#these lines are my thesis statement as a human being

[martybaker]

Over the rainbow

So I know we love torturing or at least inconveniencing retired Dream with new human ailments and realities, I love doing that as well, but the thesis of this was - what if Dream retired and he finally got to be at peace and all was well, actually 🥹

(started this for prompt First time for dreamling week but here we are over a week late)

————

“I’ve never been kissed,” Dream announces.

He’s settled on the far end of Hob’s sofa with his knees up, chin settled on top of them and arms loosely hugging his legs, somehow looking both comfortable and relaxed as well as like a model in the middle of a photoshoot.

Hob’s had a hard time not staring but when Dream says that line his eyes immediately snap to the vision on his couch, clothed in hues of beige, wrapped in Hob’s own softest cardigan, and he nearly spills the tea that he was bringing for a sip.

“Huh? What?” He asks dumbly, voice unnaturally high pitched.

Dream merely blinks at him and waits him out.

When the wheels in Hob’s brain start turning again he does try to parse that statement, but all he can come up with is: “But…you’ve had relationships? You had a wife and all, did you not kiss? Was it all like, metaphysical or-“

Dream rolls his eyes, unimpressed. “Of course I’ve kissed my partners. Let me rephrase the statement. Murphy has never been kissed.”

Oh.

Dream’s talking about his new human body. His new self, that he named Murphy, a name to be used for dull but necessary identity paperwork that Hob obtained for Dream through rather illegal means.

It’s only been a little over a month since Dream turned human, but he’s been very…calm while settling into his new reality. The retirement was his own choice and he seemed to be perfectly content with his decision, despite the fact that he was forced to live with Hob in his messy little apartment while they figure something of his own for him.

Well, if.

Dream also seemed perfectly content in Hob’s space and showed no interest whatsoever in looking at flat listings.

Not that Hob minded. He would happily spend every minute every day with his friend, if it wouldn’t make him feel guilty about slacking on his job and his students. After all, Hob’s chosen career wasn’t just to keep himself busy, he really enjoyed teaching young impressionable minds about days past, keeping the history alive. Remembering.

But his joy in teaching was currently found lacking compared to the newfound joy of Dream in his home. Not just visiting, robed in dark colors, taking time off of his duties to spend a moment with Hob, but human, dressed in earthly colors, there in the mornings for shared breakfasts and still there in the evenings when Hob returned. Reading a book, slowly going through Hob’s vast vinyl collection, playing the piano, painting, knitting, molding clay. Pale blue eyes focused and clever hands at work, creating, always creating. He’s always been an artist and that part of him stayed true, despite the big change.

All things considered, Hob’s really been having a hard time keeping his foolish heart in check. And with Dream saying things like this, things like-

“This mouth has never been kissed.”

Hob’s eyes drop to Dream’s lips as soon as Dream says that, just to see them twitch in a pleased smile.

Hob stares at him, at a loss for words, while Dream looks back at him expectantly. Expecting…an answer? A reassurance?

Hob clears his throat. “Well…I’m sure it will be? It’s a very lovely mouth,” he says, unable to stop the blush coloring his cheeks.

Dream sighs a long suffering sigh and pets the couch next to himself. “Come here,” he commands.

There’s no ancient power of a monarch of the Dreaming behind it anymore, but Dream still keeps his regality, his head held high, a quiet gravitas to him. Not quite the same as when he was an Endless, but still there.

Confident, elegant, graceful.

And calm, like the still water of an indigo lake high in the mountains.

Hob blinks. What was the question? Oh, right, he was being summoned. He moves to sit next to Dream.

Dream turns towards him, leans in and closes his eyes.

Is he…?

Hob is frozen in shock once again. “Ahh, you, you want me to…?”

Dream opens his sky blue eyes again, staring into Hob’s soul. “Yes,” he says decisively.

There’s a beat when they just stare into each other’s eyes and then Dream closes his again. Waiting, alluring lips just a few inches from Hob’s.

But Hob’s having a crisis. They’ve never done this before! Dream’s never said anything about being…attracted to Hob, he’s never suggested, he never seemed interested that way.

One time, Hob got drunk and Dream had to drag his ass upstairs to bed, and Hob was just enough at his senses to remember that he slurred: “D’ya know what I like best about being immortal?”

“What,” Dream asked as he pulled Hob upwards, making sure he wouldn’t stumble on the stairs.

And Hob smiled goofily and said: “You.”

Dream just blinked at him. He didn’t say anything, not then, not when Hob got propositioned by the shopkeep when they were out together, browsing for new (old) records, not when Death was visiting and she teased if they changed their dates to weekly instead of centennialy.

Not when they were walking in a park, and Dream seemed to be watching a couple on another path on a stroll as well, holding hands.

Hob’s good mood made him act foolish, he reached out a hand in offering, but Dream… he just stared at it. Hob quickly withdrew it, running it through his hair, chuckling nervously. “I was just teasing,” he said weakly, but by that point he was sure his feelings were transparent and Dream’s lack of reaction was a clear signal.

Then again, maybe this was just harmless experimentation? Wanting to know what it feels like, being kissed as a human?

But Hob still hesitates. He feels too strongly about Dream to casually mess around without being wary of the consequences.

“Uhh, wait. I, are you sure? I don’t-“

Dream sighs and his patience with Hob apparently runs out because he pulls Hob towards him by his shirt, kissing him square on the lips.

Hob makes a surprised sound, but then he closes his eyes and falls into the kiss.

It’s unhurried and rather chaste, yet Hob’s heart seems to be doing its best trying to jump out of his chest.

Dream pulls away, slowly opening his eyes.

“How….how did that feel?” Hob asks, reminding himself that this was just an experiment. A one time deal.

Dream contemplates his answer. “Different,” he says.

“Different than when you were..Endless?

“Yes.”

“Good different or bad different?”

Dream frowns. “No such dichotomy applies,” he says, and then he leans back in again and Hob leans away.

He chuckles nervously. “Ahh, haha, hold on. You’re gonna make me think you like kissing me.” He tries to turn it into a joke, holding Dream lightly by his shoulders, trying to prevent him from darting forward again.

Dream glares at him. “And what, pray tell, is making you think I don’t.”

“Oh…really?” Hob lets go of one bony shoulder to pinch his own arm. Surely, he’s still asleep and this is just a …dream.

Dream’s glare turns even more unimpressed. “You’re awake,” he says, sharp, and as if to prove his point he kisses Hob again, more hungrily and passionately, biting at his lower lip, Hob’s hold too slack to hold him back.

They kiss and kiss and it’s far from chaste this time, Dream seems to have made it his mission to explore Hob’s mouth thoroughly, while his hands explore his chest.

Hob’s hand burrows into Dream’s hair, he isn’t able to hold back now, kissing back with vigor, treasuring Dream’s every gasp.

They’re both breathing hard by the time they part - by the time Hob has to pull Dream back by his hair to stop him from diving back in.

He can’t help but laugh. “You do actually need to breathe now, you know.”

Dream doesn’t seem too pleased with this reminder. He huffs, sitting back onto his heels.

Hob already misses the feeling of him in his arms.

He clears his throat. There’s a very important question to be asked first.

“Is it…just the kissing that you like?”

Dream tilts his head at Hob like a cat, measuring him. “You cannot tell?”

Hob shakes his head.

“You’re not very bright, Hob Gadling,” Dream says, and Hob would protest, he would tease back, but the words get stuck in his throat when Dream takes Hob’s hand into his own, putting it on his chest and making Hob feel his racing heartbeat.

Hob inhales, blushing.

“You…I…,” he sighs, searching for words. “I still have a lot to learn,” he offers, smiling at Dream.

“As do I,” says Dream.

It is marvelous seeing Dream like this. His words are confident but his heart beats wildly under Hob’s hand, pink colors his cheeks, chest rising and falling with deep breaths.

He’s trusting Hob with this, with his very human body whose reactions he cannot temper, cannot regulate.

Hob chuckles, feeling warm.

He loves this, the marvelous feeling of finding out your crush likes you back, the feeling that’s always incredible, no matter the time and place, no matter how many times he’s experienced it. One of his favorite feelings, the ones that make life an amazing journey.

“I really thought you weren’t interested in me like that,” he says.

Dream sighs. “I…could not be.”

Hob’s heart aches.

He has to touch, now that he’s allowed, now that he’s invited to. He kisses Dream’s forehead, his cheeks, delighting in the sighs he earns.

He kisses Dream's neck and Dream tilts his head for better access, making Hob feel lightheaded and so full of happiness he can hardly contain it. “I won’t be able to keep my hands off of you now,” he warns. “I’ll kiss you a hundred times every day.”

“A thousand times” Dream says, and Hob laughs, scraping his teeth against alabaster skin, making Dream moan.

He smirks, gaining back his confidence now that he knows Dream means this. He holds him around the waist, pulling him closer.

“I did learn a certain thing or two over the years,” he says slyly, dipping Dream backwards, laying him on the couch. Dream sighs indulgently, wrapping his hands around Hob’s shoulders, holding him close.

“Want me to show you?” Hob asks, and Dream hums in confirmation, pulling him for another kiss.

Soft notes play from the old record player, outside warm spring sun rays melt the last reminders of winter, birds chirp their welcoming songs.

Hope is in the air.

Dream’s here, in Hob’s home, in his arms. The cold weeks when he was distant and quietly hurting and Hob could sense something was very, very wrong but didn’t know how to fix it now seem like a distant memory too.

Hob pulls back for a second, holding Dream’s head in his hands, savoring the moment.

“Will you stay?” he whispers.

Dream inhales, his hand shaking a little when he places it on Hob’s cheek, caressing Hob’s lips with his thumb.

“I’m exactly where I want to be,” he says, smiling.

————

[lxmelle]

Geto was loved even in death.

Wouldn’t it be nice if he were judged by his intentions in the afterlife - wherever that was? He had suffered living with the love he had. We see through the eyes of those left behind, that the ill deeds didn’t define him, as strange as that may be to us as readers in the real human world we live in. Geto’s influence and loving nature were far reaching; Gege certainly made him so treasured by many even after his death. If Gojo was touched by his caring influence, this was also Geto’s will he passed onto his students.

NOT spoiler-free as I’ll be referring to the recent chapter, 255.

I wrote this the other day:

And honestly it’s long enough; here’s part 2.

Is it obvious I’m suffering from brainrot? All my drafts from jjk brainrot are rivalling my thesis/dissertation from way back (lol)

Here is more under the cut:

I’m really moved by the reasons for why Miguel and Larue have decided to join in the risky fight against Sukuna.

It’s very obvious that Miguel is reluctant at first. He says he he’d rather terrible curses arrive at his shores than to fight with Sukuna, adding that he doesn’t see himself having any ties with Japan any longer.

We can deduce that this was part of Gojo’s plan for the possibility that he dies/loses, and I had a post about this saved in my drafts - but I guess I never got around to finishing it. Basically, in sum, he will achieve giving Geto a cremation (avenging him) and gets to show off to his students (which he does enjoy) by going all out (soo satisfying), and in the worst case scenario, he loses but gets to go all out, weakens Sukuna (for the rest to handle), and idk if he really is that romantic (so it’s really stsg headcanon fantasising) he will die on the same day as Geto.

