#ill put it in that tag bc its like. basically a meta lol

[fakeosirian]

☕️ sinner arc?

O H B O Y

full disclosure i still have not done my note-taking s3 rewatch so i'm liable to misremember (or just not remember) things but i thiiiink i'm confident enough in this opinion to post. it's not supposed to be "discoursey" tho i'm focusing on my crits of this arc more than the compliments because that's what i've done more thinking about. thank you for enabling this and also i'm sorry because you've unleashed the beast <3

thesis statement: the sinner arc, as it is, is both totally natural and consistent with the narrative up to that point and also a HUGE break from the rest of the show tone-wise, craft-wise, and tbh emotionally to the point that i think that it was kiiiiiiiind of a mistake. or at least it's hindered by being the final arc of the show (not counting TOR). some of my sour grapes are just personal bias against certain kinds of "whittling down the cast" plots, but after thinking it over for a While, tbh it bothers me moreso because the things i would change are very simple and would make a world of difference craft-wise without really changing any of the major plot beats or undermining the good parts. (and thus it's disappointing to me that that's not what we got when i feel like the creative team already avoided those exact issues in earlier parts of the show...)

so ok. getting this out of the way: i may come off harsh on this arc because i find it very stressful to watch for personal reasons LMAO so i'll hand this to it: it's very good at getting the desired emotions out of me (extreme discomfort/despair), so if that's the only metric you're using to judge quality, there you go: it's good.

unfortunately it also makes me sad about the state of the characters in a way that...you could interpret as success? but this is the bit that, even accounting for my bias, i think is Not Good. let me explain:

s1 and s2 do an excellent job of manipulating implied perspective of scenes to put characters you're primed to dislike in slow-burn situations that at first exacerbate their flaws and then give them a shot at, not necessarily "redemption," but...imperfect mutual understanding. examples: victor perceived as literally murderous is revealed to be a victim (and later perpetrator) of a generational cycle of abuse; joy, as a victim of that cycle of abuse, lashes out and victimizes others; patricia, eddie, and jerome have more moments from their povs, so it's not quite as dramatic, but they experience a similar character arc as well.

on the flip side, you also get characters whose povs you get as your "main lens" (that can trick you into thinking youre viewing an objective pov) that have biases that become apparent as they interact with those "villainized" characters and react in ways inconsistent with the tone of the scene (thinking of nina and mara here primarily, but fabian also is a good example of this). that's how you get nina flipping out at the friends that SHE CURSED to the point that finally, FINALLY, she acknowledges that she's gone too far. (i should do a writeup on the curse arc and her behavior leading up to it because i think it's a fascinating commentary on the nature of being an "audience insert" that sort of gained sentience over time lol.) mara is self-explanatory here because she cannot help herself from cooking up the WORST possible response to a mundane relationship problem, and yet the tone of the scenes from her pov ends up being extremely sympathetic to her feelings (the way it's shot, edited, the music cues, etc.) in a way that fosters a really neat type of dissonance between text and subtext that doesn't signpost/announce itself until it's already Very There.

when these two different methods for handling character clash, as an audience, you're simultaneously told how to feel (those tonal cues i was talking about) but also left enough clues to change your mind (which i think the generally pro-joy tone of the discourse on this website is proof that people will do and is an intended potential experience of the show tbh). the moral/emotional result of that is a really neat commentary on subjectivity, how complicated reconciliation is, and how the only people too far gone to improve themselves are those who simply don't want to. the scene at the end of s2 with nina giving victor the tear makes me so emotional because it's an olive branch, an acknowledgment of the complicated nature of the situation and that victor has been a horrible person and made horrible choices in the past, but he does not have to keep doing that, and he does make the right choice when push comes to shove. same thing with joy in the senet arc (and i love that fabian is simultaneously the pov character and honestly the antagonist because of his inability to manage his emotions until the end), and honestly, same thing with patricia in early s1 re: her paranoia surrounding nina.

so what does this have to do with the sinners? well, they pretty much fly in the face of that entire writing philosophy on a fundamental, functional level, by design. considering "that philosophy" is just...earnest emotionally satisfying character writing in a story primarily driven by its characters and how they interact with one another over time...that's not great!

