#was very much the norm. that was how you consumed stories in general. that was part of the purpose

[cenvast]

Laios, Monsters, & Toshiro: On Racialized Desire and Identification with the Other

Arguably, the most significant part of Laios' character is the societal ostracization he faces because of his non-normative interests and behavior. For the majority of his life, Laios struggles socially, and other humans mistreat him. When he rescues Marcille from the Nightmares, his nightmare dredges up his inability to fit into school and the army. During his early dungeoneering days, he's lied to and exploited by his fellow party members.

One of his earliest and most formative negative experiences with people is his village's abuse of Falin as a magic user. He shares that after the villagers discovered that she can use magic, "adults who were just kind yesterday, all began to bully [her]." Instead of protecting Falin, his parent tell her to leave the village. The prejudice Falin faces and his parents' response to it upsets Laios to the point that he leaves home.

While Laios cares about his friends, the Demon points out that Laios understandably does not care for people in general. Laios doesn't disagree with the Demon's assessment and suspects that the Demon "can sense all [his] thoughts." The Demon goes on to say that Laios actually "despise[s] all humans." Laios denies this assessment, but given the Demon's uncanny ability to sniff out people's desires and Laios' ashamed expression, at least part of Laios likely agrees with the Demon. It's not a stretch to assume that he's held onto some hurt and resentment towards humans due to their mistreatment of him and Falin in their youth.

In response to how human society has othered him, Laios distances himself from humans and invests his time and energy into monsters and demi-humans instead. In the DunMeshi world, monsters and demi-humans are the ultimate societal Other. People fear them, exploit them, and even hunt and kill them. As someone who's similarly been mistreated by human society, Laios resonates deeply with monsters.

His desire to become a monster and/or beastman reflects his desire to reclaim agency over how society has ostracized him. If he chooses to become a monster, he gets to place value on what society has deemed despicable. He gets to choose why society hates him and be different on his own terms.

Both textually and thematically, Laios' identification with the Other bleeds into the erotic. More blatantly, he says that he'd have sex with orc women, and his succubus is a monstrous version of Marcille.

The entire story is also steeped in the theme of consumption as carnality. Laios and his party spend the entire manga eating monsters — a taboo physical act which they reap pleasure from; the underlying eroticism isn't difficult to see.

The story also presents consumption as a form of extreme identification. Eating a monster makes the monster part of you through digestion. The line between consuming the monster and becoming the monster — between erotic desire for the monster, demonstrated by eating their flesh, and identifying with the monster — is very blurred. Note that digesting a monster is an act of absorption; it destroys the original creature. Senshi states that consuming a monster erases "its individual identity," and major manga spoilers, but Laios defeats and pacifies the Demon by consuming its desire to eat. We'll come back to this concept later.

As previously mentioned, Laios is disinterested in most humans. The notable exception to this rule is Toshiro and by extension, the Eastern Archipelago. Laios doesn't seem to know much about the Archipelago before speaking to Toshiro, so he isn't drawn to Toshiro because he's an Easterner. Instead, he's drawn to his "odd appearance."

Just like Laios views monsters and demi-humans as a visible Other, Laios views Toshiro as another visible Other. On the Island, Toshiro stands out as a foreigner at first glance. While Laios as a white tallman doesn't appear visibly strange to other people, he's drawn again and again to people and creatures who are immediately visibly "odd." He sees them as understanding what it's like to be different and be mistreated for it, and since he relates to that experience, he wants to learn about them and be closer to them.

Essentially, Laios behaves towards Toshiro and his culture the same way he behaves towards monsters; he wants to know everything about Toshiro's foreign culture — the thing which makes him different. Unintentionally, Laios unintentionally reduces Toshiro to being Japanese; if he wasn't Japanese, Laios would never have approached him.

While Laios doesn't have bad intentions, as Toshiro himself acknowledges during their fight, his behavior towards Toshiro still has negative consequences. Laios' harmless interest in monsters translates to fetishization in the context of Japanese culture. He enacts multiple microaggressions against Toshiro and crossing his boundaries.

Laios goes beyond merely learning about Japanese culture. He takes parts of it for himself when he names his sword a Japanese name. Akin to his consumption of monsters, Laios attempts to participate in Toshiro's culture while failing to respect Toshiro himself. Just as eating monsters destroys them, Laios consuming Toshiro's culture while enacting racism against him causes real harm.

Many people have already written about Laios' microaggressions towards Toshiro, but a couple include Laios telling Toshiro that he looks "odd" and asking where he's from, mispronouncing his name as "Shuro," and assuming his favorite food is rice. Laios' treatment and fetishization of Toshiro is racist and harmful. However, I'd like to dive beyond the surface of Laios' micro-aggressive remarks and examine how his obsession with Toshiro becomes a racialized mode of desire, paralleling real world phenomena.

Though no concrete canonical evidence of Laios' feelings towards Toshiro being romantic and/or sexual exists, his interactions with Toshiro have erotic undertones. Their fight dialogue, in particular, revolves around eating, an act the story consistently shows as carnal. During this fight, Laios places his thumb in Toshiro's mouth and asks him, "What's the point of even having a mouth?" Laios' penetration of Toshiro's body via his mouth and his question's potential as an innuendo lend themselves to an erotic reading of the scene's more obvious conflict. Considering the overlap between consumption and carnality throughout the story, it's not a large jump to read eroticism into Laios demanding Toshiro meet his body's physical needs.

Furthermore, Laios is more enthusiastic about Toshiro than any other human in the series. While he cares deeply about his sister and his friends, Laios repeatedly expresses how much he admires Toshiro. He retains and brings up things like Toshiro's (perceived) favorite food. He wants to go to the East in Falin's place after she rejects Toshiro's marriage proposal, and in the "What-If" extra material, he's adamant about setting up a scenario where Toshiro travels with him through the Dungeon.

Undoubtedly, Laios is drawn to Toshiro. Since he sees non-white-ness and monstrosity as equivalent markers of societal othering, Toshiro's identity as a foreigner is what cultivates and maintains Laios' interest in him. Even if Laios learns to care for Toshiro as a person, his desire for Toshiro, platonically or otherwise, is still filtered heavily through race within the narrative.

Laios' relationship with his masculinity is also fraught. He broke off his engagement with a girl from his village and doesn't express normative interest in female tallmen. Seeing how the nightmare versions of his parents ask him when he's going to give them grandchildren, Laios experiences societal pressure to conform to a normative performance of masculinity through being attracted to and marrying a tallman woman and creating a family with her.

Laios frequently talks about how cool and admirable Toshiro is when he performs masculinity through combat, etc. He might find Toshiro's Asian masculinity more appealing and more accessible to him than the masculinity that's been forced onto him, precisely because Toshiro's Asian masculinity appears non-normative in a Western lens. But co-opting the masculinities of men of color as a white man would only further feed into the white consumption of cultures of color.

Overall, Laios' entitlement to and consumption of Toshiro's culture mirrors the real-life way white people co-opt and fetishize non-white cultures. Laios' fetishistic treatment of Japanese culture, because of his attraction (platonic or otherwise) to Toshiro, parallels white people's treatment of Asian people in the Western diaspora. I can only speak on the Asian American experience, but Laios immediately being drawn to Toshiro's "odd appearance," obsessing over his culture, and primarily treating Toshiro as a conduit for his said culture feels eerily close to how some white anime and/or K-pop fans act towards Japanese and Korean people.

Similarly to Laios, real queer, neurodivergent, and/or otherwise non-normative white people are marginalized by white Western society. They relate to how society others non-white cultures and/or people of color and latch onto them. While forming human connections based on curiosity and shared experiences is wonderful, white people are often unaware of the racial dynamics at play when they engage with non-white cultures and people of color and unintentionally, end up consuming and fetishizing non-white cultures in detrimental ways.

None of this negates the reality that Laios and Toshiro canonically care for each other. For instance, Toshiro's willingness to hug Laios reveals his genuine familiarity with and affection for him. The racial dynamics of their friendship complicate their relationship in fascinating ways and open up a potential path for Laios' growth. With time and effort, Laios could absolutely unlearn his racism and become a much better friend to Toshiro.

In conclusion, Laios' behavior towards Toshiro is a study in a marginalized white person's identification with and racialized desire for a non-white Other and how even a well-intentioned attempt at connection can replicate harmful racist dynamics. Toshiro's experience with Laios closely parallels real Asian people's struggles with racism and fetishization in our world today.

[alpaca-clouds]

Decolonizing Narratives - The Final Challenge?

Yesterday I wrote about the issue, that a lot of people still have in terms of accepting Solarpunk stories that either do work without any conflict at all - or at least conflicts that do not result out of the world in truth being some sort of "trap". Part of this is very much connected to the fact that Western Narrative Storytelling assumes that every story needs a concept, while people do not realize that this is not a general, but a western thing. Which... kinda gets me to the other big issue we have: How all-encompassing colonialism is in our storytelling over here.

I spent most of 2020, while everything was in shut-down, writing a collection of more than 20 essays on the topic of "Decolonizing Fantasy". Essays in which I went into this topic: How prevalent colonial narrative and colonial patterns of storytelling are within the genres of fantasy and science fiction. (Tell me, if you are interested in me translating them into English.)

But it is not just Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is kinda everywhere. In Romance, and just "Drama", especially in terms of Literary Fiction, how people will call it. And of course it is there in Crime and Mystery.

And yeah, sometimes the colonial narratives are a lot more obvious. Like, yeah, no shit that "international thriller", in which the main characters are CIA operatives, is supportive of a colonial narrative. No shit, the horror story, that culturally appropriates wendigos is fucking colonial shit. But...

It sneaks in through so many things. So many ideas on how a story needs to be structured are western, and assuming they need to be there is a colonial thought. As it assumes that western narrative storytelling is in some way better than other forms of narrative storytelling.

I still remember that back in school I had a long argument with a teacher, who was teaching us about 3-Act and 5-Act structures, to which I - who knew about East Asian literature, due to reading the blog of a Japanese writer - went like: "Yeah, but there are other ways of structuring stories, right?" To whcih my teacher looked at me in horror and was like: "No!" And this autistic kid instantly was like: "Yeah there are." Que argument.

And there are quite a few of those things that are speaking for this phenomenon. The simple idea that "western storytelling is the only valid way of storytelling" and that "western norms are the only norms". It creeps up in so many stories in often quite subtle ways. And I am getting frustrated with either writers - or folks reviewing movies, books and other media - never questioning this stuff.

Do stories with another structure feel kinda strange, when you have been raised on the 3-Act-structure? Yeah, it does. But that it make a story bad? I would argue no. We just need to adjust our expectations in this regard.

I could repeat what I said yesterday: Try consuming media from other cultures. But I know it is not always that easy. But... If you get the chance, you should still try. Open your mind for other types of stories, rather than this one kind of story dominating western media.

[bandtrees]

Also Mingus. Of course

SEND ME A CHARACTER!!

MINGUS!!!!!!!! OF COURSE. under the cut lol

Sexuality Headcanon: bi :] it's ourple just like her. i don't think she especially cares for romance or ponders her sexuality much, but in less of an "arospec" way and more of a "forming human connection with her is a losing battle" way. i usually love arospec hcs and do see aro mingus somewhat often but it's just not something i really see myself.

Gender Headcanon: generally cis woman but i feel like if she learned what being nonbinary was she would try and release and trademark her own neopronouns and make people pay to use them. i do also see her being interpreted as transfem sometimes and i think that's a really interesting reading but not one that i actively subscribe to.

A ship I have with said character: ghghnmnnormingus. it's been really fuckin funny watching the tides change in the fandom on this ship - for a while i'd pondered it but never said anything, and then there was the time period where it was considered a weird cursed minority and i got vagueposted about it, and THEN mich came and singlehandedly pilled the masses and now its just, like, a ship. funny how that goes. but all of that talk aside, i just think they have so much potential in, like, every stage of their dynamic. the timeframe where norm's consumed by his completely one-sided obsession (/neg) with her is SO fun to think about, as is the idea post-canon of them forging a more normal relationship and possibly more. they're two of dialtown's most intricately-written characters imo, and it really shows in how layered all of their interactions are :'] there is so much baggage between them and simultaneously so little (with the point of "norm cares way more about her opinion of him than she even thinks about him") and it just makes the final confrontation of ch3 pay off so damn well. listen to nemeses by jonathan coulton it's THE normingus song to me. ⬇ SOOO ch3 norm @ mingus to me

A BROTP I have with said character: god her dynamics with all the mingling are so funny, i could listen to that group of people babble on literally forever. i wanna hear them talk about non-green related issues i want to hear what this room sounds like when its time to argue about, idk, taxes

A NOTP I have with said character: dialtown does not have that many options for edgelord proshittery but i have seen efforts at the one(1) they have. Unfortunately .

A random headcanon: always has some kind of headwear on, whether it be her trademark little hat or other ones she has made for her, or headbands or headscarves or whatnot. it's mostly cuz her head looks really off to me without the hat so i work in substitutes when im drawing or imagining her in more casual settings

General Opinion over said character: the height of dialtown's writing, her and everything to do with her. dialtown is already a good game but it goes from good to great when mingus takes center stage, imo. she's so interesting and also funny to watch - i think "seems silly but actually has deeper stuff going on"-type stories are best when the silly and the serious are tightly interwoven and you can't really distance them from eachother, and mingus is a great show of that as an inherently super tragic but also super funny character. there's not a word of dialogue she speaks where you don't get the impression of how pathetic and overcompensating she is, and that works both for humor and for sadness really well. i also like, in general, when typically "sympathetic" character flaws are played to be difficult or dangerous - in mingus' case her insecurity and desperation to follow in her grandfather's footsteps, and her compassion in wanting to be one of the only people left who still really care about him, it's objectively very noble- but less so when it becomes everyone else's problem rather than just hers. she has this in common with her grandfather 👍

[lurkingshan]

How many non-BLs do you watch in general, and why is it good to mix up your media intake?

Look at you forcing me to admit I watch more than you on main. As you know, the answer is: a lot. You don’t become a drama scholar by slacking!

My MDL right now says I’ve completed about 350 dramas, and that’s across a wide variety of Asian media. I watch stuff from Korea, Japan, Thailand, and China very regularly, as well as whatever I can find from Taiwan, Philippines, and Vietnam (some of this isn’t even tracked on MDL so my total watch number is always higher than whatever it says). I also watch Western media but not nearly as much. By my count I’ve watched about 85 dramas this year, and the bl to not-bl split is about 50/50.

I try to watch at least a few bls live week to week at any given time for fandom participation reasons, because it’s fun to take part in the discourse. And I’m always also working through a long backlog of non-bl dramas, which I binge one at a time (unlike some people who try to simultaneously watch 20 things one episode at a time, ahem). And I do think the variety is important for a number of reasons.

I am truly a lover of stories, and I always want another one. I usually also have a book going on top of my drama viewing.

I’m analytical by nature and very interested in narrative structure, characterization, plotting and pacing, and all the other components of good storytelling. You learn these things best by studying and observing what works and what doesn’t in the media you consume.

