#like. the narrative that trauma makes you stronger is pretty much universally bullshit

[2hoothoots]

what if raz has a fifth archetype that's locked up and it's representative of his generational trauma

see, that's kind of a fun concept, but it doesn't really fit with how i see archetypes? the way i interpret them, they're something that you purposefully create to help you out, rather than something that spontaneously forms. i think if you wanted to explore, say, a trauma response in a character, it'd be more likely to be reflected in their mental world, for example.

besides, raz already has an archetype to represent his repressed trauma!

[lj-writes]

I’m curious on your opinion of LoK. What’s your issue with it?

Book 1 was so ineptly written that it was fully possible to dismiss non-bender oppression as a thing that never existed and was made up to wipe out benders–and that’s how large sections of the fandom took it, in fact.

And look, Fantastic Racism in general is very easy to get wrong (looking at you, X-Men, Zootopia, too many others to name…) but LoK is particularly egregious in implying that movements for equality are essentially largescale frauds, especially when the writing is inconsistent enough to imply in places that discrimination against non-benders is in fact a problem that exists.

Abrupt fix-it at the last moment in Book 1. We’re not even allowed to experience the full tragedy of lost bending (and like, bending isn’t real so why are we supposed to care again?), that consequence has to be taken away by divine intervention because Korra was sad.

Speaking of Korra, we don’t get to watch her struggle and work her ass off the way we saw Aang or even Roku do in the brief flashbacks we got. She comes pre-equipped with water, earth, and fire at the age of five, and never even has to grow into the spiritual values of Airbending. She had her other three elements taken away and Airbending abruptly came to her because she needed it in her desperate hour. She doesn’t grow through work or by trying, but by being put in danger and pain. Looking back, this substitution of female suffering for hard work and organic development foreshadowed her end of Book 3-Book 4 trauma storyline.

As a tangent, and because I need more people to piss off apparently, this replacement of suffering for work is strongly reminiscent of Rey in the new Star Wars. Both Korra and Rey are willing to work hard, but that’s not how they actually make the most dramatic gains. Either they’re born with their prodigious talents or the work they did put in happens off screen. Their most meaningful gains come from being violated in some way by male characters, by being kidnapped, having their powers stripped, being poisoned, tied up…

I mean this is just a thinly veiled version of rape as a heroine origin story, where the thing that makes a woman truly powerful is not the hard work she puts in but the fact that some man treated her like an object.

Why are creators afraid to let women struggle? Why do we have to be born prodigies who are violated into our destinies? Yes, trauma and the way we face up to it can make us stronger, and I don’t want to take away from anyone who felt empowered by Korra’s or Rey’s stories. But when I see three seasons dedicated lovingly to Aang working to master the four elements, then Korra just getting it within a season because she had her bending stripped after being physically held down, I’m going to be just a little salty at the different ways male and female protagonists are treated.

Raava and Batu were bullshit concepts that used the trappings of yin and yang to express a stark good-evil duality. If you don’t understand what yin and yang are then stop distorting the fuck out of the imagery. And for that matter it’s pretty iffy to impose a very Christian struggle between cosmic good and evil on a universe built on Asian cultures and mythologies.

This show doesn’t even know what it wants to be. Book 2 took a complex and interesting story of a civil war between literal brothers and a moral/political debate about military interventionism, and made it into a kaiju slugfest. While the slugfest was entertaining, what the hell happened to that earlier story? It’s like Book 1 all over again, they avoided actually dealing with the political storyline they set up early in the season by shunting it aside to magic punching.

Bolin’s abuse was played for laughs. I will never not be mad about this. Because male victims of abuse are not already ridiculed enough in real life, right? Fuck whoever thought this was a good or okay idea.

Speaking of abuse, the Water Tribe brothers from Book 1 (not to be confused with the Water Tribe brothers from Book 2) dying by murder-suicide was horrifying. Hey it’s not like victims of parental abuse already feel broken and unworthy to live, let’s totally validate that by endorsing the position that the only way they have to go is death.

The brothers’ fate is such a far cry from the empowering storylines Zuko and even more minor characters like Mai and Ty Lee got escaping and recovering from their own abuse, it’s insulting for them to even exist in the same franchise.

And yeah, lots of abuse victims are assholes! But Azula was 10,000x more memorable and better written than the asshole brothers ever were, and what’s more, hers was not the only abuse victim narrative in her show–she worked as another perspective of abuse victims precisely because Zuko and the others had very different stories. LoK doesn’t have any such nuance. Just blow them up because that’s all they’re good for and we shall never mention them again.

Asami, Bolin, and Mako could have been replaced by sock puppets for all the development they got in the show. They had potential but were so massively underused while the story spent all its energy changing tracks mid-season and lurching all over the place trying to be everything. Why not do something with the characters you already have.

