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bao3bei4 · 3 years

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fan language: the victorian imaginary and cnovel fandom

there’s this pinterest image i’ve seen circulating a lot in the past year i’ve been on fandom social media. it’s a drawn infographic of a, i guess, asian-looking woman holding a fan in different places relative to her face to show what the graphic helpfully calls “the language of the fan.”

people like sharing it. they like thinking about what nefarious ancient chinese hanky code shenanigans their favorite fan-toting character might get up to⁠—accidentally or on purpose. and what’s the problem with that?

the problem is that fan language isn’t chinese. it’s victorian. and even then, it’s not really quite victorian at all.

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fans served a primarily utilitarian purpose throughout chinese history. of course, most of the surviving fans we see⁠—and the types of fans we tend to care about⁠—are closer to art pieces. but realistically speaking, the majority of fans were made of cheaper material for more mundane purposes. in china, just like all around the world, people fanned themselves. it got hot!

so here’s a big tipoff. it would be very difficult to use a fan if you had an elaborate language centered around fanning yourself.

you might argue that fine, everyday working people didn’t have a fan language. but wealthy people might have had one. the problem we encounter here is that fans weren’t really gendered. (caveat here that certain types of fans were more popular with women. however, those tended to be the round silk fans, ones that bear no resemblance to the folding fans in the graphic). no disrespect to the gnc old man fuckers in the crowd, but this language isn’t quite masc enough for a tool that someone’s dad might regularly use.

folding fans, we know, reached europe in the 17th century and gained immense popularity in the 18th. it was there that fans began to take on a gendered quality. ariel beaujot describes in their 2012 victorian fashion accessories how middle class women, in the midst of a top shortage, found themselves clutching fans in hopes of securing a husband.

she quotes an article from the illustrated london news, suggesting “women ‘not only’ used fans to ‘move the air and cool themselves but also to express their sentiments.’” general wisdom was that the movement of the fan was sufficiently expressive that it augmented a woman’s displays of emotion. and of course, the more english audiences became aware that it might do so, the more they might use their fans purposefully in that way.

notice, however, that this is no more codified than body language in general is. it turns out that “the language of the fan” was actually created by fan manufacturers at the turn of the 20th century⁠—hundreds of years after their arrival⁠ in europe—to sell more fans. i’m not even kidding right now. the story goes that it was louis duvelleroy of the maison duvelleroy who decided to include pamphlets on the language with each fan sold.

interestingly enough, beaujot suggests that it didn’t really matter what each particular fan sign meant. gentlemen could tell when they were being flirted with. as it happens, meaningful eye contact and a light flutter near the face may be a lingua franca.

so it seems then, the language of the fan is merely part of this victorian imaginary we collectively have today, which in turn itself was itself captivated by china.

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victorian references come up perhaps unexpectedly often in cnovel fandom, most often with regards to modesty.

it’s a bit of an awkward reference considering that chinese traditional fashion⁠—and the ambiguous time periods in which these novels are set⁠—far predate victorian england. it is even more awkward considering that victoria and her covered ankles did um. imperialize china.

but nonetheless, it is common. and to make a point about how ubiquitous it is, here is a link to the twitter search for “sqq victorian.” sqq is the fandom abbreviation for shen qingqiu, the main character of the scum villain’s self-saving system, by the way.

this is an awful lot of results for a search involving a chinese man who spends the entire novel in either real modern-day china or fantasy ancient china. that’s all i’m going to say on the matter, without referencing any specific tweet.

i think people are aware of the anachronism. and i think they don’t mind. even the most cursory research reveals that fan language is european and a revisionist fantasy. wikipedia can tell us this⁠—i checked!

but it doesn’t matter to me whether people are trying to make an internally consistent canon compliant claim, or whether they’re just free associating between fan facts they know. it is, instead, more interesting to me that people consistently refer to this particular bit of history. and that’s what i want to talk about today⁠—the relationship of fandom today to this two hundred odd year span of time in england (roughly stuart to victorian times) and england in that time period to its contemporaneous china.

things will slip a little here. victorian has expanded in timeframe, if only because random guys posting online do not care overly much for respect for the intricacies of british history. china has expanded in geographic location, if only because the english of the time themselves conflated china with all of asia.

in addition, note that i am critiquing a certain perspective on the topic. this is why i write about fan as white here⁠—not because all fans are white⁠—but because the tendencies i’m examining have a clear historical antecedent in whiteness that shapes how white fans encounter these novels.

i’m sure some fans of color participate in these practices. however i don’t really care about that. they are not its main perpetrators nor its main beneficiaries. so personally i am minding my own business on that front.

it’s instead important to me to illuminate the linkage between white as subject and chinese as object in history and in the present that i do argue that fannish products today are built upon.

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it’s not radical, or even new at all, for white audiences to consume⁠—or create their own versions of⁠—chinese art en masse. in many ways the white creators who appear to owe their whole style and aesthetic to their asian peers in turn are just the new chinoiserie.

this is not to say that white people can’t create asian-inspired art. but rather, i am asking you to sit with the discomfort that you may not like the artistic company you keep in the broader view of history, and to consider together what is to be done about that.

now, when i say the new chinoiserie, i first want to establish what the original one is. chinoiserie was a european artistic movement that appeared coincident with the rise in popularity of folding fans that i described above. this is not by coincidence; the european demand for asian imports and the eventual production of lookalikes is the movement itself. so: when we talk about fans, when we talk about china (porcelain), when we talk about tea in england⁠—we are talking about the legacy of chinoiserie.

there are a couple things i want to note here. while english people as a whole had a very tenuous knowledge of what china might be, their appetites for chinoiserie were roughly coincident with national relations with china. as the relationship between england and china moved from trade to out-and-out wars, chinoiserie declined in popularity until china had been safely subjugated once more by the end of the 19th century.

the second thing i want to note on the subject that contrary to what one might think at first, the appeal of chinoiserie was not that it was foreign. eugenia zuroski’s 2013 taste for china examines 18th century english literature and its descriptions of the according material culture with the lens that chinese imports might be formative to english identity, rather than antithetical to it.

beyond that bare thesis, i think it’s also worthwhile to extend her insight that material objects become animated by the literary viewpoints on them. this is true, both in a limited general sense as well as in the sense that english thinkers of the time self-consciously articulated this viewpoint. consider the quote from the illustrated london news above⁠—your fan, that object, says something about you. and not only that, but the objects you surround yourself with ought to.

it’s a bit circular, the idea that written material says that you should allow written material to shape your understanding of physical objects. but it’s both 1) what happened, and 2) integral, i think, to integrating a fannish perspective into the topic.

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japanning is the name for the popular imitative lacquering that english craftspeople developed in domestic response to the demand for lacquerware imports. in the eighteenth century, japanning became an artform especially suited for young women. manuals were published on the subject, urging young women to learn how to paint furniture and other surfaces, encouraging them to rework the designs provided in the text.

it was considered a beneficial activity for them; zuroski describes how it was “associated with commerce and connoisseurship, practical skill and aesthetic judgment.” a skillful japanner, rather than simply obscuring what lay underneath the lacquer, displayed their superior judgment in how they chose to arrange these new canonical figures and effects in a tasteful way to bring out the best qualities of them.

zuroski quotes the first english-language manual on the subject, written in 1688, which explains how japanning allows one to:

alter and correct, take out a piece from one, add a fragment to the next, and make an entire garment compleat in all its parts, though tis wrought out of never so many disagreeing patterns.

this language evokes a very different, very modern practice. it is this english reworking of an asian artform that i think the parallels are most obvious.

white people, through their artistic investment in chinese material objects and aesthetics, integrated them into their own subjectivity. these practices came to say something about the people who participated in them, in a way that had little to do with the country itself. their relationship changed from being a “consumer” of chinese objects to becoming the proprietor of these new aesthetic signifiers.

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i want to talk about this through a few pairs of tensions on the subject that i think characterize common attitudes then and now.

first, consider the relationship between the self and the other: the chinese object as something that is very familiar to you, speaking to something about your own self vs. the chinese object as something that is fundamentally different from you and unknowable to you.

consider: [insert character name] is just like me. he would no doubt like the same things i like, consume the same cultural products. we are the same in some meaningful way vs. the fast standard fic disclaimer that “i tried my best when writing this fic, but i’m a english-speaking westerner, and i’m just writing this for fun so...... [excuses and alterations the person has chosen to make in this light],” going hand-in-hand with a preoccupation with authenticity or even overreliance on the unpaid labor of chinese friends and acquaintances.

consider: hugh honour when he quotes a man from the 1640s claiming “chinoiserie of this even more hybrid kind had become so far removed from genuine Chinese tradition that it was exported from India to China as a novelty to the Chinese themselves”

these tensions coexist, and look how they have been resolved.

second, consider what we vest in objects themselves: beaujot explains how the fan became a sexualized, coquettish object in the hands of a british woman, but was used to great effect in gilbert and sullivan’s 1885 mikado to demonstrate the docility of asian women.

consider: these characters became expressions of your sexual desires and fetishes, even as their 5’10 actors themselves are emasculated.

what is liberating for one necessitates the subjugation and fetishization of the other.

third, consider reactions to the practice: enjoyment of chinese objects as a sign of your cosmopolitan palate vs “so what’s the hype about those ancient chinese gays” pop culture explainers that addressed the unconvinced mainstream.

consider: zuroski describes how both english consumers purchased china in droves, and contemporary publications reported on them. how:

It was in the pages of these papers that the growing popularity of Chinese things in the early eighteenth century acquired the reputation of a “craze”; they portrayed china fanatics as flawed, fragile, and unreliable characters, and frequently cast chinoiserie itself in the same light.

referenda on fannish behavior serve as referenda on the objects of their devotion, and vice versa. as the difference between identity and fetish collapses, they come to be treated as one and the same by not just participants but their observers.

at what point does mxtx fic cease to be chinese?

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finally, it seems readily apparent that attitudes towards chinese objects may in fact have something to do with attitudes about china as a country. i do not want to suggest that these literary concerns are primarily motivated and begot by forces entirely divorced from the real mechanics of power.

here, i want to bring in edward said, and his 1993 culture and imperialism. there, he explains how power and legitimacy go hand in hand. one is direct, and one is purely cultural. he originally wrote this in response to the outsize impact that british novelists have had in the maintenance of empire and throughout decolonization. literature, he argues, gives rise to powerful narratives that constrain our ability to think outside of them.

there’s a little bit of an inversion at play here. these are chinese novels, actually. but they’re being transformed by white narratives and artists. and just as i think the form of the novel is important to said’s critique, i think there’s something to be said about the form that fic takes and how it legitimates itself.

bound up in fandom is the idea that you have a right to create and transform as you please. it is a nice idea, but it is one that is directed towards a certain kind of asymmetry. that is, one where the author has all the power. this is the narrative we hear a lot in the history of fandom⁠—litigious authors and plucky fans, fanspaces always under attack from corporate sanitization.

meanwhile, said builds upon raymond schwab’s narrative of cultural exchange between european writers and cultural products outside the imperial core. said explains that fundamental to these two great borrowings (from greek classics and, in the so-called “oriental renaissance” of the late 18th, early 19th centuries from “india, china, japan, persia, and islam”) is asymmetry.

he had argued prior, in orientalism, that any “cultural exchange” between “partners conscious of inequality” always results in the suffering of the people. and here, he describes how “texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated” without the presence of any actual living people in that tradition.

i will not understate that there is a certain economic dynamic complicating this particular fannish asymmetry. mxtx has profited materially from the success of her works, most fans will not. also secondly, mxtx is um. not dead. LMAO.

but first, the international dynamic of extraction that said described is still present. i do not want to get overly into white attitudes towards china in this post, because i am already thoroughly derailed, but i do believe that they structure how white cnovel fandom encounters this texts.

at any rate, any profit she receives is overwhelmingly due to her domestic popularity, not her international popularity. (i say this because many of her international fans have never given her a cent. in fact, most of them have no real way to.) and moreover, as we talk about the structure of english-language fandom, what does it mean to create chinese cultural products without chinese people?

as white people take ownership over their versions of stories, do we lose something? what narratives about engagement with cnovels might exist outside of the form of classic fandom?

i think a lot of people get the relationship between ideas (the superstructure) and production (the base) confused. oftentimes they will lob in response to criticism, that look! this fic, this fandom, these people are so niche, and so underrepresented in mainstream culture, that their effects are marginal. i am not arguing that anyone’s cql fic causes imperialism. (unless you’re really annoying. then it’s anyone’s game)

i’m instead arguing something a little bit different. i think, given similar inputs, you tend to get similar outputs. i think we live in the world that imperialism built, and we have clear historical predecessors in terms of white appetites for creating, consuming, and transforming chinese objects.

we have already seen, in the case of the fan language meme that began this post, that sometimes we even prefer this white chinoiserie. after all, isn’t it beautiful, too?

i want to bring discomfort to this topic. i want to reject the paradigm of white subject and chinese object; in fact, here in this essay, i have tried to reverse it.

if you are taken aback by the comparisons i make here, how can you make meaningful changes to your fannish practice to address it?

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some concluding thoughts on the matter, because i don’t like being misunderstood!

i am not claiming white fans cannot create fanworks of cnovels or be inspired by asian art or artists. this essay is meant to elaborate on the historical connection between victorian england and cnovel characters and fandom that others have already popularized.

i don’t think people who make victorian jokes are inherently bad or racist. i am encouraging people to think about why we might make them and/or share them

the connections here are meant to be more provocative than strictly literal. (e.g. i don’t literally think writing fanfic is a 1-1 descendant of japanning). these connections are instead meant to 1) make visible the baggage that fans of color often approach fandom with and 2) recontextualize and defamiliarize fannish practice for the purposes of honest critique

please don’t turn this post into being about other different kinds of discourse, or into something that only one “kind” of fan does. please take my words at face value and consider them in good faith. i would really appreciate that.

please feel free to ask me to clarify any statements or supply more in-depth sources :)

#x #-__- another fandom essay sorry

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jostenneil · 3 years

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as much shit as the show naruto gets, which is mostly justified, the show had some gems and interesting points (and it still is a standard even tho some ppl hate to admit it considering Naruto is still being compared to new shows). But I wonder how diff it would be if it was written by a better storyteller like togashi or a shoujo mangaka

I think Naruto is very much a series that over the years has come to garner mass criticism for the wrong things. Like it is without a doubt a terribly flawed series, but not in the way most people tend to posit because their complaints are often driven by misogyny and misery rather than any productive engagement with the text or the ideas it’s trying to posit. The reason that the series has lasted for so long in comparison to so many of its contemporaries is because the framework of the narrative itself is genuinely interesting and something that’s tangibly expanded upon as the plot progresses. The problems in Naruto compound and increase in degree of complexity as the story moves forward because more and more is being revealed about the root of the problems plaguing this war-driven, largely impoverished society. It’s the perfect breeding ground for canon divergence content, because there are so many set-ups and possibilities presented to us either explicitly or implicitly by way of the world naturally expanding.

Where Kishi primarily faltered was in his inability to comprehensively flesh out or resolve almost any of the conflicts or dynamics he created. He was pretty good at establishing the bones of a story (give or take a few worldbuilding errors), but packing on the meat tended to be a big problem for him (and this is also due in part to him sometimes allowing fandom influence to confuse him, so he didn’t fully deliver on ideas he originally had because he thought if people didn’t like them they weren’t worth pursuing). I often joke that Naruto could have turned out better had it been longer, because admittedly, in his defense, I don’t think he had enough time to properly address all of the ideas he created without giving into exhaustion first. That’s something that I think we started to see manifest as he was writing the Fourth War arc, because some of the plot progressions towards the end felt truly contrived and nonsensical, and obviously we’re all aware of how inconclusive the ending itself felt. Naruto as a story itself is a big set-up—if you made a line graph that charted the characters’ emotional well being across the course of the series, I think it’d be reasonable to say they start in the negatives and slowly make their way to the zero line by the end of the war. That should have been a huge turning point for the characters in terms of them feeling more confident in their visions for the future and how they want to work together to tangibly help the villages heal and evolve, but we were robbed of seeing any kind of development along that vein when Kishi decided to just end things with a time-skip chapter. It’s true the Blank Period novels exist, but many of them (not all, I stress, before someone attacks me) are filled with empty meaningless content that did nothing to address the actual problems originally created in Naruto’s world and only dabbled in trivial adventures for the cast as a marketing tactic to keep the franchise thriving. And I get it! Kishi was tired, he still wanted to milk the franchise, and signing off on other authors making up post-canon content was an easy solution. But at the same time, I often wish that the series had just. . . ended at Chapter 699. I firmly believe that a lot of the bad perceptions of the series that exist today are as a result of the lens that content Chapter 700 and onward forces us to look at the series through. The lack of proper closure for certain relationships before they were consummated, the non-existence of any tangible improvement in ninja society, the meaningless adventure arcs (which while very cute for the kids and a great way to keep the franchise alive, still do nothing for the story as a whole)—all of that has contributed to growing skepticism of this series and magnanimity of its faults because the conclusions cast a dark pallor on the potential, which often was not bad at all. Underdeveloped, maybe, but not so unfounded as people often like to claim it is.

And I agree, it would have been really cool to see! I think what’s admirable about a mangaka like Togashi (despite him not being without flaws, either) is that he’s very stubbornly dedicated to his craft and to how he wants to execute it. That’s a kind of grit that I think you absolutely need to have as an author, because sure, being open to criticism is good, but you shouldn’t make yourself so willingly flexible as to allow the story to escape your control. And Togashi obviously also had the advantage of largely being able to publish Hunter x Hunter on his own terms and his own timeline, whereas Naruto was Kishi’s first major series, so he was far more restricted in that aspect. I do wonder how Kishi might have fared had he been published in a monthly magazine, if he’d stuck to his guns about so many of his ideas rather than scrapping them in the face of fandom opinion, or if having a better support system in terms of staff may have allowed him to carry the series on for longer to where he could have properly resolved most of his plot threads. I think a lot of people would agree that while Kishi is certainly a man of many faults, part of what’s also shaped Naruto (and a number of other shounen) for worse is the environment within which WSJ series are produced. It’s not conducive to allowing for the best product to be put out, and at some point I think some authors just resign themselves to that fact rather than try to fight it because they’re tired and they need to make a living. Togashi is really lucky he got to hold the success of Yu Yu Hakusho as leverage so that he could publish Hunter x Hunter as he pleased, and thankfully it turned out to be a really well-fleshed out narrative as a result. (A similar reasoning could apply to many shoujo series as well, obviously, since a majority of the longer series tend to be published in monthly magazines where authors are given ample time to properly develop their plots.)

#naruto #masashi kishimoto #sorry for giving you an essay anon as i am sure you by now know i’m incapable of anything else #i hope this makes sense tho! like this was really fun to talk about and put into proper words #mine:media analysis

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tuiyla · 4 years

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A Definitive History of Bubbline

With “Obsidian” coming out in two days, it really is time for a definitive history of Marceline and Bubblegum’s relationship. And by that I mean the tumultuous road that led us to “Obsidian” from a production and fandom point of view. For a list of Bubbline episodes, check out my Bubbline Guide (and part two) - which I need to update, I know I know. For this post, I wanted to highlight how far this pairing has come and what Bubbline means to queer representation in children’s cartoons.

This is less of an analysis and more of an overview with links to more information on specific incidents to keep it (relatively) brief. I say it’s a definitive history but it isn’t an exhaustive one, so do check out the links included to learn more about how we got here. I realize not everyone cares about these kinds of things but I think it’s important to know how hard Adventure Time’s creators had to fight. Bubbline is a pioneer ship in many ways but it doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves.

Initial Concepts

As is the case with much of Adventure Time, the initial concept of who the characters of Bonnibel and Marceline were going to be is very different than what we ended up getting. @gunterfan1992 explores this and other production tidbits in depth in his book so I do recommend checking that out. The short version is that these two were created to be opposites and with a Betty and Veronica type dynamic in mind where they would both be love interest to the protagonist, Finn.

This didn’t quite end up being the case but remnants of this concept are seen in “Go With Me” (March, 2011), the episode with the first on-screen Bubbline interaction. As Marcy helps - and sabotages - Finn in asking Bonnie out, she also becomes a potential love interest for him but she shuts him down immediately. So while Finn’s crush on PB continues, the notion that Marceline would be part of a love triangle is dismissed. Instead, this first Bonnie and Marcy interaction established that the two already know each other and there’s some bitterness in that past.

“What Was Missing” and the Mathematical Controversy

A potential preexisting relationship between the two was further explored in “What Was Missing” (September 2011) just a season later. The episode was written and storyboarded by Rebecca Sugar and eventual showrunner Adam Muto. Sugar was responsible for much of the character depth added to Marceline and later even played, quite aptly, her mother in the Stakes miniseries. It was Sugar who wrote the now beyond iconic “I’m Just Your Problem” based on personal experiences and suggested that Marcy and Bonnie be queer characters with a complicated romantic past.

��What Was Missing” was hugely important in how it hinted at a complex relationship through character interactions, Marceline’s song, and the last scene twist with PB’s shirt. The AT crew were supportive of the idea and sneaked in plenty of queer subtext, but this is where I have to point out that 2011 was a very different time and it’s thanks, in part, to Bubbline that things have changed. Autostraddle’s article from back when covers what is now known as the Mathematical controversy. Audiences picked up on the subtext and Cartoon Network was not having it. The popularity of the ship soared but the execs were not taking to queer implications kindly.

Great Bubbline Drought

So, the ship has sailed but controversy looms over it. “What Was Missing” s subtle by today’s standards but it was enough to keep Marceline and Bubblegum apart for two years on-screen. Each character went through wonderful development in the meantime, as did the show itself, but there’s a certain sense of bitterness to what came to be known as the Great Bubbline Drought. CN got so afraid of the potential backlash that they waited two years to have a new episode featuring the pair, “Sky Witch” (July 2013), by which point Sugar had left AT to work on her own show, Steven Universe. I’m happy that Sugar got to create her own show and push for even more queer representation, but it’s also sad that she never got to write more for the ship she pioneered.

“Sky Witch” still happened, though, and featured even more subtext, from PB’s side this time around. The shirt returned and there was hope as Marcy and Bonnie were seen hanging out together more often (”Red Starved” and “Princess Day”). Another controversy threatened to emerge in August 2014 when Olivia Olson, Marceline’s voice actress said that creator Pendleton Ward had confirmed a pre-show Bubbline romance. It was a messy ordeal with deleted tweets and questions about whether the two could get together again in the series. Fortunately, though, things changed in the three years between 2011 to 2014 and another Bubbline drought didn’t follow.

The Season That Changed Everything

It took another two years after “Sky Witch” but the ball was finally, inevitably, relentlessly rolling. “Varmints” premiered in November 2015 and three episodes later, the Stakes miniseries kicked off. What season 7 meant wasn’t just breadcrumbs and (not so) subtle songs anymore: suddenly, there were too many Bubbline moments to count. “Varmints” served as a follow-up to “What Was Missing” and a final reconciliation, and though Stakes was primarily about Marcy, it also developed her relationship with Bonnie. Afterwards, it became clear that Bubbline was heading somewhere.