The Opening theme is rather beautiful in that it interprets Gojo having the words, “we’ll meet again” stuck in his throat, which he doesn’t say. But I’m a bit weird and tend to separate anime from manga. But it’s worth noting that here.

I digress. Back to Miguel and Larue who have moved to speak privately without Yuta.

In a previous post I wondered aloud about what Yuta knew about Geto from others aside from being villainous and I guess this implies he doesn’t know much, since he wasn’t close to Miguel enough to sit around to chat with them. It makes sense.

Miguel and Larue both agree they followed Geto in jjk 0 because they wanted to see him become King. What does this even mean, really? Gege, you’re missing stuff out again!

Nevertheless, we understand how reluctant Miguel was. He enquires that Larue intends to do, clarifying: is it for revenge or to take Geto’s body back?

And it seems like their main motivation for putting their lives on the line... is to honour Geto’s memory. Like a traditional ritual one makes for the dead (customary in Japan on death anniversaries - not limited to the year, but also number of days).

It’s incredibly moving how much they love him. This is actually what led Miguel to reconsider. We see him go silent as he thinks “...” before he reaches a moment of clarity/a decision.

Tbh I have issues with interpreting his statement in between the two panels (re: hell) in Japanese - it doesn’t directly indicate if he is referring to the former part of the conversation (whether he thinks Geto is in hell), or the latter (he thinks the battle will be hell). The phrasing goes like this: “no matter how I think about it: it’s hell.” - I’m not a native speaker so it’s difficult for me to be certain which is right. But the consensus is as translated above. Larue thinks Geto is in heaven, Miguel thinks it’s hell, and we see the airport scene where presumably Haibara and Riko with Kuroi have been there for over a decade. lol. Who knows!

So the bottom line is… regardless of where they think Geto ends up in the afterlife, Miguel is willing to give Geto a send off that’ll even reach hell. Or, despite it going to be hellish, he will do it. It also seems so heartwarming how they still emphasise family and friendship in wanting to fight together - perhaps things we can surmise had meant something to Geto.

They will fight Sukuna because it is for Geto. Geto was so loved that they would risk themselves - not for a title, not for revenge, but out of … love. Again. That’s pretty damn loving. Can we imagine what Geto did and was to them, for them to experience such loyalty and reverence?

Sadly, it goes without saying that Geto’s body being used as a vessel and puppet by Kenjaku has possibly evoked an emotional response by those who cared for him - namely Mimiko and Nanako, and also Gojo. Arguably, even if it were a death without his body being hijacked, Gojo did refuse to cremate his body or have it processed “by the book” of jjk high through Shoko. If that’s not out of a form of love (or “consideration” as Kenjaku put it), I don’t know what is.

The twins went against what Geto wanted for them (to carry out his will) to fight against immensely power beings in hopes they could bring him home. Those were their reasons to fight. Gojo scheduled 24th December - this was after he teleported to Kenjaku immediately upon unsealing so he could bury Geto. We saw Larue and Miguel’s. Toshihisa is alleged to be quite weak, and despite potentially being considered a son to Geto (if his life situation did mimic that of the twins’ - source: jjk character book), he opts to follow the inherited will as prescribed by Geto.

It’s all love. Geto was loved, I’m telling you. I want to shout if off the rooftops because that man just looked so darned sad and deranged after he lost it.

So. Continuing where I left off: Everyone thus far has had a reason to go into battle with Sukuna. I wonder what / who will actually reach him? I hope it’s Yuji ... and that Megumi will react again at some point. They have their own themes relating to love and purpose. I’ll leave them to someone else more familiar with their characters to write about!

And now I’m going offside quite a bit, but it’s still of relevance to Geto and the theme of love that seems to surround him. Way back to jjk 0 and Hidden inventory.

I wanted to just bring this into the picture as well now that I’m already writing a post on that topic, but please feel free to stop if you’re bored now.

So. Jjk 0!

There were direct parallels with Yuta & Rika and Gojo & Geto. This was also confirmed by the director when discussing their vision for the movie. The light novel also drew a link between Geto and Yuta where they were described as being too sincere for this world.

There is a direct theme of love - the type, is open to interpretation.

Kenjaku also makes reference to this in the Shibuya arc. So to me, it remains relevant. Love in its many forms is somewhere in what Gege wishes to convey thematically.

Within jjk 0, Geto seemed to pursue power but this was also a symbolism where power = love. It is twisted. In light of recent events, we know that the pursuit of power leads to the dilution and even absence of love. Love that gives birth to power becomes cursed. So it seems.

As we know, Yuta bound his lover to himself to gain power.

If only he had Rika (metaphor for love: Gojo) he probably wouldn’t have had to skulk around the shadows consuming curses which he hated doing. Geto was lamenting on the past in the above panels. He probably was determined to carry on, as he vouched to give it all he got (Haibara’s last words to him echoing here).

A flashback to the past:

Geto doesn’t do things in half-measures. To avoid hypocrisy, and I headcanon that it was a merciful killing to protect them from him, he kills his parents. To die by his hands than to be used as a pawn to get to him. For them to see the horrors their son could be capable of. It is so very wrong, and we can see the twisted nature of his love in this interpretation.

And Gojo delivers the ultimate blow that leads to Geto reflecting - depicted by the mysterious ellipses “…..” (gege really likes the reader to work hard huh) - insinuating it is impossible for Geto, so don’t even bother trying. The blossoming possibility of discourse was nipped, as the strength differential was implied - you’re the strongest now, whereas it used to be “we”. There was no more place for Geto; it was probably a misunderstanding. Gojo was protecting everyone in his own way, and the only way he knew how.

For power, Gojo was a source - but Geto couldn’t do that in Shinjuku, nor earlier in the arc, when Gojo himself was on the brink of insanity and deferred to Geto about annihilating humans as he held Riko’s dead body. Geto in the scene above acknowledges their different paths they needed to take - Gojo had a place as part of the elite at the school - Geto was already facing an execution order.

And after hearing Gojo’s condescending tone in an emotionally-fuelled attempt to reach out to him. He turns away to protect his friend from himself, and himself from his friend. Anyway, I touched on this in my previous post. Geto feels they had fought and didn’t deserve a place next to Gojo. But deep inside, even his body remembers the sound of Gojo’s voice, reacting to it when called despite his soul no longer being there.

sigh. Moving on... back to jjk 0:

After witnessing the bonds through willingness to sacrifice and the love between these students, Geto was really moved. Gojo trusted Geto retained his sense of humanity / love / idealism - even if it would lead to him sacrificing himself.

He was finding it difficult anyway:

He could always empathise with love. I suspect he tried his best, but the binding vow for Yuta’s life was also just the cherry on top to make Rika super saiyan.

Kenjaku knew Geto probably could’ve won though, had he been more selfish.

Geto conceded without a fight with Gojo. Maybe it was a matter of trust in that they both knew his living on borrowed time. As the light novel insinuated, this was the only way it could ever end. And Gojo would have to carry the curse that was Geto. This seems... so cruel.

He did his best. He perhaps always wanted the love but set it free.

He did so many things for others in spite of himself, in sacrificing himself, in staining himself with blood drenched hands.

Avenging Riko by killing Sonoda. Note how manipulative “humans” are by using Jujutsu rules against them.

He embraces a life of smoke and daggers. Living in lies and half truths in order to live, survive, and find justice in a wicked world.

Watch me closely, I’ll protect you, I’ll avenge you, this is how you protect yourself.

This is the path I’ve chosen.

I’m not saying he was right or justifiable. His character is just tragic. The system had set him and others to fail.

The worm foreshadows Geto’s maternal nature. Calling him “okaasan”. I mean, this very worm had a binding vow with Toji. And now it calls for a new owner? I’m not sure if Gege had anything else in mind with this... is the womb protrusion domain Geto’s? But that’s tied to a sorcerer’s soul…. Anyway, I digress again. (Sorry). Geto did have a martyr complex and was written captivatingly well by Gege. The extra touches where how he has been perceived by others and the effect he has (and continues to have) on those we see.

And I just want to leave this heartbreaking thing here:

Source from twitter/now X:

Wouldn’t it be so sweet for Geto to get one (love declaration) at the end of his life, regardless of the way you perceive Gojo and Geto’s relationship?

Wouldn’t it be nice for him if he could know that his family who he instructed to flee had all loved him, adored him, and would honour his sacrifice in differing ways...

Instead, a form of love meant his body was desecrated and used by Kenjaku. His girls were killed, and his full potential was not quite realised at all.

If only things were different.

Gojo should have kept him in his basement!

But at least, I think, Gege is giving Geto some love even after his death.

For that I’m thankful.

And thanks for reading if you made it this far with my rambling!

If you want something more light hearted I have a fluffy fic up on AO3 (it isn’t great but i enjoyed writing it to fantasise about what happens at the airport) and if you want more angst and pain, please browse my tags (lol).

[goodluckclove]

I've been meaning to say something. (100 follower hot take)

Hey! Thanks for stopping by. I hope you've had a nice day. Why don't you rest with me for a while? I made some chocolate chip cookies - with shortening instead of butter, so they're very soft and very chocolatey. I made way too many and they aren't my wife's favorite, so I could use some help in eating them.

You're probably a writer, right? Or maybe you think about how you could be. Browse the tags here, or on other social media platforms. Maybe you used to write stories as a kid. I bet those were fun. Teachers might've thought they were impressive, or they dissected them line by line until the words didn't make sense in your head anymore. Either way, if you're here you're probably here for a reason.

(rant alert)

I dipped a toe in online writing communities on and off. My last attempt was forty-five minutes scrolling through the writing hashtag on Youtube Shorts (so TikTok, I guess? I don't know). I didn't like it. I really didn't. The thing that sticks out the strongest in my mind is one particular video where a woman claims that every story needs a second act plot twist.

Huh? Every story? All of them? Why? Since when? Who are you? What qualifications do you have to make a statement like that?

That's the common thread that makes a lot of writing spaces very uncomfortable for me. Successful writers are really only successful in their genre and for the given moment, so they don't have that much objective authority in the craft. And yet I see a lot of people deciding the things that you can't do in writing. Or the things you have to do, and how you have to do them. It was so much of Writeblr at first glance that I almost dipped out once again. I didn't, though, and I'm glad I didn't because now I get to watch some of the next great storytellers from across the world grow and examine and forge their way forward.

No one can teach you how to write. No, that's not true. Teachers teach literacy. Handwriting. Typing maybe - do schools still teach typing? Let me try saying it in a different way - no one, not one single person on this goddamned planet, has the right to tell you how to make a story.

I was supposed to get my MFA in creative writing before my first breakdown. My uncle stayed in the program I was meant to be in, and a few years after I dropped out he graduated. Recently I had the thought to look up his thesis novella, and as I searched I found myself regretting my decision to leave school. If I stayed and got to develop my writing in an actual class, with other writers and a knowledgeable professor, how much further along would I be than where I am right now?

It was bad. His novella was terrible. It was so bad I had a small existential crisis for, like, three days. He spent so much money on years and years of professional education and came out with a truly soulless story that read as if you prompted an AI to write the next Great American Novel. So if you think you need a writing degree to be a legitimate author, it could help connections-wise, but it ultimately won't be the thing that does the work for you.

Not all advice I see online on writing is bad. I find the people who are able to capture the "I" statements of therapy and phrase advice as things that have worked for them, or things that they personally enjoy, to be fine. Some writing advice can spark inspiration.

