#i felt it necessary to write about this not necessarily in the context of updating but that this is really something that needs to be spoke | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

firehawk12 · 7 years ago

Text

Crazy Rich Asians (2018): The Flawed But Necessary Asian-American Cultural Milestone

(Apologies! I keep forgetting to update my Tumblr... repost from my Medium account)

There is so much to unpack before you can even talk about Crazy Rich Asiansin any meaningful manner and understand why so much of the Asian-American community has gotten behind the film via the so-called #goldopenmovement.

I think the easiest way to begin is to imagine what life would be like if you had no sense of belonging within the culture you inhabit. Books, music, television, film, theater, fashion — none of it reflected who you are and how you were necessarily different from everyone else. For the last half-century, this is essentially how Asian-Americans (and by extension, Asians-Canadians) lived their lives.

I can only write on my behalf, but I knew at an early age that I would never really be considered a “Canadian”, because as much as we like to pretend we’re in some kind of post-race multicultural utopia, I still feel foreign despite having lived in Canada for essentially my entire life.

But obviously that’s not necessarily unique to my experience — certainly a lot of people feel alienated within their own homelands because they don’t look like, act like, or otherwise inhabit the space of normativity that defines “Canadian-ness” (or “American-ness”).

But I can’t really claim to be “Chinese” either. Certainly I am racially and ethnically Han Chinese, but culturally I am as far removed from being Chinese as one possibly can be as a “Canadian Born Chinese”. I can functionally communicate in Cantonese, read Hanzi at a grade school level, and I’ve never actually been to China or Hong Kong, and my Chinese cultural references are old John Woo and Stephen Chow movies. There is a cultural void that I’ve felt for most of my life, and it comes from — as Crazy Rich Asians explains — being a “banana”, where my race and my cultural context have created the extreme feeling of alienation that is familiar to most, if not all, minorities living in North America.

So this is where we land on the North American notion of the hybrid identity that has developed over the last century. I’m not Chinese, I’m not Canadian, but I exist in some undefined border — the liminal space between the two — as a “Chinese-Canadian”. But what does that even mean when there is no culture that defines Chinese-Canadian identity? I don’t want to deny the great cultural contributions of artists such as Mina Shum or Wayson Choy and many others (Double Happiness is still a foundational text for me in terms of being able to articulate the fact that I don’t have an identity whatsoever), and I mean no offence when I suggest that these artists aren’t household names (and I’d much rather re-read Choy than yet another Atwood novel…).

I came to Double Happiness when I was in my teens, already feeling the anxiety of not having an identity and being unable to articulate it because there was simply no outlet for me to express my inability to connect with the greater culture around me. I saw myself in Sandra Oh’s Jade, a woman who would never be Chinese enough for her parents or other Chinese people, but who isn’t Canadian enough to be accepted by Canadian society as an actress (I’m sure this was something that Sandra Oh had to fight against during the early parts of her career). I think it was at that moment that I understand that I would always feel like an outsider in my own homeland, not necessarily because I was marked with a visible difference, but because it took so long for me to see myself reflected in the culture that I consumed.

This isn’t necessarily a unique Chinese or even Asian-North American experience. As I wrote several years ago when I began to unpack the importance of yet another seminal Asian American cultural moment — the debut of Fresh Off The Boat — both the “real” and fictional Eddie Huang embraced hip hop because he was able to relate to a culture defined by alienation. Meanwhile, Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese ends by having the main character admit that he can never be white and escape “Chin-Kee”, the specter of Chinese-ness that haunts his every waking moment, and accept that being Chinese is a part of what defines him even if he doesn’t necessarily explain how that acceptance manifests itself.

But the fact that I can make references to a hit ABC sitcom and an Eisner award-winning graphic novel in order to try to articulate some notion of Chinese-American identity is precisely why it is so crucial to have a culture that represents the unique situation of being neither Chinese and neither American (or Canadian).

I love James Hong and respect him for his long career and the work he has done in order to help insert a Chinese face into American culture, but my entire identity in the early 90s was essentially tied to this clip:

youtube

The fact that I can’t remember any other “role models” from my childhood except James Hong putting on that accent and annoying Jerry, Elaine, and George is perhaps a sad reflection of my limited worldview as a child of the 90s, but also a condemnation of what happens when there is no one for you to look up to.

We are so hungry for representation because we live in a cultural vacuum, where the only other cultural reference you can make is to The Joy Luck Club or how fucked up it was that people thought this was okay:

It’s interesting because Hari Kondabolu’s attempts to address the problematic nature of Apu from The Simpsons touches on this exact same anxiety, where being South Asian is defined entirely by a single cultural touch point that can influence your life forever (that’s even before addressing the indignity of being represented by a white man putting on an accent in a bout of modern brown-face). Thankfully between The Mindy Project, The Big Sick and Master of None, South Asian-American representation has certainly improved in the last few years.

That’s not to say that East Asian-American representation, both on screen and off screen, hasn’t improved either. In film alone, Justin Lin basically built up one of the most improbably popular blockbuster franchises in recent history out of nothing — made more miraculous when you think about how the Fast and Furious films were culturally diverse before Disney decided that maybe their superheroes didn’t all have to be white men.

But even so, it’s been contingent on the Asian community to just accept things the way they are and not raise too much of a commotion about cultural representation. So when Tina Fey decides to double down on her racism with an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt about how Asian-Americans humourless internet trolls who don’t understand comedy, we’re just to accept the fact that she above criticism. When Ghost in the Shell ends by explaining a Japanese girl had her brain carved out and placed into Scarlet Johansson’s body, we should be grateful that they mentioned the character’s Japanese origins at all. When Scott Buck refuses to address Iron Fist’s Orientalism, we just have to accept that no one is allowed to change the origins of a character because comic books are sacrosanct.

All of that explains why Crazy Rich Asians is such an important film for the community. With all of this cultural baggage on their backs, I respect the sacrifice Kevin Kwan and Jon Chu made when they eschewed an easy Netflix deal in order to bring the film to theaters even more than I did when I had initially read the interview.

It’s not that there haven’t been countless great Asian-American films made between The Joy Luck Club and Crazy Rich Asians. Justin Lin’s own Better Luck Tomorrow, or Only the Brave, or Saving Face, or Eat With Me, or the recently released Gook to just name a handful are great films in their own right for telling stories about Asian Americans that simply aren’t reflected in the culture otherwise

(Edit: I’ve been told that I’ve been remiss in not including the Harold and Kumar trilogy in the above list. Apologies to John Cho and Kal Penn!)

But the only way to get the culture to pay attention — not just the people consuming it, but also the people producing it — is to make the biggest impact possible and even in 2018 with streaming services and video on demand, the path to cultural relevance is still through a major movie studio that can both promote your film and widely distribute it across the world. It’s unfortunate, but that’s why people still point to The Joy Luck Club and don’t mention any of the smaller independent films that have come out since then. The fact that the last film before The Joy Luck Club to feature an all Asian cast to be distributed by a major movie studio was Flower Drum Song in 1961 (which is a film/musical that probably has as much, if not more, cultural baggage associated with it than even The Joy Luck Club) points to the significance of Crazy Rich Asians and why it has become a moment for Asian-Americans.

Kevin Kwan made another important production decision that drives home how much is riding on this film’s success. During pitch meetings, Kwan recounts meetings where producers suggested that having a white actress in the Rachel Chu role would make for a more successful film — to pull a quote from the interview, apparently he was told that “it’s a pity you don’t have a white character” — makes his decision to option the rights to his book for a dollar in order to maintain creative control a moral stance against Hollywood producers who don’t see any value in Asian actors.

Certainly the film’s fish out of water story could have easily been adapted so that Rachel Chu became Rachael Churchill (starring Scarlett Johansson or Emma Stone, of course) and many of the beats would have been the same. But his film is so powerful precisely because Rachel (Constance Wu) is Chinese-American. She isn’t Chinese, as Nick’s mother Eleanor (performed with perfect stoicism by Michelle Yeoh) constantly points out throughout the film, and that’s actually not a problem for her. In fact, the film goes out of its way to show how her Chinese-American identity helps her navigate the precariousness of Singapore’s socialite lifestyle, allowing Rachel to be proud of being a “banana”.

Are there problems with the film? Undoubtedly. The fact that the one time South Asians are shown in the film involves using them as comedy propspoints to narrow focus of the film and how much it ignores of the realSingapore. Or how Oliver (Nico Santos) is queer, but is never actually shown with another man, perhaps because gay sex is technically still a criminal offence in Singapore. Of course, the title itself points out that the only poor people shown in the film are the servants who presumably slink back to their cramped government subsidized high-rises after they are done serving the crazy rich Asians who employ them.

