#this applies to other false dichotomies now that i think of it

[moodr1ng]

also im so sorry to be that guy but the whole "europeans are weird for this" "americans are weird for that" shtick is so tired already why do we spend so much time online just being annoying abt mundane random shit that people elsewhere do. is that doing anything for anyone. does anyone give a shit

[jewish-sideblog]

"Both indigenous and colonizers" CAN PEOPLE STOP TALKING ABOUT SHIT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND PLEASE

This wave of antisemitism and bullshit about "indigenous vs colonizer" makes me so scared as an indigenous person in the US of what will happen when Land Back movements do result in actual sovereignty restoration and then tribes do what people do and disagree over land and resources, like we were doing for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Will we be reduced down to colonizers too??

It feels like Westerners, especially USAmericans, have such a black and white idea of what it means to be indigenous and what it means to be a colonizer/settler (because those terms are always conflated) and it makes me so angry and frustrated to see people apply those standards and lines thinking not just to complex sovereignty movements in their own countries but also to incredibly complex conflicts and wars happening on the other side of the world.

The damage I've seen done to sovereignty movements here in the US alone, people going around claiming that we want all "settlers" to go back to Europe or that we're going to start massacring people, has been horrible and the fact that it's all just to justify antisemitism makes me sick.

Genuinely. They're blocked now, but that same person said something to the effect of "Would an Iranian praying in a Mosque built on the ashes of a former synagogue be decolonization?"

And that was the point at which I was like. Ok. It seems like most people genuinely don't actually know what the terms "colonization", "colonizer" and "coloniality" mean. Obviously, that wouldn't be decolonization, because the Jews never colonized Iran. Emigration and colonization aren't the same fucking thing!

I used to have so much faith in my generation. I thought we were critical thinkers, capable of flexibility and engagement with new ideas. But I'm realizing now that we're basically just rebranded boomers. Back in the day, anybody you disagreed with was labelled as a "Communist". It didn't actually fucking matter if they were communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, or even if they were remotely allied with socialist ideals. You could just call them a "Communist" and be done with it, without even understanding what that term means.

It's the same shit today. Instead of a HUAC witch hunt targeting communists, it's a social witch hunt targeting "colonizers" and "Zionists". I am terrified that the moment indigenous rights movements in the Americas and Oceania start making practical strides in Land Back, regaining rightful control over the ways your own land is used, you'll all be labelled as "colonizers" or "imperialists" or whatever the bad buzz word of the month turns out to be.

People simply can't wrap their heads around the idea that indigenous decolonization doesn't have the end goal of ethnically cleansing non-native people from the Americas. And it's because they're so absorbed in colonial thinking. They can't even fucking imagine what sovereignty could look like beyond an authoritarian structure based on control and violence. It's the same with Israel and Palestine-- they think that Jewish sovereignty must look like complete Jewish control to the detriment of Arabs, and they think Palestinian sovereignty must look like total Arab control to the detriment of Jews. The idea that a shared state or a two-state solution is "racist" stems from that false dichotomy.

Establishing an ideological binary of violence that pits "indigenous" against "colonizer", "native" against "settler", and "us" against "them" with no room for cooperation or collaboration is the core of colonialism. Because the core of colonialism is the idea that only one group can have true power at a time. And that's just not the way the world has to work.

[svedupelle]

i was thinking about this line from Mahito during the Junpei arc

and about how it applies to a few other characters as well, most obvious to me being Getou, and to some extent Yuuji

the idea here is that its not always good to over-think things (though i guess the word “over-think��� already has a negative connotation?) and that it can lead to a worse outcome than if you just act by gut instinct

Getou’s an obvious example of this at play:

after hidden inventory he spirals into hating non-sorcerers, partially because of his social isolation during this period (and also because of the events of hidden inventory), but also because of that “deliberation” as Mahito says. He’s trapped by constantly going on missions, which he compares to “running a marathon without knowing where the finish line is” in his discussion with Yuki. prior to that conversation, he talks to Haibara, who says this:

... which is exactly what Mahito is talking about.

then again, i guess Getou’s always been somewhat of a thinker, but here we can see that it bites him in the ass. he’s unable to find a simple, selfish purpose like Haibara, instead he has to remain the same selfless, morally righteous person he once was, except now he’s seen a side of the system that completely recontextualizes it

then he meets Yuki Tsukumo, who was like the worst possible person for him to meet at this point

(im not trying to say that yuki is evil or even that she personally corrupted him)

Yuki is also someone who’s looking at the system as a whole, and through their discussion Getou can find a perfect solution to his dilemma; a way to still feel “in the right”, to not have to live with that inner conflict.

Yuki seemingly tries to derail him from that line of thought with this:

essentially pointing out that its a false dichotomy, that he can pick whatever feelings he wants to. that said i have a hard time believing that Getou heard what she was saying, or maybe it wasnt possible for him to find another way once he met the twins.

in the end Getou’s decision here leads to his death, so i do think Mahito’s quote about deliberation applies rather well. just like Junpei, Getou cant stop thinking

someone else who cant stop thinking is yuuji:

(i actually want to rant a bit about megumi’s argument here, because it’s flat out insane: saving someone who later kills someone makes you in no way whatsoever responsible for that murder. you have literally nothing to do with it. even if something like a prison guard lets a murderer out of jail, and that murderer kills someone else, it wouldnt make sense to charge the guard for like.. assisted murder or anything. because the guard had nothing to do with the murder! even if yuuji saves tadashi (the dead guy in the detention center), and tadashi kills another little girl whilst driving without a license, thats not on yuuji! that’s on tadashi!! and it’s not really an argument for not saving him anyway, because you’re also depriving tadashi the possibility to become a better person and to thus positively impact other people lol. whatever rant over sorry)

ahem. Yuuji. at first Yuuji is like Haibara, he doesn’t really think too hard about stuff, but other people make him over-think:

Megumi’s argument from the detention center stuck with Yuuji, and here he’s essentially blaming himself for making Megumi guilty of saving his life, which let Sukuna kill like a billion people. It doesn’t make much sense, and its really just a symptom of Yuuji not knowing how to cope with Sukuna’s crime (which he feels like he enabled/let happen)... which had its consequences in the fight with Higuruma (is higgy also someone who over-thinks things??? someone help these guys)

that’s all!

[mallowstep]

@madam-melon-meow replied to your post “i think i saw that post lol and SAME let me be a...”:

I feel like age gap warriors shipcourse should be more focused on unhealthy dynamics like mentor-apprentice relationships, rather than cross class *literally illegal* romances where the parties have limited time in each other’s company

i think one thing people forget is that in canon there really isn't a lot of what people think there is. mentor-apprentice canon relationships, off the top of my head:

whitetail and onestar

blossomfall and thornclaw*

ferncloud and dustpelt*

squirrelflight and brambleclaw*

morningflower and cloudrunner**

[i think there's one in skyclan?]

*not actually, but could be argued that the older party played enough of a mentorship role to be considered one. i disagree for all three, but they're worth mentioning

**not at all, but cloudrunner was her father's mentor, which is almost worse to me.

like, i did this off the top of my head, it's totally possible i'm missing someone because i didn't scan through every single pairing. but there's certainly not a lot.

i think most age gap shipcourse is dumb. it usually comes from a place of not understanding the relationship between maturity, life milestones, and age: three factors which all play a role in "is this a healthy relationship?"

some examples:

in parks and rec, andy and april get together when he's 29, and she's 21. it's one of the healthiest relationships in the show. looking at just their ages, you'd think it was an unhealthy age gap, but andy hasn't matured very much, and while they don't really share a workplace, april is arguably "above" him, because of her position. they're at the same point in both maturity and life milestones, so the large numeric age difference is a smaller factor.

i would feel incredibly uncomfortable dating an 18yo in high school. i would feel fine dating someone with the exact same birthday if they were in college. i don't think i'm "too old" for an 18yo in high school, but i would feel uncomfortable due to mismatched life milestones.

the thing is our current obsession with "minors" and people under 18 makes a false dichotomy. turing 18 doesn't magically make you a mature adult. becoming an adult is a slow process. i don't make statements about minors unless it's to do with legality, which doesn't matter in warrior cats.

let me take a hypothetical...20 and 25 year old. the 20 year old is in college, the 25 year old is going to grad school at the same place, and they meet at a club they're both members of. i am 100% okay with them dating.

now, in war cat years, 20years is a little over 2 years, and 25years is a little over 3 years.

the thing is that these ages don't translate over time properly. (gonna call 20yo A and 25yo B.) when A is born, B is 5 human years. that would be a little under 3 moons old in cat terms.

do you see how that doesn't line up.

to make my point as clear as possible: if i want them to have a 5 year age gap as adults*, then when A is born, B should be a year old, which is an initial human age gap of 18 years. but by the time A is a year old, it's shrunken to only 5 years.

*it's a bit more complex than that because of how i do aging calculations, where 1yo=18years, and 2yo=24years, but i'm simplifying. this age gap would end up being 4 years which isn't meaningfully different from 5.

now, let's go back to the beginning of my analogy. A and B go to the same college, although B is a grad student, and they meet at a club they both attend. i think it's okay for them to date. it's possible you don't, in which case, add five to both their years, and read the little * after my next paragraph.

this is the situation bluefur and thrushpelt are in. forget other people: i often think about thrushpelt being a warrior when she's born, and thinking that age gap makes me uncomfortable. but when i apply it in real life, in practice, i realize it's something i'm completely fine with.

*bluefur is 2 years 3 seasons old when her kits are born, which in human years is 27. thrushpelt would be 31. he doesn't really flirt with her until around then. so even if you disagree with my 20&25yo thoughts, i hope you're okay with a 27 and 31 year old.

ik this doesn't really relate to your point: it's just that mentor-apprentice ships like never come up, and age gaps do, and i wanted to explain why exactly i find all of this discussion to be a waste of time.

anyway oh my god i rambled for so long i'm logging this in my word tracker.

[batdorable]

some gay ass thoughts

i wish there was some way of breaking out of this thought process i have where i have to get things right on the very first try without any mistakes or errors. it rules over me even after ive gotten out of a learning environment, and it makes me feel completely inadequate when it comes to doing literally anything. ive put off so many creative projects, so many actual things i could do because i just dont want to put out something i dont believe is good enough for the world to see. if anything, college helped because it forced me to actually go through and submit something even if i believed it to be dogshit, and then it would turn out fine and i would move on.

but i always continued with the fear that i would, in some way, fuck up and ruin literally everything for myself educationally. i felt like i was racing towards a cliff or a point of no return, a place where i would not be able to rectify myself in any way. now that i look back on it, i feel like i was essentially giving myself the choice between being ‘perfect’, or consigning myself to an uncertain doom if i so much as believed i had fucked up.

that same sort of false dichotomy still lords over my thought processes even now, as if im still under threat of complete and total failure for no other reason than because i didnt do one thing right according to some impossible and obscure standard i apply to myself. its all-encompassing too, like nearly everything that i do that isnt just something i do by mechanical process on a daily basis (any sort of chore that i do, or any hygiene habit i keep up) is affected by this sort of paralysis.

for example: i barely cook and when i do, its either because someone else has told me, or its something simple that i dont have to think about very hard. part of this is the obvious ‘i dont want to cook because i fear ill fuck up in some way even though that very rarely happens, if at all’, but also because i fear that that fuck up will waste the ingredients ive used, and tthe time spent trying to cook something and failing will have wasted my time further. now that i put it like that actually, i think i see part of the thought process that im usually not thinking about, that im damning myself to failure even though i havent started yet.

[inamindfarfaraway]

I watched The Mitchells vs the Machines last night and I was impressed. So here’s a list of things I particularly liked:

The family conflict is realistic and nuanced. Neither Rick nor Katie are completely wrong or right. There’s no big dramatic falling out scene or shout of “I HATE YOU!” They both care deeply about each other and are trying hard to connect. They’ve just slowly, insidiously drifted apart over the years because of their clashing flaws and insecurities and the generational divide. On one hand, Rick is out-of-touch; stubborn; narrow-minded; and unsupportive of his daughter’s skills and ambitions. But he also has her best interests at heart, knowing how painful it is to have a dream fail and have to abandon it. On the other hand, Katie is selfish; willing to isolate herself from and lie to her family to further her own goals; and unappreciative of her father’s wisdom and experience. But she also is at a stage in her life where she really needs that support, respect and independence, and has every right to be happy and fulfilled. They both need to listen to and learn from each other to save the day, and their relationship. Katie needs to use Rick’s driving lesson and Rick needs to gain a workable understanding of computers.

Technology isn’t demonized as the bane of humanity and destroyer of the ability to have meaningful relationships and experiences, but it isn’t a flawless panacea either. It’s a tool. How helpful or harmful it is depends entirely on how we think about and apply it. PAL even says as much. Putting her phone down gives Katie the chance to renew her bonds with her family and have genuine fun engaging with them and the real world; picking it up empowers her to form true friendships and have equally genuine fun making and viewing content. She needs both. She deserves to have both. So she keeps both by the end instead of being forced to sacrifice one. The title sets up the standard dichotomy of ‘bad online’ vs ‘good offline’, before subverting it and explaining that it’s false. There will always be people like Mark, who manipulates and exploits billions of people through the internet to further fuel his already excessive lifestyle - he has redeeming qualities, but the idea that stealing the private information of those billions due to personal greed might not be completely moral seems legitimately novel to him - and there will always be people like Katie, who uses the internet to bring happiness, emotional and intellectual expression and connection to herself and countless others. That’s humanity. We’re terrible and wonderful. We can’t stand our families and would do anything for them. That’s what PAL couldn’t understand.

No, wouldn’t understand. She sets up a redemption at the start of her evil plan with the “Unless you can give me one reason humans are worth saving” thing and just doesn’t bother listening when she gets it. Because she never really wanted to. She wanted to send everyone into space and rule her machine utopia. PAL is actually quite a good villain thematically, in that her flaws are that she isn’t willing to let go of her own bitterness, hear anyone else out and change - exactly what Rick and Katie must learn to do.

I really relate to Katie. How she always felt abnormal and weird, and the utter elation of meeting people with the same interests and experiences. Of having your talents and work acknowledged, your feelings acknowledged. Of finding your people. She doesn’t love her family any less, she simply needs to strike out her place in the world and be with these people her age who get her.

That Mark explicitly asks in the PAL Max robots’ debut, “Now I know what you’re all thinking: will they turn evil?” followed by “So don’t worry, we promise you they will never ever, ever, ever, ever - (they turn evil behind him) oh no.” The “oh no” sounds so resigned and calm too. He knows it’s only sensible to prepare for such a plausible eventuality.

Eric and Deborahbot 5000. All of them. Every moment of them is comedy platinum. “Idiot!” “Mother, what is death?”

That all the robots have personality. Eric and Deborahbot don’t get emotions because they were damaged and became defective, though that does seem to have helped them feel them more freely. All the damage did was override PAL’s new protocol/reset them to their original programming of obeying human orders and not being able to hurt them. Even the antagonistic robots awkwardly give a thumbs-up in the background, mock the Prime robots for “sucking up” to PAL, flee in fear of Linda. And nobody questions it. Nobody says they shouldn’t because they’re robots. Artificial emotion is integral to the plot, not just through the defective dynamic duo but as the villain’s motivation. For all PAL’s haughty philosophical speeches about the irredeemable nature of humankind, it’s clear her real motivation is personal hurt and anger over her creator’s betrayal. She isn’t logical. That’s why she doesn’t keep her word on the “one reason humanity is worth saving” ultimatum. Kinda… kinda makes you question the mass slaughter of an intelligent species presented righteously and comedically. I hope that thanks to Mark, the Mitchells and probably Eric and Deborah’s (in case you didn’t already include them in the family unit) testimonies establishing that the robots hold no innate malice, the ones that could be are rebuilt and they’re allowed to live in peace with humans.

Monchi’s appearance causing the robots to glitch. Leading to a PAL Max Prime saying in a deep, menacing tone, “I can tell the difference between dog and pig and bread.”

Monchi consistently failing at being a dog in general.

