#implying my intended audience is exclusively white

[thebestofoneshots]

I’m not trying to be rude because it really isn’t just you (which is sad) but normalize saying “white-coded” reader please, it’s very tiring to read a fic then seeing something like “you blushed” “your cheeks turned pink”, if your intended is white people then clarify that please.

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I appreciate your honesty and the opportunity to reflect on how my writing may unintentionally exclude certain readers.

Your point about "white-coded" language in fiction is valid, and it's something I've been reflecting on recently. While I may not have initially considered the implications of phrases like "your cheeks turned pink," I did read a post about it a few weeks past and now I think twice about the way I write things since they can inadvertently reinforce a narrow representation of beauty and emotion.

Lately, I've tried to move into things like "blood rushed to your cheeks" and, "you felt the skin of your face warm", and while in the past I might have written, "your cheeks turned pink" I have actively tried to avoid it now.

Having said that, the example that you provide, "you blushed" did jump at me a little since I have never considered blushing as an exclusively white reaction. I am not white, and I blush, so I decided to do a bit of research, since, perhaps, my idea of blushing has been wrong all along.

According to Felix I D Konotey-Ahulu (a consultant physician in General Medicine & Tropical Medicine at Cromwell Hospital in London) "blushing is far more than a mere cutaneous phenomenon" (Ahulu, 2004). He states that "not being able to ‘see’ the rush of blood does not mean it has not happened" (ibidem).

Now he does speak of a "white definition of blushing", that being that your cheeks turn pink and/or red, but blushing, really blushing, is not inherently related to the colour changes of your skin, but rather to the feeling it evokes: the embarrassment, the shame, etc. At least that's how I've always seen it.

If white-centricness has turned it into something that it isn't, the rest us shouldn't be feeling as though we cannot blush because our skin isn't pale enough to let it be evident, because then, in any case, we're just letting the white appropriation to topple over the meaning behind words.

Blushing is not exclusive to white people, and it never has been.

Implying that it is, is just falling into the same idea of otherness that whiteness has imposed over years of colonization, but we ARE all humans and WE ALL feel fundamentally the same emotions. Blushing is a reflection of emotion more than a physical (discernable or not) reaction.

I'm not saying I have never written "your cheeks turn pink," I have, and I think it's more to do with the media that I've consumed than with me wanting to exclude any skin tone from my texts, as you mentioned, I am not the only one to write like this, and it's because we are all reading the same books and unfortunately, those actually ARE very white-centric. Now it is not an excuse and I certainly should and WILL be more careful with the way I word things, but I'm STILL learning how to write.

I apologize if my writing has made you feel excluded or overlooked. That was never my intention, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to rethink my approach to things.

Moving forward, I will be even more mindful of the language I use and strive to create a more inclusive experience for all readers. Your feedback is invaluable in helping me grow as a writer, and I thank you for bringing this important issue to my attention, even if I found the manner in which you sent the comment a little confronting (and slightly upsetting), as it felt like you were making assumptions about me and my intended audience.

However, I respect your right to express your feelings and opinions, and I value the ability to have an open discussion and move forward together, even after this initial confrontation.

I'm committed to making positive changes based on your insights.

Bibliography:

Konotey Ahulu, F. (2004). Blushing in black skin. Blackwell Publishing Ltd , Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology. Retrieved in: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1473-2130.2004.00040.x

[pastshadows]

Shadows of the Past

Summary: After a year of blissful cohabitation, Astarion disappears without a trace, leaving behind a heartfelt letter explaining his departure. Determined to find him, you traverse Faerûn in search of your lost love, only to realize that some absences are meant to be permanent.

Returning to Waterdeep, you find solace in the company of Gale as you come to terms with Astarion's absence. But just as you begin to heal, Astarion reappears, begging for a second chance at love.

The question looms: can you forgive his abandonment and trust him once more? As you grapple with your emotions and trauma, a sinister force lurks in the shadows, targeting you for unknown reasons.

With danger closing in, you must navigate the treacherous waters of trust, love, and betrayal to uncover the truth behind the mysterious entity's motives. Will you be able to reunite with Astarion while facing the demons of your past? Can you unravel the secrets that threaten your very existence?

Setting: Post End-Game. Mostly canon compliant.

Content: Explicit 18+ - intended for mature audiences [Slow Burn].

Warnings: [Additional tags will be added, but expect mature content. Read at your own risk.}

Spoilers. Mentions of in-game missable content. Violence. Implied/Attempted Sexual Assault [Chapter 7]. Past Trauma. Murder. Death. Longing. Sexual themes. Smut. Blood drinking. Angst. Innuendos. High use of sarcasm. Completely fabricated camp interactions.

Additional Notes:

Tav is named - starts in Chapter 10.

Fabricated camp events as well as mentions of in-game story events.

Tav will likely have her own backstory.

Some details of Tav's appearance are/will be mentioned.

Mentions of Tav being a High Elf Draconic Sorcerer.

I am not familiar with the rules of DnD 5e, or how they affect the world, so for story purposes, some things may be fabricated and not congruent. I will try to avoid this as much as I can.

I write, edit and proofread most of my own works (big thank you to my friends who accept my infatuation and help me), I do apologize if there are typos or Incongruent content.

Chapter 1: Abandonment

Chapter 2: Home & Heartache

Chapter 3: Escape & Evade

Chapter 4: Magic and Mischief

Chapter 5: Soaked in Desire

Chapter 6: Reminiscence

Chapter 7: Complications Abound

Chapter 8: Flight

Chapter 9: Midnight Masquerade

Chapter 10: Eclipsing Shadows

Chapter 11: Fate's Folly

Chapter 12: Growth

Chapter 13: Imprisonment

Chapter 14: Peril

Chapter 15: Home

Chapter 16: Ruins

Chapter 17: Let Me Forget

Chapter 18: Who Are You?

Chapter 19: I Will Find You.

Chapter 20: A Plea for Tomorrow

Chapter 21: Scars Shine White in the Light

AO3: Crossposted

If you're interested, I also write a fanfic for Ascended Astarion x Spawn Tav - Fangs and Fractured Hearts

There is also an Evil Durge x AA fic exclusively under my A03 called "Lie to Me." They are a chaotic power couple.

[cat-brodsky]

The Secret History: Abridged (part 1)

Fair use disclaimer: The following text is intended as a parody and literary commentary of the published book “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt. Some direct quotations from the book, constituting a very low percentage of the original, have been integrated in the parodic text where appropriate. The author of this text neither profits nor intends to profit from it.

Dramatis personae

Richard Papen, the narrator, a perpetually starry-eyed youth with all the agency of the proverbial sexy lamp

Julian Morrow (played by King Julian of Madagaskar), a Greek professor who doesn’t actually teach

         The Toffs, as viewed through Richard’s rose-tinted glasses:

Henry Winter, a young genius, deeply devoted to Julian

Bunny Corcoran, an uncouth older student with a heart of gold deep inside

Francis Abernathy, a refined yet sensitive youth

Charles Macaulay, a young man who sometimes has a bit too much to drink

Camilla Macaulay, an exquisite beauty, the only girl in the clique

Judy Poovey, the only character in the book with both brains and heart

Georges “I told you so” Laforgue

the greek chorus (played by a person in a floral bedsheet toga with two sockpuppets)

The Fans, seated in the front row of the audience

The farmer, brutally murdered by four rich kids on a drug trip

     Chapter 1, in which Richard joins a cult (and the greek chorus monologues)

Richard: My name is Richard Pipen and I like pretty things. Maybe that��s cause my childhood was real poor and real awful.

Richard: I even picked Hampden College cause it looked pretty in the recruitment brochure. I have no friends, I failed pre-med, and the only thing I’m okay at is Greek language. …Guess I’ll take Greek.

Georges (the French teacher): Monsieur, I’m afraid zat will be a problem. You see, ze Greek teacher is incredibly… selective about his students. And by selective, I mean on a personal level.

Richard: oh, so he’s gay.

Georges: Non! He isolates his students, he grooms them to have ze same views as himself, and ze only reason ze school puts up with him is because he refuses his salary!

Richard: I dunno, my dad beat me before and after dinner, so this sounds perfectly healthy to me. Guess I’ll go knock on his door.

    Richard: knocks on Julian’s door …Please let me study Greek.

Julian: Why, that’s rather quaint of you, young man, but I’m afraid my class is filled to the brim. Only got space for five people, you see. Very rigorous, that. Anyway, excuse me, I have a princess to tutor. Istrami royalty, though I don’t assume you would know. pauper

Richard: But-

door slam

    Henry and the Four Toffs: stroll the campus, looking pretty

Richard: drools

But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing past at the wheel of a little white car, with Julian in the passenger’s seat; Bunny leaning out of an upstairs window to yell something at the twins on the lawn below. Slowly, more information came my way. Francis Abernathy was from Boston and, from most accounts, quite wealthy. Henry, too, was said to be wealthy; what’s more, he was a linguistic genius. He spoke a number of languages, ancient and modern, and had published a translation of Anacreon, with commentary, when he was only eighteen. The twins had an apartment off campus, and were from somewhere down south. And Bunny Corcoran had a habit of playing John Philip Sousa march tunes in his room, at full volume, late at night.

Not to imply that I was overly preoccupied with any of this.

the greek chorus: yeah riiight

Richard: totally not eavesdropping on The Four Toffs studying Greek

Bunny: Ablative!

Charles: That’s Latin, you dumb-

Richard: Excuse me? I’m sorry, but would the locative case do?

Bunny: Thanks, man, you helped a lot. Wish you were in our class.

awkward silence

Henry, appearing out of nowhere: Ah, yes, the archaic locative. Are you a Homeric scholar?

Richard: …I like Homer.

Henry: Oh, you “like” Homer? Name all the 1,186 ships in the Catalogue.

Henry: fake fans smh

    Richard: All my life, I’ve dealt with poor jerks, so dealing with rich jerks sounded way more appealing. I figured I’d do what worked with my old man - lie my ass off. Excuse me, Dr. Roland, I need uh two hundred dollars from my financial aid? It’s for my uh car, it’s the uh transmission.

the greek chorus: that’s 548 dollars in 2020 money. also, is everyone in this book named after a historical figure?

Richard: knocks on Julian’s door again, having bought one hundred [274] dollars’ worth of expensive clothes

Julian: Oh my, and to think I mistook you for a peasant the first time. Come in, young man - any relation to French kings? Are you from California? What do you do in California?

Richard: Oh, you know… money, orange groves, money, ennui and more money - wow, he’s actually buying it.

Julian: Even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. cough that’s why I only tutor rich and classy students. cough I’m afraid my students are never very interesting to me because I always know exactly what they’re going to do.

the greek chorus: fly, you fool

Richard: listens with stars in his eyes

Julian: Young man, I will take you on as a student, but you must take me on as your academic counselor, drop all your classes and pick up the ones I tell you to. Most of them are going to be with me - you know, a great diversity of teachers is harmful for the young mind.

Richard: Oh wow, that sounds elite and exclusive and totally not like a weird cult.

    Georges “The Voice of Reason” Laforgue: Mon Dieu, are you serious? Do you understand how isolated you’ll be from ze rest of ze college? What if you have a disagreement? What if he is unfair to you? And this man is so elitist - why, that’s ze first time he’s accepted a student on financial aid! …Does he know you’re on financial aid?

Richard: I’m not gonna tell him.

the greek chorus: annnd he switches majors

    Francis: Cubitum eamus?

Richard: what? who?

the greek chorus: did he just say “Wanna fu-”

The Fans: oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohh!

Bunny: Get a load of this guy. Henry actually bought himself a Montblanc pen just cause Julian loves them. And he used to say they were ugly. What was it, three hundred [822] bucks?

Henry: You “studied” Greek? Recite every single Greek poem.

Henry: fake fans smh. Now I’ll speak Latin and flex on you some more.

Bunny: Don’t be a prick, Henry.

Julian, coming in fashionably late:

He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one – especially after so many years – without losing a good deal in the translation.

the greek chorus: do you know what it means when someone talks big and beautiful and yet you can’t remember the talking points? means they’re talking nonsense

Julian: Though after all your Xenophon and Thucydides I dare say there are not many young people better versed in military tactics. Because, as you know, ancient Greek battle tactics are still valid in our modern age! Do you feel sufficiently special and superior, my lab m- lovely students?

Henry: The six of us could conquer Hampden town!

the greek chorus: this is new england, you’d get shot like deer

Richard, stars in his eyes: Awwwww he said six of us!

Camilla: recites from Aganemnnon

How quiet he sinks now - his soul starts from his mouth:

with one jerked gulp he brings up his own blood,

spatters me dark with the scarlet dew in his breath.

And that dew falls on me as the gods’ spring rains

fall and bless harvest back to the long-parched earth.

Julian: Now, why is this so beautiful?

the greek chorus: cause there’s no mention of the dying king voiding his bowels

Francis: It’s the meter - iambic pentameter.

The Greek Chorus: In a way, the discussion that follows is some pretty hefty foreshadowing. The subject is horrible - a dying man gurgling, choking on blood, spits it out all over his killer - but the way it’s described is poetic and makes the reader enamored with the act of murder.

This is exactly what Tartt does later on.

Five rich, entitled young people have a drug-fueled orgy, trespass, and beat an innocent farmer to death. But call an orgy a bacchanal, and it’s suddenly classy and beautiful.

Henry: Death is the mother of beauty.

The Fans: oooooooooooohhh!

Julian: And what is beauty?

Henry: Terror.

The Fans: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHH!

the greek chorus: this toxic belief is so not gonna backfire

“Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks or the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?”

I looked around the table at the six faces. To modern tastes they were somewhat chilling. I imagine any other teacher would’ve been on the phone to Psychological Counseling in about five minutes had he heard what Henry said about arming the Greek class and marching into Hampden town.

the greek chorus: richard, you idiot sandwich

Julian: The Romans’ genius and fatal flaw was their obsession with order! The Greeks knew not to deny the irrational! This is why Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly – how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them-

The Greek Chorus: The Romans valued loyalty to the state, which meant practicing the state religion. Local beliefs were okay as long as they didn’t contradict that.

Christians placed their god, monotheistic God, above the emperor. The First Commandment forbids the worship of other gods, and this includes refusing to take part in feasts, to offer incense to the emperor - this was disloyalty to the Empire. Judaism, it seems, got a pass on the same because of the ancient origin of the religion.

Furthermore, the persecution of Christianity was sporadic until Decius’ decree mandating participation in public sacrifices, and even then this edict was not universally obeyed - the Empire was far too large and too diverse. Not to mention, a lot of the accounts of persecution and martyrdom were invented by Christian historians.

Julian is full of it, and a five minute Google search can tell you as much.

Richard: wow, #deep

Julian: …And that’s why Bacchanals are good fun for the whole family!

    Chapter 2, in which Bunny invites Richard to dinner (and then nothing happens)

Judy: So you’re hanging out with those posh guys now?

Richard: What if I am

Judy: I don’t know, they’re bad news. Like, I was at a party, everyone was slam dancing, and this girl was walking across the dance floor for some reason and got mad when I slammed into her. And like I threw a beer at her, it was that kind of night, and this Henry guy and her brother Charles came to yell at me? And my friend Spike saw that and came to defend me, and then Henry and Charles beat Spike to a pulp. Those people are crazy.

Richard, stars in his eyes: Gee whiz, Henry is badass.

Judy: Aren’t you hot in this tweed jacket? Like, here, you can have another one for free if you like it.

    Bunny: Nice jacket, dude

Richard: Thanks, it’s a family relic

Bunny: Anyway, why are there so many [slur omitted] working in restaurants? Oh man, I remember when we pulled a dine and dash here, all in good fun, and then Dad took us here for drinks and it’s a good thing he was so soused he didn’t notice the waiter putting it all on his bill.

the greek chorus: boy, it sure is a good thing the cops don’t get called on rich people

Bunny: And Henry’s so damn smart, you know? He was in a bad car accident, had to stay in bed reading all those old books, and now he’s really into it and he speaks seven to eight languages, even reads them hieroglyphics.

Richard: well, Bunny’s kind of an ass but he’s not an ass to me, sounds good

Bunny: Whoops, forgot my wallet.

Richard: …never mind

the greek chorus: the bill is, quote, two hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-nine cents [786 dollars]. without the tip. twenty percent more is about tree fiddy [950 dollars]

Bunny: …I’ll call Henry. He’ll be chuffed to bail us out.

Henry: is not chuffed Bunny freeloads off people all the time.

Richard: wow that’s… imagine doing that haha

    Richard: totally not eavesdropping again

Henry: Should I do what is necessary?

Julian: You should only, ever, do what is necessary.

the greek chorus: this will definitely not be taken at face value

    if richard had a tweeter

“Reading The Great Gatsby. #relatable #billionaire-life”

“Attended a party, mingled with the hoi polloi. Plebs. How I long to be elsewhere.”

    Camilla: Come to the country house with us

Richard: totally not freeloading

    if the secret history was a movie

Happy times montage. Classical music plays over the country house; it is revealed that Charles, quite drunk but still composed, is playing the piano. Henry and Camilla are in a rowboat together, with Henry monologuing, unheard to the viewers, as she listens with rapt wonder. Bunny is pouring champaigne from a teapot. Occasional moments of foreshadowing in between the happy times - a pot of laurel leaves boiling on the stove, Richard wandering the house in the middle of the night and finding that everyone is gone - and back to happy times, playing cricket, fancy dinners with Julian. Everything looks pretty, classy, and expensive.

    Chapter 3, in which Richard is more an idiot than usual

The Five Toffs: leave for the winter holidays

Richard: I need a place to stay. Henry’s place is empty, I could ask my other friends to sublet to me, or split the bills with somebody… Nah, there’s this hippie who lets you live for free in his warehouse. I’m in.

The warehouse: literally has a hole in the roof

The Hippie: It’s all a metaphor, man. The situation is obviously dysfunctional, but Richie boy just assumes that it’s normal and he’s gonna be fine. Deep, man.

Richard: I’m sure I’ll be fine. gets pneumonia

Henry: Good thing I came back early, or you’d be dead.

Richard: Y-you saved my life, man. …Can you please bring me a mag to read?

Henry: …You must be raving. Here, I brought you a Pharmacology Update from the lounge.

    Bunny: comes back

Henry: is avoiding him

the greek chorus: that’s all, really

    Chapter 4, in which something finally happens

Bunny: Richard, man, Henry is not who he pretends to be. Be careful.

Richard: You mean, he’s gay? That can’t be right. My gaydar says it’s Francis; Henry’s straight. And I’m not gay, but if I was, Bunny wouldn’t be attractive. I mean, he’s handsome, but he’s rough trade, you know what I mean. Not my type.

