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babyybitchhh · 4 years

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Thotty Thursday: Part One

There ain’t no goddamn way I could start something like this and not come out swinging with the top dog. The heavy weight champ. My personal creme de la creme. The character who started it all and made me what I am today. That’s right, I blame all this thotty shit on this demon man right here.

“Holy blast from the past, Batman!” You cry out in dismay. “What is this, some 80’s shit!?”

I’ll have you know Yu Yu Hakusho is all 90’s, baby. Just like me. 😤

So let me tell y’all a little bit about my number one husbando. He’s perfect, for starters. Like, I’d challenge you to name one thing Hiei ever did wrong, ever.

You know what, never mind. Let’s not get into that right now.

Okay, I admit my dude has a bit of a harried past and he’s not ever always the nicest but that gives him depth. Range. He CAN go deep and he WILL.

If you catch my drift 👀

So when this bite sized snack was first introduced in the narrative he was all bad. Like bad bad. At just a glance, there was nothing good or redeeming about him and it wasn’t until later that we find out he’s something of a sympathetic antihero.

His moral alliances didn’t matter to eleven year old me one bit tho, this shit had me straight up fantasizing about becoming a ruthless thief and running off to the demon world with the man who literally knocked me on my ass

And when I say literally I don’t mean figurative, haha ironic literally. I mean literally literally

PHEW please believe that I would betray all y’all for even a single night with Hiei, on god 😩

Did i mention he’s a demon yet?

Yeah, in addition to having the super amazing ability to control fire at will, he also has a very ... eye catching transformation. 👁👁

Now, I’ve seen even some die hard fangirls reject this form but it really doesn’t bother me. I actually rather like that particular shade of green and I don’t think it detracts from his good looks - if anything it just adds another layer to the evil mysterious bad boy vibe he’s got going on.

You think I wouldn’t throw my pussy in a circle for him just because he’s covered in eyeballs??

Hah

Think again

However I will say having sex in this form would probably be an awkward affair all around. Not only because having that many eyes impassively staring me down might cause a serious case of stage fright, but also because ... those peepers on his chest bout to get poked out by my titties! 😳

I mean, if he’s into that I won’t put up much of a fight

But I personally can’t imagine having a nipple touch your cornea being a very pleasant experience

Anyway

Can we talk about those gorgeous ruby red eyes on his perfect little face for one gotdamn second please???

I admit, I am weak for a man with red eyes and that’s 100% Hiei’s fault

The only ones that even come close to being as captivating and intense are Senkuu’s (Dr. Stone, for those of you not in the know) but even his don’t hit QUITE as hard as Hiei’s

Can you even begin to imagine how it would feel to have him staring you down in a completely casual setting let alone an intimate one?? 😳

Mark me down as scared AND horny

I especially like how one minute they’ll be sharp, pinpoint dots that just tell you in no uncertain terms he’s out for blood

Which he usually is but that is neither here nor there

And then the next moment, his eyes are huge and taking up half his face

It seems like his eyes are at their biggest and most vulnerable looking whenever his sister is involved (which, for the sake of spoilers on a 25+ year old series I will not go into too much) or when he’s particularly eager about something (usually fighting) OR when someone inexplicably manages to appeal to his emotions. And trust me when I say that is a lot easier said than done

Hiei is one of the toughest eggs to crack in my harem but I like the challenge 😤

He’s not all fire and brimstone (mostly but not entirely) and I know he can lay the pipe like a goddamn CHAMP

I know his dick big, I know it is

That’s why he’s so short. All of his nutritional intake went straight to his cock but I can tell just by looking that he’s slanging some grade A meat. Do not fight me on this. I will throw hands to defend his honor and that is not a joke

I’m a strong enough bitch to stand by him even when he’s getting roasted by the squad. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.

Ofc that’s not to say he’d just stand there and let them drag him, but the point here is that I’ve got his back and that’s what counts

“But he looks like Vegeta 2.0” you reasonably point out and to that I say “what about it?”

I mean. Can Vegeta do THIS?

I’m just joking, I was a thirsty little slut over Vegeta too

Short king solidarity ✊😤

His height doesn’t even bother me fr fr tho because 1: I’m about 90% sure he’s still growing by demon standards and his sister is also quite short whereas their mother was a normal height 2: I’m also short so it’s not like I’d be towering over him anyway and 3: some men like taking a girl who’s bigger than them and bending her to their will

And when I say he’s an unchallenged top ... Lord have mercy 🥵

Every encounter with him in or out the bed would be a challenge. Every 👏 single 👏one 👏

But I believe that with enough patience it’s totally possible to chip away at his mile wide walls and I know for a fact he’d be a great (if not slightly yandereish) lover

Protective in a standoffish way, territorial, demanding, strong enough to carry you in one arm while he slashes demons in half with the other, intensely intimate, just the right amount of Demon Crazy to keep the relationship exciting 🤪

Note I said Demon Crazy and not regular ol’ crazy. There IS a difference

Just whatever you do, don’t let this big eyed baby face fool you

Hiei is not the type to share his toys or let them question who’s in charge. He lacks social finesse in a general sense and his interpersonal skills are ... toeing the negative, to say the least

Plus he’s a demon so his idea of courtship is going to be drastically different from mine. If he decides he wants it then by god he’s gonna take it and I respect that

Tbh I’d anticipate some low key stalking from this dude - the kind that you don’t even notice until it’s much too late and I don’t mean he’d be lingering around every corner or conveniently there each time you turned around. No, that’s too basic for a man like this

Tbh you wouldn’t even know he was there unless he WANTED you to know

You see that third eye he’s sporting?

It gives him telepathic abilities

That’s right. In addition to controlling fire and having a multi eyed form that should appeal to any self respecting monster fucker, he can ALSO read minds

Y’all

If this man had any idea what I was thinking about him ... 😰

He’d probably kill me for the insolence, let’s not lie

But this is MY romantic fantasy and I say fuck that

He’d be able to keep tabs on you at all hours of the day, any time, anywhere - you wouldn’t even be safe from his ever watchful eye(s) while sleeping and though it’s not an ability canon touched on I see absolutely no reason why he couldn’t telepathically slip into your dreams

A nighttime visit from Hiei? Preferably a horny one? 👀 sign me the fuck up

Imagine peacefully sawing some logs and fucking around in dreamland when he suddenly appears before you acting like your very presence is a bother

Then why are you here?? I didn’t ask you to come into my dreams, thank you very much

He responds in kind and his pointed jabs just get you more and more riled up until he finally pounces

Absolutely demolishes the pussy

I’m talking put that kitty in the grave

Then when you wake up the first thing you notice is how slick you are between the thighs

“Must’ve been a crazy dream” you mutter like the dummy thicc bitch you are

But when you look down at your sore wrist, you can see faint, blooming splotches in the shape of fingertips and you realize it was all real

A demon fucked you in your sleep and you enjoyed the hell out of it

“I wonder if he accepts frequent flyer miles” 🤔

How he finna grab the pussy

Like, hello??? Am I the only one thinking about this stuff??

Yes?

Okay then, damn. Guess I’ll just crawl back into my 90’s, smells like teen spirit cave

It’s quite comfy, actually, thanks in no small part to Hiei keeping it nice and toasty for me

The dick helps too

#thotty thursday #hiei #yu yu hakusho

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umamunandar · 4 years

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Review #4: The Illuminae Files (4.8/5)

So by this point, you should be familiar to my taste in movies and books. I mean with the lack of romance and teen fiction you see and the excessive amount of fantasy and sci-fi reviews I’ve written, you might realise that I have a thing for dystopian, sci-fi, and apocalyptic stuff.

If you’re also a dystopian geek like me, then you must have heard of Illuminae, the novel written by Amie Faufman and Jay Kristoff, which then got illustrated by Marie Lu, author of Warcross and Legend for the second book, Gemina. You might’ve heard of it’s great story, or maybe, like me, you were first introduced to its unique writing format

and i mean very unique format. (Every part I just showed belongs completely to Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, of course I’m just out here throwing these pages to you so you know what I’m talking about)

Most books get very famous quickly because the themes they offer in the books, how great the storyline is. Some are popular only because the author that wrote it has a reputation for writing super famous and the readers just want to read more of their works.

But a book famous for its writing format is unheard of for me. Illuminae was the first what, novel (?) that succeeded in telling the readers a story about the destruction of a colony, and a galactic adventure just from files they retrieved from the computers used by the characters for data processing, storage, communication, and everything else you can do with a computer by the year 2575.

The year is 2575, and two rival mega-corporations are at war over a planet that’s a little more than an ice-covered speck. Now, with enemy fire raining down on them, exes Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to escape on the evacuating fleet.

But their problems are just the beginning. The fleet’s AI has gone crazy, a deadly plague has broken out on one of the ships, and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on.

As Kady hacks into a tangled web of data to find the truth, it’s clear only one person can help her: the ex boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again.

First, let me start with a short recap of my own.

29th of January, 2575, Kady Grant had broken up with her boyfriend, Ezra Mason. But later that day, her planet’s mining company’s rival company decided that it was a great day to attack the planet (Kerenza IV) and its inhabitants. Kady and Ezra managed to escape to two of the three ships used to transport and evacuate the Kerenza refugees. Ezra was taken to the Alexander, as he was badly injured, and Kady was taken to the Hypatia, a science vessel that happened to be orbiting Kerenza during the attack. The last ship was the Copernicus.

Everyone on board were tested to see their potential, since the fleet were understaffed. Ezra passed as a pilot, and Kady, bless her genius mind, decided that it was best to not show he full potential during the test. Not receiving the role of anything, she befriended a CommTech from the Hypatia, and became a hacker, determined to just find out what’s going on. Nobody who knew the truth would tell anyone the truth and Kady was only eager to find out.

