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willbradleymedia · 1 year

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Representation of Gender & Race in Media & Film, Where is Equality?

It is no question that representation of gender in film and media has evolved significantly over the years, with women and non-binary individuals gaining greater visibility and more complex portrayals, but there is still a long way to go to achieve full equality and representation for all gender and race identities. How has media formed the idea of gender and race, through the male presentation in major films to the disregard of the female gender in films years ago, is the media advancing positively, negatively, or still in a position of complete inequality?

Media and film work within the past decade or so have presented an amazing opportunity for women and all genders and race to gain a space of equality and a larger platform to express themselves, beliefs, and most importantly, their message. Where are these examples prominent in the movie production business? How about the media as a whole? Which movies/films have helped move towards growing a factually proven background of the struggles of gender and race? These questions still flow throughout everyday life, but some cases have helped gain a better understanding of the progression of this goal to equality on a widespread scale. The movie Hidden Figures in my eyes is a perfect example of how the gender barrier in the film and media industry has been broken in our current day and age.

(Chart representing an analysis of the number of male-female led titles/actors in the global top 25 TV shows, representing a clear imbalance).

However, before discussing the importance of media expansion and platform opportunities for all genders and races, it is directly important to get a grasp on how some films and media caused a neglectful representation of gender and race before today's day and age, and how it influenced the change for better. There are unfortunately many older movies and media where gender and race representation are negatively presented, I bet you could think of some or even by a quick search online. However, one film that really caught my eye in a disgusted manner was “Gone with the Wind” from 1939. This classic film set during the Civil War and Reconstruction era of the United States has been significantly criticized for its portrayal of African Americans as inferior and subservient to white individuals. The film as well reinforces negative gender stereotypes, such as women feeling they need male protection, and are forced to be a servant-like person to the man they are with. The main problem was the timeframe, as America was still heavily racist and had specific gender societal requirements during this time, and segregation was still a waning factor in everyday American life. Movie influence is basically conjoined through the timeline in which it was lived, which brings me to the point that we are still not a perfect society in America, not even close, but there has been significant work towards equality for women and movements to bring racism and gender stereotypes to an end in the past few years. These works have been so widespread on media platforms and in film work, that the representation of gender and race has become much more welcoming and equal, such as the movie Hidden Figures.

(Photo of actor Elisabeth Olson in her hit television show Wandavision, presenting a stereotypical home wife in older television series).

The Movie Hidden Figures is a biographical drama film that depicts the story of three African American women who played a pivotal role in the United States’ space race against the Soviet Union. The film not only sheds light on the significant contributions of these women, but also acts on promoting gender equality and representation in this industry in multiple ways. At first glance, the movie features strong and intelligent female leaders who break the stereotype of women being only secondary characters or love interests, which has been seen in many older movies and television series in the early 2000s. By the portrayal of women as problem solvers, leaders, and pioneers in a male-dominated field, the movie challenges the notion that women are incapable of achieving great things. Not only is this depiction important for media expansion purposes, but also the historical basis the movie presents, as this was based off a true story. By giving a platform for this story to be shared, it expands the positive outlook and representation of women actors across the world. I specifically presented this movie as a core example considering how when I was younger, this was one of the first films that truly caught my eye, as the meaning has always stuck with me to this day. I don’t think I would have ever realized this untold story of the brilliant African American workers at NASA until this opportunity arose through the beautiful representation of the media and film production by Theodore Melfi.

Theodore Melfi, the director of the film, places great importance on the representation of race and gender in the movie. Melfi uses the film as a platform to address issues of racial and gender inequality that were prevalent during that era, while still giving actors and the vision of the film a positive outlook for women, specifically black women across the world. I thought it would be encouraging to see what he said specifically on the creation of the movie, and in an interview with Black Press USA, he states how... “Sometimes these stories get pushed to the side because they’re not sexy at the time or you need the right environment to bring it to light. We’re in the right environment now for sure. The country needs to see a story about women achieving greatness and black women achieving greatness in math and science.” - Theodore Melfi.

As well as movies and film changing for the better over the past few years, so has media. Over the past few years, there has been a gradual shift towards a more diverse and inclusive representation of gender and race in the media itself. This has clearly been driven in part by the changing societal attitudes and a growing awareness for how important representation truly is as we as a community attempt to move from the past to a better present and future, similarly to what I stated about film and movies. I would say the major way that media has given better opportunities for gender and race is the creation of more complex and nuanced characters. Female characters have been given more agency and are no longer solely defined by their relationships to male characters. This has been seen from a shift in television shows on media platforms, where before females were seen as more of a helpless character who stayed at home and worked towards appreciation from their male counterpart. It was heavily stereotypical in shows such as “I Love Lucy” in 1951 through 1957, “Leave It to Beaver” from 1957-1963, and many other mainstream shows. Once again, the idea of the timeline is definitively an influence for the cultural values in the moment and its influence. Women were often expected to prioritize their family and husband over their own interests and careers. Even though these shows may seem dated and sexist by modern standards, they provide a glimpse into the gender roles and expectations of past generations to better understand how advanced and positively different our current day influence is.

(Photo from an episode of "I Love Lucy").

To better understand the motives in creating some of these older television series, and the purpose behind their gender positionings, I journeyed across the internet to see if there were any discussions about some of these specific shows listed. In a breakdown of the show “I Love Lucy” by Cydney Delley of Word Press, she describes specific scenes in where the subversion of gender roles is reflected on certain decision making. Delley describes a scene in the hit show where two women, Lucy and Ethel, switch jobs with two men, Ricky, and Fred for a day to see the challenging circumstances women would have in a driven field of work. “This episode, while by no means truly feminist or women’s-lib, pushes back against gender roles in an interesting way, perhaps leaving us with the very 50s social tension of women being seen as capable of operating in either the public sphere or private sphere, but not both.” – Cydney Delley, Word Press. To wrap this specific discussion, the basis of the episode was to show that the main character Lucy, being a woman, was unable to keep a calm and collected notion while doing a “man’s job”, while the men were seen in a calm manner, even laughing at occasion to the similarity between work ethics. This clearly proves the point of the timeframe being subjective to the way in which certain genders are portrayed, in this case severely negatively.

As I wrap up this conversation and look at a conclusional basis, I think it is clearly important to step back and discuss this topic more and more on various platforms to get everyone’s mind thinking. Even though America and media/film production as a whole in our current time is not perfect and may not even be close to perfection for a while, this societal difference from even only 10 years ago is major in breaking the social obstacles in a positive manner. I think there is clear negativity in the way of portrayal of certain individuals, but It is severely important to note how quickly society is advancing to be more accepting of everyone, and to realize that gender and race representation in media is slowly changing for the better, and hopefully these barriers that were once built can fully crash down, leading to secure opportunities for all people no matter race, gender, or anything that once held back such driven people to reach their goals. Thank you for listening.

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(Interview with Hidden Figures director and producer Theodore Melfi).

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(Discussion video about the representation of Race, Gender, Class in the Media as a whole, by Stuart Hall's ideology and studies).

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thedaytheworldburned · 2 years

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‘Thursday’s Child Has Far To Go’ Lyric Analysis

Now, that is a longer title that I like.

Released with the Minisode 2 album, May 2022. The song is a unit song with Soobin, Beomgyu, and Taehyun. AKA, the people who don’t have a completely defined position in the storyline. It’s a very interesting song, because it seems to describe the storyline of the rest of the album, or, at least, to imply it. While the other songs add to the storyline (GBGB - the codependent relationship, Lonely Boy - the loss of love, Opening Sequence - the kdrama and movie aspects, etc), this one gives the basis for the album, and, with its position at the end of the album, leads on to the next TXT era.

It, in the same vein as the album itself, it obviously inspired by the poem/nursery rhyme ‘Monday’s Child,’ and leans heavily into the ‘weekdays’ motif.

The poem is supposed to tell the fortune of a child based on the day of their birth, and Thursday is the child with the most ambiguous meaning - the ‘far to go’ both means that they have a lot of potential and could become a great person, but also that they could fall far from that goal (and possibly even far enough that they become evil, *cough* Kai *cough*).

But it also has a reflective tone, which works well, as it is the last song of the album, and therefore leads into the next one.

I’m very interested and scared to see where it goes next.

Full lyric analysis below the line.

‘Thursday’s Child Has Far To Go.’

The fourth line here is also, ‘Go to keep the pace,’ and the last three lines are also, ‘above the tears with the moment that will be seen again, go make eye contact.’

Although the alternate translations make more sense, I think the ‘tune in’ in the original lines is good. They are literally ‘tuning in’ on TV to watch their own story, through songs like ‘Opening Sequence’.

The second line here is also, ‘I don’t think it’s Monday,’ and the fourth line is also, ‘7 days would be ruined.’

These two lines are also translated as, ‘cheer up by Saturday night, there’s one more day of Sunday.’

The first two lines of this verse are also, ‘Beyond the sorrow of breakup, I will be filled only with fluttering.’

‘I won’t cry again’ is also, ‘I will never cry again,’ which I think could be both determination and/or detachment.

The first two lines of this verse are also, ‘here and there, catches my eyes, trends that arise nowadays.’ Both ‘breakup’ and ‘glowup’ have hashtags in front of them, which just fits the concept of the song (breakup glowup), and TXT (youth and media), better.

Soobin’s first line is also, ‘put behind the long tears,’ and the last two line of the verse are also, ‘romance of being the child of Thursday, makes me smile again, feelin’ so good.’

The last three lines of this section are also translated, ‘my heart that was broken, feel refreshed, Thursday that I met again.’

The second line of this verse is also, ‘our life that is unexpected,’ and the fourth line is also, ‘splendid days that await.’

‘This is just the beginning’ here is also ‘it starts from now,’ and ‘somewhere distance and far away’ is also, ‘somewhere far and distant.’

Conclusions

I mean, it speaks for itself. It’s an interesting exploration of the nursery rhyme, and of the story of the album. Although the album has the overarching story of someone breaking up from a codependent and toxic relationship, each of the songs provides a different perspective on that same moment in life. This one is the reflective one - about grief and healing, then finding the freedom to ‘move on’.

#txt #tomorrow x together #txt theories #moa #lyric analysis #minisode #minisode 2 #thursday's child has far to go #minisode 2: thursday's child

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qqueenofhades · 3 years

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The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

#the green knight #the green knight meta #sir gawain and the green knight #medieval literature #medieval history #this meta is goddamn 5.2k words #and has its own reading list #i uh #said i had a lot of thoughts?

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hopefullystillatheatrestudent · 3 years

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i'm so excited about you taking asks again ahhhh okay so. if you'd absolutely had to choose. what would be your top 5 cockles moments, and why? thank you ily <3

here’s the thing: there are so many routes i could go down with this, because cockles moments come in all shapes and sizes and formats. these include moments from their panels, their bloopers, the footage we get when they don’t even know they’re being recorded, stories being passed down from photo ops & autographs(one of my personal favorite ways to get cockles, tbh, because they’re all insane), and social media(tweets to each other, instagram posts & comments, etc.).

SO! since many a list like this has already been made, and i want to stand out from the crowd, what i’m gonna do is definitively give the number one spot to each of these five categories.(i might even throw in honourable mentions because they’re so despicably in love that they warrant that. i really put my whole pussy into this, guys, i hope you’re happy.)

disclaimer: these are my own personal opinions. but that also means i’m right. so. enjoy.

number one: top cockles panel moment

so we’re starting off with a bang, because how do you even BEGIN to rank what atrocities jensen and misha commit at jibcon. every single one they’ve had is damning in it’s own right, for different reasons.

however, considering just how much unabashed fuckery they’ve given us to sift through, it’s a good thing i do have a personal favorite despite it all. it’s heartwarming, the sweetest thing i’ve ever seen, AND it’s jarringly cinematic - mainly because it has a whole ass arc to it that was years in the making. it might even be surprising to some people, but my favorite cockles panel moment, and what i consider the one that encompasses their entire gut-wrenching journey from 2008-2013 in the most sweepingly romantic gesture possible, is this one.

i want this burned into my retinas. i am not even joking. when i'm through with my explanation, let me convince you why this is thee most romantic cockles moment of all time.

first, some history: people call this the resume off, but many seem to forget the botched attempt at a resume off a year prior. and yes, you guessed it: it's during their break up. it's a juicy time period for a reason, guys. it came across as exceedingly one-sided and VERY awkward. let me refresh your memory as to just how bad it was, and just how hard jensen was trying and ultimately failing at winning misha over: the funniest part of the whole resume off in 2013??? every joke/bit had literally already been made/done. they were just going through the motions again, but the difference THIS time...is that misha reciprocated jensen's energy. it. is. fascinating. i want to get into it more detail in another post, and i'll link it here when i'm done, but the main takeaway, i think, and the main difference that showcases how much they've grown in a year, is that in jib 3, misha flat out refused to do an accent, and this time around, he indulges jensen for literal minutes. when i tell you they're crazy, they're crazy. i can't wait to actually dive into it later.

