#where they kill off the hero and glorify manipulation and abuse

[sassyandclassy94]

Lol. The high hopes OUAT first timers have🤣 Its cute you have that much faith in the losers that are Adam and Eddie🥹

[popanalysis99]

Toxic Men in TV Series who are the absolute worst.

(TW: R*pe and Sexual Assault)

While there are some men who seem to be interesting, let’s not deny the fact that there are most male characters who act like their “toxicity” is cool but honestly, it’s horrible and something not to root for. So here are the toxic male characters who are the absolute worst, excuse my misandry:

Kevin McRoberts - Kevin Can F**k Himself

We had to start somewhere from the bottom of the underworld. A recent entry on this list, Kevin is the lead character Allison’s husband who...let’s just say has the brain of a dumb frat bro who is extremely high on pot and hasn’t recovered since then. While most of the sitcoms in the past would portray these so-called goofy and dim-witted husbands as “big fun” and lovable, Kevin is not like that, at all. In this anti-sitcom nightmare, Kevin literally believes that the whole world revolves around him. He plans such stupid unrealistic schemes to seize the day, recklessly spends the savings on stupid irrelevant sports merchandises and doesn’t even let Allison have her own agency outside of his life. Plus he is so petty and spiteful to the point he destroys one good thing that any of the women in the series have, like Allison’s dream job and Patty’s love life. And that latter was because she didn’t bring him a burger! All of this makes him look less funny and more tyrannical. No wonder poor Allison got spurred into wanting to kill him.

Ross Geller - Friends

Ross may seemed like a “nice guy”, but let’s just agree it was a facade. Ross believes that he knows what’s best for the women he dates in the series and thinks he is superior and is always right about everything. He is seems extremely disturbed over the fact that his ex-wife, Carol is a lesbian and is jilted towards her current wife, Susan and snarks at the latter for it. And then there is her extreme control and jealousy towards Rachel, especially in her career. While Rachel is no saint either, Ross jumps to the conclusion that the man who got her a perfect job wants to sleep with her, then goes out of his way to humiliate and mark his territory on her and even if it’s revealed that the said guy has a girlfriend of his own, Ross still doesn’t abandon his theory, unless he believes that the guy is cheating on his girlfriend with Rachel. And then there is the fact that he joined his student girlfriend on a spring break just to have her all to himself, not caring about the fact that what if one of his students or colleagues would’ve seen him on TV with her and that could’ve put him in a huge scrutiny.

Joe Goldberg - You

The show is basically built around how toxic Joe is, but this didn’t stop him from having his own fanbase apparently, with most of them glossing over his actions. But Joe is not a dream boyfriend at all. Once he sees a woman in front of him, he immediately gets obsessed with her and believes she belongs to him and him only. And to achieve that, he stalks her, he checks everything about her, kills people he believes are harmful to her when he himself is the same and when the woman finds out about him and rejects him, he kidnaps and kills her and the cycle begins again.

Chuck Bass - Gossip Girl

What is it with the teen drama industry’s obsession with the “Bad Boy who can be redeemed with love” trope? Chuck Bass is “the bad boy” of Gossip Girl. If his attempted rape of Serena and Jenny didn’t give fans an indication that how deranged he is, his violent and emotional abuse of his girlfriend Blair cements him as this. He slut-shamed women around him, hit Blair once and even traded her for a hotel ownership and somehow he gets a happy ending with her at the end! What?

Nate Jacobs - Euphoria

Nate is a star quarterback of his high school football team and seems like he has it all, but underneath, he is fucking deranged. His untamed manly rage causes him to physically and emotionally abuse his girlfriend Maddy and blackmail Jules, who didn’t do anything wrong but just sleep with his father, which makes me think that Nate is blackmailing her into lying to the cops about his assault on Maddy when she wasn’t even there when it happened just because it’s fun for him. Honestly, I’d like to see the imagine Rue and Jules had of killing him become a reality someday.

Dawson Leery - Dawson’s Creek

Just because the show is named after him since he is the protagonist, doesn’t justify his actions. Dawson sees himself as some sort of a Nice Guy hero who believes he is entitled to everything. He has this extreme view on women and how they should fulfil his fantasies of his Rom-Com world. He is extremely critical of Jen when he finds out about her promiscuous past and tells her that she should be ashamed of herself for it, and gets jealous when his two best friends Joey and Pacey begin dating. And when he was briefly in the movie business, he was a rookie but was already a primadonna with the director and crew of the movie was working on and insulted a film critic for criticising his movie which was actually bad.

Kilgrave - Jessica Jones

Kilgrave is the main villain of the Marvel-Netflix series Jessica Jones. He becomes obsessed with the titular heroine when she breaks off from his mind-control. Before that, he spent years treating her as his sex slave and raping her constantly, which left her traumatised. He begins to stalker and believe it will be a “lover’s reunion” when he will see her again someday. He manipulates and brainwashes everyone around him to his whim and treats most women as objects but despite all that, sees himself as the good guy of the situation. Even after Jessica finally gives him his just desserts, he still haunts her everyday.

Fernando Vera - Mr. Robot

This spawn of satan is the reason why I decided to write this list in the first place. Where do I even start? He is first introduced into the series when he forces Shayla to go on a date with her and later rape her. This is what causes the misandrist vigilante Elliot to sell him out to the FBI and this apparently turns on Vera and moves his unhealthy obsession to Elliot. He has Shayla killed when he tricks Elliot into breaking him out of prison, then returns to have him all to himself by kidnapping his therapist Krista and forcing information out of her about Elliot so that he could “break him and build him back up”, like a fucked up version of The Taming Of The Shrew. He psychologically abuses Elliot into remembering being sexually abused by his father as a child and proceeds to gaslight him into thinking that he was just helping him. The huge problem with Vera is that he sees himself as some sort of Christian Grey who believes that his abuse towards both Shayla and Elliot is charming. Whenever someone failed his desires, he immediately gets bored of them and moves onto someone else, like when he got Shayla killed and moved onto Elliot. That’s why it felt so cathartic when Krista killed him.

Tate Langdon - American Horror Story

Apparently, he is Tate Langdon and he is...hot?? While most of the AHS fans glorified him due to his emo bad boy nature, let’s not forget the fact that he was a school shooter who murdered innocent students and staff and was in general possessive and toxic towards Violet. So no way he is boyfriend material!

Don Draper - Mad Men

Don Draper was the main protagonist of Mad Men. He was an advertisement and marketing executive who had a lot of vices and did a lot of horrible things such as cheat on his wife and treat almost every women and colleagues like crap.

Dexter Morgan - Dexter

While Dexter might seem like the serial-killer killer, there are a lot of things about him which are unadmirable. He gaslights those he is close to so that they could get off his back, obstructs evidence pointing out to him, captures those who didn’t even fit his victims like Doakes and caused the deaths of LaGuerta, Rita and finally his sister Debra. Yeah I think you should stay away from him.

Walter White - Breaking Bad

Aaah..the worst of the worst. Walter White is the protagonist of the series Breaking Bad. He first starts off as a pushover high school teacher who isn’t respected by anyone. When he gets diagnosed with Lung Cancer, he gets into the meth business so that he could support his family, but we all know that it’s not true. He relishes on the power and glory from being a drug dealer and then kingpin and because of that he ends up abusing both Jesse and Skyler, emotionally abusing and selling out the former to the sadistic Nazis and raping the latter several times. He is so petty and spiteful that he kills anyone insulting his ego, just ask Mike. And even after all this, he still claims that it’s all for his family. Like what?

[horrorhot-line]

Do you have any writing tips Coz i rlly like your writing ❤😭

This one took a while to answer because of how much I had to say. (Please keep in mind that I am in no way telling you to follow these tips, take whatever you think will work for you and discard what doesn't, okay?)

Alright, first things first, I've been writing on and off for the past seven years, and I can say for a fact that I've definitely improved since my first fic (which was on paper, we don't talk about it). The following tips are what works for me, and what I believe has helped me become better at writing. 

Remember, fanfiction is supposed to be self-indulgent, and therefore you are entitled to write whatever you like because it's your work, so you don’t have to follow any of these tips if you don’t feel like it.

Proofreading, making sense & grammar

Grammar and punctuation make a huge difference. You could have an amazing story, but bad grammar can make that piece of work flop. Stories are supposed to be immersive, but if there are too many mistakes or the words don't make sense, it can ruin it for a reader. (I don't mean your garden variety missing letters, I mean something like 'an he and her goes and u were like oh no'.) I can't name the amount of time I've started to read something online and ditched it because the grammar irks me (your instead of you're, their instead of they're and so on). I've seen a lot of fanfiction writers also switch between past tense, present tense and future tense in the same paragraph, which makes it hard to understand what's happening. 

If you're trying to post and have it get attention, please do check your work to make sure it makes sense. Write down everything first, don't correct anything, and once you're done writing the scene, go back to proofread the whole thing. Get someone to read it for you and point out mistakes or things that don't make sense, if you can. 

If you can't, then there are alternatives. There's 'text to speech', where you can copy and paste what you've written down onto a website, and it will read the text out loud to you. It works the best (for me anyway). There's also grammarly, which is kind of similar to google docs except it points out all the mistakes you may have in your work. (Bear in mind a few mistakes don't matter, but if there's too many then it's likely that your post or blog won't get much attention.) This tip helps you to get a lot of likes on your writing.

Research

If you're writing fanfiction, please study the character(s). My biggest pet peeve when I read fanfiction, is that the love interest is out of character. Whether it be the way they talk or the way they act, if it isn't close to canon, I cannot read it.

So, if you're trying to gain traction and have your work get a lot of positive feedback or likes, then it's best to do research. Most fictional characters have wiki pages where their personalities, relationships and life stories are listed, so why not make the most of it? It's all there for the taking. When writing for a character, rewatch the show/movie to get a good grasp of their personality and then begin to write. The more canon your writing is, the more people will enjoy it.

Reader Inserts

Ever come across an x reader where there's way too much description about their appearance? (Specified hair colour, hair length, named family members etc.) I once read a reader insert where the author described the reader as someone who had pale skin, blue eyes and blonde hair... I was like, huh? That's not what I look like :') 

When you specify or go into details about 'reader's' appearance, it will most likely ruin the mental image your readers have in their heads already. I feel like when one tries to write a story or oneshot with a reader, they should be as vague as possible. There's no need to specify the height, or the reader's dream job or names of family members, or outfit choice- that's up to the people that are reading your stuff to work out. Leave it to their imagination. (This doesn't apply to requests made by others for specific character traits or appearances.)

Write believable characters

If your work has a reader insert or original characters, please make them believable. You don't want to write characters that are 2D and have little to no depth. Please don't make them perfect, that takes the fun out of things and makes your character somewhat boring. You don’t want to write a character that your readers find it hard to care about, so even if you were to kill them, the readers wouldn’t care. 

Make them real, with real problems and a factor of relatability. Heck, give them toxic/bad personality traits while you're at it. Easily irritable, overly sensitive, cynical, selfish, manipulative, people pleaser- the list is endless (we all have our flaws, no?). Contrary to what others may believe, this will make your character easy to relate to or understand, and more people will like your work that way. (this links to my next tip btw)

Mary Sues

I've seen this a lot in the fanfiction community, and oh god, does it make me cringe (this is because of personal preference, though). Mary sues, if you aren't aware, are perfect characters that have no faults. They don't make mistakes, and everyone loves them even if they do nothing. They are basically the perfect hero/heroine, and that makes them boring. My biggest pet peeves are mary sues in fanfiction author's works, (but, this is because I can't stand perfect and over-powered characters that everyone seems to fall for at first sight). 

Fair enough if the entire story is self-indulgent, I'm not here to bash others over personal preferences (this is just how I feel on the matter), but that also means that you take the risk of your work flopping for that sole reason. Your work might not get any traction or positive feedback because it is overly indulgent. 

Don't make your original character or reader insert a mary sue. Throw hurdles and hardships at them, let them make huge mistakes and learn from them, let them mature. Let them have flaws, let them win over the love interest slowly, instead of having the two fall in love instantly. 

Use the right inspiration for romantic relationships

Please for the love of god do not use toxic relationships as your inspiration for the romance you write into your story. 'After' by Anna Todd comes to mind first, as it is a good example of a romance written horribly. If you don't know already, then it's a Harry Styles wattpad fanfiction that got popular and was published, with two movie adaptations out already, (with more on the way)- the classic good girl falls for bad boy cliche. 

So, what's so wrong with 'After'? For one, the male interest is toxic as hell. Anger management issues, substance abuse, trash personality, the list goes on. What does the female interest to about it? Absolutely nothing. She lets him walk all over her and forgives him for it every time. 

Please don't use stories like this as a basis for what the romance in your work is like. Relationships where one abuses the other, whether it be mentally, physically or verbally are wrong and shouldn't be glorified nor romanticised. Relationships are supposed to be healthy, and shouldn't tear the people in it, apart. Use the right inspiration, there's plenty out there.

Writing chemistry between characters

For me, I use inspiration where ever I can find it. Movies, animes, books, real life, you name it. Observe the different types of media around you. How do friends interact with each other? How is it different from childhood friends and family friends? How is it different to lovers? I watch Netflix shows/movies in my free time, mostly romance- and yes, it is for research purposes. From there, I take a particular interaction or scene and get to thinking. If the characters from my works were in that situation, how would they react? 

Ever watched a movie or a show and thought to yourself, 'Wow, the interactions are so awkward'? That's mostly because the script is forced, and that's the last thing you want to write like. Chemistry, whether it be platonic or romantic, should be natural. The best way for you to do this is by thinking about how characters would interact and letting it come naturally to you.

Don't rush it

You have all the time in the world to write chemistry between characters. Why rush it? Slow burns hit the hardest and a lot of people like them. What I mean to say is, please for the love of god, don't let the characters in your work meet and then immediately fall in love. 

The countless amount of times I've sighed in frustration because I've decided to read a story and the first chapter they meet, the second they're already a thing and the third they get married? (This is an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.) What? Why? The time between realising feelings and officially dating should at least take a month, so write with that in mind. (This tip doesn't apply to one-shots.)

Narration

I’ve seen authors skip out on explaining where the story takes place and give the bare minimum when it comes to details, and have realised that it makes it very hard for the reader to understand what’s happening. When there’s barely any context, the story is no longer immersive and is less enjoyable.

Focus on describing the settings. There should be more description than dialogue. The weather, the surrounding, if there are people near or not, smells, sounds, etc. This will help the reader visualise what's happening, and will make it more enjoyable all around. The surroundings should be included in your story to make it more interesting and to keep the reader hooked. I've seen authors do this in their fanfiction and my god, when it's done right, it is so beautiful.

The first paragraph

This is a tip I've only recently started to use. You should always start the first paragraph off with something interesting. It's gotta be eye-catching. This makes sure that the reader doesn't click off of your work before you get to the good bits. There are a lot of writers who start their stories off with the classic 'I woke up in the morning to the alarm clock sounding,' and it is the absolute worst because it's the most overused cliche I've ever seen. 

Reading about someone waking up isn't interesting unless it's important to the story. For example, you can start off with a character waking up, if they're sick, 'I jolted awake only to immediately groan at the headache I was hit with. I moved to massage the bridge of my nose, to ease my pain, somewhat. It was then that I realised I was covered in a thin layer of sweat. Breathing in through my nose, I kicked the covers off of myself in an attempt to try and cool down. Turning my head and coughing into my pillow, I wondered if it was even worth it to get up.'

Internal monologues

Internal monologues give character to the person you're writing about and also gives the reader a good idea of what they're like. They also make your story better as a whole and can prove to lengthen it a bit more. Sprinkle them in where you see fit.

For example, 'The school day dragged on. You gazed at the clock yet again- why did it feel as if the hand on it hadn't moved? You should have stayed home. What was the point of this again? You could be spending your time doing something better. You suppressed the urge to yawn as the teacher droned on about how to calculate frequencies and wavelengths.'

Read

I mean this. When you're not writing, read, and do it like it's a job. Find a good book or a fanfiction that's well written, and take note of things the author has done that you think, 'Oh! That's worded beautifully.' This will help you expand your vocabulary, provide you with inspiration and overall will improve your writing.

hope this helps 💞💞💞💞

[stillness-in-green]

Shigaraki, the League and “Redemption”

(In this post: 1700 words about how much I feel like stories/meta in which Shigaraki is rescued or redeemed miss the entire point of Shigaraki.)

It's a big open question how much of Shigaraki's backstory was engineered by All For One.  We're not even sure if AFO is the villain who killed Nana's husband, the event that kicked off the entire downward spiral of the Shimura family, much less what degree of involvement he had in Tenko's manifestation of Decay.  There's a tremendous amount of well-thought-out, interesting meta and fic about what will happen when Shigaraki finds out the truth, whether he can or should still be redeemed as he currently stands, or how Tenko might have been saved from ever becoming Shigaraki to begin with.  While I have read and enjoyed quite a lot of those theories and stories, I still find myself bothered by the prevalence of that line of thought because it ignores the fact that hero society stands condemned regardless.  

Whether or not AFO gave Tenko the Decay quirk knowing what would happen, whether he found out about Tenko the night of the accident or never lost track of Kotaro from the very beginning, in truth, none of that matters to the narrative of the League on the whole.  Nothing about Shigaraki's past has any bearing on the pasts of the other members. Trying to decide how to "save" Shigaraki avoids the fact that he is the leader of the League of Villains and their pain still stands regardless of their leader's history. 

You cannot act as though saving Shigaraki--with All Might, Inko, Izuku, Eraserhead, anyone--would redeem hero society, because Shigaraki is not hero society's only victim. He's not even its most straightforward one!  The condemnation he articulates of the world he lives in can't be addressed by him realizing he was manipulated by AFO all along or getting a good therapist in prison, because the world he lives in has failed a good many more people than just him. 

