third leg in a love triangle designed to keep a pining Bellarke apart, season 7 uses their master-spy dynamic to bolster Echo's development almost exclusively. Post-season 6, Bellarke is so primed to get together, one honest admission of mutual feelings without Echo as an obstacle and BOOM. Canon couple.

Echo has a more extensive role than girl-to-be-dumped, and I'm not upset over it. She gets to stand up as a character after the majority of her life has been marked by slavery for her crown, and I'm not upset over it. As indemnification for the loss of her relationship, this orphan-turned-soldier is finding her place in a supportive, loving family while developing a sense of identity and independence, and I'm not upset over it.

I would’ve preferred Jason found a way to take her on this path without B/E remaining intact this far into the final season and theoretically for the foreseeable episodes. I would always choose to end them sooner rather than later, given a choice. But I understand why Jason didn't.

Echo can’t very well outgrow a master-spy complex if there is no master to her spy. And as much as I hate it, the romantic aspect of B/E is a believable, convenient tool to keep this complex in place until her story comes to fruition. Would Echo act so extremely in service to a recent ex-boyfriend who left her for another woman? Probably not. As far as I can tell, the pinnacle of her arc is the moment she realizes she has to break free from Bellamy. So narrative structure demands B/E stay together, however technically, long enough for her to break those chains.

I was initially excited about the flashbacks, if only because I took them as a sign of an impending breakup. But the timing doesn't pan out. Aside from the logistics of Echo and Bellamy presumably on separate worlds, and with her thinking him dead, we've only just reached the point where Echo might start to ask herself those hard questions she's been avoiding. She must have noticed a change in her relationship. Between Psychosis!Emori, B/E's 6x04 fight, and Anomaly!Roan, she's had enough cause for doubt. But I think she's suppressed any urge to reflect upon it for a number of reasons. Love. Continued hope they'll last. War. A mission to save him. It took a lot of meticulous maneuvering to corner Echo to this point. Now that we're here, I don't think Jason would pull a reverse Uno card in a 40-minute episode. It seems more likely that he will let her continue to stew in her emotions. Either she'll keep sinking until she hits rock bottom, or she'll start learning how to swim.

Jason could always prove me wrong. And if I am, I'd never be happier for him to do so. If I'm not? It's at times like this when I am reminded of the resolution I made at the end of season 6- rest easy in the comfort of knowing B/E will meet its inevitable end but do not try to speculate when that might be. Attempting to discern the specifics of "when" brings one only misery.

Jason’s signature sometimes-too-fast, other-times-too-slow pacing, is often liable to tempt one into ripping their own hair out. That being said, I’ve seen enough of this show to trust in his ability to tell a damn good story. Faith in his competency for the craft just requires on our part, the patience of a saint.

If nothing else, it isn’t my story to tell, so I’ll just have to suck it up and find a way to deal with any disappointments I may feel. Or I can try to find the value within the story told. It's a better alternative than to be left bitter. No promises, though.

Maybe Echo’s actions against the Disciples aren’t reprehensible, considering the people she’s killing are those complicit in kidnapping and torturing her people. But Orlando was a good, honorable man whose naïveté convinced him to play for the wrong team, yet helped our heroes when he didn’t have to. Not unlike Shaw, whom Echo sold to Diyoza to fulfill her mission. But I assume “We are not his people” is residual mistrust leftover from Ryker’s betrayal of her. She miscalculated the feelings of one possible defector before, she won’t make the same mistake twice.

If she was able to save Bellamy in the end, I’m sure she’d be able to justify the spilled blood it took to get there. But Orlando suffered at her hands for nothing, and she may not be overly concerned with morality, but she cares for the people she grows close to. Unless the episode proves otherwise, I’d like to think Orlando’s fate will weigh heavily on her.

They may not have been close. But five years in close quarters with only a few people akin to friends for comfort, it'd be hard not to feel the slightest bit attached.

Those of us who believe in Bellarke know Echo is the third-party obstacle in a love triangle. But what is far more interesting is the role she played in the seasons-long Blake siblings struggle.

Echo was persona non grata to both siblings following her and Octavia's mountaintop fight. Six years later, she highlights the difference in the siblings' maturities. Whereas Bellamy has learned to embrace empathy and forgiveness with open arms, Octavia is cold and unyielding. On a more personal note, B/E represents Octavia's persistent unwillingness to respect Bellamy as his own person, with needs and wants independent of her.

After her soul searching on Skyring, I thought she had buried the hatchet, as per her lack of vitriol in her 6x12 conversation with Bellamy, and enthusiastically joining forces with Echo in 6x13. Maybe she did. But Octavia has also proven herself an unreliable narrator, and Hope feels indignation on her aunt's behalf. Whatever the case, there's a reason why the dialogue keeps referencing Echo and Octavia's hostile history. And I think it's building to a head in 7x07.

I think mutual love for Bellamy is healing the divide between them when Echo is at her most fractured. She's isolated from Bellamy and the rest of Spacekru. Left in pain and seeking retribution as Octavia did, which, as we know, is where it all went wrong for the latter. Octavia, more than most, is in the best position to empathize with what Echo is currently feeling and how pain can destroy her if she lets it consume her.

If Octavia can remind Echo she's not alone, if a former enemy can convince her she belongs and welcome her with open arms- as her brother did before her- it might do well in healing some broken piece inside of her. And it would be a roundabout display of Octavia's newfound maturity. This is good for both of them. This spiral she is in will require her to look inward. Since her fixation with Bellamy is partly what landed her in this mess, absolution cannot come from him. She can only find it in herself if she wants it. But I'd be glad if Octavia can help see her through it. This is what I mean about seeking value in the story told. We're so concerned about Octavia calling Echo family, about the possibility of it legitimizing B/E, it doesn't occur to us that it's about the characters themselves. And B/E is only a vehicle used to bring us there. It's easier to see when not consumed by automatic seething rage, as typical of our fellow Bellarke compatriots, for anything remotely associated with Echo.

If my heart and mind weren’t chanting “BELLARKEBELLARKEBELLARKE,” there’s a good chance I’d be able to better appreciate the complexities B/E gives to the development of the four characters it directly impacts.

Our side of fandom has made lots of accusations about B/E since 5x01. It’s a forgettable, physical relationship worth little to Bellamy. B/E is unhealthy for reasons x, y, and z. We generate a different example in every episode. Click slideshow for more details. But the fact of the matter is, much of this isn't true. Until Echo went postal, B/E wasn’t unhealthy. Bellamy just had a greater love for Clarke. Up until their ending scene in 6x04, there was nothing they couldn’t come back from together, if both committed themselves fully, no more walls. It's not a particularly popular train of thought among us, but Jason absolutely could've written B/E as an endgame pairing. And all it would take to deliver a final killing blow is the inclusion of a single damning scene.

We can gripe over the length of time they've stayed together. But, in spite of what most people think about every new B/E development and Bellarke separation, Jason has never actually dropped an ax on Bellarke. Hope persists.

Jason is responsible for the development of dozens of characters, major plots, and dozens of smaller subplots. But our fandom reduced the story chiefly to Bellarke's romance. Our villains are those who stand in their way. Namely Echo, the only outside love interest to be an official obstacle. We fashioned Echo as our enemy. In lieu of removing her from the narrative (which is not in our power to do), we've done everything within our purview to diminish her. If Jason won't treat B/E and Echo as the jokes we know they are, we'll do it ourselves. Minimizing her role in the story makes it a hell of a lot easier to erase a character we'd rather didn't exist for our preferred ship to advance.

Lord knows how many times we've claimed she has no story. That absent relevance or substantial bearing, she's there simply because Jason is partial to her for some elusive reason. But the reality is, we never looked for her story because we wanted to be able to claim its inexistence. We wanted to be able to say she's frivolous to the story, and by extension, to Bellamy. We want to be able to dismantle B/E when it appears Jason doesn't. Except he is and has been doing so since day one.

Months ago, on a whim, when I was feeling benevolent towards Echo, I wrote a long post HERE giving her the benefit of the doubt, and I said:

In the grand scheme of the story, I think this is the purpose Echo serves, to represent the part that says, “We’re all human. No matter what tribe we belong to, we fight for the same reasons. We love the same way. When you leave allegiances aside, when you see someone for who they are at their core, an enemy today can become a friend tomorrow.”

True peace, a series-long running theme for our heroes, begins with embracing former outsiders like Echo and Emori. Easy to lose sight of this when focused on ship wars.

It is perfectly acceptable not to love all the components of a story. It is understandable to focus your attention on those select segments you find appealing. But a tunnel-visioned mindset lands you in trouble when you become resentful at the reminders that a story is a composite of more moving pieces than just the parts you like. And when you forget that screentime allotted to developing those pieces ahead of what you favor is permissible. Everything on a show has its time, all in due course.

On the other hand, B/E shippers overinflate their ship's significance. They take canon and twist it to say, "Look at how strong B/E is, Bellarke could never. B/E is endgame, and Blorkes are delusional." Their conclusion of an epic love is another bias-based fandom interpretation that doesn’t hold water, either.

I think the reality of B/E lies somewhere in a muddled middle of these two extremes.

One last point, and I'll get off my soapbox. Despite what the melodramatic diatribe in my opening paragraph suggests, B/E is never as atrocious as fandom makes them out to be. Greater fandom treats anything remotely associated with B/E as the next great catastrophe. And as it turns out, it never really is.

Tagging @sometimesrosy, because I think, after years of combating opinions you don’t agree with, it might be a refreshing change of pace to know some of us do have more balanced views regarding B/E. If I do say so myself.

#hmmm how i tag this in a way that will land me in the least amount of hot water?#the 100 meta #with a side order of #fandom wank #long post #the 100 #bellarke #b/e #c/b/e #the 100 season 7 #my post

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themattress · 5 years

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I Grade: Lusamine

The first female Big Bad of a Pokemon generation...what the Hell went so wrong here!?

