#themes threads and throughlines

[opbackgrounds]

It's funny, because Buggy tried so hard to betray Luffy so many times. It's like the universe itself wouldn't let him not help after Luffy gave him the treasure marker.

Mihawk will make it explicit during the Marineford arc that Luffy's greatest strength isn't his physical prowess, but his ability to make allies. It's interesting to contrast the way in which Luffy wins people over compared to other thematic foils like Blackbeard, who gains equally enormous influence through violence and coercion. Luffy's guileless faith in characters like Buggy (which later shows up in his alliance with Law) is on its surface stupid in the cutthroat world of pirates, but it's because not despite Luffy is who he is that he influences others to his cause.

Cynical characters like Buggy and Mr. 3 will try (and fail) to take advantage of him, but by mere proximity Luffy will in turn inspire them to grow beyond their base instincts, and he's rewarded by the narrative for his trouble. Mr. 2 comes back to save him after being terrified of Magellan. Mr. 3 unlocks the keys to Ace's cuffs. Buggy saves his ass repeatedly through the saga. It's like Luffy is a gravity well that people can't help but fall into, and it's that charisma and ability to almost instantly create bonds with other people that will cause him to eventually become the Pirate King.

[veliseraptor]

genuine qn!! can you tell us more about mxtx and her preoccupations thematically and including character types and and relationship dynamics, so interesting

oh man so we'll see how long it takes me to answer this ask because I could probably write a whole goddamn essay for this. with footnotes and everything. am I tempted, yes, but the last time I did that it took me like a year and a half and I'm pretty sure nobody cared

anyway, yeah! mxtx is definitely a writer where I feel like I can see the throughlines in a lot of her work pretty clearly. some of these are probably generic and I'm only somewhat equipped to recognize those (being yet a novice in the world of danmei specifically and cnovels more generally), so I can't be certain all of this is mxtx and not just the generic milieu she's working within. but I tried to parse it out based on what I've noticed.

I focused on thematics because that's what I personally find most interesting (and easiest to elaborate on, since some of the relationship dynamics are less specific to MXTX than they are romance conventions, a genre I am less familiar with).

this is necessarily an incomplete list because I haven't reread in a hot minute and also I am, again, not writing a complete essay for this (right now)

Justice/injustice. This one recurs across all three novels, both in terms of the desire for justice and the ways in which injustice is woven into the fabric of society and sometimes, it seems, almost inevitable. There's something deeply pessimistic, for instance, about the way that MDZS deals with this question, or at least a certain ambivalence, but in general I would say it's a theme of MXTX's work that people don't get what they "deserve", and what is or would be just is at best a difficult and often an unanswerable question.

Cycles of revenge/violence. Relatedly: MXTX seems to me very concerned with cycles of revenge and violence and what comes of them - namely, nothing. In SVSSS you see it with Shen Jiu and PIDW!Luo Binghe in particular, and how Shen Yuan's cutting of that violent cycle transforms not just Luo Binghe but the fate of the world as a whole. In MDZS you see it most clearly with the Nie Mingjue/Jin Guangyao/Nie Huaisang situation, which ultimately ends with nobody winning, but also in Jin Ling's explicit rejection of revenge at the end of the novel. In TGCF you can see it in Black Water Arc, where - again - nobody wins, but you can also see it with Xie Lian and Jun Wu. This further relates to:

Disinterest in/distrust of punitive impulses. This is the one I wrote a whole essay about! But in general I think that MXTX is...skeptical...of the impulse to punishment/retaliation, because of the stance she seems to take that violence only ever begets violence and never makes anything better. Again this threads back to the aforementioned "nobody gets what they deserve" thing - because if nobody gets what they deserve, who decides what anyone deserves?

Ambivalence about the "fixability" of society at large. This also kind of goes back to the first point on this list, and specifically I think is illustrated through the fact that two of three of her main pairings retreat from the world at large at the end of their stories. They aren't completely removed from society, but they are distanced from it - in both cases, I would argue, out of some disillusionment with its functioning and/or their place within it. There is a certain feeling in MXTX's work that society is, if not irreparably broken, fundamentally unjust in a way that is difficult to change. (I think TGCF is an interesting outlier in this way, actually.)

Class/status dynamics. I'm not saying that MXTX is, like, writing about class or status, but I am saying that she seems to be interested in the role that it plays in shaping/defining a character, given how often it turns up as a factor - in Shen Jiu, in Luo Binghe, in Jin Guangyao, in Wei Wuxian, in Mu Qing, in Hua Cheng, even in Xie Lian's crash from the heights of wealth to the depths of poverty.

The fickleness of the crowd. This also has to do with the importance of rumor and reputation, but what it often seems to come down to in terms of impact is how quickly people at large change their minds and bend to the beliefs of the people around them; how much attitude toward a person is informed by, and defined by, public opinion - regardless of that opinion's basis in truth. Often, explicitly, in spite of the opinion's basis in lies.

[thisisnotthenerd]

despite having threads in multiple characters’ backstories and a clear emphasis in ruidian society, i can’t help but feel that the theme of experimentation/exploitation could have been explored to a greater extent.

going down the line:

chetney was turned accidentally, but deliberately triggered by ruidus flares that the weave mind influenced

laudna was explicitly selected and experimented on by delilah briarwood before becoming her vessel of undeath

fcg was a created being, programmed for subterfuge and violence

fearne was born for the sake of bringing ruidus to the fey realm. less of a direct impact on her as a person, but more in terms of what it confers onto her as a person of interest.

imogen wasn’t directly experimented on, but liliana sure was, by the grim verity and likely also by the vanguard

orym’s family was killed for the sake of enemy experimentation and testing.

ashton was the sacrifice in an experimental ritual for reawakening a titan, and the subject of experimental healing using dunamis. human subject experiments georg.

the weave mind promoted bioengineering for the purpose of creating more powerful psychics, more optimized warriors, and more efficient beasts of war.

ludinus experimented multiple times with contacting predathos to unbelievably bad effect (molaesmyr)

the pieces were there. it’s just not something that was a priority as a throughline.

[centrally-unplanned]

Since I am discussing anime academia today, I was reading another paper that was equally frustrating, along a different axis:

“Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime

This as a premise is a good concept; someone mining the 90's Usenet anime communities for how the fandom saw female fans back then (the article title is quoting one such thread). So of course, the opening line of this article about the anime fandom in the 90's is....sigh....a reference to Donald Trump:

Commenting on the 2016 American presidential elections, multiple news reporters noted that a relationship could be found between Donald Trump supporters and online anime fans

It of course goes on to discuss Gamergate, 8chan, online right-wing radicalization, references to the "Fascist" themes of Attack on Titan, and on and on. The obvious problem with this is that it is irrelevant; the "methodology" section involves this aside about how they pulled this data from Google Archives but Google is an advertising firm and not a replacement for a real archive and we need to Fight The System and buddy my dude that is not germane to your sample size!!! But more importantly, it is backwards. I don't need to explain the argument here in detail; the article is positing a throughline from 90's anime discourse to modern right-wing internet politics through a sort of 'lock-in' effect of built culture norms around misogyny. Which is fine, you can make that argument - but why is all this future stuff in the first section? You haven't really presented the argument yet! This isn't a book, its not the intro chapter - literally 30% of the text of this article is stating a conclusion upfront, justified not through the text itself but citations to other articles about its truth.

This is something media studies pulled from traditional science - traditional science states "established facts" up front that the paper is building on. But that is because - a thousand caveats aside - in chemistry those facts are....facts. They may be wrong facts, but they can, ostensibly, be objective descriptors. This paper cites "anime is still synonymous with far-right ideologies of white and male supremacy, and events of anti-Blackness" like its citing the covalent bond count of carbon. That is not and never will be a fact one can cite, that is an argument; and its not one that is important for understanding this analysis of Usenet groups. This structure is pulled from other sciences, but it flourishes because it lets you pad the citation count of your peers. Its embarrassing how often you can skip the first 1/3rd of a paper in this field - really the worst possible thing to copy from economics (ding!)

This paper also does the insane thing of jumping between citations from 1992 and events in the 2010's like anime culture is continuous between those time periods. Its an extremely bold claim it just does in the background... but lets set that aside.