But if someone is the type of person to boil every story down to troupes and cliches, and then immediately say that every story that uses the trait they don't like is automatically bad for everyone? I'm dropping the kindness for a second - that's trash. That's a trash take and I see far too many writers use it as a reason to stop before they begin.

I don't like whump. I say my reasons in previous posts if you go back through my blog. But you will never hear me say that any story with whump in it is bad, because I don't know that. You might prove me wrong. I am an adult human being and I have the humility to admit that I can like something I didn't expect to. I genuinely enjoy the direction of The Human Centipede (only the first one) and if you cringed just now that probably means you haven't seen it.

There are so many types of books and movies and plays and comics out there. To enjoy a specific genre is fine, to ignore the existence of everything else is a really, really, really odd thing to do. Maybe someone will hate your story because they think everything should be Neil Gaiman, and therefore have no way to understand your epistolary high-Western. You are not the wrong end of that situation just for existing.

And at there is a definite threshold on how many writing tips you can gather before they stop being useful. If you find them interesting, that's one thing. That's fine. But if the culture of creativity online has made you feel like you need to educate yourself on every possible angle before you can write a story, you are actively harming yourself.

Imagine taking the level of structure you put on yourself in that way and putting it on children playing pretend in the backyard. Oh, Susie, don't you know that it's overdone for your Kitsune have dead parents? Xyler, shouldn't you ask someone else before you decide how Spiderman would react to this? It would make no sense and they do not need it. Kids will make a whole world out of nothing and it's the most fucked thing in my heart that at some point they get access to Reddit and dipshits start insisting that's wrong.

They aren't wrong and you aren't either. Your favorite creative influencer can't tell you your story, strangers on the internet can't tell you your story, your teachers and loved ones can't tell you your story. They can influence it, but they can't write it honestly the way you can.

You do that. That's the thing you do.

Man that makes me upset. I can't tell you how to make a story, either. If anyone sends me asks for writing advice the most I'll do is say what I've done before hopping into your DMs and starting a direct conversation. it's so personal to each individual artist, and I'd like to think that the people selling these classes and software and promoting these platforms haven't thought about that before. Otherwise it does feel manipulative. If you have a willingness to practice and imagine and really experiment with the possibilities, you are ready to write your story.

And if it doesn't work? Try again. That's what you do.

Stephen King has written roughly a thousand books and maybe five of them have decent endings. He is unimaginably successful.

I'm rambling now. I think I got that out of my system. I was really worried to say this out of fear of being too weird or somehow reverse-gatekeeping so hard that it circles back into also being a bad thing. I've just spoken to a lot of people who I still think of throughout my day, and I truly ache for them to get past the fear of creation. Because it's worth it. It's worth it and it's fun, even when it's messy and you're tired.

Let it Be just came on. Beatles. I haven't listened to The Beatles in a long time. Feels a little apropos.

I love you, reader. Reader, Writer, Colleague. Take care of yourself. Especially the little you, still sitting there in the backyard of your soul, bathing in the sun with their bare feet in the damp earth.

Consider joining them, maybe.

[mythserene]

Mark Lewisohn understanding Paul McCartney

Only Mark Lewisohn really understands the Beatles. Only he can comprehend their true motivations. Only he can see behind their veneers. Especially Paul McCartney's. He truly understands Paul.

I cut down this clip from an amazing new interview of Lewisohn repeating how if he doesn't write his books the Beatles' story will be “wrong forever” to just the bit where he says “it's only through my immersion in [the Beatles] that I can comprehend at least nearly right.” This is our thesis statement. 😏

“It's a drag”

Lewisohn: “I'm quite an astute watcher of Paul McCartney,” and so I know that his “It's a drag” line after John's murder was all about Paul's irritation at John Lennon's lionization. “John was being promoted and Paul was being relegated, and he didn't like it.”

Paul doesn't say his last name on the phone because he wants to screw with you and put you on the back foot. And definitely not because he just figures you'll know who he is.

(I've posted this one before, but it is needed here, with Lewisohn claiming he's the only one who can truly understand the Beatles and Paul.)

[enlitment]

Just finished Voltaire's Candide! (shout-out to @chaotic-history for the... vicarious recommendation? Recommendation by proxy?)

It was overall a very fun read and it had a great message and the end!

The beginning especially was certainly much more... graphic than I would have expected, with all the corpses and guts everywhere and the stuff constantly happening to all the female characters and... if I took a shot every time Candide got beat up I'd be dead... Once it got to the travelling it got really exciting though!

The pacing especially was great, things were happening so fast that it was almost impossible to get bored at any point. Lots of parts were also just laugh-out-loud funny. Voltaire had no chill whatsoever and I was there for it!

Some of my favourite bits, in no particular order:

The footnotes!! My edition had a lot of things explained, but most of it was just an itemised list of people Voltaire seemed to have a beef with, explaining why and how he mocks them in Candide. Case in point:

2. Everyone constantly running into each other even though they've travelled all over the world was really funny imo. Also the supposedly dead characters appearing in weird places. It was so ridiculous! I loved it.

3. Candide stroking the sheep (my footnotes said that it was probably a llama!) was just so wholesome? After having been through so much, the idea of him just hanging out on a ship, stroking a llama is just... 🥺 I need a drawing of that, asap.

4. Martin! Have I mentioned how much I love Martin? Martin is the absolute best. God I love Martin.

He had them arrested on the spot and told his men to escort them to prison. "I'm more Manichean than ever," said Martin.

idk why but this may be my favourite line, it's so dry, I adore it. I kind of want to use the line next time something bad happens.

5. I'm not sure how exactly to interpret it but I think that by having his characters choosing not to stay in El Dorado (basically this perfect utopian paradise of place where they could live in perfect comfort forever if they wanted to), V. points out something interesting about human nature.

I'd totally believe that we as humans are inclined to be always striving for something greater and don't actually want to be perfectly content... idk how to explain it properly. But, with the ending aside, it was one of the most philosophically interesting parts of the book for me.

6. The ending! I was really worried that it's just not going to have a happy ending at all, which I guess would serve to further emphasise how misguided Candide's genuine attempt at & Pangloss' faux optimism is.

But in the end, I was really glad that things turned out reasonably well for my precious meow--- for the characters because I really did care about them by the end and wanted them to be happy.

And let's be honest - the above is a solid thesis statement. Even better that it's essentially coming from a philosopher.

Kind of aligns with my bc thesis as well, a bit? I've sort of came to the conclusion that too much introspection and reasoning for reasoning's sake is just simply not good for our well-being (at least according to my guy™).

TL;DR: be right back. Gotta work on my garden and enjoy some candied lemon peels!

Bonus- literally just a funny paragraph roasting critics & Pangloss

[96percentdone]

Every time my old post expressing bafflement at 'anti player theory' undertale and deltarune fans gets a note, I go through the war again. Maybe some of them are normal, but like every post from these people that I have ever seen is never content to just have a strictly in universe read of the text. They gotta assert that believing a video game has meta elements spits in the face of craft and storytelling, and no video game could ever draw attention to it being a video game as part of it's thematic identity. They have to debunk the concept of metafiction just to be right, which is hilarious because they end up overwriting the thematic craft they claim to be the only real supporters of.

Undertale is about war, and violence, and hate and how we respond to it. Most monsters don't really want to fight, half of them are just hanging out, so they're happy to be friends if you are, but the memory of the war between monsters and humans lingers. Whether they don't entirely understand the war's true essence because of their purehearted natures make them antithetical to it (Papyrus, Monster Kid), or use the narrative around it as a prop for their personal goals and are forced to contend themselves (Alphys, Mettaton), or try to teach its horrors with its methods (Toriel), or are convinced that the only way to escape the shadow of the war is to win it (Undyne) even if they don't really want to wage war at all (Asgore), the history of that war informs it all. Flowey is who he is because that violence ravaged Asriel, a small child, SO hard his grief and anger are now everyone's problems. He cannot feel love because the cycle of violence stole his ability to believe in it. Every genocide boss only fights you to stop you from carrying out your own. They know that if the entire underground is so easily destroyed, there is no reason humanity wouldn't face the same fate, and this cycle must end, even if they are powerless. The ending is determined by whether you perpetuate war. The genocide run is a grueling, unfulfilling, deliberately difficult challenge as punishment for enacting war for nebulous gain, while pacifist ending brings about the best future, where everyone including Asriel is saved, and it is the most fun to play, because is one where you commit to kindness and understanding. They both are in service to the thesis statement that "love and compassion are good and the key to rectifying all wrongs."

Hbomberguy and NezumiVA have made videos on the same lines, but Undertale's meta because it's about how we engage with video games as a medium. It's about completionism. It asks whether mining a story for every possible scrap of information is worthwhile. Chara's true name is literally a derivative of player character, you are meant to name them after yourself, and project onto them and Frisk until the game seperates them from you because you are a real human being, not a character in a video game. You only learn Frisk's name by the end of pacifist, the best possible ending that you should be satisfied with as a means of separating your ties, and you only meet Chara when you go way the fuck out of your way to get the worst possible ending because of vague hints that there is one. Undertale uses the vibe and aesthetic of old turn-based rpgs to draw you in, get you comfortable, only to use it's characters to ask why are you doing any of this? Is this why you like stories? Are video games merely arrangements of lore to be logged into a wiki until you run out of data to sort, or did you like Undertale and other video games because its characters and ideas resonated with you emotionally? The text has a lot of compassion for Alphys and her fan hobbies, and it only criticizes her when she treats the real world as a self insert fanfic, and it's meta thesis for you is similar. It's fine and good that you love your favorite games, but what are you getting out of engaging with the medium in this way? "Don't you have anything better to do?"

But Deltarune is where they really start to lose me. It is not finished, things could change with later installments, but from what little we have, it follows up on Undertale's commentary about the cycle of violence, and brings it back to suburbia. Violence here is interpersonal abuse and neglect. It is adults caught up in the myriad problems of adult life they do not notice, or fail to support, or do not care about the children suffering under those same systems. Kris is a child who lives in the shadow of their older brother. They befriend Susie, who eats garbage and doesn't seem to have parents (or at least not any that give a shit), and they have a childhood bond with Noelle, who has lost her sister, her father is in the hospital, and her mother is absent and otherwise not great. Even Berdley has a whole complex about needing to be smart thanks to his upbringing. Kris opens this portal themself, literally escaping into a fantasy land where they, children, are the most important and powerful, unbeholden to adults and their baggage. They get to be agents, not subjects, and yet the dark world still has those same anxieties. Lancer is afraid of his father, Queen is an overbearing mother, Rouxls is an opportunist most concerned with himself, King struggles in vain to liberate himself from being a subject while forcing his subjects to adhere to his agenda, Spamton wants to escape his chains and is the incarnation of a spambot, Seam gives up, and Jevil escapes into his imagination. Kris can abuse Noelle into the snowgrave route, and Susie and Berdley are bullies because kids are just as capable of hurting one another as adults are. Darkners may say shit about not wanting to fight anyway, and Ralsei might regurgitate Undertale's lesson as truth like it's his full time job, but even he re-evaluates by the end of chapter one. In the real world things cannot be as simple they were in Undertale.

