#he wasn’t written originally with that intention. He wasn’t doomed by the narrative he was doomed by the reader poll

[kittykatninja321]

I've always found the: "Jason was to die at age fifteen no matter what." deeply interesting in that sense of: "What would Jason choose?" like... was it worth it? Were those few years he spent with Bruce worth a horrible death?

Also, when you put it next to a Jason that grows up into adulthood... you still put it into a balance. We know, textually know, that those few years were Jason and Bruce were together as father and son are deeply precious to both of them so would it be worth it? Would it be worth it to live and having never experienced them? Guess it's the same question as if Jason was to die no matter what... was meeting Bruce worth all the pain that would become?

was the love worth it….

[ardenttheories]

@fun-with-colors

I saw your tags. I’m here to theorise. 

Knights of Light, for as long as I’ve been able to understand them, have always seemed to me to be the type that just come across Knowledge. There’s no real intention on their part to find it; it just happens to be right there, waiting for them. 

They’re the kind that get messages from the Horrorterrors in their dreams, though they’re never aware that their dreams are from other beings. They can’t fully comprehend what they’re seeing, even in a dreaming state, and as a result transfer it into something they can analyse, find meaning in, and understand. 

For instance, when I originally had Dane (from my AU Ectostuck) classpected as a Knight of Light, one of his biggest theories was “mothman is real”. He got this information from the revelation in his dreams that he was going to be prototyped with a Mothsprite, and that he would die early into the game. In technicality, this would make him a Moth Man. 

If we want to go wholly narrative with this, then we can assume that a Knight of Light is physically capable of hearing or interacting with the narrative. They’re likely able to dream about it as if it’s an open book, or can just innately recognise it in the back of their head, as if it’s transcribed somewhere and playing out in a voice that their subconscious can hear. 

They might not be fully aware of what it is, and as such, they’re more likely to assume that they’re just good at Knowing things. But this also means that they can use the narrative in an exploitative way.

If the Knight of Light is a few steps ahead in the narrative and can “read” that their next reaction is to bow to a person they actually don’t like, they can completely avoid that outcome. They can exploit it by knowing what’s going to happen, and doing something else. 

Lets say that Terezi were a Knight of Light instead of a Seer of Mind. If she knew that killing Vriska on the meteor would much, much later on lead to a doomed timeline, and that letting her live would get them all killed, all because she had the narrative playing out in the back of her head at all times, then she’d know immediately that she’d just have to get the drop on Vriska and knock her out. 

She wouldn’t know why, per se, knocking Vriska out is the best option, but she’d know that it has to be done - and in doing so, she’d completely skip any of the events that led to Game Over. 

Of course, Knights of Light would also be able to tell if a narrative speaker is present, and they’d be able to exploit that voiced narrative in order to trick the narrator. 

A Knight of Light in Meat could’ve easily gotten the drop on Dirk because they’d have known almost instantly that Dirk was in control of the narrative. They could then use that Information and play along until such a point that Dirk can’t fight them back, and while they wouldn’t know he was the narrator or that he was using the narrative specifically, they’d be able to guess that Dirk had been controlling everyone the entire time and wouldn’t be swayed by his influence. 

(In other words, much like Dave, they’d hear Dirk’s voice in the back of their mind - but they’d hear it in full clarity, and they’d be able to decide what they do and don’t do, how much they give away.) 

Hell, a really good Knight of Light could be able to control the narrative itself without meaning to. If they exploited it to the full, they’d be able to change that narrative in their head - the actual narrative that they’re being exposed to - the same way that Dirk changes the narrative of Pony Pals. The original narrative would still be there, but you’d have sections crossed out or written over by the Knight of Light, subconciously or completely intentionally. 

I mean, this could even be done physically. Think of the book Calliope reads that details the story of the Alpha and Beta kids. If a Knight of Light got their hands on that and actually wrote over it, the things they wrote would come True. 

Light has so much to do with the Plot and Importance, it’s very easy to say that a Knight of Light would become the main character of any narrative they’re present in - likely turning something like Homestuck from the 2nd persona to the 1st - and that they’d have a significant effect on the narrative as a whole. I think, however, they’d never be fully aware of it.

Like, they’d get the idea and the concepts, but they’d see it as just that; concepts. A way to visualise what they’re doing rather than what’s actually happening. They’d only realise that as Truth if they ever become a Realised player or (more likely) the Ultimate Self, but even then I’d say it’s more lowkey. 

After all, Rose is a Light player - a literal Seer of the Plot - and she doesn’t have as much of a narrative grasp as Dave does (being that she isn’t aware that Dirk’s controlling the narrative in Meat, and doesn’t host any concern to the physical text during Candy, either. She sees the plot and the story, but not the words). It’d make sense that the Knight can interact, but can’t actually see. 

Of course, Light is a more metaphysical aspect - one of the idealist ones, rather than the realist Aspects, such as Time - so it’s always going to be a fact that it’s easier for a Light player to mess with the out-of-universe things. 

In that sense... A Knight of Light could be the player to recongise that they’re in a story, but see it as a sort of “alternate universe” sort of deal. I don’t think they’d realise that there’s a narrator - that Andrew Hussie, for instance, is writing Homestuck itself - but they’d know that there’s people who can see, and people who can help. They could likely exploit that by interacting with a real-world audience. They’d be 4th wall breakers, if they got really good at it. Knowing that something’s there, but maybe not wholly what. 

They’d also be able to exploit the things the narrative doesn’t focus on. I think I mentioned this before, but I’ll go over it again with a deeper focus; Dave has always loved breadsticks, but this wasn’t relevant enough for us to know, and thus wasn’t written in the narrative. There’s likely a thousand other things he likes that we don’t see - and it’s logical to think that there’s a thousand things he does that we don’t see, either.

For instance, we know that all the characters collect the Grist that drops from the monsters. We don’t see them do it, but they must do, because their Grist counter goes up.

We also know that they must eat and pee. It’s just... human biology. We don’t see it because watching that isn’t relevant to the story, but surely they must do. 

We also know that they must walk places without us actually seeing them do it. We don’t see every step of their travels; sometimes we just see where they end up. Maybe they picked a flower while walking. We’ll never see that flower, but it’s still there, on their person. 

Maybe they give that flower to someone else. We still won’t see that flower, because it’s not imporant. This flower could move from person to person and we’d never know. 

In the same vein, we’ll never know what happened between Dirk and Jake during their relationship word for word. We missed a lot of that. The build up wasn’t as important as the actual breakup and fallout; so there’s a thousand things they could have done and said to each other during that time that we’ll never see. 

Naturally, a Knight of Light could exploit this. Imagine they just randomly brandish an incredibly powerful item that the narrative isn’t prepared for, all because they did the quest for it off-screen. Imagine that they take detours all across the map whenever we’re not focused on them so that they can avoid specific points of confrontation later in the narrative, or so that they can help set up something off screen that ends up being invaluable later. 

A lot of what they do would have to have some sort of on-screen significance - it’d be a Knight of Void, probably, who hides things that’re never seen again within the narrative, and only they who can stop it from ever being revealled, thereby creating their own purposeful plotholes (that only stay irrelevant for as long as even the author doesn’t mention or explain it) - but they could exploit those lapses within the narrative wholly. 

There’s a lot that can come from the narrative when you really think about it, and I’m so glad I always read tags so I didn’t miss that! This post got so much longer than I intended it to be, all because I kept thinking of more and more that a Knight of Light could exploit within the narrative. I think I need to end it here, though, in case it gets too long. But, for a final thought:

When you read this text, you are essentially reading my voice. I am influencing the way you read things in a very clear and precise way. However, if you didn’t know that this was, in and of itself, a form of narrative, you wouldn’t maybe focus on the fact that I am a real person writing these words with a specific purpose. You wouldn’t know that every word is being transcribed from my thoughts onto a page, and that there is an overarching figure to contend with. You would know that there is a narrative being made, and that is as far as you’d be able to get. This is the experience of the Knight of Light.

They would be able to understand my arguments, and they would be able to garner everything they needed from them - but they wouldn’t know that these words have an author. They’d interact with the narrative, change it, disobey it - but they wouldn’t talk as if they knew that a wider figure, a god-like figure, is writing it all down.

In Homestuck, Rose knows there’s a plot but doesn’t focus on the idea of finding the author in order to change things, even though there is still an author physically writing their story even after Hussie (the character) has died, and their narrative focuses more on them as real people than as fictional characters. In some ways, this is because that would get too meta. A character who knows there’s a conceptual “story” is one thing; a character who knows they don’t truly exist, because everything they say is being written down by someone else, someone bigger, is another. 

So when you think about the Knight of Light, it’s always best to imagine that their influence ends with the in-universe understanding. They can break the 4th wall, but not come through it; they can exploit the plot, but not the author; they can recognise that a story’s being told, but not that there is someone responsible for it - at the very least, not someone who isn’t already present within the universe. 

[kallypsowrites]

Game of thrones: Conquest and Rebellion

I’m a happy camper this Christmas as I finally got Game of Thrones season 7 for myself. And I was surprised when it came with this beautiful little DVD that contains an over 40 minute history of the Targaryens in Westeros, narrated by several of the characters in Game of Thrones including: Viserys, Varys, Euron, Peytr Baelish, Sansa, and Jaime. I say characters and not actors because it is clearly supposed to be from the perspective of the characters and what they have learned about the history of the Targaryens.

Now, I was intrigued to watch this because I am actually midway through a big ol’ post on unreliable history in Fire and Blood. The basic thesis is that by telling the history of his world through the eyes of someone in that world, he makes it unreliable and biased and this is very much by design. I have my ideas about what is exagerated vs what is real in Fire and Blood, but I wanted to see how this video compared. Especially since it contains what the SHOW views as the most important notes in the Targaryen conquest.

And boy did it confirm my suspicions about unreliable history. In fact, hearing individual characters bring in their bias illustrated my thesis perfectly. But let’s talk about some of the highlights. Because I was surprised to see how the Targaryens were represented her.

1. Viserys suggests that the Targaryens may have left Old Valyria because of a court mishap and not the prophesy from ‘The Dreamer’. I have had my suspicions about some of the “prophetical” motivation behind the Targaryen conquest, because in large part it seemed like stories written to justify Aegon’s conquest. Like it’s his “destiny”. However, I never thought to question the idea of the dreamer foreseeing the doom of Valyria. Now, if this was from any other character’s narration I might call it unreliable and an attempt to discredit the Targaryens but this is Viserys, “number one Targaryen fanboy”, “my family is the best and like GODS among MEN” Targaryen. Even he thinks that perhaps the vision is just a story. At the very least, the vision wasn’t super clear as the Targaryens left a full twelve years before the Doom. Already the show seems to be calling attention to the fact that the Targaryens are just like everyone else.

2. This continues with the implication that Aegon conquered for resources and knew he could win because of dragons. This is also Viserys’ implication. He also makes a statement about Aegon “teaching the squabbling families the meaning of greatness” and it sounds very villainy. Again. This is Viserys who later on calls Maegar the cruel, “the wise” and says the title of cruel was slander! Viserys is 100% team Targaryen and yet he does not begin to make Aegon’s intentions sound noble. Even though the Targaryen history books are FILLED with that kind of thing. Viserys also calls them “strangers” to Westeros which follows the narrative of this being an invasion. in fact the next section is even TITLED ‘invasion’

After this, we switch to Varys’ narration. As a narrator, he’s probs the most trustworthy as he is the most neutral. And HE adds in the suggestion that Aegon used the hands of the envoy sent to him by Argilac the arrogant were just a PRETEXT for the conquest he’d been planning for a long time. He wanted to rule the seven kingdoms and was just looking for an excuse to attack. He also suggests that Argilac the arrogant was surpassed by Aegon in arrogance. Not a great picture painted of Aegon.

3. “Before he was done, the rivers fields and skies would turn red” -- Varys on Aegon the conqueror. Continues to speak of this man like a villain. in sharp contrast to the ‘noble conqueror’ painted in Fire and Blood. Speaking of which, Aegon is the one who comes up with the words ‘Fire and Blood’ according to this video, which definetily makes him seem like he was hoping for some casual mass murder.

4. Obviously, Harren the Black and Argilac the Arrogant sucked. Totally not coming to their defense. But how are their deaths portrated. Well, Euron is given the chance to describe the death of Harren and he is CLEARLY turned on by the destruction of his ancestors which is a bad sign. It’s description is horrifying and the animation is dark. Obviously if Euron likes it, its supposed to be kind of freaky.

Argilac, however, is given a heroic final battle seeming almost noble. Orys Baratheon, the most humanized of all the conquerors, seems to respect him enough to take his sigil and words “out of respect”. We’ll talk more about how the characters are drawn later, but there’s a big difference between Orys and Aegon.

5. Jaime describes the field of fire and he himself looks VERY MUCH like Lorren Lannister. He stresses that Aegon had “no mercy”. But its no surprise that he hates Targaryens cause they have a bad history. But still, the Field of Fire is shot like a horrifying war scene and the Targaryens are again depicted as the villain. Thousands return home as “scarred monsters”.

Favorite line “Aegon had a fetish for collecting swords”.

6. Sansa narrates the bits about House Stark and House Stark is indisputidly depicted as heroes. Now, this isn’t surprising. Sansa is loyal to her house. But she implies that the north was different than the other kingdoms because they were focused on survival not power. There is focus for a lot of time on the white walkers and how it is a Stark problem to deal with and they are a greater threat than dragons.

