#but the rest are also just really good. the characters feel like their authentic selves

[pencil-peach]

Thinking about Persona 4 Arena Ultimax

Specifically the Persona 3 side of it.

I think it's interesting (and kinda funny) how a lot of the P3 content in this game is built upon the many CD Dramas that released in Japan following Persona 3/FES' releases, specifically the New Moon/Full Moon and Daylight/Moonlight Duologies.

As what's most likely the largest example, Labrys, one of the two major characters introduced in the game, was actually named in the Moonlight CD, which was released back in 2007 (Arena was released in 2012, for reference)

"The 7th Generation, Aigis, was created from all the data we'd obtained from all prior designs up to the 5th Generation, Labrys." (Moonlight)

Aigis' and Labrys' motivation of finding their mother is also building upon the story of Moonlight, where Aigis is able to speak with the girl whose personality was one of the bases used for the Anti-Shadow Weapon development project, and who refers to herself as her mother (but looks more like her younger sister).

"That's right... in human terms, I guess I'm kinda like your mother or something? A-ah, but based on our outward appearances, I guess I look more like your younger sister?" (Moonlight)

(For context, she is forced to forget this meeting at the end of the CD, but resolves to meet with the girl in real life. She isn't named, but we're told she has black hair.)

I think Mitsuru is the most interesting, as her appearance in the game is almost wholly influenced by the story of the New Moon/Full Moon Drama CDs, which are a side story covering her and the broader Kirijo Group's situation immediately following Takeharu's death, released in 2009.

Mitsuru's story opens up with her going public about the bloody past of the Kirijo Group and the existence of the Dark Hour and Shadows. This is following up on her resolution near the end of Full Moon, where she states plainly that this is the path she's going to take.

Ichiro Takadera: "Well then, do you intend to make a public announcement regardless of what follows? About the Shadows and so on?"

Mitsuru: "That is my path in life. I cannot stray from it." (Full Moon)

Kikuno Saikawa, Mitsuru's right hand maid and one of the shadow operatives, also made her debut in New/Full Moon. The two of them met when they were children, and Kikuno vowed to protect Mitsuru after she'd saved her from her despair as a child.

Kikuno: "Six years ago, when I learned my stay at the hospital wasn't because of illness but because I was sold over by my parents, you were the one who saved me from my despair. On that day, I swore I'd devote my life to following this person." (Full Moon)

Ultimax was the first time she was given a design, but she would later appear in the Persona 3 Movie: Winter of Rebirth. Her characterization in Ultimax is pretty faithful to her depiction in the CD.

(A fun fact is that Kikuno was also mentioned in the "Seaside Vacation Before Death's Scythe" Drama CD, which was released in 2013 as a promotion for the then upcoming first Persona 3 Movie, Spring of Birth.)

One of the Kirijo artifacts mentioned in Mitsuru's prologue is a ring that gives its wearer immunity to the effects of the Dark Hour. This too is an object introduced in New/Full Moon.

"Also, there is no need to worry, as everyone who are not in possession of special powers, including me, will wear this ring. While it's on you are able to experience the Dark Hour and even when you take it off your memories of it will remain." (New Moon)

Something that doesn't come up in Ultimax is that if you smash the jewel in the center of the ring, you'll lose all your memories of the Dark Hour. It's an interesting little thing! I mean it's. Useless now cause the Dark Hour is gone but it's pretty cool...

Mitsuru's main internal conflict is her inability to ask others for help for fear of burdening or endangering them. This is something that comes up in Persona 3, but in the Drama CDs this aspect of her character is very deeply explored. It's her main emotional arc and the source of her conflict with Yukari in both the New/Full Moon CDs and Persona 3 Character Drama Vol. 4, which focuses on their relationship.

Yukari: Is your faith in us that weak?

Mitsuru: To be frank, I can't bear it anymore. I don't want others to die for my sake!

Y: And you're gonna sacrifice yourself because of that? Why do you take on so much by yourself? Is that really okay with you? Don't you want to see your friends and family again?! And to survive?! Why can't you just be honest?!

M: Of course I want to! But...that is...what should I say? It's always like that...whenever I get soft or burden others... They might end up dying again. [...] Aragaki, and my Father... What am I supposed to tell you after all that happened? Even if I'm afraid and wish to be saved, what do I say?! What should I say?! (Full Moon)

Yukari even brings up that they've had this talk before. It could be referring to their heart to heart in Kyoto, but I think it could also be read as their conflicts in the CDs too.

When Ken asks Kikuno where she learned to fly a helicopter, she states that she learned it after being involved in an assault operation on a high school dormitory, an incident which Ken says he remembers. (Say it with me now!) This is most likely referencing the climax in Full Moon, where the Kirijo Group led by Takadera attempt to raid Iwatodai Dorm and forcibly apprehend SEES, so as to avoid the possibility of Ikutsuki's plot and the Group's sins from becoming public.

There's definitely more stuff, but I just wanted to point out the things I noticed/particularly liked with Mitsuru's story.

I think Junpei suffers the most from having a lot of his characterization be taken from the CDs. A lot of people were (and still are) confused about P4AU Junpei's seemingly sudden hard pivot to Baseball, as in Persona 3 proper, it's not a very large aspect of his character.

But in the CDs, Junpei being Into Baseball is MUCH more prominent. As in he refers to everyday situations in baseball terms sometimes.

In Persona 3 Character Drama Vol 2., (released in 2008 and centered around Junpei and Chidori) Junpei dreams about taking Chidori out on a date, and eventually settles on asking her to go to a baseball game with him. (She accepts, if you were curious).

He talks with Chidori about baseball so much that she got into it herself and started watching baseball in the hospital.

At the end of Moonlight, the SEES gang talk about what they want to do after they defeat Nyx, and Junpei says he wants to go to a baseball game. They even kind of tacitly explain why he didn't talk about it all that much ingame by saying he'd fallen out of interest in it but that he "feels like it's returned in full force!"

The thing about P4AU's heavy references to the CDs though, especially in Junpei's case, is that they were never officially translated or released outside of Japan. To this day the only way for non-Japanese speaking audiences to experience the CDs is to listen to them with (usually slightly incomplete) fansubs online.

While I kind of appreciate the novelty of that, it's definitely caused some confusion when it comes to characterization. In P3 Reload, for instance, Junpei makes a lot more references to baseball in his dialogue. And for a lot of people, it feels like the purpose of that is to retroactively make Junpei's appearance in P4AU make more sense.

And while that's not incorrect, it misses the fact that Junpei was already established to like baseball in supplementary material before Arena came out. It's more like making his character consistent with the same material that P4AU used when writing Junpei.

But it's not like you can even blame people for thinking that because a lot of people are normal and don't listen to 16 year old fan translated Drama CDs uploaded to youtube. It's just interesting to me I suppose. I wonder how much characterization we miss due to lack of access to supplementary material.

Anyway you should listen to the CDs though they're really good. New Moon/Full Moon especially.

Moonlight is also very good, it's a pseudo-prelude to The Answer, and the character writing is top notch.

But that's all I had to say, really. Just thought it'd be fun to talk about.

Translation Credits: imaginary_numbers (Moonlight) pipeds (New Moon) pipeds (Full Moon)

[therealvinelle]

I know this is like taking a bat to the beehive but... I really wanna hear your opinions on the whole... Imprinting thing

(Note before we go any further: this meta is written purely about the shapeshifting aspect of the Quileute characters, I don’t at all get into the racism in Twilight or any kind of social commentary. This is a purely watsonian meta. Others in this fandom have already addressed the racial dynamics at play, far more eloquently and knowledgeably than me. If I say something in here that’s in any way offensive, that’s not my intention and I’m open to criticism.)

Ooh imprinting.

I touch upon it here, basically I hate it.

The imprinting is part of this theme where the shapeshifters lose their free will and autonomy, and I find it tragic, cruel, and unnecessary.

First of, the fact that they have to phase at all.

They’re made warriors to protect their tribe. There’s no choice involved, only genetics and magic irrevocably changing their lives, and at a ridiculously young age, too. Sam is the oldest of them, and he is 19.

Violence is an inherent part of what they become. Their purpose is to protect the tribe, by fighting vampires. Not only is this insanely dangerous (we see Jake get so injured by a single vampire that he’s bedridden for weeks), but if they succeed, they will have killed. In the singularly brutal manner of tearing apart and burning someone who looks a lot like a human, who talks and might beg for their life, at that. And I remind you, most of these shapeshifters are literal children. They might not see vampires as people, but all the same, killing one can’t be good for their mental wellbeing. (Thought: Perhaps an argument can be made for Laurent’s death having a part in the turn Jake’s personality took? Some, though not many, of the symptoms for PTSD do fit. I don’t know enough about PTSD to pursue this train of thought, but it occurred to me just now, in particular he becomes quite aggressive and prone to outbursts after that incident, so into a parenthesis it goes)

Not to mention how inhumane that responsibility is. Vampires in the Twilight-verse are terrifying, and the shapeshifters might have the power to fight them. But (and this is where I plug one of my all-time favorite animes, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, as it asks the question “Is it okay to sacrifice yourself for others?” because that’s... well there’s a parallel to be made to the shapeshifters. It’s on Netflix!) does that mean they should? Is it really their responsibility? Again- they’re kids!

Then there’s the time Sam lost control, and accidentally mauled the girl he loved. And it’s so cruel to both him and Emily. Sam never chose to have to control himself in the first place, he never chose shapeshifting. He didn’t choose to imprint on Emily either, and he didn’t choose to lose control that day. At no point in the series of events that led to Emily being mauled did Sam have any real choice, and yet he will shoulder the guilt for what happened for the rest of his life.

These kids get superpowers, and several of them seem to enjoy being shapeshifters, but the fact remains that they now carry this huge responsibility to protect their families and homes, doing so is incredibly dangerous, they lose out on their regular lives, and they can’t opt out of it.

This all sucks, but then we get to the fact that they are deprived of their free will, as their alpha can issue an order they physically can’t break. The alpha becomes alpha because of bloodlines, not because of a democratic election. Jake got a mockery of a choice in that he could choose to become alpha himself, or let Sam continue, which was really just choosing between a rock and a hard place. There is no limitation to what this order can be, from “don’t say X to person Y” to “let’s kill someone you love”. Jake has to struggle to break that last one, and he’s only successful because of the bloodline thing letting him become his own alpha.

Oh, and there’s the massive invasion of privacy when they have a hive mind. Cool concept, less cool to have it be reality. Leah is the poster child for how a hive mind can backfire, and they can’t opt out of this.

I’m not good at gifs, but the shapeshifters just make me think of that gif of someone flicking a lightswitch on and off, “WELCOME TO HELL!”. Of course, Twilight in general is a pit of despair for everybody, so I suppose that gif really is... well it sums up all of canon.

So, we have these kids aged 19 or younger, as of Breaking Dawn they skew as young as thirteen, their lives are turned upside down by something they can’t opt out of, they must shoulder this huge responsibility to protect their homes and families from the terrifying threat of vampires, and on top of all of that, they must obey orders that are so irresistible, they can compel them to harm someone they care for.

With all of that in mind, you’d think that the shapeshifters had enough on their plate. That through all of this they would at least retain their selves, and be able to look forward to a future where they could stop phasing, and go on to live normal, human, lives.

Yeah, NOT IF THEY IMPRINT.

I’ll just quote Jake’s description:

Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the halfvampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was—my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self—disconnected from me in that second—snip, snip, snip—and floated up into space. 

I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was. 

Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing—to the very center of the universe. 

I could see that now—how the universe swirled around this one point. I’d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain. 

The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood. (Breaking Dawn, page 237)

Everything that made me who I was disconnected from me.

Jake’s love for his father, his home, his very own self, it’s all gone now. And while I have thoughts on the authenticity of this imprint, whether it was organic, the description above is apparently how imprinting feels. It’s along the lines of what Sam, Jared, and Paul all describe.

I don’t think I can put into words just how devastating I find imprinting, I think the above quotation speaks for itself. And as with all other shapeshifter things, there is no choice involved.

We see its devastating effects in the Emily, Sam, and Leah debacle. Sam and Leah were serious together, so much so that they were engaged. Sam had fallen for and chosen to be with Leah. Perhaps they would have broken up eventually, but Leah was still the choice he made. Then he imprints on Emily, and all that is for naught. He had to break up with Leah, who if she hadn’t phased never would have learned why, Emily and Leah’s relationship is ruined, and Emily must forever live with the knowledge that if Sam had his free will intact he would be with another woman.

Then there’s Jared and Kim. Kim crushed on Jared, but Jared never noticed her. The fact that they were in the same class is damning: if a boy is attracted to a girl, he's gonna notice her. Jared never did.

Quil imprints on Claire, who is a toddler. That’s just a recipe for misery and disaster all around.

And I’ve only touched the shapeshifter side of things. They lose their autonomy and freedom, but the imprintées draw the short straw too. They’re now responsible for this other person’s happiness. Sure, having someone who’ll be whatever you need them to be sounds nice (well, it sounds horrifying, but I’m playing ball) on paper, but you can’t opt out of them being like that. The imprintée can’t say “Sorry, not interested,” and she certainly can’t shut the imprinter out of her life, not without irrevocably ruining the imprinter’s life. The imprinter needs her. She’s the center of his earth now, but she didn’t choose to be.

Imprinting is a liferuiner for everyone involved.

Then we have the question of what imprinting is even for. I’m afraid I agree with Billy, that it’s for procreation. We see Sam, who was dating a woman about to phase (even if Leah isn’t infertile, she’s a warrior now. She can’t run in the woods and fight vampires, and gestate and nurse a child at the same time) conveniently imprint on her cousin, who as cousin to Leah is from a shifter bloodline. Claire, as Emily’s cousin, has those same genetics. Paul imprints on a woman from the Black family line. Jake is the outlier, but either Renesmée’s gift helped that imprinting along, or he imprinted because of the offspring they could potentially have (I firmly believe it’s the former because the latter... NOPE. Also, I can’t imagine whatever magic drives imprinting would want vampiric progeny for the future generations. Regardless of Renesmée’s person, her biology is wired to desire human blood. That’s exactly what Jake is supposed to protect people from. Bad match.).

I just.... ughhh. God, I hate imprinting so much, and on every level.

To me, everything about the shapeshifters is about free will, autonomy, and the loss thereof. And it would have been beautiful if their story was about reclaiming that, but it isn’t. None of this, with the exception of the alpha orders, is even acknowledged.

So, in summation, yes I hate imprinting, but it’s only the horror cherry on top of a very sad and problematic cake.

[intheseautumnhands]

Sorting Hat Chats: Oxventures

Hey look, I finally actually got a sorting post written! .... and it's one that I'm pretty sure interests absolutely nobody else, because I don't think anyone else in the Sorting Hat Chats community is into Oxventures, and also the reverse. But the brainwanderings will go where they wish and they don't ask me for permission, and I've been marathoning (and sleeping to) a lot of Oxventures lately, so let's go.

Just in case anyone does choose to take a look, I'll do a brief sum up of both system and canon, so that no one's lost. System first, because I have some other thoughts about canon I want to mention. The full rundown of the basics is here, but just so we're all on the same page:

A VERY BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE @sortinghatchats​SYSTEM

Your Primary house is your motivations, values, and why you do what you do. 

Lion Primaries do it this way because their gut tells them it's right.

Bird Primaries do it this way because the system they've put together to guide them tells them this is what's right.

Badger Primaries do it this way because it's the best thing for the community as a whole, or for the most people.

Snake Primaries do it this way because it's the best thing for the people they prioritize.

Your Secondary house is how you approach the world, the methods that come most easily and naturally to you.

Lion Secondaries charge. They attack problems head-on and directly, and they're in their comfort zone when they are their authentic selves.

Bird Secondaries plan. They collect tools, skills, and information, and they're in their comfort zone when they're prepared for the situation.

Badger Secondaries toil. They put their nose to the grindstone or they build connections to get things done, and they're in their comfort zone when things call for steady, consistent work.

Snake Secondaries improvise. They're adaptive and quick on their feet, and they're in their comfort zone when they have the wiggle room to go with what comes to them.

Other terminology may come up as well. I will try and link to posts that explain it better if I end up using anything.

A VERY BRIEF EXPLANATION OF OXVENTURES

Oxventures is the D&D Actual Play show done by the youtube gaming channels Outside Xbox and Outside Xtra, DMed by Johnny Chiodini from the tabletop game channel Dicebreaker. They've been going since fall 2017, first in-person and now streamed. It is an extremely fun show with a group of very entertaining players that have been basically learning to play as it goes. If you're into D&D shows and not too bothered by a very hand-wavey approach to rules, I greatly recommend it.

There are, however, some things that make it difficult to sort. It's a comedy show, and while I don't think this is true for every comedy, in general, it's very easy for characterization to occasionally get passed over for a laugh. It's sometimes hard to tell what jokes are being thrown around OOC versus IC. And the D&D format means there is no going back and editing anything; characterization is developed on the fly, and there's already been discussion that talked about how some of the characters changed as they were being played. Also, it's action-driven -- you don't always get a lot of information on what's going through people's head, so motivation can be hard to pin down.

So it's a little difficult and I've gotten wobbly on a lot of them. Which makes it a great choice for my first sorting!

(...To be fair, it's my first sorting post. I've been watching this system and sorting things to myself for -- *checks when I first mentioned it* wait hold on five years? Really? Okay, cool. Excuse me while I sit and have a mental montage to How Far We've Come as I remember all the fine-tuning it's been through in that time.

Anyway, I've been sorting things to myself for five years, so I'm not new to this, I'm just new to trying to explain my whys, so I hope this comes out understandable. I'm sorry for the rambling, because we're already 750 words in and I haven't even started.)

   ANYWAY LET'S GET TO THE SORTING.

Corazón de Ballena, human pirate rogue  Corazón, oh Corazón, what... do I even do with you. He's clearly not a Badger -- fairness and other people's needs are not his priority. Between the obvious Jack Sparrow riff and the "pirate seeking glory" thing, my instinct is to say a Lion Primary, probably a Gloryhound Lion in specific. I could see a Bird Primary, just because there is something extremely constructed-feeling about Corazón -- I think his truth would look very Snake-like, prioritizing himself and the people he chooses, but I could see it.

But I'm going to lean into a full Snake Primary, I think. While he doesn't care about most people, he does care very much about the people who do matter to him -- see his whole complicated relationship with his father, even after his father tried to kill him; see his burning down a guy's house because he's mean to Prudence; to some extent, see his attempt to help end his old crew's curse. He puts people above anything else, but only the people he chooses to (or where can't help it, in his father's case) I think he'd almost like people to believe that he's Burned and doesn't care about anyone else, but he very much is not, though he doesn't seem to let new people into the circle often or easily, either. I could still very much see a Gloryhound Lion, but in the end I think if asked to put the party first or fame and fortune first -- he would complain, he would never let them hear the end of it, but he would also choose the party every single time.