Let's break it down.  

The League Members

Twice fell through the cracks because of a lack of social support after his parents were killed in a villain attack.  He was just a teenager back then--what arrangements were made about where he was going to live?  If he was old enough that foster care/being placed in a group home wasn't a good option, did he instead have a stipend from the government?  Where was the social worker who should have been overseeing his case?  Where was his homeroom teacher when he dropped out of school?  What support should have been available when he wound up homeless on the streets?  Heroes stop villains and are rewarded both socially and monetarily for doing so, but the much more difficult and involved work of dealing with the fallout from those battles is clearly undervalued, badly so, in comparison.  Hero society, which prioritizes glamorized reaction over everyday prevention, failed Bubaigawara Jin.

Spinner had the wrong kind of face.  X-Men-style mutant discrimination left him isolated and alienated, shunned by the inhabitants of his backwater hometown because of his animal-type quirk.  To say nothing about the threat of violent hate crimes implied by the existence of a KKK analogue!  But it goes further than just the bigotry of his neighbors--Spinner's quirk was also unremarkable, meaning that, in a society that prizes flashy and offense-based quirks in its heroes, Spinner would have had few if any role models.  Given how many heroes there are, it seems strange to consider that there isn't a single straightforward heteromorph for Spinner to idolize, but given how strongly he latches onto first Stain's warped ideals and later Shigaraki's nihilistic grandeur, Spinner is clearly a young man desperate for a role model--if a hero that fit the bill existed, he wouldn't be a villain today.  So he's failed directly by his community for their bigotry and indirectly by society for the way it told him, in a thousand ways big and small, that Iguchi Shuuichi was not a person worth valuing.

Toga had the wrong kind of quirk.  It's true that, more than anyone else in the League, she feels like a character who would always have struggled with mental stability, even with the best help imaginable--but she didn't get the best help imaginable, did she?  She got parents who called her a freak, who berated a child barely into grade school about how unnatural and awful the desires she was born with were.  She was put into a quirk counselling program that apparently only caused her to feel more detached from society.  If Curious' characterization of quirk counselling is at all accurate, it seems to focus not on how to manage one's unusual or difficult quirk in healthy or productive ways, but rather on stressing what society considers "normal," on teaching its participants how to force themselves into that mold.  Hero society wants people with different needs to learn how to function like "normal" people; it is unwilling to look for ways to accommodate such people on a societal level.  Toga Himiko was failed by a society that demonized and othered her for a trait that she did not choose and innate desires that she never asked to experience.

And then, most prominently of all*, there's Dabi.  We all know where the big Dabi backstory mystery is going, and his is the most open condemnation of hero society of them all.  Dabi was raised on a heady cocktail, parental abuse mixed liberally with unquestioned acceptance of the fundamental importance of having a powerful quirk.  Whatever else can be said of Endeavor's path to redemption, the old Enji is emblematic of everything wrong with hero society: the fundamental devaluing of those without power, the fervent strain to push oneself past one's limits over and over and over again, regardless of the consequences to your health or your relationships, the practice of raising children to glorify a dangerous profession that fights the symptoms of societal ills rather than the root causes.  The ugly secrets hidden in the Todoroki house are the ugly secrets hidden within hero society's ideals, and because he embodies those ideals so thoroughly, of course Endeavor is lionized and well-paid by a society that never had to see Todoroki Touya's scars.

Mirror of Reality

All of these issues map to things in real life, and I don't only mean in a vague, universal sense--I mean they reflect on specific and observable Japanese problems. Read up on koseki family registries and consider how the dogged insistence on maintaining them impacted the Shimura family, tracked down by a monster.  Look into societal bias against orphans and imagine how it shaped peoples' reactions to teenaged Jin and his alleged 'scary face.'  Read up on how Japan approaches mental and physical disabilities, on what it regularly does to homeless camps, on what responses get trotted out when someone comes forward with a story about closeted abuse.  The League embodies these issues in indirect, sometimes fantastical ways, but they're not what I would call subtle, either; there's a reason the generally poor, disenfranchised League members are contrasted with powerful, urbane criminals like All for One, callous manipulators like Overhaul, and entrenched pillars of society like Re-Destro.  

Hero AUs are a fun thought exercise and all, but the League exists to call out and typify very real problems in heroic society and, by metaphorical extension, modern day Japanese society as well.  Hero society studiously looks away from its victims.  It doesn't want to see them and it thinks even trying to talk about them is disruptive and distasteful.  There's no indication in-universe that there's even a movement trying to change this state of affairs.  Certainly there are a great many things that could have changed to spare the BNHA world Shigaraki Tomura, but none of those quick, easy solutions would have saved Twice or Toga, Spinner or Dabi.  The League of Villains is the punishment, the overdue reckoning that their country will have to face for its myriad failures--for letting its social safety nets grow ragged, for failing to stamp out quirk-based prejudice, for allowing its heroes to operate with so little oversight.  For growing so complacent that not one person had the moral wherewithal to extend a hand to a bloodied, lost, suffering child.  

Shigaraki, Past and Future

One of the most heartbreaking and yet awe-inspiring aspects of Shigaraki's characterization in his Deika City flashback is that he was thoughtful and compassionate enough to reach out to other kids who were being excluded and teased by the rest of his peer group.  The League is foreshadowed for him even as a child, because even back then, he was a kid suffering repression and repudiation and so had empathy for others in similar straits.  Young Tenko is the person who would have reached out a hand to the scary but obviously needy Tenko wandering the streets; Tomura, despite everything All For One did to him, still retains that core of fellow-feeling that invites other outcasts to play with him.

"Saving" Shigaraki without addressing the societal flaws that created the people gathered under his banner negates the entire point he and the League exist to raise. I think readers will be forced to confront those flaws alongside Midoriya and the rest of his classmates, who the story has made a point to keep mostly isolated and on a steady PLUS ULTRA diet of all the same rhetoric that leads to consequences like the League to begin with.  I only wish more of the fandom--hero and villain fandom alike--was on the same page and writing their fic and meta accordingly.

Footnotes and Etc.

*The only characters in the League whose backstories we don't have much window on are Mr. Compress and Magne, both of whom are framed as seeing society as repressive.  Magne openly says as much to Overhaul; Mr. C intimates it to the 1-A kids during the training camp attack.  I'm inclined to hold off on commenting on them very thoroughly, though, because in neither case do we know exactly what drove them to crime in the first place. That's not a huge problem for Sako--if anyone on that team is into flamboyant villainy for the sheer joy of it, it's him--but I would definitely want to know more specifics about Magne's personal history before I correlate her experience as a trans woman with her portrayal as a violent, even lethal, criminal.  That would get right into the problematic elements of portraying all these societal outcasts as villains, people who undoubtedly have a point, but have taken to terrorism to illustrate it.  It's very possible that, for all that the League maps to real problems in Japan, we're still going to get a very mealy-mouthed, "But it's still wrong to lash out when you could protest nonviolently and work with your oppressors to seek a peaceful solution," moral from all this.

P.S.  None of the above meta even takes into account the multiple non-League characters whose stories illustrate various failings of hero society--Gentle Criminal, Hawks, Shinsou, even Midoriya himself, as those endless reams of Villain!Deku AUs are ever hasty to expound upon.  Vigilantes touches on the idea of "hero" and "villain" categorizations as being almost entirely political in their inception, as is also hinted at with historical characters like Destro.  Seriously, the mountain of problems with hero culture just looms higher with every passing arc!  

P.P.S.  I absolutely do not mean to imply with this meta that Japan suffers uniquely from any of the problems discussed above.  Other countries obviously have their own difficulties with homelessness, accessibility of care, victim blaming, and so forth.  Horikoshi is writing in and about his own culture, though, and stripping Shigaraki of his villainous circumstances in the interest of making him happier and/or more palatable strikes me as being kind of culture-blind in a way that it’s very easy for Western fans to unthinkingly slip into.  Just some food for thought.

[aion-rsa]

The Dark Knight: Why Heath Ledger’s Joker is Still Scary Today

https://ift.tt/2MFoX6l

It’s one of the great villain introductions in cinema history. Standing with a slight hunch at the center of a massive 70mm image, Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker not so much dominates the frame as he commandeers it. He seduces the IMAX camera, which is still capturing vast amounts of Chicago’s cityscape around him, and draws it closer to his sphere of influence, and by extension us. Before this moment in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the director’s Gotham City functioned with clocklike precision. Even its greatest villains were slaves to the need of rationalizing everything in cold, utilitarian logic.

Not the Joker.

Within our first breath next to Ledger’s clown, one senses a malevolent spirit has been summoned, and he’s chosen to manifest out of thin air at this exact moment, on this exact street corner. He’s come to claim Gotham’s collective soul, but he’ll settle for any individual with delusions of virtue who crosses his path—including you.

This is of course just a fleeting moment in The Dark Knight; a brisk tease before Ledger’s shown his makeup-encrusted face or uttered even a word. In fact, Nolan and the actor dole out the character with impressive restraint: first as a masked Mephistopheles who is primarily a sing-song-y voice until he unmasks at the end of a bravura bank robbery. Later he becomes an actual narrative presence when he shows up again more than 20 minutes into the film, demonstrating for Gotham’s criminal underworld how to perform a magic trick.

As an isolated performance, there’s an argument to be made that none has ever been finer in the realm of superhero movies. Sure, there’ve been showy turns before and since in comic book blockbusters; there have even been great interpretations of the Joker before and after Ledger. Yet what the actor was able to do in 2008 transfixed audiences because he, like the character, had the freedom to bend the film to his will—even as Nolan prevented the movie from simply becoming merely a showcase for the performance.

With the grungy strung out hair of an addict who hasn’t showered in three months, greasy self-applied pancake makeup, and a grisly Glasgow smile that’s as unnerving as it is uneven (suggesting perhaps half of it was self-inflicted to make a matching set of scars), Ledger’s anarchist supervillain was a long way from Jack Nicholson’s hammy version of the same character in 1989. For audiences, and even comic book fans baying for something darker than Nicholson, it was abrasive in its time—and electrifying, like a punk rocker leaping into the mosh pit. Indeed, Ledger reportedly based the character’s appearance in part on the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, and there is more than a hint of Tom Waits’ gravel in Ledger’s cadence whenever the clown growls.

But more than aesthetic culture shock, the enduring horror (and not-so-secret appeal) of Ledger’s Joker lies in the effect he has on the film, both in terms of its narrative storytelling and its enduring pop culture standing. Speaking strictly about this Joker as a character, the villain is off screen for far more of The Dark Knight’s running time than he’s on it. Appearing in only 33 minutes of The Dark Knight’s epic 152-minute running time, the average length of a Hollywood spectacle passes without the Joker on screen. Yet he’s omnipresent in the film, a shadow that hangs over each of Nolan’s three relatively equal protagonists: vigilante Batman (Christian Bale), police lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman), and district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

Nolan and his brother and co-screenwriter, Jonathan Nolan, have admitted the setup is somewhat inspired by another quintessential blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In both films, three disparate, combative male authority figures band together for a mythic battle against a presence so malignant and evil, it transcends being simply a shark or a madman in makeup—or even a comic book supervillain. Like that beast, Joker has no arc, no psychological growth, he’s a force of primal evil unbounded. And as the heroes’ battle against him creeps on, it seems like the sanity of their entire community is being dragged into the abyss.

This framing allows Ledger’s Joker to functionally be a catch-all stand-in for many of the social anxieties that kept American audiences up at night during the Bush years. Some of them still do today. There are of course obvious implications to the Joker being the terrorist, the non-state actor who cannot be negotiated with, and who doesn’t play by preconceived rules or notions of fairness. There is also shading of the lone wolf, the usually male gunman who inexplicably pulls the trigger. Most of all though, the Joker represents the hole in which much of humanity’s irrational predilections toward violence is collectively stored and ignored by our cultural memory… until it can’t be.

As Michael Caine’s Alfred Pennyworth famously reasons, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” That summation of staring into irrational, needless cruelty is what gives The Dark Knight bite. And what a sharp bite it is in moments like when Ledger’s Joker laughs manically at the Batman, our ostensible hero who’s resorted to pummeling (or torturing) the villain in an interrogation room. The clown gloats, “You have nothing to threaten me with, nothing to do with all your strength.”

This is why the Joker is such an effective villain for The Dark Knight’s parable about how best to use moral power in immoral (i.e. irrational) times—and perhaps why the thrill of Ledger’s performance was so strong on first glance that it powered him all the way to a posthumous Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category seven months after the film’s release.

Still, Ledger’s Joker, more than any other movie villain in recent memory, continues to haunt well after that Oscar night. The mental image of the character slipping his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, like a cobra, and licking his scars—a tic Ledger invented to keep his prosthetics in place while upping the creep factor—has stayed with us like a subconscious boogeyman. Thirteen years on from The Dark Knight’s release, Ledger’s depiction of the Clown Prince of Crime has gone down in the annals of cinema alongside Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs or, well, that shark in Jaws again. He’s an enigmatic and mysterious persona who is barely seen in his film, yet unmistakably casts a pall of evil over the whole proceeding.

We don’t know why Ledger’s Joker actually became the way he is, or what made him so obsessed with the Batman—to the point where he was inspired to put on “war paint” and declare his love for the Caped Crusader by saying, “You complete me!” The Joker gives multiple versions of his origin story in The Dark Knight, telling one mobster played by Michael Jai White that he’s a victim of an abusive father while later recounting to Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that he scarred his own face to cheer up his similarly disfigured wife. Both tales are of course lies, transparent manipulations intended to prey upon perceived vulnerabilities in his victims. This touch was inspired by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke where the comic book Joker provides the reader with a sob story flashback, and then confesses he probably made it up.

“If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice,” he says on the page.

Read more

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Joker: 6 Actors Who Have Played the Clown Prince of Crime

By David Crow

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The Dark Knight, The Joker, and Game Theory

By Ryan Lambie

The Nolan brothers understand the horror of this, and they keep the Joker a manipulative and inscrutable evil. Beyond obvious sociopathic tendencies, we know nothing about his inner-psychology and barely can ferret out his real motives beyond an odd devotion to maintaining Batman’s attention. He claims to be an agent of chaos who wants to “just do things,” yet his meticulously planned attacks belie this claim. In the end, he sees himself in a battle for “Gotham’s soul.” Like Amity Island’s Great White Leviathan, or the original incomprehensible nature of Thomas Harris’ cannibal serial killer in the earliest books, we never know the truth about why he is, and how he’s able to do what he does.

That mystery makes him live on in our own heads for years after the story ends and the credits roll.

It’s interesting to consider that effect now, after years of pop culture storytelling going in the completely opposite direction, particularly in comic book movies and other fanboy-driven media. Rather than find satisfaction in the inexplicability of evil, or standalone visions, we like to rationalize it and sympathize with it, even while glorifying it. Most of all, however, we insatiably seem to simply want more.

The need for endless content being generated by intellectual property has led to prequels, sequels, and even spinoffs that explore and too often redeem villains. Even the Joker himself is not wholly immune to this.

Since 2008, there have been two big screen versions of the Joker. Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix both had the unenviable task of stepping into Ledger’s shadow, with at least one of them being dwarfed by it. Leto’s attempts at “method acting” stunts on the set of Suicide Squad shows what can go wrong when scenery-chewing is mistaken with Strasberg.

Phoenix obviously fared better in his own Joker movie two years ago, making the actor the second performer to win an Oscar for playing the comic book villain. However, his film’s interpretation is diametrically opposed to Ledger’s enigma. Instead Phoenix’s film attempts to rationalize everything about the character, depicting the Joker as a mentally ill sad sack whose motivations are borrowed from other iconic movie screen villains and anti-heroes like the mother-obsessed Norman Bates (Psycho) and ticking time bomb Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver).

It still makes for a fascinating (if unoriginal) portrait, but one divorced from the terror of the unknown. We understand who Phoenix’s Joker is and why he is. Society, man. Phoenix’s Joker even outright states it before murdering not-Johnny Carson (Robert De Niro). “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? I’ll tell you what you get, you get what you fucking deserve!”

Technically, Phoenix’s Joker appears closer to our reality and our daily horrors. With clown makeup inspired by real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy and preening self-pity parties resembling the manifestos of so many mass murderers, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is modeled as much off nightly news nightmares as comic book panels. Writer-director Todd Phillips is inelegantly blatant about it.

Nevertheless, whatever ugly truth there may be in that approach, it’s not as haunting, or exhilarating, to witness as what Ledger did in his own rock star interpretation of evil. Save for a blink-and-you-miss-it insert shot, we never see Ledger with the makeup off. And while he might indulge in mocking “society,” he is a character who says more by basking in the chaos of a city in terror, literally sticking his head out of a stolen police car like a dog with the wind in his hair and our horror on his face. It’s a more enduring image than a didactic conversation about insecurities with a father figure. Thirteen years later, Ledger’s version of the character continues to confound, horrify, and ultimately thrill. He still has the last laugh.

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The post The Dark Knight: Why Heath Ledger’s Joker is Still Scary Today appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[artistic-mathematics]

Is this another She-Ra theories/speculations post?

It is indeed.

Season 3 spoilers!!! Again!!!

Part 1 is here!

Catra’s redemption arc (and Beast Island?)

Yeah, I think she’s getting one. She seems irredeemable at the moment, but I’m here to try to change your mind.

There’s been a bit of talk on the sidelines about how Catra will probably end up at Beast Island and the whole sequence of the people seeing her as a queen, yada yada. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go read about the original Catra. Yes, from the original theories.)

Generally speaking, Catra’s hit a new low. It’s noted that her main motivation is spite, and will do whatever it takes to defeat Adora, even if it meant watching the world burn in the process. She’s kidnapped Bow and Glimmer, tried to kill Adora several times, destroyed many parts of Etheria in her quest to gain power and have Hordak trust her.