It’s worth noting that the cultural context also changed between when “Sky Witch” and “Varmints” aired. In December 2014, The Legend of Korra ended with Korra and Asami beginning their romantic relationship, and Rebecca Sugar was making Steven Universe more and more explicitly queer by the day. Adventure Time started the ball rolling but now it wasn’t alone as a popular Western cable cartoon with queer characters. However, Bubbline was still very much subtext at this point, just with significantly more hope of becoming more.

Late Series Entanglement

But at what point does subtext become plain text? Bubbline fans sure did have fun with that question between Stakes and the finale. Bonnie and Marcy became near inseparable, with most of their major appearances involving one another from this point on. These included the meet the adoptive dad date “Broke His Crown” (March 2016), the Elements miniseries (April 2017) and the nigh on obnoxiously on the nose “Marcy & Hunson” (December 2017). In fact, all but two of Marceline’s major appearances from season 7 on included Bonnie - the exceptions being “Everything Stays” as part of Stakes, and “Ketchup”, which really wasn’t any less gay.

Bubbline moments really did become too many to count, with the vast majority of them having romantic implications. And with queer representation becoming more and more prominent in Western animation, canon Bubbline romance seemed like a question of when rather than if. I’d like to point out here how this was often frustrating, though. After the very rocky start, this relationship was thriving and was really basically confirmed, but that last little push to make it undeniably a part of queer history was still needed.

“Come on!” - The End and Beyond

The almost three years that passed between Stakes and “Come Along With Me” (September 2018) were much more tolerable than the Drought; after all, there was plenty of Bubbline content in the later seasons. The big question as the finale came was whether Adventure Time would fizzle out on its early pioneer of a wlw ship or follow through, once and for all. Almost four years after LoK ended and just before season 1 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power dropped, Marcy and Bonnie had an emotional moment, kissed on screen, and ended the series together.

The intricacies of why a kiss was needed as a signifier of romance is a discussion for another day. But wouldn’t it have been strange after almost a decade of build-up for them not to seal the deal with a kiss? And to think it almost didn’t happen, as by that point it was so obvious they were together. Again, I direct your attention towards Paul Thomas’s book, he explains how it was storyboard artist Hanna K. Nyström’s call to add this final detail. Because, come on! Sometimes, you need to be as clear as possible, and that’s the case with queer representation in animation.

Since the finale, the comics have been continuing the Bubbline train - which are not technically canon but one can have fun regardless. In any case, the existence of Marcy and Bonnie’s relationship, of their queer identities, is not something that can reasonably be denied. It was a long road, and, make no mistake, an arduous one, but this is the story of a win. A win for storytelling and a win for wlw relationships.

We’ll Build Our Own Forever

So, there you have it, a Bubbline timeline of sorts. In March of 2011 we had the first on-screen interaction and now, in November of 2020, we’re getting a 45-minute-long special with the two of them as the central characters. They’re canonically in love, with King Princess covers of Bubbline songs and more. I tried to contain myself, for once, and not write too much. I think it’s important that people have a general idea of just how monumental all of this is and how, even just 9 years ago, “Obsidian” would have been totally inconceivable.

Some of this might have come as a surprise to you. It’s certainly not been easy to get to where we are now with Bubbline and it’s yet to be seen how open “Obsidian” will be about the relationship. I’ve been talking about Bubbline for years and attempted to chronicle their relationship many times so I’m happy I’ve finally done it from this perspective as well.

Adventure Time: Distant Lands “Obsidian” is streaming on Nov 19 on HBO Max. If you can, stream it so we can show that there’s popular demand for stories like that of an angry vampire and a despotic piece of gum.

#Adventure Time #bubbline #obsidian #marceline abadeer #adventure time distant lands #at #pb #my thoughts #definitive history of bubbline #there you have it folks #princess bubblegum

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rheaitis · 3 years

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growing up gay on the internet

(apologies if you’ve seen this on twitter)

The first time I told a girl I loved her, she'd been telling me stories from fanfic she'd been reading. Not right then, a few hours before. When I told her, she stared at me, horrified, and said, "You're trying to make everything like that fanfic." [friends to lovers, slow-burn] Harry Potter, of course. I think Ron/Harry? Of course because everyone I knew in school read Harry Potter, often in great heaving knots gathered around OotP till teachers intervened. Many of us then read fanfic because we just wanted more stories in that place.

I read in other fandoms, at the time X-Men. I am still angry about X3, not just because X3 was bad, but because it wasn't Minisinoo's Grail in re Warren Worthington III. Not that I expected it have a queer Warren. I didn't know at the time that Warren is canonically queer in at least one timeline, and I never expected satisfying queerness from media in any case. This was 2004, early 2005, and wee teenaged Rhea knew better. I was wrong, but not about the movieverse unqueering X-Men. (Incidentally, if you haven't, please watch @eruthrosish's amazing Straightening Up the House, which talks about just this)

But anyway, back to 2004-05, a very little and increasingly angry Rhea trying to explain that it was love! Uninfluenced by fanfic! All me, baby! I mean, it wasn't true, a lot of that was very definitely the fanfic. Where else was I gonna find models of happy queers? Not in Indian media, for sure. In American... Tara Maclay died, Will Truman never got any dates, Lex Luthor was only coded queer. I was years away from reading queer lit, and even there fandom was my guide.

I was lucky, insofar as I went to a single-sex school where a lot of people were gay-for-the-stay, including the girl I was confessing to. But for-the-stay, mostly, leading to my current consternation about the batch group chat I've just joined. The girls I kissed, tho, the girl I was in love with, they weren't thinking of queer futures, and all my dreaming happened with my nose pushed up to the screen of boxy desktops with limited or paid-by-the-hour internet. The last three years of school, I skulked around fandom. I read everything. First as much queer Harry Potter stuff as I could find, then whatever my favourite authors had written in other fandoms, then whatever their friends had written in those. The Magneto in my heart is penknife's wry, wounded one written in the wake of the 1st film. I read *so much* in so many fandoms, wandering around forums and livejournal blogs and the personal & communal websites where people like @astolat and @rageprufrock and @seperis hosted their fanfic. Smallville and pre-Cas SPN and SG1/SGA.

And of course, Harry Potter. We rp'ed Harry Potter en masse, in 04-05: my batch the Marauder generation, our juniors the protagonist's. Rampages and letter-writing and patched-together friendships across school, and in the middle of it, I with my trove of queer fic in a dis/similar school.

This is not, btw, to commend fandom, then or now, but especially then, 5-2 years before RaceFail. (i-was-there-gandalf.gif) Even in my limited (by pocket-money) and very single-minded experience, it was misogynistic & racist, but I could see a brown girl on TV any time. Probably as a joke if she was dark and fat like me [by the standards of my community at the time] but there, anyway. There and straight. Fire had come out when I was learning I liked girls, but it wasn't exactly accessible. Girlfriend had just been released & I hated it.

All I wanted from fandom was to be flooded with stories of queerness, the possibility that I could become an adult without suddenly wanting to kiss (or marry!) men, that it didn't have to be a phase I would grow out of, or an entanglement, like Ma said, from which I could escape. A paucity of imagination, perhaps. I didn't know to demand canonical queers till I was in college. I still barely know how to demand canonical Indian queers. All I wanted was girls kissing girls, not as a game or dare or all the excuses the girls kissing me used. Queer love, queer domesticity, queer pining that ended in mutual confessions, fandom's favourite games. I'd have done so much better in my board exams if I hadn't been spending every free minute reading about Remus/Sirius or Lex/Clark or Jack/Daniel. (Notice the lack of f/f)

A note also in memory of all the we're-not-gay-we-just-love-each-other fic that I very possibly read against the grain as people escaping the shackles of comphet because of the strength of their love. (I didn't know the word comphet. What I was thinking was very awkward.)

Fandom found me friends. Fandom found me community. Fandom raised me in the bits of my life I couldn't admit to any of the adults around me. But honestly, fandom's job was done the moment it gave me access to queer texts, queer narratives I never expected from canonised media. I could go home from school, ferret my pendrive from its hiding place, and just spend a couple hours every day reading about Sirius & Remus raising Harry, Clark & Lex driving to the ocean, Jack & Daniel wandering alien sands. Queer people! Not defined/restricted by queerness! okay fine, cis white dudes, primarily. but that's a fandom problem, and I was used, anyway, to all my English-language media being about white folk. Queer POC still blew my mind in 2015, desi queers still do. Queer people! Who can pronounce my name maybe?!

If you'd told me at 15 that I could read published books that had queer people in them... Well. And again, fandom did that work for me as well. That's how I discovered queer lit beyond, like, Oscar Wilde. Fandom recc'd me Maurice & Mary Renault & Sarah Waters.

I usually conclude this kinda spiel by saying fandom helped me find love, and that's true, but only in a roundabout way each time. The first girlfriend I had was the girl at the beginning of this story; three years after we broke up, I met @filianoctis and immediately told her Renault stories: the novel, first, and then fic. Yes and no, basically. But fandom let me imagine it, in all the stories of queer adults buying groceries and making beds, drinking beer and raising kids. Desire I knew I had the first time I wanted to kiss a girl but a future was harder to imagine. The first time I told a girl I loved her, the 2009 decriminalisation was four+ years away. I had no queer adults to turn to; I wasn't entirely sure adults could be queer. Nothing in my experience suggested it.

Except fanfic.

#queerness #here and queer

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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If you still want an excuse to address the textuality of destiel, I will pretend to be a shit anon bc i'm honestly a sucker for your big destiel in canon posts :D cOUGHS i mean, (disguises my voice to sound especially wanky) supernatural isnt a destiel glory hole and i'll bet you have no way of proving otherwise!!!

I went searching for a Becky gif to make a comedic response to this but instead found reformed!Becky and between my two unfinished videos and my giant fic cowrite project thing I found a mood so first before I answer your question let me segue

Okay now to resume

The experience-its calculated mystery, its silliness-was fun, but the whole phenomenon begs the question: what for? The trend clearly owes some debt to Situationist ideas, guerrilla theater, and other tactics of creative civil disobedience, but where the Situationists were on some level attempting to extend a Marxist critique into a post-consumerist, leisure-class age-their spraypainted slogans on the sides of buildings in Paris in 1968 may have been elliptical and self-consciously vague, but they were at least identifiable as anticapitalist critique-these flash mobs seem designed to resist such interpretation. The mob I participated in did take place in a giant toy store, and the monster we ironically celebrated was one of the few objects in sight not for sale, but the event seemed intended primarily for the sake of public absurdity.

– “Bob Berens”, The Last Page, Dissent Magazine.

(#This Is A Berens Appreciation Blog)

How about I just masterpost a few topics of mine on the matter to start and see if there’s any you missed.

Social Codes: Literally How The World Works And I’m Not Sure Why Fandom Forgets -- Like why the squiggly shapes on your screen right now mean things and what does that mean reviewing text

Highlighting Fandom Absurdity: Square Peg in a Round Hole? - only marginally attached to text or queer argumentation as much as pointing out the blatant absurdities amplified in general fandom discussion.

The Problem With Dreamhunter (Is That There Is No Problem With Dreamhunter): WLW vs MLM bias or shipping culture effects - fandom’s had its pants down for almost two seasons and hasn’t even realized it yet.

Similar commentary, but het vs queer

Gay Rage Rant: The Magic Moving Checkbox

*Waves Epistemology of the closet loudly*

Representation, Authorial Diversity, and more - have you noticed a shift from the metanarrative hostility of early SPN towards the LGBT community to a more current dialogue, ships aside?

After reading the above, Knowing the Authors more than Fandom Holes

Random old rec list of blogs that discuss it from established angle

That alone is more solid of a start than any length of pointing out the current structure.

Like here, lemme pitch this guys. This is gonna be a weird segue to the ask but bear with.

If the father, mother, big brother, cursed child theme is there -- jack to sam, for example, cas echoing mary over jack, dean regressing without cas textually to grieving john, wouldn’t the true break in the chain being letting dean and castiel both move on like john and mary finally did, and sam getting his grown-man moment to go from being jack’s big brother in absence of his father and mother in S13-- into being his father then?

As John to Sam and Dean: I’m sorry/you’re a grown man/I’m proud of you; and back You loved us/fought for us -- like Dean to Sam in Swan Song, “You’re a grown man, and I can’t keep treating you like a kid anymore.” And in Jensen’s 15.04 the cold open to the invaded bunker with Benny using a line Dean has used twice in face of death: “See you on the other side.” -- how wild would that be to foreshadow an ending huh.

Cuz it’s seeming to move on from the Wife dying but not chasing revenge and more destruction, but ultimately being happy together in a restructured heaven -- say, idk, Cas echoing Rowena for the heaventhrone, much like John and Mary, even while Sam takes a few years to catch up because he has a godchild Jack to help raise right to make earth itself better or something in the vein while Eileen helps rebuild the AMOL legacy--huntercorp if you will.

Okay so, weird place to pitch that right?

Here’s the thing-- go back over. Read that premise. I have a question. Is that text or is that just the subtext? Think hard beyond just my shorthand summary, dig through those moments and how they’re constantly self referential in an almost limitless stream since S12.

Whether that thought, spec or concept is how it goes or not, the very ability to discuss this resolutely at the end and these identifiers have mapped their paths so well and so far, it’s... fairly self explanatory. At this point not only is it a thousand little textual things you can find me nailing down in just about anything tagged “my meta” on my blog, it’s about literal respect to the entire body of text and basic social codes. No amount of fandom noise is about to make me make my queer content or goalposts for it hop on command, that’s for fuckin’ sure.

So there, anon. Hope that scratched an itch???

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collaborationandresearchproposal · 3 years

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Thursday 29th April, Research Report: Lycanthropy and the hays code

Notable points * lycanthropy seems to be synonymous with homosexuality- parallels between Teen Wolf and Buffy The Vampire Slayer's respective coming out scenes. * The Queer-ness of the character Remus Lupin from the Harry Potter books and film series. Many fans head cannon and write slash fics about Remus and Sirius' romance and relationship, reading the characters as queer. The ship, named 'Wolf Star' is quite popular and well known within the fandom. Many fans feel there is enough evidence to build this relationship on; Remus and Sirius' ghosts stood next to each other in the resurrection stone, mirroring Harry's parents, a canonically married couple. They also bought Harry a joint present for his birthday and know the intricacies of each others personalities. Dumbledore also infamously told Sirius to 'lie low at Lupins.' But the problem here, as the article points out, is that Rowling doesn't acknowledge Lupin as queer, despite the homoerotic cues in the writings, and instead gives him a female love interest and admits that Lupins Lycantrhopy is a metaphor for AIDS/HIV. She has further dismissed any alternative readings of the character, disappointing fans' hopes of there being a shred of representation in a queer monster who is actually queer. This sort of behaviour from authors and creators is what turns Queer-coding into the more harmful and frustrating Queer-baiting. A large majority of queer representation comes from connotations and interpretations. the clues are there and queer audiences do pick them up. However this grey area allows allows straight culture to use queerness for pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting to it. Modern examples of this are CW's Supernatural and BBC's Sherlock. I can't personally speak for Supernatural but having watched Sherlock with the advantage of a queer eye, I can say with confidence that it is a prime example of queer-baiting. there is clear homoerotic subtext between Sherlock and John and even Sherlock and Moriarty. I Personally think it's entirely romantic as I head cannon Sherlock to be Asexual or at least on that spectrum but the point is, it is not just wishful thinking or pushing of a narrative. It's manipulation. Queer-baiting takes advantage of an already vulnerable group of people by preying on their desire for representation in the media.

In modern media werewolf's are often portrayed as having chiselled bodies and looming over each other. The 1985 Teen Wolf received a television reboot and it's fair to say it got reasonably more progressive. It seemed interested in queering the werewolf narrative and in a sly moment of gender-bending the traditional Little Red Riding Hood narrative, protagonist Scott receives the Bite from a male werewolf while wearing a Little Red Hoodie (‘Wolf Moon’). Additionally, the show features LGBTQ characters while Scott’s human best friend Stiles visits a gay bar and makes friends with a group of drag queens in startling contrast to the gay panic of the 1985 film’s version of Stiles. By midway through the show’s second season, the slash pairing that had proved dominant in the fandom was Stiles and wannabe-Alpha Derek Hale. The two characters, who operate in the narrative as belligerent and begrudging allies, rapidly became a slash phenomenon, due, in part, to the chemistry and comic timing between actors Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien. The narrative is further subverted when Derek is raped by an adult human woman.

The pair 'Sterek' gained so much traction that it caught the attention of MTV and the cast and crew behind the show. So much so that they released a video of Hoechlin and O'Brien cuddling on a boat, asking fans to vote for Teen Wolf for this years Choice Summer TV Show at the Teen Choice Awards. This was big as it acknowledged fans and slash flics and the pairing itself as a possibility and many queer voices who watched the show felt heard and validated. However this didn't last long. MTV released a video on the official Teen Wolf Facebook, this time featuring O’Brien asking fans to vote for Teen Wolf in a TV Guide Poll. O’Brien joked that if fans did not vote, then the show would kill off its sole remaining gay character and one of the few remaining non-white characters on the show, Danny. The Teen Wolf Facebook released the video with the following caption: ‘Keep #TeenWolf in first place! Heed Dylan and Linden’s advice or we might have to. #KillDanny’ (Teen Wolf). The show’s social media team then attempted to make the #KillDanny tag go viral on Facebook and twitter, but fans, understandably, were not amused, primarily using the tag for outraged tweets to MTV (Baker-Whitelaw).Such blatant disregard for fans’ concerns about queer representation on the show alienated a large number of fans, especially when coupled with Jeff Davis’ more frequently dismissive and condescending comments about the Sterek pairing where he had been enthusiastic and even encouraging of the ship. As seasons wore on without any indication that Sterek would indeed become canon, it became clear that MTV and Jeff Davis had been queer-baiting Sterek fans as a marketing technique and that the unique interplay that fans had enjoyed with Davis, which offered a new kind of truly interactive fandom had, in fact, been something of an illusion. ' serial killer Hannibal Lecter and his love interest Will Graham in Hannibal, and reanimated gay corpses Kieren, Simon, and Rick in In the Flesh. Notably, both series have received an overwhelmingly positive response from fans and critics who have applauded the series for taking their queer monsters beyond mere coding and into explicit text. The warm reception of Hannibal and In the Flesh’s handling of queer representation by fans, and the continuing frustration with Teen Wolf’s queer-baiting and the appropriative nature of Remus Lupin’s narrative in Harry Potter, belie a desire not only for better queer representation, but also for more complex re-articulations of queer monstrosity' the symbolic and narrative trappings of monsters are often used as metaphors for queerness without actually acknowledging the positive behind that queer identity or even confirming the queer identity at all. Another positive example is the miniseries Good Omens. Based on the book of the same name, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Pretty much the whole fandom believe That the two leads, Crowley and Aziraphale are in a romantic relationship. They've known each other for centuries and perhaps what was the main fuel to this ships fire was the episode 3 cold open. Even fans who have only read the book seem to support these two as a couple and what's perhaps even more amazing is Gaiman’s response on twitter. "I wrote it as a love story. They acted it as a love story. You saw it as a love story. How much more proof do you need?" and "I wouldn't exclude the ideas that they are ace, or aromantic, or trans. They are an angel and a demon, not as make humans, per the book. Occult/Ethereal beings don't have sexes, something we tried to reflect in the casting. Whatever Crowley and Aziraphale are, it's a love story." It's beautiful because not only does it confirm that they are in love but it also leaves room for interpretations of what kind of relationship they have together.

https://dialogues.rutgers.edu/images/Journals_PDF/2017-18-dialogues-web_e6db3.pdf#page=164

In the year 1922, when cinema was gaining traction and popularity, The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) hired a devout Presbyterian, Will H. Hays as its head. Eight years later, in 1930, the MPPDA ratified the Motion Picture Production Code. Also known as the Hays Code, these guidelines were set up as “a list of rules that studios could follow to avoid the censors’ wrath” one specific line read “sexual perversion or any inference to it is forbidden” This era in censorship set the stage for a culture in which the stereotypical behaviour of homosexuals, or any behaviour deviating from the traditional gender roles, is seen as dangerous, evil, and even fatal. By representing coded homosexual characters as depressed, perverse, and succumbing to punishing ends, it shifted social subconscious beliefs of LGBT individuals in real life to those represented on screen. Media often teaches us how to feel about others and ourselves – e.g., it promotes specific body types and clothing styles. In the same way, by promoting gendered behaviour and banning homosexuality, it spread a message that homosexuality was not fit to be viewed openly. Although themes of homosexuality were banned they were definitely alluded to and that continues today.

#researchproposal

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captain-aralias · 5 years

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“Fuck the Mage” – a look at the politics of Carry On’s most and least popular characters

I’ve written this not to try and make anyone feel bad about liking Baz, or Fiona, or Natasha, or any of Baz’s family (I like Baz and Baz’s family). I haven’t even written it to try and make it OK to like the Mage, or to stop it being OK not to like him. (It’s OK to not like him – he’s a bad guy.)

But we’re coming up to another general election. Today is actually the day of the Conservative party manifesto launch! And I said I would write this to @basic-banshee, who I like and admire, and who was right to say Baz is a Tory earlier in the week.

It feels like the right time.

I should also say now that I don’t closely follow politics. This isn’t my specialist subject. I’m just British and I live with a hardcore socialist.

I also think I said all of these things in The Mage’s Heir already, so if you want you can read that instead. It has vampire sex too, which this doesn’t.

(Keep reading will take you to an essay that is almost five thousand words long. So strap in.)

---

"One will come to end us; and one will bring his fall” - the narrative drive of the Chosen One story

It is a truth universally acknowledged that ‘Carry On’ is based on ‘Harry Potter’. More than that, though, it’s specifically a challenge to the kind of book that Potter is – in which a hero is chosen and fulfils his destiny defeating the big bad. It purposefully subverts the expectations of readers familiar with that sort of story.

That means that, where the villain in ‘Harry Potter’ is a racial supremacist who is obviously and actively evil, the supposed big-bad villain in ‘Carry On’ doesn’t really exist. The Humdrum is just an echo of Simon, who by the end of the book identifies himself as the villain as well as the hero. This is a neat twist on the format. It isn’t supposed to be an argument that all heroes are actually the causes of their own destruction, although you could read it that way.

The real villain is the Mage. Who in classic Dumbledore fashion left Simon to be raised in horrible conditions and never gave him enough information to make his own choices. He also murders Ebb, locks Baz in a coffin in inhumane conditions, and let vampires into Watford – an event that directly or indirectly led to the death of Natasha Grimm-Pitch.

