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mbti-notes · 4 years

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Would you mind explaining why you see Rey as ESFJ and Kylo Ren as INTP from the new Star Wars? I've always seen Rey as a stereotypical ISFP action hero (quick to adapt to new situations, hands on, a fierce sense of 'moral right' borne of self), and I'm undecided on Kylo, but thought he exhibited FP tendencies -- a struggle between self-identity and rationality, that indicates a F/T imbalance.

[con’t: In reading Leonore Thomson’s book on personalities, the Fi-dom section brought Kylo to mind – unless prone to developing Se/Ne, the IFP fiercely guards their sense of ‘identity’ / self against outside influences and becomes rigid. Isn’t that what he’s doing, in differentiating himself from his parents and refusing to see reality any other way than what he has decided it is, based on his feelings / experiences?]

Judging by the debates I saw online, there doesn’t seem to be any general consensus on either character, which is interesting. It’s a trilogy and the character development beats are scattered and difficult to piece together. And there were several blanks that I had to fill with my own speculation. I didn’t really enjoy the process of typing these characters, but I did it because I kept on receiving requests week after week ever since the first movie came out. I found the character development arcs shallow and poorly paced, and the resolutions were too pat to be very interesting. I reviewed the Kylo and Rey scenes several times, with different personality types in focus each time, in order to ensure that the function pieces fit together to my satisfaction.

***** Major spoilers ahead! ******

Kylo

Although I think there are weak points in her book, I don’t take issue with Thomson’s description of Fi doms. I mainly disagree with the motive that you ascribe to Kylo. I don’t think he’s being protective of his identity, I don’t think he cares about identity, in the way that Fi doms do. I will concede that he gives the impression of being a rebellious teenager in defying his parents/mentor/birthright, but defiance alone does not make him Fi dom. Pretty much everyone (even some animal species) goes through a stupid teenage phase of rebellion at some point in their life, and some people never properly get past it. To me, he looks like a stuck-in-adolescence INTP: entirely too full of himself and blind to everything else.

One little point made it difficult for me to settle on a type. Leia was absolutely convinced that Kylo was “manipulated” by Snoke/Palpatine to join the dark side, but there was little indication from Kylo, Luke, and Han that this was actually the case. Should we trust Leia, since the movie portrayed her as being much more powerful than meets the eye, or should we trust Kylo’s subjective experience of himself as being fully and completely the master of his own fate? I go for the latter. If anyone’s going to be prone to blind belief, it’s a mom who doesn’t want to admit that she’s lost her son to her enemies. And I see no compelling evidence that he is a person who’s easily manipulated, emotionally or otherwise, which is a big strike against F. If you see such evidence, please present it.

The most revealing aspect of Kylo’s development was found in the conflicting and exaggerated accounts about what happened with Luke that led to the destruction of the Jedi academy. If you grow up being fed a constant diet of legends about galactic warfare from the Alliance, you’re naturally going to think of the Jedi as the good guys and the Empire as the bad guys (as we, the audience, are supposed to). However, if you’re Ben Solo, you don’t experience the Jedi as good guys, at all. He was “abandoned” by parents who were too busy/neglectful/high-minded to properly care for him and he was “abandoned” by a supposedly saintly mentor/uncle who wanted to kill him (even if the urge was fleeting). Additionally, Jedi training is essentially martial arts training in that you’re not supposed to use it violently unless you absolutely have to, which leaves the Jedi looking like total wusses much of the time, politically, always leading from behind and allowing evil to get a foothold over and over again.

Therefore, my theory is that Kylo turned, completely willingly, because he saw nothing but pathetic posturing and hypocrisy around him. It was an extremely deep cynicism (the belief that “good”, “love”, “happiness”, or anything that makes humans noble, don’t really exist) that allowed him to fully embrace his own darkness to very powerful effect - no manipulation necessary. This wouldn’t work with Fi-Te but fits with Ti-Fe. I postulate that his conception of morality was extremely reductive and childish. Essentially, “good guys should be totally free of bad”, so any whiff of anyone feeling conflicted or making dumb choices and they no longer get the privilege of being labeled as a “good” person. Accordingly, any hint of conflict in himself cements the fact that he is bad, irredeemably bad, because he’s full of conflict.

But I argue that the reason he’s full of conflict is not because he’s bad or a Feeler, it’s because the way he was being taught was not well-suited to his personality at all, in fact, it was quite damaging to him, which pushed him into skepticism and alienation. Here’s the blank I’m filling in: Luke is Fi dom. Fi and Ti do not communicate easily. Being forced or shamed into being good with no proper reasoning process by Fs tends to really aggravate inferior Fe grip problems in young Ti doms (it’s a common relationship dynamic). Fi doms construct beliefs from their feelings and it’s easy for them to expect that everyone should feel-believe the same. How is a person supposed to react when you keep telling them to Fi everything but they simply can’t or have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about? External manipulation or not, I speculate that Kylo was already in a deep state of doubt about whether he was in the right place. Luke’s intense fear and disgust in that fateful moment only confirmed Kylo’s suspicions that he didn’t belong there, and that Luke was no “good” guy.