Agency obviously relates back to the meta, as Kris' is literally overwritten by the red soul you are asked to give your own name in a dialogue that once again separates you from your fictional vessel, a player character, then goes even harder when they slam dunk that little guy you made into the trash because "No one can choose who they are in this world." You can't either. You can get Kris to abuse Noelle into killing people, carry out the abuses that made these kids desperate to escape in the first place, even if they don't want that, but understanding the player solely as a force that strips agency, much like understanding Undertale's player as a comment on real world morality, is incomplete.

If Undertale critiques completionism and datamining as a valuable ways to understand art, then Deltarune reuses its cast and critiques is thesis as part of a its meta to showcase the it's real value. It is a story that even in universe is about fiction. The dark world and its inhabitants are palatable reflections of Hometown. Kris and Susie keep going back because it is freeing, and allows them to grapple with the their complicated feelings about their world. They can come out more confident in themselves, with a healthier mindset, or Berdley can fucking die! Violence in the dark world comes back out of it because the dark world is a mirror. Video games aren't real, you don't actually kill monsters or darkners, but war is real, and violence is real, and abuse is real, aren't they? Isn't that why you get sad when characters you like die? How often do we use analogies and metaphors to explain our feelings, or complicated ideas? Fiction is just a tool to understand the world. What are the stories you love saying to you?

If the meta doesn't compel you, it's not what you find value in, or how you interpret the text, I don't care, even if I think it's strange. What you get out of these games belongs to you, and you deserve to have your reading as much as I or any meta proponent does. But anyone making claims about what fiction must be, just to deny the a meta angle is possible? That's anti-intellectual bullshit. It denies metafiction exists as a tool altogether. It shits on not just Undertale and Deltarune, or meta video games, but stories written across every medium that have ever used their work to comment on itself, its genre, its medium, or art as a whole. If you denigrate a whole artistic convention and the work of countless artists just to validate your hot take? You don't deserve any respect.

[ecrivainsolitaire]

Open Art Guild – Testing the boundaries of collective IP ownership

Experimental release: Dr. T’chem’s Office (authorised for personal and commercial use)

I’ll try to keep this brief (you can read the full thesis statement here) but as we all know, intellectual property law is broken. It’s being exploited from every side and art workers are more vulnerable than ever to automation, copyright theft and myriad other unforeseeable forms of theft from the proletariat. We as a collective need to come together and work towards the creation of a better future.

The Open Art Guild is my proposal for the first of many steps towards a far away but necessary goal: the eradication of intellectual property as it pertains to the arts. It’s based on the open source standard and the creative commons, and the goal is for us to start creating a future where we stop thinking of artworks as private property to hoard, and start sharing the responsibilities and the benefits of their creation with the collective. And as I am proposing the idea, I should give the first step.

Which is why I am announcing the release of my short story series, Dr. T’chem’s Office, into the Open Art Guild license. This is an episodic HFY comedy series about the office hours of a sleazy yet well intentioned xenoanthropologist in charge of human integration into the crew of a spaceship, who happens to find them fascinating. You can read the first few instalments here:

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |

The basics of the license go as follows: I’m giving any artist permission to use the assets of my artwork (in this case, settings, characters, plot lines and other unique concepts) both for personal use and for commercial use, provided they commit to crediting the original artist, giving away 30% of any profit back to the hands of the collective in the breakdown the guidelines specify, and giving the same license to any works they create derivative from this series. Any artist can join the Guild by remixing existing artworks in its database or voluntarily submitting their own works. For the time being this prototype model will have to rely on the honour system, but I have outlined the basic guidelines for a platform dedicated to facilitating the Guild’s business and income redistribution.

The purpose of this experiment is to test whether this system is financially viable, what modifications it needs, and how to enforce it. It’s also a way to study what the community thinks of this model. To summarise the implications, here are the pros and cons as I see them.

Pros:

- All fan art, spin-offs, third-party merchandise and other forms of adaptation become automatically authorised and monetisable, provided both the original artist and the remixer are active members of the Guild.

- All adaptations are automatically non-exclusive and must give away the same rights as the original, diminishing the incentive for massive corporations to try and scam an artist out of their intellectual property.

- It effectively unionises freelance artists of all fields to balance out negotiations with non Guild entities.

- It encourages artists to continue their output in order to reap the benefits of the Guild, by using the redistribution system as an incentive, instead of the current status quo where artists are actively fighting market forces all by themselves in order to make enough time and resources to work on their craft.

- It provides a safety net where everyone is invested in the continuous welfare of everyone else, giving a sense of class solidarity and facilitating donations and shared resources.

- It motivates artists to invest in each other, as the growth of one means the growth of the whole Guild.

- Eventually, if the project succeeds and the proposed platform comes to exist, it would effectively create a universal basic income for all Guild members, as well as a self sustained legal fund to protect their assets from IP theft by non Guild entities.

- It will give you complete control over whether your art can be used for AI dataset training, on an opt-in, post-by-post basis, so you don’t have to wonder who might be stealing it. If the platform is created, all works whose creators have not authorised to be used for this will have data scrambling features to make sure thieves can’t use them.

Cons:

- It will require all Guild members to permanently renounce to 30% of their profit, in order to build up the funds and distribution system.

- It will have to be built entirely on trust of the collective, at least until a platform can be established, which may take weeks or may take decades depending on lots of unpredictable factors.

- Leaving the Guild will require all artworks shared with the collective to become Creative Commons; once you renounce your right to monopoly of your IP, it’s permanent, no way to go back. This is necessary in order to prevent asset flippers and other forms of IP scabs to join the Guild, extract other people’s assets and then scram.

- Due to banking regulations entirely out of our hands, some artists will have participating in the redistribution. If the platform ever becomes a reality, one of its main goals will be to remedy this immediately.

This proposal requires a high cost, but it provides an invaluable reward. If the system works, it will empower all artists to profit from their work and protect it as a collective. If it doesn’t, all that will have happened is that you will have created a lot of Creative Commons art, which financially isn’t ideal, but artistically is extremely commendable. Even in the worst case scenario, corporations will not be able to hold your art hostage with exclusivity deals. To me, the benefits vastly outweigh the costs, but I do want to emphasise: there will be costs. This is an effort to subvert the entire way art has been monetised since the 1700s. It will require a lot of work, a lot of people, and a lot of time, to make it work. But I believe it can work. If you believe it too, you are welcome to join the Open Art Guild.

Please do read the guidelines for the Guild and the guidelines for the platform before you start creating, and give me whatever feedback you have. If it’s good, if it’s lacking, if I’m overstepping legal boundaries, if you can find loopholes, anything. I tried to make it airtight but I’m not a legal expert. This is not my project, it is a project for the proletariat. Everyone should have a say on what they’re signing on for. And regardless of what you think, share it with all artists you can. This will only work if as many people as possible participate.

Doctor T’chem’s Office’s license

This work has been released under the Open Art Guild license, and has been approved for reuse and adaptation under the following conditions:

For personal, educational and archival use, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, to all Guild members and non members.

For commercial use, provided redistribution guidelines of the Guild be followed, to all active Guild members.

For commercial use to non Guild members, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, with the explicit approval of the artist and proper redistribution of profit following the guidelines of the Guild.

For non commercial dataset training of open source generative art technologies, provided the explicit consent of the artist, proper credit and redistribution of profit in its entirety to the Guild.

Shall this work be appropriated by non Guild members without proper authorisation, credit and redistribution of profit, the non Guild entity waives their right to intellectual property over any derivative works, copyrights, trademarks or patents of any sort and cedes it to the Creative Commons, under the 4.0 license, irrevocably and unconditionally, in perpetuity, throughout time and space in the known multiverse. The Guild reserves the right to withhold trade relations with any known infractors for the duration its members deem appropriate, including the reversal of any currently standing contracts and agreements.

[ponyregrets]

@glorious-spoon tagged me for the opening lines meme!

rules: share the first line of your last ten published works or as many as you are able and see if there are any patterns!

1. I'm Hearing Secret Harmonies: When the firefighter walks into Eddie's coffeeshop, Eddie immediately knows two things about him: he's not human, and he's the love of Eddie's life.

2. doesn't take a scientist to understand what's going on: Eddie is letting--definitely letting, absolutely voluntary, he could be winning if he wanted to--Chris destroy him in Mario Kart when his phone buzzes with a typically inscrutable message from Buck: What do you think?

3. daydreams slide to colour from shadow: The morning of Evan's twelfth birthday is the same as every other morning: he wakes up at dawn, has a small breakfast, and gets to work.

4. Your Morning Sunrise All the Time: Taylor doesn't care about soulmarks until her mother dies.

5. One Hundred Miles an Hour In My Head: Buck sort of assumed that, at some point, he'd evolve out of being needy and insecure.

6. Vary My Days: "Do you have hobbies?" Eddie asks Buck, four days after Chris leaves.

7. Blue Jean Serenade: "Why do I even have to go to school?" Chris asks, pushing his spoon around his cereal bowl with an epic pout.

8. We're at an Impasse Here; Maybe We Should Compromise: Obviously, Chimney knew things were bad.

9. Maybe We're Strong: Buck has never thought much about the afterlife.

10. Hey, boy, where do you get it from?: Evan's first threesome is basically a straight-out-of-porn situation: he's bartending in Virginia Beach, recently "broken up" with the girl who taught him to surf (who didn't think they had enough of a relationship that they needed to break up) and serving two very cute girls who are both flirting with him.

I think the last time I did this, I said my opening sentences served as kind of a thesis statement for the fics, which is still happening in some of these, but less than last time I think? This is probably party because of the last time I did this, which made me more self-conscious about that. I think about half of these, the opening sentence is also the whole opening paragraph? That's a trend probably. I like opening with dialogue even though I think I read somewhere you're not supposed to do that, so I've been trying to do it less, so there's also less of that here.

tagging @frightfullytreeish @jennybeantime @itsactuallycorrine and anyone else who'd like to do it! my brain is still a mush from moving, tagging is even harder than usual

[afterthefeast]

terror ep 7 rewatch

ok kind of funny hodgson was the one who let hickey on to the terror. all things considered.

“are these our own choices, cornelius? or are they being made for us?” kiiiind of a thesis statement methinks. cause like tbh yeah their choices are being made for them, there’s no real counter to that. and while i do think the mutiny is supposed to be read as crossing a moral line, turning one’s back on the bonds that make one human, at the same time hickey et al are all products of a victorian class system which has confined them to a certain strata of society and only encouraged resentment and ruthless competition between those born in the same class as you for very little reward. hickey’s whole logic for the mutiny is rooted in this competition; the idea that the correct response in the face of resource scarcity is to maximise your share regardless of the cost. capitalism moments i guess.

billy being the first to suggest the mutiny, though hickey starts to take control of the overall idea once tozer indicates he’s in favour — good demonstration of hickey’s general opportunism rather than machiavellian scheming.

