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star-arcana · 5 months ago

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In defense of Pokémon Horizons episode 79 "Over the Top" : Why Geeta isn't weak!

SPOILERS!!!

Ok, I already made a post on it on twitter, that site won't allow me to go into detail as much as I wanna. So I use THIS side to explain, as to why this episode is well made and why the ultimate outcome not only makes story wise sense, but was the best conclusion Horizons could take!

So I'm going to write a better version of my post, in defense of Geeta, La Primera,standing over the top, as well as for our Heroine Liko, and her friends, Roy and Dot! Llet's begin!

The Origin of Geeta's controversial role as Champion!

Geeta is considered to be one of the worst champions of all time, even as THE WORST champion by many. In Scarlet and Violet, she poses as the final challenge of the Paldean League and as champion battles us to see, if we can become champion too. Due to how poorly she perfomed however, people have a sour taste left in their mouth with her role as champion, despite having fulfilled her role rather masterfully, which I will get later on. Just know that before Horizons's most recent episode, Geeta had long before garnered a bad reputation as a poor champ, even if it's undeserved imo. So I will go in detail over that first to establish why that is bollocks and why she actually works well in the games, and how it influenced the anime's take of her. It was all made with the utmost care and sincere respect for Geeta as character that is even unmachted compared to her game counterpart.

She is in the anime even better than ever before and it will be soon not difficult to see why!

La Primera has a role to fulfil in Horizons, and it explains the outcome of this episode, as well as to why the controversy happened! So let's briefly go over her games's version first!

Geeta's role in the games!

You see, Horizons drew massive inspirations from Scarlet and Violet, not only with it's Pokémon, but setting as well! But Horizons is self-containted as storyline, and not established to be canon within the games. So therefore, it doesn't follow strickly or even remotely the same path of the game and has it's own story, making most of SV take a backseat for more interesting, compelling and well-written narratives!

But Geeta's anime counterpart and many of the elements of Horizons are based on the story of Scarlet and Violet, and they gave a template for how that character works, even if not fully used (since you cannpot blindly copy the games).

Now I come REALLY to her game's role:

Golden Owl, a youtuber who studied game design and lives in Singapore, outlined many of the reasons as to why Geeta isn't bad as champion. I will use many of his points here, as well as using some of his phrases, because they are funny! This video from Golden Owl influenced me, as well as my own reasoning regarding my views on Geeta in both media. So check his video out if you want to know his takes yourself.

He is really knowledgeable and trustworthy, check him out please and subscribe to his channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EghD8e3ziMM&pp=ygUdZ2VldGEgaXMgdGhlIHdlYWtlc3QgY2hhbXBpb24%3D

So as underlined in his video, Geeta was despite her role as champion never the final boss of this game. The Paradox Professors were, and Geeta is not even the final boss of the very storyline where you face her: That is Nemona!!! Da Da Daaa!!!

Scarlet and Violet is seperated into three storyline in total, not counting the DLC's as they aren't relevant here, and the final one happening after you finished all of the main three.

Arven's story, "Path of Legends", is about facing Titan Pokémon to help him heal his Mabosstiff's illness and meanwhile strenghtening your Koraidon/Miraidon (depending on which version you play as).

Penny's story "Starfall Street" is about with fighting against Team Star to stop them from bullying other students, and learning about their motives and why they are that way!

And finally, Nemona's story "Victory Road", which is the one where you face Geeta, so we go with this one here:

Nemona at the start of this storyline wants to make you, the player, a rival worthy of facing her in battle, as no one was able to truly make her go all-out on anyone. She convinces you to partake in the Paldean League to become a champion level trainer yoruself and face Nemona afterwards! So, you face the 8 Gym Leaders and occasionally battle with Nemona herself. Then you face the Elite 4, and finally the top champion Geeta , whom you have to beat to become Nemona's most worthy rival and opponent... ... ... ...and let's be honest here, Geeta's battle performance was...not so good...I won't go into very big detail here, since that had been discussed endlessly to death regarding Geeta, so I get this most basic info out straight:

1. Geeta's ace, Glimmora, should have been send out first to make most use of it's Toxic Debris ability to lay toxic spikes on the enemies's field to poison and weaken the enemy, if hit by a physical attack. Instead, it comes out last and Glimmora also has no defensive attack to stall the enemy. Thus the Spikes are, in addition to poor placement, are rendered almost useless, espcially when that ability can be ignored by using special attacks, which aren't hard to optain, especially super effective ones.

2. Gogoat, Avaluug and Veluza aren't particularly challenging and lack the defensive utility to help with Glimmora's spikes,especially with how late that mon comes out. They cannot help this team and can be easily taken out. Avalugg's ginormous defensive bulk is also marred by it's SUPER LOW special defense and therefore is REALLY vulnerable to special attackers.

3. Kingambit's most memable and powerful ability, Supreme Overlord, that buff it's attack stage by 10% for each fallen team member is never send out last (in fact it often is send out second) and therefore never fully maximized it's ability.

Thus the only Pokémon used competently here is Espathra with it's Opportunist ability and coverage taking advantage of your stat boost, by buffing itself with the same boost.

So...yeah...this team wasn't designed to be hard, it was built around rather the many biomes you encountered on your journey across the Paldean Region:

Gogoat representing the grassy highlands! Veluza the lakes northwest! Avalugg the top of Paldea's icy and cold mountains! Espathra the hot, burning deserts west! Kingambit the forests northeast! and Glimmora representing A0, the final destination awaiting you next.

You are in fact level wise meant to beat Geeta alongside the final bosses of the two other storylines, with Penny and Arven bein around Geeta's level. Meanwhile Neomona is slightly higher than them all, meaning Victory Road was concieved as the storyline to be finished last.

Thus Geeta wasn't gameplay wise meant to be hard, and she didn't needed to be hard, because Nemona is the true driving force and the final boss of that storyline, just like Blue in Gen 1. Blue was to the player in the first Pokémon games, as the most personal foe, who became champ first by beating the Elite 4 before you and losing shortly after the title to you! How exciting!

Geeta doesn't fulfil the same role as champ, Nemona does, and, in fact, neither she or Nemona are even the true final bosses of SV! That would be the Paradox Professors in the last storyline you unlock after you finish all the three others storylines.

You unlock the last challenge in the base game facing either Sada (Scarlet) or Turo (Violet) depending on each version in the final storyline called "The Way Home", where you enter Area Zero and face the truth of Paradox Pokémon and what happened to Koraidon/Miraidon, as well as the original Professors, basically a horror story with a good ending afterwards!

Therefore Geeta had to be held back, as to not outperorm the final bosses of that game. So yeah, for someone who says that they never held back, there was a lot of holding back done here, not by her, but by the narrative. This makes sense, as Nemona by Geeta's own words held even against her held back, because Nemona felt no true satisfaction in this battle. But now that even Geeta, the Champion of Paldea is defeated, Nemona is faced last, and she is actually much stronger, with a more competent team, but mostly gameplay wise, as Geeta herself is still considered by Nemona really strong.

So in the end, the issue of Geeta's bad impression on fans was with the role given to her, as another boss before facing the actual final boss. That is unlike many of the other champions in the whole series that peopled wanted her to be like, and a lot of fans were then dissapointed in Geeta!

Unlike Geeta, the other champions are the final bosses and/or super bosses of their respective games, like Cynthia, Lance, Blue e.t.c. They were powerhouses always meant to be fought last, as they are the ultimate challenge for the player to overcome and beating them therefore is the ultimate end goal of these games.

The only other game aside from SV in the series so far that had the actual champion be second fiddle to more powerful trainers, was Alder from Black and White 1. He is there the Champion of the Unova League and meant to be seen as powerful mentor with the twist of him losing his title to N, who defeated him and in turn became the new champion. Withonly the player, that is you, remaining as last hope to stop him. After you do this, Ghetsis then reveals himself as the true villain and final boss and gets taken out, too. Alder is then fought in the post-game, as an actually challenging boss. But aside from these two exceptions, champions are always seen as the strongest trainers and even the greatest rivals to overcome, with everyone else being a stepping stone between them and you!

This is unusual in the case of Geeta here, as she never recieved the role as final boss and ultimate foe. So, she had to be made weak compared to Nemona, as not to upset the flow of the story and game, since the strongest bosses are always meant to fight last. This is how and why Geeta is considered the worst champion of all time, because she was not the final boss many hoped she would be and instead is just another challenge.

One could argue they overdid this with lowering her potential in the base game, but I feel like this isn't so bad, after all, the finale of a game is what should be most challenging, not the stepping stones and she is good enough for this to work and delivered even more in the DLC!

How the DLC fixed this!

Geeta got in the Indigo Disk a massive buff with her rematch team in the League Club room. She has a more competent team and placement that actually benefits her Pokémon more:

She still has Glimmora, Espathra, Avalugg and Kingambit, but Glimmora is placed first and Kingambit last to maximize and optimize their abilities. Avalugg is the only weak link, but has somewhat good defenses to justify it's placement as bulky Ice type. She also has now a Chesnaught and Dragapult, the former being a defense mon and the latter a powerful Pseudo-Legendary with great coverage and attacks. This team boasts now a great defensive style with Espathra and Chesnaught to stall with defensive moves such as protect and Spiky Shield to stall enough the enemy for the spikes to work. And finally, once the heavy hitters are taken out afterwards , a Tera-Flying Kingambit with max Supreme Overlord to remove all of it's previous weaknesses can sweep through the enemy's team. Yeah, she really is utterly incapable of holding back!

Thus Geeta is now with this team considered really strong, with many saying that this team is amongst the best in the whole series when compared to that of other champions. Better than Leon's and even around Cynthia's level, maybe even better than hers! Overall Geeta impressed here many who tought of her as weak...but this wasn't enough.

Despite this, the original impression remains and was not possible to shackle, especially with her being hyped up as top battler that never holds back. She was made utterly incapable of delivering this gameplay wise, cuz the game clearly held her back...Even with this second chance that Geeta got, this impression never changed, which lead to a rather unfortunately place in the fandom that Geeta never deserves...

In conclusion...La Primera was not final boss material by design...which led to many dissapointed fans of the games and Geeta getting slandered into obliviion by many...but this isn't the end of all of this, since she would appear in a new storyline, that also led a lot of the same reactions, so let's finally go over there!

Geeta's role in the anime!

How well recieved the Horizons is by the fandom is a diffrent discussion for another time, but many have hoped that Geeta would have been given her just due in the anime, to making up for the "poor" performance in the games...many were happy, others not so much, which made me do this post to begin with!

I will go to her overall role later in detail, but first I wanna go to the episode first!

So lets's get that out of the way:

This episode's outcome was predictable all things considered!

Unless you ignored the implication of Floragato surviving the Tera Blast in the promo, as well as ultimately ignoring Geeta's conditions for the trio entering A0, namely defeating her or no entrance, there is no reason to assume that this battle shouldn't ever have ended in a victory for the RVT. Even considering the earlier losses of them against other foes before, many of which were trials to test their skills. But they were not challenges to overcome via winning, as victory was not the condition set out by their challengers, like Kleavor in Kitakami for instance.

So Geeta had to be defeated and lose, regardless of how powerful the title of champion is, and she did this with grace and excellency too. It took the trio much effort in terms of intellect, power, resilliance and strenght in spirit to overcome Geeta and it is not difficult to see why this is plausable! I will first go and briefly summarize the events of that battle and then explain Geeta's role in the anime, starting with the batle:

Liko with Floragato worked together with Roy and Dot, who brought with them Crocalor and Quaxwell respectely into battle to face Geeta as team. Geeta uses Glimmora as her Ace again, and is aided by two Glimmets, pre-evolutions of Glimmora. So Geeta uses a team of three, all of them very same evolutionary line. And as a small tangent, this correlates with the journey of our heroes and the usage of Glimmora in the games: Just like in the games, Glimmora is represented as a warning of what awaits the trio in Area Zero. The same role is fulfilled by the two Glimmets helping it to make this theme of Geeta's challenge team clear:

This is truly a test to see, if they can enter and even survive A0, hence why Geeta doesn't use her other mons, as they aren't from that Area, and would have thematically no relevance to either this fight or the episode. They are irrelevant to the RVT's current goals and wishes, they aren't right now exploring all of Paldea, and therefore Geeta built her team accordingly to their desires of the RVT. hus Liko, Roy and Dot face a team built around testing them for Area Zero, and if they win, they may enter, but if they lose, they can't, per La Primera's own words. Before the battle starts, Geeta warns them that she is unable to hold back during battles, so she will fight them with full force, setting an omnimous tone for the fight!

The Battle starts with Crocalor attacking the two Glimmets with Stomping Tantrum, but they use Rock Polish to evade the attack with enhanced speed. Roy and Dot ponder on attacking the Glimmets, but Liko knows better and realizes it is easier to attack focusing on one point first, that being, Glimmora itself. And all of them unleash their combined attack on Glimmora: Floragato using Magical Leaf, Crocalor Flamethrower, and Quaxwell using Water Gun, but that gets countered easily by Dazzling Gleam, which blinds the starters and the two Glimmets rain upon them from above with Power Gem. This shows how cunning and powerful Geeta is for cooking up this strategy, proving that she is no weakling. Immiediately afterwards, Dazzling gleam is fired up again to prepare for another double power Gem salve, but Roy counters it by telling Crocalor to use Disarming Voice to prevent them from attacking, as that move always hits, as well as bypassing accuracy checks like Dazzling Gleam. Meanwhile Liko and Dot tell Floragato and Quaxwell to attack Glimmora. Dot tells Qauxwell to use Liquidatio, but gets countered easily by Grassy spike. Geeta wants then Glimmora to use Power Gem on the approaching Floragato, but Liko tells her partner to use a good old sucker punch to delibetate Geeta's Ace, as that attack in response to offensive moves prevents the foe from attacking. But this attack activates the ability of Glimmora; Toxic Debris. Now the trio has their starters being poisoned by Toxic Spikes and the two Glimmets attack with venoshock, a poison type move that doubles the damage if the target has a status condition, like being poisoned, using thus the Toxic Debris effect to it's greatest potential. The team is concerned, as Geeta is fighting like no one else they meet before, but Roy gets an idea! He remembers Kleavor's strategy on using the sound of incoming attacks to avoid them, as that mon fought within a Bamboo forest using hearing to make up with poor eyesight. They use this strat learned from Kleavor to counter Geeta's Dazzling Gleam + double attack from above strat!

