Tumgik
#Like we have a real issue with accepting anger and aggression from female characters
ifthejemfitz · 3 years
Text
Reasons why you should stan North:
First point she’s hot asf. Those doey brown eyes, all that red hair down to her bum. That first mission when they go to the warehouse in the pouring rain - No thoughts, head empty. Just tiddies
She’s infinitely selfless. Countless times we see she’s willing to give her life for Markus and the cause. Being willing to give your life, something you’ve fought for, for a cause bigger than yourself and for others knowing that you won’t be around to enjoy the very rights you’re fighting for, but it means that others will is imo completely admirable
She’s actually a strong and caring leader. Someone who’s willing to pick up the mantel and continue the cause whilst others may prefer to hide away. Yes, she leads a revolution and yes, she can never be victorious in her crusade. But she refuses to back down, and refuses to let her people be the target of an out and out genocide
She’s compassionate. She certainly makes brash recommendations but imo they always come from a place of protection and self-defence. We see with Connor that she never once holds his past against him, besides in jest, even if he’s potentially hunted down other deviants at that point. In fact she withholds judgement on any deviants’ past, because I’m sure that she’d hate for own to held against her
Controversial point (though it shouldn’t be) but her anger is justified. She’s been systematically abused in one of the most violent and horrendous ways for a prolonged period of time with no access to therapy. I’m not trying to justify her approach but I really don’t see any other way a person who has only witnessed violence, only been able to escape using violence and then seeing other deviants in hiding also been victims of violence how she wouldn’t respond using that exact same force. She’s a fighter plain and simple, and victims have no obligation to be tolerable of their oppressors or be the “perfect victim” and respond to their personal trauma in ways that are palatable to others
That being said I’m so glad that certain scenes show that she can be vulnerable. Sometimes bad bitches are also soft bitches and regardless of how you feel on shipping I’m glad that we see a side of her that can emotionally open up to others, talk about her trauma openly, openly sob on multiple occasions and clearly demonstrate the ability to love/receive love/be emotionally intimate (side point which could be its own post but I am so grateful we don’t ever see flashbacks to said abuse. Far too many pieces of media have opted for “realism” by showing unnecessary sexual violence and personally I don’t need to see it graphically displayed in order to believe her. Also props for not making it an “empowering feminist moment!!!” either. Abuse is not something women need to undergo to make them “stronger” and it’s abundantly obvious she’s furious about it and struggling with what is essentially ptsd)
She has a super unique role in the story. When Kara is killed and Connor permanently decommissioned that’s it for their stories. However, even if Markus is still alive but is removed as leader the narrative chooses to follow her. Yes, it’s more to do with the revolution by that point but it’s still surprising that she essentially fills in his role in his absence, even persuading Connor to deviate. And the fact they only made slight changes to the dialogue (conscious changes rather than completely rewriting or having them say the exact same lines) that her and Markus share in those scenes only proves how similar they are in that role. I’m just bummed she can’t be victorious (even with Connor on their side) because the success of a revolution should not be built entirely on the role of one person but alas.
Lastly she’s a bad bish, she takes no shit, she serves cunt, she kills her own r*pist and riot police, she’s bi because she can never sit properly and I say so, she leads a whole revolution with painted nails, her 5ft 3 ass literally hauls Markus out of danger multiple times and personally I’d let her break my face
46 notes · View notes
chainofclovers · 3 years
Text
Grace and Frankie 7x1 - 7x4 thoughts
Meh? Like...I love them so much, but...meh?
Tumblr media
(I did enjoy this line about brunch.)
I really loved season 6 of Grace and Frankie. I thought it was well-paced, largely very well-acted, generally well-written, and it culminated in a massive moment of character development for the title characters, who, having spent years growing closer and being there for each other when others could not or would not be, finally articulate to each other that they are the primary person in each other’s lives. Platonic gal pal soulmate BFF emotional support witches 4 lyfe!
I know progress isn’t always linear, and in fact is very rarely linear, but after a moment that significant, you’d think the writers on this show would maybe come up with some more interesting things for these characters to do than spin in circles?
@bristler and I watched on Friday night, and just this morning over breakfast had a good conversation about the first four episodes of the new season now that they have settled in our brains a bit. We concluded that the writing (often noticeably clunky, like the dialogue is responsible for more narration than usual) and the tone (aggressively wacky) feel really off, especially compared to the prior season. I think we diagnosed the big issue, which is that Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda are by far the most talented actors on this show (if you disagree, fight me in the parking lot) and it feels surprisingly unfortunate that their characters have, to this point in the new season, pretty much figured out their perspectives on each other. No matter how people feel about Grace and Frankie’s sexualities, the whole show has been about them finding each other and getting in deeper and deeper, and it’s less interesting to watch other characters have realizations about that than it is to watch Grace and Frankie having realizations about themselves. If the title characters are now limited to reacting to other people’s actions, and the title characters are played by the best actors on the show, the whole show’s gonna suffer. And is suffering, very much so, at least for these first four episodes. I’m definitely still excited for the final twelve in 2022 (twelve! I cannot believe this season will have sixteen eps!), but I’m pretty disappointed so far.
Stuff I Loved:
The family brunch. These families have been entwined for so long, and the backstory for this particular brunch was so fun (even though I didn’t care for the effects they did to depict Grace and Robert 25 years ago; there was no need for a visual flashback in the scene). I love that Grace hit Frankie with a wiffle ball bat. I love that the two couples realized some of the emotional reasons behind their decisions to lie to each other about Bud’s Bunny and about M’Challah. I love the way Jane Fonda sounds uttering the phrase “Bud’s Bunny” with little to no irony. I love that Grace is able to recognize and articulate just how deep and miserable her anger issues were, albeit with the continued help of her omnipresent martini, and that Frankie told her she’d now make up a holiday in order to spend more time with Grace. I really, really hope Frankie does exactly this at some point in the remaining episodes of the season. I love that Grace is generally a pretty good person now, with aspirations of being a delightful person. I love that she and Frankie don’t have it in them to stay angry with each other, and I love all the evidence that they really, really talk to each other about everything now.
Frankie talking to the man at the office (I don’t remember who he was supposed to be? A toilet manufacturer? I didn’t mention this before, but I actually got pretty high while watching?!? Believe it or not, this was the first time I smoked pot and watched Grace and Frankie at the same time despite having enjoyed both activities on their own for quite some time. I would recommend the combo! And I think I still pretty much got what was happening) about paying for the toilet parts with candy. This whole subplot with the money laundering was absurd and not that interesting, but I loved this particular scene because it was finally evidence of some really thoughtful writing. The concepts aren’t enough! You have to write them into good dialogue! And the whole cash/candy thing was a moment of dialogue that only someone as hilarious as Lily Tomlin could pull off. Which she did, IMO.
In a show about super messy people, Coyote has stayed sober this entire time. He is sober, employed, in love, and preparing to buy a full-sized house with his partner. He hasn’t murdered anyone in his family. Hasn’t even attempted murder once.
In 2017 or whatever, Grace Hanson would have been furious about Frankie using obscure Beatles references like a treasure map when hiding the cash. But here in 2021, she cooperates and even gets in on the fun. The writing is very unsubtle this season, but that did feel like a reasonably subtle moment that shows how good of a partner she is for Frankie. (Platonic, of course! So platonic. Female friendship, amirite?)
Stuff I Did NOT Love and Felt Incredibly Negative About:
Brianna. I can only conclude that June Diane Raphael has decided she’s happy with playing a character whose primary role in life is to be hot and mean. She succeeds at being hot and mean, but I have reached my limit with this character. I realize we’re only a quarter of the way into the season, but I don’t think I can take another arc about her learning to compromise only to reveal to Barry that she never intended to compromise at all. At this point, it’s both abusive and boring. How?! The Grace/Brianna parallels aren’t interesting anymore, because one character has grown and the other is stagnant. I get that Brianna was raised in an emotionally stilted environment by two unhealthy people. But I think it would be very cool if she could learn something from her mother at this point. Grace has put a ton of effort into dealing with her “rabbit-killing, mad-at-the-world anger.” She’s put a ton of effort into figuring out what makes her happy, what she wants her life to look like. She’s even started accepting her age and abilities without shame. And that growth is believable; Grace is still short-tempered and she still slugs back way too many martinis and she struggles to articulate certain things, but she’s grown into a truly lovely human. And while, as a daughter with a mother, I can absolutely attest to the fact that it can be difficult and uncomfortable to learn lessons from one’s mother, Brianna really, really should. Grace spent decades letting anger and shame trap her in a small, miserable life. Brianna—and even Mallory, who just seems like a vapid idiot this season—are traveling that same path, but there’s someone right there who could really help, maybe even more than Frankie helped when the Hanson girls were first growing up.
The arraignment. The scene might’ve been salvageable if it was filmed from Grace’s perspective, and filmed to reflect how surreal and improbable it all was. But speaking of non-linear progress, this scene erased everything Nick Skolka has done to put himself in my good graces (LOL) over the past couple seasons. I mean, I tried, man. I even wrote fic about Nick, Grace, and Frankie making a genuine effort at polyamory. But the arraignment is so emotionally manipulative, such a slap in the face of everything Grace has worked for, and while we’re certainly “supposed” to feel the weight of the moment, I mean, it’s not like we’re supposed to be like, “Oh, cool, we’re in a rom com now! This is adorable!” it still felt bad and unearned and slapdash.
And I want Frankie to process these things with her! Frankie seems so happy to have all this information about Grace and how Grace feels, but I want to see scenes in which we can gain an understanding of how Frankie actually feels. Hearing Frankie talk to other people about how Grace feels is interesting, but it’s like there’s no room in these episodes for us to learn anything new about Frankie herself.
Grace’s transitional wig. Is so. Bad. It is. Such a. Bad wig. Oof. I mean, I like what they’re doing with Grace’s hair from a plot perspective, although (see one bullet up) I would really like to get more of an understanding of what’s happening in Grace’s head, not just on top of her head. And gosh, Frankie would be a really good person to talk to about this in a conversation that lasts longer than 30 seconds. But the wig! She’s in a wig in all four episodes, of course, since Jane Fonda went grey and cut her hair short before they started filming this season. The wig for episodes 1 and 2 is fine; it’s a good approximation of Grace’s typical hair, and of course we know that canonically Grace’s hair isn’t 100% her own hair anyway. But the wig with grey roots looks so weird. The part that’s growing out doesn’t look the same as the hair on the wig from 1 and 2. And the grey roots look like a yarmulke. I cannot wait to get to the point in the season when Grace goes all the way grey.
(One more thing about the hair. I can’t let it go. I paused the show while we were watching to rant, but I’m not done.) I had the great privilege of seeing Jane Fonda in person at a protest in 2019. She is an insanely beautiful human. She was growing her hair out and it was partially dyed blonde and partially grey. It looked really cool. I am not ashamed to say I spent that day learning many things about the climate crisis and about Jane Fonda’s hair. Having seen her in real life with her real hair looking that fucking great, I just have a an extra-large grudge against everyone involved in that horrible wig. The wig is necessary, but it didn’t have to be this bad.
What Do I Care About Now?
I am pretty intrigued by the way Grace threw out her real age in a conversation with Nick and Elena. She has nothing to fear anymore! She’s so chill about aging! What could go wrong? I assume that Nick and Elena maneuvering for Nick to be on house arrest in Grace's house specifically has to do with the fact that Grace is 82. She’s gonna find out that Nick is allowed to be with her because she’s ancient and helpless and the court took pity. Or something like that. She’s going to feel betrayed on top of feeling stifled and overwhelmed by Nick’s presence. I want to see where this goes for sure.
Other than that, and other than the fact that I really do continue to believe this show is moving in a direction in which Grace and Frankie will choose each other, I feel very whatever about this whole thing. I love this show and I will always appreciate this show for giving me some incredible characters to spend years of my life writing about, and for bringing me some pretty amazing friendships. Speaking of those friendships, yesterday @ellydash and @telanu and I were talking about some of the incredible TV we’ve watched recently, like Ted Lasso and Hacks and Fleabag and Killing Eve, and how great it feels to watch beautifully written TV crafted by writers who are profoundly—organically yet intentionally—attuned to even the most minor character’s rhythm. The disappointment of these first few episodes of the new G&F season feels like a mild disappointment rather than a sharp heartbreak, and that has a lot to do with being deeply invested in other shows that could also go in all kinds of different directions but with writing I fundamentally trust.
Also Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are my forever faves and my appreciation for their performances and general awesomeness onscreen and in life is undiminished. So that’s pretty cool.
58 notes · View notes
Text
ACOSF FINAL THOUGHTS. 3/5
It was good. But it could have been EPIC. I think I got caught up in the hype and should have remained blissfully ignorant. Loved Nestas journey and her finding happiness. WELL DESERVED.
However lots of loose threads, ignored angst, rushed ending, pregnancy plot overshaowed a lot - 2 chapters wasted!
It was Nestas book with Cassians POV to balance. It was interesting to read how skewed, almost backwards it was the way Nesta saw things. Like the IC behaviour/comments at times to her was counter acted then with Cassians interpretation. Really showed her low her self esteem was.
I know it's Nesta letting go and being happy with herself and I believe SJM wrote it this way to be deliberately CLEAR that the IC are NOT perfect and are 100% capable of being total pricks. BUT that they are not held accountable for their actions the same way Nesta is, was frustrating. Cold hard facts: Nesta never murdered/stole/lied/tortured/assaulted anyone. She was a bum and a drunk who spewed hurtful shite. An angry bitch. However the only thing she ever wilfully killed was the King of Hyburn at the NC's request. The level of disgust from Amren/Rhys/Mor directed at Nesta in the beginning was uncomfortable to read and didn't sit well with me.
I'll have to read it again but I was not satisfied . Nestas character arc started half way through ACOWAR. She stepped up when they needed her to.
Feyre agreeing despite her experience in Spring was a step backwards for me. Then again it's exactly what Nesta needed. Cruel to be kind. And Feyre had Nestas back repeatedly throughout the narrative.
Loved Nestas story all of it, training, friendships, self love, etc etc. Gwyn and Emerie ❤ All epic. And she's well...more interesting! Detail on Cassian killing all those monsters, scene in the big, wow so good.
Feysand overkill or perhaps Rhys overkill. Sorry SJM but you need to pull back.
Nessian happened the way I thought it would. That Cassian isn't perfect is normal. His heart is Nestas, it's pretty clear. Smut scenes, I've read better sorry !!! Intensity was not the same as previous books. More sexy and less crude for me. Missed Cassians swagger but I guess we are in his head, and he's a big cuddly insecure bear. With a big d**k.
More thoughts (in my humble opinion).
Feysand pregnancy DRAMA. Unnecessary. Keep it, just don't let it happen the way it did. I've already said I thought the sacrifice should have been for Gywn/Emerie and there is a simple tie in IMO (see previous posts). Or perhaps Cassian actually stabbing himself rather than hurting Nesta with the Queen. But I get SJM and 'losing' her power, that much power just undermines the remaining plot for next few books. Nesta could just blast them all to hell. And she stole it in anger and has let it go with love. Growth! She is clearly still hella powerful. We don't know the half of it.
For me the above was the most irritating. The ending squeezed in. And I like Feysand. But Nesta healing with Feyre needn't have been so convoluted. Or drastic. More private, perhaps a real angsty, tense conversation and confession. They didn't discuss anything.
The last few chapters too much went on...important moments; first females to win The Rite, sidelined. Accepting the mating bond, sidelined. WTF is Nestas power now, sidelined. Queen dead, sidelined. An ILLYRANIAN FEMALE KICKING ASS sidelined. I mean Christ that was Cassians goal! And nothing. NOTHING. Not even a handshake.
Rhys. It was plain uncomfortable. But someone mentioned SJM deliberately wrote Rhys that way for this book and that's true. In the Feyre POV she mentions "two mates" the reasonable one and the asshole so that, I think, is telling. He's def more HL and pulls rank in this book with everyone.
Rhys clearly witnesses Nestas trauma from her nightmare but there is no recognition with Nesta. Not a peep. Yet he clearly feels massive regret. Is that for our benefit, the readers? That at least we know. Don't hate on Rhys. (I like Rhys btw)
I'd have liked a full circle scene where they are back in THAT sitting room admiring baby Nyx and Nesta just says a few things. Cooly and calmly. She's happy they intervened, but for all their wisdom and years of living it left a lot to be desired. Nothing too crazy, just a few delivered lines, Nesta style.
Felt Nesta lost a little of her fire. But maybe you see it more from the others POV. Though they always provoked her and it was a defence mechanism. And she was a bitch at times. With others outside the IC it's clear she is not like that. Make what you will of that.
I know SJM doesn't like to over detail things but a moment with Feyre/Nyx/Nesta alone would have been nice.
The sisters never meeting Gwyn or Emerie. A scene like that would have been powerful.
Amren is as Mor rightly said is a "cranky old bastard". And "Welcome back to the Night Court Nesta Archeron" screamed, now that you've scrubbed up love come on home. I don't know. Amren was clearly done with Nesta she was the one that stood by her the most and got sick shit of her. All Amren can command is respect now and Nesta really wanted hers, possibly the most.
Can I make a point about people harping on about slut shaming. Amren made one catty observation, that Nesta would ride almost anything. No other character mentioned it. Not one. And Nesta enjoyed her bed partners, she refers to some of it (threesome!). There was zero shame. And SJM hates slut shaming. So stop. It's not a thing.
I'm nitpicking but there was a lot of hurt just left off. Perhaps that was the point. SJM was like, fuck it, Nesta doesn't want to feel that anger or resentment anymore she wants to live and be happy. She's found inner peace with herself and those that matter most. Me wanting justification for how they treated her at timea is not the point!!! Lol.
The painting, that stood out for me in ACOFAS. It hurt to read it. Maybe Feyre had nothing to paint of Nesta. They didn't talk. Share thoughts. I think Feyre asking Nesta herself to show her memories of The Rite so she could paint it would have had more impact. But it read very plainly like now you've earned your spot here...or I like you now or something. She was deliberately not there, perhaps until she wanted to be. Or finally accepted and embraced life with the IC. It was an unnecessary detail that just fueled the Feysand halo (again I like Feysand).
Nesta made those weapons therefore they are hers. Amren is power hungry. Rhys seems happy to hand them over. High King drama, I can see it. It could happen.
It's clear that Nesta didn't want to leave the NC, therefore she had to fall in. People have a problem with 'who's boss' but we've only ever had court dynamics from Rhys/Feyre POV. And they are the top dogs in the NC. We are going to have to get used of seeing Feysand make decisions from the outside. It's THEIR court. And to be fair, Feyre always had Nestas back.
And yes I believe you always have a choice with Rhys. I know some scoff at that.
Rhys kneeling to Nesta further proves our gal is a Queen. Feyre is the only one he's ever bowed to. SJM gave us that moment for Nesta and we will have to be content despite he's questionable aggressive behaviour. He clearly has issues with family given his past.
Enjoyed seeing a bit of Elaine. Finally. And Nesta delivered some home truths! Elaine needs to find some backbone. Really looking forward to her story. Go mad SJM!
Feysand POV should have been the fallout of Rhys keeping baby drama from Feyre. Now THAT I would want to hear. And perhaps Feyre saying to Nesta I'm "secretly glad you told me".
Eris I always found super interesting. It's clear to me he knows Mor is gay. Him helping her would have meant she was trapped in the AC. 'Rejecting her' allowed Rhys and Co to save her and to have freedom. She screwed him by keeping it secret. His arc will be with Lucien I think.
Az and Elaine not for me. Sorry. I'd like Lucien to find some happiness. I've spoken of this before see other posts. Az tortures people for a living, he has serious issues.
I've already spoken about Mor....remember her lol. Where is she! Ha! Actions speak louder than words with Mor. Winnow please my mate is being a dick, teach me to dance, dress shopping. But I guess she's Feyres friend, Nesta has hers. Nesta feeling ashamed as to how she treated Mor, will be interesting to see how Mor feels about that oul time when I was such a hypocrite, lol, what I really meant was....
There are 2 more books and a novella so who knows. Nessian ain't over.
Going to look forward to the fanfiction!
Thanks SJM.