Games: In Sun/Moon, Lusamine is the Big Bad. There is no question about it, there is no adversary higher on the totem pole. And not only that, she is one of, if not the most terrifying villains the franchise has ever presented. Completely out of her mind and detached from reality, self-absorbed to the extreme, prone to raging mood swings, devoid of morality, and worst of all a textbook abusive, narcissistic parent to her children Lillie and Gladion, the president of the Aether Foundation is very easy to fear and loathe. And refreshingly for the franchise at this point, Lusamine doesn’t actually have a huge, destructive, high-stakes goal in mind. There’s a chance for mass destruction in Alola because of what she pulls, but that’s not actually the point. With her, it’s more personal: she wants to enter a world where she can be with what she loves most, the Ultra Beast Nihilego (which her twisted mind deems to be perfect, “beautiful” children that need her as a loving mother), even if it means abandoning her mistreated actual children and hurting or killing the Pokemon closest to them to do it. Clearly, this bitch is another Ghetsis: excessively vile and wholly irredeemable. Right?

......RIGHT?

Yeah, wrong. Bizarrely, Game Freak didn’t seem to actually realize just how badly they were portraying Lusamine, as it wasn’t their intention. In their minds, Lusamine was a tragic villain: a woman broken by the loss of her husband to an Ultra Wormhole experiment gone wrong, becoming possessive over her children in a misguided effort to not lose them too, and then getting addicted to Nihilego toxin while trying to find a way to get her husband back. The toxin messed with her mind, amplified all of her negative qualities such as her possessiveness toward her children to the extreme, and gradually shifted them to be directed solely toward the source of the toxin itself: Nihilego. This is why by the end of the story, Lusamine is treated as redeemable, with Lillie making strides in reconciling with her offscreen and even traveling away from her found family in Alola to go find Lusamine special medical help in Kanto.

But this just failed to come off to the majority of players. Not only is most of the necessary backstory spoken of above buried within the postgame and relayed by sources other than Lusamine herself, but all of the actual scenes in the game with Lusamine do way too good a job hitting close to home for players that have either had or known people who’ve had abusive, narcissistic parents. The child abuse angle is portrayed so strongly that any nuance gets lost in the shuffle. An astonishing number of players don’t even appear to remember Lillie reconciling with and going to help Lusamine at the end, their memory selectively stops at the powerfully-delivered speech from Lillie: “Children are not just THINGS that belong to their parents! We're not made for you to just discard when you get bored with us! That is terrible, Mother! You are terrible!" The idea of Lusamine being redeemed and reconciled with her children is not a happy one to them, and so they ignore it and continue hating her.

This backlash clearly caught Game Freak off guard, and they made an effort to rectify it. In Ultra Sun / Ultra Moon, Lusamine’s trajectory is changed. No longer falling prey to Nihilego toxin, she is still a highly flawed and arguably abusive parent and still commits morally reprehensible acts, but now it’s for the greater good: she wants to stop the looming threat of Necrozma from destroying Alola. Her backstory is mentioned by her in the story, and it becomes clear that she’s truly motivated by her foolish pride, feeling as if defeating Necrozma will validate her self-absorbed self-image of a savior and make up for the fact that she couldn’t save her husband and drove her children away in becoming too protective of them. When she is thrashed by Necrozma and causes it to get loose and create the very threat to Alola she was hoping to prevent, Lusamine undergoes some serious self-reflection and character development for the rest of the game: reconciling with her children, making peace with the fact that she’s never getting her husband back, fixing the harm she had the Aether Foundation cause, and overall having a clear and efficient on-screen redemption.

BUT, unlike with Cyrus in Platinum where issues he had as both a character and as a villain were corrected, here Game Freak was so concerned with correcting Lusamine’s character that they neglected how she was as a villain. Since they removed the main factors that made Lusamine such a memorably terrifying villain in S/M, she now comes off as a retread of Zinnia, the antagonist of OR/AS’s postgame Delta Episode. This in itself still might have not been too bad since she still plays this antagonistic role quite well, but then the game goes and has Lusamine made to look like a putz compared to other villains not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES. First she’s beat down by Necrozma, then she’s sold out by her own underling Faba, and finally she’s held hostage by Giovanni. None of the Big Bads of the previous gens have been treated this way, as is reinforced in Episode RR where they all get to shine, so it happening to the first ever female Big Bad kind of feels like a slap in the face for many.

The IOS game Pokemon Masters continues Game Freak’s course correction by showing us S/M’s Lusamine after she has recovered from Nihilego’s toxin, and we actually get to see her redemption process onscreen as she struggles to be a better, more selfless mother to her children and move beyond the immense guilt she feels for hurting them so badly in the past. Much like in US/UM, she still has her moments of shallowness and narcissism, but the fact that she’s aware of these flaws and is working on self-improvement makes them forgivable.

Lusamine, when taken as a villain in S/M, is great. Lusamine, when taken as a villainous character in US/UM, is great. The problem lies in the fact that there is almost nothing in common between the two depictions of her, which while having an explanation behind it (one is juiced up on Nihilego toxin and the other is not), it still doesn’t change how jarring it feels. On the whole, the score for Lusamine in the core game series is dead middle. A good villain, but she could’ve been so much better if she was properly thought through from the beginning.

Score = 3

Anime: OK, I probably should be angry at how Lusamine is portrayed in the Sun & Moon anime series. She’s a silly, zany, energetic womanchild as opposed to a refined, graceful professional, she isn’t a villain at all since her evildoing in the anime’s Nebby arc is given to Faba and she only becomes an antagonistic Ultra Beast hybrid against her will, and furthermore she is the furthest thing from a depiction of the Gen VII Big Bad in that she is actually a Big Good: as the commander of the Ultra Guardians, she is who Ash and his friends take their orders from in their missions to defend the peace in Alola. I imagine that many people who were fans of Lusamine as a villain took this as an egregious betrayal.

But with that said, I just fucking love her! Because she appears so regularly and has interactions with so many different characters, this is the most fleshed out Lusamine in the franchise, the most real and human-feeling in spite of how comically she often behaves. The tragedy of the loss of her husband and the troubled relationship with her children manages to be kept in tact even without making her a villain, and she naturally has the happiest resolution out of all versions of the character. So despite not being evil, she’s still a fabulous Lusamine.

Score = 3.5

Manga: The chief human antagonist in the Sun/Moon Chapter, Lusamine is very well-portrayed here....for the most part, anyway. She starts off as mostly an adaptation of the S/M games’ version, but Yamamoto takes great pains to draw her a certain way - ridiculously widened eyes and a near perpetual smile on her face - to make it abundantly clear to readers that something is wrong with her, that this isn’t her normal state of mind and she is clearly badly drugged up on something (Nihilego toxin). It’s similar to this manga’s N, except...good. Because the manga can go darker than the games, we actually get to see flashbacks that show her emotional abuse of Lillie under this state, and they are extremely unsettling.

She reaches her peak when her insane goal is revealed: rather than want to go to the world of Nihilego, she’s been so intoxicated that her “love” has spread to all Ultra Beats and she wants to bring them all to Alola in order to make a paradise for them where she can be their mother. And she succeeds, too! But even that isn’t enough for her, and so she sets out to capture fucking Necrozma because she feels like only then will her paradise be complete! This leads to the highlight of her role in this arc: “Mother Beast” Lusamine vs. Necrozma! Seeing the Big Bad of S/M and the Big Bad of US/UM go at it is exhilarating to witness.

But there is one HUGE flaw holding this incarnation of Lusamine back from total greatness: it turns out that her losing her husband, getting hooked on Nihilego toxin, and everything bad that transpires with her...was facilitated by Faba. Lusamine’s personal agency that makes her story more tragic is neutered in favor of making some douchebag man responsible for it. Maybe Kusaka did this because he was worried about the readers being able to accept Lusamine’s redemption otherwise, given the reaction to her in the S/M games, but it was still the wrong call to make. He was doing so well with this Lusamine, combining the best from S/M and US/UM in her, and was building her up as the biggest human antagonist in the arc, the penultimate threat before Necrozma...and he blew it. Oh well, she is still effective in the role he has her play, and I consider this problem to be more of Faba’s than Lusamine’s.

Score = 3.5

TCG: Lusamine debuts with the “Lusamine” card in the Crimson Invasion expansion, staged as the person who is responsible for unleashing Ultra Beasts into Alola. While not to the extent as Lysandre, Lusamine also proved to be troublesome to official tournaments and her card banned from any Expanded format games played in them. The same card was reprinted in the later Ultra Prism set, with Lusamine now being in her notorious Mother Beast form.

In the Lost Thunder set, Lusamine and her Aether Foundation return to cause more trouble, with Lusamine getting a new “Lusamine” card. This time it was a rule on the card that you can only have one of it in your deck, and you can only play it under specific circumstances.

Score = 3

Other: In the Pokemon Evolutions web series, Lusamine shows up in the 2nd episode “The Eclipse”, voiced to perfection by Dawn M. Bennett. She’s adapted from Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon here, abusively sneering at Lillie about how useless she is and how only she can be the savior that Alola needs. This makes it all the more satisfying when she’s reduced to a cowardly wreck following the beatdown Necrozma gives her, while Lillie is actually able to face her fears and stand up to the monster alongside Selene in order to rescue Nebby.

Score = 3

TOTAL FRANCHISE SCORE = 3 out of 5

Lusamine is a good villain in the franchise, but it will likely always be a point of frustration that she couldn’t become a great one. Everything about her on paper seems like it would make for one of the best antagonists we’ve had to date, but it just didn’t stack up that way in execution. Whatever the medium, Lusamine ended her run not looking like the Big Bad of Gen VII, with Necrozma, Giovanni, or even Faba upstaging her in that position. And that is extremely disappointing, given how many people had wanted a female Big Bad for years and were so excited that we finally seemed to have one. But hey, she tried. Kudos to her for that, at least.

