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sabugabr · 1 year

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RRR, Black Adam and the Response of the Oppressed

OR: The Colonial Wound and how to approach Violence as a solution against the mechanisms of oppression

OR: how to get the debate right VS how to ruin it completely

Spoiler: RRR gets it right

So, I was keeping this one to myself because it's a very delicate subject, but rejoicing in RRR's recent Golden Globe nomination, I thought hell might as well talk about it.

First of all, a very important disclaimer:

I am not here, in any way, defending or endorsing any side in this debate. My personal views on violence and armed struggle and guerrilla warfare are not what I will be addressing. Armed struggle, is an extremely complex issue that is still being debated today by theorists and academics much more qualified than I am, so no.

Rather, my aim here is simply to address how this debate has been represented, and my take on this issue: media portrayals of social, historical and most importantly, decolonial debates. And recently in 2022, we've had two approaches (And yes, I am fully aware that this topic is much better covered in dozens of media that have this debate entirely as their main focus, but I am talking about superhero blockbusters here, so keep that in mind) that may seem similar, but are fundamentally completely divergent:

The Telugu movie RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt)

And curiously, DC Film's Black Adam

No need to say, there'll be major spoilers ahead, so be warned

1. THE RESPONSE OF THE OPRESSED

Before I start, I would like to clarify as briefly as I can some terms and concepts that I consider necessary to begin to understand decolonialism and the response of the oppressed, a term that was coined in the famous quote by Jaylen Brown during the height of the BLM movement, "Do not confuse the response of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor".

Pierre Bourdieu differentiates the violence of the oppressor into two categories:

explicit violence – in which the action of the dominant subject is visible (and therefore, in our current society, subject to questioning and legal or moral limitations)

and symbolic violence – conceptualized by Bourdieu when he addressed the issue of male domination in society and all the faces in which it presents itself – and we see it everywhere, from racial demographics in income distribution to that homophobic joke your uncle always makes.

This relationship of systematic domination can be understood as a chain, and in view of the necessary rise of awareness and consequent rupture of this chain, Audre Lorde presents the uses of anger.

By connecting the idea of symbolic power and the breaking of the domination relationship with the use of anger, we have the explosion of a natural reaction of the oppressed triggered by centuries of imprisonment in their own fear and, bringing this reality specifically to colonial relations, using anger over your own fear results in liberation. (source)

And although it wouldn't hurt to address the revolutionary terms in its most famous roots in the French Revolution and etc, here it seems more fitting to comment on Marx. And class struggle.

Briefly, Marx and Engels saw revolution as the result of organized political action by the exploited. Therefore, one can only speak of revolution when there is a rupture with the old political, social and economic order; and in its place, new standards of social relations are established whose principle is to ensure freedom and social equality among men.

This is what we mean when we talk about inverting the social order, and Marx will also use the terms infrastructure (productive forces + relations of production) and superstructure (politics, police, army, law, morals, religion, etc.).

The superstructure, for Marx, is created by the most favored and dominant class, but determined or conditioned by the infrastructure.

Therefore, the revolution would happen when the working class (and in that logic, any oppressed group) reversed the order and took control of the superstructure.

In short, this can be understood as the basis of revolutionary thinking.

Now apply this to the invasion, colonization and genocide scenario, and you'll see where I'm going here.

KKKKKKKKKKKKKK THAT'S A BIT EXTREME EXAMPLE SORRY but actually in Black Panther I the plot could very well be read through Marxist lens (and that has certainly been done), but I won't even go into that here, god forbid Wakanda Forever hahahah imagine that, anyway going back to my thread

2. ARMED STRUGGLE

A quick definition of armed struggle, which can be found in dictionaries, is armed resistance against oppressive regimes. In the armed struggle, the militants understand that the situation of society requires drastic action so that it can be modified, and for this reason they decide to take up arms and declare war on the oppressive regime. Guerrilla warfare is an example of armed struggle.

In the armed struggle, a group of militants opposed to the current regime in a given society, organize actions that can be strikes, attacks on barracks or public buildings, etc, aiming to destabilize the current power with the aim of overthrowing it and placing a different regime in its place, like a democracy, for example – in general, the armed struggle follows a leftist tendency. (source)

In Brazil, for example, the armed struggle appeared mainly as resistance to the Military Dictatorship between 1964 and 1985.

All of this goes along the idea of using violence as resistance to oppression (as already pointed out before): fire is answered with fire. In the specific scenario of the guerrilla, the French philosopher, journalist, former government official and academic Jules Régis Debray writes the controversial book Révolution Dans La Révolution, where he points out that "The main objective of a revolutionary guerrilla is the destruction of the enemy's military potential"; the enemy is stripped of it's military power (it's weapons) to ensure a greater chance of victory.

"To destroy an army you need another army.", Debray says. "Precisely because it is a mass struggle, and the most radical of all, the guerrillas need, in order to triumph militarily, to gather politically around themselves the active and organized majority, since it is the general strike and the generalized urban insurrection which will give the coup de grace to the regime and destroy its latest maneuvers - last minute coup d'état, provisional junta, elections - by extending the struggle throughout the country." (source)

Does that all ring a bell?

Sure it does.

Now, these are all historical scenarios, and nowadays the moral debates about armed struggle have become extremely more complex (as they should), and the disarmament discourse is taking more and more space in these debates. Is armed struggle the only solution? Wouldn't there be others?

But it is still a complex debate. The Brazilian rapper (and political thinker and, dare I say, philosopher) Mano Brown, a strong advocate of disarmament, staunchly defends that violence, most of the time, bounces back on the oppressed, not the oppressor.

Look at him all precious

He argues, however, that one cannot simply condemn the oppressed who react violently. Already in 2006 he presented in an interview that:

"I am in favor of disarmament, but this argument is difficult, things should be done differently […] People are coming as a class struggle, you know? Rich people don't want poor people to arm themselves and remain unarmed. And poor people don't want rich people to arm themselves and remain unarmed. Did you see the kid's argument: "How are the police allowed to carry guns while I remain unarmed? " It's kind of uneven. It's confusing." (source - translated by me)

Mano Brown is part of the Brazilian rap band Racionais formed by 4 black men from the periphery, who revamped their music after realizing that it could be used to foment violence. They front a series of social programs, and revolutionized the way peripheral music is seen and consumed. Nowadays, in 2023, Mano Brown hosts one of the biggest political interview podcasts in Brazil (having even interviewed Angela Davis), is considered one of the most active leaders of the racial struggle, and along with the other members of Racionais, has taught open classes in estate universities.

The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, considered one of the most notable thinkers in the history of world pedagogy, inaugurates in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (you can read it translated right here) the idea of the liberation pedagogy. He strongly emphasizes that liberation pedagogy is a political process that aims to awaken individuals from their oppression and generate actions for social transformation – through education.

NOW WITH ALL THAT IN MIND WE CAN FINALLY MOVE ON TO WHAT MATTERS,

3. THE MOVIES

I'm going to talk about RRR here first because it makes me happier, but for reasons of time and your patience I'm not going to extend myself so much in the analysis of this film technically, and if you want a more detailed look at the grandeur and the importance and the genius of this film, please watch any of the many videos that are now appearing on youtube on the subject (I recommend RRR: Make Movies EPIC Again, by Jared Bauer, and The Importance of RRR, by the wonderful Accented Cinema)

ONCE AGAIN ATTENTION FOR BIG, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

The story therefore revolves around two men: Raju, who infiltrates the British army to steal fireguns and deliver them to the people's guerrilla, and Bheem, a Gond leader who is after Mali, a child of his people who was kidnapped by the British to basically serve as a pet.

They meet under false identities, and unaware that they were both fighting for the liberation of India (through different methods), the two men form an extremely strong bond of love and friendship, which results in their struggles coalescing into an evocation of patriotic unity and popular resurgence against the colonial forces.

First of all, RRR is a fictionalized biography of two real-life Indian revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem. So, in real life, Alluri Raju actually stole guns from the British to stage uprisings against the British Raj, and Komaram Bheem really was a Gond revolutionary leader who coined the slogan Jal, Jangal, Zameen (transl. Water, Forest, Land) wich became a call to action for Adivasis (or Scheduled Tribes) peoples.

You can see the flag in the last scenes

This "historical aspect" (in addition to the incredible, completely impossible and impossibly glorious action scenes) makes it plausible to draw parallels between RRR and Tarantino's historical revisionism films like Django Unchained (2013) and Inglourious Basterds (2009), where in all cases we see scenes of extreme violence that somehow feel justified, or cathartic, for being directed against oppressors (slave masters, Nazis, British colonizers, etc etc)

The parallels are just there.

Black Adam, on the other hand, states in its synopsis that "After nearly five thousand years of imprisonment, Black Adam, an anti-hero from the ancient city of Kahndaq, is released in modern times. His brutal tactics and righteous ways attract the attention of the Justice Society of America, who try to stop his rampage by teaching him to be more of a hero than a villain, and they all must band together to stop a force more powerful than Adam himself."

So we have a superhero story set in the present day in a fictional country on the Sinai Peninsula (that means, right there besides the Gaza Strip and the Suez Canal), occupied by a mercenary crime syndicate called Intergang, who brutally oppresses the Kahndaqi people while robbing their mineral resources. All good, all great.

But as stated in the synopsis, the film's great moral conflict revolves around whether the use of violence against mechanisms of oppression is justified or not.

Basically,

And while these two scenarios may seem similar, the approach the two films take to this debate, which, as I've said before, is EXTREMELY DELICATED, and EXTREMELY COMPLEX, is completely different. Firstly, because RRR is the only one of the two that treats it as, well, a debate.

From the beginning, RRR establishes the two characters as essentially polar opposites; Raju is fire

Look at the scenery with the european buildings in the background

Bheem is water

And here, the native, untouched forest with pure cristaline water

Bheem is the god Bhima, immovable, patient and resilient

(like water)

And Raju is the god Rama, heroic, springy and skillful

(and hot)

Bheem is the legs (the foundation) while Raju is the arms (the action)

They ✨ complement ✨ each other

And this is translated into their different approaches to the revolution: Raju with his arms policy (inherited from his guerrilla father), who operates within the system to overthrow it, and Bheem with his native philosophy, using the land, the fauna, the culture, the religion, the people themselves as agents against oppression, operating from outside the system to overthrow it.

At the beginning of the film, Raju dresses Bheem in western clothing so that he can attend a British party (which allows him to know the building and locate Mali), and at the end of the film, Bheem dresses Raju in the traditional clothing of the god Rama, and arms him not with european firearms but with a sacred bow and arrow, evoking his native homeland in what configures the real defeat of the colonizers.

Not even getting into the merits of comparing these two films technically, just talking about the discourse itself, what for me fundamentally separates RRR from Black Adam, and even Django and Inglourious Basterds, is precisely Bheem's character. It's the other way to fight (but fight nonetheless)

This does not mean that the armed struggle is delegitimized, or diminished. On the contrary, it is explained, justified (within that historical and social context) and respected. People who fought in the armed struggle, and died in the armed struggle, are honored and respected. It allows you to understand where the idea of arming the population is coming from (in a certain parallel with Mano Brown's interview that I mentioned above), but it also presents other discussions on the subject, that happened at the time, and still happens today.

And above all, as I mentioned before, the film presents and reinforces the idea of inspiration. Even if education is presented only very briefly, in a popular assembly, in the long term, the film still gives extreme focus to the importance of raising awareness among the oppressed people.

This can be clearly seen in the scene where Bheem is being tortured in a public square by the British government, and refuses to kneel.

So when the torture becomes too much to bear, he starts to sing

Now, this is the most important scene in this movie and I'll die on this hill

And then, this happens

Bheem inspires not only the population, but also Raju, who even after years of enticement by his own father, steps back on his original (armamentist) plan when he realizes that "I was under the impression that guns would bring us freedom. But Bheem inspired a whole crowd with one song"

Even though in the context of the film the "path of choice" was still violent (this still is, after all, an action superhero movie), the message of this scene is extremely metaphorical. The idea of a song (art) inspiring all people to "become a weapon" against an oppressive regime is very powerful, and it resonates deeply in anti-opression movements all over History. It is, literally, the power of the people.

Furthermore, at crucial moments in the plot, both Bheem and Raju put aside their collective struggles for the other's individual good; Unlike his father, who readily accepts the militarization of his child son for the greater good, Raju, when questioned by his guerrilla companion for abandoning 15 years of work to save Bheem, says that "I will bear it for another 25 years, but I won't sacrifice Bheem for my goal".

Bheem, here, represents not only the friendship and love between them, but, metaphorically, an entire ideal of the people. Ultimately, one can say that this film addresses the idea of "what are the limits in my revolution": I will not sacrifice the other for my revolution; the limits of my revolution must be the wellness of the other (and in our metaphorical reading here, the wellness of the people).

Parallel, the torture scene can be metaphorically read as: the only valid sacrifice is my own, never that of the other. (and I won't be commenting on the revolutionary character of ideas like martyrdom and self-sacrifice, but yes). That's what Bheem and Raju do throughout the entire film, they put the other above themselves.

And in the end, they kill the british defeat oppression together✨

Now, as I've mentioned before, yes, this movie still ends violently, yes, it still glorifies and celebrates this violence in some of the best action scenes I've seen in my whole life, yes, it is heavily patriotic and sometimes a little bit too on the nose about it, yes, and did I rejoyce in it? Yes.

But it cannot be denied that RRR at least presents a reflection not often seen in films of the genre, which is the mere existence of real debate. In addition, the film is placed in an extremely specific historical context, portraying real historical figures, real life revolutionaries, folkloric parallels, a gigantic symbolic charge, in short, a whole other deal.

Besides it, the only difference between this film and idk, Braveheart, or Star Wars, is that in this film the social and racial parallels, the guerrilla warfare and class struggle (and the colonial wound) become clearer – and perhaps this is a more responsible way of representing a revolution.

NOW, BLACK ADAM ON THE OTHER HAND KKKKKKK

As mentioned in the synopsis, the background of Black Adam is curiously similar: we have an oppressed people, we have the militia, a clear racial reference to a real-life conflict, which affects thousands of people daily, and the figure of a mythologically evocative hero with super powers who will free the people from oppression through violent means. And yes, there is debate: we have the Justice Society, which condemns Black Adam's methods and questions his use of violence, only to be proven wrong at the end of the movie.

But the "proved wrong" isn't really built, or developed (as Intergang is quickly forgotten when they all start fighting each other and then… Satan? For some reason??), and it basically boils down to this:

KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

And that's so funny because he actually just… killed like 3 soldiers in the second act of the movie. That's all he did.

And it gets even funnier because at some point we have a scene that genuinely makes a VERY VALID point that made me very hopeful when I was in the theater watching it

Like, this is SO VALID and she is SO RIGHT and this is such a great argument and a great debate point and then it just... goes nowhere

He just killed like 3 guys he didn't even talk to the people he just, quite literally, killed some pawn soldiers and went on to fight his own individual battles that had nothing to do with the actual opression state of the country besides them telling you that "it was bad".

The problem with Black Adam's is ac how shallow the argument is. Nothing is justified, nothing is not even debated, we just have Hawk Man going "killing is bad" and Black Adam going "yeah but I do it caused I'm disruptive like that", and even when we have this "inspire the people" moment is just... this kid with a cape doing this symbol and yes, symbols of struggle are a great tool in fighting oppression, and yes they work and they're so, so great, but this one specifically kind of just…was there?

LIKE OK THIS IS ALL GREAT but then it lead to people… fighting zombies?????

zombies ??!?!??!!!????