She puts emphasis on how Starks are willing to make alliances for survival, regadless of pride as well. She seems to respect Torrhen Stark’s decision to kneel saying ‘he had no choice’. Aegon was offering a very ‘kneel or die’ message after all. The Starks would have died if they did not bow. But their swords are still taken for the throne!

The most ominous bit is this:

“The swords Aegon took from them were not twisted or mangled” - Sansa

“Yet” - Viserys, very ominously

What an ominous thing to throw in there Viserys!

7. Most unsettling display of Targaryen villainy happens in the Eyrie, narrated by Littlefinger. Queen Arryn arrives to see that Visenya is with her son, next to her dragon. Visenya doesn’t say it, but she is fully threatening the boy. You can see it by her smile which is just...oof. It’s scary. She clearly intends to kill him if his mother doesn’t give the crown. She has “no choice” and Littlefinger describes him as a “poor boy”. Visenya is clear villain in this. This is in HUGE contrast to the two women apparently relating and connecting with each other in Fire and Blood.

8. Viserys mocks the “religious” reasons for old town’s surrender suggesting that they knelt because otherwise everyone would die. This once again undercuts the idea that the septon saw some grand purpose for Aegon which is suggested in Fire and Blood. The septon is just afraid, again, according to Viserys the number one Targaryen fanboy. Bonus: calls the north savages because Targaryens are better than everyone~~ He even calls the Targaryens the "Greatest dynasty ever.” when Aegon is crowned.

9. But after Aegon’s victory, the neutral Varys comes in to remind us of the Dorne failure. Rather than making Rhaenys seem unflapable and invincible as Fire and Blood did, Varys suggested that the yellow toad of Dorne SCARED Rhaenys. And later on, of course, Rhaenys gets taken down. Dorne really is painted as the heroic underdogs of this scene. and emphasis is placed on the fact that Aegon and Visenya set every city on fire except sunspear. If there HAD been people there, they would all be dead. Fire and Blood indeed.

10. We skip right from the conquest to the Dance of Dragons.

“With no enemies left they started fighting each other.” - Viserys

This defs doesn’t sound like the centuries of peace and prosperity that Dany talked about. This video is focused ENTIRELY on the wars of the Targaryens and not the good things or building of infrastructure. No mention of Jahaerys the concilitator at all. Instead we focus on Aegon, Maegar, the Dance, Aegon the Unworthy and the Mad King. All the very worst Targaryens. And there are lots of good things the Targaryens did! But instead of focusing on that, the show focuses on the war, which means they know that Dany’s line about “centuries of peace” is wrong.

Bonus, we have more of Viserys arguing for blood purity and that Targaryens are SPECIAL and that they would have been fine if Aegon didn’t legitimize so many dirty half breed bastards.

11. The greatest Targaryen threat, however, is madness (according to Jaime who saw the Mad King first hand). We bring up that line again: “Every time a Targaryen is born the gods flip a coin”

“We put up with Aerys hoping Rhaegar would be better but then he also proved mad when he took Lyanna Stark”

This does not place Rhaegar as the sane, good sibling most people do. Instead, it also paints him in a negative light. Which, this is Jaime, so take it with a grain of salt. But he actually never hated Rhaegar so yeah...

12. Jaime is so bitter about Ned condemning him and it’s kinda funny. I love Nikolaj narration

“I saw what Ned Stark couldn’t. Robert was ashamed of the bodies of the children... and more ashamed at his relief. Glorious heroes didn’t kill children. They simply didn’t punish their murderers” - Jaime being smart with one of my fave lines.

He clearly sees things as they are. He doesn’t like the Targaryens but he also doesn’t elevate Robert as a god. Jaime doesn’t believe in heroes and it shows here.

13. Then we end with a particularly ominous note.

“One day I’ll return and repay all traitors with the only coin my family knows. Fire and blood” - Viserys. 

These are the last words in the video. A threat. It really does not paint the Targaryens as tragic characters pushed out of their rightful throne.

And this is where I want to talk about the character drawings. Every pose from the original three dragons (Aegon and sisters) is the most villainous thing in the world and the music behind their conquest is intense and dark. Their faces are often lowered but with their eyes glaring up and shrouded in shadow. Their smiles are sharp. Their body language is arrogant. It is victims of the conquest like Lorren and Torrhen who are given more humanized designs.

On the Targaryen side of things, the most humanized design belongs to Orys Baratheon who has much kinder eyes and a more open expression. And the there’s Viserys and Daenerys at the end who look like scared children more than anything. But the Targaryen dynasty that is their birth right doesn’t appear to start out on a great foot.

This kinda all backs up my point that if Daenerys wants to break the wheel, she will have to reject and correct the legacy of her family. The show clearly does not view Aegon as a great hero. So if they mean for Daenerys to be a hero, I hope they have her recognize the history and take steps to correct it (maybe even destroy the iron throne, plz?) And if she doesn’t recognize her history or tries to emulate Aegon, she could be headed down a bad path.

I love the Targaryen family because, like lots of my favorite Westeros families, they are SCREWED UP and have lots of interesting characters, and I look forward to exploring them more in my Fire and Blood post. But if anything, this video just backs up my thesis about unreliable history and what Dany will have to do if she wants to be a good ruler. Break that wheel! It was forged in fire and blood!

[airlock]

airlock grades the Camus archetype

next in this series, we delve into the world of fancy jackets, ebon horses, and loves that cannot be. that’s right -- it’s the day in the lives of the one who was fortunate enough to fuck off into the ocean with no memories, and all the other ones who just straight-up died!

(do note: under cut are spoilers for… everything, and also a significant amount of me criticizing or blamming characters that you might like. you’ve been warned! but if you’d press on, then I’m afraid I have no choice but to face you on the battlefield-)

a foreword

so, I’m not trying to end up rating every single semi-sympathetic miniboss out here; to this end, I will be working with a very specific definition of a Camus for this exercise. I do not claim it to be the definition of a Camus; it’s simply what I’ll be working with. it’s as such: a Camus is a secondary villain who is characterized as virtuous, but tragically doomed to stand against the player characters, either in keeping with the aforementioned virtue, because of an overpowering external circumstance, or both.

so, let us dig in!

camoo

(7/10)

there he is, folks! the man whose dick launches thousands of ships, hurtling into each other on a maelstrom of tragedy.

a multitude of appearances -- matched only by a certain trio of flying girls -- has given him incredible room to expand as a complex, dynamic character. where his original appearance alone might blip as gently tragic but not incredibly compelling, he’s incrementally gained a robust character, and ultimately got to be one of the ones who managed to elude the pits of data size issues in Akaneian characterization.

screaming camus

(1/10)

is it a stretch to tout him as a “virtuous” character? perhaps, but for the purposes of classification alone, intent weighs a little more than execution, and I think it’s clear that the writers had intended for Berkut to be sympathetic, but tragic, as far as secondary antagonists go.

unfortunately, though, they failed big time. Ian Sinclair’s stellar voice acting counts in Berkut’s favor, but little else does. his character is nigh-on pastiche and he seems to hog a lot of screentime without adding anything of significant interest to the story or to other characters. his motivations, while genuine enough, are irritatingly played by the narrative as being sympathetic when they absolutely are not; and worst of all, his fall from grace is severely cheapened by ending on a note of easy redemption that he does not at all deserve.

mongolian camus

(4/10)

in concept, this is a brillant player punch; as if Hardin wasn’t enough, you have to make enemies of even more of those who fought by your side on the previous game, and this guy -- alongside his underlings bar Roshea -- aren’t even fighting you because they’ve gone mad; they’re the same as they were before, and it’s only unfortunate that now, their master is no longer on your side.

however, further labor on the execution front would have been invaluable here. as far as Camuses (camusi? camii? camee?) go, the ole Wolfpack has a lot less time in the limelight than is par for the course, and the one-two maps they haunt don’t leave enough room to draw out the drama.

I’m not docking points for this, but New Mystery of the Emblem also does the Wolfpack a serious disservice in making them all recruitable. besides being a cowardly evasion from the tragedies of war that Fire Emblem is well-known to mercilessly portray, it’s not even a better outcome for them personally. like, have you seen Wolf’s epilogue? and it’s only further a shame after Shadow Dragon went and made Wolf and Sedgar so busted they may have had a better chance to leave an impression on the player -- which would then have made it all the more of a gut twister if they’d remained as full proper... goddamnit I’m not doing the plural Camus thing again.

wine camus

(10/10)

without hesitation, one of the most effective... camus characters, okay, there, I settled that... ever written. it’s sad enough when you have to snuff out someone nice because war is hell and the world is an awful place, but having the guy be the protagonist’s best friend is just ruthless.

and it’s not just text, either; it’s set up brillantly. Eldigan and Sigurd’s good bond is put well on display before it’s brutally shattered. he’s even given an unusual out in that you don’t have to kill him -- but if you don’t, Chagall will! hoohoohoo, Jugdral is the bestworst.

seriously, though, I think I’ve honest to god cried at least once about Eldigan, and making me cry is pretty difficult -- like, outside of an argument or other situation where crying totally sabotages me so of course my body will do that to me.

thunder camus

(5/10)

I appreciate an extremely powerful female character as much as anyone should, but other than that, I will have to admit that I don’t find her incredibly compelling.

although Genealogy of the Holy War may have been the game that gave us Hilda, it very much betrays the Kagaman’s hesitancy in letting women be villainous, and there are not many better examples of this than Ishtar here. as far as Camus characters (hahahaha! I am unstoppable!) go, she’s one of the most virtuous -- and also one with the flimsiest reasons for staying the course of villainy anyway.

like, sure, she has a boyfriend who turned into satan. we sure get told that. and then it stays as absolutely nothing other than text, when she tends to act like she’s being forced by the greatest of all powers to continue opposing you. Thracia 776 at least strengthens the script by depicting the extant relationship as an abusive one, which would shed a little more sense into things, but it’s too little too late; too late because it’s one whole game later, and too little because Ishtar and Julius are not focal characters of that game and don’t have enough room to expand in there. (plus, it’s not a great idea for Julius anyway -- he’s hellspawn, not a smooth operator.)

tiny hand camus

(5/10)

curiously, I’d actually bill Reinhardt here as a hybrid Camus-Michalis -- while his arc swallows elements of inevitable tragedy such as a star-crossed crush and a superior that he won’t defy, it never feels like he has to fight you in the way that a Camus normally does; rather, it feels like he chooses to anyway because of his shortcomings, in the way that a Michalis normally does.

and putting these things together... well, I’m grading the whole character here, but let’s be real, he’s far more effective of a Michalis than a Camus. intent regadless, sympathy isn’t usually the sentiment that he flints up, and I believe even Olwen is ultimately of that mindset; still, it gets to be a shame that he makes the choices he does when he’s otherwise not such an overtly repugnant type.

(I went this whole time not talking about Heroes, yes? that’s because I’m not going there. not the memes, not his thorougly botched characterization there, nothing.)

alamo camus

(2/10)

I believe that Galle and Murdock are intended as Camus characters (booyaka booyaka! shakalaka!) as well, but they’re so painfully inconsequential I’m not going to get sidetracked in their direction here.

Brunnya is not that much better off than they are, alas; she gets a little more screentime, but remains underdeveloped until her one chapter in the limelight. she does get to play an interesting role as a Camus who outlives her master and still decides to carry on his will, but we’ve seen better and more compelling all over this list.

double camus

(9/10)

oh, snap, there are two of them! ... well, so there were in Genealogy of the Holy War, but these here bros aren’t to be analyzed in isolation.

the moral complexities that they play at together are interesting, but I think that the coolest aspect of their character, by far, is that they play at being direct counterparts to Eliwood and Hector. the charming, reasonable one and the brutish, straightforward one who strengthen each other through their balance -- they’re shining mirrors of what could have been, or what comes to be when you take the same strengths as those of the heroes but place them irrevocably in the path of the villains. ... hmmm, I wonder if they’d have a non-adoptive sister if Lyn were, like, relevant at that point of the story.

their screentime is surprisingly short, but all indicates that they make tidal waves on the little time they have. I’m certain they’d have benefitted from more, but they’re still amongst the best of the Camus characters (I did it again!! I did it again!!).

not severa camus

(8/10)

although her tale is not as gut-wrenching as Eldigan’s or the Reed bros’, she’s one perfectly adequate Camus. virtuous, and impactfully so, but loyal to the end, and justifiedly so -- both in a relevant backstory and in a string of deceptions and misfortunes that play her stronger qualities against her.