Seeing oneself as irredeemably bad is a big blow to the ego, so one must engage in self-defense. The fact that turning dark allowed him to realize the full potential of his force capabilities, to him, meant that the Jedi were completely wrong in their conception of what is “good”. Therefore, he doesn’t consider himself to be bad per se, rather, he believes that he has discovered the truth about what it means to be great - being great via T is better than being good via F. He was trying to discover his true self through dominant Ti, perfectly normal part of development, but he chose the wrong path, because it was a reactionary decision that was merely rebelling against all the people who were trying to force him into being F. This poor choice meant that he had to keep trying to sever his connection to everything good in himself = disowning F. In his mind, the Jedi were stupid, weak, and deluding themselves all along, but he knows what’s up, and that granted him a high degree of confidence in his decisions. He saw himself as the real deal because he was smart enough and strong enough to be brutally honest about what he is. In essence, he’s no faker, and that makes him superior. These mental gymnastics happen with Ti, not Fi.

When Fi doms (even just start to) see themselves as bad, it ruins them and renders them impotent and dysfunctional (see previous post about Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender as a great example). Yet I see no compelling evidence that Kylo’s identity, feelings, or conflicts held him back, rather, they only served to fuel his rise. Despite appearances, he didn’t lust for power and validation like Te loop/grip, rather, he was only interested in self-mastery, and was willing to do whatever it took to achieve it, because he had no other ideal outside of himself to believe in. Nothing could really stop him unless he decided to stop. When he was frustrated, he would let it out in a quick burst, and then continued on as though it never happened (Fe). He was actually very disciplined in growing his abilities by setting consistent and logical challenges for himself to overcome (Ti), and he always succeeded in achieving his goals and reaching whatever potential he had envisioned for himself (Ne). Furthermore, someone who is very “defensive of their identity” wouldn’t be able to change themselves on a dime, as he did at the end. When faced with the right counter-evidence, he did a whiplash 180 without hemming or hawing or performative self-flagellation or whining about “losing myself”, etc. Would that be possible for Fi-Te?

Rey

Is she introverted? She is unapologetically assertive, she gets involved even when it doesn’t/shouldn’t involve her, she never balks at interacting with people/objects, she always faces situations immediately, she has trouble holding her tongue, she has difficulty introspecting (as evidenced from Luke’s training sessions), and most importantly, she exhibits no sign of needing a lot of down time to recharge. I’ve never known an introvert like that, let alone an ISFP, as they often dwell in their feelings away from the world and dislike taking on too much responsibility due to inferior Te. If she’s introverted, provide me with evidence, since I seem to have missed it.

I don’t think that there’s any evidence of N. She’s resourceful to a certain extent, but she seems to rely very heavily on other people to generate positive ideas and possibilities for reassurance, because she starts to panic when thinking on her own about “what could happen” (low Ne). She doesn’t easily come to intuitive insights about anything, let alone the future (no Ni). One scene in particular made me LOL. Luke was training her and asked her to close her eyes to meditate. He instructed her to “reach out” (to feel the energy of the force), and she extended her hand out physically into the air. That is the exemplar of being too literal. Furthermore, she spent how many freakin’ years following the same set routine day after day, in the same crap dump of a town, waiting obediently for her parents to pick her up? That’s the exemplar of Si discipline. Would SPs be capable of that patience or living in the dreary past for so long?

I agree that she is primarily motivated by her feelings when making judgments and decisions, which means F. She had to fend for herself since childhood, so her skills are unsurprising. Yet she irrationally lacks self-confidence despite the fact that she’s proven over and over again to be quite scrappy and capable, and people even tell her as much all the time - this is likely to indicate an inferior T insecurity. She has great difficulty (i.e. is unconsciously resistant to) probing around within herself, which is common for inferior Ti in not wanting to feel one’s own darkness. The fact that introspection results in her discovering that her deepest, darkest fear is being completely and utterly “alone” as a “nothing” in “nothingness” is very compelling evidence for inferior Ti.

If inferior Ti, then dominant Fe is a must. I see lots of evidence. She is inexplicably able to communicate with anyone, of any species of bot or animal, with effortless empathic understanding? Her first stance is to give people the benefit of the doubt, no matter how strange or wayward they seem. She has a very naive trust in the goodness of people despite dealing with crooks all the time. She takes it upon herself to bring out the good in people whenever she is in a position to. I don’t think she’s always sure of her feelings (Fi-Ni), rather, she’s always sure that there is goodness to be found if one only looks hard enough (Fe-Ne). A lot of people have strong moral feelings and values, so I’m a bit tired of the lazy stereotype that Fi doms have the monopoly on morality. If you’re going to reference a person’s morality, go deeper to see what exactly it is they believe, how they came to those beliefs, and how they express those beliefs in detail, as that would be more revealing of their functions.