Watching dramas from different countries gives you the chance to learn about a variety of cultures and draw connections between cultural norms and values, how stories get told, and how each industry interacts with audiences both domestic and international.

Having a well-balanced media diet also affords you the opportunity to learn about differences between cultures and how these countries’ media speaks to and influences each other.

Fiction is a great way to process your emotions and get to know yourself. Varying the genre, style, and tone on your watch list opens your mind to so much creativity and allows you to find affinity and connection with things you didn’t even know you liked. If you’re not willing to venture out of your usual patterns and safe zones, you may never know yourself entirely.

Consuming too much of any one thing is bad for your brain. If you only watch one kind of story over and over again, you will lack perspective and capacity for critical analysis, because you lose touch with the wider context of the media landscape. Comparative analysis keeps you sharp and helps you learn.

To put it simply: There’s a great wide world of stories out there, and I want to see and learn from them all.

[olderthannetfic]

Re: https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/722192574032527360/translators-who-localize-a-story-to-the-point-of

This makes me think of the book Yellowface that came out recently, which I’ve been finding a thrilling read. It’s about a white woman author who, when her extremely successful asian author friend dies, steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own.

Personally I find it very helpful when learning about some new craft to see a generally agreed upon set of “good” examples of it, and then “bad” examples. As an example, when I was learning to knit I was helped by seeing examples of mistakes next to the stitches done correctly. I was able to improve much faster with stark examples.

Yellowface is a fiction book and so the story is the main point of it, but it’s also a very good example of the “bad” when it comes to cultural erasure through translation or americanization. The white woman character does a tremendous amount of editing of the manuscript to make it more easily digestible to what she thinks of as “regular” (meaning non-asian) audiences, and if you know anything about chinese culture, naming practices, or linguistic norms, each change she makes feels like an immense violation. Because she’s a villain character, they’re mentioned in the most obvious and horrifying way, often with a “does this really matter?” attitude. Genuinely an extremely helpful list of what not to do when trying to translate chinese characters, and if someone didn’t know anything at all about the topic, I would consider it a very googleable list to learn more about what matters in translation for chinese culture specifically. Things such as “Why do some character names have A- in front of them? What does that mean?” as one example of what I mean.

I also think the discussion around the Seven Seas translations of the author MXTX’s work is another good place to look for more information about translation of chinese works. There’s been a lot of fandom debate about specific translation points, so that whole fandom history could be a great treasure trove to learn more as well.

What you said as a general rule, to avoid non-idiomatic direct translations only left in to make a work feel “foreign” to non-native speakers—that comes up a lot with the character Lan Wangji specifically, and how best to translate his speaking style. So discussion around him specifically would be a great place to start within that.

Happy learning more about new cultures in translation to everyone! If anyone has examples of discussion or debate with translation of another culture’s works, I would love to see an ask like that for those cultures too. Or if anyone has more examples of chinese works in translation that could be useful, please add them.

--

Oh god. These days, I mostly read manga to practice my Japanese, but back when I was in anime fandom and consuming a lot of translations, there was constant wank about translation choices...

...and most of it demanded Charlie Chan-level garbage translations that made the audience feel smart and like they were accessing something "authentic". Gag me.

[communistkenobi]

Because generational change will be an important theme in our story, we should pause briefly here to consider how social change and generational change are interrelated. As a matter of simple accounting, any social change - from the rise of rap music to the decline of newspapers - is always produced by some combination of two very different processes. The first is for many individuals to change their tastes and habits in a single direction simultaneously. This sort of social change can occur quickly and be reversed just as quickly. If large numbers of Americans, young and old, fall in love with sport utility vehicles, as they did in the 1990s, the automotive marketplace can be quickly transformed, and it can be transformed in a different direction just as quickly. Sociologists sometimes call this type of change "intracohort," because the change is detectable within each age cohort. The second sort of social change is slower, more subtle, and harder to reverse. If different generations have different tastes or habits, the social physiology of birth and death will eventually transform society, even if no individual ever changes. Much of the change in sexual mores over the last several decades has been of this sort. Relatively few adults changed their views about morality, and most of those who did actually became more conservative. In the aggregate, however, American attitudes toward premarital sex, for example, have been radically liberalized over the last several decades, because a generation with stricter beliefs was gradually replaced by a later generation with more relaxed norms. Sociologists call this type of change "intercohort," because the change is detectable only across different age groups. Precisely because the rhythm of generational change is slower paced, it is more nearly inexorable. (Bowling Alone, p35)

This is fucking nonsense!!! Literally what are you talking about old man!!!! Sexual norms didn’t “relax” with a new generation because young people are ontologically more progressive than their parents - if this was the case we would all be polyamorous kinksters today, especially given that church attendance and Christian affiliation is at all time historic lows. Like maybe this has more to do with no-fault divorce becoming legal and the necessity of women to work outside the home as a result of neoliberal economic policy and liberal feminist pushes for (white!) women to earn a wage independent of their husbands, which resulted in a change in the way we view sex outside of marriage (along with a bunch of other factors!!).

Similarly, trends in vehicle consumer preferences are not these random events that just “happen” because a bunch of individuals spontaneously and independently decided that they liked sports cars all at the same time. the necessity of vehicle ownership in places like America are the end result of rapid post-war low-density suburban development that pushed for homeownership as a way to shore up middle class interests as a bulwark against proletarian class conscious (to paraphrase William Levitt, homeowners are too busy to be communists), which was part of the broader policy regime of McCarthyism. This was coupled with the neoliberalisation of the state in the 1970s and 80s, resulting in the gutting of public transit and the selling off the public roads to private companies, further necessitating vehicle ownership and subsequently placing a large cultural emphasis on the prestige of owning a car, which can be easily flaunted in public as a display of personal wealth. and finally, the land available to do this rapid development & privatisation was the result of centuries of settler genocide and racial slavery which produced a perfect “terra nullius” for whites to build an empire on top of. So a preference for what vehicle someone thinks looks cool is far downwind of this historical context, none of which is apparently important to Putnam when weighed against the titanic explanatory power of “generational change”

[kneelingshadowsalome]

I really love having places like your fantastic blog were we can explore insane, evil or out of the norm characters like your König without shame! Without weird looks from others or being judged for liking that kind of stuff. For me, even as a child I always found the broken, evil or (seemingly) villainous characters soooo much more appealing than the heros or knights in shining armour. For example, I always found the villains in sailor moon waaay cooler than the good characters! And that's still the case as a grown up for me when I consume media.

And I'm obviously not alone, seeing everyone here go crazy about your yandere König or fics with dark themes and characters in general. You said somewhere, that you weren't sure about the reactions to just friends when you posted it but honestly - I'm not surprised at all that everyone likes it so much! I think it's very healthy to explore dark themes through fiction and it's a great outlet for our normal everyday lifes. As well as the smut that comes with these problematic characters! I'm in a very loving and healthy relationship with my partner and I wouldn't want it any other way, but reading stories with that kind of dark sexual content just soothes that little itch inside of me and I really enjoy the thought experiments that come with this.

It seems a lot of people here (or in general) are surprised, that they are so into this kind of stuff. So I'm just rambling in your ask box because I think there's nothing wrong with being enamoured with content like this and it's fantastic, that we can all explore it together, inspire each other and let loose a bit! <3

Yes! Oh my god I'm so here for you and all the people who have an itch for madness and morally grey characters 🩷🩷🩷 this is absolutely a safe space for exploring yandere König or brat tamer Ghost or whatever else that's a little bit broken, without shame.

This message was so sweet and I read it like ten times with a huge smile on my face because it's just so liberating and loving. I'm so happy to have found all you lovely people to share these crazy thoughts & obsess over fictional PTSD men with.

I'm also a firm believer in that it is only healthy to explore our "shadow" through art. And I consider fanart, fanfiction, all this creativity and brainstorming here art – it's creative, it's fun, it does what art is supposed to do: it inspires thought and emotion and connection 💗 These things are what make us human and it's better to have some kind of an outlet than none at all.

And I mean... I could analyze what's at work behind the attraction to these characters/dynamics, sure... I could debate from different feminist (not to talk of psychological 🫠) viewpoints how problematic it is and what it reveals of me when I'm entertained when writing or reading this shit. But nope, not gonna deep-dive into that in here, and not going to kink-shame myself or anyone else here either.

And like you said – it's not that serious! The world is kinda crazy and we all have our worries, we all have our hopes and fears and quirks. Why not have some fun with toxic König while we're at it. No harm, no foul.

Thank you so much for this message and I hope you have a lovely day 💋🩷💞

[itonlinetraining]

Top 5 Sprint Metrics to Report to your stakeholders

The successful management of software development projects is aided by integrating agile metrics into the workflow. Do you need clarification about joining the agile metric courses? You don't need to get upset, and you can go for the best training centers and get agile certification online. Metrics data, sometimes without an explanation, will frequently give fatal results. Those misunderstood can be very damaging to your team because they raise many concerns and anxiety among the leadership group, which increases stress levels among the team members who may feel like they are being unfairly judged. The performance of your team will suffer as a result.. Here we guide you to the top 5 Sprint Metrics to report to your stakeholders in this post.

Should select specific metrics

Regularly reporting metrics to your leadership team will encourage a fact-based approach to project delivery. This may be a massive benefit for your project team in your business, where openness is valued and open communication is the norm. The goal of the metrics before being involved in specific measures such as increasing the understanding level, communicating your progress, boosting confidence, sharing accomplishments, and defining the value being delivered.

What is Sprint Metrics?

Teams must be able to provide Sprint objections consistently and dependably to fulfill long-term user and business expectations because sprints are the foundation for effective delivery. These sprint metrics, especially the Flow metrics, should always be present. They should be discussed each day at stand-ups and in teams, respectively. You can go for agile certification training through online centers to learn more about this.

Five basic sprint metrics that report to your stakeholders

Velocity

Agile velocity indicates how much work was completed in a given amount of time. Project owners can estimate the time needed to accomplish a project using a rate. Velocity in software development refers to the speed at which assertions are turned into programs. The project's velocity equals the total story points accumulated during the last few sprints. The outcomes of this data allow you to forecast the output for the following few sprints. It is the statistic that agile teams utilize the most to measure their performance. 

Acceptance of work

Acceptance of work is crucial for monitoring since it shows that value has been given, assuming that your Product Owner is providing the end users or customers with an accurate picture. You may tell you to have a high-performing team if your team can routinely reach most of the acceptance. So the most important thing is that the work should get approval and need to accept it.

Defect rate

Organizations frequently need to pay more attention to the importance of quality because they are more preoccupied with cost overruns and timetable slippage. You can still assess quality and defects and compare the trend to communicate the team's performance even if they are not creating software products. Collecting data throughout the development life cycle can give a wider view of the project's quality. You may better comprehend the team's general efforts to uphold or improve project quality.

User Satisfaction

The lifespan of your team and your company will be significantly impacted by client feelings and project approval, even though it might be difficult to get direct input from customers consistently. Despite this, this is a crucial indicator that is worth measuring. To determine how your consumers feel about your product or service, metrics might be a quick and easy solution.

Total team happiness

The team morale metric is another that is sometimes overlooked. You have to check how they are pleased. Do they feel inspired and engaged to produce their finest work? Do they have the resources necessary to produce creative products? If you pay attention to the well-being of your team, there's a potential that they will be more motivated due to a lack of interest which could be dangerous for your project.

Wrapping Up

Developing the sprint metrics is a significant process. You can learn about these metrics through online courses in the best training centers. Hope you gain knowledge about the top 5 Sprint Metrics to report to your stakeholders, know it, and use it wisely.

[francisp0rter]

BLINDSPOT/ROCKIFICATION

Why does this dude have such a massive blindspot when it comes to trap and street rap?

Just take a look at his new top 50 albums list. Not one trap or drill album. Not a single one. Are you fucked in the head? How are you gonna call yourself "the internet's busiest music nerd" when you don't even acknowledge the existence of the biggest rap subgenre in the world currently.

Imagine leaving Babyface Ray, Icewear Vezzo, BabyTron, Quavo & Takeoff, Duvy, Lucki, iayze etc. off of your end of the year list in favour of some generic, derivative garbage like The Forever Story. Just try and imagine that. Try and imagine having that bad of taste while also calling yourself "the internet's busiest music nerd."

The bald man seems like a nice guy but he needs to learn to listen to music properly. You're supposed to be this bigtime music critic right? So why you still listen to music like a fan then?

The thing that drives me nuts about Fantano is the simple fact that he tries to cover pretty much all music in the popular and indie spheres. There's a reason that reporters and critics have "beats" or specific areas of expertise that they cover. Pitchfork wouldn't send Al Pierre to review a Carly Rae Jepsen record. They know that's not his wheelhouse. They'll get Dylan Green or some other poptimist sycophant to do that kind of bidding. So why is Fantano reviewing shit that he doesn't like, is never going to like, and doesn't understand? That's not to say critics shouldn't give negative reviews. That would be ridiculous. I'm saying that a critic should not speak on music that they don't understand, and based on Fantano referring to Chief Keef's "Finally Rich" as "ridiculous novelty" (as well as his general ignorance on street rap), I think it's fair to say that he has no understanding of it. A 16 year old kid recounting all the murder, addiction, and destruction he's seen in his life is "ridiculous novelty" to you? Come the fuck on, bald man.

Remember when this dude was sucking off Brockhampton being all buddy buddy with them? That shit was unbelievable. What kind of self respecting music critic would ever make friends with an artist? There is a very necessary division between critic and artist and you can't just go around playing jump rope with it. Lester Bangs didn't start kissing up to Lou Reed when he interviewed him, despite Reed being Bangs' idol. No. He did the exact opposite. He called Lou Reed a bitch to his face and said his music sucks now and he should give it up. That's a real critic.

This guy needs to realize that traditional albums have never been a good way to consume rap music. Sure, you get an Illmatic or a Butterfly every now and then, but for the most part rap is a singles genre, and rappers' attempts to create albums in the rock & roll tradition (ten to fifteen songs, cohesive, with a curated tracklist and reflective cover art) is always annoying. It rarely ever works out. That's why J. Cole sucks so bad on albums but on features he's pretty good. Because when he's on a feature or a single he's just rapping. He's not concerned with making some great cohesive rap album, he's just spitting bars.

Idk. I love albums. I hate them in the context of rap sometimes. I "hate" them for the same reason that I hate when rappers perform with a live band. This is Hip Hop. It's not rock music. We don't need to conform the genre to the popular standards of music, because none of this was ever about that. The whole thing I fell in love with about rap, besides the music itself, is that it existed in stark contrast to and firm defiance of established musical norms. Rappers didn't try and be popstars. If one became a popstar, like Em or Wayne or Hov, it was almost always in spite of them being a rapper, not because of it. And I loved that. I mean, it's great that rap is popular now, but also it's terrible at the same time. I'm glad more people are being exposed to it, but also I wish that they would please just leave us alone and stop trying to make this genre into something it's not.

I'm aware that I'm not making the clearest point here, so let me say this: Trap and drill music are the new blues. It is a hyper-violent blues, but it is blues nonetheless in that it is poetics and rhythms that speak on a working class Black American experience. And it is being received with the same ignorance and narcissism that blues was received with.