ANYWAY, the resume off culminates in this moment here. and, like, a million things happen in this gifset. actually, more like a million and one. the music starts playingneediremindyouthatthesongissingingintherain(h e l p), misha starts dancing, jensen 'perpetually fake grumpy' ackles lets misha think he's not going to join, misha sits down defeated, but no!!! that was jensen's plan all along(look at his stupid fucking smirk) and he offers his arm to his dance partner who immediately grins like a fool, jensen then leads misha into their kick step, they perfectly synchronise and let loose, and are then very clearly having the time of their lives, hanging off of each other with joy and ease. from their expressions alone i can tell that this moment is so. so. so. so! much more than what initially meets the eye. i mean-misha is fighting back the biggest smile i've ever seen. to me, it reads like jensen is offering something to misha, something that misha kind of gave up on expecting, and him offering his arm like that is like, a surprise to him in the best possible way(and it's so not platonic, let me just say that.) as soon as jensen did that, it ushered in a new era of cockles. this panel is jensen and misha's favourite for a reason, and i think this moment is the biggest clue as to why.

whew!!! ok. that took a lot out of me and that was only point one. moving on,

number two: top cockles blooper moment

cockles bloopers hold an extremely special place in my heart, because it shows just how fucking disastrous jensen and misha are. they are so goddamn infatuated with each other that they HOLD UP PRODUCTION ALL THE TIME TO FLIRT WITH EACH OTHER(???). let me repeat. let it sink in. jensen ackles; arguably one of the most professional actors on that show who puts everything he has into each scene, with mountains and mountains of notes to prove it: would rather hold up production to flirt with misha collins. this sounds fake. it's not. he does it. all. the. time. and here's the thing guys!!! i'm gonna let you in on a secret!!! misha loves it. he loveesssss it. on top of that-misha collins: overlooked because he's pranked and people assume he's unprofessional as well, but his only pranks are in retaliation/off-set, and he rarely if EVER causes problems if he can help it....lets himself get carried away when it comes to jensen making kissy faces at him!!! are you actually kidding me!!! i mean. misha. it's just a face. you've seen it a million times. i don't buy that it triggers something in you that strongly....you like it, and you like jensen's reaction. you can't fool me!!! lisa berry's face in that one gifset shows just how fed up the crew is with their gross, coupley boyfriend antics.

i could pull up so many examples. sooooooo many. but my favourite was sealed since the moment i saw it.

i actually already wrote an analysis on it but i can't find it :(((( which SUCKS because i really unpacked the whole thing. i'll try to summarise.

basically, a backstory is part of this too!!! jensen and misha both had a really really hard time with this scene(because it's explicitly romantic there i said it), they sat down for hours and poured over their scripts together, they were super super nervous going into filming, both of them, jensen especially, were super hard on themselves for their performances not being true to their characters but they both complimented the other's work(boyfriend moments fr). so, yeah. they weren't confident going into shooting. and how do they get themselves to feel better???? by cuddling each other, apparently.

a lot. a LOT. happens in this specific blooper. to the point that i saw it years before i knew about cockles and it raised all sorts of flags for me.

1) stop pulling my face towards your crotch(as a thinly veiled request that misha would, in fact, move jensen's face towards his crotch, considering it was jensen moving himself there in the first place. also, why so comfy down there guys???) 2) you're my baby daddy i know(in the most intimate voice i've ever heard please) 3) i know, i know, i love you too i didn't say i love you i know but you wanted to say it etc. misha's right, of course. that's what jensen meant.

it just reeks of comfort, familiarity and intimacy between the two, and it's a moment that is extremely sweet and silly at the same time. they're so <3

number three: top cockles found footage moment

WONDERFUL category. truly the culmination of the cockles experience. many people have said that shipping cockles doesn't work because 'they're just onstage you dummies!! they're playing it up for the audience!!!' here's the thing, love. i could not disagree with you more. once you climb your way up the cockles ladder, you soon learn that they are, in fact, playing their dynamic DOWN, not up. they really are just Like That™, and they could not care less about the paying audience, if we're being honest, considering how much time they take to giggle with each other and refuse to let the audience in on the joke. and i love them for it <3

anyway, my point is that this category is for all you naysayers out there, all you 'jensen and misha's relationship is just for show and is real life queerbaiting'(?????lordhelp???) oh yeah? ok, explain this.

he. he. he calls jensen sweetheart. literally enough said. there's nothing to really add here, except, misha and jared then immediately engage in damage control. jared's method is distraction and misha's is retconning('get out of the car, dude') this was what got me to buy into the cockles dumpster for GOOD good. you don't call your buddy sweetheart accidentally and sound so completely earnest while doing it! especially not when that buddy is jensen ackles!!! you think he would let any of his friends call him that? do you?

one more thing; if it was a slip of the tongue, little mouth thing or whatever, you think jared wouldn't have jumped on it immediately??? i can hear it now. 'did you just call him SWEETHEART???' yeah. that's what i thought. you know why he didn't? because it was too revealing.

number four: top cockles autograph moment

i mean, i think we all know what it's gonna be, and if you don't, well, do i have the piece de cockles resistance that is gonna send you over the edge.

if you haven't heard of this story by now, as a cockles, truther, i'm gonna go ahead and get you to read it, because there is no possible heterosexual explanation for any of it, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise.

spoiler alert: it's the story where phones weren't allowed in an auto session, jensen nuzzles himself in misha's hair, leans his full body weight onto him, holds his hand, etc. etc. i'm imploding just repeating this back, actually. also, just, the sheer amount of stories from photo ops where they tackle hug each other or slap each other's asses or sing romantic songs to each other or almost kiss is, frankly, a lot. if i could wish for anything, it would be to witness them in person.

and finally,

number five: top cockles social media moment

this one is super difficult, because there's obviously a lot to choose from. but you know what? full send, i'm going with this one:

i just. what to say about this. how often do misha and jensen watch sunsets together for it to qualify as ‘always’ ??? why are sunsets synonymous with their relationship??? that’s like??? a very romantic thing????? ‘this guy’??? the fact that it’s a CANDID??? i don’t know guys.

that could have been better but i am TIRED so. there you go rose ily

#cockles #cockles ask #liz answers #i really just. spend hours. writing about misha and his boyfriend.#why. why do i. do that #long post for ts

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sanstropfremir · 3 years

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Hey love, hope you're having a nice day

My mom strongly believes Taemin has a thing for using some sort of element to cover his head in most of his MVs. Obviously we're both too dumb to catch the symbolism (if any) so I thought why not ask someone who knows?

So what do you think? Is there any deep reason behind the head bags or is it just an aesthetic thing?

anon!!!! mwah!!! i'm having a better day because you sent this in!!!!

your mom is right, taemin absolutely has a thing for covering his head, specifically his face! you can see masks and/or veils (under the cut):

in the hit the stage performance of sayonara hitori

in the offsick concert teaser

in the nippon budokan performance of i’m crying

in the move mv here (there are several shots from this scene), and here

in the want mv here

there’s a quick shot of him pulling off a veil in criminal

and of course, advice. and again.

also some other images:

1. from the ngda act 1 promo photos

2. from the 2kids promo photos

3. from the move album scans

4. the cover of ngda act 2 messiah version

5. an actual bag over his head in the criminal mv

6. from the most recent short vcr in the ngda beyond live

7. from the sayonara hitori album scans

this is not an exhaustive list because i know i’ve missed some; i'm 80% sure there was a mask with the red outfit in the ngda act 1 scans but this is enough examples i think to show that it’s definitely deliberate. and i'm not even bringing up all the times he physically covers his face with a body part or it’s obscured through an effect, because then we gotta talk about the famous choreography, the idea choreography, the just me and you vcr, and countless promo photos and album scans from essentially every era in his entire solo career.

the backbone of the kpop industry in its current state is the idols' faces. human nature has proven time and time again that the easiest way to catch an audience is through a pretty face (by whatever the standards are at the time), and in an industry built on militant commercialism, of course the emphasis is going to be on those faces. you can see it in every bit of content. turning physical albums into mass collectibles, with multiple versions, giant photobooks, photocards. an idol’s face IS their uniform. when an idol doesn’t want to be seen, what's the first thing they do? cover their face. (and people still take pictures of them anyways). i’ve seen countless times on vlives and ig lives where an idol is wearing a mask and there will be a stream of “show us your face <3”’s until they do. their face is their brand. every decision a stylist, a publicist, a company makes is to optimize exactly how beautiful they can make their idols look, because that’s by and large what the fans want. obviously it's a product of the larger trend in unattainable beauty standards fueled by social media, but i'm not going to talk much about that, because it's a lot. if you’ve followed me for long enough (probably just for more than a few days tbh, since i talk about it constantly), you’ll have noticed that i'm a huge proponent of ‘ugly’ hair trends, and i'm a huge proponent of ugly styling in general. when idols have to be fashion models as well as inhuman performing machines, you’re setting them up to everything that plagues that industry as well, which means massive complexes about their faces and bodies, in the most mild of terms.

‘ugliness’ has freedom in it. part of the reason why i’ve gone extra insane for advice as a whole is because it IS ugly. taemin’s extensions ARE awful. his hands are blackened and dirty the whole mv, and so are portions of his body. he’s visibly flaunting his real tattoos*, which are still deeply stigmatized in the east. we see him get in a car crash. in arguably the most flattering/conventionally attractive outfit, he’s got heavy mascara tear tracks. the song isn’t particularly melodic, the choreography is childish and jerky, the lyrics directly call out the people that treat him like an object. and of course, the mask. all of these are cracks in the facade, confronting us, on purpose, with the crumbling of his perpetually pretty, perfect persona. he's hurt, he's angry, he's got his hands deep in the grime of living in the public eye that the public refuses to see, and now he's going to smear it all over himself until you DO see it. at the end of the mv his triumph is not that he washes himself clean, but that he paints overtop. gesso on an old canvas; a fresh start, but fundamentally informed by the things underneath.

taemin uses masks as a way to deface himself. both in the literal sense of removing his face from the equation but also in the synonomic sense of the destruction, the obliteration, the vandalization of himself. of his brand. known as sm’s pretty boy since he was 14, who is he if he doesn’t have his face?

as a general device the masks are an entreaty to address him on his own artistic merit. but they do often have specific meanings within their contexts. in the i’m crying performance it is to remove himself as an entity all together; he is anonymous now, an unseen narrator to the performers on stage.** in move and want it’s for emphasis on his body; proof that he can still ensnare you with his limbs alone. pulling off the veil/reversing it back on in criminal as a revealing/concealing of the two sides of himself on display in the mv. the literal suffocation of one of those sides with a plastic bag. the voice in idea says ‘you are my messiah,’ but the cover of the album denies confirmation of that identity.

there’s more to be dug into here, especially with the ngda act 2 photos but i’d have to go back through my catholic iconography notes again and this would be a lot longer than it already is. i’m also looking at this from a western perspective, there are undoubtedly double meanings specific to a korean context that i haven’t clocked. but that’s the reason i love his work so much! it stands up to a lot of rigorous analysis and there’s always going to be something that i don’t catch right away, something more to learn.

---

* we learned like yesterday that his hip tattoo is a peony, which he named as symbolizing freedom. peonies tend to have primarily positive meanings across east asian cultures, but in victorian floriography, they mean shame and sometimes anger.

** this style of performance is very common in cirque du soleil shows, especially the older ones from the early 2000s. it's pretty common to have a ballad or operatic singer featured as a ‘narrator’ to a specific story section of routine. i’m sure this is probably frequent in other places as well, but i’m naming cirque specifically because that’s where i’ve seen it the most, and also because there is an actual circus performer on stage during this. plus there’s a guy in a pierrot costume, who is probably the most famous clown***. (although the costume is technically wrong because pierrot is supposed to be unmasked. (ironic plays loudly in the distance))

*** clown of the technical variety and not clown of the honk honk birthday variety.

#taemin #im not just saying i like ugly hair because i have a neon orange mullet with an undercut #but also i do have a neon orange mullet with an undercut so that should give you a pretty good indication of my opinions #frankly im just for ugly clothes in general because im tired of looking at the same types of faces/outfits/whatever #thats been propagated by instagram and tiktok #also by celebrity culture and beauty standards in general #that being said none of what taemin is doing is actually ugly ugly #he definitely has waaaaay too much pride to deface himself physically that far and i doubt sm would ever allow it #this is just looking at his public persona and how it interacts with his art #his solo career in particular i think you would be hard pressed to find anything of shinee's that covers their faces #the odd concept photos are the only ones i can think of that come close #i think youd be hard pressed to find any group that willingly has covered or distorted faces in their main promotional material #without the purpose of like 'oh who is this going to be~~~' surprise type reveals #ok tags and the post are very long now i will stop #anon please give your mom a kiss for me i think it sweet you talk about kpop with her!!!#taemin meta #kpop analysis #text #anonymous #fun additional fact about me which is very indicative of my current path in life #i used to make my parents tape cbc broadcasts of cirque shows #those tapes and art attack were the only tv i watched with any consistency until i was like #12 #i didnt watch a single disney movie until i was like 14 maybe?#did watching only art attack and cirque irreparably fuck me up as a child? yea probably #but at least i dont have a sentimental relationship to the disney corporation so i won in the long run #kpop questions #group analysis

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flufffysocks · 3 years

Text

let's talk about andi mack's worldbuilding

sorry this took forever to make! i've been pretty busy with school stuff and i kind of lost my inspiration for a bit, but i ultimately really enjoyed writing it! i wish i could've included more pics (tumblr has a max of 10 per post), and it kinda turned from less of a mini analysis to more of an extremely long rant... but i hope it's still a fun read!

i've been rewatching the show over the past few weeks (thanks again to @disneymack for the link!), and i’ve been noticing a lot that i never did the first time around. this is really the first time i’ve watched the show from start to finish since it aired, and it honestly feels so different this time - probably a combination of the fact that i’m not as focused on plot and can appreciate the show as a whole, and also that the fandom is much, much smaller now, so there’s a lot less noise. so the way i’m consuming this show feels super different than it did the first time, but the show itself doesn’t - it’s just as warm and comforting to me as it was the first time around, if not more so.

i think a lot of that can be attributed to andi mack’s “worldbuilding”. i’m not quite sure that this is the right word in this context, to be honest, because i mostly see it used in reference to fantasy and sci-fi universes, but it just sort of feels right to me for andi mack, because you can really tell how much love and care went into constructing this universe. for clarity, worldbuilding is “the process of creating an imaginary world” in its simplest sense. there’s two main types: hard worldbuilding, which involves inventing entire universes, languages, people, cultures, places, foods, etc. from scratch (think “lord of the rings” or “dune”), and soft worldbuilding, in which the creators don’t explicitly state or explain much about the fictional universe, but rather let it’s nature reveal itself as the story progresses (think studio ghibli films). andi mack to me falls in the soft worldbuilding category. even though it takes place in a realistic fiction universe, there’s a lot of aspects to it that are inexplicably novel in really subtle ways.

so watching the show now, i’ve noticed that the worldbuilding comes primarily from two things - setting and props, and oftentimes the both of them in tandem (because a big part of setting in filmmaking does depend on the props placed in it!).

one of the most obvious examples is the spoon. it really is a sort of quintessential, tropic setting in that it's the main gang's "spot", which automatically gives it a warm and homey feel to it. and its set design only amplifies this:

the choice to make it a very traditional 50s-style diner creates a very nostalgic, retro feel to it, which is something that's really consistent throughout the show, as you'll see. from the round stools at the bar, to the booths, to the staff uniforms, this is very obvious. the thing that i found especially interesting about it though is the choice of color. the typical 50s diner is outfitted with metallic surfaces and red accented furnishings, but the spoon is very distinctly not this.

instead, it's dressed in vibrant teal and orange, giving it a very fresh and modern take on a classic look. so it still maintains that feeling of being funky and retro, but that doesn't retract from the fact that the show is set distinctly in modern times.