The story was told by emails, chat boxes, documents, security camera footage, even information from the Alexander’s AI, which was pretty much messed up due to the attack at Kerenza, but was still functioning enough to tell a story, nevertheless. The second book got an illustrator, Marie Lu, the same person who wrote Warcross and Legend, and the content source didn’t just come from computers anymore. By Gemina, the information that led readers through the story was also gained from Hanna Donnelly—the story’s female lead’s personal journal, hand drawn, not soft copy from a computer.

Personally, Illuminae was the first story that brought me to loving sci-fi slash dystopian slash apocalyptic novels. I was always a fantasy geek, thanks to Harry Potter and Wildwood. Kingdoms, princesses in pretty dresses, or magic, they were always closer to me than spaceships, AI, and intergalactic war, but Illuminae completely changed my mind. I was even surprised when I found myself buying a handful of dystopian novels during a book fair the other day. They were just really fun to read.

Oh but you know what else is fun? Guessing which cuss word the characters in the books used. Sure, the story was told through files, which means some were formal documents like reports and formal emails, but remember that there are also chat boxes and the informal emails sent from one refugee to the other as a form of communication to ask how they were doing and whatnot. Cussing and slang were used constantly in the book, but because they were compiled and as I quote, ‘sent’ as a formal file, the cursing had to be censored and blocked. It was still fun to guess the words they used anyway.

Writing this review, I had already read Gemina, and Obsidio was being shipped to my house, so yes, I really love this trilogy.

I’d love to get into more depth about the two books, but since nearly every page is filled with action, I can’t really write a spoiler-free review with it so let’s get to the positive points and negative points of the book,

Pros:

The book, as we all know and as I have mentioned for the fifth time now is formatted like emails, chat boxes, documents, and literally every other thing you can extract from a computer by the year 2575. Despite all three books being thicker than 500 pages, some of the pages aren’t even full pages, and you can read them in under one minute, even for a slow reader. Some examples:

Countdown pages

Those pages when something dramatic happens, like the description of missiles travelling through the space between two ships

In Gemina (and possibly Obsidio), some pages from Hanna Donnelly’s personal journal were incorporated in the files, the second Illuminae Files. But unlike Kady who prefers writing (or typing) her thoughts and securing them with a handful of layers of security and passwords, Hanna draws hers, and they didn’t take that long to read either.

‘The pattern is always the same’

‘White light’

And everything else

I know Illuminae was my first ever sci-fi dystopian novel, but I’ve consulted a few people on the matter, and I found out that the story the series offered is a good one on its own, even without the dramatic effect. So yes, one of the pros is that it actually offers a good story. You never know what’s going to happen next. It’s like say, you just got over a dramatic point in one of the books, and suddenly the document in the next page is a bloody medical report that tells you something is up.

Another plus point would be how the events in the books are so well described, despite there being no actual description done in the books except for those surveillance camera transcripts. We don’t even know Kady and Ezra’s specific physical appearances, just the fact that Kady has pink hair and Ezra is a pretty much a teen fiction novel average golden boy, unlike Hanna and Nik who’s illustrations we see from again, Hanna’s journal in Gemina.

Cons:

We should all put this fact in consideration, that the book is not meant to tell a story from a formal standpoint. Like I said, cussing is used in nearly every page of the book, though it’s censored. Mildly explicit jokes and references were also used in the book, though no actual harm is done. Then again, I’m not against this or anything, in fact, it brings an essence to the story, but some people (*cough* boomers*cough*) might not be comfortable with it.

Personally, I’m not fond of thick books. Four hundred pages is a workload for me. I was suffering throughout the Order of the Phoenix. Don’t like thick books? Illuminae isn’t for you. All three books had like, five hundred or so pages. I know I said it was told through a less boring format for a novel, and the story is good, but you still have to read. It’s a relief I made it through both Illuminae and Gemina, there’s a possibility I might drop Obsidio and leave it to rot before reaching the three-hundredth page. Though, there is a solution to this. You can buy the audiobook instead. I heard they did a good job with it, with great casts too.

Aaand, I think that’s about it. There’s really not much I can say about the story without giving away spoilers, and since I’m dedicated to make this a spoiler-free blog, I think it’s best you buy the book if you’re interested in the story of Kady, Ezra, Hanna, Nik, and two more characters I’m not supposed to tell you about because it’s technically a spoiler (?) from Obsidio.

I’m open for any discussion too! Just, don’t tell me anything about Obsidio just yet, I’m expecting the copy this week.

#illuminae #gemina #obsidio #the illuminae files #kady grant #ezra mason #hanna donnelly #nik malikov #book review #spoiler free book review #books #reads

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piracytheorist · 6 years

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Reactions to this post hating on fanfic, that the original poster/hater will never read. Sadly.

(I'm doing this partly in a live-blog fashion, so keep that in mind.)

1) But I/we aren’t trying to make any money out of it!

Well, see, this is where “illegal” comes in. You can’t break into somebody’s house, even if you don’t mean to steal anything. You can’t camp in someone’s backyard without permission, even if you aren’t raising a marijuana crop back there. And you can’t use someone’s copyrighted characters for your own purposes, no matter what those purposes are.

That's bullshit. This is bullshit. And btw, the law isn't always right, let's not forget. You can't compare those things; you're practically saying every musician who ever played a variation/remix of an existing temporary music piece without asking for the rights to use them but also without demanding money to show their work, are criminals. I guess say goodbye to street musicians. You're saying anyone who paints themselves a copy (or a variation) of Picasso's Guernica and hangs it in a public space (say, a coffee shop) is a criminal. Bullshit.

Oddly enough, the notion of using someone else’s characters never occurred to me. I just tried to do it on my own. Surprise! It worked.

Oddly enough, not everyone's like you. Surprise! The world doesn't turn around you.

[...] are you getting positive feedback because some fans are so hooked on the characters that they’ll read anything involving those names (whether the writing accurately reflects those characters or not)? One real easy way to find out. Write anything you want, using Jamie Fraser, Edward Cullen, Harry Potter _and_ Dr. Who….and then change the characters’ names before you post it. Simple. Find All: “Jamie Fraser”. Replace with: “Joe Kerastopolous”. No problemo, all your own work, and any praise you get is duly earned.

How does this even make sense? The only thing this woman cares about are what names we use in fanfiction? If we don't then everything is solved?

4) But nobody would read stuff I wrote if it wasn’t about characters they already like!

Possibly true, possibly not. Depends on how good a writer you are, and how you go about displaying your work once you’ve written it. But—allowing for the moment that this argument holds water—what you’re saying is that a) you deserve an audience, no matter what, and b) you’d prefer to exploit someone else’s talent and hard work, rather than go to the trouble of making your own way.

Way to encourage newbie writers!

I already mentioned the shit she said about Donald Duck being created by Carl Barks. And she was paid by the Walt Disney Corporation, for crying out loud.

[...] if you want to write stories for the Silver Surfer or Superman, go talk to Marvel or DC, and see if they’re taking new submissions or would let you write a sample script.

You know, not everyone wants to be a full-time writer. Some only want to do it in their free time after a work that has nothing to do with writing. What she's saying is to either dedicate yourself fully to writing or not at all. Again, way to encourage newbie writers.

This is, btw, one reason why fan-fic versions of popular characters so often seem superficial; they lack the depth that the Real Thing has—the writer has merely grabbed at the broadest impression of the character, not built them in complex layers.

Did she just ditch the entirety of fanfiction on the basis that they aren't as DEEP as the Real Thing? Even if in a lot of cases the opposite applies?

I understand the urge to take a story that’s fired your imagination and carry it on or explore other avenues that it might have taken. ¬_Everybody_ does this, when they’ve seen a movie or read a book that captured their imagination [...] Giving people intriguing possibilities is one of the hallmarks of good fiction. But what you do in the privacy of your own imagination is a matter of total freedom; what you do in public is not.

So... we have no freedom of speech then? I mean, I get calling out someone who is talking rude in public, but that's still this asshole's right, as it is my right to call them out.

Beyond the specific arguments against the concept remains the unfortunate fact that a terrible lot of fan-fic is outright cringe-worthy and ought to be suppressed on purely aesthetic grounds.

So are so, so many published books that had no connection to fanfiction whatsoever. Didn't see you going against publishing in general.

Now, I don’t go looking for fan-fiction written about my characters; in fact, I try _not¬_ to see it. But now and then someone sends me a link to a site displaying it [...]

See, if the writer didn't send you the link themselves, you shouldn't blame them for you getting exposed to it! There's a reason the majority of fanfiction writers don't want to send their writings to the original content creators. But you would’ve known that, had you asked the fanfiction community first before you tried to paint us as horrible people.

Now, look. Human beings are hardwired to be interested in sex. We just _are_. Any kind of sex, performed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Bad sex, good sex, poorly depicted sex, elegantly drawn sex…it doesn’t matter. We have a genetic compulsion to _look_. We’ll look at _anything_ having sex, human or not.

And on your right side, you can see erasure of asexuality.

But…imagine opening your daily mail and finding a letter detailing an explicit sexual encounter between, say, your twenty-one-year-old daughter and your forty-eight-year-old male neighbor---written by the neighbor. At the bottom it says, “Fiction! Just my imagination. All cool, right?” This would perhaps prevent your calling the police, but I repeat…ick. I wouldn’t like people writing sex fantasies for public consumption about me or members of my family—why would I be all right with them doing it to the intimate creations of my imagination and personality?

Is she actually comparing her protective feelings to her fictional characters with the protective feelings to her own family? Is this woman mentally okay?

And personally, I would have called the police.