Like, how, seriously, how does this have to do with any of your previous state of opression? How does this change absolutely anything??? Are we going to have elections after the zombies thing, or... ?

And that, to me, is such a poor and wasteful way of representing people power that, even though I didn't take this film seriously, I couldn't help but feel mildly frustrated. Much of the recent wave of blockbuster media about decolonialism, in my opinion, has been making this same mistake, which is apparently thinking that just because a movie is made to be a blockbuster, or a superhero movie, or an action movie and easy entertainment, it cannot tackle complex topics. It cannot deepen a discussion. It can't take 10 minutes off a fight scene to establish a full dialogue. As if that would, idk, tire the audience maybe? Idk.

As if a universe of superheroes, or fantasy and action, couldn't contain a scene like this:

This scene seems so simple but it is so, so huge

Andor is perhaps an example out of the curve, because Andor is a series that makes a great effort to represent the fight against oppression in a very serious and responsible way, making it its main theme, of representing what a fascist government is,how a fascist government acts and affects all layers of a population, what is the immigrant cause, what is the armed struggle, what is it like to be a person of color in an far-right government. And it does all of this in an unprecedented way in the genre so far, indeed.

But as I said before, perhaps this should be how all media represent these themes. Because otherwise, even the best of intentions can turn against the causes you sought to defend. And ok, I know that Black Adam is "just a superhero movie" and that maybe it's unfair to demand so much from a movie that only came to propose a simple entertainment with fight scenes and jokes, and I had fun watching it indeed. I love Dwayne Jhonson we all do. But the thing is, if you're going to represent that debate, I genuinely believe it can't be done as simply, or as poorly explained, as it was in this film. A poorly presented arms discourse can become an attack on the legitimization of the armed struggle in its historical context, it can become a justification for a shootout against anti-oppression demonstrations, it can become the excuse for why a policeman mistook an umbrella for a rifle, or a piece of wood for a gun, and killed innocent (and peripheral) men.

In the best of scenarios, the intent is simply forgotten, or it's so hidden in the metaphorical layers of the work that it's easy to miss them. If that weren't the case, there wouldn't be so many racist, misogynistic, right-wing Star Wars fans, for example (just to be clear, I'm not attacking Star Wars here at all, ok, I'm just using it as an example – you'll agree with me that I've never seen any Cambridge professors attack Star Wars)

And fair is fair, Luke did explode a moon-sized military base full of millions of people and all that...

SO ANYWAY

Armamentism is an extremely serious issue, and it must be handled very, very carefully. As I mentioned before, RRR has a historical context, and an argument builded throughout the entire film; I hardly think anyone comes out of RRR, or WomanKing, wanting to pick up a gun and simply shoot someone (I hope). But the way this idea was presented in Black Adam, it is not an exaggeration to say that someone might have had this impression after watching it. At the very least, the movie took no care making sure this wasn't the case, and that for me is troubling enough.

The struggle against oppression and decolonialism are extremely important topics, and I am happy that these themes are increasingly making themselves present in more and more media works (and we have had several very good ones recently) – and Black Adam does have good ideas in the middle of the mess. But if you're going to make a film to talk about oppression, without actually commiting to approach it responsibly, why do it?

And ok, RRR does have a very imperative call to action but well, look at them, would you not answer???

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sabugabr · 1 year

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@lwoorl Thank you so much for this text! You are absolutely right, and I apologize for my choice of words and approach to this topic.

When I watched this film, as a Latine person but still seeing it from outside the Colombian reality, the first thing I got from it was to associate the scene of the escape and the crossing of the river as an analogy to this imagery of crossing the river as immigration from a place originating from "war" to a place of "peace and prosperity" that I immediately understood as an American discourse without stopping to delve into the context of the Colombian internal conflict, and am terribly sorry for that.

Thank you once again for writing this, and I'm sure to research more deeply (or at least be less incisive with my particular points of view before saying nonsense hahahaha) in the future!!!

"Encanto" and the myth of the Magical Latin America

Well hello again my gorgeous maritacas ✨ Today, we talk yet again about, yes, colonialism.

SOO, I hope I didn't miss the boat on this subject, cause I've been wanting to write about it since I first saw the very first divulgation of Disney's most recent animation movie, Encanto (2021).

I am Brazilian, born and raised in Latin America, and I have been in love with this place since I opened my little dark brown eyes. I spent most of my academic years researching latinex art and culture and history, and one of my deepest passions is our literature. So imagine my instigation when I heard Disney would be making this movie.

You see, in addition to taking place in Latin America and in a country neighboring mine, which would already be a reason for me to be 1000% more intrigued about this, most of the comments and publicity over it followed this line:

✨Magical Realism ✨

And then I started to worry

And then I watched the movie

Then I got more worry

Because, yes, I know that this is an ongoing discussion on if Encanto is Magical Realism or not, and there're people debating very fairly on both sides, but here I'd like to leave my arguments over why and how I feel culturally obliged to disagree. So, this is my point, and my side, so please don't take anything I say here for fact or go on me for idk, indoctrinate in an argument. But I will be linking a lot of references for you to really see where I'm coming from here, and that place is

NO, ENCANTO IS NOT MAGICAL REALISM

And we really need to talk about it

So buckle up, because this will be long (but necessary, trust me)

SO, I went to read those interviews with the directors and producers of this movie and they said this:

" [...] once Charise joined us, she had such a great grounding and magical realism, that this place, Colombia, which is one of the cradles of that literary style with Gabriel Garcia Márquez, it just made total sense, talking about a family. And a great way to get organic Latin American magic into this film without trying to force it into some European type of magic, that you’ve maybe seen before in other films." (source)

And then, when asked about the differences between "European magic" and "Latin American magic", Charise Castro Smith said:

"Well, I think magical realism is a fast tradition that doesn’t just exist in Latin America. It’s a literature tradition that’s throughout the world. But I think the way we started to think about it and sort of define it within the context of our film, was that it was magic that was born out of emotion. Magic that was born out of character and relationship, instead of something that was like an external force sort of foisted upon the characters in the story." (x)

So, they defined Encanto as "Latin America magic", and defined it as Magical Realism, and that as "magic born out of emotion".

That is not wrong, but that's also not quite right. From what I could get from these interviews, the thing is that, maybe it was wrong phrasing, but I think they mistook Magical Realism for metaphors.

But before I get into that, I have to state that I really liked Encanto. It's fun, it's colorful, and I really think they've done a great job representing how Latino families are structured, and how we relate to our families. I could relate to a lot of the situations in the film on a very personal level, and one of the ways they were able to do that, in my opinion, was through the use of, yes, metaphors.

Because, in this movie, you can divide magic in about two ways:

First, when it's used narratively. That's the case of Bruno's magic, and Dolores', for example. And actually, kudos to Dolores for being one of the biggest narrative tools I've seen in a long time.

And second, when it's used as a metaphor. That would be the case of Luisa's magic, and Peppa's, and etc

See that? That's a metaphor. A very clear one.

And it works just fine. It's good. It's well done. It does a great job passing the point. Magic, here, works as an external representation of internal conflict. Makes us able to get the metaphor and relate to these very personal conflicts without directly addressing them (which would make the movie way, let's say, heavier to watch kkkkkk I'm so funny). So yes, I definitely agree with Castro Smith that Encanto is about magic that comes out of emotion. That's great, 10/10.

But that's not what Magical Realism is.

And I could get into why the whole "magic as metaphor" thing couldn't be considered "European magic" or what even is "European magic" anyway, which would lead me to this whole "let's talk about Christianity" thread, but I'll stick to my current point here (for now)

And for you to properly understand my point here, before getting properly into Encanto I'll have to do some contextualization first, so...

1. MAGICAL REALISM

Let's name the donkeys (Brazilian saying, sorry).

So, the thing Castro Smith said there above, about magical realism not being like, Latin America exclusive? That's absolutely right. We have a huge plurality of great works and authors writing Magical Realism all around the world (one of my favorites is the Mozambican writer Mia Couto, btw). So, for this little contextualization here, I'll quote some lines of another post I wrote about Magic Realism, applied specifically in the context of Brazil (and feel free to check it out here), but which sufficiently covers my point at the moment:

To make matters short, if you never heard of it, Magical Realism is a 20th century genre that portrays "a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements" to it, without this "magic" being perceived as such within this established world.

Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as:

"what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe." (source)

So, basically, one of the key points of Magic Realism is the assimilation of this magic as not being "magical" — as we are used to understanding "magic", but rather an estrangement within an apparently common scenario. It is closer to the uncanny than to the fantastical, and the fact that the "commom" people (the characters) within these realistic and common settings do not seem to perceive or assimilate the uncanny as being uncanny, is what creates this feeling of enchantment in these works.

And yes, I know that technically Magical Realism was born in Germany in the 20s, but it really peaked in America Latina. When you think of Magical Realism, the names that probably come to mind are Frida Kahlo, Gabriel García Márquez, María Luisa Bombal, etc. etc. We just nailed it.

And Frida can't let me lie

In his Nobel-winning speech (called The Solitude of Latin America) for his book Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez addressed a somewhat poor understanding of his work on the part of European society, who might perceive our Magical Realism as being fanciful and enchanted.

He said:

"I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."

I've linked the full speech there above. It's translated to English, but I highly recommend you read the original in Spanish, if you can understand it. Is incomparable

What García Márquez is saying is that there is a subtle difference in the way we Latinos relate to Magical Realism. For us, the fantastic is not there because it is magical or beautiful, or simply as a metaphor. Yes, it is a metaphor, but one so ingrained in our sentiments and experiences that it becomes very difficult to explain or translate to outsiders. The fantastic is actually an European-imposed way of seeing ourselves, because it's how they saw us since the 1500s.

2. THE MAGICAL TERRA INCOGNITA

When Europeans first arrived in our lands, they described Latin America as a land of enchantments. As they were not familiar with the native cultures, native peoples, our fauna and our flora, their way of seeing us was through the lens of the fantastic; lens that they created themselves. If you search online, you will find a series of period maps of the South America depicting magical creatures:

Map by Pedro Reinel and Lopo Homem, named Terra Brasilis, 1519

See the little dragon? That's actually a true story: you see, when the Portuguese arrived, they heard the jaguars roaring in the woods, and thought it was the sound of dragons. They saw the manatees swimming under the river and thought they were mermaids.

As they entered the Amazon River, some boats were attacked by the Icamiabas, warriors of a matriarchal indigenous people in which women went out to fight — and they were spectacular warriors. Seeing these women, the Europeans thought they had arrived on the magical island of the Amazons, of Greek culture. And that's why the Amazon River is now called "Amazon", and that's why the forest is called the "Amazon" forest (source). Because Europeans mystified native peoples.

And ultimately, fetishized and bestialized these native peoples.

And that's just like, 3 examples in the specific context of Brazilian colonization process. That's just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Regarding that map above, the professor André Reyes Novaes, in his article "Terra Brasilis as Terra Incognita", says (translated by me) that

"At that time, “Terra Brasilis”, as named on the map, was “Terrae Incognitae”, which gave cartographers “carte blanche” (free pass) to fill in the “empty spaces on the map” (Safier, 2009). El Dourado, Ilha Brasil, the Amazon Warriors and many other “myths” occupied the interior of the continent on maps in the period of expansion of the Iberian colonies. [...] Contrasting with the "mythological" interior, the sea appears full of caravels, coats of arms and flags, a space clearly determinated and scratched by the geometry of the orientation lines of the portolan charts. [...] According to Hiatt (2008), the expression terra incognita is today a powerful metaphor, because even in the era of the comprehensive “Google Earth”, it continues to be applied to discuss the relationship between imagination and “unknown” spaces by specific groups. As Wright (1947:72) stated, “if today there is no terra incognita in the absolute sense, there is also no absolute terra cognita”, as we continue to relate to space based on socially produced and shared representations and models." (source)

So, through these records, Europeans created the contrast between European civilizations (organized, mapped, civilized) and native civilizations (bestialized, savage, magical). And that was a very important tool in the domination of our lands. Because when you mystify a people, you dehumanize that people. And it is easier to dominate a dehumanized people.

This enchanted narrative they created actually masked a history of oppression, exploitation, rape and genocide.

And this fantastical way of seeing ourselves ended up being imprinted on us. Magical Realism does not exist to be magical, it exists to express in words, using the language that has been imposed on us, the absurdity of our narrative. It's the way we can translate the reality of our otherwise unbelievable history. As García Márquez said,

"we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable".

And this resonates even today. Because even after the movements of Independance, Latin America suffered and still suffers from the consequences of colonization, first by Europe, and later by the United States. As Reyes Novaes continues:

"As literal terra incognita, the South American frontiers have gone centuries without being properly explored and represented by European cartographers. As metaphorical terra incognita, these regions continue to be recurrently qualified through imagination and shared narrative in metropolitan centers. Even in the 21st century, the idea of “empty space to be occupied” still populates the imagination about the borders of South American power centers and new mythological “monsters” are represented in these spaces, such as drug-dealers, invaders, smugglers and criminals." [...]

"Considering the metropolitan and coastal vision of many Brazilians, Terra Brasilis remains Terra Incógnita, a relatively "empty" and "uncivilized" space, dependent on public policies formulated from outside. The persistence of this vision in the 21st century is perhaps one of the great challenges for the recognition of our own dynamics and autonomous exchanges existing in border spaces, often imagined as areas to be occupied, protected and colonized by the metropolitan centers." (x)

And by no means this just the story of Latin America. This is the story of Polynesia. Of Southern Asia. Of the African Continent. Of so many nations genocidated by the violence of the colonizer. This mystifications (and later demonizations) of non-European cultures shaped the fantastic imagination of these cultures. That's why I said that Magical Realism found a huge plurality around the world. It represents the imaginary of a colonized nation.

3. MAGICAL REALISM AS A WAY OF PRESERVING AND EXPRESSING COLLECTIVE MEMORY

For this, I'll use García Marquez's work (so often cited to relate to Encanto) as a reference. In his best-known work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Marquez weaves the story of generations of the Buendía family, founders of the city of Macondo, over 100 years.

After the book's release, not few managed to find, in Macondo, an analogy for Latin America itself, and the events that surround the characters in the book, mirrors for events that marked our own history.

The metaphors that appear throughout the book, not so much metaphors for personal feelings, are closer to metaphors to express the feeling of an entire nation during actual events, as he said in his speech, of unbelievable, "unbridled reality".

Look at this excerpt:

"Although in the months that followed they reinforced the grave with walls about it, between which they threw compressed ash, sawdust, and quicklime, the cemetery still smelled of powder for many years after, until the engineers from the banana company covered the grave over with a shell of concrete." (source, p. 69)

At a certain point in the book, an American arrives in Macondo and, settling himself next to a train line, starts an innocent banana plantation. Later, his business grows and he starts a banana company, which takes over Macondo and suddenly, the entire production of the city consists only of bananas. Macondo no longer produces anything other than bananas, which are quickly loaded into huge train cars that carry these bananas away. The city is then taken over by a banana plague, and as the above passage describes, eventually even the cemetery is covered by the banana company.

Now, if you have ever studied anything from Latin America, you will probably immediately associate this with the famous United Fruit, a real multinational known throughout the world for creating the concept of the Banana Republic and for changing the political and economic directions of an entire continent (ours).