For such a goody-goody-two-shoes, her response to Kylo wasn’t the judgmental disgust that Luke barfed up (Fi-Te) but rather a scary desire to figure him out (Fe-Ti). She seemed quite UNcertain about her personal feelings about him (not Fi), which made their relationship one-sided for quite some time, as she struggled with the push-pull dynamic. ESFJs are often attracted to “dark and mysterious” people due to the unconscious yearnings of inferior Ti, even when Si-Ne warns them that these people are bad news. And it doesn’t get more mysterious than some powerful dude dressed in black donning a mask that shows up in random visions. When avoiding him was no longer possible, she made an admirable effort to dive deeper into his perspective, even when she rightfully feared losing herself in the process. She felt compelled to “get both sides of the story” in typical diplomat fashion before deciding what to do, in hopes of “fixing” Kylo through repairing his relationship with Luke.

Although there seemed to be constant teasing about the possibility of Rey turning dark, I never really saw any possibility. She gave no major indication of being afraid of turning, and it seemed that she never lost touch with her strong desire to be good. She only ever indicated a fear of failing to perform her duty capably (Si) and of failing all the people who were relying upon her powers to succeed (Fe). Discovering her true lineage didn’t really shake her because her parents were good in spite of their bloodline, so there was already an “exception to the rule” for her to follow and emulate. Turning dark would sever and betray her emotional connection to her parents - totally out of the question.

As far as I can tell, the only reason she survived her horrible childhood relatively unscathed was because she held on to the belief that her parents loved her enough to come back, i.e., emotional connection to others is her lifeline. I don’t think it’s an accident that, in her moment of greatest need, it was the connection to past Jedi and their encouragement that saved her butt. She was existentially SHOOK when Kylo claimed that her parents were horrible and abandoned her. And she was only able to find her footing again by inserting herself (i.e. “belonging” to) the Skywalker clan, essentially by being the model of a kid that Ben should’ve been. What self-respecting ISFP would be happy latching on to someone else’s mom, riding someone else’s coattails, and literally defining their identity through someone else’s name and legacy?

I’ve heard some people critique Rey as a flat mary sue character, and I see where they’re coming from. But which type is most likely to resemble a mary sue at first glance? She is supposed to be the hero in a fairy tale after all, so one would expect her flawedness to be minimized.

Relationship Dynamics

In the final movie, the audience is bludgeoned over and over again with the claim that Kylo and Rey are meant to be a dyad. This all but guarantees that they will be exact functional opposites, otherwise, there would be no strong sense of complementary forces pulling them together into one perfectly harmonized and united front. Although the chemistry between them wasn’t properly developed IMO, I think I saw on paper what was meant to be happening in terms of the writer’s intentions.

Luke was unsuited to helping either of them with questions of identity and morality because, being Fi dom, he took these things for granted, presumptive, already settled non-issues, which amounts to him being closed to any real questioning and discussion. As a result of lacking good guidance, what drew Kylo and Rey together was an underlying need to help each other make sense of themselves, with the unconscious suspicion that the other person held the missing piece of the puzzle.

Rey was only able to reach her potential by confronting the full extent of her own darkness within (inferior Ti), which was what Kylo forced her to do in incremental steps, as he kept nudging her to question her fundamental beliefs about who she is and what she stands for, presumably in the same way that he had done for himself. But it’s not as easy to twist someone’s sense of morality when F is at the top and healthy versus the bottom of the stack. By making it through his gauntlet of tests and critiques and facing down her fears, she was able to develop into a stronger and more self-assured person to eventually achieve inferior Ti closure. Don’t forget how her eyes would light up when hearing stories of Jedi masters and their achievements. It is mainly EJs who run headfirst toward responsibility rather than away from it. We see, in the end, a picture of Rey as a beaming, confident, and self-possessed person who feels like the world is her oyster, fully inhabiting her role in the hero story that she had always wished to be a part of. The audience is meant to believe that she’s the rightful heir when she finally believes in herself.

By questioning Rey’s identity, Kylo eventually had to question his own as well, since he was the one who wanted to believe that they shared a similar path to feeling lost. Kylo is stuck in adolescent cynicism as explained above, with Si loop resentment from the past preventing him from seeing other, better possibilities for himself. Late in the trilogy, I see in his face that he’s probably suffering from the sunk cost fallacy of thinking that he is past the point of no return. Perhaps he believes that he has no choice but to resign himself to the fate he has chosen (parallel to Vader) since Ti doms strongly believe in personal responsibility. He’s not wrong. If he wasn’t irredeemable at first, he certainly was after the profound destruction he had wrought. Ti doms are rarely wrong as their logic is usually impeccable, but they tend to lack perspective. E.g. He’s not wrong in believing that people are hypocritical because they really are (Ti factual judgment is spot on), but then he defines his terms too narrowly in dismissing all people as unworthy of being called “good” (Fe value judgment is very immature).