This hyper-politicization & hyper-theorizing leads to the second issue of extreme under-analysis. This is the actual value-add of this paper:

From this search, I was able to find the discussion threads “How many females read r.a.a.?” (135 messages; opened on July 13, 1993), “Question: Girls on r.a.a?” (23 messages; opened on February 25, 1994), “Female Otakus” (221 messages; opened on June 25, 1994), “Women watching anime” (72 messages; opened on October 4, 1994), and “Female fans - Do they exist?” (61 messages; opened on October 26, 1995). While these discussions may seem like they were spaces for marginalized users to discuss their experiences, they were often started and overwhelmingly occupied by identified male users. In total, I extracted 252 messages from 1992 to 1996 that were relevant to the gendering of anime fandom, and among those, I classified them as 7 kinds of negative networking discursive practices: (e.g. Table 1. Negative networking practices on rec.arts.anime).

252 messages, five threads - later on it will name other threads, so its more than this, but you get it. It has a bunch of data. And from that data, the article quotes...less than half a dozen examples. There are no quantitative metrics, no threads are presented or discussed in detail from this data set. Some other event is discussed in detail, but again it quotes essentially one person once. The provided "Table 1", the only Table, is a list of the author's categorizations of the data; the data itself is not present. Its file format is a CSV, presumably to mock me for clicking it.

There is, from top to bottom, a complete lack of engagement with the data in question. This would fail an intro anthropology seminar; the conclusion is simply presumed from 1% of the sample size while the rest of the messages are left on read. I just don't think there is any value in that, a handful of messages from 1996 divorced from their context and stapled onto modern politics as a wrap-up. What did the people on this Usenet value? How did they think of women collectively? As anime fans, as outsiders, as romantic partners, as friends? What subfactions existed? Questions like those would presumably be the point of this investigation, but they are treated as distractions.

And this article was, in anime academic circles, a pretty well-trumpeted one. I'm not cherry-picking a bad one here, it was the "hot paper" of the month when it came out. Its just that the standards can be so low, its a field that simply lacks rigor. Which doesn't stop a ton of great work from being done btw, that isn't my point at all. My point is that the great work is not selected for; it goes unrewarded, bogged down by academic standards divorced from discovering real insights.

(I do not think the question "why are they misogynist" ever crossed the author's mind. That should be your literal thesis, and its a ghost. Just ugh.)

[bengiyo]

Step By Step: I Get It, But I'm Fine

There's a lot of frustration coming out of episode 11 for a lot of folks, and I genuinely respect how everyone is feeling about it.

I get that we probably should have spent more time inside of Pat and Jeng's dynamic so we could understand what was and wasn't working so we'd be more connected to the breakup.

I get that we probably should have spent more time with Chot and Krit to get a sense of what a long-term, partially-closted relationship looked like in this setting.

I get that we probably spent too much time away from the office tower, and so lost the thread of the workplace politics while in the LGBT-BL-production bubble.

And yet, for me the absence of so many of the romantic beats folks are writing about feels oddly correct for me. Pat has only had one bad relationship, and Jeng feels like he's underdeveloped romantically as well. So much of their relationship feels like a series of false starts and missteps, and Jeng (and Put) are unable to talk about those problems and work with Pat.

It sucks, because I feel like so much of this story is about Pat growing because of the insights he has from his parents, Chot, and his own history, and it's being a bit lost in the shuffle.

Like @ginnymoonbeam wrote and @respectthepetty detailed, I think much of the throughline has been foreshadowed well enough. As a gay person who dated from the closet, I genuinely get a lot of what's happening at an intrinsic level. I'm dissatisfied that their romance is failing, but I'm not surprised or offended, per se. It again makes sense to me.

I mostly just wish everything didn't feel so muddled, because the ideas about how queer people are not allowed romance or joy in the workplace that is going to profit from their existence is a strong theme I wish hadn't gotten lost in the shuffle.

[septemberlikeastorm]

hi! love your acolyte fic on ao3 <3! i was wondering how you manage to pace your story so well and if you have any advice for new fic weiters on pacing out longer fics? i'm working on my first ever fic but i'm really struggling with keeping my chapters from being all over the place or certain scenes not progressing as far as i'd like them to.

ahhh hello my friend, thank you for being so kind & i am so glad you are looking to start writing fic!!!!

the really ugly & unsatisfying answer is experience, you can't tell from my ao3 profile but i am a battle-hardened fic veteran come from the trenches of FFN.net, riparoni to a real one

hopefully the more helpful & immediately applicable answer for a new fic writer is, i personally never think about pacing, only about throughlines, by which i mean, i never really am trying to go TO somewhere, but rather come FROM somewhere in the story

which looks like: i CONSTANTLY reread earlier chapters (or, if i've not begun the work yet, religiously pore over the canon) & go okay, what's been left open-ended? which character is pushing themselves too hard & bound to collapse soon? when they collapse, how does the other character react? what does Character B's reaction to the collapse reveal to Character A? etc

a concrete example is: i never ever conceived of the scene at the end of chapter 3 of cascade ocean wave blues come, where osha's interrogating qimir over his intentions toward her. i'd planned to end that chapter with them having Brat Summer but it was getting way too long (because when you write like this, all scenes progress WAY further than you ever intended, it's why my chapter count keeps rising lmao) & i needed to come up with something else meaningful to end the chapter on

so i reread what i'd written so far & said okay, osha's been having a really overwhelming day where she's discovering she really gets along well with this guy who Murdered Her Friends & she's kind of starting to understand why he did it & see that potential for violence in herself which is pretty upsetting, on top of which she's just found out he also kills for pay, which like, what the fuck but in the same breath he assures her, very seriously but also very casually, that if anyone hurt even a hair on her head he'd raze an entire planet. & they've known each other for like two weeks

& like. how's a girl meant to respond to all that at once??? so i thought an impactful way to end the chapter might be to have her try to take stock of the situation by asking what he really wants from her, a scene i'd never planned on but turned out to be one of my favorites & be really well-received by readers!

so hopefully this approach might help push scenes to progress fully/really allow you to mine each one for all its potential? as for chapters being all over the place, i think what could help is applying this method of unspooling threads from canon/past chapters not just to plot beats but to themes & metaphors

so for example, i never started cascade intending to liken qimir's most intimate feelings to shattering & to red birds, those were just throwaway lines from the first chapter that, upon obsessive rereads, i thought i could beat the horse dead about extend further to explore how his perceptions of himself & of his capacity for love & joy evolve throughout the story

& even if you've got a chapter that doesn't feel, in terms of action, like a cohesive whole, if you can touch on those themes/metaphors/that emotional through-line in most of the scenes, it can really tie everything together & show how a character's emotional journey carries a story through chapters & to the end - not necessarily to where you'd started the fic intending to go

i hope that is even A Little Bit helpful!!!!!

[alephskoteinos]

A dark seed

There's a few throughlines from Gregory Shaw's "Hellenic Tantra" that I feel like laying out here. I figured it'd be easier to lay them out simultaneously here rather than on a Twitter thread or even multiple threads. Where I'mg going concerns eroticism, to some extent coming back to Georges Bataille, and that starts from Shaw's presentation of Tantra (and theurgy) as a way of seeing the material senses as a path to divine incarnation, but also the extent to which individual particularity, and thereby the self, is also considered divine.

If the sensate experience and the world of passion are pathways of enlightenment, this would naturally mean that eroticism is a vehicle of liberation and divine realisation in life, thus liberation while alive/embodied (jivanmukta). But this has its own inextricable dark side. The premise I just presented would also mean open ways to liberation and divine realisation that are linked to the suffering and pain of the world, or can be felt in what we call sin, or even those which seem to bring us close to death, at least in the sense that Bataille communicated.

Shaw presents a connection between eroticism and sex on one hand and divine possession on the other through the concept of samāveśa. Samāveśa is a term used a state of possession voluntarily induced by two sexual partners, representing Shiva and Shakti. This is in contrest to āveśa, which is simply divine possession or spirit possession by itself, and which can be wilder, "more transgressive", more spontaneous, perhaps to some extent less agentic on our end. But possession, whether samāveśa or just āveśa, attains an erotic import in a very Bataillean sense, and this comes back to the theme of divinity as continuity: for the self to attain continuity, it must collapse the boundaries between itself and continuity, as possession does.