It's like a scheme:

Basically, using local (and inhumanly cheaper) labor, they specialize in the cultivation of a single commodity, produce that commodity on a large scale (thus ending any family farming systems that might exist and alienating production and the local market) and then export this commodity abroad at ABSURDLY lower prices than other markets. That's what happened with the banana. This type of system forces a country to remain in underdevelopment, and this was a large-scale project carried out in Latin America by the United States. And we reap the "rewards" of that in our industry and economy to this day.

And then García Marquez writes:

“Look at the mess we’ve got ourselves into,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said at that time, “just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.” (p. 114)

Do you know what happens next? The exploited workers revolt against the banana company, and they are all machine-gunned by the American military. Women and children too. After managing to escape with his life and return home, José Buendía counted about three thousand dead. And when he goes and tells all this, horrified, to the first person he meets, do you know what that person says to him? She says "What are you talking about? There weren't any dead".

"The official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped." (p. 151)

Now you go, and you Google "United Fruit Banana Massacre" or just "Banana Massacre". That's the Realism in Magical Realism.

Through a prosaic narrative, what García Marquez is doing is documenting historical events. Trough the narrative of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Marquez told the story of his own land.

And the banana case is clearer to understand, but these historical relationships run through every aspect of the book. Take this other example: Right at the beginning, the narrative shows the patriarch of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía (and his wife Úrsula Iguarán) guiding a group of people into the virgin forest in search of a place to build a village, and then,

"When they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky, they were speechless with fascination. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers." (p. 12)

They find a Spanish galleon. Intact. Filled with flowers. They were for the first time clearing a virgin forest, making their way, and when they arrive in the land that in the future would be their home, they discover that Spain was already there, craved in the stone soil. Here, the galleon can be interpreted as representative of the Spanish domination, which is embedded in the imagination of our lands by the invention of the narrative of a "discovery" that completely erases the history that existed here before the arrival of Europeans.

But if you are not familiar (or at least know about it) with the collective feeling of the solitude of being the result of an erased history and memory, the only thing you'll take from this scene is how beautiful it is.

And as I said before, Latin America is not the only one to use Magical Realism to translate a fantasized reality. The book Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land), by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto (I just love this author so much), is another great example of what I'm talking about. And I won't go into this otherwise it would be very long, but just go and read it. It's amazing.

So, I think you got the hang of the ideia by now.

But what does all of this have to do with Encanto?

4. "LATIN AMERICA MAGIC"

Now that you've been covered up with all this historical contextualization and some examples above, I'll repeat what I said at the beginning: to me, Encanto is not Magical Realism. And this is due to two factors:

The magic is perceived as magic within the movie's stablished universe

The magic in Encanto is always individualized

Let's start with number 1. As I said there above, there isn't exactly a rule on this particular aspect, but it's a general consensus that for Magical Realism to happen, you can't have phrasings like "this is magic!" or "they did magic!" within your universe. As Figueiredo points out (and yes, I'll put here yet another source here, but this is only to stablish my point using more then one academic source so you don't think I'm taking this off my ass (another Brazilian saying, sorry again), in Magical Realism

"...the supernatural is presented in a realistic way, as if it doesn't contradict reason, and there are no explanations for the unreal events presented. There is no reference to the mythical imagination of pre-industrial societies, as if the author, not concerned with the reader, exercises full freedom of creation. Magic refers to inexplicable, prodigious, or fantastical occurrences that contradict the laws of the natural world, and there are no convincing explanations in the text for their presence. It differs from the fantastic in that the narrator is not altered, intrigued or disturbed by this reality." (source, translated by me)

You can see that in Sleepwalking Land, where the character Kindzu sees his brother turn into a rooster in front of him and his reaction is closer to "well that sucks, guess we gonna put him in the chicken coop now" than some astonishment.

Or in O Tempo e o Vento (The Time and The Wind, a Brazilian novel), which tells the story of generations of a family in which the fate of women is to spin, cry and wait, and where, on the return to his wife, a man ends up arriving 50 years late.

And he finds her an old woman, of course, waiting.

You can see that in One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the city is attacked by a plague of oblivion and there's no fuss over it. Or when it rains for 4 years and the old people just decide to wait to die in the drought, because they don't want to die wet. Or when a pig-tailed baby is literally carried into the earth by countless ants and no one bats an eye. Or when Remedios the Beauty had to be isolated from any contact with foreigners because her scent was so seductive and so strong that in one incident, upon seeing her naked, a man's blood turned into oils soaked in her perfume, torturing him even after death. Or when, after the death of José Arcadio Buendía, the city was covered with yellow flowers that fell from the sky, and the only reaction was that they had to mobilize people to clean the streets so the funeral procession could pass by.

In fact, the only scene in which a character in the book is truly astonished by something is when, for the first time, José Arcadio Buendía and his son Aureliano see ice.

"MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." [...]

“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”

“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”

José Arcadio Buendía, without understanding, stretched out his hand toward the block, but the giant moved it away. “Five reales more to touch it,” he said. José Arcadio Buendía paid them and put his hand on the ice and held it there for several minutes as his heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery. Without knowing what to say, he paid ten reales more so that his sons could have that prodigious experience. Little José Arcadio refused to touch it. Aureliano, on the other hand, took a step forward and put his hand on it, withdrawing it immediately. “It’s boiling,” he exclaimed, startled. But his father paid no attention to him. Intoxicated by the evidence of the miracle, he forgot at that moment about the frustration of his delirious undertakings and Melquíades’ body, abandoned to the appetite of the squids. He paid another five reales and with his hand on the block, as if giving testimony on the holy scriptures, he exclaimed:

“This is the greatest invention of our time.” (p. 8-15)

CAN YOU FEEL THE CHILLS WHILE READING THIS? CAUSE I CAN

Magical Realism doesn't enchant us because it is magical. It enchant us because it is so raw, and crude, and so painfully real, that we feel our souls tearing apart when we come in contact with it. Just take a look at any Frida's paintings and you'll get what I mean

In Encanto, however, the "magic" is definitively perceived as magic, and it's often pointed out by MANY characters throughout the story. So, to me, that kind of breaks the Magical Realism thing.

Because it just looks like a "magic as a metaphor" situation, not anything out of the ordinary for a Disney movie. For example, how are any of the magical situations in Encanto different from, say, the ones in Beauty and the Beast? Really, it's pretty much the same idea, magic as a metaphor. And a magic house.

You even get the emotion magic going on and all

And that's super ok.

I love Disney magic. Everybody does.

So why call it differently just because it's set on Latin America?

AS FOR NUMBER 2

This might seem more of a personal opinion, and maybe it is, but this was actually one of the things that bothered me the most in this whole "Encanto is so Magical Realism" thing.

Because, as I spent 90% of this post explaining, Magical Realism in Latin America has very specific contours that are the result of centuries of troubled history. To ignore the social, historical and, above all, political undertones that the Latin works of Magical Realism have, is to ignore all the effort that this movement had in reclaiming the fantastic narrative of our own existence.

Is to ignore all the power we got by taking away from the colonizers the right to see us as "enchanted" or "magical".

And again, maybe this is a personal feeling of mine. But I can't see a work in which magic is used in such a personal and individual way by the characters as Magical Realism. As a metaphor for overload, or for personal conflicts, or for intergenerational trauma, or for singular heartache. Don't get me wrong, I loved the way Encanto created these metaphors. And they are great. I just can't fit it into everything I said above.

And I know the film DOES represents a reference to our troubled history and violence through the story of Abuela Alma. And again, this may be a personal opinion, but although I was deeply moved and cried the whole time, I don't think it was enough to frame this scene as "social criticism", or as something political.

In fact, I think this scene relates much more to the children and grandchildren of immigrants who had to leave Latin America for violent and inhumane reasons, than to us who stayed here. And perhaps that was the purpose of the film, to speak to the Latino families who were forced to diaspora. But then we are talking about another story. Not Colombia's.

I can't disassociate Magical Realism from politics, and I don't think it should be done. Because when you strip the Magical Realism from the political and historical and social contexcts, the only thing left is the "magic". And that's giving back the power to the colonizers. We are not "magical". Latin America is not "magical".

And I think that when you strip the symbols created by García Marquez from their original contexts, so carefully stitched together by him, you vastly impoverish his work.

For me the best example of this is the yellow butterfly.

The yellow butterfly ended up turning into something, apparently. Not only in Encanto, but in more than one "Latin" recent work I've seen some mention of butterflies that were clearly based on One Hundred Years of Solitude (yes, All The Crooked Saints, I'm looking at you)

And you can see that there is a direct relationship between the yellow butterflies in Encanto and the yellow butterflies in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And while there's no way to know what was going through García Marquez's head when he wrote these butterflies (only that yellow butterflies populated his grandparents' house during his childhood), the yellow butterfly ended up becoming a symbol of Latin Magical Realism.

Which is beautiful. But if you read the book, you'll see that they only appear in the narrative of the life of Renata Remedios (Meme), great-great-granddaughter of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán. More precisely, the butterflies would only appear around Mauricio Babilonia.

"It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia. She had seen them before, especially over the garage, and she had thought that they were drawn by the smell of paint. Once she had seen them fluttering about her head before she went into the movies. But when Mauricio Babilonia began to pursue her like a ghost that only she could identify in the crowd, she understood that the butterflies had something to do with him. Mauricio Babilonia was always in the audience at the concerts, at the movies, at high mass, and she did not have to see him to know that he was there, because the butterflies were always there." (p. 141)

The passion of Meme and Mauricio is one of the most detailed and poetic of the book. When the relationship is forbidden by Meme's mother, Fernanda, the two start to see each other in secrecy. Mauricio spends every night sneaking into Meme's quarters. And as, consumed by passion, she lives for the moment she will meet him, she waits for him lying on the bathroom floor, naked and burning with love, surrounded by scorpions. And the first sign of his arrival are the yellow butterflies coming through the window and infesting the house.

There's a line, when they're meeting at the cinema, that says:

"Meme felt the weight of his hand on her knee, and she knew that they were both arriving at the other side of abandonment at that instant". (p. 142)

The thing is, the two are lonely. And the more they sink into each other, the lonelier they get together. After Mauricio's death, the butterflies start to follow Meme, who drowns in lethargy. The yellow butterflies are, in the book, the symbol of the relationship of these two characters, who drowned their loneliness in each other's carnality. It's an intense, and carnal, and sensual, and painfully shallow relationship. And most of all, it's incredibly sad.

"Aureliano recognized him, he pursued the hidden paths of his descent, and he found the instant of his own conception among the scorpions and the yellow butterflies in a sunset bathroom where a mechanic satisfied his lust on a woman who was giving herself out of rebellion" (p. 200)

This is what was translated into the feeling of the solitude of the Latin America. Not by García Marquez himself, but by later interpretations. When I think about it, I always picture it as the feeling of the moment when, every night, Meme sees the first yellow butterfly coming through the window, and she can feel that in her gut.

And now you tell me,

why would anyone consider using this symbology in a Disney movie?

And even more, to use as a symbology of reconciliation and protection and family love? And...???

Disney my beloved??????

So, yeah, I think this movie had a lot of beautiful references to García Marquez, but taken so far from the original contexts and in such shallow ways that to me it felt more like they researched and saw that apparently yellow butterflies represent Latin Magical Realism and García Marquez and thought "wow this is lovely let's totally use that look how beautiful this is" because it looked "magical".

SO IN CONCLUSION

I like Encanto. This post is in NO WAY an attack on the film, or the Latin representation of the film. In fact, I think Encanto does a really great job at it (and as a light-skinned latina, I can stand by that very deeply).

But the statements about the magic of this movie, and the divulgation around it, and the way the producers of this movie have labeled it and approached all of this... Idk. I don't know why they felt the need to place Encanto as belonging to or inspired by Magical Realism, rather than simply telling a story that stands on its own, and happens to be set in Latin America.

I don't think the homages they paid to García Marquez were wrong or offensive in any way, in fact I thought they were all nice. I thought the yellow butterflies were beautiful, and yes, they did ended up becoming a symbol of Colombia, whether this is based on their original meaning or not. I am not complaining about the fact that they were there. What bothers me is that label. This justification that the magic of Encanto would be, somehow, different, because it was latina. That we'd have a magic that'd be different from the "European Magic".

And that bothers me even more because, I was curious enough to research to see if I was missing something, and I couldn't find ONE Latin story or legend that mentioned a magic house, for example. In Brazil we have some stories that take place in magical houses or castles (my favorites when I was a kid were "The Devil's Godchild" and "The Black Bird"), but all of these are adaptations of originally European tales. That arrived here with the European colonizers. This idea of a magical house with lots of doors and rooms bigger than the outside and fantastic things inside each of them is INCREDIBLY European. Based on European fairy tales and fables.

Aside from the fauna and flora and architecture and clothing and family dynamics the movie depicted wonderfully, there was NOTHING in the magic of Encanto that referenced or translated any folkloric magical elements of Colombian culture. I saw nothing remotely close the the La Madre de Agua, or a patasola, or a candileja, or Las Brujas de Burgama, nothing.

Why, when Disney makes a movie based in some European country, they choose fairy tales and stories from those countries to adapt, but in Latin America they ignore our stories? The legends of the native people, indigenous people, inland culture, anything?

Curious, isn't it?

But anyway, back on track. Since they didn't take an already existed tale from here, guess they thought that Magical Realism would be a good way to convey that. But they kinda didn't do that? As I said, I don't think Encanto is Magical Realism.

And honestly, if they had just made up a story that made sense and was respectful to our culture, and just placed it in Latin America (like The Emperor's New Groove, the most flawless Disney movie ever made), I think I would have enjoyed it a LOT more. But to me, it just felt like they were trying to make the whole thing about Magical Realism, without delivering it properly.

So they just made Latin America magical for the gringo eyes again.

Cheers.

SO YEAH, these were my thoughts on the subject!!! Please don't take any of it as any kind of personal attack on the people behind the movie, if there's any blame I'm more then happy to just put it on Disney Company (but we all agree on that, I think). I just wanted to tell a little of our history and explain why Magical Realism means so much to us. And you are totally free to have whatever opinion you do on this!!! RISE AND SHINE

And, as always, thank you so, so much for reading!!! ❤

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sabugabr · 2 years

Text

Interestingly, Amazon's Rings of Power issues can actually be summarized into its costumes

OR: Why Númenor cannot really look like Rome

Hello again, I YET LIVE! 💃

Soo, I haven't been able to write in ages cause since my graduation I've been in full monday to saturday 9AM-7PM proletarian mode, and I am a brazilian living in Brazil during one of the biggest attacks on democracy that we as a nation have experienced since the end of the military dictatorship 37 years ago aka Bolsonaro which is as nice as a kick in the nose, BUT FOR THIS SPECIFIC CASE, I, like palpatine, HAVE RETURNED.

but I'll make this one quick tho I swear (kkkkkkk)

I'm gonna talk about fictional characters' clothes.

And before I start, a brief disclaimer, I HAVE NOT FULLY WATCHED RINGS OF POWER YET. In fact, I've only watched the first three episodes. First because I didn't have the time, and second because honestly if they wanted to keep my attention longer they should've tried harder to make me care about any character other than my little boy Arondir, which they didn't so here we are.

But seriously, I'd like to make something very clear, I have absolutely no rights to tell you if Rings of Power is good or not, because I haven't watched it in its entirety, simple as that. That's not my point here, so if you liked this show, if you were moved by it, if it brought you back to a happy and safe place in Middle Earth, I'm glad, because that's great. We are living in very difficult times worldwide, and I will be the last person to condemn someone for consuming media that makes them happy and comforted. My issues here with it lies in a much simpler department, and that's what I'll be going on about.