“we’d prefer to die under english blankets, smelling english coal.” — the interesting thing is that the show pretty neatly balances the harsh truth that this doesn’t really matter because they’re equally dead with the fact that it sort of does matter in that if they’re dead either way at least they died with that comfort? but also on the other hand that attitude is really what doomed them from the start

ship as confessor is cool — from now on there’s nowhere for crozier to hide, figuratively or literally. not only does his survival succeed or die based on his own physical strength but also the entire expedition lives or dies based on his flaws.

collins & goodsir conversation — “my stomach doesn’t know horrible from supper, but i do” wooo the horrible logic of cannibalism. eating other people does necessitate on some level a loss of identity (as human, as someone who was friends with those people etc etc) — and in fact probably on some level requires that breakdown in identity (material necessity overriding in-group ties at the very least) to become justifiable.

goodsir begging crozier to send out hunting parties — crozier is sort of becoming franklin here a little, i think? while i personally hate franklin i really don’t think he’s intended to be completely dislikable and probably this is supposed to show how for all he was a dick about it he was dealing with very difficult questions. but crozier does then later send out hunting parties once morfin dies so he’s not fully there yet.

deeply tattered british flag.

tozer asking for weapons is kind of a lose/lose situation for crozier because at this stage tozer’s still somewhat loyal, though probably the mutiny was a foregone conclusion. arming a group including hickey is obviously dangerous, but as little and crozier admit tozer’s reasoning is sound, so refusing to arm them only further distances tozer and strengthens the argument that sticking with crozier will not ensure their survival.

goodsir carrying around jacko’s body — he’s so interesting!! like simultaneously he feels so bad but also he’s

crozier remembering morfin’s name and that he’s from gainsborough

actually i think in this episode in particular there’s a strong undercurrent of choice running through it. like broadly that’s a theme in the show more generally but it’s really to the forefront of this episode — obviously with billy asking if they’re even making their own choice, and with collins and goodsir’s conversation throwing into question whether cannibalism can even be considered a choice if you’re just that hungry. and then most importantly with morfin; crozier won’t let him die, and like, yes that demonstrates crozier’s insistence on getting all of his men out of here, but also there’s no reason why morfin shouldn’t get his wish. he is dying, incredibly painfully, and he obviously won’t make it to whatever paradise may be waiting for them. but he lacks the means to kill himself so he’s begging someone to do it for him and crozier refuses. notably in two episodes he will make the exact opposite decision with fitzjames.

there’s a few things here — the first is showing how the arctic will slowly push you towards making harder and harder choices and compromises and crozier hasn’t reached that point. the second is that a lot of the characters are in their position because of the choices of other people. of the admiralty to send the expedition in the first place, of franklin for refusing to listen to crozier’s advice, of crozier and fitzjames deciding to walk, and these choices get passed further and further down the chain of command to little & dundy abandoning the sick. and third i think there’s a suggestion of the arctic as a crucible in which your choices are thrown into stark relief. the cogs of empire tend to make every choice seem very far removed (you don’t see the person who died to get your coffee etc etc, a general won’t see the soldier they ordered into battle actually die, decisions are made by people far away from where they’ll be felt most). but in the arctic that distance is removed and you’re face to face with the reality of your choices. this has implications both for empire in that it’s a site where the structures that supported it break down under their own weight, because they’re no longer protected by that distance. but it also has key implications for the self — you can distill the interactions between crozier & morfin and later crozier & fitzjames into the basic question of mercy killing another human being, and what you do in that situation? initially, in ep 7 crozier is still somewhat protected from the cold reality of that choice and it’s ultimately made for him by tozer, but in ep 9 he cannot hide from it and chooses differently. there’s also the sense, not that your true self is revealed in the arctic, but that it does test you to see how, well, you “measure up”, because every choice you’re faced with is an immediate one. there are no empty choices, and so your responses to them says everything there is to say about who you actually are.

oh and tozer shooting morfin eventually is pretty key; shows that he will make that difficult choice and contextualises his view of the mutiny as really an extension of this.

silna & goodsir — their relationship is sooo fascinating but mostly

in a way hartnell has what hickey wanted with crozier i think — a special relationship, his ear and confidence. hartnell achieves this by working within the system; he has the appropriate response to his punishment, exactly what a good victorian boy should do. whereas hickey’s response is really more reasonable to a modern day viewer; he’s resentful and angry. like yeah hickey is an irredeemable racist and his view of what is fair is ultimately also deeply embedded in a victorian worldview (see his extreme resentment of silna) but he does on some level recognise that the world is unfair and rage against it. this isn’t hickey apologism though and more i suppose suggesting that hartnell (who ultimately dies for crozier in his arms) is an illustrative example of the unfairness of the victorian system, and the only way to get anywhere within it is to meekly submit to indignity and suffering.

jopson getting promoted. fitzjames psyching him out is very sweet, as is how excited the rest of them are. alsoooo breakdown of norms woo

why exactly does hickey say he needs an officer for the mutiny? is it to give it a veneer of legitimacy or because he’s more comfortable acting as second to a leader who can take the fall?

i am actually so confused about what hodgson’s role is. why wasn’t he at the command meeting and why if they’re short of officers is he going in the same hunting group as irving?

irving meeting the netsilik…ultimately he is reduced purely to John, nothing more and nothing else (the arctic will strip away all vanity and conceit).

[kassandra-the-witch]

Some would argue that a good piece of literature has to put its thesis statement in its opening. While I would disagree with such structural determinism, let me zero in on these first lines of conversation in Umineko Ep2 because, and bear with me here please, I think there is something interesting going on here on two distinct levels.

All content notes for Umineko apply to the following short analysis.

In these six lines, the player-reader is confronted with an almost superficially idyllic scene of a couple going to an aquarium. Sayo, in almost child-like wonder, is amazed by the sharks. George comments that he would eat them if he could. Sayo voices sympathy for the sharks and remarks that this was a very Japanese sentiment for George to express. George counters that members of specific other national identity groups would likely do the same. Sayo does not know how to react to that.

This is not the first time a member of the Ushiromiya family has reacted to a large and fascinating set of animals with the suggestion to consume them. In Ep1, when the visitors first arrive on the island, people remark on the absence of the seagulls. Battler jokes to Maria that Jessica might have grilled and eaten them. While I interpret that moment in Ep1 to moreso demonstrate one of Battler’s useless and strange attempts at making a joke while employing misogyny and fatphobia, there is something else going on. The usage of animals and animal products is a complex subject that requires a broader awareness of material conditions, modes of production, and the ordering of relationships between nature and humanity and I do not wish to suggest to say the important point of these moments is the suggestion to eat an animal. Rather, it is the rather totalizing gaze that designates everything, in this case living creatures, as something yet-to-be-consumed that sticks out to me. I have spoken in length about the Ushiromiya relationship to the ecology in underchapter 2.3 of my essay on Ep1. Here, I see a repetition of what happened between Maria and the singular wilting rose – the ability to empathize with other living beings around oneself is attributed to childishness, whereas the consumptive perspective is elevated as normalized and sensible. This ordering of the relationship between nature and humanity is then attributed to not only one specific national identity, but also attributed to the United States and Italy. Japan, the United States, and Italy have all been – and continue to be – imperialist actors. As I suggest in underchapter 2.4 of my essay on Ep1, it is the historical situation of convergence between US imperialism, Japanese fascism, and European fascism(s), that gave Kinzo the ability to resurrect the Ushiromiya family as significant profiteers of imperialism and fascism. Furthermore, the entirety of underchapter 3 my essay on Ep1 explores another Italian connection, this time intertextually, in the form of the (anti-)Dantian references and Beatrices of Ep1. As innocent as this exchange is, it is still mired and enwebbed by the violence that is the Ushiromiya family. I am still of the firm conviction that there is an unadressed and undeniably coercive element to George’s relationship with Sayo given that his grandfather forced Sayo into servitude as a literal child without support network. Dating the much younger disenfranchised woman who your grandfather de-facto materially controls and has emotionally abused for most of her life is not the beautiful romance you think it is, George. Disregarding this interpersonal relationship, the consumptive urge of the Ushiromiya family is once again taking the centre stage. Given how the cycle of violence this family operates on, I would not be surprised about this topos of consumption repeating at several points. And, in the same vein and given the gore and grotesque so central to Umineko, I would not in the slightest bit be surprised to see either symbolic or actual cannibalism at some point of the story. To quote what @siphonophorus once said about the Ushiromiyas: “theyre an ouroboros”.

The second level of reading this initial exchange is metatextual. From my short adventure into Ep2 before I wrote my essay on Ep1, I know that this day at the aquarium is an isolated and idealized event, an unlikely scenario in the course the Ushiromiya family takes. The player-reader observing Sayo and George in their mundane couple interactions takes a similar relationship to them as they do towards the sharks. In other words, the sharks are in an isolated, idealized environment meant to demonstrate some typical, mundane shark activities. Outside of this isolated, idealized environment, in their natural habitat, those sharks, like most species, would be subjected to the systemic collapse caused by the colonial-capitalist world system. Outside of this superficially cute date visiting the aquarium, in their more common home of the mansion of Rokkenjima, George and Sayo would be subject to the corroding social forces of the colonial-capitalist world system that props up the Ushiromiya family. Is me writing this analysis not like tapping against the glass and wondering if they will react? (This is a metaphor. Please do not tap against the glasses of actual aquariums.) Interpreting this relationship between play-reader and characters in that way also brings up one of my questions from my essay on Ep1; namely, how I am supposed to read the witches. Perhaps I am not supposed to read the witches in the first place. Perhaps the witches read me. When Bernkastel turns her gaze towards the player-reader in the second-order frame narrative of Ep1, a.k.a. the witches’ tea party, she establishes knowledge of the player-reader, furthermore designating them as merely a figure in her game. This inversion of the fourth (glass) wall, is this her tapping against the glass of the aquarium that the player-reader inhabits? Are the witches looking at the player-readers with the same consumptive yearning that underlies George’s remarks in these opening lines? Is there an order of being observed ongoing that goes from fish to George to the player-reader to the witches? Is me reacting to the story also just a story to Beato? Is the goal of Umineko then to break free from being read by the witches? But is that even possible?[1] Just some thoughts I have here before going into Ep2 proper. I am looking forward to it. I have been told Battler dies many deaths in this Episode and I hate that man.

[1] Of course, and I stress this here because such metatextual games toying with elements of unreality can wreak havoc on people that have a difficult connection to reality, the witches are not real in the actual real world. But I could easily imagine that Umineko as a text might try to frame the player-reader in a certain way, to implicate them in the actions of the story, to create a fictional suppersession and reordering of the reader-character relationship inherent to most stories.

[roxannepolice]

Ooh, I've been thinking about Mozart lately! I'd love to hear your thoughts/feelings on him if you have anything you'd like to talk about 💜

I mean, talking about music is supposedly like dancing about architecture, and I'm no Nijinsky... and I should clarify that my thesis was specifically about Milos Forman's biopics, i.e. Amadeus and Goya's ghosts... so I guess the good part is that a "fictionalized" Mozart is arguably more appropriate to blorboify 😅

And the truth is I absolutely love Mozart's music, largely thanks to Forman's film. I think it managed to convey the pure genius spot on, not just in showing baby Wolfgang playing flawlessly with his eyes covered or exclamations of how there are no corrections on his sheets (which... I've been to Mizart museum in Vienna. It's freaking true. That guys really wasjust transcribing what was already in his head), but perhaps most in one of my favourite scenes in cinema history, that is Mozart vamping up Salieri's march:

Just... the moment a... Decent. Good. Better by a mile than what most people will write in their lifetime! piece of music turns into something so purely brilliant that hits something going beyond conscious mind, or culture or history, and just... touches the moment beauty crosses the line of aesthetic and becomes a value in its own right???? AND ALL THAT FROM LISTENING ONCE TO A VERY POOR PERFORMANCE (honestly, tons of ink were spilled for F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce, and justly so, but shoutout to Jeffrey Jones for the performance that in one of my better choices of words I described as "majestically unaware of his own mediocrity")???!!!! This explains what pure genius is in a way that no cognitivistics ever could!