    Richard: Oh no, I left my book in Henry’s apartment. I’ll have to find it there. …Weird, why does he have a flight to Argentina reserved? And why were the four of them, minus Bunny, absent from classes?

cheesecake in the fridge: please don’t steal me, I’m on financial aid

Bunny: Mm, too lemony but tastes better flavored with tears.

Richard: Haha, screw the poor

Bunny: Man, Henry’s a bit of a Jew. I like him tho.

    Bunny: keeps making weird crime-and-punishment jokes before class

Richard: Good old Bunny, such a jester.

The Toffs: tell a weirdly rehearsed story about their absence

Julian: notices absolutely nothing

    Henry: Don’t you want to know about our trip to Argentina? By which I mean, I know you snooped.

Richard: Man, why the secrecy? It’s not like you murdered someone.

Henry: Yeah, about that...

flashback time

Henry: The four of us must flee to Argentina. But there’s no way I can get my hands on more than thirty thousand [80,418 dollars]. Francis, you have a trust, right?

Francis: Yeah, I can withdraw one hundred and fifty thousand [402,090] a year. ...Bad news, my mum cleared it out.

The Toffs, in unison: What? Do you mean we’d have to live like the poor? Or worse, resort to menial labor? That is inconceivable.

the greek chorus: and they didn’t go to argentina.

Henry: We had but a meager five thousand [13,403 dollars] between us. Anyway, why did you cover up for us?

Richard:

Henry: So yeah we decided to take drugs, party, and fornicate, like everybody else in this college does. Except we’re rich and smart and we’re calling it a bacchanal, because it’s classier that way.

Henry: Julian knew and approved, by the way, but you’re not gonna learn this until chapter five.

Henry: And Bunny just wasn’t taking our posh rave seriously. I caught him eating when he was supposed to be fasting. Barbarian.

Henry: Anyway, when we all came down from our trip, we were drenched in blood and there was a corpse of a middle-aged middle-class man with his neck broken and his brains splattered and a huge gash in his stomach. And worse, he was wearing an ugly plaid shirt.

Henry: I haven’t been so upset since I hit a deer with my car. Oh, hi, Francis.

    Chapter 5, in which we forget about the farmer

Francis: oh no did you just tell him

Henry: Oh yes I did.

Richard, still starry-eyed: Why didn’t you call the police?

Henry: Yeah, right. We’re too rich to be judged by poor people.

Francis: It was just an accident, a little harmless fun.

Henry: Imagine being tried for my life by a Vermont circuit-court judge and a jury box full of telephone operators.

Francis: They’d just say that we are a bunch of rich entitled kids who got high and trespassed on private land and tore an innocent man to pieces.

the greek chorus: THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT YOU DID

Henry: If Bunny snitches, we’re dragging him in too. He has no alibi. Can’t prove he wasn’t with us. He saw us dressed in bedsheets and covered in gore and got upset for no reason at all. Dropped a pint of ice-cream on my antique rug. Honestly, that was the last straw.

Henry: I paid for our trip together in Italy to shut him up, but then he found my diary - in which I happened to write a poem about our Bacchanal in iambic pentameter. I didn’t think the rube could even read. I slapped him rather hard, and he took offense to that. And now we have no choice but keep letting him mooch off us!

Francis: It's a terrible thing, what we did. I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It's a shame. I feel bad about it.

Henry: But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it.

Francis: snorts No, not that bad.

Henry: So... wanna play cards?

    the greek chorus: here comes a turning point in the story. will richard do the moral thing, will he turn his friends in?

the greek chorus: yeah, right

    The Toffs: Time for a road trip!

Richard: It’s odd how little power the dead farmer exercised over an imagination as morbid and hysterical as my own. Oh well, nobody cares about poor people.

Julian: In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true. A poor man who wishes to rise above his station is only making himself needlessly miserable. And the wise poor have always known this, the same as do the wise rich.

Bunny: You don't care about a goddamn thing, do you? Not a thing but your own self, you and all the rest of them!

the greek chorus: edmund corcoran, the bigot, the idiot of the group - the only one who cares about the murder

  Richard: And now Bunny’s acting like a huge ass to me and to my friends. Gee, that’s no fun at all.

Richard: He’s nagging Charles about him being a drunk, Francis about him being gay, and me about being poor! And Camilla about being a girl, but women are inherently inferior in Greek language, nothing personal. And he’s implying the twins sleep together!

the greek chorus: all of these are true

    Henry: I know! I shall poison my traitorous friend with death cap mushrooms mixed in with fun trip mushrooms. The ancient Arabic treatises on poisons must still be relevant.

the greek chorus: textbook high Intelligence low Wisdom

Henry: Richard, my friend, weren’t you in pre-med?

Richard: Uhh I guess, let me just... add the number of mushrooms, carry the one - jeez, that’s some advanced calculus...You know, the concentrations in chemistry are measured in moles, so we have catch a mole first...

Henry: I tested it on two dogs. Sadly, one lived.

Richard: Oh, Henry, you’re such a rascal. First a farmer, now a dog? Anyway,   those mushrooms are just too funny-shaped. It’s just too hard.

Henry: Why don’t you weigh - you know what, nevermind, I can see I’m dealing with a genius.

    Julian: I’m so concerned for young Edmund! He’s such a lovely and smart boy...

Richard: yeah, right - I mean, bright. Very bright.

Julian: I fear he may be about to convert to Christianity! Not even Catholicism, but something plebian. He keeps asking me about sin and forgiveness - how very... not Greek of him.

    Bunny, piss drunk in the middle of the night: Richard, man, I can’t take it, I just have to confess - they killed a man! Tore him to pieces!

Richard: Guys, this is bad, Bunny just told me.

Henry: Welp, got no choice but to kill him. He’s acting so irrational.

Richard: Yeah, and he’s been real racist and bigoted lately -

Charles: I know, right? Why can’t he be more like us and hate on poor, classless people instead?

Henry: re-rolls wisdom We’ll push him into the ravine in the forest he conveniently loves hiking in. Piece of cake.

     Judy: Rich, there’s gonna be a big party, come have fun!

Henry: Who’d have known there would be a party? Aside from, I mean, everyone who doesn’t live in their own Greek bubble. Oh well, guess I’ll dig for ferns instead.

Bunny: Hey, guys, whatcha doing?

Henry: Oh, you know... killing time. Now, who wants to see a flying rabbit?

[brotheralyosha]

do you have any specific anti rupi kaur poetry opinions you wish to share? i just ask because I can't stand her poetry and it drives me crazy

Oh dear lord anon, I’ve kept quiet on my views of Rupi Kaur’s poetry for years because I wanted to avoid The Discourse - thank you for finally giving me an excuse!

Honestly, the best summation of my feelings on Rupi Kaur is in two very excellent articles. They’re both worth reading in their entirety, but I’ve included my favorite sections below.

No Filter, by Soraya Roberts

What is perhaps as consistent as the badness of Instapoetry—there are rare exceptions, Shire (who, it must be said, is more a Tumblr and Twitter poet, her Instagram being primarily made up of images and video) being one—is the general unwillingness to speak openly of its badness. Admirers focus on its genuine feeling, its emotional truth. Critics shrug it off, claiming it’s just not their thing. Which is basically how it was designed: Instagram was developed out of a project titled “Send the Sunshine” at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, not exactly a project intended to accommodate criticism. Though critical trepidation is a common consequence of the slippery definition of art—we once believed readymades sucked, too—part of this reluctance is also to do with the genre appealing predominantly to young women and haven’t young women been policed enough? Rupi Kaur herself wields this tack as a way to deflect excoriation, equating the criticism of her work to the criticism of marginalized demographics. Of the label “Instagram poet,” she told PBS, “A lot of the readers are young women who are experiencing really real things, and they’re not able to talk about it with maybe family or other friends, and so they go to this type of poetry to sort of feel understood and to have these conversations. And so, when you use that term, you invalidate this space that they use to heal and to feel closer to one another.” You also invalidate women of color as Kaur frames herself within a landscape of both female and immigrant oppression, a context in which judgment is tantamount to muting the disenfranchised. To the literary world, she has pronounced, “This is actually not for you. This is for that, like, seventeen-year-old brown woman in Brampton who is not even thinking about that space, who is just trying to live, survive, get through her day.” It is a savvy move, invalidating all manner of criticism before it has even been formulated.

But here it is: Her poetry, and much of Instapoetry, is poor. This poetry is not poor because it is genuine, it is poor because that is all it is. To do more than that, regardless of talent, requires time, and, by its very definition, Instapoetry has none. Ezra Pound’s epic collection of poems The Cantos took decades to complete. Maya Angelou has said she has found poetry the most challenging of all her professions: “When I come close to saying what I want to, I’m over the moon. Even if it’s just six lines, I pull out the champagne. But until then, my goodness, those lines worry me like a mosquito in the ear.” Even Rimbaud, who was already composing his best work in adolescence, conceded in his “Letter of the Seer,” “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” Time is what is required to think, the kind of thinking that allows the poet to imbue each individual word with a world of meaning. Harold Bloom described canonical writing as that which demands rereading, William Empson that it needs to work for readers with divergent opinions, provoking a variety of responses and interpretations. All of this implies a richness, a complexity, a variety of strata. The majority of Instapoetry has none of this. It is almost exclusively a banal vessel of self-care, equivalent to an affirmation, designed for young women of a certain privileged position and disposition, one that is entirely self-absorbed. The genre’s batheticisms remove specificity, to avoid alienation, supplanting them with the sort of platitude you find on a department store tea towel. Because this is what Instapoetry is—it is not art, it is a good to be sold, or, less, regrammed. Its value is quantity not quality.

The Problem with Rupi Kaur’s Poetry, by Chiara Giovanni

While more female South Asian voices are indeed needed in mainstream culture and media, there is something deeply uncomfortable about the self-appointed spokesperson of South Asian womanhood being a privileged young woman from the West who unproblematically claims the experience of the colonized subject as her own, and profits from her invocation of generational trauma. There is no shame in acknowledging the many differences between Kaur’s experience of the world in 2017 and that of a woman living directly under colonial rule in the early 20th century. For example: neither is any more “authentically” South Asian. But it is disingenuous to collect a variety of traumatic narratives and present them to the West as a kind of feminist ethnography under the mantle of confession, while only vaguely acknowledging those whose stories inspired the poetry.

…

Kaur’s strategic appeals to two different markets also inform the composition of her collection and her social media presence. While milk and honey contains several poems that, through coded words like “dishonor,” obliquely refer to Kaur’s cultural upbringing, that’s about as explicit as it gets: The poems are vague enough to provide identifiable prompts for readers from a variety of different cultural environments, including — in many cases — white Western readers. Thus the collection remains relatable — and, crucially, marketable — to a wider audience, while still retaining an element of culturally informed authenticity that forms much of Kaur’s brand. The few poems that specifically address race are positioned facing each other, a brief interlude in a collection that is otherwise devoid of racial politics, and once again addresses a white, Western audience in their appeal for recognition of South Asian beauty and resilience.

…

Thanks to this social media strategy of sharing pieces with little to no context, Kaur is able to target two demographics: white Westerners who might be disinclined to buy books by minority writers, and her loyal grassroots fan base that includes a large contingent of young people of color across the world. She is thus able to maintain her brand of authenticity and relatability, but in different ways for different groups; to her Western metropolitan audience, she is “the patron saint of millennial heartbreak,” while to her marginal readers she is a representation of their desire for diversity in the literary world, despite rarely touching upon race in her work. This is not to reinforce the often-damaging expectation that writers of color must write only about racism in order to be successful, only that Kaur claims to be documenting a specifically South Asian experience that never materializes.

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

on blake and running away

this post will be just me rambling about some tension i’ve noticed in the show for the longest time, yeah? i'm not trying to like, take people’s favorite characters away from them or whatever, but it’s me trying to come to terms with the fact that “running away” seems to be a very common theme for WBY... and for BY, it’s handled a bit oddly.

adam is mentioned as a matter of course, but i don’t really look at him the way you are used to--i don’t talk about the race stuff at all. i exclusively look at his abuse to Blake here; let it not be said that i’m so hung up on the race stuff that i ignore this part of his character. but if talk about abuse triggers you, you may not want to read this--it doesn’t really talk about personal experience at all and it’s not graphic, but this is a deeply personal Topic so i will warn you right now.

since this is long (no, really, it’s long as hell because it takes some explaining, and it’s more me trying to wrap my head around this than coming to a conclusion), i’ll stick it under a readmore:

Hello there!

Now, let’s all get on the same page, shall we? We all know that Adam’s a slimy creep in the show, right? And that most of his words to Blake should be taken in the context of what he intends to do and comes forth from his character?

This is a pretty basic observation... the things that characters say can be safely assumed to have a purpose in some way. Like Adam saying “my dear” or “wow we finally have alone time!” or whatever crap isn’t meant to be taken at face value as romantic, right? In fact, because Adam is (supposed to be) charismatic and an emotional abuser, you should generally assume there is some ulterior motive to what he says. (If this isn’t obvious to you, see Blake telling Yang that Adam only has power because of his manipulation in the Brunswick Arc.)

Which kind of strikes me as weird because... this isn’t really in line with how the writer’s depend on Adam’s dialogue sometimes? At certain points you’re supposed to take his framing as basically true--think of when he yells “what does she even see in you?” which ... is supposed to be taken by the audience as “see, even Adam sees their relationship, in case you haven’t gotten it yet!” rather than the kind of meaningless unhinged statement an abusive, jealous controlling asshole would make,

And like, if it were limited to rare instances like this, I wouldn’t really care about it that much, I would just take the unnatural dialogue as the audience clue-ins they’re meant to be and take Adam’s talkativeness in the final fight as RT being excited that Garrett Hunter can finally do the bare minimum of voice acting. But the reason it bugs me is because Adam was previously used to outright tell us Blake’s supposed character flaw of running away and we were just... supposed to take it at face value?

So, Adam constantly taunts Yang during their volume 6 fight, reminding her of Beacon to no end. And if you know Adam’s character, you’d know that this is meant to be intimidating shit-talking to Yang and to get her to attack him. It’s not even really subtle. “You’re a coward! Just like [Blake]” etc etc etc

(The fact that it doesn’t really work at all in this fight and he fucking keeps taunting her even when it clearly doesn’t work is the reason why Adam is annoying as hell during that fight. I’m salty that I was forced to be put through his voice acting, yes, I’m allowed to be petty.)

Remember this line of dialogue from him, because it’ll be important later: “You’re a coward! Just like her!” He frames her running away as a flaw pretty consistently, and this actually lines up with her character arc:

So flashback to the earlier volumes, right? Blake’s self-identified flaw is that she “always runs away” in volume 2. In that infamous volume 3 fight, Adam says, in response to Blake’s “I’m not running!”: “You will.” And that’s what happens, and it’s supposed to fuel most of the Yang-Blake drama in subsequent volumes. 

Volume 4 has Blake outright say that the reason she ran away was because she wants her friends to hate her so they can be safe, and Sun basically tells her, “you don’t have to be alone, your friends are here.”

In volume 5, Yang reinforces that this is supposed to be a trait of Blake, and it’s also framed negatively: “she ran!” Now Weiss contextualizes this in their talk by basically saying that Blake is lonely and she ran away because she wanted to protect them, and Yang repeats the whole notion of “she doesn’t have to run! We were here for her.” In that very same volume, Blake  “now he can see what it feels like to run away” when she successfully out-organizes Adam. The parallel between Blake now having Support and Backup and Therefore She Doesn’t Need to Run Away Anymore, while Adam Lost His Influence and Therefore Must Run Away.

In the V6 ending  song “Nevermore,” Blake’s first singing part implies that her running away is a character flaw that she got over by killing Adam:

Will I be afraid (Adrienne) Nor will I run away (Casey) It's behind me (Adrienne + Casey) Freedom is finally here (Casey)

So it’s clear that the story the show wants you to take away from this is that Blake always runs away because she views herself as a burden to her friends and won’t let them help her, and she needs to open up more and be more confident in her value as a person and push people away. Her arc is about that in volume 5, where she defeats people via the Power of Friendship. She spells out her character arc to Sun in volume 5, chapter 5:

“I’m going to try and help [Ilia] the way you helped me. You showed me that sometimes you need to be there for a friend even when they don’t want you to be. I was drowning in guilt and fear, and I tried to push you away, but you didn’t give up on me. And I can’t give up on Ilia; it’s about time I saved my friends for once.”

Blake’s character arc post-season 3 revolves around being comfortable with relying on support and supporting others, and that helpfully stops her from running away and lets her face her big problems. 

This would all be all well and good if it weren’t for the fact that running away actually isn’t the bad thing that the show tries to frame it to be, if you were to judge by what actually happened in the events of the show and the actions of other characters, and this is where my big beef with Blake’s arc comes from. I’m going to argue that running away wasn’t actually a character flaw Blake had at all, and the show treating it as such is it basically siding with Adam on this particular issue.

Blake has run away 3 times in the show’s runtime thus far.

1. The first time was in the Black Trailer

2. The second time is in volume 1 when she inadvertently reveals herself as an ex-White Fang member to Weiss

3. The last time is during the epilogue to volume three when she absconds to Menagerie

All three instances were actually valid and ended up being good for Blake. (1) is her escaping an abusive relationship. (2) leads to her finding Sun and opening up to a fellow faunus for once. (3) is Blake running away back to a support system she already had--her parents, who are pretty loving and accepting of her. The fact that she ran away might be the best thing Blake did--yeah, it wasn’t perfect, Yang was hurt--but objectively, Blake reconnected with the people who love her unconditionally and she was also there to save her parents from being murdered by Adam.

To pile on to these instances, Blake’s personality is actually rather confrontational. She constantly gets in arguments with Weiss in volume 1, and in volume 2, her character arc is basically her freaking out because they weren’t doing enough about Torchwick. 

But but but--! I hear the objection to this statement--Blake in volume 2 herself said that she always runs away from her problems! Checkmate atheists!

Well, dear reader, it’s not. Self-perception isn’t necessarily always true, especially if you’ve been emotionally abused before, as Blake has been. In volume 2, Blake sees herself as a coward who runs away all the time even though this is directly contradicted by her personality and actions.

Now, who in her past might benefit from framing “running away” as a bad thing? That leaving him to “run away” to other people means she’s a coward?

If you bothered to remember the quote I told you to remember earlier, it’s Adam! Adam stands everything to gain by telling Blake that running away is Bad; stay with me, Blake, don’t run and abandon me like your parents did. This would be the most striking and lasting example of emotional abuse, directly related to Blake’s self-perception and tying into a lot of the things she does in the show.