✨ CHEAP COSTUMING ✨

And seriously, as I've said before, haven't watched the show, so I'm not even going to get into the merits of addressing good costuming in the narrative field, or the character development field, or anything like that – and you can easily find A LOT of videos and articles by much more qualified people than me covering these topics in detail. I'd just like to point out the problems with these costumes in the most basic way possible: they're the laziest thing I've ever seen since the end of the Night King in that 8th season.

And honestly that's embarrassing.

So look, I wouldn't be so picky if this were literally any other fantasy production.

While I fully understand and agree that any work must be able to stand on its own, and be amenable to analysis and criticism as a unit short of "necessary" contextualization, I also believe that in certain cases this separation is not, and should not be, possible – and in this scenario, this is the case of the construction of an universe. When you transfer this to the media field, it translates into the construction of the imagery of a universe, and for me, in my opinion, in these situations you cannot analyze each work of a same universe separately.

They need to dialogue with each other, and in the case of imagery, they need to have visual connections.

And one of the most powerful ways to convey to an audience that yes, this work takes place in this particular universe, is through costuming and characterization.

It is as if someone asked you to go to the market to buy lemons, and then showed you what a lemon is, so that when you arrive at the market, you can identify the lemons, and differentiate them from, for example, an orange, or a lime, or a tangerine. Right?

Rings of Power did not understand that.

Pray tell me, can you differentiate the lemons from the limes here?

Really, can you?

If you didn't already know these series, would you really be able to point out for sure which is which? Or, more importantly, which universe are they a part of? And, even more importantly, if you didn't already know, could you point out to me which of these are Lord of the Rings?

I couldn't.

And actually, there's inherently no problem for you to have a fantasy series with generic fantasy costumes (I, myself, particularly prefer it when the costumes aren't generic, but there are a number of shows or movies where the costumes might not be the most distinguishable thing in the world, but work really well in that context and are overall great costumes. That's absolutely fine). But in this specific series, it is very much a problem.

Because Lord of the Rings is not generic.

Even if they were creating the first ever visual adaptation of Tolkien works, I would already have rave reviews. But worse than that, they're putting themselves in a universe with imagery that not only already exists but is METICULARLY well established by the Peter Jackson films.

And what's interesting to me isn't even the fact that they're different from the costumes in the Peter Jackson movies. Depending on how it was done, I could at least respect the decision to create a completely fresh identity (provided it could dialogue with the previously established one, and with the worldbuilding created by Tolkien in the source material). What I find interesting is that in pretty much every costume, I can see where they got their inspiration from. And they are all the laziest possible.

Take Númenor for example. It's as if they looked at a summary of what Númenor is in Tolkien's writings and thought "a colonizing nation and mighty empire that existed before a society that years in the future would be represented as medieval inspired = Roman Empire". And/or Macedonian/Byzantine, for I can see a mixture of elements of those in many of the costumes and settings.

Even in the setting of the scenes: Compare the throne room of Númenor with that of Gondor, the latter with rounded columns and elliptical arches and a direction that always showed the room diagonally – from the corners, or behind the throne, to create an effect of disharmony, emptiness and decay (in almost every scene, the columns seem to be a little slanting). In contrast, the hall of Númenor is presented in the most squared and geometric way possible: the columns are straight, the scene is perfectly framed in the center, perfectly mirrored, and all the lines are either parallel or perpendicular, indicating straightness, balance and patterning – very Hellenic.

The association seems to be very obvious at first glance. The Hellenic empires are by far the best-known and most perpetuated example of empire in the mediatic imaginary of our Western culture, so it's a very easy way to convey to us, the audience, that these guys are your standart big "advanced" and colonizing civilization that see themselves as "closer to the gods" or something. And ok, fine.

I don't think the concept of being aesthetically inspired by the Romans would be anywhere near bad, were that any case other than Tolkien's universe.

For example, within the imagery created by Tolkien I would much rather see a Celtic inspiration for Númenor than a Roman/Macedonian one (since we're talking about great cultures that preceded Christian kingdoms in Europe), simply because this Roman aesthetic, while efficient in giving us the most basic impression possible about these people as lazily quickly and efficiently as possible, inevitably ends up pulling us by the throat out of the immersion of Middle Earth. It simply breaks it.

Like, really tho, would you bait an eye on this an call it Middle Earth??

And ok, fine, I know the Celts aren't the first association we make with "great nation" (and actually they were colonized and genocidated by the Romans so there's that lovely layer) BUT THE THING IS THAT MIDDLE-EARTH IS NOT THE REAL WORLD. And yes, I know that Gondor can easily be associated, yes, with Rome and the Byzantine Empire, and that Númenor is very much Atlantis. But one thing is contextual and narrative inspiration, another is aesthetic inspiration. And it's aesthetics I'm talking about here. If the two always went hand in hand, then in House of the Dragon we would have to see the Targaryens walking around 24/7 in full roman attire.

That's what I mean when I call the costuming lazy. Because it's much easier for you to make a visual association than to actually build one through writing and narrative construction. And that's why I say that for me this is a reflection of the whole series. They seem more focused on making checklists in a basic formula than showing us, you know, Tolkien.

"Oh but Númenor is clearly based on Atlantis, you said so yourself", technically, yes (and Tolkien wrote of Númenor as Atlantis in several of his letters), but primarily, Númenor is simply a big island that was swallowed by the sea, and this mythology is by no means unique to the Greeks. In adaptation, Númenor could be based for example on the Cornish "Lyonesse", or on the Breton "Ys", or even the Gaelic "Hy Breasail". Atlantis is just the most well-known version of this myth (to put it simply), and therefore the one that would be most quickly recognized, and therefore the easiest to pull off.

In fact, if one were to delve deeper into the meaning of the fall of Númenor (and there one can even extend to the greater meaning of all these mythologies entering 100% in the field of the collective unconscious and Ginzburg-ish tracks), to which the Tolkien refers to as the second fall of man, with "its central theme is (inevitably, I think, in a story of Men) a Ban, or Prohibition" [x]. The Numenoreans desired immortality, and for their pride they were banished, forbidden from entering the Undying Lands of Aman – which, essentially, comes very close to the idea of the Fall embodied by Christianity.

Satan's Fall From Heaven, illustration by Gustav Dore for John Milton's Paradise Lost

As Tolkien himself said in his 1951 letter to Milton Waldman:

"I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more 'life' a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.) Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes." [...] "This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities of 'Fall'. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as 'its own', the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality." Letter to Milton Waldman, 1951, p. 2 – you can read it here

And directly about Númenor, (if you wanna go full nerdy here), he stated that

"The Downfall of Númenor, the Second Fall of Man (or Man rehabilitated but still mortal), brings on the catastrophic end, not only of the Second Age, but of the Old World, the primeval world of legend." [...] "Their reward is their undoing – or the means of their temptation. Their long life aids their achievements in an and wisdom, but breeds a possessive attitude to these things, and desire awakes for more time for their enjoyment. Foreseeing this in pan, the gods laid a Ban on the Númenóreans from the beginning: they must never sail to Eressëa, nor westward out of sight of their own land. In all other directions they could go as they would. They must not set foot on 'immortal' lands, and so become enamoured of an immortality (within the world), which was against their law, the special doom or gift of Ilúvatar (God), and which their nature could not in fact endure." "There are three phases in their fall from grace. First acquiescence, obedience that is free and willing, though without complete understanding. Then for long they obey unwillingly, murmuring more and more openly. Finally they rebel – and a rift appears between the King's men and rebels, and the small minority of persecuted Faithful." Letter to Milton Waldman, 1951, p. 7 - 8

So like, I think there was a lot of room to go around here. There was absolutely no need to deviate from the already existing aesthetic (from the movies) in order to evoke a counterpart in the real world – to me, this just impoverish interpretations, discussions and overall the whole work. A great example of this is the Numenorean symbol.

In the books, the main symbols of Númenor (if I'm not mistaken) are the tree of Númenor, the eagle and especially the five-pointed star.

The island (or continent) on which Númenor was located was in the shape of a five-pointed star, and they were a nation that relied largely on astrocartographies for their navigations.

So you would assume that we would see these symbols on the series, right? Five-pointed stars and trees and stuff like that, right?

Wrong

They gave us this:

The golden Sun

Nowhere in Tolkien's writings (to my knowledge) does he compare Númenor with the sun. I know that technically the sun is a star, but these are completely different archetypal symbols. Tolkien's greatest association with the sun is in relation to Anar, and the Two Trees (and perhaps one could even make an association about how in Middle-Earth the sunlight is "inferior" to the original light of the Two Trees as a metaphor for like the Numenoreans try to persue immortality and emulate the elves, but honestly it's a very long stretch).

(being fair, they did try to play with some celtic sun symbols there, but it ended up just looking out of place)

The main association with the golden sun in our western culture (excluding indigenous cultures, Mesoamerica and South America, we have our own relationships with the figure of the sun that does not enter here at all) is with the Panhellenic symbol of the Macedonian Sun, or Vergina Sun.

You can see the resemblance very clearly, especially in that golden banner in the first image

And there is, again, no problem with you drinking from real world inspired sources to build a fantasy world (every fantasy world is an analogy to the real world and etc etc). But if you're going to make direct visual associations with real-world elements, those associations must be very well thought out and very well planned. Otherwise, as happened (in my opinion) with the golden sun of Númenor, you end up breaking the immersion of a visual universe that, if it drink from some source, is not the one you used.

Famously, the great inspirations for Tolkien's work were Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, Slavic, Greek and Norse language, folklore and mythology, especially the Icelandic sagas and ultimately the basic christian structures. [little sources 1, 2 and 3 if you wanna know more, or you can go to the first page of Tolkien's letter to hear it from the man himself]. You even have this whole diagrams going on about it:

This is the foundation of the universe, this is the fountain you will want to drink from. And that's the source that Ngila Dickson drank from to make the costumes for the Lord of the Rings movies.

Compare for example Elendil's costumes from the The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and then from Rings of Power (2022).

Can you see where I'm coming from?

Ngila Dickson's take on Elendil not only fits perfectly into the setting of this world being presented to us, but it also manages to create a unique and recognizable aesthetic for the character (and therefore, for his people).

When, in the third film, we see Aragorn'scoronation, it is not difficult to recognize if not the armor, but at least Elendil's royal crown.

Dickson plays not only with historical inspirations but mainly with associations within the visual universe of the films: in the crown alone, you can see inspirations taken from the architecture of Gondor itself: the crown aesthetically resembles the city. She's not referencing the real world, she's referencing Middle Earth.

In Rings of Power, Elendil only looks Byzantine.

And that's just lazy.

Also, for some reason I didn't get, the elves also wear roman elements? Like, what's the point of that? Are the Numenoreans then trying to copy the elves in some way, or…? Idk???

What's with the laurels? Did I miss something or...????:???^::??

And honestly I could go on and on and on on the elves ALONE, but a lot of people already covered that and this is already getting long enought so for my point here I'd only like to point out one detail that dialogues with my lazyness critique here, and it regards Galadriel.

Now, once again, I COULD GO ON AN ON ABOUT HER PORTRAYL (and I'll sure be doing a post addressing female archetypes so I won't extend myself here) but not my point here, I'd only like to talk about this particular dress:

The blue dress

To be quite blunt, the thing with this dress is that it is literally a copy of Éowyn's maiden dress.

Literally.

It's so ridiculously blatant.

The impression it gives me is that they, once again, instead of even trying to show through writing or narrative construction a certain element, they simply copied and pasted the most obvious thing possible. They wanted to say "look at how Galadriel is a strong warrior woman" so they just made her look like the other "woman with a sword" in the franchise.

It was a big "she's the new Éowyn pls like her" move.

Instead of giving her... you know... her own construction? Some individuality? Any at all?

And that, in addition to being extremely lazy YET AGAIN, is a big shot in the foot (Brazilian saying, don't know if it makes sense in english sorry), because it only makes us compare the two directly. And even if you liked Rings of Power, I think we can all collectively agree that the Galadriel we were introduced to is definitely no Éowym.

So why did they do it??? because they're lazy that's it that's the point

It's the same with the thought of putting on a Wooden Elf with armor that looks like WOOD, or taking the concept of "people connected with nature" and translating that into purely shoving, idk, a bird's nest on people's heads and making them dirty with earth. Very connected with nature and stuff. It's just LAZYYYYY

Yes, it's very cute, but.... Costuming-wise, it's just dumb?? You know?

And what screams the most is also the difference in quality between the costumes. The difference in the cut of the dresses, in the quality of the fabrics, in everything. IT SCREAMS. I won't get into that because, again, lot of people already covered that BUT REALLY, I'M SORRY, BUT THIS IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE MEDIA PRODUCTION OF IDK, EVER???? THIS FIRST SEASON ALONE COST NEAR THE BUDGET FOR THE WHOLE 3 LOTR MOVIES AND AND

THE PRINTED FABRICS I CAN'T EVEN-

Like, we had this:

And they thought we'd settle for THIS?????

I could forgive this so easily if this was the standart fantasy production. I really could. But this is the most expensive production in history, produced by a billionaire mega corporation that exploits millions of people and literally kills our planet daily, about one of the most well-established universes in the fantastic imagination of our western culture. The least they could do was give us something with a minimum of effort.

I can't talk about their effort on other story elements because I haven't watched the entire series. But, I'm sorry, from the level of care and attention I've seen in these costumes… They literally just did the MINIMUM, and that honestly doesn't really get me excited for the rest of the production.

Like, because they said this character is Galadriel, should we immediately love her just because they said she's Galadriel? To me it fells like they took a LOT of things for granted, and unfortunately it shows.

AND JUST A SMALL ADDENDUM THAT I THINK I SHOULD MAKE

I know that in the big picture, the dwarf costumes are the least worst of this series, and I agree.

ALTHOUGH, YET, HOWEVER

I really think it's extremely complicated for you to represent dwarves as, again, "dirty" and "stubby" people who live in "rustic" caves and are "rustic" and "quarrelsome" and "drunkish". I… I just think it's bad.

Especially with the accent they effectively chose to use for pretty much ALL the dwarves, and seeing them interacting with posh Enrold with his perfect posh British accent… It's just bad.

And I loved Durin's personality and character, but in terms of costumes...

This:

Will never be this:

My personal feelings regarding The Hobbit movies aside, THIS is what a dwarf prince looks like for me. Simply as that. Just look at the condition of the fur in both costumes. C'mon.

Anyway, thank you once again for reading!!! This is just my opinion, as always, feel free to desagree with my at any point! ✨

#rings of power #lotr #and honestly I found it troubling and maybe disrespectful to make Sauron charismatic #like there's ac people rooting for him and he is ac rootfull #but that's just my opinion #galadriel #numenor #lord of the rings #the rings of power #costume analysis #costume design #movie essay

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sabugabr · 2 years

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@ariel-seagull-wings @superkingofpriderock @metropolitan-mutant-of-ark

FUN FACT

In Northeast Brazil, there's a origin story for this whole torture the Saint Anthony thing: it says that once upon a time there was this lovely girl who couldn't find a husband, no matter what she did

She'd pray, and worship, and donate money, and lay flowers and candles and sweets, cakes and gifts for the saint and nothing would work, until one day she got so sick of it and so pissed that in a lash of anger she threw the saint image out the window BUT SO IT HAPPENED THAT there was a very handsome lad walking down the street that very moment, and the saint ended up hitting him on the head and knocking him out, so the girl hurried to aid him and long story short, THEY FELL IN LOVE AND MARRIED AND LIVED HAPPLY EVER AFTER

And that's (allegedly) it's the origin for the torture, because apparently it would be more effective

BUT also worth mentioning that Santo Antônio (Saint Anthony) is one of the most religiously syncretized figures in Brazil, having "counterparts" in African-based brazilian religions such as the Candomblé and Umbanda, and was also influenced by several indigenous religions; this may have contributed to the fact that in our "catholic" culture, to the worship of this saint (and honestly many others) was attributed a practice of slightly more polytheistic flavour: the bargaining.