of course, this could just be a one-off quirky set piece, but this idea of modernizing and novelizing "retro" things is a really common motif throughout the show. take red rooster records. i mean, it's a record shop - need i say more? it's obviously a very prominent store in shadyside, at least for the main characters, but there's no apparent reason why it is (until season 2 when bowie starts working there, and jonah starts performing there). a lot of the time, though, it functions solely as a record shop. vinyl obviously isn't the most practical or convenient way of listening to music, but it's had its resurgence in pop culture even in the real world, mostly due to its aesthetic value, so it's safe to say that it serves the same purpose in the andi mack universe.

the fringe seems to be nostalgic of a different era, specifically the Y2K/early 2000s period (because it's meant to be bex's territory and symbolic of who she used to be, and its later transformation into cloud 10 is representative of her character arc, but that's beside the point). to be honest, exactly what this store was supposed to be always confused me. it was kind of a combination party store/clothing store/makeup store/beauty parlor? i think that's sort of the point of it though, it's supposed to feel very grunge-y and chaotic (within the confines of a relatively mellow-toned show, of course), and it's supposed to act as a sort of treasure chest of little curios that both make the place interesting and allow the characters to interact with it.

and, of course, there's andi shack. this is really the cherry on top of all of andi mack's sets, just because it's so distinctly andi. it serves such amazing narrative purpose for her (ex. the storyline where cece and ham were going to move - i really loved this because it highlights its place in the andi mack universe so well, and i'm a sucker for the paper cranes shot + i'm still salty that sadie's cranes didn't make it into the finale) and it's the perfect reflection of andi's character development because of how dynamic it is (the crafts and art supplies can get moved around or switched out, and there's always new creations visible).

going back to the nostalgia motif though, the "shack" aspect of it always struck me as very treehouse-like. personally, whenever i think of treehouses, there's this very golden sheen of childhood about it, if that makes sense. i've always seen treehouses in media as a sort of shelter for characters' youthful innocence and idealistic memories. for example, the episode "up a tree" from good luck charlie, the episode "treehouse" from modern family, and "to all the boys 2" all use a treehouse setting as a device to explore the character's desire to hold onto their perfect image of their childhood (side note: this exact theme is actually explored in andi mack in the episode "perfect day 2.0"!). andi shack is no exception to this, but it harnesses this childhood idealism in the same way that it captures the nostalgia of the 50s in the spoon, or the early 2000s in the fringe. it's not some image of a distant past being reflected through that setting; it's very present, and very alive, because it reflects andi as she is in the given moment.

some honorable mentions of more one-off settings include the ferris wheel (from "the snorpion"), the alley art gallery (from "a walker to remember"), SAVA, the color factory (from "it's a dilemna"), and my personal favorite, the cake shop (from "that syncing feeling").

[every time i watch this episode i want to eat those cakes so bad]

these settings have less of a distinctly nostalgic feel (especially the color factory, which is a very late 2010s, instagram era setting), but they all definitely have an aura of perfection about them. andi mack is all about bright, colorful visuals, and these settings really play to that, making the andi mack universe seem really fun and inviting, and frankly very instagrammable (literally so, when it comes to the color factory!).

props, on the other hand, are probably a much less obvious tool of worldbuilding. they definitely take up less space in the frame and are generally not as noticeable (i'm sure i'll have missed a bunch that will be great examples, but i'm kind of coming up with all of this off the top of my head), but they really tie everything together.

for example, bex's box, bex's polaroid, and the old tv at the mack apartment (the tv is usually only visible in the periphery of some shots, so you might not catch it at first glance) all complement that very retro aesthetic established through the settings (especially the polaroid and the tv, because there's really no good reason that the characters would otherwise be using these).

besides this, andi's artistic nature provides the perfect excuse for plenty of colorful, crafty props to amplify the visuals and the tone. obviously, as i discussed before, andi shack is the best example of this because it's filled with interesting props. but you also see bits of andi's (and other people's) crafts popping up throughout the show (ex. the tape on the fridge in the mack apartment, andi's and libby's headbands in "the new girls", walker's shoes, andi's phone case, and of course, the bracelet). not only does doing this really solidify this talent as an essential tenet of andi's character, but it also just makes the entirety of shadyside feel like an extension of andi shack. the whole town is a canvas for her crafts (or art, depending on how you want to look at it. i say it's both), and it immensely adds to shadyside's idealism. because who wouldn't want to live in a world made of andi mack's creations?

and, while it's not exactly a prop, the characters' wardrobe is undoubtedly a major influence on the show's worldbuilding. true to it's nature as a disney channel show, all of the characters are always dressed in exceptionally curated outfits of whatever the current trends are, making the show that much more visually appealing. i won't elaborate too much on this, because i could honestly write a whole other analysis on andi mack's fashion (my favorites are andi's and bex's outfits! and kudos to the costume designer(s) for creating such wonderful and in-character wardrobes!). but, i think it's a really really important aspect of how the show's universe is perceived, so it had to be touched upon.

[^ some of my favorite outfits from the show! i am so obsessed with andi's jacket in the finale, and i aspire to be at bex's level of being a leather jacket bisexual]

and lastly, phones. this is a bit of an interesting case (pun intended), because the way they're used fluctuates a bit throughout the show, but i definitely noticed that at least in the first season terri minsky tried to avoid using them altogether. these efforts at distancing from modern tech really grounds the show in it's idealist, nostalgia-heavy roots, so even when the characters start using their phones more later in the show, they don't alter the viewer's impression of the andi mack universe very much.

so, what does all of this have to do with worldbuilding? in andi mack's case, because it's set in a realistic universe and not a fantasy one, a lot of what sets it apart from the real world comes down to tone. because, as much as this world is based on our own, it really does feel separate from it, like an alternate reality that's just slightly more perfect than ours, which makes all the difference. it's the idealism in color and composition in andi mack's settings that makes it so unmistakably andi mack. even the weather is always sunny and perfect (which is incredibly ironic because the town is called shadyside - yes, i am very proud of that observation).

the andi mack universe resides somewhere in this perfect medium that makes it feel like a small town in the middle of nowhere (almost like hill valley in 1955 from "back to the future"), but at the same time like an enclave within a big city (because of its proximity to so many modern, unique, and honestly very classy looking establishments). it is, essentially, an unattainable dream land that tricks you into believing it is attainable because it's just real enough.

all this to say, andi mack does an amazing job of creating of polished, perfect world for its characters. this is pretty common among disney channel and nickelodeon shows, but because most other shows tend to be filmed in a studio with three-wall sets, andi mack is really set apart from them in that it automatically feels more real and tangible. it has its quintessential recurring locations, but it has far more of them (most disney/nick shows usually only have 3-4 recurring settings), and it has a lot more one-off locations. it's also a lot more considerate when it comes to its props, so rather than the show just looking garish and aggressively trendy, it has a distinctive style that's actually appropriate to the characters and the story. overall this creates the effect of expanding the universe, making shadyside feel like it really is a part of a wider world, rather than an artificial bubble. it's idealism is, first and foremost, grounded in reality, and that provides a basis for its brilliant, creative, and relatable storytelling.

tl;dr: andi mack's sets and props give it a very retro and nostalgic tone which makes its whole universe seem super perfect and i want to live there so bad!!

#andi mack #buffy driscoll #cyrus goodman #jonah beck #tj kippen #tyrus #ambi #bex mack #analysis #film analysis #disney channel

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gretchensinister · 3 years

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Little Souls and Careless Gods: An Exploration of Worldbuilding in Toy Story

Sid did nothing wrong.

Or, let me clarify. The things Sid did wrong were: taking his sister’s toys and modifying them without her permission. That’s it.

Hi, my name is gretchensinister and I have a lot of thoughts about the worldbuilding in Toy Story.

I should admit at this point that I haven’t seen Toy Story 4, only talked about it with someone who has, so if some of my questions are answered by that movie or if it torpedoes some of my speculations, that’s just—that’s just an imperfection of this essay.

I barely know where to begin, but, I started with Sid, so I’ll keep going with Sid. Sid is a kid. Sid is a jerk to his younger sister, but she’s freely yelling across the house tattling on him, so it doesn’t seem like she’s suffering irreparable damage from this. Other things Sid does: wins a squeaky toy for his dog in a claw machine game, blows up toys with fireworks, takes toys apart and joins them to other toys to make new toys. Burns a toy with a magnifying glass.

None of these things is an immoral action, for a person who, through all lived experience (until the toy attack) understands that toys are objects. It’s not bad to give your dog an object to chew on. It’s not bad (morally) to blow up an object with a firework. It’s not bad to take objects (that are yours) and make them into new, different objects. It’s not bad to burn an object with a magnifying glass. From the toys’ perspective, Sid is a sadistic mad scientist type, but from everything he could possibly know, his “torture” of Woody is messing around with an object! His object! That he got from a claw machine! The pretend torture as a choice of play is worth questioning, but it’s not so uncommon as a media trope that an average kid would never have seen anything like that in an action-adventure context. And it doesn’t predict how Sid will treat actual living beings!

(As an aside, I’m firmly of the belief that if you own an object, you should feel free to do whatever you want with it. Set it on fire, take it apart to see how it works, use it as raw materials in a craft project, etc. And yeah I would make exceptions to this rule for like, privately owned culturally significant art or scientifically significant artifacts…but if they’re that significant…they shouldn’t be privately owned.)

So yeah. Sid gets traumatized because he treats objects like objects, and the objects don’t like that. Because they’re actually alive and have now promised to constantly surveil him.

And let’s be clear: Andy doesn’t know toys are alive, either. He never does. He just has a different play style than Sid, and more of an interest in keeping his toys intact. Andy has no empathy with Woody and Buzz, because he is not aware that they are beings that he could empathize with.

All right. Beyond Sid, what I really want to talk about is the nature of a toy’s mind/soul in the Toy Story universe. I will call this the toy’s animus. Much like with the soul and mind of a human being, the animus raises several questions. How is the animus created? Where does the animus reside? Is the animus a tabula rasa, or does it possess innate knowledge? Where does this innate knowledge come from, if so? Is the animus mortal or immortal?

The Toy Story universe offers various pieces of evidence to answer these questions, and they are all extremely worrying if toys and humans are both morally significant beings, though humans do not know this about toys.

Is a toy mortal or immortal?

In the Toy Story movies it is clear that toys believe they can die. Sufficient destruction of the body would cause a toy’s death. Sid’s plan to blow up Buzz Lightyear with a firework threatens his life. In Toy Story 3, the toys in the trash incinerator clearly believe that burning/melting will kill them. But, short of catastrophic destruction of the body, toys are immortal. Jessie suffers, but does not die, from withdrawal of her owner’s love. Stinky Pete was never played with by a child, and he’s alive as any other toy. Additionally, human-mimicking toys are not killed even when damaged in ways that would kill a human, though this does affect their ability to communicate. In the tea party scene in Toy Story, the headless dolls wave when they are referred to. (This raises more questions—how does a headless doll experience the world? They can still hear, but how? Also, why doesn’t the headless teddy bear move? Perhaps they simply don’t want to get involved in whatever’s going on with Woody and Buzz.)

I think, according to what we see in the movies, the animus is divisible, and each part of the divided animus contains only a portion of the cognitive ability of the whole. Moreover, the animus is not centered in the head, but rather dispersed throughout the body. I would further argue that splitting the body/splitting the animus, is traumatic, even when reversible. Consider that Buzz’s mental breakdown coincides with the detachment of his arm.

What does this mean for Sid’s creations? Well, it would explain why they don’t talk. The baby-doll head with the spiderlike erector-set body (aside: is this a reference to The Thing (1982)?) really has no reason to be mute, if a toy simply must have a mouth to speak. Its form is unconventional, but, I would say, still “complete.” But if the head only carries an incomplete animus, and the erector set parts carry no animus of their own (an assumption which will be questioned later) then the whole toy would not have enough animus for verbal communication.

Janie the doll and the pterodactyl, with their switched heads, suffer significant disruption of their animi. Would their fractured animi eventually merge to form a new animus for each new body, with a different personality than Janie or pterodactyl? What part of the “Barbie” personality lingers in the animus of the toy crane with Barbie legs?

There is an exception to the concept of the fractured animus, however, and that is Mr. Potato Head. Mr. Potato Head exists in several parts to begin with, and mere separation does not fracture the animus. Curiously, though, some parts of Mr. Potato Head do not appear to contain any part of his animus, such as his plastic potato body. He retains all of his personality and ability to communicate when he has to put his features on a tortilla (?—don’t remember this part well) even though he is from an era of Mr. Potato Heads where his features are only meant to be put in the plastic potato body, not random foodstuffs. (Another question here: what would happen if an even amount of Mrs. Potato Head and Mr. Potato Head features were put on one plastic potato body? Do both animi retain coherence?) It is impossible not to wonder how far apart the features of Mr. Potato Head could be spread and the animus remain whole. At least as far apart as different buildings, as shown in Toy Story 3, but how much farther?

Creation of the animus and innate knowledge.

We are now about to embark on the specific topic that fills my thoughts now when I think about the Toy Story universe. I believe I will first fix myself a vodka cranberry (note: not just vodka and cranberry juice. To make it properly you must also add a splash each of orange juice and lime juice) and read a synopsis of Toy Story 4. Forky’s creation is a deep source of trouble here, and I must fortify myself to face it.

Where do I even begin? Okay. Bonnie, a kindergartner, creates Forky from items salvaged from the trash and names him. He comes to life after being named. According to the synopsis Forky then suffers an existential crisis because he believes he his trash and not a toy. So in this case, the animus appears to arrive after naming, and the animus is not a tabula rasa. The history of the materials appears to have some effect on the animus? (What this might mean for Rex or the plastic army men is especially concerning here.) It doesn’t make sense for Bonnie to think of Forky as trash, so this conviction has entered Forky’s animus from somewhere other than his creator. Also Bonnie has created sentient life without being aware of doing so, probably before being able to write a full sentence.

That’s troubling enough, because, to the eyes of adults or even older children, Forky is garbage. I project Forky’s lifespan of play to be that of months. And he won’t get passed onto other children. Depending on how Bonnie’s community disposes of trash, he may linger with an intact animus, at a landfill, for longer than Bonnie’s own life. It boggles the mind. (And invites hoarding in the empathetic.) However, despite all this, I would be cool with it if this was the only way toys became animate: being owned/named/played with by a child. That could be a complete worldbuilding conceit.