For Secondary: Corazón would really want people to think he's a Snake. If he could read the descriptions and pick his own, I'm pretty sure he'd say he was a Snake. Adaptable, cunning, deceitful -- and it's not that he's not these things, but the way it manifests itself feels much more like a rapid-fire Bird Secondary. He's analytical, he learned magic entirely from books, and I haven't actually counted, but I would bet you that he makes more investigation rolls than anyone else. While his quickly thought up plans do work, they often tend to rely on things he already knows -- disguise self and minor illusion come up often, hiding and evading, etc. He seems to be one of the party that gets the most non-combat use out of his various magical abilities. It's a very quick and jack-of-many-trades style of Bird, but it's still very Bird.

Dob, half-orc bard  Dob is quite possibly the loudest loyalist primary... just, that I have ever seen, ever. To start with, I'm just going to drop this quote here: "I know there's good in you, jailor I just met!"

How about the way that he's first introduced as a bard who goes from town to town playing the lullaby his lost sister used to sing to him, searching for her. Or his habit of, to quote TV Tropes, "engaging in random acts of adoption". Or the time he tried to learn spells to apologize to the dead orphans. Or how he still managed to forgive the skeletons that killed the orphans. Or the time he forgave the cult that almost got them all killed. Or giving the cultists (from a different cult) relationship advice. Or the time he ended up listening to the jailor's marriage woes. Or....

Look, I could keep going but I think we've got enough examples. So: Badger or Snake? On the one hand he definitely seems to worry about saving his particular people first when there's danger... but, there's a level of guilt about innocent people who have died on his watch, and that habit of taking in random people on multiple adventures, that really makes me lean towards a Badger Primary. Dob seems to genuinely care about everyone they cross as a default, and of all of them, he's the first I can see coming to the aid of an enemy who he has no prior positive experiences with.

As for a Secondary, Dob is the master of quick plans, quicker lies, and steamrolling NPCs into going along with things. The entire party ends up thinking on their feet more often than not, but he seems to do his best work that way, as a Snake Secondary often does. Sometimes he goes so fast that he forgets something and makes a mistake -- which is how "don't be a Dob" has become a thing -- but his impulsive ideas actually work out more often than it doesn't, and he's also very good at connecting with a wide variety of people. On the page for Snake/Slytherin Secondaries, the SHC site says, 

"Slytherins will adapt to their own best advantage without thinking about it. They’ll walk into a situation and things will work out to their benefit without them quite knowing what happened or what they did to influence it." 

-- and doesn't that just fit with Dob's ridiculous amounts of luck?

He does seem to spend a fair amount of time in his neutral state, or at least adapting in a non-conscious kind of way. There is something generally blunt about Dob a lot of the time, enough that I considered Lion pretty heavily -- but in the end, he works best when he's running on the fly and making shit up, in a way that feels extremely Snake to me. And he's not only so good at lying, but so quick to default to it, that Lion doesn't feel accurate.

Egbert the Careless, dragonborn paladin Poor Egbert, the worst paladin. While his original order really seems to prioritize a very classic Paragon Lion Primary, Egbert barely seems to have a model of one -- it's more of a performance, which is being chipped steadily away by the rest of the party. He tries, but I can't see a genuine Lion Primary from his background killing people so casually. Or hitting an old man with a cursed mace over and over until he turns into a seal. And then keeping the seal as a pet. Or just... saying "maybe crime is good!" because he likes the food at the crime den. He's trying, but he's really not good at it. So the question remains: what is he?

I think it's hard to place him because, one, he really want to be that Lion. And second, whatever he is, I think the values that motivation is set on are... kind of in flux? I don't think he's super burned; I think he might be lightly charred at best. But: if he's a Bird, he's in the process of losing the truth of "whatever the Order of the Dragon Door says is right" to something that comes more from the party and probably more genuinely. If he's a Badger, he's in the process of changing communities. If he's a Snake, the Order is getting pushed more and more out of his inner circle, replaced by the party.

I was leaning Badger, but the more I think about it, I think that's the remnants of the attempt to play Lion. I think Egbert's a Snake Primary who is starting to shed his old skin. (There's like three layers of bad joke in that, and I'm sorry.) The Lion priorities made that Snake look a little more Badger-y, but he does so, so many things that just don't strike me as caring deep down about need. Like the thing where he turned an old man into a seal. I just keep looking at that incident and I either need to completely ignore that incident -- which is hard, when Seal Gaiman is still hanging around -- or go with something else. His reaction to Dana's bigotry in Snow Mercy does feel a little more Badger-y to me... but that could still be that Lion Performance flavoring, and/or a symptom of how the party as a whole gets pissed about anti-tiefling sentiment coming out in sympathy of another maligned race. I also feel like a Badger would be working a little more actively on atonement and stop getting distracted.

He is, however, a very loud Lion Secondary. While the party as a whole does a lot of ploys that involve deceit or talking their way into things, Egbert is rarely the one doing that part. He doesn't bother with subtlety, or with doing any of the many things he can as a paladin, which is how we got the whole glorious "you've been able to teleport for how long?" moment. He does sometimes manage to make connections that move the story along, and he always does it by being himself.

But most of all, I can't think of a better word to describe how Egbert attacks a situation than charging. I'm just going to quote again from the site: 

"their problems are met head on rather than subverted, negotiated, or cajoled. They have an efficiency so direct it’s almost combative." 

And that seems like Egbert to a T.

Merilwen, wood elf druid Merilwen is a Badger Primary whose version of "people" is "animals, my community, and also I guess these four now". She doesn't really seem to care about what would traditionally be considered "people", and Ellen (who plays her) has spoken about how Merilwen's morals towards non-animals is pretty much entirely influenced by the party --  but with the things she cares about she strikes me as extremely Badger. She's absolutely ready to throw down everything for the party, but when they're not in danger from it, she will also absolutely fight the rest of them for an animal -- see that incident where she talked everyone out of fighting the Owlbear. "Animals are hurt" or "you hurt my friends" is the fastest way to bring out her viscous side.

She could also maybe be a Snake who includes all animals in her circle, but: one, I very much feel like she'd choose whether to prioritize her friends or an animal over who needs her more. Two, the way she interacts with her family and her community in Elf Hazard seems very Badger to me. Her worry about not being able to see her family again, her unwillingness to disappoint them and decision to take a new name to make them happy, even after the danger is past. Things like Merilwen's Meat-Grinder also strike me this way -- specifically, her willingness to do massive damage to save the party and subsequent discomfort with having done it, even though she doesn't care that much about the people who were hurt even after having done it. "Fair and loyal" seems like a good way to sum up her morality in general. Her being so close to Dob and understanding each other so well also adds to this (even if a lot of that likely has to do with Ellen and Luke (who plays Dob) being so close as much as anything, but if I try to separate out things that are OOC-influence I will be here forever).

I'm torn between the foundational Secondaries for her: Bird, or Badger. There is something about her likelihood to fall back on "I turn into a [cat/bear/octopus]" as a plan that feels a little Bird-like to me -- that fallback on the favored, most well-used, best-understood tools, even in situations where it takes a little forcing to make them fit. On the other hand, she seems to be the one most likely to see a job that's not being done as part of the plan, and go fill that role. She's certainly steady, trustworthy, quiet, and consistent. I don't think she has a problem with shortcuts on many things, but could see her raising objections about things she actively cares about. She also often solves things by connecting with animals, which fits when you consider her people/community largely being animal-based. I'm still a little back and forth on this, but in the end, I'm going to lean towards a Badger Secondary.

Prudence, tiefling warlock I'm having a hard time putting my finger on Prudence. I think this is partly Jane's play style -- I feel like she's the least likely to go into what's going on in Prudence's head or why she's doing things, and she doesn't really have a driving goal we're aware of except "do things to make Cthulhu pleased", but that's mostly along the way. She's not a Badger. I would lean towards not a Lion; I guess it's possibly she's a Lion whose gut morality is about hedonism, "I should have what I want", or something like that, but I really don't get the impression that she has much of an internal morality overall. "Some things are just wrong and you can't talk your way out of it" (to quote the Lion/Gryffindor Primary page) absolutely does not sound like something Prudence would ever thing.

So again we're between the decided Primaries: Bird or Snake? I could see her being a Bird, but I have no idea what her truth is at this point. Still, I want to lean towards Snake Primary, specifically one that was burnt. We're going into how-IC-was-this-anyway territory here again, but there's a moment early on, in Brawl of the Wild, where Jane is narrating Prudence hurling herself in front of two of the others and stops mid-narration to ask "wait, why am I doing that" -- it feels incredibly like a Snake who's found themselves unburning while they weren't paying attention and now is trying to figure out how this happened. She's also pretty open with how fond she is of the party, pleased as punch when Corazón burns down the house of a guy who's an asshole to her, even more pleased when Egbert seems corruptible, seems genuinely happy that the group has gotten more lax about killing, and of course there's "You'll never leave me, Corazón, I'll kill you first" and hugging the Egbert-statue after he's been kidnapped when no one can see her.

But more than the party, what makes me lean towards Snake is her relationship with her warlock patron. There's nothing cold, nothing business-like, it's not even worshipful: Cthulhu-dad is kind of a joke, but... it's also not? Even if the actual fatherly-ness of it can be read as joking, she still genuinely seems to have warm, loving feelings for him, and that particular set-up really strikes me a loyalist thing.

(That gives us an all-loyalist party, but honestly, considering they're not the most moral people around and how quickly they all bond... that kind of works?)

Bird Secondary -- her plans tend to be the most practical, she has her favored methods for handling things, and her interest in all things magic strikes me as very Bird-with-a-favorite-thing. Her Bird seems pretty good at reading people, too, particularly knowing the party's strengths -- which is often chaos and making things up. She's not quite a rapid-fire as Corazón, but she's pretty good on her feet if need be... it's just that her lack of interest in what's morally right means the plan she usually pulls out is "eldritch blast". To be fair, it usually works.

IN SUMMATION:

Corazón: Snake Primary/Bird Secondary (possible Snake performance)

Dob: Badger Primary/Snake Secondary (possible Badger model)

Egbert: Snake Primary (attempting to model the Order and possibly Shattershield's Lion Primary, which comes off weirdly Badger-ish in the end)/Lion Secondary

Merilwen: Badger Primary (whose "people" are animals, the elf community she grew up in, and now the Oxventurers)/Badger Secondary

Prudence: Unburning Snake Primary/Bird Secondary

OXVENTURE IN THE DARK BONUS ROUND:

Very recently they've begun an Oxventure spin-off series, playing Blades in the Dark instead. We're only two episodes in, and since part of the plan is to rotate who's in each episode, most of them are only in one -- and since we've gotten so little of the new group, and so much can change as the players learn their characters and find their feet, I can't confidently sort them right now. But I think it'd be interesting to share some initial impressions and see how they hold up down the line. Spoilers for both episodes if anyone's behind, I'll put Lillith and Barnaby last just to be sure.

Edvard: If Edvard the inventor is not a Bird Secondary, I will eat my hat. I could see him going the way of the traditional SHC impulsive scientists who do things For Science, and ending up in Lion/Bird territory, or going towards Bird/Bird; at the moment I don't think he'll be a loyalist, but we'll see!

Zillah: I think we know less about Zillah than anyone else at this point, but we do know that, one, she's doing crime to get money for her family, and two, she seems pretty level-headed. I'm thinking maybe a Lion Secondary, leaning away from Bird Primary but at this point could see anything else.

Kasamir: Between his class/playbook being about having his fingers in a lot of crime pies, Johnny saying he's not really good at anything besides crime, and his slight mentor-y vibe in episode one, I'm getting Badger Secondary or Bird Secondary vibes -- leaning Badger right now, but we'll see. (I'm also getting Mozzie-from-White-Collar-but-more-physical vibes, but I cannot find the sorting that Moz used to be under, unfortunately. I want to say either Badger/Bird or Bird/Badger.) He doesn't strike me as a Lion Primary at this point, but we'll see.

Lillith: I was going to say Bird Secondary because she's leaning so hard into the intellectual, but so far she has tried to solve problems by befriending a ghost girl and convincing the workers to start a union so.... I'm feeling some Badger/Lion or Lion/Badger vibes coming off her at this point. She might slide into a more Bird-y role in the future, or it might end up looking more like a model.

Barnaby: Despite having gotten through two episodes now basically saving the day by being himself, I don't get Lion Secondary vibes from him -- actually, I'm thinking he could end up a Badger Secondary, just extremely far on the Courtier Badger side of the scale, and one that’s very full of himself. Not sure on that yet, though. Primary: no idea, but probably not Badger.

[oneweekoneband]

I’m slightly nauseous already with knowing I’m going to say this, but what does “self-awareness”  even mean? In modern parlance, as a descriptive phrase, as a comment on art? I’m asking in earnest, like, I’ve been Googling lately, which for me is basically on par with doctoral study in terms of academic rigor. The self is king, anyway, tyrant, so where is the line of distinction between material that intentionally is nodding at some truth about the artist’s life and what’s just, like, all the rest of the regular navel-gazing bullshit. I mean, I’m all self, I am guilty here. I can’t get it out of my poems or even make it more quiet. This is the tenth time I’ve invoked “I” in the space of six sentences. Processing art has always necessitated a certain amount of grappling with the creator, but the busywork of it lately grows more and more tedious. Joy drains out of my body parsing marks left behind not just in stylistic tendencies and themes, but in literal, intentional tags like graffiti on a water tower. This feels an age old and moth-holed complaint, dull, and I am no historian, or really a serious thinker of any kind. I’ve now complained at some length about self-referential art, but didn’t I love how Martin Scorsese nodded to the famous Goodfellas Copacabana tracking shot with the opening frames of last year’s The Irishman? Didn’t I find that terribly fun and sort of sweet? So there’s distinctions. I’m only saying I don’t know with certainty what they even are. I’m unreliable, and someone smarter than me has likely already solved my quandary about why self-knowledge often transforms into overly precious self-reflexivity in such a way that the knowledge is diminished and obscured, leaving only cutesy Easter eggs behind. Postmodernism has birthed a moralizing culture where art exists to be termed either “self-aware Good” or “self-aware Bad”.  Self-referentiality in media is so commonplace, so much the standard, that what was once credited as metatextual inventiveness often feels lazy now. In 1996, Scream was revitalizing a genre. Today, two thirds of all horror movies spend half their running time making sure that you know that they know they’re a horror movie, which is fine, I guess, except sometimes you just wanna watch someone get butchered with an axe in peace. 

This is all to say that in 2020 Taylor Swift looked long and hard upon her image in the reflecting pool of her heart and has written yet another song about Gone Girl.

“mirrorball” is a very good piece of Gone Girl —feels insane to tell anyone reading a post on a blog what Gone Girl is but, you know, the extremely popular 2012 novel about a woman who pretends to have been murdered and frames her husband for it, and subsequently the 2014 film adaption where you kinda see Ben Affleck’s dick for a second—fanfiction. It would be a fine song, a good song, really, even if it weren’t that, if it were just something normal and not unhinged written by a chill person who behaves in a regular way, but we need to acknowledge the facts for what they are. When Taylor Swift watched Rosamund Pike toss her freshly self-bobbed hair out of her face and hiss, “You think you’d be happy with some nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby. I’m it!” her brain lit up like a Christmas tree, and she’s never been the same. If you Google “taylor swift gone girl” there waiting for you will be a medium sized lake’s worth of articles speculating about how Gone Girl influenced and is referenced in past Swift singles “Blank Space” and “Look What You Made Me Do”. This is not new behavior, and if anything it’s getting a bit troubling to think that it’s been this long since Taylor’s read another book. Still, while the prior offerings were a fair attempt at this particular feat of depravity, “mirrorball” has brought Taylor’s Amy Elliott Dunne deification to stunning new heights. And most importantly, Taylor has done a service to every person alive with more than six brain cells and a Internet connection by putting an end to the “Cool Girl” discourse once and for all. By the power invested in “mirrorball”, it is hereby decreed that the Cool Girl speech from Gone Girl is neither feminist or antifeminist, not ironic nor aspirational. No. It’s something much better than all that. It’s a threat. I ! Can ! Change ! Everything ! About ! Me ! To ! Fit ! In !

Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn

“mirrorball” (2020) by Taylor Swift

When the twinkly musical stylings of Jack Antonoff, a man I distinctly distrust, but for no one specific reason, whirl to life at the beginning of this song I feel instantly entranced, blurry-brained and pleasure-pickled like an infant beneath a light-up crib mobile or, I guess, myself in the old times, the outside times, three tequila sodas deep under the disco lights at The Short Stop. Under a mirrorball in my head. I know very little about music, as a craft, and I really don’t care to know more. I’m happy in a world of pure, dumb sensation. I’m not even sure what kind of instruments are making these jangly little sounds. I just like it. I am vibing. We may not ever be able to behave badly in a club again, but I can sway to my stupid Taylor Swift-and-the-brother-of-the-lady-who-makes-like-those-sweatshirts-with-little-sayings-or-like-vulvas-which-famous-white-women-wear-on-instagram-you-know-what-I-mean song, pressing up onto my tiptoes on the linoleum tile of our kitchen floor and can feel for a second or two something approaching bliss. “mirrorball” is a lush sound bath that I like a lot and then also it’s about being all things to all people, chameleoning at a second’s notice, doing Oscar worthy work on every Zoom call, performing the you who is good, performing the you who is funny, performing the you who draws a liter of your own blood and throws it around the kitchen then cleans it up badly all to get your husband sent to jail for sleeping with a college student... Too much talk about making and unmaking of the self is way too, like, 2012 Tumblr for me now, and I start hearing the word “praxis” ring threateningly in my head, but I’m not yet so evolved that I don’t feel a pull. Musings on the disorganized self—on how we are new all the time, and not just because of all the fresh skin coming up under the dead, personhood in the end so frighteningly flexible—are always going to compel me, I’m afraid, but that goes double for musings on the disorganized self which posit that Taylor Swift still thinks Amy Dunne made some points.

Because on “mirrorball” Taylor is for once not hamfistedly addressing some “hater”, in the quiet and the lack of embarrassing martyrdom it actually offers an interesting answer to the complaint that Taylor is insufficiently self-aware. This criticism emerges often in tandem with claiming to have discovered some crack in the chassis of Swift’s public self, revealing the sweetness to be insincere. My instinct is to dismiss this more or less out of hand as just a mutation of the school of thought that presumes all work by women must be autobiography. And, regardless, it is made altogether laughable by the fact that anyone actually paying attention has known since at least Speak Now, a delightful record populated by the most appalling, horrible characters imaginable, and all of them written by a twenty year old Taylor Swift, that this woman is a pure weirdo. To accuse Taylor Swift of lacking in self-awareness is a reductive misunderstanding, I think, of artifice. Being a fake bitch takes work. Which is to say, if we agree that her public self is a calculated performance—eliding the fact that all public selves are a performance to avoid getting too in the weeds yadda yadda— why, then, should it be presumed that performance is rooted in ignorance? Would it not make more sense that, in fact, someone able to contort themselves so ably into various shapes for public consumption would have a certain understanding of the basic materials they’re working with and concealing? Taylor Swift, in a decade and a half of fame, has presented herself from inside a number of distinct packages. The gangly teenager draped in long curls like climbing wisteria who wrote lyrics down her arms in glitter paint gave way to red lipstick, a Diet Coke campaign, and bad dancing at awards shows. There was the period where she was surrounded constantly by a gaggle of models, then suddenly wasn’t anymore, and that rough interlude with the bleached hair. The whole Polaroid thing. Last year she boldly revealed she’s a democrat. Now it’s the end of the world and she’s got frizzy bangs and flannels and muted little piano songs. Perhaps this endless shape-shifting contradicts or undermines, for some, the pose of tender authenticity which has remained static through each phase, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been doing it all on purpose the entire time. I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try...