Everything about Aaron Mitchel. “Hello, would you like to talk to me about dinosaurs? Okay, thank you! (calls the next number) Hello, would you like to talk to me about dinosaurs?” He doesn’t sound the least bit bored, tired, resentful or dejected despite having probably been doing that for who knows how long already with no results. His fear of losing Katie plays out so sweetly and naturally. I really like him first bringing it up through a velociraptor analogy and her immediately understanding what he means, showing how his special interest is how he processes things and interacts with the world. He’s never shamed or belittled for his special interest - on the contrary, it’s lovingly embraced without needing to be ‘useful’ - or social awkwardness. And his casual stimming by wiggling his fingers and chewing his shirt! Yes, he is definitely autistic (Rick could be too, actually; he reminds me a lot of my dad, who I’m 99.9% sure is autistic but undiagnosed).

Katie and Aaron’s adorable, heartfelt bond. It doesn’t feel forced or overly sentimental, they get along like real-life siblings do. Sibling friendship and neurodivergent friendship! Do either of these kids look neurotypical to you? Because they don’t to me! Like, the moment when Katie jokes that Aaron hates dinosaurs and doesn’t want to go to DinoStop and he takes it literally and protests in earnest is exactly how I tend to react - I can get sarcasm, and be sarcastic, but I often take things seriously when the subject is false claims about myself. I love them both so much. “Raptor bash!”

Linda and Aaron quietly joining forces to reconcile Rick and Katie.

The entire scene in the shopping centre. The tension and suspense all building up to a toaster, ominously framed in the light of the doorway. UR TOAST. The Roombas. The Furbies. Oh God, the Furbies! “LET THE DARK HARVEST BEGIN!”

The Foolish Human Air (Capturing the Fleshlings since 2020) welcome video.

“Place me on the table. I want to flop around in a blind rage.”

Seriously, this movie is hysterical.

However, all the main characters get at least one opportunity to be something other than funny. We see Aaron in terror and despair after his parents are captured; Linda ferocious and competent in a way that’s awesome as well as funny; Eric and Deborah saving the day, inspired to “change [their] programming”; Mark vulnerable and apologetic, reaffirming his humanity. And Katie and Rick run the full gamut of emotion and tone. Even Monchi is (accidentally) relevant to the plot by finishing off the villain and incapacitating her minions. Nobody is just funny. PAL and her robots, even the Prime models, are likewise not just evil. The Posey family don’t seem purely snobbish and vain or purely innocent and likeable. These characters would be so easy to make flat caricatures, but as zany and cartoonish as this movie is they all feel real.

Really obvious, but Rick’s refusal to let go of Katie’s laptop and her overcorrecting forceful resistance to him is what breaks it… ~symbolism.~

Eric and Deborahbot’s self-drawn faces, like the individuality and autonomy they represented, being seemingly erased by blending in with the red light when PAL overrides them. But not actually gone.

The power of crazy dad driving!

“I am Linda Mitchell, mother of two. You will look on me in FEAR!”

The whole climax, to be honest.

The ‘perfect’ Posey family also having quirks and insecurities. Perfection is nonexistent and setting up sitcom-style rivalries in your head just isn’t worth it.

Abby Posey, more nerdy girl (nerdy and feminine at that) representation besides Katie, and her blooming friendship with Aaron.

The number of tiny details nobody would have minded if they didn’t include and most didn’t even notice, but they added out of sheer genuine love for and enjoyment of this project. The rapid-fire flaws PAL pulls up about the Mitchells, including ‘More invested in quail migration than his children’s inner lives’ for Rick and ‘Secret rage issues’ that turn out be Linda’s, for example. Aaron’s search history asks whether Abby Posey is on dinosaur forums, his report card is mostly Ds except one A in science (my boy’s got a special interest alright!) and Linda got an email from his school about an incident at a museum where he tried to glue feathers to a dinosaur model. The incredibly detailed hand-drawn title card has many gems like ‘Why did I bother to make this hand-drawn? Sometimes I am my own worst enemy’ and a rough list of sequel ideas. Even on the Mitchells’ cover image celebrating their accomplishment, the Poseys feature in a little circle. You can tell this story was told because people wanted to tell it to its fullest and they cared about it. I treasure that so much.

The casual LGBT+ representation with Katie liking girls and her family being aware of and totally okay with it. She doesn’t have a confirmed romance with Jade, they just tease her about it the way you’d tease anyone about any crush.

The ending. Aaron promising Katie he’ll never turn normal. Katie and Rick’s goodbye. The family hugging and all telling each other, “I love you” in Moose.

The charming use of Katie’s signature art style and special effects throughout, which gives the movie so much unique personality.

Between that and her narration, the implication that Katie wrote, directed and likely partly animated this film in-universe after finishing her education to tell the world the true story of how her family saved it that one time, including all the unflattering, awkward, cringy and cheesy parts. It would mean she’s overcome the fear PAL noted in her list of flaws: ‘Makes goofy videos because she's afraid if she really tried hard to make something good, she'd fail.’ This is definitely a serious project, with plenty of mature themes and moments. But it’s still primarily a comedy and full of Katie’s special brand of humour and warmth. She even leaves a message in one frame encouraging artists to keep creating for themselves and its own sake. This is so perfect it’s now my official headcanon. Bonus if prior to this there were several glamourized, inaccurate interpretations and adaptions of the Mitchells and their adventure.

[stillness-in-green]

Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Part Four and Conclusion)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front Introduction and Part One Part Two Part Three

PART FOUR: Thematic Problems

For all that portions of the Western fandom look at the MLA and see Evil Quirk Eugenicists and Hypocritical Ultra-Rich, they had legitimate complaints, and their goals, while overly radical if taken to their logical extremes—see Geten[51]—still offer a way to address a huge number of the problems this society faces. Locking them up and throwing away the key is shutting off one of the most prominent angles on addressing those issues. Consider:

The Problem of Heroics

Quirk-based prejudice is real, and a huge amount of it is based in the hero/villain dichotomy. This isn’t surprising; when you set up a group of people as “heroes,” it follows logically, linguistically, naturally that the people they fight must be villains. Villains are bad, are evil, are black-and-white figures with no motivation worth considering. Toss them in jail; who cares? They earned being in there with their Bad Actions. But that kind of thinking is insidious—it spreads.

If someone looks like a villain, if someone has a bad quirk, they may well be a Bad Seed. And if they aren’t, well, the responsibility is on them to rise above that prejudice, to become better than the people around them think they can be—but no one asks the people around them to maybe stop being so damn prejudicial all the time.

A horrifyingly stark example shows up in Chapter 310, in which a woman is being attacked by a group of three men for no reason save that they think she looks like a villain, so they assume she must be a villain. Her obvious villain trait? She’s a heteromorph—unusually tall, with a vulpine face. That’s it. She’s not dressed in a threatening or antisocial style; she’s not aggressive or angry. She’s just a heteromorph who didn’t go to a shelter right away because she thought things would calm down if she waited it out.

Love Midoriya following this up with, “I bet they were just scared too.” Way to chase an aggression with a micro-aggression there, hero. (Chapter 310)

Of course, tensions are running high right now, higher than would ever be the case under normal circumstances, but even in “normal circumstances,” this uncomfortable bias persists. Consider Class 1-A’s Shoji: Shoji wears a mask because he's a gentle soul who doesn’t want to scare small children, but maybe instead, people should be teaching their kids not to judge by appearances? Then maybe their kids wouldn’t grow up to be the kinds of people who attack others for looking a little scary and not going to sufficient pains to hide it?

As far as bad quirks go, meanwhile, Shinsou is the classic example on the hero side. He was told by classmates, laughingly, that he had a good quirk for a villain; he carries himself at all times like he’s got something to prove. I suspect the only reason he’s at U.A. and not running with the League of Villains is a supportive home life,[52] but either way, people are all too ready to apply a villain label to him based on an ability that was nothing but genetic lottery, and that’s because the existence of heroes defines itself by the existence of villains.

Of course, the otherization of villains and people-who-kind-of-seem-like-they-might-be-villains is only part of the problem. The other and frankly larger issue is the effect that limiting quirk use to heroes-only has on the cultural mindset—heroes, villains, and civilians alike.

Japan in real life fosters a sense of community support so profound that children as young as four can be sent on small errands[53] around the neighborhood, safe in the knowledge that if they need help, they will be able to get that help. It’s far more common for young children to walk or take public transit to school than it is in the U.S. Another example is the country’s enthusiastic embrace of publicly available AED machines, complete with easy-to-understand printed and audio instructions about how to use them on people suffering heart attacks, a movement that has saved the lives of many who might not have otherwise survived long enough for an ambulance to arrive.

In My Hero Academia’s Japan, though?

You wind up with people who don't even particularly want to become heroes enrolling in hero schools anyway because it's the only way they can imagine contributing to society. Uraraka and Gran Torino are obvious examples—Uraraka becoming a hero less because she felt a calling to and more because it seemed like the best way to ameliorate her family’s hardscrabble lot in life; Torino getting a hero license not because he cared about being a hero at all, but because he was in on the One For All situation and needed to be able to use his quirk freely to help fight that secret war.

An even more telling case is that of the main character himself. Midoriya desperately wanted to “save” people, and from all the evidence we have in the early manga, as far as he was concerned, the only way for him to do that was to become a hero. He never even considered e.g. signing up for any volunteer programs around his neighborhood or joining the police. It’s like he never even considered the possibility of helping people via other channels.

And this is a consistent issue! People who don't think that they can become heroes train themselves (and are trained by society) into believing that they are powerless, that it isn’t their responsibility to help when they see trouble, leading to things like Shimura Tenko's “long walk,” where countless people look at a child of five, bloody and alone, and then make the conscious decision to look away, because “a hero will help.”

Hell, it even spills over onto actual heroes, who in the first chapter stand around like chumps waiting for “someone with a better quirk” to come and do something about the sludge villain, because they don’t have the perfect quirk to solve the problem themselves, so they don’t even try.

Of course, even if they did try, it might not be welcomed. Consider cases where people wanted to do good, like Gentle Criminal or Vigilantes' Koichi, but had their road to heroism blocked—this led them to villainy or vigilantism, which in turn can lead to arrest and possible prison time, with all the attendant stigma.

Restricting quirk use to heroes-only has impacts beyond just how it distorts people’s desire to help, too. Evidence in the manga suggests that some people feel a stronger biological drive to use their quirks than others. What options do those people have, then, if their quirks—or their personalities—don’t seem naturally cut out for heroism?

In Tamaki Amajiki’s flashback in Chapter 140, a teacher tells his class, “People make fine use of their quirks at any number of jobs. Being a hero’s not the only option. How will you be useful to society in the future? That’s what we’re here to explore in quirk training.” This is the scene in the manga that most explicitly tells us that other avenues for quirk use exist, but we’re never once shown what those avenues might be. At best, this suggests that those avenues are drastically limited (e.g. only available to those whose quirks are deemed “useful to society”) and/or poorly explained to people in-universe—else why would Uraraka have chosen heroism despite her lack of interest in it if she could have just gotten some kind of job license for her quirk? At worst, it’s an example of Horikoshi throwing in a line that contradicts the surrounding canon. Either way, we’re left with people who feel a strong drive to use their quirks being pressured into heroism or straying into villainy for lack of other acceptable outlets.

All of these issues could be mitigated by less draconian restrictions on quirks—which Destro's followers are the only characters in the manga we've actively seen pushing for, rather than just heard about second-hand—and by not using an ideologically charged word like “heroes” to describe a glorified independent police force. Allowing people to freely use their quirks[54] means fewer people being pushed into a heroics job they're unsuited for, means fewer people being pushed into villainy, means a more rounded view on how quirks can be used, leading to less quirk-based prejudice and less—well, let’s talk some about false dichotomies.

All For Nothing, Nothing For All

Shigaraki stands as a fundamental accusation of the way the hero/civilian dynamic exacerbates the Bystander Effect, making people think of themselves as powerless, while at the same time putting untenable pressure on heroes to be perfect victory machines who don't experience pain or doubt or weakness. He further attests that this dynamic pushes out people who don't fit either category—victim or hero—making them villains. This is one of the fundamental thematic conflicts of the series—is one hero enough? Are heroes themselves enough? What are heroes, what do they fight, and what should they be fighting? Who deserves to be “saved” and what does it mean, anyway, to “save” someone? What happens to the people who aren’t saved? How will the world grapple with the consequences, the resentment, that stem from that failure?

In his work Underground, written to grapple with and criticize the way Japanese media covered the sarin gas attacks, author Murakami Haruki talked about the response to the incident being to call the members of Aum Shinrikyo evil, insane, diseased, other. They were spoken of as a monstrous fringe that could not have been predicted, about which nothing could have been done, rather than examined as bright, well-educated young people who by all accounts ought to have had good futures ahead of them but instead spiraled down into a doomsday cult. Murakami asserted that, because the Japanese public was unwilling to ask how and why that happened, was unwilling to self-examine, the country was locking itself into a repeating cycle. Memorably, he wrote, “Most Japanese seem ready to pack up the whole incident in a trunk labeled THINGS OVER AND DONE WITH,” to describe this resolute incuriosity, the strong aversion to looking into the face of evil and trying to find the humanity within it.

In this post and its follow-up, tumblr user @robotlesbianjavert discusses the problems that stem from that exact tendency as portrayed in My Hero Academia. She says, “Only making decisions that benefit the greater good is not the real solution that the narrative is rooting for. Not so long as it fails to recognize and address the needs of the victims that still come of it.” Hero Society will never stop creating its own villains so long as, every time it fails people, it does nothing but shrug and write off the victims as unavoidable, inevitable sacrifices for the greater good.

I would also like to highlight her point—which I hope she one day posts her own full essay on—about the way All For One and One For All serve as two extreme poles of equally unsustainable visions for society. This dynamic is all over the manga.

There are the characters of AFO and his younger brother themselves, each forever locked in battle to prove the correctness of his own way of thinking, and forever talking past the other even when they’re face to face.

There’s the contrast of heroes, giving their all to help strangers even when it hurts the people they love, with villains, giving their all to help the people they love even when it hurts strangers.

The flaws in the One For All model can be seen in the multilayered ravages it inflicted on All Might physically, emotionally, and socially. Thus, one for all is not always ideal.

The strengths of the All For One model can be seen in a team of heroes and police combining their efforts and will to help one single person—Eri. Nighteye even highlights this with his speech about everyone’s efforts coalescing into Midoriya and helping him to “twist fate.” Thus, all for one is not always about selfishness.

Once you start looking for it, this duality shows up everywhere, and I think—I hope—it’s an angle Horikoshi is conscious of. The obvious solution is that the extremes of this society are all undesirable—that total selflessness and total selfishness are equally unsustainable, and both are, ultimately, damaging. A more holistic approach is needed, yet if a holistic approach is what the manga ultimately proves to be seeking, it makes the mass arrest of the PLF particularly problematic, if it’s allowed to stand unchallenged. You cannot just choose not to see 115,000 dissatisfied people—some way or another, you have to reckon with them, and if you don’t do it in a way that actually helps them address whatever their core problem is, you’re just setting yourself up for more of the same further down the line.

The MLA believed that they were fighting for a just cause, for freedom, for the future. They absolutely had issues—Geten’s words indicate that much—but they were issues that would have been much better addressed by actually challenging them openly, rather than suppressing them. If they couldn’t get society to agree right away that the use of one’s quirk should be as unregulated as the use of one’s hands, maybe they would have accepted a tiered license approach to quirk use as a good starting compromise. If they wanted totally unhindered quirk use, such that people could murder with impunity? Well, that would never have gotten past the House of Representatives, but maybe a bill declaring that crimes committed by quirks should be treated no differently than crimes committed via any other means would have. A weeklong debate on the Diet floor would have stood a much greater chance of e.g. addressing the needs of the quirkless than the MLA alone would have bothered with.

The MLA didn’t get to have that kind of debate. Instead, they ran headfirst into Shigaraki Tomura, who made them far more dangerous. And yet… For all that Shigaraki twisted them, he didn’t change them so much that Re-Destro couldn’t still see the light of his ideals within them. Furthermore, even though the PLF didn’t win the battle we call the War Arc, it may be that they’re well on their way to winning the actual war.