Sex is in some ways central to that idea, and the union implied by samāveśa has to be active, consensual between the partners, and also basically ritual. Because of this, and the fact that sex and ritual eroticism allows the individual to descend into its own re-definition. As Lorilai Biernacki said in her book Renowed Goddess of Desire:

Sex is key because it emphasizes the contingency that is the body, and at the same time affords a space where the solipsistic subject loses itself, even becoming the object of another’s pleasure, or situated outside the subjective experience of pleasure that one sees the other experiencing. In this sense, as Joan Copjec notes, the act of sex functions to ‘‘shatter the ego’s boundaries,’’ opening a space for a new construction of identity.

Thus eroticism is what Shaw calls the “dark seed” of Tantra, implied by the original “hardcore” sexual rites practiced by Tantric sects such as Kaula (and the central, indivisible Tantric divinity is "light"). Mystical interpreations of eroticism and kink could easily follow.

But then there's the divinity of the self, a somewhat different matter, but which also takes to the "dark seed" Shaw was talking about.

For much of Tantric Hinduism, and Shaiva Hinduism, the goal was to attain direct identification between the yogi and the divine. For these Hindu sects, there is ultimately no fundamental difference between the individual self and the divine or universal identity. The point is that they are really the same, observed from different angles. If the self is already part of the universe or part of the divine, then to conform oneself to the universe is surely a useless exercise, but the point is not to conform oneself to God (as if to imply a dualist premise) or dissolve oneself totally. It is more about destroying the barriers between ourselves and the world of divine identity (continuity), destroying the mundane dualistic consciousness by which we frequently seem to abide, through ritualisation of course.

Much of the thrust on the whole nondualist divinity of the self is more pronounced from Shaw's discussion of theurgy rather than Tantra, though the Tantric philosophy and phenomenology aids this discourse considerably, even if it does mean monism of a sort, and even if theurgy favours an indirect identification with the divine rather than the direct identification proposed by Tantra. The point that Shaw introduces regarding theurgy and the self is that our mortal embodiment, and therefore individualised embodiment, is itself an aspect of divine activity, as much as the universal itself is divine. In many ways, this makes the self divine. For Shaw of course it comes down to the idea that this realisation only comes about because we are particularised animals, and that only by fully accepting our mortality may we become a conduit for the gods. We are fully human/animal and fully divine, but the latter is only because of the former, homeward bound only because of our fall. Only ritual or revelation can engage with that paradox. Reason is unable to grapple with it. That also means you must confirm the divinity of oneself through ritual experience, not discursive thought, argument, or even philosophy in the sense that we usually understand it. The practice of attaining apotheosis is in some ways precisely this.

We must simply remove the barriers between our divine self and the divine world, and then the self, far from being dissolved, attains supra-individual cosmic life as the divinised individual self. What else could follow from the notion that particularity and the universal are really the same thing from different standpoints? The self must gain knowledge of its divinity through ritual precisely so that it can assert itself as its own divine presence, as part of a pagan multiplicity of gods! That the self should be divine is a logical consequence of the non-dualism that Shaw is trying to talk about, and in some ways it also connects us once again to the hongaku thought presented by Tendai Buddhism. Perhaps this is a place from which we can explore the comparison between Japanese esoteric Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism once again. I suspect something like what I'm saying is implicit in the way some people talked about Crowley's Aeon of Horus. As either John Balance or Peter Christopherson of Coil said of that Aeon: "During this time, the true self of man would dominate. God would be within us rather than a separate external entity. The only allegiance would be to ourselves.".

But, of course, the whole argument has a flipside, and from there we return to the dark side.

If the self is part of divine activity, there is no reason why everything else isn’t to some degree or another. Desire, passion, sin, eroticism, magic, sadism, masochism, violence, demons, inferno, horror, conflict, the unconscious struggle for the survival of life, even death itself. The true scope of divine activity is in some ways unimaginable, at least for the human mind, but if your non-dualist metaphysics really is “fully inclusive”, then why shouldn’t divine activity consist of even the things we think it shouldn’t? I argue that this is one of the secrets of the Left Hand Path, if not the ultimate secret. Satan himself must be divine.

In some sense Shaw is correct about dualism, in that throughout human history, it really has only been some species of dualism or another that has given us the promise, or rather the pretence, that we can divide between “the light” and “the darkness” of the divine: that we can define divine activity as basically just a hypostasis of everything good about ourselves and the world, and exclude whatever seems to be problematic. But the dualism that makes this sort of promise is weak, even the most elaborate dualist schemes are still nothing more than bad philosophy by another name, and in the end such schemes really have more to say about human hopes, prejudices, expectations, fears, desires, or perhaps even our own identity than they could ever reveal about the true nature of divine activity.

But from there we again come back to a "dark seed", an erotic premise, because of what I said earlier about the link between this form of realisation and eroticism, and therefore, to a degree, the Bataillean continuity of pain and pleasure, sex and death, kinky as it is. Both the Iamblichean and Plotinian camps of Platonism acknowledge the material world as full of suffering and passion, but propose different responses to it, and thence comes a question that should be asked more often. You can almost think of it as another version of Nietzsche's demon questioning you about eternal return. Suppose that some of the Gnostics were correct and that the universe is ruled and created an evil power or principle, a devil who begets devils and demons, and populated with even more demons to keep its wheels turning, would you still take this world as the basis of any liberation, as the Tantric Hindus seem to have done, instead of retreating from it as many Gnostics did? Or would you look at Sade’s Nature with a similar view? In my opinion, Zosimos of Panopolis already had some idea to a similar effect. If your answer to my question is yes, you have the determination and conviction needed for Satanism, for you have embraced life in a way that can only be classed as Satanic (except perhaps also as “sadomasochistic” in a somewhat loose sense), and thus it is in this Satanism that you have taken the logic that Shaw claims for both Tantra and theurgy to the zenith of its emancipatory principle, or at least its most defiantly "perverse".

In other words, if you want to truly embrace the embodied liberation that Shaw is talking about, I would say that Satanism is the highest expression of that liberation. After all, Satanism is a religion whose answer is, of course, "you are a god and I have never heard anything more divine".

[aotopmha]

I did all of the Dawntrail Role Quests.

(Spoilers!)

I think they are not "substantial" enough to go over individually, but I really like the throughline of cultural exchange/cultural shock and criticism of colonial entitlement in them.

Very much like the ShB and EW ones and the job quests in general, they range from fairly forgettable to there being some stand-outs.

For EW and ShB, the Healer quests stand out to me the most and would be the only ones I think I would make a full post on at some point aside from the follow-ups on the ShB ones.

The Physical DPS one was my favourite for DT because it just ended on such a strong funny note with characters I really enjoy (Cirina/Sadu/Magnai) and had some fun jokes throughout in general. I also think the shapeshifting treasure is the most interesting out of all of them.

Though, I do have a soft spot for the Healer quest villain (Ellerete) and her specific theatric personality.

I liked seeing some of these faces again. Cirina/Sadu/Magnai were great. I wasn't expecting Brayflox in the Healer one, either, for example.

I also think people who are super harsh about "plot holes" or "big stakes" will hate these, but to me it feels like a bunch of these just do it for comedy and it's kind of part of the point of it, even if it's technically "wasting" time.

Additionally, I'm eyeing the treasures very suspiciously and can't help but feel like they're being very sneaky and these might matter in some form later down the line. Be it in concept or as items.

I think they're very similar to the Memoria of the 13th, the Sacred Treasures of the Kojin and the Auspicies/The Four Lords; essentially being another take on all of these concepts like the Regulators in Solution 9.

The theming feels fresh even if the story has explored these thematic elements before, particularly in the above-mentioned Four Lords storyline and the Azim Steppe section of Stormblood.