(This was one of my major statements in the thesis, btw. One of the biggest questions regarding biopics if you can bend historical facts for a story. And I get how that's a problem, but can you convey the pure genius basing on something that isn't already genius? Because the two "improvised" pieces in Amadeus are both in fact music already written by Mozart, with the "march" being the aria Non piu andrai and the "Bach-like" melody in the party/fart scene is Vivat Bacchus. If you already have a contrast between, again. Decent. Good. and GENIUS, should you really avoid an analysis of what's the difference? Incidentally, neither Shaffer nor Forman say Salieri did in fact murder Mozart)

I think if anyone's looking for someone who did have a Nijinsky skill in writing about Mozart, I really recommend Norbert Elias's Mozart: sociology of a genius. He formulates a sort of sociological look on how genius comes to be. Not so much in a "oh, it's actually all about habitus and people maintaining concepts of beauty to serve their own purposes" or "how to raise a genius" (incidentally, if you're looking for "how NOT to raise a kid" look no further than Leopold Mozart), but really digging into "not denying some unique gift, what social circumstances allow this gift to bloom?"

I just think Mozart's music is the epitome of joyfulness that's profound. It grasps the essential unseriousness of life while keeping its importance to each individual. Makes the everyday into an ideal, without stripping or objectifying anything. It gives a sense of connection that remains thoroughly introspective. It's mathematically perfect while quintessentially human. It is, indeed, how God hears the world.

[weaselandfriends]

Almost Nowhere: Finished, Thoughts

I finished @nostalgebraist's Almost Nowhere. Here are my thoughts (with spoilers).

I was fortunate enough to speak to Nostalgebraist about the story; one of the things he told me was that he put especial care into ensuring that the first and third parts of the story were written to sound and feel alike. That statement informs much of my subsequent thoughts on the structure of the story as a whole.

Almost Nowhere has three parts, distinguished in the text by their chapter numbering scheme. Notably, in line with what Nost told me, Part 1 and Part 3 use the same numbering scheme (with Part 1's last chapter being titled XVI and Part 3's first chapter being titled XVII), whereas Part 2 uses a different numbering scheme, which sets it apart from the other two.

This disjointed numbering scheme introduces a few oddities into the story structure (notably that Part 2 ends with a chapter titled "17" only for Part 3 to begin with a chapter titled "XVII"), but overall each part, even 1 and 3, have a distinct narrative focus that makes their divisions natural:

Part 1 focuses on characters living inside individualized "crashes" (Matrix simulations)

Part 2 focuses on a unified, all-encompassing megacrash called "Advanced Containment," with a concurrent story set in one particular individualized crash of especial importance

Part 3 focuses on life outside of crashes, in the "real world."

Why, then, the especial emphasis on linking Part 1 and Part 3 stylistically and via the chapter numbering scheme, when they lack a clear narrative connection?

My thesis is that the answer to that question lies in the mirroring between the story's structure and the structure of the "worldbuilding" that guides the story itself. By the end of the story, the shape of that worldbuilding shakes up like so:

There are a virtually unlimited number of branching parallel timelines reaching all the way back to the beginning of the universe. This web of timelines is initially described as a "tree" and later called "Everywhere-Heaven." Due to how alternate timelines work, they are mostly populated by altruistic beings who seek only to improve the lives of beings on lower-level alternate timelines.

The absolute lowest (or highest, depending on how you look at it) level alternate timeline, the sort of progenitor timeline from which all the alternate timelines emerge, is called "Almost-Nowhere," and it is in this timeline that most of the characters of the story reside. These characters live in a less than idyllic state and are not altruistic, and Everywhere-Heaven is trying to help them.

Later in this "progenitor" timeline, way later, like "after the heat death of the universe" later, alien beings called Anomalings live; they have the ability to travel through time. They were created by the altruistic denizens of Everywhere-Heaven so that something might survive the heat death of the universe, but they went rogue, went back in time, and massacred many of their creators. Now they are imprisoning humanity in the aforementioned crashes.

That's the quick-and-dirty synopsis, gliding over much complexity and many physics lectures. The primary key is the three-tiered division of the worldbuilding: Everywhere-Heaven, Almost-Nowhere, and the Anomaling future.

Azad comments late in the story:

Azad: There are others like us, everywhere. Except in one respect. We happen to live on the fulcrum, around which all the rest pivots. Azad: We live in the Almost-Nowhere. It’s an ordinary neighborhood, like all the others. People live there — we do — but people live everywhere, only we do not see them. Azad: It’s an ordinary neighborhood, except for the fact that the tower of life hangs from its ceiling. Azad: Do you know, Grant, that the tower of life is marked for demolition? Everyone is going to die. Azad: Almost-everyone, I should say. Azad: If there’s a way to save it, it can only be through some application of force at the site of the fulcrum.

Almost-Nowhere, being the central tier of this structure, is the "fulcrum" on which everything relies. Everywhere-Heaven cannot exist as parallel timelines if its progenitor timeline does not exist. The Anomalings also view Almost-Nowhere as the "center" in their initial, ominous message to humanity before the mass enslavement:

An abomination has formed near the center of the world.

Its "central" position as a "fulcrum" is what lends Almost-Nowhere its critical, multiverse-encompassing importance.

The shared stylistic and tonal elements of Parts 1 and 3, as well as their shared understated chapter numbering system, emphasizes Part 2 as the "center" of the story. Even during a cursory look at the chapter index, zoomed to display the entire work, Part 2 literally sticks out:

Beyond that, though, the narrative's conclusion emphasizes the contents of Part 2 as particularly pivotal. First, in the penultimate chapter, the resolution of the plot is framed as a return to and improvement on Advanced Containment, Part 2's setting:

“I will have our ‘dream,’ Lucifer!” Sylvie shouts.  The halo-light pulses in tune with his voice. “I will have it, dammit, no matter what it takes! “I will make advanced containment again!  With a fresh new crash, if I need to! “I’ll make it stronger, this time!  I’ll make a wall around it, a new kind of wall, Sylvie’s wall that can never be breached!

Though the narrative ends before Sylvie's plan is enacted, the plan is agreed upon by the three major warring factions on Almost-Nowhere (Sylvie, Hector, and the beasts) and is designed in a way that should, in theory, sate the competing needs of Everywhere-Heaven and the Anomalings. Essentially, it is presented without contradiction as a perfect compromise between every character in the story, the compromise that so many characters have sought without success for so long. And this plan is to create a new (better) Advanced Containment, to return to Part 2, to strengthen and defend the "center" of the story Almost Nowhere, much as Everywhere-Heaven sought to strengthen the "center" of the location Almost-Nowhere from the Anomalings via fantastical metals and technology.

Then, in the final chapter, Anne 27 returns to the other location pivotal to Part 2: Michael's Crash. Though Michael's Crash is first introduced as one of the isolated crashes in Part 1, it is quickly abandoned and only returned to in Part 2, where it serves as the setting for half of the part. Michael's Crash is itself considered a "load-bearing" center of the worldbuilding, as the oldest crash, which for a variety of technical reasons I won't delve too deeply into makes it capable of causing the most change to the "real world." Additionally, if destroyed, it would create a time paradox that might destroy the real world in its entirety. Anne 27 does not use Michael's Crash to cause some major change, however; she allows Sylvie's plan of Advanced Containment to proceed unmolested. All she does is seek a moment of personal catharsis for herself, speaking to her younger self, and reaching an emotional resolution detached from the plot resolution.

Mirrors play a fundamental role in Almost Nowhere, notably in early descriptions that seek to explain how the Anomalings think differently than the humans. (The term "bilateral" comes from this thought process.) But mirroring is also used through the narrative on a structural level. In Part 1, when three concurrent stories in three different crashes are told, and the reader has little context as to how they relate, mirrored elements in each crash are used to thematically tie them together: The moon in Mooncrash and the Shroud in CC-Crash 09μ function similarly despite their different names, preparing the reader to understand how the two crashes are alike. This thought process, the ability to see how two different things are alike, is also described as a core differentiator between humans and Anomalings, the latter of whom cannot think in metaphor and find it abhorrent. It only makes sense, then, that metaphor plays such a prominent role in Almost Nowhere itself.

(Hence also why there is so much emphasis in Almost Nowhere on addressing a "reader," the human who interprets the text. Without a reader to see that Thing 1 is "like" Thing 2, the text loses its potency. This constant addressing places the reader front and center, suggesting they are not a passive entity, but an active contributor to the text via the act of understanding it. There is even an in-text metaphor for this act of understanding in the concept of Mnemopoesis.)

So if Almost Nowhere is "like" Almost-Nowhere, what does it mean, metaphorically, that Almost Nowhere ends with a return to its center, to its fulcrum?

To understand that, it's important to understand what that center is. Specifically, what Advanced Containment is. Sylvie describes it best:

“An addictive structure that iterates the same pattern of variation upon the same pattern, nested unto infinity, appearing to contain boundless complexity and novelty, but still bounded at its outside, thus omitting most of the structure of the universe and placing reliable bounds on the entrapped mind, though the mind believes itself to journey boundlessly within . . . metaphorically an embedding of a hyperbolic space into a Euclidean one, you’ve seen the Escher drawing with the bats, something like that . . . advanced containment is full of them, we chose to embrace your frenzied cognition and divert it this time, instead of trying to shut it off . . . much more reliable . . . yes, yes, I can do this, this is the whole point!”

Alternatively, a "lotus recursion." An endlessly repeating, nested loop that provides the illusion of progress while remaining bounded. This is the structure that Sylvie and Stein and the beast ambassador Organism-2 agree to at the end of the story, with a few improvements to make it better than the original Advanced Containment. It's a trick, a way to make the mind think it is doing something of importance without the body actually doing anything at all.

This lotus recursion structure is itself mirrored throughout the text. A slowly unraveling series of mysteries that present new mysteries that often turn out to be new variations on the old mysteries; the repetition of character trauma and growth (Sylvie having innumerable manic episodes only to be talked down by Grant every time, usually by almost identical emotional appeals), Hector Stein's rise and fall and rise again and fall again and rise again, the end of one containment only to enter a new type of containment that then leads a third type, and especially the common refrain:

The return to the site of the trauma! The re-infliction of the wound!

Advanced Containment, conceptually, uses humans' powers of metaphor against them, confounding them with an endless array of similar things to present the idea of progress without progress.

Michael describes Advanced Containment as a "dead end," "doomed to failure." And he is proven right; Advanced Containment ends quickly, lasting less time than the first containment that it sought to improve upon. Furthermore, by comparing Advanced Containment's structure to that of Almost Nowhere, it becomes a moribund solution for the problems of the story. Sylvie, Hector, the beasts, and almost every character agreeing to Advanced Containment 2.0 is not a triumphant resolution of the story. It is merely its prolonging, the creation of another ring within the lotus recursion. The characters agree merely to return to the site of the trauma (the "center" of the "world" of Almost Nowhere, where the abomination has formed!) and re-inflict the wound, to continue the story the way it has already gone, setting the stage for a new ring of conflict later.