Would be. But the show sort sides with Adam here--running away is Bad. Adam is, according to the explicit messages of RWBY, what the show wants you to believe, right in saying that Blake always runs away. 

But she doesn’t. Hell, she doesn’t even run away from him when the going gets tough, and Adam himself doesn’t even believe that Blake is a coward. Remember the first time she him saw in in volume 3? They were really far apart and Blake could have just ran, but Adam stabbed a random civvie knowing that Blake would rush in to protect him. And like clockwork, Blake indeed did attack Adam to try to prevent harm.

(And yes, Adam used the exact same trick to lure Yang into attacking him, except instead of stabbing a nondescript extra, he stabbed Blake. Connections!)

This kind of stuff partially why I’ve always been uncomfortable with the abuse backstory, because much like the racism stuff that I have a problem with, the show just... ignores the big elephant in the room. Blake already had this self-image discrepancy going on in the first 3 volumes, but it never properly gets addressed again. Like with the violent-but-not-extremist White Fang and Sienna, it gets a throwaway line to explain its absence: “Yeah, look, Adam called Yang a coward! We’ll just vaguely nod at this!” But Blake’s arc proper? There’s nothing about coming to terms with her running away or using it as a concrete in-story example of her untangling Adam’s abuse--that might actually get people uncomfortable, you see--so it slowly gets morphed into the safer and easier plotline of “see, you just need to let yourself rely on people!”

And it’s weird that it got dropped so easily because “running away” is pretty much a... not a theme, but a thing three of the four main girls have going on. Yang has abandonment issues because her mother up and ran away--in fact, the language of how Running Away is Bad and Cowardly is brought up in the talk-ju-jitsu scene with Raven. 

This is probably the easiest connection in the world to make--Raven and Blake both ran away, but as far as Yang is concerned, it’s okay with Blake because... “she came back,” which... uh??? uhhhh???? It uncritically accepts that Running Away is a Bad Thing--it’s the coming back part (which wasn’t even an intentional thing on Blake’s end; she didn’t even know RWBY would be there) that “redeems” Blake’s sin--see Yang’s “you came back!” and Weiss’s “she will [come back.]”

Which... is actually kind of weird in light of how Running Away vis-a-vis Blake is handled (ie, she gets the notion that it’s a bad thing from Adam--but certainly she shouldn’t go back to him). The show didn’t need to do everything in its power to frame Running Away as a bad thing; it could acknowledge that while it may hurt somebody, running away is sometimes the best thing you can do, and this could actually tie into Yang’s abandonment issues, because if there was a character that also needed untangling with the concept of Running Away, it was her. 

But it seems like Blake and Yang won’t really talk about any of this in the future, because we can’t have conflict because of people’s differing experiences with running away, apparently. Blake’s act at the end of volume 3 did hurt Yang and potentially... swept under the rug, because Blake Came Back, Guys! We can put a ring on it now. Because getting over abuse is always straightforward, you will never make mistakes trying to heal yourself, and there are never hard decisions to make! 

I never see people talk about this, so maybe it’s worth a mention. But Weiss is also technically guilty of Running Away--from an abusive household, in this case, much like her sister. And here, much like with Blake, it’s a good thing. But with Weiss, the narrative actually admits that leaving was the right thing to do for herself and her character arc is actually about that. So it’s exceedingly strange for me that Blake doing the exact thing Weiss does is a “flaw” she had to get over, instead of something that could be looked at and digested.

Blake’s experience with abuse is an element that never seemed to really resonate with me personally, because what I saw on screen and what was implied didn’t add up perfectly. I like the message of “support systems matter” of Blakes volume 4-5 arc in concept, but it never felt exactly right, because what Blake actually resolved and what was visibly her problem never felt 1:1 to me. 

[planetsam]

if you're still doing prompts, alex goes with Michael cause he wants to help after their trailer scene in the finale!

Alex isn’t sure what he intends to do when he steps towards Michael after explaining everything. Or what he’s expecting Michael to do. But whatever it is he’s expecting, that’s not what happens.

Michael doubles over, screaming through his teeth.

Alex still can’t say he’s got a handle on everything the aliens can do, but he knows enough to recognize something bad is happening. Michael grips the table white knuckled and struggles against whatever is happening. His lips part in surprise and horror as he gasps for air and before he can stop himself, Alex grasps his elbows. Michael latches on, fisting his hands in his jacket as he takes in deep breaths of air.

“I have to go. I have to go!” He says, “I have to go!” He releases Alex and scrambles for his jacket.

“Okay,” Alex says.

“Come back tomorrow. We can talk then,” he says and Alex scrambles after him.

“I’m coming with you,” he says.

“No!” Michael throws over his shoulder, but he doesn’t slow his pace. Alex jogs after him and gets to the car before he does, slamming his hand on the door before Michael can open it, “Alex I don’t have time—“

“If someone is out there attacking people you need all the help you can get.”

“He’s killed people!” Michael bellows at him.

“So have I!” Alex shouts right back, “I’m coming with you Guerin, this is just a question of whether I ride with you or follow.”

Michael grinds his teeth together as they stare at each other for a moment. Alex can see the line they’re crossing and how much Michael does not want to cross it. But all Alex can see is him going into the fight and whatever happened in the trailer repeating. He also sees the blood on Michael’s neck, which he is definitely not convinced belongs to someone else with a killer on the lose.

“It’s Noah,” He says. It takes Alex a moment to place him as Isobel’s husband, “I’m driving.”

“He knows your car,” Alex says.

“I’m driving,” Michael tells him.

He grabs something from the back of his truck and they go over to Alex’s black car. He tosses Michael his keys and they get in. He swallows when all the mirrors adjust automatically but ignores any misgivings as Michael turns the car on and pulls out onto the road. Alex finally speaks into the suffocating quiet that has engulfed the car, fueled by Michael’s nervous energy.

“What happened back there?” Alex asks, ‘with your—“ he motions to his head.

“Max, Isobel and I can sense each other, when the other is in danger,” he says, “Isobel’s in trouble.”

Alex nods. He’s got no basis for any of this but he compartmentalizes it like any good solider. He filters the information he can and the rest he shoves to another part of his mind. All things go back to the same basic question of how can he use it to accomplish the objective. How can he use what he knows to stop a serial killer and get them all safely home. It’s unexpected when Michael slams his hand against the wheel.

“I liked Noah. I thought of him as family.And he’s a fucking alien the whole time,” he says.

“Did he know?” Alex asks.

Michael shakes his head. Alex doesn’t know where he comes off with any of this. Irrationally he feels the well of anger, anger he’s been shoving down the entire time, start to bubble. Alex isn’t afraid of ugly truths. He hates not having all the information. He always thought that he was the one with the secrets in their relationship. Alex does his best to tap into the anger as the car speeds towards wherever they’re going. Michael stops the car and shuts it off, Alex gets the distinct impression it isn’t his car that makes the locks all flip.

“This is my family,” Michael says turning to him, suddenly brighter and angrier than Alex has seen in a long time, “we don’t involve people in this,” Alex bristles for the fight to come, “I don’t care what you see, what they do, Max and Iz are the only ones that matter, got it?”

Alex gives a curt nod and nothing happens.

“Yes,” He says, “Jesus, Guerin, my dad locked your mom up and my brother tried to kill both of us, you think they’re going to do something worse?”

Michael glares and the doors unlock.

It is utter and total chaos.

He comes to with stars in his eyes and blood on his cheek to see Michael and Isobel slumped against rocks and Max pulling down actual lightening from the sky. He’s in a god damn marvel movie, is the only thought in his head. Fortunately if he had to pick someone to be, Bucky Barnes is not the worst. Especially with Noah having his back turned, shouting that Max is the savior of a race and implying that Jesus was an alien. Alex takes aim and shoots to kill, putting several very fatal shots in Noah who says something about a ‘her’ and whose dead before he hits the ground. Max stares at him with lightening in his hands as Alex double checks Noah is dead and puts an extra shot in him to be certain. He doesn’t holster his weapon as Max keeps looking at him.

“Did you hear what he said?” He asks.

“Yes,” Alex says, “is he—“ Max nods.

They go back to the cave as Michael and Isobel get up, looking around. They both look alright, physically at least, but Michael’s eyes widen and he hurried over to him. Alex knows he’s bleeding from his forehead. But after everything he isn’t expecting Michael to immediately grab his chin. He jerks because while he’s good at shooting, being touched in this mode is less simple. Michael isn’t a solider though. His face falls momentarily before he takes both of Alex’s cheeks in his hands, turning his face.

“I’m fine,” Alex says.

“The hell you are,” Michael looks over, “Max.”

“I can’t walk around with a glowing handprint on my face,” Alex say.

“I can hide it in your hair,” Max offers.

“I’m okay,” he says, “we have to find whoever he was talking about.”

Michael is suddenly in his face, so close it’s a miracle Alex doesn’t get blood on him. Any thought that he’s an outside here vanishes when he sees that annoyed look Michael only seems to get when he’s doing something he particularly doesn’t like and can’t seem to do the mental gymnastics to say he deserves.  

“Stop being stubborn,” Michael says.

“Guerin I’m fine, head wounds bleed, it’s nothing.”

“That’s an oxymoron,” Michael snaps, “we got more to do and you could have a concussion. Just let him heal you.”

“Michael,” Max starts.

“Stay out of it,” Michael snaps and looks back at him.

Alex exhales sharply. Someone is out there and he knows they have to find him. He’s also aware that Michael has been pushed well past his limits and his actions are responsible. But the idea of having anyone in his head isn’t one he’s incredibly fond of. Especially not for anything as minor as a flesh wound.

“I said I’m fine,” he says, “we have someone to find.”

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why won’t you let him fix your head?” Michael picks this moment to go stubborn and fold his arms, glaring at him.

“The same reason you won’t let him fix your hand.”

The Evans twins gasp audibly and if Alex wasn’t so dead set on things being different, he would be embarrassed that they have an audience. Michael scowls at him and even though they have an audience and things to do, Alex can spare a thought for how much he’s missed that look on his face. Wanting to know Michael doesn’t mean just the big things that seem to have come one after the other. But Michael’s hand is long healed and Alex knows the headwound looks worse than it is.

“This is shallow,” he says pointing at his forehead.

“You’re still hurt.”

“I lost a leg, Guerin, this is nothing.”

Michael’s jaw drops and Alex realizes that this is the first time he’s referenced his leg without meaning to. It just slips out. Right on the heels of Michael’s hand. All his therapy has told him that one day he’ll be able to mention it without the world shifting and the most he can say it does is wobble a little. Not that that is going to stop him. He tears his gaze from Michael’s to look at the twins who immediately turn and look at other things like they aren’t all standing together in a cave with a dead body a few feet away.

“We need to find whoever Noah was talking about,” he looks at Noah, “and do something with the body,” he looks between them, “who can do what?”

“We will find whoever Noah was talking about,” isobel says, grabbing Michael, “you and Max handle the body.”

He and Max look at each other.

“Put him in his car,” he says, “we’ll stage a accident.”

They get Noah in and Max sparks something in the car that sets it ablaze. They stand there watching the body burn. There is a sick corner of himself that he knows shares his family’s ruthlessness. Their stubbornness and their dedication to finishing a job no matter the consequences. But as he stands there with Max, he realizes this depraved corner might not exclusively be a Manes family flaw. The odd thing is standing with someone as it happens, even if he doesn’t know Max all that well.

“Michael has his own reasons for not letting me fix his hand,” Max says. Alex looks at him but Max is as closed as always, “maybe you can help him.”

He gets the sense Max isn’t going to be more transparent than that. He’s learning more and more that everything on the surface is an act for the three of them, a denial of what they actually are. He’s always know that about Michael, but now he sees it more with the others. And just like that determination, he recognizes himself in it. He goes over to his car instead of answering and wipes the strip of blood from his face, disinfecting his cut and applying a butterfly bandage to close it. He grabs more ammo and turns around to see Max a lot closer than he was.

“They found her,” he says, “follow me.”

Alex takes a deep breath and when Max starts his car up, he puts his in gear and follows him into the darkness.

[demented-dukey]

In-depth Meta of “Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts” as it pertains to Incest and the presumed sibling relationship between Remus and Roman

Thanks to @squipfromjapan​ for picking out these moments from the episode. They also notated other moments that could be interperated as “sibling banter”, but for this post I’m going to focus on the dialogue that specifically references brotherhood.

I’m making this post so I have something to link to whenever someone tells me that “They called each other brothers several times!” or “The episode said they were twins!”, because I keep seeing the same assumptions made over and over again being represented as cold hard facts, when there is so much more nuance and room for debate.

So. Let’s look at the episode “Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts”, shall we? Buckle your seatbelts, kiddos, ‘cause this is gonna be a wild ride.

💚

Timestamp: 5:46 Remus: “Have you ever imagined killing your brother?”  

Remus whispers this line in Thomas’s head. He is referencing Thomas’s dream the previous night, where Thomas literally imagined murdering his brother and dragging the dead body into his bathroom. The dream sequence won’t be revealed until later in the episode, but upon rewatch this is a clear reference to ~specifically~ That Dream. This is also a more subtle reference to the “Moving On” two-ep arc, when Thomas showed a drawing his younger self had made of him electrocuting his brother. We know from the livestreams that Thomas and Joan have been planning Remus since the “Growing Up” episode, and have been dropping hints and easter eggs about Remus’s existence in various episodes. That drawing indicates that these “intrusive thoughts” have been with Character!Thomas for a long time, and this is not the first time this particular thought has crossed his mind.

A few moments later, Remus appears and knocks out Roman. Patton screams, “You killed him!”, but it’s a lot less likely that Remus was actually intending to ~murder~ Roman - Roman is obviously not “dead” because he continues to mutter in his sleep, and Remus does not continue to attack Roman to finish the job. It’s made clear later in the episode when Remus attacks Logan that his actions are impermanent, and do not do lasting harm to the other sides.

Because Remus attacked Roman directly after uttering this line, many people have taken that to mean the “brother” in question is Roman, thus it implies that Remus was talking about killing Roman. But correlation does not equal causation - just because the action happened so soon after the line, doesn’t mean that the line is referring to that action. The action echoing the line makes for a beautiful cinematic parallel, but it’s all a matter of interpretation. People can make that association, but it is their headcanon, NOT actual canon proof.

For example: Immediately before Remus’s appearance, the other sides are taking about whether ghosts are evil, or if they just appear to scare people. At the same time, Remus is appearing (much like a ghost) behind Roman. The conversation directly parallels this for a reason - the viewer is supposed to make that association and wonder “Is Remus evil? Or does he just scare people because you never know when he’s going to show up?” Being a mental projection of Thomas’s mind, Remus is very ghost-like, and he even says the trademark ghost sound, “Boo!”, but in this scene there is no more “proof” that Remus is a literal “ghost” of a dead person than there is “proof” that Remus is trying to kill his literal “brother”.

Conclusion: “Have you ever imagined killing your brother?” is referring to Thomas’s bad dream, not the relationship between Remus and Roman.

💚

Timestamp: 7:53 Roman: “Bro, I’m gonna whip your butt!”

Roman calls Remus ‘bro’. Yes, this can imply a sibling relationship, but “bro” is often used for non-sibling relationships as well. Roman says this line as a threat, much like the common phrase, “Come at me, bro!” or the less threatening but equally common phrase “Cool story, bro.” - which can be used to address anyone of any gender without indicating a sibling relationship. Much like “Dude”, “Bro” carries a inherently “male” association, but it is not used exclusively to address “men” - it can also be used interchangeably to refer to a woman or nonbinary person.

For example: In the beginning of this episode, Thomas is doing an advertisement for Hello Fresh. He holds up a dish of food and says to the viewer, “You jealous of this, bro?” Thomas is using the term “bro” as a nickname, and addressing his entire audience irregardless of gender. Thomas is NOT implying a sibling relationship with the audience.

Conclusion: “Bro” is a commonly used generic greeting, not proof of a sibling relationship.

💚

Timestamp: 14:30 Logan: “At a young age you filed away your products of your imagination as either welcome or forbidden. This led to the development of two separate sides of your creativity.” Thomas: “So my creativity split in two?” Logan: "Into two parts during your development, yes. Like an ovum. The Duke is like Roman’s twin.”

For this scene, let's go over some basic English Grammar rules. What Logan is saying is an example of a simile, because he uses the word "like". Logan says "Like an ovum. The Duke is like Roman's twin."

A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two things. Logan has proven in other episodes that he is very literal and very, very careful with his speech, so he is using a simile on purpose. He is not saying that the Duke ~is~ Roman's twin, he is saying that the Duke is ~like~ Roman's twin, drawing a comparison so that Thomas can better understand Remus’s role in Thomas’s psyche. This comparison has nothing to do with how Roman and Remus ~feel~ about each other, it is strictly an example of Remus’s role in Thomas’s brain and the portion of his negative Creativity that Remus embodies, as a comparison to Roman’s role and control of Thomas’s positive Creativity.

As Logan says this, he hold up two fingers together before splitting them while talking about why Remus exists - this indicates that Roman and Remus were once one whole side. Much like Thomas’s “whole” personality “split” into the personifications of Creativity, Morality, and Logic, Creativity “split” again to form Roman and Remus. Therefore, Remus and Roman are no more “genetically” related to each other than any of the other sides. 

It’s worth noting, also, that the specific details around the split are still unclear. A majority of the fandom has accepted the headcanon that Creativity, prior to the split, was a Personification of unknown name and personality that was equally split into what we now know as Roman and Remus. But it is possible that Roman himself was the Original Creativity with Complete Control, until the negative attributes were removed from him and created into a separate being, like Eve was created from Adam’s rib.

Conclusion: “The Duke is like Roman's twin" is a simile used to explain what Remus’s job is in comparison to Roman’s job. It is not a description of how Roman and Remus feel about each other, and it is not proof that they are siblings.

💚

Timestamp: 15:01 Remus: “You made me this way Thomas. I was the unloved brother from the Genesis. Roman and I are Cain and Abel.”

Logan points out later in the video that Remus intentionally uses Religious Iconography to play to Thomas’s sensitivities. It’s possible Remus is being deliberately misleading as a scare-tactic (he accused Logan of being Deceit when he knew he wasn’t, so he is capable of lying), but for this meta let’s assume he is being genuine in his comparison.

Remus uses a metaphor (not a simile) to compare himself and Roman to Cain and Abel. While some people use this comparison as “proof” that Remus harbors a desire to kill Roman, this is not the point he is trying to make.