BONUS: Which version is my personal favorite?

While on a strictly personal level I love the anime’s version best, when I have to choose which Lusamine works best in the villainous role she was created for then I’d have to go with US/UM’s version. While her constant getting nerfed annoys me, she still is effective as the source of all the conflict in the main story (even Necrozma would not have been the threat it is without Lusamine provoking it). And cutting down on all the craziness and child abuse, no matter how memorably terrifying that made her, did wonders for making her a nuanced foe.

#Pokemon #I Grade #Lusamine #Aether Foundation #Evil #Opinion #Analysis

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sinrau · 4 years

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Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and co-founder of Center for Human Technology, appears before Congress in “The Social Dilemma.” (Netflix)

Picture, if you will, a high-tech voodoo doll of you on a server somewhere. Probably more than one server.

While the makers of that reverse-engineered avatar might not be sticking literal pins into it, in “The Social Dilemma,” filmmaker Jeff Orlowski makes a fine case that in mining data from your onscreen interactions, they are constructing a predictive version of you and trying to prick your interests and put a spell on your attention in historically unprecedented ways. (“The Social Dilemma” began streaming on Netflix this week.)

The quotes Orlowski begins his wake-up call of a documentary with — and peppers throughout — aren’t easy to top. There’s Sophocles’ “Nothing vast enters the world of mortals without a curse.” And this from sci-fi giant Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And this wry quip from data-visualization guru Edward Tufte: “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.”

Yet, here’s one to add: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” It may not be as elegant as the others, but it represents the tone taken by the tech leaders interviewed by the Boulder-based director who investigated the extraordinary problems wrought by big-tech behemoths, particularly the ones that have entangled so many in the vast web of social media: Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Among the documentary’s smart and personable talking heads: Justin Rosenstein, co-inventor of Facebook’s “like” button; Tim Kendall, former president of Pinterest and former Facebook director of monetization; and Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” (That book’s subtitle: “A Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.”)

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, became notable for writing an early internal and legendary document questioning the addictive tendencies of smartphone tech. Think Jerry Maguire’s manifesto after his dark night of the soul. Harris caused a buzz and then, well, crickets. He went on to co-found the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit promoting the ethics of consumer tech.

RELATED: Watch this very real Netflix doc about a man who welded himself inside a “killdozer” and destroyed half of Granby

These days, Silicon Valley is referred to in much the way we talk about Hollywood or Washington: It is a global economic force, a wielder of spectacular power, somehow exemplary, too, of some more honorable ideals. Orlowski went to one of its feeder schools.

“I was class of ’06 at Stanford. When we all graduated, that was (around) the birth of the iPhone and the birth of apps. So many of my closest friends went directly to Facebook, Google or Twitter. Multiple friends sold their companies to Twitter for exorbitant amounts of money,” Orlowski said on the phone before his film’s world premiere at January’s Sundance Film Festival.

The project came out of conversations with those friends “who were starting to talk about the problems with the big social media companies back in 2017, at the birth of the tech backlash that we’ve been seeing. Honestly, I’d heard nothing about it, knew nothing about it.”

So many of his creative, thoughtful friends were working in new tech that Orlowski wondered, “How’s it a problem?” A fan of long-form journalism, he set out to answer that question and a few others. “For me, this process was two years of being an investigative journalist. (Of doing) first-hand research with the people who make the technology and trying to understand what the hell is going on.”

Director Jeff Orlowski attends the World Premiere of “The Social Dilemma,” an official selection of the Documentary Premieres program at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. (Azikiwe Aboagye, provided by the Sundance Institute)

He is not alone in trying to wrap his brain — and ours — around that. Orlowski was among a cluster of storytellers at January’s Sundance Film Festival, posing timely questions about societal costs of seemingly free platforms — quandaries that have been reflected in a deluge of headlines about big tech’s role in our lives, in civil discourse, in democracy. (The film’s final cut includes a few recent images of news footage hinting at the rough tango between our lives and the Twittersphere around COVID-19.)

Two other high-profile projects that should prompt a rethink were Shalini Kantayya’s “Coded Bias,” about the MIT Media Lab, where research uncovered just how racially biased facial recognition software is. It’s a searing yet inspiring look at what happens when the people making tech’s design choices, and building its algorithms, create for people who look exactly like them. Co-directors and Karim Amer and Guvenc Ozel’s vivid virtual-reality living-room installation, “Persuasion Machines,” depicts with its jaw-dropping environment the data-mining excesses of a “smart home.”

There have always been concerns about the amount of private information that customers seem so willing to cede with little regard for security. But social media is proving itself a voracious beast. It’s less about identity theft than the potential for manipulation on a mass scale. Advances in AI and machine learning have added a special — arguably dystopian-courting — wrinkle.

It’s little surprise, then, that Orlowski is asking urgent questions. He’s forged a place in the documentary vanguard. He first made a splash when he trailed environmental photographer James Balog around Greenland, Iceland and Alaska. With stunning images, Balog documented the calving of ice shelves, the receding of glaciers, and Orlowski documented him.

The resultant work, “Chasing Ice” (2012), was gorgeous and chilling — in all the wrong ways. It was a different kind of climate change doc, not a screed but a nature film that made a compelling case that there are seismic — likely irreversible — changes afoot. It won an Emmy. (Traveling through Denver International Airport, you may have stopped to watch Balog’s mesmerizing time-lapse video for his Extreme Ice Survey work.)

Orlowski’s 2017 follow-up, “Chasing Coral,” won an Emmy for Best Nature Documentary.

“This is the beginning of a decade of films about technology and the consequences of technology,” Orlowski said of the company. “There’s so much at risk and so much at scale, the way technology is designed.”

In both “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral,” he worked to make concepts starkly or strikingly visual. He faced a similar challenge with “The Social Dilemma. “We were trying to think of ways to show people what’s happening on the other side of their screens that’s invisible,” he said. “How do you show people something that is literally impossible to see? You can’t see what’s happening on the servers, right? You can’t even see the servers. But how are the algorithms designed and what are they doing that control 3 billion people?”

The number is not far off: According to German data-statistics tracking company Statista, there are currently 3.5 billion smartphone users.

For “The Social Dilemma,” Orlowski weaves a narrative tale about a multiracial family wrestling with the role of tech in their home. Think of it as a dramatization of concerns. The strategy evolved out of his own response to the news he was hearing from his Silicon Valley friends and their worries around the industry’s overreach.

“Because of the way they were describing it, every time I looked at my phone, I kept seeing a manipulative machine on the other side trying to puppeteer me. For the year I was on Facebook, I thought, ‘I’m being used.’ And it gave birth to this narrative storyline we figured out this way to interweave with the documentary.”

As a filmmaker, it was a chance to direct actors. Vincent Kartheiser of “Mad Men” plays the three-yammering embodiments of AI, dialing up the needs, nudging impulses and commanding the attention of Ben. Skyler Gisondo portrays the increasingly distracted high schooler. Helping create this intricate dance between the interviews and narrative was Oscar-winning editor Davis Coombe, a local filmmaking luminary. (He also co-wrote the doc with Orlowski and Vickie Curtis.)

“I really loved doing all that,” said Orlowski. “The writing, the shooting, the directing. All of the narrative stuff was really fun and brought, I hope, a different dimension.”

Ben and his family are intended to represent the ways many of us interact with the technology, not as designers but as Instagrammers and Tweeters, friends and over-sharers, TikTok-ing kids and their aggravated parents.

Of course, recanting can be a tricky thing. We admire people who see the flaws — even corruption — in a system and alert us to the dangers. But we can also be suspicious of their declarations. Indeed, there is an undercurrent of quiet hubris intermixed with the insider cautions of a number of Orlowski’s experts.

An intentionally witty moment comes early in the movie when, after a few of them have reflected on the unintended consequences of tech, and the sense that it was meant to help not harm. Although each had been a chatterbox of insights and perspectives, every one of them grows silent, looking for all the world stumped by the simple question that Orlowski asks: “So what’s the problem?” More than once, an interviewee reminds us that one of the tools to address the hyper-speed amassing of power and profit is rather old-school: regulation.

Even more illuminating than confessing their own addictions to email, or push notifications, or Twitter are the moments when these engineers, software designers, marketing whizzes share their own practices for themselves — or their family’s rules for their children — about social media.

“I’ve uninstalled a ton of apps from my phone that I felt were just wasting of my time … and I’ve turned off notifications,” said Rosenstein.

“Never accept a video recommended to you on YouTube. Always choose. That’s another way to fight,” said Jaron Lanier, one of tech’s most innovative minds turned most trenchant critics.

“We’re zealots about it. Crazy,” said Allen, asked about social media and his children. “We don’t let our kids have really any screen time.”

And perhaps the most timely advice: “Before you share, fact check,” said Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “If it seems like something designed to push your emotional buttons, it probably is.”

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, In The Know, to get entertainment news sent straight to your inbox.

A Boulder filmmaker’s new Netflix documentary will make you want to delete social media forever

#IFTTT #WordPress

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scifigeneration · 7 years

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Blade Runner 2049 – and why eyes are so important in this vision of the future

by Kevin Hunt

Even a brief glimpse of Blade Runner 2049 takes you straight into Deckard’s world. Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece gets the colour palette just right, perfectly capturing the tone of the original.

Achieving the look and feel of the original Blade Runner (1982) is essential because appearances, vision and eyes are key to both the experience and the story.

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Blade Runner was ahead of the AI curve when it made sci-fi arguments about identity and philosophy a mainstream concern. Is Deckard a replicant? Do androids have souls? What makes us human?

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In the original, seeking answers was all about looking at the eyes. The film’s Voight-Kampff “empathy test”, used by the Blade Runners to identify replicants, now has its own special place in popular culture. The striking image of a glorious blue iris reflecting fire and light has become a cinematic icon; and Rutger Hauer’s emotional final lines when his character, Roy Batty, succumbs to death are a sublime moment in film history:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to die.