Even if you ignore the social issues, the film itself isn’t perfect either. It has the feel of an adaptation where they didn’t want to cut any of the cast, but had to cut all of their supporting stories in order to get the film to hit the 120 minute running time. And I mean this with utmost respect to Jon Chu’s career, but I still haven’t forgiven him for what he did to Jem and the Holograms a few years ago and there are times when the film feels just as workmanlike and banal as that failed outing. You’d think the climatic moment where Nick chases down Rachel in order to propose to her (again) would be wonderfully cinematic, but it’s perhaps the least exciting visual moment of the film. Similarly, the much written about Mahjong battle at the end was a great moment in spite of the direction, not because of it.

There is a lot wrong with the film. That’s unavoidable. Do I wish a studio picked up George Takei’s Allegiance and I was writing about about a big budget film about a Japanese-American family torn apart by the forced internment policies of a racist United States? That would have been great.

But in a way, this is very much like Fresh Off The Boat (and not just because of Constance Wu). When the real Eddie Huang quit narrating the show because it deviated so far from the harsh reality of his childhood experiences as a Chinese-American growing up in Florida, I totally sympathized with his decision and understood his rationale. Fresh Off The Boat isn’t an unvarnished look at the Chinese-American experience, nor is it ever going to touch on issues of race in a meaningful way. For better or for worse, it’s just not that kind of show nor is it trying to be. But the producers of the show were able to include an episode where the entire B-story was in Mandarin, a first for a family sitcom in America.

Crazy Rich Asians is very much in the same position as Fresh Off The Boat. It’s telling the world that Asians and Asian-Americans are just people like everyone else, facing similar problems as we try to carve out an existence in the world and live our lives. We fight with our in-laws, we get cheated on by our husbands, we have rivals who try to sabotage us, we deal with friends that we only talk to because we grew up with them and not because we have anything in common with them, we even deal with racism from time to time (although most of us don’t have the money to humiliate a racist by buying their place of employment).

It’s not the Asian-American of Do The Right Thing, let alone BlacKkKlansman, but I have to hope that if this movie is a success, then those types of stories will come in time. Maybe they’ll make a spin-off featuring Nico Santos’ Oliver called Crazy Rich Gaysians and have his character confront Singapore’s endemic social and structural homophobia. Or maybe they’ll make a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead-like movie about the two guards where they discuss the existential crisis of life defined only by serving as a backdrop to the stories of the rich. I believe that we can get there eventually, we just need to use Crazy Rich Asians as the push to get us there.

Anecdotally, the movie feels like it is appealing to more than just Asian-Americans desperate to be represented on screen. When the credits started rolling at my screening, a couple of Jewish women (who went out of their way to build a connection with me by telling me that Jewish culture and Chinese culture are connected by Mahjong and Chinese food at Christmas) told me that they had a great time watching the film. And in the moment of hesitation I felt when they unknowingly asked me to represent my entire race and culture by asking me if I liked the film, I told them that I did.

Maybe I don’t like the film for all the same reasons that they did, but that’s the point. Crazy Rich Asians is a film that is miraculously both culturally specific and broadly appealing. Even if you don’t care about any of what I wrote and just want to watch a good romantic comedy, you would be hard pressed to find one as good as this one in recent years. But if you are that Asian-American who has been waiting for over two decades to feel like you belong to a culture that has largely ignored you and taken you for granted, you will be witnessing a moment of cinematic history. That alone is worth the price of admission.

I didn’t have any place to put this, and it’s such a minor point that really isn’t worth including, but as a former teaching assistant I felt compelled to at least mention it.

So the film is supposed to take place during Rachel’s spring break. We see early in the film that she has a TA (that she tortures), so it’s possible that she dumps all her papers on him and tells him to grade everything while she’s having an adventure in Singapore. That’s perfectly fine, but it seems clear that she ends up staying in Singapore for much longer than a week (there is at least 3 days of flying time depicted in the film).

This means that there is no way she gets back in time to teach her class, assuming she even goes back after getting engaged, which means the poor TA is stuck holding the bag with a bunch of undergrads who will probably blame him for their grades not being in or for class being delayed.

Won’t anyone think of the poor teaching assistants who don’t have billionaire partners to sweep them off their feet?

#review #film #crazy rich asians #fresh off the boat #race #asian #asian-american #2018

10 notes · View notes

8-intergalacticbutterfly-8-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Relationships: Part II – I’ve Heard You Shouldn’t Make Homes Out of People

Thinking more about the problems and questions I posed in the first part, I felt it necessary to make some distinctions. Although I condemn the use of pain to hurt others in person-to-person interactions, I do not believe the same can apply at other “levels” or “layers” of social and historical existence. When we speak of structural violence, we often refer to social institutions that perpetuate discrimination, exclusion and marginalization through various processes. These “processes” are composed of social practices and beliefs that, through their simultaneous operations, create the kinds of worlds in-and-through which we, as social subjects, come to see ourselves and others. The term “structural” can be interpreted as “networks” that coordinate themselves according to shifting condensations of economic, social, cultural and human capital – a “push” here, for example, might necessitate a “pull” there. In this way, no singular person could be said to serve as a point of absolute origin for the forms of violence that people experience in their day-to-day lives. Instead, power comes to embody the shape of conglomerations, of clusters, of interconnected nodes in network societies. Based on this particular understanding of power, authority and violence, the finger of blame cannot be pointed at a singular subject. Or, in other words, the problem does not necessarily lie with, for instance, “white people” themselves but with whiteness as a network of social institutions, ideologies and practices that maintains people who identify as (or even look) white in a structural position of relative privilege (whiteness also affords power to people who align themselves with these same institutions, ideologies and practices – of which my writing as an academic trained in elite institutions is complicit with).

So, what do we do with statistics such as these:

“In Australia, indigenous youth are 28 times more likely than non-indigenous youth to be detained (ABC News, 2011), while in the US black and Hispanic youth face harsher treatment at each stage in the criminal justice system (The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 2000). While black youth represent 5 per cent and Hispanic youth 19 per cent of the juvenile population in the US, respectively they account for 45 per cent and 25 per cent of the incarcerated youth population (Saavedra, 2010).” (Andy Furlong, Youth Studies: An introduction, 2013, p. 191)

Clearly, there are groups of people that are structurally pre-dispositioned to be kept in certain social segments (e.g., physically in jail cells [issues of space/place]; migrants kept waiting for the right to have rights [issues of time/temporality]). There are specific histories of economic dispossession, social displacement and cultural genocide that help explain why brown and black communities (this isn’t exclusive to issues of skin color, though colorism can and does affect how people experience their lives) are over-represented in prison populations. To move from an individual level (the person-to-person engagements I addressed in “Part I”), to a structural level, means having to reckon with suffering and exploitation in ways that consider the larger contexts that inform how people think and act. At this level of social experience, attempts to count and leverage “coins” of pain in a group’s “historical jar” cannot be simply reduced to selfish acts of vengeance or egotistical demands for attention and care. At a structural level, socially afflicted communities are often cornered into political positions where there is little wiggle room to act “ethically” according to existing frameworks of morality and legality (morals and laws that often contribute structurally to more violence and marginalization, than to support or assistance).

I’ve heard that you shouldn’t make homes out of people.

My discussion of relationships in Part I begins to carve out the reasons why this statement might be true. “Hurt people, hurt people,” as the saying goes. The violence people embody often gets displaced onto others because they lack the capacity to hold the unbearable weight of histories (simultaneously distant and personal) that both connect and separate them. I think this is why we often “snap” at those whom we consider to be the closest and most intimate—we expect them to serve as our personal punching bags (after all, they love us, right?). This is also why people, amidst their busy schedules and right to live their lives, can sometimes only offer a share on Instagram or a status update on Facebook when confronted with global atrocities—including those sponsored by their “own” governments and countries (which also means, economically-speaking, their taxable incomes). The line that separates virtuous resistance from complicity to oppression is becoming increasingly thinner and thinner in social worlds where the clothes we wear and the foods we eat come to us from disparate locations, near and far, and often by exploitative means.

Is anyone innocent?

If one shouldn’t make a home out of people, perhaps it is in part because our insides mirror the wars taking place outside. There are terrible, invisible battles inside people’s hearts and minds that twinkle like guns fired all over the world—past and present. I believe change at a structural, systemic level requires social retribution for historical debts that persistently and perniciously feed current forms of inequity across differences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability and nationality. At an interpersonal level, however, I fear these same demands fuel further alienation, splinter coalitions and build a general distrust of people who are different from “us.” Is there a way to mediate the two positions without falling into extreme forms of nationalism and territoriality, or empty “inclusions” that simply reproduce and reinforce social hierarchies? I return to an often-cited quote by Subcomandante Marcos: “El mundo que queremos es uno donde quepan muchos mundos;” “The world we desire is one where many worlds can fit.” I highlight this demand not to romanticize indigenous Zapatista politics, nor to offer a solution to planetary disarray, but to suggest that a haunting question/reality remains with many communities today: Are people capable of letting “difference” live with integrity and on its own terms? Or are certain organizations of political and communal life automatically hostile to one another, preventing any “sincere” or “authentic” compromise from emerging? It is important to note that difference has many forms: ecological environments; non-human animals and plant life; cultural and political systems; spiritual and religious beliefs and practices; gendered and sexual diversities; and the list goes on.

