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myrmidryad · 3 years

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20 Questions - Writer’s Edition

Tagged by @lambourngb thank you! 💗

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

81 total, mostly Les Mis and RNM.

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

1,557,760 holy shit I’ve written over a million words 😵

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

On AO3, not counting the universes I’ve written fusions with, there are seven: Les Mis, Roswell New Mexico, Merlin, MCU, Young Avengers, X-Men, and Vikings.

On ff.net, nine more: Teen Titans, Xiaolin Showdown, Transformers, Naruto, Narnia, Hellboy, Artemis Fowl, Lord of the Flies, and Skins.

Some fics are on both, but when I moved to AO3 I mostly left the ones I didn’t think were good enough to expose to a new audience. And gone from the internet forever (probably) is the Maximum Ride fanfic I wrote and posted to a forum back in the day. RIP that fic.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

from one side to the other (Les Mis, exr soulmate oneshot)

sentimental you and faithful me (Les Mis, exr bodyswap oneshot)

Just Another Guy With A Bow (Avengers, Clint/Coulson, Clint origin fic)

potentially lovely, perpetually human (Les Mis, exr empath!Enjolras)

This brave new world’s not like yesterday (Les Mis, exr the bowling alley fic)

5. What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

If there’s a rocket, tie me to it is one of the first Les Mis fics I wrote, and it’s uhhhh very canon in that everyone dies. In my head it was kind of a partner fic to <a pattern in the system> A Bullet In The Gun, which was also a dystopia fic, but that one had a happy ending, and I wanted to go again and have the canon ending for Les Amis. And I think that might have been the last unhappy ending I ever wrote? I like happier endings way better!

6. What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

Basically all of them have happy endings, especially the long ones that actually have plots! But I’m going to pick Finding You, because I skidded canon to the left to force events into happiness before tragedy could ever strike, and spun that out into a nice long roadtrip with lots of happiness and love and friendship, ending on a great big optimistic note that everyone’s future would be just as happy and unstruck by tragedy. I reread chunks of this fic all the time for the good vibes.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you've written?

I’ve written a bunch of fusions, but I think the only one that actually counts as a crossover is Fighting the Hurricane, which is a Les Mis/Pacific Rim fic. I’m not sure if my Les Mis/Oglaf fic is a crossover or a fusion, but it’s definitely the craziest one I’ve written just because Oglaf itself is so off the wall - Sharpshooter.

8. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I looooooove writing smut, of all kinds. I’ve written a lot of bdsm smut in particular for Les Mis, and weirdly almost none for RNM, idk what that’s about.

9. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I usually do these days, though on multi-chap fics if I’m posting a chapter a day or similarly quickly, I’ll wait and reply only the last chapter. I didn’t used to reply to comments at all unless they were particularly stand-out or asked a question, which was following the example of other writers, more than anything else. I also had the notion that people do sometimes use the number of comments on a fic as a metric to judge whether to give it a go or not, and replies massively skew that count.

I reply now, or try to. Um, confused widgeon, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I haven’t replied to your comments from July 2020 yet. They were too nice and I got overwhelmed. One day I’ll get to them!

10. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Lol yes, I was weirdly pleased and immediately deleted it.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not as far as I know.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I’ve had a couple of people ask about it before, but idk if it went anywhere.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I co-wrote very bad Transformers fic with my best friend in secondary school and we had a great time. Shout out @scythling! Since then though, no. I’m too precious over creative control, I think, and I quite like writing in a vacuum.

14. What's your all time favourite ship to write for?

Of all time is tricky. Enjolras/Grantaire will have to take the trophy though, I think. They’re iconic!

15. What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

I have a bunch I’ve abandoned and accepted that I’ve abandoned, too many to list, so I’m not counting those because I know I’m never finishing them. Of the ones that are still in my WIP folders...there are also too many to list, but only a handful I’d be sad about never coming back to. I think the main one is probably Underground Dreaming, which would be very difficult to finish for multiple reasons, the main one being that I always envisioned it as open-ended. But I am sad that I stalled out on posting more than a few fics in that series. Too much research can kill the muse!

16. What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue and spooky atmospheres. Love me a spooky atmosphere.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

I use ‘grinned’ way too much. Dialogue tags in general, but ‘grinned’ in particular. And I’ve developed a real problem with length, where I’ve become almost incapable of writing short fic. Which isn’t necessarily bad, exactly - length is needed for some of the stories I want to tell, but being concise isn’t something that comes naturally to me anymore.

18. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Language barriers are one of my favourite things to write, actually, but because I’m very much not fluent in anything but English, I shy away from putting in actual words from other languages. I’d much rather have a whole exchange or speech in another language actually written all in English, with the difference indicated either by outright saying the character/s are speaking in another language or by altering the grammar and sentence structure.

19. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Either Teen Titans or Xiaolin Showdown.

20. What's your favourite fic you've written?

Shadow Work is something I’m going to be proud of till I die, probably.

I think a lot of people have already been tagged so uhhhhhh if you haven’t done it already or want to @beautifulcheat @sugarfey @im-the-punk-who @gritkitty @maeglinthebold @daughterofelros @dotsayers

#fic meme #my fic

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spacecrone · 4 years

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Sorry, Cassandra.

So, it's definite then

It's written in the stars, darlings

Everything must come to an end - Susanne Sundfør

I first learned about the climate crisis in 2008, as an undergrad at Hunter College, in a class called The History and Science of Climate Change. For the next decade I would struggle with how to process and act on the scientific paradigm shift climate change required: that human activity could disrupt the climate system and create a planetary ecosystem shift making Earth uninhabitable to human life. I became a climate justice activist and attempted to work directly on The Problem which was actually, as philosopher Timothy Morton writes, a hyperobject, something so systemic and enormous in size and scope as to be almost unintelligible to human awareness. I’ve cycled through probably every single response a person could have to this knowledge, despair, ecstasy, rage, hope. I’ve landed somewhere close to what I might call engaged bewilderment. For me, his particular locale has a soundtrack, and it’s Susanne Sundfør’s cinematic dance dystopia Ten Love Songs, an album that tells a story of love and loss in the Anthropocene. Sundfør is a sonic death doula for the Neoliberal project, with a uniquely Scandinavian version of bleak optimism. To truly grapple with this time of escalating transition, we need to really face what is, not what we hope or fear will be, but what is actually happening. A throbbing beat with shimmering synths around which to orient your dancing mortal envelope can’t hurt.

Susanne Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs was released a few days after Valentine’s Day in February of 2015, six months after I had been organizing Buddhists and meditators for the Peoples Climate March. I was already a fan, having first heard her voice as part of her collaboration with dreamy synth-pop outfit m83 on the Oblivion soundtrack. Oblivion was visually striking but felt like a long music video. The soaring synths and Sundfør’s powerful voice drove the plot more than the acting, though I loved how Andrea Riseborough played the tragic character Vika, whose story could have been more central to the plot but was sidelined for a traditional Tom Cruise romantic centerpiece. But since the movie was almost proud of its style over investment in substance, the music stood out. The soundscapes were as expansive as the green-screened vistas of 2077 in the movie. It was just nostalgic enough while also feeling totally new, a paradox encapsulated in the name of m83’s similarly wistful and sweeping Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. I am not exempt from taking comfort in style that signifies a previous era, and I am also not alone in it. It’s a huge industry, and while the MAGA-style yearning for a previous era is one manifestation, maybe there are ways to acknowledge culture as cyclical in a way that doesn’t sacrifice traditional knowledge to some imagined myth of perpetual progress.

When Ten Love Songs came out the following year, I listened to it on repeat for days. Sundfør seemed to have absorbed the music-driven sci-fi into a concept album, with m83 providing her with a whole new panopoly of sounds at her disposal. Like Oblivion, Ten Love Songs told the story of a future dystopia with high speed chases, nihilistic pleasure-seeking and operatic decadence against a backdrop of technocratic inequality. It mixed electro-pop with chamber music and I listened to it on a Greyhound ride to Atlantic City in the middle of snowy February. I hadn’t felt like this since high school, that a full album was a sort of soundtrack to my own life, which I could experience as cinematic in some way while the music was playing. This situated me in my own story, of studying climate change as an undergrad and graduating into a financial collapse, working as a personal assistant to an author writing about ecological collapse and ritual use of psychedelics, to joining a Buddhist community and organizing spiritual activists around climate justice.

Ten Love Songs is a breakup album, with lyrics telling of endings and running out of time. But it didn’t read to me as an album about a single human romantic relationship coming to an end. It felt like a series of vignettes about the planet and its ecosphere breaking up with us, all of us. People. Some songs like Accelerate, one of the album’s singles, throb in an anthem to nihilistic numbness and speeding up into a catastrophe that feels inevitable. Fade Away is a bit lighter, tonally and lyrically, (and if you listen, please note the exquisitely perfect placement of what sounds like a toaster “ding!”), but is still about fading away, falling apart. The way the songs seem to drive a narrative of anthropocenic collapse built on science fiction film scores, the combination of orchestra and techno-pop, absolutely draws on Sundfør’s experience collaborating with m83 for the Oblivion soundtrack, which itself combined Anthony Gonzalez’s love for the adult-scripted teen dramas of his own 80’s adolescence. In Ten Love Songs, Sundfør takes what she learned from this collaboration and scores not a movie but a life experience of living through ecological collapse and all of the heartbreak and desire that erupts in a time when everything seems so close to the knife’s edge.

I am reminded of another Scandinavian dance album that was extremely danceable yet harbored within it a sense of foreboding. The Visitors, ABBA’s eighth studio album, was considered their venture into more mature and complex music. The two couples who comprised the band had divorced the year before it was released, and the entire atmosphere of the album is paranoid, gloomy, and tense. The cover shows the four musicians, on opposite sides of a dark room, ignoring each other. Each song is melancholy and strange in its own way, unique for a pop ensemble like Abba. One song in particular showcases their ability to use an archetype of narrative tragedy and prophesy to tell the story of regret. Cassandra is sung from the perspective of those who didn’t heed the woman cursed by Zeus to foretell the future but never be believed.

I have always considered myself a pretty big Abba fan, something my high school choir instructor thought was riotously funny. I was born in the 80’s and nobody in my family liked disco, so I seemed like something of an anachronism. But pop music, especially synth-oriented pop, has always felt like a brain massage to me. It could get my inner motor moving when I felt utterly collapsed in resignation to the scary chaos of my early life. But I only discovered the song Cassandra in 2017, while giving The Visitors a full listen. It felt like I had never heard the song before, though, as a fan I must have. But something about 2015 made the song stand out more. It starts with piano, soft tambourine, and the ambient sound of a harbor. It has a coastal Mediterranean vibe, as some Abba songs do, foreshadowing Cassandra’s removal from her home city, an event she foretold but could not get anyone to believe. It’s a farewell song of regret, echoing the regret the members of Abba felt about their own breakups.

We feel so full of promise at the dawn of a new relationship. Only after the split can we look back and say we saw the fissures in the bond. The signs were there. Why did we ignore them? This happens on an individual level but the Cassandra paradox is an archetype that climate scientists and journalists are very familiar with. This particular Abba song, and the Visitors album overall, uses this archetype to tell the story of a breakup in retrospect. With climate change, the warnings have been there, even before science discovered the rising carbon in the atmosphere. Indigenous peoples have been warning of ecological collapse since colonization began. Because of white supremacy and an unwavering belief in “progress,” perpetual economic and technological development and growth, warnings from any source but especially marginalized sources have been noise to those who benefit from that perpetual growth model and from white supremacy itself. Is there a way to undo the Cassandra curse and render warnings signal BEFORE some major event turns us all into the chorus from Abba’s song, singing “some of us wanted- but none of us could-- listen to words of warning?” Composer Pauline Oliveros called listening a radical act. It is especially so when we listen actively to the sounds and signals of those we would otherwise overlook.

When I look back at my life in the time that Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs and m83’s movie music seems nostalgic for, the late 1980’s in New Jersey, I was a child with deeply dissociative and escapist tendencies, which helped me survive unresolved grief, loss, and chaos. I recognize my love for Abba’s hypnotic synth music as a surrendering to the precise and driving rhythm of an all-encompassing sound experience. I also see how my early life prepared me to be sensitized to the story climate science was telling when I finally discovered it in 2008. I had already grown up with Save the Whales assemblies and poster-making contests, with a heavy emphasis on cutting six-pack rings so that sea life would not be strangled to death. I knew what it was like to see something terrible happening all around you and to feel powerless to stop it, because of the way my parents seemed incapable of and unsupported in their acting out their own traumatic dysregulation. Wounds, unable to heal, sucking other people into the abyss. I escaped through reading science fiction, listening to music like Abba and Aphex Twin loud enough to rattle my bones. I wanted to overwhelm my own dysregulated nervous system. I dreamed of solitude on other planets, sweeping grey vistas, being the protagonist of my own story where nothing ever hurt because ice ran through my veins and the fjords around me. My home planet was dying, and nobody could hear those of us screaming into the wind about it.

Ten Love Songs woke up that lost cosmic child who had banished herself to another solar system. Songs of decadence, songs of endings, songs of loss. Though that album was not overtly about climate change, Sundfør did talk about ecological collapse in interviews for her radically different follow-up album Music For People In Trouble. After the success of Ten Love Songs, Sundfør chose to travel to places that she said “might not be around much longer” in order to chronicle the loss of the biosphere for her new album. It is more expressly and urgently about the current global political moment, but the seeds for those themes were present and in my opinion much more potent in the poppier album. But maybe that’s the escapist in me.

The old forms that brought us to this point are in need of end-of-life care. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchal theocratic nationalism, neoliberalism, they all need death doulas. Escapism makes sense in response to traumatic stimulus, and for many of us it may have helped us survive difficult circumstances. But if we are to face what it means to be alive on this planet at this moment, we might be here to be present to and help facilitate and ease the process of putting these systems to rest. And maybe this work is not at odds with a dance party. The ability to be visionary about shared alternatives to these dying systems is not inherently escapist, when we are willing to take the steps together to live into those new stories. What would happen if cursed Cassandras, instead of pleading with existing power structures to heed warnings that sound like noise to them, turned to each other to restore the civic body through listening, through bearing witness to each others unacknowledged and thwarted grief over losses unacknowledged by those same systems of coercive power?

Engaged bewilderment means my version of hope, informed by Rebecca Solnit’s work on the topic, comes from the acceptance that things will happen that I could never have imagined possible. Climate change is happening and there are certain scientific certainties built into that trajectory. Some of it is written in the stars. But as with any dynamic system change, we do not know exactly how it will all shake out. These unknowns can be sources of fear and despair, but there is also the possibility for agency, choice and experimentation. The trajectory of my individual life was always going to end in death. Does that make it a failure? Or does it render each choice and engagement of movement towards the unknown an ecstatic act? As the old forms collapse, no need to apologize to the oracles. At this point they are dancing, and hope you’ll join.