What finally broke the mental confinement of Si loop? IMO, three contributing factors: 1) He started to suffer the same skepticism about the dark side as he had with the Jedi, since Ti promotes impartial judgment, which opened him up somewhat to questioning his choices. INTPs deeply dislike sheep mentality and blind ideology, so being constantly asked to prove his “allegiance” and quietly “submit” all the time by his superiors only served to reveal their flawed mentality in the same vein as Luke, which gave him the logical justification he needed for eliminating one boss after another. 2) He was drawn deeper and deeper into Rey’s psychology, which backfired on him, because it proved to him, again and again, every which way, that goodness is indeed possible, as Rey easily aced every temptation and challenge that he was able to fling at her. For NPs(Ne), believing in possibility can’t help but create a strong desire to actualize it. 3) Leia intervened with what I’m assuming was one last-ditch attempt to communicate how much she truly loves him despite what he’s become, which perhaps served to expand his thinking about what it means to love.

In the end, he redeemed himself on his own terms (even if he was not fully redeemed for the audience). As a result, he discovered something resembling happiness in his last moments of connection with Rey. You can’t tell a Ti dom to be good “just because”, or take goodness as default without question, or present a fake and idealized image of goodness for them to live up to, because that will never satisfy Ti. At the same time, morality cannot remain an abstract concept or else it is very easy to twist upside down. Goodness must be deeply FELT in order to be a motivating force, and he, at long last, felt goodness in his bones, through his decision to place the greater good above himself - inferior F often means arriving very late to the feeling party. He finally caught a glimpse of what he could be and should be through Rey’s, and possibly his mother’s, eyes, which allowed for inferior Fe closure. He had always gotten by okay without love and only believing and trusting in himself, but he realized that he was far better off for opening himself up to something more.

That’s my take anyway. Or perhaps that’s what I needed to see to make the story more interesting for myself, lol.

#star wars #rey #kylo ren #fiction #fictional depictions #esfj #intp #ask

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oscopelabs · 5 years

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The Murder Artist: Alfred Hitchcock At The End Of His Rope by Alice Stoehr

“Rope was an interesting technical experiment that I was lucky and happy to be a part of, but I don’t think it was one of Hitchcock’s better films.” So wrote Farley Granger, one of its two stars, in his memoir Include Me Out. The actor was in his early twenties when the Master of Suspense plucked him from Samuel Goldwyn’s roster. He’d star in the first production from the director’s new Transatlantic Pictures as Phillip Morgan, a pianist and co-conspirator in murder. John Dall would play his partner, homicidal mastermind Brandon Shaw. Granger had the stiff pout to Dall’s trembling smirk.

The “interesting technical experiment” was Hitchcock’s decision to shoot the film, adapted from a twenty-year-old English play, as a series of 10-minute shots stitched together into a simulated feature-length take. This allowed him to retain the stage’s spatial and temporal unities while guiding the audience with the camera’s eye. In the process, he’d embed a host of meta-textual and erotic nuances within the sinister mise-en-scène. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents (Granger’s boyfriend, for a time) updated the play’s fictionalized account of Chicagoan thrill killers Leopold and Loeb to a penthouse in late ‘40s Manhattan. There, Phillip strangles the duo’s friend David—his scream behind a curtain opens the film—immediately prior to a dinner party where they’ll serve pâté atop the box that serves as his coffin. It’s a morbid premise for a comedy of manners, and Brandon taunts his guests throughout the evening. (Asked if it’s someone’s birthday, he coyly replies, “It’s, uh, really almost the opposite.”)

Granger deemed the film lesser Hitchcock due to two limitations. One was the sheer repetition and exact blocking demanded by its formal conceit, the other the Production Code’s blanket ban on “sex perversion,” which meant tiptoeing around the fact that Brandon and Phillip—like their real-life inspirations and, to some degree, Rope’s leading men—were gay. That stringent homophobia forced Hitchcock and Laurents to convey their sexuality through ambiguity and implication; the director would use similar tactics to adapt queer writers like Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith. (“Hitchcock confessed that he actually enjoyed his negotiations with [Code honcho Joseph] Breen,” notes Thomas Doherty in the book Hollywood’s Censor. “The spirited give-and-take, said Hitchcock, possessed all the thrill of competitive horse trading.”) The nature of the characters’ relationship is hardly subtext: Rope starts with their orgasmic shudder over David’s death, then labored panting after which Brandon pulls out a cigarette and lets in some light. A few minutes later, Brandon strokes the neck of a champagne bottle; Phillip asks how he felt during the act, and he gasps “tremendously exhilarated.”

Like Brandon’s hints about the murder, the homosexuality on display is surprisingly explicit if an audience can decode it. The whole film pivots around their partnership, both criminal and domestic. In an impish bit of conflation, their scheme even stands in for “the love that dare not speak its name,” with David’s body acting as a fetish object in a sexual game no one else can perceive. The guests, as Brandon puts it, are “a dull crew,” “those idiots” who include David’s father and aunt, played by London theater veterans Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier. Joan Chandler and Douglas Dick, both a couple years into what would be modest careers, play David’s fiancée Janet and her ex Kenneth. Character actress Edith Evanson appears as housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, a prototype for Thelma Ritter’s Stella in Rear Window, and a top-billed James Stewart is Rupert Cadell, who once mentored the murderers in arcane philosophy.

