#I do not know if that is necessary for such a simplistic depiction? but I would always rather play it safe

[juniepops]

#is this anything #morrissey #the smiths #heaven knows i'm miserable now #emeto tw #I do not know if that is necessary for such a simplistic depiction? but I would always rather play it safe

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

Alright, I read your recent post and need to know - what is your interpretation of Maglor’s relationship with the twins?

askjdhslkjag my biggest self-inflicted problem in this fandom is that my take on maglor, elrond, and elros' relationship is so intensely detailed and specific i am forever tormented by none of the fic i read ever quite getting it right (from my perspective; i’ve read plenty of fic that presents a good interpretation on their own terms, it’s just never mine.) it’s simultaneously way darker than the fluffy kidnap dads stuff and nowhere near as black-and-white awful as the anti-fëanorian crowd likes to paint it, it’s messy and complicated and surrounded by darkness, and yet there’s also a sincere connection within it which mostly serves to make all those complications worse. angry teenage elrond is angry for a great many reasons, and the circumstances around him being raised by kinslayers account for at least half of them. there’s lots of complexity here, and i don’t see it in fic nearly as often as i’d like

(warning: the post... feathers? i already have an internet friend called faeiri this could be awkward - anyway, the post she’s talking about includes the line ‘everyone is wrong about kidnap dads except me.’ this post follows on from that in being as much a commentary about why various popular interpretations of both how the kidnapdoption went and the way people subsequently characterise the twins just don’t work for me as it is a setting out of my own ideas. i’m not really interested in getting into discourse here, i’m just trying to get my thoughts down. i’ve read fic with these interpretations before that i’ve liked, even, don’t take this as a Condemnation, aight? also this turned out long as hell, so i’m putting it under a cut)

i can never buy entirely fluffy depictions of kidnap dads

which isn’t to say i don’t read them! sometimes all i want is something sweet, for these kids to get to be happy for once. it’s not like i think their time with the fëanorians was completely devoid of laughter

it’s just. the pet names, the special days out, the home-cooked meals, it can get so treacly it stops feeling like the characters they are in the situation they’re in and turns into Generic Found Family #272

it soaks out all the complexity - which is the thing i am here for - and acts like oh, these kids were never in any danger, they were perfectly happy being abducted by the people who murdered everyone they knew, there’s nothing possibly questionable about this relationship at all

and... yeah. that’s not the characters i know. that’s not the context i know they belong to

i just can’t forget the circumstances that led them to meet

rivers of blood, the air filled with screams, a town ablaze, a woman choosing to die. every interaction the three of them have is going to proceed from that nightmare

(sidenote: i tend to hold it was maglor that raised the twins, with maedhros looming ominously in the background not really getting involved. it’s mostly personal preference, i’ve been in and out of the fandom since before this kidnap dads thing blew up and when i joined that was a perfectly standard reading)

(also the cave thing was a dumb idea, old man, if only because it implies beleriand had streams safe enough for children to play in at that point. the way it separates the twins from the third kinslaying is also something i don’t particularly vibe with)

probably my least favourite angle i’ve seen on the situation (edged out only by ‘maglor was actively abusive towards the twins’ which no no no no no no no no NO) is the idea that maglor (and/or maedhros, append as necessary) took the twins specifically to raise them

like, i get where it’s coming from, but it makes maglor come off as really creepy

(i have read fics where it is indeed played off as really creepy, but that’s not a maglor i have any interest in reading about)

(’mags 100% bad’ is just as facile a take to me as ‘mags 100% good’)

even if you’re saying maglor took them in because they had no one left to take care of them - i highly doubt they were the only children the fëanorians orphaned at sirion. idk, it always makes maglor seem much less sympathetic than i think it’s meant to

i prefer to think of it as more... organic? something that evolved, not something that was preordained. them growing closer gradually, the twins finding an adult who might maybe be on their side, maglor becoming invested in them almost by accident

and then the twins are so comfortable with the second scariest monster in amon ereb they frequently sass him off and maglor’s gotten so used to not hurting them he’s not even thinking about it any more. no one’s quite sure how it happened, but they’ve made a Connection

‘wait aren’t they a murderous warlord of questionable mental stability and a pair of terrified small children who’ve lost everyone they ever knew? isn’t that kinda fucked up?’ yup! that’s the point! complexity!

another idea i don’t like is the idea that maglor was an objectively better parent to the twins than eärendil or elwing

other people have talked about this already, i won’t rehash the whole thing. i will say that while i don’t think elwing was a perfect parent - someone so young, in such a horrible situation, i wouldn’t blame her for screwing up - i do think she (and eärendil) did the best by them they possibly could

this is one of the few things they have in common with maglor

something i come across now and again is the idea that sure, elwing and eärendil weren’t abusive or horrible or anything, but they were a couple of basically-teenagers with so many other responsibilities, there was only so much they could do. maglor, on the other hand, is an experienced adult who could take much better care of the twins

and...

first off, it’s not like mags doesn’t have a job. he’s a warlord, he has a fortress to help run, military shit to handle, lots of other stuff that needs to get done to stop everyone from starving or getting eaten by orcs. i feel like sirion had enough of a government there was plenty of opportunity for elwing to take days off and play with her kids, but in the fëanorian camp nobody really has the time to chase after a couple of toddlers, least of all one of the last points on the command network. they just don’t have the people any more

(seriously, the twins getting a formal education with tutors and classes and shit is a weirdly specific pet peeve of mine. this is a band of renegades, not a royal household; if there’s anyone left with those kinds of skills they almost certainly have more important things to do)

more than that, though - well, a quick glance through my late stage fëanorians tag should tell you a lot about what i think maglor’s mental state is like at this point. he is so accustomed to violence death means nothing to him, he’s lost most of his capacity for genuinely positive emotion to an endless century of defeat and despair, he hates everything in the universe, especially himself, he’s only able to keep functioning through a truly astounding amount of denial, and he covers it all up with a layer of snark and feigned apathy, which he defends aggressively because he’s subconsciously realised that if it breaks he’ll have absolutely nothing left

(maedhros, for the record, is... i’d say more stable, but at a lower point. maglor may interact with the world mostly through cold stares and mocking laughter, but at least his mind is firmly rooted in the present)

(on the other hand, at least maedhros lets himself be aware of what they are and where their road will lead)

which... this doesn’t mean maglor doesn’t try to be kind to the twins, or rein in his worst impulses around them

there’s just so little of him left but the weapon

he stalks through the halls like a portent of death and gets into hours-long screaming matches with maedhros and has definitely killed people in front of the twins

not even as, like, a deliberate attempt to scare them, but because when you solve most of your problems by stabbing them it’s pretty much a given that people who spend a lot of time around you are going to see you do it at least once

and sometimes, he curls up in an empty hallway, and weeps

... suffice it to say i don’t think elwing’s the more preoccupied, or the less mentally ill, parent here

just. in general, the fëanorians aren’t cackling boogeymen, but they’re not particularly nice either

no one has the energy left for that. not these isolated and weary soldiers at the end of a long losing war and the beginning of the end of the world. they don’t really bother to guard the kids against them escaping. where else are they going to go?

the sheer despair that must have been in the fëanorian camp after sirion, the knowledge that the cause cannot be fulfilled, that they are utterly forsaken, that they’re really just waiting to die -

it can’t have been a happy place to grow up in, under the shadow of loss and grief and deeds unrepentable, and the slow march of inevitable defeat

they would have had a better childhood if they stayed in sirion, raised by people who knew how to hope

but that isn’t the childhood they had. and despite everything i’ve said, i don’t think that childhood was an entirely awful one

yeah, see, this is where the other side of my self-inflicted fandom catch-22 comes in. just as much of the pro-kidnap dads stuff comes off as overly saccharine and simplified to me, i find much of the anti-kidnap dads stuff equally simplistic in the opposite direction

the idea that maglor and the fëanorians never meant anything to elros and elrond, that they had no effect on the people they became at all, that it was just a horrible thing that happened when they were children, easily thrown in the rear-view mirror...

that’s even more impossible to me than the idea that life with the fëanorians was 100% fluffy and nice

like, i’ve seen the take that elros and elrond hated the fëanorians from start to finish. they were perfect little sindarin princes, loyal to their people and the memory of doriath, spurning every scrap of kindness offered to them and knowing just what to say to twist the knife into the kinslayers’ wounds

... dude. they were six. hell, given their peredhelness, mentally they could easily have been younger

what six year old has a firm grasp of their ethnic identity? what six year old is fully aware of their place in history? what six year old would understand the politics that led to their situation?

don’t get me wrong, i can see hatred in there. but something else that doesn’t get acknowledged alongside it often enough is the fear

some of the stuff i’ve read feels like it gives the kids too much power in the situation. they’re perfectly happy to talk back to and belittle the people who burned down their hometown and killed everyone they ever knew, like miniature adults who don’t feel threatened at all

and, like, six. i can see them going for insults as a defensive measure, but it is defensive. it’s covering up fear, not coming from secure disdain

(and a lot of those insults sound, again, like things an adult who’s already familiar with the fëanorians would say, not a scared child who’s lost almost everything. why would a six year old raised by sindar and gondolindrim know what the noldolantë is, let alone what it means to maglor?)

(... i’m just ranting about this one fic that’s been ruffling my feathers for five years straight now, aren’t i)

i mean, i write elrond as the world’s angriest teenager, who snipes at maglor pretty much constantly, but the thing about angry teenage elrond is that he’s angry teenage elrond

he’s spent long enough with the fëanorians he has a pretty secure position within the camp, and he knows that maglor won’t hurt him from a decade and change of maglor not, in fact, hurting him

but as a small and terrified child abducted by the monsters his mother had nightmares about? he fluctuated wildly between ‘randomly guessing at things to say that wouldn’t get him killed’ ‘screaming at maglor to go away in words rarely more complicated than that’ 'desperately trying not to do or say anything in the hopes of not being noticed’ and ‘hiding’

(and i don’t think the twins were never in any danger from the fëanorians, either. quite besides the point that before they started orbiting maglor nobody was really sure what to do with them... well, they wouldn’t be the first children of thingol’s line the minions took revenge on)

(fortunately for them, maglor did, in fact, take them under his wing. by this point even their own followers are shit scared of the last two sons of fëanor, nobody’s going to mess with their stuff and risk getting mauled. tactically, it was a pretty good decision for a couple of toddlers)

more to the point, i feel like a child that young, in a situation that horrible, wouldn’t reject any kindness they were offered, any soothing touch in a universe of terror

in a world full of big scary monsters, the best way to survive is to get the biggest scariest monster possible to protect you. that’s how elros rationalises it when they’re, like, eight, mentally, but at the time they were just latching on to the only person around them who seemed to care about them

that’s how it started, on their end. two very young very scared children lost in a neverending nightmare clinging tightly to the lone outstretched pair of hands

as for maglor...

i’ve called mags evil before, but i see that as more of a... technical term? he is evil because he did the murder, he remains evil because he won’t stop doing the murder. hot take: murder bad

but that doesn’t make him, like, a moustache-twirling saturday morning cartoon villain. he is deeply unhappy with the position he’s in and the person he’s become, and he’s always trying not to take that final step over the edge

it’s not that i can’t see a maglor who is abusive or manipulative or who sees the twins more as objects than people. it’s just that that characterisation is one i am profoundly uninterested in. i do occasionally read fic with it, but it never enters my own headcanons

horrible people can do good things!! kinslayers can do good things!! the fallen are capable of humanity!! people can do both good and evil things at the same time, because people are complicated!! maglor is not psychologically incapable of actually taking pity on these kids!!!!

it’s... again, complexity. the fëanorians straddle the line between black and white, which is a lot less sharp in the legendarium than it’s sometimes characterised as. it’s what draws me to their characters so much, why i have so many stupid headcanons about them. pretending they fall firmly on either side of the line is my real fandom pet peeve

and, like, this moment? this sincere connection between a bloodstained warlord and two children who will grow up to be great and kind in equal measure? i may not entirely like the direction the fandom’s taken it recently, but that beat, that relationship, it still gets me

so no, i don’t think elrond and elros’ years with the fëanorians were an endless cavalcade of abuse and misery. i think there was love there, despite the darkness all around them

an old, tired monster, and the two tiny children it protects

maglor never hurts the twins, not ever, not once. his claws are sharp and his fangs are keen, if he so much as swatted them he’d rip them in half. instead he folds down the razor edges of his being, interacting with them ever so carefully. he has nightmares of suddenly tearing into their skin

seriously, the power differential between them is so great, maglor so much as raising his voice would break any trust they have in this horribly dangerous creature. fics where he does corporal punishment always get the side-eye from me

the mood of their relationship is... i find it hard to put into words. melancholy, maybe, like a sunny afternoon a few days before the end of the world. three people who’ve lost so much finding what respite they can in each other as the world slowly crumbles around them

there are times when it feels like the three of them exist in a world of their own, marked out by the edges of the firelight. maglor telling stories of the stars, elros giving relaxed irreverent commentary, elrond getting a few moments to just be, all their troubles kept at bay

they are the last two lights in a world sunk into darkness, the last two living beings he does not on some level hate. he will tear his own heart out before he sees them in pain

he teaches them to ride, he teaches them to read, he gives them everything he still has left. the twins should never have been in this situation, maglor probably isn’t entirely fit to take care of them, but it is what it is, and they take what love they can

(maglor depends on the twins emotionally a bit more than any adult should rely on any child. he’s still very much the caretaker in their relationship, but that relationship is the only one he has left that’s not stained by a century of rage and grief. he’s obsessed with them, maedhros tells him frequently. maglor’s standard response to this is to try to gouge maedhros’ eyes out)

(that particular darker side to their relationship, where maglor’s attachment to the twins turns into a desperate possessiveness - that’s not something i think i’ve ever seen in fic. which is a shame, it feels much closer to my own characterisation than the standard ways this relationship gets maleficised. darker, in a different way than usual. horribly compelling in its plausibility)

however you want to read it, i don’t think you can deny this is a relationship that defines elrond and elros’ childhood. they were raised in the woods by a pack of kinslayers, the text is quite clear on this

but i’ve seen a lot of talk about how elros and elrond are only sirion’s children. they are completely 100% sindarin, they love and forgive eärendil and elwing thoroughly and without question, they identify with doriath over - even gondolin, let alone tirion. the fëanorians - the people who raised them - had zero effect on the people they grew into and the selves they created

and that, more than anything else, i find utterly unbelievable

look, i get what this is a reaction to. a lot of the kidnap dads stuff paints the fëanorians as elrond and elros’ ‘real’ family, and i’ve already talked about what i think of the idea that maglor-and-possibly-also-maedhros were better parents than eärendil and elwing. i think it’s reductive and overly optimistic and just a little too neat

but to say instead that elrond and elros held no great love in their hearts for maglor, no lingering affinity with the fëanorians, no influence on their identity from the people they grew up around, none at all? that after it happened they just left it behind and resumed being the same people they were in sirion?

that strikes me as just as much an oversimplification. it sands down all the potential rough edges of their identity, all that inconvenient complexity that stops them from fitting into any well-defined box, and replaces it with a nice safe simple self-conception i find just as flat and boring as declaring them 100% fëanorian

we can quibble over who they call ‘father’ (i personally find that whole debate kinda petty) but denying that it was actually maglor who was the closest thing they knew to a parent for most of their childhoods, and that that would, in fact, affect the way they thought of themselves and their family, elides so many interesting possibilities out of existence

(i’m not even going to get into the most braindead take i have ever heard on the subject, namely that because their time with the fëanorians was such a small fraction of elrond’s total lifespan it was like being kidnapped for two weeks as a toddler and had no greater significance than that. do you not understand what childhood is????)

like, i tend to think of elrond as a child as being very loudly not-a-fëanorian. elros is more willing to go with the flow - hey, if the creepy kinslayer wants kids, elros is happy to play into that in order to not be murdered - but elrond is very firm that he’s not happy to be here and he doesn’t belong with them

(this is after they get over their initial terror, of course, when they’ve realised they won’t be fed to the orcs for the tiniest slight. even so, elrond only really gets shirty about it around people he’s comfortable with, whose reactions he can reasonably guess at. naturally, the first person he does it to is maglor)

elros calls maglor their father exactly once, when they’re... maybe early preteens? this is because elrond hears him do it and immediately loses his shit. they have a dad, elrond says, in tears, and a mum, and any day now their real parents are going to come to pick them up and take them home

... right?

it gets harder to believe as the years roll on, as their memories of sirion fade, as they find their own places within the host, as maglor watches over them as they grow. elrond still mentally sets himself apart from the fëanorians, but it’s more of an effort every year. life in the fëanorian camp is the only one he’s ever really known. he can barely remember his mother’s voice

then the war of wrath starts, and the fëanorian host drifts closer to the army of valinor, and the twins come into contact with non-fëanorians for the first time in forever, and it becomes clear just how obviously fëanorian elrond is. he always insisted he wasn’t like the kinslayers at all, but he dresses like them, talks like them, fights like them

the myth cycles the edain tell are almost completely unfamiliar to him, he barely remembers the shape of the songs of lost doriath. even these sarcastic commentary and subversive reinterpretations he made of maglor’s stories - those were still maglor’s stories! he’s been trying to guess at the person he was meant to be, but it’s growing nightmarishly blatant how little elrond ever knew about him

instead, the people he was born to are as alien to him as the orcs of morgoth. he is a fëanorian, through and through

... yeah, elrond (and/or elros) having an absolutely massive identity crisis upon being reintroduced to his quote-unquote ‘true kin’ is another angle i’d love to see in fic that i don’t think i’ve ever come across. all those potential grey areas around who they are and who they’re supposed to be sound utterly fascinating, and i think it’s the complexity i hate to see elided over the most

i really, really doubt they could effortlessly slot back into being eärendil and elwing’s children. not when they’ve been surrounded by, lived alongside, been raised by the people who were supposed to enemies for most of their lives

they just don’t fit into that box any more. they can’t

speaking of eärendil and elwing, while i do agree that they both (especially elwing) get a lot more flak than they deserve, i don’t agree that therefore elrond and elros were never the slightest bit mad at them and fully forgave them for everything with no reservations

because, well, they were left behind. elwing had no other choice, but they were still left behind; it led to the world being saved, but they were still left behind. all the best intentions in the universe don’t erase the weeks and months and years of waiting, of a hope that grew thinner and frailer until it finally quietly broke

that’s a real hurt, and a real grievance. even if the twins rationally understand that their parents were making the best out of their terrible situation, you can’t logic away emotions like that. it’s perfectly possible for them to know they have no reason to resent eärendil or elwing, and yet still harbour that bitterness and pain

(i did write a thing once where elrond loudly rejects eärendil as his father in favour of maglor, but something i didn’t add in that i probably should have is that elrond later regretted doing that)

(not like, several centuries later, when he’d grown old and wise. two hours later, when he’d calmed down. but he was still legitimately angry at eärendil, because the one thing angry teenage elrond was not lacking in was reasons to be mad at the adults around him, and before he could figure out if he had anything less furious to say the hosts of the valar left middle-earth behind)

(it’s another element to the tragedy of the whole thing. in that particular story, which is mostly aiming for maximum pain, the only thing elrond’s birth parents know about their son for thousands of years is that he hates them)

(and he doesn’t, not really. you can’t hate someone you’ve never known)

not that i think they couldn’t ever make up with their parents! fics where elrond and his birth parents work past all the things that lie between them and form a functional familial bond despite it all give me life. i just don’t like the idea that there’s nothing difficult for them to work past

i don’t like the idea that elrond and elros would naturally, effortlessly identify with the mother they last saw when they were six and the people they only vaguely remember. i can see them doing it as a political move, i can see them going for it as a deliberate personal choice, but i can’t seeing it being immediate and automatic and easy

no matter how great a pair of heroes eärendil and elwing are, that doesn’t change the fact that to elrond and elros, they’re at most a few scattered memories and a collection of far-off stories. and so long as the twins stay in middle-earth, they’re never going to draw any closer

compared to the dynamic, multifaceted, personal, and deep bonds they have with the fëanorians - who, and i know i keep saying this but i think it gets tossed aside way more casually than it should, are the people who actually raised them, their birth parents must feel like a distant idea

and that’s why i can never buy interpretations of elrond as 100% sindarin, a pure son of doriath, with no messy grey areas or awkward jagged edges to his identity. given everything we know about his life, it seems almost cartoonishly simplistic

honestly it seems like a narrative a bunch of old doriathrin nobles trying to manouevre elrond into being high king of the sindar or something would propagate. it's neat and nice and tidy, something that’d be much more convenient for everyone if elrond did feel that way

but i just don’t see how he can. this narrative is easy and simple in a way real people never are, it ignores all the forces pulling him apart. elrond being uncomplicatedly sindarin with the life he lives and the people he's close to - that doesn’t make any sense to me

which isn’t to say i think he’s 100% noldorin, from either a gondolindrim or a fëanorian perspective. (i find it a little more believable, given, again, who he grew up around and who he hangs out with, but it’s still a bit too reductive for my tastes.) it’s also not to say i couldn’t believe an elrond who made an active choice to emphasise his sindarin heritage

it’s not how i think of him, but it works. i don’t have a problem with other people interpreting the complexities of the twins’ identities differently

i just have a problem with people acting like it doesn’t exist

in general i think there’s a lot untapped potential that gets left behind when you declare the twins, separately or together, as All One Thing

they’re descended from half the noble houses of beleriand, and they have deep personal ties to most of the rest. they belong to all of the free peoples even the dwarves, somehow, probably and i feel like that was kind of the old man’s point? so many peoples meet in them, to say they wholly belong to any one species is probably an oversimplification

they sit at a crossroads of potential identities, and rather than narrowing down their worldviews to one single path, they take the hard road and choose all of them. that’s what you need to do, if you want to change the world

and, to bring this back to my ostensible topic, in my estimation at least this mélange of possible selves does include them as fëanorians! it’s not overpowering, but it’s certainly there, and the adults they grow into long after they’ve left the host still bear influence from their childhood

nothing super obvious, nothing that wouldn’t stand out if you didn’t know what to look for, but there’s something almost incandescent in how fiercely elros reaches out for his dreams

there’s something almost defiant in elrond’s drive to be as kind as summer

as for who they publically claim as their family... honestly, it depends. while it’s usually more tactically prudent for elros to connect himself to his various human ancestors, on occasion he does find a use for his free in with the elf mafia, and elrond, code switcher par excellence, is famously the son of whoever is most politically convenient at the moment, which is rarely, but not never, maglor