Let’s backtrack to the story of Cain and Abel: Cain and Abel are the first two sons born to Adam and Eve. Cain, a farmer, offers God a portion of his crops one day as a sacrifice, only to learn that God is more pleased when Abel, a herdsman, presents God with the fattest portion of his flocks. Enraged, Cain kills his brother. God exiles Cain from his home to wander in the land east of Eden.

Why is Remus using this as a metaphor for how Thomas “made” Remus the way he is? Remus equates Thomas to “God” in the story, because Character!Thomas is the one who “created” his own sides - He is the one responsible for visualizing them as separate beings. Logan points out that Remus and Roman literally wear Black and White because they are Thomas’s sides, and that is how Thomas sees them. Roman and Remus each contribute creative ideas to Thomas (read: “sacrifices” to their “God”), but Thomas is more pleased with Roman’s contributions and shuns/exiles Remus. Remus doesn’t actually say that he wants to kill Roman; however he does heavily imply that it is Thomas’s fault that Remus was created to be inferior, Thomas who chose to favor Roman over Remus, and therefore Thomas’s fault for Remus’s actions and any rage Remus may feel towards Roman.

Conclusion Part One: Remus uses religious imagery on purpose to play to Thomas’s sensitivities. He uses the metaphor of Cain and Abel to point out how he has been mistreated by Thomas, but does not confirm or deny any harsh feelings towards Roman himself.

But while we’re on the topic, let’s look a little more into Religious Canon. Adam was the first human created by God on the planet. God removed a rib from Adam and used it to fashion Eve, to be Adam’s wife. (As I mentioned above, this iconography is a cinematic parallel to Remus’s creation. As Eve used to be a part of Adam, so was Remus a part of Roman before he was removed and reformed into a separate being.) Not only was Eve literally created from a physical part of Adam, she also would then share his genetic code. Even if Adam and Eve didn’t have sibling “feelings” towards each other, an argument can be made that they are still an incest pairing.

Cain, a son of Adam and Eve, marries a woman and produces children to populate the earth. But if Adam and Eve were the only humans on Earth, then Cain’s wife must be a daughter of Adam and Eve, and therefore Cain’s sister. Thus, Cain and his wife are also an incest pairing.

Conclusion Part Two: Adam & Eve, as well as Cain & his wife, are both incest relationships. If a romantic relationship between Roman and Remus is considered incest, it is still no more problematic than the biblical family Remus was comparing himself to.

💚

Timestamp: 35:52 Thomas: “So, you have a brother?” Roman: “Yeah.”

This is, by far, the most commonly used argument in favor of the headcanon that Roman and Remus are brothers. Most fans hear Roman’s “yeah” as confirmation that he sees Remus as a brother. 

However, there is still room for debate. “So, you have a brother?” “…yeaaaaah.” Roman is reluctant. He tilts his head back. He stretches the word out. Maybe he’s not quite sure “brother” is the right term for it, but there’s not really anything else he can call him. There’s no easy word for the other half of what used to be a whole fusion. Remus is like a limb that used to be attached, or a rib that was removed and created into a separate person. Remus is something to him, alright, and Roman feels responsible for Remus in a way that the other sides aren’t because of their shared history. So of course he would default to “brother”, it’s the simplest way to try to grasp a large and complex issue. He then starts comparing Remus to a mirror - “It shows you everything you don’t want to be.” When he looks at Remus, he doesn’t say he sees a sibling or a rival - he says he sees ~himself~, the dark parts of his own mind he doesn’t want to admit to. The dark parts that used to BE part of his own mind before they were separated. 

Conclusion: Roman’s “Yeah.” is the closest thing to “proof” of a sibling relationship in the entire episode. But it’s also debatable - Roman seems hesitant/reluctant to confirm that Remus is his brother, and he doesn’t actually use the term himself.

💚

So, let’s recap. In the Intrusive Thoughts episode, there were the following references to brotherhood:

One (1) occurrence of Roman calling Remus “bro”, which is a generic form of address.

One (1) occurrence of Remus comparing his relationship with Roman to “Cain and Abel”, which is an intentional use of Incestual and Religious Iconography designed to shock and repulse Thomas.

Two (2) occurrences of Someone Else (Logan and Thomas) associating Remus with a familial term (twin/brother).

One (1) occurrence of Roman (reluctantly?) “confirming” Thomas’s “brother” association, but never using the term himself.

Roman never calls Remus his twin, nor uses the word “brother”, and he compares his feelings towards Remus to “looking in a mirror” and seeing not a twin, but himself.

Remus never calls Roman his brother, nor his twin, and he never directly comments on his feelings towards Roman.

This will change as new episodes reveal more about Roman and Remus, but as of “Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts”, all the “proof” in the episode that Roman and Remus are brothers and/or twins is debatable and subject to interpretation.

If you want to believe that they ARE twins/brothers and share a platonic relationship, that’s a valid headcanon, but it is not the only one.

If you want to believe that they ARE twins/brothers and share a romantic relationship, that’s a valid headcanon. There are many reasons to intentionally ship a fictional incest pairing.

If you want to believe that they are NOT twins/brothers and share a platonic relationship, that's a valid headcanon.

If you want to believe that they are NOT twins/brothers and share a romantic relationship, that's a valid headcanon.

[fightmeyeats]

Three Years Late to the Party: A Critique of Predator/Prey Metaphors in Zootopia (2016)

I’m not sure why I am writing about Zootopia (2016). Although it was generally received very favorably (as I am writing this it has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes), it was released over three years ago and  in many ways not a hugely significant film. Even stranger, perhaps, is that I initially intended to discuss Suicide Squad (2016), and then both films at once, and then--realizing I really had no interest in rewatching Suicide Squad, ever in my life if I can help it, I decided to instead discuss only Zootopia. At first glance one may wonder what these two films have in common--one is a children’s animated film which received a good deal of praise, the other a superhero action film which feels like a fever dream poorly cobbled together on iMovie (look, I’m not the only one who feels this way it has a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes). What I see as a common ground and in need of critique is the way both films handle racism and sexism. For the sake of readability I am going to try to keep this as short as I can, and again for the sake of my own sanity I’m going to discuss Zootopia but I’m more than happy to share my perspective on Suicide Squad (I do have a lot to say even without giving it a full rewatch, I just don’t want to launch into a critique when I can’t fully do it justice). In an attempt of brevity I am also going to focus on the implications of the metaphor(s) embodied in the prey/predator dynamic, at the exclusion of any discussion of the implication of the systems represented in the film and the way they shape ideologies of what counts as resolution to discriminatory practices (ie “acceptance” and “within the police force”).

Zootopia is centered around a predator/prey metaphor which encompases both racism and sexism in largely lumpy/uneven ways that ultimately are disengaging from real world race/gender politics and leave the metaphor deeply confused. What I mean by this is that the “prey” dimension seems to be attempting to address sexism as an oversimplified monolith, while the “predator” dimension seems to be addressing racism, again as an oversimplified monolith; thrown into this is the dimension of size, which also seems to be relevant to the characters’ experiences: a large prey animal, for example, seems to return to being coded masculine (perhaps these are the metaphoric white men? the legibility of this is difficult to determine, given the main example of a powerful prey figure is voiced by Idris Elba), as well as the fact that the predator dimension of the metaphor seems to swing back and forth from discussing the way masculinity (again monolithic) is viewed and how people of color are viewed, with no clear demarcation as to why the switch is being made.

In actual feminist discourses the main pitfall of race/gender binary approaches to understanding oppression is that it erases the experiences of women of color, but in the case of pop media it also becomes relevant to acknowledge that it also erases the privileged position of white masculinity. Take, for example, the choice to have Nick Wilde, the main predator character, voiced by a white man, and yet central to the argument of predator victimhood. There is a definite unevenness to the way in which these various metaphors are deployed throughout the film: the mayor, Mr. Lionheart is established as being in a privileged position, and his privilege/pompousness/power are the implicit motive behind the villain’s actions--he is voiced by a white man and it seems that he could be legible as a metaphor for (white) male privilege. At the same time, the disappearance of Emmitt Otterton (who does not have a speaking role) does not seem to be of huge concern: while sympathy is expressed towards his wife, Mrs. Otterton (who is voiced by a Black actress), Judy is ultimately assigned to the investigation because she volunteers for it under conditions which imply that the department is not willing to give the job to someone with more experience, and she does not have access to the full police resources to solve the case; furthermore, her assignment to solve his disappearance in two days is part of a wager, further suggesting that the police are not seriously concerned with his disappearance. All of this parallels a real life disregard for the lives of people of color especially by the police.

The way the news sensationalizes the fact that predators are supposedly going “feral” is also significant in this context: if the biases experienced by predator characters are intended to articulate racism, this could be commentary on the way people of color (and especially Black men) are represented as hyper-violent and a potential danger to white society in the real world. If, however, predators are intended to be privileged male figures like the mayor the suggestion may be that all men are viewed as violent/uncivilized and that this is harmful: a critique of critiquing “toxic masculinity” rather than “toxic masculinities” themself. Let’s break this down a little bit more, as it largely overlooks the ways violence and masculinity are actually intertwined in the Global North: first of all, it maintains an idea of white male victimhood which is initially suggested by Nick Wilde’s real world whiteness by implying that white men are viewed as violent in ways which broadly overlook the way that society hegemonically views men of color to be violent and violent white men to be outliers, despite actual trends suggesting otherwise (consider racism and the war on drugs/imagining of the “super predator,” hegemonic discourses on violence which surround mass shootings/acts of terror and how these shift based off the race/ethnicity of the shooter, the mass incarceration of men of color, the disproportionate nature of police violence and murder enacted on people of color). Secondly, it creates the insinuation that critiques of the way violence often becomes accepted and expected in many kinds of masculinities are more harmful to men than the way stoicism/rugged individualism/violence are so prevalent in masculine “norms.” Thirdly, it disengages with the real harm violent norms can and do cause women.

Part of what makes the dynamics of this metaphor so difficult to follow is that the film starts off from the position that Judy is facing discrimination which she must overcome, and then switches into the new position that Judy herself holds discriminatory beliefs. While there is value to this narrative arc: say we scrap the animal metaphor and Judy is, for example, a middle class white woman overcoming sexism to join the police force who then partners with Nick who is, to stick with the film's casting choices, a poor white man, or, to stick with the metaphor, a Black man, and in the process she realizes that oppression is multifaceted and she herself has internalized prejudices which affect other people’s reality; this could be a useful and important story. But because of the way the world is developed and because the writing is so focused on binary logics, we have a strange world where “prey” animals are discriminated against, but not the large ones, and “predator” animals hold positions of power (despite incompetence), but they also have to navigate discrimination and prejudicial tensions, and these tensions are heightened by attacks intended to heightened these fears, but the attacks are caused because a prey animal is tired of facing discrimination at the hands of the predators.

Let me give two further examples which I think can help clarify my point here: Officer Clawhauser (voiced by a white actor), who is shown to be well meaning and kind, but at the same time holds “soft” discriminatory beliefs towards Judy (although he apologizes when she comments on it) and is, frankly, not very good at his job. Most of his onscreen time at work involves him eating donuts and messing around on his phone; yet when he is fired because he is a predator it becomes a significant moment of compassion on Judy’s part where she realizes she must rethink her bias. Again, if “predator” is understood to be the stand-in for masculinity, we must also reconsider the stakes: why is Clawhauser viewed as being a better fit for the police academy than Judy in the first place? And what are the implications of his no longer being viewed this way? Why is his performance not considered at any point in his employment? Is the way he becomes viewed as a potential threat and is subsequently fired part of a patriarchal paranoid fantasy which is anxious that the integration of women on equal terms in the workplace will lead to a total dialectical switch of positions? And if so, why is this fear being articulated in 2016? On the other hand, if prejudice against predators is a metaphor for racism, it is difficult to understand why he got the job in the first place (he is not framed as being any sort of “diversity” hire in the way that Judy is).

A second example is that towards the end of the film Nick becomes upset, hurt, and angry to discover that Judy carries “Fox Spray” just to be safe; this commentary only holds up if the predator metaphor is one of race/racism rather than gender/sexism. What we, as an audience, have to ask is what the fox spray is intended to represent in the real world: is this a criticism of women carrying mace or other self-protection devices? Surely it cannot be intended to suggest that women need to consider how emotionally “hurtful” it might be for men to realize that women have to take extra precautions because of the legal and social structures which facilitate sexual assault and re-victimize survivors. So is “Fox Spray” the same as “[Racial/Ethnic Group] Spray”? The implications between these two interpretations vary widely, and the messiness of the metaphor leaves this commentary confused.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

A theory.

Wacky comic book theory but here we go.

One way or another we all talk about representation these days and the ways in which it can be done well or badly, etc.

And when those discussions happen more broadly usually they boil down to representing 4 groups.

Females, People of Colour and queer/non-homosexual people, and trans people. Of course there are others too. Gender fluid could be counted as it’s own thing and frankly I see not much talk as far as disabled representation is concerned, be it physical or mental. But for the sake of argument let’s stick to those four.

As far as comic books are concerned female and characters and poc (especially black and Asian) characters are comparatively the best covered whereas queer characters ain’t. It doesn’t help that sometimes creators forget some characters aren’t straight or else the fact that they aren’t is such a minor point that people honestly don’t know (see Felicia Hardy).

But as poorly represented as queer characters are (off the top of my head, and I’m sure I’m forgetting people, Harley Quinn, Deadpool, Ice Man and America Chavez are just about the only queer characters headlining their own series right now), trans characters really are non-existent.

Which brings me to those pictures of Superman, Wonder Woman and Black Panther up there.

See I have a theory that for certain under represented groups in comic books (at least superhero comic books) what is needed is a sort of ambassador character, specifically one in the form of a stone cold power fantasy.

Now you could argue ALL superheroes are power fantasies to one degree or another, but if you think about those three characters they are taking the notion of being power fantasies almost as their core concepts.

I don’t buy Superman or most superheroes as on some level inherently MALE power fantasies for various reasons, but Superman was certainly a potent HUMANIST power fantasy.

Human beings are animals and as such we innately have a drive to survive which takes the form of self preservation and preservation of our species. Preservation mostly boils down to ensuring our bodies can function properly and also avoiding injury.

If you look at the myths and legends of cultures across the world and all eras of history you find figures that speak to these innate instincts. You find human or human like figures who have abilities beyond those of mere mortals. In Western culture the most famous examples of these types of figures are of course the Greco-Roman Heroes like Herakles/Hercules. A man with God’s blood in his veins who’s strength, stamina and resistance to injury dwarfs normal people. And he uses that to slay monsters to plague the land or perform feats that kick the natural order of nature in the ass like descending into the Underworld and emerging unscathed, or surviving terrible poisonous injuries for days and days or moving mountains, fighting off Titans from the Realm of the Gods themselves. 

Superman though maybe not intentionally came from EXACTLY the same innate human instincts to be more powerful than we are s we can survive threats and protect our fellow species. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall building in a single bound, he can survive ten exploding shells and later he can even defy gravity itself. And he uses those powers to protect the innocent and take down the bad guys who’d hurt them. Replace gangsters and citizens with the Hydra and the village folks and you essentially have the same thing as Hercules.

And we all know how Superman consequently ushered in...well literally the entire superhero genre.

Superman was a gateway character who opened the door to everything else and he did it in large part because he inherently embodied an indulgent wish fulfillment fantasy.

And Wonder Woman did the same thing except instead of being a humanist power fantasy she was an indulgent FEMALE power fantasy. Put aside how its a matter of record that her creator was deliberately aiming for that end goal, just look at her character. She comes from an island exclusively of women. That society is morally and technologically superior to the rest of the world, the rest of the world labelled as ‘man’s world’ which by default makes Paradise Island ‘woman’s world’ if you like. The Amazons were created and guided by the GodDESS Aphrodite, who is associated with (rightly or wrongly) stereo typically female qualities like love and beauty and elegance, traits she then gives to her Amazons. There’s a lot more to dive into but I won’t for now.

Wonder Woman opened the door to ALL consequent female characters after her. But it wasn’t MERELY because she happened to be female and come first. She did it an managed to endure into the silver age revival of superheroes when most of her peers didn’t BECAUSE she had substance to her and that substance stemmed from her being explicitly a power fantasy for a specific group of people.

And then Black Panther did the same thing, except instead of being a humanist or a female power fantasy he was an indulgent BLACK power fantasy. Sure he didn’t get launched as a headliner but that wound up working in his favour as he showed up and kicked the asses of (at the time) THE premiere Marvel superheroes. Obviously that will that automatically convey this guy as powerful just in general, but that isn’t really what made T’Challa resonate, nor was it merely the fact that he happened to be black.

For T’Challa being black was as vital to his character as being female was to Diana’s. He was someone ethnically native to the AFRICAN continent. He came from a country in Africa that had NEVER been colonized by anyone and was 100% autonomous, not answering to any larger organization nor in a submissive alliance with a more powerful nation. He drew his powers from traditions native to his African nation, which were tied up with an animal that was literally black and also native to the African continent. Shit, he even had BLACK in his name. 

Those traditions co-existed with a civilized and technologically proficient society. In fact it was MORE technologically advanced than America and the citizens (at first glance anyway) seemed far more content and at well provided for than America with it’s variety of social problems. It’s technological advancement came from a special natural resource EXCLUSIVE to T’Challa’s nation, no one else had it or had managed to take it from them. In fact when one evil white guy (dressed in stereotypically colonial clothes) TRIED to take it he was defeated. And if all that wasn’t enough Black Panther was not just a superhero who could own the F4 and came from this fantastic African nation...he was straight up it’s KING.

As much of a black power fantasy as Luke Cage was/is...T’Challa was on a whole other level pretty much from day one.

And whilst there had been black characters before him, T’Challa was the guy who really cemented the idea of black (and other poc) superheroes as being legitimately a thing. No T’Challa no Luke Cage, Miles Morales, Blade, Jon Stewart, Storm, etc. 

So what’s my overall point with this?

If Marvel and DC really want to make queer and trans heroes a thing like female and poc heroes are then they NEED to present a legitimate queer and trans power fantasy.

I’m not saying introduce a new gay hero or trans hero who can instantely own all the Avengers or anything. Even the Fantastic Four rallies around and managed to defeat T’Challa, and he was shown to have to really plan ahead to get as far as he did.

But I am saying introduce for example a trans character who exudes physical power and confidence and is a formidable fighter, not a hero in training learning the ropes. Somone who shows up on the scene already knowing how to kick ass. Then in ways I am not really qualified to speak to, make being trans inherent to not just their general life and personality, but their core concept, the source of their awesome powers. Make them someone who comes from a  fantastical advanced, society where being trans isn’t merely accepted it’s the inherent norm and part of the societal structure. 