As such, the reader is not shown Advanced Containment 2.0. There is no epilogue that ties up the end state in a nice bow, because Advanced Containment 2.0 is not an end state. The end state of the story instead comes from the one character who rejects the truce, Anne 27:

There is only one single thing in existence, with no constituent parts.  There is only the one story, told over and over again. That primeval mistake, and the working-out of its consequences. She swims in the opposite direction, toward her starting point. She thinks of Cordelia. And she thinks: It is actually you, that I value, and wish to preserve.  And not another one like you, even if she is better, and happier. She thinks of her ruined sisters. And she thinks: I harmed you, once.  I will do you an honor, now, by refusing to repeat my mistake. She comes to the central point, from which the spokes of the tracks diverge.  She feels the familiar Annes there. My sisters, she thinks.   Not some other ones, like them. I refuse teleopoesis, she thinks. I make another wish, its opposite.   I hope you will understand, Arthur. I think that you will.

Anne 27 breaks the recursive lotus. She rejects the justifications Azad previously used for his bad behavior in Michael's Crash (there is only one story, I am doomed to repeat it, I cannot help but repeat it) and decides to not repeat it. She seeks only solace for herself, a healing of her own wounds without the infliction of others (or the same wound, re-inflicted). She leaves all others to continue as they were unmolested, removing only herself from this endless story.

And then the story ends. Thank you, reader.

Nostalgebraist has also described Almost Nowhere as following a similar structure as Homestuck, specifically likening Part 3 to Homestuck's Act 6. (Homestuck itself leans into the recursive lotus structure with its Act 6 Act 6 Act 6es.) I understand the comparison, but I would liken the ending of Almost Nowhere to the ending not of Homestuck proper, but its Epilogues: The story continues for some people, but not our protagonist; they have finally found peace, and in so doing can slip away from the canon entirely. I considered that ending to be the perfect one for Homestuck on the whole, and it's excellent here in Almost Nowhere, which is significantly more tightly coiled.

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of the structure complexities of Almost Nowhere and what they mean, and my thoughts have been somewhat disjointed, perhaps poorly articulated. I hope I've explained myself well enough at least.

[princessamericachavez]

the arc 6b is stablishing

okay so

I have to say, after so many years, I should not be surprised by fandom’s obvious lack of comprehension when it comes to arcs and storylines

but here we are and I’m once again rolling my eyes at some takes in the fandom

this time around? the overwhelming anger towards the show “insisting on redeeming bad parents”. 

First of all, most of the “bad parents” we are talking about here aren’t villains. Yes, they are extremely flawed human beings who have fucked up and hurt their children due to their shortcomings... nearly every single parent of the 118 firefam is. They aren’t evil or actively going out of their way to hurt them, though. Chim’s dad, who might be the most openly harmful imo, is neglectful and absent. And the show hasn’t really made any move to humanize him up until now. So let’s see wtf is going on outside of Howard’s point. 

REGARDLESS THOUGH, that’s not even my point. 

MY POINT IS ARCS AND STORYTELLING. 

Now, hear me out. 6x10 is three things at once: 

-The continuation of the show’s overall story

-The continuation of season’s 6 overarching storylines

-The beginning of season 6b’s arcs

So my point here is... we are at the BEGINNING of those arcs. The show is telling us where these characters need to go. 

So let’s look at the evidence we do have:

-The Buckley parents are being oddly nice. Yes. Oddly so. And you can roll your eyes and call bad storytelling... except, the show is spotlighting how weird it is. Buck, Chim and Maddie all comment on it. So whatever that weirdness is coming from, they are telegraphing it to us. Eventually, we’ll find out. 

-Buck and Maddie believe that their lives would’ve been happier if Daniel had lived. They just fed this to us right openly... BEFORE WE SEE BUCK’S FEVER COMA DREAM WHERE DANIEL LIVED AND EVERYTHING ISN’T ALRIGHT. As a matter of fact, it looks like Buck is actively trying to get back to this life, his real life, with his found family. 

So? What can we learn in this second example, that we already saw on the first? The characters have made a statement (either by actions, the Buckleys, or with words, Buck and Maddie). The show will prove them wrong. They will learn and grow from it. 

-So, thirdly, while I do think they are going to try to to ‘cut some slack’ for Chim’s dad or show us his point of view, I think the whole point of him being here, the whole thing, it’s just so we can get this wonderfully wrong line: A man cannot raise a child fathered by another man. 

Now, I don’t think I need to explain how this is wrong... but I want to use it as an example of how this entire episode was filled with wrong/false statements. This line, it jumps at us, because we KNOW that it goes against the thesis of this show. Here’s some examples: 

a) Bobby has been clearly stablished as Buck’s father figure. In show. In interviews. And specifically in this episode, which was all about parents and children, mostly fathers and sons. 

b) Buck is practically co-parenting another man’s child. Whether they acknowledge it being romantic or not, the show does acknowledge Buck’s part in raising Christopher. Other characters do too. The actors and writers even. It’s an undeniable fact. 

c) Howard himself was raised by another couple. And it wasn’t just shown to us, it was made rather explicit when he invited them to be part of Jee’s life in the role of grandparents. 

d) Hen and Karen are raising a child who doesn’t biologically belong to either of them but the show has consistently insisted on their family unit and, furthermore, is currently exploring those implications. 

e) The show literally just made the point to have May call Bobby her dad last season during Mayday. And it was a big, important, and insisted upon moment. 

So? We know this statement is wrong. We know it’s being made specifically so the storyline in 6b can state, once again, how and why it is wrong. And I suspect we’ll see a lot of that with Chris and Buck next episode already. 

Anyway, I wish fandom spent less time freaking out about “bad” stuff in the show and used more of that energy to analyze where those plot points mean to take us. 

[sylvies-chen]

ok it’s been days and though this is not the most aggravating thing about 11x03 of CF (which honestly, INSANELY, says a lot about how awful this episode was) it’s still worth being discussed so here is my hot take of an essay on why Sylvie’s monologue in this episode was absolute bullshit writing.

putting everything under the cut as always, just to clean up your dashboards. I hope you’re ready for some intellectually vocalized anger :))))

So listen. I get it. The “this job, this life… it forges you in steel” line is really cool. It’s a pretty fucking badass line, everyone can see that. But thematically, Sylvie’s monologue of an explanation for why she’s truly— no seriously— okay with her breakup with Matt is not only extremely out of character for her, but also brings up an issue I have had with the way the writers room, and One Chicago in general, writes female characters.

Sylvie uses the anecdote of the female stabbing victim who died by her side in season 6 to explain to Violet why the breakup isn’t affecting her as openly as expected. She says that when it happened, she cried in her car for days because she had a hard time dealing with it, but now she’s stronger than that. That statement in and of itself is completely antithetical to Sylvie Brett as a character. (And boy if you could see the utter fury with which I say that out loud.)

The story is fine, if she hadn’t already used it four seasons ago as a reason why Matt should seek help and open up about his feelings as opposed to pushing everyone out and internalizing it. That behaviour is what she condemned in season 7, because she regretted not having opened up and let others in to see that emotion. Now, in season 11, she all but embraces it. What she once used as a story to promote healthy emotional vulnerability is now being used to help her push her feelings down even further.

Which brings me to my larger thesis on the Chicago Fire writers: that these writers have no clue how to break free from their own unhealthy masculine ideas of strength to be able to write what real strength is. Because to me, claiming that Sylvie (in season 6) crying in her car was weak sends the message that crying itself is not a strong thing to do. That she somehow needed thicker skin.

I am well aware of the horrid nature of being a first responder. I know a thick skin is needed. But that still does not completely negate the sometimes therapeutic and healing value of having a good cry. Letting your emotions come out in whatever form they take in a moment, that is always a healthy thing. If you let an emotion exist as it is in a moment, whether it be crying or screaming into an open field or just straight taking a nap, it becomes easier to let it go. You’ve sat with the feeling, you know what it is and you’ve let yourself feel it wholly, and now you’re picking yourself up and trying to be happy again. You are not supposed to let a feeling consume you or make you scared, but you also aren’t suppoed to completely numb yourself to a feeling. There is a balance to be had.

So now you have Sylvie, saying she’s stronger than a version of herself who would cry when she felt sad (because wow, how terrifying would that have been). An extremely important relationship for her has ended— one she thought was it for her, the happy ending, the last relationship she thought she’d ever need— and she is refusing to shed a single tear. That is really disheartening, because women are often berated for being emotional and vulnerable, and now this development in Sylvie only enforces the idea that being an emotional, feeling, crying human being is somehow a sign of weakness. An error. A flaw. It is none of these things. Crying in healthy doses and being affected in moderation by the work you do and the things you experience is not only normal, but in itself a strong thing to do. Make no mistake: it is extremely brave to let yourself feel strong, raw emotions.

This is the same problem I had with Gabby Dawson. Now I promise with all my heart this is not “shit on Gabby Dawson” hour. I’m not trashing her character, I’m just pointing out something that bothered me with the way she was written. We are introduced to her in season 1 and immediately she is established as a total badass. She’s one of the boys, basically: she can match their speed and strength, she’s tough, cool, doesn’t take their digs personally, responds to things with anger first before sadness, doesn’t like relying on anyone. And as much as I loved that, I find that sometimes the writers overdid it wayyyyyy too much. Whether you like it or not, Gabby Dawson exemplified every trait of toxic masculinity: disregard for the rules and for authority being seen as badass, rarely cried when handling tough calls, an acute aversion to depending on anyone or anything. She was rewarded for it. She was the strong female character only because she was like the men.

Men have an idea in their heads of what it means to be strong, or to be a man, which almost always involves some sort of concealing of emotions. No crying, no honesty, no vulnerability with people you are close to. Just bear it all “like a real man would.” Stoicism is worshipped, placed on a pedestal and regarded as the ultimate show of strength. It is bullshit, and it bothers me when women show strength and emotion simultaneously and are then punished for it. It bothers me when men try and impose these very ideas onto women as well. Why should Sylvie Brett be seen as any weaker than the rest of her coworkers for letting herself feel sad and cry when she needed to cry? Why should a woman like her be seen as in need of some toughening up if she can cry that hard in her car and still go to work the next day with her head completely in the game? Why is what we consider femininity constantly mocked and undermined and seen as incompatible with strength?

Women? We are strong in our own ways. Our emotional openness is a pièce de résistance in today’s patriarchal society. We know it is a mark of strength. That is a fact.

Sylvie Brett has always been strong. She has been as strong when crying in Matt’s arms or embracing “femininity” by bringing flowers into the firehouse as she has been when she’s had a gun held to her head. This is non-negotiable, and the writers can never take that from me.

[alovelyburn]

Continuing from @zombiesgohome​ over here:

I think the “that misses the whole point” thing is what chaps my ass the worst. It misses the point of Berserk’s thesis statement, it misses the point of Griffith as a character and it misses the point of the whole system Miura invented to create Apostles and Godhand.

Because the purpose behind the Sacrifice working the way it does is to support Berserk’s theory on humanity - that humanity is twisted and beautiful and awful and wonderful and capable of immense cruelty and betrayal or kindness and loyalty, and all those things are in every person. It’s explicitly noted in the lost chapter that all those hellish emotions are a fundamental part of being human. When Griffith says he can feel that darkness in himself the story wasn’t telling us he’s inherently evil, it’s telling us that it’s a part of every human, and he’s exceptionally human.

