#would probably work great for him because it would be an explicitly transactional relationship!!

[bthump]

Au where Griffith doesn’t overhear guts and casca’s conversation (or maybe actually hears guts explicitly saying that he doesn’t want to leave) and the eclipse doesn’t happen + guts stays to take care of Griffith/find a way to heal him. If they got together post rescue what do you think their first time would be like

I’m gonna cut this bc it’s a little long and meandering and I throw in a darker angstier version at the end that might require a minor consent issues warning.

ooooh boy this is hard to answer lol, post torture sexual intimacy for them would be a minefield with hindered communication on top of mountains of trauma. I can’t see Guts going for it without like, a very clear direct understanding that Griffith wants it. Like I can easily imagine Guts taking care of Griffith for a little while and getting comfortable with close physical contact with him and thoughtlessly kissing him while brushing his hair or something, but then his reaction imo would be to freak the fuck out and hate himself, and Griffith is not going to have an easy time convincing Guts he’s into it.

On top of that I see Griffith with issues relating to seeing sex as transactional, which is an issue that would be in absolute overdrive in these circumstances - I mean we already saw that with the wagon scene with Casca. If he feels like a burden to Guts, and imo he totally would, he would 100% go along with anything Guts initiated no matter how he actually feels in the moment. And he is in love with Guts and does want to have sex with him, but like, he’s still got to be emotionally capable of saying no when he’s not in the mood and idt he would be.

But I stubbornly believe that they still have solid positive relationship potential post-torture so there’s got to be a way through.

I think the easiest way for it to work is if it happens a while in the future - like after they’ve settled somewhere and have a routine going and have worked out some communication shortcuts and most importantly Guts is visibly happy, and Griffith knows it.

(tbh my ideal scenario is probably Guts and Casca both staying with Griffith, with the Raiders following Guts as well, and they settle somewhere out of Midland’s reach and form a new mercenary band. Guts and Casca trade off staying home and taking care of Griffith and leading the Raiders, until it becomes really obvious that Casca is a much better leader and Guts is a much better caretaker, and eventually they realize they’re actually a lot happier that way too, and also Casca gets a girlfriend.)

ANYWAY the point is Guts and Griffith accept their new lives together before they start fucking, and so when sex enters the picture Griffith isn’t paranoid that Guts wants to leave again and Guts knows how to read Griffith and communicate with Griffith enough to make things go as smoothly as possible.

Or conversely they start boning way too soon and hit half the mines on their way through the field but manage to muddle their way through without any successful suicide attempts and come out the other side anyway, which honestly would be great for a long dramatic and p dark fic imho.

And now I’m re-reading your ask and realizing I didn’t really answer your question lol. Well I’m not great at detail, if I was I’d just write the fics lol, but in general I think in the best case scenario their first time would be really sweet, Guts would go super slow and be overly cautious, hyper aware of Griffith’s reactions to everything. It would probably be a little while after Guts has impulsively kissed him or w/e because I think Guts would need to talk himself up to it. He’d also be aware of the possibility of things going bad for himself wrt flashbacks and stuff so idt he’d be taken by surprise and start strangling Griffith or anything like the sex scene with Casca. Tbh Guts would probably be so aware of all the ways it could go wrong that it would be terrible, boring sex lol, and Griffith would get annoyed at all the “is this good?” talk, but it’d get better the more they fuck.

Also I could easily just see Guts sticking to handjobs and maybe working his way up to oral and stopping there indefinitely unless Griffith indicated that he wanted to have penetrative sex and tbh they could probably be totally content without it anyway.

I focused on a regular no Eclipse AU without any magical healing but idt the answer is too different if there was some kind of magic healing that made communication easier except that I could see Griffith starting the ball rolling in that circumstance, at least if he had some solid indication that Guts is physically attracted to him. And the sex would be less awkward, and Griffith would probably take more control. And they’d probably have penetrative sex pretty soon bc like, even if Griff does have rape trauma whether wrt the torture chamber or just Gennon, I think he’d try to avoid acknowledging it as much as possible and would say he’s dtf regardless. Then they can deal with any emotional fallout of that afterwards I guess, but at least in this scenario they could both talk lol.

(For a darker scenario, consider: cliche unfortunate erection while Guts is helping Griff bathe, Guts awkwardly offers to take care of it, Griff wants to refuse bc it’s humiliating bc Guts makes it sound like another part of taking care of him but he wants Guts so bad that he doesn’t refuse, it’s just the worst most awkward sexual encounter ever, later Griff practically begs Guts to fuck him inasmuch as he can without a tongue so Guts gets something out of it too and he feels less like a burden, it’s also terrible and Griffith is in a major self loathing + traumatized headspace while Guts has no idea what he’s doing and is too worried about hurting Griffith to enjoy it.

But hey then let’s say it becomes routine and it grows into less perfunctory sex and more emotional lovemaking and all is eventually well, bc after all they do both love each other and want to have sex. They can work through their issues while regularly fucking too, it just makes things extra fraught. Or I guess to be more dramatic maybe they have terrible ill-advised sex until something happens, like maybe Guts has a flashback or Griffith convinces himself Guts resents him and attempts suicide or something and it leads to an outpouring of feelings from Guts, and Griffith realizes Guts legit loves him and then things start to get better.)

