#where the focus may have been on something different like color or symbol or narrative over realism you sort of see them as “lesser”

[deepseacityunderground]

ive said this before but so much of what Retvrn Freaks glorify in early modern european art are just components inherent to the mediums being used at the time as opposed to like. an example of heightened skill that has been supposedly Lost in these degenerate times.... oil paint just looks like that. its very tonal and rich and even an artist with mediocre rendering skills will have their rendering skills improved by painting in oil. old oil paintings took years to complete not because the artists doing them were very skilled but because oil takes months to dry and they built up subtle washes over dried paint. tracing was also commonly utilized during that time period, and artists also often had small armies of apprentices who would do the hard work for them with no credit. these huge highly tonal oil paintings become significantly less impressive when you actually learn about their context.

[dreamersleeps]

I keep re-reading MHA 299 and I know many are upset Hawks is standing up for Endeavor but... I get the whole chapter was setting up that Hawks is going to commit suicide by heroically protecting Endeavor. He doesn’t want to look at the alternative because it just adds to the tragedy of his life, but also because he wants to die. He probably feels he doesn’t HAVE to investigate it at ALL because what does it do for him? He’ll be dead and it won’t be something he has to worry about.

Hello, it’s nice to talk to you again! :) So I’m not sure if this is the response you were looking for cause I just sat down, began writing and it kinda went off topic? I’m not entirely sure, but thank you for sending your thoughts and opinions in!

I read over Chapter 299 a few more times and I’m not sure if I really interpreted it as Hawks wanting to die. However I think I can kind of see what you mean by he’s going to commit suicide in the sense that (depending on the outcome) the action of Hawks going to help Endeavor is “suicide” in that it is his choice. 

I think the root of my interpretation lies with my opinion that while Horikoshi does work with heavy and difficult subjects, I can not see him ending the story of Hawks’ with death. While I think he could die in a metaphorical or symbolic way (something I believe has already happened when he took Jin’s life) when his story ends, a physical death is not impossible.

Just to express my train of thoughts easier, the following panels are not in the exact order of how they appear. 

"Endeavor’s in Trouble” 

I can see how you could interpret what Hawks says as him “standing up” for Endeavor but I did not really read it in that way. Standing up for him implies that he is in a way “okay” with what Endeavor has done in the past, and if we get more on Hawks’ thoughts later it will be clearer on where he stands but if this is all we get, I’d argue that he is not “letting things slide,” because it’s Endeavor. 

All we currently have is that Hawks states, “Endeavor’s in trouble.” I think he’s most likely referring to Dabi here. 

I guess you could argue that he may commit metaphorical suicide by choosing to help Endeavor. If we want to continue pursuing the Icarus narrative: then even after falling and after gaining his freedom, Hawks chooses to head towards Endeavor, or the sun again.  

So as you convey, this is the controversial page. 

“Even if what Dabi says about the Todoroki family is true... I know things are different now.” 

The inclusion of Hawks’ memory of Shouto and Endeavor is very, very important here. It appears in the middle of this sentence. I’d argue that Hawks here was not brushing off or ignoring what happened in the Todoroki household, and again this is mainly because of the inclusion of the memory which happens during the Endeavor Internship arc. This is how he is thinking through the situation. Seeing as we get a glimpse of Hawks’ past memories, I’m sure that he has been contemplating about everything that was revealed by Dabi. Especially considering that Hawks most likely can relate to Touya to a certain extent. 

Hawks’ hero career involved a lot of him having to collect information, analyze information and reach a conclusion in order for him to act upon it. Perhaps that is why when he states, “I know things are different now,” it comes off as very bold. I think the boldness of his statement is what may have upset people but I think it has to do with the way he’s been trained to think. 

The secret missions Hawks had to undertake while working for the Hero Public Safety Commission required one to detach their job from their individual feelings and thoughts. He must not let sentiments get in the way. 

Sentiments 

As always, I like to include definitions of words I find very important that could be understood differently based on who you are - what are sentiments? A couple definitions that come up in the dictionary are: 

1) an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling, 2) an idea colored by emotion (Merriam-Webster) and 3) exaggerated and self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness or nostalgia (dictionary) 

We see that feelings and emotion get in the way with his job when Hawks confronts Jin. Hawks had a connection and relationship with Jin that he did not have in his life. As we see below in Chapter 265 even Dabi points this out, “Looks like sentiment tripped you up after all, hero!” Yes, ultimately Hawks takes Jin’s life but I do believe he was hesitant and did not want to. The dialogue between the two has Hawks expressing that he believes that Jin is a good person who was dealt an unlucky hand in life. 

While he does convey that he wants to “save” Jin by helping him but after already assessing the threat he believed Jin posed and with the arrival of Dabi, Hawks weights his options and chooses to take his life. 

From a detached, cold reading of this scene, Hawks does mess up. His hesitance distracts him and makes himself vulnerable to Dabi’s attack which badly burns him, and he loses a large portion of his feathers. 

Now I’m only going to focus on the fact that Hawks takes Jin’s life and the thinking that went behind it. I’m not here to discuss in depth about my thoughts and opinions on the matter however I think by the end of this post, you may have an idea on where I stand.  

What is a hero? 

Okay, my wording here is confusing but I’m going to try the best I can to convey what I’m trying to get at. There is also the idea of the two concepts of heroism that float around the manga: 1) working as hero as an occupation and being able to fulfill that role, and then 2) one who we label as a hero/heroic in how they think and act. For both we think of saving, strength, power, charisma, etc. 

Then there are the other qualities we tend to associate with the second concept of who/what a hero is: being selfless and compassionate, having moral integrity, showing concern for others no matter who it is and being understanding of others’ perspectives. There are others as well but these are what come to mind at the moment. 

While the qualities I list above can be associated with heroes in general, in BNHA there has been an effort to differentiate at least two different concepts of heroism. The biggest example was with the introduction of the character Stain. If the reader had not been questioning hero society beforehand, Stain told us directly to think critically and refrain from being passive like the characters in the story. Due to the emergence of quirks, there were those whose quirks deemed “unacceptable” by society, their existence often leading to a difficult life or being  labeled as a villain. The demand for heroes created the concept of the hero as a job. 

And so heroes became celebrities. They are rich and influential, and they cover the cities with their faces to sell and endorse products. Even the physical copies of the BNHA manga have ads of various pro-heroes selling products in the back. There’s plenty of other criticisms that you could talk about such as the Hero Billboard Chart. 

While the older pro-heroes seem to have lost or never embodied the meaning of what the reader may argue as “being a true hero,” we see that there is a difference with the students, but first let’s go back to Hawks and Twice again. 

Yes, Hawks attempts to save Jin but the outcome is that he takes his life instead. Definitely not what the act of saving is supposed to look like. As seen above, Hawks had already verbalized that he may have to kill Jin. I’ll also throw in that I felt like Hawks was looking down at him in pity (like he does with his parents) and determines that Jin is need of saving. Hawks reaches that conclusion himself. But that is not what happens. Instead he decides that the death, or “sacrifice” of an individual is worth it if he can save hundreds or thousands of others. In this way you could argue that he has successfully acted to fulfill his job as a hero. But, as many people were wondering: 

Aren’t heroes supposed to save everyone? 

Perhaps one of the defining qualities of a hero is that they chose to save indiscriminately or most importantly, whoever they can reach. 

In the same arc we get Midoriya who is faced with a very similar situation. Shigaraki poses as a significant threat to the heroes and the rest of Japan. Midoriya knows that Shigaraki can wipe out all of those he holds dear to him and the rest of Japan if he is not stopped. Midoriya sees firsthand Shigaraki’s terrifying and destructive powers, his friends, teachers and allies being critically injured. He is with the knowledge that the people in his life and millions others may lose their lives. 

When faced with such a horrifying outcome, would stopping Shigaraki be enough? I’m assuming that taking his life would have been a very tempting option. To take a life to save millions of lives.

But even after all that we get this page spread of Midoriya’s final thoughts before he loses consciousness at the end of Chapter 295. 

Midoriya chooses compassion. 

The juxtaposition of Midoriya’s thoughts and image gave me chills when I first saw it. We see the outcome of the conflict: a quiet, lifeless city in ruins with the dust in the process of settling. This is the result of Shigaraki’s destruction. The reality that there are thousands of civilians who got hurt, are critically injured or even dead hangs heavy in the air. When society chose to ignore Shigaraki and the heroes chose to label him as an evil, unredeemable villain, Midoriya has chosen to look directly at him. 

Based on the first concept of what a hero is/does according to hero society, Midoriya dues not fulfill his duty as a hero after failing to defeat Shigaraki, however based on the second concept because he chooses compassion he has begun to embody the ideals of who a hero truly is.

Hawks is tripped up by sentiments but acts to finish the job the way he sees fit. 

exaggerated and self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness or nostalgia 

He tries to be compassionate and understanding but isn’t. He has an image of Jin he created himself that is not the true Jin, hence why they are mere sentiments. He chooses to focus on his mission because he does not actual understand how Jin was feeling. This results in him looking past Jin’s life to protect the lives of millions of others. In contrast, Midoriya recognizes Shigaraki, the person who is standing immediately in front of him. In its purest form, to be a hero means to save indiscriminately and to save those you can reach. 

Being a hero as a career in BNHA becomes tricky as it means to defeat and take down villains, and choosing who to save as Hawks demonstrates. 

However to save someone like Shigaraki, Dabi or Toga (who were all let down by hero society) requires someone to take the more difficult path to reach a hand out with selflessness, compassion, and understanding. It seems that Midoriya, Shouto and Ochako will be the ones to extend their hands to them. 

“Starting With my Origin” 

Children often are only able to understand and grasp basic concepts. A hero is someone who saves you, or puts a smile on your face. We get a glimpse back in to Hawks’ childhood, to that innocent concept of heroes that Hawks had. 

As they say, “Never meet your idols/heroes” mainly because they are not actually who they are portrayed to be. The world looks very simple when you are younger, black and white, but as you grow and experience more of life, you start to begin to see just how complicated things are. There are way more gray areas when you begin to look closely. 

Similarly, Hawks does not see him in the same lens as he did in his childhood. He understands that the image of Endeavor he had when he was younger is not who Endeavor actually is. I don’t think that Hawks’ decision to want to go help him was made without thought. He takes in information and contemplates on it until he makes a conclusion. For someone who was actively seeking out more information, I’m wondering if all he has is what Dabi has stated. We have to remember that the information we have as the reader is not the same as the characters in the story. I’d also argue that he is not ignoring what Dabi has said but taking into consideration the past and whether Endeavor is working to change. 

Now that he is most likely no longer working for the Hero Public Safety Commission, he is free to do as he please, and as seen earlier, he chooses to walk towards Endeavor. The team up between the two in Fukuoka, and the ambush against the League of Villains and Meta liberation army may have strengthened their relationship but Hawks wanting to help Endeavor this time does not stem from hero work. 

Wanting to help Endeavor will put him directly on the path towards Dabi. 

Like you, some people believe that he may as in consequence for his actions, he will ultimately crash in to the ocean like Icarus, and die. The final fall. Perhaps his mistake will be that he will choose to pick Endeavor over Dabi, or find himself in a position where he may believe he has to take Dabi’s life away as well. 

Others believe that Hawks has had his Icarus fall already but will learn from the consequences of his actions. He’s died, but has been reborn like a phoenix. Shouto will be meeting Dabi again as well, and as we’ve seen, like Midoriya, he sees Touya as a person: his brother. He even identifies himself to him. I’ve seen people talking about and hoping for a team up between Hawks and Shouto so we’ll see what happens if they do. 

I’m going to bring the very last page back, but most of Chapter 299 has to do with Hawks’ childhood. His mother would ask him about why he was born and what the point of his wings were for and Hawks’ answer is to save people.

“Starting with my origin, so to speak... Endeavor’s in trouble.” 

We get a focus, visually to Hawks’ back. The origins of what allowed Hawks to save and be a hero: his fierce wings quirk, and it looks his wings are healing and growing back. I think you could also see it as him referring to Endeavor as well. The hero who saved him when he was a child, could also be seen as his origin.

During the High End vs Endeavor fight in Chapter 190, we see some of Hawks’ insecurities. Hawks is/was insecure about his back, and that is where his wings are. This was during the time when Hawks was working as a hero because it was his job. He did have that desire to save people but it was only a muted motivation behind what he did: he worked as a hero as a job first. I’m wondering if things have changed. 

Putting this all together, I think I’m currently leaning towards the second possible outcome from what I listed before. If Hawks can go back to his origin and become someone who tries to embody the true heroism. Of course he’ll stumble but it’ll still be a drastic change from how he had been living before. 

While I understand that many people are upset about these panels, I think we have to wait to see what will happen. To be honest, while I’d personally prefer the second outcome, I think I would be satisfied with either outcome. 

As the reader, we certainly can argue that Hawks is a tragic character however I’m not sure if Hawks considers his life as “tragic.” I think he will continue to do what he can as I feel like he defines his purpose based on what he does.

So will Hawks be tripped up on sentiments again, or will he be able to think and be understanding like Midoriya? 

As for now, I think it may be the first. 

[mellointheory]

Honey and Glass

Punz had been tending bees for decades. He knew the moods of a hive, the way they could sense danger coming, the way the entire swarm would exude agitation when a disaster was near. There was no denying it: this entire town wasn’t going to last another day. The bees knew; they always did.

Normally once he entered the dome they would settle on his shoulders and arms, humming calmly as he slid the racks of honeycombs out of hives, drained the honey, and filtered it. Today, however, they refused to even come near him. Half of the entire hives’ population seemed to be flying over his head, bumping against the dome, crawling against the seams between the glass and the wood beams that supported it. They knew it wasn’t safe here anymore.

Punz had no reason not to trust their judgement. He opened the doors of the dome, standing aside and waiting for the insects to realize that their way out was open. They poured out past him, wings sending the air abuzz, taking to the skies en masse. No sympathy or goodbyes from them, they just wanted to survive. He hoped they thrived without him.

He’d had dozens of hives over his lifetime; he could always find another. He was an expert in leaving things behind. All he needed were a few possessions.

The white hood Bad had given him a few years ago. The gold chain he’d received as a status symbol in a cult once, back before he’d even stopped aging. A leather rucksack full of the honey he’d collected from his bees previously and hadn’t brought to the market yet.

The market…

Punz didn’t know the people in town very well. He’d come to this far-flung forest a few years back, after a little bit of a mixup with a disgraced king. It was only ever a place to sleep off his wounds, lay low for a couple decades, take a break and let himself be forgotten before he returned to mercenary work. He never saw any of the residents except when he went to town every few months to sell his honey and buy the foods he couldn’t grow out in the woods.

Considering they possibly were going to die soon, he may as well give the honey away for free.

The marketplace was busy. It always was at this time of afternoon; familiar vendors behind their stalls while the attendees wandered and bargained and shouted. Pumpkins and corn and potatoes, jewelry brought from distant lands, homemade alcohol that felt like a kick to the teeth. Punz found himself a quiet corner and sat cross-legged on the ground, opening up his rucksack and laying bottles of amber honey on the cobblestones in front of him.

He let his mind wander as he sat there. Occasionally someone would come by, inquire the price, and upon hearing it was free take as many as they could hold. Maybe he should have warned them.

Maybe, maybe, but Punz hadn’t lived this long by looking out for others. He would give them the fruits of his work for the past few years and then he would move on, out of here. Getting attached to people who would inevitably die was never a good idea. Bad would disagree with him, of course--the demon was one of the nicest people Punz knew, ironically--but Bad wasn’t here and Punz was.

A flash of color caught his eyes amid the crowd and he looked up. A young man was talking animatedly amid a group of four or five people. Punz didn’t pay attention to the others, but the person in the middle was hard not to see. He wore a hood like Punz’s, but cut differently and sewn together out of patches of wildly different colors. He had brown hair and fidgeted around a lot as he talked, wide movements and animated hand gestures.

The man turned slightly, glancing across the market, halfway through a sentence, and his eyes fell on Punz. He stopped talking.

Fuck.

Punz winced, immediately focusing his attention on the bottles of honey in front of him. He had no idea what about him was distracting the stranger, but making awkward eye contact in public never got any less embarrassing, no matter how long you lived.

Through his lashes he could see the man make a quick excuse to the people he was talking to and begin to jog across the street. He came to a stop in front of Punz, tilting his head curiously.

“Do I--do I know you?” The man asked slowly.

Punz looked up at him. He had green eyes and freckles, and his face was flushed from the heat. He didn’t look like anyone Punz knew or had known over the years--the social circles he ran in were more for warriors and bodyguards and assassins. This person looked like he hadn’t even witnessed a simple bar fight before.

“I don’t think so.” Punz said carefully, scanning the man’s face. “You don’t look like my type of person.”

The man giggled. “What does that mean? Are you calling me ugly or something?”

Punz blinked. “I--what?”

“I’m just messing with you.” The man leaned down, absentmindedly tapping a painted fingernail against one of the bottles of honey. He was still smiling brightly. “I’m Karl, by the way.”

Karl. Nope, Punz definitely didn’t know any Karls. “Do you want some honey?” Punz nodded at the bottle that Karl kept tapping.

“I mean, I don’t have any money.” Karl shrugged.

“It’s free.”

Karl flushed a little bit, picking up the round glass bottle and sliding it into the pocket of his hooded jacket. “Really? Thank you.”

Punz debated for a second, trying to figure out exactly if this was a bad idea or not.

“If I were you, I’d get out of here.” The blonde said finally. “This place isn’t going to last long. You probably don’t want to die.”

Karl’s face fell, but not in the way Punz expected. He didn’t look skeptical or worried, just resigned. Punz had warned people of their deaths many, many times and he knew this look. This man was expecting to die.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t be one of those.” He said softly, wrapping a fist around the honey bottle in his pocket. “It’s fine, though. Are you leaving?”

“Of course I fucking am. I don’t feel like dying today.” Punz shrugged, scooping up the remaining honey into his rucksack. He slung it over his shoulder and stood up. Something made him hesitate, though, waiting for the last thing Karl would say.

“Tell me your name first?” Karl asked, staring up at him.

“It’s Punz.” Punz exhaled a heavy sigh, sliding his arms through the rucksack’s straps. “So are you coming?”

“I…” Karl glanced behind him, at the group of people he’d left behind to come over to Punz’s corner. There was the brief flash of uncertainty in his eyes, almost desperation. Punz had judged him wrong at first; this wasn’t someone wholly unacquainted with death.

“I can’t. Stories to tell, and all that.” Karl smiled weakly. “I guess I’ll see you in a few hundred years.”

Years?

But Punz didn’t ask and Karl didn’t offer an explanation. The brunette turned and walked away, and after a brief moment Punz followed suit. He’d lost hundreds of people over the years. Karl had a story to tell, apparently, and Punz wasn’t someone to interrupt another person’s narrative.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The sun was going down when the earth broke open under them all.

Karl had seen it coming, ever since his new friends explained the strange rumblings underground, taken him around to see places where homes had disappeared into sinkholes. He’d seen it coming ever since he first landed here, because it had been a long, long time since he’d left a time without dying first.

There was screaming. Debris was falling too, breaking beams and rocks cascading down the side of the massive chasm. Someone below him shrieked for help as they plummeted. He knew he needed to write the screams, but sometimes he still couldn’t handle hearing the words. It was too much, too real, too sickening that the people he’d met just that day were dying with him. He would wake up from this. They wouldn’t.

Karl curled up as he fell, trying to drown out the wails. Focus on something happy. Focus on something else.