This was the first of Stewart’s four collaborations with Hitchcock. It cast the actor against type not as a romantic hero but as an observer and provocateur, his gaze shrewd, his dialogue heavy with irony. The role presaged his work in the ‘50s, with Mann rather than Capra, emphasizing psychology over ideology. Rupert, like L.B. Jeffries or Scottie Ferguson, is rooting out a crime, and in so doing comes to seem more loathsome than the villains themselves. “Murder is—or should be—an art,” he lectures midway through Rope, eyebrow arched, martini glass in hand. “Not one of the seven lively perhaps, but an art nevertheless.” Half an hour in real time later, having seen David’s body, he flies into a moralizing monologue: “You’ve given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of!” It takes up the last several minutes of the film, with Rupert snarling from deep in his righteous indignation, “Did you think you were God, Brandon?”

Stewart was a master of sputtering, impassioned oratory, and his facility for it renders Rupert’s hypocrisy especially stark. He taught these murderers; he can’t just shrug off his culpability. The Code decreed that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, or sin.” Every transgression reaps a punishment. The ending of Rope abides by the letter of this law, as Rupert fires several shots into the night, drawing a police siren toward the building. He sits, deflated, while Phillip plays piano and Brandon has one last drink. But none of David’s loved ones get to excoriate his killers. The one man here with no integrity, no moral authority, is the one who gets the final, self-flagellating word.

The Code forbade throwing sympathy to the side of sin, but if Hitchcock meant any character in Rope as his stand-in, it was Brandon, not Rupert. The top to Phillip’s bottom, he’s the director of the play within a film. He’s storyboarded it to perfection. Janet, realizing he’s toying with her, cries that he’s incapable of just throwing a party. “No, you’d have to add something that appealed to your warped sense of humor!” Hitchcock, who’d built a corpus of corpses, must have gotten a chuckle from that line. Whereas Phillip fears discovery, Brandon puts symbolism above pragmatism, prioritizing what Phillip dubs his “neat little touches.” He needs to have dinner on the chest, the murder weapon tied around antique books, and his surrogate father Rupert in attendance, much as the film’s director needed to shoot in long takes—not because it’s pragmatic, but because it’s beautiful. He went to great lengths for verisimilar beauty here, as Steven Jacobs details in The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Miniatures in the three-dimensional cyclorama seen through the broad penthouse window were wired and connected to a ‘light organ’ that allowed for the gradual activation of the skyline’s thousands of lights and hundreds of neon signs. Meanwhile, spun-glass clouds were shifted by technicians from right to left during moments when the camera turned away from the window.

Jacobs notes as well that a painting by Fidelio Ponce de León hanging on Brandon and Phillip’s wall actually belonged to the director and had previously hung in his own home. Rope is avant-garde art wrapped in a bourgeois thriller, about avant-garde art wrapped in a dinner party, pushing moral and aesthetic boundaries while collapsing any distinction between the two. In this nested construction, Brandon the murder artist becomes a figure of auto-critique or perhaps apologia. Did you think you were God, Alfred? By 1948, he’d already made dozens of films, often obliquely about sex and violence, across decades and continents. He’d become the world champion sick joke raconteur. Rope is a reckoning with the ethics of his genre.

By 1948, the world had changed. A few years earlier, Hitchcock’s friend (and Rope co-producer) Sidney Bernstein had asked him to advise on a film about Germany’s newly liberated concentration camps. As Kay Gladstone writes in Holocaust and the Moving Image, Hitchcock worried that “tricky editing” would let skeptics read its footage as fraudulent and asked the editors “to use as far as possible long shots and panning shots with no cuts.” The director took his own counsel to heart.

Rope was also his first color film, the start of his fascination with dull palettes. (A quarter-century later he’d limn Frenzy’s London with every shade of beige.) Genteel browns and grays dominate the penthouse, the hues of men’s suits. Only after nightfall does the apartment glow with, in Jacobs’ phrasing, “the expressive possibilities of urban neon light.” The dinner party takes place at the crest of postwar modernity, a world away from the camps. Here, among the East Coast intelligentsia, murder’s merely a thought experiment. When David’s father mentions Hitler, Brandon dismisses him as “a paranoiac savage.” Yet even in polite society, the evening can begin with a secret killing and end with that iniquity brought to light. “Perhaps what is called civilization is hypocrisy,” says Brandon. “Perhaps,” David’s father concedes.