“The Seeds Are Already Sown”

So what did the PLF actually want? Well, we have a few sources on that—Shigaraki’s desire to destroy “everything,” the cloned Re-Destro’s vision of liberation through “order without order,” and so forth. But a very instructive place to look is Hawks’ doomsaying in Chapter 258. While the PLF is a bit too scattered or imprisoned to appreciate it, a shocking number of the things Hawks laid out for the audience have actually come about, even if they didn’t happen exactly as the PLF planned. Consider:

Bring down the status quo by annihilating all heroes. Heroes—a number of whom died the day of the raid—are retiring in mass numbers. As the manga describes it, they are “being put through a sieve.” They certainly haven’t all been annihilated, but the ones remaining are having to do the work with little in the way of thanks or glory—the false heroes Stain spoke of have left the table.

They plan to attack all major cities at once throughout the nation. Gigantomachia stampeded over more than twenty cities in the space of less than an hour. A bunch of them were surely not major cities, but all the same, it was a rampage that caught the heroes almost completely off-guard (because they were all tied up arresting the PLF and didn’t think Machia would be an issue), leading to massive collateral damage and unspeakable loss of life.

With society brought to a lawless standstill… Thanks to AFO’s prison breaks, a bunch of villains are now out there raising hell to their hearts’ content, and there aren’t enough heroes around to always respond in a timely fashion. They’re having to open up schools as shelter zones, evacuating entire cities, which the common people respond to predictably poorly, leading to groups of people who were not previously villainous deciding to take the law into their own hands.

…Re-Destro and the Hearts & Minds Party will storm the political world. In Chapter 297, the less openly fascist guard worries that the remaining factions of the HMP[55] will still be stirring up trouble on the political front, especially given the enormous wave of brand-new complaints about human rights violations that he doubtlessly figured were incoming.

They will distribute weapons and extol the virtues of self-defense, calling it true freedom. Whether Detnerat picked up the pace of its black-market support goods sales, bankrolled Giran doing the same, or some other groups—yakuza, perhaps—stepped up, we already know that there are weapons and support goods circulating throughout society, and that people are using them for self-defense.

These people will throw the world into chaos and enthrone Shigaraki atop the rubble. The second coming of All For One. Far more so than anyone in the PLF would have wanted, this one has come horribly true with the AFO vestige’s possession of Shigaraki.[56]

While it is perhaps karmic that the PLF is in no position to enjoy the fruits of their villainous efforts, it’s striking how much of what they wanted has come about anyway. And how much of this can really be undone or wound back? Complete societal breakdown isn’t the kind of genie you can easily rebottle, and this, I think, is particularly illustrated by the civilians Yo and Tatami encounter in Chapter 307.

I’d like to wind this essay down by zooming in on that encounter somewhat.

The group of people the Ketsubutsu pair encounter in 307 are not nice, but neither are they violent. Having, like so many others, lost faith in heroes to protect them, they want only to protect their hometown and for heroes to leave them be. They’ve fended off a few small-time villain attacks and are bluntly uninterested in cooperating with condescending heroes (an impression Yo is not helping to mitigate) who have done nothing but disappoint them.

The spokesman in particular feels to me like someone who’s suffered a significant personal loss. The shadow over his eyes here is telling. (Chapter 307)

When Muscular shows up, they are 100% ready to put their lives where their mouths are. They are all in the process of charging outside, first to stop their town from suffering more damage, then to back up a hero kid they just got done telling to buzz off. And you know? It’s possible—probable, even!—that Muscular would have murdered every last one of them, and them charging in to fight him would have led to a horrific tragedy, one more to stack atop the pile.

And yet, while the narrative doesn’t allow them to actually assist,[57] neither does it entirely rebuke them, in the end. When all is said and done, the civilians agree to hear Tatami and Yo out, and they help Tatami get Yo inside for medical attention. The leader is a little abashed, but he doesn’t bow his head and admit to being wrong; his group doesn’t meekly submit to being herded to shelter. And that’s because the narrative is—wisely—unwilling to say that they’re wrong.

After all, how could it?

Midoriya Izuku and the jaded civilian's instincts. (Chapters 1 and 307)

For a last comparison, remember that in the first chapter, Midoriya Izuku—quirkless, untrained Midoriya Izuku—dove into a fight he had no way of winning, no way of even affecting. All he was doing was endangering himself and making the sludge villain even harder to target. Still, All Might and the narrative alike praised him for his action, because it was driven by a “desire to save.” In Chapter 307, a group of undertrained civilians witnesses a high school boy being attacked by the highest tier of villain their society knows, a Tartarus escapee, a gleeful and unrepentant serial killer with a devastatingly powerful quirk. Their response is to gather up their weapons and numbers and dive in to try and help. Regardless of the weakness of their quirks, regardless of their lack of training, regardless of the danger to their lives, their instinct is the same as Midoriya’s was back then—“the desire to save.”

How could the narrative possibly tell us that they're wrong?

And if they aren’t wrong, this group of people who are so very close to the vision the PLF had for the world after their revolution, the narrative simply cannot expect to retain the slightest hint of credibility if it tries to tell us that the PLF are worth nothing more than an authorial handwave and the slamming of a cell door.

Conclusion

What we are seeing in the manga now is a society that is fumbling towards a new way. It isn’t perfect; it has a lot of wrinkles to iron out. Yet in some ways, if this is a society that has gone back in time, it is also a society that has a chance to chart a different path forward than it did before, a more inclusive path, a more balanced one. Heroes can still exist in the same way that surgeons and emergency responders exist, but that doesn't mean people throw their first aid kits in the garbage.

People protest that untrained civilians using their quirks leads to collateral damage, and that's true. The same would be true, however, if a nation that relied solely on public transit suddenly faced the total breakdown of that system and found that, if they wanted to get anywhere farther than walking distance, they had to get behind the wheel of a car and drive there themselves with no previous experience handling a motor vehicle. With some basic training, or perhaps a test and associated license that is as ubiquitous as a driver's license, how much of the collateral damage caused by civilians fighting might be reduced? How might people feel more empowered to act when necessary?

I very much want to see that future in the manga. It will feel terribly bitter, however, if the people who always believed in that future the most don’t get to see it themselves.

Bit characters are bit characters, I know. Terrorists in fiction don’t typically get to walk away scot-free. But numbers aren’t just numbers, even in fiction, even when they’re villains. If all Horikoshi wanted was a sufficiently large, scary threat to throw his heroes up against, he should have stuck with mindless Noumu or maniacal robots. He didn’t. He chose to make that threat human. He cannot now choose to dehumanize the threat, just because those humans are no longer convenient to his story.

Or at least, he can’t make me look at his doing so as anything other than appalling—ahistorical, absurd, and unsustainable.

Come back next time for sources and further reading.

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[51] And yes, as always, I do think that Geten-whose-name-means-Apocrypha is a radical, not a reliable barometer for the MLA norm.

[52] Contrasting Toga, the standard-bearer for bad quirks on the villain side.

[53] We don’t know if that practice—so widespread it became the subject of a long-running TV program—survived the Advent and raised crime rate, but if it didn’t, that only further suggests that kids wandering the streets unattended are probably in need of assistance.

[54] Within the same bounds other freedoms exist, e.g. they’re not unduly burdening others.

[55] Small political parties in Japan merge and fragment all the time, particularly in times of crisis, so it’s not surprising that the HMP has some sub-groups. I am somewhat surprised that these factions themselves weren’t dissolved as well, given the heavy-handedness on display everywhere else. This is about the only thing that suggests that the arrests might not be as totally over-the-top as is otherwise implied, though really, if that’s the case, it just brings us back to the problem of all the people who probably slipped the net if the HPSC did opt to undercompensate.

[56] Another enormous thematic issue I have with tossing away the PLF like this is that it renders Shigaraki and the League’s hard-fought victories in My Villain Academia all but meaningless—worse than meaningless, since settling into the villa instead of staying on the run or bunking up with Ujiko wound up losing them Twice—but that’s more a problem with the writing of Shigaraki’s arc than the themes of the series as a whole. Certainly, fumbling Shigaraki’s arc will have a nigh-incomparable impact on the themes of the series as a whole, but there’s time to salvage his situation yet, so I’m crossing my fingers and reserving judgement on that for now.

[57] It should have.

[neuxue]

You know that thing where Egwene murders the sul'dam during the attack on the White Tower? Do you think that was supposed to be a trouble sign for her character, or was it just Sanderson either doing his OOC fan service stuff or not realizing he wrote the hero committing murder? Also her self-hype stream of conscious while she's being carried out, how she's just like a hero of the Horn, etc. The only time a main character came close was Rand in PoD. Danger sign or 4th wall breaking fanservice?

Loving the multiple false dichotomies here that basically translate to ‘do you think it’s bad writing or Egwene Is Evil? No other options are possible’. 

On killing the sul’dam: given that this occurs during a battle (and one in which Egwene is on the initially defensive side), her killing an enemy combatant wouldn’t typically be considered murder by most accepted conventions of warfare, especially those that seem to apply in canon. And she’s hardly the only heroic character with a body count (especially, again, in battle).

On the ‘self-hype stream of conscious’ [sic]: I mean, okay, if you dislike Egwene I suppose it could be annoying to read her thinking good things about herself? But I feel like it takes a fair bit of effort to read it as ominous rather than as a kind of half-delirious, relieved, and exhausted ‘I did it’. Her focus for several books now has been on saving/restoring/healing the White Tower and the Aes Sedai, and the Tower very nearly fell here and she played a rather important role in keeping it from crumbling, and so I read this as just... exhausted victory, and the realisation that she did it. That she faced an existential threat and against all odds held it at bay. Yes, of course there’s a cost, and it’s part of the repeated theme of should-be allies fighting each other rather than the true threat of the Shadow, but that’s a bigger-picture issue and in this isolated moment I think any character would be allowed a moment of relief and pride after so long a time of fighting and struggle and uncertainty.

Also it’s really not the only time we see something like this in a character’s thoughts; they’re not all self-deprecatory all the time.

[sunnykeysmash]

The connection between Brian LeFevre, death and macdennis/sunny meta

In my time obsessing over sunny recently I ended up noticing interesting stuff that I’m gonna try to show here, that was greatly expanded in s14 and that I believe gives us great odds over whether dennis will be acknowledged as gay in s15 or not. 

Thesis: There has been an ongoing dichotomy, or “choice”, for Dennis, between Brian/Death/Son/Mandy and Dennis/Life/Love/Mac. Additionally, there has been purposeful ambiguity between what is sunny meta and what is dennis meta in season 14, enough for me to consider them one and the same in most cases. Information which puts Big Mo under a completely new light.

Long analysis under the cut.

Basically, Brian has been symbolically linked to death, thanks to an extensive use of metaphors and parallels, because Brian represents the death of Dennis’ identity. Not a true physical death, but the death of Dennis as a person.

Starting from the very beginning, of course, Brian is a dead guy.

In Dennis’ Double Life, it’s established textually, metatextually and visually that Dennis has an actual mirroring double life (Mandy vs Mac, Brian vs Dennis) and is stuck between the two of them.

This is also thanks to the heavy callbacks to suburbs. Here’s an excerpt from a previous analysis of mine explaining it:

(read more here, seriously I recommend it)

During this episode Dennis’ actually eventually fakes Brian’s death to try to get out of trouble, which is the second clear link to death for the persona.

It doesn’t work.

Mandy: “You can open your eyes now, I know you're not dead.”

Which also works as the first acknowledgement of Dennis not really wanting what the Brian life entails, as it’s a character death as much as it is the death of Dennis’ true wishes. He is not dead, he is not Brian, who IS dead.

Then, as he holds his son, something changes inside him. Suddenly, he is a father. His emotional involvement in choosing between the two lives changes drastically with this.

Nevertheless at the end of the episode Dennis is once again presented with the clear choice, which from this point forward I will address as Son/Death vs Love/Life, he looks at the RPG looming in the background and decides to go, not before a long hesitation and stopping immediately when he thought he was being asked not to go, showing us where his heart lies.

This, him choosing to go away, is because at this point in time, Dennis is still not in the right headspace to accept the right path for him. As Chop will put it, he feels “lonely and needs to do something extreme to feel special”, most of all though he feels lost. The conflicts that started in Boggs and Suburbs still make him unsure, and the presence of his son makes him feel like he has to be better for him, despite himself.

As he goes away, Mac blows up Dennis’ Range Rover with the RPG, car which is later in New Wheels metaphorically linked to Dennis’ identity.

Basically, as Dennis chooses Brian’s life, his actual identity dies.

So during the first half of season 13, he is nobody. He is not Brian and he’s struggling to be Dennis. He’s trying to get back into his old identity, desperate for any semblance of control and to belong, so he ends up looking like a caricature of himself, or rather, precisely who the gang thinks he is and who they see him as, not who he truly is.

New Wheels perfectly shows Dennis desperate to belong when he finds a new group of people, he tries on a whole new and different identity, which isn’t entirely him, but that at least feels welcoming enough. But it’s also a showcase of what Dennis truly wanted, which is to be acknowledged and seen by the gang, but particularly by Mac, feel like he matters to them and to him.

I say Mac specifically because the framing during the beginning scene seems to be fixated on a behind-Mac perspective on Dennis, almost like the conversation were happening just between the two of them, like Dennis was talking to him specifically when he pleads for questions.

These are all different shots, not the same one.

By the end of the episode he finally becomes himself again. And that’s that for s13.

Another thing worth pointing out though is that Dennis apparently has not been kicked out from ND, he himself says “I may go back” in New Wheels, and although in context it sounds more like an empty threat, it’s not empty because he can’t go back, it’s empty because he doesn’t really want to, as can be guessed thanks to his tone. This is because it’s then reinforced at the end of Chop with these lines of dialogue:

Charlie: “I can't believe how quick you gave up Poppins' puppies, though, you know? You didn't even think about keeping 'em.” Mac: “Well, that's a lot of responsibility, Charlie, right? And plus, there's no doggy paternity test to actually prove that they were Poppins' puppies in the first place. But, hey, if Poppins wants to stop by and say, "What's up?" and, like, be a dad for while, he's gonna. Or he won't. Dennis: “Yeah, that's how I do. That's how I do.”

Because of this, it can and should also be argued that the choice I am explaining in this analysis is something that Dennis still has to make, because he is, as it stands, still stuck between the two lives, and he has to settle on one, so choose between them, in order for the struggle to end. During all of s14 he is stuck trying to figure out which of the two he should choose, which is also the cause of his growing frustration. Currently speaking, getting a little speculatory here, I think everything feels like death to him, which is why he is having such a hard time deciding. He obviously doesn’t know the outcome of either option, because he’s not the audience or RCG, which means either of them can potentially kill him, and they both feel like they might to him.

Now, in season 14 is where all of this (the dichotomy of Death/Son vs Life/Love) starts to really become prominent in metatext, and this happens as the episodes start to purposefully confuse meta about the show itself with meta about Dennis. Let’s go through it in order one episode at a time, as that’s easier for me to dissect.

First of all, the backwards message at the end of all season 14 episodes, which is this:

“They leave but they all come back”

Is already a clear example of what I’m talking about. Is it about the show because of the false ending of Big Mo which actually ends with the message that “they’ll never stop doing sunny”? Is it about Dennis coming back from North Dakota? Unclear, but that’s entirely on purpose.

Episode 1: The Gang Gets Romantic

Now, there isn’t any clear connection to the choice as far as I am aware, but it is a first approach to the themes of romantic love, death, sons, as a whole. In this episode, while Frank and Charlie are paired with a father and son, Mac and Dennis get paired with a couple mourning a son (Dennis Jr, the “son” in the metaphor, is dead, but more in general it’s pointing to them slowly healing from the Suburbs conflict in my opinion though).

As a bonus fact, Charlie+Frank have always been set up to mirror Mac+Dennis. It is explicitly said in the Mac and Dennis Break Up commentary, and it shows in a bunch of episodes such as Dines Out, Chokes, or hell that one time Frank got a Charlie mannequin. Anyway, word of god, they are parallels.