(in the privacy of their own minds, well, eärendil and elwing may have been the parents elros was supposed to have, but maglor was the parent he actually had, and elros doesn’t particularly care to mope over what might have been. elrond, for his part, figures that after all the shit maglor has put him through, the least that bastard owes him is a father)

but honestly? i think before any of their mountain of identities, before thinking of themselves as sindarin or gondolindel or hadorian or haladin or fëanorian or anything, elrond and elros identify as themselves

they are peredhil, they are númenóreans, they are whoever they make themselves to be. that’s how elrond finally resolved his identity, figured out who he was and found something past the pain and the rage

he wasn’t doriathrin, or gondolindrin, or falathrin, or fëanorian, or whatever else. he was elrond, no more and no less

and that person, elrond, could be whatever he chose to be

... elros came to a similar conclusion, with much less sturm und drang that he’s willing to admit. being able to go ‘hey, i can’t possibly be biased towards any one of your cultures, because i’m descended from all of you and i was raised by murderelves’ makes it a lot easier to unite people around your personal banner, turns out

the stories other people tried to force on them shattered into pieces, and the peredhel twins were free to shape themselves into anything they could dream of

and as the new world struggles alive, these lost children of an Age of death begin to bloom into their full glorious selves -

i just. i love the poetry of that. despite every single shadow that hangs over their past, despite all the clashing notes pulling them apart, they harmonise it all into a greater, kinder theme, determined to make their world a better place in whatever way they can

they fail, of course, but so do all things. the inevitable march of entropy doesn’t diminish the long millennia they (and their descendants) held onto the light

and their growing up in the fëanorian host definitely had a huge effect on the noble lords they became. you can see it in elros’ loud ambition to create a land of happiness and hope, elrond’s quiet resolve to heal all the hurts inflicted by this marred reality

it wasn’t a perfect time by any means, but neither was it a nightmare. it was what it was, a desperate existence at the edge of a knife where, nevertheless, they were loved

even after years upon decades upon centuries have passed, it’s hard for the wise king and the honourable sage to separate out and identify all the conflicting emotions swirling around their childhood. they never knew eärendil or elwing, true, but they also never really knew maglor

not as equals, not as adults, not as people who could truly understand him. he disappeared into the fog of history, leaving only childhood memories of razor-sharp, gentle hands

it’s messy and it’s complicated and getting any real closure would be like shoving their way through a thornbush with bare hands even if elrond could find the shithead, and yet at the core of it all, there is light. not the brightest of lights, maybe, but an enduring one

that contrast, above all, that note of warmth amidst the shadows, is what fascinates me so much about their relationship. three screwed up people in a screwed up world, finding a little peace with each other

and the fact that somehow, it does have a good ending - the children grow up magnificent and compassionate and just, they become exemplars of all their peoples, lodestars of the new world born out of the ashes of the old - that makes it seem to me like this relationship must have contained some fragment of happiness

but, fuck, all the darkness that surrounds that love, all the tangled-up emotions its existence necessitates, all the prefabricated self-identities it can never slot into - nothing about it is simple, nothing about it is easy, and i find that utterly enthralling. especially how, despite everything, that flickering light never goes out

well, i don’t think it does, anyway. my take on this relationship is both complicated enough no one else ever quite gets it right and well-defined enough every single ‘error’ in other people’s interpretations sticks out like a kinslayer in rivendell

it is an entirely self-inflicted problem, i will admit. other people are allowed to interpret those complexities differently from me, and it’s entirely my own fault i lack the :waves hands around nebulously: to write my own hypothetical fic on the subject at a pace faster than glacial

still, though. i do wish there was more fic out there that engaged with these complexities. a lot of the common fandom interpretations of this relationship just sweep it all away

#ask #my terrible headcanons #elros #elrond #maglor #elwing #earendil #feanorians #niphredilien #yellow feathered faerie #putting your old url in the tags for archival purposes #post nyanyannya askbox clearout #ironically it turned out almost as long as the songfic that clogged up my askbox in the first place #and it is DONE #fuck this took forever to write #stayed up late just to get it out the door so i don't have to think about it any more #this is a long ramble and i'm pretty sure the end is just me repeating myself ad nausem sorry #i'll admit to a certain pro-feanorian bias in my interpretation #but i also don't want elros and elrond to just. live in a neverending horrorshow for decades #the silm's cruel enough we don't need that #narratively i feel like elrond being All Of The Elves is a good mirror for elros being All Of The Humans #but it didn't really fit the angle i was going for #bleck #let's see how many followers i lose for this

[techmomma]

Drawin’ Hamnds

I think another one of the reasons that tutorials for difficult things to draw like hands or faces fall short is because the artist has neglected to mention, or possibly hasn’t even noticed, that they’ve been mastering another technique alongside whatever they’re showing you. Most will talk about learning 3D forms and how easy that makes it, whatever. Sure, that’s a little important.

The skill they haven’t mentioned that is necessary is rendering. Creating a convincing illusion that this 2D object exists in space. They’ve been learning how to create the illusion of ridges, texture, dips and valleys, how value interplays with these. The Elements of Art, and how they apply to drawing hands, or eyes, or whatever (likely something they’ve been doing subconsciously).

Here’s a few examples. These are all different rendering techniques. Ways to use line, shape, and value. (In digital art, “ink wash” correlates to “gradients.”)

Notice that each of these creates a different illusion of texture! They’re all depicting essentially the same value range, and are depicting spheres with light coming from the top right corner. But if I take away the names...

These could be drawings of six different objects. The bottom-right sphere immediately gives off sort of a metallic sheen, it could be a polished silver sphere. The bottom left reminds me of that scraggly texture of a tennis ball. 

As an artist, we need knowledge of many different kinds of rendering techniques, in black and white, greyscale, and in color. Without these, that’s how our hands end up looking like turkey-hands.

Yes that is my hand I traced on my tablet.

With only a basic knowledge of the element of Line, yes, of course this hand is going to come out wonky. (This technique here, only using line where the lines seem most “obvious,” is sometimes called the Stained Glass Technique or the Animation Cel Technique.) Hands are, despite what any artist tells you, full of weird shapes and forms that are not easily conveyed in only simple lines like this. Our eyes know this. But watch what happens when I put knowledge of different rendering techniques at work to convey texture and value.

Looks a lot more like a hand, huh! Didn’t even have to go into things like 3D shapes. With this knowledge of rendering, I can even go back and do more stylistic interpretations, using simplistic lines and implied lines in more complicated, nuanced ways than before to give the illusion of form.

See? I’ve used only some contour lines, a little hatching here and there, and shapes, to convey textures and depressions and crests in the tendons and wrinkles on my knuckles and implied lines to create the softer difference between the pink and white of my fingernails.

This is the heart of style! This is learning rendering techniques to interpret the world around you. Rendering techniques are the grammar and vocabulary of the language of art; you’re not gonna be able to communicate complicated sentences and ideas if you only know baby words!

To understand these, google search “the elements of art” and “the principles of art,” as well as “rendering techniques” There’s a ton of online classes, instructions, tutorials, examples, and videos that can help you learn all three subjects.

Learn them.

Live them.

Breathe them.

Dream them.

(Did you even notice that the hand proportions were off? :>)

#art reference #drawing reference #hand tutorial #hand reference #Steph is sick of tutorials saying it's Just That Easy with 3D shapes #it is not!! #Yes I enjoy drawing hands! #Yes I am good at drawing hands! #No hands are not easy! #not unless you learn how to render!!

[captainkurosolaire]

Let it all go

Think, speak, do. We shine through these formed notions.

No secret we’re all the byproducts of passion. So It’s no wonder innately we excel under that pacific condition. Or feel so strongly compelled to it. Whether it’s lust, ambition or undertaking our creative outlet. Morally people depict you differently by confessing or being earnest. Because of this, that characteristic trait has become deserted. If you convey too much emotion, you’re weak. Should you be ill, you’re pitied or invalidated from any struggles you accomplish or unknowingly given a farce bond. To debate is a conflict that many believe only can be of hatred intent. Or to win with senseless ego. When often in reality it’s to be polar educated, for betterment. Our society has pressurized this naturalness that attention of others warrants a higher value. Appeasement to be perceived by others, will never be relevant. Simplistically being real is what matters. We’re all diverse. Unique and special, our weaknesses they’re really strength’s awaiting you to channel them. I’d implore to seize them! All you are. Identifying yourself is how you’ll reach an apex and find true enjoyment, happiness, your flame of passion cannot be extinguished, even when you stumble. One thing or person, will never dictate your worth. Despite how it should feel… Confidence and openness isn’t a sin. If I could spread my abundance many times over, I would. However this is where I introduce myself. Typically where any wisdom comes from is because of firsthand experiences. Achieved a piss-poor job in updating and letting everyone know, I’m alright, those who do care.   For them, I lay it all here. I’m incredibly impulsive, stubborn, and most importantly a loser. With only one thing in common in symmetry to a pirate, I play. These things are quintessential, instead of allowing us to be defined. We’re rebellious. In realism. Little I’ve told in life, but I’m mildly autistic. I try desperately to be more and otherwise never show, but denials don’t heal. Furthermore, I also have a rare disease, but again I am not conveying myself for sorrow or anything else. The people I have come to know here, you’re my friends alongside inspirations. You all mean a lot even though I struggle in communicating it. Perhaps should my confession here be splayed out, It’ll hold a few understandings. So I struggle horribly in remaining socially energized in connection with everyone that I really do, wish too. In regards to any RPer’s that may have felt inadequate or vice-versa that I felt suddenly distant, I do apologize. But know, that I assure you, I’m the only one who’s ever felt anything but obsolete. My passion stems because It’s required and necessary. It’s my intense obsessive tick. Within it, pain is foreign. I’ve painstakingly dealt with struggling in my learning’s, teachings, my attention span requires desire. Though, I’ve a lot of exercises. Never did I think or sought to have gotten as many people’s time that I have had, whether their eyes, or Role-play, sharing. It’s valued and appreciated. Builds me up and no matter the amount, has gotten me back up. I am convicted strictly to achieve one thing, to be good enough, to find and maintain that. It’s really it. My impulsiveness is my fault, my unpredictable and lackluster energy of little sleep leaves me never the same, it’s like waking up with a reset button, often. So a majority of the time, I have to write all in one-shot. My quality under that fluctuates, worsens, or shifts. For me, quantity more often is better than quality. Because the more repetition I practice in things, or train for it’ll cancel out being reset. I want to be able to effortlessly write quality so the more extensive the better. As I stand, I continuously never feel I can sustain or stay in one place long but that’s not in another it’s because of my inability to remain like I’m giving them my everything. Or gifting it. I cannot ever put in real words or meaning when it matters, and I often just push away or out those who matter, I always act when it’s too late. And, due to this, I’ve failed and failed, and failed. It’s under that pressure, anxiety builds, the dam breaks, and suddenly, no matter what you set out to do or the purpose, it’s for not. Then like many in this abyss, you don’t even try anymore, or become almost weightless. Or you reunite back to where often it starts, alone. And maybe that’s just where I’m destined to perform within as recommended by the closest. And I don’t say any of that for sympathy or edginess. This is just finding identification. Writing is the only avenue I eventually even am able to convey my truths or show my authenticity. In us lies world’s only we witness within our minds. Only able to be written and given life by you to allow others a sharing. So I know there’s many factors that can discourage but do unleash, only you can ever bring that light. Even should my pen ever be hollowed, I assure you my heart does roar. With each word and thing I do, there’s a heartbeat. So hopefully this all covers a lot of the missing tags I never got too. Thanks for the inclusions, invitations, whether FC’s, dungeons, weddings. They weren’t unseen and the inbox of asks, either chain’s or otherwise, and love, support, hell even if there’s any resentment or hate out there for me and disdain, any emotion I gladly absorb, It’s all energy. That sustains my well-being. With all this cleansing, it’s probably better I go on reserved with RP and maybe just discontinue altogether. Outside of the long-term people or other’s who can even tolerate my insanity, I’m probably just one-shots, shorts, erotics, shipping, or hashing established out already RP. Or like in the case of few people already if there’s deep interest can just include when I do stories.  Been getting few people that join Crew regarding things and I just work on giving them mentions and inclusions or figure out what they’d partake in. Centering myself out and creating so many Crewmates and antagonists and things, gives a lot of balance. Especially with hyper imagination. Hard to ever feel empty. Not nearly good or reliable enough, for long-term. Though I’ll keep practicing forward, I’ve managed to improve greatly compared to where I first began. With the right mindset and psyche, I’ve found there’s little I cannot conquer. In my hope’s one day, I’ll make my destination. You gave me a beautiful world to know and hold. Stay precious, life.

#This is just essentially a Mun - About Me #OOC stuff #Updates #Sorry for the month's gone #Soul searching courage

[mxstyassasxin]

Baptize Me (T, 2k)

on AO3

Regulus woke, terrified again, screaming at the nightmare that would probably plague him for the rest of his life. As with every night, he was momentarily disoriented, looking around in confusion at the softly decorated room, pale walls offset by the rich raspberry furnishings. He was settling back onto the mounds of comfortable cushions littering the bed, taking deep breaths to calm himself, when the door opened and a woman with long red hair stood in the light from the landing, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

"Regulus," her voice was as comforting as the room. And familiar. "Was it the dream again?"

He swallowed his remaining fear and nodded, watching as she made her way across the room to sit on the edge of his bed, taking his hand in hers and studying his face with kind, green eyes.

"Lily," he breathed in recognition, leaning forward to wrap his arms around her, taking comfort in her steady presence. "I woke you, didn't I? You don't have to always come in here. I think you'd be doing it the rest of your life if you did."

"Yeah, well just be glad you got me and not James, he's a grumpy bugger when he's just woken up." Her laugh was light, and it added an extra glint to her eyes.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked him, her voice taking on a more sombre tone. "If it'll help, you know."

Regulus just shook his head. "It's exactly the same as all the other nights I've been here, Lils. I don't know why you don't just turn me out with Sirius."

"Because you've got a price on your head, silly," she says, mussing up his dark, Black family hair. "You're safest here."

He'd been there, in Godrics Hollow, staying with James and Lily Potter for about a month now, every night waking from the same dream, the same nightmare of what might have happened had Kreacher not managed to pull him out of that cave.

He had given the locket to the wizened house elf and begged him to go, to destroy it, yelling what he was sure would be his final orders as the Inferi dragged his weakened body further into the water. Kreacher had surprised him by appearing in the water beside him and dragging him through the ether, with magic unique to house elves, back to Grimmauld Place. One second, Regulus' lungs had been filling with icy water and the next, he had been coughing it up onto Sirius' old, dusty, scarlet bed cover.

"Sirius' room?" he had questioned Kreacher between his wracking coughs. "I won't be able to get out of here, the door's locked."

"No, but I will." Regulus had jumped at the sound of his brother's voice, gravelly from those muggle things he insisted on smoking. "Kreacher," he greeted the house elf cordially before thanking him for something. "I'll take him from here. And the locket too."

Sirius had wrapped a leather-clad arm around Regulus' waist and held out a hand which Kreacher dropped the locket into, then twisted on the spot, apparating them both to Godrics Hollow. There, Remus had fed him chocolate and healed the deep wound he had cut in his palm, while Lily wrapped her arms around his shoulders and James tried to get Sirius to stop pacing a hole in the carpet.

He had barely seen Sirius or Remus since then, the two of them always out on missions for the Order, reluctant to visit for fear of leading the Death Eaters to Regulus. Lily told him one evening that the intensity and frequency of the missions had increased since Regulus had found the locket. It had been destroyed by Dumbledore almost immediately, but it had also confirmed a theory he had that there were more like it out there, hidden in various objects the Dark Lord had felt an affinity with. So, the Order members had been sent off to recover them, James and Lily staying behind to protect Regulus following his defection.

Truthfully, it made him feel a little guilty because James definitely did not enjoy being cooped up in the one place. Obviously, he would have preferred an active mission with his best friends but, when Regulus broached these concerns with him, James had just clapped him on the shoulder.

"Of course I would, mate, but Lily's my number one now. Wherever she is, I will be too and right now, that is here, protecting my best mate's little brother. We're all lucky to have her, don't you think."

And that was exactly what Regulus did think. How could he not when she was here, comforting him after his nightmares yet again, willing to protect him with her life if necessary whenever the Death Eaters decided to come calling.

"Thank you, Lily," he said to her now. "I don't know what I would do without you. I always wake up just as they drag me under and then you're always here, in the doorway with your hair like fire. That's the only way to kill them you know."

"I know," she told him, voice soft as she smiled at him. "Get some rest now, Regulus. Do you want some Dreamless Sleep?"

He shook his head. "No, thank you. It makes me feel funny. I don't like being unaware."

"Alright then. I'll leave the landing light on though. Good night."

"Good night, Lily," he said as she walked out the door.

Regulus tried to get to sleep again, he really did, but after a while he found himself turning to books again to occupy his mind. He had read all the books on the shelves in his room and had finished the one he'd come to bed with. So, he slipped his feet into the slippers by the side of his bed and made his way downstairs to the living room which had bookshelves either side of the fireplace.

He noticed that one particular book had been pulled free of the others and lay flat on the front of one of the shelves. Picking it up, the red, leather-bound book was no bigger than his hand. The pages, edged in red, were so thin that they appeared almost translucent and the writing upon them was tiny, an effort to fit so many words into such a small book. Regulus finished flipping quickly through the pages and ran his thumb thoughtfully over the symbol debossed into the cover.

Making his decision, he curled his legs up under him in the large armchair with the deep, comfortable seat and pulled the crochet blanket over to cover them, intrigued by the small book. He was even more intrigued when he opened it to the title page only to find ‘Lily Evans' scrawled in childish handwriting in the top right corner.

It seemed a very strange book for Lily to have had as a child. The passages were numbered strangely and different parts of it seemed to have been written by different people. Some of the themes it dealt with were also bizarre material for a child, but it ultimately appeared to be about the same main characters. Unfortunately, even his confusion at the strange stories couldn't ward off tiredness for long and that was how Lily found him in the morning, still with her small book held loosely in his grasp.

"Regulus," she shook him awake. "Regulus, I need that book today."

"Huh," he rubbed his eyes and yawned before attempting to shake himself awake. "Oh, morning Lils. Sorry, I found it last night when I couldn't sleep."

Lily chuckled softly and Regulus noticed that she was already dressed for the day in a knee-length woollen skirt, white cotton shirt and stockings. Stockings. Now that was a far cry from the Lily he had come to know. She even had a blazer of some sort flung over her forearm.

"Yes, it probably is one of the best books to use as a sleep aid. Now come on, I need it." She held out a hand to him.

"Are you going somewhere?" He asked, thinking that was the only reason for her attire.

"Yes, somewhere I haven't been able to go for a while."

"Out?" Regulus was confused. They were safe here. Why was she going somewhere?

"Yes, out." Lily rolled her eyes at him, so he scowled and handed her the book. "You don't have to worry, Reg. I'm going to transfigure my appearance a bit. You could come too if you wanted and Remus will be there. That's the only reason I'm willing to go this week."

Regulus perked up a bit hearing Remus would be there. "Will Sirius be there too?"

Lily just smiled amusedly. "No, he doesn't hold with what we're going to do. Neither does James. He thinks it's stupid we still go."

"Go where?" Regulus scowled and quirked an eyebrow.

"I guess you could say we're going to discuss the contents of this book," she said, holding it up slightly. "It can be a great relief in burdensome times. A habit left over from my upbringing in the muggle world."

"Okay then," Regulus agreed, thoroughly intrigued. "Let me get dressed. I'll be quick."

"You'll need a muggle suit. I think there's one in the wardrobe in the spare room," she called after him as he ran up the stairs.

Twenty minutes later, Regulus was sat on an uncomfortable wooden bench in a large, single-roomed building full of muggles, wearing a muggle suit charmed to fit him and transfigured slightly to mute his distinctive looks. Lily, too, was sporting brown hair now rather than fiery red and her bright green eyes were a fairly ordinary hazel. Remus, on his other side, couldn't hide his magical scars but he had adjusted the shape of his facial features just to throw them off a bit and was now leaning forward with his elbows on the shelf in front of him that was attached to the back of another bench, hands pressed together in front of him, head bowed.

Lily was pointing out different parts of the building to him even though he couldn't understand a majority of the terms she used, but he could still appreciate the simplistic beauty of a few of the pieces, especially the windows. She had only just finished explaining who the people depicted in one of the windows were when a man in white and black robes came to stand at the front of the room, his arms raised asking for silence.