Irredeemable, though? I think not.

Remember that Catra had an abusive upbringing. She was always overshadowed by Adora as they both grew up, only because Shadow Weaver saw that power within her and glorified it, while Catra was only kept around because Adora was “fond” of her. She was always overshadowed, always being thrown around like she’s useless, always being blamed and taking the fall for any of Adora’s mishaps. In order to lessen the blows, she always acted somewhat tame around the others.

The moment Adora left, her one motivation to stay tame disappeared. She didn’t want to go with Adora not because she necessarily liked the Horde, but because she wanted to prove to Shadow Weaver and Hordak that she was capable. At first, it was getting Adora back to the Horde. When that failed, it became the ability to defeat Adora and the Princess Alliance.

Catra simply believes that Adora betrayed her by leaving to join the Princess Alliance. She didn’t go with Adora just because she wanted to prove that she was just as capable, even more so, than Adora in the Horde.

That’s why her interaction with Shadow Weaver in the prison was so crucial. Catra leaned into her touch like it was addicting, almost. Shadow Weaver praised her, even mentioning how Catra could be better if she took the right precautions. Shadow Weaver felt like the parental figure she never had, for a moment. Then Shadow Weaver escaped and Catra was devastated. She thought she had met her expectations for once, her being especially crucial. As abusive as she was, Shadow Weaver was the only parental figure Catra had known. She was happy for a second, comforted by that one parental figure for probably what was the first and only time, only for her to realize that it was Shadow Weaver manipulating Catra one last time, punching her in the gut, and leaving her... once again, for Adora.

And Catra is ticked off by it.

Now she no longer cares. She’s been backstabbed by Shadow Weaver who screwed her over for Adora. She’s felt so insignificant. She’s willing to do whatever it takes to get the approval of the person who’s truly in power here, Hordak.

Remember in the Crimson Waste when Catra mentions she’s lost everything? Haha, no she didn’t, at the time. The moment she left the Crimson Waste to return to the Fright Zone and prove to Hordak that she was useful, she lost everything she’s had, for real this time.

She backstabbed Entrapta after she admitted Adora was right, even after she saved Catra’s life. If Hordak ever finds out, she’s utterly screwed.

She then turned on Scorpia, who tried to intervene when Catra stabs Entrapta with a stun baton. Scorpia looks extremely hurt, although later mentions she believes that Catra was just scared and didn’t mean to. But Scorpia doesn’t even entirely believe that anymore, considering her face expression as she tried to convince Adora of it. Scorpia is no longer convinced herself.

Notice how both Scorpia and Entrapta cut off mid-sentence when talking about Catra in the warped reality and pause for a second? Yeah.

The worst part is that Catra pushed Adora to the limit here too. Catra’s pissed Adora off completely, and Adora is no longer going to go easy on Catra. Adora’s always been gentle with Catra despite the fact she could easily take her out (cue berserk She-Ra scene) but she never has. It’s no longer the case now, and Catra knows. She knows she’s made a huge mistake.

Catra has now completely lost everything.

Now here’s what I’m thinking... there’s two main ways (I could think of that’s fairly reasonable) the plot could go with this.

Catra gets away with backstabbing Entrapta, but soon finds out that Hordak isn’t even the true leader. Hordak gets his redemption arc, in which he sides with the princesses against Horde Prime. Angered, Catra sides with Horde Prime.

Going down this course, however, Catra’s going to realize that she is nothing to Horde Prime as well.

Horde Prime clearly wants to be a monarch. He doesn’t care about others. He’s not going to want Catra to be a second in command at all. Even if he does end up doing that, he’ll just use her and dispose of her.

The only thing I can see here is that Catra will eventually be forced to join the Princess Alliance.

Hordak finds out about what Catra did and gets sent to Beast Island just as the Princess Alliance go to the island as well.

Scorpia is very likely going to rat Catra out. That scorpion cannot keep a secret for her life and it’s... pretty obvious.

Catra gets sent to Beast Island and there’s the whole sequence of Catra and her mask and being the queen of the Magicats... this is entirely speculation upon the original She-Ra series. You can read the original Catra’s story here.

Even if the whole Magicats sequence doesn’t happen, I’m sure that she’ll end up just rallying a bunch of people against Hordak or something. How much do we all want to bet that there are a bunch of Horde rejects there and they end up influencing her into taking revenge? I mean, her main motivation is spite, once again.

Either way, I think she’ll get a redemption arc. It may take a while, and I think it’ll be after Hordak gets a redemption (ahaha, who we thought to be the main villain getting a redemption? who thought?) if he gets one, which I really think he will.

To be completely fair, with his interactions with Entrapta, I really think he will. It’s clear that he’s bitter about being cast out and definitely has emotions that he represses. Where have we seen that before, hmm...

Madame Razz

Alright, we’re coming back to her.

I originally thought that she may be a First One, but by the way she acts and talks, I don’t think so anymore. I think she’s just been on Etheria for a very long time and has come to expect the weird things that occur on the planet. She also seems to be some sort of magical being. She seemed entirely unfazed by the portal instability, possibly because of Mara, but I’m starting to wonder if she has some sort of time traveling experience, or is some all-seeing being maybe? (I mentioned time-travel because she does mention that it was “just yesterday” for herself when she watched Mara do the same thing, trying to fix the portal...) In fact, she walked straight into everything that was disappearing while everyone else fled from it.

And she does say “Oh, it’s been such a long time since we last saw each other, hasn’t it? That, or, it hasn’t happened yet. I always get those two things mixed up.” How the hell do you mix up the future and the past? She has to have some sort of time-travel capability. (or future vision like Garnet, like where she mentions she can see into other timelines and stuff...)

She was kind of everywhere in S3E5, which caused Adora to run around the Fright Zone while freaking out. She even led Adora straight to Hordak’s sanctum when the door disappeared...

I mean, she seems to know Adora’s power very well from Mara. And since Mara and Adora look nothing alike, I wonder if she senses the same magic Shadow Weaver sensed from Adora.

It would make sense, at least, because they both are She-Ras... and Razz can’t exactly tell them apart.

Also the whole Mara and She-Ra thing on the piece of paper would make more sense, but that could just be Adora struggling to remember and her subconsciousness screwing with her.

She’s still a huge mystery to me. At least I could mention this, at least.

PS! She-Razz when?!!

Light Hope and the First Ones

Oh boy, do I want to talk about this.

I think they’ll end up being the end-game villains.

Note Mara’s words here... “I never wanted to be a hero. I won’t be remembered as one.”

It’s odd. She never straight-up mentions that she wasn’t a hero. She said that she never wanted to be one... and those who remember her name won’t see her as one. It’s very unique wording. And it shows a lot.

Light Hope seems directly programmed in getting rid of Adora’s attachments. She’s constantly telling Adora to move on, never really explaining Adora’s background and purpose, never giving Adora a choice in anything.

Mara grew attached. But to what?

The First Ones were explorers. They weren’t native to Etheria.

They created all these structures and seemed to have left in a hurry, or at least, that’s what Adora said when they were in that Ghost Town. My speculation is that they left when Mara was stranding Etheria.

I feel like the First Ones were colonizers. They didn’t care much for the people around. Mara realized this, grew attached to the native people of Etheria, and tried to save the people of Etheria from future colonizers. I’m assuming the settlers panicked and fled.

It would also explain why there are no more First Ones. They all ran when Mara turned against them.

It also explains what She-Ra was for before Horde Prime. She-Ra was for keeping peace, for restoring balance. So what type of disorder was there back then?

If the First Ones were explorers, then the first thing that comes to mind is peace with the natives of Etheria. It would also make sense that Mara grew attached to them, much to the First Ones’ dismay, causing them to shun her. Causing Light Hope to declare that Mara was, well, a failure. But she really wasn’t.

Even Razz says “Destroy the world? No! Mara saved the world!” And I think Razz is right.

A general speculation...

The storyline of She-Ra is a massive struggle for power. Those who end out on top are the people who were willing to widen their perspective. The same is true, mostly, in the real world.

We’ve already seen a few examples of this...

Let’s hope some of the current antagonists of the story do the same.

[noisemakerreviews]

‘Joker’ Paints An Uncomfortable Picture of Today’s World

Never did I think I’d see the day where I could parallel even the darkest of Batman themes to the world we live in. 

Todd Phillips’ latest blockbuster Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix as the clown prince of crime we all know and love. Phillips’ other films include the Hangover trilogy, but this new film doesn’t have a happy go-lucky trio trying to remember their drunken stupors and find their fourth mate. 

Joker makes the audience laugh, but in a nervous, sort of uncomfortable way. 

At the Venice Film Festival, Joker received an eight-minute standing ovation. 

Reviews poured in following the Italian premiere and they backed up the hype. Mark Hughes of Forbes said, “The fact is, everyone is going to be stunned by what Phoenix accomplishes, because it’s what many thought impossible — a portrayal that matches and potentially exceeds that of The Dark Knight’s Clown Prince of Crime.”

The film opens with Phoenix touching up his makeup in front of a vanity. He hooks his fingers in the corners of his mouth and pulls them upward in a smile, downwards in a frown, then back up again; a single, mascara-stained tears roll down his cheek, and laughter ensues. 

Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, an eccentric man with a funny laugh and a horrifying past, searching for his identity. The film encapsulates Arthur’s journey with himself and his downward spiral into becoming the Joker.   

There are some prevalent themes within Joker that are worth talking about; the most prevalent being mental health and its effect on people in today’s society. There are several scenes in which Phoenix is sitting in front of his therapist, and she eventually jerks the needle off the record and informs him that the city has cut the clinic’s funding and their meetings must come to an end. The therapist goes on to claim that the higher-ups, “don’t give a shit,” about people like him or her. 

According to the National Survey of Drug Use and Health, in 2016, 9.8 million adults aged 18 or older in the U.S. had a serious mental illness; 2.8 million of those adults were below the poverty line. Insurance companies have also been known to skimp when it comes to mental health cases, which makes it that much harder for people relating to Arthur to seek help. According to a study published by Milliman, in 2015, behavioral care was four to six times more likely to be provided out-of-network than medical or surgical care. In President Trump’s proposed 2020 budget, his administration aims to cut $241 billion from Medicaid, an assistance program that provides healthcare to low-income Americans.

Dancing is a symbol that is heavy in Joker. According to a Harvard study, “dance helps reduce stress, increases levels of the feel-good hormone serotonin, and helps develop new neural connections, especially in regions involved in executive function, long-term memory, and spatial recognition.” After especially tense scenes, Arthur begins a slow, emphasized dance routine that is hauntingly beautiful.

 With mental health being such a prevalent theme, Arthur clinging onto dancing as a coping mechanism or escape from the world backs up the analysis that he’s doing it to improve his mental health — or at least attempt to. 

In any Batman rendition — comics, movies, TV shows, video games — Gotham is always on fire… literally. In Joker, we see a bright Gotham in the beginning, with normal big-city crimes happening: teenagers stealing things, muggings, etc. By the end of the film, Arthur has bred chaos in the streets, and we see the imagery of Gotham that has become so prevalent within the Batman universe. In both Arthur and Gotham’s descent into madness, there’s an arc that’s ever present: protesting the elite. 

All around the country, protests have emerged to combat the elite. Most recently, climate change has brought criticism on the world’s elite members and their inability to make a change. In the past, police brutality has created protests in riots from victim’s families and their supporters, calling for change in law enforcement procedures. Countless marches have been held in response to several pieces of legislations passed (abortion laws, Planned Parenthood budget cuts, LGBTQ+ rights). 

“Kill The Rich” is a headline that pops up time and time again throughout the film, feeding into this “protest the elite” arc. Arthur guns down three rich men in the subway following their harassment of a woman and a physical altercation between himself and the men. This sparks a movement within Gotham that empowers Arthur and makes him feel noticed, something he’d never experienced in his life before. Citizens of Gotham supporting this movement don clown masks to imitate the suspect, aka, Arthur. 

Joker has faced its fair share of backlash. Stephanie Zacharek of Time Magazine took no prisoners in her review, stating that Joker, “lionizes and glamorizes Arthur even as it shakes its head, faux-sorrowfully, over his violent behavior.” Other reviews have had similar opinions. In 2012, a mass shooting broke out at a Colorado movie theatre during The Dark Knight Rises premiere. The assailant fatally shot 12 people. Family members of the slain victims wrote a letter to Warner Bros. expressing their concerns. 

Sandy Phillips, mother to 24-year-old victim Jessica Ghawi, told The Hollywood Reporter, “I don't need to see a picture of [the gunman]; I just need to see a Joker promo and I see a picture of the killer … My worry is that one person who may be out there — and who knows if it is just one — who is on the edge, who is wanting to be a mass shooter, may be encouraged by this movie. And that terrifies me.”

In what is perhaps its most iconic scene, Arthur eccentrically dances down the stairs that we see him trudge up throughout the film. This is also the first time we see him in that iconic purple suit, green hair, and a full face of makeup. He is dancing to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part Two,” which has earned the film more backlash. Gary Glitter is a convicted pedophile currently serving a 16-year prison sentence. According to CNBC, Glitter is allegedly slated to receive royalties from the use of his song in the movie. 

People took to Twitter to post their opinions about the film. One user tweeted, “#JokerMovie was the most brutal, uncomfortable and tense movie experience I’ve had in a long time. Joaquin Phoenix is chilling. The film was spot on and did everything it should have for a character like the Joker.”

Another user tweeted, “Outstandingly Disturbing. Prolific. Necessary Blessing to Modern Cinema.”

As much as I enjoyed the film’s premise, production, and Phoenix’s performance, I do think there are some troubling themes that need to be brought up. Arthur often justifies his heinous actions by stating “they deserved it” and using the defense that society treats “people like him” like “trash” so, they should all die. He feeds into the “Kill The Rich” movement that he involuntarily created in the subway when he committed what we presume to be his first murder(s). 

Though I know the concept behind the Joker character, I can see how this can be construed as glorifying gun violence. However, we can’t have the Gotham supervillain without violence and guns. It’s an accurate representation of the character, and it’s unfortunate that it parallels a lot of what’s going on in the world today. 

The Joker is also painted to incite pity within viewers, which a lot of times, it does --- or at least attempts to. This is classic Joker behavior. In Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s comic Mad Love, readers meet Dr. Harleen Quinzel, a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum. She gets assigned to none other than --- you guessed it --- the Joker. Though this woman is highly educated (we won’t talk about the things she did to get that education), the Joker still manipulates her and convinces her to not only help him escape Arkham, but become his partner-in-crime as well; Harleen Quinzel is no more and Harley Quinn is born.

She pities him and his situation, and he spins his tale of woe so expertly that she has the wool pulled over her eyes. Throughout the comic --- and the general timeline for Joker and Harley --- Joker mercilessly abuses Harley, from pushing her out a window to not noticing she was gone for six months. He is a cruel, manipulative psychopath that nobody should follow in the footsteps of; however, he’s good at his job, and Joker showcases that, however controversial and uncomfortable it may be.

Joker is rated R for a reason; not only are there a few F-bombs, the violence is staggering. However, when dealing with a character that is known for inciting violence and not caring about the consequences, tough scenes are necessary. Phillips didn’t shy away from blood and intensity in his murder scenes, and Phoenix went all in when it came to brutality. Personally, (spoiler!) I never really wanted to see Robert De Niro’s brains blown out the back of his skull, but you can’t have the Joker without some blood. 

And finally, while the troubled citizens looking for a leader are terrorizing Gotham following Arthur’s murder of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) on live television, our hero’s story starts. Thomas and Martha Wayne are gunned down in an alley outside a theatre by a rogue thug and Joker fan, and young Bruce Wayne begins his famous story. 

Joker was original in concept and plot, but had just enough callbacks to the comics to make it permissible. The atmosphere in the full theatre I was in was palpable. There were chuckles and titters here and there when Arthur would make a funny joke, or everyone was just laughing off the tension of the moment. There were also audible gasps and groans when things got especially rough (such as the aforementioned Robert De Niro scene). Joker did exactly what the real Joker would have wanted: it incited a reaction out of people.

I had low expectations going into the movie because, as someone who grew up reading Batman and loving to hate the Joker, I was afraid my favorite complex villain was going to get ruined (looking at you, Jared Leto). I was pleasantly surprised by Phoenix’s performance and Phillips’ take on Mista J, and it was a refreshing performance that was a polar opposite from the late Heath Ledger’s, but equally as convincing and chilling.

An Oscar seems to be on the horizon for both Phillips and Phoenix for Joker. The film is raunchy and tense, and I didn’t know I could hold my breath for two hours. It’s exactly what a Joker movie should be, and I’d encourage anyone to go watch it.

[tfrohock]

How to write strong male characters, or writing non-toxic heroes

Okay, that title is a tweak on all of the numerous blog posts I once read (and to be fair, wrote) about writing strong female characters. Remember those? Back a few years, you couldn’t swing a dead rat without knocking down a blog post on how to write a female character. I enjoyed those posts, not simply because what the authors were saying was true, but also because of the empowerment those essays gave to both the authors and the readers.

However, when I floated the idea on Twitter of writing a similar post about male characters, I was met with some snark, such as a recommendation to gender-flip everyone, or make all of the characters female. Frankly, the suggestion of gender-flipping the characters and suddenly all-is-well-with-the-world-and-bluebirds-sing as a solution tells me the individual in question hasn’t been around toxic women, which is another blog post altogether, but suffice to say that gender-flipping isn’t a cure and completely avoids the toxicity of some male characters.

Another individual advised me to write a gender-balanced novel, which tells me they haven’t read mine.

For the record: the male/female ratio from Where Oblivion Lives is 17 men and 15 women. This is a rough count from my style sheet and omits anyone who is/was an actual historical person.

