#to appreciate the danger he's in and display a full range of appropriate emotions

[marypsue]

Anyway! While I’m on the subject of big-budget franchises with David Harbour and extremely affected Russian accents in them (she says, several days after making the first such post), I have a number of (mostly uncomplimentary) thoughts about how the Russians in Stranger Things season 3 are constructed and written and framed, but they all pretty much boil down to “Steve knocking out the Russian guard in a fistfight is classic propaganda”. 

The villains of s1 and s2 can best be described as, well, sometimes the bad guys are smart too. The Lab and the Mind Flayer are competent. They are threatening. When they work in secret, they’re very difficult to detect. Their motivations appear to be largely internally consistent, and to exist independently of Our Heroes (well, up until s3, anyway). Their actions have logic behind them and are intended to help achieve their goals. They pose a genuine challenge to and even frequently outwit or outfight Our Heroes - except when it really counts.

By comparison, the Russians in s3 are cardboard props for Our Heroes to knock down. Not a single one of them has a distinct personality beyond ‘funny accent villain’ (except maybe the Terminator expy, who is a Terminator expy). They act as plot devices, not characters; their actions don’t always seem to have a consistent internal logic behind them, and don’t always even benefit them or move them toward what poorly-defined goals they might have. Rather, they’re reduced to whatever the writers think will, in the moment, make them look Big and Bad and Scary (or Cute and Funny and Likeable, in Alexei’s case), oppose (or, again re: Alexei, assist) Our Heroes’ goals, and/or move the plot forward.

That’s plain old bad writing. By itself, it’s unremarkable. Lots of writers make these mistakes when they construct antagonists. 

But also: the Russians - who, again, are not written or presented as full, individual people with goals, motivations, and coherent internal realities - are framed as simultaneously a terrifying, irresistible, insidious threat to everything the viewer is assumed to hold dear, and weak, incompetent, bumbling buffoons. And that’s where we tip over into propaganda.

I’m sure this has been talked about at length by people more knowledgeable than me. But this, to the best of my understanding, is one of the primary ways propaganda works. It presents an enemy, defines them as an other - not a person, like you and me, not really - and establishes them as a clear and present threat. It has to make them dangerous. It has to make them scary. It has to make its audience feel personally threatened and endangered by the very existence of this other, so that its audience wants to see that other defeated, subdued, gone. They could be in your unassuming Midwestern town! They could be hiding under your crowning symbol of capitalist success! And you would never know until it was too late, and they’d already unleashed unimaginable horror on the world and way of life you treasure, destroying it forever!

But also, propaganda can’t give the enemy too much credit. Too much fear plays into your enemy’s hands, leaves your own people afraid to move against them. And, if the enemy looks competent enough to pull off the kinds of atrocities pinned to them, then they might start looking smart. Like people who might have good ideas. Like people who might be able to win. 

So the enemy also has to be shown to be weak. Pathetic. A laughingstock. Easily outwitted and defeated by, for example, four bored kids - because the least of us is still smarter, stronger, better than the best of them.

So you might show that enemy as cunning and devious enough to build a secret base and laboratory under a shopping mall in the heart of enemy territory without anyone noticing - but too stupid or lazy to outfit it with any kind of security system. Powerful and unstoppable enough to hunt down and murder a man with impunity in the middle of a crowd - and it’s notable that the only person the Terminator expy actually manages to kill is one of his own - but weak and useless enough to lose a fistfight to a teenager who has, every other time he’s fought another vanilla human, had his ass absolutely handed to him. Terrifying and insidious - but ultimately powerless and pathetic.

Anyway, that’s why I’m worried about s4 trying to take Our Heroes to Russia.

[magaprima]

THREES.

 ❥ TAGGED BY: @wildpawed​  ❥ TAGGING:  @killthebxy @lloronala @dr-jillian @ozwolff @youhavemyrespect @jennyorjanna @byersmom

MUSE: Lilith. First woman. First witch. Queen of Hell. Temporary High School Principal. 