22 notes · View notes
brightershadows · 3 years
Text
Euphorically Honest-- Euphoria, Teenagers, and the Realities in Hardship
OVERVIEW
Euphoria is brutally honest about the hardships of life. Focusing on the stories of a group of teenagers in modern-day California, it navigates through issues of drug addiction, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, violence, and depression. It can be tragic and liberating. But it is honest. Created by Sam Levinson, a screenwriter for Assassination Nation and The Wizard of Lies,  the story reflects on his own experience with drug addiction as a teenager, as well as having a loose basis in an Israeli show of the same name (Stack, 2019). The story follows a group of young people of varying genders, ethnicities, classes, and sexualities, including the drug-addicted narrator Rue, new-to-the-suburbs Jules, Cassie, beautiful but easily manipulated, her kind and easy-going sister Lexi, Kat, who embraces her body type as she gains confidence through sex, Nate, a manipulative and dominating male with control issues, and his girlfriend, Maddy, who battles her self-identity and her reliance on Nate (Levinson, 2019). Euphoria can be seen as overly graphic, or critiqued as too sexual, but its mature nature allows it to unearth the ugly truths about life, living, and loving, and the beauty behind the hardships too. 
EPISODE TWO REVIEW
In “Stuntin Like My Daddy,” Nate discovers his father’s sex tape collection at a very young age, videos of his father having sex with several people. This is where Nate’s disdain male sexual anatomy stems from. Nate quickly becomes infatuated with Maddy. Whether disturbing or romantic, he fantasizes about hurting or killing the person who dares harms her. A series of flashbacks from Rue’s summer shows her consuming various drugs and getting high, fighting with her mom, waking up in the hospital, and singing in the car with her mom and sister, highlighting what she has gone through as well as her relationship with her family. On several occasions, Rue relapses. Reluctantly and unable to say no, she takes a dose of fentanyl. Unaware of the consequences, Jules is called to take care of Rue. Their friendship further develops. Kat learns that an explicit video of her has been posted to a porn website. When the video’s view count continues to grow, Kat is intrigued and signs for a web cam streaming account. Obsessed with Maddy, Nate begins stalking Tyler, Maddy’s most recent hookup. Maddy, still wanting to get back together with Nate, tells him that she was blacked out and did not mean to do what she did. This causes Nate to believe that Tyler had raped Maddy. Furious, Nate breaks into Tyler’s apartment and beats him half to death. At the end of the episode, we learn that the guy Jules has been texting is named Tyler but it actually turns out to be Nate.
Nate Jacobs is the typical football jock, yet he exhibits anger, aggression, and sociopathic behavior. Rue Bennett struggles with her own psyche as she suffers from ADHD, bipolar, general anxiety, BPD (borderline personality disorder), and drug addiction. Jules Vaughan is unapologetically herself, although she seems to seek attention, approval, and sexual relationships from men who are undeserving of her. Maddy Perez is the popular cheerleader who knows she is attractive and she goes after what she wants. She stands up to everybody else except Nate. Kat Hernandez may seem like a side character, the fat best friend, at first, but she finds her confidence grows as an individual. Fez/Fezco is Rue’s main drug dealer. Although he supplies her, he also cares for Rue and does want her to get mixed up with a worst crowd.
Although there are people of color in the show, there could always be more representation of race. Rue and her sister, Gia, are mixed, with a Black mom and a white dad. Maddy is Latina as both of her parents are Latino. Kat Hernandez is also of Latin descent but we do not see much of her parents or family. Every other (main) character in this episode is white, this includes Nate, Jules, and Tyler. This show, and episode, is not particularly making any waves or strides with their representation of race. And with the representation of race that they do have, there is no portrayal of racial identity, culture, or heritage. Jules definitely stands out as she is a transgender woman. She is currently taking hormones and her father and closest friends accept her for who she is. Jules goes on to have sexual encounters with older men as well budding romances with boys her age. Nate is a stark contrast to Jules, with him being set in his heteronormative, gender binary ways. Most, if not all of the characters identify with the gender that they present. The males, Nate and Fez identity as male. The females, Rue, Kat, Jules, and Maddy identify as female. The main characters mainly fall into one of the two binary genders. All of the romantic or sexual relationship aspects in episode 2 revolve around a male and a female, such as Nate and Maddy, or Maddy and Tyler, or even Jules and her mysterious texter (a man). To my knowledge, there is no presence of a non-binary or agender character. Jules, a transgender woman, challenges Nate’s notion of the strict gender binary system.
Euphoria definitely relies on stereotypes because the writers of this show intend on having the characters break said stereotypes. Kat is initially insecure and self-conscious. After she has sex for the first time and the video of the act gets leaked, she redefines herself. Her sexuality blossoms throughout this show as she also begins to have casual sex which normalizing women having and enjoying sex. Kat becomes comfortable with herself by wearing clothes that are considered more edgy, outfits that she would have never worn before. Kat’s character breaks the sexuality stereotype because the media hardly ever sees a plus-sized woman be expressed in a sexually positive light, even though it may not have started out that way. Nate’s character is embodiment of the toxic, cis-gendered white masculinity. He describes the perfect girl as dressing more feminine, acting like a “proper lady,” and overall more “girly” as opposed to “tomboy.” Because he is so uncomfortable with the male sexual anatomy, and even disturbed by how comfortable others are, he may have some issues regarding internal homophobia. Nate does not really defy this stereotype, his character is the epitome of this stereotype. Maddy, a cisgender, heterosexual female, understands the delicate nature of the gender constructed society. She has prioritized Nate and his needs sexually by watching porn in order to mimic what the porn actress does so that she can please Nate. Her sexuality is rarely mentioned, it only rises in conjunction with other boys. Jules’ character as a transgender person challenges the conventional gender roles and constructs. Jules is very comfortable with herself and her sexuality and is proud of who she is.The concept of a non-binary gender system perplexes many people. With the current administration, transgender rights are not protected. In fact, transgender people are continued to be discriminated against. The Trump administration has played a major role in “withdrawing regulatory protections for transgender children in schools, fought recognition of transgender people under federal employment laws, banned transgender people from serving in the military, rolled back protections for transgender people in prisons, and threatened to cut off funding to schools that let transgender girls participate in sports” (Thoreson). Although Jules is able to be who she want to be and live the life that she wants, this may not be the case for many transgender people in the real world outside of the show.
Today people are often quick to criminalize or shun drug users and addicts. They are quick to judge and want the most severe punishment to be given. But medical professionals know that addiction is a very serious disease, one that requires “treatment, compassion, and support” (Siegel). Euphoria attempts to destigmatize and humanize addiction. The legal system should not be punishing people who have abused drugs by putting them into a jail cell where they are isolated from society, instead these people need real help through rehab and various treatments. Due to the fact that Rue had several relapses once she completed her rehab program, one may say that these programs do not work; however there is no singular timeline to get better. It may take weeks, months, or years, and the journey is difficult. But society cannot give up. Social and political reforms concerning drug use/abuse and addiction is very much needed. 
EPISODE THREE REVIEW
In ' Made You Look,' Nate meets Jules on a gay dating app disguised as Shyguy118. Although Nate doesn't identify as gay, Jules reveals being transexual and quickly falls in love with Shyguy118, oblivious to his true identity as a classmate at the same school. Maddy becomes skeptical of Nate and searches through his phone and, in shock, learns of Nate's involvement with a gay dating app and nude sending with Jules. Jules's heightened obsession over the mysterious Shyguy118 leads Jules to agree to meet Nate for the first time in person near a lake at night. While all of this unfolds, Rue, who is Jules's supportive best friend, at first, entertains Jules's fantasies by helping Jules send pornographic images to Nate. However, tension arises when Rue exposes her worries for her best friend and undeniable attraction for her as more than just friends. Unfortunately, Jules did not reciprocate the kiss they shared. This sent Rue spiraling into a frenzy and falling back into the addictive habit of taking pills and getting high, undoing Rue's 60-day clean streak. Embarrassed, Rue runs straight back to Fezco, her drug dealer, in hopes to illegally obtain more drugs to numb the humiliation she felt. Fortunately, Fezco doesn't give in to Rue and shuts the door on her, leaving Rue to look toward Ali, an omniscient man she met at a therapy gathering for drug users to seek guidance.
Kat, a Tumblr fanfiction queen, masks herself while exploring her curiosity for explicit content and webcam streaming. She exposes herself to lingerie and twerking on her account; she agrees to perform a private camera meet with a man who falls in love with Kat's powerful and sexual dominatrix persona. Originally insecure with her weight, Kat eventually learns to embrace her curves and dives into a new and unusual world of femdom. This episode also introduces Cassie. She displays as a bold, open-minded party girl that isn't phased by frat party endeavors. McKay, Cassie's crush, invites her to his frat-hazing event, and they both fall deeply in love with each other, foreshadowing potential problems to come from concupiscence for one another.
This episode involves various races but is primarily white-dominant. Cassie is blonde and white, represented as audacious and open-minded. Maddy is a cis-gender Latina and, in this episode, victimized by Nate, a white playboy who cheats on Maddy. Rue and her sister are a mix from a black mom and a white dad. Despite various races represented, this episode minimally illustrates heritage background and racial and cultural distinctiveness. There are very minimal cultural representations and race diversity besides the racially represented individuals such as Rue, Maddy, Kat, Ali, and Fezco. Although the film is predominantly white race influenced, there is still a general race narration awareness displayed in the show.  
Sexuality representation is a flourishing topic within each episode in Euphoria. Arguably one of the most influential characters in this episode, Rue, a lesbian half black teenager, finds herself falling in love with her openly transgender best friend. This tricky love triangle is demonstrated between Rue caring for Jules while she cares for Nate. Jules is head over heels for her classmate, Nate, who hasn't announced is gay but is chatting with Jules on a gay dating site. Moreover, Nate's girlfriend in this episode, Maddy, is only now beginning to question if Nate is straight like he demands he is.This episode centers around redirecting the audience's view of how a character's sexuality is initially perceived to how each character's sexuality is either nonchanging or questioned and altered due to more self-awareness. For example, Jules, from the beginning, identified as transgender and unchanging while Rue begins to question her sexuality and feelings for her friend after kissing her. Male, female, and non-binary characters speak and act quite differently in Euphoria. Male actors such as Nate, Ali, and Fezco are very much dominant and slightly manipulative in this episode. Nate is a controlling and manipulative character fueled by curiosity and confusion. Ali is a mysterious, omniscient figure who sees past Rue's addiction. Lastly, Fezco shuts Rue out when she almost dies from the drugs he gave her. The females include Maddy, Rue, Jules, Kat, and Cassie. Non-binary characters were not present in this episode; however, Nate being on a gay dating site and taking an interest in Jules knowing her being transgender urges the question of what Nate's sexuality may be. 
Cassie, in this episode, played an essential role in breaking gender profiling stereotypes. When Cassie was at the weekend frat-hazing party with McKay, she stood up to the guys at the party and took a shot of water with a live goldfish in it without hesitation, while McKay was hesitant and wanted to reject the challenge. Cassie taking that shot was significant because she didn't abide by her gender role limitations. Instead, she proved that she could equally compete alongside the frat boys at the party.
Illegal drug use for underage teenagers is very much a political issue. The creator of Euphoria, Sam Levinson, opens up about his struggles with addiction growing up. He talks about how his personal history of drug use as a teenager animated Rue's similar struggles in Euphoria. It's essential to recognize that Rue was not using drugs because of peer pressure but because she was struggling with "obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit disorder (ADD), general anxiety disorder, and even bipolar disorder" (Health, 2020). Many teens go undiagnosed with disorders like these and spend their teenage years fighting addiction and going to rehab centers, sometimes more than once in hopes of ending the addiction. There are other situations where undiagnosed individuals who don't fall victim to drug addiction still live a life of struggle with their mental illness. Euphoria sheds light on addiction and mental health and de-stigmatizes mental illness, a topic that should be further normalized and empathized with. 
EPISODE SEVEN REVIEW
“The Trials and Tribulations of Trying to Pee While Depressed” tackles a lot of issues. In many ways, this episode is openly candid about the hardships of life and the modern influences of distraction and avoidance. The candor of this episode is heartbreaking, revelating, and so, so real. The episode before the season finale follows multiple characters, including Jules, a trans woman battling confusion about her relationship with her best friend and her changing life; Cassie, a beautiful blonde teenager facing an unplanned pregnancy; and Rue, a drug addicted teenager battling a major low in her depression (Levinson 2019). This episode follows many differing plots that do not intersect in its time; however, at the root of the 59 minutes is the juxtaposition of two teenagers, the structures of family, and the deconstruction of femininity. 
As a whole, this show is unapologetically divergent from the stereotypes of society. It does not hesitate to tackle hard issues, easily addresses controversial issues regarding race, sexuality, and gender, without negating their seriousness. It makes normal the darkness we all battle in our private lives, especially in this episode. In it, characters from all walks of life get a say in the plot. Not only is the narrator and main character a gay Black women in love with her best friend, we also follow the story of Jules, a trans women, and hear from Cassie, a straight cisgender blonde girl who falls victim to the confines of the patriarchy, allowing herself to be sexualized and invalidated as a possession by the men in her life (Johnson, 2014). My only criticisms regarding this episode’s diversity is that there is little male influence or perspective on the storyline, and further, that there is little diversity outside of “black and white.” That is to say, while there are many Black characters given voice to this episode (and, by default many white characters as well), there is little representation of other ethnicities. We do not hear, for example, from the perspective of an Asian-American. That, to some extent, is an area that can be improved as the show continues. 
Earlier I mentioned the juxtaposition at the core of this episode, and I want to dive a little deeper into that. Cassie and Rue are, in many regards, polar opposites. Rue is Black, gay, struggles with drug addiction and is a social outcast. Cassie, in comparison, is blonde and blue eyed, gorgeous, and popular. Rue is an older sister; Cassie is the younger in her family. But this juxtaposition highlights the conditions of the patriarchy that define familial dynamics, such as sisterhood and motherhood, both amplifying and deconstructing those norms. For example, at the end of the episode, Rue and Cassie both go to their moms, the caretakers, for help when they reach rock bottom. Those mothers show up, and they do their job: care. However, at the same time, these mothers have taken up the role of being the breadwinner for the family as well, defying the stereotype of reliance on the male for prosperity and survival. Rue’s mom, however, is portrayed as more successful and put-together than Cassie’s mother, whom we see to be an alcoholic and basically a hot mess. This is contrary to racial stereotypes that typically portray the black community as one falling apart and the white suburban mom as picture-perfect. The gender and racial norms that society and time have produced throughout our history in America are blurred as these two realities are expressed in this show (Scott, 1986).
This episode also attacks femininity. Speaking with her friends from the city, Jules, says, “In my head, it’s like if I can conquer men, I can conquer femininity” (Levinson, 2019). This conquering, or, as Jules later says, obliteration of femininity is addressed throughout the episode. Cassie, conforming to societal expectations, allows herself to be objectified and sexualized by all the men in her life, using that perception of beauty to define her over the course of her life. Rue, on the other hand, does not conform to femininity at all, as we see in the way she dresses, and even the persona of the masculine “detective” she took on in a manic state. These three approaches to femininity contrast each other, as each one represents a different sector of diversity: race, sexuality, and gender identity. 
Euphoria is inherently political. It brings to light the reasons why the personal is political, especially in the midst of an election cycle where the rights of those who don’t conform to societal norms are under threat. This show creates an avenue for those rights and the real people behind those laws to speak and tell their own stories. Not only that, it represents mental illness and drug abuse, revealing the realities of living with these issues and bringing to light the struggles of the individual and their community through addiction and mental health crises. The show helps create empathy; empathy creates connection.  And connection, more than anything else, is something we deeply need right now. 
CITATIONS
Euphoria creator Sam Levinson on his controversial show: 'I hope it opens up a dialogue' [Interview by T. Stack]. (2019, June 16). Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2020, from https://ew.com/tv/2019/06/16/euphoria-creator-sam-levinson/.
Health, A. (2020). How HBO’s ‘Euphoria’ Depicts Teenage Drug Addiction Accurately. Retrieved 14 November 2020, from https://amhealth.com/2019/09/25/how-hbos-euphoria-depicts-teenage-drug-addiction-accurately/
Johnson, A. G. (2020). Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, or an Us. In 1046495481 799935172 G. Kirk & 1046495482 799935172 M. Okazawa-Rey (Authors), Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (Seventh ed., pp. 62-70). New York, New York: Oxford University Press. (The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, (2014))
Levinson, S. (Writer). (2019). Euphoria [Television series]. HBO.
Levinson, S. (Writer). (2019, June 23). Stuntin’ Like My Daddy [Television series episode] In Euphoria. HBO.
Levinson, S. (Writer). (2019, July 28). The Trials and Tribulations of Trying to Pee While Depressed [Television series episode]. In Euphoria. HBO.
Scott, J. (1986). Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review. doi:10.1086/ahr/91.5.1053
Siegel, Z. (2019, August 06). Euphoria Doesn't Have a Drug Problem. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/euphoria-hbo-drug-addiction-overdose.html
12 notes · View notes
Link
Lets debunk the BS from this. Up top a lot of this BS comes from Bob Chipman/MovieBob who is the guy who if you recall said:
-         Superheroes like Superman (and thus by extension Spider-Man who marry civilians were jerks for putting their spouses through the same stuff soldiers’ spouses go through
-         Spider-Man appeals best to teens (even though he provably doesn’t since most people get into him before their teens and he appealed to college students in his heyday)
-         The Spider-Marriage was nothing more than a forced publicity stunt
-         Sins Past is worse than OMD
-         Spider-Man is about passive aggressive power
-         And the best one, ever since OMD Peter and MJ had become ‘more interesting’
That all being said lets dive into this:
Someone asked the panel what a queer reading would add to the character of Miles…Jesus…that’s just the greatest sign of hope for this podcast isn’t it? Shoot me now…
Miles was not 3 dimensional when he was created. Even if you disagree it is nonsense to say that Peter wasn’t  three dimensional when he was first created. Just look at how much Stan explored Peter’s psychology in this singular panel from ASM #50
Tumblr media
Look at that. Peter Parker pulled between the two sides of his life. Making a judgement of someone. But then calling out his own judgement of them and acknowledging maybe he’s in the wrong.
This was 1967!
That isn’t three dimensional?
Additionally other people would disagree that Peter wasn’t three dimensional early on.
And even if you disagree with that it’s nonsense to say he hasn’t SINCE become three dimensional or that retaining his origin story (which Miles broadly uses as the basis for his story in every version of his character) somehow holds him back from being three dimensional. If nothing else Peter was at least multifaceted for the time period.
Spider-Man wasn’t an example of stories about a 15 year old made for 7 year olds. Spider-Man was intended to be a senior in AF #15 and the stories were written by Stan for at worst an older audience but at best basically just for him.
Stan Lee confirmed that AF #15 was written not as a one off but as something that if successful COULD become an on-going series.
Its BS to say Peter makes no sense as a character because he makes sense about as much as any character within the confines of the superhero genre can. MILES doesn’t somehow make more sense whatsoever.
No. Spider-Man wasn’t merely a thrown together ‘hey here is a teenage superhero story with a downer ending’ it was a story about selfishness, responsibility and appealed via it’s relative normalcy and lack of idealization of the superhero protagonist.
The psychology and thematic idea of his exclusive powers (invisibility+venom blast) is the same…how? How is disappearing and repelling people the same thing? They keep saying that in the podcast as though it’s obvious and it’s really not
Great Power=Great responsibility isn’t Peter’s catch phrase it’s the philosophy underpinning everything he does
‘The young end millennials have been thrown under the bus by society so the optimism is reserved for the young end millenials like Miles and Gwen’ oh but also ‘you need 5-10 years added to each character to have this make sense and also Spide-Ham doesn’t quit fit’…So…the theory doesn’t  make sense then does it. Also, what optimism is there for teen millenials in the late 2010s? We are all shit scared Global warming needs to be fixed within the next 10-20 years. The young end millenials will not be in much of a position to do that. Maybe not the high-end millenials either. The power rests in older Gen Xers or even older generations. So this ‘generational’ theory is bullshit. Yeah, Miles as the next generation maybe makes sense but not when you apply real world concepts of who the different generations are. Especially considering that’s made up bullshit anyway.