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And now Blade Runner 2049 appears primed to expand the exploration of eyes and identity with mind-bending visuals. In the neon flashes and noirish glimmers, Jared Leto’s character, Niander Wallace, muses on the act of creating replicants like a blind god. His white irises have a sinister and mysterious beauty, but they also belie any sense of limitation caused by his lack of sight – even though he can’t see, he has the “vision” to create or end life.

David Bowie was actually Villeneuve’s first choice for the Niander Wallace role. Seen as an influence upon Blade Runner “in many ways”, the late singer was also well-known for his distinctive mismatched eyes that gave him an otherworldly persona – an affect Leto created in his own way with “custom made contact lenses that turned his eyes totally opaque”.

Eye spy

Cinema has often used eyes as a visual code for character and morality. Traditionally, damaged eyes tend to represent “baddies” and corruption – suggesting an off-kilter world seen in a dark and dangerous way. The vicious scar Donald Pleasence has around his right eye as a highly memorable Ernst Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (1967) helps to make him an enduring Bond villain.

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The Oscar winning Chinatown (1974), meanwhile, is full of cracked lenses, broken glasses and other means of distorting vision – ending with the disturbing shot of Faye Dunaway, as Evelyn Mulwray, with her eye socket blown apart by a bullet.

And as Carl Fogarty in A History of Violence (2005), Ed Harris relishes showing his scar tissue to the camera as he recalls his eye being ripped out with barbed wire.

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Cinema also has its fair share of “old crones” with cataracts setting curses (Drag Me to Hell); blind priests who have forsaken their faith (Father Spiletto in The Omen), and “mutants” with unusual eyes spying on unwitting victims (The Hills Have Eyes).

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Computers and robots add a different twist to this psychopathology. The calm red lens of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Yul Brenner’s blank metallic eyes in Westworld (1973), and the persistent red dot shining out of Arnie’s silver skull in the original Terminator (1984) all project fear through a sense of the uncanny.

If the thought of a non-human consciousness glimpsed through the eye as a “window to the soul” is consistently unnerving, it is because instead of a human connection there is something else there entirely: the terror and wonder of the unknown.

By contrast, heroes are more likely to benefit from enhanced vision. Christopher Reeve’s Superman (1978) famously has X-ray eyes, while Keanu Reeve’s “Neo” in The Matrix (1999) realises his destiny as “The One” only when he can visualise the code world and see how to change its rules from within.

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New look

But our changing perception of eyes and how we see them is also visible onscreen. We now have popular blind superheroes like Daredevil, on film (2003) and TV (2015 onwards), and anti-heroes like Elliot in Mr Robot (2015 onwards) who “sees differently” due to a strange combination of dissociative identity disorder and next-level hacker skills. Rami Malek’s starring eyes, somewhere between the unblinking focus of a screen addict and the wide-eyed paranoia of a drug addict, add a mesmeric quality to his performance of Mr Robot’s complex persona.

Back in Deckard’s increasingly toxic world, it looks like Niander Wallace is set to become an iconic cinematic villain in a film already seen by some as a masterpiece. His cloudy eyes feel well suited to the shadowy undertones of Blade Runner 2049, while his ability to create artificial intelligence offer a dark vision of the future. However bleak an outlook Blade Runner 2049 might visualise, films that look as good as this make it hard to take your eyes off the screen – and offer a glimpse of our future.

Kevin Hunt is a Senior Lecturer in Design, Culture and Context at Nottingham Trent University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

#science fiction #movies #featured #Blade Runner #Blade Runner 2049

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rpedia · 7 years

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[Ask RPedia] Muse Controlling The Mun?

Anonymous asked: New reader! I have a question. My muse is a villain and sometimes I feel like they're more in-control of the blog than I, the Mun, am. Is that normal?

This brings up some interesting questions, mostly, how much is the muse and how much is the mun? The issue is that with a lot of the things we see about writers and roleplayers, we commonly hear ‘I’m sorry! The muse made me do it!’ So it becomes something normal to expect: We’re going to lose control to what the muse wants. This can be truly awful if someone uses it as an excuse to let their character get away with everything up to and including murder. So let’s look at how much the muse is really taking over and what it means. (Spoiler: They aren’t really. You’re giving in to your knowledge of characterization and gut reactions and blaming it on them, and we’ll see how badly that can go.) As usual, read with the knowledge this is just one guy’s opinion, not an argument, or the end all be all of shit. Just what I’ve gathered over the years.

So as a writer it’s pretty normal to feel like the characters are writing themselves, this is true whether you play a side character, a villain, or a hero. There’s no one group of characters who take over the most, even if villains sound like they should. I mean. Evil overlords. It’s kind of their game right? But the truth is, there’s way more to it than the characters just seeming to have more control.

Writers, that’s you and me babe, are essentially actors. Some very good writers are method actors. Method acting is when you put yourself in a character’s place, and ask yourself how the character would feel. You explore life as the character, expand your mind and sublimate your own emotions into that of the character. You essentially shelf yourself and live out their lives to get a more unhindered tap directly into their emotions and reactions.

This is instinctive, as a writer, and many people are not aware that they do it in quite so many words. They simply think of the Muse as a sort of half-alive being that talks to them, that they’re sharing space in your mind and memories. Sometimes people are afraid to voice or express that because it seems awkward, or out of touch. I mean, imaginary friends? That talk to you? Who has those as adults right? (Give or take some sensitive topics.) Surprise! It’s okay, you’re creating an identity within yourself for the purpose of acting, and will wear that persona to get in better touch with their goals and instincts. This is a normal human process. We do this. It happens.

So with method acting, or rather method writing in our cases, it almost feels like the roles have come alive. We understand the characters intuitively. We’ve harnessed our memories, our emotions, our knowledge of situations and growth as a character and allowed ourselves to live, or relive them as we write them. This can form extremely strong attachments and memories to those characters. I myself sort of wanna slug people who say they aren’t real because they feel so real. They feel so strongly there that they are my friends, and they are important to me as both a coping mechanism and as a way to write. Maybe don’t hit people, but it’s not going to hurt anything to love and appreciate your muses like I do.

In fact, treating them as their own people helps you create a compartmentalization box around them. You can define their ‘edges’ so to speak, to keep them from leaking into your own personality. Since you’ve invested so much time and effort into making sure they feel, breathe, and exist on a level that makes your writing so much better, of course they’ll fucking leak, dude. That’s like, it’s just a part of you you attributed to another name. It’s a persona you wear to act like that person. You remember the shit they do, not vice-versa, and what they do changes your approach in life however minutely. The thing is... they are never actually in control.

I know! It feels that way sometimes right? This unstoppable urge to do something because it feels so right for the character, so perfect as a reaction. The easiest way to put it into words, or to understand it, is to go ‘well the Muse feels in control’ but it’s okay. They aren’t, you just know the best course of action as that character. You understand the Muse’s point of view, and your development of this persona is so advanced that you can react as them without thinking about it. So you don’t think about it, why waste braincells on that, when you can begin creating something we like to call immersion instead? Immersion is important to get a really good depth to a character, and we experience it both as a writer, and as a consumer of media.

When we go to a movie, or read a book, we aren’t sitting there thinking about that movie or book from an outsider’s point of view unless we’re really trying or we aren’t that into books/movies. When you get a good one, you forget you exist. You fall into the suspension of disbelief and immerse yourself in it. You don’t think about your seat, you don’t think about your life. You adapt your empathy to the story being told, to characters onscreen. Your heart thrills with their victories, and falls with their loss. This is also part of the human ability to adapt to other points of view. Turns out, we got empathy up the ASS.

That’s why we anthropomorphize animals, we give them human traits to explain behaviors which are... probably not what we think, but it’s cute. You don’t have to stop, unless it might be harmful to the health of the animal, or causing issues in scientific explanations of these behaviors, but it shows we empathize so much with animals. Whoo boy, we see absolutely any animal and at least one human goes FRIEND! and bolts across the meadow to be besties. We see an animal in pain? We want to help it. We see an animal going hungry? We want to feed it. We see anything happening to something that isn’t even human, we understand that problem from the perspective of the animal, reflect that onto our own emotions, and act accordingly to either make it stronger (yes! You love tummy rubs don’t you!) or lesser (You poor thing! Here’s more water. You must be so thirsty.) in reaction to that empathy. We care. We as a species care. This is why we can look at a sagging chair and thing the poor thing is tired. It’s a fucking chair people, but hey, I guess that’s our superpower.

We do that for other humans to, of course, that’s why the sad eyed children in commercials were supposed to work. They function on the principle of battering your empathy and sympathy until you try to fix it. But the place they fall flat is giving us a tangible story we understand and connect with. This goes to show, thankfully, humans are also extremely limited in where we throw that empathy the strongest. We don’t like keeping other people’s stories in our head 24/7, or we get lost, unless they have a significant connection with us.

We actually have something we like to call Dunbar’s Number, which is a proposed idea that there’s a limited number of close stable relationships we can maintain. We think it’s about 100-250 people we can comfortably hang out with at any given time without feeling out of touch with them. Cool right? We actually fuck with that number on Facebook, studies show we tend to only keep up with the lives of about 150-200 people comfortably and more than that stresses us out. Okay wait, I got a little side tracked with cool info.

The point is, we connect to people because as humans we are empathetic and stories make us relive things. We watch movies and read books and listen to our coworker’s funny story to connect to those emotions. Those emotions are at times connected to fictional characters. Once we start feeling a connection to someone else’s imaginary friends, what stops us from making our own imaginary friends so in depth, so real, that we feel a connection to them? Part of our ability to imitate others, to act, to understand their lives, to put ourselves in their shoes depends on our ability to assume that other points of view are people.