I don’t find her to be a standout, but she’s a perfect execution of her own concept -- and considering the staggering amount of unfulfilled potential we’ve seen up to here, that deserves its due praise.

tincan camus

(4/10)

although he’s fairly interesting, the sins of his master befall him -- the reveal of his identity is severly dragged-out for also meaning very little until the additional reveal of his brand. and by then, it’s doomed to be only a blur out of the many unfulfilled twists in the Tower of Guidance.

even beneath the mask, he’s had a lot of chances for player punches that he missed out on. his confrontation with Greil emphatizes his role as Ashnard’s underling, instead of his role as Greil’s former student and Ike’s newly-made archrival, and I feel like that’s a severe mistake -- for one thing, it forces the cutscene to end with a lame halfway intervention from Caineghis, where it would’ve been perfectly viable for Ike to walk out of that one alive exclusively due to Zelgius’s own motivations.

even beyond that, his appearances in both Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn often play him as a plot device instead of a character; as a matter of fact, that ridiculous magic warp powder of his accomplishes no purpose other than enabling him to be a plot device wherever plot needs him (aside from how it silently explains how he lives a double life in two different countries, but that’s kind of a pointless detail).

and lastly, just how impossibly lame is it that he’s given a deadly final confrontation with Ike, that he’s just going to walk off of by the sequel anyway? it’s easy to see why it’s necessary for the plots of the two games it affects, but it’s laaaaaaaaame.

samurai camus

(1/10)

easily the least compelling of the list. he comes in to carry the half of a nonsense arc that doesn’t have enough room to fully build him, and it shows. and to make things worse, he’s one of the most notable sufferers of a syndrome that thorougly afflicts antagonists in Awakening and, to a lesser extent, beyond: a tendency to try to paint them as unambiguously evil before you fight them, but tragic and redeemable right after you fight them. which ultimately completely fails as the player punch that the writers ostensibly intended and robs the confrontation itself of much-needed gravitas.

if-conditional camus characters

(??/10)

hahahahaha!!! hahahahahahaahhahahahaaaa!! sockeye!!! I did the thing again and right in the middle of a nickname too!!

but yeah, I haven’t played Fates any more now than at the time of the Gharnef post.

anyways, what do you all think? have I earned your undying loyalty, or does chivalry demand that you slaughter me for my vile takes? if the upcoming Three Houses is to have a Camus... oh, who are we kidding, of course there’s going to be a Camus. in another life, things have been different, but this fate is inescapable. the only mercy we can extend for it now is to wonder what it’ll be like. once again, I welcome your comments in the replies and reblogs -- would you wrong your country by keeping them to yourself anyway?

[fyeahfantasticfour]

1960s Sue Storm: A Recuperative, Feminist Reading

I’m not going to pretend that comics in the 1960s weren’t sexist by today’s standards. Of course they were. All popular media from that time was. Second Wave Feminism, at the time Sue first appeared in November of 1961, was still in its infancy and hadn’t yet made its way into popular consciousness (Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking feminist tract, The Feminine Mystique, wouldn’t be published until 1963). Pointing out all of the ways in which Lee/Kirby’s run on the Fantastic Four is sexist is not much of a challenge and not very interesting — what I’m going to do by reading 1960s Sue against the grain is something far more nuanced that I hope will restore some of the agency that fandom interpretations have stripped away from her. I am striving for a recuperative reading of 1960s Sue Storm, one that pushes back against the fairly common and pernicious notion that she is or ever has been “just” a meek and mild housewife, because she never has been that, and I think that highlighting the degree of agency, strength, and courage she had even in the 1960s will help emphasize that. I don’t find the complete and total erasure of the level of agency Sue did, in fact, possess in the 1960s to be particularly nuanced or feminist because it ignores how transgressive she would have seemed at the time. So I am going to point to moments during Lee/Kirby’s run where Sue exhibited agency, strength, and power that were feminist for the period in which they were written, while simultaneously acknowledging that the narrative frequently undercuts and underserves her. I am not at all pretending that any of this was intentional on Jack Kirby or Stan Lee’s part -- I don’t and can’t know that, and frankly, I don’t think it matters in this context.

To begin with, Sue’s invisibility can be read as a critique of sexism, since it grants her both the ability to escape the male gaze and to weaponize her societal invisibility as a woman. I’m sure we’ve all heard of Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, which comments on both the hyper- and invisibility of black men. The manner in which Sue’s powers function is not unconnected to Ellison’s nameless Invisible Man. Sue’s physical beauty always exposed her to a great deal of unwanted male attention, but that surely escalated after she became famous as a member of the FF, thus becoming hypervisible to a degree she hadn’t been before. We see this in Fantastic Four v1 #10, when a strange man on the street recognizes Sue and interprets her fame as permission to harass her. Her invisibility allows her to dodge him and his gaze while she vehemently condemns his misogynistic behavior. 

Note that it’s specifically framed as Sue resisting, by turning invisible, his reductive view of her as a beautiful object that exists for his pleasure and not much else. “Mmm -- you shouldn’t ever turn invisible, doll!” he tells her. “How’s about a smile for one of your fans??” This is immediately followed by Sue directly defying him by both refusing to smile and turning invisible, thus removing herself from his sexualizing male gaze. Sue’s invisibility is in this way feminist and transgressive -- if women within the highly patriarchal society of the U.S. in the 1960s were given little choice but to exist as sexual objects on display for the titillation of the men around them, their subjectivity and humanity stripped from them, Sue’s invisibility gave her the power to defy that narrow categorization and control when she is seen and by whom. She claimed for herself the power to remove herself from the patriarchal male gaze that sexualized and dehumanized her whenever she wished.

Cut for length.

Her invisibility also allows her to transgressively wield her enemies’ sexist tendency to overlook and underestimate her against them (i.e., treat her as though she is insignificant and thus invisible). She is only successful in defeating male villains when she turns invisible because none of them ever think to wonder what happened to the FF’s female member. They are too busy focusing on the men, who they mistakenly view as more powerful and thus more of a threat than a mere woman. In Fantastic Four #5, for instance, Victor Von Doom demands that Sue surrender herself as a hostage so that he can coerce the male members of the team into doing as he demands. Victor’s plan hinges around Sue being a helpless damsel in distress, but Sue turns the tables on Victor by making the decision to go with Victor part of HER plan to gather information and draw him out into the open. Notice that Reed defers to Sue’s leadership here:

And her plan ultimately works. She defeats Victor and rescues herself and her teammates, all of whom would have been murdered by Victor if not for her. She is able to do so only because Victor does not deem her much of a threat and therefore overlooks her. She might as well have been invisible, as far as he was concerned—and she uses that fact to defeat him.

This overlooking of Sue by male antagonists happens repeatedly -- for instance in Fantastic Four v1 #95, when the Monocle also forgets about Sue completely:

Fantastic Four #5 is not the only time in the 1960s that Reed defers to Sue and her leadership, might I add -- in Fantastic Four v1 #20, Sue proposes one that centers around her taking the Molecule Man’s wand away, and Reed agrees to play bait for her:

They are working as a team here, as equal partners, which is what Lee at least presented Sue as, even if his ability to imagine what equality for a woman looked like was severely limited. Within the comics themselves, Sue herself has always insisted on equality both as a team member and as Reed’s lover and, later on, wife. In 1964′s Fantastic Four Annual #2, Reed, concerned with his girlfriend’s safety, decides that Doom is far too dangerous an enemy for Sue to go up against, but Sue insists on being treated like a full member of the team, as she always has been—and even threatens to break up with Reed if dating him means that she’ll be left behind on dangerous missions. 

And she actually follows through on that threat nearly a decade later in 1973′s Fantastic Four v1 #130, which takes place after they’re married and have a son. The Frightful Four attack and Sue participates in the battle, but when Reed orders her to get their infant son to safety and Sue doesn’t listen, they get into an argument. Reed is livid that Sue (recklessly, he believes) prioritized remaining in the fight over their baby’s life, and Sue is equally furious that Reed is treating her as though Franklin’s mother is all she is rather than as an equal teammate. She then leaves him for the first of two times (the other being during Civil War I). 

When they reunite, Sue is adamant that she be treated as an equal by all of them. Reed struggles at first to stop being so overprotective of Sue, but he does his best to comply because she has been very clear that if he does not, he will lose her permanently. By the time Marvel Two-In-One v1 #67 was published in 1980, he is able to tell Ben that he’s made his peace with the fact that Sue has just as much right to put herself in harm’s way as he does:

It’s worth noting also that in every version of the origin story, Sue’s decision to become a superhero—i.e., a warrior, on active, front-line duty—is never questioned by Reed, Ben, or Johnny (contrast that with Wonder Woman two decades or so earlier, who was initially relegated to being the Justice Society’s secretary). As a matter of fact, while Reed mentions in Fantastic Four v1 #22, the issue where Sue develops the ability to create forcefields, that Sue has been doubting the value of her powers and her usefulness to the team, he emphasizes that, to the contrary, she is “about to become the star member.” So not only has Sue always been a member of the FF, 22 issues after her first appearance she was already being presented as its most powerful member thanks to her forcefields. Needless to say, the fact that Sue was not only a member of the FF but also explicitly its most powerful member was fairly groundbreaking for the 1960s. I struggle to think of another team from that time period that could say that its female member(s) were the most powerful or that their superiority was openly acknowledged by every male member of the team.

Sue was also an active part of the team from the beginning and went everywhere her team members did—to the moon, other planets, other dimensions, Monster Island, the heart of Latveria, up against the Hulk, Skrulls, the Molecule Man, etc.—no matter how dangerous. She occasionally even spearheaded their attacks on villains and even made her own battle plans. In Fantastic Four v1 #3, which was only the FF’s third appearance, Sue goes after the Miracle Man by herself because she believes that she alone will be more effective than an entire army battalion:

Sue takes on a leadership role in these early issues far more often than anyone nowadays ever acknowledges. In Fantastic Four v1 #23, when the FF start to bicker and question why Reed gets to be the one in charge, Ben, Sue, and Johnny all vote for who they think should lead the team—and Sue votes for herself. She isn’t content to simply be a part of the team. It is 1964, and she already wants to lead the FF and thinks it’s time for a woman to do so.

And she one day would. By the 1980s, she was already the FF’s second-in-command, in charge when Reed wasn’t there, and she briefly took over leadership of the team when Reed was abducted and put on trial for saving Galactus’ life. In the 1990s, when Reed was twice presumed dead, Sue became the team leader both times and Ben and Johnny answered to her. By the 2000s and 2010s, the balance of power in Reed and Sue’s relationship has shifted almost entirely in Sue’s favor, to the point that Reed himself admits that Sue is the real leader of the team:

But it’s not as though these panels have no precedent, even all the way back in 1970′s Fantastic Four v1 #98:

Reed and Sue’s relationship has simply never been what fandom makes it out to be -- one that is profoundly unequal, where Sue gets no say at all in anything. It’s always been more of a back-and-forth, more of a partnership. Sue has always had the power to order Reed around (in certain contexts, at least) and Reed has always listened to Sue and her advice. Her power and influence has indisputably increased over the years, but it’s important to note that it was never wholly absent.

I could also point out that Sue has a perfect right to lead the team she was largely responsible for creating. Her role in the formation of the FF tends to be vastly underestimated. Sue was instrumental in orchestrating the FF’s theft of the rocket ship that Reed designed, which has been canon since Fantastic Four v1 #1. Without Sue passionately persuading Ben to fly the rocket (while Reed stood silently by), the flight never would have happened:

Neither was she solely motivated by her love and loyalty to Reed—in this, the original version you see above, her sense of patriotism had just as much to do with why she decided to accompany Reed on the rocket flight. Later writers have even portrayed Sue as being motivated by a love for adventure that rivals Reed’s and, more importantly, as being responsible for pushing Reed to go through with his plan -- Reed says point-blank that he was “content doing pure research” until Sue “pulled me out of the lab and into your amorphous idea of ‘field work.’” Despite the fact that it’s largely (wrongly) understood as Reed’s plan and Reed’s decision, I think that canon actually points to the theft of the rocket ship as being something that Reed and Sue decided and implemented together—or, arguably, even as more Sue’s than it was Reed’s. He floated the idea. She made it happen. Ben decided to pilot the rocket because Sue talked him into it. Johnny tagged along because of his love for Sue. The FF would never have come into being if not for Sue.

While 1960s Reed has become something of the poster boy for 1960s sexism in fandom, I think that attitude is unfair, inaccurate, and detrimental to fandom perceptions of Sue. At the time, Reed certainly wouldn’t have been read that way -- he gave his wife a great deal of freedom and autonomy for the time period, readily acknowledged that she was more powerful than he was, followed her leadership at times, and even personally trained Sue in hand-to-hand combat. Sue, it’s worth pointing out, has always defied and exceeded conventional femininity’s bounds, and Reed has never had an issue with that -- to the contrary, he’s actively supported and encouraged her. In Fantastic Four v1 #17, for instance, Victor abducts Alicia Masters, and Sue is the one who finds her first. When Victor enters the room, Sue is so confident that she can defeat him singlehandedly in hand-to-hand combat that she calls him her prisoner and says that she’s been looking forward to proving what she can do on her own:

And then she does, and Victor is forced to resort to pointing a gun at her to defeat her (this was before her forcefields):

She is so confident that she can beat him in hand-to-hand because she has been trained to fight by Reed, who even in the 1960s thought his girlfriend should know how to fight and didn’t think it too unladylike. 

Furthermore, I would argue that Sue chose to marry Reed rather than Namor precisely because Reed was significantly more respectful of her agency, consent, and right to self-determination and bodily autonomy than Namor ever was (...not that that’s a high bar). In Fantastic Four v1 #11, Reed, while discussing his and Sue’s lengthy romance (at the time, they were childhood sweethearts who had known each other their whole lives), brings up the fact that Sue has not decisively chosen between him and Namor. Sue tells him that she doesn’t know how she feels, and Reed very respectfully says that he understands how she feels and promises he won’t mention it again until she does, a promise he, crucially, keeps. 

