#my thesis statement forever. you can just tell people when you like something about what they're doing in life.

[vulpinesaint]

truly you have to participate in the compliment economy. random compliments are so rare but it's not because you don't deserve them! our discomfort with engaging with other people makes it so that only some people take the initiative to give compliments in the first place, and that's really only if there's something standout about the person they're complimenting. it doesn't have to be that way. get comfortable with telling people that you like their clothes or their hair or that they have nice eyes or a good smile or a pretty laugh or that you admire the way they carry themself or like their music taste or just that you think they're nice or smart or cool. put a little delight out into the world! once you've done that, it opens up similar dialogues bit by bit... and as a secret special bonus, when you tell someone something nice, they're often very happy to have a chance to tell you something nice in return :)

[zeep-xanflorp]

making sense of that's amorte bc i'm silly

ok so the spaghetti like represents a lot of things. it brings the family together despite bad things happening. it brings them joy. but then they find out that this product that is bringing them so much happiness actually comes from a direct result of unhappiness, depression, and ultimately a person's suicide. they're eating the body of a person who killed themselves. i suppose the question then is: is it worth it to continue enjoying something that makes you happy even if it's something you consider wrong? rick considers the spaghetti guilt free, so his answer is yes, prioritising his own pleasure. but morty's answer is no, and he seeks to solve it.

he wants to learn the names of the ppl he's been eating in an attempt to humanise them and get closure, but isn't satisfied even then. he goes to the funeral of their most recent victim and tells the people there about what they were doing, to get it off his chest.

interestingly, the family are more upset over not having their spaghetti night anymore than the fact they've been eating people and are angrier at morty than rick.

the government then invites morty back to the planet to get his full statement on everything he's doing. they serve him a plate of human spaghetti and tell him it's okay bc the person who it came from consented to being eaten. morty says this makes it go down easier and they realise they have a product bc of how delicious it is. they start selling it on a large scale under the brand name "morty-o's suicide spaghetti."

then this episode turns into a critique on capitalism and consumerism and potentially cannibalism? in the way it kinda explores the argument that cannibalism is the only ethical way to consume meat. the government of the world rick was stealing bodies from is now using morty to indirectly act like the frontman to advertising spaghetti as a product. this makes the planet start to commodify their ppl's pain. literally. they make ppl more miserable to cause more suicides so they can make more product to sell more money.

morty decides this is unacceptable and seeks a solution. he tells rick that if he gets help, he won't look for the moral flaws in rick's deeds ever again. rick agrees and manufactures a creature that is almost a person but is basically created just to kill themselves and become spaghetti. they seem to be okay with this option, until it's ruined by protestors and they're back to square one.

then my leadt favourite part of the episode. morty remembers rick can synthesise anything he gets a sample of which HE OR RICK SHOULDVE REMEMBERED SOONER BEFORE SO MANY PPL DIED. IDC HOW NAIVE YOURE TRYING TO MAKE MORTY OUT TO BE HERE HES FUCKING NOT ANYMORE SO ALL OF THE PPL WHO HAVE DIED IN THIS FUCKING EPISODE AFTER THE MORTY-'O'S DISCOVERY IS FUCKING ON FHEM.

but there's only one person left who would probably kill themselves and the only way they're able to convince him to follow through is to present him an opportunity to end the spaghetti trade forever. and so he agrees. he goes into a euthanasia chamber and presses a button, rick grabs everyone's attention and broadcasts this guys entire life history to everyone so they can see the intrinsic value of life, the beauty of individuality and lived experiences. then everyone's finally grossed out by the spaghetti and put off it forever. no more spaghetti.

rick points out that it's not these ppl's deaths that made the spaghetti distasteful but the complexity of life, and i think that's basically the thesis statement of this episode. that and the fact that not everything is black and white, even if morty desperately wants them to be. he learns grey areas are sometimes acceptable.

favourite scene is the ending when rick is teasing them.

idk not the biggest fan of this episode. i think it had smth to say but missed the mark. this is just me reading into everything and trying to make sense of this. fucking dark even for this show, even for my tastes.

[theparadoxmachine]

I need to explain why this man means so much to me.

I grew up in the 90s, actually a little too young to have watched him the first go around. But growing up, I feel like every show I watched had a storyline where the main character has to learn the lesson Be Yourself. And that's a fine message. But those characters were specifically designed to appeal to a mass audience of kids. They were everyman style characters. And frankly, it's easier to Just Be Yourself when you're an everyman and the weirdest thing about you is that you still play with Barbies in middle school (everyone did this I think) I liked those characters fine too. There's nothing wrong with Lizzie MacGuire or Ginger Foutley. But they weren't me. The characters that most resembled me were usually in episodes where the lesson was Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover. See it's a lot harder to swallow the lesson of "Just be yourself! Give people a chance to know the real you!" When you're weird. And I was WEIRD.

I now realize that I am in fact a traumatized, mentally ill neurodivergent queer woman, but back then I was a Weird Girl. So yeah good for you Lizzie, you're not getting bullied for ribbon dancing but what were my peers supposed to do with someone like me? I was reading Poe at the age of 8. I was quiet and liked fire and wanted to be a war goddess while being afraid of everything. The family joke was that I was actually from another planet. I was processing trauma I didn't know I had while listening to John Williams and Fleetwood Mac while everyone else was listening to Hansen and the Spice Girls. I loved reading about curses and cryptids and medieval torture devices. No amount of just be yourself messages from cartoon preteens was going to cut it.

But then there was Pee-wee. Pee-wee was WEIRD. His entire thesis statement was weirdness. He was the Patron Saint of Weirdos. He looked me dead in my eyes and, as Paul said on Portlandia, told me BEING WEIRD IS NOT A CRIME. When someone with a pet pterodactyl and a talking armchair tells you it's ok to be yourself, you fucking believe them. He walked the weird walk and took as many weirdos along with him as were willing to join him. And there were many it turns out.

Would Pee-wee think my love of horror and death was weird? Probably. Would he think it was weird that I make friends with moths and wasps and spiders and snakes? Yeah. But you better believe he'd take one look at my gothy apartment and put me right at the top of his list of people to call when it was time to decorate for Halloween. I'd have been on the guest list for his Halloween parties every year. Because being weird wasn't something that needed to be forgiven or tolerated. Being weird is a GOOD thing.

I have had such a strange emotional journey lately but where I've landed now is this. I'm not sure I can live for myself right now. But I'm going to do my best to stick around. For him. For Pee-wee and for Paul. Because I know he'd want me to. He'd want me to live and be weird and rejoice in my weirdness.

And he was always there. During bouts of depression and hardship, through all my health problems. His natural soft speaking voice always resonated at the perfect frequency to calm me down during my anxiety attacks. When I was stuck at home with spinal fluid draining into my brain, I played Pee-wee's Big Adventure, because it made me happy and because the dvd always restarted without prompting so I never had to get up if I lost the remote amongst my messed up sheets.

I met him in 2017. I pushed back all my social anxiety and went alone to my first convention because he was going to be there. Doing the terrible math, this would have been around the time he probably got diagnosed. I will be forever glad I went. I was speechless but I shook his hand and held it and tried to thank him, to convey without words how and why he's one of my favorite people in the whole world. The line for the meet and greet was over 2 hours long. He had to leave in the middle to get something to eat. He went to every single person in line and apologized and promised he would be back. I regret I'll never get to bring him muffins. But he was by all accounts one of the sweetest men in the world and I'm going to spend a lot of time missing him. And rejoicing in my weirdness. Because being weird is not a crime. Because he'd want me to. Because weirdos have to stick together.

And given the people I met at that convention, I think it's safe for me to paraphrase the words of Blanche Devereaux here and say, if love can help you wherever you are, you've got it. More than you could ever know.

I love you and I miss you.

[isntthatwrite]

if i was anything, i'd be everything - 12th house

astrology tangent: from my perspective, houses tend to be the thing that separates the astrology enthusiasts from the Vaguely Curious But Not That Into It. houses kind of ask that you really learn the material and apply it, think a little deeper, etc etc. my perspective. anyway, the 12th house in astrology is probably the first of the houses i began to seek more information on. discovering i have a luminary (my moon) in the 12th house was a trip.

we follow the houses through a life cycle- born in the 1st house, going all the way around until the 12th, the end of the cycle. 12th is where we review everything before we die, but we are not yet ready to let go. it's like how in older age, you remember bits and pieces - less of the details and more of the feelings. the feelings will never die. to me, 12th house has always felt like i've had the feelings and am looking back reflectively, but i have no recollection of the experience itself. like i'm reviewing a life i haven't even experienced myself. here, i attempt to elaborate.

----

pulling a line from carrie bradshaw after hearing Big was engaged - after the relationship ends, where does the love go? except my focus is neither of those bozos. it's the concept of this intangible- what happens to feeling once it's time to leave? what happens to this part of you that does not die after it's been born? what happens when you're born into a house of memories?

on a cellular level, i can never forget any of it. the conscious memories always lied dormant, which i speculate is why it was so easy to begin to feel them again when given the prompt. it takes time to make peace with reality. some of us never belonged in linear time to begin with. some of us have a physical response to what has never happened to us on this plane of existence, and it makes us look insane to the external eye. i could never put it to words and i thought for all this time it would be useless to try -- maybe it still is -- maybe i don't mind it being useless. in the grand scheme of it, no one can tell me what matters to me like i can. nobody writes the thesis statement for the essay that makes no sense and elicits criticism for its incoherence and complete rejection of mandatory structure. nobody remembers the writer who is too old to live and too young to die.

i am enrolled in film 1101 and watching a homemade psychedelic mind trip of a final project by a freshman who is exploring fantastical concepts he doesn't believe in and immediately fails class critique. i am trapped at the intersection of the dreamers and the realists and i remind them they are more alike than they are opposite. at the end of it all, we become the same thing over and over recursively until we no longer can be differentiated. i love you in the sense that our molecular structure was once interwoven and i never forgot, i just needed to see again. i love you in the sense that i would never deny that we forever change each other every time we meet, and we always arrive at exactly the time we need, each and every time. we are there exactly as long as we need to be and not a second more - but there we always were and always will be. i speak like this about everyone, past present and future, because they all coexist. much like everyone i've ever loved, time also can no longer be differentiated. the smell in the air reminds me of yesterday, 5 years ago, a day soon to come, the rest of my life and i know these things all to be true with no evidence to provide until it can be demonstrated in the linear scope. by that point, no one will care, but it was never going to matter to anyone but myself. i can only bear witness to myself in here, i cannot see anyone else despite my best efforts

state change is the only thing most people will recognize. i've left, i've started again, i've done something markedly new and different and i have stopped the old. nobody saw what i did before the change. nobody saw what brought me there, how hard it was to be in the state of inbetween, incapable of witness and intangible to everyone including myself. it hurts to be here because i do not know where anything is going, how i'll know when it arrives, anything more than i will just have to hope.

i have faith in what i cannot yet see. i look delusional for it. i know the joy i will experience because it lives within me and i have felt it throughout time. einstein's "spooky action at a distance" or quantum entanglement is an attempt to describe and quantify this phenomenon that many of us viscerally know and feel (whether we admit it or not)- the pieces of us that live within each other and activate as the years go on and influence each other without ever having solid evidence as to why. i never had to even know you to have been influenced. we share the same state and have no idea until perhaps one day in this life, we meet. over and over, the universe creates parallels, pieces of each other will live together / separate / in some bizarre in between state of together yet separate / forever influenced though intentionally separate. in minor ways, we are always preparing for what will be coming. meeting people changes our lives forever.

being born honors an entire previous lineage. i love who i never knew but always will be. there i once was, there we once were, there we always will be - i can never be without you. i reject the notion that i can never know the women who came before me who didn't live at the same time as i did, i'm more them that i can ever cognitively realize. i feel pain when visiting places i never even knew you suffered in. i speak what was hidden without a clue as to why i'm saying it. you cannot put me in the box that hurt her. i won't fit. i am the opportunity to try again and i do not have the option to go back in. i am crying out in pain because she wished she could, i wake up confused as to why i'm crying -- i'm crying for us all, so she can finally be free and at peace -- she deserved it long ago

i think there is this universally believed concept that anyone can give anyone advice on how they can receive closure and move on.