With a bisexual protagonist married to his gay partner, I was highly conscious of the number of females and their roles as I wrote the story. Whenever possible, I made the supporting characters females in high-profile jobs (such as Sofia, who is the chief of Guillermo’s spy unit, and Carme, who is more badass than all the men put together) wherever and whenever possible. However, we’re not here to talk about them.

“TOXIC MASCULINITY" AND WHY I DISLIKE THE TERM

The term “toxic masculinity” is mutable, depending on the time period, who is defining it, and whether it is the product of popular jargon or actual gender studies. No one denies that male violence and sexism are issues that need to be addressed on a cultural level; however, the cause of those issues aren’t necessarily masculinity. Men do not burst from the womb loathing women and fighting the other babies in the nursery. Misogyny and violence are learned behaviors, and one of the many places where men learn those toxic behaviors is by reading books with characters who make misogyny and violence an acceptable part of being male.

Also, I’m not here to lead a discussion in gender studies, because I’m not qualified for that. I’m a writer and we’re here to talk about writing characters that provide positive role models not just for young men, but also for young women. So rather than “toxic masculinity,” I’ll be talking about the toxic behavior we normally ascribe to men, and how I avoided making the men in my novels behave in ways that would make violence and misogyny seem appealing.

I gave the toxic behavioral traits of glorifying violence and power-structures to my antagonists, Jordi and Karl. They believe they are “destined for greatness” and that by virtue of birthrights and poorly constructed ideals of male dominance, their place is assured. Stylistically, I approach these aspects of character through their actions and by what the other characters observe of Jordi’s and Karl’s behavior.

For example: we never go into Karl’s point-of-view, but we see him through Diago’s eyes as Diago walks through a drawing room, looking at pictures of Karl standing triumphantly over big game animals he has killed. Diago notes that “Karl likes killing things.” However, it’s not so much about killing as it is about Karl’s need for dominance over other creatures.

Does this mean that Guillermo and Miquel don’t possess toxic behaviors? No.

The difference between the Jordi/Karl and Guillermo/Miquel dynamic is that Jordi/Karl see nothing wrong with their behavior and make no efforts to change. Guillermo and Miquel, on the other hand, tend to listen when confronted about their behavior, and they do make sincere efforts to modify not just their actions, but also the thought processes that lead to those actions, thereby making an active effort to break the cycle of toxicity.

WRITING NONTOXIC HEROES

Is not as hard as it sounds; although it takes a lot more than just adding more women to the cast. The women have to be proactive and possess agency of their own, and the men need to respond to them as equals.

One of my favorite scenes from Where Oblivion Lives is the dinner scene, where Guillermo’s eight-year-old daughter, Ysabel, decides to make her stand for independence. Her mother, Juanita, is in full support of her daughter and coaching her from the sidelines. Guillermo’s behavior is toxic in that he wants to control the situation, and he uses manipulative means to do so. At the same time, this particular scene is the catalyst for some of the subsequent changes in Guillermo’s personality later on in the novel.

I’ve edited this scene down to its essential parts, but it all begins after dinner when Ysabel asks if she and Rafael and can go outside and play fútbol:

Guillermo traded a calculating look with Juanita. “I don’t see the harm in it.” Before Ysabel could move, he pointed at his jubilant daughter. “But it had better be fútbol and not that spy game you’ve started playing. No more of that. I don’t want you creeping around the compound listening under windows. Do you understand me?”

With her round face and thick auburn curls, she was an eight-year-old version of her father, right down to the way her face belied her guilt when caught flat-footed in a scheme. “How am I ever going to be a proper nefil if I don’t learn how to gather information?”

“If you want to be a proper nefil, you’ll follow orders and I’ve just given you one.”

Ysa showed no sign of letting the argument go, however. “You said you learned on the streets when you were younger than me.”

“That was a different time.”

“Not that different,” Juanita said.

Guillermo’s cheeks flushed pink. “Whose side are you on?”

As cool as her milk-pale skin, Juanita rested her chin on her hand and met her husband’s glare. “It’s not about sides. If she was a boy, you’d be complimenting her on her acumen.”

“That’s not fair,” Guillermo shot back. “I give my experienced female Guards the same respect and assignments as I do the males.”

Ysabel seized the opening. “How did they get their experience?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. “By doing the work.”

“They weren’t eight years old.”

“I want to learn, Papá.”

Seeking to help his friend, Rafael said, “Ysa is really very good at it, Don Guillermo, and she is very careful.”

High praise indeed, given that Rafael spent his first six years on the streets. Nonetheless, Diago touched his son’s arm and whispered, “Be still.”

Guillermo ignored everyone but Ysabel. “This has nothing to do with your gender. You’re my daughter. If something happens to you, my heart will die.”

An appeal to the emotions. Nice save, Diago thought, taking mental notes in case Rafael developed a sudden interest in proving his value to the Inner Guard through espionage. Fortunately, his son seemed more intent on picking the almonds off his plate with his fingers.

Ysa stood her ground and retorted, “I’d be in a lot less danger with your guidance.”

And touché. Diago wondered what prompted her to challenge her father today. A quick glance at Juanita told him that whatever the reason, she supported Ysa’s cause, because she assessed her daughter’s attitude with the eye of a maestro watching her student deliver a master performance.

Juanita said, “She has your craving for knowledge, Guillermo, and she is ready to begin learning about the family business.”

Guillermo’s cheeks reddened again, but this time from chagrin rather than anger, because everyone at the table knew Juanita spoke the truth.

She continued, “Besides, she’s right: it’s better she work under your supervision rather than running amok on her own.”

* * *

Although I don’t actually state it, a couple of things can be noted from Guillermo’s behavior:

He doesn’t immediately deny Ysabel’s request and send her to her room. The closest he comes to an ultimatum is “If you want to be a proper nefil, you’ll follow orders and I’ve just given you one.” However, he doesn’t cut her off when she continues the argument. This shows he does respect his daughter’s opinion as well as her personal autonomy.

Nor does he treat her like a child. He tries to reason with her on an adult level, and even though he’s manipulative at one point, he knows in his heart of hearts that both of the women in his life are right. That much is evident from his actions. As much as he wants his little girl to stay a little girl forever, he recognizes the fact that she isn’t mortal and that he is going to have to eventually teach her the family business, ugly though it is.

As Guillermo’s character arc develops, we see him proactively working toward changing how he views his daughter and her place in Los Nefilim. Ysabel blossoms into a strong leader in the second novel, primarily because of her parents’ partnership and mutual respect for one another.

Any character (male or female) can certainly possess toxic behaviors—in this particular scene, it’s Guillermo wanting to be overprotective to the point of crippling Ysabel—but the key to making the character non-toxic is having them resist that impulse to lash out and exert dominance over others based on nothing more than the power dynamics of the relationship. Guillermo exhibits a willingness to listen, and subsequently, a willingness to change. These two points are what elevates him over his brother, Jordi.

GIVE THE TOXICITY TO YOUR ANTAGONISTS

As the antagonist, Jordi and Karl exhibit the classic toxicity often associated with male characters. They are abusive, violent, and in their reasoning, the world belongs to them. They feel justified in their excesses. And I deliberately give them those characteristics, because by showing toxic behavior in all its ugliness, I have the chance to contrast the two types of men.

WHY SADDLE THE WOMEN WITH THE RESPONSIBILITY OF SHOWING MEN THEIR TOXICITY?

Parenting is a partnership, where the spouses play to one another’s strengths and weaknesses. In this case, it just happened to be Juanita nudging Guillermo in the right direction. Later on in the same novel, Miquel has his own ideas of how to raise Rafael, which Diago ignores, so it’s not about women but about spouses.

It also just so happened that I needed a character arc for Guillermo and the issue of Ysabel’s upbringing fit his personality perfectly while showing that men make good parents. Which brings me to my final point …

WORDS HAVE POWER

… and our characters exist through our words, so they, too, have power. Writing a story requires being conscious of the world around us, but also of the world we want to see. In stories, we shape our worlds through our characters and their interactions, which often mirror our own. Fortunately, we don’t always have to show our readers the world as it is, but we can explore the world as we’d like to know it. Shifting the toxic behavior normally associated with men from the heroes to the antagonists gives us a chance to reshape our world.

[keeloves]

MY Top 10 Worst Male Characters

 Keep in mind this just my personal opinion! I would love to hear your thoughts but please keep them civil and respectful. Kicking off the list at number 10

10 Jake Salt (Famous in Love)

Don’t get me wrong he is super cute/hot but ugh he freaking irks me! First of all he treats girls like crap, he is emotionally needy and as Paige put “Nothing is ever his fault” He slept with Lexi to try and get his script published into a movie. He slept with her for several days and when once he realized that wasn’t happening he got pissed off blamed her and then he ghosted Lexi. Yeah, I know what an asshole. He confesses his “love” for Paige at a press conference right after Rainer had a severe melt down. Then once he gets with Paige he treats her like crap and is emotionally abusive. He doesn’t move into the house she bought, he didn’t stick up for her when she said no to shots but instead helped pressured her into doing shots of tequila and she ended up getting so drunk that she ended up missing her screen test and he didn’t defend her when she was being ripped to shreds by a producer guy. Skip to like 5:28 and watch until 7:16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYMVnvjcfpY&t=7s This video was made by my dear friend @disneyfanforever3 This clip pretty much sums up why I can’t stand Jake. I am so happy Paige called him out on his bullshit.

9. Sinbad (Sinbad from Legends of the Seven Seas) 

First of all he doesn’t deserve to have this movie named after him because he is a terrible protagonist. He speaks disrespectfully to women, and just ugh! He is okay letting his friend Proteus die for a crime he did not commit and and Sinbad would run off to Fiji fully knowing his friend Proteus that he has known since CHILDHOOD would be dead as long as he can run off to Fiji. Proteus said to Sinbad while taking his place “I know you would do the same for me” and Sinbad’s reply is “No I wouldn’t” like ugh dude you aren’t that loyal! So Marina is the real hero of the movie. In fact I go a little more into detail on why I hate Sinbad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhD6mbhLJpY&lc=z23iz1vpsv3kyla3xacdp430q55un5sqk3m3zmlonvhw03c010c

8.Oliver Queen (Arrow)

I have ranted on him several times so I will try to keep this brief! He is a womanizing manwhore. He serial cheated on his girlfriend Laurel with basically every woman including her sister Sara. He did nothing to make the situation better. This pic I used of him is him flirting with Sara at the Lance family dinner and this is the moment where I wanted to punch him in the face! Ugh god he is the worst. He cheated so much that he fathered a child. He abandon Thea after she got out of the Lazurus pit all so he could play house with Felicity and he constantly goes back and forth on his no kill rule. Oh and this Oliver is a knock off version of Bruce Wayne and he is a complete 180 of who he should be.

7. Mon El (Supergirl)

I hate Mon El so much! He lied to Kara about who he was on Daxam yes I know Kara was judgmental at first but Mon El just planned to keep her in the dark the entire time of their relationship. He owned slaves and did nothing to correct the issue he just chose to stay with Kara. He called Kara his kryptonite which is something that can kill her literally so bleh! He disrespected Kara at every moment she tried to help him. He beat up another Aileen for money and he is so selfish. In fact how here is Kara chewing out Mon El’s ass out! Its very satisfying like “Paige Townsen Nothing’s ever your fault speech to Jake.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnHZInGzQ4w

6. Moses Puloki Dance Teacher (Lilo and Stitch)

A while back I made a list of my most annoying cartoon characters and he is number one on the most annoying cartoon characters list. I put him on this list because he is an adult who lets Mrytle get away with bullying Lilo. He sees it happening before his very eyes and he does nothing to stop it and instead it always Lilo’s fault. He never asks for Lilo’s side of the story and he just assumes Lilo is at fault when she beats up Mrytle. At least that is how it feels. I have never once seen him say anything to Mrytle or her possy that follow her around. To me he is my least favorite character from Lilo and Stitch and it makes me wonder why he is a teacher in the first place.

5. Thomas Humprey aka Humps (Orange is the New Black

He is an abliest piece of shit. He caused a fight all for a stupid bet. He gas lit Suzanne Warren aka Crazy Eyes and she said repeatitly she didn’t want to fight. The other gaurds are terrible because they went along with is bullshit and because of him this Suzanne beat the hell out of this other woman who also appeared to be mentally unstable because the other woman was insulting Suzanne. Suzanne beat up this other woman so much that this girl was bleeding and her face was bruised up. Two other inmates had to get Suzanne off of this other inmate. Yet all Humps did was laugh and said “Well I just made $20 bucks” Suzanne is left to cry and feel ashamed for something he started! He is so terrible he makes Pornstache look like a saint.

4. Pablo Money (Famous in Love)

He is emotionally and phyically abusive He stole Jordan’s IPad and accused Tangey of cheating. He treats Tangey like an object to be had and he kicked the door of the room where Tangey was hiding. He is possessive,manipulative and ugh! I also put him on the list because he treats my favorite character on the show like shit.

3. Every Itteration of Harrison Wells (The Flash)

I have gone on ar ant about why I hate this character so I will kep this brief as I can. The only Wells I will put up with are The original Earth 1 Wells Eowells (Season1) and Harry Wells. This character is boring, he is played out and he is just there to take up space and be a boring whtie character that Cisco has to play glorified baby sitter too. EoWells is terrible because he killed Barry’s mom, he killed Cisco and when Cisco remembers EoWells laughs in his face. Harry is awful, he faked an illness to guilt Wally into not moving in with Jesse knowing full Well that is how Francine West (Wally and Iris’s mother) died. He chokes Cisco, he also breaks Cisco’s things and never offers to fix them and he is just an ass wipe. The rest of the Wells are annoying because we don’t need anymore Wells and Sherloque Wells has annoying accent.

2. Ezra Fitz (Pretty Little Liars)

I have also ranted on him a lot as well so bare with me. He stalked teenage girls, he got with Aria knowing full well she was going to be his student and knowing she was underage. He framed Spencer for something she didn’t do and because she was on to him. He stole her files and gave it to Aria which by the way is illegal to do. Then again what does this man care about what law he breaks he is all ready guilty of statutory rape, stalking and violating privacy. He hooked up with Alison and he should have gone to prison but instead he gets to live happily ever after with Aria. He ends up marrying Aria. Yeap that’s right folks he married the girl he groomed and stalked and manipulated. He even trapped her on a Ferris wheel. 

1. Damon Salvotore (The Vampier

Ugh just thinking about him makes nauseated. He is abusive, manipulative and he ruined hi brother’s life and stole his girl and he is part of the reason why I have a hard time getting into the show. Damon is a serial rapist and serial killer. He raped Caroline, fed off of her and terrified her. He kills people Elena cares about just because she isn’t giving him what he wants. Man if Damon wants something he better get it now or else. I bet he is terrible in bed because three girls have bragged about how good Stephan is in bed and Damon only brags about himself. I say he is terrible because if he wasn’t he wouldn’t have to compel girls to sleep with him. He killed a pregnant woman this means he also killed a baby. He has no remorse for any of these things and he just relies on Elena to change him. The only time I can deal with him is when he is around Bonnie! Ugh I hate this character! He needs to trade places with Stephan and now the fact that Delena have kids together make me want to throw up my insides because it makes my skin crawl knowing Damon would father a child. Plus I think Ian Somerholder though he seems nice is not all that great of an actor.

[him-e]

Ships and “Endgame” in the ST

I’m curious about are how the narrative treats Rey and Kylo’s interactions in TLJ and how Rey interacts with Finn: I just wanted to hear a counter-argument on why F/innRey wouldn’t be endgame and/or Rey/Kylo would be endgame. They’re not connected necessarily: both can’t be endgame at the same time because I don’t expect Lucasfilm to depict a poly relationship any time soon, but arguing against Reylo being endgame doesn’t mean f/nnrey must be canon or vice versa. Please don’t think I’m writing this in bad faith, I’m genuinely curious about these points and I don’t mean to disrespect anyone who ships Reylo. 

Rey and Finn’s interactions in TFA and TLJ are framed very positively. The lines of dialogue between them like “Cute boyfriend?” and “You looked at me like no one ever had,” definitely point to romantic interest to me: I don’t see why the creators would include lines like that without indicating some romantic interest was there. Finn is the first person to ever “come back” for Rey, and their experiences with each other are “firsts” that are incredibly important. They care deeply about each other.

In TLJ, they are separated for the majority of it, but you could say that separation is always part of the romantic arc, and Rey is constantly thinking about him, while Finn is constantly thinking about her. Before she heads off to save Kylo, she gives Chewie an important message to Finn. (Which could have been something like “I love you” but I don’t want to assume.) When they see each other and embrace at the end of the movie, it’s the first time Rey looks *happy* in TLJ. She looks so happy when they hug, and there’s a long hold both on their embrace and at Rey’s heartbroken expression as Finn tucks  in Rose.

In contrast, the Rey and Kylo scenes could be interpreted as Rey learning her lesson about how important Kylo is to saving the galaxy: not a “Don’t Trust Your Sexuality” lesson, which I do find a misogynistic angle to take on this particular issue, but a lesson about thinking she needs Ben Solo to save the galaxy, a lesson that she doesn’t need him. Additionally, although most of their Force bonds are weighed with attraction, she never seems to be very happy with him, and at the end, he says deeply cruel things to her (The Throne Room scene) and attempts to have her killed on Crait. 

The last Force bond tells me Rey is not budging, and, per the novelization, has no compassion for him: it would be a long, long road to have her forgive him at all, let alone build some sort of romantic dynamic even though they will probably be enemies for a significant portion of IX. (Noting here that yes, they were enemies in TLJ too, but IX can’t spend a large portion of its running time devoted to intimate conversations like TLJ did: it’s the final act of this Trilogy and the Skywalker Saga, things need to start wrapping up.)