Fantastic Four v1 #27, however, is the pivotal issue where Sue definitively chooses Reed over Namor, and she does so because Namor proves to her that he has no respect for her or her wishes while Reed proves that he does. The issue begins with Namor deciding unilaterally that he has waited long enough for Sue to make up her mind -- he wants the decision made on his terms, at his pace, rather than on Sue’s. So he announces to his people that he’s going to marry Sue now (without having bothered to ask her what she wants, if she’s ready, etc.) and then goes to the Baxter Building and beats up Sue’s family. When she arrives, she is horrified at what he’s done and frantically tries to see if her 17yo baby brother is all right, but Namor knocks her out and abducts her. She wakes up to find herself trapped in a glass bowl and screams to be let out, but Namor ignores her pleas:

This is a clear violation of Sue’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination. She does not want to be in that glass bowl, but Namor does not listen to her or care about her consent. Namor is attempting to coerce Sue into behaving as he wishes -- i.e., imposing his will on her -- rather than allowing her to make up her own mind as Reed did. And he has the colossal gall to literally blame the victim by implying that she made him abduct and imprison her because of her indecisiveness. Reed, let me point out, never felt the need to do the same, despite being in a worse situation, given that he and Sue had known each other their whole lives, been dating for years, and were virtually engaged before Namor showed up. Despite all that, when Namor taunts Reed by asking what he would do if Sue chose Namor rather than him, Reed replies that Sue will, of course, decide for herself -- but on her time and her terms, not on Namor’s or Reed’s. Sue, unsurprisingly, announces at the end of this issue that she loves Reed and not Namor, and that was the end of the love triangle for the next decade. 

Reed continues to be uncertain about her feelings, however. He doesn’t propose until Fantastic Four v1 #35, and he does so only after Sue herself says that she has been waiting for him to propose and echoes back the phrase (“It’s always been you!”) that Reed used to declare his love for her in Fantastic Four v1 #11. He waited until she signaled to him that she was ready, on her own terms and at her own pace. 

I keep reading people wondering why Sue would have chosen a nerd like Reed over a hunk like Namor, and this is why. Reed proved to Sue that he respected her right to decide who she loves on her time and her terms, and Namor proved definitively that he did not.

And even after Sue marries Reed and has a baby, she does not quit the team or remain at home. While she does take a brief leave of absence during her pregnancy, she returns to active duty in a rather spectacular way. Reed, Ben, Johnny, and Crystal are all in Latveria, powerless, and on the verge of being blown up by Doom’s bombs, along with the village they are in. The bombs go off...and everyone is mysteriously fine. No one can understand why they’re still alive until Sue materializes, and they realize that she saved everyone with her forcefields. 

Reed is overjoyed that she’s there -- despite the extreme danger -- and not at all upset by the fact that she has returned to active duty. Let me also point out that there was never any question of Sue leaving the team after she married Reed or even after she had a baby, and this at a time when it was expected and commonplace for women to quit their jobs and become housewives after marriage. Reed, Ben, Johnny -- they all simply assumed Sue would continue on the team as she always had. 

So of course comics in the 1960s were sexist, of course Sue was sometimes frustratingly passive and silent by today’s standards, but that doesn’t erase or diminish all of the times when she was not. Sue has been fighting tooth and nail to assert herself as an equal for decades, and personally, I think that her tenacity, determination, and courage even when belittled and underestimated by the men around her make her just as much of a hero as her superpowers, if not more so, and I am, frankly, tired of fandom's constant belittlement of Sue.

[him-e]

this might be a dumb comparison but would you consider star wars/skywalkers in general to be kind of like a greek tragedy? or at least inspired by greek tragedies? i just really love mythology and would like to think there’s some sort of connection in some way. thank you! :)

Definitely! Star Wars relies heavily on archetypes and psychological motifs, and many of them come from Greek and Latin literature. In the original trilogy, taken in isolation, you see more echoes of arthurian myths and classic fairytale elements than tragedy. It’s when you think of the three trilogies as a whole, particularly in terms of Anakin’s arc, his rise and fall and redemption and the repetition of the cycle with Ben’s fall just a generation later, that the Greek tragedy vibes become evident.

To put it in very simple terms, Greek tragedy typically revolves around a good/average man who has one “fatal” flaw (usually an error in judgment or hubris). Because of this, but also because of the crucial role played in the genre by the inevitability of fate and the cosmic order dwarfing humanity, fragile and powerless even at its best and at the mercy of much bigger and incomprehensible forces, the hero is bound to fall. And one fundamental aspect of tragedy is that the audience knows he’s going to fall, and watching the events unravel to the inevitable gut wrenching conclusion is cathartic. (see how the whole prequels experience is built on the premise that you know exactly how it’s going to end.) (also, side note, catharsis is a major reason why even today we need fiction, including “dark” fiction.) 

The fall of the hero often takes the form of a heavily immoral act, a horrific crime against the aforementioned cosmic order that the hero performs either in good faith, as a result of his hubris, anger or passion, or because he feels he has to—be it accidentally killing your father and sleeping with your mother, sacrificing your own daughter to the gods, punishing your asshole ex husband by killing your own children, or choking your pregnant wife who has come to confront you after you slaughtered a temple of younglings. As monstrous as the act can be, the audience can’t help but sympathize with the fallen hero, because it’s clear he’s motivated by a desire to do the right thing (or to fix some wrong), he loves fiercely and intensely, he is (at least in part) a victim of circumstances, and the pain and punishment inflicted on him and everyone who he loves and who loves him is disproportionate. What happens to the protagonist is a metaphor of the fragility of human condition, in which sometimes a minor mistake or an unforeseeable chain of events leads to catastrophic consequences. Individual responsibility matters, but it’s always portrayed in tension with the cruel irony of a blind, irrational fate who tears good people and bad people down alike, which it often succumbs to, or is proven to be eventually irrelevant.

You can see how Anakin is in this sense the quintessential tragic hero. A good man raised in humble conditions but destined to be royalty, to be the hope of a galaxy, the fulfillment of a long awaited prophecy, who rises to a state of quasi-kingship (becoming a Jedi master, marrying a former queen), but remains ultimately a slave—to his own passions and fears, to destiny (as personified by Palpatineworking slowly to corrupt him), to the will of the gods (the Force), to the trappings and limitations of a corrupt society (the Jedi order and the republic). His one fatal flaw, loving Padmé, backfires and turns him into the very cause of her death. 

Ben’s fall is also deeply tragic, as it’s the result of a twofold lapse in judgment: Luke’s (who falls for a second prey of his own darkness and briefly considers executing his nephew for the greater good) and Ben’s himself (who mistakes this one second of weakness for a truly murderous intent, and violentlyretaliates, and never stops acting on the false assumption that his uncle was really going to kill him).

Hubris and madness are two other crucial themes in greek tragedy and I can see the dark side as a fascinating space opera portrayal of both. And then, vengeance, and family—and even more relevant to star wars, the cycle of violence-pain-revenge. The original crime opens a wound in the cosmic order (you could also say: the Force becomes unbalanced) that spreads like a cancer dooming multiple generationsand is only really healed when there is a genuine will to step out of this cycle. 

This is imo the key to understand the three trilogies in their entirety, and what they’re trying to do with the sequel trilogy in particular. Many people struggle with Ben’s fall because he “had everything”—i.e. was born in a time of peace, from a loving family of revered rebellion heroes, with unique force powers and someone to teach him how to use them, etc.—so his turning to the dark side is thrice as hard to swallow. Was he a bad seed from the start? Or did he just infuriatingly squander all he had? Other people complain that the new trilogy is built on a nihilistic concept, that evil always come back cyclically one way or another, that victory is never complete, that the heroes are bound to make the same mistakes over and over again, or that everyone is inevitably destined to be corrupted and lose hope (see the discourse re: Luke in TLJ).

Both miss the point, in my opinion. The way I see it, it all ties back to Anakin’s original crime—his tragic, blood-soaked fall to the dark side, order 66, and most importantly Padmé’s death—and how that crime was a cosmic wound that tore the balance of the universe apart and was never fully healed. So it reverberates across the galaxy, onto his progeny, and his progeny’s progeny (Ben).

Luke did begin to make things right—by choosing to reject violence he gave Vader the chance to sacrifice himself to to kill the emperor and save his son, which earned him his redemption. And…it’s a good way to end a story if you want it to end there, but if you want the story to continue, then you have to face the fact that it’s only a partial, and in many ways convenient solution to a much larger problem. Vader’s redemption did nothing to eradicate the deep-seated political views of those who were still loyal to the Empire and fighting for a dictatorship in the moment when Palpatine was killed. It wasn’t enough for Luke and Leia to actually embrace their lineage and come out as Vader’s children, if Bloodline is to be believed. It wasn’t enough to shield little Ben from Snoke’s attentions—in fact, Anakin’s blood is exactly what put a big ol’ target on Ben’s back, with nothing of his grandfather’s post-redemption wisdom to keep him on the right track, only the myth of his legacy, a myth that as we’ve sadly seen can be easily misconstrued and exploited and that Leia and Luke never properly explained to Ben either. Anakin just died, and if that single sacrifice was enough to save his soul, it actually didn’t do much to fix the countless wrongs he contributed to create during the two decades he served the Empire as lord Vader. The galaxy bled because of him. And he just died and left his children to clean up his mess. Lucas’ original idea that Vader’s redemption brought balance to the Force is a good happily ever after, but only if you don’t really plan to deal with the consequences.

More on a thematic level, RotJ represents a perfect fairytale ending on almost all fronts but it leaves a question unanswered: was Anakin wrong to love Padmé? Is romantic love wrong? Aside from Han and Leia—whose marriage didn’t end well anyway—romantic love comes out of this narrative as a tragically negative force. Specifically, romantic love for a Jedi. If you consider the first six films, the logical conclusion is that the Jedi were right, after all, to forbid romantic attachments, because look at the mess Anakin made. Anakin destroyed himself and Padmé. It was only Luke’s familial love that made him come back to the light—Luke, the eternal celibate Jedi. Familial love is good, romantic love is poisonous. The narrative absolutely implies this reading.

So although RotJ’s ending fixes everything on a superficial level, the wound keeps festering underneath, there are still many things that weren’t made right, and this is why only a few years later Luke is still so haunted by the darkness and still so afraid that a new Vader is possible that he actually considers killing his nephew for a split second. This is why the ashes of the old Empire don’t die out, but instead give birth to a new tyrannical power; and why Leia cannot be free to live her life in peace with her family, but still feels committed to a rebellion that never ceased to have reasons to exist, even after the Emperor’s death.The gods (the Force) aren’t satisfied, if you will, so they keep punishing this family. The original evil has not been completely exorcised. Love, personified by Padmé’s unacceptable, unnatural death, hasn’t been vindicated. The balance is not restored. And Ben falls.

The sequel trilogy is set to heal this wound, for real, this time. It’s also why it has a much darker tone (despite the superficial humor) than the original trilogy. It’s not impossible for a tragedy to have a happy ending, but the resolution must have the same tone, the same gravity of the premise. The prequels are a tragedy, and the original trilogy is essentially a fairytale, a hero’s journey—they’re basically two different genres, and Vader’s last minute redemption seems (and is) inadequate once you’ve seen all three movies of his very detailed and nuanced fall to the Dark Side.

We’re watching, through Ben, the tortured redemption arc that should have been written for Vader if this story had followed a chronologically and stylistically linear narrative. Through Ben and Rey, we’re watching a reconciliation of the Dark and the Light side, whose unresolved conflict, worsened by the repressive puritanical policy of the Jedi order, originated the schism in Anakin’s soul. And we’ll also (hopefully) get the answer to that question I said earlier, and see the redemption of romantic love.

[quranreadalong]

#113, Surah 20

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 113

Let’s see... where were we, again? The pharaoh is dead, the Jews are out of Egypt, and Allah is telling them how awesome he is. Right. 20:81 is where we’re starting. Allah tells the Jews not to transgress the limits he has set up for them, lest they face “My wrath”, which seems bad. But 20:82 is relatively good in comparison, saying that he is “relenting” towards those who believe and do good and pray for forgiveness etc.

Anyway, then Allah asks Moses (while he is up on the mountain getting the Ten Commandments and such) why he’s gone away from his people. Moses says that they’re still nearby, at the bottom of the mountain, he just wanted some alone time with Allah. But Allah informs him that something has happened while he’s been away.

He said: Lo! We have tried thy folk in thine absence, and As-Samiri hath misled them. 

...wait, who the hell is As-Samiri? We’ve seen the golden calf story before a bunch of times, but this guy hasn’t been mentioned until this ayah. Did we pick up some Samaritan guy offscreen? A little help here, Ibn Kathir...?

Muhammad bin Ishaq reported from Ibn `Abbas that he said, "As-Samiri was a man from the people of Bajarma, a people who worshipped cows. He still had the love of cow worshipping in his soul. However, he acted as though he had accepted Islam with the Children of Israel. His name was Musa bin Zafar.''

Yeah that was the opposite of helpful, thanks. I have no clue who the supposed cow-worshipers of “Bajarma” are supposed to be. A footnote in al-Tabari’s history says it was in what is now northern Syria or Iraq. But then how the hell did he end up traveling with Hebrew slaves out of Egypt and into Israel?! Lo! Let us look at another opinion, please. The Jalals and several others translate his name as “the Samaritan”, as in someone from Samaria in the modern-day West Bank, which seems far more plausible... until you realize that Samaria does not yet exist in this part of the Biblical timeline, as the Hebrews have not gotten to the Promised Land yet. Uh...