(https://www.tumblr.com/mitskiarthistory/612950940503441408/illustration-for-goodnight-moon-clement-hurd)

[goldrushzukka]

aidays playlist breakdown: chapter 1

hello! i am so proud of this fic and everything that's sprung up around it, but i am especially proud of the soundtrack ive built to go with it. at all times i am thinking about either the fic or the playlist, and never more than a tiny suggestion of interest away from babbling about it for hours. so. here we go.

here's the fic (there will obviously be spoilers in this post but tbh if you haven't read the fic what are you even doing here)

here's the playlist

treacherous (taylor's version) by taylor swift

this is. well. it's the theme song. it's the thesis statement. the zukka community would be nothing without treacherous and you may quote me on that. aidays obviously owes its title to treacherous but the themes and ideas of this song are woven throughout the entire fic. i find myself coming back to this song again and again for guidance.

(ID: "Put your lips close to mine / As long as they don't touch / Out of focus, eye to eye / 'Til the gravity's too much". End ID)

zuko and sokka work so hard throughout this fic to convince themselves (and others) that there isn't really anything between them, it's just fun and easy and casual. these lines for me are about teetering on the edge of Something. they're holding themselves back from the cliff edge at the same time that they're trying to see what's at the bottom. (this is also VERY applicable to ch10 but im not gonna say anything more about that lol)

(ID: "And I'll do anything you say / If you say it with your hands". End ID)

it's the title!!! i couldn't not include it. this was always my favourite line from treacherous even before i wrote aidays, but of course it has become even more important to me now. this is one of the horniest lines in taylor's entire discography, which makes it an obvious choice to title a fic about casual sex, but for me it's also about like. commitment and dedication. it's a willingness to do absolutely anything to keep this thing going, to make this last as long as possible. all the little not-casual things zuko and sokka do for each other because they're not quite ready to let this thing end yet. like, let me tell you about my tragic past so we can go back to making out. take this key to my apartment so you can use it as a getaway from your weird home life and also fuck me stupid.

(ID: "I can't decide if it's a choice / Getting swept away / I hear the sound of my own voice / Asking you to stay". End ID)

this is sooooo ch1-4 vibes. very much in the way of like, not being able to tell when "casual" disappeared and became this new thing. where does one thing end and the other begin, or were they always the same thing to begin with? were the feelings always here? was this even an arrival at a point, or was it just looking around and finally seeing where they'd been the entire time? a little bit on the nose but the end of ch3/4 ("I can stay." "So stay." immortalised here by @bleekay) was definitely influenced by this.

(ID: "Forever going with the flow / But you're friction". End ID)

this one is so. like. ok. so in ch1 it's zuko who says he doesn't want anything serious. this is because, given his history, he doesn't believe "anything serious" is an option for him. he's too broken, he's too sad, he's too much for other people. so he defaults to casual. but then there's sokka, throwing all those ideas out the window by discovering all the damaged parts of zuko that make other people discard him, and then liking him more for them.

(ID: "Two headlights shine through the sleepless night / And I will get you a, get you alone / Your name has echoed through my mind / And I just think you should, think you should know / That nothing safe is worth the drive / And I would follow you, follow you home". End ID)

this bridge. godddddd. ok. obviously along with richard siken's you are jeff poem this bridge was a big inspiration for ch8. there's that devotion again, this kind of magnetic attraction between sokka and zuko throughout the fic that brings them to this point of like, you are the light in the dark, the sound in the silence, i will go wherever you take me. "nothing safe is worth the drive" in particular is very much like. if this were easy, if it were actually casual and no-strings-attached like it was supposed to be, these feelings wouldn't be here. there wouldn't be all this anguish and passion if they didn't feel this strongly for each other. like. the pain of losing you is nothing compared to the high of having you. nothing safe is worth the drive.

don't you go by all time low

this is the first of many songs about casual sex on this playlist (turns out there are a LOT of those). it's by no means all time low's best song, but it's RELEVANT so it goes in the playlist. (i've been a fan of all time low since i was 13 im allowed to say that)

(ID: "Don't you go and carry on with your life / It was a one night stand till I woke up next to you/ Don't you go saying all your goodbyes / I want a one night stand, just one more time with you". End ID)

this is just what it says on the tin like truthfully what is this chorus if not just a pop punk translation of the opening lines of the fic: It’s supposed to be a one night stand. Pick up some guy at a bar, barely remember his name and never learn anything real about him, send him packing in the morning with a thanks for the ride and a cup of coffee to-go. That’s how it’s supposed to go. But then it’s the best sex Sokka has ever had, and he thinks he’ll hate himself if he never gets to have it again.

(ID: "I got my ass kicked, but you held the ice / I was a train wreck, but you took the ride / Can we stay here, right here? / Nothing else that I want to do". End ID)

this is applicable to two scenes in aidays: ch2 when zuko tells sokka about his scar and sokka doesn't leave him, and ch6 when suki comforts sokka's broken heart with ice cream and tough love.

baby by charli xcx

absolutely crazy that charli xcx wrote all of crash (2022) about aidays. it's ALL about them. idk how she managed it but she did and i am so grateful.

(ID: "[Chorus] / I'ma make you my—, I'ma make you my— / I'ma make you my—, I'ma make you my— (Baby)" End ID)

(ID: "I'ma fuck you up, I'ma fuck you up / I'ma fuck you up, I'ma fuck you up (Baby)". End ID)

this song is really just about being hot and having sex so great it ruins you for anyone else, which is also what the start of aidays is about. great minds (me and charli xcx) think alike.

bloodline by ariana grande

another classic of the fuckbuddy anthem genre. personally i think thank u next deserved more critical and academic acclaim for the work it did on behalf of the hot sadgirl community but that's a different soapbox. quick shoutout to dani @marriedzukka, scholar of ariana grande zukkaism

(ID: "Love me, love me, baby / Are you down? Can you let me know? / Love me, thank you, leave me / Put it down, then it's time to go / Get it like you love me / But you don't, boy, it's just for show". End ID)

this is so them. doing everything they can to explain away anything that doesn't fit the definition they've given their not-relationship. like idk what else to say this is just them. worshiping each other at the altar of casual.

[bloodbenderz]

humaniterations (dot) net/2014/10/13/an-anarchist-perspective-on-the-red-lotus/ this article from oct 2014 is very dense — truly, a lot to unpack here, but I feel like you would find this piece interesting. I would love it if you shared your thoughts on the points that stood out to you, whether you agree or disagree. you obv don’t have to respond to it tho, but I’m sending it as an ask jic you feel like penning (and sharing) a magnificent essay, as is your wont 💕

article

i know this took me forever 2 answer SORRY but i just checked off all the things on my to do list for the first time in days today so. Essay incoming ladies!

ok im SO glad u sent me this bc it’s so so good. it’s a genuinely thoughtful criticism of the politics in legend of korra (altho i think its sometimes a little mean to korra unnecessarily like there’s no reason to call her a “petulant brat” or say that she throws tantrums but i do understand their point about her being an immature and reactionary hero, which i’ll get back to) and i think the author has a good balance between acknowledging like Yeah the lok writers were american liberals and wrote their show accordingly and Also writing a thorough analysis of lok’s politics that felt relevant and interesting without throwing their hands up and saying this is all useless liberal bullshit (which i will admit that i tend to do).

this article essentially argues that the red lotus antagonists of s3 were right. And that’s not an uncommon opinion i think but this gives it serious weight. Like, everything that zaheer’s gang did was, in context, fully understandable. of course the red lotus would be invested in making sure that the physically and spiritually and politically most powerful person in the world ISNT raised by world leaders and a secret society of elites that’s completely unaccountable to the people! of course the red lotus wants to bring down tyrannical governments and allow communities to form and self govern organically! and the writers dismiss all of that out of hand by 1. consistently framing the red lotus as insane and murderous (korra never actually gives zaheer’s ideas a chance or truly considers integrating them into her own approach) 2. representing the death of the earth queen as not just something that’s not necessarily popular (what was with mako’s bootlicker grandma, i’d love to know) but as something that causes unbelievable violence and chaos in ba sing se (which, like, a lot of history and research will tell you that people in disasters tend towards prosocial behaviors). so the way the story frames each of these characters and ideologies is fascinating because like. if you wanted to write season 3 of legend of korra with zaheer as the protagonist and korra as the antagonist, you wouldn’t actually have to change the sequence of events at all, really. these writers in particular and liberal writers in general LOVE writing morally-gray-but-ultimately-sympathetic characters (like, almost EVERY SINGLE fire nation character in the first series, who were full on violent colonizers but all to a degree were rehabilitated in the eyes of the viewer) but instead of framing the red lotus as good people who are devoted to justice and freedom and sometimes behave cruelly to get where theyre trying to go, they frame them as psychopaths and murderers who have good intentions don’t really understand how to make the world a better place.

and the interesting thing about all this, about the fact that the red lotus acted in most cases exactly as it should have in context and the only reason its relegated to villain status is bc the show is written by liberals, is that the red lotus actually points out really glaring sociopolitical issues in universe! like, watching the show, u think well why the fuck HASN’T korra done anything about the earth queen oppressing her subjects? why DOESN’T korra do anything about the worse than useless republic president? why the hell are so many people living in poverty while our mains live cushy well fed lives? how come earth kingdom land only seems to belong to various monarchs and settler colonists, instead of the people who are actually indigenous to it? the show does not want to answer these questions, because american liberal capitalism literally survives on the reality of oppressive governments and worse than useless presidents and people living in poverty while the middle/upper class eats and indigenous land being stolen. if the show were to answer these questions honestly, the answer would be that the status quo in real life (and the one on the show that mirrors real life) Has To Change.

So they avoid answering these questions honestly in order for the thesis statement to be that the status quo is good. and the only way for the show to escape answering these questions is for them to individualize all these broad social problems down into Good people and Bad people. so while we have obvious bad ones like the earth queen we also have all these capitalists and monarchs and politicians who are actually very nice and lovely people who would never hurt anyone! which is just such an absurd take and it’s liberal propaganda at its best. holding a position of incredible political/economic power in an unjust society is inherently unethical and maintaining that position of power requires violence against the people you have power over. which is literally social justice 101. but there’s literally no normal, average, not-politically-powerful person on the show. so when leftist anarchism is presented and says that destroying systems that enforce extreme power differentials is the only way to bring peace and freedom to all, the show has already set us up to think, hey, fuck you, top cop lin beifong and ford motor ceo asami sato are good people and good people like them exist! and all we have to do to move forward and progress as a society is to make sure we have enough good individuals in enough powerful positions (like zuko as the fire lord ending the war, or wu as the earth king ending the monarchy)! which is of course complete fiction. liberal reform doesn’t work. but by pretending that it could work by saying that the SYSTEM isnt rotten it’s just that the people running it suck and we just need to replace those people, it automatically delegitimizes any radical movements that actually seek to change things.

and that’s the most interesting thing about this article to me is that it posits that the avatar...might actually be a negative presence in the world. the avatar is the exact same thing: it’s a position of immense political and physical power bestowed completely randomly, and depending on the moral character and various actions of who fills that position at any given time, millions of people will or won’t suffer. like kyoshi, who created the fascist dai li, like roku, who refused to remove a genocidal dictator from power, like aang, who facilitated the establishment of a settler colonial state on earth kingdom land. like korra! she’s an incredibly immature avatar and a generally reactionary lead. i’ve talked about this at length before but she never actually gets in touch with the needs of the people. she’s constantly running in elite circles, exposed only to the needs and squabbles of the upper class! how the hell is she supposed to understand the complexities of oppression and privilege when she was raised by a chess club with inordinate amounts of power and associates almost exclusively with politicians and billionaires?? from day 1 we see that she tends to see things in very black and white ways which is FINE if you’re a privileged 17 yr old girl seeing the world for the first time but NOT FINE if you’re the single most powerful person in the world! Yeah, korra thinks the world is probably mostly fine and just needs a little whipping into shape every couple years, because all she has ever known is a mostly fine world! in s1 when mako mentions that he as a homeless impoverished teenager worked for a gang (which is. Not weird. Impoverished people of every background are ALWAYS more likely to resort to socially unacceptable ways of making money) korra is like “you guys are criminals?????!!!!!” she was raised in perfect luxury by a conservative institution and just never developed beyond that. So sure, if the red lotus raised her anarchist, probably a lot would’ve been different/better, but....they didn’t. and korra ended up being a reactionary and conservative avatar who protected monarchs and colonialist politicians. The avatar as a position is completely subject to the whims of whoever is currently the avatar. and not only does that suck for everyone who is not the avatar, not only is it totally unfair to whatever kid who grows up knowing the fate of the world is squarely on their shoulders, but it as a concept is a highly individualist product of the authors’ own western liberal ideas of progress! the idea that one good leader can fix the world (or should even try) based on their own inherent superiority to everyone else is unbelievably flawed and ignores the fact that all real progress is brought about as a result of COMMUNITY work, as a result of normal people working for themselves and their neighbors!