I do think that Kylo Ren’s redemption is somewhat necessary to keep the story of the Skywalker family from seeming like a complete tragedy: it would be a pessimistic ending, in my view, if the takeaway from the ST was “Sometimes, your loved one can’t be saved, and so other people must rise to the occasion,” for the Skywalker family. But, even if I think redemption is incoming, I’m still not convinced that Kylo could be with Rey. There’s audience reaction to consider (cue the cries of people asking just how this villain is worthy of the hero), but also the narrative beforehand: although Rey seemed willing to forgive Kylo completely for a part of TLJ, the audience still remembers scenes like the interrogation (a violation of Rey and something that robs her of agency, even though she does defeat Kylo), the Snow Fight, the Throne Room, and Crait. They did tone down some of his actions in the interrogation, like touching her, supposedly, but I still feel like Kylo is an unambiguous villain in those scenes, his treatment of Rey is awful (and this is just about his behavior, not whether Rey fights him off) and then, after showing us some of his humanity in TLJ, he snaps back to being a villain, and hurting Rey, intentional or not.

In TFA, Kylo is very much an aggressor/pursuer of Rey and her triumph is in fighting him off; in TLJ, he seems like more of a tempter figure, and Rey’s triumph is not giving into his offer and finding value in herself. She doesn’t ever seem happy with him, and the narrative never shows us a scene of complete fulfillment when she’s with Kylo: he never gives her anything she didn’t have, where Finn does in TFA by going back for her. (The scene where they touch hands, especially considering the music and the fact that Luke Skywalker is the one walking in on them, could also be read as an ominous one where Rey is getting too close to the dark.)

I don’t deny that Reylo was extremely “shippy” in TLJ. But Rian Johnson, in the same interview when he said that Kylo’s perspective in the throne room was a “naked, emotional appeal” also said: “It was important to me that it wasn’t a chess game, it wasn’t just a manipulation. It’s unhealthy, and there’s much that is awful about the way that he is manipulative. From his point of view, it’s a very naked, open, emotional appeal.” So he does acknowledge that Kylo is being unhealthy and manipulative, and that’s the writer’s intent. Rey’s arc in TLJ is very much fit to a naive hero’s arc, where she trusts the wrong person and sees the error of her ways. It doesn’t mean that Kylo is irredeemable and can never be trusted again, but TLJ also doesn’t mean that Kylo and Rey should be together, and includes quite a few scenes that could be read as red flags on his end, signals to the audience that this is a bad man who doesn’t have Rey’s best interests at heart.

And then there’s the next film, which is more opinion/conjecture on my part, but I don’t think JJ Abrams is the kind of storyteller who’s interested in depicting a big epic romance as the finale of the Skywalker Trilogy, or interested in involving Rey in the Skywalker Redemption question. Han and Leia care about Ben in TFA, Rey only views him as an enemy; and when she does try redeeming him in TLJ, the answer to her attempt is a solid “No.” JJ is a Better Trevorrow to me, in some ways, where he’s good at spectacle and big, bombastic movies, and although he isn’t openly misogynistic, his movies do have some sexist pitfalls. The “Reylo” arc is on a knife’s edge as it is, and already perceived as abusive and glorifying of a villain who hurts the heroine by many people: how would he be able to execute it in such a way that the audience wouldn’t be outraged at the injustice of Kylo Ren not only getting redeemed, but “getting the girl” so to speak? (I totally think the idea of Rey as a prize is repulsive, but unfortunately the majority of people do still perceive heroines or love interests who are female this way.)

Rey not needing Kylo, and being able to ascend to heroism without him, was the end point of TLJ, and I think it would undermine that ending if in IX she did turn out to need him after all and they had to work together or she had to forgive him. The movies so far have explicitly showed that while they’re attracted to each other, he’s a toxic person who isn’t good for her. And if it is going to be romantic going forward, why would it have an “endgame” type ending? And then there’s the option of Rey being alone romantically, but still surrounded by friends, allies, and people who care about her.

And on a separate note, I just feel like there are far too many “romance” cues for F/innRey for that to not have been planned from the beginning. In TFA, those “boyfriend” lines weren’t essential, they could have been taken out without affecting the friendly-rapport feeling in their relationship. In TLJ, they didn’t have to juxtapose Rey being in tears facing Kylo to happily embracing Finn upon being reunited with him. And while there is the factor of Rose kissing Finn, they never entered into a deliberate romantic relationship or showed that the feelings were mutual: I feel like FinnRose isn’t essential to the next movie if they dismissed it, since so much of Finn and Rose’s arc could be read as them being friends or compatriots. There’s really no cues of romance until she kisses him.

I’m sorry this is much longer than I anticipated, but these are the things that have been nagging me for the past few months. I did really enjoy TLJ, and I do like Reylo and apologize if my comments came off like I was trashing the ship for no reason, but this is my honest reading of the text. I have a lot of respect for your meta and wanted to bring up these points: if you don’t want to respond to this, I’m sorry for depicting a negative opinion and wasting your time.

Don’t worry, I don’t think you wrote this in bad faith! That’s one hell of an essay, and I want to thank you for taking the time to write it and submit it to my blog. The two main arguments you’re making are a) that reylo is real but is depicted negatively and so it’s unlikely to be endgame, and b) that f/nnrey can still happen and be endgame because the romantic hints dropped in TFA must go somewhere and it makes Rey happy (forgive me for the simplification). I’ll try to address some key points.

The movies so far have explicitly showed that while they’re attracted to each other, he’s a toxic person who isn’t good for her

I don’t think that’s what the movies showed. He’s not a toxic person to Rey (Daisy Ridley has gone on record saying Kylo “nurtured” Rey in a way that even Luke couldn’t do)—he’s someone whose political affiliation and morals and ideologies can’t be reconciled with Rey’s, and THAT’S why Rey dumps him. Because he doesn’t stop firing on the Resistance fleet and instead asks her to essentially become a villainess at his side, because he’s still hellbent on being the leader of a despotic military organization, that’s why the narrative separated them at the end of TLJ, not because he’s “toxic” or “abusive”.

even if I think redemption is incoming, I’m still not convinced that Kylo could be with Rey. There’s audience reaction to consider (cue the cries of people asking just how this villain is worthy of the hero), but also the narrative beforehand: although Rey seemed willing to forgive Kylo completely for a part of TLJ, the audience still remembers scenes like the interrogation (a violation of Rey and something that robs her of agency, even though she does defeat Kylo), the Snow Fight, the Throne Room, and Crait. They did tone down some of his actions in the interrogation, like touching her, supposedly, but I still feel like Kylo is an unambiguous villain in those scenes, his treatment of Rey is awful (and this is just about his behavior, not whether Rey fights him off) and then, after showing us some of his humanity in TLJ, he snaps back to being a villain, and hurting Rey, intentional or not. 

So it actually all boils down to the audience’s reaction, doesn’t it? He’s too much of a villain so let’s not make reylo happen or the audience won’t accept it. But what the narrative is depicting—intentionally—is a hero/villain romance. The villain being a villain and yes, doing villain things including trying to hurt the hero (and viceversa, the hero doing hero things and trying to stop, violently, the villain) is exactly what defines this sort of pairings. Part of the audience will love it, part won’t, but a narrative that is afraid of pissing off a part of the audience isn’t a strong narrative.

I’m also not sure what would be the point of redeeming Kylo but still having him portrayed as a toxic individual whom the heroine should stay the fuck away from. Does this sound like an epic closure to a trilogy of trilogies whose thematic pillars have always been hope and redemption? To me it just sounds like a moralistic tale trying to half assedly appeal to tumblr discourse.

The “Reylo” arc is on a knife’s edge as it is, and already perceived as abusive and glorifying of a villain who hurts the heroine by many people: how would he be able to execute it in such a way that the audience wouldn’t be outraged at the injustice of Kylo Ren not only getting redeemed, but “getting the girl” so to speak? (I totally think the idea of Rey as a prize is repulsive, but unfortunately the majority of people do still perceive heroines or love interests who are female this way.)

You’re talking as if the audience is a hivemind and universally agrees with the intra-fandom, white-feminist, tumblr-specific “Reylo is abusive” wank. But the majority of the audience is actually moderately fine with Reylo, and most of them will be overwhelmingly okay with it if IX has something that tops the praetorian guard fight in terms of iconic jedi/sith marriage alliance. A good 80% of the general target audience for SW is people who don’t engage with fandom the way we do, they couldn’t care less about reylo or f/nnrey or any other ships for that matter, they just want to see a good story and be entertained for three hours and pew pew space battles. The people who will be “outraged” if Kylo “gets the girl” are only a tiny niche if you consider the star wars audience as a whole.

Also, it isn’t Kylo getting the girl. It’s Rey getting the boy. TLJ made sure to put her perspective front and center—it’s she who pursues Kylo, she who catches him in a state of undress, she who gets the eye candy, she who ruminates on his backstory while also delving deep into her own. It’s her point of view, her feelings, her attraction, her choices, while Kylo remains relatively passive for most of the time, waiting for her (to show up in a force connection, to come to the Supremacy, to take his hand). 

The scene where they touch hands, especially considering the music and the fact that Luke Skywalker is the one walking in on them, could also be read as an ominous one where Rey is getting too close to the dark

oh, no. No, no, no. :)) The Force theme plays during the hand touch. (the /ominous/ music you hear before is actually some notes from Kylo’s theme, iirc). And the point of Luke’s arc in TLJ was that he was wrong about Ben, wrong about trying to murder him, and especially wrong about going into exile for years, and after this scene he finally decides to face his demons. He’s not the wise mentor whose perspective can be trusted. His perspective is as flawed as everyone else’s. And he is actually the one who is depicted in an ominous way in that scene (barging in, hand raised to destroy the hut in a gesture that reminds intentionally of what Ben did the night he destroyed the jedi academy).

And at no point Rey got too close to the dark. She only got close to Kylo. She was never tempted by power, or knowledge, or violence, or any of the traditional pitfalls of the dark side. Her only instinct was to help, and save someone from himself. If compassion and love are a path to the dark side, then we should rewrite the Sith code, lol. No, Luke was wrong, he learned his lesson, and by the end of the movie he went to face Kylo Ren fully knowing that he wouldn’t be the one who’d turn the monster back into a man this time, but that someone else could.

Rey not needing Kylo, and being able to ascend to heroism without him, was the end point of TLJ, and I think it would undermine that ending if in IX she did turn out to need him after all and they had to work together or she had to forgive him.

It’s not about “needing”, or “having to”. It’s about wanting. Rey not needing Kylo (and likewise Kylo not needing Rey) is something I’m thankful TLJ established, because it actually lays the basis for the healthiest kind of relationship, the one where you love someone without depending (materially or emotionally) on them. This puts all the emphasis on personal choice, rather than necessity, and I think fits extremely well with the main themes of this trilogy. Rey realizing that she doesn’t need Kylo was beautiful and I’m sure the narrative won’t backtrack on it, but I still think she’s going to be with him in the end, not because she “has to”, or “can’t live without him”, but because she wants to.

And I think this doesn’t undermine Rey’s agency at all, on the contrary, it elevates it.

Re: the proposal speech being manipulative but also genuine according to Rian, please refer to this and this. 

Re: Rey being “unhappy” with him, uhm. I see this argument tossed around all the time and it annoys me big time. Right, she was SO unhappy that she ditched Luke to run to Kylo and try to save him as soon as she got a Force flashforward of his being at her side. What an ugly vision she must have seen, right? Careful not to confuse “raw emotions for an enemy whose pain resonates deeply with mine, as I’m also fighting a war” with “unhappiness”. Rey wasn’t unhappy in TLJ anymore than she was in TFA—she just stopped pretending to be fine, as she met someone who made her dig under the surface of her plucky heroine facade and confront her own demons and feelings of abandonment, and who brought his own demons and feelings of abandonment to the table, which Rey felt intensely for.

Happiness, conversely, isn’t always a sign and guarantee of romantic love, and the idea that love always makes you feel happy is generalizing and shallow, especially when it’s more about looking happy than anything. “She looks so happy when they hug”. Uh. So? I have a best friend who is truly the only person in the world who can put a smile on my face when I’m feeling down and who I can be completely myself with, and I would even say she’s the MOST important person in my world aside from my own family, and YET, I’m not in love with her. Nor should I try to be in order to stop suffering or be generically “happy”. Friendship is friendship, and love is love: both are equally important but they’re not the same, and they fulfill different needs. (mind, this is not me dissing friends-to-lovers tropes, which I like a lot, or saying that friendship can never evolve into romantic love, just that the kind of comfort and happiness true friendship offers isn’t necessarily the best basis for a romance, especially when there aren’t any obvious signs of romantic/sexual attraction.)

Speaking of which, and moving to the pro-f/rey part of your submission… I think most of the confusion re: f/nnrey being “obviously” romantic in TFA comes from the assumption that an “endgame” relationship needs to be portrayed as unambiguously positive since the start. Yes, Finn and Rey’s interactions in TFA were overwhelmingly positive—almost too positive, which in mainstream fiction doesn’t bode well for romance. Central romances, especially of the “epic” kind, are generally bumpy (or downright antagonistic) at first. And by “at first” I don’t mean the first five minutes of interactions, as in f/nnrey’s case: I mean at least the first act of the story. Translated into the context of a movie trilogy—it amounts to the first movie, give or take.

I just feel like there are far too many “romance” cues for F/innRey for that to not have been planned from the beginning. In TFA, those “boyfriend” lines weren’t essential, they could have been taken out without affecting the friendly-rapport feeling in their relationship. In TLJ, they didn’t have to juxtapose Rey being in tears facing Kylo to happily embracing Finn upon being reunited with him. And while there is the factor of Rose kissing Finn, they never entered into a deliberate romantic relationship or showed that the feelings were mutual: I feel like FinnRose isn’t essential to the next movie if they dismissed it, since so much of Finn and Rose’s arc could be read as them being friends or compatriots. There’s really no cues of romance until she kisses him.

funny how you’re saying that f/nnrey had “too many” romance cues not to have been planned from the get go in the same breath as you also argue that finnrose isn’t irrevocably romantic and could be easily dismissed in IX. Finn and Rose have a complete romantic arc in TLJ. Complete with a kiss. Whereas Finn and Rey only have a “boyfriend” line (which could be very well foreshadowing of Rey getting a “boyfriend” in TLJ, which she did, lol) and everything else is about deeply caring for each other and being each other’s first real friend (she looked at him like no one ever had, he came back for her when nobody would). Friendship tropes, I’ll concede, can sometimes be confused with romantic tropes, but why do the tropes used in TFA f/nnrey speak of romance more clearly than what Finn and Rose had in TLJ?

My opinion: they don’t. And if it seems to you like they do, it’s probably because you want them to see that way. Which is okay, as long as you’re aware of your bias. What really tips the scale from “could be romantic” to “oh no it’s definitely romantic” is the usage of textual, unequivocal romantic tropes and situations like Rose kissing Finn on the lips against a beautiful beaming ray of light or, well, Rey accidentally walking on a half naked Kylo and being very confused. 

Those are facts, not hints.

And this isn’t Game of Thrones with its three hundred parallel storylines and red herrings or a 14 seasons-long CW teen drama, it’s a three-movie space opera that needs to be as closely knit and narratively solid as possible, it can’t afford doing a back and forth between romantic storylines, which at this point (following your logic) would be THREE, and two of them should be dismissed or ended badly in the last movie for the third to be endgame.

The main couples of this trilogy as established by TLJ are Finnrose and Reylo. F/nnrey having any sort of romantic development at this point would only confuse the audience and unnecessarily complicate the narrative, which is already complex enough as it is. 

In TLJ, [Finn and Rey] are separated for the majority of it, but you could say that separation is always part of the romantic arc

Not for the entire second act of a trilogy, the one where (statistically in the SW movies) the pairing makes the leap from platonic (or antagonistic) to romantic. 

and Rey is constantly thinking about him, while Finn is constantly thinking about her. 

…were they? I mean, they probably were and it’s fine to headcanon it that way, but we weren’t actually shown any of it on screen (it was just handwaved at, with Rey trying to make contact with Finn, and Finn trying to leave to find Rey in the beginning) and this is important, storywise. It means that their dynamic is already established; the narrative trusts the audience to remember that they’re friends, they care about each other, they have an unbreakable sibling-like bond à la Luke and Leia, and there’s no need to remind us that they care about each other or introduce new developments in their relationship, which was fully formed by the end of TFA already.

Before she heads off to save Kylo, she gives Chewie an important message to Finn. (Which could have been something like “I love you” but I don’t want to assume.)

Again, it’s fine if you want to headcanon it that way, but one half of the pairing having the revelation that she loves the other offscreen (and no payoff for that at the end of the movie) is a really bizarre way to establish an endgame romantic pairing, if you ask me.

Re: the residual “romantic” cues in finn/rey—I think, if there were any (which in itself is debatable, but still), it’s probably because the finnreylo dynamic was originally conceived (by JJ) as some sort of lowkey love triangle, and then scrapped (still by JJ) in favor of a completely platonic bond on the f/nnrey side. Thankfully, Rian threw any possibility of a wacky love triangle out of the window by introducing Rose and letting Finn have his OWN romantic storyline rather than being reduced to a third wheel or cannon fodder to some stupid romantic conflict for reylo (which has no shortage of conflict on its own anyway, lol).

You also make it sound it deceptively easy to dismiss Finnrose as some sort of failed experiment or brief but ultimately irrelevant digression in the path that leads to the f/rey romance. It’s not. Rose is an important character, whose feelings matter, and she’s EXPLICITLY, textually in love with Finn. There’s no way to work around this fact or pretend it didn’t happen or argue that they’ll magically turn into platonic coworkers or *compatriots* (?). Finn’s feelings might be less clear but that’s why we still have a whole movie to go. But they already kissed, which as I said is far more definitive storywise than a line about a cute boyfriend or a kiss on the forehead.