Outside some of the very obvious plot threads to explore like Krile's backstory and people, Erenville's new drive and the key to interdimensional fusion having Azem's mark, I'm keeping an eye out for some less obvious details like those meteorites in Mamook or a specific artifact in Alexander looking like Electrope.

I'm even eyeing the method of growing reeds we used to help the Hanuhanu.

We still have the Black Auracite tucked away with Claudien, too.

I'm not agreeing with this "dumb filler fun that won't matter ever" take some seem to have because that's not how this story has worked for most of its length.

Minor or major, most of it has ended up mattering in some shape or form. And I'm not buying they didn't start thinking about at least some kind of bigger picture right away, maybe not in full detail, but in general strokes because they very obviously feel to be in a much better place than with ARR because they literally don't have a game that is falling apart from the seams and have the lessons of completing a story arc behind them.

I could be wrong, obviously. But I at least get the sense that they might have some sort of direction already in mind (or multiple and they're testing the waters on which people seem to like the best).

[wardensantoineandevka]

would love to know your thoughts on the circle of needle and thread pcs please and thank you

Hello! Sorry I kept you waiting, but my thoughts on this wonderful circle follow! I didn't really speak at length or unpack a lot of it, but I wrote some broad strokes of what interests me about each of them.

I might unpack some of these things in future posts, but if you want to hear more about something specific I mentioned (or about a specific thing I didn't), please feel free to send more asks!

Nathaniel

I am well-known to be a Travis Stan On Main because he is into the same sorts of characters and archetypes and narratives and themes that I'm into. Nathaniel is no exception. I knew I was going to love him off the Q&A, and by God, do I love him.

I think there's something terrifying in how he often is so (endearingly) nervous and hapless yet commands absolute unthinking loyalty in Sean and Marion. But, I do love a character with an unexpected iron force of will underneath a more easily dismissed surface, and I'm always lucky Travis loves that too.

The Trapp family dynamics are absolutely BONKERS, and I've been turning over in my head the reveal that Nathaniel has lived his entire life in the shadow of not just an older brother, but an older brother who died when he was young—and he feels responsible for it. Truly blisteringly deep well to draw from here, and he's another example of how efficiently Travis can sketch a character and imbue them with a sense of deep and heavy history, a dense web of relationships, and a very present absence looming over them in so little time.

A classic Travis character. He's like what if Fjord was Cerrit.

Beatrix

I have to, unfortunately, admit that she is my least favorite of the circle. She is a solid character and well-executed in this episode, but unfortunately, she is of an archetype and is generally a type of character that I don't vibe with. (I had this same issue with Auggie—very well executed, just not my type.)

I am very interested in her place within this circle as the longest-serving among them, and I am very interested in the way she hovers over Jean and the old histories with Marion and Sean. I do also find that sort of distanced assessment of the three men and observation about having watched them go through flashbacks constantly; she is right that they, ultimately, need time, but her distanced tone teeters close to It Is What It Is and that's a fascinating, somewhat jaded perspective if so.

Sean

What a darling, violent boy. I love characters in this genre who take a shotgun or a baseball bat (literally, in this case) to supernatural creatures. Big energy of: "The horrors are incomprehensible? Buddy, I ain't interested in comprehending them. [cocks shotgun]"

His relationship with Nathaniel in particular is fascinatingly bonkers to me in the best way, and I think Sean's devotion to Nathaniel is wild in that like, even factoring in the war history, Nathaniel does not seem like a man Sean would normally respect—so this level of trust is quite evocative. The dead brothers throughline between them is going to drive me insane.

I'm so interested in leaning more about Sean's history during the war, especially because Sean is framed as that's all he has left. He is so stuck in that war that it's in his specialty, and I think there's a lot to explore in grappling with how important it is that Sean's brothers (apparently) died on the same mission Sean stopped being able to look at himself.

Jean

My girl! Like Nathaniel, I knew I was going to love her off the Q&A and, like Nathaniel, I very much do. I ADORE a character who is so tightly controlled they threaten to unravel at any moment. I love characters who seem cold and cool but care so much and is so full of warmth.

I'm also fascinated by the glimpse at her relationship with her father. There's also something very sweet and interesting in the way she dotes on Marion, and I'm definitely watching that relationship closely.

All in all, I wanna see her get her hands dirty, and she's started this chapter off with making a hard choice and I hope that she keeps struggling with them. It's very fun to watch a character who thinks they know the direction they going get all turned around. I am very excited to see this clear code she has further unravel across the chapter, and I love to watch a character with poise become undone.

Marion

As said, a sweet boy! He is so dear to me, and it tickles me that Luis comes onto the channel and immediately experiences The Visions. I'm really curious about the origin of this scar, and why the pointed plant imagery with the window and the patterned shirt and the promotional images. I also would love to know more about Marion's history during the war and what that breakdown at the end was about specifically.

I alluded to it above, but I find his relationship with Jean to be very endearing and I Am Looking while that develops. His relationship with Sean has some fascinating hesitation in it—the exchange about would you know if I was okay / would you tell me in particular—and I do have some thoughts about how interesting it is that it doesn't necessarily feel like Marion quite Gets Sean post-war even though they seemed very close pre-war. I also again find the intense loyalty Nathaniel inspires in him to be so well developed but also terrifying. Marion's is subtler than Sean's, but he is just as quick to listen to what Nathaniel commands, and I'm curious to see if we learn if there was a specific incident that earned it.

He is an enigma at the moment, but I love a haunted seer, and I'm so looking forward to it.

[7vyntheefaerie]

Poetics of Black Becoming: A Manifesto/Syllabus by 7vyn

A Prelude:

i am 7vyn. that is a self-given name that i claim in exploration of my gender and its manifestation of xpression through the digital. 7vyn is dislocated and pixelated embodiedment. a dis-spirit(ed) alien(ated) straddling human and monstrous livlihood. as 7vyn and thru this account, i hope to host a pilot of a manifesto/syllabus that crafts a tangible imaginative world that centers decolonial praxis. i wanted to create a place where texts central to themes of interest for me could live together on the same throughline to think with, around, and beyond each other.

why syllabus?

this is a tradition that came long before my attempts at uniting the scholarly and the activist for more fluid models of knowledge production and sharing. some considerations that made the syllabus a useful tool for me include:

proclamation, this syllabus is not making an argument as much as it is just saying, uniting threads of information. this syllabus is not engaged in any larger debate as much as it is a declaration of a more considerate, passionate, just world and its maintainance and flourishing needs. this syllabus/manifesto is the bare bones of a lineage of thought greater than my own wing-span, so rather than declare and leave thought to the wind as many in the tradition of manifesto do, i insist on the collabortative intention and nature of this piece. as in, this syllabus can be added to. this syllabus will remain malleauble and engaged.

invitation to learning, this syllabus/manifesto is creating a sort of index library or guide map of thinking toward decolonization in a Black trans-cyber-anarchafeminist tradition. this manifesto is uninterested in interacting with and sharing knowledge in such a way designed to exlude nonmembers of academia. so, i use my institutional access to create knowledge beyond academic spaces, straddling the line between academia and activism and daring myself and other producers of knowledge and culture to be intentional about the the work we do to prioritize and care for our audiences of intention. because this is a collaborative work, i most aim for Black transfeminists with specific niches related to the digital and decolonization (broadly) or even beyond to progress and advance the thinking of this syllabus. i encourage all others to engage this manifesto/syllabus as a learning tool.

accessible. this manifesto does not privilege knowledge. by this i mean, i am not the owner of this knowledge, i am merely an assembler, a curator. i also reject bullshit academic vernacular because i believe that is a method of exclusion and i want everyone, even people this is not useful for to at least be able to meaningfully engage with the information offered. i elect to spark enthusiasm and curiousity, not headaches.

translatable. because i think of this manifesto/syllabus as a useful learning tool, i believe that it should also have a flexibility that supports it as a learning model. this means i currently understand the syllabus/manifesto as a zine, twine game, installation, digital exhibition, and on a decentralized platform. these are initiatives i hope to take up later in the life of the manifesto/syllabus, hopefully in direct collaboration with other scholars, organizations, activists, cultural & knowledge workers, etc.

this is a living document + post. i will return as needed to update information, offer specificity, add resources, activities, prompts, and more. this post will serve as the original and masterlist. below you can gain access to some preliminary writing on the sources I have decided to include, key concepts I am drawing from them, and why they are useful to my thinking (and potentially yours too!). as i may have stated earlier in this post, this is just the pilot of this project for me. so what you see as of now (5/17/2024) is just the bare bones of something i will be building outward as long as i need to.