My point, I suppose, is that even if we consider the brief, yet deeply complex scale that is a human life, an individual person’s biography, we will eventually reach a point where violence feels inevitable, even natural: to live in societies so entrenched with bloody histories, as is the case with the United States, can anyone truly say they exist free of charge? If we do, in fact, live in social networks, does this kind of (globalizing) cultural existence not implicate practically everyone? And if it does, are people touched by violence in the same way? I think the answer would be “no,” especially if modern histories of genocide, enslavement and dispossession are to be taken seriously at all. To equalize oppression, as when one claims that “All Lives Matter,” is to commit an error of magnitude and proportion, for people of color, women, and queer and trans* folks have served historically as collateral for the “civilized,” modern lifestyles that citizens, noncitizens and second-class citizens get to live in the here and now—whether they enjoy it or not, find it meaningful or not, is beside the point. It seems to me that across the tenuous spectrums of oppressor/oppressed, there runs a loud silence, a dazzling absence that grounds the very existences of people as social individuals: systematic death as a contemporary common origin – but not one from which everyone benefits equally.

Which brings me to another question: can trauma purify?

What does an inheritance of collective pain at an individual level do? Consider the following scenario: a third-generation indigenous girl accompanied by her Mexican-American father is called “Pocahontas” by an elderly white woman at a Whole Foods in Southern California. The woman looks down at the girl and repeats her observation with a warm smile – “You look like her [Pocahontas]” –, only to be met with an uncertainty that gleams from the girl’s eyes as to the significance of the claim, of the way in which she is being interpellated by the woman as looking “native” (I won’t go into the problematics of basing native and indigenous identity on Disney representations). So, what happened here? Are these innocent, everyday exchanges? Or has certain damage been done (again)? And, if so, who’s at fault? How ought one to respond? One way to reply to these questions—arguably the most obvious—would be to assume a binary approach: the woman is the oppressor and the girl is the oppressed; each is a symbolic condensation of histories of colonial violence. But we can also just as easily say that the woman is not a willful oppressor (her comment, from her perspective, was not meant to be offending). Likewise, the girl does not willfully assume the position of the victim or the oppressed (in fact, the woman’s comment might not even make an impression amidst other priorities and preoccupations). Rather, both are given to larger and deeper structures that, before they even happen to bump into each other at an aisle in a grocery store, already situate and render meaningful interactions in ways that seem to necessitate an implicit, and thus explicit, hierarchy.

This is the distinction that I highlight between the pain people wage on one another through interpersonal contact, and the suffering that people as communities depend on, and must therefore politically mobilize, in order to make claims for social justice. The two levels co-exist and constantly inform each other—this makes the problem of historical trauma particularly tricky to frame. Through this distinction, violence demonstrates the paradoxical and contradictory ways in which an emphasis on trauma might prove necessary on one level of social experience (the systematic nature of social institutions), while possibly detrimental on another (everyday encounters with people).

At the end, however, we are still left with questions of justice and ethics. How might the woman be made accountable for her supposed “innocent” remarks based on, and supported by, the structural privileges afforded to whiteness in the U.S.? Relatedly, how might the incident be made conscious to the girl in a way that does not propagate a victim mentality or an inferiority complex, but instead affirms the dignity of her identities and her right to exist as a person? I do not have answers to these questions. They might be questions for policy and lawmakers; for researchers and scholars; for grassroots activists and organizations. The issues I raise do not have singular, once-and-for-all remedies (or at least not any that I can personally identify) – they are symptoms of the immensity and the difficulty of existing in a world haunted by the debris of chance encounters gone terribly wrong, whether they happened in 1492 or last week.

1 note · View note

ireadathing · 5 years ago

Text

Loleen Berdahl and Jonathan Malloy, Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD

This book has been so helpful to my thinking. After spending the late winter and spring of this year trying to write a SSHRC application, I started feeling so... frustrated and not excited about so many things--about my research (and my vague sense of it); about my prospects of being in the world if I pursued a PhD; about the UofT Archives, oddly, because I know there's cool stuff in there, I just wasn't finding it; about the relevance of my research interest and the way I'd have to warp my interests, which are ultimately more divergent and creative than traditional “research”, for academia.

So I picked up this book, and the more I read the more clear eyed I felt about pursuing academia vs. not. I made a list of pros and cons. The list of cons was expansive compared to the pros.

I decided to think on it. On Wednesday of that week I talked to some friends of mine on the phone and the fact that I was thinking about not doing a PhD came up. I didn't want to be boring or take over the conversation with it, but they asked and so I sort of word vomited about my thinking. About how I want to be doing something concrete in the world - I've been thinking this in particular in light of the pandemic. And how it's occurred to me that not doing a PhD doesn't mean I won't be a person who thinks and reads and produces things. I can do all of those things in a different way, in a different context.

I also had an interesting conversation with Andrew on one of our walks about how I've felt a certain amount of pressure to do something extraordinary - for reasons I won't get into here. And that has prevented me in some ways from logically seeking out more practical options.

I want to be of use in the world. And I'm already excited about the things that I can do with my life that aren't this.

I think I would like to write an email to the professors who wrote this book to thank them. It’s so clear, logical, straightforward and practical. I’ve honestly never thought practically or intentionally about my life. I’ve never planned for things, at least not far in advance. I think I’ve been scared to work with the actual substance of my life and instead of staying hidden in a few removed dreams.

I'll also write a few notes from it here, because I think it’s so generally useful:

---

Chapter 1 - Get What You Want from your PhD

“Rather than moving through your doctoral program with your eyes solely on the next step, we will push you to maximize your personal agency and strategically position that next step into the larger context of your career trajectory. What those steps and trajectory are is ultimately up toy ou; this book is oriented toward helping you decide what is best for you.

To achieve this, we structure our guidance around an overarching question for you to continuously ask yourself:

Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now?

...The question forces you to explicitly consider your future goals, and to be realistic as you do so. It pushes you together whatever information is available to you and to go beyond relying on what you presume to be true or what your well-meaning but perhaps not fully informed professors and fellow students are telling you. T he question demands you to use the information you find to weigh your options as you make your choices. And the question requires you to continually reassess your decisions and to make corrections to your path as new information emerges, as circumstances change, as your goals evolve.” (2-3)

“Making the best decision for yourself will not necessarily result in the exact outcome you predict; life lacks guarantees, and this certainly applies to the advice we provide. But ideally, by asking yourself this question about both your large and small decisions, and by continually returning to the question to reassess and change course as needed, you can avoid any future feeling of regret with respect to your career choices. You can also develop a sense of confidence that you are capable of making the best decision for yourself and that you can strategically pursue your own best interests.” (3)

“Table 1.1 Worksheet: Considering future goals and available information

Given both my future goals and the information currently available to me, what is my best decision right now

Questions to get you started:

Future Goals:

What kind of tasks do I want to be doing in my future work life?

What would my ideal work day look like? How do I envision balancing my future work and personal lives?

Where do I want to live? How important is that to me?

How much money do I want to make? How important is that to me?

What kind of difference do I want to make in the world? What do I consider to be meaningful work?

What do I like doing, both day to day and over the course of a year or more? What motivates and energizes me? What does the opposite?

Do I like immediate payoff and rewards? Or am I comfortable with investing for the long term, such as through a PhD, even if exact results are not guaranteed?

Information currently available:

What types of career skills are valued in the sectors that interest me? Do I feel I can build/acquire these skills?

What are the average PhD completion rates in my field? Time to completion rates?

In what careers do PhDs in my field work? Is a PhD necessary to do this work?

Who are recent PhD graduates in my field that I can identify as possible role models (or cautionary tales)?

What are my resources, personal priorities, and personal commitments at this stage in my life? How might they affect my pursuing a PhD?” (4)

“While many students have a single, narrow goal in mind--specifically, a tenure track university professor position--we encourage you to adopt a broader goal that takes into account all relevant information” (7)

Proposed goal: a successful rewarding career that uses your talents and the skills that you’ve developed throughout your education

“Be conscious of current experience with particular competencies and what you can do to develop further. We suggest you create a portfolio that you update monthly with absolutely everything that is even remotely relevant as evidence of your competencies. Future You will be happy you did so” (13)

“Table 1.2. Worksheet: Creating your portfolio of career competencies

Career Competency | Examples of Evidence | Your current evidence | Options to build more evidence

Critical thinking and problem solving

written and oral communication skills

Digital technology

professionalism and work ethic

teamwork and collaboration

leadership

global / intercultural fluency” (13)

Informational Interviews

“One of the best ways to learn about career options and what specific careers are really like is to speak to individuals who are working in a field. Informational interviews are a standard way to do this: They provide inside information and allow you to build and expand your professional networks. The idea of cold calling strangers to ask to meet with them may make you uncomfortable, but informational interviews are common and you should not feel that you are making an unusual or outrageous request. In the early years of your program, such meetings will provide you with key insights on the competencies that are valued in different careers; in the later years of your program, these meetings may lead to critical networks that feed directly into your job search.