There should have been something in his head to distract him, he knew it. There should have been a face there--a voice, a smile, a touch he knew well. Memories to help him pretend he wasn’t about to die along with hundreds of others. It was lost in the fog of his head, along with a million other things he knew he should remember. There was someone out there, because he felt their loss, but he couldn’t even remember their name.

He shoved a hand into his hoodie pocket. Something struck him on its way down, sending him spinning, his entire shoulder going numb. His hand reflexively closed around the bottle of honey forgotten in his pocket. Smooth glass, curved, with the weight of liquid golden sweetness behind it. That was a thought he could handle. Honey in a bottle, golden hair in sunlight, a person who shouldn’t have been this far back. A name he did remember; a familiar face despite being hundreds of years removed from Karl’s own timeline.

You probably don’t want to die. Punz had said before he walked away.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, Karl thought desperately as the bottom of the chasm got closer. But I don’t have a choice.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Even as far away as he was, Punz knew when it happened. From his perch settled cross legged in the crook of a tree limb he could see the exact moment when the lights went out.

He didn’t enjoy death. Not even over all the years he’d seen it, all the times he’d brought it on others. It wasn’t like he could see an entire town full of people, children and husbands and wives and parents, be snuffed out and feel pleased that they were gone. He’d grown tired over the years, not emotionless.

Caring was never a good idea, but he couldn’t help wishing that Karl hadn’t wanted to stay.

It was the man’s own choice. Punz wasn’t the type of person to rescue someone against their wishes. He wasn’t the type of person to decide what was best for others. He was the type of person to watch people go down their path and let them do it, even if he had lingering hopes that it wouldn’t end for them the way he foresaw.

Punz pulled a bottle of honey out of his rucksack and yanked the cork out. In the distance the ground continued to shake, tremors as the earth swallowed up the surface.

If his hearing was sharper he could probably have heard the screams when they all fell. Thank god it wasn’t.

He tilted his head back and put the bottle to his lips, letting the honey slide down his throat. Thick, sweet enough to feel like it was clogging his throat, slightly warm despite the cool of the night air. The only thing he really had left from his years in the woods of that town--he was probably the only one who would remember them. Places disappeared and were forgotten all the time. People even more so.

Punz tilted his head back against the trunk of the tree and let the bottle slide out of his fingers, plummeting to the ground far below. It shattered a few seconds later, the tinkle of broken glass on an exposed tree root. So quiet in the night, yet somehow much louder than an entire town of people vanishing off the face of the earth.

You’ve seen things like this before, he told himself tiredly. Don’t get hung up over it.

But, as he closed his eyes to fall asleep, he wondered if Karl had a chance to eat the honey he’d taken or if he died without ever tasting it.

[richincolor]

*As is usual with our discussions, there may be a few spoilers ahead, so beware.*

We all were incredibly excited to read Angeline Boulley's FIREKEEPER'S DAUGHTER when we first heard about it, so we decided to make it our second group discussion book for the year. Come join us!

As a biracial, unenrolled tribal member and the product of a scandal, eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. Daunis dreams of studying medicine, but when her family is struck by tragedy, she puts her future on hold to care for her fragile mother.

The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team. Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, certain details don’t add up and she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into the heart of a criminal investigation.

Reluctantly, Daunis agrees to go undercover, but secretly pursues her own investigation, tracking down the criminals with her knowledge of chemistry and traditional medicine. But the deceptions—and deaths—keep piling up and soon the threat strikes too close to home.

Now, Daunis must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she'll go to protect her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.

[Note: While we will not go into any great detail in this discussion, Firekeeper’s Daughter contains murder, suicide, kidnapping, sexual assault, addiction and drug use, racism, colorism, and death of parents/family members.

You can read an excerpt of the book here!]

Audrey: To get us started--let’s talk about this gorgeous cover! The cover art was created by Moses Lunham and designed by Rich Deas. The first thing I noticed when I got my copy of the book was that the two faces at the top had different skin tones. According to this interview, author Angeline Boulley says that “the different shades of the faces symbolizes Daunis claiming her biracial identity,” which is a major part of the book.

Jessica: The cover is so beautiful. It’s next to me on my desk right now and I can’t stop looking at it. Love how the cover ties into the themes of the book.

K. Imani: This cover is absolutely beautiful! I love the design of the faces looking like a butterfly as well as the bird and bear (I think) and the fire. There are so many subtle images in this cover that you can almost find something new each time. And the colors are so stunning. Like you Audrey, I noticed the faces had different skin tones which I found interesting and made me wonder what was going to happen in the book. Knowing the faces symbolize Daunis’s biracial identity now is powerful and really brings home the meaning of the book.

Crystal: I agree that the cover is gorgeous. In addition to the aspects of her physical appearance and physical identity, Daunis’ cultural identity is also displayed within the illustrations with bears representing her clan. In addition there are the birds like the one that guides her and the sun is in the background too which is from the story of the original Fire Keeper’s Daughter. The faces forming a butterfly is also just brilliant for a coming-of-age story. There’s so much to see. Each time I notice more.

Audrey: Daunis, our heroine, is on the older end of the YA protagonist spectrum at 18. She’s dealing with a lot of upheaval in her life, and things only get more complicated in short order. Something I really liked about Daunis was how often she thought about and evaluated what her responsibilities were--to her family, to her friends, to her community, and to herself. These sometimes complementary, sometimes competing, responsibilities strongly influenced her decisions.

Jessica: You mention the complementary and sometimes competing responsibilities -- that’s exactly it. I loved how her thought process was explored throughout the book in such a thorough and complex way. The way Daunis balances and reconciles the interests of her community with what the FBI wants from her and her quest for justice is laid out really clearly. Sometimes, narratives can tend toward simplistic, binary summations of the issues people, especially from marginalized communities, face -- but that’s just not the case, and Daunis really highlights that. To be honest, I was a little nervous at the introduction of law enforcement and the FBI, given the racism and oppression baked into these institutions, but the way Daunis navigates her interactions with them, plus the way other members of the community tell the truth about these institutions, really played out in such a nuanced way. (I really, really hope that the Netflix adaptation keeps these nuances and hard truths in the show, but I suspect that won’t be the case, unfortunately.)

K. Imani: I enjoyed that Daunis was 18 and on the cusp of adulthood. So many YA novels focus on the character’s high school life but a lot does happen and teens do grow and change a lot in that year after high school. Many have left home for college (that was me) or working full time and they are learning how to navigate a life that was not completely so structured. In addition to having to deal with changing friendships as people move away or just become busy. It’s a unique time and I loved that we got to spend time with Daunis as she was going through this change. She was learning how to become an adult in one of the most stressful ways possible, and sometimes I felt she was a little too idealistic, but I’m glad that she kept her truth throughout and was focused on helping her community in addition to helping the FBI. Her perspective helped keep the investigation grounded in what mattered which wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t involved.

Crystal: Daunis balances a lot of responsibilities and really tries to follow what she’s learned from elders. She considers how her actions may affect all of her relatives within her family, clan, community, and beyond. Boulley embedded a lot of elder wisdom within Daunis’ inner dialogue such as thinking about the seventh generation when making decisions.

Audrey: One of the things that I really appreciated about Firekeeper’s Daughter was the depth of the setting and the characters in it. While Boulley says that Daunis’s tribe is fictionalized in the author note, it’s clear how much care and thought Boulley put into creating Daunis’s community. It’s filled with people who have complex histories (both within and between Native and non-Native groups), with differing opinions and prejudices and goals.

Jessica: This really highlights how important it is to have stories where cultures and communities aren’t portrayed as a monolith. It’s not just the right thing to do, it makes for a better and more accurate story. I read Firekeeper’s Daughter and watched the TV show Rutherford Falls back to back, which really drove home the power of depicting a community with nuance. (Also, sidebar: Highly recommend checking out Rutherford Falls, which does this really well.)

K. Imani: One of my favorite aspects of Firekeeper’s Daughter were the elders in Daunis’s tribe and how we got to hear many of their individual stories which showed the complexity of real life. I loved that Daunis listened to her elders, really took in their stories and learned from them. Her interactions with the elders greatly contributed to her growing sense of self and her desire to help her community. And this is where this novel being truly #ownvoices shines because of Boulley’s connection to her community that she took great care in making sure Daunis’s tribe felt real and authentic as well as culturally accurate. It was not full of stereotypes but filled with real people who had real lives and real stories. I was drawn into Daunis’s community and really cared about the people that made Daunis who she is and becomes.

Crystal: Like Jessica says, there is a lot of nuance here. When you have a wide variety of characters who are not simply good or bad, the story has more power and is definitely more believable. The people in our everyday lives are also complex and have a story if only we take the time to listen. This is what Daunis excels at with elders and others around her. She is paying attention and trying to connect with people. There is a lot of love throughout the book of many different types. The love is beautiful and yet also has some ugliness too in the betrayals. It’s not picture perfect and that makes it so much more real.

Audrey: Boulley tackles a lot of difficult topics in Firekeeper’s Daughter, especially ones that can hit hard on a community level. Much of the plot focuses on drug use and addiction, of course, but violence against Native women also has a significant impact on what happens in the book and affects multiple characters, including Daunis.

Crystal: Daunis and the other women are examples of the many, many, women who have been harmed in the past and the present. That’s not the whole story though. As Daunis is learning, there are many ways of being brave. Throughout the story, we see many women being strong and brave though at initial glance their actions may not seem to be either of those things. There is bravery in speaking out, but sometimes bravery requires something else. These women have done what they needed to do to survive or help their loved ones survive.

Audrey: Firekeeper’s Daughter has a complicated ending, and it left me thinking about two things. The first was how proud I was of Daunis and her character growth. There were a couple of times where she came across as very Not Like Other Girls (particularly with the hockey players’ girlfriends), but that changed over the course of the book. The second was grief at how many people and institutions failed Daunis and her community, both within and without. Just as one example, even though Daunis is a confidential informant for the FBI, the FBI doesn’t come out of this story as a Good Guy.

K. Imani: I was torn by the ending too. I so wanted justice for Daunis and Lily and for others who were murdered, but on the other hand life doesn’t always have a happy ending and I recognize that Boulley gave us that horribly realistic ending because the fight for missing and murdered Indigenous women continues and the fight for justice for Indigenous peoples. It was a heartbreaking reminder of a very real issue. On the other hand, I was so proud of Daunis as well. She was able to achieve her goals of helping out the FBI while staying true to herself and her community. She grew so much as a character and really found her place in her world.

Crystal: The ending gave me much to think about too. Daunis grew a lot as she worked through this complicated puzzle in her community. She learned much about herself and some of the assumptions folks have about others. I also really, really wanted justice, but unfortunately, would be unlikely in real life with our current justice system. I also found Jamie’s growth to be interesting. He is truly struggling with his own identity as an adopted child with Cherokee roots, but no Cherokee teachings or culture to turn to. I don’t know if a sequel or companion book is planned, but I would be interested in seeing more of their journeys whether their paths cross again or not.

Jessica: Audrey, thanks so much for leading this discussion! Now I have a question for you all -- what YA books by/about BIPOC are you reading right now?

For AAPI month, I’m rereading Turtle Under Ice by Juleah del Rosario. After that, I’m planning on reading The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He, Apple: Skin to the Core by Eric Gansworth, and Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart! Yes, my TBR pile is excellent. :P

Audrey: Next up on my list are The Theft of Sunlight by Intisar Khanani, Forest of Stolen Girls by June Hur, and Simone Breaks All the Rules by Debbie Rigaud. I feel like that’s a pretty good mix of genres and authors right there!

K. Imani: Since I’m needing some inspiration for my vampire manuscript, I’m re-reading and new reading some vampire novels. Currently I am reading Fledgling by Octavia Butler then up next is Renee Ahdieh’s series The Beautiful and the sequel The Damned.

Crystal: I just re-read Saints & Misfits and then dove into the sequel Misfit in Love. S.K. Ali is an author that I really enjoy and I am loving it so far. Next up is American Betiya by Anuradha D. Rajurkar along with Love & Other Natural Disasters by Misa Sugiura. I also think my TBR is pretty stellar.

If you've had the chance to read FIREKEEPER'S DAUGHTER, please join in the discussion below! We'd love to hear what you think.

[leapingtitan]

The Final Season - Episode 1 Thoughts

I've watched the first episode around 3 times on my own and over a dozen times from anime-only live reactions on YouTube. Those are always something to have a field day with every season, and are part of the whole enjoyment post-watching the episode on your own.

Obviously I'm only reviewing this based on the first episode, so it's way too early to judge The Final Season as a whole. However, I will say that my strategy to keep my expectations low definitely worked. I was very hyped, don't get me wrong, but after Season 3 Part 2, I realized that production and scheduling has never been this show's strong suite and things behind the scenes were always chaotic. And it was my mistake to realize it this late and have unrealistically high expectations of the manga's adaptation.

But enough about that. I'm just gonna say it right now. I absolutely loved this episode and was completely blown away by it. It was a rollercoaster ride from start to finish and boy, the staff wasn't kidding when they said the first episode was like a movie. It definitely felt like that, and it went by in a flash. Now, on to the individual points.

Story/Adaptation

Flawless. Everything was executed perfectly and went beyond my expectations. The thing that stood out to me the most was how many things were changed from the PV in terms of scene construction, camera angles, and overall storyboards. There was only one shot that we reused from the PV, namely the one with Zeke and Reiner inside the airship where they're referred to as the spear and shield. Everything else was redone, which was a huge surprise. Wit was always very faithful to the original manga panels with how they used them as a big reference for most of their cuts, but this one changes them up a lot. Personally, I am 100% fine with it and as someone who has read these chapters in the manga dozens of times over the past few years, seeing them like this was a pleasant and very welcome surprise.

The anime-only additions here are notable and also quite welcome. Falco's line in the beginning in particular stood out the most in the long-run, but the addition of the Eldians' terror being shown as well as the scene before the ED was very welcome. I would like to assume that this was Isayama's doing as whenever the anime usually adds/changes up things, it's his request to do so. He sort of considers the anime to be the "definitive" version of the story that he, for one reason or another, couldn't do in the manga himself when that particular chapter came out. Season 3 Part 1 (The Uprising Arc) is a prime example for this. Once again, I'm very content with what was done here and I trust MAPPA will do the story justice.

A small but very neat thing is the fact that we got to keep the title cards and the info eyecatches mid-episode. Really added to the whole sense of consistency.

Animation

When the initial trailer came out, many people were concerned about Shigeki Asakawa (Director of Photography)'s odd and excessive usage of blur filters on top of the scenes and were wondering if they would remain in the final product, given her track record with other shows like The God of Highschool. Luckily, that is not the case here as the scenes look very clean and the minimal blur on top adds a bit to the muddy/gritty atmosphere of what's going on. Personally, I don't mind it at all and I barely notice it anyway. MAPPA's biggest strength to me is the usage of effects like blood and explosions. You feel the impact of everything and with such an action-packed episode, it made everything so much better.

The usage of 3D CGI for the Titan Shifters has been the biggest controversy surrounding this first episode. When I first watched it, it didn't bother me at all. Personally I care more about a model fitting in the action sequence rather than how it looks for the most part. Right now I would say I'm neutral. It's not the greatest CG ever conceived in anime but it definitely does not look out of place and is pretty decent. For the Jaw Titan, I couldn't tell what was CG and what wasn't for the most part. For the other Titans it's more obvious, but it's not too jarring. Obviously, if it was up to me and the production committee/NHK didn't push their scheduling shenanigans onto MAPPA, I would have gotten every Titan in 2D, but you can't have everything. If they choose to focus on more important scenes later on and cut corners in this first episode as a result, that's understandable. I can live with it. And again, even then, it's not that bad in my eyes.

Now, the character designs are just absolutely stellar. In multiple interviews, it’s been stated that they wanted to stay true to Kyoji Asano’s designs at Wit while also being consistent with Isayama’s style in the manga. And boy did they absolutely nail it. It’s exactly what as they said. Tomohiro Kishi could not have done a better job with the characters we’ve seen so far and I am beyond impressed with his work. I look forward to seeing the rest of the characters in this arc.

Sound

I've been following Kohta Yamamoto's works for a few years now, ever since he started working with Sawano (and being mentored by him to an extent) in early 2017. Although he's been involved with AoT before, particularly with the character songs in Season 2, whenever those two would collaborate on a project it would usually be because Sawano is too busy to compose a full soundtrack. So what usually happens is, Sawano does one track and variations of it (think ShingekiNoKyojin, ThanksAT and T-KT), and nothing else. Meanwhile, Yamamoto handles the rest of the music for the show. On top of that, Yamamoto's style as a composer is different from Sawano's as he comes from a rock/guitarist background as opposed to Sawano, who is a pianist and is classically trained. My biggest concern for The Final Season was that we would get a similar case as with the other shows where Sawano doesn't put in too much effort, while Yamamoto essentially becomes the main composer. Although it looks like this is in fact the case after this first episode, let me explain why I don't think it's a bad thing.

After the premiere of the first episode, both Sawano and Yamamoto tweeted that it was in fact Yamamoto who is handling the majority of the Marley Arc's music. And after this first episode, I have to say I'm impressed. His initial track that he made for the PV was a bit off-putting to me because it sounded like every epic blockbuster Hollywood trailer background track ever, but after the way it was used in this episode alongside a few other tracks, I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. It fits what's going on, and overall delivers a fresh sound to the show that is very appropriate given the massive change in narrative. Back during S3 Part 1, Sawano stated in an interview that he was already burned out and had trouble coming up with new music for AoT given how many tracks he had already composed for it. Given how few new melodies were in S3 Part 2;s music, I think this should be clear. Especially now that we're going into yet another season. To summarize, I think Yamamoto's work here is a result of three conditions that just happened to line up perfectly. The change in narrative, which the new composer style reflects. Sawano being busy. And Sawano being burned out with AoT. Now personally I still believe we're going to get at least one new original Sawano track with variations of it for the big climax moments this arc, and he may compose more music for the 2nd half of this 16-episode season, since that's technically a new arc. But we'll see. As a whole though, I'm satisfied with what I've heard from Kohta Yamamoto in this first episode.

The last point to make in regards to the sound is Masafumi Mima who, apart from Sawano, the voice cast, and some freelancers, is the only one from the previous seasons' staff members to return here. And once again, his work here is absolutely phenomenal. The mixing and usage of sound effects in this episode was stellar and truly felt like I was watching a war movie. It enhanced the action tenfold and I could not want it any better. Music usage is something that goes through the director (Yuichiro Hayashi), but ultimately the sound director is the one who implements the track (instrument layering/stem editing) and does the mixing. The usage of Kohta Yamamoto's music here was very well done, and although the track from the PV repeated quite a bit, it didn't get repetitive at all. Also, the sound director remaining consistent here means we got to keep things like the titan transformation sound effects, which may be a small thing but was very welcome and added to the whole consistency.

Opening/Ending

I'm gonna wait until Shinsei Kamattechan releases the full version of the opening in a single or album to fully judge the song, but boy do I love this opening. Although I'm not sure if the TV-size version is my favorite AoT opening yet, I have to say that it's without a doubt the most fitting OP this show has had until this point. It perfectly showcases the themes of war that this arc focuses on and has this lowkey disturbing eerie vibe with the dissonant chords and mixing of the vocals that feels just as "mysterious" and "tense" as the show itself. I love it so much, honestly. Now, Isayama was a fan of Shinsei Kamattechan prior to them doing the S2 ED, and was the one who got them on-board to do it. Although that song isn't really my thing it's also a perfect fit, which leads me to believe that Isayama himself most likely chose the band again, namely to do this OP. And it's fantastic. I love the song. The visuals also have a very distinct style with all the colors and white backgrounds and I love how it's more metaphorical and symbolic (I guess "abstract" as well?) rather than flat-out just spoiling everything like the last arc's OP did.