the leadup to a sinner capture is great. the afterwards is my issue. you take these characters who are in a narrative about not letting your flaws define you forever and you erase and overwrite their personality to be their singular greatest flaw, and then you reverse that and snatch away their memories to add insult to injury. that's not character regression (which is a completely legit avenue and is why the sinner captures are great in theory) -- it's anti-development, anti-human. it's certainly made worse by the fact that it's the show's final arc and thus the ex-sinners don't get a chance to process their experience on screen (needing that closure for myself is why i'm writing flat on your face lol), but even if it was addressed in the show in the best manner possible, it'd still feel cheap to me because it's agency-stripping and deeply cynical by design.

the thing is, this is deeply fixable. there's no singular way, but one i'm particularly interested in experimenting with is having the "sinner" be a sort of alter-ego that takes over in certain circumstances, subverting the conscious mind and leaving behind memory gaps and inconsistencies that lead the sinners to doubt themselves just as much as the other characters. it'd heighten the themes of misplaced trust that s3 is doing a lot of work with, and it would give the sinners a chance to still be their characters, have agency, continue to develop, and idk imagining a scenario where patricia or fabian is desperately begging someone to NOT trust them sounds fucking delicious to me. also other thing: it'd also fix something that's not really a "mistake" but just makes me sad, which is the fact that once a sinner is taken...that's pretty much it for their character as you know them for the rest of the show. like yeah, they're still there, but man, when the show was airing and fabian got taken, i straight up felt like he died, lol.

there's another issue that that proposed solution would sort of solve? but tbh is just another consequence of this type of plotline, which is: zero-sum game character development, or characters getting their quality/development sacrificed for the development of other characters. i do not like that patricia, easily one of the most complex and interesting characters on the show who goes back and forth between evolving and devolving as a person regularly in a way that feels sympathetic and consistent with her previous behavior and environment, has that progress torched and flattened for the sake of eddie's development. it's not necessarily poorly conceived or structured or illegitimate, but it's hella depressing for me to watch, personally. if it felt like she had more agency as a sinner (ie. the way sinners function being changed fundamentally), i wouldn't mind as much/it wouldn't feel like as much of a zero-sum sacrifice, but as it stands, her sinner capture and subsequent existence is completely centered on making eddie maximum miserable enough to move the plot forward. that's where i feel like i need to rewatch because that's certainly an uncharitable read, so that take is accompanied with a metric ton of salt!

that brings me to my other semi-gripe (less significant than the above but worth talking about): who specifically gets taken.

victor getting taken at all, but especially first, kinda rubs me the wrong way because following s2 where he was getting taken for a ride just as much as the kids were (if not more), its sad to see him flattened back into the caricature he was through the kids' pov in early-mid s1, except this time he's actually just like that. i do feel like taking victor is natural, though, so i'm not totally against him being a sinner/he's a character that i think can survive being made this sort of pseudo-"irredeemable" without being retroactively ruined because he's always been a tragic character. sweet, though should not have been taken, full stop, and i legit hate that as a writing choice.

when it comes to the kids, i understand the thinking behind taking old guard sibuna and it does appeal to me to have old vs new happening within the greater landscape of s3 and the show as a whole, but i think it's missing the trees for the forest a bit. it's too focused on the subtextual positioning rather than the material reality of what patricia, fabian, and alfie are feeling and doing as individuals -- not so much re: patricia and fabian (they were cruising for a bruising), but alfie. like idk alfie isn't always a saint but mara was right there. (jerome was right there. joy was right there. i dont necessarily think either of them would have made good sinners -- frankly they might have made me angrier actually and mara is PERFECT PERFECT IDEAL -- but they make more sense than alfie to me.)

re: fabian, his capture is easily the best scene of all the captures, despite the fact that it makes me physically ill (honestly because it makes me physically ill lol), and that's because it's founded in previous behavior (senet arc is basically the blueprint for the sinner arc in many, many ways) and exceptionally tragic to see as a result because you like him, but he's been off the rails lately. the thing is, i love him being messy, but i hate the permanence of the consequences, like all you need to do is have one (frankly deeply semantic) slipup of character, and boom, you're evil forever unless your bestie can clean up your mess. it's good writing, but the message it sends is nasty, which like i feel like i've probably said a million times in this post, is sort of the whole deal with the sinners.

tl;dr: the sinner arc is powerful emotionally, and i enjoy picking apart the effects it would have on the characters in fanfic (so i'm not full on pro-revisionism lol), but it's just too cynical for me to vibe with and enjoy watching. i love the rest of the show for how earnest and unwavering it is in its belief in people, so seeing it take that turn for the intensely cynical gut punch right at the end -- even if everything works out in the end -- will always be somewhat off-putting to me. i feel like there's more i want to say to further explain that, but i've already spun my wheels enough here, so i'll save it for a follow-up once i've finally cracked and done that deep-dive rewatch, lol.