In the Disney+ documentary—which, in order to watch, I had to grudgingly give the vile mouse seven dollars, because the login information that I’d begged off of my little sister didn’t work and I was too embarrassed to bring it up a second time—Taylor referred to “mirrorball” as the first time on the album where she explicitly addressed the pandemic, referring to the lyrics that start, “And they called off the circus, Burned the disco down,” and end with “I’m still on that tightrope, I’m still trying everything to get you laughing at me,” which actually did made me laugh, feeling sort of warmly foolish and a little fond, because it never would have occurred to me that she was trying to be literal there. I suppose we really do all contain multitudes. Hate that.

[ohshcscenerios]

Beach House

Chapter Twenty Six - Choose Your Own Adventure

Result of previous poll: Read to find out ;-)

Hikaru and Kaoru arranged the fireworks in neat rows in the sand, twisting the cardboard tubes into the sand to make them stand on their own. One by one they lined their grand finale beneath a dark sky, commemorating their wonderful weekend at the beach with an explosive display. 

Haruhi sat upright with her arms supporting her leaned postured on a beach towel, watching the twins laugh and tease each other in the distance coaxed a smile. She enjoyed watching her friends behaving as their real authentic selves, no matter how silly or foolish or even conniving they truly were. She always respected those who valued themselves over other’s opinions, who stuck to their own guns despite what they heard whispered behind their back. 

Haruhi had her fair share in ignoring the whispers when she was young. Her classmates couldn’t - or wouldn’t - understand her father’s profession as merely a profession and it in no way negatively reflected his character. He may favor women’s clothing and fashion but he was the only father God gave her and she would never sneer nor betray that. 

Her friends may have been raised in luxury and blissful ignorance but they were also genuine, curious, and most of all accepting of others. When she joined their group all those years ago she never expected the six young men parading across a dark beach to become such essential figures in her life and yet here she was, depending on them just as much as they depended on her. 

She loved them, respected them, and wished nothing but health and success for them... and yet she felt her heart yearning for one in particular. 

She couldn’t say when she first noticed her growing feelings. Years ago? Months ago? This very weekend? She couldn’t say. Her feelings felt brand new and yet they weighed heavy in her heart as if she had carried them for a long time without knowing. It was so foreign and yet... it felt right. 

She watched Kyoya and Tamaki bicker a few feet away, arguing if they should quickly buy more fireworks. Tamaki was not quite ready to say goodbye to this weekend and Kyoya knew he was trying to use his anxious energy to stall for more time. Kyoya insisted they bought enough and they couldn’t risk disrupting the locals. They couldn’t end this weekend with a surprise visit from the police. 

To her left Takashi and Mitsukuni were building a sandcastle throne for Usa-chan to rest in during their firework display. Mistukuni was cheerfully giggling as Takashi playfully kept knocking down the same sand tower. They were technically men, functioning citizens who contributed to Japan with their earned degrees, and yet they could reach into their inner child to enjoy a sandcastle. 

As their weekend came to a close Haruhi was forced to think about what would happen next. Next week. Next year. She tried to illustrate her five year plan in her mind’s eye but could only paint out a lonely office stuffed away in a gray building. 

She had always worked hard to achieve her goals and even now she wouldn’t slow down but thanks to this very interesting and revealing weekend she also considered what she was working hard for. She couldn’t waste her years satisfying a boss and her clients. She needed someone to truly make it all worth it. She needed to come home to someone to talk about her day, enjoy a relaxing night in with, share a few laughs, and receive a sense of purpose from. 

She decided... she needed him.

Because in the end it would always be him. 

Hikaru ran towards the group with Kaoru close behind, carefully running a corde along the sand. As they got closer Hikaru waved his hands while flashing the biggest smile she’s ever seen spread across his face. 

“We’re ready! Everyone take your seats!” He shouted excitedly. 

The twins dove into the sand, piling atop each other just inches from the beach towel they lied down as their spot. Mitsukuni finished patting down his sandcastle and propped Usa-chan in the make shift seat and situated his blanket beside it, sitting crossed legged nest to his stuffed friend. Kyoya opted in sitting in a wooden patio chair instead of the cold sand and Tamaki fluffed his beach towel right beside him. 

Takashi took out a lighter and clicked a flame to life, shielding it with his hand. Carefully he brought it to the cord and lit the fuse. Instantly lively sparks danced about and raced down the long fuse toward the long row of fireworks. 

“Here we go!” Kaoru cheered, throwing his hands in the air. 

Takashi took his seat behind Haruhi and gently slid her backwards between his spread legs so he could hold her close. She welcomed his embrace and rested her head against his naked chest, momentarily focused on the rise and fall of his lungs. 

One firework shot into the sky with a whiney whistle before exploding in the night sky, spreading neon green flares across the beach. Before the flares could disappear into the darkness another firework whistled through the air and exploded bright pinks and purples above them. 

Haruhi had to admit it was a very fitting way to end their vacation. Their wacky, confusing, thrilling vacation. The vacation she would come to remember as one of the most important moments in her life. 

The sky above them lit up in brilliant colors. Blues, greens, purples, reds, and blinding whites littered the night sky, veiling them beneath a a ceiling of light. 

Takashi leaned forward and kissed her cheek once- twice- and a third time for good measure. Maybe to convince himself that she was really here with him, in his arms. Maybe to further express how much he adored her. He didn’t know and he didn’t care. 

He hovered by her ear and spoke loud enough for only her to hear, “Haruhi, I love you.”

She turned to face him with a sheepish smile that quickly grew more confident once she met his happy gray eyes. Even in the dark of night she could see his beautiful eyes. The fireworks reflecting off his dark irises, teasing the idea that a person’s eyes truly were a window into their soul. 

She knew his soul to be beautiful, kind, loyal, gentle, and above all loving. He best expressed himself through actions, not needing to rely on words to illustrate his thoughts, and yet he had just spoken three very important words to her. 

Haruhi decided to respond in a way he understood best. She leaned into him and pressed her lips against his, slowly tasting the remnants of mint toothpaste and the salty air mix together for a unique flavor. He pressed back, placing his hand on her nape to draw her closer - if it were possible. 

He softly snared her lips between his, gently tugging at her supple skin as he kiss her. He slowly savored her, taking his time in tasting her unique flavor. He wanted to burn this memory in his brain, remember every touch and sensation that sparked through his body whenever she kissed him back for years and years to come. 

He never expected their weekend to end like this but he thanked every higher being for his golden chance to win over his love. 

A forced cough brought the couple back to reality just before the big finale, or as the twins named it. They said the Americans bundled together multiple fireworks to be set off at once as the show ended. Kyoya could only pray the locals didn’t send a policeman to their front door. 

Haruhi glanced at Kyoya and had to do a double take, almost missing a very interesting development. Hidden underneath his chair’s arm rest Kaoru rested his hand on Kyoya’s. Although they weren’t necessarily holding hands Kyoya didn’t move to jerk his away. 

Haruhi smiled, happy to see love sprouting in more ways than one. Perhaps she and Takashi weren’t the only lucky ones. 

The big finale was nearly deafening but the twins were right, the display left them in awe. Everyone’s jaws hung open as they watched the fireworks chaotically overtake the night sky. 

Takashi tightened his hold her waist and kissed her head before resting his chin on her head. Yes, this weekend would be remembered as a very important vacation for years and years to come. 

This concludes our Choose Your Own Adventure story! Thank you to everyone who liked, commented, and reblogged. You made this experience so much fun for me and for others around you! I hope you enjoyed this story and it’s ending. 

The poll asking if you’d like to experience another Choose Your Own Adventure story again had an overwhelming response and it was a landslide! Everyone but one voted yes! This means you can look forward to another interactive story in the near future. 

Until then, have a good night!

[mikaey43]

#16 A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Rating: 4/5

Pages: 247 (with “An Appreciation” by Anna Quindlen, and additional content)

Publisher: Squarefish (an imprint of Macmillian)

(I shouldn’t make goals. I’m not good at keeping them. But I digress.) There are books I didn’t read as a kid. They didn’t appeal to me then. I can’t read it with the eyes of a child, but I can still read them. I decided to read the following book before news broke of its theatrical film adaptation—what reader doesn’t. This book has a simple plot, a good cast of characters, character development, and showcases an insight to the goodness of humanity. And above all, it has strong female characters. Not to say that the men are lacking, but it’s always refreshing to read about a girl who simply is. In any genre. I can’t wait to read the other books in this series: A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle.

The plot is simple: after not hearing from Mr. Murry since he went off to work on a top-secret experiment, the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit visits the Murry family one “dark and stormy night” and thrusts our main characters into a journey across the universe.

The story opens with Meg Murry, the eldest of the Murry children. She is the typical awkward mess who excels in the sciences and mathematics but fails in humanities. That is refreshing since usually intelligent female characters are written as being all-around, book-smart girls. It isn’t a bad thing but should not always be the case. Through her journey, Meg comes to understand that a person, even her scientist parents, have both strengths and shortcomings.

Then there’s the youngest and the most brilliant of the Murrys: Charles Wallace. At five years old, he is the most intellectual and wise. The town gossips about him, just as with his father. They presume that because he’s not particularly loquacious he therefore lacks intelligence. But Mrs. Whatsit directs herself to him not just as a mouthpiece but someone who will able to understand the complexity of their mission across the universe.

We also meet sixteen-year-old, Calvin O’Keefe. He is the compassionate son of a family who neglects him, a gifted junior at Meg’s school, and talented athlete. He shares the same gift as Charles Wallace but is more open where Charles is reserved. He is centered and level-headed. He joins them on their mission with no other reason than but that he was “meant” to be at the right time and place.

I don’t focus on too many characters, just those that I feel add significance to the story. I will touch as briefly as I can on Mr. and Mrs. Murry, Mrs. Whatsit, Which, and Who, since I believe they add necessary layers to what is usually a very one-tone genre for middle-grade.

In most young adult fiction, the young protagonist has free rein to push the boundaries as the parents are pushed to the outskirts of the plot. They are often shown as incompetent, not technologically savvy, or just plain “uncool.” In L’Engle’s story, we see not only competent parents with professional careers but who are idolized by their children. L’Engle presents Mr. and Mrs. Murry as what they really are: people. This is what frustrates Meg. She believes her parents are supposed to be different as opposed to the other adults. Meg knows they are a powerhouse couple: intelligent, handsome, and down-to-earth. They are scientists after all, they should be able to solve any kind of problem that comes their way. But they don’t have all the answers and apparently need rescuing too.

Mrs. Murry is a devoted stay-at-home mother and scientist who runs her lab from the basement. She has been somewhat of a “single mother” since her husband went to work on a top-secret assignment years ago. As she awaits her husband’s return, she continues their research, raising their children, all the while trying to find Mr. Murry. But her faith in her husband never waivers. Meg admires her for her strength of character, intelligence, and beauty. Mrs. Murry appears as an unreachable idol because Meg feels she will never attain that level of sophistication. 

We know that Mr. Murry, like Mrs. Murry, is a scientist. He has been working on an experiment since Charles was a baby. It is rumored that he abandoned his family for another woman, but his family loves and respects him very much. They believe that he’s working on this experiment. He is thought of as a smart, loving, reasonable, and sensible man.

Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which are harder to explain. They appear from and disappear back to nothing. They are gentle and kind. They also seem to know a lot about human history and its most influential people. They can bend space and therefore transport themselves easily through large distances throughout the universe.

We find out that the “wrinkle in time” makes it possible to travel through space to other worlds. Through this type of travel, we visit four worlds in a “catch and release” fashion. Only visiting the worlds to pick up necessary information without really “exploring” it, but we do meet strange creatures. By the time we finally arrive at Camazotz, ready to explore the world, it turns out to be an imitation of our world. Only difference is that it is almost completely controlled by IT although, there are glimpses of inadvertent freethinkers.

While I usually spotlight a quote, I would like to focus instead on an idea: the examination of conformity versus uniqueness. The reader is warned about its dangers. Mrs. Murry tells Meg that “people are more than just the way they look” (54). This is the most evident in Mrs. Whatsit, Who, and Which. They are more than what they seem but adjusted their true selves since the children go by the preconceived notion of physical sight.

We also know that the trio—while unique—conform. Calvin, idolized by the town for his brilliance in both academics and sports, miserably conforms to his superficial image when he cannot authentically connect with anyone. The opposite goes for Charles. His intelligence is vastly superior to anyone in that town, but because he fears their rejection, he tolerates the town’s opinion that he’s intellectually slow. Finally, Meg tries and wishes she could conform but cannot mold into the small mind of the small town because of her logical, impatient, impulsive, and awkward personality. She is the question itself. Thankfully, the characters begin to deviate from the idea of how they are “seen” and toward how they want to be known. This begins with Mrs. Whatsit transformation to her original form and completed when she reveals that she is a star. This echoes the second part of Mrs. Murry’s explanation that the “difference isn’t physical. It’s in essence.” (54, my emphasis).

When the children travel to Camazotz, Meg physically sees how radical conformity for “normalcy” can get. Not just in appearances but the exact beat (ie: essence) to which the planet marches, plays, “thinks,” and lives. The inescapable humdrum of IT’s beat illustrates how enticing yet lamentable life is when one is programmed to sameness.

Meg must see beyond the physical into essential concepts to free Charles. A lesson Aunt Beast reminds her of before returning to Camazotz: “We look not at the things which are what you call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.” (205).

The question about conformity is answered. Meg decides to face the evil of “sameness” when IT tries to prove that “equal and alike” are indistinguishable. While everyone is equal in worth for being human, we are not alike in essence. Different is okay. And that is why the Murry family and Calvin O’Keefe hug it out in the middle of the twin's vegetable garden.

There are many things that I like. First, that Meg realizes she has put everyone on pedestals, but it turns out, they are fallible. This lets her be free to finally be whoever she wants to be. This leads me to say how much I loved that the women are given equal footing with their male counterparts. The Mrs. Ws, Mrs. Murry, and Meg have gifted and compassionate teammates. These relationships are built on respect, trust, support, and admiration. Mrs. Murry trusts that Mr. Murry’s lack of communication is due to some unforeseen circumstance. The Mrs. Ws know that with Charles Wallace’s help he will not only interpret their information but use it to guide Calvin and Meg. And Calvin helps center Meg during her thought process. Teamwork. I also liked all the science that L’Engle sprinkles throughout her novel, and how simple she makes it.

And while I liked the idea of the story, there were a few instances that had me refraining from exploring it further. There is the constant world-hopping—which I understand is the whole point—but because we were never in one place for too long, I lacked a connection. Even as the final battle takes place in IT-controlled Camazotz, since it mirrors Earth, it lacks its own personality. And after that final battle, I was left with more questions than answers. The most burning question: what happened to IT? Also: was Camazotz able to rid itself of IT? There’s not much backstory of IT’s conquest of Camazotz. We also don’t know why the Mrs. Ws couldn’t go with Meg to help her. We are tied to the facts of the text, which isn't a bad thing, I guess. After all, their only mission was to find Mr. Murry.

I had originally rated this book a five out of five stars, but because of the world-building I had to knock out a star. I am very glad to have read about a brave girl who rescues her father and gains more understanding of the world she also saves. I did like it from beginning to end and can’t wait to read the rest of the books in the series.

[robert-c]

What Really Makes America Great

What made (and still makes) America great is a unique idea, imperfectly achieved, but generally improving. That idea is that there could be a society where everyone would be equal before the law, and have the freedom to pursue their own version of happiness or success. The implications of such a society is that it doesn’t endorse or enforce a particular set of religious beliefs, or other individual opinions. There is one obvious, or at least it should be obvious, exception – in order for all to be free to believe as they wish, there is a limit on your own belief, and that is you cannot claim your belief gives you the right to impose it on others. If this were allowed there would soon be no freedoms, only the strongest group would prevail. You don’t have to agree with others, you can privately believe that they will all go to Hell if that’s your thing, but you have to agree that they are allowed in our society, that is unless you are just a wannabe tyrant. This attitude was best expressed by a quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall (often misattributed to Voltaire) "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".

Some of our “cultural warriors” would have us believe that the climate of diversity, and “political correctness” that rebukes them for making racial and religious slurs is somehow infringing on their beliefs. They conveniently forget that if expressing disapproval of their views is infringement, then so is their expression of disapproval of diversity. The problem seems to be tied up with the idea that if they are truly committed to their beliefs then they must somehow be intolerant of others, and as extreme in their application as possible; as if that were some measure of their sincerity. That is a simplistic approach to ideas and ideals, the sort of thing more appropriate to those who don’t have the willingness or the intellectual capacity to go beyond the emotional sound bite. I want to believe that most of my countrymen are better than that.

America wasn’t great when we bullied the rest of the world into arrangements that were primarily beneficial to us alone. And we certainly weren’t great when we hypocritically preached that we were a land of opportunity for all while maintaining a racial class structure of separate but “equal”. Every other nation in the past has defined itself primarily on the basis of ethnic or religious (aka “cultural”) commonality. Citing that as a reason why we should have only one dominant cultural identity is to ignore the truly unique concept that is America, and to set the stage for repression. It all sounds fine, as long as you’re assuming your brand of culture is the dominant one. There is a difference between unity and uniformity, another subtlety lost on some.

Nevertheless, I do understand the appeal of the simple answer, and the sense of confusion some feel by the changes that have taken place over the last few decades. I was born just two years after the end of the Second World War, so you can imagine the changes I’ve seen. Like many people I have very fond memories of my childhood. I also had the sense that I could accomplish anything – and as a Protestant white male, in the 50’s and 60’s that was mostly true. I also remember discovering that “liberty and justice for all” wasn’t exactly true. So while I remember my youth in the 50’s and 60’s fondly, I also remember that people with dark skin couldn’t just sit in any available seat on the bus, or at the lunch counter. I remember that there were many more limitations on women of every color. No, I would not want to have our world like it was then; there was a lot wrong with it, some of which has been fixed, but much work still remains. The point is not to confuse happy memories of the past with the policies and practices of those times.

Change is never comfortable, and if it seems to be going against something misidentified as a fundamental principle or idea, then it’s easy to make resisting the change seem like patriotism, or a moral duty. Change is an inevitable and unstoppable thing. Many people over the ages have tried to stop things from changing. They have all failed, and failed spectacularly. As often as not, attempts to stop the changes make them happen faster and in less desirable ways for all. Being a part of the essential changes is the only way to have any influence on their outcome.

I ended up living two miles from the house where I grew up. As a child it was on the edge of the city. A few minutes bike ride and I was in the countryside, with farmer’s fields all around. Today it’s a 20 minute trip down a freeway to reach the countryside. A few miles from home was a brand new shopping center. It had an A&P, a Sears, and a Mott’s Five and Dime; not to mention many other names not so well known. It had businesses on each of the four corners of the intersection. Today those businesses are gone. The old center is getting a makeover but it is very different in character from what it was, and not just in the names of the shops. In one quarter of the center all the shops have signs in Spanish. The rest of the center contains the sort of stores you’d expect anywhere else; a Walmart neighborhood market (more or less where the A&P used to be), pharmacies, shoe stores, etc.