Solidarity (tag: #solid, where strength lies)

Accomplices Not Allies by Indigenous Action

Insurrectionary Mutual Aid by Curious George Brigade

Power Makes Us Sick Issue #3

Resistance (tag: #push/pull)

My Gender is Marronage by Nsambu Za Suekama/Bl3ssing

Them Goon Rules by Marquis Bey

Rave:n by Kelela

Sabotage (tag: #set aflame)

Random Acts of Flyness by Terrence Nance

The Poetics of Difference by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Play With The Changes by Rochelle Jordan

thank you for reading! my placemaking & writing on process does not end here, so stay tuned!

with care,

7vyn

[bleachbleachbleach]

9/6 - 9/10/2023

I think my biggest accomplishment this week is definitely regrowing a decent bit of skin on my leg, and in addition to my "omg just write fanfic do not clean the kitchen it's dangerous out there" lesson I mentioned last week, I've now also learned a lot about burn care! Or not the care itself, but burn progression, and what those stages look and feel like. Also learned that Reddit won't let you view "mature content" (burn images) on your phone unless it's through the Reddit app, which is very annoying. I'm never gonna download the Reddit app. Anyway, new skin is thrilling! And while my September plans were supposed to be "work out more," the burn care thing has sort of tabled that for a bit, which has let me commit more to "omg just write fanfic" September.

I spent most of this week working on scenes that do not feel that great. Reasons for this:

My attempts to describe setting and/or stage business keep coming out in the most arcanely described and/or overwritten (or maybe underwritten?? who knows) ways. Why.

It just feels like there's a lot of Things, and why are there so many things. Like *butterfly meme* is this worldbuilding or is this an episode of Hoarders

But by the time I got to the stuff I was writing on Saturday and this morning, *I* at least feel like some of the threads are coming together. I spent a lot of Thursday feeling despair of the "but who's going to read that far" variety, but part of me is also like, well, it's fairly likely no one's going to read this either way, so maybe the concern should be proportional to that.

Right now, I'm about 1000 words into a Renji-Akon conversation that's had all the middle bits written for like, a year and a half. The middle bits were all jokes, lol, but I'm currently feeling pretty excited by the Themes and Motifs that are coming out of the full version of the scene. It's been really interesting learning about how their POVs about the Gotei and their co-workers and the NATURE OF LIFE AND DEATH mesh, or don't. I always think it's interesting thinking about like, people who've worked together(ish) for decades, and what about each other is knowable and old hat--except you're co-workers, not exactly friends, so your dataset of what's very known vs. what you know absolutely nothing about is super skewed.

To finish the chapter, I have the end of the Renji-Akon conversation to write; the end of the subsequent scene to write, which will probably be more involved than it seems because it's kinda-sorta a fight scene; and then revisions to the chapter tag, which I think will mostly be about trying to make this chapter seem less like a grab bag of things that happen to happen in sequence and more like there's some kind of narrative throughline.

I want to say I can finish the chapter by the end of the week, but unfortunately I'm out of town Thurs-Sun for a ~strategy retreat~ and am feeling very upset about having to drive myself to the airport (hell itself) at 2:30AM on Wednesday night, so I'll probably spend most of the first half of the week trying to keep all my shit together and then a lot of next week trying to get everything back together.

I'm going to boldly aim to finish this chapter, my Part 1 read-through, and Chapter 7 (to finish out Part 1) by the end of September! Which was my previously-stated goal for the end of August, lol.

Part 2 starts with Kira's chapter, which I think is the only chapter I've written absolutely none of, and which I have the least notes for (and all of those notes are about Hinamori, not Kira), but Renji and Akon just talked a lot about Kira, and I'm pretty excited for that horizon once I get there!

[opbackgrounds]

Throughout Impel Down and the Marineford War, Jinbe will repeatedly make statements about this about being willing to die to stop the war. It fits with the focus on honor and yakuza boss vibe, but it's also an attitude that doesn't survive contact with Luffy. The answer isn't to die, but to live.

[variousqueerthings]

I am an idiot with a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning. I don’t need an army

Dark Water/Death In Heaven -- we're doing it as a double episode single-review, because it's one continuous story. It also wraps up a lot of the thematic threads of season eight and finally reveals that *gasp* it was the Master all along! (I genuinely do not remember if people were taken by surprise back in the day, I never watched this far at that time, and obviously I knew when I finally did)

sexism rank objectification (female character is ogled/harassed/turned into a sex joke by the doctor and/or a lead we’re supposed to root for and/or the camera): 6/10

sexism rank plot-point (lead female character is only there to serve plot, not to have her emotional interiority explored, or given agency to her emotional interiority): 6/10

interesting complex or pointlessly complex (does the complexity serve the narrative or does it just serve to be confusing as a stand-in for smart, this includes visually): 3/10

furthers character and/or lore and/or plot development (broader question that ties into the previous ones, at least two of these, ideally three should be fulfilled): 5/10

companion matters (the companion doesn’t always have to be there, but if the companion is there, can they function without the doctor– and overall per season how often is the companion the focus or POV of the story): 5/10

the doctor is more than just “godlike” (examines the doctor’s flaws and limitations, doesn’t solve a plot by having it revolve entirely around the doctor’s existence): 5/10

doesn’t look down on previous doctor who (by erasing or mocking its importance, by redoing and “bettering” previous beloved plotpoints or characters, etc.): 6/10

isn’t trying to insert hamfisted sexiness (m*ffat famously talked a lot about how dw should be sexier multiple times, he sucks at writing it): 4/10

internal world has consistency (characters have backgrounds, feel rooted in a place with other people, generally feel like they have Lives): 4/10

Politics (how conservative is the story): 2/10

FULL RATING: 46/100 (if I can count….)

the real issue with the plot of the finale, as I see it is actually solidly in the field of "pacing." there's some other stuff (I'll get into what I think about fulfilling character arcs and concepts about soldiers below), but pacing is the throughline as we take a look at various themes and arcs and whether they were sufficiently wrapped up

EDIT: this one is quite long because it also partially covers the whole season + I rant about the military

OBJECTIFICATION: oooof the four women in this finale, Clara, Kate, Osgood, and Gomez!Master, we technically don't get this much, however I do think it's interesting that M*ffat's Master is... called... Missy....

which I will not be doing, because I hate it. you see she's "Mistress" because she's a woman now, but no nonono, she needs a cutesy version of it, so it's "Missy," she's like the sexy dom you always dreamed of (just like Irene and River and several single-episode characters...)

at least he didn't dress her in leather

it's also hard to designate whether the way he writes her is so off from the way Simm!Master was written, because he for sure had a bunch of "I'm just Cu-raaazyy" moments. also he used bigotry as a casual hammer, which I'd be curious to talk with RTD about. I don't think he'd do that the same way if he were writing those episodes today, anyway, wrong era

Gomez!Master, in these episodes, has some really really stellar moments. she also has moments that make me go, "ah yes, this is a woman written by M*ffat," most noticeably in some of her one-sided "flirting" with the Doctor. again, it's hard to pinpoint, because a lot of it is just "yeah they're unhinged about each other and have been forever," but some of the "ooh Doctor I'm doing all of this for you," stuff is... it just feels like they can do that because of het Nonsense now (which I will get into in the "sexiness" point)

like she can be softer now (in a Master way) because she's portrayed by a woman opposite Capaldi's Doctor, which I think the "short for Mistress" moment is the most prime example of

I do also think though, this is (you guessed it) partially a pacing issue, because they didn't insert Gomez!Master into the main narrative until the second-to-last episode. if we could have seen her in some material way doing something prior to that -- but wait, Simm!Master also only appeared properly in the second-to-last episode, yes, correct, but Simm!Master was materially affecting the narrative from very early on, and not in a somewhat random "I gave you a number to call for a helpline that turned out to be the Tardis and also I'm sort of sitting around waiting for the plot to catch up with me" setup, but in a "I'm monitoring your family, I'm fucking with the government" kind of way -- there was even a musical cue that included the four beats that recurred so that we could connect that to the overarching story of mind-control

I'm going to get back to this in complexity, because we're getting off-point. Point is the jump from where we left off to where we find Gomez!Master being a bit lovey-dovey (again, in a Master way) just wasn't there and I feel like M*ffat thought he could do it this way because of course now they're played by a man and a woman... hypothesis. theory, if you will. Charlie Day Corkboard meme perhaps. but M*ffat would never have done this if the Master were played by a guy, looking at his track record. he might have done it if the Doctor were played by a woman, but I think the real issue there would have been how incredibly porn-opening-adjacent his Doctor/Master interactions would have become, so that's a different sort of lesbophobic bullet dodged

like, I'll take more explicit Master/Doctor stuff. but I'm fucking watching you M*ffat, youknow.