This is again a twist on the format. The Mage fills the role of the wise mentor and we find out as early as ‘Fangirl’ that he’s Simon’s father. Even though there’s a strong movement that argues that Dumbledore is a manipulative dick who used to date a Nazi, I don’t think anyone would call him the villain of Potter. He’s still far more good than bad and he’s still absolutely necessary in helping Harry work out how to defeat Voldemort.

That’s why the Mage has to be the villain – it’s because you wouldn’t expect it of the person in his narrative role or with his political views. (I’d guess it’s not supposed to be a statement about all wise mentors, though it could be. Or even all socialist reformers.) It’s also because the kinds of things that Dumbledore did to Harry are worse when viewed through the more personal lens of YA romance, rather than the more traditional school-story fantasy of Potter.

Fandom is essentially united in its absolute condemnation of the Mage as a character.

He’s almost always written as an abusive father in fic. (This is particularly noticeable for me in non-magic AUs where he often physically and mentally hurts Simon outside of the fantasy genre where sending a child to take on a dragon is loosely acceptable.)

Penny tells us that he’s sexist (although Agatha – who also doesn’t like the Mage – points out that it’s possible the Mage just hates everyone). Penny tells us that anyone can call themselves the ‘Great Reformer’ and she’s right. The Mage’s Men are actively equated to Nazis through their raids, which is backed up by other familiar emotive language like ‘banned books, banned phrases’.

But the thing is, the Mage really was a great reformer. And Baz’s family really were a bunch of privileged, self-centred assholes who deserved not to be in charge, no matter how much we like them. We don’t talk about it much, beyond how Malcolm’s (very standardly conservative) homophobia affects Baz on a personal level, because the emotions of the story lead us down a different path.

Baz is the romantic hero, Natasha Pitch is his dead and wronged mother, and the Mage is the villain. Not because he’s a Nazi (he isn’t). Not even because he killed Ebb or imprisoned Baz.

It’s primarily because, unlike Natasha, he isn’t a good parent.

Which is fine. It makes sense for all the reasons above, and the Mage is a bad parent

But the problem with ‘Carry On’ being an inversion of the tropes of traditional narratives is that we end up with a canon that (even though it’s full of POC characters and gay characters and disabled characters) almost asks us to be OK with the politics of Baz’s family and class, because we like Baz and we don’t like the Mage.

And they’re not really OK.

“Not one of ours” – the Old Families as Conservatives

I’ll talk more about the Mage later, but he exists as a reaction to the Pitches, so let’s talk about their political leanings first. Specifically, I’m going to talk about Loyalty, The Other, Vampires, and Taxes.

Ban wrote a nice and also brief description of what Conservatives/Tories are to start you off, if you didn’t read it. Later an anon (sorry if this was you!) said that Rainbow would never have really meant for Baz to be read as a Tory.

But I’m pretty sure she did and I respect how much she didn’t shy away from it.

In fact, the only way I can imagine Baz and his family not voting Conservative/Tory is if they just didn’t vote at all, because they thought Normal politics were unimportant. Which is also a highly privileged position to take as it assumes that none of them will ever need to take advantage of Normal public services and that it’s no concern of theirs what happens to everyone else in the country i.e. this is the one situation where not voting Tory is actually the most Tory thing you could ever do.

1. Loyalty

Now obviously Baz’s family do care – passionately – about the people they care about. This is one of their most appealing characteristics as characters. It’s very likeable and understandable. Rainbow has suggested Baz is a Hufflepuff. Hardworking – and (this is the key) loyal. I see it, although I think he would have turned out very differently if he’d been told from the age of eleven that this is who he was, rather than being essentially told he was a Slytherin. But that’s a detour.

The problem with being loyal is that there are people you aren’t loyal to, and you can see this clearly in the Pitches. The people they love must be protected, even at the expense of everyone else. Its barely a choice. Although the Pitches would never betray each other, they’re famous betrayers.

I adore Fiona, she’s one of my favourite characters. But she is also – as Rainbow stated recently – ‘a dangerous lunatic’. She is hardly bothered when the specific action that she insights Baz (a child) to take against Simon (a child who hasn’t done anything to her) causes Philippa Stainton (another child who really hasn’t done anything to her) to be permanently disabled.

Baz is almost unable to comment on how this event makes him feel even in his POV - probably because he’s loyal and he doesn’t want to criticise Fiona. Although we know it causes him to stop trying to kill Simon, so I’d guess that it troubled him, even if it didn’t trouble Fiona. (We’ll come back to Baz as part of his family later.)

2. The Other

If Natasha were still in charge of Watford, Trixie wouldn’t be allowed to attend. Gareth wouldn’t be allowed to attend. Simon wouldn’t be allowed to attend. The Minotaur worked on the grounds, since ‘creatures weren’t allowed on the staff’ (which is horrifically racist language, even if it’s true.)

Oddly, Simon is able to voice this within the text (probably because he’s been hanging around with the Mage so much), although his opinion is disregarded because it sounds naïve and because even he tell us that he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

“I still don’t think it’s a war,” Agatha insists. “It’s just politics, just like in the Normal world. The Mage has power, and the Old Families want it back. They’ll bitch and moan and cut deals and throw parties---” “It’s not just politics.” Simon leans towards her, pointing. “It’s right and wrong.” Agatha rolls her eyes. “But that’s what the other side says, too.” … “It’s not just politics,” he says again. “It’s right. And wrong. It’s our lives. If the Old Families had their way, I wouldn’t even be here. They wouldn’t have let me into Watford.” “But that wasn’t personal, Simon,” Agatha says. “It’s because you’re a Normal.”

Firstly – it probably was personal, let’s face it. But secondly – even if it wasn’t personal-personal, it’s still an example of a prejudice that echoes the distain people like the Malfoys have for ‘Mudbloods’. Just because Simon could be the first Normal to gain magic, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be allowed to join Watford. The Mage shouldn’t have to give him a title and a sword just to get him in.

Simon’s right, even if he doesn’t mean it this way. Politics affects people’s lives.

“Ask Natasha Grimm-Pitch about suicide rates among low-magicians,” the Mage tells Mitali Bunce – who is right that killing people isn’t the answer, but also not nearly as progressive as she thinks she is. “Ask your Coven what they’re doing to fight pixie sticks and every other magickal disease that doesn’t affect their own sons and daughters.

3. Vampires as a specific example of the Other

Natasha and the Old Families were in charge when Nicodemus Petty joined the vampires. It wasn’t the Mage who struck Nicodemus’s name from the book and pulled out his fangs. Which we’re told is fine, actually, because it’s against Mage Law. Even though the idea of this happening to Baz is horrific and unthinkable, and even though we have no evidence that Nicky ever killed anyone. Just that he wasn’t human.

If you’ve read ‘The Mage’s Heir’ you’ll know I think Nicky is a very interesting character to bring into this space. He’s powerful and he’s innovative, inventing spells Baz has never heard of even after he has his magic taken away from him. He’s like the Mage, and like the Mage (who is from Wales, which is traditionally a very poor area of the UK), he’s clearly from a low-class family. The accent that both he and Ebb have is East-End London, which means they’re poor. Even though they’re powerful magicians and therefore theoretically as valid as the Pitches in the Pitch-world order.

Yes, he chose to become a vampire and Baz didn’t but partly he’s punished for being poor and trying to become more powerful in a way that the Pitches don’t understand. He wasn’t necessarily going to kill anyone.

Are vampires even bad?

Because Baz isn’t bad – or not just because he’s a vampire, anyway. We see Simon wrestling with this in ‘Wayward Son’ and he struggles because of his personal hatred for Lamb.

Even (and perhaps especially) under the Mage, the World of Mages just uniformly accepts that a whole group is evil. I think ‘Wayward Son’ begins to trouble this, even as Lamb betrays Baz and vampires are the enemy. But we find Baz actually thinking: “I’m not used to thinking of vampires as fellow victims.”

What he means is that he’s not used to thinking of them as people.

It’s completely appalling to keep Baz in a coffin – I’m sure we all agree with that. If it was another vampire, would the Old Families and the rest of the World of Mages feel the same way, or would they think that was a proportionate response?

When we talk about the death of Natasha Pitch we talk about the Humdrum having killed her, or the Mage having killed her. The vampires are presented as a random instrument of death (which if they had been taken over the Humdrum they would have been), rather than people who were paid by the Mage to do something.

The way the situation is presented to us in the Record, by Natasha herself, and by popular memory is that monsters broke into the nursery and would have killed Baz and Natasha if she hadn’t responded as she did.

However, Nicky says to Baz: “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he meant for your mum to die – but I don’t think he minded much. Made everything a lot easier.”

So it’s at least worth contemplating a reality where this is what happened:

The Mage paid vampires to break into Watford and cause a disturbance. He didn’t think anyone would die.

One of the vampires bit Baz but didn’t intend to either kill or Turn him, which we know is now a possibility but which nobody in the World of Mages had ever bothered to find out.

Even if the vampires did intend to Turn Baz, it could easily be a political statement – an opportunity to show that even a Pitch could be a vampire and that the World of Mages might like to reappraise its choices.

When Natasha arrived, she saw her son being threatened, acted on her prejudices and didn’t ask questions. She murdered a large group of people who had broken into her school, but who otherwise hadn’t necessarily done anything wrong.

I don’t say this is what happened, just that it’s a possibility.

Even if these vampires are evil and this was a terrorist attack (a phrase I’m using deliberately) the fact that presumably most of the others aren’t evil is still relevant. We barely scratch the surface of what this means for the World of Mages even in ‘Wayward Son’.

One of the things I think that’s most interesting about the Mage’s rise to power is that he does using the same hateful speech that the Old Families use, just exclusively directed against the Dark Creatures, rather than all creatures and low-powered magicians. It probably made it easier for him to gain support because these are views that everyone holds, but it’s completely at odds with his whole stated reason for being in charge.

Definitely not ideal. We do deserve better.

4. Taxes

Baz also tells us that his family are against the idea of taxation, which the Mage has introduced largely to benefit people who aren’t like Baz.

‘Taxes to cover all the Mage’s initiatives; most notably to pay for every faun bastard and centaur cousin, and every pathetic excuse for a magician in the Realm to attend Watford. The World of Mages never had taxes before. Taxes were for Normals, we had standards instead.’

I’m writing this post in November 2019, about a week after the Labour manifesto has dropped. It has this to say about taxes:

Universal public services, collectively provided through general taxation and free at the point of use for all, are how we guarantee the right to a good life. Public services do more than make sure everyone has the basics. They create shared experiences and strengthen social bonds. They make our lives richer and more fulfilling. A decade of Tory cuts has pushed our public services to breaking point. Labour offers real change – we will make Britain’s public services the best and most extensive in the world. We will pay for this by creating a fairer taxation system, asking for a little more from those with the broadest shoulders, and making sure that everyone pays what they owe. We will reverse some of the Tories’ cuts to corporation tax while keeping rates lower than in 2010. We’ll ask those who earn more than £80,000 a year to pay a little more income tax, while freezing National Insurance and income tax rates for everyone else. We will end the unfairness that sees income from wealth taxed at lower rates than income from work. VAT is a regressive tax that hits the poorest hardest and we guarantee no increases in VAT.

The Conservatives have launched a rival site called https://www.labourmanifesto.co.uk/ It has this to say about taxes:

“Hardworking taxpayers would have to pay an extra £2,400 each year in tax on average to cover Jeremy Corbyn’s reckless spending.”

The language of the Conservative party is about how higher taxes will negatively affect you the voter, rather than benefit the whole country. It’s also about tradition and how brilliant it is.

We Will Put You First Getting Brexit done. Investing in our public services and infrastructure. Supporting workers and families. Strengthening the Union. Unleashing Britain’s potential. The future is there for us to grasp. Not a future in which we endlessly refight the battles of Brexit and the Scottish independence referendum, or in which Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell – propped up by Nicola Sturgeon – lead a Government which rejects everything that has made the UK great.

I’m not saying traditions aren’t important (unless they’re bad traditions – like imperialism, which made the UK great, for sure), but they’re definitely less important than helping large groups of people through public service. Also Brexit sucks and is incredibly bad for the economy the Tories claim is so important to them.

If you aren’t from the UK (as I’d assume most readers aren’t), it may not be so cripplingly obvious that Baz’s family are rich therefore Conservative. But they’re also conservative – and therefore Conservative.

“a Tory vampire” – Baz’s own politics

Baz is a version of Draco Malfoy, who calls Hermione a ‘Mudblood’ and supports Umbridge and then Voldemort, although he later regrets it.

I haven’t really read any Harry/Draco (I was in Wolfstar), but I’m guessing that a lot of the fic builds on the fact that Draco cries in a bathroom, is unable to go through with murdering Dumbledore and Harry, and that his family ultimately decide to leave the Final Battle rather than support Voldemort. I’d guess that we argue that he was young and stupid, didn’t understand the full impact of what he was doing until it was too late, and then had to stay with the Death Eaters because he was afraid for his life and the lives of his family.

Baz, I am arguing, comes from a similar upbringing and has similar beliefs, even if he never got to the murdering Mudbloods stage. (He’s given an out in a way by never being in power when we see him.)

I’d also argue – because I really like Baz and I don’t want him to be ‘racist and speciest’ – that his actions and beliefs are, like Draco’s, massively affected by situational factors outside of his control. And that he, too, was young and stupid. I find it almost impossible that he could arrive at Watford with any other ideology – and I say this as an ex-Remus/Sirius shipper, who clearly found it totally reasonable that Sirius would hate his family and side immediately with a bunch of do-gooding Gryffindors.

The key there, though, is that Sirius hates his family; whereas Baz and Draco love their families and are (see above) incredibly loyal to them. One of the reason it’s easy for me to sit here and say ‘voting Conservative isn’t a thing I would ever do’ is that my family are hardcore ‘Not Conservative’ voters. If I ultimately decided I didn’t agree with them, I could do that, but I started out thinking they were probably right. This is the case with Baz and Draco – they have further to go than someone like Penny who was raised by Mitali and still tells Shepard that imagining being a Normal is like imagining being a frog.

I think Baz is a more sympathetic character than Draco Malfoy by a long way, but Draco has a strong justification for being more evil in that Voldemort will literally murder him if he doesn’t perform hateful actions. Baz merely worries that the Mage will “drive his whole family out of magic” if he doesn’t fight Simon, which is a bit of a weak argument when you think about it.

What has the Mage actually done? He’s forced the Old Families off the Coven – of course he did. They would have voted against his reforms. He’s raided their houses for dark objects that they do actually have. He doesn’t let them meet in large groups – which is an edict that they’re clearly ignoring given that the Club (so Tory) exists and also that the Old Families do actually have a Consortium that meets to try and work out how to seize power through potentially illegal means.

Are these actions designed to win the love of the Old Families? Of course not. Could there have been better, less repressive strategies? Yes, absolutely.

But how empty are Baz’s coffers really? They still have at least two massive houses that we know about. They’re not exactly on the streets.

All that aside though, Baz does have a very good reason for acting the way he does, much better than Malfoy. His entire life that has been warped around his mother’s death.

The fact that she’s dead, and that she died in (arguably) heroic circumstances, makes it very difficult for Baz to think of her as anything other than completely perfect and right about everything. Even when he thinks about how she’d probably kill him for being a vampire, even though he knows that he’s never hurt anyone and therefore does not deserve to die, even then he still thinks that she must be right and that he is a monster who deserves to die. Fiona has exactly the same reaction.

Because he thinks his mother was perfect and because everyone around him tells him what a good headmistress she was (and because the Mage is presumably very bad at this part of his job), he also has to regret the fact that she isn’t in charge of the school anymore. Education is important to him.

And the timing of Natasha’s death is also specifically and strongly linked to the loss of power, and the two are inextricably bound together. If Baz is to love and honour his mother, to regret her loss, he must also regret the loss of the things that she stood for.

Now the Mage isn’t in power anymore, and Baz’s mother is at peace, he probably can start to think differently about the way the society is structured.

I believe that ‘Wayward Son’ – in which I don’t think Baz thinks a single racist thing, and instead queries the idea of going to America given the ‘current political climate’ – shows that he’s already starting to consider his view on the world differently.

Part of this is because of who he is personally. He’s gay – and of course he’s a vampire, both of which wouldn’t normally be acceptable to his family. (Although you can be gay and a powerful Conservative, of course. It’s much less unacceptable than being poor.) (Incidentally, I know you didn’t ask, but I don’t think the Mage would care if Simon was gay. He’s a liberal. He’d want to be OK with it, even if he wasn’t. But he’d care that Simon was dating a Tory and would definitely try and forbid it.)

Baz has more reason than any other Pitch to reassess his family’s politics, because they negatively affect him personally.

The trick will be to see if he can look outwards from himself, and care about things that don’t help him at all. Which I think he can.

“He’s still more good than bad, I think” – the Mage and his poor decisions

OK, here we go. The most controversial part.

So, the Mage is the villain and is also a bad guy who left Simon in a home, tortured Baz, killed people, and incited hate against vampires. As I said right at the beginning, I’m not going to argue that you should forgive or even like him because ultimately I can’t if eighth year plays out as it does in canon.

But Lucy tells us that we shouldn’t take him as a straight-forward villain and if we’re willing to give the Pitches the benefit of the doubt over some things, I think we should at least give it a try for the Mage.

Here’s what I’ve got.

1. The political situation at the start of ‘Carry On’

In a story where the Mage was the hero, the book would have finished where he got into power. We’ve defeated the evil oppressive empire and now it’s a chance for reforms, hurrah! Everything will probably be good.

What we actually find at the beginning of Simon’s eighth year is that the Mage has been fighting the Old Families solidly for the last twelve years. They’ve resisted absolutely everything he’s tried to do, and far from being powerless now they’re not in charge, they’re actively and effectively using extreme wealth to obstruct the process of normal government:

“Half of Wales has stopped tithing. The Pitches are paying three members of the Coven to stay away from meetings, so we don’t have quorum. And there have been skirmishes up and down the road to London all summer long.” “Skirmishes?” “Traps, tussles. Tests – they’re all tests, Simon. You know the Old Families would seize the reins if they thought for a moment I was distracted. They’d roll back everything we’ve accomplished.” “Do they think they can fight the Humdrum without us?” “I think they’re so shortsighted,” he says, looking over at me “that they don’t care.”

Now, obviously, this is the Mage’s viewpoint on what is happening and so can’t be trusted in terms of the Old Families motivations. We also can’t ask them because we only hear from Baz (and once, briefly, from Fiona) who has his own view of the world which is coloured massively by his relationship with Simon and his mother.

Shockingly Simon again said it best: “That’s the problem with all the Pitches and their allies – it’s impossible to tell when they’re up to something and when they’re just being people.”

I sort of expect that the Mage is right, though, based on everything I know and feel about the Old Families. The Humdrum hasn’t directly affected them – or it doesn’t until the hole in Hampshire – meanwhile the Mage “will drive them out of magic.” (Will he though? Or will taxing people who earn over £80k a year not actually affect their lifestyle all that much?)

To be fair, I think the Mage probably thinks that the Old Families are the greater threat as well - they were the threat that he summoned the Greatest Mage to fight – although it’s the threat of the Humdrum that drives him to try and take Ebb’s magic.

I’m not saying that if they cooperated the Mage would have been able to work out what to do about the Humdrum, but their refusal to acknowledge that fighting the threat is important is probably infuriating.

2. He’s alone, overworked, and doesn’t trust anyone

The Mage has the two most important jobs in the World of Mages. It’s strongly implied that these were held by separate people before he took them both. And the reason he took them both is that I doubt he thought anyone else could be trusted, because until he became a political figure, only one person had ever treated him as anything other than a complete lunatic. After that, he gets people like Premal and the Mage’s Men (and Simon and Lucy) who obsessively and unquestioningly follow him, which also can’t be good for him.

He probably wasn’t very old when he worked out how to summon the Greatest Mage, probably 22-23. He doesn’t go to university and took power before he was 30, well before most Normal politicians. (Natasha, obviously, also wasn’t very old, so take that as you will.)

He’s doing two incredibly difficult jobs at a time when there’s a world-level threat (that admittedly he caused, but by accident) as well as a constant political threat. Of course he’s shit at both of them. Of course he didn’t think he could take care of a child on his own while this was happening.

He doesn’t have Dumbledore’s excuse of ‘Old Magic’ keeping Simon safe during the holidays, but I think he probably thinks it’s for the best and doesn’t see many other options when he’s so time-poor himself.

He doesn’t have any friends and never has done, because he’s never valued the personal over the global. He doesn’t have time for friends and family; finds it impossible to forgive the lightest of slights, like Mitali valuing tradition as well as wanting change; and even if he did have time for friends and found someone to be friends with, he wouldn’t be willing to spend time enjoying himself while what he perceived to be injustice was going on. People have headcanon-ed Simon as autistic before; if he is, it’s not impossible he got it from his father.

By the time we see him in ‘Carry On’, I assume the Mage is exhausted and angry and making the worst decisions of his life in an attempt to try and stop the Humdrum from destroying the world.

That doesn’t justify any of them, but I think it puts them into perspective. And for me – it means he is redeemable in an AU if you avert Baz’s kidnapping, which is unforgiveable even if you assume he didn’t know how the numpties would treat him.

It doesn’t mean he will have been a better father to Simon, though. Simon will still have had to have grown up scared and hungry and alone, for the greater good.

So it depends what you think makes a villain.

The end:

This essay was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be. It took me some time to write, and presumably longer for you to read than you might have expected, so thank you for getting to this point.

I think that’s probably all I have to say right now. Please read ‘The Mage’s Heir’ and ‘Keep Calm’, if you found this interesting. I’m also turning over a thing in my head where Natasha is still alive, which will almost certainly be a lot gentler than this, because I barely talk here about the good things about Natasha and the Pitches of which there are many. But which will show a lot of the above playing out – like Penny’s roommate just won’t be Trixie anymore.

I hope ‘Any Way the Wind Blows’ has something to say about politics that isn’t just tied to the Mage!

I think it’ll be easier to tell what’s really going on without him being there.

And please, if you live in the UK - even if you want to vote Conservative - register to vote before the 26th of November.

But also - consider not voting Conservative.

#carry on #meta #my meta #my content

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vedj-f-bekuesu · 4 years

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2019 in Retrospect

2019 has been fairly quiet, so I decided to start off this year by looking back on it. I’ll be dividing it by main fandoms/characters/ships because this year there were actually some new ones. That hasn’t been the case since, like, 2013.

Sonic the Hedgehog

It was an...alright year for Sonic. TSR was fine but too light on content, Mario and Sonic Tokyo felt like a step down from Mario and Sonic Rio but was still alright, and I have not played SEGA Heroes (and haven’t bothered with the Chao in Space short). Lowest spot for me was the IDW comic; the Zombot arc has had one interesting story so far, but the rest has had either bad writing (primarily aimed at Shadow’s turn) or it’s just been wallowing in its bleakness in a way even Shadow the Game didn’t. Then again, I find zombie stories uninteresting to begin with, so no duh I’m not interested in a Sonic take on it.