the broader analysis of bending was really interesting to me too, but im honestly not sure i Totally agree with it. the article pretty much accepts the show’s assertion that bending is a privilege (and frankly backs it up much better than the original show did, but whatever), and i don’t think that’s NECESSARILY untrue since it is, like, a physical advantage (the author compares it to, for example, the fact that some people are born athletically gifted and others are born with extreme physical limitations), but i DO think that it discounts the in universe racialization of bending. in any sequel to atla that made sense, bending as a race making fact would have been explored ALONGSIDE the physical advantages it bestows on people. colonialism and its aftermath is generally ignored in this article which is its major weakness i think, especially in conjunction with bending. you can bring up the ideas the author did about individual vs community oriented progress in the avatar universe while safely ignoring the colonialism, but you can’t not bring up race and colonialism when you discuss bending. especially once you get to thinking about how water/earth/airbenders were imprisoned and killed specifically because bending was a physical advantage, and that physical advantage was something that would have given colonized populations a means of resistance and that the fire nation wanted to keep to itself.

i think that’s the best lens thru which to analyze bending tbh! like in the avatar universe bending is a tool that different ethnic groups tend to use in different ways. at its best, bending actually doesn’t represent social power differences (despite representing a physical power difference) because it’s used to represent/maintain community solidarity. like, take the water tribe. katara being the last waterbender, in some way, makes her the last of a part of swt CULTURE. the implication is that when there were a lot of waterbenders in the south, they dedicated their talents to building community and helping their neighbors, because this was something incredibly culturally important and important to the water tribe as a community. the swt as a COLLECTIVE values bending for what it can do for the entire tribe, which counts for basically every other talent a person can have (strength, creativity, etc). the fire nation, by contrast, distorts the community value of bending by racializing it: anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is inherently NOT fire nation (and therefore inherently inferior) and, because of the physical power that bending confers, anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is a threat to fire nation hegemony. and in THAT framework of bending, it’s something that intrinsically assigns worth and reifies race in a way that’s conveniently beneficial to the oppressor.

it IS worth talking about how using Element as a way to categorize people reifies nations, borders, and race in a way that is VERY characteristic of white american liberals. i tried to be conscious of that (and the way that elements/bending can act in DIFFERENT ways, depending on cultural context) but i think it’s pretty clear that the writers did intend for element to unequivocally signify nation (and, by extension, race), which is part of why they screwed up mixed families so bad in lok. when they’ve locked themselves into this idea that element=nation=race, they end up with sets of siblings like mako and bolin or kya tenzin and bumi, who all “take” after only one parent based on the element that they bend. which is just completely stupid but very indicative of how the writers actually INTENDED element/bending to be a race making process. and its both fucked up and interesting that the writers display the same framework of race analysis that the canonical antagonists of atla do.

anyway that’s a few thoughts! thank u again for sending the article i really loved it and i had a lot of fun writing this <3

[tsskyx]

Unmeta

You know what’s ridiculous? This post was originally supposed to be an essay, an entire thesis backed with unshakable logic that I wanted to become my magnum opus. But as it turns out, I’m pretty terrible at doing that sort of thing. The first day I’m full of enthusiasm, while the next day I reread what I wrote and I delete it all again. It’s terrible.

For this reason, I’ve decided to just start with the opinion part. Instead of laying out the facts and easing the reader into it, I’ll just blurt everything out in one go. Instead of neatly organizing everything, I’ll write my thoughts as they come to me.

(Update for 2/Oct/2021: I no longer remember when I made the first draft of this post. Maybe it was in 2018, maybe even as early as 2017. Who knows. This post existed in my drafts since forever. It is time to finally publish it. It contains very little information, very little evidence for anything or logic or facts, it’s just a one big opinion piece that I began writing years ago out of frustration. Frustration not aimed at the game itself, nor at Toby or anyone else, but at my inability to decouple the “meta” from Undertale and thus causing me to disassociate from the characters that I loved, when I didn’t plan to do so. All I ever wanted is to make sense of the Undertale world, instead of giving its inhabitants a meta-existential dread. In a nutshell, for the Undertale world to be self-contained, the 4th wall must stay intact, and the mechanics of the UT world mustn’t resemble a video game. That’s basically the gist of this post. Proceed with reading.)

You know Undertale meta? All the 4th wall breaking stuff and whatnot? The stuff that makes the game so awesome?

What about it you say?

It’s not real. I don’t think it is. It cannot be.

Tell me, has Undertale personally impacted you? Was it more than just a game to you? I know for a fact that for many people, it was much more than that. So tell me, is it fine by you that despite presenting itself in this way to us, it still sort of cops out of this at the very end? (By which I mean, when we learn that we aren’t Frisk. That we’re just someone controlling them.)

Some say that this cop-out, this act of “disassociation”, is necessary for our psychological journey to end. And I agree. We cannot dwell on this forever, else we lose our minds. But what I meant is something much more... materialistic.

Let’s take Oneshot, a game that’s arguably even more meta than Undertale. Oneshot embraces the 4th wall. It labels us a god. It portrays the game itself as an in-game machine. And yet, it feels real. Despite all this ridiculousness, the story feels real and possible. Kind of like The Matrix. Perhaps think of everyone in Oneshot except for the main character as a Matrix program, while Niko is the only user hooked up to it. It still feels real, because Niko is real, because there exists a real world they can to return to.

But Undertale floats somewhere between being real and being a fairy tale, a mere bedtime story. The reason is its lax handling of the 4th wall. Say, if Undertale were to be considered a “real” possibility, as in, entirely fictional, but still believable, kinda like The Matrix, kinda like any science fiction, or just fiction in general, what would it be like?

I’ll tell you, everything would have to be real, everything would have to look exactly how we see it. There’d need to be turns, there’d need to be save files, there’d need to be so many bizarre things, it probably wouldn’t take long before the NPCs themselves realized their own nonexistence, probably around the time they developed computers and video games. It’d be so similar, they’d have to be either stupid or under some kind of spell to not realize that their entire world is just one giant video game. Especially Flowey. Some say that he has already realized this, as his dialogue hints towards this. Which puts a super unfortunate spin on his condition. Furthermore, the entire game could be described through its Game Maker code. No need for laws of physics, just observe the if-else statements!

It would also mean that Frisk is controlled by a third unknown entity. If we were to take everything we do to Frisk at face value, it must all be them. Except... after a true reset, everything gets reset, even things about Frisk, such as them expecting the whoopee cushion prank. So... Frisk isn’t in control. But Chara isn’t either. Take for example the final fight against Asriel. Chara appeared pretty enthusiastic during it. What if someone were to reset the timeline during the fight? Either it wasn’t them who did so, or they were just pretending to be entertained, or perhaps they aren’t the narrator in the first place even.

No matter what, there will always be an instance where Frisk forgets, and where Chara doesn’t do something when they could have. Once you mess with the game enough, their personalities stop making sense.

This gradual breakdown of the narrative as I keep attacking the logic of it from every direction imaginable is a symptom of something far bigger. The fact that unlike The Matrix or Oneshot, there is no “real world” in this game. The virtual part of it is what the game is trying to make us focus on. It’s all there is. There is not even a hint of “another” world in the game, a world that wouldn’t be governed by these terrible rules. And even if there was one, even if you consider what Sans said to be that world, even if you considered Deltarune to be that world, there is still no guarantee that everything will be okay. What if the characters - your friends, aren’t real in this actual real world, what if they’re all just computer simulations? There’d have to be an entire population hooked up to a virtual reality for everyone to be “safe” as I’m putting it in this hypothetical real world, which sounds not only ridiculous, but like a direct ripoff of The Matrix.

The game has made Frisk the main character. Why, when making Sans the main one, the one who at least has a possibility of coming from a “real” real world, would be far more logical?

Because it lacks logic. Undertale is an experiment. Toby Fox is not a genius. He was just messing around, he didn’t think of literally every tiny little logical detail (contrary to what some individuals would like to think), he just explained enough for most of the story to make sense. But, no matter how you spin it, this fundamental flaw will always be there. The story tries to merge you and the protagonist, before disassociating you from them. Even if you always were disassociated from them, how can the in-game world be real, when other aspects of your reality weren’t disassociated yet? Where’s the disassociation for battles and turns, for save files and time travel, for stats and everything? How can Undertale claim to be complete, when it isn’t? ... Perhaps because it is not claiming to be. It’s an experiment after all. And I don’t mean “incomplete” as in a single update / new game can fix it. I mean the premise itself is already broken from the start. And while there are many fictional worlds which function on a similar level of meta, Undertale is the only one that appears to irk me mad. I don’t know why. Maybe I love the characters. Maybe I love them very much. Maybe I love them so much, that I wanna write a fan fiction about them. And maybe, just maybe, this tiny little issue is making this dream of mine impossible. Undertale is a story conveyed through game mechanics. Choosing any other medium breaks everything down and the author needs to invent their own rules. There’s simply no way around it. Unless someone has the balls to program a fan game of their own, there’s just no way to resolve this without adjusting the canon a little bit, to make it “a little bit more sensible” as some would put it. Just a small nudge, a lil’ nudgie wudgie to the canon mechanics AAAAAND we’re in fanon territory. Excellent, better go all out.

Here’s my head canon, my little “adjustment” of the canon rules. Thanks to it, I can once again think about Undertale as a real world, I no longer need to philosophize over the meta like I did above, I can all put it past me:

Saving, loading, resetting? Regular sci-fi time travel.

The save file? The parameters of the time machine.

LV and EXP? Another set of properties of the machine, though it could be properties of the soul too. I’m undecided on that note. But either works, that’s what’s important.

Chara destroying the world through LV? No, screw that, Chara merely tuned Frisk out. And the black void was the inside of their mind as Chara denied them access to their own body.

The intro? Literally never happened, no one “saw” it. (The past was still real. It’s just the intro that never existed.) The outro? Literally never physically occurred, Frisk wasn’t “stuck” on the ending credits, unable to go further, fuck that.

Flowey? No screw everything meta about Flowey, there exists a perfectly logical explanation to everything he says, and if not, such as in the genocide run with him hinting towards people watching but not acting... he never said that in the first place!

Same with turns, the battles don’t actually look that way, there are no turns, what Sans perceives and abuses as such is just an illusion, the actual battle against Sans is absolutely fluid. And him pausing at the end and not letting us go is him keeping his guard up, until falling asleep and giving us an opportunity to sneak near him and strike. We don’t need turns to explain it. And what he said about turns... just ignore it! Ignore everything that directly proves me wrong! Because resolving that fucking conundrum IS more important than being logically consistent, and you can’t change my mind on that. Screw logic when the foundation of the entire fandom, of every UT-related fiction, is at stake here.

And I shall call this philosophy... the Unmeta. Because it attempts to undo the meta. Hence, “unmeta” for short.

[jonkentisakid]

Superman #29 Review

tl;dr I actually liked this issue. Giving this book a fair and unbiased shake, I’d say, under normal circumstances, i.e. Jon being a kid, I would continue picking it up. However, because Jon isn’t a kid, I hope this book bombs.

PKJ has written Superman in Future State, but I didn’t read any of it, so this is my time reading his work, and I’d say it was a good first issue. A writer’s first issue on a book is like their thesis statement or mission statement, showing their readers what to expect and how it’ll play out.

PKJ put together a tight issue. Some people thought it was decompressed, but I really didn’t get that. The actual story/plot is a little sparse, I’ll admit, but the point of the issue wasn’t necessarily to tell a complete story, it was to set the tone and feel of the run going forward. The only way I could say it was decompressed is because there is a part two coming up in Action Comics that would essentially be the second half of his thesis statement.