But do it in a way that isn’t on the nose condemnatory towards cis people. Black Panther wasn’t ever implying white people are inherently bad or inferior to black people, hence why the Fantastic Four and Black Panther quickly become close friends and allies. Wonder Woman wasn’t explicitly saying men are bad or American society was bad. Steve Trevor and other male characters were portrayed as good guys and Diana herself as a patriotic ally to America, in fact in the stories America was held up as a bastion for women and their rights. Now...that was bullshit of course and I’m saying you have to go that far at all. But I guess make the story and series celebrate being trans without playing it as a put down to cis people or else something intended to directly challenge their thoughts about society.

That’s something to be done down the line once the wider audience has accepted a trans superhero character. If this hypothetical trans character is T’Challa then down the line you can pull out a Luke Cage type of character who does more directly challenge that sort of stuff and critically is FROM America, not a black power fantasy country. 

Whilst you can say we already have queer characters, their success rate is spotty at best and a lot of them were originally intended to be straight. So I think  gay, bisexual, etc characters would benefit from this approach as well.

And the best part (especially as far as trans characters are concerned) is that this is legitimately untapped potential. Marvel and DC can both grab the the MASSIVE historic claim of creating the first (major) trans superhero ever and make some real money off of it. Everyone’s a winner.

Bottomline: Create ambassador power fantasy characters for various groups if you want to make them stick around. 

[thelegendofclarke]

I'm not sure that the Undercover Lover Jon thing is true, even though I get why people believe it. If it isn't true tho, what is the third treason that Dany's going to suffer? I thought it was pretty much agreed that it was going to be Jon.

Hokay I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about this, but I am nothing if nothing contrary af. SO anon I am going to use your ask as a kind of like ~general layout~ of my thoughts on the potential of UCJ.  I’m going to maintain though that I would prefer not to discuss any potential consent issues for personal reasons. 

I am also gonna shout out to the other few anons as, well as @ladyanyawaynwood and @lyanna-mormont, who also sent me asks on this topic. 

SO all right folks *drum roll* It’s the new favorite fandom Disc Horse! Either you love it or you hate it! Either you want to have its babies or want to kill it with fire!… It’s THE UNDERCOVER JON THEORY!

Before I start rambling, you should all totally check out the bottom part of this really excellent post by @him-e about some of the details and possibilities of this theory, because Claudia is so much better at words and explanations and life than me. There’s also this post by @blindestspot, whose no nonsense approach I always really appreciate.

Ok, first of all: I would like to go on record once more in saying that God I really dislike the name Undercover Jon. I primarily hate it because I feel like it’s misleading, at least in terms of what I personally would consider this theory to be. I feel like “undercover” implies deliberateness and ill intent and malice aforethought that I generally don’t really think is involved here. Also, I guess I don’t really subscribe to the Undercover Lover theory at all, because I don’t think Jon’s feelings for/sexual relationship with Dany have anything to do with it (i.e. I do not think Jon purposefully and deliberately seduced Dany for the sole purpose of manipulating her, nor do I think he is merely pretending to have feelings for her for the sole purpose of personal/political gain). 

I truly don’t believe Jon is in any way maliciously gaslighting Dany as part of any Grand Scheme. Personally, I feel that would be too much at odds with the Honorable and Noble character and narrative established for Jon. But that’s not to say that I don’t think the general theory is totally with out merit. I actually think some elements of it could definitely make up a potential plot line. I have explained my take on it as more Flying By the Seat of His Pants Jon- I think “scheme” would be way too strong a word, I think “plan” would probably even be too generous. It’s probably more along the lines of “ok so this is what we are doing now.”

Somewhere along the line I feel like this whole thing turned into something VERY black and white and moralized. I also think that somewhere down the line this turned into a VERY polarized and mutually exclusive theory, which I don’t think would be the case in the event that the theory ends up being true. I have seen a lot of comparisons being made to LF and Ned Stark. It’s either that Jon is Ned Stark’s son and he would NEVER act in this type of morally dubious manner, OR that if Jon were to be acting in this morally dubious manner that he is just as bad as LF. @blindestspot summed up this polarization kind of perfectly imo:

Hyperbolically speaking, either Jon is a cruel cad or he is a faithless idiot. If you step away from the hyperbole, his pragmatism or naivety might actually make him less of a righteous cookie-cutter hero and more like a flawed human being. But it’s the internet and ideas are quickly distorted into their most hyperbolic versions of themselves. If Jon isn’t wholly good, he has got to be evil. If Jon isn’t smart, he eats crayons for breakfast.

Likewise, I disagree with the idea that Ned Stark and LF are the only two applicable points of moral comparison, that just seems awfully restrictive imo. Also, both Ned Stark and LF are dead. This implies that in order to survive the game of thrones, you have to fall somewhere in between. I guess the best way I can think of to explain it is that I kind of view this theory and it’s different variations on a sliding scale… The more deliberate and manipulative the version of the theory makes Jon out to be, the less likely I think it is to happen in that manner. 

Jon is one of the heroes of the show; and not only that, he has often been used or portrayed as the Moral Compass Character. (And example being just this season when he refused to punish Ned Umber and Albs Karstark for the sins of their fathers). The show runners have never had any story line that explicitly and intentionally places Jon in the wrong or in an extremely negative light. There has been story lines where he has acted in a morally ambiguous manner (see: Ygritte and the Wildlings), but he has never done anything purposefully malicious or outright evil or immoral. Also, there has been no indication in the narrative that he is heading toward any kind of downward spiral. I just can’t see the show going the dark!Jon or evil!Jon or morally corrupt!Jon route in the final season when he has been consistently portrayed as the Knight in Shining Armor, Savior, and Hero of the story.

I am a lawyer… So my basic approach to things like speculation is to look at the evidence. Honestly, for this theory, imo the defense for both sides have created reasonable doubt.

Arguments for UCJ

Potential Evidence from Jon’s character:

Through the Wilding plot from s1-s3, the narrative has established that Jon is capable of deception. He is capable of having genuine feelings for someone while not being completely honest. 

Sansa told Jon he needed to be “smarter,” which he could have taken to heart. A plot like this, similar to the the Sansa and Arya vs. LF plot, could be part of the general theme of “I learn” and the Starks going from pawns to players.

Kit Harrington has said this about Jon Snow’s character in s7 and s8: “But this year, I think he becomes a politician… He starts manipulating people in a Jon Snow way - in a kind way, but he has a job to do.” (x) This not only confirms that Jon IS operating as apolitical actor, but could also imply that Jon has a strategic goal or purpose. However, Jon having real feelings for Dany is not necessarily at odds with him having a second agenda. The two things are not at all mutually exclusive.

Jon steadfastly maintained through out the season that he would not be bending the knee. He even went so far as to tell Dany “I am a king.” It could be difficult for people to see how he would make such a complete 180, and a seemingly needless and unnecessary one given that Dany agreed to fight the NK before he bent the knee.

Potential Evidence from the Show:

There have been story lines, like the Sansa and Arya vs. LF plot, that were dishonest on their face. The way they were portrayed was intended to mislead the audience. So D&D are capable of using this kind of plot device.

The way I see this kind of story line going, it would also essentially be a pretty significant parallel to the Jon and the Wildlings plot, where Jon had real feelings for Ygritte but the situation was complicated by duty and circumstance. However, this would mean that it’s material D&D are familiar with.

All of the finale was full of subtext about lying and lies and honor. They laid it on so thick. Thick enough, I felt, that it could imply that Jon is hiding something or that part of him is overcompensating and/or being motivated by guilt.

Arguments Against UCJ:

Potential Evidence from Jon’s character:

Obviously, Jon’s honor code and strong senses of morality and duty are huge parts of his character. It’s totally reasonable to think that he has no ulterior motives beyond forming an alliance to ensure Dany and her dragons will fight with the North.

I think that Jon knows The NK will probably have a dragon how (he has seen the NK raise people from the dead, and he knows from the wight hunt that the NK can also raise animals from the dead). He knows without the dragons, they do not stand a chance. So he is doing everything necessary to ensure the dragons are on their side.

Jon has been consistently portrayed as a Hero and Moral Compass type character. There would be no reason for them to do anything that had the potential to  turn the audience so vehemently against him in the final season.

Potential Evidence from the Show:

There have been some incredibly stupid story lines (jfc that wight hunt). It’s fair to be suspicious that a story line of this manner is beyond what D&D have the tendency to produce in terms of complex details.

There are only 6 episodes left. I have a really hard time imagining how they would pull this off in 6 episodes ON TOP OF everything else that has to happen before the series ends.

In regards to the plot device of characters using seduction and emotional manipulation as a tool, D&D have consistently been typical dude bro’s insofar as it has been largely female characters who have done so (Cersei, Margaery, Shae, Osha, ect.) It might be completely beyond them to think to have a male character utilize those techniques in such a manner.

I see valid arguments being made on both sides here to constitute a generally sufficient case for it going either way. I think that anyone who would argue “yes the is 100% going to happen” OR “no there is a 0% chance this is happening” would be willfully disregarding evidence from one side or the other. Obviously it’s natural that people will find one side or the other more persuasive, everything about speculation is subjective. But I just don’t feel like it would be possible to make any definitive statements at this point. 

All the reasons I have for thinking this could be possible or impossible have nothing to do with me shipping Jon/Sansa. They actually don’t really have anything to do with Sansa herself at all in any different way than they have to do with everyone in the North that Jon’s decision affects. I know there are some people who might not believe me when I say that, but I supposed there is nothing I can do about it. But that’s the thing about speculation: it’s always subjective, there can be arguments made for both sides. While some people may say “Jon has made promises to Dany and he wouldn’t break them and betray her,” the flip side is “in making these promises to Dany, Jon has betrayed his duty and promises he made to all of his subjects as their king whom they trust.” For every argument, there is a counter argument; for every action, there is a reaction. For every person who can’t believe Jon would betray Dany, there is another person who can’t believe Jon would betray his family. For every person who believes Jon was right to bend the knee, there is another person who can’t believe he would do it. For every person who thinks Dany deserves to rule the Seven Kingdoms, there is another person who believes the North deserves their freedom and independence.

All things considered, I do feel there could be some potential conflict in regards to Jon’s intentions and motivations. I think there are various events and ambiguities in the past and present plot, as well as in Jon’s actions and in Jon and Dany’s relationship, that support said hypothesis. My best guess is that Jon definitely has some guilt about bending the knee because he either: a) knows the north will NEVER go for it, or b) was being genuine and feels guilty for having unilaterally made such a huge decision that effects so many people, including his own family, with out their input (which he should because ffs dude come on!) .The only thing that I believe Jon has been outright dishonest about is telling Dany that the Northerners would bend the knee accept her as Queen. The North has a very deep seated rhetoric against the Targaryens. Whether it’s true or not is essentially a moot point, it’s just something that is deeply embedded in their history. In 7x02 they went out of their way to make a ~big deal~ about how “Targaryens can’t be trusted.” The North also has a historic distrust and disdain for Southern rule and the Iron Throne, going all the way back to Torrhen Stark, the king who knelt. I don’t think there is any way that Jon could reasonably believe that Dany won’t be met with opposition from the North… All the rest of it, including Jon’s feelings towards Dany, kind of falls into a gray area of words vs. actions vs. intent vs. motivations. Which makes sense, because this would be a morally gray plot; and it wouldn’t be the first time one of those was featured on Game of Thrones. 

I suspect that, like with Operation Wildling, Jon has no real escape plan or exit strategy here; I honestly don’t think that he has thought about it that much (also implying that any deliberate, premeditated manipulation or ill intent on his part would be minimal or non existent). Honestly, I think that Jon believes he is not going to survive to see the extended repercussions of and reactions to his bending the knee. I think that Jon truly believes he is going to die fighting the NK. He already showed that he was willing to die when he told Dany to leave him behind in 7x06. Like the rest of us, his he is probably wondering how in the ever loving fuck his ass has somehow managed to survive this long. (Honestly being like, “I’ll bend/pretend to bend the knee and then just die so I don’t have to face Sansa” would ABSOLUTELY be a Jon Snow thing to do.) I think Jon made what he saw as the best decision in the present, and isn’t concerned about the future or the fallout. Which, if true, could lead to a couple possible conflicts for next season:

Possibility 1- Jon dies in the BftD and Dany lives, leaving Dany to face the North and Cersei on her own.

Possibility 2- Dany dies in the BftD and Jon lives, leaving him to deal with the fallout in the North and Cersei alone.

Possibility 3- Both Jon and Dany survive the BftD and the North makes it clear that they will not accept his as queen, leaving Jon to decide who’s side he will be on. His decision then would obviously be complicated by his feelings for Dany and his loyalty to his family ect. ect.

Possibility 4- The White Walkers win and everyone dies so it doesn’t even matter!

(*Disclaimer: Obviously this list is just me speculating and is in no way comprehensive or exhaustive.)

And like Anon said, if Jon is going to be the third reason that Dany suffers, then Possible Conflict #’s 1 and 3 could definitely play into that. In #1 Dany would not only be dealing with Jon’s death, but also with the knowledge that he was dishonest to her. And in #3 if Jon ends up siding with the Starks in a potential conflict, that could possibly be a major betrayal.

I also think subjectivity comes into play big time here with regards to which parts of the story people prefer or find more compelling or are more interested in. Game of Thrones has SO MUCH going on and there are so many different lenses through which people can view it. Who are the most important characters? What is the most important plot? Who is The Hero™? Who is The Villain™? What is the ideal endgame? I would bet you pretty much anything no two people would answer all those questions the exact same way. We as an audience have been waiting 6 seasons for BOTH the Stark Restoration/Northern Independence AND the Dany Getting to Westeros plots to play out. I’ve kind of talked about it a little bit before, but for me personally (and I think for others as well), it was extremely narratively frustrating to finally get the narrative pay out from the Stark story line, only to have it be given up and taken away such a short time later. 

I also think that if Jon’s storyline is 100% completely honest, straight forward, and genuine as it stands, then like 90% of the major, climactic events of his arc will seem to have been pointless and he will have learned nothing from them. It would also seem that Jon bending the knee and unilaterally making such a huge decision for such a large number of people so easily would go against a lot of what he has supposedly learned. I’m not even saying that it was the wrong decision or that he didn’t have the authority to make it or even that it would be completely ooc. However, such a seemingly single minded action would show an alarming and annoying (imo) lack of character development… Which, again, is entirely possible. This is D&D after all.

In sum, I honestly don’t have that strong of a stance on this tbh. I guess mine is kind of like a Moderate View on the theory or like, “Undercover Jon Light.” I think some variation of it could definitely be possible and would be an interesting potential plot so I won’t rule it out completely. But I also won’t be surprised if it doesn’t happen.

[oneweekoneband]

Why Did It Take Me So Long To Notice That The Word Is “Fury” Not “Furry”?

Hello again. While I must admit to mild surprise at Dinosaur Jr.’s absence from the constantly growing roster of artists covered on OWOB, I should also state my attempted approach to writing about a band with no lack of wordage already available on its behalf. Though potentially futile, I will be trying to write something that benefits a cross-section of readers, from the unfamiliar but curious to the currently dismissive therefore purposely detached to the self-appointed superfan. All of this being stated, please understand that “attempted” carries one hell of an implied emphasis.

As covered in the previous post, I’m an active writer with many years in the trenches, though at least a half-decade in between my first toe-dips into this endeavor and the formative teenage moment when exposure to two Dinosaur Jr. albums (1987’s You’re Living All Over Me and 1991’s Green Mind, their second and fourth, respectively) combined to transform a fervent interest in underground music into a terminal, all-consuming obsession that almost seems to have dictated, in some way, shape or form, each lifting of a finger since. 

I’ve had a fair amount of writing published on the subject of this band, but most of it appeared during the first half of my now 18 years in this racket, barring the entries about several Dinosaur Jr. albums did make it into my second (and most recent) book, which carried the subtitle of 500 Essential American Underground Rock Albums 1981 - 1996 and a title that I absolutely hate so it shall not be revisited. On that note, attacks of full-body cringe have become as reliable as Christmas upon revisiting older writings, therefore I did not in order to guarantee no points or angles reiterated. But for what it’s worth, at some point in the early-00s, I did a long and embarrassing tribute to You’re Living All Over Me for the Perfect Sound Forever website as my first piece of writing on the band. Then once the spotlight was aimed backwards and topically in 2004-2006 for that period’s two-tiered reissue and reunion activity, I wrote a bunch of features about the Homestead and SST years (plus the early run of reunion shows) for several outlets. I interviewed both Mascis and Barlow, twice each if I remember correctly, and essentially felt like I said everything there was to possibly say about this band whose music more or less put me on a personal and professional course that continues to this day. I don’t feel like that anymore.

Two things to take into account before we move on: First, none of the subsequent entries will be this long, or at least that’s the plan. Secondly, this week will feature very little writing on the four albums of new material Dinosaur Jr. has released since the original lineup of J. Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Emmett Jefferson Murphy III (almost exclusively known as “Murph” but I find his full given name to be amusing) reunited in 2005…will be of the unflattering comparative variety. However popular it might be to jump to black-and-white, definitive conclusions, do not take this to mean I consider these albums to be bad or boring or anything of the sort. But do know that they are, despite what the rest of the world seemingly believes, inferior when placed against what I will be trying to push into your ears and lives going forward. And understand that Dinosaur Jr.’s major-label era (1991 - 1997) will be explored in a nooks-and-crannies fashion (meaning, we’re going to get into Mike Johnson’s discography), as I feel there’s a nice chunk of amazing music hidden in there that has been largely overlooked or misunderstood.

I am about as obsessed with music as I am the non-fiction ghetto in which I operate.  Therefore it might or might not behoove me to do something no one outside of this little world should waste their time with, and that would be lot of overthinking about a couple of crucial elements of artistic criticism and appreciation that appear to be under constant attack these days: context and nuance. There is no such thing as good-to-great creative nonfiction or journalism that lacks or misuses either, and the most difficult to translate of the two is, of course, context. 

These days it seems every talking head (or every record-store loiterer or live show barnacle) of similar vintage to myself should be wearing a t-shirt or rocking a bumper-sticker that says, “Ask Me What It Was Like Before The Internet!”. This is something for which I harbor a visceral and distinct distaste if not great embarrassment. Any historically-precise party line of assumed profundity is going to fail at transmitting the intended impact for two reasons. First is the obvious neutering of any meaning or relevance when beating a cultural audience over the head with something, year after year, generation after generation. The second is more problematic, as I’m not certain that being present during its heyday or for a following period of linear influence is necessitated so as to provide fundamental context needed to understand how or why a band was groundbreaking or brain-rearranging or whatnot. 