It's very commom (specially on the countryside!) to find a full variety of catholic practices that actually revolve around the concept of bargain: gime that and I shall give you this in return, help me with that and I will offer you good favour / help me not and I will damn you and your worship

Such as: when you open a new bottle of cachaça (or any alcohol really) it's a "rednek" practice to puor the first glass on the ground as an offering for the saint of your most liking (my grandad's favourite was the Virgin Mary, he alone must have given the holy lady a few hangovers over the decades as a true feminist would)

#religion #brazilian culture

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sabugabr · 2 years

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How to Become a Real Boy: Our Flag Means Death and the Queer Art of Failure

Alright, batten down the hatches, I'm pulling out my mouldering English Literature diploma and writing meta about OFMD using some of my favourite queer theory. This is long for a tumblr post (about 1500 words) but also it's essentially a very condensed version of what could easily be a 3k word essay LOL. Can anyone tell I graduated a year ago and am missing getting to do this?

So, if you haven't seen it yet David Jenkins' pinned tweet says "A lot of what we’re taught about being a man is wrong." And other people have written eloquently about this but clearly the show is exploring masculinity. But the thing I think it does differently than other media I've seen that interrogates masculinity is that rather than just criticizing it (and I think the show is doing something much more interesting than critique) it actually portrays a diverse array of alternatives.

Humour in OFMD doesn't operate under the still-too-common model of ironic cynicism. I could do a whole post just about that on its own but to try and be as concise as possible rn I'm going to quote David Foster Wallace (who I know was a shitty person but his point here still stands):

"Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the same stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive"

We know about toxic masculinity, we know it sucks, we know the patriarchy hurts everyone. Now what? The thing that OFMD does differently here is also showing us alternative kinds of masculinity that aren't toxic-- Lucius admiring Fang's body and telling Izzy that "we don't own each other," Doug hyping up Mary's artwork and bringing her breakfast in bed, Stede getting the pirates to "talk it through as a crew," the crew getting to sew flags and do silly theatre, Ed being told he "wears fine things well."

And here's where we get to my main argument: I think one of the main ways that OFMD arrives at these alternatives is through what Jack Halberstam calls "the queer art of failure."

Super quick rundown of this concept:

The terms of success in a heteropatriarchial, capitalist, colonial society are toxic, and failing to achieve these things can open you up to otherwise hard to see ways of living differently. "Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world." To put it simply, once you've totally failed to be straight enough and masculine enough and white enough and whatever else, you become free to explore the alternatives to these things.

So, ok, what does this mean for OFMD? Well, as I said in a previous post I think its main thematic question, which it sets up in episode one with the Pinnochio story, is "how do you become a real boy?" (a real pirate, a real gentleman, etc.). And the season's answer to that question is, ultimately, "you can't-- because there's no such thing."

If we think of each of these fixed identities (gentleman and pirate) as being at the top of some very tall mountain, then Stede and Ed each appear at first glance to be relatively close to their respective peaks. Stede has a wife and kids, a beautiful house and more money than he knows what to do with. Ed: well, he's Blackbeard, history's greatest pirate. But what's so fantastic about this show is that one of its major premises is that even Blackbeard isn't actually the perfect ideal he's made out to be. And if even Blackbeard can’t make it, can’t be the pinnacle of masculinity, then maybe that’s because nobody can.

Notice that the second time the Pinnochio story comes up in episode one is right after Stede says "my family is here now." The next cut has him reading aloud to that new family, the crew of the revenge, in a scene that shows off a kind of new fatherhood, a masculinity based in caring for others. I'd argue that the reason the episode ends on this scene (and the shot of all the flags displayed equally) is to tell us that while the crew may say that they're keeping Stede alive because he proved himself in battle, ultimately they're really doing it because they like being told stories and getting to do crafts together. This queer chosen family, then, comes to all of them as a result of Stede's failure to be a real gentleman (by leaving his hetero family) and his failure to be a real pirate.

And that's why Ed likes him so much, and is so interested in him in the first place! He's the only guy out there doing something new and exciting. Of course the joke is that the only reason he's doing something original is because he's totally incapable of being a "real pirate" but that's the whole point. Stede questions why he can’t be both a gentleman and a pirate but ultimately the show is about him coming to terms with the fact that he has failed to be either of those things-- and that's good, because they allow him to eschew the toxic terms of success of both.

Some more quick examples of this:

Stede failing to be a traditional father and husband opens up new possibilities for Mary, who herself is freed of her societal expectations by “failing” to be a wife anymore

Jim’s story is also about failure, failing to hide as a man, failing to live up to their revenge legacy quest. But again through those failures they find the alternative: being non-binary, falling in love with Oluwande, etc. if Jim’s lesson is that revenge won’t make them feel better, won’t bring back their family, then they can only find freedom in failing to do so (which is where they are at the end of the season).

And ok now here's the really interesting part: while Stede and Ed both fail, in different ways, to be real pirates and real gentlemen, they both also have a running thread of being unable to fail. Ed can't fail because he doesn't even have to do anything scary anymore, people are so terrified of the idea of him that just showing his face sends everyone running. Stede can't fail because his privilege-- and main character magical plot armour-- insulates him from suffering real consequences (as Badminton says, "here you are, unscathed, God's perfect little rich boy"). Each of them is trapped by their proximities to the ideals they represent (pirate and gentleman, respectively), and that is why each of them goes back to those identities in the end.

Stede fails to be a pirate, goes back to being a gentleman and then fails to be a gentleman too. And only when his failure is complete, and he reckons with the consequences of that failure, is he able to sail off toward something else. And importantly I don't think that something else is being a "real pirate." He's sailing toward love, vulnerability, queer family-- all of the things he found by failing to reach the terms of success offered to him by both identities. Ultimately Stede doesn't become anything, in a fixed sense. Instead he, though failure, opens himself up to an ocean of possibility.

Ed, on the other hand, ends the season before he can complete his failure arc. He fails to be a gentleman, goes back to being a pirate, and then...? Well, then, I think what this means is that Ed's next step in season 2 is to truly fail to be a pirate. Like Stede, he needs to complete his failure and reckon with its consequences. We can see this foreshadowed by him crying in his final shot-- the gaps and friction points in his identity have opened up and are ripe for failure. Ed thinks, right now, that he has to stay being Blackbeard, being the Kraken, because the stakes for failure are too high. But Stede, (perhaps history's worst pirate) is coming back to him full of failure and freedom. And I think only once Ed really truly fails-- and survives it-- will he be able to meet him there.

The world we live in is a cynical place, and it is in the best interests of the people in power to convince us all (like Ed has been convinced) that the stakes for failing to follow the rules, failing to go along with the success terms of heteropatriarchal capitalist colonial society, are too high. And it's true that failure sucks and it hurts, but it is also true that there are people out there who are living otherwise, people who will help you get through. And I think that's what this show is about: not being so naively optimistic to think that you can fail without getting hurt, without reckoning with consequences, and at the same time not being so cynical as to believe you have no choice but to scramble forever toward an impossible ideal. Instead, you can fail and survive it, fail and keep failing, and in doing so open yourself up to an endless horizon of ways to live differently.

#oh wait what if I apply skin shows to the kraken metaphor #this is just too beautiful #love how you applied halberstam's theory here #it fits perfectly ur a genius #ofmd #our flag means death #queer theory #ofmd meta #ac now i'm looking back to halberstam other works and going #now I want to reread all his work with ofmd in mind #thank you so much for that

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sabugabr · 2 years

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the way ofmd deals with masculinity is so fascinating. we have stede, who’s about the least masculine a character could possibly be in the traditional sense: he gets sad instead of angry, he refuses to engage in physical violence, he encourages talking about feelings, he likes fashion and interior design and romanticizes everything. he likes picking flowers. and he has been told for his whole life that he is worthless because of all of this. he has been bullied and taunted and abused for it, but that didn’t keep him from adding a secret closet to his ship (lmao) to keep his excess fineries. he is still outwardly himself.

then we have ed. ed who is the pinnacle of the idea of masculinity, part of why he was remembered as history’s greatest pirate in the first place. he’s violent, ruthless, quick to anger, hierarchical, and his name, blackbeard, even emphasizes a symbol of masculinity. he’s revered for his masculinity. his performance is so powerful that people surrender before he even shows up in person. but it’s not him. blackbeard is a character ed has played for as long as he could remember that served to protect him from harm. you can't get hurt if you're never vulnerable in the first place.

when he meets stede, he finds someone he doesn’t have to present as blackbeard for. he can indulge in the frilly colorful clothes, the dancing, the emotional honesty that stede treats as normal. ed lets stede hold his heart in his hands and stede calls it beautiful. and stede, for the first time, has met someone who doesn’t see those things as hateful or embarrassing. everything stede has been mocked for unequivocally delights ed. in the reverse, stede sees blackbeard as the man stede never was. the ideal of a pirate that he read about and romanticized before he became one himself. to stede, blackbeard is everything he could never bring himself to be.

when ed begins to outwardly become interested in stede’s way of life, izzy serves to try to force him back into that hypermasculine presentation of Blackbeard. izzy hates stede for all the same reasons stede has been hated his whole life, and he sees stede as poisoning edward with his embarrassing foppish behavior, emasculating him. this comes to a head when ed signs the act of grace, shaves his beard (the symbol of his performance of masculinity), and kisses stede. all of those go against traditional masculine norms and by extent, the idea of Blackbeard. but ed isn’t performing anymore. he smiles more after the kiss than he ever does in the rest of the show.

then, stede is held at gunpoint by chauncey, who calls stede a monster, a plague for ruining the greatest pirate in history. ruining through emasculation, which in countless other media has been presented as horrific. think about other media that puts masculine characters in prison or the army (the similarities are staggering)—the threat of beating the character down until they’re submissive and emasculated is ever-present. losing the appearance of masculinity is by and large seen as one of the worst things that could possibly happen, and is often paired thematically with the loss of autonomy.

so stede agrees. he’s horrified with himself. he himself was already not traditionally masculine, and he spread it to blackbeard like a disease. everything he (and, interestingly, the viewer) has ever been told is that ed’s shift throughout the show is something to be terrified of. ed shaving his beard, in stede’s mind, confirmed his worst fear: stede had made ed into everything stede hated about himself and wanted to change; he killed blackbeard. but what he and chauncey and izzy can’t see is that stede actually gave ed more autonomy, more freedom and comfort to be himself and do what makes ed happy.

so stede runs. he runs back to where he once performed masculinity as a father and husband (regaining his own beard, so to speak), now sure that blackbeard would have been better off not knowing him. on some level, stede does want parts of blackbeard’s edge to stay (he’s like izzy in that way) and is scared he’s somehow excised it permanently. ed doesn’t want to leave it all behind either, but he’s terrified that stede could never accept the side of him that still exists as blackbeard. i also think this is why ed didn't try to kiss stede until he was the least like blackbeard he could be; he saw it as being less likely to get rejected for the ugliness he saw in himself.

it's interesting that ed doesn't go back to being blackbeard immediately after stede abandons him. at first, he goes all-in on the emotional vulnerability, trying to hang on to the hope he had allowed himself to experience when stede had agreed to run away with him. hanging on by a thread. the thread snaps when izzy mocks him for pining after stede, for lacking the masculinity izzy required in order to maintain his respect. in quick succession ed was rejected by stede, whom he loved, and izzy, whose respect he'd had since before the show began. so he threw his walls back up. he painted his mask back on, closed himself off, and removed every reminder of when he had allowed himself to be vulnerable.

ed's return to masculinity is not presented as a good thing. it's a trauma response, a defense mechanism, and it's toxic. the show experiments with defining a line between toxic and non-toxic masculinity; izzy, calico jack, the kraken, stede's father, the admiral twins, they all represent the ways toxic masculinity enforces a culture of violence and punishes any emotion except anger. stede and his crew represent a healthier version of masculinity: emotional honesty, encouragement and care for others, kindness, and love. it's not an accident that as ed allows himself to love and be loved, he begins to leave behind the toxic aspects of masculinity he had before. i've used the word emasculated to refer to ed's transformation throughout the show, but in truth that's not entirely accurate. it lines up with how many people would view what happened to him, but in reality he did remain a man, he just became a healthier one.

#hadn't picked the beard simbolism to this extent I am now speechless and teared appart #thank you so much for this #our flag means death #stede bonnet #blackbeard #thank you taika

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sabugabr · 2 years

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I feel like years and years of media and romance media in special left our society with this very well delimited image of "who gets to be on a rom com", "who gets to get the girl/boy" that unconsciously ended up meaning "who deserves to be loved in our society standarts" and "what kind of bodies and ethnicities and looks deserves to be loved aka are passible of be considered objects of desire, admiration and affection and overall VALUE", and I feel like this got pretty intense in pretty deep ways regarding the representation of many queer (and non-white, of course) relationships on screen (that even goes downhole into issues such as hipersexualization, fettish and straigh/white-gaze), and we all know the implications of that.

So to see shows like ofmd and good omens and wwdits just so beautifully resignifying all this bagage of YEARS of damage, is just so healing. It's like they're taking us by the hand and saying "you know, you can ac be gentler to yourself, love can ac be gentler to you"

AND DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON HOW ABSURDLY HEALING IT WAS THAT OFMD JUST SAID it's ok if you are not ready for a big romantic gesture. Bc I think other thing that romantic media kind of engraved on us was this ideia of "if you dont take the gesture you loose the person, if you let that slide, congrats you just lost true love you aint gonna find it again baby" like love and this gestures are somehow codependent AND SOMETIMES THEY ARE AND THAT'S SUPER OK but not exclusevly. Sometimes you are not ready for that and what ofmd does is that it says that it's ok. And that it doesn't mean you love the person any less, or that your love is somehow "smaller" than the other person's. IDK WHY THIS GOT ME SO HARD LIKE I WAS THERE SOBBING WITH MY HEART SHATERED BUT AT THE SAME TIME IT WAS A VERY WARM FEELING U KNOW??? Idk maybe it's because it felt more human and realistic but in a good and gentler way IDK this series was just a big warm hug in my heart

So yeah anyway thank you queer-middle-aged-men media for resignifying queer affection, male affection, masculinity standarts and just overall make us all warm and feeling good inside didn't see that coming with this specifics but we really needed that

oh but I adore how everyone in this stupid pirate show is just a guy

I haven't seen ppl talk about it much but. the absolute lack of shredded abs. people show tummy and cleavage and there's not the barest hint of muscle definition anywhere

obviously some of them are very fit but it never leaves "works a physically demanding job and happens to be naturally thin" territory

and guys are fat! guys have bellies and rounded shoulders and chubby cheeks and imperfect teeth and thinning hair and are styled weirdly (that's a whole different post but the crew especially look so unprofessional styled it's great)

and they are still all hot! they are hot and desirable and find each other hot and desirable and I love that

I love to see it! nobody in this show looks like they had a personal trainer. and not just the side characters, not just a token fat guy - obv Taika Waititi is the most beautiful man you've ever seen and that little bit of tummy pudge spilling out of his crop top made us all lose our collective minds. but it's everyone else too; and it's not the extend of it either. no other show would have let black pete within 10 feet of a romance arc, much less been this sweet and sincere about it

this show is so comfortable with the human body in all it's glorious imperfection and I am in love with it

#our flag means death #thank you taika #ofmd #good omens #what we do in the shadows #wwdits #ur all doing amazing sweeties

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sabugabr · 2 years

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Why "The Book of Boba Fett" doesn't really work and why that's very problematic

SO, THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT HUH KKKKKKKK WHAT A JOYFULL SERIES

Hello again!!! So, I just finished watching The Book of Boba Fett, and while I desperately wanted to go on a deeper analysis as I usually do, my thesis deadlines are killing me so I'll just summon up very briefly (kkkkkk as if) things that bothered me in the last episode, which I think pretty much reflect problems with the entire series: what the hell was that narrative

Because I think this lack of attention and care in narrative planning and cultural repercussions in a work like this is VERY worrying to me, and I'm genuinely afraid that this will continue to occur in the next Star Wars productions (which is what will probably happen hahahaha what a joy).