The way the issue plays out it could be divided into sections, and I could very easily see those individual sections be decompressed into entire issues by a master of decompression. Luckily, not only is PKJ a competent writer, he’s also very respectful of the readers’ time and money and gives them their money’s worth.

The issue starts with no dialogue, just narration (of which I’ll address the potential meta-writing in a bit), but there is an actual conversation between Clark and Jon that I felt was well-intentioned but very misinformed before the book finishes with narration. There’s a lot of telling and not showing in comics of late, but I think PKJ was capable of showing and not telling.

Also featured in this book is Amanda Waller, who seems to be plotting something that’ll tie in with the Suicide Squad book which is also tying in with Teen Titans Academy. I appreciate the coordination between the books in Infinite Frontier, but for some reason DC is really underselling it and not really pushing the fact that there’s going to be a lot of interconnectivity between books going forward.

Now, onto the meta-writing of the narration. The narration is about a golden age where kids are naive about their parents not being invincible, which parallels a fight with space aliens that goes swimmingly for Clark and Jon, and how that golden age comes to an end when kids first learn about their parents’ mortality, which parallels a second fight with the aliens where Clark gets an injury and for some reason that upsets Jon.

I can see how some could read it to be about Jon being aged up, and I’m not entirely blind to this reading either, but the narration paralleled the action a little too closely for me to conclude there was some ulterior meaning to it. The part about the golden age coming to an end just doesn’t seem to be anything more than the theme PKJ wants to explore.

What really irks me is the conversation Clark has with Jon. I stated earlier that it was well-intentioned, showing how the hell Bendis dragged Jon through would have affected him, but it focuses on all the wrong things and, worse still, misinterprets them. This is PKJ’s attempt to try and justify and validate Bendis’ “contributions,” and he really tries his best, but it just doesn’t work and he should’ve never attempted doing it.

The long and short of it is that Jon is afraid that his father will die and he’s not ready for that to happen. Jon starts out by saying that he doesn’t like being called Superman and isn’t ready to be Superman, which I find odd because DC literally published three comics two months prior to the release of this issue where those two things were very much the case. Either way, the reason Jon feels that way is because he doesn’t want Clark to die and is struggling to accept that fact, something all children sooner or later have to deal with.

PKJ really tried something here, and I’ll give him credit for it, and I’d like to see it explored further, but this isn’t the story to tell when you haven’t addressed the real issues such as the Jon’s trauma of not only literally losing seven years of his life, but being tortured that entire time, and Lois and Clark having some of the most formative years of their child’s life stolen from them. Ultimately, it just felt too angsty, too forced, and very unnecessary.

I do want to point out a piece of foreshadowing that I think a lot of people missed and it has to do with the second to last page.

Clark is flying against space, representing the space-oriented stories he wants to do with him, and Jon is flying against the sun, representing the more earth-bound stories that’ll be told with him. PKJ isn’t going to be writing both Action Comics and Superman forever. After an unnamed Superman event, PKJ will continue writing one of those books and someone else will be writing the other, so this is a visual representation of what you’re going to be getting in the Superman books in the future.

*Side Note: In Infinite Frontier #0, PKJ claims Jon “came of age” when he was with the Legion, which is such a load of horseshit.

Below the cut I’ve included what I intiially wrote about Clark and Jon’s conversation that I felt wasn’t quite accurate after rereading it multiple times, but it isn’t necessarily lacking in credence, so I wanted to keep it for posterity.

First, PKJ makes Jon’s preoccupation be about his father’s alleged eventual, and for some reason inevitable, death, and not the seven years’ worth of torture Jon suffered on Earth-3, especially when those seven years would’ve under normal circumstances been his actual coming of age*. Further, Jon apparently learned this information from the Legion, something that was neither depicted nor mentioned in Bendis’ LoSH. I never read Bendis’ LoSH, so I can’t confirm this, but from what I understand nothing of the sort, or just about anything in fact, happened in that book.

Second, not only did PKJ get Jon’s preoccupation wrong, he makes Jon just brush off the fact he was tortured for seven years. Clark tries to get his son to play coneyball, a game Jon made up when he was a kid, but Jon says he doesn’t remember how to play it because it’s been so long. PKJ mistakes Jon’s time with the Legion with the reason why he is seven years older than his proper age.

Seriously, PKJ just glosses over the real issues, like all the time with their son that was stolen from Lois and Clark, in favor of the manufactured angst that Jon isn’t ready to lose his father because he dies and Jon isn’t ready for his dad to die and to become Superman in his place.

Did PKJ not read Super Sons of Tomorrow, a story where a future version of Tim Drake goes back in time to kill Jon because Jon kills a bunch of people in that Tim Drake’s future and the combined forces of the Teen Titans and the Titans of Tomorrow prevent that future from happening? Does PKJ not know that Jon already knows that the future is not set and there is no fate but what we make for ourselves? By traveling back in time, in both instances, the course of history has already changed so that the dark futures will never come to pass, and Jon has no reason to this anxious.

This seriously lends credence to my theory that DC actively tells new writers to ignore everything that happened in Superman Rebirth and Super Sons in favor of some mandate they’re not allowed to tell anyone.

[addictedtoeddie]

The full Esquire Spain interview translated from Spanish:  

Eddie Redmayne trial: guilty of being the most talented (and stylish) actor of his generation

The Oscar winner talks about what it means to premiere a film with Aaron Sorkin (The Chicago 7th Trial on Netflix) and filming the new part of the most famous saga of all time under the watchful eye of its author, J.K. Rowling.

By Alba Díaz (text) / JUANKR (photos and video) / Álvaro de Juan (styling) 10/23/2020  

At the Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge, stands alone and leaning on a piano Prometheus, a marble head made by Constantin Brâncusi, and the only piece of art that Eddie Redmayne (London, 1982) would save from possible massive destruction. He tells me about it as he leaves the filming set of the third installment of Fantastic Beasts in the early days of an autumn that, we suspect, we will never forget. It begins to get dark as the actor nods seriously: "I promise to do my best in this interview."

Eddie Redmayne made himself in the theater despite some voices warning him that he could not survive in it. "Many people were in charge to tell me that it would never work, that only extraordinary cases make it and that I would not be able to live from this professionally." Even his father came home one day with a list of statistics on unemployed young actors. Redmayne, who is extremely modest, polite and funny, adds: “But I enjoyed theater so much that I got to the point of thinking that if I could only do one play a year for the rest of my life… I would do it. And that would fill me completely.

Spoiler: since then until today he has participated in many more. He set his first foot in the industry when he debuted at the Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and won over critics and audiences. He then landed his first major role in My Week with Marilyn opposite Michelle Williams. And then came one of the roles of his life, the character he wanted to become an actor for, Marius. With him he sang, led a revolution and broke Cosette's heart in Les Miserables. “I found out about the Les Misérables auditions when I was shooting a movie in Illinois. Dressed like a cowboy. I picked up the iPhone and videotaped myself singing the Marius song. I always wanted to be him ”.

Now Redmayne is an Oscar winner - thanks to his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything - and the protagonist of one of the most important sagas in history, Fantastic Beasts. He plays the magizoologist Newt Scamander in it. When I ask him what it means to him to be the protagonist of a magical world that is so important to millions of people, Eddie sighs and takes a few seconds to answer. “I have always loved the Harry Potter universe. Some people like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars ... But, for me, the idea that there is a magical world that happens right in front of you, that happens without going any further on the streets of London, that. .. That exploded my imagination in another way.

During the quarantine, J. K. Rowling, who has been in charge of the script of the film, sparked a controversy through a series of tweets about transgender women. Redmayne assures that he does not agree with these statements but that it does not approve of the attacks of some people through social networks. The actor was one of the first to position himself against Rowling alongside Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and other protagonists of her films. "Trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary identities are valid."

After having spent a while talking, Redmayne confesses to me that he has never been a big dreamer not to maintain certain aspirations that ended up disappointing him. So he has always kept a handful of dreams to himself. One of them was fulfilled just a few weeks ago with the premiere of The Trial of the Chicago 7, a film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin that can already be seen on Netflix and in some - few - cinemas. “I was on vacation with my wife in Morocco and the script arrived. I think I called my agent before I even read it and said yes, I would. She probably thought the obvious, that I'm stupid. After that, of course I read the script, which is about a specific moment in history that I knew very little about. I found it exciting and a very relevant drama in today's times. "

And it is that having a script by Aaron Sorkin in your hands is no small thing. Eddie Redmayne has been a fan of his work ever since he saw The West Wing of the White House. “His scripts have delicious language and dialogue. As an actor, it's fun to play characters that are much smarter than you are in real life. That virtuosity is hard to come by. I really hope that audiences enjoy this movie and feel that there is always hope. " He remembers that since he released The Theory of Everything he has recorded, to a large extent, English period dramas, “and although the new Aaron Sorkin is not strictly contemporary,” says Redmayne, “to be able to wear jeans and shirts and sweaters instead of so much tweed is great ”.

Besides acting, art was the only thing the actor was interested in, so he ended up studying Art History at Cambridge University. “My parents are quite traditional and when I told them I wanted to act they gave me free rein but on the condition that I study a career. And I'm very grateful for that because ... Look, beyond that, when I play a real character I usually go to the National Portrait Gallery in London quite often. There I lock myself up. Now, for Sorkin's film, I went through a lot of photographs and videotapes. Art helps me to be more creative, to get into paper ”. If he were not an actor, he would be, he says decidedly, a historian or perhaps a curator. "Although I think he would be a very bad art curator."

Against all logic, Eddie Redmayne is color blind. But there is a color that you can distinguish anywhere and on any surface: klein blue. He wrote his thesis on the French artist Yves Klein and the only shade of blue he used in his works. He wrote up to 30,000 words talking about that color with which he became obsessed. “It is surprising that a color can be so emotional. One can only hope to achieve that intensity in acting. "

Like his taste for art, which encompasses the refined and compact, Redmayne seems to be in the same balance when it comes to the roles he chooses. When I ask him what aspects a character he wants to play should have, he takes a few seconds again before answering: “I wish I had a more ingenious answer but I will tell you that I know when my belly hurts. It's that feeling that I trust. In my mind I transport him to imagine myself playing that character. When I read a script I have to really enjoy it. You never fully regret those instincts. It's like when you connect with something emotionally. "

So we come to the conclusion that all his characters have some traits in common. "You know what? I never look back, and this is something personal, but I do believe that there is a parallel between Marius in Les Misérables trying to be a revolutionary, someone who is quite prone to being distracted by love but at the same time is willing to die for his cause, and Tom Hayden from The Chicago Trial of the 7 who was a man who had integrity and was passionate and fought for the things he believed in. So I suppose there may also be similarities between a young Stephen Hawking and Newt Scamander. There are traits in common in all of them that I don't really know where they come from ”.

When we talk about the year we are living in, in which it is increasingly difficult to find hope, we both let out a nervous laugh. "There must be," Redmayne says. “There is something very nice that Tom Hayden, the character I play in Sorkin's film, said to his former wife, actress Jane Fonda, just the day before she passed away. He told her that watching people die for their beliefs changed his life forever. In that sense, I also think about what Kennedy Jr. wrote about how democracy is messy, tough and never easy ... As is believing in something to fight for. I look at history and how they were willing to live their lives with that integrity to change the world and I realize that somehow that spirit still remains with us. " We fell silent thinking about it. "There must be hope."

I tell him about my love for Nick Cave's blog, The Red Hand, and one of the posts that I have liked the most in recent weeks. In it, the singer affirms that his response to a crisis has always been to create, an impulse that has saved him many times. For Redmayne there are two activities that can silence noise: drawing and playing the piano. “When you play the piano your concentration is so consumed by trying to hit that note that you can't think of anything else. Similarly, when you draw something, the focus is between the paper and what you are trying to recreate ... There I try to calm my mind.

Before saying goodbye, I drop a question that I thought I knew the answer to, but failed. What work of art would you save from mass destruction? "How difficult! I could name my favorite artists but still couldn't choose a work. Only one piece? Let me think. I am very obsessed with Yves Klein, but I would stick with a work by Brancusi. There is a sculpture of him, a small head called Prometheus, in Cambridge's Kettle’s Yard, on a dark mahogany piano. The truth is that I find it very ... beautiful ”.