[alpaca-clouds]

Why I hate the concept of player-sexual characters

Okay, you know what? Let me talk about this. Because it really irks me. Like, it really irks me. I cannot express how much it irks me, to be honest.

I love BG3. And BG3 is doing a lot of stuff right when it comes to queer representation. Not so much in regards to any other form of representation (How is it that there is only one none-white character among your teammates? Why is there literally no body diversity at all? Why is there no fucking combat wheelchair?), but on terms of queer rep the game is doing very good. I mean, literally, most canonical relationships you interact with are queer. You meet a lot more happy queer couples than happy straight couples. Which is nice. And while I could've done with maybe one canonical trans character, you can at least play your player character as trans, which is fucking nice. So yeah, we are getting there.

But for heaven's sake, I will never, ever see player-sexual characters as bi/pan representation. Because they are not. Their universal sexual attraction serves not to define them as characters in their identity, but just for the player to fulfill their own power fantasy in whatever way the player desires. The fact that the characters do not care about what gender the player character has, is not really tied to the character or their story.

Which is why I like it so much more the way that Bioware did it with Dragon Age: Inquisition and some of the later Mass Effect games (is this true for Starfield as well? I have no idea). Where the characters do have a canon sexuality that influences who you can romance and who you cannot romance.

Like, I am in general not a big fan of the Dragon Age games, with the exception of Inquisition, because boy, I got invested into those characters and part of the reason is this. Like, holy hell, I cannot explain to you how invested I got into Dorian and his entire story. Like, back then I was still in egg-mode and I played the game with a female character - but I then did a second playthrough with a male PC just so I could romance Dorian.

Their sexuality is tied to who they are as people.

And sure, yeah, fine. Basically BG3 goes about sexuality in the way of: "The world does not care about it, so neither should you." Like, there is so many queer couples, some have kids that might be their biological kids, because magic, I guess, and nobody really bats an eye. So, I guess something like with Dorian, where part of his story was dealing with a homophobic dad would not happen here. Still, you know, with their supposed bisexuality not playing any role at all, it feels... hollow.

Because it does really feel like this part of them only exists for the player - not as part of their characterization. And I would feel a lot better about it, if it was.

I think it feels partly so offensive to me, because I am a bisexual trans dude and lived as a bi woman for so long. And as that my bisexuality has often been seen by men as something that they can consume in one way or another to act out their personal fantasies. So, player-sexuality/bisexuality in games being used for the player to act out that kinda fantasy feels... wrong.

How could Larian have done it or do it in future games? Well, pretty simple.

Bring in former relationships of different genders, let the characters comment on finding other characters (both in your party and out of it) attractive, allow the non-romanced characters to hook up together or hook up with other NPCs. Make their sexuality part of their story.

I totally would be fine with the characters all being bisexual. Sure, its a bit boring, but I also totally could buy into "in this world bisexuality/pansexuality is the norm" as part of the worldbuilding. But then show it through their interactions outside of being willing/able to hook up with the player character.

Though admittedly, this is in general one of my biggest issue with the writing on the game: Rather than having the characters talk with each other about stuff (outside of the idle banter in your party), they talk to the player character about how they feel about each other. You know, I have seen a lot of comments about how the ending feels unrewarding because apparently (I am closing in on the ending, but I am not quite there yet) after everything is said and done everybody just goes their own way, not acknowledging each other at all. But I think it is a problem in general.

Like, I get that each scene in which the characters interact more significantly than awkwardly standing in front of each other is a ton of work, because you gotta motion capture it - and also rendering it on the system make the workload on the hardware you are using a lot bigger... But it definitely would help the characterization.

To come back to Dragon Age: Inquisition (look, it is the one game I played that worked a lot with this), I had a general feeling for how the other characters related to each other, like, what their relationships were like. I knew how Cassandra felt about Solas and Varric. Or Sera about Cole. Sure, not all character relations were as well defined, but there was a lot happening there. Which here... I mean, I know how Shadowheart and Lae'zel see each other and how that evolves over time. I know how Karlach and Wyll feel about each other. But for example, there is never a scene where Karlach and Astarion argue with each other, even though they are moral-wise fundamentally opposed and probably would argue. Like, when you learn about the ritual and Astarion goes like "I totally should do it!", none of the other characters has an opinion on him planning that, let alone confronts him about it. Or where Gale gets annoyed with Karlach's approach to solving problems by just beating her axe at the problem. Or, like, Halsin and Janeira hanging out with each other, talking about druid stuff. Because outside of single cutscenes and the idle banter, the characters just do not interact a whole lot.

And I think that is a shame. Because they are already fun, engaging characters. But they totally would be more fun and engaging if they had a life outside of their backstory and their relationship to the player character. (And mind you, if you play an Origin playsthrough this does not change, because whatever character you play, still is the player character.)

Allow them friendships and romances outside of the player character. And be it just by having them awkwardly stand together and talk in front of the same tent at camp from time to time. lol

When you have that, their sexuality also would feel real - and not just like a device to propell the player's power fantasy.

Also, for fucks sake, just give us some aroace characters. Q-Q

[tomwambsmilk]

Television and movies are such an insane storytelling medium because of the finality of them. You write a book, anyone who reads that book can make the images look like whatever they want in their head, can hear the dialogue however it makes sense to them, can imagine the characters and the settings however they want. You write a play, every actor who performs it will look different and move different and play the character with their own unique spin. It's the same story, in all these cases, but it's constantly being filtered through the imagination and creative life of someone who is not the original author, and that's a crucial part of the way the recipient of the story understands it.

With movies and TV, you write a story, and then one singular person is cast as that character. And their performance is definitive. Sure, the audience can still interpret it a variety of ways. But the gestures they make and the inflections in their line delivery are an irrevocable part of the canon of that character. A character says a line and that is the way they say that line, definitively and forever. And that doesn't even get into things like costumes and setting - in a book, usually most of that is left up to the imagination of the reader, because the author will focus on whatever elements are crucial to the story. A play will have a different set each time its performed. Not only are movie sets permanent, but they feature a level of detail that isn't in the reader imagination or the theatrical production, and again, that detail is definitive.

I'm not saying this as a criticism - I love TV and film, because I think the medium gives us lots of new interesting ways to tell stories. But I think the way an audience relates to storytelling in that medium is so different, and I think maybe the prevalence of movies and TV in modern culture has changed the way we relate to stories in general. I don't think its a coincidence that modern fandom culture really didn't exist before the 60s, about the same time when televisions became exceedingly common in most Western homes. I wonder if the elimination of some of the creative engagement with storytelling - more and more people becoming used to consuming a visual, unchanging story somewhat passively, rather than engaging imaginatively with the written word - directly fed the growth of things like fanfic and fanart, which do allow the audience to engage creatively with a story. Stories with this kind of finality are such a recent thing in the history of storytelling, and I think maybe we don't always appreciate that enough.

[fozmeadows]

race & culture in fandom

For the past decade, English language fanwriting culture post the days of LiveJournal and Strikethrough has been hugely shaped by a handful of megafandoms that exploded across AO3 and tumblr – I’m talking Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Dr Who, the MCU, Harry Potter, Star Wars, BBC Sherlock – which have all been overwhelmingly white. I don’t mean in terms of the fans themselves, although whiteness also figures prominently in said fandoms: I mean that the source materials themselves feature very few POC, and the ones who are there tended to be done dirty by the creators.

Periodically, this has led POC in fandom to point out, extremely reasonably, that even where non-white characters do get central roles in various media properties, they’re often overlooked by fandom at large, such that the popular focus stays primarily on the white characters. Sometimes this happened (it was argued) because the POC characters were secondary to begin with and as such attracted less fan devotion (although this has never stopped fandoms from picking a random white gremlin from the background cast and elevating them to the status of Fave); at other times, however, there has been a clear trend of sidelining POC leads in favour of white alternatives (as per Finn, Poe and Rose Tico being edged out in Star Wars shipping by Hux, Kylo and Rey). I mention this, not to demonize individuals whose preferred ships happen to involve white characters, but to point out the collective impact these trends can have on POC in fandom spaces: it’s not bad to ship what you ship, but that doesn’t mean there’s no utility in analysing what’s popular and why through a racial lens.

All this being so, it feels increasingly salient that fanwriting culture as exists right now developed under the influence and in the shadow of these white-dominated fandoms – specifically, the taboo against criticizing or critiquing fics for any reason. Certainly, there’s a hell of a lot of value to Don’t Like, Don’t Read as a general policy, especially when it comes to the darker, kinkier side of ficwriting, and whether the context is professional or recreational, offering someone direct, unsolicited feedback on their writing style is a dick move. But on the flipside, the anti-criticism culture in fanwriting has consistently worked against fans of colour who speak out about racist tropes, fan ignorance and hurtful portrayals of living cultures. Voicing anything negative about works created for free is seen as violating a core rule of ficwriting culture – but as that culture has been foundationally shaped by white fandoms, white characters and, overwhelmingly, white ideas about what’s allowed and what isn’t, we ought to consider that all critical contexts are not created equal.

Right now, the rise of C-drama (and K-drama, and J-drama) fandoms is seeing a surge of white creators – myself included – writing fics for fandoms in which no white people exist, and where the cultural context which informs the canon is different to western norms. Which isn’t to say that no popular fandoms focused on POC have existed before now – K-pop RPF and anime fandoms, for example, have been big for a while. But with the success of The Untamed, more western fans are investing in stories whose plots, references, characterization and settings are so fundamentally rooted in real Chinese history and living Chinese culture that it’s not really possible to write around it. And yet, inevitably, too many in fandom are trying to do just that, treating respect for Chinese culture or an attempt to understand it as optional extras – because surely, fandom shouldn’t feel like work. If you’re writing something for free, on your own time, for your own pleasure, why should anyone else get to demand that you research the subject matter first?

Because it matters, is the short answer. Because race and culture are not made-up things like lightsabers and werewolves that you can alter, mock or misunderstand without the risk of hurting or marginalizing actual real people – and because, quite frankly, we already know that fandom is capable of drawing lines in the sand where it chooses. When Brony culture first reared its head (hah), the online fandom for My Little Pony – which, like the other fandoms we’re discussing here, is overwhelmingly female – was initially welcoming. It felt like progress, that so many straight men could identify with such a feminine show; a potential sign that maybe, we were finally leaving the era of mainstream hypermasculine fandom bullshit behind, at least in this one arena. And then, in pretty much the blink of an eye, things got overwhelmingly bad. Artists drawing hardcorn porn didn’t tag their works as adult, leading to those images flooding the public search results for a children’s show. Women were edged out of their own spaces. Bronies got aggressive, posting harsh, ugly criticism of artists whose gijinka interpretations of the Mane Six as humans were deemed insufficiently fuckable.

The resulting fandom conflict was deeply unpleasant, but in the end, the verdict was laid down loud and clear: if you cannot comport yourself like a decent fucking person – if your base mode of engagement within a fandom is to coopt it from the original audience and declare it newly cool only because you’re into it now; if you do not, at the very least, attempt to understand and respect the original context so as to engage appropriately (in this case, by acknowledging that the media you’re consuming was foundational to many women who were there before you and is still consumed by minors, and tagging your goddamn porn) – then the rest of fandom will treat you like a social biohazard, and rightly so.

Here’s the thing, fellow white people: when it comes to C-drama fandoms and other non-white, non-western properties? We are the Bronies.

Not, I hasten to add, in terms of toxic fuckery – though if we don’t get our collective shit together, I’m not taking that darkest timeline off the table. What I mean is that, by virtue of the whiteminding which, both consciously and unconsciously, has shaped current fan culture, particularly in terms of ficwriting conventions, we’re collectively acting as though we’re the primary audience for narratives that weren’t actually made with us in mind, being hostile dicks to Chinese and Chinese diaspora fans when they take the time to point out what we’re getting wrong. We’re bristling because we’ve conceived of ficwriting as a place wherein No Criticism Occurs without questioning how this culture, while valuable in some respects, also serves to uphold, excuse and perpetuate microaggresions and other forms of racism, lashing out or falling back on passive aggression when POC, quite understandably, talk about how they’re sick and tired of our bullshit.

An analogy: one of the most helpful and important tags on AO3 is the one for homophobia, not just because it allows readers to brace for or opt out of reading content they might find distressing, but because it lets the reader know that the writer knows what homophobia is, and is employing it deliberately. When this concept is tagged, I – like many others – often feel more able to read about it than I do when it crops up in untagged works of commercial fiction, film or TV, because I don’t have to worry that the author thinks what they’re depicting is okay. I can say definitively, “yes, the author knows this is messed up, but has elected to tell a messed up story, a fact that will be obvious to anyone who reads this,” instead of worrying that someone will see a fucked up story blind and think “oh, I guess that’s fine.” The contextual framing matters, is the point – which is why it’s so jarring and unpleasant on those rare occasions when I do stumble on a fic whose author has legitimately mistaken homophobic microaggressions for cute banter. This is why, in a ficwriting culture that otherwise aggressively dislikes criticism, the request to tag for a certain thing – while still sometimes fraught – is generally permitted: it helps everyone to have a good time and to curate their fan experience appropriately.

But when white and/or western fans fail to educate ourselves about race, culture and the history of other countries and proceed to deploy that ignorance in our writing, we’re not tagging for racism as a thing we’ve explored deliberately; we’re just being ignorant at best and hateful at worst, which means fans of colour don’t know to avoid or brace for the content of those works until they get hit in the face with microaggresions and/or outright racism. Instead, the burden is placed on them to navigate a minefield not of their creation: which fans can be trusted to write respectfully? Who, if they make an error, will listen and apologise if the error is explained? Who, if lived experience, personal translations or cultural insights are shared, can be counted on to acknowledge those contributions rather than taking sole credit? Too often, fans of colour are being made to feel like guests in their own house, while white fans act like a tone-policing HOA.

Point being: fandom and ficwriting cultures as they currently exist badly need to confront the implicit acceptance of racism and cultural bias that underlies a lot of community rules about engagement and criticism, and that needs to start with white and western fans. We don’t want to be the new Bronies, guys. We need to do better.  

[balioc]

The Gender Trinary: Hero, Maiden, Monster

I've talked about this before, but maybe it's worth doing so in a more comprehensive fashion.

----------

I should start by saying: this is not any kind of commentary on how the world really works.

It is an exploration of a symbolic paradigm that is meaningful to me, personally.  (A paradigm that was, to be sure, more meaningful to me when I was younger and angstier and less-well-integrated into my life.  But still meaningful.)  It tells you far more about my own neuroses than it does about any external reality.

I have found it noteworthy, in fact, how poorly the gender trinary paradigm ends up mapping onto the reality of my experience.  Feminism has made a hash of the Maiden role and its broader social salience, to no one’s surprise, but it’s the Hero role that really fails to sync up with the world around me.  It’s rooted in a vision of normative masculinity that just...doesn’t line up with what men actually do, or how men actually feel about themselves, at least within my field of vision.  Maybe that’s an artifact of my living in a rarefied nerd-bubble where no one really cares about the conventional masculine ideal.  Maybe it’s an artifact of modern society being different from earlier stages of society.  Maybe it was just an illusion to begin with, fostered by consuming too much genre media.  I dunno.  