PLOT-POINT: Clara is not a plot-point in this episode, however I do think the pacing of Stuff hits her quite hard. we had a slowish build-up of her and Danny over the episodes, although fascinatingly he never really got to have proper feelings about the acres of lies she'd told him -- she was working up to telling him about it properly, but he got hit by a car before she could

this brings up a Thing about Clara, which is that she makes a loooot of bad decisions that prioritise her own current wants over what's good for her and/or people around her, and I doooo think that's intentional -- she has a line in this episode where she says to Danny, "I wasn’t very good at it, but I did love you"

now season 9 might deal with the guilt of the above, so there may be things to come, but there was certainly a lot of confusion on my side about what her journey was going to be about, and so far it seems to be a very unhealthy "I am owed things" rather than about running away from something tangible or feeling overwhelmed from life

there is the original idea that it was her mother's death that prompted her to want to travel, but something always got in the way, and that this (for example taking care of two kids whose mother died recently) indicates that she's a "good" person who cares for others -- and she doesn't not care, but it's certainly not her driving character trait in the way that it seemed to look like when Eleven met her properly and gauged her as a person who could be a companion

this is all very waffly, because I'm still not sure where Clara lands in all of this, or if I think it works in the grand scheme of things, especially in tandem with the other characterisations and themes of this season. it's got a very depressing, hopeless sort of framing to it that in other contexts I might be really into, but I may not enjoy for Doctor Who

that being said... it's consistent throughout the season. Clara sees the Doctor's red flags (and we'll get to those) and provided the ending is okay and she can control the Doctor and her own role in the situation, she's okay with the idea that people get used along the way -- as long as the Doctor doesn't try that on her

in this episode of course Clara threatens to (and makes good on that promise, even if it doesn't work) destroy the Tardis keys, stranding them both on a volcano, rails against the ordinariness of grief and feels that she is owed something more, shuts down Danny's attempts to say that he loves her, because it's not on her terms (granted, these terms are "please just accept that I'm dead," but that is kind of the point with Clara and her sense of controlling things, even death), then decides to be the one to kill Danny properly as a Cyberman, despite the Doctor explaining that Cyber-Danny will kill others, and then is fully intending to just straight up kill the Master!!!!

this is wild to me -- back in s3, when Francine and the entire Jones family are prepared to see the Master dead, it's because he destroyed the earth and made them watch and kept them as slaves for a year

in this episode, Clara wants to kill the Master because she did bad things that, yes, prolonged the sadness of Danny's death, but crucially did not actually cause Danny's death. Danny just... died. yeah, there's probably theories out there that the Master might have caused it (we'll get to this too), but this is never textual in the episode, and Clara never gives an indication that that's her belief

she's just angry that the Master is a bad person who did bad things, as concept. and mostly she's angry because her boyfriend is dead, and as far as I can see, the Doctor is now off the hook (whereas at the beginning the Doctor was very much on the hook) and the Master is the closest person around to take that anger out on

bonkers for a companion to be this way. again, Martha, my beloved Martha, Osterhagen key back in the day, she's not doing this out of anger, she's having a straight-up bad time and the whole tragedy is about the Doctor accidentally turning companions into soldiers. they've got guns and everything. Clara just bypasses this and is simply down for murder because she's upset

at the end of course she elects to not tell the Doctor about Danny's sacrifice/still being dead, because she thinks the Doctor would stay rather than return to Gallifrey (which may not be found after all, because the Doctor lies to her about that too), which is quite self-sacrificial of her. we'll see where this sentiment goes, especially as it's another lie, which is kind of their whole... thing with one another. terrible terrible for one another, which I know is the appeal for their fans, so I'm not necessarily writing this as critique

I am reminded of the Doctor and Martha again, who also had a whole unhealthy thing going on, but it was very based in the narrative and had a specific trajectory and then an ending that acknowledged this as a reason for Martha no longer wishing to travel with them (and then some things I have questions about, RTD bring Martha back I'm not satisfied!)

in this story, it feels like this is simply who Clara is. and while it does contradict some of her earlier narrative in s7, I can accept that it's consistent now. but yeah... as said, there's some plotting and pacing inconsistencies. where are the kids from before (I know she stopped taking care of them, but one feels like they had no tangible impact on the story), why was Danny's death written in the way it was (we'll get to that), where did some of her s7 characterisation go (I really missed a Clara who wasn't just smart and quippy, but was also scared and out of her depth), is this because she "knows" a lot of the Doctor lore now, so she feels like she belongs more in this world than other people? why was she in love with Danny, to the point of wanting to go to a possible afterlife to get him back (actually this is a big one, because while they did have scenes together, I don't know what drew her to him, and I have some feelings about Danny down in the politics section of this, which somewhat can be boiled down to "he gives me the vibes of a man who is kind and sensitive and easily used and Clara likes to use people so...")

like I said- it's not that Clara doesn't make sense for who she is now, but that the pacing and structure don't support her arc very well. I don't think this is the worst thing to happen to a female character during M*ffat's run, but it does make this finale less emotionally fulfilling than it clearly wants to be

am I sad that Danny is dead? yeah, but not because of Clara. I'm sad because of his unrealised potential as a character. am I shocked that Clara wanted to shoot the Master? yes, but because it was a Bonkers Yonkers bit of characterisation on top of some already wild things she did which any past Doctor I think would have said "ok, you are not suitable for this kind of life, because you are way too down with murder and have no emotional stability." When Clara left the Doctor, I was kinda like. yeah, ok, she could end this here I guess (I say that, and acknowledge that actually the Christmas Special right after gives her a bit more depth on the whole "Danny Dying Sitch" of things, although again, it does not make me think she should be continuing to travel with the Doctor, never mind be working with UNIT in s9????)

ok. but. pacing. let's get to it

COMPLEXITY: ok the problem with this episode is not technically complexity, although it does fall for a couple of M*ffat standards in that it didn't need to be doing some of the things it is doing (the cremation stuff I think is particularly unsettling in a needless way that I think crosses a line, but that is possibly subjective)

the problem is the questions I was asking in the previous sections and a whole bunch more, that shows that all of the themes and questions that were set up throughout the season weren't paced well or satisfactorily concluded

take one that I like: The Master. big fan of Gomez' portrayal of The Master barring a few things that are very M*ffat female character, with a dash of his Moriarty (so youknow the drill if you've ever spent too long engaging with a M*ffat narrative), but that's not her, that's just her having to make a "hey Missy you're so fine" dialogue work

I mentioned it was odd that she was so sidelined and just... hanging around... until the second-to-last episode. I am unclear why she "chose" Clara to travel with the Doctor, first of all. I cannot remember if this is answered in the episode, beyond like "the Universe and fate and shit" which I'm not a fan of if so. second of all... why didn't she kill Danny? (EDIT: did read there's a short story that confirmed she did kill Danny, but we're going purely by episodes here)

if we want to go big, say, why wasn't there a big, slow reveal that she'd been poking around in Clara's life, maybe also Danny's life who knows, and that she was giving all of these things to the Doctor as a gift by using humans as puppets culminating in Danny's death and this is what sets Clara off? the idea that she once again is just playing to the tune of a larger narrative that she has no control over and worse, isn't even about her, but about this fucked up dynamic between these two incredibly old aliens