Well... let’s assume that Mohammed didn’t quite understand the admittedly complicated timeline and assume he meant “the Samaritan”. Who is this guy and what has he done? Moses stomps back into camp and demands answers. His people tell him that the Samaritan told them to melt down all their golden jewelry, and then...

Then he produced for them a calf, of saffron hue, which gave forth a lowing sound. 

Then he... uh... made it into the shape of a cow, which mooed. Damn impressive, really, especially given that they’re in the middle of nowhere. Quite hard to hand-shape molten gold! But why would “the Samaritan” do such a thing? Well, I do believe there is an answer for this. In the Book of Hosea, chapter 8, we read the following:

They have set up kings, but not by Me; They have appointed princes, but I did not know it. With their silver and gold they have made idols for themselves, That they might be cut off.  He has rejected your calf, O Samaria, saying, "My anger burns against them!" How long will they be incapable of innocence? For from Israel is even this! A craftsman made it, so it is not God; Surely the calf of Samaria will be broken to pieces.

Remember in the history lesson I talked about Jeroboam and how he made golden calf idols? And remember also how Samaria was the capital of Jeroboam’s kingdom? Yeah, that’s what this is about. Now, uh... according to the Biblical timeline this happened like 500+ years after the Moses story, but this clearly seems to be where Mohammed got the idea about “a Samaritan” making a golden calf idol from, even though this person is not present in the Exodus version, nor are Samaritans a thing yet.

An unanswerable question is whether Mohammed intentionally spliced these unrelated stories together or if he just got confused and thought they were about the same incident. The latter is certainly possible, as he’s done such things before, but there’s evidence for the former as well. In the Exodus version, all of this is instead done by Aaron, Moses’ brother. Aaron is later forgiven for it, but the change seems intentional. Mohammed wasn’t a fan of character flaws in holy men and tended to write many of the prophets’ “moments of weakness” out of the Quran’s narrative.

...but it’s equally likely he was just confused. The whole history of Israel/Judah, like the stuff from Kings and Chronicles, is totally skipped over in the Quran so I don’t think he knew much about it, and it’s totally possible he heard “Samaria built a golden calf” and assumed it was about this story. Idk!!

Anyway, the golden calf was, of course, not a real god. Unlike his complicit counterpart in the Exodus version, the Quran’s Aaron tells the Hebrews to stop it, but they ignore him because Moses isn’t there. When Moses hears about this, he gets angry at Aaron for not stopping them, but again Aaron pleads for forgiveness. Neutral if non-Biblical. Relenting, Moses then turns his anger on the Samaritan gentleman in question, asking what the hell he thought he was doing. He cryptically replies in 20:96:

I perceived what they perceive not, so I seized a handful from the footsteps of the messenger, and then threw it in. Thus my soul commended to me. 

Tafsir authors think that this refers to the Samaritan seeing Gabriel riding his horse, then scooping up the dust on which the horse had trodden, and throwing it into the mix. Thus the magic mooing, I guess? I dunno. The Quran doesn’t really specify what he “perceived” or what he “seized a handful of” or who the “messenger” is, so that guess is as good as any.

I did notice that the Babylonian Talmud records a story in which Satan appears in the Jews’ camp, sending a storm to confuse them while Moses is on the mountain, trying to convince them that Moses was dead by showing them an “image of Moses’ corpse in a cloud”. I have no idea if that’s even remotely connected to this story or not, but at least there’s an idea of some otherworldly being being present at the time.

Regardless, Moses essentially gives the Samaritan the punishment of being an untouchable, and tells him that he’s gonna wreck his dumb cow statue.

(Moses) said: Then go! and lo! in this life it is for thee to say: Touch me not! and lo! there is for thee a tryst thou canst not break. Now look upon thy god of which thou hast remained a votary. Verily we will burn it and will scatter its dust over the sea. 

Here’s the thing about the Samaritans. According to them (some still exist, not many though; forced conversions to both Christianity and Islam greatly reduced their numbers), they are simply descendants of the fallen Kingdom of Israel. They follow the Pentateuch, just like “regular Jews”, but do not follow the other books of the Bible. There are a few differences between their version and the “regular” version, but most of it is the same. (As I said in the history lesson, it seems that while the bulk of the Pentateuch was completed in the first post-exile century, editing of the text continued for centuries. The editing produced thousands of grammatical differences between the two, though the stories themselves are virtually identical with one exception.) So it seems that after the exiles returned from Babylon, their northern neighbors took on their holy book without much religious strife.

But problems began to develop between the two. The issue that seems to have precipitated this feud was the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. The Book of Ezra casts them in a very negative light, saying that they clashed with the returned exiles and tried to stop the new temple from being built. This was because the Samaritans already had their own holy site, called Mount Gerizim, which was in Samaria--in the modern-day city of Nablus. And they weren’t interested in Jerusalem taking its place. This is, in fact, the main difference between Samaritans and Jews: the emphasis on Gerizim or Jerusalem, respectively. According to Ezra, the Samaritans delayed the completion of the temple for nearly 40 years, and the relationship between the two communities was permanently damaged.

As such, other parts of the Bible (written by the returned Judean exiles) give the Samaritans a rather unfavorable origin story. It says that they are not Israelites by blood--that they are polytheists who were brought in to Israel by the Assyrians to replace its native population. (For what it’s worth, judging by genetics, the Samaritans are descended both from native Israelites and resettled people brought in by Assyria, so both are kind of correct.) While Jews still begrudgingly acknowledged that the Samaritans followed essentially the same religious rules as they themselves did, they were labelled not fully Jewish. Intermarriage with Samaritans was banned and from then on the communities became quite separate, with Samaritans regarding the Jews as mistaken and the Jews looking down upon the Samaritans as lesser. Thus the story of the good Samaritan in the Gospels and the general idea that they should not be engaged, etc.

So I guess Mohammed turned this into their original sin or something even though Samaria didn’t exist then?? Anyway Allah is god etc and that’s the end of this very dumb story. We’ll stop there.

NEXT TIME: Doom, doom, Iblis, doom

The Quran Read-Along: Day 113

Ayat: 19

Good: 1 (20:82)

Neutral: 17 (20:83-99)

Bad: 1 (20:81)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

⇚ previous day | next day ⇛

[the-desolated-quill]

The Time Of The Doctor - Doctor Who blog (So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish Fingers And Custard)

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Remember way back when I reviewed The End Of Time Part 2, I said I was afraid that Russell T Davies may have set a precedent for overly sentimental, ridiculously OTT, and utterly self indulgent regenerations that are more about the showrunner than the Doctor? Well if you thought David Tennant’s Lord Of The Ring’s style farewell tour complete with stupid choir music and oh so poetic tears trickling down the cheeks was unbearable, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Time Of The Doctor is fucking dreadful for the most part. Moffat takes everything that may have annoyed you about the RTD finale and then multiplies it by a factor of 10 before dolloping on a few more ladles of pretentious stupidity for good measure. Combine that with the usual Christmas special bollocks, and it becomes truly nauseating to sit through.

A mysterious signal from a backwater planet attracts an army of Doctor Who villains into its orbit, but before we can ponder on how similar this is to The Pandorica Opens, we’re whisked off back to present day Earth for Christmas dinner with Clara’s family. Clara needs the Doctor to pretend to be her boyfriend (do women still do that? I haven’t seen a TV show try that joke since the 90s), but there’s a complication. The Doctor is naked! Oh how awkward and embarrassing! Why is he naked?

The Doctor: “Because I’m going to church!”

Of course he is.

You know at this point I’ve become so accustomed to Steven Moffat and Matt Smith’s obnoxious bullshit that i don’t think anything will phase me anymore. The Doctor could walk in wearing a bunny girl outfit and I honestly wouldn’t bat an eyelid. It wouldn’t be funny, but I wouldn’t be surprised neither. Because that’s the problem with doing a random, wacky Doctor. After a while the randomness gets to a point where it paradoxically starts to become boringly predictable. I mean it’s not as if there’s any reason for the Papel Mainframe to have a nudity policy, and the characters wear holographic clothes anyway, so if it’s not funny and it doesn’t serve a purpose, what’s the point?

So off we go to church to meet Tasha Yem, played by Orla Brady. A sassy, flirty dominatrix type character who has a thing for the Doctor. Well gee. haven’t seen that before in a Moffat episode. What’s even weirder is not only is Tasha Yem virtually identical to every female character Moffat has ever written, but she also has a lot in common with one specific female character Moffat has written. She can fly the TARDIS, has absolute authority over the Doctor and there’s a reference to her inner psychopath. Was River Song originally supposed to be in this episode? Either way, it shows how unimaginative Moffat is when it comes to writing women.

At this point the thing that’s irritating me the most (apart from Matt Smith) is the whole greatest hits remix. We’ve had cameos from the Daleks and Cybermen, the Silence show up for no reason, and now the Weeping Angels are back. It seems Moffat is determined to squeeze all the scary out of them completely and it’s just bloody irritating. There’s no reason for any of them to be there really and it’s completely self indulgent. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Regeneration episodes should be about the Doctor. Never the showrunner.

And just when you thought Moffat was done mining through his back catalogue of crap, the bloody crack of doom shows up again. Turns out this is Trenzalore and on the other side of the crack is Gallifrey. The Time Lords want back in and need the Doctor to answer a simple question so they know they’ve got the right universe. Doctor who? Which leads to the main crux of the narrative. The Doctor having to protect Trenzalore from comedy Sontarans, Daleks that all of a sudden remember who the Doctor is now thus rendering Asylum of The Daleks completely pointless, and a wooden Cyberman with a flamethrower (I’m not even going to dignify that with a response). Armed only with his magic wand/sonic screwdriver, he must prevent another Time War from occurring. Oh boy. Where do we start with this bullshit? Let’s start with the Question itself. Why do the Time Lords need the Doctor’s name for verification? They have no problem listening to Clara’s pleas at the end. Why doesn’t the Doctor just tell them to stop broadcasting the signal and wait a bit while he deals with the mess they’ve caused? And what’s the point of the truth field? Either the Doctor wants to reveal his name or he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to lie about it. Plus Moffat ends up contradicting this by having the Doctor lie to someone about having a plan. So what’s the point?

At a push, this could have worked if the story focused on the people of Trenzalore. Get us to care for them and have the Doctor form a strong emotional connection with them, thus giving this siege some dramatic weight. At least put some effort into trying to justify why the Doctor stays so long (at one point he says he’s finally found somewhere that needs him to stay, but that’s bollocks. I can think of several places that could have benefitted from an extended stay from the Doctor). Instead Moffat seems more preoccupied with other matters. Like how many regenerations the Doctor has left and tying up the loose ends of his bullshit arcs. So the exploding TARDIS was the result of some rogue chapter of the Paper Mainframe trying to kill the Doctor. So they planned to save the universe from another Time War... by destroying the universe? 

And the Silence are genetically engineered priests that make you forget your own confessions?... Doesn’t that make confessing your sins somewhat redundant once you’ve forgotten them?

And then there’s the whole Doctor dying crap. If the BBC had any balls at all, they would have made this the last ever Doctor Who story. The reason Robert Holmes introduced the 12 regeneration limit way back in The Deadly Assassin was in order to impose a limitation on the show. It would still have some longevity, but at the same time it wouldn’t be infinite and threaten to outstay its welcome. After the Thirteenth Doctor, that’s it. Now thanks to the retroactive inclusion of the War Doctor and the Ten clone we got in Journey’s End, Eleven is to all intents and purposes the last ever Doctor. And yeah. Why not? 50 years is a good solid number to end a show on, right? 

But the BBC clearly have other plans.

A more naive member of the audience might think all the Doctor’s speeches about how all things must come to end might be setting us up for the grand finale to the whole thing, but naturally that’s not what happens. Of course Moffat finds some contrived way to extend the regeneration limit indefinitely. Doctor Who is the BBC’s biggest cash cow. They’re not going to let it go quite so readily. So Clara demands that the Time Lords save the Doctor like the spoilt, arrogant, entitled little prat that she is and hey presto, the Doctor can now blow up spaceships with his laser hands (God knows what’s going to happen when Peter Capaldi regenerates. He’s probably going to end up blowing up a small moon).

And don’t get me started on the avalanche of plot holes this opens up. So if the Doctor never died at Trenzalore, how did Clara jump into the wound in time to save the Doctor? Without the wound in time, there’s no Oswin or Clara in Asylum Of The Daleks and The Snowmen. Without Oswin and Clara, the Doctor would never have tried to find present day Clara in the first place. Without Oswin and Clara, the First Doctor would never have picked the right TARDIS back on Gallifrey (ugh). Good luck trying to work out the Eleventh Doctor’s canon now because Moffat has become so liberal with the timey wimeys that the whole thing has just descended into a mindless mess.

And even after all that, The Time Of The Doctor still isn’t finished yet. Oh no. Instead of Peter Capaldi walking down from the tower and into the TARDIS, we get another sappy monologue from Matt Smith about how change is good and how he’ll always remember when the Doctor was him, Murray Gold goes into overdrive with his violins in an attempt to drown us in slush, Clara starts crying her eyes out for no bloody reason (seriously, why the fuck is she crying? She knows what’s going to happen. Hell, she was the one that made sure it would happen. Dozy cow), and just when you thought this couldn’t possibly get any worse, fucking Amy shows up! For God’s sake! No doubt the Moffat fans were crying gallons of tears over this. I was too busy sticking a cushion over my face and trying to pretend this wasn’t happening. Honestly, I have never seen such cringeworthy, self-indulgent drivel in all my life. They should have replaced this with Steven Moffat giving himself a self congratulatory blowjob. It would have had the same effect.