In any event -- the point is that this concept-suite will probably break if you put any weight on it.  If you find yourself inclined to poke around at it with questions, I’m probably happy to field them, but don’t be surprised if they end up being grounded in “I found these ideas powerful when I was an alienated bookish teenager, and the resonance of it has never really gone away, as the resonances of such things generally don’t.”  

OK then.  Moving on.

What is the basic idea of the gender trinary?

There are three “genders” -- hero, maiden, and monster.  These correspond to the roles in a primordial, mythic passion-play narrative.  

As it is written:

The Monster, who is transgressive, lays a claim on the Maiden, who is desirable and pure.  The Hero contests this claim, defeats the Monster, and saves the Maiden.

Rama / Sita / Ravana is probably the best example of the pure, uncomplicated version of that story from “authentic” mythology.  Many gender-trinary-tangent myths either have a monster who isn’t remotely personlike in any way (Perseus / Andromeda / Cetus) or complicate the interaction to the point of near-unrecognizability (Gilgamesh / Shamhat / Enkidu).

Modern culture has provided us with a lot of very pure, very recognizable gender trinary instantiations.  Mario / Peach / Bowser and Link / Zelda / Ganon are absolutely textbook.  Modern culture has also provided us with a lot of trope deconstructions (Braid, Dr. Horrible).

Versions of this story with a focus on the Monster form the core of the gothic-romance trope suite.  Beauty and the Beast and The Phantom of the Opera are foundational texts.  

Are those roles really “genders,” though?

Well, to some extent.

The trinary paradigm is definitely an overlay on the male/female gender binary, not a replacement for it.  In particular, while the Hero role is undeniably masculine in its construction, and the Maiden role is similarly feminine -- even if you allow for female Heroes (which I do, absolutely) and male Maidens (which I do, kinda) -- the Monster role doesn’t really have its own parallel suite of gender tropes.  A Monster can embody either extreme masculinity or extreme femininity, in ways that work within those concept-suites rather than subverting them.  There are classic extremely-monster-y monsters who code as hyper-men (King Kong, Beast) and ones who code as hyper-women (vampy succubi etc.). Monsters can also certainly be androgynous, or display traits that are off-the-gender-spectrum entirely...but that tends to come across as ambiguously gendered or un-gendered rather than distinctively third-gendered.  This is particularly relevant when discussing romantic and sexual attraction, which tends to be plugged into a very low-level set of physical and behavioral cues in a way that isn’t amenable to being warped through high-level narrative abstraction.  Saying, e.g., that Adam is “bisexual” because he is attracted to both Lilith (Monster) and Eve (Maiden) feels pretty dumb.  

But genders come with gender roles.  And, to a large extent, the point of the trinary is to create (or make explicit) a set of three different gender roles that are all legible to each other, that all have their own distinct boundaries, and that all cohere internally.  There are important ways in which a hulking manly brute monster and a slinky witchy siren monster and a totally inhuman bug monster all expect to play the same role in the broader context of society, and all expect to engage with Heroes and with Maidens in basically similar ways.  Certainly, if you use social narrative as a guide, there are important ways in which all of those Monsters can expect to have similar standards of success and to be perceiving their own identities in similar ways. (Or so I posit.)  And once you’ve gotten that far, well, “gender” doesn’t seem like an inappropriate term.

Your mileage may vary. 

Aesthetics

This is basically a place for me to point out that there isn’t a single iconic image for any of these roles.

Heroes, in the full flower of their Heroic physicality, can run the gamut from lithe twinky bishounen to jacked Spartan hoplites with huge beards.  “Wispy pink-and-purple fairy princess” and “voluptuously sensual earth goddess” are both overwhelmingly Maiden looks.  

Monsters, as suggested earlier, get even more of a range than that.  Their appearance can exaggeratedly emphasize physical power (ogres) or exaggeratedly de-emphasize it (Jabba the Hutt).  They can possess extreme masculine beauty (Dracula), extreme masculine ugliness (Lord Voldemort), extreme feminine beauty (succubi), or extreme feminine ugliness (night hags).  The only real commonality to a “Monster look” is that it should be somehow wrong.  Ugliness is wrong by default; inhumanity is obviously wrong by default; beauty must be cast as somehow sickly or unwholesome.  You can have Monsters who don’t look particularly wrong (Dr. Horrible), but this makes them “less monstrous” in the way that physical traits can make someone “less masculine” or “less feminine.” 

Associated Concepts

Or: “What do these words mean, anyway?”  The part for which you’re all here.

Perhaps it is easiest to start by saying: the “point” of the Monster role (in some sense) is that it is unsocialized and transgressive, and what it gets for those costs is self-expression and freedom.  

Both the Hero and the Maiden are, essentially and necessarily, socialized roles.  To be a [successful] Hero or Maiden, you must be embedded in some kind of society; you must be bound to the ideals of that society; and the success of your gender performance is, in the end, a reflection of how well you can embody those ideals.  

(“Society” can mean a lot of different things here, and it doesn’t have to be particularly big or expansive or civilization-y.  In particular, when you’re talking about Heroes, a little mutually-reinforcing “band of brothers” is very definitely enough of a society to qualify.)  

The Hero role is obviously very related to the “male gender role,” although it’s not identical.  At its absolute most basic core, it is about having the competence to fight in defense of your society and your Maiden.  This radiates out to “competence,” in most senses of the term -- especially most pragmatic senses -- being a Hero power concept.  Heroes do useful things for others.  They fix the car, pay the bills, save lives on the operating table, etc.  

(Domestic labor isn’t particularly Hero-coded, because [for mostly dumb reasons] it doesn’t have tight narrative associations with competence.  Cooking and cleaning are not things that you do because you’re stepping up when others can’t.  But domestic labor also isn’t particularly Maiden-coded in this schema.  It’s not really anything-coded.)  

Competition is also very close to the heart of the Hero role.  Heroes compete with each other, with Monsters, and with the obstacles presented by the uncaring universe.  I assume this is a direct outgrowth of the competence thing; you continually test, and continually show off, your power by pitting it against forces that will resist.  

The Maiden role is, to be honest, the least-fleshed-out in abstract terms.  (Probably because I was never in any particular danger of being seen as, or of seeing myself as, a Maiden.)  It has a lot to do with love and sex, unsurprisingly -- in a standard Feminism 101 “Women are the Sex Class” kind of way, physical and emotional intimacy are part of the Maiden concept-sphere.  It has a lot to do with emotional and social power, with the ability to change what people are thinking and feeling by interacting with them.  

It has a lot to do with inherent legitimacy.  Maidens in good standing are always valid.  (Heroes must prove their validity, at least once, probably over and over; Monsters are always invalid.)  This gets tied up with a certain, uh, avatar-of-the-society’s-ideals-ness.  

One ramification of all this is that leadership is a Maiden thing.  Most forms of political and institutional leadership, at least, and also probably household leadership as well.  Maidens are the ones who contain the highest values of the society within themselves, and therefore the ones who are properly helming the ship of state, telling others what to do; they’re the ones who are good enough with people to wield command.  Often they act through Hero subordinates or champions.   

A Hero being in charge, in this schema, means that something is somehow off -- he’s probably dominated by his own ego and love of victory, rather than having the best interests of the society at heart.  

(Exceptions apply for fully Heroic sub-institutions like the military.  But those are “supposed” to be subject to some kind of higher Maiden-controlled authority.)  

Both the Hero role and the Maiden role come with a strong baked-in requirement of desirability.  Heroes and Maidens are supposed to be beautiful, outwardly and inwardly.  Occupying either role means that you are obliged to be appealing to members of the other role in a romantic/sexual sense, and to be appealing to the society-at-large in terms of embodying its ideals and meeting its needs.  Failing to appeal is...well, a failure. 

Monsters are driven by their own internal, asocial urges.  They act contrary to the ideals and the needs of their societies.  They are freed from the requirement to be desirable by being automatically anathemized.  

Needless to say, of course, it is possible for Monsters to appeal -- romantically/sexually (as in gothic romances) or even on a broader cultural level (if a Monster is faddishly fetishized, for example).  This is never [in the theoretical conceptual perfect-spherical-gender sense] because the Monster has fit itself into a template of desirability; it is because some other party has perceived the Monster’s idiosyncratic self-constructed identity, hidden or overt, and found it lovable.  It is [in theory] always sui generis and always the fruit of a unique, un-ritualized interaction.  

“Doesn’t fit into society” covers a lot of conceptual ground -- a lot more ground than “does fit into society.”  Monster-hood manifests in many very-divergent forms, because there are so many ways to be different and taboo.  

Alienation is pretty central to the role concept.  Normatively monster attitudes range from “grumpy and desirous of being left alone” to “omnicidally angry.”  

The role-syntonic (positive) Monster ways of being in love involve pedestalization, possessiveness, and focused obsession.  It is important to distinguish the loved one from everyone else.

The Monster role is neither particularly active nor particularly passive.  “Has a scheme to remake all reality and will stop at nothing to achieve it” is a very Monster deal.  So is “sits in a cave, contemplating its own strange thoughts, and will never interact with any part of the world unless disturbed.”  

The archetypical Monster is an egomaniacal monad, but for narrative purposes it’s possible for a Monster instead to be a foreigner -- to be beholden to the ideals and structures of a society, so long as it’s an alien one.

Gender Interactions in the Trinary Paradigm

It’s worth remembering that the quintessential gender trinary story is a struggle.  In a high conceptual sense, it’s a struggle in which all three roles are thrown together to find out which two of them will pair off.  

(In theory, I’m sure, you could end up with a balanced triad.  But I don’t think we have good stories about how that would work or what it would look like.  The dyadic nature of human reproduction has a lot of concept influence.)  

The most common pairing, of course, is Hero/Maiden.  The Monster is defeated -- we assume that its influence was generally a bad one, even if somewhere along the way it might have had some appeal -- and the pro-social lovers unite, bonded by their shared ideal. 

Maiden/Monster is an essentially psychological pairing in most cases, driven by deep interpersonal communication that supersedes social expectations.

Hero/Monster is the least common pairing.  Which is no surprise, because (as mentioned) Maiden is the role that’s associated with love and sex; the Hero and the Monster are fighting over the Maiden, in theory, and something weird has to happen to change that.  But there are a few well-established narratives here.  The often-bromantic-rather-than-romantic Gilgamesh/Enkidu story is one.  There’s also the version in which the Monster is made very feminine and the Hero shifts to the center of the love triangle.  This gets you a sort of gender-reversal of the Maiden/Monster pairing; the Maiden ends up being portrayed as shallow or bland, and the Monster provides a truer / spicier / more genuinely personal sort of love. 

[impostoradult]

Media Market Research (and why its undermining all the things you love)

Trying to understand what is dysfunctional about Hollywood is an epic task, and the answers are like the stars – arguably infinite. Hollywood is dysfunctional for literally more reasons than I could count.

But market research plays a fairly heavy role in its dysfunction (IMO) and the time has finally come for me to add my professional two cents about this issue. (This rant of mine has been building for a while, FYI. Hence why it is so...comprehensive. There is a tl;dr section towards the bottom, if you want the high level summary)

*** For the last 4+ years I’ve worked in the field of market research, almost exclusively with major media makers like Warner Bros., NBCU, AMC/BBCA, Viacom, FOX (before Disney acquired them), A+E, etc. (this past year I quit the job where I was doing this work for a variety of reasons, many of which will become clear as you keep reading, but I am still listed as a consultant on the company website):   https://www.kresnickaresearch.com/who/ (Rachel)

And just for comparison, here is a Halloween selfie I took 4 years ago and posted on my blog, so you can see I am who I say I am. 

I know a fair amount about how market research on major media franchises is conducted and how it influences production, and a lot of these choices can also be at least somewhat tied back to the massive flaws in the market research industry and its impact. *** First, at the highest level, you need to understand market research in general is not well-conducted much of the time. Even the people doing a reasonably good job at it are VERY limited in doing it well because of financial constraints (clients don’t want to spend more than they have to), time constraints (clients want everything done as fast as humanely possible) and just the inherent problems within the industry that are decades old and difficult to fix. For example, all market research ‘screens’ participants to make sure they qualify to participate (whether it is a mass survey, a focus group, a one-on-one interview, etc.). So, we screen people based on demographics like race, gender, age, household income, to get representative samples. But people are also screened based on their consumption habits. You don’t want to bring someone into a focus group about reality TV if they don’t watch reality TV. They aren’t going to have anything useful to say. 

