#or like he has a message about the cycle of violence he wants to convey

[lord-squiggletits]

One of my favorite parts of phase 2 (and indeed one of the few moments I resonated with IDW Prowl) was when the neutrals were coming back to Cybertron and Prowl said that he refused to let Autobots be pushed aside and overruled after they were the ones who fought for freedom for 4 million years (the exact wording escapes me atm).

And I mean, that resentment still holds true even once the colonists come on bc like. As much as it's true that Cybertron's culture is fucked up, and as funny as it can be to paint Cybertronians as a bunch of weirdos who consider trying to kill someone as a common greeting not important enough to hold a grudge over.... The colonists POV kind of pissed me off a lot of times, as did the narrative tone/implications that Cybertronians are forever warlike and doomed to die by their own hands bc it just strikes me as an extremely judgemental and unsympathetic way to deal with a huge group of people with massive war PTSD and political/social tensions that were rampant even before the war?

Like, imagine living in a society rife with bigotry and discrimination where you get locked into certain occupations and social strata based on how you were born. The political tension is so bad there's a string of assassinations of politicians and leaders. The whole planet erupts into an outright war that leads (even unintentionally) to famine and chemical/biological warfare that destroys your planet. Both sides of the war are so entrenched in their pre-war sides and resentment for each other that this war lasts 4 million years and you don't even have a home planet any more. Then your home planet gets restored and a bunch of sheltered fucks come home and go "ewww why are you so violent?? You're a bunch of freaks just go live in the wilderness so that our home can belong to The Pure People Who Weren't Stupid And Evil Enough To Be Trapped In War" and then a bunch of colonists from places that know nothing about your history go "lol you people are so weird?? 🤣🤣 I don't get why y'all are fighting can't you just like, stop??? Oh okay you people are just fucked up and evil and stupid then" ((their planets are based on colonialism where their Primes wiped out the native populations btw whereas the Autobots and OP in particular fought to save organics. But that never gets brought up as a point in their favor)) as if the damage of a lifetime of war and a society that was broken even before the war can just magically go away now that the war is over.

Prowl fucking sucks but he was basically the only person that pointed out the injustice of that.

And then from then on out most of the characters from other colonies like Caminus and wherever else are going "i fucking hate you and your conflicts" w/ people like literal-nobody Slide and various Camiens getting to just sit there lecturing Optimus about how Cybertronians are too violent for their own good and how their conflicts are stupid, with only brief sympathetic moments where the Cybertronians get to be recognized as their own ppl who deserve sympathy before going right back to being lambasted.

Like I literally struggled to enjoy the story at multiple points because there was only so much I could take of the characters I knew and loved being raked over coals constantly while barely getting to defend themselves or be defended by the narrative so like. It was just fucking depressing and a little infuriating to read exRID/OP

[sixstepsaway]

I do not think that Ed is supposed to be abusive? i'm pretty sure we are meant to understand that he's acting this way because he's scared and threatened? The headbutting was rude but one isolated incident of headbutting in an extreme situation (waking up from a coma caused by a suicide attempt! his brain was all fucked up!) does not equal abuse. Where are you getting all this? Also I thought we were supposed to tag things with "[character] critical" around here.

Anon, I want you to understand that I say this as someone who has always loved Ed, and as someone who is approaching your message with the belief you are being completely genuine: Ed not being deliberately penned as abusive is almost the entire problem.

We literally see this cycle happening on screen in the first two episodes. After an outburst of violence where he destroys some innocent sod's wedding (2), he asks after the crew and checks they had enough cake (3), and says they're welcome to rhino horn, he's snappy but there's no violence (4) and things seem fine, up until when Izzy comes in later and says the crew don't want to part with their treasure. Ed starts to get angry (1) and Izzy desperately tries to convey that they love him and want him to be okay, and that he's just concerned for him and the crew, but he misspeaks, he says something Ed doesn't like, so Ed storms upstairs and starts pointing guns at people (2) until Izzy deliberately triggers him into shooting him not the rest of the crew.

Ed tells them to handle Izzy, goes to bed. When Frenchie encounters him the next day, he's bright, he's cheerful, it's like nothing ever happened (3) except that Frenchie knows it did. Frenchie is terrified because he knows what's coming, but Ed is calm (4) and things are just fine, because Frenchie is agreeing with him and telling him what he wants to hear. Ed catches him later and starts getting cold and angry, scaring him (1). Frenchie knows what's coming, and he's terrified.

Luckily for Frenchie, Ed takes his anger out on Izzy again (2) by taking a gun down there, but arguably you can say he takes it out on all of them by trying to sink the ship.

If Ed was just being a scary motherfucker, that would be one thing, but the show was very deliberately showing the power imbalance. If Ed had wanted to kill Frenchie right then and there, who would have stopped him? Who could have?

The show wrote and showed a cycle of abuse and that is okay, what isn't great is that they then went "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ meh!" and pretended like that cycle never happened or would only apply to Izzy, the latter of which is visibly and patently not true anyway because it gets applied to the whole crew multiple times.

I would have no issue with this, or with where the show took Ed, if the show actually took the time to get him there, but all they really did was teleport him from point A (abusing everyone around him) to point J (already redeemed, done the work, much better now) in the time it took him to catch a bloody fish

And the point of the headbutt is him saying, "I wanted it to hurt!" is fine in isolation but not super great when held up against the cycle I've just been talking about, or against Stede flinching from his violence.

And as for "edward teach critical" or whatever, I saw ofmd critical so I used that, I did not know the other tag existed. I haven't been on Tumblr much and the culture changes. Plus, I was criticizing OFMD as a whole, not just Ed, who I feel was treated horribly in s2.

[radexpertturtle]

Finding a deep meaning in Denny Ja’s chosen work 35: Apart from the bomb, I called your name in silence

In the world of Indonesian literature, the name Denny Ja is familiar. The writer, also known as a political activist and culturalist, has given birth to many works that have received high appreciation. One of his works that should be traced his deep meaning is “Apart from the bomb, I called your name in silence”, which was chosen as Denny JA’s work in his 35th birthday commemoration. This article will explore various aspects in the work, reveal the strength of the message contained in it.    Pertamatama, the title of this work “Apart from the bomb, I called your name in silence” has given instructions about what will be discussed in the work. Bombs are a symbol of violence, destruction, and uncertainty. Denny JA through his work wants to invite the reader to break away from the cycle of violence and replace it with peace and silence. In that silence we can find important names, which may have been forgotten in the midst of world chaos.    One of the interesting things in this work is the use of beautiful and descriptive language. Denny JA is able to describe the atmosphere, feelings, and thoughts very detailed and clear. This makes the reader carried away in the storyline and feel the emotions that the author wants to convey. Each word and sentence is chosen carefully, so as to produce a strong picture and live in the mind of the reader.    In “Apart from the bomb, I call your name in silence”, Denny Ja also presents complex and diverse figures. Each character has a unique background and journey of life, which illustrates the diversity of humans and the complexity of life. Through their story, the author invites the reader to see the world with a different perspective, understand differences and accept diversity as wealth.    In addition, this work also contains a deep moral message. Denny Ja uses stories in his work to convey important values such as love, sacrifice, justice, and courage. Through this work, the author wants to motivate readers to think more deeply about the meaning of life and how we can contribute to building a better world.    In this work, Denny Ja also shows his expertise in combining various literary genres. He combines fictional, nonfiction, and poetry elements in a whole and structured work. This adds to the uniqueness and wealth of the work, as well as attracting readers from various backgrounds.    Overall, “Apart from the bomb, I call your name in silence” is an impressive work and has a deep meaning. Denny Ja succeeded in describing the reality of life in a beautiful and charming way. Through his work, he invites the reader to reflect, question, and look for meaning in every second of life.    In a world full of violence and chaos, works like this are very important to remind us of the importance of peace, justice, and humanity. Finding a deep meaning in the 35th Denny Ja’s work is a valuable experience and can change our perspective on the world.    In the conclusion, “Apart from the bomb, I call your name in silence” is an extraordinary work and deserves attention. Denny Ja has succeeded in creating a beautiful work, meaningful, and motivating readers to think more deeply about life and how we can contribute to creating a better world. Through the story of the story in this work, the author invites us to break away from the cycle of violence and replace it with peace and silence. This work is a strong reminder of the importance of humanitarian values and justice in a world that often loses direction. Denny Ja has gone through an extraordinary journey in his work, and “Apart from the bomb, I call your name in silence” is a concrete proof of the author’s expertise and mill. This work is a valuable gift for Indonesian literature and is an important note on Denny Ja’s journey as a writer.

Check in full: Finding a deep meaning in the 35th selected work of Denny JA: Apart from the bomb, I called your name in silence “”

[ruby-whistler]

The main reason I want c!Dream redeemed isn't because of how much I like the character, but mostly because of how brilliantly that would work with the themes of the story.

Imagine taking a character who is one of the biggest victims and biggest perpetrators of the cycle of violence, and having him say, that's enough. I want to be better. I want to heal. I did everything I could to stop this but I only put people through so much hurt. I'm done. And I'm going to help without doing more harm.

That is so incredibly powerful. That would send such an amazing message. If he can improve, through all the terrible things he did, so can you. If he deserves another chance, so do you. Punitive justice can go to hell, we're giving one of the most terrible people in the story a healing arc. He's messed up, but if he's given a single chance to get better, he makes the decision to take it, because he still cares.

And other stories also deal with messages of redemption, but c!Dream's actions are so emphasized by both the story and fandom. That would just hit so hard. Not just "go get therapy", but work through what you've gone through. Allow yourself that.

Nearly all of the characters have been hurt and nearly all have participated in hurting people. c!Dream has climbed his way to the top of both, because he is a character of extremes. Using him specifically to convey the message would have such an effect.

As a storytelling enthusiast I just can't stop thinking about how much of a brilliant writing choice that would be. Very excited to see how everything plays out, but the setup and foreshadowing are there as far as I can see, so seeing that this is a possibility has got me hyped.

[aspoonofsugar]

Well, since this is very relevant.

Could we have a post about how Mikasa and Ymir foil each other?

This discourse has been pretty common recently that attack on titan's last chapter conveys the message that be selfish and you will be happy. Mostly, they mean that the most selfless person mikasa ended up losing her most precious one and has been alone for 3 years while historia one of the most selfish people saved herself and allowed eren to murder so many people. She didn't inform any of her friends who could have stopped eren. For her silence about genocide she is rewarded with happiness, a family and some real power on the island. I can't help but agree that while eren was killed for his selfishness, historia was rewarded for her selfishness.

Hello anons,

About Mikasa and Ymir, I like @midnight-in-town’s take here.

In general, I would say Historia, Mikasa and Ymir all touch on the idea of selfishness and selflessness.

What is more, Ymir herself is not really a fleshed out character, but more of a thematic/plot device that works well for the theme, but lacks any real psychology or depth.

In short, Ymir is compared to Historia many times throughout the story, but in the end she finds her salvation in Mikasa.

Why is that so?

It has to do with the theme of selflessness and selfishness and how it plays with the idea of “self”.

Ymir is thought by others to be selfless. This is how Historia’s book describes her and Historia is even told to be like her. Her background seems to confirm this since we are shown she is a slave and a scapegoat. Morevoer, she stays as a slave throughout all her life and is one even in death.

However, as the story goes on some cracks start to be shown in this narrative. In the end, Ymir was the one who fred the pigs and in the last chapter we discover she was actually in love with King Fritz. This explains why she sacrificed her life to save him and how she tried to escape him through dying. At the same time, it means that Ymir was actually pretty selfish.

In the end, if Ymir were less focused on her personal feelings for one individual, then a lot of tragedies could have been avoided.

In other words, Ymir is presented as selfless, but she is deep down incredibly selfish. She is the same as Christa Lenz, who acts selflessly, but for selfish reasons. Christa’s persona actually contrasts Historia, who is selfish, but can act selflessly in a more genuine way.

Why is that so?

It is because selfishness is born from a very frail sense of self. This is why in snk selfish characters are actually all revealed to be “children” inside. This is the case for Eren, for example, and this might also be why symbolically Ymir is still a child in the paths. They are all characters who are struggling with their selves. They are characters who can’t stand on their own two feet. This is why Historia’s self-affirmation in the Uprising Arc leads her to become a good queen and to help others more effectively than her superficial and self-centered attempts as Christa Lenz.

It is because only if you have a solid enough self you can act selflessly, even if it is harsh. This is why Mikasa killing Eren, which is a big sacrifice is not conveyed as a negation of the self, but as an affirmation of it.

This is also why Historia’s big selfish act in the finale arc (to protect herself and to sacrifice the world) is actually a negation of the self. I am quoting from the meta linked above:

The point of Historia’s arc was not to become a selfish girl, who would sacrifice others for her sake. The point of her arc was to live not for others, but for herself. She had to become proud of who she was. This is why since the cave she has been trying to live pridefully. However, here Eren is using the words, which were symbolic of her change, to ask her to fulfill another role for him. Eren wants Historia to be a “bad girl”, but this is not qualitatively different from being a “good girl”. It is just a different adjective and a different role, but it is still a role. It is still not what Historia wants. Historia does not want a genocide, but she seems to be giving in to the fear for her future and to the feelings Eren’s words provoke in her.

Historia giving in to Eren’s request is actually her negating herself. It is her going against her promise to Ymir. She had promised to Ymir she would have lived with pride. However, here she is giving up on pride and accepting another role (the role of bad girl) becauseEren is asking her. This is why she is totally unable to affect things in the finale arc and this is why she is instead shown miserable throughout it.

Historia and Eren’s conversation can be compared with Mikasa and Eren’s one in chapter 138 instead. Let’s highlight that Mikasa does not kill Eren because he asks her too. Moreover, she actually refuses Eren’s request to forget about him. Mikasa’s answer to Eren is literally a “No”. In contrast, Historia’s answer to Eren is a heartbroken “Yes”.

So, Mikasa frees Ymir because she shows Ymir she can love, but also be her own person. And once Ymir is shown this she is able to finally affirm herself (ending the curse) through acting selflessly (freeing everyone).

Imo Mikasa and Historia’s ending in chapter 139 are seen out of context. Mikasa’s ending is not a bad one and Historia’s not a happy one.

Mikasa acted selflessly in the final arc and this is why she is given time for herself after the battle. Armin covers for her, so she can grieve in peace. She is outside the public life and can live peacefully as she has always wanted. She has literally no responsibilities to fulfill because she has already given enough. With time, she will overcome grief and will be able to start a new life free.

Historia acted selfishly in the final arc and this is why she has to help more in the aftermath. She must be one of the architects of the new world. She must protect her family, her friends (among whom Mikasa herself) and their loved ones. She has a lot on her shoulders. Luckily, the fact that she is not stuck in a horrible conundrum anymore means she has time to heal and to go back to who she had become in the cave. She can find herself once again and help people with her power.

In short, many takes of Historia getting everything and Mikasa getting nothing seem to me as if people are forcing their ideas of everything and nothing on the characters. Historia still being the Queen and having some kind of power does not matter because Historia has never wanted to be Queen to begin with. Similarly, Mikasa not being recognized as a hero does not matter because Mikasa does not want that anyway. She wants time to heal and to live peacefully.