Thus the trio alongside their starters plan on goading Geeta to use use Dazzling Gleam again with Dot telling Quaxwell to use Water gun on Glimmora, who, as predicted, counters with Dazzzling Gleam. Once more the light blinds their Pokémon, but they are prepared and close their eyes, alongside their trainers and listen to the sound of the next attack. Geeta tells her Glimmets to attack Liko's Floragato with Power Gem, but Liko then counters it with telling Floragato to go left to evade the attack and then the Grass Starter uses her Yo-Yo buds to hold the two Glimmets. Roy then tells Crocalor to use Stomping Tantrum on them. Since Glimmets are 4 x weak to ground type moves, they are now on the verge of defeat, but Geeta uses this to her advantage! She orders the weakened Glimmets to use Memento on Crocalor and Quaxwell, thus hitting them with an attack that faints the two, but harshly lowers their targets Attack and Special Attacks, greatly reducing the two's capabilities in battle. This puts the trio at a massive disadvantage, and Glimmora has now to worry less about it's enemies's attack.

Dot begins to hope for luck to help against Geeta, but Liko realizes that Geeta puts too much effort in wnning for luck to work, as she would sacrefice everything needed for her for win. So Liko has to come up with a strategy that can fool everyone, and fooling everyone she did, because when the three charge at Glimmora, Liko tells Floragato to use Sucker Punch on Crocalor to prevent him from using Stompin Tantrum, while Quaxwell makes Glimmora use up Grassy shield with Liquidation.

Liko shocked everyone, especially Geeta, who is surprised by this turn of events. But this is not all, as Liko reminds Roy that Stomping Tantrum increases in power, if the previous attempt failed. Given that Crocalor was weakened by Memento, he needed a power boost to compensate for his weaknened state, and with Liko and Floragato's help, he got it. So now Roy's Crocalor can hit with enhanced power a 4 x super effective Stompin Tantrum on Glimmora, surprising Geeta massively. However as the battle continues, the poison does catch up with the starters, and Geeta, not able to hold back has no intention to stall them anymore. Liko also realized, that she cannot pull off that same strat again on her cunning foe! Geeta then resorts to use Terastallization to go all-out on them, having no intention to stall them and defeat them with her raw might!

In response, the trio then terastalize their Pokemon! Glimmora with Tera-Rock and the starters with their actual types! Liko tells Floragato to use Magical Leaf, but the poisoning weakened that Pokémon too much to use an attack, and Geeta sees an opening to attack with Glimmora's Rock-Tera blast, Liko's Pokémon. But Roy and Dot tell their Pokémon to shield Floragato and counter Tera Blast with Flamethrower and Water Gun respectively, but to avail, as not only do they get knocked out, but Floragato got hit too, facing the full brunt of that force!

But this isn't over, as Floragato toughed out the attack, so that Liko won't feel sad! Aww, so adorable and badass! This however is not all! On top of all of this, Floragato's ability Overgrowth activates, an ability exclusive to Grass Starters that powers up the Pokémon's attack and special attack by 50%, when they are at critical health. With Terastalization, the next attack is going to hit hard and super effectively. Sensing that this is her last chance to victory,Liko tells Floragato to use a great big Magical Leaf, clashing against Geeta's Glimmora, who uses Tera Blast to counter it, only to fail, as Floragato's Magical Leaf was stronger! And thus Glimmora was hit with a super effective attack and faints, winning the trio the match!

Liko, Roy and Dot win over Geeta, thus they all passed. Having defeated La Primera and earned their victory and thus permission to enter alongside Friede A0. Geeta has gratulated on them all for their performance and Liko has finally with her team won over a Champion, now ready to enter one of the most dangerous zones in all of Pokémon...but as the Rising Voltacklers arrived at Area Zero, Coral and Sidian follow them, to monitor their progress. But I leave that for next time, let's focus on the reaction to all of this!

Geeta is once again under cross fire + Liko bested a champion!MEGA FUEL FOR CONTROVERSY!!

This loss at the hands at relatively inexperienced trainer, coupled with an already poor reputation as champion, revived the hatred and dissapointment in Geeta. It also brought new ire towards Liko for winning, despite her supposive "lack of talents", as well as having now dared to be anywhere near able to beat Ash within such a short time!

"How dare she, Ash is the best, and I need him back"!

Ugh...this fandom...really!

Basically the outrage means nothing!

Geeta fought with a team even better at utilizing Glimmora's full defensive potential and ability, with two Glimmets being great damage dealers and capable of buffing themselves and debuffing their opponents. In additon to all of this, Geeta has Glimmora equiped with a powerful Rock-Tera blast able to take down two middle-evoled starters with ease, with the only one barely able to be left standing. Heck, she has two mons using Venoshock...to take advantage of toxic spikes...how cool is that?

And yes, this still wasn't enough and Floragato won against Glimmora. Liko ultimately won, not just because of her skills in battle and her unvawering heart, but because she also had the help of awesome friends in Roy and Dot, with their mons, Crocalor and Qauxwell being excellent as well. This was a team effort, with Liko taking this win as a group win, they worked together and while Liko performed the best, she is not arrogant to sorely attribute it to her own skills, instead she is way more humble, and praises her friends as well! Liko, Roy and Dot won together, as one, not alone, but as an unified trio!

Still, the people who hated Horizons and Geeta are not able to handle that well, and needed to invent reason as to why they have to downplay it by saying how weak Geeta is, how the trio are too inexperienced, and that Geeta held back, despite having not held back in the slightest.

And to make it quite clear, I have to explain now Geeta's overall role in the anime!

Geeta's role is very much the same as in the games, actually!

Remember of what I said about Geeta not being the final boss of SV? The same applies to Horizons! You see, The purpose of Horizons is telling a tale of self-discovery, as well as following in the footsteps of the Ancient Adventurer Lucius, who wanted to find a Pokémon Paradise known as Laqua (which I also have theories about what kind of place that it). To reach Laqua, they need to gather Lucius's team, the Six Heroes, who are all tera raid levels of powerful and beyond the level of any Pokémon team in the entire franchise. They helped once Lucius to enter Laqua with his friends in the past, and the RVT need them too, to reach the very same land he did with Rystal and Gibeon. Liko, Roy and Dot earned from 4 of them their blessing, with only Paradox Entei and Black Rayquaza remaining, and as Entei's paradox form is however found in Area Zero, and even reportedly sighed there quite recently, the heroes have to enter this most dangerous part of Paldea. Geeta therefore tests the trio, to see if they have what it takes to survive this hostile enviroment, and they have to win, or else, no entry! And she didn't use her more powerful mons in this fight as partners for Glimmora, yes, but not for the reasons many people think! It's not because she wanted to hold back. This wasn't done to go easy on them, this was done by Geeta because it was the most appropriate choice for the trial, since the other mons aren't encountered in that area really, and therefore teach them nothing about Area Zero. Now that they won, they proved that Area Zero is within their skill level to reach, and therefore, their next destination is all free for them to explore!

However this didn't diminish Geeta's power in the slightest. Instead she is shown as a powerful obstacle for the heroes to overcome, as the victory was a close call and took all of the heroes might to even defeat, and all of their bright minds to even challenge. And if they would have lost and still were allowed entrance, this would have not made sense with Geeta's role as character, and would be a repeat of the previous battles that served as trials with the condition of victory not being needed to met. In the Terastal Course for instance, victory was not necessary, just showing how able they are at using Terastalization, hence Dot, Roy and Liko passed without needing to win every battle, yet they grew stronger. So with all they had gathered in terms of experience and their battle spirit fueled by Liko's wish to fulfil Pagogo's promise to Lucius alongside the rest of the Six Heroes, this battle had to be won by them!

Hence, Geeta HAD to lose to the trio, predictably so, this was the only path. The only way to end this fight! And the Trio isn't as green as one might think, they already have experience dealing with powerful Pokémon, like the recent recruit Kleavor, a Pokémon that went full Ogerpon on them in the Kitakami arc prior to the search for Entei, after they cornered it. Johto's Entei even was impressed with them.

Ultimately, the heroes aren't real weaklings, all of them won against some of the most dangerous and vile opponents and grown much more than ever before.

Thus Geeta is like in the games fulfills the role of a powerful and wise opponent to overcome; to prepare them for the final bosses of Horizons, which would most likely by Gibeon, or maybe someone else we have not seen before.

Anway, Geeta's role was obvious with how Horizons didn't focus on the Paldean League and why Liko and the others don't hunt for Gym Badges, this story isn't about that. There is no Nemona creating her perfect rival here, hence even she had her role reduced to being a happy-go-lucky girl, and gave some advices to Roy, not to raise him as her great rival, but because she wanted to help him to unlock his true potential. Horizons is more complex that the previous anime with it's storytelling by not simply adapting the game's storyline into it's own, but crafting a one-of-a-kind story for Liko. That is why the outcome ended in a victory for them, Geeta was never designed to be unstoppable.

So if this is all clear, why the controversy? For the same reason as to why Geeta's game counterpart suffers so much hate:

She isn't like the older Champions! And that is the Ash Era's anime's fault! (not completely so, but they played an important part in this)!!!

The Ash era champions created an unrealistic pedestal to stand on!

Alongside the games, the Ash-era created this idea that champions are unbeatable and unreachable for almost anyone, because they were, to Ash Ketchum. As Ash was created to be the self-insert for the young trainers going on adventures to challenge the league and beat the champions, he won badges and took on the leagues to eventually challenge a champion. Hence all the ones he encountered were portrayed as unstoppable and powerful forces that no one, aside from Legendaries, could realistically defeat. This is why Ash and many others always lost to them, like Lance beating Team Rocket, Cynthia stomping everyone left to right, Kukui winning with his Incineroar over Ash's Litten and then Torracat at the start, and Leon being this unstoppable world champion until he lost to Ash in the world championship. They were designed to be like in the games, to be the final bosses of Ash's journey, hence they were the final opponents of Ash Ketchum in his last big arc! The Master's Eight!

This created another problem for Ash and why he declined as character: He couldn't be allowed to win, or else, his goal of becoming the greatest is achieved, and they had to retire him, perhapas forever! Thus Ash was made to lose every single league, and always resetted, as to make him mirror the next generation of new player's journey for 8 generations straight. Fighting with reset strenght against new Gym Leaders and partaking in another tournaments. This meant he had to continuesly lose, UNTIL the writers and the viewers had finally enough of resetting his power level, as his story got massively repetivie. They allowed thus Ash to win against Kukui, who was playing the archetype of a traditional champion in the SM games as well. He was no real champion, in fact he had this role only because he created Alola's first League with the player becoming the very first Champ of Alola after beating him, since he is this game's final boss.

Thus Ash as the stand-in for SM's protagonist, had to win because the game did that too, and on top of this, fans were starting to get fed up with Ash, as his constant loses in the leagues prior created a sour taste in the fanbase, with the results of the Kalos, Unova, Sinnoh and Indigo league being seen as the biggest dissapointments in the whole series, due to Ash being defeated in the most embarrassing ways. The worst of which happened in the OG Anime's 79th episode, where Ash lost in the fith round of the Indigo League against Richtie. Ash lost there, because most of his team was poorly trained with only Charizard being the only powerful mon he had, and when facing Ritchie's Pikachu, Charizard just stopped fighting. Viewing Ricthie's mon beneath it, it forfeited the match, despite Ash's pleading, rather embarrassingly, to fight. But to avail, giving Ash the most horrible defeat in his whole career to date, even worse than with Cameron, because while this guy was an idiot, at the end of the day, he was a powerful trainer with a mighty Hydreigon against most of Ash's rather weak Unova team.

This is the opposite of Liko's battle against La Primera, where she with her friends defeated Geeta. Floragato, refusing to give up and even toughening out the attack for Liko, as taken from the friendship mechanics of the games, as well as gaining a buff from Overgrowth and Terastalization, wins against Glimmora's ace, a champion level trainer's stongest mon. The whole trio grew faster than Ash did in this amount of time as trainers. Ash, who was arrogant, lost due to this and had to work on himself to get batter at battling. By comparison, Liko, who attributed her win due to her team's work, showed humility, grew as well, but more healthily. Yeah...Liko garnered with this a lot of ire from Ash's fans, for being now seen as someone outperforming him here as a trainer, and in the future, could rise above him, even at his strongest.

The fact that Ash's episode in the OG show where he had his hardest loss was the 79th one, with Horizons, featuring it's 79th epidoe with a defeat of a champ at the hands of our fledging heroine, just shows the contrast between the two protags: Ash winning would mean the end of his story, while for Liko, it would continue her story. And I have proof of this:

The writers of Ash's journey, like the fanbase, had enough of Ash, with his constant loses, and broke that trend with his victory in the Alola league, becoming this region's first ever champ. They however opened up pandora's box for the world champion league! It was hinted by Paul after he lost to Ash in the DP series during the Sinnoh League!, namely the world champion league where he wanted to participate to, until he decided to be instead a Gym Leader. This has always stuck in my mind, since I heard that, and I reveal to you a childhood secret:

I guessed that when Ash wins just one big league, he will become a candidate for the World Champion League, and win it, ending his series. I did that as teenager and I always suspected that he will focus more on preparing for this league rather than on focusing on the current gen's content and BOOM, after I grew into an adult, ALL OF THIS MOSTLY HAPPENED! This ending was predictable for Ash, and after around 25 years, the ending he should have gotten, since Johto or even Unova, where in latter's case, an actual world championship in the games was held in BW2.

That is the crux of all of this, Champions had been given for so long this pedestal by every media, until gen 9 broke that with Geeta, and made her comparatively weak to the true end bosses of the game and the ones we are going to see in Horizons.

So not only did the previous games, as well as the Ash-anime, set a big example of what a champion is supposed to be like, but created an easily to fail one as seen with Geeta. She was in neither media meant to be like Cynthia or Leon. She was meant to be the Chairwoman, helping the kids getting into the Terastal Course, help them with their search of Laqua and after the most recent battle, where she lost, gave them the permission to enter A0. Without Geeta's help, none of them could get this far, and I like her more here in Horizons, because she does far more for the heroes than for the player in game, where Nemona had mostly that role. But here, Geeta is a true champ with ginormous amount of skills and power, as well as a wise and cool personality!