1. Establish a list of 20+ names

-brainstorm people you know personally

-ask those in your circle then move out to the true strangers realm

2. Make the request

-ask for a short meeting at their convenience, ideally in their office

-if in a different city, request a short telephone conversation

-clarify that you are not asking about a job, but rather than you are seeking information on careers more broadly

-request should be straightforward such as the following email:

Dear Ms. Adams,

I am writing to request a 20 minute meeting with you to learn more about careers in community relations. I am currently in the last year of my PhD in sociology and am curious to learn how community relations work. I am happy to meet with you in your office or speak with you by telephone at your convenience.

Thank you for considering this request. I look forward to hearing from you

Sincerely,

3. Prepare

-background research

-learn about org, field, individual

-prepare a specific list of questions to ask about what the job type entails what skills are involved and what the entry points are

-include in that list of questions a closing question that asks if they recommend addition people that you should talk to (and permission to use their name when contacting)

4. Work the interview

-use time to gather information and develop your professional reputation and networks

-arrive early but not too early, dress professionally, and be respectful of their time

5. follow up and reflect

-send a thank you email and keep a record for yourself of the date and details of the interview

-reflect on what competencies you learned to be valuable in that sector and consider how you might build experience with (and concrete evidence of) that competency

How can I cultivate a professional reputation

- a number of qualities tied to professionalism

-reliable, conscientious, and attentive to detail

-understand need for appropriateness relative to their circumstances and the importance of acting graciously

“at it’s core, professionalism is largely about treating others respectfully in a broad sense. When you make the effort to be punctual and to ensure that your work meets a particular standard and that your behavior is appropriate to the situation, you are showing respect for other people’s time, energy, feelings, boundaries, and so forth.” (138)

Adopting three mindsets will help you avoid unintentional disrespect:

1. Graciousness is not optional: A lack of attention to gratitude will seal your reputational coffin if you are not careful. Always say please. And, closing the loop, thank people when they do something for you, even if it is small, and even if they are your supervisor, instructor, or committee member. When people do things for you... they are giving you a gift of their time and attention... People typically notice when they are not acknowledge for their efforts, and you can easily turn a potential champion into someone who has no investment in your success. If someone is helpful to or supportive of you, take the minute it takes to express your gratitude. IF someone provides you with detailed feedback on your work, provide a more lengthy posotive response (even if you don’t agree with their comments). If you intend to say thank ou but fail to actually do so, the person is left with the impression that their efforts are not valued by you or that you feel entitled, and that person will be unlikely to help you again in the future. Make it a habit to thank people within 48 hours for all things large and small. (139)

2. Your department is your workplace and the people in it are your colleagues... Professionalism requires a strong sense of context as well a respect for differences in power and authority. Here are somethings to avoid: being late; showing up at meetings unprepared, without a pen and paper or tablet / laptop and a clear purpose; profanity; discussion of illegal or illicit activities; sloppiness, be it in personal attire, non-proofread emails and materials, or data and file management; anything beyond light alcohol consumption.

3. All information is private unless you are told otherwise... you need to become highly sensitive to showing others respect by developing a hyper-instinct for discretion... sometimes it’s crystal clear; other times not. Always err on the side of caution, asking if something can be share. And if you are gossiping or voicing opinions about faculty, other graduate students, undergraduate students, staff or anyone else, know that it will get back to them or be repeated to someone else. If you wouldn’t say it to their face or send it to them in an email, rethink voicing it at all (140)

How can I be productive?

Professionalism means doing what you say you will do and by when you say you will do it. You cement your professional reputation by getting things done--and done well, on or ahead of schedule. This requires the ability to manage time, resources, and energy to make things happen, over and over.

1. Make a list of what needs to be done

-write a list of everything you have committed to and the associated deadlines and organize the list by due date

2. Break activities down into smaller tasks, distinguishing between high- and low-energy tasks

create a more detailed list to create target completion dates to manage your time and energy

some taks must be done when you are at your peak and other tasks can be done when energy levels are lower

clearly label high and low energy tasks

3. Block work time into your calendar

the trick to getting things done (and don well and on time) is to schedule the work times into your calendar and to respect these times. Remember, an unstructured schedule and its illusion of endless time is yoru enemy; imposing structure on your day is necessary

- block off all committed times

-for each task and project, est. the number of hours you will need - because most things will take longer than you assume and to provide a cushion in case of unanticipated events - increase this number by 50%

-working back from the deadline, schedule task-specific working time in your calendar, assigning high energy tasks to the high energy time slot

this allows you to identify if you’ve taken on too much

4. Work your calendar

-execution takes discipline - honour your commitments

-many writing problems occur because people are trying to plan, write, and edit simultaneously. To get around this, start with a clear outline and then focus your daily efforts on small units within the outline. Allow yourself to put ideas in point form, making notes to yourself in the draft to be dealt with at a later time

-avoid the temptation to edit as you go

Networking

“you should develop equivalent summaries of yoru skills and competencies. Be able to speak convincingly and confidently about what you can do and why it is relevant and valuable. You set the tone. You’re a professional.” (153)

Launch your Career

“organizations...do not hire people for the sake of hiring them. They hire people because they have identified a need a gap--a problem-- and at least part of the solution is to hire someone to solve it.” (157)

Figuring Out What You Want to Do

-3 dimensions - activities, subject matter, work environment

Activities: What energizes you? What triggers your flow? - look for ovrelap between dominant competencies and types of work that energieze you

-identify which activities jazz you up and which ones wear you out along with evidence and examples

Subject Matter - What angers, inspires you? areas you feel strongly about and where you dream of making a contribution

Environment - large or small? Dynamic or slower pace? Stability or change? Routine

Use this to identify 3-4 career options that might be a good fit for you - push yourself to break apart the components

After you narrow in on ideas, do additional roudns of informational interview, to gather information and build networks - research industries and sectors - listen to your gut

Approach as research challenge

Tone: Optimism & Possibility

1 note · View note

fanfic-rants · 7 years ago

Text

What is Your Story`s Soul?

Without a soul, it doesn’t matter how interesting your story`s characters, settings, world(s), or situations are. Your story will fall flat.

So what do I mean when I say “a story`s soul?” Remove the setting, the names of the characters, and most of the details of the plot of a story. What is left? The story’s soul; what the story is truly about.

Peter Docter (a director who has been involved in many of Pixar’s famous movies) gives this example of a story`s soul when describing Monsters Inc.

“A man becoming a father for the first time.”

That single sentence is so simple, yet is also so powerful! The fact that that story is being told using a setting of monsters who make a living out of scaring children easily provides conflict to make the story interesting, and the characters themselves add even more to it (as well as providing the wonderful comedy).

This concept also applies to fanfiction. I’ll provide an example using a fanfiction I’m looking forward to seeing update: Chipped Sapphire and Brewing Hellfire by lordofire.

As far as I (the reader) can tell, this story`s soul is, "A boy who seeks to become a hero to the world, and a fallen god who comes to discover the value and beauty of the world.”

That is a soul of a story that can really draw people in. We all enjoy a good story of an aspiring hero, and that of a former villain discovering the wonders we ourselves love and enjoy. How is that story told, though? That`s where the context, the setting, and world of the story come into play. Fanfiction just makes creating all of that so much easier because most of it is already there. All the author has to do is tweak or overhaul it.

So what`s the context of Chipped Sapphire and Brewing Hellfire? What tweaks has Lordoffire made to RWBY to tell his story? The one key tweak he has made is one that only fanfiction authors would make. Jaune Arc’s soul is merged with Sauron`s. Yes, the same Sauron from Lord of the Rings. Makes you pause, doesn`t it?.

Sure, the fanfic idea sounds interesting, but without the soul of the story in mind, where is it going to go after the author manages to set it up? Without that soul of the story driving it, the story would quickly flounder.

How many stories have you encountered that seem to have such great potential, but stops before it can even get started? Why did the author stop? The idea behind the story appears so interesting. I haven`t spoken to these authors myself, so I can`t give a certain answer. However, I would be willing to bet they stopped because they didn`t know what to do with their idea. It was so fantastic when they came up with it, but it wasn`t until they started writing it out and setting it up they realized that they didn`t know what kind of story they wanted to tell, what the soul of the story using that idea was.