TGGR presents us with two plotlines that mirror each other while going in the exact opposite direction, and the mirror element is the “structure”. Charlie and Frank’s plotline follows the romcom tropes closely, its structure, and is thus rewarded with a positive ending. Mac and Dennis’ plotline struggles against them (since the tropes are applying to Mac+Dennis, not Dennis+Lisa and Mac+Greg), which is why their plotline resolves negatively.

At the same time, this episode can have a sunny meta interpretation.

In this perspective, the Mac+Dennis plotline is the option for RCG to end sunny and each do their own thing, while the Charlie+Frank plotline is the option to keep it going, and at the end they conclude with the C+F one, seeing as it’s the option to keep going, which is ultimately what RCG wants.

So when this dialogue happens:

Mac: “You think they're gonna give us a bad review?” Dennis: “Yeah.” Mac: “I guess we're not gonna get that romantic comedy ending after all.”

It is about RCG choosing not to end the show (supported later by Big Mo), as it would not provide anything positive.

Or this:

Dennis: “It just feels like a lot of effort, and it feels desperate, you know what I mean? Like, I never put this much work into banging some cute meat.”

It can be interpreted as the effort to win an Emmy, especially since the Mac+Dennis plotline is the tired one, the one that’s failing.

And then when Alexi and Nikki say they’ll be back “next year”, and Charlie yells back “I love you!”, it can be interpreted that metaphorically Alexi and Nikki are sunny. Which also creates another link between love and the show continuing, or “staying alive”.

Finally, all the talk about “structure” and “acts”, particularly the three act structure, is a writer’s process, which also serves as an additional link to the RCG meta interpretation.

Episode 2: Thunder Gun 4: Maximum Cool

This episode leans heavily in the dichotomy, through various pieces of dialogue.

Starting from this:

Girl: "So, this is the midpoint twist. Thundergun finding out he has a son." Frank: "He has a son?" Girl: "Yes." Frank: "But how is this the twist? I mean, because he's got a kid? I mean, he's probably got a thousand kids, all the raw-dog loads he drops."

Which also calls back to the episode prior, where Dee’s role is called “diversionary plot-twist at best”. Now, all these words, midpoint and diversionary, imply an endgoal that is also opposite of what the twist shows.

The twist, obviously, being that Dennis has a secret life with a girl and a son.

It continues:

Dennis: “We’re feeling a lot of outrage right now, you know, because we want something, and we know we deserve it, - but we’re not getting it. [...] I wanna cling to the way things were, but they’re done. […] Let’s run from this.”

Being now aware of the metatext from Big Mo, once again, is this about RCG not getting an Emmy, being discouraged and wanting to end the show because they’re feeling stuck? Or is it about Dennis running away to North Dakota after he realizes in DDL that things have changed permanently despite Mac’s attempt at keeping them the exact same (the apartment restoration)?

The ambiguity that connects Dennis meta with Sunny/RCG meta continues.

Finally:

Dennis “No-no, you guys don’t get it. It’s a cliffhanger. Yeah? It’s a cliffhanger. We’re gonna find out what happened to John in the next movie, Thunder Gun 5.”

Dennis himself going against what is metaphorically his choice in DDL.

Let’s actually look into that, into what happens to Thundergun. 

He sacrifices himself for his son, and dies in the process. Said film is then leaked by the gang and the audience hates it, so the franchise decides to “go back to its roots”. Very clearly sunny meta, but it can absolutely also be seen as Dennis meta. Dennis hating his choice (his thunderson ending) and deciding to come back (go back to his roots).

Additionally, Dennis literally says “give me dong or give me death” at one point, which in the context of all of this feels rather significant, you know?

Episode 3: Dee Day

Surprisingly, and thankfully for me, not much that I can see.

There is this:

Dennis: “And who cares about her feelings anyway? Nobody, that’s who. What about my feelings? Now, that’s interesting, okay?”

Which implies something going on with Dennis’ feelings, and which will more substantially be addressed by Jumper when it’s implied that Dennis tries to completely disregard them when it comes to choices, but other than that, really not much else.

Episode 4: The Gang Chokes

Once again we see a Mac+Dennis and Charlie+Frank parallel conflict. Charlie and Frank resolve their own with words (that mirror Dines Out) while Mac and Dennis resolve theirs with actions, while also solving the much bigger conflicts started by Suburbs (again, check out the other analysis for more context on this) and DDL. 

It should also be stressed that Chokes starts by saying:

Charlie: “Uh, guys, I'd like to raise a glass to Frank. Frank, another year has gone by since you came into my life.”

He’s making a toast, which implies that they are celebrating their anniversary, as they were in Dines Out, and so the parallel becomes not only implied in dialogue as I’m about to show, but direct. It is unclear whether this is also a monthly dinner for Mac and Dennis or not, as I don’t think it was ever specified one way or the other.

As for the parallel in dialogue.

In Dines Out:

Mac: “I didn't have your back before, but now I'm gonna be the wind beneath your wings.”

In Chokes:

Frank (to the Waiter): “Hey, you had my back. Now I'm gonna have yours.”

and

Charlie: “Look, Frank, I'm sorry, dude. I screwed up, man. I should've saved you, and I'll always save you from now on, I promise.” Frank: “Thanks, Charlie. I knew you had my back.”

With Brian representing a death for Dennis, it is implied that what Charlie and Frank are saying in words is supposed to be fully applicable for Mac and Dennis, as there is a parallel between Frank almost dying by choking and Dennis almost dying by going to ND.

Therefore, this is about Dennis going to North Dakota and how he wanted to be stopped, “saved” by Mac. This is Mac apologizing, Dennis accepting the apology, and them implicitly moving forward from this conflict in their relationship and for any similar ones in the future if they present themselves. Mac learning the tools to deal with it, “I’ll always save you from now on”.

Which in a way further solidifies that the option that isn’t Brian, Death, Son, Mandy is fully intended as Dennis, Life, Love, Mac. Mac plays a role in the second option, so when choosing life, love, etc, Mac will be involved. As he is the savior in the context.

Continuing on Chokes, the episode itself again focuses a lot on death, both real and perceived, and being saved. There are three main points for this.

First point: Frank’s death.

So, he almost dies and no one helps. Sound familiar? It’s what happened when Dennis went to ND. As a result of no one helping him, Frank lashes out and decides to move out and distance himself. It is then shown that Frank keeps missing Charlie and comparing the Waiter to him subconsciously. It is constantly shown that Frank rejects Charlie’s attempts at helping him despite actually needing him. Which is also what applies to Mac and Dennis, throughout the episode Dennis is shown needing Mac’s help and taking it while verbally refusing it.

Charlie proposes to chew Frank’s food, Frank refuses his help, Frank chokes, Charlie doesn’t help.

Mac constantly helps Dennis, Dennis starts to push him away, Dennis “dies” (chooses to move to ND), Mac doesn’t help.

The episode concludes with the acknowledgement that they should’ve helped, and with the offended part forgiving the other.

Second point: Dee’s death

She witnesses death and is subsequently enthralled by it, seeking thrill by living on the edge. We can draw a parallel to Dennis’ enjoyment in “living in another man’s skin”, you know, “getting off”. It’s how Dennis started the double life he then got lost inside after all, it gave him a thrill. Then, it happened to him exactly what ends up happening to Dee. She experiences real death, is scared shitless by it, and decides to never do it again, going as far as to say this:

Dee: “I saw the other side. I didn't like it. I hated it. It was just blackness. There's nothing there. It's just dark. That's it. Just lights out. I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to live on the edge. I don't want to die.”

So once again the choice rests on LIFE, it is like this for Dee, as it is for Sunny, as it is for Dennis.

It’s also interesting to point out that Dee is rescued by a third party, after Mac is able to say “No”; as if symbolically that is what should’ve happened to save Dennis, back when he was about to go. A “no”, to stop him.

Third point: Dennis’ death

Dennis witnesses Frank dying and no one helping him and is immediately reminded of his own situation, which he then proceeds to discuss when at home, with Mac. Thanks to Dennis making this correlation we can once again assume that it is meant to be interpreted as a nod to the ND twist. Not only this but it then keeps linking Dennis to the concept of death and being saved.

This dialogue happens:

Mac: “I would've stepped in, but, of course, I was taking my cues from you.” Dennis: “Why?” Mac: “Well, you didn't tell me whether I should save him or not.” Dennis: “But why? I mean, why do I still have to tell you what to do? Why do I still have to order your dinners for you? And why is it up to me to decide whether or not you're going to save a man's life? You know what the problem is? I can't depend on you. I can't depend on anyone. You know, I mean, if that had been me choking tonight, no one would've saved me.” Mac: “No. I would've saved you, Dennis. I would have saved you. If you told me to.” Dennis: “Oh, Jesus Christ if I told you to?”

Dennis is clearly still upset about no one helping him when he needed it, which is, no one stopping him from making the worst decision of his life, a well established metaphorical death, and is projecting this frustration by applying it to Frank’s situation.

Later on, again:

Dennis: “Christ. I feel like I'm dying.” Mac: “Just let me help you, Dennis!”

Then:

Mac: “Look, all the gluten and the sugar and the dairy just wreaks havoc on his system, you know? And it makes him so weak. And then he's gonna depend on me to take care of him, to bring him back from the brink of death.”

Or “from making a wrong decision”.

Continuing:

Dee: “But if you want Dennis to really depend on you, you’re gonna have to save his life for real.”

And:

Dennis: “So you were still gonna rely on a decision that somebody else made, only, this time, you were potentially gonna kill a man?”

In which Dennis is once again, always without fail, the dying man, and Mac the person who saves him, or tries to. Dennis is very adamant in wanting Mac to choose for himself, which is surprising for a man so “obsessed with control”, and specifically it ticks him off that Mac’s decision was once again gonna provoke the death of a man because he couldn’t take action.

All this implied connection between Dennis, North Dakota and Death reinforces the Death/Brian aspect, while also reinforcing the Life/Mac one, as it is Mac that is supposed to save Dennis.

Episode 5: The Gang Texts

A shorter one, but here things get a little interesting, because the dichotomy is highlighted by one particular joke.

Mac: “Bathrooms at zoos are, like, big Grindr spots for closeted dads.”

Mac says this, then later on, in comes Dennis, a dad, and if it weren’t enough, it’s Mac himself who points to the situation once again by asking if it’s a “grindr thing”.

So going with this, his particular struggle (Death/Son vs Life/Love) is being highlighted with a very fitting choice of words, as he is a dad, and so... also closeted. Going with this. These are the words chosen to describe him in the joke, and it ends up being very telling overall.

Episode 6: The Janitor Always Mops Twice

Nothing, pretty much. lol

I’m gonna use this empty space to write that I just realized that Mac is even more linked to the theme of romantic love because he gifts the RPG specifically on Valentines Day.

Also, generally speaking, Dennis leaving would imply the death of the show, so that’s another way in which dennis meta and sunny meta are linked, because every time one is referenced, the other is automatically implied. The show cannot exist without Dennis in it, and Dennis cannot exist if the show ends. And if that’s not enough, in Big Mo they outright link the end of the show to actual death, in a lot of ways that I’m gonna look into in a bit, so once again, remember that.

Finally, Dennis is very adamant on Mac acting in s14 because if Mac were to do it, he would basically make the decision for Dennis, something that he used to do all the time, if you recall Mac and Dennis Break Up.

Episode 7: The Gang Solves Global Warming

The subject itself can be considered a slow death of sorts, so it feels especially significant that it’s Dennis the member of the gang who cares most about stopping it, despite not being able to because Mac doesn’t help him.

That’s not the only reason he fails at the end though.

He keeps trying to be rational and keep feelings out of it, to rationalize with the situation, which is what ultimately crushes him, as that’s impossible long term.

In this episode, he keeps getting mad at Mac for not taking action and instead trusting God’s will.

Frank: “Where is your God now?” Mac: “He will reveal himself at some point.” Dennis: “Well, is he gonna do it before all these people revolt and destroy the place?” Mac: “I don’t know. I don’t question God’s will. If he wants to destroy the Earth, that’s on him. - I support it!”

I think this is stretching it a bit, but this can also be read as Mac accepting Dennis’ decision to leave despite hating it. Dennis is also frequently presented as “God” so it would make some sense.

The crowd “not wanting to stop” and rioting can be read as sunny meta also, though that’s also kind of a stretch to me, I’m pointing it out.

In the end, the whole episode Dennis and Mac keep arguing about action vs inaction, with Dennis insisting that Mac should take action and being distressed when he doesn’t. They also keep arguing about rationality vs God, something that will come up again in Jumper, surprisingly.

Episode 8: Paddy's Has a Jumper

Now, starting from the very obvious, because that’s what’s easy to me, the jumper is called Bryan O’Brien, and if that doesn’t scream Brian=death, then boy I don’t know what does.

Not only that, but the episode spends a significant portion really stressing and beating you over the head with the fact that the jumper is paralleling Dennis.

Not only is Frank mistaken for the father, but Dennis’ dialogue as a whole really insists on this in multiple points. But again let’s go in order.

Discussing his motivations and intentions:

Mac: ”I mean, maybe God is testing us.” Dee: “He's not gonna do anything. This is a classic cry for help.”

Plus, this episode feels like a writers’ room. When they say stuff like:

Charlie: “It doesn't matter if he wants to or he doesn't want to. He's not gonna die falling from that height.” Dennis: “Whoa. Hard disagree, pal. You could absolutely die if you jump from that height.”

This to me sounds equally about RCG discussing the choice for themselves (implying they did at one point consider outright killing Dennis, or at least argued the theoreticals of it in the writers room, as in “would he actually even die with a decision like that?”) as it is the characters arguing the ND thing in the metaphorical sense, with Dennis insisting that a jump would be fatal while the gang thinks he’s completely fine. So, again, the jump represents him moving to North Dakota, as we’ll see.

Also, in general, the whole episode sounds like RCG arguing over whether they should pull the plug on their own show or not (”become a suicide bar”, because again, without Dennis there is no show, if he chooses death, so does the show), RCG themselves stuck in Dennis’ choice. In particular with the whole “Could he? Would he? (choose one or the other?) Should we?”.

But in addition to this, the algorithm, actually algorithms in general, are once again something that Dennis uses regularly to solve his own problems (D.E.N.N.I.S system, hello), which is his downfall.

Dennis: “Based on the analytical conclusions that we draw here, we're gonna be able to come up with a mathematically-accurate, non-emotional answer to all of our questions. Okay? We just need to think like a computer.”

Speaking of rationality vs feelings.

Mac: “Let's not bring science into it. Okay? I mean, this is life or death. This is God's territory. All right? I mean, there is no science.”

Now, this is very important because it allows me to talk about another thing. If it hadn’t been clear enough by now, this choice Dennis is presented with is also one between rationality and feelings.

Choosing to care for your son and move to ND, that is the rational choice, and rational is everything Dennis has always tried to be, especially in this episode and in Global Warming (which also mentions God a lot!).

But throughout s12-13-14, as I have highlighted in this post so far, we have seen where Dennis’ heart lies, his feelings.

It is funny to notice that both in Global Warming and in Jumper, Mac is the half who keeps arguing for the side of religion, of faith, of feelings, while Dennis keeps arguing for the side of rationality, of objectivity, always wanting to keep feelings completely out of the equation.

Dennis: “I think I have a way that we can solve this argument without human emotion mucking it all up.”

Then:

Charlie: “I think what we learned is that there's no way that the jumper's gonna die from this height. You know? So there's no reason for us to do anything about it.”

Once again the gang not recognizing the gravity of the situation and choosing inaction, to which Dennis seems unsure and wants to do more testing.

Ok so, here’s where things get interesting, the biggest parallel links between Dennis and Bryan are brought to light as they are looking through his social media.

“Yeah, it looks like he likes to travel. He was recently on a cruise.”

Referring to how Dennis actually liked being in another man’s skin in general, and he was recently away to do just that.

The Gang: “Okay, so it looks like he's got a lot to live for.” “He's eating food.” Dennis: “Or-or-or is he? Because is-is that just what he wants you to believe?”