So after all that bollocks, is there ANYTHING I liked about The Time Of The Doctor?... At all? Well... I did quite like Handles. He did make me laugh a few times and I was genuinely choked up when he died. Yeah, when you’re more upset over the death of a fucking Cyberman head than the Doctor’s, something has gone spectacularly wrong. I fucking hated this episode! It’s infuriating, self indulgent, utterly moronic and extremely dull. I was so fucking bored by this episode. I didn’t care about anything that was going on. I didn’t care about Trenzalore. I didn’t care about the Time Lords potentially returning. I didn’t care about the Doctor’s impending death. I didn’t care because Moffat never gave me a reason to care. As usual he’s more concerned about his convoluted series arcs and showing everyone how clever he is rather than telling an engaging story. And the most exasperating thing of all is this isn’t even Moffat’s last series. He’s still got the Peter Capaldi era to ruin yet. So why is he bombarding us with this fanwank tribute to himself? Are we going to have to go through all of this again when Capaldi regenerates this Christmas? Jesus Christ!

I suppose I should end with my final thoughts on the Eleventh Doctor in general. I think I’ve made my views on him pretty clear over the course of these reviews. I’ve got nothing against Matt Smith. I’m sure he’s a great actor and a lovely guy. I did kind of like him in his first series. It was a nice blend of quirky and serious. What really got up my nose was when they started to ramp up the goofiness to the point where I just wanted to hurl something large and heavy at his head in a desperate attempt to shut him up. He got so annoying and so irritating that by the time we got to The Time Of The Doctor, I was more than ready to see the back of him. And look, if you like Matt Smith’s Doctor, that’s fine. More power to you. I’m genuinely glad you got more enjoyment out of his Doctor than I did. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

[pomegranate-salad]

Seeds of thought : Wicdiv #25

So, did you know midterms season is upon us ? I’m sure this has nothing to do with my subject of choice this month. I’m not projecting, you’re projecting. Anyway, thoughts and opinion on the new issue, spoilers below the cut.

ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME, TAG, YOU’RE IT

 You’ve got to admire the wicdiv team’s relentlessness when it comes to stuff we’d all rather forget : if last issue only gave us a glimpse at the weight on everyone’s shoulders, this one tackles it head on (or off, depending on your point of view). Whereas last month we dealt with drives, this issue seems to revolve around responsibility, or perhaps more specifically accountability.

In a typical wicdiv fashion, this theme is pictured multiple times throughout the issue in various framings to paint a more global questioning of the concept and how it could apply to our characters. Accusations and excuses fly left and right : can Woden be held accountable for helping Ananke ? Baal for believing in her lies ? Amaterasu for leaving Mini ? Persephone for killing people whenever she pleases ? And as a coronation, an early contender for this year’s biggest “wait… is this our fault ?” shows up at the window.

 What surfaces from all these particular situations is a debate on the very nature of responsibility : what makes us accountable for our bad deeds ? Who we are or what we are ? Inverting the question, can someone’s bad actions be justified by their specific personality, meaning we shouldn’t expect the same from everyone ? Or should the same behaviour and standards be enforced on every person, which begs the question : what about someone who isn’t a person ? What can the laws of men mean to them ?

 Obviously all the characters have their own idea on the subject. For Cass, who still considers them all as human, the rules of society are still absolute. You don’t kill people on a whim, “you just don’t”. And not just because she refuses to cover it up, but because you cannot be human and think this is a good idea. Baal, on the other hand, takes into account one’s personality before judging them : the right thing to do for Ammy would have been to save Mini, but she’s not the kind of person who had the strength to do what was right. He also applies this logic to himself and clearly feels guilty for believing Ananke, as he should have known better. But note how he refuses to share this burden with Persephone : he is to blame for acting pretty much the same as the others, but it doesn’t mean the others are as well. It’s about who you are and what should be expected of you in that regard.

 But of course the biggest antagonism in the issue comes from Persephone facing Woden.

Confronted with his bad deeds, Woden makes excuses resting exclusively on who he is : he’s weak, a coward, and in a bad place. His understanding of the world is such an egocentric one that what he could do in his situation becomes the norm ; that someone else might have acted better is irrelevant since he could not have acted that way. It’s interesting to note that in this context, his self-hatred is not a redeeming element but a defence mechanism who prevents him from having to change his ways to be a better person : he may be a little fuck, but it’s okay since he feels bad about it.

Persephone on the other hand has a deterministic approach to accountability : she considers herself exempted from the laws of men and even from morality. She is no person. Not only that, she’s doomed to a tragic fate. If it’s not going to be okay, why would she “do the right thing” ? In the most enlightening bit of their exchange, to Woden saying he was “in a bad place” Persephone replies “I’m in Hell. Join me.” Woden’s bad place is a personal one, defined by his relationship to others, while Persephone’s bad place is her own realm, one she necessarily exists in by the sole virtue of being who she is. And in this queendom, there is no system of justice or morality unless she wills it. Both Cass and Persephone see right and wrong as depending on your status, but while Cass places herself within the human paradigm of morality, Persephone sees the world from her position as a god. And within this frame of understanding, she’s not acting right or wrong because no human understanding of this dichotomy can fully seize the actions of a god.

 And despite this attitude being clearly framed as her “going off the rails”, there is a case for it. The reason why the “let’s cover up Ananke’s murder or we’ll go to jail” plot device is so ineffective as a motor force (yes, this is a hill I will die on) is because the subject of the conflict between gods and human justice has already been dealt with in the Faust Act. We know what happens when gods are faced with a human understanding of their actions.

An interesting parallel can be made between Luci and Persephone in regard to the murders they committed and its consequences. The first arc spent so much time focusing on the murder Luci didn’t commit that it almost felt incidental that she indeed killed two people in cold blood ; no one, not even Cassandra, seemed particularly shocked or was made uncomfortable by that fact. Meanwhile, Persephone murdering Ananke is still clearly on everyone’s mind. That may be because Luci’s actions could still be linked to human standards of right and wrong. Whereas self-defence is but a cover-up story in Persephone’s case, Luci killing the shooters actually comes devilishly close to actually being self-defence. If I can go all law monkey here for a second, two things are required for your action to be justified as self-defence : an actual or imminent unjust threat to your or someone else’s safety, and for your response to be reasonable in regard to the threat. However, if the first element is verifiable given there were humans in the room, the second is impossible to demonstrably satisfy or deny : how could one prove that Luci acted reasonably in regard to the threat, given no one truly knows the extent of the gods’ power ? Could she have stopped the threat some other way ? Who is to say a murder isn’t a reasonable response given how important the gods are to the fate of the world ? A miracle, after all, is beyond explanation.

Luci’s mistake was to place herself within a human paradigm of justice while acting in a way that couldn’t be accounted for within that paradigm. Her trial and imprisonment demonstrates the failure of trying to apply human justice to an act of god. Persephone has no intention of playing by human rules. To gods, godly rules only must apply. But given how small and unstructured the pantheon is, this means that Persephone is living in a vacuum of societal rules, morality, and since Ananke’s death, necessity. Nothing is just, right, fair, or even necessary. The god society has lost its only objective criteria in the form of both its authority figure and the purpose of their actions. There is no scale on which to judge Persephone. When she writes she’s “no person”, are we to assume she meant “I am a god” or, in light of the 1831 special, “I am a monster” ? Who’s to say when there’s no judge, no jury and no executioner ?

 … Until the issue’s last page, that is. The apparition of The Great Dark, with its lack of head, going after the very god that was to be sacrificed to cast it away, has every chance of being the direct result of Persephone’s actions. It is purpose, wrong to a right, wrong waiting to be righted. The structure the god society had been missing, something to base yourself on, something to be judged by. It is responsibility barging in Persephone’s Hell and demanding its due.

Unless it isn’t. Unless its apparition was unavoidable, and nothing Persephone or anyone else could have done would have prevented it. Unless it was never going to be okay. The only one who might have known the truth is dead. Worse, nothing the gods can uncover can ever be fully trusted. Some will believe they’ve to take responsibility for what they’ve done, and others will refuse the bear the blame because it was destiny. Either way, the proof they would be required to achieve is an impossible one. In law studies, we have a name for this. Probatio diabolica. The devil’s proof.

WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE :

 So New Year is a time for good resolutions, right ? How about I take up fairness this year ?

So how about that Cass/Woden dialogue ? Cass is still the greatest right ? Oh, and the evening family scene, so sweet. Loved the Anna Karenina reference, in fact all the title cards were great. Persephone’s hair deserves a mention on its own. And that underground scene ? Right up there with the best wicdiv scenes ever, right ? The art, which I ALWAYS forget to give credit to because I’m such a non-artistic person myself, was just breathtaking.

 Am I in the clear ?

*deep sigh*

Alright, let’s talk about that damn cliffhanger.

 If you’ve read… well, anything I’ve ever written, you know I mostly look for two things in a piece of media : characterization and narrative structuration. Concerning the former, Wicdiv has never let me down : I genuinely believe it is a masterpiece of modern character development, for comics and beyond. But everytime I’ve felt only so-so about an issue, which really wasn’t that often, I could pinpoint the latter as the origin. In most cases I could confidently affirm that these were objective problems that had nothing to do with my personal tastes. However, when I’m faced with something like this cliffhanger, I’m left wondering whether I’m fairly analysing it when I say it was a terrible idea or if it’s a solid development I’m unfairly judging by my own preferences.

I’m sure I’ll find some to say there is no such thing as an objective analysis and that our personal preferences always come into play, but I’ll have to respectfully disagree with these people. There is such a thing as making a mistake when telling a story. I sometimes say when commenting an issue that it is “the best version of itself”. What I mean isn’t that I agree with everything the story does, but that it found the way to make the least possible mistakes to achieve what the story achieved, and that changing a single thing would completely stray from which story the author has chosen to tell and how they chose to tell it. But to analyse things in that perspective, you have to acknowledge that the story that is told and how it is told isn’t necessarily what you would have liked. And I think this time, I may be stuck at that step, both for what the story is and how it’s told.

 Let’s talk about form first. I wasn’t reading comics growing up ; I might have been 20 the first time I picked one up. As a kid, I only ever read books, and mostly XIXth-XXth century French classics. My understanding of narration is still deeply rooted in the codes of this particular era and medium. And if there’s a staple classic books just don’t have, it’s cliffhangers. Why would they ? The answer would be right on the next page. Imagine every chapter of a book ending on a cliffhanger. Comics, on the other hand, derive more from strips and serials than they do from books, and so come from supports in which cliffhangers are the normal way to end an issue.

Cliffhangers are something I just don’t like, because my appreciation of narration comes exclusively from books. To me, it will never stop feeling like a cheap way to provoke thrill that isn’t actually there, a little artificial bump in the story that undercuts a broader rhythm to it. In this particular case, that’s two issues in a row that end on a one-page new brutal development, which ends up feeling repetitive instead of show-stopping. Not only that, it takes the thrill out of reading the next issue, since every cliffhanger has to be quickly solved or redirected in the subsequent chapter.

 But then again. If I try to be objective, I can’t think of a different way to introduce this new development. I may not like it, but where are you going to bring up a giant ball of darkness and doom capturing a child but in a ridiculously over-the-top cliffhanger ?

 So even if I’m not a fan of cliffhangers, I think my problem comes much more from where the story is going with this. I’m probably harsher now that I’ll be after a few days, but I just hated everything about this scene. It casted a shadow over the entire issue, possibly the entire arc, both of which I was loving so far. Just to list a few things, poor Mini is apparently forbidden to get even the slightest characterization before she has to go back to being damsel in distress #1. Baal’s one-liner is nonsensical, except if the Great Dark has been coming by his window to say hello every Friday after eight, in which case you’d think he would have mentioned. Mini standing saying “what’s wrong ?” while the windows shatter behind her is my new contender for Most Cliché Thing wicdiv has ever done. And like I said, the very nature of a cliffhanger means we just know the supposed “battle” isn’t going to be the crux of next issue, meaning this setting is just pointless.

But I’m even more pissed on a deeper level : bare what I said earlier about responsibility, what exactly is a Big Bad Scary Dark Thing going to bring to the story and our protagonists ? What are our characters supposed to get from facing a faceless swarm of black ? That Ananke was right ? We’ve had four arcs with a complex, tortuous villain and we’re ditching it for goth Sharknado. I hate this for the same reason I hate every movie in which the villain is a dinosaur : it’s big, mean, ugly and that’s it. It takes space and tells us nothing. I would much rather have had every single god wanking around for 5 arcs until total self-destruction than this.

 BUT.

THEN.

AGAIN.