Is this reading I am offering perfect? Not at all because I personally think Historia’s plot-line was not handled well.

This ask I have received explains why:

I think Eren’s character holds very well even after the final chapter but there’s one thing i’m not able to reconcile and that is his goal.

Eren tells Armin that he wanted them to stop him and become heroes. And also to end the titan curse. Armin says that that’s the future he saw at the medal ceremony so it seems like Eren’s had this plan since before the timeskip.

Basically Eren never intended to kill ALL of his enemies.

But so then, in his POV chapters (130 and 131), in his monologues and in his conversation with Historia, he talks about having to kill everyone and about the cycle of violence.

Doesn’t make sense why he would do that and to also not just tell Historia his actual plan of ending the titan curse and making the Alliance heroes.

Hope you can make sense of this because i don’t think Isayama would have such a major contradiction or a retcon after only 8 chapters.

First of all, to the anon’s actual question. Eren still kills 80% of humanity. It is still a genocide and he explains that it is still this genocide that makes an immediate retaliation impossible. In short, him killing 80% of humanity instead than all humanity does not change much in relation to the scenes you talked about.

It is still a genocide a part of Eren wants to do, as he himself explains. He still believes the cycle of violence will never end. So there is no contradiction here. Moreover, Eren saw a future he thought as unavoiable, so it is not that he had a plan. He simply acted to arrive to the ending he saw and adapted his own ideology and wishes to it. In general, I like this anon’s thoughts on him.

What I think is convoluted and also illogical is the way he approaches the topic with Historia. As you say anon, he could have told her the truth. Making her believe he is going to kill all of humanity and to manipulate her memories is needlessly cruel. Moreover, it does not make sense to be honest. This happens because Isayama could not reveal the ending too soon. However, I think the whole matter should have been handled better.

Thank you for the asks anons and I hope this helped!

[bluewatsons]

Anna Dorn, Why Are Women Obsessed with True Crime?, The Hairpin (May 2, 2017)

There are TV shows, podcasts, and now entire channels dedicated to female-focused murders—is it one big revenge fantasy?

During the season finale of Bravo’s “Vanderpump Rules,” Queen Bee Stassi Schroeder confronts Cool Girl Ariana Madix about why Ariana doesn’t like her (Stassi’s opener: “Why don’t you ever put me in your snapchats?”) The girls are beyond drunk, and Ariana responds by crying about her upcoming cocktail book. Stassi is thrilled to see Ariana vulnerable and comforts her, which Ariana appreciates. Beginning to show a soft side toward Stassi, Ariana says during a conciliatory cheers: “And don’t say I’m mean. I’m not mean. I’ll fucking kill you.”

Stassi takes a greedy sip of her beer, lighting up: “How would you do it?”

Ariana responds, “Well, it would be slow.” Stassi chuckles, delighted. “Because if I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna make it hurt.”

“Well maybe we have more in common than we think,” Stassi says, “because I like the thought of murdering people too.”

“I mean, if we couldn’t go to jail — ” Ariana begins.

“ — Hashtag murder,” Stassi interrupts. “For life. But like the number — ”

Now the women are speaking simultaneously, outlining the hashtag with their fingers: “4-L-Y-F-E.”

Stassi goes, “are we the same person?” The girls break out into wild laughter.

From self-proclaimed addictions to “Law & Order” and “My Favorite Murder,” to bizarre drunken reality TV power plays, it seems women are obsessed with murder. Or at least the idea of it. I’m a criminal defense attorney who has worked on murder cases, and I fully understand the tendency toward dark humor when dealing with traumatic subject matter: it’s sometimes necessary to stay sane. But it’s always struck me as odd the way women flippantly and delightedly confess an obsession with murder, as though revealing a salacious sexual fetish. And when Stassi and Ariana simultaneously uttered “#Murder4Lyfe,” I knew I needed to figure out what the hell was going on.

A 2010 study published by Social Psychological and Personality Science found that higher numbers of women are fans of true crime than men. Accordingly, crime fiction shows like “Law & Order: SVU,” “CSI,” and “Bones,” all boast a majority of women viewers. (Hell, Taylor Swift even named her cat Olivia Benson after “Law & Order”’s protagonist, and then went on to cast the actress Mariska Hartigay in her “Bad Blood” video.) Investigation Discovery (ID), a network that features documentary-style true crime shows mostly of a violent nature, is one of women’s most-watched cable networks on television. The female-focused Oxygen Network recently rebranded to focus on true-crime programming in order to remain competitive, phasing out shows like “Bad Girls Club” in favor of weekly podcasts like “Martinis and Murder.” The podcast “My Favorite Murder,” which is hosted by two women, hit the number 1 spot on the iTunes comedy list just five months after launching in the beginning of 2016.

A recent Atlantic article attributed women’s interest in “My Favorite Murder” and similar media to the “shadow hypothesis,” or the idea that the fear of sexual assault pervades women’s thinking and makes us more fearful generally. While it is unlikely that we or someone we know will be murdered by a stranger, it very likely we or someone we know has been or will be subjected to sexual violence from an intimate partner. Francine Prose wrote that beneath the “frothy, sexy” exterior of HBO’s recent hit “Big Little Lies,” the show conveys “a message about the prevalence of overt and hidden violence against women.” And even if we aren’t subjected to explicit violence, scholar Andrea Dworkin wrote that “penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent;” Catherine MacKinnon argued that it is “difficult to distinguish” rape from ordinary intercourse “under conditions of male dominance.”

One theory for the popularity of these shows among women is that after years of social conditioning to be agreeable and passive in the face of constant aggressions from the men they know, watching unfamiliar male perpetrators swiftly and harshly punished by the criminal justice system is a compelling narrative. Furthermore, women can position themselves as the aggressors (in a fictional world where they can “get away with it”) — a la Stassi and Ariana — for the same reason: a revenge fantasy or a sort of inverse Freudian sublimation of the threat.

The Atlantic article declared that women are drawn to these shows and podcasts as a way to ease our anxiety and to prepare us for real-life threats. In 2015, Julianne Escobedo Shepard chronicled her own ID addiction for Jezebel, describing a summer in which she watched the network “in what was almost a state of hypnosis.” As she “became more enthralled,” the “anxiety kicked in” — her dreams became filled with “vague threats in dark shrouds,” her days spent latching locks, “convinced that it was my fate to die horribly at the hands of an evil stranger with a violent past.” The words felt familiar as I read them, as I recall a similar summer — one in which I spent my days with my childhood best friend and true crime addict. Together, we would watch Dateline, 48 Hours, SVU for full days while nibbling dry cereal under blankets on the couch.

I thought the habit was harmless. In fact, I felt closer to my friend. Then one night I left her house to get sushi and became convinced someone in the restaurant was hatching a plan to kill me. My brain concocted an intricate plot, compelling me to wait in the bathroom until I could see his car leave through a crack in the window. I had developed true crime anxiety and, like Escobedo Shepard, I realized it was time to take it “down a notch.” But without the binge-watching, I no longer wanted to watch these shows at all. The obsession was part of the fun.

Psychology Today declared that from a neurological perspective, true crime narratives can be addictive to viewers:

People [] receive a jolt of adrenaline as a reward for witnessing the terrible deeds of a serial killer. Adrenaline is a hormone that produces a powerful, stimulating and even addictive effect on the human brain[….] The euphoric effect of serial killers on human emotions is similar to that of roller coasters or natural disasters.

Escobedo Shepard spoke to a fellow ID Addict from Florida, who admitted to watching the network “all day every day.” She explained the shows keep her “on her guard — especially being a single woman, it keeps me more aware to know what to watch out for.” Anna Breslaw likewise told The Atlantic that she “exorcis[es]” her “anxiety through obsessively reading about true crime.”

Social scientist Amanda Vicary worries that indulging a true crime addiction will only increase viewers’ anxiety, in turn creating “vicious cycle.” Vicary believes the media helps feed this paranoia: “we hear about women getting raped and killed, and we want to know more — possibly as an unconscious way to help us survive if something were to happen to us or to prevent something from happening — and in turn, we end up reading more and more about women being killed, fueling the paranoia.” The “My Favorite Murder” hosts feed this paranoia by concluding at the end of every show: “stay sexy and don’t get murdered.”

“My Favorite Murder”’s implicit thesis is that by being smart and fierce, women can protect ourselves from random attacks from rapists and murderers. The hosts have recounted the story of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, who would lure his female victims by pretending to have a broken arm and needing help carrying his bags. Essentially, he attracted his female victims by playing into our conditioning to be polite. Accordingly, “Fuck politeness” is emblazoned on podcast merch.

While the idea that women should eschew their training to be agreeable in order to protect ourselves can be a powerful feminist statement, it becomes dangerous when we’re told the consequence is random attacks from serial killers. One of the hosts of “My Favorite Murder” frequently admits to rarely leaving the house. If these programs create anxiety to the point that women end up staying inside, they paradoxically reaffirm women’s place in the home — encouraging the very power imbalance that renders women vulnerable in the first place. Studies show that women are more likely to fear violent crime, despite that statistically men are more likely to be victims. Likewise, in the most publicized cases, the victim is a middle class white woman saved by a white man, and as Tara McKelvey wrote for the BBC, the “perception of victimhood is partly a media creation.”

Author Ariana Reines powerfully concluded in her blurb of Joni Murphy’s 2016 novel Double Teenage, which follows the lives of two girls coming of age in the 1990s: “Are dead women the only kind our culture wants or understands?” Early in the novel, the protagonist watches “Law & Order” every week with her father. She falls into the “comforting rhythm” of a “brutal attack” followed by a “swift rotation of justice.” I recently spoke to Murphy, who called the weekly procedural a “systems project” that repeatedly affirms that the cops and the DA are “doing their best” and “they know how to find the guilty person.” This is particularly comforting in a world where a Stanford athlete drunkenly rapes an unconscious woman found in an alley and is disciplined as leniently as though he were caught underage drinking. But anyone who has worked in or even read about criminal defense knows the way true crime shows portray the justice system is gravely unrealistic. In many murder cases, guilt is elusive. There are rarely eyewitnesses; even if there are, memory is imperfect. Forensic science is unreliable. There is no obvious “good guy,” no one is “evil.” Victims and perpetrators alike are poor victims of a system that repeatedly fails to protect them.

Murphy sees “Law & Order” and its spinoffs as offering “utter predictability” where none normally exists — “It is very black and white, a world without much nuance or history or deep humanity.” She also noted that shows like “Law & Order” are told from a male perspective, meaning that women watching “must watch through the male gaze to see characters they might identify with.” The general message these shows is: “you must trust the (male) structures to solve the crimes that will inexplicably happen to you.”

The tongue-in-cheek approach of My Favorite Murder, Martinis & Murder, #Murder4Lyfe is a turn away from the earnest “black-and-white” justice of “Law & Order.” Stassi and Ariana flip the narrative so that they position themselves not with the victim, but with the perpetrator. A recent interview with the My Favorite Murder girls played out similarly:

“As to the future of My Favorite Murder, well… “I think I want to start killing people,” Kilgariff deadpans. “I could get away with it, too.”my f

“Start with me! That’s the final episode,” jokes Hardstark.

But all versions derive from the same place: a fantasy about experiencing agency, having control over what is done with and to our bodies, unleashing the aggression we’ve been conditioned to keep bottled up. The problem is they’re all stuck in the “victim/aggressor mode” — as Murphy told me: “Liberation […] can’t just be a switching but a reorganization and move away from these binaries that cause suffering.” In an era in which the threat to women’s bodies is more intense than ever, it’s time we start examining women’s addiction to terror-inducing true crime programming — in which a fictitiously efficient and male-dominated justice system enacts revenge over dead women — with a more critical eye.

[templarhalo]

Templarhalo reviews Birds of Prey. (It’s pretty fantabulous)

HERE BE SPOILERS YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Ok without this movie, I would have not been a Cassandra Cain fan.  I would have not four, yes four ongoing fics with her as the main character.  I would not be emotionally and financially invested in the DC cinematic universe or the comics side of things. 

Which baffles me because this movie is perfect in almost every aspect,...   Except how they treated Cassandra Cain.   Which  is a fucking shame because her actress is perfect, her chemistry and relationship with Harley is perfect, and the idea of Cass growing up as this pickpocket foster kid, taken in by Harley is unconventional, but I fucking love it. 

Here’s a brief summary. After breaking up with the Joker  Harley Quinn has to make her own way as the strong, badass, indepent woman we all know she is, while dealing with the fact that without Mistah J’s  fell reputation as his significant other to shield her, a lot of people want her raped, tortured, killed and left for the crows…  Not necessarily in that order.    

To get these people off her back and save her own skin, from one of them, the infamous Black Mask. Harley agrees to recover the Bertinelli Diamond, a diamond encoded with the info for a source of 30 million dollars, Black Mask needs to fiance his take over of Gotham. Which was pickpocketed from one of his associates by our Lady and savior Cass.   

The problem is, Cass kind of ate it( (I shit you not) and Black Mask’s guys would rather cut it out of her than wait for the poor kid to take a dump   Not to mention Detective tReene Montoya (played by her Gotham Actress, which would have been a nice bit of world building if Gotham was actually in the movie continuity) building a case against Black Mask, with the aid of Black Canary   Plus Huntress is indirectly gunning for him and Harley in her own quest for revenge.   All these plot points converge into  a very satisfying climax and fight scene with a somewhat  emotionally satisfying ending. 

From  a technical standpoint this film is a spectacle.   Gotham in the day is colorful but rundown, with markets, suave evil bad guy clubs, dilapidated Chinese restaurants and abandoned amusement parks.   The fight scenes are AMAZING  with a wonderful tension and energy that makes them incredibly visualising satisfying.  Everything flows, the ladies move with an enthralling  grace that makes them breaking bones, crushing legs,and tearing through people visceral and heartstopping.  (And arousing. Like goddamn Jurnee Smollett-Bell could kill me with her legs and I’d thank her)

The problem, is none of this applies to  Cass, and this is the films major flaw besides how short it is. (One hour and forty five minutes).  If you had problems with how Harley was handled in Suicide Squad, the movie fixes it.  Black Canary gets a short but satisfying emotional arc that feels natural. She goes from a cynical, lethargic woman, content to be Black Masks “Little Bird”; A singer at his club, driver and symbol of his power/dominance over other women until her own conscience kicks in at Harley and Cass’ predicament.  Huntress also has a short but satisfying arc in which she gets her vengeance on the people who murdered her family and clearly finds a new one to fill the hole in her life, in the form of the Birds.  Reene and her portrayal is a love letter to the 80s cop/hard boiled detectives, a pure, simultaneously complicated/uncomplicated woman seeking to do good for Gotham.       

But Cass… Doesn’t feel like Cass and is criminally underutilized except as a walking mcguffin by dint of eating the Mcguffin.   She’s introduced to us a snarky tween, stuck in a cycle of shitty foster homes and a pickpocket to get by.  And that’s it.  T

here are moments where you think she'll get a cool fight scene.  Moments where you think she’ll have an emotional heart to heart with Harley,   moments where you think…she’ll do something besides run from the bad guys and get saved by the Birds of Prey/Her four moms. 