‘Blah blah blah for most of my life I’ve been uninterested in Spider-Man because I’ve believed him to be WHITE MALE teenaged wish fulfilment.’…*internally groans*…oh boy…this woman is one of those  types huh. Frankly I, and I would advocate others too, take a salt shaker with them whenever they hear someone say something like this. But more importantly Spider-Man is seriously NOT what she describes. For starters Peter was a senior in high school when he began and shouldered adult responsibilities when his father died. That’s wish fulfilment? That’s a BURDEN. The reason that spoke to so many people was because he was just different and because his imperfections made him more relatable. The whiteness idea is also bullshit since he was intentionally or otherwise subtextually Jewish and has spoken to countless people of all colours across the generations. He very particularly has a HUGE following among African Americans which was partially what prompted the creation of Miles Morals in the first place!  Shit, the showrunner for the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon was black for God’s sake. Many of the head honcho creators for ITSV were people of colour who were clearly MASSIVE Spider-Man fans!
‘As a woman Spider-Man didn’t resonate with me’. Spider-Man is male. And he acts in ways a male would in the context of the situations. But the character as a whole, in his deepest themes and concepts, is a universal character. He does and has spoken to people across race, gender, sex, sexuality, class, culture and generations. Spider-Girl, Mayday Parker, was her father’s daughter and far more similar than different to him. She spoke to male and female readers. Peter Parker himself has had female fans since his inception. There is no end of female fans here on tumblr or in other online spaces that are the proof of this, to say nothing of old letters pages.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Miles feels more like a real kid and fits together better than most other versions of Peter Parker?...how? I don’t like USM the comic but hwo the fuck do you take that, Spec Spidey, the 1994 cartoon and the Raimi movies (that MovieBob adores btw) and say ‘it doesn’t fit together properly like Miles’. Dude, Comic Book Miles Morales is a teenager in New York who goes to a bordering school for scientifically gifted kids and yet is supposed to be an everyman. That fits together well? He risked his life before  being motivated to do so which is how most 13 year old woudn’t  have acted. Then he feels guilty about Peter dying but his BFF explains it’s not his fault and he accepts this but then goes on to become Spider-Man anyway. And somehow this equates to guilt+responsibility. THAT’s better put together? His character got web-shooters two different ways by the same writer and the guy he was a legacy to was resurrected within like 3 years of Miles’ debut. That’s well put together? This makes more sense and is more believable than a kid who’s Dad dies because he didn’t use his gifts altruistically, so he spends his whole life striving to use them altruistically?
Blah blah blah MovieBob spewing more shit about how Peter is a teenage wish fulfilment power fantasy even though he clearly isn’t from a modern POV and REALLY wasn’t in the early 1960s.
By extension arguing Peter is an adult male’s retroactive teenaged wish fulfilment fantasy of working stuff out is so plainly wrong. Peter Parker in the early 1960s didn’t have everything figured out. The whole world was against him totally unfairly. He needed Aunt May or the Human Torch at times to give him pep talks. His social life was barely existent! You wanna see a middle aged man’s retroactive young wish fulfilment fantasy? Go read Brand New Day, which MovieBob claims was superior to the pre-OMD era. What is the wish fulfilment here? That attractive young women like him? Is that it? That one thing vs. all the horrible shit beating Peter down?
Bob claims there was a lot more Steve Ditko in the early issues of his run compared to Stan Lee because Peter was very angry. First of all Ditko was such a private person claiming he was definitely angry and that the anger was all him is a MASSIVE speculation. Especially considering Stan wrote Spidey as angry plenty after Ditko left. More importantly, Peter wasn’t  angry in the early Ditko issues except for maybe issue #8. He had his moments sure, but it wasn’t at all consistent. He wasn’t raging out or smashing shit like he did later  in Ditko’s run. He was more anxious and neurotic in those early issues which is comparatively closer to how Stan and Romita handled Peter in their earliest issues together. Peter and the whole world of Spidey got angrier towards the end  of Ditko’s run. You know when Stan was letting Steve plot stuff more and more…It’s almost like Bob is full of shit or something
Bob tries to claim by the time ITSV was being written the kinks in Miles’ character had been worked out in the comics. Nah fam. If anything they’d been exacerbated. In reality it was the ITSV writers who took the wonky early Miles character and worked out those kinks themselves, creating an overall superior rendition of the character. A viewpoint I am not alone in.
‘The Prowler has never been a particularly noteworthy villain in the comics’ That’s because he’s not  a villain. He was kind of a villain in his debut but he very quickly became an ally to Spidey
The panel then get into a very pretentious discussion about how ITSV preaches you arne’t stapled to your origin, you are not your trauma. That claiming that is pretentious ala Zack Snyder. But like…isn’t that the POINT of super hero origins? That they contextualize everything about the heroes thereafter? Isn’t carrying his trauma with everything they do practically the point of Batman and Spider-Man’s origins; you know the 2 most popular heroes? Uncle Ben’s death IS stapled to Spider-Man because it underlines everything he ever does. Shit it doesn’t even make sense when applied to Miles in ITSV. He does what he does because his Spider-Man died and then so did his uncle. There is even a whole scene in his dorm room where each Spider-Hero relays the grief that shaped their own lives. I’m not saying you need death and tragedy to be Spider-Man. But that’s neither a bad thing nor something that ISN’T applicable to Peter nor ITSV Miles. Aren’t these idiots supposed to be film buffs? How do you screw up such a basic reading like that?
One of the pundits claimed the movie preaches acting heroically in spite of your tragedies not because of them. Again though…that’ not Spider-Man. Peter is a hero specifically because his uncle died. Miles endeavours to become Spider-Man because his Peter died. His Uncle Aaron’s death further fuels him and allows him to make to final leap of faith. Yes, Peter B. continues to be a hero in spite of his failings but it is only his experiences with Miles that make that possible.
‘They don’t need the tragedies to be heroic they are already heroic in their own right. Look, I don’t disagree with that more broadly. Mayday Parker didn’t need tragedy to be a hero. But in terms of the specific characters in this movie? That’s clearly not true:
youtube
This whole ‘in spite of tragedy’ shit is so pre-Marvel DC comics it hurts. Heroes who just innately do the right thing because it is the right thing to do is a dated and archaic invention Spidey and the other Marvel heroes were reacting against.
‘Spider-Man Noir detracted from the film’s message of diversity because he was a brooding WHITE MAN who prowled the night to enact fist based justice!!!!’ Do I even need to say anything to that? First of all literally every hero in the movie enacts fist based justice. Why does Noir operating at night make him worse than Peter B? Why does him being male make that worse than Peni or Gwen? Why does him being white make that worse than Miles or Peni? And as for detracting from the message of diversity, shockingly diversity can be found within the same ethnic or gender group. You know white/male people aren’t a monolith and all that. Plus creatively you want PERSONALITY diversity more than anything else. In this movie in particular you want shorthand conceptual differences too. ‘Spider-Man but an anime mech girl’ ‘Spider-Man but a noir character’. ‘Spider-Man but a cartoon pig’. This is how asinine this disgusting modern day mentality is.
Wow…MovieBob defending Noir from the asinine comment. I’m genuinely surprised. Too bad he doesn’t use the most obvious defence of ‘that is obviously a ridiculous statement to make you moron’
The next topic of discussion was related to Marvel moving away from Gwen as Spider-Man’s dead girlfriend. I spoke a lot about Bob’s ice cold take on that in this post.
He claims they introduced Spider-Gwen because the idea would be taboo and thus would get people talking. HA! Spider-Gwen was done as just a general idea not something to spark controversy. It wouldn’t even BE controversial. Marvel brought back a version of Gwen within 2 years of her death. They brought her back again 15 years after her death. They brought her back again 22 years after her death along with other versions who melted because it was the Clone Saga. During and after all those times they had AUs of Gwen in What If, Age of Apocalypse, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane and other such stuff. An explicitly AU of Gwen Stacy in 2014 was one of the most aggressively uncontroversial  things you could do.
Gwen’s ballet shoes differentiate her from every other Spider-Man ever. I mean yes in terms of being a dancer I suppose but in terms of being dedicated and studious, training hard and earning immense physical control? There have been plenty of versions of Spider-Man pre-2018 who are like that.
The only way you can make Spider-Gwen work going forward is by not tying it to her death in the canon? Boy…too God damn bad her debut and origin is entirely built upon that. Her origin in the comics and in the movies is built  upon a role reversal because it is Peter who dies to motivate her. Film audiences would’ve still grasped that role reversal because it was only 4 years ago Emma Stone’s highly popular rendition of the character died. And that was in the last pre-MCU Spider-Man movie to boot!
‘The only Iron Man story anyone cared about was Demon in a Bottle’ Actually they only cared about that story and Armor Wars. But yeah, the MCU version is lesser for neither having his alcoholism nor a crippling heart condition. The mere fact people became complacent about that doesn’t mean it wasn’t reductive.
‘These are fictional characters they need to grow and change with the times to remain popular’ Gwen Stacy sucked shit in the 1960s-1970s and was then killed off and defined by her death. Somehow she still  wound up becoming a fan favourite by the 90s and 21st century. Spider-Gwen sucks as a character but not in concept. I never had a problem with the concept. But the idea that she needed to exist to keep Gwen popular is bullshit because Gwen had somehow become immensely popular in spite of being a nothing character. And that even presumes anyone needed to perform maintenance on Gwen to keep her popular. No we didn’t. She was an irrelevant character beyond her death. It’s like saying we need to change Uncle Ben or Bruce’s parents to keep them popular.
Gwen’s affect on Peter Parker was important for awhile but we aren’t that society anymore. It’s not a fucking societal concern!  Putting aside how a 2014 movie did Gwen’s death just a few years before ITSV, Gwen’s death is about a universal human experience.  Death, grief, moving on. Oh, I see. This halfwit mistakenly believes Gwen is an example of women in the refrigerator.
Gwen died because Peter had this perfect lovely girlfriend and everything was too great for him and they didn’t know how to write beyond that. An oversimplification. Gwen died because they needed to shake things up for sales in general. Because Conway shipped Peter with MJ. And a 20 year old Spidey in 1973 really was too young to be killed off. Oh and you know she was written like shit. Yeah that’s the part no one ever talks about. Gwen is played up as this underserving victim of a character but she sucked shit.
It’s almost the 2020s! So fucking what? People still lose loved ones in the 2020s? I’m not even saying Spider-Gwen should have died in ITSV or revolved around her counterpart dying. I’m saying this dumbass is wrong for bringing it up as though killing Gwen off is dated on principle. But this is the same moron who unironically said ‘I never connected to Spider-Man because he is a teenaged white male wish fulfilment fantasy’. I’m sure she got top marks in her gender studies class
‘sOme PpL nEEd 2 gEt oVa iTTTTTTT’ I genuinely wish this person would wake up mute someday.
‘We could do a whole movie about Spider-Gwen’. I don’t respect where this opinion is coming from but I don’t necesarilly disag- ‘Get Seanen Maguire to write it’…nevermind. This gets even worse when you consider Maguire had only been writing Gwen for literally 3 issues at the time this podcast was released. Of the back of three issues  you are declaring this writer qualified to write an entire movie about the character? Not even Jason Latour who created her. I smell someone who just jumped on the bandwagon or worse is blinded by agenda and ideology.
‘Gwen could’ve done with 5 more minutes’ It’s not her movie!  It’s Miles’ movie and secondarily Peter B’s movie because he is Miles mentor. It is through their mutual relationship that Miles learns to be Spider-Man and Peter learns to be Spider-Man again.
It never made sense for an 80 year old woman to be raising a 16 year old boy! Aunt May in the 1960s wasn’t in her 80s. She just looked that way because, duh, standards of health were different back then. A 40 year old now looks much younger and in better health than someone who potentially might’ve been born in the 19th century circa 1962! A working class  woman no less…With chronic health problems! Even if she was in her mid-late 50s her looking like that was totally believable in context! And her raising Peter was also entirely believable depending upon how old Ben and May were when Richard and Mary were born. It’s not beyond possibility at all that there was 15-20 years separating Ben and his younger brother, meaning if Peter was born when Richard was 25, Ben and May would’ve been in their 40s. Thus by the time Peter was 15 they’d be in their 50s or 60s.
These idiots keep treating Peter from Miles’ universe as a bona fide version of 616 Peter when it’s blindingly obvious he’s supposed to be an idealized rendition of the character. A version intended to be a juxtaposition to the version we all know walking into the movie.
Peter B. Parker having a more traditional version of Aunt May as opposed to a more proactive and involved version has left him with a sense of giving up. Er…no. It’s pretty obvious Peter B. Parker is the Spider-Man we know and love who normally doesn’t give up but one string of failures after another has brought him to his lowest. But he rises back up again. Look Peter is supposed to be a representation of human beings. Human beings need people and need emotional support. When you lose those people and are alone you can go to a very dark place. That’s Peter B’s story. If Aunt May had been more involved but everything else went wrong (including her death) he’d have still wound up in the dark place he went to. Blonde Peter might’ve weathered May’s death better in theory but he had OTHER stuff in his life to keep him afloat. Peter B lost most everything. What horseshit it is to argue if Aunt May was different he’d have not given up.
There was no purpose for Aunt May being as old as she was or on the cusp of death in the original comics. Er…yeah there was. She was that old because it made her more vulnerable and thus accentuated the loss of her husband and the need for Peter to be her support network. It also internally justified why she was so frail and unwell. Old people usually have health problems. Duh! But then Bob admits there is a reason for those decisions. So he is contradicting himself.
Bob presumes Blonde Peter told Aunt May his secret even though there is no evidence in the movie to support that idea.
Kids today aren’t resentful of their grandparents like older generations were, that’s why Aunt May is played differently now. Um…Peter was never resentful of Aunt May in the first place. He sincerely loved her and felt he needed to pay her back for all she’d done for him.
‘Kids today have cool grandparents because 50% of them would have been hippies.’ Hippies aren’t cool. And never were. They were pretentious losers that hid behind causes as an excuse to do drugs and have lots of sex. Over half a century later the world they claimed to fight for and want to build has yet to materialise and in fact is in a lot of ways far worse off than it was before their generation rose to the seats of power. The hippy generation are part of the baby boomer generation that are so thoroughly mocked today. The people in power who’ve fucked up the job and housing market for consequent generations. These idiots literally spouted a dumbass theory earlier on about how first wave millenials have been thrown under the bus. Who do you think did that? The baby boomers, many of whom used  to be hippies! And NONE of this demands Aunt May has to be different. I have no problem with her being different in ITSV. But the idea of someone who used to be a hippy being doting? Being a worry wart? Why the Hell is that a dated concept?
These idiots clearly view the world aggressively through an identitarian and group weighted lens as opposed to how the world really is. I.e. 7 billion+ individuals
There was a weird amount of focus upon gangsters in the Spec Spidey cartoon considering it was for kids. Not really, the show was reverential of the original comics. The original comics (which were for children) had lots of gangsters
To the people who bitch and moan about getting another Spider-Man it doesn’t take away from the one you had before. No one was complaining about Miles as another Spider-Man in this movie. People weren’t claiming it ruins the Raimi movies or something. People resent it in the comics because it waters down the brand and makes Spider-Man himself less special when he is an ONGOING character. It’d be one thing maybe if the torch was passed from person to person. But nowadays it’s literally all of them co-existing.
Blah blah bah symbolism of a young black boy fighting a big WHITE business MAN. Blah blah blah this is the type of bad guy Miles would fight in real life blah blah blah…Jesus Christ… these people really just buy that type of Kool-aid in bulk don’t they? As if Miles, were he ‘real’ wouldn’t fight anyone who’s doing bad things. FFS they just got done talking about Tombstone from the Spec cartoon. Tombstone is an African American!  And he’s in this fucking movie. He’s not some weird fantastical guy, he’s a regular gangster who happens to be albino. That’s it. Miles fights him in this fucking movie! Miles first major adversary in the comics was the Prowler who was another African American. Miles wouldn’t JUST fight ‘evil white businessMEN’
‘As far as I know about Doc Ock from Superior Spider-Man, which is excellent’ Wow. So, as would be obvious with anyone with a working brain and some prior knowledge of Otto, Superior is garbage. And saying you are basing your assessments of Otto on Superior is like saying you have never known about the character
Doc Ock is in so many Spidey stories as a scientific assistant to other people because the Green Goblin is always either dead or completely untrustworthy. Bob really just said that huh? This is further proof Bob has read precious little Spider-Man material. Doc Ock is NOBODY’s assistant. Even in Secret Wars he had to be threatened into compliance by Doom himself when Ultron was his attack dog. Doc Ock isn’t recruited by other people for his genius, he is the mover and shaker. He recruits other people and is the man in charge. And who the fuck is looking to get the help of Norman Osborn because he’s a scientist? Not to mention Norman is untrustworthy, oh but Otto?????????? The guy who tried to nuke NYC???????? WTF is Bob talking about?
Since we are in the ‘age of heroes’ (whatever THAT means?) it is impossible for Spider-Man to not be mentored by some other hero. Er…yeah it is? This is obviously a defence of MCU Spider-Man and it holds no water. First of all DC and Marvel have had young heroes show up when there are a plethora of heroes around they’ve not had mentors. Second of all it’s entirely possible for Peter to not WANT a mentor and it’d be entirely believable that the other heroes might not see themselves as mentors or might mistrust him.
The Spider-Heroes take their grief and turn it into action. WHOA WHOA WHOA! Didn’t these guys say earlier that the movie preaches the heroes are more than their trauma? That they aren’t stapled to their origins? That they move on from it? What’s this change of tune all of a sudden?
Miles Dad was probably made into a cop to avoid having a difficult discussion about how the police would react to a black super hero or a black Spider-Man. Yeah, or it’s because you know…his Dad worked in law enforcement in the comics so you know…faithfulness. Also the police don’t discriminate against black heroes in the MCU except Luke Cage. Also, also not every fucking cop is racist. Also, also, also how would they know Miles is black his costume covers his whole body!
Miles Dad was super authoritarian. Dude. He didn’t like vigilantes and he followed basic rules like stopping not abusing police sirens. That’s hardly akin to being a jackbooted fascist.
Miles would’ve had a different relationship with authority and the police if his Dad hadn’t been a cop. Er…no not necessarily. First of all being the son of a cop doesn’t mean he’d have not experienced institutionalized racism from the police. Second of all even if he had experienced that he could still believe in justice and taking down obviously evil and dangerous people like Kingpin.
They never touched upon institutional racism from the police in Luke Cage which was for adults. Er, yes they did. The rapper in the later episodes of season 1 (the Bulletproof Love guy) stated he wasn’t going to call the police. The police were stopping and searching black men in their hunt for Cage. Black people wore shirts with holes in them in order to protect Cage and defy the cops. The rap mentioned how nobody was interested in protecting their neighbourhood.
Nobody wants the tell a superhero story about institutional racism within the authorities. Isn’t that literally Luke Cage’s origin? Didn’t Black Panther mention that earlier in the year ITSV was released.
I’m going to disagree that Miles fighting Kingpin was unnecessary because of the cultural connotations we talked about….God…You couldn’t just say ‘the main hero obviously has to defeat the main villain. Duh!’…
Dan Slott is a dang genius! As if you needed more proof these people are unqualified  to talk about Spider-Man…
Spider-Verse’s (the comic’s) fan service is what happens when you get Spider-Man fans to do the story vs. ITSV. Nah fam. ITSV is what happens when you get real fans who are talented  vs. Spider-Verse is what happens when you get a real fan who fundamentally misunderstands the characters and is a hack
There is no real Peter Parker. Who cares! The real Peter Parker is the original because he is the one everyone else is derivative of and therefore based upon. And fans AND creators and Marvel itself clearly care about that because they sure as fuck didn’t kill him  off so Miles could replace him. They killed off the secondary and surplus Ultimate Peter Parker. Treating the original version as the true  one doesn’t invalidate any other versions because they can still be great characters unto themselves. But given how disgustingly SJW this whole podcast has been I am unsurprised they go in for this participation trophy form of analysis where everything is equal all the time.