[...] Emmett someone (who I _think_ is from Twilight; I sort of hope it’s not the willowy young “bottom” from the TV show “Queer as Folk”…)

I'm treading carefully here since I haven't watched the show... but I do get an air of homophobia and discrimination against people who are into BDSM. Wouldn't surprise me, tbh, but I can't be sure.

I also mentioned the fact that she was angry someone wanted to write a fanfiction with her character in order to raise money for a charity. Hm. And then tried to cover it. Of course she would.

People in the book end of the trade watch these developments with a lot of interest—and some apprehension, knowing what happened to the music industry with the advent of Napster and file-sharing. The music industry still exists, of course, but it’s a lot harder for the creative people who _make_ music to make a living from it.

Dude, file-sharing harms the music industry because they take the original content and give it to the world for free. Writing fanfiction isn't copying the entirety of your book and giving it to the world for free. That's still file-sharing, blame the pirates. Fanfiction can fucking promote your work without you having to offer a single penny.

People who read my books tend to be both intelligent (not just because they like _my_ books, but by and large, it takes a fair amount of intellectual resilience to want to take on 1000-page books of any kind), and creative.

LOL honey, get over yourself already. Also, the Twilight series consist, overall, of over 2k pages. Does that mean anything for the people who read it? I read three of those books. Am I intelligent and creative too?

Characters—good characters, “real” characters—derive their reality from the person who created them. They _are_ the person who created them, refracted through the lens of that writer’s experience, imagination, love, fear, and craft. Another writer seeking to duplicate that character might equal—or conceivably surpass--the craft; they can’t touch the essence.

When you mess with my stuff, you’re not messing with my characters—you’re messing with _me_.

Who are the writers of the Outlander TV series again? Oh that's okay because you're making money out of it?

readers occasionally _do_ stumble over bits of fan-fiction, and—while they realize they’re reading fan-fiction at the time— still incorporate these _faux_ stories into their comprehension and memory of the real series.

I wonder if the script for the Outlander TV series is exactly, word-for-word the same as the script in the book series. Has she complained about that? (I’m actually asking this, though, I’ve no clue) Why should she complain about fanfiction? Because she doesn't make money out of the latter?

There is also the issue of a fan at some point writing a piece that inadvertently picks up a plotline that I have myself written, but that hasn’t yet appeared in print—and then turning around and claiming that I’ve stolen it from him/her [...].

*them. Also, that's one problematic behaviour. She's literally judging all fanfiction writers based on one problematic behaviour, what a grown-up.

Anyway, yeah, even if at some point I would have wanted to give her books a try... now I know I never will, purely out of spite.

#lillpon rambles

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novadreii · 6 years

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The Ancient Magus' Bride: A Review

Big spoilers ahead.

I’m not often compelled to write full-length reviews on series that I watch, but this one elicited an interesting response from me. I don’t think I’ve ever negatively changed my mind about an anime halfway through. If I like something from the start, I usually like it all the way through to the end. If I loathe something from the start, I try to determine if there’s room for development/improvement before continuing. And I’ve seen a good amount of shows turn it around.

But TAMG was really a strange experience for me. Everything pointed towards this being a quality show. All the signs were there. And I will commend it on what it did right. This show had gorgeous animation, lovely voice acting, and a breathtaking original soundtrack. As I said, all the signs pointed to this being a winner, maybe the best anime of the last 5 years or so.

But sadly, TAMG is, at its core, a reductive escapist fantasy for young girls.

I know, that is a bold statement. But I have evidence to support my claim! Promise.

We start off the show with Chise being bought by the titular Ancient Mage at a slave auction. It’s okay, though, because she willingly sold herself into slavery. Wait, you can do that? I guess. Anyway. This show’s big selling point is Chise’s growth from a sad girl with nothing to live for to...well, someone who is not that way. And it’s a relatable backstory for a main character. So far, so good.

But the rest of plot fails to sufficiently develop the rest of the world, lore, and characters in a way that makes Chise’s development interesting enough. Side characters are given at most one (1) episode of backstory before being utterly forgotten for the entire rest of the series. Plot points that you think will eventually loop back for an interesting game of Raise the Stakes just kind of wander out to sea and never come back (aka Chise’s family...um...her dad and brother are still out there!). The lore of the fairies and magic is just kind of there and never properly explored or utilized. Chise is supposedly there to learn magic from Elias as her teacher, yet we don’t really ever see him instructing her in the theory of it, or her magical skills progressing. All we’re really told is that Chise is both incredibly strong and weak as shit as the same time. Makes sense.

Elias’ origin is completely ignored, even that could have been an amazing addition to the story as it’s so shrouded in mystery and intrigue and often hinted at by several characters. So, at about the rough halfway point of the series, I had all these loose ends and unexplored areas of the story in my head that I was really excited about, but they never materialized in the second half. The main “villain” in the show was kind of sad and easily defeated.

The second cour of the show was focused almost exclusively on what is, in my opinion, the most mundane, cloying, and dull part of the story: the relationship between Elias and Chise. Yep, sorry friends. I don’t find these two even remotely well suited to each other in any capacity, least of all romantic. Try picturing them together when Elias is in human form; that creeps me out more than his usual form. From the very beginning, I have disliked Elias. I find him boring. Oh boohoo, you’ve been wandering around Earth for hundreds of years and still haven’t figured out what “sad” “happy” “jealous” and “angry” feel like? Are you stupid as well as inexperienced, or just willfully ignorant? Because he managed to study and become proficient in the art of magecraft, but never could figure out why watching Titanic made his eyes leak? How many times do we have to watch Elias clutch his heart and say, “Is this what _______ feels like?” Just shut up. I find it hard to believe that in between all the magic and failed cooking lessons with Lindel, they never talked about how they felt in the hundreds of years that Lindel was taking care of him? *Dr. Phil voice* Really now?

Elias’ cluelessness about basic human emotions is the basis for about 99% of the personal conflicts/drama in the story, and it gets tiresome and feels cheap. Why does anime love to center on characters who don’t know how to feel? Does it give them more agency to act like a dick? Do young girls swoon after men who don’t really care about anything? Elias is frustrating, because we never get to see him break through that monotonous “teach me how to feel” crap, except for when he’s having a rage tantrum. But we never see him buckle down and really unload on how he’s feeling in an open and communicative way. He’s very selective with what he shares, and when he does it’s because Chise is prodding him to do it.

What I found essentially disappointing about this story is how everything in it was just there to further the drama between Chise and Elias without actually furthering the story itself. Everything Elias does to Chise, from how he constantly touches/grabs/picks her up without her permission, how he looms over her menacingly in his monster form when he’s jealous, how he calls her diminutive pet names, irritates me. Chise is a child who has nothing; of course she is going to gravitate to someone who offers her the only thing she wanted: a place to call home. What’s his excuse? He is the one in the position of power, and does he ever use it to his advantage.

How many times do we witness Elias withholding information from Chise, policing her, acting shady, throwing a giant temper tantrum, and being generally creepy and possessive? The anime is masterful in that it succeeds in writing it all off as romantic and cute, because “Elias doesn’t know what emotions he’s feeling! It’s cause he must love her LOL” Again, this was a lame excuse so that Elias could have license to be an asshole. All they needed was a cool/handsome/monstrous character design and a smooth af voice actor to make it all okay. But it isn’t. Chise did not, and still doesn’t have the agency to choose differently.

And I almost fell for it too; that’s how good it is. Because it ropes you in with great production value. I admit that instinctively I am just a dumb ape who will go gaga over anything shiny and pretty. And this anime certainly is those things, but it doesn’t capitalize on the amazing potential it set up from its very beginning, choosing instead to focus on relationship drama between two people who really should not be involved romantically at all.

I ask this: would it have detracted from the story at all for them to have had an adoptive parent and child relationship, to which both characters’ age, experience, and power dynamic was a lot better suited? Would it have been less meaningful? Why did they have to be set up as husband and wife from the get go? What was the point, other than to provide a weak and frankly disturbing plot point? If parent/child is a no-go, how about we make the female main character older than 20 years old for once? Even that would have been preferable.

I did read the manga, and the author tries to dance around the issue by once again using Elias’ inexplicable lack of emotional intelligence as an excuse. He doesn’t know what a bride is, he doesn’t understand the concept of marriage, he means it innocently etc. Okay, BUT, Chise, the rest of the characters, the author of the manga himself, the readers, and literally everyone else understands exactly what marriage is and what it implies. That is the connection the author intends us to make with all the symbolism and mushy dialogue between the two of them (as well as other characters’ observations about them both). It doesn’t matter how ambiguous the author is being about something; if it’s there, it’s there. Let’s call the spade a spade.

So the story revolves primarily around the romantic development between an indisputably adult male who also holds all the resources/power, and an emotionally broken child who can’t refuse. TAMG did not develop the rest of its story enough to distract me from this point, and I was just never able to look past it. It was glaring at me with each episode I watched.

Sure, Chise gets mad sometimes, and Elias eventually comes around from pouting when he realizes he could lose her. He eventually offers a monotone apology and all is right as rain. Chise eventually develops into the Needlessly Self-Sacrificing Main Character that anime relies on just a touch too heavily. It feels disingenuous and not at all relatable. It’s tiresome.

Towards the end, Chise gets some resolution from an old painful memory during an arc where she finally breaks free of Elias so she can act of her own accord for once. Which I really liked. But then she just ran home, forgave Elias a little too easily for all his bullshit, and ended up “marrying” him (again, everything is shrouded in an infuriating layer of ambiguity because nobody wants to call it what it is, but alllllll the right symbolism is there, we can figure it out ffs). That came completely out of left field for me and solidified my hunch that this is meant to be a teen fantasy and little else: leaving everything behind only to be saved, controlled by, and obsessed over by an ominous, rich, handsome, and overbearing man who just won’t keep his hands to himself.

