#there is actually so much discourse around his character and it makes me upset quite frankly

[gemkun]

i think something that is misconstrued is that ratio is always seen as abrasive and harsh. yes , he is a people displeaser and he is unflinching in his candour but there should also be emphasis on how he informs in soft tones and with room for questions if need be , because he seeks to educate and spread knowledge to those less fortunate and to those who simply wish to expand on what they already know. just take a look at the messages he sends trailblazer. so , i don't think he should be viewed as a coarse figure but instead , he's someone who filters out the nonsense and puts forth the purified truth.

[mal3vol3nt]

hello!! I randomly spent like 30 minutes stalking your blog and!! 2 thing!!

bro I just got into atla and WHAT IS WITH THE FANDOM DUUUDE.. what’s with all the discourse it’s literally not that serious damn and how could people misinterpret literally every character so bad 😭😭 why are people so mean to my boy aang. he’s literally just a little guy. sunshine personified literally HOW IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE TO HATE HIM WHAT!! and just. everyone misinterprets everyone so bad, zuko too, also it is kind of annoying how most of the fanworks are about him, I love him too, both he and aang are my favourite characters, but it would be nice to see stuff focused on other characters too.. also people in the fandom woobify him so bad and it’s just like. why. his flaws are what make him interesting!!! also I have no strong feelings on z/k, I think it’s a pretty mid ship but it can be done well (one of my favourite fics does it really well and the reason I really liked it there is bc IT WASNT EVEN THE FOCUS THE FOCUS OF THE FIC WAS AANG AND ZUKO’S FRIENDSHIP, and the author wasn’t even planning for it in the first place it sorta just happened with the way they wrote it, so it actually made sense in that context, so it can be done well but imo it doesn’t work within the context of the show and kataang is objectively so much cuter cmon y’all have bad taste smh) anyways yeah. atla fandom is wack as hell and I will not be joining it lol a lot of people here need to go rewatch the show bc they seemingly completely forgot what it’s about and also touch some grass (but tbh aaaall the sequels will never be canon. to me. lok and most of the comics butchers the gaang so bad and it makes me so upset so I refuse to acknowledge them as canon. there are no atla sequels in ba sing se :)

ok wow sorry for the random long ass rant in your inbox I hope you don’t mind!! have been thinking about that and I guess reading a lot of your posts sorta made me want to get that out somehwre

anyways what I ACTUALLY wanted to ask is if you read fanfiction, do you know of any good aang centric fics? since. it should not be that hard to find them he’s the MAIN CHARACTER why is he so unpopular in his own show he’s literally the little guy ever <//3 more aang appreciation pls

AH sorry for taking so long to answer! i haven’t peeped my inbox in quite some time lol

BUT THANK YOUU and i agree 100%!! joining the atla fandom is like being dropped in the middle of a war zone so i’d definitely recommend staying away and just sticking to the actual show and fanfics lmao

now as for aang-centric fics i’m so glad you asked. lemme put yall on (a lot of this is aangst sorry)

1. 🧡

Aang's 18th birthday stirs up a lot of unprocessed grief and with the inauguration of the United Republic just around the corner and increasing expectations the pressure of it all is becoming too much

Republic City shenanigans, drunken truth or dares, complicated visits home and a semi-arranged marriage inbound!

Complete — 24 Chapters

Part 1 of the finding our way series

⭐️ now this is by FAR my favorite aang-centric fics of all time. it goes into aang’s repressed anger and grief in a way that is so well done i can’t believe it’s free to read. if you’re someone who loves aang, you will love this fic that is a guarantee. i seriously can’t recommend it enough

⭐️ this brilliant author also has another fic uploaded to the same series titled “beautiful boy” that is bumi ii and cloud family-centric. i’m currently reading it and it is a masterpiece so i’d highly recommend that as well

2. 🧡

A sound carried on the winds lead Aang and Katara to hope for something seeming long lost.

Complete — 3 Chapters

3. 🧡

Aang meets one of the firebenders who took part in the original Air Nomad genocide, and Suki deals with the aftermath.

One Shot

4. 🧡

Hakoda and Aang have both lost too much in the war. Together, they learn what it means to live.

One Shot

5. 🧡

In which, Aang still suffers from the guilt and shame after having abandoned his duties as the Avatar resulting in the Airnomad genocide and his friends, remind him that he isn't alone, not in this fight.

Incomplete — 4/6 Chapters

6. 🧡

A collection of ficlets written for Aang Week 2021, hosted by @ aangweek on Tumblr.

Complete — 7 Chapters

7. 🧡

Being the Avatar is a burden as heavy as the weight of the world. But as long as Katara is alive, she swears that Aang will never have to carry it alone. Written for Kataang Week 2023 Day 2: Injured.

One Shot

8. 🧡

Aang goes to Kyoshi for advice, and learns that they might have more in common than he imagined.

One Shot

9. 🧡

Raava was ancient. The spirit of order and light, created to serve as a peacekeeper among the spirits. That was her purpose. When she had fused with Wan, she had fully anticipated the years of strife and war.

What she had not anticipated, however, was the feelings. The feelings of love, joy, fear. The feelings of humanity.

And no such feelings were stronger than the love she experienced the first time she looked into the eyes of her newest incarnation. The first time she met Aang.

One Shot

10. 🧡

“I want you to make me a promise, Avatar Aang,” Katara whispered. This time, when she placed her hand on top of his, he didn’t pull away. “When this is all over, when the war is won… Promise me that you’ll grieve.”

(alternatively: grieving is hard. aang’s friends work harder. a series of missing/expanded scenes from a:tla exploring aang’s grief through his friends’ eyes.)

One Shot

(continuation in reblogs)

[rollercoasterwords]

Hey rae! So, I have a topic that I’d like to hear your opinion about because I feel like it’s been talked about a lot (at least from the media I consume) and that is saying that liking DE characters makes you anti-Semitic/ ‘support’ Nazis. I know how you feel about rosekiller, which I totally support, if you wanna be a hater, please do, but…hmmm I don’t know how I feel about people calling each other every name in the book for liking a DE. I mean that’s the same with regulus, I’ve seen quite a few people talk about how they hate him because he’s DE and liking him/any other DE makes u anti-Semitic. This has me questioning my morality and my pov because I refuse to be associated with people as horrible as Nazis, and I think that you always give a good perspective on things and so if you also think that liking these characters associates a person with them then I seriously need to sit down and have a 1:1 with myself, y’know?

Also, on the same topic i feel like there’s a huge controversy with liking Barty and hating Snape, which I see how that could be wrong, but we know more about Snape and he’s done things to characters that we really know and love so I kinda feel like not being fond of him but liking Barty is valid-ish?? Because yes, if we can erase huge parts of Barty’s character to make him more likeable&redeemable why wont we do that with Snape? I still don’t know how to feel about this whole thing because I think questioning things about yourself is a good thing and it helps you learn&grow so I’d just like to hear your thoughts (rosekiller hatred put aside). Like, if you think rosekiller is the most boring ship in the universe and if you wanna hate on it, please please do!!! Express your opinion!!!! But it kinda rubs me the wrong way to hate on the people liking DE and associating them with a hateful group. If you don’t wanna answer, that’s more than fine, you can totally ignore my ask!!! I understand if you don’t wanna share your opinion on this topic. Have a good day!!

hi! i appreciate that u value my opinion + i'm happy 2 talk thru my thoughts with u, but before i do i wanna make it clear that i am not any kind of expert in antisemitism + am not jewish myself, so you should not be taking my thoughts as like. The Ultimate Opinion on this issue at all--like, i'm happy to discuss, but i do not by any means have the authority to just deem something Good or Bad for u, y'know? nor would i ever want to! i don't really think issues like this can be boiled down to a simple "it's totally okay and no one should ever get upset about it!" vs "it's morally evil and no one should ever like these characters!" (also - if any jewish mutuals or followers wanna weigh in + let me know if there's anything i'm missing/overlooking/etc please do!)

so, i've seen at least some of the discourse you're talking about floating around online. i've seen some jewish people saying that blorbo-ifying death eater characters ignores the nazi allegory and makes nazi-allegory characters sympathetic, which is antisemitic. i've seen other jewish people saying that it's offensive to simplify naziism, a much larger, real political issue, down to calling fictional characters "wizard nazis," and that it belittles the actual historical significance to use antisemitism as a talking point in this discourse about which characters it is or isn't okay to like. that's why i say that i don't think you're gonna find One Cohesive Position on like....what's okay or not okay; it's just something you're gonna have to parse for yourself, and while i do think you should be giving particular weight to the perspectives of jewish people on this issue, that obviously doesn't mean that every single jewish person is going to agree.

anyway, i've mostly stayed out of this discourse partially bc i don't really care about most death eater characters and partially bc, as i said, i do not feel like i am any sort of expert who is like. qualified to discuss the ins and outs of antisemitism in hp fandom spaces. so again, this is just gonna be a conversation about my thoughts as they currently stand--not a lecture where i'm telling you what's right or wrong, and not a set-in-stone Stance on the Ultimate Truth of this matter or anything.

currently, my feeling on this whole quagmire of discourse basically boils down to: i think it's reductive to broadly state that anyone who likes/engages with death eater characters in fandom in any way is automatically antisemitic; i think there is more nuance to the situation and boiling down the issue to an overarching generalization is not necessarily the most useful way to address antisemitism in this particular fandom space.

and there are various reasons that i feel that way, which i'll try to break down below:

death eaters are not a 1:1 allegory for nazis

this is something that i think gets lost in translation a bit when we just say "oh the death eaters were wizard nazis." while, yes, i think jkr was definitely making some allegorical nods to naziism + hitler, particularly with the blood purity aspect of death eater-ism, personally i think that had less to do with jkr actually having a good grasp on the politics of nazi fascism and more to do with jkr being the kind of liberal who just goes "hmmm who's the Worst Person in history??" and then just cherry-picking bits and pieces of like. naziism to give her Bad Guys an easily recognizable cultural referrant to associate with their Badness. (i mean--from the critiques i have seen regarding jkr's own antisemitism that is embedded in the hp text, she clearly was not writing the death eaters as like. a disavowal of antisemitism.)

something that concerns me is that treating death eaters as a 1:1 allegory for nazis sort of obscures some very important, very fundamental differences in the fascism of actual nazis. in hp, death eaters are positioned as a fringe "terrorist" group, in that they are opposed to the wizarding State. they obtain power through largely "illegitimate" (again, by the metrics of State power) means by way of a coup; in this way, a fundamental aspect of the death eaters as Bad Guys is that they are not legitimated by the State--something that very clearly speaks to jkr's own liberal politics when it comes to defining Good versus Bad.

but real-life nazis rose to power specifically by using legitimated State power. this is really fucking important to understand!!!! historically, fascism is often perpetuated by the logics of State power, and that's part of what allows it to take hold--people think, "oh, it can't be that bad, after all, we elected this fascist leader." etc. while hitler did attempt to gain power through a coup in 1923, that specifically failed and led to him pivoting and seeking control by becoming a legitimate part of the German government. he solidified his power using completely legal means, from within the State. this is very, very different to how voldemort + the death eaters take power in hp, and also very opposed to jkr's State-centered politics about Good vs. Bad. while i think it's important + useful to recognize the ways in which death eaters draw allegorical connections to nazis and how that can perpetuate antisemitism if we're not aware of it, i think to simply paint death eaters as nazis can actually lead into the trap of thinking fascism is something that is opposed to the State, when it is more often something that grows out of the State.

liking a death eater character is not always gonna translate to liking death eaters

so, aside from the whole sticky situation with nazis as an allegory for death eaters in the first place--what's more important to me when thinking about how someone likes/engages with death eater characters is gonna be the way they engage with those characters, and what that reflects about their own politics.

if someone likes a death eater character because they like death eaters and think that like...there are no issues with the death eaters' beliefs or positions, then....yeah that's a major red flag. but most of the people who like these characters, from what i've seen, tend to do one of two things:

1 - explore the character because the character broke away from the death eaters in some way (regulus, snape, etc). this usually requires an exploration of how the death eaters are bad, because it requires an exploration of why the character turned away from them. i'm gonna be interested in how someone explores that issue and what that says about their own politics, but that's a case-by-case basis, y'know? and even if i personally think someone is still missing the heart of the issue in their "death eaters bad" story, it is still a "death eaters bad" story--i don't really think a person is aligning themselves with the death eaters if they're specifically writing about how they are bad and why someone initially taken in by their beliefs would later turn away from them.

2 - explore a character who hasn't broken away, looking at why a person might align themselves with death eaters and how someone might buy into that sort of political rhetoric. again, this is a case-by-case basis for me in terms of looking at what sort of politics is reflected, but generally speaking i do not think that writing stories about why or how someone might become a fascist is Always Morally Wrong. in fact, i think these stories are very necessary in helping us understand how fascism takes root in real life.

if someone is just writing "death eaters ra-ra!" fanfiction then. yeah i might take that as a red flag. but the death eaters are so clearly Bad Guys that i personally have not come across any examples of someone doing that, even if i have come across stories where i don't entirely agree with the politics of how someone is writing the death eaters as Bad.

liking a character in the context of fanfiction is not always going to translate to liking that character as a death eater

a lot of people write aus and stories where the death eaters don't even exist. in those situations, i struggle to understand how liking the characters, in and of itself, would be antisemitic, as the character has specifically been turned into not-a-death-eater and is oftentimes basically an oc.

liking a fictional character is not a simple moral reflection of how someone actually thinks - what i'd be more wary of is someone absorbing the neoliberal politics of hp without question

this is kind of getting back into repeating some of the points above--but again, for me personally, this is an issue that i evaluate much more on a case-by-case basis rather than trying to broadly apply One Rule. since i can't automatically know someone's reasons for liking a character, the context in which they like the character, etc, what i tend to judge more is the specific way i actually see them interacting with that character--how they write them, what stories they like to read, their hcs, etc. again, i am not an expert when it comes to judging antisemitism, so i do also try to make it a point to see what my jewish mutuals are saying when this sort of discourse comes up. but for myself, i tend to be more wary about the politics underlying specific pieces of writing rather than which characters someone is choosing to write about.

all that being said, i do still think it's fair if someone views liking death eaters as a red flag, y'know? like, everyone is allowed to judge for themselves what they see as red flags in this fandom space, and if someone is saying "i think it's antisemitic to like death eaters," i personally don't really think i have a right to go and argue with that person, for obvious reasons. since i do sometimes write about death eater characters, i try to be very aware of what kinds of politics are underlying my work and what sort of messages someone might take away. but if someone needs to block me, avoid my work, etc, i obviously don't have an issue with that--everyone is allowed and encouraged to curate their fandom space in a way that's best for them, and if someone has a boundary regarding interaction with death eater characters, that's their boundary to keep, y'know? i don't think it's productive (unless maybe you yourself experience antisemitism and it's a conversation you want to have) to go to that person and argue about why they're wrong, as if they need to tell you your actions are actually morally okay with them. sometimes people are going to have issues with the things you write or read in fandom, which is why you need to develop the ability to reflect + weigh these sorts of issues for yourself, and grow comfortable with the idea that there is not always going to be an ultimate Right and Wrong answer for How To Behave.

as for the snape vs barty [or insert whatever other death eater character here] - my thoughts on that are essentially. i truly do not think it matters which characters you like or dislike. you can like one death eater character or not another. it's fine. you don't have to like one character over another. this is fanfiction. the moral stakes are not that high.

the only instance in which i would say liking one character over another gets hypocrticial is if you are saying that people shouldn't like a character. for example -- if you are running around the internet saying that snape is a disgusting character and nobody is allowed to like him, but at the same time you're blorbo-ifying barty crouch jr. then, yeah, that's annyoing and hypocritical. but if you're just chilling in peace, reading + writing ur fic and not policing the things that other people are allowed to like or dislike, then i truly do not think it matters if you like barty crouch jr. but not snape. i'm all for self-reflection and thinking about why you personally might like one character over another, but at the end of the day writing + reading fic is not any kind of activism; it's a hobby, it's for enjoyment. i promise that u do not need to have a moral crisis about disliking severus snape from harry potter lmao

[sleepymarmot]

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Short non-spoilery review:

If you love to be grossed out and scared by movies, this one might be a disappointment. If you don’t, it might be more watchable than you’d expect. I would not classify this film as “horror” at all — it’s fairly tame speculative fiction with a surprisingly optimistic portrayal of the world and the main character. The horror aesthetic is wrapped around non-horror events; there is upsetting stuff, but it’s in the realm of tragedy or crime fiction. The premise of the film is that “pain has all but disappeared”, so the gory visuals and sounds are not accompanied by suffering — in fact, quite the opposite. My own description would be something like “transhumanist erotic sci-fi noir about having a conflicted relationship with one’s body”. If that sounds relevant to your interests, the film is worth watching regardless of its shortcomings. I thought that the execution of the concepts didn’t live up to their potential, that the worldbuilding and dialogue were weak — and it still inflicted days of intense brainrot on me. I can’t in good faith call it a great film, but it sure is thematically rich.

Below are ~9k words of my spoilery thoughts about bodies, health, age, art, gender, sex and some other things. I started writing this post as a review, but I’m not sure it counts as such by this point. I went into full fandom mode and poured two weeks’ worth of obsessive discourse blogging into a single text document. Warning: I have (hopefully temporarily) lost the ability to stay in my lane or shut up about my personal subjective experiences. I also made an abridged version that you can read instead.

Since the “review” got so long, I changed the usual order and put it before the liveblog. I assume that if anyone’s actually reading this post, they’d be more interested in something I at least tried to make coherent than in a long string of unfiltered first reactions.

Review

General thoughts

I’d been quietly obsessed with this film for a week before I had the opportunity to watch it. This means I knowingly stole from myself many if not most of the good experiences I would have had as a first time viewer. I’d seen the key scenes in gif form, and had a general awareness of the characters, themes, and plot. So by the time I got around to watching, I’d already been done feeling the positive emotions about the aspects of the film that directly catered to my tastes, and had too much time to feel dissatisfaction with their execution.

A bit of TMI: as someone who had spent the week before watching the film constantly coughing and able to sleep only with a raised pillow for several nights, and who is in general not on great terms with food and “the old sex”, I found Saul relatable in a rare way — much more than the characters close to me in gender and age (the usual criteria for representation). Sure, the plot is about him growing new organs and transforming into different species, but a major part of the character are his realistic health issues and alienation from the body. He has trouble eating, he needs to manage his pain constantly, he has to use special mechanized furniture, he has to sit down after walking somewhere, he gets (and, as far as the characters know, needs) regular surgeries; he compensates for the vulnerability of being exposed during invasive medical procedures by wrapping himself in black cloth from head to toe when in public, he struggles with conventional intimacy. The film is frustratingly vague about his experience of pain, but it seems like he’s immune to pain from cutting etc. like everyone else — and yet suffers from pain originating from chronic illness; the former makes him fantastical, the latter keeps him relatable. The elimination of pain and infection is by itself a futuristic power fantasy about health and physical wellbeing, of course. Speaking of fantasies, have you ever wished you could cut yourself open and remove a hurting internal organ? Well, Saul gets its done by the loving partner, and they get a career out of it! A good romance is always a plus, but I particularly appreciated a visibly chronically ill character who is in a functional and fulfilling long-term relationship, and is seen as attractive not only by his partner but also by someone who just met him. You don’t often see focus on health issues in genre film protagonists (unless it’s a disability+superpower blend), and for me, a character whose health is in worse condition than mine feels more real than a character with a flawless body that never gets in their way.

In other ways, though, the filmmaking perspective is all too familiar. The protagonist is a man, his love interests are women; conversely, the man is allowed to be old and sick, but the women have to be young, beautiful, and healthy. In a film about transhumanism and the meaning ascribed to human bodies, it’s conspicuous that the main characters are white and cis. Where are the people marginalized via race or ethnicity relative to whatever society this is set in, if there’s talk of some people being less human than others — and why the hell is the fascist cop the only black character?! Where are the intersex people who were subjected to violence for their bodies in childhood, like poor Brecken was? Where are the transgender people showing up to say “We fucking told you so, having a non-normative body and modifying it as you please is good actually”? Obviously I’m not against the very idea of a story that could be interpreted in multiple ways and compared to the experience of multiple existing social groups, but if you don’t acknowledge the existence of these groups within your narrative, it’s as if they don’t exist in the fictional world; it’s like making a fable about gay rights without showing a single same-gender couple on screen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “shoehorn in a token minority because it’s better than nothing”. But surely there are other ways to convey that they exist somewhere in the fictional world! In a film where a lot of the dialogue consist of philosophical exposition, it’s mostly about the characters’ personal opinions, rather than the positions of social groups and factions. There’s one tantalizing mention of “escapist propaganda”, but that’s the only hint at the larger discourse I can think of.