However, a lot of the people who participate in market research have made a ‘side-gig’ out of it and they know how to finesse the process. Basically, they’ve learned how to lie to get into studies that they aren’t a good match for because most market research is paid, and they want the money. So, a lot of TV and film market research is being done on people who don’t actually (or at least don’t regularly) watch those shows or movies or whatever but have learned how to lie well enough in these screening processes to make it through. And because of the aforementioned time and money issue, clients don’t want to spend the time or money to actually find GOOD participants. They just accept that as an inevitable part of the market research process and decide not to let it bother them too much. So, a fair number of the people representing YOU as a media consumer are people who may not be watching Supernatural (for example) at all or who watch a rerun occasionally on TNT but haven’t been watching consistently or with ANY amount of investment whatsoever. You can see why that creates very skewed data. But that’s just the tip of the skewed iceberg. *** Second, media market research is conducted in line with the norms of market research more broadly, and this is a huge problem because media is a very atypical product. How people engage with media is far more complex and in depth than how they engage with a pair of jeans, a car, or a coffee maker. There are only so many things that matter to people when it comes to liking or not liking a coffee maker, for example. Is it easy/intuitive to use? How much space does it take it on my counter? How expensive is it? Does it brew the coffee well? Maybe does it match my décor/kitchen aesthetic? Can I make my preferred brand of coffee in it? The things you as a consumer are going to care about when it comes to a coffee maker are limited, fairly easy to anticipate in advance, and also easy to interpret (usually). How people mentally and emotionally approach MEDIA? Whole other universe of thing. Infinitely more complex. And yet it is studied (more or less) as if it is also a coffee maker. This is one of the many reasons I decided to leave the media market research field despite my desire to have some ability to positively influence the process. As so often seems to be the case, I fought the law and the law won. I could never make the other people I worked with in the industry understand that the questions they were asking were not all that useful a lot of the time and they weren’t getting to the heart of the matter. They were just following industry standards because they didn’t know any better and none of them want to admit they don’t REALLY know what they’re doing. Which leads me to point 3. *** Most of the people doing this research don’t have any expertise in media or storytelling specifically. They are typically trained as social scientists in the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, or math/statistics. And many of them do not have any kind of specialization or education in media/storytelling beyond the English classes they took in high school and the one Media Studies course they took as an elective in college. Most of them have a very unsophisticated understanding of narrative structure, thematics, tropes, subtext, etc. They mainly think in terms of genres at the VERY broadest level. Also, not infrequently, they don’t watch or have much knowledge of the shows they are supposed to be doing research on, beyond what they’ve read on IMDb or Wikipedia or what is generally common knowledge. Unless they by chance happen to watch the shows themselves (which often they don’t) they often know very little about the shows they are crafting these questions about. Again, partly because they think it is like the coffee maker, and you don’t need to understand it in any depth to research it. (I know this must sound insane to you as avid media consumers, but that is the general attitude among those who do market research) There is such a lack of sophistication in how people in the business side of the industry understand media and storytelling. Most of them are either MBAs or social scientists and their training has not prepared them to examine fictional works with the kind of depth that people in the Humanities (who are specifically trained to study texts) have. Somehow, despite the fact that the Humanities is all about understanding texts, that is the one discipline they make almost no use of in the business side of Hollywood. And boy howdy does it show. *** Point 4 – average consumers CANNOT ARTICULATE WHY THEY LIKE THINGS. Particularly media things. I know this sounds condescending, but it is my honest observation. It is unbelievably hard to get people to have enough self-awareness to explain why they actually like things, especially things as mentally and emotionally complex as media. What typically happens when you ask people why they like a TV show or movie, for example? They will tell you what they most NOTICE about the TV show or movie, or what is distinctive to them about it (which may or may not have anything to do with what they actually LIKE about it). They will say things like “I like the genre”, “I think it’s funny”, “The car chases are exciting”, “I want to see the detective solve the puzzle.” Sometimes you can get them to talk about what they find relatable about it, if you push them a little. But often they leave it at either the level of literal identity (young black woman), basic personality traits (she’s a social butterfly and so am I) or situations they’ve personally experienced (I relate to this story of a man losing his father to cancer because I lost a close family member to cancer). But the vast, vast, vast majority of them can’t go to the deeper level of: a) Why X representation of a young black woman feels accurate/authentic/relatable and Y representation doesn’t b) Why it matters to me that X,Y,Z aspects of my personality, identity, experience get reflected in media whereas I don’t really care about seeing A,B,C aspects of my personality, identity, or experience reflected in media c) How and why they are relating to characters when they can’t see the literal connection between their identity/experience and the character’s identity/experience. (For example, many people have argued that women often relate to Dean Winchester because a lot of his struggles and past negative experiences are more stereotypical of women – being forced to raise a younger sibling on behalf of an actual parent, being seen and treated as beautiful/sexually desirable but vacuous/unintelligent, his body being treated as an instrument for a more powerful group to quite literally possess, etc. Part of the reason Supernatural has always been such a mystery/problem for the CW and Warner Bros is they could never crack the code at this level. Never.) Part of the reason they can’t crack these codes is average people CANNOT give you that kind of feedback in a survey or a focus group, or even an in-depth interview (much of the time). They just don’t have the self-awareness or the vocabulary to get it at that level. Let alone asking them to articulate why Game of Thrones is compelling to them in an era where wealth disparity is creating a ruling class that is fundamentally incompetent at maintaining a just/functional society, which is especially concerning at this particular moment, given the existential threat we face due to climate change. And the truth is, that IS part of what people – even average people – are responding to in Game of Thrones. But what they’ll tell you when you do market research on it is: they like the dragons, they like the violence, they relate to Tyrion Lannister being a smart mouth, maybe they’ll say they like the moral ambiguity of many of the conflicts (if they are more sophisticated than average). But the ‘Dean Winchester is heavily female coded despite his veneer of ultra-masculinity’ or the ‘Game of Thrones is a prescient metaphor for the current political dynamics and fissures of modern western society’ is the level you ACTUALLY need to get to. And most market research can’t get you that because the people ASKING the questions don’t know what to ask to get to this level, and most of the respondents couldn’t give you the answers even IF you were asking them the right questions (which usually you are not) And I’m not saying average people are dumb because they can’t do this. But it requires practice, it requires giving the matter a great deal of in-depth thought, and most people just don’t care enough about it to do that while taking a market research survey. (I know this is going to feel counter-intuitive to people on Tumblr. But you have to remember, you are NOT average media consumers. You are highly atypical media consumers who have far more self-awareness and a much more sophisticated engagement with media than the average person watching TV. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here talking about it in the first place) Point 4.1 – People also lie/misrepresent their own experiences to market researchers because they want to maintain certain self-narratives. You have no idea how many people would get disqualified from our surveys for saying they watched less than 5 hours of TV a week. And sure, that might actually be true for a few of them. But if you watch TV with any regularity at all (which most people in modern America do) you probably watch more than 5 hours a week. The problem is, people think it makes them sound lazy to say they watch 15-20 hours a week, even though that’s about 2-3 hours a day (which actually isn’t THAT high). People lie and misrepresent their behaviors, thoughts and feelings because it can be socially uncomfortable to admit you do what you actually do or feel how you actually feel, even in the context of an anonymous survey, let alone a focus group or a one-on-one interview. People want to make themselves look good to THEMSELVES and to the researchers asking them questions. But that makes the market research data on media (and lots of other things) very questionable. For example, one finding we saw more than once in the surveys I was involved in conducting was people would radically downplay how much the romance elements of a story mattered to them, even large portions of female respondents. When we would ask people in surveys what parts of the story they were most invested in, romances ALWAYS came out among the lowest ranked elements. And yet, any passing familiarity with fandom would tell you that finding is just WRONG. It’s wrong. People are just flat out lying about how much that matters to them because of the negative connotations we have around being invested in romance. And never mind the issue of erotic/sexual content. (I don’t mean sexual identity here, I mean sexy content). The only people who will occasionally cop to wanting the erotic fan service is young men (and even they are hesitant to do so in market research) and women frequently REFUSE to admit that stuff in market research, or they radically downplay how much it matters to them and in what ways. There is still so much stigma towards women expressing sexuality in that way. Not to mention, you have to fight tooth and nail to even include question about erotic/sexual content because oftentimes the clients don’t even want to go there at all, partly because it is awkward for everyone involved to sit around crafting market research questions to interrogate what makes people hot and bothered. That’s socially awkward for the researchers doing the research and the businesspeople who have to sit in rooms and listen to presentations about why more women find Spock sexier than Kirk. (Which was a real thing that happened with the original Star Trek, and the network couldn’t figure out why) Aside from people not have enough deeper level self-awareness to get at what they really like about media content, they also will lie or misrepresent certain things to you because they are trying to maintain certain self-narratives and are socially performing that version of themselves to researchers. *** Point 5 – Qualitative data is way more useful for understanding people’s relationships to media. However, quantitative data is way more valued and relied upon both due to larger market research industry standards and because quantitative data is just seen as harder/more factual than qualitative data. A lot of media market research involves gathering both qualitative and quantitative data and reporting jointly on both. (Sometimes you only do one or the other, depending on your objectives, but doing both is considered ‘standard’ and higher quality). However, quantitative data is heavily prioritized in reporting and when there is a conflict between what they see in qualitative versus quantitative data, the quant data is usually relied upon to be the more accurate of the two. This is understandable to an extent, because quantitative surveys usually involve responses from a couple thousand participants, whereas qualitative data involves typically a few dozen participants at most, depending on whether you did focus groups, individual interviews, or ‘diaries’/ethnography. The larger sample is considered more reliable and more reflective of ‘the audience’ as a whole. However, quantitative surveys usually have the flattest, least nuanced data, and they can only ever reflect what questions and choices people in the survey were given. In something like focus groups or individual interviews or ethnographies, you still structure what you ask people, but they can go “off script.” They can say things you never anticipated (as a researcher) and can explain themselves and their answers with more depth. In a survey, participants can only “say” what they survey lets them say based on the questions and question responses that are pre-baked for them. And as I’ve already explained, a lot of times these quantitative surveys are written by people with no expertise in media, fiction, or textual analysis, and so they often are asking very basic, not very useful questions. In sum, the data that is the most relied upon is the least informative, least nuanced data. It is also the MOST likely to reflect the responses of people who don’t actually qualify for the research but have become good at scamming the system to make extra money. With qualitative research, they are usually a little more careful screening people (poorly qualified participants still make it through, but not as often as with mass surveys, where I suspect a good 35% of participants, at least, probably do not actually qualify for the research and are just working the system). 

Most commonly, when market research gets reported to business decision-makers, it highlights the quantitative data, and uses the qualitative data to simply ‘color in’ the quantitative data. Give it a face, so to speak. Qualitative data is usually supplemental to quant data and used more to make the reports ‘fun’ and ‘warm’ because graphs and charts and stats by themselves are boring to look at in a meeting. (I’m not making this up, I can’t tell you how many times I was told to make adjustments on how things were reported on because they didn’t want to bore people in the meeting). (Sub-point – it is also worth noting that you can’t report on anything that doesn’t fit easily on a power point slide and isn’t easily digestible to any random person who might pick it up and read it. The amount of times I was told to simplify points and dumb things down so it could be made ‘digestible’ for a business audience, I can’t even tell you. It was soul crushing and another reason I stopped doing this job full time. I had to make things VERY dumb for these business audiences, which often meant losing a lot of the point I was actually trying to make) Point 5.1 – Because of the way that representative sampling works, quantitative data can be very misleading, particularly in understanding audience/fandom sentiments about media. As I’m sure most of you know, sampling is typically designed to be representative of the population, broadly speaking. So, unless a media company is specifically out to understand LGBTQ consumers or Hispanic/Latinx consumers, it will typically sample using census data as a template and represent populations that way. Roughly 50/50 male/female. Roughly even numbers in different age brackets, roughly representative samplings of the racial make-up of the country, etc. (FYI, they do often include a non-binary option in the gender category these days, but it usually ends up being like 5 people out of 2000, which is not enough of a sample to get statistical significance for them as a distinct group)   There is a good reason to do this, even when a show or movie has a disproportionately female audience, or young audience. Because they need enough sample in all of the “breaks” (gender, race, age, household income, etc.) to be able to make statistically sound statements about each subgroup. If you only have 35 African American people in your sample of 1000, you can’t make any statistically sound statements about that African American cohort. The sample is just too small. So, they force minimums/quotas in a lot of the samples, to ensure they can make statistically sound statements about all the subgroups they care about. They use ratings data to understand what their audience make up actually is. (Which also has major failings, but I’ll leave that alone for the minute) With market research, they are not usually looking to proportionately represent their audience, or their fandom; they are looking to have data they can break in the ways they want to break it and still have statistically significant subgroups represented. But that means that when you report on the data as a whole sample – which you often do – it can be very skewed towards groups who don’t make up as large a portion of the show’s actual audience, or even if they do, they don’t tend to be the most invested, loyal, active fans. Men get weighted equally to women, even when women make up 65% of the audience, and 80% of the active fandom. Granted, they DO break the data by gender, and race, and age, etc. and if there are major differences in how women versus men respond, or younger people versus older people, they want to know that...sometimes. But here’s where things get complex. So, if you are doing a sample of Supernatural viewers. And you do the standard (US census-based) sampling on a group of 2000 respondents (a pretty normal sample size in market research). ~1000 are going to be female. But with something they call “interlocking quotas” the female sample is going to be representative of the other groupings to a degree. So, the female sample will have roughly equal numbers of all the age brackets (13-17, 18-24, 25-34, etc.). And it will have roughly 10% non-heterosexual respondents, and so on. They do this to ensure that these breaks aren’t too conflated with each other. (For example, if your female sample is mostly younger and your male sample is mostly older, how do you know whether it is the gender or the age that is creating differences in their responses? You don’t. So, you have to make sure that all the individual breaks (gender, race, age) have a good mix of the other breaks within them, so groups aren’t getting conflated) But what that means is, Supernatural, whose core fandom is (at a conservative guess) 65% younger, queer, women, gets represented in a lot of statistical market research sampling as maybe 50-100 people, in a 2000-person survey. 50-100 people can barely move the needle on anything in a 2000-person survey. Furthermore, usually in the analysis of data like this, you don’t go beyond looking at 2 breaks simultaneously. So you may look at young female respondents as a group, or high income male respondents, or older white respondents, but you rarely do more than 2 breaks combined. And the reason for that is, by the time you get down to 3 breaks or more (young, Hispanic, women) you usually don’t have enough sample to make statistically significant claims. (It also just takes longer to do those analyses and as I explained in the beginning, they are always rushing this stuff). To do several breaks at a time you’d have to get MUCH larger samples, and that’s too expensive for them. And again, I want to stress, this type of sampling isn’t intended to sinisterly erase anyone. Kind of the opposite. It is intended to make sure most groups have enough representation in the data that you can make sound claims about them on the subgroup level. The problem is that it can create a very skewed sense of their overall audience sentiment when they take the data at ‘face value’ so to speak, and don’t weight segments based on viewership proportion, or fandom engagement, etc. Point 5.2 – Which leads me to my next point, which is that fandom activity that doesn’t have a dollar amount attached to it doesn’t make you a ‘valuable’ segment in their minds. One of the breaks they ALWAYS ask for in data like this is high income people, and people who spend a lot of MONEY on their media consumption. And they do prioritize those people’s responses and data quite a bit.   And guess what – young women aren’t usually high-income earners, and although some of them are high spenders on media, high spending on media and media related merch skews toward higher income people just because they HAVE more disposable income. Older white men are usually the highest income earners (absolutely no surprise) and they are more likely in a lot of cases to report spending a lot on the media they care about. Having expendable income makes you more important in the eyes of people doing market research than if you’ve spent every day for the last 10 years blogging excessively about Supernatural. They don’t (really) care about how much you care. They care about how much money you can generate for them. And given that young audiences don’t watch TV live anymore, and they give all their (minimal) expendable income to Netflix and Hulu, you with your Supernatural blog and your 101 essays about Destiel is all but meaningless to many of them (from a business standpoint) Now, some of them kind of understand that online fandom matters to the degree that fandom spreads. Fandom creates fandom. But if the fandom you are helping to create is other young, queer women with minimal income who only watch Supernatural via Netflix, well, that’s of very limited value to them as well. I don’t want to suggest they don’t care about you at ALL. Nor do I want to suggest that the “they” we are talking about is even a cohesive “they.” Different people in the industry have different approaches to thinking about fandom, consumer engagement and strategy, market research and how it ought to be understood/used, and so on. They aren’t a monolith. BUT, they are, at the end of the day, a business trying to make money. And they are never going to place the value of your blogging ahead of the concrete income you can generate for them. (Also, highly related to my point about people lying, men are more likely to SAY they have higher incomes than they do, because it’s an ego thing for them. And women are more likely to downplay how much money they spend on ‘frivolous’ things like fandom because of the social judgement involved. Some of the money gender disparity you see in media market research is real, but some of it is being generated by the gender norms people are falsely enacting in market research– men being breadwinners, women wanting to avoid the stereotype of being frivolous with money) *** In sum/tl;dr: Point 1 – Market research in general is not well conducted because of a variety of constraints including time, money, and the historical norms of how the industry operates (e.g., there being a large subsection of almost professionalized respondents who know how to game the system for the financial incentives) Point 2 – Media is a highly atypical kind of product being studied more or less as if it were equivalent to a coffeemaker or a pair of jeans. Point 3 – Most of the people studying media consumption in the market research field have no expertise or background in media, film, narrative, storytelling, etc. They are primarily people who were trained as social scientists and statisticians, and they aren’t well equipped to research media properties and people’s deeper emotional attachment and meaning-making processes related to media properties. Point 4(etc.) – Average consumers typically don’t have enough self-awareness or the vocabulary to explain the deep, underlying reasons they like pieces of media. Furthermore, when participating in market research, people lie and misrepresent their thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses for a variety of reasons including social awkwardness and preserving certain self-narratives like “I’m above caring about dumb, low-brow things like romance.” Point 5 (etc.) – Quantitative data is treated as way more meaningful, valuable, and ‘accurate’ than qualitative data, and this is a particular problem with media market research because of how varied and complex people’s reactions to media can be. Also, the nature of statistical sampling, and how it is done, can massively misrepresent audience sentiments toward media and fail to apprehend deeper fandom sentiments and dynamics. There is also a strong bias towards the responses of high income/high spending segments, which tend to be older and male and white. Side but important point – Research reports are written to be as entertaining and digestible as possible, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice it often means you lose much of the substance you are trying to communicate for the sake of not boring people or making them feel stupid/out of their depth. (Because god forbid you make some high-level corporate suit feel stupid) *** What can be done about this? Well, the most primary thing I would recommend is for you to participate in market research, particularly if you are American (there’s a lot of American bias in researching these properties, even when they have large international fanbases). However, some international market research is done and I recommend looking into local resources for participation, where ever you are. If you are American, there are now several market research apps you can download to your smart phone and participate in paid market research through (typically paid via PayPal). Things like dscout and Surveys On the Go. And I know there are more. You should also look into becoming panelists for focus groups, particularly if you live near a large metropolitan area (another bias in market research). Just Google it and you should be able to figure it out fairly easily. Again, it is PAID, and your perspective will carry a lot more weight when it is communicated via a focus group or a dscout project, versus when it is shouted on Twitter. However, that’s merely a Band-Aid on the bigger issue, which I consider to be the fact that businesspeople think the Humanities is garbage, even when they make their living off it. There is virtually no respect for the expertise of fictional textual analysis, or how it could help Hollywood make better content. And I don’t know what the fix is for that. I spent 4 years of my life trying to get these people to understand what the Humanities has to offer them, and I got shouted down and dismissed so many times I stopped banging my head against that wall. I gave up. They don’t listen, mostly because conceding to the value of deep-reading textual analysis as a way to make better content would threaten the whole system of how they do business. And I mean that literally. So many people’s jobs, from the market researchers to the corporate strategists to the marketing departments to the writers/creatives to the C-level executives, would have to radically shift both their thinking and their modes of business operation and the inertia of ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’ is JUST SO POWERFUL. I have no earthly idea how to stop that train, let alone shift it to an entirely different track. BTW, if you want the deeper level of analysis of why I can’t stop rewatching Moneyball now that it’s been added to Netflix, the above paragraph should give you a good hint