 In the end she drives into the sunset with Harley and Bruce the Hyena, but it doesn’t feel earned, satisfying as the scene is.  There is nothing implying or hinting she’s the daughter of two of the deadliest assassins in the DC universe, nothing about her running away from David Cain, nothing on her learning disabilities/selective mutism  and NOTHING, setting her up to be adopted by Batman and become Batgirl 

And this is a fucking shame, because Ella Jay Basco has a real chemistry with Margert and the rest of the cast.  She’s adorable, funny, snarky and wonderful as Cass. She brings energy and spunk and I would cut off my left hand, to see her act as Cassandra Cain, not this  generic punk kid with the name.

And I feel like this is  a HUGE problem because the movie sets up this Mother/daughter relationship, with Cass being Harley’s motivation to be a better person.  She goes from willing to hand her over to Black Mask to taking the kid under her wing.   Cass is the glue that bands the Birds of Prey together.   These lovely, dangerous, women coming together to keep a little girl safe,  doesn’t feel as emotionally satisfying as it should because Cass isn’t Cass.

While I will praise the movie for Harley’s arc of seeking her own emancipation and agency outside her abusive relationships and life of crime,  I feel like Harley’s arc should have been a question of redemption.    Cassandra’s motivation to become Batgirl was her refusal to kill again.  (Hey WB remember how in Batman Begins Bruce refused to kill a man because “I will not be an executioner.”)  

Here Cass is fine with killing. She chucks a bomb at some goons chasing her and  she kills Black Mask with a grenade in the end.

Yeah… Cass “I refuse to kill because my dad made me kill an innocent man at eight years old and killing is wrong” kills people.  

*head meet desk*

Sucide Squad, set up Harley and the squad, for an unconventional redemption arc, spite motivated it may be, yet Harley despite her line to Cass “You make me want to  be a less terrible person”  isn’t seeking to make amends for what she did as the Joker’s henchman.  (Like being an accomplice to Jason Todd’s murder).   

.Cass pickpots and steals to survive, because she’s a kid with no family passed from foster home to foster home, Harley steals because she can, steal a truck to blow up a chemical plant because she can.  Kills because she can.   (granted she does use an M79 grenade launcher with bean bag shells for one scene but besides that.) 

I like the idea of Harley taking Cass under her wing, its an unconventional but fresh idea, but it doesn’t feel entirely satisfying, and Cass not being Cass, not having an arc beyond “Go along with Harley as her apprentice” really undermines the excellent themes and message the movie is trying to convey.

Now maybe in the Suicide Squad reboot with James Gunn or a future DC film , Cass is going to leave Harley because that life of crime and killing doesn’t suit her and she realizes she’s trying to be something she’s not and I’m just being overly critical, but I still feel like “Harley and Cass seeking redemption and moving past their abusers together”  should have been where this movie left off, and it baffles me that it doesn’t from a narrative perspective.

Anway the overall themes and message of Birds of Prey are represented in Evan Mcregor’s Black Mask, a walking talking example of repressive toxic masculinity and misogyny.   A flamboyant, all but stated to  be a repressed Bi, crime lord seeking to take control of Gotham, Black Mask moves with confidence in his loud suits, and charming quirkiness,   He’s cruel, sadistic and repulsive  His mannerisms ooz terror,and insanity. He moves like a love child between Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix’s take on the Joker, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and Joffery Baratheon from Game of Thrones.   He’s a control freak, trying to  be a badass. 

 One minute he’s the Godfather, the next he’s a brat.  He views Harley as nothing without the Joker, telling her that she needs him to protect her.   He enjoys asserting his dominance over Harley during her brief capture by having his men beat her while he eats popcorn.  He objectifies Black Canary for her singing voice and beauty..   

Black Mask asserts his power and authority over the underworld by  his control over women.  In one  frightening scene, he believes one of the women at his club is laughing at him for his failure to capture Cass, so he orders her  to stand on a table, then for her boyfriend to rip open her dress with a knife because he finds it ugly.

In summary he represents the patriarchy.  He represents sexist, abusive men.   He’s a representation of social norms and ideals that are repressive and disgusting, and rob women of their agency, and self-worth. He represents the use of violence, not for noble reasons, but as a means to control women and lash out at those that defy him and supposedly wronged him .

Furthering this line of thought are  the costumes. Black Canary’s costumes represent the amount of control, Black Mask has in her life.  When we first see her, Dinah is wearing a long black netted evening gown that accents her legs as she sings “It’s a Man’s Man’s World”. Later she wears  a blue tank top and gold, tightfitting pants clearly meant to draw our gaze to her ass and thighs. When she’s Black Mask��s driver, she’s wearing a Bra/crop top that bares her midriff under a short blue blaze, but when she decides she’s going to defy him, she wears a yellow tank top and jeans with  a gold belt.

Harley’s costumes are as eclectic as she is, with her DIY caution tape shawl, stamped tops and cut up shorts.  Huntress’s outfits are all black leather and punkish athletic wear, utilitarian and elegant in their simplicity while Reene wears  a  “I shave my balls for this” t-shirt reflecting her uncouth, blunt demeanor, as well as button down  dress shirts and slacks for the climactic asskicking montage .  

Cass is a kid,who clearly doesn’t have the funds for super nice clothes. She;s running around in ratty shorts and a worn out hoody with  a red windbreaker, with an orange bandanna askew on her head.  At the end, when she rides off with Harley, she copying Harley’s style.

Speaking of costumes, one thing I appreciate is that instead of the male gaze and sexualisation, we get what I like to call “passive fan service”  What I mean is that instead of tracking shots on Harley’s ass or boob shoots, like in Suicide Squad  the camera just lets these women’s beauty do the talking. 

 Huntress is wearing a sports bra and tactical pants for the climax, but the camera doesn’t linger on her boobs.  A primary example of this is a lot of Padme’s scenes in Episodes II and III of Star Wars.  Lucas knows Natalie Portman is a gorgeous woman and he doesn’t need to remind us by deliberate camera shots.  He lets Natalie herself and Trisha Biggar’s excellent costumes do it for us. 

Also one thing I really… really liked was how in the big penultimate fight, Harley actually passes Dinah a hair tie so she can get her hair out of the way. So for like a minute, she’s beating the ever loving fuck out of goons with her legs as she ties up her hair.  A very nice case of reality ensures.

In conclusion Birds of Prey is another notch in the belt for the DC cinematic universe, a solid, fun film with  an excellent cast with clear chemistry, hampered by character derailment that undermines its sorely needed themes and message it's trying to convey.   The plot is  fast paced, but doesn't feel rushed even though it’s only a little over an hour long.  It’s uncompromisingly  bold, bloody and hilarious. The lack of a proper post credits scene is somewhat annoying and I'm very disappointed how Cass was handled , but this is by no means a terrible film. 

Overall I give it a 8.9 out of 10.  Highly recommend you go see it. Drag your friends, smuggle in as much candy and drinks as you can.  Buy it when it comes out on DVD.   If you’re a Cass fan, reread the Puckett run or pick up her new graphic novel Shadow of the Batgirl to wash out the bittersweet taste this will give you.  Speaking of Kelley Puckett, he was actually listed in the “Special thanks to…”  in the credits, which i’m sure many will appreciate.

These following posts and thoughts on the film I recommend.

https://dcwomenofcolor.tumblr.com/post/190693985900/how-would-you-fix-bop-cass

https://wits-writing.tumblr.com/post/190718974642/birds-of-prey-movie-review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YeFJjoQoec

[mrneighbourlove]

A Study of Abuse and Forgiveness: The Skull Kid

Let’s talk about the Skull Kid.  I was eight when I first played Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. I was lucky enough to have open parents who exposed me to different aspects of life through film, theatre, video games and life events. Violence was something I quickly learned through ‘Alien’ and other forms of art. However, for me, this moment was different from other forms of violence when I experienced it. It made me uncomfortable. Not from the violence itself though, but what the violence represented, and what I took away from it. Friends shouldn’t hurt friends.

The Skull Kid is my favourite Legend of Zelda character, and one of my favourite characters in fiction when you pair him up with Majora. This is a character who is a child of mind and soul. And what makes him realistic to me, is that he’s a kid. And most kids are the paragon of mischief and misbehaviour. They have fun, whether or not they do so at the expense of others’ comfort at times, mostly adults. This does not necessarily make kids inherently bad too.

We learn more about the Skull Kid before he had the mask through the word of Tatl. According to Tatl, people didn’t associate or play with Skull Kid because he was always up to tricks. This may be why, when they find Skull Kid, he is all alone and hiding under a log, shivering from the rain, even though he’s not too far away from Clock Town. People don’t like to be tricked after all, but we don’t know how far Skull Kid went with his pranks. Did he hurt the feelings of people around him greatly, or did he simply annoy them to the point of indifference?

Kids are usually loud or are big and noticeable with their actions when they want attention. For someone as lonely and different as the Skull Kid, it was friendship he sought. So, when he befriends Tatl and Tael he seems pretty content. The most trickery we see is him sneaking up on Tael and giving him a spook, or drawing Grafitti on a tree. Other than that, the Skull Kid is simply playing in the fields of Termina, playing music for his new friends, and having a good time. He acts like an average kid.

Then Majora’s Mask enters the picture. This is the first chronological case of abusive behaviour from Skull Kid. One might be able to argue that the mask somehow reached out to Skull Kid’s weak mind and influenced the Imp’s actions subtlety but, at the end of the day, the Skull Kid used violence to knock the Happy Mask Salesman out cold, rummage through his sack, and take Majora’s Mask for himself.

Now, it’s an interesting case to judge the actions of Skull Kid from this point on. There seems to be acts of evil that are clearly the Entity of Mask’s influence, such as the destruction of the world, as it would not have benefited the Skull Kid of before; however, we also see that the Skull Kid appears to be able to control his actions, at least in the opening act. He slips off the mask to congratulate his fairy friends, so the mask has not fully possessed him at that point or, at the very least, it does not seem to worry about Skull Kid abandoning it.

These are the crimes that were carried out by the Skull Kid throughout the game, but there is no way to know who was in control. 

- Turning Kafei into a child, resulting in a near broken relationship.

- Transforming the Deku Butler’s Son in a rooted husk, permanently killing him.

- Sealing the Giants Guardian Gods away.

- Physically assaulting Koume the witch, leaving her in a paralyzed state.

- Cursing Woodfall, creating a monster that kidnapped the Deku Princess, leaving an innocent monkey to be unjustly punished.

- Cursing Snowhead, leaving the mountains in an never ending winter, freezing Gorons, sending the Goron Hero Darmani to his death, and leaving him a ghost full of regrets.

- Cursing Great Bay. Following this by telling a group of Gerudo Pirates to steal Lulu’s Zora Eggs, which short term gets Mikau killed, and long term tricks the pirates into traveling into a typhoon.

- Cursing Stone Tower, unleashing spirits of the dead and damned, which are unable to return to rest, and cursing Pamela’s father into becoming a Gibdo.

- Knocking Link out, mugging him, stealing his horse and Ocarina, ditching the horse right after because he can’t ride it, cursing Link into becoming a Deku Scrub, and laughing as he leaves his friend Tatl behind.

- Cursing the moon to fall and crash onto Termina, bringing the end to all life.

- Striking his friend Tael for pleading for help to the giants.

It may have been Skull Kid himself, the Skull Kid under the influence of the mask, or Majora with Skull Kid unaware at all of his actions and possibly being under control of Majora, with the demon speaking through Skull Kid, possessed ala Regan from the Exorcist. 

Some of these seem childish and in line with Skull Kid, such as the opening act with Link or cursing Kafei, but I choose, in my opinion, to believe Majora at least influences most of these evil actions. That said, a lot of pain has been inflicted on others leading up to the the end of the three day cycle. Does the Skull Kid deserve forgiveness for his actions?

The biggest contender for forgiveness is the giants. They are the guardians of Termina. It is their job to ensure the inhabitants are safe. Yet, after all the giants are freed from the imprisonment by the power of the mask, they say this to Link and Tatl.

“Forgive your friend.”

They see the grasp of evil the mask has enveloped around the Skull Kid. This is a kid who has become entangled with something absolutely insidious, and they recognize that. That said, I also wish to examine a more grounded viewpoint of the argument of the abuse Skull Kid was a part of and whether or not he deserves forgiveness by looking into the debate between Tatl and Tael.

Tatl, rightfully so, is concerned for her brother. Skull Kid’s hitting of his friend and her brother is NOT acceptable behaviour. It is not something that is ok. And, like any child, he should know better. Now, this can be interpreted as the Skull Kid having hit Tael more than once off screen, but is more likely evidence of Tatl’s immunity to the effect of time reset, and her losing her patience for seeing Skull Kid hit her brother over and over and over again in the time loop.

This is a line to convey pity and, perhaps, remorse for the Skull Kid. The little imp seems to have always been alone. In the Lost Woods he was separate from other Skull Children; he didn’t seem to be included with the people of Clock Town and his antics made him isolated. Should we forgive Skull Kid just because of his life? Because he is a child in mind and soul, can we hope that he will become a better person if shown compassion and friendship?

Even if we are hurt and lonely, we make the choices that define us. To Tatl, Skull Kid chose to cause destruction and pain by lashing out with the power of the mask. Regardless of whether or not Majora made that final choice, the message is strong. We can’t defend bad behaviour just because of circumstance.

Absolutely. With great power, comes great responsibility. Give power to a child and bad things will happen, but the Skull Kid was doomed to failure due to the evil that possessed him, not him possessing it.

Which leads to the ultimate reveal. In the end, Majora manipulated Skull Kid’s weak will to its own end. It worked through Skull Kid to bring about pain, suffering, and death to the world. Skull Kid’s body is cast aside as Majora reveals itself at the final hour.

A big part of Majora’s Mask, is that you save a lot of people from the pain the mask is inflicting on the world. All of the masks you collect are symbols of every person you have helped to live a happier life. And Skull Kid is the last person you save from Majora. He was manipulated by a darkness far beyond his comprehension. And despite hurting Tael, the fairy forgives his friend.

However, what matters to me the most about the Skull Kid is an act that comes after you slay Majora. The Skull Kid displays shame at his actions.

He lowers his head and shakes. To me, this can be taken two ways. He could be addressing the giants, shocked at how they forgave him. Or, alternatively, I think it could be subtly showing Skull Kid is ashamed of hurting Tatl and Tael, that he feels guilt at his actions. He feels guilt that he was shown compassion. And the fairies fly over to comfort him in an act of forgiveness. Despite any abuse the Skull Kid committed under Majora, they forgive him. To me, it’s huge that Skull Kid shows any regret at all. It’s a sign of self-reflection, which he can use to become a better person.