One fanfiction that illustrates this very well is Bound to Crimson Wings by Hysterical Clerical Hijinks. Set in a fantasy setting, Weiss gets bonded to a dragon partner, appropriately referred to as bonded, named Ruby. Read this final passage of the first chapter and tell me (again ignoring the grammatical errors) that you wouldn`t be interested in reading more.

Meanwhile Weiss was staring down her own Dragon, but not nearly as calmly as Blake. Despite having gotten the attention of the smaller of the two, Weiss was not reassured.

The larger dragon was far less intimidating.

It glided toward her, each step startlingly silent. It was moving very quickly, deceptively swift and snakelike. Weiss felt her pulse pick as it approached, looking dark and dreadful. She fought to retreat, to simply flee in the other direction from the predator in front of her.

Eventually it was right next to her, and Weiss could feel the cold sweat dripping down her forehead. She was pretty sure that even if she did want to flee, her body wouldn`t follow her orders anymore. The Dragon`s face lowered to face Weiss, warm breath puffing over Weiss. She gulped, staring at the deadly looking teeth. She looked up, dread pooling her stomach, and stared into a pair of large, slitted silver eyes…

Then it licked her.

Right in the face.

Weiss was stunned into unfeeling silence, drool dripping down her face and her fringe stuck in the air, unable to comprehend that said Dragon had just breezed past her mental shields.

‘My name`s Ruby and we`re going to be the best Bonded ever~!’ She exclaimed cheerfully unto Weiss` mind. Her voice was young girl`s, mid teens at most if Weiss was to guess. It was incredibly chirpy. She was getting heavy sensations of pridejoypridefriendhappinessjoyteamfriendteam. Coupled with gleeful silver eyes, and a massive wagging tail.

This wasn`t a Dragon, it was the biggest puppy on Remnant.

Weiss could feel her headache coming back with a vengeance already.

And that was only a part of the whole chapter. The idea of Ruby being a puppy in the body of a lethal, terrifying dragon on top of being Weiss`s partner is such a wonderful idea full of potential, and Hysterical Clerical Hijinks writes this story very well. There`s just one major heartbreaker about this story.

That first chapter is currently [December 11th, 2017] the only chapter, and it was posted January 28th, 2015. At this point, it is in the unofficial hiatus hell.

How could Hysterical Clerical Hijinks do this? Why would he begin such a wonderful story, only to stop at the very beginning just as we`re all hooked? If we were to message him, I`d imagine his reply would be along the lines of “I didn`t know what to do with it.”

Yes, he had an amazing setting. Yes, his writing was good. he even did an excellent job of staying true to the RWBY characters he was recreating for his story. His problem came from lacking an actual story to tell with all of that. His stories lacked a driving soul.

Knowing the soul of a story greatly helps in giving the author direction; even if the creative juices have ceased to flow for a bit, and the possibilities offered by the setting have run out. Wondering what to do next in the story? Look at the soul of the story, throw a wrench of some sort at it, and write out experience the protagonists have, while maintaining the integrity of their setting, as they try to deal with the conflict and stay true to their soul.

For example, let's look at Bound to Crimson Wings again, give it a few different souls, and then throw some wrenches at them.

“A girl, isolated in her home for her whole life, seeks companionship.” Some wrenches to throw at this? Her teammate is an enemy of her family. Her bonded is so different from her. A situation arises that demands she returns home.

“Two girls, running from their own pasts and prisons of a home, seek to better the world.” Some wrenches to throw at this? One of their homes is in danger, and they have the option of returning to save/protect it. One or both of their pasts threaten their current life/lives unless they abandon it to return. One or both of their pasts pose a threat to the world, and they are capable of doing something to stop it/them.

These wrenches allow the author to create the conflicts that bring readers in. Even if encountering a writer’s block, or just simply not knowing where to go next with the story, the story’s soul can allow the author to figure out where to go next. Of course, the author should also realize when to simply allow the story to be done. If there are no more potential conflicts, no more viable wrenches to throw at the soul of the story, then the story needs to be brought to a close.

Luckily, if the story is well thought out, there may be multiple “souls” operating within a single story that can allow multiple wrenches to be thrown at it.

How can a story have more than one soul? Wouldn’t they conflict with each other? Not necessarily. A good story should be a lot like real life. Every character that shows up, from nameless background people to the main protagonist, has their own story, and those stories have their own soul.

When telling a story, however, the author should pick a “dominant” soul, and allow all the other souls involved to support it. If a particular soul does not support the “dominant” soul, then the author should not bother revealing it more than necessary.

For example, in the video game Mass Effect II, there is a mission you can perform for a crewmate of yours, Thane Krios, who wants to stop his son from walking the path of an assassin like he has. The story for the mission is a good one, but there is a soul that really shines out in it that is never explored: that of Captain Bailey, the Citadel Security officer who acts as a supporting role in the mission. It is never specifically spoken, but you can see and hear, in almost every word spoken by the captain, that he feels a personal connection to this mission. Perhaps the most notable can be found on TVTropes’ page of Mass Effect II quotes:

"You think he's [Thane] the only man who's ever messed up raising a son?"

Even for those who are not experienced at reading between the lines can tell that Captain Bailey bears a personal tragedy on his shoulders whenever he speaks about Thane trying to save his son.

So why is this soul not explored? Because the soul of the story for Captain Bailey and his son does not pertain to the dominant soul of Mass Effect II: Commander Shepard seeking to save the galaxy his (the player’s) way. As interesting as that story would be, it would be unnecessary baggage that would have bogged down the game. So, it had to be left out.

With that example of a soul that does not support the “dominant” soul of a story out of the way, how about an example of a soul that does support the “dominant” soul?

For the official RWBY anime by Roosterteeth, I believe the “dominant” soul can be identified as “four girls who seek to make the world a better place.” (Please correct me if you think that’s wrong or inaccurate).

Each of the souls for the members of the primary cast, the members of team RWBY, are able to support this soul. For Weiss Schnee and Blake Belladonna, they practically state the souls for their stories in Episode 25 of Season 2, Search and Destroy, and Episode 26 of Volume 2, Mountain Glenn; and Ruby Rose states hers in Episode 3 of Volume 1, The Shining Beacon, Pt 2. For Ruby’s soul, it is the most reflective of the show (which, I suspect, is why she is the first character to be introduced in it): “A girl who seeks to fight for what’s right and those who can’t protect themselves” (see transcript for episode 3, Volume 1: The Shining Beacon, Pt. 2) For Weiss, her’s is: “A girl who seeks to redeem her family name.” For Blake, its: “A girl who seeks to fight for equality and justice.”

Now, upon reading those souls, one might be inclined to think, “these all sound more like the character’s motives than their stories’ souls.” This is mostly because their motives help shape and create their souls. Because of that, they can be easily confused to the point where they can be used interchangeably. However, by examining the final member of team RWBY, Yang Xiao Long, we can identify the difference between a character’s motive and the soul for their story.

Yang’s surface motives, the ones that govern her personal and outside actions, are many. In Search and Destroy, Yang states that she wants to live a life of adventure “not knowing what tomorrow will bring.” However, in episode 21 of Season 2, Extracurricular, Yang reveals that she is still looking for her mother who left her shortly after she was born. While these motives do shape the soul of her story, the actual soul of her story is quite different. Thus far [December 11th, 2017] it can be identified as this: “A big sister who seeks to be present when those she loves are in need.”

All of those souls are not only compatible with the dominant soul of RWBY, they also support it. Thus, by exploring these souls, the author, Roosterteeth (following the death of Monty Oum), also explores the soul of RWBY. There are bound to be many more potential souls within the world of RWBY, but if they are to be explored, they must be done so outside of this anime series in order to prevent the bogging down of any of the souls involved.

So much more can be said about the soul of a story, and I’m certain that much has already been said about it (just in different words). However, I hope that upon reading this; you will at least be much more aware of this concept, and be able to fill the world with even greater stories than before.

Also, I have a separate post that links to a list of potential souls that I have collected. If you’re interested or are just looking for a few writing prompt ideas, follow this link to check it out. Please message me if you have any ideas for potential souls that I have not already included on my list as well as (if you can) the sources of inspiration you got the souls from.

If you liked this post, please hit the like button. If you have anything to add to this post, please reply to or repost it. If you know of anyone who you think would appreciate and/or benefit from this post, please share it with them. If you want to see more rants by me as I come up with them, please follow me. I hope to not disappoint.