#susanne sundfør #abba #anthropocene #hope #climate crisis #climate change #ecological collapse #scandinavian music #dystopia #utopia

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teaveetamer · 5 years

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My Issues With TFioS (and Other Elements of John Green)

Alright I’m just going to preface this with two things.

It’s been about six years since I’ve read the entire thing through, so my points are probably not going to be as detailed or precise as they were when I first read it.

If you enjoyed the book, identify with the fanbase, or like John Green in any capacity... Great! You might want to skip this one. This is definitely not the post for you. I’m going to put all of my more controversial thoughts under the cut so if you don’t want to see them you can just move on.

I brought up the book in that other post because I felt it had relevance to the discussion of “authors using characters as a mouthpiece”, but that’s only a small part of my issue with the book itself. I suppose I could have used a fanfiction example, since there’s more than enough fodder there, but I brought up The Fault in our Stars specifically because I feel comfortable criticizing a book in a way that I don’t feel comfortable criticizing fan works. John Green is a public figure that produced a paid product, made money, and does this professionally, while most fanfic authors are amateurs that provide free entertainment and just do it for fun.

Now with that said, we move on to the meat of the post.

Some Background

Perhaps this is not a little known fact, but I absolutely adore love stories. I don’t have incredibly high standards for them by any means, and in fact I actively enjoy them even when they aren’t the deepest, most thought provoking pieces. Someone got me a copy of Red, White, and Royal Blue for my birthday this year and I read the entire thing cover to cover in a day (and I seriously recommend if you’re looking for a pretty easy read with a lot of gay).

The only thing I love more than love stories? Tragic love stories, of course. If anyone has followed my fanfiction or main blog for any amount of time then you know that I love a little bit of tragedy. Usually with a happy ending, but not always. So when one of my friends shoved (and I mean literally shoved) The Fault in Our Stars into my hands and billed it as a “tragic but heartwarming love story” I thought it would be perfect for me.

I was sixteen at the time, the target age demographic, and I was always looking for books with smart, well written teen characters. At this point in my life I’d never heard of John Green or his fanbase before. I tell you this because I disliked the book as I read it, but I think John Green and his fanbase are a major factor in why I disliked it so much I’m willing to sit down and write a blog post about it six years later. Granted, that’s not all on the book, but it is a factor.

Needless to say, I was not all that impressed by it. At some points I was downright infuriated, really.

My Issues With the Book

In summary, it feels very meh and overly pretentious. After about two chapters I just wanted to put it down, and the only reason I pushed through is because my friend insisted that it got better. She said it was funny, relatable, and intelligent, but I found it to be none of these things.

The impression I got was that the author, whoever he was, fancied himself terribly clever and he wanted everyone to know it. You know the type, the kinds of people that go around and assure everyone of how smart they are? It feels like it was made for haughty teens to brag about how intelligent they were because they read a “deep” book. The book itself, despite being a surface level of “witty”, didn’t really have anything to say. In the end it reads like a thirty-something year old man bragging about how smart he is and waxing philosophical about the nature of life (and... Breakfast food..?) and using a fictional teenage girl to do it.

That’s why I brought up the “mouthpiece” thing. I didn’t want to read a book about a thirty-something dressing up his thoughts as a teenage girl. I wanted to read a book about a teenage girl.

Speaking of Hazel Grace… I don’t know if this is a common experience, but can anyone else tell when a man writes a female character? I find that I usually can. Men have a particular voice when they write, and especially when they write women. Every single page hammered me over the head with the fact that this was a man who was trying (and, in my opinion, failing miserably) to write a relatable teenage girl. And, in my opinion, he parroted a lot of very upsetting, dangerous mentalities for young women.

There were quite a few “I’m not like other girls, and not just because of the cancer!” moments (a mentality that I find wholly problematic coming from other women, let alone a man writing for a woman) that just had me rolling my eyes straight out of their sockets. She doesn’t care about shoes, see! She reads books! Isn’t that awesome and unique? Because, apparently, women are not allowed to do both.

These problematic mentalities extend into the book’s romance plot, too. Augustus is, frankly, one of the creepiest motherfuckers I’ve ever had the displeasure to read about. Not only is his aggressive creepiness portrayed as romantic, but Hazel reacts exactly how men wish women would react to their advances. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of the book in front of me so you won’t get much in the way of direct quotes, but some examples include:

He stares at her, completely unblinking, for the duration of their cancer kids support group meeting… before they’ve even so much as spoken a word to each other. Which also features this gem of a quote: "A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well." which just perpetuates the disgusting misconception that women are okay with being creeped on as long as a guy is attractive. Spoiler alert: We fucking aren’t.

He repeatedly refers to Hazel as “Hazel Grace”, despite her introducing herself as “Hazel” and asking him to just call her “Hazel”. And not only does he ask for her full name, he demands she give it to him. This rings all kinds of alarm bells for me, because you know who else does that kind of shit? Christian Grey. And it’s manipulative, disrespectful, and downright rude. It is essentially saying “I hear your desires, but I would prefer to address you how I want to address you, not how you would like to be addressed, because my ego is more important than your comfort”.

Hazel is perfectly fine with getting into a complete stranger’s car and spending time at his house mere minutes after meeting with him and after all of the questionable shit he just pulled.

Continuing this book’s litany of problems with women, let’s talk about Isaac’s (ex)girlfriend. The book treats their breakup as this massive betrayal, then even goes on to justify vandalizing her property because of it.

I’m sorry, but no.

You, as an autonomous human being, have the right to end a relationship with someone else whenever, wherever, and for whatever reasons you designate, regardless of previously expressed emotions or promises. How and when she did it was not the most ideal, but she’s an emotionally immature teenager, and there’s never going to be a good time to do something like this. What was she supposed to do, keep pity dating him because she felt sorry for him? Wait until someone invented technology to cure blindness? Assuming she did actually break up with him because of his disability… Are her reasons shitty? Sure. But she’s allowed to have them.

And you know what? He’s allowed to be mad about it. His anger might be completely understandable, if not totally justified. But you know what else? That does not give him the right to take revenge on her by vandalizing her property.

I would have no problem with this scene if it were honest about what it was: a bunch of teenagers with under-developed frontal lobes that are angry and feeling vindictive. But it’s not that. It’s depicted as not only completely justified, but heroic. I’m sorry, no. You are never heroic for harassing another human being.

And Augustus’s dumb little speech to her mom is such garbage. You really expect me to believe that a grown woman was so pwned by some jerk teenager’s super witty justification for destroying her property that she just went inside and, idk, watched TV? Didn’t call the police to report the crime that he and his friends were actively committing against her? Bullshit.

Speaking of bullshit, that scene is pretty egregious, but that doesn’t even begin to cover my issues with this book’s pretentious dialogue. If you told me that they ran every word in this book through Thesaurus.com then I would believe you without hesitation. The one hook, the draw, the thing that kept me reading was supposed to be the relatable characters, but they just aren’t relatable. They’re not realistic in the slightest. Seriously, go read any line of this book out loud and tell me how ridiculous you feel. I kept expecting Augustus to pull off his skinsuit and reveal that he was secretly a robot trying to imitate human speech the entire time.

I’m not sure how far I can go into this point without giving you direct quotes, but half the stuff that comes out of these characters mouths is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. “Put the killing thing between your teeth so it can’t kill you”?

It’s not a metaphor.

Putting an unlit cigarette in your mouth is still stupid. I guess it won’t give you lung cancer, but really? It’s still not a great idea.

Augustus has to go buy these cigarettes, which means he’s actively going out and giving money to an industry that has been funding pseudoscience and suppressing health initiatives that would prevent people from suffering what he did (i.e. fucking cancer).

Here’s a clue: Tobacco companies don’t actually care about what you do with the cigarettes. Their transaction stops as soon as you put the money in their hands. I could purchase a hundred packs and throw them in the garbage, and the only thing they know is that they got about $600 from me. Way to “stick it to the man”, asshole. You’re not clever.

With the exception of the Isaac’s-girlfriend thing, all of that is in chapters 1-4, by the way. This book turned me off so thoroughly that early.

So by the time the Amsterdam trip rolled around I was already not enjoying this book, but then this thing happened and it was just the final nail in the coffin for me. You probably know what I’m talking about already, but if you don’t… The Anne Frank Museum kiss.

I honestly cannot even articulate how incredibly tasteless and disrespectful I find the entire thing, and not only does that happen, but it’s followed by an r/ThatHappened “and then everybody stood up and clapped!” Seriously?

There are smarter, more well-versed people than me that have covered this topic, so I’ll leave the analysis for why that’s all kinds of wrong to them.

Those are really my big gripes, though there’s a few smaller ones (like Augustus throwing a pre-funeral like are you a psychopath? Why would you put the people you love through that???) that I’m not going to touch on because they weren’t all that instrumental in putting me off. Instead I’ll move on to the external factors.

The Fanbase

So I finished the book, a little miffed at having just wasted my time, and immediately told my friend that I didn’t like it much, and that I would be returning her copy the next day. Feeling pretty meh-to-slightly-negative about it, but whatever, it happens.

I was essentially met with “wow I can’t believe you didn’t get it.” and “Oh well maybe you’ll finally understand how deep it is when you’re older” from my friend. Which is really just one step away from the wow can’t you read?! BS that I’ve been seeing more and more frequently these days. So immediately I was pissed. All that aside, I was sixteen, the target age demographic? If I didn’t ‘get it’ then John Green was doing a pretty piss poor job of conveying what it is.

So I went online seeking something. Either validation that I wasn’t wrong and that I didn’t miss the point, the book just wasn’t great, or an explanation of what this it was that I’d missed. And let me tell you... Spotting a negative opinion of this book was like looking for a unicorn. There were a few, and many of them were met with the same kind of thing I had experienced. Vitriol, insistence that they were stupid or that they didn’t get it (again, with no explanation of what it was), and, apparently, a lot of harassment and threats.

I discovered that John Green’s target audience had a tendency to be… A bit obsessive. Lots of young, impressionable teenagers that were willing to jump on an opposing opinion with zealous outrage. If I had any interest in pursuing any of John Green’s other works or John Green as an internet personality any further, then it died in that moment. Absolutely nothing turns me off like a rabid, spiteful fanbase.

Now by this point I was already in the rabbit hole, and I began encountering a lot of criticisms of John Green and the things he’s said and done in the past. I did not like what I found.

John Green Himself

To be extremely blunt, the guy put such a bad taste in my mouth that it retroactively soured my opinion of The Fault in Our Stars even more. Since this is a post about my opinions on the book, I’m only going to be discussing things that affected my view at the time I read it. These are all things that happened six years ago, and I have no idea what this man has been up to or what he’s said about any of these topics since.

Let’s just get this out of the way… John Green writes the same book over and over. There’s always a quirky, nerdy white boy that is invariably cisgendered, and almost always straight. He is always an outcast with only a few friends, though apparently never directly bullied. He always meets an edgy girl that he falls in love with the idea of. Usually there is a road trip somewhere in there too.

The Fault in our Stars admittedly doesn’t follow the exact same framework, but it’s close enough in a lot of ways. Instead of the Quirky, Too-Smart-For-His-Own-Good cisboi being the PoV character, it’s the love interest (Hazel also fits this description, albeit a female version). Hazel and Augustus are both still outcasts. Hazel is attracted to Augustus because he’s Deep and Edgy and A Little Larger Than Life. The road trip is a flight to Amsterdam.

Looking at the man... Yeah the entire premise starts to come off as some weird self-insert fanfiction. I can feel the “I was a quirky, bullied teen and I wish this is how my high school life had been!” energy coming through absolutely every pore and every molecule of ink. Every character reads like John Green. John Green has written book after book and the main character always appears to be John Green in a slightly different teenage skinsuit.

And that’s fine, I guess. A little lazy, but I guess it’s working for him since he’s making hella bank? It’s certainly not enough to put me off the guy, just not something I’m interested in reading, and not something I find compelling.

What put me off for good were some of his comments. Dude skeeves me the fuck out. I’ll just go over some of the highlights I found at the time, and why they upset me so much when I heard them.

“Nerd girls are the world's most underutilized romantic resource.”

As a nerdy girl that has been stalked and harassed by men because I’m “good girlfriend material” (aka I like video games and traditionally masculine stuff and I’m pretty! I must be a unicorn!), this statement is disgusting.

I don’t care if it was a joke. I don’t care if he wasn’t being serious. This is the kind of shit that men think is a compliment because they think it makes “quirky” girls feel “unique” and “special”, but that “complement” is also an insult. You know why? Because it makes female interests all about how men perceive their sexual or romantic viability.

John Green’s penchant for writing “special” and “unique” girls (while simultaneously shaming “typical” girls, but I’ll get to that in the next point) and depicting them as the ideal woman just reaffirms my feelings about this quote. I think, on some level, John Green has no idea why this is such a bad take. And that’s not even getting into the fact that he called human beings resources. Women are not objects that exist to be a plot device or for your gratification. Fuck right off with that shit.

“She was incredibly hot, in that popular-girl-with-bleached-teeth-and-anorexia kind of way, which was Colin’s least favourite way of being hot”

This is just one quote of many that shames people with eating disorders and weight problems (on both ends of the spectrum, “too fat” and “too skinny”. Another fun one being: “there’s the weird culturally-constructed definition of hot, which means ‘that individual is malnourished, and has probably had plastic bags inserted into her breasts.’")

Know what this line is? It’s called “negging”, and it’s a popular tactic of incels because it works. You make someone seek your approval by intentionally giving them backhanded compliments to undermine their self esteem. The idea is that the more you insult them, the harder they’ll work to try and impress you. It doesn’t work on everyone, but you know who it does tend to work on? Insecure younger people (usually girls). You know who John Green’s target audience is? Insecure teenage girls.

As for the actual substance of the quote… I hate it. He’s shaming a woman for the choices she makes over her appearance. Which are, fun fact, none of his damn business. Also the idea that “skinny” and “anorexic” somehow need to go hand in hand is just wrong, insulting women for a mental health disorder they have no control over is offensive, and using a serious mental health disorder (did you know that anorexia is the most deadly mental health condition?) as an insult is disgusting.

Coming back to my earlier point about shaming “normal” girls, this quote is just the tip of the iceberg. He repeatedly shames women in his books for looking or behaving “typically”, while quirky girls are lauded as the ideal. Quirky girls are “weird and interesting” and normal girls are “boring”. If this was intended as a compliment, it’s a shitty one. If you have to shame one group to make another feel better, it is not a compliment. You are lowering all women when you pull that shit. You teach them that in order to feel good about themselves another group has to be made to feel worse.