And mostly, I need to get all of that out of my system.

Every passing day George Lucas's face here just makes more and more sense to me and that's amazing

SO LET'S MAKE THIS BRIEF LET'S GO TOPICS

And of course this goes without saying, there'll be a lot of spoilers ahead

1. PACING WHAT'S PACING NEVER HEARD OF HER

So, I know I said I was going to talk about the last episode, but watching the last episode compared to the first one thing was very clear to me:

The pacing of the first episodes is a disaster.

They are so dull. Nothing happens. It's 4 episodes with practically nothing happening on screen, did you notice that too? If the theme of the series was the creation of a found-family of crime, it didn't happen; we have almost no development of the relationships between the characters, old and new. There isn't ONE significant interaction between Boba and the kids in that gang, for example. Nothing personal. Not family-like. Nothing. We barely got Boba and Fennec interacting deeply.

If the topic was criminal syndicates and how clans work and how Tatooine's underworld is organized, I don't think the show did a good job of it either. Seriously, I spent the first 4 episodes without understanding and ended the series without understanding what effectively a Daimyo DOES. Seriously, I have no idea. How will they make money? God knows. They were just there spending Jabba's money and that was it, I guess. That's the job.

And if the series was to explore Boba's character and explain his motivations and do a (gasp) character arc, I don't think they did a good job of that either. I mean, Boba didn't even appear in 2 of the episodes of a series named after him. And honestly, did he have a character arc??? No he didn't. I mean, there was this plot with the Tusken Raiders, but all this was delegated to flashbacks instead of being an actual plot, and that for me was a huge mistake. Not only it led to nothing but also stalled and slowed down the main narrative.

And in the end what should have been a big resolution, to me it was....meh? The motivation of the villains was something so simple that it could be summed up in a single sentence, there was no big plot twist, no character peak, it was just... Some action scenes and fan services and cameos and Peli Motto being the main character (not complaining about that tho).

So congratulations, they gave us 4 episodes of nothing, 2 episodes of another series and ended up with a big mess (and somehow the mess managed to be better than the first 4 episodes)

😀

2. BOBA'S BONDS? WHO ARE THEY DON'T THINK THEY EXIST

So you know the scene in the last episode where they're cornered and suddenly Freetown's cavalry arrives to save the day?

That was awful.

Not the scene itself, not the cavalry, not the people of Freetown. But the fact that this cavalry had NOTHING to do with Boba. He didn't even know those people. Who saved the day were the consequences of affective bonds and companionship of past actions of MANDO, not Boba. AND THAT IS ABSURDLY PROBLEMATIC IN A SERIES THAT IS CALLED "THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT". It is not "The Book of Din Djarin". So why are Din's "good deeds" (narratively speaking) that save the day and are rewarded? Because beyond that, and the random people Boba HIRES to work for him, there isn't a single scene where any of his decisions or bonds have had any impact. Except, I don't know, he took in the rancor? And basically just that.

Even his relationship with Fennec, the deepest bond he has on the show, starts at point A and ends at point A. There is absolutely no evolution or change in the relationship between the two main characters, and most of the time the said relationship is more Fennec giving advice and Boba ignoring them and Fennec resigning than anything deeper.

And that's just my opinion, but honestly? It should have been the Tusken Raiders saving the day at the final episode.

I mean, why weren't the Tusken? Serious. Why???? It would be SO MUCH BETTER. We would all cheer, we all love them, it would make so much sense and make such a great connection to Boba's flashbacks and everything would be just better. Because, the way the series did it, they went all those extra miles exploring and developing the Tusken Raiders, humanizing and giving them a spirituality, and spent so much screentime on them, and in the end it was all for NOTHING. So congratulations, you just threw 2 hours (or more) of flashbacks down the drain and it was all useless. Congratulations.

And this leads me to

3. CONGRATS ON MANAGING TO REPRODUCE ONE OF THE WORST NARRATIVE TROPES INVOLVING INDIGENOUS PEOPLE POSSIBLE

Okay, so, back to Boba's flashbacks. What happens is that he's rescued by the Tusken Raiders, and he basically becomes one of them, being inducted into the clan, family, whatever.

AND THE FUNNY THING IS, taking the "classic western analogy" in account here, the thing is: The Tusken are an analogy for native american indigenous peoples. In reality, they are an analogy to the portrayal of indigenous people in these western classics (kkkkkkkk so fun). That's pretty obvious in these recent Star Wars series.

So what you have here in TBOBF, basically, is that you have the "outsider" protagonist getting in touch with this "extremely violent native tribe" everyone is afraid of, discovering that they are not actually "savages" but a beautiful people with a beautiful culture and beautiful spirituality that are only being exploited by the invaders who built a train line in their ancestral lands, and then this "outsider" takes the fight of the natives for himself, but tragically all the natives are brutally murdered by the oppressor so the "outsider" becomes the sole heir of that beautiful culture.

That's what happens.

THEY PULLED OFF THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS TROPE, GUYS. THEY DID THAT.

And since they reproduced this trope with an indigenous actor, it's harder to get, but still. It's the same INCREDIBLY PROBLEMATIC story. They looked at the westerns and thought "hmm, this is it, this is the view of the natives that I'm going to represent in my big western analogy here" AND THEY WENT WITH IT. God, they even put a "mystical ritual of guidance" with dreams of a "sacred tree" and... God

And it serves to absolutely NOTHING. Boba doesn't have any major developments that can be attributed to his time with the Tusken, they don't move the plot at all, they don't move Boba's motivations or actions at any time, and even the "revenge" mini-plot is completely empty, because he was going to fight the Pykes anyway so...yeah.

The indigenous analogy? KINDA BAD

The Tusken? GENOCIDED

The mystical ritual and the dream with the sacred tree? MEANT FOR NOTHING

This whole plot? NOT RELEVANT

Thanks I hate it.

And they also managed to THROW IN THE GARBAGE the by far best character aesthetic in the series aka this queen here so CONGRATULATIONS DISNEY.

We could have had so much more

But no, instead we got the rebel kids' gang

4. THANKS I HATED THEM

This is more of a personal opinion, so feel free to skip it, but

WHAT THE HELL KKKKKKKKKKK

GOD I HATE THESE FOLKS SO MUCH, POOR THINGS I feel bad for disliking them this much but I just can't I-

First, I really don't like their aesthetics? Idk, they don't look very "Tatooine" to me, you know? They look far more, idk, Coruscant-like, or something like that. There's even this scene where this very cool-looking girl that I loved, why wasn't she a major character from Freetown calls them "city rats" or something like that and this just felt SO OFF to me because, Tatooine always had this "countryside nothing happens here" vibes, and suddenly you get this bunch of colorful big city punks that look like very rich kids who wanted to rebel their rich parents you know?

LIKE KKKKKKKKK there's this scene where they're complaining because people are poor or whatever and things are too expensive so they're stealing and THIS WAS JUST SO HARD FOR ME TO BUY BECAUSE THEY LOOK SO RIDICULOUSLY LIKE SPOILED-RICH KIDS that honestly I just laughed in this scene. Really, everytime the angry white girl with the bangs was complaining about opression I'd just giggle on my water here.

And ok, at least if they had any relevance, ok, I didn't dislike the colors, I liked the coloring bikes, I liked the idea, I could have swallowed their spoiled faces. OK.

But the big problem is that, once again, they had no relevance beyond being hired labor. Again, no family moments. No affective bond with Boba, no deep dialogue between any of them and Boba. No backstory, no context. I have NO IDEA what even the names of any of these kids are. So??????

5. THEY JUST THREW CAD BANE IN THERE FOR NOTHING AT ALL AND THEN KILLED HIM

So, THIS, for me, could have been SO GOOD. Boba's relationship with Cad Bane is one of the coolest in all Star Wars and one that genuinely gets little attention and that genuinely deserves to be further explored. THIS should have been told in flashbacks. THIS is a great emotional link that would serve VERY WELL as a narrative development for the main character. His past as a bounty hunter. This figure that pretty much shaped him into what he is today. Boba's conflict between his father's morals and the wrong values Cad Bane taught him.

He is this coolest character, how come he didn't get more narrative attention in a series that is so strongly sedimented in everything that suits him so perfectly?

He was Boba's mentor, for God's sake

And in the end, when you have their meeting, I genuinely liked the script, I liked their dialogue. BUT, it wasn't built at all.

We didn't have any mention of Cad Bane before he came along, no context. In fact, if you don't watch the animated series, you probably won't even know what the relationship between these two characters is. BECAUSE THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT DOESN'T BOTHER TELLING YOU the necessary context to understand the emotional charge of their encounter. The series doesn't explain to you the significance of Boba killing Cad Bane. Because in the series, it's just a cool duel between two bad ass characters. The series completely guts any emotional or narrative meaning from this scene.

First of all why is he baby blue

AND WHY

WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS

WHY

Why would they squander this narrative, and then KILL Cad Bane, ending any chance of their past relationship being properly developed and explained? TO FOCUS ON IDK, THE MAYER OR WHATEVER OTHER PLOT THEY CAME UP WITH THAT LEAD TO NOTHING

And honestly, his intro scene in the series was just a live action copy of his cameo in The Bad Batch, and honestly I found the TBB scene to be the more thrilling.

I'm putting the scene here bc yeah I have my issues with TBB as anyone else, but this scene was just so gooood ~ the soundtrack ~

But who am I to judge says the person after judging for hours

6. NO ACTION BY BOBA HAS ANY REPERCUSSION AT ALL

So, in addition to not having any palpable developments, no new relationships deepened or any pre-existing relationships explored, the thing about this series is that Boba isn't really good for much. AND THAT ANNOYS ME SO MUCH. I can't put into words how much I've loved Boba Fett since I was a kid (like 90% of Star Wars fans, I think), and how much I love Temuera Morrison.

And he deserved so much more.

Because at the end of the day, Boba has almost no impact on the flow of the narrative. No deals he makes pays off, no alliances are concretely made other than employment contracts (because in reality that's what happened), he hasn't saved the day any big time. He had his beautiful, glorious moment with the rancor in the last episode and the duel with Cad Bane, but those were the only two really relevant points in his narrative. For the rest, he was more of a passive bystander with a lot of money than a political or criminal or family player in any way.

And the scene at the end, when people bow to him in the street, didn't feel earned, because he didn't do anything to really earn it. We didn't see him earning the respect of the people. Indeed, this did not happen. He lowered the price of a water supplier at a one-off event while protecting a gang of hooligans. THAT WAS THE MOST HE HAS ACTIVELY DONE FOR THE CITY.

And God, he deserved so much more than that. Temuera Morrison deserved SO MUCH MORE.

But honestly, Temuera Morrison's underutilization is nothing new in these recent Star Wars media, and we all know that. I'm just sick of it.

For me, it all had a bitter taste of "they wanted to ride the wave of The Mandalorian's success but by putting another mini franchise in the middle of it all and using this mini franchise as an excuse to give Mando more stage and make more money."

Because at the end of the day and this series, honestly, who saved the day was Din and Grogu.

Look at the "major character" vibe pouring from him look at him the light shines in his silver helmet

And now, am I complaining about Mando showing up?

Am I complaining about Grogu's How to Train your Dragon moment with the rancor that was absolutely adorable?

Am I complaining that I've had the blessing of hearing once again Pedro Pascal's soft, melodious and infinitely gentle voice dripping like honey through my ears, and seeing his beautiful cloak float around him and his helmet shimmering in the warm sunlight and receiving his return like a 1918s wife seeing her loved, loved husband returning from the war?

No, I'm not complaining about that.

But honestly, nothing justifies you just shoving one character and one storyline inside another for absolutely NOTHING, and having that character solve all the problems and steal the show from your protagonist.

And like... TWO WHOLE EPISODES???? OF A 7-EPISODE SHOW??? Come on

Honestly, I found it disrespectful to everyone involved. They all deserved more than a season that could have been summed up in one sentence. Because honestly, if you showed me Boba Fett and Fennec from The Mandalorian season 2, and then you say, "Oh, they went back to Tatooine and took over the city and kicked out the Pykes" I wouldn't miss a thing of TBOBF's plot. Literally, NOTHING happened in this series that could be an actual gap if you don't watch it.

In fact, the only thing that is a gap and that you ac need to watch is Mando's plot. Because now, to understand season 3 of The Mandalorian, you will probably need to watch episodes 5 and 6 of TBOBF. But regarding Boba himself, I don't think that's going to be necessary. And honestly, ??????

It's very, very bizarre to me too that they simply solved The Mandalorian's biggest conflict - whether or not Din was going to part with Grogu - in a single episode of another series. They just said "nah, let's just fix this right now real quick". And even the plot of Din struggling with the Darksaber, and the duel with Vizla, does not lead to ANYTHING in the narrative of TBOBF, that is, it is probably something that will be solved in Mandalorian season 3, that is, they started a conflict and a whole narrative for nothing.

AND SINCE I'M ALREADY HERE might as well just do all the laundry

Black Krrsantan deserved more

How DARE they give me Black Krrsantan and not build the friendship with him and Boba I don't care if that's the Han Solo movie plot all over again I DON'T CARE I just love them your honor I wanted bonding moments I wanted backstories I wanted the comical realization that he and Han Solo now match and people commenting over this and Boba and BK getting triggered I wanted Boba realizing that he and Han Solo now match and getting triggered.

SO BASICALLY THE ABSTRACT OF THIS POST IS

EVERYONE DESERVED BETTER

And seriously now, I am genuinely very sad that this kind of thing is happening in Star Wars productions.

Star Wars has always managed to touch people's hearts and speak to people and be considered to this day as a Modern Myth precisely because it managed to represent very well the conflicts and metaphors and human lessons through tales and mythology intrinsic to our culture.

Star Wars works (also) because of its archetypal constructions and the beauty of basically having a fairy tale taking place in a spaceship with a 70's aesthetic. And since George Lucas knew how to use these archetypes and these tales and the whole Joseph Campbell's collective unconscious theory and all that in an EXCELLENT way, we ended up creating a very strong connection with this story, which has a very strong cultural impact.

And if you like these things, please go and check out this documentary by History Channel about the mythology of Star Wars and the social and cultural impacts of an archetypal narrative. It's very nice.

So seeing a Star Wars work be so pointless and so blatantly commercial, just... saddens me a lot.