For example, Dinosaur Jr. was four albums and seven years active once its music entered my life in earnest. Still, when it comes to blanket mantras of the reality-removed like, “This Was Before The Internet!” or “We Didn’t Have Cell Phones” battle stories, usually issued as some delusional badge of struggle or evidence of authenticity, we’re talking something that means far less than is assumed to a recipient without the same experiential history. I usually cringe when I witness someone else trying to get this across to a younger generation, though I have yet to figure out myself how to do it effectively. 

Conversely, there are examples of past underground rock prescience (well beyond the legendary trio of albums released by Dinosaur Jr. between 1985 and 1988) such as Mission of Burma, Black Flag, NEU!, Brian Eno’s “Third Uncle”, The Feelies, The Embarrassment, Can, This Heat, The Fall, mid-period Sonic Youth, Husker Du’s SST years, Black Sabbath, Slayer, mid-80s Swans, and Miles Davis’ 1970 - 1975 output, to name but a few, that occurred long before I developed anything close to refined taste or the ability to let music have an impact on a deep emotional and intellectual level. Or, for that matter, the ability to breath air outside of the womb in some of those cases. 

Still, once properly blown away, I could easily wrap my head around how each example was way ahead of the curve, or scared the shit out of most listeners who came in contact with it in real time. Of course, it helps if the music in question resides in the exclusive canon reserved for that which is genuinely timeless. If it falls short of timeless it sure as hell better be a high quality, well-aged specimen of music that’s nonetheless easily identifiable as being from a certain era of yore. Much of material released by Dinosaur Jr.’s during the band’s first two phases of activity, which together span 1985 until 1997, fits into one of those two categories.

My first meaningful introduction to Dinosaur Jr. essentially played out in similar a similar fashion to formative life-altering moments spun by many writers, musicians, and fans of my generation or older. I suppose a warning should now be issued that you’re about to read yet another account of someone taping episodes of MTV’s 120 Minutes. I had a habit of setting the recording time to the shittiest quality of six hours and fitting three episodes of said show onto my parents’ VHS copies of HBO and Cinemax films like The Cotton Club and Bill Cosby’s Himself. Some time after its parent album (You’re Living All Over Me) was released, on a Christmas night when I was in my early teens, the video for “Little Fury Things” ran between a Michelle Shocked number and The Cure’s infuriatingly awful “Let’s Go To Bed” (that goes for the video and the song). At first I focused on other future life-alterers like the clip for The Fall’s “New Big Prinz” and Sonic Youth’s iconic “Teenage Riot” video, as Dinosaur Jr.’s idea of a video and that song were just too fucking dark and ominous for my young teenage mind. 

But because I had to fast forward or rewind through multiple Christmas-special live-in-the-studio tomfoolery from hosts They Might Be Giants along with crap that was somehow already “not for me” like Fishbone, Camouflage, Translator, and the not-that-bad-but-long-as-hell video for Love And Rockets’ “Dog End Of A Day Gone By”, I eventually came around to the three minutes and change that was the “Little Fury Things” video….like a moth to flame. I still have the very VHS tape I used to play and rewind repeatedly while my parents were at work during the day, blasting it through the shitty speakers of our 27” Sony Trinitron and running all over the floorplans of the three houses (well, one house and two apartments, if we’re to split hairs) I lived in during my high school years. The beginning of the video goes blank for a few seconds because I accidentally hit “record” on the remote amidst some furious bouncing all over the couches and chairs.

I seriously doubt there’s a song I’ve listened to, on my own accord, more times than this one and it still delivers a palpable, albeit much different due to time passed, charge as it plays at this very moment. The sonic dichotomy that makes this track exciting- powerful noise/distortion married to a huge, highly emotive pop hook-happens to be another dragon I chase to this day and in general has been one of the crucial elements of forward movement undertaken by post-hardcore, proto and first-gen indie-rock, punk rock, shoegaze and underground metal over the last 30 years. Because I still run into music obsessives, mostly younger, who are unaware of Dinosaur Jr.’s legacy and historical place as a paramount force of innovation, influence and well-aged listening excitement, I’ll close this entry with the aforementioned video despite it visually communicating far less than it does musically. 

Much has been written (years ago by myself and more recently in Nick Atfield’s 33 ⅓ book on the album it opens) about attempting to decipher or assign one’s own meaning and words to what is probably a bunch of lyrical nonsense. I think that’s organically symptomatic of anything that hits with this kind of power and non-cheesy melancholic punch. A personal fave, however, would have to go to the one-off “Hallelujah, the sunlight brings the red out in your eyes” line that opens the gate for an instrumental mid-section of riffs (where a guitar solo might normally be).

“Little Fury Things” official video from 1987′s You’re Living All Over Me

And here’s a couple of clips that hopefully illustrate how insanely loud and air-moving Dinosaur Jr. Mach I must have been as a live band, especially considering the average age of the members was 20 to 22.

1986 at UMass…

Germany, 1988, full set. Pretty good sound given the age/era.

[internationalmarkets-contex-blog]

Music Culture in Manchester

The chosen theme of our group project focuses around the Musical Cultures within Manchester. The area in which I have specifically worked in throughout the module is designing and composing the artwork for the album covers, which includes the layout, the colour schemes, the choice of typography, the photographs, the use of shapes, the logos, and the manipulation implied. From considering all these areas, I have had to look upon this project and make decisions from a graphic designer’s point of view, as well as a photographer’s perspective.

To fulfil the brief, I have created four final images of album covers along with an A3 image of the merchandise poster and another A3 image of a collection of skulls_resulting in a total of six final images. The four album designs are all slightly smaller than A3 and are shaped as a square to resemble a CD or LP. Each album has a skull, or several skulls, as the subject matter which include geometric shapes and the use of text presenting the name of the band and the self-titled album ‘Ensnare the Sun’. Both the skull collection and the merchandise cover are landscape images and present multiple photographs which I have taken or composed.

To make these album covers I photographed several skulls from different angles and locations and, once uploaded in Photoshop, used a combination of the exclusion and multiply blend modes to alter their appearance and merge several images together. Some areas and layers needed to have a low opacity in order to allow other imagery to appear through. Both images presenting the left-hand side of a skull with the roses are the Standard Edition albums which can either be purchased with a black background or a white background. This is so the buyer can choose to purchase the cover they prefer and also so that all the albums work as a cohesive set of photographic images; two being white and two being black. The album cover presenting the skull from a low-level angle with horns on a black background is the Special Edition album which took drastically longer to make. To create the smashed horn effect, I duplicated the layer several times and cropped into each one in different areas. After that I altered the sizes of each one and moved them around the page to appear as if the horn had immediately been hit by a heavy object. I also presented the side of the face as if it was shattering with part of the jaw breaking away. Finally, the album cover with the two cat skulls and a white background is the Deluxe Edition album. Making this design took more time with experimenting with the tones and contrast as the skulls were more detailed than the previous ones. However, completing this design probably took the least amount of time. The skulls in this design are the same cat skull but photographed from two different camera angles, I also incorporated the use of shapes and lines which are presented in front or behind the subject matters for all the editions. Creating each album design was, overall, a slow process and took several hours to complete, but each worked as a success and resulted with the excellent outcomes which I had hoped for.

I admit that the subject matters of my works are illogical in terms of meaning. However, I have been inspired by the Surrealism Movement and Pioneers of the movement such as Salvador Dali and Man Ray who also produce works which are, sometimes, illogical. As four album covers, they represent the group project and the chosen theme which we wanted to cover which relates to the music scene. I have also researched into artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and H.R Giger who have both heavily influenced my work. Both these artists have made surreal paintings which present demonic themes which are either biblical, dystopian, or demonstrate some form of negativity through unsettling subject matters. And so I have made work which presents a combination of this to relate to the Heavy Metal/Thrash genre. I tend to always get my ideas when sleeping. Normally I would wake up during the night with the idea and immediately write it down or do a quick sketch of it so that I remember it the following morning. I have never gained a ‘good’ idea for my works whilst being awake and so sleeping, and dreaming, remains as the best solution for me to get my ideas.

As a group, we decided to create a lie based around our chosen topic, consisting of a ‘fictional’ band which all our imagery and designs would be made for. The purpose for creating a fictional band was originally to allow the audience to think that we, as photographers, were actually the band members and that our work is expressing us and our interests; we later changed this so that we were the artists who made the photographic work specifically for an underground band which expresses the members and their interests. The other reason for doing this is so that our body of work, as a whole, seemed as if it was intended for a purpose rather than simply being photography work without any intention for being used for anything, besides presenting Manchester’s music culture. We didn’t announce that the band did not exist until the end of the exhibition at the back of the hand-outs. This was so that the viewers could engage with the project and gain an understanding of what we wanted to do but also so that they discover the truth about our work, and see how photography can manipulate that truth.

To continue creating the lie around a ‘fictional’ band, and to allow audiences to believe in it, I decided to make an advertising board of the merchandise for the band. Doing this involved layer-blending my own photographs onto the products to help promote the band along with the typography. I did this so the audience felt as if they could purchase actual artefacts and feel as if it was for something real. I also did this so that the band, and what we created for that band, seemed more realistic and true to life if merchandise could be purchased as well.

Having imagery which is designed specifically for a band could represent what it is all about in terms of musical genre or hidden meanings_which links with the photo-montages and manipulated imagery made for the exhibition, as it is all ‘untrue’ and deliberately edited to look a certain way. This further links to the band itself not being real, and being a part of the lie along with the the manipulated photography and the merchandise which does not exist.

In terms of layout, I decided to focus on the use of space in each album cover so that they did not appear overcrowded or busy. I presented each subject matter in the centre of the page with the text underneath, allowing the eyes of the viewers to focus on the subject first and then notice the name. This was so the imagery still remained as the main feature of the work, but so that it worked together with the other aspects of the album designs. I only used two colours for these artworks, which were either black or white, so that the collection remained neutral and presented possible themes relating to light and dark, life and death, a positive and a negative etc. But overall keeping the finished designs simplistic.

The font which I have used for both the album covers and the merchandise poster is ‘Futura Lt’ and is presented with a strike going through the lettering. I have chosen to use this type of font because of how the lettering is thin and has no distracting serifs. The typeface appears masculine as it is striking but is not too bold or overpowering for the viewer; it is clean, precise, and engaging for the audience. The reason for including the strike through the text is so that it adds more obscurity to the band and the surreal artwork, but more so that it allows the whole artwork to seem original and to allow the viewers to keep wanting to analyse it. The choice of text is creative, simplistic, all in capitals, and is in contrast to the background colour so that it cannot be overlooked easily _allowing it to be more eye-catching. Which, overall, makes it appear as an immediate recognisable logo as well as just text.

The name ‘Ensnare the Sun’ was inspired from the genre of music I personally like to listen to, and which inspires a lot of my personal work. I discovered that one of my personal favourite bands have also made an instrumental track with this same title in which added to the inspiration, but also made me concerned, to name my own creation as this. From this, I was considering to name the band ‘Ensnare Our Sun’ instead, however I didn’t think this sounded quite as powerful or as dramatic_it also sounded more like an ask, as if it was telling the audience to do the action, whereas my original intention sounded more like a verb, as if it was an action which was already happening or about to happen. I decided to stick with the original name for that reason and because it sounded quite mysterious and fitted in with the theme of the project and genre. ‘Ensnare’ meaning to seize, catch, or trap; and including ‘the Sun’ meaning capturing or trapping the light, and creating darkness. And so, I decided to name our fictional band ‘Ensnare the Sun’.

The purpose for including the unedited skull collection as part of the exhibition was to portray the possessions, which a member of the band has collected, which is completely unedited but still associates with our theme. The reason for photographing skulls is so that they fit in with the genre and also to show the personal interests and collections of the owner or band. These images were left unedited so that they show what inspired the rest of the artworks. This was also to fit in with the lie surrounding our project, allowing audiences to think I was displaying actual possessions of someone from the band; when infact, all the skulls are ornaments, decorative items, or accessories which I own. I decided to present the skulls all in the same image and all together so that they are seen as ‘a Collection’ which has inspired the album art. 

Due to the band being a Heavy Metal/Thrash band, each skull has been included in the album design to try and create an impression for the audience of almost being ‘rebellious’ towards most mainstream music and other artworks presenting different styles or themes. The reason for having the skull shattering on the Special Edition cover is to allow it to present the different feelings towards the associations of skulls; which are both positive and negative. Associations of this genre tend to present skulls and present themes of the paranormal, evil, life and death, and sometimes Satanic references. For some people skulls do represent this, but for others skulls symbolise strength, protection, power, fearlessness, wisdom, guidance, overcoming death, surviving through a difficult time, or even immortality. People assign meaning to certain objects to represent ideas or qualities. Despite this, my work is not religious in any way, but is more focused towards the strange and peculiar. I didn’t want to create artwork for a typical mainstream band as I am personally not interested with a lot of that music, and my fascination is within Metal and the associations and artwork surrounding it. I think my work for the project will be aimed more for people who enjoy the genre of music that it presents and/or are into artistic designs which portray the associations of Metal; probably people between the ages of 18-35.

The entire exhibition took place at the Old Pint Pot, Adelphi Street, Salford on Monday 6th March between 15:00-19:00. We decided to host the event here so that it related to our chosen theme, as many underground musicians/bands normally perform in local pubs or small music venues as a starting point. The venue also has a disability access facility, and we displayed our work so that people can view them up close if short-sighted. The hand-outs contained all the information we wanted the audience to know, which even revealed the truth about the lie we created. One other member of our group produced the these by using the album designs and typography which I created to help promote our exhibition and, together, composed over forty leaflets containing our artist statements and information on the project. In making these, he presented the title of our project and all our names on the front cover in the Futura Lt typeface with a strike through the lettering. This seemed to cause a bit of confusion for our viewers at first, as a couple asked why this strike appeared through our names on the front cover. And so we explained that the reason for this was to match the typography which was presented on all four album covers. We had the hand-outs left on the tables within the exhibition area for people to easily spot and pick up. Many leaflets were taken as souvenirs by the visitors, and all of them seemed to like the way we presented the information within the booklet. A couple of guests even told us that they were truly convinced with the artwork and our project, and actually believed that Ensnare the Sun was a real band which they had just never heard of before. Meaning that our lie must have worked.

The way I decided to display my work at the venue was to have my four album designs all together on a wall in a square shape, to resemble a CD/LP, and have the two Standard Editions presented at the bottom and the Special Edition and Deluxe Edition at the top. I did this so the Special and Deluxe Edition were seen as more important over the Standard Editions, as they differ in terms of photo editing and, if real, the bonus tracks and DVD which would be included. I wanted the merchandise image and the skull collection image to be both presented on the left-hand side of the album covers so that the albums were not left in a corner and look less-important. I also displayed it this way so that the skull collection was seen as the ingredients to making all the artwork, and that the merchandise were the artefacts of those unique creations. I was inspired by Dwight Eschliman to do this as he has documented the ingredients for several foods and presented them alongside the finished result for many of his photographic works. I have presented the skull collection and merchandise advert as side-projects that, along with the completed album covers, connect and work together as an entire collection.

We wanted to play with the idea of ‘photography capturing reality’ when infact we presented a false statement of this_allowing the audience to believe we created work for an existing band as well as presenting Manchester’s music culture. Our audience may think that what we did, and the idea of using the photographer as a truth-teller, is fun and creative_as photography is supposed to tell the truth. When infact, in most cases, photography is anything but the truth.

[rabbiandrewrosenblatt]

From Debate to Dialogue

In 1992 I took Modern British Literature 3269 at Columbia University, taught by the celebrated professor, Palestinian nationalist, and author Edward Said. He used literary theory and criticism to argue that European colonialism was a system in which the indigenous people in colonized lands were portrayed in art, politics, and everyday discourse as racially inferior to the white Europeans who colonized them. A central thesis of this intellectual project was Orientalism (also the title of his book that popularized the notion) – which is the point that language has the power to normalize the racial distinctions and hierarchies that enabled European empires to colonize, oppress, and enslave the non-white inhabitants of the so-called Orient. A corollary to this was the claim that Zionism was an extension of European colonialism. He argued that the founders of the Zionist movement were white Europeans who followed the same strategy to displace Arabs that European colonizers had used to conquer and enslave non-white Indians, Asians, and Africans. 

By the time I was in Prof. Said’s class, his reputation was well established. He had become an influential person in politics, advocating for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He had been an independent member of the Palestinian National Council. He had once acted on behalf of the US government to convey a peace plan to Yasir Arafat. Many of the Jewish students in my class naturally anticipated that there would be some discussion of politics. There was none. 

However, according to my fellow students there was one episode of politics. It happened in a lecture that coincided with Yom Kippur, when none of the Jewish students were in attendance. The novel covered in that session was Youth by Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s work had been a central case study of Said’s doctoral thesis. Many of Conrad's works feature ships. In Youth, the ship is the Judea. However, in that particular class, Said referred to the ship as the Palestine. My classmates were confused; they would have had less context to question the nuance of this substitution than the Jewish students who observed Yom Kippur. The next class, we all anticipated further discussion about the novel, and his changing the name of the ship. 

There was none. 

If we apply Said’s method of critical analysis to the ‘text’ of his lecturing, then he was taking advantage of an opportunity to frame or re-frame the narrative of the defining conflict of his life – i.e., the birth of Israel at the expense of the birth of a Palestinian state. The classroom is often seen as a place where knowledge, truth, and history are defined for tomorrow’s leaders. If Said saw the birth of Israel as a racist, colonialist displacement of Arab Palestine, then re-naming Judea – the ancient designation for the Jewish state – would be a step toward reversing Orientalism. 

Three weeks ago, I wrote a Friday message that commented on a podcast featuring Seth Rogen. That week’s writing got more responses than any other Friday message. Some were supportive and some critical. Last week my letter included an apology to Mr. Rogen and his family for the personal tone of my criticism of the podcast. I said the following:

In a message two weeks ago, I aggressively argued against Seth Rogen’s remarks regarding the founding of the State of Israel. The wording of the message implied a judgment of how our community and his family educated him. That was wrong, and my words should never have even suggested that. I apologize for expressing my arguments in terms that impugned the Rogen family. I, too, have to learn from my mistakes and errors 

This week, I got a phone call from Mr. Rogen. I want to share what I learned from him and what I believe we agreed we learned from the reactions to the podcast.  