The ED by Yuko Ando is fantastic. The first time I listened to the full song on its own I couldn't stop getting chills. Love the production aspects of the song and it's just really nice altogether. The visuals are quite interesting especially towards the end and I also like them a lot. Not much else to say about the ED. It's amazing. Go listen to it.

Conclusion

As a whole, I kept my expectations extremely low prior to the premiere despite my hype. As a result of that, not only were they exceeded, I was absolutely blown away by this first episode in pretty much every way. It may still be too early to judge, but from what has been shown here so far, I am absolutely looking forward to see MAPPA adapt the rest of this amazing story, or about as far as they can get with 16 episodes.

[writingwithcolor]

Fairy Tale Retellings with POC

@anjareedd asked:

Hello, Writing with Color! First of all, thank you for all you do. Second, do you have any advice for a white person retelling fairy tales, both European fairy tale and non-European fairy tales? Is it okay to retell non-European fairy tales? I would feel bad if all fairy tales I retold were European as those are over represented, but given how much white people have erased and whitewashed other culture's fairy tales I understand if that were off-limits for a white person. Thank you!

Fairy tale retellings are my favorite thing. I love reading, rewriting and creating new fairy tale-style stories with People of Color!

As you write, keep in mind:

European does not mean white. 

The possibility of PoC in European or Western historical settings tends to throw off so many. There are plenty of European People of Color, then and today. You can have an Indian British little red riding hood and it isn’t “unrealistic.” And we wanna read about them!

Still, research the history of your settings and time period. Use multiple credible sources, as even the most well-known ones may exclude the history of People of Color or skim over it. The stories might be shoved into a corner, but we live and have lived everywhere. The specific groups (and numbers of) in a certain region may vary, though. 

How and when did they or their family get there, and why?

Has it been centuries, decades, longer than one can remember?

Who are the indigenous people of the region? (Because hey, places like America and Australia would love to have you believe its earliest people were white...)

Is there a connection with the Moors, trade, political marriage; was it simply immigration?

No need to elaborate all too much. A sentence or more woven into the story in passing may do the trick to establish context, depending on your story and circumstance. 

Or if you want to ignore all of that, because this is fantasy-London or whatever, by all means do. POC really don’t need a explanation to exist, but I simply like to briefly establish context for those who may struggle to “get it”, personally. This is a side effect of POC being seen as the Other and white as the default.

Although, if PoC existing in a fairy tale is the reader’s biggest stumbling block in a world of magic, speculation, or fantasy, that’s none of your concern.

Can you picture any of the people below, or someone with these backgrounds, the protagonist of their own fairytale? I hope so!

Above: Painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1760s - 1800s), British Heiress with her cousin. Check out her history as well as the movie, Belle (2013).

Source: English Heritage: Women in History - Dido Belle

 Above: Abraham Janssens - The Agrippine Sibyl - Netherlands (c. 1575)

“Since ancient times Sybils were considered seers sent by god, priestesses foretelling the coming of great events. This model serves to depict the Sybil of Agrippina, one of the 12 that foretold the coming of Christ. Notice the flagellum and crown of thrones which are symbolic objects reminding the viewer of Christs suffering.”  X

Above: “Major Musa Bhai, 3 November 1890. Musa Bhai travelled to England in 1888 as part of the Booth family, who founded the Salvation Army.” X

Above: Eleanor Xiniwe and Johanna Jonkers, respectively and other members of the African Choir, who all had portraits taken at the London Stereoscopic Company in 1891. 

“The African Choir were a group of young South African singers that toured Britain between 1891 and 1893. They were formed to raise funds for a Christian school in their home country and performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, a royal residence on the Isle of Wight.” X

The examples above just scratch the surface. Luckily, more and more historians and researchers are publishing lesser known (and at times purposefully masked) PoC history.

More Sources 

PoC in History (WWC Search Link)

POC in Europe (WWC Search Link)

The Black Victorians: astonishing portraits unseen for 120 years

Hidden histories: the first Black people photographed in Britain – in pictures

Let’s talk about oppression and slavery 

There is a hyper-focus on chattel slavery as if the times when and where it occurred is the only narrative that exists. And even when it is part of a Person of Color’s history, that is seldom all there is to say of the person or their lives. For example, Dido Elizabeth Belle.

People of Color were not all slaves, actively enslaved, or oppressed for racial reasons at all times in history! Dig deep into the research of your time period and region. Across the long, wide history of the world, People of Color are and were a norm and also NOT simply exceptions. Explore all the possibilities to discover the little known and seldom told history. Use this as inspiration for your writing.

PoC (especially Black people) were not always in chains, especially in a world of your making. 

Don’t get me wrong. These stories do have a place and not even painful histories should be erased. I personally read these stories as well, if and when written by someone who is from the background. Some might even combine fairy tale, fantasy, and oppression in history. However...

There are plenty of stories on oppressed PoC. How many fairy tales?

Many European tales have versions outside of Europe. 

Just because a tale was popularized under a western setting doesn’t mean that it originates there. Overtime, many were rewritten and altered to fit European settings, values and themes.

Read original tales. 

You might be inspired to include a story in its original setting. Even if you kept it in a western setting, why not consider a protagonist from the ethnicity of the story’s origin?

For example: the Cinderella most are familiar with was popularized by the French in 1697. However, Cinderella has Chinese and Greek versions that date back from the 9th Century CE and 6th Century BCE, respectively. 

Choosing a Setting: European or Non-European?

I do not see anything wrong with either (I write tales set in western and non-western settings, all with Heroines of Color). There is great potential in both.

Non-Western Settings (pros and cons)

Normalizes non-Western settings. Not just the “exotic” realm of the Other.

Potential for rich, cultural elements and representation

Requires more research and thoughtfulness (the case for any setting one is unfamiliar with, though)

European or Western Setting (pros and cons)

Normalizes PoC as heroes, not the Other, or only fit to be side characters.

Representation for People of Color who live in Western countries/regions 

Loss of some cultural elements (that character can still bring in that culture, though! Living in the West often means balancing 2+ cultures)

Outdated Color and Ethnic Symbolism 

Many fairy tales paint blackness (and darkness, and the Other) as bad, ominous and ugly, and white as good and pure. 

Language that worships whiteness as the symbol of beauty. For example: “Fair” being synonymous with beauty. Characters like Snow White being the “fairest” of them all.

Wicked witches with large hooked noses, often meant to be coded as ethnically Jewish people. 

Don’t follow an old tale back into that same pit of dark and Other phobia. There’s many ways to change up and subvert the trope, even while still using it, if you wish. Heroines and heroes can have dark skin and large noses and still stand for good, innocence and beauty.

Read: Black and White Symbolism: Discussion and Alternatives 

Non-European Fairy tales - Tips to keep in Mind: 

Some stories and creatures belong to a belief system and is not just myth to alter. Before writing or changing details, read and seek the opinions of the group. You might change the whole meaning of something by tweaking details you didn’t realize were sacred and relevant.

Combine Tales Wisely: 

Picking stories and beings from different cultural groups and placing them in one setting can come across as them belonging to the same group or place (Ex: A Japanese fairy tale with Chinese elements). This misrepresents and erases true origins. If you mix creatures or elements from tales, show how they all play together and try to include their origin, so it isn’t as if the elements were combined at random or without careful selection.

Balance is key: 

When including creatures of myths, take care to balance your Human of Color vs. creatures ratio, as well as the nature of them both (good, evil, gray moral). EX: Creatures from Native American groups but no human Native characters from that same group (or all evil, gray, or too underdeveloped to know) is poor representation.

Moral Alignment: 

Changing a good or neutral cultural creature into something evil may be considered disrespectful and misappropriation. 

Have Fun! 

No, seriously. Fairy tales, even those with the most somber of meanings, are meant to be intriguing little adventures. Don’t forget that as you write or get hung up on getting the “right message” out and so on. That’s what editing is for.

--Colette  

[revlyncox]

Naming Our Joy

Taking note of all of the things that make us happy - large and small - is a helpful practice. This Platform Address was written for the Washington Ethical Society, June 20, 2021.

We started a project at our house on June 1. Even though we’re not yet back to spending a whole afternoon indoors at the library with the children, we wanted to collectively celebrate the experience of a summer reading club. The kids used several sheets of flip chart paper to draw one hundred rectangles, plus doodles and illustrations and instructions for a shared reading chart. Everyone in the house has their own color of magic marker to color in a rectangle with the name of a book as we complete it. Reading, for us, is a delight. Asking each other questions about what we’re reading is a love-language. And so, as the rectangles have bloomed in six different colors throughout the month so far, each one has been a small notation of joy.

Sometimes we think about the seasons of our joy only in terms of peak experiences. We think of the Winter Festival, or New Year’s Eve, or the state fair, each a symbolic splash on a monthly page in the scrapbooks in our minds. If you’re a person who celebrates birthdays, maybe that’s an important milestone. Maybe camping or travel or visiting family we can rarely see sticks out in our minds as we anticipate our hopes for the year ahead. These are all good things. And yet peak experiences are not the only things that bring us joy.

It seems to me that paying attention to all of the things that bring us joy can help carry us through times of transition. Many things in our shared lives are improving, and we’ll get back to some of our favorite big, celebratory events in adapted ways; meanwhile, let’s value all of the things that keep us grounded in the best of who we are and who we can be. Today, as we hang on the cusp of summer, celebrating parents and graduates and weddings and pride, yet still aching from a difficult year and a half, let’s open our minds and hearts to all the forms of joy we can name.

Today’s story, “A List,” from Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel, gives some hints about how to notice joy. The attention to detail in this story, the room Lobel makes in the narrative for pause, and the enduring friendship that is the focus of the entire series are all helpful lessons for us as we gather up sparks of happiness in our own lives, fireflies that may be only with us for a moment, but whose lights we can remember for years. From this story, I learn that small things count, that it’s important to rest and reset, and that we can find joy when we travel together.

Small Things Count

As we are naming our joy, small things count. Frog begins his day by checking off tasks like, “get dressed” and “eat breakfast.” Those things matter. There are days when self-care is a victory, and days when we need to practice self-compassion because those tasks are out of reach. In some ways, it’s a practice of mindfulness, of paying attention to where we are in the moment. As we dress, we can notice the feeling of fabric on skin, and we can hold in loving kindness all those who saw to the completion of that garment.

I think back to times when celebrating small things got me through the day, or helped me inch toward a distant goal, or just brought me back to center after being knocked off balance by the regular turns of daily life. After my children were born, I decided to give fitness walking and running a try. I had never done that before - my favorite team sports up until that time were swimming and frisbee - but something about taking time for myself with my headphones every day was appealing at that point in my life. So I got a “couch to 5K” application on my phone to help guide me through workouts that started very small, and gradually increased until I could participate in a whole race.

The first couple of days were frustrating. I felt like I spent more time lacing up my shoes than I did actually running. But eventually, because there were records, I could look back and see my stamina increasing over time. Not every day, because some days are better than others, but over time there was improvement. I could celebrate when I could run rather than walk for a whole minute, and then a whole five minutes. When I was able to value the time I spent on the practice, even if all I could do that day was walk around the block, I had more energy to keep going. I did get to run in a race eventually. I have since switched to a different form of exercise for my regular workouts, because I have age-appropriate knees, but I did learn something about finding joy in small achievements. Sometimes we need to work up to things gradually, and when there are setbacks we need to work up gradually again. Writing down the joys and the milestones can help.

Focusing on the positive aspects of the experience and on the signs of improvement helped me sustain a practice. The same can be true for groups. I think people at WES have experienced Appreciative Inquiry before. Sometimes we think of Appreciative Inquiry in terms of a meeting or an event or a process of discernment, it’s also a paradigm shift in our organizational life together, a perspective where we lift up and leverage strengths rather than focusing on deficits. The philosophy of Appreciative Inquiry was developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva at Case Western Reserve University in the early 1990s. So Appreciative Inquiry has been around for awhile now, and there are newer ideas we need to incorporate about competing value systems and multicultural competency, yet I think it is worth returning to an approach where we ask questions about what’s working and build a positive vision for a future we can move toward together. To bring out the best we can be, we need to identify and nurture what’s best right now.

As our community gradually re-emerges from the pandemic and builds toward a new normal of accessibility, inclusion, compassion, and justice, we will face setbacks, and the speed of our hopes may outpace the reality of how fast we can go without leaving people behind. Let’s find joy in each moment, each time we find ourselves sharing time or space or intention. When you appreciate something about WES going forward, write it down. Ask questions about how members can keep doing what you do well. Share your excitement about small things with others. Make a list, because small things count.

Rest and Reset

The second thing we learn from Frog and Toad about naming our joy is that we can rest and reset. The first thing on Toad’s list is “wake up.” That’s what makes it the beginning of the list. Every day is new. The last thing on the list is “go to sleep.” Toad does not take for granted that he will automatically remember to rest at the end of the day, he puts it on a list. Maybe some of us need a reminder sometimes, to care for our bodies instead of pushing to do one more thing. And when he doesn’t know what else to do, Toad pauses. Now, as the reader, we can imagine that it would also have been a fine choice for Toad to let go of his attachment to his list and either help Frog try to find it or create a new plan, and maybe that’s something some of us need to hear as well, but I also have some admiration for a character who will simply pause rather than rushing into the next thing without consideration.

We’ve talked before at WES about the tension between our focus on “deeds, not creeds,” and the philosophical foundation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person--value that people simply have without earning it. What we do, and the impact we have, is of greater concern than the intentions of our minds or the secrets of our hearts. Yet we cannot forget that worth is inherent, even if we or our neighbors haven’t achieved any great deeds lately. So I hope we can encourage ourselves and each other to rest. People need time to bask in their inherent worth; to notice the beauty of the people and world around them and within them; and to care for their own valuable, precious being. It may be the case that allowing rest for ourselves will also remind us of the inherent worth of others, and will lead us to create a world where every person can have what they need rather than putting up obstacles to separate the worthy from the unworthy. Rest may give us a foretaste of the Beloved Community. Rest creates room for the experience of joy.

The reset part is also important. We can experience time as a kind of river, and there are ways in which the past and the future flow into one another, yet most of us experience time as moving. The past and the present and the future are connected, but they are different from one another. Rest gives us an island in the river so that we can separate them, looking back and looking forward and looking around us so that we can differentiate what was from what is and from what we anticipate will be. Things that brought us joy in the past are worth remembering fondly, but that doesn’t mean repeating the same thing will bring us the same joy or is even possible. Being present in the here and now, resting in the sense of not striving or problem solving or planning or fixing, helps us experience what is bringing us joy right now, without diminishing that joy with comparison to the past or the future. Frog and Toad go to sleep. Maybe tomorrow they will take another walk, or go swimming, or grow a garden, or write a letter. But the comfort of being in that moment is where we pause at the end of that chapter, and pausing helps us value the joy in that moment. Rest and reset to highlight the joy of the present moment.

Travel Together

A third thing we learn from Frog and Toad is that traveling together can help us amplify joy. The thing on Toad’s to-do list that transforms his day is meeting up with Frog. As companions, they support each other in new discoveries, they affirm each other, and sometimes they can be of service to their friend in a way that brings its own kind of joy. When Frog sees the list, he says, “Oh, that is very nice.” Frog appreciates the project his friend has worked on, and that’s a source of happiness. When Toad is disappointed about losing his list, Frog sits with him, simply being present, the peace of friendship providing a balance to the sorrow of a project gone awry. As the evening nears, Frog reminds Toad of something on his list, and reconnecting with his project brings Toad the excitement of a reclaimed goal. There is more joy in their adventure together than there would have been for either of them alone.

May it be so for all of us. Sometimes companions are hard to find, and most relationships come with moments of tension and conflict, yet there are ways we can cultivate a practice of presence with one another that amplify joy, make sorrow more bearable, and help sustain us on the journey. Some of the secret is in the first two things we learned, that small things count and that we can take time to rest and reset. Small affirmations and appreciations make a difference in our relationships, they help us find joy in each other. Taking time to rest, being fully present even when our companions are having a difficult time, letting the new day reset us for the here and now to be with our loved ones as the people they have grown to become, all of these are practices of friendship that make room for joy.

Over the past year and a half, we have had to reassess what it means to travel together. We share time differently than we used to. We find connection in chat messages and text messages, shared movies over an internet connection, recorded sentiments and songs, notes back and forth about books we’re reading, and cards in the postal mail that are ever more precious. May it be so that in-person connections become more practical for more people, but that does not take away the value of the connections that sustained us during this time. We don’t need to devalue the ways we had to adapt, and we definitely don’t need to abandon the people for whom those adaptations are still needed. We are better together, and that includes the friends who have limited mobility, or sensory sensitivities, or transportation challenges, or delicate immune systems. Our beloveds of inherent worth come in many varieties.

I believe there are spectacular adventures ahead for WES. This continues to be a vital community of exploration, mutual support, and action for justice. We will find new ways to live out WES’s core values, and become ever more fluent in new and old ways to connect as members journey in collaboration. We are better together. In that, there is joy. I invite you to continue that joyful journey and your commitment to WES.

Conclusion

Our joy is cultivated and uplifted when we notice it in progress. This is especially true of the small joys, the moments of contentment, discovery, and affection that sneak up on us without being scheduled. Taking note of our joys - writing them down, sharing them with each other, savoring the moments, naming these times as what they are - helps us to experience them fully. Small things count, so give every moment of joy its due. Rest and reset, finding ways to be fully present and to bask in your inherent worth. Travel together, with appreciation for your companions, respect for their inherent worth, and joy in what you can discover in your shared journey.

[jinruihokankeikaku]

Could you do an analysis for a Rogue of Rage?

I certainly could ::::)

Title: Rogue of Rage

Title Breakdown: One who passively appropriates [redistributes, balances, steals for others’ benefit] Rage [negativity, anger, doubt, skepticism, meta-narrative, demons]

Role in the Session: A Rogue of Rage distributes hatred, fear, spite, doubt, anxiety and all the varied scourges and angsts of humanity to where they need to be, and leaves their opposites – Hopes, faith, joy, belief – in their place. They’re ultimately tasked with maintaining a balance between belief and disbelief on a grander scale, but as with any Passive Class, they’ll take some time to grow into their Role. Rogues start out with a fear of their Aspect, which fear will generally be fueled first by the Rogue’s innate ability to sense that that Aspect is out of balance, and second by doubts regarding their personal capacity to fix it. Since Rage as an Aspect is already associated with fear, it’s quite possible that a Rogue of Rage will begin the session (and spend much of their early life and the earliest stages of the game) in a state of perpetual fear or anxiety. While members of any Class could suffer from pathological fear / phobia due to personal trauma, predisposition, or experience (in-game or pre-game), I’d be especially unsurprised if the Rogue had a very specific and intense fear of something. A “fear of fear itself” would be especially apt – a less-than-developed Rogue of Rage might posture to appear courageous in order to conceal their fear of expressing negative emotion, surrendering, failing to fight back, &c.&c.. On the more meta end of the spectrum, our Rogue of Rage might have anxieties over the belief that they’re not real, or that they’re merely players in a simulation or a narrative. This initial phase is nigh-on full inversion to a Knight of Hope (another Role that, in its unhealthies state, will project false bravery out of fears or doubts regarding the strength of their own faith).