It also doesn’t invalidate the idea of Spider-Man being anyone. Spider-Man CAN be anyone. But not everyone can be Peter Parker. If we are going to say otherwise the praise these jackoffs lauded onto Miles for how his specific identity was explored is invalidated. Peter is Peter. Miles is Miles. They can both be Spider-Heroes worthy of the mantle.
Because Miles is a POC people who don’t look like Peter can believe they can be Spider-Man. I’m not arguing against Miles but seriously, that was the case before Miles existed. The showrunner of Spider-Man 1994 was an African American and he related to Peter Parker in the 1960s. Poc can relate to Spider-Man regardless of skin colour.
The original comic book version of Spider-Man isn’t the true one just because he is the original. Er….yeah. It seriously does precisely BECAUSE he is the version all the other ones are derivative of. Hence he’s from the PRIME universe. Shit the Spider-Verse comic book the movie takes mild inspiration from literally says that. Granted it then contradicts itself but the point still stands. Because he is the original one he IS the true one because without him the others would not exist. He is the canonical one!
The true 616 Spider-Man will never be in any adaptation because there is too much continuity…Yeah…so? How does that make him not  the original one in the broad context though when you compare every version?
Continuity is the killer of enjoyment when it comes to movies. No, this podcast is the killer of enjoyment. And btw, maybe ask all the people who went to see Infinity War earlier in the year ITSV was released and ask them if continuity ruined that movie for them. This is such a lazy, myopic attitude.
If continuity is used to exclude people it is bad. Good job nobody was ever saying ITSV shouldn’t exist because Miles isn’t Peter then
Infinity War is a fine movie even if you do not know who everybody is. No it isn’t. Infinity War is wholly inaccessible if you do not know who everyone is because it’s throwing dozens of characters at you with little-no context provided.
Black Panther is better than Infinity War, this proves continuity is bad. No. Black Panther not having to have it’s story wrapped up in everything else in the wider universe was what helped make it better. FFS, Winter Soldier is better than Avengers 2012 and that still relies upon plenty of continuity. Civil War is better than Thor the Dark World and the latter has way less continuity than the former. It’s not about having continuity it’s about how you use it. Black Panther was world building in it’s own corner. It wasn’t plugged in so directly to the wider universe the way Homecoming or FFH was. THAT’s what made it good but that’s not a continuity issue that’s a world building issue.
Continuity is toxic when you use it to claim a long running fantasy series didn’t satisfy you. Uh huh, hey do you wanna ask all the people who hated Game of Thrones’ final season that?
Oh, and one of the pundits, the one who bleeted on about Spidey as a ‘tEEnAgE WHITE mAle wish fUlLfiLmEnt fantasy!’ is a Hollywood actress. Now her views make waaaaaaaaaay too much sense
In conclusion…Sigh…For a podcast called School of Movies I think these guys need to go back to kindergarten.
21 notes · View notes
mystech-master · 5 years
Text
Ragna in the other BBTAG worlds
I asked a while ago for ideas as to where Ragna could end up post-CF as his “retirement” world, I’ve gotten like 3 suggestions; Bleach (mainly to pair him with Kukaku Shiba, but given everything else happening in that world he’ll have no chill there), Animal Crossing, and Mario Galaxy (on the Comet Observatory with Rosalina and the Lumas)
but today, I want to take a look at how he’d fare living in the worlds presented to us in BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. Just for the hell of it:
Long post bellow
Persona: if Ragna were to end up living in the Persona world thing might be difficult at first, he grew up in the middle of nowhere and the woods and lived in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, so there will be a bit of a culture shock. But if Akihiko can run around shirtless then this world will be fine with someone like Ragna. I think he might end up working with the Shadow Operatives, hey he was raised to fight so may as well put his supernatural power and fighting ability to use against the Shadows right? I mean the Kirijo group managed to make an identity for Aigis when she attended Gekkoukan High in P3, so they could make Ragna have an identity. Since the dude has Son Goku levels of education I ‘d find it funny if Mitsuru put his ass through some kind of education program or something. I mean it is never too late to get an education and I’m sure there are many real-life examples of people who couldn’t go to school for some reason or another. Also, I’ve said this before, Ragna might give of serious “Shinjiro” vibes to the Shadow Operatives, so they might be able to navigate his personality a bit better. Mitsuru can be the cool-headed one w/o being a bitch like Rachel, Akihiko would make a good sparring partner, he’ll treat Aigis and Labrys right since he treats the Murakumos like people, Yukari is pretty normal compared to most of them and can also get annoyed by their antics so Ragna might like her (he enjoys the company of average/normal people since they aren’t too zany for his tastes), Ken is pretty mature for his age, but Junpei might get on his nerves. But also, if Ragna enters around P4 Arena time, then if he stays there a few years he could be present for the Persona 5 story, and THAT would be a fun setting to play in with Ragna.
Under Night In-Birth: it being a modern world won’t be too much of an issue, like with Persona there’ll be some culture shock but lots of the people there are also kind of weirdoes. If he ends up with the main good guys (Hyde, Linne, Waldstein, and Vatista) we can just add another guy bumming around Hyde’s house.  Helping train Hyde, spar with Wald, cook for Linne (give her actual good food and she’ll be worshiping you I bet), and Vatista May remind him of Lambda so he’d be chill around her. But another idea could be him being a mercenary like Gordeau, like maybe the two becoming friendly rivals or something (I just liked how chill he was with Ragna in BBTAG’s story oka, sue me). Also, I could totally see Hilda trying to recruit Ragna into Amnesia because she hears about him being the SS-Class criminal trying to take down the keepers of the order of his world, much like how she is trying to do to Licht Kreis, she tries to get a little flirty with him, but Ragna declines b/c 1. When he was taking on the N.O.L. he was doing it for revenge, Hilda is just doing it for shits and giggles (10 points to whoever gets that reference), 2. Ragna can totally sense danger coming to from this chick, and 3. the dude is at least smart enough not to stick his dick in crazy. He and Merkava would have an interesting conversation, Merkava being a beast with a man within, and Ragna being a man with a beast within.
RWBY: Okay this might depend on where in the timeline he’s put (Pre-Volume 3 like in BBTAG, or Pre-Volume 6 like what I’ve been thinking of), but let’s stick with the Beacon arc-like in BBTAG. The current state of the world is: Cinder and her team are in disguise as Haven students, Roman is arrested, everyone thinks the threat is gone and that the Breach was the big plan, but the Ozluminati know better and are just trying to keep the peace. Ragna is a very aggressive person and easily angered, not a good thing when dealing with Grimm, which are attracted to negative emotions. Also, may I remind you that the Grimm have no souls, and thus are immune to Ragna's Soul Eater power drive which is partially what has allowed him to be such a dangerous threat in his world. In fact, his power is WAY more suitable for fighting people, considering the Huntsmen and Huntresses powers come from their Aura which comes from their soul. Like, he just grabs them and watches that Aura meter just drop FAST. Also, I’m not sure if he’d even be able to gain Aura and a Semblance himself with the Azure Grimoire also fucking his soul up. Ironwood might just say to kill/imprison this guy before he becomes a threat while Ozpin might try and be a bit more diplomatic if he at least hears about his nicer exploits (maybe from Ruby). And no, I do not know how his Soul Eater power could be used on the Maiden Powers or Ozpin’s reincarnating soul. MAYBE it could be used to kill Salem by consuming HER immortal soul instead of just physically killing her, but I do not know if it could be used to rip the Maiden Powers out of their hosts. He and Qrow might talk about their shitty lives but when Qrow offers him a drink Ragna declines b.c Ragna’s Azure Grimoire healing factor also works on toxins (seen in the Variable Heart manga where he shrugs of Shiori’s poison), also I think Ragna views Alchohol as a bitch’s way of dealing with problems. A fight between him and Raven would be interesting also, like them giving each other lectures about family: Ragna giving Raven shit for abandoning Yang (who I assume he might bond with), while Raven says that he has no right to talk about family considering the state of HIS.
There’s probably a lot more that could happen but I can’t think of anything else atm.
I’ll be skipping Arcana Heart since A. I barely know jack fuck about that series (the second game isn't even localized), B. the main powerset in that game seems to only go to girls, which leads to C. there are NO male characters, not even side NPCs, so Ragna would stick out WAY too much.
Senran Kagura: Much like Arcana Heart I don’t know much but I looked through character descriptions and some basic plot summaries here and there (mostly from TVTropes so please forgive me if I fuck something up, which I will) , so I at least get the BASIC gist of things going on. The only place I could think of Ragna going is him looking after or palling around with the Homura Crimson Squad. He isn’t one to join some big organization (the Good Ninja side won’t accept him after his MASSIVE body count in his world, and the Hebijo guys are way too intense), and depending on the timeline he could either help protect the Crimson Squad from the Hebijo team out to kill them for deserting, or he also likes to be independent and train/fight his own way. He could help Homura train for her next fight with her rival Asuka (plus she’ll be a fan of his meat cooking). He might try to get Yomi to add some more variety to her food instead of bean sprouts (cue fight). Hikage might freak him out since she looks like almost a female Hazama/Terumi, but she also struggles with socializing and likes to cook for her friends so after the initial awkwardness they might get along. Mirai hates being ignored so this might cause some annoyance to Ragna, but she’s also a bully victim. I could see him being annoyed by her but then later sees her getting picked on and his big-brother instinct kicks in and he helps, then they gain a sort of understanding. Haruka is the real beast here, the dominatrix sadist scientist who wants to make people her dolls, so Ragna might need to step up a bit to keep her under control (like I said I only know the bare minimum, she might not actually be that bad post-character development but I don’t know). Finally, just for the sake of it, I’m not too sure where on the power scale Ragna would fall in the SK universe. The most powerful person there is Sayuri/Jasmine, with I think Rin and Daidōji both sharing the second strongest spot. I’ll say Ragna is around Daidōji and Rin’s level because Sayuri/Jasmine would most likely be like Jubei level. Also because the power scaling in Blazblue is absurd so comparing the Shinobi (of whom only a few have unique powers) to the Blazblue cast (who have magical weapons and reality-fucking powers) is kind of unfair, plus it gives Ragna a sort of cap so he won’t be too unstoppable in this world. Finally, not too keen on shipping. I’ve been using the “half your age plus seven” rule of dating so to not make things weird, Ragna is 22 in my HC and the minimum age is 18 (lots of people say once your over 18 you can date whoever you want that’s older, but........no), but while a few girls in SK are 18 they are still in high school (the birthdays and ages don’t match up with their school years, and that angers me) so.....no, he just has a big brother instinct for the Crimson Squad.
I’ll also skip Akatsuki Blitzkampf b/c A. Like Arcana Heart above I barely know the story, and B. What little I have seen of the story isn’t.......much. Story Isn’t exactly a big factor in this series.
Lemme know what you guys think Ragna would get up to in these other worlds. I might add to this if another series is added to BBTAG.
11 notes · View notes
solitarylurker · 4 years
Text
a critical reflection on the failings of star wars: the rise of skywalker
(Rey's failure as a Star Wars protagonist)
the key element of the Star Wars protagonist is a combination of compassion and love, specifically an altruistic, Christlike compassion/love
Anakin fails in the prequel trilogy to cultivate this aspect within himself, instead descending into a self-serving, possessive variant of love that is more root chakra level rather than heart/crown chakra-based; his example and his failure are meant to set the tragic stage for what he ultimately becomes: Darth Vader, Luke's main antagonist for the original trilogy
it's important to note that Anakin's failure isn't simply a moral failing on his part, although certainly he bears responsibility for that--it's also the result of the restrictions placed on him by the stringent jedi misunderstanding of the redeeming power of attachment, love, and connection, and this ties into the faint callbacks to Buddhist mysticism that Lucas likes to dabble in, and the potential drawbacks of taking that mysticism too zealously at the expense of life
this theme, of the jedi reacting with the inappropriate response to the natural call of the "dark side", returns in the original trilogy with Luke, who is tasked by his masters Yoda and Obi-wan with finishing what they started--taking down his disgraced father Anakin Skywalker, now Darth Vader
Luke is a rebellious character; much of his coming-of-age story is about pushing back against the restrictions placed upon him (an echo of Anakin before him), and he has a good heart and a sound instinct, even if he's clumsy in execution and petulant at the wrong moments
this good heart of Luke's is ultimately the source of redemption for his father, when he rebels against his masters and willingly submits himself to his father in order to call him back to the light
Luke does become deeply tempted by the dark side when Darth Vader begins threatening Leia (Luke's sister and first love), but he is able to overthrow this temptation with compassion for the sad figure of his father when he finds Darth Vader at his mercy
Luke's abstention from violence is the heart of Star Wars and the key component of why this story continues to resonate on a mythological level for so many viewers of all walks of life; Anakin's reverse trajectory, where love no longer reaches him and he resorts to depravity and violence, stands as a mirror image of Luke's compassionate pacifism, even if the easier solution would have been violence
Luke's example, along with the essence of the jedi code, sets up the moral foundation of the Star Wars protagonist, and this is the foundation upon which Rey is set at the beginning of her journey
the problem is, Rey doesn't have any compassion in her
oh, sure, she likes her friends well enough (when she can be bothered), and she's nice (when she remembers to be), but she's quick to anger and quick to hate and quick to rejection and quick to judgment
Rey, in other words, is far more akin to a sith than a jedi in the sequel trilogy
some of Rey's failings as a Star Wars protagonist are likely due to her being a creator’s pet to JJ Abrams as well as to the current climate surrounding how female characters are written--downplaying the feminine healing, nurturing qualities in favor of overemphasizing the violent/aggressive/masculine qualities
but a lot of it has to do with the structure of Rey as a character--she is meant to be someone who struggles with deep-rooted anger and trauma, who must overcome that anger by learning how to accept the reflection of that anger in the form of her villain--Kylo Ren
the dance between Rey and Kylo Ren works perfectly in TFA and TLJ, but flops in TROS because Abrams randomly decides that Rey's anger is perfectly appropriate and not a real issue to be addressed or overcome
instead, what we receive is a Rey who is overly antagonistic, who is quick to lash out, who can't even have a calm conversation with the antagonist she's supposed to love even if he's disappointed her, who acts more like a sith with each passing scene but never seems to sit down and deal with it, and when she does deal with it (realizing she's a Palpatine), nothing comes of it--no revelation, no understanding, no sudden compassion for the sufferings of those who have been drawn to the dark side
in other words, Rey learns nothing from her anger, learns nothing from her hate, learns nothing from her experience--she's "too pure" to even grapple with the realities within herself, or perhaps more accurately too "in denial" to accept the darkness that exists both within herself and Kylo Ren and all those who fall to the dark side--that perhaps they are not merely evil, but driven by passions over which they struggle to control and through which anyone can fall
the reason the finale of TROS is so deeply unsatisfying (even setting aside Kylo's death) is because Rey does not overcome her antagonist with compassion or love, nor does her victory come through love
it would be one thing if Rey's method of defeating Palpatine was to absorb his power via her dyad bond with Kylo, draining him of his power until he's merely a sad husk of an old man, and then gently telling him she pities him as she jumps down to rescue Kylo from the pit of doom, but instead the two have a passive and unenlightening battle to the death like in any lame super hero movie, which is a sith method of victory, not a jedi's
Rey's lack of compassion for either Palpatine or Kylo in the film is what makes the film ring hollow at the end
all the triumphs of the film are Kylo's--his love and compassion for Rey are what rescues her twice, not her love for him or her compassion for him/Palpatine
i realize most people will be content with the idea that she loved Chewie, Finn, and Poe, and that's all well and good, but loving your friends is not a higher level of compassion/morality--these are not the things that make a Star Wars protagonist great
Rey needed to demonstrate a higher level of consciousness than just "if a person is nice to me, they're good; if they're mean to me, they're bad" in order to fulfill her promise as a Star Wars heroine; she needed to forgive Kylo for his failings (and through him, herself), to help him see the light, and to find a way for everyone to achieve happiness without judging them
Luke didn't spend Return of the Jedi haranguing the Emperor about how evil he was and how bad he was--his focus was always on his goal, which was to influence his father and win him back to his side; Rey should have had a similar trajectory, whether that was trying to reach Palpatine's sad old heart (perhaps an impossibility) or to neutralize him in a way where he couldn't hurt anyone anymore but would have to pay for his crimes in another manner
it's just disheartening that Rey, for all that she's painted as some saintly being, can't seem to overcome the darkness inside her or even legitimately come to terms with it before the end of her story--in the end, it is Kylo's love and some miraculous jedi ghost intervention (which, by the way, neither Luke nor Anakin ever got) which save the day for her, rather than her standing on her own and winning with the strength of her compassion and love
[5/9]
2 notes · View notes
ladyloveandjustice · 6 years
Text
Spring 2018 Anime Overview: Aggretsuko/Aggressive Retsuko
Tumblr media
Aggretsuko follows a cute red panda named Retsuko. By day, she’s a mild-mannered office worker dealing with a literal chauvinist pig of a boss. But by night, she vents her frustrations by screaming death metal. The show shows her trying to navigate her hostile work environment and daily life.
Aggretsuko is a simple but entertaining narrative with good characters galore. The animals choices for the characters are spot on (secretary bird, y’all) and the characters themselves are endearing and often have more depth than is first apparent. Fenneko’s sarcasm and social media saavy, Washimi’s no nonsense badassery, Gori’s excitable nature- it’s all great, it’s all dynamic and distinct. The humor lands well for me, the tone is balanced well between cynicism and optimism and it’s just praiseworthy all around.
Tumblr media
But the true key to Aggretsuko’s success is probably in how much it captures the daily pressures faced by millennials, its target audience. Being overworked and underpaid, being taken for granted, struggling with whether you should take the risk and try to launch that internet start-up or continue at your soul sucking job, navigating sexism and generation gaps- everything in this show is so #relatable it hurts.
Retsuko’s entire gimmick even speaks to something women (and others) can relate to- having to suppress your anger and real frustration because society will use any opportunity to belittle women for being “emotional”  and dismiss them. Women are not allowed to assert themselves- studies show that in the workplace women are considered to be “too dominating in the conversation” even when they’re talking way less than their male counterparts. Retsuko has to play the part of meek, submissive employee, but at night, she becomes her true self and vents her rage. It’s so relatable, but also a criticism way women are forced to kill their true feelings for the sake of being a “good girl”. 
Indeed, Retsuko’s boss is openly sexist and abuses his power. In another Too Real moment, the show acknowledges that if he was reported, he’d just get a slap on the wrist. Men in powerful positions are let off the hook all the time.
Tumblr media
But Aggretsuko offers hope as well. Retsuko ends up finding solace and support in other women. She is in awe of Washimi and Gori, who are successful women in high ranking positions. And Washimi and Gori end up befriending her and seeing her true rage-filled self and they are here for it. They jam with her, mentor her and have her back. And you know I’m head over heels for female friendships being super important and women banding together and being there for each other! We need this message of support and understanding in these trying times.
(there be spoilers ahead)
In fact, in a fantastic scene, Washimi even decides to do something about the sexist harassment of her friend and when the CEO immediately dismisses her concerns, she brings down the heat on him, reminding him this shit could get the company raked through the coals on the internet, so he better take it seriously. It was really satisfying to see this in the #MeToo era (and yes, many Japanese women are aware of and following the #MeToo movement , no need to concern troll about cultural differences).
Tumblr media
But the show doesn’t say climbing the corporate ladder is the answer to all women’s problems. It is acknowledged that even Washimi and Gori have to “not ever show weakness in the office” though this (literally) strains them. And it’s acknowledged that reporting Retsuko’s boss is just a band-aid on the situation, as long as he remains in power, Retsuko’s still in trouble and even Washimi can’t get him fired. Washimi and Gori are also women doing their best to get by in a system that’s stacked against them. 
And that’s where Aggretsuko really seems to land. The system sucks, we need to support each other and do our best to survive in the face of it. Change may come, but it’s slow and hard, so in the meantime we have to do what we can to help each other get by.
Tumblr media
One thing I really appreciate about Aggretsuko is it doesn’t resort to any Good Woman vs Bad Woman nonsense. There’s such a varied range of female characters with unique personalities and ways of handling things and the show celebrates that. Tsunoda is a girl who acts cutesy and sucks up to the boss in order to avoid his wrath, and in a less thoughtful narrative, she would be demonized for this and held up as the worst of women. But Aggretsuko treats her with empathy-when she goes out for a drink with Retsuko, she’s honest with her. She knows and admits she’s being fake, but she’s just trying to survive and she’s not ashamed of that. She wants to succeed in a hostile environment and she’ll use all she has to do that, even if people look down on her for it. But hey, she’ll also bro down with other girls and get real with them when she’s off the clock. That’s cool.