When Griffith goes into the eclipse and sacrifices his friends and turns into a demon the structure of the dimensional space created by the behelit’s activation is defined by infinite human faces to represent that what happens here is in line with the collective will of humanity. And honestly if you think Griffith is a monster then what does it say about humanity as a collective that he is the one they desired?

Which is where people start talking about how they were conned by fake prophecies or whatever, but... even if the prophecy of the Hawk of Light is just a dream, it’s a dream constructed because humanity wanted a savior.

I think one of the big issues with Berserk is that its thesis statement re: the nature of humanity is at odds with what many people think: that humans are fundamentally good and that when someone does a substantially bad thing, it's either because something went wrong that pushed them to do that thing or because there’s something substantially wrong with them -they're assholes on a fundamental level. So someone cheats on their spouse and its like, well was it because the spouse was cold and unavailable and they were driven to it by feelings of loneliness and rejection, OR was it because that person is just an asshole and we didn’t realize it until now but now we see their true face: that of an asshole.

I contribute to that too. "Human" as "good" or at least "better than other stuff" is deeply embedded into the culture and also into the language. Even fans of Griffith’s character tend to say Femto is cruel because he lost his humanity. Even SF stories dealing with androids or AIs or aliens will tend to assume that the closer a non-human entity is to replicating humanity the better they are both morally and existentially.

But even if a reader believes that humanity is just great and only monsters do bad things, Berserk doesn't share that perspective. And because it doesn’t, the story will show humans doing terrible things without necessarily judging them as inherently terrible people. And if someone imposes their... idk, rosier?? worldview on Berserk they end up having to explain “bad” behavior through essentialism - Griffith did a cruel thing because he is fundamentally a cruel person.  And because he’s a fundamentally cruel person, everything he does is now tainted by that cruelty. From there it’s honestly not a long walk to “he would have sacrificed them at any time and under any circumstances,” because If circumstances had nothing to do with him making the choice - if he made it because he’s evil and selfish -  why would different circumstances result in a different outcome?

And I mean, realistically this isn’t true. People’s behaviors arise from a complicated mix of inherent factors and circumstantial factors. But I think that regardless of whether or not it’s true in real life, that causes a problem if they carry that into stories even when the story is saying something else.

One of the big complaints i see about Griffith a lot of the time is that the narrative doesn’t seem to judge him for his actions - and while I don’t actually agree with that, I do think the narrative doesn’t impose the unequivocal judgement of “monster” on him the way people would perhaps like or expect. But a lot of that has to do with the story just saying different things about humans than some people are used to hearing, or looking to hear.

[gunjounoflorseca]

“全人類ヒューマノイド/We are to be humanoid beings” Analysis or Whatever by firstname “bunny” lastname

My caveats

1. I have an extremely elementary understanding of Japanese, DeepL and language forums can only take you so far. Going off the English translation of the lyrics in the video and just doing my best with the written interview

2. Even more basic understanding of music theory, I am a simple college dropout vocalist

3. Never read hamlet, not an astronomer

This seems to be a work where every aspect of it is a different story expressing the same or a connected theme. We get different information in each part that pulls it all together.

A. Lyrics

B. MV

C. The music itself

D. To Be

BONUS: thing I just considered

It’s the feeling of losing humanity and the Earth, quite literally ⤵️

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars

But also how this dynamic can fit in one’s personal life

LYRICS

So, first time through, it appears as a breakup song full of resentment and either a literal sci-fi horror romance event, or a little delusion. The protagonist, A, is going through a breakup full of cruelty, rage, and the feeling that they don’t know who they’re with anymore. A feels like their partner, B, isn’t even human anymore. A does consider if it’s themself that’s changed, but regardless, it’s over. A still feels deeply for B and wants the best for them, (though I don’t particularly trust them as a narrator) but it’s over.

The second verse is about how soon some humans, including B, are going to participate in the project of abandoning earth to move to mars. I’m unsure if A is also joining because of the “I hope your comrades on mars make you happy” line. Maybe when A & B get there they’ll just stop hanging out, though.

If we aren’t taking this literally, the event isn’t migration but something that pushed A too far and caused the breakup. I think understanding the original lyrics would help me sort out this part better. 😞

I also think it’s possible that the perspective switches between A & B due to the “to be” factor which I will get to!

I think the thesis statement of the lyrical story & themes are in the title and the English lyrics. Of course the title will stand out, and why use a different language if not to emphasize it? Maybe because it sounds different or fits better but she’s a very intentional and thorough artist.

For the final part with the title “humanoid” is repeated multiple times while the protagonist breaks down into total despair with the final line “in a room without you” it adds an enclosed feeling, as opposed to the video where those characters are out in the open. 「全人類ヒューマノイド」 is an endgame event, a terrible occurrence. Suffocating and life destroying.

For the English portions there are:

“Break up, it’s over / stay away from me”

And “I’ll never say you again 「愛してるよ」” / “I’ll never see you again” which strongly establish the breakup portion of the story. I think there could be a reading that maybe the couple will get back together, there are still feelings there, but with these ideas emphasized, that’s the ending for sure.

But my favorite is “survive in any form.” I think this speaks strongest to the overall message of 「全人類ヒューマノイド」 / “We are to be Humanoid Beings.” No matter what happens, even if you become “humanoid” rather than “human,” you will continue. It’s the theme of survival over humanity, staying in the relationship despite loss of love(/respect/care/whatever), staying alive and free despite having to carry the burden of death.

VIDEO

The characters are White, Black, and White2.

White is in extreme poverty, living on the street in the city and we see Black sitting in a run down building. While scavenging, White is caught by him and tied up. We also see her sitting under a streetlight and Black appears offering her hand. She takes it. Black leads her out of the city, over water and trails, feeding her and assumedly taking her out of poverty. The power shifts at some point, where still tied up, White drags Black through the dirt. When they’re far enough away from the city, Black unties her. She chokes him to death. We see a similar scene under the streetlight but instead of offering his hand, he walks past her. White breaks down sobbing. We see a montage of their time together and her life before they met. She returns to the city, now wearing his clothes. Under the streetlight, White stands before another girl, White2, wearing White’s previous clothes, and offers her hand. White2 takes it.

Notes:

- The rope and bottom of White’s shoes are bright reddish orange. I believe this represents the Mars angle

- In a scene under the streetlight a rat runs by and when she’s being led to a field, there’s a couple shots of frogs (that appear to be, anyway) having sex. Lucky!!! Very fitting!!!

- Throughout the video there are very quick shots and still images of White digging in trash and sitting curled up in the city. Sometimes the colors change and ummm it’s just a very good video

- I think it’s possible to read the end as White and White2 being the same person and the cycle continues inwards but I don’t think that’s the case. We see a shot of White2’s face and I think it wouldn’t be too hard to make it look like Saechi is both people. I’m going with the interpretation that they’re two different people.

I think this video tells a few stories. Taking it all very literally, where a man kidnaps a woman under the guise of helping her, she kills him, and then takes on his role to then do the same that was done to her, to another woman. I would watch this movie. I did watch this movie, it’s a music video. It’s very good. Did I say that it’s good yet?

Next, connecting it to the lyrics, it can be a regular bad love story. Someone emotionally vulnerable is taken advantage of and coerced into an abusive relationship. There’s power imbalance and struggle there and even though they break up, the victim carries that hurt and continues the cycle of abuse into their next relationship.

But I think it’s mostly about Mars. In capitalist cultures we (broadly speaking) don’t take care of the Earth, we don’t take care of each other, we don’t even take care of what we’ve made ourselves. We build and we destroy and we take over and then we leave it to rot when it doesn’t serve us. If you can’t make money, what use are you? People have debates on who “deserves” health and happiness based on how much work they do. This is also how we treat the planet. Is it worth saving or is fattening rich people’s wallets more important? If we move to Mars, we haven’t learned anything. We’ll do the same thing to her. We’ll do the same thing until we’ve died out. This story is a terrible tragedy and a simple statement. If we continue as we are, it’s inevitable that humanity will disappear.

MUSIC

I don’t have much to say here but I think it’s worth mentioning that I think the actual arrangement and music itself is part of this story building. It feels huge and dark, while building a lot of tension. There are a lot of instruments used but they compliment each other rather than blend together (in my opinion!) so it really suits the idea of a planet-altering event. I really don’t know how to talk about this 😰 the feelings the strings bring is a base feeling of tragedy and adding chorus, piano, guitar, in the way that they’re used really creates a kind of terror. The inhale at the end of the song makes me feel like there’s more to the story, too, going along with the cycle ending of the video.

“TO BE”

In the video description it says

原作「To be, or not to be」：大塚紗英

Original work “To be, or not to be”: Sae Otsuka

PART A

[I’ve just found out that there is a film with the same title but I’m pretending that’s not an option because I don’t know anything about it (curtesy)]

And that is the very famous phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I’ve actually been meaning to get into Shakespeare maybe I’ll start with this one? Info ⤵️

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be,_or_not_to_be

Basically, this is the beginning of the speech where Hamlet considers if he should commit suicide or murder and if life is worth it despite so much pain. Is death a peaceful sleep or not?

Is it worth it to break up a relationship you’re so used to being in? Is it worth it to give up on Earth and try to survive on a planet you weren’t made for?

PART B

The official English title of the song is “We are to be Humanoid Beings,” something that surprised me! 「人類」 is not a word I’d ever consciously come across before so I was curious how it would be translated and thought it would be something like “All humanity are humanoids.” This shouldn’t have surprised me though because recent releases have a similar thing going (“ロマンスのはじまり /the beginning of romance” is officially “romance dawn” and “ロマンスは映画より奇なり / romance is stranger than films”became “romance is stranger than this sweet movie”). This is super telling to what the core idea is, like with the usage of English in the lyrics. She’s incredibly deliberate with her word choices.

“Humanoid” in English, and I think it’s the same in Japanese but forgive me if I’m missing nuance, is something that looks like a human but is not. Robots, aliens, monsters, that kind of thing.

“To be” is connected to Hamlet in the description but in addition to being an English verb it’s also a phrase meaning “future.” “Soon-to-be”, “bride-to-be,” “humanoid being-to-be.”

If we aren’t on Earth, are we still humans?

BONUS: THING I JUST CONSIDERED

There is also something to be said about gender here because Mars’s symbol ♂ is also used represent the male sex scientifically and culturally and Venus ♀, the feminine counterpart, is another planet people have theorized about terraforming/colonizing. I took the romance story as gender neutral/fluid rather than about a straight couple’s power dynamics. I think I could do a whole queer lens reading about why White2 is specifically a woman but I think it’s more to show that the gender doesn’t matter here? Abuse and hurt can take place in any kind of relationship. (Or she is who they had available/it would stand out more to have a guy in a dress.)「僕 」and 「あなた」 are what’s used for “I” and “you” which are neutral in English. 「僕」 is masculine but not uncommon to be used by women in lyrics and 「あなた」 is neutral but there are more masculine alternatives. (I don’t know if any of the other lyrics are particularly gendered, forgive me 😰) So it could be BF -> GF but I think along with the video with the story of GF -> BF it balances it out. Maybe! Just thought about Roman mythology and sailor moon for a moment and thought it was worth mentioning!

IN CONCLUSION: LETS TRY TO NOT DESTROY EARTH OR EACH OTHER, OK? 💕💕💕💕