Chaotix kind of mirror that. Vector’s managed to get a good showing in, batting 3 for 3 on the game front, and having a key role in two of them. And like I said before, the Chaotix have genuinely had the most interesting stories within the Zombot arc, although with Vector and Charmy turned this may become more limited. Speaking of though, Espio and Charmy have had weaker presences. Espio managed to get into all three games in some form but to a lesser extent (one just by name), and Charmy was really left behind.

As for Vecpio, it’s been pretty bare for canon material stuff. Espio got mentioned in TSR as contributing the report that reveals Dodon Pa’s true role (with him and Vector being the key to making everyone shut up about him being suspicious, proving they’re best as a team). And Mario and Sonic Tokyo has something if you headcanon some stuff; when Vector talks about the medals, Espio is the first person you’re directed to. Nothing is said by Vector about Espio in text, but you can implicate that Espio was chosen first because of his strong link to Vector, being the first one Vector would trust to compete at a gold level. Other than that? Dry. And with no announcements for Sonic games in 2020, this may just continue.

Crash Bandicoot

On the reverse side, we have Crash Bandicoot having a really strong year. CTR:NF came out (which is a remake of my favourite Crash game) and has been doing gangbusters. On top of this, it has been going out of its way to revive pretty much every dead character in the franchise, to the point that we have RIlla Roo back in the fold (something I genuinely didn’t think would happen 19 years beforehand).

Skipping straight to the shipping for this, I wouldn’t have imagined it for Crash ever, but there’s actually some in-game material for me to latch onto for DingodileXKomodo Joe! Dingodile has been pushed into a more jovial character since N-Sane Trilogy, being even more doubled down on in CTR:NF. However, for the past 20 years Komodo Joe has managed to avoid being given traits closer to Espio. This game finally catches up to him, and does it hard. Seriously, his character took a hard turn for the stoic badass Espio did after Heroes, and when did Joe ever use Martial Arts magic ever? Aside from making that dynamic naturally more matching, Slide Coliseum joins in the fun with the visual upgrade. It has holographic projections of a trophy girl repping a couple of racers dancing each, and guess who the devs felt could be paired up for how they go together rhythmically? That’s right, my reptile boys. Man.

Super Mario Bros

What a weak year for Mario for me. What Mario got for new games this year were Luigi’s Mansion 3 (which I’ve not played), Mario Maker 2 (which isn’t new story content and doesn’t interest me in the slightest), Yoshi’s Crafted World (which I forgot was a thing) and Mario Kart Tour/Dr Mario World (which...um).

Because of this set-up, Bowser hardly got anything to do so he’s really been on the backburner. Considering how he’s been pushed in the rest of the decade that’s saying something. In fact, the most character stuff he got was in Mario and Sonic Tokyo, and even that was mostly just alright (I think Bowser Jr got the best deal out of that).

Spyro the Dragon

Spyro was alright, but this one’s more understandable. With 2018 being the big year for Spyro’s return, 2019 was a rest for the little guy. That being said it wasn’t completely quiet; Spyro Reignited Trilogy finally got its port on the Switch, and to tie in with that Spyro got an appearance in CTR:NF.

Because of the latter point, Gnasty Gnorc got a surprisingly strong year. Not only having more people learn about his glow-up in SRT, but bringing over that petty and angry character to CTR:NF. Seriously, his bit in the grand prix intro video is great, and he has more lines in his racing quips than any other game.

OK KO

I don’t think I made a post about OK KO on Tumblr (or maybe I did one, I can’t remember). But I did manage to get into this just before it got cancelled so there’s that.

I maintain that the Sonic crossover (aka the first thing I really knew about OK KO) didn’t give me a good impression of the show.It just seemed like “here’s the Sonic and Eggman dynamic but with more cartoon shenanigans*” and it spent more time making endless Sonic references. While some were deeper cuts which actually were impressive, most were references I could see in pretty much any Sonic-referencing material. It wasn’t until I decided to look up more info on Lord Boxman sometime after because I wanted to check if N.Gin was an influence that I found out the plot of the actual show (crossover notwithstanding) was pretty nuts and way more up my alley.

Speaking of, there’s Voxman. Whereas other ships on here I have to dig through material to construct nuggets from them, this was literally in the text. And why not, they have a good dynamic and are usually the most fun to watch bounce off each other. And I still like the fact that if KO and Lord Boxman were the Sonic and Eggman parallel, the story ends with Eggman becoming Sonic’s stepfather. Let’s see IDW tell a story like that, it’d be better than the Zombot stuff.

*I think that was the point but still.

LEGO

Man I wouldn’t have thought they would have remade LEGO Racers but the one they made this year was gre--

Okay no, this year basically reignited another flame that I thought was snuffed out like 16 years ago. For a brief history of me and LEGO, when I was six I had a freestyle box which I used to make an elemental superhero persona. I played with this until I was 11. Before then, my sister got some LEGO Harry Potter sets (which we still have in the loft), I played LEGO Racers a lot (and wasn’t very good at it), and I owned two random other LEGO sets (the trike from Life on Mars and Lava from RoboRIders).

After that, I only dabbled in LEGO when there was a Sonic set done for LEGO Dimensions. I did try to play more into it, but it was really prone to crashing in certain worlds so I eventually got frustrated enough to stop playing it. Sometime in the interim though my sister started enjoying LEGO films without me knowing, so when February came around I was dragged to see LEGO Movie 2 when all I wanted to see in 2019 was Toy Story 4. Dad insisted on it since we rarely have family outings. In retrospect;

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LEGO Movie 2 hit me in a way a piece of media hasn’t for years, or even decades. It’s shot up to be my third-favourite film of all time. And it’s revealed to me that LEGO is shockingly good at making endearing characters. So much so that breaking it down (pun not intended) has to be done by theme.

LEGO Movie: Part of the reason why I didn’t get into LEGO earlier was because I did see LEGO Movie back in 2014 when my sister was given it on DVD (she wasn’t into LEGO then) and I wasn’t impressed with it. In retrospect, I can appreciate what it did more, and I bring it up because it’s what makes Unikitty, Benny and Metalbeard so endearing when combined with what happened in TLM2. Lucy’s okay (moreso in the sequel), Emmet’s cute, President Business is fun but the MVP is definitely Rex Dangervest, who’s this feral monster but with Emmet buried away deep inside ready to flesh him out. When I make LEGO stories, I just have Rex change his mind on rescuing himself after getting the dinosaurs, and instead wreaking havoc in the present. This kills Emmet off in any story I do but it’s a worthy sacrifice.

LEGO City Undercover: As a video game person I’m kicking myself for not getting into this before. Frank Honey is the best; he’s adorable and weird yet still feeling very much human and basically the Emmet of his city. Rex Fury has grown on me lots since my initial assessment of him,it’s infectious how much fun he has with being a criminal (while Vinnie is more fun when not doing criminal stuff and Chan seems to be more focused on doing criminal stuff as a job. I also think his calmer side is criminally (no pun intended again) overlooked). Also Ellie is underrated, she is the best straight man you could ask for.

LEGO City Adventures: As I’ve said before, pretty much everyone in LCA is adorable, especially Duke and Harl. Still hoping for more Daisy time in the second season, she could be a riot if played properly and not just a Fendrich stooge.

Ninjago: Coming in with the hot take here; I prefer the movie version of Ninjago to the series. I think the problem with the series is that it has so much baggage from before the series started to iron out some of its issues and cliches that it’s kinda hard to get into as a new person, whereas movie Ninjago is a lot more approachable and written better off the bat (although I do see why it wouldn’t go down well with existing Ninjago fans). This all just makes me think of that moment in series 11 where Nya sees her worst fear of being normal in an artefact and it shows her movie self, almost as a take that. It just makes me think the show writers are salty about movie Nya kicking show Nya’s ass in being a better character. Also shout outs to Kai, Cole, Zane and Lloyd for being great characters as well (Jay is cute in the movie, his show self can be punted off a cliff for all I care). And I am with the movement to have Cole come out as gay (or at least bi if they want to keep Tournament of Elements I guess).

Nexo Knights: This show is regarded as another Ninjago wannabe, but it feels very different to Ninjago to me. So much so, there’s not a single one of the heroes I don’t like and they all need to be cherished. Macy gets props for being the best female character to me, Aaron is probably my favourite now and this is a house of Clance for future reference.

So, with all that being said, what do I think of the prospects for 2020? I think it’s going to be quieter than 2019 to be honest, since there’s a lot winding down, and on the game side there’s been zero announcements. Crash and Spyro having a rest is understandable, Sonic’s going to have to get past the movie before gearing up for 2021 probably (for the record I have no interest in the movie) and Mario just needs to try harder. And with OK KO dead, only LCA is holding the fort for guaranteed new content I want to engage in right now.

You know what would be fun though? Series 20 of the minifigures theme is due at the end of this year. Wouldn’t it be awesome to use the occasion to give some phsical minifigures to characters who never got them before? LIke, Rex Fury somehow still has enough demand to be a persistent feature in the customs market, give him an official figure (especially since he’s the only character from LCU that’s not Chase that’s even appeared in merch outside the game). Or let Sky Lane get her LEGO Universe look in physical form to go with her LIXS look. Or heck, finally give Rocket Racer his original look, that’s how I discovered the minifigure world in the first place!

#VEDJ-F talks #a lot #2019 #sonic the hedgehog #Crash Bandicoot #Spyro the Dragon #super mario bros #ok ko #lego #vecpio #tagging the vecpio because this is still a vecpio centric account at heart #but please I do not want lego chaotix that would just look weird

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moonlitgleek · 5 years

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On Account of Her Womanhood

I started this post over two months ago with the hope that it would help me work through my iffy feelings on Fire and Blood, namely how much I dislike the way many of the female characters are written in this book and how it repeats and expands on some unsavory elements of GRRM’s narrative that have been broadly noted in fandom across multiple books. But a closer look only increased my frustration with this book for how it underlined several of Martin’s problematic patterns when it comes to writing women but in a more condensed form this time, perhaps due to the nature of the medium. The history book form of F&B focuses these recurring problems and offers little to offset or challenge them that the authorial issue of casual and uncritical misogynistic writing feels more pervasive. It may be that Martin tried to address at least one aspect that’s been criticized before, but I remain disquieted with how he largely traded one issue for another.

Whatever the case, I think that a writer of Martin’s caliber and with his affinity for interrogating and examining traditional genre tropes can and should do better than this uncritical use of misogynistic writing that he not only leaves to stand unchallenged, but actively leans into. In this depressingly long post, I’ll address some of the problems that jumped out at me while reading. Feel free to add any I may have overlooked.

Objectification and the categorical sexualization of female bodies:

One of the most noticeable trends I found in F&B is how distinctly different it treats male and female bodies. While there may be plenty of overlapping, there is a decidedly heavier focus on sex in women’s stories. Too many stories witnesses a woman’s ultimate fate incorporate a sexual component, often violent and/or fatal, that is if the story isn’t completely built on sexual appetites or escapades. Fire and Blood dives into the personal lives of its characters far more than its cousin The World of Ice and Fire, and that has translated to a lot of sex. That is not inherently a bad thing, but F&B is also notably heavier on female characters so it’s really conspicuous that the number of women goes up in direct proportion to the increase in cases of sexualization and sex stories.

To put it mildly, women’s stories are drenched in sex, to the point where I’ve compiled a list in my initial notes under the title “Gyladyn is a Pervert” due to the sheer amount of unsolicited, unnecessary and disturbingly detailed accounts of women’s sexual experiences. You’d be hard pressed to go one chapter without focus being given to minute details of women’s sex lives which sometimes spans whole pages of the text. It’s primarily the women who get framed through a sexual lens in this book, especially in instances where the female characters don’t even get a story that is not based on their sexual history. Sexuality is not just one aspect of a woman’s personality like it is for the men, it is the core of her entire characterization. Far too many Targaryen ladies get that treatment, along with a myriad of other women. I chose some examples to discuss, but they are but a drop in the total number of characters receiving that treatment.

Coryanne Wylde

Lady Coryanne’s story is the most infamous examples of a gratuitous sex tale that doesn’t serve any real purpose in the narrative, but not only does it occupy way too much space in Gyldayn’s writing, he goes on to describe in excruciating detail the violation and abuse of a young girl while consistently blaming her for it. For all that Gyldayn keeps saying that we need not concern ourselves with the sordid details of A Caution For Young Girls, we get to hear quite a lot about Coryanne’s sexual history.

Coryanne’s entire narrative derives from sex. She gets no other story and no other characterization. Her voice and actions are filtered through the opinions and assumptions of various maesters. Her body is presented as an object for more powerful and/or older men to use and abuse, and the one spin of her story that affords her some figment of agency (i.e, the take that Coryanne taught Jaehaerys how to have sex because she became fond of him and Alysanne) deliberately minimizes how dysfunctional her entire situation is and neglects to reflect her real age and experiences by casting her as someone with more carnal knowledge and the ability to teach Jaehaerys about sex. Keep in mind that Coryanne’s so-called sexual "knowledge” has been exclusively through rape.

I read to what amounts to one quarter of a chapter about Coryanne Wylde but I still have no idea who this girl was. What I do know is way too much information about her sexual history and the men who took advantage of her.

Rhaena Targaryen

Rhaena is luckier than Coryanne in the sense that her characterization doesn’t derive solely from her sexuality and her story is more nuanced and layered. However, not only does Rhaena’s sexuality remain the underlying factor in her narrative, it’s kinda absurd how the narrative ties itself into knots trying to justify the inclusion of rumors about how Rhaena lost her virginity to a lowborn lover whose identity is debated, even though the information presented thus far by the in-universe author contradicts the very premise of those rumors or even the reasoning presented as the cause for discussing those rumors. The whispers of Rhaena’s so-called affair is preceded by rather strong hints of Rhaena’s preference of women; though that does not necessarily preclude the possibility of her liking men too as her reported affection for her brother Aegon suggests, it’s that affection and the note about how Rhaena and Aegon grew up expecting and welcoming their eventual nuptials that makes Rhaena’s supposed loss of virginity to a random guy all the more weird. Too, it’s been noted previously that Rhaena neither encouraged nor entertained any of her many suitors and instead preferred the company of her siblings, dragon and her latest favorite Alayne Royce. So for rumors to exist about her having a raunchy affair with some lowborn guy she met while dragonriding is not only random but baseless. Where did these rumors come from if there is nothing in Rhaena’s history to either trigger or support them?

The reasoning the narrative gives us for those rumors is to explain Rhaena and Aegon’s marriage, since Aenys was supposedly driven to marry Rhaena off as soon as possible in light of these rumors. However, reports of Rhaena and Aegon’s closeness and their expectation to wed, as well as the Targaryen incestuous tradition more than explains the match and Aenys’ decision, especially since Rhaena and Aegon were well-within the normal age for marriage in Westeros. There is nothing weird about this match that warrants an obscure affair to explain. Which only serves to illustrate the oddity of this unsolicited commentary on Rhaena’s virginity. Those rumors stand as a random tangent about a subject that no one should care about in the context of the story. Who cares whether Rhaena was a virgin or not when she married Aegon? What possible effect did her virginity or possible lack thereof have on the narrative for it to be included? The way this story is handled, Rhaena’s sexual agency is there to serve as a matter of intrigue, speculation and scandal when there is no fathomable reason for that to happen, not to mention that it makes Rhaena’s dynastic role as the expected future queen dependent on the expression of her sexuality.

Alyssa Targaryen

Full disclosure: I hate how Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s daughters are written and how sex is the make of their stories. That’s the case for five of the seven daughters they had, and it is infuriating. Is this the best you could come up with for the daughters of the best Targaryen queen Westeros has seen, GRRM? Sex, dead (Daenerys), septa (Maegelle who is clever and reconciled her parents, that’s mostly it) and barely mentioned (if you count Jocelyn Baratheon) are the only options?

The characterization of Princess Alyssa starts off promising enough with information about her personality, her unladylike interests and her closeness to her brother Baelon, but quickly devolves to be solely about sex. We literally do not hear one word from Alyssa’s mouth that is not about sex. Her story is a tale about how she loved sex, had sex, joked about sex and shrieked during sex. For all the narrative says that Alyssa was brave and irrepressible, it reduces her to someone whose sole purpose and sole story focus is sex. Alyssa Targaryen exists to have sex with Baelon and give birth to Viserys and Daemon before conveniently dying of complications after birthing her third son.

Alyssa’s story is not only symptomatic of the incessant sexualization in this book but of the recurring misogynistic problem of reducing women to their sexuality and fertility. Alyssa’s function in the story becomes intrinsically tied to both since the narrative never bothers to give her anything outside of her sex life. What non-sexual tidbits we get are either dismissed or glossed over. This is a princess who reportedly delighted in dragonriding, followed her brothers to the training yard and eschewed ladylike activities but for some reason, she responds to Baelon’s statement about how his bravery in battles does not measure to her own in giving birth by telling him that he was made for battles and she was made for childbirth. What even is that?

Alyssa Targaryen is a woman of whom Septon Barth said: “Alyssa may be all her mother is and more”, but we never get any elaboration on that. Instead we get to know about how Alyssa’s sounds of pleasure echoed through the Red Keep on a regular basis and how she constantly wanted to have sex.

Saera Targaryen

Dear god, is this an optimal example of how this book centers women’s characterization on their sexuality. Saera’s story is that she had sex with her companions and Jaehaerys punished her for having sex with her companions, which filters all aspects of her personality through a sexual lens by the narrative. It’s rather pointed that everything we know of Saera’s childhood is almost exclusively negative with a clear vibe of presenting her behavior as an escalating problem that reaches its peak when she has sex. It felt like Saera’s entire characterization up to when her sexual relations are discovered is one long build-up to that point of discovery. Saera’s “appetites” are remarked upon since she is literally a baby in a rather clear attempt to underscore her later actions when those appetites turned sexual. This is not simply a matter of hindsight coloring perception of Saera too, given how Maetser Elysar’s comments about how Saera “wants what she wants and she wants it now” are dated to 69 AC, when Saera was all of two. That gives the feel that Saera’s sexuality was the fulcrum that the rest of her characterization was build on, which certainly explains why her sexual affairs are framed as an extension of her previous bad behavior.

Daella Targaryen

Oh but this is a lesson in frustration. Daella's story doesn’t drip of sex like her sister Saera, but even when she is not unbearably sexualized, sex is still a primary filter that Gyldayn uses to shape our perception of her as this childlike frightened figure who apparently had no interests and no purpose in life other than needing comfort, and who wouldn’t talk to boys because she was frightened.

The text infantilizes Daella to such an extent that her disinterest in men who had no interest in her (Corlys Velaryon), who tried to force her into drinking (Simon Staunton) and who sexually assaulted her (Ellard Crane) is treated as a fault in Daella. Her entire story is about her parents’ ardent efforts to find a husband for her, a pursuit so irksome to Jaehaerys that he mandates that Daella must marry within the year when she approaches 16, in a conversation that introduces a rather needless sexual component in how Jaehaerys talks about Daella when he suggests lining a hundred naked men before his not-yet-16 year old daughter so she could pick one to marry. The story also seems to treat Daella’s later refusal of a bedding ceremony as a childish quirk that Rodrik Arryn indulged “his precious princess” in.

It might be a different facet of how a woman’s sexuality is used to define her than the previous cases, but it remains that Daella is treated as a sexual object by both the characters and the narrative in their dismay of how she doesn’t fit the traditional mold of womanly behavior and sexual mores in Westeros. It’s as if Daella is looked down upon for not having a sexual history.

Baela Targaryen

Wild, willful and wanton are the three words used to describe Baela Targaryen. It honestly boggles the mind that a character that has so much going for her gets introduced through a sexual situation. One of our first glimpses of Baela’s agency comes through the mention of her playing kissing games with squires followed by that one time she was found with a kitchen scullion who had his hand inside her jerkin. It’s especially notable to see how Baela’s willfulness (and unladylike behavior) is tied time and again to her sexuality and her interest in boys, which is very clear when Gyldayn talks about her unsuitable pets that she brought back to the Red Keep, a mention that is immediately followed by how her septa - who was in charge of Baela’s “moral instructions” - despaired of her and how Septon Eustace spoke of the need for her to wed immediately.

(Side note: I found the language of that paragraph so weird. It carries a heavy suggestion that Baela may have been involved sexually with her so-called pets, makes fun of her intelligence and suggests that she may or may have not been involved with the twin female prostitutes that the text then links to her own sister because they were twins “like us, Rhae” in Baela’s own words. There is a lot going on in that paragraph that I don’t know what to do with. Is Gyldayn trying to imply that Baela had sex with all of these people, including an entire trope of mummers and two girls that she explicitly connected to herself and her sister? Because he is certainly insinuating so, and I have been burned by this book enough already to assume good intentions).

Nettles

Instead of basing her characterization on it, how about we use a woman’s sexuality to undermine her accomplishments just to shake things up? Here’s a girl who relied on her intelligence instead of a pedigree to tame a dragon and succeeded in becoming a dragonrider, but her taming of Sheepstealer gets prefaced by a statement about how “worse was yet to come with dire consequences for the Seven Kingdoms” to preemptively blame Nettles for Rhaenyra’s own brutality and Daemon’s subsequent abandonment of her cause (a statement not made any better by talking about how “the power young maidens exert over older men is well-known” when discussing Daemon’s affair with Nettles as if to cast her as a seductress), and that’s when her dragontaming is not getting framed as something she traded sex for as suggested by Gyldayn’s speculation about how she traded sex for the sheep she fed Sheepstealer. He makes sure to treat us to his thoughts on the state of Nettles’ virginity when she began her affair with Daemon while he is at it as well.

Helaena Targaryen & Alicent Hightower

Straining logic to add a sexual rumor is a personal favorite of mine. Look, Gyldayn may be less zealous and less outrageous than Septon Eustace in his bias towards Aegon II, but he is still clearly biased towards him. He writes about him with a degree of sympathy not present in his writing of Rhaenyra and he goes out of his way to undermine events that may paint Rhaenyra in a better light while arguing against rumors that paint the greens as (more) monstrous. How convenient it is, then, for that bias to fail when it comes to discussing the rumor about how the teenage Alicent may have slept with both Viserys I before Aemma’s death and the elderly Jaehaerys I when she was his caretaker, a rumor that Gyldayn seems disinclined to believe (or so he claims) but more than willing to wink at its possible accuracy through a comment about how Alicent strangely spoke often of the Old King in her final hours but not of her late husband.

To add insult to injury, we’re also treated to a rumor about how Rhaenyra, on the behest of Mysaria, may have forcibly prostituted Alicent and Helaena in what comes to be referred to as the Brothel Queens. Spending time on a rumor that casts Rhaenyra in a bad light at least falls in line with Gyldayn’s biases, but it strains logic to have Mushroom be the source of that rumor. Why would a guy who loved Rhaenyra well as Gyldayn says perpetuate a rumor that casts Rhaenyra in such a monstrous light? It seems like the logic of this amounts to “Mushroom delights in sex tales and perverse rumors so he was the obvious choice” which doesn’t account for Mushroom’s feelings or biases (and which is problematic in its own way - do you think I missed that the two vulgar books that are widely quoted in this work were written by a woman and a dwarf, GRRM? Do you think I missed that the implication here is that Mushroom’s sexual perversions are prioritized over his depiction as a person who liked Rhaenyra?)