[dillydedalus]

books i read in july

i stole this format from @berlincorpography and i’m doing it kinda early bc i just started a longer book that i won’t finish today - anyway here’s what i read in july

open city, teju cole (uni) i appreciate what this book is doing as a contemporary postcolonial immigrant take on the flâneur and i know the irritation i felt was all intentional  but it’s still annoying!!! also i don’t think the twist really works and the way it’s used just made me super uncomfortable. 3/5 

the complete stories, agnes owens i mentioned this one in my midyear wrap-up already but like it is just too dreary and bleak and eventually i couldn’t stand it anymore. i think a ‘selected stories’ would have been much better, because some of them are really good - horrible people, dark humour, sharp wit - ‘arabella’ is brilliant. 2/5

the city of brass, s.a. chakraborty (daevabad #1) this is a YA-ish fantasy novel set partly in ottoman cairo and partly in the city of the djinn (daevabad). the protag is a con-artist (!!!) in cairo who has some ~mysterious powers accidentally summons a mean hawt djinn and there’s djinn politics and court intrigue and all that fun stuff. i had fun but it has all the YA Fantasy Tropes Ever to a slightly ridiculous effect. plus the love story goes from Making Out With the Hot Magical Dude Who Kinda Maybe Abducted You, which is incredibly #valid, to ~doomed true love, which. whatever. 2.5/5 might continue the series

do not say we have nothing, madeleine thien a family history in 20th century china - it was interesting bc i haven’t read much lit set in china but i didn’t rly connect with the characters and it was just Too Damn Long. 3/5

wir sind ja nicht zum spaß hier, deniz yücel deniz yücel is a german journalist who was imprisoned under no/bogus charges for about a year in turkey and was only recently released. this is a collection of some of his best texts plus his prison writing. really like his writing & perspective and i would personally fistfight erdoğan and the whole entire afd for his honour so meet me in the pit i guess. 4/5 #deutschlandschaffdichab

not that bad: dispatched from rape culture, various authors, edited by roxane gay a collection of essays on rape culture - most of them of a personal/testimonial nature. i think i expected (and would have preferred) a more analytical approach bc in my Personal SexTrauma Recovery i’m just at a point where reading about other people’s experiences over & over doesn’t do me much good. but that is obvi personal. no rating

love, hate and other filters, samira ahmed kind of cute and it gets better when it adresses islamophobia, but the romance is VERY cringe and gets way too much time devoted to it. plus the writing is often really awkward and i found the character kind of... unbelievable in how she reacts to things emotionally. eh. 2/5

spinning silver, naomi novik AAAAAAAAH. as i have mentioned before, i absolutely adore uprooted, so my hopes were high and overall i loved it & it filled that uprooted-shaped hole in my heart. it’s vaguely based on rumplestilskin, has winter fae with Weird Fae Logic (everything’s a transaction & u better know how to bargain) who are obsessed with gold, a fire demon, and gr8 characters. the protagonist, miryem, is the daughter of a money-lender who’s too kind for his job, and she’s exhausted and hungry and angry (so angry) so she decides fuck this antisemitic piece-of-shit village, and takes over from her father. and she’s really fucking good at collecting debts and at trading, so good that the king of the winter fae challenges her to turn silver into gold for him three times. she’s amazing and sharp and constantly furious and she out-bargains the King of Weird Transactional Fae Logic and i just love her!! (and yes her and her family are explicitly jewish so that’s cool). there are some other pov characters and they’re mostly good but pale in comparison to miryem and i think the plot is a bit overloaded (plus having read this and uprooted i feel like i have some very specific info about naomi novik’s kinks aka abduction seduction) but i enjoyed it a lot and will probably reread it in winter. 4/5 

there there, tommy orange definitely worth reading, important, impactful etc. for me, the multi-perspective structure (12 characters with 2-3 shortish chapters each) didn’t work out entirely; i kind of would have preferred fewer characters and more in-depth depictions of them instead, but this kind of structure is always difficult to pull of well, and i think for some characters it did work. but like, it’s def deserving of the hype and all that. 3.5/5

heißer sommer, uwe timm this is a german novel following a student who becomes involved in the ‘68 student protest movement. it’s an interesting setting & i enjoyed the depiction of the clash between the student’s generation and their parents’ generation - but the clashes within the movement are basically just leftie tumblr discourse but in ‘68. it’s really slow-paced and rambly & there’s a lot of sexism which i thiiiink was an intentional critique of ullrich and the movement but: ugh. 2/5

marat/sade, peter weiss if u like weirdo pomo meta-theatre you’ll probably like this play about a performance of the assassination of french revolutionary marat performed by inmates of an asylum under the direction of the marquis de sade. if you don’t like weirdo pomo meta-theatre you probably rly won’t! 3/5 (it’s also on youtube)

my brilliant friend, elena ferrante (neapolitan #1) complex, relatable & not always likable female characters? genuinely complicated & fraught female friendships that aren’t just ‘catty frenemies lol’? set amid the poverty and hopelessness and violence of post-war naples? good stuff! this one is pretty slow-moving (i’ve heard the later ones are faster-paced) but tbh if knausgaard can write a six-part autobiographical cycle called..... my struggle..... then ferrante should be able to write four novels about stuff that is actually interesting w/o being harrassed about her true identity but apparently not lmao! 3.5/5 (will continue with the series eventually)

assassin’s apprentice, robin hobb (farseer trilogy #1) this is a slow-paced coming-of-age/apprenticeship fantasy story with magical elements and court intrigue - in terms of plot and worldbuilding it’s fairly generic, but it’s well-executed and there are hints of more exciting and unusual things to come. what really won me over were the characters and their relationships and then the finale is really great; also i teared up at the last paragraph so thanks for that robin. i will continue with this trilogy asap (c’mon overdrive) and then maybe go on with the larger realm of the elderlings series (16 books total lol) after a while. 3/5

aaand that’s it for july. i’m currently reading rebecca by daphne du maurier but yeah i won’t finish it today (i will saw tho @ thenarrator look i’m a selfconscious awkward neurotic mess so i can relate but girl you need to chill)

[bambamramfan]

“Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.