Before leaving, he confesses to me - with a childish and slow voice - that he would like to direct something one day. We said goodbye, saying that we will talk about his next project. Next, the first thing I do is open the Google search engine. "P-r-o-m-e-t-h-e-u-s". Although Eddie Redmayne has trouble distinguishing violet from blue, he doesn't have them when choosing a good piece. He's right, that work deserves to be saved.

* This article appears in the November 2020 issue of Esquire magazine

Source: esquire.com/es/actualidad/cine/a34434114/eddie-redmayne-juicio-7-chicago-netflix-entrevista/

[theshinsun]

KNB for the fandom ask thing if you’d like to!!

(sorry this took forever, work was crazy this week ;;-;;)

send me a fandom and i’ll tell you…

the first character i ever fell in love with:

Kagami. (I know, right?) I started watching the show when I saw the way he was drawn, and came to really love his character throughout seasons 1 and 2. 

Side note: I really only fell in love with Aomine once I saw how he looked in the manga, and got more into his backstory in late season 2/early season 3. 

a character that i used to love/like, but now do not:

Idk I used to like, unironically like Himuro, and subscribe to canon’s endgame portrayal of him as a harmless nice guy (with no personality to speak of). Now I like him, but like... only in the sense that he can be used narratively, and to comedic effect. I also still like his play style, but I don’t like him like, as a person.

a ship that i used to love/like, but now do not:

I don’t really wanna bash any ship in this show, since the characters are loose (read: underdeveloped) enough for their actual ship dynamics to kinda be up for interpretation. 

The one example I can think of, though, for a ship I used to enjoy that now kinda bothers me, is KiKasa. I just don’t see much genuine affection between these two, and yeah I get that people show their love in different ways and all that, and there is definitely something there to work with if you read between the lines, but still... I dunno in canon it mostly seems one-sided at best and antagonistic at worst to me.

my ultimate favorite character™:

...C’mon, you know who it is. The number one spot has to go to Aomine, every time. Someday I’ll write a whole in-depth character study to explain why, but if you want the thesis statement, it’s this: Aomine is the most interesting, developed and multi-faceted character in the entire series, and you can fight me on that.

prettiest character:

If we’re talking manga, then Aomine, but since he looks like a raisin in the anime, I have to give the award to Midorima, with Mibuchi coming in a close second.

my most hated character:

Heh. Uh... funny story, it used to be Hanamiya, or possibly Haizaki, but now I think my hatred for Akashi has actually surpassed them both, because we’re meant to dislike them so at least they serve their most basic function. Whereas Akashi’s arc is so forced and anticlimactic it’s infuriating, and that’s before even getting into his personality.  

my OTP:

You know what, it’s still AoKaga. After six fucking years, they still have my heart. If I can bend the rules and slip in an OT3, I’d say AoKagaKuro, but otherwise, if I had to pick one ship, it’s those two idiots with their rival dynamic, interesting chemistry and essential narrative function of pushing each other to get better. 

my NOTP:

Like I said, I don’t want to bash any ship, but if I have to pick one that just grinds my gears, it’s AkaKuro. I just... don’t get it. I mean, I get it, I know why it exists, but I don’t get it, you know? 

...I dunno, if that’s your cup of tea, more power to ya, but I personally don’t ship it and I don’t think I’m ever going to. 

favorite episode:

Episode 37: I Look Forward To It. 

Ah, the onsen episode... I know this one by heart. 

Okay, I guess I should explain myself, because on the surface this looks like pure empty fan-service (on both sides), but this episode actually has some really great character and plot-related moments. It’s the part I always jump back into when I re-read the manga, because it’s where things really start to kick off. Seirin’s been beaten down and hopeless and finally have their chance at revenge, and they find out in this episode that they’re going to be getting it right away. There’s some really great Seirin and Touou bonding, some more evidence of Momoi being a data-gathering badass (though her actual appearance in this ep bombs the Bechdel test and kinda just rubs me the wrong way). 

My favorite part, though, is Aomine and Kuroko’s confrontation in the bath house. I’ve heard someone say once (and I agree) that this episode shows a whole team of naked men (and two naked women) and yet the scene with the most sexual tension has everyone fully clothed. It’s also just a super emotionally-charged moment, full of saying things without saying them, and Kagami showing up to declare Seirin’s intentions of victory is the cherry on top. I love this episode, I’ve probably watched it about a hundred times, but I’d gladly watch it a hundred more and that tells me it’s my favorite.  

saddest death:

Himuro’s character development. I mean uh... Kiyoshi’s leg breaking, yeah, that’s totally it. Actually, him leaving at the end of season 3 is really sad, we don’t get many third years retiring in this show but that hit just as hard.

favorite season:

Season 2. It’s where the show kicks into high gear, and the plot really gets rolling. It’s well-paced and exciting up until the middle of the Yousen game, and shows so much awesome development for the characters it introduced in the previous season. Everyone gets some new abilities, but my favorite reveals have to be Kuroko’s Vanishing Drive and Overflow (that moment when Izuki gets “erased” in the Seirin/Touou game lives in my head rent free), and of course the Zone. Season 1 is nice and season 3 has some really iconic moments, but season 2 is great from start to (almost) finish, and that makes it the strongest of the bunch.

least favorite season:

As I said, it has some iconic moments, but KNB’s weakest season by far is its finale. For one thing, it focuses almost entirely on a single game, and so that game drags on forever, beyond the realm of enjoyment until it becomes tedious to get through. Besides that, though, it goes out of its way to introduce plot threads and characters that don’t really go anywhere (Haizaki and Ogiwara come to mind...) the animation budget takes a noticeable beating, and so do the trajectories of two of Season 2′s most interesting antagonists (Himuro and Akashi). The main saving grace of this season is the Teiko arc, but, enjoyable as it is, under a critical eye it’s still a lengthy, pretty unnecessary detour that stops the main narrative dead in its tracks and all but kills the tension for the final game.  

character that everyone else in the fandom loves, but i hate:

Would it be gratuitous to say Akashi, at this point? It’s funny, because I never really liked him, and didn’t understand why so many people did, but I never had any strong opinions about him until recently, when I started looking at his character up close bc I’ve run out of reasons not to. Again, if you like him, that’s totally fine, but I just can’t agree.

my ‘you’re piece of trash, but you’re still a fave’ fave:

Uhh... Imayoshi, I think. I don’t know what it is about this guy, but I love him so much. He’s a shit, and he knows it, but he’s also smart, and funny, and kind of just a big dork? Severely underrated character, with a really unique look (I don’t care if he doesn’t have eyes except when he’s pissed, it’s good character design, you guys are just mean). 

my ‘beautiful cinnamon roll who deserves better than this’ fave:

Oh, Kuroko... sidelined in your own damn show. I’ve heard people argue that Kuroko is not the protagonist of KNB, and in fact it’s Kagami, and just... whether that’s true or not technically, it just makes me sad for Kuroko bc once again he’s being overlooked in favor of other, more flashy characters on screen. Maybe that’s the point, but still, I don’t see this guy get nearly enough attention considering his name is in the fucking title. Kuroko is every bit as valid and interesting as the other GoM, and the other members of Seirin, often even more so, and he deserves all the love.

my ‘this ship is wrong, nasty, and makes me want to cleanse my soul, but i still love it’ ship:

Pretty much anything with Haizaki, but because this is me we’re talking about... AoHai. I used to be interested purely from a hatefucking standpoint, but recently I’ve seen some art and short little ficlets, and... have started to maybe ship it... unironically? Um. Yeah, so that happened.

my ‘they’re kind of cute, and i lowkey ship them, but i’m not too invested’ ship:

KiKuro. I don’t think I’ve really talked about them before, I love their backstory and dynamic, and I tend to write them together off on the sidelines, but I’m not very passionate about this one. Maybe because it is often used as a background ship, maybe because they both work better with other people (side tangent: their dynamic instantly becomes more interesting the second you throw a third person in the mix... doesn’t matter who it is either, KiKuroKaga? AoKiKuro? KiKuroMomo? I could go on) Idk. It’s sweet, but I don’t often give this pairing a whole lot of thought on its own, maybe I ought to...

[zynart]

i just want to be someone capable of experiencing peace of mind

I feel like I fit the profile of someone that either rediscovers religion or enters a cult in my thirties. Spiritual crisis, aimlessness and emptiness, a deterministic way of thinking that leaves no room for anything like grace, fully internalized idea of my sins as irredeemable

Right now, my (unwanted, but present) skepticism makes it hard for me to buy into anything but I yearn for an authority I wholly trust to tell me there’s a greater purpose, path to redemption, that humanity isn’t doomed in some other world if not this one, that life isn’t a deterministic machine

Which I think is why a lot of people get into religion or weird religious cults? Not gullibility, as much as needing something simpler you can throw yourself into that’ll ease all that existential terror. If this whole file had a thesis statement, it would be to see human beings charitably as deeply flawed people driven by our subconscious needs and a drive to avoid psychological distress by correcting cognitive dissonances and existential terror, that that’s a powerful enough drive to make seemingly smart and rational people who stupid and irrational things, that people who do those things aren’t any lesser than you and that you’re no less susceptible to some for of it

If I could just shut out the skeptical voice in my head I'd be happier. I value the skepticism of “knowing” “objective” “reality” less than I would value being happy and fulfilled and less unmoored. I’m miserable. If something can trick me into being less miserable, less adrift, less nihilistic, I want it

I might have a need for independence and hatred of authority and a need to think and think and think and think over everything I believe to make sure it’s true and justifiable and internally consistent. The idea of some hippie commune trying to build a utopian city and a spiritual authority whose legitimacy I buy into just sounds like an elusive actual peace of mind

I watched Wild Wild Country not long ago and was surprised by what I took away from it. Osho and Sheila might have been shady, the cult may have been disingenuous, but the concept of finding purpose in building something new drew me in so powerfully. It sounded peaceful. I used to find that purpose in trying to make a better world, but this world no longer feels like it can get better, or I’ve gotten too cynical to think I can contribute to making it better

The person I am now couldn’t do that. But I can see how, one possibility of me continuing down this path (and I hope I don’t, I hope I find something meaningful in real life) is my spirit being crushed enough by the time I’m 35 that I become someone that wants that. It’s not about whether it’s true. It’s about how I’m really not sure that being miserable while knowing things is better than being blissfully wrong. Or that whether or not religion and the afterlife is real, if I’m really going to cease to exist once I die, believing in some versions of an afterlife until I do might make the time that I’m still alive so much less miserable. I want to sink into it, shut down the cynical part of my brain and let myself feel some kind of peace

I don’t know if it’s just me. It might well be. A generation living through the Great Recession and the rise of the global far-right and constant news of how awful the world is and the steady march of climate change, and forever war,

And the tech dystopia, and fake-news breakdown of our shared reality, obscene inequality, the lack of faith in democratic institutions, the disillusionment of really seeing how meritocracy is fake and complete idiots have all the money and power in the world, and the impending end of human civilization,

and with… sometimes, a rigid idea of permanent sin without grace (I refuse to call this cancel culture) and revolution eschatology

Maybe we would prob be attracted to something that offers simplicity, purpose, the chance to unburden yourself of burnout, the hope a better world exists whether it’s in Heaven or in some enclave you build yourself, that offers absolution, an excuse to leave behind Online and our tech dystopia and social media cynicism/shallowness and our constant self-monitoring panopticon

And a spirituality separate from the... deterministic kind of spiritual guidance that we currently get from psychology or sociology concepts of how the brain works and common therapy tools for how to deal with the self, where sometimes you can feel like a bunch of diagnostic categories overlapping with the world

I guess what I’m saying is… I’ll be seeing a dozen of you in ten years, in some hippie commune led by some bullshit mystic where we spend our days building a new society from scratch.

Soon maybe we won’t even have to do it in real life. Soon the software to make entire virtual reality worlds and computers powerful enough to run them will be as ubiquitous as Photoshop, and we’ll end up making our own VR enclaves with both social rules and the actual physical laws of the universe something we can make up beautifully from scratch. A world where when we’re in physical danger, we can just switch locations or reset, and where most of our belongings are open-source code and not corporate creations, who knows? The point is I want to believe, in something

[back to home]

[roswelldetails]

RNM 2x05 - I'll Stand By You

So just a little note from me, the person behind the season 2 detailing.  I am trying really really hard to keep emotion out of these posts...which is really really hard for me because I'm an inherently emotional person. I'm a glass case of emotion, ready to shatter at any given moment. (#dramatic)  But I want to be true to the intent of this blog and keep my feelings, biases, and, you know, shipping out of this blog.