The Brothel Queens rumor adds nothing to the narrative but another case of unnecessary sexualization. Gyldayn ultimately rejects that rumor as false but I question the need to include it in the first place. Is it there to perhaps inform us that the public view of Rhaenyra was so bad at this point that people were inclined to not only believe in but also manufacture rumors about her monstrosity? Having one of Rhaenyra’s supporters as the accredited source of that rumor flies in the face of that, and narratively speaking, this doesn’t accomplish anything that the latter rumor about how Rhaenyra sent Maelor’s head to Helaena in a chamber pot - which is clearly framed as evidence of how much the public opinion on Rhaenyra has soured - doesn’t. So why is this pesky rumor there and what purpose does it have beyond showing us that Gyldayn is all too willing to spend his time discussing every sexual rumor under the sun?

As I’ve said, these examples are but a few of the number of women needlessly and excessively sexualized in this book. I have more on my list but talking about every story separately is going to make this post longer than it already is, not to mention be unbearably repetitive because many of them bear the same elements of having our knowledge of these women centered almost exclusively on their sex lives and their presence in the text reduced to their sexuality. Gael Targaryen was seduced, gave birth and died. Sara Snow's is a contrived and downright illogical story that only exists so she could have sex with Jace either as his wife or a fling. All Viserra Targaryen gets to do is pit boys against each other for her favor and try unsuccessfully to seduce her brother Baelon. Aliandra Martell is there to entertain men and possibly sleep with Alyn Velaryon to the displeasure of her siblings (psst, GRRM, your depiction of the Dornish, especially Dornish women, continues to be atrocious and this book does nothing to deconstruct the stereotype of them as violent hypersexual people). The questions Gyldayn ponders while discussing Tess killing Dalton Greyjoy include ones about her virginity and her physical beauty. Rue - one of two female writers in the book, the other supposedly being Coryanne Wylde - is there to write a vulgar account about Alyn Velaryon who she may or may not have slept with. The list goes on and on.

Sexualizing the mundane:

The hypersexualized treatment of women bodies is so overwhelming in this book that it extends to ordinary stuff like nursing and pregnancy, both of which get weirdly graphic and gross descriptions in Alys Rivers’ story when she puts her pregnancy with Aemond’s child as “I can feel his fire licking at my womb” while her wetnursing is described as “the milk that flowed abundantly from the breasts of Alys Rivers”. Not even death or description of women’s death throes is spared that sexual aspect. While Princess Aerea is getting cooked from within in a horrifying portrait of suffering and agony, the fact that smoke is emanating from her vagina gets described as obscene, even though smoke is coming from every other body orifice. Meria Martell gets the rumor that she was coupling with a stallion at the time of her death. Rhaenyra’s breast is prickled to rouse Sunfyre.

Even in death, women’s bodies are treated as sexual objects. Mysaria’s horrific death via scourging has a sexualized dimension in how her body is put on display in her agony as she gets whipped while being paraded naked despite her crimes not being sexual in nature. To be fair, both Septon Bernard and Lysaro Rogare also get sexual punishments for non-sexual crimes, but the notable difference between them and Mysaria is that Lady Misery gets narrative focus on her “pale white body” while dying. (Mysaria’s fate is also too contrived in a way that Bernard’s and Lysaro’s aren’t but that’s only relevant here for how it appears like the narrative conspired to have her caught by that specific mob so she could get such a punishment). Even immolation gets a gendered and sexualized tint because when it’s women burning, they obviously get to “dance in gowns of fire, naked and lewd underneath the flames”. The thrashing of someone burning is apparently “lewd” if it’s a woman. Women’s suffering get inexplicably beautified (dance in gowns of fire) and sexualized, and somehow they are blamed for it because they are being lewd by thrashing in agony.

Child brides

Let’s start with their number, shall we?

Alyssa Velaryon, 15

Larissa Velaryon, between 12 and 14

Alysanne Targaryen, 13

Alyssa Targaryen, 15

Aemma Arryn, 11

Helaena Targaryen, 13

Elinor Costayne, exact age unclear but younger than 16

Floris Baratheon, 14\15

Unwin Peake’s unnamed daughter, 11\12

The Northern blacksmith’s daughter whose story Alysanne cited to ban the first night, 14.

Daenaera Velaryon, 6

Jaehaera Targaryen, 8

This list doesn’t account for those who were meant to be child brides but ultimately weren’t because of external circumstances. Cassandra Baratheon hadn’t yet flowered in 129 but she was going to marry Aegon II immediately in 131 when she was between 13 and 15. Viserra Targaryen was being shipped off to wed at 15. Myrielle Peake (14) was touted as a suitable queen for Aegon III because she could get pregnant immediately. Prudence and Prunella Celtigar were offered by their father for Maegor to immediately wed at 12 and 13 (at a time when Maegor had just murdered two wives, btw), Jaehaerys Targaryen made ardent effort to marry off Daella as young as 13 and mandated she marry by 16. And those are only the marital relationships that involve young girls, but the inherent issues of child brides exist in cases of non-marital sexual relationships like Marlida of Hull’s with Corlys Velaryon when Marlida was 15 if not younger, or Rhaenyra Targaryen’s “training” by her uncle Daemon at 14.

So what’s the problem?

This has been a subject of debate for a long, long time, whether in terms of its actual historical inaccuracy despite GRRM’s claim to the contrary, or of its defiance of Martin’s own Word of God. Margaret Beaufort is an example that has been brought up repeatedly to justify the broad inclusion of child brides in ASOIAF but while Margaret did give birth aged 13, the severe physical toll that took on her not only rendered her sterile but was a main reason she argued vehemently against her granddaughter being wed young too. But Martin only reflects the first part of the story while steadfastly ignoring the second part. Oh, it’s true that F&B acknowledges that the in-universe characters know that bedding young girls has severe and often fatal health risks, but that knowledge is either dismissed or categorically ignored.

The most outrageous example of that comes from the story of Daella Targaryen. In what could have worked as a way for the narrative to call out the problems entrenched in the concept of child brides, Gyldayn notes that Queen Alysanne blamed herself and King Jaehaerys for marrying Princess Daella too young when her physical constitution made pregnancy dangerous and indeed ultimately fatal for her. But rather than working as a resounding rebuff, the way this plot is handled makes it stick out instead as an oblique attempt for the author to say “see, I said it was bad!” rather than a serious condemnation of that constant trend. It’s a throwaway line without the commitment to showing that this information changed anything in-universe or was even allowed to stand as a clear, if a late and woefully limited, condemnation of the narrative’s over-reliance on child brides. Rather, Alysanne’s justifiable condemnation is promptly undermined by how it is immediately tied to her grief over Daella’s death with the clear aim to paint Alysanne’s deduction as an emotional - and thusly not rational - response which in turn dismisses her completely justified assessment.

Still, I might have only ascribed this to Gyldayn’s own misogyny if only that statement hadn’t been soundly forgotten by everyone in-universe, apparently including Alysanne herself. This incident appears to have come and gone with no visible effect on the main participants’ actions - it sure doesn’t look like either Rodrik Arryn nor Jaehaerys Targaryen learned one damn thing considering they go on to sign off on Aemma Arryn’s marriage at age 11, at a time when Queen Alysanne goes mysteriously silent on the subject. That is further compounded by how Alysanne herself comes to arrange for the 15-year-old Viserra to wed only four years after Daella’s death.

Be sure to give it up for the maesters’ (painfully casual) assessment that Aemma’s childbearing issues were because she was bedded too young though, it sure had as much impact on the narrative as Alysanne’s own statement years earlier, considering the numerous girls who would go on to be child brides, including Viserys I’s own daughter Helaena. Despite strong evidence of the risk of forcing girls into sex and pregnancy at an early age and despite the narrative’s own admission to it, it remains a regular occurrence to see teen girls married off (often with no pressing reason) and giving birth way too young without any kind of explanation as to why their guardians would think it a splendid idea.

Also a story where the text came close to properly addressing the core issue of child brides is that of Alysanne Targaryen. The narrative initially touches upon the issue of the inherent sexualization of child brides with Alysanne’s story, but somehow still ends up reaffirming how young girls tend to be regarded through a sexual gaze in Westeros. Gyldayn goes to great lengths in trying to differentiate between Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s nuptials and consummation, and that of your average Westerosi child bride where girls get no agency in the matches made for them, often to much older men who have no qualms about having sex with actual children. By contrast, Alysanne is shown as an architect of her marriage to Jaehaerys, actively going to him to curtail her betrothal to Orryn Baratheon and pushing for their marriage to be consummated so that no one could set it aside. Alysanne’s ability to consent in a match that she pursued to a similarly-aged boy is starkly different from what we typically see in matches with child brides, which is then affirmed by Jaehaerys’ recognition that Alysanne is too young for the marriage to be consummated after their first wedding, and her own advocacy for consummation later despite Jaehaerys’ lingering hesitance. So far, so good. It is another instance of a child bride but it’s used to add commentary about the inherent problematic elements of it rather than being presented in an abstract manner and left to stand unchallenged.

But not only is the commentary we can glean from this story undermined by Jaehaerys’ own actions with his daughters and granddaughter later, it is further diminished by the constant insistence to sexualize Alysanne. Gyldayn deems it necessary to tell us of how Jaehaerys and Alysanne slept naked, gives us servant gossip about the long lingering kisses they shared and inserts an offhand rumor about how Jaehaerys might have invited Alysanne to the bed he supposedly shared with Coryanne Wylde to “frolic with them in episodes most often associated with the infamous pleasure houses of Lys”, persisting in referring to Alysanne as “the little queen” throughout. That insistent sexualization of Alysanne contextualizes the mention of Jaehaerys’ refusal to consummate the marriage to be an attempt from the author-character to make Jaehaerys look good, rather than an attempt to offer any kind of critique to the custom of deflowering too-young maidens. It does, however, fall right in line with Gyldayn’s tendency to dedicate an ordinate amount of space to comment on the sex lives of teen girls. Which brings me to:

The hypersexualization of young girls

One can not go through this book without taking notice of how absolutely obsessed Gyldayn is with the sex lives and sex appeal of teen girls. Too much of this book is spent discussing, speculating on and pondering rumors about the sex lives of young girls, minor and major characters alike. It’s really telling that he, and the narrative by association, is so cavalier about inserting commentary about a girl’s body, sexuality or sexual desirability, even for characters who were only mentioned once or twice in the text. It’s all so disturbingly casual that it might not register on first read but there is an unholy pattern of slipping in a sexualizing comment about barely seen teenagers and pubescent girls. They may have no personality, no voice, no agency and sometimes no names but for some reason their sexual history (read: abuse), desirability or physicality is brought up. Among them:

Prudence and Prunella Celtigar. For the longest time, our knowledge of both is restricted to their age, and Rogar Baratheon’s charming comment about them being chinless, breastless and witless which Gyldayn keeps bringing up as their defining factor.

The Archon of Tyrosh’s daughter (15) is noted for her wit, hair and flirtatious manner (she is later rumored to have cuckolded her eventual husband, Orryn Baratheon, and birthed a daughter that wasn’t his, since she is a woman of the Free Citites and all that)

There may have been a nameless faceless 12-year-old girl that was being raped by Aegon II at the time of Viserys’ death. But fear not, we know exactly what kind of sexual act she was performing on him.

Jocelyn Baratheon (16) barely exists in the text, but we needed her physical description to include that she was full-breasted just so we can understand that she was desirable.

According to Mushroom, Aemond kissed all four of Borros Baratheon’s prepubescent daughters to “taste the nectar of their lips” before picking one as a bride. The second-eldest, Maris, makes a sexually-charged comment to challenge Aemond’s manhood at like, 11.

Floris Baratheon’s characterization is limited to pretty, sweet, somewhat frivolous and dead.

The only mention of the 15-year-old Johanna Swann’s is that she was sold into sexual slavery and became a famous courtesan in “a fascinating” tale according to Gyldayn.

No less than 8 girls involved in the so-called Maiden’s Day Cattle Show are defined by sexual comments and sexual deeds. (There is a comment from Mushroom about how everything couldn’t have been more beautiful, unless if the girls had all arrived naked. This is a ball that had girls as young as six and seven.)

Coryanne Wylde’s first sexual “encounter” rape happens at 13 and she is assaulted repeatedly by the time she is 15.

“Aegon III had never shown any carnal interest in either of his queens (understandably in the case of Queen Daenaera, who was yet a child)” - Uh, Gyldayn? Jaehaera was ten when she died. So why is the extent of Aegon’s maturity judged as lacking because he didn’t desire a literal child and measured negatively against that of his brother Viserys because Viserys, who was a child himself, consummated his own marriage?

As for the regular-flavor hypersexualizion of major characters by the narrative, you can find Rhaenyra Targaryen whose sexual training assault at Daemon’s hand at 14 is described in painful detail, Rhaena Targaryen who is strongly implied to have had somewhat of a sexual awakening at the age of 12, Nettles whose virginity is speculated upon with the conclusion that she must have had sex before she flowered taken as a basic fact and Baela Targaryen who gets a majority story focus on her sexual adventures.

The worst part is that there is no point to most of the above. I can maybe find a logical narrative motive for one of those stories and the only point I can find to several others is to frame the character of the men involved, including Gyldayn. But mostly, these characters exist to serve as as a set dressing, to be exploited and paraded to sensationalize a story.

Sexual violence as a punishment, a plot device, and a sacrifice for male characters’ story

GRRM has frequently claimed that the various acts of sexual violence in his books, against both men and women, is historically accurate. He takes it as a dishonest approach for him not to show that rape and sexual assault were historically a part of war. The existence of sexual violence in wars can not be denied, but it’s rather remarkable that Martin took only the negative parts of women’s lives from real life history, then made it worse for the women in his narrative. Despite his claim that Westeros is no darker nor more depraved than our RL history, Westerosi patriarchy is actually worse than the real Middle Ages and it is lacking a lot of the roles women occupied throughout history, which gives the effect of furthering the women’s suffering without giving them the benefit of having proper well-rounded narratives.

Furthermore, if, as Martin claims, sexual violence is a part of war narrative, what are we to do with the numerous examples of assault and sexual violence that occur in peacetime, both in the main narrative and in F&B? Westeros wasn’t at war when seven Lyseni slaves were used and abused by the Baratheon brothers prior to the Golden Wedding, nor did Coryanne Wylde’s repeated assaults occur during war. Alyssa Velaryon and Alysanne Targaryen were not impregnated, to the former’s grave and against the latter’s expressed wishes, by wartime enemies but by their own husbands. Saera Targaryen had her own father condone her humiliation and abuse in the name of punishing her. And what about the countless child brides who had no choice in their marriages, many of whom went on to either die in childbed or suffer health problems due to premature consummation of their marriages?

Sexual violence is a frequently used window dressing across the series. That Westeros is a terrible place for women is often the singular take of such stories that consistently build on the victimization of women, either as a decoration for the setting to inform us over and over and over that Westeros is a misogynistic society, or as a tool to characterize male characters and further their stories. This is an overarching problem in Martin’s narrative that sees the use of women’s very bodies on the sacrificial altar of the narrative’s requirements, to the extent that even in their suffering, the story belongs less to these women and more to the men whose stories they are sacrificed for. Too often does that happen in this book.

Argella Durrandon is one such case, a women whose violation at the hand of her own men is mostly there to tell us about the gentleness of Orys Baratheon. Several women are used in various ways to inform us about Rogar Baratheon in what is frankly a perplexing waste of narrative space because we didn’t really need these women’s suffering to tell us that Rogar is a grade A asshole when we had plenty of damning evidence of his villainy and misogyny. But we still get such casual mentions of Rogar and his brothers “deflowering” slaves who were probably too young, mainly to juxtapose the actions of Rogar and young Jaehaerys during the proceedings of the Golden Wedding and paint the former in a bad light while holding up the latter. Coryanne Wylde has her narrative of abuse that tells us nothing about her and more about the men taking advantage of her, and Alyssa Velaryon is severely sidelined by the narrative during the regency and has her body used to her death to further Rogar’s characterization. And while this upcoming example is a part of a war narrative, it remains that the function of the rape and sexual slavery of Lady Alys Oakheart and her ladies is largely about informing our perception of Wyl of Wyl and being used to threaten Princess Deria with a similar fate.

Sexual violence also gets used as a tool of punishment against women for various “offenses”. Argella Durrandon is stripped of her clothes and her voice alike for her defiance. Coryanne Wylde’s assault is treated as some sort of karmic punishment for her so-called promiscuity and bearing a child out of wedlock. Princess Saera gets silenced, shaved and beaten essentially for liking sex. Her punishment is designed to shame her for having had sex before she is pressed to the Faith in an attempt to force her into chastity and moral righteousness. The Silent Sisters continue to be routinely used as a threat and a punishment for sexual promiscuity.

Rape culture and normalising sexual violence

I’m having a bit of a case of stating the obvious when I say that Westeros has a flourishing rape culture. But it’s still a fact. Westerosi patriarchy perpetuates and enables sexual violence on an institutional level to the extent that rape has become so normalised that no one so much as blinks at it. The custom of the first night is a clear example of that. And although we have Alysanne and Septon Barth’s impassioned arguments against it that ultimately succeed in having it banned, Gyldayn does his level-best to downplay and beatify the sentiment towards the first night on Dragonstone and exclude the Targaryens from pushback against it. According to Gyldayn, not only was the resentment of the first night muted on Dragonstone, but “brides thus blessed upon their wedding nights were envied, and the children born of such unions were esteemed above all others". Normalise and glamorize rape, why don’t you, Gyldayn?

Also a fixed feature of Westerosi mores is the bedding ceremony, something that involves the stripping of both the bride and the groom by the wedding guests and that often include liberities taken with the bride. In F&B, Daella’s rejection of a bedding is treated disparagingly by the narrative as a facet of her childishness and immaturity, while Rhaenyra, at the age of 9, is included in the party that disrobed her father for his bedding ceremony. For the boys, the bedding ceremony is treated as a sign of virility, strength and character maturity as seen by the reactions of those who attended the bedding ceremony of the 13-year-old Maegor, and the description of how mature the 12-year-old Viserys was because he bedded his wife.

Those are facets of a problem that, for me, largely starts and ends with the authorial attitude towards some forms of sexual violence in the text. In a discussion about F&B on westeros.org, Martin’s collaborator Elio Garcia, echoing previous comments made by Martin, insisted that bedding young girls is understood to be gross and inappropriate in Westeros and that an example such as Unwin Peake’s young daughter is simply an indication of Peake’s (and his onetime goodson’s) awfulness and cruelty. However, the argument that it’s socially, if not legally, frowned upon to bed young girls in Westeros does not hold in the face of the sheer amount of young girls being wed and bedded at young age, to the extent that the matter became so normalised that neither father nor husband of any such unfortunate girl attracts any kind of censure, not even socially. I certainly saw no such sentiment when Viserys I was marrying the 11-year-old Aemma Arryn and bedding her at 13 to the tune of zero opposition. Nor when no one blinked at the fact that the-nearly-60 year old Thaddeus Rowan was searching for a suitable young maid to wed after the death of his first two wives, or when he later wed the 14/15-year-old Floris Baratheon. What about when Jaehaerys and Alysanne Targaryen arranged for their daughter Viserra to wed their contemporary Theomore Manderly at age 15? Or when the 60-year-old Corlys Velaryon started sleeping with Marlida of Hull at 15, if not younger, which earned zero condemnation and zero focus? The perversion and predatory behavior of these old men is treated as a non-issue within the text, even though Martin and Garcia keep telling us that it should. They just fail to have the narrative actually show that. But you can’t keep insisting that it’s considered perverse in-universe to bed young girls when everyone is doing it.

As for the argument that young Lady Peake’s example was meant as a deliberate point about her father’s character, that’s a fig leaf that doesn’t even hold up in the face of the text. It’s easy to say that this was an added commentary on Unwin Peake’s character when Peake is an awful human being that we’re meant to hate, but what about Thaddeus Rowan who is clearly presented to us by the narrative as a decent and moral man that we’re supposed to sympathize with? Was there a point to be made about what an awful man he was in his marriage to Floris Baratheon too? Did I miss any part of the narrative that treated Rowan as a figure worthy of denunciation for his culpability in Floris’ death, or even acknowledged that culpability? Because from where I’m standing, that young girl’s death was treated as something that we’re supposed to sympathize with Rowan over. What about Rodrik Arryn, a two-time offender who impregnated the delicate Daella and witnessed her death only to repeat the tragedy by marrying off his daughter as a child? Rodrik is also presented as a decent person who loved Daella and who is barely criticized for his part in her death, which is ironically an improvement on the lack of acknowledgment of what he did to Aemma.

You want to present child brides as some sort of commentary about the terrible character of their guardians and husbands? Don’t have your best king - who previously refused to consummate his marriage to his own sister-wife on account of her age - and his good queen arrange a marriage for their minor daughter. Don’t have the fact that Rodrik Arryn had loved Daella for years before marrying her at 16 count as something in his favor when that means he was in love with a literal child. Don’t have numerous kindly-written characters do the exact same thing that you claim indicates awfulness and cruelty. Also, also, don’t have your characters treat the rape of a 13-year-old girl as her fault. F&B is utterly unsympathetic to Coryanne Wylde despite acknowledging that the man who slept with her was in his thirties, but Coryanne is blamed by everyone for “her shame” and her subsequent assaults are treated as something she brought on herself. Don’t tell me that a boy kissed Daella against her will in those exact words, then not only act like she was unreasonable for disliking him, but make no mention of any kind of rebuke made to a kid who forced himself on a royal princess. Don’t normalise child brides and build a society that enables, encourages and accepts the rape of pubescent and prepubescent kids as par for the course.

Depiction of female sexuality and queerness:

Let me preface this section by saying that I’m not a medievalist or a historian so my knowledge of the medieval era comes from what research I did on the subject, all of which makes me scratch my head over the fascination with female sexuality present in Gyldayn’s writing. This goes beyond cases where a woman’s sexuality was a part of events that would typically be noted by a historian to include random tangents about a lady’s sexuality for pretty much no reason. That strikes me as really weird because that information is relayed to us in the form of a history book, and female sexuality wasn’t typically that widely scrutinized, recorded and commented on. Moreover, the way their sexuality is used in the narrative leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially when it comes to talk of their queerness - the narrative gives us very little in means of a relationship between two queer women, but uses their sexual orientation to either undermine or negatively frame these women.