 Mini getting kidnapped again is a very telling clue that this figure is linked to the ritual, and Baal actually having seen the Great Dark can still find an explanation somewhere. Gillen has said upfront in the latest notes that this arc will be about self-indulgence, so I can’t fault him for going with the clichés. As for the deeper stuff, it’s still way too early to tell exactly how the great dark will feature as an opposing force, or if it will at all. Maybe it’s just going to disappear with Mini in tow and the gods will be left wondering what to do. Part of why I am so angry at this development is definitely me : I like human villains and dark mirrors. Non-sentient or one-dimensional antagonists is something I have zero interest in. I was probably also taken aback by how Persephone gets exactly what she wants in this issue, a force she can battle with even less remorse than Ananke, when I’d identified this arc as the one Persephone would finally have to deal with herself. So, points for unexpected direction. Or hell, maybe I was still right, and the real danger will come for the gods’ incompetence in handling this. Oh, and maybe this new player will reveal itself to be an old one, or even a current one in disguise. Theories are already floating around.

 So yeah, I’ve got nothing. I hate this, I really do. It’s not the story I want. But it may still be the best version of itself. We’ll see. As a good resolution this year, I am trusting artists with their work.

[smokeybrandreviews]

Go Woke Go Broke

I am a fan of great stories. I adore brilliant, unique, art. I adore when both are integral to a creation be it film, comic, book, short story, light novel, fan fiction; Whatever. I find the ability to build worlds in almost any capacity, incredible. I’m also an older Millennial; Part of the tweener, X/Y, Oregon Trail generation. Born in the 80s, raised in the 90s, and came of age in the early 00s.We played until the street lights caught us, my first game system was an NES, and all my Saturday morning cartoons were sans Disney, toy commercials. I got an honorable mention once at a science fair and my parents were unimpressed so Participation Trophies were a joke to me and i learned how to deal with bullies by dealing with bullies. I had to worry about gangs shooting up my school, not that lone, weird kid in a trench coat. I’m all about representation but i understand that if you want people to look like you on film, you’d better find a way to make that film in white ass Hollywood. Basically, i have sense whereas most Millennials born after 89, do not. I need to make that distinction because we are about to get into some sh*t.

The merit and value of representation or visibility in mainstream media is dependent on the quality of said portrayal in the cultural zeitgeist. I’m a giant black dude who lives in America so representation for me basically begins and ends with a thug persona. As a black person in general, watching actors who look like me get passed over in roles that are uplifting and enriching to the culture like Hurricane or Ali for very specific, very demeaning, very marginalization, stereotypes, is disgusting. Black people, however excellent they are, never win for anything other than the magical Negro, uplifting slave, or non-threatening service person. Hidden Figures is an amazing tale of the trio of black women who saved NASA during the height of the space race. It was nominated for three Oscars and won none. Mahershala Ali did win an Oscar for best supporting actor portraying Juan, a drug dealer. Another movie he was in won several Oscars as well, Green Book. Ali plays Dr. Don Shirley characterized by the magical negro trope. I can go on and on. Denzel Washington got his second Oscar for Training day playing a corrupt ass cop when he turned in a much better, far more emotional performance, in Hurricane the year before. His first? Glory, where he played a former slave. A few years later? Snubbed for Philadelphia. Washington played, deftly i might add, a lawyer named Joe Milller who had to reconcile his own prejudices bout what it meant to have AIDS. Dude wasn’t even nominated. Tom Hanks won, though. See that pattern?

I don’t like Steven Universe. I don’t think it’s a very good show but because it has a massive fanbase among the LBGTQ community, it’s bullet proof from criticism. Nah, i’m about to go in. I adore Rebecca Sugar and i commend her creativity. My favorite episodes of Adventure Time are often attribute to her in some way, wither s0rt direction story boarding, or song writing. Marceline wouldn’t be Marcy with Sugar and i’ll always love her for that. That said, Steven Universe is melodramatic trash that uses pandering as a crutch. I don’t have a problem with the gays or whatever getting their visibility, but there are ways to do it without coming across as plagiarized drivel. Euphoria immediately comes to mind. Universe wears it’s anime inspirations on it’s sleeve. Sugar is a massive fan of Sailor Moon and you see, just, SO much of that in this show. Entire scenes and plot points are directly lifted from Usagi’s epic adventure but, because of the nostalgia goggles, cats are blinded to the straight-up theft. I’m not. That lack of originality is hindrance to the message. I mean, not really, i guess, because people love this show but it’s hard for me to acknowledge anything genuine about it because i know it is all a fraud. Hell, Land of the Lustrous, a manga by the name of Hoseki no Kuni, bares more than a striking similarity to Universe and came out a full year before Steven first bared his belly gem! Guess what Lustrous is? A manga! Guess who loves anime and manga? Sugar! Guess who has built a career on Sailor Moon images and Fan art? Sugar! Hell, Lustrous does a better job of LBGTQ representation by accident. Seriously, check that sh*t out. It’s an excellent narrative that doesn’t pander to the SJW crowd. It just tells it’s story about gem girls and space monsters. Sh*t is dope.

Where i feel the most sting, however, is in the US comic industry. All of this PC wokeness is in direct contrast to creative storytelling, for the most part. Marvel is hilariously guilty of this sh*t. I was on board when they decided to turn carol Danvers into Captain Marvel, effectively retiring her leotard costume and pretending kike it never happened. Fine. I liked that design but i get how impractical is was. The homage to Mar-Vell in her current duds is cool, too. I was one of the few that waited before running to judgment as Bendis race-bent Spider-Man into Miles Morales and then gender bent Iron Man into Riri Williams. Riri is a sh*t character in her own right but the outrage was more about her gender and race which made the criticism seem neckbeard nerd rage. Even then, i stuck around. Hell, when that Mockingbird run dropped and was literally a feminist manifesto, i let it ride because it was cleverly written and, foe the most part, i am kind of a feminist. More Equalist but there are feminist undertones in there. More recently, however, we got this New Warriors book and this is where i have to draw the line. Snowflake and Safe pace? Token non-binary hero? Marvel used to be at the forefront of this sh*t. They had gay superheroes in the 70s. They got married in the 80s. They addressed AIDS in the 90s and muslim bigotry in the 00s. Marvel was always crazy social conscious. That was one of their story telling staples and they delivered those messages with a light but firm touch.

F*ck, dude, the X-Men are an allegory for black people and the Civil Rights movement! Magneto and Professor X are literally caricatures of Malcom X and Dr. King.  mainstream comic, broaching the subject of discrimination, camouflaged in the vibrant arto f superhuman clashes, sold to white kids across America, during the f*cking 60s? Are you serious? That sh*t changes minds. That sh*t starts a conversation. That sh*t is status quo changing! Snowflake and Safespace? F*cking really? This is your social discourse now? Disrespectful parody of a marginalizing slur and already absurd concept derived by weenies? This isn’t even satire, it’s outright disrespect. I think safespaces are detrimental to proper, healthy, discourse or that the notion of those who stand up to offense are snowflakes who “need to get a sense of humor”, but for real? The fact that cats just tacked on the one is non-binary just outright exposes the true intent. This sh*t is pandering, straight up. It’s non representation It’s not progress. It’s disrespectful Woke point grabbing. It’s superficial lip-service being played to those that feel like their label isn’t getting enough media scrutiny. I think all of these new genders or whatever are stupid but i’m an old person. Some kid might identify with being non-binary or whatever and THIS sh8t is what they have to look forward to seeing. You can’t be serious.

Now, the whole reason i’m writing this, the entire reason i was even thing king about this subject, is because of Late Night with Lily Singh. Singh is a comedy Youtuber who has crossed over into the mainstream. I, personally, don’t find her funny, but i understand how important her success is in the world. Singh is, if you haven’t deduced by her name, a Desi woman. She’s a Canadian of Punjabi descent and she’s making moves. Ma is one of the most popular channels on the platform and, indeed, i first came across her through another cat i follow. Even though i personally do not enjoy her content, the breadth of what she has accomplished does not elude me. Singh is a powerhouse and should be recognized as such. However, her actual, on-air, late night talk show is f*cking dog sh*t. Singh is not geared for that. Like, at all. Her jokes are bad, her monologues are delivered with a clumsy anxiousness that belies the energetic skit-maker from her Youtube channel, and she is the worst interviewer on television! Her guests are often visibly bewildered. Watching James Corden interview someone is off-putting, dude does his best impression of graham Norton, but Seeing Singh just assault her guests with mediocrity is textbook cringe. Why the f*ck was she put into this very public position, thrown to the wolves, doomed to fail?

Her show is bad, man, but when you say so, the PC Police come out to beat your sh*t in. Singh is Indian, female, and bisexually; The three biggest spaces on the Marginalized bingo board. Being brown, or queer, or prone to vaginas gets you them woke points whenever you create anything but to have all three at once? Boy, you bulletproof! Saying anything remotely resembling criticism gets you cancelled on the grounds of sexism, homophobia or just plain classic racism, all the while, her show i literal sh*t! Singh, herself, is often racist and sexist throughout her “comedy” skits! I’m not one to subscribe to white people being discriminated against. A a black dude with a firm grasp of history, i personally believe white people should just take it when a minority goes after them because they never have a problem taking from everyone else. Goose/gander, you know what i’m saying? That said, there’s an art, a nuance, to that racial observation. Singh does not deliver her content with that deft touch. She’s built a career on malicious caricatures of the whites and the penises, which would be fine if there was a message in her satire, but there’s not. It’s base and uninspired.

You can build a career on that type of content. Dave Chappelle’s entire career is that type of content and he’s one of the greatest comedians to ever comedy. The difference between his material and Singh’s is that Chappelle says something. Chappelle hits you in the gut and forces you to look within. His sh*t is actually profound. Lily Singh is not. She’s skews closer to that trainwreck, Nicole Arbour, than she does Eddie Murphy. She’s more Amy Schumer than Wanda Sykes and that sh*t is on full display with her terrible, terrible, talk show. I read somewhere that it might be getting cancelled soon and my first thought was, “It’s not cancelled now?” If i am aware that Singh’s content is pedestrian, surely the studio knew it was. I mean, the ratings of her show are abysmal. She even found her way into a race controversy as a female, lesbian, Desi on TV! Then it dawned on me; This wasn’t true representation This was NBC casing Woke points. They never believed in this show, rather, wanted to use Singh as a sounding board. She’s a trophy for a network trying to court that meek, 90s baby, everyone-is-special, “Muh anxiety”, crowd. It didn’t work and Singh’s show is getting shelved, as it should, but it’s f*cked up that this is what representation at the corporate level looks like. This sh*t is tokenism, plain and simple

Representation is great. I want all of us to be seen. People around the world judge our various cultures based on what our entertainment contributes to the cultural zeitgeist of the world. Mot blacks aren’t gang-bangers, rappers, or dug dealers. Most Muslims aren’t terrorists. hell, most Muslims aren’t even of middle eastern descent! Islam is the largest religion in the world. You’re more likely to meat an south Asian with a Koran than an Iranian with a suicide belt. Gays aren’t going to turn you, Women don’t have vagina dentata, and the handicapped are more resilient than you think. Don’t pander. Don’t token. This game of playing for Woke points in the media and arts needs to stop. All of this faux outrage by mostly rich, white, people on behalf of the people their privilege marginalizes, needs to stop. Patting yourself on the back because you’re book has a Sudanese, paraplegic, lesbian, lead is not being progressive, it’s masturbatory at best. Approach your project with a sense of levity, common sense, and, more than anything, respect. Is what you deem “representation” a good look for whatever class you’re trying to champion? Or is it just a means to stroke your ego and push your politics? Are you Brad Pitt or are you Kathleen Kennedy? Is what you want to show us going to do more bad than good?

At the end of the day, create what you ant to create, just be conscious of how you create. Evaluate your message. Make sure it’ something that needs to be said. Something that, when said, can’t be ignored. Make the message profound and the representation enriching. Make that sh*t count because doing so in an effort to appear the Wokest, just trivializes everything you are attempting to do.

[smokeybrand]

Go Woke Go Broke

I am a fan of great stories. I adore brilliant, unique, art. I adore when both are integral to a creation be it film, comic, book, short story, light novel, fan fiction; Whatever. I find the ability to build worlds in almost any capacity, incredible. I’m also an older Millennial; Part of the tweener, X/Y, Oregon Trail generation. Born in the 80s, raised in the 90s, and came of age in the early 00s.We played until the street lights caught us, my first game system was an NES, and all my Saturday morning cartoons were sans Disney, toy commercials. I got an honorable mention once at a science fair and my parents were unimpressed so Participation Trophies were a joke to me and i learned how to deal with bullies by dealing with bullies. I had to worry about gangs shooting up my school, not that lone, weird kid in a trench coat. I’m all about representation but i understand that if you want people to look like you on film, you’d better find a way to make that film in white ass Hollywood. Basically, i have sense whereas most Millennials born after 89, do not. I need to make that distinction because we are about to get into some sh*t.

The merit and value of representation or visibility in mainstream media is dependent on the quality of said portrayal in the cultural zeitgeist. I’m a giant black dude who lives in America so representation for me basically begins and ends with a thug persona. As a black person in general, watching actors who look like me get passed over in roles that are uplifting and enriching to the culture like Hurricane or Ali for very specific, very demeaning, very marginalization, stereotypes, is disgusting. Black people, however excellent they are, never win for anything other than the magical Negro, uplifting slave, or non-threatening service person. Hidden Figures is an amazing tale of the trio of black women who saved NASA during the height of the space race. It was nominated for three Oscars and won none. Mahershala Ali did win an Oscar for best supporting actor portraying Juan, a drug dealer. Another movie he was in won several Oscars as well, Green Book. Ali plays Dr. Don Shirley characterized by the magical negro trope. I can go on and on. Denzel Washington got his second Oscar for Training day playing a corrupt ass cop when he turned in a much better, far more emotional performance, in Hurricane the year before. His first? Glory, where he played a former slave. A few years later? Snubbed for Philadelphia. Washington played, deftly i might add, a lawyer named Joe Milller who had to reconcile his own prejudices bout what it meant to have AIDS. Dude wasn’t even nominated. Tom Hanks won, though. See that pattern?