As soon as everyone began speaking in unison of sins, repentance and forgiveness, Regulus could feel a warmth starting to radiate through his chest. Then there was a sort of song called a hymn that Regulus could only mumble along to but that filled his heart with hope. It was strange really, that this meeting of people felt so different from the meetings of Death Eaters he'd been present at, even though this group also seemed to be praising a single entity. There was no fear here, no oppression. The acts of the entity that the robed man spoke of reminded him a bit of magic and he glanced curiously to Lily who smiled at him and lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

When everyone in the building bowed their heads as Remus had done earlier, Regulus followed suit and listened to the soothing voice wash over him as it spoke of the vulnerable and the downtrodden, of the lonely and the meek. He found himself joining in easily and emotion was starting to prickle the back of his throat, so much so that he couldn't keep the tune of the next hymn properly. Then, Lily pulled him up to the front of the room, towards the robed man with everyone else. He was slightly nervous now because the man had begun talking about body and blood, and Regulus had had enough bad experiences with that, but Lily reassured him it was just bread and wine, symbolising an oath, so he would just kneel for a blessing.

A blessing. Him. Regulus Black received a blessing from a muggle, and that had really put him in danger of the prickle at the back of his throat becoming tears he could barely hold back. What ended up pushing him over the edge though, just a few moments later, were the dozens of muggles, men, women and children, who grasped his hand and wished for peace to be upon him.

He didn't hear any more of the meeting after that. Not even the final hymn as the emotions had risen in him to become a river of tears that would not stop flowing. All he could do was take comfort, once again, in Lily's arms and remember this new, overwhelming feeling of peace and forgiveness that he had found.

#end of year fic countdown #regulus black #my fic #i was super proud of this one #background jily #marauders era #first wizarding war #hp fics #regulus & lily

[1921designs]

Smuggler

“Then what are you complaining about?”

“About hypocrisy. About lies. About misrepresentation. About that smuggler’s behavior to which you drive the uranist.”

—André Gide, Corydon, Fourth Dialogue

1.

I REMEMBER MY first kiss with absolute clarity. I was reading on a black chaise longue, upholstered with shiny velour, and it was right after dinner, the hour of freedom before I was obliged to begin my homework. I was sixteen.

It must have been early autumn or late spring, because I know I was in school at the time, and the sun was still out. I was shocked and thrilled by it, and reading that passage, from a novel by Hermann Hesse, made the book feel intensely real, fusing Hesse’s imaginary world with the physical object I was holding in my hands. I looked down at it, and back at the words on the page, and then around the room, which was empty, and I felt a keen and deep sense of discovery and shame. Something new had entered my life, undetected by anyone else, delivered safely and surreptitiously to me alone. To borrow an idea from André Gide, I had become a smuggler.

It wasn’t, of course, the first kiss I had encountered in a book. But this was the first kiss between two boys, characters in Beneath the Wheel, a short, sad novel about a sensitive student who gains admission to an elite school but then fails, quickly and inexorably, after he becomes entwined in friendship with a reckless, poetic classmate. I was stunned by their encounter—which most readers, and almost certainly Hesse himself, would have assigned to that liminal stage of adolescence before boys turn definitively to heterosexual interests. For me, however, it was the first evidence that I wasn’t entirely alone in my own desires. It made my loneliness seem more present to me, more intelligible and tangible, and something that could be named. Even more shocking was the innocence with which Hesse presented it:

An adult witnessing this little scene might have derived a quiet joy from it, from the tenderly inept shyness and the earnestness of these two narrow faces, both of them handsome, promising, boyish yet marked half with childish grace and half with shy yet attractive adolescent defiance.

Certainly no adult I knew would have derived anything like joy from this little scene—far from it. Where I grew up, a decaying Rust Belt city in upstate New York, there was no tradition of schoolboy romance, at least none that had made it to my public high school, where the hierarchies were rigid, the social categories inviolable, the avenues for sexual expression strictly and collectively policed by adults and youth alike. These were the early days of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when recent gains in visibility and political legitimacy for gay rights were being vigorously countered by a newly resurgent cultural conservatism. The adults in my world, had they witnessed two lonely young boys reach out to each other in passionate friendship, would have thrashed them before committing them to the counsel of religion or psychiatry.

But the discovery of that kiss changed me. Reading, which had seemed a retreat from the world, was suddenly more vital, dangerous, and necessary. If before I had read haphazardly, bouncing from adventure to history to novels and the classics, now I read with focus and determination. For the next five years, I sought to expand and open the tiny fissure that had been created by that kiss. Suddenly, after years of feeling almost entirely disconnected from the sexual world, my reading was finally spurred both by curiosity and Eros.

From an oppressive theological academy in southern Germany, where students struggled to learn Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to the rooftops of Paris during the final days of Adolf Hitler’s occupation, I sought in books the company of poets and scholars, hoodlums and thieves, tormented aristocrats bouncing around the spas and casinos of Europe, expat Americans slumming it in the City of Light, an introspective Roman emperor lamenting a lost boyfriend, and a middle-aged author at the height of his powers and the brink of exhaustion. These were the worlds, and the men, presented by Gide, Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, to name only those whose writing has lingered with me. Some of these authors were linked by ties of friendship. Some of them were themselves more or less openly homosexual, others ambiguous or fluid in their desires, and others, by all evidence, bisexual or primarily heterosexual. It would be too much to say their work formed a canon of gay literature—but for those who sought such a canon, their work was about all one could find.

And yet, in retrospect, and after rereading many of those books more than thirty years later, I’m astonished by how sad, furtive, and destructive an image of sexuality they presented. Today we have an insipid idea of literature as selfdiscovery, and a reflexive conviction that young people—especially those struggling with identity or prejudice—need role models. But these books contained no role models at all, and they depicted self-discovery as a cataclysmic severance from society. The price of survival, for the self-aware homosexual, was a complete inversion of values, dislocation, wandering, and rebellion. One of the few traditions you were allowed to keep was misogyny. And most of the men represented in these books were not willing to pay the heavy price of rebellion and were, to appropriate Hesse’s phrase, ground beneath the wheel.

The value of these books wasn’t anything wholesome they contained, or any moral instruction they offered. Rather, it was the process of finding them, the thrill of reading them, the way the books themselves, like the men they depicted, detached you from the familiar moral landscape. They gave a name to the palpable, physical loneliness of sexual solitude, but they also greatly increased your intellectual and emotional solitude. Until very recently, the canon of literature for a gay kid was discovered entirely alone, by threads of connection that linked authors from intertwined demimondes. It was smuggling, but also scavenging. There was no Internet, no “customers who bought this item also bought,” no helpful librarians steeped in the discourse of tolerance and diversity, and certainly no one in the adult world who could be trusted to give advice and advance the project of limning this still mostly forbidden body of work.

The pleasure of finding new access to these worlds was almost always punctured by the bleakness of the books themselves. One of the two boys who kissed in that Hesse novel eventually came apart at the seams, lapsed into nervous exhaustion, and then one afternoon, after too much beer, he stumbled or willingly slid into a slow-moving river, where his body was found, like Ophelia’s, floating serenely and beautiful in the chilly waters. Hesse would blame poor Hans’s collapse on the severity of his education and a lamentable disconnection from nature, friendship, and congenial social structures. But surely that kiss, and that friendship with a wayward poet, had something to do with it. As Hans is broken to pieces, he remembers that kiss, a sign that at some level Hesse felt it must be punished.

Hans was relatively lucky, dispensed with chaste, poetic discretion, like the lover in a song cycle by Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann. Other boys who found themselves enmeshed in the milieu of homoerotic desire were raped, bullied, or killed, or lapsed into madness, disease, or criminality. They were disposable or interchangeable, the objects of pederastic fixation or the instrumental playthings of adult characters going through aesthetic, moral, or existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest existential crises. Even the survivors face, at the end of these novels, the bleakest of futures: isolation, wandering, and a perverse form of aging in which the loss of youth is never compensated with wisdom.

One doesn’t expect novelists to give us happy endings. But looking back on many of the books I read during my age of smuggling, I’m profoundly disturbed by what I now recognize as their deeply entrenched homophobia. I wonder if it took a toll on me, if what seemed a process of self-liberation was inseparable from infection with the insecurities, evasions, and hypocrisy stamped into gay identity during the painful, formative decades of its nascence in the last century. I wonder how these books will survive, and in what form: historical documents, symptoms of an ugly era, cris de coeur of men (mostly men) who had made it only a few steps along the long road to true equality? Will we condescend to them, and treat their anguish with polite, clinical detachment? I hesitate to say that these books formed me, because that suggests too simplistic a connection between literature and character. But I can’t be the only gay man in middle age who now wonders if what seemed a gift at the time—the discovery of a literature of same-sex desire just respectable enough to circulate without suspicion—was in fact more toxic than a youth of that era could ever have anticipated.

2.

Before the mid-1990s, when the Internet began to collapse the distinction between cities, suburbs, and everywhere else, books were the most reliable access to the larger world, and the only access to books was the bookstore or the library. The physical fact of a book was both a curse and a blessing. It made reading a potentially dangerous act if you were reading the wrong things, and of course one had to physically find and possess the book. But the mere fact of being a book, the fact that someone had published the words and they were circulating in the world, gave a book the presumption of respectability, especially if it was deemed “literature.” There were, of course, bad or dangerous books in the world—and self-appointed guardians who sought to suppress and destroy them—but decent people assumed that these were safely contained within universities.

I borrowed my copy of Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel from the library, so I can’t be sure whether it contained any of the small clues that led to other like-minded books. At least one copy I have found in a used bookstore does have an invaluable signpost on the back cover: “Along with Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel, Emil Strauss’s Friend Death, and Robert Musil’s Young Törless, all of which came out in the same period, it belongs to the genre of school novels.” Perhaps that’s what prompted me to read Musil’s far more complicated, beautifully written, and excruciating schoolboy saga. Hans, shy, studious, and trusting, led me to Törless, a bolder, meaner, more dangerous boy.

Other threads of connection came from the introductions, afterwords, footnotes, and the solicitations to buy other books found just inside the back cover. When I first started reading independently of classroom assignments and the usual boy’s diet of Rudyard Kipling, Jonathan Swift, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne—reading without guidance and with all the odd detours and byways of an autodidact—I devised a three-part test for choosing a new volume: first, a book had to have a black or orange spine, then the colors of Penguin Classics, which someone had assured me was a reliable brand; second, I had to be able to finish the book within a few days, lest I waste the opportunity of my weekly visit to the bookstore; and third, I had to be hooked by the narrative within one or two pages. That is certainly what led me, by chance, to Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, a rather slight and pretentious novel of incestuous infatuation, gender slippage, homoerotic desire, and surreal distortions of time and space. I knew nothing of Cocteau but was intrigued by one of his line drawings on the cover, which showed two androgynous teenagers, and a summary which assured it was about a boy named Paul, who worshipped a fellow student.

I still have that copy of Cocteau. In the back there was yet more treasure, a whole page devoted to advertising the novels of Gide (The Immoralist is described as “the story of man’s rebellion against social and sexual conformity”) and another to Genet (The Thief’s Journal is “a voyage of discovery beyond all moral laws; the expression of a philosophy of perverted vice, the working out of an aesthetic degradation”). These little précis were themselves a guide to the coded language—“illicit, corruption, hedonism”—that often, though not infallibly, led to other enticing books. And yet one might follow these little broken twigs and crushed leaves only to end up in the frustrating world of mere decadence, Wagnerian salons, undirected voluptuousness, the enervating eccentricities of Joris-Karl Huysmans or the chaste, coy allusions to vice in Wilde.

Finally, there were a handful of narratives that had successfully transitioned into open and public respectability, even if always slightly tainted by scandal. If the local theater company still performed Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, who could fault a boy for reading The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Conveniently, a 1982 Bantam Classics edition contained both, and also the play Salomé. Wilde’s novel was a skein of brilliant banter stretched over a rather silly, Gothic tale, and the hiding-in-plain-sight of its homoeroticism was deeply unfulfilling. Even then, too scared to openly acknowledge my own feelings, I found Wilde’s obfuscations embarrassing. More powerful than anything in the highly contrived and overwrought games of Dorian was a passing moment in Salomé when the Page of Herodias obliquely confesses his love for the Young Syrian, who has committed suicide in disgust at Salomé’s licentious display. “He has killed himself,” the boy laments, “the man who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and earrings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself.” It was these moments that slipped through, sudden intimations of honest feeling, which made plowing through Wilde’s self-indulgence worth the effort.

Then there was the most holy and terrifying of all the publicly respectable representations of homosexual desire, Mann’s Death in Venice, which might even be found in one’s parents’ library, the danger of its sexuality safely ossified inside the imposing façade of its reputation. A boy who read Death in Venice wasn’t slavering over a beautiful Polish adolescent in a sailor’s suit, he was climbing a mountain of sorts, proving his devotion to culture.

But a boy who read Death in Venicewas receiving a very strange moral and sentimental education. Great love was somehow linked to intellectual crisis, a symptom of mental exhaustion. It was entirely inward and unrequited, and it was likely triggered by some dislocation of the self from familiar surroundings, to travel, new sights and smells, and hot climates. It was unsettling and isolating, and drove one to humiliating vanities and abject voyeurism. Like so much of what one found in Wilde (perfumed and swaddled in cant), Gide (transplanted to the colonial realms of North Africa, where bourgeois morality was suspended), or Genet (floating freely in the postwar wreckage and flotsam of values, ideals, and norms), Death in Venice also required a young reader to locate himself somewhere on the inexorable axis of pederastic desire.

In retrospect I understand that this fixation on older men who suddenly have their worlds shattered by the brilliant beauty of a young man or adolescent was an intentional, even ironic repurposing of the classical approbation of Platonic pederasty. It allowed the “uranist”—to use the pejorative Victorian term for a homosexual—to broach, tentatively and under the cover of a venerable and respected literary tradition, the broader subject of same-sex desire. While for some, especially Gide, pederasty was the ideal, for others it may have been a gateway to discussing desire among men of relatively equal age and status, what we now think of as being gay. But as an eighteen-year-old reader, I had no interest in being on the receiving end of the attentions of older men; and as a middle-aged man, no interest in children.

The dynamics of the pederastic dyad—like so many narratives of colonialism —also meant that in most cases the boy was silent, seemingly without an intellectual or moral life. He was pure object, pure receptivity, unprotesting, perfect and perfectly silent in his beauty. When Benjamin Britten composed his last opera, based on Mann’s novella, the youth is portrayed by a dancer, voiceless in a world of singing, present only as an ideal body moving in space. In Gide’s Immoralist, the boys of Algeria (and Italy and France) are interchangeable, lost in the torrents of monologue from the narrator, Michel, who wants us to believe that they are mere instruments in his long, agonizing process of self-discovery and liberation. In Genet’s Funeral Rites, a frequently pornographic novel of sexual violence among the partisans and collaborators of Paris during the liberation, the narrator/author even attempts to make a virtue of the interchangeability of his young objects of desire: “The characters in my books all resemble each other,” he says. He’s right, and he amplifies their sameness by suppressing or eliding their personalities, dropping identifying names or pronouns as he shifts between their individual stories, often reducing them to anonymous body parts.

By reducing boys and young men to ciphers, the narrative space becomes open for untrammeled displays of solipsism, narcissism, self-pity, and of course self-justification. These books, written over a period of decades, by authors of vastly different temperaments and sexualities, are surprisingly alike in this claustrophobia of desire and subjugation of the other. Indeed, the psychological violence done to the male object of desire is often worse in authors who didn’t manifest any particular personal interest in same-sex desire. For example, in Musil’s Confusions of Young Törless, a gentle and slightly effeminate boy named Basini becomes a tool for the social, intellectual, and emotional advancement of three classmates who are all, presumably, destined to get married and lead entirely heterosexual lives. One student uses Basini to learn how to exercise power and manipulate people in preparation for a life of public accomplishment; another tortures him to test his confused spiritual theories, a stew of supposedly Eastern mysticism; and Törless turns to him, and turns on him, simply to feel something, to sense his presence and power in the world, to add to the stockroom of his mind and soul.

We are led to believe that this last form of manipulation is, in its effect on poor Basini, the cruelest. Later in the book, when Musil offers us the classic irony of the bildungsroman—the guarantee that everything that has happened was just a phase, a way station on the path of authorial evolution—he explains why Törless “never felt remorse” for what he did to Basini:

For the only real interest [that “aesthetically inclined intellectuals” like the older Törless] feel is concentrated on the growth of their own soul, or personality, or whatever one may call the thing within us that every now and then increases by the addition of some idea picked up between the lines of a book, or which speaks to us in the silent language of a painting[,] the thing that every now and then awakens when some solitary, wayward tune floats past us and away, away into the distance, whence with alien movements tugs at the thin scarlet thread of our blood —the thing that is never there when we are writing minutes, building machines, going to the circus, or following any of the hundreds of other similar occupations.

The conquest of beautiful boys, whether a hallowed tradition of all-male schools or the vestigial remnant of classical poetry, is simply another way to add to one’s fund of poetic and emotional knowledge, like going to the symphony. Today we might be blunter: to refine his aesthetic sensibility, Törless participated in the rape, torture, humiliation, and emotional abuse of a gay kid.

And he did it in a confined space. It is a recurring theme (and perhaps cliché) of many of these novels that homoerotic desire must be bounded within narrow spaces, dark rooms, private attics, as if the breach in conventional morality opened by same-sex desire demands careful, diligent, and architectural containment. The boys who beat and sodomize Basini do it in a secret space in the attic above their prep school. Throughout much of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, two siblings inhabit a darkly enchanted room, bickering and berating each other as they attempt to displace unrequited or forbidden desires onto acceptable alternatives. Cocteau helpfully gives us a sketch of this room—a few wispy lines that suggest something that Henri Matisse might have painted—with two beds, parallel to each other, as if in a hospital ward. Sickness, of course, is ever-present throughout almost all of these novels as well: the cholera that kills Aschenbach in Death in Venice, the tuberculosis which Michel overcomes and to which his hapless wife succumbs in The Immoralist, and the pallor, ennui, listlessness, and fevers of Cocteau. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, a later, more deeply ambivalent contribution to this canon of illness and enclosure, takes its name from the cramped, cluttered chambre de bonne that contains this desire, with the narrator keenly aware that if what happens there—a passionate relationship between a young American man in Paris and his Italian boyfriend— escapes that space, the world of possibilities for gay men would explode. But floods of booze, perhaps alcoholism, and an almost suicidal emotional frailty haunt this space, too.

Often it is the author’s relation to these dark spaces that gives us our only reliable sense of how he envisioned the historical trajectory of being gay. In Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth Cocteau’s novel, the room becomes a ship, or a portal, transporting the youth into the larger world of adult desires. The lines are fluid, but there is a possibility of connection between the perfervid world of contained sexuality and the larger universe of sanctioned desires. In Baldwin, the young Italian proposes the two men keep their room as a space apart, a refuge for secret assignations, even as his American lover prepares to reunite with his fiancée and return to a life of normative sexuality. They could continue their relationship privately, on the side, a quiet compromise between two sexual realms. But Musil’s attic, essentially a torture chamber, is a much more desperate space, a permanent ghetto for illicit desire.

Even those among these books that were self-consciously written to advance the cause of gay men, to make their anguish more comprehensible to a reflexively hostile straight audience, leave almost no room—no space—for many openly gay readers. The parallels with colonial discourse are troubling: the colonized “other,” the homosexual making his appeal to straight society, must in turn pass on the violence and colonize and suppress yet weaker or more marginal figures on the spectrum of sexuality. Thus in the last of Gide’s daring dialogues in defense of homosexuality, first published piecemeal, then together commercially as Corydon in 1924—a tedious book full of pseudoscience and speculative extensions of Darwinian theory—the narrator contemptuously dismisses the unmanly homosexual: “If you please, we’ll leave the inverts aside for now. The trouble is that ill-informed people confuse them with normal homosexuals. And you understand, I hope, what I mean by ‘inverts.’ After all, heterosexuality too includes certain degenerates, people who are sick and obsessed.”

Along with the effeminate, the old and the aging are also beneath contempt. The casual scorn in Mann’s novella for an older man whom Aschenbach encounters on his passage to Venice is almost as horrifying as the sexual abuse and mental torture of young Basini in Musil’s novel. Among gay men, Mann’s painted clown is one of the most unsettling figures in literature, a “young-old man” whom Mann calls a “repulsive sight.” He apes the manners and dress of youth but has false teeth and bad makeup, luridly colored clothing, and a rakish hat, and is desperately trying to run with a younger crowd of men: “He was an old man, beyond a doubt, with wrinkles and crow’s feet round eyes and mouth; the dull carmine of the cheeks was rouge, the brown hair a wig.” Mann’s writing rises to a suspiciously incandescent brilliance in his descriptions of this supposedly loathsome figure. For reasons entirely unnecessary to the plot or development of his central characters, Baldwin resurrects Mann’s grotesquerie, in a phantasmagorical scene that describes an encounter between his young

American protagonist and a nameless old “queen” who approaches him in a bar:

American protagonist and a nameless old “queen” who approaches him in a bar:

The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver crucifix; the shirt was covered with paper-thin wafers, red and green and orange and yellow and blue, which stormed in the light and made one feel that the mummy might, at any moment, disappear in flame.