And hey, maybe the pretty girl likes her teeth bleached because it makes her feel confident? Why can’t bleached teeth girl and anime t-shirt girl both be beautiful and unique and confident in their own right? Why is it “powerful” for anime t-shirt girl to wear her nerdy clothes, but scorn-worthy for bleached teeth girl to like bleaching her teeth?

What John Green is doing is simply replacing one ideal (skinny pretty girl) with another (quirky cute girl), and then he pretends like his version is somehow “woke” because it’s not based on physical appearance (though all of the women in his books are also physically attractive. Hmmm. Guess “nerd girls” are only “viable resources” when they aren’t hard to look at?).

And trust me, I’ve been down this path. I’ve been taken in by guys who try to make me feel ~special~ by putting down other women, and it leads to absolutely nothing good. It doesn’t make you feel better. It just makes you feel angry and resentful, and that’s not a place you want to be in. In fact, this was a mentality I had recently escaped from around the time I picked up this book. Seeing someone with as much influence as John Green parroting this specific brand of toxic shit to exactly the audience that would be most likely to feed into it? I was never going to be able to like the guy, sorry.

I know some people are able to “separate the art from the artist”, and I might have been willing to do that had the book actually been good… but it wasn’t. So in the end the book just looked worse for all of the author’s shortcomings.

So yeah, in summary: The book was mediocre at best, the author pushed all of my angry feminist buttons, and elements of the fanbase were annoying, condescending, and spiteful. I didn’t like the book in the first place due to the myriad of problems plaguing it, but everything else just made it look so much worse in hindsight.

Anyways, this probably got kind of ranty, but it was cathartic and I did make this blog to vent about dumb stuff. I think this qualifies.

#Personal stuff #TFioS Opinion Piece #Sorry it took so long #I had a lot to say #A little ranty

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airbender-dacyon · 5 years

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Life and Kataang Week Delays

So I’ve been thinking about writing up this post for a while now, but haven’t had the chance until today. Its part explanation as to why there were so many delays and inconsistent updates with Kataang Week and part cathartic exercise for me personally. If you’re curious about what happened, feel free to read. I think this is more for me than anyone else, but like I said, it also serves as something of an explanation for how I poorly handled Kataang Week this year.

Before I get into the details, I’d just like to give a huge shout out to everyone who has offered me kind words and support these last several weeks. It means the world to me. And I sincerely apologize if I forget a name or two; @kristallioness @thecaroliner @the-rosey-one @s-n-arly @mindatworkk and @secretsecrettunnel

And thank you to everyone who participated in Kataang Week or helped spread the word that it was still happening.

If you’ve followed my personal blog for a while, you know I’m prone to hiatuses due to personal life or more likely, my anxiety/depression. And while I can more or less manage that outside of the internet, my online presence suffers. I spent far too long as a recluse back in 2013/2014 hiding away from friends and family in real life by retreating into the internet. I have no desire to return to those days. So despite my best efforts, much of this year I was unfortunately unable to maintain a consistent presence on tumblr.

The source of much of that anxiety was my former warehouse job, which I just very recently left. The work itself was not terrible, but after the first few weeks it transitioned from a 40 hours per week job to 50-60 hours per week. The mandatory overtime, combined with family obligations, left me with very little time to focus on my personal life. The pay wasn’t as great as previous jobs I’d held, the benefits were crap, the management was more concerned about hiring new employees than retaining current ones, and overall the experience just left me physically drained and apathetic towards the job/company.

Additional anxiety came from working towards entry into graduate school, just prior to starting said former job. Although I was accepted into the graduate school of my choice, I still have plenty of work to do before the semester starts in a few weeks. Again, most everything in my life was put on hold or pushed back thanks to that warehouse.

And although my exact area wasn’t directly affected, Southwest Ohio has been dealing with a lot this year. Several tornadoes tore through the region, heavy rains affected farming and roads for weeks, and much more recently, the shock of the mass shooting in Dayton. Again, while none of these have directly affected me, I personally know friends and family who were affected. And while we were fortunate to not have friends or family lost in the Oregon District, we are saddened at the loss of life and terrified at how quickly such a tragedy came about, especially in an area we imagined was welcoming and safe.

All of what I mentioned above was plenty to deal with, but I think I would have probably been able to keep up with Kataang Week/tumblr had I not been dealing with the grief that I am.

Around February/March, I learned that an old high school classmate and friend committed suicide. I scrambled to try and remember when we had last spoken and realized that – with the exception of possible, since deleted conversations on facebook – we likely hadn’t talked since graduation several years ago. I have vague memories of them – I know what they looked like, their voice, their general attitude and personality – but whenever I try to really remember events or exact memories, I draw blanks. And I think that hurts me as much as actually losing them because in a sense, I’d already lost them in my memories before I lost them in life.

On a similar note, I’ve learned about other friends I’ve known from high school and college and how some of them have changed and… I’m not sure what hurts worse on that front – uncertain if we’re really friends anymore or that I discovered these developments on my own/they didn’t trust me enough to tell me directly. Some of them I lost when I became a recluse in 2013/2014, others I don’t really know when. And I know people grow and change through life, but it hurts all the same.

Within days of hearing about my classmate’s suicide, I learned my last living grandparent – my grandmother – had passed away. She had suffered from Alzheimer’s/dementia for about five years now, declining with each and every visit until other relatives managed to move her to a nursing home to provide her with better care. I hadn’t seen her in well over a year by the time she passed due to the distance to travel to where she lived and the next loss I’m going to talk about. I cried after the fact, but up to and during her funeral, I just felt numb.

It was these losses that caused the initial delays for Kataang Week this year.

For almost the last two years, the greatest obligation in my family life was to visit another relative – a member of my immediate family – who was suffering from a rare disease.

My mother was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s some years ago and she fought valiantly to maintain her life despite the rather aggressive onset of the disease. By the time she was reliant on a cane, she had to quit her job and apply for disability. The next year, she was reliant on a walker; less than a year later, a wheelchair. As her motor control and strength were taken from her, so was her mind in bits and pieces. She became confused and forgetful more often, slurred her speech and lost her voice some days, among other symptoms. My father and I did the best we could to make our home accessible to her, but eventually even in a wheelchair she became largely reliant on the two of us.

My Dad shouldered most of her care and for far longer than he probably should have. After speaking with a neurologist about the possibility of a surgical procedure (deep brain stimulation, I believe – known to help ‘reset’ the brain for Parkinson’s patients and give them independence and motor control again for another 5-10 years), we were informed that my Mom wasn’t actually afflicted with Parkinson’s.

The disease she actually suffered from is known as Multiple System Atrophy (often referred to simply as MSA) and presents itself as ‘Parkinson’s on steroids.’ It is much less common than Parkinson’s and there is no cure. After symptom onset, those afflicted with MSA live for an average of 7 more years before succumbing to complications (most often respiratory related) resulting from the disease.

Eventually it became too difficult to care for her at home and we moved her into a nursing home. So when I was home from school or off work, I spent as much time as I could with my Mom in her new home. As a result, 10 hour days followed by several hours at the nursing home didn’t leave me with much time for tumblr/Kataang Week this year.

She sometimes had enough strength and mental aptitude to move herself around in her wheelchair, other times she was still reliant on family or staff. She made new friends and eventually came to accept her situation. She knew she was declining and often wondered what she had done to deserve such a cruel fate.

Within the last year, she became almost entirely confined to her bed. She didn’t have the strength to sit up long enough in a wheelchair for anything other than short trips through the nursing home for her personal hygiene. On days she was more mentally ‘with it,’ more aware of her situation, she was very depressed with her situation. The best days were when she could hold conversations and laugh, despite everything. However, the good days increasingly became fewer and father apart. She began to eat less and simply stare at visitors.

After almost two weeks of staring with little talking and poor appetite, I had a good day with her. She was smiling and talking with me. She ate a decent dinner that evening. We laughed at funny commercials on the television and family stories. It was a good day. I thought things were going to start looking up, getting better. I wish I had stayed with her longer that night.

I don’t think she ever spoke more than a few words after that night. The poor appetite and vacant staring returned, interrupted only by an occasional spark of consciousness or smile. Within a week of that last good day I spent with her, hospice told us she was likely not going to live much longer; she passed not even a full day after hospice told us that.

We had been living in a state of perpetual grief as we watched her slip further and further away these last several years. But to lose her so suddenly still cut deep. We were also relieved that she didn’t have to suffer anymore.

My Mom’s rapid decline and death happened in the final weeks leading up to Kataang Week. I tried to get things situated well enough for the week, but I failed. I appreciate everyone’s support and patience this year and Marie for helping out when I needed it most.

o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

TL;DR - Work, weather, and deaths of friends/family piled on the anxiety/depression and delayed Kataang Week.

So if you’ve taken the time to read all of this, I thank you. I feel a little lighter now that I’ve written it all out. And if you made it this far, I’d just like to say – the next time you see your parents or a loved one you haven’t seen in a while, give them a hug. Tell them you love them. You never know how much longer you’ll have with them. Sometimes the death of a loved one is sudden and unexpected. Sometimes it’s an inevitability you’ve feared for years. Either way, it hurts like hell.

To end, I’d just like to wish all my mutuals, friends, and followers – and their loved ones – long, healthy, and happy lives. And again, thank you all for your boundless support and friendship.

- Dan

#Dan rambles #Personal #This is really rambly and a mess and I didn't spellcheck or anything #But its something of an explanation

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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The Best Anime of the 2010s

Here it is, the third and final installment in our Best of the 2010s series! We’ve gotten manga and video games out of the way, so it’s time for anime.

If you’re just tuning in, here’s how it works: our three contributors (Evan Minto, Ink, and David Estrella) each ranked their top anime series and movies released between 2010 and 2019. We scored them all based on their positions in the three lists, and came up with a single combined list of 10, which you’ll find below. We haven’t seen every anime out there, so there may be some conspicuous omissions, but of all of our lists, this is the one we’re most confident in. That’s mainly because the contributors covered over 120 titles between the three of them! The full lists for anime, manga, and games, including our individual rankings, are now available on the Ani-Gamers Patreon.

Below you’ll find everything from lo-fi comedies to tragic war stories. And befitting the many ways anime is produced and distributed, our list contains TV series, net animations, short films, big-budget feature films, rotoscope animation, and more. It’s been a great decade for anime, and we hope you find something new (er, more like old) to add to your watch list. Enjoy, and feel free to chime in with your own picks in the comments!

10. Tantei Opera Milky Holmes: Act 2 (2012)

David Estrella: No one believes me when I say that Milky Holmes II is an essential anime and frankly, I don’t have the wherewithal to argue with close-minded idiots that have had the bulk of the 2010s to listen to me for once. If you have to ask, it’s already too late for you but in case you’re 14 and your first anime was a post-Bleach shonen thing, Milky Holmes is a comedy that begins as a mildly amusing goofy slapstick magical girl detective cartoon and soon spirals out into an insane spectacle that completely incinerates all the other half-way passable, middle-of-the-road multimedia schlock that used to made before it all became indistinguishable idol gacha crap. Someone went highly off-script on this production and every Milky Holmes afterwards is not even worth mentioning next to these first two seasons. Between this, gdgd Fairies, and Teekyu, the last breaths of creative expression in TV anime were all concentrated in 2012, and before we knew it, it was gone.

9. Flowers of Evil (2013)

Ink: As far as manga adaptations go, hell, as far as film goes, Flowers of Evil is nothing short of a masterwork. Layering animation atop live action (rotoscoping) to emulate the basic premise behind the poetic movement so treasured by the “tortured” protagonist … not to mention actually including relevant, inspirational poems, Director Hiroshi Nagahama takes great risks – from pacing to form and even content – and sticks the landing with technical and emotional force to improve upon the source material (even though the anime only adapts half the manga). It’s an anime that reveals how beautiful ugliness can be and vice-versa.

8. Kill la Kill (2013–2014)

Evan Minto: There’s nothing quite as enjoyable as watching Hiroyuki Imaishi and Kazuki Nakashima go to town on an anime TV series. Kill la Kill is a bonkers ride from start to finish. It’s got superpowered talking school uniforms, nudist secret societies, fanservice so obnoxious it somehow becomes cool, and a never-ending parade of shocking heel-turns. There’s something in there about fascism and the fashion industry and maybe if you squint hard enough you can argue it’s feminist, but the most important F word when it comes to Kill la Kill is “fun.”

7. Kizumonogatari (2016–2017)

David Estrella: I don’t think I’ll ever fly to Japan for the sake of seeing an anime film on opening day again, and fortunately Kizumonogatari was such a peak for cinema that I’m perfectly fine with that. Kizumonogatari left me fulfilled in a way that people with weaker immune systems would pass on to the hereafter upon leaving the theater. It’s not a coincidence that my interest in anime tanked severely once the Kizu trilogy wrapped up since, with a few rare exceptions, very little anime possesses the same ambitious spirit as I found in Kizumonogatari. While Makoto Shinkai is busy making extended Apple commercials under the guise of magical realist teen romance films, I’m really finding it easier and easier to call the anime medium completely and totally solved as early as 2017.

6. From the New World (2012–2013)

David Estrella: Due to circumstances outside of my control, From the New World appears higher on the list over the definitive best anime of the decade and I’m stuck writing about it. I’ll play along if only because From the New World is a great show that deserves another look to appreciate how much it was doing within the boundaries of weekly 24-minute episodes. Adapted from a science-fiction novel that will never be translated and published into English, it’s the rare sort of anime TV show that gets its hooks in early and continues sinking them in until the thought of taking a break before reaching the resolution is unbearable.

5. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (2012–present)

David Estrella: The loudest JoJo people say that Stardust Crusaders is the best JoJo, then two camps split between Diamond is Unbreakable and Golden Wind say their JoJo is the best JoJo, and then I’m the obnoxious voice in the back that hoots and hollers anytime someone says the phrase “Battle Tendency”. All the other JoJo’s are technically more sophisticated than the first couple of parts, but none of them really match the sheer power of that initial hit, those two amazing openings, and the actual best JoJo, Joseph Joestar, voiced by Tomokazu Sugita giving the performance of a lifetime. At the very least, we will all be haunted by Roundabout memes for as long as JoJo remains relevant.

4. Endless Night (2015)

Ink: Storytelling that relies solely on visuals is seemingly rare in anime these days, and even though Sayo Yamamoto’s Animator Expo figure skating short (which led to the more verbose Yuri!!! on Ice) is backed by a perfectly expressive song by Hiroshi Nakamura, the latter is made superfluous thanks to emotionally soaked movements and settings, laudably implemented surreality, seamless flow, minimalist color palette, and evocative texturing. Seven minutes (if that) lays out, engrossingly, a complete story of inspiration, infatuation, and (ultimately) realization. Ignore the East German judge; the passion and implementation is a 10/10.