Vaati is an evil wizard who kidnaps women. Zant is a crazy creep who usurped his kingdom. Ganondorf is an evil king who tries to control the world. Skull Kid is a child. You want to save him, with everyone else in Termina, because he has an innocence the other antagonists of Zelda just don’t share. He is someone you can be friends with at the end, once all of the evil has been exorcised out of the land and its people. In my own conclusion, I believe we can forgive Skull Kid, just as the Giants, Tael, Tatl, and Link have done.

Skull Kid isn’t completely evil. But, he also isn’t completely pure. He’s a kid. Kids screw up - sometimes they hurt their friends with the choices they make. But they can also learn from their mistakes. And they learn better if given a chance to be forgiven.  I believe Skull Kid just needs a friend to help guide him, and he can grow through the ages to be a good person, and an even better friend back. 

[morievna]

Ni-Ti loop curse - Ugetsu’s arc and predictions

I noticed that most of fandom thinks that after chapters 27-28 Ugetsu’s story is finished. It surprised me a little since I have different opinion that in fact he will definitely play role in upcoming final arc and that him getting happy ending is still possible.

Whole Given basically

Spoilers for manga below.

1. Ugetsu compared to rest of characters

Since Ugetsu was introduced I was clearly intrigued by him, but no means I expected him grow to be my favorite character. I was rather surprised that instead of presenting him in a bad-ex trope way he got full-fleshed and nuanced. I like how he is one of mysteries of the story – at first we know that he is responsible for Akihiko views of love as painful thing and we got tidbits of theirs domestic life where they seems to be intimate but we get vibe that there is something wrong. Then we got chapter 17 and we know what went wrong and it is heartbreaking. I think it interesting choice that we simultaneously got both Akihiko and Ugetsu perspective on it and we get why it went that way. Natsuki-sensei not only spent lot of time fleshing out story from his perspective to sympathize with him and clearly puts a lot of effort in showing all emotions on his face. Compared to other supporting characters he got the most of time in manga and we get him to know relatively very well – from little information about childhood, his motivation and so on. Besides, what also distinguish him from them the most is the way he impact main storyline – he is important both to Akihiko’s as well as Mafuyu’s story, while rest orbits primarily around one character.

But what I found truly fascinating is how he is foil and contrast with rest of characters, because he is such extremum when it comes to music and relationships.

Uenoyama – he is called prodigy too; before meeting Mafuyu his life was centered only on music but it didn’t go well for him

Haruki -  totally opposite in almost everything from acting towards others, living space, views on music to relationship with Akihiko

Mafuyu – another prodigy who express feelings via music, but who wants to cultivate bonds with others

Yuki – both are dedicated to music at cost of their wellbeing and relationship

Akihiko – since he and Ugetsu are paralleled a lot with Yuuki-Mafuyu I will use Hiiragi’s quote “together, they filled in each other’s missing pieces” – in terms of character qualities and simple things as providing home and support, whose they respectively needed.

By all this I wanted to show you how his story entwines with rest of characters, so cutting him from main plot would be for me at least weird.

2. Ni-Ti loop and CAC song

To be honest I was worried that we may get negative character arc to contrast him with Mafuyu. But after rereading whole story I have more hope about this. So let’s start what is core of positive/negative character arc

“The Central Problem: This is the damaging belief your character must face to complete their arc. They may believe they’re weak or inferior to others, or they may refuse to trust anyone but themselves. This inner struggle will be confronted at the Climax and their ability to overcome it will determine if they succeed or fail in the conflict of your story.”

https://thenovelsmithy.com/positive-negative-character-arcs/

Applying it to Ugetsu he believes that being isolated from others is only way to be dedicated to music, thus pushing away others and acting inconsiderate to them.

It reminds me also of Ni-Ti loop:

“Instead of a healthy balance of introverted and extroverted functions, the INFJ becomes stuck in their introverted processes, keeping them trapped within their own mind in a seemingly endless loop of thought.

As our introverted iNtuition (Ni) ponders theories, concepts and possibilities, it feeds these ideas to our Ti which seeks facts and logic to back up and solidify these thoughts.  As it obtains this information, it feeds it back to our Ni which creates even more theories and concepts.

Each time this loop goes full circle, the thoughts become more and more radical and outlandish, pushing us further from reality and deeper into our minds.”

http://www.jennifersoldner.com/2016/02/ni-ti-loop.html

So we get Ugetsu thinking about how they chasing each other and neglecting music, then instead of talking to Akihiko about his insecurities he decided to push him away since prior to their meeting he was alone and fine this way. When declaring breakup didn’t work, he fallen further in this way of thinking and tried to discourage Akihiko by sleeping with other men. However, logic doesn’t apply well to love, so he is conflicted about his feelings constantly. So there is cycle in their relationship of pulling and pushing away resulting only in more pain and violence.

But even after Akihiko leaves him after their argument, it got even worse – he got more isolated from rest of world and depressed. His solution didn’t work at all.

During CAC we can observe that he starts to understand this. He seems to be stunned that not only Mafuyu can perform music on his level and be connected to others and Akihiko’s skill in drums got so much better thanks to Haruki’s influence.

Theoretically this could be end with him failing to change but…

CAC song is about ending and begging. It conveys that positive change is possible. I like how Mafuyu is not only referencing his experience about trauma and healing, but want to help others persons in his life and reassure them that everything will be alright. And there is this frame:

Of course it has double meaning – Mafuyu want to resonate feelings via music like Ugetsu as well as to resonate meaning of song to him.

So concluding – with the both facts that Ugetsu does no longer believe in his previous standpoint and we have positive message of the song, we can discard option that his story ends here. But what comes next?

3. 3-act structure and what it means for the story

Quoting Wikipedia:

“The three-act structure is a model used in narrative fiction that divides a story into three parts, often called the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution.”

For Given as whole it would look like that (image from wikipedia, little changed by me):

3-act structure is one of most common used in stories. I think it can be applied to Given too, because of the way stakes are gradually rising and evolution of Mafuyu’s songs (first one about his trauma and past love, second about positive change and final will be most likely about his feelings for Uenoyama – well technically second one mentions it too, but I think it will be explored more). For now I rather want to use that structure as tool to predict what can happen. Let’s look again at what Wikipedia says about final act:

“The third act features the resolution of the story and its subplots. The climax is the scene or sequence in which the main tensions of the story are brought to their most intense point and the dramatic question answered, leaving the protagonist and other characters with a new sense of who they really are.”

How to grow more tension?

For me the most interesting it would be instead of *insert some cliché drama* getting all main four character confronted with someone who foils all of them on both music and personal level. It would cause to challenge their perspectives, disrupt the routine and reevaluate their standpoints. In the end it would be resulting in character grow for all of them.

In less vague terms my theory is that Ugetsu will perform together with Given on debut in festival. To break Ni-Ti loop the best is interacting with people and outside world. To step out of comfort zone and leave basement.

I envision this scenario roughly like that:

Since it is very likely that Mafuyu will write new song (probably together with Uenoyama)

Then he would consult it with Ugetsu

Mafuyu would be concerned about the other wellbeing hence trying to help him the same way it worked for him in begging of the story 

Tensions during rehearsals – mainly due to Ugetsu being critical of their skills at music

After some time Ugetsu will start open towards rest of group and genuine wanting to help them performing at their the best – even if it would took some sacrifice from him (like resignation from violin competition or concert)

Thus resulting in final reconciliation with Akihiko (not necessary in romantic sense, more like healing each other wounds they caused before)

Climax at debut

Of course, maybe I went too far with this theory, but it would wrap up things nicely in my opinion. This was written emphasizing Ugetsu’s story, maybe I will expand it in relation to rest characters another time.

Finally I want to point out certain issues that would tie into this from recent chapter:

1.    Mafuyu’s hesitation about debut - his fear of taking music seriously is rooted in Yuuki’s death and Ugetsu’s story as well. As chapter 18 showed he want to learn from their mistakes and I think he is afraid of losing himself too much in music and breaking up with Uenoyama in result. In order to move forward he has to make peace with music in some sense like discussing his insecurities with certain some who embodies music basically XD

2.    Akihiko pursuing both violin and drums – these two instruments are so loaded with double meaning (drums – fun, escaping pain and violin – passion and lost dreams). But regardless if Akihiko has to choose one of them or not – pursing violin corresponds to confronting why he given up on violinist career earlier and by this confronting Ugetsu

Bonus:

Doesn’t sound it like foreshadowing?

So this is all for today. I don’t remember writing this much since my thesis – I hope it is coherent and that there is not that many errors XD If there is something unclear – feel free to ask.

[hamliet]

On Banana Fish’s Ending

Welcome to the hell that is Banana Fish’s ending. If you like it it’s hell. If you hate it it’s definitely hell. If you’re like me somewhere in the middle but closer to “I don’t like this” it’s hell. We’re all suffering. 

Like any useless writer, I cope by writing out my feelings so here, have this.

I can see why some feel the ending narratively works in some respects, and in some ways I can even agree it can be read in certain ways that make it work. But I also think a happy ending could have been just as narratively excellent, depending on the execution, and my personal opinion is that this would have been a more responsible ending. But no one has to agree, and I understand why people hate the ending and why people defend the ending. 

I’m going to talk about this in a few segments: authorial statements, social messages, and genre. (I’m writing another meta on the narrative themes of the ending because that section got massively long.) For what it’s worth, a story does not exist in a vacuum, and while it’s absolutely valid to interpret and critique a story according to simply the written story, it’s also valid to weigh authorial intent (or to dismiss it), and to evaluate how the story plays into both larger cultural messages and larger literary trends. Any author 100% knows that their story will be interpreted according to all of these. But what follows is mostly my opinion/explaining why I feel as I do. It is not me saying anyone has to feel or interpret it the same way. 

Authorial Statements

I know Yoshida has made... contradictory and, frankly, offensive statements on the ending, in which she’s said things such as that Ash narratively had to die because he was a murderer and people who kill need to pay with their own lives. In general, Yoshida seems to struggle in interviews--like saying she hates Yut-Lung when the story’s moral center character (Sing) literally tells him in his last scene “I can’t hate you” and promises to help him redeem himself. This is hardly unique to her. It’s hard to explain a complex element of story in a few sentences of an answer. Ishida’s first interview after the end of TG had some cringeworthy moments, Rowling seems to make constant missteps (and retcons), etc. Hence, I generally employ “death of the author”--I think the author’s intent matters to the extent their work conveys their intent, but not if their work contradicts what they then say. 

The entirety of Banana Fish contradicts this idea of murderous karma. In fact, the story is at its core about finding a way out of a violent cycle, of finding freedom. Ash dying with a smile on his face literally says that he did not die trapped in a system of karmic violence with no hope of freedom. 

Not to mention Sing is a murderer. Yut-Lung* is a murderer. Blanca is a murderer. They all live, and get hopeful (even happy-ish) endings and implied redemption for Yut-Lung and for Blanca. 

*I know Yut-Lung is name-dropped as having been assassinated in a later manga called Yasha but like, he never actually appears in Yasha and it has nothing to do with his character’s arc in Banana Fish, so I don’t think it’s relevant to anything relating to Yut-Lung’s character as we know him. It’s really just an Easter egg, and since Yut-Lung dying in Yasha is a retcon of the fact that his arc ending with him living in the main story (Banana Fish) I feel completely free to disregard it as not actually canon.*

Additionally, Banana Fish takes empathetic looks at children who are suffering in a world where they are forced into the roles of prostitutes and killers, and what’s the point of empathy if it can’t change anything? Eiji is noted to basically be walking empathy, having a gift for comforting those around him, and the mutual, spiritual, and yes, romantic, love he and Ash share changes things for Ash (and for Eiji). To say that death had to happen narratively is to say that Eiji was, in the words of his critics, useless, which is rather at odds with the central emotional draw of the story: Ash and Eiji’s relationship. It contradicts Eiji’s beautiful letter, the one that Ash smiled as he died because of, because in this letter Eiji assures Ash: “you can change your destiny.”

So anyways, regardless of what Yoshida says, Ash being a murderer is not a narrative justification for the ending because that simply isn’t what the story conveys.

That being said, that perspective--that Ash’s death is karma for killing--is exactly Ash’s perspective. Just when he was about to overcome his flaw of not seeing his value by realizing how much he meant to Eiji, Lao reminds him of Shorter’s death, the one thing he cannot forgive himself for. And so Ash allows himself to die. But the thing is this perspective is wrong and narratively condemned. Eiji’s letter offers a counter to this, but Ash doesn’t take it (which is slightly inexplicable). Plus, as we see in “Garden of Light,” it leaves Eiji unable to completely overcome his flaw (an inability to act/truly live) for seven years, so the story condemns it too. 

And, of course, Ash also did not kill Shorter out of malice--he was forced into it, like he was forced into the life he had to live with Dino. It’s not the deaths of one of the people begging to be spared whom Ash killed for playing a role in killing Shorter, but Shorter’s death itself that brings about fear and mistrust in Lao. To have Ash’s death be a consequence for killing willingly (which he did plenty of), it should have been for one of those nameless people we got a brief shot of, instead of as a consequence for a murder Ash had no choice in and was a victim of almost as much as Shorter was. But that also wouldn’t work because a nameless death doesn’t quite suffice for offing your main character, so. Yeah. Ash’s death is not a narrative consequence for killing others; it’s expressly framed as a tragic and cruel result of his inability to forgive himself for specific acts that were not his fault. 

Social Messages Part 1: LGBT relationships

While Banana Fish was written in the 1980s-90s (kind of a dire time for LGBT+ people in the United States with the AIDS crisis), the trope of “bury your gays” has received rightful criticism since, and the ending can definitely be seen as “bury your gays.” (A criticism that is not helped by what happens to the gay/bi character in Yasha.) In other words, while I think the themes, characters, and frankly issues of Banana Fish are generally timeless, the ending is the only part of the story that I don’t think ages well. As time goes by, it will probably get even more criticism because of current society finally moving towards being better in the portrayal of LGBT+ characters. 

*Because I want to complain and explain why I really don’t consider anything post-GoL canon: the follow-up picture book “New York Sense” doesn’t help the “bury your gays” impression either: Sing and Akira are certainly intended to be parallels to Ash and Eiji as Akira is brought to the US by Ibe and interacts with gangster Sing in “Garden of Light,” and while such framing is very ambiguous/bordering on not being there in GoL the follow-ups absolutely paint a romantic framing to their interactions in GoL. They marry and raise a son, popping up in cameos in Yoshida’s other works. Hence it runs dangerously close to reading as the heterosexual couple introduced in the epilogue got the happy ending while the gay couple we spent 19 volumes with did not. Since Sing is also still heavily involved with the mafia in all of the follow-ups, this again contradicts narrative justifications for Ash’s death as karma. 

While I very much like Akira’s character, her romance with Sing isn’t just uncomfortable because of the above issue--it’s also uncomfortable because she is 13 and he is 23 in GoL (though their relationship doesn’t have to be read as mutually romantic there, and I don’t read it that way) and according to “New York Sense,” they marry when she is 18 which... implies things that seems very, very out of character for Sing, the series’ moral compass, and dramatically contradicts the skeevy adults preying on kids theme. It can also raise some cringe-worthy questions about why it’s framed as okay for the heterosexual couple but negatively (as it should be) for the people--who are primarily men--who assault Ash (and there is noted to have been a woman who assaulted him in “Private Opinion”). Like with Yut-Lung’s death, I just... don’t accept this retconning as canon. It contradicts the themes of Banana Fish as a story so I don’t have to.*

Social Messages Part 2: Abuse Survivors

For people who have been through abuse similar to Ash’s, in which choices over basic things like life, death, and your own body are taken from you, it’s honestly cruel to show someone who has spent their entire life suffering just about to grasp happiness, and then they die. It is fully valid to find this completely distasteful, and I do too.