So, Muses are as far as our emotions and brains are concerned, people. Fictional people, yes, and we should always keep that line in mind. Once we stop seeing the line of fiction and reality, shit does downhill really fast. We start attributing things to the Muse rather than taking responsibility as a writer. Because they can force us to have a kneejerk emotional response when we’re currently letting ourselves occupy their space, we assume they can force anything. They are the tiny man at the controls, laughing evilly while they hurt someone else’s character.

I mean, you’re not mean right?

You’d never hurt someone on purpose, like your character is doing.

It must be them.

That’s where shit goes wrong really quickly. Once you compartmentalize and develop a distance between you, and the outcome of what you do, it becomes so much easier to blame ‘someone else’. But it is you, I’m so sorry if you are scared of what you are capable of, but it is you. There is no Muse who can actually take you over completely without it being part of a significantly atypical neural landscape that may need a form of psychological help. It’s easy to attribute the darker parts of yourself to ‘someone else’ in your head, but... you can’t. The thing that separates you here is your willingness to carry them out in reality verses fiction.

It is alright to have bad thoughts. I know, sometimes people can get a little obsessed with purity of the soul. This happens in religions, militaries, utopias and dystopias, this happens in any place with an ideal to strive for, this happens everywhere. People push for purity, because they imagine that if no one ever had a bad thought, that bad things could not exist. It’s not a functional way of living by any means, but let’s put that oft spoken of empathy and ability to see a Point of View to work here. It’s understandable that if you boil it down to the simplest answer, no one having any bad urges at all is the best one if somehow you could accomplish that. But it misses a lot of other factors, and it won’t work.

It doesn’t take into account what people are. We are imaginative. We are complex. We need to understand what happens when we do something. We want to see things that are bad, or wrong, and develop problem solving methods for those situations, or similar situations. So we do think of bad things and it’s alright! That’s fine! The shit that is absolutely horrifying for another person, does not have to be horrifying for us. We are individuals, and so long as we respect the boundaries of others, and give fair warning when expressing ourselves, we have to go through the darkest, most disgusting underbelly of humanity to understand it. We cannot be satisfied with ‘it’s bad, don’t do it’ or our parents arguments of just doing what they say because it’s bad would have had a lot more weight. You cannot forbid another person from thinking of something you don’t like, because they do not have your experiences or limits within them.

We are raised to question and explore limits for ourselves in a very personal fashion. Don’t be ashamed of that, don’t. It’s one of our greatest strengths. The ability to push empathy into fictional territory to explore problem solving methods and what if’s so we can develop further as a whole. We aren’t perfect, of course. When we imagine what we would do if we were scared, it rarely matches up with real life. As much as you yell at horror movies not to drop the weapon, how many of us might drop the weapon without thinking and be cursing ourselves while outrunning Chainsaw McStabby? But the fact that we understand that hanging onto that weapon is a good fucking idea, comes from us exploring things that no one wants to happen to them.

So you’re going to have ‘bad thoughts’. You’re going to think of situations which other people have experienced and been traumatized by. It happens. It exists. It’s okay. The point at which that becomes bad is when you inflict it on others without permission. Fictional scenarios have a level of permission to explore shit we wouldn’t. As a people exploring this medium, we’ve learned about squick (things that simply make us uncomfortable and feel icky that we aren’t ready to endure) and triggers (things that set off a response, in psychology usually relating to panic attacks or PTSD, or other forms of flashbacks). There are certain things that cause these squicks and triggers disproportionately to the rest of existence. We’ve decided to tag those, so people can explore them at their own speed.

This is an amazing healthy social growth thing honestly, as an aside. We have, through fictional works, developed a rather solid list of things that people like to be warned about, and have as a social unit, put those into play to make sure people are safe. There’s a few things that go wrong, sometimes people don’t understand the labels, sometimes people forget them, or don’t use them. Sometimes people have one that is pretty rare and unique, so no one knows to tag and it’s superfluous to the larger group. But as a big picture, we commonly hit the big shit with a nail on the head every time. This shows groupthink built to ID problems, and solve them in a way that allows people to actively continue empathetic troubleshooting and exploration, without damaging a portion of the group. We’re functioning as a single organism protecting the vulnerable already hurt parts of itself, while still continuing an action using the less experienced and worn down parts to push through and understand it more fully. It’s amazing.

So while we mutate the ideas a little this way or that way, we’re just exploring ways to understand it. People say ‘this is wrong’ and we auto-correct over the sizable population doing this. It’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay not to write thing perfectly, or to understand them if we’re exploring them. We may be exploring a related idea through a format we can apply it to, and get an entirely different lesson. That’s okay too. So don’t worry, you’re part of a much larger communal whole, and thinking of bad shit for you villain to do is helpful. So long as you know, people can opt in or opt out. We need forms of crisis to solve and grow, even if other people have faced those crisis and come out with a perspective of their own already. Limiting other people with your perspective damages their growth as a person, and everyone needs to make mistakes in order to learn from them. As long as those mistakes take steps to avoid hurting others, then don’t attack them, encourage them with changes and ways to alter their perception more towards a realistic goal, and remember their goals may be different. They might be taking a round-about or unused path to their destination and you have to respect that you don’t know everything even if you’ve experienced the path they took and came out with a different opinion, emotion, issue, goal, or story.

Now that we have that caveat out of the way, and we understand it’s natural to mentally follow the path leading into the dark sometimes... Your ass better understand it ain’t the god damn Muse. It’s still you, and as a player you have a responsibility. You are in control of them, no matter how much it feels like you aren’t. You are the one who will have to deal with whatever comes of their actions. You have responsibility. The fallout of your actions while in-character fall squarely on your shoulders, with no respite. That’s it. Period. There is not “But--!” There is only you fucking did it. You wrote it, read it, and decided to hit send. Your character is not hitting send. Your character does not stop you from understanding what is written. Your character doesn’t grab you and throw you out of the way to do things. You make the choice to let it into the world.

You can write that thing they want! No matter what it is! But then you have to let yourself take on a sort of ‘Godhood’ in relation to your Muses. You are in full control of their lives, you can rip off their limbs in accidents. You can destroy their lives. Change their names. Curse or bless them. You can rewrite their histories, make them look different, swap their genitalia, and throw nasty wrenches into their games. So as far as your Muses and characters go, you’re their God. You have all the power.

And as usual, ‘Why would God let this happen?’ comes into play. We like to make anyone with the power to stop things, responsible for the things. If you see something bad or wrong or badong going on, you netted the job of editing it. Fix what they did. Create an alternate universe and smash the one that would have caused problems for your real life under your thumb. Make sure your character’s initial instincts about a situation and another person’s Muse, doesn’t hurt the second layer of their reality. That is, in other words, behind the 4th wall another player exists and you have to be aware of that. You get to make sure the other player is safe. Give them warnings and know their limits. As a narrator, explain what’s going on that your Muse doesn’t realize, and make sure they know what is going on is the character. Know yourself that it is a character, and you have control.

Once you stop letting your character be the only voice on the keyboard, your writing will get that much better too. You can start playing against yourself, showing more details by cracking open things they say, and displaying the innards for the other player playing God with their own characters. The more they understand, the better they can respond. This give stories you can enjoy with them more depth and realism. Share. Share everything. Share the power, the story, the limelight, the details of your character’s soul. Bare them to each other, and then do like writers always do:

... Totally fuck with them.

So in short after all that nattering: Yeah it is normal to feel like your Muse is in control. They aren’t, and you need to be aware of the consequences of your actions while wearing their skin, and be ready to alter shitty things or at least point out they’re fictional; but they do feel like it, right? It’s amazing how we can empathize with something we created, and I think it’s beautiful so long as we remember the line. We have to remember the difference between us and them. They can be erased over time or changed, but we have to live with what they’ve done and fix it or cherish it. There is a line, and that line is OOC/IC. The Muse is not you, and you are not your Muse. You just play one on TV. Have fun.

#Muses #Roleplay #Mun #Character #RP #Ask RPedia #RPedia #Wow I kinda got #deep with this #sorry guys!

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daughter-of-water · 5 years

Video

youtube

Why Rey is a Mary Sue and Luke Skywalker is Not

Sorry it took so long to respond to this Anon. I really wanted to take my time to unpack all this. First of all, I will concede that it is possible that Rey might meet Literature Devil’s criteria of a Mary Sue –a character to which the universe and plot bends in TROS as in that movie we apparently have such scenes as Kylo Ren against his established characterization attempting to run Rey over with his TIE fighter for no real reason other than to show how awesome she is when she flips over it. This is indicative of a Mary Sue moment according to his definition of it. However, the incidents he uses to make his argument do not come from TROS. The examples he cites comes mainly from TFA and are grounded in a flawed supposition that the plot is meant to adhere to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey cycle as Luke’s did and his own faulty observations.

He expands upon his definition of Mary Sue by describing it as a situation when a rookie is able to defeat a veteran for no discernible reason then “he’s just awesome” then refuses to acknowledge the premise that Rey defeated Kylo Ren because Kylo was at his lowest point at the time– he was emotional compromised after killing his father and running out of steam after suffering two injuries, one of which was pretty major. In Literature Devil’s mind this should be impossible for Rey to accomplish and proof of her Mary Sue universe bending powers™ . He doesn’t take into account that stories reflect life rather than adhere to a strict skill stat score. A veteran can lose to someone less experienced if they underestimate their opponent or something emerges that interferes with their ability to perform.