[nabrizoya]

honestly would LOVE to hear your thoughts on the nikolai duology because i really only see blanket praise or blanket hate for it whereas I see a lot of wasted potential. Bardugo's actual writing was beautiful as ever for the most part, but the choice of the plot/beats feels baffling to me. I love Nina, but her parts felt so separate from the rest of the book until the very end, and even that felt off. I liked the first 2/3 of KoS enough, dealing with the monster, political tensions, 1/2

and even the cult of the starless saint was at least interesting because dealing with people trying to rewrite the narrative of their greatest enemy (who hurt these young leaders in deeply PERSONAL ways) was really compelling (making him literally come back was. a choice) but I feel like somewhere in the last third, KoS went in a wholly differeent direction, and RoW has this vibe of feeling like she definitely wrote it after reading the show scripts or even seeing some footage. idk. 2/2

I will try to be brief (1/12)

Hey anon! Thank you so much for asking this even though it took 38756588247834 years to answer this I’m so sorry !! The Nikolai duology was good—wonderful too maybe because of the myriad of themes and topics it discussed and explored, all in addition to how beloved these characters are. For me, it’s the end of KoS as it is for you, and the entirety of RoW in particular that irk me the most.

I have very little issue with KoS, and I agree with everything you’ve said. The political tensions, the sort of urgency in trying to secure a country at the cost of personal reservations, preparing for a war that seems unforgivably near the door, etc. was all thrilling. After all, it is the first installment in the duology, and it’s supposed to set the course for the upcoming books.

KoS managed to introduce the stakes and the circumstances, lay the rails for what the characters will face and what it might mean to a vast set of entities connected to the events. And it’s hardly out of sense to expect Rule of Wolves to pick up where the previous book left off and carry forward the themes and plot points introduced in the first book.

Except, RoW failed spectacularly in that aspect.

Rule of Wolves: the second book, and the supposed finale to the Grishaverse and the Nikolai duology; it fails to continue the other number of threads that KoS set up for it, effectively compromising the characters, their characterizations, the themes and other political tensions and stakes. The due importance that should be given to the heavy set of topics that get brought up in the povs are not through, nor are the small details that Leigh added to the conversations evolve into something worth talking about, which are the actual points that could have been given some more page time to explore than just making them facts or points of nostalgia for the characters.

If you take a step back and analyze the whole timeline, events, characterization, objectives of the arcs and the plot points etc. etc., all the way from Crooked Kingdom to Rule of Wolves, there’s so much that is left out and tied in, quite haphazardly, which leads me to believe that Leigh wanted to attempt writing a duology that is more plot-driven than it is character driven. And we know that Leigh writes character driven stories brilliantly, and SoC, CK and TLoT are testament to the same. Heck, even TGT has more consistency than whatever TND has.

So, objectively? Plot possibilities? Characterization? Potential? Personal goals? Addressing the very serious themes it brought up, in little or major light, but give no proper elaboration about them?

The lost potential readily compromised the characterizations of many characters, and it all amounted to their arcs being very underwhelming.

I’m dividing this into four parts and here’s the basic outline.

Writing and Plotting

The Plot, Possibilities and Potential.

Characters, Characterization, Character Potential.

Remedy (what I think would've worked better to tie this all up)

This can get very looong, so be forewarned.

I. Writing & Plotting

Now, Leigh Bardugo’s writing is exceptional, no doubt. The sentences are short and flowy, and convey the tone, psyche, environment and the setting and its effects on the pov character marvellously. It's also immersive. It’s the same in Rule of Wolves, except, a little or a lot weaker.

The two main parts of this is that one, that Leigh slightly overdid showing a lot more than telling, and two, that the RoW (and perhaps KoS too), was more plot driven than character driven, the latter of which is actually Leigh’s strength.

In Rule of Wolves, Leigh’s writing seemed very choppy and snappish. The descriptions were lacking, or maybe that’s just me wishing for more internal conflict and dilemma, and going back and forth in one's own head for a bit. It felt like she showed more than she told.

Example being how Zoya ‘snaps’, ‘drawls’, ‘scoffs’, or ‘scowls’ less, and even if that’s supposed to be show Zoya beginning to be a little less unpleasant than she usually is, the tone in those chapters was not strong enough to distinguish how and why the character was acting a certain way. Nor pinpoint an explanation on what brought that change about. (And there were many instances like this with many other characters), which resulted in the characters themselves feeling so off to me.

Leigh’s characters are important to the story. They carry tremendous weight and actively contribute to the plot. Except, by focusing a lot more on the plot, some parts of these characters’ relevance was not up to the mark. It is greatly due to how weak the plotting and pacing of the book was, tbh, more than just her writing.

Consider: Mayu Kir Kaat. She is integral to the story, but she is thrust into responsibilities, and that doesn’t give us much time to see her as a person, and then as a person with a duty, like we see with most other characters. Whatever parts of her we did see were very circumstantial and timed, which is probably the reason why not many we’re unable to appreciate Mayu as much as we should. (Maybe fandom racism also plays a part, so, well,,,).

Like, we know from Six of Crows and with The Language of Thorns, how great care went into describing the characters’ state of mind, which further heavily influenced their choices and decisions. This time though, I think she wanted it to be more plot driven, hence the whole crowded feeling of the book and general worry about oh my god too much is happening, how will all this be solved and all that.

And this, I think, greatly hampered Leigh's writing, leading to unsettling and rather unsatisfying character arcs. Not to mention that there was quite little space given for the characters to develop or let them grow in a satisfying way which touches on most of the elements and themes that get brought up with regard to their powers and potential,,, and when it was indeed brought up, it was all in vain since they were never followed through.

That's one of the biggest problems for me in RoW: Plot points brought up in KoS were not brought forward in RoW.

II. The Plot, Possibilities and Potential.

Phew. Truly buckle up because this train has too many coaches. And to discuss them all, let’s keep the starting point as Crooked Kingdom.

a) Parem

Now, by the end of Crooked Kingdom, we know some important things about the parem.

It's dangerous asf for the Grisha who have to sacrifice their will and capabilities for a short time superpower high that they didn’t even ask for

Which means they are more often than not forced to consume the drug

Shu Han is the creator of the Parem and are also creating a new kind of soldiers called Khergud (who additionally require Ruthenium, but we’ll talk abt that later)

Fjerda snatched the formula after kidnapping Bo Yul-Bayur, keeping him away in the Ice Court and in their possession, and used the Parem to further their own heedlessly heinous agenda

I think it’s easy to understand how KoS started off on the right track, considering that Kuwei Yul Bo is mentioned, the antidote and jurda is brought up and so come the political tensions alongside it (what with the impending war, the demon, the lack of funds in the coffers and security and peace for the country alongside safety for the Grisha).

The point is, parem is a character of its own. CK was its inception, and its fate was decreed along with its lifespan and its doom. Ideally, by the end of RoW, parem should have been vanquished while addressing its nature as a deadly drug, the addiction and aftermath, and the key person who will guide the plot: Kuwei Yul Bo.

Parem is a political tool that pitted countries against each other, making one another their allies or enemies. (Though parem is not the only one factor). Ravka doesn’t yet know about Kerch’s neutrality. The Shu made their move to assassinate in the end, just as Fjerda cleared the air about their goals.

Point is, parem is weapon, a new kind of warfare that keeps getting alluded to in KoS. The first book gave a glimpse of how the Shu and Fjerda are using parem, thereby exploiting, prejudicing etc. the Grisha in their countries. Khergud whose humanity is washed away with parem + ruthenium, and the Fjerdan Grisha (are targeted) drugged and exploited while be subjected to torture, training and imminent death, parametres of these outcomes being severely gendered.

Ravka too wanted to weaponize it and create a usable strain that would still give the Grisha their powers but at a minimal cost, until Nikolai’s conversation with Grigori convinces him out of it and to use only the antidote for the Grisha.

And when are the contents of this conversation brought up again?

Never.

Another aspect of parem (that the conversation also covers) is this: that what was once merzost, parem is its strange cousin. Parem parallels breaking the bounds of Grisha norms unnaturally, while merzost takes it a step further to break the bounds of nature itself, which comes with a heavy price. They're both the same with little differences. Amplifiers are in tune with this discussion, hence the conversation between Zoya and Nikolai about how, and whether or not the abomination in him, the parem, and the amplifiers are tied together. This gets brought up again in the conversation with Grigori.

Parem parallels the superpowers, something that Zoya too manages to achieve once the corruption of the amplifier business is resolved, which makes her realize how in tune with nature the Grisha must be, and how limited the Grisha powers until then had been. And why the amplifiers were a corrupted piece of magic.

Zoya was supposed to be the conduit in that sense that she reversed the Grisha norms and understood the importance and nature of small science. This is alongisde parem getting abolished or resolved in the least, be given a redressal.

Yet instead in RoW, we barely see any of Zoya’s powers, nor even her experimentation and hunger for power which would give her protection. We don't see how she begins to realize that while power was indeed protection, it was also a responsibility. Not clearly, anyway.

So like, not only is this entire discussion thrown away in Rule of Wolves, but no matters are resolved either. Parem did not reach its end like it was supposed to. Merzost with regard to parem would have been an excellent thing to address, with or without the Darkling being present, because the blight is there. But that doesn’t happen.

What happens instead? We get one chapter of Grisha getting the antidote during the face off at the start of the book, the women in Fjerda are not brought up again and instead we jump to Shu Han. Kuwei is also conveniently forgotten because hey, the Zemeni are here so it’s all sorted!

RoW could have (should have actually) sought to address both the political and medical (?) aftermath and implications. Maybe it did succeed in showing the political side of it, with regard to Mayu, Ehri, Makhi and Tamar’s storylines. But that’s only in Shu Han, whose state of affairs we had NO idea of until RoW. No idea, so much that it was completely out of the blue.

And what we did know (get to know about in KoS) is Fjerda and the affairs there remained… unsolved.

(...sorry).

b) Grisha Powers

Re: From the conversation between Nikolai and Grigori, and Juris and Zoya, about how parem and the amplifiers are parallel to each other in terms of being abominations, a corruption of Grisha powers. Now the theory of it is not entirely explained, but we do know that the parem and whatever Zoya learnt from Juris was meant to move along in the same direction.

But we don't see another mention of it, except maybe we could dig a little deeper and realize that it all adds up because Zoya is the Grisha Queen of Ravka, Summoner, Soldier, Saint, all of it rushed and unnecessarily magical in a war so dire and realistic in RoW.

Welp.

c) Spy business

Just… genuinely what even was Nina up to in RoW? A spy, sure, but only to garner information on the pretender?

Why couldn’t there have been two responsibilities for her to uncover: the lies or truths about the pretender while the Apparat causes hindrances, and Nina trying to seek out more documents of the locations and labs where the Grisha women are being tormented and the other Grisha being weaponized? It could have been a leverage to discredit Fjerda in front of everybody in the Os Kervo scene. Imagine if Nina whipped out the documents of Grisha labs and brought the truth of the exploitation and killing and kidnapping etc. in front of the convention of all nations. All of it together would have upped the political tensions by quite the notch.

Even then, there’s a possibility that it wouldn’t matter either because the Grisha aren’t exactly valuable to all the nations. But killing and exploiting is still wrong so maybe it might have worked? Or see, even if it wouldn’t have, the slow and sluggish realization of Mila’s identity by Brum, and alongside writing it as a tragedy where Nina’s efforts seem to have gone to waste, or where Nina is telling Zoya about not accounting for Prince Rasmus’ word and she informs her about the documents she has snatched? Something could have been done here?

The point is, KoS focused on Fjerda and its unraveling, and it wasn’t continued with and through in Rule of Wolves. Instead it sought to find the problem in a whole new country, Shu Han, and fixed it within the same book leaving the other country as it is.

d) Ruthenium and the Blight

Ruthenium, the metal that is an alloy of regular metal and Grisha made steel, could have been utilized more significantly in the books.