tysm for asking!! <3

[janiedean]

Why do you think the SW fandom is so knee-deep in SJ Calvinism? Because I understand wanting representation or being upset because a movie didn’t fulfill your expectations, but the “if you don’t ship X you’re racist” “if you don’t stan Y you’re bigoted” and the harassment over a disappointing movie is surprising just because of how pervasive it is. I was trying to find some St*rmpilot blogs to follow and the amount of hate is Yikes, especially the hate for Rose and the stans of a Certain Ship

eeeeeeh I think it’s because ep. 7 came out at the height of the... well, reaping the seeds the social justice calvinism had sown since 2014 so to speak? I mean, SW is hardly the one fandom where it happened (*cough* voltron and SU *cough*) but as SW is way broader in audience than those other shows that certainly didn’t help, but like, if you think on it, since 2013-ish (but I think before as well, I mean, I’ve been here since 2011 and already when I got here I felt like something was going very wrong when it came to politics-in-fandom-attitude), basically people on tumblr have progressively, when it came to fandoms:

pushed the idea that you have to over-analyze everything you consume through political lens;

pushed the idea that what you like and how you like it also has to be pushed through political lens and what you like says things about who you are as a person or your political leanings;

pushed the idea that if you care for something *problematic* just because you like it you’re excusing it;

pushed the idea that if you were problematic once you can’t ever not be problematic, you can’t change your mind and you can’t learn also because ‘it’s not my job to educate you’ so people either learn themselves or idek what but again, calvinism.

now obviously those politics are tumblr-politics which are also US centric like woah and are also high-school petty like woah, and since more or less then people have:

continuously other-ed lgbt people from *straight*/heterosexual people pushing a narrative where straight = bad and therefore putting it before anything automatically makes it a valid insult which added to the above means that if you ship het you’re already problematic regardless of whether you’re straight or not (and if you are.. lol);

pushed the performative feminism of Doom TM that says men and women should be equal but is like, an excuse to shit on men and on women who like men (see the rampant biphobia around and the whole ‘straight girls are so stupid if they’re into men they should try women’ discourse);

pushed the US terminology when it comes to the POC discourse, in the sense that everything works on the US-centered context where white people = white anglosaxon protestant, poc = everything else without realizing that in the rest of the world white does not equal wasp, that poc = black people only in most of europe (and no one who’s actually black or not white who lives in africa or asia and so on would describe themselves as poc because why the hell would you when your skin color/ethinicity is the norm where you live?), which also goes with the whole white passing debate which where I live would not exist but in that context is a mess because again, oscar i*saac is schroedinger’s poc (as in, he’s poc automatically for american standards because he’s latin-american but like he has the same skin tone as my mother and my mother in italy is white same as 90% of us, which means endless confusion) and assumed that all of us have to accept that terminology/context regardless of whether it’s valid in our countries;

kept on progressively putting minorities against each other in an endless loop of WHO HAS IT WORST/oppression olympics;

kept on progressively split hairs on issues that aren’t exactly, like, that important if there’s more urgent stuff to deal with because 90% of the activism here is performative;

made the 180° turn for which headcanons and shit are seen as, like, doing representation instead of, you know, supporting what rep is there never mind when people decide *one* ship is the right one and if another is canonized and it’s rep it gets thoroughly ignored;

pushed on a mindset for which if something isn’t perfect at the get-go then it’s canceled.

and so on.

like, all of that shit has been continuously not criticized because criticizing it especially if you don’t belong to a minority means that you’re out of line/discussing things that don’t concern you, but if you’re a minority and you criticize it then it’s suddenly YOU BETRAYED OUR CAUSE *INSERT SLUR HERE ABOUT PANDERING TO THE MAJORITY*, and the result exploded in toxic af fandoms, but like... if you look at the issues of the SW sequel trilogy fandom it’s all of that in a nutshell because:

k/ylo ren is automatically the worst because he’s white (horrible), a man (even worse), not canonically attractive (I didn’t touch on that topic bc I’m honestly not up for it mentally but lmao that counts too) and presumably heterosexual (or well, no one said he’s not but you know, since he’s a white dude on the bad side [supposedly] then we don’t give him the benefit of the doubt that he might be bi), so if you like ky/lo ren or relate to him you’re automatically problematic;