I'm sure some people like the randomness of Danny's death. I personally do not. I think it's contrived angst that comes out of nowhere in the same way so much of M*ffat's narrative tends to do. why is this happening now? because we need the story to go there and we forgot to place 90% of the establishing building blocks that make it feel organic -- the worst offender for this in my opinion is still the "Amy grew up with River as her best friend the whole time, you just didn't know," but this is a pretty bad example in my opinion too, because on the surface it is very very sad, and the randomness of death is a great idea... but hey, remember when they did that story in 2005 with Rose's dad and it was really good and established and played into the overarching themes of her story? this is not that. this is using sadness as a cheap device

there's like. a story in here that is really really good, and it gets buried underneath a bunch of contrived over-the-top stuff (although, while I initially thought the "president of the earth" stuff was bad, and still kind of do, I did think it was funny that the Doctor mocked the Master about all those times they tried to rule the world and the Doctor managed it by accident)

I also -- and I'm sure many people have noticed this too -- cannot help but go, "oh isn't this just the Library plot but evil? and with a worse/less believable set of scifi nonsense explanations?" and that's such a M*ffat classic too. use three or four good (and sometimes not good) ideas over and over again, but bigger and more unwieldy

Ohhhh boy the idea of the Brigadier becoming a Cyberman, because all of earth - no wait, more than earth, some of the people who end up there aren't on earth - for the last x amount of years has just been sucked into the evil Library database. (seriously, tell me how this works, because it works across Time and Space apparently??) -- anyway billions? trillions? of people becoming Cybermen. I don't think this is explained either. I am not a fan of the Brigadier becoming a Cyberman, let's say that

none of the core scifi stuff is explained beyond a handwave, and none of the emotional arcs are given a satisfying conclusion but!

listen Michelle Gomez is so cool, I relish the future when I know she's getting better dialogue

also in theory I like the callback to the "I win" in s3. we know the Doctor doesn't kill her, but yeah, him going "you win." they're such weirdos about each other, truly. again, with all of the rest of the "stuff" this season, the poor pacing, the scrape-the-surface-and-it's-cheap-sentimentality I don't think it entirely works, but hey, Gomez will return so!

CHARACTERS/LORE/PLOT: Danny is dead. the Master is Michelle Gomez (and not dead). the Doctor is slightly? more chill in themself (maybe, idk, going by the following episode, maybe not). Gallifrey is still lost. I think that covers it?

also the Doctor just straight-up wasn't looking for Gallifrey this whole time it seems

COMPANIONS MATTER: Clara does some things in this one. notably, not a single thing she does works, but for the ways they work because the Doctor and/or Danny care about her so so much, which I think is at the heart of all of this -- if you (the audience) believe that the Doctor and Danny have so much affection and/or love for Clara that despite her behaviour they would go to the afterlife for her, they would break cyber-coding for her, then this works

if you don't believe this, then we're in trouble.

things Clara does: aforementioned attempted destruction of Tardis key, attempting to save Danny from death, passing herself off as the Doctor, killing Danny, killing the Master

I thiiiink... that covers it. within this she does convince the Doctor to take her to the afterlife, and Danny saves her life a few times

I want to note the "Clara pretends to be the Doctor" moment, because I think it's a good example of some of the flattening of her character. in her earlier entries in s7 she was afraid at times. now, obviously, like the other companions she's seen more, she's more confident, but she is still in very real danger -- contrasting with Rose in Doomsday and how she taunts the Daleks, she's still very very afraid, she's sure they're all going to die

and I think Rose in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday is the closest to Clara out of previous companions I've seen (not counting Classic Who which I haven't finished). by that point she's seen so much that her mother comments that she doesn't seem like herself anymore (I wish Clara's grandmother had made a similar observation -- or at least some kind of observation). she knows a bunch of DW lore, she loves the travel for the sake of it, she feels, yeah, special (although with the caveat that she's met previous companions, the Doom hangs over them all season, we know this is about to end one way or another)

I just sat there the whole time thinking, "why is the director not asking JLC to put more emotion into her voice, more doubt, more desperation, just... more. why is this scene so flat?"

“GODLIKE” DOCTOR: the Doctor is a headless chicken in this one, except for the fact that he's like "yeah we'll go to the afterlife" and then promptly goes "there is no afterlife, this is stupid."

it's a small thing on the whole, but hey, Doctor, you're the one who decided to go there

as for the Doctor as a seasons-arc roundup. I... don't hate it... but I still don't like how this Doctor is characterised. he's still incredibly unlikeable just on a personal level, and yeah yeah good doesn't mean nice, but he's also just not kind. and I think I struggle to enjoy an iteration of the Doctor who isn't kind, at least sometimes

I think a lot of that -- the unkindness -- falls to the wayside as a concept in this episode, because idk, it's not important I guess? whereas I think it's central to the Doctor's question of "am I good"? are you good because you try to make people not-die, sure, but you're also good because you don't mock kids. you don't casually state that you've forgotten peoples faces because they're so forgettable/unimportant to you. you don't treat people poorly that know they're about to die

if that stuff -- that domestic stuff, as Nine might have called it -- isn't important to the question, then I don't think the question is being satisfactorily answered by this episode

yes, Twelve turns down the chance to have a literal army that could just kill all bad guys, but I never doubted that. does Twelve treat others with kindness? Mmmm still not really, going by the episode right after. it's a fun little exploration of something absolutely wild the Master might try, but I don't think it tells me anything new about the Twelfth Doctor

PREVIOUS DOCTOR WHO: ok, I'm sure some people loved some of these callbacks. The Brigadier. the Cybermen outside St Pauls.

did like Osgood saying that Simm!Master prime-minister wasn't even the worst one we've had. that ages ever more hilariously

I just don't think the plot is good enough for a lot of them. and as an ending to the Brigadier well... ok, I liked it better than way back (s6) the Doctor receives a random phonecall that the Brigadier is dead and it's apropos nothing and Kate Stewart hadn't been introduced yet, so it was just some random guy that the old fans knew, but the nu fans would have been ??? about, because why does this guy dying drive the plot like that? I liked that the Brigadier has context

of course that context is, your brain was uploaded to a computer database for years and now you're fully a cyberman -- and it's not framed as super tragic? it's another one of the ways the emotional Stuff falls flat in this episode, and I just choose to pretend it's not something that happens

“SEXINESS”: M I S S Y... short for Mistress... because we need to gender this now. Anyway, the first time this character meets the Doctor in this form, she forcibly grabs him and kisses him without his consent (afterwards Clara smirks and asks if she used tongue)

so that is... that is a thing that happens. that is a thing that has happened a lot on this show, both to Ten and Eleven, but not to Twelve until now, because I guess women only humorously throw themselves at twinks

when will our suffering end?? why is this considered funny???? Stop!!!

she also at one point says "you know I should shoot you in a jealous rage, now wouldn’t that be sexy," which was one thing I was alluding to with the "where does writing the Master as kind of fucked up end and writing the Master as a Crazy Evil Sexy Lady begin" because this is definitely in the latter category

INTERNAL WORLD: is this just the Silence of the Library but evil and less believable? yes. does it make sense that they could magically put all those minds back into reconstructed Cyberbodies on top of corpses, including people who must have been dead for centuries, or died in the future not even on earth? don't think about it

POLITICS: So, you know how this season is all about the Doctor and soldiers and "am I a good man" and Danny was a soldier and calls the Doctor an officer, and on the plus-side we have the Doctor's speech about not being a good man or an officer or anything like that, but just "some fuckn guy" (paraphrased, he actually calls himself an idiot)

on the flipside of that we have... Danny. oh Danny. I. so I really want to like Danny, and I actually do like Danny, I think he's the most underserved character of the season, in the sense that everyone else being written to be an asshole just makes it shine through that he is... not. and his whole thing is that he feels guilty about having shot a kid in Afghanistan and that's what made him leave the military, because... it felt bad, I guess