It was really really hard to do with this episode. Because I straight up ugly cried for like, 45 of the 60 minutes. 😂

So I guess, the point is, I'm proud of myself and sticking to the details here. My regular blog is where I'm doing the emotional flip out thing! 😂

EPISODE SUMMARY:

ACCEPTING REALITY — The discovery of some complications with Max’s (Nathan Dean) pod forces Liz (Jeanine Mason), Michael (Michael Vlamis) and Isobel (Lily Cowles) to confront the possibility that they may not be able to save him. Elsewhere, Maria (Heather Hemmens) and Alex (Tyler Blackburn) make amends. Kimberly McCullough directed the episode written by Alanna Bennett & Jason Gavin (#205). Original airdate 4/13/2020. 

DETAILS:

Max/Isobel/Michael reunite at age 11 according to what Michael tells Alex in 1x10.  So that would make the opening of this episode set in 2002ish.

Michael tells Max and Isobel, "I remember you. I don't know you."

"After nobody adopted me for a year they just stuck me with the name of that trucker who found us."

"I didn't ask you for anything."

This is like the thesis statement of Michael's whole history with Max in the flashbacks.

"Don't pay more than you collect, kid. Passing credit back and forth is a good way to get stuck with somebody forever."

Rosa's art. 

What I can see says: "...what they all told me, but I didn't listen" and "Stand the shelter".

Rosa on her dreams

"I have not had any freaky dreams in weeks. Okay, Max is probably off haunting Isobel now that they're strong enough for their psychic twincest weirdness."

"How long has that been happening?"

"Um, I don't know. It's an old boom box."

"Rosa, have electrical appliances been malfunctioning around you?"

"I really thought it was just a side effect of the handprint."

"If being in the pod introduced a new protein into your system it could have altered your DNA too. You could be developing abilities."

"Liz, look. The handprint is changing.  It's smaller."

"It's fading."

"Tell me this is a good thing."

"I don't think so."

Michael and Liz theorizing on why the pod shorted out:

"The pod's got a charge. It's like a battery powering the preservation process. This one's gone dead."

"Did the generator blow the electromagnetic threshold?"

"I think a surge came from the pod itself. But that pod has lasted almost a century. It shouldn't glitch out."

"Okay, well, then, this one did."

"All right, stop. It doesn't matter why the pod is broken. It just is. So how long does Max have?"

"My theory is that being tethered to Rosa through the mark is what kept Max from going brain-dead, and in turn the stasis process is what kept the mark from fading. So he could be gone by tonight."

"Okay, well, we have three more pods. So let's just put him into another pod."

"No. He's just gonna do it again. I haven't told you everything. I didn't want to scare you. I didn't want to be the one that took the hope away."

"Talk now, Rosa. Right now."

"I was seeing Max in my nightmares months before I told you about it, and he was begging me to stop you. He said that he was in a lot of pain in there."

"That's Noah's pod. Noah told us it was broken. It wasn't keeping him in stasis. He could feel time passing. None of us thought of that."

"We've been doing everything we can to make Max stronger. He pulled his own plug."

Note...as far as we know Isobel was the only one who knew about Noah's pod being broken.  In 1x12 it was before Liz arrived at the house that he told them about the broken pod, so only Max and Isobel heard that part of the story.

Alex on his training. "NSA intelligence cryptology training".

Monitor screen in the secret lab:

Noah's heart is still too weak to transplant. Kyle says it needs at least eight more weeks

"I wrote a paper for a bioethics class on patients in vegetative states who feel pain. Sometimes it's all they feel."

As a non sciencey person, I was wondering if bioethics class was a real thing. Tonight I saw an interview on the news with a UC Berkeley bioethics professor on COVID. So yes, it's a thing.

Alex on Michael that summer post-Rosa's death:

Starting fights with jocks

Broke into the drugstore

Not going to UNM

Hasn't hung out with Max all summer

Got busted for stealing hubcaps (Kyle's hubcaps, we learn later) 

Became a walking bar fight

Was in jail when Alex left to enlist

Michael on Max in 2008:

"It's more than that. And it's less than that. We were friends when we were kids, but now Max reminds me of a bunch of stuff that I'd rather forget. The only thing that we have in common anymore is Isobel."

Max's yearbook had a pencil stuck in the page with Liz and Max's photo in it. (The one we first saw in 1x03).

"Biology Club. Max hated science. He was in that club for four years just to watch your sister chew on the end of her pencil."

Max's mindscape:

First just desert, clouds, and then lightning strikes (destructive energy?)

Liz's antennae -- they disappear from Isobel's hands

Rosa describes it as broken

Crashdown special is Max's favorite "Little Green Man milkshake".

The Crashdown counter is kind of merged with biology lab equipment. 

The juke box is there

The Crashdown booths

Jeep

Neon Crashdown sign

One of those claw drop game machines (from the Crashdown) but it's filled with baked good displays.

The yearbook

Later, everything else is gone except the one Crashdown booth, the Jeep, and the neon sign.

The distorted music they follow to find Max is the Cactus Groove song in the music list...just, messed around with. See @angsty-nerd's post here:

"I'm the hothead. You are the hero. It's always been that way."

"You stole the hubcaps off Kyle Valenti's graduation present. Both his parents are cops. Do you want to end up in jail tonight?". 

👀 Tonight, specifically. 

Michael seemed excited about the job at Foster's Ranch until he found out that Max set it up for him.  Max found out about it from his dad (only like the 2nd or 3rd mention of his dad in the series so far).

"When I got back in town I asked Max why you and your brilliant mind hadn't changed the world yet. He said you didn't care about the world enough to bother changing it. He believed you could."

Max and Isobel in the mindscape:

"You're okay. I could feel something was wrong with you.  Everything felt…"

"Cold. I know."

"You can't be here. It's finally ending.  I can feel it. But I don't know what happens if you're in my head when I die."

"So it's true? You want this?"

"I could feel my connection to the outside world getting stronger, so I snapped. I couldn't take it anymore. I released a surge. You have to let me go, Iz."

"I can't take it anymore."

"Okay."

"I am so sorry."

"I just want to memorize this."

"Okay. Okay.  I need you to tell Liz something."

"You can tell her yourself.  She and Kyle are prepping for surgery.  They're going to use the faulty heart. She just wants to talk to you before you die."

"No. No."

"You won't be suffering. They're just gonna bring you back and then let you go."

"No you have to stop this.  You cannot bring me back under any circumstances."

"Max? What is really going on?"

"I am dangerous.  Whatever Liz is bringing back is not me. It's just some broken shell."

Maria on her mom's computer 

"Her nurse said that for the two weeks before she went missing, when she wasn't trying to escape, she was talking to someone online."

The 21st birthday flashback

Isobel gets Michael to help move Max after getting drunk on tequila.  He passed out in front of the tattoo parlor. It's the same tattoo parlor Michael goes to at the end of the episode.

Max's weird drunken statement.

"The thing is, there has to be there. Okay? There's always three. Until the very end.  I'll show you...What it means is you should be here…'cause it's all broken without three. So we'll figure it out.  You'll find your way back."

👀 Until the very end. Interesting.

On Max becoming a deputy:

"You know he did the whole police academy thing because of you, right? He thinks you're gonna get into the kind of trouble you can't get out of if you don't know someone."

Back in the mindscape:

"I figured it all out. She, there's an energy to suffering, there's an energy to death, and when I heal people, I absorb that energy. So when I resurrected Rosa, I took in ten years of emptiness. So if you resurrect me, you will be bringing back an infection. Don't want… I don't want to come back as a monster. I don't want to hurt anyone that I care about."

"That's what this is about? We've been hurting, Max. We don't work without you."

"You will! You will. You are stronger now than when I died. All of you are. You, Michael, Liz, you will survive this. The three of you. No, you need to stop them, Iz. Now."

"Okay. I love you."

"You too." Isobel disappears.

Max is using pretty similar wording to his drunken rambles in the 21st birthday flashback

We don't see that Max is chained down until this next exchange with Rosa. Isobel didn't see that detail as far as we know.  Didn't hear the chains clanking when they stood and hugged. Only after Isobel left.

"I'm sorry this is happening."

"Isobel is lying. She is buying time.  You know she'll never let me go. But you can feel the darkness too, right? That's why you don't like being in my head. Because you know it's real."

"I didn't want that to be true, but yes."

"I know my sister and I know your sister and they'll never give up. So you have to be the one to stop this surgery, okay? Or I will destroy everything that we love. You have to stop them to save them. Now go.  Please, Rosa. Go."

Isobel explaining to Liz

"When he saved Rosa he absorbed all of that dark energy. He's gonna have to expel it."

"And he's afraid he's gonna kill someone when he does."

"Yeah. So we just need someone stronger than Max to take that hit...if he thinks he needs to protect us he obviously doesn't know how capable we are. Bring him back, Liz. I'll handle the rest."

"I get it now. It's gotta be the three of us."

"He would never pull his plug to end his own suffering. Unless he thought he was saving us from something. And I'm a little sick of his heroic martyr crap."

In case you missed it, Michael did not know that.  At the beginning of the hospital sequence Isobel is telling Liz what she learned in Max's mindscape and says that she hasn't been able to get ahold of Michael.  Michael figured it out on his own. He finally "got it".

The pacemaker:

Isobel with Max at the end… everything is gone except the Jeep. And Bright Eyes playing (the song he and Liz danced to on their first date back in 2008). And then his eyes close and Bright Eyes fades away.

“First thing I remember is the three of us. We woke up terrified and lost. But together. And then all of the sudden I was alone. I got real good at being alone. I had given up on people entirely. And then you found me again. Hell of hero move. You showed up just in time. When you are a kid who nobody loves, kindness is a currency. Friendship doesn’t means jack. Family just lies, and hurts, and leaves. I’ve only ever known love to be temporary. So yeah, I push people away. Every time someone threatens to care about me I test their love until they have to leave. Connection is conditional. Everybody eventually gives up on the guy who refuses to be rescued. But you were the only one who I couldn’t run off. You never believed me when I tried to be something I wasn’t. So this thing in your chest, it might give your heart a pretty solid kick every once in a while. Consider it payback. It’s my hero move, Max. If you wake up, you consider us even, okay? If you wake up, we can be a family.”

Good visual parallels during Michael's speech. Alex and Kyle drinking together during the "and then you found me again". Maria walking up on "the guy who refuses to be rescued"

Max is in the coma for three weeks.  Wakes up at the secret lab (instead of his house, which is where he was previously.  I'm guessing it was a planned wake up because he's no longer plugged into all of the IVs and whatnot.

"I begged you to understand."

"Max, it's gonna be fine."

"No… I told you to let me go. I can feel it inside me."

"It's...it's symmetry, okay? It's just energy for energy.  We can deal with that. Fight it, Max. This isn't you."

"I don't want to hurt you. I need to get out. I need to get away from you, from everyone."

"I can't let you do that."

Max shoves Isobel and runs. When he shoves her there's a slight ringing like the sound they use when the aliens use their powers.  Isobel follows and stops him with her powers.

"I made a promise that if you came back and you weren't Max, and you were actually going to hurt people that I would kill you. I figure, hey, you got to play God. Make life and death decisions all on your own. Well it's my turn now."

MUSIC:

1. Letters To Cleo "Here and Now"

2. Lady Antebellum "Love Don't Live Here"

3. Cactus Groove "Fallin"

4. James Talley "Big Thunder"

8. Ross Copperman "Stars Are On Your Side"

5. Lindsey Ray "Keep You Safe"

6. Tommee Profitt feat. Sam Tinnesz "With you Til The End"

7. Bright Eyes "First Day Of My Life"

The Cactus Groove song is the first song this season that I haven’t been able to find on Spotify… let me know if any of y’all had any luck with it!

[mysticalmusicwhispers]

APH College AU: Hong Kong

AU Intro here, AU headcanons are tagged #college au musings.