I knew I would ask all of these questions about representation long before I pressed play, but what I realized with the context of the entire film was that it was a general problem of the lack of worldbuilding and social awareness. The film’s scope is very small, restricted to the sphere of the protagonist’s personal reach. It’s about the body hidden in a black cloak or exposed in a surgical theater, about lying on a bed and sitting on a chair, about having a meal (or failing to), about taking a political stance or having sex in private vs in an auditorium full of people. But what is the society around that? What exactly is legal and what isn’t? Why is the National Organ Registry like that? What happened to the normal computers, why is digital technology used only in medical devices and one (1) kind of camera? How does the organic technology fit into all this? Is this post-apocalyptic future or alternate history? What exactly are all the different factions in relation to each other? If pain and infection have “all but disappeared”, what about Saul’s “pain centers” and the commercially produced equipment meant to manage them? If “only a lucky handful of us experience pain in our sleep”, how does LifeFormWare’s business stay afloat? Is there an inherent difference between acute and chronic pain in this world if the former is nowhere to be seen but the latter remains? How does elimination of pain and infection change society and its largest institutions — what happens to the army, police, prisons, healthcare? How do the standards of hygiene or access to clean food and water change when infection is not a concern? When did pain and infection disappear, was it both at the same time, was the process sudden or gradual? How long ago did that happen, how many people remember the world as it was before, how did living through the change affect them? What language are the film’s characters speaking in-universe, what is the geopolitical situation? You can see that lack of interest in the wordbuilding even in the UX of the surgery/autopsy remote: seems like nobody cared to make the buttons correspond to specific movements of the SARK’s limbs, so the actors just stroke them in whatever way is the most sensual.

Someone’s review said that the film feels like a mediocre adaptation of a good novel. I agree: the unfulfilled worldbuilding potential makes the film seem like a part of something bigger. We all like to complain about franchises and profess our love for standalone stories these days, and yet I can’t help but want to get more out of this premise. I can easily imagine it in a book (or series), a prestige TV show, a tabletop RPG setting. The film just came out, and I am already ready to fantasize about a remake or an adaptation that would fix all my problems with it! And not only problems, to be honest. I want to know what happens next: does Saul ever talk to Timlin again, do Saul and Caprice make his evolution known to public, are they able to escape persecution? Conversely, as much as I love the established romantic relationship, I’d also not mind seeing how they “unleashed things in each other”. (That could work just as well in fanfiction form, though.)

But the almost nonexistent worldbuilding is only my second biggest problem with the screenplay. The problem number one is dialogue. It’s bad. Star Wars prequel trilogy level bad. Sometimes perhaps worse. (Actually, the comparison with George Lucas might be more accurate than originally intended: this is the work of a visionary who really should have found a co-writer who would have reshaped his cool ideas into decent dialogue.) There’s an enormous amount of exposition, and yet it’s often unclear what history characters and organizations have with or what they know about each other (I’m thinking of the first scene in the National Organ Registry in particular). At times, neither sentence structure nor the word choices sound anything remotely like what a real person would say aloud (maybe their brains evolved first and they never noticed?) A couple of examples a very short time apart from each other that I just had to write down: - “I’ve heard that some of the Sarks that were modified for performance surgery have been really brutally hacked around, but this one was converted by someone with a very delicate touch.” - “Seeing you here, is like a lightning bolt from the blue. It strikes you very hard and very convincingly.”

The weird thing is, there is one exception: the dialogue is consistently effective when it’s humorous. The clearest example was when Kristen Stewart spent about two minutes straight on fighting for her life against the most forced monologue of all time, then a few more minutes later Viggo Mortensen closed the scene with a single very effective quip.

My top 3 of the funniest dialogue in the film:

“I’m sorry. I’m not very good at the old sex.”

“Careful. Don’t spill.”

“Why is he a corpse?” (two lines later) “You have the body of your son?” “Yes, of course I have the body of my son. He’s my son.” “Wow.” “Yeah, I know.”

Not only the dialogue, but the internal logic of the scenes and their staging are often illogical too. One particularly bizarre example: the scene that reveals that the purple bars are toxic. Why are the two technicians talking to some random guy? Why is Lang leaving his secret and deadly plastic bar on the table? Why is the random guy picking up someone else’s food and eating it? Why does Lang not bother to stop him?

Of course, there were also scenes where the way characters existed in their space drew my attention in a positive way. Some physical comedy highlights:

An instance of dark/hypocritical comedy where a character rants about human evolution that makes people too perfect with the lack of pain and infection, while Saul leans on the door, sinks to the floor in exhaustion and stays there. Nobody offers him a chair! Even Caprice leaves his side just as he slides down, and doesn’t bother to help him! Either this is thoughtless direction (which was my initial thought, tbh), or the characters are all assholes.

Timlin after the performance laser-focusing on Saul, quickly finishing her drink and getting rid of the glass without taking her eyes off him, and beelining to Saul’s seat to ask him “something intimate” without so much as a hello.

The scene in Timlin’s office is hysterical from start to finish. Her very awkwardly advancing and him somehow even more awkwardly moving out of range and hiding his face. Her prying his mouth open with considerable effort and looking inside like he’s a goddamn horse as he stares at her in mild confusion.

Kristen Stewart needed more screentime — I expected a full-fledged love triangle or maybe something more :c Her acting style is completely different from anyone else in the film. In her very first scene we see her on the left side of the screen while Seydoux is on the right, and they have a conversation like two characters who came from entirely different genres. But I can’t be mad at her overacting because everything she does is completely unhinged sex comedy. She has got to be one of the horniest characters I have ever seen on screen. She almost literally says “rearrange my guts daddy” at one point. Initially I wanted to open the review with the sicko meme but that’s redundant because Timlin is already an embodiment of it.

Whatever was happening to Saul and Caprice’s relationship never coalesced into a coherent storyline for me. I think they were supposed to have Marital Problems™, which is unsurprising when one of the partners is also the other’s collaborator, assistant, caretaker, and doctor. Caprice was clearly dissatisfied with her professional role: “Saul likes me to do the techno dog work. Keeps me in touch with my roots,” she says with clear resentment. That, I guess, was supposed to be solved when Caprice declared her intent to engage more creatively and actively in the shows’ planning and performance — but Saul reacted to that with a surprising lack of enthusiasm. You’d think he’d show more pride and interest in his girlfriend’s personal growth, but instead they both seem uncomfortable, and she even defensive. Another question: are Saul and Caprice in an open relationship, or are they cheating on each other? (I feel like whatever happened with Odile would count as a fling, even if it wouldn’t in our world.) They seem to talk honestly with each other (Saul says he finds Timlin attractive, Caprice repeats Odile’s “desire to be open” line), but in both cases the other reacts like they hate to hear about that. This also seemed like a natural starting point for a storyline that never happened. Perhaps I should take these scenes as a good sign: the two are communicating their honest feelings like adults they are, instead of suppressing themselves and putting on a mask even for the person closest to them. There was at least one undeniable, glaring communication issue, though: Saul going behind Caprice’s back to secretly work with the goddamn fascist cops. I was sure he’d come clean at the end! It’s not like I require characters to be pure and unproblematic, but the way these threads were left hanging made me feel unsure whether I imagined them or was just missing what the film was trying to tell me. I guess it bothers me specifically because otherwise the relationship is very sweet and romantic, and found myself strongly emotionally attached to it. What’s better than finding the one person in the world who understands and accepts your weirdness because their own weirdness perfectly complements yours!

I’m not really a fan of horror, body horror in particular; I’ve seen gifs from some of Cronenberg’s earlier work and found the special effects repulsive, and not in a fun way. I’m also a romantic who prefers uplifting endings. The only Cronenberg film I’d seen before was Videodrome, which had one of the most despicable protagonists I’ve encountered in recent memory and a very cynical perspective on sex and romance. It felt like a gift to me personally that the same director’s new futuristic sci-fi was centered on a heartfelt romance and took such a hopeful stance overall. Humanity will evolve past the problems that have plagued it since the beginning, and even direct that evolution. Nature and technology will find a new balance as humans gain the ability to lessen the damage their industry has done to the planet. People will adjust to their changing bodies and find new forms of pleasure and intimacy. Grotesque alterations of human flesh will be painless and consensual, even desired. And one man will be able to handle the tense antagonistic relationships both with his own body and with the world that demands different things from it, and he will have a supportive partner by his side.

About bodies, surgeries, and age

This is a film about eating plastic and enjoying surgery. Plastic surgery. Haha get it?

No, seriously, was the surgical CGI supposed to look plastic? It was pretty unconvincing, even before I went to look up some real-life videos. It’s not just the visuals but the procedure, too; as this review points out, “there’s no question of infection or, for that matter, of blood flow. Caprice sterilizes nothing, cleans nothing, suctions nothing, and closes up Saul’s wounds with a mere heat seal”.

Cronenberg himself commented on the previous point in this interview: “In the surgeries that we show, there’s not much blood, and in the real surgery, there would be much more. Of course, they’d be sweeping it away so that they could see what they’re doing, so it’s a little bit of a fudge factor — I’m sort of pretending that’s what’s happening. Yes, it’s open-abdomen surgery, but I think the context in the film is so specific and artificial fantastic that the gross-out factor is really diminished.”)

The same interview also highlights some important connections: the fictional old artist representing the old artist who created him; old age as the time when it becomes more common for human bodies to become reliant on and intertwined with technology, changing their senses and relationship with the world; the shared the experience of modifying one’s body as basis for interpersonal connection.

I’ve talked about the age gap before; Caprice didn’t have to be young, but it’s crucial that Saul is old. Even one of the first things we hear from Saul and Caprice is, on a thematic level, a conversation about his age: “I thought I was all tapped out. Dried up.” “You always think that, and you're always wrong.” “One day, I’ll be right.” “Not today.” His body’s biological productivity is the basis of his art which is the basis of his sex life. These are the words of an aging man dreading the approach of artistic and sexual impotence, knowing that deterioration is coming but not knowing when. The formation of new organs holds two thematic symbolic meanings: it is a disease that he seeks to get under control, but also the foundation of his lifestyle that he’s afraid to let go; both the presence and the loss of that process can be a metaphor for aging.

Many metaphorical interpretations can be made for Saul’s antagonism with his body. An old person trying to hold back the deterioration of their health. A young person horrified and disgusted by puberty. (I came up with this and then a few hour later realized I’d been halfway through an article titled “Art Is the New Puberty”, haha.) A public figure promoting plastic surgery and/or dieting, making a career out of fighting their body’s natural growth and removing the parts that don’t fit their idea of normality. And of course there’s the trans reading, which people more qualified than me have already written about. There’s even a connection with the more traditional horror trope of monstrous transformation: the body not accepting human food, the growing pains, the grotesque new organs.

There’s something I really like about Saul’s transformation as this film’s secret true horror element. The “body horror” that can be seen in trailers and screenshots is not associated with fear, suffering or violence — the qualities of the horror genre. On the other hand, the slow painful transformation of a human into a frightening, mysterious entity is a classic horror trope… But the way it’s represented in this film is via its most naturalistic element that I have praised above as representation: the protagonist’s health issues. When a character in a horror story transforms into a monster like a vampire or a werewolf, it is normally signified by outside characteristics like fangs, fur, inhuman eyes etc. But Saul’s transformation happens inside, invisibly to the viewer! It’s his internal organs that are transforming! Because it’s a film about the internal organs, about the hidden truth beneath the surface! Which lets the film hide its true horror content in plain sight. We see Saul’s food problems twelve minutes in! And we see Brecken eat plastic long before that. That should be enough to connect the dots, and I’m sure there are viewers who do. But there is so much else going on, and the performance is so naturalistic, that the side of the character that is most relevant to the main plot and to horror as a genre seems deceptively mundane.

Another contrast is the conflict between the best and the worst things about embodiment. The body as a conduit for pleasure, human connection and artistic expression, vs the body as a torturous and exhausting malfunctioning cage and the target of external violence and control.

The differences between our real world and the world of the film sometimes mean that the viewers’ and the characters’ ideas of normality are the reverse of each other. Something like tattooing a person’s internal organs (while they’re wide awake, too!) would be completely horrifying in our world, but for the characters with “plastic”, invulnerable bodies it’s intimate and domestic. Conversely, Caprice is shocked and horrified at the sight of a child’s dead body and the thought of doing autopsy on it, and she’s the person who regularly cuts her boyfriend open as sexy performance art.

That last point is actually very important for the theme of people ascribing meaning to bodies. I’ve seen people voice discomfort with the “surgery is the new sex” film culminating on a child autopsy, but I think that’s the point. There’s nothing inherently sexual in cutting someone open even in the film’s world. The meaning of the action is ascribed to it by its participants. This is something I see discussed pretty often in the real world, in relation to things like kissing on the lips or having a bath together. Or, within the film: the entire basis for Timlin’s statement that the surgery was sex is a simple projection on her part. She really walked up to a celebrity and said with her whole chest “what you just were doing in front of me was sex because I thought it was hot”. Okay!

Another thing about the child autopsy I’ve seen people comment on was the body’s nudity. I was a bit surprised by that myself, because in my memory of famous art pieces depicting autopsies the body was always covered. The same film takes pains to preserve its adult stars’ modesty, having them fold legs strategically, so this was a deliberate artistic choice. I felt like it dehumanized the body, treating it as just flesh on a slab… Which was probably the intention of the film’s director, but my question is: why would that the people directing the show in-universe, Saul and Caprice, want that effect? Doesn’t that contradict the humanizing message of Caprice’s speech? Either way, this is very effective at making me not want to post screenshots or gifs of this very important scene in case the platform takes it the wrong way.

More about the autopsy: Caprice only started taking the job seriously when she encountered the saw the child’s body with her own eyes. The moment it became real for her, she started crying reflexively and never really stopped. Do you think she felt guilty about the erotic “rehearsal” she had earlier?

Caprice’s lines about her sudden “desire to cut her face open” confused me, especially because she proceeded to add horn-like mods instead of something that evokes openness. I think I understand better now. That conversation starts with Odile saying “Oh, you have no idea how hard it's been for me to find plastic surgeons who understand that I do not wish to be made more beautiful.” Caprice in her performance looked like a very beautiful, very normal woman. Saul’s body gets to be interestingly gross and weird, but she could be seen as “normal” (if you don’t pay too much attention to the unabashed look of lust on her face, at least.) Altering her face and speaking during the performance makes a statement that she’s also a freak and proud of it, that she doesn’t want to be aligned with normality and palatability. The unblemished pretty face was a mask, and to put a crack into that mask it’s enough to make the face weird. In this interpretation of openness, it’s not necessary to literally show the inside of her body to the public like Saul does.

About bodies, comfort, pain, and furniture

More about contrasts and extremes: the smash cut between Saul and Caprice melting into a kiss so tenderly and comfortably to Saul painfully trying to force down a single spoon of breakfast, straining in his wobbly wheezing chair.

This furniture looks sooo uncomfortable btw 😭 As does the way Saul uses it. The bed doesn’t have a mattress and seems way too firm, there’s no blanket, Saul sleeps in his day clothes. (In fact, I’m pretty sure he spends the entire film in the same set of clothes, day and night…) The chair, too, would be a great idea in theory, but in practice we don’t see a single character who is helped by it, and I can’t imagine what good it could do except making the owner carsick in the middle of their meal.

At the beginning of the film, we see Saul and Caprice eat breakfast separately, and I thought it was a bit cold of her to sit comfortably in the sun while he struggles alone. But in a later scene Caprice keeps Saul company in the evening while he’s trying to eat. So maybe it’s Saul who doesn’t want to watch her easily eat normal tasty food while he can barely force down his dreadful purée.

Speaking of LifeFormWare, I don’t understand how the bed is supposed to interact with Saul’s pain. At first I thought it was simply pain relief. But at one point one of the technicians says: “Creation of art is often associated with pain, and pain, as we know, is always associated with sleep. We at LifeFormWare specialize in manipulating and modulating the pain of artists, and, to us, Saul Tenser is the greatest challenge, so intimate and involving in his art, and the nature of his pain. A good night's sleep is a hard thing to define when you're an artist and you seek pain.” (By the way, yet another endless sentence that no living person would under any circumstances say spontaneously aloud.) So what exactly is it supposed to do? Nothing about Saul’s onscreen relationship with his chronic pain seemed to me like he sought it…

To stay on the topic of pain, it’s remarkable that the justification for the society where people use surgery as sex and are obsessed with body mods is not “everyone is masochistic” but “nobody can feel pain”. These are two very different things! I’m glad the film went with the latter: it’s more original, more alien, and allows pain-as-the-general-audience-knows-it to be a negative presence in the protagonist’s life without making a distinction like “good pain” and “bad pain” (which would have been very confusing in a screenplay).

The practicalities of the body mods had me straining my suspension of disbelief. Sure, there’s no pain, but there are still other concerns! Even normal zippers are a pain in the ass when they catch on your clothes, imagine one doing the same to your intestine! Even if infections aren’t a problem, yikes! Is there a horrible little flesh flap inside to help prevent that? And how is that random woman going to walk after having her foot cut to the bone, is giving her a disability actually the point here, or if not then what is?

I want to talk again about Saul not changing clothes for an unknown length of time, unlike any other character. Is this part of his characterization as a sick old man, implying that he can’t keep up with with regular standards of hygiene? If he doesn’t change clothes, I assume he doesn’t shower either. Or is that more normative in a world where “nobody washes their hands anymore”? What other forms of personal hygiene have become obsolete? We see Brecken brush his teeth, so that’s still a thing at least. On another note, this is another example of the gendered double standard I mentioned before, where the male protagonist is not held to the same standards of physical perfection and glamorousness as his female love interests; both Caprice and Timlin wear a selection of distinct outfits.

About art

After all that, I still don’t really see how Saul is an artist. How isn’t he “just a glorified organ donor”, as the film’s primary antagonist (and the only black man, ugh) put it?

In the interview with Letterboxd, Cronenberg says: “It’s a movie about an artist who gives everything, including the insides of his body, to his art. […] When I step back, having made the film, I can say, ‘Yes, this is what art is to me: that you are really giving everything you have.’ And for me, “everything” is the body. That’s the most that you can give. I’m interested in performance artists, because they do that. A performance artist who alters their body in a permanent way is giving a lot. It’s a real commitment to your art.” Maybe I just disagree with his views on performance art in general… If Saul and Caprice were thinking of the extra organs as tumours, and of their removal as necessary and life-saving, how can that count as “giving” or “commitment to art”?

Cronenberg also gives similar explanations in this interview with Vanity Fair: “So the performance artists here are the avatar, the template of any artist who is passionate and aggressive and ambitious, opening himself up, opening themselves up, completely exposing themselves, their most intimate inner workings, offering them to an audience which makes them incredibly vulnerable to rejection to misunderstanding, to anger, and it basically, therefore, is the model of what an artist is.” This argument is more understandable to me, it works on a metaphorical level — but I still don’t really see how it makes Saul an artist in a literal way. By this logic, anyone who exposes themselves to an unusual extent to the public is an artist!

Artists other than the main couple didn’t present a coherent picture either. Someone who grafts ears all over himself but can’t hear through them as a hack, but someone who has gills cut on her face and says “What I do to myself is very traumatic” even though she can’t feel pain is brilliant and exhilarating?

The most convincing argument that I can see for Saul being a true artist is that there’s a theatricality in their performances we haven’t really been shown. In the post-Odile conversation, Saul says “You want to take over the Brecken show,” and Caprice responds “I want to perform”. Then they discuss the show’s structure. Earlier, Timlin says Saul “creates theatre out of” “the rebellion of his own body”. Perhaps there’s more to the usual performances than the surgery, but we haven’t been shown that because the film chose a different focus. We also see Saul work on the SARK, and the technicians praise the quality of his alterations, so maybe his contributions as a mechanic count too?

While Videodrome is about media and its power to influence the masses, the Crimes of the Future world has no media at all. Partially it’s a consequence in the film’s disinterest in institutions and large-scale worldbuilding, but it has an interesting effect on the main characters, making them truly independent artists. It seems that they are just famous enough to have the audience they need, and executives breathing down their necks are not a concern. Everything in the film points to their art being noncommercialized and authentic — including its erotic component, which in another situation could have been a cynical “sex sells” (or, as the closest thing to a villain in this film put it, “sexier means easier funding”).