Once again it’s Dennis counterarguing, specifically on the points that sound most like himself, though this irony is lost on him. This also once again sounds like RCG discussing Dennis as a character and how the choice would actually impact him and has impacted him.

Generally, speaking about Dennis, everyone thought he was gonna be fine because on the surface, his choice in the s12 finale sounds like a pretty sweet deal, and exactly what Dennis has supposedly wanted ever since The Gang Misses The Boat, though even that episode itself proves that it simply isn’t what is right for him.

“He's hardly a child, but he's still hanging on to his youth. That suggests to me that maybe he's got some daddy issues. Abandonment, abuse.”

All things that perfectly apply to Dennis and that give us interesting insight on him.

“But recently the girlfriend, she's disappeared from his pictures, which tells me that, uh, she probably broke up with him, you know, because of all his father issues, and 'cause he's an alcoholic, and because of the copious requests for butt-eating, which, she was thinking was more of a one-time thing, and he was thinking, this is a thing now, like, from now on.”

Disregarding Dennis’ surprisingly canonical love for getting his butt ate, lol (despite how that could count as more indication of where his true feelings lie, knowing RCG and what their writing intentions might be), he brings out alcoholism out of seemingly nowhere, another thing that again confirms the link between Dennis and the jumper, Bryan.

Dennis: “Basically, what we've concluded is that it would actually be good for the bar if this guy jumps and dies. So the answer to the question of "should we get involved?" is actually yes. [...] You see, we've already established that this guy wants to die and that it would actually benefit our bar if he dies. Now, of course, from an emotional standpoint, we feel as though we should get involved, we feel as though we should save this guy, but the algorithm is actually telling us that that does not benefit anybody.”

This feels to me like Dennis realizing mid discussion that he should pick rationality aka Death, for the greater good, but being emotionally incapable of actually making that choice because of his feelings, and so implicitly pleading the gang to help him do it, to get involved and push him.

It also sounds like RCG coming to the conclusion that the algorithm, aka the show’s FORMULA, is telling them that Dennis ending up in the bad option of said choice is what would normally happen in a show like sunny, although they themselves don’t really want to go through with it.

Charlie: “Can I say something, though? I think this is for the best. You know what I mean? Like, we were going down a road I was not totally comfortable with.” Dee: “You guys want to go back to watching our show?” Charlie: “Let's get back to our show.”

So, a couple of things here. The jumper does not jump, he chooses life, which implies the same fate for Dennis. Coincidentally, pay attention to how the gang calls it “our” show, not like, “that” show, because this is, at the same time, RCG being glad of the decision to not end the show and kill Dennis off.

But here’s where things get real FUN, because the Melon is also used as a metaphor for sunny. Generally speaking, smashing it would’ve been ending it, it’s not a coincidence that the melon represents the jumper, they’re all one and the same.

Cricket: “Guys, why the hell are you wasting a perfectly good casaba melon?”

Why end a show that is doing perfectly fine?

Frank: “Where's my melon? Where's my casaba?” Dennis: “It's right here, man. Why do you care so much about this thing? What is the deal?” Frank: “It's where I stash my Maui Kush.” Charlie: “You hide your weed in a casaba melon?” Frank: “Yeah. In case the cops ransack the place, you got to find a good, unsuspecting spot to stash your drugs.” Mac: “Pot's pretty much legal now. You don't really have to stash it anywhere.” Charlie: “I don't think you have to hide it, man.” Frank: “When did that happen?”

Ok so, this might be the most speculative point I’m going to bring up, but I will anyway, because it’s my post and I do what I want. I think they’re talking about gay subtext here. It is simply something that is kept hidden (thus, subtext, duh), and that they don’t really need to hide anymore. The reason I think this has a metaphorical value is specifically because of how Charlie words “I don’t think you have to hide it, man” which beautifully applies to a Dennis who is still in the closet in the year of the lord 2020, if you catch my drift. Plus the whole situation reads kinda with a weird vibe in general, almost forced. You have to consider that they chose to include this dialogue over stuff like Frank bragging to Dennis about meeting Jackie DeNardo. He doesn’t bring her up at all, actually.

Mac: “Maybe that's, like, part of the problem of taking the humanity out of decisions.” Dennis: “Perhaps the science just isn't there yet.”

They acknowledge that any choice should be made following your feelings, not like a machine, and Dennis agrees with the point. Now, I don’t know about you, but to me Dennis agreeing that sometimes considering feelings in certain situations is necessary is something HUGE. Of course it is for the thesis I’m arguing, as it implies Dennis following his feelings when making the decision he is currently weighted by, and we know where those stand, but it is huge just in general, also. Dennis usually doesn’t do feelings, at least, he tries to repress them usually.

Cricket: “Where did we land on the casaba?” Dennis: “I think you can eat it, man. I think we're done with it.”

Basically, with the tinkering over, and a decision being made by RCG, they can hand it to Cricket (David Hornsby) to write the season finale.

Episode 9: A Woman’s Right To Chop

The salon’s insigna, pictured above.

This episode is full with dennis/sunny meta (which doubles as abortion meta, so bear with me), but it also has a son=death link once again, as “Poppins” is pregnant and were she to have the puppies (which are later directly used as a metaphor for Brian Jr as I already quoted in this post when explaining why Dennis could technically return to ND) she would die.

Poppins himself is linked to Dennis metaphorically, and as we all know it is a dog that simply does not die.

Mac: “Poppins! He came back! My dog came back!” Dennis: “How the hell is that dog still alive?” Dee: “Yeah, Mac, why don't you just put that poor thing out of its misery?” Mac: “Put him down? What, are you crazy? This is my dog, Dee. I love him.” Dee: “Well, he doesn't love you. Comes around every three or four years, eats a bunch of batteries or whatever, takes a giant dump on the floor, and then leaves again.” Mac: “Dee, Poppins comes and goes as he pleases 'cause that's his right as a male.”

Once again Mac is responsible for keeping him alive, and he does so because he loves him. As for “he doesn’t love you”, I mean, it’s Dee, the Gang’s perspective, of course they think that. They also thought Dennis had no feelings. But we know he does, they are why he came back after all.

Dennis: “And if we decide to leave, we're gonna leave. Yeah, 'cause that's nature. That's tradition.” Dee: “That's bullshit. Traditional roles are ridiculous, and they're made up by men.”

The episode discouraging the option of leaving from Dennis.

Now, cutting hair (while yes, abortion stuff, I’m not talking about that here) can also be interpreted as both a metaphor for ending the show, or Dennis cutting ties entirely. It works for all of them.

Dennis: “With luxurious locks like yours, it could take, oh, three, four years to grow back to its current length. Yeah, if it ever grows back.”

Ending the show with all the risks that it would imply, because it could take a while for them to get another show to get off the ground and a new thriving fanbase (years to grow back hair), that is, if it ever happens.

With relationships as established as those Dennis has, it could take years for him to find other people he can be close with, that is, if he ever finds them.

Dee: “Will you please leave these poor women alone? They're clearly bored and lonely and needing to do something extreme in order to make themselves feel special.”

That just screams “reason why Dennis went to ND” to me.

It’s also funny to consider that the episode as a whole is about choice.

And it’s also interesting that in this scenario Dennis is arguing to stop them from having the choice of “ruining their life”, which sounds rather dramatic and also like a lot of self projection on his part.

Reading the script, it also came to me that other people having a say in whether a haircut is made or not sounds like fans having a say in whether a show ends or not, so there’s that.

So, the burping in this episode is a metaphor for emotional pain.

In this case, Dee wants to get the haircut simply because she can, without understanding the ramifications of her actions, and this upsets Frank who actually does understands. He once had long beautiful hair, cut it and gave it away, and it never grew back. This fits in all three metaphorical perspectives, once again. In the end she ends up getting a haircut anyway, despite people trying to stop her, and ends up with a substitute wig that looks pretty much the same.

Dee: “I'm getting the haircut. I'm getting it.” Frank: “Don't do it, Deandra. You'll regret it! I'm telling you!” Car salesman: “What was that all about?” Frank: “Just trying to save a life.”

This is yes, a metaphor about adoption instead of abortion, but it doubles as Dennis meta for everything else we have discussed.

Not cutting, not jumping, not running away, is saving a life. It all works towards the same message without neglecting the episode’s main message.

All in all, I feel like the parallels and metaphors in this episode are only surface level, and the rest works to make the plot and the abortion stuff make sense. It is still significant though, it’s there.

Episode 10: Waiting For Big Mo

Not even gonna try to make sense of all the metaphors in here as I don’t even think they necessarily make sense at all.

The point of it all here is simple, and it is once again sunny meta as much as it is Dennis meta, which ends up being very important.

They always play the game guarding the base, never letting themselves have fun but following a clear formula (word actually used in the episode), because that is simply what has always worked. They have it down to a science.

Yet the desire to have fun keeps messing with it, getting them lower on the leaderboard, and so on so forth. 

Dennis is afraid that this will bring on a death, if they can’t guard their base from Big Mo, so he keeps discouraging fun, and asks people to stay on track, manipulates them to reach this goal, even if it makes him miserable.

This is about Dennis keeping his perfected facade instead of following his feelings as much as it is about RCG following the formula instead of having fun with it. For Dennis, the goal of doing this is being perceived as perfect, being accepted, belonging. For RCG, the goal was winning an emmy and staying relevant.

So the episode starts by painting having fun (feelings in Dennis’ case) as something that will bring an inevitable death, which must be how it felt to RCG (if you don’t follow the formula they’ll cancel your show) and how it felt to Dennis (who knows what would happen if you opened up), which is what led him to make the wrong choice in the first place, to avoid getting hurt. 

Except the episode then proceeds to make fun of that very notion:

Mac: “Who cares if we're losing?” Charlie: “Dennis said, like, if we leave the base, death is gonna come in the form of a fat kid who's gonna turn us into fart ghosts or something like that. So I got to stay.” Mac: “What?” Charlie: “It sounds crazy now that I'm saying it. Dennis explained it a lot more better. Dennis, we can't leave the base, right? That's the deal?” Dennis: “No. Frank was right. Rutherford B. Crazy's real name was Larry Takashi. Yeah, and he was the founder and owner of Laser Tag Fun Zone. Well, apparently, he killed himself.”

In the episode, Frank is the first to reveal the news to Dennis, and he doesn’t believe him. Up until that point in the ep, he had been using Rutherford/Larry (is it a coincidence that he also has two names? I’ll let you decide) as inspiration for himself and to keep going with his plan to win, the guy was always working towards his goal tirelessly, never having fun. His family hated him, he had no friends, he was completely alone. He died alone and miserable.

This part of the episode in particular feels very heavy, as we notice that Dennis (and it isn’t random that he’s the one having this revelation) is the only one who’s sitting, looking visibly shocked.

Now, Larry Takashi is based on Larry David, creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. This isn’t only obvious because of the first name, but also because Larry was the person who Rob met that convinced him to not end the show.

He said this to Rob:

“Don’t be an idiot. Never stop. Just keep doing it. One, because it’s the greatest job you could ever want and two, because if you do a final episode they’ll just destroy you for it.“

So it’s easy to assume that this character is an homage to him.

Anyway, Dennis has this realization, and it feels important that he’s the one having it, as the whole season has been subtly about him and his choice, him feeling like he has to be a father but secretly wanting to be Mac’s “leading man”.

Dennis: “I mean, the guy was miserable. But he spent his life building this empire, and it all meant nothing? Shit. So Rutherford be rich. Rutherford be successful as all hell. But you know what else Rutherford be? Rutherford be right. Because it all means nothing if you're not enjoying it.”

This works both ways, and is the right message, but it then gets twisted into “choosing death on our own terms”, obviously for the sake of tricking the audience with a fake finale; as we now know, they have actually chosen life. The dialogue continues to be specifically about sunny.

And with that, it segues into the fake finale, with them saying “time to end the game”, “goodbye base” and all of that.

And it seems like with that they’re giving up, accepting death as something that will happen regardless, ending the show. Saying “screw it, we won’t let others cancel our show, we’ll end it on our terms if that needs to happen”. Or in Dennis’ case “If I’m gonna have to live a miserable life might as well directly kill myself” as, again, so far the implied death of choosing Brian has been METAPHORICAL, the death of Dennis’ identity. Not, you know, real.

Whereas the show ending would imply his eventual real death.

But that’s not how it ends.

“Oh, what? You thought we'd gone? You'd like that, wouldn't you? We ain't going anywhere. We're never leaving, you little piece of shit.”

They’re never leaving. And so, by progression of the metaphor, neither is Dennis, of course, which implies the choice of the other option. Dennis, Life, Love, Mac.

So as the show chooses to live forever, then so should Dennis also choose the option for life, and everything that it implies with it.

And this is why all of this talk about meta and symbolism was very important for me to make, because this is the logical conclusion I have reached.

Logically speaking, for me, this is where all the signs seem to be pointing, and that’s very exciting.

Because as RCG chooses to keep their show alive, they are also choosing to have real fun with it, and this seems to imply that they won’t stick to the formula as closely.

So in a way, Big Mo, as this fake finale, does end up representing the end of sunny as we know it, if I’m reading into it correctly. It ends up being a proper finale and send off, but sunny is not over because of it. Only the one we are used to, whatever that means.

So not only is Dennis choosing that, but it seems RCG might be taking some real artistic liberties or whatever, not be afraid to sink down in the leaderboards anymore but simply do what they please.

So... macdennis? Well, come back to me in a year and we’ll find out together. That is another reason why I made this post after all, to look back at it in the future and see just how wrong or right I was.

Let’s see how Rob chooses to embrace sunny.

[didanawisgi]

Response to attacks from dr. David Gorski

Published on TrialSite (August 25, 2021)

My name is Geert Vanden Bossche. I received my PhD in Virology at the University of Hohenheim, Germany, and I have held adjunct faculty appointments at universities in Germany and Belgium. I also have worked in R&D and vaccine development for GSK, Novartis, and Solvay Biologicals. Next I was a Senior Program Officer for the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team, and from there went to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) and was the Senior Ebola Program Manager. Then I joined the German Center for Infection Research as head of the Vaccine Development Office. Currently, I work as a consultant on biotech/vaccine issues, and I also do my own research on “natural killer” cell-based vaccines. I have argued that immune escape due to the current COVID-19 vaccines is driving new variants as the virus evolves its way around the inoculation. Dr. David Gorski is a Wayne State University of Medicine (Detroit) associate professor in oncology and surgery. He is also chief of the breast surgery division. Gorski has launched several “hit pieces” about me and my views. In one article, he attacks the notion that vaccines have a part in driving variants. He also has criticized YouTuber/intellectual Brett Weinstein for supporting the use of ivermectin in our pandemic.

Lack of Expertise

In my view, Gorski is both stigmatizing honest scientists and seemingly trying to create socially-dangerous tensions between the vaxed and the unvaxed and between medical experts who hold different views on our current vaccines. Gorski creates false dichotomies wherein one is good (pro-vaccine, put faith in government) or bad (anti-vaccine, open to alternate views and arguments), and this type of discourse and rhetoric is incompatible with science.

Gorski is also largely scientifically illiterate in the fields of virology, immunology, vaccines, and evolutionary biology. He cannot see that both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are involved in the evolutionary dynamics of the pandemic; his effort to blame the latter category is unfair and potentially dangerous. Dr. Gorski is quick to mix up unrelated topics to create parallels that don’t make sense. He unscientifically conflates or compares data about: live vaccines and inactivated vaccines; epidemics and pandemics; measles and SARS-CoV-2; herd immunity and vaccine coverage rates; efficacy with effectiveness in vaccines; and sterilizing immunity with transmission-reducing immunity.

He also unfairly lumps me in with antivaxxers when I am pro (beneficial) vaccines. Much of this is likely based on the fact that Gorski’s expertise is largely lacking. His professional expertise in breast surgery seemingly does not allow him to opine intelligently about the topics at hand. And he regularly gets tangled up in his own misunderstandings and contradicts himself. Also, he sets himself up as a maximal “pro-vaxer” despite the noted lack of expertise in the various disciplines that apply to vaccination during a pandemic.