You could look at those changes and bemoan the loss of the lily white neighborhoods filled with World War II vets and their Baby Boomer children, or accept that things change and look for the good in the new experiences. A virtual trip to Mexico is just down the street. I can buy authentic conchas, and a host of other foods I would have had to travel hundreds of miles to get as a child.

But even more important is that Texas should be a “multicultural melting pot” almost as much as New York City. Texas’ independence from Mexico was won by the efforts of Texians (the Anglo Texans) AND Tejanos (Hispanic Texans). In fact, the popularization of the phrase “Remember the Alamo” is owed in part to the Tejano soldiers in Sam Houston’s army. Like most of the Texas revolutionaries they had no uniforms, and Santa Ana’s soldiers often tried to escape the battles by ditching their uniforms and dressing as locals. But the Tejanos wrote inside their straw hats: “Recuerdo el Alamo” (“I remember the Alamo”) to set themselves apart from the Mexican troops when encountering the Texian troops.

Like other places in the US, Texas was born by the efforts of people from different backgrounds united by a common desire for liberty. THAT is what makes America great, not some racist monolithic culture; not some fear of “foreigners”, or some isolationist ideal.

I don’t know of any cogent answer from this president about when and what he thought made America great. It seems to be an empty phrase, meant to allow everyone to insert their own ideas, without ever having to take a solid stand, or justify the choice. It is the very definition of demagogic appeal and manipulation.

I’m sure that our Founding Fathers could never have imagined the world we live in today, and I would even be willing to say they would be shocked at some of the interpretations of rights we consider the norm today. However, I also like to think that most of them would eventually understand that their ideas were bigger and grander than they imagined; that they had put together a framework which could be a model for how people of vastly different backgrounds and beliefs could live together in a peaceful and prosperous society.

So unless your idea of a “great America” includes Jim Crow laws, and an imperialistic approach to the rest of the world, we never lost greatness, but from time to time (like now) we’ve lost sight of our best objectives, of our better selves and the best of our ideals.

[paperclipninja]

Younger post-ep ramble 6x09

After the very public outing of Liza’s real age last week, it was no surprise that this week’s Younger episode, ‘Millennial’s Next Top Model’, was all about the fallout. In true Younger style we were treated to some unexpected twists and turns, saw Kelsey take control at work and in her personal life and welcomed back my #1 mega-villain who I hate-love fiercely, Quinn Tyler.  This ep was written by Grant Sloss, who is responsible for a number of my favourite episodes and lot of my fave moments in the series and one thing I am always blown away by is his ability to craft character interactions in which the sentiment and emotion are really palpable (plus the one-liners are always top of the game) and we certainly saw a number of those this week.  Even though Liza is 100% responsible for the position she now finds herself in, my heart went out to her this whole episode and Kelsey, Charles and Diana’s show of solidarity right from the get-go pretty much sums up everything I love about this show. 

I need to say upfront that while I know this episode is all about Liza, it is hands down my favourite episode of Kelsey’s in the series. In a time of real pressure and stress, we see Kelsey step up in the role of publisher, starting with the damage control team meeting in her office. I have big feelings about this opening moment, in which Diana proves why she is an actual Queen who rises above past grievances and now offers unwavering support of Liza while continuing to have zero time for Zane’s bullshit (the ‘well mercifully they have a paywall now’ to Zane’s New York Magazine tidbit was all of the yes). We learn of the deal with Infinitely 21 (was it just me or did anyone else get heart flutters at the thought of Kelsey, Diana and Liza being their brilliant selves and brokering that arrangement? Just me? Cool) and I have spoken of my love for the way this show parodies real life things but this might take the cake. Alexa, what are synonyms for ‘forever’? I just adore that it is very clear that Kelsey is in charge and that Charles and Diana are offering up potential solutions (Diana’s ‘rest her a bit’ is so in character I cannot. Between that and Charles’ thoroughbred thighs from season 4 I fully expect her to have a couple of horses upstate somewhere called Charles and Liza by the end of this series), meanwhile Zane clearly still hasn’t caught on to the fact that these three are not going to throw Liza under a bus.

Enter Liza as he’s ending his tirade about her poisoning the company (and lbh, what he is saying isn’t actually ridiculous from a business p.o.v but he’s talking about the best friend, girlfriend and (old) maid of honour of the people in the room) and it’s awkward af and pretty awful and I want to climb through my screen, wrap Liza in a blanket and tell her it’s all going to be ok. Zane’s extreme over-estimation of his importance in Liza’s life continues when he tells her that what he’s saying can’t be personal because ‘I don’t know who you are’ (worth it for Charles’ ‘Zane’ reprimand though amirite) and as I said after last week’s episode, I can’t even count on one hand the number of interactions Zane and Liza have had so yes Zane, that is accurate and nothing to do with her age reveal. At least once he discovered that Kelsey has known about the lie he FINALLY has a reason to be hurt (maybe? Still a little fuzzy on this one) and look Zane saying they’re all insane might be somewhat accurate but everyone in that room loves Liza and I love all of them so I felt personally attacked tbh.

Keeping with the stellar guest star casting this season, Shelly Rozansky (played by Annaleigh Ashford) is every kind of irritating as brand rep of Infinitely 21. Kelsey and Liza’s meeting with her, in which Shelly explains that 'the tea’ is that their authentic brand cannot be associated with Millennial’s inauthentic one (I love the moral high ground re: brand but I’m pretty sure Millennial doesn’t have factory workers making less than a living wage so…) and this very real ramification of Liza’s lie paves the way for one of Liza’s best moments on the show to date.

Taking that tea of Shelly’s and throwing it in her face, Liza’s monologue that 'everyone is pretending to be younger’ reaches it’s climax with the zinger, 'Millennial is not an age, it’s an attitude and if you can’t sell that, we’ll go somewhere else’, and Kelsey’s look of pride, same girl SAME. One thing I have commented on in the past is that as a '26 year old’ Liza rarely, if ever, really stood up for herself. The few times we’ve seen her do so have been as the forty year old who takes no crap from anyone (David, Charles, Don) so I am here times a million for strong ass Liza to finally shed that guilt, know her worth and be able to show this side of herself now that the lie is no longer in play (I feel like Diana will dig this very much).

Turns out Shelly was quite into Liza’s feisty outburst too ('what you screamed at me today, justifiably, we’re still friends promise…it resonated’ = award winning line/delivery combo), as she calls to let Liza know they’re going to unfreeze the partnership and asks Liza to be the face (and legs) of Infinitely 21’s Spring campaign. This phone call takes place in a very delicious looking cupcake shop where Liza and Charles are playing cards with his daughters in an all round delightful family situation that gives us a glimpse of the Miller-Brooks dynamic and makes the point that after a pretty terrible day, Liza is grateful to have this in her life to counter all the drama. I am also pleased to see that Bianca and Nicole have been located (meanwhile Caitlin, Beth and all of Josh’s friends remain stuck in the Upside Down or have become bunker people or something equally ominous I fear).

I am very into a number of aspects of this entire scene: a) Charles eating candy just up and gets me for some reason. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but it’s akin to seeing him walking round barefoot, it confuses my brain but I’m pretty sure I like it; b) Bianca is clearly the fave child with her cute little, 'I won’t take your last bag of candy Liza’ (lol at Charles’ 'wow’ when Liza offers that up for the taking btw, he knows that’s a serious gamble) though I was 100% Nicole as a kid; c) those kids are so not sleeping after all that sugar so I hope they’re staying at Pauline’s, while Charles’ dad game is strong with the breakfast cupcakes and; d) Charles kissing Liza on the cheek as she takes Shelly’s call is so damn sweet (pun intended) and supportive and I love that Liza suggesting he go stand with the girls in case she starts crying again indicates she has been an open mess around him. It’s writing like this that I really appreciate when there is so much to fit into an episode, because it provides insight into the kind of relationship Liza and Charles have when there simply isn’t time to show it.

While Liza is drowning her sorrows in candy and cupcakes, Maggie is at the brilliantly cringy art exhibit, 'Masculinity Detox: A Softer Male Gaze’. Look I have to be honest, I was really happy to see Oded Fehr because he can play a skeeze with charm like no other, but I don’t know how I feel about this entire plot. I can only comment on it from a straight perspective, so I am aware that I’m not really in a position to express an opinion in relation to the impact of showing a gay character thinking it’s a good idea to sample a penis every ten years or so, but I certainly feel like it’s problematic. In relation to this character though, it is consistent with Maggie sleeping with Tommy Minetti (and his sister Tammy) as a result of Berlin’s 'Take my Breath Away’ (I don’t know why I remember that, I can’t remember what month it is yet this stuff is right there) and there is no denying that there were actual sparks between Maggie and Rafael in the loft, the palpable chemistry that Grant Sloss’ eps seem to draw out on full display. 

Another dimension of Maggie that I love seeing emerge in this ep is that while she is usually a total badass in absolute control, every now and then we see that her judgement of character is just way off. There was Montana, those weirdo art collectors who actually collect artists and now this guy. I love that there’s a side of her that gets a bit blinded by flattery so she thinks 'what the hell?’ and the inevitable 'oh I CAN-NOT with this bullshit’ that follows, usually very publicly - Exhibit A: Maggie countering dirtbag Rafael’s, 'I’ll change you mind, I’m a flipper’ with a literal flip of the restaurant table once she realises she was simply another conquest. She seems so unflappable that these reminders that she’s fallible (I legit sometimes forget she’s not an actual super hero) are really great and maintains the 'flawed human’ aspect this show does so well. Honestly, other than Liza in a full tracksuit (sweat clothes?? I don’t know what it is in American but that cute pink sweat top and sweatpants combo) thinking they were being robbed and very confused by what had happened (so were we all lbh and Kinsey 9 LOL), it was Maggie equating sex with a man to being suffocated by a damp rug that was the highlight of this entire storyline for me. So damn funny.

Diana continues to have Liza’s back as she heads to the photo-shoot to steer her away from anything pleather (I may need a spin off of these two or some kind of one off special episode that’s just an elaborate Diana/Liza adventure, maybe rescuing Caitlin and co. from the bunker??), but not before we catch Kelsey still slaying it as a boss as she leaves a voicemail for the increasingly petulant Zane. Hearing her so firm and sure of herself is brilliant and the friendship vibe between Diana and Kelsey is peaking and I am loving every bit of it. I am so glad we heard Diana asking Kelsey how she took the lie, while Diana was able to forgive and move forward it would have been strange if we didn’t see her still processing some of it this week. Plus it’s Diana who points out that Zane’s tantrum is not because Liza is who he is upset with (and THANK YOU Kelsey for pointing out that Liza and Zane hardly know each other). 

Rather than letting the whole Zane thing fester away, Kelsey continues to impressively show initiative by going to Zane’s and offering to cook dinner (which Zane knows is a lol and it’s not long before he’s cooking, so well played Kels) to give him the opportunity to ask anything he wants and she will answer honestly. Once a proper explanation of why Liza lied and why Kelsey kept it from him is given, Zane suddenly reverts back to being a rational human being which is a relief because he was fast becoming the worst (though his comment that they were all bad liars, what now?? Yes they be cray but their lying game is strong friend). I am not particularly invested in Kelsey and Zane as a pairing but I always appreciate good storytelling and writing, and revisiting the fact Zane told her he loved her in past tense was an example of both of these. In order for any kind of relationship between these two to progress believably this needed to be addressed and hearing Kelsey call Zane out on his shitty and manipulative behaviour was great, but even greater was seeing Kelsey drop her guard.

Opening up about being mad at herself too and that maybe if they were both more open about their feelings they wouldn’t have wasted so much time denying how they really felt; that she felt, no, feels, the same way, present tense; the resetting of the timer so she can finish what she was going to say instead of taking the option of backing out; the honest conversation…you know what all this is? Growth. Kelsey Lorraine Peters, I am just so damn proud of you because I am the first to admit that I was not sure this character could be redeemed for me after last season but here we are. The emotion for this whole scene, you could feel it and Zane’s, 'oh that timer was for food’ was fab, before he just casually drops in, ’ I love you, but stay out of my kitchen’. OK.  Smitten mode activated.

Meanwhile, Diana is no doubt enjoying Shelly’s disbelief that she and Liza are almost the same age about as much as a root canal and Lauren appears with a 'bowflex for your face’ to combat the 5 o'clock jowls. Side note: Lauren and Liza really need to have a convo asap because I definitely feel like Lauren is not ok with the lie since it’s been revealed. Scene of the ep goes to Charles walking into the trailer (with flowers for Liza *swoon*) while Diana is flapping that contraption, before he slowly backs away and I tell you, I was howling so hard I almost ruptured something. Liza’s hideous romper/scooter combo is just no on many levels, she clearly feels super unnatural and the photographer snapping Charles and Liza, who are not expecting to be photographed while her being made up to look so young obviously makes them look very far apart in age and a bit awks means that yes, the daddy/daughter dance vibe is strong, though that line made me vom in my mouth a little bit.

Between shoots our extremely excellent villain Quinn pays Liza a visit to show her support and her well-polling glasses. Her real talk that the good news about the publishing reaction to Liza’s lie is that 'eight blocks outside of midtown, nobody cares’, is what we were all thinking and is def to be filed under 'G’ for Gold. So naturally Quinn drags her into a completely self-serving NY1 interview (bless Liza for thinking they wanted to interview her) and I freaking love Quinn, she’s such a delicious character coz she’s awful and funny and pretty and a total smart ass. I stan.

Before we jump to the second part of the photo-shoot I have to say that the very obvious ploy to try and juxtapose Liza’s relationships with Charles and Josh felt like it was trying too hard and was mostly disappointing to me because it felt so forced. I want to be very clear that it has nothing to do with who I like Liza with romantically, it would have felt contrived regardless and was the only aspect of the episode that I felt could have been crafted with a little more nuance. Or maybe that was the point? Perhaps the obviousness was part of the humour of it *shrug emoji* 

Either way, Liza is looking pretty exhausted when Josh turns up at the bar photo-shoot for reasons (whose name I am betting is Lauren Heller because there is no way he would just turn up and it is 100% in her wheelhouse to send him along after seeing the expressions on her face at the earlier shoot. I feel like this will def come out at some point and that really this whole shoot is serving to bring about stuff in future eps) and he doesn’t get to explain why he is there because he’s teasing Liza about being a model and I really do love their banter. Shelly has no idea what’s happening but she likes it and is thirsting pretty hard as she shakes his hand and I enjoyed hearing Liza talk about Josh as patient zero, her 'would you correct him?’ as she squeezed his cheeks made me smile. I know there have been a LOT of feelings about this scene expressed on social media, but I found the reminiscing, as Josh talked about how when he first met Liza he thought she was smart and sexy and he wanted to keep talking to her, really sweet (and quickly countered by his joking about being really drunk and it being dark).  

I actually love this dynamic so much and if this show had moved these two properly into the friendzone I would be celebrating this as a pin-up example of how to show romantic-platonic relationship transition. I still may, because at this stage there is nothing to indicate that Liza is anything but committed to Charles and Josh gave no impression of pining for her IMO, but as an experienced TV connoisseur (aka obsessive tv show watcher) I am not naive enough to think that this interaction mightn’t be setting in motion a resurgence of the triangle. By the same token, I do not see any triangle in play at the moment and one thing this show does excel at is surprising us, so time will tell, but I am going to keep my faith in the writers to tell good, compelling stories that stay true to all the excellent characters and narratives they have in front of them, as they have done up until now.

While Liza’s colleagues aren’t going to throw her under a bus, Quinn is not only more than happy to, I’m pretty sure she’d drive the bus herself if it served her own self interest.  Quinn saying that she found out about Liza’s lie the week before in The New Yorker article, ooomph, did you feel that? It was the wind being knocked out of all of us, along with poor Liza, as Quinn counters Liza’s suggestion that she knew the truth before she invested on live TV. It was evident fairly quickly that Quinn was using the interview as a campaign platform and Liza’s expression as Quinn betrays her so publicly is yet another credit to Sutton Foster’s incredible talent.

My Kelsey love was brought home this week when she met Quinn following the NY1 interview. She is unrelenting in her backing of Liza and unwavering in her stance to Quinn when she is asks her to fire Liza. From the moment she arrives Kelsey is so kick ass, she sees every one of Quinn’s attempts to bully her into getting what she wants and Kelsey’s, 'please don’t minimise the strength I bring to this meeting’ was such a hell yes moment. There is something so satisfying about seeing Quinn in a position where she needs something from Kelsey and Kelsey standing so firm. Kelsey’s 'are we done here?’ before walking away was such a power move and the transition into her own office the next day, with Charles reassuring her that she did the right thing, was wonderful. Seeing these two as equals, talking business with a bit of a mentor/mentee dynamic is a dream. It was on my season 6 wish list and I can’t wait to see more of it.

It is upon discovering that Audrey Colbert’s manuscript delivery cheque bounced and that Diana just heard one of the Jennifer’s, the sloppy one from publicity (this line, I swear and also I need to meet her), say her direct deposit didn’t go through that we discover Quinn has thrown the ultimate tantrum and pulled her funding and Mercurennial is broke.

Poor Liza feels that it’s all her fault, I’m sure partly because of the way her colleagues turn and look at her when she walks in the office and partly because it is, but Charles continues to play the role of ultimate supportive partner as they stroll down the street after work, pointing out that Liza attracted Quinn to the company in the first place (and we ALL know it was not the company she was attracted to). I am simple folk and Charles saying he’s spoken for as he put his arm around her made me melt into a puddle and if anyone is feeling concerned about Liza’s level of besotted, watch this final scene as Charles reassures her that, 'you know what’s great about the worst thing happening? There’s no place to go but up. Only good things ahead’. I may have actually died from the sweetness of the entire thing and Liza does exactly what any self respecting person would in that situation and kisses him before they walk off hand in hand. To live happily ever after…jokes LOL I mean it’s television and it turns out Infinitely 21 has the most efficient marketing team on the planet because their campaign is launched and whattya know, it looks as though Liza and her ex will be plastered all over the city. 

File under 'O’ for OF COURSE.

[so-shiny-so-chrome]

Witness: Kalashnikorn

Creator name (AO3): Kalashnikorn

Creator name (Tumblr): Main-force-patrol

Link to creator works: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalashnikorn

Creator name (other platform- please specify): @Riccarterfans (twitter)

Q: Why the Mad Max Fandom?