And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”

This is great, and it’s important to fight the temptation to think of foreign cultures as completely ridiculous idiots who do stuff for no reason. But it all works out so neatly – and so much better than when anyone else treats the same topics – that I’m always nervous if I’m not familiar enough with the culture involved to know whether they’re being shoehorned into a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing than other anthropologists (or they themselves) would recognize.”

This question of the rationality of extremely different cultures has a long pedigree in anthropology. One of the classic early attempts to grapple with this problem is Edward Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande based on fieldwork he conducted in Sudan in the 1920s and 1930s. The Azade believe that almost every ill-fortune that befalls them is the result of witchcraft and have to constantly consult oracles when something goes wrong – they fail to catch a wild boar while hunting, or one of their wives gets sick. Evans-Pritchard was trying to show that by the internal logic of their own thinking, everything they did was perfectly rational. If you accepted their fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality then they were acting completely logically. One popular thought experiment given to first year anthropology students is to get them to imagine an Azande anthropologist coming to Europe. At first they would think, “these people are mad, they don’t accept the obvious existence of witches and attribute everything that goes wrong to ill-fortune.” Then, they might do something like the move David Friedman makes and think, “Actually, perhaps not believing in witches provides a sort of social cohesion necessary to the proper functioning of European society. If they accepted the reality of witches they would have to deal with the fact that people are constantly casting malevolent spells on them and the resulting disputes could be a threat to the stability to the social order.”

The Azande example is obviously dealing with whether other cultures’ actions are rational by their own logic, but there have been plenty of attempts to argue that they’re also rational by our standards. Economic anthropology as a sub-discipline was largely created in the 40s/50s by a debate between two groups known as the formalists and the substantivists. The formalists argued that the economic behaviour of “natives” could be understood by applying theories of rational, self-interested maximisation drawn from mainstream economics whereas the substantivists held that they had to be understood as working on different logics to our economic system. This debate never really got resolved and economic anthropology moved onto other questions, largely because the idea that homo economicus explained behaviour in pre-capitalist societies seemed fairly clearly untrue to the majority of anthropologists who’d spent a long time conducting research in such societies, but the substantivists never really came up with a good explanation of motivation, no reason why people did the things they did beyond “because it’s their culture”.

The problem never really went away though. One of the most famous relatively more recent examples was a debate between Gananath Obeysekere and Marshall Shalins about the death of Captain Cook at the hands of Hawaiian natives. Sahlins had argued that the Hawaiian’s killing of Cook made sense in the context of their mythical worldview, particularly in relation to their belief that he was a kind of deity. Obeysekere attacked him, claiming that there is a universal ‘practical rationality’ which was confirmed by contemporary knowledge of neurophysiology and cognitive thought processes. The Hawaiians, in his view, had known perfectly well that Cook was a man just like them, not a god, and they killed him for reasons that look perfectly rational to a Western understanding of the world.

Interestingly, Obeysekere is the postmodernist in this debate. During the back and forth between them he argues that Sahlins is engaging in a kind of orientalism in ascribing a fundamentally different way of comprehending the world to the Hawaiian’s, criticises Sahlins’ reading of Western sources as not being critical enough and believing they roughly correspond to objective reality when they’re obviously engaged in just the same orientalism he accuses Sahlins of. He even argues that as a native Sri Lankan he is better able to understand the non-Western view of Hawaiians than the white, Western Sahlins.

This should not actually be especially surprising. The idea of people being rational, and particularly the idea of calculatedly pursuing their own self interest pervades a lot of post-structuralism (a relative of postmodernism, although most people here seem to lump them in together.) This passage from Pierre Bourdieu (although in Bourdieu’s case the conflation of postmodernism and post-structuralism doesn’t quite work as much of his sociology was based on doing statistical analyses of large sets of data) on gift exchange among the Kabyle is a fairly clear example:

“A rational contract would telescope into an instant a transaction which gift exchange disguises, by stretching it out in time; and because of this, gift exchange is, if not the only mode of commodity circulation practiced, at least the only mode to be fully recognized, in societies which, because they deny ‘the true soil of their own life,’ as Lukacs puts it, have an economy in itself and not for itself. Everything takes place as if the essence of the “archaic” economy lay in the fact that economic activity cannot explicitly acknowledge the economic ends in relation to which it is objectively oriented: the “idolatry of nature” which makes it impossible to think of nature as a raw material or, consequently, to see human activity as labour, i.e., as man’s struggle against nature, tends, together with the systematic emphasis on the symbolic aspect of the activities and relations of production, to prevent the economy from being grasped as an economy, i.e., as a system governed by the laws of interested calculation, competition, or exploitation.”

This might be a good point to return to David Friedman’s book and Scott’s question of ‘whether [the cultures discussed are] being shoehorned into a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing than other anthropologists (or they themselves) would recognize.’ I think the answer here is that, yes, they are, but this isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself. Any theory for understanding societies or human action is going to be incomplete and at best capture a small slice of the infinitely more complex reality of the objective processes that took place or are taking place right now. When you try to reduce a society or even multiple societies to words on a page you’re undoubtedly going to lose the vast majority of what’s actually going on but hopefully your theoretical simplifications can still contain some accuracy and have some use in making sense of the world. Scott points to one of the benefits of this book: that it translates seemingly bizarre customs into terms that are familiar to contemporary Westerners with some understanding of economics and through this, powerfully conveys the truth that these people aren’t just crazy idiots engaging in behaviour that’s at best pointless and at worse self-destructive. It’s also probably useful for the development of economics itself: applying familiar concepts to unfamiliar contexts can help refine your understanding and use of these concepts and on returning to more familiar modern, capitalist economies you might well use these concepts in a sharper and more illuminating way. It probably won’t be as rich or as nuanced as some of the accounts of historians and anthropologists and probably in some respects less accurate but it might well be perfectly suited to Friendman’s purposes and could capture some aspects that these other accounts miss.