There’s so much more I wanted to know about, and I get that you can’t fit everything into 24 episodes. But people like Silky, Ruth, Renfred, and Alice were utterly forgotten about even though they had solid, developed stories in the beginning of the anime. It’s like they hooked me in and left me hanging; the whole time I was waiting for MORE from those characters. For Silky to say even one word or to have more of a relationship with Chise other than hugging her dramatically from time to time, for Chise and Ruth to have another mage/familiar moment (or even arc). Things like that would have added so much more depth and significance to the story than even one more minute of Elias and Chise awkwardly and needlessly cuddling (or sleeping in bed together....honestly, wtf).

So in conclusion (am I writing a thesis or something?), The Ancient Magus’ Bride felt something like a betrayal. It drew me in with the promise of a gorgeous and heartfelt story, only to focus on what I thought was an inappropriate and forced relationship. I’m sure 16-year-old me would have eaten all of this up like a six-course meal. It’s a Japanese twist on Twilight (therefore also reminiscent of the even worse Fifty Shades franchise). As I get older and automatically tend think a lot more critically about why I like or dislike things, something like this isn’t going to cut it for me. It pulled at the heartstrings with emotive music and pretty visuals, but left me wanting so much more. I don’t want the media I consume to make me feel like I should like it; I just want to.

To any teen girls who adore this anime, I’m not telling you what to personally like/dislike. But I do hope you’ll think about why you do, and contemplate the fact that just because something is wrapped up in pretty packaging, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s harmless. Love doesn’t have to mean being dominated, stalked, policed, or controlled. And you don’t have to be married before you’re 20 or it’s game over. Healthy relationships are balanced, with an equal flow of power, love, and trust between parties involved. They can happen at 17, 45, or never, and that’s all okay. My fear is that this anime will reinforce the exact opposite message with its audience, in a manner that is honestly kind of insidious. It was so well-made, the tone and ambiance they created is so lovely that the harmful messages will just fly over your head; like they almost did to me.

Or...just enjoy it without a second thought and leave me to my over-analyzing. I do admit I look very closely at things, but I don’t know any other way to be.

TLDR; A lot of style, not a whole lot of substance. 4.5/10

#review #the ancient magus bride #mahoutsukai no yome #beware if you liked the series you may not want to read this lol #diary of nova #i'm not even trying to be a contrarian or anything #this has been my genuine emotional and critical response and honestly i'm a bit sad #i really wanted to love it

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laughingpinecone · 7 years

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Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Albert Rosenfield/Harry Truman Characters: Albert Rosenfield, Harry Truman Additional Tags: Canonical Character Disappearance, Loyalty, Second Chances but Sad, An Overwhelming Lack of Dale Cooper, Resolved Sexual Tension, Canon Levels of Sad and Ominous (or at least I tried), Mentions of Dale/Harry, Immediate Post-Cliffhanger, TSHOTP compliant, but not spoilery except for Coop's status which shockingly confirms the s2 finale who'd have thought

Yuletide treat for Tiriel!

Then he left. Like a shadow shifting on the forest's soil as the wind weaves the branches above, Dale Cooper was gone by the end of March, then back, then gone again in the fogs of a rainy April morning. He paid for his hotel room with a joke that made sense in the rarefied, hypnotic air of dawn, like in a dream, and that the concierge could never quite put back together; he then left a generous tip and an uneasy grin to the valet who led him to his car and disappeared on a westbound road. His Dodge Diplomat was never spotted again.

Agent Rosenfield was not allowed near the case. Too personal, his superiors repeated while the trail up North got colder and frayed, too involved.

Too competent, too qualified, he told himself, and shelved that thought at the bottom of a career's worth of doubts and suspicions.

He should have, at least, for comfort and decency, gotten in a car and driven up to that rural eldritch dystopia on personal business, to find closure for and from the other poor unfortunate sods Coop left behind. He never did. Obviously, he was not the only one left grieving. Obviously, it would have taken two blind eyes and a kick in the shin to miss the Sheriff's helpless gaze whenever Dale Cooper was in the room, a drowning man giving up one inch away from the shore. Sheriff Truman had a disarming simplicity etched in his very bones, which meant he was either faring a lot better than Albert, enjoying the perks of a life led with the thoughtlessness of your average dairy cow, or a whole lot worse. Either way, if someone really lives up there in a big cloud in the sky distributing roles to humankind and gave “consoling shoulder to cry on” to Albert Rosenfield of all people, that someone is a nitwit and an incompetent fraud and should be fired. Harry would drag him down, or he would drag Harry down, and they would both drown in this dense oily rage.

So when the case that had kept him in Seattle wrapped up, Albert was ready to pack and scram. Past expensive toiletries, a host of suits, blue silk pajamas and a veritable nest of ties, there wasn't much to collect in his motel room: five boxes of his favorite licorice, fortuitously found in Tacoma while restocking on cigarettes; a monograph on the Bay of Pigs invasion with the laconic handwritten dedication “Food for thought - Dale Cooper”; cufflinks from his father, rarely worn. At the very bottom of his suitcase, pressed against two identical yet mismatched socks, lay a few daydreams, well-worn fantasies that kept him company throughout the past couple of weeks.

Coop often blathered about parallel universes - Coop often blathered about all things under the sun and several which have only been recorded under the influence of heavy hallucinogens, but then again, it was always part of the charm. Albert won't say that desperation has made a convert out of him, but he has to wonder if things may have gone differently elsewhere, if some other Albert had more time, more chances before it all came crashing down. Thing is, he used to think about Sheriff Truman.

It would go like this: he would go back to that detestable hamlet for any old jolly perfunctory reason. To bring updates on a case? Sure, in person, just to spite Bell, Meucci and all that posse. To check on Coop? Story of his life. To move along a masturbatory fantasy with little care for accessory details? That too, on occasion.

Coop himself would be a reassuring presence at the margin of his vision. Albert was aware that it is hardly fair to make a move on the newest crush of your oldest friend, but it is not fair to take your crush's side when your crush has just punched your oldest friend either, so, as the saying goes, them’s the breaks. Fair play for fair play, Coop.

The details of his movements got bogged down in the fog. Albert was in the woods outside Twin Peaks, an abject receptacle of mud, lichens, fungi and the occasional skunk working in concert to make an attempt on his senses, or at least his brogues. Truman was there with him. A singular source of comfort among the trees, sturdier than a fir, and their surroundings would fade away to focus on his hoarse little laugh and on stray sunlight caressing dark curls. Albert would stand by him, or kick back in the passenger's seat of his pickup, and breathe in his presence. Truman was a fixed point, a sturdy pillar of banalities.

Or they would be in his office, back at the station. That place represented its occupant to a cringe-worthy degree and it was good to be surrounded by it like an embrace, all the while staring at that embarrassing “The buck stopped here” plaque, and at Truman, and back at the plaque and back at Truman as the perfect quip slowly formed on his tongue and he savored it in full before letting it loose. And that was the trick, the one sure-fire way he knew of getting his attention, of riling him up like Albert himself was shaken by this stupid attraction. He lashed out, poking at his composed lawman act until he found the crude instinct underneath. It just followed, logically, as these things go (when they do not end up in violence, i.e., always, but he'd learned how to let that thought slide), that when the Sheriff snapped, he shut him up by putting his arms squarely on Albert's shoulders and kissing him. In his daydream, he tasted of coffee and donuts, and resin, and Albert had imagined to run his mouth against that stubble for so long that he could feel his lips go raw. His hands were at once on the coarse texture of the man's goddamn warm, cuddly, purple insult of a jacket, tugging at his shirt's neckline, lost among unruly hair. Auspicably, he was being pushed against something - the desk would do; preferably a tree when outside, for the added image of rough bark clawing at his back. Harry didn't know how to handle him, so he would take his time to guide the oaf into a half-decent kiss.

Albert could get lost in him. His life was a struggle with contradictions, morals and the whole palette of human doubts, but here was this safe, rugged man who elicited a safe, rugged love and channeled a rare sort of peace (for someone who is not, in fact, a dairy cow). So he monologued the depth of his feelings, as these things go, still holding him close, fingers pressed against his bare sides under three layers or more of assorted rustic cloth, and then some feeling of shame eventually caught up with him. The guy had a girlfriend, or the girlfriend had just died, or it felt like betraying Coop, depending on how long this mess of a crush had gone on for. The fantasy was over; Albert Rosenfield kicked back in his chair and felt bad for himself.

Then he left. Dale Cooper was gone in the fogs of a rainy April morning and he wasn't allowed to run after him and the world had the gall to keep spinning. Albert packed his hopes and feelings and left for Philadelphia, eager to meet the next blue rose kid who wouldn't last halfway through their first assignment. With some luck, he'd get to know them long enough to mourn them once they disappeared. Someone had to.

And daydreams went and soured, past their expiration date. Truman was a good man, one of the few, but he was Sheriff in that pastoral hellhole, as deeply rooted in its rotten ground as the mountains and trees themselves, and Albert was not going back there just to cut his stitches and reopen all his wounds. He could not even bear to go back to his fantasies, where his memory of the man would be too gentle and allow him to curl up in an embrace and let go.

And Albert needed to be holding onto his composure, letting his rage condense and crystallize in his legs, his spine, a dense knot in his stomach to keep standing and fighting (if not for Coop, if he wasn't allowed to do that, then in his name along the usual banners of love and justice). One cannot always afford to break down and cry.

During that week, he did not see the signs. This happened partly because he was grieving and his eyes were fixed solely on his desk or on the ground; mostly because, despite Cole's best attempts, his forays into extrasensorial experiences amounted to having developed a keen instinct for telling whenever Dale Cooper had run out of coffee.