For the Rogue of Rage to move beyond this phase and avoid an inversion crisis, they’ll have to embrace Rage – a difficult, counterintuitive, and likely socially alienating task. Their power, as the power of an any Rage player, relies on their ability and willingness to tap into their most negative feelings. Their Quest, and the Planet upon which that Quest is set, will help to guide them along this path, reluctant as they may be, perhaps by placing them in deliberately frightening or infuriating situations in order to provoke an explosive outburst of Rage. Rage being as it is an Expansive-Explosive Aspect lends itself towards such outbursts, although in this case said outbursts will likely be tempered by the Rogue’s significant passivity relative to other Classes. While this initial outburst will likely be a discomfiting and frightening experience for the Rogue, it will represent the initial crack in the dam holding back their bond to their Aspect, and as they recover from the initial shock, they will with greater and greater clarity see that that which has so long held them back is also that which will ultimately propel them forward. The imbalance of Rage in both their immediate environment and the session as a whole will become eminently apparent to them, and they’ll be able to set about the work of leaching Rage’s tenebrous boons from their foes, and distributing those boons to those who need them most (for example, particularly repressed or reticent co-players). These boons are broad and varied, ranging from the capacity to channel or act on literal Rage, negativity, or skepticism to the capacity to access Rage’s more symbolic manifestations – fire, explosions, diabolic forces, and even metagame or metanarrative knowledge. A Life player, particularly a Sylph or perhaps a Maid, could confer upon the Rogue the ability to channel their furor into directed rebellion – alternatively slash additionally, a Rogue of Rage could wreak more physical destruction and transformation with the aid of a Witch or Mage of Space.

Opposite Role: The Knight of Hope. The Knight of Hope is a Role I’ve analyzed recently, and despite a few superficial similarities of personality between them and the Rogue of Rage, their Roles’ respective character arcs run more or less parallel to one another. While the Rogue is tasked with awakening the Rage within themselves in order to take Rage from where it oughtn’t to be and bring it where it ought to, the Knight is tasked with wielding their own Hope (the absence of Rage) in order to defend the Hope of those around them, meaning that the two players will likely find themselves at cross-purposes. Additionally, the Rogue’s attitude of skepticism, but hesitance to express it will clash with the Knight’s firm convictions and eagerness to express them, should their systems of belief differ sufficiently.

God Tier Powers

Rage is the Expansive-Explosive personal Aspect; its domains include skepticism, anger, fear, and of course literal Rage. The Rogue is the Passive Appropriation Class, destined to restore balance to their Aspect by stealing it from those who have it in excess and spreading it where it has been scarce or absent. In combination, this suggests a Role capable of inciting aggression or fear in those around them, while alleviating it in those who are excessively in its sway.

Steam Vents: The Rogue of Rage drains someone of their accumulated Rage and allows it to scatter and distribute freely, leaving in its place little to no Rage, but not much Hope either – essentially leaving them apathetic and without fervor. Their stolen Rage will disperse, maybe manifesting physically as dark or colorful amorphous shapes and psychologically in those nearby who would normally be apathetic or demotivated, perhaps even including the Rogue. The redistributed Rage may not manifest in a manner identical to the manner in which it manifested prior to being stolen – for example, the Rogue may take furor from their enemies by stealing their Rage, and then allow the Rage to distribute, perhaps allowing their allies to see clearly through some illusion that has distracted or entranced them.

Delayed Release: The Rogue can sense when explosions are about to occur, whether they’re large or small, literal or metaphorical. If they choose to, they can temporarily defer such an explosion, focusing on containing it until they deliberately or accidentally break their focus and allow it to go off. This could be used to suppress massive pyrotechnic explosions, but also outbursts of anger, fear, or despair, and with sufficiently precise focus, minute primary explosions or chemical reactions as might occur in a firearm (thereby preventing any projectile from actually firing until the Rogue chooses to allow it to).

A Balanced Narrative: The Rogue of Rage channels the chaotic nature of Rage and the Rogue’s limited ability to ghost their Inverse Aspect (in this case Hope) as well as to… shall we say… meddle with “meta” elements of the narrative they inhabit. Using this ability, the Ascended Rogue of Rage steals all the rage (aaaaaaaall of it) from a particular imagined incident, in effect making it real. However, this reality-bending comes at a price – the more implausible the reified event, the more Rage the Rogue distributes across the timeline and the narrative as a whole, potentially causing other implausible events that occurred without the Mage’s meddling to retroactively cease to have happened, provided the amount of Rage distributed by the Rogue exceeds the Plausibility Level necessary for the event to be canonical. A wise and well-developed Rogue would use this ability only to reify events that could plausibly have occurred, lest they irreparably damage the author’s artistic integrity and the reader’s suspension of disbelief - (A/N: wwait wwhat???????? too meta. moooooooovin on…)

Personality: While I mentioned the particular fears and anxieties that might hold a Rogue of Rage back in their Planet’s Quest or in their personal narrative arc, their personality is of course far more than the sum of their weaknesses. Rogues tend to be generous people, and the Rogue of Rage is no exception, although what they have to give may be less tangible than the gifts of other Rogues. They may make effective agents provocateurs, awakening doubt, weakness, and the will to act in people who might otherwise be complacent or deluded. They have a knack for investigation and insight, which while perhaps not on par with the perspicacity of a Seer or Mage of Rage is nonetheless a valuable personal asset. Their friends may come to rely on them to fact-check information, or to temper discussions when Rage begins to flare up in excess. However, they may struggle with expressing their own emotions, particularly negative emotions, and until they’ve embraced and expanded their relationship with their Aspect, they may find themselves bottling up latent resentments, which is dubiously healthy for anyone but particularly hazardous for a Rage player. The most important step forward in the Rogue’s development is their diverging from the flow and acting in ways true to their own beliefs, rather than acting in passive compliance.

Songs

Until Olympius Returns by the Mountain Goats

SING by My Chemical Romance

War Buddies by Harvey Danger

~ I hope you found this analysis entertainin and slash or informativve, anon!! Thanks for the ask, and sorry a8out the delay ::::>

~ P L U R ~

[houseofvans]

ART SCHOOL | INTERVIEW WITH BUNNIE REISS 

A combination of folk art, psychedelia, nature, magic, stars and animals, the artworks by LA based artist Bunnie Reiss imagines a visual language and beauty that is both narrative and full of storytelling. Bunnie’s large scale murals have been and are still popping up all over Los Angeles, so we wanted to catch up with this talented lady to find out more about how she got interested in art, the subjects and themes of her work, and what she’s got coming up the rest of the year! 

Photographs courtesy of the artist | Portrait by Tod Seelie

Could you introduce yourself to everybody?  I’m Bunnie Reiss, muralist, installation artist and painter, living and working in Los Angeles. My work is a combination of folk art from my eastern European background, places I’ve traveled around the world, psychedelic dreams, strange imaginary worlds, nature, magic, the stars and animals. 

I’ve worked really hard to create a fairly diverse career that includes painting huge 9-story buildings, designing custom patterns for fashion icons like Isabel Marant, building large space boats that float on imaginary clouds, and writing/illustrating children’s books. It keeps me crazy busy, and I am grateful to be living such a full life. 

I own a 5 acre property in Landers, just outside of Joshua Tree, where we go for breaks from crazy city life and often gather with many of my artist friends. It’s super magical and I love it out there. I also have a very small Maine Coone kitty named Robert Plant that I treat like a dog and comes everywhere with me ;)

How did you first find yourself creating art or being interested in art? I was a tiny rebel with a large imagination, and I kinda knew from the beginning that I didn’t fit in. There are no other artists in my family, and I was definitely the odd ball. Art was, like most misunderstood kids, the only thing that felt really good to me. I loved museums, fashion, weird books and storytelling. There seemed to be huge worlds that were out there, and I had zero fear in discovering them. Recently a family friend sent a package with tons of drawings and art I did for her when I was a child, and it’s amazing to see the same imagery I use now in many of the funny things I drew as a kid.

How would you describe your work to someone who perhaps is just coming across it for the very first time? What would you want that person to maybe take away from it? As I mentioned above, my work is crazy combo of different things: Eastern European folk art, nature, imaginary worlds, psychedelic landscapes, animals. I have worked hard on my own visual language, my own dictionary, and continue to do so. It is an ever expanding vocabulary that I hope will keep growing until the day I die. I always want people to feel like they have a sense of place, that they can feel good, even for just a brief moment in the day (which is actually a tall order for most people). I want people’s imagination to go crazy when they see one of my murals!

What are your favorite things to paint or draw in your works? I absolutely love painting animals. They are my top. And hands are right below that.

In your various works you often paint portraits of animals, hands, mythical creatures and the natural world. Tell us about your subjects and themes you explore in your works? I have fairly consistent imagery, but the conversations are always different. For instance, the children’s book I wrote and illustrated a few years ago, The Cosmic Child, was actually about Plato’s Cosmology and the idea that we have a twin star in the universe. It was a book about never feeling alone. I like taking my simple imagery and combining it with complicated stories. It adds a layer of honesty and vulnerability. I am currently working on a new book about climate change, that will consist of 50 animal portraits. I decided that instead of trying to explain why climate change is such an important issue, I am using the idea of irreversible loss to describe what is might feel like to loose entire species. Visual art is so interesting because you don’t often get the back-story about why someone has made what they have made, but you can usually feel the emotion behind it. That to me is really successful, thoughtful work.

When your working developing a new painting or piece, how does it begin - take us from sketchbook, to color choices, to finished painting? I an an avid sketchbook user, and I tend to try and do as many drawings as possible, with no specific direction. It take the pressure off of things having to be ‘something’ and keeps things really interesting. When I’m ready to work on a body, I look back over the sketchbooks to see if there is a connection to any of the drawings. Sometimes I go back to sketchbooks from 5 years ago! Sometimes entire sketchbooks become dedicated to one idea. This process allows for a very organic build of my paintings. I am almost always looking at animal references, old quilts and folk art, and reading about magic symbols and the universe. All of my paintings and murals come from my sketchbooks, and are often repainted over and over again in different ways or patterns. I like exploring how many times I can do a single image and make it look unique. My color palette is fairly consistent, and I will push on darker or lighter themes (navy blues vs pastels), depending on what the mood I’m working with is. I like painting on antique papers and things that already have energy living in them, and my colors will be based off of the color of the papers. Mural walls are treated similarly, where I’m often trying to preserve and enhance the architecture of the building. I generally try and tie in my murals with something local, like an animal that is native, a myth about the city, the state flower, etc. It’s really fun and usually feels like some kind of treasure map where I’m unearthing weird facts about the places I paint.

What’s a typical day in the studio for you like? And what are you currently working on in or out of the studio? I try and keep regular day hours as often as possible in my studio, because if I don’t I sorta become a vampire who stays up all night and sleeps all day. I bring Robert Plant, my kitty, with me and he’s always around when I’m working. Sometimes I have to ‘clean’ all day long in order to actually get to painting. Sometimes I have to organize and move things around, or do other weird stuff, in order to get things going. It all depends on my mood. I just wrapped a bunch of paintings for my last show at KP Projects in Los Angeles, and that particular body of work will continue for a while. It’s mostly portraits of animals that are extinct or close to extinction, and ties into my book as well. I am always working on mural concepts, and there are tons of drawings and sketches on my walls that may or may not turn into murals. I also quilt sometimes and love to sew, especially when I am not feeling very inspired to paint. Murals and other public work can be fairly demanding, and quilting helps me to recoup when I have wrapped a big project and need to take a little break from painting.

How do you unplug yourself so to speak? What do you do to center or re-focus yourself if you find yourself stressed out about deadlines, art shows, and the sort? It’s definitely challenging, especially when you live in such a wild city like Los Angeles. I am so grateful to have a property in the desert, and I will often go out there for a few days to unplug and just be in the quiet. The stars are amazing, and laying on my deck and staring up at the sky does wonders for my brain. I also love to ride my bike and will sometimes go out on night rides, which tends to help me refocus and feel like I’m back in my body. When I have time, surfing is the absolute best! Painting, especially big things, takes you out of your physical body and puts you in a deep space of meditation. You are usually on a large lift, far away from anyone, concentrating but also kinda in a trance. You don’t really feel much of anything. When you finish a large project, you feel everything come back into you, and it can be overwhelming and exhausting. It’s imparitive that you find outlets that really help you to keep going at a healthy pace without getting to rundown.

What inspires you and your art? What are things that influence what you do and what you make? My imagination keeps me really busy, but reading Popular Science, going to libraries and book stores, walking in neighborhoods that I’m unfamiliar with, and traveling to countries where I do not speak the language keep me filled with information. I love architecture and looking at buildings, I get obsessed with walls I want to paint and will sometimes drive by to visit them. Going out in nature and just listening to the trees speaking to each other is pretty amazing.

Not only do you create painting, but you have been doing large scale mural works for quite a bit. How did that start and how different is it for you compared to works on paper or canvas? What do you like about muraling and what do you find to be the most challenging part of it? I lived in the Bay Area for a long time (well over a decade) and space was always an issue. I loved painting big, but hated trying to store anything after I was finished. I would also get fairly lonely working in my studio for long hours, and liked interaction, but a very specific kinds. Public art and mural painting solved a lot of these problems. I could paint HUGE and leave it, walk away, never look at it again. It was a freedom that I loved, and the very special was to interact with people and neighborhoods. At the time, it was so unique and didn’t compare to anything I had ever done. This was a long time ago, and I still feel exactly the same way. There is no better way to understand a community, a city, a neighborhood, then painting outside and really being a part of it. And people are so happy and grateful that you are adding something beautiful to their neighborhood. I also love that murals are free for people to look at, and so many demographics are affected by the work. You never know who will see it and be inspired. It’s powerful and humbling at the same time, mostly because the work is incredibly physical. It sometimes feels like you are running a marathon, painting for 12-15 hours a day, dealing with weather and trouble-shooting all kinds of strange things that can happen with different kinds of walls. I love big boom lifts, dancing and singing when I am way up high with my headphones on. I have such a great time when I am painting a monster wall in the sun! I can’t stand painting in the cold ;)

What’s been one of your most rewarding projects? And what kind of challenges did you face and how did you overcome them? This past year I was invited by the United Nations to paint a mural in Mexico City on climate change. It was amazing! I painted at the largest market in Mexico, and it was nuts. So much going on around me, so much pollution mixed with sun blasting a huge wall for more than half the day. I loved it, but it was also pretty crazy.

Since we call this feature, Art School, what tip do you have for artists and folks interested in becoming an artist? Work hard, harder than you ever thought you could work, but also work smart. You have a very long career, and lots of time to develop your own style and really build your craft. There is no rush, and your work will be that much better if you take the time to really develop who you are as an artist. Also, ask for help. Reach out to other artists and see if they need help. Be an active community member and don’t isolate yourself too much in the studio. Have fun! Travel the world ;)

Who are some important artists, past or present, you are inspired by? Remedios Varo Johannes Vermeer Louise Bourgeois Antoni Gaudi Shel Silverstein

So we gotta ask what are your FAVORITE Vans? The Era.

What do you have planned for the coming up? What are you looking forward to starting? Mural season is in full-swing, and it’s going to get really busy, with murals everything month until the end of the year. I am working super hard on my climate change book, and putting together a few projects that will tie in with that project. (and maybe a book tour). I continue to build up my desert property, and love that I can put energy into it slowly and really make it a life-long art project. I am working on expanding my mural practice into 3D objects, mosaics tiles, furniture and playgrounds. My murals are only one part of a much larger puzzle that I am putting together, and soon you will get to see entire worlds built by me. It’s an exciting time!!

FOLLOW BUNNIE | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM 

[ink-logging]

Detective Comics #1000, Chris Conroy & Dave Wielgosz, eds.: I bought this on impulse because it was on the new releases shelf and people were talking about Batman online. It’s a 100-page anthology tribute for the Batman character’s 80th year and the one thousandth issue of “Detective Comics”. I don’t think anyone is ever at their best in a tribute anthology, but that makes them kind of interesting to look at, you know? There are eleven stories, which I will now spoil in their entirety.

1. “Batman’s Longest Case”, Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, FCO Plascencia, Tom Napolitano: The first of two stories in which Batman is doing something that looks grim, but is actually happy and anniversary-ish - both with similar titles, and both from major Batman writers. This is the better one, because I think Capullo is an interesting artist. He’s comparable to Jae Lee, in that he’s someone who had some work in comics under his belt prior to being ushered into the second ‘generation’ of popular Image artists, and has continued to evolve quite vividly over the years. The Capullo of today dials up the use of shadows and silhouette that used to sort of decorate the folds of Spawn’s flowing cape and such - here, they’re used more to focus attention on storytelling fundamentals: geography; gesture; etc. I also generally like the colorist, FCO Plascencia, who’s done some Varleyesque color-as-mood work on earlier comics with this team, though the story here is subdued... very classy, dressed for the gala.   

Hints of ‘90s grotesquerie only pop up once Batman has solved a large number of flamboyantly abstruse riddles and discovered that the titular Longest Case is really an initiation test fronted by wrinkly old Slam Bradley, the original Siegel & Shuster-created star of “Detective Comics” back in 1937, who welcomes Batman to a Guild of Detection. This is clever of the writer, Scott Snyder, because Batman as a basic concept is hugely derivative of earlier pulp, detective and strip hero characters - and, if you’re being honest about paying homage to the character’s origins, you might as well play up lineage as your metaphor.

2. “Manufacture for Use”, Kevin Smith, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Alex Sinclair, Todd Klein: In contrast, this story shoots for the quintessential. Smith, of course, is the filmmaker and longtime geek culture celebrity who’s written comics off and on, so maybe it’s his distance from the continuum of superhero writing that has inspired a short story that could have run as a backup in any Batman comic since the 1970s, give or take few cultural references. Matches Malone (Batman, when he is being an undercover cop) descends into the secretive world of true crime memorabilia to buy the gun that killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, which he then melts down to form the metal bat-symbol plate Batman wears on his chest, verily steeling his heart with the memory of this tragedy to fortify him in his neverending battle against crime! NANANANANANANANA BATMAAAAAN! Jim Lee and his usual crew makes everything look like it’s ‘supposed’ to, provided you see this type of statuesque posing as the best sort of superhero art, which many DC comics readers presumably do, given how a lot of these things look.

3. “The Legend of Knute Brody”, Paul Dini, Dustin Nguyen, Derek Fridolfs, John Kalisz, Steve Wands: Dini has written tons of comics, with not a few of those drawn by Nguyen, but this feels mostly like DC1k (acronym’s resemblance to “DICK” a purely innocuous reference to Nightwing, I assure you) acknowledging the extensive legacy of “Batman: The Animated Series”, on which Dini was a writer and producer. The story takes the form of a biography of an infamously clumsy hired thug for supervillains, whom even the most novice reader will have figured out is a Batman Family asset about halfway down page 4 of 8, leaving a whole lot of laborious and narration-heavy slapstick to wade through. Admittedly, this might work better as an animated cartoon, with voice acting leavening the pace of the gags, but I’m also not sure ‘this would be better in a different art form’ is the impression superhero comics should be giving right now.

4. “The Batman’s Design”, Warren Ellis, Becky Cloonan, Jordie Bellaire, Simon Bowland: 

Most of the drawing in DC1k is the kind of stuff you can easily trace to a few popular and fairly narrow traditions of ‘realistic’ superhero art. Becky Cloonan is the only woman to draw an entire comic in here -- Joëlle Jones co-pencils a story with Tony Daniel later on, and Amanda Conner does a pinup, mind -- and her work is the only place in this book where you catch glimpses of a global popular comics beyond the superhero provinces in the Hewlettian wild eyes of the hapless human opponents of her Batman, lunging through velvet layers of cape and smoke, lipless mouth parted on a shōnen ai jaw. It is really very impressive. 