One narrative arc that Aggretsuko touches on really well is how people are led to believe romance as the essential the answer to all their problems. Retsuko hates her job so much she starts dreaming of landing a well-off guy and being a housewife, seeing it as the perfect escape. Washimi points out that marriages are difficult to navigate and being a housewife has its own challenges, but Retsuko so wants this to be the easy answer. And we’ve all been there, really. Who hasn’t fantasized about being swept of their feet by a rich person and taking it easy?
Tumblr media
So Retsuko ends up wanting that fairy tale romance so badly that she decides this limp houseplant of a guy is her ideal boyfriend simply because he does one nice thing for her. She projects her perfect vision of a boyfriend onto him, ignoring his obvious flaws. She even swallows down her real feelings of frustration and unhappiness with them because she believes she needs this fake, perfect romance more than anyone. She NEEDS to make this work, even if it means not being true to her hardcore self.
The dude is also pretty much shoved into the relationship by his friend who insists he just NEEDS a girlfriend to be complete even though he doesn’t feel that way and is not interested.  This is two people who are just together because they’re told/feel they SHOULD BE- Retsuko subconsciously, Resasuke consciously. Retsuko puts her own needs aside in her struggle to make this work, while Resasuke doesn’t really put in effort at all.
That’s a really common scenario that people face and it’s an important issue to highlight. The show does well in representing how some romances just fall flat, and we make them into something they’re not to fit this image of romance we’re sold from infancy. That image is flawed and fake in the end.
Tumblr media
Aggretsuko also really thankfully goes out of its way to subvert the Nice Guy TM nonsense with Retsuko’s friend Haida, who crushes on her. He admits he was jealous of her boyfriend and initially thought he was better for her because of how he’d known her longer, but then realized he only knew his idealized version of her. He expresses the desire NOT to idealize her, to know the real her and that’s clearly something that touches Retsuko’s heart. 
It was a very nice development, and felt like it was really deliberate as a takedown of the common narrative of men being “more deserving” a relationship girl just because they're friends with her and therefore “know all about her”. Ya gotta look at women as people, turns out! Or uh, as red pandas.
I really liked that we didn’t get Retsuko’s answer to Haida, because that’s not what it’s about. It’s about Retsuko becoming more comfortable with herself and finding people who accept her as a complex person, the romance is just a sidenote.
Tumblr media
Aggretsuko was a solid narrative that treated its characters with respect and realism, despite them being funny cartoon animals here to sell you Sanrio toys. And it had a lot of relevant and well done social themes. That’s quite a feat. It was funny, it was warm, it was painful and it was just a worthwhile experience overall. I’m really glad it exists. Highly recommended, all around.
77 notes · View notes
theonceoverthinker · 6 years
Text
OUAT 2X11 - The Outsider
Hey everyone! Don’t even SMEE-k to me until you’ve read my thoughts on the episode below the cut!
Tumblr media
Press Release Mr. Gold finds an unwilling test subject to see if a spell he has concocted will allow him to cross the border of Storybrooke – without losing his memory – and go in search of his son, Bae; Belle stumbles upon a vengeful Hook in the Storybrooke harbor whose main goal is to eradicate Rumplestiltskin; and Mary Margaret and David go house hunting in search of a bigger place to live. Meanwhile, in the fairytale land that was, Belle meets Mulan as the two set out to slay a fearsome beast called the Yaoguai, who has been ravaging the land. General Thoughts - Characters/Stories/Themes and Their Effectiveness Past What I like about this segment is the pair up. Both Mulan and Belle provide something that the other wants and while their story of “person with no experience befriends hardened mentor or friend figure with more experience while simultaneously melting her heart with friendliness and trust” is pretty simple and is about as predictable as these tend to go, Belle and Mulan are interesting enough that it works.
That having been said, Belle and Mulan don’t get nearly enough quality time together as they should, and it does hinder Mulan’s resolve to let Belle kill the monster and for a couple of reasons. First, Mulan has been characterized as really freakin’ stubborn thus far in the series and those scenes all take place after this one. Why would she be so willing to give in to fighting the Yaoguai, especially given all the love she has for her village? Second, Belle brings up the good point that she’s not a fighter but instead a researcher and Mulan doesn’t give her much of an answer to it. And when she does, Belle having something worth fighting for isn’t reinforced at any point in the episode, making her resolution weak. Also, Belle’s overall story is just weird. Is she trying to just prove that she can be a warrior? Is it about being a female warrior? Is the story about accepting magic when it’s light? Fighting beasts with kindness rather than violence? There’s a lack of clarity here and it’s makes Belle’s story here feel undefined and because of that, her defeat of the Yaoguai and resolve to go t Rumple afterwards doesn’t strike the powerful note that it’s clearly supposed to.
Finally, the approach to the hunters in this episode is weird. Why not have them on their side? Yeah, they’re douchey, but it’s not like in “The Girl in the Tower,” when Alice and the hunters had diametrically opposed reasons for wanting to go after the troll (Alice wanted to protect the trolls and the hunters wanted to kill the troll). Here, they all want to take the troll down. They also don’t establish the men as sexist, yet the episode tries to paint them as it later on. They’re just a weird blend of evil, but it does nothing to establish Belle’s conflict. Present I have a large problem with a lot of this segment. They’re trying to set up that Rumple is losing sight of getting back to Bae to deal out vengeance (“Tell me this is just about getting the shawl back” is a crucial line in the Rumple/Belle fight scene at the shop and it’s made to be a big point that Rumple doesn’t answer this) while not having established that as a conflict Rumple’s actually going through. His actions haven’t been excessive when this instance of dialogue happened, and they only get excessive after Belle is threatened and Killian goads him on. Even his interaction with Smee isn’t all that different from his interactions with the man in previous episodes. And I do recognize that they finally get to showing him act excessively aggressive, but the moment isn’t helped by the lack of appropriate setup earlier.
I get that Belle isn’t super receptive to Killian’s speech about Milah and Rumple’s evil nature because of the gun, and I swear I get that, but what is the point of telling Belle all of this if she’s not going to change her mindset in any way as a result of this, especially when she’s the one who the audience is supposed to connect with, is generally framed in the right, and is being told about two characters who have established a level of sympathy? Killian’s definitely taking things too far, but we as an audience know that his words about Milah’s death are true and Belle refuses to react to that, making the scene entirely pointless. I understand that the theme of the story is that “when you find something worth fighting for, you never give up,” but this is never challenged and especially as Belle is learning that Rumple murdered someone, that would be the perfect time to challenge that sentiment. But instead, she just leaves the situation at: ”Because his [Rumple’s] heart is true. And yours [Killian’s]? Yours is rotten.” Again, this makes Belle’s doubling down feel so much weaker than it should. Insights - Stream of Consciousness -The town line is glowing! The hell?! -Rumple, wipe that SMEE-rk off your face! -”It’s [Smee’s hat] always brought me good fortune.” You have a very warped perspective on “good fortune.” -It’s so weird seeing such an optimistic character like Snow deliver a eulogy, but when you think about it, she’s probably the best person. Her eulogy is all at once a celebration of Archie’s life, a validity of the sadness of the other townspeople in attendance, and an encouragement to keep on living while keeping Archie in their hearts. -I feel so bad for whoever’s job it is to make tombstones in this world. Between Archie, Rumple, and Killian, they must’ve gotten so fed up with all of the resurrections. I imagine they are like the Cabbage Merchant in Avatar: The Last Airbender! -Bitter segue, writers from the funeral to Archie being tortured. Bitter segue. -Archie, just say “he came to my office one time.” -How does Killian know Archie is a cricket? I’d imagine that Cora told him, but how does she know? -We’ve got our start of the Captain Beauty BROTP here...I love what this is going to turn to, but this is awkward af… -I don’t think I’m ever going to be over the fact that Belle defeated Captain Hook with a fucking BOOKCASE! XD -I am pretty sure that right after that scene in the library is where the hug blooper (i.e. My favorite blooper ever) took place! Update: OH MY GOD, IT TOTALLY WAS! -Rumple, what the hell are you wasting time on? You literally just got what you wanted! -”You expect to defeat the fiercest creature in the land with a book?” No, but give her a case full of them and you might be surprised! XD -Belle’s gambit in that wagon scene was weird. Did she know they were going to push her off the wagon? And if she didn’t, then why lead them the wrong way? If she wanted to go on her own, then why not just leave on her own? -Do platonic relationships have food, because Swan Believer’s is totally Pop Tarts. -Grumpy makes so many good points in his speech to Snow and Emma. Like, the fandom loves to infantize him, but there’s a reason why he’s as in-good with the Charming family as he is: He considers things that no one else will and for the most part, he backs that information up. -”We’re a bit homesick.” My previous point having been said, I’m sad that they don’t really acknowledge this point all that much to my memory. That also having been said, why wouldn’t you want to stay here? I’m with Isaac! Indoor plumbing is the best! -Belle is amazingly inquisitive and I love her no-nonsense approach to learning about Rumple and Killian’s beef with each other. -Rumple, especially considering what happens to Milah in roughly three seasons, fuck you for lying. Now I get it narratively-speaking and it makes sense for him as a character and I get that it’s a half truth. But still...fuck you for lying. -Also, as I said back in my review of “The Return,” I like how to a point, for as inquisitive as Belle is, she reaches a point where she won’t push an issue any further, and I like how moments like that subtly show the differences between Belle and Bae. -Damn, Killian. While I don’t know if you know who that scarf will lead Rumple to, that was EVIL! -I almost hate to make this comparison, but Rumple has a very Kylo Ren way of dealing with his anger (Breaking shit). -”And this is my fault.” Belle, this is so the opposite of your fault. Like, no. This blame game just doesn’t work. -”You’ll cast some spell that gives me no choice?” ...Just play the fucking Rumple irony clip here, okay? -Smee, why can’t you talk? RAT got your tongue?! -Belle rocks. It takes serious balls of steel to walk into an invisible portal, especially over water. -Batten up the hatches, Belle! -Archie, more like “Aren’t ‘chu glad to see me?!” ...They can’t all be winners. -Wow! Seeing Henry call Archie’s answering machine just to hear his voice just breaks my heart. That’s too real! Hell, Henry hasn’t even changed after the funeral. That’s too sad for words! How is this one moment the best part of the episode?! -”It’s just four people and a dalmation is a lot.” Snowy, baby, you have no fucking idea what’s to come! XD -”We could get our own place.” Jeez, Snow! Also, this is another point that’s brought up, but not really dealt with, not even really in the Season where they do get a house. Hell, at least suggest buying a house for all of them to live in together! The Swan Jones house had more than enough room for all of you! -So, Snow’s scene makes no sense. First, she poses that they should move out and then she talks about how they should take the chance for a fresh start that Storybrooke gives them. -”That doesn’t belong to you.” Belle, never change! XD -”It’s just ahead.” This line is the best segue ever! XD -”What makes you think his son wants to be found?” Oooh, with the Killian and Baelfire episode’s information in hindsight, that stings so badly, both as a point on Baelfire and Killian’s characters. Killian of course knows Bae wants to avoid his father after what went down with the portal, and Killian feels the same way about his own father after his abandonment. -Thank you, Killian for telling Belle the truth! Like, I get why this doesn’t prompt any change in Belle because of the gun he has on her, but yesss!! -”He will do anything to hold onto his power. Why do you think anyone who’s ever gotten close to him has either run away or been killed?” -Belle, do not destroy the town to save it! This isn’t “Man of Steel!” That monster is fire and the town is wood! I don’t need to read a lot of books to know that this is bad! -Mal, that was one badass curse! -Wait a sec. Belle left an injured Mulan in the path of a beast without letting anyone know this? -I’m looking at the David and Mary Margaret material, and I feel like if you mix the Season 2 energy with the Season 6 timing and context, this subplot would’ve been so much better. -”Unless we don’t want the same thing.” WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS LINE? -The Cricket Believer hug soothes my soul!!! -”I knew it.” I’m going to be generous and give this line the benefit of the doubt that it was meant to be a joke. -Belle, why are you going on about how you can make Rumple powerless in front of his enemy?! -”What you’ve done cannot be undone.” Suuuuuuuuure Rumple. XD Arcs - How are These Storylines Progressing? Rumple’s Redemption - So, while I don’t think the episode made this come through effectively at all, the lesson of prioritization does hold through for a while, especially at the start of the next episode. Killian’s Revenge/Redemption - Well, Killian definitely gets his revenge! This I felt was also well done because it was effectively set up that Killian was going to go after Rumple’s love in order to destroy him throughout the episode. Favorite Dynamic Swan Believer. It honestly frustrates me that this has to be put down as my favorite dynamic. Now, that’s not because I don’t love Swan Believer. I fucking love Swan Believer, but when so many interesting dynamics are going up against each other, one of them should be theoretically higher than what amounts to a side story! But yeah. Emma’s struggling with and eventual comforting of Henry as he grieves Archie is really good. It’s a great continuation from what we got in “The Cricket Game,” as this is another aspect of motherhood that Emma has to learn if she wants to truly be a mother, and in addition to just generally comforting him and validating his feelings, getting Pongo is a big step (Or would be). That’s not only a cool thing, but it’s a motherly commitment for herself as she and Henry will be taking care of him together (Or would, if Archie was really dead). Writer I am so disappointed. Goldberg and Chambliss were freakin’ legends for me going into this episode, with prior episodes having such a strong thematic presence. How did they drop the ball this badly? Like, there is just no sense of story structure in either segment and it tarnishes what has the potential to be two great stories. There’s no cohesion between the individual scenes and what we’re supposed to be taking away from them. Motivations and framing go out the window and while some of the individual character moments work, little else does. Apart from plot, nothing else changes, and that’s not what a story should ever do. The writing itself is shallow, playing the “tell, don’t show game” to say what the character’s problems are, but not showing how those are problems. Rating 4/10. This episode’s sole saving grace (Aside from great acting, set design, and music, but those are practically givens on OUAT) is it’s fantastic individual character moments, for any sense of cohesion in the delivery or understanding of his story is nonexistent. Belle’s character isn’t shown to grow from any of her experiences (In either story), Rumple’s actions are weak for what the story is trying to make them seem like, and the nuances of Killian’s motivation, while given time to be presented, are completely ignored. As for the flashback, the same lack of cohesion applies as to exactly how Belle is supposed to learn what the episode is supposed to paint her as learning. Additionally, the time spent with the Charming family adds up to nothing. Flip My Ship - Home of All Things “Shippy Goodness” Rumbelle - Something I find so interesting is how Rumple hates fairies, but Belle is so much of the closest OUAT gets to a fairy fangirl outside of Nova. She’s shown to be friendly with Blue, to the point of making her Gideon’s godmother and teaming up with her on more than one occasion and is much more welcoming at the sign of using light fairy magic in her quests. Also, in terms of the episode itself, Rumple and Belle get a lot of cute moments. Their initial scene in the shop screams of puppy love, their hug after Belle’s rescue is so nice, and before Belle’s shot, hers and Rumple’s farewell is utterly beautiful. Grumpy Beauty - I LOVE these two together! Everytime they share a scene, it’s so tiny, but it tells so much about how much they value each other and their emotional supportiveness of one another. The connection to “Dreamy” itself is just great and helps to reinforce when “Dreamy” encourages Belle to join the hunting party. Millian - So it all comes to an obviously dark place, but you really feel Killian’s fervor for Milah all throughout this episode, from Killian’s excitement at the prospect of his revenge to the more leveled way he speaks of Milah to Belle to the fact that he kept Milah’s scarf despite knowing better to the way he so quietly enflares when Belle says she died to the way he tries to goad Rumple into killing him, and to the wide-eyed venom at the town line. The character work here, both as a shared effort on the part of the writers and Colin’s acting, is sublime. ()()()()()()()()() Writing negative reviews are both the absolute worst ones to write, especially when you’re expecting a good episode. They’re easy to construct because it’s easy to explain why something doesn’t work as opposed to why it does, but fun to put together? Not at all. No one wants to see something bad unless it’s something for jokes like “The Room,” and I’m at the top of this list. I remembered loving this episode, and it honestly hurt to see that it wasn’t nearly as good as I built it in my head it to be from memory and nostalgia.
I sincerely hope the next one is better.
Thank you for reading and to those at @watchingfairytales. Season 2 Tally (96/220) Writer Tally for Season 2: Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis: (29/60) Jane Espenson (17/50) Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg (24/50) David Goodman (16/30) Robert Hull (16/30) Christine Boylan (7/30) Kalinda Vazquez (10/30) Daniel Thomsen (10/20) Operation Rewatch Archives
20 notes · View notes
Note
I know that SQ at this point is a dead thing with no hopes of happening now but at what point do we suddenly flock to this new lgbt character/relationship A&E are trying to sell us. I understand representation is important and scarce but to kiss a$$ to these two guys who treated our fandom like crap and have no regrets over the last 6 years "cause who remembers?" (a la Eddy) is upsetting to me. I feel like it's a betrayal to SQ to accept this. It gives them thought that we only wanted any f/f
Hey Anon!
Is this a general comment in response to things you read or is it because I tweeted Adam about how the announcement of the inclusion of an LGBTQ character had the opposite effect of normalizing? 
I can - obviously - see why people think it’s not going to happen, but I am still pretty sure that it will if they get to tell their story, which influences the way I communicate about it. It all makes sense if you look at their world building as Emma’s mental space - the how might be unpredictable, but it’s pretty clear they set up Regina and Henry to be Emma’s fairy tale happy ending and her story isn’t actually over yet.
The first openly queer characters were Ruby & Dorothy. Ruby is the wolf and the wolf guides the way as I talked about here. So if you look at Emma’s mind as that of a repressed lesbian - the product of religion and unaccepting society - then suddenly the queer subtext being everywhere just below the surface makes a lot of sense. Ruby symbolized a desire that would no longer be repressed - the first breakthrough if you will.
“The Ruby Slippers are a deep dream symbol, representing both Dorothy’s means of getting around in Oz and her identity, her unassailable integrity. The shoes are a reassuring Mentor’s gift, the knowledge that you are a unique being with a core that cannot be shaken by outside events. They are like Ariadne’s Thread in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, a connection with a positive, loving anima that gets you through the darkest of labyrinths.”From: The Writer’s Journey - Christopher Vogler
That brings me to the spoilers of a new LGBTQ character - my money is on Alice. I’ve written about this new book telling the story from the perspective of consciousness - check here, here and here. From the spoilers it’s my guess many of these new characters will be playing out aspects of Emma’s life before we met her. Many females of different ages are added and we’re going to an urban setting in our world. She’s remembering who she is. Whatever this character’s storyline is, it’s the next step in Emma’s process of breaking through repression and being honest about who she loves. It will still be fantastical, it’s still a fairy tale setting, but my guess is it will give us more clues about Emma’s past that are a little closer to how things actually happened than the hints we’ve gotten so far.
Now I want to talk about what you’re saying, about people selling out. The fandom has done every conceivable thing to get the showrunners’ and the media’s attention over the years. There’s been anger and attempts at diplomatic conversation. There have been twitter trends and media articles. Nothing really came of it. If anyone involved doesn’t know the importance of Emma, Regina & Henry versus any other LGBTQ couple by now, then they’re never going to know because they do not want to know. Not to mention they know what they have written and produced. They know exactly what they have been doing, what they have been suggesting with these characters.
Now I see a mentality of placing blame on each other for how fandom has been treated or how the storyline has evolved. “If only we had done this differently we would have had different results. We would have gotten what we wanted.” It’s a defense mechanism in order to not feel powerless. Look for somebody closer to you. Somebody who you can blame so you don’t feel out of control. So you feel you can get some form of justice by punishing someone. The reality is that the blame lies with:
An inherently homophobic society
A conservative media culture
Heterosexual writers writing queer characters based on research but not from life experience
Old school PR principles
If you accept blame lies with a marginalized group or individuals within it and how they react to their unfair treatment - even if people are doing the opposite of what you think is productive - you are losing sight of the real issues and the real causes. The truth is that you are angry with other people who are reacting to an unfair situation they are also a victim of. We have to recognize that in some ways we simply are powerless before we can figure out what power we do have. 