But that’s NOT how animi are generally formed in the Toy Story universe. Let’s back up to Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear has a personality and memories of his history as a space ranger right out of his box. And as we see in Toy Story 2, every Buzz Lightyear comes with that same initial personality. A commercial in Toy Story shows aisles upon aisles of Buzz Lightyears. Something has enabled the creation of thousands, if not millions, of identical animi. There is no direction this can go that isn’t kind of batshit.

Buzz Lightyear and the story that forms his memories were designed and created by adults. It was someone’s (and probably a team’s) job to design a toy that would be popular for a specific demographic, with (if I remember correctly) a cartoon that elaborates on the story and can basically serve as a long-running commercial for the toy. There were probably team meetings, and focus groups, and brand analysis to come up with the name “Buzz Lightyear.” And in such an endeavor, while I would like to imagine that there were some truly creative people involved who cared about the design and story, the people involved would not be the ones playing with the toys as toys want to be played with. And this is where every Buzz Lightyear animus comes from? But how? A manager or director approves the name and then…what? Is there a wellspring of animus that forms? Is it tied to the prototype? The factory workers in Taiwan don’t care about Buzz Lightyear the way Bonnie cares about Forky, and yet their actions in completing Buzz Lightyears call the animi to the plastic bodies. (And the animi are there, without a child’s touch. Stinky Pete was aware in his unopened box. Other toys opened a new Buzz Lightyear and got a living Buzz Lightyear.) And even leaving aside how the animi get into the Buzz Lightyears, the fact is that with millions of Buzz Lightyears out there, we have to conclude that the process that created his animus/animi is orders of magnitude more powerful than what Bonnie did to make Forky. Even assuming some personal care held by Buzz’s designers towards their design, it gets weird. The imaginations of adult toy designers are that much more powerful than a little girl creating and naming her own toy? NOT the way I would expect such a story-world to be set up, but the evidence is there.

And what if the designers of Buzz Lightyear weren’t particularly passionate? What if their boss just said “space is popular now, make me a space toy” and that’s the only reason why they did? That could very well be the case for a different type of toy in the series: the claw machine aliens. Those toys were not designed as a soulful passion project. I’m trying to write this to not be mean to designers who work in not-so-great places, but seriously. We have all seen generic toys in claw machine games before. They were not made to be immortally loved. (And yet! This is what the animus of a toy inherently desires!) Now, the claw machine aliens do seem to have much less backstory than Buzz Lightyear, and have personalities (or maybe just personality)/culture based on the nature of the claw machine. That makes sense, since they wouldn’t have been given a backstory with creation. The point is, though, that they still have animi. In the process of creating these cheap, cheap toys, by the dozens and hundreds and thousands, somehow their bodies were invested with full, identical animi. Adult, corporate creation somehow gives more life to toys than individual, child-led creation.

There are more questions to ask. If adults still have the power (and MASSIVELY MORE power) to invest toys with animi that they also possessed as children, then what can be invested with an animus? What are the limits of toy-ness in the Toy Story universe? Is it the name? I don’t think it’s the face, because there’s Woody merchandise in Toy Story 2 with Woody’s face on it that doesn’t talk. And I think that some faceless toys are shown to move independently/have an animus (possibly including things like LEGO—are the bricks a hivemind? Do the minifigs live inside sentient structures? Can they communicate with these structures? Also, if so, the erector set legs on Sid’s spider baby toy should have added to its total animus. But that’s not the corporate intent, so they’re still voiceless.). Christine (1983) could fit into this universe if the name is of primary importance (movie backstory for Christine, not book). But this would also mean that literally every boat and ship was sentient, but secretly so.*

If the name isn’t the important thing, is it the intent that the object be played with as a toy? In this case, that would mean that Bo Peep’s animus was not mass-produced, as she was originally part of a lamp if I remember correctly. Child-created animi would therefore be more common among non-toy objects than manufactured toys. I also want to bring The Brave Little Toaster (1987) up at this point. In this movie a group of appliances behave similarly to Toy Story toys in some ways, including being played with by their owner and then missing his attention to a high degree when he goes to college. However in this film all appliances and cars have animi, and I personally do not want my vacuum cleaner to feel any kind of way about me, or ever think I have played with it, because I hate vacuuming and would neglect it to death if feasible. (That being said…roombas in the Toy Story universe can hardly avoid being invested with animi, I imagine, no matter the details of the worldbuilding structure.) I bring this up, though, because Wikipedia notes that the original members of Pixar worked on The Brave Little Toaster. Toy Story was released in 1995 and was Pixar’s first feature length film. There is a connection, is what I am trying to say.

I think I have to go with: intent of the object to be a toy and/or being played with as a toy invests a toy with an animus. If it was the naming, then many, many public statues would be as alive as Woody and Buzz, and the people of Denver I’m sure have enough to worry about without Blucifer (Jiménez, 2008) galloping around. Bizarre to say that the least troubling option places mass production on a higher level of investing power than a child’s imagination. And I mean what I say about the mass produced animi being somehow more powerful than child-created animi.

Let’s go back to Sid’s creations. What is wrong with them? Why aren’t they able to communicate like Forky? Possibility 1: Sid just doesn’t have the creative power that Bonnie does. I don’t like this because, as I said at the beginning, Sid is not doing anything wrong by making these chimera toys. He’s treating objects as objects, and the difference between Sid’s chimera toys and Forky is that Forky’s component parts were not originally part of mass-produced toys. So, (from a worldbuilding/Watsonian perspective), I have to go with possibility 2, which goes like this: mass-produced toys are imbued with animi because they are toys. Sid’s chimera toys suffer from their animi being fractured when he alters them. But these fractured, mass-produced animi retain enough coherence and power that Sid, a child, cannot replace the fractured animus with whatever he imagines for his new creations. He’s an imaginative kid! But the corporate animus cannot be expelled. The factory animus is the underlying animus and cannot be removed once the toy is a toy. It can develop with memory and experience, but it will always be the toy making corporation that brought the spark of life, not the child that actually plays with the toy.

And this actually corresponds to Sid’s toys’ decision to rebel and help Woody and Buzz. Their animi are more loyal to the corporate intent that first created them. Sid made them into something new, presumably plays with them, and yet they are not Sid’s. They are meant to be read as broken and tortured (Sid has changed them from their factory-created wholeness), not as new beings. A factory-created, owned object, is meant to be held with the same level of care and maintenance of coherence as a living being in the Toy Story universe. What a child imagines about their own toys has less creative power than a distant designer who’s been told to come up with something appealing to put in a claw machine. Children only have animating power for their toys when they make them out of raw materials.

On the one hand, it’s tempting to say that of course the toys aren’t Sid’s, they’re their own people—isn’t that what having an animus means? But Woody, for example, find it very important that he’s Andy’s toy—a possession—“a child’s plaything.” Andy writes his name on him and this is very important to Woody, enough a part of his identity that when Andy’s name is painted over by the restorer in Toy Story 2 the scene reads as an erasure of something important to him, not as a restoration of his autonomy. Time and again we see that toys want to be owned by children.

This is another place where things get weird. First, I raise the question: What do toys need to keep animus and body together? Not much—only a certain baseline of bodily coherency. They don’t need to take in anything from their environment. More interesting, though, is that they don’t need anything from the children they bond to. Shelved, boxed, and forgotten toys suffer, but they don’t die from these states. No toy will ever find a toy’s corpse the way a human could find a human corpse—whole in every way except for the absence of the animating spirit.

So: toys as entities need little. The next question is then, what do toys want? Toys want to be owned and played with by a child (I say child and not children, because the communal state of the daycare in Toy Story 3 is clearly not desirable to the toys). Woody relishes his place as favorite and most played with toy at the beginning of Toy Story. In Toy Story 2 Jessie grieves when her child outgrows her. Stinky Pete was ignored by children for years, causing him to develop the abnormal belief that it would be better for the Woody’s Roundup toys to be preserved in a museum.

(At this point, I spot another thread to follow. It seems that for a toy, the most important relationship in their existence is meant to be toy + owner. In Toy Story Woody is very invested in making Buzz understand that Buzz is a toy and not a space ranger—Buzz is supposed to stay with Andy. In Toy Story 2 the consequences of not being owned by a child are grief and violence. But at the end Woody tells Buzz he’s not worried about Andy outgrowing him, since they’ll always have each other. Now, Toy Story 3 builds up Buzz/Jessie and in Toy Story 4 Bo Peep returns and Woody leaves Buzz and the other group of Andy’s toys for a life with her, but Woody also leaves the toy + owner life to be with Bo. Toys aren’t made to have an independent existence, yet this is how they end up, also acting as matchmakers to help lost toys find new owners and enter into new toy + owner relationships? THERE IS A WHOLE OTHER ESSAY HERE.)

To stay within just one rabbit hole here, however, I must focus on this: Toys want to be owned and played with by a child. They bond with child owners who do not deliberately alter their bodies (I add this because again, Sid’s toys do not appear to be bonded with him). But within this framework, there must be essential pain within a toy’s existence. Toys are immortal unless destroyed. Toys will experience actual play with a child for, let’s say, ten years, maximum, and that’s if the toy is given to the child when the child is very young and the toy is more classic/versatile than most. That’s way shorter than the best human friendships and familial relationships, and at least human beings can often reasonably hope to have lifespans that are of comparable lengths. Oh yeah, and among human beings people are usually AWARE of the relationship that’s taking place. So toys want to form deep bonds with their children and want to have these relationships last. But the relationships can’t last. I’ll gladly state that play, in some form, is necessary for humans to thrive throughout their lives, but the kind of play that the toys in Toy Story find ideal is a childhood phase of play that that most people naturally outgrow. And even if a human did engage in play ideal for toys throughout their entire life, toys are immortal unless destroyed. All toys will lose their owners, and usually after a pretty short handful of years.

The aftermath of the owner + toy relationship is always painful for the toy. What are the options? To remain owned, but not played with: perhaps the “best” option, but it still leaves the toy with only a memory of a full life. Is a shelf life really a life? This is what was facing Woody, I believe, if Andy had taken him with him to college. Another option: to be outgrown and forgotten. This is what happens to Jessie, and it is a deeply, deeply painful experience for her. She develops claustrophobia from being stored in a box. To be donated or sold at a garage sale: also a source of trauma and panic for the toys, but still better than the worst fate, to be thrown out. But toys that have been separated from their previous owners are so often grieving and/or bitter in the Toy Story series.

This is troubling, to say the least, but it also loops back to questions about the animus and memory. Toys are not tabula rasa. Buzz has a strong personality and memory set from his unboxing. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head do not need to court each other. Tour Guide Barbie will act as a tour guide in the absence of children. But with time, and accumulation of true memories as a toy, the toys will develop their own personalities, even if the animus starting point can often remain a strong influence. In Toy Story 3, however, we learn that certain toys, such as Buzz Lightyear, can be returned to the original animus state through a factory reset. I hardly know what to do with this. It wasn’t a permanent reset; Buzz’s memories and the personality he’s developed do come back. (But now he also has access to a “Spanish mode” that is…sexier (can such a word apply?) to Jessie than his English mode. Also other toys can put him into his mode against his will. There are so many worms in this can. Sexualization of Latinx people, can a toy expect bodily autonomy from other toys, etc.?) But not every toy has a reset button. Woody doesn’t. Slinky Dog, Rex, Mr. Potato Head, etc. don’t. Does the threat of a reset only affect toys with bodily components that could be considered brain analogues, i.e., microchips? But the animus is not the “brain” and neither does the “brain” store memories/personality. I really, really don’t know what to do with this, except it seems once again to assert the ultimate strength of the adult/corporate-created animus.

The point is, toys can lose their memories, but when we see that in the movies, it leads the toy to go back to their earliest state.

Now: a mystery. In Toy Story, Woody has developed enough memory and personality that he is well aware of being a toy and is involved with the life of Andy’s room in ways that neither his sheriff role or Andy’s imagination reasonably encompasses. (Consider the “Plastic Corrosion Awareness Meeting.”) All right. This would be of no concern if Woody was a generic wild west doll, but he’s not. He was made to represent a character on the Woody’s Roundup TV show in the 1950s. He would have had an animus strongly imprinted with that backstory just like Buzz Lightyear had his strongly imprinted space ranger backstory. Well, then maybe this means that Woody just never lost his memory. That would be the best explanation. That’s why he has a personality mostly free from this imprinted backstory, having been Andy’s favorite toy for some time. But Woody has lost his memory. In Toy Story 2, Woody learns (learns!) that he’s a representation of a TV character. He meets Jessie and Bullseye and Stinky Pete without knowing who they are at all. Woody has somehow completely forgotten his origins. He experienced memory loss that brought him farther away from his animus starting point.

Okay, so there are multiple kinds of amnesia for toys; I was wrong in my earlier assertion that memory loss tends to the origin animus. But I want to keep poking at Woody’s memory issues because of something else that Woody’s timeline leads me to conclude: Andy is not Woody’s first owner, OR Woody was boxed up and forgotten for DECADES before Andy. Actually, he’s probably spent a significant amount of time in storage or on a shelf regardless of whether Andy is his first owner or not.

Toy Story was released in 1995. If the story is set in the present, then Andy is very close to my age. Now, Woody is “an old family toy” according to Toy Story 2, and Al, as a toy collector, was so thrilled and astonished to find a Woody at a garage sale that he stole him when he learned he wasn’t actually for sale. This leads me to the conclusion that Woody toys aren’t in continuous production. Woody was probably only manufactured during the height of Woody’s Roundup’s popularity, in the 1950s. So there’s two options for Woody’s ownership history. I’m also going to presume in both cases that Andy’s father was the parent that previously owned him, though there’s no reason why his mother couldn’t have been the owner.