But on the other hand I'm happy with the comments I'm seeing on the internet and here on tumblr, especially about Luke, and how people are reacting to Luke's depiction on TBOBF. Because I think it shows just how much Star Wars touched and still touches us sentimentally, how emotional we get when we see Luke staring at the binary suns while The Force Theme plays, and how this is not something that can be satisfied purely with fan service. About all that Star Wars means and it's message and how this should be taken seriously by the people who have the rights and the money to tell these stories nowadays. Because if they continue to do so the way they've been doing it...

BUT TILL THEN HERE WE ARE TRAPPED WITH A CGI LUKE WITH DEAD ROBOTIC EYES AND COMPUTER-MADE VOICE QUOTING LINES FROM THE ORIGINAL MOVIES ROBOTICALLY AND ACTING OUT OF CHARACTER ONCE AGAIN I HATE IT HERE

ANYWAYS THANKS FOR READING 💖

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sabugabr · 2 years

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i think the reason disney luke doesn't work, has never worked and will never work is that they're seeing him through the lens of a cultural phenomenon they feel they have to conquer instead of understanding he's literally the heart of the story and compromising the heart will always be in detriment of everything else. you make your heart bitter and resentful the entire thing falls apart. you stripe him of his kindness and optimism and even his humanity by replacing him with a computer generated mask and you're left with nothing except aesthetics. superficial glow. he's a party trick now. nothing else.

#YES THAT'S IT #they are literally replacing an arquetype for a custom symbol they think will sell #and that's so so sad??#luke skywalker #star wars #I'm sad

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sabugabr · 2 years

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"Encanto" and the myth of the Magical Latin America

Well hello again my gorgeous maritacas ✨ Today, we talk yet again about, yes, colonialism.

SOO, I hope I didn't miss the boat on this subject, cause I've been wanting to write about it since I first saw the very first divulgation of Disney's most recent animation movie, Encanto (2021).

✨Magical Realism ✨

And then I started to worry

And then I watched the movie

Then I got more worry

NO, ENCANTO IS NOT MAGICAL REALISM

And we really need to talk about it

So buckle up, because this will be long (but necessary, trust me)

SO, I went to read those interviews with the directors and producers of this movie and they said this:

And then, when asked about the differences between "European magic" and "Latin American magic", Charise Castro Smith said:

So, they defined Encanto as "Latin America magic", and defined it as Magical Realism, and that as "magic born out of emotion".

Because, in this movie, you can divide magic in about two ways:

First, when it's used narratively. That's the case of Bruno's magic, and Dolores', for example. And actually, kudos to Dolores for being one of the biggest narrative tools I've seen in a long time.

And second, when it's used as a metaphor. That would be the case of Luisa's magic, and Peppa's, and etc

See that? That's a metaphor. A very clear one.

But that's not what Magical Realism is.

And for you to properly understand my point here, before getting properly into Encanto I'll have to do some contextualization first, so...

1. MAGICAL REALISM

Let's name the donkeys (Brazilian saying, sorry).

Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as:

"what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe." (source)

And Frida can't let me lie

He said:

I've linked the full speech there above. It's translated to English, but I highly recommend you read the original in Spanish, if you can understand it. Is incomparable

2. THE MAGICAL TERRA INCOGNITA

Map by Pedro Reinel and Lopo Homem, named Terra Brasilis, 1519

And ultimately, fetishized and bestialized these native peoples.

And that's just like, 3 examples in the specific context of Brazilian colonization process. That's just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Regarding that map above, the professor André Reyes Novaes, in his article "Terra Brasilis as Terra Incognita", says (translated by me) that

This enchanted narrative they created actually masked a history of oppression, exploitation, rape and genocide.

"we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable".

3. MAGICAL REALISM AS A WAY OF PRESERVING AND EXPRESSING COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Look at this excerpt:

It's like a scheme:

And then García Marquez writes:

“Look at the mess we’ve got ourselves into,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said at that time, “just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.” (p. 114)

Now you go, and you Google "United Fruit Banana Massacre" or just "Banana Massacre". That's the Realism in Magical Realism.

Through a prosaic narrative, what García Marquez is doing is documenting historical events. Trough the narrative of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Marquez told the story of his own land.

So, I think you got the hang of the ideia by now.

But what does all of this have to do with Encanto?

4. "LATIN AMERICA MAGIC"

The magic is perceived as magic within the movie's stablished universe

The magic in Encanto is always individualized

And he finds her an old woman, of course, waiting.

In fact, the only scene in which a character in the book is truly astonished by something is when, for the first time, José Arcadio Buendía and his son Aureliano see ice.

"MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." [...]

“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”

“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”

“This is the greatest invention of our time.” (p. 8-15)

CAN YOU FEEL THE CHILLS WHILE READING THIS? CAUSE I CAN

In Encanto, however, the "magic" is definitively perceived as magic, and it's often pointed out by MANY characters throughout the story. So, to me, that kind of breaks the Magical Realism thing.

You even get the emotion magic going on and all

And that's super ok.

I love Disney magic. Everybody does.

So why call it differently just because it's set on Latin America?

AS FOR NUMBER 2

This might seem more of a personal opinion, and maybe it is, but this was actually one of the things that bothered me the most in this whole "Encanto is so Magical Realism" thing.

Is to ignore all the power we got by taking away from the colonizers the right to see us as "enchanted" or "magical".

And I think that when you strip the symbols created by García Marquez from their original contexts, so carefully stitched together by him, you vastly impoverish his work.

For me the best example of this is the yellow butterfly.

And you can see that there is a direct relationship between the yellow butterflies in Encanto and the yellow butterflies in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There's a line, when they're meeting at the cinema, that says:

"Meme felt the weight of his hand on her knee, and she knew that they were both arriving at the other side of abandonment at that instant". (p. 142)

And now you tell me,

why would anyone consider using this symbology in a Disney movie?

And even more, to use as a symbology of reconciliation and protection and family love? And...???

Disney my beloved??????

SO IN CONCLUSION

Curious, isn't it?

So they just made Latin America magical for the gringo eyes again.

Cheers.

And, as always, thank you so, so much for reading!!! ❤

#encanto #encanto 2021 #disney encanto #disney #disney animated movies #meta #movie essay #magical realism #colombia #gabriel garcía márquez #cien años de soledad #latin america #history

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sabugabr · 2 years

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Netflix's"The Witcher" and how costuming matters (2/2)

OR: How to kill a metaphor (and make a pointless work)

SO! Continuing from Part 1...

I was complaining about how the costumes on the Netflix show The Witcher (2019) were poorly executed, and the impacts this has on our understanding of worldbuilding and our narrative tracking on political, social and cultural relations within that established world. Later here, I'll also adress how this not only reflects a trivialization but also an erasure of the racial, social and political connotations that are so strong in Sapkowski's books.

aka: it was all confunsing as hell, and the clothes all looking the same didn't help.

Such unique designs!!!!

"But sabuga" you might say "you're talking about minor and background caracthers, does it really matter that much?" and the answer would be: yes, it really does matter that much. But for the sake of it and for the continuity of my argument back there, let's narrow it down: let's talk about Yennefer

* DISCLAIMER * : First, as I mentioned before, in this post I'll only cover season one, and second, I'd like to state that I recognize the importance of the video game in characterizing a lot of these characters, and that the Netflix series is an adaptation. However, I firmly believe that any type of media should suffice on its own, so here I will consider the Netflix series first as it's own work, taking only geographic and political contextualizations from the book, and not comparing the fidelity of the characters' characterization in the sense book X tv show. The book comparison will come only at the end for a political note, not a design one. And, as always, please forgive any broken English!!! ( * cries in Brazilian * )

2.1 HOW TO WASTE A STATEMENT DRESS — AND MAYBE CROSS THE LINE ON SEXISM WHILE DOING IT

Let's play a second little game

To exemplify what I'm going on and on about how to use a costume narratively, let's take the ball scene in talked about in Part 1, where I complained about the guys in white (remember the guys in white?). So, to be slightly fair, there is actually some relation to color in that scene, because at some point in the ball we discover that one of the dudes in white is actually the King of Aedirn, an extremely wealthy kingdom that is also the home country of Yennefer.

Now, if you remember correctly (I didn't), the conflict in this scene is that this king would very much like to have a sorceress counselor from his own country, and Yennefer very much wanted to be that king's counselor, but because she is half-elf, the mage council (??? don't know if that's the right name but whatever) deceived her and appointed another sorceress to be the counselor to that king. Right?

So, Yennefer is PISSED, and in the first climax of her long (and ac really good) character arc, she decides to make the pact to rip out the uterus and gain various powers and thus become a big hottie. She then APPEARS AT THE BALL AS A BIG HOTTIE and snatches the King, dancing with him all night long, etc etc. So, this dress is her statement dress, right? THE BIG DRESS FOR THE BIG MOMENT FOR THE BIG HOTTIE

This is the dress:

The king is the white dude with the crown, so that you know

Now, you can have any opinion about this dress. I'm not particularly fond of it (and I'll go into this in more detail later), but whether it's good or not is my point at the moment. Let's talk narrative.

SO NOW IMAGINE that instead of having these identical costumes that give you NO notion of identity and make you either have to google which kingdom is which, or just give up and accept whatever the plot gives you (which I originally did), this series had well-demarcated costumes for each place, either by shape, or by color, or by different cultural inspiration (and not so Eurocentric as they were here). So that when the first part of Yennefer's life appears in Aedirn, we'd be able to get some sense of that country's fashion. Maybe reinforce that in other scenes, something like that.

With that well established, imagine that the sorceress clothes WERE an unit. Not only would this give the other sorceress more individual personality without having to give them much screentime (by showing things like, how they would personally enhance or maintain the "uniform"), but it would also make it so much easier for us to identify them. Imagine how these uniforms could be used to show the sorceress' allegiance to the mages' agenda, things like that. SO OK WE HYPOTHETICALLY HAVE A SORCERESS FASHION AND AN AEDIRNIAN FASHION HERE. BACK TO THE BALL

In the series, with the statement dress, it's kinda of implied that the reason the King took a liking on Yennefer had much more to do with the fact that she looked hot, and less with her being Aerdinian (since he kinda ditched the other sorceress even before Yennefer opened her mouth). Now in this hypothetical scenario, imagine that instead of appearing in a standart black hot dress, she suddenly appeared in an AERDINIAN black hot dress. Unlike all other sorceress, that'd be wearing Aretuza looks/colors.

Here, it wouldn't be explicit that the King necessarily thought she was hot and that's why he was impressed, even before he knew who she was. Now, in addition to making Yennefer not just appear sexualized, a political statement would be added to the dress itself. Not only would it show her nationality, but her pride in her nationalilty, and the possible interest in putting Aedirn's agenda above, perhaps, Aretuza's itself.

A good example of this concept being applied is in the recent Hulu series The Great (2020) where, contrary to the Westernized French-inspired fashion that was in effect at the Russian court, the major caracther Catherine (played by the MARVELOUS Elle Fanning and based on the historical figure Catherine the Great, Russia's longest ruling female monarch) appears at her coronation wearing a gown inspired by the traditional sarafan:

As Fania Soo Hoo states better than I do,

".. This moment teaches a ripped-from-the-history-books lesson: Fashion is a powerful tool to help inspire change. Born in Prussia as German royalty, the real Catherine the Great established the Russian imperial style of dress to distinguish from the French and Western European fashions previously favored by the court. Wielding fashion as a soft power, the Empress illustrated her national pride and connected with the Russian people by bringing traditional Russian clothing, like the rural folk pinafore — sarafan — back in style.

In "The Great," Catherine uses her coronation gown to directly reach her new subjects, change her German "mail-order bride" narrative (per husband Peter, played by Nicholas Hoult) and send a message of modernity and change." (source)

Catherine, here, manages not only to message all that, but also throw a big slap in the court's face. She's saying "I'm more Russian than any of you", without having to say a single word. Her clothes say it for her. And they do so while also being STUNNING.

Fashion is a soft power, and a very underrated one in most of historical/fantasy series and movies I've seen. Women don't have to be dressed just to look good, they can also be dressed to state things they maybe couldn't say out loud.

Let's got back to Yennefer in the hypotetical Aerdinian dress. Perhaps, in this context, the political innuendo is ALSO why the King is interested in her, and not only due to her looks. It would have been a power move. There could be a whole political layer involved in the scene, without a word being mentioned directly about it. The whole situation could be recognized on only with intended smiles between Yennefer and the King, and we would still understand it.

And the way the series did it was just SO FRUSTRATING to me in this aspect, because they even made the King and aparently his court wear white on purpose. So you can really think that white is somehow related to Aedirn (even tho the kingdom's actual colors were yellow, red and black, but anyway), and then they made Fringilla (the previously assigned sorceress) wear white.

So now they purposely made Fringilla respect the (here) established colors of Aedirn, which would be the great political move I was talking about, and this was completely disregarded by the King in favor of this newcommer hot lady FOR NO REASON AT ALL besides, apparently, her being hot. And only that.

And of course that, done correctly, there is no problem with a woman weaponizing her sexuality, or whatever this scene was intended to do. Yennefer's arc is very much related to her personal relationship to her own appearance, and it would be totally ok for her to appear "beautiful", and be socially perceived by others as "beautiful", purely for the sake of it. I know the importance that feeling pretty, and seen and admired for her looks has in the early stages of Yennefer's story.

But in my opinion, this scene can be understood not as an empowerment of Yennefer's appearance, but as her being reduced to it. Everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph would be kept with her wearing a beautiful AND political dress. Again, that's just my opinion, but the show's approach to me just felt reductive, and had some "Ugly Duckling Transformation TM" vibes that just didn't work for me.

PLUS, it would also show Yennefer's break with the academy more clearly, and more easily to get. Because, while watching, I admit that it took me a long time to understand what was going on in that scene, and why everyone was so impacted then I realized that it was just because "she looks hot now" and I got a little pissed BUT ANYWAY and would also make the future episodes SO MUCH CLEARER. Because you see, after the ball, Yennefer went to work for the King of Aedirn, but in the next scene we see Yennefer, she's working for ANOTHER KINGDOM. Yennefer is already in ANOTHER realm. The problem is, when I watched it, I just didn't understand this information.

And ok, I understand that in this specific context of this episode, it wasn't necessary for you to understand which kingdom Yennefer was in. It just wasn't the focus of the episode, and not knowing what was going on politically didn't directly undermine your understanding of the series as a whole, as the focus of these scenes is on Yennefer's development. But??? Would it hurt?? To make a more intuitive differentiation between the kingdoms, so that we didn't just depend on our memory for names or Google to situate us in the events?? WOULD IT HURT????

2.2 YOU REALLY CAN'T BLAME THE BUDGET HERE

Now I'm going to go into a thread that is purely my personal opinion, but since I'm here I might as well get this out of my system. Several of the clothes look cheap.

And before I get into that, I'd like to make very clear that expensive costuming is NOT the same as good costuming, and vice versa. You can do wonders with a very low budget, and at the same time you can produce atrocities while swimming in money (Brazilian saying). So I'm not saying the problem is the actual money involved, but I do believe you have a huge ploblem when a caracther who's supposed to dress good just... doesn't.

Look at these 3 outfits:

Told you I'd go back at the ball dress

As for the shape and cut of the dresses themselves, you can see a coherence between them. They follow the same stylistic line, elements like the structure of the shoulder pieces are very similar, and the necklines are too. Does that mean they are good dresses? Not necessarily.

You get to see some historically inspired crumbs (you can see the French cut neckline, that shoulder piece has some Victorian vibes to me, and you sure get SEVERAL "The Tudor"'s-female-costuming vibes), but it feels more like it took inspiration from contemporary fashion that is inspired by historical fashion, than historical fashion itself (this is all within Tim Aslam's concept, of course), and I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of inspirations here were modern, BUT without the sophistication of contemporary high fashion (and historical ones, for that matter).