- Music major. However, he took quite a lot of computer engineering and business classes in high school because China insisted (in classic Asian parent fashion), and he still takes them because he sees them as useful for later life (freelance musician or managing a songwriter or something).

- His reasoning for going into music was that it was a relatively cool and not boring job; he wouldn’t have to always be tied to a computer or an indoor office and had more freedom. I think HK kinda hates getting a job in general because he’s got to Do Very Specific Work and doesn’t have time to do side projects/fool around, but he could deal with being a freelance musician or someone who creates background tracks for other artists, game music, etc. Also chose music to spite Yao, because he was expected to do either business or computer science/engineering (but he’s still pretty thankful for taking a lot of business and engineering classes because he legitimately needs them now)

- Soundcloud artist, and has quite a lot of followers. He does a lot of electronic instrumental mixes (idk how to describe it), but also sings sometimes, with lyrics about taking what you’ve got and running with it, carpe diem, breaking away from norms imposed by elders and parents; a mix of hopeful and rebellious. Never writes love songs, because he thinks it’s rather sappy and would rather express love in other (chill) ways. Doesn’t really write sad songs, but there are occasionally ones about rejection and estrangement.

- Re: soundcloud; he really wants to get in their direct monetization program, but doesn’t want to pay for a pro membership. Complains about it a lot to anyone who’ll listen.

- Memes memes memes memes memes

- Trendy™. He knows all the latest fashions and cool things, often tries to brand himself as the one to go to for fashion advice. He gives good advice most of the time (will tell you if your outfit sucks), but also makes questionable decisions (he stripped in the manga because he said Jackie Chen would do it too). Moral of the story, take some things he says with a grain of salt.

- Internet guy (knows all the hacks). He WILL find a free WiFi network anywhere he goes to avoid paying cellular, and knows way more hotspot passwords than he should via word of mouth and eavesdropping.

- Also, his phone is his lifeline. HK: “What do you mean, you’re taking it away from me?” CHN: “You’re using your phone too much; it’s bad for your eyes!!” HK: “No it isn’t! My eyes are fine; you’re the only one who has contacts in this family!! Give it back Yao!!!”

- Routinely called by other students to fix their computers and stuff, charges 25-75 dollars on average per fix. He is such a stickler with prices and absolutely refuses to go lower than a certain price. When Netherlands comes to him for a repair, they’ll haggle for hours and it’s not fun; Leon will postpone literally anything to keep on bargaining and not give up on his offer/price bar

- Avoids 8 AM classes as much as possible, but has never missed the ones he has to attend

- Learned Cantonese to spite Yao. I think Yao would’ve taught all his siblings (the East Asian squad) Mandarin, but they all picked up another language (or dialect of one) somewhere. Leon learned Cantonese specifically because he was lazy and it uses the same Mandarin characters (traditional vs simplified characters but similar enough) but is pronounced different enough that his brother can’t understand most of what he’s saying.

- Gets really whiney when he’s tired, or when he’s frustrated. Complains a lot.

- When he gets really angry, he becomes really cold. He’ll stop talking as much, but other than that he acts almost the same as usual, and it’s hard for people to pick up that he’s mad. However, everything he says kinda sounds passive aggressive, and he won’t laugh at anything. You have to be the first one to acknowledge something’s wrong, and then he’ll talk.

- Re: anger, it’s really awkward if he won’t talk to you because he’s usually really lighthearted, and seeing him serious is rather unsettling. Plus he can end any conversation when he wants to if he wants to make someone uncomfortable

- Is asked to be the DJ for a lot of college parties. He’s the type of person a lot of people vaguely know about because of just one “thing”, the “thing” being that he’s really good at mixing music and has good taste

- He makes sure everyone who even says hi to him knows about his music and his hobby, so he can get popular. Shouts about his Soundcloud profile (it’s not really bragging, but more like advertising himself)

- Types up all his notes onto his computer, but he uses so much slang that his notes read like weird text messages. His history notes read like a giant reality tv drama, because he tends to put things into modern terms and create his own way of remembering things, if that makes sense.

- Hasn’t touched a pencil in forever; he’s so comfortable in the digital world it’s insane

- Buys luxury brands to show off but is also really cheap, and judges certain products hard because they don’t live up to his very finicky standards (read my last post, it’s my take on his consumerism and is more in depth)

- Rather picky with his food, because he has really high standards. He will complain on and on about a restaurant’s noodle’s being too stale or too salty or something, finds flaws in everything when he wants to.

- B to A range grades, doesn’t stress too much over school. He doesn’t mind missing a couple of assignments (as long as they’re not big projects) and makes up for it with his other work

- Delays stuff until the last minute, but doesn’t panic or anything. It’s basically a habit by now; HK doesn’t mind it because it’s efficient and works for him. He can chill for the evening and then get all his work done between 3-7 am

- His relationship with his professors is okay; they all know his name and that he’s the “music dude” but he’s not too close with any of them; he prefers his friends’ company more. He’d get along with fun or young professors better, since they’re more in touch with “the youth” and he doesn’t see them as boomers

- Average at math, kinda bad at science, it’s just not his thing. He does better in the humanities, although he doesn’t exactly enjoy English and history classes. He’s very good at debating though, so his essays and thesis statements are very strong

- He’s pretty functional on 3 hours of sleep, but loves to sleep in when he can

- Proud of his Asian heritage and shows it!! He sometimes shows up at Asian American Culture Club but isn’t very dedicated, because he thinks some of the meetings are a little cringey

- He’d love to have a last name that isn’t Wang (such as any X starting Chinese surname) because he’d love to watch people struggle to pronounce it and he’d love to correct them (in a polite but simultaneously obnoxious way)

Thanks for reading! sksks these were much more general headcanons that probably could apply to nationverse too, but anyways... Next’ll be Taiwan probably!

[nicnacsnonsense]

Frozen 2. I have notes. (Spoilers)

In general I did enjoy seeing Frozen 2. If a friend wanted to see it, I would go see it again. But there is definitely room for improvement. There are three major areas that stood out to me that could use some reworking.

The first is Kristoff’s whole subplot. Him proposing to Anna is good and tripping over his words while doing so is in character, but other than that. Why would he be trying to propose to Anna while they’re busy trying to solve a crisis? Why would he run off to spend all night gathering reindeer and butterflies for an elaborate proposal when he knows they have an important mission the next morning in potentially dangerous territory. And Anna’s consistent misunderstanding of his bumbling in the worst way possible leading to snappish and angry responses from her is out of character for Anna and makes their relationship look unhealthy.

The second two are both related to Elsa. The first is that her character arc is narratively redundant. The first Frozen movie Elsa’s arc was one of self-discovery and self-acceptance related to her powers. In Frozen 2 her arc is one of self-discovery and self-acceptance related to her powers. Obviously self-acceptance is not a one a done proposition, but this doesn’t really feel like a continuation of her issues from the last movie; it’s a brand new issue that happens to be thematically identical to the ones from the last movie, making it redundant rather than a continuation. And my other issue with her arc is the way it ended. In Frozen Elsa is born different from everyone else and spends most of her life hiding that for fear of hatred and rejection from those around her if they knew. Over the course of the movie she learns to accept herself and the people around her come to accept and love her regardless and even because of her differences. In Frozen 2 Elsa is born different than everyone else, and her arc involves her accepting herself and moving to somewhere new where the people are all like her. Which if Elsa were a real person I would totally support if that was what made her happy, but as story being told by a company run by a bunch of old rich white guys starts to give vibes of “well of course all of us normal people here in Arendelle like magic users; we just think they’d be happier if they stuck to their own kind. We don’t have a problem with them. We just wouldn’t want any living in our neighborhood.” Which is a bit... not good.

So how do we fix this? We make it Anna’s story.

To be clear I’m not talking a full overhaul of the plot here. Actually very little is going to change in that regard. The plot of the movie will still be driven by Elsa’s journey, but the emotional core of the movie will be Anna’s character arc. Which, hey, actually makes a nice parallel to Frozen, where the plot was driven by Anna running around, but the emotional core was Elsa’s arc. The upside of this is obviously there’s a lot less work to do to fix things up. Downside is we still keep that same ending for Elsa; however I hope by shifting the emotional narrative around that ending we can minimize the impact of the unfortunate implications.

The movie opens with the prologue and after that we get the song “Some Things Never Change” that, with perhaps a few minor tweaks to Elsa’s somber part, can stay. (In fact most of the songs get to stay. Yay! Except “Lost in the Woods.” Sorry Kristoff; we’ll add a cute duet for you and Anna instead.) This song is going to set up Anna’s core emotional conflict for the movie as well as Elsa’s complementary conflict. Anna tells Oalf she’s not afraid of change because she’s not alone anymore. But that’s the catch; she’s terrified of change that might result in her losing her loved ones in any capacity. She spent most of her formative years feeling isolated and it’s made her clingy and needy as an adult (see her accepting Hans’ proposal after knowing him for a few hours). She can function fine on a day-to-day basis, it’s just when she feels her relationships with her loved ones are threatened that she begins to fall apart. She was alone for so long and she is convinced she cannot - not refuses to, physical and emotionally can not - do it again. Meanwhile we see Elsa who is restless and yearning for something unknown, but holding herself back for Anna’s sake, because she promised Anna she’d be there for her from now on.

Family game night happens, but Kristoff successfully proposes to Anna and everyone is happy. This is our high point for both the movie and Anna’s character from which everything is going to come slowly crashing down (until it picks up again at the end, obviously). The celebration is interrupted by Elsa hearing the voice calling her. She excuses herself, saying she’s tired, and encourages everyone else to keep having fun. Anna tries to, but Kristoff can tell she’s worried about Elsa and tells her to go check on her; he’s not going anywhere.

The next scene, “Into the Unknown,” and the evacuation occur mostly as canon, with again perhaps a few small changes in the lyrics to the song to emphasize Elsa is not holding back out of her own fear, but for Anna’s sake. Our next big change is the conversation after the evacuation about going to the Enchanted Forest. Rather than Anna having to push to come, Elsa invites everyone to come with her, but warns them it could be dangerous and they need to follow her lead. Everyone agrees and they set off.

Plot wise most of what happens next will be more or less the same as canon, but with a different tenor to the conversations between Anna and Kristoff and Anna and Elsa. Anna and Kristoff are actually engaged so their conversations are either positive and excited about that (we can replace the disastrous second proposal attempt with that cute duet I mentioned earlier) or Kristoff being comforting and supportive of Anna as she worries about her sister. For Elsa and Anna the feeling of a lot of their conversations in canon is that Elsa is falling back on old habits and being closed off and reckless while Anna is the sensible one. Instead here Elsa is confident and in her element while Anna is reckless and even clingy.

They make it to the village and are planning on spending the night when the rock giants show up. Because Anna and Kristoff are already engaged, he hasn’t run off to put together a dumb proposal, and is there when they have to leave. We get another action sequence here and at one point all of them are running along a cliff. The edge of the cliff sheers off, and Kristoff and Sven go tumbling down. Anna screams and for a second it looks like she’s going to throw herself off the cliff after him. Elsa drags her away to safety at which point Anna has a mini breakdown. Elsa tries to reassure her that the other two are probably fine — though we can tell that not even she totally believes it — and reminds Anna that she still has her and Olaf. They continue on.

They reach the ship and find out what happened to their parents. Elsa freaks out but not because she thinks it’s her fault their parents died. She freaks out because she sees now that what comes next is too dangerous for Anna to come. She swore to Anna that she’d always be there for her, but now Elsa needs to go and Anna needs to stay. This moment is the culmination of Elsa’s arc, where she’s realizing that she can’t actually always be there for Anna. Sometimes life is going to pull them in different directions and that’s okay. She has to let it happen rather than always fighting and holding herself back.

Anna wants no part of this. She protests strongly and Elsa has to trick her to send her and Olaf away. Anna and Olaf are both upset, but Olaf recognizes that Elsa might have had a point, and reassures Anna that at least they still have each other.

From this point everything goes pretty much as canon, so I just want to reflect on how this earlier changes impact the meaning of the things that happen.