In 1948, the world was changing. That year saw the publication of Gore Vidal’s landmark gay novel The City and the Pillar and the first of the Kinsey Reports. Antonioni was a documentarian about to make his first feature; Truffaut was a delinquent catching Hitchcock movies at the Cinémathèque. Rope’s amorality and pitch-black humor augur a world and a cinema that were yet to come. It’s thorny gay art through a straight auteur. The film’s last thirty seconds show Rupert’s back to the camera while Brandon sips his cocktail and Phillip plays a tune, the trio lit by flashing neon. In this denouement lie decadence and damnation, art and death, the Code-closeted past and a disaffected future.

#alfred hitchcock #rope film #rope movie #hitchcock #james stewart #farley granger #john dall #gore vidal #michelangelo antonioni #francois truffaut #frenzy film #the wrong house: the architecture of alfred hitchcock #musings #film writing #film essay #oscilloscope laboratories #o-scope labs #adam yauch #Beastie Boys

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adazieht · 4 years

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Initially, I wrote an article for a Russian-speaking audience. I TRANSLATED WITH THE HELP OF AN ONLINE TRANSLATOR. WITHIN A FEW MONTHS I WILL TRANSLATE MYSELF, BUT MOST LIKELY TO THE GERMAN LANGUAGE.

Attention: I love the world of "Harry Potter," but I think the main character is antihero.

The system of roles that I have described for the story's characters is based on the Writer's Way (the old edition was called the Hero's Way), a classic Hollywood typology. Briefly about the typology Of " the way of the Writer/Hero's» The author believes that by giving a group of first-and second-plan characters clear roles that affect the plot and the Main Character, it is possible to create a strong story. Its typology was at first critically accepted, as proponents of chaotic plot creation thought that it would kill the individual. But in the end, everything turned out exactly the opposite and indeed the best pictures of American and European cinema were created using this typology. Proving once again that random writing can't create a clear and understandable story for female viewers.

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In my opinion the path of the Writer/This is a very strong system, which has been present in the stories of Pixar, Disney, paramount, especially 20th century Fox and others for twenty years (or even more, it should be clarified). However, it creates at first glance clear restrictions that the authors first see and therefore decide to work within the framework, although the typology is intended to adapt to the authors, their mentality, mentality and territoriality (for example: the plot in Germany from an Irish immigrant will not be similar to the plot of an American, although they strictly followed the system of the role of heroes in the plot).

Let The Writer/The hero does not give full will in what characters to use and how. Since it has a total of 7 types (Hero, Trickster, guardian of the Threshold, Mentor, Werewolf, Partners and Shadow). Around which is usually built a dynamic, but short story, which is not easy for everyone to work through and yet is mostly suitable for a movie in the last 1.5 hours.

But it really can be useful, it's just better to Supplement it with your own interpretation and other typologies. It should be clarified that I will not touch on the manner of writing a story using the writer's Path system, since I do not share the opinion about its convenience. Although it is definitely more convenient than the classical system, which is actively taught in Russian universities, where thank you that there are not 25 steps in the story, which are told to put in 40 minutes of narration.

I used The Writer's Path/the hero to quickly think through what classic conflict/action should occur in connection with one of the characters.

Mentor. The mentor was the same Yoda from Star Wars. That is, the character performing the function of a Mentor should teach something to the Main Character/Hero, perhaps even accompany the story, like Merlin. Or teach a lesson and die provoking the Heroine / Hero into action (Uncle Ben from Spider-Man).

False Mentor. Negative Mentor, so to speak. He is trusted by the main character, he even teaches him, but leads thereby to destruction because he is actually an insidious manipulator. Dumbledore from Harry Potter.

The topic of Harry Potter as a character will be touched upon later to demonstrate how we can be manipulated by writers and writers who keep in mind the ideal image of the Main Character-Hercules.

The trickster. Tricksters are the most independent characters. People like to say that Loki from marvel is a Trickster, but in fact he only has trickster elements in his system of action. Namely, to act not only during the main actions on the screen, but also before, between, and behind them. Tricksters don't care about the goals of the Main Character, the Villain, or anyone else. They have their own goals and want to achieve them. Tricksters are always active and do not stand still, so they are rarely in the focus of the cameras or suddenly appear on the scene and thank you if they decide to support Hero. We can say that Tricksters are one of the most powerful characters, both mentally and physically, some of them therefore decide not to go into the main plot especially (if they are not interested in the reward for help or the object of the Main Character's hunt), because why should they go into what they decide with one hand? This is boring, and boredom is not for them, and they like to pretend to be physically weak. As a result, I will write that Tricksters exist so that the world in which the actions take place is alive. So that the tower over there will explode and attract attention, so that at this moment the reader will be hooked by its mystery trickster. To create an active and complete world atmosphere.

Guardian of the threshold. Always on the side of the villain. In the story, it serves to become the last obstacle for the hero, after which he is convinced of his strength and that he definitely needs to defeat the Shadow (the main villain). Sometimes it can take the side of the Hero, since the main role of the Guardian is educational and inspiring during the contact between them. The guardian can decide that the Hero is perfect or that his strength has earned his loyalty, and the Shadow will lose. Usually in the arches of the confrontation between Batman( the Hero) and the Joker (the Shadow), the role of the Guardian is performed by Harley Quinn, who is not rarely disappointed in the Shadow and tries to start living again. But most often the Threshold Guard is killed.