Thus Geeta stands to me here tall, as Top champ and the greatest trainer the RVT ever faced so far. With only Lucius, Rystal and Gibeon being greater, and perhaps even Nemon and Kieran being also greater than if the last two will be allowed to be given bigger roles in the anime.

So yeah, that is why we are here, because of impossibly high expectations that weren't supposed to be met by Geeta, or even needed to met. Geeta proves that just because you are the region's strongest, you can still lose to a Heroine and her friends! Titles mean not everything!

Conclusion-When and when not to hold back!

Geeta imo shows in this battle her greatest strenght and betrays her greatest weakness!

Geeta's inability to held back makes her powerful and reckless, able to hit hard in battle but also leaves her wide open for any harmful attacks, skills and tricks...ironically had she not done this, and stalled their attacks, with poisoning withering the trio, Geeta could have won. But Geeza chose to go all out and made the coolest descision she could have done here! Giving us the best fight possible for this year's start and allowing us to have this discussion.

Because you see, even with all the negativety, this made Horizons relevant in the eyes of fans, and causes it to sparkle talks about what a champ has to be like, and how cool Liko, Roy and Dot were, making us question if champions should really be this invincible or not? Did Ash really had to lose all the time, and was it even a good idea to keep making him unable to face champs for this long? the answer is yes, btw! A more interesting disccussion is on how people simply underestimated Liko and her friends, and just didn't really saw how powerful they truly are. I make no secret that I enjoy somewhat the negativity here. I am like aGrimmsnarl and all of this alt feeds me!!! I love such heated discussions (to a degree) and actually enjoyed that Horizons doesn't hold back with it's story!

Everything they did so far broke in a few years more convensions, rules, tropes, cliches and ideas people have for Pokémon anime, and beyond, even the series itself:

From not following the route of going to the league (not just yet), to having an ancient adventurer having a team of 6 mega large Pokémon, 3 of the being legendaries, and the strongest being a Shiny. To the villain having a Shiny Legendary as well.

With a story uncovering the secrets of said adventurer and a new Legendary that the heroine catches, a female main protagonist, who is rather feminine, but not traditionally so, and shows characters traits both genders can relate to. That journey also being about exploring the world with a theme of self-discovery here and many more stuff. Now Horizons has cemented itself as the most unique Pokémon experience ever and will grow into something bigger, now a trio of relatively inexperienced trainers beat a Champion level trainer...how cool is that!

I could go into detail, but one thing is clear: Horizons pushes the boundaries of what Pokémon can be and is very novel, with unique concepts for a Pokémon anime, and even beyond, is really a good show!

Horizons even helped me pushed my very own boundaries of what I can be, because more than ever...I am interested in what my life is, if I keep taking more steps when stuck. I can, thanks to Liko and her story see how I can achieve happiness: By trying to continue and listen to myself!

Thus Liko showed me with great work, some loses, some wins, and being true to yourself and believing in your self and your own future, will help you make feel better about yourself. So Horizons has shown with this episod how to be truly over the top: Being willingly to sacrefice everything needed to win, without being truly evil that is, as Geeta and Liko are universally good people despite their dark tactics. Don't rely always on luck, use your head and try to find ways to be happy! Be more like Liko, listen to your true hearts desires and find like her, the will and courage to win even against Champions, with friends like Dot and Roy by your side, who will cheer you up, and whom you can protect!

In conclusion being a champion, even if that title carries weight, garantees no victory. Geeta lost, because despite her powers, she is ultimately not invincible and can be taken out by relatively inexperienced trainers, if they work together well. Still, Geeta is shown to be strong, having clever tactics and being brutal, while also being reckless. The Trio is not the most experienced, but they are able to handle themselves well and even impressed Legendary Pokémon and their equally impressive allies in the form of the Six Heroes and before facing Geeta, Johto's Entei, one of the 3 legendary beasts.

So don't underestimate the Rising Voltacklers: These three, Liko, Dot and Roy are champion level trainers in the making, and perhaps Geeta will return as a battler in the future, with a new team far stronger than before, given thus, like in the games via DLC, a second chance to prove herself, maybe in Paldea League arc...but that is a story for another time! Now, Liko and the others enter Area Zero, to find Entei, Black Rayquaza, Laqua and save the world!

Goodbye and see ya next time!

#star arcana revelations #pokemon horizons #pokemon liko #pokemon roy #pokemon dot #pokemon anime #pokemon geeta #fan analysis #ash ketchum

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realcleverissues · 4 months ago

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Tolerance: Pact? Virtue? Maybe both

We've all seen annoying people who point to leftist protests against things like racism and fascism, and conclude "so much for the tolerant left".

As most of you probably know, others have replied that tolerance is a social agreement to peacefully coexist with those who differ from us, as long as they reciprocate and don't infringe on others' rights or safety. It's not unconditional acceptance of any view or behavior, but a mutual pact for societal harmony.

However, I rather dislike this notion that tolerance isn't a virtue, but merely a pact of non-aggression. This seems shallow and not reflective of people's actual views. But I think there's a way it can be both.

Let's take an easy example: Murder bad. Societies need laws to function, including bans on murder. So, the social contract says, "you don't murder me; I won't murder you." But most people consider abstaining from murder to not just be an agreement, but a basic moral principle and thus a virtue - even if the bar is really low. Thus, our abstention from murder begins as a pact, a social contract, but people tend to extend this further, to a virtue. What about killing someone in self-defense? Or to save someone else? Is that non-virtuous? Sinful? Illegal? No. It's none of those. Because our moral concept of murder evolved from the social contract against murder, our moral concepts also include exceptions. We don't call killing in self-defense murder. (We even invented different words to differentiate them! E.g. kill, murder, manslaughter.) No one would argue, "you say you're anti-murder, but here you are murdering someone who was about to kill you!" Again, we don't see that as a contradiction bc the virtue is born as an extension of the social pact and its boundaries.

I think the same is true about tolerance. It begins as a social pact of non-aggression, but from there evolves to a virtue. However, the virtue of tolerance has the same essential borders as the pact (just like the virtue of not-murdering has the same essential borders as the law). So I think the social pact of tolerance demands we not harm those who don't seek the harm us, and the virtuous aspect of tolerance sees the morality in not just non-aggression, but in seeking understanding and peace (similar to not-murdering).

I think there is an interesting discussion to be had about moral values that exceed the social contract. E.g. turn the other cheek. I do think that is the *ideal* way to resolve an issue, but sometimes you can't win by just turning the other cheek. So I see a tension between the social contract as the base or fundamentals of a functioning society, and moral values which seek to expand the minimum-requirements of the social contract to the maximum-possibilities of ethics.

p.s. obviously, see also the "paradox of tolerance".

pps. there's also a difference between judging people for things they can't control (e.g. race, age, sex, etc) and things they can (e.g. political views). I think there's an easy case to make that tolerance should automatically apply to the former but not the latter. (That said, I don't think this point covers the entire discussion, as I think the more fundamental issue is the dichotomy between political views which harm people and those which don't.)

#tolerance #social contract #politics #society

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cheeseoburger · 1 year ago

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Future paradox Meloetta Fakemon

Iron melody

Types: Normal/Ice

S: A musical device resembling Meloetta that's featured in a dubious magazine and it's said to be from the future

V: It's capable of singing in a way that causes physical pain on it's enemies if it so desires. Thre's almost no data about this pokemon

Magazine:

Iron melody: A megaphone possesed by an ice ghost?!

Rumors talk about a megaphone possesed by the soul of a Meloetta roams close to the Casseroya Lake, followed by many souls that increase in number every night

Even tho it resembles Meloetta it's uncapable of dancing

Stats: 590

HP: 80

Atk: 160

Def: 70

SpAtk: 60

SpDef: 70

Spd: 140

Ability: Quark Drive

Signature move: Frigid encore

Power: 30,70 Accuracy:100 PP:15

Type: Ice Category: physical

Extra info: Sound, priority+2,-7, hit 1 fails in psychic terrain

Target: all

Effect: Attacks 2 times

moves it can learn:

all sound moves; all nondance/nonpsychic based moves meloetta learns minus rain dance and sunny day; electric terrain, avalanche, ice shard, icycle crash, Sheer cold, mist, haze, freeze-dry, snowscape, aurora veil, all non-signature wind based moves

ok so some notes here, the reason it can use phisical moves an why it's so good at physical attack it's because it attacks using the note arm things after using the megaphone body to propel them, making the songs physical this is a rough sketch of how she attacks

think of it as the megaphone being a gun and the notes being the bullets but the bullets are part of her body so it's physical, that also makes all contact moves she uses make sense

and the ice's because no soul put into the songs because it's a machine and all that

#paradox pokemon #pokemon #pokemon sv #pokemon violet #meloetta #fakemon

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tsunagite · 1 year ago

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The man himself… sorta. He still won’t *physically* appear for… certain reasons, only bein mentioned in passing by the former Pandora Boxxx members.

But, I shall take this opportunity to replace the universe name from “Noxton” to something more appropriate-

Because, the main story of “Noxton”… was the supposive revival of Pandora Paradoxxx. Hence his absence, and why Raikiri was one of the first Rhythms I decided to draw.

As he has the most knowledge about what happened. And why the EmpError’s reawakening may be a sign…

#art tag #paradox project tag #pp… lmao #still gonna keep the character tags as they are tho #save for #paradox: pandora paradoxxx

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meanypunches · 5 months ago

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Is Camille Paglia’s “Decadence” a type of horror in modern society?

Her takedown of Kafka and the early Romantic poets starts with Wordsworth, who “wants nature without sex” and sparked a “movement in modern literature leading to . . . Kafka’s crippled cockroach”, a literary invention that “forfeits maleness for spiritual union with mother nature: wholeness through self-mutilation.” (pp. 300-301) I never thought of Kafka as a metaphorical eunuch, but then again Paglia makes the same charge of James Joyce, whom she lumps together with Henry James, “a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess.” (p. 49) Paglia traces this line of emasculated malcontents back to Rousseau and his ideas such as the ‘noble savage’. To large degree I agree with her about Rousseau, who I’ve read also inspired Pol Pot. However, sometimes I find her ideas about maleness a bit trifling, almost like her entire argument rests on a straw man (haha pun intended). Certainly most writers don’t live normal lives any more than serial killers do. It strikes me as paradoxical that Paglia would like to describe poetry and art in terms of sexual virility, yet she would have us believe that mother nature demands that her priests be castrated. Still it occurs to me I have misunderstood Paglia. She is essentially a real pagan, insofar as any materialist can worship anything, and insofar as paganism exists in modern society through ripples in the art subsystem, popular ‘new age’ movements, and even via remnants in Catholicism. G. K. Chesterton made a similar point about Catholicism being most of what’s left of paganism, which I would say includes folklore. Modern folklore would include cinema and other forms of pop culture.

It seems to me though, that Paglia would love to travel back to the time when art lived in “magic circles . . . sacred spaces . . . [and] sexualized spasms of creation”. (p. 328) She posits a rear guard action of premodern paganism against modern society, a “war between vision and language”, (p. 339) waged across an enchanted battlefield haunted by the godlike forms of Apollo and Dionysus, the spirits of Nefertiti and Emily Dickinson, all bound in ritual service to the demigods and demigoddesses of ‘Iconos’, Hollywood, and perhaps even ancient mystery cults reborn as the castrati of ‘the deep State’. Then you take a breath and remember that art is just another differentiated subsystem of modern society, with no more weight than politics, law, science, religion, or even sports. The pagan cinema may rule the western eye, but the written word still controls the western courtroom and the electoral college. At least that’s what you tell yourself. Even Luhmann called out modern distinctions as “illusion” now and again. The written word ironically enough does appear to still govern scholarship, but Paglia argues that the written word too can be Dionysian. (discussing Wilde p. 562 and Whitman p. 604) Certainly the word appears necessary to explain the image. Even folklore must be spoken to survive in meaningful form. Some visual arts exist in folkloric crafts, sigils, signs and dance, but meaning remains confined to the word no matter how many Amish barn hexes are photographed. Cinema which can be visual storytelling is perhaps the best example she’s got of the image as meaning, but this book isn’t really about cinema, and besides, do all of these oicotypes on the screen actually support her argument or would she be forced to cherry pick?

Regardless, I would call her a boxer, a fighter, an Amazon as she might admit but most of all a terrorist in the sense that she is a terroristic thinker. For anyone who studies academic communication this should come as no surprise as academics are in the business of erasing modern distinctions as it suits them, so long as their own professional distinctions remain intact. The terroristic thinker like an actual terrorist seeks to destroy modern distinctions but with metaphorical bombs aka words. Paglia leads with a Molotov cocktail from Egypt, then a letter bomb from the Greek theater, and then she heads for the central bank of the humanities, aka poetry and literature, to read the entrails of her hostages.

She has definitely given us something to chew, a bloody piece of chthonian meat, but will the gorgons of ancient empires or even the silver screen turn us all to stone? Paglia does hint at this separation between art and life when she says “Greek tragedy is a conceptual cage in which Dionysus, founder of theater, is caught.” This has been said about horror movies too, well before this book was written even, by film critics also influenced by Freud, speaking in context of ‘the return of the repressed’, and Paglia largely agrees when she says that “[a] play is an anxiety-formation freezing . . . barbaric Protean energy.” (p. 101) It is easy to see the Bacchae as a horror or disaster movie. I am reminded of how prominently the Bacchae features in My Dinner with Andre, a film also about the battle between society and nature. Andre Gregory would likely agree with Euripides’s assessment of a society in its “late or decadent phase”. (p. 102) Dionysus, like the horror film boogeymen of our own age, represents “the return of the repressed, the id . . . bursting from bondage.” (p. 103) Andre Gregory’s idea to use the actual head of a human cadaver in his production of the Bacchae seeks to sever the modern (‘decadent’?) distinctions between theater and life, performance and consummation, society and nature. Like terrorists both ancient and modern, Dionysus destroys distinctions and tears apart differentiation, or as Paglia says, “dissolves the Apollonian borderlines between objects and beings.” (p. 103)

Last I checked, military weapons also perform this function in modern society, both because of and irregardless of their ‘hard Apollonian edge’. This is another paradox that Pagalia does not approach directly, the idea that the hard modern edge actually destroys itself, as part of its autopoietic function, in order to allow space for ‘the individual’. As other commentators such as Matteo Pasquinel have argued in discussing the “uncanny . . . neurological traumas [of] the alien hand . . . first described by the German-Jewish neurologist Kurt Goldstein in 1908” (see Pasquinel’s article “The Alien Hand of the Technosphere. Kurt Goldstein and the Trauma of Intelligent Machines”, available at Academia.edu), trauma itself could be a part of society, a source of identity and even growth for the individuals caught up in society’s web. “The Bacchae [like Andre Gregory’s avant-garde pretensions] deconstructs western personality.” (p. 104)

Andre Gregory is surprised that his privately commissioned personal flag ends up including the Tibetan swastika; he is careful to stress its less sinister quality as “not the Nazi swastika . . . one of the most ancient Tibetan symbols”, yet he continually brings up his subtle connections (social and psychological) to Nazism. If you read his autobiography Gregory accuses his own father of having been a Nazi collaborator. Furthermore, he mentions in the autobiography his avant-garde theater company had connections to the CIA among its board members. The hydra of MK Ultra and its attendant conspiracy tales rears its many heads, a modern gorgon that has given form to American conspiracy folklore since the sixties. The paradox is also a distinction, order/chaos, and order thus also includes chaos or the Dionysian power to disorder someone’s mind. Disinformation or counterintelligence is specifically relevant, but always must contain some truth to do its work.