But for me at least, one aspect that circumvents... some of the distasteful implication that Ash really was broken by things he had no choice in is the fact that Ash triumphed over his abusers first. Yet of course, having him die afterwards still hurts people who read the story and see themselves in a character like Ash, as it can reinforce the idea that abuse defines your life. 

I do wish (though I don’t think there’s a moral necessity) that more authors/creators would acknowledge that, in creating characters whom you in theory want people to relate to, see themselves in, root for, care about, you’re asking people to suffer with them as they suffer and if they die, grieve for them. Given the heaviness of Ash’s arc and the specific nature of his suffering (especially since it was horrifically emphasized in the story’s last arc with Foxx), the fact that Ash didn’t in the end overcome the message that he did not have value is going to be very painful for readers/viewers. (Lao missed his vital organs, so Ash really chose to die instead of getting help, because he chose to believe Blanca over Eiji, which... I’m not sure it quite works.) If you could have narratively had it end happily (and it absolutely could have, and apparently Yoshida’s editor told her not to end it with Ash’s death), there’s room to say that going with the tragic ending is hurtful and bordering on irresponsible. 

Genre

That defeat of Ash’s abusers is the reason I don’t think Banana Fish is quite as tragic as other stories like, say, the first Tokyo Ghoul or Hamlet or Macbeth, though it’s certainly tragic. In those stories, every single characters’ flaws lead to them dying, and it offers a cautionary tale. Banana Fish is more in the vein of say, Romeo and Juliet, or even the movie Titanic (I’m not making a romance comparison, for the record), in that the main characters might die, but their choices and the people they loved and how they loved manage to save a city, in the case of Romeo & Juliet, or to save Rose in the case of Titanic. In Banana Fish, Ash did help Eiji live, even if Eiji would need time to process it after the set-back of Ash’s death. 

In other words, even if I’m unhappy with it and I am, I don’t consider Banana Fish’s ending nihilistic. It wasn’t “life sucks and then you die,” at least not to me. Life sucked, but it also meant something, even beyond Ash’s relationship with Eiji. Ash’s life had value. Through saving Sing in the story’s climactic battle, and then helping Max with that article that would save other child prostitutes, Ash saved younger versions of himself. That’s powerful. Not only that, but Ash found love and hope in his personal life as well with Eiji, Max, Shorter, etc., and through that genuine happiness. Even if he couldn’t fully grasp it, he knew it was there, and he died knowing there was genuine, true love, and therefore beauty, in the world too. And that, for me, comes across as far more hopeful than surface-level, cheaper happier endings. But still, the fact that Ash couldn’t fully experience this beauty and happiness because of the cycle of violence he had no choice about being involved in, plus a questionable character decision, does leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. (That questionable character decision, with the letter not having a full effect, makes tragedy seem a bit forced on Yoshida’s part.)

I want to quote Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man,” and I’ve highlighted parts I think explain how I feel about Banana Fish and Ash’s character (in particular, why I don’t think a tragic ending necessarily sends a nihilistic message, at least not to me):

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this sketching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains "size," the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

This applies to basically all tragedy, of course, but I think some tragedies are more hopeful than others. And I see that struggle in Ash’s, and a hope in Banana Fish that I don’t see in other more nihilistic stories. Ash fought to reclaim the humanity that people tried to deny him, and through Eiji realized his humanity was there all along. 

Anyways, these are my complicated, all-over-the-place feelings on the ending. It’s fine for people to feel strongly either way, but also understand that when discussing such a heavy, fundamentally triggering work, it’s good to be sensitive to where people are coming from and interact with differing opinions with empathy. Many of us relate to characters like Ash, Eiji, and Yut-Lung, and since you don’t know where someone is coming from, let them express their feelings, and be kind. 

I’ll post another meta on thematic impressions on Banana Fish later. But to each their own. Also please note, again, this is really just my opinion. 

[blackfreethinkers]

Ten years have passed since my book, “The New Jim Crow,” was published. I wrote it to challenge our nation to reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform, retrenchment and rebirth of caste-like systems that have defined our racial history since slavery. It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed.

When I was researching and writing the book, Barack Obama had not yet been elected president of the United States. I was in disbelief that our country would actually elect a black man to be the leader of the so-called free world. As the election approached, I felt an odd sense of hope and dread. I hoped against all reason that we would actually do it. But I also knew that, if we did, there would be a price to pay.

Everything I knew through experience and study told me that we as a nation did not fully understand the nature of the moment we were in. We had recently birthed another caste system — a system of mass incarceration — that locked millions of poor people and people of color in literal and virtual cages.

Our nation’s prison and jail population had quintupled in 30 years, leaving us with the highest incarceration rate in the world. A third of black men had felony records — due in large part to a racially biased, brutal drug war — and were relegated to a permanent second-class status. Tens of millions of people in the United States had been stripped of basic civil and human rights, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, education and basic public benefits.

Nevertheless, our nation remained in deep denial that a new caste system even existed, and most of us — even those who cared deeply about racial justice — did not seem to understand that powerful racial dynamics and political forces were at play that made much of our racial progress illusory. We had not faced our racial history and could not tell the truth about our racial present, yet growing numbers of Americans wanted to elect a black president and leap into a “colorblind” future.

I was right to worry about the aftermath of Obama’s election. After he was inaugurated, our nation was awash in “post-racialism.” Black History Month events revolved around “how far we’ve come.” Many in the black community and beyond felt that, if Obama could win the presidency, anything was possible. Few people wanted to hear the message I felt desperate to convey: Despite appearances, our nation remains trapped in a cycle of racial reform, backlash and re-formation of systems of racial and social control.

Things have changed since then. Donald Trump is president of the United States. For many, this feels like whiplash. After eight years of Barack Obama — a man who embraced the rhetoric (though not the politics) of the civil rights movement — we now have a president who embraces the rhetoric and the politics of white nationalism. This is a president who openly stokes racial animosity and even racial violence, who praises dictators (and likely aspires to be one), who behaves like a petulant toddler on Twitter, and who has a passionate, devoted following of millions of people who proudly say they want to “make America great again” by taking us back to a time that we’ve left behind.

We are now living in an era not of post-racialism but of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political and economic dominance could be taken for granted — no apologies required. Racial bigotry, fearmongering and scapegoating are no longer subterranean in our political discourse; the dog whistles have been replaced by bullhorns. White nationalist movements are operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks.

White nationalism has been emboldened by our president, who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people — calling Mexican migrants criminals, “rapists” and “bad people,” referring to developing African nations as “shithole countries” and smearing a district of the majority-black city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities.

Contrary to what many people would have us believe, what our nation is experiencing is not an “aberration.” The politics of “Trumpism” and “fake news” are not new; they are as old as the nation itself. The very same playbook has been used over and over in this country by those who seek to preserve racial hierarchy, or to exploit racial resentments and anxieties for political gain, each time with similar results.

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, Democratic and Republican politicians leaned heavily on the racial stereotypes of “crack heads,” “crack babies,” “superpredators” and “welfare queens” to mobilize public support for the War on Drugs, a get-tough movement and a prison-building boom — a political strategy that was traceable in large part to the desire to appeal to poor and working-class white voters who had defected from the Democratic Party in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Today, the rhetoric has changed, but the game remains the same. Public enemy No. 1 in the 2016 election was a brown-skinned immigrant, an “illegal,” a “terrorist” or an influx of people who want to take your job or rape your daughter. As Trump put it: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

He promised to solve this imaginary crisis through mass deportation and building a wall between the United States and Mexico. He also insisted that his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, wanted “millions of illegal immigrants to come in and take everybody’s jobs.” And he blamed domestic terroristic attacks in New Jersey and New York on “our extremely open immigration system,” which, he argued, allows Muslim terrorists into our country.

The fact that Trump’s claims were demonstrably false did not impede his rise, just as facts were largely irrelevant at the outset of the War on Drugs. It didn’t matter back then that studies consistently found that whites were equally likely, if not more likely, than people of color to use and sell illegal drugs. Black people were still labeled the enemy. Nor did it matter, when the drug war was taking off, that nearly all of the sensationalized claims that crack cocaine was some kind of “demon drug,” drastically more harmful than powder cocaine, were false or misleading. Black people charged with possession of crack in inner cities were still punished far more harshly than white people in possession of powder cocaine in the suburbs. And it didn’t matter that African-Americans weren’t actually taking white people’s jobs or college educations in significant numbers through affirmative action programs.

Getting tough on “them” — the racially defined “others” who could easily be used as scapegoats and cast as the enemy — was all that mattered. Facts were treated as largely irrelevant then. As they are now.

Fortunately, a growing number of scholars and activists have begun to connect the dots between mass incarceration and mass deportation in our nation’s history and current politics. The historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, in her essay “Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” chronicles how these systems have emerged as interlocking forms of social control that relegate “aliens” and “felons” to a racialized caste of outsiders. In recent decades, the system of mass incarceration has stripped away from millions of U.S. citizens basic civil and human rights until their status mirrors (or dips below) that of noncitizen immigrants within the United States. This development has coincided with the criminalization of immigration in the United States, resulting in a new class of “illegal immigrants” and “aliens” who are viewed and treated like “felons” or “criminals.” Immigration violations that were once treated as minor civil infractions are now crimes. And minor legal infractions, ranging from shoplifting to marijuana possession to traffic violations, now routinely prompt one of the nation’s most devastating sanctions — deportation.

The story of how our “nation of immigrants” came to deport and incarcerate so many for so little, Hernández explains, is a story of race and unfreedom reaching back to the era of emancipation. If we fail to understand the historical relationship between these systems, especially the racial politics that enabled them, we will be unable to build a truly united front that will prevent the continual re-formation of systems of racial and social control.

In my experience, those who argue that the systems of mass incarceration and mass deportation simply reflect sincere (but misguided) efforts to address the real harms caused by crime, or the real challenges created by surges in immigration, tend to underestimate the corrupting influence of white supremacy whenever black and brown people are perceived to be the problem. “Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question,” W.E.B. Du Bois famously said back in 1897: “How does it feel to be a problem?” White people are generally allowed to have problems, and they’ve historically been granted the power to define and respond to them. But people of color — in this “land of the free” forged through slavery and genocide — are regularly viewed and treated as the problem.

White nationalism, at its core, reflects a belief that our nation’s problems would be solved if only people of color could somehow be gotten rid of, or at least better controlled. In short, mass incarceration and mass deportation have less to do with crime and immigration than the ways we’ve chosen to respond to those issues when black and brown people are framed as the problem.

As Khalil Gibran Muhammad points out in “The Condemnation of Blackness,” throughout our nation’s history, when crime and immigration have been perceived as white, our nation’s response has been radically different from when those phenomena have been defined as black or brown. The systems of mass incarceration and mass deportation may seem entirely unrelated at first glance, but they are both deeply rooted in our racial history, and they both have expanded in part because of the enormous profits to be made in controlling, exploiting and eliminating vulnerable human beings.

It is tempting to imagine that electing a Democratic president or more Democratic politicians will fix the crises in our justice systems and our democracy. To be clear, removing Trump from office is necessary and urgent; but simply electing more Democrats to office is no guarantee that our nation will break its habit of birthing enormous systems of racial and social control. Indeed, one of the lessons of recent decades is these systems can grow and thrive even when our elected leaders claim to be progressive and espouse the rhetoric of equality, inclusion and civil rights.

President Bill Clinton, who publicly aligned himself with the black community and black leaders, escalated a racially discriminatory drug war in part to avoid being cast by conservatives as “soft on crime.” Similarly, President Obama publicly preached values of inclusion and compassion toward immigrants, yet he escalated the mass detention and deportation of noncitizens.

Obama claimed that his administration was focused on deporting: “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” However, reports by The New York Times and the Marshall Project revealed that, despite Obama’s rhetoric, a clear majority of immigrants detained and deported during his administration had no criminal records, except minor infractions, including traffic violations, and posed no threat.

Equally important is the reality that “felons” have families. And “criminals” are often children or teenagers. The notion that, if you’ve ever committed a crime, you’re permanently disposable is the very idea that has rationalized mass incarceration in the United States.

None of this is to minimize the real progress that has occurred on many issues of race and criminal justice during the past decade. Today, there is bipartisan support for some prison downsizing, and hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars have begun to flow toward criminal justice reform. A vibrant movement led by formerly incarcerated and convicted people is on the rise — a movement that has challenged or repealed disenfranchisement laws in several states, mobilized support of sentencing reform and successfully organized to “ban the box” on employment applications that discriminate against those with criminal records by asking the dreaded question: “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”

Activism challenging police violence has swept the nation — inspired by the courageous uprisings in Ferguson, Mo., the viral videos of police killings of unarmed black people, and #BlackLivesMatter. Promising movements for restorative and transformative justice have taken hold in numerous cities. Campaigns against cash bail have gained steam. Marijuana legalization has sped across the nation, with more than 25 states having partly or fully decriminalized cannabis since 2012.

And “The New Jim Crow,” which some predicted would never get an audience, wound up spending nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and has been used widely by faith groups, activists, educators and people directly affected by mass incarceration inside and outside prisons. Over the past 10 years, I’ve received thousands of letters — and tens of thousands of emails — from people in all walks of life who have written to share how the book changed their lives or how they have used it to support consciousness-raising or activism in countless ways.

Everything has changed. And yet nothing has.

The politics of white supremacy, which defined our original constitution, have continued unabated — repeatedly and predictably engendering new systems of racial and social control. Just a few decades ago, politicians vowed to build more prison walls. Today, they promise border walls.

The political strategy of divide, demonize and conquer has worked for centuries in the United States — since the days of slavery — to keep poor and working people angry at (and fearful of) one another rather than uniting to challenge unjust political and economic systems. At times, the tactics of white supremacy have led to open warfare. Other times, the divisions and conflicts are less visible, lurking beneath the surface.

The stakes now are as high as they’ve ever been. Nearly everyone seems aware that our democracy is in crisis, yet few seem prepared to reckon with the reality that removing Trump from office will not rid our nation of the social and political dynamics that made his election possible. No issue has proved more vexing to this nation than the issue of race, and yet no question is more pressing than how to overcome the politics of white supremacy — a form of politics that not only led to an actual civil war but that threatens our ability ever to create a truly fair, just and inclusive democracy.

We find ourselves in this dangerous place not because something radically different has occurred in our nation’s politics, but because so much has remained the same.