3. Inferno Cop (2012–2013)

Evan Minto: “Best of” lists like this one have a tendency toward “high” art, toward stories about Big Ideas and Important Subjects. Inferno Cop is the lowest art of all: a series of nonsensical, lo-fi cutout animated shorts written with the reckless abandon of children playing with action figures. It’s also one of the funniest anime series in a very long time, and certainly one of the best comedies of the decade. It’s only fitting that it served as the world’s introduction to Studio Trigger, who closed out the 2010s with their smash-hit feature film Promare.

2. The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013)

Ink: The recently late and perpetually bereaved Isao Takahata was, ironically, given the work about which this blurb is written, a realist compared to Ghibli co-founder’s (Miyazaki) escapist tendencies. Why, then, is this retelling of a very familiar folktale in The Tale of Princess Kaguya so powerful? Because the characterizations are as palpable as the animation is expressive; there are few scenes in the all of anime that draw breath like those of the MC’s dashing sequences. The art itself is simultaneously emulative of both a child’s picture book and a depiction of time as age sets in. Fairy tales are forever. RIP and thank you, Takahata.

1. In This Corner of the World (2016)

Evan Minto: This movie handily snagged the #1 spot in our ranking, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a story about the hardships of World War II told not through combat, but through the grueling travails of civilian life. In This Corner of the World’s gut-wrenching tragedy is tempered and amplified by the currents of love and big-hearted, true-to-life comedy that run through it. The film is a beautiful tribute to the innocent souls trampled by war, comparable and even — dare I say — superior to the classic Grave of the Fireflies.

Check out our list of the Best Manga and the Best Video Games of the 2010s!

The Best Anime of the 2010s originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on February 21, 2020 at 8:43 PM.

By: David Estrella

#Anime #News #Ani-Gamers

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techmomma · 5 years

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Not Every Story Needs A Happy Ending

I’ve been noticing a very uncomfortable trend of writers and creatives not being “allowed” to write tragic ends for their characters. That, because an audience loves a character and is rooting for them to succeed, that they’re not allowed to have an unhappy end. And I think that’s a very dangerous ideology.

Let me preface this with an acknowledgment: I know where this trend is coming from. For ages now, we’ve had Hollywood directors cramming grim and gritty stories down our throats as if these stories are better because they’re More Realistic(tm) and More Mature(tm). Which is wrong. Grim and tragic for the sake of shock value? Bad. Audiences are tired of it. Truuuust me, I am too. I hate it.

But in response, many people are saying now that characters are not allowed to have an unhappy end, because Tragedy is Bad Writing. And that idea is dangerous too.

It’s understandable to be sick of it and not want to read it or watch it because it’s not our cup of tea, and that’s okay. Let me repeat: it’s okay to not like tragic endings. We have enough tragedy and horror and bullshit to deal with on a daily basis with a planet that’s struggling and capitalism strangling us. We need happy stories.

But... so too do we need these unhappy stories, because they have messages to send too. They have worth to us. To look back in history, many fables end tragically because they are a warning. Many classic stories are the authors trying to warn us “this is what will happen, to follow this path.”

Take, for example, George Orwell’s 1984. Spoiler alert, it’s a downer ending. The protag who’d been trying desperately to organize the beginning of a revolution against a supreme totalitarian oligarchy (probably?) is shot at the end (probably). Obviously, that’s a little upsetting, especially when you start to root and cheer for the protagonist so hard. He seems to make such gains and at the end, it’s all for naught. The authoritarian group in charge knew the whole time, and it ends with him being tortured into submission, and then being shot.

This book is not meant to have a happy ending because Orwell is trying to warn us of the extreme dangers of authoritarianism and fascism. How pervasive and subtle it can become, re-writing history by changing the meaning of words (alternative facts, anyone?), becoming an inextricable part of our lives if left uncontrolled. How it will be the death of us.

This story would not have been as powerful as it was had the protagonist lived. You are meant to read this book, relate to the protagonist, cheer for the protagonist because you are meant to put yourself in the protag’s shoes, to believe “this would be me, were I in this story,” to then see the result. To see the grip of pure fascism and what it could do to you.That you might end up like the protag, if we allow fascism to take root and grow. If the protagonist had won, it would have been yet another Plucky Revolutionist Defeats Fascism story.

Ancient fables, myths, with tragic endings serve to warn us of the dangers of pride, wrath, envy, sometimes even just the dangers of going into the woods at night. We need these stories too. We need these stories to learn from and not repeat the mistakes of the past, or to avoid the horrors of the future. Sometimes we need these stories because we need to be reminded that sometimes, even the most vile monsters of history are still humans like us, and we are closer to them than we ever want to acknowledge. Sometimes we need these stories because they remind us of past traumas and allow us to experience them in a a safe way at our own pace, and allow us to heal. Sometimes, we need these stories because sometimes, they are mirrors of ourselves that we need to look into, or risk the fate of the story itself. Sometimes we need “DO NOT ENTER/RISK OF DEATH” signs instead of “please do not enter” in power plants, right?

You don’t have to like tragic stories. But let them be written.**

**A caveat: LGBT, women, poc, neurodivergent, disabled and otherwise marginalized persons have historically been denied happy endings and continue to be denied happy endings. We have overwhelming numbers of tragic stories with these groups, and these groups need more happy endings. Be warned that to give them a tragic ending may perpetuate harmful tropes against these groups, so take heavy care in how you tell their story. You do not have to give them a happy ending, but be incredibly aware of the context regarding these groups and the history behind them before dipping into downer endings for these characters, especially if you are not in one of these groups. This is what sensitivity readers are for.

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odeuteros-blog · 6 years

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--------------------- deutero- ;

second; secondary: //; ( deu·ter·ag·o·nist : the person second in importance to the protagonist in a drama. )

hey what up i’ve got stats homework im neglecting !!

* slaps the roof of this post * this bad boy can fit so much useless fucking info in it ( including my ooc intro but like , )

----- alrighty lets rock & roll buckaroos i’m linx, i’ve been on this earth two decades too long,,, and i’m in the est. canada baby. i’m super excited to write w/ y’all and i haven’t written an oc in ten years so bear w/ me & my word vomit yea?

mattias eriksson was born and raised ( for the most part) in an itty bitty tiny fishing village in iceland. by itty bitty we’re talking a population of about 300 ( pretty much based off suðureyri ). he was the middle child in a family that was ( now looking back ) at most times insufferable.

there’s tragedy somewhere in there. before he was capable of remembering anything. his parents sung praises when it came to his older brother but time reveals all truths. or at least articles and news clippings do. he’s four ( give or take ) when his brother is ‘ murdered ‘ by a super-human. he’s about fifteen when he puts the pieces together ( his brother wasn’t savagely murdered - on the contrary - he antagonized and harassed the ability harnessing girl until it boiled over & blew up in his face. all too literally. ) finally, he’s nineteen when he gets the FUCK out of there.

plenty happens in the in-between. he’s raised in an intolerant household. anyone who wasn’t STRICTLY human was an abomination, a curse, a plague upon this earth. his parents constantly spitting venom when it came to the loss of their firstborn son // while matti, conflicted, found it hard to mourn for a man he hardly knew. his focus much more so on his younger sister - who was, well, alive. there. real.

from a young age, he thrived on challenge. puzzles. anything to exercise the brain. there was always a better way to do something. he was often scolded for sticking his nose where it didn’t need to be - in adult business. eventually having enough of being chased off - he branched out. made some friends. two, in particular, stood out. a brother and sister ; patrek and magnea. in time the trio was inseperable.

eventually, a strain showed itself. patrek didn’t fit the strict /human/ criteria that mattias’ had grown up on - but time healed wounds, and his had barely been there. he couldn’t carry his parent’s grief. couldn’t pin that on his friend. but patrek’s secret wasn’t his to keep and it came out - with it came an unspoken ultimatum ; cut his ties with his friends or suffer the consequences with his family. the choice was fairly clear, though no less painful.

knowing there was nothing there for him in his hometown, except a life of fishing, it was time to take leave. the siblings aspired for more just as he did & so the three parted with their respective homes. no goodbyes. no notes. mattias leaves while his parents are at work - his biggest regret to this day is never saying goodbye to his sister. if they knew, he’d never have been able to leave. he needed the headstart.

like something out of a film, patrek aspired to do more with his abilities and so begun mattias’ life as the man behind the scenes. finally able to stick his nose in ‘ adult business ‘. it was a bit campy - but it was exciting. they lived a life on the road, constantly moving. helping where they could. mattias learned his way around technology, being hands on where he could. however, he never wished for the limelight. did not want to be on the spread of a newspaper. he just wanted to help his friends. there was some petty theft on their part ( you had to eat and sometimes money was short ) but they managed to stay on the straight and narrow. this lasted for three years.

something had to go awry eventually. he’s too close to the scene, catches an injury that initially looked, not horrible. a scar would become a permanent fixture on his skin - but he’d survive. --------- until infection sets in. until it blossoms into something their petty medical skills can’t cover. maybe slapping some bandages and medical tape on it & calling it a day hadn’t been such a good idea. they were still kids ---- and they’d fucked up.

their hand is forced. petrek and magnea drop him off at the nearest hospital - welcome to crystalline city - and have no choice but to continue on their way less their reputation should precede them and they get caught up with law enforcement. sometimes it was just easier to be ‘ the man behind the scenes ‘.

one hefty hospital bill later and he’s now resident in crystalline - much, MUCH, larger than where he’d originated. there’s some forgery on his part and plenty of loans and he eventually lands himself an apartment with the bare minimum. it’s a lot at twenty-two with an education that is scarce on paper - but he’s worldly & where there’s a will, there’s a way.

you can’t say he doesn’t have drive. it takes some time to scout out a job but he’s not above some begging and pleading if he has to ( he wants to keep that roof above his head somehow ). haggis tech is his beacon of hope and saving grace * finger guns to the real MVP harriet haggis. perhaps there was embellishing on his part - a resume and interview really was just about selling ones self - but he knew he had what it took to back it up - and nothing he’d ever done thus far was out of malintent. eventually ( more like somehow ) he lands on the radar of the harriet haggis and finds himself as a trainee. godspeed.

TL ; DR or the simplified summary

he’s just happy to be here.

on an emo note ; the type of person to feel lonely in a room full of people. would rather shy away from large crowds.

perpetually homesick even though his family / save for his sister / were assholes. they were still his mom and dad. also probably a little heartbroken because the likelihood of them ever looking for him or putting out a missing person notice is slim to nothing and he knows it - probably checked. shit was just too :/ rough. the relationships were kind of shot.

probably checks in on their online activity - discreetly though. like a window into their lives. it’s probably the part of his life he keeps tight-lipped about. partly ashamed and partly hurt.

& his friends kind of up and left him in the city so that adds to that sweet sweet homesick feeling. since that was his last tie.

probably also overcoming his conflicted feelings about people with abilities. it’s more like having to correct a negative thought. he knows it's not true - but he can’t help but feel it upon first meeting. oh they’re inherently dangerous. but like ?? he sees heroes all the time.

wanted/ideas for connections !!

give me that replacement for his little sibling. someone he dotes on. just let him fill ONE void in his life.

someone who he’s just like ?? attached himself to. something about them makes him feel better. the kind of relationship where he’s put himself on their doorstep waiting for them to come home. he’s that friend who spends more time at your house than their own. he’s pretty solitary but this is like the one person(s) that he likes to just have occupied space?? like they don’t even have to be doing anything - just the presence alone is enough - listen im jsut trying to fill this sense of loneliness in his life don’t @ me. if you want to spice things up this person can be a villain / someone he probably shouldn’t be associating himself with.

honestly im an angst hoe too so like throw anything angsty at me - enemies, friends to enemies idc.

friends are fine

GIVE ME A BICKERING. oof i love a good hate/love.

rivals

someone he might be trying to steer back onto the right path of life idk i mean he’s not squeaky clean but like out of villainy ?? that shits wack.

he’s my dumb son and i LOVE HIM. sk;ld also my dumbass doesn’t have discord but if you want to plot my IMs are open just like ??? know me and plotting have a rocky relationship.

#the more i think about it #the more he's probably in peter parker level debt #and thats okay #he's my good son but im amazed his ass isn't in jail #// he probably handed in his resume #with some straight up TRANSPARENT BS on it #sure jan :/#death tw #i probably need to edit the font size on my theme klsdkas smh #i cant think of anything else to add and now my friend wants me to go over her paper again skldk #my whole ass theme is getting an overhaul to be friendlier once i finish this skldjs #sakldj dashboard ver for uno momento

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Raya and The Last Dragon Review: The Best Disney Princess Movie Since Mulan

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If Raya and the Last Dragon proves anything, it’s that Disney is trying to tell a more modern “Disney Princess” story with their latest animated effort. Commercially, Disney’s transition into the 21st century has been a smooth one. While the shuttering of Disney theme parks in the last year due to the pandemic has cost the billions-dollar conglomerate money, Disney has many, many revenue streams, and the Disney brand remains strong. And much of that brand still relies on the studio’s signature Disney Princess movies, which have not had as seamless a narrative transition into modern storytelling as many fans might have hoped.

Rigidly faithful live-action adaptations of the animated classics that millennials grew up with are now recognized for their narrow romantic messaging, and the often racist, colonialist world-building that’s used to prop up this type of storytelling. Meanwhile Walt Disney Animation Studios has attempted to complicate and modernize the Disney Princess template in interesting ways, but they’ve never quite nailed it narratively.

Frozen was a step in the right direction with its emphasis on sisterly love, but it couldn’t resist shoehorning a thematically superfluous romance into its plot with the Kristoff character. Moana, which features Disney’s first Polynesian heroine, makes great strides in giving viewers a more authentic representation of a non-European culture, but still makes some classic colonialist mistakes—blindspots that will always surface when the chief creative forces behind a film are appropriating a culture or cultures they are paid to understand—that keep its fresh setting from truly shining.

Disney is working to tell more modern stories not because it is good for our culture and world (though individuals involved in the production of Disney films might be motivated by this value), but because there is money to be made in telling new stories that give us fresh, feminist takes on the many cultures that influence the melting pot (or salad bowl) that is modern America and the territories of the larger global box office. Raya and the Last Dragon, which will be in theaters and available via Disney+ Premier Access on March 5, makes headway from both the thematic surplus of Frozen and the cultural appropriation of Moana. In doing so, it gives us the best, post-Renaissance “Disney Princess” story yet.

Raya lives in a fictional land once known as Kumandra, a place where humans and dragons co-existed in harmony. Five hundred years before the start of our story, monsters known as the Druun came to Kumandra, turning both people and dragons to stone. Dragons sacrificed themselves to save humanity, but fear and paranoia tore Kumandra apart into five distinct lands, each named after a different part of the dragon: Heart, Tail, Spine, Talon, and Fang. Raya lives in Heart, where her family has tasked itself with guarding the Dragon Gem, the MacGuffin that the last dragon used to save the world a half-millennia prior. When the Dragon Gem is broken and the Druun return, Raya sets out to find the mythical last dragon, Sisu, and to fix the world.