In context of the academic coding ‘true/false’, Paglia’s book then to me appears something of a tangled mess but perhaps it is meant to be. Paglia draws lines such as between distinctions like ‘image/word’, and then scribbles over them hastily in places, revising her theory as she goes. There are some inconsistencies here that serve her terroristic ends. Terror in its political sense, and horror in its theatrical, like tragedy I would agree with Paglia, “springs from the clash between Apollo and Dionysus” (p. 104) or one could say the conflict between order and disorder. The classical horror narrative always cycles through safety and security (order), to threat (disorder), and back to order again. (see Monsters and Mad Scientists by Andrew Tudor) Andre Gregory and his pet avant-garde (again perhaps so delicately shepherded by the CIA in both its board connections and top secret LSD experiments) would like to let Dionysus out of his cage, even if still keeping the (lower case) god on a leash. Niklas Luhmann’s riposte to all of this is that order/disorder still functions to maintain society, its autopoietic ebb and flow like nature itself, now beyond the ability of individuals to control. “Individualism and self-realization as a model” (p. 10) may easily become decadence, is what Paglia suggests and even celebrates, but without order there can be no decay. A living system or ‘nature’ has its own order that perhaps the acolytes of Dionysus are too blind to fully describe. Though Paglia never mentions him, I would say that as Jack Kerouac pointed out (more or less), decay is a part of the life of human systems like cities, society, or empire.

Paglia favors pagan empires over Christian ones, and prefers “ritual orgy” to “street carnival”. (p. 138) Her idea here could be only that ‘ritual’ is more honest than ‘carnival’. “Religion, ritual, and art began as one,” (pp. 28-29) but of late our society is differentiated as Niklas Luhmann points out. ‘Invisible hierarchies’ may be constructed to replace the premodern ‘visible’ hierarchies of the ancient world, Paglia is telling us, and with that I think Luhmann would agree. “Freedom makes new prisons.” (p. 235) Apparently modern society can repress the pagan rituals only so much as they will always resurface in the dreams and fantasies of society, aka cinema and folklore. However in a differentiated society is this such a big deal?

Just rewatching the classic 80s action flick Highlander which has a brilliant fade out from the hero’s face to a mural of the Mona Lisa on the side of a skyscraper in New York City. Paglia calls the Mona Lisa a kind of totem in the art world, “the premiere sexual persona of western art”,(p. 154) which functions as “an apotropaion, a charm to ward off evil spirits, like the giant eye painted on the prows of ancient ships. (p. 49) The Mona Lisa to Paglia presides “over her desolate landscape . . . a gorgoneion, staring hierarchic of pitiless nature.” (p. 49) The immortal catch phrase from Highlander of ‘there can be only one!’ might as well be the battle cry of every sperm on its way to the egg. The immortals here seek to decapitate all the other contenders. Alan Dundes the folklorist points out that decapitation is a substitute in stories for the motif of castration. This story then softens the harsh realities of nature for a wider audience perhaps. The story told in the film is of the efforts of an immortal few to civilize the barbarism of earlier ages. The crude and premodern Highlander calls the civilized Ramirez a “Spanish peacock”, to which Ramirez replies that he’s originally Egyptian, a detail I find intriguing in reflection of Paglia’s argument. Vampires too in the popular imagination can always be traced back to Egypt (see Anne Rice, The Hunger, etc.), and the immortals in Highlander are also compared to vampires. Also the bit about “holy ground” which is a traditional no-conflict zone that none of the immortals will violate, even the evil, barbaric antagonist, the Kurgan. I’m sure Paglia would make much of the scene where the Kurgan jokingly says “Mom” in mock affection to his carjacking victim. Yet this bit of folklore cannot escape a moral view. One can say it is merely ‘quasi-Christian’, a global universalism perhaps, with Churches still considered holy and assuming as it does a super nature without speculating much about the origins of this “kind of magic”. The “prize” here is a single unifying mind to guide humanity (a kind of monotheism?!). The failure of the heroic Highlander to secure this ‘treasure’ would be to leave this power in the hands of the Kurgan, an evil (Dionysian) force opposed to all decent, reasonable and humanitarian ends, i.e. antisocial in every sense, and with this I think Paglia would agree, that society creates these distinctions to protect the weak.

However, Paglia’s idea is that these good intentions are illusory, or at least ‘on the road’ to somewhere entirely unintended. Always underneath the good intentions of society, there is a destructive darkness, she would say. As a social systems theorist might say, there is no perfect system. “Every road from Rousseau leads to Sade” is Paglia’s Nietzschean gauntlet cast down at the feet of modern pieties. (p. 14) She points out correctly that in movies we can also see this in the example of “the femme fatale [who] reappears, as a return of the repressed”. (p. 13) In communication one can only observe what is not discussed as an ‘unmarked space’ according to Luhmann, and Paglia makes a similar observation when she says “what is not said presses upon what is.” (pp. 615-16) So each communication one could say ‘represses’ that which it does not discuss, an inevitable result of the reduction in complexity necessary for communication to occur. (This is perhaps one reason why autopoietic communication may never stop—there is always something left out of the previous system operation.) I’m surprised that so far Paglia doesn’t address directly the possibility that horror movies are a modern version of Sade. Of course she mentions pornography, but reading her descriptions and quotations from Sade, I was struck forcefully with the connection between Sade’s writings and body horror. Sade was perhaps an aristocratic version of Ed Gein, at least on paper. Too bad Tobe Hooper never made a movie about the French Revolution. Again, I had to repeatedly remind myself that despite the bombastic and nearly apocalyptic tone of this book, it is mostly about the art subsystem.

I suppose after awhile it appears to me this is also about a moment in our own contemporary history, the rise of gay rights, feminism, and the impact on our society of these movements. Paglia is a defender of ��Decadence”, which she equates with “aestheticism”, (p. 512) and ultimately she connects these concepts to the creativity of both modern (differentiated) society and specifically the art subsystem. Paglia apparently has no concept directly equivalent to system differentiation and I would say she goes too far when she claims that “Romanticism freed art from society and Christianity”. (p. 513) So for Paglia, writing within the academic subsystem, she would describe the differentiated subsystem of art as “freed”. It makes sense to me that an academic would say that, but is it accurate? Certainly modern society has a place to stash its decadence, and no erstwhile Oscar Wildes will be thrown in gaol (aside from perhaps in a few extreme national segments within the global order that still entertain such a possibility). At least many artists continue to believe in the heresy that ordinary rules of society do not apply to them. A true Romantic might argue that Oscar Wilde’s power derives paradoxically and in some small part from his persecution. Niklas Luhmann argues that segmentation (such as into different national jurisdictions in the legal system) can facilitate global social system evolution by increasing variety and I would think the same holds true for differentiation. So Paglia’s case perhaps is a bit overstated or even hyperbolic. I won’t go so far as to call it ‘hysterical’, as that is out of fashion.

However, she does correctly diagnose the difficulty with all human systems of communication, which is the ultimate ‘tenemos’ (sacred or unobservable space)—consciousness. In rather spectacular fashion she gets at the root of all social system ‘problems’ which is to map the mind or personality. ‘As above, so below,’ as they say. Now humans are really attempting to build artificial brains that may outperform our own! Paglia correctly points out that older systems, social ‘maps’, or ‘models’ were essentially about the same problem, even if based in less than scientific methods. The “predictive part of astrology is less important than its psychology.” (p. 222) Setting aside for the moment the idea that nearly all of civilization can be traced back to writing and the theory that writing is founded in the practice of divination (prediction!), we are back to the ‘New Age’ and older ‘magical’ systems as ‘self-help’. (see Freemasonry for example) A dash of Jung’s “synchronicity” (p. 222) and the idea that the “Greek word zodiac means circle of animals” (p. 222) and we can return again to folklore and its animal fables, along with the ultimate end game in the west of all this theatricality, the hardest edge of all as far as personality goes, the sociopath, psychopath, antisocial or ‘predatory personality’.

The Zodiac killer perhaps not interested in scholarship but only in codes, even social codes or conventions, the cypher of the identity of ‘the individual’ as the ultimate secret, unobservable by even the most determined Quixote or tradecraft specialist (aka the classic ‘fool/detective’ or even ‘writer’). The text becomes a dream/nightmare for only a moment before we wake up to discover we have never left the art subsystem entirely. “Things happen in complex patterns of apparent coincidence, noticed by the keen eyes of the artist.” (p. 222) David Fincher (or George Smiley) couldn’t have said it any better. Paglia delves into what one might call the ‘philosophy of serial murder’, which she describes as “a perversion of male intellect. . . . There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” (p. 247) Funny I find out later this is one of her most quoted lines. The folklore around serial killers is thick. However, Paglia’s high end taste has no room for “horror films . . . of the splattering kind” which she finds “pedestrian.” (p. 268) Nonetheless she argues “[h]orror films are rituals of pagan worship.” (p. 268) I would say they entertain modern audiences by allowing social description of a collapse of differentiation within the ‘cage of theatricality’, i.e. at a safe distance. Serial killers such as Edmund Kemper may claim to collect their victims as ‘spirit wives’, and the Zodiac claims to collect the souls of his victims as ‘slaves’, but no matter how much art goes into a work directed by David Fincher, like the “run-of-the-mill horror film” such killers remain “anti-aesthetic and anti-idealizing”, expressing “the form-pulverizing energies of Dionysus.” (p. 268) Yet no one who is not a specialist can recall the names of Kemper’s victims, or the Zodiac’s for that matter. They remain ‘slaves’ at least in a social sense, to serve their murderers in a social afterlife if not metaphysical, a true decadent ‘dead end’, as Paglia might admit.

Paglia sometimes fights against her own pessimism it seems though, arguing that “great literature and art [even if] never affirmative”, may still be celebrated “in order to win victory over something else, something uncontrolled.” (p. 383) So perhaps her end is control, steering. Luhmann says you can’t steer society, but he agreed that ‘problems’ are the ‘catalyst’ of social system function. I recall at this time Paglia’s discussion of Elvis, whom she calls “a myth-maker”, and when my wife and I visited Graceland, I pointed out a book (that belonged to and may even have been read by Elvis) in a glass case about ‘the Age of Aquarius’ opened to a page that had text underlined about how this age would be characterized by an empowerment of women. Oddly enough while raking leaves on a Saturday, the thought occurs to me how powerful Christ remains, despite his critics and the differentiation of modern systems of communication on display here. The words Paglia uses ultimately come across to me as defensive, a charge she often seems to level at the Romantic poets she studies. It strikes me that she feels compelled to compare all of this analysis against the example of Christ, even if she gets it mostly wrong. Her understanding of Christian doctrine on Gnosticism I would suggest is woefully lacking, to cite one example. All these petty magicians and artists, along with the bomb throwers accompanying them, cannot compete with the truth of Christ, no matter how many armies of academics hue and cry that modern society has been “freed” from the Holy Roman Empire. (see Radiohead for example) Religion remains as important as art for understanding society, precisely because so many seem compelled to attack it. With a description of the “social ostracism” of lesbianism as “heroic”, according to Walter Benjamin no less, even Baudeaire writes from a “world-view [that] is Christian” according to Paglia. (p. 426) To quote Gang of Four, “no escape from society.”

Paglia approaches this idea when she admits Oscar Wilde’s “glittering great chain of being is . . . not the actual world of law, finance, or aristocracy.” (p. 567) One could add ‘or religion’, but like Wilde, I would say Paglia remains trapped within her own academic “visionary construction” close to what some call ‘the genital chakra’. Such illusions of spirit or theory appear as a (false) method of escape (transcendence), to join with the too-serious scholars of Tao, other types of intellectuals, serial killers or similar ‘statistical unpersons’ desperate to communicate but unwilling to compromise a singular vision of either self or society. All of this ‘decadence’ may be not much more than the fracturing of identity under the weight of the differentiation of subsystems in modern society such as art, religion, economy and politics. I recall some studies show schizophrenia increases in many urban areas. Paglia herself points out scholarship indicating “the nineteenth century self came apart or ‘pluralized’” (citing Van den Berg, p. 493) As Luhmann points out in his treatise on the religious subsystem, the shaman does not always return from the trance journey aka ‘vision quest’. Poets too carry this risk. Any seeker of associative knowledge may become trapped in phantasms of dissociative agony, especially in a fragmented/differentiated society so keen to uphold individuality/trauma as a model of self actualization. If the shaman or the poet runs the risk of merely trading one form of trauma for another, then one can see this mirrored in the complexity and differentiation of modern society. Mother nature as much as man it seems is looking for the hard Apollonian edge of a rocket to carry her children off world. What could be more natural than to reproduce life on another planet? Conflict, both sexual and social, may be as much required as stability in order to self-generate these systems, whether psychic (individual) or social.