On a more light-hearted note: Saul’s amused reaction to Timlin’s confession is very funny in the light of him being an author avatar. I can only imagine how many people told Cronenberg “Your films awakened something in me, thanks”!

About sex and also art

It’s nice to see characters in a healthy long-term relationship who don’t need to negotiate something they’ve done before many times (the surgery), but when improvising something new they either communicate verbally (Caprice clearly says what she wants in the naked scene) or successfully read each other’s body language (Saul shows off his zipper and Caprice doesn’t need to ask before proceeding). There’s very little drama in any of that (as opposed to films where sex scenes are used to show characters getting together or growing apart), just character development and worldbuilding.

I’m pretty sure we never see the main couple kiss until the very end of the film. The progression of what the viewers are shown: sex in public, then sex in private, then a romantic kiss. It’s a fun reversal, and makes sense for an established couple.

Do these scenes form a storyline that decouples Saul’s identities as an artist and a lover? The starting point is the big scene that establishes the status quo: performance = surgery = sex. Then there’s the scene at home with the role reversal and the “this is just for us”. Then there’s the zipper scene where Saul and Caprice have a conversation about art and sex (which is, frankly, not the best written or most coherent dialogue in the film):

Caprice: Have we just been made obsolete? Saul: No, of course not. It’s just a functional thing. It’s a zippered fly; it’s not art, It’s not sensual. Besides, remember what our Registry friend said: sex is surgery. A zipper can’t replace our Sark. Caprice: I think she said “surgery is the new sex”. Besides, zippers have their own sex appeal.

I can’t follow the train of thought very well, but it seems to me that Saul is making the argument that only something artistic and high-effort can be truly erotic, and Caprice provides a counterargument in words and in action. Once again it’s Saul who is fixated on the artistic performance and Caprice who advocates directness and spontaneity (aligning with the more traditional gender roles in this, unlike their roles during the surgery).

Then there’s Caprice’s epiphany about wanting to be even more direct and in touch with her emotions (to which Saul reacts with strange, almost dismissive coldness). After that comes the kiss with Timlin who is desperate to be in his show but loses her nerve after a couple of seconds of awkward coughing from him. And finally, an opposite of that — the big romantic kiss with Caprice in the middle of the night in his bedroom, placed between the two scenes where he chooses his side in the ideological/physiological battle, which implies that his artistic period of pruning his “rebelling” body is coming to an end. Perhaps Caprice’s recording of his plastic meal will become his last performance.

(I haven’t mentioned whatever Timlin was doing to Saul during their first scene together because it doesn’t really feel like a part of this storyline. But. I just want to give a quick shout out to that moment so that you don’t think I missed or forgot about it.)

The phrase “surgery is the new sex” is also interesting because the wording here implies that surgery is not a type of sex, but “the new sex” i. e. a different thing that eclipses the original in popularity and is used for similar purposes (intimacy and pleasure, in this case) but doesn’t necessarily achieve them in a similar way.

It’s really a shame that we never hear how Saul and Caprice defined what they were doing before a creepy stranger came along and they started using the “new sex” phrase she coined. What language had they been using the entire time before? I am once again asking: where is the discourse, what do the various groups of people in this world say about the new developments in human sexuality? We see people cutting each other in dark alleys instead of making out etc., are they outliers or is this a general trend? “It’s time” for “the new sex” for what reasons exactly — only cultural or also physiological? Did the shift in the human perception of touch also lead to the collective loss of interest in the previously common sexual practices? If that’s physiological, where does that evolutionary road lead in terms of reproduction? How have the changes already affected the relationships between genders, the institution of marriage, the industries that deal with health or sex? Does this solve the problem of abortion access? Saul and Caprice’s thing is remarkably healthy, but how many dark counterparts do they have in people who are pressured into unwanted mutilation to keep the interest of their partner or commercial audience? Or is that escalation held back by the lack of mass media and advanced communication, making Saul and Caprice pretty extreme by the entire world’s standards? What are the communities, identities, common points of contention in this world? It seems like the world changed within a single lifetime, so how did people handle that? Are there bestselling memoirs like “I was a masochist for 30 years and then there was no more pain in the world”? What do people like that think of our main characters?

Of course I have a similar question about the opinions from the real world. So far I haven’t seen any serious discussions of this film as kink representation, and I want to know what people are saying. Certainly this feels astonishingly more positive than the scaremongering I saw in Videodrome. Also curious how this film and Cronenberg’s work in general compares to ero guro as a genre, I’m not familiar with it at all.

This film is the latest example of the very fun kind of media that makes me feel like I’m an alien in a human sexuality college class. *taking notes* Seems like some humans find the concept of touching one another’s bodies on the inside and not just on the surface erotic by itself, instead of only practicing penetration for pragmatic purposes! Weird, and even weirder that it’s news to me at this age, but okay! Or maybe it’s just Cronenberg, who can tell, certainly not me!

Every scene in the film where something erotic is happening passes every criteria I can think of with flying colors. They’re all important for the plot, themes, and character development; they’re not vulgar or violent or offensive; they’re not unexpected. Still, I couldn’t help but feel slight irritation at how much trouble R-rated films are logistically if you don’t live alone, regardless of the quality of adult content. Took me a few days to find a good time window…

The order of events in the film is one hell of an icebreaker. Usually I get a bit squicked when camera gets right into the characters’ faces to show kissing, but the scene with Timlin was so far into the film that by that point I was like “I’ve already seen this guy’s liver. I don’t care if I see his tongue, actually. Whatever.”

About genital symbolism

Viewer who has only seen Videodrome, watching her second Cronenberg: if I had a nickel every time this guy’s movies featured a stomach pussy I’d have two nickels so far, is that a coincidence or am I going to be rich?

To be serious for a second: in both films, the addition of an orifice resembling a vulva to the protagonist’s body is supposed to unsettle and disgust the audience; it is meant to be unnatural for a viewpoint character to have such a thing on their body, and its presence disturbs the bodily integrity and creates an image of vulnerability. Here are some features that the yonic orifices have in both films: a body part that does not belong on a “default” body; artificially and invasively produced for someone else’s benefit instead of being an integral part of the body; a hole instead of a functional organ; an orifice for inserting things, and not for either having things come out of it or even not being disturbed at all. In other words, the way yonic wound imagery in used both of these films reveals a patriarchal perspective in which people without vaginas are the default/the subject, while vaginas and the people who have them signify the Other/the object and exist in relation to the former.

Years ago, I complained about similarly misogynistic writing in “The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec” from Morrowind; in it, the cis male writer gives the androgynous (and often interpreted as intersex) protagonist a weapon that symbolically represents their genitals, with the phallic shape (a spear) and the yonic name (“Milk Taker”) — except, as you can see, the supposedly yonic part is also phallocentric because the misogynistic writer could not conceptualize a vagina beyond its utility for a penis. Same thing as the misogynistic real life etymology of the word “vagina” as “sheath, scabbard”, or, conversely, the “-ussy” words.

To give credit where it’s due: in this film, the yonic slit is created consensually and used for mutually enjoyable sex with a woman, unlike the violent insertion of the cassette and whatever was happening in there with the gun in Videodrome. Progress! But this is the brand new latest work of a very old and prolific artist, and I wonder how long it took him to get here. Hopefully I’ll have better informed opinions when I’m more familiar with Cronenberg’s filmography. Though I kind of spoiled his entire body of work for myself when two weeks after writing this part of the post, I came across an academic article about this exact topic… (Sounds like his early films were horrifically misogynistic, ouch.) If anyone has other good links with analysis of “offputting vagina” imagery in cis men’s art, I’d be interested, too.

About gender roles

On a similar note of the man as the default subject — this time in the sense of being allowed more interiority. I really love the tender scene at the end where Caprice and Saul have nightmares after the autopsy and comfort each other. It took me several rewatches to notice that it’s only Saul who talks about his nightmare. The only thing Caprice says about her own is “I almost thought I was feeling,” and it isn’t even clear what she meant (at least to me). Because it’s important to show the viewers what the man is thinking and feeling, the contents of the woman’s mind don’t matter so much, just infer them from the context! I understand he’s the protagonist, but I also think the audience is supposed to think of them as equals, and this approach undermines that.

The artistic collaboration between Saul and Caprice involves a refreshing role reversal. Usually the woman would provide the body, be it as a model or as a canvas, to represent the unthinking, instinctual, sensual side of the process, and the man would be the one holding the brush, purposeful and intellectual. Here, it’s the man who grows new organs without control or intent (but perhaps out of subconscious, repressed instinct) and provides his body as raw material that is tattooed and surgically sculpted by the woman while he lies back passively — and it’s the woman who holds the tools and even calls them her paintbrush on screen. For the audience of the surgery, it’s the man who is reduced to a collection of objectified body parts, his torso exposed (stripped not only of clothes but also skin) and face irrelevant.

Saul’s black outfit has many ambiguously gendered connotations. The masculinity of Aragorn’s hooded or Batman’s masked silhouette in the dark and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, plus the femininity of black clothing covering him from head to toe and leaving only the eyes exposed like a niqab, plus the genderlessness of a monk or a nun’s robes. The mysterious heroism, the Romantic loneliness. The type of body that becomes the subject of ideologically-driven government control and public debate. The denial of the body and its sensuality, its removal from the gendered paradigm.

Saul’s black clothes also mirror Caprice’s white clothes, and in the kiss scene their bodies almost form the Yin-Yang symbol. The roles are reversed: the woman is Yang (light, active) and the man is Ying (dark, passive).

About “natural” and “artificial”

In a previous section I used the phrase “artificially and invasively produced” in the negative context of sexism in art. I wanted to make a note that the film actually celebrates the artificial and the invasive, but immediately realized it was more complex than that.

The motivation for Saul and Caprice’s invasive procedures is to preserve the “natural”, original state of his body by removing the growth presumed to be invasive and hostile. On the other hand, there’s what the government fears and the plastic eaters want: the results of surgeries being preserved and passed down genetically. Both sides use the same word: respectively, “It was all natural. He was born that way” vs “The first to be born with a plastic processing digestive system. To be naturally unnatural.”

These two threads intersect in the pivotal scene where Saul and Caprice defend the former worldview and Lang Dotrice defends the latter. It is not only a theoretical ideological clash; one of the two arguments is backed by nature itself, and it’s Lang’s, even though he doesn’t live to see it. Body is reality. The reality cannot be denied. Saul has to either die or accept what nature has chosen for him. Or has he done it, subconsciously, himself? The film asks the question of how much input Saul has on what’s “cooking” inside him, but never gives a definite answer. What is clear, though, is that the film takes the side of accepting the “natural” state of one’s body, of growing past the futile attempts to control and fight it. The relief and joy of finally being at peace with one’s body is portrayed as a transcendent, spiritual experience in the final shot of the film. Does that mean that the film’s position is ultimately against surgery? After the happy ending, the couple will probably stop removing new organs, so their performances must end or at least change in a major way — does that mean the film presents the surgical sex of the performances as a distraction or even a mistake? The assistive chair goes quiet, not needed anymore as the protagonist is transformed by the acceptance of his body — does that count as a miraculously cured disability? I’m not sure, but the film’s position is definitely more complex than it seems at first glance.

About the cinematography

When we see Saul’s room for the first time at the beginning of the movie, the visuals of the shot just bother me. The blurry landscape outside looks greenscreened in. The light is supposed to be coming out of the door to the balcony, but the room and especially Caprice’s body are much more noticeably lit from the front, from a secondary light source or a huge reflector.

In the window kiss scene, whenever Timlin raises her hands, for some reason it throws a soft rose/red light on her neck and face. Very distracting.

Nice parallel: Caprice looking intensely at Saul during the first surgical scene we see (when she’s operating on/having sex with him) and during the last one, the autopsy (when she says “Let us not be afraid to map the chaos inside. Let us create a map that will guide us into the heart of darkness” to him and about him — her mind clearly changed since the argument with Lang and her line “We’re making art out of anarchy” in it).

Great excuse for shifting into black and white for the final shot. I haven’t seen The Passion of Joan of Arc, but I think I get the idea. Actually I’d seen the screenshot comparison before the film itself, and it had me very concerned about Saul’s fate — so getting to the end of the film and realizing the real context was a relief.

About genre and similarities to other things

I said above that I don’t see this film as a horror film, but there’s a caveat. Horror does have a presence in it — not just drama and tragedy and revulsion but the actual emotion of horror. The main characters are not monsters or survivors — but they witness horror. And it leaves a mark on them: Caprice is inspired to “not be afraid to map the chaos inside”, Saul chooses a side. We watch them pull each other closer after the destruction of someone else’s family gave the both of them nightmares. Saul and Caprice are also themselves artists of the horror genre, creating gory spectacles that shock and unsettle the audience. So the autopsy is a multi-layered horror event: other people do something horrific and violent, Saul and Caprice make a spectacle out of showing it to public, and their roles shift from the creators of fake tame horror to the audience of real violent horror.

This film being classified as horror because of its painless gore is also funny to me because “icky and uncomfortable to watch, but the characters enjoy it so at least the empathetic reaction is positive” is that how I usually react to entirely ordinary sex scenes in media. Welcome to my world!

Weirdly, this film reminds me of Stalker. Both because of the general aesthetic and atmosphere, and because the plot is thin and the characters are mouthpieces delivering author’s opinions on abstract discourse with little personal touch. Stalker is way better visually (at a horrible real-life cost) and has smoother direction and dialogue, but despite its reputation I found Crimes more thought-provoking (as evidenced by the length of this post) even if less articulate. Curious how the philosophy of the two films is directly opposed: Stalker is a Christian’s complaint about “the victory of materialism” while Crimes of the Future is an atheist’s rumination on “body is reality”. The former declares viewers like me to be its ideological enemy, the latter resonates with my own worldview (which is why I went so unhinged with this post). Now that I think of it, there’s also something that reminds me of Dostoyevsky: the contrast between gloomy naturalism and characters who are deep within their own heads (or up their own asses).

Things I didn’t understand

The purpose of the beauty pageant subplot — I think it went nowhere.

The meaning of Caprice’s speech during the autopsy — did she also realize that the organs were faked by the government, or did she play right into their hands? To be honest, the autopsy scene didn’t work for me on most intended levels — I was confused by the organs, and Caprice’s speech didn’t make sense ideologically or emotionally. It’s supposed to be the film’s Big Dramatic High Point but it feels like a misfire.

Had Saul and Caprice interacted with the Registry before? How much were the two bureaucrats familiar with them by the time they met in person? There’s a lot of contradictory information in the relevant scenes.

What was Timlin’s worldview? How come she was the one to actually coin the film’s “Surgery is the new sex” motto, seem to be actively interested in futuristic bodies and modes of interacting with them — and she still ended up working against the most futuristic faction?! How did she expect that to improve her chances of “being Caprice for him” and not to completely destroy them?!

When Timlin talked to Saul, Caprice asked “What was that all about?” and he said it was about art, did she hear the conversation and joke about how weird it was, or did she not hear it, ask him about the content and get a lie as a response? Oh wait, found the answer to this one myself: in the zipper scene, Saul quotes Timlin’s words from that scene inaccurately and Caprice corrects him. So she heard everything. Leaving this one in, in case someone else has the same question.

Caught rewatching the scene: at the beginning of the film, the National Organ Registry guy tells Saul and Caprice: “Our fear is that some of these neo-organs might establish themselves genetically, and then be passed down from parents to children, who would then no longer be, strictly speaking, human.” At the end of the film, the plastic-eating guy says that’s what happened to his son, Saul says that “sounds insane”, and Caprice doesn’t argue. Were Saul and Caprice also not paying attention?

If the plastic eaters became plastic eaters after “the same elaborate surgery” “developed over years of collaboration”, and the only other known way to acquire the mutation is to inherit it genetically, how did Saul spontaneously and independently gain the ability to eat the exact same material as they do? We see Dr. Nasatir have struggle with his food in the same way — has this mutation started to occur spontaneously in people who are messing with their insides in other ways?

What is the goal and ideology of the two technicians? Is LifeFormWare a separate faction with its own ominous goals, or are these two women New Vice’s moles within LifeFormWare?

Why is Saul sleeping on the floor at the end? Did the technicians sabotage Saul’s bed? Did he decide he can’t trust them and their technology? Did the bed malfunction all by itself? Did he roll off because of the nightmare? My first assumption was that the bed threw him out, which is pretty scary honestly.

When Caprice says “I almost thought I was feeling” at the end, what does it mean? Was she dreaming about physical pain? Or is it supposed to be a last-minute reveal that pain wasn’t the only sensation/emotion that people lost? If people completely lost the sense of touch and can feel only what in the real life would be agonizing, that should have been established early because it would affect everything about the way characters interact or simply exist on screen.

Here’s one not about the film, but about the audience reaction. I don’t understand why people keep calling the setting dystopian. It doesn’t seem much more oppressive than real life — in fact, the authorities seem absurdly powerless. The one step back compared to our world is the lack of computers — but even as an extremely online person, I think I would have given up the internet in exchange for no pain or infection for every single human being worldwide. Please, where can I find a devil to bargain with and sell TikTok in exchange for no COVID? If anything, I actually thought this world was almost utopian, and a pretty interesting take on the concept at that; not a sustained utopia, not one built on a cracked foundation and currently in decline like a certain podcast season, but a world on a rocky road to becoming one. This is the future liberals (me) want!

If you’re still reading the post, thank you! The “review” is over now. Next are the notes I took during the first viewing. (Obviously, I had to look up so many scenes while writing this post that I rewatched almost the entire thing already.)

Liveblog

I’ve read all the warnings and was prepared for this scene. Wasn’t even as bad as I feared. Very sad though

Haha the horror music for the high-tech bed Is the balcony greenscreened in? The lighting doesn’t look right

Wait is she just having a look or tattooing his insides?

What is this chair even doing future assistive technology sucks

“National Organ Registry” in a place like this?! What is the state of the world here, is it post-apocalyptic? Or just a small poor country? I Don’t Believe That Man Has Ever Been To Medical School. Or law school for that matter

The difference between Seydoux’s realistic performance and Stewart’s overacting is hilarious. They’re on screen at the same time but they belong to totally different genres. Stewart’s character is so unbelievably horny on main from the first second we see her lmfao

Stewart’s quite literally playing the “haha yes” sicko

Is he upset about the tattoos in general or the specific one Caprice gave him?

Are we gonna get any worldbuilding details because it’s wild. High tech medical devices with seemingly organic elements but pre-computer paper documentation… Tiny ring-sized digital cameras but also uhh film cameras?

How does the audience even see anything? I see only one screen it’s transmitted to, and it’s tiny

Whatever genre everyone else is in, Stewart is in a sex comedy

Why does the new character look so much like the murder mom

“Why is he a corpse?” (two lines later) “You have the body of your son?” “Yes, of course I have the body of my son. He’s my son.” “Wow.” “Yeah, I know.”

Did he leave it on autopilot or something? Doesn’t that defeat the point? I’m no expert, but I’ve always assumed that if your partner says “keep going”, your next step shouldn’t be to stop what you’re doing and lie down to cuddle.

“What I’m saying with that body-art stuff is that I don’t like what’s happening with the body. In particular, what’s happening with my body, which is why I keep cutting it up.” Aw :(

Do I want to google wtf a “stoolie” is

“I’ve heard that some of the Sarks that were modified for performance surgery have been really brutally hacked around, but this one was converted by someone with a very delicate touch.” “Seeing you here, is like a lightning bolt from the blue. It strikes you very hard and very convincingly.” WHAT IS THIS DIALOGUE. DID GEORGE LUCAS WRITE THIS

Where are they? Did she catch him in a random alley on the way home?

Does the bearded dude want him too?

I still don’t understand what is supposed to be legal and what isn’t. Anyway why is Stewart’s character crying “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at the old sex.” How come every normal line the worst writing I’ve ever heard but every funny line is comedy gold?

Do Caprice and Saul have an open relationship or are both of them just very willing to cheat?

This is at least the second time I see Greek alphabet. Are they just in Greece?

“Has it ever occurred to you that you might simply be interfering in a fantastic natural process that you should surrender to?” I’m desperately trying to remember where I’ve seen this story before

Alright, so the moral dilemma for the protagonist has finally crystallized: does he deny his nature and betray the other “mutants”, or does he stand with them?