Having said this, you don’t want to do too much shoe-horning, and although I haven’t read Friedman’s book so I can’t say whether he does this or not, economic accounts often tend to do this. This comes out in Bourdieu’s analysis quoted above – in his view, the level on which they are acting in economic self-interest is the objective level of reality. They may think they’re being generous but a scientific analysis is one which shows how really there’s calculation at work behind this subjective mask of munificence. There’s a tendency that when we see, ‘The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes,’ we don’t interpret it as a particular way of describing reality that reveals some features while occluding others to be judged on what it reveals and how well it corresponds to actual practice, we interpret it as an objective description of what is happening.

There’s often a strange correspondence between ‘a mold that’s more rational-self-interest-maximizing’ and seeing things as being “objective” or “scientific”, like in Bourdieu’s account where the objective level is the one where we can say that people are being selfish. This is then often extended metaphorically across levels so that we can find an economic incentive for punishing crimes but also, ‘natural-human-desire-for-vengeance is probably just evolution’s solution to this same problem.’ We extend optimisation through the pursuit of self-interest down the scale towards biology and up the scale towards societies. Genes should be understood as if they were rationally pursuing their own self interest and this is an explanation for progress. Ideas should be understood through an analogy with genes as memes, which also act as if they were pursuing a self-interested desire to replicate. Institutions and even societies can be understood as if they were self-interested, competing individuals, and this again drives progress. I think it ends up with a sort of evolutionism that much more closely resembles the Spencerian version than what you’d find in On the Origin of Species. Less “variation under natural selection” and more “survival of the fittest” as a cosmic principle driving an optimising teleological process. It ends up with optimisation caused by competing individuals, not being one theory of society or one aspect of the economy, but a natural law of progress. Margaret Thatcher was famously nick-named TINA because of her fondness for proclaiming “there is no alternative”. The only arena where competition cannot be allowed is in the marketplace of ideas. Interestingly, she got this line from Spencer who was just as keen on claiming there is no alternative to competition because it is a natural law of progressive evolution.

tl;dr Anthropologists have debated the question of how rational seemingly exotic cultures are and in what sense they are rational. Shoe-horning other cultures into the terms of economic theory is not a problem as long as it’s for a purpose and we keep in mind that it’s just one way of describing/modelling objective reality and we take care not to confuse it for objective reality itself.

[ruffoverthinksthings]

Can you please try the Core 4 in your vice/virtue assessment?

Iapologize for the delay.

Itried to answer this some time back, and already had all myjustifications written out in my head when I made the chart and theoriginal post, but sadly, I didn’t have the energy to write themdown, and I’d already forgotten them, so now I had to think back,debate, and put it them into words all over again, along withremembering what specific scenarios or logical assumptions wouldqualify them for a Vice or a Virtue.

Withoutfurther ado, the Rotten Four’s Vices and Virtues:

TheRotten Four are an interesting case as their “Vices” are largelyattributed to blatant misinformation, abuse, and the twisted valuesystem of the Isle. None of these “Vices” are considered badthings, and are actually admired traits, only discouraged when itstarts to personally affect you, such as Jay getting so greedy thathe starts stealing from Jafar’s stock along with everyone else’spockets.

However,I will still consider them all to be guilty of these Vices becauseignorance does not excuse you from the consequences of your actions,and more so, the Rotten Four KNEW outright that they were being“Evil.”

Mal

Gluttony- Desire for Excess.

More,more, and more, it’s never enough, and never will be for Mal—ormore specifically, Maleficent. Bythe time of the Isleof the Lost (book),she’s the princess of the prison, top dog among her peers, fearedand respected by all to the point where anyonewho knows better willnot mess with her, and even those that don’t have second thoughts.

Butit’s still not enough, as she constantly seeks to get more power, amore fearsome reputation, more evil deedsunder her belt, even if it’s only inthe hopes of impressingher mother.

Wrath- Desire for Harm.

Youcould make the case for her trapping Evie in Cruella’s closet inthe Isle of the Lost (book) as the penultimate exampleof Mal’s Wrath, but I think that her behaviour towards Audrey inthe beginning of the movie is much better.

Withthe former, she was being coerced and forced into pulling amean-spirited prank as part of her education in Dragon Hall; she hasgreat, understandable motivation to want to pass this class with theheads of her enemies set up proudly on the ramparts.

Withthe latter, there’s really no good reason for her to pissoff Audrey, nothing to gain but the satisfaction of having earned herire, and more to lose with an enemy that could potentially sabotagetheir plans to steal the wand.

Envy- Desire for Other’s Belongings.

Malliterally being green-eyed aside, one of her first acts in TheIsle of the Lost (book) is to banish Evie and the Evil Queen fromthe Isle at large because she didn’t invite her to her 6thbirthday party, and she was jealous of all the attention and thepresents Evie was receiving.

Herhabit of pickpocketing and stealing (though not to the extent of Jay)is also a sign of this.

Pride- Desire for Attention.

Mal’sPride stems largely from Maleficent’s transactional parentingstyle, where love is only parceled out as soon as you prove yourself“worthy” of it. This is a problem in itself, and crosses into therealm of Pride when all of Mal’s truly cruel actions like trappingEvie in Cruella’s trap-laden closet was her way of permanentlycementing herself as the “Evilest of them All, next to Maleficent.”

Plus,when you make graffiti in such an iconic and easily recognizablestyle that you’ll immediately know who made it just from a glance,and put it all over every surface you can as your supply of spraypaint allows, it’s safe to say that you probably really wantto put your name out there.

Diligence- Being Steadfast in Work.