Finally,

it would be a long, long road to have [Rey] forgive [Kylo] at all, let alone build some sort of romantic dynamic even though they will probably be enemies for a significant portion of IX. 

It wouldn’t be a long, long road to have her forgive him, it would be a very short and simple road, because TLJ already did the bulk of the work in this sense, and made Rey deeply care for Kylo and, even more importantly, understand where his rage and hurt come from. The romantic dynamic is already established, it only needs to come to fruition, which is incredibly easy to make it happen since (to your admission too) they’re doing Bendeption anyway. To be frank, Kylo only needs to choose to ditch the First Order and maybe make ONE selfless act to redeem himself, even in Rey’s eyes, especially in Rey’s eyes. Nothing he did on Crait was worse than what he did on Starkiller (his body count is even shorter!), and it took Rey approximately 5 days to believe in his inherent goodness. I don’t think she’s changed her mind on that. I think she knows he isn’t in the right place to change his views yet, and is fully ready to fight him if need come, but she also doesn’t hate him, as the novelization also confirms (whereas, post tfa, she thought she did).

yes, they were enemies in TLJ too, but IX can’t spend a large portion of its running time devoted to intimate conversations like TLJ did: it’s the final act of this Trilogy and the Skywalker Saga, things need to start wrapping up.

Actually, it can. TLJ did it and managed to have TWO other full fledged storylines (including another romantic arc) running parallel to the reylo one, an identity/redemption arc for Luke AND an epic climatic battle in the end. 2 hours and 45 minutes are a LONG time to develop a dynamic to its fulfillment. And what other loose ends or main conflicts does this trilogy have to resolve yet, other than Ben’s relationship with Rey (and reconciliation with Leia, hopefully)? The only reason you think IX can’t spend time on reylo is because you don’t see it as a crucial part of this trilogy. But it is.

TL;DR; in my opinion f/rey doesn’t have enough set up to be the endgame romance (not even considering TFA alone), and with Rose’s introduction they kind of sealed the deal. Having Finn and Rey be involved in romantic threads with two other main characters only to undo those threads and put them together in the end actually requires more work (narrative-wise) than letting their respective romantic storylines evolve to their natural conclusion in IX. Pre-TLJ I said that both f/rey and reylo can be “canon”, and both are, the former as a friendship (the most important one in this trilogy) and the latter as a romance. I just don’t think they’ll be both romantic in the end. There’s potential in that to explore in fanfiction (just like there was potential in, say, Luke/Leia or Obi Wan/Padmé or even O/bikin), but it’s an extremely unlikely (and messy) direction to go for the canon story.

Hope this clarifies my opinion on the issues you raised, and that I didn’t sound too dismissive of your points. If so I apologize in advance.

[redorblue]

Books 27-29/2017 - The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan

If you have any kind of positive feelings for this book - stay away. I mean it. This was possibly - probably - the worst read of my life. The only reason I made it through all three of them was that I wanted to make an educated complaint and pick up everything I could of what is wrong with these books. And believe me, it’s a lot: not just quality-wise, it has a whole lot of other issues like misogyny, racism and internalized homophobia. I just finished the last part, and normally I let a book settle for a few days before I write about it, but I’m so mad about this, and I have been since I was a few chapters into the first part, that I can’t put this off.

I’m gonna put this under a cut because I don’t wanna spread my hate for this book farther than necessary where possibly underaged fans could see it, and because it’s gonna be looong. I have a lot to say.

First, let’s start with why it is simply not a good book. I have to add, I read a German translation that I picked up from the flea market (thank God I didn’t spend more money on this. I get why someone wanted to get rid of them now). I’m not used to reading in German, and there are bad translations, but there are also very good translations, and normally I get used to German a few chapters in. I guess in the end it happened here, too, so although the translator may be to blame, I really don’t believe so, because even if she screwed it up, there’s so many other things screaming that Trudi Canavan is a bad writer that I strongly tend to blame the author. Again, I may be wrong, and she may have improved, considering that this is her first published work - however that happened - and after all style is subjective and all that, but I really didn’t like the way this book was written. I don’t mean to be arrogant and play the high-and-mighty literary critic here, there’s lots of books that aren’t considered literature which I love, and many of those are YA books with some fantasy elements. So these books could have appealed to me. But apart from all the things that alternately made me mad, annoyed, and second-hand embarassed, the way this series is written just didn’t do anything for me. Not even the gay romance, which is normally a pretty sure-fire way to get me interested. Everything about these characters, their interactions and the story in general just felt so way beyond belief, so implausible, that it didn’t make me feel anything at all at best, and cringing away at worst. And to me, that’s just bad writing.

Let me elaborate on why I found so many things so implausible. First, the romances. The books cover around 2,5 years I think, which means that there would have been time to develop them properly, but most of them just went from either hating the other person or not knowing them at all, to all-out love in two or three weeks. And while that may happen in real life, you have to lay the groundwork for that in a book, drop some hints, have some reflections, show the audience where this is going, instead of just dropping it into their laps. It wasn’t a surprise who fell for whom because it’s all very predictable and cliché, but still, you can’t just do that and expect your readers to accept it and get emotionally invested (only it seems like you can?? Because there’s people who like this book and give it good reviews?? Dear God how...). Like, it was soo obvious that the main protagonist (Sonea) was going to pick the tall-dark-handsome mystery guy in the end, and that at first she was going to have a thing for this shiny Nice Guy^TM who was the first to ever pay her any attention, all while her childhood friend was pining away for her which of course she never noticed evva. This childhood friend thing I was still ready to overlook because it happened early when I was still optimistic that these books would get better, and because they at least had a relationship at some point - even though they hadn’t seen each other for years and he fell for her in about an hour. Sorry, but love on first sight is really not a thing for me. But yeah, okay. With the second guy, the Nice one, I was starting to get really impatient, because they had two short scenes together in which they barely talked, and all of a sudden they were kissing and talking about the future and she was thinking about waiting for him for four more years while he disappeared into his backwater village... I’m sorry girl, but didn’t you have a life, and dreams, and plans for the future?? Like those you talked about for the last book and a half so that even the dumbest reader would get sick of it? But hey, who needs a personality, or (female) agency, especially in your protagonist, when you can have so much love with this really dreamy guy? Not the author, I guess.

And then, there’s boyfriend No. 3, the one who makes it all the way into her heart in the end, but then he dies and she loses all her will to live. After hating him for two years, falling for him for three days and being with him for two weeks. Yeah, sounds romantic, and it gets even better when you consider the fact that she’s half is age. If you thought the first two guys were stereotypes, this is the one to rule them all. He has it all - tall, dark, mysterious, handsome, powerful, and I guess the author wanted him to have a soft and loving heart under his unapproachable shell, but she waaayyy overdid it. He’s not just gruff, he’s downright cruel, he’s a narcissist who believes he’s the only one who can be trusted with anything, he’s dismissive and arrogant and indifferent even toward those he calls his friends (until they die, but then it’s a bit late for that buddy) and just overall an awful person. Which really doesn’t make me inclined to care for his oh so terrible backstory. Yes it’s sad that you were a slave for a few years, kept for the magical energy your master could harvest from you, I get that, but it doesn’t give you the right to behave like an asshole and manipulate and emotionally abuse everyone around you. The author has him sacrifice himself in the end, which comes straight outta nowhere character-wise, so he ends up a glorified martyr and war hero with no one ever challenging him in any way, making him face up to his mistakes and the consequences they had for everyone’s lives. I’m sorry, but this is bad writing, this makes it look like he was right to treat everyone like shit. And, even worse, this is the guy who gets the girl and is presented like this oh so desirable man that he really is not. This isn’t supposed to sound sexist from my side, it’s just the way this relationship is presented. At some point the protagonist even says it exactly that way, when Nice Guy and Asshole have a fit of jealousy because of course she’s something to possess and have a pissing contest over. God I hate him, this whole relationship is so cringy, and I don’t even wanna get into the misogyny yet because it is not an isolated incident and I’m not done with him yet.

So he fails as a person, and also as a boyfriend, but even the one thing that he could do well because of all his power and forbidden knowledge - he fucks it up. The third book ends with an invasion of the magician guild’s city by some Bad Guys, and yes, he fights them then, but he knew that they were a danger for the last ten years or so, and he never told anybody although people were dying because of it, because of course he knows best and doesn’t need anybody to help him. So when the bad guys finally arrive the city is woefully unprepared because he told them all of two weeks ago, as part of his defense while he is being accused of practising black magic and having killed people - so the whole thing doesn’t look at all like an excuse, oh no, not coming from him who lied to them for like ten years. Don’t get me wrong, this guild is terrible and annoyingly obstinate in its own way, but I don’t blame them for not entirely believing him when he tells them after such a long time, as part of an excuse for committing pretty much the worst crime they can think of, and without offering any easily verifiable evidence. Good plan, yeah. You just managed to severely weaken the one force that has at least a tiny chance of fighting off the bad guys by dividing them and being too secretive to give them any proof, instead of having spent the last years preparing them for a war that you knew very well was at least a possibility. Amazing job.

So yeah, that’s the guy young girls reading these books are supposed to pine for. Great message. By comparison the two other romances in the books are better than this, but it hurts my fingers to write that because one is laden with orientalism and fetishization, and the other, while trying really hard to be progressive, falls into so many silently homophobic pitfalls, it’s pathetic. In both cases I’m pretty sure it’s not intentional, but when you’re a writer creating a whole new world and you want to include diverse ethnicities and sexual orientations - which in and of itself is laudable - you have to be careful how you write your LGBT+ and your characters of colour. There’s many harmful tropes out there, and I certainly don’t expect a book to avoid every single one out there, or claim to notice every problematic thing, but in this book it’s not an isolated incident, it’s simple ignorance and lazyness to do a bit of research about the harmful stereotypes you have inadvertently absorbed your whole life so as not to repeat them.

This kind of reflection clearly didn’t happen neither during the writing process nor during editing, so what we get is a mess. What we get is one relationship where the woman is described as looking like someone of Central Asian descent, with all the stereotypes commonly to be found in an Oriental tale written by a Western person. This woman never gets a backstory, she just kinda appears on the scene and the reader never really knows what she wants, only that she’s there to help out her white, male love interest in his time of need, before maliciously abusing his trust and disappearing into the woods again. We’re told that she’s good at fighting, but we never see her really doing it - the only one she ever really shares screentime with is her love interest with whom she has a whole lot of sex. Really, every scene either ends with them having sex, or her talking dirty to him, which makes it appear as if all that’s on her mind is sex! And ain’t that stereotypical of the mysterious, Oriental seductress who spends all of her time either spinning intrigues or plotting how to get the next innocent white boy into her clutches. So, overall, absolutely terrible romance, and I’m gonna come back to this because like sexism, this orientalism/racism is not an isolated incident either.

The other relationship lacking reflection that we get is the one between this gay magician from the very conservative country where the main story is set, and this also gay scholar from a slightly less conservative, but all the more patronizing culture. The book at least questions the first country’s stance on the issue, although it only does so through its gay characters, which severely restricts the validity of the point considering that none of the straight characters ever even thinks to reflect if this stance on homosexuality might be wrong. What I can’t forgive is that the narrative never once questions the stance of the slightly less conservative country, which treats its gays (only men, mind you, there’s never once mention of a gay woman) as lewd weirdos and outcasts and calls them “boys”. This is so bad. It’s one thing to present a culture that views gay men as not-quite-men - we all know it happens often enough - but if you write such a culture and you don’t want this to be the point you’re making, you have to criticize and contradict such a view through your narrative. Have them talk about it, have them think about it, I don’t care, just make it explicit that it’s wrong. And don’t be lazy and hide behind this excuse that the readers will get it through plot alone - you have to write it down somewhere so that casual readers won’t miss it. Otherwise you end up with something like this where this culture you wanted to present as so progressive and kind of a save haven ends up patronizing and emasculating your gay male characters, and this doesn’t subvert neither harmful tropes nor real-life views. Just like the fact that your gay characters hide their relationship until after the end of the books, and find nothing wrong with it because it’s just the culture they’re living in. This is a latent confirmation that it’s right that gay couples have to hide their relationship and don’t confront others with their being different, and again, if this is not what you wanted as a writer, make it explicit. And for God’s sake, include more than one kiss in three whole books between your gay couple, when the straight ones kiss all the time and even get explicit scenes. Because otherwise your oh-so-progressive gay couple is just two really close male friends who happened to kiss once. Better write a great platonic relationship then and leave the gay stuff to the people who actually know how to handle it and won’t turn it around on itself.

So, I think I’ve established that in my opinion, the romantic relationships are absolute rubbish. I would like to say that the platonic ones fare better, but honestly, they just don’t get enough screentime for me to say. It’s quite astonishing - in a book series with 1840 pages (in my paperback edition) there doesn’t seem to be any space for friendships or family bonds. We’re told that they exist, mind you, but I personally didn’t really understand why those two people are friends, what makes their friendship special, what characterizes it. Not even what characterizes the characters, for that matter, because even the way the main characters are fleshed out feels a bit half-assed, and don’t even get me started on the secondary characters. And with a bit of good will, I could ignore that fact if the plot was really great, but it’s not either, so I honestly don’t get what the author did with all that space. I can summarize what happens in each book with one sentence: The first is about Sonea hiding from the mages because they’re bad, then being scared of them because they’re bad, and then suddenly joining them because plot. In the second book, she’s bullied by her classmates, but doesn’t do anything about it on her own because oh no, she could hurt them, and doesn’t tell anyone who could do something about it either because plot. The third is about the great conspiracy with the war and all that and fares a bit better action-wise, but it’s still mainly Sonea following this guy of hers along because apparently he needs her, and I guess he does, but he still treats her like shit right until they have sex. So yeah, plenty of space for character development, but for some reason it just doesn’t happen.

To be fair, I guess Sonea developed a bit, considering that she’s not as scared of pretty much everything as she was in the beginning - although the number of times that “her blood froze in her veins” really made me dislike that phrase. Her childhood friend developed a bit in that he gained a higher position in the city’s underworld. And Mr. Tall-Dark-Mysterious (TDM, for future reference) opened up a bit about his oh-so-tragic past. But is that really character development? I guess if you squinted you could count it as that if these were some unimportant secondary characters, but these are the main protagonists and POVs! In almost 2000 pages there should be a bit more than that! And if that’s what the main characters get... There was this one character that I kinda liked, another POV but a secondary one, who was Sonea’s first mentor in the guild and some kind of father figure for her. That was the one relationship where I saw a bit of potential - until the second half of the second book, when TDM takes Sonea hostage (romantic, I know) and forbids her to ever speak to her former mentor again, which effectively ends their relationship for good. So no development there, either.

But for a character to develop, and especially for a relationship between two characters two develop, you first need exactly that: characters. And this book doesn’t have any. There’s very few things I could tell you about the POVs’ personality traits, and it’s mostly just stereotypes - Sonea’s a classic Mary Sue, TDM is... well, TDM, the mentor is fatherly and benevolent, the childhood friend is adventurous, and the gay magician represses his feelings for his friends. I’m not kidding, that’s basically it. The same goes for backstory - none of them seems to have parents, siblings or other relatives, except for Sonea who has an aunt and an uncle that she’s apparently close to, but who briefly show up on screen around three times and get mentioned three more. Everyone’s fathers just kinda disappeared into the void, and the mothers are all dead to make it a bit more tragic - another tired trope that is a bit beyond belief because how on earth did all those mothers get dead, and why doesn’t even one father seem to care for his offspring? There’s one exception, the mentor guy about whom we’re told that he cares for his son, but again, it’s just that - we’re told he does, because otherwise, from their interactions, we wouldn’t get it. And that doesn’t count. The same goes for all other aspects of backstory, which is typically limited to a handful of sentences except for when we’re supposed to care for TDM - he actually gets a handful of paragraphs. So generous. I normally prefer character-driven stories over plot-driven stories, so I don’t mind that much when there’s not an awful lot of plot if (!!!) the characters are well done and engaging. But they’re not, they’re basically walking paper stands, and that I can’t forgive.

So far I mainly talked about what makes this trilogy lazy writing. Now I’m gonna talk about what makes it not only bad, but really problematic. I already touched on homophobia, but due to the lack of real gay representation there’s not much more I can add to that, so I’ll focus on misogyny/sexism and on racism/orientalism. I’m not sure how established the latter concept is outside my academic circle, so here’s a good summary of what it means. Basically, orientalism refers to a binary worldview that presents the West as progressive, dynamic, and inherently superior to a backward, barbaric and static East that therefore has to be rescued and remodeled by the West. Of course there are other issues like racism and imperialism tied into it that also refer to other non-Western cultures and ethnicities, but orientalism transports a specific set of stereotypes about people and cultures from the Middle East and North Africa, typically Muslims. It’s hateful, it’s patronizing, it harms people, and it’s all to be found in these books. 

There’s two main examples of this. This fantasy world that the author describes includes two countries inhabited by people of colour: Lonmar, where the people are described as dark-skinned, and Sachaka, where they look like someone of Central Asian descent. First of all, there aren’t many characters from these countries that even get a bit of individuality - they’re mainly just there for background noise and never step outside the crowd (a stereotype that is also to be found in orientalism, specifically in the “Arab Street”). For Lonmar, there’s one named, recurring character who isn’t entirely to be trusted, but overall a decent guy - because, and here’s the problem, he has been socialized in white Kyralia (another thing typical of orientalism - the distinction between the “good”, Westernized muslims, and the “bad” oriental ones, easily distinguishable by dress and socialization). All the other (few) characters from Lonmar are not characters but crowds with not a single speck of individuality and one feature that unites them all: they’re all members of this really strict, intolerant religion specific to Lonmar that is so obviously modeled after - you guessed it - Islam. Or rather the monolithic, prejudiced version of Islam an uninformed Westerner might think of if they only consumed what was given to them by mainstream media and never talked to a Muslim person in their entire life. This religion locks up its female adherents, it punishes homosexuality with public execution, it talks a lot about the unbelievers and is generally intolerant, it doesn’t give a f* about individual wishes and desires, and - maybe worst of all - it’s canonically all based on a lie. On the imaginary ramblings of a madman who for some reason was able to trick people into believing in him and making him a prophet. I can’t begin to express how awful this is. With the homophobia I don’t believe it was intentional - but this is. This has to be. And I’m so, so mad at this woman for mocking the beliefs, the worldview and the very lives of 1,6 billion people on earth in such a an offhanded, cruel way.