I mention it in association with the blight because while on one hand it is true that the blight is an area full of nothingness, ruthenium as a metal could have been utilized to show the effects of rushed industrialization that is leading to the ground losing its essence. This is supposed to be advanced warfare after all. Besides, Makhi loses someone very dear to her. Perhaps ruthenium is more dangerous in Shu Han because the Shu use it to create the khergud, so the constant manufacturing of it has been leading to the metal leeching the lands of their fertility, along with the blight.

And so also to broker peace, Ravka could have provided aid in some ways. :

1) The Darkling sacrificed himself, as a result of which the blight vanishes. While the blight took away her niece, the possibility of a blight persisting despite the ending of RoW could be attributed to ruthenium.

2) Ravka could provide the reversing effect to the alloy of ruthenium and metal using Grisha and otkazt’sya engineering and ingenuity to replenish the lands.

All in addition to whatever will be Shu Han’s policies to bring lushness to their lands.

e) Women and War:

Holy fucking Shit, where do I start with this?

Whatever we saw in Fjerda was haunting, and we see it from Nina’s chapters. There’s literally no resolution for it, nor is it ever brought up again, at all. In Zoya’s chapters, we see through her eyes the brunt that Grisha faced with the war, and in a country that has refused to recognize Grisha as the citizens and considers them expendable.

Add to it her own narrative of how the women are never mentioned, let alone the ones that she has lost or has known to suffer, at the hands of the war, at the Darkling's torture and powers. The description of these women suffering, often being forgotten and thrown aside as mere casualties… where or when was it ever going to be brought up again?

Like, switching between such horrifying things happening in Fjerda to whatever was happening with Zoya and Nikolai and Isaak is such a contrast, horrifyingly demeaning and insulting, even more so when it failed to align with the importance of parem and offer a solution to both these problems.

Now switch to Rule of Wolves, where the Tavgahard women immolate themselves on Queen Makhi’s orders. Not only is that such a cheap and insensitive thing to do, it gets treated a simple fucking plot point in the book, and it barely gets addressed afterwards. Women in Asia have a vastly complex and complicated history with fire, and this is a serious criticism that culturally affects readers in personal ways. And what gets done about it? Fine, Zoya feels baaaad, sorry oops why would the women do that?!?!?

Where is the adequate sensitivity to the topic? Where is the continuation of the pain Zoya feels for many people, despite them being the enemy? How does she honour them? Where is all that dilemma and pain? Why does she not think of them or just get a line or two to talk about them?

Where is the due importance for this suffering given? Structurally and culturally?

f) Soldier, Summoner, Saint / Yaromir the Great

We never really get any explanation for why Zoya deserves to be the Queen, and why she is the best. But we do get to see why Nikolai isn’t the one supposed to be on the throne, and it’s not just because of his parentage but also because of his failings and doubts and the need for acceptance with the secrets he carried.

Here's the thing though; it’s not just about her showing mercy. It’s very subtle, and in good sense, should actually have been given a little bit more importance that be loosely brought up at random times.

Keeping aside the fact that Zoya is representative of Ravka—a woman, a Grisha, a Suli girl who changed the course of war and who knew what it was like living in poverty, being as an underprivileged person of the society in addition to the trauma from then and the state of living at her aunt’s place—which is meant to be covertly apparent, the other reason tracks back to Yaromir the First, who with the help of Sankt Feliks of the Apple Boughs—the one who raised the thornwood—lead Ravka at that time into the age of peace.

The Darkling testified that in his POVs, that while Feliks and Yaromir worked in tandem for Ravka, Aleksander worked for safeguarding the Grisha. In one sense, Zoya is supposed to reflect that moment in history in the present moment, except she is Queen and Sankta, and Grisha, all three at once.

It is brought up in one of the Darkling’s POVs and once in the conversation with Yuri in KoS. Other than that, we never actually get any more hints of this explanation in the text, which is the reason why the entire ending felt so so rushed, and like a fever dream, that even if it was a plot twist, it was kinda very baseless when it should have been more ohhhhh sort of a thing.

g) The Starless Cult and Saint Worship

This cult had immense potential to blossom into many things, some of which were indeed touched upon in KoS when Zoya says that she saw a bit of herself in Yuri, and brings up time and again how easily she’d been led and had not been aware enough of what’s right and wrong, just as she supposes Yuri is too. And to some extent, there is truth there, because in the Lives of Saints, we do see why Yrui comes about to hail the Darkling and how it parallels Zoya’s, of being helpless and ten being saved by a different power/ their own power, respectively.

That’s where it forks, that Zoya is older and realizes the path that Yuri has chosen and understands that it won't happen until he realizes it himself because the Darkling’s crimes are so obvious.

Even then, there’s still more potential: This cult could have been the mirror that would make Zoya reflect on the questionable methods of the Darkling, and the ways in which she might be mirroring them, despite or not it is the necessity because of the war. How she is training soldiers too, just as the Darkling did, and while the need to take children away from their homes just as soon as they were discovered Grisha was abolished, it was war, and they needed soldiers.

So like, there’s quite a big narrative going on here, how mere children are pushed into one path of becoming a soldier and the whole system that was that the Darkling followed to train the Grisha and all of that. All of this in addition to the juxtaposition to the Grisha being seen as elite despite them being hunted, and the people who are not Grisha frowning upon them. This is also the work of the Darkling, which actually paves the way to see how there can be a world where the Grisha are not feared or seen as abnormal, despite or not they are given a Saint-like narrative.

This cult could also have been the segue to discussing Yuri and his brainwashing, and the sort of cult-ish behaviour of believing in something firm when you couldn’t believe in yourself, or not seeing the magnitude of the crimes of their supposed Saint, alongside always staying focused on becoming a soldier only and never actually thinking beyond what is told.

Some of these are very subtle and some are brought up, but never given too much of an explanation.

Genya brings up another good point in the funeral chapter, about how Fjerda seemingly taking into the whole Saints thing could mean that if the Darkling moved there, he could very well sprawl his influence there to bring in supporters. Which leads to another discussion that gets brought up towards the end of the book: about Nina telling about the Ravkan Saints to Hanne and therefore to the Fjerdans,,, which doesn’t exactly sit right with me. It’s still a very nascent topic, and I think SoC3 will explore this path of faith and personal beliefs etc. but leaving it just there, while talking so much about Saints in both the countries,,, don’t exactly know how to put it into thoughts here.

But regardless, the cult of the Starless had different potential to talk of (blind) worshipping of an ideal without critically examining why the person must be put on the pedestal in the first place (and if it is simply power, then there is actually a narrative right there, which RoW gets right, about the people valuing the power still, as a result of which the monarchy still persists at the end of RoW. Even then, there’s more discussion awaiting there).

Not sure if any of this makes sense, but I’ll leave it at this here for now.

edit: 05/07/2021 | I think what I was trying to say here is that we do not have any kind of narrative evidence to seeing how and why it seems right that the Fjerdans will worship Ravkan Saints; is it merely because they are all Grisha? Or is it because of the segue explore this path of faith and personal beliefs and all of that, of the talk of the monastery and the Grisha there being of all identities, that a monastery is in Shu Han, that it has Djel's sacred Ash tree so far away from Fjerda... much to think about.

III. Characters, Characterization, Character Potential.

Mostly going to be about Nina and Zoya, but I’ll bunch up the rest of them at the end.

a) Nina

*head in hands*

I severely mourned how poorly Zoya was written in RoW, but then I realized that more than Zoya, it’s Nina whose potential was severely undermined and wasted. On one hand, I’m glad she uses her powers and quick thinking,observation and her own tactics to analyze the population and opt for the best way to make them see the truth she wants to show them (eg: making Leoni and Adrik and Zoya saints and also showing that the Grisha are the children of Djel via people’s belief to Joran and Rasmus’s mother).

But then, it’s like you said; her parts were so offbeat and outpaced and completely disjointed, when in fact, Nina is the thread that ties all the characters, their plotlines and potential, together. Nina is connected to Zoya and Hanne, two equally important characters and main characters of the duology. Whatever scope Nina has, they are greatly in parallel to Zoya and Hanne. And it’s all literally there, in the text! What a waste.

Though keeping aside these parallels, Nina’s own journey from Ketterdam to Ravka to Fjerda, while is spoken about, doesn’t touch some other parts that I see potential in. Or this is just meta.

Nina has grief not just from Matthias’ death but also from the loss of her powers as Heartrender. So much of the Second Army was built on being a soldier, and perhaps the Darkling was not outright disdainful of racial differences in his army, yet he still stripped every part of the children away until they weren’t children anymore in his view. They’re all soldiers… (albeit his soldiers, preparing them to do his bidding because hey, give and take right?). Nina was a soldier, and she is a soldier still under Zoya’s role as a General, but an ‘other’ of a soldier. That’s her only identity, and the loss of her powers means that she’s a different kind of soldier.

I imagine that this entire time, some small part of Nina longed for normalcy, or whatever settled as normal for a life like hers. In the sense that she wants to go back, but what is back and where exactly did she want to go back to? What was the before and after and where did things go wrong or change? There’s tragedy in the realization that whatever you were before what you became is not a place you can return to, and that’s a different kind of loss that she has to bear, and all by herself. She has powers over the dead now, a strange power she learns to grow to, but all the places she has been, all the lives she has led and people she had been, everything might seem like they’ve all been locked away in some strange place leaving her barren and indisposable.

She’s off to Fjerda as someone she isn’t, figuratively and literally. In KoS, Nina brings up many times how odd she feels as Mila and in some capacity longs to be Nina Zenik again. This ties in with the previous point of returning to somewhere, but where?, but is also a segue towards body dysmorphia, the thing that Nina and Hanne’s storylines parallel and connect too with in a small way. It’s a great line to follow to discuss what her discomfort with her body means to herself while it means something entirely different to Hanne, who is also not entirely comfortable being who they are. (This discomfort further which leads to gender dysphoria, while for Nina, it will be about learning to accept her powers. I’ll add on to this in a bit,).

I'm mourning the lost potential of that experience being a parallel to Hanne’s own feelings, of a discussion between people being uncomfortable with their bodies, something that can mean multitudes to each person and on their own accord.

In parallel to Zoya, I like to draw it from the fact about Nina wanting to go back to who she was, while Zoya actively tries to lock her past away and drown it somewhere or throw it to the storm, never to hear of it again. She has no identity other than being a soldier, and that’s enough for Zoya, because who she was before she was a soldier is not pleasant. But moving from being just another expendable shell of soldier under the Darkling’s rule, Zoya becomes the one third of the Triumvirate, and then the King’s general, all of which bring self-awareness of Zoya’s capabilities and challenges that are bound to excite her. But all of these also compel Zoya to be many other people to others as she slowly grows to realize that power is not just protection but also a responsibility, and it will inadvertently mean confronting her past of her lost identity, realizing the how of the Darkling, and how harmful it was. As Genya puts it perfectly in Rule of Wolves, that they were all taken away when they were young kids, not even barely children, and then thrust into responsibilities that didn’t allow them to be anything else other than what the Darkling told them to be.

Back to Nina; a few other great parts about Nina’s arc could have been about her connection to languages, as language being a mode of strengthening identity, in addition to growing to her powers. In RoW, there’s this line that goes ‘how sweet it was to speak her language [Ravkan] again’, and the feeling of homesickness. Like, Nina is trying to connect to Ravka through what she knows best—language, and then stories. In that, Nina realizes a part of her identity, which could also act as a segue to Zoya reclaiming her own heritage and ethnicity. Not only that but Zoya and Nina’s stories are literally so intertwined that it’s hard not to see how their choices and line of thought affect one another’s arcs, in the grief they have and how they choose to treat it, and also show why Zoya is particularly protective of Nina (and keeps wishing that she doesn’t become the monster Zoya had become, in the sense that Nina is more mature in handling her grief than Zoya was and the entire mercy plotline ties Nina, Zoya and even Genya together. More meta, haH).

And that’s why the ending doesn’t make sense. Even though the part about her not being comfortable as Mila is not brought up many times in the continuing chapters (and that’s why perhaps naming Nina’s discomfort as body dysmorphia may be wrong), there’s still the part of Nina readily accepting to be who she was a Mila and remain in Fjerda that seems iffy to me. Especially when Nina and Hanne literally a few chapters ago think about running away (it may be just another alternative they might be fantasizing about, but I think it still means that they both want to be their true selves without hiding any parts of it away). So her staying as Mila… well, it doesn’t exactly add up.

I’d also add the part of Nina’s story mirroring Leoni’s, and how she is from Novyi Zem and being a part of the Second Army meant that she had little to no connection with her past, her culture etc. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part that Leigh went for that arc.

edit: 05/07/2021 | I don't agree with my point anymore about Nina not having the kind of ending I assumed she might have, considering that it is very well possible for Nina to treat her identity as Mila as a fresh start, as a Grisha with a command over the the dead and begin a new normal that is suited for her. You can read more here.

b) Zoya

For one, white passing Zoya is not canon to me. I simply pretend I do not see it.

See, her race was handled very badly. Making her half-Suli was supposed to show the struggles and the trauma that the ridiculing of her identity by other people has caused to her. Except, not enough time nor text is given to thoroughly discuss it. Not to forget how problematic of a narrative in itself it is to make Zoya white passing.

It would have made more sense to make her dark skinned and predominantly Suli-looking than whatever yt bs she was put through. Her not being white-passing would have led to conversations about tokenization, or people caring little about her and not giving her any respect because she is Suli. Or being called beautiful to the face and praised just for it or a harmless tumble in their point of view.

So like, instead of making the ‘mistake’ of seeking for acceptance, seeking appreciation and love, from her mother at first and then the Darkling, Zoya instead makes herself someone to be feared, if respect was not what she deserved. The iciness is a part of her and has always been, but all of it soon became a shield, an armour that she vowed to harden her heart with. Just the sheer impact of this narrative and her reluctance, and seeing Nikolai love her for beyond who she thinks she is… if all of this was canon, I’m pretty sure I’d have built a shrine for this duology.

Let’s now talk about her grief, and...

…

Okay it’s not for me to point fingers at how Leigh chose to write about grief because there’s no one way or one proper approach to go through that pain, and if that’s how she chose to write about grief for Zoya, fine! But I really wish we’d have gotten a little more into her head to see how the trauma has affected her thoughts and how she struggles against why and what exactly it is that Juris wants her to do. That enough time and text was dedicated to Zoya’s feelings and the mayhem it caused her, as a result of which the dragon’s eye took its cue and made things more unbearable to her because she was the only one to bear them all.

Like, I feel like Zoya was overwhelmed throughout the book and in between she had some skyhigh responsibilities to discharge and it’s all so inconsistent and poorly woven,,, it completely dissolved her character from KoS and made it 10000000x more miserable for me to read her POVs. And honestly, what even were her assignments that the Kirkus review mentioned? Never an inch of text in RoW is given to decipher her complications of her mind, the muddled sense of hopelessness and fear that grips her time and again. Why overwhelm her so much that you fail to do her mental state and capacity any justice?