#fanfic #Fanfiction #RWBY #writing #story #Stories #storytelling

3 notes · View notes

naughtygals · 8 years ago

Text

week 5 day 3

this has already been such a successful week and i finally feel i’m getting the hang of rc and how to get the most out of it. some combination of learn & teach, be generous w your time, work with others to allow you to think more deeply about your problems.

monday & tuesday were a day of extensive learning and diving deeper into what it means to build embedded systems. after a good deal of confusion and head scratching on monday i paired with an experienced batchmate on improving my Makefiles and working to cross-compile Lua for the arm cortex. a number of tangents came out of this work and it was a fantastic project to pair with.

i learnt a great deal about how the compiler operates – creating object files (and only when they’ve changed if you write a good make file!), and then linking them together (also with shared libraries *.a or *.so {dynamic/static}). the key to the lua compilation issue was that the linker wasn’t getting the -arch flag. while the sources were being compiled for arm, the linker was linking to the x86 libc and libm libraries, causing an architecture mismatch. i’d kind of caught this before and updated my CFLAGS correctly, but due to not understanding where the linker was operating, i had failed to set the flags correctly. we reorganized the Makefile to have linker flags on a separate line & to more explicitly say where the linking was happening.

onward- i was super excited to get Lua sending me an error message, and called it a day when i had to go attend some work details.

today i spent the first half of the day pairing, before getting back to this problem. the conclusion though, is that i now have a working REPL that sends a string to Lua which runs the string as a script, then returns a string to represent the output which is printed & saved in a history array. this felt like a massive milestone to have the interpreter successfully parse a string, then run it, and return a meaningful value. i spent a good chunk of time refactoring the EVAL function and abstracted the history display update to its own function.

now the final step to having a meaningful REPL is to get usb-keyboard / hid working which i’m hoping is more fruitful than previous endeavours with usb audio. i have a feeling this will be easier and have much more boilerplate than the audio setup which has a great deal more variables to juggle.

furthermore i’d like to work on calling a Lua script in a separate file from the command line, just to show how one can write a Lua script as a *.lua file (ie a script in pure Lua), and execute it on the hardware. perhaps this would be a good piece to pair on with another rc-er due to the overlap of languages / interests.

when i first arrived today i spent some time pairing on a project euler challenge which led to a discussion about the representability of numbers, how floats work under the hood, and how to represent and operate on numbers that are bigger than the available working datatypes. this felt like a nice exchange with give and take regarding knowledge sharing. in the process i learnt a good chunk about clojure and the power of functional programming. this led onto a discussion & exploration of the mathematical implications of the factorial function. we spent a chunk of time then exploring the manner in which factorial functions necessarily have an increasingly number of trailing zeroes.

beyond this pairing, i also worked on a swift project designing a visualizer for ios. we explored the way in which data is transferred from cpu to gpu, and attempted to trouble-shoot some framerate drops they were experiencing. in the end i think we arrived at a place not a great deal better off in terms of working code, but certainly got a lot more inside how the process was being implemented. the big realization was that it’s very expensive to copy a frame buffer in full-hd, uncompressed, between cpu & gpu.

this then led to a continued pairing on the disco project, which was largely an education in how embedded memory works & also the structure of a dsp loop. we started with trying to explain the usart, leading to DMA, leading to codec as an example, leading to dissecting the dsp block function. obviously dsp blocks are a great example of why DMA is necessary, avoiding codec interrupts affecting the cpu on every sample.

we spoke a lot about how and why to handle pointers in this context, plus delved quite deep into how the leaky-integrator-into-differentiator works as a high-pass (DC) filter. i think i actually came to a better understand of what that code did at the same time.

eventually we ended up looking at the oscillator and discovering that the current version didn’t map the raw incrementer values to a triangle-wave as initially intended. we implemented this mapping function, including a stub function for finding the sign of a float. unfortunately something i’ve added since last thursday is taking a lot of time in the main loop and causing the audio loop to run out of time (and hence be a garbled mess). this is another thing to find a solution to sooner than later, so dsp functions called from lua are meaningful.

a final note about these interactions is they made me realize that using an IDE is not the worst thing in the world. it can be super useful and rapidly speed up development time if used in the right context.

tomorrow i plan to pair with a recurser i have yet to spend much time with, as well as have a planning session with 2 recursers to discuss how to implement the rPi games console we’ve been talking about. the idea is to create a system which allows future (and past!) rc-ers to easily add their games into a console system that can be downloaded as an image for folks to take home. we want to provide ability for flexible input devices (keyboard / mouse / gamepad etc), and also make it compatible with a comprehensive list of platforms / languages. additionally a key part of the project is streamlining the process of adding one’s game onto the system, so it’s easy for future rc members to take over the development.

one element one of the members wants to focus on is low-level dev (which they haven’t done). as such we’re probably going to spend some time hooking up leds or other simple hardware bits, so we can have a look at what’s happening on a low-level. we might end up writing a driver for some external hardware piece if there’s something that makes sense in the context.

another proposal is to make a physical console. i think this would be a good method to make the thing more fun & highly used, as well as maintaining more status (and hence visibility) once we’re gone. it would be nice if future batches said “if you’re into games, you should build one and put it on the rConsole!”. not to be vain, but rather to provide a platform that can develop into a larger scale project if someone is so inclined.

i’d like to pair with a batchmate on converting the dsp functions to dynamic memory allocation such that they can be constructed/destroyed at runtime. ultimately this is so the dsp graph is dynamic (and thus scriptable), but would be a great lesson in C for someone interested in how memory management works, or wanting to spend more time writing C / handling pointers.

0 notes

briangroth27 · 8 years ago

Text

Iron Fist Season 1 Review

I went into Iron Fist knowing next to nothing of the character: only his reputation as Luke Cage’s best friend/fellow Hero for Hire and his “zen surfer” portrayal on Ultimate Spider-man. Unfortunately, I didn’t leave the character’s first live action showcase, currently streaming on Netflix, a fan. It’s gotten a lot of bad reviews, and sadly I think they’re largely deserved. The show is low-stakes and repetitive from the get-go, never really has a grasp of who Danny (Finn Jones) is or what the main threat should be, and (though this doesn’t seem to be entirely their fault) boasts a mythology behind its central character that makes little to no sense.

Full spoilers…

First off, I don’t understand the Iron Fist mythology. Iron Fist is supposed to be a great warrior who guards the path to the mystical K’un-Lun (which only appears in our reality every 15 years), meaning he has to stay there. But he’s also the sworn enemy of The Hand…so how can he destroy them if he’s not supposed to leave his monastic Brigadoon? Was the plan to just wipe out any Hand who happened to try to take the village whenever the path appeared, hoping they’d never stop trying until their ranks had been completely destroyed? To the show’s credit, Danny does realize this contradiction…eleven episodes in (and even then, it comes off as an excuse for why he won’t go back rather than a mission-altering epiphany). It would’ve been a stronger character motivation had he left K’un-Lun to destroy The Hand to complete that portion of his duties instead of completely abandoning them, choosing a proactive approach rather than sitting and doing nothing. That’s another issue: since K’un-Lun only appears in our plane of existence every 15 years, their information is outdated, but even that doesn’t excuse the idea that The Hand are talked about as if they’re mythical enemies who haven’t existed for a very long time. Danny has no idea The Hand are currently active in modern-day New York when he gets there; who did he think he was training to fight all these years if he didn’t believe The Hand were still real? Why is the Iron Fist necessary to protect the gateway to a magical training camp that didn't even know its sworn enemy was still around? Is Danny Rand anything more than a mystical doorman? I don’t know if any of this is the case in the comics, but if it is, the show should’ve either updated it, better explained it, or used it to spin the characters into interesting directions.

K’un-Lun itself should’ve been much more explored. We got maybe five minutes of screentime spent there, all of it very vague and barren. There's not much context to anything Danny felt there because we barely even saw snippets of his stay; it's all secondhand for us. These were the 15 most transformative years of Danny’s life and we saw next to nothing. We never see him struggle (except for one random scene of the monks beating him as a child). We never see him as an outsider. What we did see was entirely unimpressive. I didn’t need the entire series to be about his training (nor would I want it to be), but I definitely needed a better idea of what it was like and how being there changed him (since we have no information about the kid he was before he went missing either). Maybe the show should’ve started off with the first two-three episodes detailing his training or the rules of magic in Danny’s world. Much like Dr. Strange, I wish they'd gone FAR weirder and more outlandish with the supernatural elements. A season later, I’m not even sure what's so great about K'un-Lun that makes them so much more important than the rest of the world. And who were the masters of the Iron Fist mysticism, who thought it unnecessary to teach Danny how to use his focused Chi to heal others, or even to recharge his powers? Even if his “training went a little sideways,” as he claims, shouldn’t recharging his abilities have been lesson #2?