And that’s not even the only example, oh no. There’s also Sachaka. Sachaka, happens to be the homecountry of the murderous lunatics who terrorize the city in the first two books and assault it in the third, and who all happen to be brown-skinned. There are a few more characters from this country who had the honour to receive a name, but the way they’re described is in no way less problematic than the Lonmars. The only character who’s not openly evil, is the deceitful nymphomaniac who serves as a love interest to the white childhood friend. I already mentioned how unbearably sexualized she is, which is terrible in and of its own, but takes on a whole other dimension in combination with her race. It’s another feature of orientalism to either present oriental women as sheepish victims of oppression waiting to be rescued, or as eroticized/fetishized succubus-like beings, beautiful and alluring and generally a (white) man’s slavering fantasy. And not only is the only woman and morally okay character from Sachaka presented in such a way, she also - surprisingly- doesn’t get not a single line of backstory. We don’t know what she does back home, who she is, why the hell she ended up in this white-hot mess of a story, what she wants... Nothing. She’s literally just there to seduce the white guy, help him get over the protagonist, and save his ass once before she betrays him and disappears again. A ripped-out page out of a playboy edition could fulfil every single purpose she has in the story, even the saving part. There, white guy gets attacked by one of the evil magicians, and she mainly buys him time to get away, although we’re told (ha!) that she’s a good fighter. Put the playboy page in evil guy’s face, wait until his sex-crazed oriental mind gets distracted, run away, problem solved.

Because of course he’s sex-crazed, he’s oriental, what did you expect? They’re all that way, men and women, sexual predators all over the board. In addition to being cruel, sadistic, conniving, good at killing but bad at healing and collaborating, power-hungry, scheming... And did I mention that they keep their slaves like cattle? Yeah, no idea what that reminds me of. Plus, as cunning as they are presented, they’re also really stupid. Before the invasion, the bad guys have been sending slaves to the magicians’ city for years to spy on them and find out whether they know how to use black magic or not (they don’t, except for TDM which is why he’s the only one who can kill them and has to go on this lonesome quest alone, isolated from everyone he ever cared about... You get the idea). This is so stupid. They do it for years, they send slave after slave with no result at all, when at the same time it’s a well-established fact that when magicians communicate with each other mentally, anyone can listen in! You can’t tell me that in all this time, no one ever mentioned black magic being forbidden! Because it’s not a secret anyone except for TDM even knows is necessary to keep, so no one knows that they can’t talk about it. This is another instance of the plot being unnecessary complicated and like a desperate attempt to create some artificial conflict that could have been solved within five minutes... But I’m digressing.

And it’s not only the evil mages who are presented in such a bad light; the few lines we get about the country (it’s a desert, by the way, just like Lonmar. Surprise) suggest that the rest is pretty much the same. Not as mad maybe, but just as power-hungry and conniving as the bad guys, and certainly not as civilized as the white countries around it. So it’s no surprise when the protagonist, no less, starts thinking about some White Man’s Burden kind of shit. The backstory is this: Some 500 years ago there was a war between Sachaka (bad) and Kyralia (good). Kyralia won and, when drawing back, operated on a scorched earth-policy, leaving behind a wasteland and turning their backs, for which the people from Sachaka still want revenge (500! years! later!) because that’s what orientals do when their honour is scratched. The protagonist reflects on that story and then honestly starts thinking about how Kyralia should have stayed in Sachaka, basically occupying it, in order to try and teach the backward Sachakans how to be civilized. This... is some seriously fucked-up shit. My dear author, not only is every single one of your big bad guys a person of colour, and not only is the description of their cultures and their characterization creaking under the weight of all your prejudice, but now you have your protagonist want to civilize them? Who are you, George Bush? Or some 19th-century missionary despairing under the terrible weight of his burden to make the barbaric indigenous half-apes wear silk hats? Whoever your soul was in the last go-round, let me tell you, you’re not making a point for the almighty Western civilization if you write crap like this.

Okay deep breaths. Last issue, sexism and misogyny. I feel like the author wanted these books to make a point about female agency and Strong Female Characters^TM, but as with gay representation she entirely missed the mark and instead wrote something that’s more detrimental to positive female representation than anything. I already mentioned in the relationship part how her boyfriend treat the protagonist as a possession to fight over and how she has apparently internalized and endorsed that view, and in the character part how the mothers were all killed off before the story even started in order to add some trauma to the characters’ backstories. This is lazy, it’s misogynistic in that it robs these women of everything that makes them human (mostly they’re not even named) for the sake of shock value, and then the narrative doesn’t even use what it bought so dearly and minimizes the effect the deaths of the mothers have on the characters, and thereby a mother’s contribution to her child’s development. It makes the mothers mere means to an end, and it doesn’t do the same to the fathers, which makes it deeply misogynist.

This misogyny is glaringly obvious in the off-stage deaths of two women: the mentor guy’s wife, and TDM’s first love. About the mentor guy’s wife, we know barely more than that she was the mentor guy’s wife, and that her name was Yilara. Mentor guy loved her, and had a son with her, and then she died of... something. Doesn’t matter what it was, really, because her only purpose in the story was to give mentor guy a sad past. And it can’t have been that sad, because he mentions her like twice, and their son doesn’t mention her at all. I don’t know how old he was when she died (see what I mean), so he might not remember, but considering that mentor guy claims he still loves her, he could think about her a bit more often and remember a bit more about her than her lying in her bed, softly smiling, like a saintly martyr. This is already bad, but the other case is infinitely worse. Naturally, it involves TDM. He got to know his first love while he was a slave in Sachaka as she belonged to the same evil guy he did. She was evil guy’s sex slave (this author has no imagination), and when evil guy found out she and TDM loved each other, he raped her to death. Poor her, you might think, what a terrible end to a terrible life. Well, that’s not what our dear protagonist thought. What she thought was, poor TDM, this is so sad for him, he had to suffer through so much. Him, him him, him. I don’t even want to call the slave girl (no name)’s death shock value or manpain any more, because this is on a totally different level. There’s this girl, probably a woman of colour, against whom a horrific, sexualized and clearly gendered form of violence was used repeatedly, and in the end to kill her no less, and all our also female protagonist can think of is how much her boyfriend must have suffered. She doesn’t spend a single thought on the girl. Not one. And neither does the narrative itself, this is all we ever hear about her. TDM had the hots for her, she was brutally murdered, he got sad, the end. It’s astonishing how often the sheer wrongness of these books leaves me speechless.

And there’s more. I’ve read a few times that this book has some Strong Female Characters^TM and generally does well on female representation. Well, no. I recently came across this amazing article about this particular brand of Strong Female Characters that comes to the conclusion that lots of allegedly strong women in media, typically tomboy-like women with “male” interests and skills and no meaningful relationships with other women, are nothing but empty tropes whose only function is to prop up the male protagonist who saves the day. This is exactly what happens here, with the male skill being magic/fighting. Not only is there an astonishing lack of female characters featuring exactly no diversity at all (except for the nymphomaniac of course), but they also don’t interact. There’s a few snippets of conversation here and there, but those are all influenced by social hierarchy and consist of barely more than small talk, and none of the women except Sonea get any depth at all. They get names and functions, if they’re lucky, but that’s it. And even Sonea, whose head we spend more time in than anyone else’s, is so consumed by his wishes every time a man comes along and expresses the slightest interest in her that it’s hard to spot a personality underneath. Like honestly, she looses the will to live, along with all of her plans and other relationships, because the guy she was in a relationship with for all of 2-3 weeks died. That’s so over the top, and so frustrating... I mean I get it, you loved him, love can be quick I guess, but that quick?? I get that you can’t turn to your girl-friends or your mother for support because oopsie daisy you don’t have any of those, but there’s some men who care about you, and not even in a sexual way, so come on.

And then there’s the ending. Oh how I love the ending. I mentioned that TDM dies in the end - the first good decision the author made, although I can’t shake the feeling that the protagonist’s role in the end is mainly to augment the impact his sacrifice has. Not only is he presented as a martyr and the ultimate hero of the story who gave all of his life energy to save the city from evil, conveniently never having to face up to all the wrong he’s done and the impact it had on the lives of those around him. His death also practically ends life for the protagonist with his death being her last POV scene. I guess some may find that romantic, but it seems as though her voice just disappears after he’s dead, never to be heard of again, and that robs her of all agency of personality. It’s as if she only has those things with him, while through his backstory we know that he had them without her. And I can’t shake the feeling that that’s because he’s male, and oh so dreamy. But that’s not the last we hear of him, oh no. Because after the last chapter, there’s an epilogue where we learn (from another person’s POV) that he left something of his behind. Namely his sperm, inside the protagonist, who’s pregnant with his child now. She mentions at some point that it’s too early for her to have a child, but now it happened, and we have no idea how she feels about that because this huge turning point in her life still isn’t told from her point of view to drive the point home that TDM’s death really meant the end of her. Again the narrative puts him over her although she’s the supposed protagonist of the story, which fits neatly into the Strong Female Character concept I mentioned earlier.

And it’s not only that, the story of how she got pregnant in the first place is incredibly sexist, too. Apparently there’s a way for both male and female magicians to avoid pregnancy. But the males are only taught how to do it per personal request because obviously it’s not a man’s responsibility whether he puts children in the world or not. The women get taught a bit more regularly, someone takes them aside to teach them when they begin to show interest in boys and the danger arises, but no one ever did that for Sonea because as far as the teachers knew, no one wanted to sleep with her. First of all, this is stupid because what if the teachers don’t notice in time or the sex just happens without a lot of courting before the actual act? And second of all... The message is basically that if no one likes you while you’re in school, or probably if you’re ugly, you are never going to have sex anyway, so you don’t need to be told how to avoid unwanted consequences. If you’re a woman, that is, for the men it’s different. This is so incredibly sexist. And in Sonea’s case this kind of thinking had the worst possible consequences: he thought she’d take care of it, and she thought he would, so now there’s a baby, and not even a father to match (bad as he would have been) and that is that. I’m yet undecided as to whether this sexist arrangement is just another carelessness from the side of the author, or a way to get the author what she wanted plot-wise because an ending to a romance novel needs to have a baby, no matter if it makes sense together with the rest of the story or not.

I could elaborate further on pretty much any point I made here, but I think I got the gist across, so fear not, I’m gonna stop (if anyone even made it to this point which I doubt). Writing up all of this made me so mad that I’m actually considering writing to the author to let her know what I think of this trilogy of hers. A bit more politely than this (maybe), but I feel like this is so problematic that I can’t just let it stand there without objecting to its messages in any way I can. After being done with this I have no doubt whatsoever that this was the most awful book I’ve ever read, and I dearly hope that it will keep this position for the rest of my life.

[dannymolloy]

In Marius’ defence; getting very personal

First of all, there has been some confusion here on Tumblr as to what my intentions are with this post. If you read this and honestly believe I condone pedophilia, I can tell you now; I don’t. Simple as that. If you read this post, written out of my own emotions and translate that to me not caring about yours, that’s simply false. Just because I share mine, doesn’t mean I don’t care about yours. Each their own. Simple as that.  If you truly believe I wrote this piece to trivialize abuse victims and/or glorify sexual predators, you think very poorly of me and I invite you to come and talk to me to get to know me better. I guarantee you, I’m a very nice, loving and caring person. Secondly, we’re talking about a fandom. Almost in all fandoms, there is love for protagonists and antagonists alike. This does not mean we condone crime, rape and murder in real life. Look at the love for The Joker, Sephiroth, Moriarty, The Master,  Mason Verger etc. Is everyone that loves these characters a bigot and contributor to the trivialising of crime victims? No. Wether it’s a villain that not so bad or a ‘hero’ that’s not all good; it is still fiction. No matter how real our feelings are for certain fictional characters, this is not a real reflection of our stance in real life. Period. Especially in VC, the fandom is based on loving killers. We love Lestat. We love Armand. All the vampires in VC have done horrible, horrid stuff, taken lives and committed an array of criminal acts to (for example) get undeniable wealth. To go into this and pin pointing one guy with a flaw that makes him in all honesty a villain (Marius in this case); is funny to me as they then all are. They are all criminals. They are all killers, arsonists and thieves and all have their own mental issues to cope with. I will gladly have discussions about individual characters and their crimes or contributions to the fandom, but don’t point fingers saying I discredit crime victims when the whole series does that in romanticizing vampirism in the first place. If you don’t like the books, I discourage you to read this post or anything I post on my Daniel blog. 

If someone reads this and still finds me a horrible person, I insist you contact me personally in PM for an open conversation. Don’t hide behind others. If you want your voice to be heard, speak up. I am open to any civil, reasonable conversation. ON TO THE ACTUAL POST. ------ One of my dear friends just messaged me about how she feels terrible about the fact that Marius is being portrait as an abusive monster by a lot of people of the fandom and nothing but that. And I just want to share with you my story to let you guys know why there are people out there that love him.

Reading this story take in account that I am religious. When I was 15 I got into a particular fandom which stimulated my art, my creatively and my love for roleplay. I fell madly in love with one of the characters and RPed him for a looooong time. Nonstop. Only back then I did not know what a muse was. I did not know of the word. And darker forces took advantage of that. When it was revealed that this particular character died in the next book, it tore my heart to shreds. And instead of experiencing the muse as an inspirational source for my writing, it became a constant presence that would ‘talk’ to me. Said it came to be with me. Demand things of me. For almost two years this thing pretending to be him tried to isolate me and drag me down a dark path. I would be his and only his. I even broke up with a boyfriend back then whom I was crazy about. Because he told me to. And in the end he would even start telling me to off myself to truly be with him. Thank god something then clicked in me, only then realising this was going too far. I believe by recognising it, God reached out and expelled it. This thing left. But I didn’t realise it was my own strength- my own doing that did this. So I was distraught. It broke me. It left me depressed and unhappy for more years than I dare admit. It ruined my ability to be romantically involved with anyone which I still suffer from till this day.

But then something happened. I got introduced to the Vampire Chronicles fandom. I was scared at first. The confrontation with such strong, vibrant characters and the overwhelming subject of death made me so very weary for this fandom. But when I reached the point in The Vampire Lestat where Marius dug Lestat up and Lestat said he had never laid eyes on something so beautiful, I was roused. And as I kept reading, this Marius- this beautiful, man so full of life and optimism and love for life made me smile again. He was calm and wise and friendly and so extremely patient. An artist too and in love with everything beautiful in life. He appreciated the simple gesture of opening a door and all his strength and power made him humble towards weakness. Through his death, he only loved life more. All these lessons overwhelmed me. Shook me to my core. Slapped me in the face and told me this was the muse to follow. And he saved me. He literally saved me. I smiled again. I started appreciating life again. I went back to art school. I started appreciating the small beauties around me again. He opened my eyes again to the beauty of living. Getting back into roleplay scared me but I met a girl who for the first time explained what a muse was and only then did I realise that I had been tricked. That I had been taken advantage of by darker forces. And so then I decided that if I was going to RP again, I was going to keep the now called muses at a distance. And I did. And I still do. And I can enjoy it again. I can enjoy life again.

-----

In Marius’ defence Yes, after reading all the books, I realise he has major issues. I know he made some really bad decisions and a million more mistakes. But let me tell you; I was happy to see he wasn’t perfect. I was relieved to know that even those we look up to are flawed. And yes, in the span of his life, which is over 20 lifetimes!!!!, it is really quite OKAY for him to make more mistakes than we do in a lifetime. But lets not forget he is a vampire. Do we blame a lion for killing the antelope? No. It’s in his nature. Do we blame a vampire for manipulating and taking lives? No. It’s in their nature. It is quite unfair to throw shade at Marius for faltering every now and then when he so desperately tries to be human. And then there are some things I wish to point out that people seem to forget. - If it wasn’t for Marius, The Parents would have died thousands of years ago and the vampire race would have gone extinct. There would literally be no VC if it wasn’t for Marius sacrificing his freedom to harness and protect the Core.

- The knowledge of Marius’ possible existence was the thing that kept Lestat going in TVL. It was Marius that dug him out of the ground for a second shot at life. It was Marius who showed Lestat there was more to vampirism than the pain he had suffered so far.

- Without Marius intervening, Daniel would have been lost. Despite Marius’ double agenda to kill his own loneliness or feeble attempts to make it up to Armand, taking Daniel in was an act of kindness. Marius saved Daniel and only could through his endless patience.

- Marius welcomes Mael into his house. This is such an important aspect of his endless attempts to be good. Do not forget Marius was a very, very happy man in his mortal days. Mael stole that away from him. He robbed him of a simple but wonderful life and tossed him into this whirlpool of death and loneliness and misery. And yet Marius lets him sleep under his roof and offers him his own clothes!! His kindness is often obscured by acts of petty behaviour, but in his heart he is a genuinely good man who wants peace. He tries. And that is what matters.