Malis mentioned as frequently passing over perfectly goodif not exceptional ideasfor her Ultimate Prank for Dragon Hall, and goes to great pains andincredible lengths tomake her schemes work, such as arranging the giant wildpartyin Cruella’s mansion (though admittedly most of the actual legworkwas onCarlos).

Thataside, she is a verydeterminedgirl who won’t stop until the job is done—be that trying to stealthe Fairy Godmother’s wand, stopping Maleficent from taking overAuradon,or all the numerous other “Let’s Save/Doom The World!” ploysshegets roped into.

Allthat pressure to constantly achieve and dobetter, especially without any meaningful reward or evenacknowledgment like a pat on the head would drive most people to justgive up, and declare honest,hard work intoanythinganinherently futile and painful endeavour.

ButnotwithMal.

Carlos

Diligence- Being Steadfast in Work.

Thoughthis might have stemmed largely from him being turned into Cruella’spersonal slave, and it being in his best interest to get work donewell and when Cruella said he should have, Carlos is still shown tobe a very hard and eager worker.

Youcan see this with his personal projects in the Isle of the Lost(book), where despite being constantly overworked,underappreciated, abused, and malnourished, he still finds time andmotivation to tinker with his personal projects, build himself a lab,and go through the inevitable break-downs, unexpected failures, andjust flat-out “will not start” prototypes before you get anactually working invention.

Beforeyou ask, yes, I do realize that there is also the looming threat ofMal, Evie, and Jay calling him out for being lazy and not helpingwith the “steal the wand” ploy, but as they’re all friends, Idoubt they would be as harsh and as great of a “motivator” as hismother is.

Patience- Being Peaceful in Goal.

Youcould argue that Carlos isn’t a fighter in the first place andwould get himself creamed in a straight up fist-fight, but not havinga hope in hell of actually winning never stopped anyone from saying“Fight me!” and following through.

(Justask a bartender about their favourite one-sided bar brawls.)

Youcould also argue that Cruella has made it so thatback-talking, getting angry, and making return threats is a VERY badidea indeed, but I would also like to point out that some bulliesthat lash out at others and get pissed off at the most innocuous andimagined of slights do that because they can’t actually fight theirtormentors, so they do what they wish they could do to them onothers.

Carloshas never been shown to take a violent or aggressive solution to muchof anything, except for the Tourney field and his clearlyfriendly rough-housing with Jay. It’s VERY impressive thatsomeone who has been tormented, abused, and picked-on like him canjust go on and show civility and kindness towards others, instead ofdishing out the same hand he’d been given as a misguided form of“karmic retribution” towards the world.

Alot of abused kids like Mal don’t just stop being mean as soon asyou take them out of the abusive environment; there are NUMEROUSscars and maladaptive habits that take years to heal and deprogram,if they’re not permanent.

Kindness- Being Good towards All Life.

Inthe Isle of the Lost (book),despite having absolutely nothing to gain from it, he gives Evie ahand in escaping his mother’s bear-trap ridden fur-closet. Shedoesn’t have anything to give him, nor does he ask for anything; hejust saw another victim like him in need of help, and he offered it.

Thisisn’t really that strange to us, but please remember that the Islehas a strictly “Every one for themselves, but also for just me!”and “I’ve got mine, now fuck off!” philosophy drilledinto all of their heads.

Evie

Lust- Desire for Pleasure.

Mydefinition doesn’t define this as purely desire for sexualpleasure, but with a LOT less PG-13 and all over realistic portrayalof Descendants, I wouldn’t put it past Evie to have slept aroundquite a lot, using and abusing boys for her own pleasure and selfishbenefit, and of course, getting access to all their luxuries and nicethings (relative to the Isle) using (what she assumes to be) hergreatest and only asset that matters.

(Orof you want to get specific, assets.)

Also,aside from wanting to impress her mother, the entire motivation ofher being a throne grabber (the Auradonian version of a “golddigger”) is for her to live a comfortable, carefree life with ahandsome, rich prince with a big castle that answers all of herneeds, which frees her up for all of her wants.

Envy- Desire for Other’s Belongings.

Greed- Desire for Things.

Gluttony- Desire for Excess.

Allthree are related to Lust, in that it ties in with her being a thronegrabber, and explicitly desiring and having been implied to do allmanner of unsavoury things to get more than her fair share fromothers.

“Rottento the Core’s” “schemer” and “heart-breaker” lines fromEvie’s section could allude to her charming and manipulating peopleinto getting what she wants, and most probably past the point whereshe’d already satisfied her needs, and is purely in the realm ofwants and luxury.

Shefalls into both Greed and Envy because this could be somethingimmaterial like influence, and/or having boys (and sometimes girls)head over heels for her past the point where she could or would wantto have a serious, healthy relationship with any of them; to materialthings, like someone’s jewelry, quality (again, relative to theIsle) goods and food, or someone else’s boyfriend, stolen justbecause she wanted to prove that she could.

Pride- Desire for Attention.

Eviehas long past the point of “having healthy self-confidence” withher primadonna attitude.

Thoughnot nearly as bad as Audrey can get (which is really sayingsomething), she still can get very selfish and self-centered like inWicked World where she complains that everyone else piling theirproblems onto Mal is distracting from her addressing the mostimportant issues of all, that makes everything else pale incomparison:

Evie’s.

Shealso tends to act like a stereotypical princess in that she thinksshe’s inherently better, prettier, and more competent than everyoneelse. She’s getting better after the first movie, but bad habitsdon’t die that easily.

Diligence- Being Steadfast in Work.

Shecooks, she cleans, she sows, she does your homework for you—Eviecouldn’t have learned all of these domestic skills and gotten herincredible in cosmetics, sewing, and alchemy without a LOT of hoursof dedicated practice, and more failures than successes.