My first impression of Danny Rand from the trailers was that he’d be yet another rich guy who got lost/traveled abroad and came back to save his city with new powers and/or skills. Having seen this from Green Arrow, Batman, Iron Man, and Dr. Strange, I wasn’t sure what new twists Iron Fist could bring to the table. Turns out, not many. Not every character has to reinvent the wheel—there are only so many origin story tropes—but they should all find some fresh angle. Iron Fist didn’t. He doesn’t seem to come home with a concrete goal at all, beyond convincing people he’s really Danny Rand. His attempt to get back into his family’s company feels half-hearted (unfortunately so, since I liked him best when he was insisting on better business practices and on using their resources to help people) and is quickly forgotten. It barely even feels like getting in is what he wants (he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to do there once he’s in); it’s just something to kill time. He later centers on trying to figure out who killed his parents, eventually giving us the season’s main villain, but even that felt completely routine; the only trope more well-trodden than dead parents inspiring heroes and guys coming back home with skills/talents is evil businessmen. I didn’t find Danny compelling, but the unfocused writing and direction may take some blame off Jones. They asked him to show several seemingly conflicting facets of Danny’s personality that never had a strong connective tissue (more on that in a bit).

Rand was surrounded by controversy from the show’s first announcement: some saw him as a white savior figure who’d appropriated Asian culture; a relic of the 70s that didn’t belong in the modern day. Many argued Marvel should change his character to be Asian-American. Others said they should remain faithful to his Caucasian comic book appearance, claiming an Asian character who’s good at martial arts would be racist in and of itself. It seemed Marvel was damned either way. I don't necessarily mind Danny being white and an expert at martial arts—there's no reason someone from any background can't become an expert in any field with enough practice and training (assuming we're not looking at a story where the white guy is just automatically special and better for no reason beyond the idea that he naturally is; a magical chosen white savior)—and the way he talked about wanting to be Iron Fist more than anything and fighting against impossible odds to attain the title and responsibilities associated with it felt respectable and earned. However, the way he's better at every aspect of Colleen Wing’s life and culture (fight skills, speaking Mandarin, knowing where the best food is served, dojo etiquette, meditation and Tai Chi techniques, capturing the attention of students (until he’s too violent), etc.) than she is does grate on me and crosses the line. His apology for correcting Colleen after informing her about challenging a dojo’s master also came off as condescending. Nothing said K’un-Lun culture had to be exactly hers—not every Asian culture is the same, obviously, especially not made-up mystical ones—but the show chose to have them correlate almost exactly, and it’s in his complete domination of her culture that he comes off as appropriating it. Iron Fist had a golden opportunity by going with Danny’s comic book whiteness to discuss cultural appropriation—what it is and isn’t, why it’s wrong, etc.—in the same way that Daredevil did gentrification, Jessica Jones did sexism and misogyny, and Luke Cage did racism. Danny's talk about feeling empty and thinking the Iron Fist would solve all his problems could’ve been a perfect metaphor for cultural appropriation if the show were at all interested in exploring that. But it isn’t. Had they gone with an Asian-American actor instead, Danny fighting so hard to claim the Iron Fist title could’ve been a great parallel to an Asian-American kid (who would already feel out of place in both American and Asian culture, by the way) fighting to reclaim his culture, as Lewis Tan (a potential Danny Rand) said. It was also frustrating that, even though Danny says he worked hard and earned the Iron Fist mantle, the show teases out an idea that he is some mystical Chosen One who was meant to be Iron Fist all along. That plays even further into the White Savior trope, and that’s not something I’m down to explore in future seasons.

One of the most common arguments I read about why Danny “had to be white” was that he had to feel like an outsider in the Asian-cultured K’un-Lun. If that’s an essential part of Danny’s background, the show completely dropped the ball. It feels like they paid lip service at most to Danny feeling like a fish out of water in both K'un L'un and New York. He commented on being called an outsider back in his mystical land and said there were some unhappy memories, but also mentioned a best friend and fun times sneaking wine. Episode 6 reveals that he might actually be a mighty prophesied savior and was trained to believe as such...some outsider. It does seem like the requirements of being Iron Fist are colder than I’d anticipated, but assuming the beatings he received as a child were part of his training (and we have no reason to think they weren’t), that seems like the rigors everyone else was going through too, not something specifically aimed at him because he was white. And there’s no “Man out of Time” element to his journey back to New York after 15 years; the only times he feels out of place amount to people questioning his lack of footwear, him being friendly with the homeless, not sleeping in a bed, and his lack of "business acumen"…which is really just him having the most basic compassion about clean emissions and the price of pharmaceuticals. He doesn't seem to struggle to connect with anyone he really wants to, unless the other party has dubious interests (the Meachums, mainly) and are intentionally working against him or have the common sense not to invite total strangers into their lives after being semi-stalked by them (Colleen). Nothing about his situation feels very different from any other superhero, much less any other rich guy who returns home with powers/tech to be a hero.

Danny's clear PTSD that he ignored to focus on his training feels like something that could’ve been explored more to add dimension to his character. His fear of flying and near-freakout during turbulence (that’s how his parents died) was a great eample of this, but it was never explored beyond his fits. Along the lines of another trope—the dead parents—why is it necessary that Danny's folks be murdered? Batman’s parents’ murders made him vow not to let that happen to anyone else. Uncle Ben was killed to show Spider-man he could and should be doing more to help people with his powers. What does Danny get out of the fact that his parents were murdered? Wouldn't a random accident providing no enemy to take out his frustrations on be a bigger challenge for his survivor's guilt and his (completely inadequate) attempts to re-center himself? Furthermore, his childlike sensibility upon returning to New York would’ve played better had it been the result of his training to suppress his emotions, rather than just existing completely independent of his PTSD, as if one or the other state of his being didn’t exist at various times. The other problem is we don’t really ever see his training work. It appears the best he can manage is seizure-esque outbursts of shouting and hitting things when he gets overwhelmed. These fits seem like they’re trying to show us a character who could break but for the sake of his training, but they only come off as making it seem like he’s wasted the last 15 years. Along those same lines, he says he took a vow of celibacy, but only a few episodes later sleeps with Colleen. Challenging his resolve, vows, and training would’ve been one thing, but it doesn't feel like he trained for 15 years to be the best anything (despite showing up Colleen at nearly every turn), much less a mystical warrior who's supposed to be in total control of his emotions (he is absolutely not). The show could’ve mined that for an interesting character development—and it almost does, with Claire calling out how unhealthy suppressing his emotions is—but Danny’s answer is to go back to K’un-Lun for even more training at the end of the season (completely reversing his epiphany from the final battle). Ultimately, Danny doesn't feel like he has an arc at all because he's just flitting from one situation to the next as the plot demands. It’s as if they regressed him from where he should’ve been at the start for the sake of drama to watch him kinda-sorta regain all of his skill again, only to have him set off for even more training at the end. He has the nuts and bolts of a complex personality, but they aren’t assembled or explored at all.

The series’ best attributes are without a doubt Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson), Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), and Madame Gao (Wai Ching Ho). Carrie Ann Moss is another very strong Netflix-verse asset, though she doesn’t get as much screentime as the others. I'm glad Claire's here to talk sense into these heroes (she’s the wisest person on these Netfilx shows). I love her as a helper to heroes and I’m glad she’s adding self-defense to her skills (her insisting on going to collect Gao was great!). Claire's talks with Danny about dealing with his issues and letting his emotions out instead of running back to K'un-Lun were really solid. Dawson’s no-nonsense presence and sarcasm ground and humanize these shows so well I don’t know why they’re so afraid to go more fantastical. Galactus could show up and she’d still make it feel like we were tethered to the real world. And she got to say “Sweet Christmas,” which was great! Madame Gao was still the stoic and imposing Hand operative from Daredevil. I’ll always be glad to have her reappear. Since she’s apparently been around since the 17th century, it seems there are many more tales to tell about her!

Colleen was the best new addition to the Netflix-verse and I liked her a lot! Of the characters on the show, she’s the one I want to read more about in the comics. Her struggle with adhering to the Bushido code and keeping her students invested in training and off the streets was far more interesting than Danny stumbling his way through pretrial proceedings that ultimately went nowhere and his other issues. The things she was up against felt real—right down to just paying the rent—and Henwick brought a sense that Colleen really was tested by the forces against her, like with her comments about issues with control in the fight club. Danny’s approach to “dealing” with frustrations served to throw Colleen’s into a much more sympathetic light too. While his dating style—bringing a restaurant to her—felt just like any other billionaire, Danny being impressed with her sword and nunchuck skills—and her glee at showing him she was his equal for once—was cute. I didn’t need them to be together, but I was fine with their relationship. When she was poisoned, I was more concerned about Colleen dying than I was about anyone else at any point on the show, even though I figured she probably wouldn’t die. I absolutely did not see the reveal that she was proudly a member of The Hand coming! That was the one place the show truly shocked me—the one point where it took the more interesting option—and I loved it. I didn’t understand why a martial arts instructor would be training her students to hunt people on the streets, but then it all made sense. Colleen struggling to justify her Hand allegiance and having a good argument that certain segments do help people was good, solid stuff. Claire's retort that they should've chosen another name was perfect...I've had the same thought about SHIELD after they were outted as half-Hydra. It didn’t quite make sense that she wouldn’t know more about the Iron Fist if she were a member of The Hand, but I suppose she could’ve been playing dumb with Danny. I also thought her turn from true believer to betrayer was a little quick, but The Hand attacking Danny was a justifiable motivator and a strong reason to believe him. I’m glad we didn’t get anyone trying to convince her that Danny had struck first. I also felt sorry for her when she realized The Hand would kill her for her doubts, which would’ve been a great parallel to Danny's doubts in the Iron Fist's mission had his side been explored more. Although, him telling her that he knows what it's like to believe in something only to have it pulled away falls totally flat when he's the one who left K'un-Lun.