But the real reason that Rey shouldn’t be allowed to defeat Kylo Ren so early in the game in Literature Devil’s mind is because it goes against the Hero’s Journey cycle. The sole basis he has for the supposition that the sequel trilogy will following this formula in it’s storytelling is the similarities that can be found between ‘The Force Awakens’ and a ‘A New Hope’. He doesn’t once consider that this is intentionally put there to set up what will be a subversion of the Hero’s Journey in many ways and instead, anticipates a repeat of Luke’s story only this time Luke’s a girl. If he had actually been paying attention to Reylo meta rather than just condemning it as “whataboutism” or obfuscation, he’d learn that Rey’s journey isn’t following the Hero’s Journey cycle in the first place and is actually following the Heroine Journey cycle, a formula designed by a student of Campbell’s. In the Heroine’s Journey cycle the heroine does achieve early material success than the hero because it’s illusionary. Her journey is psychologically driven and about reconciling two ways of looking at the world rather than the surmounting of challenges posed by a rival. It’s not about the student becoming the master. It’s about figuring out what success means and what someone really wants in life. If one has watched Avatar the Last Airbender as Literature Devil has, this cycle should already be familiar to them. The heroine’s journey formula is used to formulate Zuko’s character arc.

Literature Devil begins his argument by first going over the skills that both Luke and Rey are supposed to have garnered as part of their upbringing and profession and while he exposes what is the fatal flaw of this trilogy, he also exposes the quality of his own observational skills. The greatest flaw of this trilogy is the fact that Disney withheld crucial information that was key to understanding the characters and their backstories from being developed onscreen and left it for visual dictionaries, comics, and novelizations to tell. Only the most diehard of fans read these which leads to many erroneous assumptions such as the one Literature Devil makes that Rey survived on Jakku entirely on her own and had zero mentors. In actuality, the novelizations inform us that she was sold to Unkar Plutt as a child and shadowed other scavengers employed by him to learn the trade and how to defend herself. She was driven to learn how to read the schematics of ships because Unkar doles out more portions for parts that were still working as opposed to merely on the basis of the value of the material they were made from. The reason she knows about the compressor that Unkar Plutt put on the Millennium Falcon is because she worked as a mechanic for him. Unfortunately the Force Awakens doesn’t give us enough dialogue between them to establish that relationship on screen. His hand holding onto her arm and admonishing her to be quiet in her flashback is the only indication he owns her as a slave.

It isn’t just Rey that suffers from this problem but really all the new characters in the trilogy but Literature Devil shows the quality of his observation skills and/or biases when he criticizes the basic setup of her character–the emphasis on how alone she is and how much she wants to be reunited with her parents. For some reason, he really dislikes this element of her backstory and feels the narrative needs to tell him what Rey’s parents did to deserve her devotion as if wanting someone to rescue you from the hell that is Jakku and give you the home and a sense of belonging isn’t enough. Because of this, he completely misses key moments that would tell him why Rey is moved to join the Resistance and help BB-8. He fails to note that yes, while she doesn’t interact with the wilted flower or the Resistance Doll seen in her AT-AT, she does put on a Rebel Alliance helmet as she eats her dinner. The combination of the helmet and the doll suggests a childlike adoration for the Rebels and the heroes of the last war and we do see this play out with how excited she is to hear the stories of the Jedi being real. Literature Devil also asserts the narrative suffers from a lack of any moment that would endear BB-8 to Rey and cause her to shift from reluctant helper to stalwart attack dog when in fact there was such a moment when they arrive at Niima Outpost. BB-8 reveals to Rey that he is waiting for someone to return to him. BB-8 is just like her and by helping to reunite him with his family, she is helping someone achieve something she cannot. She attacks Finn under the belief that Finn stole Poe’s jacket and may have done something to him that led to BB-8′s abandonment. Her actions are projection of her own issues.

Rey’s motivation isn’t just that she is kind as Literature Devil supposes. The strongest connections she makes are with characters who can act as parental substitutes such as Han and Leia or characters who have been abandoned and left behind like her such as BB-8 and Ben Solo. It plays an integral part of the story and Literature Devil’s proposed changes to her story of having her wait for a Jedi master as much as it would assuage the criticism of her abilities in the Force would at the same time undermine the entire conceit of her character and what is really the only consistently decent thing in this trilogy-her relationship with Kylo Ren. Literature Devil assumes Kylo Ren’s role in the story is the same as Vader’s to Luke–a rival that Rey must hone her combat skills against but he complete ignores how different Kylo Ren’s narrative is from Vader’s. Kylo Ren from the onset is presented to us not as a fearsome machine man but as the lost prodigal son hiding behind a mask whose salvation is made an objective of the story in a major way. The challenge Kylo presents for Rey isn’t physical so much as emotional and yes, romantic even. Their relationship is more akin to Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy than it is Luke’s and Vader’s. Rey’s siphoning of Kylo’s abilities or his defeat at her hands does not come as a result of her just being so awesome. They serve to highlight the conflicted nature of Kylo’s character and his longing for the same sense of belonging and end to isolation that Rey seeks.

I could go on more about the flaws in Literature Devil’s argument but this is already long enough. In short, I do not think Rey is a Mary Sue as far as TFA and TLJ are concerned. The fact that her journey doesn’t conform to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and that you’re not getting your combat training montage with a wizened mentor is because her journey isn’t following that formula in the first place. Nevertheless, I do agree with Literature Devil in the sense that I do think Rey is a victim of bad writing just like all the new characters are. The things included in the outside materials should have been in the damn movies.

#Rey #Star Wars #The Sequel Trilogy #Reylo #Kylo Ren #Ben Solo #Storytelling #Literary Criticism #Mary Sues #Daughter of Water answers #Anons #submission

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wahoopli · 7 years

Note

how does 13rw spread a dangerous message?

Discussion of suicide and 13 Reasons Why tw! Not gonna be graphic or anything, but I will be talking about suicide a lot.

also this is LONG I have Opinions (and honestly I think a lot of this is really important so)

Okay anon, I’ve been trying to phrase this all day, so here goes. I have a LOT of issues with it, sooo we’ll see what this looks like. And like, I say this as a person who has attempted suicide, so please consider that I have personal knowledge of this kind of thing. I don’t speak for all suicidal people, of course, but my experiences and feelings are relevant to the topic.

1. I totally disagree with the premise that the people Hannah to whom sent the tapes were responsible for her suicide. Certainly people’s actions can contribute to a person’s pain. But no one is responsible for someone else’s suicide. As someone who experiences suicidal thoughts regularly, I would never, ever want anyone I know to feel responsible for my death.

Part of where I’m coming from on this is a friendship of mine that was very unhealthy for about a year. This was tied up in my severe depression. My friend felt responsible for my life. It was hell for her. If I had died, the guilt would have destroyed her. And we were both wildly imperfect. I was manipulative. I was irresponsible. She was too. She said things that triggered my suicidal thoughts. But she wasn’t responsible for them. If she hadn’t said things like that, I could very well have been suicidal anyway because I saw a story I wrote as a kid lying on the floor. Because I had a different breakfast than I wanted. Heck, because the sky was blue.

I don’t mean to devalue suicide, but when you are intensely suicidal day in, day out, it becomes your natural response to *any negative emotion/event*. It’s that whole creating neuropathways in your brain thing, which was compounded by the fact that I was 17 and my brain still developing (sigh).

The point is that while certain things may trigger suicidal thoughts and contribute to a person’s pain, they do not cause a suicide or force a person into a situation where they have no other choice but to commit suicide. Your actions do not take that plunge for me. Whether the suicidal person is totally responsible for their actions is up for debate (I have mixed feelings on that one), but you do not cause a certain outcome.

It’s important to understand that suicidal thoughts occur in the context of mental illness. If your brain was well, you would not react to these events by wanting to die. Although there are certainly traumatic events to which suicidal ideation is a natural response, the key point is that they *traumatize* you and mess with your brain.

I also disagree that other people’s actions can cause suicide because there is no clear point when a specific action is bad enough that it will push someone over the edge. Something you say to person A, who has suicidal ideation, might not trigger them at all, but saying that same thing to person B, who also has suicidal ideation, might be very triggering. Or maybe one day you say something to person A and it hurts them but the saying it the next day wouldn’t hurt them at all. Where is the line? Sometimes honesty hurts. Saying that makes me sound like a jerk, but you should be able to tell someone that they are hurting you without being afraid that you will kill them. Obviously there are some things you should not say or do to someone, but there are others that are just not clearly black or white. I’m concerned by the idea that certain actions can cause suicide because there is no way to know what actions those are. Until we can read minds, the argument fails.

To be clear, I find it absolutely horrific to blame individual people for a person’s death. Placing the responsibility on them is in my opinion an act of violence.

2. I find it deeply concerning that the show is about suicide, but they never mention depression or mental illness once. I’m not the first to say this, but how can you make a tv show about suicide and not talk about mental illness at all? And to be honest, avoiding discussing mental illness outright only contributes to the stigma surrounding it and suicide.

3. It is morally disgusting and artistically terrible to show the suicide onscreen. First off, this is lazy writing. What was the point? Shock value? They couldn’t communicate the stakes with the rest of the show? To show how horrific suicide can be? They had to actually show it onscreen to communicate that? If you have to actually show it graphically onscreen to communicate that suicide is bad, you’ve got a pretty terrible show.

And showing it onscreen does not communicate that suicide is bad. Honestly, many suicidal people frequently and graphically fantasize about their own deaths. They don’t see this and think, “Oh wow, that’s absolutely horrific and I will never want to die again.” Some suicidal people may see it and think this way! But others will see it and think, “Oh, this is what it looks like. I could do this to myself.” Showing it onscreen doesn’t condemn suicide, it asks the viewer to be fascinated by it. It says, “Here, look at how horrifying this girl’s death was.” It turns her death into a spectacle. That’s disgusting. (Also, to reduce her life to her death and the way in which she died is pretty terrible??)

To be clear, I don’t think potentially triggering media shouldn’t exist. There is graphic content that can be very important. But in this case, I think it was beyond distasteful and morally reprehensible, even with trigger warnings.

And as my friend @theletterem said, “Who sits there and thinks, ‘It would be an awesome idea to show potentially suicidal teens how to kill themselves,’?”