Queen Rhaena Targaryen is a prime example of how a woman’s queerness gets used to depict her negatively in the text. It doesn’t get any clearer than her sexuality being referred to as a beast through Frankly Farman’s Four-Headed Beast epithet that just so happens to describe four queer women. It might be argued that Franklyn is not necessarily the voice of the text and so his view is only reflective of him and not of a textual problem, but the problem is that the text never really bothers to challenge Franklyn’s misogynistic and queerphobic view. In fact, it appears as if the text is at best excusing and at worst exonerating Franklyn, first by repeatedly talking about how condescending and dismissive Rhaena’s companions were towards Androw as if to suggest that Franklyn was correct to dislike them and label them as beasts, then by having Rhaena’s confrontation with Franklyn after Elissa’s escape condemned unanimously by Jaehaerys and his court as Rhaena’s fault. Jaehaerys might have taken issue with how Myles Smallwood talked about Rhaena but he certainly did not contradict his assessment of her or Franklyn’s own misogynistic response to her. It’s Rhaena who gets the explicit censure while also being painted as wrong and borderline hysterical.

Too, I dislike the way that Rhaena’s performance of her formal dynastic role seems to have been tied to her sexuality by the text, an implication which exists in the pointed reporting of Rhaena’s rudeness and emotional absence during a royal progress until her current favorite was summoned to her side, and in how Jaehaerys seems to blame Rhaena for bringing Elissa to Dragonstone in a segment that carries a suggestion that Rhaena’s sexuality and her love for Elissa undermined her governance of Dragontone. More damning is the sense of vagueness with which Gyldayn talks about Rhaena’s companions that were killed by Androw. While the term “favorite” is consistently used when the text wants to indicate a lover rather than a friend, Gyldayn has used the term “companion” to indicate a relationship too - more clearly in the case of Jeyne Arryn and her dear companion Jessamyn Redfort - so for him to call those killed by Androw Rhaena’s companions and including two of her acknowledged favorites among them, Gyldayn (and Androw himself in his final conversation with Rhaena) seem to be implying that Rhaena was involved with all of them. Even the 14-year-old Cassella Staunton and Lianne Velaryon? It’s unclear but that vagueness introduces a problematic dimension to Rhaena’s sexuality that certainly did not need to be there and that does nothing for the story.

The story of the Maiden of the Vale carries similar elements to Rhaena, only clearer. While the story provides us with an entirely legitimate concern of how men try to leech power from powerful women as a possible motive for Lady Jeyne’s refusal of marriage, she is still the subject of rumors about being a lesbian, or alternatively, someone trading sexual favors from the 15-year-old Jace for her political and military support which links her political action to her sexuality, of which we only get a last-minute confirmation on her deathbed. The rumors about Lady Jeyne can certainly stand as an example of in-universe misogyny, but it’s undeniable that the story both builds on and asserts a prevalent misogynistic assumption that a women who doesn’t want a husband must be a lesbian (which strikes me as a modern stereotype), while linking refusal of marriage to a man to exploitative behavior.

Also a modern stereotype is the assumption that two gender non-conforming women who share quarters and appear to be close must be lovers which is present in the thinly-veiled suggestion that Sabitha Frey and Alysanne Blackwood were involved. It’s immensely strange to base such a deduction on the fact that the two ladies shared a tent and were always in each other’s company when they were the only two women in an army of men, especially in a society where a highborn lady sharing her quarters with friends, companions and ladies-in-waiting is a common occurrence. I can see where people would think Lady Sabitha or Black Aly unnatural or even grotesque in the way Brienne is treated in the main novels for being gender non-conforming and/or ugly/not traditionally beautiful, but making the jump to “well, they must be queer” for keeping company with each other and sharing a tent when surrounded by men is not a typical sentiment of the medieval era as far as I know.

This, however, is a symptom of how Sabitha Frey in particular is portrayed in the narrative. She is a fairly prominent figure throughout the Dance and yet we don’t really get much in the way of a characterization for her. She gets called merciless and grasping in passing with no elaboration as to why she is thought to be so and when she gets a moment of close examination, Gyldayn uses it to tell us of how she “would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women”. I don’t know if Martin was trying to lean into or affirm our negative perception of House Frey, but Sabitha’s sexuality and gender performance seem to be the focal point of her characterization so assigning uncorroborated negative attributes to her does not come across in the best light.

Another aspect of how badly this books deal with queerness comes from a certain parallel I noticed between the stories of Saera Targaryen, Baela Targaryen and three girls from the Maiden’s Day Ball, the three Jeynes as Gyldayn calls them - Jeyne Smallwood, Jeyne Mooton and Jeyne Merryweather. In all three stories, there is an offhand mention (or an obscure insinuation in Baela’s case) of how each of them had sex or at least experimented sexually with other women that is simply there to frame the scandalous wanton behavior of each of them. Saera’s relationship with Perianne Moore and Alys Turnberry, Baela’s possible involvement with the twin brothel workers, and the three Jeynes’ supposed visits to the Street of Silk are mentioned casually and aren’t treated like any kind of a meaningful connection but as a sensationalized scandal that adds color to the story through its eroticism. That treats wlw relationships as an embellishment that solely exist to decorate the narrative. It’s fetishizing and dehumanizing in the way it treats these women and their relationships as merely objects of scandal.

Portrayal of women’s relationships:

This is one part where I think Martin made an attempt to in try to fix the solitary woman issue that’s been pointed out repeatedly in the main novels – how we keep hearing about male friendships and male relationships that frame and sometimes drive the narrative whereas women are either mysteriously solitary figures or have their friendships go unexplored/framed negatively. Queen Alysanne and her companions are where Martin succeeds in fixing this problem to some extent; everywhere else..... Eh.

I’ve argued before that the problem in Martin’s writing of female friendships isn’t just that he gives precious few of them, especially compared to the male friendships that drive the narrative; it’s in the overwhelmingly negative representation of female friendships. The majority of female friendships (and that includes familial relationships) are mired in conflict and negative associations across the series, and this book is no difference. Women’s relationships are often defined by jealousy, competitiveness over a man or rooted dislike. Maris Baratheon is so jealous that Aemond Targaryen chose one of her sisters over her that she challenges his manhood and, in Gyldayn’s eyes, provokes Aemond into attacking Lucaerys Velaryon in a plot that is both unnecessary and contrived so as to blame a woman girl for a man’s actions. Cassandra Baratheon spreads a false rumor that her sister Ellyn asked Aegon III if he liked her breasts during the Maiden’s Day Ball, and that’s when we’re not spending time on rumors about how she may have been involved in young Jaehaera’s death because she blamed the little queen for her woes, which are that she didn’t get to marry Aegon II and become queen, and that she lost her place as the heir to Storm’s End due to her little brother’s birth. Oh yeah, I can certainly see how that is a natural line of thought. Cassandra then goes on to be involved in the plotting against Daenaera Velaryon and the Rogares.

Saera Targaryen is disliked by every single one of her sisters (but it should be noted that both Aemon and Baelon were amused by her). The question of the possible motive of Jaehaera Targayen’s suicide includes her being jealous of Baela’s pregnancy (Jaehaera was ten). Rhaenys and Visenya’s relationship is largely defined by a rivalry over Aegon. Rhaena and Alysanne’s relationship is afflicted by tension, resentment and blame. Lucinda Penrose’s jealousy of Daenaera Velaryon having the queenship she coveted not only led her to participate in the plot against her, but made her quite randomly blame Daenaera for no man wanting her, implying she was attacked because of Daenaera which is not true. Priscella Hogg wanted Larra Rogare dead so that Prince Viserys could marry her.

Why do female relationships need to be defined by the presence of a guy, GRRM? What’s up with the downright illogical motivations of some of them? Why is it that the only positive relationship a queen has with her ladies on-page is that of Queen Alysanne?

GRRM also has a frustrating tendency to link female friendships to their sexuality or introduce a sexual component to those friendships. In the main novels, we have Cersei’s rape of Taena Merryweather and Arianne’s youthful sexual experimentation with Tyene Sand as notable examples; in F&B, Rhaena Targaryen is the first woman who gets meaningful relationships with named women and it’s suggested that many of them were her lovers (Rhaenys, Visenya and Alyssa Velaryon are said to have had lady companions as well but we barely get anything in the way of an actual relationship with any of them, or, you know, names for them). Sabitha Frey and Aly Blackwood gravitate to each other and share a tent during the Dance and we immediately get a reference to a potential sexual involvement. Coryanne Wylde, in one of the many versions of A Caution For Young Girls, is said to have thought of Alysanne as her own sister, with the reported rumors being either that she “taught” Alysanne’s husband how to pleasure Alysanne or that she taught Alysanne herself alongside Jaehaerys how to have sex. Saera had sexual intercourse with her two female companions. It is as if two women can not be friends without sex being a part of it.

So basically, men get to have friends and meaningful positive relationships in asoiaf while women get sexually-tinged friendships or have their relationships revolve around squabbling over a man. With the exception of Queen Alysanne and her companions, the vast majority of female relationships are either negative or framed negatively by the text.

Broken mothers, broken women:

Grief is a woman’s kryptonite in this book, especially if she is a mother. Gender is used as a default explanation for why several women break and freeze after a child’s death, often as a prelude to their stories tapering off till their death. While certainly understandable in the context of the tragedies they face, I question why it’s always the women who break down, rend their garments and retreat from public life, whereas men react to similar tragedies with anger, pursuit of vengeance and singular political focus. I also question why Martin uses a mother’s grief so often as a convenient plot device to force passivity, silence and absence on his female characters to fit the requirements of the plot, even when their previous (and sometimes even later) characterization and actions fly against that abstract frozen moment of time they experience due to their grief. Why do you keep having women freeze in their grief, Martin?

The tale of the Dance of the Dragons is not new to F&B but in the stories of Rhaenyra and Helaena appears a clear gendered approach to the depiction of women’s grief over their children that is echoed in several other places. This is somewhat more apparent during the Dance for how Rhaenyra and Helaena’s reactions can be contrasted against that of Daemon and Aegon II, both of whom reacted to the death of Lucerys and young Jaehaerys respectively by swearing vengeance, exacting a bloody toll in revenge and pushing their political and military campaigns. But while their husbands reacted, Rhaenyra and Helaena suffered from crippling depression that forced them out of the war narrative entirely, even to the detriment of their respective factions as underlined by the repetitive remarks about how additional draconic power might have affected the course of the war. That Dreamfyre was rendered useless to the greens because of Helaena’s inability to ride due to her depression is pointed out repeatedly, whereas Rhaenyra’s seclusion and grief over Luke’s death and her absence from her own war council is blamed for Princess Rhaenys flying to Rook’s Nest alone and getting killed. The narrative even accentuates how detrimental Rhaenyra’s absence might have been to her own war efforts in having Corlys Velaryon blame her for Rhaenys’ death, and again in having Jace recruit dragonseeds to increase the black’s draconic power at a time when one of their dragonriders is indisposed.

In the case of both sisters, a mother’s grief is largely used as a way to get a dragonrider out of the picture, at least for a period of time in Rhaenyra’s case - a gendered approach that adds to how Rhaenyra’s pregnancy and childbirth, both clearly gendered, were also used as a convenient plot device to sideline her in the early days of the Dance. In the words of Gyldayn, “[t]he death of her son Lucerys had been a crushing blow to a woman already broken by pregnancy, labor, and stillbirth”

Mother’s grief is also used to explain how sisters Rhaena and Alysanne retreated from public life after the loss of their daughters. Rhaena leaves Dragonstone for Tarth then Harrenhal, turning into a ghost herself as she settles in the haunted castle after refusing to return to her seat on Dragonstone or have anything to do with court for years till her death (Rhaena had previously stopped governing Dragonstone and retreated to her chambers to mourn her companions as well), while Alysanne takes herself from court to Dragonstone after Gael’s death, a more acute echo of her self-imposed isolation following Princess Daenerys’ death, and the offhand mention of how her four youngest children’s marital plans brought her so much pain and grief that she considered joining the silent sisters. It just so happens that two of the four (i.e, Daella and Viserra) had died at the time and Jaehaerys persisted in pushing Alysanne to consider Saera dead as well. Alysanne even tells Jaehaerys point-blank that she is going to Dragonstone to grieve for her dead daughters.

But two exceptions exist to this trend: Alyssa Velaryon and Alicent Hightower. Alyssa is a character that defies the broken mother trope by being a main architect of Jaerhaerys I’ accession and the survival of the Targaryen dynasty after her two eldest sons died horrifically. She survived the loss of three children and estrangement from her surviving three. She could have been a sound critique to the broken woman trope, if only the narrative allowed her to stay that active dynamic figure she was instead of trying to minimize her. Despite her defiance of the trend of how a mother’s grief leads to depressed seclusion, the narrative still managed to sideline Alyssa by having her inexplicably choose a self-imposed confinement for the remainder of Jaehaerys’ regency after her confrontation with Rogar Baratheon in the small council. Not only is this undeniably minimizing to Alyssa’s character, it flies in the face of all her prior characterization. This is the woman who survived the loss of two sons by horrifying means but soldiered on and showed tremendous political ability, who dealt with estrangement from her surviving children but continued to rule the realm throughout it, who stood up bravely in the face of her husband’s dehumanizing attack. But I’m supposed to buy that Rogar Baratheon broke her? Come on now. To make things worse, this act of isolation is the last thing we get of Alyssa’s own agency.

Alicent Hightower is another case of someone who defied the broken mother trope by being a steady political presence throughout the Dance, even after only Aegon II remained to her. Even after Aegon’s death, Alicent still tried to influence the court by trying to get her granddaughter Jaehaera to kill Aegon III. But when the time came for Alicent to depart the narrative, GRRM chose to fall on his tried trope of the broken depressed woman. For the last year of her life, Alicent's time in confinement was spent weeping, ripping her clothes to pieces and talking to herself. Alicent’s deteriorating mental state might not seem unreasonable in the context of her circumstances, but it certainly boggles the mind that she is presented to us as slowly losing her wits while imprisoned in her own apartments at the same time that the horrifically tortured and maimed Tyland Lannister is said to have kept his sharp wit through his harsh imprisonment in the black cells, so Alicent’s gentle imprisonment in a familiar place with servants and septas attending her somehow took a worse toll than Tyland’s residence in inhumane conditions where he was tortured regularly. Too, Alicent's final image in the text is wretched and undignified which is striking compared to how Grand Maester Orwyle is presented as a hero during the course of the Winter Fever and a vital source of information on the Dance through the confessions he wrote while imprisoned.

So even in the cases that the broken mother trope is challenged, GRRM still uses the same element of seclusion and depression to define a woman’s fate. It has not escaped me that our final look at both Alyssa and Alicent depicts them in ghastly conditions.

Treatment of women’s voices:

Fire and Blood’s handling of women’s voices is hit-and-miss, with the misses outpacing the hits by miles. It goes without saying that not everyone in the narrative can or should have a voice so it’s not that I expect every single woman that ever appears to have one, but some of the omissions are really glaring. Take Jocelyn Baratheon for example. She was a sister/surrogate daughter to Jaehaerys and Alysanne, wife to Aemon and mother to the fiery Princess Rhaenys.... and we know almost nothing about her, leaving her function to the story to be about her motherhood and her fertility. Pages upon page of this book is dedicated to discussing women’s sexual lives but I guess the life and experiences of a court-raised onetime crown princess was unimportant to warrant a mention. Jocelyn existed to birth Rhaenys then promptly disappeared from the narrative after her angered reaction to Baelon being named heir over Rhaenys and her unborn child.

More acutely, the narrative has a bad tendency to have notable women suddenly fall silent or completely disappear at times when they should be present and outspoken, if it’s not actively punishing them for having a voice altogether, while their male counterparts get pages detailing their opinions and their reactions. The broken mother/woman trope discussed above contributes heavily to this problem in presenting a distinct sense of narrative-enforced quietness that befalls these characters once the narrative decides that their voices are no longer necessary for plot development. Princess Rhaena Targaryne is pretty much turned into a ghost on the outskirts of the story from Aerea’s death till her own. Her mother Alyssa gets turned into a nonentity not long after her fight with Rogar Baratheon in the small council. Alyssa’s retreat from public court is the last time she is given a voice of her own. The report that both the former Hand and the Queen Regent were “wounded and silent” in the aftermath of that showdown really struck me, because for all that Rogar and Alyssa fell silent, it’s Rogar that the narrative chose to restore voice to, despite the fact that, unlike Alyssa, Rogar’s silence was a result of his own hubris and thirst for power. For him and Alyssa to be treated as if on equal foot by the narrative in the first place and for their silence and “wounds” to be framed as similar is preposterous, but what’s even more preposterous is the fact that Rogar gets afforded pages to detail his reconciliation with Jaehaerys and even a transcript of their meeting, whereas Alyssa gets one paragraph in which the focus is on Jaehaerys’ own thoughts and we hear nothing from her; instead her thoughts and feelings are posited by Grand Maester Benifer.

From there on out, we don’t hear from Alyssa Velaryon, only of her. The narrative deliberately silences Alyssa and substitutes her voice with the suppositions and opinions of the men around her. It’s Jaehaerys and Rogar who get voices in Alyssa’s own marital reconciliation but we don’t hear about what she thought about it. We don’t know what Alyssa thought about either of her pregnancies or the health risk they posed. We do hear about Rogar and Benifer’s happiness and Barth’s concerns though. Even when she lay dying and arguments were made about her and her child’s chances of survival, Alyssa is denied a voice. The one statement we get from her is immediately dismissed by Gyldayn as likely not happening and we’re left with the reactions of those around her, Jaehaerys and Rogar, Alysanne and Rhaena. But we never find out what Alyssa thought or wanted. Instead, her narrative purpose lies in her fertility.

At least Rhaena voices a condemnation for the way women’s bodies are callously used by men in Westeros in a statement that is contextually very powerful but that is, once again, undermined by the narrative not too long after. It is both outrageous and unnecessary to have Jaehaerys himself ignore such a powerful statement years later in a plot that also dismisses Alysanne’s clearly expressed wishes and borderline silences her since Jaehaerys’ objection to her reasoning is voiced to Grand Maester Elysar rather than Alysanne herself, and she isn’t even given the chance to give the counter-argument that, you know, the mother that Jaehaerys is citing died because her husband only cared about having a child. Queen Alysanne may be the most prominent, most well-rounded female voice in F&B, but that does not stop the narrative from robbing her of her voice when it wants to. I certainly have not forgotten how she falls silent on the matter of her granddaughter Aemma’s marriage, or how there is so much discussion about the tragic fates of Alysanne’s children all around that conspicuous quietness. Neither have I forgotten how there is a random comment about how Alysanne contempled joining the silent sisters due to the pain and grief she suffered in the matter of her youngest four’s marital prospects.

Then there is Maris Baratheon and the convoluted needless story that does nothing but attempt to shift blame off Aemond for Lucerys Velaryon’s murder and lay it on Maris, then have her literally silenced as a punishment, whether that’s through being consigned to the silent sisters or the rumor that she had her tongue removed beforehand. Maris exists to be scapegoated and silenced, her forced silence a penalty for a man’s violent tendencies.

Going back a little in history to Aegon’s conquest gets us a few more queens who got silenced by the narrative. I’ve talked before about how Argella Durrandon’s fate stands as a unique abnormality in the history of the rebellion and how her forceful loss of voice was the last we hear of her in the narrative as the focus thereafter shifts to Orys and his own actions and behavior. Similarly, the circumstances of Marla Sunderland’s deposing bears uncomfortable parallels to Argella’s own: while not sexually humiliating like Argella’s, Marla had her voice violently stripped away when her tongue was pulled out before she was sequestered to an order that takes women’s voices away in the name of piety. That Argella and Marla were the only ones to suffer that literal loss of voice in the history of the rebellion (while Rhaenys and Visenya get their voices take away by the narrative itself since both inexplicably vanish from the story despite being physically in the area right before Argella and Marla were deposed) makes it very much about their gender.

Of course there is always the argument that it’s not only women who had their tongues ripped out or got silenced throughout the narrative, and while that is true, they were the only ones during the rebellion to receive that pointed stripping of voice by men, including Marla’s own brother. Moreover, it’s really glaring that this violation was specifically a punishment for defiance and daring to claim power. The violence visited on Argella and Marla was unnecessary for plot development, weirdly personal in a clearly gendered way, and done exclusively by men for the benefit of men as a punishment to these women for having the audacity to have agency and power in their own right.

Death by childbed

In times of peace especially, it was not uncommon for a man to outlive the wife of his youth, for young men most oft perish upon the battlefield, young women in the birthing bed.

Well, perhaps women wouldn’t die that often in the birthing bed if they weren’t getting pregnant as young as 12. Just saying.

This is another recurring problem in Martin’s writing that’s been broadly criticized for being too present in the narrative. It intersects with the problem of child brides, and the Dead Ladies Club, though it’s not only limited to them.

Death in childbirth is an inherently gendered death that is used as a rather convenient way to kill off female characters across the series. Often these women’s relevance in the text amounts to their fertility and the children they bore, and they are used as either a vessel to deliver the true important characters, or a part of the setting around a male character. By my count, F&B has 12 women dead by childbirth.

The unnamed wife of Edmyn Tully. Exists to explain why her husband resigned his seat on the Small Council

Queen Jeyne Westerling. Exists as a part of framing Maegor’s political decline and her function in the story is explicitly solely about her fertility.

Queen Alyssa Velaryon.

Princess Alyssa Targaryen.

Princess Daella Targaryen.

Queen Aemma Arryn. No characterization. Narrative function lies in having Rhaenyra.

Lady Laena Velaryon. Afforded scant characterization. Dies for the convenience of the plot. Main function is having Baela and Rhaena Targrayen.

The unnamed fourth wife of Jasper Wylde. The first three may or may not have died of “exhaustion” as well, since the man sired twenty nine children on four wives.

Lady Arra Norrey. Childhood companion and wife to Cregan Stark. Dead giving birth to his son Rickon. That’s it. That’s all we know of her.

The unnamed daughter of Unwin Peake. She died in childbed aged 12. That’s the extent of her relevance.

Lady Floris Baratheon. Pretty, sweet, frivolous, dead.

Ormund Hightower’s unnamed wife. Only mentioned in the introduction of her successor, Samantha Hightower.

The main point of criticism here is that these women didn’t need to die in childbirth or complications from childbirth of all things. They didn’t need to be reduced to walking wombs or plot devices or set decorations. They didn’t need to be a side note tacked on to explain a quirky nickname. And they didn’t need to die for the male character’s angst or characterization.

“But the above is only reflective of Gyldayn’s misogyny, not an authorial problem”

I chose to address this argument at the conclusion of this post because I know that inevitably, the argument that the problem lies in the in-universe narrator’s bias rather than an authorial failure will come up. I’ve already seen it argued, by fans as well as Elio Garcia, that Gyldayn’s own misogyny and personal views account for the problems that many fans have criticized in the text. But that’s a paper shield. Ascribing every problematic element in the narrative to the in-universe characters is not good enough at this point. This argument is neither productive nor satisfactory, and it strikes me as a rather transparent and convenient way to shut down any critique leveled at Martin’s writing, or at the very least deviate it from its intended objective to tangle us in a debate about sexist narratives vs sexist societies.