This is the future to which the narrator—and by extension the reader if he is a gay man—is condemned. Unless, of course, he succumbs to disease or addiction. At best there is a retreat from society, perhaps to someplace where the economic differential between the Western pederast and the colonized boy makes an endless string of anonymous liaisons economically feasible. Violent death is the worst of the escapes. Not content with merely parodying older gay men, Baldwin must also murder them. In a scene that does gratuitous violence to the basic voice and continuity of the book, the narrator imagines in intimate detail events he has not actually witnessed: the murder of a flamboyant bar owner who sexually harasses and extorts the young Giovanni (by this point betrayed, abandoned, and reduced to what is, in effect, prostitution). The murder happens behind closed doors, safely contained in a room filled with “silks, colors, perfumes.”

3.

If I remember with absolute clarity the first same-sex kiss I encountered in literature, I don’t remember very well when my interest in specifically homoerotic narrative began to wane. But again, thanks to the physicality of the book, I have an archaeology more reliable than memory. As a young reader, I was in the habit of writing the date when I finished a book on the inside front cover, and so I know that sometime shortly before I turned twenty-one, my passion for dark tales of unrequited desire, sexual manipulation, and destructive Nietzschean paroxysms of self-transcendence peaked, then flagged. That was also the same time that I came out to friends and family, which was prompted by the complete loss of hope that a long and unrequited love for a classmate might be returned. Logic suggests that these events were related, that the collapse of romantic illusions and the subsequent initiation of an actual erotic life with real, living people dulled the allure of Wilde, Gide, Mann, and the other authors who were loosely in their various orbits.

were loosely in their various orbits.

It happened this way: For several years I had been drawn to a young man who seemed to me curiously like Hans from Hesse’s novel. Physically, at least, they were alike: “Deep-set, uneasy eyes glowed dimly in his handsome and delicate face; fine wrinkles, signs of troubled thinking, twitched on his forehead, and his thin, emaciated arms and hands hung at his side with the weary gracefulness reminiscent of a figure by Botticelli.” But in every other way my beloved was an invention. I projected onto him an elaborate but entirely imaginary psychology, which I now suspect was cobbled together from bits and pieces of the books I had been reading. He was sad, silent, and doomed, like Hans, but also cold, remote, and severe, like Törless, cruelly beautiful like all the interchangeable sailors and hoodlums in Genet, but also intellectual, suffering, and mystically connected to dark truths from which I was excluded. When I recklessly confessed my love to him—how long I had nurtured it and how complex, beautiful, and poetic it was—he responded not with anger or disgust but impatience: “You can’t put all this on me.”

He was right. It took me only a few days to realize it intellectually, a few weeks to begin accepting it emotionally, and a few years not to feel fear and shame in his presence. He had recognized in an instant that what I had felt for years, rather like Swann for Odette, had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t even love, properly speaking. I can’t claim that it was all clear to me at the time, that I was conscious of any connection between what I had read and the excruciating dead end of my own fantasy life. I make these connections in retrospect. But the realization that I would never be with him because he didn’t in fact exist—not in the way I imagined him—must have soured me on the literature of longing, torment, and convoluted desire. And the challenge and excitement of negotiating a genuine erotic life rendered so much of what I had found in these books painfully dated and irrelevant.

I want to be rigorously honest about my feelings for this literature, whether it distorted my sense of self and even, perhaps, corrupted my imagination. The safe thing to say is that I can’t possibly find an answer to that, not simply because memory is unreliable, but because we never know whether books implant things in us or merely confirm what is already there. In Young Törless, Musil proposes the idea that the great literature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and William Shakespeare is essentially a transitional crutch for young minds, a mental prosthesis or substitute identity during the formlessness of adolescence: “These associations originating outside, and these borrowed emotions, carry young people over the dangerously soft spiritual ground of the years in which they need to be of some significance to themselves and nevertheless are still too incomplete to have any real significance.”

It’s important to divorce the question of how these books may have influenced me from the malicious accusations of corruption that have dogged gay fiction from the beginning. In the course of our reading lives, we will devour dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crude, scabrous, violent books, with no discernible impact on our moral constitution. And homosexual writers certainly didn’t invent the general connection between sexuality and illness, or the thin line between passion and violence, or sadism and masochism, or the sexual exploitation of the young or defenseless. And the mere mention of same-sex desire is still seen in too many places around the world today as inherently destructive to young minds. Gide’s Corydon decried the illogic of this a century ago: “And if, in spite of advice, invitations, provocations of all kinds, he should manifest a homosexual tendency, you immediately blame his reading or some other influence (and you argue in the same way for an entire nation, an entire people); it has to be an acquired taste, you insist; he must have been taught it; you refuse to admit that he might have invented it all by himself.”

And I want to register an important caveat about the literature of same-sex desire: it is not limited to the books I read, the authors I encountered, or the tropes that now seem to me so sad and destructive. In 1928, E. M. Forster wrote a short story called “Arthur Snatchfold” that wasn’t published until 1972, two years after the author’s death. In it, an older man, Sir Richard Conway, respectable in all ways, visits the country estate of a business acquaintance, where he has a quick, early-morning sexual encounter with a young deliveryman in a field near the house. Later, as Sir Richard chats with his host at their club in London, he learns that the liaison was seen by a policeman, the young man was arrested, and the authorities sent him to prison. To his great relief, Sir Richard also learns that he himself is safe from discovery, that the “other man” was never identified, and despite great pressure on the working-class man to incriminate his upper-class partner, he refused to do so.

“He [the deliveryman] was instantly removed from the court and as he went he shouted back at us—you’ll never credit this��that if he and the old grandfather didn’t mind it why should anyone else,” says Sir Richard’s host, fatuously indignant about the whole affair. Sir Richard, ashamed and sad but trapped in the armor of his social position, does the only thing he can: “Taking a notebook from his pocket, he wrote down the name of his lover, yes, his lover who was going to prison to save him, in order that he might not forget it.” It isn’t a great story, but it is an important moment in the evolution of an idea of loyalty and honor within the emerging category of homosexual identity. I didn’t

discover it until years after it might have done me some good.

Forster’s story is exceptional because only one man is punished, and he is given a voice—and a final, clear, unequivocal protest against the injustice. The other man escapes, but into shame, guilt, and self-recrimination. And yet it is the escapee who takes up the pen and begins to write. We might say of Sir Richard what we often say of our parents as we come to peace with them: he did the best he could. And for all the internalized homophobia of the authors I began reading more than thirty years ago, I would say the same thing. They did the best they could. They certainly did far more than privately inscribe a name in a book. I can’t honestly say that I would have had even Sir Richard’s limited courage in 1928.

But Forster’s story, which he didn’t dare publish while he was alive, is the exception, not the rule. It is painful to read the bulk of this early canon, and it will only become more and more painful, as gay subcultures dissolve and the bourgeois respectability that so many of these authors abandoned yet craved becomes the norm. In Genet, marriage between two men was the ultimate profanation, one of the strongest inversions of value the author could muster to scandalize his audience and delight his rebellious readers. The image of samesex marriage was purely explosive, a strategy for blasting apart the hypocrisy and pretentions of traditional morality. Today it is becoming commonplace.

I wonder if these books will survive like the literature of abolition, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—marginal, dated, remembered as important for its earnest, sentimental ambition but also a catalogue of stereotypes. Or if they will be mostly forgotten, like the nineteenth-century literature of aesthetic perversity and decadence that many of these authors so deeply admired. Will Gide and Genet be as obscure to readers as Huysmans and the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)?

I hope not, and not least because they mattered to me, and helped forge a common language of reference among many gay men of my generation. I hope they survive for the many poignant epitaphs they contain, grave markers for the men who were used, abused, and banished from their pages. Let me write them down in my notebook, so I don’t forget their names: Hans, who loved Hermann; Basini, who loved Törless; the Page of Herodias, who loved the Young Syrian; Giovanni, who loved David; and all the rest, unnamed, often with no voice, but not forgotten.

TIM KREIDER

[rwby-redux]

Deconstruction

Worldbuilding: Geography

Full disclosure: I hated doing this post. Not because the writing was difficult or the topic was boring—far from it. No, the reason I hated doing this was because I got sucked into a wikihole. I started out researching climate zones, and ten hours later I was reading an article about Icelandic hot spring rye bread (which is called hverabrauð by the way and you should absolutely check it out). I only realized what time it was when I looked out my window and saw the sun starting to rise. Try to picture what my sleep schedule has looked like for the last few days, and you can see why I might be just a smidge upset.

Sorry. Where was I?

Ah, yes: geography. The bane of cartographers everywhere. If you’ve ever dabbled in writing stories with a non-Earth setting, you’ll know that one of the most fundamental aspects of worldbuilding is the lay of the land. Even before you’ve started working on the cultures of your fictional people (or hell, even the plot), you need to develop the locations. Any writer worth their salt will correctly tell you that geography dictates who the characters are, what the story’s about, when major actions occur, where the major story beats take place, why things progress the way they do, and how certain steps are achieved.

Want an example of this? Take a look at the geography of Avatar: The Last Airbender and how it influenced the Fire Nation’s culture and resulting imperialistic conquest: [1]               

A geographic map of Avatar: The Last Airbender depicting the four major countries: the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, Water Tribes, and Air Temples. | Source: Imgur.

The Fire Nation, being located on a volcanic archipelago, was able to jumpstart its industrial revolution decades before anyone else, courtesy of access to natural resources such as coal and metal ore deposits (which were disproportionately scarcer in the other countries). This abundance of minerals was reflected in gold being commonly incorporated into Fire Nation royal attire, and the Fire Nation boasting some of the most proficient blacksmiths and swordfighters in the world (like Piandao).

Being an island nation, their culinary staples included aquatic and marine species such as waterfowl, fish, cephalopods, crustaceans, bivalves, and seaweed.

The mountainous regions of the Fire Nation made the land ill-suited for agriculture, which likely influenced the development of an oceanic trade route. This allowed for the import of otherwise-unavailable resources from the Earth Kingdom.

The trade route helped to reinforce a unified state by connecting all seaports, trading outposts, and settlements in the archipelago to the major urban capital. This interconnectivity created economic advantages, and solidified a sense of cultural unity and loyalty to the nation by making communication (via ship and messenger hawk) direct and expedient.

The navy emerged as a natural outgrowth of the oceanic trade route. Martial vessels would have been necessary for protecting merchant ships from pirates, collecting taxes from provincial settlements (because navies have steep operating costs), and enforcing the laws of the central authority. Similarly, as an island country, the only way the Fire Nation could have feasibly been harmed is through a naval attack, which would have given it the incentive to cultivate a naval defense.

At the beginning of the Hundred Year War, the Fire Nation seized control of the northwestern Earth Kingdom because the region was rich in resources that they would need to sustain themselves if they were going to survive without international trade.

Their technologically-advanced navy and control of the major oceanic trade routes allowed the Fire Nation to orchestrate blockades, quickly transport troops and equipment between places, and limit the tactical movements of the other countries.

To say that geography dictates the story is an understatement—without it, the story wouldn’t exist. Good writing and likeable characters can only do so much to save a story that lacks this crucial component of worldbuilding.

So, how does this apply to RWBY?

In order to talk about that, first we have to address the unusual way that Remnant’s map was designed.

Back in 2012, while out at an IHOP with Shane Newville, Monty Oum had the idea of squirting a ketchup bottle into a napkin, crumpling it up, and then unfolding it to reveal the blotchy proto-topography of Remnant. His reason for doing so, as he explains:

“The philosophy behind [making the map that way] is that, I feel like, as a 3D animator […] utilizing all this technology, our process—all these computers, all these numbers and stuff—our process is so artificial, it’s riddled with so much artifice, that not only for that, but for everything else I do, I try to imbue kind of like an anarchy, an anarchic-like chaos, just to give it some sense of, like, randomness. Like, you need to preserve that sense of chaos because the process we do is so robotic. […] But the important thing was, like especially with everything that we just raise in our production value, that you have to preserve that anarchic energy that influences everything you do.” [2]

The original terrain map created by Monty Oum. | Source: RWBY Wiki contributor user:Sgt D Grif.

You’d be hard-pressed to disagree with the artistic merit of this design approach. There’s a simplistic elegance to be found in a creator forfeiting a degree of their control over a project, in order to watch how it might organically evolve.

But here’s the thing: this isn’t like leaving slime molds in a petri dish and letting them network until they resemble Japanese subway lines. While anarchic chaos can work for some disciplines of art, it creates glaring issues when applied to worldbuilding. Nature, although it appears outwardly random, is actually rather ordered. The reason why we don’t leave our houses every day carrying umbrellas is because we don’t have to—we have meteorologists that can anticipate the forecast days or weeks ahead. Plenty of natural phenomena can be predicted: weather systems over vast areas, environmental selection pressures converging on similar traits…

And, of course, plate tectonics.

You see, the problem with Monty’s method is that it didn’t account for the movement of Remnant’s continents. Because the planet’s continents were born from artistic randomness rather than methodical and deliberate forethought, we have no reliable access to certain information, like atmospheric circulation, ocean currents, or plate boundaries. All three of these planetary subsystems—the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere—and their dynamics shape the geography of a planet.

Without this information, we can’t answer certain questions.

Was Lake Matsu formed by glacial retreat?

Are Vale’s mountains sitting on a convergent plate boundary? Or are they more like the Appalachians, which are the remains of the Central Pangean Mountains?

If Vale’s mountains were formed by convergent plate boundaries, then why don’t we see evidence of it in the forms of volcanism and earthquakes?

Is Vacuo’s interior desert formed by a rain shadow?

If Solitas’ geography is based on a polar ice cap, then how did early settlers survive long enough to excavate the Dust? How would they have dug through the ice and permafrost?

Has climate change ever resulted in changes in sea level that submerged or exposed the continents? Did early humans and Faunus move between continents by land bridges? Have rises in sea level ever hidden continents (like Earth’s Zealandia)?

Does Mistral’s capital rely on meltwater from the surrounding mountains for irrigating crops?

When the Younger Brother shattered the moon, did the lunar debris alter the landscape when it fell to Remnant? Was it like the Chicxulub asteroid that caused the K-Pg extinction? Did the lunar debris leave craters on the planet’s surface, or cause phenomena like impact winters and ocean acidification?

It bears mentioning that these questions pertain to real-life geographic concepts. This isn’t even touching upon fictional geographic concepts that RWBY introduced, like largescale Dust deposits altering the local environment in such a way that it functionally becomes its own ecosystem (like Lake Matsu’s floating islands). We’re also assuming that RWBY’s continental plates are capable of drift, and weren’t magically glued in place by the gods during the formation of the planet.

Given the scale of these problems, I think it’s safe to say that—while I can appreciate the artistry behind Monty’s design philosophy—the way he designed Remnant ultimately did more harm than good.

While I could spend all afternoon debating the pros and cons of condiment cartography, there are more productive things I could be doing with my time. Instead, I want to discuss Remnant’s geography as it currently is. Specifically, there are three questions I want to test:

How well does the geography hold up?

Does the geography have a realistic influence on society?

How well does the show integrate foreign geographic features into its worldbuilding?

As a quick disclaimer, I’m not an expert on any of the aforementioned subsystems. And because I don’t have any canonical information on Remnant’s atmospheric circulation, ocean currents, or plate boundaries, it becomes impossible to prove or disprove the realism of its geography. For now, we’re going to err on the side of caution and assume that Remnant is a planet with a functionally-analogous lithosphere to Earth’s, and that Remnant’s features are byproducts of such a system.

The current geographic map of Remnant. It boasts five major continents (of which only four have been named) and multiple islands. | Source: World of Remnant, Volume 4, Episode 1: “Vale.”

How Well Does the Geography Hold Up?

To answer this, I used the Köppen-Geiger climate classification to categorize Remnant’s main landmasses (with the exception of the unnamed continent). This model organizes areas into distinct climatic regions based on seasonal precipitation and temperature patterns. The results I cobbled together are based on approximate latitude, ecosystems that we’ve seen in the show, canon maps, and comparisons between the continents and their real-world sources of inspiration (Asia for Anima, North America for eastern Sanus, Australia for Menagerie, etc). Here’s what I came up with:

SANUS: Tropical savanna (Aw/As), cold desert (BWk), cold semi-arid (BSk), hot-summer mediterranean (Csa), warm-summer mediterranean (Csb), humid subtropical (Cfa, Cwa), hot-summer humid continental (Dfa), warm-summer humid continental (Dfb)

ANIMA: Tropical rainforest (Af), area of tropical monsoon (Am), tropical savanna (Aw/As), desert (BWh), hot semi-arid (BSh), humid subtropical (Cfa, Cwa), subtropical highland (Cwb), hot-summer humid continental (Dfa), warm-summer humid continental (Dfb), subarctic (Dfc), Mediterranean-influenced subarctic (Dsc)

SOLITAS: Tundra (ET), subarctic (Dfc), ice cap (EF)

MENAGERIE: Tropical savanna (Aw/As), desert (BWh), hot semi-arid (BSh), humid subtropical (Cfa, Cwa), temperate oceanic (Cfb)

VYTAL: Subpolar oceanic (Cfb)

This isn’t perfect by any means, but I think it satisfies some lingering doubt about the credibility of the geography. Sanus’ interior desert, for example, could easily be a cold desert climate. The exterior band of foliage on the northern and western sides appears to be indicative of a rain shadow effect caused by a mountain belt (the conditions necessary for creating this climate type). We have evidence of there being nearby western mountains courtesy of the earthquakes in Vacuo, [3] as earthquakes often occur near mountain ranges created by subduction boundaries. Similarly, oases (like the one once found in Vacuo) tend to form in cold desert climates as the result of rain shadows (similar to the el-Djerid oases near the Atlas Mountains).

All things considered, I’m inclined to give the climate regions a tentative pass. Like I said, they’re not perfect, but they seem to be holding up so far.

Does the Geography Have a Realistic Influence on Society?

Ehhh. It depends. With Vale it’s hard to say, given how little we’ve seen of the areas outside the capital (like the Emerald Forest and Forever Fall), and the fact that we haven’t visited any other cities in the kingdom. We know that Vale makes use of a massive port for trade and travel due to the nearby body of water. But there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unique about the capital’s culture that can be directly attributed to its geography. Despite being a coastal city, it doesn’t have any signature delicacies derived from the abundant seafood. The architecture is largely generic urban-Western, and doesn’t incorporate the mountains in any way. Vale’s geography is little more than a convenient buffer against the Grimm.

Mistral, on the other hand, is heavily influenced by the geography. All of its houses and shops are directly integrated into the mountains, with an emphasis on vertical building to accommodate the limited space on the cliffs. Stairs, bridges, and electronic lifts are used for getting around the city. Unlike Vale, Atlas, and Mantle, which use motor vehicles, Mistral doesn’t have the space to accommodate modern roads, and instead relies on railroad transport (like the Argus Limited) to move around the continent. Compared to Vale, Mistral is a vast improvement on how well the writers used geography to influence the culture of a city. However, I still think the show could’ve done more to strengthen this connection. For instance, we see evidence of cave systems in Mistral, which briefly appear on-screen and are never brought up again. [4] Talk about wasted potential. Additionally, the show never addresses how the Council keeps its citizens from falling to death. No joke, the only place in the city that has railings is the safehouse where Qrow and the kids stay. What the hell do people do in the winter when the stairs and paths ice over? How do they not slip and fall and plummet to their deaths? And while I’m thinking about it, why doesn’t the city have a system of ziplines or ski lifts for getting around? Are native-born Mistrali people adapted to the lower oxygen found at higher elevations? And what about Mistral’s agriculture? Do farmers live outside the capital? How do they protect themselves?

Like I said, Mistral is better than Vale in this department, but it could still do with more worldbuilding.

Atlas and Mantle are more akin to Vale when it comes to noticeable geographic influence—or rather, a lack thereof. While the technology accommodates its residents via the heating grid, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of how the geography shaped the people of this continent. You’d expect a circumpolar indigenous group to have very distinct cultural traits, but there’s none of that. It’s just rampant technological growth. Now, you could argue that any aspect of geographic influence on culture was wiped out around the time of the Great War. But if the show wants me to believe that, it needs to show me proof. Whether it’s a conversation between two characters, or a political movement spearheading cultural revitalization. Something—anything—that might hint at how geography influenced pre-industrial Mantle.

And forgive me if I don’t feel like speculating about Vacuo, given that it’s only appeared in After the Fall and Before the Dawn. When the show decides to unveil it, then I’ll have more to say.

As for Menagerie? Another resounding meh. The inherent intrigue of a settlement that shelters aquatic Faunus is never fully explored. We get to briefly visit the Shallow Sea district of Kuo Kuana, but the scene is too focused on Blake’s and Sun’s conversation to let us fully explore the area. Which is a shame, because a concept like that could easily be taken to some really cool extremes. Like, what about entirely underwater settlements that are built on coral reefs? How cool would that be for Faunus that have gills, webbed appendages, or caudal fins? I’m not expecting Zootopia or anything like that, but it’d be neat if settlers had gone to creative extremes to accommodate the wide variety of Faunus traits.

How Well Does the Show Integrate Foreign Geographic Features into Its Worldbuilding?

In Volume 5 we’re introduced to Lake Matsu, an area rich with naturally-occurring superterranean Gravity Dust. What makes this place so intriguing is the fact that the Dust is in a constant active state, causing the islands to float in the air. Given that Dust is usually inert unless activated by an Aura, the existence of this place is frankly astonishing, and for the life of me I don’t get why the show treated it as little more than set dressing.

This phenomenon—which I’ve taken to calling a Dust vortex—has so much worldbuilding potential. What if Remnant had pseudo-ephemeral lakes created by concentrations of Water Dust? Or how about a cave system with an abundance of Electricity Dust that causes magnetic charges in the surrounding minerals, creating a place similar to Unova’s Chargestone Cave? Maybe Sanus’ southeastern desert has large pockets of Steam Dust that enshroud the area in permanent fog?