On Monday, waiting in a boring line for boring bureaucracy, he saw that someone had forgotten a guide of the Pacific Northwest. It was earmarked on Mount St Helens, its eruption, the stubborn man whose life it took, but Albert did not bother to open it.

On Wednesday, he certainly did not notice that the horoscope for Virgo and Taurus were switched, mistakenly printed one in place of the other.

On Thursday, he heard on the radio about a landslide ruining acres of forest, but other than a drive to donate some money to some ecologist organization or another, which he already had, he wouldn't know what to do with the news.

It is past the deepest hour of a stormy night, nearing the hypnotic quality of dawn, and Albert, who has been lying on his bed all night with barely a wink of sleep, is thinking about an old tale, a joke which almost made sense, once, in a dream, when the doorbell rings.

His steps across the corridor are rare and heavy: he is carving a path, like an astronaut on alien soil when dozens and dozens of corridors contemporary and parallel to the one he is traversing remain empty.

“I can hear you there, Rosenfield,” a deep voice says says, half prayer, half accusation. “You said- you said you love me.”

Albert fumbles the door open and blinks, taking in the sight. Harry S. Truman is waiting outside, shaking and smelling like a wet, drunk dog. Under the unflattering light of the porch, a patch of his jacket stands out, darker and torn where his badge used to be. Albert doesn't want to know how he made it to his doorstep in that state, all the way from Washington; the man crashes in his arms with a sob, resting his big, curly head in the curve of his neck. “You said you love me,” he repeats. “You did.”

He did. Not quite how he meant it back then, but that's life having a sense of humor for you.

“You heard me right the first time, you loutish boor.” Albert holds him and tries to make a physical, spacial sense of this man's presence in his arms, running his hands along the grain of his jacket, unbuttoning a cold, dripping wet shirt which is likewise soaking his pajamas but that's a complaint for another day, brushing his hair in a gruff gesture of reassurance. When he is finally holding him, when he is sure that he's there between his hands, firmly placed on his sides, he props him up against the door and hurriedly finds his lips for a kiss that's half alcohol, half tobacco and has them both recoil. But it's a start.

Two hours later, Harry is asleep on the couch, freshly showered if not yet shaven, wearing a mismatched set of Albert's spare gym slacks and a tank top courtesy of the Bureau. They haven't shared a word, aside from Albert's barked instructions on where to find the shampoo, and exhaustion caught up with his guest as soon as his head hit the pillow. There will be time. Albert isn't leaving his side, caressing his hand in his - the man may be pushing forty, but spread on the couch like this, he looks like a boy, an outcast whose roots weren't as solid as they looked.

“Keep up, Truman, this won't do.” Someone has to be a pillar and a beacon in there and it won't be Coop anymore. It won't always be Albert, either, who is just now feeling tears roll across his face, the first after their lives fell apart.

They are stranded so far away from the best of all possible worlds, but they’ll make do.

#twin peaks #fanfiction #albert rosenfield #sheriff truman #guess who's the very worst at crossposting

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rosejardine-blog · 5 years

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Research in Practice Dissertation: Traces (photos referred to appear elsewhere in this blog)

Section One] Introduction to Practice. Discussion & Context.

This practice led dissertation explores interaction between art, psychological and philosophical theories with personal arts practice. Relevancies to practice are selected which articulate critical and developmental thinking. The key focus of the work is emotion. The vastness of area, in conjunction with length regulations, places some restriction on outcomes. It is out with the scope to address this whole complex topic. However it will address aspects relating to practice. The work seeks out that which is within, and that which is beyond understanding and reaction. It embeds and synthesises emotional explorations and personal visual arts practice within theoretical contexts. In pursuit of wider realisation and transformative understanding, the task draws on communication between experiential, theoretical, perceptual, and tacit knowledge. To facilitate fluid discussion, detail of the methodologies involved are listed in Appendix One.

Different forms of knowing are explored and intertwined in the work. It takes principle stance that demarcations in awareness’s from e.g. phenomenology, poetry and painting are artificially imposed. This is discussed throughout the literature in various guises. Fortnum (1) has advocated that we resist automatic ideas of knowledge and that we attempt to understand more about the space we need for 'not knowing'.Further, According to Bourdieu (2) theory without empirical data is ‘empty’, and empirical research without theoretical insights is equally blind. He refers to the necessary ongoing interaction of these components as ‘Praxis’.It means that theory and artistic practice mesh with each other and interpenetrate each other organically. Marx (3) views praxis as a relation of continuous interpenetration of theory and practice which leads to a form of ‘embodied knowledge.’ This is explored further from in Sections two and three. The work draws on personal reflections and wider theoretical perspectives, therefore aspires to address both the personal and collective. Collingwood (4) has stated that:

The artist’s business is to express emotions; and the only emotions he can express are those which he feels, namely his own. If he attaches any importance to the judgement of his audience, it can only be because he thinks that the emotions he has tried to express are . . . shared by his audience. . . . In other words he undertakes his artistic labour not as a personal effort on his own private behalf, but as a public labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs.

Collingwood’s statement adds support to Kant’s (5) original theory of census com-munis. This refers to a ‘sense held to unite the sensations, of all senses’, in sensation or perception. This is vital to arts practice which incorporates comprehension of theory and context beyond self-knowledge towards a social consciousness.

Practice considerations include deliberate bypass of mimicry (6) co-opted image, and word (7). Disparate, medium and materials are used to transcend these constraints. There is an ongoing quest for malleability complexity and depth. These practice pursuits can be witnessed in earlier work around abstract expressive works of the sea and landscape which appear below. Further thinking around these pieces is discussed in Appendix 2.

When painting, I have no real vision of how the final piece is going to appear before I begin. Frequently I scrape down the whole surface of the canvas before I make another attempt it. I continue to do this until I find acceptable resolution in the work. Sometimes I may have later preferred earlier versions of the work. These had been initially rejected and have now disappeared below the surface. Experimentation continued throughout the module in ethereal blobs, ghostly faded mountains and direct screen printing. Layered impasto, plaster and resins worked to pursue resonance.

Prior practice has focussed on aspects of form and gesture in relation to emotion. Over the course period work became increasingly expressive and abstract at times. It also expanded to incorporate related aspects of the environment. Much of the work visually and metaphorically references land. I also used stone, rust, slate and cement in later pieces. I became interested in how my sea paintings were similar to the natural qualities of rock.

The work immediately above was inspired by the painting below. However it also lacked the colourful jewelled relief of fireworks and spectator.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler. 1872-77. Nocturne in Black and gold. The Falling Rocket

A simple observation I made when reviewing these earlier paintings, and in considering the subject matter of this dissertation, is that they do not appear to be particularly ‘happy’. I can see lightness within them, but a sense of gravity and foreboding frequently dominates. Bourgeois’s (8) has claimed that her work on metaphoric abstraction was an attempt to access to the unconscious, as well as function as psychological release. However, it is incoherence, and the impossibility of ‘knowing,’ most cogently expressed in her work. Bourgeois considered art as her parallel ‘form of psychoanalysis’ offering her privileged and unique access to the unconscious, as well as a form of psychological release. On a piece of pink paper she scratched the slogan, "Art is a guarantee of sanity." Her artwork was intended as reparative, a form of mental mending .

Louise Bourgeois, Art is a Guaranty of Sanity, 2000, Pencil on pink paper, 27.9 x 21.5 cm. Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York, Photo: Christopher Burke.

While aspects of resolution may be attained in the work, the content may be that of something unresolved. This analysis concerned me as I want my work to be about psychological freedom. Nevertheless traces of this continued to pervade practice. Reviewing the literature led me to doubt if there could be such a thing as psychological freedom, when we ourselves are drawn from experiences. For example in reviewing a recent piece, I questioned if the haunting, dancing, perhaps writhing, forms, and oddly shaded opaque egg whites on black card. This may have been influenced by recent reading and analysis of Paul Celan’s ‘(9) Black Milk’ in Death Fugue

Work involving the use of cement and the encasing of objects within resins stemmed from a play on Picasso’s (10) ‘Still Life’ constructions. The thinking behind these practice experimentations is discussed in Appendix 2. Key to the thinking is the recognition that it is not only physical senses which perceive and interpret experience, but a vast range of other influences. These contribute to, and generate our emotion, meaning and knowledge. Such influencers include our cultures, genders, experiences, families, education and religions. It would take countless dissertations to even begin to address these multi-facetted areas. However we must acknowledge this range of disparate relevancies and influencers. This awareness is crucial to developing visual arts theory and practice and indeed to feeling, seeing and knowing (11). Many artists attempt to create meaning free from these obstacles and attempt to find a new language to express untranslatable things.

My practice utilises a range of materials. These include experiments in the stark ‘blocking out’ of qualities of Tippex correction fluid, or cement, resin, eggs, tar, rust, old tools, slate, bitumen, oil, talcum powder, straw, hair latex, fading photographs and thick layers of paint and plaster. Such explorations are a core mechanism of inquiry. Process and application are also significant. There is variously quest for malleability, translucency, surface superficiality, complexity and depth. The process of mark making and sensitive or harsh application are attempted evocatively and purposely. There is an ongoing, possibly pointless, quest for liberated individual ‘uninfluenced meaning. Equally, to fully consider the material world in addition to that of the ‘human’ one.