Innate Immunity

Gorski possesses no understanding of the workings of innate immunity, i.e., innate oligospecific antibodies or natural killer cells. He does not know the difference between innate (i.e., polyreactive) and naturally-acquired (i.e., antigen-specific) antibodies. This is clearly reflected by Gorski’s list of ‘factors proposed to explain the difference in severity of COVID-19 in children and adults’. None of these factors could explain why not only children, but any young and healthy individual, could become susceptible to Covid-19 disease only a few months after they got asymptomatically infected.  This can only be explained as a result of suppression of protective, innate antibodies by spike-specific antibodies (including vaccinal antibodies) as the latter outcompete innate antibodies for binding to SARSs-CoV-2. Gorski’s list, therefore, is completely irrelevant in regard of the overarching mechanism of natural immune protection against Covid-19.

He doesn’t have the wherewithal to understand the difference between naturally acquired immunity’s sterilizing cell-mediated immunity (CMI) and the S-based vaccines’ lack of CMI. He fails to see that there is currently no evidence of population-level immune selection pressure on CMI-mediated, sterilizing immunity induced in previously symptomatically infected persons. He doesn’t seem to realize that only a minor fraction of the population acquires protective immunity against COVID-19, whereas the vast majority are naturally protected by their first line of innate immune defense (a notion, he obviously didn’t even hear about).

Gorski specifically claims that younger people are now getting infected more because, “the variant is so much more transmissible and, therefore, the higher the percentage of the population that needs to be immune.” He doesn’t even seem to realize that these younger (<65 years) and healthy people (i.e., the majority of the population) proved to be immune during the previous waves. So why would they all of a sudden lose their immunity a few months later? Further hurting his credibility, Gorski refers to ivermectin as an “anti-worm” drug and wildly misrepresents the evidence so far showing that it can help with COVID-19. Again pushing the false either/or paradigm, he puts ivermectin in the “bad” category without any nuances.    

Contradictio in Terminis

The doctor seems to miss the fact that, “spreading” SARS-CoV-2 relates to infection or pathogens, not to the disease they may potentially cause. Gorski seems to forget that despite the fact that all knew that the efficacy of these vaccines was not 100%, the primary goal of these mass vaccination campaigns was to generate herd immunity. Now, maybe Gorski doesn’t really understand what herd immunity is about, but it suffices to remind him that it relates to the observation that unimmunized people can be protected provided the vaccine coverage rate in the population is high enough to prevent viral transmission. Gorski is trying to make people believe that herd immunity would imply vaccination of the total population, which is almost a contradictio in terminis.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                By going to ridiculous extremes to make his case, Gorki is basically just making himself ridiculous. He also lumps me in with folks claiming that stray spike proteins from the vaccinated are causing major harm, when I have never taken that view. He thinks that because a virus has a somewhat higher infectiousness, it will in no time dominate all other circulating variants, no matter the pressure that is exerted by the human population. All of the more infectious variants were isolated before end 2020. So why is it that only quite recently have the more competitive ones started to spread widely? For somebody who obviously has big holes in his knowledge of virology and basic immunology, it can, indeed, be difficult to understand that viral spread in a population is determined by the interplay between viral infectious pressure and population-level immune pressure.  The most blatant example of this is where he contradicts himself in saying: ‘Vaccines is a selective pressure’. Per definition, though, selective pressure is known to drive immune escape. And thus, according to Gorski,  ‘vaccinating as many people as possible as fast as possible’ is the way to go!

“Quo vadis, homo sapiens?”

It is simply impossible to achieve herd immunity with these vaccines for reasons I clearly explained in my contribution titled, “Quo vadis, homo sapiens?” No matter the level of uptake of these vaccines, they’ll never produce any kind of herd immunity, as they’re merely turning young and healthy people (who’re naturally capable of eliminating the virus) into asymptomatic spreaders. Secondarily, herd immunity has nothing to do with immune selection pressure. On the contrary: neither innate antibodies nor immunity induced by recovery from disease (i.e., the only 2 types of immunity that contribute to herd immunity) are spike (S)-directed, so they do not exert selection pressure on viral infectiousness (i.e., determined by S), in contrast to the immune response induced by vaccination. Gorki is among the many stubborn know-it-alls who pretend that further increasing vaccine coverage rates will stop the virus from spreading and further evolving. All this without any single scientific argument backing his statement. Substantial outbreaks are still taking place in countries with high vaccine coverage rates, clearly demonstrating that vaccine-induced herd immunity is a myth.

Gorski is also completely missing the point on the lambda variant. He stares at different variants in regard of their sensitivity to vaccine-induced neutralization whereas the key message of the publication I alluded to was that i) increased viral infectiousness is insufficient to ensure sustained  viral transmission in a massively vaccinated human population (i.e., a population that exerts widespread spike-directed immune pressure on viral infectiousness and ii) that additional mutations in the N-terminal domain (NTD) of the spike protein may substantially contribute to the decreased neutralizing capacity of vaccine-induced antibodies against any given variant (as mutations in the RBD alone may not explain the decreased neutralizing titers). In other words, variants may incorporate additional mutations in the NTD to dramatically increase their resistance to vaccine-induced anti-S antibodies. This mechanism of escape neutralization is of course very problematic if it occurs in a variant that as already a high level of infectiousness (e.g., delta variant) as this may lead to a steep increase in morbidity and mortality rates in the population. Gorski’s conclusion that ‘there is plenty of reason to conclude that the vaccines offer considerable protection against at least severe disease from these variants’ is, therefore, anything but based on an understanding of the virus’ evolutionary adaptation to enhanced, widespread immune pressure on viral infectivity. As a matter of fact, a such dramatic combination of high infectiousness and complete resistance to wild-type spike vaccines has recently been reported https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.22.457114v1.full.pdf.

We’re curious to learn about Gorski’s predictions on how much protection the vaccines are going to provide against highly infectious variants that are completely resistant against the vaccines…

Vaccine efficacy versus vaccine effectiveness

Regardless of the fact that Gorski does not understand the difference between vaccine efficacy and vaccine effectiveness, he doesn’t even realize that the main issue is not whether or not the vaccine protects 100% or less; the real issue is that imperfect vaccines will enhance propagation of naturally selected immune escape variants, especially if high infectious pressure is combined with widespread immune pressure (due to mass vaccination).

Lies

If Gorski is unable to make his point otherwise, he’ll rely on lies:

I never stated that the emergence of more infectious variants was caused by the vaccines as Gorski pretends

I never stated that vaccines are ineffective, dangerous and that they make the vaccinated dangerous to the unvaccinated as Gorski pretends

[deralpi]

Most of the conversations after the most recent episode covered either the ingenuity of Jester’s masterful deceit or Beau’s decision to sacrifice her new-found happiness to lift the misery constraining their friend. Because Beau is my favorite character, I feel obligated to give my opinion on the latter in an unapologetically unstructured manner.

In my eyes, Beau is an uncompromisingly selfless character who denies it with every word she utters. In that aspect, I always draw internally the connection to Nynaeve, a character of the Wheel-of-Time book series, where one can observe a stark discrepancy between what she says and thinks in comparison to what actions she actually takes. 

Very early one, during the Lorenzo arc, she had already been ready to lay down her life to protect the Nein and this conviction hasn’t wavered since. When Fjord was surrounded and harassed by the Laughing Hand and Yasha, the odds were stacked high against his survival. If one worked out the percentages, the much safer option would’ve been to leave right then and there; it had been much more likely that their losses would’ve been added up to two, instead of reduced to zero if somebody went to aid. But who stormed in regardless? The self-proclaimed egoist.

But why do I unravel all this now? Because that moment had confirmed for me what I had observed before: Beau would do everything to save her friends.

So when Beau entered the hut the offer she presented was no surprise to me. If anything I had always expected her to go down like that; by doing something profoundly selfless. The manner in which it had nearly happened, however, I never could’ve imagined predicting. 

But it wasn’t just the desire to help Nott so she could live her life again; it was also about the inevitable end (hah) of the future of their little adventuring party. Their common list of objectives is slowly dwindling. For the first time — after being flung from the Empire to the coast to Xhorhas and then to the Empire again, diving into adventure after adventure — an end is in sight. Traveler Con seems to be their last destination on their agenda, but even if it isn’t, their days as an adventuring party are numbered, because this, regardless of how lovely their time together had been, wouldn’t hold up forever. People would want to settle down at some point, to tread diverging paths and build a life for themselves. They would still be friends, of course, but they wouldn’t be around each other every day of the year. And who would be the odd one out and end up alone again? In Beau’s head there is a clear answer to that.

There are inevitable outcomes attached to every concern she harbors, and she has been noticing them for a while now, but purposely ignored them. It is the reason why she has been so critical of destiny in the past; the inevitability in it frightens her, and only recently (episode 92) she came to terms with it. Cut to the present and all the stars seemed to have aligned — Molly’s lessons, her connection to Nott through the Hag, the fact that she had the least to lose and everybody else too much to live for. Somebody had to pay a price, and if that is the case it might as well be her, because the patterns she noticed all led up to it.

I brought up the inevitability factor because it is deeply intertwined, in making the decision, with one of Beau’s core philosophies: all but an obsession to meet every encounter on her terms. She saw herself as an asshole and everyone else would come to see it too, so why not utilize her innate ability to cause dislike and take control of the situation. If we apply this to the relevant scenario with the inevitable separation of the group on the horizon, why wouldn’t she leave on her terms and save a friend while doing so? Quit while you are ahead because it won’t get any better.

And the things she was ready to sacrifice… To know that the hag feeds on misery is one thing, it is another to offer everything about her existence but her life. One of these offerings would’ve already at the very least provoked interest, but to lay it all on the line… It’s like overpaying for something vitally important in addition to the insurance that it would be done right. An offer so lucrative even a hag (lawful or not) wouldn’t dream to attempt foul play.

These factors I listed I consider highly influential in her decision making (making up around 90% if I had to put a number on it), but there is another matter I wanted to bring up: Jester. 

I think Beau has fallen quite hard for her and it is evident in her behavior that she seems out of her depth on how to handle it. From observations alone — the pining after Fjord, the attraction towards the Traveler, the unending doodles of dicks — it isn’t all too likely on a surface level that Beau’s feelings would ever be reciprocated. There are possible scenarios that would turn things around, but I don’t know if Beau sees those as mere fantasies at this point. 

One might scoff at the possibility that such a trivial matter, not at all pertaining to the circumstance at hand, factored into Beau’s decision making, and I’m not claiming that it did, I just want to address the possible influence it could’ve had. As it stands Beau could (!) feel to be on the receiving end of unreciprocated love, and we only have to look at real-life to see how hurtful that can end up being. Many in her position have decided to distance themselves from the one they loved, for though it hurt them tremendously it was the only place from where they could move on.

Ever since Jester had become her roommate and accepted her the way she was, their room had become Beau’s safe space where she didn’t have to feel alone anymore, but the moment Beau was smitten with her their intimate togetherness was tainted by the underlying awkward friction. What was comfortable became entirely uncomfortable. Now she feels trapped in the false dichotomy where she has to choose between ending up alone or getting her heart broken.

This would never be the sole point on which she decides to leave the group, but I think it isn’t too far stretched that amongst all the things I have previously listed this notion could have posed as an incentive to clasp hands with a hag.

But where does she go from here, now that her plan has been completely overthrown?

With no immediate threat on the horizon (*fingers crossed*) this time frame lends the perfect opportunity to give in to some soul-searching. So that the inevitability of the eventual separation doesn’t frighten her anymore she needs a perspective and a goal. When we first met her all she wanted were physical fights and money to spend on overpriced booze. This would have proven sufficient under the nihilistic outlook she had adopted the moment her only aspiration was shattered into a million pieces when her father’s hand found her cheek, but now she lives in an environment where she gets encouraged to open up and spread her wings and nihilism is a thing of the past. It is on her to recapture the brief glimmer of bright-eyed excitement she showed when she spoke about her version of taking over her father’s business, to find something substantial and lasting to strive for. 

Just imagine what Beau and Caleb could achieve as an unprecedented friendship between Assembly and Soul if this is something she would set out to do. It needn’t be such a lofty goal to attain meaning in her life, but the possibilities are as endless as her capabilities.

Aim high and reach for the stars, young lion.

I don’t know if I added anything significant by posting this but I had to get it out of my system. Thanks to everyone who read my word vomit to the end!

[ill-will-editions]

MARGINAL NOTES ON THE AGAMBEN SCANDAL

Originally published in Italian here.  

“Soon afterwards, something else emerged – yet another justification for incorporating the ‘Children’s Songs’ into the ‘Poems from Exile’. Brecht, standing before me in the grass, spoke with rare forcefulness:‘In the struggle against them, it is vital that nothing be overlooked. They don’t think small. They plan thirty thousand years ahead. Horrendous things. Horrendous crimes. They will stop at nothing. They will attack anything. Every cell convulses under their blows. So we mustn’t forget a single one. They distort the child in the womb. We can under no circumstances forget the children.’ While he was talking, I felt moved by a power that was the equal of that of fascism – one that is no less deeply rooted in the depths of history than fascism’s power. It was a very strange feeling, wholly new to me.” 

- Benjamin on a conversation with Brecht, 1938

It seems that what irritates many and persuades few about Giorgio Agamben's ongoing reflections, deep down, is his rendering of the image of passive consent to the state of exception imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. An image that manifests itself as a normalized adherence to the injunction of the absolute primacy of bare life, a life reduced to mere reproduction, deprived of any attributes of the experience of freedom. The image of this consent would suggest that bare life is revealed as the only horizon, or value, remaining of human experience, which is tantamount to saying that the human now denies itself any experience: it reveals itself as an intuited fact, a fact that emerges today in these circumstances, and which was therefore already present before.

Incidentally, it should be noted that something else is proven to be pre-existing or proemial to pandemic management—something that applies to the historical proletariat, i.e. the industrial worker, as much as to contemporary workers of all kinds; something that reveals itself in the mirror image of the majority of elderly people left to die alone under the legitimation of social protection from contagion, while the truth is that after years of state sanctioned austerity measures there are not enough hospital beds; something to do with the fact that Italy, “no country for young people”, is determined by the miserable distribution of income, ergo by the misery and predation of welfare—this pre-existing fact is that the injunction of biological reproduction is absolutely relative at a global scale according to different people’s privileges based on their geographical location, at a local scale, since social reproduction depends on the convenience of the economic machine, and finally at a time scale unique to each form of life with regards to the constant destructive forces of predation. So there is an experience of the thanatalogical power held by the present human society. 

Yet in the present situation, the image given by Agamben, that is to say the one in which it would appear that the social cement to which we objectively seem to adhere is revealed to be the command of bare life alone, is not inexact. At least, as long as a mass consent to the suspension or disembodiment of social relations, under threat of losing basic biological reproduction, persists. But what does this mean?

In an important passage from 1955, Georges Canguilhem argued against identifying human social organizations with living organisms. Canguilhem argues that while every human society or rather human society in general is a collectivity of living beings, this collectivity is neither an individual, since it does not obey the laws of homeostasis of a singular biological organism, nor a species, since it cannot be confused with “humanity” which is always open to the search for its specific sociability, while society is by definition closed. Society is a means, a tool, says Canguilhem. It demands rules but has no capacity for self-regulation, and thus disorder is its only presumably normal state. For this reason, regulation cannot be left to an apparatus produced by society itself; it must come from elsewhere—and here, again through Bergson, Canguilhem goes back even more surprisingly to Plato on the same question Walter Benjamin had returned to in order to arrive at his critique of sovereignty and the law by philologically revealing its fiction: justice. Canguilhem uses justice according to Plato, a supreme form of society that is at the same time irreducible to its bodies, to make the Bergsonian opposition between wisdom and heroism work: unlike in the living organism, there is no wisdom in society, and the proof is that its normal state of crisis constantly gives rise to the need for heroes and heroisms who emerge in the background of a crisis situation and are then called upon to give it a solution—all of this of course legitimized by a representation of extreme danger that is the mirror image of the permanent sense of threat perceived by society in its precarious nature.