Still Paglia hardly touches the gleeman poets, mostly keeping to the scholar poets (or those with sufficient wall of scholarship around them to guarantee a labyrinth). She scratches the surface of Elvis yes, briefly comparing him to Byron, but fails to remark on the long-standing feud between the scholar poets and the gleemen poets (or minstrels as they say). I’m not sure if the gleemen side would entirely support her thesis but she seems determined to add “the King” into her mix. Elvis though obviously a sexual icon is only barely androgynous. He owned a .45 with a turquoise handle initialed ‘E’ on one side and ‘P’ on the other. Fairly masculine I’d call that. Then again William S. Burroughs was fond of shotguns too. I think the Beat poets as I mentioned Kerouac above might also throw a few solid punches at Paglia’s thesis. I base this on watching the documentary about Kerouac where Gregory Corso said it best: “Spirit is a hard, tough baby.” Is Kerouac too a deformed priest of the mother goddess, or was he beaten down by Madison Avenue usurping and twisting his message? I suppose he did have some issues with his mother, who was also a drunk. I wonder where does Johnny Cash fit into her scheme? He walks the line yes, but that ring of fire is suspect. Or Bob Dylan? The resolution of the thousand year feud between the scholar poets and the gleemen finds this Nobel Prize winner calling for a truce! He just wants to be friends with mother nature one could say, and doesn’t want to get pulled down in a hole by those who are deformed by “society’s pliers”. (Paglia does finally get around to mentioning Bob Dylan, though she indicates he isn’t upset enough with Christianity for her tastes or Emily Dickinson’s haha.) Even the likes of Tom Petty might have a line or two about this ‘American girl’, but perhaps nothing that would satisfy Paglia, who nonetheless claims “[w]e still live in the age of Romanticism.” (p. 358) To my line of thought it is another example of a certain type of scholarly hyperbole when she calls Edie Sedgwick an “androgyne” who most men would say remains precisely female regardless of her haircut.

Ridiculous also when Paglia agrees with Bloom that Robert Graves is wrong about Keats and “his White Goddess”. (p. 385) Paglia has a real problem it seems with Graves whom she calls homophobic (p. 672), a decadent slur if ever there was one. As in her analysis related to Christianity, I detect some defensiveness on her part. Graves’s analysis more than any other agrees with her position on Wilde who in “trying to remove the chthonianism from nature, trivializes her, an error for which he will . . . suffer.” (p. 565) I’ve heard some folklore that editors who turned down Graves’s book The White Goddess suffered too. From Paglia’s perspective, Graves perhaps trivializes homosexuality or androgyny in relation to his ‘White Goddess’. The charge may be accurate but is Graves actually more correct in his reading of the relationship between poet and muse? My own reading of Graves suggests his analysis is more deeply connected to the poetic. Graves would never say the White Goddess demands castration of true poets, admitting though that seeking this prize may lead to madness or death. Graves also offers escape from Paglia’s ‘cult of self’ when he suggests that self-knowledge can be properly left in the care of a wife or mistress. I should note that Graves addresses Paglia’s concerns even more directly when he says that the real sin of Socrates was not homosexuality, but only the idea he could know himself “in the Apollonian style”. (see The White Goddess, p. 12)

Perhaps the problem here is that Paglia is merely a critic, and no poet so far as I know. She relies on the “principle that the western objet d’art is an Apollonian protest against the chthonian.” (p. 388) Yet the range of human emotion and personality, one might argue at least, transcends the sexual. She screams that the “eye” of decadent late phase art “becomes its own prison.” (p. 419) (Yet I searched for any reference to Georges Bataille but nothing in the index haha). She does get around to mentioning surrealism, but in the context of Dickinson’s ‘surreal’ poetry. I would maintain (and I think Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory supports me in this) that the eye is only perception and not all encompassing of society (communication) or personality (consciousness). Paglia finds the opposite to be true, namely that if “psychic . . . therefore sexual”. (p. 436) I would argue that this central assumption of her analysis rings false. For Paglia “sexuality, even at its most perverse, is implicitly religious.” Certainly this concept is blasphemous even for academia, which allows for study (observation) of sexuality as a purely biological function. One might as well say that physics is implicitly religious, certainly a collapse of differentiation. In accepting only a material interpretation of reality then, religion is only a connection to nature, a pagan concept for Paglia, and essentially premodern. “Sex is the ritual link between man and nature” is her claim, (p. 436) but is it the only such connection? In removing any possibility of ‘super nature’, Paglia essentially removes the connection between man and God, something which can exist both inside and outside of nature. Perhaps then her idea of decadence as “abandonment of . . . duty” (p. 437) at least is consistent with something (“duty”) which can be described as transcendent. Paglia rejects duty in favor of androgyny, but her idea about androgyny is a false idol.

After reading this book, I’ve never been so sick of the word “androgyne” in all my life. Perhaps it is because my father is a narcissist. The “androgyne” (like the narcissist) is the perfect monster, a “[s]elf-complete” being that needs “no one and nothing.” (p. 441) When I was a teenager for a few weeks one summer I became half-convinced my father was planning to murder us (the whole family) with a shotgun. I say ‘half-convinced’ in that I almost believed it, and even took some actions to disrupt his possible plans, like hiding his shotgun shells for a week or so, before I suddenly put them back, nervously thinking I would be discovered, and telling myself I was being foolish, that my father wasn’t really planning on murdering us all, that it was only a strange notion in my head. I now see this anxiety as my conscious mind struggling with what my intuition (my ‘unconscious’) already knew, that the family was merely an accessory to my father’s monstrous ego. He could discard us at any time, as it suited him. So long as we served his purpose of perhaps securing his own position in society as ‘the breadwinner’ and ‘family man’, he would keep us around, but if we ever got in the way of his desires, he could cut us out of his life as easily as he cut out cancerous lungs from his patients. Years later, sitting out on a deck at Chimney Rock, my mother tells me that it has emerged through their marriage counseling sessions that my father is a narcissist. This all came out into the open due to a ‘blackmail attempt’ caused by my father’s ending of a long 20-year affair (that she knows of only because he had been forced to confess after the attempted blackmail). I would later connect all these dots to my anxiety that one summer from my youth.

This is one thread that goes through my mind reading Paglia, a little personal experience of decadence that contributed to my own fairly unsuccessful sojourn in the art subsystem during the 90s. By the time she gets to Swinburne, the journey through the narcissistic prison of the genital chakra has worn me out. “Decadence is about dead ends.” (p. 494) Is Paglia’s criticism itself decadent, a dead end? Oscar Wilde is close to the coup de grace. His “one liners . . . [owe] something to ‘the Irish—perhaps originally the theological—habit of paradox.’” (quoting Brigid Brophy, p. 545) In the old world I recall, the only one who could criticize the king was the court jester. Comedy in English, Paglia explains, depends on the conflict between order and disorder, aka “the context of British formality.” (p. 550) This connection between slapstick and zombie films is brought more fully into the light—perhaps the reason for the pie fight sequence in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). The zombie, like the ‘androgyne’ or narcissist, is self-sufficient (aside from a hint of cannibalism). Comedy and tragedy united in horror, together at last, “darting into the linguistic infinite on a jet of the English epicene.” (p. 550) Finally I feel quite dumb, a middle manager, not at all qualified to hang out with these sophisticates in their “matrix of perverse fantasy”. (p. 371)

She wants to somehow be able to cast certain decadents, or libertines, as defenders of civilization, as “Apollonian”. So to believe this line of thought, one must accept that “[f]or the idealizing Wilde, the chthonian is literally an alien realm”, and he desires somehow “to keep his native tongue in a state of Apollonian purity.” (p. 562) Isn’t the word always Apollonian at its root? Again as I’ve already pointed out, Paglia suggests it can also be Dionysian in the case of Wilde and Whitman. (pp. 562, 604) However by the terms of Paglia’s own argument, decadence can never be entirely Apollonian but always essentially Dionysian, as it creates chaos in the social order through abandonment of duty, a line that could be said to define modern society at the most basic level within every subsystem. For example in the law of tort we find its standard of care which all people in society owe to one another. In religion they call this ‘the golden rule’. Does the academic subsystem have its own version of this? Certainly tenure and other social structures such as rules against plagiarism could be seen as rigidly hierarchic and imposing of duty. Art in modern society of course faces a precarious position with its coding of ‘art/non-art’—those like Wilde who would like to live through their art, risk violating the only moral rule that does apply to the art system, namely that anything outside (‘non-art’), anything which steps beyond the ‘conceptual cage of theatricality’ reserved for the Apollonian/Dionysian battle in our society, no longer receives the same special dispensation generally granted to the genius to act outside the rules so to speak, as the village idiot, jester, fool, madman, or visionary he or she may claim to be. Artists like to play with this edge I agree.

As for Paglia’s claims, despite the brilliance of this book, I’d say she is hyperbolic and sometimes clearly false. “Mythologically”, she claims, “there never has been a purely masculine vegetation deity.” (p. 588) Osiris? Yes in the myth cycle he is castrated and then reborn, but clearly masculine and so she’s off base about this claim. I wonder though if any man is ‘purely masculine’ enough for Paglia? Any man that shows tenderness is ‘homoerotic’ it seems, there is no such thing as a comrade in arms or a friendship, and any verse or man who is too masculine is repressing something—there is no escape from her labyrinth, her analysis has no doors or windows for the light to enter this oubliette, no opening in her vision for transcendence through the “umbilical noose” as Kurt Cobain called it. Trauma it would seem is a part of life, for both men and women, but does all art have to be erotic? Paglia's analysis is suddenly reminding me of that film by David Cronenberg, They Came From Within. Everything becomes sexual for Paglia. Anything “light and frothy” is actually “perverse psychodrama”. (p. 642) When the poet says “I had rather be loved than to be called a king in earth” this cannot be the simple cry of loneliness expressed by an emotional and physical shut-in, but must be “the option of a future sex change.” (pp. 640-41) Paglia accuses Melville of being “[w]hipsawed between paradoxes” but she ignores her own. (p. 589) I would say the biggest gap in her analysis is the New World, i.e. America, clearly a break in the ice of the ordinary decadent amusements of Europe, but she skates around these incongruities. For Paglia, Mark Twain is “completely out of sync with the internal development of major American literature.” (p. 623) She hates anything sincere or kind it seems, and imagines that writers and poets must follow her own theoretical time line and frame.

So I ask her, are poets not allowed to grow up? Is everything truly perverse or is that only her hope? Is there nothing outside this obsession with self? Has Paglia cherry-picked art that only supports her case? Perhaps all critics must do this to a degree but her choices sometimes break under close scrutiny. For example, she invokes traditional folklore in her analysis of Emily Dickinson when she argues “[t]he shoe is a male gift, not a prince’s glass slipper but a paternal tyrant’s iron boot.” (p. 645) Alan Dundes the folklore critic (another admirer of Freud) too describes the glass slipper or a shoe as metaphor for sex. Still I find Paglia’s analysis overwrought and avant garde, i.e. divorced from popular (‘folk’) meaning. Folklore and film critics make the same mistake when they call John Carpenter's Halloween ‘conservative’ in the political sense, ignoring the popular (and modern) thrill in watching social authority fail to stop the threat. For Emily Dickinson, a day at the beach, and the sea is a ‘he’? “His Silver Heel” fills up her shoe. (p. 645) Where is ‘mother nature’ in these words? How does this not express some degree of heterosexual desire? It has me thinking, could the ‘he’ be akin to Poseidon? Paglia does not comment on this pagan association but to me the line suggests another ‘nature divinity’ that is masculine and throws a wrench in her efforts to lay it all at the feet of mother nature. The unmarked space in this book is vast as the sea - so sweeping in its ambition, yet so narrow in its focus. I am reminded of Shakespeare: ‘the lady doth protest too much’. To return here to where we began, Paglia accuses James Joyce of writing a maze of words, lumping him together with Henry James as “a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess”. (p. 49) My thought here though (to borrow a phrase from childhood) is ‘takes one to know one’, i.e. that Paglia has also created a brilliant but “tangled reality of a labyrinthine construction . . . to entangle intruders”, (p. 49) a mess of a book as part of her own pagan worship of art amidst this “frigid, godless universe”. (p. 656) It drags at the end and feels masochistic to even finish it. I dare say I’ve had enough psychic vampirism in my own real life to want to read anymore about Emily Dickinson and this cult of necrophilia. How Paglia can find this to be invocation of the muse seems to privilege death over life, when love cannot exist without both sides of this distinction. Ultimately this tome reminds me more than anything of how C. S. Lewis described Narnia under the white witch, to paraphrase, ‘like winter without Christmas’. Finally though, what this odious quagmire of a book suggests more than truth is this unmarked space, that our merely human efforts to describe nature and even ourselves are forever incomplete.

#horror #camille paglia #horror film #c. s. lewis #niklas luhmann

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the1entirecircus · 4 months ago

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Virizion Wireless presents: Indomonstrum

So, I got back into my dinosaur special interest, and when i first started that special interest, that lead to me creating hybrids because of Jurassic World and Jurassic World the Game. Mixtures of different animals to create something new and cool seemed so awesome to me. And of course when I got into pokemon, I made hybrids of them. I think the first hybrid I made was called Indominustrike and to pay homage to that, I was going to name this hybrid Indostrike. But because that name just didn't fit right, I decided to call it Indomonstrum instead.

Indomonstrum has four concepts behind it. The two most notable ones are the names that make up the start and end of Indomonstrum. Indominus Rex and Tyrantrum. I had to partly name it after its namesake because why wouldn't I? It wouldn't be an Indominus Rex-inspired hybrid if not for the Indominus Rex. Indominus Rex's name means indomitable or unstoppable king. The tantrum part of Tyrantrum's name is included as the "rex" part of Indomonstrum. This also accidentally formulated the word "monstrum" when it was originall meant to just be monster. Monstrum is just another word for monster.

As for its typing of Steel/Dragon, this was meant to reflect how its like Tyrantrum, but stronger, much like how the Indominus is compared to the T. rex.

Here's a post from reddit about the genetic composition of the Indomonstrum as I don't want to re-explain it.

I'm planning on doing an Indoraptor and Scorpius Rex fakemon. I probably won't do Stegoceratops, Spinoraptor, Ankylodocus, or Spinoceratops because of the lack of appropriate fossil pokemon for those pokemon. I'm not saying we don't have the required parts. I could make a Stegoceratops out of Gouging Fire and Slither Wing, but those are paradox pokemon, not actual fossil pokemon despite what G.F.'s dex entry states. Spinoraptor and Spinoceratops are in the same boat of where the only spinosaurus pokemon is Baxcalibur, which is a pseudo legendary primarily based on Godzilla. And Godzilla already has many different deseign elements from different dinosaurs so thats just a big mess. Then there's Ankylodocus where not many pokemon fit the bill. Sure, there are pokemon that are like Ankylosaurus and Diplodocus, but they're not fossil pokemon. And before anyone says Aurorus is like Diplodocus and try to remind me I used Archeops for Velociraptor: I know I did. BUT Aurorus is based on the Amargosaurus which has enough distinct features from Diplodocus to distinguish itself. Archeops has the same body plan as a velociraptor. Its just slightly bigger than the average raptor (real life ones anyway, not the big ones in the movies).