We are told that this story takes place long ago, but Raya’s vibrant world is already well-lived in when we come to it. The societies of Kumandra are different from both the European castles of Beauty and the Beast or Frozen, and the more rural aesthetic of Pocahontas or Moana. Pushing back against the false binary of the “civilized” city and the indigenous wilderness of other Disney Princess movies, the world of Raya is both urban and organic.

The filmmakers traveled throughout Southeast Asia to do research for the film, and it shows. Visually, Raya’s Heart homeland looks like Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, a vestige of the mighty Khmer empire. A trip to Talon reveals a merchant town seemingly in perpetual night market mode. It’s a Disney-fied version of the Banana Pancake Trail more than a specific cultural vision, but that doesn’t totally undercut the excitement the fresh Disney Princess setting infuses into its narrative.

The world of Raya and The Last Dragon is both teeming and accessible at the same time, suggestive of a richness and depth that welcomes rather than intimidates. It is more reminiscent of Avatar: The Last Airbender than anything Disney has done before.

To be clear, like Avatar before it, Raya and The Last Dragon is still very much an American story. While the setting may be a fictionalized world inspired by Southeast Asian cultures, Raya‘s premise is classic Hollywood: Raya suffers a familial tragedy and then must set out on her own quest to save the world. Raya brings that storytelling structure into the 21st century by eschewing the traditional trappings of romance or personal glory (which can be done in modern, interesting ways, but, given the redundancy of those stories needs to be worked harder toward), and leaning into themes of healing, forgiveness, and community. The biggest stakes here aren’t about securing a love or marriage—which, at least in Western media, has inextricable ties to the consolidation of privilege and power—but rather the (figurative) soul of humanity.

While Raya is, broadly speaking, a princess (her father Chief Benja is the leader of Kumandra’s Heart land), Raya’s quest to collect all of the pieces of the Dragon Gem is explicitly depicted to be about a fair redistribution of power and resources. The Druun are simple monsters, yes, but they are also effective stand-ins for the much more intangible forces that threaten our present and future: namely climate change and the devastating conflict that arises from the instability it creates. In Raya, our heroine’s mission is never about regaining or consolidating power. It’s about healing a community and, with it, the natural world—two necessary pieces of the same solution.

Raya and the Last Dragon has a diverse team behind its story. Written by Vietnamese-American playwright Qui Nguyen (Dispatches From Elsewhere, The Society) and Malaysian-born American Adele Lim (Crazy Rich Asians), the movie was co-directed by American filmmaker (and Moana co-director) Don Hall and by Mexican-American filmmaker Carlos López Estrada (Blindspotting). Thai artist Fawn Veerasunthorn served as the Head of Story for the film. It’s hard to imagine a predominantly white creative team telling this same story with anywhere close to the same success.

Lim (along with with co-writer Nguyen) brings the same character-driven humor she displayed in the Crazy Rich Asians script, giving Raya some laugh out loud funny moments for both kids and adults. Much of the American audience’s previous experience with Southeast Asian settings will no doubt be from the mostly masculine-coded aesthetic of action movie set-pieces or martial arts films that made their way to the United States. In Raya and the Last Dragon, we get both action set-pieces and martial arts showdowns… but they can also be pretty. That feels new.

The film has been criticized for its lack of Southeast Asian representation in its cast, which mostly features voice actors of East Asian descent. This kind of blanket, pan-regional representation is common in Hollywood, which tends to conflate communities of color based on a perceived shared distance to whiteness rather than any similarities their cultures may or may not have to one another. This is also true for Raya and the Last Dragon, which drew from the cultures of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, and Malaysia to tell its story. Southeast Asia has a population of over 670 million, which makes up more than 8.5 percent of the global population. It is a region with diverse and distinct cultures, and Raya and the Last Dragon‘s attempt to conflate them all into one world and call it fictional is problematic and will most likely undercut the emotional effectiveness of the story for some viewers.

While Raya‘s world may feel fresh and vibrant to many viewers, it’s the film’s character work that truly shines. The Disney Princess movie has not one, but three female characters at the heart of its film: Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), antagonist Namaari (Gemma Chan), and dragon Sisu (Awkwafina, with her signature blend of goofiness and heart). They all have complex relationships with themselves and one another, even when on different sides of the race for the Dragon Gem. The girl trifecta is rounded out by a solid supporting cast filled with subversive and fun character types that twist the plot and complicate the world in unexpected ways, including Raya’s adorable and visually clever pet pill bug companion Tuk Tuk (Alan Tudyk).

Movies

How Raya and the Last Dragon Became the First Disney Movie Made at Home

By David Crow

Movies

Raya and the Last Dragon Finds Magic in Southeast Asian Tradition

By David Crow

In a culture where more people than ever have a platform to voice their criticisms of mainstream stories, there is no such thing as a non-problematic fave. Raya and the Last Dragon will no doubt have its critics, and many of them will have valid criticisms. As viewers, we all have our narrative priorities—the aspects of storytelling that will pull us out of a story if done poorly, and the narrative elements that we prioritize so highly we will forgive a story its faults when done well.

For me, Raya and The Last Dragon is the most exciting Disney Princess story since Mulan. It gives us fiercely kind and incredibly flawed characters who care about healing a broken world and a setting that recognizes there is beauty and value outside of European castle towns. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s something incredibly special that feels like a step forward for the Disney Princess canon.

Raya and the Last Dragon is available to watch on Disney+ beginning on March 5.

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writegrammar · 4 years

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A Farewell to Arms Post #6

Ian Rocha

Blog Post #6 A Farewell to Arms

Throughout all my experience blogging and reading A Farewell to Arms, the book has been building up to an infamous and tragic ending. Although I was lucky enough to stay away from spoilers for this 90 year old novel, I’ve always assumed that as the book starts with the drifting, lone narrator Frederick Henry, it would end him alone as well. Sadly, I was correct, and at the end of my reading I was left feeling as heartbroken and frankly nihilistic as readers have for years at the death of his true love and stillborn son. Through a portrayal of failing escapism and tragedy, Hemmingway elaborates the inevitability of death, especially in context of the time the novel was written.

A pattern throughout book five, and a theme throughout the novel as a whole, is escapism, and Henry’s efforts to separate himself from the war and his own worsening outlook. Henry particularly fits the role of someone completely disinterested in the world as a mild-mannered guy chasing the most normal life possible. He isn’t particularly patriotic, noble, or emotional, something that is quintessesized in his role as an American ambulance driver thrown into the Italian army. Yet, no matter how much he would move with Catherine to get away or abandon the war, he would be forced to constantly deny the reality of the world. This culminates in the last chapter, where during Catherine’s childbirth in death he loses grasp of any way to avoid his new, empty reality.

Right off the bat, Henry is constantly ushered out of the hospital room from Catherine during her childbirth. He would leave to get breakfast or grab a beer all whilst maintaining a “everything is fine” dialogue with Catherine, referring to each other as “lovely”or “darling”, and, near the end, repeating to himself and Catherine that “she will not die.” Yet, each time he came back into the room, her state was worse than when he left. His efforts to escape the ongoing tragedy worked less and less as she came nearer to death. A related metaphor was shown through the gas anesthetic, which started as almost playful in helping the light pain and making Catherine act “drunk”, but would devolve into her pleading to make the pain stop and Henry being forced to turn the gas dial all the way up to give her a second of relief against doctors orders. Concluding with the ultimate symbol of Catherine’s death, Henry’s world of escape and running was crashing down.

With nothing left to turn to, Hemingway elaborates the true tragedy of Henry, and his realization that in the end there is no way to escape death and the tragedy of life. Throughout the birth itself there would be multiple efforts to survive and save Catherine, just as there were countless efforts to avoid the death of the war in the novel as a whole. Despite the adaptation and decisions made by Henry, like moving closer to a hospital or switching to a caesarean operation, in the end, they wouldn’t matter. Henry was forced to come to this realization, and did so harshly.

“Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about... They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end.. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.” (180)

With an unconditional and nihilistic perspective, Henry see’s the inevitably of his own wife’s death. Corroborating this passage with the heartbroken panics he was sent into, and contrasting the mentioned experience of Rinaldi syphilis and Aymo’s sudden death, Catherine was closer to Henry than anyone else. This is why this experience left him as nihilistic as he was; death was the machine that took away his everything. The final quote sums up Henry and the tone of the book in just a short two sentences, “It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” (284) With Catherine a symbol of a “statue”, perpetually meaningless and only a life meant to die, and the “rain”, which resembles the harshness of the outside world never letting anyone escape, Henry fully is submerged into his climaxing philosophy.

Reading and writing about A Farewell to Arms has given me an intense focus on Henry, as for the most part this is his story. His ultimate nihilism and heartbreak he experiences exists as a symbol for grander meanings onto our world and the world of Ernest Hemmingway. As tragic as this is, the book is very much Hemmingway’s most personal novel. Not only directly through his parallel to Henry in being a WW1 ambulance driver, but in his tragic view on death as well. Something tough to read at points were Henry’s suicidal blips as he portrayed himself onto the death of others. Researching Hemmingway’s death and his family history with suicide, one can assume this novels dark theme as something related to that trauma and perspective that someone can go through. Knowing this, on a surface level the reader gets a heavy, and real perspective of the impact of war onto people. The constant reference to “they will kill you” in the novel can often be summarized to an abstract philosophical viewpoint, but also to the concurrent role of WW1 and WW2 onto people living and serving in those times. Life was really rough and traumatic for many people in times of war. And the way it shaped people was a story in itself. I hesitate writing on this topic because my modern experience, frankly, is nothing like this. I by no means experienced the tragedy of war or death upfront, and my worldview is optimistic and joyous. It’s hard to draw a greater significance when the message of the story, to me, was an experience on how tragedy can shape a person. So, in the end I feel the most respectful thing to comment on in Hemmingway’s writing is the realness of it all. Feeling for the tragedy of Catherine’s death and understanding the horridness of war is the greatest significance I can gleam, as multifaceted as it might be.

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thegreatantonchekhov · 4 years

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Excellent people

By Anton Chekhov

Translated by Constance Garnett

“He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author’s vanity.“

ONCE upon a time there lived in Moscow a man called Vladimir Semyonitch Liadovsky. He took his degree at the university in the faculty of law and had a post on the board of management of some railway; but if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone:

“My work is literature.”

After completing his course at the university, Vladimir Semyonitch had had a paragraph of theatrical criticism accepted by a newspaper. From this paragraph he passed on to reviewing, and a year later he had advanced to writing a weekly article on literary matters for the same paper. But it does not follow from these facts that he was an amateur, that his literary work was of an ephemeral, haphazard character. Whenever I saw his neat spare figure, his high forehead and long mane of hair, when I listened to his speeches, it always seemed to me that his writing, quite apart from what and how he wrote, was something organically part of him, like the beating of his heart, and that his whole literary programme must have been an integral part of his brain while he was a baby in his mother’s womb. Even in his walk, his gestures, his manner of shaking off the ash from his cigarette, I could read this whole programme from A to Z, with all its claptrap, dulness, and honourable sentiments. He was a literary man all over when with an inspired face he laid a wreath on the coffin of some celebrity, or with a grave and solemn face collected signatures for some address; his passion for making the acquaintance of distinguished literary men, his faculty for finding talent even where it was absent, his perpetual enthusiasm, his pulse that went at one hundred and twenty a minute, his ignorance of life, the genuinely feminine flutter with which he threw himself into concerts and literary evenings for the benefit of destitute students, the way in which he gravitated towards the young -- all this would have created for him the reputation of a writer even if he had not written his articles.

He was one of those writers to whom phrases like, “We are but few,” or “What would life be without strife? Forward!” were pre-eminently becoming, though he never strove with any one and never did go forward. It did not even sound mawkish when he fell to discoursing of ideals. Every anniversary of the university, on St. Tatiana’s Day, he got drunk, chanted Gaudeamus out of tune, and his beaming and perspiring countenance seemed to say: “See, I’m drunk; I’m keeping it up!” But even that suited him.

Vladimir Semyonitch had genuine faith in his literary vocation and his whole programme. He had no doubts, and was evidently very well pleased with himself. Only one thing grieved him -- the paper for which he worked had a limited circulation and was not very influential. But Vladimir Semyonitch believed that sooner or later he would succeed in getting on to a solid magazine where he would have scope and could display himself -- and what little distress he felt on this score was pale beside the brilliance of his hopes.

Visiting this charming man, I made the acquaintance of his sister, Vera Semyonovna, a woman doctor. At first sight, what struck me about this woman was her look of exhaustion and extreme ill-health. She was young, with a good figure and regular, rather large features, but in comparison with her agile, elegant, and talkative brother she seemed angular, listless, slovenly, and sullen. There was something strained, cold, apathetic in her movements, smiles, and words; she was not liked, and was thought proud and not very intelligent.

In reality, I fancy, she was resting.

“My dear friend,” her brother would often say to me, sighing and flinging back his hair in his picturesque literary way, “one must never judge by appearances! Look at this book: it has long ago been read. It is warped, tattered, and lies in the dust uncared for; but open it, and it will make you weep and turn pale. My sister is like that book. Lift the cover and peep into her soul, and you will be horror-stricken. Vera passed in some three months through experiences that would have been ample for a whole lifetime!”

Vladimir Semyonitch looked round him, took me by the sleeve, and began to whisper:

“You know, after taking her degree she married, for love, an architect. It’s a complete tragedy! They had hardly been married a month when -- whew -- her husband died of typhus. But that was not all. She caught typhus from him, and when, on her recovery, she learnt that her Ivan was dead, she took a good dose of morphia. If it had not been for vigorous measures taken by her friends, my Vera would have been by now in Paradise. Tell me, isn’t it a tragedy? And is not my sister like an ingénue, who has played already all the five acts of her life? The audience may stay for the farce, but the ingénue must go home to rest.”

After three months of misery Vera Semyonovna had come to live with her brother. She was not fitted for the practice of medicine, which exhausted her and did not satisfy her; she did not give one the impression of knowing her subject, and I never once heard her say anything referring to her medical studies.

She gave up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she were a prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colourless apathy, with bowed head and hanging hands. The only thing to which she was not completely indifferent, and which brought some brightness into the twilight of her life, was the presence of her brother, whom she loved. She loved him himself and his programme, she was full of reverence for his articles; and when she was asked what her brother was doing, she would answer in a subdued voice as though afraid of waking or distracting him: “He is writing. . . .” Usually when he was at his work she used to sit beside him, her eyes fixed on his writing hand. She used at such moments to look like a sick animal warming itself in the sun. . . .