3 strengths

Intelligence. Lilith has a strong emotional intelligence in that she’s able to recognise thought and feeling processes in the large majority of people. While everyone else, Satan included, were all about forcing and threatening Sabrina to sign the book, Lilith was the one who recognised Sabrina would never sign the book to save herself, but she’d do it to save others, and so manipulates events accordingly. She’s constantly manipulating at every turn, that is literally her whole jam, and she does it well; she’s never discovered, she’s never challenged, she gets everything done subtly and successfully, and she has been doing this well for thousands of years. She has a great track record (and yet still isn’t appreciated). The only reason she is discovered is her temper (weakness listed below) gets the better of her and so leads Sabrina right to her. She also general intelligence as she is able to make up stories and false histories on the spot, she teaches an actual history class, and apparently does it well, for several months, like she legitimately taught, and she has a never ending knowledge on all things magical. Everything she’s ever asked about she has an answer for, she is a constant pool of information. There’s a reason Sabrina keeps going back to her for answers and help. It’s also the reason Hilda goes to her, because the woman just gives off a constantly knowledgeable, mentorish vibe. 

Extremely powerful. We only see a few displays in the show, due to the primary narrative being about Sabrina’s magic, but what we do see is immense. She was able to use minimal items to make a very powerful scrying spell that covered the entire Spellman house and went undetected by the family,, she was able to put out a Yule Log (something that should have been guarded against outside magic) with relatively little effort, she is unaffected by the Spellman’s defensive spells, and she is able to hold the Dark Lord back by his throat using her own telekinetic gifts. Like literal Satan and she was able to hold him back with one hand. That’s extremely, fucking powerful. But she is, after all, the first witch and she is also a demoness. So, she is, like Sabrina, two things, and, like Sabrina, it seems to only add to her gifts and make her extra powerful. She is not someone an ordinary witch or warlock could hope to defeat alone. 

Her survival instincts. Lilith is thousand of years old and she has gone through several transformations, a long-term abusive relationship, she’s remained close to the Dark Lord without being killed, survived being Banished by the False God and left to wander a wilderness to die, and she is still here, still going strong. Self-preservation is a really big thing for her, and comes before everything. It’s even what she tells Sabrina, to leave her Aunts behind in favour of saving herself; this attitude is what has kept Lilith arrive and until the Part 2 finale she is very uninterested in changing that. She is a woman who knows how to survive, as a lot of long-term abuse victims do, and she does it no matter what. She has suffered majorly several times over, but she has lived through and, in the end, was able to come out on top and finally crown herself as queen, and that was only possible because she had survived everything else.

3 weaknesses

Lucifer. For so many reasons. He’s her weakness because she fell in love with him and a part of her will always love him no matter how much she tries to destroy that, so that make her vulnerable. He’s her weakness because he was her abuser for such a long, long time, millennia in fact, and therefore, for all her strength and confidence, she was always frightened of him, always wary of upsetting him. He’s her weakness because he’s one of the few in existence to be more powerful than her and older than her, therefore there’s a risk there. Due to my headcanon that Lilith got her witchly powers when she defied the False God, as she supposedly did in traditional mythology, rather than signing the Book, he isn’t able to take her powers away entirely, but he would have been capable of binding her, making her powerless, perhaps even has done for periods of time in the past, so he’s her weakness there. He is a rare chink in her very strong armour. 

Her lack of positive emotional experiences. The fact that nearly all of Lilith’s relationships- romantic, platonic, familial- have all been negative ones means she doesn’t have the full breadth of experience needed to make emotionally intelligent decisions and to react to things in an appropriate way. It’s the reason she sees Sabrina as an enemy rather than ally, because her experiences tell her Sabrina would stab her in the back and steal everything from her. It’s why she’s unable to make emotional connections until Part 2, it takes her that long to have those first developments. She doesn’t react normally because of this lack of range in relationships; she flips to extreme, negative reactions rather than waiting things out and weighing everything up. It’s also why, when people reach out to her, she doesn’t know what to do, and is either stunned into silence, or react defensively because she’s uncomfortable with the sincerity. 

Her temper. This is related to the previous points, as more positive experiences might have helped curb her temper, or at least her willingness to indulge it. Instead she gives into it with the fiery hellish passion you’d expect from the destined Queen of Hell. We see it first when her puppet scarecrow is destroyed and she throws the whole thing with an unearthly scream, it’s temper that makes her create the Adam Creature and try to kill Sabrina. Because she is intelligent and patient, her temper isn’t indulged too often, but when it is, it’s self-destructive. She doesn’t think intelligently or react thoughtfully when she gives into that rage. 