Iron Fist’s writing definitely has some holes (what psychiatric hospital would let their completely unknown new patient wander around unsupervised with a "tour guide" who was caught trying to convince him to kill himself???), but the biggest problem is that it’s nothing new or inventive. The dialogue isn’t the most original and the show’s pacing is way off. This has been a problem with previous Netflix shows too—I really wish they’d be a little less serialized instead of trying to be 13-hour movies with a single plot—but it was especially apparent here. Two episodes in, Danny was still mostly walking around going “I’m Danny Rand. No, really,” someone disbelieves him, and then he goes on to the next person to start it all over again. There’s also a recurring thing where everyone comments on Danny’s lack of shoes like it’s the funniest running gag ever (it’s not); as if that’s the only thing weird about this guy. There’s also a bit in episode two where Danny’s thought insane because he has a stolen passport with a different name on it, but Danny had no reason to believe his company and his best friends Joy and Ward Meachum (Jessica Stroup and Tom Pelphrey) are no longer friendly, so why didn’t he just call his company? Why all the subterfuge? The later reveal that he knows Jeri Hogarth (Carrie Ann Moss) and that she’s gung-ho about helping him confirms he could’ve just gotten her to bend the rules and let him in the country, making those early plot developments pointless. Even better, why not use his super-ninja skills to sneak in? Unnecessary speed-bumps like these slowed the plot down right off the bat and it never really recovers, thanks to wishy-washy writing around its lead character.

That the Netflix shows keep referring to the Avengers Chitauri invasion as "The Incident" and largely ignoring it has gotten annoying (at least Daredevil used it to regress Hell’s Kitchen and Luke Cage featured bootleg video of it as a plot point). I do not understand the desire to keep halfway pretending that they’re in some separate, mostly grounded universe; they are not. They don't need to talk about it as incessantly as SHIELD did in season 1, but coyly vague references draw more attention to the lack of Avengers than the simple fact that these heroes don't world-savers’ help does. On a show like this with magic, this is especially apparent. I’m not sure why Clarie wouldn’t think dragons might be real in this world. I mean, sure, just because one crazy thing is real doesn't mean they all are, but given everything that's happened to New York alone (not to mention the existence of Thor), a little less skepticism would be believable. Even more baffling, why doesn't Claire call Daredevil (or even refer to him by his superhero name)? He might be absolutely helpful in fighting the Hand! Just use an excuse that he’s out of town or something if they don’t want to bring Matt in.

This unwillingness to venture into a bigger universe extends to the opponents Danny faces. Madame Gao and The Hand are great villains, but The Hand aren't anything like what they were in Daredevil and don't come off as a threat here at all. They seem decidedly toned down and it feels like they could’ve been any generic mercenaries. Where are the badass, creepy, somewhat undead ninjas Daredevil fought? If you're going to start your show with Danny as a superhero (and for all intents and purposes, he was—this is 15 years into his training!), you have to give him opponents who are more threatening than random gangsters (Luke Cage had this issue too) and martial arts-trained street kids. If the street kids are supposed to undergo some kind of process to become the heartbeat-less assassins of Daredevil, where is that happening? And what happened to them after Danny busted out of their training compound? The Hand’s leader, Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez) was just an OK villain, which wasn’t enough on a season this long when he was supposed to be second only to Meachum in terms of villainy (according to the season’s structure, at least). He seemed to have no real plan beyond the continued existence of the Hand via Rand Corp’s assets, making him seem pretty weak. Lewis Tan's drunken guard had more character and charisma than 90% of the characters on this show and also provided the best fight of the series up to episode 8. If they aren’t going to go creepy, they at least need to go distinct. The karaoke-loving assassin from episode 6 felt a little cliché, but at least he and the other three Hand champions Danny faced had personalities and unique fighting styles. Across the board on Netflix series, I want more powered supervillains and far fewer gangsters and businessmen. I don’t know who Danny has in his Rogues Gallery, but he’s gotta have a few mystical enemies he could’ve fought here, if for no other reason than to vary the fights and Danny’s tactics therein. On that note, Danny is the third Defender whose power is super strength. Obviously superheroes are more than their powers, but I’d like to see more variation of them (a super-punch is not that impressive anymore).

Davos (Sacha Dhawan), Danny’s former best friend in K’un-Lun, was another good opponent, and I would’ve liked his arc expanded a lot. There was a lot that could’ve been mined from his well-crafted belief that Danny wasn’t the right choice for the Iron Fist, which never came off as petty jealousy to me. He seemed legitimately hurt that Danny abandoned his duties and sided with a member of the Hand. The one area where Danny’s seeming failure in most of his training worked perfectly was in Davos’ assessment of him; Danny being so unbalanced fueled and justified Davos’ hate quite effectively. I absolutely believe Davos should’ve been the primary antagonist, if not secondary only to The Hand. Imagine how much more complex the show would’ve been had Danny left to defeat The Hand, with Davos following him to stand up for (and represent K’un-Lun and its teachings) and bring him back from the start. Davos chasing Danny for leaving his duties would’ve completed the parallel to Colleen being chased by The Hand for doubting their mission too.

The season’s actual main antagonists, the Meachums, were not compelling to me at all. Danny’s attempts to save Ward and Joy from themselves seemed to fall rapidly to the wayside as the siblings took turns going morally black before bouncing back to gray, then back again, over the course of the season. I understood their desire to keep the company they’d built and didn’t really harbor them any ill will over it—again, Danny never seemed to truly want it—but I never really cared about who controlled it. Ward’s drug problem didn’t interest me at all, nor did Harold’s (David Wenham) attempts to get the company back from his children and The Hand. I didn’t see Ward killing Harold or Harold’s resurrection coming, but I suppose I should’ve, given Nobu’s repeated resurrections on Daredevil. I wasn’t a fan of Harold’s confused undead state and apparently he’ll start becoming a crazed murderer, so a member of the Daredevil cast has that to look forward to… Harold was at least a little interesting to me when it seemed like he really was on Danny’s side, but the reveal of his true evil intentions fell flat because nothing about him stood out in the first place. I didn’t guess that he was behind the Rands’ murders, but it also didn’t shock me. That Harold’s entire goal was to be running Rand (he’s immortal and that’s all he wants? Really?) was so small compared to everything else going on that he felt like a minor villain who should’ve been dealt with by mid-season if not sooner. By no means did he deserve to be the embodiment of Danny’s cave dragon, which felt entirely anticlimactic. I don’t think my lack of interest in the Meachums was the fault of any of these three actors; they were just stuck in a mediocre plot that carried on far longer than it should have.

Speaking of the fights, outside of Bakuto vs. Colleen and Davos vs. Danny (and the massive battle leading into them), none of them have any emotional component to them. Maybe that’s just because most of them involve thugs, but even Danny vs. Harold—the climactic battle of the season—left me cold and just waiting for it to end. If the show doesn’t get me invested in the conflicts between characters, the fights will feel empty. Even though Harold killed Danny’s parents, I wasn’t feeling it. The choreography to Danny’s fights wasn’t the most polished either, but this wasn’t Jones’ fault, as he apparently only had 15 minutes of training before each fight was filmed.

I wish they’d done what the other Netflix shows have done: showcase the hero’s city in the opening credits to make it as much a character as anything else. Here, the credits only showed a CGI Danny doing kung-fu. They should’ve shown off K’un-Lun and juxtaposed it with New York City. The score also felt repetitive.

I didn’t want this to be disappointing (why would anyone want anything they’re watching to be bad?), but unfortunately it was. There are kernels of a good, maybe even great, show here (Colleen, Claire, Gao, Davos), but Danny’s character arc, the villain aspects, and the rest of the show never coalesce around them. It almost always takes the least interesting option, so it comes off as bland and repetitive. If Danny’s character can be redeemed in Defenders, then cool, but it will take a great deal of boldness and precise direction/writing/acting choices to right this ship.

0 notes