A: My interest in Mad Max started early. I was maybe 12-14 when my mom picked it up on VHS at a garage sale because she had fond memories of the film when it came out (she saw it in theaters, which is rare for her). We’re both fond of cars and dystopian/apocalyptic stuff, so I easily connected with the movie and fell in love with WAY too many of the characters. So there was my weirdo self, in the early 2000s, loving MM1 but not really having a fandom to join. I had fun on my own, drawing stuff, making toys of the characters, writing doofy adolescent fanfic. You know, the works. But I did it in isolation, because I was a LONELY kid. Not just in terms of fandom, there were just never other kids around, or adults (other than my parents) around. Therefore, I spent most of my time online, and lost countless hours lurking on the MadMaxMovies.com forum. But I didn’t feel safe talking to people there, because the only other fans were guys my dad’s age. For years, if I had any kind of fandom-related wish that I’d give an arm to fulfill, it was that other girls and queer folks would embrace the MM series so I could finally share my excitement with people that would “get” me. Fast forward to 2015. Fury Road fulfilled that wish. I knew tumblr was my best chance at getting those friends I’d wanted for so long. It’s better than I’d ever dreamed. Mad Max Fandom, I love you! Special shoutout to @d--t, @crunkmouse, @sillyb0yblue, @sleepymayo, @lethalpr0tector, @legendofstraydog, @partyinvalhalla and @vanessa-geraldine-carlysle! 

Q: What do you think are some defining aspects of your work? Do you have a style? Recurrent themes?

A: I love to write first-person fic that delves into the darker aspects of the human psyche. How do we justify killing others? What impact does a hypermasculine culture have upon a man with depression and anxiety? Is violence really the key to surviving the apocalypse? I also enjoy writing about people seeking control or freedom, and wrestling with that they believe they need to do to achieve that. 

Q: What (if any) music do you listen to for help getting those creative juices flowing?

A: Since I do first person, I like something to get me into the head of the character I’m writing, so I make playlists for certain characters. 99% of the time, anymore, I’m writing as Roop, so on his playlist I’ve got a bunch of stuff quasi-hipster stuff that touches upon themes of isolation, anger, violence, and feelings of helplessness. There’s a bunch of indie rock, some seventies stuff, and A LOT OF PINK FLOYD. Oh, and there’s some Aussie rock in there too, of course. 

Q: What is your biggest challenge as a creator?

A: Finding the time to write! 

Q: Which character do you relate to the most, and how does that affect your approach to that character? Is someone else your favourite to portray? How has your understanding of these characters grown through portraying them?

A: Roop… And Roop.  And my understanding of him has absolutely grown through portraying him. He’s a character that’s in MM1 for like.. Ten minutes? And after the opening chase scene, he hardly has any lines. But Steve Millichamp does an excellent job portraying him with his posture, body language, etc. So I gleaned ideas from his non-verbal performance. Honestly, if you look at the number of times he makes a mopey face, it’s astounding. Other times, he looks at Fifi for guidance, the way a kid looks at a parent or teacher. He doesn’t seem to have any friends at work, partially due to his own personality. I could go on for hours. From all that, I extrapolated that he’s basically caught between childhood and adulthood, and he’s trying to sort out what it means to be a good cop and a good person. Sometimes those things aren’t congruent, and it tears him up because he’s a very type A, hardworking perfectionist. Growing up, he was told that he was gifted, smart, etc., and he feels like an imposter because he fixates on his shortcomings and mistakes. And when trying to live up to this impossibly high standard, he puts a lot of pressure on himself and struggles when he has to surrender or when he fails. There’s a ton more, but those are the highlights. The vast majority my MM/Roop fic stays offline. Pretty much all of it is irrelevant to the rest of the Mad Max universe, so there’s no point in posting it. It’s taken on a life of its own. Of course, some people have let me know that they dislike or disagree with my characterization of Roop. That’s fine. Nobody’s forcing them to read my fic.

Q: Do you ever self-insert, even accidentally?

A: Oh hell yes. And I’m completely shameless about it, because I don’t think the practice should be taboo or frowned upon. We wouldn’t shame an actor who tapped their lived experience to bring authenticity to a role, would we?  I think we should extend the same understanding to writers. Aside from being a great way to understand more about our selves, enjoy an escapist fantasy, or work through trauma, I think self-insertion can be a great way to evoke emotional authenticity in a story.

Q: Do you have any favourite relationships to portray? What interests you about them?

A: I pretty much stick to what I consider my strength, which is genfic. So I mostly stick to portraying platonic interactions, both friendly and unfriendly. I particularly like exploring how Roop interacts with/judges his co-workers. I’m also fond of writing about good moms who love and encourage their kids. Sometimes the mom is the viewpoint character, sometimes it’s the kid. Regardless, I like looking at how parental relationships can shape a person’s worldview.

Q: How does your work for the fandom change how you look at the source material?

A: My work makes me hyper-analyze MM1 and its novelization. I mostly write MM1 fic because I feel like we could have gotten a lot more mileage out of exploring MM1’s world, before society fully broke down and became the more fantastical wasteland we know and love in MM2, MM3, and MMFR. As much as I like the later worldbuilding stuff, I can really appreciate watching a civilization crumble in a grounded, slow-burning manner. 

Q: To break or not to break canon? Why?

A: Depends on what you mean by “break.” I think a lot purists would say that I break canon, so I’ll put it this way: I like to write stories where I add to canon without directly contradicting it. We’re never shown Roop’s home life, for instance. It’s free real estate! I do this because I just want MORE MM1. More Roop, more MFP, more Armalites, all of it. I don’t feel the need to change anything, just add more volume to it. That said, I love it when others break canon! I have a ton of fun reading AUs and alternate scenes. 

Q: Share some headcanons

A: GRAB A SEAT AND PUT YOUR SITTIN’ PANTS ON. Here we go: In addition to recruiting local police officers and other traditional recruiting strategies, the MFP uses conscription to fill out its ranks. Roop is one such draftee. Roop doesn’t spend any time with Charlie outside of work. He really just tries to minimize contact with the guy. If we do all my Roop headcanons, we’ll be here until the Miller completes MM5. Charlie wanted to go seminary school and become a priest, but was drafted. Losing his voice pretty much killed his dream of preaching. Fifi takes an interest in his men, but only so he can better manipulate them into staying/reenlisting. Bubba was a former MFP officer who went rogue once budget cuts and bureaucratic decisions made law enforcement abandon his rural hometown.

Q: Who are some works by other creators inside and outside of the fandom that have influenced your work?Inside the fandom, the old RP crowd and I bounced a lot of ideas off each other, and interacting with their muses helped Roop’s story grow by leaps and bounds (finger guns at @d--t’s OC, Renholder, @vanessa-geraldine-carlysle’s portrayal of Charlie, and @legendofstraydog’s OC, Syrup!) Outside the fandom, my biggest influences are Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Sam Esmail.

Q: Have you visited or do you plan to visit Australia, Wasteland Weekend, or other Mad Max place?

A: Not yet, but I'd love to go someday!

Q: Tell us about a current WIP or planned project

A: “Autotomy” is my big current WIP. It’s 7 chapters into its 9 or 10 chapter run (I’ve literally got chapter 8 open in another window as I’m writing this). It follows Roop immediately after MM1 ends. He sees the aftermath of Max’s rampage, and begins to question his own ideals. Then his morals are put to the test when an unexpected guest arrives at his home. The word “autotomy” describes cutting off a part of oneself to escape a greater threat. Think of a lizard that sheds its trapped tail to avoid being eaten. I’m using it in the literal and metaphorical sense. At the end of MM1, we see someone have to make a literal life-or-limb decision. And in this story, Roop has to decide whether or not to cut off the toxic ideology that has guided his actions.

Thank you @main-force-patrol @richardcarterfans some of your tags got lost in reformatting.  You may want to retag your peeps

[raguna-blade]

Getting Closer to actually daily rambling

So, I am, slowly, quite slowly, achingly slowly, working my way to doing a big ole analysis of Persona 5 Because that’s the exact kind of nerd I am but one thing has kind of stuck out to me in Persona 5 as a weird problem.

Like, in a game that starts out with a PRETTY FUCKING DIRE stance on sexualization of young women, what the fuck is going on with Ann?

LIke, it’s weird that the game starts off so strong on that front, and then from that point forward in regards to Ann drops the ball like a lead weight into a blackhole.

Seriously, the statement is made rather objectively and clearly, Don’t Sexualize the young lady and then...proceeds to kind of do that the entire game right? Unless I’m misremembering things rather badly which is quite possible.

And I got a little mini essay thing of notes hidden away elsewhere right now looking at it, but this one thought came to mind semi recently and well...

Ok, let’s talk about themes in the persona games, at least in the last three mainline ones alright? And specifically, we’re gonna talk about said themes in relation to Shadows which are of varying levels of importance throughout the series. Honestly, I should one day do the first couple of games to get a full picture of it but...

Still before we go further, Quick definition. Fans will know, unfan’s won’t, but either way I want to be clear of the definition I’m rolling with here. What the flip fuck is a Shadow? In series, a Shadow is basically an embodiment of well...You. It’s all the stuff you repress about yourself, and in series that’s pretty universally negative.

Thing is though, the thing about that, Shadows in Jungian Psych aren’t. As I understand it anyway, they’re not inherently negative. Shadows are basically just whatever you repress about yourself, good or bad. It’s whatever you refuse to acknowledge, either because of trauma, danger, ignorance, actual refusal, whatever. Anything and everything about yourself that you don’t ever want to deal with and you shove off into the negative space of your mind halls so you don’t have to deal with it ever again becomes a part of the Shadow.

Got it? Cool.

Now themes though. Persona 3 has a pretty cut and dry theme (more or less, and drawing from rather old memories at this point) involving Death, Mortality, and the fact that you are absolutely positively going to kick the fucking bucket one day so you better live up and be the best you you possibly can be of yourself. You see it in all of the Persona’s and how they evolve going through the game’s story line. Inevitably, as they have to deal with things that they’ve struggled with in a unvarnished and straightforward way, they have to integrate these new truths into themselves and basically become better people, more whole. And in doing so, their persona’s grow up and become stronger.

Now as far as shadows go, they never really make an appearance in the game formally (in the sense of specific shadows relevant to the characters themselves. You spend the entire game putting foot to shadowy ass, much to your detriment) EXCEPT FOR, Strega and those who use the drugs to control their personas. Which is weird, because they’re still personas right? Except that a Persona is EXPLICITLY a tamed shadow, yourself put under your control more or less, so for Strega and the other drug users, They haven’t actually done the proper actualization that the rest of SEES and them do to get their persona’s under their control. They haven’t exactly confronted themselves and overcome it, thus why, occasionally, their Persona Flip out and try to kill them because YOU STILL HAVEN’T GOTTEN THIS SHIT UNDER CONTROL YOU NINNIES.

Make sense? Cool, we move forward to 4.

Four has a rather explicit and subtle theme about reaching out to the truth and cutting through ignorance to find the heart of things, and as regards shadows and self, acknowledging your true self. The more you do it, the stronger your persona becomes etc etc, but unique here is that everyone (and I include MC here because I am DAMN certain that Teddie is his castoff shadow but that’s a whole other story) literally confronts their shadows before making them into their personas, and what we see universally is that their shadows are...Kind of raging assholes yes, but also none of them are exactly you know...EVIL. Kind of dickish, and playing up fears and such, but that’s kind of what happens when you don’t deal with your shadow. Let it fester and you start getting weird neuroses about things and start tearing yourself up about such minor things as you know, hating the town you live in, the distinct possibility that you’re nowhere near as straight as you thought you were, the disquieting thought that you’re basically whoring yourself out to make a living, or that you’ve got a distinct and actual problem with Gender In Regards to your desired profession and/or yourself.

You know. Minor Teen things.

But Inevitably, you confront yourself, you confront the situation, you integrate, and your shadow becomes your persona. Cool Story.

Now I’m going to pause here and mention something that only explicitly becomes a thing here in four and that is that Shadows are shown universally to have bright yellow GLEAMING eyes, and that’s going to become SILLY important in about 20 seconds.

SO WE MOVE ON TO PERSONA 5, with it’s themes of rebellion and freedom, and being your own authentic self all times everytime, anytime. Symbolized, rather explicitly, by the outfits each and every one of the Phantom Thieves wear when they enter a Palace.

Which is cool, but I hear you asking, but what of the shadows? WHAT OF THE SHADOWS MAN.

Where the fuck are they? I mean, yeah their persona but...

Hey.

Hey buddy.

You remember every single time the characters transform for the first time their eyes turn into that gleaming yellow color in their eye spaces?

Why it’s almost like they’re...Almost like they’re becoming their shadows?

Why yes, that is exactly what I think is happening here, because TO A MAN, every shadow summon we see has them saying some frankly OMINOUS SHIT. Like...One second let me just rip from the SMT Wiki right quick.

Listen to this shit Arsene Says when he’s summoned.

"What's the matter...? Are you simply going to watch? Are you forsaking him to save yourself? Death awaits him if you do nothing. Was your previous decision a mistake then? Very well...I have heeded your resolve. Vow to me. I am thou, thou art I...Thou who art willing to perform all sacrilegious acts for thine own justice! Call upon my name, and release thy rage! Show the strength of thy will to ascertain all on thine own, though thou be chained to Hell itself!" 

Now if Persona Are Shadows, an established fact in canon, the fact Arsene is saying this to Akira is KIND OF FUCKING CONCERNING, and as I realized like yesterday pretty explicitly foreshadows the bad end. Because well...Do what I want for my own justice? yeah no way that can go wrong it’s not like anyone else in the game is doing that no sirree.

But this is about Ann right? And her frankly kind of weird sexualization that’s going on throughout the game?

What’s Carmen Got to say?

"My... It's taken far too long. Tell me... Who is going to avenge her if you don't? Forgiving him was never the option... Such is the scream of the other you that dwells within... I am thou, thou art I... We can finally forge a contract... There you go... Nothing can be solved by restraining yourself. Understand? Then I'll gladly lend you my strength."

That’s...Actually relatively tame. Stop restraining yourself. Uh...ok. Guess that has nothing to-

WAIT A FUCKING SECOND WHO’S CARMEN?

Hey now, short story, Carmen is the heroine of the titular play, and she is a woman who is rather handily in control of her sexuality even when it ends up destroying her (admittedly, because two idiots couldn’t stop being you know...dumb. But anyway). Critical thing though, Carmen is basically a femme fatale, and as Ann says in her Social Link, those were always the kinds of characters that she wanted to be like. Those sexy, kind of devilish lady villains from kids cartoons and you know what, that’s pretty cool. That’s a level of absolute self confidence and such that cannot be denied I think so fair’s fair.

But uh...Have...have any of you seen Ann seduce anyone in the game? She’s....She’s really fucking bad at it guys. She’s actually, consistently awful at it. And yet, Ann is also consistently, continually, stated and shown to be the hot one of the group, such as it goes.

Which, fine, but still...Why the ball dro-

Have you seen her social link? The one where she more or less throughout finds that things she’s been doing on automatic require real genuine effort more than what she was doing? Like say, consistent diet and exercise, skin care, etc etc etc if she wants to be a model? Things she was absolutely not doing? Things she was, in fact, kind of really stunningly, amazingly ignorant of?

I...I almost feel...I almost feel like there’s a parallel here, something something...

Well, Their Shadowverse costumes are explicitly their idea of rebellion, and transforming into it, at least for the first time, has them apparently transforming however briefly into their shadows.

Which says to me, that functionally she, and the rest of the Phantom Thieves, are TRYING ON their shadows. That is to say, they are actively, knowingly, willingly embracing their Shadow Selves, in opposition to the previous groups who more or less suborn the shit out of their less repressed halves. And why wouldn’t they?

I didn’t bring up themes for no reason you know, ramble though this is. The Story is obssessed with being free, breaking the chains that bind you, and outright rebellion. How could they POSSIBLY keep on theme with that, if the first thing that happens upon awakening your persona you shove your shadow in a box and never talk about it again because Hey Y’all, it’s under control, no need to deal with that den of horrors and things I don’t want to think about.

Ann is, effectively, just as everyone else is, trying to directly integrate her shadow self into her. And for her, that involves sexuality rather explicitly. Which is probably even more of a problem for her (for all that it’s not explicitly brought up again ever by anyone else in the game because you know...Rape/Sexual Assault, whether threatened or actual is kind of stressing? Especially if it’s by someone who’s an authority figure and you were supposed to respect and was supposed to protect you? Just...Yeah.)

I mean I’m not an expert by any means, but holy fuck would I think repressing thoughts of myself being sexual in any way shape or form especially when I really wasn’t trying to be and up until that point wasn’t consciously aware of how I was would be absolutely understandable if not justified especially given proximity to the event.

But with that said, She, and the rest of the cast for all of their less than stellar attributes as expressed by their outfits and persona, are actively trying on those parts of themselves, rather explicitly being the version of themselves that they don’t feel they are, or don’t exactly want to be, and have hidden away for one reason or another.

And for Ann, that’s well...being a sexual person. Which notably, no one else at all seems to struggle with save perhaps Makoto but that is arguably a different story (her blanket lack of understanding of love does lean towards inexperience in relationships, which I absolutely get, but on the other hand, her first action upon awakening is to put on a full leather outfit, call herself queen, and immediately mount and ride her [female who pretended to be male] persona out of the mind bank ufo of a dude who kind of threatened making her with prostitution(not strictly in that order), not to mention that her Arcana Card has a lady checking out a questionably clothed model but uh...It’s a different sexual issue shall we say? Although, now that I think about it, does raise some curious questions if my Makoto is the other actual protag thing ever bears fruit.)

Now mind, this doesn’t exactly excuse the camera antics involved, that’s something else entirely, but otherwise, it’s actually pretty consistent from what I recall of it all, So you know...There’s that.

Still mostly a ramble, as there’s a lot missing here but still.

Gotta get into the habit if I’m gonna make a right and proper daily ramble yah?

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: They Call Me IDOL! Reliving BTS' Musical Journey Through IDOLiSH7

  One day as I was cruising the crunchy-catalog, I came across a little show called IDOLiSH7. I was in the market for a new show, and what I was presented with was not only a show with delightful characters and great music but a nostalgic reminder of the musical journey of one of my favorite k-pop groups ... yes, it's BTS! You know, TIME's Entertainer of the Year. Between a similar origin story, self-marketing, and team image, I couldn't help but draw comparisons to how this show reminded me of "International K-pop Sensation Sunshine Rainbow Traditional Transfer USB Hub Shrimp BTS," as well as see how the show highlights the entertainment industry when it comes to navigating trainee life, agencies, and debut.

  Who doesn't love an underdog story? IDOLiSH7 revolves around seven young, aspiring idols who train under the agency Takanashi Productions, and their manager, Tsumugi Takanashi, who is tasked with coaching these hard-working trainees to debut as a successful idol group.

From the beginning, it's very apparent Takanashi Productions is a small agency that doesn't have a lot of money. Aside from the rare times they splurge when celebrating special occasions, the idols are often supplied cheaper lunches. When it comes to promotion, it's not TV performances that are getting their name out there, but rather the idols themselves and their manager promoting their music and upcoming concerts around town by spreading the word, handing out flyers, and street performing. Because flyers and local concerts can only reach so many people, Tsumugi decides to later emphasize internet projects like IDOLiSH Night With You, a variety web show where IDOLiSH7 partakes in activities while also working on their approachability, accessibility, and connecting with their fans.