LikeCarlos, you can attribute this to her mother making it a very badidea to be lazy (with their needs, anyway), but as Wicked Worldshows, she was willing to put in enough effort and reality-bendingprowess to make cupcakes that have every single element in theperiodic table.

Thisis particularly impressive when you realize a lot of these willEXPLODE, produce poisonous gas if you put them together, or outrightkill Evie from exposure.

Patience- Being Peaceful in Goal.

LikeCarlos, Evie has never been shown to get violent or that aggressiveand brutal towards others. I wouldn’t put it past her to be one ofthe Isle’s best roasters, with every VK having suffered a brutalburn from her at least once, but she doesn’t seem like the kind ofperson that just flat-out insults and destroys people’s sense ofself-worth for shits and giggles.

Youcould even excuse this behaviour somewhat as it was a necessarydefense mechanism to survive on the Isle.

Kindness- Being Good towards All Life.

Relatedto Carlos own entry, Evie sacrificing one of her pillows (a HIGHLYvalued commodity when the stock sleeping quarters is a cold, damp,hard floor) to repay him for saving her from Cruella’s closet isvery telling and impressive, given that the default Isle response tothis would be “see how much more kindness you can milk from himbefore he turns you down.”

Iwouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Evie treated most people thathad been good to her in the past, to be fair, unlike Carlos, theyprobably had their own ulterior motives, too.

Jay

Lust- Desire for Pleasure.

Jayhas been shown have the same carpe diem attitude of Aladdin,just taking every day as it comes, doing whatever he needs tosurvive, but without the generosity and the goodwill towards others,so whenever he does come across something good, it’s purely for hisenjoyment.

Hisconstant flirting with pretty much everyone is also a hint of one ofhis primary pickpocketing tactics—distract them with his sexy, sexyself—a history of (unhealthy, to be clear) casual flings andrelationships like Evie, or both, as I wouldn’t be surprised if hisexes complain that he stole their hearts and their wallets.

Gluttony- Desire for Excess.

Greed- Desire for Things.

Thoughit’s more apparent with Greed, in that he has his wandering eyes onvaluables, electronics, and other precious goods, Jay also showssigns of Gluttony how he keeps on stealing despite alreadyhaving a healthy and productive outlet for all that energy inTourney.

Stealinghas already stopped being a way for him to survive, and it seemsclear that all the Rotten Four have stopped trying to impress or earnthe love of their heartless parents; at this point, it just seemspurely for the thrill of it, and/or his still being unsatisfied withall the good things that have been given to him.

Wrath- Desire for Harm.

He’snever shown to actually physically fight his fellow VKs, and theworst he does to Chad is to get in his way and look intimidating, butit’s not that far of a stretch to assume that someone as bulky andlarge as him has gotten into much more than his fare share offights.

Ifit’s not for his stealing and them noticing before he’s out ofsight, then it’s when someone weaker or on his level has somethinghe wants and discretely pilfering it isn’t an option (along with“fair trade” not really being a thing on the Isle), or him takingoffense to something or someone, before taking the low-road into aback-alley, or just taking them on right there and then.

Sometimes,it might have even just been because he was bored, or REALLY neededto punch someone, period.

Envy- Desire for Other’s Belongings.

Necessityand Jafar’s abusive use of him as a shop employee more than a son,it’s not hard to imagine that a lot of Jay’s thefts were doneafter he saw someone with something very nice that he didn’t have,or wanted more of.

Pride- Desire for Attention.

Jayconstantly displays an over-inflated sense of self-confidence withhow he shamelessly flirts with everyone, and seems genuinelysurprised that someone WOULDN’T be attracted or respond positivelyto his words and actions.

He’snot as much of a narcissist as Chad is, but again, not hard toimagine that a more realistic and less PG portrayal of Jay would havehim showboating and being more arrogant than he already, constantlytalking about how awesome, handsome, and intelligent he is in spiteof the reality.

Diligence- Being Steadfast in Work.

Thoughthe work may be inherently illegal, you can’t say Jay doesn’thave impeccable work ethic, single-handedly keeping hisfather’s junk shop in business for all this time in spite of thelack of due compensation and acknowledgment for his deed.

There’s also theinfamous scene in the first movie where he dumps a giant armload ofstolen phones, tablets, and laptops for the group to use.

[twodatesaweek]

first date since E

my first date with E went like this, this past monday: a guy who seemed fine off the bat, and very cute in his photographs, messaged with me a little. name dropped the words ‘emotional intimacy’ and bell hooks and i thought to myself, wow, this sounds great. he said he had to leave for mexico for work for two weeks and immediately asked if he could buy me dinner. in my head, i thought, what i am learning is that this is the baseline. the conversation is easy, i am attracted to the person, and he asks me out like his life depends on it! 

i had dinner with a friend beforehand and we laughed about how likely it is when someone seems really great online that you show up and they are short or have a weird voice. it put me in a better mood about the date, which i had been anxious about all day! i had to speak to the anxiety while i did laps earlier and ask it what it was doing there? was i anxious bc i felt myself getting excited? because it seemed too good to be true? still unclear, but probably a mix of those things, or maybe just a gut feeling that something was off.

i arrived at the bar and he looked...dissimilar from his photographs. he was short AND had a weird voice and at that point i just had to laugh. so i laughed from the time we met throughout the 45 minutes i could stand to sit there as he chattered at me, squirmed in his seat like a toddler, agreed voraciously with everything i said (after confessing that he loved animals...he was wearing a black shirt with a manatee on it....he’s 31...vehemently agreed with me that people who own dogs are emotionally damaged) attempted to impress me by saying how much he likes to knit, and eventually got so unsettled that he broke down and told me all of his emotional issues...that he had been single for so long, i don’t know, other really performatively sensitive things that made me want to tear my eyes out. 

my therapist yesterday read me to death in a way i have never experienced...it felt like the first time i became myself, the first time i received the parenting i was always so desperate for as a child. i was explaining to her a dynamic i’ve recently found troubling in some of my professional friendships, wherein i move on from them and the other person freaks out at me in sort of overblown ways. one, for instance, made me get on the phone to say how neglected and unsupported he’d felt after i’d declined to join in on bashing another writer we both dislike. in my head, i’d narrativized these situations as men needing women to take on their emotional burdens, that actually i had just become friends with people who were selfish and narcissistic. but my therapist pointed out that at some point, i’d become friends with these people because i wanted something, and she pointed out that i held space for them...performed a level of emotional intimacy for them...because i could sense that that was their vulnerability. ‘so they could probably sense when you pulled away after you stopped needing them.’