The inconvenient truth is that racial progress in this country is always more complex and frequently more illusory than it appears at first glance. The past 10 years has been a case in point. Our nation has swung sharply from what Marc Mauer memorably termed “a race to incarcerate” — propelled by bipartisan wars on “drugs” and “crime” — to a bipartisan commitment to criminal justice reform, particularly in the area of drug policy. And yet, it must be acknowledged that much of the progress occurred not because of newfound concern for people of color who have been the primary targets of the drug war, but because drug addiction, due to the opioid crisis, became perceived as a white problem, and wealthy white investors became interested in profiting from the emerging legal cannabis industry.

Some of the reversals in political opinion have been striking. For example, John Boehner, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, stated in 2011 that he was “unalterably opposed to decriminalizing marijuana,” but by the spring of 2018 he had joined the board of a cannabis company.

Growing sympathy for illegal drug users among whites and conservatives, and concern regarding the expense of mass imprisonment, helped to make possible a bipartisan consensus in support of the Trump administration’s First Step Act — leading to the early release of more than 3,000 people from federal prisons for drug offenses. This development, which benefits people of color subject to harsh and biased drug sentencing laws, is difficult to characterize as major progress toward ending mass incarceration, given that Trump continued to unleash racially hostile tirades against communities of color and his administration vowed to reinstate the federal death penalty. He also rescinded a number of significant reforms adopted by Obama and expanded the use of private prisons.

Obama also has a complicated legacy with respect to criminal justice reform. Obama was the first sitting president to visit a federal correctional facility, the first to oversee a drop in the federal prison population in more than 30 years, and he granted clemency to nearly 2,000 people behind bars — the highest total for any president since Harry Truman. His administration enacted significant policy changes, including legislation reducing sentencing disparities involving crack and powder cocaine, a phasing out of federal contracts with private prisons, and limitations on the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.

And yet it sometimes appeared that Obama was reluctant to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the structural changes required to address police violence and the prevailing systems of racial and social control.

For example, when black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in his own home for no reason, Obama responded to the national furor and media frenzy by inviting Gates and the arresting officer to a “beer summit” at the White House to work things out over drinks and peanuts, as though racial profiling is little more than an interpersonal dispute that can be resolved through friendly dialogue.

Most troubling, the modest criminal justice reforms that were achieved during the Obama administration coincided with the expansion of the system of mass deportation. Although the administration agreed to phase out federal contracts for private prisons, it made enormous investments in private detention centers for immigrants, including the granting of a $1 billion contract to Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison company, to build a detention facility for women and children asylum seekers from Central America.

Immigrant detention centers were exempted from the phaseout plan for private prisons, which meant that only about a quarter of the population held in private facilities in the United States was affected by the plan. The caging of immigrants for profit was allowed to continue without restraint.

The reality is that, during both the Obama and Clinton years, highly racialized and punitive systems thrived under liberal presidents who were given the benefit of the doubt by those who might otherwise have been critics. Obama and Clinton’s public displays of affection for communities of color, the egalitarian values they preached and their liberal or progressive stances on other issues helped to shield these vast systems of control from close scrutiny.

Many of us saw these presidents as “good people” with our best interests at heart, doing what they could to navigate a political environment in which only limited justice is possible. All of these factors played a role, but one was key: These systems grew with relatively little political resistance because people of all colors were willing to tolerate the disposal of millions of individuals once they had been labeled criminals in the media and political discourse. This painful reality suggests that ending our nation’s habit of creating enormous systems of racial and social control requires us to expand our sphere of moral concern so widely that none of us, not even those branded criminals, can be viewed or treated as disposable.

If there is any silver lining to be found in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, it is that millions of people have been inspired to demonstrate solidarity on a large scale across the lines of gender, race, religion and class in defense of those who have been demonized and targeted for elimination. Trump’s blatant racial demagogy has awakened many from their “colorblind” slumber and spurred collective action to oppose the Muslim ban and the border wall, and to create sanctuaries for immigrants in their places of worship and local communities.

Many who are engaged in this work are also deeply involved in, or supportive of, movements to end police violence and mass incarceration. Growing numbers of people are beginning to see how the politics of white supremacy have resurfaced again and again, leading to the creation and maintenance of new systems of racial and social control. A politics of deep solidarity is beginning to emerge — the only form of politics that holds any hope for our collective liberation.

The centuries-long struggle to birth a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy — a nation in which every voice and every life truly matters — did not begin with us, and it will not end with us. The struggle is as old as the nation itself and the birth process has been painful, to say the least. My greatest hope and prayer is that we will serve as faithful midwives in our lifetimes and do what we can to make America, finally, what it must become.

[no1else-but-me]

Book Recs if you love Jaime and Brienne

This is a collection of all the book recs I could find from @briennesjaime​ tumblr books rec, the reddit, and my own. Please reblog your own if you have some. 

1. The Queen of Attolia which is book#2 of the The Queen’s Thief series

This is definitely more for the enemies to lovers trope. The thief even loses a hand like Jaime but under much different circumstances.  The Queen is like the colder version of Brienne.

Revenge When Eugenides, the Thief of Eddis, stole Hamiathes’s Gift, the Queen of Attolia lost more than a mythical relic. She lost face. Everyone knew that Eugenides had outwitted and escaped her. To restore her reputation and reassert her power, the Queen of Attolia will go to any length and accept any help that is offered…she will risk her country to execute the perfect revenge. …but Eugenides can steal anything. And he taunts the Queen of Attolia, moving through her strongholds seemingly at will. So Attolia waits, secure in the knowledge that the Thief will slip, that he will haunt her palace one too many times. …at what price? When Eugenides finds his small mountain country at war with Attolia, he must steal a man, he must steal a queen, he must steal peace. But his greatest triumph, and his greatest loss, comes in capturing something that the Queen of Attolia thought she had sacrificed long ago… 

2. The Lumatere Chronicles 

One of my favorite series of all time. It’s character driven and it’s has many surprises. Starts off with Finnikin has lost hope like Jaime but gains it slowly over time. Evanjalin her honor and her pursuit of her quest reminds me very much of  Brienne. 

Finnikin of the Rock and his guardian, Sir Topher, have not been home to their beloved Lumatere for ten years. Not since the dark days when the royal family was murdered and the kingdom put under a terrible curse. But then Finnikin is summoned to meet Evanjalin, a young woman with an incredible claim: the heir to the throne of Lumatere, Prince Balthazar, is alive. Evanjalin is determined to return home and she is the only one who can lead them to the heir. As they journey together, Finnikin is affected by her arrogance … and her hope. He begins to believe he will see his childhood friend, Prince Balthazar, again. And that their cursed people will be able to enter Lumatere and be reunited with those trapped inside. He even believes he will find his imprisoned father. But Evanjalin is not what she seems. And the truth will test not only Finnikin’s faith in her … but in himself.

3. Howl’s Moving Castle 

This one might be a stretch but hear me out. Howl is pretty much the embodiment of Jaime but probably more vain. While, Sophie really conveys Brienne self-esteem issues but still noble in her own right. Plus, their banter very reminiscent to Jaime and Brienne. 

Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady. Her only chance at breaking it lies in the ever-moving castle in the hills: the Wizard Howl’s castle. To untangle the enchantment, Sophie must handle the heartless Howl, strike a bargain with a fire demon, and meet the Witch of the Waste head-on. Along the way, she discovers that there’s far more to Howl—and herself—than first meets the eye.

@temporiibus recommends The Raven Cycle!!

“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.” It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive. Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her. His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble. But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little. For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore. From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before. 

The Winners Trilogy

As a general’s daughter in a vast empire that revels in war and enslaves those it conquers, seventeen-year-old Kestrel has two choices: she can join the military or get married. But Kestrel has other intentions.  One day, she is startled to find a kindred spirit in a young slave up for auction. Arin’s eyes seem to defy everything and everyone. Following her instinct, Kestrel buys him—with unexpected consequences. It’s not long before she has to hide her growing love for Arin.  But he, too, has a secret, and Kestrel quickly learns that the price she paid for a fellow human is much higher than she ever could have imagined.  Set in a richly imagined new world, The Winner’s Curse by Marie Rutkoski is a story of deadly games where everything is at stake, and the gamble is whether you will keep your head or lose your heart.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone recommended by @realduality

Errand requiring immediate attention. Come. The note was on vellum, pierced by the talons of the almost-crow that delivered it. Karou read the message. 'He never says please', she sighed, but she gathered up her things. When Brimstone called, she always came. In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she's a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in 'Elsewhere', she has never understood Brimstone's dark work - buying teeth from hunters and murderers - nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn't whole. Now the doors to Elsewhere are closing, and Karou must choose between the safety of her human life and the dangers of a war-ravaged world that may hold the answers she has always sought.

The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Hard SF, and the romance is definitely not a major plot, but one of the characters involved in the trope is legit my favorite fictional character of all time and that journey from enemy to friend to lover is a big part of it.

In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research & cutting-edge science in the 1st of a trilogy chronicling the colonization of Mars: For eons, sandstorms have swept the desolate landscape. For centuries, Mars has beckoned humans to conquer its hostile climate. Now, in 2026, a group of 100 colonists is about to fulfill that destiny. John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers & Arkady Bogdanov lead a terraforming mission. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage & madness. For others it offers an opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. For the genetic alchemists, it presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life & death. The colonists orbit giant satellite mirrors to reflect light to the surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth. Massive tunnels, kilometers deep, will be drilled into the mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves & friendships will form & fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed. Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope & ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in evolution, creating a world in its entirety. It shows a future, with both glory & tarnish, that awes with complexity & inspires with vision.

The Folk of the Air

Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever. And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe. Jude was seven when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King. To win a place at the Court, she must defy him–and face the consequences. As Jude becomes more deeply embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, she discovers her own capacity for trickery and bloodshed. But as betrayal threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.

Feyre's survival rests upon her ability to hunt and kill – the forest where she lives is a cold, bleak place in the long winter months. So when she spots a deer in the forest being pursued by a wolf, she cannot resist fighting it for the flesh. But to do so, she must kill the predator and killing something so precious comes at a price ... Dragged to a magical kingdom for the murder of a faerie, Feyre discovers that her captor, his face obscured by a jewelled mask, is hiding far more than his piercing green eyes would suggest. Feyre's presence at the court is closely guarded, and as she begins to learn why, her feelings for him turn from hostility to passion and the faerie lands become an even more dangerous place. Feyre must fight to break an ancient curse, or she will lose him forever.

 @swainlake recommends the darkest powers trilogy by kelley armstrong is really good

My name is Chloe Saunders and my life will never be the same again. All I wanted was to make friends, meet boys, and keep on being ordinary. I don't even know what that means anymore. It all started on the day that I saw my first ghost - and the ghost saw me. Now there are ghosts everywhere and they won't leave me alone. To top it all off, I somehow got myself locked up in Lyle House, a "special home" for troubled teens. Yet the home isn't what it seems. Don't tell anyone, but I think there might be more to my housemates than meets the eye. The question is, whose side are they on? It's up to me to figure out the dangerous secrets behind Lyle House... before its skeletons come back to haunt me

@imladriss recommends: We hunt the flame by hafsah faizal

People lived because she killed. People died because he lived. Zafira is the Hunter, disguising herself as a man when she braves the cursed forest of the Arz to feed her people. Nasir is the Prince of Death, assassinating those foolish enough to defy his autocratic father, the king. If Zafira was exposed as a girl, all of her achievements would be rejected; if Nasir displayed his compassion, his father would punish him in the most brutal of ways.  Both are legends in the kingdom of Arawiya—but neither wants to be. War is brewing, and the Arz sweeps closer with each passing day, engulfing the land in shadow. When Zafira embarks on a quest to uncover a lost artifact that can restore magic to her suffering world and stop the Arz, Nasir is sent by the king on a similar mission: retrieve the artifact and kill the Hunter. But an ancient evil stirs as their journey unfolds—and the prize they seek may pose a threat greater than either can imagine. Set in a richly detailed world inspired by ancient Arabia, We Hunt the Flame is a gripping debut of discovery, conquering fear, and taking identity into your own hands.

@moirindeclermont recommends  anything from Jacqueline Carey (she is a goddess and my favourite writer) but also Deborah Harkness (A discovery of witches) which is amazing, I’m obsessed with it. Nemesis by Isaac Asimov touches some themes similar to Brienne’s. Arn the knight

The land of Terre d'Ange is a place of unsurpassing beauty and grace. It is said that angels found the land and saw it was good... and the ensuing race that rose from the seed of angels and men live by one simple rule: Love as thou wilt.  Phèdre nó Delaunay is a young woman who was born with a scarlet mote in her left eye. Sold into indentured servitude as a child, her bond is purchased by Anafiel Delaunay, a nobleman with very a special mission... and the first one to recognize who and what she is: one pricked by Kushiel's Dart, chosen to forever experience pain and pleasure as one. Phèdre is trained equally in the courtly arts and the talents of the bedchamber, but, above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. Almost as talented a spy as she is courtesan, Phèdre stumbles upon a plot that threatens the very foundations of her homeland. Treachery sets her on her path; love and honor goad her further. And in the doing, it will take her to the edge of despair... and beyond. Hateful friend, loving enemy, beloved assassin; they can all wear the same glittering mask in this world, and Phèdre will get but one chance to save all that she holds dear.  Set in a world of cunning poets, deadly courtiers, heroic traitors, and a truly Machiavellian villainess, this is a novel of grandeur, luxuriance, sacrifice, betrayal, and deeply laid conspiracies. Not since Dune has there been an epic on the scale of Kushiel's Dart-a massive tale about the violent death of an old age, and the birth of a new.

Deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library. Diana has stumbled upon a coveted treasure lost for centuries-and she is the only creature who can break its spell.

In a hail of fire and flashing sword, as the burning city of Acre falls from the hands of the West in 1291, The Last Templar opens with a young Templar knight, his mentor, and a handful of others escaping to the sea carrying a mysterious chest entrusted to them by the Order's dying Grand Master. The ship vanishes without a trace. In present day Manhattan, four masked horsemen dressed as Templar Knights emerge from Central Park and ride up the Fifth Avenue steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the blacktie opening of a Treasures of the Vatican exhibit. Storming through the crowds, the horsemen brutally attack anyone standing between them and their prize. Attending the gala, archaeologist Tess Chaykin watches in silent terror as the leader of the horsemen hones in on one piece in particular, a strange geared device. He utters a few cryptic Latin words as he takes hold of it with reverence before leading the horsemen out and disappearing into the night. In the aftermath, an FBI investigation is led by anti-terrorist specialist Sean Reilly. Soon, he and Tess are drawn into the dark, hidden history of the crusading Knights, plunging them into a deadly game of cat and mouse with ruthless killers as they race across three continents to recover the lost secret of the Templars. 

Irissa and Kendric Series

Irissa was the last of the sorcerous Torlocs, untutored in magic and abandoned upon this decaying world by her people. Kendric was one of the Six of Swords, gifted with a legendary weapon to guard the Realms from harm. But now he was an outcast, and his death was sought with reason by the other Five. Sorceress and swordsman, they were thrown together; each filled with ancient prejudices against the other. But only by combining her uncertain powers with his remaining skills could they survive. Survive they must, however. Rule was a world formed upon magic - but now magic was failing and there would soon be no place for it. And destiny in strange guise had chosen them to make one last stand against the dark forces that were waiting at the Gate of Valna, seeking to destroy their world

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard.