So, option one: the young parents/young grandparents option. If Andy’s grandparents had his father when they were about twenty, and then Andy’s parents had Andy when they were about twenty, then Andy’s grandfather could have gotten Woody at ideal playing age and then later passed him down to Andy’s father and then Andy’s father would have passed him to Andy. I don’t think this is the case, though, because Woody still has his incredibly rare hat and a functional voice box. If Woody had been played with by a child at ideal playing age at the height of the popularity of his character’s show, I think it’s likely that he would have gotten played with so much (and taken to places so much) that he would have lost his hat and his voice box would have worn out. Woody didn’t start off life as a collectible, and play causes wear and tear on toys. And if Woody was originally the grandfather’s toy, then he would have gone through another round of play with Andy’s father. Woody’s condition is too good for that. Unless, that is, Andy’s whole family is made up of people who are unusually careful with their toys? That’s sort of an intriguing idea, since it means that Sid’s actions look even more horrifying by contrast, and generations of “ideal owners” for Woody obscure the bizarre nature of the life of a thinking, feeling toy. However, the Toy Story universe keeps raising questions in Toy Story 2-4 about what it means to be a toy, so there doesn’t seem to be a motivation in the series for such obscuring. This is despite the fact that Woody’s amnesia does obscure some things about the nature of a toy’s life, at least in the original Toy Story. (I know the Doylist perspective answers all this easily—this isn’t what the audience is meant to think about, Woody’s backstory as a toy from a 1950s TV show isn’t important in Toy Story, and in fact this backstory didn’t exist until Toy Story 2 was created.)

Regardless, I don’t think the young parents/young grandparents option is the right one. Instead, I choose option 2: the slightly older parents option. Woody’s Roundup is a TV show from the 1950s. It was popular enough to lead to a lot of merchandise, not just the dolls of the main characters. Brief research shows that in the 1950s television Westerns were incredibly popular, and there were Westerns made for kids and Westerns made for adults. The question I’m trying to get at here is trying to figure out how Andy’s grandparents would have known about a kid’s Western show. But, it’s really not that difficult. In this timeline I’m building now, Andy’s father would have been born in the 1950s, making him in his early-mid thirties when he became Andy’s father. Given this timeline, it’s overwhelmingly likely that Andy’s father has siblings, including older siblings, that might already watch Woody’s Roundup. Or, even if Andy’s father was the oldest child, it’s also overwhelmingly likely that Andy’s grandparents’ friends had plenty of kids of their own and probably talked among themselves about what kids liked. The significant thing in this timeline is that Woody would have been given to Andy’s father when Andy’s father was very young. Perhaps too young for a Woody doll, but perhaps also with the assumption that Andy’s father would grow into the doll. So Woody is unboxed and waits on a shelf for a couple years while Andy’s father grows a little. My theory is that Woody’s Roundup was no longer on television by the time Andy’s father was at the right age to start playing with a doll of Woody’s type. This would have two consequences. One: Andy’s father would have been unguided by the TV show in regard of how to play with Woody, meaning that Woody would have formed many memories unrelated to his original animus in this early stage of his life. Two: even though Woody was played with, he never was Andy’s father’s favorite toy, which is why he was able to be passed down to Andy in good condition (and still with his hat).

In this option 2, which I feel is more likely, Woody has probably spent at least 25 years on a shelf or in storage. So why is this important? I think it’s important because Woody doesn’t act like he’s been through the decades-in-storage experience, or the experience of having an owner outgrow him. He sympathizes with Jessie after learning her story, but he says nothing about having experienced anything like it himself. And as far as the movies are concerned, his worries about Andy outgrowing him are new worries. But they can’t be new! He’s already been outgrown at least once before! I mean, with Andy he’s a favorite toy, so that’s a unique owner + toy relationship status that he (probably) didn’t have before. Maybe that amplifies what he’s going through this time?

But there’s another aspect to Woody’s experiences that I want to touch on. All the other toys he would have known as Andy’s father’s toy are gone. There are no other “heirloom” toys in Andy’s room, or at least there is no evidence of this. All of Andy’s other toys seem to have been purchased just for Andy, and purchased new. There is no reference to garage sale trauma, previous owners, or anything like that. And as we’ve seen from other toys throughout the series, toys remember that kind of thing! But Woody doesn’t. His animus is one that shows years of experience building over his character backstory, but he never acts like he’s experienced being outgrown or losing all his toy friends.

Or at least he never says anything about such experiences.

I think it makes sense to read Woody’s amnesia as genuine. But I also think it would be reasonable to read his character as one that has undergone traumatic experiences and has responded by burying them so deep within his mind that he has no conscious access to them, even though they influence his current personality and life. (It’s impossible to know, but do toys in every household respond to birthdays and Christmas with such intense monitoring—with the desire for even the slightest early warning of replacement? Woody is the one who worries most about these celebrations, extremely anxious of his own status as favorite toy.) That the ending of Toy Story 4 removes him from the cycle of ownership and outgrowing can’t be ignored. Better to not have an owner than to experience losing an owner again, and again, and again?

But I do think there is one other possibility: Andy’s ownership of Woody caused him to lose all his memories of Andy’s father. A child may not be able to give a manufactured toy a new animus, but by possessing a toy in a play relationship (as opposed to a collector relationship) a child may be able to overwrite any memories of the toy’s previous owner. The process doesn’t happen instantaneously, as Andy’s toys don’t immediately forget him upon being transferred to Bonnie, but it would certainly explain why Woody makes no reference ever to a previous owner, even though he was most likely manufactured at least 35 years before coming into Andy’s possession. However, Jessie’s story argues against this. While she is happy among Andy’s toys, there’s nothing to show that she is forgetting her own past.

The possibility of a new child owner driving out all thoughts of the previous one is interesting, as it puts some degree of power over the toy’s animus back with the child. However, in the Toy Story universe, it’s clear that if this is the case, it’s not an instantaneous process. And if it’s not an instantaneous process, then it becomes overly complex. What memories would be driven out? For toys less adventurous than the main characters of the Toy Story movies, their whole lives are centered on their owners. They live in their child’s room/house. Anything that took place there would have to be forgotten to not bring up thoughts of the previous owner, including conversations with other toys that were friends of that first toy. At this point we approach a state of complete memory loss before the claim by a new owner. A gradual process would at least allow continuity of personality, since new memories under the new owner would be continually being made. But then, some new memories would have to fade, also. For wouldn’t a toy talk about their past while they could still remember it? And wouldn’t their new friends maybe bring up their past in conversation sometimes? They might even talk about the process of forgetting. That process would be noticed and known among toys. No, after thinking about it, I would say that there is no inherent forgetting process. Memories will mostly tend to stay, with whatever pain and joy they bring. And there will never be any transition process that is easy for the toy.

Woody’s amnesia remains his own, and remains his best defense against the trauma of being outgrown and shelved or stored for many years.

Toys have a strange and painful lot in life, semi-immortals being made to be silent companions to the briefest stage of a mortal lifespan. They live because they are made for children, but for most, in this world of mass production, children do not create them. Their animi are the spawn of creators who have no intent to create thinking, feeling beings. Escaping the stamp of such thoughtless creation means living long enough to know the deepest loss a toy can experience. Sometimes the only way to move forward from such loss is to forget. And yet, there is little will for most toys to move beyond this cycle. Toys overwhelmingly retain their roles as objects. I’d like to say that maybe this means that play is worth it, that temporary joy is worth it. But maybe it’s just the nature of being a toy. After all, if there’s any intent in their creation, there was the intent that they should be objects.

*I would never leave a dangling asterisk. My previous point was about ships and boats, but, if seagoing vehicles live because they are named, then there’s no reason why land vehicles would not do the same. It might be possible to argue that the Cars universe came about after some cataclysm wiped out humans and left only named vehicles behind.

Other avenues of investigation that were beyond the scope of this essay:

1) The situation between the Diamonds and every other gem in Steven Universe is highly analogous to the situation between humans and toys in the Toy Story universe, save for the crucial difference that the Diamonds have no excuse to not know that the other gems are complete feeling, thinking beings and to treat them as such. It was actually parallels I saw between Spinel + Pink Diamond and Jessie + her owner that got me thinking about aspects of the Toy Story universe in ways that I know are meant to be ignored. Also Pink Diamond bringing all those little pebble people to life just by crying on them. That’s a lot of responsibility coming from a solitary expression of emotion!

2) I’d be curious to know if a hugely popular series based on the agency of objects has had an effect on fan culture at all. Or it might at least be a way to examine actions taken on behalf of characters. Fictional characters, after all, don’t feel any kind of way about the situations and relationships people envision them in. They’re mental objects like toys are physical objects. In the real world is anyone going to argue that putting the faces of dolls or action figures together and making kissing noises is something to worry about? Is anything about putting a naked Barbie on top of a naked Ken a harmful act? In the real world I would say no. Also, with full awareness that this is a can of worms, what is the impact of such things in the Toy Story universe? Obviously this wouldn’t be addressed in any canon. But the Toy Story universe is supposed to be like reality with one big secret so there are kids that are definitely using their toys to play out love stories and stories including a vague understanding of sex. And another aspect to all this…if you’ve seen Booksmart, consider one of the characters’ uses of her childhood stuffed animal. I understand that this is not uncommon.

All right. I think I’m done now. And that I will probably go get another drink.

(I had a few baby dolls as a child that included their own toys as accessories. H—how would THAT work?)

#I've been out of school for YEARS and yet I was still compelled to write a long and slightly deranged essay in mid-December #Toy Story

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technospotatoes · 3 years

Text

C!SAM - Redeemable Qualities Analysis (Dream SMP)

Hallo! I’m back with another brain rot post for ya’ll instead of doing my schoolwork :]

Recently, I’ve been doing some thinking and theorizing with some friends on discord following Quackity’s huge lore stream (if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you watch it). I woke up this morning with a head full of many thoughts about C!Awesamdude and where his story could take us. Seeing as how there is going to be lots of change in the future with the server, there must be changes in these characters as well-- evil to good, good to evil, and the like. With these changes comes my thought: “can these characters be redeemed?” Here are my thoughts on how this applies to C!Sam.

Please let me know your thoughts and theories, I’d love to discuss with you! As always, strap in, it’s gonna be a long one :]

I hope you enjoy!

Author’s note: I want to start this off by saying that all of the contents being discussed are fictional, and are from the Dream SMP universe. I do not support the actions of these characters, but merely have interest in analyzing them through a lens of psychology and for entertainment purposes. Content of this post will contain spoilers up to 3/25/21 of the DSMP lore. I will also talk about ATLA a little bit ;)

Content warning: mentions of torture, manipulation, death, possible psychological trauma

(pls be safe ily)

What makes a redeemable character?

Redeemable characters are some of the most pleasing and favored characters in modern media. Their stories are rich with emotion, and they can even evoke some form of catharsis within the most skeptic consumers. Redeemable characters are memorable and inspiring, and without one, a story can feel empty. Before we apply this character trope to the Dream SMP and C!Sam, we need to answer a basic question in order to fully understand the complexity of redeemable characters and how they are so universally significant.

What is a redeemable character?

Simply put, a redeeming character or characteristic counteracts or corrects something negative. From a storytelling standpoint, a redeemable character is someone who has roots in good qualities, turns bad, and has the ability to revert their wrong choices to become a better person.

Examples of redeemed characters in popular media include:

Zuko - Avatar the Last Airbender

Boromir - Lord of the Rings

Kylo Ren - Star Wars

Severus Snape - Harry Potter

Zuko, for example, starts his story off as the villain. He tirelessly hunts down the protagonist, and will stop at nothing to achieve his goal to please his father. However, as the show progresses, we learn that Zuko wasn’t always bad. He was only driven to his path of villainy because of his fear of failure, of his father (the firelord and true antagonist of the show), and of a greater punishment than what he had already received. With the help of his uncle, Zuko learned to push through and accept his past, while also making amends with his wrongs and coming to the realization of who the true enemy was; ultimately choosing peace and unity over destruction and fear. Zuko’s story is so appealing because it was drawn out. It was raw, it was real, and it was a genuine telling of how damaged people can heal, change, and come to accept themselves. Because he went through the process of redemption, he was not only able to be loved by those around him, but also by his audience-- And I believe that this can be the same case with any redeemable character.

So how does this relate to C!Sam? How could he possibly be redeemable if he is not evil?

C!Sam has become increasingly interesting to me in the DSMP lore, and he has shown how complex his character is-- in contrast to many first impressions that people have of him. Based upon his actions from the past, and his willingness to remain neutral in times of conflict, we can conclude that he sustains both “neutral good” and “lawful neutral/good” qualities. This means that Sam is a reliable character, driven by his own personal values, and is devoted to helping others (when he sees fit). Evidence of these qualities emerge…

When he sided with Pogtopia during the Manberg War to maintain good relations with Tommy and Tubbo.

When he saved Hannah from the Egg

Created Sam Nook to assist Tommy in building his hotel

Built Pandora’s Vault for Dream

Showed concern for Ranboo after one of his denied prison visits

Sam’s moral code is deeply rooted with good intentions; he keeps an eye out for his friends, maintains his relationships, assists in builds/projects, and also serves as a “stable adult figure” for some of the younger members of the server. In contrast to his logical outward appearance, C!Sam lets his emotions drive his decision making-- which can lead to many severe consequences depending on how he acts. However, recently Sam’s actions indicate that he is experiencing a flip in morals.

Below are incidents that have led to C!Sam’s recent change in moral code.

Incident 1: Trapped with the Egg

Many weeks ago, during the height of character involvement with the Egg lore, C!Sam was lured into a trap by BBH and Antfrost. He spent about a day trapped in close contact with the Egg, and after he was saved by Puffy and Tommy, he was clearly changed. It is likely that the Egg is behind these sudden changes in character motivation for Sam… similarly to how it corrupted BBH, Ant, and Punz. Whether this is the case with Sam is unclear.

Incident 2: Tommy’s death

C!Sam and C!Tommy’s relationship within the DSMP lore is one of my favorite things to talk about. After his victory over the disk war and finally landing his nemesis in prison, Tommy was left empty, without much to do. He decided to take upon a new project to incite a new era of peace, and was able to enlist the help of Sam with building his hotel. Throughout this process (and under the watchful eye of Sam Nook), Tommy and Sam were able to develop a bond with each other through their work, along with their interactions at the Prison.

Sam has made it clear that he intends to defend Tommy no matter what-- but after his untimely death at the hands of C!Dream, Sam was deeply wounded. He felt as if he failed his promise to keep Tommy safe, and he made it clear that the blame for the “security issue” and C!Tommy’s death should be placed fully on him. No matter how selfless and responsible this makes his character appear, this event will only serve as the basis for severe consequences in moral change in the future.