How many goddamn factions are there

Hold on, didn’t Caprice want to be the one cutting?

I don’t get it. How are there tattoos on the inside? Why is this supposed to be ugly if the tattoos on Saul’s internal organs weren’t?

Oh okay the tattoos were faked and in truth the kid was “all natural”. So the film isn’t siding with the fucking eugenical police. That’s a relief

Ohhh I think I see what is going to happen in the remaining 13 minutes. Saul will publicly cut himself up to reveal what the plastic-eating bodies actually look like.

Noo, Timlin did this?! Why?! I thought her bad vibes were in the opposite direction!

“It’s going to make him a martyr. Just what the cause needs.” Well that’s good news at least

I like the fakeout where at first it sounds as if the two are having “old sex”. Did the technicians sabotage Saul’s bed?

She really should use a normal stationary camera. How the hell does it look when she opens the plastic bar while the camera is on her hand, it must be just shaking footage of the wall!

Yay for self-acceptance! I’m glad the couple remained a team until the end, I was really rooting for them.

Wait, what was the beauty pageant subplot for?! And what was the meaning of Caprice’s speech during the autopsy — did she also realize that the organs were faked by the government, or did she play right into their hands?

[avintagekiss24]

Hi! I don't want to start anything on here and am always willing for civil conversations. At this point there's so much I've found out about Seb (besides the video he liked, the tommy lee thing, and the girlfriend thing) that I feel so guilty if I would continue to support him. I love him sm but it just doesn't look good rn. He is associated/follows an organisation (for helping veterans) that has posted a blue lives matter flag picture and who's co-founder has sexual assault allegations against him, and worked with him in 'The last full measure'. His friend Paul Walter Hauser has done blackface in the past, and when called out on it he just listed a few people that also did blackface. There's more, I found a discussion on here that I can link. I seriously don't support "cancel culture" bc I don't think it helps anyone but there are just a lot of 'mistakes' and shady people that can be linked to Seb, I wish it wouldn't be that way. I honestly don't know what to think about it anymore.

Hi! I’m also open to having civil conversations and I don’t believe you’re trying to start anything. I really do think this situation of dragging up a four year old video and taking it completely out of context is harmful not just to Black people, but to fandom/activism in general. This is gonna be long because I’m going to take your points one by one, and I want to preface this by saying that I will not answer any derogatory, sideways asks pertaining to this subject. I will delete every single one and will block your silly ass. I’m not going to argue with people who think I’m blindly supporting Sebastian because I’m just trying to get fucked by him, or people who think I hate myself and am trying to appease some white man.

So, on with the discourse!

The video he liked - this video was taken completely out of context and that is my main issue with this whole situation. It was not a video of a white man saying that he thinks he should be able to say the n word as everyone claimed it was. They were quickly debating on whether or not it's okay to say in rap lyrics. He was told no, that's not okay, that's never okay and they moved on from it. That's it. End of story. That somehow was twisted into a click bait style headline of "Sebastian Stan likes a video of a white man defending his right to say the n word" when that is absolutely not true. My other issue is that people are more upset that Sebastian liked the video than they are about the white man in the video literally saying the n word. So, do you really care about the use of the n word like you're claiming? Cuz if you do, you'd be more upset at the white man that said the word than you would be about the white man simply liking the video. Or, are you just using this as an excuse to grandstand against a white man you don't like?

The Tommy Lee thing - Sebastian Stan playing Tommy Lee does not make Sebastian Stan a bad person. Is Charlize Theron a bad person for playing Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute who started murdering men? Is Leonardo DiCaprio a bad person for playing a slave owner? Is Edward Norton a bad person for playing a nazi sympathizing racist? Actors play bad people. That doesn't mean that they themselves are bad people. 1990's Tommy Lee was a bad person, but that should have no bearing on who Sebastian Stan is or his character as a man.

The gf/Paul Walter Hauser thing - Why are we holding Sebastian accountable for what the people around him are doing? Again, why are we more upset that Sebastian is associated with people who have done questionable things than the specific people themselves? I'm not going to speak on the kimono wearing -- I'm not Asian. It's not my place to say whether or not its offensive because it's not my culture, but she posted that picture and attended that party before she started dating Sebastian, quite possibly before she even knew him. Same with Paul. I think that black face thing was long before he knew Sebastian. Now, if Sebastian was defending these actions, going around saying "I think it's okay for white women to wear Kimono's" "I think black face is fine" "I think white people should be able to say the n word" then we'd have a different story, wouldn't we? But that's not what we have, and that's not what he is doing. He is not responsible for the things his friends do or have done in the past just because he's more famous than they are, and he is not required to speak on them. Let's put it this way -- would you be comfortable having to be responsible for something a friend of yours did before you knew them? Would you want to have to be forced to answer for your friend when you yourself had nothing to do with the questionable behavior?

The organization that supports the military/blue lives matter - Sebastian cannot control what message that foundation puts out and it does not mean that he is or is not pro-police himself. There is not enough concrete evidence -- if any evidence for that matter -- that Sebastian is a blue lives matter supporter. Did Sebastian donate before they put up the blue lives matter post? Or after? I don’t know, cuz I don’t follow him that closely, but if he donates before they come out with a particular stance, that means he should be held accountable for that? I know I donated to an organization once and they turned out to support something that i’m 100% against. That means I’m a bad person because I couldn’t see into the future? Another point, how can we be certain that Sebastian saw the blue lives matter post in the first place? I know I’m not online 24 hrs a day, I miss posts all the time and I’m just an average person. I make three or four tumblr posts a day, and I’m gone. I have to play catch up on social media, and even then, I still miss stuff. So I’m sure the same happens to a working actor. As for the co-founder, I don't know who this person is and would rather not get into any allegations against them because I don't want to trigger anyone who comes across this post. If Sebastian knows about these allegations, is a willing participant/supporter of this person then yeah, that's pretty shitty, but we don't know the inner workings of this friendship/acquaintance/work relationship. We don’t know how close they are or if they even still speak.

I’m a pretty big fan of Don Cheadle. He’s a stand up guy, he’s a great actor, he’s funny, he’s political and stands up for what he believes in and in a very public way. I support him. Don Cheadle is also friends with Chris Evans, RDJ, Mark Ruffalo, and Letitia Wright (just to name a few). Chris Evans has a bipartisan forum that highlights/promotes right wing politicians, RDJ defended Chris Pratt during the whole “he’s the worst Chris in Hollywood” crap, who’s technically done black face, and who once said to a female reporter “nice tits” when she walked into the room, Mark Ruffalo just walked back his support of Palestine, and Letitia Wright retweeted/supported an anti-vaxxer/anti-trans Pastor who equated an ingredient of the covid vaccine to the devil because it contained some parts of the word Lucifer. Does that mean Don is now a bad person because he’s friends with these people? Why isn’t he getting any heat for his friendships with them? Why isn’t he being held accountable for what they’ve done and said? Oh right, because he’s not a white fave. So people don’t care one way or the other, which brings me to my next point. 

I can guarantee you that if Sebastian’s gf or Paul or this co-founder were not associated with Sebastian in any way, nobody would give a shit about her wearing a kimono, about Paul doing black face, or about the co-founder/organization being blue lives matter supporters and in that lies the actual problem. Being critical of people and their actions should be consistent and should happen all the time -- not just when they interact with your white fave. That’s when it becomes performative and looks like you just want to be able to show internet people that you follow/support/stan unproblematic celebrities, when really, you don’t care.

I think the moral of this post is that I think it's unfair to hold a complete stranger to a standard that I cannot hold myself to. I also don't view celebrities the way most teenagers/twenty somethings do, and that’s because when I entered fandom we didn't have social media, so I grew up with a wall between myself and said celebrities. There is no wall now with the presence of social media. "Fans" nowadays have a weird ownership feeling over celebrities because they can read their personal thoughts or view personal pictures and think that they have this personal quasi-friendship with them. I can't get on board with that. I prefer having the wall and I still keep the wall.

If supporting Sebastian makes you uncomfortable, then by all means, stop supporting him. Just make sure you are making this decision for yourself based on credible sources and concrete evidence and that you're not letting this fake woke activist mob make you feel uncomfortable. Internet activism means nothing unless you put your money where your mouth is in your real life and 90% of the social justice internet warriors do not. Real activism is bigger than changing your avi to a black square.

[mistchievous]

If Eddie revealed in the next few episodes that, all his life he's been drinking coffee but he doesn't really like it, and now he discovered tea and found his perfect drink, would you reconsider your stance on the superiority of gay lo-- err tea?

Oh man. Anon, I know you're just in here teasing, but you have accidentally stepped in an issue that makes me want to word vomit all over Tumblr.

As much as I'd like to engage with this at a surface level and stick to talking about tea vs. coffee, you've turned the discussion into something else.

I'm not upset with you, but this is gonna be a rollercoaster of a response. So bear with me.

People in fandom have a really bad habit of forgetting what the point of fanfiction and the like actually are. It's right there in the name. The word fiction.

As much as people like to think otherwise, fanfiction and headcanons and whatnot are not fact. They're ideas created by fans. None of them are canon. The words headcanon, fanon, etc. exist for a reason, and it's okay to explore something in fanfiction that has no real basis in canon.

Because the entire point of fanfiction - of creating things in a fandom - is to explore non-canon ideas. What would happen in this situation? What if we put these characters in a different universe where so-and-so owns a coffee shop? What if, what if, what if...? It's all about having fun with the characters, setting, etc.

One of the problems in this particular fandom is that people can't seem to differentiate between exploring ideas and applying those ideas to canon. And that's an issue.

And I'm going to use the issue you brought up to explain it.

The Gay!Eddie vs. Bi!Eddie discourse is important. Now, the issue isn't with people addressing this in fanfiction. If people want to write about Eddie being closeted this entire time and yadda yadda, more power to them. Let them explore that idea.

But talking about it as though it has a basis in canon and wishing for it to be canon can be problematic because then you dive headfirst into erasure. Eddie very much loved his wife. He not only loved his wife; he enjoyed having sex with her. A lot. He was not only with her for Chris. He was fucking her while hiding her from Chris entirely. That was for himself. What we see on-screen is him very much being into Shannon. Sneaking around just to get into bed with her. Dude is having a grand time. There are no actual signs that he didn't love her and no actual signs that he wasn't attracted to her. Just a lot of twisting and reading into things by fans.

So, using your own analogy, him discovering he likes tea does not mean he never liked coffee. It doesn't mean he still doesn't like coffee. It just means he's discovered something else that he enjoys.

And people will say "Oh, but Michael." But we have no idea what his and Athena's sex life was like. It's not like we saw him fucking Athena into incoherency and enjoying the hell out of it just for him to turn around and be like "Oh. I'm gay." It was implied that this was something he wrestled with for quite a while before being honest with her. We don't even know if he ever sought her out for sex. We don't know what he felt when having sex with her or how into it he was. Not to mention there are mental and physical aspects to sex. Mental and physical stimuli. And they're different.

Bi erasure is a big problem irl. The idea that "Oh, well you like so-and-so now or this gender or whatever means that you didn't really like/love that other person before". The writers going ahead with Gay!Eddie in canon would mean they would literally have to erase and invalidate his previous relationships. Particularly his relationship with Shannon. Because canonically, as I've already mentioned, the dude was really into his wife, and we literally saw it on-screen.

They'd have to go back and be like "Nah. That wasn't legit."

Nothing was erased on-screen for Michael. Like I said, we saw nothing of his relationship with Athena beyond the fact that they care for each other, and that didn't change.

But with Eddie, it would literally be a push to validate bi-erasure, and that's not okay. There is literally no reason for them to invalidate his previous relationships just to confirm that he's into men. None whatsoever. If they confirm he's into men, it should be "also" not "instead of". And pushing for "instead of" and trying to twist previous interactions he's had with Shannon to disprove the legitimacy of his past relationships with women in canon is erasure and is a problem.

If you want to explore it in fandom, feel free. But when you start twisting canon or saying certain things should have been done in canon, you're crossing a line that you might not even realize is there.

And it's not just with this issue.

90% of the discourse in this fandom would fucking vanish if people understood this more.

Even the anti-Maddie fics aren't an issue just because they exist. Technically, you can write what you want. Because yes, "Dont like; don't read" is a thing. People can just filter you out and move on.

But this fandom doesn't just write what they want and tag problematic content that can then be easily filtered. They then defend it and talk about it as though this is how it should have happened.

"Maddie should have been arrested." "Buck should have blah blah blah when she told him about Daniel."

People in this fandom want their bashing fics to be validated instead of just acknowledging that they're bashing fics. So in author's notes and Tumblr posts and the like, they'll say this should have happened and twist entire interactions to justify whatever problematic content they create.

And that's fucked up. Because no. None of that shit is what should have happened to Maddie. Victim-blaming is extremely dangerous and damaging.

But again, this fandom can't just be like "This is bashing and you won't like it, so stay away." They try to defend it to actual victims. They're spreading dangerous ideas because they want validation that they're right about a character or a situation to avoid having to acknowledge that they're creating content with problematic themes.

And that's not okay.

This fandom needs to learn how to explore something in fiction without:

Acting as though it is or should be canon.

Acting as though projections on a character are equal to analyses of a character. (Ex. Buck did not care about Taylor unlocking his phone even if you would have. Your boundaries are not the same as every other person on the planet's.)

Hiding behind "Don't like; don't read" as a blanket statement to spew hate and dangerous ideas. (Tag your hate and own that what you're writing is some kind of guilty pleasure fic instead of trying to promote and defend the idea as a good and legitimate one that applies to actual people.)

Anyway, I've gone wildly off-topic. This doesn't even touch on things like racism and the like. I could vent all day about fandom.

But Idek how much sense I'm making anymore, so lemme stop here. I'm literally rambling now.

Anyway, anon. I know you were just teasing, but you kinda stepped on an ant pile. Sorry. 😂😭

[zutarabender]

I understand why the discourse surrounding Aang’s role in The Southern Raiders is so charged. It’s indisputably colored by how people perceive the characters themselves, the relationships between them, and the morality around the things said and choices made. I honestly believe there is no true objective analysis of Aang’s behavior. All of it is absolutely valid. Love him, hate him, that’s all fair.

But on this end, none of the opinions I’ve heard so far ever felt right to me. I’ve heard that Aang’s advice played a crucial part in Katara’s arc. I’ve also heard that Aang’s intervention could have been taken out of the episode and nothing would have changed.

I find that the truth is a little bit more complicated.

No, I don’t think Katara’s actions were truly impacted by Aang’s advice. But at the same time, his involvement is necessary for us to understand Katara better. Furthermore, Aang’s involvement was important not only to kickstart the last leg of his arc, but it was imperative to highlight someone else’s growth.

(Spoiler alert: It’s Zuko, of course)

Before you proceed, I will warn that this meta is long, and it criticizes both Aang and Zuko’s actions (and Katara’s to a much lesser degree). The thing about character growth is that there needs to be a starting point in which things don’t go exactly right. However, since I discuss Aang the most, I suspect this meta has the potential to be upsetting on the Aang-critical front, so if that’s something you wish to avoid, I’ll advice you not to engage.

I’m breaking down this meta into two parts - Aang’s impact on Katara’s actions, and Aang’s impact on Zuko’s growth.

As I said above, I really do believe the impact Aang’s advice had on Katara’s actions was minimal. First and most importantly, she implies so herself. I’m going to start from the end, and inch my way back to the beginning, because their last scene together just about sums it up.

Katara doesn’t react with happiness, relief or gratitude when Aang says he’s proud. Quite the opposite. When he says he’s proud of her, she says she actually wanted to do it, implying he has no reason to be proud of her at all. In saying that maybe she’s too weak to do it (ie. murder), she implies that part of her wishes she had done it, or believes she should have. And this is the second time she describes the non-murder as inability rather than refusal (we’ll go over the first time in a bit). She just couldn’t do it. It was something stronger than her that she cannot explain, not a conscious decision.

Aang: Zuko told me what you did. Or what you didn't do, I guess. I'm proud of you.

Katara: I wanted to do it. I wanted to take out all my anger at him, but I couldn't. I don't know if it's because I'm too weak to do it or because I'm strong enough not to.

Aang: You did the right thing. Forgiveness is the first step you have to take to begin healing.

Katara: But I didn't forgive him. I'll never forgive him.

Had she been guided by Aang’s advice, the answer would be simple. She would have admitted she thought of what he said, and that he was right. That’s not what’s happening here. Quite the opposite, both her lines stand in direct opposition to what Aang believes. And to add to that, in wondering whether her actions make her weak or strong, she further proves the point that whatever the answer is, it lies within herself and not external sources. This is her moral compass speaking.

Perhaps this is why Aang telling Katara that she did the right thing feels off. Of course he would try to reassure her, but if Katara herself isn’t certain she did the right thing, then it matters little what Aang thinks. To further that sensation of disconnect, Aang also jumps to the conclusion that her inability to commit revenge means that she forgave Yon Rha.

Here, Aang is explicitly wrong. Katara didn’t forgive, and will never forgive. And this is something she said before going on her journey: forgiveness is impossible. The one thing she backed out on was revenge (arguably; more on that later) and she has no idea why she couldn’t kill Yon Rha. If you want to believe she eventually realized it was thanks to Aang, I’m not here to stop you, but this was not on the text (or the subtext for that matter) so I cannot agree with that interpretation.

Let me phrase all of that differently, and ask yourself the following question: would Katara have gone through with murder had Aang not tried to convince her otherwise?

I don’t think there’s an objectively right answer to this, and much of people’s perceptions of this episode hinge on the answer. My answer comes from the subtext in this exchange:

Yon Rha: I did a bad thing! I know I did and you deserve revenge, so why don't you take my mother? That would be fair!

“Why don’t you take my mother?” highlights better than anything else how unhelpful eye-for-an-eye revenge would be in Katara’s situation, and it’s crucial. This moment of pure evil prompts Katara to realize how pathetic and empty of a person Yon Rha is, and immediately after declare that she can’t kill him. In the end, he’s too evil for the audience to feel sorry for him, but brought too low and harmless for him to be worth dealing with. Again, note how she describes her sparing Yon Rha as passive can’t rather than a conscious won’t, and this is prefaced by her pointing out the kind of horrible man he is... which is the one clue we have as to where Katara’s inability to murder comes from.

Katara: I always wondered what kind of person could do such a thing, but now that I see you, I think I understand. There's just nothing inside you, nothing at all. You're pathetic and sad and empty.

Yon Rha: Please, spare me!

Katara: But as much as I hate you... I just can't do it.

While this is not in the text, I do think that it’s subtextually implied that her inability to kill Yon Rha was at least somewhat influenced by the kind of man she found him to be. Had Yon Rha still been a commander in active duty, still terrorizing innocent people, Katara might have felt more anger than disgust and pity. She might have gone through with murder, and it would’ve possibly been morally right (as he would have been an enemy with the capacity and intent to cause harm to her people). On the flipside, Yon Rha might have also been portrayed as an otherwise decent man wholly repentant of his actions, or surrounded by a loving family, and Katara’s outlook would have also been impacted by this.

In the end, the writers’ decision to have a still evil Yon Rha living a sad existence in retirement was deliberate. This frames the possible murder as an act of revenge alone (rather than a justified act of war, or a moral wrong for unrelated reasons). But at the same time, Yon Rha being reduced to this state colors Katara’s perception of him, and is lightly implied to influence her ability to go through with murder.

So yes, I do believe Katara was never going to kill this Yon Rha no matter what Aang (or Zuko) believed was best for her, and that she might have gone through with it had he still had the power to hurt others.

Moving forward to other parts of Aang’s advice, I wondered if this scene could count as Katara “letting her anger out, then letting it go”. In the sense that she threatened to kill a man, was about to do it, but then refused to - yes, that’s absolutely what happened. She displayed anger, then didn’t use that anger to commit murder. There is more to it, though.

Katara’s anger still manifested itself in violent urges and a desire to cause harm. And in a way, she did cause harm. She used Bloodbending on someone she believed to be her mother’s killer. She threatened Yon Rha’s life, brought him to the point of fear for his life, highlighted his inferiority as he begged in tears, and only then did she decide she’d had enough to finally walk away. These are acts of violence committed out of the desire to get revenge. Revenge is causing hurt because you’ve been hurt, which is precisely what Katara does. She doesn’t just let out her anger, she directs it as its target with a genuine desire to cause him harm.