Dust vortices wouldn’t just be aesthetically cool, either; they’d have important implications for the lore. Let’s use Lake Matsu as an example.

If the Dust vortex has been there for a long time (upwards of thousands of years), then the organisms in this ecosystem would’ve adapted to it. You would have endemic wildlife—agamid-like gliding lizards, plants with wind-dispersed fruit, lianas and mosses draped from the underside of the islands, diving birds that nest on the outcrops, microbial detritivores found exclusively in the islands’ soil. Maybe Lake Matsu is an important stopover for migrating birds. Maybe the shadows from the overhead islands are important for predatory fish, which hide in the shade to ambush flying insects. Because the wildlife would be endemic to this ecosystem, perhaps the Mistrali government would designate it a protected area and prevent Dust companies from excavating the site. What if there were fishing towns on the shore that depended on tourism to sustain the local economy? Would they ever come into conflict with Dust companies that lobby the government to open up the area to selective mining?

I’m sure I must sound like a broken record at this point, but the worldbuilding possibilities on display here are nothing short of incredible. And the failure of RWBY to explore even a single one feels like getting repeatedly kicked in the stomach by a feral horse.

We’re now 3,000 words in and I didn’t even get to include ideas for tautological place names. It sucks, but sometimes you have to compromise and go with the idea that make sense to include, rather than the idea that exists just to be novel.

Sound familiar?

-

[1] Hello Future Me. “Avatar: A Study in Worldbuilding — the Fire Nation [ The Last Airbender ]” YouTube video. October 26, 2019. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa2BD13VzxY&t=3s]

[2] Rooster Teeth. “RT Podcast: Ep. 191.” YouTube video. November 14, 2012. 7:52 - 12:01. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kymVnsIUWLY]

[3] Myers, E. C. RWBY: Before the Dawn (Book 2). Scholastic Inc, 2020. Online preview. “The city of Vacuo had some order to it, with different districts for residences and businesses, and a wide street down the center for the market. But the outer edges of it were periodically wiped out, because of sandstorms or sinkholes or earthquakes.”

[4] Volume 5, Episode 1: “Welcome to Haven.”

#deconstruction #worldbuilding #writing #geography

[mllemaenad]

Wizards in Harry Potter aren't liable to be possessed by literal demons from Hell regardless of their good intentions. Furthermore, non-magical people in Harry Potter also have guns, sniper rifles combat planes, tanks, heat seeking missiles, NUCLEAR BOMBS to equalize the fight if a dark wizard starts thinking that he should rule them. The two settings are completely different. Give these advantages to non-magical people in Thedas and I will agree that the Circles aren't necessary.

Hi Anonymous person!

Look. I’m a little perturbed by what you’ve got there, because you seem awfully willing to cause harm to helpless people on the basis of what they might do. But I’ll do this in chunks.

Wizards in Harry Potter aren’t liable to be possessed by literal demons from Hell regardless of their good intentions.

Well. Neither are mages in Dragon Age, largely because ‘hell’ doesn’t exist. I know that sounds flippant, but it’s important. Andrastianism isn’t Christianity, of course, but it does have a Christian aesthetic – more specifically a Catholic one – and the Chantry operates in a world reminiscent of a time when a pope could dominate kings and start holy wars.

That Christian aesthetic is also applied to spirits. Instead of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ we have Enchanter Brahm’s five demons: rage, hunger, sloth, desire and pride. It’s a useful game mechanic, absolutely; you can’t have infinite monster designs in a game, and it helps the player figure out what kind of weapons to employ in any given fight. However, as the story goes on it becomes increasingly clear that the Chantry’s view of spirits and demons is simplistic at best and outright wrong at worst.

Spirits embody something that has become important to them. There are many, many more kinds than the Chantry’s sins and virtues lists would acknowledge. There’s a spirit of Command hanging out in Crestwood in Inquisition who just really wants someone to obey its orders for a while. Solas will talk to you about a spirit who embodies an ideal people have forgotten.

Demons seem to be largely spirits who have suffered in some way. We usually don’t know why. Solas’s friend is an obvious example – a spirit who was inexpertly summoned and trapped by frightened mages. It’s also noteworthy that Merrill talks about her ‘demon’ being bound and left over from war. While of course we can’t know exactly what happened there, we can fucking guess, right?

These are all just beings – people. And they’re all from the same place. Not hell, heaven, purgatory or anything like that. They’re from The Fade, which is their home, the source of magic, and was apparently much closer to the rest of the world before Solas and the Veil.

I’ve noted repeatedly that spirit possession is an important part of several cultures, and is often a positive thing. Possessed mages serve as companion characters (Wynne, Anders) and kick some serious arse in battle, and Justice just wanders around in Awakening wearing a corpse and it’s fine.

Of course, no one is saying that possession can’t go wrong. I’ve played the games, and of course my characters have killed both ‘demons’ and ‘abominations’. But. When you say something like ‘demons from hell’ you’re imposing a particular religious view on the story – one that allows you to simply declare that these people are evil and that it’s fine to kill them. We know that it is possible to liberate a possessed mage, and to heal a spirit who has been corrupted. We have seen both those things. But why bother if they’re evil, right? Just lock them up and kill them if things get tricky.

That view is wholly wrong for the setting of Dragon Age. But it is … pretty well on par with the view the Chantry actually expresses. So when you say ‘demons from hell’ I actually think that’s an excellent reason why the Circles should be abolished, because it’s imposing ideas on this situation that are wrong, unhelpful and cruel.

Also. I mean. Also. Yes, I have fought possessed mages in Dragon Age. I have also fought possessed templars. Possessed trees. Possessed bones. Possessed rocks.

If you feel we need to lock up everything that can get possessed, you’re going to have to start with all the people and then move on to all the plants and inanimate objects. If all things can be possessed, then all things need to be locked up. And if all things are inside the prison, couldn’t we just … not have one?

Furthermore, non-magical people in Harry Potter also have guns, sniper rifles combat planes, tanks, heat seeking missiles, NUCLEAR BOMBS to equalize the fight if a dark wizard starts thinking that he should rule them.

Um. Sorry Anonymous person but … what? Have you … read those books? Now, granted I haven’t read them in a while but I have read them. And … I have no idea what you’re talking about.

‘Muggles’ in Harry Potter are usually comic relief, and even the ones that aren’t simple buffoons are depicted as largely helpless against magical attacks of any kind. The British government shows up just long enough to express a heartfelt ‘What the actual fuck?’ at the war with Voldemort before promptly vanishing from the plot again.

All of this … stuff about conventional weapons you’ve introduced has come from your imagination. It’s not how the relationship between Muggles and wizards is portrayed in the novels at all.

In fact, conceptually, I would say that the wizards of Harry Potter are much scarier than the mages of Dragon Age. Tevinter had an empire in Dragon Age, and because they value magic the magisters undoubtedly used it in the fight to obtain that empire. But they were taken down by famine and Blight, and finished off by war. In the series’ ‘present day’ Orlais has achieved the exact same thing as Tevinter with significantly less magic (not no magic, of course, since they will drag their imprisoned mages into battle), and there’s no sense that Tevinter can just zap its way back into power. They are constrained by economics, geography and politics just like everyone else. Magic is useful, but only up to a point.

Now … in Harry Potter, there’s a pretty strong sense that wizards could just take over the planet any time they felt like it. In fact, the back story contains one Grindelwald, who actually did want to take over the world and enslave Muggles. This was not a war between Muggles (who are not supposed to have been able to prevent this) and wizards, but rather an internal schism in the wizarding community. Gindelwald was not defeated by NUCLEAR BOMBS (And seriously – what the hell, is your plan to defeat wizards ‘flatten Scotland’? because that’s what would happen if you tried to bomb Hogwarts. You want to take out Diagon Alley? Congratulations, you just blew up London.), but rather in an old style man-to-man duel with another wizard. In a castle. They were ex-lovers. I’m assuming it was on the ramparts, it was raining and everyone was screaming like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith.

I haven’t kept up with it, but I am peripherally aware that J K Rowling has said … increasingly weird things over the years, and I’m not attempting to defend any of that. But there was a general … theme in the novels that … most people probably aren’t fascists, and when the fascists come from within it is the community that must take them down. So Muggles are not given much power or agency at all.

This had nothing to do with heat-seeking missiles. Just … what?

Meanwhile, over in Dragon Age the Chantry talks a lot about mages having advantages in battle, but in practice that’s not what we actually see. For a start, non-mages have plenty of weapons that work just fine against magical enemies - swords, spears, arrows, axes. Nobody in Thedas has NUCLEAR BOMBS, mage or not. It’s not setting appropriate. Anders may have been a mage, but he had to rely on explosive material (likely gunpowder) to actually get a significant bang.

Non-mages may also wield enchanted weapons, meaning that they can literally take magic into battle with them. The mage over there is shooting lightning from her fingers? Your sword shoots fireballs. What the hell are you complaining about?

Nor does simply having a weapon in your hand mean that you know how to use it. I don’t know how to use a gun. Someone could give me one, in a crisis, I suppose. But it would only be luck that allowed me to incapacitate an assailant, and I certainly couldn’t fight several. Most ‘ordinary’ people in Thedas won’t have much in the way of weaponry. But likewise, neither will mages. They have magic, but that isn’t the same thing.

How many dead bodies do you need to prove this? The mage who was apparently murdered by villagers in Crestwood, when she went in to try to help them. The mages cut down by the Qunari swords in The Demands of the Qun. The villagers who were going to fucking lynch Rhys and his friends in Asunder.

It feels like you’ve made up a story about how magic works in both of these series that isn’t true to either of them.

Give these advantages to non-magical people in Thedas and I will agree that the Circles aren’t necessary.

So … to be clear, you’re arguing for:

the abduction of and permanent separation of children from their parents

forced conversion to a religion and the suppression of alternative religious beliefs

deprivation of citizenship and the basic rights that come with that

reducing people to a permanent infantile status as wards of a religious institution

permanent surveillance of affected individuals (phylacteries)

execution without trial where deemed appropriate by religious authorities

… because people might get possessed and can sometimes make fire come out of their hands? Well. Okay then. Good to know.

#dragon age #chantry critical #Anonymous

[dxmedstudent]

On contraceptives and medicine...

Occasionally you come across threads online where people seem to think that contraceptives are some kind of medical conspiracy. There’s a narrative that ‘medicine doesn’t know ANYTHING about women’s problems so medicine is useless and doctors don’t know anything’. There’s still been a lot of research; not enough but that’s true of many conditions. Whilst there’s a very real gap in research and accommodation when it comes to women, how it is depicted is often simplistic.  We do need more research, but in the meantime we need to encourage people to make use of what we have now to empower themselves. As a woman, I have to make do with what we have now, whilst I encourage medicine to do better.  Science and medicine hasn’t always served women, but it’s something that is slowly being addressed. Yes, contraceptives also have a checquered past. A lot of medicines have a dodgy and far from illustrious past; we can’t realistically throw out everything in history with a less than perfect past. On an individual level, some people have horrible experiences with doctors. We need to hold people to account if they are failing their patients and work on better training for new doctors if current training is lacking.  I, too, haven’t always been ideally served as a patient. As a woman and doctor, I think this is harmful because it dissuades people from seeking help. If you keep hearing that nobody is any good, and that nobody knows anything anyway, why would you bother? We need to encourage people to educate themselves and empower them to look for doctors who can listen and help, not spread the idea that it’s useless.  So there are a few ideas that I think it would help to clear up: Asking about your sexual health is part of holistic healthcare It is wrong for a doctor to assume that a young person (or person of any age) should be sexually active. I’ve had chats like that as a patient when I was younger and it’s awkward because you shouldn’t have to explain why you aren’t sexually active; it’s enough for that to simply be a choice you’ve made. And it shouldn’t be treated as a weird thing. However, it’s not wrong for a doctor to ask if someone is sexually active; sexual health is part of holistic care. I’ve seen people literally say ‘doctors asume we’re all sluts’ or ‘doctors are patronising by assuming I don’t know all about sex’.  I can’t argue if someone feels that their doctor took a patronising tone they need to improve on. But asking if someone is having sex of any sort is not assuming that you’re promiscuous, and it does not inherently have to be a value judgement. It’s covering the fact that many (actually most) people are sexually active at some point, and the vast majority of people are sexually active before marriage. A good healthcare professional shouldn’t care at all whether you are having sex before marriage (or at all); it should be a neutral topic to them. Their only care should be; does what you are doing fulfil you, and how can they make it as safe as possible. If a doctor is being judgemental, that’s on them, and that’s bad care. But being judgemental is not an integral part of the process. And that’s part of your health care that especially needs covering if you go to see a doctor about your reproductive organs. It’s also important for healthcare professionals not to assume how much you know about your reproductive tract, sexual health or contraception. We all have a different amount of knowledge and different experiences; if their manner is off, that’s frustrating and they need to work on that, but that does not make it wrong to try to ensure that you’re starting from a good foundation. I’ve talked to patients with a very wide range of understanding of their bodies - our jobs as clinicians are to ensure that whatever someone’s baseline knowledge is, we can relay information in a way that suits them, rather than with jargon.

PIV is not the only form of sex We also need to abolish this idea that there is ‘the Sex’ and ‘everthing but’ as if they are two wholly separate patterns of behaviour. Sex of any sort is part of the spectrum of sexual behaviour. It doesn’t matter if the P hasn’t hit the V; sexually transmissible infections are still a thing, as long as any bits get anywhere near genitals and body fluids have a way of getting... everywhere. Sex, even playing around, is a messy process. I’ve definitely seen a few posts in these threads with the theme of ‘well I wasn’t virginal, but I was technically a virgin’ -  it doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t have to explain yourself in terms of how far you did or didn’t get. Holistic care would still recommend the discussion of contraception and limiting the risks of infection transmission, if you have any sexual activity with someone. You can still be a ‘technical virgin’ and be at risk of STIs, and therefore in certain contexts that’s still an appropriate discussion for clinicians to have with you. That’s not to say that people don’t often have important reasons for enjoying different kinds of sexual activities at different times in their lives; you’re not accountable to anyone for your choices and it’s your body. But I feel that in some of these posts I detect an underlying theme of ‘ well, what I was doing wasn’t real sex, so don’t lump me with those slutty people having premarital sex’.

I mean, it’s pretty weird - someone could be playing around with their partner and as long as they stop short of PIV, it’s considered acceptable, but PIV is taboo - but all the other things are also pretty intimate, and, also well, still sex. You can put yourself through all sorts of mental gymnastics about ‘real sex’ versus ‘everything else’ to justify things, but in the end it’s all pretty similar. You’ve got intimacy and body fluids going on.

You don’t have to have Sex (TM) to be at risk of infections. And infections aren’t something to be ashamed of, or a sign that you’re promiscuous, or even that your partner has been promiscuous; all it takes is for them to have been with one other person in their lives. And frankly, it’s ridiculous that someone can have had sex with exactly (1) other person in the context of a loving relationship and be labelled slutty.  I know these threads are often in the context of US conservative Christian marriages, but sex outside of heteronormativity exists, and protection is still very necessary even in those situations. Most people these days are having extramarital sex, regardless of their orientation, and medical care needs to reflect that. So you may be asked questions about the other kinds of sex you are having, if it’s relevant. Vaccines are important and STIs don’t come with warning labels. The HPV vaccine is important. I’m glad my GP told me of a prescribing loophole through which she could prescribe it for me; I was a little older than the cut-off, but I had never been sexually active, and she knew that it was important to protect as many people as possible. The vaccine itself isn’t 100% but it’s better than nothing, given that HPV is almost ubiquitous. 8/10 people will catch it, and condoms are only about 70% successful at preventing spread, so if you have sex with anyone, there’s a good chance you might get it. Saying “I don’t need the vaccine because I only ever plan to have sex with one person” is risky and badly thought out.  Because it relies on that other person never having had sexual contact with anyone else, ever, and I don’t think it’s fair to place that expectation on a partner. And if they know there’s that expectation, what’s to stop them from lying? Anyone is entitled to refuse vaccination, of course. It’s a free country. But refusing a vaccination is never without risks, which are almost always greater than those of the vaccine themselves. Cervical cancer is horrible and people can die young, and treatments can affect your ability to carry pregnancies. Plus, genital warts are nasty, and if you can decrease the risk of both, why not?  The cervical cancer vaccine carries a stigma specifically because it relates to sexual activity. Whilst we’re at it, there’s no such thing as ‘I know my partner doesn’t have STIs’. This simply does not exist. You can’t 100% know for certain that your partner has never had sexual contact with another person - if you’re in a cultural situation where people expect their partner to be a virgin, you’re also in a situation where people are motivated to lie if they fall short of this expectation to cover their reputation. And if they have been with anyone, then you don’t know if they could have caught something. Hey, I’ve seen a lot of penises and vulvas, and although I can say that someone looks healthy or normal, that’s not guarantee of not having infections. For example, chlamydia and gonorrhoea are often symptomless but can damage fertility, and HIV can often go years without any symptoms or problems. Unless someone has tested negative (and they haven’t slept with anyone new in that incubation window period), then you just don’t know.  You also can’t 100% know that your partner isn’t cheating or has never cheated. Now, on a personal level, we all have to believe our partner is honest; that’s how relationships work, through trust. So I’m not going to tell you to assume your partner is doing the dirty on you.  But on a statistical level? Cheating partners cause significant spread of sexually transmitted disease, particularly if they have sex with sex workers. This is something that happens around the world, in conservative as well as liberal environments.  So even if you never plan to sleep wth anyone else, sometimes you can still suffer the consequences of someone else’s risky behaviour. It’s not fair and it’s not nice, but in healthcare we have to deal with that reality. That’s also why the vaccine remains relevant even in conservative communities. On a statistical level, even in communities where promiscuity or sex outside marriage is discouraged, it isn’t nonexistant. Contraceptives are valid medical treatments, but nobody HAS to use them. Particular kinds of hormonal contraceptives tend to be effective and frontline treatments for hormonally treating particular conditions; for example PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids. It’s perfectly fine to want to explore the options, from doing nothing, to managing as conservatively as possible, to considering operations (if possible), to hormonal treatments, etc. You’re allowed to decide to not do something, or to choose how aggressively you want to treat something. Some people seem to be frustrated that doctors can’t offer many non-hormonal treatments. But that’s partly because many problems relating to the gynaecological system are affected by your hormonal cycle. A lot of what goes on with that system is closely tied up with our hormones. The way we make endometriosis less bad is by stopping periods. The way we make PCOS less of an issue is by managing hormones.  Depending on the problem, sometimes there are non-hormonal treatments that can help with symptoms (for example, there are medications for painful or heavy periods, or acne that aren’t hormonal), but they can’t inherently change what is going on there.

I know there’s a lot of concern from some people about the effect of hormonal contraceptives, and I think that concern about the longterm effects of any treatment is reasonable. There are risks associated with hormonal contraceptives. And more research on long term effects of any medicaiton should always be welcomed.  But I do wonder in this case how much of that concern is tied up with the taboo surrounding sex, particularly if it’s ‘consequence free’ as some people describe it.

There are lots of reasons why people might not want to use hormonal contraception, and in the end nobody has to. They are simply a choice. Some people can’t get on with the side effects, some don’t like the risks involved, some have religious objections, some people just don’t want to take tablets or stick things into their bodies. It’s your choice, and it’s all valid. But it’s not valid to trash that choice for other people, or to imply anyone who lives differently is degenerate. There’s a lot of judgement in these threads.

Contraceptives do not turn women into a sex object. Contraceptives do not objectify women by turning them into a sex object. I’ve seen people suggest that they only exist so women can be consequence free receptacles of sex for men and are therefore inherently tools of the patriarchy. For people claiming that contraceptives objectify women, these people are literally embodying women as semen receptacles with no agency of their own and having the audacity to pretend they are feminist. Women have agency. They are people. They do not become sex objects because they choose to have sex. They do not become sex objects because they have ‘conseqence free’ sex. Regardless of whether that sex is in marriage, or not. And with one partner, or many. The funny thing is that initially ontraceptives were only prescribed to married women with their husbands’ permission; society very clearly didn’t want to give women the ability to control their own reproductive choices. Even historically, they weren’t about turning women into objects, but allowing married women the ability to choose when to plan their family. Nowadays, contraceptives allow anyone with a uterus/ovary combination the ability to control if they menstruate or are likely to get pregnant. That’s it. They don’t force you to have sex or dictate the kind of relationship you have with penis-havers. You know what happened before we had contraceptives? Women still had sex. Men, when they wanted to, still pressured women into sex and raped them.  Husbands still had sex with their wives. Women still had sex outside of wedlock, sometimes willingly, sometimes through force. They just... didn’t have as many options to prevent pregnancy or prevent the transmission of disease, so they had to deal with the stigma of having sex outside of marriage, or carrying an illegitimate child; consequences that men never had to deal with. And that doesn’t seem to have stopped many men through the years doing what they like, no matter what the social consequences were for women. It didn’t stop men failing to look after their illegitimate children or the women who birthed them. It didn’t stop life-threatening abortions. It just created an atmosphere of shame and secrecy; of unwed mother’s institutions and babies disappearing or quietly being given away. Even in the context of loving marriages, many families struggled to look after the many children that ensued; imagine if they had the knowledge or resources to pace out their children so they could afford to look after them. So arguing that contraceptives mainly benefit men is completely disingenuous. Sure, perhaps men get to have a bit more sex now because women feel more happy to have sex knowing they are a lot less likely to get pregnant. Men can still be deadbeat or missing fathers if they choose. But women have benefited far, far more, despite the side effects and risks because historically, having sex and giving birth have always been risky for women. It’s not that birth control is an easy, fun choice, it’s that the choices have often been dire. For many women around the world, the choices are still dire. Lack of access to contraception means many girls and women around the world still bear children they do not want to have, and catch infections from the men who have sex with, or rape them. A woman who can’t recognise that other women around the world might desperately need to stave off having kids or protect themselves, just because they themselves don’t feel this particular method is for them, is not acting as a feminist. By forgetting the situaiton that women around the world are still dealing with, we’re letting our own privilege get the better of us. To be honest, commentary like this  makes me pretty suspicious of the underlying beliefs of some posters who otherwise purport to be feminist. Since these people believe they have the agency to choose to have sex (it’s implied this is within marriage, almost always, in these threads) it’s clear that what is being attacked when they criticise contraceptives here, is the agency of women who choose to have sex in a context these people disapprove of.  Having safe, ‘consequence-free’ sex is not dirty, or immoral. It does not, in itself, turn you into a sex object, because women are grown human beings with agency and the ability to want and enjoy sex on their terms. I hate the term consequence free sex, because it implies sex ought to come with consequences - what? Risks? Punishment? Diseases? Babies? The consequences of sex can be fun, intimacy, enjoyment, bonding and an expression of deep love. For many people, it’s an integral part of relationships and often, ultimately marriage if that’s what they want.