One winter evening Vladimir Semyonitch was sitting at his table writing a critical article for his newspaper: Vera Semyonovna was sitting beside him, staring as usual at his writing hand. The critic wrote rapidly, without erasures or corrections. The pen scratched and squeaked. On the table near the writing hand there lay open a freshly-cut volume of a thick magazine, containing a story of peasant life, signed with two initials. Vladimir Semyonitch was enthusiastic; he thought the author was admirable in his handling of the subject, suggested Turgenev in his descriptions of nature, was truthful, and had an excellent knowledge of the life of the peasantry. The critic himself knew nothing of peasant life except from books and hearsay, but his feelings and his inner convictions forced him to believe the story. He foretold a brilliant future for the author, assured him he should await the conclusion of the story with great impatience, and so on.

“Fine story!” he said, flinging himself back in his chair and closing his eyes with pleasure. “The tone is extremely good.”

Vera Semyonovna looked at him, yawned aloud, and suddenly asked an unexpected question. In the evening she had a habit of yawning nervously and asking short, abrupt questions, not always relevant.

“Volodya,” she asked, “what is the meaning of non-resistance to evil?”

“Non-resistance to evil!” repeated her brother, opening his eyes.

“Yes. What do you understand by it?”

“You see, my dear, imagine that thieves or brigands attack you, and you, instead of . . .”

“No, give me a logical definition.

“A logical definition? Um! Well.” Vladimir Semyonitch pondered. “Non-resistance to evil means an attitude of non-interference with regard to all that in the sphere of mortality is called evil.”

Saying this, Vladimir Semyonitch bent over the table and took up a novel. This novel, written by a woman, dealt with the painfulness of the irregular position of a society lady who was living under the same roof with her lover and her illegitimate child. Vladimir Semyonitch was pleased with the excellent tendency of the story, the plot and the presentation of it. Making a brief summary of the novel, he selected the best passages and added to them in his account: “How true to reality, how living, how picturesque! The author is not merely an artist; he is also a subtle psychologist who can see into the hearts of his characters. Take, for example, this vivid description of the emotions of the heroine on meeting her husband,” and so on.

“Volodya,” Vera Semyonovna interrupted his critical effusions, “I’ve been haunted by a strange idea since yesterday. I keep wondering where we should all be if human life were ordered on the basis of non-resistance to evil?

“In all probability, nowhere. Non-resistance to evil would give the full rein to the criminal will, and, to say nothing of civilisation, this would leave not one stone standing upon another anywhere on earth.”

“What would be left?”

“Bashi-Bazouke and brothels. In my next article I’ll talk about that perhaps. Thank you for reminding me.”

And a week later my friend kept his promise. That was just at the period -- in the eighties -- when people were beginning to talk and write of non-resistance, of the right to judge, to punish, to make war; when some people in our set were beginning to do without servants, to retire into the country, to work on the land, and to renounce animal food and carnal love.

After reading her brother’s article, Vera Semyonovna pondered and hardly perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.

“Very nice!” she said. “But still there’s a great deal I don’t understand. For instance, in Leskov’s story ‘Belonging to the Cathedral’ there is a queer gardener who sows for the benefit of all -- for customers, for beggars, and any who care to steal. Did he behave sensibly?”

From his sister’s tone and expression Vladimir Semyonitch saw that she did not like his article, and, almost for the first time in his life, his vanity as an author sustained a shock. With a shade of irritation he answered:

“Theft is immoral. To sow for thieves is to recognise the right of thieves to existence. What would you think if I were to establish a newspaper and, dividing it into sections, provide for blackmailing as well as for liberal ideas? Following the example of that gardener, I ought, logically, to provide a section for blackmailers, the intellectual scoundrels? Yes.”

Vera Semyonovna made no answer. She got up from the table, moved languidly to the sofa and lay down.

“I don’t know, I know nothing about it,” she said musingly. “You are probably right, but it seems to me, I feel somehow, that there’s something false in our resistance to evil, as though there were something concealed or unsaid. God knows, perhaps our methods of resisting evil belong to the category of prejudices which have become so deeply rooted in us, that we are incapable of parting with them, and therefore cannot form a correct judgment of them.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain to you. Perhaps man is mistaken in thinking that he is obliged to resist evil and has a right to do so, just as he is mistaken in thinking, for instance, that the heart looks like an ace of hearts. It is very possible in resisting evil we ought not to use force, but to use what is the very opposite of force -- if you, for instance, don’t want this picture stolen from you, you ought to give it away rather than lock it up. . . .”

“That’s clever, very clever! If I want to marry a rich, vulgar woman, she ought to prevent me from such a shabby action by hastening to make me an offer herself!”

The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding each other. If any outsider had overheard them he would hardly have been able to make out what either of them was driving at.

They usually spent the evening at home. There were no friends’ houses to which they could go, and they felt no need for friends; they only went to the theatre when there was a new play -- such was the custom in literary circles -- they did not go to concerts, for they did not care for music.

“You may think what you like,” Vera Semyonovna began again the next day, “but for me the question is to a great extent settled. I am firmly convinced that I have no grounds for resisting evil directed against me personally. If they want to kill me, let them. My defending myself will not make the murderer better. All I have now to decide is the second half of the question: how I ought to behave to evil directed against my neighbours?”

“Vera, mind you don’t become rabid! “said Vladimir Semyonitch, laughing. “ I see non-resistance is becoming your idée fixe!”

He wanted to turn off these tedious conversations with a jest, but somehow it was beyond a jest; his smile was artificial and sour. His sister gave up sitting beside his table and gazing reverently at his writing hand, and he felt every evening that behind him on the sofa lay a person who did not agree with him. And his back grew stiff and numb, and there was a chill in his soul. An author’s vanity is vindictive, implacable, incapable of forgiveness, and his sister was the first and only person who had laid bare and disturbed that uneasy feeling, which is like a big box of crockery, easy to unpack but impossible to pack up again as it was before.

Weeks and months passed by, and his sister clung to her ideas, and did not sit down by the table. One spring evening Vladimir Semyonitch was sitting at his table writing an article. He was reviewing a novel which described how a village schoolmistress refused the man whom she loved and who loved her, a man both wealthy and intellectual, simply because marriage made her work as a schoolmistress impossible. Vera Semyonovna lay on the sofa and brooded.

“My God, how slow it is!” she said, stretching. “How insipid and empty life is! I don’t know what to do with myself, and you are wasting your best years in goodness knows what. Like some alchemist, you are rummaging in old rubbish that nobody wants. My God!”

Vladimir Semyonitch dropped his pen and slowly looked round at his sister.

“It’s depressing to look at you!” said his sister. “Wagner in ‘Faust’ dug up worms, but he was looking for a treasure, anyway, and you are looking for worms for the sake of the worms.”

“That’s vague!”

“Yes, Volodya; all these days I’ve been thinking, I’ve been thinking painfully for a long time, and I have come to the conclusion that you are hopelessly reactionary and conventional. Come, ask yourself what is the object of your zealous, conscientious work? Tell me, what is it? Why, everything has long ago been extracted that can be extracted from that rubbish in which you are always rummaging. You may pound water in a mortar and analyse it as long as you like, you’ll make nothing more of it than the chemists have made already. . . .”

“Indeed!” drawled Vladimir Semyonitch, getting up. “Yes, all this is old rubbish because these ideas are eternal; but what do you consider new, then?”

“You undertake to work in the domain of thought; it is for you to think of something new. It’s not for me to teach you.”

“Me -- an alchemist!” the critic cried in wonder and indignation, screwing up his eyes ironically. “Art, progress -- all that is alchemy?”

“You see, Volodya, it seems to me that if all you thinking people had set yourselves to solving great problems, all these little questions that you fuss about now would solve themselves by the way. If you go up in a balloon to see a town, you will incidentally, without any effort, see the fields and the villages and the rivers as well. When stearine is manufactured, you get glycerine as a by-product. It seems to me that contemporary thought has settled on one spot and stuck to it. It is prejudiced, apathetic, timid, afraid to take a wide titanic flight, just as you and I are afraid to climb on a high mountain; it is conservative.”

Such conversations could not but leave traces. The relations of the brother and sister grew more and more strained every day. The brother became unable to work in his sister’s presence, and grew irritable when he knew his sister was lying on the sofa, looking at his back; while the sister frowned nervously and stretched when, trying to bring back the past, he attempted to share his enthusiasms with her. Every evening she complained of being bored, and talked about independence of mind and those who are in the rut of tradition. Carried away by her new ideas, Vera Semyonovna proved that the work that her brother was so engrossed in was conventional, that it was a vain effort of conservative minds to preserve what had already served its turn and was vanishing from the scene of action. She made no end of comparisons. She compared her brother at one time to an alchemist, then to a musty old Believer who would sooner die than listen to reason. By degrees there was a perceptible change in her manner of life, too. She was capable of lying on the sofa all day long doing nothing but think, while her face wore a cold, dry expression such as one sees in one-sided people of strong faith. She began to refuse the attentions of the servants, swept and tidied her own room, cleaned her own boots and brushed her own clothes. Her brother could not help looking with irritation and even hatred at her cold face when she went about her menial work. In that work, which was always performed with a certain solemnity, he saw something strained and false, he saw something both pharisaical and affected. And knowing he could not touch her by persuasion, he carped at her and teased her like a schoolboy.

“You won’t resist evil, but you resist my having servants!” he taunted her. “If servants are an evil, why do you oppose it? That’s inconsistent!”

He suffered, was indignant and even ashamed. He felt ashamed when his sister began doing odd things before strangers.

“It’s awful, my dear fellow,” he said to me in private, waving his hands in despair. “It seems that our ingénue has remained to play a part in the farce, too. She’s become morbid to the marrow of her bones! I’ve washed my hands of her, let her think as she likes; but why does she talk, why does she excite me? She ought to think what it means for me to listen to her. What I feel when in my presence she has the effrontery to support her errors by blasphemously quoting the teaching of Christ! It chokes me! It makes me hot all over to hear my sister propounding her doctrines and trying to distort the Gospel to suit her, when she purposely refrains from mentioning how the moneychangers were driven out of the Temple. That’s, my dear fellow, what comes of being half educated, undeveloped! That’s what comes of medical studies which provide no general culture!”

One day on coming home from the office, Vladimir Semyonitch found his sister crying. She was sitting on the sofa with her head bowed, wringing her hands, and tears were flowing freely down her cheeks. The critic’s good heart throbbed with pain. Tears fell from his eyes, too, and he longed to pet his sister, to forgive her, to beg her forgiveness, and to live as they used to before. . . . He knelt down and kissed her head, her hands, her shoulders. . . . She smiled, smiled bitterly, unaccountably, while he with a cry of joy jumped up, seized the magazine from the table and said warmly:

“Hurrah! We’ll live as we used to, Verotchka! With God’s blessing! And I’ve such a surprise for you here! Instead of celebrating the occasion with champagne, let us read it together! A splendid, wonderful thing!”

“Oh, no, no!” cried Vera Semyonovna, pushing away the book in alarm. “I’ve read it already! I don’t want it, I don’t want it!”

“When did you read it?”

“A year . . . two years ago. . . I read it long ago, and I know it, I know it!”

“H’m! . . . You’re a fanatic!” her brother said coldly, flinging the magazine on to the table.

“No, you are a fanatic, not I! You!” And Vera Semyonovna dissolved into tears again. Her brother stood before her, looked at her quivering shoulders, and thought. He thought, not of the agonies of loneliness endured by any one who begins to think in a new way of their own, not of the inevitable sufferings of a genuine spiritual revolution, but of the outrage of his programme, the outrage to his author’s vanity.

From this time he treated his sister coldly, with careless irony, and he endured her presence in the room as one endures the presence of old women that are dependent on one. For her part, she left off disputing with him and met all his arguments, jeers, and attacks with a condescending silence which irritated him more than ever.

One summer morning Vera Semyonovna, dressed for travelling with a satchel over her shoulder, went in to her brother and coldly kissed him on the forehead.

“Where are you going?” he asked with surprise.

“To the province of N. to do vaccination work.” Her brother went out into the street with her.

“So that’s what you’ve decided upon, you queer girl,” he muttered. “Don’t you want some money?”

“No, thank you. Good-bye.”

The sister shook her brother’s hand and set off.

“Why don’t you have a cab?” cried Vladimir Semyonitch.

She did not answer. Her brother gazed after her, watched her rusty-looking waterproof, the swaying of her figure as she slouched along, forced himself to sigh, but did not succeed in rousing a feeling of regret. His sister had become a stranger to him. And he was a stranger to her. Anyway, she did not once look round.

Going back to his room, Vladimir Semyonitch at once sat down to the table and began to work at his article.

I never saw Vera Semyonovna again. Where she is now I do not know. And Vladimir Semyonitch went on writing his articles, laying wreaths on coffins, singing Gaudeamus, busying himself over the Mutual Aid Society of Moscow Journalists.

He fell ill with inflammation of the lungs; he was ill in bed for three months -- at first at home, and afterwards in the Golitsyn Hospital. An abscess developed in his knee. People said he ought to be sent to the Crimea, and began getting up a collection for him. But he did not go to the Crimea -- he died. We buried him in the Vagankovsky Cemetery, on the left side, where artists and literary men are buried.

One day we writers were sitting in the Tatars’ restaurant. I mentioned that I had lately been in the Vagankovsky Cemetery and had seen Vladimir Semyonitch’s grave there. It was utterly neglected and almost indistinguishable from the rest of the ground, the cross had fallen; it was necessary to collect a few roubles to put it in order.

But they listened to what I said unconcernedly, made no answer, and I could not collect a farthing. No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He was utterly forgotten.

NOTES

St. Tatiana’s Day: January 5 (Julian Calendar)

Gaudeamus: a student song of German origin sometimes sung at academic exercises; the first words, Gaudeamus igitur mean “Let us therefore rejoice”

Leskov: Nikolay S. Leskov (1831-1895) was known for the humor and raciness of his stories

idée fixe: an obsession

ingénue: the role of an artless, innocent young woman in a dramatic production

old Believer: a member of a religious sect that refused to accept the Church reforms of 1682

#Chekhov

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

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As a Cas-girl, I am so tired of all the Cas-related alarmism. Anyone who's worried about his place in the show needs a refresher course on what things were like late S6 early S7. We are so far from that atmosphere right now it's not even funny, no matter how many parallels there may be to that period in the story itself. Like, come on guys, give Dabb the credit he deserves here. So thank you for your reasonable words on the subject.

Thanks, although I wish you didn’t have to say that in the first place >.>

I guess people get jumpy online and ideas spread like wildfire. One of the anons mentioned the comments section although they didn’t say where, “comments section” to me immediately conjures the worst of humanity. :P I assume in fandom contexts that’s where people voice their wildest thoughts and fears unfiltered… Though I know some people in tumblr fandom were pretty worked up about Cas because of all the anons we got after he died, and all the fears that he would be AU Cas or all sorts of things about not getting Cas back. I think people are just tuned to dread and expect the worst…

But yeah it feels like Dabb is trying for positive development so hard. I mean case in point we’d never get a grief counsellor episode if there wasn’t the thought that maybe it’s time to start working through their feelings towards a better end. And of course being a horror show soaked in tragedy a good way to get them really addressing and confronting their feelings is to kill off those closest to them because being a horror show they can come up with ways to bring back Cas or make it only look like Mary is lost. Things which make drama or physically hurt or incapacitate the characters don’t actually convey the writers’ feelings about them.