What to do?
Anger is fuel, it’s energy. Treasure it, but try to direct it. Within the disadvantaged group, find the people who feel the same about this issue as you do. Maybe it’s only one person, maybe it’s five people, maybe you can find a bigger group. Vent with them. Talk out the frustrations with them to take the edge off. Publicly talk about what frustrates you and why, but avoid being passive aggressive and placing blame. Backgrounds of people online and what they seek here are incredibly diverse. Ages, levels of education, how far they are in the self-acceptance and coming out process, financial backgrounds, ethnicities, temperaments, levels of involvement, … Always be aware you are lacking a lot of information about the people you are interacting with - some of which you would have in real life. People are more receptive when they’re not under attack and many here feel vulnerable - whether they seem like they do or not. You may be right about something, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be understood. Pick your battles, focus on being understood first. 
Now with your group of people - or even if it’s just you - decide what you can do with what you have. Get informed. Read books on activism. Find the right words. Decide what the right course of action is for you. Identify the power structures you are fighting. Think big. Think about the next time around, think about changing things for future generations. Consider supporting the opposite of what you are fighting. There are a million ways to make a change. Find something that works with your personality, your means, your level of comfort, your talents. Find something that is safe for you to do depending on your situation - and if you are risking your safety, make it a conscious choice, something that comes from within and not from outside pressures.
I’m under the impression that in emancipatory struggles of minorities there are always roughly two groups. Generally, there will be a group labeled as “radical”. I would say that these people are actually more right about how things should be. They will rally, point out the flaws in the system. They are often considered aggressive, but they’re obviously not, they’re just very aware of the unfairness and point out the differences between them and the privileged group.
The other group is a group who is more focused on building bridges and being diplomatic. They try not to rock the boat and aim for smaller changes. What you bring up - “selling out” - is often a complaint heard from the more radical group when talking about the moderate group, while the moderate group is worried about the boat rocking too hard and there being repercussions and setbacks to the progress if we push too hard and too fast.
In reality it’s often those two groups taking opposite action - but doing in the same moment in time - that creates change. We need people to loudly call attention to issues, we need people to gently explain the issues when people are called to attention. Some people need to be kicked into action, others need a gentle hand guiding them. The power comes from these different approaches. While we need to keep each other in check - especially when it comes to intersectionality, because yes, in those cases diplomacy often crosses over into selling out - seeing things this way helps me personally recenter. Take a step back, look at the bigger picture and never forget who and what you are actually fighting. Make sure that’s where you direct your energy. Be communicative within your own group, but don’t get completely side-tracked interacting with people who do things differently but who ultimately share your cause. 
Odds are someone needs to hear what they have to say in the way they say it. Odds are somebody needs to hear what you have to say in the way you have to say it too. Just don’t lose sight of the real causes of your discomfort.
39 notes · View notes
ingu · 7 years
Text
i feel like so much about fanfiction’s predicament is that so much of it is personal (often sexual) fantasies brought to life. fanfiction is accountable to no one really for the simple fact that a. it’s freely created, and then it’s trouble comes because b. it has been made freely accessible.
in the ‘real world’, there are certain social rules which mean that sex as a broad topic is typically off the table in every day interaction. and much of it ties in with the general fear of male sexuality alongside the oppression of female sexuality which twists together and ties into pseudo-religious policing of what types of porn is appropriate and what people should be allowed to get off to. so much baggage is carried from ‘the real world’ as such that displays of male sexuality is often automatically read as aggressive and oppressive even when it is under female control. likewise, the complexities of (particularly female) sexuality in general has been so oppressed and removed from mainstream discussion that people seem unable to grasp the function of fantasy. And all of it is done without consideration for context and nuance.
i want to talk about power and control here because it seems to be the perceptions around it that is causing so much conflict. and i think that certain elements of anti-logic actually does carry weight in that fandom as it currently stands isn’t really structured in a way that allows people to ‘not see’ things that they find distasteful. tumblr is dependent entirely on a self-policed tagging system and personal curatorship which is spotty and unreliable. and even personally, i have lost count of the amount of times i’ve scrolled to find something (usually kinky) I personally find confronting reblogged without comment or acknowledgement by mutuals I trusted. And then there is ao3, which offers no easily accessible options to exclude tags and similarly makes no effort to filter its explicit works from default search the same way that fanfiction.net has done for a long time.
The result is that short of each person individually compiling a long list of tags containing every single thing that they do not want to see or experience and applying it to each search attempt, each of us is going to be forced to read through several summaries referencing rape, abuse, or incest just to find whatever it is we each enjoy. And really, at the end of the day, the things these antis don’t want to see are hardly insensible when you simply step back from the fandom environment you’ve been so immersed in and look at things with the eyes of, dare I say it, I regular person. Is it really wrong to walk into a library wanting to find a nice fluffy au of some sort and having to find it on the same shelf next to half a dozen hardcore pwps?
It is really quite easy for people who are used to this system to put the blame people for complaining too much and not taking enough responsibility for themselves. But again, there is a fact to be acknowledged in that so many people are genuinely children. In turn, society places a certain onus on older people to protect them from being exposed to certain things before they are emotionally capable of handling it. Would you show a 14 year old your kinky bdsm porn when they ask if you have written something original about their otp? And yet it is default and acceptable for ao3 and tumblr to do just that. And is it really surprising when these same 14 year olds express their anger and confusion the same way that most teenagers often resort to - through bullying and harassment?
I am in no way saying that the bullying and extremist rhetoric that is prolific in fandom is in any way acceptable. But I think there is something to be said about the irresponsibility of a large part of fandom in that we are so wrapped up in protecting our right to produce and consume kinky porn that we are neglecting the fact that people are in fact continuously being hurt by the structures we have set up. Would it be terrible if ao3 excluded its explicit works in default searches so minors (and adults alike) wouldn’t have to read tags such as ‘bestiality’ and ‘parent/child incest’ when they are just venturing into a new ship (or fandom in general) and just getting their bearings? Is it really wrong to add more warning options to the current three (rape, mcd, violence) to include things like abuse and incest when the point of warnings is to protect the people who don’t want to see it? What makes incest or bestiality more pure than rape fantasies?
And I think all of this comes back to fanfiction’s growing identity issue. Because as we mature more and more as a literary genre, the nuances within the genre itself needs clearly distinguishing. You wouldn’t walk into a video store or a library and see hardcore pornography placed side by side with Tolkien, and that is where the frustration of so many people come from.
An alternate line of argument may be that – yes, why not put porn and tolkien together? Fandom has such deep roots in fantasy, especially that of the sexual kind, and prides itself on progressivism. Female controlled porn should be given front and centre attention and be respected and acknowledged. You cannot conflate fanfiction with commercial media. the latter is created to Make Money TM and actively promoted and distributed on a wide commercial scale. The former are passion projects utilising existing characters that exists for no reason other than the creator’s personal enjoyment (as well as the enjoyment of other like-minded people). Don’t like? Don’t read!
But the thing is, changing the structure to be less confrontational doesn’t mean that people’s rights to produce and consume kinky porn are sacrificed. It just gives the people who don’t want to see it better tools to protect themselves. If you are in the mood for abusive porn and you know exactly what you want, and can use the tags to find it. But for people who are hurt or made deeply uncomfortable by topics like incest or rape… is their comfort less important than your convenience? Libraries acknowledge differences in genre in that you won’t find The Ring put in the same section as Love Actually. And they respect that not everyone wants to see naked bodies and put their pornography together on an out of the way shelf or even behind a curtain. Fandom, and again, ao3, does not allow that. And people are justifiably frustrated.
It is so easy to dismiss all ‘antis’ as some seething swarm of irrational hypocritical youngsters who don’t do anything but hate. (Admittedly, people like that do exist). But at the heart of it all, is it really crazy for a blogger to rant on their private blog about how they don’t want to see incest or an ‘abusive ship’ when looking for fic about a different otp? Everyone’s headcanons are different, and something which may not necessarily be abuse to you can be that way for another. Why is it that respect is only deserved when it conveniences someone’s preferred side of the argument?
And I’ve talked about the oppression of female sexuality and fear of male sexuality earlier. But so much of that are issues around society, and baggage that we all carry no matter what. There are platforms for remedying the misconceptions around rape fantasies, bdsm, torture porn, underage porn, and so on. (They are fantasies constructed and consumed in a safe environment one can exit at any time, and does not hurt any real people. The same way you can murder a garrison of enemy soldiers in a video game and feel empowered but also not condone real life war and violence.) I don’t think respecting people’s boundaries around what they wish to be exposed to is going to directly impede those whose purpose is education.
Because at the end of the day, we still live by the rules and expectations of the society we exist in. And becoming more mature and popular as a genre brings with it the politics of scrutiny. If we want to become more accessible and less misunderstood, maybe a step toward respecting our peers is the right thing to do.
35 notes · View notes
ark-of-eden · 7 years
Text
Thoughts on the Function of Art?
(R:) I didn't want to append this to that big thread about censorship, questionable story content, and authorial intent because I am a Small Person who just consumes things and I was pretty sure that I can't actually add anything useful to the discussion. But I'm still stuck on it a little, so here is a thing that I'm putting behind a readmore in case everyone is fucking tired of the whole censorship debate.
tl;dr: Riss is old and grew up in an environment that was not exactly info-rich when it came to controversial issues. Riss is clumsily attempting to tape this and that together for some reason, possibly just to get it out of the brain. (This ultimately turned into a long fucking story about my early life that doesn't really go anywhere. It's just a long fucking story.)(**ALERT: This includes discussions of stereotypes, slurs, and fetishization.)
People in that thread pointed out the weird over-reliance on interrogating an author about what exactly they meant by writing certain content and that authorial intent should be a yardstick for whether certain content is edifying (and deserving of existence) or not. Other people wisely pointed out that every consumer will inevitably interpret every creation through the lens of their own experience and come up with a different take on what the piece is "saying" about whatever it depicts.
Back when I was very young, there was no way to directly contact any sort of creator. Novels had small text somewhere that mentioned how to send snailmail to the author C/O the publishing company, but naturally there could be no expectation that an author would ever actually write you back. Direct contact with creators was usually in the context of them being guests at a con or signing or gallery showing, which was sort of like seeing a band play live. Every other exposure to them was one-way or indirect, through their work or news articles or possibly from hearing a radio interview or watching a TV program about them, if they were important enough. This was pre-widespread-Internet, so nobody had blogs; some big-name people had fanclubs that mailed out regular newsletters, but the vast majority of creators had nothing but their content in circulation.
I guess that the point of saying all of that is just to illustrate that the present-day situation in which creators have public social media accounts that one can just drop into and toss opinions and questions about intent at them is...kind of a luxury, in my experience? For writers of "classics," there might be printed articles or essays in which they went on about their intent or process, but for creators who weren't popular while they were alive, historians have to go mining for diaries or letters to even get an idea of what sort of person they were, much less what they meant when they wrote that one scene from that one novel that was Kind Of Problematic.
And that was a tangent leading around to a perspective about creative work in general that I heard very early on and took to heart when it came to consuming media. I read somewhere that the point of creating something was to produce a response or emotion in the consumer. Any response. The creation was meant to be a catalyst for newness or change in the viewer, even if the response was something like anger, fear, or disgust. The worst possible response to a creation was dull indifference, because it had failed to do anything at all to the consumer.
I saw supporting evidence for this perspective in a lot of media. Bands built up weird, elaborate Aesthetics purely to draw attention to their songs, not because they were demonstrating some deeply-held belief system. (I've lost track of how many CDs I saw from bands who made dark music about cruelty, despair, and the emptiness of the universe and yet, in tiny liner-note text, poured out flowery squee about how they thanked the loving Lord God and Jesus Christ for blessing them with their musical careers.) Artists who talked to other artists about their craft admitted that they often made the art they did just because they wanted to make it for no special reason, but they fabricated deep-sounding bullshit to attach to it so that collectors would buy the thing just for the story that went with it.
A piece that kept getting talked about over and over back then was Piss Christ, which was literally a large glass jar full of urine that had a crucifix floating in it. Large sections of society were fucking outraged that this thing even existed, that galleries dared to let it darken their doorways, that the artist was even depraved enough to think up such a thing. I don't recall what the artist herself (I think it was a she) said about why she made it, but what was clear to me was that she had succeeded at the goal of art like an absolute champion. Nobody could look at that piece without having some kind of intense response, and whole groups of educated people were compelled to spill out their opinions and argue about it. Piss Christ was Successful Art, the thing that every piece of art wished that it could be. It didn't matter that most of the responses were negative. Apart from making it, the artist did nothing to encourage all the discussions prompted by the art's existence. People used it as a springboard for debates about What Is Art Really, the empty veneration of religious iconography, public obscenity, and all sorts of other things, entirely on their own.
Granted, there were clear downsides to not having instant access to people's creative narratives and backgrounds, or to the greater community of consumers. There were panels discussing themes in modern writing at cons and sometimes a nearby book club where people could rec things and talk about good and bad aspects to whatever they were reading, but if you weren't in a position to have either of those things? There wasn't a lot to do but chat with any reader buddies you might have or actually trust marketing. This book is a NYT Bestseller and has its own special display in Borders? Well, must be a well-written book with quality content, or else it wouldn't have that kind of backing, right? (I was such a trusting little idiot back then, seriously.) So this was when all those toxic norms of casual misogyny, racism, and queer villainization went unchallenged in a lot of places and was just The Way Things Are.
My family moved around to many parts of the US while I was young and I swear I never heard people anywhere bothering to have a discussion about the trend of weak female characters or how POC cultures kept getting reduced to exotic window dressing. There was a sense that those kinds of intellectual topics were the sort of thing that academics did in far-off Academic Country, where they only read classic literature and went over word-by-word symbolism with ever finer combs. I'm no quality literature historian, but I imagine that those kinds of thematic conversations probably got louder as widescale communication got easier, such that a person could throw out into the aether, "Is it just me, or is the only time when cultural elements from Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American, or African civilizations turn up in mainstream lit is when they need 'exotic savage foreigners'?" and people would be able to chorus back, "OMFG THANK YOU I thought I was the only one bothered by that!!" (I mean, advancements in communication helped every minority find other people like themselves, which is why the Internet is part of real life and a genuinely precious resource to isolated odd folk who are forced to live in places that are hostile to them. You no longer have to live your entire life being the only lonely freak instance of your kind in the entire universe.)
So I recognize the shitty situation of having mainstream marketers telling people which stories were good and which story elements were admirable without also having access to Discourse that would challenge those norms. I remember just accepting that girls would hardly ever be able to be heroes the way boys could be, and that people from far-away cultures were always primitive and backward but in fascinating ways. Nothing in my daily life countered anything that I read. Discussions that I found online much later in life caused me to rethink the trends in everything that I'd read as a kid and see it all with fresh eyes so that I could realign my opinions. It's vital to have discourse and challenge happening alongside creation so that we don't have generations of people absorbing shitty norms that are supported by fiction and not realizing that there are even alternative ways of seeing things.
But there's still that issue, in my mind, of a good creation being one that creates ripples far outside of itself by prompting any kind of response in the consumer. Which is, I guess, why it seems fine to me that Problematic things exist and that people encounter them even if they come away hating those things. The encounter with that thing can make a person think about their own perceptions and experiences, and it can prompt conversations about was learned from that encounter - the why of the result and what it means. Obviously, the same can be done with media that makes a person happy or comforted, and that ends up in Discourse because people end up comparing their experiences and questioning whether the people who are happy/comforted are correct to feel that way about the media.
(Bonus Tangent: it's never possible to be incorrectly upset/offended, only incorrectly happy, strangely. Because telling people that they are not allowed to be upset about something is controlling and aggressive, but telling people that they're wrong to enjoy something is...I'm not finding any positive result. It's shaming, which is a response used to exert social control over others. Talking about whether or not casting shame on total strangers leads to the desired result is something that even I don't want to take the space to talk about. I'm one of those who considers emotion to be out of a person's control. Emotion precedes action. What's important, IMO, is what action a person takes regardless of what emotions they might have, because it's possible to choose actions. Telling a person that they're not allowed to feel a certain way is an attack based on something that a person can't actually control. Whenever I see antis saying things like "no one should ever enjoy this content," I wonder how people are supposed to casually shut off their enjoyment. Can the antis shut off their outrage with a flip of a switch, since it's just an emotion too? Attempting to reprogram a person's emotional or motivational palette leads to things like conversion therapy, which has a high rate of failure/relapse and tends to traumatize people into other mental deformities. That's why it's far more useful to focus on responses to emotion instead of emotion itself. People with uncontrollable emotional responses - such as phobias or fetishes, say - can learn adaptive actions faster than they can unlearn emotional responses.)
This was a hugely roundabout way of saying that I really think that bad media or problematic media are still important. They can prompt discussion and introspection, as mentioned, but, IME, even a shitty representation of a concept can put cracks in a person's worldview and make it possible for them to be open to better ideas in the same vein later on.
For instance, I had that strict mainstream heteronormative upbringing. The only thing I knew about queer people for a huge part of my life was that they needed to be pitied because they were going to hell, and the closest thing to a trans person that I knew about was that Crying Game trap drag queen concept where the sinister man in a dress seduced honest straight men with borrowed feminine wiles. (I literally did not know that transgender people were actually real until after I was 20, which is one reason why I am such a massive late trans bloomer.) I also had that strict gender role upbringing in which there were certain things that a person must and must not do in order to be "proper."
Back when I first got on the Internet and started interacting with fandoms, genderswap fics were popular in my circle. Often, it was basically the same plot as the source material, but you'd switch everybody to the opposite binary gender and then, based on the assumption that men and women think and do things in slightly different ways, the plot would usually derail from canon because the genderswapped characters wouldn't do the same things that they canonically did. It was just one of many common fanfic thought exercises.
Looking back, reading genderswap fics was something that started eroding the strict worldview that I'd inherited. The "men and women just naturally do things differently" was enough in line with traditional gender roles that it passed by my defenses, but the swapped cast of just about everything ended up with lots of strong, heroic women and the occasional male sidekick. Further, writers tended to use the "women are more socially/emotionally intelligent than men" stereotype to correct shitty things that male characters did in canon because, if they were women, they'd be too smart and perceptive to do whatever stupid thing they did and everything would have happened differently. Nowadays, there's formal discussion about the lack of strong female characters in mainstream fiction, but in fandom, female writers just fixed the problem directly with genderswap so all the interesting, powerful people could be women and the guys could be useless arm candy for once. It was a way of reclaiming importance and power when canon media didn't give women much else to work with.
(I became aware while ago that Discourse is informing people that genderswap fics are hugely offensive to trans people. Now, I've described my crappy upbringing, but as a trans person, I don't understand this at all. I get that the "opposite gender" swap upholds the gender binary, but the issue is offense against trans people, not against genderqueer or nonbinary people. I seriously don't get why I should be offended? Is it because the genderswap doesn't include actual RL transgender experiences, as if the entire cast were realistically transitioning as a plot element? Genderswap is not acceptable unless it specifically includes things like "this is the story of how Cloud Strife got her testicles removed and enjoyed growing breast buds thanks to HRT"?? Maybe I'm an idiot, but those are two distinctly different story concepts and both have merit. o_o)
Later on, I became aware of people who were preoccupied with stories and fantasies of fantastical gender transformation, usually male to female. Some stereotypical male character would get injected with an alien serum or zapped by a fairy's wand or something and he would immediately metamorphose into a woman. There was often a disturbingly rapey element to these stories, like the boy wouldn't want to be transformed and was horrified while he was changing, but after he settled into the woman-shape or had sex as a woman after changing, he realized that he loved it and felt so much better that way. The stories were mostly just short repeats of this exact same situation, written by different authors with slightly different details, and this group never seemed to get tired of them.