‘oh,’ i said, feeling as though a question i’d forever asked myself was finally, improbably in the air. ‘that sounds emotionally manipulative.’ she just kept looking me in the eyes. 

‘how does that make you feel,’ she asked.

‘really sad,’ i said, ‘of course that would be so painful for them to experience.’ 

she offered that i couldn’t help it, really, my parents and brother were emotionally manipulative so in order to exist at all and make life livable i would have had to adopt some tools of emotional manipulation too. but they i pointed out that in relationships, i’ve found that it can be hard for me to even recognize if intimacy is true or performed -- with e, for instance, it was a year later that i realized it was all a performance. 

‘i would guess that you have maybe never felt true intimacy in a romantic relationship.’ i protested, but the truth is i think it’s probably correct. i have real intimacy in my friendships, but many of those friendships took years to develop and my newer ones often freaked me out so much in the beginning (me, paranoid about whether or not my new friend was genuine, whether they could be up to something) that i would spend months pulling away and pulling back in. and, at the end of the day, there is no particular professional achievement, social power, or thing that i want from my friendships aside from just company. 

i’ve been thinking about this all day -- my aptitude for seeing other peoples’ vulnerabilities, my aptitude for getting what i want by using emotional intimacy and empathy as a form of currency. this month -- cancer season and mercury retrograde -- have thrown these sorts of relationships back in my face, have forced me to confront the consequences of this transaction that i learned, somehow, so long ago, that i’m only now speaking its name.

relationships, boyfriends, a husband, a life with a person....these are all things i want explicitly that i am ambitious to find. have i sought those out who are unable to take care of their emotions on their own to pay for their commitment with my empathy? and isn’t it easier for me to begin relationships with them, precisely because they are distant? my old therapist used to caution me against my description of relationships as ‘easy’ -- i think i see now that she was right. 

i finally forced my date to settle up so we could go -- it was too painful to sit there, feeling like i was wielding all the power and he was regressing back into a small child. jonah hill walked past me as he was paying but when i turned back to my date to ask if it was really jonah hill, he was lost in thought, clearly playing back the entire conversation in his head anxiously, and then anxious again when he had to answer in the negative to my question. i felt sorry for him and also in some ways a little confused about myself -- should i have been nicer? my desire for the date was to be myself rather than catering to him, and yet it was painful or at least to watch him freefall. dating is hilarious and horrible, i guess, and i couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the entire thing, on my way home. 

- W

[caveartfair]

This Photographer Captured the Glitz and Despair of the Global Culture of Wealth

Lindsey, 18, at a Fourth of July party three days after her nose job, Calabasas, California, 1993. Lauren Greenfield Fahey/Klein Gallery

There were many people for whom the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States came as a total surprise. Photographer Lauren Greenfield was probably not one of them. For nearly three decades, Greenfield has been meticulously documenting wealth: those who have it, those who aspire to it, and its pernicious influence on our culture.

In that period, she’s watched how a worship of prosperity has spread, transmitted and amplified through technology, popular culture, and the media. Is it any wonder that someone who so perfectly embodies our fascination with wealth, and all the emptiness and artifice that so often lies beneath it, ultimately snaked his way into the White House?

“Generation Wealth,” opening later this month at the International Center Photography, features over 200 of Greenfield’s photographs from her decades-long exploration of the culture of affluence in its many facets. It’s accompanied by a mammoth book of the same name, published by Phaidon this May and bound (naturally) in gold cloth.

Greenfield decided to bring these works together, she said, in the aftermath of the financial crisis. She, like many Americans, found herself reflecting on what had caused an entire nation, seemingly, to run amok.

She realized in looking back at her early work that what she had documented was “a time of cultural change, and of change in our values and change in technology which was a big driver of these values,” she said. “Where I started ended up being really important, because it was kind of the beginning of all of these trends which I ended up covering for 25 years.”

Lauren Greenfield, Xue Qiwenin, 43, Shanghai, 2005. © Lauren Greenfield/Institute. Courtesy of Phaidon Press.

Greenfield had not intended to become a visual chronicler of the wealthy and their aspirants, an F. Scott Fitzgerald or an Edith Wharton wielding a camera instead of a pen. She grew up in what was then the grungy neighborhood of Venice, Los Angeles, but attended the ritzy private high school Crossroads, alongside the children of Hollywood’s rich and famous. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1987 with a degree in visual and environmental studies, she embarked with her mother, a psychology professor, on an assignment for National Geographic in Chiapas, Mexico. She quickly realized her status as a cultural outsider (and the discomfort her subjects felt with being photographed) was hindering her work; she longed instead to return to Los Angeles and “[turn] the camera on my own culture,” she said.

That project became her first book, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (1997), a broad exploration of Los Angeles youth culture, which took her to East and South Central L.A. to photograph the young people who were part of, or adjacent to, the gang culture that Crossroads students, enamored of hip-hop and graffiti, tried to emulate. At the same time, she notes, the youth in South Central and East L.A. themselves lusted after the markers of wealth (gold chains, designer clothes) the Crossroads kids took for granted.