4. This leads me into my next issue with it. 13 Reasons Why is a warning to friends and acquaintances of suicidal people. Everyone talks about how the message of the show is that our words and actions matter. Its audience is the people around potentially suicidal folks, but it completely disregards that suicidal people will watch it. I think there is a place for media focused on friends and relatives of suicidal people! But you have to acknowledge and understand that suicidal people will consume it. You have to think carefully about the messages it sends to us. I dislike 13 Reasons Why because it ignores the impact it may have on suicidal viewers.

I think it’s most concisely said like this (although of course I couldn’t be concise; I had to talk as much as possible): I find it appalling and shameful to create media that relies on suicidal people’s experiences and then to ignore its potential effects on those very people.

4a. This is a personal pet peeve, but I am so sick of centering friends and relatives in suicidal people’s stories. We should be showing hope and pain, giving meaning to the experiences suicidal people have, instead of providing watered-down messages for the people around them. (I mean seriously, “be nice”? you needed the threat of responsibility for someone’s death to tell you that?)

Here’s where this becomes less about 13 Reasons Why and more about what I’d like to see in media/change in society.

I’m really sick of stories that come at it sideways via the people they know instead of reaching out to the suicidal person and saying, “Hey, you matter.” By focusing on the people around them, you devalue suicidal people’s lives. When every depiction of people like me in media focuses on the pain I may cause in other people, you are saying my life doesn’t matter. Really: why are my experiences about how much they’ll make other people hurt? Why not talk about the value in my life? It implies I don’t have any.

Let me repeat myself just to be perfectly clear. When you turn the value of someone’s life into the pain they could potentially cause someone else, you are saying they don’t actually matter. You are saying you don’t believe their life has worth – you believe the wellbeing of the people around them does. Suicidal people deserve better. We do matter. We are valuable. I want to see that reflected in discussions of suicide. I want to see that reflected in media discussing suicide. I want to see media that focuses on the suicidal person and says their life is valuable. Their experiences are meaningful.

Because they are.

#13rw tw #anti 13rw #anti 13 reasons why #anon #emily rambles #suicide tw #13rw #13 reasons why #if there's one thing that has come out of this mess it's that i was able to #talk about this with my friend #and come to a lot of coherent thoughts #i do really appreciate the conclusions i've come to #and i think i phrased a lot of them pretty well #(also i feel so valuable now?????)

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frazzledsoul · 7 years

Text

Disclaimer: I am less than proud of this post. I was going to keep it in my drafts, but I figured I’ll just put most of it under a cut instead. It’s pretty ugly and angry and irrational and I can’t back up most of the claims I make, but it is what it is. As I said the other day on here, no one thinks less of Amy Sherman Palladino than me. I don’t like her or trust her and while I might begrudgingly respect her for the show she created in the first place, I will not touch anything new she does in the future ever again. I think she’s earned that in spades: most of what I talk about here can be applied not just to love triangle shenanigans that happened a decade ago but to Rory’s plot in general in the revival, which was in its way a much bigger betrayal of everything the show stood for. It’s definitely a pattern and it’s not a positive one.

I will also say that one of the major reasons that the events at the end of season six hit me so hard is because I lived a much uglier, messier, more devastating version of these events in my family twice over the past 15 years. I’m obfuscating the details to protect the guilty, but in real life the damage is so much worse than what we saw played out on screen. There are some things that will never, ever be okay with me, that there are just no excuses for, no matter what. I don’t think I ever really processed that part of it, nor did I ever really process what it felt like to be dealt the final blow in what seemed to be a long, contentious battle between the creator of this show and the fans who kept hoping that Amy wouldn’t do the one thing we always feared she would resort to in order to achieve her own ends. So much of the time it felt like we (and Luke, but he’s fictional, so he’ll get over it) were just bugs waiting to be squashed.

So maybe this is because I am in a melancholy mood lately, but I just had some things to get off my chest about why I’m still so angry about the end of season 6 eleven long years after the fact. I still take it personally, and I still feel betrayed by that whole wretched plot development, and I still will never, ever forgive ASP for what she did. The revival may have worked out to my satisfaction, but I still don’t want the woman to write new episodes of the series because I don’t trust her. There’s no reason to believe she wouldn’t take everything positive she last left us with and obliterate it just because she could. She’s got a long track record of doing exactly that.

The bottom line is that we talk about this damn showrunner too much. It’s not a good reflection on her work. If what she was writing was good enough to speak for itself, we wouldn’t spend so much time trying to justify her choices and going WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF over and over again. Honestly, it shouldn’t be this hard. This is coming from someone who does still make a lot of excuses for her, from Luke and Lorelai not having kids to their decision to delay marriage to Rory’s surprise pregnancy and dour, unimaginative fate. The idea that everything she does is inviolable because she’s the one controlling the puppet strings and nothing else matters is a really unhealthy mentality.

Sometimes it’s okay to just flat-out say that a lot of the stuff she forced on us was simply wrong.

Of course, part of this is my fault because I come at it from the other side, too. It’s not in the best interest of an invested fan to pay too much attention to what the writing team says. They don’t see it like we do. It’s mostly pieces to move around on a chessboard to them and they’ll never understand why we care so much. I think the fan culture is much more balanced these days, or maybe I just say that because the only other shows I keep up with are genre shows where being a fan is an experience that’s so much bigger than what happens in those 42 minutes we see onscreen. It’s not to say that problems don’t exist or that there isn’t fan discontent, but it’s not like it was ten years ago. We’re all part of the whole for so much of the experience.

Showrunners like ASP (and I would count the notoriously sadistic Shonda Rhimes in here, too) don’t play that game, of course. I can definitively say that if I had never read any of her interviews, this would have been a way more pleasant viewing experience for me. What if I hadn’t known that ASP kept come up with excuses to keep Luke and Lorelai apart because she didn’t think she could get it right? What if I didn’t know that she only hooked them up because the show got into trouble ratings-wise and she knew David Sutcliffe was available for Christopher to “cause problems” if she got bored? What if I didn’t read that interview where she essentially said that anyone who cared about Luke would have to accept him being relegated to the sidelines because it was time for Christopher to show how good he was at a relationship?

What if this entire fandom experience didn’t feel like a huge battle to keep ASP from bringing it all crashing down in the most disastrous way possible so that she could pursue the relationship outcome that she really wanted? What if it didn’t feel like a constant fight not to have one of my favorite characters be replaced? What if I didn’t feel that it was only a matter of time before Lorelai would betray Luke in the worst way possible, and do the one thing that he and the fans always feared the most, just so that ASP could have her favorite swoop in on his white horse to rescue her from the love interest who would always only be humble and ordinary?

Maybe it’s never a good idea to know what’s going on behind the curtain. Knowing all of this definitely made what was already a deeply upsetting plot twist that much worse. It’s impossible to have faith that any of this is ever going to be fixed when it seems the person in control is always fighting against you. There was no reason to think that it was going to get better, because she didn’t seem to want the same things that we did. We were just standing in the way of the happy ending that she preferred.

I didn’t have many expectations for what I wanted from this show. All I wanted (during the OS and the revival) was for Lorelai not to run off with Christopher and break Luke’s heart after they had been together. When Amy wrote that ending that so many of us feared would eventually come, it felt like a spit in the face, a final triumph on her part for this adversarial process. It was anyone who care about Luke and Lorelai as a couple or even Luke by himself against her and her Christopher fantasy, and she won. The worst part was that I had quit watching months earlier because I knew it would always come back to this. I tuned into the last half of Partings hoping that she wouldn’t do what I always dreaded, that she wouldn’t take it that far. But I had been right all along.

Of course, maybe Christopher was just a diversion in the first place. It doesn’t change the fact that Amy twisted Luke into something he wasn’t in order to build up his rival simply because she was bored. None of this had to happen, but she wanted more time with her favorite and the rest of us had to suffer the consequences. I really, really want to say that what she planned was temporary and that the happy ending we got was in the cards all along, but in my heart of hearts I’m never be able to talk myself into completely believing that. She still can’t bring herself to talk of the happy ending she eventually gave us as anything other than what the fans forced on her.

Why shouldn’t I believe that she would choose the worst possible outcome if left to her own devices? She already did it once before.

You’ll notice I haven’t talked a lot about the actual plot twist in question. There’s nothing I can say about it that hasn’t been said before. The truth is that we can argue about whose fault it was until the cows come home, but it was a plot machination whipped up so that ASP could write the Christopher/Lorelai romance that she always seemed to really want. The Lorelai I knew and loved for six seasons (because despite some immature passive-aggressive behavior earlier in the season, she still remains very sympathetic to me right up until the end here) would not go as far she did. No matter how upset she was, no matter how betrayed she felt by Luke telling her no, she would not hurt him the way she did. She wouldn’t blatantly use Christopher like that. She wouldn’t put Rory in the position of having to sift through the ramifications of her fucked-up latethirtysomething love triangle and put her on shaky terms with both of her father figures.

The Lorelai Gilmore I knew wouldn’t have hurt the people she most cared about that way. She wasn’t that type of person. I’m intimately familiar with that type of person, and Lorelai was better than that. But if that’s what needed to happen for ASP to get what she wanted, that’s what was going to happen.

I know it was fixed eventually. Fate intervened before ASP could write that Christopher plot she wanted so badly, and we got not one but two happy endings for Luke and Lorelai. Believe me, I’m grateful for all of that. But it doesn’t change what happened, and it doesn’t make it any less of a betrayal as far as I am concerned. I really wish I had been less Internet savvy back when I was watching the show, that I didn’t view everything in terms of this fight I felt ASP was having with the fans through the media. In the end, I don’t know if it would have made any of it make any more sense to me, though.