Eventually, I learned that most of the people in the core of this group identified as trans women, but they lived in circumstances where they weren't permitted any female expression or had lost hope of ever transitioning. They fixated on transformation fic as a way to soothe the pain of living. Looking back, the noncon/dubcon themes that kept appearing in the fics made sense as a way of indirectly satisfying the powerful social forces that were demanding masculinity of them. The male characters were trying hard to stay male, fighting back against the transformation; they were clearly performing all the do not want signals expected of men threatened with feminization. They fought the good fight, but the enemy overpowered them! Womanhood was forced upon them! It was totally unexpected that they enjoyed being a girl after all, but because their maleness had been aggressively destroyed, they were free to stop performing resistance and love themselves.
But you can find fetish material like this in a lot of places, without any context as to the intent of the creator. (And I'd argue that it counts as a fetish if you crave it as necessary somehow, regardless of whether or not you're jacking/jilling to it.) Some people would write the same kind of stories for forced feminization as a type of humiliation. Among furries, transformation fetish material seems to add an extra angle of growing into new power and strength by a change into some larger, more magnificent creature in addition to changes involving sexual characteristics.
Further into the fantasy fetish scene is smut involving dickgirls/cuntboys. Those terms are inherently objectifying and fetishizing; the focus is entirely on the genitals and how a person has the "wrong" ones for their body. Understandably, this is where trans people get turned into dehumanized kink fuel, and real life "tranny chasers" exist who try to weasel into relationships with trans people just to have an embodiment of their fetish.
Artists seem to be slowly getting better with at least giving a nod to real trans people when tagging this sort of art, but (likely to get the most search hits) usually it's just "transwoman/man" alongside "dickgirl/cuntboy." And the art, at least, is clearly designed as fap fuel, so it's not like changing the label makes the content more respectful to the real humans it resembles.
Fetish art with that sort of name shouldn't be uplifting or encouraging because it makes trans people into objects, I know. But I enjoy it when I see it not because it gets me hot in itself, but because I feel heartened when I see sexy art of, essentially, trans people who have not had any genital surgery. I'm fortunate in that I don't have the worst soul-crushing dysphoria surrounding my (still XX factory standard) genitals, but I know a lot of trans people get seriously torn up about theirs and worry that they'll never be truly attractive to others because their genitals are "wrong." While it's possible to find humiliation art online of people with all kinds of body configurations, I tend not to (YMMV again) find much that seems to be specifically shaming or hating on characters who have trans genitals specifically because they are wrong/ugly/queer/etc. They're just participating in enthusiastic hot sex like all the other characters. Sometimes they're literally just standing around looking sexy, like any other badly-posed pinup. But when they're in the mix of whatever smut they're depicted in, they're objects of desire with their own sexual power, unashamed and equal to the others, and the other characters find them attractive and are clearly really excited to be doing whatever they're doing with that hot trans character.
And this response is very problematic, I know, because smut of trans characters that's designed to satisfy fetishes actually does lead to cis stalkers who want trans partners as living sex toys. And art of pre/non-op trans people being sexually liberated and desirable might end up being nearly indistinguishable from most of the fetish art I've seen, apart from lacking the objectifying dickgirl/cuntboy label. I hate seeing those terms in art tags, but the art itself makes me happy. Not even aroused, just happy to see characters who are essentially pre/non-op trans people being desired and enjoying themselves. When you've lived your life believing that you're ugly and unlovable, seeing people similar to yourself in those kinds of situations is a Band-Aid on an old, deep wound. I wish someone would look at me that way. I wish someone wanted to touch me that way. And even if you can't have that for yourself, you can at least look at art where similar people can, and even if those trans people are imaginary six-breasted purple foxtaurs, you can still feel like at least there are trans people somewhere in the galaxy who are free and happy and desirable. It's the same as those trans girls who spent years telling each other the same MTF transformation story over and over and over even though it was pure fantasy. They needed periodic inoculations of that fiction to keep themselves afloat when they believed that they could never have the reality.
That's why, to return to my earlier point and to the points that the people in that big thread probably said better than I have, I don't want bad media to go away. Even gross White Man Story For White Menfolk fiction can at least prompt discussion and response and might have little bits in it that made someone out there think of something in a way that they haven't before. Even depictions of minorities that are pretty clearly designed to be shallow fetish fuel might be a lifeline to some isolated person to whom that shitty depiction is the most positive representation of their identity that they've ever seen. You'd hope that they'd quickly be able to find better ones, but beggars can't be choosers, and if that shitty depiction hadn't existed then they might never have had the chance or the knowledge that different views were possible. You just can't know what people see and think when they consume a particular piece of media. They bring so much of their own context into the experience.
That's why I wish people would focus on action instead of on vague, catastrophizing speculations about intent or potential or who has a "right" to create or consume certain things. There are at least a couple of stories floating around about female fic writers who regularly wrote m/m smut, but who, IRL, opposed same-sex marriage and disowned their queer relatives. IMO, that's how you can tell who is making objectifying content - by whether they treat actual, living representations of minorities/fetishes like frivolous entertainment. I would bet that those IRL-anti-queer fic writers wrote things that were indistinguishable from the general mass of fanfic, which was why other fandom people were shocked to discover their IRL actions. People create things for all sorts of different reasons, not because ther creations are a clear window into their innermost motivations. You just can't know what's in a person's head, no matter what sort of things they create.
And I've literally spent hours writing this and sort of vaguely editing it paragraph by paragraph, so I'm going to post this now and release myself from childhood memory hell. Ultimately, that reblogged thread still said all of this better, but I just had a compulsion to LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE FOR TEN FUCKING PAGES. :P
And oh hey, I was so caught up in time-warping back to the 80's and early 90's that I forgot that Wikipedia existed, so here's their page on Piss Christ. Turns out the artist was male. Says it was only a photo?? Lies!! I distinctly remember seeing the goddamn gross jar of pee!! Because human memory is a reliable, unalterable record!! (Okay, I've clearly gone on too long here. I apologize to the whole internet in advance.)
1 note · View note
ambigamingcorner · 4 years
Text
It’s been a while since I’ve written about the quagmire that is gender and gaming. But we’re winding up for another set of posts on the topic, and what better way to ease into this topic than talking about toxic masculinity and toxic femininity/feminism?
The Issue of Non-Issue
What fascinates me about this particular issue is that because sexim is not blatantly overt in the general population, and gender roles have changed slightly, many people are content to dust off their hands, say, “Problem solved!” and give a side-eye to those who continue to question whether the solutions are as absolute as some people like to claim.
So, in this particular article, we will be defining masculinity and femininity, and talking about when these constructs are taken to their unyielding extreme and begin to not work in harmony, but strike at the foundations of a cohesive society.
A Few Definitions
When I posted about this topic on Patreon, I had a nice discussion with LightningEllen about toxic masculinity and toxic femininity. What was most striking to me was that there was no real definition to the latter and, indeed, the two of us had wildly different ideas as to what these terms actually entailed.
So, to make sure we are on the same page, for the following article, I will be defining the above terms thus:
Masculinity: physical, emotional, and behavioral traits traditionally associated with men. These characteristics are active (that is, the person is taking an active role in social contexts), and are opposite to the feminine.
Toxic masculinity: a state of being wherein masculine traits are exhibited to a point that they are harmful or oppressive to the person exhibiting the traits, and/or to those around them. A man must never show weakness in any capacity: physically, mentally, or emotionally.
NO NO NO NO NO
Femininity: physical, emotional, and behavioral traits traditionally associated with women. These characteristics are passive (that is, the person is being acted upon by other forces, such as the masculine), and are opposite to the masculine.
Toxic femininity: A sub-group under toxic masculinity. It is a state of being wherein feminine traits are exhibited to a point that they are harmful or oppressive to the person exhibiting the traits, and/or to those around them. Tends toward women being passive and being acted upon, rather than taking action.
  Do you know how hard it is to find a picture for toxic femininity? That’s how passive it is.
Feminism: a social idea that the genders should be equal in social, cultural, and vocational positions.
Yay! Yes!
Third-wave feminism: Extreme, revenge-filled feminism. It is a set of ideas that proclaims women to be superior to men, or otherwise labels men as “the other” or, worse, “the enemy.” Also sees women who want to be stay-at-home moms, believe that men should be the breadwinners, and/or who simply don’t believe men are The Enemy, as “the enemy.”
When It’s Okay, and When It’s Toxic
I have a radical idea: masculine and feminine are actually made to complement each other. The strength, courage, independence, violence, and assertiveness are balanced by empathy, gentleness, and sensitivity. There is nothing inherently wrong or toxic about any of these characteristics, and having a balance of both is – or should be – considered ideal.
This is actually a real idea!!!
When this begins to crumble is when they are taken to their extreme, to the point where a person is expected to have all of Column A without ever demonstrating characteristics from Column B. The characteristics in the above paragraph are some examples of masculinity and femininity, but within society there are many other expectations that pressure men and women to think, act, and feel in particular ways.
When all of these things become toxic, it’s because a person has adopted these characteristics, but then also attempts to take away another person’s autonomy because of them. This can either be internal or external. For instance, a man might feel pressure to not “show weakness” by crying at a movie, or he might think it’s okay to talk over women because he has been raised to always be assertive with his ideas. A woman might feel pressure to wear makeup and be appealing for “the male gaze,” or she might think it’s okay to wield her emotions like a weapon.*
Notice something here. These are both harmful, please make no mistake about that. But when one group is always the one “acting” and one group is always being “acted upon,” it not only harmful to the individual, but can be harmful to the group as a whole.
A Brief Digression
But Athena, some of you might wonder. If everyone just stayed in their gender roles, this wouldn’t be a problem. You said yourself that masculine and feminine are complements of each other!
The hammer and nail argument, yes. In Japan, there is a saying that roughly translates to: the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Sure, yes, if everyone sat down, shut up, and continued on, yep this wouldn’t be a problem. We’d all be squeezed into our tiny little cookie cutters, whether or not we really fix, and go through our lives peacefully, if not incredibly unhappy.
Everyone wants to be the hammer, and doesn’t think about who is the nail.
Let’s face it, people. We’re all affected by “The Patriarchy,” but because within the confines of the masculine and feminine gender roles one is always active and one is always acted upon, some issues are a lot more immediately or externally harmful, and some are more internally harmful. As a blunt example: men can take what they want, when they want it, but if a woman wants something for herself (which is outside of her “gender role”) she must subvert the system and act in a manipulative way, since being assertive isn’t a socially acceptable option.
This causes men to be angry at how deceptive “women as an entire gender” are, and then further results in women being expected/forced to deal with/deflect/defuse their anger. And because men are supposed to be dominant, there is no room for listening to “her side” of the story. Man must stay in control, because men are always supposed to be in control.*
Two sides of one horrendous, ridiculous coin.
Games and This Whole Mess
Thank the Maker, we’re finally talking about video games.
I’m not even going to attempt to dive into the cesspool that is toxic masculine behavior online or within gaming communities, with gatekeeping, slurs, and general horribleness happening from men to women and men to other men. But I would like to talk briefly about the roles that games play in all of this.
For those of you who have been hanging around a while, you’ll know that I am a big believer in representation mattering in games. We emulate behaviors that we observe, whether that is in real life or on a screen. We emulate behaviors more strongly when we have an inherent disposition toward an idea (i.e., it’s “in our nature” or “our personality”), but we can also absorb as true the ideas that are presented to us most consistently, even at a subconscious level.
Remember a long time ago when I asked you to play a game with me? And then we talked about what the game was all about? Seeing how certain characters are portrayed, as you guys know, contributes to how a person sees themselves. Yes, it is possible to rage against the machine, as it were, but when operating within a social group, we are expected to fulfill the norms and expectations put on us, with a slight degree of variation (again decided by society) being acceptable. Break all the norms and expectations, and the group at large will not be accepting of your behavior.
How these norms are developed is far outside of the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that once the norms are developed, it is up to the member of society and the media of that society to maintain and enforce those norms. Such is the state of video games and the video game community.
On the video game front, we are given men and women who fall into masculine and feminine boxes. Solid Snake and Cole McGrath, for instance, are as comic-book-hero-esque as characters can get, and are examples of what A Man should be: powerful, aggressive, lacking any sort of emotional display other than outrage or anger (or, if they do, it’s not long before the more “acceptable” emotions come back, i.e., sadness turning immediately into anger). Compare to Raiden from Metal Gear Solid 2: still pretty powerful, still pretty aggressive, but also has a girlfriend that he loves and is emotionally hurt by. And fans called him a pansy.
Some men might not see this as a problem, though.
Let’s take two queens of gaming, Princess Zelda and Princess Peach. Avoiding stereotypical language, Peach is the woman who waits at home for Mario, baking him cakes and offering him kisses as rewards for doing things for her. She passively waits for Mario to actively go and be the hero. Princess Zelda (with the exception of possibly Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild) is demure and quiet, although enjoys the slight deviation from the norm by being wise and even taking a slightly more active role in Twilight Princess when she actually holds a sword for a few seconds and fires some arrows alongside Link, but sufficiently makes up for this by being largely absent as Link saves the world.
Compare this to another famous woman in gaming, Lara Croft, who started off as a female Indiana Jones and then was somehow twisted into gaming’s biggest sex symbol, because it wasn’t enough that she was smart and capable and the primary character like her male counterparts: she had to be appealing to men.
Notice as she became more realistic (in many ways), her body proportions changed.
Which brings me to the actual point of this article: the effects these games can have on a person. Video games enforce (for the most part) the ideals and values of the society, and so the societal pressure on a man to never be weak, and a woman to always be second, is reflected in that.
Why Is This Bad, and Why Aren’t You Talking About Games Yet?
I’ll be blunt: toxic masculinity is bad because it hurts people. It forces men into a role that is not sustainable, at least without compromising other people. How can one always be in control, unless one takes control away from another person? How can one always be the strongest, if the other person isn’t expected to be weaker? How can one always be right, unless other thoughts and opinions are silenced or belittled? How can one be expected to not emote, and yet be expected to be so compassionate as to risk life and limb for another person? How can a person help bring another person into being, and then think it’s okay to say that they are “babysitting” their own children, when in reality they are parenting?
What about toxic femininity? Well, that hurts people, too, but in a more reactive (versus active) way. How can one succeed in a job that requires you to self-advocate, when one is insulted for being assertive? How can one exert independence, when one is expected to sit quietly and wait for a man to come along? How can one ever hope for equality, when there is one superior and one inferior gender?
While some folks may disagree, media is so important. To be clear, no, video games, movies, books, and the like don’t need to validate my existence and I’m not asking society for permission to exist. But I’m asking media to have balance, to offer a window into worlds that we might not otherwise see, to offer a window into worlds that could be, if only we tried hard enough.
Because it matters.
Studies have shown that, when men are exposed to video games that glorify the “masculine” stereotype and systematically supports the oppression of women, those men have a greater tolerance for real-life violence against women. The same effects were not seen when women played these same games.
So what does that mean? That means that society primes men to think a certain way (they are “masculine”), and media reinforces that “masculine” means never being feminine, and that harming those who are “the feminine” is okay. Rewarded, even. So that’s what one learns.
And thus we have reinforced toxic masculinity.
Video games that portray men being violent toward women causes men to be more tolerant toward violence against women.
I… shouldn’t have to say anything after that.
Like violence before this, being subjected to certain themes in certain games can make you more tolerant of them. Maybe there isn’t causation between playing a video game and actually sexually harassing a woman, but seeing images of men dominating women reinforces that men are the ones who do the acting, and women are the ones who are acted upon. In these games, men are always in control and always exerting power over others. And the man doing the acting is the hero, and the woman being acted upon is just that: scenery, waiting for a man to show up and give her existence meaning.
Out of context game picture is out of context.
So, no, while playing a Grand Theft Auto game isn’t going to turn you into a sexual predator, it might make a man feel entitled to a woman, or reinforce that respecting her integrity or right to an existence outside of your gaze/pleasure is not necessary. And that’s a problem.
But #NotAllMen!
Yes. Not all men, and not all games. Men are not, I’ll remind all of you sharpening your pitchforks, the enemy here. No one is the enemy here. No one is an enemy. Say it with me: no one is an enemy.
In recent years, games have begun to explore more realistic portrayals of women, and that’s great. I’m certainly not saying that power fantasies are inherently bad; after all, who doesn’t want to be a superhero all the time? And I’m not saying that no video game should ever objectify or subjugate anyone else. I’m not completely out-of-touch: being able to exert power over someone else makes a person feel powerful. You can’t always do it in the physical world, so sure, put it in a game. But also realize that what you put in a game is going to affect how the person interacts with their actual, real world.
So men may feel pressure to never feel anything beyond angry, to “man up” and fulfill any number of stereotypes that can, at the end of the day, oppress their true natures. And women might feel pressured to stay a step behind men, keeping their heads down and their voices soft, waiting to be called on. Society says it, games show it, and that’s the only possibility that is ever given.
What I advocate, as per usual, is the inclusion of games into our collective minds that have well-written characters. Yes, there is a whole social brick wall that we’re going to run into, because men have been led to believe they can’t show emotions, and so will not want to play as a “sissy,” as we saw with poor Raiden. Women have been led to believe that being assertive is being a bitch, or that women cannot take care of themselves, and so may instead prefer playing as a “strong” man instead of a “strong” woman.
We’re all stuck in the matrix, folks. We are all constantly under pressure by society to fit into the little boxes it provides to us, all little pegs waiting to be hammered down into our respective holes, whether or not we actually fit in them.
I love video games. I love that they can open the door to new realities and experiences that aren’t possible in the physical world.
I love that they can open doors into worlds that are possible, and that could be, if only…
I love that games can hold up a mirror and say, here’s what is.
And I really love that they are important enough to us that they can influence our behavior.
…We just always need to be aware of the type of person we are being influenced to be.
What are your thoughts on toxic masculinity/femininity? How can this be translated into our real-world communities? Or is this not a problem at all? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you soon! ~ Athena
Do you like what you’ve read? Become a revered Aegis of AmbiGaming and show your support for small creators and for video games as a serious, viable, and relevant medium!
For more reading on games and masculinity:
Fox, J., & Tang, W.Y. (2013). Sexism in online video games: The role of conformity to masculine norms and social dominance orientation. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 314-320. Linked here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/be6b/69d4062dd20d35728ff2e515048b1dcd5f5e.pdf
Dill, K.E., Brown, B.P., & Collins, M.A. (2007). Effects of exposure to sex-stereotyped video game characters on tolerance of sexual harassment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1402-1408.
http://www.marissabellino.com/uploads/7/6/6/1/7661682/content_analysis_video_games_and_gender.pdf
#ICYMI: Better late than never: #men, #women, #games, and #toxicity. Hold onto your hats! Oh, and maybe some #feminism, too. All in one #ThrowbackThursday #tbt It’s been a while since I’ve written about the quagmire that is gender and gaming. But we’re winding up for another set of posts on the topic, and what better way to ease into this topic than talking about toxic masculinity and toxic femininity/feminism?
0 notes
ossyuche · 5 years
Text
Are Men Too Lonely? Are Women Too Judgmental? Yes!!
This article from Harpers Bazaar had my head spinning for a number of reasons.
“Women continue to bear the burden of men’s emotional lives, and why wouldn’t they? For generations, men have been taught to reject traits like gentleness and sensitivity, leaving them without the tools to deal with internalized anger and frustration.”
Yes, it’s true that men are, in general, less in touch with their emotions than women. At the same time, I think men are more sensitive than ever before. As a dating coach, it’s a big part of what women – like this author – are complaining about.
More importantly, why is it that a man acting vulnerable with his girlfriend is “a burden” but if a woman dumps everything on her boyfriend, it’s just part of his job description?
“I want a man who makes me feel safe, heard, understood. A man who makes me feel validated and powerful. A man who makes me feel connected. A man with whom I could be myself and know that I’m going to be loved unconditionally.”
Man says the same thing.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.”
I wrote about this in my second book, “Why You’re Still Single,” in a chapter called “Men Don’t Go Both Ways.” Basically, women want a man to be BOTH the Marlboro Man AND the Sensitive Artist simultaneously. If he acts too stoic, it’s frustrating that you don’t feel more emotionally connected to him. If he acts too vulnerable, it’s frustrating that he seems so weak. No matter what he does, he’s screwed.
This same double standard continues elsewhere in the article.