And I mean you can tell in season 6/7 the overall feeling was not pro-Cas just from the way it was written, and that the writers who did like Cas had to do what they could to send him off and memorialise him, whereas now we’ve been working on a Cas-rehabilitation from narrative neglect in season 10 (where he was only having a single off-season after 8 and 9 focused a lot on him and gave him powerful arcs) because he got more personal arcs and the “mention Cas in every episode” initiative began a shaky start. Season 12 was better than season 11, and ended up mirroring season 8′s structure for Cas/Destiel in some ways, which is considered one of the big Destiel seasons, and then in season 13 the writing has been absolutely lavishing Cas with attention and care.

I mean I can’t really tell people how to react but I feel like I’m fairly chill about the actual show, and all my histrionics are entirely me being OTT for comedy purposes… which, tbh, with the wide tumblr audience it’s kind of worrying that I think people don’t actually get when I’m being ridiculous for attention because who are you without some sort of nonsense people associate you with, and I’ve chosen the concept of Nonsense Itself… :P

I’ve had some enormous misunderstandings about things I’ve said about Cas from sensitive Cas fans who don’t understand that nothing I say is real and I’m basically emotionally blogging from a large claw-footed bubble bath with a glass of champagne in one hand and maybe some macaroons or something in the other… Obviously there are a whole bunch of candles around me… Anyway it’s weird getting vagueblogged at, recognising your post from the description, but seeing someone misinterpret your raucous joy as essentially betraying a massive Cas-hating conspiracy about how we’re squawking with delight about him being written out and killed off for good just to make Destiel canon - again, I don’t think this person actually TRUSTED the show to bring Cas back even though 99.99999999999% of hiatus we KNEW he was going to be back and fine and his normal self eventually. So my post probably looked like a tasteless vulture to them instead of utter glee knowing from the moment Cas exploded into white grace out of his eyes and mouth that we were getting this incredible development for him and Destiel in season 13.

So, idk. Every side of the fandom has its own weird hangups and feeling of injustice from the show. I try and save mine for being weary about them killing off characters like Charlie, Eileen, Kevin, Billie(!) etc and less about getting very protective of a favourite character. TFW each mean an ENORMOUS amount to me on a deep personal level, but as a meta blog I try to be as rational as I can while still harpy-screeching for comic effect about them, and actually pay attention to the writing. I can see a decided quality increase in recent years, especially in paying attention to that fans want good emotional arcs, less contrived or pointlessly dragged out bro drama and better communication, more Cas or at least Cas in a central role to prove he’s well and truly an indelible part of the story… Billie back… :P (KEVIN BACK!?! WHAAAAT). In NO way is the show perfect but I can give points for effort, and for utterly pandering to me when it comes to the TFW emotional arcs :P

And I have stopped watching the show out of boredom in early season 9 and been salvaged only by a strong start to season 11 where I had the show on very bitter thin ice after season 10. So I know what it’s like to not care or to feel the show is awful garbage, but because I knew I was hooked I gave it a CHANCE to get better, and it proved itself to me, and has been on an upward path ever since. I think that shaped my expectations and feelings about the show to make me this chill, that I went right through all those horrible feelings from the end of season 10, but decided to give it another go. But some people can’t extend that hand when they’re clinging to their favourite character or dynamic or whatever, and feeling the show is ruining the one thing they love. Sometimes bitterness and complaining is a way to process having to stop watching the show. Sometimes people cling on and become vengeful ghosts powered by fear or anger :P

I think the Cas side of fandom has a lot of these in particular who are loud and feeling justifiably hurt, who lost all love for the other characters through various things they did to Cas, and now only care about Cas at all, which is a bad place to be in when you don’t want to humour the narrative or to give the show a chance to explain itself. And the people who aren’t angry are perpetually scared something like season 6/7 will happen again and no matter what people say they just don’t trust anything, so they cling on waiting for the horrible news. I don’t think reassuring messages to anons really help all that much but I still take the time to do it in case it helps anyone who is maybe not as lost as the anon but still upset enough it catches their thoughts at the right time :/

#Asks #it's weird - I just don't remember watching season 7 even though I did #I remember like maybe 3 things from season 7 and 8 first watches :P #I just have no frame of reference for how it feels to even watch season 7 for the first time #and I didn't join fandom after season 6 when I came thiiiiiiiis close to doing so #so yeah #I am glad there are still people out there who remember #fandom problems

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ahnmin · 7 years

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Analysis of “mother!”

WARNING: The following contains MASSIVE spoilers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I highly suggest you bookmark this page, go watch the incredible film, then come back to read this so we could discuss whether or not you agree with me.

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(Note: My reading focuses on the artist/creation aspect. I don’t really dive into the Biblical allegory, which you can find with a quick Google search.)

mother! is about humanity’s most selfish and vile habits related to creativity, artistry, celebrity, and fandom.

The beginning and ending of the film as bookends clue us into the repeating cycle. The first shot is a woman, who is not Mother (JLaw), burning up. The last shot is the formation of the Foremother, who again is not Mother (JLaw), waking up and saying, “Baby.” The journey of Mother, from house repair to giving birth to burning the house, will repeat in perpetuity with brand new mothers.

Mother is Poet’s muse. She is also his Home. She brings new life to the house—biologically (she nurtures the Home’s literal heart, sparked by the previous mother) and physically (she repairs, renovates and rebuilds the home, wall to wall). This is done out of pure love. The Woman (Pfeiffer) keeps telling her: “You really do love him, don’t you?” She is completely in love with Poet and adores his writing. She wants nothing more than to provide a “paradise” for themselves and allow him to create another work of art. But unfortunately, he has writer’s block and hasn’t written a single word.

Man (Harris) shows up to their home. He is an admiring fan of his past work. It changed his life. Man brings his wife, Woman, and they end up shattering the Glass Object, which is the previous mother’s heart. This destroys the Poet and he boards up his writing room. He is vowing to never go back to that place again to write another work. Fans are so fascinated by the source of an artist’s inspiration. But they mishandle the fragile thing and clumsily end up dropping and shattering it. This ends up hurting the artist who shuts him/herself up and keeps everyone out.

As Mother tries to kick the couple out, their sons arrive, bringing their problems and drama. They experience the tragedy of their youngest son being murdered by the older son (Cain and Abel allegory). This prompts Poet to invite them in again, along with other relatives and friends. As they grieve, he shares some words with them that help ease their pain and suffering and brings them comfort. Poet tells them that his home is theirs to fully share, and the guests take advantage of this sentiment. They go into their more private spaces upstairs. When Mother protests and claims that this is her home, they respond incredulously: “Your home, huh? Sure.” This is in line with fans of an artist feeling entitled to their personal space. It’s not enough to admire the work and be comforted by it. They invade the artist’s privacy. But the artist is fully open to this and even encourages it.

After Mother kicks them out, she taunts Poet. He still hasn’t written anything. He feels emasculated and purposeless. He only has sex with her after she challenges him. In the morning, she realizes she is pregnant and suddenly, Poet becomes alive with a renewed vigor, igniting him to write his latest masterwork. “Those people’s pain and stories, and now you, and this new baby…” Mother reads it and is floored by its beauty. We see a picture of life being restored to a once burnt down home. But Mother was not the first to read it—the work has already been reviewed and published.

This is when all hell breaks loose.

Their home balloons with sycophants, admirers, cultish obsessives, partygoers, the military, refugees, etc. They steal things—"How else will people know we were here?" They want a piece of Poet, anything at all that belongs to him. They worship him as a Christlike figure. They just want to be marked by him. To find salvation through him. Soon enough, the chaos of the world rushes into their home. Terrorism, political turmoil, power struggles, hedonism, imprisonment, police brutality, warring factions, religious divisions. Because Poet generously opens his doors to the fans, the entire world and all of its problems have entered in. When an artist makes themselves vulnerable and connects to the public, they invite everything else with it, warts and all, politics and all. You can’t cherry pick which parts of the public you want to connect to. It’s either all or nothing.

Mother eventually gives birth inside the writing room—once shut in and boarded up, now the site of new life. The baby itself, the most sacred creation, the utmost life-filled gift that she can give him is taken by the Poet and handed over to his rabid fans. Mother: “Please, tell them to leave.” Poet: “I don't want them to." He is sustained by their adoration. He is narcissistic to the point of needing it for survival. The crowd takes the baby and literally consumes it. Poet's most precious creation—they feed on it, for their own gain.

The way we are obsessed with celebrities' personal lives and personal matters, we feed on gossip like savage wolves. We believe that it will comfort our pain and give us new life.

Mother fights back, appalled at their wretchedness and greed. They respond and horrifically beat her. "Cunt! Whore!" They hate her for lashing out. They punish her for it. This is society’s double standard on women and hating them for being human and angry, which is wholly justified. We shame and batter women when they show any kind of retaliation. Poet defends her but she is pushed to her absolute brink. She lights the entire home on fire, burning down the enterprise.

And now the truths are made clear. He never loved her. He only loved how she loved him. He used her.

She has nothing left to give except one last final thing. Her actual heart. Which completely extinguishes her when he pulls it out because it is her life force. A beautiful glass object found inside the charred stone of her heart. And it regenerates the home. Paving the way for a brand new muse, who will go through the same cycle, just as Mother did before her.

Artists often use and exploit their muses. They’re not interested in the muse as a living breathing Person, with a personality, with emotions. They’re only interested in what the muse can do for them. In how they can serve their purpose of creating a new work of art. They love fandom, they love adoration. They’re willing to sacrifice something as precious as their own child just to keep the crowd satisfied. They want to be Christ. And when they’ve finally drained their muse to the point of being burned to a crisp, they take whatever little they have left until they are finally gone. And even after completely consuming them, the cycle starts again. Rinse repeat.

#mother #mothermovie #jennifer lawrence #darren aronofsky #film analysis

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femslashrevolution · 8 years

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I Am Femslash by coalitiongirl

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

I’ve been a casual femslasher for as long as I can remember. I live in a very inhospitable environment to gay ladies like myself, and I think that for a long time, it felt like…committing to femslash would be the first step down a rabbit hole that’d just make me miserable if I thought about it too much. I stuck to slash and het ships and never let myself get invested enough to even join a femslash fandom. I read a lot of fic, especially once I hit the point where I’d tired of reading about fictional men altogether, but I would never have considered joining a fandom.

And then Once Upon a Time happened, aka probably one of the worst fandoms out there to join as a femslasher. The rest of the fandom tended to use the vocal Emma/Regina (Swan Queen) shippers as a scapegoat, most of the cast and crew made it clear from the start that we were unwanted, and the writing itself was so uneven that it was often a battle just to make sense of it. But I was caught almost immediately, from the moment I first saw the two ladies smile at each other and thought hey, maybe– until now, four years later, still hopelessly in love.

And for me, I think that part of the appeal of a non-canon ship like Swan Queen was in the potential of it. There are so many beautiful canon ships out there now (and many of them haven’t even ended in tragedy!) and there are so many vibrant communities surrounding them that don’t have that kind of ugliness around them from het shippers or cast and crew who don’t comprehend. I can’t deny that seeing two ladies kiss onscreen gives me butterflies and can lift my mood for days, even if I don’t watch the show!

But it’s the non-canon ships– the Swan Queen and the Jetra, the Supercat and the Bering and Wells, arguably– that really draw me in. There’s something magical about taking a given canon, taking a story full of promise but never explicitly written, and transforming it into the story it could be. And in the hands of fandom, promising narratives become love stories! Engaging dynamics become slow burns of the kind that f/f fandoms are rarely blessed with, and the power of the story is in our hands.

And going back to Once Upon a Time in particular, what really drew me in was that this was a show– and a fandom– brought in by the promise of family and happy endings. There were many people who saw the first season– which began with two women set up as antagonists but joined by a shared son– and believed at once that the narrative that they were seeing was a love story. And even now, too often, there are narratives written for them that are wholly about love, about family, about fighting fate, and about happy endings.

Swan Queen gave me the kind of narrative I’d been craving my whole life– a fairytale, an enemies-turned-friends-turned-moms-turned-????. Swan Queen gave me a story and a slow burn beyond any I’d ever experienced, because it feels so often like the narrative is demanding it while the writers are resistant. Somehow, despite every overbearing love interest and bump in the road, this absolute disaster of a show keeps doing one thing right, and it’s Swan Queen and their little self-made family.

And honestly, it’s not even just Swan Queen that has me in love. It’s the beautiful, hopeful femslash fandom surrounding it that believes so hard in this family and their happy endings. It’s been five and a half years for many of us and I’m perpetually awed at fandom’s creativity and determination, at how every new development is another reason to subvert and create and fight for this family’s happy ending together. Being in Swan Queen fandom is being surrounded by people who love as deeply as both Emma and Regina and who want those happy endings just as fiercely, and being in Swan Queen fandom is being just as committed as the characters are to fighting back against fate (or in our cases, an increasingly heteronormative narrative).

And I think back to those years where I didn’t want to invest, where I was terrified of what it might mean to be so surrounded by something that I’d barely be able to access offline, and I think that it might have been easier back then. But never as fulfilling, never as encouraging or as full of hope and fight. Femslash fandom and Swan Queen in particular gave me a place where I belong, a place where I could dare to set aside cynicism and a less hopeful reality and believe in happy (and yes, okay, clearly a little sappy!!!) endings.

—-

Mari is 27 and likes stories, ladies, and stories about ladies. She teaches murder and mayhem (or history, as some like to call it) and has zero attention span for watching TV but somehow manages to do just fine with 100k fics. She can be found at coalitiongirl on Tumblr and AO3.

#coalitiongirl #Femslash February 2017 #Femslash February #I Am Femslash #Type: Meta #submission

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burlybard · 8 years

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The Living and the Dead and Undertale

I wrote this in October 2015. Four months later, my grandmother died. Six months later, my mom died. Grappling with so much tragedy has absolutely altered how I look at pop culture now, especially our culture’s relationship with death and mourning. But looking back at this piece, I don’t think I’d change a word. Only one thing has really changed: I believe, more than ever, that Undertale is perhaps the wisest and most emotionally honest game ever made about the subject of death, which is something most games are inundated with but never have the courage to address. It’s about sadness, mourning, remembrance, and love. It’s about the things we are so often afraid to confront when we experience tragedy. It is almost certainly my favorite game ever made.