This show has a really big fucking underlying problem with class. The supposedly good people, Korra, Tenzin, Lin, Su-yin, Iroh II and so on are essentially aristocrats, sons and daughters of heroes and world leaders who, in the case of Korra and Tenzin, have entire organizations dedicated to serving and helping them. Their servants and the orphans they graciously take in, on the other hand, are either invisible or become traitors and Big Bads.

I mean while I squeed at Korrasami, I get cynical about it at times and wonder if what really made Asami the endgame mate for Korra and not Mako was that Asami is the daughter of a rich industrialist who inherited everything from her dickish dad, while Mako is an orphan who grew up on the streets.

Even among the underdeveloped trio of Asami, Mako, and Bolin, it’s clearly Asami who did the best in terms of character development at least toward the end, reconciling with her asshole would-be murderer dad, while Mako and Bolin’s far more interesting mixed heritage family was swept under the rug.

Speaking of which, MAKO WAS TOTALLY IN THE RIGHT FOR SNITCHING KORRA’S AWFUL INTERVENTIONIST PLAN TO THE PRESIDENT AND YOU CAN FIGHT ME ON THIS. Both Korra and Iroh II can get fucked for acting like the New Republic was their fucking property and casually trying to plunge it into war. Fuck that noise and fuck those entitled brats.

Too bad the showrunners were too cowardly to follow up on this actually interesting political and interpersonal conflict, but inconsistency and lack of follow-through are pretty much LoK’s calling cards so what else is new.

[susandsnell]

whaaat Hadestown sounds awesome!!! i’ll definitely check both those out but it sounds like Hadestown is like, the style of my dreams. also anything that starts as a folk opera is awesome bc i love the concept of a folk opera. follow up: i’ve seen some things about Be More Chill and somehow missed its jump to Broadway? what’s it about?

Sorry I took a day to get back to you, musical anon, but I just had to write my penultimate final first thing this morning! Hadestown is the style of everyone’s dreams, and I really hope you like it when you do check it out. It’s incredibly unique. 

As to your second query, permit me to have some obnoxious gif usage because life is short and I am now permanently on my bullshit. And, well. You just asked me, Coco, about Be More Chill.

WELCOME TO HELL. YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE NOW. 

(Festive, right?) 

So! 

Be More Chill is a very loose adaptation of a (vastly different and quite offensive) 2004 novel by the same name. It did the work of my dreams, which is combine my two favourite genres, science fiction and musical theatre, in a big way, while also stealth being a narrative about mental health, recovery, friendship, love, and sexy computers.  Also, the songs are absolute bops and the music style is contemporary but still unmistakably Broadway. It’s also openly inspired by Little Shop of Horrors (while also being very much in the vein of other wacky, culty musicals like Reefer Madness, a bit of Rocky Horror thrown in, etc), which is a major plus. 

It’s a darkly hilarious, sci-fi-horror-teen drama-romance-musical, in short. 

In long??? A little gist: 

So, our leading man, Jeremy Heere, is a (canonically Jewish! Canonically Jewish! CANONICALLY JEWISH!!!) typical high school geeky outcast who struggles with severe anxiety, self hatred, and a vast panoply of other issues. He’s badly bullied, only has one friend, Michael Mell, who is quite literally the savior of the universe, and crushes on the local theatre kid (and a literal queen), Christine Canigula. In an effort to impress her, he takes the advice of the local bully, Rich, and buys a pill from the back of a Payless shoe store called a SQUIP (short for Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor), which, if ingested and activated by Mountain Dew (just go with it I promise it’s worth it), installs a computer chip in his brain that can manifest the illusion only he can see of a personification that is an intensely attractive person (has been cast as multiple genders depending on the production!!!) who will instruct him on what the right thing to do or say is so that he can overcome his perceived social and personal failings, and improve himself, and maybe get the girl. 

Of course, this thing goes evil, and absolute epic mayhem ensues. 

Where do I even start with what I love about this musical? 

The characters are incredibly true to life; literally nobody is who they seem to be in terms of typical high school, sci fi, or even theatre tropes. which is part of the ultimate message (and I love that!!!) Jeremy’s narrative is very much a subversion of the typical entitled-nerd-boy-goes-wild-trying-to-get-the-girl, because his actions and mistakes are steeped very much in long lasting mental health struggles (he literally mentions having to go to the nurse constantly due to his anxiety attacks), as well as a heartrendingly realistic and depressing home life, and the show is very clear about this, pulling no punches. He’s flawed, he’s sweet, he’s funny, he’s tragic, he’s redemptive, he’s just…wonderful. 