Incident 3: Confrontation with Quackity

Following the large emotional impact of Tommy’s death, C!Sam is very vulnerable, because he is still within the stages of grief. C!Quackity came to Sam for a partnership, to take advantage of Sam while he was low to gain the upper hand. It’s no question that Q’s character is a talented manipulator, we can see that clearly in his interaction with Sam. Q restates again and again that Sam failed, further cementing Sam’s existing guilt and desire for revenge for his failure. Sam gives in to the manipulation, and somewhat reluctantly allows Quackity to torture Dream to get information and to get payback for what he did to Tommy... which completely goes against what his responsibility of Warden entails.

As Warden, C!Sam is supposed to uphold the law and rules of visitation, but because of his leniency with Quackity (in breaking the rules) and because he is still emotionally raw, he no longer defends good from evil, but is now biased against it. C!Sam probably wants Dream dead, but as Warden, his opinion shouldn’t matter. Because Sam fully blames himself for failing Tommy, he's lost the "lawful good" in his character, meaning Warden Sam (as a set of morals) truly doesn't exist anymore.

Incident 4: Ponk’s mistake

To recap a stream briefly, Ponk did a prank on Sam a couple days ago, and stole a few of the expired keycards to Pandora’s Vault. Rightfully, Sam was very angry, and not only took back the keycards, but also imprisoned Ponk. However, where this interaction should have ended, C!Sam only took it to the extreme. (TW!!!!) Out of anger and frustration, C!Sam tortured Ponk for his wrongdoing by setting him on fire, and amputating his arm (END TW!!!).

This only proves my point from Incident 3. Warden Sam is fading, only bits and pieces of his morally neutral character remain within him for basic tasks. His encounter with Quackity had a huge impact on his psyche, not only is he allowing the torture of the prison occupants, but he is doing it himself as well. C!Sam is now starting to believe that pain and torture are the only solutions for punishment, which is the complete opposite of what he believed before Dream was imprisoned.

In short...

C!Sam is losing his grip on moral and mental stability because of his emotional insecurity due to his psychological trauma. Because of this, I believe that it is entirely possible for Sam’s character to explore the route of evil and unlawful values-- which furthers the possibility for a redemption arc. Even currently, Sam is eligible for redemption as well.

If C!Sam is willing to acknowledge his wrongs from today and improve himself upon them, he will likely become a more memorable, lovable, and even more human character than we’ve seen in the SMP before.

SIDENOTE!

IRL Sam recently posted in his discord talking about his character. Here are a few key things to keep in mind as the story goes forward:

“There is a LOT of things in the plan for me as a character and a very big change is coming about for me as the story moves along.”

I believe this change could be a villain arc, or a turn towards evil that incites the possibility for redemption.

“My character is playing a role that I think is VITAL for the server and a role that I like to think was a good one for me to pick up and accept.”

You can read the reddit post I referenced for this here (ty to my friend on discord for providing me with the link <3)

TYSM FOR READING!! <3 <3 <3

#dreamsmp #awesamdude #ponk #tommyinnit #tubbo #mcyt #captainpuffy #dsmplore #dream smp lore #dream #dream smp analysis #QUACKITY #my work

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aspiringhorrorauthor · 3 years

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hello, PLEASE tell me your aroace analysis of the black parade album, i would like to see it 👀👀

What up guys, I just passed a vet med practice exam and I’m aroace and emo as fuck so let’s do this

First off, I will preface that I know that this wasn’t quite MCR’s idea of the album, but art is interpretive and I will at every possible opportunity rub my grubby little aroace hands all over that shit. This is also gonna get long so here’s a read more

Okay so first off, let me just exclude the following songs from this interpretation simply because they are exactly as they appear: The End, Dead!, Welcome to the Black Parade, Sleep, Teenagers and Blood. I can’t find anything to really psychoanalyse in this regarding the aroace experience so much as they are about the emo experience. And also, as a heads up, I feel this may teter more into aromantic interpretation than asexual simply because that’s how I roll, baby.

Let’s start with ‘This Is How I Disappear’, there’s something in here that strikes me as ‘coming to terms with being aroace Very Badly’, that first onset of panic when you realise ‘oh crap, I’m not allo’. I didn’t have the ‘hell yeah no sexual/romantic attraction oh wait there’s a word for that?’ realisation often stated online, I was in a lot of denial, especially when I first started listening to this album.

The lines “And without you is how I disappear/and live my life alone forever now” really strikes this message to me. The gnawing sense of loneliness and isolation when you first realise that you’re not like everyone else, that ‘living a life alone’ is both what you want from life and dread, as an amatonormative society drills into every one of us that love and relationships is what makes us important in life, and without it we will simply disappear. The line hits home the pain of questioning, the horror of when you realise this is who you likely are before you can truly accept it. It’s not a pretty part of being aroace, it wasn’t for me, but it is an important one, and the lines always hit home to me in this era.

Added on to this is a sense of how we’re seen in media. Consider the line “Who walks among the famous living dead”. There’s a real push in amatonormativity that love and romance is what makes us human, what makes us alive, and without it, we’re not human. Therefore, by extension, the aromantic narrator is ‘not alive’ by these standards, nor is their community they’ve yet to find. This is also doubled down by the monster symbolism throughout the song; especially when I was younger, aromantic (and asexual) coded characters in media were always the bad guys, the monsters who could only be stopped by the unstoppable power of love; the narrator is lamenting how this part of themselves seems monstrous, evil to society, when really that isn’t true, and this evolves over the course of the album.

Let’s move on to The Sharpest Lives. This is less aroace specific, but it certainly seems like a downward spiral of the narrator, which carries on from the self-loathing of Disappear. There’s really only 1 line I want to talk about here: “Juliet loves the beat and the lust it commands/Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands, Romeo”. This is an obvious allusion to Romeo and Juliet, but it turns on its head the usual story of Romeo and Juliet being in love; Juliet doesn’t love Romeo, she just loves the beat, and Romeo is taking it too far. This speaks to another experience, not exclusive to aromantics, but definitely strongly felt in it, when someone misinterprets the relationship or your feelings and tries to push for romance when all you wanted was a good time. I had an awful experience of this myself, so I’m claiming this one for the aroaces.

(As an aside, I got into MCR around the same time we did Romeo and Juliet at school, so imagine little me, not knowing she’s aroace and sick to death of talking about romance at school and hearing this line. To say I lost my shit was an understatement. I ADORE that line.)

Next up is ‘I Don’t Love You’. I’ve talked about this one before on my blog, but this is the song that really gives it away to me that this album is very strongly catered towards aroaces. “But it’s a break up song!” No, it’s not, if you look at it from the correct angle. Also I’ve gone to further lengths with other break up songs so try me bitches (See: Love Drunk by Boys Like Girls being about disregarding amatonormativity rather than breaking up with someone. It’s so damn obvious too)

Here’s the short of it: I Don’t Love You is actually about falling out with a friend because you had entirely different ideas as to what it was you wanted from your relationship. The aro narrator wants it to remain friends; they’re happy with where they are, and doesn’t want it to change. The other ‘person’ in the song is alloromantic, and wants it to become a romantic relationship. The most important line for this is the most important line in the song: “When you go, would you even turn to say, I don’t love you like I did yesterday”. Let’s focus on the word choice here: ‘Like I did yesterday’. When allos talk about love, they talk about the amount; if this was about falling out of love, it would reflect that, that the other person in the song loves them less, not differently. The narrator is lamenting that their friend no longer loves them as a friend; the friend’s view of love has changed, they love them romantically, and less as a friend as a result, and the narrator’s insistence on remaining friends has highlighted this.

What’s more, I don’t think this is the first time the narrator has gone through this. Admittedly, I misheard one of the lines for years and I insist the line is “Another time was just another blow” but I’m not American so we don’t have dollars, and this is about me and my interpretation of the album so we’re in this ride together and I’m driving so lets do this. The song is very pained, you can hear it in Gerard’s voice, and there’s so little about the pain of losing a friend, especially when they wanted romance from you, that this song really speaks to.

What really gets me though is how the narrator is clearly still struggling with being aroace too. Let’s consider the line “Sometimes I cry so hard from pleading”. The narrator clearly isn’t at ease with their identity yet; maybe they wish they could keep their friend, but their placing their boundaries down, even though its costing a friend. These boundaries are important, and its important for our friends to respect them too. And listening to, and singing along to, this song really makes me proud for the narrator in a sort of self-love kind of way when you couldn’t love yourself.

Final matter on this song: the narrator still thinks of them as a friend, which is tearing the narrator apart. Yes, the line “Don’t ever think I’ll make you try to stay” might make you think differently, but I believe that’s the narrator setting their boundaries; they’re not going to become an item just to please their friend and make them stay. Instead lets look at “Better get out while you can”. The narrator sees that their different views on the relationship is incompatible, and suggests they ‘fall out’ before their friend gets too caught up, and the rejection pains them both even more.

Now for House of Wolves. Not a long to say on this one, but I see it as being about media and ace exclusionists. See, the song flips between another character seeing the narrator as an angel and as a sinner simultaneously; just as how the media depicts asexual/aromatic/aroace people as non-human, that our sexuality (or lack thereof) makes us incomplete (the sinner aspect), while exclusionists say that we must be loved by the same media (and by religion too) for being aspec (the angel aspect). The song flip flops between them very rapidly, a state of confusion that felt very poignant for me when I was questioning in the height of the ace discourse.

Okay Mama is just here not for interpretation but because my English teacher once told us to analyse songs for her to mark as revision for exams and she loves long songs and kept making us analyse them so I analysed Mama and handed that in and got an A*. So Mama said AroAce rights that day.

Disenchanted is another strange one, filled with lines that mean more to aroace interpretation than the song itself. It spoke to me most when I was on my year out, having failed to get into uni despite good grades, still struggling with coming to terms with being aromantic, and dealing with severe anxiety. All in all, it was a year of disenchantment. It’s a good song. So what about an aroace interpretation?

The main thing about the song seems to be pretending to be someone you’re not. And really, when talking with family who expect you to be allo, how can you be anything but? I was told in this time that ‘Girls only go to university to find a husband’, which is many levels of wrong, but that thought always sticks in my head with this song. Moreover, I always think of break up songs with the line “You’re just a sad song, with nothing to say”, because they ARE just sad songs with nothing to say; and yet we’re expected to love them, because it’s a universal experience. There’s never been nothing to them.

But really, the line “I spent my high school career spit on and shoved to agree, so I can watch all my heroes sell a car on TV” is what really spoke to me. You spend school years being told that these people are sexy, you’ll want romance one day, and you have to agree or we’ll bully you mercilessly for it. The kids at school knew who was aroace before they knew what aroace meant. And we grow up watching heroes we relate to on TV, the fantastic loners who don’t need a significant other, only for fandom and the shows themselves to pair them up, make them “sell cars on tv” and sell out what made them special to us. And it hurts. And this song reflects that so well. In this song, the narrator is reflecting back on the years lost by hating themselves, slowly coming to terms with being aroace.

And finally, Famous Last Words. This is the real tipping point where the narrator feels comfortable with themselves, and finally confronts the friend from ‘I Don’t Love You’. The song is sung by one person, yes, but it feels like a dialogue between the friend, who still wants to hold a romantic relationship with the narrator, and the narrator who’s finally had enough. The introduction is from the friend, their thoughts on the narrator and how they know that they’re not going to win, but maybe they can make them feel bad for it “But where’s your heart?”, the friend is accusing the narrator of being heartless for being aromantic. But here’s the thing:

The narrator’s accepted who they are. “Well is it hard understanding? I’m incomplete.” The narrator accepts that they’re aroace, that to the friend, they are different, they don’t experience romance. The pain that they felt in the first few songs, of being the living dead and disappearing, makes them feel incomplete still, but they’re finally secure with being aroace enough to declare that, while they aren’t fully there yet, “I am not afraid to walk this world alone.” The narrator knows who they are, and they’re no longer afraid of it. Even when the friend tries to backpedal “Honey if you stay I’ll be forgiving” the narrator knows that the friend isn’t worth the pain anymore “Nothing you can say can stop me going home.”

That’s also why the lines about ‘love’ in this song are so important too. “A love that’s so demanding I can’t speak” “A love that’s so demanding, I get weak”. The narrator is explaining that, for them, romance is demanding; it’s not easy, and it’s not worth it for them, it’ll tire them out. The first quote can also speak of their friendship now; it’s so demanding, the narrator feels that if they stay, they may not be able to speak up for themselves any more. They have to friend break up, for both of their wellbeings.

And finally, the last verses “Awake and unafraid, asleep or dead” is the final attempt at kicking the narrator, harking back to “the famous living dead”. But the narrator refutes it by insisting that they’re not afraid to be alone anymore. And the song ends with the narrator winning, leaving the friend for good, for a better life.

And that’s the aroace interpretation of Black Parade.

And it’s 2200 words long fuck

#my chemical romance #the black parade #aroace #aromantic #asexual #You should've asked me why I can headcannon every video game character as aroace instead its shorter #Well all except the sims 2

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jamestaylorswift · 4 years

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Love’s a game, wanna play? A meta-analysis of the game of love and Taylor’s love of games

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Before actually getting into this, I’m obligated to make the disclaimer that this is just my interpretation of some songs. I’m not claiming to be “right” about anything. I have no way of knowing whether my observations will hold true if/when Taylor releases more music. It doesn’t really matter. There are many ways to interpret music.

Games are not the only extended metaphor in her discography; if you understand one, you don’t necessarily understand them all. This essay is an exploration of how one particular metaphor could be so effective.

In addition, I am often the first person to say that “not everything is that deep.” Yet here I am, making something deep. I was only mildly curious about this metaphor at first. In the process of documenting my understanding, I surprised even myself as I realized how rich this metaphor is.

A warning…this essay is very long. (It’s either mildly interesting or completely ridiculous and nothing in between. Likely the second.)

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The notion of a ‘game’ is often conflated with the notion of adversarial conflict. This misunderstanding is largely due to Western structural/cultural forces. Mathematicians and economists have a passion for framing most predicaments as zero-sum, or strictly competitive, where one player’s advantageous move by definition disadvantages their opponent. But collaborative and otherwise not strictly competitive games exist too.

Taylor’s fascination with games spans her entire discography. Artistic preoccupation is reason alone to analyze her work from such an acute angle. But pleasantly, Taylor also does not share the academics’ favorite pastime. She strays away from the zero-sum bias in very unpredictable ways. In fact, she has no bias. She prefers to mix and match her language to each situation as she sees fit. Her convolution of love and games is expressive, divorced from the logical framework by which games are defined. I think examining this facet of her work with a fine-toothed comb may be especially illuminating.