In summary therefore, reflective practice and choices of materials have attempted to consider risks inherent in the exposure to a range of influencers, including our own subconscious defences. Because of e.g. the recognized power of words in meaning creation, among many influences, it feels important for work to be visual or experienced differently from words. Visual construction is less subject to the polluting factors of language (7) and bombarded image. This area is expanded in the next section. Interestingly nonverbal seems also less subject to dilution by ones owns denial and fears.For Freud (12) the unconscious was seen as the true psychical reality. He argued that its innermost nature is as unknown to us as the reality of the external world. It is as incompletely presented by the data of the consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs. Lacan’s (13) observations of our reality further contextualise and develop this argument. He delineates how our realities are radically subjective, that our reality is in fact structured by fantasy which serves to protect us from ‘the raw’. He concludes therefore that reality itself can function as an escape from countering real. The ‘actual real’ filters through in our dreams and in our art.

These findings emphasise that despite our influencers and oppressors, at a subconscious level, the real language of desire emotion and feeling continues. However to reach wider realisation it is imperative to set arts practice within contextual awareness. It is this which makes it a quest for undigested reality rather than that of simply imagination. Iconclude this section with a powerful and pertinent quote from the controversial Scottish psychiatrist R D Laing (14)

We are so desensitized to being pressured that we are unaware when someone makes a bid to control or dominate us. We have been trained that the polite response is to overlook the violence of persuasion. We have been domesticated into obedience and submission.

Pressure, when applied by one person onto another, inevitably forces the recipient to react. All authentic action from one’s creative centre is suspended, until after the pressure has been dealt with……Some of us are still waiting

Section Two] Emotion

Emotion and meaning are closely related in research literature. Relevant movements and influences are well documented and themes include cultural, political and philosophical movements. It includes e.g., work on phenomenology (15) existentialism (16) post structuralism and post modernism (17). Background developments in this area draw from aspects of literature, linguistics (particularly semiotics), politics, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, epidemiology and the arts. The subcategorization even within the visual arts incorporates as wide-ranging issues iconography iconology language philosophy philology phenomenology socio cultural politics materials aesthetics and class. Furthermore within these multifarious areas includes subsets such as language biotope lexicon biotopes and habitats!

Panofsky (18) was perhaps the first to attempt categorisation of such mechanisms in the visual arts. He developed the understanding and interpretation of meaning in visual representations, breaking these into three increasing levels of depth. These include the interpretation of meaning through factual descriptions and what we derive and interpret from with our own experiences.His theory progresses toa deeper understanding the motifs and messages within an image and recognition of events taking place within it. His final level communicates things that the artist may not have been consciously thinking about. This level allows us to reveal what he describes as the underlying:

Basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work”

The word emotion is used in many different ways. As described from above I am unable to separate it entirely from language. However I do not consider it necessary to extricate it entirely, as long as the limitation and power of language is recognised and considered. It is for this reason that work has been set among selected poetry in this dissertation.Painting and Poetry are closely correlated. Leonardo da Vinci has been cited as saying that says, "Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen and that ‘Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.’

..Our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost

Gaston Bachelard

Both of these endeavours explore the essential qualities of what it means to be human. According to Hepworth (19) ‘Painting not what you see but what you feel in your body.’ It concerns the psychological subtext to our lives, what makes us tick. Randell (20) has also talked about the emotional subtexts of time and space speaking directly across time and space. His sculptures are about direct physical experience and creating rather than illustrating.

Otto Dix The War

However, while it may be colloquial to state here, in reference to Emotion, that ‘you will know it when you see it’ I believe this to be true. Viewing the work of Otto Dix affirms this for me. This painter, who fought in the trenches, used etching and aquatint mediums to heighten the emotional and realistic effects of his images of terror. His use of multiple acid baths ate away at the images, and mimicked decaying flesh. The emotions of fear horror and empathy are cogently conveyed.

For Rothko (21), there were no visible prototypes for that which he aspired to depict, so he had to create them. His conveys a huge emotional range. He surrounded viewers both with massive, imposing visions of darkness, and with blissful luminosity. His work utilises movement texture translucency and plasticity to achieve these ends.

If you are only moved by colour relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom."

Mark Rothko

It has been observed that Rothko’s (21) work could represent the opposition between a rational or abstract element and an emotional, primal, or tragic one. By softening the contours of his figures, and enveloping them in a nebulous haze, he let his viewers know that these allusive images asked metaphysical questions about meaning, emotion and the purpose of existence. Hisworkhighlights that certain qualities such as radiance or the duality of light and dark have symbolic meanings to us. His impression of vast space was said to represent the historical artistic concept of ‘the sublime,’ a quasi-religious experience of limitless immensity. The installation of Rothko’s canvases also produces their own sacrosanct environment. An image of his ‘Dark Palette’ is shown below:

Keifer’s (22) work is also noted for its symbolic potency. The use of materials such as straw, earth, and tree roots reference both time and patterns of life, death, and decay. They provoke strong emotional and psychological effects on viewers.Brisley (23) also pursues deep questioning in relation to those who are forgotten, alienated and dispossessed. His uses of materials include sand, bitumen, and sacking. Brisley’s works are a useful vehicle in which to observe materials in both physical and psychological form. His website (24) highlights:

Concern for the everyday and for things that have fallen down (detritus on the streets, human excrement) and the marginalised (miners, bin men, homeless).

He selects his materials to explore emotion and humanness. His critical motivations remain unchanged, the production of a political art that in its richness of metaphor and range of expressive resources is capable of capturing the 'morbid symptoms' of capitalist culture.

The practice of these artists has been a catalyst in my artistic development. Much of the subconscious subtext of my work is that emerging through and complex multi layered aspects of emotion. It consists of tapping into subconscious feelings and images through an unself conscious dialogue in the process itself. However as we have seen, emotion while perhaps not fully understood, is not blind. It too is contextualised in experience.Practice requires the development of Integrity and of knowing why you are selecting things and doing things, but not in a paralysing or inhibiting way. Ongoing studio experimentation forcefully accentuates the dichotomies between mind and body. Studio practice magnifies the unsettled relationship between what we see, and what we know. Handling and listening to materials become a catalyst in the recognition and liberation of emergent ideas. This works to nurture and reveal nascent and embryonic inklings that can produce new and unexpected knowledge.Research in Practice has required time and space to allow the materials to fulfil their capabilities. I did not want to rush in and narrow the vision. Handling materials allowed me to feel and inhabit them as they imparted physical, tacit embodied knowledge. Moments which invigorate the interiority of the imagination? This examination of their potentiality is crucial to my desire to create and unveil, rather than produce or and fabricate. The work attempts to capture and harness aspects of fragility, subtlety complexity, connection and changing memory. This involves a creative persistence in new combinations. Key to this is a pursuit of thatbeyond the subconscious, the raw, unspoken, embodied knowledge,

Most recent work has involved a series of drawings in charcoal, ink and water. Originally I carried out these experiments with coloured chalks, paints and melted crayons. Observation of Riley’s (25) work encouraged my experimentation in black and white. From 1961 to 1964 Riley worked with black and white, sometimes adding tones of grey. I enjoyed her combinations of relaxed gentle curves the increasing rapid compressions within her work. I was particularly intrigued by her compositions at their verges, on the edge of disintegration without collapse.Some of the recent charcoal works appear below. They seem to take on aspects of motion and organic, wing like, formations.

Section Three] Traces

3.1 Traces

This paper has worked towards deconstruction of aspects of emotion and meaning in visual arts practice. To develop this further it is necessary to think about the nature of knowledge itself. Hume (26) has stated that reports of factual knowledge e.g. "triangles have three sides" are not knowledge at all. Rather they are definitions. They provide us with no knowledge other than what specific terms mean. In his discussion on relations of ideashe states:

All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: the mind has but a slender hold of them: they are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas; and when we have often employed any term, though without a distinct meaning, we are apt to imagine it has a determinate idea annexed to it. On the contrary, all impressions…are strong and vivid: the limits between them are more exactly determined: nor is it easy to fall into any error or mistake with regard to them. When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed with any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived?

Here he equates impressions roughly to feeling, and ideas to thinking. According to Hume ideas are ‘faint copies’ of impressions. They are ‘less forcible and lively’ and weaker fainter. However each faint impression/mark is crucial to wider conceptualisation and thinking.

I have been intrigued by these notions when analysing historical and ongoing practice. Thinking and feeling work together in personal practice, and I consider that this theory can be applied to it in a novel way. For example, the metaphor might be applied that each faint mark/impression is working towards a wider body of work/idea, or working backwards and becoming detangled from that concrete mass of emotion and cognition. Despite my work changing and developing, edit has often resulted in the revisiting of earlier stages. It may involve the uncovering of an earlier mark and bringing faintness to the surface once more, for example in paintings below chalky and oily translucencies were built up, covered and then recovered in parts. In these way aspects of fragility, connection and depth is uncovered.

Fool’s Gold Rose Jardine 2018

Hamilton (27) has highlighted how it is these moments which invigorate the interiority of the imagination. This post examination of their potentiality was crucial to my increasing desire to create and unveil, rather than produce or fabricate. Kaur (28) and other theoreticians have highlighted that a difficulty we currently face in the west, is the lack of direct sensory experience. We have become increasingly reliant on processed second hand information in our everyday lives. He concludes that this experience gap has led to erosion of natural mental resources. As commented by my previous supervisor, it may because of the many exploratory aspects of disparate work and experimentation that my more recent pieces have not been forced into over-determined ‘final pieces’. He considered that this allowed them to retain a suggestiveness, an open-ended ambiguity, which made them more intriguing as images or objects. The softness and roundness of their shapes inevitably calling to mind the female form without over-prescribing this as a way of seeing it. A useful outcome of this is that it may assist in the work containing multiple meanings, open to several interpretations. I quickly became aware that I needed to be alert to how my work could escape from my intentions to take on a life of its own and become different things to different people. This is detailed in Appendix 2. I did not consider this a negative thing. It often meant that the work had richer content than I had assumed. This led me to working directly with materials, inventing new forms, creating new objects.Often these can involve many iterations of the same idea, investigating different combinations of materials, being as ‘unprescriptive’ as possible, leaving room for emergence, and trying to get a sense of what to keep and what to leave out. Some of this work appears below. A fuller account is given in previously submitted critical evaluations, exploratory publications and presentations.