3 secrets

She’s not quite the mortal hater she appears to be, generally  speaking. Generally speaking, she doesn’t like mortals, she dismisses them as unworthy, but there’s never outright hate, because that would mean she had to care about them in any regard and she really doesn’t. Generally nothings them. However due to thinking nothing of them she can hate witches or warlocks for preferring the, a Edward did, for example. So, despite people presuming she abhors all mortals, she doesn’t. She can hate mortal men, but she also hates warlock men, so that’s more about gender than species, but as Lilith was originally created as mortal first (which is where a lot of her internal dislike and dismissal as being ‘unworthy’ comes from, due to everything she suffered as a mortal and also as she perceives it as the reason Satan thinks her unworthy) she can’t completely hate them, because some primal, original part of her still ties her to them, despite her denials. And, her recent experiences at Baxter High, have opened her mind a little more to mortals, and their worth, but this softening towards particular ones is a secret even to herself. 

She has maternal instincts, even if she fights and denies them constantly. Lilith was created as an all-mother, the wife, the life-giver etc etc. If she had kept her role as assigned by the False God, she would have filled Eve’s role, which is the archetype of the traditional woman; a wife, a mother, a life-giver, a nuturer. Therefore, Lilith  was created with those properties; she does have a maternal instinct in her, but it is perceived as weakness by almost everyone in her circle, including Lucifer, so she has suppressed it and denied it, except when she uses it to manipulate her own way. However, despite that, it can be prompted by certain people and interactions (as Sabrina prompted it in her in the finale. The way she speaks to her in her bedroom about her being Queen, and still studying the books, and the way she saves her life at the coronation), but when she feels that happen, she tries her utmost best to suppress it once more. But that maternal instinct is there to be triggered. 

She likes Sabrina. She genuinely likes her, even feels proud of her when she does certain things. Sabrina rebels against the order, as Lilith did, she doesn’t accept things from an unseen God, she challenges the rules, questions things, all things Lilith did, and so she can’t help but admire that. She never planned on actually liking her, but spending so much time with her in a supportive, mentor environment opened up the above maternal instincts as well as processes and bonds Lilith hadn’t expected. She has a genuine soft spot for her, hence why she didn’t just return her powers, but Ms Wardwell too. Lilith feels a bond to Sabrina, that they’re cut from the same cloth in away (it’s also why she can be wary of her too)

3 fears

That Lucifer will escape his prison. Lilith has always played her game from the shadows, never showing her cards until the last moment, the moment of certainty, but with challenging the Dark Lord, openly grabbing him, revealing herself as co-conspirator, there’s no way she could merely ‘survive’ if he escaped. He would be furious with Sabrina, but I imagine Lilith’s life would be forfeit. She knows personally how dangerous and powerful he is, so she fears his escape more than anyone. Which is why she will guard Nick relentlessly. 

That she’ll lose her crown/throne. She’s waited so long for it and worked so hard for it and finally it’s hers; she’s Queen of Hell. But she’s aware that Sabrina was the intended Queen and that certain residents of Hell will prefer Lucifer, or be loyal to him beyond his imprisonment, or don’t want to be ruled by a woman etc and will challenge her. She will fight to the last to keep her crown now that she has it, but she’s wary of coups and someone trying to trap and imprison her. She also the irrational fear that Sabrina will change her mind and want the crown after all. 

That the False God might drag her back to his realm and to Adam. This fear was at his greatest in the beginning when it seemed entirely legitimate that he might drag her back, but even after thousands of years she can’t shake that dread at the idea. Adam was a cruel ‘husband’ and treated her as something less than, something to serve, he was cruel and vindictive, dismissive, the list goes on, and he had the support of the False God. In a paradise, Lilith suffered and was unprotected, and even though she has suffered with Lucifer, she still fears being dragged back more, because with Adam she was mortal and powerless; at least in hell she has power. 

3 goals

Her main goal, in fact her primary and essential goal for like eternity, was to become Queen of Hell. However, originally it was to rule beside Lucifer, but then she changes to ‘let’s gut the bastard and I’ll take the crown for myself’, but then she actually got the crown, so goal achieved. So now, her new goal is to keep the crown.  

To see witches back in places of power. The path of night has taken a bad step in the very wrong direction in giving warlocks all the power. Under her rule, Lilith wants to see witches taking centre stage, more high priestesses rather than high priestesses, a Witches’ Council full of women, so she wants to orchestrate all that coming into being. 

To keep Nick safe, as her promise to Sabrina, but, more importantly, to keep Lucifer trapped and therefore unable to wreak bloody revenge on them all.