I’m not going to be harsh about how much David’s death bothered me-- no actually fuck that; what’s the point? Fine, he died. All because you wanted to make his death a plot device to make Zoya reconcile with loss and deal with it? Where was Genya’s grief? Literally no point of having a death in the book at all, and it didn’t even achieve anything. (I’m still trying to wrap my head around why David’s death was important and maybe if I find some straws, I’ll consider…)

There were so many other ways around it; could have brought back Lada and killed her off, or have the Darkling piss her off so badly or just. Something. Instead of whatever happened with David. I think this is too harsh and insensitive of me to say about Leigh, but still… there’s a myriad of other ways to have gone about it. Helping Zoya deal with her grief with Nikolai at her side, to understand that the rage that was fueled from her loneliness, like it had been in the past, could now be a weight that Nikolai was willing to carry with her… Helping someone with their grief, staying and choosing is also a love language you know?

So in that regard, I won’t regret saying how flat the garden scene was to me. Zoya’s lines, though tinged with grief, were so out of what I would expect KoS Zoya to say. Maybe it’s also because of how bitter I was reading about David's death, despite that part being spoiled for me.

The cost shouldn’t have been David’s death, especially not when his death too wasn’t properly handled at all, and Genya’s grief was never spared a second thought beyond bringing Titanium.

+

Now let’s talk about how Out of Character Zoya was throughout the book. Her punchy attitude was missing, and even if she was warming up to her friends, we see little of the iciness she continues to retain. Another part of this is about exploring her relationships, particularly with Nikolai and her growing feelings for him. I wish we’d have seen them grapple with more of their confusion and propriety, if only for the yearning™. Besides, no matter how cute their scenes were, they were mostly (like maybe some. 70%) awful to read them, simply because it felt so odd to see Zoya be so open with Nikolai, all of a sudden.

A part of this definitely has to be the fact that we don’t know just how much time has passed between the end of KoS and the start of RoW, and we never, never see any description of they regarded their feelings for each other and how they understood it themselves. I don’t actually know how exactly I can put this into words in a manner that will make sense, but the only scenes where I appreciated Zoyalai were in the Ketterdam chapters, ONLY. The rest was… bleh lmao. Their scenes were so cute and brilliant, and if only we’d seen more of the internal conflict and had given some more time for them to practically approach their feelings but still end up in the puddle of it. If only.

Their scenes apart were the good ones, because that’s where we finally see Nikolai feeling the loss, no matter how temporary (on the verge of being permanent since it’s the war), of not having Zoya with him, of not being there with Zoya because who else would it be if it wasn’t her? Zoyalai had good scenes but they barely lived up to the mark lol. Their feelings are never thoroughly explored, nor their mental capacities.

While we’re talking about Zoyalai, let’s also talk about how lame it was for Zoya to say that Nikolai was the golden spirited hero all along, from the very start, when canonically we know Zoya had little to do with him in the earlier books, that she may have only been physically attracted to him and never saw him as more than just some guy with a responsibility to manage, and had sooooooo much distrust about him. And that it was only in the next few years of working with him and alongside did she grow to recognize his efforts and relish in the hope that he was building for Ravka, inadvertently making Zoya hopeful too.

Nope. Instead, we’ll just throw in some destiny bs that he was the one all along rather than show that the beauty of their relationship did not stem what they perceived of each other, but was instead built on strong respect and admiration for one another and their capabilities. 100% destroyed their relationship for me.

+

Some good parts about Zoya’s arc in RoW was how she acknowledged her past mistakes, and the nuance that was touched upon in seeing sense in becoming a soldier from the start, that offered her a chance to be anything other than a bride. That some part of her was grateful for the Darkling for teaching her how to fight, while still keeping Genya’s words in mind about how they were mere kids, children who had only one path to traverse because the Darkling (who wanted their acceptance and loyalty) nor the Kings of the country let the Grisha be anything else other than pawns of the war. That she recognizes her mistakes as a teen and how self centred she was, that her being snotty had at times cost some peoples’ lives too. And she doesn’t take the blame all up on herself, because it’s not hers alone to bear. Super good.

Also, the way Zoya comes to view power as responsibility instead of merely as protection was something cool to read about. It’s not clear in the books, but Zoya actively tried to not be the Darkling while still continuing to build an army for the war out of necessity, and actually sharing some parts of the dream that the Darkling had for the Grisha. I can’t articulate this so perfectly, but the point is, Zoya trying to avoid becoming a tyrant like the Darkling was an active process that she was constantly trying to change, and where Zoya could not recognize her own feelings and inherent thoughts about warfare that in some ways did mirror the Darkling’s, by the end of book, Zoya is much more self-aware and conscious of herself and her power than she was at the start of the book. And this was well done.

+

Now, what is up with YA and making people turn into giants or animals lol wtf. Why couldn’t we have seen Zoya use her dragon powers in a way that symbolizes the conditions of her dragon amplifier and the power of the knowledge she obtained from Juris? She is a Saint, and we’ve seen that their powers allowed them to cause ‘miracles’ and such, as we see at the start of KoS and at the end.

Why couldn’t we have seen Zoya dabble with her newfound powers and completely lose her shit in anger during the wae, only to rein back in mercy, just as someone from Fjerda begs for forgiveness since they see her then as a Saint? Adrik and Leoni used their powers in Fjerda, so having Zoya bring about a conundrum of all orders and do something about it would also have been cool, wouldn’t it? In the funeral scene we see her turn water into ice, thereby making a path for Genya. Why couldn’t we have had more exploration of the importance of the dragon’s eye and the general nausea of being overly empathetic every. damn. time? Why didn’t we get to see her powers? Why couldn’t we have seen her fail in them and realize that the reason she was not perfect was because she was trying to be strong on her own and was not relying on others and joint effort?

Her turning into a dragon was genuinely the most baffling part bc here’s a war that’s so serious and dire with metals and bombs, and then here’s this magic that will solve all of it entirely. Like I’m not saying it was bad, (I am actually saying just that) but I also don’t know what I am saying, except that the ending felt like a fever dream.

…?

Not sure if I’ve managed to convey it properly, but well. Zoya felt out of character throughout RoW, and that the only place I saw KoS Zoya was in the final Os Kervo scene where Zoya finally agrees to be the queen.

c) Nikolai

Nikolai’s arc was very satisfying and brilliant to read about in RoW. In KoS, he seemed very much like a passive character, one of the reasons why his stunt with the Shu in RoW was appreciable, no matter how ill-timed of a plot turn it was. His journey throughout this book was also introspective to see why others deemed him unfit as the King, and even if they were his enemies who thought that in want to dispose him from the throne, Nikolai realizes that him being on the throne is not of much value and that this book was entirely about him seeing his privilege and making decisions to counter and correct the mistakes he’s made. That was nice. Oh, also his father not being an antagonist was a pleasant surprise.

I don’t have many complaints about him, except perhaps wanting some more internal conflict and elaboration about his feelings for Zoya. Them being apart was where it was satisfying, and then in the Ketterdam chapters. His arc could have been better in KoS, but that’s to blame the plot for the characterization.

d) Hanne

Now, from the very start, their arc was super good and it only got better and better until… the ending. Except it’s so odd that Hanne, a poc, has to now live as white person, while feeling comfortable in their transmasc identity. Icky, no? That you need to eliminate one part of your identity in order to feel safe and comfortable about another? Add to this the whole white-passing Zoya thing,,, doesn't exactly send off the right message.

Together with Nina, the ending seems uncharacteristic for both of them. Them coming to accept their powers and knowing to use their powers on their own accord was brilliant, though the entire husband business felt very,,, eh to me, even if it did make sense. The ending about their name and their new identity was too vague.

e) Genya, Leoni and Adrik, Kuwei, Mayu,

Genya is the one who faced the most disservice along with David. While there were exceptional parts to both of their plotlines, it's still sad that even if David's death was necessary, we don't get to see the entirety of her grief and the possible anger, and that her kindness is simply used as the justification for lack of portrayal of grief.

It really did take me by surprise, mostly because I wasn't a fan of the original Shadow and Bone book, but seeing David's conscience and self-awareness, along with Genya's (and Zoya thinking of how she wouldn't let any harm come to them, which shows a bit of her development towards her character development), was plenty refreshing. David and Genya were genuinely the highlights of the book and to kill David off was just. doesn't sit right with me.

Leoni and Adrik deserved more page time. They’re saints and immensely capable (no wonder they’re now the Triumvirate), but a few more pages for them to shine would not only have been nice, but also a necessity.

And now, Kuwei...

....

I mean,,, parem should have been the plot, alongside the entire weaponry and the discussion of making a city killer. But uh… that didn’t happen.

There's not much I have to say about Mayu, Tamar and Ehri, except that their plot was superb, only very badly timed.

There's more to talk about them in the remedy tho.

IV. Remedy

Here’s the deal. Before KoS release, there should have been a Nina novella.

Nina is a very important character. All of her potential, alongside many other parts of her personality--from dealing with grief, to accustoming to her powers, to growing stronger--there could be so much to do with her as a protagonist, alongside another character: Mayu.

A whole book dedicated to Nina in Fjerda with Hanne? Brilliant. Show Stopping. Mind blowing. It gives SO much page time to explore not just Nina and Mayu, Hanne, but also Zoya, Leoni and Inej. All together.

How?

Nina’s plotline carries the entire medical effects of the use of parem, just as Mayu’s will carry the pain she feels about her brother being a part of the khergud program. The novella will give ample time to flesh them out as characters and protagonists, each dealing with plot problems and problems of their own--like the loss of ones powers and newfound responsibilities, and the shared loss of a beloved person in parallel, even if neither Nina or Mayu interact on page.

Fjerda and Shu Han could be tied together with one chapter as a POV from Zoya (or maybe two), who, along with the Triumvirate and Nikolai, are completely at loss with the political scenario in the country, and are debating over what should be the course of action. Zoya receives news from the scouts, and missives from Nina, and Tamar takes care of the information she garners from the rest of the network, including Shu Han.

Like, the entire surprise of finding a Zoya POV, from a character whom until CK we’ve known as cold hearted and stern and not giving a fuck about anything or anyone, be humanized in that one chapter, thereby building up the anticipation for her arc,,, the very potential,,, *chef's kiss*.

And by the end of book, we could have an POV--or maybe a cameo if not a POV--of Inej meeting Nina on one of her travels of slave hunting. Inej could help take care that the women that Nina has rescued (as Nina does in KoS) reach the Ravkan shorelines safely. But, for a price.

The entire parallels between Leoni and Hanne and Nina could be set up, while also building up the narrative for the Saints’ plotline with Adrik's, Leoni's and Nina’s powers (like it was at the end of KoS). KoS and RoW would thereby continue it by tackling the weaponization and the antidote, Sainthood and the rest of the politics of it all.

Coming to Shu Han: one key aspect that I’d love to have explored would be the importance of art, during or despite the war. Of how war or pain chips away culture, while detailing on the ill effects of it from the commoners' perspectives, from the soldiers etc. Art is integral to Shu Han and could be portrayed by Mayu’s pain finding balm in poetry, of seeing glimpses of Ehri poring over poetry also mayri ftw, of politics that Makhi is weaving against Ravka, etc.

Or also add some more length to Zoya’s POV and explore a bit of Tamar and Tolya and Kuwei’s interactions and perspective added to it, of missing a home that they seemed to not know, or know; of discussing culture and differences on the basis of where they’re from (maybe the twins are from the borders, while Kuwei grew up near the capital or somewhere distant from the borders etc.), all while directly pointing at Zoya’s heritage and how it ebbs at her conscience, no matter how much she wants to bury it.

POTENTIAL !!!

Like,,, Nina novella would have been too powerful. It would have been perfect. I think I’d excuse bringing back the Darkling too if this was the case. (Or maybe not).

But welp.

Hey, thanks for reading! Not sure if you could make it this far, but if you have, you honestly deserve a medal for sitting through this all. I can’t imagine how tiring it must be to read through this, considering it seemed to take it more than month to compile this there’s also me procrastinating on it too so i’,mbhbdhshfsdn

Drop an ask if you want to talk more about this!

Sincerely, thank you!!!

[likeadog]

Genuine question, though- why exactly is art being easily consumable a bad thing? I do think it’d be better phrased as “let people enjoy things so long as that enjoyment isn’t at the expense of others”

Also imo hcing the mains kissing is fine just tag it so people who /don’t/ want to see it can avoid it but ik that can be debated

Okay so in part that post was unclear with what i meant

I don't think art should be gatekept from people. I do believe that the idea of "high art" and elitism in who decides what is art leads to more harm than good and as someone who spent a very large portion of the last few years preparing for a career in art and studying art history i think the idea has a few large aspects we need to tackle

1) the commodification. art is pumped out for the masses to be SOLD to the masses. the worst offender of this i think is NFT's; the art of deceased artist, ai-generated asset mixes, etc all being sold as status symbols BECAUSE of the concept of scarcity and the fact that they Cost A Lot Of Money.

2) because of this commodification, art is becoming increasingly sanitized. especially with the internet, and the phenomenon of people's attention spans (and personal time! we cannot discount how capitalist labor has destroyed people's ability to spend time on the things they love) getting increasingly shorter, companies are pushing out shorter, "emptier" content to catch attention quickly. This trend then trickles down to fandom through the use of algorithms; tiktok, instagram, etc all promote very shortform content en masse, and when you produce things en masse to be profitable, you have to cut corners. a lot of artists have said they can ONLY make a following by making fandom content that appeals to the widest audiences possible, and things like "aesthetic sketchbooks" continue to perpetuate the idea that all art has to be clean and easy to digest. we see much less willingness from both companies and fans to engage with dirty, messy, emotional art, and i think as a whole culture suffers from it.

not only that, but especially online, this rapid-fire cycle of consumption leads to echochambers;;; which leads to things like racism on fandomwide scales, misogyny, grooming-- etc. by enforcing the idea that you do not have to THINK about the art and the implications of what you are ingesting and then spitting out, you enforce the idea that what you are doing can never be harmful to other people.

and this is what i mean by the devaluing of art-- while the entertainment industry booms, and fandom has become more relevant and widespread than ever, people don't VALUE what it means for someone to be MAKING art. people dont VALUE the deeper themes that art could be presenting.

and i won't say fandom content cant be deeper art, too. i will never say you can put it on the level of entirely original works, but i would be a hypocrite if i didnt admit ive even used shows i dont think are particularly good to explore a theme they presented in a way that was deeply personal to myself (such as my cult background) because having a base there made it easier to hone in on those details.

and i dont have an issue with individuals headcanoning things and having ships; it is when those things overtake the basic themes, context, or even the PLOT of the story that i find them to be an offense, especially on a large scale. when i initially watched devilman crybaby, i was severely mislead by dozens upon dozens of people about the actual content of the show because of how cutesy-fying akira and ryo's relationship was the norm, and that's just one of many examples. same with this phenomenon of encanto-- this is a disney movie about family. it is made for children and tries to deliver the themes of generational trauma in a way that introduces the concept of healing for generational audiences. (and the criticisms of disney for encanto are not mine to tell but they are out there and are very interesting reads if ur interested, but this is about fandom) but people are obsessed with finding some sort of ship or headcanon to slap on top, in a way that feels like a shallow non-engagement of the text. which is not particularly hard to engage with, given that it is a CHILDRENS MOVIE