But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?

Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England

In the medieval and fantastic realm of Tortall, Keladry of Mindelan (known as Kel) is the first girl to take advantage of the decree that permits women to train for knighthood. But not everyone in Tortall believes a woman is up to the task, and Kel faces harsh discrimination. With unparalleled determination and a knack for leadership, she captures the hearts of her peers and proves that she is not a girl to underestimate! 

[truthbeetoldmedia]

What is a Legacy?: A Tribute to Monty and Harper

Legacy, what is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.

Well, here we are. About one week since the finale, and fandom is still reeling from The 100’s Season 5 finale that aired on August 7. A lot of major changes happened for our characters: the last remaining survivable land on Earth was destroyed. The survivors entered cryo sleep for 125 years only to wake up and discover a new planet and something even more unexpected: Monty and Harper’s son, Jordan.

We know now, thanks to Monty and Harper’s heartbreaking video messages to Bellamy and Clarke, that they chose not to go into cryo. Then, when Monty realized the Earth was never going to come back, they dedicated the rest of their lives to ensure the survival of their friends. Their send off was a best case scenario for a show like The 100, and it’s the first time I’ve been truly satisfied with the ending of a character’s journey. I didn’t want to leave it at that, so here is my official appreciation article dedicated to Monty and Harper.

Let’s begin with Harper. In my opinion, Harper (and Chelsey Reist who portrays her, for that matter) is the most underappreciated and underutilized character on the show. After allowing her to shine in Season 4, Season 5 only giving her a few lines and a few backgrounds to stand in was more than disappointing.

Harper’s strength and importance comes from the fact that she’s a regular character. She isn’t a chosen leader like Bellamy or Clarke; she isn’t given a moniker like Blodreina or Wanheda. She doesn’t have a definable skill that she’s best at, like Raven with mechanics or Abby with medicine. But she is the last of the female gunners from Season 1. She’s one of the original members of the 100. She endured multiple bone marrow extractions while trapped in Mount Weather and still fought as hard as anyone at the end of Season 2. In Season 3, she NEVER took the chip, and she acted as a spy in the same season to inform on Pike. Not to mention, she has what’s arguably the best line of the series: "We could just shock-lash Pike’s fascist ass and hand him to the Grounders."

Harper makes herself special. She chose to make herself strong, not out of duty or necessity, but because she could. She survived on her own tenacity, remaining loyal and kind through circumstances that crushed others. While others grew accustomed to violence as a vital part of existence, Harper never became cold or unfeeling about the lives of those around her. We see other characters, namely Clarke, write off casualties as something necessary to get the human race to where they need to be. In a sharp contrast, we see Harper in Season 4 being emotionally devastated by the death of a stranger after she inadvertently knocked him over in the black rain. We see Harper in a depressive spiral of sorts after this, struggling with the upcoming Praimfaya and the worry that everything they do is for nothing. Much like Jasper, we see Harper become hopeless for the first time, exhausted by the constant stress of survival and the worry that the human race will be stuck in this cycle forever.

My favorite bit of acting from Chelsey comes from this season, too: when Monty goes to their room in Arkadia, confused as to why Harper hasn’t started packing for their journey to the bunker in Polis. She answers him, quietly: “I tried.”

Anyone who's been depressed could easily understand the emotion that Chelsey conveyed in those two words. Packing is such a simple thing, but when you struggle with depression, everything is a monumental task. Getting out of bed is suddenly the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do.

Thankfully, with Monty by her side, Harper chooses yet again to survive.

Monty Green is the true gem of the whole show, and I’ll fight anyone about that. Monty is so important as a character and as a part of the show; the only one who remained uncompromised by the horror that surrounded him.

What’s great about Monty is that not only is he intelligent, he’s inherently logical, and not afraid to call it like it is. While in Mount Weather, he was the first one to suspect that those in power were hiding something in regards to the bone marrow transplants. In Season 4, he came up with the idea to seal what was left of the Ark to create a shelter that would withstand Praimfaya. When he learned that his father had been killed by grounders, he didn’t let it blind him with anger. He decided to support his mother alongside Pike in Season 3, but when he saw the toxicity of Pike’s rule, he changed sides to help the resistance. He killed his mother to protect Octavia, and again to save the human race from destruction via ALIE.

Through all of this, Monty Green never compromised his beliefs. He was a farmer in the beginning and the end, never once stopping his pursuit of peace from season to season, especially in Season 5. Sure, Monty made difficult choices. He took part in the genocide at Mount Weather, among other things, but he never became comfortable being morally grey. He refused to accept that the survival of the human race was dependent on violence and drastic measures.

We see this in Season 2, after Maya showed Monty and Jasper that they were holding grounders captive, using them for blood transfusions and bone marrow. Maya was upset but conflicted: the people of Mount Weather needed to do this to survive. Without it they would die, what were they supposed to do?

Monty answered, “Die.”

This is echoed in Season 5, during an argument about fighting for Eden when Monty says “If a war is the only way to have the last survivable land on Earth, then maybe we don't deserve it.” Everyone is so concerned with the survival of the human race that no one bothers to think about whether or not they deserve to survive. You could argue that for some characters, this distinction doesn’t matter, and it’s a tribute to Monty’s goodness that he does.

All of this results in Monty being the only character (along with Harper) that actively strives for peace. After reading Jasper’s suicide note, he’s determined to challenge Jasper’s belief that they’re caught in an endless cycle of violence and war. Monty steadfastly sticks to his algae and his hope that there is a solution to save humanity that isn’t deadly. Monty and Harper refuse to take part in more destruction, and instead dedicate their time to regrowing the hydrofarm in the bunker. Monty desperately brings up his algae and his plans for regrowing the Earth multiple times in the season, only to be laughed off in favor of more “serious” plans. He’s so dedicated to finding a way to break the cycle that he interrupts a fight in the arena to show everyone a glimpse of his progress with the hydrofarm; a glimmer of hope in the midst of the chaos. If you ever need to visualize the concept of hope, just picture Monty Green, holding up a jar of flowers in the middle of a bloody pit.

In hindsight, this season was a perfect setup for the send off they gave Monty and Harper. They simply refused to take part in the destruction of humanity, and when it seems like their last chance at survival is gone, they find a new one.

Earlier in the season, Octavia told Monty that farmers won’t save the world. But that’s exactly what happened. Monty and Harper dedicated their lives to ensuring a safe new home for their friends, leaving a final message of hope for both Clarke and Bellamy:

“I hope we do better there. I hope Jasper was wrong and we aren’t the problem. I hope your lives there will be as happy as mine has been. Be the good guys. May we meet again.”

The irony here is both Monty and Harper were left off of Clarke’s list. When determining who would ensure the survival of humanity best, Monty and Harper were left out. So it’s poetic to know that they’re the two who made a second chance possible: the cosmic Adam and Eve that Kane mentioned in the very first episode of the series.

Monty and Harper are examples that you can strive for peace amongst violence. Not only that you can, but that you should. Never resign yourself to making difficult decision after difficult decision. There are good guys, but only if we try.

[rwdestuffs]

Done dirty: Blake.

So……… Her best disguise is putting on a bow?- That’s like Superman showing up to the daily planet in a pair of glasses, still in his full suit, and introducing himself as Superman while trying to claim that he’s not at all related to the Superman who regularly bench-presses planets!

Oh Blake Blake Blake Blake… What the fuck is up with your character?

You wanted to go to Beacon so that you could reform the White Fang, and there’s not really anything that indicates that this would be at all effective outside of taking it back by force?

It’s blatantly clear that the introduction of Ghira and Kali are retcons, along with the fact that her father created the WF, and the fact that she’s essentially the princess of Menagerie. The biggest reason for this is that there’s no evidence that “Belladonna” is a common name. So there would be nothing stopping an informed person  (Like someone whose family had supposedly been at war with the WF for years) to ask, “Like… the Blake Belladonna that’s the daughter of the chieftain of Menagerie who is also the creator of the White Fang?”

Another reason would be Blake’s lack of a tan. I stand outside for eight hours a week, and I get a tan. But Blake lives on this tropical, sunny island, and she’s about as pale as Ruby?- That makes no sense. Then again…

……… Most of the other denizens of the place also don’t have tans, so I guess the point is moot……… or it would be, if we didn’t see other people with darker skin tones.

So yeah. Blake not having a tan?- I don’t buy it. The island is sunny, and there’s a lot of open space. There’s no reason for the people there to not have a tan.

Then again, Sun’s last name is “Wukong” and they portray him to be a white guy, so I guess there’s no real reason for anyone to have any appropriate skin tones.

Blake’s story makes no sense. Like I alluded to in the intro, thanks to the retconning that happened, Blake’s disguise being at all effective is total nonsense. Say what you want about the Clark Kent disguise, but I doubt that you’d think that the geeky guy who had trouble opening a bottle and works for a news company would be the same person who just beat up Darkseid and his Parademons.

Not to mention that Blake’s parents come out of left field.

THIS is the only indication that Blake had at least one parent in the White Fang, but the way it’s worded doesn’t imply any parents. Kali and Ghira are neither foreshadowed, or mentioned. If you never saw Volume 4, you would be forgiven for believing that Blake was missing either one or both of her parents. Most of the fans believed it, due to there being no indication that Blake still had parents. Now, granted, this could be from a belief that she thought that she had driven them away, and she didn’t deserve to have them anymore, but there wasn’t any mention of it.

Blake is hardly her own character. She has one of the more generic backstories of the main cast, and the characters she interact with are far more interesting than her. Say what you want about Sun, but at least we know what his interests are. Blake’s love for books isn’t mentioned as often as it could, and is only really given a spotlight in the spinoff show. Blake being a bookworm is an interesting idea. We could have mentions of her wanting to have rather stayed back at Beacon instead of being out in Vale because she wanted to read some books instead of “Checking out the competition,” but no. We don’t get that.

(As a side note: How exactly did Weiss know about Sun stowing away?- There were no mentions of other team leaders arriving, so Weiss’ desire to go to the docks makes no sense. (My idea from the Done dirty: Sun edition is right there, if anyone wants to make a fix-fic for that)).

Blake then decides that it’s safer to hang around the stowaway thief that followed her around instead of……… anywhere else. You know what?- Tukson could have been a character that Blake knew. Like… an honorary uncle or something, and she could have run to him. Not only would have it made Tukson a character that we would actually care about when he gets axed in volume 2, but it also could have built Blake’s relationships better.  And she’d be in a bookstore.

Enough with the tangent, let’s start at her trailer where, much like Yang and Junior’s bar, she receives little consequences for her actions on the train. Admittedly, she feels regret for her actions (which is more than I can say for Yang), but really?- That’s not exactly a whole lot.

Her introduction to Volume 1 is also jarring and weird. She knows all this unkind evidence about the Schnee Dust Company, and Weiss thinks… nothing is suspicious about that? The rest of her time in the volume involves picking the person who is basically her antithesis as a partner, and doing the aforementioned things I listed above.

Volume 2 is where we get her obsession arc, and… it’s actually pretty good. We see her wanting to fix a problem, and we see her passion behind it. And we see the results of her finally getting some rest and having a nice time. But Volume 2 also has the Mount Glenn scene, where sh is questioned on how she plans on helping the Faunus.- She has no answer. And this is realistic. Sometimes, people with a passion for a major cause have no real idea as to what they need to do. But in the case of Blake, this makes little sense. She’s had years to think of how to do this, and this is all she has to show for it?

Not to mention her tirade of only wanting to use non-violence is stupid. People like to think that Martin Luther King Jr was all peace, and that everyone agreed with him because he was peaceful. But that’s not true. MLK was imprisoned because of his beliefs, and it took a lot of time and effort for his teachings to make some headway. Contrary to (an unfortunate) popular belief, the Civil War was indeed over slavery, and equal rights. And contrasting the name, the Civil War was anything but civil.

So when the writers go around, spouting that “only nonviolence is okay” then they clearly haven’t read a history book.

Not to mention that Blake (much like the rest of her team, and Oobleck), feel no remorse for all the White Fang members they trapped and killed when they were fighting on the train. “Violence isn’t okay, unless the opponent is a minority.”- That’s the sort of message that the writers are conveying. Unintentionally or not, they seem to be saying that minorities need to suck it up, and take the abuse if they want equal rights, but if any of them are being unruly, then it’s okay to attack them. I didn’t see any member of that team trying to disarm and entrap them. They seemed to be fighting with intent of “kill or be killed” and they chose “kill.” Quite a lot actually. I don’t know how many of those WF members were on that train, but I’m willing to bet that it was a lot.

Volume 3 is just there to show that life isn’t a fairy tale, and Blake gets stabbed. But her reacting apprehensive to Yang is interesting. It shows that her mentor went down a similar path, and she wants reassurance that Yang isn’t going down the same path. It’s understandable, but the way that Blake so easily trusts Yang is… off-setting to say the least.

Volume 4 and 5 is where Blake is so out of character, I’m surprised that she didn’t change her name.

And speaking of name changes, you know how I mentioned how Blake is the daughter of the White Fang founder?- Well, as it turns out, she NEVER CHANGED HER NAME!- This is what I meant when I said that it felt like a retcon that her parents were WF founders, and that she was basically the princess of Menagerie.

Not to mention that Blake slaps Sun around. I get that he was putting her on edge, and his company was unwelcome, but she’s an abuse survivor. That sort of behavior should horrify her. She would be worried that she might be turning into another Adam.

But aside from that, there’s another problem: The narrative doesn’t seem to want to say that Sun was in the wrong here. Instead, it plays off the abuse for comedy, and we’re supposed to sympathize with Sun, fairly similar to how we’re supposed to sympathize with jaune for his Volume 2 behavior. At least Sun faces punishments though, but again, the narrative seems to want to say that Sun doesn’t deserve it, and some of the audience is saying that Blake is being irrational because he’s trying to help.

And then Blake basically only gets back into the fight when Sun gets hurt. The narrative was treating Sun like Blake’s prop. At least she didn’t get him killed…

But Volume 5 shows that it’s more the characters that Blake interacts with, rather than Blake herself that is interesting. Ilia?- Her backstory is way more interesting and sympathetic than Menagerie Princess’ backstory. Sun?- His motivations to help out Blake and get some payback is more interesting than Blake’s.

Blake literally describes her friends in one word.- Y’know, most people don’t do that. They would go on and on about their friends. The least the writers could have done was have Blake explain why she chose those words. But no. We don’t get that even.

She sets her house in fire, and gives a speech that seems really lacking in self-awareness. I get that the idea is that Adam’s actions would reflect poorly on the Faunus, but from a narrative standpoint, there’s no real worry. There’s no mention of how “If this guy acts up again, we’re going to bomb Menagerie.” Blake wouldn’t even have to know that. She could just be unwittingly saving her home from an attack that would perpetuate the cycle of violence. There should have been interviewers sent over to Menagerie to at least get Ghira’s word that they don’t condone Adam’s actions.- But I think that last part can be blamed on the CCT going down.