The writer, Warren Ellis, does a pathos-of-the-hard-man story, in which Batman explains his combat strategies via narration while carrying them out, occasionally making reference to the medical bills his prey will incur and their timely motivations as terroristic white men who feel ignored by the world, and at the end Batman asks the last guy U WANT TO LIVE IN MY NIGHTMARE, LITTLE BOY and the guy is like n- no dr. batman sir, and gives up because Batman’s is too dangerous and scary a life model. It is made clear from the text that Batman has programmed himself into a system of reactionary violence that he inevitably reinforces, but this message is so heavily sugared with cool action and tough talk that the reader can easily disregard such commentary, if so inclined, which has been a trait of Ellis’ genre comics writing since at least as far back as “The Authority” in the late 1990s. It fits Batman as naturally as the goddamned cowl.  

 5. “Return to Crime Alley”, Dennis O’Neil, Steve Epting, Elizabeth Breitweiser, ‘Andworld Design’: I was surprised that there weren’t other writers from across the Atlantic in DC1k, given the extensive contributions of Alan Grant and Grant Morrison to the character. I was maybe not as surprised to see Dennis O’Neil as the lone credited writer to pre-date the blood and thunder revolution of Frank Miller et al. in the mid-1980s, as that commercial shadow is far too long to escape. Of course, O’Neil was one of the architects of superhero comics as a socially relevant proposition and Batman as a once-again ‘serious’ character in the 1970s, and it may be a reflection of his standing as a patriarch that this story contains no sugar whatsoever: on the anniversary of his parents’ death, Batman is confronted by a childhood caregiver who has figured out his dumb secret identity, and castigates him for doing stupid shit like dressing up as an animal and punching the underclass when he could actually do something as a wealthy man to improve the world. Then Batman starts beating the shit out of young masked teens who have stolen a gun, after which Batman, who is also a masked thug, is told that he is, at best, a figure of pity. The end! 

What emerges from this story, to my eye, is that Batman is a terrible fucking idea if examined with any sort of serious realism - and Steve Epting draws the story as close to photorealism as anything in this book gets. I also think it is not insignificant that O’Neil, the writer here most unplugged from superhero comics as a commercial vocation, is the one to make these observations; to believe in superhero comics is to understand that there is play at the heart of these paper dolls, and to make your living from these things is to contemplate new avenues for play. Maybe Batman is dark, obsessive! Should he... kill? Sure, Bill Finger made him kill. The Shadow killed lots of dudes. So did Dick Tracy. Ramp up the verisimilitude too much, though, and you’ve got a guy wearing a hood going out by the cover of night to scare the shit out of superstitious cowards who’ve been taking from the good people of society, which, in terms of motivational narratives, is the same origin as the Ku Klux Klan. To play nonetheless, is the craftsman’s burden.

6. “Heretic”, Christopher Priest, Neal Adams, Dave Stewart, Willie Schubert: Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, is veteran Batman artist and frequent Dennis O’Neil collaborator Neal Adams. And while Adams is not credited as the writer on this story, it bears all the hallmarks of his 21st century work at DC: whiplash pacing; uneasy expository dialogue; and eager callbacks to Adams’ earlier work. This is the Batman comic as a continuity-driven adventure, and I found it largely incomprehensible as a story, not unlike Adams’ recent “Deadman” miniseries. I still like his husky Batman, though. 

7. “I Know”, Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev, Josh Reed: Hey, did you know Brian Michael Bendis, writer of approximately ten and one half zillion Marvel comics, is writing comics at DC these days? Here he teams with longtime collaborator Maleev for a story that brings to mind the old line from Grant Morrison’s & Dave McKean’s “Arkham Asylum” about Batman being the real person and the guy under the mask being the mask. The Penguin, of all villains, figures out Batman’s secret identity, but elects not to pursue Bruce Wayne in his private life, because destroying Bruce Wayne would create a pure Batman far too dark and twiztid for anyone to handle. Or, maybe that is all just an image the perfectly sane Batman has deliberately encouraged as part of his umpteenth contingency plan. I would argue that this is a gentle spoof of people taking Batman too seriously, which clicks with what I’ve read of Bendis’ idea of the character in those 100-page comics they sell at Walmart: a globetrotting detective-adventurer, appropriate for all ages. Bear in mind, I’ve read maybe 0.2% of all Brian Bendis comics.  

8. “The Last Crime in Gotham”, Geoff Johns, Kelley Jones, Michelle Madsen, Rob Leigh: Whoa, now we’re talking! Kelley Jones! Just look at this: 

Such totally weird stuff, coming from the artist who drew all those classic ‘90s covers with the huge bat-ears and wildly distorted musculature, the cape this absurd, unreal shroud. It looks like he’s working from photo reference with some of this comic, but also just tearing out these drawings of huge jawlines and shit, this total what-the-fuck-is-going-on haze, which perfectly matches Geoff Johns’ furiously ridiculous story about an elderly Batman and his wife, Catwoman, and their daughter, and Damian, and a dog, who all investigate a mass murder that turns out to be the Joker’s son committing suicide, and then Batman unplugs the Bat-Signal because crime is over in Gotham forever, and then we find out it’s all the birthday wish of Batman, who is blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, in costume, in the Batcave. Is “Doomsday Clock” like this? Should I pirate it??

9. “The Precedent”, James Tynion IV, Alvaro Martinez-Bueno, Raul Fernandez, Brad Anderson, Sal Cipriano: Inevitably, we come to the story that argues that Batman is actually a great guy, and his pressing of children into action as vigilantes under the cover of night is an amazingly positive thing. This is what I mean by “play” - it doesn’t literally make sense, we all know that, but if you buy into the superhero idea, you can buy into this universe of metaphor where the Batman Family is a vivification of finding your company of people, and belonging, and being loved. Lots of talk in here about snatching young people out of the darkness and forging them in light, and helping them find a better path - it sounds like Batman is signing these kids up for the Marine Corps, which is one of several organizations that recognizes the power of these arch-romantic impulses.

10. “Batman’s Greatest Case.”, Tom King, Tony S. Daniel, Joëlle Jones, Tomeu Morey, Clayton Cowles: This is just unbearable. Oh god, what absolute treacle. It’s the second story in this book about Batman being serious and mysterious, but it turns out something nice is going on - he really just wants a photo of the whole Batman Family, because he lost his family when his parents got shot, but then he cracked his greatest case by finding a new family, which is the Batman Family!

All of this is communicated via clipped dialogue in which various Batman Family superheroes trade faux-awkward quips and cutesy ‘moments’ that are supposed to embody the endearing traits of the characters, but read as the blunt machinations of art that is absolutely desperate to be liked. This is art that is weeping on my shoulder and insisting I am its friend, and I want to get away from it, immediately. Tom King is the most acclaimed superhero writer of this generation, and I can only presume his better work is elsewhere.

11. “Medieval”, Peter J. Tomasi, Doug Mahnke, Jaime Mendoza, David Baron, Rob Leigh:

Finally, we have the obligatory story-that-leads-into-next-issue’s-serial, thereby demonstrating that Batman endures. It’s done as a series of 12 splash pages, depicting Batman in battle with his greatest foes, and it benefits immeasurably from the presence of artist Doug Mahnke (some inks by Jaime Mendoza), whose been a favorite of mine since those early, blood-splattered issues of “The Mask” at Dark Horse decades ago. Broadly speaking, Mahnke is working in a similarly muscular vein as many contributors to DC1k, but his sense of composition, of spectacle -- that boot-in-the-face energy the British call thrill-power -- adds an important extra crackle, and an element of humor; his Batman looks like a hulking maniac dressed in garbage bags, beating the shit out of monster after leering monster. What we are seeing is the fevered imagining of a new villain, the Arkham Knight (a variant of a character introduced in a video game), whom writer Peter J. Tomasi characterizes via the old trick of having the villain narrate to us a bunch of familiar criticisms of the hero, which the hero will presumably react to and overcome, or acknowledge in an interesting way, or something, in future installments. This probably would have worked better if other stories in this book hadn’t already made a lot of the same points in a manner that is not an advertisement for the rebuttal of those points... or if I were even capable of reading a story like this without imagining a final dialogue bubble coming in from off-panel going “SIR, THIS IS A BURGER KING DRIVE-THRU.” But something’s gotta go in issue #1001.

-Jog

[douxreviews]

The OA - Season 1 Review

By Billie Doux

(The first part of this review is spoiler-free. I'll discuss the ending underneath the adorable spoiler kitten.)

The OA is an eight-episode series currently available on Netflix that was created by Brit Marling, who plays the lead, and Zal Batmanglij. It tells the story of a young blind woman named Prairie Johnson, missing for seven years, who returns home unexpectedly.

Prairie, no longer blind and inexplicably referring to herself as "The OA," won't tell the FBI or her parents (the wonderful former Borg queen Alice Krige and equally wonderful Walking Dead alum Scott Wilson) what happened to her during the seven years she was missing, although there are physical indications that she was imprisoned and abused. Instead, she begins telling her story to five random people in an abandoned house at midnight. The story, and it's a wild one, is told in chapters on successive nights throughout the succeeding episodes, and it has a dramatic effect on the lives of the five listeners, all of whom are from the local high school.

The ending of this series, or possibly first season since there are rumors that there may be a second, is controversial and is generating a lot of discussion. For me, The OA isn't so much about the ending, although I'm one of the viewers who found it quite powerful. It's my opinion that The OA is about the strength and transformative power of storytelling. We've all read books that have changed our lives and made us see the world in a new way. That's what this story did for the OA's five acolytes, four of whom are high school students: Steve, a violent outcast who deals drugs; druggie Jesse; brilliant and disadvantaged Alfonso; Buck the youngest who is trans and struggling to make his parents understand him; and Betty Broderick-Allen, a teacher.

I'm not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend The OA. Some are finding it utterly fascinating and well worth watching (like me. I thought it was), while others are pissed about the ending and think it was a huge waste of their time. Caveat emptor?

And now, some spoilers. If you're planning to watch The OA, go no further until after you do!

What was real?

It appears that Prairie Johnson was kidnapped and imprisoned for seven years. She was blind when she was kidnapped, and regained her sight before she returned. Her five acolytes indeed used "the movements" she taught them to distract the school shooter long enough to keep him from killing the children in the cafeteria. Were the five actually sending the OA through an interdimensional portal so that she could rescue Homer and the others, or was that all in her head?

Honestly, I was about to give up on this series while watching the first episode, until I got to the end when the "I was born in Russia in 1987" thing started, oddly coinciding with the title sequence. Who puts the title sequence at the end? It was like saying, the story actually begins here. Of course, her childhood in Russia and the way she came back from the dead was very secret princess. It was so unbelievable that this was the point where I started wondering if OA was making the whole thing up. Or if maybe she believed it, but was stark raving mad.

There are so many hints and parallels throughout that make it seem possible that OA is either lying about her past and her seven years of imprisonment, or that she is mentally ill and honestly believes things that are not true. Her parents kept her medicated for nearly her entire childhood because of her unbelievable stories. There were multiple references to her head injuries. After her return home, the doctors in St. Louis said she should be committed. In the final episode, she is again being medicated and has an ankle monitor. There are also many indications that OA is psychic, which could be true even if she fabricated the whole thing.

After I finished the series, I rewatched the pilot, searching for clues. The first thing she asked when she woke after jumping off the bridge was, "Did I flatline?" She said that she was trying to get back to where she'd been held captive, even though she knew that they were gone. She also said, "We all died more times than I can count." The first thing she did when she arrived in her childhood home was attempt to find Homer Roberts on her computer, and later, she did. Although why couldn't Steve and Alfonso find evidence of her story online, too?

Did Hap exist, or was his search for proof of life after death a way that the OA used to humanize her captor? During the series, we often see things from Hap's viewpoint, even to his trips to find other NDE survivors and that strange murder of his friend at a morgue. (What the hell really happened in that morgue? What was that other guy doing?) The OA told her five acolytes that her father was a miner, and Hap's house was situated at an abandoned mine. When the OA was little and her name was Nina Azarova, her father forced her into freezing water in order to cure her fear of her nightmares of drowning in an aquarium, and note the similarity to Hap repeatedly drowning his captive subjects. Plus, the series began when the OA jumped off a bridge, and the kids on the school bus in Russia went over a bridge. Note also the use of glass or plastic during the OA's seven years of imprisonment and in the final shooting scene.

The neighborhood that the OA and her acolytes lived in was outright creepy. It looked like a typical suburb on the surface, but it consisted of jarring and oddly naked tract houses and there were often strange objects in the street. And I dare say most suburban neighborhoods don't have a half-built abandoned house sitting in the middle of an empty street? There was also the weirdness of the OA's instructions to her acolytes to leave their doors open while they were at her storytelling seances, something I found uncomfortable in present-day America; was that because the FBI instructed the Johnsons that "doors should remain open at all times"?

Steve, the OA's first follower and the character who changed the most, was introduced with a jarring, explicit sex scene right in front of a picture window showing that strange neighborhood. A drug-dealing bully with rage issues, Steve was the one who chose the other acolytes — except for teacher Betty Broderick-Allen, who basically chose herself. Grief-stricken by the recent death of her twin brother, Betty at first appeared to be a closed-minded teacher parroting the views of a rigid educational system uninterested in connecting with children who are different. Phyllis Smith is wonderful as Betty, and I thought her developing relationship with Steve, and in particular, the night she gave away her inheritance to save him from the goons from Asheville, was one of the high points of the series. I also really loved the scene where the OA impersonated Steve's stepmother and talked Betty out of expelling Steve, especially the bizarre little detail of one of the OA's fake press-on nails popping off while they were talking. Note that the OA guessed correctly that Betty had just lost a sibling, another bit that made me think she was psychic.

So let's talk about the ending.

The scene where Alfonso found the books under the OA's bed was very Usual Suspects, but it was also ambiguous. Yes, the OA could have used those books to create the details in her story, but she also could have been reading about subjects that had a relationship to her life, couldn't she? Why did Alfonso look in the mirror and see himself as Homer? And here's the big one for me. What was FBI agent Elias doing in the Johnson home alone at night, and why was he so weird and unconventional in the first place?

After I finished all eight episodes, I checked out a lot of articles and reviews on the internet. What seems to upset critics the most is the insertion of a school shooting into the narrative, supposedly out of nowhere. (That, and the admittedly silly interpretive dance "movements" that were intended to open the interdimensional portal.)

Honestly, I don't think the school shooting came out of nowhere. The focus of the entire series was saving the lives of children, and the five acolytes were all from the high school. The OA's story began with the Russian children dying on the bus, and then focused on five youths trapped under glass and killed and revived repeatedly in Hap's basement. Plus, it seemed to me that Steve fit the profile of a possible school shooter, and even though he momentarily reacted to the OA with anger in the pencil-stabbing scene, he was the one who changed the most, and for the better, over the course of the story.

We're now hearing that there may be a second season in the works. I cannot imagine what a second season could be about. Almost anything they do to answer questions about what happened in the first season might ruin the whole thing. Then again, what if the OA really did go through a portal in the end? What if Homer, Rachel, Scott and Renata do exist and are still imprisoned, waiting for her to rescue them?

A few bits:

-- OA may have meant "original angel." I thought that it could have been an interpretation of the word "away."

-- I didn't notice it the first time through, but there is a lot of purple, the color of royalty (secret princess), magic and spirituality.

-- There's Braille, too. There are actually strips on Braille on Khatun's face during the afterlife scenes. Also, the OA kept touching her white bedspread that had knobby protrusions like Braille.

-- How on earth did the OA and Homer write the symbols representing the movements on their skin? They couldn't touch each other; could anyone physically do that? Was that the reason the OA was told to make her arms longer during that scene with the bill and the trench?

-- Why were there potted plants in Hap's underground prison?

-- Why did the OA's mother Nancy freak out in the restaurant?

-- Loved the tiny blue quail eggs in milk for breakfast, and the bit in the afterlife about swallowing a bird.

So what is this show? Is it pretentious arty crap, or is it a powerful story about storytelling, mysticism and life after death? Lines are open. What did you guys think?

Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.

[trinuviel]

The Rose of Highgarden. On Margaery Tyrell (part 2)

This is the second part in a series of metas about Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones (Part 1). In the first part I wrote about Margaery’s narrative arc and her characterization in season 2 - the season where’s she first introduced. In this post I will take a closer look at her costumes in this season. 

Costume design is a particular interest of mine and Game of Thrones has some of the most interesting costumes on television - especially when it comes to the female characters. The award-winning costumier Michele Clapton’s work for the show is very original and in several cases visually arresting. However, a lot of fans have complained that the costumes are not medievalist enough. While I do think that this argument has some merit, I personally have no problem with the fact that Clapton’s work isn’t very medievalist. Whilst the feudal society of Westeros is largely inspired by 15th century England, it is also a fantasy world and that means that the costumes don’t necessarily have to be period specific. 

Clapton’s decision not to go medievalist is a conscious choice since she has previously worked on period pieces such as the Jane Austen adaptation Sense & Sensibility (2008) and the English Civil War drama The Devil’s Whore (2008), for which she won a BAFTA. Instead, she has chosen to take inspiration from both history and high fashion:

“I look at contemporary fashion and art,” she says. (x)

When it comes to the costumes of Game of Thrones, Clapton have taken a very eclectic approach with inspiration from a number of different sources: historical costume, contemporary couture and vintage fashion.  While her costumes may not be “historically correct”, which btw is a bit of an anachronistic concept when it comes to fantasy, her eclectic approach has yielded a number of original and iconic costumes that have prompted a number of articles in various news outlets. 

Whilst a number of fans have decried her costumes as ugly, they overlook the fact that in television and cinema, costume design is not just about making pretty clothes - rather it is about supporting and articulating the characterization in relation to the narrative. 

Even in real life, clothes is more than just about functionality and aesthetics. It is also a form of communication, which is why there’s an entire discipline dedicated to the communicative aspects of clothing that is called fashion semiotics.

Semiotics is the study of how people understand or make sense of life events or relationships. It is the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. Likewise, fashion is a language which holds a symbolic and communicative role. It helps express one’s unique style, identity, profession, social status, and gender or group affiliation. Therefore, the semiotics of fashion is the study of fashion and how humans symbolize specific social and cultural positions through dress.

Garments are non-verbal signs that can be interpreted differently depending on the context, situation or culture. Hence, fashion significance is constructed depending on culturally accepted codes. For example, in Western cultures white color is chosen for weddings because it represents purity while in Asian cultures this color means death and is most likely used in funerals.

Dress codes identify individuals within a culture. (x)

The same thing applies to how costumes work as meaningful elements in a visual narrative - and this is exactly the approach that Michele Clapton has adopted for her work on GoT:

For her, the key is looking at costume design as a mode of storytelling. “It’s so easy to draw a pretty dress in a fun way,” Clapton told Fast Company. “But this is so much more about finding the right look and telling so much more about that character, and that’s what I really, really enjoy: the storytelling.” (x)

Therefore, when we look at the costume design in this show, we have to ask what it says about the characters.

So what does Margaery Tyrell’s costumes say about her in season 2?

BOLD AND SEDUCTIVE

Margaery has three different costumes in season 2. Two of these dresses have the same basic design and silhouette whereas the third is perhaps one of the most unique costumes in the entire show. I’m going to start with a look at the gown we see in Margaery’s last scene in season 2 - the light blue gown with the rocaille pattern on the bodice. 

Unlike the red-gold costumes of the Lannisters in season 2, Margaery’s costumes don’t use the green-gold colours of House Tyrell. This is something that a number of fans objected to but this article argues that the use of light colours such a soft blue and purple serves as a subtle contrast to the power dressing of the Lannisters. The Tyrells are just as ambitious as the Lannisters but they are subtle about it and with the use of soft colours, they make themselves look non-threatening whilst they secret plot to extend their political influence.