It seems counterintuitive to argue that games could (or should) be anything more than Taylor’s favorite metaphorical manifestation of logos. Yet revisiting a metaphor is itself communication, conscious or not. Advancing an understanding of this extended metaphor, in my opinion, substantiates what is usually intangible about Taylor’s songwriting brilliance.

On Games

Precocious and perceptive, Taylor has, for as long as she’s been writing, placed competition, strategy, and collaboration alongside conflict. Therefore, for the sake of coherence and relative brevity, analysis is scoped only to songs with significant mentions of games, puzzles, or game-related imagery. ‘Games’ are not conflated with general fighting, trickery, toying, revenge, mention of rules/strategizing, or winning/losing. ‘Puzzles’ are not conflated with disorder; puzzle pieces must be pieces of a larger, vivid picture.

Consider football. Imagery of high school football makes “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” fair territory. Someone shouting over a football game in a bar does not qualify “Mean.” The football helmet worn in “Stay Stay Stay” is an absurd and compelling detail in context, as likely to be fictitious as it is true, and hence more significant than a televised sporting event; “Stay Stay Stay” qualifies. In essence, games are interesting as a device rather than a simple detail.

Below is a list of the songs with significant game reference(s), categorized by implied type. Note that a song can belong to multiple categories if it contains multiple references.

Generic/unspecified games: “Come in With the Rain”, “Dear John”, “State of Grace”, “Blank Space”, “Wonderland”, “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Card games: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Dice games: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Board games: “Dear John”

Sports/contests: “The Story Of Us”, “Long Live”, “Stay Stay Stay”, “End Game”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Puzzles: “Red”, “All Too Well”, “So It Goes…”

Other: “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Like many people, Taylor habitually seeks structure to manage unpredictability. (Games provide structure for situational volatility, hence her artistic love affair with this metaphor.) The stylistic choices she makes to entertain this habit, however, are anything but consistent.

The games have a variety of different players, such as in “Dear John” and “Look What You Made Me Do.”

She does not establish strict parity between characters’ emotional affiliation and the competitiveness of a game. “Dear John” features an adversarial game. Conversely, her partner in “Blank Space” is a co-conspirator/collaborator. “All Too Well” analogizes autumn leaves as puzzle pieces; puzzles are collaborative games.

Taylor famously claims that love is a game in “Blank Space.” This song is colloquially understood to be about the love story we see play out in the media. Games can thus include all parts of her ‘love life.’ Arguably, she foreshadows this in “Long Live” by intertwining parts of her ‘America’s sweetheart’ image with professional success, which is derived from writing about love.

Taylor is not always a player in a game, such as in “Cruel Summer.” Her partner may not be either; see the crossword in “Red.”

In short, humans are unpredictable, as is love. It is clear that Taylor uses games as an incredibly powerful metaphorical device. They are a genuine reflection of her feelings about love.

Musical analysis usually begins with careful consideration of each track. Given a disparate and lengthy list of songs, it is probably more fruitful to go up a layer of abstraction. Of particular intrigue for this set of songs is the relationship between time and Taylor’s willingness to divulge more information about a metaphorical game.

We revisit the set of songs to list them in chronological order. The purely ‘generic’ songs are now bolded: “Come in With the Rain”, “Dear John”, “The Story Of Us”, “Long Live”, “State of Grace”, “Red”, “All Too Well”, “Stay Stay Stay”, “Blank Space”, “Wonderland”, “New Romantics”, ”…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”, “So It Goes…”, “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Specificity about a game seems to decrease with proximity to the 1989 era.

Lyrical imprecision in “Come in With the Rain,” a true outlier, probably boils down to youth.

“State of Grace” is a preamble about the themes of Red. “Begin Again,” though much later on that album, shares the same inspiration as “State of Grace.” Red is constructed as a sandwich between these two songs which present the album’s thesis. The album considered as a whole is thus a buffer for 1989.

reputation is a buffer for 1989 because the ‘generic’ game songs are heavily and intentionally front-loaded.

“New Romantics” is a coda for 1989, and its poker game reference is slightly ambiguous. What, exactly, is poker; what is all in the timing? The thematic material of “New Romantics” is most similar to that of “Blank Space.” ‘It’ is the same crude game played in the earlier track, the affair of collecting men. Perhaps this close relation subsumes “New Romantics” under the ‘generic’ game category. (Though this is a loose explanation.)

There exists an undeniable chronological pattern to game characterization. If you graphed the amount of game-related lyrical obscurity versus time, it would look like a shallow sand dune with the tip at the 1989 era. (Or a hill. Or a big pile of leaves. You get the picture.)

Armed with a basic understanding of Taylor’s career, one might say that her desire for personal privacy manifests as reticence to define metaphorical games. The 1989 era was the height of media attention on her. This caused more than a few issues. The art created around this time would have naturally reflected how she felt about the public eye. (See: the entire reputation era.)

But isn’t Taylor almost as famous as ever today? Sure, her name is not as saturated in the zeitgeist as it was in 2014. She’s still one of the world’s mega-stars. And does she not have a very private relationship today? Taylor’s work reflects her hardened personal boundaries, but boundaries alone do not explain the pattern of how she writes about games. Otherwise Lover would be filled to the brim with songs about ‘generic’ games.

To summarize, Taylor uses games as a perennial favorite metaphor to frame her experiences of love. Increased public scrutiny undoubtedly changed the way that Taylor approached songwriting; even so, fame was not a factor that changed how she wrote about games. The connection between time and types of games suggests that we cannot consider game metaphors in isolation.

On Love

The next piece of the puzzle (no pun intended) is what she shares about love. Which 1989 songs are most revealing? Technically…most of them, if you think hard enough. I’d like to draw special attention to “Wonderland” and “You Are in Love.”

Ah, “You Are in Love.” The musical gift that keeps on giving! Fitting, because true love should be too.

In “Wonderland,” Taylor says:

It’s all fun and games ’til somebody loses their mind

Shortly thereafter in the “You Are in Love” bridge, she proclaims:

You understand now why they lost their mind and fought the wars

And why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words

Taylor reverses her opinion about the prospect of losing her mind for love. (The abruptness here is a consequence of a real-life relationship change, plus the fact that both of these songs are bonus tracks.) Of course, she also tells us an important connection between love and games.

I’ll pause here to say that I’m not going to turn this into a (frankly uninteresting) relationship timeline/proof post. But may the profound significance of “You Are in Love” and its subject never escape us.

“You Are in Love” is written in the second person. Taylor is the intensely guarded ‘you.’ We witness her emotional walls get broken down by her lover, the ‘he.’ Fascinatingly, Taylor departs from the second person point of view in the bridge. Suddenly, she alerts us to the presence of an ‘I.’ The bridge says that ‘you’ Taylor, whole and normal-person-in-a-relationship Taylor, finally understands true love. In the same breath, ‘I,’ writer Taylor, admits that she’s had it all wrong for years. (This is not to say that her writing pursuits before this moment were pointless.) Therefore, breaking the second person point of view to include the ‘I’ line shows that Taylor distills the nature of true love in that ‘eureka’ moment.

Yet she exposes the schism of writer Taylor and whole, normal person Taylor in a moment where, in theory, those two roles could not overlap more. Taylor has every reason to faithfully represent her feelings. Her sentiment is always sincere even though she may falsify details of a story. “You Are in Love” is (as far as I’m aware) the only song in which Taylor ever blatantly admits to writer-person misalignment. The schism must run extremely deep.

Taylor was—and surely still is—drawn to songwriting as a means to explore love. She tries to to capture its enigmatic essence with the written word. How fascinating it is that, at the very moment she communicates her deepest understanding of love, she says that the part of her that puts it into words is inherently disconnected from her spirit which feels it.

On Games And Love

We must briefly table the meta-implications of “You Are in Love” to return to the topic of games.

Love probably would have stopped feeling like a game after finding a real gem of a person who doesn’t mess with your head. (Love also probably would have stopped feeling like a game after dialing down on brazen PR tomfoolery.) Taylor has written several albums about her true love. It’s easier now to trace the arc of her feelings: it is a positive path, as anyone would predict.

Why would she continue to write about games after 1989? The obvious answer is that she likes doing it. It remains a useful metaphor.

But recall that chronology discourages us from considering metaphorical games in isolation. To clarify the principal function of the game metaphor in her discography, we must consider the writer-person dichotomy.

First, note that Taylor exposes the writer-person dichotomy in an honest, vulnerable moment. She confirms it as a human phenomenon. The phenomenon thus must extend beyond a singular moment during 1989. Distance between writer Taylor and whole, normal person Taylor—a measure henceforth called writer-person distance—is necessarily a function of time. Coincidentally, so is the measure of game-related lyrical obscurity.

Writer-person distance can grow or shrink. It was small in her youth; this is what pushed her into songwriting. It is small now, as she has told us in the albums since 1989 that true love has stitched her back together. Again, because writer-person distance is a human phenomenon, it changes slowly, smoothly. (“You Are in Love” simply marks the biggest distance.) Does this sound familiar? If you graphed writer-person distance versus time, the graph would look like a shallow sand dune with the tip at the 1989 era. (Or a hill. Or a big pile of leaves. Once again, you get the picture.)

To summarize, game-related lyrical obscurity and writer-person distance are smooth functions. “You Are in Love” is the inflection point of both measures.

With “Wonderland” and “You Are in Love,” Taylor tells us that games are linked to how she conceptualizes love. But not just any love. 🎶 True love. 🎶

At the same time, Taylor presents “You Are in Love” as a dividing line between ‘that which is a best attempt to understand something that inherently cannot be captured’ and ‘that which refines the thing that, against all odds, was captured.’ Our interpretation of games must synthesize an abrupt ‘eureka’ moment with both the measures’ gradual changes.

If we are to talk about metaphorical games, we also must talk about true love. But we know that if we are to talk about games, we also must talk about time. Vital to uniting these ideas is the revelation that Taylor conceptualizes the nature of true love as the nature of time. For doesn’t time define what is gradual and abrupt?

The most important line in “You Are in Love” is when Taylor finds it—‘it’ being love. A literal ‘eureka’ moment. This isn’t just a one-time coincidence.

Writer-person bifurcation clarifies why the game metaphor is surprisingly effective. As Taylor revisits the convolution of love and games, the metaphor morphs in tandem with her innate understanding of love.

Some Good Old-fashioned Song Analysis

Observing how games, love, and time are intertwined requires that we reject purely literal interpretations of game-related lyrics after “You Are in Love.” Of course, literal interpretations are still generally useful, even correct. Games are literal, so references to them should be interpreted as such. Also, lyrics about games are probably Not This Deep in reality. We didn’t have to do all this work to realize what songs might belong in conversation with each other; identifying lyrical callbacks would have been sufficient. Treating game lyrics as purely literal limits how we might decipher a recurring metaphor. Without the notions of game specificity or writer-person distance, we would lack a framework with which to fully interrogate how these songs are are connected (i.e. through time). And, after all, the ultimate goal is to understand why the game metaphor is so successful. But, I digress.

(We’ve also made it this far and we might as well keep going. Another couple thousand words…don’t threaten me with a good time, amirite?)

To observe how games, love, and time are intertwined, I propose the following rule of thumb: A game reference before “You Are in Love” is Taylor’s description of love, whereas a game reference afterwards is a pointer to past instances of that game. Such a reference is metaphysical, or more appropriately, meta-lyrical. If she’s referenced a game already, she knows how to use that reference again. If she introduces a new reference, she’s planting it for future use.

We can group the songs after “You Are in Love” by game type:

Generic/unspecified games: “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Dice games: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Card games: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Sports/contests: “End Game”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Puzzles: “So It Goes…”

Other: “It’s Nice To Have A Friend"

Analysis requires precision. We should pare down the duplicates, if possible.

“It’s Nice To Have A Friend” is tricky because it’s naturally sparse. “Video games,” for example, are more than a simple detail: they are an essential part of creating a childhood vignette. “Twenty questions” and the card game “bluff” function analogously in the later verses. The brilliance of this song lies in how Taylor illustrates the development of companionship and intimacy. The verse about marriage is the most significant verse because it reveals the meaning of the whole song. Thus, we may take the bluff to be more important than twenty questions, which is more important than video games. “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” ultimately belongs in the card game category.

Central to the pathos of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” is the “stupid” dice game lyric. Of equal importance is the portrait of Americana, painted with lyrics about Friday night lights. This song truly belongs in two categories.

At the end of “…Ready For It?” Taylor fires a starting pistol, letting ‘generic’ games begin. “End Game” follows and we assume it must pertain to the same game. So Taylor intentionally places this song in the first category. The hook has lyrics about a varsity “A-team,” though this is probably just a nod to Ed Sheeran. The other truly interesting game-related lyric is the one about bluffing. Thus, “End Game” also belongs in the card game category.

Here’s the new list:

Generic/unspecified games: “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Dice games: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Card games: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Sports/contests: “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Puzzles: “So It Goes…”

Each of the four obvious groups of songs illustrate a different way Taylor weaves the natures of true love and time together:

Déjà vu: “So It Goes…”

Hindsight/wisdom: “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Fate: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Progress: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Déjà vu

The puzzles category only contains one song, making it easiest to analyze. The namesake of “So It Goes…” is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, famously constructed like a mosaic. Puzzles are central to the meaning of this song.

“All Too Well” contains the first instance of a puzzle metaphor in her discography:

Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place

Taylor calls back to “All Too Well” in the chorus of “So It Goes…”

And our pieces fall

Right into place

Get caught up in the moment

Lipstick on your face

By referencing a previous song using identical phrasing, Taylor creates the illusion of a sudden ‘déjà vu’ moment. The effect is similar to “You Are in Love,” where she reaches sudden enlightenment.

Sonically and lyrically, the “moment” she gets caught up in is implied to be the one in which she gets lost in passionate sex. The déjà vu moment could be this moment, but it doesn’t have to be. Déjà vu is agnostic to the present in the sense that the feeling can be triggered in the strangest of times. The déjà vu moment is whatever prompted her to write this song.

This game lyric connection clearly shows how a moment of love is defined by a moment of time.

Hindsight/Wisdom

The bombastic group of singles, “…Ready For It?”, “End Game,” and “Look What You Made Me Do,” sets the tone for all of reputation. The ‘generic’ games in these songs are the same as those in 1989, particularly the crude (and, in Taylor’s case, often interchangeable) games of celebrity and dating. In “Blank Space,” Taylor spells out in gory detail what she does as an agent in the celebrity dating game. She does not explicitly define the rules of that game, though. It remains sufficient for her to prove that she knows how to play by them. (Musically, this is far more interesting.)