shipping re/ylo because automatically problematic because it’s a *straight* (evil) ship made of two white people (when there’s options to ship them both with people that aren’t white, so IT’S RACIST), they have an age gap (BAD BECAUSE POWER IMBALANCE) and it’s enemies to lovers, so it’s a context where people who don’t conceive redemption or that people can become better are basically crying problematic all the time, and the fact that people decided it’s *abusive* when it has like nothing that can equate it to a really abusive relationship says all;

ky/lux being the most popular slash ship immediately means that it’s the fault of the horrible straight (white) women fetishizing the (white) men on the dark side (when it’s most likely because for a while ky/lux was literally the only side of that fandom where people were chill/there wasn’t wank every other moment);

st/ormpilot has been declared The Right Ship because it’s two non-white men and it’s not straight which automatically turns into what I said before about hating other ships that would be rep anyway and feeds into the lowkey oppression olympics racism, because like if finn/rose becomes canon it’s still a mixed/biracial ship because he’s black and she’s asian....... except that it’s not the right ship for people who decided that finn has to be either with rey or poe (and guess what rey is white and poe is... schroedinger’s poc because oscar isaac in europe wouldn’t pass for *poc*), which to me has stank of lowkey racism since tlj came out because sorry but if ‘finn deserves better than rose’ or ‘finn should be with rey because if he doesn’t get rey then it’s unfair’ and the various other bullshit I read on the topic basically says that the white woman is *worthier* than the asian woman or that rose is a downgrade from rey which is fucking bullshit, rose isn’t even a bad character all the contrary. and that’s for the het side of it, but like then it’s not as good as stormpilot because it’s a straight ship (NOOOO THEY MADE FINN STRAIGHT/THEY’RE NOT MAKING THEM GAY THIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT = stuff I legit saw on the tag) and ngl I’m 100% sure that the fact that daisy is Standard Attractive and kelly marie t/ran is lovely but doesn't conform to the usual beauty standard western-viewers apply on asian women did play a role in there, but: what did I say before? the slash ship is automatically better than the het ship never mind that they’re both biracial and rose is actually a rep (asian girls who don’t adhere to stereotypical body shapes - and like, the rep for all body types and shapes should be valid for all women, not just white) that isn’t exactly popular especially in mainstream cinema, so people should be happy.... but since rose is Not A Dude and Not Rey and Not The Right Kind Of Representation For That Crowd, automatically rose is a shit character and deserves to be viciously hated on. and this is a thing done by people who most likely then turn on the other side and talk shit about horrible straight women who hate the only female character for getting in the way of their slash ship without realizing that their rose hate is exactly that. and of course since sto/rmpilot is the two good guys, if you ship that then you also have to hate re/ylo because how can you, a person who ships The Good Ship On The Light Side, support such a problematic enemies to lovers thing? yeah, right, hahaha.

this also tbqh also pairs up with how on tumblr people only recognize mental health issues/abuse victims when the narrative suits them - like, being a bad victim automatically means you lose sympathy and mental health issues are only valid if you aren’t ***privileged*** otherwise why would you have them, which shows transparently in how a lot of people absolutely deny that ky/lo ren is a) an abuse victim, b) obviously mentally ill however it is that he deals with it, but no, he has to be The Most Horrible In Existence Because Otherwise We Should Have Empathy For A Bad Guy Who Also Might Get Redeemed And Redemption Is Not Happening Ever Because Bad People Don’t Deserve it.

like, all of the issues sw sequel trilogy has when it comes to the fandom are direct consequences of the nonsensical social justice calvinism climate on tumblr dot com that no one took care to put a stop to since 2013 and of its ridiculous oppression olympics and pitting people against each other and that was my take. cheers.

(ps: I also ship sto/rmpilot like woah and it’s my otp but there’s a reason why I unfollowed most SP blogs I followed and why I don’t go into the tag anymore - I’m not here for the anti-rose racism dressed up as performative wokeness, I’m not here to get lectured about as a white person I fetishize poc gay men if I ship it - yes I read that too - and I’m not here to read a bunch of meta about how re/ylo is a bad ship and blah blah blah, so yeah. I feel you.) (pps: ky/lo ren isn’t even my favorite character and I care relatively but gdi the way the fandom approaches him is honestly mindboggling in that sense, and I don’t mean people who actually dislike him because fair reasons, I mean people who can’t recognize his abuse victim status and the precarious status of his mental health. like, not all abuse victims and mentally ill people are the right victim or come from the right background and you can be cool motive still murder and still recognize that he’s like that because he has issues, not because he was drawn that way. /bye)