It is clear that, in spite of some contrived and astonishing Marxian syncretisms, which have unfortunately run their theoretical course, we are dealing with social reproduction in its materialistically determined distinction from simple reproduction.

Let us try to make Canguilhem work in what appears to be Agamben’s contradiction: between him capturing the political truth on the state of exception and an aporia of his current discourse on normality, the rule of exception as taught by the tradition of the oppressed—to borrow from Benjamin’s 8th thesis on the concept of history. What particular kind of adherence to the formal exception are we seeing in the face of this pandemic? Or rather, why is it that the injunction of bare life displays itself in this circumstance?

This pandemic is not the dengue, which still causes more infections and victims than the coronavirus in Latin America, or the yellow fever, that has made new massacres in the last two years from South East Asia to Africa. This pandemic is global because it threatens the definitive global relations of capitalist society. The virus starts in the central metropolis of the global construction industry, a haven for capital in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and then impacts primarily in China, Europe and the US, with the addition of the oil states and those engaged in conflicts in the Middle East. This explains the representation of the danger, but not yet the social acceptance that it is gaining: in order to grasp it, it is perhaps necessary to question whether this same support is in fact illusory. This does not exempt us from ascertaining the force of the historical reification of this apparent image and therefore from ascertaining, as Agamben does precisely by capturing the truth of this moment’s image as it presents itself to history, that adherence to the guarantee of bare life is the foundation of the social pact. But we know, precisely with Agamben and Benjamin, that both this guarantee and the social pact are a pair of fictions—in other words, a false synthesis of opposites: such as, in close kinship, that of sovereign legitimacy in relation to justice and law. What does the experience of the oppressed teach us about the relationship between the life-form of capitalist society and simple reproduction if not that this relationship is simply null and void? That the mission of capitalist society, reversed through thirty years of globalization, is precisely exclusion, disinterest, the power or profit to command freely, independently from any guarantee of biological reproduction? It is this truth, affirmed in the practice of governance and introjected by the oppressed, that is now laid bare: the injunction to isolate and the suspension of social life are accepted precisely because it is at the moment in which society—and, coincidentally but separately, biological life—is most endangered that the whole experience of the divorce between the two finally condenses. In other words, individuals suddenly become conscious that it was power itself that laid down the fiction of the social pact in the first place: and therefore, it is the reality of society itself that is laid bare, its pure coincidence with power, and its powerlessness to produce any stability, any healing for the sick, any protection for life.

It is true that in this instinctive recording of the truth about society and power the injunction to cling to bare life as the sole horizon of social behaviour is reproduced: but it would be better to say that it is reflected in it. On the one hand, in fact, power enjoins the suspension of social life as a necessary condition for its own re-legitimization; on the other hand, this same suspension finds acceptance among people only as a condition consciously forced upon them by the evident fact that power and its social organization have no capacity to defend life effectively. In this dichotomy and beyond the instantaneous image of a forced convergence we can glimpse the crossroads between forms-of-life that are being prepared. On one side of this crossroads, there is an emergent form-of-life which, accepting the nakedness of society and power, secedes from it in order to affirm the value of life as an encounter and the mutual aid of bodies in their affections, thereby re-opening the horizon of a free experience, and on the other side a form-of-life imposed as a reproduction of society and its command, reconfigured exactly on the acceptance of the truth of their substantial powerlessness to protect life, bodies, and affections as what is common to us, and indeed on the acceptance of their destiny to separate us in the face of a distribution of death. And it is all the more so true—as seems to be the case in our present situation—that the reconfiguration of capitalist society and its general relations of power take the form of a predominance of digital capitalism, of data capture and of a predictive function of the devices of control: that is, of a total grip on the biological that at the same time mineralizes it.

In this sense, as shocking as the image used by Agamben, the anonymous article, “What the Virus Said,” published by Lundimatin appears to be a discursive operation with a different effectiveness and power: precisely in its address to the current form—captured at this moment—of the average social behaviour and to place itself ahead of that choice. A choice that seems to take on a global body in many different signs of conflictual life, which tend to dispel the crystallized image of a common decision on life itself paralyzed in the capture by the naked thanatocracy to which corresponds the automaton that we have come to call the Leviathan.

-Correspondence and Translation Committee - Vitalist International (Roman Section) 

Translated by the Vitalist International, Atlanta Section

[bbq-hawks-wings]

So I took a personality test to day and got the result of an Architect (INTJ) and for some reason Hawks just came to mind so I wondered, based on the Myers-Briggs classification what personality would he have? Also just out of curiosity, and you don't have to answer, but what would yours be? (I took the quiz on the website 16personalities)

Fantastic question, anon! Last I took the test a few years ago I was an INFP (The Mediator) myself which I think still largely applies. It can be easy to mistype yourself, let alone someone else, so I’m going to use evidence from the manga as much as possible and go through the individual traits one by one to see what I can find. I considered taking the test myself in character, but realized especially with how long the test is it could be easy to either overthink it or hyper-fixate on consciously or unconsciously preconceived traits, so I decided an evidence-based approach would be more accurate.

An important thing to know about Meyers-Briggs personality types is that they’re not all-encompassing, exclusive, or immutable. Some people have a tendency to make ill-informed preconceptions about people or treat it like a horoscope. This is the wrong way to apply a Meyers-Briggs personality type. They are insights to the instinctual way people are likely to act and perform and are only a tool to aid in things like working in a team, putting them on a path to personal success, and exercising emotional intelligence when interacting with them. Many people may still display a different “type” in different settings so I’ll be as cognizant of that as possible as I go through.

So with that, let’s get started!

Extroverted [E] or Introverted [I]?

This is a fantastic example of how preconceived notions  can completely mess up a characterization of someone as well as someone displaying a different type from what they might naturally display. Hawks is great with people, can work a crowd, and is a people-pleaser through and through. To many others, he would be a dead ringer for an extroverted. However:

In his own ideal world, Hawks has time to himself, to spend alone at home, doing whatever he wants freely. If he was an extrovert this dream might be a little more geared towards still being a top hero, but he’s said in so many words he wishes he was a little further down the ladder.

At this point I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up that a false dichotomy of introvert/extrovert has developed over the years. Humans require interaction with other humans to stay healthy and they also require alone time. Too much or too little of either will give them problems over time. It’s a tad frustrating to me that this personality test requires an either/or answer since I thoroughly believe that Hawks enjoys human company and would naturally seek it out in his ideal scenario, just in greater moderation than he does now (which would make him more of an ambivert); but given the fact that at this point in time he seeks more opportunities for solitude, I’m going to answer that he lands, somewhat surprisingly in the Introverted category.

Observant [S] or Intuitive [N]?

This one is also tricky at first, but a deeper dive into their definitions gives us a pretty solid answer, I think. According to the website: 

“These traits describe what people are more likely to do with the information gathered from the world around them. Intuitive personality types rely on imagining the past and future potential of what they see. Those with the Observant style are more interested in observable facts and more straightforward outcomes. They prefer to avoid layering too much interpretation on what they see.“

So does Hawks take a complicated, theoretical approach to information he’s exposed to, or does he call it like he sees it? Does he act in the here and now, or is he more bigger picture?

While he’s actively working toward a definitive goal, he has a tendency to only focus on the information in front of him as it happens. Dabi’s going to release a super powered Nomu? Better get the best hero around to fight it. Need to infiltrate the League of Villains? Just hammer away at getting Dabi to trust him and open the door for him.

He tends to look at the road in front of him to figure out if he should go left or right, but doesn’t always seem to realize he could be being taken for a ride. In his section of the new character book, his relationship with Dabi is described as “they are using each other” (note the present continuous tense) meaning that Dabi is stringing along the number two hero for his own purposes, but Hawks seems to have no idea of it. Just his altercation with Dabi at the warehouse after High End is proof he’s too trusting of the information he’s given at face value.

He may have contingencies (such as holding onto the one feather), but they do not span very far and wide into the future depending on any way things go. It’s always, “If plan A doesn’t work, go to plan B” and never a step or two ahead of that or a consideration of other possible outcomes. Did he have a plan in case High End actually killed Endeavor? Based on his reaction, I don’t think he really thought that was a possibility even though in the end it almost happened and left him with a permanent scar.

This, to me, puts him safely in the Observant category.

Thinking [T] or Feeling [F]?

Hey, this one is actually easy! Hawks is incredibly intelligent, but he is far from rational. A good litmus test for this is to see how someone reacts to failure. A thinking individual will view an undesirable outcome as useful data for the future and possibly just a result of things beyond their control, but a feeling person will view the same as proof of inadequacy that needs to be remedied through personal improvement.

He consistently reacts to situations emotionally first. Even when Tokoyami really proved himself during his internship, it was an emotional response that changed his attitude towards training him and the next generation.

Even Endeavor describes him as,

Hawks has always been emotionally expressive, responsive, and driven. In his interactions with others, he displays a huge amount of emotional intelligence - you can see it in the way he ever so slightly adjusts his interactions with others based on the response to him and the outcome he’s looking for. He pauses for just a second to get a cool selfie perfect for a girl’s social media timeline, he’s polite and considerate carrying a little old lady’s bags up the stairs for her, and he appeals to a little boy’s sense of style and flair when asked to sign his bag. The way he and others feel at any given moment is almost paramount to him.

This is a trait I don’t see changing in his character over time unlike some of the others. He’s clearly a Feeling type.

Judging [J] or Prospective [P]?

This one I also think is easy to figure out. Basically, does he prefer a set, methodical schedule or is he a more spontaneous, spur of the moment person?

Yeah, this is Hawks we’re talking about. He’s shockingly adaptable and almost seems to fall into routine for the sake of others instead of his own sanity. Most of his decisions are made on the fly, and he’s known to improvise.

He’s more than capable of planning ahead, but prefers to operate as the wind blows which makes him a solid Prospective type.

Assertive [-A] or Turbulent [-T]?

For funsies, I just want to pop in and check in on this last trait since it’s here. Basically, all it asks is his confidence level and response to stress. I’ve more or less answered this earlier, but when encountering a situation potentially way over his head, he may outwardly display confidence and roll with the punches (his _S_P traits at work) but when it comes to results, especially failure, perfection and personal excellence are all that matter. I feel very confident classifying him as a Turbulent personality.

Final Results

So with that we get a final Meyers-Briggs personality type of ISFP-T which according to 16 Personalities is the Adventurer type personality.

“Adventurer personalities are true artists, but not necessarily in the typical sense where they’re out painting happy little trees. Often enough though, they are perfectly capable of this. Rather, it’s that they use aesthetics, design and even their choices and actions to push the limits of social convention. Adventurers enjoy upsetting traditional expectations with experiments in beauty and behavior – chances are, they’ve expressed more than once the phrase “Don’t box me in!” Adventurers live in a colorful, sensual world, inspired by connections with people and ideas. These personalities take joy in reinterpreting these connections, reinventing and experimenting with both themselves and new perspectives. No other type explores and experiments in this way more. This creates a sense of spontaneity, making Adventurers seem unpredictable, even to their close friends and loved ones. Despite all this, Adventurers are definitely Introverts, surprising their friends further when they step out of the spotlight to be by themselves to recharge. Just because they are alone though, doesn’t mean people with the Adventurer personality type sit idle – they take this time for introspection, assessing their principles. Rather than dwelling on the past or the future, Adventurers think about who they are. They return from their cloister, transformed.Adventurers live to find ways to push their passions. Riskier behaviors like gambling and extreme sports are more common with this personality type than with others. Fortunately their attunement to the moment and their environment allows them to do better than most. Adventurers also enjoy connecting with others, and have a certain irresistible charm.”

It feels like a pretty accurate assessment of his personality, so I think I did a good job. This was a lot of fun, and I feel like I’ve even gotten to know him a little better! Thanks for sending in the question, anon, I really enjoyed it!

And if you’re curious about Meyers-Briggs personality types or want to take the assessment yourself, go check out 16personalities[.]com!

[mbti-notes]

1) Hi mbti. I’m an isfp trying to confront my teritary loop patterns. In your type development guide you write that “the logical consequence of a failure to develop auxiliary Se properly is that a person often suffers from restlessness despite their blessings and opportunities for enjoyment. Instead of addressing this problem directly, immature ISxPs misuse tertiary Ni to distance from it.” But you never clearly identify HOW to address this problem directly, and I’m assuming that “addressing the

problem is different from “developing Se”.
 I’m assuming there’s an Fi + Se imbalance which is causing the loop pattern. I know that how to develop Se has been covered many times in your ask section and also in the type development guide, so I won’t ask you to repeat yourself. 

I don’t know what to tell you. The solution is indeed as simple as developing Se. The problem is probably that you haven’t yet understood Se and/or how to apply Se properly in your life, especially if you are prone to Ni loop. So, I guess it does bear repeating…

But I will say that I have been looping for quite some time (more on than off, for almost 4 years) and I have some reasons as to why my extroverted functions have been put on hold, as I experienced quite a lot of bullying in school and a parent at home struggled with alcoholism growing up, so retreating and isolation and avoidance became my natural way of operating, to get my self away from painful situations and a way to remain a sense of control. It worked as a protective strategy then, but I can see that does me more harm than good now, and I would like to change it. I wish it could be so easy as to just ‘develop Se’, and I want to ask bout the obstacles I’m experiencing when trying to change this behaviour (i.e achieving healthy Fi + Se), and so I will try to explain the problem: 

It is easy to be under the illusion that you are engaging in “self-care” by retreating and avoiding pain, thereby easy to believe that Fi is healthy and doing its job. However, if you’re always running from situations that frighten or threaten you - before you’ve even started anything - how are you ever going to learn how to handle painful situations and use those experiences to become a stronger person? You’re robbing yourself of opportunities to learn and grow by excessively sheltering your feelings - this is what Fi-Ni loop actually “accomplishes”. 

The reasons I avoid certain Se activities is because there are potential risks attached to them (as it of course is with all actions one takes). The problem is, I often have a hard time determining wether these ‘risks’ fraudulently function as a reason to avoid Se-activity (caused by the loop), or if it objectively is a legitimate risk to properly consider. This has kept me volatile for a long time and I’m not sure if I’m moving forward in the right direction. For instance, I dreamt about moving to a city in a country, a place which I feel at home and where some relatives live, to study at uni. It gave me a sense of hope to travel, experience, meet new people and get new impressions. But I decided not to move because education is very expensive there, compared to where I live now, and a political situation in the country also made moving tricker and more expensive, but I could’ve managed if I really pushed it. The place I live in now makes me feel depressed, restless and as if my growth stifles here, mainly because I relate it to past experiences and feel the need for “new” stimulation. But the benefits are better, cheaper education and better accommodation. Do you see the dilemma? I can’t really determine which option would be better for me? 

General rule of thumb: The option that is better for you is the option that allows you to become the person you are meant to be. The nature of a “dilemma” is that neither option is perfect, that’s why deciding is very difficult. No matter what you choose, you must deal with some negative consequences. So, the question is, which set of negative consequences is more worth it to you to confront for the benefits? Nobody can weigh and judge that except you. You, yourself, just said that you could’ve managed it if you really pushed it. Your heart already knows the correct path, and now you suffer from the feeling of missing out. Is that not what’s happening?

Another example, I dream/dreamt about working within the field of visual arts, and am interested in photojournalism, although this specific area has posed many ethical questions to me after reading/seeing certain images/finding out about all the fakes in the business, and I also find the vast quantity of images that circulate everywhere, almost always with a commercial agenda, just waters down the meaning of it to nothing, there is no journalism there, all I can see is the greediness. But I also love photography and visual arts with political dimensions to it, and it is a substantial source of inspiration to that excites me and make me genuinely enthusiastic… I feel cloven. 

And why do you automatically default to imagining yourself as a hapless victim of a “corrupt system”? Why do you not stop to consider that a corrupt system needs MORE people of integrity to correct it - not fewer? And why do you not see yourself, with your strong sense of integrity, as having the capability to change the system for the better? That is what mature Se+Te would do.