Werewolf. An inferior type in this typology. The author is still not completely sure how much it has the place to be, as a separate type, and not a special quality of other types. For example, a False mentor can also be called a Werewolf who seemed to be one, but turned out to be another. But a Werewolf takes place when the differences from the original image are so strong that it seems that it is a completely different character. That is, There was little red riding Hood - cute, but it turned out to be a serial killer who kills grandmothers and blames the wolf.

The shadow is always the main villain of the story. The shadow has similar features to the main character, not rarely the same weaknesses, desires, but unlike him, the Shadow does not restrain anything and it creates hell that. At the same time, because of similarities, they may have mutual understanding and dialogues, but because of differences, they can not coexist.

Partners-partners and there is nothing to describe here. Just the Hero's partners. All.

And now about the Hero/Heroine and what does the deception I mentioned earlier in the story about Harry Potter have to do with it?

A hero in the classical sense is all good deeds in one person and the desire to do everything for the best. This is a great image of a person who overcomes difficulties and solves the problems of the plot. Their personal plot is easy to understand and always equals the plot of the story.

However, there is also a plot about an anti-Hero. An antihero is a hero who tends to self-flagellate, do stupid things and negatively tune in to the world around him, trying on the mask of an often beaten person who can justify his negative outbursts, bad treatment of his Partners (including sitting on their necks). Antiheroes usually arise from an attempt to make the Trickster the main character, or to arouse pity from readers, often ending with the death of this antihero in order to teach the audience something.

And this is a description of the main character of "Harry Potter", that is, Harry himself. And classics stories about anti-Heroes he was also dragged through the plot, through his "do not want", while its true purpose (which is at least not entirely overlap with the purpose of his environment and history) a large part of the plot was not formed, and after the trigger 4 in the book, he started to want revenge for parents who didn't idealiziruete the image of his cause (revenge for ideal people and for the lost perfect life in complete comfort, instead of to create comfort; despite the fact that he also, like a typical anti-hero, clung to those who would give him this comfort). Then he learns information that tells him that perfect people are not completely perfect. And it is during this period that he begins to physically threaten other people, even committing actions that can kill someone, giving in to anger. Around the characters begin to die, which of course puts pressure on the antihero, but emotionally he does not often remember the deaths, quickly moving away (if it is not the characters who gave him either hope for comfort, or already giving comfort).

Like all anti-heroes, he also exhales sharply, then flares up, then sees that darkness is happening around him. Dies for the sake of achieving a good future (because the decision of the plot is always either in the death of the anti-hero, or because he can do nothing else). Sometimes the authors at the same time give the antihero during or after death a chance to solve the main conflict of the story plot with their own hands, organizing their rebirth, as if they are Phoenixes and are born again bright and clean.

Where do the legs of a typical anti-Hero story grow from? From Greek myths, where heroes often performed "feats" in which they not infrequently killed those who did not harm them or creatures that logically ate those who wandered into the heart of their territories, or killed deservedly villains, but again in the name of Victory, Revenge, to Order, and not justice.

Greek mythology as a whole can be characterized as an anti-Hero cult, which serves to satisfy and encourage the fact that at that time Greece was a very negative country in terms of moral appearance. However, these feats of HEROES were presented to all of us as something beautiful and truly heroic. The same disney cartoon about Hercules could not become anything else either. At the same time, thanks to the development of critical thinking people, it was noticed that the only one who had motivation - was Hades, and the same Zeus asshole.

And if you superimpose Hercules from the beginning of the story and Harry Potter, will there be a special difference in functionality? There are great forces and all around say that he is special, the world around him does not understand, he wants more and feels that somewhere there is a true comfort for him. He wants justice for Himself, not for others. Then something happens that gets him involved in the story's plot. He is given the opportunity to enter the magical world, where he seems to be in the theme, allowed to practice their own powers. At the same time, he does not want to return to the old world, as he is inclined to devalue all the good that he received there. He wants to become a Hero, feeling that he is an inferior classic Hero and something is wrong with him ( he is an anti-hero). And a sense of inferiority develops. There is a trigger that causes him to have a clearly formulated goal, but his goal is not perfect in fact. He is disappointed, but decides to act like a Hero, without showing empathy for others, emotionally distancing himself (he does not understand someone's reasons why they do this, but sees how they do it). There is a dangerous situation for their lives with the deaths of other people (or near deaths). The final, where he is white and cleared of doubt.

Very often, the Shadow of the anti-Hero in the final finally goes mad, reflecting the anti-Hero's obsession with his own goal. Remember when Hades and Voldemort had their roofs blown off?

This is the end of the article. Good luck to all and enjoy writing any texts.