  When I look back at the early days of BTS, they too debuted under a small agency with limited money — especially when compared to the big three entertainment giants in South Korea: JYP, SM, and YG Entertainment. When getting started, BTS didn't have the same resources as other idol groups. While IDOLiSH7 ate cheaper lunches, BTS had to practice their singing in a basement and recorded songs for their first full album in a garage. When it came to promotion, Big Hit didn't have the ability to market the group widely, so BTS turned to the digital space, relying heavily on social media as a means to connect with fans. Their social presence included casual posts, vlogs, and later on, yup you guessed it, a well-produced — and very entertaining — variety show! While IDOLiSH7 has IDOLiSH Night With You, BTS has Run BTS, a variety show that also participates in activities like drama reenactments and cooking shows, allowing fans to feel connected and providing an approachable feel where ARMY are able to see the members being their honest selves.

  #방탄소년단 #BTS Debut Showcase photo update! ☞ (( http://t.co/43HAicnXiR )) pic.twitter.com/MddkYmQWRQ

— BTS_official (@bts_bighit) June 13, 2013

  Both the members of IDOLiSH7 and BTS were specifically selected — brought together in untraditional ways with a mixture of personalities and individual appeal that brings something special to the group when they are all together. In short, it's seven members with various personalities, skills, and goals. This connection seems VERY obvious, I get it. On the surface, it's super easy to make a connection between RM and Yamato by saying, "Oh well they're both the leader," or to compare Nagi and Jin because they're both visuals who also just so happen to have this youthful and fun personality with love for character mascots. But as I continued watching the series and saw the character development, I started to see a deeper connection beyond the surface and immediate similarities.

      BT21의 특별선물 전세계에 딱 하나뿐인 대형알제이 진 에디션 중고로 나오면 범인은 김석진 완성 소식 듣고 자다 일어나서 출근함 감사합니다BT21 pic.twitter.com/bdoJwjnx4G

— 방탄소년단 (@BTS_twt) July 17, 2020

  Not all of the IDOLiSH7 characters had the same reason for becoming an idol. Mitsuki — who brings this feeling of encouragement and positive energy — dreamed of becoming an idol and worked hard auditioning for years in the hope of signing with an agency to get their chance in the spotlight. Iori — whose personality is more logical — simply wanted to support and help fulfill another's dream. 

When I watched this development between Mitsuki and Iori unfold, I couldn't help but think of V and how he came to be a trainee at Big Hit, and later, a member of BTS. Like Iori, V initially had no intention of auditioning for an agency, but soon found himself as a trainee after he was encouraged to try out by an executive, (and getting permission from his dad) after being spotted at an audition, even though he was just there supporting someone who was trying out. While V and Iori entered into the industry by unconventional means, getting in is half the battle. Staying in is a whole other pressure that, as I was watching IDOLiSH7, I came to realize Riku and Suga know all too well.

  The entertainment industry is tough and often an uphill battle. Trainees work hard for years to get their shot at debuting and despite all that hard work, it's not guaranteed your career will be launched. Being let go is a harsh reality and trainees don't want to give the agencies any reason to cut them. This is why some trainees hide secrets that could affect their chances of debuting, and in IDOLiSH7, it's Riku who withholds knowledge about a certain condition. Luckily for Riku, he's surrounded by support from his fellow members and his manager who sees his potential and wants him to continue this journey.

    When the series revealed this aspect of Riku fairly early on, I recalled when Suga injured his shoulder while working a part-time delivery job to pay his tuition, and how he too kept that a secret from his agency in the fear of having his dreams of working in music cut short. When talking about his injury, Suga said he thought Big Hit would let him go if they knew about it, but that wasn't what happened. When Suga discussed his future with Big Hit and Bang Si-Hyuk, their support for him became apparent, and like Riku, Suga saw how Big Hit was willing to wait and they ended up paying for his tuition.

  via BANGTANTV

  IDOLiSH7 members Sogo and Tamaki are members of a subunit called MEZZO. Now, I won't go into detail about how MEZZO came about because you know, spoilers, BUT what struck me is that although these two characters perform as members of a subunit, their desire to perform with the rest of the group remains strong.

IDOLiSH7 is a series that really focuses on that team aspect. Tsumugi is a supportive manager who fights for the group's success, and the members are appreciative of her hard work and guidance. Although there are certain strategies Tsumugi wants to explore when it comes to getting this group off the ground, Tsumugi also hears the thoughts and opinions of the group, creating a trustworthy, well-balanced partnership and establishing a strong team image.

  Similarly, BTS is a group whose members partake in solo projects and perform in subunits. From mixtapes to music singles to performing songs as either the rap line or vocal line, the members of BTS are individuals with unique identities who express themselves creatively through many musical opportunities. Although BTS has the opportunity to express themselves creatively and create and collaborate on music as individuals, Big Hit and Bang Si-Hyuk also emphasize team image, and like IDOLiSH7, it's very clear BTS loves performing as a group, which is inspiring to see. 

  RM's playlist "mono." 10/23 -- pic.twitter.com/hPNhNMMHSw

— 방탄소년단 (@BTS_twt) October 20, 2018

#jhope <Chicken Noodle Soup (feat. Becky G)> MV Sketch More photos @ (https://t.co/FYK528MADp) pic.twitter.com/PbqCNSWB3w

— BTS_official (@bts_bighit) September 28, 2019

Agust D '대취타' Music Video Out Now (https://t.co/yed4lgwPrg)#AgustD #D_2 #대취타 #Daechwita

— BigHit Entertainment (@BigHitEnt) May 22, 2020

[#오늘의방탄] Good Morning America @GMA???? with #BTS -The Biggest Boy Band on the Planet- #BTSonGMA pic.twitter.com/dBho7QqGss

— BTS_official (@bts_bighit) September 26, 2018

  IDOLiSH7 intrigued me with its similar origin story to a music group I admire, but it hooked me with its well-balanced ensemble cast, upbeat music, and an authentic look at the entertainment industry. I clicked because of the connection, but I "jumped high" for Yamato, Mitsuki, Sogo, Nagi, Riku, Iori, and Tamaki, better known as IDOLiSH7!

  What are your thoughts on IDOLiSH7 and BTS? Let us know in the comments!

    Pro hero Veronica Valencia is an anime-loving hot sauce enthusiast! You can follow more of her work as a host, writer, and producer on Twitter and Instagram.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Veronica Valencia

[bcdaily]

hmm... I wanted to ask you something however, I have a problem with putting my thoughts into words, so please bear with me. Also, this is going to be a long ramble. For the past week, I've been creeping through your blog trying to distract myself from writing my thesis. And I stumbled upon an answered ask of yours where someone asked you about James and Liz. I don't remember details, but there was something that stuck with me. You wrote that the bond between them goes beyond anything romantic.

HA. This is the longest ask ever. Rest of it and answer under the cut...

then what's really the point of the relationship? Both James and Liz changed at least a bit since last year, so maybe now their relationship would work better. They just make more sense to me. They are more compatible with each other than anyone else. They have more in common, they have a history. No secrets or lies between them. No pretending. Just one mistake they've made. Maybe Lily would be better off without James too? Did you ever think that by creating Saunders and her relationship with James, you might have created a character that is more suited to be with him than Lily? I'm not saying that James wants to get back to her, he said so himself. And I believe him. And you. But there is a level of comfort and familiarity between them that might not be possible to recreate by him and Lily. This is not just James being loyal, but him being his truest self around her and if you're not comfortable.  Don't get me wrong I love them, but as hot and zingy their makeout sessions are, there's no real connection there. She didn't even like him two months ago, he does seem to try to use her to prove something to...a lot of people. There moments in the story when I'm not even sure I want them together, but you can't be faulted for my interpretation and feelings. This is really a long and way to elaborated way to ask .But! And it got me to think. Because damn. You're right. And most importantly as much as Liz is a bitch to Lily, she's right too. She does know him better. She was there for him and with him. She still is. And even when/if James spills all his secrets to Lily, bares his soul to her and cry his heart out and all that jazz. It will not be remotely close enough to the bond he has with Liz. It makes this thing he has with Lily a bit of a superficial.

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the relationship between Liz and James, and who James was when he was in that relationship. In no no no way was 6thyear!Tormented!James his “true self”. He was leagues far from his true self. Both James and Liz were. They’d both been through hellish times--James nearly lost his mother, Liz did lose hers, and the basis of their relationship stemmed from, “S/He’s someone who gets that, and is going to let me deal with it as destructively as possible.” It wasn’t one hellish mistake. That one hellish mistake was the straw that broke the camel’s back after months of just blind self-sabotaging, with each other as supporting cheerleaders. Sirius does explain that when he goes into all of it. James and Liz are not any bit of their authentic selves while they’re together. They’re the versions of themselves pushed to a brink, and grappling desperately for something to make it better (and looking in all the wrong places).

Is that sort of thing incredibly bonding? Yessir. You’re likely right that no matter how much or when James shares all his secrets, Lily isn’t ever going to be in them the way Liz was. But that’s...better? In a lot of ways? Who wants to rehash or value a point in time when you were one of the worst versions of yourself? Um, no one. And while James and Liz had reasons for them being the way they were, they were in no way good for each other, then or (I would argue) now. Liz still clearly has some lingering issues. James hasn’t found his way completely back to himself either. But a shared history does not a stable ground make. Two people may be able to come out of hell together and find their way back to each other on the other side...but James and Liz broke up in March. If there was anything--anything--truly romantically significant holding them together, they would have explored it by now, no? The point is that their relationship wasn’t about romance. Not really. And especially not for James.

James has a lot of baggage. Lily has a lot of baggage. The main point of contention in their relationship--and where the story leaves them off presently--is that all their individual baggage crashes and exacerbates the other’s. In attempting to work so hard to please the other, they make an utter hash of it all. Is that a small thing? Nooooope. But it doesn’t make them wrong for one another. Not if they can deal with it. That’s the question the story leaves us at now: can they deal with it?

I love Liz. I love James. But loving them together as a couple? Oooh, boy, no. Not from my view, anyway.

[clonerightsagenda]

I quit writing Homestuck meta a long time ago, but I guess the pre-4/13 fervor is infectious, because this popped into my head and wouldn’t go away. So here’s some musings on Homestuck, the ending, and its portrayal (or rather, erasure) of character identity and agency.  

Let’s rewind back several years and a few subsubacts, to the meteor and battleship crews’ not so triumphant arrival in the combined session. Two of the kids’ number have been mind-controlled and forced to work for the Empress. Two have been thrown in prison. One has been banished to the outer reaches of space. The rest have been divvied up and placed on various Lands, given different tasks to be completed for the Empress. Even in beating SBURB and winning the game they have no escape, because she intends to rule the new universe they create… until it spawns Lord English and is destroyed.

Things look bleak. And things look even bleaker when Game Over rolls around, and most of the cast gets exterminated. But wait! John Egbert, Heir of Breath and leader of the Beta session, has gotten his hands on a miraculous artifact supposedly useful as a weapon against Lord English. He now has the ability to travel throughout time and space and to change things that usually cannot be changed. While his friends get wiped out, he fights the “tyrannous author” figure who has been telling their story wrong and wins. Surely with his newfound abilities, he will set things right and lead them to freedom.

Except.  Not really.

Oh sure, John “saves the day”. He uses his retcon abilities to create a new timeline where everyone lives and wins the game. But is it a victory? And did everyone really live?

I’m going to argue that the ending of Homestuck is a tragedy where characters’ identities are frequently ignored or overwritten in order to serve the utilitarian aims of the narrative (and Skaia). I do not make this argument believing Hussie intended it. I think the dip in quality and coherency at the end of Homestuck was the product of an author who was tired of his project, had lost track of a bunch of plot points and characters, and just wanted to be finished. But I do think its treatment of identity is drastically different from the rest of the work and sends some disturbing messages about how “happy” that ending really is.

Alternate Selves

Dave and Davesprite. Vriska and (Vriska). Pre- and post-scratch. Bro, Dirk, Hal. Throughout the comic, we’re shown that alternate selves are different people. They may begin as the same when they split apart, but in not too long, their personalities diverge as part of lived experience. Bro is not Dirk is not Hal. They have certain base characteristics and sometimes experiences in common, but they are different people. Most members of the fandom would agree that it’s silly to suggest that they aren’t.

And yet the ending of Homestuck asks us to accept something very similar. The Game Over iterations of characters are wiped out, and a new set takes their place. While earlier parts of the comic train readers to view the loss of any one iteration as significant and the introduction of a new iteration as something different (Rose’s grief over losing her mother cannot be completely abated by the introduction of Roxy; Rose’s mother is still dead. And I suspect the fandom would not have been pleased if Dave had died forever and Davesprite had been anointed sole Dave survivor.) this asks them to do the opposite. Oh, sure, the characters you’ve been following for years are dead and never coming back. But here’s a new set!

Even more eerily, the characters themselves go along with it. Rose, who saw a version of Roxy die in front of her, is perfectly content to greet a new version. GO!Roxy’s arrival absolves Jane of the guilt of killing her best friend, and apparently the other Alphas aren’t at all perturbed that the Roxy joining them has a different set of memories. (I’m not sure anyone even tells Dirk, who was out in space for all of this.) John, who has a history of looking down on alternate selves (his entire fraught relationship with Davesprite versus the “real” Dave, his proclamation of friendship with “past Terezi”) apparently has no problem meeting up with a version of his sister who has no memories of the three years he spent with another version of her, and neither does she. The GO! survivors slot right into the retcon kids’ lives to fill some available gaps, even though earlier they would have been considered separate people by the story, not replacements.

Characterization

I’m not going to get into how nearly everyone’s character arc and development got dropped (or expound on why ‘real people don’t have arcs’ is nonsense) beyond that the majority of characters get sidelined, used as means to an end, and/or objectified, which also impedes their agency and identity. That’s another post. But what I will focus on is how one character who gets brought to the front of the stage exemplifies the destruction of identity for the sake of utility that this ending seems to prioritize. That character is Vriska Serket.

Now, Vriska is a lightning rod of fandom de88. But identity and the negotiation, suppression, or recreation of it has always been a big thing for her. Vriska emulates Mindfang and adopts many of her nastier behaviors on Alternia in order to survive their violent culture and her dangerous lusus. This is the explanation for a lot of her actions, but it doesn’t excuse them. Throughout the story, she frequently teeters on the edge of realizing and accepting that her behavior is wrong (GO!Vriska gets closest, although she never quite makes it). Retcon!Vriska, though, has had that spark of self-awareness snuffed. Puffed up with self-importance over having reality literally rewritten to save her life, she’s cruel for the sake of cruelty and forces everyone else to go along with her power gamer strategy regardless of whether it’s a good choice. When she encounters GO!Vriska, who we can presume is closer to what Vriska might have been without all these toxic influences, she lashes out at her and seems disgusted by who she has become (her more authentic self?). GO!Vriska then wanders off, encounters Terezi, and vanishes from the story entirely. Retcon!Vriska is the one who “defeats” (?) Lord English before vanishing as well. She is sold as the missing ingredient that leads to a victorious timeline – the version of Vriska who has rejected and lost her true identity under a warped façade, turning into the monster she always fronted as. Inspiring.

The Dreaming Dead

(EDIT) Since we just talked about Vriska, let’s talk about her pawns. The dreaming dead get jerked around a lot throughout the story, but the first time Vriska and Aranea steal their minds, it’s supposed to be messed up. The image of Scorpio signs hovering over their blank expressions is eerie, and John (the hero) points out it’s ethically dubious. Later, Sollux bails because the whole thing makes him “feel dirty”. The first time dreamers die at English’s hand, it’s portrayed as horrific both through the presentation in Caliborn: Enter itself and Dave talking later about how after witnessing “the screaming and the killing” he’s had a hard time sleeping. We even recognize some of the dreamers - the version of John killed hails from Davesprite’s timeline, and we even followed his time with Vriska briefly. These ghosts have identities. We know them.

In Collide, though, dreamers are dispatched in droves without fanfare. They’re simply a distraction Vriska uses until she can get English with the weapon (although why she needed a diversion I’m not sure, since she doesn’t exactly try to sneak up on him). They change hands between ‘leaders’ without ever having voices of their own, and their deaths have no impact. It’s just visual noise. The dead only matter to the extent that they can serve main characters’ aims and the narrative. 

Ultimate Selves

In the last handful of pages of the comic, Hussie introduces the concept of “ultimate selves” through Davepeta. Apparently combo sprites can remember all iterations of themselves (although they don’t particularly act like it, but whatever). From this perspective, they find differences of selves meaningless, and inform Jade that every self is important because they help create your ‘ultimate self’, which is a compilation of all selves into a sort of Platonic ideal. This means, they tell poor Jade, that she didn’t really miss out on three years with her friends! Her ultimate self had a great time. Why this is supposed to be a consolation to this Jade, who had a shitty time, I am not sure.

Again, this flies against the established differences between selves that earlier Homestuck prizes. Alt selves have different identities. They’re different people. Claiming the boundaries between them are meaningless erases that. The concept of an ultimate self makes sense from a reader’s perspective. We get to see all the different paths the characters go down. We get to look at different selves and use that information to inform our reading of the character or our grasp of some of their inherent qualities. But that doesn’t apply to the characters themselves. It’s cold comfort telling this Jade that another version of her didn’t suffer alone for three years. She did. If this were leading up to some massive memory merge between timelines then I might acknowledge it held water, but as it is… it reads like the attempts of an author to justify a bad decision.

We have whatever Terezi did in Remem8er (a beautiful flash, but no one can quite determine what it meant) but we don’t know whether she actually accomplished retrieving any memories because she never gets to talk about it. (The flash also implies that every death spawns a ghost, which is directly contrary to previously established game mechanics so I won’t really get into it, but that does further complicate the whole identity thing we have going on here.) And I’m not sure I buy Davepeta’s pep talk at face value, as I’ll expand on in the next section.  

Sprites Squared

Oh boy. If you’ve followed me much you know I hold a grudge against these entities for a whoooole bunch of reasons. But among other things, they’re an excellent example of lategame Homestuck’s identity destruction at work.

The combosprites take characters in pretty bad shape – struggling with depression and alcoholism (and Nepeta, but she seems mostly along for the ride. I mean, she doesn’t even get a Heart symbol as part of Dp’s outfit) – and perk them right up. Setting aside the fact that this is weirdly like the whole ‘smile away your problems’ shtick in Trickster mode, something even more sinister seems to be going on. Neither of them act all that much how you’d expect them to. Davepeta doesn’t talk much at all like either of their components besides surface level quirks and cat puns, imo. Jasprose, after Rose died lamenting that she didn’t tell Kanaya she loved her, rebounds at lightning speed. But let’s move right on over to the smoking gun, where Davepeta suggests dating Jasprose shouldn’t be off the table, even if some of their components are related. “The Dave part of me is saying no no no,” they say, “but that brain tantrum just cracks me up”.

This seems to imply that the components of the combosprites are in fact 1) separate 2) sentient and 3) not pleased. And were sprites ever true unions of personalities? We don’t see much of Erisol or Fefeta, but as soon as he’s distressed, ARquius’s two components start speaking separately, and based on Tavros’s comment that being Tavris wasn’t that bad versus Tavris screaming that they’re an abomination, that sounds like it was mostly Vriska talking.