I don’t like Steven Universe. I don’t think it’s a very good show but because it has a massive fanbase among the LBGTQ community, it’s bullet proof from criticism. Nah, i’m about to go in. I adore Rebecca Sugar and i commend her creativity. My favorite episodes of Adventure Time are often attribute to her in some way, wither s0rt direction story boarding, or song writing. Marceline wouldn’t be Marcy with Sugar and i’ll always love her for that. That said, Steven Universe is melodramatic trash that uses pandering as a crutch. I don’t have a problem with the gays or whatever getting their visibility, but there are ways to do it without coming across as plagiarized drivel. Euphoria immediately comes to mind. Universe wears it’s anime inspirations on it’s sleeve. Sugar is a massive fan of Sailor Moon and you see, just, SO much of that in this show. Entire scenes and plot points are directly lifted from Usagi’s epic adventure but, because of the nostalgia goggles, cats are blinded to the straight-up theft. I’m not. That lack of originality is hindrance to the message. I mean, not really, i guess, because people love this show but it’s hard for me to acknowledge anything genuine about it because i know it is all a fraud. Hell, Land of the Lustrous, a manga by the name of Hoseki no Kuni, bares more than a striking similarity to Universe and came out a full year before Steven first bared his belly gem! Guess what Lustrous is? A manga! Guess who loves anime and manga? Sugar! Guess who has built a career on Sailor Moon images and Fan art? Sugar! Hell, Lustrous does a better job of LBGTQ representation by accident. Seriously, check that sh*t out. It’s an excellent narrative that doesn’t pander to the SJW crowd. It just tells it’s story about gem girls and space monsters. Sh*t is dope.

Where i feel the most sting, however, is in the US comic industry. All of this PC wokeness is in direct contrast to creative storytelling, for the most part. Marvel is hilariously guilty of this sh*t. I was on board when they decided to turn carol Danvers into Captain Marvel, effectively retiring her leotard costume and pretending kike it never happened. Fine. I liked that design but i get how impractical is was. The homage to Mar-Vell in her current duds is cool, too. I was one of the few that waited before running to judgment as Bendis race-bent Spider-Man into Miles Morales and then gender bent Iron Man into Riri Williams. Riri is a sh*t character in her own right but the outrage was more about her gender and race which made the criticism seem neckbeard nerd rage. Even then, i stuck around. Hell, when that Mockingbird run dropped and was literally a feminist manifesto, i let it ride because it was cleverly written and, foe the most part, i am kind of a feminist. More Equalist but there are feminist undertones in there. More recently, however, we got this New Warriors book and this is where i have to draw the line. Snowflake and Safe pace? Token non-binary hero? Marvel used to be at the forefront of this sh*t. They had gay superheroes in the 70s. They got married in the 80s. They addressed AIDS in the 90s and muslim bigotry in the 00s. Marvel was always crazy social conscious. That was one of their story telling staples and they delivered those messages with a light but firm touch.

F*ck, dude, the X-Men are an allegory for black people and the Civil Rights movement! Magneto and Professor X are literally caricatures of Malcom X and Dr. King.  mainstream comic, broaching the subject of discrimination, camouflaged in the vibrant arto f superhuman clashes, sold to white kids across America, during the f*cking 60s? Are you serious? That sh*t changes minds. That sh*t starts a conversation. That sh*t is status quo changing! Snowflake and Safespace? F*cking really? This is your social discourse now? Disrespectful parody of a marginalizing slur and already absurd concept derived by weenies? This isn’t even satire, it’s outright disrespect. I think safespaces are detrimental to proper, healthy, discourse or that the notion of those who stand up to offense are snowflakes who “need to get a sense of humor”, but for real? The fact that cats just tacked on the one is non-binary just outright exposes the true intent. This sh*t is pandering, straight up. It’s non representation It’s not progress. It’s disrespectful Woke point grabbing. It’s superficial lip-service being played to those that feel like their label isn’t getting enough media scrutiny. I think all of these new genders or whatever are stupid but i’m an old person. Some kid might identify with being non-binary or whatever and THIS sh8t is what they have to look forward to seeing. You can’t be serious.

Now, the whole reason i’m writing this, the entire reason i was even thing king about this subject, is because of Late Night with Lily Singh. Singh is a comedy Youtuber who has crossed over into the mainstream. I, personally, don’t find her funny, but i understand how important her success is in the world. Singh is, if you haven’t deduced by her name, a Desi woman. She’s a Canadian of Punjabi descent and she’s making moves. Ma is one of the most popular channels on the platform and, indeed, i first came across her through another cat i follow. Even though i personally do not enjoy her content, the breadth of what she has accomplished does not elude me. Singh is a powerhouse and should be recognized as such. However, her actual, on-air, late night talk show is f*cking dog sh*t. Singh is not geared for that. Like, at all. Her jokes are bad, her monologues are delivered with a clumsy anxiousness that belies the energetic skit-maker from her Youtube channel, and she is the worst interviewer on television! Her guests are often visibly bewildered. Watching James Corden interview someone is off-putting, dude does his best impression of graham Norton, but Seeing Singh just assault her guests with mediocrity is textbook cringe. Why the f*ck was she put into this very public position, thrown to the wolves, doomed to fail?

Her show is bad, man, but when you say so, the PC Police come out to beat your sh*t in. Singh is Indian, female, and bisexually; The three biggest spaces on the Marginalized bingo board. Being brown, or queer, or prone to vaginas gets you them woke points whenever you create anything but to have all three at once? Boy, you bulletproof! Saying anything remotely resembling criticism gets you cancelled on the grounds of sexism, homophobia or just plain classic racism, all the while, her show i literal sh*t! Singh, herself, is often racist and sexist throughout her “comedy” skits! I’m not one to subscribe to white people being discriminated against. A a black dude with a firm grasp of history, i personally believe white people should just take it when a minority goes after them because they never have a problem taking from everyone else. Goose/gander, you know what i’m saying? That said, there’s an art, a nuance, to that racial observation. Singh does not deliver her content with that deft touch. She’s built a career on malicious caricatures of the whites and the penises, which would be fine if there was a message in her satire, but there’s not. It’s base and uninspired.

You can build a career on that type of content. Dave Chappelle’s entire career is that type of content and he’s one of the greatest comedians to ever comedy. The difference between his material and Singh’s is that Chappelle says something. Chappelle hits you in the gut and forces you to look within. His sh*t is actually profound. Lily Singh is not. She’s skews closer to that trainwreck, Nicole Arbour, than she does Eddie Murphy. She’s more Amy Schumer than Wanda Sykes and that sh*t is on full display with her terrible, terrible, talk show. I read somewhere that it might be getting cancelled soon and my first thought was, “It’s not cancelled now?” If i am aware that Singh’s content is pedestrian, surely the studio knew it was. I mean, the ratings of her show are abysmal. She even found her way into a race controversy as a female, lesbian, Desi on TV! Then it dawned on me; This wasn’t true representation This was NBC casing Woke points. They never believed in this show, rather, wanted to use Singh as a sounding board. She’s a trophy for a network trying to court that meek, 90s baby, everyone-is-special, “Muh anxiety”, crowd. It didn’t work and Singh’s show is getting shelved, as it should, but it’s f*cked up that this is what representation at the corporate level looks like. This sh*t is tokenism, plain and simple

Representation is great. I want all of us to be seen. People around the world judge our various cultures based on what our entertainment contributes to the cultural zeitgeist of the world. Mot blacks aren’t gang-bangers, rappers, or dug dealers. Most Muslims aren’t terrorists. hell, most Muslims aren’t even of middle eastern descent! Islam is the largest religion in the world. You’re more likely to meat an south Asian with a Koran than an Iranian with a suicide belt. Gays aren’t going to turn you, Women don’t have vagina dentata, and the handicapped are more resilient than you think. Don’t pander. Don’t token. This game of playing for Woke points in the media and arts needs to stop. All of this faux outrage by mostly rich, white, people on behalf of the people their privilege marginalizes, needs to stop. Patting yourself on the back because you’re book has a Sudanese, paraplegic, lesbian, lead is not being progressive, it’s masturbatory at best. Approach your project with a sense of levity, common sense, and, more than anything, respect. Is what you deem “representation” a good look for whatever class you’re trying to champion? Or is it just a means to stroke your ego and push your politics? Are you Brad Pitt or are you Kathleen Kennedy? Is what you want to show us going to do more bad than good?

At the end of the day, create what you ant to create, just be conscious of how you create. Evaluate your message. Make sure it’ something that needs to be said. Something that, when said, can’t be ignored. Make the message profound and the representation enriching. Make that sh*t count because doing so in an effort to appear the Wokest, just trivializes everything you are attempting to do.

[politicaltheoryexplained-blog]

Republican Healthcare Success, and Ultimate Failure

First, allow me to preface this by praising Republicans for perhaps the greatest bit of political spin in American history; by dubbing the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” they managed to convince everyone that it was bad, merely because it went along with the narrative that Obama was evil incarnate. Yet what makes it such amazing spin is the fact that many parts of the Republican base actually need “Obamacare” and thus the fact that they successfully managed to convince people that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were different things cannot be understated. It should also be noted that Democrats did nothing to stop this, adopting the Obamacare rhetoric that has now doomed the act itself. After all, it’s easy to be partisan for repealing something your predecessor on the other side of the aisle did. It’s much harder to say that you’re repealing the ‘affordable care act.’ That just makes you sound like an asshole. 

Let me also preface this by saying that the Affordable Care Act is not a perfect law. I myself was originally against it, not because of what it did, but because of how they passed it. They essentially passed a couple thousand page law through congress, when most of the people voting for it admitted they hadn’t even read it. Now, that’s just irresponsible. In fact, if it hadn’t turned out that the law was well written, unlike many Republican proposed laws these days, we might have been looking at a real disaster. But instead, we had a mostly successful law. Yes, there are problems, problems like government mandates on digitizing medical records, which is an expensive process that has caused numerous small practices to close in favor of bigger and less personal offices. This is where the ‘losing your family doctor’ rhetoric comes from; the small personal practices simply can’t afford to digitize sometimes up to forty years worth of paperwork in a short amount of time, at least without reimbursement, which wasn’t given. 

So again, Obamacare isn’t perfect. It’s also not the worst law ever by any stretch. Yet, it must be acknowledged that Republicans have successfully demonized the law, and not only that, managed to convince many people that it is somehow entirely separate from the law that many of the people in their base actually support. This of course, was only possible due to the undue idea that Obama’s name meant overwhelming support; instead it was easily used to demonstrate his ego. And while he clearly had the best of intentions, refusing to stop calling it Obamacare ultimately allowed it be politicized and allowed what it actually did to be obscured by political spin. 

But now, let’s focus on the present and the practical realities of the situation. The Republicans will repeal Obamacare. That’s all but certain at the moment. The biggest problem then becomes how they replace it. After all, upwards of twenty million people use the Affordable Care Act to get health insurance, and repealing it would actually cost more money than funding it, due to removing taxable income from the wealthy while allowing hospitals to just bill the federal government when they treat people without insurance, because the two options that are presented when hospitals cannot bill the taxpayers for people without insurance are to just let people without insurance die, or to let hospitals go under financially, and neither of those options are acceptable to anyone of any political affiliation. 

So what can we make of all this? 

First of all, there’s nothing accidental about Republicans. Make no mistake, this decision to repeal and not replace is deliberately designed to box Democrats into a corner. The idea, of course, is to force through a repeal, and then when Democrats block any replacement, as they have vowed to do, to blame them for the fact that people don’t have healthcare. That way, Republicans can say ‘oh, we had great ideas about how to make your lives better, but democrats didn’t let us pass it!’ Even though they’re the majority, and even though they’re the ones that caused the problem, they’re wagering that they can blame the Democrats for the problems, forcing them to either accept whatever terrible replacement they come up with, or look like the people who are keeping people from getting healthcare. 

There’s another calculation here too. Recall how I said earlier that many of the twenty million people ensured by the Affordable Care Act come from these republican districts. Well, as it turns out, this has made many conservative lawmakers worried about just repealing the law. However, by then forcing a vote, it will force these wavering members to stick with the rest of the party, even if it hurts their own constituents. 

Of course, this political gamble is likely to pay off. After all, if Republicans successfully convinced the people who are voting for them that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are different things, why shouldn’t they believe that they can then repeal it and blame the democrats for why they don’t have anything to put in its place? Republicans, for all their stonewalling and arguably cancerous actions against our government, have been entirely successful in getting their message out, in a way that democrats simply haven’t been able to do. It’s very, very clear that Republicans have no plan to replace Obamacare; not just as a group but individually. Despite the party’s overwhelming cohesion against Obama, inside the party no one has any idea what to actually do after the fact. It is, simply put, like a dog chasing a car; it has no idea what to do once it actually catches it. 

Well, Republicans caught their car. Now they don’t know what to actually do to with it.