This overall body of this subsequent work has been entitled Traces. Practice and this paper, have built towards this reflection. The original meaning of the term ‘traces’ refers not only to the trace marks and residual evidence of what has taken place, but also to a path followed. Paths are equally about meandering journeys as destinations. Sometimes they lead nowhere. It is possible that enduring remnants or ‘Traces’ in my visual arts practice to be analysed from differing perspectives. For example to consider them as that which is known and distant, that shrouded and not fully known and underpinnings unearthed or built upon. In some ways it attempts to explore what are both there and not there. However the work also addresses the spaces in between. It attempts to reach that which is renounced, disavowed and denied. This search beneath the surface appearance of physical reality draws upon sources of theoretical and practice knowledge. The work seems to sit comfortably within Merleau Ponty’s (29) notions of embodiment. This relates to the visible and the invisible, the space in-between the different bodies of experience and the intertwining of those different bodies. In my practice this involves strong and contrasting emotions. I conducted experiment in automatic writing which can be seen at the front of this paper. Words such as vestigial, veiled, memory, and persistence emerged. It bears testament to latent time and, intracorporeally, to the experience being embodied but mediated by continual interactions of perception and practice. There seems to be relationality between temporal dimensions in the work. It touches on aspects of temporality and phenomenology. Bachelard’s (30) landmark work, The Poetics of Space, evokes metaphysical elements which incorporate identify how knowledge of the world is based ultimately on experience. In his analysis he tried to consider images without personal interpretation. He concludes that the Trans subjectivity of the image could not be understood through subjective reference alone. The theme of traces is continued in altering guises. I have entitled the final two subsections Reverberation and Engram

3.2 Reverberation

Reverberation is defined as a resonance, an echolikeforceor effect or repercussion.It refers to something which persists after its source has stopped. This links past and future. It incorporates that beyond a current physical presence into the traces, echoes and repercussions of prior that knowledge and experience. Repetition seriality and pattern is well documented in the research literature (31). Breaking up a surface into increments (pattern) makes one more aware of the forms innaccessible interior. Earlier work and exhibition has explored this area in further depth (see Appendix Two). It relates to areas such as domesticity, repetition, communication, connection and trauma. It is about working out how things make us feel as well as thinking about the interconnectivity of factors

The artist I would like discuss under this section is Shozo Shimamoto (32). He and his fellow artists, such as Kazuo Shiraga, turned the energy of war into that of a new art accessible to all. It was their intent to renew the tradition of Japanese art (particularly the Zen culture) through performance, experimentation, and play; they strove to rip apart the demarcations between art and life. The Guatai Manfesto (33) describes how this was done in an effort to break free from the past. It searched for different energies and forms. The artists ripped, tore, smashed, cut, burned, or affixed objects to canvas. It is testimony to process and relationship between gesture and matter. Below is part of Shozo Shimamoto’s Holes series.

3.3 Engram.

The concluding section of his work is Engram, not endgame. ‘There are miles to go before I sleep’. The existence of Engrams is posited by scientific theory (34) as the means by which memoriesare stored. The hypothesis postulates a change in neural account for persistence of memory.It seems appropriate to conclude our analysis of Tracesin this focus on that which eventually engrained. Interesting researchers are studying not only how individual memories form, but how memories interact with each other and change over time. Work has started to look that related memories can merge into a single representation, especially if the memories are acquired in close succession. These findings gain potency, when we consider aspects of emotion and meaning in visual arts practice, and wider research theory which we have attempted to unpick and also synthesise in this work. They relate to inherent non-translatable things.

It is interesting to apply these neuroscientific theories more generally to the world, and to visual arts practice. The authors (34) conclude that:

Our memory is not just pockets and islands of information, we actually build concepts, and we link things together that have common threads between them.

Perhaps these threads are also Traces.

Ends

Word count 4330.

This is to the prescribed limit of 4000, plus the additional 10 % allowance, which brings the allowance to 4400. Decorative Cover/Sectioning Format Pages & Images not included in word count.

References

Fortnum, R. On not knowing: how artists think London: Black Dog Publishing. (2013).

Bourdieu, P. The Logic of Practice, Oxford: Polity Press. (1990).

McBride, W. The philosophy of Marx London: Hutchinson, (1977).

Collingwood, R. G.

(Robin George), 1889-1943

The principles of art

OxfordUniversity Press, (1958).

Kant, I. The critique of pure reason. Pacific Publishing Studio. (2011).

Foster, H. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcdmq8U4cOM&t=9s. (accessed December 2018).

Foucault, M. Power/Knowledge, Brighton: Harvester. (1980).

Larrat-Smith, P. Louise Bourgeois, the theory, and practice of psychoanalysis

Available at:http://arttattler.com/archivebourgeois.html (accessed January 4th 2019).

Celan, P. 1920 – 1970. Death Fugue (1944)

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Heuman, Jackie. A Technical Study of Picasso’s Construction Still Life, 1914. Tate Papers No 11 Sping 2009 (accessed Dec 2018)

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Berger, J. Ways of seeing London:Penguin. (2008)

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Freud, S. The psychopathology of everyday life; translated by Anthea Bell with an introduction by Paul Keegan. London : Penguin. (2002)

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Groves, J. Lacan for beginners Cambridge: Icon, (1995)

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Laing, R. D. (1960) The divided self : an existential study in sanity and madness.Tavistock.

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Husserl, E. (1913) Collected Works: Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Translated by F. Kreston Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Kluwer Academic Publishers Group. (1983)

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Satre, J.P. (1991). Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. London: Verso

17)

Sarup. M An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism.

Pearson Education. (1993)

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Panofsky, E Meaning in the visual arts, 1892-1968 Published London: Penguin, (1993)

19)

Smith, R. Figure and Landscape: Barbara Hepworth’s Phenomenology of Perception TATE PAPERS NO 20

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McAvera, B. Emotional Subtext of Form and Space: A Conversation with Peter Randall-Page International Sculpture Center Vol.22 No. 6 (2003)

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Rothko, M. The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. Yale University Press, New Haven (2006)

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Biro, M. Anselm Kiefer London: Phaidon, (2013)

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Aesthetica Magazine [Accessed April 6th 2016] Available at: www.aestheticamagazine.com/stuart-brisley/

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Brisley S http://www.stuartbrisley.com

25)

Riley, B. available at http://www.artnet.com/artists/bridget-riley/. (Accesed December 2018)

26)

Hume, D, 1711-1776; A treatise of human nature Harmondsworth: Penguin,

27)

Hamilton, Ann. Available at https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/12/making-not-knowing-ann-hamilton/ (accessed December 2018)

28)

Kaur, R. Ecological psychology: New trends and innovations New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, (2005)

39)

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard; Translated from the French by Maria Jolas; with a new foreword by John R. Stilgoe. Boston:Beacon Press. (1994).

31)

Araujo, A. Repetition, Pattern, and the Domestic: Notes on the Relationship between Pattern and Home-making, Textile, 8:2, 180-201, DOI: 10.2752/175183510X12791896965574 (2010)

32)

Guatai Manifesto [Accessed December 2018] Available at: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art112/Readings/Yoshiharo_GutaiManifesto.pdf (1956)

33)

Schimmel, P Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949-1962. Audiobook Publishing (2012)

34)

Bruce, Darryl ‘Fifty Years Since Lashley's In Search of the Engram’. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. 10 (3): 308–318. doi:10.1076/jhin.10.3.308.9086.(2001).

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compartmentalisinghmpf · 6 years

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My goodreads review of The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross

(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8041402-the-fuller-memorandum)

Ok, time for that review I promised. The Fuller Memorandum is my favourite installment of the Laundry series. After my fourth read I can also safely say that it's one of my favourite books in general - and I'm as surprised by that as anyone. (I mean: really? The third volume of a Lovecraftian urban fantasy/spy thriller series, when neither of the genres involved, nor the trend for books to appear in series, are things I'm all that fond of? Odd choice, for a favourite!) The thing is, the exact mix of genre elements, and of other elements, too (more on those later), makes the Laundry series, and The Fuller Memorandum in particular, a bit of a special case for me. This was my first Laundry book: I found it on a bookcrossing shelf, and had read and enjoyed some Stross before, so decided to give it a chance, despite the facts that its genres didn't appeal to me that much, and that it was third in a series. Much to my surprise, I not only found it accessible despite my complete lack of background knowledge - I found it incredibly involving.