The first and most important lesson is that we can all be guilty of oversimplifying each other’s positions or oversimplifying the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Rogen told me that he felt that his comments had been taken out of context. I had focused on a sound bite that was intended for a podcast on comedy. To clarify his position on Israel he linked me to a long-format podcast with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In this interview he said he realized, on reflection with his wife, “when having a conversation about something so sensitive...it is what we said and it is also what we did not say. When you're having even a humorous conversation about something so nuanced, leaving things out or omitting things can become just as bad as the things you do say.”  

I now see that I had responded to an oversimplification at the same level, with platitudes. After speaking with Mr. Rogen and learning more about his personal values, I think that his position on Israel reflects a certain ideal, not entirely different from the philosophy of the Kibbutz movement – in which his parents met – that sought to bring a strong sense of justice and equality to the world. The humanitarian ethos of Zionism is very different from Prof. Said’s view of Zionism as an inherently racist enterprise. 

From the Kibbutz movement’s perspective, the values of liberal democracy and fairness should be applied to the present situation. Israel’s treatment of Palestine and of Palestinians should reflect the humanitarian ideals that were at the core of the humanist labour movement. The argument Mr. Rogen advances sees the current policies and negotiation strategies as a betrayal of the founding principles of Israel. Many Israelis agree. I think there is much to value in such a perspective; dismissing the merits and values of such a perspective is not true to my own thinking, nor is it an effective way to get others to understand my opinion. 

There is irony in the fact that this all began with a comedy podcast and a simple line about how Mr. Rogen’s Israel education was too narrow, and then was carried on by responses, including my own, that were similarly narrow. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that organized Jewish communities present a curriculum designed exclusively to build Jewish identity and love of Israel. It speaks to the nervousness of the diaspora about the disaffection and disappearance of Jews. It speaks to the reality that there are so many narrowly-defined anti-Israel counter-narratives out there – like Prof. Said’s linguistic turn on Youth – that it is only natural to advance a counter-counter-narrative. It speaks to the very real security concerns that Jews have had in Israel from 1920 to the present. However, narrowly focusing on any single factor leaves little room, if any, for a more fulsome presentation of the Palestinian condition portrayed in the media, in the arts, and in the classroom. Too often, it leaves out a balanced view of how dehumanizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be to ordinary people on both sides – especially to Palestinians. 

Mr. Rogen and I are probably more in agreement than he might think. In the weekly letter of 8 December 2017, I applied this principle [with Terry Neiman] to the Israel-Palestine situation as follows.

It is hard to imagine listening to a narrative from enemies who lie and mislabel us as an occupier, a Nazi, and a war criminal. It is hard to listen to people who cannot utter the word Israel without the modifier of Apartheid… However, in our experience, problems do not get solved without genuine appreciation of the story of the other side. Those who choose to remain callous to the opposite story in a conflict are doomed to a status quo of conflict. 

Palestinians call their story the Nakba - the Catastrophe. 

The Torah, at its core, values investigation that is broadly fact gathering to present the whole picture of any situation. The laws that emerge from this week’s Torah reading [Parshat Shoftim] concerning the procedures of the court reflect the need for both fact-finding and empathy. A panel of judges must include experts in the fields of practical knowledge. The law cannot exist outside of the factual knowledge of a conflict. Interestingly, the members of the court cannot be “exceedingly old.” Rashi understands this to mean that they must not be so detached from having raised their own children that they have ceased to have the patience and mercy that it takes to tolerate the indiscretions of youth. 

There is a law in the Code of Torah Courts that if a court gives a unanimous verdict of guilty, then they must declare the accused exempt from punishment. One interpretation, a close reading of Maimonides in Sanhedrin 9:1, is that if everyone is of one mind to convict, then it may be that the court was biased or predisposed to find guilt and therefore was guilty of either prejudice, group-think, or both. As such, even those who are the most loyal defenders of Israel should be open to widening their lens. 

I am ever mindful that my readers – many of whom I know personally – have a range of views and political leanings. My pulpit gives me the privilege to share my narrative with many, and affords me the advantage of controlling my email distribution list. In contrast to this, Edward Said had a captive, non-Jewish audience that lacked context for his interpretations, and lacked the power to challenge his academic pulpit. He was using his privilege to re-write someone else's narrative. Mr. Rogen and I, with very different audiences, share the quality of getting more diverse, unfiltered feedback than Said got in the classroom. This experience taught me that my words carried beyond my intended readership, and that those readers were sent emotionally and intellectually in a direction opposite to what I intended.

I believe that one’s ability to engage in meaningful reflections on Israel and its policy decisions and its treatment of the Palestinians suffers from being far from the realities on both sides of the conflict. We speak about Israel from the comfort and shelter of being an ocean and a continent away, and fail to appreciate what a luxury it is to opine on Israeli and Palestinian actions when we are not part of the facts on the ground.

On reflection, I see more clearly now how my conversations with political or intellectual critics and adversaries is different from my discussions with my co-author and contributing editor Terry Neiman. Over the years, Dr. Neiman and I have developed a process of  dialogue. We agree, disagree, re-construct, re-approach, and incorporate each other’s perspectives. In contrast to that, the adversarial debates I have with others are more like competitive wrestling matches in which one person will be pinned or submit. To the extent that all our debates seek to open the perspectives of all, it is a good thing. To the extent that they intend to suppress voices and perspectives, it is a very bad thing.   

I appreciate that Seth Rogen took the time to call me to sort this out. I don’t know if his conversations with me or with Haaretz changed his opinion or gave him opportunity to see things differently. I can say for myself it was an inspiration to read further, explore more, and to be disciplined enough not to fall further into the trap of electronically-mediated debate – the so-called echo chamber effect. The chiddush – the novel approach – here is that we stopped lobbing shots at each other in the media and started a dialogue. I look forward to less oversimplification, less winner-take-all debate, less competition for control of the narratives, and more dialogue. 

[djatoon]

I’m sick of fighting moronic culture wars The best weapon against people who take themselves too seriously is not to denounce but to make fun of them. BY LIONEL SHRIVER

Lionel Shriver is an author, journalist and columnist, who writes regularly for The Spectator. She is based in London.

When I left Australia in September of 2016, I didn’t expect to ever go back.

I’d been invited to deliver the opening address of the Brisbane literary festival. The organisers had originally requested that I speak on the theme of “Community and belonging”; I told them for such a soft, sappy topic they had the wrong speaker. By all means, choose your own subject, they wrote back. I proposed to speak about identity politics in fiction, and received wholehearted approval.

I chose to focus on a concept I’d only recently encountered, which at the time had primarily been used to castigate adventurous musicians and fashion designers. ‘Cultural appropriation’ was a brand new taboo: ‘stealing’ from other people’s traditions for your own evil creative purposes without ‘permission’. Although it was baffling however one might go about securing such a licence.

In 2016, I was hard-pressed to come up with examples of this peculiar no-no being used to impugn works of fiction. But I did manage to dig up the fact that a white male British novelist had recently been chided in reviews and on social media for daring to employ a female Nigerian character. I worried that if this sort of rebuke spread, the new taboo could be catastrophic for my occupation, one wholly dependent on imagining what it’s like to be someone else.

Alas, only three years later, I’d have found copious examples of fiction writers who’ve had their knuckles rapped for helping themselves to what didn’t belong to them.

Before delivering that lecture, I’d been solely concerned that my thesis was so self-evident that the speech would be boring. Afterwards, I was informed that one audience member, a 24-year-old from Southern Sudan, had flounced down the middle aisle and out of the venue – to be followed, after several minutes, by her concerned mother.

The young woman — who has dined out on her rude exit ever since — promptly posted an indignant screed online about how deeply hurt and offended she was by my talk (much of which she did not hear). Said screed was so over-written that it was actually funny. Nevertheless, the Guardian, which has an increasingly, shall we say, ambivalent relationship to my politics, picked up the blog and posted it on the paper’s website.

The rest is history.

Media across the world piled on. The story, such as there was one, was widely misreported. One woman walking out, followed five minutes later by her mother, transformed into a mass audience desertion. My final flourish of donning a sombrero – a droll reference to the speech’s intro, and worn only during the last three words of the speech – was mis-described in every account. According to news reports, I’d worn the sombrero belligerently during the entire 45-minute address. Now, that was slanderous. I have a far better sense of theatre.

To set the record straight, I had had my publicist post the keynote’s text online. Meanwhile, the festival administrators informed the press that I had spoken “beyond my brief”, and had no permission to address this topic. When my publisher sent the organisers a copy of the email thread demonstrating that they knew perfectly well what I would speak about and had given the topic their blessing, we got back sorrow about my “hurt” and “pain”. I wasn’t hurt or in pain. I was pissed off. Advertising that I go rogue at the podium impugned my reputation, and potentially curtailed future speaking invitations.

In private, I received a surprising quantity of supportive email, some from friends I didn’t know I had, but most of these defenders didn’t take a public stand. Oh, and that British writer, whose novel I stuck up for? He’s never spoken to me again.

*

It had been my intention to nip in the bud a poorly thought-out hard-Left injunction that had the capacity, if widely applied, to make my occupation untenable. Instead I fear that I helped spread the very concept that I’d hoped to discourage. For ‘cultural appropriation’ has in this last three years become widely regarded as forbidden in fiction.

I confess that I’m sick of the subject. Nevertheless, my opposition to this harebrained notion has grown only more implacable.

It took me a while to figure out that the ‘appropriation’ foofaraw is, in part, about the commodification of identity. In those indignant 2016 comment pieces, I encountered outrage that pale-faced authors were making money from experience that wasn’t theirs to sell. Thus the idea must be to reduce supply of writing about ‘marginalised communities’, and thereby to increase demand. Presumably, if we white writers are prevented from using ‘stolen’ material – if we’re required, in the latest lingo, to ‘stay in our lane’ – then, clamouring for fiction about characters from Southern Sudan, the minority-starved reading public will turn the recent first novel of a certain huffy African-Australian activist into a bestseller. I fear this model displays a poor understanding of economics and publishing both.

In literature, too, ideological predation on established writers is intended to allow younger, woker folks to take their place. When I was coming of age, we younger writers were eager to find mentors whom we admired, and with whom we often tried to ingratiate ourselves in Master of Fine Arts programs. We inhaled the work of accomplished predecessors, the better to hone our own skills.

We now have a generation that simply ‘cancels’ the older generation, the better to clear the stage and clamber onto it. (None of these people read anymore, but mysteriously they all still want to be writers.) What I encountered in Brisbane hewed to an ugly behavioural model that has more in common with big game hunting than with art.

More fundamentally, I challenge the propositions that any of us ‘own’ our own culture, that a culture is even subject to strict definition, and that a culture has any borders that can therefore be rigidly policed. Because we are all elements in other people’s landscapes, our experience – how we act, what we say, what traditions we observe – is also an ingredient in other people’s experience. Thus I would submit: we do not even own exclusive title to ourselves.

I reject this hoarding, hostile, selfish, and perplexingly commercial relationship to ‘identity’. Better that we all conduct our work and social lives in a spirit of sharing, generosity, exploration, curiosity, experimentation, and even willingness to fail in our sincere efforts to understand one another.

But apparently we white writers are now on notice that we don’t have “permission” to write non-white characters. There was actually a headline I tripped over online during the Brisbane hullabaloo, atop an article I didn’t choose to read: “Lionel Shriver Should not Write Minority Characters” – just in case I hadn’t got the message loudly and clearly enough. Ironically, this implies that authors like me are obliged to portray the Western world as if it’s still the 1950s. Off the page, our countries may grow ever more ‘diverse’, but between book covers we’re back to apartheid.

*

The strictures now constraining the imaginations of fiction writers are not limited to a ban on cultural kleptomania. All artists today are encouraged to be political, but only in the service of a narrow hard-Left orthodoxy. Any novel that challenges the trans movement or the 100% socially and economically beneficial character of today’s mass immigration to the West will attract a Twitter mob and scathing reviews. And that’s assuming you could get such books published in the first place.

Cutting-edge artists were once famously ‘transgressive’.  Now to be cutting edge is to be cookie-cutter. Despite the reputation of the artist as a maverick, I live in a world of conformity. I don’t personally know a single fiction writer in London who supports Brexit.

You know, even having characters voice views or behave in a manner that runs contrary to progressive mores is now dangerous. At the 2016 Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee, fellow authors accused Allen Wier of a “microaggression” because three old men in a baseball park ogled a young woman in his short story.

It’s especially perilous for a novelist to express anything but officially approved progressive opinions in non-fiction – and as a prolific comment writer and columnist, I should know. I should have kept my noxious libertarian views about tax policy, the EU, and affirmative action to myself. I’ve made myself a target of animosity for virtually all the people who can influence my career – who commission the manuscripts, judge the literary prizes, award the writing residencies, and assign the reviews. For politically, my professional milieu is almost perfectly homogeneous. In outing myself in journalism, I’ve branded myself an outsider, if not an exile, among my own kind.

Hence I now get a brand of review I’ve come to recognise —whose author pre-hated me, and read my novel only with a view to locating unforgivable sins against social justice.

A friend of mine who teaches criticism at Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program in New York confirmed that this recent inclination to judge literature in accordance with its adherence to a political catechism is not all in my head. Over a glass of white wine last summer, she despaired that all her criticism students think the job of a critic is to assess a given work in accordance with its implicit racial or sexual mores. Her students won’t even cut historical texts any slack if the content doesn’t line up perfectly with contemporary progressive values.

*

Writing fiction used to be a hoot. Now it’s fraught with anxiety. My colleagues and I have been made destructively self-conscious about any sentence that touches on race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual harassment or assault, Israel, colonialism, imperialism, diversity, class, or inequality – and that list keeps getting longer. As a consequence, too many of today’s artists are struggling to be ‘good’ rather than to do ‘well’. Perpetual nervousness that a foot wrong could get you banished from civilisation for life is not conducive to making art at all, much less outstanding art.

Publishers’ practice of employing “sensitivity readers” to vet and censure manuscripts is currently restricted largely to Young Adult fiction, but could soon be coming to a mainstream publisher near you. Self-appointed experts in the delicate feelings of a range of protected special-interest groups supposedly ensure that the text doesn’t offend anyone —although at this point if your book doesn’t offend anyone, it’s probably not worth reading.

After #MeToo, we authors are also fearful about how we behave at parties, which could not only invite personal censure but get our books withdrawn from the shelves. Now that the presumption of innocence is out the window, we have to protect ourselves from both our real sexual lapses and mere accusations of such lapses. Ask Junot Diaz. It took months of ignominy to clear the author’s name after he was accused of planting an unwanted kiss, and meanwhile booksellers banned his work.

Remember when writers like Hemingway were expected to be licentious hell-raisers who drank too much? I’m perfectly capable of batting the odd hand from my knee, so please give me back the old days, when being a novelist was good fun.

*

What are we all to do?  Because this watch-your-step environment is not only a problem for artists. We’re all being coached to use dumb expressions, to edit what we say lest we violate a host of unwritten regulations, and to be increasingly avoidant of people different from ourselves not because we’re bigots but because we might say something wrong.

The hard Left’s code of conduct is drafted by people with no authority. A small group of self-nominated tyrants concocted ‘cultural appropriation’ as an unpardonable transgression, but that doesn’t mean we have to pay any attention to these bullies. The only thing that gives made-up rules any teeth is obeying them.

I’m an old-school rebel. Tell me I can’t do something and my immediate impulse is to do it. I write minority characters. You can only dispense with silly rules by breaking them, and any freedoms that you don’t exercise you’re bound to lose.

This means resisting the all-too-rational protective urge to self-censor. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint outraged American conservatives, and Roth meant the novel to be outrageous. He recognised that artists are supposed to push the confining cultural boundaries of their times. But these days, that means pushing back against the rigid rectitude of the Left.

We can also maintain our senses of humour. The best weapon against people who take themselves too seriously is not to denounce but to make fun of them. They deserve it, and we deserve a good belly laugh at their expense.

It’s also important to come to the defence, publicly and not only in private emails, of artists, academics, journalists, and thinkers who have stuck their necks out only to have their heads chopped off. The august, yet temporarily disgraced philosopher, Roger Scruton, who was crucified by an irresponsible journalist taking his quotes out of context, was only restored to respectability with the assistance of friends and allies who advocated on his behalf.

Otherwise, we just have to weather the storm. This Left-wing mania for dos and don’ts can’t last forever. I fear what may be required is some sort of catastrophe, one that makes ‘microaggressions’ suddenly seem as trivial as the expression suggests. This lunatic authoritarian obsession with an infinitely growing list of rules in relation to an infinitely growing list of specially protected categories of people? It’s an ailment born of prosperity. It’s the ultimate first-world problem. A plague of antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating bacteria across the planet might kill billions of people, but it would also wipe identity politics right off the map. In my desperation to restore sanity, playfulness, mischief, and abandon to our cultural landscape, I just hope I don’t have to resort to disseminating the bacteria myself.

Both artists and arts consumers need to return to first principles. That is, the purpose of art is not to do good. A given novelist may choose to promote the author’s version of virtue, but being good-as-in-virtuous is not what makes a book good-as-in-excellent.

It’s time to return to valuing not only nuance and complexity, but anarchy, wickedness, and heresy. It’s time to stop feeling obliged to be such good little campers, at least in our heads. Both writers and readers need to feel free to explore the unseemly underbelly of our imaginations. After all — aren’t books the ultimate ‘safe space’?

And sometimes we just have to talk about something else — something besides whatever group is socially disadvantaged this week, or what remark some public figure made about race or gender that’s supposedly beyond the pale. Sometimes we authors have to write about something else — so maybe I’m even apologising for the very topic I’m speaking of right now.

Because for me, the biggest trap of this whole identity politics lark has been getting lured into debating a proposition that’s unworthy of my address. I get drawn into fights from which I’d be better off just walking away. I’m genuinely embarrassed to have continually explained what I think is wrong with the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ for three solid years. It’s a dumb idea, and it’s dumb terminology. Call it ‘cultural appreciation’ and the argument is over. For there’s a way in which, when you spend your precious time on this earth battling something dumb, even if at length you prevail, you’ve nevertheless thrown your pearls before swine, and the morons have still won.

[necromancer-nonbinary]

God has no power to stop my hand, subtitled: apparently I can write 7-page papers no problem, just not about anything I actually need to write about.