This dress also feature a rocaille pattern on this bodice. In an art historical context, rocaille denotes an exuberant and elaborate form of ornamentation associated with the rococo style of the 18th century. 

The aristocratic culture that the rococo style is associated with was in many ways a hedonistic, sophisticated and somewhat frivolous culture that put a lot of focus on the love of pleasure. In the context of this costume, the use of the rocaille pattern may serve as a hint that the culture of the Reach, which the Tyrells rule, is one associated with abundance, pleasure and cultural sophistication. 

Another aspect of this costume is that it is quite revealing - as we’ll see in season 3, the costumes of Margaery Tyrell and her ladies feature a lot of cut-outs as well as plunging necklines, which hints at the warmer climate of the Reach as well as a more hedonistic culture than what we see in the North and the Crownlands. The most noticeable element of this dress is the plunging neckline, which emphasizes Margaery’s bold sexuality. However, the revealing nature of this gown also works at a metaphorical level:

Cersei hides behind her clothes, and Margaery instead chooses to expose herself.  A very nice and metaphorical way of showing to the people at King's Landing that she has nothing to hide. This also allows her to expose large amounts of skin, which not only helps cement the idea that the Tyrells come from a warmer weather (as mentioned earlier) but also helps cement the idea that she uses her sexuality and femininity as a political tool in itself. Presenting herself as a young, delicate and alluring girl, she avoids being perceived as a player in the game, even though she very much is. (x)

It is thus ironic that Margaery wears this particular outfit in a scene where she is dishonest when she talks about how she’s come to Joffrey from afar. In this scene Margaery acts bashful and girlish, the role of the innocent maid, which the audience already knows is an act. 

During the entire conversation between Joffrey, Loras and Margaery, she utilizes a specific kind of performative femininity, i.e. she tailors her courtly performance so it conforms to a very specific ideal of femininity: the bashful and innocent maid. Notice how she initially keeps her gaze lowered, signalling meek sub-mission. When Joffrey professes his admiration of her, she lifts her gaze and bats her eyes at him, which is a very calculated move. (x)

This is underscored by a costume where the sexy neckline stands in contrast to the softness of the light blue colour. In this context, it is interesting to compare and contrast Margaery’s costume with one of the dresses that Sansa Stark wears in season 1.

Whilst the colour is very similar, the cut and silhouettes of the two gowns couldn’t be more different. Sansa’s gown is modest and loose, hiding her body, whereas Margaery’s gown is close-fitting and very revealing. This highlights the differences between the two characters. Sansa IS an innocent young girl whereas Margaery is a sexually confident woman who simply plays the role of the bashful maid.

FASHION QUEEN

Let’s take a look at the costume Margaery wears when the audience is introduced to her character. First of all, this gown is identical in design to the light blue gown I mentioned above. However, in this scene Margaery has donned a rather unconventional cloak that stylistically sets her apart from any other female character we’ve seen so far.

Like the gown above, this outfit emphasizes Margaery’s confident sexuality. Not only does it have a deeply plunging neckline but the beaded strings that are attached to the button at the front of the cape serve to draw visual attention to her exposed cleavage. 

Apart from the plunging neckline, the most visually arresting element of this costume is the structured shoulders of the billowing cloak. This gives the outfit a slightly armoured “feel”:

She dons a billowing cape with structured shoulders that give a sense of armor.  It is interesting to note the armor-like aspect of most of Margaery’s season two outfits.  She spends the majority of the season at Renly’s camp in Storm’s End while the Tyrell/Baratheon forces prepare for war. Without the security of castle walls for protection, perhaps this is her more feminine way of being always armed and on guard for whatever is in store. (x)

The armoured aspect is an interesting one in terms of character. However, in relation to this costume the armoured “feel” of the shoulder piece takes on a rather tongue-in-cheek aspect since it is paired with a very lightweight fabric that billows in the wind. This is play-acting, which resonates perfectly with Margaery’s presence at a tourney where knights play at war whilst a real war rages elsewhere. However, this costume also signals that Margaery is fashion-forward in a sense few other Westerosi women are. She’s the consort of a royal pretender who wants to present an alternative to the current regime - and Margaery mirrors that by setting herself up as stylistically different, as a future taste-maker.

It is interesting to note that Margaery wears a kind of scarf underneath the bodice in order to make the neckline LESS revealing. The tent scene with Renly shows EXACTLY how deep the neckline really is.

Here the revealing nature of the costume supports both the narrative and the character. In this scene Margaery tries to seduce her reluctant husband but she also reveals her pragmatic nature - as I’ve detailed in my previous post.

ARMOURED IN FASHION

The third costume that Margaery Tyrell wears in season 2 is perhaps the most avantgarde and also the most controversial costume on the show. I am, of course, speaking of the now infamous funnel dress that Clapton designed as an homage to Alexandre McQueen’s iconic Bell Dress that he made for Björk in 2004.

Margaery's funnel dress was obviously an homage to the wonderful Alexander McQueen's costume for Bjork. It just felt right that this young ambitious girl would be experimenting with shapes, honing her style skills which we now see her employing to great effect. It was a risk and divided the audience. (x)

“From the very beginning she is brave and experimental in her look, which I wanted. She was a young girl who wanted to be the queen,” Clapton explained.

Margaery is often spotted in revealing or outré outfits. One episode she wore a funnel dress that Clapton told Vogue was an homage to an Alexander McQueen dress made for Bjork. “It was ridiculous. She’s a teenage girl trying things out.” (x)

Clapton designed this dress to emphasize that Margaery is rather avantgarde in terms of style. She’s experimenting style-wise but this look is so radical in relation to the rest of the fashions of Westeros that I cannot help but think that she’s also trying to create a new paradigm. She wants to stand out, to be seen as different from everybody else.

Another aspect of the funnel dress is that it has an armoured “feel” that is even stronger than the structured shoulder piece she wears at the tourney. The dress itself is made from a much heavier fabric than her low-cut, lightweight dresses and it has a very structured silhouette - and in contrast to her two other gowns it covers her completely. 

The funnel dress essentially functions as a structured coat-dress that Margaery wears over one of her more revealing dresses. If you look closely, you can see that the blue sleeves with the cut-outs over the shoulders match the seductive blue dress that she wears in the scene where she’s betrothed to Joffrey. 

Once again, the costume design supports the overall narrative since Margaery wears this dress in two scenes where she is in a defensive position - Lady Sansa Stark was taught that courtsey is a lady’s armour but for Margaery, fashion can be armour as well:

We witness Margaery’s armor full-on with her infamous “cone-dress”. She wears this in two scenes, and is speaking with Littlefinger in both.  She knows this is a man with whom you must always be on your guard, and this is reflected in the heavy satins and silk embroidery, but she keeps her shoulders exposed just enough to maintain a feminine air. (x)

It is noteworthy that Margaery only wears this dress in scenes where she is in a defensive position. The first time in the scene with Baelish where he’s questioning the status of her marriage to Renly and the second time after Renly’s death where Margaery is quietly scared because she knows exactly how dangerous the situation has become for both herself and her family. 

TOO AVANTGARDE?

The funnel dress turned out to be a very controversial costume in terms of audience reception. It was the subject of a number of think-pieces but here I’ll just focus on article since its arguments exhibit a couple of different argumentative fallacies. 

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: this costume is ugly. It has no redeeming qualities. It isn’t fashion-forward in any sense. It isn’t interesting. It isn’t even well-made (note the seam where the pattern does not align: on the front of the damn garment!). I can’t even give credit where credit is due regarding the embroidery, which must have taken hours, because the embroidery is so ugly.  (Fandomentals)

It is a perfectly valid opinion to say that this dress is ugly. It is, after all, a matter of taste. However, the quote above is followed by this little tidbit:

....the sheer and objective ugliness of this costume. (Fandomentals)

It is one thing to say I don’t like this dress, it is another thing to call it “objectively” ugly as this is just manifestly wrong. When it comes to aesthetics, beauty is always in the eyes of the beholder. Presenting a subjective opinion as an objective fact is a bad faith argument and it undermines what the author’s point. 

Then they go on saying that such an avantgarde dress is unbelievable in a feaudal society based on the medieval period of European history - conveniently ignoring that there plenty of outrageous and not very functional fashions has existed throughout history. 

While there are fashion trends in Westeros, there isn’t high fashion as we know it today. No one is picking bizarre pieces off the runways in Milan or opining over Vogue. There are no catwalks in the Reach, and there is no King’s Landing couture (though I wish there was!). Westeros is a world based on medieval human history, where men and women wore clothing to express their status in society. Clothing served a functional purpose and certainly did not step out of the norm to this extent. (Fandomentals)

It is also an argument that displays a lack of knowledge about the history of dress. Whilst there was no fashion industry in the middle ages and the renaissance, the concept of fashion as related to clothing styles did in fact exist as early as the 12th century:

How are we to distinguish between a culture organized around fashion, and one where the desire for novel adornment is latent, intermittent, or prohibited? How do fashion systems organize social hierarchies, individual psychology, creativity, and production? Medieval French culture offers a case study of "systematic fashion", demonstrating desire for novelty, rejection of the old in favor of the new, and criticism of outrageous display. 

Texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries describe how cleverly-cut garments or unique possessions make a character distinctive, and even offer advice on how to look attractive on a budget or gain enough spending money to shop for oneself. Such descriptions suggest fashion's presence, yet accepted notions date the birth of Western fashion to the mid-fourteenth-century revolution in men's clothing styles. A fashion system must have been present prior to this 'revolution' in styles to facilitate such changes, and abundant evidence for the existence of such a system is cogently set out in this study. Ultimately, fashion is a conceptual system expressed by words evaluating a style's ephemeral worth, and changes in visual details are symptomatic, rather than determinative. (x)

Secondly, fashion trends most certainly did exist in the past - just not in the forms we know today, i.e. supported and embedded in an industry. During the medieval age, the renaissance and the baroque the taste makers who set the fashion where individuals, royal and aristocratic men and women. There are numerous examples of aristocratic fashions that were not about function but about display. What this writer fail to understand is that all clothing is part of the semiotics of fashion. Clothing and bodily decoration have always been both about beauty as well as about signalling social standing and/or political affiliation. ALWAYS. 

Thirdly, costume design is an integral part of the visual story-telling and thus the costumes serve a larger function than just world-building. The relation between story-telling and costume design is something that Clapton herself emphasizes: 

...viewers should consider the bigger picture and storyline to understand costume choice–or even to look for hints about how a character is evolving. “I don’t think any costume should be looked at in isolation, rather, through the arc of the character,” Clapton says. “Each thing will tell a story. It might look like a costume is wrong, but actually it’s supposed to look like that. It’s telling you something about the character at the time.” (x)

Ultimately, the question is not whether Margaery’s funnel dress is ugly, pretty or historically correct. It serves a narrative purpose and it serves it well as I’ve argued above. Not only does this dress reflect Margaery’s bold personality but it also functions as her armour in situations where she is in a defensive position and in that context I find that this particular costume makes perfect sense.

A QUEEN WITHOUT A CROWN

There’s one final detail that I want to address. Unlike her husband, Margaery doesn’t wear a crown even though she is addressed as Your Grace, which is a title reserved for royalty. From a Watsonian perspective it would make sense for Margaery to wear a crown since she’s the consort to a man who has proclaimed himself king and who wears a crown himself.

However, in this case, Margaery not wearing a crown is connected to her narrative arc. In the scene with Baelish where she proclaims that she wants to be THE queen, Margaery has come to realize that “Calling yourself a king doesn’t make you one”. She realizes that Renly wasn’t really a king and therefore she wasn’t really a queen. Clapton pays attention to details like this and that is why she didn’t make a crown for Daenerys in season 7:

Well, she's not the queen yet. You can't have a crown until you are queen. You can have the chain, but until you get the throne you're not queen. (x)

Thus, the fact that Margaery never wears a crown during her short-lived marriage to Renly is less about world-building and more about the narrative.

Thanks to @lilbreck for the edits.

[lonesomealley]

The Beginner’s Guide as a Proper Beginner’s Guide SCRIPT

Why The Beginner’s Guide is a proper beginner’s guide.

By Count_

Spoiler Warning / Opening

Warning, this is the obligatory spoiler warning, if you have not played The Beginner’s Guide I fully recommend that you purchase it for full price and play it. Although if you do not have money, I would recommend that you then go and watch a YouTube let’s play of the experience because you can effectively get the same experience from both despite what some people say. In the description below is a link to a silent let’s play that I recorded which is what was used as the footage for parts of this video. Please watch or play this experience and then come back and watch this video, it won’t be going anywhere. Also, just in case you may want to listen to this video purely through audio, you may miss out on many of the examples that I’ll be flashing up in the backgrounds of my commentary. Spoiler warning over in 3… 2… 1...

The Beginner’s Guide is a narrative experience created by the brilliant mind of Davey Wreden. What ensues is a hybrid of a first and second person narrative where the player walks about the small -death of the author like- 3D environment projects created by an ominous character named Coda. And over time the player begins to learn that the narrator, Davey Wreden himself, isn’t to be entirely trusted. Keeping details of the game emitted until Coda them self leaves a message explaining why they aren’t around anymore.

My overview of this information is so simple because the experience itself is not what the video’s about. The video you’re watching is a case study into how the player can use The Beginner’s Guide as a valuable resource when working on their own passion projects. Since i have played The Beginner's Guide over ten times now, I can say with certainty that there is a lot more here than just an interesting drama. The name “The Beginner’s Guide” not only reflects genius work but is also a dive into the basics of how to make art, media, writing, etc. I’m led to believe that the topics I’m about to discuss hasn’t been considered all too much either, because when looking into the idea there doesn’t appear to be any documentation on these concepts. So what I’m going to talk about are ways that I feel the medium of passion work can be pushed to the absolute limits. Here are some timestamps on screen and they will be in the description if you wish to click past the parts that don’t seem interesting to you.

Case 1: Build with a Purpose

It’s arguable to say that the levels in The Beginner’s Guide are somewhat poorly constructed at times and even amateur. Which is interesting when you take into account that Wreden is taking us on a journey through a collection of amateur environment-story telling projects. And in turn this property makes these levels believable, the player actually feels like they are going through levels produced by someone who isn’t getting paid for their work. Now some people will say that this argument simply exists to dodge criticism but hear me out. Would the experience really be strengthened by having highly polished and professional levels that give the idea that these levels were created by a professional while talking about a single character who simply created these games for them self? No, no it wouldn’t. Wreden even uses this as a plot device when talking about the house level, where he states: [VIDEO CLIP WHERE DAVEY CALLS OUT THE INCREASING QUALITY]. Obviously something to consider when paying attention to the release dates of Coda’s works.

This may seem obvious to some, but those who are just starting off in design should make sure that everything they create has a purpose. I especially find myself in a loop of not really knowing what I want to do because I don’t have a grasp on what is important to developing the world I am trying to show off. What’s the solution? You can build the essentials of a project piece and then add the meaningless details later. Just make sure those meaningless details don’t ruin the overall purpose you are trying to give your work. Although that is no reason for the developers to become lazy with their work; that’s not what is being advertised here. What’s trying to be said is to make everything believable because immersion is one of the preeminent, vital ‘organs’ of passion design. Just like mentioned above, Wreden intentionally made everything appear amateur not to ease his workload, but to convince they player these games were truly made by someone else in their spare time. And from here, the player is given a gateway into the convincing mind of an imaginary character.

A few examples come to mind, such as the environment changing as you move through it to imply the player is in a dreamlike state. Or the player is experiencing the world through the eyes of a grumpy old man who is dying and dissatisfied with his life, so you show the world around in him a different light to reflect this: Dirty textures, things dying underneath the character as he walks around the environment. How about a character that suffers from PTSD triggered from symbolistic objects, and so the developer may make those symbols stand out from the environment, something as simple as making the object colorless in a colorful environment. All of these ideas are relatively simple, yet their impact should not underestimated when it comes to storytelling.

Another thought to maintain as well, keep things simple yet use complexity to your advantage. The literal language that I am speaking right now is based on using simplistic words and sounds to communicate ideas to each other. It’s when one starts applying complexity to an idea and object that it makes such stand out from all of the other ideas and objects. If you’re writing a story for example, you won’t describe every single object in the story unless it provides a gateway to deeper plot devices and storytelling. I can say, “The child tiptoed across the floor.” in a scenario where nothing

else is important except that the child tiptoed across the floor. To add complexity onto this sentence, I can apply details like, “The child tiptoed across the floor in the darkest hours of night.” Now what we have is a situation where a child is probably sneaking around somewhere to avoid something. Finally I can add detailing about the floor, “The child tiptoed across the wooden, creaky flooring at the darkest hours of night.” Now what we have is a sentence that implies a form of danger and performance. It can be important that the child tiptoes across the creaky floor to avoid his parents hearing them, or possibly that they’re trying to escape a monster. There’s even an example of this in the material, you notice these characters? All of them have a distinct box on their head that indicates what role they have in the story. Except for this one. Why? Because it can be inferred that this is a representation of a person from the real world, and that these are prop characters used for a story, whether it be Coda or just a random character used to pull off this idea.

How The Beginner’s Guide pulls off this technique is very subtle, yet when the player looks past the melancholy story and strange environments, they can find how perfectly everything fits into the grand scale of Wreden’s creation. This idea can be applied to most other reputable games as well. If you don't believe me, try looking at your favorite video game, movie, or story, and look at how perfectly the world is crafted simply because everything was created with a purpose.

Case 2: Every POV’s a Screenshot

This next topic drops off the storytelling side of passion design for a little bit, and is more purely about visual design such as video games, painting, and even photography, sprinkled in with some audio design, yet primarily video games since they enact interactivity. If you’re looking for tips on how to do storytelling and are not interested in anything else, you can skip to the next case in the video. Although I would recommend sticking around for this part if you are looking to give your audience a unique mental image to remember your work.

Imagine being placed into a plain, grey, room. No doors, no windows, just you and your mind, starved of entertainment Then all of a sudden, the wall transforms into this bizarre rainbow tunnel or the wall starts getting really trippy. Which one looks better? This, or this [of course showing examples]. If a photographer were to take a picture of either room, which do you think will sell better to an audience? Here is an example from the level Mobius, the player is in a spaceship with a giant door hurdling itself at the ship. Look at this screenshot, everything feels crafted in a way that looks like a work of art, with the main focus being the large colliding space door. Think of abnormalities like this and start applying them everywhere. Except in this scenario, the abnormality only exist because of a painfully plain existence within a controlled environment. Sometimes the abnormalities are subtle enough that it resonates with the observer and becomes something of beauty. Then there are large collections of these abnormalities, which interact with each other to create environments, paintings, defining words scrawled out onto a page. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re wondering “what I am talking about.”

To actually understand the insanity of the first paragraph I need to explain the idea of abnormalities, because believe it or not, our entire reality is made up of those abnormalities. When walking outside everyday, the average person may not take notice of everything around them because they are familiar with the area. Now think of someone who has never been in that environment before, such as a tourist who missed their flight and are stranded in that same environment. Everything feels very strange to them, and they will be wary of their surroundings, keeping an eye out for threats as well as useful places like hotels and fast food joints. What may be a boring town for one person could be seen as mysterious by another. The world is abnormal when you think about it, because all of our standards are different from each other. Google’s definition of abnormal is: “Deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.” Now then you have to ask the question, “What is normal?” which isn’t an easy or even consistent question to ask on a methodical level. Things that are normal are those that ‘conform to a standard,’ yet now there is another problem, what is the standard? Everyone has different standards, though most of us agree that certain topics are normal and others are not, such as murder, rape, mass genocide, war. But there is always a niche, and in an established society those niches are serial killers, people who are deemed mentally unstable, nazis, and savages. And while I could rant all day about these people, they do exist, and they find such normal offenses such as rape and murder to be normal. Normality is completely subjective from person to person, and is only the result of previous experience and morals. The world is a set of abnormalities that creates ultimately what is normal, and this correlates strongly with video games.