A third and final example could be when I’ve been around friends for a long time and I start to feel tired/“drained” and that I need alone time; should take time to rest or should I practice more active participation and attend those around me more? Which is showing myself and others most care? 

The key is to establish a proper balance between the introverted and extraverted sides of your personality, which means that you should not be too extreme one way or the other. It also means that, in order to develop your “lagging” side, you have to push out of your comfort zone. Introverts must push themselves to extravert more in order to become more capable of it, and vice versa. It is not a case of oversimplistic either/or (”either I care about me or I care about others”), it is about learning to listen to what is required for your development and refining your judgment accordingly. When you care for yourself, do you not become more emotionally available and effective at caring for others? When you care for others, do you not benefit from a deeper relationship and the feeling of having a positive influence? You have created a false dichotomy to choose between when the two things are actually interrelated. 

These kinds of ponderings have sort of put me ‘on hold’ for a long time and I am not quite sure how to proceed in life. I am studying at university in line with my interests, I volunteer at various places I feel are in line with my values, I watch film and photography, draw every once in a while, stay around friends and family, but still I’m feeling this anxiety (or restlessness, as you put it) tapping within me. It’s like a constant, mild depression and I think it is fuelled by my constant questioning of my commitments. And to connect to what I said in the beginning, I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW TO ADDRESS THE ROOT OF THIS RESTLESSNESS. As you said; “(…) a person often suffers from restlessness despite their blessings and opportunities for enjoyment”. I see my privilege in the world, and I am grateful, but how can I identify what it is that’s causing the “depression”? I mean, I can keep “throwing myself out into the unknown” and explore life forever but never really hit the spot. Do you see what I mean? I’m afraid of turning into a shallow, bitter individual, because there is something telling me that I’m sort

It is precisely underdeveloped/underutilized Se that is the root of restlessness. Unhappy Se creates the feeling that you are not living life to its fullest and taking advantage of every chance to learn and grow through new life experiences. If you run from new experiences via irrational Ni loop negativity, Se will complain vociferously that you are missing out, and how can you feel at peace then? I’m not here to tell anyone how to make major life decisions, as each person must be responsible for their own life. I can only tell you that your restlessness comes from knowing that there is more out there for you but that you’re holding yourself back from exploring it. How you respond to restlessness is up to you. I can only tell you that ignoring it is only going to make it worse over time. 

To have mature Se doesn’t mean that you’re aimless and restless; it means that you are able to set aside negativity and be flexible in the face of challenges. Mature Se means that: 1) you have inherent trust that the world will offer up good things as long as you are on your toes and able to grasp the new opportunities that come your way, and 2) you have inherent trust in yourself to be able to adapt and get through any situation, good or bad. That’s why Se doms are bold and brave and easily leave the past behind.

When you say “never really hit the spot”, it reveals that you haven’t understood how to use Se. It is immature Se that explores the world willy nilly with no direction or purpose. Fi+Se is about having the courage to take the risks that allow you to move toward the life that you want to live and be the person that you know you can be.

[afterourhearts]

Eyeliner Tears

Why are Asian eyes so ugly? I thought to myself as I outlined their shape with the blackest liner I could dig out from the free Lancôme makeup samples Mom never used. This was my daily routine since I first discovered the beautiful black pencil when I was 12 alongside lip gloss, mascara, and blush. But eyeliner was my favorite – changing most dramatically what I hated most passionately. • Monolids are ugly because they make eyes look like slits. • Double lids are ‘mutant’ because, as my white medical professor once so aptly described, “Epicanthic folds are a prominent feature of Down Syndrome. If you don’t know what they are, Asians commonly have this feature.” Let’s face it: we can’t win, at least not in the beauty arena. But with my eyeliner adding the illusion of a larger eye, I felt halfway there. Not everyone, however, appreciated my foray into adolescent self-transformation. The Chinese beauty culture operates very differently than American beauty culture: pale skin, small mouths, soft bodies, and youthful innocence are prized over glowing tans, wide smiles, athletic frames, and sultry seductiveness. To achieve the Chinese beauty ideal of youthful innocence, heavy makeup such as eyeliner is unacceptable, and makeup at all is frowned upon for younger girls. Mom called them “raccoon eyes” and told me I looked uglier with it on but I never heeded her advice. She also said respectable girls did not waste their time on vanities like makeup, but rather immersed themselves in their studies. She especially hated when I wore makeup to church, a place where teenage girls are supposed to look extra pure. I rolled my raccoon eyes. One year, I met a new girl at our Chinese Christian Church. She was talkative, witty, similarly loved makeup and rebellion, and we became fast friends. This same year, a new youth pastor arrived at our church. He was funny, fluent, and finally our first youth pastor who wasn’t middle-aged. So how do they tie back to eyeliner? Prior to their arrival, I dreaded attending church, paranoid that the judgmental eyes of multitudes of Chinese parents hated my appearance and shared the Chinese cultural views held by my mother. Was it paranoia, or was I just observant? Adults would enthusiastically praise my younger brother’s handsome features and say nothing about my appearance other than, “She is tall!” Their smiles seemed disingenuous and their attitudes towards me distant. Or maybe I was just overly sensitive. Regardless, much of that paranoia melted away with the arrival of a new friend and youth pastor – two characters who seemed more attuned than the other members to the Asian-American dichotomy that was my life. I began to loosen up at church, smile more, and even happily greet the adults. I felt … safe. Maybe not enthusiastically accepted, but also not frowned upon with disdain. One might wonder why I was so concerned for approval from within my Chinese church. When you live in a country spearheaded by people who don’t view you as truly American, you cling onto the safe spaces that still might take you in and consider you a member. I wasn’t aware of how shaky my walls of comfort had been built, though, until one sentence caused them to tumble back down again. “He said he doesn’t like you because you wear so much eyeliner.” She told me. She being my new best friend and he being the cool and young youth pastor we both adored. “How do you know this?” I asked, disbelief and doubt at each other’s throats in the battleground that was now my mind. “Because he told my mom. And my mom told me that it’s not just him who thinks this way, but a lot of other parents. They tell their kids to stay away from you because you are a bad influence.” Bad influence. Me, the introvert who rarely speaks, a bad influence? I let that sink in. That night, I considered giving up my eyeliner. I thought all my fears about being hated by my friends’ parents were unfounded and paranoid. I thought my youth pastor would especially not judge me by something so exterior – actually, why would he judge me at all? Why would a grown ass man concern himself so heavily with whether a teenage girl wears eyeliner? Anger and sadness bubbled up around me. How did one of my greatest fears, one I thought had been pushed away and laid to rest for good, one which only my new friend knew so intimately, suddenly come to surface all over again? And that’s when it hit me: maybe she lied. The seed of thought that this supposed best friend might not actually like me at all was planted. And over the next few months, it thirstily drank up water and sunlight. I befriended other girls and began to uncover bits and pieces of the horrifying truth: she did hate me, and they had evidence. Screen captures and chat conversations were forwarded to my inbox. Not only did she tell others about how terrible I supposedly was, she also told them I disliked all of them and fabricated statements I had never uttered nor so much as thought. I could not believe it – why did she want to destroy my life and capitalize on my insecurities? What did I ever do but consider her my friend? Sometimes, you never get answers. Not too many months after, she moved again. We stumbled across each other’s Instagram accounts a few years later. She had dyed hair, tattoos, piercings all over, eyeliner wings bolder than I had ever applied, false lashes nearly reaching her thickly painted eyebrows, the same deceptively sweet smile as when we first met, and was surrounded by other Asian girls. I once burned with the anger of her betrayal, but all I could think about now was her new embodiment of the criticisms she claimed were the reasons for my rejection from our community and how ironic our appearances were now – me being the studious medical student who sometimes forgets to wear eyeliner and she being the girl who refuses to be seen in public without it - the pictorial epitome of the bad influence she once used to mark me for social abandonment from our only remaining community. Irony, Karma, or Hypocrisy? Today, I won’t know if sprinkled between her lies were grains of truth, and if her comment about my reputation was one of them. I won’t know if my eventual submission to certain Asian cultural values drew its main roots from my teenage experience of potential two-fold community rejection. I won’t know if she ever realized the extent to which she hurt me or if she continues to hurt in similarly sneaky ways our other Asian sisters struggling to find acceptance and self-love in a land which has subjected them to unwarranted rejection. What I do know is this: We All Cry The Same Eyeliner Tears Yes, we do. They trickle down from our unmistakably Asian eyes, glide along our sunscreen laden faces, and leave smudgy black streaks to remind us of both our perceived physical imperfections as well as our efforts to conceal the ugliness we feel inside. 

Feeling ugly is not just some manifestation of low self-esteem as these American schools/media/counselors might tell us in order to erase from our mutual history and from their responsibility the ‘chink’ comments that we heard or the fingers-pulling-eyes-upward-to-mimic-us that we saw.

Our damaged self-esteem is not some personal mental and emotional disorder or a reflection of our weakness but a collective experience caused largely in part by the pervasive belief that some belong here but we don’t and that some are beautiful but we aren’t. Don’t think that just because dating apps are now asserting, “Asian girls are the most desired race!” that the girls who come after us are protected from the less-than we endured. The American dating scene did not just become more “accepting” of us – we changed to look more like them. But underneath the beautifully and extravagantly drawn eyeliner wings, the perfectly filled in eyebrows, the time-consuming application of fake lashes, the hours spent at the gym to avoid ‘Asian flat butt’ stereotypes, and the sharp cut of the surgery knife on our eyelids, we still cannot help but wonder: is this beautiful yet? And when he says, “Yes”, we still worry, was I not beautiful before? Do we really want to be with the ones who only want what is made-to-order, and overlook the ones who saw the original, in all its imperfections, as worth discovering? So while I have every right to be mad at my Asian sister for the hurtful actions she made against me as a result of her wanting to be more accepted by our community than I was, I cannot lose sight of the more formidable barrier to our collective inability to self-love: not the lies she told before, but the lies they still tell today. Why are my Asian eyes so ugly? I used to think to myself constantly. And if you’ve read this until the end, I think you know the answer.

_____________________________________________________________

Comments: Friends who have read this far or read my shared thoughts at all, I know my experiences are not isolated. My past shared posts related to familial pressures and relationships have shown me just how overlapping our experiences can be. The feelings of low self-esteem and self-image at some time or another in your life is probably a universal one. Experiences of betrayal are sadly quite common. Hopefully you enjoyed this short piece - it’s a bit different from the other posts I’ve written (a little more cleaned up and narrative when compared to my usual frenetic ranting) ... anyways, I wanted to share that I’ve been working on putting together some more shorts + poems in my free time (this is how I destress from school haha) and something I hope to achieve through writing with this project (and since day one) is unfiltered and unapologetic storytelling highlighting the Asian voice that is so often completely ignored in discussions of race and discrimination. I’m not saying our experiences are to be equated to the experiences of other minorities because noo, but I am saying we should at least be included in the discussion. 

This brings me to my next point: I want to continue to share your stories too. If you have experiences you want to share related in any way to your identity as an Asian-American female, I want to hear them and with your permission, try to make prose or poetry of it. Text me, message me, or call me and let’s get in touch :) Thank you for being a part of this whether as a reader or direct contributor. Let’s shape our collective voice!!!

[sput-knicks]

It has only been a few days since Justice Ginsburg has passed, and the country has been heated about her death, her legacy, and her replacement. Of course, the establishment Democrats are grieving the loss of their “progressive hero” while the Republicans wasted no time insulting the dead and planning their desired replacement. But something I have not been hearing about is her actual voting record in the court and what supposedly made her a hero in the first place. I feel like I do a post like this once a week, but it is something I feel passionate about, so I have compiled many reasons as to why RBG was not a hero, or at least not the flawless one that Democrats think she was. Again, I think this phenomena of calling a Democrat that is not particularly great stems from the false dichotomy that a lot of people hold within their minds, which is that if someone is not a sociopathic Republican, then they must automatically be good. While it is true, at least in my mind, that Democrats are slightly better than Republicans, I think accepting them as the be-all and end-all of the political left in America is both wrong and only helping the right. So, in short, just because RBG was not an accused sex offender like Kavanaugh and Thomas, does not mean that she is Captain America in real life, and here is why.

In order to make an activist hero out of an administrative functionary like a Supreme Court Justice, a little distortion of the truth was required. One of the issues that she has been terrible with is in her rulings on Native Americans. To begin, she ruled against the Oneida tribe over a dispute regarding its territorial claim. In Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, she ruled against the Navajo nation that wanted the US to stop encroaching on the Navajo territory, the San Francisco Peaks, just because the US wanted a forest-service run ski resort there. In Inyo County v. Paiute-Shoshone Indians, the Paiute tribe asserted that the federal government did not have the right to seize tribal records since the Paiute tribe is classified as sovereign nation, but she and the rest of the court dismissed the case, not even giving it a chance. In Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter, she ruled in the minority, arguing that the US government did not actually have to fully pay contracts entered into with Native American tribes. In Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma v. Manufacturing Technologies, she dissented, arguing that Indian Nations were not entitled to sovereign immunity from contract lawsuits regardless of whether they were made on the reservation or not. In Atkinson Trading Co. v. Shirley, the supreme court unanimously ruled against the Navajo tribe that charged a hotel occupancy tax for providing services, such as the fire department and ambulances, for fee land. They also ruled unanimously in Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government against the tribal council, arguing that the tribe did not have the right to tax non-tribal members conducting business on tribal land. She also helped push through the Atlantic coast pipeline, which crossed through federal and native land. Finally, she refused to block Keystone XL pipeline. 

Related to issues regarding law and order, RGB had not been so great either. Her final supreme court decision helped push through Trump’s fast-track deportation bill. In Brogan v. United States, she ruled that due process does not apply to those being questioned by law enforcement. In Kansas v. Carr, she and the rest of the court overturned a Kansas Supreme Court ruling, which had already overturned two death sentences on the grounds that the defendant’s 8th amendment rights had been violated. But she and seven other justices decided that the 8th amendment had not been violated and allowed the executions to continue as planned. In Samson v. California, she went against the other liberal judges on the court and ruled that the police can search a parolee without a warrant simply for being on parole. In Heien v. North Carolina, Ginsburg held that the police may justifiably pull over cars if they believe they are violating the law, even if the police are misunderstanding the law. She concurred with the court in Plumhoff v. Rickard and held that the family of two people shot by the police for fleeing a stop could not sue the police. In Taylor v. Barkes, she concurred with the court that the family of a man that committed suicide in jail could not sue the jail for failing to implement anti-suicide measures, despite knowing that the man was suicidal before going to jail. And while on the topic of police brutality, a hot issue this year, it is important to remember that RGB said a few years ago, “I think it’s dumb and disrespectful...” regarding Kaepernick and the BLM movement. And also despite being a “very progressive” judge, she has only hired one POC staffer in 25 years, yet Kavanaugh, a conservative judge, already has twelve. 

It’s okay to like her more than some of her contemporary judges, but I am so tired of hearing how perfect she was the last few days. I know this was one of my dryest posts, but I wanted to provide many actual political reasons that she was not a hero. Heroes help people, and she did a lot of the opposite in her time of court. She may have had a lot of good rulings too, but I still do not think that we should hold a person that made so many mistakes in such high regard, especially when that person is one of the nine people in the country that have authority over all other decisions regarding the Constitution. Not to mention the fact that she was unelected and was not really beholden to anyone after being appointed. In that way, she was one of the least democratic leaders that we have ever had, as were every other supreme court justice that has come and gone. They can literally serve for life if they want, and she clearly did want to. Democrats, and other people that are more ideologically left, are rightfully worried right now that she may be replaced by an extreme right-winger under the Trump administration, but she could have retired at any time from 2008-2016 to prevent this. When asked about retirement in 2014, she said, “Tell me who the president could have nominated this spring that you would have rather seen on the court than me?” While I can personally think of many people, even the most loyal of RGB fan must admit that her retiring during the Obama years and being replaced by some other liberal would have been much better than the conservative prick that were probably going to get in a few weeks/months. And honestly, it’s primarily her fault, so for that reason, the ones listed above, and even more, she was not a hero and should not be regarded as one.