#character #characterdesign #blog #blog post #writing #The Writer's Way #Hero's Way #How to write #Harry Potter #Online translator #:d <3

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fe8meta · 4 years

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Knowledge, Faith, and Lyon

Anonymous asked:

I’m really interested in Knoll and Natasha’s Supports theme revolving around knowledge vs faith, and how that ties into Lyon’s character. Lyon willingly broke the laws of fate in his quest to help others, and persisted despite initial doubts. He wanted to lift the stigma of dark magic to save lives and prove that it wasn’t evil. Unfortunately his actions are counterproductive to that goal, and it ended badly.

There is an exchange in their C and A supports that is quite interesting, which I think will by extension be useful in talking about how it relates back to Lyon:

C Support:

Knoll: Your magic stems from faith in the unknowable, the divine presence. In contrast, dark magic stems from knowledge, from understanding. We distrust what we do not understand, and we strive to know the unknowable.

A Support:

Knoll: You would drop everything without hesitation just to help others. This is the difference between mages and priests. Knowledge versus sacrifice.

(Note: In the Japanese version, “This is the difference between mages and priests. Knowledge versus sacrifice” isn’t literally in the text. Instead, he says “We dark mages could never hope to be like you.”)

At the beginning of the support, Knoll sets up the dichotomy between light and dark magic as faith vs. knowledge. Or, in more subtle undertones, unquestioning vs. questioning. He points out the lack of a hard truth earlier in the C support... which creates a rather curious contrast with his rather self-assured idea of what Natasha’s mentor (implied to be Father MacGregor) was like.

For all of Knoll’s verbal self-flagellation during his recruitment in Chapter 14B and in his supports with Natasha and Duessel, it is Knoll himself who is trying to run from the truth of what has occurred. He talks in riddles and diverts the question whenever he is questioned on the events that occurred.

When he informs Natasha of the future they saw, it boggles his mind when she rejects his advice to avoid the disaster by traveling north. That she would willingly stay in an area she knows will come to unavoidable destruction to help those who cannot escape goes against everything he and the other dark mages thought of as their only way of overcoming the disaster. It is in the face of her determination that Knoll amends his perception of priests.

So what does this mean for Lyon? Well, for one, there is another extremely peculiar line that we get from the B support: Natasha, upon hearing that Lyon sought to restore dark magic’s integrity, says “Prince Lyon would never–” (in JP she says リオン様が･･･そのような･･･, or “Prince Lyon... also [felt that way]...”)

This means that Lyon’s use of dark magic was not widely known. It has a lot of implications for the discussion on Lyon’s cowardice in the face of adversity and sheds a new light on Lyon’s secretiveness about the results of his research. However, we aren’t here to discuss that thread at the moment, so I’ll reserve it for another time.

Lyon’s and the dark mages’ adamance in their quest to use dark magic for good is not all too different from piety into an unseen divine being. They continue their research into the uses of dark magic in spite of their misgivings, all with a belief --- faith, really --- that their achievements will be lauded for how it has helped the people.

(Note: I was going to add a section about the line in Duessel-Knoll B where he exclaims about “such horrors” after talking about ceremonies and rituals, but this is evidently only in the English version. In the JP script, all he says was “Delighted, we and Prince Lyon continued our divination rituals.”)

The English-only addition aside, by the end of Ephraim’s route, Lyon seems to have a degree of sunken cost fallacy going on in his head. By obtaining Grado’s salvation, he will justify this massive war he’s caused and all the blood that has been spilled because of him. He’s gotten this far; he must succeed in his plans or it will all have been for naught. Of course, he never really entertains the idea that his whole course has been wrong besides that one scene in 14B.

As I’m writing this meta, there’s something nagging at me about the way Knoll speaks of dark magic, but I can’t quite pinpoint it. It’s a jumble of thoughts regarding its involvement in the game and I can’t sort them out.

One train of thought I was having is that the knowledge Knoll and Lyon seek is not a wisdom type of knowledge. There is no “old wisdom” to it, there is no true comprehension or understanding. In real life, adages were used to pass down knowledge and practical wisdom long before the scientific reasons why they were accurate were known. Those adages pointed to recurring phenomenons that could then be used to uncover the science behind them.

By contrast, Lyon and the mages jump through a very rapid procession of increasingly unnatural endeavors. Healing is not that big a deal, it just shows that the Sacred Stone’s power could heal beyond normal limits. (Wonder if that girl got any... side-effects from her healing...) Predicting a major incoming storm is also not that mind-blowing, and Lyon’s response to it is pretty logical; close all the ports until the storm passes.

Then he goes on to predicting disasters to happen further into the future; not impossible (we have similar technology now) but a bit of a stretch for their apparent technology level. But then he also talks about things like moving mountains (yeah, we... haven’t gotten that part down quite as much) and then resurrecting the dead (nope).

This rapid escalation ultimately results in a turn of events that Knoll cannot understand. Vigarde is resurrected... but as a shell, and their Sacred Stone is lost in one fell swoop with Lyon possessed and himself a shell formed only by his ambitions.

#FE8 #magvel #natasha #knoll #lyon #character meta #script #long post

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