The idea pushed here is to make your environments interesting; worthy of having photos taken. I can go through several screenshots that are beautiful, weird, and enlightening about what meaning the author is pushing forward from their work. And don’t forget that we are working with full 3D environments that allow for movement, sound, and a lot of visual freedom. Rooms with unassuming visuals may be bolstered in-game by a memorable soundtrack or symbolic meaning. Before you ask, yes I am clearly stating that you should also encourage players to take audio screenshots, A.K.A. making memorable music. Especially since it’s often said that audio is 51% when making videos [POINT TO CITATION], and that applies here [POINT BACK TO VIDEO GAME] where the landscape never comes across as empty, but rather rewards the player for looking around and listening in. Simply turning around in some of the levels is enough to give off an entirely different feel. And most of the time that feeling in The Beginner’s Guide is reflection, a need to look back on what you just experienced. Although in your own medium, this feeling can be anything: surprise, shock, confusion, even confidence if you play the cards right.

One critique I’ve seen commonly used against Wreden’s works is that they’re pretentious, sometimes saying that these interactive experiences are just glorified movies. I’m not going to go at destroying this criticism, I was just trying to be clever with my topic transitions, but I will provide why this is relevant soon. So we shouldn’t forget that emotions and feelings are purely mental, along with instincts and logic. Abusing the whims of the human brain can lead to player attachment, interest, immersion, and practices with logical thinking. If the designer places a bunch of strange figures in a room in a certain manner, the player may ask themselves, “Why have they done this?” or think to themselves “Why does this seem to have so much importance even though I don’t immediately understand it?” From here the player will begin to develop their own understanding of the world and what your creations mean to them. The player often becomes the played when going through passion work, because it is expected that the player feels certain emotions and thinks about certain objects in the environment. Though that said, it should be pointed out that a good creator should never need to force a meaning toward it’s players *unless again it is for a pivotal reason within the work, again comparable to Wreden’s narration.* Okay now that this information has been told: what does any of this have to do with pretension? Because while there is no need for The Beginner’s Guide to be interactive, that doesn’t mean there’s no benefit received from this interactivity. The case can be argued that being able to control your own camera in these environments allows the player to further bond with whatever they are faced with. Does the player really need to pay $10 for interactivity? Well if this were a movie instead, the player would still need to pay money in order to watch the movie.

Having a great understanding of the world and what can and cannot be by reality is a strong starting point for anyone who wants to make interesting worlds out of their works. Especially today where the lands of drama and sadness in passion really only cover the basis of love and money, there is a lot of room for unique creativity. So use this knowledge in order to direct your audience toward a place that might just allow them to ponder your creativity and spread it far. *Just a side note: I kind of went on a rant here but I hope that you were able to tap into my mind there and pick up all of what I was trying to explain.*

Case 3: Place Your 4th Wall Somewhere Else

Funnily enough, the entire reason that this part exist in the first place is due to another video created by Ian Danskin (aka Innuendo Studios) titled, “The Artist is Absent, Davey Wreden and The Beginner’s Guide”. In this video essay Danskin states the following: [VIDEO CLIP]. And I know later he goes back on this statement but bear with me. While I watched, I had an epiphany: “ isn’t Davey just a disembodied character who really doesn’t have much to do with the environments in The Beginner’s Guide?” I mean, he does have an impactful role on the environment, but not intentionally. Is it possible that the fourth wall isn’t between Davey and the audience, for which he is constantly breaking, or rather is the fourth wall behind Davey [Shitty Drawing]. So by this logic, the game actually does have a fourth wall, which mind you still does get broken, but it gets broken in a unique way.

The entire story between Coda, Wreden, and these environments is kind of like a crumbling wall, thousands of years old. Coda tries his hardest to renew the wall and build it back up to glory, yet Wreden keeps attacking it and tearing down progress. At the end of it all, Coda gets tired of trying to fight for a lost cause and opts to knock the wall down himself. The Beginner’s Guide has a very obvious beginning, middle, and end much like how the story of the castle wall I described does in the sense of a tragedy. In the beginning, the world is fine and perfect and these little projects are just beautiful. In the middle, things start getting weird and more mental and the questions start to come up. And in the end, everything is going to hell and it’s a mental breakdown of both Coda and Wreden. Except that the story gets so meta that it literally begins to destroy it’s own fourth wall as the process keeps going. Because it is established within the story that Wreden is an unreliable narrator, ironic considering he is our only narrator and the person that is immediately bonded with and trusted.

By the logic that we have setup, where Wreden isn’t a part of the story but rather he’s a part of the audience just like the player, then there becomes this strange scenario where the audience itself actually breaks down the fourth wall as the story continues. Immediately is can be assumed that these projects are for no one, they exist purely to satisfy Coda. When you start the game, Wreden even references this: [VIDEO CLIP]. Which continues to get referenced as the experience unfolds. Speaking of unfolding, at a certain point within the player’s adventure, Wreden takes notice of a lamppost at the end of a segment, and of course this is later to be blamed on Wreden for meddling with

Coda’s work. The earliest example of this act is the stairs level where Davey writes a script that allows the players to bypass an intended mechanic by the creator. If Wreden is part of the audience, but has managed to add content to these works, then surely this is some weird reverse wall where the audience is working with the story. And what is now left is a story where it’s a creator versus their audience, and sure this sounds like a common story, but it has quite the unexpected twist. The audience is not intended out of Coda’s work. Coda makes this point abundantly obvious at the end of The Beginner’s Guide when he states towards Wreden, “Would you stop taking my games and showing them to people against my wishes?” There are a lot of unique qualities about The Beginner’s Guide that make up a lot of possibilities for one to begin creating their own work. I find this experience to be a good reference point for kinds of creative works that I want to create. And I believe that there is a far land of unmarked territory that creative works could step into to; a call to become stronger than the media of today.

I imagine a story where another story is being told from the perspective of a child who is reading that story. And there are moments when the story abruptly stops for moments of time because something comes up, like the kid gets hungry or possibly his mother comes in and takes the book away from him. There can be multiple levels of fourth wall it feels like, maybe at one point there is a letter in the story that’s from the son’s father and it tells him of a tragic world where nothing matters. And from there the child talks to the reader telling them to go out and enjoy their life. Or in the case of video games, have the player personally be the protagonist, not like those games where you simply put in your name and nothing else matters but possibly you could be adding things to the game. A game where the player needs to cross a pit, but the only way to do that is to open the game’s map file and manually add in a bridge of their own. At the end of it all though it could just be said, “Well the wall always rests between the player and what’s inside of the experience.” I simply don’t agree, the fourth wall should be a rather subjective thing because it allows for an expansive idea for how to write a narrative. Everything about creative work is subjective really, and while we refer to our ancestors, times change, and to keep up with the changing times, there should be a change in the possibilities of reality, or as I’m talking here: original works.

This case is much more about opportunity rather than it is logic, or standards of writing. Being capable of shifting the mechanics of how a innovative work can operate allows for much more expansion for how new, high quality work is even produced and what that entails. To begin shifting those mechanics, one must understand the basics of how to communicate and produce, which conveniently rolls back around to Ian Danskin’s video about The Beginner’s Guide, which much like mine isn’t purely about The Beginner’s Guide but heavily relies on the material for sake of topic. The video covers the fundamentals of storytelling, authorship, and communication, which has a vast amount of research dumped into the discussion. Just hold out with me a little bit longer, and then I’ll provide an annotation to this video if you’re curious.

Rephrase / Closing

No matter how many times I play The Beginner’s Guide, I will never quite get the true idea of what the story is trying to tell me. It can be inferred what the game wants me to know, but it never truly feels right to make such a concise opinion about a game that wants to be so vague about itself. It’s a piece of work that much like some of the environments in Coda’s work, appears so closed off and distant from any form of distinguishable character. Wreden has created a scenario where you can never truly know what is trying to be said, yet sprinkles enough information so that you can get pretty close. And I think this is what most stories should strive, such open ended-ness that the player or reader can come to their own conclusion of what to take away.

In my personal opinion, Wreden has created some of the most inspiring works that I have come by. It’s always the bizarre ways that a story will attempt to present itself that gets to me the most, such as the methodical lectures from Alan Watts that tells the universe in a very new but interesting way. Except I’m not talking just stories here, I’m talking art, audio, environments, our language, and the interactivity of video games. The area of passion work is currently in a weird spell where works will have tenuous story beats that allude to being more complex than what is presented simply because it’s the hip and cool thing of today. Yet none of those projects are talked about for very long, they all seem to get the cop out card for not being capable of creating anything more intriguing. Those that seek out a method of having that illusory mean something other than, “Isn’t it funny that you’re currently thinking of how weird this game is?” will often find their works to last longer than the ones that fall into this trap.

The Beginner’s Guide is a stand up in the ring of modern storytelling that I feel needs to be remembered. I mean, this video only exists because I find Davey Wreden to be a genius: [VIDEO CLIP OF THIS VIDEO IN META WAY THING]. If you haven’t picked up on this already, this entire essay is heavily biased, most of what I have talked about here stem from my own head; they aren’t based on facts. The purpose here is to inform myself and any others who are possibly lost in the crossroads of passion design, with what I hope to be a unique perspective. For anyone that is interesting in creating passion work for themselves, or believes that they can do something with the information I have provided, I highly recommend you give another play through of The Beginner’s Guide. Because as Ian Danskin says, The Beginner’s Guide is “a strange meta textual monster of an indie game”. [END]

[rutilation]

So, I’m putting all my crack theories/observations about hnk in one place so that if any of them are proven correct I’ll be able to refer back to this and say that I called it.

The title of Ichikawa’s art book, Pseudomorph of Love seems to allude to her approach for Phosphophyllite’s changes.  Whenever Phos loses and gains a new body part, it’s an act of compassion in some way.  Except for the pearl eye, all of Phos’s alterations have followed this pattern

They lost their legs while trying to help Ventricosus, and gained their agate legs because Ventri decided to show them compassion and not stoop to the level of the Lunarians.

While Phos’s own self-hatred tempted them to chop off their arms, it was only when the ice floes preyed on their desire to save Cinnabar that Phos accidentally-on-purpose lost their arms.  Antarc initially dismisses the gold and platinum as useless, but when they see that Phos is not-so-subtly projecting their own feelings of uselessness onto the metals, Antarc changes their tune and decides to attach them to Phos.  In a roundabout way, Antarc is trying to communicate to Phos that they aren’t useless ;_;

Phos loses their head trying to save Cairngorm’s arm, and Cairngorm decides to give them Lapis’s head.  While they kind of can’t help but project Lapis onto Phos after they wake up, the fact that they were willing to give up their own head, and the fact that they finally admitted to themselves that they don’t believe any of the gems will be brought back indicate to me that they did this out of genuine concern for Phos and not because they’re trying to resurrect Lapis.

Edit as of 5/11: I totally forgot about this, but Phos loses Lapis’s hair trying to shield baby Morga and Goshe from the lunarians.

Edit as of 6/12: Phos had to have some pieces chipped off from trying to help Cinnabar.  They also lost the piece of their leg they offered to Variegatus.

Because the pearl eye is the exception to this, and is primarily associated with betrayal on Phos’s part and manipulation on Aechmea’s, I suspect it’s going to be replaced later on in the story, maybe by a red pearl, which is closer to how the pearl is described in the whole seven treasures thing. (and just as an aside, I totally buy that Ichikawa is referencing the seven treasures with Phos’s new limbs.  She said in an interview that Buddhist sutras about gemstones are what inspired her to write the story in the first place so I think it’s safe to say that she’s familiar with the concept.)  I also think that Phos will get this possible new eye from Cicada, because he is a cinnamon roll. 

I also think that Phos choosing to get rid of one of their alterations and replacing it with a more positive one would be a good way to progress their character arc while also forwarding the work’s themes about identity.  Perhaps the solution to the tragedy of Phos slowly losing themselves is gaining the capacity to choose how they change, which I find a lot more poignant than edgy pondering about how Phos isn’t Phos anymore–I find that take in particular to be a rather un-nuanced appraisal of Phos’s situation, and it bugs me how common it is.

I think that the lower half of Phos’s torso is going to be the next thing to go, leaving only their chest (metaphorically, their heart) behind.  There are several bits of visual story telling that lead me to think this is a possibility.  The first is in the various non-permanent injuries that Phos suffers throughout the series.  I may be reading too much into things since there are only so many ways for Phos to break, but it’s possible they function as visual foreshadowing:

loses their arms and legs in the first chapter after getting caught up in Kongo’s attack

loses their arms while trying to grab cinnabar

is completely dissolved by Ventricosus (I’ll come back to this.)

left eye gets knocked off by one of Aculeatus’s tentacles

arms get shattered after Kongo yells at them

an arm gets broken after Phos falls off the roof of the school

they get cut in half by a lunarian’s arrow

their face is punched off twice by Cairngorm

they destroy their head during a mental breakdown, and then get punched in half by Jade–in more or less the same spot where they got shot before

lol I cannot keep track of all the injuries they got against the explosive shogi pieces

Cairngorm shatters their torso

Aechmea slices off their limbs

Every single one of Phos’s more permanent losses has been preceded by at least one injury to the exact same area.  In the first half of the manga, it was mostly losses of their arms and legs, in the second half, we see a lot of Phos getting either decapitated or bisected.

Another bit of visual storytelling comes from the anime.  The director has stated in an interview that he had a long chat with Ichikawa and is aware of future events not yet depicted in the manga.  While he obviously wasn’t allowed to overtly hint at said future events, there’s one bit of anime-original content that might hint at Phos’s future changes.  The abstract scene of Phos being put back together after being dug out of the shell is very different between the anime and manga.  In the manga, they slowly coalesce out of a stream of Cinnabar’s mercury.  In the anime, Phos forms out of a liquid of their own coloration.  What I want to focus on is what the camera emphasizes in this scene.  It focuses on Phos’s feet, arms, pelvis, head, and then their eye.  Apart from their pelvis, these are all parts that Phos eventually loses.  I suspect this scene was actually the director trying to include some visual foreshadowing.

Assuming I’m right about Phos losing half their torso, I think Padparadscha is going to be what replaces it.  Despite their few appearances, they’ve been given a lot of narrative weight, and have a similar coloration to carnelian, ruby, and amber–which are the different interpretations of the red gem written of in the aforementioned sutra.  Not to mention all the lotus symbolism surrounding them.

I think that the new Morga and Goshe are actually reincarnations of the old ones, only they were reincarnated as the others’ gemstone.  New Goshe’s personality matches old Morga’s and vice versa.  The fact that they heard Phos calling out to them in their dreams while Phos was dreaming of the shattered gems seems like a dead giveaway to me.  Although given how bad the translation is, I could be misinterpreting Goshe’s words.  That said, I do think that Phos is actually somehow psychically connecting to the dead gems in this scene and not just dreaming–the fact that it’s the first full-color scene we’ve had since the beginning of the manga just screams “Pay attention, this is important!”

I’m not the one who came up with this theory but I certainly agree with it: I think that the reason the gems were ground into a fine powder and not just turned into jewelry is because it allowed the Lunarians to extract the gems’ inclusions, and that’s what the human particle is made of.  In which case, the dusted gems are well and truly dead, and no amount of reconstruction will bring them back.  In my view, the thematic core of the story is about coming to terms with change, loss, and death.  Bringing back the lost gems would undercut this theme. 

However, I have a feeling that Antarc was actually kept alive.  This is one of my crackier theories but please bear with me:

As much as I love Phos to bits, Antarc would probably hate the person Phos has become, which means Ichikawa could still forward those themes I just mentioned even if Antarc was brought back.  Things would never be the same between them.

The fact that Aechmea had a replica of one of the broken pieces of Antarc’s face ready when he met Phos is reeeaaaallllly suspect.  At the very least, it means that Aechmea has been interested in Phos and has expected them to come to the moon eventually for a while now.  Why on earth would he just happen to have a piece of Antarc on him otherwise?  My theory is that when Aechmea became aware of Phos’s new arms and the fact that one of the seemingly static gems was rapidly changing, he took an interest in Phos and decided to spare Antarc so he could use them as leverage.  (Not that he really needed to since Phos was dumb enough to do his job for him and bring a bunch of potential hostages to the moon. rip)

Going back to the situation with Morga and Goshe, I think it’s possible something went wrong when the Lunarians tried to extract their inclusions which lead to their inclusions dying, and thus why Mora and Goshe were reincarnated whereas none of the other gems appeared to be.

Also going back to when Phos got dissolved and eaten, I think it might be foreshadowing that by the end of the story, Phos will have lost all their original parts.  Or maybe it’s just supposed to clue us in early on that the story we’re reading will be about how Phos is broken and repaired, both literally and metaphorically. One or the other…

I’ve noticed that apart from Phos (and kind-of-sort-of Cinnabar,) no one appears on the volume covers more than once.  Since they’ve been pretty active recently, I suspect that Euclase and Jade will be on the cover of volume nine.  On a related note, I think that Cinnabar will finally crawl out of their dust jacket hovel and onto the cover in the final volume. 

The Lunarians briefly mention a gem called Apophyllite after they collect Phos.  The fact that there used to be a gem who was the same color as Phos, as well as having a name with similar etymology–and said etymology refers to both gems’ breakage no less–makes me think they might be important later.  It wouldn’t be the first time Ichikawa casually name-dropped someone crucial to the plot many chapters before they became relevant.

While Kongo couldn’t understand Ventricosus, the way he talked about the ice flows made it sound like he could understand them.  So I think the ice flows must be speaking some human language.

The Admirabilis all seem to be named after the shapes of their shell.  Aculeatus means spiked, and he has a spiky shell.  Ventricosus means swollen or distended, which may refer to her round snail-like shell.  Variegatus means multicolored, so if we ever see her shell, I expect it will be very colorful.  I also think Variegatus herself might be bluish green like Phos, since the chapter focused on her definitely invited parallels between her and the old Phos, what with her outgoing personality, the fact that her people see her as a little kid and don’t take her seriously, her tendency to get herself in trouble, and her desire to venture past the safe confines of her society and explore the gems’ island and the moon.  Not to mention the fact that Phos themselves could be described as variegated at this point in the story.

Melon has pikachu powers as a sort of fantasy take on tourmaline’s pyroelectric (generates a charge when heated) and piezoelectric (generates a charge under applied mechanical stress)  properties.  But hemimorphite is also strongly piezo/pyroelectric.  I theorize that the reason the two were paired up was so that Hemimor could teach Melon about their electricity powers, and that we’ll see Hemimor using said powers sometime in the future.

Everyone’s already talking about that intriguing shot of the human particle after Phos gets the pearl eye, so I don’t really have much to add to that discussion.

Also, I’ve seen people speculate that the gems are all super short because of how tall they are compared to Kongo.  I don’t know if I buy this though, because that assumes that Kongo is as tall as an average human man, which has never been confirmed.  When we see Aechmea stand next to Phos, he’s not much taller than they are.  In any case, I think it’s a bit too early to speculate on how tall the gems are.

Well that’s about all I can vomit out of my brain for the moment.  And despite the wall of text I just wrote, I don’t have much of an idea of how the story will end.  I’m excited to see what Ichikawa will say with the ending regardless of how happy or sad the story ends up being.  Knowing her, it’ll at least be interesting.