Signature Move:

Savage Strike Type: Dragon Physical/Special Damage: 120 Accuracy: 70 PP: 5 Description: The user attacks the target with a wild display of ferocity and power. The damage type will change depending on which type of damage the target is weakest to. This move is super effective regardless of the enemy pokemon's type.

Moves:

Tackle, Tail Whip, Roar, Ancient Power, Bite, Dragon Tail, Stomp, Crunch, Dragon Claw, Thrash, Earth Quake, Horn Drill, Giga Impact, Head Smash, Leer, Rock Throw, Scary Face, Pluck, Quick Guard, Endeavor, U-Turn, Rock Slide, Outrage, Power Trip, Swagger, Foul Play, Thrash, Harden, Metal Claw, Headbutt, Protect, Iron Head, Metal Sound,Autotomize, Iron Tail, Iron Defense, Heavy Slam, Double-Edge, Metal Burst, Revenge, Sucker Punch, Snap Trap, Flail, Fissure, Endure, Clanging Scales, Work Up, Clangorous Soul, Close Combat, Dragon Dance, Dragon Breath

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theshoegirldiaries · 4 months ago

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#Scentoftheday round-up from last week, clockwise from top left, I was still trialling KAYALI Yum Boujee Marshmallow | 81 EDP Intense on 6 separate days with... Prada Paradoxe EDP, Chloe Nomade Nuit d'Egypte EDP, Moncler Sunrise EDP, Givenchy L'Interdit Rouge Ultime EDP, Valentino Donna Born In Roma Pink PP EDP and YSL Black Opium Le Parfum EDP. More on my combo trials later. Prada Les Infusions d'Amande EDP (worn on it's own).

#perfume #fragrance #valentino #ysl beauty #ysl #prada #givenchy #moncler #chloe #kayali #yves saint laurent #beauty #pink haired princess #bbloggers

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justacryingbaby · 4 months ago

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How Tumblr’s Platform Vernacular Shapes Digital Activism and Micro-Publics

Tumblr isn’t just a relic of 2010s internet culture - It’s a living, breathing ecosystem where *platform vernacular* fuels niche communities and redefines digital activism. But how do Tumblr’s unique language and norms empower marginalized voices while navigating the paradoxes of the “public sphere”?

Micro-Publics and the Rise of Hashtag Vernacular

Habermas’s “public sphere” idealizes open, rational discourse, but Tumblr’s fragmented micro-publics - like LGBTQ+ blogs or fan communities - show how digital spaces operate differently (Simpson 2018). Here, hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo aren’t just metadata; they’re rallying cries that shape political discourse (Rho & Mazmanian 2020).

For instance, the #bodypositive movement on Tumblr challenges beauty norms through user-generated selfies and essays, fostering a community-driven counter-narrative to mainstream media (Reif, Miller & Taddicken 2022). These hashtags act as vernacular glue, binding users through shared slang (e.g., “OTP” or “AU”), GIFs, and reblogs - a far cry from Habermas’s text-heavy ideal.

Anonymity as a Double-Edged Sword

Tumblr’s lack of real-name policies creates safe spaces for marginalized groups, like LGBTQIA+ teens, to express themselves without fear of surveillance (Cavalcante 2018). Yet, this anonymity coexists with algorithmic biases. While Tumblr’s reverse-chronological feed *seems* democratic, studies show platforms like Twitter skew political discourse leftward, raising questions about whose voices get amplified (Huszár et al. 2021).

Platform Vernacular in Action: Memes and Fandom

Tumblr’s vernacular thrives on remix culture. Take TJLC (The Johnlock Conspiracy), a Sherlock fandom theory that spiralled into a meta-commentary on queer representation. To be more specific, the video of Sarah Z’s dissection of TJLC highlights how Tumblr’s “shitposting” and roleplay (RP) cultures blend humour with activism. Memes here aren’t just jokes - they’re resistance tools, as seen in political movements like #FreeHongKong, where absurdist humour critiques authoritarianism (Zheng & Li 2023).

youtube

Challenges: Surveillance and Algorithmic Gatekeeping

Despite its grassroots ethos, Tumblr isn’t immune to corporate or governmental surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security’s social media monitoring underscores how “safe spaces” can still be policed (Boyce 2016). Meanwhile, algorithmic curation risks homogenizing discourse - echoing Habermas’s fear of institutional influence.

Conclusion: Tumblr as a Vernacular Public Sphere?

Tumblr’s vernacular - reblogs, dashboards, and niche slang - creates a *participatory* public sphere where aesthetics and activism collide. Yet, its fragmented micro-publics remind us that the digital “public sphere” is plural, messy, and perpetually evolving. As platforms phase out hashtags, Tumblr’s survival hinges on balancing creativity with resistance to algorithmic control.

Reference:

Anselmo, DW 2018, ‘Gender and Queer Fan Labor on Tumblr’, Feminist Media Histories, vol. 4, University of California Press, no. 1, pp. 84–114.

Boyce, GA 2015, ‘The rugged border: Surveillance, policing and the dynamic materiality of the US/Mexico frontier’, Environment and Planning D Society and Space, vol. 34, SAGE Publishing, no. 2, pp. 245–262.

Cavalcante, A 2018, ‘Tumbling Into Queer Utopias and Vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ Social Media Users on Tumblr’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 66, Taylor & Francis, no. 12, pp. 1715–1735.‌

Huszár, F, Ktena, SI, O’Brien, C, Belli, L, Schlaikjer, A & Hardt, M 2021, ‘Algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 119, no. 1.

Reif, A, Miller, I & Taddicken, M 2022, ‘“Love the Skin You‘re In”: An Analysis of Women’s Self-Presentation and User Reactions to Selfies Using the Tumblr Hashtag #bodypositive’, Mass Communication & Society, vol. 26, Taylor & Francis, no. 6, pp. 1038–1061.

Rho, EH & Mazmanian, M 2020, ‘Political Hashtags & the Lost Art of Democratic Discourse’, pp. 1–13, viewed 16 February 2025.

Simpson, E 2018, ‘Integrated & Alone’, pp. 237–240.

Zheng, Q & Li, M 2024, ‘Foreign Movies and TV Dramas as the Source of Political Argot in an Authoritarian Context: Memes and Creative Resistance in Chinese Social Media’, Critical Arts, Taylor & Francis, pp. 1–19.

#mda20009 #PlatformVernacular #DigitalCommunities #HashtagActivism #PublicSphere #TumblrCulture #SocialMediaTheory #MicroPublics #DigitalCitizenship #Youtube

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the-physicality · 4 months ago

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Laura deserves a lot more recognition than what she is getting right now 🤯 5 pts in 5 games is amazing. She’s always everywhere when she's on the ice. To me, she's the one who needs to be on Poulin's right side for the 1 line. The connexion between these two on the ice is unmatchable. They can see each other with their eyes closed. And with the fact that Pou only have 1 pt in 5 games, I think it's save to say that her and Fillier doesn't work anymore (Fillier also having only 1pt in 5 games..)

and thus we encounter the LS7 paradox. She plays well enough to skate on the first line, but her impact is felt more when she is leading a second line. there is a reason that troy put the clark-turnbull-stacey line back together. at the same time this is also why she and poulin are on pp1 in mtl. because you can stack the pp teams.

in the same way just because dalton and mgm are so good on the 3rd line doesn't mean you can pop them up. because part of why they play well is their chemistry, and with national teams, there's just not a lot of time to build it.

tbh i think the poulin fillier thing always felt a little forced [even at last worlds they weren't super successful. tho part of that was poulin coming back]

the tricky part is i think because of the "we have to get the next generational talent skating with the current generational talent" thing, fillier, who can center a line, has been pushed to wing [same thing happened in pwhl]. She even started skating wing in college to prepare for worlds first line. in the same way that you don't want your whole front line in soccer to be 10s, you want everyone on a line to have chemistry, feel comfortable in their role, and create a versatile group.

again i was unable to really watch this game or last, so I really cannot comment on specific gameplay.

did the maltais-poulin-stacey line not work? or was it that clark and turnbull weren't the same without Stacey? really, the question is was there a more value in skating her on the first line or reuniting the 2nd/3rd line? and that has to take a lot of things into consideration. it's the kori cheverie question: do you have the strongest possible first line or do you try to distribute you strengths so no matter what line is on the ice, they can make it work and you don't get stuck in your own end.

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7ban-sama · 1 year ago

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Hello, so, I've been following you for a while, and I think you write so well. I would actually read a fanfic of yours about those three, you know, Tsukasa, Yashiro, Hanako. My question is, what do you imagine it would be like: Nene and Hanako's first time, Hanako and Tsukasa's first time Yashiro and Tsukasa's first time and finally, the first time between the three of them? Yes, about sex itself. It's okay if you don't feel comfortable answering, but I'm genuinely curious to know how you would imagine it.

Thank you for the compliment on my writing...! I like to write, so... nice that others can regard that writing kindly. 💦 I suppose on that note, since it's relevant to your question: I've actually covered the idea of a 'first time' between all 3 in a fic before, in A heart in the right place (a collaboration between me and @2n2n💜) Feel free to check that out, if it would be of interest.

Now as for your question-! Actually... I really love thinking about 'first times'... in fact, it's really fun to try and approach it from different angles, like solving a puzzle. 'How can I make [this] particular thing happen between [them]? Hm hm hm...'

I'll try to summarize my thoughts. :3

HanaNene

The classic shoujo ship of the manga~ I honestly adore that at it's bones, you have a pair between a tragic ghost boy and a girl with her little devil horns and skull brooch. They're very sweetly designed to be 'for' one another, and I always appreciate that. I love that they're both childish and inclined to play together. There's also an awkwardness between them I find really precious, they seem soo easily overwhelmed when things get 'serious'... As if it's difficult brushing up against the intensity of how much they like each other. But before it gets serious, it has to start out kind of silly, I think...

Depending on the world, Amane is either creepily shmoozing onto her in a predatory fashion (canon, Ghost Hotel, Bakeneko Ryokan) or... he's 'shy', fussy, perhaps even avoidant (your more mundane Amanes are this I think, a spectrum between the presented identity in PP and something like Teen School Drama boy...) I feel as though Nene always has to go through a phase of, 'he's not my type', followed by 'I'm just a normal girl!' 'This is too much!' haha... She's innately charmed by him, but wary, and unsure about saying yes to... this. This isn't how any of her fantasies ever played out... (Imagined more traditional experiences ww) ; By contrast, I would say Amane is more... immediately infatuated-? Consciously attracted-?? But he doesn't, expect or prepare for deep attachment... Doesn't think it's, love, kind of, sucks, is thinking HOT GIRL... pant pant... Sure, I'll take a shot, why not... <- Bizarre amount of confidence and detachment.

Hmm, I guess actually, I see them as both not expecting to be as into the dynamic as they are, so they're unprepared (and inexperienced...) Hence, all the hesitation about committing to it being More... Subsequently, I think it takes quiet a while to get to dating, and even longer until confessions. Typically I imagine sex happening before all that actually! It may seem out of order, but something sexual is easier to access than deeply working out feelings... 'One thing leads to another.'

For first times specifically, I am,, naturally, inclined, to think about it being noncon-!! !! !! OTL💦 In some manner...!

(... in my defense, the manga harasses me into thinking about it...

This is bullying-!! I'm being bullied.💔)

... but in all seriousness... u.u; That's really how I picture it happening... The cocktail of Amane's instability, possessiveness, forcefulness, leads to something snapping inside. Amane... he can't help but being a bit of a ticking time bomb. He has rabies (dormant.) And his urges are often being coaxed and encouraged by Nene, even. Actually, I really like when things start consensual, then devolves into rape. 9.9 Paradoxically.

To be more specific... Imagine something set relatively early in the manga, amidst the first couple volumes. Nene proposes, a bit clumsily, something like — practice kissing. For fun-! Nothing too 'serious', so. Amane can be agreeable, smiling about it, maybe even half-lidded. "Ohhh... Yashiro, you wanna do that~? Haha." [she baps him for teasing]

They do this a couple times... Both are feeling, more doki-doki about it than they'd expect, but with different responses to that. Nene is kind of like, twirling her hair, writing diary entries cutely at home about it... Amane is feeling wary, on edge. (Doesn't like feeling passion, because the last time that happened...🔪) He wouldn't let on his concerns though, just be normal silly ghost guy, deflecting. Out of Nene's periphery, she could watch as he clutches the edge of his clothes, fist shaking. Nene sees that as a victory though, like, ah he's! Nervous, Hanako-kun, he likes this... *mind wanders, imagine he wants to touch her more during!* huehueuee.... hehe!

So naturally, Nene so-kindly offers that he rest his hands on her, if he wants, he, doesn't have to keep them to himself. >> Maybe cheekily (but shyly) imply that they could practice... Well more things! Poses... dialogue?? Surprisingly, he doesn't take to the offer though. (Well it seems weird bc he is, known pervert ghost.) You could then imagine Nene getting a bit persistent, like... He just needs encouragement. Hanako-kun, he's surprisingly shy... But I can take the lead-! That kind of mindset.

To Amane, she feels strangely pushy, like, why does she keep trying, saying things like that, she should be more careful. I'm a, guy, ugh, Yashiro, you can't just go inviting these things, you don't know what'll happen. [guy who is a murderer voice] He feels ah, poked, prodded, goaded. ? And he kind of is... but that's scary for Amane, like-!! He's kind of all or nothing, in my mind, holding it all back or... Losing control, in a haze, brain overheated, boiling inside. Need to DO something...

So even if Nene was encouraging or even fantasizing about ~something~ happening between them, I think the inciting action is very sudden, harsh, without warning. And so it feels violating! Getting pinned down, groped, mouthed desperately... Tights shoved out of way quickly, and, by the time he drives a finger in, her mind is going blank.