Anna and Olaf are in the cave, Elsa’s message comes through, and Olaf dissolves away. Cue “The Next Right Thing.” This song is perfect and is now the thesis statement of the movie, as it rightly deserves to be. Anna started off terrified of losing her loved ones, and now one-by-one that’s what’s happened. She’s all alone and it hurts; it hurts worse than she ever imagined. But. But. But she can keep going. She can take one more step, just one more. And after she takes that step she can maybe take just one more. And one more. It’s not okay, it may never be okay again. But she can take one more step.

Having learned this lesson things begin to turn around. She’s disturbed the rock giants and as they’re gaining on her Kristoff (and Sven) ride in to the rescue. Kristoff is back, and he’s back from the supposed dead this time, which is far more triumphant than being back from wandering off to catch butterflies. They destroy the dam, and then Anna and Kristoff get a moment to reunite. Then just as Anna is breaking the news about Elsa, they spot her riding up on her water horse. Anna and Elsa also get a chance to reunite. Then Elsa brings Olaf back to life and their whole family is together again. We get a moment to bask in this before Elsa breaks the news to Anna that she’s going away. Not forever, but she has other things she needs to do with her life. And Anna is sad to see her sister go, but she’s going to be okay.

We redefined this ending so now instead of Elsa leaving being the result of her journey of self-discovery and realizing she really belongs off in the woods somewhere, it’s a result of the lessons both Elsa and Anna have learned. Elsa knows now that while it’s important to be there for your loved ones, you can’t do it at the expense of yourself. And Anna has learned how to rely on her loved ones without being dependent on them. Frozen was about them coming together and Frozen 2 is about them growing apart without letting it break their relationship. Our stories now reflect and complete each other.

[peppersjam]

My Top 10 Albums of 2019

2019 presented me with a handful of incredible events and memories (I turned 30, I got married, etc.), while also serving me a big challenge (my partner is temporarily living on the other side of the country). In a poetic world, these things would have a significant impact on the music that I listened to and loved, but no, not really. This year is pretty on the nose for me, music-wise. Oh, except that I got really into Taylor Swift in the second half of the year.

Before we hop into boring Steve's boring top 10 list, let's revisit the 2018 list. The only album on the list that I barely listened to in 2019 was Cardi's Invasion of Privacy. Everything else gets at least semi-regular spins, although I'd elevate Historian, boygenius, and Big Red Machine above these others.

My biggest disappointment this year was Charli XCX's CHARLI, which is a solid album, but it didn't grab me nearly as much as Pop 2 did a couple years ago. It hasn't stuck in my rotation.

Runners up:

Bon Iver - "i,i" (I love it when I listen to it, but for some reason I'm not often compelled to listen to it)

Ariana Grande - "thank u, next" (Staple of early 2019, but fell off)

Carly Rae Jepsen - "Dedicated" (Great, but I'd rather listen to E•MO•TION)

Taylor Swift - "Lover" (Some true standout tracks, like Lover and Paper Rings, but too many cloyboys and CRJ rip-offs)

Weyes Blood - "Titanic Rising" (I could see this growing on me over the years, like a Radiohead record)

And the pre-2019 albums that should've made my respective yearly lists:

Beyoncé - "4" (2011)

Beyoncé - "BEYONCE" (2013)

Big Thief - "Capacity" (2017)

Big Thief - "Masterpiece" (2016)

Perfume Genius - "No Shape" (2017)

Snail Mail - "Lush" (2018)

Taylor Swift - "Red" (2012)

10. Big Thief – U.F.O.F

Early in the year, I "discovered" Big Thief. I don't know how I missed them before. Specifically, the song "Masterpiece" got right up in my brain and has been hanging out there since. Then Big Thief gave us U.F.O.F. which was yet another great Big Thief album. See #3 below.

9. Andrew Bird – My Finest Work Yet

Look, I'll stop putting Andrew Bird records on my end-of-year lists when he stops making them.

Andrew Bird turned a corner with the release of Are You Serious where he basically acknowledged that he was now going to work with other people and write scrutable songs. It was a good album, but My Finest Work Yet refines this Andrew Bird 2.0 and delivers some of his... finest work yet ("Sisyphus," "Manifest," "Olympians"). While I still prefer earlier Andrew Bird (A Nervous Tic Motion into Fake Palindromes into Measuring Cups... my gosh, that's 10 incredible minutes of music), I understand why he's moved on to something else.

8. JPEGMAFIA – All My Heroes Are Cornballs

I've been in a rap rut. Kanye is putting out self-indulgent gospel albums. Chance and Drake are boring now. JAY Z is working with the NFL.

But the rut is mostly a lack of imagination on my part. There's a lot of rap out there that hasn't made it through my naive filter, and I want to seek more of it out in 2020. Case in point: JPEGMAFIA. He's weird, political, funny... all the things that the aforementioned rappers aren't (or at least, aren't anymore). All My Heroes Are Cornballs is the most hypnotic rap album I've listened to in years. The glitchy beats and effortless flow makes it impossible to turn off mid-album.

7. BROCKHAMPTON – Ginger

GINGER is a proper follow-up to the SATURATION trilogy. While Iridescence had some good tracks on it, the overall experience was jarring (not without reason, given what the group was going through with Ameer). GINGER reads (ok, plays) like an album in a way that the Saturations never did. While it may be spiritually linked to the Satursation, it's a complete departure sonically. Even though it's more constrained and less bombastic than their hits from that era, it feels much bigger and, ahem, More Important. That might not be to the taste of some of their fans, but I'm happy to have both versions of BROCKHAMPTON in my music library.

6. Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!

Music publications couldn't get over the fact that on NFR!, Lana, yes LANA DEL REY, was wordsmithing at a high level. Is it that hard to believe that someone would become a better poet as they gained more life experiences, inching closer to the mystical 10,000 hours? Some of the praise may have gone a little overboard (and, frankly, seems rooted in a narrow, misogynistic view of Who Can Do Music Good™️™️™️), but I agree with the underlying principle of the praise: that this is a collection of well written and well performed songs. It has my favorite album closer of the year, "Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have - but I Have It." I get chills just thinking about it.

5. Clairo – Immunity

I enjoyed my first listen.

On my second listen, I wondered if it was maybe too simple. I didn't listen again for several months.

But then, when I was working from Pittsburgh the week before Christmas, I listened again. And I couldn't stop listening. It's simpler music than many of the albums on this list, but it appeals to me for the same reason I had a fixation with Snail Mail's Lush this year: it's incredible that songs that sound so "simple" (and I truly do not mean simple in an insulting way) can still be different than anything we've heard before, and can still transfix us in new ways. Behold ye, the power of combinatorics!

4. Vampire Weekend – Father of the Bride

Channel Orange to Blonde was 4 years. There's nothing you can do to get your favorite artists to make music faster. There's some beauty in that... that if an artist is financially successful enough, they don't need to rush.

Modern Vampires of the City to Father of the Bride was 6 years (i.e., 20% of my lifetime). But at least there are no duds here, and "Harmony Hall" might sneak into my hypothetical favorite-songs-of-all-time pantheon.

3. Big Thief – Two Hands

Oh, but then a few months later, Big Thief gave us another album. They started working on it right after they finished U.F.O.F, which tracks based on every interview I've read with Adrianne Lenker. She talked about the insane touring and album release schedule they've been on in the past four years, but her point wasn't "I'm getting tired," but rather "let's see if I can do this forever." I saw them play at The Fillmore after they released Two Hands and I got the sense that Adrianne has to make and perform music. She was uncomfortable engaging in the standard nearly-identical pleasantries that artists share with the audience. She was shy. She was surprised to find that we were hanging on her every word and chord. It was relatable. She's the closest to a genius I've seen in an indie rock band in the last several years, although I'm sure she'd hate anyone calling her that.

That genius produced Two Hands, an affecting indie rock record that practically demands that you close your eyes because you need to experience it and only it.

2. Tyler, the Creator – IGOR

This year, I listened to IGOR over and over again. The hooks, verses, beats, and vibe are all infectious. Boring Steve says "hey, look, it's just a great album." I don't have a deeper thought about it. I eagerly await Tyler's next project.

1. Nilüfer Yanya – Miss Universe

This year, like 2009 a decade ago, was an exciting year to be an indie rock fan. Vampire Weekend and Bon Iver cemented their elder ("elder") statesperson statuses, Big Thief came into their own as a true force of nature, and acts like Clairo and Nilüfer made me extremely jazzed about the Ghost of Indie Future.

Nilüfer has a unique and delightful voice that punches through some really fun songwriting and arrangements. Like, what a dumb, awesome lyric:

Although I cannot tell if I'm paranoid

Or it's all in my head, it's all in my head

Miss Universe is her debut full-length album, and it's a lovable and off-kilter thesis statement for what I assume will be a lovable and off-kilter music career. I can better explain why some of the other albums on this list are great, but suffice it to say, the system rewards unique performances.

[haus-of-wu]

not gonna lie - me finally getting around to making part 2 is bc kangin’s departure has me going through some shit so i figured we all needed some nostalgia

also a number of y’all vaguely requested / shamed me in the tags to do this for the other members

(@SM: please let there be a OT15 talk/variety show special for their 15th anniversary, just to get the whole crew together to talk about the good times, i’m begging you) 

if you want to know my deeper thoughts about scandals/departures, it’ll be below the cut

other SJ powerpoint memes by me: beginner’s guide to SJ part 1 / welcome back kyu

thesis statement:

SJ always talks about how they want to do a comeback with everybody, aka as many members as possible. they’re adults, they’re not naive, they know their members best. let them do a comeback with as many people as they want.

they’re adults, let them make their own decisions, and respect those decisions.

they didn’t thrive for 13+ years in the industry and make their own sublabel by mistake y’all, they know what they’re doing

about kangin:

yes, drinking and driving is a trash thing to do. it’s especially a garbage thing to do twice. thankfully no one was hurt, but to do the same thing twice in seven years isn’t a great track record.

being an idol is stressful - and there’s a number of healthy and unhealthy ways to cope with the pressure. alcohol is definitely one of them. i think the fact that both times kangin turned himself in to police says something about his character. it’s not like he thought he was above the law. he’s taken his punishment and feels regretful about these incidents.

given the number of rehab stints western artists go through, i’m not super shocked that this is something kangin struggled with. what i find scarier is that he didn’t feel like he had someone he could lean on to call to get him home.

alcohol misuse (i am refraining from saying abuse/addiction bc i don’t have enough information to feel confident in slapping a label on kangin) isn’t something you’re born with, it’s the result of a multitude of things/stressors happening in your life.

it pains me to see him leave SJ. i selfishly wish this decision had been made earlier. his last offense was in 2016 - it’s been three years of some of us ELF clinging onto a thread of hope that he’d be able to participate in activities again. i can only imagine that kangin has been going back in forth in his head for all this time wondering whether he should throw the towel in.

sad hours: seeing those photos of SJ holding each other at the airport when they found out kangin made that announcement is just...depressing - kudos to them for still being able to hold it together to slay in saudi arabia

about sungmin:

the tldr is the timing of sungmin’s relationship/marriage, and the way he went about it wasn’t great.

as i mentioned on the slide, whenever you start a romantic relationship with someone, you have to start playing the balancing game of spending time with your SO versus with your friends. in sungmin’s case, when friend time is also technically work time, this put a strain on the team dynamic.

especially when sungmin’s overall level of diligence/responsibility regarding SJ things began to drop, it’s understandable that the team started to become skeptical about saeun, marriage, and what not. they were rearranging entire promotion schedules for him. that’s not easy when the group is this big.

it definitely didn’t help when sungmin just went off and said something along the lines of “if you don’t want to support me anymore, i’m fine with it, you can leave” in response to haters telling him to leave SJ. definitely a move made in the heat of the moment, along with a number of other sorta petty moves that set off antis even more.

all this being said, it has been five years. the beginning of a romantic relationship is much more distracting/time consuming than being n years married. SJ has moved on, so why can’t the antis?

(hey, remember when sungmin showed up for kyuhyun’s pre-public service meal? remember how things were a-okay between the members in 2016 ?? it’s 2019 now guys come on)

about zhoumi and henry:

now that henry’s kinda YOLO’d off on his own, i have zero idea what the status of SJM is (SM, you can’t keep hiding zhoumi in the closet forever)

i really want an SJM comeback, but with 2/3 of the china crew gone, and sungmin’s nebulous status, it’s highly unlikely

:/ :/ keep doing your thing, i guess