“As modern relationships continue to put pressure on “the one” to be The Only One (where men cast their wives and girlfriends to play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secretary, emotional cheerleader, mom—to him, their future kids, or both—and eventually, on-call therapist minus the $200/hour fee), this form of emotional gold-digging is not only detrimental to men, it’s exhausting an entire generation of women.”
Honestly, if either of the two genders was looking for a partner to “have it all,” couldn’t we agree that it’s women?
Are you pretty? Are you nice? Will you accept him and have sex with him sometimes?
Congratulations, you are capable of making 90% of men perfectly happy!
Congratulations, you are capable of making 90% of men perfectly happy!
Contrast that with my job, talking to women every day for 16 years and you’ll quickly realize that these cute, nice and accepting won’t get you anywhere with my clients.
“What does he do?”, “How much money does he make?”, “Who did he vote for?”, “Does he love animals?”, “Does he have any fashion sense?”, “Where did he go to college?”, “Does he believe in God?”; all of these come up quickly – and that’s before we ever get to the important questions of kindness, consistency, communication, character, and commitment.
This is not to suggest that the article doesn’t have anything valid to say. It does. It’s just a bit one-sided and overstated about the toxicity of an entire gender.
Here’s something that I largely agree with:
“Across the spectrum, women seem to be complaining about the same thing: While they read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.”
Is the author correct that men are isolated, less likely to ask for help, and overly dependent on their relationship for emotional support?
Yes.
Does that negate all men as partners? I sure hope not.
I’ve written before about my own loneliness. It has been a project for years to find a group of friends that I can connect with regularly. The struggle is real.
My college friends are too far away and caught up with their young families.
My local friends are great guys who are similarly caught up in the cycle of work/family and don’t have the time to cultivate deeper relationships on a regular basis.
I tried a poker game. Some of the guys were just too douchey for me.
I checked out a local men’s group. Says one men’s group member in the linked article:
“In our culture, men have always found ways to be near each other, but it’s never been centered around feelings,” he explains. “Men are taught the remedy to heartbreak is to get drunk with your buddies, objectify women, and go out and get laid; to basically distance yourself from your feelings and channel them into an aggressive outlet. We use sports as an excuse to bump up against each other, so desperate we are for human touch and intimacy. But this kind of closeness is based in camaraderie and aggression, not vulnerability and trust. The former is very surface level and not nearly as satisfying as the latter.”
This is all partially true. But you know what happened at the men’s group I attended?
There was a silent meditation and tea. We spent four hours talking about shame.
It might have been the most depressing night I’ve ever spent with other men. For the men who have issues around shame, I appreciate that it may have been cathartic.
Me? I would much rather have gone to a steakhouse with two guy friends and talked about our wives, our kids, work, and fantasy football for four hours.
Hey, if you need therapy, get therapy. I think a lot of us just need some guy friends. It doesn’t have to be deep emotional work to fulfill an unmet need.
In other words, there’s masculinity and there’s toxic masculinity. Nobody’s endorsing the latter. But let’s not tarnish an entire gender as emotionally bereft just because men prefer to connect over beers instead of book clubs.
I’m not making apologies for the damaged narcissists who drain all your energy.
If a guy is broken then break up with him.
If a guy is a taker and doesn’t give a much in return, break up with him.
But if you’re dating a good guy who, for reasons beyond his control, has a hard time cultivating an active social life with other men, please cut him some slack.
You haven’t walked a mile in his shoes to know what it’s like.
And if you don’t want him to judge you for the drama surrounding you, your work, your girlfriends, your fellow soccer moms, your sister and your mother, perhaps you should reserve judgment when he doesn’t have anyone else to turn to except you.
Your thoughts, below, are greatly appreciated.
  The post Are Men Too Lonely? Are Women Too Judgmental? Yes!! appeared first on Dating Coach – Evan Marc Katz | Understand Men. Find Love..
Related posts:
I’m a Little Lonely. Most Men Are REALLY Lonely.
Why Women Should Make Men Wait For Sex — Part II
The Blind Spot In Rori Raye’s Circular Dating
Original source: https://www.evanmarckatz.com/blog/understanding-men/are-men-too-lonely-are-women-too-judgmental-yes
from WordPress https://hotandsizzlingonline.com/are-men-too-lonely-are-women-too-judgmental-yes/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-men-too-lonely-are-women-too-judgmental-yes via IFTTT
0 notes
Link
As I lobbed a plate against the wall, I wondered: When was the last time I broke something on purpose? There must have been some moment in childhood when I smashed something in a primal rage, but nothing came to mind. Maybe I don’t remember, but I’ve always been a rule abider, and it’s entirely possible I’d never broken anything on purpose in my life.
I was demolishing dishes at the Wrecking Club, New York City’s original rage room. A rage room, for the unfamiliar, is a place where you pay to go break stuff. It’s one part fitness phenomenon, a kind of anti-yoga, but it’s much less about working out than about the unusual experience of smashing things to smithereens.
Female rage is all the rage these days. It has launched a thousand think pieces and served as the subject of two recently released books — Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her — that treat the centrality of rage in the feminist movement, and mad women more generally. Anger has been a clarion call of sorts for women on the left since the 2016 election: Get mad.
The Brett Kavanaugh hearings — and perhaps especially a still photo that circulated of Kavanaugh with his mouth wide open, eyebrows furrowed, face contorted into a tableau of indignant anger — have prompted related discussions about white male rage. First: Does it exist? (Conor Friedersdorf thinks no; Paul Krugman thinks yes.) If so, what does it look like and how does it manifest? What is its relationship to “I like beer,” and what is its relationship to violence against women?
I was intrigued by rage rooms against the backdrop of these conversations about anger. Smashing stuff with baseball bats seemed more akin to what some are now calling “white male rage” than the now politically fashionable rage of liberal women (also most accessible to white women). It made me think of the (mostly male) social media stunters who filmed themselves smashing Keurig coffee makers in response to the company’s boycott of Sean Hannity, or burning their Nikes in response to the sportswear brand’s ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick. Physical, violent, irrational, uncontained — I was interested in what it would be like to act out those things, for a few minutes. I decided to try.
The Wrecking Club opened its doors in midtown Manhattan in 2017, and a similar space, called the Rage Cage, opened nearby in September. There are now rage rooms in Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other cities around the country. You pay a fee for a timed session, often a relatively high one; the lowest rate for 30 minutes at the Wrecking Club is $79.99 for a one- to two-person package. (Anger is lots of things, but it’s also marketable.) In exchange, you get an offering of electronics, furniture, dishes, glasses, and other household items; whacking implements including a baseball bat and a sledgehammer; and a room of one’s own.
Penelope Green of the New York Times described the aesthetic of the Wrecking Club’s rooms as “part CBGB’s basement circa 1977, part Stasi interrogation room,” which is nearly perfect. I would add that when I entered my rage room — where a printer, an ancient-looking computer monitor, and a bucket of dishes were balanced atop dented kegs, next to a battered foam model of a man’s torso — I thought immediately of a frat house.
There are a few rules: Don’t throw the kegs. Wear closed-toe shoes, goggles, gloves, long sleeves, and a helmet. Otherwise, you’re unsupervised and can do what you want.
How to begin? Tentatively, for me. I put on a Spotify playlist of female pop anthems that a friend had made post-election, titled “Nasty Women.” I selected the baseball bat and brought it down gently on the screen of the computer, which I expected to shatter. It barely registered the hit, or the next one. I decided to warm up with some glass; I have accidentally broken many glasses in my life, so I was confident I could do it. I perched a vase on top of a keg. I brought my bat down. It exploded instantly in a single incandescent burst. It was thrilling.
I began to rage in earnest, taking big swings at the printer with the bat and then the heavy sledgehammer. It felt like a psychopathic challenge — I had to be able to conquer this machine. Every splintering of plastic felt like a victory, and its innards of wiring began to spill out. When I got discouraged, I turned to the dishes. I threw them against the walls, where they broke instantly. It was hard to stop, even as I sweated and my right shoulder began to ache alarmingly. (Raging is extremely physical, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s good for the body.) Meanwhile, “There You Go” by Pink and “Not Ready to Make Nice” by the Dixie Chicks blared.
There’s a sense in which this phenomenon is totally bizarre: Why pay for a space like this when you could theoretically break whatever you want in the privacy of your own home? It feels more like you’re paying for license to go wild for a little while, outside the confines of the socially acceptable.
Nearby, the Rage Cage has a cheaper deal — $44.99 for 25 minutes — for a much smaller package of breakable goods. It has a more Instagram-oriented vibe; there’s a mount for your phone in the room that allows you to film yourself, and a spray-painted bull’s-eye on the wall. But in most respects, it’s similar: a private box for your sustained smashing, four walls and empty space, and permission to do as you please.
As I smashed, I thought of a party I’d been to during my sophomore year of college. It was hosted by a sports team dominated by Very Big Guys. It was the dead of a New England winter, and they were roasting a lamb in the backyard of a house where they lived, which people ate with their hands. There were not many girls at the party. There was an excess of beer. At some point — after hours of warming ourselves with beer as we saw our breath emerge in white puffs — boys started throwing stuff off the roof. I can’t remember what, at first, but then I looked up to see a TV hurling down. I was filled with a mixture of fear and awe at the base masculine impulse to throw something. I was that guy now, and I liked it.
The impulse to destroy objects — as the Keurig smashers and Nike burners did — always seemed inexplicable. I remember wondering: They know that their Keurig will be broken now, right, and that it’s their fault? But as I became increasingly enraged at the printer’s refusal to snap, I understood it as more of a wild release of primal energy, the inanimate object as a focal point for everything else.
The question I found myself testing, as I swung a sledgehammer into a printer: Is it good or bad that I enjoyed this? One psychologist, writing in Psychology Today, theorized: Rage Rooms Not a Good Idea. He wrote that they may fuel aggression, particularly for those with anxiety and anger issues, rather than serving as a release — and I see his point. Maybe for someone like me, whose anger feels cloudy and often inaccessible, this space was freeing, but for someone who struggles to control their anger, it could be toxic.
Perhaps — related to the political discussions about rage and who’s permitted it — the utility of rage rooms varies depending on who’s doing the raging. For many women, it’s a chance, albeit an expensive one, to play a character of sorts: the frat bro, the Keurig smasher. But for others, it might be a kind of sinking into the darkness of real rage.
The rage room is a wellness product, even if it’s aesthetically anti-wellness. Like all wellness products, it sells a kind of balm to our discontents: in this case, our rage. It solves nothing, but it may be worth the money anyway, for the sweaty, wild relief of smashing stuff.
Toward the end of my session, I ran out of dishes. I couldn’t help it: I absurdly paid $20 to add on another bucket of glass and dishes. One after another, I threw them against the dented steel walls of the room. It was incredible, sublimating my anger into fireworks of broken glass. I surveyed the wreckage at the end, sweating, in the empty room.
Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.
Original Source -> Rage rooms are the latest self-care craze that won’t make us feel any better
via The Conservative Brief
0 notes
keihlfeminism · 6 years
Text
A new take on an old misconception
This piece discusses some upsetting topics and uses some offensive terminology. I’ll wait while you decide whether to move on.
Tumblr media
Now that you are consenting, let’s try to go through this to the end. I hope it will be rewarding for you.
Sigmund Freud postulated that there was a dichotomy to how society views women, known as the virgin versus the whore concept. In politics, the conservative desire is for women to be virgins, because otherwise they are whores. The liberal stance is that a woman can be whatever she wants, as long as there is consent. I prefer to look on things sort of like the Golden Girls mixed with Wiccan concepts around the maiden, the mother, and the crone. You could see Rue McClanahan as the maiden, who feels young and vibrant, Betty White as the mother who is loving, nurturing, and supportive, and lastly you could see Estelle Getty as the crone, someone who has seen a lot and carries much wisdom and strength. At this point, either your mind is blown, or you’re thinking that I am one chromosome away from a potato.
Tumblr media
As someone who is genderfluid, I do not like binary thinking, so I like to think of ways that we can break away from dichotomies into trichotomies or even matrices. So when I was reflecting upon the virgin versus whore dichotomy and trying to apply it to masculinity in society, I could not apply it in the same way, because the defining attribute for masculinity in western culture is that of strength.
Tumblr media
When I suffered from severe asthma problems due to pneumonia or back issues due to injuries on the job, I was demoted in people’s eyes as a man, solely because I refused to wear out my damaged body with too much manual labor. People assumed that somehow making a pair of women set up a folding table, for example, was shirking my duties as a man. Masculine people are expected to stoically bear the burden of their labors and keep it bottled up. The old saying “are you a man or a mouse” is embedded in us as youngsters. But thinking about that saying, it means that we consider women to be nothing but rodents and pests. This illustrates aspects of a larger point, which is that binary thinking and toxic masculinity go hand in hand.
                       (You were expecting a GIF here, weren’t you?)
Think about it: in toxic masculinity, there is only straight or gay, and if you are gay, then you are not considered a real man, but more akin to a eunuch, as he is less so-called “competition” for the mating pool of eligible women. If you are a married man, then you are beholden to your vows and you do not want to break them. A man who can not provide for himself and others is demoted to being less of a man. While current generations have come to embrace the stay-at-home dad, many people still assume that he is just lazy. We have been taught that housework or “women’s” work is too easy for a man to do, and hence is not really fit for a man to do as his main responsibility. A loyally married man is considered almost cuckolded by his wife, but never the less controlled from what society considers men’s natural status of being a sexually aggressive creature.
Choose whatever term you like, but the descriptions all mean the same thing: Lothario, Casanova, Don Juan, Horndog, or the more offensive internet term, F__kboy.
Tumblr media
The trichotomy of modern masculinity seems to exist on a spectrum between statuses of being a Horndog, a cuckold, and a eunuch. Each status has its different aspects to consider, so let’s start with the one we all know and hate: the horndog.
A lot of our iconic figures are horndogs: James Bond, Captain Kirk, Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and most male protagonists in action films or comedies are horndogs. We look at the horndog as the natural state of masculinity, looking only to have sex with everyone possible, disloyal and disrespectful to women unless he can use them. We see them as predatory animals, fiends and enemies, liars who will do anything to get what they want, and in turn, slaves to the fragile male ego.
By contrast, in society, you often see the cuckold and the eunuch grouped together. The cuckold has popular icons too, like Robocop, John McClane, and Jack Ryan. The eunuch has characters like Frodo, Luke Skywalker, and other characters who are both somewhat infantilized and therefore sexless.
You only have to look at shows like Two and a Half Men to see all three concepts lined up as caricatures in front of you. Cuckolds are essentially considered limitedly sexed and compared to the Don Juan, they are considered limitedly aggressive, not unlike livestock that has been broken. They work hard but do so for a reason, and are not given to excesses in their appetites, because their love is considered purer. Eunuchs are the men you consider harmless. They can be older to the point that they are determined toothless and weak by others. Of course, as we all know, age does not bring with it such things, but it is how society seems to consider such men, simply because they are no longer teenagers or young bucks as the saying goes.
When we find out that a man we have in our midst likes to date women, then we automatically lump him into the Don Juan category. We assume that he will not respect boundaries, that he is a sexual deviant, and that he is low and animalistic; hence the terms dog or pig. Single men are basically considered vagrants in polite society until they are older or married. Anything said or done by the Don Juan is deemed as in pursuit of sexual gratification.
Of course, when we lump men into these categories, we ignore the possibilities that they are queer, asexual but romantic, survivors of rape or incest, demisexual, or that they just aren’t interested in gratuitous sex. So comes the time, dear reader, when I put it to you that you may have been lumping men exclusively into these three categories. And why not? You had examples given to you of clearly defined pop culture figures who fall into these three areas. Except James Bond got married, as did Han Solo and Captain Kirk. Alan Harper on Two and a Half Men had quite a few girlfriends, while Charlie went steady with women a few times, and even Alan’s son, Jake had a few girlfriends in the show’s run.
Tumblr media
The truth is that just like with the Virgin versus Whore dichotomy, no person is exclusively in one of these pigeonholes. For example, I was attending a church in Toledo, Ohio, and for some reason, everyone just assumed that I was married. I had a noncommittal partner whom I brought to services, but people assumed we were married. (I wanted marriage some day, but she was against it.) Once I explained that I was single, people assumed that I was interested in all women: married, single, or anything in between. I loved my partner, but we weren’t exclusive, so she gave me permission to date other women. I didn’t really date a lot during that time, but I would flirt a little.
Tumblr media
We assume that unmarried men will commit every sexual taboo from adultery to dating someone much younger than him, and even certain crimes, like child molestation and rape. But of course, such presumption ignores the droves of married men who rape women and children every year, to say nothing of the Eunuch group, like Catholic priests, who take a vow of celibacy.
We assume that all men are basically sluts, rather than discussing matters with them, and will often send unmarried men off if they rise to our microaggressions or grow fond of anyone in particular and flirt a little. Toxic masculinity has dictated for so long that men can only feel anger or pride. If a man cries or feels mournful, then we demote him for being sensitive. If our harsh words or actions to marginalize him makes him cry foul, we ignore his pain and describe him as a weakling. If he loves someone, we still see it as only a means to sex. We have actually stopped considering a father’s love real: turning it into a form of responsibility and devotion. We say that fatherhood is his job, being a husband is his job, everything comes down to working. Your love and affection for someone is unappreciated, and the man who feels it is considered a milquetoast or a faggot.
Tumblr media
One of the reasons why we have to employ women-only safe-spaces is because of the problem of male gaze. Women are conditioned to be highly sensitive to being looked at by men, and hidden camera footage from women walking the streets has shown that men do not just look: they stare!
So I will not call on the women in the audience to change their perceptions of men more than they are willing to, but I challenge all the men taking this in to reconsider themselves and the men around them.
And don’t simply call out men who are acting like Horndogs. Call them in and call them forth: which means you should encourage them to look on themselves as more than the horndog. Don’t look on horndogs as broken, either, because there are good aspects to being a horndog. Being confident and independent fosters spontaneity in your romantic life, surprising a partner or spouse with random gifts, compliments, love notes, or tender affection. There are positive sides to being a Eunuch when the time calls for it. You could work with beautiful women all day, and it is a good work habit to view your female coworkers as people. So it can be good to be asexual at work. Likewise, while we view the cuckold as a humbled figure of a man, or a noble one, let us instead just accept that being part of a family is a natural aspect to that individual man. If he is older and single, do not look down on him as broken or flawed, but as undiscovered. A lot of Millennials are marrying later in life, and many people with disabilities find it hard to date or maintain relationships; especially those with invisible disabilities like social anxiety.
The more we look at one another as whole people, the better off we are. Men and women have a lot more in common than we are taught. People like me who are nonbinary or gender-nonconforming understand this very well.
Tumblr media
So while we could sit around, and try to label every person we know as one of two or three mutually exclusive things, it will not lead to a greater understanding of the person you’re examining.
If you want to look at men differently, start by not grouping them all together, and instead, really piercing his soul to understand him. He may need help reflecting on himself, so encourage the men in your life to be sensitive and to undertake emotional labors like empathy.
It will be worthwhile for every man to see himself in more than two dimensions, and for those around him to see him for everything he can be.
Tumblr media
Part of the point of this discussion is that we often hold men to the virgin versus whore dichotomy in society, especially in progressive circles and safe spaces. Once we see a person in the light of the whore, our image of them as anything else tends to shatter. So as previously stated, we have to open up our definition to accept that people generally do not want to date someone, unless they like them as a friend first (eunuch - emotionally open and basically asexual, possibly oblivious/naive) and when building a relationship, someone may wish to engage in healthy, consensual affection in different ways (the cuckold - tempered and emotionally in tune with a partner), but once it feels appropriate to engage in sexuality, the Don Juan can emerge: wanting, spontaneous, emotionally engaged in connection with the other person. The average person exists on a state that is rarely exclusive to one camp, but exists in a blobby, grey area, the facets of which are more prevalent in one area of life than in others. It means that we can allow for men and those assigned male at birth in many spaces.
For example, we can allow for trans folks in public bathrooms, because they are not there as the Horndog, but as the Cuckold or the Eunuch. We can allow for bachelor men to be around kids, and encourage an air or respect and affection for the same reason.
The implications are far reaching, but the more we come to understand that there is more to men than anger, ego, and libido, the better off we will be.
0 notes