And if a woman doesn’t have agency or is being coerced or pressured into sex, that is not her fault. And in such a situation, contraceptives may still play a vital role because they prevent people from falling pregnant in dire situations. In such a situation, contraceptives are not the bad guys, and the woman would likely be coerced regardless of whether she was protected. But it’s disingenuous to claim that doctors are pushing an agenda without reflecting that the people telling you hormonal contraceptives are bad or that you shouldn’t be having premarital sex etc are also pushing an agenda. The largest critics of hormonal contraception have historically been those in power in conservatively religious communities who have strict rules about what women are and aren’t allowed to do. And that those rules have very rarely been empowering for women. Allowing people to break free of those rules hands the choice back to us. What people do with the freedoms that contraception allows them is up to them. And feminism will always be about giving people the knowledge and the choice to do what is best for them. If that’s not having sex, good for you. But that may equally mean having sex for someone else. Disclosure of interests: I don’t get paid by manufacturers of contraceptives, I don’t even prescribe them on my current job. Before anyone caims that I’m a proponent of ‘hookup culture’ who just can’t ‘get’ people who don’t want to have sex, I don’t personally do ‘hookups’ and waited til I was ready. I’ve spent a ton of time single. I really don’t care if people wait until marriage or have sex with 10 people every day. I don’t believe people should be stigmatised for having sex, or not having sex. It simply is not a reflection of anyone’s worth or morality.

#feminism #contraception #dx dates #dxdates #oh dear is this discourse

[rooneywritesbest]

 The Golden Days Of Reality: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Review

  Imagine a simpler time of life. Where the TV screen was a tiny box on a table, and the picture ran in black and white. The influence of drugs and narcotics were rampant everywhere. Vibrant colors flooded the scenery of the environment. Now do me a favor and put yourself back into that era of the swinging '60s. One crucial way to accomplish this task is to watch Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. The film is another creation molded from the sporadic mind of Quentin Tarantino.  Tarantino has gone on record saying in his life.

"He only wants to make 10 films".

  It's quite ironic to think someone of his level, and creative genius wants to limit his craft to 10 films. However as fans of media, and visionary passion. We need to respect his decision. 

  In 2019, another masterpiece came from the mind of Tarantino, and his 9th film came to fruition with the release of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.  Essentially a love letter to the golden mirage of Hollywood in the late decaying ’60s.  Due to the 1970s on the horizon. The thing that works so well is the concept of the film. Tarantino has whipped up an in-depth character study of a failing actor who is tight cast as a western esque actor from the 1950s. 

  The protagonist is now struggling to find work with the alure of the western films slowly dying off in the landscape of Hollywood. Due to the influx of new media with such properties as Batman, Hogans Heroes, and other TV shows that graced the network at the time. The injection of new blood was just what the network needed. However, too many actors including the one we follow played by Leonardo Dicaprio did not enjoy the tide of change occurring at once. 

  In our tale, Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton. An actor struggling with the dose of reality in the form of being tight cast. Of course, he still lives his rich lifestyle. The nice house, cars you name it. Dalton is at the end of the lifespan of acting. Being subjected to be labeled as tight cast. The term tight cast means the market, and the casting committee only views the actor or actress in the subject of conversation as that certain part, and cannot adhere to other roles. 

  It was truly eye-opening to see the downward spiral of Rick Dalton sharing a lot of qualities of losing everything before his very eyes, and not having any semblance of control to stop the dose of reality being portrayed before him. The immediate thought that ran through my train of thought was that many actors in real life actually go down this spiral of misery. 

  One name that comes to mind is Adam West, or as many know from his tenure as the caped crusader adorning the blue and yellow cowl from 1966 to 1969. After that, he fell into the same boat as Dalton and couldn’t land anyone’s roles out. Because the entire world could only see West as Batman. In my opinion, this film took a lot of notes, and inspiration from the episode of the Batman the Animated Series Beware the Grey Ghost. The episode is a reflective commentary of what West had to endure after his fixture of the tight cast was bestowed upon him. 

  Tarantino has a wonderful scene of a metaphor of Dalton reading a novel, and the novel is a mirror on what’s gonna happen to him over the next few periods of time ahead in the future waiting for him. 

  On the other hand, Dalton is still at the top of the social class despite the end on the horizon.  Juxtaposed to Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth, who is DiCaprio's stunt double. He gets nothing from his job at all. No credibility, no fame; just a simplistic life beat up people, and make Dalton look good then go home. Pitt lives in a small apartment, and essentially makes ends meat to survive. No romantic figure in his life just his dog. 

  The first thought that would run through the mind of everyone would be is Booth content with this lifestyle. On paper he is, but with the creative genius of Tarantino. The presence of side conversations is fully shown and played out with bits of drama to ease the transition of satire unfolding from the screenplay. I want to say so much more, but I don’t dive into spoilers. 

  Hidden below the main plots of the reflective perception of Dalton, and Booth is Margot Robbie’s, Sharon Tate. Robbie plays Tate with such vigor and youthful joy. Robbie is a carefree spirit and has a side plot with the Manson Cult. Again to reveal any more would take away from the levity, and ingenuity of the film. 

  I feel the inclusion of a third plot or perspective was to give the film depth. The film is about 2 hours and 45 minutes. So the pacing of the plot is actually pretty consistent with the long runtime. 

  In closing, the film is a blast from start to finish riddled with various cameos, and tributes to the icons of that era. Tarantino checks off all the boxes. The film has heart, great acting, and a magnificent cast. For those who grew up in the golden age of cinema, and the simplstic standard of life. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is a film that fits the criteria necessary for your viewership. I would give Once Upon A In Hollywood an (A). 

  I truly enjoyed the trip down memory lane to an era, I never knew. A time of simpler ideas, and depictions of life. One that reveled in tales and stories from those who witnessed the journey. Thus bringing the age-old quote “Seeing is Beliving” to frution in a present-day of 2020. A society struggling to find it’s identity, and peeking back into the past with this film gives clarity necessary to find your self in these hard times. 

#once upon a time in hollywood #margot robbie #leonardo dicaprio #brad pitt #oscars #golden globes #luke perry #al pacino #quentin tarantino #sharon tate #rick dalton #cliff booth #adam west #batman #batman 66 #hogans heroes #summer 2019 #2019 films #tight cast #bruce lee #kurt russel #the grey ghost #batman the animated series #writing #movie review #1969 #golden age #hollywood #golden age of hollywood

[beneaththetangles]

The First Duty of Every Starfleet Otaku is to the Truth, Whether it’s Scientific Truth, or Historical Truth, or Personal Truth

(It’s getting difficult to distinguish between the titles of my posts and the titles of light novels, isn’t it?)

You’ve probably heard that the winners write the history books. The victors of various conflicts (military, political, cultural, etc.) fabricate self-glorifying stories at the expense of the losers. Except that’s not how history actually works. Since winners-write-history is such a ubiquitous misconception, it’s always worth beating up on, and what brought this issue to mind most recently is a quote from The Combat Baker and Automaton Waitress, Vol. 6. The narrator states:

“Human beings are neither gods nor devils. Their behavior is not always good. However, history is written by the winners. The winners always seek to portray their path as glorious and blessed. They pretend their past—their cowardly, traitorous, oppressive and bloodstained past—never happened. Or they try to cast it in a new light. And every time they do, they make use of people incapable of protest. The dead… The defeated… They come in many forms.”

According to this light novel, history is just a web of lies crafted to glorify the powerful by taking advantage of those who can’t share their side of the story. I think that’s a fairly typical depiction of this cynical attitude toward history. And I want to burn it.

The best examples I can give are from early U.S. history, since that’s what I’ve studied the most. For example, who wrote about the American War of Independence? Well, as you might guess, Americans (the “winners”) did. But that’s not all. There are many accounts of the war by the British, their Hessian allies, Tories (people of the colonies who remained loyal to Britain), etc. It’s especially amusing to read the memoirs of various defeated British generals; they try to paint themselves in a positive light and make excuses for why they weren’t more successful. And despite these sources being written by the perceived “losers,” American historians use them in research. I know because I, an American and a historian, have used them.

It’s even more true that “losers” write the “history” when we look at the American Civil War. Unrepentant white southerners created an extensive mythology (often termed the Lost Cause) relating to the war. Starting almost as soon as the war ended, white southerners made extensive efforts to falsify why they rebelled and started the war, what slavery was like and how enslaved black southerners truly felt about it, and why the Confederacy lost. Confusion wrought by the postwar writings of these former Confederates lingers even today. The losers were so successful at embedding their version of “history” in popular culture that historians are still fighting to correct it. Ironically, white southerners themselves provided a lot of the ammunition necessary to attack the Lost Cause. You see, they ramped up their mythologizing after losing the war… but their writings from before and during the war were a lot more honest. (If you want to hear more truth about the CSA and the American Civil War from a professional historian, I’m would be happy to discuss it further on Twitter.)

There’s an episode of the 2018 version of GeGeGe no Kitaro that pretty clearly indicates this problem of losers writing history is relevant to Japan—specifically, Japan’s involvement in World War II. (For example, the Japanese have long resisted acknowledging the terrible evils Imperial Japan committed in Korea and China.) In the aforementioned anime episode, while visiting a Pacific island (possibly New Guinea), average Japanese schoolgirl Mana is shocked to find a grave marker with a Japanese inscription. She doesn’t understand why Japanese soldiers would have been fighting and dying on an island so far from Japan. A surprised Daddy Eyeball asks the question:

Mana’s confused response makes clear that her school only taught her a sanitized shadow of the war’s history. For instance, she’s surprised to hear that Japan attacked countries like Britain and America. The episode as a whole comes across as a critique of how the war is remembered in Japan. In other words, it’s saying that despite being the unequivocal loser of the Pacific War, Japan has managed to invent it’s own doctored, self-serving version of “history.”

So in the first place, “losers” have written quite a lot of “history,” but in addition, the winners-write-history paradigm collapses in the face of how history actually gets written. “History” starts with primary sources: eyewitness, contemporary accounts written close to the time of historical events by people directly connected to those events. The literate write primary sources. Not winners. Not losers. Just anybody capable of writing. If primary sources are overwhelmingly slanted toward one side of a conflict, it’s probably because the other side was largely illiterate and/or because the events happened so long ago that relatively few documents have survived the ravages of time.

And then there are secondary sources. These are the sort of history books with which you’re probably more familiar. Secondary sources are written by historians who analyze and synthesize the primary sources, piecing them together to see the big picture and create larger narratives. Historians strive to take into account the biases of their sources, and by consulting numerous primary sources, they can detect inaccuracies. This is aided by the reality that historians are distant in time from the people and events they study. For example, am I one of the winners of the American Civil War, or one of the losers? Well, the war ended more than 150 years ago, long before I even existed. There’s no logical basis for thinking of myself as being on the either side.

The idea that history is written by the winners to make themselves look good and slander their helpless victims is a simplistic justification for cynicism. “Now let me be clear,” historians are quite fallible, but “winners-write-history” isn’t a substantive critique. It’s merely a glib excuse to dismiss history without even examining the arguments or the primary sources on which those arguments are based. Fulfilling what Jean-Luc Picard termed our “duty” to “historical truth” requires that we put aside the fallacious winners-write-history paradigm, and instead face the real human complexities of the past.

#Anime #GeGeGe no Kitaro #Truth #History #Articles #Author: JeskaiAngel

[abigailnussbaum]

The Handmaid’s Tale, 3x01 - 3x03

There’s a loose arc to these three episodes that tries to justify June’s decision to remain in Gilead by arguing that she can form (or join) a resistance rooted in female solidarity.  That’s not inherently an awful idea, especially when it comes to rejecting the potential of Gilead’s men to offer salvation.  Nick, for example, is finally shown for the collaborator that he is.  Now a Commander, he can no longer claim to be a foot soldier merely going along to get along.  In a short while he’ll be fighting to enslave the women and children of Chicago, and his only problem with this is that it’ll endanger his own life.  Not even June can work up enough interest in that dilemma, so his only value to her is one last night of freely-chosen sex.

Then there’s Commander Lawrence, whose decision to let Emily go last season is finally given a context that leaves him looking just as ugly as a high ranking Commander should.  I think June has him dead to rights in their confrontation in episode 3.  He’s just smart enough to understand that the world he’s created is a hellscape, but not brave enough to do anything meaningful about it.  So he satisfies himself with small mercies, and much more than that, with petty humiliations of the women in his power.  And through it all, like Nick, he expects women to see to him, to coddle him, entertain him, and when necessary, to sit back and let him abuse them.

But just because men in Gilead are useless at best doesn’t mean women are allies.  This is a problem on a simple (and yet potentially life-threatening) level in episode 2.  Why do the Marthas trust June and bring her into their network?  The only thing they know about her is that she’s a troublemaker who recently tried to abduct a child from a Commander’s home, and inexplicably ended up with a new assignment instead of on the wall.  That should scream “informer”.  And yet the idea that women might inform on the Marthas’ network, either out of necessity or because they were planted there, never seems to occur to anyone, because to acknowledge the possibility might cut into the show’s simplistic notions of resistance.

Even worse are the ways the show tries to depict, if not solidarity, then at least fellow-feeling, between June and Gilead’s Wives.  She gets at least one good lick in during her confrontation with Mrs. Mackenzie, the woman who is raising her daughter, when she points out that the reason Hannah is traumatized can be laid solely at Gilead’s feet.  But then the show seems to genuinely want us to take it seriously when Mrs. Mackenzie tries to relate to June on the level of their shared motherhood.  The idea that they both love Hannah and can find their shared humanity on that score is something we’re apparently meant to take at face value.

What’s left completely out of that scene, however, is the question of what it means to be a mother in Gilead.  Mrs. Mackenzie may claim to love Hannah, but the simple truth is that she is raising her to be ignorant, illiterate, dependent, and powerless.  That she is teaching her to aspire to nothing more than to be given in marriage to a man who will have complete power over her - including to rape, beat, mutilate, and even kill her.  That if Hannah happens to be gay or trans, Mrs. Mackenzie will teach her to hate those parts of herself, to the point of self-denial or even self-harm, and in the belief that she deserves to be punished - including physically - for those aspects of her identity.  

June is trying to save Hannah from all that.  These are not equivalent forms of motherhood, and it is perverse for the show to claim that they are.  You can’t equate the love of a woman who is teaching her daughter to hate herself with the love of a woman who is trying to save her daughter from slavery.  This would be true even if Hannah wasn’t June’s biological daughter and hadn’t been ripped from her arms at gunpoint.  But again, it can’t be acknowledged, because the show loves the frisson of equating an evil person with a good one too much to admit that this equivalence is hollow and unjustifiable.

At least Serena Joy (or, I suppose, just Serena now) understands that.  Her one (semi-)redeeming characteristic is that she has finally figured out that Gilead is no place to raise a child, even if it took her own motherhood, and then her own mutilation, to realize that.  But do we really buy that awakening?  Gilead didn’t just happen to Serena.  She wasn’t a dutiful wife just going along with her husband’s plans.  Serena made Gilead happen.  She fought, bled, and killed for it.  And before we get too hung up on her sudden realization of what Gilead could do to a child, let’s think back to Emily’s gay colleague being lynched, or her Martha lover being hanged, and remember that Serena still has no problem with that.  The only parts of Gilead that bother her are the ones that affect her directly.

A more honest show, I think, would acknowledge that there isn’t that much of a difference between Serena and Commander Lawrence.  They’re both smart people who created a hell on Earth to justify their own twisted notions of superiority, and they both realize that fact, on some level, and are tortured by it (though not nearly as much as their victims are and have been).  I think episode 3 is trying to draw a distinction between them when it has Lawrence continue his mind games with June (and his casual acceptance of female fawning from the dependent members of his household) while Serena at least opens herself up to the idea of rebellion.  It might be rooting that distinction in gender, in arrogance and humility, and even in religious faith.  But I don’t buy it.  A person who did the things Serena has done (notice how her orchestrating June’s rape has simply been memory-holed?  Not just ignored for the sake of expediency, but completely forgotten) wouldn’t be as open to remorse as she is.  You don’t just wake up one morning and think “you know, maybe creating a fascist, theocratic rape-dystopia was a bad idea”.

I can’t help but think that the show would be smarter about these issues if it were better about race.  If June were a woman of color, wouldn’t it be more obvious that she and Mrs. Mackenzie have no common ground?  (If nothing else, it would do more to recall the way that children separated from their parents at the US border are being sold into adoption by white parents - usually conservative Christian ones.)  If the Handmaids were mostly non-white instead of the other way around, wouldn’t it be more clear that Serena’s project with Gilead was a supremacist one, and that her heart is too poisoned by those attitudes to ever really switch sides?  Ignoring the issue of race is what allows the show to call upon its thin, unconvincing version of female solidarity, in which any woman, even a Wife of Gilead, can be counted on to act with compassion and decency when the chips are down.  But the truth is, women like that are the enemy, and until the show admits this, I don’t see how it could tell a story worth telling.

#the handmaid's tale #season 3

[mxstyassasxin]

Baptize Me - Day 4 of 24

I’ve had a go at writing sweet, baby Regulus in a bit of canon divergence where he survives the cave and is then protected by James and Lily at Godrics Hollow with Lily helping him to find peace and forgiveness. 

Inspired by Baptize Me (X Ambassadors) and also available on AO3 and FFN. 

Regulus woke, terrified again, screaming at the nightmare that would probably plague him for the rest of his life. As with every night, he was momentarily disoriented, looking around in confusion at the softly decorated room, pale walls offset by the rich raspberry furnishings. He was settling back onto the mounds of comfortable cushions littering the bed, taking deep breaths to calm himself, when the door opened and a woman with long red hair stood in the light from the landing, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

"Regulus," her voice was as comforting as the room. And familiar. "Was it the dream again?"

He swallowed his remaining fear and nodded, watching as she made her way across the room to sit on the edge of his bed, taking his hand in hers and studying his face with kind, green eyes.

"Lily," he breathed in recognition, leaning forward to wrap his arms around her, taking comfort in her steady presence. "I woke you, didn't I? You don't have to always come in here. I think you'd be doing it the rest of your life if you did."

"Yeah, well just be glad you got me and not James, he's a grumpy bugger when he's just woken up." Her laugh was light, and it added an extra glint to her eyes.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked him, her voice taking on a more sombre tone. "If it'll help, you know."

Regulus just shook his head. "It's exactly the same as all the other nights I've been here, Lils. I don't know why you don't just turn me out with Sirius."

"Because you've got a price on your head, silly," she says, mussing up his dark, Black family hair. "You're safest here."

He'd been there, in Godrics Hollow, staying with James and Lily Potter for about a month now, every night waking from the same dream, the same nightmare of what might have happened had Kreacher not managed to pull him out of that cave.

He had given the locket to the wizened house elf and begged him to go, to destroy it, yelling what he was sure would be his final orders as the Inferi dragged his weakened body further into the water. Kreacher had surprised him by appearing in the water beside him and dragging him through the ether, with magic unique to house elves, back to Grimmauld Place. One second, Regulus' lungs had been filling with icy water and the next, he had been coughing it up onto Sirius' old, dusty, scarlet bed cover.

"Sirius' room?" he had questioned Kreacher between his wracking coughs. "I won't be able to get out of here, the door's locked."

"No, but I will." Regulus had jumped at the sound of his brother's voice, gravelly from those muggle things he insisted on smoking. "Kreacher," he greeted the house elf cordially before thanking him for something. "I'll take him from here. And the locket too."

Sirius had wrapped a leather-clad arm around Regulus' waist and held out a hand which Kreacher dropped the locket into, then twisted on the spot, apparating them both to Godrics Hollow. There, Remus had fed him chocolate and healed the deep wound he had cut in his palm, while Lily wrapped her arms around his shoulders and James tried to get Sirius to stop pacing a hole in the carpet.