Blake forgives Ilia for nearly bringing her back to her abuser and being complicit in her parent’s murder, but the other guy (I forget his name) isn’t?- The guy lost his brother!

And then there’s Blake’s fighting style of how she went from dual-weilding her sword and sheath, to her holding her sword with two hands. Blake’s fighting style used to be interesting an unique. She was the only one outside of jaune and Pyrrha to use two different weapons. But unlike jaune and Pyrrha, Blake’s weapons were both for offense.

The writers’ lack of understanding racism is dragging Blake down into the realm of mediocrity. Soon she will join Renora in this regard.

She once said that “life isn’t like a fairy tale”

So,  why does she keep going on her spiel about nonviolence being the only answer?- It feels as if she knows that life isn’t a fairy tale, but she isn’t going to stop living in one.

Because it feels like she wants validation.

Or, alternatively, her abuse at the hands of Adam has made her detest violence so much, that she can’t stand it being used to get one’s way………

Which contradicts her beating up Roman to get her way of stopping the White Fang.

Blake’s consistency is like one of her shadow clones. Once you try to grasp it, it dissipates.

[blandmemoirs]

Ode to Fury

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This song has been incredibly relevant in my mind as of late. Playing on an almost loop. Obviously, a song themed on an unending anger and how to live with it would be relevant to my psyche. But I think it has been made more important in my listening habits as I took the time to learn the lore of Kratos through hours of YouTube walkthroughs of the God of War games and my own personal play through of God of War 2 on the PlayStation 2. The character has had my interest for several years before my recent deep dive into his history. I've always had a base level understanding of Kratos and his story. I had just never made the time to fully explore the depth of his pain and anger. That is, until the most recent God of War game came out. I let the initial release pass me by and took little interest since I didnt own a PS4 myself, but I caught glimpses of gameplay here and there through random YouTube encounters or looking over the shoulder of my peers watching gameplay in class. The game was beautiful, and I got glimpses of a genuinely raw story. Then Miracle of Sound dropped two songs about the game.

For more context, Miracle of Sound is my favorite musician. Simply because his songs all take great stories from movies or games I adore and condense them into an epic song that recites the themes and messages from the original material with outstanding beat and vocals. Much of his songs are in my personal playlist of favorites, particularly this one. When he makes a new song, I trust the source material is going to be good.

That said, two songs dedicated to God of War was enough to convince me. I listened, enjoyed, but didnt fully appreciate. I didnt fully understand the themes or message since I hadnt fully consumed the source. So, I picked my favorite lets player who did a walk through and dedicated myself to discovering this world and understanding it. I was enthralled and I fell in love with the characters and lore. When the game ended, I knew I needed more. So I bought a Kratos figure and acted out a few of my own stories as I introduced him to the world of the blandclan. I watched videos explaining the story behind the other games in the franchise, and eventually happened upon a copy of God of War 2 at a local game shop. I played it, beat it, and began to truly appreciate this series. I added the original Kratos to my toy collection as well.

Kratos is a man of tragedy. In a quest for power he was tricked into killing his own family so that he may lose his humanity and be a servant of the gods. But in doing so he turned his rage onto his betrayers and killed every single god in the Greek pantheon through his own ascension and fall from godhood. He killed his father, Zeus, a betrayer and manipulator. His rampage resulted in the total destruction of the Greek world. Surviving his own suicide attempt, he retreated to the realm of the Norse gods to live out the rest of his days in solitude, eventually starting a new life with a wife and son. But the fury is not quieted so easily. His pain was not satiated in the destruction of the gods, of the ones who betrayed and hurt him. In fact, he is haunted by his actions. Kratos still is full of anger and hatred. Because he hates himself, and he cannot destroy himself. He already tried that. His whole story is a tale of the everconsuming flame that is anger and when kept unchecked it will burn all it touches. Kratos must learn to control his rage, not to let it control him. He must learn to live with himself instead of merely killing all that hurts him.

As such, in the newest God of War, Kratos struggles to raise his naive son as a now single father. In the past merely being a distant hunter-gatherer occasionally teaching his son to fight and hunt, Kratos let his wife do much of the raising. Kratos does not want his son to be like him, and so he hides himself from his son. He lies about his son's heritage and is very stern in order to keep his "boy" from violence. But through the game Kratos is ultimately forced to come clean and tell his son all the hard truths of their life and lineage. Kratos is forced to once again remember his past and own his rage he kept buried for so long. Once Kratos allows himself to be honest with both himself and his boy, the two are able to repair their strained relationship and work as a true team. No longer afraid of his own rage, Kratos controls his fury and lets go of his pain.

Kratos is an angry character. He is quite literally too angry to die as proven several times in his life. This song is dedicated to that unending fire in the heart of the Ghost of Sparta. Full of grief, shame, blame, and woe, Kratos has attempted to lock up the anger inside him, but "the fury it never leaves". He has tried to run from it and hide it away, but he cannot. When he attempts to bury his anger he suffers from the "hunger" and attempts to "silence the cry" of his fury. It yearns to be free. It burns, and it will not be forgotten. He is angry. He will be angry. He will hurt. He must carry his pain. Yet, he fears his emotion because it may lead to judgement upon his son. He doesnt want his son to suffer the same fate he has. But try as he may, the fury it never leaves. So he must live with it. He must not run from it, he must contain it. He has to accept himself for who he is so he can raise his son to be better. He must own his anger and pain so he may teach his boy how to live with it.

The music itself is so captivating to listen to, from the chanting of the lyrics to the beating of drum to the scrapement of chains throughout, it is a powerful sound that conveys the many mixed feelings which guide Kratos' arc. He is suffering and unable to forgive himself, and so he only really knows anger, causing himself to further resent himself. It is no secret at this point I have at times found myself in a similar condition.

As such, this song serves as both an Ode to Kratos' Fury and a piece by which I can use to remind myself of my own powerful feelings I harbor. Through my ability to relate to Kratos' arc, I can search for my own peace and acceptance of myself. A search which may never end, but will allow me to live with myself easier. I love this song. I love the artist. I love the game. I love the character. I love the series. I love myself.

The fury it never leaves me, but I am living with it.

As Kratos says in the climax of the game, "the cycle ends here".

[0100100100101101]

At the beginning of Detroit: Become Human, a video game about American androids fighting for equal rights, a character looks out from the television screen and says, directly to the player, “Remember: This is not just a story. This is our future.”

It’s a bold claim. As Detroit’s story unfolds, the game switches between three different androids: household servant turned revolutionary leader Markus; Kara, a robot fleeing from government persecution with the abused child she rescued from her former boss; and Connor, an agent of the delightfully named megacorp CyberLife who hunts down “deviant androids” disobeying their programming. Through their perspectives, we’re meant to observe a technological future the game wants us to believe is, in fact, soon to come. Connor’s character may sound familiar. That’s because he’s essentially a recast of Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner from Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic. In each case, Deckard and Connor are hunting aberrant robots, capturing and/or killing those who have broken free of their programming and attempting to live outside their intended roles as servants to humanity.

In both Detroit and Blade Runner the point of these robot hunters is to introduce the question of what separates humanity from a synthetic being so emotionally and intellectually advanced that it is indistinguishable from any member of our species. By the time we’ve watched the monologue from Blade Runner’s bleach blond “replicant” robot Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) about his memories vanishing “like tears in rain,” any hint of inhumanity feels irrelevant. He, like the soulful androids who populate Detroit, remembers his past in the same way we do. He loves. He can be sad. He thinks about his own mortality. The movie ends with the audience having been convinced that a robot with incredibly advanced artificial intelligence deserves to be treated better than a defective home appliance. Blade Runner, it bears repeating, was released in 1982. Detroit: Become Human came out May of this year.

Again and again, Detroit attempts to pull its sci-fi storyline into the real world to convey the same message Blade Runner accomplished so many years ago. It evokes the American civil rights movement (its future Michigan features segregated shops and public transit where androids are kept to the back of city buses; one chapter is even called “Freedom March”), American slavery (the horrific abuses visited on the androids by their masters are regular enough to become numbing), and the Holocaust (extermination camps are set up to house revolutionary androids near the game’s finale) in order to do so. Others have done a great job running down the myriad ways in which Detroit fails in its evocation of the civil rights movement and class-based civil unrest. The poor taste inherent in its decision to make tone-deaf comparisons between its (multi-ethnic, apparently secular) robots and some of human history’s most reprehensible moments of violent prejudice is grotesque enough on its own. But it’s worth noting that on a dramatic level, Detroit also falls completely flat.

Its central point, presented with the satisfied air of a toddler smugly revealing that the family dog feels pain when you yank its tail, is that an android with a sophisticated sense of the world and itself deserves the same rights as any human. This seems like a philosophical problem that ought to have been put to bed around the time Blade Runner made the “dilemma” of android humanity part of mainstream pop culture. For decades now, audiences have watched, read, and played through stories that very persuasively argue there’s no good moral case for treating sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence—especially when housed in an independently thinking and feeling robot body—like dirt. To watch Roy Batty die in Blade Runner and feel nothing isn’t a failure of social and cultural empathy, but the viewer for just kind of being a monster. To release a video game in 2018 where players are honestly expected to experience conflicting emotions or a sense of emotional revelation when a completely humanistic robot is tortured or killed in cold blood ignores decades of genre-advancing history.

Even outside popular art, the past few decades have seen seismic shifts in our relationship with technology that should be impossible to ignore. In the ’80s, a home computer was revolutionary. Now, we live in an era where it’s completely mundane to ask talking boxes for trivia answers and maintain digital extensions of our personae on websites accessed through portable phones. We are not as suspicious of technology as we once were. It’s a part of us now—something we live with.

This shift is pretty clear in other areas of pop culture. Westworld—one of the highest profile sci-fi works in recent years—spent much of its first season retreading some of the same familiar ground as Detroit, but has found a more interesting path as it’s continued onward. While early episodes floundered with dramatically inert questions of whether sexually assaulting, torturing, and murdering lifelike thinking and feeling robots was an okay premise for an amusement park, it’s since moved on from hammering home the simplistic, insultingly moralizing lesson that “treating humanoid androids badly is the wrong thing to do.” At its best, characters like the show’s standout, Bernard Lowe—a tortured robot who is very well aware he is a robot—bring a welcome complexity.

Bernard, in actor Jeffrey Wright’s strongest performance to date, alternates naturally between a machine’s cold, vacant-eyed calculations and the trembling pathos of an android traumatized not only by the loss of his family and the violence of the world in which he lives, but also the knowledge that his memories are artificially coded and that his programming has led him to contribute to the horror of his surroundings. With this focus, viewers are given scenes far more philosophically troubling than the show’s earlier attempts to question whether it’s all right to kill humanlike robots for fun. In season two’s “Les Écorchés,” for example, Bernard is sat in a diagnostic interrogation and tormented by park co-creator Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), who, apparently, has entered his system in the form of a viral digital consciousness. Ford flits about his mind like a demonic possession. Bernard remembers killing others while under the intruder’s control. He cries and shakes like any human wracked with so much psychological pain would. “It’s like he’s trying to debug himself,” a technician notes. A digital read-out of Bernard’s synthetic brain shows his consciousness is “heavily fragmented,” as if under attack from a computer virus.

Rather than focus on simple ideas, the show acknowledges, in instances like these, that its audience is willing to accept an android character like Bernard as “human” enough to deserve empathy while remembering, too, that his mechanical nature introduces more compelling dramatic possibilities. Thankfully, Westworld’s second season has leaned further into this direction, moving (albeit at a glacial pace) toward stories about what it means for robots to embrace their freedom while being both deeply human and, due to their computerized nature, still fundamentally alien. By the end of the season, its earlier concern with flat moral questions has largely been swept away. Its finale, while still prone to narrative cliché elsewhere, shows a greater willingness to delve into explorations of how concepts like free will, mortality, and the nature of reality function for the computerized minds of its characters.

This is the sort of thing that elevates modern sci-fi, that reaffirms its potential for valuable speculation rather than just being a place to indulge familiar tropes and revisit nostalgic aesthetics. We see it in games like Nier: Automata, whose anime-tinged action is set in a far-future world where humanity has gone extinct, leaving behind only androids who must grapple with their minds persisting over centuries of samsara-like cycles of endless war against simpler machines trying to come to grips with their own intellectual awakening. We see it in Soma, which explores similar territory and turns it into soul-shaking horror by telling a story where people’s minds have been transplanted into synthetic consciousnesses, stored immortally on computers that reside in facilities dotting the inky depths of the ocean floor while the Earth dies out far above them. Like Bernard—and like many of the other characters now freeing themselves from both their shackles as Westworld’s park “hosts” and the narrative constraints of the show’s earlier episodes—these games transcend the outdated concerns of a story like Detroit. They give us something new to chew on, concerns that are not only intellectually fuller but also more reflective of where we are now as a technology-dependent species.

There’s no better summary of this change than the extremely belated Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Its predecessor was devoted entirely to convincing audiences that its assumedly inhuman replicants are worthy of empathy. It ended by asking if we’d even be able to tell the difference between a flesh-and-blood person and a synthetic one. Compare that to 2049, where protagonist K—Ryan Gosling playing a character with a suitably product-line-style name—is shown to be an android almost from the start. The plot of the film centers (like Detroit and Westworld) on a fast-approaching revolution where self-sufficient androids will overthrow their human creators, but the heart of its story is about the psychology of artificially intelligent beings. K is depicted as deeply troubled, grasping for affection from the mass-market hologram AI he’s in love with, grappling with the fact that he might be the first replicant to be born from another android, hoping to connect with his possible father, and being tormented by his inability to distinguish between what’s been programmed into his synthetic mind and what’s a “real” memory.

Blade Runner 2049 considers it a given that modern audiences can empathize with this android character without prerequisite arguments—that we’re not instinctively terrified of what he represents but willing to think about what such a creation means when set against age-old concepts of love and selfhood. As a sequel to the movie that did so much to settle questions about whether a robotic being was equal to humanity, it moves its concerns forward in tandem with society itself.

There’s a scene in 2049 where K, having learned of the existence of the first replicant child to be born of two replicant parents, is asked by his boss, Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), to homicidally erase this revolutionary evidence in order to maintain the world’s status quo. K says he’s never killed something “born” before. When asked why that makes him uncomfortable, he replies that being born means having a soul—that that may be a crucial difference. “You’ve been getting on fine without one,” Joshi says. “What’s that, madam?” K replies. “A soul.”

It’s an exchange that takes moments, but it’s enough to communicate more about the nature of an AI consciousness than Detroit manages over its dozen hours. In these few words, 2049 puts an old debate to rest while raising new questions about what it means for a machine to worry about its place in the world. K doesn’t “have a soul” in the traditional sense, but he is tortured by the knowledge that he, with his need to love and be loved, may possess something quite like it. Modern science fiction is capable of asking us to explore what it means to view technology this way. It’s able to make us consider how our sense of reality may or may not intersect with the ever-more complex computers we create. It is, basically, able to do a lot more than revisit tired questions about whether the kind of highly advanced robots that populate Detroit: Become Human are worth taking seriously enough to care about in the first place.