But I will have that conversation because this distinction causes a lot of confusion over what’s an authorial problem and what’s not. Westeros is a misogynistic patriarchal society that systematically minimizes, marginalizes and dehumanizes women, but just because your society is sexist doesn’t mean that your narrative has to be. We see that in the main novels when characters like Catelyn, Asha, Brienne, Arya and many others have to contend with the limitations their society places on them and the prejudices leveled at them because of their gender, but the narrative does not validate that misogyny. It doesn’t discredit these women or treat them as an afterthought. Westeros may be biased against these women but the narrative isn’t. That is not the case with F&B because Martin chose to make our sole source of information on these women a deeply misogynistic man, which made his narrative deeply misogynistic as well by virtue of the narrative adopting Gyldayn’s biases and making them a defining aspect of the characters’ stories. That is a choice on Martin’s part, just like exaggerating Gyldayn’s misogyny to the point of minimizing the few instances of challenge the narrative attempts to offer is also a choice.

It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to leave Alysanne’s condemnation of Jaehaerys and Rodrik Arryn’s role in Daella’s death to stand without undermining it. It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to let Alyssa Velaryon and Alicent Hightower remain as a deconstruction of the broken mother trope, instead of falling back on tired ideas that build on breaking women’s spirits down to their graves. It wouldn’t have cost Martin anything to have Rhaena’s powerful statement about how men use women’s bodies to their graves to stand without undercutting it via Jaehaerys (who once refused to consummate his marriage out of concern for Alysanne but apparently have grown to not care that much about her health in later years). Those rare cases of pushback are right there; they allow for both the characterization of the author-character and the worldbuilding of the society to stand but offer a critique of the misogyny shown instead of just leaving it present and unchallenged as a set decoration. Even allowing for Gyldayn’s misogyny, Martin could have found a way to elevate some of the problematic aspects of this book. He didn’t. He chose to undermine his challenges instead.

I find that the idea that Gyldayn is the one who should be blamed for what this book is rather than GRRM such a weird argument to make. Gyldayn is Martin’s creation; he does not exist independently from Martin. If Gyldayn is a sex-obsessed pervert, it’s because Martin chose to write him that way. If Gyldayn is a misogynistic victim-blaming abuse apologist, it’s because Martin chose to write him that way. It goes without saying that it’s not inherently problematic to write a character with these characteristics, but the problem emerges when that character is an author whose lens our knowledge of every single woman is filtered through. We’re not likely to have any information about these historical characters from any other source. The best we can hope for is a throwaway line in the main novels that wouldn’t give us much in the way of personhood for these characters. In writing Gyldayn as he did, Martin crippled our knowledge of a large number of women in Westeros history and denied them any chance of ever becoming realized characters in our eyes. So why did Martin choose to write Gyldayn as the avatar of every patriarchal bias in existence? What is the narrative gain in having your narrator be so interested in the sex lives of teenage girls? What did GRRM do to push back against Gyldayn’s misogyny? Why is Gyldayn’s characterization prioritized over the personhood of so many women? Because Gyldayn’s characterization is only relevant insofar as his function as a vehicle for authorial exposition. The narrative and the readers gain nothing by him being so painfully misogynistic. In fact, this is what is used to cut any attempts by the narrative to challenge the rampant misogyny in the text at the knees.

Furthermore, the argument that that Gyldayn’s prejudices shouldn’t be taken for the narrative’s own and thus as an authorial problem falls apart when you consider how many of the issues I discussed above exists in the main novels too, when there is no Gyldayn to blame for the narrative’s misogyny. Also, it should be noted that Gyldayn in-universe misogyny doesn’t even account for all the problems of the text. Gyldayn isn’t the one who made Jaehaerys ignore Alysanne’s wishes not to have more children. Gyldayn isn’t the one who made Septon Barth denigrate Alyssa Velaryon as someone whose main objective was to be liked. Gyldayn certainly isn’t the one who decided to kill off 12 women in childbirth, or cover F&B with child brides. Gyldayn isn’t the one who decided that multiple women needed to isolate themselves to grieve. And Gyldayn might have been the one who reported on Coryanne Wylde, but he sure as hell wasn’t the one who created her story. Those are authorial choices made by GRRM.

I’ve seen it argued that F&B is supposed to be some kind of critique of how misogyny colors history but I disagree vehemently with that notion. You can’t lean into old sexist tropes and call it a critique. You can’t put an inordinate focus on women’s sexual lives to the exclusion of their own personhood and call it a critique. I know that that depiction is not endorsement, but it is not a critique either. Depiction is not inherently a condemnation. There is no inherent challenge in events just being there - the narrative needs to make some effort to push back against them to make it clear that something is being called out. F&B rarely challenges the misogyny permeating it, and when it does, the challenge is promptly undermined, dismissed or ignored.

#asoiaf #asoiaf meta #fire and blood volume 1 #asoiaf criticism #misogyny in asoiaf #gender in asoiaf #the dead ladies club #warning for a lot of awfulness #gyldayn #is a warning on his own #also I'm a ranter so be aware #long post

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toaarcan · 5 years

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Scourge the Hedgehog: The Bad Fanfic Apotheosis

Y’all are gonna hate me for this one.

This is something of a followup to my previous post, Fiona Fox: Depth vs. Prominence, and inspired directly by the discussion I had with a friend in the comments section of the DA upload of it.

Part 1: Fanfic vs. Canon- Genesis of the Recolour Elements of the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic have long been compared to a bad fanfiction, particularly the parts of the story written by Ken Penders, though other writers like Bollers, Chacon, and Flynn have drawn that label too. I'm one of the people that's done it, and that's largely because I hold fanfic and official material to very different standards. There are certain things you can do in fanfic that you can't do in official material, especially with franchises like Sonic, and especially with more niche parts of said franchise, like a comic series. Of course, there are also certain things you can do in both, but you probably shouldn't. And Scourge is one of them. What exactly the process behind Scourge's creation was is something that's been debated. For a lot of people, he's considered to be a parody of the then-rampant "Sonic Recolour" fad, wherein fans would take screenshots of Sonic X, and other official artwork, and then edit it in Microsoft Paint, or another similar program, to create their own characters and stories. Now, this was long decried by other fans, myself included, as incredibly lacking in creativity and originality. It also had an "Ew, cringe" reaction, due to the often-shoddy editing, text-to-speech voices, and usually some top-tier mid-2000s Nu Metal for the music. These days, it's much easier to look back and say "These were mostly made by kids who were just having fun, and it's completely harmless", and it becomes apparent that a lot of the people that were making fun of them and criticising them were grown men, at which point you kinda realise that this "internet fad" was basically just bullying a bunch of children for not being up to the creative standards of some adults. Everybody was looking for the next Chris-Chan, but Chris-Chan is a near-unique entity, as only one other person alive has ever managed to combine that sheer void of talent with a monumentally repulsive personality, and that person is Ken Penders. But Sonichu is the least interesting thing about Chris, and Chris became the laughingstock that he is because of his inability to avoid posting his entire life on the Internet, which was something of a rarity in those halcyon days before the rise of modern social media. Sonichu was a gateway to the actually interesting content also on his channels, whereas these recolour-creators didn't have anything like that, just endless Windows Movie Maker slideshows. And, like, Chris was in his 20s when he became the Internet's punching bag for the first time, and while he's a horrible person, so were the people that dedicated their time and effort to trolling him- His story is fascinating, but it has no heroes. And into this collective cocktail of grown men shitting on preteens, so Ian Flynn introduced Scourge the Hedgehog. Is Scourge a parody of Sonic recolours? I sincerely hope not. The reason for that is twofold, and I'll discuss how his portrayal generally doesn't seem to be mocking those tropes further down the page, but the second issue with the idea that he is a parody is best explained by Sir Terry.

Parody can never punch down, and as a then-24 year old man writing official canon for a franchise, mocking a bunch of 10 year olds on the Internet for making bad stories would definitely be punching down. And, as I said, nothing about the way Scourge is written is in any way poking fun at the tropes of these fancharacters and stories. It's pretty much all played completely straight. So not only do I hope Ian wasn't trying to mock these fancharacters, but there's also little reason to believe that he actually was. He's not a parody, he is a send-up. And on the one hand, it's kinda nice to throw a bone to those kids. But on the other hand... is Scourge really the character you want to represent your part of the fandom in official material? A cruel, violent, abusive, vicious monster that spends his time palling around with a girlfriend that the writer reforged to be the most unlikable character in the entire comic? Yeah, can't say that's what I'd want if I were one of those people, but he seems to be popular enough, so maybe I'm in the minority there. But now we get to the meat of the problem. You see, the way Scourge is written is one of those things that you can do in fanfic, but you shouldn't do in canon. Part 2: What is a Mary-Sue? The term "Mary-Sue" gets thrown around a lot these days. It's gradually lost all meaning, and has slowly become a term for "Female character that I don't like," mainly used by whiny, easily-offended Broflake Youtubers, who get all pissy that Star Wars films aren't specifically catering to them, to the point that you only have to make a girl be good at something in a movie and these pissbabies lose their shit. I liked Episode VII and VIII more than I, II, or VI, get fucked. But what, then, is a Mary-Sue? And why is it relevant to Scourge? The answer to that first question is a lot more complicated than it might seem. Not just because there are now several different varieties of the trope, but also because the trope itself evolved as it began to be applied to non-fanworks, and additionally because the name itself is somewhat non-indicative. A male Mary-Sue can exist, though these are normally referred to as "Marty-Stue" or "Gary-Stue", or more cynically "The Protagonist". Check out the average Batman comic these days and you'll see what I mean. Originally, the term applied only to a self-insert character in a fanfic, that was an overly-idealised version of the author, dramatically overpowered, hugely popular, normally dating whichever member of the cast the author wanted to bone, or sometimes multiple partners at the same time, along with a few other traits. It's actually pre-Internet term, originating in a Star Trek fanzine when "Mary-Sue" was created as a parody of other fans' similar characters. Over time, the trope evolved to the point that, while the "author avatar" feature is still a pretty big indicator, it's not really necessary. So while there are probably plenty of people out there who want to be Batman, not every character that is a Mary-Sue is someone for the author to project themselves onto, and not every author avatar is a Mary-Sue. Generally, the important features of a Mary-Sue are now: 1) Receives a great deal of favouritism from the author 2) More powerful than the rest of the cast, often to the point of absurdity 3) Faces zero consequences for their actions. 4) Liked by characters that have no reason to do so 5) In a relationship with a character that has no reason to date them, previous relationships be damned. 6) Most importantly, the story will bend over backwards to give them easy wins, even in situations where they logically should struggle. You're probably starting to get where I'm going with this, and if you're not... Part 3: Creator's Pet Scourge is a Creator's Pet. He gets shown a fair bit of favouritism from Ian Flynn, primarily the guise of how much focus he gets. Scourge is the most prolific villain in Ian's run, aside from Eggman himself. While other, better villains like Mogul and Naugus were being imprisoned repeatedly until one retired and the other became a dog, and a huge chunk of the comic's remaining antagonists were being subsumed into the Eggman Empire, Scourge was only moving up, not only being the villain of Ian's first two issues on the book, but continuing to make sporadic appearances for the next twenty issues, before appearing as the new leader of the Destructix under Finitevus in the Enerjak Reborn arc, followed swiftly by a stint as the Big Bad in Bold New Moebius. Does he actually deserve this level of importance? You be the judge, but personally, I don't think so. Even within those stories, Scourge gets special treatment, the biggest and most obvious being Metal Scourge. Now, personally, I think Metal Scourge was a better character than Scourge himself, but the fact that, of all people, Scourge got a Metal counterpart before anyone else, including Knuckles, who had such a counterpart in the games for over a decade by that point. Especially since, well... Metal and Mettle is a fun story, but it doesn't really do anything for Bold New Moebius as a whole, does it? It's basically pure filler, only really serving to add another dead Metal Sonic to Ian's list and stall the plot out for a bit longer. And, of course, the most clear indicator of Scourge's favouritism is that he was he first Archie character to receive his own Sonic Universe arc, and the only one to do so without needing two or three SEGA characters also making up the rest of the lead cast. "Lockdown" isn't a particularly good story, but its existence speaks to not just the insane popularity that such an unworthy character received, but also Archie's willingness to indulge that. Sonic Universe was largely intended to tell stories revolving around the members of the SEGA cast that, for whatever reason, weren't able to regularly appear in the main book. This... frequently got broken, with Sonic, Tails, Sally, Bunnie, Antoine, and Amy all taking centre-stage in the book before obvious candidates like the Chaotix got a look in, some of them twice over, but Scourge was the only time they were willing to try a story based entirely around one of their characters, and they gave it to the already extremely prominent Scourge. It's pretty clear that Ian loved using this character, and did so as much as possible. YMMV on whether that's good or not. Part 4: Scourge OP plz nerf Let's be real, he's overpowered as fuck. Now, overpowered characters aren't necessarily bad, but it's significantly harder to write an OP character than an on-average one, and Scourge didn't work out so well. From the moment he turns green, he's basically unstoppable. The one time he actually seems to remotely struggle is actually in 161, where he looks ever-so-slightly winded after curbstomping Sonic and Shadow at the same time. From then on, while he does start to slowly even out with Sonic, he also continues to utterly demolish basically everyone else, especially his easy conquest of Moebius. It's been suggested that conquering Moebius should be easy, because the big threats are all good, kind people there, but that somewhat ignores that there are anti-versions of the heroes kicking about too. All the (Mostly) benevolent rulers of the Primeverse should be tyrannical despots there, and there are excessively powerful entities like the Anti-versions of Merlin and the Guardians, not to mention whatever horrors Anti-Gerald would've unleashed on the world, and that's without the Suppression Squad themselves. While the comic has generally treated Sonic as being able to stomp the entire rest of the FF, well, who says it has to be a fight? Why the fuck doesn't Patch just poison him? I mean, the obvious answer is "Because then Bold New Moebius won't have a main villain", and sometimes contractual villain immortality has to be a thing, but a good writer should be able to avoid putting the characters in that position. Following on from that, Scourge gets to fight basically the entire FF and Suppression Squad at the same time, (Sonic and Amy are absent and Fiona is on his side), and he's winning until Sonic shows up. Then directly after that is the hedgehog brawl, and despite Sonic managing to get everyone against Scourge, he easily manages to escape and break out his Super form. Even after spending his time in the No-Zone completely powerless, Scourge manages to break out the moment he gets his powers back, despite the prison being full of characters who should be equally or more powerful than him, and the police force that caught them all, basically unchallenged. Scourge never faces an actual challenge in the comic. He never struggles, and the one time he actually loses? Ian makes up some new lore on the spot, which is contradictory to SEGA lore from the same year, and then uses that to have Sonic trick Scourge into depowering himself. Not only does Scourge never struggle with anything, but he also never actually loses a fight. Part 5: When will you learn, that your actions have consequences?! Probably never, because Scourge's actions never have consequences. Throughout his entire run, Scourge gets to go wherever he wants, do what he wants, with or to whomever he wants, and he never has to deal with the fallout of the decisions he makes. Absorbs the energy of a matter world into his antimatter body? He's better than fine, it only made him stronger. Turns up in Knothole with his secret girlfriend's hated arch rival by his side? Never mentioned again. Blows Fiona's connection to him, costing Finitevus' operation a potential spy in Knothole, where Knuckles is? Not even considered a factor. Ditches Finitevus to go and make Moebius into an egopolis? Finitevus isn't bothered, and supports Fiona's efforts to rescue him later down the line after than plan backfired on him. Blinds Patch in one eye out of jealousy/spite? The guy that poisoned Armand and Max, took a torch to Antoine's personal life, took advantage of Sally's frayed mental state, emotionally damaged Bunnie, and tried to assassinate Elias to get what he wanted lets him get away with it. Openly announces that he's going to destroy both worlds? Conveniently does it when he's alone with Sonic so nobody can tell Fiona what she's letting herself in for. He eventually does get sent to jail, but he breaks out with ease the next time he turns up. Because, y'know, that's just what we want to see. Villains never having to deal with karma. Part 6: What does anyone see in him? Scourge doesn't quite get the "everyone loves him" treatment, but he still gets a whole lot more respect than he's ever earned. Both Sonic and Zobotnik are portrayed arbitrarily deciding that maybe there's a shred of good in this monster, and this is the part where I stress that he's abusive again. Maybe if I repeat that enough it'll sink in. Despite knowing full-well the sort of person Scourge is, Sonic's response to Scourge's crappy cribbing of the "One Bad Day" speech is to try and turn it around and claim that Scourge only needs a tiny bit of decency to be a good person, and this is outright untrue, and given what we see of Scourge later, I'm frankly disgusted that Ian tried to pull this with a character he'll pretty much unambiguously portray as an abuser. Zobotnik's case is even more baffling. We're introduced to the guy in the Lockdown arc, and it's implied that he's effectively a tyrannical warden, ruling over the No-Zone with an iron fist, taking an almost sadistic delight in punishing the inmates. But yet, for whatever reason, he decides that it's a good idea to try and rehabilitate Scourge, for no adequately established reason. Even on the other side of the morality line, we have Finitevus, who apparently respects Scourge enough to not just make him leader of the Destructix during the Enerjak Reborn arc, despite him very clearly not being a leader, and not being liked by any of his comrades except Fiona, but then when he promptly ditches the whole plan toward the end, Finitevus apparently decides that he not only wants to get him back, but is willing to go to great lengths and risk losing the only team of mercenaries dumb enough to work for a guy who is quite open about his intentions to "purify the world with Chaos fire" in order to do it. And speaking of, the most egregious case of this comes again in Lockdown, where the Destructix all end up siding with Scourge. Across the second half of the arc, Scourge learns his new team's backstories, and despite them clearly showing traits and beliefs that should make them respect him less, this somehow works in his favour, and he manages to wrest leadership of the team from Fiona. Especially galling is that it appears that Fiona loses their respect early on because of her faith in Scourge, who to them, looks pathetic, but then they end up supporting him anyway, despite doing nothing to earn it. But wait, one's missing... Looks like it's that time again. Part 7: Oh right, he's an abuser. It's time to talk about Fiona. Fiona's heel turn is really, really effective at selling you on the idea that Fiona is a vile, cruel, and selfish person. It's a dramatic, "big bang" moment that, in basically a single panel, got an entire fandom to hate a character. Now for some it was more of a "Love to hate" thing, but there are plenty of people out there who just really hate Fiona for this single moment. And when you're introducing a new major villain, maybe that's what you want to accomplish. What it doesn't do, however, is sell you on her motives for taking that course of action. Fiona, for the rest of her existence, mainly antagonises Sally, whom she has no worthwhile connection to on either side of her turn, other than being the evil Sally to Scourge's Evil Sonic, and stands around or clings to Scourge's arm, looking smug about her abusive relationship. And yes, it is abusive, verbal abuse is still abuse, and the implications that he's physically abusive are present too. I know this is something that Scourge's fans don't really want to accept, but it's true, and we're going to get into that later. For now, what matters is that this character's run as a villain mainly consists of: Fiona: "Hey Sugar-Queen, look at how much my boyfriend yells at me and insults me, and probably beats me when he's angry. I make smart decisions and you suck." We never come to understand why this character, who is so motivated by her belief that everyone will eventually double-cross her that she has decided to start lashing out at people before they can turn on her, is willing to put her faith 100% in someone so repeatedly deceptive that he first approached her by pretending to be someone else. Like, in terms of bad first impressions, that's up there with arriving at a job interview in full clown regalia. The comic makes no effort to show why these characters like each other. Scourge allegedly likes her because she chooses to turn evil and join him, rather than being born evil, but this clashes with not only the fact that Fiona is a genuinely good person before this, who makes a solid effort to stay loyal to her friends first, and is lured into villainy by him, but also the fact that she blames everyone but herself for her current situation, but especially with the fact that all of the foreshadowing for Fiona turning evil consists of people not trusting her because she has a shady history. Scourge claims to appreciate that Fiona is a good person that chooses to be evil, but the narrative has a clear message of "If you started evil, it doesn't matter if you try to become good, you will always revert to type." Which isn't exactly a good message, Ian. In return, all we get from Fiona's side is that Scourge "has no expectations of her and just wants to have fun", which clashes entirely with how we see them interact in subsequent arcs, where Fiona frequently looks disturbed or apprehensive, or just bored, while Scourge yells at her and threatens her for not meeting his standards. Seriously, why do people ship this? But okay, okay. Scourge is a good liar, and Fiona's established paranoia and history do make her vulnerable to manipulators like him, so maybe she falls for his lies and gets taken for a ride. That could happen, sure. Doesn't really explain why she becomes a horrendous person all of a sudden, but whatever. Maybe he convinced her to do it as a sort of hazing, and a means of ensuring she couldn't go back. That fits with his abusive nature (You might also notice that this the explanation I used in Revival). But why does she stay? And why does she refuse every out she's given? Why, after everything that pulled her to his side has turned out to be bullshit, does she remain devoted to him? Now, you can argue that due to the abuse and the manipulation she's suffered, she believes she has to stay with him, and that's a fair shout, but her appearance in Journey to the East is kind of a stumbling block for that theory, because we're shown a Fiona who is fully capable of functioning without him, and even after making efforts to establish herself... the next time we see her she's gone back for him. And now... well, it's time to talk about that "A" word I've been bringing up a lot in this section. Scourge is abusive. I've frequently referenced that he verbally abuses Fiona every time she displeases him across the book, but the most telling scene is this one from Issue 190.