He had barely seen Sirius or Remus since then, the two of them always out on missions for the Order, reluctant to visit for fear of leading the Death Eaters to Regulus. Lily told him one evening that the intensity and frequency of the missions had increased since Regulus had found the locket. It had been destroyed by Dumbledore almost immediately, but it had also confirmed a theory he had that there were more like it out there, hidden in various objects the Dark Lord had felt an affinity with. So, the Order members had been sent off to recover them, James and Lily staying behind to protect Regulus following his defection.

Truthfully, it made him feel a little guilty because James definitely did not enjoy being cooped up in the one place. Obviously, he would have preferred an active mission with his best friends but, when Regulus broached these concerns with him, James had just clapped him on the shoulder.

"Of course I would, mate, but Lily's my number one now. Wherever she is, I will be too and right now, that is here, protecting my best mate's little brother. We're all lucky to have her, don't you think."

And that was exactly what Regulus did think. How could he not when she was here, comforting him after his nightmares yet again, willing to protect him with her life if necessary whenever the Death Eaters decided to come calling.

"Thank you, Lily," he said to her now. "I don't know what I would do without you. I always wake up just as they drag me under and then you're always here, in the doorway with your hair like fire. That's the only way to kill them you know."

"I know," she told him, voice soft as she smiled at him. "Get some rest now, Regulus. Do you want some Dreamless Sleep?"

He shook his head. "No, thank you. It makes me feel funny. I don't like being unaware."

"Alright then. I'll leave the landing light on though. Good night."

"Good night, Lily," he said as she walked out the door.

Regulus tried to get to sleep again, he really did, but after a while he found himself turning to books again to occupy his mind. He had read all the books on the shelves in his room and had finished the one he'd come to bed with. So, he slipped his feet into the slippers by the side of his bed and made his way downstairs to the living room which had bookshelves either side of the fireplace.

He noticed that one particular book had been pulled free of the others and lay flat on the front of one of the shelves. Picking it up, the red, leather-bound book was no bigger than his hand. The pages, edged in red, were so thin that they appeared almost translucent and the writing upon them was tiny, an effort to fit so many words into such a small book. Regulus finished flipping quickly through the pages and ran his thumb thoughtfully over the symbol debossed into the cover.

Making his decision, he curled his legs up under him in the large armchair with the deep, comfortable seat and pulled the crochet blanket over to cover them, intrigued by the small book. He was even more intrigued when he opened it to the title page only to find ‘Lily Evans' scrawled in childish handwriting in the top right corner.

It seemed a very strange book for Lily to have had as a child. The passages were numbered strangely and different parts of it seemed to have been written by different people. Some of the themes it dealt with were also bizarre material for a child, but it ultimately appeared to be about the same main characters. Unfortunately, even his confusion at the strange stories couldn't ward off tiredness for long and that was how Lily found him in the morning, still with her small book held loosely in his grasp.

"Regulus," she shook him awake. "Regulus, I need that book today."

"Huh," he rubbed his eyes and yawned before attempting to shake himself awake. "Oh, morning Lils. Sorry, I found it last night when I couldn't sleep."

Lily chuckled softly and Regulus noticed that she was already dressed for the day in a knee-length woollen skirt, white cotton shirt and stockings. Stockings. Now that was a far cry from the Lily he had come to know. She even had a blazer of some sort flung over her forearm.

"Yes, it probably is one of the best books to use as a sleep aid. Now come on, I need it." She held out a hand to him.

"Are you going somewhere?" He asked, thinking that was the only reason for her attire.

"Yes, somewhere I haven't been able to go for a while."

"Out?" Regulus was confused. They were safe here. Why was she going somewhere?

"Yes, out." Lily rolled her eyes at him, so he scowled and handed her the book. "You don't have to worry, Reg. I'm going to transfigure my appearance a bit. You could come too if you wanted and Remus will be there. That's the only reason I'm willing to go this week."

Regulus perked up a bit hearing Remus would be there. "Will Sirius be there too?"

Lily just smiled amusedly. "No, he doesn't hold with what we're going to do. Neither does James. He thinks it's stupid we still go."

"Go where?" Regulus scowled and quirked an eyebrow.

"I guess you could say we're going to discuss the contents of this book," she said, holding it up slightly. "It can be a great relief in burdensome times. A habit left over from my upbringing in the muggle world."

"Okay then," Regulus agreed, thoroughly intrigued. "Let me get dressed. I'll be quick."

"You'll need a muggle suit. I think there's one in the wardrobe in the spare room," she called after him as he ran up the stairs.

Twenty minutes later, Regulus was sat on an uncomfortable wooden bench in a large, single-roomed building full of muggles, wearing a muggle suit charmed to fit him and transfigured slightly to mute his distinctive looks. Lily, too, was sporting brown hair now rather than fiery red and her bright green eyes were a fairly ordinary hazel. Remus, on his other side, couldn't hide his magical scars but he had adjusted the shape of his facial features just to throw them off a bit and was now leaning forward with his elbows on the shelf in front of him that was attached to the back of another bench, hands pressed together in front of him, head bowed.

Lily was pointing out different parts of the building to him even though he couldn't understand a majority of the terms she used, but he could still appreciate the simplistic beauty of a few of the pieces, especially the windows. She had only just finished explaining who the people depicted in one of the windows were when a man in white and black robes came to stand at the front of the room, his arms raised asking for silence.

As soon as everyone began speaking in unison of sins, repentance and forgiveness, Regulus could feel a warmth starting to radiate through his chest. Then there was a sort of song called a hymn that Regulus could only mumble along to but that filled his heart with hope. It was strange really, that this meeting of people felt so different from the meetings of Death Eaters he'd been present at, even though this group also seemed to be praising a single entity. There was no fear here, no oppression. The acts of the entity that the robed man spoke of reminded him a bit of magic and he glanced curiously to Lily who smiled at him and lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

When everyone in the building bowed their heads as Remus had done earlier, Regulus followed suit and listened to the soothing voice wash over him as it spoke of the vulnerable and the downtrodden, of the lonely and the meek. He found himself joining in easily and emotion was starting to prickle the back of his throat, so much so that he couldn't keep the tune of the next hymn properly. Then, Lily pulled him up to the front of the room, towards the robed man with everyone else. He was slightly nervous now because the man had begun talking about body and blood, and Regulus had had enough bad experiences with that, but Lily reassured him it was just bread and wine, symbolising an oath, so he would just kneel for a blessing.

A blessing. Him. Regulus Black received a blessing from a muggle, and that had really put him in danger of the prickle at the back of his throat becoming tears he could barely hold back. What ended up pushing him over the edge though, just a few moments later, were the dozens of muggles, men, women and children, who grasped his hand and wished for peace to be upon him.

He didn't hear any more of the meeting after that. Not even the final hymn as the emotions had risen in him to become a river of tears that would not stop flowing. All he could do was take comfort, once again, in Lily's arms and remember this new, overwhelming feeling of peace and forgiveness that he had found.

#my fic #hp ficlet #sweet baby regulus #regulus black #lily evans #marauders era #canon divergence #peace and forgiveness #sirius black #james potter #kreacher #remus lupin

[kcwcommentary]

VLD6x06 – “All Good Things”

6x06 – “All Good Things”

For me, the title “All Good Things” is a cliché. Unfortunately, that hints at the many clichés that are in the writing of this episode.

As we continue to finish Lotor’s story, this show continues to offend me with its declaration that Lotor, as an abuse victim, is as bad as his abuser. It infuriates me that this is the message the show chose to send through this story. I imagine that the EPs and the writers weren’t even aware they were doing so, but that does not absolve them of doing it. I haven’t read or seen every interview with them, so maybe they apologized for doing so, but I don’t know of them having done so.

We start in the Black Lion’s psychic space with Shiro repeating Keith’s name, and Keith opening his eyes. His opening his eyes here would have worked better if the last we saw of him in the previous episode was him closing his eyes. However, last episode ended with him opening his eyes, sort of symbolizing a psychological awakening, so him beginning this episode by opening his eyes feels off. The way last episode ended, there was a resignation in Keith. Shiro’s clone was unconscious, the facility was destroyed, and Keith and Shiro were plummeting toward the planet. It was a slow, dramatic, interestingly peaceful moment. But now, this episode is ignoring that tone and feels like it’s resetting Keith’s mental state to the anger and aggression he had during the fight, not to the calm he had as he fell with Shiro’s clone at the end of last episode. The beginning of this episode is not matching up well with the end of last episode.

Shiro’s spirit appears to Keith. He’s calm and quiet as he talks.

“The thing that attacked you wasn’t me,” Shiro says. I really do not like that they have him call the clone a “thing.” That “thing” was someone who the Black Lion sensed across great distance and directed Keith to save back in 3x05 “The Journey.” It would have been nice had this show not ignored or forgotten this (honestly, I can very much imagine the EPs and writers of this show truly forgetting what story they’ve told earlier in the show). The Black Lion also let the clone pilot her. The Black Lion would not have directed Keith to rescue the clone nor let the clone pilot her if she considered the clone to be an evil thing.

Shiro says that he’s been here in this psychic space since the fight with Zarkon at the end of season two. “My physical form was gone,” and the show never bothers to explain what happened to Shiro’s body, nor how he died.

“I tried to warn the others about the imposter while on Olkarion, but our connection was not strong enough,” Shiro says as his image fades and disappears. I’ll say that it seems reasonable that he would have a hard time connecting to them since the others have demonstrated through their actions that they don’t really think of Shiro as a friend.

Keith opens his eyes and he’s inside the Black Lion. “You saved us,” Keith quietly says to Black. Us! Not just Keith. The Black Lion has again saved the clone! He’s laying nearby, unconscious but reactive enough to slightly groan. The EPs and the writers want us to think that the clone is evil. They write that into the dialog of the characters. They just had the spirit of Shiro call the clone a “thing.” But the Black Lion saved the clone again! This means something, and the show totally ignores it in its push to call the clone evil. This is something the show absolutely should have addressed, but they couldn’t because it would undermine their premise that the clone was not a person that is used to justify having the Paladins use the clone’s body without any debate about the ethics of doing so.

Coran, Hunk, and Pidge are working on the Castle to the get the ship working again. Allura is visibly experiencing emotional distress. Lance seems to notice, but he doesn’t say anything at first. Krolia and Romelle have just been standing off to the side until Krolia announces she’ll go help with repairs and Romelle follows her. Why weren’t they helping to begin with? Lance takes the opportunity to ask Allura if she’s okay.

She says she’s angry at herself for “play[ing] right into Lotor’s hands.” Of course, I don’t blame her since I blame the EPs and the writers for purposefully writing Lotor as if he was a character undergoing a transformational arc specifically so that they could claim a cheap plot twist of saying he was evil all along. Lance says, “You didn’t put us in this situation. It was Shiro who went rogue and released the virus in the Castle.” I know they don’t yet know about the clone, but it still bothers me hearing them talk about Shiro like this.

Allura goes on about how she trusted Lotor but shouldn’t have and about how she doesn’t think she can trust herself now. While these are valid feelings for her to have given what has happened in the story, I’m stilled aggravated by it because it’s all coming from the EPs’ and writers’ efforts to manipulate the audience by writing Lotor to be a good person for most of his time on the show.

���I had more reason than anyone not to trust him,” Lance says. Thus, the show says that Lance feeling intense jealousy over Allura being with Lotor was right. Allura responds by hugging Lance. Lance’s jealousy is justified, and he’s rewarded with a moment of getting-the-girl for it. Ugh!

Keith establishes communication with the Castle and informs Allura and Lance that Shiro was a clone. He also tells them he’s detected that Lotor’s ships are heading back to them, but it will take time for him to get to them. They’ll have to hold off Lotor without him. Keith tries asking the spirit of Shiro to help him get to the others. The Black Lion’s wing is still sparking. This sparking first started as a depiction of damage from a fight, so its continual sparking should be setting up something to happen, like the wing exploding or Black losing all propulsion or something, but nothing ever comes of it. It’s not necessary to explain Black being too far away to get to the others before the battle starts, so if that’s what it’s supposed to be signifying, then it’s pointless.

Allura narrates, “Accessing the quintessence field has been Lotor’s singular drive for millennia. He wants to harness the power for himself.” I have a hard time dealing with this switch the show has flipped in Lotor’s motivation. The show made the situation more complicated in a really good way by having Lotor argue that using the rift as a source of quintessence would allow him to move the Galra away from taking quintessence from living creatures. With the show’s twist that Lotor’s a villain all along, what was a great complication is now ignored and replaced with a simplistic, selfish desire for power. By having this twist with Lotor, the show has narrowed and made the current primary antagonist generic. Allrua says the Paladins have to destroy the gate at the opening to the rift.

Ugh. Lotor tells Ezor and Zethrid, “My deepest apologies for lying to you both. But in order to gain the Princess’s trust and make the Paladins of Voltron believe we were truly at odds, it had to be done.” By now having Lotor talk like a generic villain, he becomes far less interesting. That the EPs and writers think this is interesting baffles me. Having Lotor talk like this now feels fake. This is just not the same character they’ve written since at least 4x06 “A New Defender.” And it makes the title of that episode a total lie, proof of the EPs’ audience manipulation.

Titles function as a promise, almost like a thesis statement, about the content of the story so titled. But this show did not use that title as a promise, it was purposefully a deception used against the audience. Allura earlier talked about how she shouldn’t have trusted Lotor, and how she doesn’t think she can trust herself now. Well, this whole Lotor-is-a-villain-all-along plot twist tells the audience that we should not trust the EPs and writers of this show. What makes this particularly infuriating is that the EPs and writers clearly think that they were clever with this plot twist. It feels more amateurish to me than anything even slightly resembling clever.

I’m not quite sure why Allura thinks she can have the Lions blow up the gate and it’ll destroy the rift. I understand that she feels the need to do something, and there’s little she can do at this point. But we know her plan to destroy the gate will not get rid of the rift opening. One, the narrative doesn’t tell this little bit of story significantly enough to make it have the tonality of a conclusion. But also, we know the history of this rift opening. We know that Alfor destroyed Daibazaal trying to destroy the rift opening, and yet it has continued to exist for 10,000 years.

The fact that this rift opening has persisted is unexplained though. When we had the “comet” having opened a rift in 3x04 “Hole in the Sky,” that rift closed as soon as Voltron pulled the “comet” through the rift opening into this reality. So, what held this rift at Daibazaal open for 10,000 years? Also, given Honerva’s obsession with the rift, why has she never come back here to work with it over those 10,000 years?

Hunk says, “The last time we fought Lotor, we had five ships and Lotor had two, and he still kicked our butts. This time, he’s going to have three ships, and we’re only going to have four.” I guess technically true since Lotor was unconscious last episode when the whole of Voltron fought all three of Lotor’s ships, but it still feels like Hunk’s statement is wrong since they fought all three ships.

Coran is given an extended repair sequence. It’s nice that the show is giving Coran something to do since they’ve barely used him the past several seasons. He finds an old tool kit from his grandfather.

Lotor’s ships arrive.

Allura yells at Lotor, “You enslaved countless Alteans. Harnessed their life source for your own personal gain. How many innocent lives did you destroy?”

He responds, “It’s true, many Alteans perished in my quest to unlock the mysteries of quintessence. But I protected thousands more, and I rescued their culture. Our culture.” We’ve been told by the narrative that we’re not supposed to trust anything Lotor has ever said or will say again. The problem is that by writing this dialog, the show reminds us of Lotor’s argument. And the thing is, despite the show declaring him to be a lying villain, he’s not wrong here.

This makes me think of the issue of energy production. Some Alteans, for some never properly explained reason, have the ability to produce more quintessence than most other lifeforms. This is part of the problem with this show never properly defining its magic system. The show never explains what quintessence is. It’s always generic as just some miscellaneous life energy. But why can some Alteans create more of it than everyone else? And what does it say about the position of privilege that their ability to do so grants them? Or at least, the privilege that it gives Allura. She uses quintessence to power her ship all the time. The show never explores that Lotor and the Galra’s desire for quintessence to power their civilization gives them a valid point of critique against Allura. Why does she get to have a source of energy that benefits just her and the few she chooses to use it for? This is not to say that it’s okay for the Galra to produce quintessence by taking it from other life forms. Lotor himself has said as much, that he wants to transition the Galra off of this method of energy production. That’s been his whole point in trying to get quintessence from the rift.

Part of why this conclusion to Lotor’s story is so unfulfilling is because the show does not resolve this argument. I even wonder if the show realizes it’s made this argument. I can easily imagine that the EPs and writers saw Lotor’s argument as nothing but a means to trick everyone into letting their guard down. But the problem for them then is that the show still has Lotor make a very valid argument that is never resolved.

Ezor says, “I stopped trying to figure out Lotor’s master plan long ago. Too complicated.” Ezor here is totally lampshading the story; the show is acknowledging that this plot has become too complicated, and they’re essentially asking the audience to ignore it and just move on. This feels like the writers almost admitting that they’re too unskilled to be able to handle writing this story. I imagine there are instances of lampshading in other stories that work and don’t end up feeling like the writers insulting the audience for the audience wanting the story to make sense, but this does not have that effect for me. I want this story to make sense. I want it to be consistent, but it’s not. All this does is point out that the writers know there’s a problem with what they’ve written. It does nothing to fix the problem.

Allura fires first. Lotor orders his team to hold their fire. Lotor tells Allura, “My feelings for you are true, and I know you have feelings for me as well.” Maybe it’s just the voice acting being better than the show’s story arc deserves, but Lotor sounds genuine in what he’s saying. My guess is that the voice actor, maybe even the voice director, believed that what Lotor says is true, but the problem then is that the EPs and the writers have declared it that Lotor is just a deceptive villain.

Allura responds by saying, “You betrayed and used me. You’re more like Zarkon than I could have ever imagined.” In order for her statement to be true, that he did betray and use her, it requires that everything he’s said to her to be a lie. Because his arguments have always been valid, I cannot believe his past statements to Allura to be lies. So, how then has he used her? If his goal is and always has been accessing a source of quintessence to provide energy to the Galra so that he can make the Empire stop producing it through taking it from living creatures, then how has he “betrayed and used” her?

The show does not explain what Lotor’s goal was in harvesting quintessence from the Alteans. It’s used as a demonstration that Lotor is an evil person, so I guess that combined with the show declaring him to be a liar is supposed to make it that he did it as a cliché villain taking life from other people and no deeper explanation was ever crafted by the writers. But again, this runs into the problem of Lotor’s argument about getting quintessence from the rift being totally valid and never invalidated.

Also, I hate what the show does with Allura here. Lotor was abused by his father. We know this. Lotor has talked to Allura about it. And here, they have her tell someone who’s been abused that they are like their abuser. This is cruel. This is the show itself, not just Allura, being offensive. Lotor has demonstrated several times throughout this show that he has vigorously tried to escape his father’s abuse. He has actively worked to do things differently than his father. He has been subject to ridicule from both his father and mother because he’s not full-Galra, while he has rejected that racism and Galra-supremacism by embracing his Altean heritage and accepting Axca, Ezor, Zethrid, and Narti, in defiance of the Galra who condemned him for doing so. In 3x01 “Changing of the Guard,” we learn that unlike Zarkon, Lotor does not adhere to classist discrimination and fights alongside lower ranking soldiers; we see some of Zarkon’s classist discrimination when he condemns Blaytz in 3x07 “The Legend Begins” for flirting with a server at dinner. Lotor specifically told Allura in 5x06 “White Lion” that he envied Alfor being her father because Zarkon never supported his desire to be an explorer. He told her about how he was in charge of a planet, how Zarkon got angry that Lotor let the population there rule themselves, how Zarkon ordered Lotor to destroy the planet, and when Lotor refused, Zarkon did so himself. Lotor is not like Zarkon. It is absolutely cruel for the show to write Allura saying this. And it’s offensive to those of us who have been subject to parental abuse. Through Allura’s condemnation of Lotor, the show is saying that no matter how much we try, we will not only never escape the abuse, we’ll become as horrible as those who abused us.

The show then goes generic villain by having Lotor criticize Alfor for being “too weak.” He orders his team to destroy the Lions. They all start fighting. I have to say that there is definitely something wrong with the writing when I’m actually on the antagonist’s side instead of the protagonist’s.

Coran does whatever ultimately miscellaneous thing he does to get the Castle back up and running. It’s a moment that is played for humor, but given the tension of the moment, of the dialog between Lotor and Allura, this is not the time for humor. This show has a recurrent problem with tonality dissonance like this.

Lotor says, “Once I wipe out Voltron, I’m going to start a new Altea. An Altea that will never know Princess Allura or King Alfor. Nor will they know the Lions of Voltron. All they will know is me, their great leader! I’m ready to wipe the universe clean of all my enemies: Voltron, Haggar, and the rest of the Galra!” The show now has Lotor screaming like a cliché maniacal villain. Ugh. This last line shocks Ezor, Zethrid, and Axca. How they’re surprised that Lotor views Galra culture as highly toxic and one that has been cruel to anyone who isn’t full-Galra, I don’t know. It’s not like the Galra Empire hasn’t discriminated against the three of them for their being only part-Galra.

Axca says, “I think it’s time for us to sever our ties to Lotor for good.” The EPs and writers of this show cannot ever decide on where Lotor’s generals’ loyalty actually lies, can they? By switching that allegiance around so damn much, I’m left confused. I’m tired of having to try to figure out what Ezor, Zethrid, and Axca’s motivations are. With these characters, I feel like I’m being jerked around.