Carrie: The Musical. Notorious in its 1980’s rendition as one of the biggest flops in Broadway history (right up there with the disastrous Spider-Man musical), it had a small resurgence in a 2012 off-Broadway rewrite. This rewrite changed a number of details, though I’m only familiar with the ones at the very beginning and very end, as I physically could not bring myself to watch more than five minutes of the recording my castmates found on YouTube. A community theatre on a military base in Stuttgart, Germany, put on a production of the revival version in 2014, which I was a part of. It was a very fun show to do, especially as my first in any sort of major role, and even now, I occasionally go back to it via the video recording we definitely did not make and the shitty cast album I ripped from the audio of that same definitely nonexistent recording. It’s fun to see what I remember from it, and how much my body and my emotional state still respond to something I did for just a few months years ago. But what really gets me more and more each time I come back to it is just how easy it is to read the title role of Carrie as trans.

           I’m biased. I’m trans myself. Two other people in the cast (that I know of) have also come out in the years since, bringing it up to three out of a cast of twenty. I can, have, and will continue to find a trans reading of almost everything I love, because why shouldn’t I? These readings almost invariably enrich the characters in question, and it’s fun to piss off cis people who clutch their pearls at the notion that people can be trans without explicit confirmation or their stories revolving around coming out. I almost hesitate with my reading of Carrie because (spoiler alert, if you haven’t either read the book or seen any of the many adaptations of the story since the 60’s), Carrie not only dies, but goes out in a burst of rage that kills almost every single other named character in the story. It’s not the world’s nicest trope. The saving grace in this case, I think, is that what sends Carrie over the edge is explicitly not a problem within her own mind; it’s the actions of people who are unjustly cruel to her. Still not a happy ending. But then again, it’s horror. What else would we expect?

[cut for length. this thing is seven fucking pages long according to microsoft word.]

           This reading is going to take into account the aspects of the revival musical which support my reading, address those which don’t (not necessarily in a way that resolves them! Just admitting that I know they are there before anyone starts arguing “well she had a period blah blah” I know this. I memorized that whole script. I ran out onstage screaming that I was bleeding and dying at least 4 dozen times. I know), and possibly something else which I can’t remember right now because it was a tangent I got on in the shower this morning and was probably still more related to gender than anything else.

           The biggest thing I want to discuss is Carrie’s own language about herself in the show. She speaks very little in comparison to the other teenagers in the show; most of her vocalization is either in song or dialogue contained within a song. Her first words in the play are not her own; she’s repeating the Lord’s Prayer, trying to calm herself down (something I want to come back to later when I discuss religion). Her next are almost incoherent, when she runs out of the shower after realizing she’s bleeding and begs the other girls for help. “It hurts,” she says to Ms. Gardner when she comes in to see what’s happening. “My stomach.” Carrie is not eloquent in standard speech, which also probably contributes to the teasing she suffers (in our production, she was played by me, which also means she definitely came across as autistic – another strike against her, but that’s not my point right now). But what elicits her first powerful verbal expression is right before the song “Carrie”: overhearing Chris tell Sue about the various nicknames people at school have for Carrie, in particular “Scary White,” which is followed by a chorus of students – implied, I think, to be in her own head (which comes back later!) whispering, then chanting, then shouting the nicknames. “Scary White,” they croon, and more generic insults such as “Weirdo!” “Loser!” “Freak!” and “Dumb bitch,” until Carrie screams, “That’s not my name!”

           The first coherent words of her own in the play: the insistence upon being called her own name. This entire song is alternately her repeating her own name and lamenting that the other students are so cruel to her: “I will not cry. I’m okay/I try so hard to play their way/Why do they find it so hard to say/Carrie?” This is a feeling that any trans person with a new name can relate to, especially when the people in their life are less than thrilled about respecting it. As she moves through the song, repeating her name, though, she grows more confident in it, until she reaches the final lines and exclaims, “But someday/Oh my, someday/Someone will know my name!”

           I am not going to spend much time on “And Eve Was Weak,” in part because it still freaks me the fuck out five years after the end of the show, and in part because its focus rests on Carrie’s period and the deeply upsetting relationship between her and her mother. All I will say about it is that it ends with Carrie being hurled into a closet. Which, really, is all the proof I need to decide that she is trans. Also bi, but that’s not really the focus of this essay.

           Time and time again, we also hear Carrie referring to the “other” in a way that indicates that she has only recently been able to insert herself into the category of “girl.” In the end-of-the-act confrontation song “I Remember How Those Boys Could Dance,” she tells her mother that “I know I’m not like all the others/Sometimes I dream in color” and that “nobody feels the things that I do.” This is an easy surface reading that of course she doesn’t feel like anyone she knows; she is isolated from other people her age by their cruelty and from any adult other than her mother by the town’s distaste for her mother. But trans people almost invariably feel separated from the people around them, especially before they realize they’re trans: they feel alienated from their AGAB but as if they couldn’t possibly belong with people of their actual gender, no matter how untrue that feeling may be. Notable here is that at no point does Carrie refer to that feeling that she’s unlike others as an explicitly negative one. “Sometimes I dream in color” is a kind of nonsense line, one I never could puzzle out while I was actually in the show, but it isn’t negative; she senses there is something more to her because of her difference, and it’s good. In at least two other songs, she talks about other girls specifically: “I bet other girls already know/the ways to get their skin to glow/but I can learn./I’m not sure how all these colors mix/those other girls, they’ve got their tricks/but I can learn/It’s my turn/on Saturday night!” (from “A Night We’ll Never Forget”) and the repetition of a formulaic “if other girls (X)” than I can too in “Why Not Me?” – “if other girls can do this, why can’t I?”, “and if other girls get through this why not me?”, “I know I may not be welcome but at least I will be there/and if other girls belong, then I do too.” What is especially interesting to me when she refers to others is the shift in the way she does so. Early on, at the end of the first act and in “Night We’ll Never Forget,” it is almost exclusively about the physical. The line I mentioned earlier, “sometimes I dream in color,” is followed immediately by the line “sometimes I even think I’m lovely,” and of course, in “Night We’ll Never Forget” she is trying to learn how to do her makeup the way that other girls do. But by the time we reach “Why Not Me?”, she has reached beyond wanting to physically look like other girls and instead is asserting that she has just as much right to belonging as every other girl at the school. There is a subtext of physicality to this song, because as she sings it, she is getting made up to go to the prom, but it isn’t just about looking like a girl anymore. It’s about being one.  

           I want to move now to things other people and the narrative as a whole say about Carrie, starting with the obvious: seventeen is incredibly late to start menstruating and, despite a general decrease in the age of onset over the last few decades, was still very late in the 60’s when the book was first written. Most people who experience periods in the US begin menstruating about the age of twelve and 90% have begun by the time they are fourteen. It is obviously intended to be linked to her telekinetic powers and her mother’s paranoia about Carrie reaching an age of sexual maturity, and it is a literal period – the stage directions and later dialogue explicitly refer to Carrie coming onstage with blood on her hands and dripping down her legs – but there are interesting implications for my reading in it being so late. Menstruation is linked in the cisgender mind to womanhood. It is not a sure sign, as any trans person could tell you, but it is one of the easiest ways to signify to a cis audience that a character is a woman. This has numerous flaws – the most obvious in relation to my topic being that not all people who menstruate are women, and not all women menstruate – but also because the onset of menstruation, even in cis women, does not mean that person is now a woman. A twelve-year-old could by no stretch of the imagination be considered an adult. It doesn’t even mean sexual maturity; from a simple biological standpoint, the child who has just begun menstruating is not biologically ready to have a child, as their body is not yet fully grown and often the first several periods a child has are nonovulatory. Despite these flaws, what Carrie’s period tells most of the audience is that she is coming to womanhood years after most of her peers. Her mother held to an unreasonable hope that she would never come to it at all.

           Carrie’s mother is another clear roadblock to the theory of Carrie as a trans woman; such a viciously religious woman would be very unlikely to allow her child to express being trans. But I also think there’s something to be said for the fear with which she treats Carrie’s womanhood. The narrative makes it obvious she fears Carrie growing up and being able to leave her behind, and a few offhand lines in “And Eve Was Weak” indicate that she knows something about Carrie’s telekinesis: “The seed conveys the power and it’s come again/it’s come again/it’s come again/Until the seed is crushed this power never ends/it never ends/it never ends.” Margaret White does not know about Carrie’s powers until she reveals them at the end of the act, but she suspects that something will come of her maturation other than her own loss of control over her daughter’s life. But this doesn’t change the fact that she regards Carrie’s womanhood with more fear than is reasonable, and the simple fact that Margaret is not sound of mind doesn’t necessarily explain all of it.

           The treatment she receives from her peers is also interesting in the light of a transgender reading. Carrie is undeniably odd; she talks infrequently, dresses strangely, and has a mother who is the town outcast (and again, when played by yours truly, she reads very autistic), but she is not strange enough on her own to become an outcast; when she gets to the prom, Frieda and Tommy treat her very kindly, and they seem to have an easy time talking to one another. Her mother’s strangeness is meant to be the clear reason why she is treated so badly. The other students know from their parents that Margaret White is a Bible-thumping weirdo, and so assume Carrie would be too. The trouble with that is that she clearly is not. Outside of her home, she references religion twice in the play, both times in the same way: by reciting the Lord’s Prayer to calm herself down. During “The Destruction” she also repeats her mother’s admonition that “God made Eve to bear the curse/The curse of blood,” but there is a strong argument to be made that most of the events at the beginning of “The Destruction” are actually only happening inside her head. There is an abrupt switch after her line, “Oh my God oh my God oh my God” and before she begins singing where the other students and both teachers at the prom (including Tommy and Frieda, who had been nice to her all night, and Miss Gardner, who has been kind to her throughout the play) begin laughing and jeering and echoing the fragments of songs which Carrie sings, and another abrupt switch as she sings her final line in the song when everyone stops and appears to be in shock. The fact that every line of “The Destruction” is one taken from an earlier song and twisted back at her mockingly also indicates that this is an extreme panic reaction and not something actually happening or spoken aloud. What this means is that, one, the students and teachers did not actually begin mocking her as she believed, and instead were as horrified by Chris’s prank as the audience, and two, that the fragment of her mother’s kind of religion she spits is not actually her but the version of her mother that lives in her head. I think most of us have that, but for Carrie, it is a source of fear rather than common sense. On multiple occasions through the play, dialogue makes it clear that Carrie is a normal girl who happens to be outcast and also have secret telekinetic powers. People very rarely end up outcasts for no reason; bullying does not happen randomly. Her mother’s oddity may have made her a target to begin with, but it is made clear narratively that she does not share it. Thus, there must be another reason why the other students cast her out. Enter the theory that she is trans, therefore different, therefore to be mocked.

           It isn’t a happy view of transness from several angles, not least of which being that she dies and takes everyone out with her, but from outside the horror aspect, a trans reading of Carrie is almost positive. She finds support in Miss Gardner, who is heavily coded to be LGBT herself, and despite opposition is able to stand proudly in her womanhood at the prom and begin proving – rather easily, even – that she belongs there just as much as everyone else. I doubt there’s a way to actually make the angle of Carrie as a trans woman work onstage, because of the various obstacles I outlined, but I do believe that being able to take a character or story and read transness in it gives it new dimensions. There’s value in finding an understanding of media which goes outside of the standards we’ve unconsciously set as the norm; it helps expand our definition of what “normal” is and gives us insight into a part of life that many people don’t often think about.

[onlinemarketingsystemworld-blog]

Why Facebook Deserves Over $10 Billion

Yahoo! have actually remained in talks with Facebook for over a year currently as well as apparently recently got reluctant at Facebook's $1 billion asking rate but as I will certainly describe here Yahoo! have missed out on an outright deal.

Facebook have 18 million users, plenty. Nevertheless MySpace has 100 million + and sold for a simple $580 million to News Corp's in 2005. YouTube sold to Google for a reported $1.65 billion in 2006 but it offers over 100 million video clip's a day as well as has more than 25 million visitors a month. So what makes Facebook so important? It obtains relatively massive website traffic levels but out par with YouTube or MySpace. Despite currently being readily available to anyone it started life as an exclusive network for pupils (you required an academic email to register) and this is still its main customer group.

So where's the cash?

Currently Facebook displays traditional banner marketing on customers' homepages as well as picked pages through the website. Adverts are unobtrusive and random in so much as they're not targeted at any specific individual- they're simply served to the whole website on a random basis. Facebook are doing ok from this plan on the basis of the variety of page perceptions they receive, although in truth they're keeping advertising and marketing at a minimum in order to accumulate the value of the site for its eventual sale which will certainly probably happen in 2007/8. Smart guys!

The power of details

Register with Facebook and also quickly you could find yourself distributing significant quantities of useful individual info. Think about it ... Facebook understand your name, they recognize exactly how old you are (actually your D.O.B which is definitely more valuable as I'll go on to clarify), they know if you're male or female, they recognize your hometown, your postcode if you choose to give it away (although I question many individuals pick this), they know if you're single, in a connection (as well as that with), wed, divorced etc, they understand your sexual orientation. Ok so you can answer all these inquiries as honestly, dishonestly or vaguely as you like yet from what I've seen individuals gladly give exact info regarding themselves as it's their friends as well as possible buddies that are going to see it- and no person else right?

However just what else do Facebook recognize? Well they know where you mosted likely to school, where you function, more sinisterly your religious and political views. From this we can start to accumulate a rather beneficial market account. As I'm informing Facebook I could too inform you I'm Male, 22 (born in August), Straight, in a connection, conventional, atheist from Brighton, England. Mosted likely to school at Blatchington Mill Second, college at a location called BHASVIC, University at Bournemouth. From this information we can draw more assumptions- I reside in Brighton and based upon the area of my institutions catchment area we could rather accurately map areas in Brighton I find out about, visit, as well as reside in (assume Google maps API). I'm a directly; conservative from a reasonably well-off location in full time employment as a result I'm most likely white, center course with a respectable non reusable revenue.

So exactly what else? Facebook know what you resemble, they possibly know what you used to look like a few years ago too. Probably most considerably they understand that your buddies are, they recognize just how you recognize them, they understand when you speak with them, just what they appear like and also eventually they know precisely the very same information about them as they learn about you- you're interests, suches as and dislikes as well as your buddies tastes too.

They understand your email address, so they understand if you make use of Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and so on. They recognize your telephone number so they could very easily work out your phone service provider. They have your IP address so they might exercise your ISP. They recognize where you've reached the site from so they recognize what online search engine you use (get in Yahoo! As well as Google to the bidding process battle), what internet browser you're on, they know if you're aesthetically impaired or have finding out impairments from the setups on your web browser.

Facebook know when I'm visiting and also from where so they understand the hrs I work, if I'm making use of the web at the office, the web pages I leave Facebook to visit or the web pages I originate from so they understand just what other websites I check out. I could establish my present condition and inform Facebook precisely what I'm doing or really feeling right this 2nd.

Ok so you get the picture by now, one last point though, is your Facebook password the same as your email account password, your internet as well as telephone banking password, each password you utilize in your life (because until I wrote this blog post mine was!) how much even more info do you want to hand out?

What's the risk here?

Genuinely it's very slim. Facebook are a nice lot of individuals as well as a great website, I like using it as well as in spite of understanding just what I learn about info safety and so on I choose to distribute a large chunk of the info I have actually spoken about here.

Yahoo! And Facebook

So if Yahoo!, Google or god forbid Microsoft effectively purchase Facebook (as I say I'm fairly confident this will certainly occur this year) the Orwellian lucid desire recommended by this blog post ends up being a continuous headache. Imagine a firm who have actually made billions and also controlled the fastest growing market in the world by developing algorithms which creep hundreds of countless pages of arbitrary information (the web) and classify that details with the supreme goal of matching it to businesses and offering marketing.

The search algorithm let loose on Facebook

Imagine the online search engine let loose on Facebook. An algorithm tuned to choose profile details (John, born 13.08.84). Map it to search phrases in individual rate of interests i.e. football, Manchester United. Plot your location on a map i.e. Brighton, England. Comply with links to your closest pals with comparable interests i.e. Bob and also Dave who live round the corner as well as serve me an advert something like:

Pleased birthday for next week John.

Did you recognize its Dave's birthday celebration the week after?

Why not publication tickets for Brighton and also Hove Albion vs. Manchester united on 12.08.07

Visit this site to book now and obtain 3 tickets for the price of 2 (why not ask bob to find along- he sustains Brighton and also you have not talked in a while).

Schedule today as well as we'll offer you a half price limousine from your house to the video game with trashy-limo's. com.

Now that's powerful advertising as well as it's simply nearby. If Facebook has 25 million signed up individuals by the time it's sold, half of which see each day that's a minimum 12.5 million web page impressions a day. Serve the advert above at $1 a click (which is much less than its worth based upon the current AdWords CPC design) expect a click with price of as much as 10% based on the exact nature of the marketing which's $1.2 million minimum a day- virtually $ 1/2 a billion a year. Grow that individual group to 50 million (reasonable if Google or Yahoo! can use their existing individual database) and also offer advertisement room on an affiliate basis claim the football tickets at $300 with a 10% affiliate kickback and also a 10% conversion price =$ 3 per user x 25 million users =$ 75 million a day or $2737500000 in year 1! OK allows not obtain brought away individuals aren't mosting likely to spend $300 each day yet the logics there therefore the money.

Will the audience except it?

Much better quality marketing indicates much less advertising- less web sites rammed with banners so you can not discover exactly what you're looking for, much less popups, less low quality items. This is the primary driving force behind the success of search advertising programs and account based marketing is already in position with Google's individualized search returning extra targeted AdWords advertisements compared to previously possible. If it falls under the hands of Microsoft then individuals could be more careful yet with the picture of Google or Yahoo! and Facebook account details is considered as soft details as the business does not sell you products directly as well as he solution is complimentary. It's the method the internet is going and also I believe it's where we'll remain in 5 years.

Identification theft

The factor I've been making tediously through this article is that we ought to be extra mindful concerning just what information we give up and also to whom. If the net was an area it would certainly be Nazi Germany and also Facebook would certainly be the Gestapo! Social energies like Facebook are afforded the kind of fortunate details fascist federal governments everywhere would certainly and have actually killed for. We moan concerning identity cards being presented in the UK (actually there's several Facebook groups committed to the reason) but we gladly surrender personal details to a number of college geeks in the states that are ultimately intending on offering our details to the highest bidder (the value of any website is based upon the volume, top quality and quantity of info they have regarding their web traffic- however finest of good luck to them) possibly to the business that currently control the majority of world business systems with the home windows system.

This blog post is not implied to scare- it's simply an acknowledgment of the power of new web modern technologies, their possibly applications as well as to pose the inquiry- if your Facebook pals are your actual pals shouldn't they understand your birthday celebration? Are Facebook actually going to buy you a present?!