“There was this kind of homogenization of culture that I was seeing from kids from really different backgrounds, even in the ’90s,” said Greenfield. “Part of Fast Forward is about the rich kids and [their] disproportionate influence.” The Generation Wealth book, she added, is “really not about wealth, it’s more about the influence of affluence and the aspiration to wealth.”

So what does Generation Wealth look like? Greenfield notes that it’s “really not about wealth, it’s more about the influence of affluence and the aspiration to wealth.” As the photographer writes in the introduction to the book, her subjects “seek material-based status, from Minnesota to Milan, South Central Los Angeles to Shanghai, Dubai to Moscow.” At one end of the spectrum, there are mansions, designer handbags, two-year-olds getting pedicures, the staid rituals of France’s aristocrats, portraits on the tarmac in front of a private jet.  

But just as compelling, if not more so, are the images of what it looks like to merely aspire to that lifestyle, with varying degrees of success. There are unfinished homes in Dubai after the financial crisis, women making thousands of dollars a week as strippers to support their families, people posing on a toilet made of solid 24-karat gold in Hong Kong, four-year-olds sporting tiny false teeth at beauty pageants, the funeral of a teenage gang member in an L.A. suburb. Across the social and economic landscape, power and money tends to concentrate in the hands of men.

Lauren Greenfield, Marquee nightclub, Las Vegas, 2012. © Lauren Greenfield/Institute. Courtesy of Phaidon Press.

“It was important to me to include so many different kinds of places because in a way, what I’m looking at are the similarities more than the differences,” Greenfield said.

In chronicling Russia’s emerging elite, for example, Greenfield meets a Moscow real estate developer whose luxury homes come pre-stocked with a library of the finest Russian, British, French, German, and American literature, and an art collection for which he’s also printed a hefty catalogue that the buyers of his homes can leave prominently displayed, in case there’s any doubt as to how important the art collection is. But Greenfield is quick to point out that deploying culture to signal taste and class is on a continuum with the behavior of a newly flush finance bro in New York, only more visible.  

“As an oligarch, you could buy culture. And in a way that was the ultimate thing to purchase: education, class, culture…kind of what money can’t buy,” said Greenfield. That explicitly transactional approach to culture might seem extreme, she said, but it can make visible similar, if more hidden, dynamics around us.  

“In New York, you might have a wealthy person who hires an art consultant who buys for them, and so the owner doesn’t actually know anything about the art,” she said. “Well, that’s a hard thing to document here: It’s like so subtle, they probably would not want to share that they don’t know the provenance of their actual art.”

In both the book and the show, Greenfield’s photos are accompanied by the subjects’ own words. There is a series of portraits of Jackie Siegel, the wife of time-share mogul David Siegel, dubbed the Queen of Versailles (after the spectacular mega-mansion the couple was building before the economy collapsed in 2008). Siegel started her career as an engineer at IBM in upstate New York, but quickly realized she’d fare better modeling in New York City and marrying rich. “You can never be too rich or have big enough boobs,” she told Greenfield, reflecting on her four breast augmentations (whose end result fills the entire frame of one photo).  

Adam, 13, and a go-go dancer hired to entertain at a bar mitzvah party at the Whisky a Go Go nightclub in West Hollywood, 2012. Lauren Greenfield Fahey/Klein Gallery

Or consider 13-year-old Adam, a subject in Fast Forward who told Greenfield that he and his peers feel compelled to spend $50,000 on a bar mitzvah or risk being unpopular. “Money affects kids in many ways. It has ruined a lot of kids I know. It has ruined me.” His parents know that, and send him to summer camp in Michigan where “the kids are so different,” he said. “They are nice.”

“He had so much insight,” Greenfield said. “He was kind of a social critic, but was still affected by these pressures, and right in the middle of them.”

That helped her see that the subjects’ voices were a critical component of the project, documentation that rounds out—or often stand at odds with—the accompanying images. “A lot of my work is about this conflict and contradiction between image and substance,” she said.

“Photography is a great medium to think about image, because I can use glossy colors and shiny surfaces and strobe,” Greenfield continued. The interviews, by contrast, “provide a deeper cut, sometimes even a contradictory cut to what’s going on. The photographs are really my perspective, and the interviews allow their voices to come through in a deeper way.”

She knows that ambivalence from her own relationship to material goods,  even as her decades-long dive into the culture of wealth has made her extra conscious of how destructive it can be to covet.

“If I didn’t care about those things I don’t think I’d be able to document it either,” she said. “I’m not immune to the things that I cover. When I go into a store I’m…attracted and excited by shiny objects. I kind of know that about myself so I try to stay out of that environment unless I really want something or need something.”

Lauren Greenfield, Ilona with her daughter, Michelle, 4, Moscow, 2012. © Lauren Greenfield/Institute. Courtesy of Phaidon Press.  

Greenfield credits her kids with holding her accountable, describing a recent incident when her youngest son chastised her for putting a $55 face cream in the grocery basket. Perhaps more Americans could use a similar watchdog. The nation’s credit card debt hit highs this year not seen since 2009, and defaults have begun to climb, too. The worship of affluence, by some measures, is as strong as ever, with Donald Trump its reigning deity. Greenfield’s ongoing examination of wealth (she’s currently working on a related documentary film) feels more urgent than ever.

Incidentally, Trump is one person who she never got to capture on film, even though she tried, although she observed that time-share magnate David Siegel (who called Trump’s election “the greatest thing that’s happened to me since I discovered sex”) embodied many of the same qualities.

“The one dream shoot that I never got for Generation Wealth is the President, because he embodies so many of the qualities of Generation Wealth,” she said. “That was probably the fish that got away.”

—Anna Louie Sussman

from Artsy News