The design is very plain, the details all seem kinda rough, and there were some contrasting shapes and angles that I really disliked. You have some strong and hard lines, but to me they seem too poorly-finished to convey the refinement I'd expect from a dress for any of the situations in which ther are worn, and they just fail to go along with Anya's naturally elegant face and bearing.

So now look at this outfits:

Here we have some Elie Saab designs, some Valentinos, Zuhair Murad, Iris Van Herpen, Balmain, a Dior over here in the bottom, I could go on and on all day. If you are interested, there's this whole blog solemnly dedicated to reunite haute couture inspirations based on The Witcher's (and others) universe, and I highly recommend you check it out! It's super fun!

So, you can see some correlations in some shapes, concepts and stuff that were also used in Yennefer's costumes, but here everything just look so passionate and unique and elaborated and sophisticated. Of course that these are VERY different scenarios with different purposes and VERY DIFFERENT BUDGETS, but just look at how you can really feel how much the people who did those gowns just loved them, how every sew was so well thought and planned and fitted to create a work of art, and you know, this is high fashion. You can't compare your work to high fashion and not expect me to actually compare them.

Now you compare them to Yennefer's. The one in the last image of her is the most bothering to me, with that fragile-looking shoulder structure, plastered in glitter. I like the idea of it, but I can't even begin to describe how much I hate this glitter. As I said before, a good costume doesn't necessarily have to be an expensive costume, and I usually love medias that play with "trashy" historical styles (don't even get me started on A Knight's Tale and Ella Enchanted — that's a controversial opinion, but you gotta love that wooden escalators), but here Yennefer's clothes don't look trashy on purpose, nor do they look "fun" to me. This glitter dress, with that paper mask, just gives me the impression that I would get a very similar result using the materials I have now in my office and PVA. And even tho I work with design, I don't mean that in a good way.

Once again, this is my personal opinion, but from the serie's text I really got the impression that Yennefer was meant to be this "dress to impress" type of caracther, and I didn't get this from some of her costuming at all. In the same way that the ball dress bothers me, in these other outfits what I get is that their only purpose is to make her look "hot", and that's all. Which, again, okay, but it's so disappointing to me given the potential and narrative depth of this character, and Anya Chalotra's infinitely captivating acting. And even so, I think the only reason they look hot is because Anya is gorgeous and the dresses show some skin. But that gets into this very deep pool of the ways our Western society sexualize women, and if I get into that this would be endless.

So anyway, I particularly find them unflattering and overall boring choices, and on top of that, I can't really say what story these clothes are telling.

Like, I can't say how those dresses relate to these ones:

Yeah, I know I repeated the black and white lace dress, but I ac like this last one and Anya's cute smile wearing it look at her HER LITTLE FOOT I CAN'T -

Because, yes, they are all black, but you can clearly see two diffent lines going on here, the first (A) more "seductive" with the very strong, low French cut neckline, the often exposed chest and tighter silhouette, and the second (B) with the long paned sleeves, the big V neckline and the high collars, broadening her chest. Even the rope one, though more "eccentric", follows this overalll vibe (and even tho I'm not that inclined to the rope dress, at least I can respect it — the top part of it, as least. Not really a fan of her hair and make-up also, actually, but anyway). So we have these two "styles" going on, but really, I can't really tell which is her actual personal style.

I'm inclined to guess B, but I can't really be sure, as there is no linearity between the two. Chronologically, she doesn't start wearing A and ends up wearing B, she kinda jumps from one to the other? And you could argue that she uses A when she wants to shape others' perception of herself, weaponizing her sexuality, and B would be her true style. This is an interpretation. But you could also say that all the times she uses B are somehow "work-related", whereas A is times when she's on her own, so it could be argued that her personal style would be A and Honestly, you can freely conjecture, but it won't go beyond that: conjecture and personal interpretations. Because, besides, those A and B clothes don't tell you anything. And how am I going to know who she is, if I can't even tell what is her style? She likes the color black, is that really all you can get? And if I can't visually see her caratcher arc through her clothes, if I can't seem to put a progression or narrative linearity into these outfits, and they're not particularly showstopping... why are they there?

And, again, that's not an isolated event, it was EVERYWHERE

JUST LOOK AT THESE:

Just going really fast about these two examples because I inteded to make this just about Yennefer to not be so long but these make me so mad,

Our boy Jaskier. Yes, the clothes are colorful, but...? First, they seem to have been bought in a costume shop with the vague theme of "Renaissance". And I'm not talking about an expensive shop. And second, it gives me the impression that he bought clothes that weren't exactly the right size for him, so they all look badly-fitted? Either too big in the wrong places, or too tight in the armpits. Later, I found out that apparently Jaskier would be 18 in season one, so maybe this is to make him look younger? But honestly speaking, I think this was just made to make him look more comical (he is the queercoded one after all hahaha such funl), and smaller, and less virile, and therefore make Geralt look even manlier in comparison. Which, honestly, is a waste of Joey Batey's hot ass, and an affront to the character that by book should be the best dressed one there. He should've been covered gold in jewelry he got from his numerous rich lovers, wearing nothing less than Gucci.

And you can't change my mind.

AND THE NILFGAARDIAN ARMOR. GOD. I know everyone disliked it, but still, GOD. I research the, you know, concept, and found an interview with showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich saying that

"The Nilfgaardian army is one of conscription. As they march northward, the army pillages towns and forces villagers into military servitude. They are not an elite fighting force -- yet... There are powerful leaders in the forefront, yes, but the army itself is more rag-tag, borne of necessity, without glamour or means." (source)

?????. I'm sorry but it doesn't look like they were pillaging from battle to battle and making their armor from what they'd found. It doesn't look "rag-tag". I'm gonna be REALLY mean here, and please forgive me, but it just looks like they bought this huge 3D printer and made all their armor using it. The 3D printer. I can't even -

2.3 BUT LET'S TALK BUDGET ANYWAY

It was not pretty. And, as I said before, it wasn't due to lack of money. The costumes probably weren't actually cheap. For you to have a basis for comparison, the first season of The Witcher had a budget of approximately $80 million dollars, with an average of $15 million per episode. The first season of Game of Thrones cost $60 million, and until its last season it maintained an average of $8 million per episode. 20 million difference is a lot of money. The Witcher was MUCH more expensive than a production like Game of Thrones, and comparing the first season of both series, I think the difference in the technical quality of the productions is undeniable. With a lot less, GoT delivered a lot more. (on it's first seasons, but I won't dwelve into that)

Remember my little paragraph over GoT's costumes in Part 1? I'll put the images here again so that you can remember them:

I said it before and I'll say this again, these are showstopping. In my opinion, Michele Clapton really excelled in her work in GoT, (and once again I recommend you check out this blog on each character's costumes in greater detail, it's really great) and she did it with considerably less money. And even tho the show went spiraling downhill, the quality of this worldbuilding and attention to detail and palpable love for each little piece and thread prevailed. I fell in love with all those costumes. They helped shape and bring to live these characters I already loved so much, and they genuinely helped me want to revisit them.

Heck, I watched Mirror Mirror (2012) about 5 times for the costumes alone, and I don't even like that movie. BUT LOOK AT THESE COSTUMES:

With (curiously) a similar budget to Tim Aslam in The Witcher, Eiko Ishioka designed and created genuinely breathtaking costumes, and I really recommend you check this great article covering them. They are worth it. And I find it nice how here you can clearly see the same "historical inspired but with modern high fashion touches to create unique, vibrant designs" concept, only that here, it works. But anyway.

The thing is that even if you are not some costume obsessed person, good costuming still has an impact. It shapes our views. It's one of the main points in how much we'll dwell into that universe and buy that fiction, because it has the power to make it feel real. It matters. As @trinuviel (the writer of those articles on GoT costumes I mentioned earlier) states (way better than my poor native-portuguese ass could ever articulate), "costume design is not just about making pretty clothes - rather it is about supporting and articulating the characterization in relation to the narrative" (source). Which is the point I'm going over and over again here, that ties to Semiotics, my area of study. Because

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

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

Dress codes identify individuals within a culture." (source)

And it just saddens me that a world as The Witcher's just didn't receive this level of care in their cultural visuality, because while I was reading the books I felt in love with that universe, with how rich and beautiful and diverse it was.

But as I mentioned before, I don't think any of this is directly the costume designer's fault. Far, far from it. I got to see an interview where Tim Aslam says that:

"We were going into a fast production process, so it was very important that we had everything we needed. It would be a waste of time to place orders otherwise and wait for them to arrive. In fact, this can be a little intimidating because you have to rely on your instincts. In the future, you may need to buy according to what you expect to use for months later. Sometimes, even for a character that has not yet been written, you will need to have the materials at hand." (source)

I mean, I know that unfortunately this is not unusual, but look at this conditions. It's pretty much a fast-fashion costume design, and this shows so, SO many layers of issues that, to my opinion, link directly at this recent "tendency" to mass-produce media. It feels like they just wanted to make whatever they could, as fast as possible, to wrap it all up and release and fuck the details. They can just cancel it if it goes wrong, so who cares right? THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH

Because, honestly, if anyone has the money to make a big, decent production of any series, it's Netflix. They have the money, they have the resources, they have whatever they want to have. It's Netflix, it's not like the production was subjected to those conditions because there was no choice. THERE WAS A LOT OF CHOICE. They just didn't make them, and apparently left the poor costume designer and who knows who else to juggle what they were able to do.

2.4 THE BIGGER ISSUE

And even though maybe I should, I won't even get too deep to the point of how disappointing it is to me that they took a universe created by a Polish writer, who draws so heavily on Eastern European and Nordic countries, and that offers so many possibilities of correlations on political, social and racial issues in the history of Poland and those countries (and you can get a sense of that by reading this article here), and then ignored all this to focus on a design that privileges Italian and French fashions; I can't even articulate on a single post how badly this sinks to me. If you can't, or don't wan't to, read the full article I linked there, just take this excerpt for contextualization on my point here:

[The humans] "waged war against elves and other nonhumans, and eventually established the Northern Kingdoms. The humans built cities over elven ruins. The Nilfgaardian Empire rose to the south. By the time The Witcher’s story starts, many nonhumans in the Northern Kingdoms have assimilated into human society, although they live in ghettos and are treated as an underclass. Some nonhumans live in the wilds to avoid human control. Elves, dwarves, and halflings rebelling against the humans form the Scoia’tael guerrilla units, which commit violent acts of terrorism.

The Witcher’s setting (and the complicated conflict tearing it apart) recalls the fundamental history of Central and Eastern Europe. The part of Europe stretching from Germany’s eastern border to inner Russia was subject to migration and invasion from the West, the Middle East, and Asia, though the history of the area is incomplete and unclear. By the end of the 10th century, the area had hosted Slavs, Huns, the Turkic-speaking (but also multiethnic and multifaith) Khazar khaganate, Germanic Franks, Magyars, the Kievan Rus, and others.

Sapkowski grew up in a country aware of its history, and in turn, the story of The Witcher shares a deep connection with the past. The disputes between nonhumans and humans echo real-world disputes over territory and citizenship that draw dividing lines according to race, nationality, or ethnicity. This has happened in Poland often" (source)

I know that fantasy media overall tends to give the impression that Middle and Modern Ages only happened in countries like Italy, and England, and France, and that's an issue that our white-praising, westernized society tries to push down on us. But the truth is that the world was so much wider than the Western Europe. There was so many other things happening even in Europe itself, including the countries and events that inspired The Witcher. So why do they all look western in the series? Really, where are the Polish inspired outfits? The Slavics? The Otoman? (lighting up the air a little bit, if you like you can check out this very amusing reddit argument over the possible real-life counterparts of The Witcher's countries)

And I know this doesn't seem like much of a big deal, but as I stated in my very angry rant about the "white-minority" in fictional medias, (modesty aside, it's a very good and very angry little article, you should definetly read it) everything produced by people will intrinsically contain and reflect cultural aspects (intended or not), and that might and will influence not only the way this thing is effectively produced but mainly how this thing will be perceived by others (and if those “others” belong or not to the culture in which this thing was produced will also have a huge impact). So basically, it’s impossible to consume something without attributing cultural meanings to it, or without making cultural associations. That’s just the way we are programmed to perceive the world.

And, in building fictional worlds, this metaphorical co-relation can be used as a tool to improve our connection to certain narratives, especially fantastic ones. Because even if a story takes place in a fantastic/sci fi universe, with all fictional species and people and worlds and cultures, they never come from nowhere, and almost always they have some or a lot of basing in real people and cultures. And when done properly, this can help making these stories resonate in a very beautifull, meaningfull way. I actually believe this intrisic cultural associations are the things that make these stories work at all.

Quoting that article once again,

"Only Sapkowski can say exactly what was going through his mind when he wrote his stories [...] but within the fantasy tales, there are parallels to the complicated history of ethnic strife and resistance to oppression in Central and Eastern Europe. Fighting monsters is frightening, but Geralt’s survival during a brutal moment, one that mirrors real-world international conflict, speaks greater truths." (x)

So, this is a personal take, but honestly, I saw nothing of that social and racial context, that ethnic strife, in the Netflix's show. I saw nothing of real people and real opression and stuggle, and grey morality. I saw nothing of the immigration issues, the holocaust issues, the persecution of minorities that actual minorities could actually relate to. Opressed groups are not exactly white europeans with elven, pointy ears. And if you can't relate to the metaphor, why is it there?

Honeslty, it was to the extent that I really couldn't tell that there was a metaphor at all. And as the brilliant, wonderful, showstopping american writer Ursula K. Le Guin says,

"All fiction is metaphor. [...] If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words" (source, p. 5)

So if they ripped off the metaphor, why did they write it? What is the point of this series?

(Answer: Making easy money, that's the point of the series)

BUT ANYWAY

I purposely didn't touch characters like Geralt and Ciri, because that would go on too long, and even if I got too deep into Jaskier this would definitely have a part 3 at the very least, so forgive me if this felt like a direct attack on Yennefer, that was not my intention at all! I just used her as an example, and I didn't mean to indicate in any way that her characterization is the only problem, or a bigger problem than any other character in this series (Ciri's outfit is pretty decent though, I wouldn't have much to say from Ciri, to be quite honest. Maybe it's a little boring, that's all, but it works just fine). Far from it. I've actually wrote a whole college paper in a historical fashion design class just on Jaskier (I even got to the poin to redesign some costumes), so there's that. But I hope this was enough for you to get where I am coming from in my critic here!

And even tho I just spend all this time DRAGGING this series, I actually like The Witcher (90% due to liking the cast and the original source, but anyways...), I still find it watcheable and fun and I will definitively go back for season 2 and 3 and who knows how many more (I saw some of the new costumes for season 2 now that they changed the costume designer and I like them a lot more already, so that makes me substantially happier). But it is very, very flawed, and it pains me a lot, because, as I said, it deserved better.

This ended up gettin (as always) very long, and I deeply apologize! But I hope you managed to easily follow the track (I tend to deviate a lot from the subject, pardon me) and enjoyed this little rant!

And as always, feel free to desagree with me at any point!

Thank you so so much for reading!!!

#the witcher #costume design #costuming #costume analysis #cinematography #color theory #netflix #the witcher netflix #character analysis #the witcher season 1 #yennefer #jaskier #geralt of rivia #I guess i can tag got as well #game of thrones #the great #meta #rant #the witcher books

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