Is that actually revenge? Well, this is a bit murkier, because the characters use “revenge” as shorthand for murder. None of the characters mentions murder, but it’s very strongly implied all throughout that this is what they mean by “revenge” or other euphemisms. But revenge can take different shapes, and seeing the man responsible for her trauma powerless and begging may count as revenge for Katara. This is neither confirmed nor refuted, though. 

Basically, the only thing Katara unequivocally did that Aang wished she would was to spare Yon Rha’s life, which she does because of reasons stronger than herself that she doesn't yet understand (very strongly implied to be her inner moral compass). She never cites Aang’s influence. Beyond this, Katara:

Does not, will not forgive Yon Rha, and was always firm about this. It also appears she’s still angry (ie. hasn’t let the anger go as Aang advised) but the anger is no longer consuming her.

Does commit angry and violent acts that go beyond finding an outlet for her anger; these acts debatably counts as an act of revenge.

And look. Just because Katara didn’t listen doesn’t mean that he was 100% factually wrong. There’s a reason why revenge and murder are generally frowned upon. If Katara felt threatening Yon Rha was revenge enough, she doesn’t seem to enjoy it either (and if Aang was right, she still needed to learn that lesson by herself). At his core, Aang understood her pain, and he knew Katara would probably not get what she needed from causing particular sorts of harm.

However, his words failed to reach her, and this had to be the case because those were things Katara needed to determine for herself. I know I’m not the first one to point out that he was going about supporting Katara in entirely the wrong way, which only made Katara feel more distant from him. He can understand Katara’s pain and rage, but he cannot comfort her in the way she needs. And so, Katara just doesn’t listen.

And before my criticism of Aang’s actions is misconstrued, I will say I’m not trying to vilify the lack of emotional intelligence of a twelve-year-old kid that isn’t used to being placed in this situation. Black-and-white mentality is strong with that age group, and Aang and Katara have different enough styles of communication that he would have had a hard time reaching her anyway. He obviously doesn’t intend to hurt Katara, and truly wants what’s best for her, but he fails to convey his point in a way that takes her feelings into full consideration.

This point is driven home further when they have their last conversation, in which Aang is convinced that Katara followed his advice and Katara subtly (and not-so-subtly) points out that this isn’t quite right. This episode is all about the relativity of morality, and Aang fails Katara as a friend when he fails to account for that.

In the course of both their conversations on the matter, Aang acts in several ways that cause Katara to feel he was antagonizing her:

His wording when questioning her motives isn’t ideal - “what exactly do you think this will accomplish?” comes across as a bit dismissive; it implies from the get-go that Aang believes her quest will accomplish nothing. Katara understandably clams up (”I knew you wouldn’t understand”)

It’s logical that Aang would share his experiences when attempting to support Katara through her anger and pain. However, prefacing these experiences with “how do you think I felt when...” is the wrong way to go about it. It shifts the emotional labor onto Katara, forces the focus onto Aang’s experiences, and doesn’t address the root of Katara’s anger. Even if he does know the grief she’s experiencing, he is unable to empathize in a way that would make her feel understood and supported.

Aang compares her to Jet when Katara finally admits she wants revenge. This is an extremely low blow, and I cannot imagine Aang doesn’t know it. Jet is someone who betrayed Katara personally and was all about indiscriminately targeting innocents. In contrast, Katara has been radically kind to the civilians of the Fire Nation, and wants to enact revenge on the one man that is absolutely guilty. It’s a comparison she’d feel is insulting and invalid (she calls this out) and the fact that Sokka backs it up is even more hurtful to Katara.

And then later, when she tries to sneak out of camp at night:

Saying “I forgive you. Does this give you any ideas?” when Katara tries to steal Appa is appallingly reductive of her grief. Once again, he’s trying to turn this into a teaching moment rather than making any effort to listen and comfort her when she is evidently hurting. Aang wants to be heard, not to listen, because he believes he already has all the information he needs.

He gives her unwanted advice, and it’s unwanted advice that disregards her agency. Katara has declared she believes forgiveness to be impossible; him flat-out telling her “forgive him” is tone-deaf. Forgiveness is a deeply personal matter, not something that can be requested from someone on behalf of a third party that might not regret their actions.

At this point, Aang is more intent in getting his point across than he is willing to listen or support Katara. It actually makes sense for someone of his age and position. Since he wholly understands her grief, he believes that he has all the answers (so does Zuko, for that matter, but Zuko goes about it differently). This is why Katara reacts negatively to Aang for most of this episode and mostly contradicts him or tunes him out.

That said, there is one count of growth Aang shows between both conversations. It’s never stated why he went from “what do you think this will accomplish?” to “you need to face this man”, but whatever the reason, Katara does acknowledge that change of heart and reacts positively to it (”thanks for understanding”). That’s the thing; Aang understands, but is unable to translate that understanding into empathy, support and active listening.

As a bit of a sidenote, I’d also like to point out that no one else offers to go with Katara and Zuko. There was absolutely no reason for the others to stay behind (they literally have nothing better to do, they are just camping and existing at this point in the story), but they actively stay behind, tacitly removing their support for Katara’s actions. We are given no reason for this. If we go by the meta reason that it had to be Katara and Zuko, they could have Katara refuse their help, or have Katara and Zuko steal Appa. Point is, no one even offers when they have the chance to, and I do believe Sokka and/or Aang should have, especially if they were so fearful of her state of mind. But I digress.

While different interpretations of the text are valid, this is my safe conclusion of how little impact Aang’s advice had in Katara’s decision. Also, again - Aang making mistakes and having attitudes worthy of criticism isn’t something I’d like to vilify him for. What I do strongly oppose is the notion that he was objectively and unquestionably correct (which is an assertion I’ve seen both from official and fandom) because that’s just factually wrong. I also criticize the writing choice of not having him admit that he was wrong, even though this is presented clearly to the viewer, because it understates his growth. It is far from my intent to portray him as a villain, but that can coexist with the assertion that he isn’t always right, and wasn’t the friend Katara needed at this point in time.

So, if his advice wasn’t meant to impact Katara, what was it there for?

Well, for one, Zuko is the one who openly admits to Aang that he was wrong, so at least he was listening.

Now, it’s not like he was completely wrong. Katara did need the “closure and justice” he insightfully spoke of, but not the eye-for-an-eye sort of revenge he thought she was after. In his quiet support of her, he allowed her to take agency over her own journey. And the observation that she was conflating her anger at her mother’s death with her anger at him was terrifyingly accurate for someone as socially unaware as Zuko. He truly was the right person to help her at this point in time.

He was completely wrong about the necessity for violence and the satisfaction it would bring Katara, though. For that reason, Aang’s belief that violence is not the answer was a big lesson for Zuko. Of course, for Zuko it’s more like violence isn’t always the answer (he absolutely still believes that Ozai should die, and to the show’s credit, he’s never vilified for it). The point still stands. Contrasting Aang and Zuko’s morals wasn’t really about Katara, who ends up doing her own thing, but about both of them guys. Go figure.

This means that, contrary to popular assumption, Zuko wasn’t a “bad influence” for Katara because he wasn’t an influence at all. Katara was beyond influencing. Zuko’s assumption that Katara would murder her mother’s killer was a projection of his own desires. Much like Aang, Zuko understands Katara’s pain and assumes she would act as he himself would want to. Zuko would have absolutely murdered the man who took his mother away from him hadn’t his honor system dictated that it’s not his destiny. When Katara didn’t act in the way he expected, Zuko finally internalized Aang’s words. And while it was a wrong assumption about Katara, his way of going about it was exactly right (compare this to Aang who had some right ideas, but went about them in exactly the wrong way). All he does in the “field trip” is to aid Katara in her quest, without trying to guide her behavior or inciting her to be violent.

It all boils down to, had Katara felt wronged by Zuko during their quest, her forgiveness of him wouldn’t have been earned. Say what you will, Katara herself doesn’t seem to believe Zuko’s intervention was negative, and this experience actually made her think better of him, enough to finally forgive him. Whether it’s by finally being able to empathize with the deep anger he once felt, or the fact that he relentlessly stood by her at this low point of her life, Katara is finally convinced that Zuko is trustworthy, and this wouldn’t have happened if she'd felt wronged again. 

Now, I’m not trying to say Zuko did nothing wrong in this episode. He did. All I’m saying is that, much like with Aang, his moral stance on violence isn’t important for Katara’s journey beyond it being his reason to lead Katara to Yon Rha. His wrongdoings are mostly toward Aang. In their conversations, Zuko is the one who directly opposes Aang’s pacifist stance. That would be alright on its own, but Zuko’s attitude goes beyond him disagreeing with Aang or being frustrated at his naivete, and how little he questions it. Aang may not be going about things perfectly, but that doesn’t excuse the following interactions:

And later:

Aang: The monks used to say that revenge is like a two-headed rat viper. While you watch your enemy go down, you're being poisoned yourself.

Zuko: That's cute, but this isn't air temple preschool. It's the real world.

Notice how in both instances, Zuko angrily belittles Aang’s ideology in a way that is directly tied to Aang’s cultural background. A cultural background the Fire Nation worked its hardest to erase. This context is not made explicit, but it’s hard to believe it wasn’t purposeful when Zuko’s way of contradicting Aang is by bringing up his identity. Twice.

Katara: Don't try to stop us.

Aang: I wasn't planning to. This is a journey you need to take. You need to face this man. But when you do, please don't choose revenge. Let your anger out, and then let it go. Forgive him.

Zuko: Okay, we'll be sure to do that, guru goody-goody.

Now, to be fair to Zuko, his endgame in these scenes is not to establish his cultural superiority. He comes from an abusive upbringing in which wrongdoing (real or perceived) is punished with extreme and violent acts, and is still dealing with the aftermath. It makes sense Aang’s ideology would come across as out-of-touch and almost insulting, though this isn’t the way to go about it. In contrast, Aang is still twelve, and holds on tight to his ideals because it’s one of the few things he has left from his nation, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t question them much or internalize the full extent of his elders’ teachings, or how little they apply to others, to everyone’s frustration. The cultural implications are secondary (and so, they remain in the subtext) and this clash is about them as characters and humans rather than representatives of their nations.

The context is there, though, and it highlights why Aang is the right person to speak on pacifist morality, and in turn, this is why it’s so extremely important that Zuko admits being wrong to Aang in particular. He learns his lesson not by listening, but by observing Katara... and yet, it’s Aang he admits this to, and it’s also telling that it happens when Katara is no longer around.

Most importantly, this is a lesson Zuko must learn. We know in hindsight that Zuko’s destiny is to become a honorable leader to the Fire Nation and establish an era of peace. “Violence isn’t (always) the answer” is a lesson that he has to internalize before he gets there. Zuko watching Katara lash out violently, then turn her back on murder, brought the point home. But just as important is the fact that Aang is the only survivor (that we know of) from the Air Nomads’ genocide, and Zuko needs to learn to respect him as such before he becomes Fire Lord.

(Incidentally, Zuko’s support of Katara’s mission aligns with this philosophy of learning to listen to victims. His frustration at her not forgiving him is completely overturned when he listens to her and accepts her anger, and he becomes proactive about seeking forgiveness).

Aang might have not reached Katara, but his words had to reach Zuko. In turn, Aang also has to learn to question his elders’ teachings. Not only does Katara follow her own moral compass on her own terms, showing Aang that his way isn’t the only right way (if he does choose to learn that lesson, of which we sadly have no unequivocal confirmation of). But Zuko also throws him a challenge in the end, asking him what he plans to do about Ozai - which is, frankly speaking, something Aang should have thought about before.

That’s why it was absolutely necessary for Aang to be so frank about where he stood regarding Katara’s quest. Aang’s morals needed to come in perfect opposition with Zuko’s for him to learn. At the same time, they also needed to be disregarded by Katara to highlight how her moral compass is entirely her own.

So that’s all there is to it, and thank you if you have come this far.

On a closing note, all of the above will also explain the personal frustration of mine that this episode has been turned into some sort of cornerstone of the shipping wars. I have to wonder about the intentions of people who vilify Zuko and overstate Aang’s influence, or those who pretend Zuko did absolutely nothing wrong and that Aang’s interference served no purpose. It’s highly reductive to boil this down to “which boy is right for Katara”, especially when the field trip episodes were conceived with the notion that Zuko was the one right person to accompany his co-protagonist on that particular mission, and that has nothing to do with romance (and to be frank, before TSR rolled around, most of us had made up our minds already on the shipping front, so let’s not be disingenuous).

In this case, it needed to be about Zuko and Katara, and Aang’s role is something that needs to be analyzed by virtue of what it added to their journeys. End of story. The disconnect between Katara and Aang (...and the others, for that matter) was written in by design, not only to allow Katara to follow her own heart and make her own mistakes, but to justify her turning to Zuko, whom she ostensibly didn’t trust at that point. Zuko was better at helping Katara deal with her anger in this particular case, and that’s kind of the whole point of this episode even existing. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement.

My takeaway from Aang’s role in this episode is that Aang’s intervention was necessary to punctuate Zuko’s growth in his mission with Katara, and that Aang and Zuko being both wrong (at least somewhat) about what Katara needed highlights Katara’s agency in her journey. I can’t think of either of those as bad things.

[razorblade180]

Overall thoughts on V8? Assuming you didn't answer this already.

I meant to do a volume wrap up review but I got incredibly busy and it fell to the waste side. The thing about me judging RWBY I have to come at it from two angles or I won’t feel like I judged it appropriately. There’s the casual, first time seeing the episodes and seeing this through the lens as a casual watcher who probably only sees the episodes once or twice. But then there’s the other side to that coin. I review these episodes, write aus, theorize, check extended lore, listen to the music, etc; that means I have to go back and watch episodes several times for any given reason and that’s when you start noticing the holes or picking up on things you didn’t before.

As a casual watcher, I’d give this an 8/10. There’s plenty of moments where characters do things that got me excited and plot points I wanted explored. This volume actually gave a decent amount of things I wanted for quite some time and some things I didn’t know I needed. Certainly there are things I don’t like in this but I’m open and curious to see where RT takes their storie because it’s their story.

Okay, now as a someone who’s had to deep dive and take a step back multiple times for a variety of reasons. 6.5/10 maybe a 7/10 if I’m being generous. A lot of my problems with this volume are problems that aren’t new to RWBY and that’s just how surface layer portions of arcs are and how a variety of choices/bonds don’t exactly make sense with what we were previously shown, or they only make sense because the writers don’t want introduce other complexities even though they should be there realistically. I’ll give a couple examples of these and yes, I’m aware what I say doesn’t bother everyone but it bothers me.

Qrow was never angry at or brought up Robyn being the reason their airship crashed in the first place because she started the fight; which aids in Clover dying.

Emerald follows Cinder, not Salem. Even if Cinder is working under Salem, why would Emerald be so willingly to complete shift to the side that actively goes against Cinder? There’s been no grand revelation to make Emerald believe Cinder doesn’t give a damn about her. Leaving made sense because she was about to get tortured. Going full turncoat right now doesn’t. No change happened. Emerald always hated being near Salem but adored Cinder no matter the crimes and the show hasn’t done anything to switch that view point.

I’m happy Whitley and Weiss had a touching sibling moment that implies they’re okay and making/made up, but there was never a conversation about the actual problem and thoughts that had them at odds in the first place. Weiss saving his and Willow’s life shouldn’t be the thing that smooths things over. It would’ve been terrible if Weiss do something to save their life. Whitley helping Penny is okay I guess because he really had no reason to contribute but did anyways. Even so, a person doing a morally correct thing doesn’t automatically warrant the conflict between him and Weiss’s resolved.

We got Cinder’s backstory; it didn’t tell us anything about how she eventually came into contact with Salem. Honestly her back story felt more in line of her main goal through the series was an absolute freedom by the means of breaking down the systems that trapped and didn’t give a damn, rather than her quest for power. Yes you can argue gaining power means it’s easier to maintain her freedom to do whatever she wants but I personally think that’s a little off the mark when you gave her a story that involves her trapped by rules and time rather than being too physically weak to gain freedom.

This show has built up that the Schnee family has suffered various types of abuse because of Jacques and uses Weiss as a medium to build towards breaking free from that. Not just overcoming but confronting the abuse by cementing it’s place below you. We don’t really get that. There will never be a moment where the siblings and mother truly get to break out of Jacques grasps emotionally and then put him in his place because he’s dead! Yeah they never have to worry about him again but even last volume they showed Winter still having turmoil and being able to get strung along by him. We don’t even really know how Whitley perceived his father. It feels so lackluster. Then they care to mention how it’s Weiss’s idea to save him like it’s an empowering moment when in actuality, it would be against her character, values of a huntress, and morality to let a person die in cell when you’re the reason they’re in a cell! Letting him die in there would just terrible. I don’t even know why he wasn’t let out in that scene! He’s a coward! He’d follow their orders to save his skin. All he has to do is shut up and walk through a portal.

Ironwood and Oscar both knew they could remove that staff to use it and Atlas wouldn’t drop immediately. Why did nobody have any kind of compromise with one another since there’s nothing stopping them from using the staff for something and then putting it back? They had this morally gray thing going on which I liked but then they decided to make Ironwood go full evil. I’ve never had to say this before but the song he got in V7 and the character they made him be in V8 just don’t connect. I got upset listening to that song recently because I liked that Ironwood.

Clover’s importance. RT tried making a character who had no more than 9 minutes in the series and one meaningful line of dialogue into the cornerstone of a side plot. Clover is such a nothing character. Vine did more than Clover. They try to make him have such a profound impact to the people around him but we never see him bond with his team; Harriet specifically. We get one scene of Clover telling Qrow the kids are fortunate to have Qrow even if he doesn’t think so. First, I doubt Clover knows Qrow decided to get drunk in a ghost town and the kids nearly died and cellar while he did it so that compliment doesn’t hold much weight for me. Second, We see nothing meaningful between the two. V7 has a time skip and just expects viewers to be on board with Clover being this influential change on Qrow without showing anything outside of a witty remark and Clover flexing his semblance. I would’ve bought it more of Qrow almost relapsed and Clover stopped him then had a real meaningful conversation.

Ruby goes against Ironwood only to then want to do a plan that’s aligned to longer term thinking than even his, talks about how everyone should be working together, but then adds a part in her video to actively antagonize and vilify Ironwood. Afterwards, she wonders where everything went wrong and doesn’t think of a plan or do anything to immediately help either kingdom until the final hour between the ultimatum being made, to everything getting destroyed. The inciting incident was disagreeing Mantle should be left in favor of Atlas but the main character didn’t do anything to help Mantle 90% of the season and hindered Atlas’s safety up until the final plan.

Yang is used to be the devil’s advocate in a bunch of situations, but she’s wrong most of the time or her lines just don’t make any sense. They weren’t doing just fine before Atlas. They almost died every step of the way. The team didn’t beat a Leviathan; silver eyes and a robot take credit for that. Why would Blake think less of Yang for wanting to go save people immediately? Blake was never mad at anyone to begin with. Yang consistently calls out people for following orders as if it’s objectively wrong, but is never called out on the fact she hasn’t followed anybody’s orders but her own and added discourse to every situation. I get RT is making her ask questions because that’s what Raven told her to do, but all she’s really doing is picking fights and disobeying every order. Yang states to Ruby they accomplished more than they expected. That’s false, getting Oscar back is correcting a mistake caused by her own plan that she didn’t even complete.

It took 6 volumes before Yang had anything to do with the Summer Rose subplot again and 7 volumes before her and Ruby had a sister to sister conversations; 5 if you wanna count Yang telling Ruby to leave at the end of volume three. The reason I bring this up is because in V8 , they treat their argument as if it’s a big deal but then have every character say it wasn’t that big a deal; but then have two circle back to that conversation later after having neither character discuss to anybody that the argument actually did weigh on them. Yang doesn’t think about Ruby until she sees her again and the closest we get with Ruby is Blake reassuring her that people need her and how Blake admires her. I like that scene but it’s not the same as Ruby actually airing out the specific point that Yang said something that Ruby found hurtful. Vol8 in general people trying to comfort others but nobody ever actually addresses what made them uncomfortable to start with. Except Ren.