Ah that's another element... I think of fingering super often as their first time! Fingering expresses something like, impatience in Amane, wanting to hurriedly shove inside! There's no time, he wants to confirm everything in tactile touch, wants to feel her warm and wet insides! Her living body-!! Raurgh... It's a lot of effort to unbuckle, unzip, get self out, and, there's a loss of control at that point that is too scary almost? I think Amane's hind brain worries about getting out his cock. (Again, it's kind of like.🔪🔪🔪)

Luckily for Amane he has a finger fetish and, I think it results in admiring other's fingers, as well as being very fixated on interfacing things with his own. Verrry stimulated by wiggling fingers inside, feeling the give of inner walls, reaching far into her. There'll be a point where he gets lost in the raw sensations of pumping in and out. As for Nene... I always think she's besieged by genuine confusion, disorientation, some fear (as she can't get away, can't push him off), then sadness (why didn't he tell me he wanted to...) Yet she is simultaneously enthralled to get to feel something so intense.

There's. [sigh.....] A joke in PP that insinuates Nene masturbates a lot... I internalize this as truth, and a part of her whole romance-obsession and, the way she goes on flights of fancy... Nene-chan is someone who has spent a lot of time ~fantasizing~... and she has imagined guys being forceful with her... For a girl who worries about being unwanted and ugly, it'd be relieving for someone to instead be so into her they MUST touch her. So it's not all bad, I think she does feel her heart pounding wildly in her chest, is amazed at how Amane holds her close. When Amane feels things... it's with crazy intensity! Something you never see on anyone else! So that's incredible to witness...

The aftermath can go any which-way, but let's say generally I think of things getting 'better' over time... Even with the fraught start. ❤

Those are generally the things I envision in canon. I like to go anywhere between V1-8, mostly focusing on things before PP & the Severance. Picture Perfect arc is like, it's own beast, so envisioning a first time occurring then has a different vibe. That being said, I have a delusion that in PP, Amane was going to finger Nene-chan at the movies. And I've thought very hard about him fingering her in the jail cell, while Nene pretends to be unconscious. 😶

Also in AUs, like mundane non-magic ones, I like to think of them going at a pretty steady pace of hanging out, flirting, getting to know each other. But then, Amane suddenly drags Nene into a closet or bathroom stall and fingers her with 0 conversation beforehand, really putting Nene through a lot emotionally wrhghfh... Even in a world where there's less extreme circumstance, I guess I envision Amane just being so bad at things like asking permission. He really would rather not. He'd prefer, taking advantage of openings. "Houdai"... *sighs*

AmaTsuka

The twins... Ooh, they are so painful for me to think about. In adoration of each other, and yet...💔 Haaa. I will be blunt, I think they have it the hardest, when it comes to consummating... The disadvantage of the incest taboo isn't negligible; it isn't an intuitive thought, to be attracted to your twin brother. Why, how? That's not how it's 'supposed' to be. I think Amane and Tsukasa both struggle to identify their feelings as romantic/sexual. Though-! I think Amane is closer to 'seeing' it, but he's also a lot more avoidant about confronting sensitive feelings like that. (Even with Nene...) So.

The result of this all is: the ultimate slow burn, taking yeeeears to remotely realize their feelings. And even if one of them does, if they don't have confidence the other reciprocates, they can't make progress...

(Looking at AUs, the lovers suicide seems STEP 1 of romance actualization. Amane needs to, reach his limit EXPLODE, take Tsukasa with him... Perhaps, do crazy things like drink his blood, eat his fingers, hold his heart in his fist.)

As you can imagine... Sex is a very far-off goal... And ah, another factor that muddies things is, I think Amane and Tsukasa both have unusual sexualities... the sort of thing you can't really put labels on. I will be blunt, I never think of them as being attracted to 'boys'... because, there's no attraction to the general concept of maleness, and they'd never like. Have a crush on some guy, ever. This is strictly an obsession with one another, and further defined by roles/inclinations of theirs. Tsukasa being very servile & masochistic, while Amane is very domineering & sadistic. Another reason why things tend to culminate in something as extreme as heart-stab. Uncontrollably into 🔪stabbing and being stabbed.💘

The prelude to this all is in childhood; many fleeting 'incidents'... Small moments where they colluded sexually, like — were both horny about something they were doing together. But that "something" could be any number of innocuous things... such as.

Chasing each other in the yard, pretending to be dinosaurs, playbiting. Rough-housing in a pool, holding each other underwater, wiggling out from each other's grasps. Laying around on the floor indoors, bicycling legs together, devolving into nudging and kicking the other. Having... a staring competition? Throwing food for the other to catch in their mouth-!? The list goes on... it gets eccentric, minuscule. Invisible. Aroused by Amane commanding you in a callous tone. Aroused by Tsukasa licking something off his fingers mindlesssly. Heart racing while Amane circles you, examines your yukata, adjusts your obi, laughs under his breath. Holding Tsukasa's mouth open to inspect the new gap from the recently lost baby tooth, seeing remnants of bloody tissue.

Mesmerized by one another. Made to feel a distant twinge of heat. Throat clenching, making it hard to talk. Blinking slowly. These physical responses are as mysterious as the instigators... Neither twin can understand it... Wouldn't it feel absurd to think anything of it? You're probably just excited to be with your brother, because you love your brother, because you're supposed to love your brother. 'The end.'

There's no way to really pursue anything they feel. It's all brief... ends as abruptly as it starts. Kind of lost between Tsukasa's cluelessness, and Amane's defensiveness. I think Tsukasa follows Amane's lead, let's him set the tone, and it's Amane that wants to dismiss things, laugh it off, explain it away. Even so, these incidents are endless little dots accumulating over their entire childhood. Building up steadily.

Another detail... I tend to HC the twins as being easily affectionate and touchy throughout most of their childhood. Comfortable to reach for the other's hand, play together, take naps, etc. Even bathing was likely very mundane, your basic skinship.

Many years spent like this! Friendly, touchy, comfortable.

As they age, there's a bit more distance... modesty. I think Amane is the one who gets rather stiff, more like 'sigh, come on...' [not looking at Tsukasa when he grabs his hand.] Sounding beleaguered, something like that... Increased tsundere, really.

(They're still very close though. Without thinking about it... anyone else would see them as quite attached.)

Noting this though because I think of Amane as suffering more from the onset of ~puberty~... Like genuinely, ah, more pervasive awareness of own arousal, struggling with getting hard over nothing. More. Debilitated. By penis. Can't let gaze linger on Tsukasa when they get dressed in the morning. Because. It's weird now. Kind of like an invisible wall is manifesting between him and Tsukasa steadily...

Tsukasa is aware of the growing distance, but... his inclinations are to presume Amane simply finds him annoying... (Despite what we see in PP, I've yet to think that 12-13 yo Tsukasa was quite so *tackle glomp*... I think yorishiro Tsukasa is his own entity, more adjacent to an excitable 3 yo Tsu. Currently think of 12 yo boy as more modest as well...) Anyways this miscommunication occurs... concurrent with Tsukasa's unconscious pining for Amane deepening, which manifests as a urgency to be useful to him in some manner. A continuation of his feelings as a child...

Going to try and explain a philosophy of mine, but. I think if the twins had sex, they wouldn't have died, so. Logically they did not, and that's why they're ghosts in canon setting. And as ghosts, I can't see AmaTsuka managing to have sex without TsuNene/3way happening first. Nene-chan provides necessary encouragement and motivation for both as they struggle with recognizing what they feel. In a lot of ways, her simple-girl outlook on things helps her go, gasp... Wait, is it, love? WHICH... THEY REALLY NEED... And unfortunately I think Amane is a tough nut to crack, he kind of needs a certain amount of pressure. A girl scolding him. (And it needs to be Amane who does something, because Tsukasa won't...)

Related to that... I usually think Amane needs to endure a bit of cucking, in some form, first, before, making his move. He needs to feel agony as Tsukasa's first kiss is with someone else. He needs to be on the brink of tears thinking about Tsukasa's virginity. We really need to cattle prod Amane until he puts his foot down. Get insane... That's... MY otouto, he's MINE, I KILLED HIM AND HE'S MINE, HE BELONGS TO ME, HE'S MY PROPERTY!!! I DECIDE WHAT HE GETS!! ! !! !! *froths*

Once you get him going though, it's— you need, look no further, he will be unstoppable. All those years, man! I think it could be as batshit as choking Tsukasa against the ground while humping him. Or like immediately facefucking him. Jerking Tsukasa off with one hand, holding his jaw in the other, crazily talking down at him. Fingering his mouth, throat, making him gag. Any number of things. Sometimes Nene-chan must watch as Tsukasa gets an agonizing overstimulating blowjob. Poor baby... *but she was instigating this & also it IS important it happens* *sits with mouth pressed in line*

Now... putting a little integrity aside... When I want to soothe my brain, I think about the Yugi somehow miraculously managing something in their childhood. (You have to just assume this is fate-altering, a new timeline emerged from it.) My favorite backdrop for childhood first times is something at Tanabata... Age 8. After running around together, laughing, holding hands... Laying in the grass, on this warm summer night. Scent plumes from your yukata collars. Sweaty... Hazy...

I think about things like, Amane being careless and just — kissing Tsukasa on impulse. Some measly thought behind it like, it'd be fun to imitate what couples do, it would be fun to watch Tsukasa react to a kiss lol, etc. Frustratingly easygoing about it, since he's not thinking hard... Tsukasa is left stunned, spellbound. He has special feefees about Tanabata and, fixates on the romantic elements more, so I think it's overwhelming for him...

Well, ig there's no reason not to include these sketches of mine.

You get the vibe. Similar to how he shmoozes Nene really, somehow... the doting, the condescending! Playfulness. Not being as serious as he ought to be.

Though at this age I don't think Amane is as encumbered as 50 yo murder-suicide ghost Hanako... So I think he can initiate more with Tsukasa. Ahhh I usually think about them either tucked behind a stall or somewhere distant from the festival, Amane hiking his yukata up and Tsukasa curious, eager to please, easily coaxed into a blowjob. Thinking so simply... it's like kissing Amane... but here.

This is probably the most innocent I can envision it... Something like this, it's more explorative, experimental. Kind of extrapolating on how they're always playing together, this can feel like another 'game'... sort of.

[blinks] I realize I can't possibly summarize AU AmaTsuka shennanies... not meangfully. I think it's. For lack of kinder terms, a lot of dumb yaoi bullshit, I don't know. AidaIro are really faffing off in those AUs... Like, I think TS Tsukasa just goes to their dorm and puts on that stupid bunny mask Amane is horny about and Amane just gets to jerk off onto him. Bakeneko Ryokan Amane is just fucking Tsukasa in the sabi space or whatever and their collars are jingling in unison. The Valentine's day devil-angel twins are just going to have SEX later as prize for Amane winning the bet. I hate it so much. Let's move on.

TsuNene

[clearing my mind...]

After those other two pairings, it kind of amuses me to say, I think TsuNene have a lot less... emotional obstacles, stopping them from getting close. But it's kind of mean, the major difference is that they're both more open, honest individuals than Amane... That's just the truth! Oh well 💔💔 At least they love him dearly so, he's not going to be left behind or anything...

I often internally describe TsuNene as a "schoolyard romance"... having chemistry the way two kindergartners would, playing in the sandbox together. Nene easily gets carried away, and so does Tsukasa! Childish, naive, silly-willies! These two are prone to getting lost in the throes of playtime, hardly stopping to second-guess much... Recent updates have really delighted me, as we finally get to see Tsukasa and Nene play together directly! Even though he's been the mysterious "villain" Nene has fleeting interactions with... They wind up playing tag, laughing while flying around, and singing together, now don't they?

⬆A dream come true for me... All the potential I see in TsuNene well exemplified here.

Of course, not to discredit the other moments they've had together... I think TsuNene is so very real in the manga! (Really, it's just that others have taken a while to acknowledge it.) I've based a lot of my writing, etc. on things like the red house arc...

I think Nene can easily find Tsukasa cute, precious, sweet and smart! She can step up and be the onee-san between them too, much like she does with 8 yo Amane as well... Meanwhile, I think Tsukasa formed a crush on Nene back here... A nice pretty girl doting on him. And she likes Amane too, ahh... They are matching!

If they spend enough time hanging out, I think it's inevitable for them to get along, really...

There are things Tsukasa lacks, like.. a kind of territorial, demanding quality. Amane pushes himself onto Nene, makes ploys for her attention, wants to be seen as cool (and he does the very same to Tsukasa, as well.) He 'puts it on', he 'works you over'... Tsukasa is the opposite; he doesn't ask anything of the other. He's not jealous... he doesn't have expectations. He's just, Tsukasa, he only thinks to respond honestly. A little kid showing you a bug, because he thinks you'll like it. I think this is disarming...!

On top of it all, there's this ethereal quality to him, as he thinks so bluntly, and isn't encumbered by what is 'acceptable'... So he will hold your face and look directly into your eyes, and say aloud what he observes you feeling. Or ask you what you're feeling, because he's curious. Or, say how he's feeling... He can be so direct. He can say he likes you, or thinks you are pretty.

It's just so direct... I think a girl could really appreciate that! While Amane is teasing, fussy, rude... it can be mysterious if Amane even likes you... With Tsukasa, no mystery! As Nene is befriending him, he would certainly seem as though he likes her... maybe just so innocently, it's hard to discern romance from it.

Basically I think in any timeline/world, Nene is destined to go through the thought process: Wait, does Tsukasa-kun like me? I had no idea... all along, is that what 'this' was? *looks back on memories* Eh- well- m-maybe that's...

... no, um. Hmm. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself...

Lol but just as well, it doesn't stop Nene from confronting how she would feel if this were the case. IF it's possible that Tsukasa likes her... then. Nene basically begins forming a sense of excitement at the prospect, deep in her heart. Her imagination runs wild... because, of course, she can't help but like him... She's deep down attracted to Amane, and I think. She is. Allured. By the concept of being courted by, twins. Multiple boys... we know Nene is weak to the idea.

Usualllyyyy, I think about them getting as far as a kiss on their own, and the idea of more is a bit intimidating... at first. But if Nene is lustful she could succeed in taking it further, really. I think, she can just, reach under that hakama, and there's no resistance. At most Tsukasa is simply ah, overwhelmed like, did not know Nene-chan liked me that much! Did not ever think about getting to do things with a girl ever! Has never... felt... desirable, in that way... That's almost like, not what he's 'for'...