I write that, because Danny didn't leave the army because he didn't agree with their politics anymore. despite having a bunch of lines derogatorily calling the Doctor "sir," and flipping shit like "watch the blood-soaked general in action" there's never actually a story of Danny realising a superior officer was using his power to hurt anyone, and he never questions that having been there in the first place, in a position to shoot a child, might have been the bad thing

he's not railing against superiors, he's just railing, which is frustrating when it's so close to getting it right. it seemed like they might be going there for awhile, there was a hot second where I thought they might, but at the end he firmly re-identifies himself as a soldier and shoots himself and the other Cybermen into the sky to save the planet. it's so... oooh it's so [flames on the side of my head]

he does send the kid back, rather than himself, which circles back to my thinking about Danny the character (kind, compassionate, sensitive) and Danny as keeper of certain themes (that it's not the system of soldiering that's bad, in fact we need to defend ourselves, see Doctor, your black and white narrative about soldiers as related to any guilt you might feel about having once killed people, or making situations happen where people die or or, is false, because it's more complicated than that, and soldiers are a good thing actually -- no, we haven't actually made a narrative about systems of soldiering, we've conflated freedom-fighting against a fictional fascist-coded alien with the British army, it's the same thing in the end)

it makes me want to -- in that oh-so-silly fandom way -- take Danny away from the writers and look back at his core traits: he's an orphan who by the sounds of things was never adopted, so in a place of being easily groomed by a structure like the army, he believes in the inherent goodness of people (I think), like I said, kind, compassionate, sensitive, lovely to kids, clearly suffers from PTSD (of course), and... in my opinion eaaasily misused by others, because he judges things to be solely on his shoulders

because Clara is a very forceful personality, I can sooo easily see how he'd be taken with her and want to forgive her over and over again and sacrifice himself for her

I wish that Danny's storyline had been about realising his worth. not his worth as a fucking soldier, but just "oh, I've been scared my whole life, I've had to do what others told me my whole life, and now this is my choice." I mean, the sacrificing is still... sigh (I do remember seeing people pointing out that great, we introduce a Black recurring character and then yeet him into the sky once his use is up, vs, say Rory who is there from beginning to end)

(I actually like Danny better than Rory on the whole, but I also think Danny and Rory have a lot of similar traits, and they both fall in love with women who have treated them abysmally, but at least Clara understands this as a part of her arc, both in the final episode of this and the subsequent Christmas episode)

but at least it wouldn't have been a sacrifice in which he reinserts himself as a cog in a machine. fucking soldier. please Danny, you deserve more from this thematic journey. if we'd had a narrative about an abusive or simply bad or incompetent or idealistically incompatible officer, this would have made more sense, but instead we just get vague references that go nowhere

ok I'm writing in circles now, so let's drop this and talk about the kid he shoots, whom he meets in the "afterlife" (argh this whole concept is so stupid) and I guess just... sits with? until he scares him away. and then sends him back to life again

there's something poignant in that to an extent, it's just of course that this random unnamed kid from Afghanistan who says not a line is a prop to absolve Danny of his personal guilt at shooting a child, and, again, not really about the nature of British colonialism and military violence

now oof, those are some heavy themes to bring up, can we expect all this from a silly show like Doctor Who? well, M*ffat did, he just wasn't able to follow through. heavy themes aren't shock value, you'd better be a good enough writer to do something with them, or idk, not want to suck the British army's dick

ooh, that was a bit aggressive on my part. I think because season eight actually has so much interesting stuff it's playing with, so this time I could finally see Stuff, but then the payoff was just a disappointing slap. RIP Danny, in my heart you had character development this season that went into all of the interesting narrative threads that were introduced, and you became a passionate speaker for not grooming kids into joining the army

the TL;DR of this point is "soldiers good sometimes. check mate Pacifist" -- but similar to Kill The Moon, it's so messy I'm not sure it actually knows what it wants to say

FULL RATING: 46/100 (if I can count….)

I feel like not everyone would agree with me, but I like the Master's overall plan. it fits with the wildly swinging way they try to win the Doctor over, just to lash out when the Doctor (understandably) turns them down, while also pinpointing the little hypocrisies of the Doctor's morals, because the Master keeps offering the ability to Change Things and the Doctor prefers little shifts of the status quo that often mean people get left behind or get hurt or it's much messier than a clean sweep of "if you just ruled the Universe with me, we'd do good things"

(the Doctor is of course right to go "yeahno, this is not a good idea, for starters we both have so many issues, for seconds anyone who sets out to be a good ruler of anything has already failed because of the premise"). it's the strongest part of the episodes for me, I just wish it had had a more satisfying build-up and been able to tie in better to the themes of the season (or rather that the themes of the season had been written better in previous episodes so as to tie in better with this wrapping-up)

and obviously the whole "soldier" stuff is just badly written

and Clara...? I'll wait and see in her final season. it's very much a "depends on how they round it off" for me

also, oh boy am I done with quips. the Wh*donesque quipping is doing my head in, please make it stooop

"One last chance. I don’t care about the rules, I don’t give a damn about paradoxes, I swear you will never step inside your Tardis again" <- this is Villain Behaviour Clara!!!!

[fipindustries]

ok finished at the mountains of madness.

it was actually really good, i would even say great, i was glued to the page by the end. lovecraft knows how to write a climax.

and with that concludes the antartic trilogy! final thoughts?

verne is definetly the loser here, his story is a lot more tedious and the slavish way in which he sticks to poe's canon plays against it. he was much more interested in the human element, in dirk peters and godon pym and captain guy and he basically ignores all supernatural hints dropped in gordon pym.

lovecraft on the other hand grabs those few supernatural elements and runs off in an entirely new direction, all his own. he builds upon, he extrapolates, at times divorcing himself entirely of the original story and doing his own thing only to connect it back with a thin thread at the very end.

between poe and lovecraft i have to say poe is the better classical writer. gordon pym is a proper novel of adventures and he is masterful in letting the tension rise and fall and the emotions flow. in a sense its the perfect balance if you were to mix antartic mystery and mountains of madness in one single book. on the other hand lovecraft is too good at being lovecraft, noone does lovecraft like he does and that hews much closer to my own heart. the fact that his story is shorter also helps.

there is a definite throughline here about man vs nature. i figure the miniseries the terror makes a great companion piece for this, albeit that one happens literally at the other side of the world. the polar lands are alien and impenetrable and how disorienting, how vertigo unducing is the fact that this other world is actually part of our world. if i were to condense the themes of this trilogy in one single phrase, it would be the classical and undying script at the border of all maps "here be monsters"

[daisyachain]

Third time I’ve made this post probably. the main themes of TBM break down into

Schoolyard drama (N&N, Violet, WWS)

Relationship in its death throes (P&N, UYS)

True crime conducted by/to children (N&N, Violet, H&S)

Journey to/through a supernatural door (Superstition, Diamonds)

(4b) Ghosts/crossing the threshold of death (WWS, H&S)

Minor themes include: the ocean, seductive boys, generic murder, mean girls, the imminence of death, wronged loner girls, haunted houses, female apparitions, mirrors, jealousy. Fascination is the one with the weakest throughline (bounces between a few of these without committing to a story) so I’m hoping Pathways chooses a thread to follow…

[scorchiesdragons]

I got all the pair cards done, gods that took forever. Lucky for me, I still had the pair template for my last hatchery lying around, and it's (probably) faster to make then the fancy ones.

Mine's pretty modular, it's mostly BBcode with an image for colors and an image with 2-4 hatchling possibilities, all the gene odds are in regular text so I can change them on a whim and only have to redo the hatchling possibilities.

I also did a mini lair purge, and also realized that I don't really want either of my Aether pairs in a hatchery (the babies aren't. that great, even if I like the dragons themselves). One of them has been designated as a fodder pair, and the other is in limbo (I'll get a new mate for at least one dragon from the second pair eventually). I still have 41 proper pairs (and 3 stock the pond adjacent pairs).

Now I gotta figure out if I want to make graphics or not. and how to make the graphics if I do (there is no theme. how do you make nice graphics with NO THEME or THROUGHLINE)

I also have to set up the thread and figure out the new pinglist system (which is probably really great for regular size hatcheries, but a little overwhelming for me)