This one is a nitpicking but I’ll say it anyways. Penny getting hacked only served as a purpose to go to the vault, a thing Ironwood already wanted them to do. Nobody got her because she was hacked. You can’t even say her getting hacked is the leading factor to her actually dying because Penny became a vulnerable human afterwards that can’t be rebuilt. Pietro was gone, and already stated last volume he doesn’t have the aura to build Penny again. If she died as a robot then it’s still permanent death. No core, no Pietro, and no aura; hacking her was just to create a Hound reveal situation and make them go to the vault on a different set of terms. I’m not exactly upset with this, but I don’t understand why the extra steps. The Hound was hunting her anyways. I would’ve brought some kind of value if she hurt a friend and it caused them to potentially hinder the plan later on or remove them entirely. Penny could’ve rekt Yang and it only adds value to Yang getting one shot later. I don’t know. I’m rambling.

I think I’ve wasted enough people’s time. Honestly, I do like this volume. I’ve enjoyed a bunch of it. But there’s things that legitimately make me think it’s not as good others and makes V7 even worse.

[pastamic]

So I’ve seen quite a few posts complaining about the way Entrapta was treated by the Princesses, particularly with a lot of vitriol towards Mermista. I know a lot of us who are neurodivergent are really excited about Entrapta as a character because she’s autistic coded and a lot of us can really relate to her. I think a lot of us are also, and rightfully so, very defensive of the way these types of characters are treated because they get treated honestly so badly by show creators and other characters in their series more often than not, and that’s totally reasonable. If you’re uncomfortable with the way she was treated in regards to what I’m about to talk about I’m in no way saying you can’t still be uncomfortable about this because this is just my opinion and the way I saw it as one touch-averse ND person. To preface this I have not received an autism diagnoses, but I have an ADHD diagnoses and have started to suspect that I might be autistic as well (though it’s hard to tell with the overlapping symptoms.) My fiance is autistic and also has ADHD and has agreed with me on several of these points. 

SO 

[id: Screenshot of Mermista pulling Entrapta’s hair while they approach Horde Prime’s spire in season 5. Caption reads “I’m sorry I’m bad at listening!” end id]

This scene, which a lot of people had an issue with. I had an issue with it at first too bc like pulling peoples hair is generally like not okay! Though the situation was very stressful and dire and Mermista was under a lot of stress. I think this episode was actually particularly important because it showed Entrapta’s issues with feelings and people (like not realizing they were all upset with her) and the stress and residual resentment from fighting on opposite sides and the issues that the other princesses had with understanding Entrapta with a resolution that got talked through. Something that in my personal experience is really important for everyone, but especially ND people and people with mental illnesses. Miscommunications and misunderstandings happen and they all talked it through and I thought it was very sweet. 

But, the hair pulling (and the weird leash thing that Perfuma made with vines but that’s a whole post on it’s own and I’m not gonna get into it) 

Now like I said I thought it was kinda shitty at first, but thanks to quarantine and depression I’ve re-watched spop probably fifteen times now and I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern. 

Most of us have already noticed that Entrapta uses her hair as hands for stuff 

[id: Screenshot of Entrapta leaning over in Hordak’s lab and shaping one of her pigtails into a hand. Caption reads “Failure is a vital part of scientific endeavor.” end id]

Like literal hands

[id: Screenshot of Entrapta standing in Darla’s doorway holding her tools with her hair and making a suggestive face. end id] 

It’s her superpower, and while the other princesses do use their powers as a bit of an extension of themselves, for Entrapta her hair is straight up another body part/limb for her. Tbh if I had hair like that I would use it for literally everything and never touch shit with my hands. 

I think I’ve seen people point this out to an extent before but I noticed that Entrapta never really reaches out to touch anybody with her actual hands with the exception of Hordak.

[id: Screenshot of Entrapta smiling  in the Fright Zone squishing Catra’s cheeks with her hair. Caption reads “Hi, Catra. I saved your life. You’re welcome.” end id]

When she convinces Hordak to send Catra to the Crimson Waste instead of to Beast Island she like grabs her cheeks with her hair, and again in season 5 she pats Catra on the head when she tells her she forgives her. 

[id: Screenshot of Entrapta and Hordak in Hordak’s lab. Entrapta is using her hair to hold out Hordak’s arms in a T-pose. Caption reads “And you’re really way too obsessed with this whole failure thing.” end id] 

And when she’s talking about Hordak’s disability and brainstorming about his suit. I actually chose both of the above screenshots because I thought at first that she only used her hair in place of her hands because her hands always had her tablet in them but both of her hands are free in these scenes, though one could argue that she needs to use her hair to reach Hordak’s hands, she could lift herself up with her hair if she really wanted to reach out with her hands. 

Actually there’s a point in Season 3, episode 4 where she straight up just scratches her hair with the Shera sword so I’m not even sure she has feeling in her hair??? 

[id: Screenshot of Entrapta in Hordak’s lab scratching her head with the Shera sword. Caption reads “I’m not sure if we just need the sword or if we need She-Ra, too.” end id] 

She’s scratching her head with a big fuck off sword so I think that we can infer two things from that: that she can’t really feel much through her hair, and that her hair is like durable as fuck. Considering she lifts herself up by her hair a ton I’d imagine it’s not attached to her scalp in quite the same sensitive way that like non-magic hair would be. 

So I think it makes sense, and might be a respect of her boundaries, to reach for her hair over her hand if they need to keep her from going somewhere. You could argue that grabbing someone in general is a disrespect of boundaries, and in a lot of cases it can be, but in the case of a battle or dangerous mission grabbing someone isn’t really out of the ordinary. We see it with the Best Friends Squad a lot, but also with Scorpia and like literally everyone she’s around. 

When Hordak saves Entrapta from the portal exploding we do see him grab her by the hand, but it’s continuously established that Entrapta exhibits way more intimacy with him than with pretty much anyone else. She allows touch from others and doesn’t seem bothered by it, but Hordak is the person she most consistently reaches out to in regards to touch. 

[id: Screenshot of Bow kissing Entrapta’s pigtail like it’s her hand. end id] 

When Bow first officially meets Entrapta he kisses her pigtail like it’s her hand, which by the way is just super adorable I love fanboy Bow, but it’s not just Bow. Catra and Scorpia also mainly interact with Entrapta through her hair.

Whenever someone needs to interact with Entrapta in a tactile way, it’s pretty much always through her hair. When Entrapta needs to interact with others in a tactile way, it’s pretty much always through her hair. Entrapta’s hair is like another set (sets?? She can split her hair up a lot) of hands. So I don’t think it’s as rough of a treatment as people are making it out to be. It’s not like pulling a non-magic person’s hair. Entrapta’s hair is magic and she uses it in place of her hands near constantly. It’s not like pulling someone else’s hair because Entrapta’s hair is her power, it’s an extension of herself in a way that other’s hair is not. 

It’s okay to feel uncomfortable with Mermista (or others) pulling Entrapta’s hair if that makes you uncomfortable, especially if you’re neurodivergent as many of us have experiences of people completely disregarding our bodily autonomy and infantilizing us in a way that’s frustrating and harmful, but (and I’m not gonna name names bc this isn’t meant to be a discourse post and I’ve seen it a lot) demonizing Mermista for pulling her hair in a high stress situation when she’s struggling with leadership already and Entrapta is seemingly ignoring her orders to do whatever for the sake of science. Though we find out that’s not the case, Mermista doesn’t know that at first and was intending to keep Entrapta from putting herself or the rest of the team in danger which is a foundation of leadership responsibility. 

Should she have tried to be more understanding of Entrapta and actually try to communicate frankly that she was mad instead of assuming that Entrapta would realize it on her own? Absolutely, especially as a leader. But she’s new to leadership and that’s like half of what that episode was about, and people make mistakes, especially with communication. That’s something that I think spop as a show handles really well. People make mistakes, people do things they regret, and people struggle with things like communicating and boundaries even when they have the best of intentions. What matters is that it’s talked out, apologized for, resolved, etc. I’m ND myself, and I’m friends with a lot of neurodivergent people and miscommunications happen A LOT even with like the base knowledge that we need to speak bluntly, clearly, and honestly in order to be understood. Sometimes even when you’re blunt and honest and open things still get miscommunicated. I definitely think the princesses infantilize Entrapta far too much, but I don’t think the hair pulling is as much of an issue as I’ve seen people make it out to be and I definitely don’t think Mermista is some Vile Bitch (tm) for doing what she did. 

(Also I took all these screenshots myself please appreciate that I spent like two hours combing through spop episodes to find them djsfjklds) 

[equalseleventhirds]

quick disclaimer before fic: this is not meant to excuse or absolve melanie and georgie of outing jon; what they did was wrong and they should not have done it. instead it is an... examination of a character who is Maybe working some things out but, due to Internalized Issues, is harshly rejecting it both for herself and other people. (i’m aware i wrote something with the exact same FUCKING premise back when i was in the sh*rl*ck fandom dear god don’t read that linked fic it is from a deeply shameful time of fandom i only linked it as proof i did the same thing before. almost like i’m still working through the same stuff via writing fanfiction. hm.) (further discussion on THAT in post-fic notes; i wanted to keep it under the cut for personal reasons.)

furthermore: warning for discussion of sex (but not explicit depictions of sex), characters experiencing aphobia both internalized and not, mention of sexism wrt jobs, characters outing other characters without their consent (more than once, and more than just jon), and mention of consensual but unwanted sex (as in, consent was given, but the consenter did not enjoy it, and consented due to expectations).

- - -

It starts with: “I don’t, I, I usually can’t—Lately. I mean. Lately I can’t.” Melanie shuts her eyes so she won’t have to see Georgie, her hand on the sheets, judgment questions in her eyes. “Since I got—shot. It’s more difficult, is all.”

“Melanie—”

“You can still try,” she says, the words falling too fast, too panicked. “If you want, sometimes other people—and it’s fine! I’m always, it’s fine to try. Sometimes I do. I just might not. You know.”

“You might not orgasm,” Georgie finishes for her. It’s hard to tell how she’s feeling about it—until her fingers brush Melanie’s chin, turning her face up.

Reluctantly, Melanie opens her eyes, and then she’s glad she did. Because Georgie’s smiling, not a mocking smile, gentle. And they said this was just, just casual, just between friends (there’s too much going on with ghosts and the Institute and Georgie’s ex sleeping on her couch when he isn’t being kidnapped for it to be more than that), but Melanie’s glad Georgie is smiling.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Georgie says. She’s sitting up now, not lying almost-not-quite between Melanie’s legs anymore. She looks gorgeous, naked and cross-legged on that horrible mattress with a microfiber sheet wrapped around her shoulders, and Melanie wants to curl up in the sheet with her and eat the leftover pizza from earlier and fall asleep together with grease on their hands.

No. Focus. “It’s okay,” Georgie says again, gentler. “If you can’t right now. If you don’t want to. You certainly gave me a lovely orgasm—”

“—or three—”

“—yes, thank you, and if you’d rather just call it there, I’m not pushing it. As long as you enjoyed yourself.” She frowns, suddenly, glancing down at Melanie’s hands. “You… did enjoy yourself? I hope we didn’t—”

“I did!” She always does, when it’s other people coming, when she gets to be touching warm skin and watching someone fall apart. It’s… nice. “It’s just, you know. I got shot.”

(And isn’t that a convenient excuse, she sneers in her own head, and it sounds like Toni refusing to come back to the team, it sounds like the most sarcastic videos about her breakdown, it sounds like Elias. Isn’t it convenient that now you can blame your little problem on blood flow, or nerve endings, or stress. Never mind that you didn’t have those excuses a year ago. Or two years. Or back when you had a real girlfriend, and you always said yes but she got tired before—)

Georgie tucks a strand of hair behind Melanie’s ear. “Okay, good. If we, you know, try this again sometime? If you’re feeling better? Then I can try.” She stops, licks her lips, watches Melanie’s expression. “Or I can… not try, if you’d still prefer that. Later. You know. If.”

“I’m not—” And she’s rushing again, always rushing, she doesn’t even know if she and Georgie will ever—

“No, I know! It’s fine! But like—Look, this isn’t exactly new for me, you know? If that’s something you want. Something you don’t want. Or I, I’m saying it’s not a problem, if you do or don’t want me to make you come in the future, or even if you don’t want to have sex at all, I mean, when we were dating Jon didn’t—”

That’s where Georgie stops, as if talking about Jon is too much, as if she hasn’t been speaking Melanie’s secret insecurities out loud in bed like it’s something they can talk about, as if all of this hasn’t already been too much and too terrifying already.

Melanie stands up, grabs the comforter as a makeshift cloak (because Georgie has the sheet, and suddenly she isn’t sure she wants to share the sheet with her). “Right.”

“I’m just—I have a friend. Who you might talk to, if you wanted to talk about this.”

She steps away from the bed, towards the door. “Sure. Pizza? I’m hungry.”

-

The problem is, Melanie doesn’t much like Jon. He was such a dick about the Youtube thing, and about her statement, and about Sasha. And even though she knows (sort of) that part of it hadn’t been his fault, she still isn’t going to talk over her disinterest in sex with him. It’s mortifying. Even if he wasn’t her boss. And Georgie’s ex. And currently out of the Archives, anyway.

But she wants to talk to somebody, about Georgie’s words running around and around and around her head, about the sheer panic mixing with almost-relief and then the visceral no no no churning low in her stomach that had made it a struggle just to choke down her pizza. She wants to ask someone is this normal, am I allowed, is it even enough to be halfway to ‘not at all’ or should I just suck it up. She wants to talk that out desperately.

It’s just… she doesn’t have many friends left, after her whole fall from Youtube ghost hunter grace. She’s not going to ask Georgie about it, any more than Jon, although for pretty much the opposite reason. Who’s left? Her shiny new coworkers? Tim, who seethes and hates everything and everyone in the Archives? Martin, who’s still upset that Jon so much as spoke to her while he was on the run? Basira?

-

When Melanie met Sasha—the real Sasha, the one apparently no one but her even remembers—she’d been the only woman in the Archives. And Melanie had chatted with her about haunted pubs, and maximizing SEO, and how to talk to people who’d seen a white dog while they were drunk and thought it was a ghost. And about their jobs, of course, which led to both of them scoffing about the sexist bullshit of academia and how someone like Sasha could be just an assistant and the only woman on her team.

And then Elias hired Melanie to replace… the thing that replaced Sasha. Hired another woman to replace the only woman. You learn to see patterns from the kind of person who might say diversity the same way as toilet plunger: something necessary, but distasteful. Melanie was filling a role he needed filled, and she could live with that.

And then Basira.

Who wasn’t there because she wanted to be, of course, but was still there. Was still another woman in the boy’s club of terror they’d apparently signed on for. Could maybe, maybe, be someone Melanie could connect with. Someone she could talk to.

Maybe.

-

“Do you know if he and Jon ever…?”

“No clue, and not interested!” She’s laughing, about to just dismiss it out of hand, but… maybe. She can feel the questions she never asked Georgie, the words sharpening their claws on the edges of her mind. The no, not me, not allowed sinking in her gut.

“Although…” Make it light. Make it interesting. Make it about someone else. How to hook an audience without having a public breakdown and becoming a— “According to Georgie, Jon… doesn’t.”

It feels wrong as soon as she says it. Like she’s dirty. Like she’s lying. Like a thousand eyes are looking at her, watching her, waiting for more. Make it a story. Engage your audience. Like it’s 2013 in a convention hotel room and Pete just told everyone Don’t worry, Mel likes girls actually, and even though they were all fine about it that moment of sharpshock terror in her throat as they all looked—

“Like, at all?”

The one thing she never learned was how to stop talking. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, that does explain some stuff.”

And that’s… it, really. That does explain some stuff. Jon is a dick, has always been a dick, overfocused on work and not on other people, and that does explain some stuff. Right. Yes. Like her last girlfriend had told her, about all you do is work, I can’t even get you off. An explanation, just like she always knew it would be.

It doesn’t really matter. She has a boss to go kill.

-

“I think,” she says, slow, like every word is being dragged out of her, “that I might not like. Sex. As much as, you know, people do.”

“You’re a person,” her therapist says, firm, and she has to bite back a sarcastic laugh.

“Right. ‘Course.”

- - -

post-fic notes: i myself personally have previously identified as: heteroromantic gray-ace, heteroromantic ace, aroace, aro gray-ace, aro bi, bi, arospec bi, aro bi again, and aro bi but sex ambivalent. part of that has been natural progression and change; part of that was bcos some people i considered friends got very into aphobic discourse, and i internalized a lot of what they said. in recent months i have been examining my sex ambivalence (sometimes repulsion) and considering what that means about whether or not i am on the ace spectrum. i’m still thinking about these things. i’m still, deep down inside, afraid of the aphobic people i respected and cared about hearing about this.

in part i wrote this to work through some of My Own Shit regarding this. in part i wrote this bcos i will get my grubby little aspec hands (bcos regardless of anything else, i am aspec, whether that’s ace or aro) on every character i can. yes, even the ones who did an objectively shitty thing to jon, the one canonical ace character. bcos sometimes people (like me) internalize things and make mistakes.

[soysaucecas]

oooh for the ask game 24, 30, and 44!

MAGPIE MY BELOVED HELLO

24. What are your favorite episodes?

The only episodes I've really watched are TMWWBK (which is my favorite episode and I'm certain would still be my favorite if I watched every single one because it has the only SPN character and the only SPN line), The French Mistake (which was funny enough but honestly in the Just Okay category for me, which makes me pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy actually watching SPN if this is one of the funniest/highest-rated eps), and Reading Is Fundamental (my best friend was watching it and asked me if I wanted to hop on Discord, I thought it might be fun to see Kevin's first introduction but instead this ep found the two of us taking like 90 minutes to get through it bc we kept pausing and screaming (derogatory) as the model minority stereotype jokes piled up and up and up... Unfortunately not a favorite even if we got Meg AND the "pull my finger" joke AND the "Sorry" shot). Other than TMWWBK, from clipping and transcript-reading, I like Wayward Sisters (who doesn't?), The Things We Left Behind (Claire!!!! Cas trying to be a dad! The diner scene aka my favorite destiel scene of all time bc being in love just looks so good on Cas! Also the parallels between Claire and Randy and teen Dean and the adults at that club in his story... woof.), Golden Time (Eileen gets to be HERE and be sad and loved and fight people with ghost powers and Cas gets to do a cool speech and a stabbing and do the Asian community a favor), and Lucifer Rising (just immensely sexy on all counts for Ruby, Sam, Cas, and myself). Also I am SO fond of Steve!Cas so I'll add Heaven Can't Wait even if I barely know anything about it.

30. What is an unpopular opinion or headcanon you have about the show?

Ooh okay hm I think. So I adore confession scene, but I don't think the "I cared about the whole world because of you" is like. The Objective Truth the way that most bloggers seem to take it. Cas was lobotomized tons of times before he met Dean, he was described as coming off the line with a crack in his chassis, he's always been the weird little angel who likes humanity too much! I don't think Dean came first, and although gay love was part of what helped Cas invent free will, he *Ruby voice* didn't need the feather to fly, Dumbo! I do think Cas believes what he says in the moment, but I also think he sorta... made himself believe it? This is probably just me deciding that cas-coding should go both ways, but like. I very much crush as a coping mechanism and I very much overascribe my actions to love because it simply seems more noble/poetic to do so. Being miserable because school is hard is cringefail but being miserable because of unrequited love is Good Shit. And I have been in unrequited love with my best friend for at least 7 years (probably 9 but I didn't realize it earlier) and if you asked I would 100% say that she taught me love and defined love for me and that she will be my first and last, but I also know that that is not entirely true; it's just the narrative that I like for myself. And I think that being in an Empty deal contingent on whether or not he LETS himself feel happy would lead Cas to do plenty of mental maneuvering, which I think involved intentional self-poor-little-meow-meow-ification via overascribing his choices and happiness to Dean (and I also think he'd already been doing that for a while just because of personal self-worth issues and because it's a nice narrative). I know as Cas's last Moment on the show it was probably written to be The Objective Truth, but I am perceiving him and I say no.

44. If you could write an episode of Supernatural, what would happen?

Oh scream okay! This is a fun one! I am going to start out with two ideas from other people:

1. Months ago Nate from the pocnatural discord had the idea of an episode from the "monster"'s perspective where the Winchesters are just clearly the antagonists while not doing anything different than they usually do. I think the idea was that all these supernatural beings live in a self-regulating community together and we have one Very Likable pov character who's a member of this community, but one of the newer members messes up one day and kills someone and the Winchesters come on a case and wreak havoc on this Very Much Functioning (there was going to be a whole rehab and reparations thing for the new member who messed up!) system and kill pov character and in the end you just HATE Sam and Dean for it.