So if Davepeta doesn’t sound much like either of their components, and at least one of those personalities is still independently yelling somewhere in their subconscious, who ARE they? I’m not sure, but I’d sure take their cheerful promotion of “ultimate selves” with a heaping pound or two of salt. (EDIT) Especially as I’ve argued elsewhere that it’s in Skaia’s best interests  to have a bunch of game victors complacent about the sacrifice of hordes of people for the Big Picture, and sprites are a mouthpiece for Skaia and the game. And even more so since the message of the combosprites’ “fixing” of their components’ emotional distress seems to be that the way to achieve happiness is to stop being you, much as the Game Over kids were only able to stop suffering by ceasing to exist at all.

Retconbound

Finally, let’s look at John’s finest moment, altering the timeline so that everyone lives. He’s Breath – communication, freedom, travel – given ultimate agency by the juju powers. But… he doesn’t get much agency. He’s following Terezi’s orders, written in blood (Blood, an aspect of bonds and binding). And he seems rather unconscious or uncaring of the effect he’s having. After picking up the ring, he drops by a set of meteor kids recently transported onto LOMAX and enjoys a touching reunion, saying hi and hugging them… and then teleports off to make that never happen. What was the point of that display of friendship? What even happened to that group of kids, in a timeline with no ring of life? We don’t know, and the narrative suggests we shouldn’t care, any more than John does as he blithely flies away. We’re racking up a bunch of characters and timelines who are merely there to serve the narrative’s latest whim or need, not because they’re important in themselves.

And here’s the kicker. That juju, that magic device that saves the day? It’s powered by four Beta kids’ souls trapped inside it for eternity. We don’t know what timeline they come from, or whether they ever escape. They are faceless, voiceless, identityless plot devices that give John the ability to do what he does. They’re the culmination of how this narrative treats its characters in the endgame – as tools to get to the last page. Skaia doesn’t care who walks through the door, as long as it has warm bodies to hatch the frog and keep its cycle going. Homestuck, it seems, doesn’t care which set of characters prevails as long as it can close the damn curtains at last.

And the thing is, you could have gone somewhere with this. After all, how many troll ghosts are in the bubbles? Thousands. We don’t follow their story and then watch them die, but a bunch of versions of those characters we know and care about died and festered in the furthest ring. There could have been a point made about how Skaia is happy to consign groups of children to the scrap bin if they don’t fulfill its aims, how horrifying the whole system is and how little regard it has for life. Current set of tools broken? Fixing them would take too long and they’re not useful now, so bin ‘em and start fresh. Someone has to win. Doesn’t matter who. A quote by Hussie occasionally makes the rounds talking about how many Marios die before the end of a game, but we only care about the one who wins. Maybe that’s what he was going for, but I think he missed the mark tonally. (EDIT) Not to mention that the story’s biggest villain is a Lord of Time who, besides losing most of his own identity beyond a love of destruction long ago, is all about forcing people onto the paths that serve him despite what might be better for them and who has a whole subplot where he actually attempts to rewrite their story with crappy, subpar imitations of every character. You could easily have made a connection there, but that would suggest the villain triumphed in the end. Elements of the final flash almost seem to point in that direction, but the story still tries to play things off as a victory.

Because in the end, I think the Homestuck ending sucked. Some people say it’s a psycheout and the Epilogue will have more, or reveal that it was written by Caliborn, or whatever. Guess we won’t know until it arrives. But as it all stands now, I think it sucked a lot. And I could write about the dropped character arcs or messed up plot points, but I honestly try not to talk too much about post retcon HS because it depresses me that something I was so fond of ended so terribly. I wouldn’t have been happy if it had ended as a blatant tragedy, but I could have at least respected it a little more. But this? It’s not just that many characters sidelined and ignored, that plenty of important plot points are ignored or forgotten, that some of the writing and pacing is just poorly done. After an entire comic’s worth of emphasizing the differences between iterations of individuals and the importance and value of those independent lives, characters are treated as interchangeable and expendable as long as they get the job done. Utilitarianism rules the day. That’s how to win the game, to get this hulking behemoth of a tale to limp to its final rest. And the story tries to play this as a happy ending, and that’s the worst bit of all.

[topmixtrends]

This essay is excerpted from The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, edited by Houman Barekat, David Winters, and Robert Barry, and out this month from OR Books.

¤

RECENTLY I WAS EMAILING with a friend about the new book by Geoff Dyer and I said:

Is that piece he wrote for the LRB about having a stroke in it? My take-home from that was a deep envy of the “twice-baked hazelnut croissants” he ate every day in LA. Come to think of it, I remember a croissant in the piece he wrote for Yoga too. I think it was almond. Maybe he really likes croissants.

A few emails before, my friend was telling me an anecdote about the French author, Michel Houellebecq, who is a regular visitor to a bar where his friend works. We speculated about Houellebecq’s tastes as evinced in his writing — which, like Dyer’s, is often autofictional — for “fancy French reds.” We wanted to know more about Houellebecq, about Dyer, and we combed their texts for clues, as though knowing were the point. Reading this way made us feel cool. It also made us feel a bit fake.

In 1967, the French theorist Roland Barthes said the author was dead, shifting the burden of textual meaning to the reader. “To give a text an author,” he wrote, “is to impose a limit on the text.” In What Is An Author (1969), often considered a response to Barthes’s work, the French theorist, Michel Foucault wrote: “The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” It was around that time that my parents, who loved books, bought vast numbers of cheap paperbacks, which were cheaper than they had ever been. My parents rarely saw even a jacket photo of these books’ authors who, until they died and their biographies were written, gave little or no account of their lives outside what could be deduced from within the limits of the texts they produced. Just as the idea of the author provided limits for the textual meaning, the texts provided limits within which these limiting author-figures could be constructed.

In 1967, it really was possible to be a “book lover.” What readers loved about books was sometimes the language, the story, but this very seldom occurred without their also loving the characters. To love a character could be, to paraphrase Barthes, a way of putting a limit on love. Characters could also be, after Foucault, the ideological figures by which one marks the manner in which we fear love’s proliferation. This love was accompanied by the anxiety of their knowledge that these people were fake.

¤

In 2007, the author Sheila Heti wrote, of her autofiction How Should a Person Be?: “Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just — I can’t do it.” The line between “fiction” and autobiography from the 20th and into the 21st century has acted as an increasingly sharply acknowledged focus for anxiety grouped around ideas of fakeness, and consequently of authenticity, and so of “virtue” in terms of moral good and quality of writing. But it is “fake” writing — the ability and intention to make up a “persona” — that has historically been seen as “good” writing. Autobiographical writing in fiction has been decried as “bad” writing, and an admission of autobiography as what identities a “fake” writer.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger thought autobiography had nothing to do with “good” writing. Of Aristotle he said: “He was born, he thought, he died. And all the rest is pure anecdote.” I cannot track down this quote to identify it with its speaker, as the story is itself anecdotal. It was told by Jacques Derrida in the film, Derrida (2002), a purely anecdotal biography that shows the French philosopher making some breakfast that is not a croissant, and choosing his teaching suits, but little of his work, other than what is revealed through his everyday activities. Jacques Derrida, author of Circumfession, an autobiography written in collaboration (“this book presupposes a contract”) with the scholar Geoffrey Bennington, and published in their jointly written book, Jacques Derrida (1999), valued autobiography in a writer’s work. In the biographical film, Derrida, he asked “Why have [philosophers] effaced their private lives from their work? Why do they never talk about personal things? I’m not saying someone should make a porn film about Hegel or Heidegger. I want to hear them talking about the part love plays in their lives.”

In 2012, Sheila Heti responded to critics who panned her book for directly discussing the part love (both friendly and erotic) plays in her life: “People who look at themselves in order to better look at the world — that is not narcissism. It is, and has always been, what people who make art do, and must do. You cannot do it blind. You cannot do it by looking at a toaster.” Heti implicitly accepts her critics’ point that a “narcissistic” author-position — presumably one that demands and relies on a legitimizing response from the reader — is both morally undesirable and produces “bad” writing. In 1948, Truman Capote published Other Voices, Other Rooms, a novel he only later recognized as autobiographical. “Rereading it now,” he said later in 1972, as related in an anecdote written by Gerald Clarke in his biography Capote (2013), “I find such self-deception unpardonable.” The autobiographical material about the part love played in Truman Capote’s life in Other Voices, Other Rooms was hidden in fiction and the author escaped accusations of “narcissism” exactly because his material was considered “immoral” enough for him to — by fictionalizing it — practice a deception on himself and, by extension, his reader. That the fictional and the immoral are close companions can be revealed only when fiction is “narcissistically” confessed to be autobiographical, at which point its writer encounters the double bind of having written not only “immorally” but “badly.”

While the potentially controversial autobiographical subject matter of Other Voices, Other Rooms went under the radar, Truman Capote’s “seductive” author photo appearing, unusually for the time, on the book’s jacket made him instantly recognizable, and caused, wrote his biographer Clarke, “uproar […] He had not foreseen that the picture would overshadow, and in some ways trivialize, the work it was promoting, transforming the real right thing into something that many dismissed as the product of a brilliant publicity campaign.” Clarke relates how Random House’s publicity posters for the book showed the photograph, with the strapline: “This is Truman Capote.”

Capote’s image became his acknowledged avatar, a communiqué from the author that bypassed his work. Another Clarke anecdote goes that, while Capote denied complicity with the campaign in public, he colluded with it enthusiastically in private. In The Words of Selves (2000), Denise Riley wrote: “[M]y self-definition can be a determined appeal for recognition […] In [some] sense it may well be a performative, like a first declaration of love.” Wikipedia puts the date of the “Affective Turn” — the rise of the study of affective theory and emotion in the humanities and sciences — also in the year 2000. In 2015, the star of approval on Twitter turned into the heart of affection. We are no longer giving prizes for writing: what we are giving is (and is for) something else.

I think my metaphor is falling in love. Wait, I didn’t mean metaphor, I meant métier: some kind of work. Of art.

¤

In 2016, I talked to the American poet Anne Boyer about the regular “suiciding” of her Twitter account. She had, she said, become addicted to self-destruction. She also spoke of the labor of accounting for yourself in writing. In Wages Against Housework (1975), Silvia Federici says:

Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the reduction of wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself.

Or she could have said:

Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which authors express in discussing wages for accounting for yourself stem from the reduction of wages for accounting for yourself to an object, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for accounting for yourself as an object rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself.

In 2016, an author undertakes the labor of self-accounting online. Of course it is possible to avoid self-accounting, just as it would have been possible for Capote, in 1948, to have written a novel that gave an open account of his life, but the demands of contemporary culture weigh against both. On social media authors fake themselves, drawing up accounts of themselves as digital objects, differently from the ways an author-figure can be constructed via the pages of a book. Dyer’s croissants made me and my friend feel cool as readers not only, perhaps, in the sense of being post-morally disengaged from the affective possibilities of the text (its characters, its language) but also in the McLuhanian sense, drawn into a critical game of constructing the author from a series of associated objects across different media, in this case crucially beyond the limits of the text. The game (as Federici says, the “perspective”) seemed the point.

An object in digital programming is not, as Federici puts it “a lump”: it works a bit more like an anecdote. It is a set of data, plus a method. A programmed object is its characteristics, plus how it is used: its data is encapsulated in its functions. Why call it an object at all, why fit it to a figure of speech? Well, programming is semantic. Names are grasping tools, bridging the gap between concept and code, and what they grasp is physical, or so it appears. The language of programming is one of metaphor: its “objects” correspond to things found in the real world. When we think of data + method as a “library,” or a “checkout,” it’s easier to understand, to maintain, to evolve the virtual, but this also means our behaviors are carried over from the meatspace. A programming “object” is a real white elephant in the room, a whatnot, a bibelot, a conversation piece: useless in itself until it demands our response. Its metaphors are social, familial, the stuff of private lives, or anecdote (as in the real world, “inheritance” give rise to a “hierarchy” — behaviors are carried across from one object to all its “relations”). Textual meaning is best located in the author-space into which can be put any number of possible anecdotes (a.k.a. digital objects) hinging on seemingly 3D anecdotal objects such as croissants, teaching suits, and fancy French reds. The burden of fakeness shifts to the reader. Now it is as possible to fall in love with a croissant as a book. And I mean the word “croissant.”

(In the meantime, I would like to read a novel about a toaster.)

¤

The Italian writer Elena Ferrante does not have an author photo. This is not the same as not having an author photo in 1947, or in 1967. It is her lack of photo that now invites anecdote. To have a biography means you must not account for yourself.

“The anecdote,” said the poet Anne Boyer, when I met her for the first time in the flesh and not on Twitter, in 2016, “resists authority.” Until late 2016, there were no anecdotes about Elena Ferrante, only about readers’ experiences of accounting for Elena Ferrante, including guesses as to her age, sex, nationality, inheritance, hierarchy, and familial and professional relations. Ferrrante was not a “dead” author as she had no public identity from which to “suicide” (the only contemporary option open), and so provided readers with no limit, no ability to mark their fear of love’s proliferation. Given few other objects to work with, readers often tried to identify her by traditional means, via her books, and the accounts she gave, in them, of her characters’ lives. This labor, shifted to the reader, is not in an appeal for recognition by the writer, but marks a corresponding desire, in the reader, to recognize. With books no longer a reliable holding zone for implicit autobiography, Ferrante’s refusal either to admit or hide her “narcissism” shifted the moral burden of creating meaning back to her readers who, once more, were left to attempt to mark their anxiety via the limits of their creation.

“They say it is love,” wrote Silvia Federici in Wages Against Housework. “We say it is unwaged work.”

¤

Joanna Walsh is a writer, literary journalist, and activist. Her latest books are Seed, and Worlds from the Word’s End.

The post Book Lovers: Literary Necrophilia in the 21st Century appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2AZeUPg

[mayalotuz-blog]

Lucid astral delta state

Today I will speak about lucid dreaming.  Another term for lucid dreaming is astral projection.  It occurred to me to share this topic after having an experience while in delta state. My mind experienced my dream as a waking experience,  as if in a profoundly meditative state.

In our dreams we are guided through patterns  by a higher intelligence.  What we see and do occurs entirely in our own mind  yet it is channeled from the divine universe.  As gravity flows through our system,  a condensation forms on our receptors,  condensation is lucid processing experiences.

I felt compelled to communicate about this topic since my dreams have done more than come from a place of anxiety, whimsical  interest.   The thematic messages  relayed to me during my dream time has been more complicated then my logical rational thinking brain can comprehend.

On a subtle level the morphing narratives with hidden intense agendas feature bitter and controlling characters revolving around my own destiny and preventing my personal evolution while leading me by the reins toward disempowerment. Complexity of the symbolisms delivered upon my vessel has led me to analyze deeper revelations upon my own understanding of reality.

My grandmother appeared before my eyes and revealed held at hands end, a magnificent pearl. Not any pearl.  This one was truly spectacular.  It was fabulous and it glowed like a thousand diamonds in the sun. I was in awe.

Yet it seemed so familiar to me.  It made me feel as if I were a character in some great play that had been going on conducted by identities larger than myself. It made me feel as if she was holding some sort of great powerful gem that signified a treasure important to who I was and  the identity our galaxy was embracing as it transformed like a butterfly in a cocoon undergoing metamorphosis.

It was teardrop-shaped and violet.  I reached out to my grandmother telling her that I recognized it.  It was entirely transparent and beyond the purple tint swirling mists drew me into it.  I was drawn into the heart of the pearl.  I was drawn into a smaller pearl that existed within that pearl I had been shown. Also I was being drawn into another story that was within this story, or some story.

Within my story was the story of a woman.  This woman was living in virginia.  They say I was highly forested and she was living along the coast. Whether she used to live along the coastline or she used to gather oysters or clams or whatever they were,  from an area that was farther away from where she resided,  the case was that one day she was eating clams or oysters or whatever they were.  I am certain that it was oysters because she bit into something like a mussels and almost swallowed a very valuable stone. She might have almost lost a tooth in the process or broken a tooth and swallowed that if not for that by the happenstance of good chance she instead found this very same pearl that I have been describing to which my grandmother to communicated to me about.

That in which you are fully convinced of or not, the same dream continued again many nights ago. This woman did not fully recognize or take at face value the uniqueness of the gem before  her eyes. It was almost like a parable of life or about it. We can allow ourselves to become rich or poor, constrained or otherwise. We can come to develop our sovereignty and independence but never independence of the source of creation which is love.

It wasn't at all what it appeared to be on the surface. This precious stone held so many stories of individuals; yet when you came to look at it, all of these stories meshed together. Each person was representative of the hair in this strand of braided fibers. Each character in its own place and time was symbolic of adversity that needed to be overcome in order to form a interconnected trellis of consciousness identifying as geometry.

The gem which the woman did not realize was actually priceless but she had not the eyes to see it and in fact almost accidentally choked upon this hiding pearl.  The lesson is that we can up see abundance on the table or we do not seek to create abundance because moreover we are simply focused on not choking or survivalism. We don't want to have to turn purple in the face because our lungs are incapable of taking in oxygen. We do not want to have to be afraid for our lives because we are having difficulty getting past the throat chakra and are worried someone will have to perform a tracheotomy upon me.

Here is where it got really confusing.  Not that it was really confusing but that it could be really confusing for some people trying to figure out what I'm talking about from here. The stone was a consciousness or an entity in and of itself. It represented a higher consciousness or something that was more unified or authentically true when identifying as an entity then we could ever do in our simple human shells. My grandmother brought me that stone so many nights ago so that I might dive into it in my mind with my heart and energy as if it were a pensieve and I were in a jk rowling novel.  Maybe I was in the half blood prince or the order of the phoenix and were having to learn occlumency in order to develop barriers so my enemies could not penetrate my own mind.

By learning to have sympathy for other people by walking in the shoes of other selves existing in parallel timelines, I was interfacing with a technology and advanced demonstrating a simple geometric way of connecting with the akashic record in some sort of form.  For all intents and purposes this is what it appeared to be like.

I thought that this pearl might be perhaps an amethyst or a sapphire. It was maybe  like the color of the dragon in eragon or glowing like some dragon egg. Potentially it would hatch a dragon at any moment that would develop a relationship with a boy intending on apprenticing some great magician formerly a dragon rider. Maybe that relationship would be symbolized by a tattoo. This was some sort of impermanent marked as if it had been painted or airbrushed on my henna. If the dragon died in the tattoo was severed but the mark was always branded into the skin or at least lingering, scarring the epidermis. It was an interdimensional sort of tattoo and if the physical body of the dragon where to perish then the mark would also fade into some sort of netherrealm.

Potentially this dragon or maybe it wasn't a dragon at all, was supposed to guard a princess or the gringotts bank. That's why end magic person harnessing the foul or something like in warcraft, also have income from another realm to this world with intent to conquer, was so god damn hell bent on pile driving his horde through the center lane of the empire end burning down villages in the process in order to obtain glowing mysterious eggs hiding out in a decrepit radon filled cellar. Perhaps right next to the old aging bottles and anne frank herself viciously compiling diary entries and attaching tables of contents, there were the biological weapons of mass destruction. They had been untraceable in the 2003 surge into afghanistan. They had tried to be reinserted into the timeline again in aleppo thanks to those brigands and their guns mounted to truck tops. Maybe it was some sort of evil spider or even whatsoever more, contained within the pearl. A leviathan or sea monster hiding out in some moat like an ancient crocodile, hybrid hapie-mermaid to be investing subterranean bases hundreds of miles beneath metropolitan sewers.