Michael, who in any other show would be ‘the goofy best friend’ character and that’s it gets an incredible arc showing his brilliance, and his own inner demons, including the big showstopper Michael In The Bathroom, which is famous not only for being an incredible song, but because it goes there; it depicts the entirety of a severe panic attack in gut-wrenching detail. All set to awesome music, of course. His depth is revealed in that the otherwise cheerful, happy-go-lucky best friend character whose life seems to revolve around the protagonist’s brought to the logical conclusion of this archetype; extreme codependency and other mental health struggles. This is by no means all that he is – I’d explain why, and what an incredible, positive, heroic character he is, but I won’t dare spoil where his arc ends up going. 

Christine Canigula, our leading lady, is a badass feminist and so much more than a perky theatre kid; she’s shown to struggle much in the same ways Jeremy and Michael do, she’s politically involved and dedicated, while still being desperately uncertain about what to do with her life, her entire character is dedicated to subverting expectations (all her big numbers end with a subverted rhyme to prove this!!), she’s developed so much more than other love interest characters, and is in so many ways so much more than a love interest. She’s fiercely intelligent, but tempted to take the easy route to popularity in different ways than Jeremy, while being more inclined to being true to herself, and her autonomy drives the plot. She’s also canonically a woc who has ADHD and she’s a gun control advocate. Like??? When will your faves ever?  Her romance is believable and wonderful and driven by what she wants and her arc, while subtle, is integral to the plot. 

I could do a paragraph for each character (and if you’re on my blog, I’ll probably get around to writing meta for each of them), but the popular kids, the bullies, even the apparently useless parent character…none of them are what they seem. As for the SQUIP, I don’t dare reveal the awesomeness of that particular villain, except to say that it’s a metaphor for…a number of things, while incredibly enthralling, and The Pitiful Children, the big villain song, is honestly up there with any of your Disney villains for a truly epic sci-fi experience. It’s a completely irredeemable villain whose appeal lies in its irredeemability, especially fascinating because it’s a machine, and hence gains no sadistic pleasure from it’s evildoing; it merely seeks results, which is just chilling. 

The cast is incredibly diverse, and there is a TON of LGBT+ representation, including Michael having lesbian mothers, a completely non-stereotyped bisexual male character who ACTUALLY CALLS HIMSELF BISEXUAL OUT LOUD, and who is arguably the most tragic character in the show, but that tragedy is separate almost entirely from his orientation, and more. 

While being lighthearted sci-fi fare, it deals pretty straightforwardly with a number of heavy topics, such as mental illness, suicidal ideation, extreme loneliness, self-hatred, isolation,  trauma, abuse, sexual orientation, dysfunctional families, dysfunctional friendships, existential crises, near-death experiences, brainwashing, addiction, bullying, torture (of the sci-fi variety but still pretty damn hard to watch), and even (albeit briefly, but it still bears mention) male sexual assault, and handles all of them exceptionally well, never overdoing it on any of them (they’re interwoven and sometimes entirely subtextual to the plot) but also being honest enough about the fact that some of our darkest moments include incredibly dark comedy, all while never making light of these serious issues. That being said, consider this the trigger warning paragraph if any of that’s a limit for you! They’re so wonderfully balanced by a narrative of healing and forgiveness and loyalty and love that it makes the story all the stronger; seeing everyone facing these awful things, and being able to overcome them together. 

It’s also the type of sci-fi that I love; the kind that, like Back to the Future, Weird Science, and Stranger Things embraces a retro aesthetic, and is a smaller, singular fantastical/sci-fi element contained in a setting that is otherwise very recognizable to our world; the kind of adventures you feel like you could have between your own classes. The sci-fi effects and costumes are incredible, especially in Act 2. 

AND, and and and, It’s an underdog story within an underdog story; it opened in a regional theatre in Jersey for a limited run in 2015 and closed very quickly, and everyone assumed it would never be picked up again, but in Winter 2017, it blew up by sheer word of mouth due to a combination of the original cast album being on Spotify and the popularity of certain amateur productions since it got licenced; eventually, it got a 2017 regional theatre revival at Exit 82, and that sparked an online fandom so strong that the show got a second chance with an off-Broadway run that happened this past summer, which in turn got so successful that the show is transferring to Broadway. All the way from a seemingly failed regional limited run, with most of the original cast (who are darlings, as are the creators, incredibly empathetic people bringing this wonderful, weird, warm story to the forefront). And who doesn’t love the meta of the show itself being an underdog when the cast is entirely of underdogs?

Just. Please. Do yourself a favour and check it out. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll cheer.  I heard about it only peripherally since around mid-2017 ish and then only really got into it this past May/June, and….gosh. My life’s gotten so much better since. I’ve met dear friends through the fandom, dragged other dear friends into this glorious pit, and the show, as a narrative of healing, is helping to heal me, too. 

Possibly a new all-time favourite.