2. It's hard to adapt anything from bad moon rising (aka my favorite spn fic) very well because the point of an Arab Winchesters season 1 rewrite is that it doesn't really work with the white characters we have now, but I think I could see a version of chapter 2 adapted as long as Haley (an Ojibwe hunter who lives in the area affected by what Sam and Dean are hunting) takes the lead. I'd especially like to see this section:

Dean laughs, a little disbelievingly. The question has never crossed his mind. “Do you like it?”

This gives Haley no pause at all. “Yeah,” she says. “I mean, it’s not really about killing monsters, though, for me. Or, it’s not always about killing monsters. It’s about community. Not violence. It’s a spiritual thing to build a home, you know?”

“Oh,” Dean says. He can’t think of anything else to say. It has never crossed his mind before that hunting could be compatible with a community.

I don't have any original episode ideas to add to the hunting discourse, so we're on to my ideas about character-driven eps. I think I would like to see a version of my sastiel possession fic (ty again for beta-ing that! you're a real one) as an ep around the time of 9.11 because Sam deserves to work through their trauma, but idk what the Dean plot should be for that. Another thing I would like very much is TFW drunk history storytime (so like. Tall Tales bass boosted), where for some reason they all need to go over what they were doing during Stanford era but each of them is telling someone else's story. It's gonna be either Sam->Dean->Cas->Sam or Dean->Sam->Cas->Dean. It starts out very funny (they all have terrible wigs and makeup in the flashbacks. Cas is Jimmy wearing a giant mask with googly eyes on it.) but as it goes on it gets increasingly sad how much these three don't really know each other.

In the Sam->Dean->Cas->Sam episode, Sam's telling of Dean's past veers wildly between "crushing pussy and killing things" and "feels like absolute shit all the time" and it's funny but Not Right and afterwards Dean goes "I didn't know you thought of me that way" and Sam says "... I am basically reading off the voicemails you left me back then" and Dean has to sit there and contend with the mythology he himself wrote for Sam to believe in. Dean->Cas provides the comedic beats for the episode as Dean awkwardly narrates Cas's Life As A Weird Little Guy who watches trees grow and heals babies and in the end Dean goes "so how did I do" and Cas is like "well actually I was either getting lobotomized or murdering people so like 3/10?" The moral of this plot line is that Dean is bi. Cas gives a fairly faithful retelling of Sam living her trans little life at Stanford and veering between trying to be Normal and being a total weirdgirl and feeling guilty and angry and happy and free. It becomes clear that Cas admires Sam a lot (but also feels like. guilt and some self-recrimination for not being that) for rebelling from their dad and exploring their queerness during a time Cas was still to his knowledge in total soldier mode, and Sam is having an a_good_soldier's Thesis 5 moment about how she failed the kid she used to be and how very sorry they are about all the things that happened to them, and Dean hates that this is the first he's hearing about so much of this but is also quite emo about the parts where Sam is struggling. The ep ends with them all in the same room not looking at each other and not knowing if they want to group hug or never talk again.

Dean->Sam->Cas episode is similar but the storytelling dissolves a lot faster as it becomes clearer way faster how much their own emotions are getting in the way. Dean is upset that Sam could leave their family so easily and probably swing a normal life, Sam keeps wondering what it would be like to live millennia just KNOWING that you were right and good and clean, and Cas is gay and veering between fitting Dean's life into a larger Righteous Man narrative and just being very tender (and sad and angry) about Dean's pain. Episode ends in a rather cathartic shouting match where they all end up apologizing to each other for many things.

Oh also I would like to see Cassie again but I don't have an episode in mind there. Also would love to see Kaia adjusting to life in Sioux Falls and befriending the others and dealing with Bad Place trauma.

tysm for the questions sorry for taking so long!

(ask game)

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992)

This review contains spoilers.

For the past few years, I didn’t spend a lot of time rewatching movies. Quite frankly, the thrill of discovering something new (and the risk that it might not be all that good) outweighed the pleasures of the familiar ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Yet this year, perhaps because it’s been so miserable on the whole, I’ve spent a bit more time revisiting films I’d already seen. In some cases, it was to relive the joy of seeing something I already liked or loved. But in other cases, perhaps because I’d been easier to please on average, I would go back to things I’d felt somewhat at a distance to in the hopes that I would finally be won over. Full Metal Jacket finally clicked with me (seeing it in a different aspect ratio did the trick) and I’ve warmed up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as much as I probably ever will. With that in mind, and prompted by a bizarre dream in which I watched it on Netflix in the wee hours of the morning, I ended up waking up stupid early and giving Reservoir Dogs another viewing. (The dream wasn’t terribly interesting, although it did involve me watching the new Scream, which had magically already been completed and was available on Netflix. There was a lot of yellowish, Fincher-esque lighting and Alison Brie got thrown over a railing at one point. As someone who enjoyed the fourth, I was upset by that turn of events, but dreams can be upsetting. In the words of the Shogun Assassin in Shogun Assassin, “bad dreams are only dreams.”)

I don’t think my opinion changed all that much with this viewing. I still feel that it’s one of Tarantino’s weaker films, lacking the confidence and depth of his next few films. I think Tarantino’s career is generally discussed as being split into his earlier, more story-oriented or reality-grounded films and his later, more indulgent genre pastiches, but I think this one lacks the focus that kind of discourse implies. The characters are barely fleshed out and the directorial touches aren’t as purposeful or effective as they would become in his later work. But at the same time, it’s still a stylish and highly entertaining affair, with a great cast giving some very good performances and delivering some punchy, very funny dialogue. It’s pleasures and limitations are obvious and have been better discussed by those more eloquent than me, so I don’t know how deeply I’ll delve into them. (On a side note, I felt a strange pang of nostalgia revisiting this despite it never having been a favourite of mine. It was very big among the internet crowd I first started discussing film with as I first got into the subject, so it’s hard for me to separate those feelings from the actual movie. I got the same feeling watching Boogie Nights a few weeks ago, despite never having seen that film until now.)

But what I did chew over a bit more this time around is how the movie positions the characters’ morality. We know that Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange is the “good guy”, the undercover cop who kills the psychopathic Mr. Blonde played by Michael Madsen. But at the same time he betrays the trust of Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White. Mr. White is sort of a “good guy” too, but foolishly risks his own fate and those of his associates as he bonds with someone who sets him up. Mr. Blonde is a sadistic psychopath but also extremely loyal, having refused to rat out his friends while serving a tough prison term. Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink is entirely business-minded and self-interested, but is that really any less honourable than the intentions of those around him? Chris Penn’s Nice Guy Eddie loves his father, Lawrence Tierney’s Joe Cabot, who is the closest thing to a paternal, authoritative presence in the movie, but both are also extremely ruthless, not to mention racist. Tarantino’s relationship with race is complicated (he’s been criticized for his use of the n-word, particularly in a certain scene in Pulp Fiction, and while I do enjoy his performance in that movie, I’m not sure I can defend a certain line of dialogue), but here the characters’ rampant use of racial slurs seems like a clear indicator of their (lack of) character. (These characters also freely use homophobic slurs, but such language was unfortunately a mainstay of macho dialogue at the time and doesn’t seem as pointed a comment on their natures.) Even when Mr. Orange praises the connection he used to get in with the criminals, another character is quick to point out that the connection is ratting out his friends. There’s some moral relativism in my argument here, but the movie invites that line of thought. Reservoir Dogs is about a bunch of lowlife crooks and despite the extent to which we may identify with them, it never lets us forget that.

In that sense, it’s in clear contrast to some of its influences. Ringo Lam’s City on Fire features the same plot but emphasizes the value of brotherhood between the criminals, so that the betrayal there stings extra hard. Tarantino highlights the meaninglessness of such appeals to solidarity. (Bizarrely, Tarantino has denied having seen that other film despite the hard to ignore story similarities. He even dedicated the screenplay to Chow Yun Fat and pulls the image of a dual wielding gunman in sunglasses from that actor’s oeuvre and has made a brand of pulling from his influences, so I’m baffled why he’d deny this one instance.) Jean-Pierre Melville’s work features gangsters in tailoring adhering to strict codes and conducting themselves with honour in dire situations. Tarantino points out the futility of such codes. His next film handles these dynamics even more elegantly. In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta’s character is a villain in one segment and a hero in another, while Samuel L. Jackson’s character reflects on the dishonourable nature of their work and decides to walk away at the end.

Where I think Pulp Fiction succeeds in handling that theme is that it gives us a sense of Jackson and Travolta contemplating (or failing to do so, respectively) their choices and having something resembling actual worldviews (however limited, as in the case of the latter). The characters in Reservoir Dogs in contrast are drawn in shorthand from gangster cliches so that our identification with them is limited. Mr. Orange should be our audience vantage point, but Tarantino fumbles a key scene in which he relates a made-up story to ingratiate himself with the other criminals. It should be about how Mr. Orange wins their trust, which would help make later speculation on his loyalty more dramatically potent, but in choosing to actually depict the proceedings in the story onscreen, Tarantino makes it about the cuts and shot choices he energetically deploys. It’s not a badly directed scene on its own, but the wrong one for the movie. Yet in other scenes, like the opening in the diner, he’s able to elegantly paint character detail while letting us enjoy the surface pleasure of the dialogue. Mr. Pink refuses to tip as an extension of his business-minded nature. Mr. Blonde volunteers to shoot Mr. White, jokingly revealing his bloodthirst. Mr. White takes things too personally (”You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize”). Joe Cabot struggles to remember a name, implying that his criminal instincts are slipping. The movie shuffles its timeline in the vein of The Killing to draw out these contrasts between the characters and to build to a tense and memorable climax, yet had more of the individual character moments been as deftly handled as this first scene, the film might have landed with me more strongly. That being said, there’s a nonzero chance I’ll come back to this in a few years, hoping it will finally click.

[veridium]

fuck it, queer meta.

About a year ago I wrote one of my first and largest meta posts about why I consider Cassandra a prime example of queerbaiting despite her being a character who explicitly says she is heterosexual. This lead to quite the day of inbox hate mail from people throughout the fandom. Most were upset I used the “q slur” and left it untagged as such in the big DA meta tags. I can imagine for those folks, the substance of what I had to say mattered little as a result. 

I deleted most of those messages and my responses soon afterward. They upset me greatly even as I took it all in stride. However, given that it’s been about 365 days since that fiasco, and some interesting events have happened with regards to current and former DA writers, I thought it would be “fun” to write a recap and reflection on why, generally, I still feel the way I did when I wrote that post. With some changes and growth, of course. 

The gist of it is, as we have come to learn in past, recent, and ongoing discourses in fandom, that much to the chagrin of a lot of folks in this fandom: BioWare, and in this instance DA writers, are not your SJW Icons. Furthermore, they never should have been, or should be, considered as such. 

The gist (part two) for me, is: for as much as diverse characters, worlds, and societies are being uplifted by Games these days, the counterbalance of bullshit is still there. And I think it survives most sturdily in the kind of logic the BioWare writing culture throughout the years. This sense of egalitarian, “of course” logic, that appears to make socially deviant identities normalized but really just falsely positions those identities as meant to be in lock-step with the norm. Representation to gaming, and most of media writ large, all-too-easily falls into the trap of “we want what the privileged have,” which it to say, we want our existence to be a no-brainer, even if it means we lost the essence of why our stories are so profound, important, and necessary to do justice. 

I really can’t imagine accepting the way characters like Cassandra were written because I don’t accept the writer(s) who wrote her. Why?

Come with me, and we’ll be, in a world, of pure fuckery...but with citations...because I’m an Academic and that’s my roll.*

*Please see tags for pertinent content warnings before clicking.**

**if you reblog and tag this shit with “q slur,” I will take all the reserves of understanding I have as a DA fic writer for all of the enraged womxn in the series and express it accordingly. And, as a femslash-oriented author, I can promise you: that expression will be consumptive. 

Hm, I wonder, what with the predominant writer for her character inquires on Twitter for “lesbian fanfic porn” recommendations for writing “research,” but seems to be unable to hire appropriate creatives to write, consult, etc. for the project. 

Or that the writers room made, and continues to make, space for a writer who continually does Black and queer characters dirty with his mediocre-at-best work, in both game and novel form (because, plot twist, he’s a shit writer) (1) (2) (3). 

Or that the writer’s room, and specifically Ga*der, attesting that the development of the Qunari was based on Arab cultures around the time of “Medieval Europe,” which is somehow his way of getting out of the thematic botching of the Qunari language, social structure, etc. from Islamic tradition. 

Or, the writers who intentionally shaped the story so that Vivienne, one of the limited number of Black women characters in the entire series to have a role as an ally, to be a red herring of an distrustful and conceited antagonist, to the point where her treatment by fandom has been incredibly racist, heinous, and lazy for years.

These are a few of MANY reasons, with thorough exposition, why the veneer of “progressive inclusion” studios like BioWare claim to be authentic. Having “diverse” writers in the room -- and I’m using that word incredibly tenuously here -- didn’t change the result of any of these harmful scenarios. In fact, it created them. This, combined with the tale as old as time: toxic fandom culture with white, anglo-centric, cisheterosexual masculinist ideals at the fore, have gotten us here. 

So, do I hold all of the reasons why I am angry about Cassandra’s character writing the same way now, as I did then? No. Certainly not. In fact, there are parts where I would correct myself. On the other hand, the thesis for me remains largely preserved: I revile G*ider, I revile that he gets the accolades he does by fandom for his “diversity” of characters when he exploits, erases, and uses slippery morality to get out of admitting he has shortcomings in his work. I hate that the exaltation for representation still funnels itself onto the heads of white writers and predominantly white-staffed studios. 

And, underneath it all, I am mad that some of ya’ll see no problem with that. Because what does it matter, if you do not come from communities, cultures, and coalitions that get the brunt of this misrepresentation? What does it matter if it angers a lesbian fan that the writers who have a long history of misusing and conveniently copping themselves out when they write women and queer characters, seem to use that “expertise” as permission to do what they are supposedly combating?

G*ider, the hero himself, is on written record saying that it should not be second guessed as to why Cassandra is straight, just as he thinks it should not be second guessed that Dorian is gay. Yet, when he asked on Twitter if there was some moral significance to people modding character’s sexuality (in this specific instance, Dorian, actually), G*ider said that in the end, people’s mods “do not change” what he wrote, and that unless they claim their changes “supercede” canon, there’s no harm done. 

So, really, I’m just over here like -- is this ya’lls hero?

Why in the fuck would someone be modding a gay character to be bisexual or heterosexual, if they didn’t somehow believe that version “supercedes” the canon rendition? Secondly, where is the attention to the fact that, in an ensemble of multiple romanceable characters, Dorian has to be the one that has to be sexually and romantically accessible to those outside of his canonical realm of attraction?

I mean, for fuck’s sake, it’s the whole virtue grounding his companion side quest, the fact that he is estranged from his Father who tried to magically change his orientation! This is a crucial part of Dorian’s entire journey to serving the Inquisition, and serving Tevinter as a dissident.

But, you know, it doesn’t change what G*ider wrote. And he’s correct, it doesn’t change what he wrote, which he got credit, money, and esteem for. It doesn’t change that if you load up the base game, Dorian’s gay. In G*ider’s head, that is the protective force: the parts where he has ties, and not the culture of the fandom, the culture the fans who helped fill his pockets from that game have to dwell within. This isn’t revolutionary, this isn’t good-faith representation. This is getting a piece of the rotten-sweet pie and saying “let bygones be bygones, you toxic, funky heteronormative assholes!”

But, where are my manners. I’m getting heated, aren’t I?

Basically, if you condemn queer fans for calling out queer bating -- or any marginalized fan for throwing up the alarm for bullshit -- and your first reaction is to side with folks like G*ider who got theirs and said screw everything else, fuck off. Literally, fuck off. I call Cassandra’s circumstance queerbaiting because she’s one example of writers getting their cake and eating it, too. If they are so aware of just how much of their fanbase is marginalized folks, they don’t get to say they don’t have fingerprints on things like queerbaiting. You don’t get to be acclaimed and excused for the shit you say you are combating, which is the source of that acclaim. And if your claim is happy ignorance, then you definitely don’t get to blithely equivocate when fans do ask you why the story happened the way it did. 

I also just want to keep in mind here that there’s a deductive conclusion to be had about this, given how La*idlaw explicitly stated they endeavored to make Cassandra extremely hot, “really enticing.” That conclusion is: 

(1) Either they aren’t/weren’t nearly as attuned to their queer audiences as they generally claim to be, or 

(2) They were, and had no intention of developing compassion or empathy passed G*ider talking out of his ass about why Cassandra was developed as straight. Which, ultimately, does coincide with conclusion (1) more than not. 

No matter what, the contour to the conclusion is: wow, a taste of nauseating objectification, in the BioWare writer’s room. Who knew!

It’s no wild accusation to make to a writer like him and his colleagues, that they don’t know how to handle sapphic, wlw, and/or queer-related storylines, especially with women. Especially when the answer seems to be, “well, it was decided before I took the lead, and in any case, why question it! You wouldn’t question a gay character’s orientation!”

But that’s just it, you complete and utter turnip. People did question Dorian’s sexuality. People do question Dorian’s sexuality. That fantasy world of equal bearings is as insincere as it is out-of-touch. And why not, when, as you said, 

it doesn’t change what you got paid for.

The ethos seems to be crudely reflexive: people’s phobic interpretations and alterations of the canon do not matter, but then again, why would you even question why a character is straight? Why would you question my narrative vision, in all of its beautiful shittery?

It’s all a game of dodge, ya’ll. Dodge, dodge, dodge. With a strong and acidic dose of vanity. 

So. In summation, folks: I could care less for your false equivalences. I could care less about my contribution of queer content fucking up your good time in the meta tags. Obviously you aren’t there to actually engage in creative, exploratory thought, so why bother reasoning. There is more to the possibilities of queerbaiting than stringing along a could-be, would-be, should-be queer storyline directly. There’s knowing your audience enough to exploit your good graces with them. There’s benefitting from a charade of liberal progressive clout. There’s the ability to foresee that queer people will cathect to a given character, and not only denying an experience they could have, but denying it so harshly that the character says they can’t love yours because you’re female. 

And I am so, so, so sick of these people continually enriching themselves off of the “nobody’s perfect” grace. To me, that grace is the promise of good faith, and the intention to do right by people. When that isn’t there, the grace isn’t going somewhere where it’ll be appreciated, that it will be nourished by. I mean, fucking hell, people, this is rainbow capitalism: don’t you taste it?

That’s that, then. “Cassandra and Queerbaiting Rant,” one year on. An extra dose of salt, just for the haters. 

[tonyglowheart]

This entire thing is a rant, feel free to ignore it, but I saw your post about how destiel fans can’t win in this context, and yeah. So have some rambles.

I’ve been thinking about the fact we (current spn/destiel fans) can’t win all night... I’ve seen so many people talking about how homophobic it is - and while I would very much like to argue, as every point I’ve seen made by a non-spn fan has been wrong so far, if I did everyone inside the fandom would agree and everyone outside would either call me straight or pity me for believing it’s okay.

(Cas wasn’t even sent to hell lmao. He was sent to angel death (the empty), a place he has escaped in the past. Other points, like that meta about spn has been predicting exactly this for months, that Dean ended up sobbing on the floor because he was so upset, like that death means next to nothing on spn, like that there is two episodes left, etc etc. you feel me right? I just don’t want to post wank to other spn blogs atm, we’re getting enough frustration as it is, no need to add to it.

It’s also worth pointing out that the bar is very, very low. Spn is a prominent TV show - not a Netflix show, or indie, or whatever - and it just said “main character in gay love saved the world”. [insert gif of ghostfacers dude saying that gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day here]

I just saw someone saying that spn having Naomi try to brainwash Cas out of loving dean makes spn homophobic (it is a conversion therapy parallel). My first response to that is that Naomi was the villain lmao? I guess we can’t write villains doing anything homophobic because having villains do homophobic things makes, uh - checks notes - villains look homophobic, and clearly we can’t have that.

There certainly are legitimate things to criticise spn about, but this isn’t it lol.

Also now some people are unironically trying to cancel Jensen because “his acting was homophobic, and so he’s clearly homophobic”, nevermind that he’s an actor and his character struggles with understanding his emotions (which I think he played excellently, myself. That scene had a very Dean delayed emotional response), nevermind the support he’s given to us queers in the past. Like. Idek man.