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As a child, I didn’t comprehend death until a whole bunch of it hit my family all at once. When I was five years old, over a six month span aunt died at 23 of bone cancer, my grandfather died at 62 of pancreatic cancer, and my uncle died at 30 after he was struck in his car by a drunk driver. I learned then, before I knew much else about anything, that death was permanent, that death disabled entire families (some temporarily, some permanently), that death presented a wall of grief that simply has to be endured until every individual affected has the strength to move on, on their own terms.

As I grew older, the stories I consumed pretty much ignored all that.

In stories, death is typically a device. It is an obstacle for a hero to avoid. It is a convenient way of setting stakes. It is a means of taking large numbers of enemies out of the equation and assuring that they will not bother you again. It is a way of showing how much a character has changed, for the good (in how and why they face death) or for the bad (usually in inflicting it). This is not inherently a bad thing. Storytelling relies on tension. To create tension, characters need to have something to worry about. Death is hard to beat in that regard. Of the greatest TV dramas of all-time, how many didn’t rely on the possibility of death to provide impetus for the plot? Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood- all had death and killing around every corner. The same for Lost, The-X-Files, 24, and Game of Thrones.

Or what about films? Of the AFI’s top 50 films, by my count 35 feature death as a major plot point. Citizen Kane opens with the protagonist’s final breath. The Godfather is about a man’s descent into cold-blooded killing. Shane is about a man’s inability to escape a life of killing. Some Like it Hot is about two men who witness a murder and go on the run. Death moves stories forward. It’s natural to use to it to that effect. But sometimes, I wish more stories reflected on the aftermath. Sometimes, I wish more stories were about what happens when it feels like everything is crashing down at once, because someone you know and love has died. The way death affects the living is different for everyone. Stories are rarely about this.

That video games feature killing and death goes without saying. Ludonarrative dissonance permanently entered the gaming thinkpiece lexicon a few years ago as it became harder and harder to sympathize with a protagonist who commits mass slaughter simply to move the plot forward. I remember checking the stats while playing Uncharted 2 and seeing that I had amassed more than 900 kills and wasn’t close to finishing the game. The sheer absurdity of the number made it impossible not to imagine Nathan Drake- the game’s jovial and good-hearted protagonist- as a harbinger of death, wiping out entire bloodlines. It’s easier to make no attempt to reconcile the dissonance. It’s easier to accept it and get back to having fun.

My favorite work of literature about death is James Joyce’s short story The Dead. It’s title is up front about its theme, no? And yet the story itself meanders through a day in a man’s life, not broaching its titular subject until the very end. You’ve probably read it. If you haven’t, please do so now. It won’t take that long. The plot isn’t really about death. It’s about a man named Gabriel who builds his ego up a bit too much over a speech at a Christmas party. He hears someone singing “The Lass of Aughrim” in another room. He gives the speech. He is proud of himself. He is flushed with affection for his wife, Gretta. On the way to their hotel for the night, he asks her how she feels. Gretta reflects sadly on a boy she’d loved when she was young. He sang “The Lass of Aughrim” to her. Got caught in the rain. Died. Snow falls. Gabriel reflects on how this young man whose life was so short, who accomplished so little during it, could still so deeply affect his wife. They are all still bound together. The dead never really abandon the living. Humanity is in a perpetual state of overlap, those who knew the dead keep living, passing on their memories to others who never knew them. Joyce writes: His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

We never leave Gabriel’s point of view. Somehow, by the story’s end, we know Michael Furey. Time stopped for Gretta when he died. Sometimes, it still does.

Undertale. What does that title evoke? Graves, perhaps. A vague sense of the unknown. It takes place in a world of monsters. You are thrown into this world with no preparation. Early on, one monster asks you very kindly, to please have mercy when you get into a fight. This is easier said than done. You play the game as you are accustomed to doing with these games. Fight monsters, defeat them, level up. Progress through the story. But this game gives you options. You don’t have to fight. And if you do, you don’t have to fight to the death. Granted, it can be hard. But you don’t have to. You are reminded of this regularly. A character you kill might be referenced by someone else later on in the game. Characters you speak to might mention a frightening entity who has come down from above, killing innocents. But this isn’t new. You move on. You reach the end, beat the game. There’s much, much more to it than that, but I’m trying leave this experience as fresh as possible. The first playthrough of Undertale took me about six hours, and I enjoyed every minute.

After winning, the game does something that was surprising when it happened and, in hindsight, is sort of remarkable.

It asks you to play again. With absolutely no killing.

Is this a gimmick? It might look to be. It’s not. It’s where Undertale becomes something truly remarkable.

One of my favorite films about death is The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Have you seen it? There’s a good chance you haven’t. It was directed by and stars Tommy Lee Jones, and written by Guillermo Arriaga. It generated some buzz at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, where Jones won best actor and Arriaga won best screenplay. It came and went in February 2006, earned mostly strong reviews, grossed less than $10 million. I believe it’s one of the best films ever made about the living and the dead.

Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cellido) is a rancher in southern Texas. Pete Perkins (Jones) is his work partner and closest friend. Estrada (this isn’t a spoiler, look at the title) is killed senselessly by a border patrol agent (Barry Pepper) who, as men in positions of power and holding weapons that kill often do, fires without regard. The agent attempts to cover up the killing. Pete digs deep, finds out what happened, and exacts justice. A normal telling of this story would involve revenge. Eye for an eye. A killing for a killing. Death as a device. Jones and Arriaga have a better story to tell than that. Pete wants the agent to see what he has done. To honor the life he stole. Pete kidnaps the agent and takes him on a journey to Melquiades’s home town in Mexico. To say any more would be to spoil the quiet richness of this film. In refusing the easier path, it finds truth and beauty. Revenge makes for shallow stories. Pete’s method of justice accomplishes something deeper. He makes sure his friend is not forgotten. He ensures that Melquiades will survive for unforgiving march of time.

On my second playthrough of Undertale, I noticed a detail in one of the first locations. A diary. Its contents were amusing at first. Knowing their full context is impossible without beating the game once. Seeing it again, I felt my spirits lift with a sort of happy recognition, its meaning coming full circle., before falling back down with sadness, knowing its full context.

I found myself being more careful. Not just refusing to fight. Getting to know characters I hadn’t talked to before. Talking my way out of conflicts that I thought could only be resolved through violence. I found myself unlocking new relationships, new stories, and even new places in the game. I was more than happy with the novelty of this experience, of how different the game was with this approach. Then I neared the end.

A character who’d been my adversary in both playthroughs found themselves changed by my actions. They wanted to change. But time was running out for them. I hadn’t fought them. As in life, death comes to all, one way or another. I was given the chance to reach out to them, to forgive them for our differences. They reached out physically and embraced me. I don’t want to let go, they said.

They were the first character to die in this playthrough. I was moved to tears. Screw that. I was sobbing. Games are so often rife with death. Undertale, more than any I’ve ever played, is about the dead, as well as the living. It’s a game where the dead are meant to be remembered. And for the living in their wake, time stops.

#Undertale

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joechappel · 5 years

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VICTORY

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” - I Corinthians The written word is painfully ill-suited to convey the textured nuance and layered complexity of human communication, in its glorious fullness. Irony, sarcasm, and the way we display one emotion to guard another...these are all part of the beautiful way we Homo sapiens communicate. Much of this nuance is achieved through non-verbal means, whether it be visual cues, or the aural cues found in the rise and fall, timbre, or breathiness of a voice, or in countless other ways. I often reflect on this when I hear about the tweets of the man who currently lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, especially when weighed against that same man’s outrageous speech and behavior at his political rallies. I am intentionally NOT a follower, but it would be nearly impossible to not know about them - that in itself says so much. It becomes glaringly obvious when staffers write Tweets meant to make him “relatable” (like his tweet about A$AP Rocky) and when he becomes that most dangerous of combinations: unhinged and unmanaged; and writes something more dark, more genuine, and more revealing, like his reprehensible language inviting Americans to leave their own native land and “go back” to some other country, all because they do not look like his small-minded idea of what an American should look, think, and behave like. Sadly, many Americans find connection in his words, written or otherwise, and there has been much hypothesizing about how influential his hate speech would be to his followers. How far would they go? Unfortunately, the question has some very dark answers, and the freakishly tragic answers to that question keep coming with greater frequency. Even the most willfully ignorant observer finds it difficult to ignore the evidence. When the suspects of more than one mass shooting subscribe to the verbatim philosophy, language, tenets, and policies elevated by the POTUS himself, there can be no denying the connection. At this point, we can no longer delude ourselves into believing we are still in some earlier time of hypothetical what-ifs and the ‘gaming-out’ of different ghoulish scenarios in regards to the behavior of Trump followers in the wake of his dog whistling and race-baiting speech. We are no longer in a time of predictions. We are in a time of analysis. The truth is we’ve been at this point for a very long time, but even the most aloof onlooker really has to work hard to not notice on days like this. Back to my point on language, I often run into friends who jokingly comment on my seemingly shameless anger they glean from my posts, but as I already said, the written word often misses the precise mark. What the reader sees as anger can often be anxiety and fear. And I know that these days when I wake up and type what guides my spirit in the moment, it is my fear that consumes me. Fear as an American witnessing the shameless unraveling of the pillars of our democracy, fear as a gay Black man who cannot escape the ‘othering’ of his very person and will always be amongst the most obvious and identifiable of targets to the xenophobic, racist, and/or homophobic bully. And They will always come for me and my kind first, so my fear is of an existential nature. So you may read unlimited anger, but I’m telling you it’s more often panic and fear - especially because so many of you don’t seem to notice or (this is the most frightening of all) you don’t seem to care (enough). Fear as a human sharing my vulnerability in the presence of others (like being willing to stand naked in public or willing to risk ridicule and rejection - these are my Kryptonite) because the older I get, I’m learning that the only way to live the life that enrages my demons and gladdens my angels is to walk in my truth. It is the only way I can sleep at night and hold my head a little higher in the day. The fear and the anger and the anxiety are determined to do their toll, one way or another. That is an energy none of us can wish, pray, or ignore away. The power we possess is in our choice to hold it all in and let the damage be on us or to be vulnerable and open and honest about it and hope that the energy dissipates in some healthy useful way. The other risk we take is that the dissipation can be ugly and unhealthy when we put it back out into the world. That is what is happening with these misguided men. They are releasing a horrendous pain out into the world, because they can no longer bear their loneliness, their deprivation, and their feeling of being wronged in this life, and along comes a voice and a movement that gives them permission to wallow in righteous anger and preys on their brokenness - it is a harmonic convergence of vulnerability, toxicity, and ignorance that comprises the recipe for the tragic events of Gilroy and El Paso and Charlottesville and countless other places. To say that I feel sympathy for these men would be an awful exaggeration...I don’t even want to use the word ‘empathy’, but in a some ways I do understand the genesis of their mental and emotional depravity. This year in particular has been one monumental cosmic mindfuck. I have experienced unexpected loss, the stripping away, paring down, and letting go of so many things I thought were prerequisites to the defining of me...all of it as the universe keeps whittling me down to my most bare essentials. And somehow I know I’m still not done - there is a transformation afoot and I am being shown who I am and am not, what I can live with and without, who is and isn’t essential in my life. The gift of such a time is that I’m also being offered a newfound clarity in my life’s priorities. I am not my progeny - I am childless. And I am not the lesser half of a spouse - I am single. I am not my next cool gig. I am not my last cool gig. I am not Big Joe or Skinny Joe - I am at all times wonderfully and simply Joe. I am not my casual acquaintances. And I am still me, even when my most cherished friends and loved ones leave my life one way or another. I am still me, when my physical ‘stuff’ gets lost or stolen or broken or misplaced. I am not my wealth or lack thereof. I am vulnerable, sensitive, still somewhat broken, talented, opinionated, imperfect, sassy, intelligent, on-a-journey Joe. All day and everyday. Occasionally I go through my photos on my phone as I did the other day. Each time I notice something cool or interesting about the collection in its entirety. This time I was struck by how many pictures I am embracing or being embraced by someone. I thought I had a bunch of selfies on my phone, but my pics tell a different story. I am a man who defines himself through the relationships in his life. I am my friends. I am my loved ones. It is in the company of others that I truly flourish. As much as I regard myself as a loner, I need that human interaction to thrive - just like all humans, I need to relate. It is that same need that I believe drives so many to become hypnotized by the sinister words of POTUS. Young White males who feel alone, abandoned, forgotten, left behind, denied entry into a life of unearned entitlement that is their perceived birthright ....these vulnerable individuals find connection and kinship in his racist and nationalistic hate-speech. The point is that I can relate to loss and loneliness and feeling robbed of one’s things and even one’s very station in life. That kind of pain has a universality to it, but the myriad ways we choose to let it manifest in our lives can have consequences that go far beyond our personal spheres of influence. Sometimes the unhealthiness of our coping skills has irreversibly tragic outcomes. A friend used to always end his emails with the famous Horace Mann quote “be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” I was so moved by it that I stole the idea (like 100% of the truly wise and impressive things I share) and started ending my own letters and email with the same quote. I’ve since stopped using the quote that way but it popped into my head today. The funny thing is that when I first heard it, I thought “some victory” equated with a grand feat. Anything less than Nobel-laureate-worthy work, or some act that would garner the attention and praise of a thankful public was not qualified to fulfill the task. I needed to write a symphony, run for office, cure something, write the next great American novel or do some other noteworthy deed. Today when I read the same exact words and measure them against the ugliness and tragedy of the world around me, my concept of “some victory” alters. When my portion is fully rendered and I am weighed in the balance for the last time who is the man others will describe? Did his arms stiffen and perpetually keep others at length or did those arms endlessly seek to embrace, comfort, and help others? Did that man walk in the fullness of his truth or did he wither in fear? Was he a model of good citizenship, to the best of his ability, for the next generation to witness or did he leave them to figure it out all on their own? Did he steward his world and his wisdom and then selflessly pass it on or did he selfishly hoard it, taking it all to the grave? Today I am convinced Mann’s ‘victory’ is in our successfully living better today than we did yesterday. I believe that when we are willing to be vulnerable and walk in our truth we can access a compassion for others such as the immigrant, the less advantaged, or whomever we deem the ‘other’, and simultaneously we can show the Patrick Crusiuses of the world a better way forward than the cruel narrow path our failed current leaders have set before these at-risk individuals. The deed is done, so there is no saving this particular man and the lives he has taken, but perhaps we can channel our righteous anger for some other future good and save the next scared, lonely, and angry individual from making the same sick choice. There are untold lives at stake. Yes, we should be ashamed to die, not having “won some victory for humanity.” But the victory is nearer and more immediate than we think. The victory is in our personal living and the battle rages on at the core of our collective soul. More than our thoughts and prayers, this world could use our better living and a greater expression of our humanity. “Be ashamed to die, until you have won some victory for humanity.” - Horace Mann

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