As they take two of Lotor’s ships away from battle, Lotor responds, “Even my generals betray me.” Since the EPs have said in an interview that their goal with Lotor was to have him end up being like Azula from Avatar the Last Airbender, this moment and this line is clearly supposed to be a copy of Azula breaking down after Mai and Ty Lee turn against her. This moment reminding me of that interview causes me again to think about how amateurish it is for the EPs and writers to build their characters by trying to copy characters from other shows. They inadvertently cause me to compare Lotor to Azula while watching this episode. What Azula went through in the end of AtLA was written with a great deal of respect for her character. Her viciousness is condemned, but the last we see of her in AtLA is Azula experiencing severe psychological anguish, crying, and Zuko and Katara looking on with expressions of pain and sympathy for Azula. With how this show ends Lotor’s character, and the EPs saying that he was supposed to be like Azula in the end, I have to think that they totally missed what made the conclusion of Azula’s character poignant. In the end for Lotor, he’s just a screaming maniacal villain.

Lotor takes over the other two ships and ejects his generals from them. He then combines his three ships into Sincline. It’s been a long while since this show has had a mecha versus mecha battle.

Pidge reacts, saying, “What is that thing!?” This is not the first mecha she’s seen in this show, so this response is silly. Allura says, “That is why he was using me. I helped him build it.” The ability for it to physically combine has nothing to do with the quintessence-imbuing alchemy that Allura did. If what Allura did is what enabled this to happen, I would think she would have noticed that she was doing it. Also, the show has very much already established that what she did was make the ships capable of entering the rift. So, this is just more inconsistent writing. Hunk comments, “Well, the good news is that it’s now four-on-one.” I genuinely laughed.

Sincline attacks the Lions. Coran has the Castle shoot Sincline, but Sincline eventually returns fire. The two blasts do the cliché opposing beams directly clashing with one another until eventually one overpowers the other thing. Sincline hits the Castle. Pidge reacts by saying, “Impossible! Lotor’s weapon has completely repelled the Castle’s attack!” One, we can already see that his weapon has done so, so that dialog does not add literally anything to the show. Two, who thought having her proclaim something we just saw happen to be “impossible” is good writing? It’s cliché at best, but even if it wasn’t cliché, it still wouldn’t be good dialog.

Meanwhile, Keith is listening to communications of the battle. He starts begging Shiro to help him. His screaming Shiro’s name is a bit too much, causing the moment to totally fall over into excessive melodrama, which despite the intended purpose of melodrama actually causes the moment to lose emotion, not gain it. Keith appears in the psychic space again, and Shiro puts his hand on Keith’s shoulder. Shiro tells Keith to see through the Lion’s eyes. He repeats his advice to Keith from back in season one: “Patience yields focus.”

The music in this moment is really nice.

Keith’s hands start to glow, he drives the controls forward, and the Black Lion’s wings glow and expand into bigger engines.

The other Lions are floating motionless in space, seemingly lacking power. Lotor’s dialog continues to be cliché villain-speak. Sincline detects the Black Lion incoming, which slams into Sincline as it flies past. Keith orders them to form Voltron. Though I wish they would have occasionally updated the form-Voltron animation, I actually like its use in this moment.

The two mechas are poised for what comes next, the final shot of the episode is great.

I’m left thinking that, even if the show had the same plot points, everything that contributes to how we get to them could have been written so much better. It feels like, due to inexperience and carelessness, the EPs and the writers lost control of the story long before now, but because the plot development inherently has risen the stakes of the story, the failure to sculpt the details causes the story to turn into a blend of clichés and offensive implications. The resolution of Lotor’s story is not one that is fulfilling. It ends up feeling like the EPs and writers destroyed something interesting in order to make something generic from it. Like most of this whole series, it’s the loss of what could have been, the potential the show had, that makes this story so disappointing.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron #vld #voltron criticism #vld criticism #voltron critical #vld critical #vld season 6 #vld 6x06 #commentary

[bthump]

I'm pretty sure you've already talked about this but, I want to know your opinion on guts letting go of his obsession with griffith? In one of berserks chapters when they ask his opinion about hawk of light he answers with a smile so people think that he's gotten over it

Extremely short answer: if that’s chapter 345 you’re referring to Guts isn’t smiling in a single one of his panels after he gets asked about Griffith, in fact he has a pretty pronounced :/ face throughout, so that’s just inaccurate. If it’s a different scene, then I have no memory of Guts being asked about the ~Hawk of Light~ any other time so idk lol.

Now, here’s the long answer. I wrote it out last night and decided it was too late to post. Now that the new chapter raws have come out, well, idk if anything here is straight up contradicted now (i’m being pretty vague anyway), but bear in mind that I wrote this before seeing them.

This is a tricky topic for me ngl, like this is the exact question that fucks me up when it comes to my hopes and fears for Berserk.

Is Guts going to get over his obsession with Griffith and genuinely move on?

But as of right now my answer is an emphatic no, Guts is not over his obsession yet. After his last climactic test of resolve when he got in a boat on the docks we saw Guts’ residual feelings loud and clear. Guts’ eyes meeting Griffith’s across a vast distance, the Beast of Darkness taunting him in his subconscious and calling Griffith “the true light that burns us,” and Guts thinking to himself on the boat, “when this journey’s over, I’ll…” before flashing to an image of Griffith.

It would just be straight up poor storytelling if somewhere between Guts ruminating on the boat after the sea god fight and landing at Elfhelm he’d conquered his obsession off-screen and now he’s totally “over it.”

What I think is possible, if shitty, is Guts conquering his obsession at some point in the future in a climactic and conclusive way - after backsliding first. Like let’s be real here, all this constant foreshadowing about the armour and the Beast of Darkness and Guts ignoring various warning signs etc isn’t going nowhere. Guts is going to lose himself to the armour and fight Griffith. That’s pretty much a foregone conclusion.

After that happens I will grant that there is a chance we’re headed for something along the lines of the power of rpg group friendship and/or het love saving the day and Guts’ soul, bringing him back from the armour, and then Guts conquers his obsession properly and… Griffith is defeated in some way, quite possibly because after everything he’s failed to overcome his own feelings. Might be an end of his own making, if that’s the case. Could be by Casca’s hand. Guts could still easily die in this scenario, but yk, it’d be bittersweet bc he dies with his humanity intact or whatever.

Conversely, what I want to happen, what I think would be good, emotionally impactful and thematically resonant writing, is Guts being forced to confront and untangle his feelings for Griffith instead of just trying to overcome them. I want Guts’ apparent inner conflict of Griffith/revenge/Beast of Darkness vs Casca/rpg group/humanity to ultimately turn out to be overly simplistic bullshit. I want Guts’ attempt to get over Griffith to have been misguided from the start, another one of his many ultimately futile and misguided attempts to repress painful and complex feelings through the pursuit of a goal.

I think the most satisfying ending is one where Guts finally confronts his mixed feelings for Griffith and untangles them, and finds the positive feelings still have value. I want the remains of their intense world-altering relationship to go hand in hand with the tattered remnants of their respective humanities. I want Guts to emotionally connect with Griffith and his conveniently unfrozen heart during their final confrontation so they can finally understand each other and their feelings and give readers a real cathartic conclusion to their relationship while probably providing an intimate emotional parallel to whatever world changing metaphysical bullshit is also going on.

Like not only do I not want Guts to move on, I want Guts’ failure to move on to mirror Griffith’s failure to move on and be an essential piece of a non-tragic ending. I want Guts’ lingering positive feelings for Griffith to be what save him from the armour, or from losing his soul to the temptation of revenge, or what the fuck ever.

I want their Golden Age relationship to still have a positive impact on the story, basically.

Essentially my question when it comes to the future of Berserk isn’t Will Guts get over Griffith? but rather Should Guts get over Griffith? And I want the answer to be no.

Idk. I can honestly see good arguments either way lol. It’s frustrating, for every great argument I come up with that supports Guts examining his complicated contradictory feelings and untangling them rather than lumping them together and getting over them, I think of an argument that supports Guts getting over Griffith entirely as intended genuine personal growth. And vice versa, for that matter.

But no matter which option is more likely at this point, I absolutely 100% think that Guts confronting his feelings instead of getting over them is by far better writing. It’s less contradictory, it’s more interesting, it’s narratively symmetrical (in that Guts and Griffith and their mutual failed attempts to get over their residual feelings would mirror each other), their relationship’s got more emotional grounding and build up than Guts and a group of people who barely know him, or Guts and a woman who only even entered into a relationship because Miura wanted more Eclipse drama, it’s more thematically resonant*, and imo it’s absolutely necessary to any emotionally satisfying ending.

Also like, I want to emphasize that this doesn’t mean Guts needs to go “oh shit I’ve been wrong the whole time I should’ve been dealing with my Griffith related feelings instead of trying to fix Casca, wow I fucked up” lol. Literally all it would take is a) Elfhelm turns out to be a bust (which I think is very likely anyway), and b) the emotions between Griffith and Guts amount to something positive as they conflict. This can be anything from smthn life saving to a moment of understanding and personal fulfillment to something that affects the world in a more yk epic metaphysical way to saving souls, to one or both dying smiling.

I just need something, you know?

*I use this phrase a lot lol but what I mean specifically here is that Guts and Griffith’s relationship has been our main illustration of the impact of relationships in contrast to isolating dreams, and I think it would be more powerful to maintain their relationship as our illustration of that theme - true light, the impact of being known and valued, love and hate and need for connection, humanity vs monstrosity - than to swap it out with a different relationship in the last fifth of the story or whatever, and depict Guts and Griffith’s confrontation without that intense, complex emotion fueling it.

#Anonymous #ask #a #b #theme: speculation #theme: ending #theme: true light #character: guts #theme: relationships as personal growth

[film-focus-mind]

my essay on autistic representation in the media

I wrote this for three months for my usem class, it’s just my opinions on what is wrong with most autistic media representation

Abstract

The representation of those with autism in the media is, simply put, stereotypical and deeply flawed. From depicting people with autism as eternal children, rude, idiotic, or genius savants, the media portrayals play into and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. This portrayal affects how society views autism, despite how consciously some people realize that the autistic representation is not accurate and socially harmful. If a character with autistic traits is shown in a negative light, people will form implicit biases and associate autistic traits as being wrong and bad. Media representation of those with autism has to change to be more accurate and less abusive and stereotyped. There needs to be better autistic representation for the sake of both neurotypical people and people with autism. Stereotypes need to be rejected and replaced with people with autism as being people.

Keywords: autism, media representation, stereotypes, Autism Spectrum Disorder

My interest in autistic representation is personal. My little brother Leo was diagnosed with autism at age three. Despite this diagnosis, he never knew he had autism until he was thirteen. Around that time, the popular kids show Sesame Street started featuring an autistic character named Julia (Cohen, 2017). Julia talked like my brother did: in short incomplete sentences and sometimes repeating what others had just said, she got upset when there were loud noises, and she could not stand the feeling of paint on her fingers. As Leo and I watched the show and the character’s interactions with others, it dawned on me that Leo didn’t know what he and Julia had in common. My parents never told him because they didn’t want Leo to feel different.

“Leo, do you know why you’re like Julia?” I asked.

“Why?” Leo replied. “Why” in Leo’s case also meant who, what, where, when, and how. 

“It’s because you both are autistic!” I explained. “Your brains both work just a little bit differently.”

Although the Julia of Sesame Street was created as a caring and positive role model, she’s one of the few instances of positive representation of people with autism on television. Most autism representation shows people with autism as rude, child-like, dumb, or worse. Many characters who are on the autism spectrum are quite one- dimensional. Having autistic traits has been portrayed in a negative light or in an overly simplistic way. Autistic represetation hardly factors the experiences of actual people with autism. If the media portrayed people with autism as equals, there would be dozens of Julias in mainstream media (Safran, 1998). How is the media portraying people with Autism Spectrum Disorder? How can things improve? What does this say about society’s views on autism? 

For clarification, the terms ‘high functioning’ and ‘low functioning’ are problematic and will not be used in the context of this discussion because those words hold a very discriminatory view of autism, one that prioritizes the neurotypical ways of functioning over other ways of functioning. In this paper, the terms autism and Asperger’s syndrome will be used to differentiate between the two distinctly different types of ways that autism affects people. It is important to remember that Asperger, the doctor whose name is used to describe a branch of autism, was a Nazi (Baron-Cohen, 2018). That historical association speaks great lengths about how autism is/was viewed, considering how Asperger describes autism. Asperger’s opinions on autism would be considered very outdated and insulting to contemporary people with autism (Draaisma, 2009). 

Portrayals of autism in terms of fictional characters can be split into two distinct tropes, which are infantilization (Stevenson, Harp, & Gernsbacher 2014) and the savant (Draaisma, 2009). The former usually applies to autism generally, while the latter applies to those exhibiting the characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome. Tropes are different character archetypes that group characters by their believed-to-be stereotypical traits. In a few cases of media representation, both tropes can apply to the same character, but for the most part they do not overlap. Both tropes only give a glimpse at the complexities of autism, usually leaving out autistic traits that can be seen as good.

To start, there’s infantilization (Stevenson, Harp & Gernsbacher, 2014), or for a better term, the eternal child trope. This trope portrays characters with autism of any age as child-like, and usually also naive or idiotic. These characters can be either autistic or have Asperger’s, but they act the same, naive, unable to focus, throwing tantrums, and generally interacting with the world in “innocent” and “unsophisticated” ways. Also, these characters typically have a special “obsessive” interest that they love talking about, some of examples of obsessive fixations are classical music, science, outer space, cartoons, trains, and dinosaurs. It is more harmful when adults are portrayed with this trope, as a person can be an adult with autism, and a mature autistic adult. We often think of neurotypical children as also having obsessive interests or naïve qualities, so the stereotype is not as blatantly discriminatory. Yet, when these are the only traits an autistic character has, that becomes problematic. This child trope creates a stigma of autism disappearing when one turns eighteen, or that people with autism are incapable of mental growth. Some examples of this trope that can be seen in mainstream film, television and book portrayals are Kirk from the television show Gilmore Girls (Palladino, 2000), Lenny from the great American novel Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 1965), and Amelie from the French movie Amelie (Jean-Marc, 2001)

Multimedia tropes are not the only case of infantilization of those on the autism spectrum. Most autism-based charities only show children with autism, effectively branding it as a children’s disease and leaving out the reality that many with autism are mature adults. In a study done in 2014, only eight out of 170 autism based charities had pictures that included adults with autism (Stevenson, Harp & Gernsbacher, 2014). When only children with autism are shown, it leaves out adults from the picture. Such absences also contribute to the man-child stereotype. When one only sees children with autism, and then meets adults with autism, they won’t be seen as the adults that they are. Adults with autism then get treated like children. Infantilization ultimately restricts the definition of what a person with autism is like, and the next trope does that as well. 

The next difficult trope is the savant (Draaisma, 2009). The definition of savant is someone who is good at one particular subject, at an almost unnatural level, but that other-worldly savant syndrome seems to come at a price. Characters with autism who fall under this trope are smart beyond their peers, but are depicted as being very rude and as lacking in key social skills. This character trope, like that which focuses on  infantilization, will show people have a special interest, like physics, medicine, drawing, learning languages to name a few examples, which they pursue with genius intensity and knowledge. These characters have friends, but are often depicted as being overly blunt and difficult or not nice to their friends. This kind of portrayal brands people with autism as being bad people and antisocial. Thus, the general public are led to believe that all people with autism must be rude (Safran, 1998). All people with autism are expected to be a know-it-all in one area, but are thought of as idiots if they are not. Some examples of the savant trope are Sherlock from the BBC’s television show Sherlock (Moffat, 2010), Paris from the sitcom Gilmore Girls (Palladino, 2000) and Sheldon Cooper from the tv show the Big Bang Theory (Cendrowski, 2007).

Sometimes, the savant trope is combined with the eternal child trope to create a doubly stereotyped character with autism. Typically these children are beyond their peers, but have trouble making friends, with a tendency to be alienated. An example would be Max from the tv show Parenthood (Holton, 2013). Max enjoys talking about beetles, wearing pirate costumes and he doesn’t like candles. When his parents find out about him being autistic, they resolve not to tell him of his diagnosis. Not telling kids of their diagnosis is bad because the children may be already feeling as if they are an outcast among their peers, but they don’t know why (Sinclair, 1999). Sometimes having information about what makes someone different can provide comfort in challenging situations. Keeping information like that from children with autism does more harm than good. It would deprive an understanding of themselves necessary to overcome their disabilities.

Another autistic stereotype is that autism affects more boys than it does girls (Lai, Lombardo, Auyeung, Chakrabarti, & Baron-Cohen, 2015, pp. 11-24). Most portrayals of autism on television are of males, effectively erasing autistic women from the narrative as well. This erasure actually has an effect on diagnosing autism because many believe that girls do not “get” autism. This also happens on a social level because females do not have the diagnosis that might help them understand their behaviors and social interactions at younger ages. With the bias of being a mostly male disorder, women with autism get diagnosed at a later age than their male counterparts (Bargiela, Steward, & Mandy, 2016). Many autistic women are not diagnosed until adulthood, which can set them back multiple years of working to get help with their disorder. Women being autistic is seen just as much of being an oxymoron as an autistic adult.

Autistic misrepresentation occurs even though characters are not explicitly stated as being autistic. When characters are portrayed with stereotypical autistic traits, they are understood by viewers as being autistic. When people see these traits being portrayed as dislikable, that may cause people to see those traits in a very negative light. This happens even before people with autism have a chance to prove those stereotypes wrong. In short, it doesn’t matter whether the word autism is used. Only the traits matter, not the label. 

How do autistic stereotypes affect people with autism? For starters, when people meet someone who shares traits with a negatively portrayed autistic character, people think that having those traits are linked with being a bad person (Safran, 1998). This leads to isolation, ostracization, and bullying. Stereotyping of any sort can be quite harmful. People will tend to judge all persons with autism they encounter in real life based on the examples they see in media. The general public will see what’s on tv and believe it to be true, even if subconsciously. It predisposes persons to negatively prejudge people with autism before meeting them.

People without autism are also hampered by these stereotypes by causing people with autism to struggle to find their respected and credible voice in social, educational and work settings. Successful interactions with people with autism require an unbiased and accurate understanding of them. These successful interactions are rendered less likely by stereotypical portrayals, which foster disrespect and distrust of people with autism encountered in real life. Everyone should want to treat everyone with respect, and correct their behavior if it is wrong.

People can actively undertake many strategies to make autistic representation more like Julia from Sesame Street, and less like every other character fuelling misunderstanding. The first solution is hiring actual people with autism as consultants for a show (Huws & Jones, 2010, pp. 331-344; Holton, 2013), ensuring the screenwriting matches up with the real experience of autism. Another way is to try to make a multidimensional and meaningful character, not a character who is merely a foil based on comic relief or being a challenge for the other characters. Autistic characters must exist as themselves, not as plot devices for other neurotypical characters.  

Another solution is to approach rectifying harmful stereotypes by using a character to educate non-autistic people about the realities of autism (Behind the Scenes, 2017). Upon seeing a character as a learning opportunity, research is done into the subject, and a more accurate portrayal occurs. People have a tendency to learn from engaging and considering fictional characters. Thus, making one accurate fictional character would do the most good when it comes to opening up people to the nuanced realities of autism spectrum disorder.   

.In conclusion, autistic representation in books, films and televisions shows negatively effects or influences therefore society’s general views of autism. These tropes are discriminatory and harm people with autism by spreading misinformation. There are many years of poor autistic misrepresentation that those in the media industry must work to undo.

References

Bargiela, S., Steward, R., & Mandy, W. (2016). The experiences of late-diagnosed women with autism spectrum conditions: an investigation of the female autism phenotype. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(10), 3281-3294.

Baron-Cohen, S., Klin, A., Silberman, S., & Buxbaum, J. D. (2018). Did Hans Asperger actively assist the Nazi euthanasia program? Molecular Autism, 9(1). doi:10.1186/s13229-018-0209-5

 Bringing Julia to Life [Behind the Scenes]. (2017, March 20). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzfHVmSLRU

Cendrowski M (Director). (2007). The Big Bang Theory [Television series]. Los Angeles, California: CBS.

Cohen E (Director). (2017). Sesame Street, season 47 episode 15 [Television series]. Los Angeles, California: PBS

Draaisma D. (2009). Stereotypes of autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 364(1522), 1475-80. Retrieved from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2008.0324

Holton, A. E. (2013). What’s wrong with max? Parenthood and the portrayal of Autism Spectrum Disorders 37(1) 45-63. In Sagepub. Retrieved January 29, 2019, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0196859912472507

 Huws, J.C. & Jones, R.S.P (2010) ‘They just seem to live their lives in their own little world’: Lay perceptions of autism, Disability & Society, 25:3, 331-344, DOI: 10.1080/09687591003701231

Jean-Marc D. (Producer), & Jeunet J. (Director). (2001). Amelie [Motion Picture]. France: Canal+.

Lai, M., Lombardo, M. V., Auyeung, B., Chakrabarti, B., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2015). Sex/Gender Differences and Autism: Setting the Scene for Future Research. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 54(1), 11-24. doi:10.1016/j.jaac.2014.10.003

Moffat S, (Executive Producer). (2010). Sherlock [Television series]. London, United Kingdom: BBC.

Safran, S. P. (1998). Disability Portrayal in Film: Reflecting the Past, Directing the Future. Exceptional Children, 64(2), 227-238. doi:10.1177/001440299806400206

Steinbeck, J. (1965). Of mice and men: With an introduction. New York: Random House.

Sherman Palladino, A (Director). (2000). Gilmore Girls [Television series]. Los Angeles, California: the WB.

Sinclair, J. (1999). Don't mourn for us. Autistic Rights Movement UK.

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