[watchandtalk]

Blade Runner (1982)

It's been a while since I've updated this blog! In celebration of the release of Blade Runner 2049, I'm going to provide my own (very) personal review of the original Blade Runner (1982) film:

It sucked, and I hate it!＊

＊This is obviously my personal opinion, and I am not hailing it as an objective truth. I also need to point out that I am heavily biased toward the book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick). I am also completely aware that the film is a loose adaptation of the book, but I will address this further on.

I very rarely ‘hate’ films – it is an intense word, after all. After years of being force-fed overanalyses in high school, however, I feel that the film warrants this. The thing is that in high school, English teachers will tell you that it’s ‘okay to have your own opinion of the film!’ before going on to inspect every little detail that points toward it being a literary masterpiece. Then they go on to say that your opinion must be founded – without offering any advice for analysing it from a negative perspective. Here I am to say that it is indeed entirely possible to both effectively analyse the techniques used as well as show that a film (in this case, Blade Runner) is completely and utterly terrible!

I summed it up quite nicely after very recently (within the past hour) watching Blade Runner with my family in the hopes of inspiring hype for the sequel: Blade Runner is a good film, but a terrible story.

The film:

Good symbolism – the use of animal associations for the Replicants in order to accentuate their inhumanness; the unicorn, as well as the origami; color; motifs associated with implanted memories (phrases, sounds of children’s laughter); fire (a la Prometheus);

The noir feeling – I personally am not a fan of the genre, but the pacing, soundtrack, general atmosphere of the film and the theatricality of the interactions, so to speak, represent the genre well;

You know the rest – intertextual references (Paradise Lost, if I’m recalling correctly; the parable of the prodigal son); world building referencing the context of the film, that being increasing globalisation and the mixing of cultures; Tyrell being short-sighted despite his ‘visionary’ status and the shortness of the Replicant lifespan... I could go on, but that would involve searching for my high school English notebook, which I’m fairly certain I threw away as soon as I was done with it. You’ve heard it all before.

The story:

Bad – thanks for highlighting their inhumanity when the point was that they’re pretty much humans anyway; all it took for Deckard to wonder if killing Replicants was a good idea was a totally unnecessary romantic subplot; I know the ending with Batty was supposed to be symbolic or whatever, but narratively speaking, it makes very little sense that after all he did, he would choose to save Deckard;

The noir feeling – you may have noticed this was in the film section. I personally hated what the pacing did to the film and how it changed the focus;

It’s flimsy, it holds no water, it’s bad.

Again, I need to stress that this is my own opinion, and I am very specifically comparing the film to the book despite the fact that the film is only very loosely based on the book. I do find it significant to address adaptations in general, however, and the consequences of one ‘badly done’.

Loose adaptations, loose narratives

For this segment, I’m going to make reference to the film Edge of Tomorrow (2014). The source material of that film is less well-known (in the West, at least) than that of Blade Runner (being adapted from All You Need is Kill, by Sakurazaka Hiroshi), but nonetheless, there are very significant parallels to be made that can be attributed to the common factor of their being ‘loose adaptations’.

Here’s the thing: I’m not at all saying that adaptations must be 100% accurate or not be made at all. Especially when the source material is cross-cultural, one can’t expect values to translate directly, or indeed the original context of the source material may be vastly different from the adaptation temporally speaking. The message may not even be the same, perhaps being intentionally subverted in order to make a point.

What I’m saying is this:

When one co-opts the narrative of a piece of media, there is a certain point at which one has to be very careful when changing around significant plot points and events.

There is an internal logic that runs within a narrative. Changing an event disrupts that logic. In order to make the event fit, the narrative will have to be moved around, the backstory rearranged, certain elements introduced or removed. If you go around changing things willy-nilly without a care for what it does to the consistency of the story, you end up with: one (1) horrible, no good story.

At this point, I would present a good adaptation for the sake of comparison. Unfortunately, many of the ones I can think of that are good (Fight Club, perhaps arguably; The Silence of the Lambs; The Shining) are ones where I’ve only seen the films for, so on the point of them being adaptations, I am not well informed.

So again, I ask you to think of really bad adaptations. I think we can all agree on the Hollywood renditions of Dragonball, The Last Airbender and Death Note being absolutely horrendous adaptations. We can’t change around ideas without considering the effects or how the narrative must be changed to accommodate this, but thinking about all these other horrid adaptations also suggests that there is something essential to the source material that one cannot abandon. In Dragonball, this may be Goku’s unique personality, or the fact that he’s Japanese. In Death Note, this may be the fact that Light was meant to be a perfect student who was too smart and developed a god-complex. There are things that make the characters who they are and there are things that a story is about, and ultimately tampering with them is something that backfires more often than not.

Let’s go back to Edge of Tomorrow and Blade Runner.

I didn’t like Edge of Tomorrow. Even before reading the source material, I did not like it. There’s first the fact that the consistency is dubious regarding the whole omega/alpha thing; what’s up with him going back in time and the omega suddenly blowing up? The film also introduces a lot of values that weren’t present in the book. This is understandable, seeing as the source material is Japanese and this is a Hollywood adaptation, but that does not mean it was done well; there’s a big emphasis on teamwork and team sacrifice (where in the book, there are two significant characters pretty much), and there’s this weird theme of Cage (white-washing aside for now) going through the loops and slowly becoming this brooding sacrificial hero figure that ultimately becomes better than Rita, who a) had already gone through this before, and b) is a more accomplished fighter than Cage at any given point. This is pretty sexist, as despite her seniority in pretty much every aspect, Rita quickly becomes the film’s damsel in distress, but what makes it the most disappointing is how it compares to the book:

Rita, front cover to back cover, retains her seniority over Keiji at all times. On one hand, this may be because of Japan’s larger focus on social hierarchy and community; this still leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth when the West is supposedly becoming more ‘progressive’ and leaving the damsel stereotype behind. It also transforms the story; in the very end, Rita is the one who figures out what is going on, and it’s through her actions and decisions that the loops finally end. In fact, she dies only because she decided she was going to die – “I finally understood. When I met Rita yesterday, she had decided that she was going to die.” (p.187) Yes, Keiji becomes a hero and is acknowledged as such, but up until the very end, he recognises Rita as her own person, someone he could never replace and perhaps could never amount to. “Red was your color, yours and yours alone. It should rest with you. I will paint my Jacket sky blue, the color you told me you loved when we first met.” (p. 196) All that emotion, that weight? Gone.

The change of her role also creates an awkwardness in the alien hierarchy system. Originally, the Mimics had a server which triggered loops through the antennae, and Rita had been an antenna. The solution is thus pretty simple in the novel. This changes with the introduction of the alpha/omega system, and the transfer of the target from the ‘alpha’ to the ‘omega’, creating that strange maybe-contradictory ending.

But I digress.

The point of that tangent was that while one can understand that yes, of course things are allowed to change, but that doesn’t mean that it makes the narrative better or more cohesive. Betraying the point of the original material is one thing, but doing it badly is something else entirely.

To very briefly sum up the main themes of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?:

ableism, classism, the importance of status in society and how this ties in with the dystopian setting – see Isidore and his being a ‘chickenhead’; how this and classism separates those staying on a war-trodden earth and those who escape off-world; how they separate humans and ‘non-humans’; artificial animals and real animals serving as a status symbol;

emotions, intelligence, and how they make up the human identity – there’s the idea of the androids feeling emotions, which is portrayed in a much more nuanced fashion in the books, as well as the parallel with the Penfield mood organs; the explicit fact that humans and androids have varying levels of both intelligence and emotional capacity, further suggesting the lack of true difference between Replicant and human;

the concept of a machine being either a hazard or a benefit – though Deckard mentions this in the film, it hardly makes the same impact as meeting Luba, who for all intents and purposes enriched musical culture and did not pose a hazard; there’s also the idea of humans having the ability to be just as deplorable as androids supposedly are, as in Resch;

Mercerism – this one is understandably not incorporated in the film (seeing as this is a film, and not a two- or three-part series), but it does add an interesting dimension vis a vis the concept of artificiality and technology as a means of shared consciousness, as well as the willingness of humans to believe in something that is irrevocably proven false.

What it boils down to, essentially, is ‘what makes a human human, good or bad’, as well as the implications on society as being a community of humans. Typical sci-fi philosophical fare, but it very much leaves you thinking that the answer is, ‘well, humans are pretty terrible but also incredibly variable and really is there any difference between humans and androids? No, I guess’.

The first thing that should pop out is that there is a clear mismatch between central themes in the two media. You can argue that the vague idea is the same, but how they go about it is extremely different. Perhaps to an extent this is a given, as there’s only so much philosophising that a film can allow without stretching into the two hours and above section, but the film undeniably displays it in  a much more shallow way. Batty’s dramatics are just that: dramatics, theatrics, all for show. Maybe not strictly accurate, but another word that comes to mind is pretentious. Again, it’s for the cinematics, perhaps part of the genre, but personally I find it difficult to engage with something that is clearly a caricature. Perhaps this is the point, but certainly this was never the point that the novel had meant to make.

What the film tells you about the androids is ultimately very different as well. As mentioned beforehand, all the Replicants have an associated animal – Pris with a raccoon, Batty with a wolf, and so on – which further heightens their inhumanity. What strikes me is that in the novels, there’s no such clear distinction between human and inhuman – the androids are not made into animals and neither are the humans. However, what does happen in the novels is that traits that are considered human or inhuman are shown to be prevalent in both androids and humans. Androids have lower emotional capacity and cannot pass the Voight-Kampff test – but then again, there are many humans that can’t, either, for a lot of different reasons. Androids are portrayed as ruthless, violent, cold-hearted – but then again, there are humans that are, as well. So what makes humans so different? Well, they can think for themselves and have their own ambitions – but so do the androids. But the one thing they can’t fake is emotions, right? Well...

What may differentiate the film and the novel in their portrayals of humanity and inhumanity is their ascription of good and bad to them, respectively. The humans in Blade Runner are assumed to be good because of their humanity – conversely, the androids are assumed to be bad, because of their inhumanity. There are many themes running through the novel, but this black-and-white morality is not one of them.

If we take away this assumed good-or-bad dichotomy, we find that Blade Runner is ultimately a shallow film with no backstory or deeper meaning. Why did the Replicants flee? How did they know each other? With no reason for this, the film is forced to come up with an additional plot point: the four year lifespan. The focus stops being ‘what is human’ and starts becoming a tale about playing god.

The film manages to not only simplify any sort of complexity in the absolute worst way possible, but it also manages to go against the central themes holding the novel together.

And you know what? Blade Runner isn’t unique for this. Plenty of blockbuster films are guilty of the shallowest, most predictable and bland storylines imaginable. But what really takes the cake is this:

The Final Nail in the Coffin

Despite Blade Runner being despairingly simple objectively, despite it being straightforward and not requiring any real critical thinking or philosophising, despite it being an alright film at best and an insomnia-killer at worst, despite all of this, they made us study it for HSC English, and they had the audacity to make it sound deep and complex and made us analyse it as deeply as one would the mysteries of the universe.

I never want to hear about how the fires are reminiscent of Prometheus bringing fire to humanity or how the sight of the sun is reminiscent of Egyptian Pharaohs and a symbol of power or about the intertextual value of Batty’s pretentious spiels ever again. It took me watching the film again, years later, to realise that I absolutely abhor the film, and would do well never to watch it again.

Phew.

Again, as a film? Technical beauty. Easy to pick out techniques and stylistic decisions – probably why it was chosen as a focus in the first place. But hey – so is Gattaca, and that’s actually a good film.

[harpers-galleria]

Brooklyn Museum’s: “We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-1985” Exhibition

By Antonette Ayton 

September 17, 2017

Revolutionary (Angela Davis), 1971 by Wadsworth A. Jarrell

Cataloging the work of more than 40 artists and activist spanning 1965-1985, the exhibition, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, concentrates on the black female perspective. Through the expression of subversive methodologies within shifting socio-cultural paradigms, dualities are explored through a range of mediums both texturally and temporally. Resistance is a common thread throughout the work, whether, subtly being expressed within introspective pieces exploring identity politics, or staunchly in opposition to wider systems of oppression. Collectively the exhibition showcases the spectrum of the black female experience, whilst capturing the ways in which banal gestures such as rocking an afro can become radicalized.

The definition of revolution, a forcible overthrow of a government or a social order in favor of a new system, does not fully capture the breathe of resistance within the Black Female experience. Rather its Latin root, revolvere which translates to roll back, starts to unpack suggested nuances. Riots, protesting, civil unrest and war may have shaped national sentiment within 1960’s America, but the motifs explored within this exhibition transcends that. Traversing the landscape of identity politics, as well as racial and social disparities, the viewer is presented with many layers of engagement between the artists and these social constructs.

The exhibition commences with various works from the Black Arts Movement. Politically motivated, the movement was populated with distinct art collectives such as the Spiral Art Group, and Afri-COBRA. Serving as a reflection of the collective Black consciousness and socio-political strife, works created, complemented the Black Power Movement. Empowerment and black nationalism were promoted as a way of advancement, therein, rejecting assimilation as the road to social acceptance within wider culture. Rather, knowledge and awareness of oneself and one's history would provide an alternate path.

Committee to Defend the Black Panthers, 1970 by Faith Ringgold

Artistically bucking the trend of widespread modernism with the art world, Afri-COBRA, in particular, dismissed tenets of ‘art for art sake’ and instead focused on the creation of work which was socially motivated. Reflected in the creation of posters via printmaking, members such as Barbara Jones-Hogu captured the communal spirit of resistance in posters such as “Unite”. Serving as a call to action, the artwork as well as the method of printmaking allowed for a rebellious sense of activism. Working outside of the constructs of the commercialized art world, printmaking allowed for easy dissemination of the work within their respective communities, making the artists revolutionaries in their own right. Democratizing the art allowed for the collective and other artists to promote an agenda of Black pride while forging their own space within the art world.

Unite, 1971 by Barbara Jones-Hogu

Black Men We Need You, 1971 by Barbara Jones-Hogu

The uprising of communal solidarity amongst the Black-American population lead to a repudiation of White cultural precedents. Influenced by Pan-Africanism, and different depictions of black beauty, many women began to reject idealized European beauty and traded in their wigs and straight hair for Afros. Looking introspectively at common themes of oppression across the African diaspora, many began to embrace the militant convictions of Black nationalistic sentiment which was reflected in many cultural aspects, from the art to the fashion. This was captured on the cover of magazines such as Jet, and also within artistic motifs.

Urban Wall Suit, 1969 by Jae Jarrell 

Ebony Family, 1968 by Jae Jarrell

Reflecting the collective consciousness, many pieces captured iconic symbols of the time. Gestures such as the Black Power Salute were widely used in popular culture, showing a dedication to the resistance by simply raising a clenched fist. Expressed within a range of mediums throughout the exhibition, a sculpture, Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968), by Elizabeth Catlett, offers a more suggestive approach. Drawing direct inspiration from the historic event at the Summer Olympics of that year, Black-American medalists boldly held their fists high. Referencing this moment as well as the comradery amongst black females within the art world, spanning generations and geographic borders, Catlett visualized the experience navigating these social movements and spaces. Craving sinuous forms within cedar and manipulating the perception of negative and positive space, she highlighted the spirit of resistance within the salute, whilst delineating space for females within the revolution.

Homage to My Young Black Sisters, 1968 by Elizabeth Catlett

The act of creating art as a black female was radical in itself. Culture became a tool of resistance and within the 1970, focus shifted from combating racial inequality to that of gender equity. Second wave feminism emerged to the forefront and women of color were brought into the fold. However the overarching narrative was controlled by white middle class women, thereby eclipsing the cultural experience of black women. Race was inextricably linked to black female expression but the inclusion of race relations within the space of feminism was denounced. Feeling displaced and frankly suspicious of the movement, an introspective shift occurred which was mirrored within the artist works produced. The assortment of work from this period captured recurring motifs of duality and redefinition. Less traditional mediums such as conceptual art, performance, film, and video were explored alongside photography and painting.

Sapphire, 1985 by Alison Saar  

Seeking to deconstruct stereotypical tropes whilst also carving out space within the art world, black women demonstrated a level of perseverance. While the larger feminist movement gave white women a voice within the art world, their black counterparts were not extended the same visibility. Traditional artistic spaces such as galleries and museums were reluctant to showcase their work and rather than simply protest, many women followed their predecessors and banded together to create their own art collectives. Groups such as “Where We At” featured artists like  Kay Brown. Meanwhile groups such as the “Combahee River Collective” focused on advancing the agenda of black feminism, in response to the misogynistic tenor of the Black Power Movement, and the false promise of second wave feminism.  Aiming to reorient the conversation of identity politics, “Black Feminism”, later garnered the title of Womanist within the 80’s, thereby recognizing and differentiating culturally specific goals of the black female community.

Kick of Life, 1974 by Kay Brown

Depth and multiplicity are explored through many introspective works featured in the exhibition, showcasing the breadth of the black female experience. Counteracting social tropes imbued within figures such as Aunt Jemima,  artist used their work to address racial and identity politics. With a sense of urgency, artists such as Lorraine O’Grady transformed her mere act of protest into performance art with the conception of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1981), as she sought to end systematic oppression within art. Making a declaration for a change to the social order, the masses were informed that black female artists had something to say. Rather than simply seeking recognition from their peers within the industry, they called for a reconfiguration of ingrained systematic oppression.

The Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail, (1973) by Betye Saar

Juxtaposing the resounding outspoken nature of O’Grady, the photographic works of Ming Smith capture banal yet intimate moments of her subjects. Evident within Grace Mirror (1978), an atypical level of vulnerability is framed within intrapersonal moments whilst displaying a level of resilience. Expressing duality, social misconceptions of black women are challenged by Smith. Alongside, fellow artists continued to explore identity and misrepresentation within narratives which drove cultural perception. Aspiring to deconstruct these notions text, words and phrases were cop-opted to complement imagery, thereby recontextualizing the prospective discourse.

Grace Mirror, 1978 by Ming Smith

Combining text and imagery, set upon the timely arrival of mixed media and postmodernism within the 1980’s. This tool was widely employed by artists such as Lorna Simpson in, Water Bearer (1986), and by Carrie Mae Weems within the series entitled, Ain’t Joking. A captivating photograph, Mirror Mirror (1987) provides a critical perspective into the pressures to conform to  eurocentric beauty ideals. A reflective moment at mirror, displays a failed effort to culturally assimilate. Delving into the subjects’ shortcomings, unattainable beauty standards that are imposed upon black women by wider society are exhibited. In particular, the politics of black women's hair has always been a polarizing force within cultural discourse. Something as futile as wearing ones hair in its natural state became politicized or was viewed as unkempt. Hair as a tool of cultural identity is explored within an animation, Hair Piece (1985), by Ayoka Chenzira. The history, struggles, and repercussions within the pursuit of straight hair are documented in a personable graphic manner. Self expression and identity are inextricably linked with the perception of oneself and by others, thereby posing the age old question of  “Who are you?”

Waterbearer, 1986 by Lorna Simpson

Challenging misrepresentation on the front of identity politics, gender inequity and within racial discrimination concisely captures the purview of this exhibition. We Wanted A Revolution details the undulating road to unachieved actualization through the lens of the radical black female. Art is used as a vehicle, contributing to socio-cultural movements whilst disrupting cultural norms. Showcasing a breadth of artistic expressions and cultural experiences, the complexities of the black female is exhibited. There is a resonance of multiplicity, agency and resilience within the works crafted and in the methods in which they were deployed. Through a celebration of their contributions, a counter-narrative is revealed. A reclamation is underway as the curated works seem more contemporary than ever as activism, cultural identity, and cultural experience are once again at the forefront of the social conversation.

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