Part of the reason for that is simple: it's clear from the very first page that this is a book filled with deep, existential, apocalyptic angst, covered by a thin surface layer of jokes - the narrator pretty much explicitly tells us this on page three or so. And I'm all about that. (A side-effect of growing up in the "No Future" 80s, perhaps.) I am, in particular, all about that when it's combined with humour. Make me laugh/grin, then punch me in the gut? Yes, please. (Not literally, though, ok?) So, there is that. And then, after that programmatic prologue, we're all of a sudden in a different book. It's still a novel about occult spies, oh yes - but it manages to infuse this doubly exotic subject with a downright staggering dose of mundanity. Our narrator Bob may be sent to exorcise haunted fighter jets as part of his remit, but most of his life is spent in ways that will feel sadly familiar to people who aren't in his rather exotic line of work: he is subject to the inscrutable whims of management, deals with bad office coffee and rampant bureaucracy, spends too much time on uncomfortable public transport, tries, and mostly fails, to have a social life on top of his time-consuming job... Even the exorcism, when we get to it, feels rather a lot like a tech support routine. This could be terribly dry - indeed, to some readers, it apparently is - but for me, this is what really sold me on this series. The apocalypse is coming, and our narrator is bleakly aware of it, and he's a freaking magician (though that is a term rarely used by the Laundry, an organisation full of nerds who prefer to be called "computational demonologists") - but really, everyday life is still everyday life... at least for a little while longer. The shit will hit the fan soon enough, the Elder Gods will return, but until then, there's no getting around the fact that you need to do the dishes and shop for groceries. This emotional mixture of humdrum mundanity and cosmic horror just utterly works for me. The mundanity heightens the horror by anchoring it very solidly in reality, and the horror lends a downright tragic dimension to the mundanity. Make no mistake: we eventually do get to an explosive finale, because this is a Charles Stross book, and he's very good at that... but for a long while, the ride there is a somewhat leisurely one in this book, with Bob spending more time reading old classified documents than having magical encounters. The tension keeps rising even during the "quiet" parts of the book, though - but it's an old-fashioned, understated kind of tension. The comparatively low-on-action middle section of the book is welcome in another way: a fair bit of time is spent on Bob and his wife Mo's private life, giving them both, and their relationship, a great deal of previously lacking depth -- speaking from the perspective of someone who has read the first two books, too... In particular, we see the personal, devastating fallout from an especially horrifying recent job Mo has done for the Laundry - and it's frankly surprising she only has a proper mental breakdown three books later... Though really, of course, both Mo and Bob are, by the time of The Fuller Memorandum, already severely overextended and in permanent crisis mode, and in a sane world neither of them would be on active duty for quite a while, after this book... Overall, we get a strong sense of these two mutually supporting each other, heartbreakingly, in a context of constant trauma. We also get to see them angst-bicker about which shopping bag the jar of pickles and the milk should go in when you may need to suddenly drop the shopping to reach for your magical invisible gun. These are the real issues of the paranoid spy lifestyle! (And this is exactly the kind of detail for which I love the Laundry series.) To return to the aforementioned explosive finale: without going into any spoilerific specifics, this, too, is balanced admirably between big-screen, pyrotechnic-etc. action, and a more personal level of drama, and is all the more powerful for it. I really don't want to spoil things here, so let me just say that on that personal level, the stakes are huge, and so are the consequences we are left with. There was never going to be any returning to a comfortable status quo for the Laundry either way, of course - but with The Fuller Memorandum, Bob himself reaches a personal point of no return. And it's completely fascinating.

#books

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graphicpolicy · 6 years

Text

*WARNING*: Minor Spoilers

Coyotes #4 concludes the current arc of the series. As the Victorias raid the secret location of the Coyotes, they need the help of their oldest enemy Seff. In the midst of blood, violence, and lost, Red will rise out of the ashes. But will she become the champion of women and girls? Or another predator?

The fun starts with the cover. I haven’t talked a lot about the series’ covers since the first issue, but here it’s just too gorgeous to ignore. The intensity of the all-red palette emphasizes the danger and action, visually solidified with the images of Red carrying an unconscious Eyepatch, great canine beast behind them. The wavy, often chaotic art of Caitlin Yarsky makes this image stick in your head.

Opening up the issue to the first two pages, and we get splashes that blast the promised intensity of the cover at your face. Here, the art’s aforementioned attributes are in full swing to illustrate the messy, savage fighting. A lot that makes this work is the panel layouts. They are the traditional rectangles and squares but also huge and contain abundant details. It’s a significant departure from many western comics that prefer 5-9 panel layouts. There are barely any layouts exceeding more than 4 panels. It reminds me of manga. Less but wider panels makes a scene appear more dramatic. For comparison, here is an image of Coyotes #4 next to Shuzo Oshimi’s Happiness Vol. 1.

However, these larger panels also cause the pacing of the issue to be too quick. In a manga trade with 100+ pages, larger panels work. But in a 20+ page single issue, you finish in under 10 minutes or so. A smooth read sacrifices a feeling of hefty content. Mind you, most American single issue comics have that problem. Most of all though, I feel like the pacing concludes the current art too quickly. The events that transpire are satisfying and have a logical progression, but there should have been a lot more in the middle. I would have, if not add extra issues to the arc, increased the page count of the single issues. This was similarly done in Sean Lewis’ previous project The Few quite effectively.

Don’t let this nitpick eclipse the greatness of the art. It might be short, but each page is a slam dunk. A new trick Yarsky pulls is more experimentation with color. It has always been there, but grayish colors tended to be the primary palette. Now there are scenes with intense shades of orange and red. Now that I think about it, the presence of red ties back to how red has been an ever present color motif. Deducing the meaning of this color has been a challenge, but if I had to guess, it’s about the growth of Red’s character from hapless orphan to Champion of the Victorias.

Since I’ve mentioned Red’s character arc, it’s time to talk about Sean Lewis’ writing. This issue definitely feels like the characters, particularly the protagonists, are the centerpiece. The Victorias finally face down the Coyotes, and serious power shifts take place. The most significant is of course with Red. She gains higher statues among the Victorias, becoming their champion. This ties back to the power struggle between her and Duchess, where the latter party seemed to have had plans for the young girl but never clear what those were. This lack of clarity gave the impression of nefariousness, an unfair dynamic between master and servant that diminished the Victorias’ feminist agenda. It isn’t clear if Red’s new statues evens it out. Duchess also seems to gain higher statues among the Victorias, which reveals some tension between her and Abuela that wasn’t fully explored due to the pacing. What any of this does to heighten the stakes is for the next arc to expand upon.

I’ve already spoiled enough of the plot, so I’ll try to be a bit more obscure by discussing the feminist theme. This theme has twisted into many directions, but the core is still how patriarchy and toxic masculinity terrify women into submission. Issue #4 doesn’t add another layer so much as it brings this theme to a satisfying triumph for feminism. Watching the Victorias slay the coyotes is satisfying. Hell, the Victorias are so gung-ho that a splash page has them unleashing superpowers, even one popping the claws freaking Wolverine style. Absurdism, the greatest power against patriarchy.

On a more serious note, there are two lines of dialogue from Red that really hit the nail on the hammer regarding these concepts. Free of spoilers, here is the first:

“This is what people do to us. They make us pose. And then they make us disappear.”

It is a commentary on the imagery of harmed women. Mass media is full of these images, from news reports that contain pictures of abuse victims to fiction where a dead woman becomes the protagonist’s motivation. There is a larger discussion on this topic, incredibly complex and too much ground to cover on this review, but there is something sickening about the prevalence of this imagery, yet its consumption is superficial. Women are harmed every day, and while their broken bodies and minds might be remembered (temporarily), themselves as individuals are forgotten. Their suffering, their personal trauma, is stolen and mass marketed to a larger audience without empathy or respect. It becomes a spectacle.

Violence against women is imagery quite common in Coyotes, but often with better context. We are meant to know, understand, and root for these women. Most of all, despite how monstrous it presents the men that commit this violence, it also gets to what drives them: fear.

”Funny when monsters lose their power. They don’t really want to fight. They just want to run.”

I might have mentioned this before, but men’s violence against women is out of fear. Without their beastly forms, the coyotes are just small, weak men. This seems to be a parallel to toxic men in real life, the domestic abusers in meat space and the trolls online. They have deep insecurity in themselves, and women are, for them, easy targets to take that self-loathing out on. They commit their violence while behind a facade of masculinity, but when confronted with women like the Victorias, the facade crumbles even as they act more aggressively. I guess what I’m trying to get at with my rambling is that Sean Lewis is engaging in feminism in an earnest way. It is not perfect, but at least he processes it way better than other men attempting, and failing, to write these type of stories.

That said, the coyotes are a particular case because the coyote forms are forced on them, kind of how like toxic masculinity is forced on us. But are we willing to accept it? The men that become coyotes are on the borderline of how much they just act out to what they are programmed to do vs. inner desires to murder women. It’s a moral conundrum, one that could have been further explored, but, again, the arc was too short. Either way, women should not have to hold the emotional burden of understanding the male violence directed their way, not when it is a case of life or death.

That said, there are men in Coyotes that show positive growth. Detective Frank Coffey goes from cautionary observer to full-blown ally of the Victorias, expressing utter disgust of the coyotes committing violence. Nothing about it seems self-serving. Just like the author Sean Lewis, Coffey is legitimately invested in feminism. Men that engage eagerly with feminism would be an interesting subject for the next arc. Judging by the black and white epilogue of this arc, that might just be the case. I’ll be excited to see how that goes.

Coyotes #4 is, despite minor bumps in the road, a satisfying conclusion to the current arc. The heroes show up and kick serious ass, new possibilities are open up, and Caitlin Yarsky gets to expand on her amazing artistic abilities. I didn’t even go into depth of her amazing lettering this issue.

I think it speaks for itself.

In fact, this entire comic speaks for itself. Go pick it up. Enjoy the action-packed horror, fantasy, surrealism with an earnest feminist message. It’s one of the best sleeper hits of this past four months, and I hope it continues to grow in success.

Story: Sean Lewis Art: Caitlin Yarsky Story: 9.5 Art: 9.5 Overall: 10 Recommendation: Buy

Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Coyotes #4 is action-packed horror, fantasy, surrealism with an earnest feminist message @yarrrsky @ImageComics @Coyotes_Comic #comics *WARNING*: Minor Spoilers Coyotes #4 concludes the current arc of the series. As the Victorias raid the secret location of the Coyotes, they need the help of their oldest enemy Seff.

#caitlin yarsky #comic books #Comics #coyotes #image comics #sean lewis

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