As manic as he is usually, I think Tsukasa gets very 6.6 [small...] in an intimate moment like this. It's that way he gets, where he struggles to dream even about humble platonic things... All the fixation on romance as well means, kissy, touchy, is like /// wah //// so you like me that much...// //// Subsequently, Nene-chan must take the lead! But again... if she's confident enough, she can do it...

They're cute... I really just think about, her hand reaching under hakama, kimono... first grasping and feeling under the layers of clothes, heart racing. She's ah, nervous too of course... Excited though, to finally feel 'it', weouue.... Real boy... Cute boy, flustered boy! Amusingly enough I think she'd really wish to see, Tsukasa's junk directly but it's so many layers it feels, like invasive in a way she isn't confident about. So instead it's like mmh... mostly fixating on the sensations of her hand around him, the twitching she can feel.. Until it gets too much for her and she neeeeds to feel it inside. (In my mind Nene is insatiable, has almost no patience for waiting for PIV... Like ah amusingly Amane can keep her at bay from it, when she'd wish it would be sooner. COBCVK!!! NEED>....)

Dunno why but I often imagine them in doggystyle... It's a different vibe than when I picture HanaNene in it also — more clumsy! Nene on all fours, Tsukasa close up against her, clutching her... Tsukasa is more liable to slip out and need help rearranging, reaching back, being slipped in... Lose 'rhythm', struggle to focus! I also like Tsukasa struggling to stay hard... sometimes get half-chubs, fluctuating. Fffeeels good thoughhh... for both of them. They're both like >< >< ouuh.... Squeeze... He squeeze, cling to her, she nuzzles by tilting her head back against him...

By the end it's like... flop over!! Touch foreheads!! Kiss, thread fingers...!! Bwbwhuuu... Peaceful afterglow... whisper to each other about it...

... in a world where neither of them have gotten to bridge intimacy with Amane yet, it's very like... sighs together... Wish they could talk to him about it, wish they could share it with him, in some way. Though I think they could keep boning for a while before doing anything about it kfkfjh like... W-well, it's fun and good andndhfhg no reason not to.

And that's

thesis.

On all pairings. Houugh. [crumples up...]

I'd almost feel silly describing HanaNeneTsuka itself since, that's what I'm always posting about and drawing porn of kfkgjhsdg... [briefly imagining like, me describing the twins taking turns coming in Nene and eating her out or something...] The. It's fine. Just imagine the way all 3 of these perfectly intersect. Everyone is really really really really really into each other and they get along. Anyways there's my fanfic, as I mentioned, which is culminates in the three-! And... also this blog archiving RPs between me and my wife I've been chipping away at. Lose your mind there if you need.

OKAY thanks goodnight.

#☀️#💬#❤️🤍💜#i haven't had much energy lately... *coughs blood*#but i can offer you. this.

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aboutanancientenquiry · 2 years ago

Text

Another review of the book of Christopher Pelling Herodotus and the Question Why

"2021

Review of "Herodotus and the Question Why," written by Christopher Pelling

Joel A. Schlosser

Christopher Pelling, (2019) Herodotus and the Question Why. Austin: University of Texas Press. xv + 360 pp. $55.00. ISBN 9781477318324 (hbk).

‘Does Herodotus think democracy a good thing?’ Christopher Pelling asks toward the end of his erudite and wide-ranging Herodotus and the Question Why. ‘The answer surely will be “yes and no”’ (p. 234). Freedom and democracy often lead to disturbing consequences as well as inspiring ones; Herodotus praises nothing without also revealing, sometimes subtly, its potential downsides. Strengths and weaknesses go closely together, both building and then imperiling greatness. Herodotus’ ability to hold these opposing interpretations together is not, Pelling asserts, an incoherence of thought. It is just a paradox.

Summoning many decades of inquiries into Herodotus (and citing 35 of his own articles, chapters, and books on the subject), Pelling centers the work of explanation in his study of Herodotus. Explanation appears as one of the motivations for the Histories themselves, which Herodotus describes (in Pelling’s translation) as ‘why they [sc. the Greeks and the barbarians] came to war with one another’ (p. 22). Explanation hopes to ‘make something more understandable’ (p. 5) and Pelling untangles the many skeins of explanation that Herodotus offers in the early books of the Histories: aiti- words that focus on blameworthiness or charges of malfeasance; prophasis, which Herodotus uses like Thucydides to describe an explanatory account put forward by an interested party; and proschêma, which describes a pretext or rationalization––not the true cause but a supposed one. Herodotus also employs stories for the sake of explanation, letting audiences draw their own inferences from recurrent patterns or suggestive narratives. Explanation, Pelling observes, ‘is a game for two’: explanatory success depends on an audience’s uptake. Herodotus’ preferred modes of explanation say a lot about who he took his audience to be and his variety of explanatory strategies suggests the different forms of persuasion current in his day.

But explanation comes with closure, and Herodotus’ Histories seem to resist closure at every turn. Herodotus and the Question Why expands the very idea of explanation early in its argument, opening it like a folded envelope to reveal the letter within. Herodotus does not just explain; he shows his readers how you could possibly know anything. He shows his own ‘rethinking in stride’ (p. 93)––one wonderful formulation among many in this volume––reworking patterns and complicating seemingly simply explanations as he goes. Pelling sees an affinity here with the Hippocratics, who developed ‘corroborative argument’ (p. 88) as well as such revisions, either finding support for initial hypotheses or revising their hypotheses when they discovered contrary evidence. Herodotus, for example, begins his description of the Egyptians by asserting that their way of life inverts that of the Greeks. ‘When the topsy-turvy idea returns’, Pelling writes, Herodotus has revised the ‘attention-grabbing initial strong proposition’ (p. 90), writing that the Egyptians ‘avoid using Greek customs and, so to speak, those of any other peoples’ (2.91), a phrase that leaves the possibility of similarities open.

As the narrative of the Histories unfurls, the predictability that explanations would seem to promise––e.g. that x phenomenon will lead to y consequence––becomes less clear cut. Aitia begins to appear ambiguous. Herodotus’ language of wonders (thômata) reflects his increasing awareness of unpredictable and inexplicable phenomena in the world he encounters. Modern historians worry about overdetermined events––what social scientists call ‘endogeneity problems’––but the language of wonder often evokes the opposite: underdetermined phenomena that seem enormously important yet stun and bemuse the inquirer. Wonders are things and events that resist explanation.

When Pelling turns to the actual sequence of events of the Histories––which he loosely follows in the latter two-thirds of the book––these framing thoughts on explanation allow for an expansive expatiation of Herodotus’ stories. While many interpretations leap on the pattern of expansionism and self-destruction that begins in Book I and shapes the narrative of the Persians’ invasions in the books that follow, Pelling sounds the many dissonant notes to this over-simple account. For one, the Greeks do a lot to bring the war with the Persians on themselves––meddling at the court, caring more about their own petty factionalism, and being sucked into aggressive behavior, such as when the Athenians are persuaded by Aristagoras to join the Ionian revolt from Persian control (5.97). More broadly, claims about blame and vengeance are ‘displaced from their natural place and placed in mouths where they ring false’ (p. 127). The stories of the Persians raise questions about how much they really differ from their Greek enemies. These stories are redolent with an ‘un-Greek’ atmosphere, yet while Cambyses behaves with ‘brutal insensitivity’, when Darius later asks Indians and Greeks about how they would treat the bodies of their dead fathers, the Greeks’ horror at the Indians’ response––that they would eat them––resembles Cambyses’ prejudicial judgment, while Darius exemplifies open-minded understanding.

Pelling’s own sensitivity to nuance and paradox in the Histories culminates in his approach to the treatment of the Greeks’ victory and especially the tendency among many readers of Herodotus to explain the triumph as one of Greek values––embodied by democracy or freedom or ‘civilization’––over Persian ones. Pelling grants that this story has some basis in Herodotus – Herodotus comments that isêgoria in Athens prompted her rise to greatness (5.78), and the Spartan Demaratus explains that it is the nomos of freedom that empowers the Greeks to fight (7.104). There are reasons to believe the Greeks’ triumph was of their own making. Pelling impersonates these moments of Greek pride when he asks: ‘Aren’t we simply better than them, and isn’t that explanation enough?’ (p. 167)

Such a rhetorical question may have satisfied many of Herodotus’ early auditors, but it did not stop Herodotus from further inquiry. For one, Herodotus’ sense of contingency qualifies any explanation: ‘Time and again, it could easily have been different’, Pelling observes (p. 167). Even with this qualification, no single explanatory variable––such as the Greeks’ being ‘better’––can suffice. In a rather un-Herodotean systematic survey, Pelling lays out the inadequacy of any simple explanation for the Greek victory: neither the gods nor ‘Greek values’ nor Greek strategies and tactics nor freedom nor democracy provides sufficient explanation. Unlike Thucydides, Herodotus does not appear interested in adducing a single set of causes. Peeling back the layers of Herodotus’ explanations, one never reaches the pith.

Yet each layer of explanation is distinct from the others. In this way, Herodotus is helpful for resisting the modern tendency toward conflating democracy and freedom. On his account, the Persians are free, but so are the Spartans, the Scythians, and the Athenians. Yet among these, only the Athenians have a democracy––and their democracy does not exist for the entirety of the Histories. Freedom may provide the rallying cry for the allied Greeks against the Persian invasion, but Herodotus has already staged a similar moment when Cyrus rallies the Persians against the Lydians on the grounds of freedom [my aboutanancientenquiry's remark: this is obviously a lapsus and the author means the Medes of Astyages, as it becomes clear later in the text]. Democracy is not necessary for freedom.

Nor is democracy sufficient for freedom. Democracy does play a powerful role at certain moments of the Histories, but its influence can also lead to ambivalent consequences. Pelling points out how democratic slogans in Ionia prompted revolts that then laid the groundwork for new forms of tyranny. The equal speaking for which democracy became notorious could get out of hand. Pelling describes how the Greek debate before the Battle of Salamis was a mess, a ‘great pushing and shoving of words’ during which Herodotus shows, on Pelling’s reading, that ‘the Greeks are wasting their bellicosity’ with endless vociferation (p. 184).

Demokratia, for which Herodotus is the earliest source, was not yet a laudatory word in the late 5th century when Herodotus was composing his inquiries. Herodotus often employs periphrastics such as the series of iso- related words––isonomia, isokratia, and isêgoria––that surface from the mouths of quite unlikely sources (like Otanes, the Persian nobleman) as well as quite undemocratic regimes (like the Spartans and the Corinthians). Pelling notes that isonomia is ‘never used pejoratively’, perhaps suggesting Herodotus’ affinities with the tyrant-slayers Aristogeiton and Harmodius who ‘made Athens isonomoi’ (p. 194). Yet while democracy ‘glistens’ for modern readers (p. 195), Herodotus does not shirk from casting shade.

Pelling casts doubt on a reading of Herodotus that celebrates the triumph of the people (dêmos). More often than he speaks of the dêmos, Herodotus describes groups of people––the Athenians, the Spartans, and the Persians. Yet even more often than this, Herodotus focuses his narrative on what Pelling calls the ‘big man antagonisms’, the vying of leaders of these groups of people. ‘It is as a tool’ of such antagonisms, Pelling asserts, ‘that the dêmos comes into play with Cleisthenes’ (p. 196). Cleisthenes’ engagement with Isagoras led him to ‘recruit the dêmos to his faction’ (translating Herodotus 5.66.2). The Spartans later complain of the ‘ungrateful demos’ (5.91) that threw off their protection, but as Pelling points out, the subsequent debate concerns not democracy but the broader conflict between tyranny and freedom.

Democracy, according to Pelling, ‘allows for a prism for seeing freedom pushed to the limit’, functioning as an inverse image of tyranny as a prism for seeing people ‘at the mercy of unrestrained power’ (p. 197). Here I wonder if Pelling too quickly assimilates the democracy of the Athenians with democracy in general and loses Herodotus’ appreciation for the wide variety of ways in which the people can create and lose power. Take, for example, the episode when Cyrus leads the Persians to revolt against Astyages. Pelling mentions the passage where Herodotus describes how ‘they’––the Persians––‘cast off the yoke of slavery and became free men’ (1.95), but he places this in the larger context of ‘big man’ accomplishments. I would instead interpret Herodotus here as anticipating his description of the strength of the Athenians, whose liberation was also a collective act (5.78). When Cyrus later calls on the Persians to free themselves from slavery, Herodotus relates how ‘they enthusiastically went about gaining their independence’ (1.128). Yes, Darius’ father Hystaspes describes Cyrus as having made the Persians free, but this does not come in the narrator’s own voice. So too with Darius’ later argument that disavows the importance of the dêmos for freeing the Persians. When Herodotus describes the event independent of a particular character, it has much more of a popular flavor. The Persians themselves act as rulers; they affirm their power to create their freedom.

Athenian democracy may not be as ‘special’ (p. 207) for Herodotus as 21st century readers, myself included, tend to make it, but Pelling’s insistence on this point risks glossing the nuances among different formations of collective power that appear across the Histories. Dêmokratia, as Pelling points out, does not receive systematic treatment by Herodotus. Tyranny and freedom, however, do. I would suggest that Herodotus’ attention to how different peoples create, sustain, and fail to maintain collective power through nomoi illuminates an underlying counterpoint to the ‘big man’ narratives he also loves to tell. Winning freedom may depend on a leader, but its sustenance requires that the collective wean itself from such dependence. Themistocles gives good advice about how the ‘wall of wood’ refers to a fleet ready for battle at sea, but the Athenians decide to follow this advice. The collectivity holds the power and they are, after all, the ones who win the battle itself.

That said, the paradox to which Pelling returns readers of the Histories remains: Herodotus proposes no definitive set of nomoi––culture, customs, or laws––that can guarantee the perdurance of freedom won by collective power. So ‘yes and no’ to democracy but also ‘yes and no’ to Spartan isokratia or Ionian isonomia. And ‘yes and no’ to each of the politeiai that Herodotus introduces across the course of his inquiry. As Pelling demonstrates, Herodotus brings readers to appreciate this paradox through his wonderful summoning of myriad causes, explanations, stories, and human and nonhuman actors. By doing so, Herodotus equips us to understand and appreciate the dynamic nature of things, illuminating the reasons for both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Herodotus and the Question Why opens such a reading of Herodotus with skill and intelligence. About the book, then, one can declare with confidence a resounding ‘yes’.

Joel Alden Schlosser Bryn Mawr College [email protected]"

#herodotus #the histories #christopher pelling #joel alden schlosser #historical causation

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