I’m glad we got the ending we did, but the fact that we had to suffer through so much to get it was completely unnecessary. I no longer let myself get emotionally attached to ships or characters: I still fangirl, but in a more general way. It’s not worth it to fight another war with someone who’s at such cross purposes with what makes her enterprise work, or who seems to delight in making her fans as miserable as possible. I haven’t encountered a situation like this with anything else I’ve gotten interested in, but there are always things out there that end up slamming the door in your face at the last moment. The finale of HIMYM is probably what comes closest.

If we have to focus this much attention on the writer’s motivations in order to justify what she put forth, something clearly isn’t working right. If it can’t stand on its own, maybe the creator needs to take a step back and focus a little less on forcing her own agenda on something that isn’t right.

Or to put it much more simply, the shippers aren’t always wrong.

#lonnnnnng rambling thoughts #i had 11 + years of pent up angst and I needed to put it somewhere #lesson learned: dont read showrunners interviews #there's a lot of personal stuff in here for me as well #gilmore girls #gilmore girls ayitl

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1y1e · 7 years

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‘the ice-cream van’ meme - a critical analysis

This essay is my attempt to identify and explore the various factors behind what makes the above 26 second YouTube video such a viral sensation - at time of writing it has over 17 million views in the three and a half years since it was uploaded. We will examine the meta aspects that make this video so attractive to click in the first place, and then dive into the grounded world we are first presented with when the video starts. The timing and escalation of concerns feels expertly crafted to maximise drama, and the end itself is surprising and a brilliant subversion of our expectations. As we will see, this video has an astonishing amount of depth, most of which appears to be entirely accidental, that it is more than worth examining with a critical eye.

The Front Cover

From the outside, the video does almost everything correctly to attract views. We will be considering the properties of the video a modern YouTube user would see if they were to stumble across it in a sidebar or trending page: the thumbnail (a frame from the main build up shot, showing the older boy with toast in mouth looking to the side), the video duration (26 seconds), the video title (”the ice-cream van”), the channel name (Selina Omeara), and the view count (at time of writing: over 17 million).

The thumbnail and title work together to entice viewers in, since cute kids and ice cream are both things that typically make people feel good, and the lack of capitalisation in the title contributes towards the ‘down to Earth’ and approachable nature of the video. The channel name further reinforces this effect - this isn’t from some mega-popular meme-harvesting brand name, but from a literal mum uploading the first video to her channel. The only thing out of place would be the view count, a discrepancy that would indicate that something here is worthy of our attention.

The video duration of 26 seconds is also particularly worth highlighting, since it is ideal for virality - not long enough to put off the attention span the modern meme-hunter, but not too short that it feels trivial or frivolous. There is a long history of ~30 second video memes online, and entire subreddits have sprung up around the concept.

World Building

When the video first loads, the opening scene contains out first subversion of expectations: where is the ice-cream van? This is the mystery that persists for the first 15 seconds of the video, before our attention is turned elsewhere - more on that later. We must first explore the world we are presented with in that opening scene. The framing here shows us everything we need to know about these characters and situation: a family getting some food at the end of a busy day. The boys are in a jacket and hoodie, with the younger boy wearing outside shoes, suggesting they’ve recently returned home. It appears to be a typical early/mid evening judging by the lack of natural light from outside. The food they are having, beans on toast with milk, is a quick and easy meal for a parent to make, and with the empty bowls around the kitchen (possibly the left overs from an earlier breakfast?), all signs point to this being the first peaceful moment after a full day out with the boys. We should also acknowledge the presence of the mother herself, who is easy to miss - during the first 15 seconds we can hear her satisfied slurps of a hot drink as she idly films the boys.

Video Walkthrough: The Set Up

These first 15 seconds are so important for getting the viewer comfortable before the forthcoming drama. An expert balance is struck here - it is required to be slow, with not much happening so as to set up expectations and make the viewer think they know how the video is going to play out, but if there is NOT ENOUGH activity the viewer would be instantly bored. The most important thing that holds engagement is the shift of focus around the scene. The older boy is naturally the first thing we look at, since he is larger in the frame and is taking his first bite as the video starts. Each bite of the toast is a relatively dangerous action, since it is larger than his hands and he is delicately lifting it each time as if it were a serving platter. The apparent instability of this maneuver is reinforced by a single bean on the table in front of him, the fallout from a previous attempt. As viewers we might be expecting a “fail” meme, so we anticipate the inevitable messy face and/or clothing. Despite all the odds though, the older boy prevails, and looks satisfied. The first focus shift now occurs as the boy looks at his food, and we see how loaded up the toast is on the far side, raising the stakes for subsequent bites. Following the boy’s gaze as he looks away from his toast and back towards us, he goes for the next bite - surely this is where the anticipated failure occurs? But no, successful chomping happens again, and the boy again looks satisfied.

Almost as if in response to the challenge, his younger brother now makes an attempted bite - for some viewers, this might be the first time they even notice the boy in the background. Despite his firmer grip, as a younger man we can expect the task to be harder than his brother’s, so we start to expect that THIS is the bite that gets messy. A clear pattern has been established, which would also match the comedic “rule of three” pattern. Of course, nothing goes wrong and from an analytical point of view, we can consider the opening sequence of events to be competed.

The “action” moving from character to character keeps us engaged as viewers, but there is not just a psychological shift of focus, but also a LITERAL one. The camera itself pans around slightly, keeping the frame dynamic but fundamentally unchanged in content. This combined with the auto-focus shifting in and out keeps the scene visually interesting. Furthermore, attentive viewers might be distracted by the specs of black on the left of the screen, a sign of dirt or dust on the lens, which also draws attention to the shaky camera movements. This has the additional purpose of contributing to the world-building by demonstrating that this is a candid, impulsively constructed shot by an amateur.

Video Walkthrough: The Turn

As a comfortable audience, we finally approach the payoff. The camera unfocusses one last time, before landing on the younger brother’s coy smirk as he takes a swaggering step forward, missteps, and collapses off to the side. On first viewing it is surprising since it was not immediately obvious that the younger boy was on an inch-high box - typical viewer reaction matches the mother’s “Oh gosh” chuckle. The act is silly, but no need for concern - the boy rolled relatively slowly and safely down, and indeed it is later revealed that he even held onto his toast throughout the ordeal. Our attention as a viewer is drawn to the older boy, the only character remaining on screen, because he now obscures his brother - but he seems content in continuing to eat his own toast in his own little world.

This world is interrupted by an outside force, as the promised ice-cream van jingle plays loudly and unambiguously! This snaps the older boy out of it, his eyes grow wide and he places his hand on the table to steady his descent. In his raspy, dramatic, but somehow still cute voice, he confirms his intentions: “THE ICE-CREAM -” as he raises his toast high and promptly plunging out of frame. The camera stays still as if in shock as the mother processes what has happened, and again her stifled laughter reflects our own. The older brother took up a decent third of the shot a few seconds ago, but he has fallen so far and so fast that his absence now in the same shot adds to the absurdity.

Video Walkthrough: The Conclusion

The damage is done and the narrative now considers the consequences. As smooth as our attention was shifted from younger to older, we now shift back again as the younger brother is revealed (in stark contrast) to have regains his footing. But this time his smug grin has turned to concern as he looks down and out of shot, and both the camera and the mother turns once again to the older brother for the final time. Her stifled laughter turns into an emphatic “Oh my GOOOOOD…” (in essence a more intense version of her reaction to the initial, softer fall) as the drama of the situation is made apparent by the teary expression of our injured protagonist.

Escalation

Now that we’re familiar with the finer points of viewers’ attention as the video progresses, we can clearly see an escalation of drama on multiple levels. The length of each of the three stage increases the intensity as we move forwards, since each is approximately half the time of the previous stage: 15 seconds of setup into 7 seconds of action into 4 of aftermath. The onscreen action and visual interest transitions from static shot of static characters in the intro, to a static shot of active characters, to finally both an active shot AND active characters as the camera itself moves in the conclusion. Each stage adds visual interest by adding something new. The same is true of the audio - what starts as quiet, contemplative eating and drinking, moves into the bangs of children falling to the floor and the titular ice-cream van jingle is introduced, into the final wails of the older boy drowning out all previous sounds. There is also the more symbolic escalation of the young and simple to older and more complex when comparing each brother’s respective eating and falling actions.

Subversion of Expectations

It should also be highlighted how expertly this video subverts our expectations though misdirection. We go in expecting something about kids being cute with ice cream, but we get the kids eating a completely different food. The video takes ample time to establish this new setting, before subverting again with a completely unrelated event in the boys falling, the twist that it’s the promise of ice cream that causes the real drama being a great callback and a great break in tension. We don’t know which boy (if any!) is going to be the focus of the video until the final third, and just when we think it’s been confirmed we get the actual and intensified “fail”.

Mother’s story

We’d be wrong to skip the wider story of the mother, who is arguably the most important character because she represents the viewer in this situation as the only adult, the camera operator, and as the emotional touchstone to the events as the unfold. This video isn’t the start or end of a story, but the main struggle in a larger story of that day for the family overall. We know from the implied worldbuilding that they’ve had a busy day, and clearly the aftermath of this video will need some parental care to console the older boy - luckily ice cream is a great healer. The genius of this video is it’s brevity (which this essay has helpfully ruined by existing). We can deduce a larger, multiple-hour story of what came before and after the events of the video, but all we actually need is this single 26 second clip as the central narrative nugget that is ripe for extrapolation.

Conclusion

Even on a superficial layer, the combined power of fail memes and cute kid memes is potent enough that “the ice-cream van” was likely to be a hit regardless of actual details of the content. What I hope I have demonstrated today is that the construction of this video goes far and above the standard expected for such a short and transient experience for the viewer. The fact that this was all put together in an accidental way, when so much of it appears to have all the hallmarks of a carefully planned and edited sequence is astounding to me, and really makes me want to look out for the subtleties in editing and design of other viral gems like this.

Thanks for reading! As we all know, Internet is Serious Business ;) If you have a response or comment, feel free to HMU on them Twitters yo.

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