- It is Santino that destroyed Armand. Not Marius. It gets my blood boiling when people have Armand speak in defence of Santino and somehow dare to shove all the blame onto Marius. Despite his questionable ethics with children, Marius wanted nothing but to give the boys and especially Amadeo a second chance in life. He wanted to make him happy, knowledgeable, successful and powerful. Marius is not the one that set the Palazzo on fire. Marius is not the one that tossed children in a fire. Marius is not the one that cruelly made Amadeo kill his best friend. Marius is the one that got burned to the bone and had to recover for 100 YEARS!! Marius is the one that had to suffer the loss of all his children. The loss of his happiness he experienced in Venice. The loss of his acolyte. The loss of his empire. His pupil. His lover. Marius is the one that served Akasha and was therefor told to leave Amadeo behind. I am not saying he was right in leaving Amadeo behind. Yes, t was one of the biggest mistakes he made. Despite being weak and in excruciating pain, he gave up on Amadeo because Santino had already tainted him. The fact that Amadeo forgot about his trauma’s in the past, Marius had a clean slate to make the best piece of art he had ever made. But Santino went over it with a sharpy and Marius, forever being the perfectionist, did not see a chance of saving it. And yes, that was wrong of him. And yes, he should have tried to get Amadeo back and save him. But it is extremely unfair to forget all these things in play. Marius suffered tremendously through this ordeal and caught his own traumas on the way. - He stays positive. He couldn’t marry the girl he loved due to discrimination. He was kidnapped. He was robbed of his mortal life by a man whom he later had to safe by pulling his head off and putting it back the right way. Three of his houses got burned down to the ground. He sacrificed his own freedom for the sake of his kind by taking care of The Parents. Akasha then thanked him by crushing him and breaking all his bones. He lost his happiness and the love of his life by a Satan-worshipping cult. He suffered 100 years because he was set on fire. He got the chance to finally be with the woman he loved but literally missed the memo. And yet... he stays positive. His natural optimism of living a happy, mortal life is what kept him going. It’s what made him a child of the millennia. He is the eternal optimist because he knows how precious life is.

So again; I am not saying you don’t have any right or reasons to dislike Marius or distrust him. All I want to say with this, is that despite his flaws, he inspired and set in motion more than the fandom gives him credit for. He suffered more than the fandom gives him credit for. He saved my life and therefor I will always defend him. He deserves it.

[grace52373]

6:17 Awake

Okay, this episode really disturbed me and angered me a lot so let’s start with what was good about the episode:

Giles showed us a Gideon who was soo conflicted and in pain that it brought tears to my eyes. Belle telling him that no matter what he does for the Black fairy, he is always loved and welcomed with his parents. I needed to hear Belle say this after almost giving up on her son. I needed to hear that she would accept him no matter what and I am sad to say but with her current black/white, heroes/villains attitude, I was concerned that if her baby wasn’t the perfect hero she pushed him to be, and we saw the negative consequences for that, she would reject him. I am happy that I was wrong. I love Belle don’t get me wrong but the way she is currently being written, I had my doubts.

Rumple was awesome last night. Yes he told the Black Fairy that Gideon saved a flower to help the Charmings and that he was going to get his heart back but I think that was to put his mother on notice that Gideon is his and Belle’s son and they will stop at nothing to save him and she got the message alright!

Black Fairy was creepy as heck! Jamie Murrary did a great job and I congratulated her and The Gold family on their awesome performances last night.

I would have congratulated Ginny and Josh as well but don’t have their twitter tag. They were awesome too. Their chemistry like Rumbelle’s is off the charts and they actually took what was a horrible story and breathed life into it. I cried when they closed the door on finding Emma early and chose to go back to the curse and I cried when Snow was willing to go into an enchanted forever sleep, dying , so their daughter would be reunited with the man she loves. They showed tremendous love for their daughter and for their people. They acted like true heroes last night and they haven’t been acting that way for awhile. I don’t agree with their choice because I think if they raised Emma, they could have still raised a savior but they made a sacrifice and the shame of it is, Emma suffered for it. which explains why Snow was willing to sacrifice for her daughter’s happiness in amends. Also, another way of looking at it was that Emma might never have met her real true love, Neal and had Henry.

Tiger lily was awesome and I loved the way she handled Hook and the Lost boys, who are my heroes for sentencing Hook to death! I love that she was a fairy too!

Hook was an selfish jerk as usual. Like Emma, he could have cared less for Tiger Lily’s warnings about the coming darkness until he realized Emma was involved and Tiger Lily was trying to save her, than he couldn’t do enough! Selfish ass! Also the second proposal over her parents almost dead bodies was disgusting and I thought their first proposal was bad! Of course him stepping up to take the sleeping curse first unlike Snow and David’s daughter would have been a good choice but his comment ruined it. Once again, he is all about himself and helping only those who help him.

Before you say it, Rumple has done more selfless things with no reward and Hook has yet to do any. Canon proves me right!

Emma, Emma, Emma! I miss the bad ass who cared about others more than herself. She is going after a man whom she knows was abused and needs help and she doesn’t care. She and her mom joke about killing Gideon in front of his parents last episode and she refuses to give Gideon a chance but of course Hook gets one and Zelena which infuriates me! When have they actually changed? They haven’t and you bet I let the writers know that as well as why they have low ratings and how they are writing an abusive couple.

Funny how in the episode, CS is proven to be true love, they are also shown to be abusive. Emma actually excused Hook’s lie by saying it was her fault he had to lie , that she didn’t make it easy for him to tell the truth. Hello! It is never easy to tell the truth! Ask Rumple who has told some painful truths lately! A poster tweeted that scene to Adam saying this is how women get killed in abusive relationships and I retweeted it saying they created an abusive ship and I hope they enjoy the low ratings!

Back to Emma who hit a new low by letting her dying mother convince her to save her boyfriend who she than accepts his proposal and kisses him before remembering her dying parents. Who saved Snow and Charming you ask? It was Regina who unlike Emma, has actually come a long way! Emma didn’t even give her brother a thought along with his parents. I feel for baby Neal! He is the loser in this story! Emma has now proven to be as selfish as her boyfriend. True love isn’t selfishness so don’t come into my blog or ask box proclaiming CS is true love because I will viciously and intelligently cut you off at the knees! Emma has been brought down to Hook’s level and is no longer the vibrant, fun, badass, take no crap from anyone Swan! She has become the villain of her own fairytale. She is a selfish, inconsiderate bitch who is looking as evil and self-centered as the Black Fairy!

Emma’s excusing of Hook’s lying and putting the blame on herself horrified me and I find it hard to believe, no one in the CS fandom isn’t horrified. I remember words like that coming from my cousin to explain her dad’s and her boyfriend’s emotional abuse of her. Thankfully her dad got help and she did as well and dumped the boyfriend but before that, I had to hear her excuse their bad behavior and put the blame on herself  and it sickened me that they glorified this on the show. I am not watching these two get married. I will watch Rumbelle scenes only and I am not coming back for season 7. I can’t watch this train wreck anymore. This isn’t about my ship swan fire not being endgame this is about seeing emotional abuse being romanticized and I can’t in good conscious watch anymore. I just can’t!

Screw you writers and you too Emma and Hook! You have destroyed what was once a show about hope! I will take pride in being a part of the Rumbelle fandom and the swan fire fandom because at least those weren’t supporting abuse. At least those couples made sense and despite their problems, they were handled well.

One last thing, where the heck were these people when Rumple needed to wake up Belle? Why didn’t they use this to wake her up since she couldn’t because she was being manipulated by her son via the Black fairy!

I am so freaking sick of Rumbelle being treated like this! I am sick of all the other fandoms being treated like this to prop a one dimensional, abusive, character! Hook and Zelena should have been killed off long ago! Adam and Eddie, you destroyed this show beyond redemption and I look forward to seeing where these talented people go after your shit show!

[roxilalonde]

Vriska Serket and the Antihero’s Archetype

In other news, I am endlessly fascinated with the Spidertroll. So I wrote an essay about gender, social perspective, literary archetypes, stages of morality, and Vriska Serket. 

First off: I’m not here to argue that Vriska is perfect. She fucks up. In some cases, she fucks up to the point where she seriously hurts others, mentally and physically, and becomes seriously toxic company. I’m not here to excuse her behavior wrt Tavros, or to justify her treatment of others’ emotional needs, because neither is healthy or defensible. But what I am interested in is how she ended up being the Fandom Recognized “worst troll ever” in a group with (a) a murderous bigot, (b) an abusive murderclown, and (c) a racist with a penchant for bestiality and a characteristic lack of regard for consent. 

The answer: It’s a long story.

Let’s talk about Vriska.

Absolutely necessary in any constructive discussion of Vriska’s character is an examination of her upbringing. Her lusus, a.k.a “Spidermom,” is demonstrably the worst parent of any of the trolls. Keeping her alive requires Vriska to routinely kill or be killed, and it obviously strains her; the psychological effects of having such a huge burden placed on her at a young age are demonstrated here; she voices a strong dislike for her lusus here. Further, Spidermom fails to care for Vriska to any extent you would expect from a parent, and Vriska seems delighted to be rid of her once the game starts. When confronted with the task of killing her parent, she is neither frightened nor even unhappy about it - her only concern is whether she’ll be able to do the job.

Your surroundings as a child define how you view the world and relate to it. Changing that perspective is difficult, and takes years of work and support. People in fandom like to characterize Vriska as a suave manipulator, cruel and unfeeling to the plight of others unless it benefits her to be concerned. But reading her pesterlogs, you would only believe that if you took everything she said at face value, which is a thin reading. A face-value reading implies that Dave likes puppets, Rose hates her mother, and Caliborn is a tactical genius. The impression Vriska gives is that of a person with a fundamental inability to connect with other people, who struggles with empathy in particular. She experiences sympathy - feeling bad that others are suffering - just fine. (Terezi and Kanaya, for example, are both recipients of her sympathy, after she does them harm.) But empathy, or the emotional understanding of others’ emotions as they experience them, she lacks, which evidences that her emotional intelligence never developed as a child (or she can’t do empathy, generally; neither is a character deficit so much as a product of circumstances outside of her control). Passages I think are useful reading here: these pesterlogs with Aradia and John, and the famous pirate cave monologue.

Now, let’s throw in Mindfang. From the onset, Vriska has two clearly established models in her life: a neglectful (arguably abusive) lusus, and an inaccessible, deified ancestor who glorifies violence and unlawfulness. Her value of Mindfang seems to come from Mindfang’s “coolness,” i.e., the fact that Mindfang is never awkward or incompetent. Of course a socially inept child is going to deify someone who’s always in control of their self-presentation. Especially since the Mindfang narrative that Vriska reads is entirely written by Mindfang, so there’s probably some severe manipulation of the facts going down to make her seem cooler than she is. 

And then Doc Scratch. An omniscient deity meddling in the affairs of a prepubescent girl from a young age, informing her that she has no choice in most of her critical decisions, and pushing her towards the decisions that will make possible the Alpha Timeline. He humors her desire for attention and importance by predicating his attention to her on her obedience; when she rebels, tries to develop an independent conscience, he criticizes her. From a young age, Vriska is being told that morality is impossible because everything in the universe is predetermined. That her choice doesn’t matter. Her life is a series of desperate grasps at free will, which has been denied her since birth. So she exerts her control over others to mimic the ways of her role models, Mindfang and Scratch. This is where Tavros comes in. 

That said: Vriska’s treatment of Tavros is inexcusable. It’s degrading, physically harmful, and toxic. Again, I’m not trying to defend it. But I want to point out that it comes from her trying to “improve” him, to change what she perceives as a flaw - his cowardice and indecisiveness. Already, Vriska is an improvement on her predecessors in that when she exerts control over others, she does it out of a misguided belief that she’s improving society - not solely for selfish reasons. And she points what she perceives as flaws with Tavros’ character. (Her comments about his disability, notably, which are ableist and inexcusable, do not fall under this category.) In trying to play Mindfang, and make him into her Summoner, the inept Vriska ends up hurting him. It doesn’t stem from malignancy; it stems from instability, and a lack of emotional intelligence. That’s where virtually all of her problems come from.

Additionally, her egotism in thinking she can “fix” Tavros can be traced to Spidermom and Mindfang, too. Her need to step out of her idols’ shadow leads to a desperate search for recognition, first and foremost a positive one. She’s a neglected child who desperately wants attention. What she does to get that attention is coached in the norms of a brutally violent society, but is a cry for help nonetheless.

Let’s talk about antiheroes.

Contrary to popular belief, an antihero is not just “an imperfect hero” or “a hero who doesn’t always do the right thing.” The antihero, specifically, is a person with ethical principles designed to contrast the protagonist - whom you root for even if they make the wrong choices. The AH has the same goals as the Protag, but a different set of ethics from whence they derive those goals. From TV Tropes:

“An Archetypal Character who is almost as common in modern fiction as the Ideal Hero, an antihero is a protagonist who has the opposite of most of the traditional attributes of a hero . . . often an antihero is just an amoral misfit. While heroes are typically conventional, anti-heroes, depending on the circumstances, may be preconventional (in a "good" society), postconventional (if the government is "evil") or even unconventional. Not to be confused with the Villain or the Big Bad, who is the opponent of Heroes (and Anti-Heroes, for that matter).”

Aranea is a villain. She directly opposes the goals of our protagonists (winning the session, and/or bodily autonomy). Gamzee is a villain: he directly opposes the goals of our protagonists (staying alive, not dying). The Condesce is a villain: she directly opposes the goals of our protagonists (staying alive, winning the session). Vriska is not a villain, archetypally: she does not oppose the goals of our protagonists, most of the time, and in fact helps in achieving them. Putting aside the question of whether she’s a bad person, she’s not a Bad Guy.

Her code of ethics most closely aligns with an Antihero - in this case, a preconventional one. There’s a neat article to be written about Vriska’s advancement along the Kohlberg stages of moral development, but for our purposes, “preconventional” just means “I do things for me, and to the extent that doing things for others will do things for me.” Her main goal: fame and glory. Subsidiary goals: help her teammates to win the game, and create a new universe. Unlike traditional preconventional actors, she doesn’t care about her own life and wellbeing, or if she does, only insofar as they can aid her ultimate goal, which is attention and acclaim.

AG: I only ever wanted to do the right thing no matter how it made people judge me, and I don't need a magic ring to do that.

Let’s talk about gender.

Take a moment and tally up all the male antiheroes in popular media you can remember. (Count them twice if they get a redemption arc.) Off the top of my head: Zuko, Lestat, Derek Hale, Nico di Angelo, Severus Snape, Jason Todd, Captain Jack Sparrow, Han Solo, Spike, Tyrion Lannister. That’s without a single glance at the TV Tropes page, either. Those are all from some of the most popular media of the past twenty years: ATLA, IWAV, Teen Wolf, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Batman, PoTC, Star Wars, Buffy, Game of Thrones. 

Now count the women. (Count them as half if their “alternative code of ethics” is “I sleep with and lie to men to get what I want, which is almost exclusively money, until I met Protagonist, who changed my evil ways.”) Personally, I’ve got a decently sized list, but at least half are from Homestuck, with others being characters I go out of my way to explore: Arya Stark, Princess Bubblegum, Marcelline, most women from House. I’d give it to Furiosa, too, although that’s arguable. Maybe you have a long list; if so, please tell me what you’ve been reading/watching lately, because these women are either sidelined in the popular media they appear in, or aren’t depicted in popular media to the same level that their male counterparts are at all. (Note: the one-off female antihero, on the other hand, is incredibly popular, perhaps because the writer doesn’t need to develop her character or give her a substantive arc: see Jyn from ATLA, Calypso from PoTC, Narcissa Malfoy from HP.) 

Here’s why: people are much more inclined to forgive a man for doing bad things than they are to forgive a woman. You can chalk this up to any number of stereotypes about women in media: that they have to be nurturers, or that their “purity” is an important aspect of their being. Regardless, if you look over the TV Tropes page for the antihero (even with the obvious miscategorizations), and you’ll find the vast majority are men. Writers have realized that audiences are far more interested in a morally grey, badass, complex, tragic-backstoried man of action than a woman of the same persuasion. 

Let’s go back to talking about Vriska.

Contrast the fandom’s reception of Vriska with its reception of Eridan. To clarify: Eridan, ultimately, isn’t an antihero. He’s a villain. He murders people. He wants to commit genocide. Furthermore, he has no discernible motivation for this except being a bigoted asshat. But you don’t see 2,000-word callouts for Eridan, despite there being a large portion of fandom that wholeheartedly stans him. This doesn’t mean you can’t be interested in Eridan as a character, or even that you can’t like him, although I don’t understand the appeal, personally. But it means that condemning Vriska, all of whose mistakes are clearly motivated and regretted, probably isn’t the hill you want to die on.

I envision a hypothetical world where Vriska is written a boy. And I guarantee you, in that world, there’s a dedicated group of fans who - unironically - call him “a perfect sinnamon roll” and “my innocent son.” His trauma is openly discussed and sympathized with in fandom. Vrisrezi is in the top 5 most popular Homestuck ships on AO3. The Scourge Bros are the most popular troll ship, period. 

We forgive Terezi for manipulating Dave. We forgive Terezi for manipulating and murdering John. Because hey, narratively speaking, they end up fine, right? (Just like Tavros does.) But Vriska is where we draw the line in the sand. Because she’s an antihero, whereas Terezi has always been a nice, comfortable female protagonist. She doesn’t conflict with John & Co. She is clearly motivated by the Greater Good. Vriska is not.

Conclusion

Vriska isn’t simple. Female characters who aren’t simple inevitably cause controversy, to a much lesser degree than male characters of the same nature. Furthermore, the fact that she isn’t a protagonist in the classical sense - whereas most of her group, in contrast, are clearly written as protagonists - makes her appear “worse” than the others, or even, at an extreme “the worst.” Disliking her is perfectly understandable. Thinking she’s a bad person is reasonable. But please don’t do either without considering why she does what she does, and evaluating for yourself whether she deserves the reputation she has.