We would have been laughed at if we got no destiel, too.

It would have been worse, had the writers pulled a dumbledore. At this point I also trust the writers not to pull a GoT - they have explicitly criticised that ending in spn’s canon.

Spn’s writers did that by making the main villain of this season, Chuck / God, say GoT had a good ending. To reiterate a previous point I had: villains do bad things because they’re bad. And the bad things they do make them bad. For the people out there not still following, if someone does something in a story and it makes them a villain, that is explicitly telling you the story (and probably the writers) thinks that thing is bad. In this case, Chuck likes to write things for him, and we the audience have been shown and told that is bad.

Apparently thinking a gay confession is good in 2020 makes me straight. Seems unlikely, but whatever. Sorry for the length, I guess I went overboard, I’ve been holding it in lol. Anyway, DESTIEL IS CANON 💚💙 hope you have a good night

Helloo supernatural anon I hope you are living your best life right now. Yeah I’m like..... skeptical and leery myself but having lived through some absolute garbage discourse that is general purity wank, as well as the C/QL greater fandom here and on Twitter I find myself... much more wanting to question the “general wisdom” of things esp in terms of negativity, bc a lot of the time I find.... it’s wrong? Like so wrong. Or at least presents such an incomplete picture of the whole situation and also presents it in such a removed context that words that have meaning and are operationalized in a certain way for a reason, no longer have meaningful usage.

Anyway I don’t... know too much about the specifics of Spn but someone I follow is into it and talks a lot about the Gnostic stuff and that all was very fascinating to me, and I also have been grappling a lot with cultural Christianity bc of cmedia and the way ppl just *clenches fist* unthinkingly or uncritically slap some Christian norms on it and call it a day 😩 help I’m Tired. My thing here being... I actually got tired of the uncritical “superhell”s at some pt bc I am, in fact, incredibly exhausted with cultural Christianity, and because it does seem like, even possibly(?) without the Gnostic stuff it’s different from a “hell” or other Protestant-derived afterlife concept, and also yeah that it wasn’t seeded out of nowhere, it was set up to happen, which then... lends credence to the idea that whatever the current era of Spn is doing, the current showrunners are doing it with purpose.

And idk I just... refuse to believe the concept that ALL of the fans of Spn - esp the ones who have been following it still, or got back into it and are following it currently, are acting under delusion or are fooling themselves into liking it or thinking it’s good or whatever. I personally find that kinda infantilizing and patronizing and playing into issues of dismissing things women and/or other marginalized identities like.

Plus I find the concept that (from what I think I’ve been seeing Spn fans say) that the current era of the show is quite actively grappling with itself, its past, its legacy. to be very interesting and compelling; it hearkens back to like an old lore kind of feeling, of a thing that has grown into a nigh undefeatable monster and realizing that, also realizing that the only way to defeat itself is through grappling with its own nature and transforming and transmuting itself into something else. I personally find that more plausible and compelling than “Supernatural has been actively and continuously queerbaiting for 15 homophobic homophobic years., so right now we’re all very sorry for you because this maybe is no longer queerbaiting but it’s still homophobic and it can never be anything different ever.” I’ve been sort of tangentially aware of Spn thru the years and didn’t we agree, around the time of that in-universe play about Spn and with the lil Destiel shoutout, that Spn has come a ways as far as coming to terms with its fandom and working to treat its fans better? Why the sudden regression into “oh no, Supernatural is and forever will be homophobic and a hate crime”? 🤔 

The rest under a cut bc the ask is already long and then my rambling will get longer-

But yeah I mean..... I get that the legacy of Supernatural has been certifiably Rough, but I think people also forget how different of a time 2005 was? Hell, how different of a time 2015 was, even, prior to, say, Obergefell v. Hodges. Now I’m not saying that to blanket-excuse Supernatural, but like, you look at mainstream shows from the era and... there’s a lot of shit lmao. The fact that Supernatural has existed this long seems to me like.... maybe we CAN look at how it’s developed through the years vs just insisting it is what it was 15, 10, hell, 5 years ago. Especially since, to my knowledge, there’s been showrunner changes? Which seems to me like it would... affect things? I mean honestly, I remember back when I got into Spn for a hot second because of Castiel, I remember watching panel, Q&A, etc vids thru the years, and like... I thought we agreed that... it was the fans who were going a bit far pushing the shipping question like literally ALL the time to the actors, who are not in control of the show and.... like at the time.... that could have had personal implications for them? And yes homophobia bad, and people can still be allies despite that, but again like.... I do feel like - from what I’ve seen - that these guys were NOT ready to deal with a lot of that but they’ve (okay Jensen I’m talking about Jensen here) genuinely grown and learned? Also how many years ago was the essay autograph thing that people keep trotting out, like what year was it in and what year of spn was it, and what were the prevailing opinions on LGBT issues and bisexuality then.

I’ve been seeing some murmurings of identity politicsing surrounding ppl who enjoy Supernatural, and I’m sorry that that’s happening to you, it really fucking sucks and it’s also the dumbest way to “make” or “win” an argument because it shouldn’t ever be a final determiner, just factors to consider when considering what life experiences might have informed someone else’s PoV and views as well as maybe how you can better communicate with them. Instead of it being a “weapon” or “tool” to either dismiss someone or de facto validate an argument.

Also yeah I get it that you don’t want to send discourse to spn blogs bc I imagine you guys ARE actively grappling with all the bs rn and it’s a lot. Even just from like, the stuff I see around, I’m like tired of it. I’m genuinely having more fun with ppl who are having a good time with Supernatural than the ppl who are hating on it, even in this sort of backhanded “oh we’re not clowning YOU we’re clowning the writers and showrunners who think you should be satisfied with this,” when... yeah? the people who HAVE been watching the show and therefore... know what’s up.. DO seem to be? And all this based on *fake gasp* context. And that’s where the backhandedness becomes kind of poisonous to me, because it implies that it IS bad, and that you SHOULDN’T be satisfied, but poor little you are but don’t worry, we’re not making fun of YOU for liking garbage, you’re just the hapless victim who is consuming the garbage bc... idk, whatever reasons ppl are coming up with ig.

idk man it’s 2020. Fandom isn’t activism, performative or otherwise, it’s okay to let people enjoy things even if you think they’re “objectively” bad, and like... I don’t know if people can call something bad when they’re not even working with the whole context and instead are dealing with rumor and reputation. 

[sirloozelite]

My Current Mood on Rex and Order 66 (and why we should accept differing opinions)

First things first.... MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE CLONE WARS!!! DON’T READ BELOW IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS FOR SEASON 7, EPISODE 11. (Also, there is a TL’DR at the bottom)

Now.... I’m not gonna lie to you lot. I don’t know how to feel about the latest episode, specifically the role that Rex played in Order 66.

I never really like the Clones much... mainly because I was always convinced that they were the bad guys. I mean... they turned and betrayed their Jedi, and when Ahsoka became my favorite character, I was always paranoid that Rex would be the one to off her during Order 66, hence my dislike for him and the other Clones.

And then they did the arc with the inhibitor chip and Fives, and most of my anger at the Clones faded away. It wasn’t their fault, I saw that, and they couldn’t really be held responsible for what happened unless they went on to willing serve the Empire afterwards (looking at you Cody! XD)

Despite the revelation, I was still skeptical of the Clones. I no longer outright hated them, but I still didn’t really like them very much, including Rex.

Flash forward to Rebels, I wasn’t that excited for Rex’s return. I still didn’t really like or trust him.

And then he dropped the bombshell. He had removed his chip... and he hadn’t betrayed his Jedi.

From that point onward I started to warm to Rex because he had actually shown initiative and listened to Fives, getting the chip out in the process. Rex, in a weird way, redeemed himself in my eyes when he didn’t need to, to the point where I began to like him.

And then season 7 of Clone Wars began to air... and it was noted by many that Rex had not yet removed his chip, instantly raising alarm bells in my head. He had told Kanan he had removed it, and not betrayed his Jedi. If that was true... where was the scar?

And then Episode 11 occurred... and Order 66 went out... and Rex obeyed.

Instantly... all of those thoughts from the time before the chip reveal came back, and my mood on his character soured once more. To me, it seemed like I was right to distrust him all along, and I was annoyed that the writers had gotten me to like him, only for his ‘I didn’t betray my Jedi.’ and ‘Wolffe, Gregor and I all removed out control chips’ line to be seemingly proven a lie!

Now to make it clear, I don’t blame Rex or the Clones for Order 66. It was what they were created to do after all. They didn’t have a choice.

What did upset me though was the writers decision to have his Rebels line be essentially turned into a lie. He did betray his Jedi, even if he managed to resist it long enough to give Ahsoka the Fives clue. And he didn’t remove his chip...Ahsoka did.

Now, you can say that Rex pointed the way for Ahsoka... and I agree, he did... but the question remains, why didn’t he remove it beforehand when he had plenty of time to do so. Kix managed it (and yes, I know he’s a medic so it would be easier for him, but it just doesn’t seem like Rex’s character to ignore something this big, especially after the Krell incident, and Ahsoka’s trial!)

Still, in the end the chip is removed, so there is no real reason to be angry for Rex trying to kill Ahsoka. My main gripe, as I said, is the seemingly lie he told Kanan, a person who was quite obviously suffering from PTSD.

As a consequence of all this, I just don’t know how to feel about Rex’s character at the moment. I’m glad he sided with Ahsoka when he had the choice to do so, but the fact that he didn’t do anything about the chip beforehand and then lied to Kanan about it has upset me.

I know that next to no one shares this opinion, and I’ve already had been telling me I’m wrong for having it and that ‘I don’t understand Star Wars’ and ‘You’re not a fan at all’ because of it. Maybe that is the case... or maybe it’s just that everyone has their own opinion about everything.

I’ve seen a lot of discourse saying that Rex didn’t lie, and there are a lot of convincing arguments for it. However, in the end of the day, people take things differently, and not everyone is the same. I’m struggling to trust Rex right now, and that’s mainly down to the writing decision from Filoni and his team and the, in my mind, plot hole/retcon that had been created from it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that everyone has their own opinion about events in Star Wars, and that we shouldn’t attack people for it. Instead, we should simply accept them, even if we disagree. I’m no fan of the Clones, nor Anakin for that matter, but I accept that other people are, and I’m not gonna tell them they are wrong for believing that Rex didn’t lie. In fact, I welcome your opinions as well, no matter how badly my messed up, depressed mind disagrees with them.

So just be kind to everyone at the moment people. Let them handle things their own way, and don’t do what the Star Wars fandom has a reputation of doing and lash out in anger. People like that have nearly driven others to suicide before.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, no matter what we think of them, and every opinion and point of view is useful to some degree. If you guys think Rex didn’t lie, that’s fine with me, and I welcome your opinion. I just ask that you don’t attack others who don’t have the same opinion. There is already too much conflict going around in the fandom these days. 

Please... just... be nice. That’s all I ask. (not that anyone ever listens to me)

TL’DR: Be nice to everyone, even if the don’t share your opinion on a matter. Everyone deals with things in different ways. There’s no need to attack them for it.

[escarlatafox]

whispers for the 'send you a series' meme, i'm tempted to just be Unoriginal and say kung fu panda, but if you'd rather something else, i'm seeing a lot of steven universe around here jfjfiea

Masha ily. You know that, right? :D

Kung Fu Panda:

Favourite character: Who else but Shifu? XD

Second favourite character: It might actually be Po

Least favourite character: Hard to think of a least favourite character. If we ONLY count the main cast + the villains in the movies and exclude any other minor characters, then I’d say Kai maybe? Just wasn’t as impactful to me as the other characters/villains. Or if we include minor characters I might say the hugging panda from the third movie because the gag and his character didn’t really add much. Also, I’ve already spoken about this in the past, possibly more than once, but back when I was a child upon watching the first movie, my answer to this question would actually be Ping. Suffice it to say, my opinion on him changed a LOT. XD

The character I’m most like: Maybe I am like Po in some ways. At my core, I’m a fangirl lol. And I like food :O

Favourite pairing: Don’t really have any ships. Crane and the girl from that one short tho. Like idk if I’d want them to get together, maybe not now that I think about it. But it would be nice to see them interact more.

Least favourite pairing: HAH. Let’s just say I really hate what Legends of Awesomeness decided to do with Shifu in the shipping realm and leave it at that. :P

Favourite moment: YOU’RE GONNA MAKE ME CHOOSE? There’s no way. I could only list off notable ones. Okay, if we narrow it down to non-Shifu moments, off the top of my head, you obviously have the iconic cannonball scene at the end of kung fu panda 2, and in the THIRD movie I love love love how when Po is in the spirit realm and he says “turns out... I’m all of them” and the music swells and the framing and the scenery is just. so gorgeous . I love. So much. If I sat here thinking too long I’d probably start recapping all the movies SO since I’ve thrown those two out there I’ll cut myself off before I get too out of hand. XD

Rating out of 10: First movie is just 10/10 for me. It’s my favourite movie, not just in the franchise but like, probably ever among movies in general, and just about every moment and scene feels like home when I watch it. The trio of movies I’d then put at probably around 9/10.

Steven Universe:

Favourite character: I can now say with confidence that it is Steven Universe.

The people who liked Steven “before it was cool” certainly have bragging rights, because I was one of those people who failed to find myself among them, as I lacked the foresight, or... future vision for it. :P. At first, in the very early days, I didn’t really care for Steven. It’s often very easy to gloss over a protagonist, and, in my case, not truly appreciate what’s great in a character like early-days Steven, or even Po. Now, Steven and Po are, naturally, quite distinct characters in their distinct franchises but there are certainly parallels that can be drawn, not only in their character but how I initially felt towards them. By asking for both fandoms in the one ask, I feel like you’ve given me the opportunity to speak about this, which has been idly on my mind every so often. XDBoth Steven and Po are the protagonist of the franchise they’re in. They’re both fond of food, they both start out needing training and then develop incredible skills along the way until they become one of, if not the most powerful in the cast. They’re both generally very easygoing, excitable, enthusiastic, FRIENDLY, and generally kind. At the start of their journeys, there’s a lot of focus on how much they’re lacking in skills and abilities, how difficult it is for them to accomplish even the basics. They both gotta Save The World, whether it be more in the sense of the universe as a whole or China.And the thing is I had the same issue with Po as I did with early-days Steven; I didn’t realise how great Po is. I was just a little too dismissive. With time, (and I’m talking around the point where I actually entered the fandom after the second movie was out, so it was mostly kid me who is guilty of not recognising Po’s greatness) I grew to realise just how cool Po is, to truly appreciate his genuine enthusiasm and excitement and also utmost reverence and admiration of kung fu. I simply Expected Po’s character to be less than it was, which is what caused the oversight. But Po is honestly so fantastic and deserves every last bit of love the fandom has to offer him. Also, seeing his potential and him reaching his potential is so damn epic. See: his “turns out, I’m all of them” quote/scene I mentioned earlier.So to bring things back to Steven, whose character arc nonetheless has its VERY stark differences from Po’s, it was around when Steven managed to calm down and stop the cluster that it fully registered in my mind how fantastic and amazing he is and how much I appreciate his character. In fact, it was a little earlier than that. Pretty sure I hadn’t actually started watching the show yet when Sadie’s Song aired, but I was getting all the deets secondhand on my dashboard and I loved what I heard and saw in gifs/pics. A boy who just wants to perform and dance around on stage in heels and a gorgeous outfit to boot (I really liked the thought of trans girl Steven at the time tbh, which was being thrown about on my dashboard back then, though of course that’s not the path the show decided to go down, so he/him it is...!). He had my full support. And THEN when he calmed the cluster down like that... (and I think I was probably watching the show at that point?) I just, loved his incredible talent to reach out to others and HELP them, I loved his magical gem abilities and how he always seemed to be triumphing against the odds, and as the show progressed his feats only started getting more and more impressive. I absolutely noticed how much responsibilities he’d started forcing onto himself, how he was trying to manage everyone and be an adult to all the adults in his life, I was kind of intrigued by how much he was shouldering, and it struck me that he had developed an Atlas Personality long, long before he was ever listed as an example of it on the wikipedia page. I simply adored Steven and his placement in the show and everything.He’s also completely ACING things as usual in the movie too.And then Steven Universe Future hit, and oh boy, that’s a whole other story. Steven truly emerged as the forefront seeing as the focus was now unrelentingly on him and his issues. What initially got me really hooked as well, was the inherent shock and intrigue of seeing a character who would usually always do the right thing, who always seemed to know what was best for everyone, who always seemed to be able to read a situation and understand who needed help and then reaching out and offering them help... not only completely failing to recognise that HE was the source of a given problem (see: the pink dome rapidly closing in), but to actively dig himself deeper by being convinced SOMEONE ELSE was at fault, and whirling around and trying to pin it all on them. Before Steven whirled around to point at Lars, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was about to be like “guys, you know what? I think I’m causing this - I think I have some stuff going on” LOL NOPE. And that was only the tip of the ice berg. Steven had nowhere else to go but down, and boy, down did he go until he hit rock bottom, pulled out a shovel and started digging.

Second favourite character: Hard to say. I do know that I am crazy about the zircons (I mean c’mon - lawyers!). I was crazy about Blue Pearl when we first saw her too. My answer might’ve been Aquamarine or even Eyeball if it wasn’t for Steven Universe Future. Seeing more of them just kinda made me go “ok you know what, yeah this isn’t really what I expected and they’re not actually really my thing after all.” I reeeeally don’t know. Steven Universe has such a stellar cast of great characters. Steven Universe Future also kinda threw me off Spinel, but obviously Spinel is A+ as well.

Least favourite character: I don’t really care about Lapis. She just kind of lost appeal as a character to me and I never really understood her I guess. I was also never fond of the diamonds... because you know, discourse, and like, the discourse kind of has a point. But after Steven Universe Future I might invest more in trying to understand their positioning in the show a little more, now with the confirmation that Steven never did actually forgive them. I completely wrote-off White Diamond’s seemingly quick turnaround for the longest time and honestly never bought it and felt it was WAY too easy and rushed/forced. But I came to an internal understanding quite recently and I THINK I finally get what the show meant there so I think I can buy it now and find it believable at last, which is nice. So don’t quote me and don’t crucify me, but I might warm up to the diamonds a Little.

The character I’m most like: omg. There’s so many characters idk who is most like me hahaha

Favourite pairing: Connverse. Connie kissing Steven on the cheek in the movie made me SO pleased, and I can say this is my favourite pairing if only because the prospect of it not working out and instead going up in flames and not actually having a good resolution - which is a threat that felt so very real during Steven Universe Future - was deeply, DEEPLY upsetting to me. Like I didn’t care because I’d been taking it for GRANTED, but the moment anyone suggested, with alarming plausibility that they may split up or whatever, I was immediately on edge like “NO NO NO NO NO”.

Least favourite pairing: Stevinel. Stevidot. Just, any ship with Steven and any of the gems is an instant no from me. D:

Favourite moment: omggg. Again, there are simply way too many, so no answer I give here can or will be definitive. So I’ll simply state my love for when Steven is singing Change and Spinel yeets him in the sky and there’s the stellar animation where he goes “You can make it different... You can make it right! You can make it better! We don’t have to fight!”

Rating out of 10: I’d probably give it a 9/10, if only because, look. There are a LOT of shows out there. There are a lot of pieces of media I’m into and have watched. And Steven Universe is just. It’s good. Even when I like another piece of media MORE than Steven Universe, I can still more than readily acknowledge when/if SU has vastly superior writing. And it usually does. The only thing stopping me from giving it a 10/10 is because for the vast majority of SU’s existence I was mainly only ever a passive watcher/fan and/or got secondhand knowledge (closer to the start of it airing), so it lacks that fundamental closeness to my heart that something like Kung Fu Panda has. (Though I got way more close to it during SUF, as my reblogs can attest to LOL). The other thing stopping it from hitting that 10/10 is there are things I still take issue with, like how the Rose=Pink reveal undermines Pearl’s character (the “rebellion” aspect) and casts an EXTREMELY uncomfortable light on Pearl being in love with Rose. Yes, the show already showed us that Pearl’s obsession with Rose is unhealthy and problematised it. But regardless of how problematised it already was, I’m just not comfortable with a former slave being shown as being in love with their former master at all. What does that add, realistically? There are other valid criticisms that have been pointed out, namely how aspects of the show such as Sugilite’s role in Coach Steven do fail its Black audience. That undercurrent is there and it’s unfortunate.