"You do not want to be sent back with me." Translation: "If I get sent back, and you're sent back too, I'm going to beat the shit out of you." Fiona (With her invisible left arm) isn't excluded from this threat. Fiona isn't surprised by this threat either. Nor does she not take the threat seriously. She looks like she's expecting to be struck. He beats her. And please, nobody say that "he's just angry", that's apologism. Now, I dunno if this was in the script, or if Fiona's face was something Yardley did on his own, but given that this arc ends with Super Scourge announcing his intention to destroy both Mobius and Moebius, simply because he can, regardless of the collateral, I'm willing to bet that this relationship wasn't a happy, stable one. But, unfortunately, this element was never made clear enough. Now, your mileage may vary on whether you think Sonic the Hedgehog comics are the appropriate place to discuss abusive relationships or not, but we've got one now, and Ian dropped the ball. This wasn't a Joker/Harley, where the pairing was clearly abusive but also sold DC/Warner millions of dollars worth of merch, this wasn't a RWBY, where Adam took three years to show up and had already won a huge number of fans from his admittedly cool design and powers, so people already liked him before they even knew what his personality was like. Ian had full control over this, no merch to worry about, and Scourge's prolific appearances gave him plenty of opportunity to make it clear that this was an ugly, repulsive thing that Fiona needed to get out of ASAP. And he didn't. Because panels like this, and all the yelling, clearly weren't enough for the fandom. No, you point this detail out to them and they'll make excuses, try to pretend it didn't happen, or just get offended, or worst of all, outright say they don't care and still ship it. We have fanartists who became real official artists creating stories where this garbage-fire pairing is used for sad feels, not because Fiona got stuck in a relationship with a controlling, violent monster, but because oh no they really loved each other and now Fiona's dead isn't it tragic don't you feel sorry for Scourge? No. No I don't. I feel sorry for the thousands of teenagers who support an abusive relationship because Ian was too cowardly to make it clear that the relationship in question was just that. Now, do I think that Ian is an intentional abuse apologist? No. Do I think he wimped out of taking the necessary steps to make it clear that this was bad because he didn't want people to dislike his shitty pet villain? Oh yeah, I do. Scourge's reputation was more important to Flynn than appropriately and sensitively portraying a destructive, damaging relationship between a woman and her monstrous partner. Well, I say "Woman", let's not forget that Fiona was meant to be sixteen, and realistically if you take her timeline into account she's more likely to be about fourteen. Real fucking classy. Part 8: Effort? What effort? So, now we get to our final criteria. And frankly, it's the easiest one to cover. From the moment, Scourge turns green, his life becomes a cakewalk. Everything he ever wants is handed to him with zero actual struggle on his part. Wants to be stronger than Sonic? He is. Zero side-effects to using a Chaos energy form from a mirror universe, or having a Super transformation interrupted, he just seemingly gets to be half-Super forever. Wants another leg-up on Sonic? Here's Fiona, sans personality. Sonic says he's just a lame ripoff of himself? He conquered a planet in a week, look at how cool he is. Also his team all roll over and make him their leader even though they hate him and they could easily kill him. He gets to walk through the entire FF/Squad teamup, and the Hedgehog teamup, and then when he gets to the No-Zone, Zobotnik, who has kept far smarter and more dangerous characters locked up for decades arbitrarily decides to reform him and gets completely suckered by him. The Destructix fully throw in with him, despite him never actually earning their respect. He never loses a fight where he wasn't depowered first. You know what the irony of this is? Ian has a character whom he is contractually obligated to never have lose for longer than an issue or two. And honestly, he wasn't awful at disguising that. Sonic gets a few wins that feel too easy, but for the most part, the issues with this rule mainly manifest in Sonic's limp responses to the tragedies happening around him, and a sprinkling of minor failures and pyrrhic victories ensure that the rule looks more like shoddy writing in a few places unless you're explicitly told about it. And even then, he still manages to make it look like Sonic struggles to attain those victories, that he has to actually put his back into it every time. He is challenged. Scourge isn't allowed to be challenged. That's the irony. Ian has a protagonist who he is not allowed to have lose, and Sonic still manages to be avoid looking like a boring invincible hero, while Scourge just never faces anything that can actually pose a threat to him. Powerful opponents crumple before him. Characters' personalities and development shift to suit his needs. The plot warps to benefit him. Because heaven forbid Scourge actually have to work for his wins. Who needs stakes when you can have the writer on your side! Part 9: In summation... I think you should've all twigged where this is going by now, so let's wrap up. 1) Does Scourge receive a great deal of favouritism from the author? Yes. 2) Is Scourge more powerful than the rest of the cast, often to the point of absurdity? Yes. 3) Does Scourge face zero consequences for his actions? Yes. 4) Is Scourge liked or respected by characters that have no reason to do so? Yes. 5) Is Scourge in a relationship with a character that has no reason to date him? Yes. 6) Most importantly, does the story will bend over backwards to give Scourge easy wins, even in situations where he logically should struggle? Yes. According to these criteria, Scourge the Hedgehog is almost a textbook example of a Mary-Sue. Which is probably why something as disgusting as him got away with so much. I guess, then, that his role in Revival, and a lot of the stuff before that, is the unfortunate reality of a Mary-Sue who suddenly has to deal with the fact that they're no longer getting that special treatment from the writer. That now their actions have consequences, that now the universe doesn't shape itself to their desires.

#Sonic the Hedgehog #Archie Sonic #Ian Flynn #Scourge the Hedgehog #Fiona Fox #Evil Sonic #Critical #CW: Abuse #TW: Abuse

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argentdandelion · 5 years

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Difficulties in Finding Interesting Posts/Fanfics/Fan Comics

(Modified slightly from the Pillowfort version)

When it comes to Tumblr, Pillowfort and, in fact, several news aggregators, I have problems filtering the signal from the noise. I prefer not to scroll endlessly for several minutes, but find what I like in less than a minute and read that for ten (or twenty) minutes.

Could someone help me out?

Preferences

What I like:

Analysis Posts/Text Posts

(These are harder to find, so it's less likely I will have read them already. They are also more valuable to me.)

Analysis Posts (Specifically looking for Undertale ones; though Kill la Kill and Green Lantern: The Animated Series posts are also valuable)

Text posts that are 300+ words long will be used as a proxy for these posts, since I don't think everyone uses the same tags for these posts.

Related: Posts that make essay-like arguments (potentially “discourse”: I don't know why that has become a dirty word)

Examples: A CHARActer Analysis, How Chara's Behavior Points to a Case of Abuse, (actually, a big chunk of the articles on Nochocolate) and that post's rebuttal, most of the Undertale-Science blog back when it was still active

Comics/Fanfictions

Lengthy (30+ pages) comics, with good characterization and stakes:

*Lengthy (9+ chapters/~68000 words and longer) fanfictions, action-adventure genre, that have good pacing, plot, and writing that flows (getting more specific would take too long to describe)

Examples: Flowey is Not a Good Life Coach (the fanfic), Soul Dichromatism (one of my favorites), One by One, We Need to Talk

*What I Don't Like/False Positives

Certain themes in fanfictions (works that are nothing but romantic fluff, "R-rated stuff" (equivalent to Explicit or Mature in fanfiction), harems, plopping multiple variations of Sans and Papyrus together, Reader Inserts, Reader x ____ romances, most instances of second-person narration, which are largely reader inserts anyway)

Artwork which is, so to speak, above PG-13 (though there's probably a cultural precedent to thoroughly tag that or have a safe mode)

Works with Extensive grammar errors, spelling errors, and other errors of the English language (which is a good thing, for some: I do fanfic/fan comic editing for a bunch of people...but I wouldn't offer to help if the errors were too common or the works were bad)

Drawing Sans' face like he doesn't have teeth (I can tolerate a few instances of this, but, in general, if Sans is overly expressive all the time I don't like it)

Personal Experience and Problems

I, like many Pillowfort users, came here from Tumblr. Therefore, my experience in finding content from Tumblr and Pillowfort will be influenced by my Tumblr experience.

One problem in finding the content I like is that Tumblr is apparently primarily visual. This would not be a problem if comics of the kind I like were easy to find, but they are not, and collectively the comics I like are outnumbered by non-target visual posts. (The fact Tumblr’s blocked posts with links from showing up in tag search might affect this.) Despite its Livejournal inspirations, Pillowfort seems to be leaning in Tumblr’s direction of being primarily visual, too. (Disclaimer: I almost exclusively browse the Undertale fandom on both sites.)

For now, Tumblr has much greater volume than Pillowfort, but it’s hard to discover interesting content, especially if one’s tastes are specific and uncommonly posted. Tumblr has a similar problem, but in reverse: namely, the low content flow. Content I want is buried under non-target content on Tumblr, but if what I want to find is rare to begin with, with a small selection available I might never see target content at all.

Potential Solutions

Pillowfort has a sophisticated blacklist function. This could help in trimming away the fat of things I dislike; indeed, I’ve tested it and it works very well. Yet, based on news aggregator experience I get better results from specifying what I do like rather than what I don’t like, and Pillowfort doesn’t have that function. It’s trickier still if people don’t tag their posts with, say, “Undertale Analysis”, allowing me to easily track the tag.

Pillowfort is run differently from Tumblr; it’s intended to encourage discussion and conversation. In principle, this is just what I would want. However, in the places I frequent, comments and comment-conversations are rare. It could be that those from Tumblr haven’t shed Tumblr-ian customs,or it could be that the sorts of posts that stoke conversation are just rare in this fandom. Theoretically, exporting my posts in bulk might help in inspiring conversation and similar posts.

One of Pillowfort’s differences and advantages from Tumblr is its sense of community. Specifically, people are meant to join communities that reflect their tastes. The trouble with this is that general, fandom-wide communities are big, but communities for more specific tastes (e.g., text posts for a specific fandom only) are much smaller, or don’t exist.

#Undertale

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zerochanges · 5 years

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Chunsoft and Sound Novels

I remember when visual novels weren't quite known as well as they are today. By no means are visual novels a mainstream genre of video games--in fact you won’t be hard pressed to find some “expert” try to argue with you over how they are not games at all--but their notoriety is far more than that of even just ten years prior. For the longest time visual novels were seen as just an anime fandom “thing” that mainstream gamers paid no mind to. Very few titles were discussed outside those that had animes be it a TV series or an erotic OVA, and even some of the earliest visual novels localized into English were done so by anime and manga translation companies and not actual video game publishers.

If I had to pinpoint a time in my own memory where the genre started to get noticed more it would be when the Nintendo DS took off. With the DS there was an increase amount of western releases for visual novels thanks in large part to its touch screen interface working well with adventure style games. This wasn't just noticed by Japanese developers either as a fair share of American and European made adventure style games were developed for the console as well. It seems everybody was anxious to utilize the system’s unique features when the DS started soaring in popularity. The point ‘n click and visual novel genres really had a home on the DS, and because of that a lot of people outside of just the anime community got a taste of these kinds of games with beginner friendly titles such as Ace Attorney, Trauma Center, and Hotel Dusk.

However, despite the Nintendo DS (and later to a lesser extent the PSP and PS Vita) giving gamers a finely curated and easily digestible dose of the genre I’d say the sad thing is the push was pretty small and died out quickly. Instead what seems to be the biggest reason why most video game outlets nowadays talk about visual novels are because of the parody dating sims that started to grow in popularity. Hey, do you want to date some monster? Is your girlfriend a llama? Maybe all you need in your life is to date a pigeon. Don’t try to hide it, we all know you secretly wish you could go out with a YouTuber. Not into dorky millennials, well no problem, we got a game for you--that is if dating other people’s dads is a you thing. Yes, this is the era of the wacky, silly dating sims taking over in the English market. It wasn't always like this however, and yes Japan has had a long history of doujin dating sim parodies themselves, but lately it feels like all people know are the parodies that make good YouTube videos to react to instead of what a large amount of the games in the genre can offer.

Don’t get me wrong however, I’m by no means saying parodies do not have a place nor should they stay out of the limelight, and I definitely love that this fad has ushered in a wave of indie made English titles--but simply put this wave lacks so much variety and has been stretched so thin by this point. For every one creative title that pushes boundaries and gets new people interested in visual novels there are ten bland titles spilled all over Steam that feel like they were made by people with barley a grasp on what a visual novel can be outside of either parody dating or “boobies are pretty awesome”. Some of these bland games are even really well made and have a lot of care and attention added to their interfaces and artwork, but when push comes to shove, they are still just a basic joke stretched to its thinnest level. Visual novels don’t have to be that however, and while most mainstream gaming outlets may still be joking about how great it is to date your kitchen appliances, you don’t have to (unless you want to, in which case I recommend dating the toaster for he is the bravest of all kitchen dwellers).

A lot of this misunderstanding can be tied into the nebulous relationship between visual novel and dating sim, two “genres” that many people debate are separate things entirely yet due to the overlapping nature of the two they are often confused for each other. There’s a great article by Brian Crimmins online that actually goes into heavy detail about how visual novels came to be as a genre and how over time both visual novels and dating sims affected and evolved each other. It’s a wonderful read that I really recommend it for anyone curious about games such as these, but either way, whether or not you think visual novels and dating sims are the same thing or should be counted as separate but similar genres of games; it certainly doesn't seem to stop most western gaming outlets reporting solely on gag dating sims as visual novels and taking away a majority of people’s attention from so much more that these games can offer.

I take back all my complaints

I somewhat lost focus and started rambling today, so let’s move on now and finally discuss what I wanted to talk about--that being, despite there being well known visual novel developers to the tight knit community that follows games such as these--examples including but not limited to: Mages, Type Moon, or Nitroplus--my favorite developer often seems forgotten in the conversation. What company is that you ask? Well, it’s Chunsoft. So today I want to talk about why Chunsoft really should be talked about more in the western fandom and all their contributions to the genre.

Chunsoft is one of the many long standing Japanese developers that have been around for every major home console since the Famicom. Nowadays they are known as Spike Chunsoft after their merger with Spike Co. in April of 2012. For the sake of this blog post however I am mostly going to refer to them as Chunsoft still given everything I really want to talk about predates the merger. Chunsoft’s involvement with Japanese style adventure games and visual novels more or less are tied to the very beginning of the genre. There isn't quite a de facto known “first” visual novel per se, but most fans put the starting line at around 1982 or ‘83 depending on which game they may be talking about and which source they want to use for the release date (remember release dates were not entirely clear back in these early days).

One of the earliest contenders for this honor is Yuji Horii’s adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case (Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken), a game that was based around Horii’s interest in western style adventure titles, much like Horii’s later known legendary game Dragon Quest was based around his fascination with Wizzardy and Ultima and how to replicate those games in an easier to understand interface for his home nation. It’s here we can see “visual novel” wasn't even a blip on the radar yet, and there was no definitive understanding of what genres for games really were at the time. Portopia proved to be a major hit during its release however and lives on even to this day as a fondly remembered game (and also a Japanese internet meme). Chunsoft handled the porting of the title to the Famicom and this was the beginning of a long business relationship between Chunsoft president Koichi Nakamura and Enix’s own Yuji Horii as in the years to follow Chunsoft would develop the first five entries in the hit Dragon Quest franchise for Enix.

With the birth of the Super Famicom things began to change between both Enix and Chunsoft. Having developed games primarily for the publisher Enix Chunsoft felt they should move into their own publishing, and soon got certification from Nintendo to do so. After slaving away on four Dragon Quest titles on the Famicom, and also working on the fifth title for the Super Famicom, most of the employees at Chunsoft were burned out so they decided their first self published title should be a simple game. Koichi Nakamura wanted to help make gaming more accessible at the time and took both the team’s exhaustion and his desire for a more casual audience into consideration when they moved forward.

The title Nakamura needed to make had to be simple; a game that anyone could be able to figure out to navigate--even those intimidated by a controller, but despite that also needed to take advantage of the more powerful hardware of the Super Famicom by using Kanji scripts which again would make the experience easier on casual players who had trouble getting into video games because game consoles prior could only display text entirely in Hiragana or Katakana making the reading experience poor and hard to enjoy for Japanese players (see Japanese writing systems for more details). To all these ends the team at Chunsoft decided to create a game entirely around reading to tackle this Hiragana issue and show off the hardware (or at least the hardware’s Kanji capabilities) while also being something anyone of any gaming skill level could enjoy. The game would mostly be text for the player to navigate through and present choices at key moments in the story to advance, cutting out any complicated aspects from western adventure style games that might intimidate the unfamiliar such as solving puzzles or finding hidden items. This is how Otogirisō was born.

Otogirisō (Japanese for St John Wort) was Chunsoft’s very first sound novel, a nomenclature which has since confused the hell out of everyone. But what exactly is a sound novel you may ask? Well, people get kind of convoluted about it. Looking at the definition currently found on Giant Bomb a sound novel can be defined by its heavy reliance on sound effects and music to create a game's atmosphere. Usually sound novels will use minimalist visuals and choose to emphasize the text over the artwork presented on screen--most commonly covering the entire screen in said text instead of keeping text only contained in a dialogue box. Something among these lines is the definition usually seen online when you look into it. It’s not entirely wrong either, but it’s also missing something to it. The term sound novel is a creation of Chunsoft themselves, and something they own a copyright on, this is also often brought up when you search sound novel, but at the time of its creation sound novel was meant to be something really easily understood and not this tangled mess of “a certain kind of visual novel”.

When Chunsoft first created Otogirisō the brand sound novel was added to its box in order to help potential customers understand what kind of game it was. At the time it was just a way to let people unfamiliar with adventure style games (more commonly found in the west) to understand that this title will largely feature reading. In fact when Otogirisō was originally shown to the press in a 1991 Nintendo Space World show the game looked radically different from its finished project. Otogirisō was presented mostly as a book that the player would read, pretty much just like modern e-readers are now, with the exception that it included some sound effects and music. The press at the time was underwhelmed by this so Chunsoft took the game back to the drawing board and created unique visual backgrounds to give the game more flair and in doing so set a certain precedence for future visual novels to follow in.

An important factor to remember here is there was no clear cut way to define games such as these yet. The term visual novel had not yet been coined, and even gamers themselves were not very well aware of genres. As Nakamura admits in a Famitsu interview when asked about the creation of sound novels, “if you look back at the very beginning of video games, for me, the conception of “genre” didn’t exist. Take action games, for example: within that label you had shooting games [note: Shoot ‘em Ups], you had stuff like Pac Man and Dig Dug, and you had more puzzle-y games too. It was very diverse. On the same note, with adventure games, there were Ascii Magazine’s games like Ometesandou Adventure and Minamiseizan Adventure, which were pure text adventures… but you also had things like Mystery House, which had a few pictures, or war simulation games like Fleet Commander. I played all those, and while I recognized there were many different types of games, I never thought about it in terms of genres.” So basically, at the time sound novel was conceived it was just meant to be the most straightforward way to define this Japanese style of adventure gaming that Chunsoft was trying out on the Super Famicom.

But does it end there? Well no. That’s only the part of the answer. Otogirisō ended up being a modest sleeper hit upon its release and this lead to Chunsoft to making more sound novels, with their next title being a legendary game that has since eclipsed Otogirisō as the de facto sound novel; Kamaitachi no Yoru (Night of the Sickle Weasels). This game was a hit, there’s no easy way for me to describe just how big it really was back during its release--out of the pantheon of legendary Japanese games that people in the US and Europe know jack about Kamaitachi no Yoru is one of the highest. Kamaitachi no Yoru is a fantastic game and I talked about it ad nauseum a few years ago when I payed the localized version called Banshee’s Last Cry, check that out if you’d like to know more, and if you’re still somehow able to play it then you’re definitely in for a darn good time.

With the a string of successes in the visual novel marketplace after both Otogirisō and Kamaitachi no Yoru, Chunsoft kept churning out games over the years, many of which are highly respected by the fandom still such as Machi and 428: Shibuya Scramble. All these releases of theirs had a certain tone and atmosphere, not to mention a distinct presentation that didn’t change much over the years and because of that did not look like what visual novels typically look like now. There’s a certain charm and narrative style between all of Chunsoft’s sound novels that is a really strong defining link in their catalogue despite a lot of these games being stand alone--and because of that people come to expect certain things upon seeing the term sound novel. Many titles would eventually come out not made by Chunsoft that shared similarities to their brand--these games followed in the footsteps of Chunsoft’s tone, structure, style, and presentation--and people began to notice, the most famous of which being 07th Expansion’s Higurashi doujin series. This is where we begin to see that murky kind of convoluted aspect of sound novels, as they start to transcend a basic label put on a box almost three decades ago and turn into their own little sub genre or maybe better described as their own style of visual novel.

So what the heck is a sound novel then? The simplest answer is a sound novel is a dated term that Chunsoft used regularly and has since fallen out of use for visual novel; the more complicated answer is that sound novels are both a term used by Chunsoft for their brand of visual novels back before the term visual novel existed and also a certain style of visual novel that is mostly inspired by the early Chunsoft games’ presentation and ambiance.

Top Left to Right: Otogirisō - Chunsoft '92, Kamaitachi no Yoru - Chunsoft '94, and Machi - Chunsoft '98 Bottom Left to Right: Higurashi When They Cry - 07Expansion 2002, Tsukihime - Type Moon 2000, and GeGeGe no Kitaro Maboroshi Fuyu Kaikitan - Bandai '96

Over the years Chunsoft has expanded, changed, and moved beyond their sound novel brand. Despite this however, they have never really stopped putting out solid titles in the visual novel market, and it seems like each new generation of gaming is blessed with at least one visual novel of theirs. My personal favorite title out of all their work from this era would definitely have to be 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the Nintendo DS. It was because of this game in particular that my love of visual novels in general really started, and Kotaro Uchikoshi’s sharp writing--especially the incredible dialogue and thorough thought narration in protagonist's Junpei’s head still stands at the peak in my mind. Throw in beautiful sprite work based around art from legendary Capcom (and now freelance) artist Kinu Nishimura, and a fantastic soundtrack from the man himself, Shinji Hosoe and you got yourself a meeting of some fantastic minds. I've written about 999 in the past, and you can read about it here, but I still want to write more about it in the future, especially tackling the latest release it got in 2017’s Zero Escape: The Nonary Games.

Recent years have seen Spike Chunsoft make it big with their Dangan ronpa franchise, admittedly however the first Dangan ronpa title should be more attributed to Spike, as the game was released in 2010 two years before their merger. However the two companies together as one have since released three more Dangan ronpa games, and two (or is it three?) Dangan ronpa anime titles, and many, many rereleases and compilations. My own interest in the franchise isn't nearly as strong as everyone else’s seem to be but I did however absolutely adore the last game, Dangan ronpa V3, with how many times it managed to jump the shark, upping the game, and constant plot twist after more ludicrous plot twist. If there was ever a way to end something like Dangan ronpa it was what that game did, and oh boy did I get a kick out of that.

Finally moving past Dangan ronpa, 2019 will see Spike Chunsoft develop and publish Kotaro Uchikoshi’s newest game, AI: The Somnium Files, for the Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Steam which just got its newest trailer and release date announced earlier this week. I am very excited for it personally and love the intricate and complex alternate reality game type marketing the team has been using to build up to its release! This is some next level stuff, and has been tons of fun all on its own.

Then there’s of course one more game I simply cannot pass up mentioning, 428: Shibuya Scramble. Now I briefly spoke this title earlier mentioning later sound novels that have been highly acclaimed, and trust me 428 is definitely beloved; its perfect score in Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu really meant something back in 2008 on the Wii. But why mention this with recent Spike Chunsoft games? Well the answer is easy, 2018 saw the much beloved, super Japanese game finally get an American and European release! And much celebration was had! If anything in this whole blog post remotely sounded interesting to you I really implore you all to go check it out either on the PS4 or Steam, and see what a Chunsoft sound novel is all about. And for the impatient, I will be writing about it next on blog!

Despite Chunsoft changing over time and no longer using their sound novel brand, they have still put out many classic and fantastic games in the visual novel genre. Their later work may take a radically different presentation from their prior titles, but despite their moving away from that set style there are still other developers out there that keep up that mantle. Overall I think the effect Chunsoft has had on the genre is undeniable and anyone missing out on their catalogue of fantastic titles are really missing on some of the best titles visual novels have to offer. That’s why I really wanted to write this blog post about them and put into words my thoughts about this developer’s library that just seems so often overlooked by many others in the fandom, at least in my experience. I hope through all my grumbling, and “kids today” rant I was able to at least get somebody interested in trying out one of their games.

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