We know that the reputation singles’ literal proximity to 1989 indicates Taylor’s direct emotional response the previous era. The consequences of a ‘fall from grace’ underpin the entire reputation era. Therefore, Taylor uses lyrical connections from reputation back to 1989 to illustrate hindsight. She tells us what she learned from her mistakes and what she wished she would have done differently.

But first, she gets to be salty about it. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” Taylor laments the fact that she participates in public games to appease others. (Because, really, withdrawing from the celebrity circus would immediately solve a lot of her problems. Alas, megastardom is a Venus flytrap.)

I don't like your little games

Don't like your tilted stage

The role you made me play

Of the fool, no, I don't like you

Let’s return to “Blank Space” for a moment. Taylor’s boyfriend in “Blank Space” is considered a co-conspirator/collaborator with her in the celebrity dating game. Central to our understanding of that song, however, is the unequal power dynamic. Taylor is the strategic mastermind, whereas her boyfriend is just along for the ride. The two are on the same team, but they are not equals.

Taylor actually leans further into the games of the 1989 era in “…Ready For It?”

Baby, let the games begin

Unlike in 1989, her partner is an equal on her team:

Me, I was a robber first time that he saw me

Stealing hearts and running off and never saying sorry

But if I'm a thief, then he can join the heist

And we'll move to an island

She then connects “…Ready For It?” to “End Game”

Baby, let the games begin

Are you ready for it?

I wanna be your end game

Both Taylor and her partner are forced to play the same game and they share share the same goal. Her partner’s “end game” is Taylor; thus, Taylor keeps her true love by beating the celebrity dating game. They have to work together to achieve this difficult task.

Though the celebrity dating game is not true love, it impacts Taylor’s relationship with anyone who could be her true love. In hindsight, Taylor realizes how media games blew up in her face. It is wisdom—to keep her relationship private, to dial down on PR tomfoolery, to prioritize her happiness—that helps her pre-empt these problems for the reputation era. And indeed we understand the love story of reputation as the lovers’ prolonged attempt to hide from the public eye.

Hindsight comes with the natural passage of time. One only accrues wisdom, however, when they apply the lessons of hindsight to make better judgements about the future. Games again unite the ideas of love and time; they elucidate how Taylor uses wisdom to protect someone she loves.

Fate

“Cruel Summer” and “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” highlight the elegance of the meta-rule of thumb.

The dice game in “Cruel Summer” is a unique incarnation of the game metaphor because Taylor doesn’t confirm whether she is directly involved in this game:

Devils roll the dice

Angels roll their eyes

What doesn’t kill me makes me want you more // And if I bleed you’ll be the last to know

The song doesn’t reveal much about the nature of the dice game other than the fact that it is competitive. It could be a fitting description of what is going on in Taylor’s personal life. It may not be. What is more important is that Taylor positions herself as collateral damage of the outcome of the game.

This is also the dice game’s first appearance. By our rule of thumb, this lyric exists only to be a link to “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince.”

“Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” belongs to two different game categories, sports/contests and dice games.

First, dice games. We get a few more answers about the nature of the “Cruel Summer” competition:

It's you and me

That's my whole world

They whisper in the hallway, "she's a bad, bad girl"

The whole school is rolling fake dice

You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes

It's you and me

There's nothing like this

Miss Americana and The Heartbreak Prince

We're so sad, we paint the town blue

Voted most likely to run away with you

Both Taylor and her partner are forced to play the dice game by virtue of being metaphorical students. As a disgraced and about-to-be-vagrant prom queen, Taylor has finally realized that winning the school’s dice game is not worth the price of a ‘fall from grace.’

Next, sports/contests. With the understanding of these lyrics as pointers to her previous songs, sports/contests harkens back to “The Story of Us,” “Long Live,” and “Stay Stay Stay.”

“The Story Of Us” suggests that a shared quality of sports/contest metaphors is that conflict is nuanced, even hidden to outsiders:

This is looking like a contest

Of who can act like they care less

In “Stay Stay Stay,” football is connected to (for lack of a better word) violence, conflict that could result in emotional and physical harm:

I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night

I threw my phone across the room at you

I was expecting some dramatic turn away

But you stayed

This morning I said we should talk about it

'Cause I read you should never leave a fight unresolved

That's when you came in wearing a football helmet

And said, "Okay, let's talk"

Finally, “Long Live” blends the ideas of small town Americana with Taylor’s personal and professional life:

I said remember this moment

In the back of my mind

The time we stood with our shaking hands

The crowds in stands went wild

I said remember this feeling

I passed the pictures around

Of all the years that we stood there on the sidelines

Wishing for right now

We are the kings and the queens

You traded your baseball cap for a crown

When they gave us our trophies

And we held them up for our town

And the cynics were outraged

Screaming, "this is absurd"

'Cause for a moment a band of thieves in ripped up jeans

Got to rule the world

The backdrop of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” is not just any part of America. The juxtaposition of idyllic parts of American life with frictional, violent, yet sometimes subtle forces tells us that the song’s backdrop is an American culture war. It is conflict which unsettles everyone, but by nature hurts only some.

In totality, the function of the dice game metaphor is to position Taylor as collateral damage of an American culture war. (Chew on that one for a bit.)

Again, we probably could have surmised this by examining the lyrics closely. The song lends itself to being a signpost in the Lover chronology. It seems too autobiographical to be anything different. We all remember 2016.

However, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” sticks out like a sore thumb from the album’s theme of “a love letter to love itself.” Revisiting games as a glue between love and time expands on the purpose of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” in Lover.

The “Cruel Summer” bridge contains this lyric understood to be about her true love:

And I snuck in through the garden gate

Every night that summer just to seal my fate

Taylor identifies “that summer” in the 1989 era as the moment which she sealed her fate. Implicit in this confirmation is her perspective from the future. She is looking back on 1989 from the time when her terrible fate has just been realized.

The moment of realization is—you guessed it—the chorus of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince.” The chorus depicts post-prom queen defamation. Taylor is aware of every single action (many, probably deliberate) that helped her achieve royalty. She never divulges them. The song is scoped only to the time when she lives her fate.

We usually take observations about fate and love to describe how two souls are bound to each other. Taylor does not tell us much about her lover in “Cruel Summer” sans the fact that the shape of their body is new. Paying special attention to games reframes “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” within the Lover theme as a commentary on fate. However, the emphasis of fate should not be on her lover. The dice game connection tells us that Taylor views “that summer” in the 1989 era as the time when she sealed her fate as collateral damage in the American culture war. From the “love letter to love itself” perspective, the moral is that passion and excitement can make lovers forget the immutability of individual destiny. If you are fated to be with someone, both of you are at the mercy of whatever the world has in store for the partnership and you as individuals.

Progress

An eclectic group of songs shares a reference to bluffing in a card game. The game metaphor beautifully stitches these songs together into parts of the same story.

The first and most detailed description of the card game is in “New Romantics”

We're all here

the lights and boys are blinding

We hang back

It's all in the timing

It's poker

He can't see it in my face

But I'm about to play my ace

A bluff in poker is an attempt to trick one’s opponent into thinking one has a better hand than they do in reality. The opponent may call their bluff and challenge them to prove their hand is as good as they advertise.

Bluffing requires deception, often telegraphed by facial expressions. Here, Taylor says that she is good at bluffing because she doesn’t let her façade crack. She is not truly bluffing, though, because she possesses an ace, presumably part of her even better hand. Her opponent has called her perceived bluff to prompt to her to reveal the ace.

The opponent, “he,” behaves as though Taylor is bluffing. Taylor, strategic as ever, is prepared to counter by revealing the most powerful card. We should thus interpret this metaphor as the ‘bluffer’ exceeding expectations. (Remember that the first instance of a metaphor is a base case, so we must take its meaning more literally.)

Likewise, in “End Game” and “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”, Taylor is the bluffer:

You've been calling my bluff on all my usual tricks

Call my bluff, call you "babe"

However, “Cornelia Street” allows room for the interpretation that both Taylor and her lover are bluffers:

Back when we were card sharks, playing games

I thought you were leading me on

I packed my bags, left Cornelia Street

Before you even knew I was gone

But then you called, showed your hand

I turned around before I hit the tunnel

Sat on the roof, you and I

Taylor may have also been a trickster: “then you called” could refer to the lover calling Taylor’s bluff.

The recurring bluff metaphor coincides with progress or forward momentum in a relationship.

Recall a previous discussion of “New Romantics.” We defined the “it” which is “all in the timing” as a reference to finding romance. “New Romantics” is set in a club with a dance floor, boys, and blinding lights. It’s the kind of setting conducive only to landing one-night stands. Taylor plays games with someone in the club, but exceeds expectations for the outcome of that game. What was flirting or courting becomes something more serious than a one night stand (i.e. an actual relationship). The act of calling a bluff in a card game engenders (relationship) progress. Yet again, what is intrinsic to time is intrinsic to love.

This observation fits with each song.

reputation charts the development of Taylor’s relationship, but the card game bluff in “End Game” is at the beginning of the album. That’s exactly why this lyric works so well. Her relationship is still new, nonetheless significant, after 1989. Her verse mixes these ideas:

I hit you like bang

We tried to forget it, but we just couldn't

And I bury hatchets but I keep maps of where I put 'em

And I can't let you go, your hand print's on my soul

The “End Game” bluff represents how Taylor goes from wanting a steady relationship to wanting everything.

You might be able to see where this is going. “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” is the ‘discographical endpoint’ of the bluff metaphor. The verse about marriage delivers the song’s emotional punch:

Church bells ring, carry me home

Rice on the ground looks like snow

Call my bluff, call you "babe"

Have my back, yeah, everyday

Feels like home, stay in bed

The whole weekend

Notice, however, that the bluff metaphor occurs after the implied wedding. This is actually a beautiful sentiment. Intimacy, trust, and commitment are ongoing; growth doesn’t stop with a ring on a finger. The bluff, which represents delivering on promises and exceeding expectations for love, powers the relationship forward.

All signs point to the “Cornelia Street” bluff as the one that may have led to marriage.

Back when we were card sharks, playing games

I thought you were leading me on

I packed my bags, left Cornelia Street

Before you even knew I was gone

But then you called, showed your hand

I turned around before I hit the tunnel

Sat on the roof, you and I

So emotionally charged is this scene that we have to wonder what, exactly, Taylor’s steady partner could do to make her (1) walk out if she were being led on and (2) come back so quickly.

The most intriguing detail about this card game is that both parties may have been bluffing. The lover is leading Taylor on, but Taylor does not stay to call the bluff. She leaves. Usually in poker, one would not want their opponent to be able to prove the bluff with a good hand. (Think back to the ace in “New Romantics”.) But what if both players are on the same team at the end of the day? Calling a bluff is now setting oneself up for potential disappointment. Taylor walks out because she is frightened by the mere possibility of being let down.

Taylor is also bluffing, but her lover doesn’t let her walk away so easily. They pull out all the stops and concede their hand in a desperate attempt to get Taylor to turn around from the tunnel. It works. By our understanding of the bluff metaphor, the lover exceeds all of Taylor’s expectations. The events that transpire on the roof presumably are when Taylor reveals her own cards.

The topic of marriage fits with this emotionally charged scene. Of course both lovers would tiptoe around the topic and be scared to reveal their true feelings.

So following the bluff metaphor helps us follow the course of true love. Calling and revealing a bluff is the catalyst for Taylor’s relationship. However, it also is the nature of time which underpins progress.

I concede that interpreting the bluff metaphor as the catalyst of a story makes it vulnerable to any truth-fuzzing. Perhaps Taylor hasn’t ever written about a real-life engagement or marriage. We have no way of knowing. We instead should take comfort in the fact that her lyrics are beautiful and music is open to interpretation.

On Writing

Our beliefs about love are bound to change over time. As a writer, Taylor is in a unique position to capture this change by revisiting a metaphor.

Take “It’s Nice To Have A Friend.” The song is written as a series of vignettes to define the qualities of love that remain consistent while relationships change over time. The middle vignette, with its reference to “twenty questions,” could very well point back to the same day as the “Cornelia Street” card game. Feelings reoccur in certain moments—déjà vu. The first vignette is a picture of childhood. The last vignette is a picture of adulthood. Therefore, it seems just as natural to interpret the middle vignette as a picture of adolescence or young adulthood. Light pink skies, back-and-forth conversations, and brave, soft moments of intimacy illustrate a coming-of-age experience. The same moment that pulls Taylor forward in her relationship is the one that also pulls her back to a different time.

Then the coming-of-age experience is reminiscent of the portrait of Americana, the Friday night lights, marching band, and high school prom. During adolescence, we only have an inkling of our futures. We are less aware of all the ways we are connected to others and our world. Young and impressionable, our only job is to live, to change, to make memories and mistakes. Memories and mistakes define what was, and experience creates wisdom that shapes what will be. So Taylor captures this duality in fate. The moment a fate is realized is a moment that is equally a fossil of the past and a forecast for the future. The moment it all makes sense…eureka!

As an artist, Taylor’s job is to communicate her human experience. Listeners decide whether or not she successfully telegraphs what is universal about it. However, Taylor is no more of a spokesperson for the universal human experience than anyone else. She simply possesses the talent, work ethic, and privilege to make a career of it.

Consider Taylor’s own summary of the past decade:

I once believed love would be burnin' red

But it's golden

She consciously and elegantly edits her previous beliefs about love. (Obviously, she may plant callbacks to previous songs purely for fun. This one is certainly sincere.) These lines illustrate the craft she has worked hard to develop.

Manifested in her craft is the need to revisit her ideas. It seems as though certain recurring metaphors have become the only way for her to accurately capture some parts of love. They become self-perpetuating. Unforced yet expressive subconscious consistency constitutes artistry. It is artistry which compels us to believe in the universality of music.

The self-perpetuating love/games metaphor is especially fascinating. It is one of the purest examples, though perhaps also one of the strangest, of how writing about love engenders new experiences of it. Taylor translates love into game language. Games illustrate duality. Duality is love.

Perhaps this conclusion is something others already know about Taylor’s talent. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on it until now.

To me, it seems like the songs are writing themselves.

#taylor swift #kaylor #gaylor swift #music analysis #my post

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