We can imagine the paradigm setting crack forming now. The cracks which would lead to nefertiti's secret chamber. We can imagine the land splitting apart as if the continents were being flooded. We can imagine the rio de janeiro, the amazon river and the nile all coming to form inland seas. We can imagine these great waters turning the tide. We see the waters coming to rush in like a golf.

Where is it that we can imagine that the rush is not that you are being pursued by king or pharaoh ramses ii entourage of imperialists? In a parody of black friday or november the 30th, the black gun powder barrel treason, or more appropriately cyber monday, metaphorically everyone is running all over amazon.Com. Can you see it?

Visualize the hatching of this pearl giving life to viable offspring. At the same time we could just imagine like a clap of lightning or a butterfly impression formatting upon the last quarantine bastion in the movie I am legend’s glass as the zombie beats its head to get in, to get an equal share of consciousness, the garden of eden turned into e. O. Wilson’s slaughterhouse, magnon sleeping with eve, the ascension up the tower of babel, end the frost dragon of the white walkers coming to destroy the wall of jon snow and the rest of the free world.

Perhaps a few hot air balloons and well-placed black powder weapons could be used to knock out the queen.  According to the edge of tomorrow in which events tend to repeat themselves according to the weather and a ferret or ermine are marmots are stoat, or now that I come to think about it where it's to be a hamster or a gerbil? No it must be a guinea pig. Oh wait I have finally come to the following: the answer that I am searching for is a pika. If the pika is able to see its shadow then this determines whether or not humanity will proceed to junction a whether humanity will be allocated to timstream b.

As we see, or perhaps we don't but the evidence is clearly in front of our own eyes, in the movies the butterfly effect with ashton kutcher or before I fall we find out that a sacrifice of a person will be necessary much like mother nature choosing to consume the father of the hero’s journey himself to satiate her serial killer ideations.

According to the 1st and 2nd laws of nonlinear gravitation, the advanced free energy devices

And gyros, which are to be found in principal in agartha under the atlantic ocean,  in the aliens versus predator requiem temples ( mesoamerican pyramid structures portrayed in the movie aliens versus predator 2001), or in the cavities underneath the giza plateau  whose opening are located directly underneath the monument called the sphinx.

In order to get to agartha we have to follow someone who has been there to agartha and not get stuck in through dinotopia along the way.  Admiral byrd was never able to get to the atlantic temples because he encountered saucers. These saucers were like upside down tea cup saucers and when they fired weapons upon them, they were equipped with inferior technology and spiritual disciplines which did not enable them to reflect the laser based weapons back at the source of firing. Another phenomenon was not a whirlpool forming or hurricane such as the intervention famously made known by the history channel and ancient aliens as the sinking of the spanish armada in the 1600s. The planes that were deployed off of the aircraft carriers in theory we're crashing into barriers and the ships could not get over the barrier made famous by movies such as the hunger games the truman show and the 13th floor.

Of course this is all entertaining propaganda that has been timed to be delivered and revealed or unveiled at precisely the right moment so as to steer the ship into the highest possible consciousness for the highest possible number. This is sort of a utilitarian concept regarding to eugenics and intelligence principles, manifesting and embodiment of timeline accepted reality that needs to be lived out or experienced by a particular body according to the clause of individuation. We say accepted reality because it is clear to realize or is becoming rapidly more apparent that for the past 75 years all people living here on this planet have been undergoing a reality that is rapidly eroding like sand on the beach in a tsunami or a granule of clay in an epic mudslide varying thousands of people in the andes.

According to this person, where they came from, clams grew this precious stone. This was most certainly a living conscious clam or effectually the heart of it. Oyster is sort of like a muscle. It is just a soft pliable tissue but it has strings sort of like spider-man's webbing that it uses to adhere to barnacles. It just rocks gently absorbing the energy of the atmosphere as it rises the tide in and out and up and down.

They say that godzilla have been around for a very long time perhaps thousands of years and you have to wonder whether they are saying it is due to the radiation these days that he's absorbing or the black sun itself. Perhaps he is just a gigantic zone of disruption like a city. I can see it now godzilla and king kong being portrayed as giants walking or rather monsters rolling down the street representing healer christ consciousness.

This green toxic material which was engineered by dr. Baxter at the shredder’s laboratory, probably loaded with nanites and sponsored by the vatican, might see to it in the ninja turtles number 3 that our infamous 5 mutants, disregarding esmeralda the conquistador in the hunchback of notre dame, as well as ephialtes, could live to be far older than any tortoise.

Playing off of what mouse said in the matrix that maybe the machines got it wrong and who are they to know what tasty wheat really tastes like, who are we besides being a another facet of biodiversity in the same evolving biosphere, to say that a frog, turtle, or a clown fish really lives to be 250 years old and not 250000 years old.

It's like value of money. Everyone is so worried about what 19.5 trillion dollars of debt looks like compared to what they said had gone missing to .6 trillion dollars or compared to the 26 trillion-dollar debt figure that was thrown around after the time of the audit of fort knox. Can you really compare money or stove any sort of consciousness to the twinkle that occurs in lovers eyes before the grounding or birth of a higher? Is it the love and the hormones and comfortability that usually leads to the conception and pregnancy? Maybe we can judge the value of a dollar based upon the billions of people that are living on the planet and how many trees there are and how much resources there are and what infrastructure is in place to be able to develop these commodities, to turn the raw material into commodities. Some people would have you believe that you can base your own value based upon a carbon footprint and if your carbon footprint is heavy then you are going to hell.

Oyster as a metabolic process and as it is growing it ingests many toxins and these toxins clump together and as they crystallize over thousands of years, they form a precious stone known as a string of pearls. Very similar to a mink pelt you only get pelt per mink.

This particular pearl is a type that is found along the canadian coastline and in texas where I currently am or at least my body as my astral self travels in the dream world. Strings of pearls were used for trading and bartering along routes and roads very similar to the silk roads found in eurasia.

I envision myself admiral of an armada peacefully sailing around the world to promote consciousness and growth without bullying anyone.  Not at dark fleet but I imagine that each pearl contains its own fleet within it and I am admiral of thousands and thousands of interconnected fleet called the consciousness of the stars.

What is the price of only a single pearl?  What is the price of a single diamond or what is the price of a single life of a mother? Is it wrong that sigmund freud and nietzsche are so popular for their therapeutic views of life that are so good for everyone, when we have self fulfilling prophecies, endless feedback loops, regarding child armies and blood diamonds in africa and oedipus complex.

Love is like a vessel in the middle of the bay. It is berthed not because it is tied but it is berthed because it is anchored. You can't force habitats to conform to ‘the only’ ideal standards of what level of intelligence or types of beings are driving the dialogue as to if and when they should transform into shopping malls or a parking lot.

It is so easy to take that leap from a parasite and to being something that understands geometry and beauty so that you can relay through the entire field how it is that humans could best act and to promote the most ideal conditions. What is it that you are most passionate about? Is it even possible for what is below to unite with your higher self due to the conditions experienced in this pervasive reality? It's kind of like shakespeare's play macbeth, or the game of thrones, in that in a competitive society there's no peace of mind except for the comfort that anybody could slit your throat while you sleep in order to take what you have to be deemed more intelligent or prudent by acting rather than surrendering to naive instincts which lead to enslavement.

If we are to move towards a more aesthetic based culture, a culture that can see the preventable situations that can be circumvented by incorporating wisdom into the social practices of day-to-day life, we see ourselves as interconnected, because the gravity that flows through the geometry which we share with all of our relations and ourselves, inherently binds us to a fabric structure that we can sense before we can interpret with the physical vessel.

The fighting's done in and amongst warlords is done to establish a harem. By capturing more women, there is more women to father children in the society. The act of fornication guides how we develop behavioral mechanisms used in the discernment process of discovering what is sin compared to a saint. Dualisms such as if we will get a piece of ass or a share of the pie prevent us from over writing the programs so that each of our strings might be interwoven.

By learning to control the emotional body sometimes we think that we need to suppress our emotional true selves in order to appease those that have such a significant impression within our direct sphere of influence. It is almost as if societal suppression is achieved through dark forces seeking to sabotage our relationship with our guides that lead us to our higher selves add spell out the way as the carpet is unrolled before us. We are all celebrities and stars in our own right and you don't have to be blinded by the strobe light of cameras in order to know that you are loved and worth respect.

Everyone is on a quest line adventure and they seek many high council's upon their journey in order to truly bear the ring.  Bearing the ring symbolizes that we are willing to align with our own north star or higher self frequencies coming through from the multiverses at any moment as opposed to pretending we're operating on scripts that have been regurgitated through the lines of history.

No of course developing a relationship with our highest cell is not impossible. It is just like being drawn into the pearl as I was drawn into the mists of my dream. Engagement comes from automatically going with the flow. Discerning what feels good for me at any particular moment and knowing in the now how there is a balance between being a steward of the earth and self-gratification.

The highest will, identities and symbolism comes from being a shepherd of mankind in ushering them and myself toward becoming or embodying a new golden race. We sometimes trip upon hurdles as we are going down the lane. These hurdles are the terrestrial energies embodied by lower versions of ourselves and other people upon our shared planet. We can't win until we are willing to all become winners and more than leave no child behind, we can't leave anyone behind because everyone is screaming violently to be able to freely be themselves without being persecuted.

There is so much persecution to go around and so little room to hide from that persecution. We can prove to ourselves that we are committed to our highest will but we need to search out help in order to do that and when we take assistance, we need to be prudent and cautious with the ways that the resonance effects our body.

That's because it assists with the growth process. This doesn't mean that it will feel good. Just because it feels good doesn't mean that it will assist with the evolution of the planet.

In commitment to a twin flame we find all relations with everyone to be enhanced because they are from interdimensional in nature.

Love, Love those around you. Love a single flower a single a rose a single person for, Love is the connectedness that we need to bind us together sometimes it is that twin flame that can activate that fire of love, Be open….

But primarily love yourself!!!!

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EXCLUSIVE: Jill Soloway on Patriarchy, Privilege and Flipping the Male Gaze

In 2014, Jill Soloway burst onto the digital TV landscape with Transparent on Amazon and quickly became an Emmy darling for its portrayal of a complicated Pfferman clan in transition. Now Soloway, who identifies as gender nonbinary and uses the pronoun “they,” is serving up a second helping of their particular brand of art house matriarchy in the messy, cerebral, hilarious series I Love Dick.

Based on the 1997 book of the same name by Chris Kraus, the story follows a married couple, Sylvere and Chris (played by Griffin Dune and Kathryn Hahn), as they move to Marfa, Texas, where the husband attends an art institute run by a cowboy named Dick. On its face, the show is about Chris falling in love with the idea of Dick (Kevin Bacon) and using that stolen sexual excitement to reinvigorate her marriage and artistic direction, swapping filmmaking for the performance art of writing lusty love letters to Dick, which she pastes all over town. In reality, I Love Dick depicts Dick himself as a muse and explores how that designation unravels him and sends him and the rest of the characters down a rabbit hole of feminism, the male gaze, sexuality and gender norms.

Unsurprisingly, the show was able to plumb those depths courtesy of an all-female writers’ room. “It’s about wanting to keep pure that rage [of growing up other] and not feel like it had to be softened to keep the peace of the room,” Soloway says of the show’s writing staff.

MORE: Kathryn Hahn on Her Most Important Working Relationship

Soloway was born and raised in Chicago and got their start on shows like The Steve Harvey Show, United States of Tara and Six Feet Under. At home, they say they were “lucky enough” to have one parent come out as transgender. That experience became the basis for their understanding of that community, the foundation for Transparent and the inspiration for their own nonbinary identification. Soloway says they spent years as a femme lesbian but eventually identified as butch; however, the weight of that box’s trappings was crushing. Now, they’ve carved out a new path as nonbinary.

“For me, I still have all the rage [of growing up other], but identifying as nonbinary really calms me because I don’t have to go, ‘This is my lot as a woman. F**k, this is what’s expected of me,’” Soloway explains while stressing that they’re not abandoning women.

If I Love Dick, another Emmy frontrunner, is any indication of Soloway’s feminist dedication and furthering their goal of toppling the patriarchy (also referenced in the name of their production company, Topple Productions), the plan is working. On the heels of the release of their newest Amazon hit, Soloway spoke to ET about flipping the male gaze, female empowerment and that pesky patriarchy.

EMMYS 2017: The Standout Performances of the Season

ET: At first, I Love Dick seems to be about unrequited love. Then I realized it’s about turning the male gaze on its ear, and how most men can’t handle that constant attention. It’s also about the male act of looking at women together, whether it’s in porn or just in the everyday.

Jill Soloway: In the pilot, when they’re at dinner and Dick and Sylvere are looking at Chris together and ask each other whether or not she’s a good filmmaker, this is the moment where Sylvere leaves her and joins Dick in this corroboration of male gaze. It is the inciting incident of the whole series, where she’s like, “I will not be the object of the male gaze. I am going to try to find my own way of seeing the world.” The truth is women are used as the conduit for men to be able to enjoy sexuality together.

How has your own identity played out in your work?

One of the things that’s been so enlightening has been moving from femme to butch. When I was more femme, it was my job to hold the beauty. Now that I’m butch and am dating more femme women, I’ve noticed that both men and other butch women want to see a picture of [the woman I’m dating]. They want us to talk about her together because images of hot girls are conduits for men to get together and talk about their desires and their worship of beauty. That’s one of the hardest things about the male gaze as you try to understand it, the ways you’re asked to participate without your consent.

I love when Sylvere asks Dick, “You don’t like being the muse?” and Dick replies, “It’s humiliating.” It reminded me of my high school dream to have a video where I’m fully clothed, wearing a turtleneck and fur coat, surrounded by nearly nude men -- as a reaction to music videos featuring nearly nude women dancing around fully clothed men.

You could see that male gaze back then; you could watch and feel that.

Do you think women can objectify themselves for monetary purposes instead of the male gaze?

If you monetize it, you own it -- and that could be anyone from a stripper to a Kardashian. These are people who are incredibly empowered, who recognize their body is a tool for empowerment. My problem is that empowerment comes one degree away from the male gaze, because you’re trying to get a man to do something by engaging their gaze. For me, the dream of being in the center of the video in the turtleneck is that you aren’t actually being looked at, you’re doing the looking. The fantasy for women, for me, is to be invisible and have my work investigated.

I can’t outrun the problem of people talking about my looks, but I do suffer from having spent years working on how I look as a way to feel powerful. Now I feel this tragic sense of “Oh, my God, I missed so many years of having a full mind.” I could’ve been becoming smarter and creating.

In I Love Dick, the women are speaking from positions of power, regardless of how they identify, their jobs or how much clothing they’re wearing. Did that come from the years you wasted on beauty, like, “Let me allow these women to be their full selves?”

Power is the word of the moment for me. It’s shorter than intersectionality or solidarity, and both words create questions about who stands for whom. We all want power; women want it, people of color want it, queer people want it, gender nonconforming people want it. We all want the power that comes with being the default subject, that’s why we’re full of rage. No man will ever understand what it feels like to grow up other, no white person will ever understand growing up as a person of color. There’s so much rage over not only wanting to be recognized as we are, but also who we would be had we been the original subject, and not been born into this other.

You hired an all-female writers’ room. What was the purpose of that, aside from creating an authentic female experience?

You’re always silently clocking your allies in whatever room you’re in, and the idea of what is “good story” or whether a story is “working” is the kind of thing that people who’ve had more time in the business might say. Like, “Alright, it’s all well and good that we’re just having fun here, but as a person with experience/the guy -- and I’m not criticizing what’s going on -- I just want to make sure you guys are getting this right.” In doing so, cisgender men might be unconsciously advocating for what makes them feel comfortable, and that would be versions of the male gaze. That could damage a blossoming possibility when you have a group of people in a room together who’ve never had the opportunity to do that before. It’s exactly the same thing with people of color. I’m sure if Donald Glover had an all-black writers’ room…

He did for Atlanta; I was just going to say the same thing.

What if someone would’ve said to him, “You need to have just one white person in there. It’s their job to rein you in because you’re going be too black!” Or, for a women’s writers’ room, there was a guy in there like, “Too much period blood!” You don’t even want that physics, so that choice was to create a room without the male gaze.

I think that space made deeper women-centered scenes possible. Like when the lesbian character, Devon, calls out the woman she’s dating, Toby, while the latter is completely naked for a performance piece that Devon thinks is exploitive. It was a rabbit hole of white feminism versus brown feminism, art for art’s sake versus creating something purposeful and a conversation between lovers.

Thank you for seeing that! I think women viewers do go down a rabbit hole with our show. One woman’s empowerment is another people’s disempowerment, and how does that get talked about in a story between two people who are falling in or out of love? So much fun for a feminist intellectual to think about!

Circling back to the man as muse, what kind of direction did you give Kevin Bacon in playing Dick?

I don’t really get too micro when it comes to a scene, I’m more creating a space for everybody to let loose. I’ll talk to Kevin about a larger emotion he’s playing and he takes care of the pain and sorrow. I do think that who Kevin Bacon is, the six degrees of separation, means something. In looking for real connections, he probably felt a little about Hollywood the way Dick feels about Marfa.

How does being nonbinary affect your work and topple the patriarchy, your goal and the name of your production company?

Luckily, I have the privilege to try being femme, butch or nonbinary. I don’t want to be frivolous about that.

You don’t want to be privileged about your privilege?

No, I don’t want to be privileged about my privilege, because there are so many people who would like to walk into another experience and for whatever reason, they can’t. I’ve been able to create space in my life to experiment, and my parent coming out was a big deal because it allowed me to notice, besides my age and where I am in life, “Where and how do I want to be today?” It’s a very strange thought experiment that feels like a little bit like your turtleneck: I’m not what you see. I’m not even the other thing, like, “Oh, Jill’s a guy now and she’s failing at that!” I don’t want to be failing at my butchness either! I just want to be. The nonbinary thing is great because I just step out of all of the questions of what I am.

I don’t hassle people about pronouns because I know how hard it is. But when people get my pronoun right, it’s such a lovely feeling to not say, “Women are this” or “She is this” or even “Butch is this, masculine is this.” I’m neither, I’m both, I’m constantly changing. It really removes me from my own self-talk of failure, a lot of which was gender.

So, the nonbinary identity itself is fighting the patriarchy by not subscribing to a label.

Yeah, it is all off my table.

What does toppling the patriarchy look like for you?

If Donald Trump could dream of being president, we can dream of anything. Things are happening so quickly; I couldn’t have even imagined I Love Dick five years ago, let alone that it would be on television. I have to believe that there could be a world where the shared values that are currently thought of as religious values, like God, actually become shared values like love and justice. I think most people prefer peace, but because of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism or any of the -isms, we’re where we are right now.

A toppled world means that the kind of masculine, war-mongering, dominance-obsessed men that have their hold on our planet would evolve in a positive way. To me, believing that I can change the world through culture, television, books or movies, that’s how I get out of bed. I don’t see it happening in my lifetime, but I have an 8-year-old, and this could be his future.

This interview has been edited and condensed.